Marta could not help but note his derision as the man snorted again.
“You hide us,” Luca went on, his grin widening, “you’ll get one over these rangers, the best ever there was. They’ll walk right past you, never even noticing the secret you keep. And all the while you’ll be pissing down on their heads and them thinking it was rain.”
The man laughed, huffing it out one side of his mouth. “Good reason enough, though I’ll still be requiring that coat.”
The greatcoat was Marta’s last relic from the Newfield army, save Kearney’s pipe and the scar branded into her forehead. She had no great attachment to the coat, but it was the middle of autumn, and the air grew chillier by the day. She still nodded without hesitation just to be free from the fear a few hours. “We’ll need to gather our friends.”
“You mean them gnats what’s been buzzing behind me since I came cross your trail?” The man nodded towards the path behind Marta and Luca’s ambush, and Isabelle emerged from the brush, her hand clutching Caddie’s. “The older girl’s got some skill to her, I’ll grant you, but these are my hills.” He gestured with his chin before slinking back into the brush. “You head on up the trail a peck more until you come to a fork. Wait there.”
Luca answered her unsaid question soon as the stranger departed. “I think we can tie to him. He’s vain and prideful about his talents, but so long as we keep feeding him what he likes eating, he won’t bite. So make sure to toss him a compliment when you see him. You do catch more flies with honey after all.”
“Why you catching flies?” Marta inquired flatly. “Should just swat them.”
Marta walked over to adjust the collar of Caddie’s coat. Even at night it was not quite chilly enough for snow, but she did not want the child catching cold and hampering their flight. At least that was what Marta told herself when not meeting the girl’s gaze, those moments when her head still functioned properly. Lately, whenever the girl’s blue orbs pierced Marta’s brown, all thoughts but the preservation of Caddie’s life fled her head. There was something unnatural about this, but Marta had little time to dwell as they hurried farther up the path.
***
They found the fork and waited just a moment before Isabelle shot Luca a look. “She says there’s a hidden path,” he announced before adding, “and she’ll keep her opinion to herself if she knows what’s best for us.”
The odd man appeared behind them within the half hour, barely breaking stride as he called out to Isabelle. “Go on, lead the way.”
Isabelle grabbed a scrub tree and easily hefted it aside, revealing its roots to be tied up in a burlap sack. Part of Marta’s Cildra training focused on recognizing small details, but she never would have detected this anomaly in the terrain. Here in the wilderness, Isabelle’s eyes outstripped her own, and Marta found herself wondering how proficient a Cildra the woman might have been had fate treated her kindlier.
Leading the way up the newly uncovered path, Marta, Luca, and Caddie followed at Isabelle’s heels. Once past the threshold, Marta looked back to see the woodsman not bother to return the camouflaging brush. He caught her eyes and shrugged.
“If thems as good as you say, no reason to hide. The smell will give me away.”
He did not exaggerate about the smell, the stink slapping Marta’s face long before they reached the three buildings. The middle-sized one was a shack, roughly wrought by hand from the timber covering the hills. The smallest appeared set aside for storage, whereas the largest dwarfed them both, a building open on three sides with canvas flaps currently tied up and a large table still covered in the stretched hide of a deer. Unlabeled bottles of dark liquids adorned the one wall, but looked stopped up and therefore not the source of the stench. The three barrels just outside the largest building were the obvious culprit, their lids insufficient at containing the reek of urine used to tan his hides.
Although Luca warned Marta to ply their host with compliments, she openly pinched her nose. The tanner did not notice as he strode to the shack. “Move the table aside. You’ll be camped out below.”
Marta and Luca slid the table to one side, revealing a set of loose wooden slats underneath. Peeling the boards back, they unveiled a wooden pit that would serve. Its contents were few, only a metal lockbox and a small package wrapped up in brown paper.
Movement and what sounded like a squawk issued from inside the house before the man emerged, carrying a huge black hide. Seeing them still outside the hole, he rolled his eyes. “Putting it off won’t make it easier.”
Marta hopped down first, Luca and Isabelle following, but Caddie remained at the lip.
“She need encouragement?” The man asked unkindly, and Marta felt her hackles rise. She still did her best to keep her voice civil.
“No, she’ll do it on her own.” Turning her eyes to the girl’s did not help Marta’s impulse to cuff the man, but she softened her inflection. “Come on, Caddie. It will be dark, but it’ll be safe. And we need to keep you safe.”
For a moment, Marta thought Caddie might bolt, but the girl finally held out her soft hand. Marta took it and helped her down into the shallow pit. Using her other hand, Marta pressed the girl down to her rump to join the already seated Luca and Isabelle. It would be a tight fit, but it would suffice.
“Thank you,” Marta said, flaring her shoulders to slough off her coat.
“Keep it for now. And keep this safe while you’re at it.”
He tossed her the black hide. She recognized it as bearskin, and Marta understood why it would remain hidden with them. The symbol of the nation of Newfield, a hefty tax was levied on bear hides, a tax their woodland savior seemed unwilling to cough up. Although he claimed no need for money, the bear hide and lockbox said otherwise, and his personal motivation to keep them hidden made Marta feel marginally better.
Without another word, he started setting the boards back over their heads, the daylight disappearing in increments with each plank. As the last one clicked into place, Marta felt Caddie’s hand tighten, reminding the woman that she held the girl’s grasp. It tightened again at the scrape of the table as it blocked out the last of the light, bathing them in blackness.
“I’ll find them rangers of yours and steer them another way,” the man called in a muffled voice. “I ain’t back in a day, I ain’t coming back, and you best push real hard.”
***
Despite the brisk autumn air outside, the hole’s atmosphere quickly turned hot and fetid with each accumulated exhale. More worrisome was Caddie’s hand tightening around hers. When Marta first uncovered the convalescent in the Lindaire Sanitarium, the girl was victim of combat fugue and incapable of action on her own. The emet they encountered changed that, somehow unlocking the girl’s mind and returning to her the ability to move of her own accord. At first, this seemed a boon, but with the girl’s added independence came new worries of Caddie wandering off or crying out and giving their position away.
Unable to comfort the girl with words, Marta ran her other hand through Caddie’s thin white hair as soothingly as she could. When ill and gripped by fever, Marta’s mother, Cecelia Childress, used to calm her in this manner. At least back before Marta’s Cildra training commenced in earnest. For the life of her, Marta could remember no additional acts of kindness passing from her mother after that moment, but she still clung to the old memories and aped them in an attempt to soothe the girl.
With no sense of time in the dark, she did not know how long it was before they heard footfalls approaching their hideaway. The fact they aimed directly for them should have assured her, but Marta prepared to attack as the planks finally peeled back to reveal the woodsman alone. The sun had set long before, but the night still seemed much brighter than their recent darkness.
“Safe to come out now,” he said without any preamble. But Luca focused on the man, his face unsure.
“You sent them away?”
“Ain’t no one on your trail. Never was, far as I can tell.”
&nb
sp; Marta could not see the woman’s face, but suspected Isabelle’s displeasure at the aspersion to her skill. The man backed up her assumption as he broke into a grin.
“Believe me or not, no matter. I’m wrong, they still won’t be able to find you in the dark. Name’s Conroy.” He extended his hand to Marta. She thought perhaps he might be expecting a handshake until he spoke again. “I’ll be taking that coat now. Any dinner you want will be bought by that red-eye.”
Despite the dropping temperature, Marta did not begrudge him the coat as he headed back to his shack. Her face still remained sour though, Luca noticing.
“Buck up,” he told her. “Things could not be going better.”
Chapter 2
Marz 13, 552 (Fifteen Years Ago)
Things could not be any worse for the boy. Those of the yogano, the communal campfire for victorious men, pelted his lumbering pursuer with catcalls as he wove between the wagons, Luca only a few steps ahead. It irked the twelve-year old to no end that he too received their derision, men he had considered himself one of only moments before.
Dodging between two wagons, Luca considered his options. He was certainly fleeter of foot than the aggrieved farmer, his senses not dulled with wine either. But the farmer’s endurance was as unending as a waterfall and easily eclipsed his own. It was desperation that sent Luca to the edge of the encircled wagons’ light, the dark woods awaiting on the other side. He risked it all if he stepped outside the circle, but the child chanced it nonetheless.
Like all Dobra children, Luca learned to stay close to the welcoming fire in the center of the wolari, the wagon camps the Wandering tribes toured in. The darkness outside was dangerous, said to be the haunts of ghuls, gasts, glassmen and other sundry creatures. The real reason for this warning, Luca realized now, was the lack of kin to defend him from a gaji. Were he caught outside the light, there would be no one to stop this outsider from doing him harm.
His eyes still blinded from the campfire, the woods became all the blacker, Luca navigating between the trees more through luck than skill. The farmer slowed as well, but his path stayed aimed at the boy, or, more likely, the seven silver coins jingling in his pocket. Luca considered stopping dead to silence them, the farmer sure to fully lose him in the dark. But the woods loomed high, their branches rubbing together with an eerie scrape that sent a shiver up Luca’s spine. Stopping still and waiting might save him, but the boy turned tail and sprinted back to camp.
Not far outside the small town of Farnham in the state of Walshvan, this was not the worst stop they had made in Luca’s estimation, but all the stops sort of bled together. Already Luca had traveled the length of the nation of Newfield east to west, his wolari now reversing their course east again on their unending, meandering journey. Never was there a distinct destination to their wandering, only the constant journey bequeathed to them by their ancestors Dobradab and his mistress Ikus. The towns might have different names, but they were all the same to Luca: they were all inhabited by gaji, who might be willing to trade with the Dobra, but never considered him and his tribes Newfield citizens.
This made the gaji dangerous, as Luca now realized firsthand.
The woods lost to him, and the men of the yogano content to offer no more than insults, only one option remained in the form of his father. Camlo Dolphus was not a man large in stature, but his girth had increased of late, his bristling black beard making him all the more imposing, and Luca hoped it would be enough to frighten off the farmer.
It was actually his father who picked the farmer as a mark soon after he arrived in the encampment. Despite the fiddle pressed to his cheek, Luca could easily read his father’s intent when he spied the man. Like many of his fellow Dobra who were not born Blessed to earn a living by plucking the lines of ley, his father made do through his music, the gaji tossing a coin his way along with a song request. With dozens of musicians and gaji guests, the campsite quickly devolving into a cacophony of competing strains nightly. Unfortunately for the family, Camlo Dolphus was a middling musician at best, Luca already nipping at his heels despite his age.
But the music ultimately did not matter; it was only a distraction and excuse for the gaji to drink. The cheap wine the Dobra provided made their marks more pliant and willing to take part in the un-Blessed’s true source of income: trading imbued objects. All Dobra hawked imbued objects, all considered of dubious worth once removed from the camp, but the Ikus were widely renowned for fashioning authentic articles demanding dear prices. The trinkets the Ikus traded were just as counterfeit as the other tribes’, but that was all a part of the unending dance between the Dobra and gaji.
Luca played in his stead as his father signaled to the rest of the wolari his chosen mark by taking a break beside the farmer. He then struck up an offhand conversation even as he refilled the man’s cup with wine. Luca could barely hear their chat over his tune, but he Listened to the farmer’s Mind to catch what his ears could not. The farmer’s answers followed his father’s line of questioning as to the planting season, but his mind kept straying to a lady he liked, a lady currently in camp on the arm of another. Unaware of the farmer’s present disinterest in his crops, Luca’s father quickly, and inelegantly to Luca’s reckoning, turned the conversation to the pearl in his pocket.
Camlo Dolphus acquired the capper, one of the thousands of trinkets circulating the campsite, not a week back. Luca accompanied him, stepping back as his father haggled with Saban, who was widely known to always have the best baubles. After his father argued down and paid the price, he finally allowed Luca to look it over.
“It looks more like paste than a pearl.”
“Think so,” his father challenged, a glint of a grin shimmering under his beard. “You ever seen a pearl before?”
“No,” Luca answered. “Not outside of cappers.”
“Then what are the chances some soil toiler has?”
But the pearl capper turned out harder to trade than either imagined, perhaps because no farmer had ever seen one, and his father exuded desperation each time he now tried to unload it. At least that was how he appeared to his Listener son, who did not even need his Blessed ability to realize the current mark’s disinterest. The only thing on the forefront of his mind was the woman he wanted but could not win, and like the poor farmer, Luca’s father toiled away at an impossible task. Although he could put no words to it, shame licked at Luca upon seeing his father struggle so futilely.
The sting of the unnamed shame galled him to no end, and Luca dug as deep into the gaji’s Mind as his Listener talents allowed. It was no easy task, but eventually Luca came away with two names: Lisa, the object of the farmer’s affection, and Price, his fellow suitor.
Soon as he finished his song, Luca begged off by twirling the bow over his fingers in the pattern his father taught him. Realizing finally the futility of pursuing his mark any further, Camlo gave his son a nod, and Luca hurried away to find Saban.
***
“I need a capper,” Luca announced upon arriving outside the man’s vurd. All Wanderers took pride in decorating their wagons in garish colors, but the outlandish Saban outdid them all. Each piece, be it wall, wheel, awning or door, of his home sported a decidedly disparate color, Saban then draping his outer walls in strung cappers numbering in the hundreds. Anyone could easily sidestep a deal with the shrewd Saban, but none did. Theft within the wolari being considered one of the cardinal sins, punishment consisted of banishment from the tribe. Since a Dobra without a tribe was equally long to live as a bird without wings, everyone always presented themselves to Saban for trade.
“And make it a rin kuti, something a woman would wear,” Luca added, receiving a raised eyebrow upon his insistence of a particularly fine counterfeit.
“And what do you have to buy this rin kuti with?”
All the profits he received from playing beside his father belonged to the family, Luca dutifully turning over his earnings at the end of each night. Yet he managed to filch a coin or t
wo when his father showed more interested in his wine than their take, and Luca turned out his pockets, clinking the change that totaled less than a dollar.
“Rin kuti it is.”
Saban unveiled his wares, his smile widening as if displayed a true treasure. The fact such a statement was an outright lie, the trinkets and baubles Saban showed Luca nothing more than junk, did not cause him offence. Luca’s wolari, just like all the Dobra tribes, were a tight-knit people constantly tripping over each other in camp. Listeners also made up many of their number, much more than any other people covering the face of Ayr, and so everyone knew the truth about everyone else. And, as every Wanderer worth his salt knew, heading straight at a destination stole the savor from the journey. They therefore meandered around every topic, speaking straight at the truth considered the height of rudeness. As such, embellishments were always expected and considered good form in everyday interactions. Saban’s wares were no more rin kuti than Luca’s pittance a treasure, but each treated the other as if it were the Sol’s honest truth.
Luca made the requisite pretense expected of him as he oohed and aahed, but there was nothing there among the baubles that caught his eye. “Perhaps the garnet ring you showed my father,” he finally offered.
“You have fine tastes. And a good memory on top of it.”
Luca’s good memory recalled that the “garnet” appeared it might shatter from looking at it too intently, but he accepted the fawning compliment and bit his tongue so as to be equally polite.
“I’m afraid what you have here tonight would only be a first payment,” Saban said. “But as soon as you brought me another dollar, I’d be happy to part with it.”
It took Luca nearly six months to procure his meager money, so the initial price nearly made him wail. Dobra decorum dictated he proffer at least three more offers before he haggled his way down to what he could actually afford, but Luca did not believe he would ever have enough, and simply did not have the time.
The Imbued Lockblade (Sol's Harvest Book 2) Page 3
