Stormlord’s Exile

by Glenda Larke

  Russet nodded. “She married him. But only one child living. Sienna Verdigris, the silly frip.” He shook his finger at her in sudden anger. “Ye—ye—”

  “I am not Sienna,” she said and quickly changed the subject. “Where is Kermes Manor?”

  “The Slew.”

  “And that is…?”

  “The ward above Southern Marches.”

  “Will Kermes Manor still be in your family? Who will live there now?”

  “What? What? Why asking, eh? Ye live in the Peak soon! Ye the Pinnacle. Rule the land. I teach ye.” He grasped her arm, the grip of his bony fingers painfully tight.

  Feroze stepped in and led him away to sit down by the fire, telling him it was time to have something to eat.

  Elmar exchanged a look with Dibble, then shook his head at Terelle. “I don’t like this at all. I think we’re going to be up to our ears in politics when we get to Khromatis. And politics anywhere is a midden of garbage. Tread in the wrong spot and you fall straight into a waterless hell.”

  “I want to know why Feroze startled like a pebblemouse when I mentioned the name Verdigris,” she said.

  She bided her time and grabbed him later that night to ask.

  For once he was forthcoming. “I didn’t know the Pinnacle’s family name was Verdigris,” he said.

  “What does it mean to you?”

  “The military governor of the Southern Marches—that’s the man who both commands the armed men and administers the ward—is a Verdigris. He’s been there in the south for the past eight years. I suppose the Alabasters who work across the Borderlands might know if he is related to the Pinnacle, but I don’t. They hate him.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ve heard he’s a cruel man.”

  She shivered.

  They emerged from the marsh at the base of a small rise. Without stopping, they rode on. Another quarter-run of a sandglass brought them to the top of the rise to overlook a small valley. Perhaps two miles away below was March-ford, buildings jostling on either side of a ribbon of water. Chimneys smoked and belched from a jumble of outlying smelters and ovens, furnaces and manufactories. Terelle wrinkled her nose. An acrid smell hung on the air, tainting the valley and subduing the lingering stink of marshland rot. The river below the town ran brown and oily, soiling the banks.

  “We have company,” Feroze murmured and held up his hand to halt the caravan.

  She hardly heard. She was still overwhelmed by all she could see: clouds, grass, trees, slopes rising to a background of impossibly high mountains—and water. Water running over the land, through the town and out the other side, just sliding away, untrammelled, uncaught, made dirty as if it didn’t matter. Wasted. The sight was so shocking, she could hardly catch her breath. The two sides of the town were linked across the wash by a stone road. A bridge, Feroze called it.

  “Is that like a drywash when the rush comes down?” Dibble asked, wide-eyed in shock.

  “No,” she replied, her tone as unforgiving as granite. There was no comparison and there never could be. “No, nothing like.”

  “That’s a river,” Feroze said.

  “That’s Khromatis,” Russet said with smug satisfaction. “Civilised life again.” He shot a glance to where she sat on her pede. “Your home.”

  She snorted. This was even more alien to her than the Whiteout. Leafy bushes. Trees, so tall. Grass. All green. And dirtied water running to waste. She shivered. The wind, blowing from the direction of the mountains, was cold and she wasn’t used to it being cold during the day while it was still sunny. At the Bastion’s request, Alabasters in Samphire had given them warmer clothes and strange shoes that covered their feet to the ankle. Now she understood why.

  “All that green, it looks sick.” Dibble was grinning, so she guessed it was an attempt to joke.

  “Snap out of it, you two,” Elmar said. “Feroze is right—those people down there are on their way to intercept us.” He used his pede prod to point at a group of men riding up the valley slope towards them. They were still some distance away, riding in orderly formation. The spears they carried, held upright, bristled above their heads.

  “Border patrol,” Feroze said. “Water sensitives among them.”

  “Withering winds,” Elmar muttered as they approached, “as formidable an array of sharp points as the thorny lizards of the Gibber.”

  “Forty men,” Dibble said. “Riding… animals. What are those things?”

  “They look a bit like the donkeys I’ve seen in Portennabar,” Elmar said. “Hoofed. These are larger, though. And… different.”

  “The tails are different. These are all hair. And they are bred to be ridden,” Feroze said, “not to be pack animals. They are Alpiners. I’m told there’s something similar found across the Giving Sea, but they are different colours, from what I’ve heard.” He gave a grunt of disparagement. “Alpiners would be useless in the Quartern. Always wanting to drink.”

  Large men sitting on small mounts—they looked ludicrous. Nervous, Terelle wanted to giggle, but curbed the desire. The animals were covered in reddish-brown hair, but had tails and neck hair that were long and white. Muscular beasts, sinewy things to look at, yet they hinted at hidden strengths and speed.

  Her heart thumped as the men rode closer. There was no mistaking their intention to intercept the caravan. There was no mistaking their occupation, either: these were professional armsmen. Their metal helmets had plates curving across the cheek and extensions to protect the nose. Their leather breastplates were metal-studded; their biceps and forearms were armoured with metalled links. They wore swords, not scimitars.

  “Men dressed to fight,” Elmar muttered. “I am liking this less and less.”

  “They don’t need to use swords to defeat us. They have stormlords a lot more powerful than Jasper.” They can make salt dance a hundred miles away…

  “They won’t all be stormlords,” Elmar said, probably to make her feel happier.

  “In fact, very few of them,” one of the Alabasters said in agreement. “Wouldn’t be more than twenty waterlord armsmen among those patrolling the whole border, from north to south.”

  The riders weren’t sitting on their saddles; they rode astride them, which didn’t look comfortable. They wore tunics over trousers that fitted into solid leather footwear of a kind Terelle had never seen before. And over their left shoulders, slanting across their chests and pinned under a belt at the waist on the right, they all wore a kind of woven and knotted scarf of a vividly patterned weave that reminded her of Russet’s clothing. The draped ends that hung loose at a man’s right hip anchored the scabbard for his sword.

  That’s just Russet’s wrap, but worn differently.

  Feroze, at the head of their caravan, twisted in the saddle to signal for Dibble, who was driving Russet, and Elmar, driving Terelle, to bring their pedes forward to flank him on either side. The others arrayed themselves behind while they waited.

  The armsman in the lead was taller than any man Terelle had ever seen. His helmet made it hard to see his features, but there was one thing certain: he was not smiling. He shouted a command and the troop reined in. Terelle looked from one impassive face to the next but it was hard to distinguish much under those helmets. When her glance fell to the backs of their hands she could see a few were tattooed with patterns, just like Russet’s.

  No, not quite. The patterning is different.

  The leader snapped out something to Feroze that Terelle did not understand.

  Calmly, Feroze introduced himself as Saltmaster Feroze Khorash of Samphire, advisor to the Bastion, then introduced Russet by his full name and status, Lord Russet Kermes, waterpainter of Khromatis. He waved to indicate Terelle and was about to name her, but was stopped by the astonished murmur that ran through the group of riders. The leader stiffened in the saddle, the harsh lines of his face deepening into a frown. A moment later he reached up and removed his helmet. His brown hair was long and curly; unrestrained, it fell to his s
houlders. His brown skin and green eyes were a match to Terelle’s; for the first time in her life she gazed on the face of someone alike enough to have been her brother or cousin, albeit tattooed. She guessed him to be in his early forties.

  And she didn’t like him. It was not the harsh lines of his face that made her mistrust him, but the gesture of removing his helmet. It was done as a mark not of trust, but of arrogance, as if he wanted to say: Remember this face? You should know me and bow. And you should know that I do not fear you, or your puny armsmen.

  Behind him, three of the men exchanged glances, then as one, they also removed their helmets. At first Terelle could see no significance in this. Then she realised: each one of the four was tattooed across the cheeks, and the pattern on each—a swirl of blue curlicues—was identical. She suspected the four of them were proclaiming their common lineage. She guessed the leader was the father, and the three others were his sons, the oldest perhaps in his early twenties, the youngest seventeen or eighteen.

  Terelle looked over at Russet. He was sitting as motionless as a chameleon, eyes hooded, hands gripping the chair arms tightly. He knows what those tattoos mean, she thought.

  The leader stared at Russet, his eyes as hard as emeralds. When he spoke, Terelle struggled to understand, but managed to catch the gist of his words. “I thought you were dead, long since,” he said. “And what of my cousin, Sienna?”

  Russet glared at him in silence. Terelle wasn’t sure if he was angry at the question or confused by it. She asked, using her own tongue, “Your cousin? Are we related then? I am Sienna’s daughter. She died many years ago.”

  The man swung to face her, his eyebrows snapping together in a glower. She had the feeling he’d understood her. “My name is Terelle,” she said, avoiding the tangled issue of her family name. “What’s yours?”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Khromatis

  The Southern Marches

  Marchford

  Terelle didn’t like the Khromatian leader.

  She didn’t like the way he sat motionless and stared at her. There was no warmth in his eyes, no welcome in the harsh lines of his face. Only when Elmar and Dibble both started to fidget did the fellow answer the request for his name, and this time he used the language of the Quartern. “Lord Bice Verdigris. Commander of the Southern Marches.”

  Oh, hells.

  He followed that statement up with an order. Four of his men rode forward, two to where Dibble sat, two towards Elmar, their belligerence expressed in lowered spears aimed at the two armsmen.

  Feroze spoke again, in Quartern, still calm. “These two Scarpen men are the personal bodyguards of Lord Terelle. And Lord Terelle is the betrothed of the Cloudmaster of the Quartern. She is his envoy and he has asked that her attendants be granted a special dispensation to enter this land, in the interest of friendship between neighbours.”

  She gripped the saddle handle as her blood ran cold. For a moment she couldn’t identify what disturbed her so. Feroze was putting words into Jasper’s mouth, but it wasn’t the words that panicked her, it was the way he said them. The way he lowered his eyes and folded his hands in his lap. The unspoken deference and submission in the way he held himself. That wasn’t the Feroze she knew.

  Russet spoiled the effect of the words anyway, by glaring at Terelle and then spitting out words as if they were poisonous, “Betrothed? Betrothed? What? Who said? Ye belong here!”

  Elmar winced and swore under his breath.

  Terelle, trying to match Feroze’s calm, said merely, “I will marry whom I please, when I please.” She turned her attention to Lord Bice. “Greetings, cousin. I would like to keep my two guards. The Cloudmaster might take it amiss if they were to be sent back without me.” She was trying to sound both imperious and unruffled, but had no idea if she’d succeeded.

  Lord Bice met her gaze, but there was no softening there. “Very well. They can come with ye for the time being while ye are under my kharits, my… my care. But if ye and Lord Russet want to be riding further into Khromatis, ye’ll have to be doing so without them, or any Alabaster. For now, we will escort ye to my quarters beyond the town.” His heavy accent told her he had not learned the Quartern tongue as a child.

  While he was speaking, the Khromatian armsmen, in answer to some unseen signal, lined themselves up on either side of the travellers. It should have felt like an escort to honour them, but it didn’t, not to her. It felt like an armed guard for prisoners.

  Elmar made a small gesture of warning to Dibble that meant, Be alert!

  No one talked much as they descended into the town. They were travelling too fast for normal conversation anyway. Assaulted by new impressions, assailed on all sides by new sights and smells and sounds, Terelle felt a heightened tension.

  Wild trees grew on the hill slope, not the widely scattered, scraggly, twisted things of the Quartern, hardly taller than a pede; no, these were neatly grouped together, tall, leafy and plentiful. Even the town was odd to her eyes. The buildings were made of stone, not mud brick or salt, and were roofed with some sort of pale grey material. The streets were paved with stone, which the pedes hated. They clicked their mouthparts in irritation and would have swung their feelers about in outrage if their drivers had not hobbled them to the side mounting handles. Smells were strange, an irritant in her nostrils. Acridity in the smoky air, the unfamiliar odour of alpiner droppings, the all-permeating sweetness of water that was strange only in its abundance, the tickling perfume of flowers and grasses wafting from the hillsides and gardens—it all made her want to sneeze.

  The place was grimy from all the smoke, yet ablaze with colour—flowers, clothing, ornate decorations on the wealthier houses in the form of carved and painted patterns under the eaves. And wood: there was wood everywhere. Carts, barrels, doors and window frames, seats, bridge railings. Chopped wood neatly stacked in house yards, which puzzled her, until she realised it was for burning.

  Sweet waters, they burned wood.

  Abundant wood, abundant water. By all that’s sun-holy, do these people know how lucky they are?

  They did not stop on that side of the river, but rode straight through the town to the bridge. As they crossed, Terelle stared through the railings and, disoriented and dizzied by the sight of sliding water, clutched the saddle handle tight. On the other side, they entered a busy street market and were surrounded by a bustling, hustling jostle of people. Colourful stalls blocked half the roadway, and people thronged what was left. The way they gazed at Lord Bice and his men was neither cheerful nor admiring. Bice, she decided, was not popular. Alabasters used pedes to come and go across the Borderlands, so Khromatians were accustomed to seeing them, but they stared hard at her and Russet, and registered shock when they spotted Elmar and Dibble, too dark to be Alabasters, yet too fair to be Khromatians. Many wore colourful wraps similar to Russet’s; others, mostly workmen and tradesmen, wore plain trousers and tunics.

  In the market the crowd slowed the column to a crawl. Several itinerant vendors made the most of the moment and started to pester the Alabaster guards to buy their goods. One seller approached Elmar and Terelle in an attempt to sell a large cloth pouch full of the tiny mirrors that the Alabasters sewed to their clothes. She was about to dismiss the vendor with a shake of her head, when Elmar asked how much they were. After bargaining that didn’t seem much different from similar haggling back in a Scarpen city, he negotiated the purchase.

  “What do you want these for? They’re as heavy as a stone mortar,” she asked as he handed them to her to put in a saddle bag.

  “They’re for you,” he said quietly. “Just in case. Tiny, yet easily seen.”

  “Ah.” She knew what he was suggesting: it was likely they’d be separated and mirrors could mark her trail. Now that she’d met the first of her relatives, the thought was disturbing. To be alone with Russet in this land? She shrivelled inside.

  As they continued on in single file through the streets, Elmar said to her over his shoulder, �
��If they do separate us, Dibble and I won’t give up, I promise you. No matter what happens, remember that and take heart.”

  She leaned forward so she could speak into his ear. “Be careful, Elmar. This Bice scares me. I’d never forgive myself if something happened to either of you.”

  “Maybe we’re both trembling at nothing more dangerous than salt-dancers.”

  But she didn’t think so. She’d seen the flash in Lord Bice’s eyes when he realised who she was: shock had been closely followed by rage. Worse, it wasn’t the momentary rage of a hot-tempered man, soon over. No, his was a cold fury that would stay beneath the surface while he made his plans.

  She knew his kind.

  The residence of the Commander of the Southern Marches was beyond the town on the eastern bank of the river, a mile upstream. It was as large as Breccia Hall, but surrounded by gardens. Terelle had never seen a building as beautiful, or as extravagant. Elegant pillars, archways and polished stone walls were punctuated by doors and windows trimmed with polished wood; straight pieces of wood, too, not gnarled and twisted like Scarpen wild wood, or soft and patterned like bab palm. Windows were not just shuttered openings, but were glassed. She couldn’t think why anyone would want to do that. And then there was the garden. Trees that appeared to serve no purpose beyond their looks. Open ponds, exposed to the greed of the sun.

  Sunblast it, she thought, disgruntled. I will never see a Scarpen city the same way again.

  The Alabaster guards, together with Dibble and Elmar and all the pedes and the luggage, were whisked away to the barracks at the back of the house. Lord Bice handed Feroze, Russet and Terelle over to servants as soon as the rest of them arrived at the main door, then disappeared himself together with the young men she’d thought might be his sons. He had not introduced them.

  Anxious, but trying not to show it, she followed a dour young man wearing a uniform similar to the Khromatian armsmen, although without the armour or the impressive footwear.

  Feroze spoke to him in Khromatian and then dropped back to whisper to her as they trailed the man upstairs, “He’s an army orderly. This is not Bice’s personal manor house, although he and his sons treat it as such. It belongs to the army, and is the residence given to the commander.”