The Crow God's Girl

by Patrice Sarath

  Colar felt the burn of anger rise from his gut to his head. He saw Kenery ride down to meet his wife and daughter, and all three began talking at once, waving their arms about and shouting. His wife was giving as good as she got, shouting back in her father’s face even as he made threats and called her names. Colar almost laughed. It was so unlike Terrick. He could not imagine anyone in his family talking back to his father that way. This was his new family. He could only imagine what his father would say, faced with a wife such as Janye. Serve him right, to see what sort of woman he married me to.

  If it wasn’t happening to him, it could almost have been funny. His father-in-law’s House was a rude, wild place. Scarcely was there a night without a shrieking row between lord and lady, or their children, including Janye. Kenery had four children, three girls and a boy, still a toddling infant. Janye was the eldest. Two of her sisters were married to Kenery men, and they were as loud and brash and angry as anyone else in the family. Kenery blustered, his wife fluttered ineffectually, and the children spoke rudely at all of them. Colar was reminded of a saying that Kate had taught him: They sure know how to put the fun in dysfunctional.

  The House of Kenery wouldn’t have to know the word to understand the concept.

  His wife’s family either tried to cosset him as if he were a child to be bribed, or treated him with sly, winking courtesy, as if they had put one over on him. In a way, they had, he supposed. He had been sold a bill of goods in the form of a miserable wife and a promise of support when his House took over Favor. He wondered if his father was beginning to regret his bargain as well.

  For one thing, Kenery’s standing army was like the rest of the House–unruly and undisciplined. The men were ill-prepared for war. To be sure it was winter and war was off the menu until spring at the earliest, but Colar, raised and trained by men who lived and breathed for battle, was disquieted by what he saw. He might not be on speaking terms with his father, but he would have to send him a dispatch about it before the river began to freeze.

  And that was another thing, he thought, prowling the walls of Kenery’s stronghold, wrapped in furs and wool. If the river froze completely, then Kenery remained connected to the rest of Aeritan via sledges instead of boats, and that would have been all right. Instead, the river just got thick with ice floes that could sink a ship, so crossings were effectively over until the ice broke up and the river cleared. Terrick wouldn’t be able to move until spring, when Kenery could back them up with men.

  They didn’t have that long. He was reminded of Lady Trieve’s calculating look when she congratulated him on his marriage. He thought at the time it was because he had told her he was marrying another woman, but she was no fool. Lady Trieve, of all people, knew that there was no love lost between Terrick and Kenery. That little vee of concern was her figuring out that the two Houses were up to something.

  He wouldn’t be surprised if she invested Favor with men over the winter.

  Dear Dad, he thought with bitter mirth. Better gear up for starting this war without your ally. We’re stuck here all winter long, hunting, drinking, and squabbling. But I’m sure Terrick can handle it alone.

  He ended up writing the letter after all, wording it more diplomatically, not only because he knew that Kenery would probably open it and read it, but also because he knew that he needed to make his father listen.

  He thought for a long moment about whether he should write a second letter and put the idea away. There would be no way to keep Kenery from reading that one too. Besides, what could he say? I’m sorry? I got a better offer? He wondered how she was. She’s strong. She’ll do fine, he tried to convince himself with no success.

  He would see her in the spring, and his father be damned, he would talk to her then.

  Colar handed over the letter to his father-in-law, and Kenery sighed but put it in a dispatch pouch and summoned one of his fast riders.

  “The river freezes soon, young Terrick,” he said. “Best get all of your letters out of your head until spring.”

  “This is the only one, sir,” Colar said. Kenery gave him an arch look.

  “Well, and a son should write to his father, but is there no one else?” He let the question linger, and Colar wanted to wipe the smirk from his face.

  “No one else, sir.”

  Kenery’s forests bordered the headlands overlooking the river. The forests were well stocked with deer and boar, and Colar joined the men on the hunts to bring in meat for the stronghold. The forest was stripped bare in winter, the trees black columns against the white snow and frosted rocks. The sun was thin and weak and cast long shadows. Colar followed while beaters and footmen ran the dogs. The baying of the hounds got into his blood, and for a while he could forget the frustration of his place in Kenery.

  Colar fell in with Eckert and Cor, who were married to Janye’s two sisters, Alya and Nirani. The men were not noble. They were in Kenery’s guard. He wondered how they were allowed to marry the two sisters, because it wasn’t for love, clearly–they both complained endlessly about their wives. He knew they expected him to do the same, but he kept his counsel. No need to confirm what everyone probably knew anyway, that his marriage was a sham.

  They were loud blustering men. Eckert had a shock of black hair and a spade beard, and he favored a thick bearskin cloak when he hunted, because: “They think I’m one of them, eh? And sleepy as the big piggies are, they think for a minute, ‘hey, is it time to get up yet?’” He mimicked the bear’s surprise at its own death. Cor was big and brown, his teeth spotted with the snuff he dipped. He took delight in aiming and spitting streams at rocks, at walls, at the hounds that brought down their prey. He laughed when they jumped and whined.

  “So, Terrick,” Eckert said, lumbering along on his big horse. He was unsuited to the saddle, and his horse wallowed in the snow. He better hope a boar wouldn’t turn and attack, Colar noted dispassionately. The beaters and the hounds wouldn’t be able to save him. “What do you think of our little House here on the border with Brythern?”

  “You have an interesting way of doing things,” Colar said noncommittally. Cor spit at a bush and laughed.

  “Yeah, we have our own ways,” Eckert said. “Not sure it means that come spring, we need to fight for Terrick over that pigsty in the south.”

  “Yeah,” Cor said, baring brown-flecked teeth in a messy beard. “What do you think about that?”

  Colar turned his horse around and faced them. They were both big, but he knew he could take them. He didn’t let his hand move toward his sword or his crossbow as he sized them up. Eckert had been drinking although he was hardly drunk. Cor was–he wasn’t sure about Cor. Was the man even all there?

  “Oh, look,” Eckert said, reining up awkwardly. “Is he threatening us, Cor?”

  “Ooh,” said Cor. “Threatening.”

  Colar rested his hands on his saddlehorn and cocked his head. He had never felt more sure of anything in his life that he had the upper hand.

  “You know,” he said as if musing aloud. “I wonder if your wives will even miss you. I can’t imagine that Kenery will. Both of you are liabilities to him, right now, because you just told me that he intends to go back on his pact. The way I see it, I would be doing him a favor. And my new sisters too–soldier’s god, what happened, did they lose a bet?”

  Cor snorted a laugh. “A bet. More like, they were punished.”

  Eckert growled at him, and Colar masked his surprise. Kenery had punished his daughters by marrying them to these two louts. No wonder Janye hated him, if this was how marriage was treated in this House.

  “You think you can manage that job, little man?” Eckert said. He drew his sword and laid it across his thighs. It was a massive broadsword, completely unsuitable for mounted work.

  “Eckert, you fool,” Colar said. “Don’t cut off your horse’s neck with that thing. If it will make you feel better, I don’t expect Kenery to send men to Favor come spring.”

  “Nor should you,” Eck
ert said. Cor spat. “Don’t expect that at all.”

  “So there’s no need for you to threaten me or for me to kill you. Right?”

  Eckert peered at him. “Right,” he said hesitantly.

  “So we can go back to hunting and drinking, right?”

  “Right!” Cor laughed, spraying snuff.

  “Good. Because I’m getting cold and I want to kill this damn boar and get out of the woods.”

  Eckert muttered something, but fumbled his sword back into the sheath, and they rode off. Colar only breathed easier when they came upon the beaters and the rest of the hunting party. Even Eckert and Cor would be unlikely to attack him in front of an audience.

  The hunt passed without incident, the boar was killed and butchered, and the men returned home to warmth and discord, as always. Eckert and Cor were hangdog though, as if rethinking their approach to Colar. His father-in-law looked at him uneasily, as if wondering what his two idiot sons-in-law told him. Colar let him stew. The man would come to him sooner or later with some excuse and he would accept it. Winter wouldn’t last forever. He’d be out of this viper’s nest soon enough.

  He ate the noon meal with the family out of politeness, endured the bickering, and escaped as soon as he could.

  The brightness of the late winter day cast his room in stark relief. The room had none of the lazy comfort of a bridal chamber, in which husband and wife were expected to spend most of their time under warm covers. Instead, it was the room of a warrior. His gear and armor were stacked neatly on the frame provided, and his few clothes were folded in a chest. There were blankets and woolens on the bed and a bearskin rug on the floor, so motheaten and threadbare that he was sure that it had not been killed by the present Lord Kenery, and possibly not even by his father before him. At least they did not stint on fires, and his was replenished by a householder with armloads of wood several times a day.

  Colar flung his furs over another rack to let them dry and air out, and rolled his neck and shoulders to relieve them from tension. Nothing like facing down family members in an empty forest. Maybe I’ve done enough hunting for the winter. He had never been at such loose ends. At home he would be training with his father’s men, helping on the farms or in the village, and hunting Terrick’s forests to make sure the people were well provided. In Kenery, as far as he knew, the bounty of the hunt had gone to the House’s tables, not to any of the smallholders.

  A quiet knock interrupted his bitter revery. He turned and a woman brought in another armload of wood to set on the hearth. He nodded and turned back to the window, the shutters open to show him the river. It was jagged with ice floes and rushing dangerously. He admired its wild beauty even as it barred him from home. He shook his head in frustration. If there was any good to come out of this benighted pact with Kenery and Salt, it would have been the conquest of Favor. Now that was even less likely to happen than before.

  Soldier’s god. We’d have better luck if we just asked her for it.

  “My lord?”

  She was still here? Annoyed, Colar turned.

  “Thanks. You may go.”

  She stood there, biting her lip and twisting her hands in her apron, but she managed to look at him and give him a small smile, half-shy, half-welcoming. She was a few years older than he was, round and comely in her sturdy clothes, a plain cloth kerchief neatly tucked over her hair, denoting good common birth. At his regard she smiled a little brighter.

  “Is there anything–I can do for you?”

  It took him a split second to figure out what she was offering. He was almost unable to believe his good fortune. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, there is.”

  Her name was Wren, an uncommon name but it suited her, since she was like a plump little brown wren herself. They spent a blissful interlude in his bed and she crept back that night later for more. Lying in a peaceful half-doze, the bed warm for once, he asked her, “You won’t get in trouble for this, will you?”

  She snuggled in his arms and said, “If my mistress finds out, perhaps. But I think, young lord, that she will be glad of it.” Wren raised up her head to look at him, her candid eyes bright. “She is a fool if you ask me.”

  He laughed, and kissed her. “I think she’s a fool for more reasons than that.” He consoled himself with the thought that Kate could not expect him to be chaste for so long, that she would expect that he had sex with his wife, at least. I’ll see her soon, he thought. But for now, I need this.

  They dozed together for a few hours and then he awoke to a trickle of gray light between the shutters and Wren sliding out of the bed and gathering up her clothes. He raised himself up on one elbow to watch her dress in the remaining warmth of the slumbering fire.

  “Come back tonight,” he told her. She turned to look at him but she never stopped dressing herself–it was too cold for that. So her words were a little muffled as she threw her tunic over her head and shrugged it into place.

  “If I can. But don’t ask me too much, young lord. I - I don’t want to like you too much, you see.”

  And then she was gone. Colar lay back in his bed, one arm thrown up over his eyes. Oh shit, he thought. What have I done?

  Try as he might, he was unable to conjure up much remorse.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Winter in Aeritan was miserable. Even with the fires going day and night, the stronghold was freezing. Kate wore all her clothes to bed and wished for a hot shower, the kind that steamed up the bathroom and made her mother bang on the door and yell about wasting water. She and the children spent as much time as they could in the kitchens.

  Aeritan did not mark the solstice with a special celebration. In Terrick the only holidays celebrated things like putting up each year’s vintage of brandy, and the big shear, when all the sheep were shorn in one great outburst of labor. So when she explained to Drabian what the solstice was and the reason she wanted to know, he looked at her askance. But he told Kate what day it was, and so she made up Christmas gifts for Aevin, Yare, and Eri. She labored on them in secret, knitting stockings in yarn she had spun herself and dyed dark red and hunter green under Samar’s watchful eye.

  “They should be Terrick colors,” was the grim housekeeper’s only comment when Kate told her what she meant to do.

  “These are more traditional,” Kate said, without elaborating.

  Samar had tsked, but helped her anyway. The stockings were lumpy, her stitches uneven, but she managed to turn a heel and even made a little contrasting Christmas tree on each one with star on top. She filled the stockings with sweetmeats and nuts, and begged wooden whistles from Drabian, who was always whittling something.

  On Christmas Day a winter rain slashed down, washing away the snow and turning the ground to mud and ice. Kate lay in the warm bed, Eri breathing peacefully next to her, and stared up at the ceiling in the dark room.

  She didn’t want to cry, but the tears welled up in the corners of her eyes and leaked down to her ears. With her eyes closed, she imagined coming out of the woods at the end of the riding trails in North Salem and walking up the long road to her house.

  She hadn’t written to her parents since her brain reset and she felt a sudden need to try to get as close to them as she could. Kate squirmed out of bed, trying not to let cold air in, and tucked the covers back around Eri. She found a scrap of candle and lit it at the drowsing fire. She blew life into the fire and the candle, and added wood with the expertise of one who had learned to set a fire and keep it alive as a matter of life or death.

  The room warmed only marginally. Kate put on extra socks and grabbed her cloak, sitting herself at the writing table by the window, securely shuttered but with cold air seeping through nonetheless.

  Kate pulled out her letters and dipped the quill in ink, spitting in the inkwell to loosen it up.

  She set pen to paper and began. At once the pen made the shape of Aeritan letters. Kate closed her eyes and made a noise of frustration. She could see what she wanted to write in her mind’s eye. It was
all there in her head. The problem was, when she tried to write, it came out in Aeritan.

  So what would happen if she tried to write with her eyes closed?

  Well, for one thing you’ll make a mess, she scolded herself. But if she closed her eyes, she could see the letters somehow.

  “I have to try,” she whispered. Kate dipped the pen, set it on the page, and tried to aim in a straight line. She took a breath and closed her eyes.

  Dear Mom and Dad.

  She scrawled laboriously, her hand shaking, queasiness bringing sweat to her forehead despite the chill. Kate opened her eyes and her vision blurred at the strange letters crossing the page. The line wandered and she could tell the characters were oddly shaped, but best of all, they were illegible.

  If she closed her eyes and focused on the words, she could write to her parents in a language they could understand.

  A sense of peace came over her as if they were right there, hovering over her shoulder. Kate dipped the quill and closed her eyes, telling her parents everything one hard-fought letter at a time.

  Her hand was shaking and her neck and head ached in concentration by the time Eri woke and stretched.

  “Kett?”

  “Merry Christmas, Eri. I have a present for you and your brothers. Let’s go wake ‘em up so we can celebrate.”

  They bundled up and tiptoed down the hall, Eri practically jumping out of her skin at the new adventure.

  Kate had never been in the boys’ bedroom. When the three boys were home they shared a bed, but now it was just Aevin and Yare, and the bedroom smelled of boy funk, and gear, and sweaty socks and dirty boots. Eri jumped on the bed, giggling, shouting,

  “Marry Craismus!”

  Aevin was shocked, sweeping his brown hair out of his eyes. He pulled the covers up around him and Yare. They both wore long nightshirts.