The Season of the Plough

by Luke R J Maynard

  Eventually, he resigned himself to it and answered to her best efforts, though the sound of his name never pleased him. In time he learned to speak Viluri, the ancient language of the aerils, though it was harsh and deep in his throat, and with a shared language their friendship deepened into family. In the long days of winter, when Aewyn’s hair turned white and the forest was quiet, the two would go walking in the deep woods together, weaving from their thoughts a spring of sounds that never ran dry.

  It was Poe who first told her of the land beyond the trees, a warm lowland rich in birds and flowers, where he had been born among others of his kind, and grown among the karach. He told her also of those called the Iun in Viluri—people shaped like her, who lived male and female together in vast camps of stone and wood. He spoke most frequently of them, though not without pain. When he spoke of his own people, the hurt deepened, and he was quick to move on.

  Of her mother, though, Aewyn could remember little. It was, Grim insisted, the way of fairies and wood-spirits that the farther out a man ventured from their magic world, the less distinct his memories became, like a dream remembered too long after waking. In Celithrand’s native tongue she was called Aelissraia, though between them the two spoke some other tongue of the wood, some ancient whisper that seemed to Aewyn as the sound of wind through the leaves. To Aewyn she spoke little if at all, and her green eyes, though full of love, were wild and alien in their way. Her skin had the colour and smoothness of naked birch, and her hair, like Aewyn’s, changed with the seasons. Aewyn’s memory was that she smelled always of wildflowers, and her milk was woody and sweet. But she was not like a human mother, and the silly rhymes and stern warnings Karis heaped on her children were foreign to Aewyn at first. The motherhood of the Iun was altogether different. Half-imagined through a wistful veil, Aewyn had, in the end, only fleeting impressions of her mother—that she was gentle and sad; that she was inattentive, by the standards of mundane folk; that she had unseen ways of going within the deep wood, and was ever more often away.

  Celithrand was frequently on the move as well, and as her connection to Poe deepened she came to fully inhabit his mundane world. The food of the forest that had once been so plentiful was replaced by pangs of hunger and the need to forage and hunt—skills Poe taught her from his own childhood. The closer she stayed to the heart of the wood, the better she endured the cold of winter: the chilling climate did not trouble her in the deep wood, but pained her like a normal child when she ventured too far. The chill of the winter and the sparseness of food outside the heart of the forest served to keep her from coming too near the village until she was discovered. Poe’s hunger could not be sated by the magic of the wood, and he was forced to roam wider in search of food. The notion that he was a poacher—wrapped as it was in strange ideas about livestock, possession, and crime—was foreign to him. And like a soft-hearted shepherd who preferred cheese to mutton, Poe soon shed his natural inclination to hunt those domesticated herd-creatures that walked on two legs and looked too much like Aewyn. She was of human form, if not quite human spirit, and the prospect of manhunting made him uncomfortable.

  In the lazy evenings behind Alec Mercy’s house, tasting Grim’s wine and sharing stories, Grim asked her most often about her mother. Was she really a fairy? Did she have extraordinary powers? Did she really go about the woods as naked as a toad? Had she ever lured a mortal man like in the ballads? She must have, he reasoned, to birth a child; but Aewyn had answers to none of these questions. Her mother was a distant figure, a weak memory growing weaker with each day she spent in Widowvale.

  “It’s not natural,” Grim said, “for a girl to grow and not know her mother, nor father.”

  “Fawns leave their mother after two winters,” said Aewyn. “Besides which, Karis has been my mother, and you are as sure a father to me as any.”

  “I’m surprised you recall as much as you do,” said Alec. “Men who get bewitched these days mostly don’t know it. You know Robyn’s brother, Bram? He was gone all through the last muster of the Havenari. I’ve heard he was taken by a woodkin, lived a year and a day with her, and returned home that same week. He’s got that great sadness in him, like a man who loved a fairy once, and can never find his way home to her.”

  “Bram’s a good man,” said Grim. “Or the better part of one, at least. But just the same, I think it was a brown jug, not a green lady, that kept him from muster.”

  “It’s just as well he doesn’t ride out with them,” said Alec. “I’ll not trust the borderlands to a man in that condition. It’s shameful the way he embarrasses his sister.”

  “She doesn’t seem embarrassed,” Grim noted.

  “She’s had enough trouble bringing that bunch to heel without his reputation weighing on her. Eight men deserted in five years, that’s more than she deserves. She’s not weak, Grim. It’s her fool brother makes her look so.”

  Grim scoffed. “It’s all polished plate and pageantry, anywise,” he said. “Not one of the Havenari is a true soldier. Not anymore, whatever they were supposed to be, long ago.”

  “Robyn’s the finest archer in Haveïl just the same,” Alec said. “Better than I am, and I’ve loosed arrows on men in battle. I’ve seen her thread a ring at thirty yards. She’s won the tourney in the fall fair six years running.”

  “Then we’ll be safe,” Grim replied, smiling, “when the prophecies come true and the Tourney Rings rise and walk again.”

  Alec shrugged and left it at that, turning back to Aewyn. “Did your mother have—a taste for ordinary men?” he asked. “Like they say in the fairy ballads?”

  Aewyn shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “There were never men who came to see us, except Celithrand, but I remember so little about her.”

  “That baffles me,” said Grim. “I find it hard to believe you remember so little of your old life.”

  “I don’t,” Alec countered. “We’ve all come here, give or take, to forget our old lives. I was seventeen when I joined the Grand Army.”

  “I thought you played the horn,” said Aewyn. “That’s what Arran and Glam say.”

  “I did,” said Alec. “I was what’s called a bannerhorn—a signal-carrier for the legions during the Stonewind Clearances.”

  Grim nodded. “You were in one of the Blades, weren’t you?”

  “Tenth Legion of the Blade,” said Alec. “They called us the Blood Dogs, and not because we made good manor pets. I fought in the Wastes under Harrod, long before he ever became Master General of the Blade. And you know what? I remember very little of that life—and I’d like to keep it that way.”

  “Can’t say I blame you,” said Grim.

  “And you, Grim? What were you in your former life?”

  Grim chuckled. “I see your point,” he admitted. But a shadow passed over his features and he said no more.

  “You’re safe at home here, Aewyn,” said Alec. “Do the children tease you, being different?”

  “Only Glam,” she said, naming Grim’s second-oldest. “And I wallop him for it.”

  Alec smiled. “We’re all outsiders in the end, girl. You. Me. Grim. Maybe I was a soldier once. Maybe you were a magical dryad, or a dryad’s kin. Maybe you were born under a star of fate, as you say. But Widowvale’s a young town—probably no older than you—and it’s a new home for us all. You can make a new fate here, if it suits you.”

  “I don’t know what suits me,” she said.

  “I know what doesn’t suit you,” said Grim. “That’d be farm-work. But it’s where you’re at for now. We’ve taken enough of Alec’s time. Hettie Oltman’s greens aren’t going to grow themselves. Plenty of time to figure out the rest later.”

  Aewyn turned back to Alec as she stood up. “Do you miss your home, though? Or your family, if you have any?”

  Alec thought about it for a long moment. “I miss my family,” he said. “They’re spread all over, now. But I never miss the Iron City. My home is my horses, and my pasture, and the bees I kee
p in the high orchard. It’s blue skies and clean snows, roads that smell of autumn cedar rather than rubbish and window-shit. Pardon me, girl. Grim.”

  “She’s not my daughter,” Grim smiled off-handedly. “Speak as you like.”

  “Come fall, my home will be the Harvest Fair,” said Alec. “Music on the hill. Children under the oak. Bram sleepy with wine on the steps of the moot-hall, Grim here all the richer for it. Robyn in a skirt, the one night of the year, barefoot on the green, dancing the halling as well as any man.”

  Aewyn’s eyes brightened at the mention of the young woman. “I can’t wait to see Robyn again,” she said. “It’s been so long, now, since she’s come through town. The patrols or the seasons, or both, grow too long when she’s gone away.”

  “That,” said Grim knowingly, “is not a lesson you need teach Alec Mercy.”

  If there was a Harvest Fair that year, Aewyn had little memory of it. She worked through the fair, too exhausted from her labours to make much of an appearance. She heard only later from Arran, Grim’s oldest son, that it was a particularly good one: the Year of the Twins, after all, was treated by all as a year of plenty. After the census had made their head count, the miners all came in from Minter’s Rock and lands farther afield, their clothes black with dust and their sacks heavy with smelted silver. They bathed at the Riffle, and Grim’s daughter Ali was old enough that year to climb to Maiden’s Watch with the older girls. On Baker’s Day, the ceremonial loaf of autumn bread was brought to the moot-hall, signaling the beginning of the fall harvest season. When the fair finally came, the Reeve led the young children on the mushroom hunt; the balefire burned as the few who worshipped the Banlanders’ gods (and a fair number of opportunistic young couples) took to the fields and gave thanks in the old way. Grim again sold twice his weight in wine during the festival alone, an achievement that grew more impressive with each passing year—though it was Arran, mostly, who managed the sales. Grim, for his part, was no better off than Aewyn, and spent most of the festival on his back in bed, saving his strength for the work that would not end.

  Not all was as it should have been, however. For reasons unknown, the Havenari did not return. Robyn did not come to the village green; she wore no green dress, danced no dances, and for the first time in years the annual archery contest was won by someone new. Halgeir the Tall, a yellow-bearded Banlander who had come down to seek his fortune in the mines, bested Alec Mercy by a hair in the final shootout. His luck with a bow on the archery butts was evidently better than his luck in the mines, but most said it was only natural, since he’d hunted ghost hawks in some far-off northern vasily in his former life.

  That whole season was lost to Aewyn, in any case, and before long it was time again to prepare for seeding the last winter forage, a sign that the season had come to an end. Her hair, a stunning red through the autumn, had gone the pale white of old bone. Grim’s hair, too, was more grey than it once was, though its colour was not so likely to return with the spring.

  The third ploughing of the year meant real work, especially in a field the size of Hettie Oltman’s. Her farm was a large one, plotted long and lean in the shadow of the escarpment, upriver from the mill. She was called the “true-widow” for she was one of the few women whose husbands had well and truly died, and the field was as large a piece as she and her three sons could work. It had grown further since Darmod Pick had gained the good fortune of indentured help: Hettie Oltman was a shrewd woman and went hungry one season to hire Aewyn and Grim for the next. The swell of her harvest was testament to her wisdom and patience, and she was ever after sought out by the other farmers for advice and counsel.

  The seeding of her winter oats did not have to be deep, and so it was determined that the ploughing of the fallow field in preparation could be done without ox or horse. Alec Mercy had done the kindness of hauling over the larger of the two push ploughs from Grimstead with his stud horse the night before. But even under two near-full moons, the night was a dark one as Grim struggled to push his wife’s arm off him. It seemed heavier on him every night.

  “You’re going,” she managed to moan. “You only just came back.”

  “It won’t be much longer,” he said. “Shut your eyes and dream, sweetling.”

  “I’m dreaming of toys,” she said cryptically. “Leather horses, like Rinnie’s.”

  Grim kissed his wife on the forehead. “You’re mad,” he said.

  “I’ll get over it,” she groaned into the straw pillow.

  Aewyn was ready for him, as she had been all week, by the time he puffed his way down from the little loft. “Quiet as a mouse, now,” he whispered, and led her to the door. “But quick. We’re late.”

  “I was ready,” said Aewyn.

  “Well, I wasn’t,” mumbled Grim. “But the morning comes just the same. Hurry on.”

  The two shut the door of the house gently, then took to a steady jog down the main road, Aewyn light as a doe, Grim huffing to keep up. “Solstice near,” he said between ragged breaths. “Sun comes up later—every day.”

  They set to work again, Grim leaning hard on the plough as Aewyn followed him with spade and seeds. It was slow going at first; Grim struggled with the plough more than usual, and the cobwebs of dream hung over Aewyn’s eyes, though she tried to sweep them away. She had been dreaming of her mother, and of a terrible chase through the deep wood. At first, it was something like a bear chasing her mother; then, the bear’s eyes and skin were changed, slick to the touch as if turned inside-out for curing, and fire roiled in its hanging mouth. She saw the flames lick at her mother’s heels, closer this time. Though she dared not tell Grim, the dreams were getting worse. Rising before dawn, even hours before, was a pleasure to her after dreams like that.

  Aewyn wondered, sometimes, if she had the gift for prophecy. There were certainly stories about it. Karis’s sister, a merchant who still lived in the Capital, swore that the true Travosti kings, in ancient times, had been a bloodline of seers and prophets. Why not, then, the child of a dryad? She dared not think of herself as a dryad—she felt too much like the children of Widowvale now. She took too much after Glam and Gray, Grim’s second and third sons, to be anything near as strange as her mother. But she had been thinking, lately, of what it meant to have an extraordinary birth. She had considered that the facts of her life might to some be called legends—that Celithrand and her wood-spirit mother, both of whom she knew in her heart were real, were things others disbelieved in as freely as monsters or dragons. Perhaps a dryad was, in fact, a monster, in some men’s ways of thinking. And if a dryad could exist, why not a seer? Why not a dragon, or a sea monster, or…

  She was jolted from her reverie as she ran hard against Grim’s broad back where he leaned against the plough.

  “I caught up!” she said, rather proud of herself. Grim nodded slowly.

  “I must be getting faster,” she beamed, unsure of how much ground she had covered as her thoughts ran away with her. She looked back to make sure she had not been too careless in her planting. The long row stretched out as straight as an arrow shaft.

  “Aewyn.”

  Grim rolled himself around to face her. His jaw was slack, and his arms were draped limply over the cross-bar, twisted inward like a dead spider’s legs. She felt suddenly cold—and he looked it.

  “I’m tired,” he said. “I think I’m tired.”

  She didn’t think she’d be strong enough to catch him as he fell. She wasn’t. But she slowed his descent with her straining arms, staggered with her load, and he fell to the earth not like a stone, but like a dancing leaf. She called his name and he nodded.

  “Karis,” he said, his voice very small on his tongue. “Tell her I just had to come back, and meet the woman who made this soup…”

  When his lips stopped moving, the night was still, as if the whole Empire had stopped with them, and Aewyn’s heaving chest was the only thing in all the world that still moved. She screamed his name, or something like it, more than onc
e; each time the scream was a little less like his name, as Grim, too, was a little less like himself.

  A light—first a candle, then a torch—was kindled in the window of the Oltman house. Somewhere the trees rustled as a night-bird started. Hettie Oltman’s sons were big men, and Corran was the biggest of them. His body almost filled the whole door frame. He was a fast runner. The bag of seeds had fallen all in one place. Someone, probably Corran’s brother Ard, had brought a blanket for her. Grim’s face was the colour of mottled stone. There was no wind. The night was cloudless and the stars were beyond count. Aewyn’s feet were heavy and the voices of Oltman’s sons were deep rumblings around her, muddled as if heard through water. She had never seen Corran Oltman cry before. He had seemed, for many years, so much older than she was. He had come out of doors in his bare feet, and they were soon muddy from the field.

  Aewyn’s eyesight was keen as a knife’s edge, even in the dark—made, as Grim had said, for the planting of carrot seeds. There was no mistaking the gleam staring back at her from the trees, watching her. Poe’s eyes were the yellow of mashed yams by day; but in firelight the back of his eyes shone emerald green; Corran’s torch gave him away easily. She wondered what he would make of the death of a man. She wondered if a man smelled different dead than alive—wondered if a karach could smell your soul going on its way, even before the rot set in. In the days to come, she remembered nothing that transpired after they took her into the house; but she heard later that once Grim’s death was beyond doubt, they left him face-down in the field for a time, and carried her indoors instead, and gave her food and drink, warmed her, held her hands, staunched the flow of her tears with soft rags. Their first duty was to care for the living; and like many who lived in such border towns, the sons of the widow Oltman were practical young men.