She closed her eyes to hold in her tears, surprised there were any left to shed. No one saw her cry; she made sure of that. She kept her pain locked inside until darkness filled her room and sleep blocked the ears of her attendants. Only then did she allow herself time to sob and mourn; although there was no body to weep over, her boy was all but dead.
If they found him, they would kill him. If he escaped, he was as likely to die of exposure or in the gnashing teeth of something foul. And if he lived, by the grace of the White Woman, he couldn’t ever return.
‘Meri?’
‘Ronart,’ she replied and opened her eyes to the view from her window. Snow tumbled from the sky and whipped against the glass. She hadn’t heard him enter her chambers, nor cross the floor of the receiving room. He stood a few feet behind her shoulder, wise enough not to approach within striking distance.
‘No news today,’ Duke Ronart murmured. ‘I am sorry.’
Merideth sighed. ‘Husband, you are many things. Sorry is not one of them.’
‘What would you have me do?’ he asked, frustration tightening his throat around the words. She turned to see his hands open in pleading supplication, but there was a shadow of anger in his eyes. He still didn’t understand.
‘Call off your dogs. Bring my son home. Love him, despite his faults.’ She thought her demands simple enough. They had not changed since the day they dragged Ranoth into the dungeons, and had continued after they found he had escaped. ‘These are things a father should do.’
Ronart’s hands lowered to his sides and his shoulders sagged. If he thought her answer would change, that her mind and heart’s desires would alter, he did not know her at all.
‘I can’t,’ he finally replied.
Merideth shook her head. ‘You can, you just won’t.’
He left when he realised she had no more words to share. The ensuing silence was only broken by a knock at the door an hour later.
‘The watcher has arrived, ma’am,’ her butler announced from the threshold.
‘Send him in.’ She waited for the man to enter and clear his throat, and turned with her shaking hands folded as the butler closed the door. ‘Brit Doon, is it?’
‘Aye, ma’am,’ he replied with a bow, a woollen hat clasped in his hands.
‘I won’t dally with formalities. There are things you must know. You are relieved of your commission to my husband’s army and you have been transferred legally and entirely into my personal employment. Do you understand? You are no longer in the command of the duke or any of his marshals. You answer to me alone.’
His face drained of all colour and his eyes went wide. He swallowed, ‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘Do you have a family?’
‘Aye.’
‘They will be cared for.’
A muscle in his neck jumped but he nodded. ‘Aye.’
Merideth stepped forwards but not so close as to startle the man. He was already wringing his hat to death between his hands. ‘You returned my son from the Territory, is that correct?’
He only managed a nod.
‘And you were there, at the house, when it happened?’ She watched his head twitch and took it as an affirmative reply. ‘I don’t need to know what happened. Frankly, I don’t care to. But I do need to know that you can be trusted. I need to know that you can take orders. So far, I see a watcher who did his best in a bad situation and followed his master’s command, and you did not turn on my son when he was most in need. You helped him and returned him to me. Are you still that man?’
‘Aye, ma’am.’ He tried to clear the squeak of fear from his throat but failed.
‘I need you to find my son.’
For a long while, Brit said nothing. He only stared and she wondered if he was searching for a way to refuse. ‘The duke has soldiers—’
‘Yes, the duke has men crawling all over Orthia looking for Ran, but my son is more resourceful than he is given credit for. My husband has sent infantry—common soldiers from the ranks. You, on the other hand, know my son. And you are a watcher. Watchers have good eyes, yes? You will track him and you will find him.’ Merideth poured herself a cup of sweet tea from a nearby service and glanced at Brit, his eyes trained on the window. ‘I would go myself, but I would not risk my daughters by leaving them alone in this city, not while folk bay for their brother’s blood. You are the only option I have.’
He nodded. ‘And if I find him?’
‘When you find him…’ At this she paused and sighed, hardly believing the words were to pass her lips. ‘Take him as far from here as any map allows.’
Their eyes met and she saw recognition in the watcher’s face. He knew exactly what she was ordering him to do and what it meant if either of them were caught.
‘Do you understand, Watcher Doon?’
‘Aye, ma’am.’
Chapter Twenty-six
Hummel, Tolak Range, the South Lands
While there was sense in her father’s order to remain within Hummel’s walls, Lidan doubted he quite comprehended the sheer boredom of endless days and nights of confinement. Used to running through the valley at the foot of the Caine no matter the season, she quickly grew restless as her infected wounds healed and her strength returned. There were only so many things a girl could do about the hall and with all but a select few confined on the daari’s order, tasks were done faster than usual. At least she had her training to fill the hours.
Erlon made no apologies for restricting the clan as the dry season drained the colour from the Range; refusing to allow them to gather or hunt food and insisting they subsist on the yields of their small plots and the livestock kept within the walls. The rangers and gatemen scanned the trees and valley from the top of the wall, weapons ready, wary of the shadows and what might linger in them. They all heard Loge’s recollections and saw the body of the creature they called the ngaru, dragged back through the common and burned beyond the gates. They all knew what it had done and that there could be more lurking in the bush across the valley.
The clan’s people watched the pyre of tinder-dry logs, marvelling at the blue flames reaching into the sky as the corpse slowly reduced to bone and ash. They muttered and wondered about what might happen next. Would more come, or was this a lone beast, hunting on the range? Everyone whispered, except the dana. She kept her distance and stared at the creature with wide, wary eyes. Lidan watched her mother from the shadows and corners, stayed out of sight and out of the way, but she watched all the same. She saw her mother biting her perfect nails and nervously picking at the skin on her hands.
The dana slipped away after the pyre burned to the ground and the tine-women came to sluice buckets of water over the ashes and dampen the few remaining embers. Her mother hurried to the Crone’s hut and vanished behind the walls where Lidan did not dare follow and remained there for days.
When she did return, Lidan realised her mother had changed. There was an air about her, an anxious aura that caused her to startle at the smallest sounds, and she spent long spans of time staring into the middle ground where nothing existed but her thoughts. Shockingly, at the sight of the ngaru’s corpse, her mother had transformed into something Lidan had never seen before. Her mother was terrified.
For the most part, Lidan kept clear of her parents in an effort to avoid crossing paths with their fighting. She couldn’t stand the tension and anger that oozed from them both, whether or not the other was near. She knew her mother was furious at the daari for allowing her to train to fight, apoplectic that he willingly put his daughter in what she saw as utterly unnecessary danger. But her mother was at war with herself. In one moment, Sellan was content that Lidan seemed on a path to securing the succession, regardless of the sex of Farah’s unborn child; but in the next, she was consumed with anxiety and riddled with concern that Lidan’s training would get her killed.
The daari seemed equally riled that his wife had tried to turn his eldest daughter against him. Lidan felt her father’s eyes on her back as
she trained or took riding lessons from Siman in the common. He smiled to cover his cool scrutiny, but she felt it like the heat of the sun burning against her skin. He was watching and waiting, though she had no idea what for.
More than once her mother scowled at her as she wandered in, slicked with sweat and streaked with dirt. Sellan clicked her tongue at the bruises on Lidan’s forearms and hands, and made barbed, underhanded comments about the grazes on her knuckles. She hissed a hundred questions at Lidan when she limped in one afternoon after slipping from her stirrups and twisting her ankle. Otherwise, her mother kept to herself, and the silence was almost as bad as the screaming Lidan was accustomed to. In some sick way, she wished her mother would go back to being her old, unpredictable self. Instead, she was pale, jittery, sullen and paranoid, always glancing over her shoulder and never entirely settled.
The training also kept Lidan away from the ever-present sound of Farah vomiting her meals into a pail by her bed. Despite herself, the sight of her half-mother’s growing belly made Lidan’s heart thump and her mouth run dry. In a few more months, as the dry season waned and the days grew longer, that belly would birth a baby and from that day on, Lidan’s whole world could change. It might collapse like a house made of sand, her position and value in the family diminished as one tiny human took its first breath, unaware of the damage he did with that one small act. Or the child could be a girl, another in a long line of daughters and no threat to Lidan or her sisters. It turned her stomach that she saw danger growing in her half-mother’s womb.
The impending arrival and the abundance of spare time gave Lidan plenty to mull over, her mind flicking through possibilities and decisions. She tried to play them out to their ends, attempting to see the future of each path before she was forced to take one above another. None of them struck her as better than the rest, all of them with pitfalls and dangers, unpleasant and fraught to the last with choices she wished she didn’t have to make. Among them lingered her mother’s awful suggestion, and the shadow it cast followed her day and night.
*
The day was overcast and cold beyond the eaves of the hall, the north wind howling down from the tablelands with sharp teeth of ice to gnaw at any exposed skin it might find. Days like this found the common empty and the entries to homes barred tightly against the weather. The dry season was coming to an end with all the fury it could muster and Lidan ached to hear the far-off roar of an approaching summer storm and smell the promise of rain. The time between the depth of the dry season and the height of the sweltering, humid summer was the most glorious and no one in the village prayed harder than Lidan for the cold to crawl back to the mountains.
The training yard between the stables and the ranger’s barracks echoed with the satisfying crack and clack of staves meeting with force, the whisper of leather boots on hard packed soil and the laboured breath of fighters. Healed of his wounds and elevated to the status of ranger, it had been several weeks since Loge volunteered to oversee Lidan’s training when all the other rangers and gatemen stared open mouthed at Siman’s request.
None of them had the slightest idea how to train a girl of twelve, almost thirteen, in the way of the blades. Some of them were skilled close quarter fighters, but preferred axes or the clubs they hung from their saddles. Rangers and gatemen were more accustomed to hunting and shooting arrows at their prey, be it man or beast, not slicing it into submission. Knives were used to cut meat or rope, not to battle an enemy.
Lidan suspected her mother of sowing seeds of doubt among the rangers by way of their wives, muttering in their ears about the danger of training a girl who stood so far above their station. What if they hurt her? She was the heir after all...
Loge either hadn’t heard the dana’s whispered threats or didn’t care for them. He knew well how to wield the shorter knives some rangers carried and offered to train Lidan once he had recovered. She quietly suspected he did it to distract himself and fill his days with anything but cleaning tack or tending horses.
His encounter with the ngaru haunted his eyes in the moments they rested between bouts, though it had left the miller’s son with an unparalleled knowledge of how the creature manipulated its weapons. Of the other rangers who survived the ill-fated hunts, Lidan’s father included, none of them recalled the form of the creature that attacked them or the weapons it used. They had vague, blurred memories of a shadow in the bush and its screams, the heat of their wounds and the terror they’d felt, but none of them had evaded or fought one for as long as Loge. This was something he and Lidan shared, a place of darkness they’d both experienced and didn’t ever wish to return to.
Loge’s stave slapped the still-raw skin below her scar. Lidan cried out and scurried to the side as pain radiated up her arm to her shoulder.
He pointed to his eyes. ‘You weren’t looking.’
She reset her stance and pushed the pain down to the soles of her feet, willing her energy to give her strength and speed. Her eyes focused on Loge and his staves, while hers rose to a ready position. He lunged and struck high and low, forcing Lidan to deflect the blows and spin away from his weight. Taller and broader than his student, Loge’s first lesson was in balance.
‘Good!’ he said and moved to a nearby awning. His light brown skin shone with sweat and he ran a hand over his brow and through the waves of his thick black hair. Lidan snatched at the chance for a drink and gulped water from a bladder. ‘Your opponent will be bigger and stronger than you until—well, forever. Your size gives you the advantage of speed. You’re light and you need to move where they can’t. Stay inside their circle.’ He took the bladder Lidan offered and drained it. ‘Big guys can’t move like that.’
‘Shouldn’t I stay out of their reach?’ Lidan asked. She sat on a bench under the awning, her body shivering with pounding blood and adrenaline.
‘Look.’ He crouched in front of her and held his arm straight towards her shoulder. He took her arm and straightened it beside his, her fingers pointed at his shoulder. His fingertips touched just at her collarbone, while her outstretched arm only reached just past his elbow. ‘Their circle will be this wide, or bigger again. Yours is much smaller, even if you grow to be as tall as your da. Now, add the length of a club or an axe to my arm and my range is even longer. If you try and stay out of my reach I’ll smack you in the head before you get a hit in. If you get in close with those knives, you’ll have me butchered like a pig for the spit in no time. I can’t get any sort of force in my hits this close.’
He demonstrated by pulling her to her feet and flailing his arms around her head until she burst out laughing and pushed him away. Loge dropped down on the bench and rubbed at an ache in his knee. ‘Why do you want to fight, anyway? Word is your mam isn’t too impressed.’
Lidan shrugged and leaned against the awning post, letting the wind wick away her sweat and cool her head and body. ‘I wanted to keep the ngaru’s knives, so Rick and Da decided I needed to learn how to use them. I don’t want to be stuck behind these walls when summer comes. I want to ride and see the range like the other girls.’
‘There aren’t many girls who become rangers.’ It was his turn to shrug. ‘Plenty apprentice but leave when they’re matched. Nothing to say you can’t, but you’re the First Daughter…’
Lidan knew what that meant all too well. Tolak girls trained to be rangers, they knew how to ride and shoot, forage and hunt; but it was a courtesy. It was something to keep them occupied and make them more appealing to husbands when they were old enough to match.
Lidan shook her head. ‘I’m not allowed to match until I’m eighteen. I’ll be damned if I’m going to spend the next six years sewing and waiting for a husband.’
She kept the rest of her plans tucked securely away behind her lips. Loge didn’t need to know that she planned to have her father declare her is heir, even if Farah had a boy. She didn’t want to let that secret loose on the world just yet. For now, the knives were reason enough to train, and that’s all Loge need
ed to know.
‘Fair enough.’ Loge nodded and threw her coat from the back of the bench seat. ‘Put that on and do your stretches. Don’t want sore limbs for tomorrow.’
She shoved one arm through a sleeve and a whistle from the wall cut the air. Loge’s eyes met hers and they paused, listening and waiting for the following warning. What had the gatemen seen?
‘Rider!’ a man bellowed and the village sprang to life beyond the confines of the training yard.
Chapter Twenty-seven
Hummel, Tolak Range, the South Lands
Lidan frowned. ‘A rider?’
‘No riders have gone out in a week or more…’ Loge started running as rangers emerged from their barracks and hurried through the yard’s gate to see what the call was about. Lidan ran through the gathering crowd as the gates groaned open and a horse staggered through. The rider straightened, blinking his eyes.
‘Catch him!’ someone cried as he slipped from the saddle and pitched towards the ground. Spinning around, Lidan shoved her way to the back of the crowd and took the steps to the hall two at a time. She reached the door as her father burst through from the other side, the scrape of benches across the floor echoing at his back as his advisors stood at the interruption.
‘Da!’ Lidan panted. ‘A rider!’
‘What in the—?’ He scooped Lidan from his path with a heavily muscled arm and put her behind the wall of his back. ‘Who is he?’ he called down to the men helping the rider approach the steps.
‘By his symbol, he’s Namjin.’ Jac scaled the steps and held out a roll of tightly bound leather. ‘He’s carry’n a message.’
The daari took the roll and flipped it over to find the markings of the clan who sent it. From her vantage at his elbow, Lidan saw the faint impression of two mountains and the sun, enclosed in a circle—the mark of the Namjin clan who commanded the range to the northwest. They thought themselves descended from Jin; a giant they said made the world. Erlon said the story made them arrogant and overly assured of their own superiority. They were in a constant state of conflict with the Tolak and a message from them was a rare and important thing indeed.
Blood of Heirs Page 24
