The Season of the Plough

by Luke R J Maynard

  “Smoke,” said Poe, jerking as if unsure whether to halt or break into a run. He paused at once, feeling keenly his lack of a weapon.

  “I cannot smell it,” said Celithrand. “Can you name the wood?”

  Poe shook his head. “I know not the names of all the trees. But I think it has been dried. It is not a wet smoke.”

  “These mushrooms have been harvested,” said Aewyn, fingering a clump of dirt where most of a patch of chanterelles had been dug up. Celithrand knelt, handed her the torch, and sifted the soil with his fingers

  “Dry on top,” he said. “These were not harvested tonight. Someone else forages in these woods.”

  Aewyn stood with some concern, looking about her as if frightened. Celithrand brushed off his hands and arose with a smile, sheathing his sword. Poe looked to the two of them, unsure how he should react.

  “It is only some forester,” he said. “Maybe bandits or deserters, at worst.”

  “That does not sound comforting,” said Poe.

  Celithrand clapped a hand on the karach’s shoulder as he continued walking. “Let us hope that no greater evil than a few robbers ever comes your way,” he said.

  “They could kill him,” Poe said. “Iun hunt their own. They kill children. I have seen it.”

  “Not when they smell good silver,” said Celithrand, “or any good barter, if they be not coin-loving folk. There is not much the Iun cannot be compelled to do, if the silver is pure. They can nearly always be bargained with.”

  “If they have drawn one salt tear from the boy,” said Poe, “I swear by tooth and claw they will bargain before Grrǎkha alone.”

  The brush was pregnant with a low-lying fog as the three moved towards a little clearing. The sunken hut they found there, to a city-dweller or even most of the townsfolk of Widowvale, would have seemed a rudimentary shelter. Piled with grassy earth and appearing from the south as little more than a bald hillock, it was hardly an impressive structure. But all three of the figures staring out from the trees had lived in the wild for no few winters, and all knew it to be a structure of some permanence, a true house where a single man or a small family might have dwelt for some time.

  “That is a timbered mound,” Celithrand said to no one in particular; they all knew what it was.

  “The smoke is from there,” said Poe. “I swear someone abides there. Ready your sword, grandfather.”

  “Ibar fulcona luraldeon iara,” whispered Celithrand, slipping into Viluri as he touched the sword with respect. “This weapon is named. It is not for hacking woodsmen.”

  “That is not how it seemed to feel,” said Poe, “when it jumped into your hand earlier.”

  “Rinnie!” Aewyn called again, loudly, to the sudden alarm of her companions, destroying any pretense to stealth.

  “Hide,” said Celithrand, and Poe was quick to agree, seizing Aewyn and pulling her down into the bush.

  “Hullo?” called a small voice—Rinnie’s voice. The boy’s golden head peeped out from the doorway, his timid eyes wide as he searched the tree line. At the sight of him, Poe relaxed his arms, and Aewyn squealed as she ran to him, with Poe fast on her heels and no less overjoyed in his silence. The boy’s terror flared as they burst from the trees, and he fell crying into their arms as they comforted him, heedless of the fright they had caused him.

  If the little house in the clearing had really been home to bandits or worse, a pair of well-placed arrows from the tree line could have killed them on the spot, so noisy and heedless was their tearful reunion with Grim’s last and youngest son. They might have been lain in shallow graves, stripped of their few possessions, and that would have been the end of it. But no such arrows came, and nothing burst from the trees in answer. Perhaps they had been fortunate—or perhaps, for a time at least, this story belonged to them, and it was not about to let go of them lightly.

  After some moments, Celithrand emerged from the bush with the guttering torch in his hand. “You should be wary where you drop this,” he said, though his smile softened when he saw the weeping child. “Are you hurt?” he asked. Rinnie shook his head.

  “I was looking for skatts,” he said. “Venser hides them really far away. And I saw smoke, and I followed it, and there was a house in the woods.”

  “Did you see anyone?” Aewyn asked. Rinnie shook his head, golden curls bobbing.

  “No, but I found a treasure,” he said, clearly thrilled. “Aewyn, this is for you!” He held up a chubby fist and pressed into Aewyn’s palm a tiny pendant of blue glass, glistening on a braided leather necklace.

  “It’s very pretty,” said Aewyn. “But you can’t take this. It belongs to someone.”

  “It’s not for me,” said Rinnie. “It’s for you. Jewelry is for giving to girls, and a soldier can’t find any girls out here anyhow. Besides, I want the sword!”

  “There’s a sword?” she asked him.

  “A sword and armour,” said Rinnie, his head bobbing. “That’s how I know he was a soldier. Maybe from the City.”

  “Are they in the house?”

  Rinnie nodded. “I was playing, but then it got dark. I didn’t come out because of the monsters I heard.”

  “Well, there are no monsters,” Aewyn said. “Just my friend Poe here.”

  Rinnie peered around her at the huge karach, wide-eyed, as Celithrand paced around the clearing cautiously.

  “When naughty children go missing and do not tell their parents,” said the karach, approximating a smile, “they send me to hunt them down and eat them.”

  The boy fell to crying again and buried his head against Aewyn’s breast. She shot her friend an incredulous glare.

  “I do not understand humour,” said Poe, wisely putting his teeth away.

  “There was a fire,” said Celithrand, raising his voice over the child’s crying. “It’s been out for some time. But someone still lives here, and the Reeve is still missing. Take the boy back to town. I will keep searching.”

  “What of these weapons?”

  “Search the house,” Celithrand advised.

  “I will take no man’s weapon,” Poe warned him.

  “Take nothing,” said the druid, “but see what is to be seen.”

  The interior of the hut was a single room dug out of the earth, with a crude fire-pit in the middle, furnished with blankets and a single wooden bench. The largest planks framing the roof were branded somehow—Poe could not read—and seemed to have been pried off a wagon and reshaped. There was a bundle of tools made of bone, bronze, and wood, a well-used axe, and an empty chest with real iron hinges. Left carelessly on the dirt floor, as a young boy might leave anything, were a steel broadsword and a cloak-wrapped bundle of plate and chain armour that no doubt added up to a full suit. Poe turned the pieces over in his clawed hands, and a flash of rich blue lining met him from the inside of the cloak. He let go at once, the bundle clattering to the floor, and left the house to find Celithrand had already gone.

  “Come,” he barked to Aewyn, who had just finished soothing the child. “We must get back.”

  “What did you see?”

  “Death,” said Poe, and he seized the child from her, and he was off running.

  There was no question of which way he had gone. Where he had eased carefully through the bush, he now trampled, his broad shoulders smashing branches and his clawed feet mashing the fallen leaves. Where she lost sight of him in the fog, Aewyn could hear the rustle and snap of his graceless travel. She was truly winded, her calves burning, when she reached the lip of the escarpment and half-ran, half-stumbled down its slope to find Poe on the village green, surrounded by Karis, her children, and no small number of the townsfolk, all weeping with joy as they hugged him like a family member—and he, panting hard and shaking with something he could not understand, hugging them back.

  It was not Celithrand, in the end, who found the elder Marin. When she had returned from her time in the foggy woods and heard what had happened, Robyn fastened her armour over her muddy dr
ess and organized a proper scouting party out of the five or six Havenari who had sobered enough to move with speed and stealth. She did not search blindly, but searched as she might have searched for a child, with no gift for tracking but her own common sense.

  Unlike the child, Marin had had the good sense, in the beginning, to plant a pair of ranger’s flags on the edge of the hunt area, indicating his direction of travel. But it was dark, now, and the flags were cut from faded rags and planted low, where the fog had rolled in over them. Robyn combed the whole edge of the field for some time, and found what she was looking for only with great difficulty.

  Once the flags were found and a straight line plotted, tracking the Reeve was straightforward. He was a big man and moving fast, having broken into a run not far into the deep woods, and his path was clear where he careened down the edge of a shallow ravine. He was pale as death where they found him on the ravine floor, staring up with glassy eyes, though his barrel chest rose and fell rapidly. At first they did not move him, for fear he had broken something in the fall—but Tsúla let out a blast from his horn straight away to let them know the Reeve had been found. It was answered at once from the town by Alec Mercy’s bannerhorn, whose perfect bell-like tone filled the air as clear as day and broke the Reeve, for a moment, from his shock.

  “Get me up!” he said, and in his struggles to rise—though he fell again to his knees—they could see nothing so broken that he could not walk.

  Two of the Havenari, the largest two, hoisted him to his feet and began the trek home with him. They were joined by Celithrand, who had followed the sound of the horn, and came among them as if he had always been there.

  “Marin,” he said evenly but firmly. “Can you feel your feet?”

  “Get me up,” breathed Marin.

  “Can you feel your hands?” asked the druid. But the Reeve began to shake, and passed in and out of thought, and could neither hear nor speak.

  “What happened to him?” Robyn asked him, but Celithrand waved her away with a hand.

  “We take him to town,” he said, with such firmness that Robyn took him at his word.

  “Move,” she said, and they moved.

  By the time they had come back to the field, night had completely come down, and the bonfire had cooled to a few small flames over orange coals. The children roasted mushrooms on sticks where there was fire to be had, and Rinnie was among them, looking no worse for his adventure in the stranger’s hut. Hendec had stayed with them, sorting safe mushrooms from those that looked suspect to him, and the townsfolk milled about nervously, waiting for their elected master of the town.

  Alec met them at the green’s edge. “We need a sound house,” said Celithrand.

  “Is Marin hurt?” asked Alec. Celithrand pulled back his hood; the fine features of the aerils, and the age of his haggard face, were unmistakable.

  “I know you, my lord,” breathed Alec. “Take mine. There, across the green, that one.”

  “Send someone for water,” said Celithrand. “Robyn, how well do you know your plants and flowers?”

  She looked nearly offended. “Folk who know nothing of plants don’t belong out here,” she said. “Nor do they last long.”

  “Good.” He handed her a small silver ring. “If one of the merchants has brought up mandrake root from the south, buy it with this. If not, run to the river and find me a flowering nightbell, young as possible. Bring the whole plant.”

  “Both are poisonous,” said Robyn.

  “They are,” said Celithrand dismissively as he followed the shaking Reeve into Alec’s house.

  The night was long and dark. Clouds had rolled in to cover the stars, and there were only two furtive crescents to see by as half the town slept and half waited up in silent vigil for their Reeve. Celithrand stayed up long into the night, brewing strange teas and visiting mysterious remedies on the man, who was calmed into half-sleep but moaned and yelled his way through the night on Alec Mercy’s table. Alec and Robyn stayed with him; so did old Orin, who had delivered foals and lambs upside-down and backwards, and was the closest thing to a physician Widowvale could offer. Aewyn stayed, too, knowing Celithrand, knowing Robyn, and having lost sight of Poe in the commotion.

  “I did not know you at first glance, my lord,” said Alec as he returned with the coldest water that could be drawn. “Forgive me.”

  “I am no one’s lord,” said Celithrand. “And there are many in Valithar’s city who would take issue with your calling me such.”

  “You were a hero to all of us,” said Alec. “Every boy old enough to oil his father’s sword knows your stories.”

  “Even I did not recognize you,” said Robyn sheepishly, “though I have seen you many times, in the margins of old books.”

  “I did,” said Aewyn smugly, to a smile from everyone except Orin.

  “You’ll forgive me, sire,” said the old groom, “if I do not take your presence in our woods to be a good omen. You travel unnamed and hooded, peddling spice and liquor, which tells me you do not wish to be seen. And I know well what sickness has befallen this man. My father told me of it, long ago. I know of no way to cure it, but I know what fortunes you have brought here.”

  “What’s wrong with him?” asked Aewyn.

  “The men of Travalaith call it Aldwode,” said Orin. “Leastwise, they used to. Delirium, if you like. The things this man has seen will unravel his mind. It is kinder to let him die.”

  “Not so,” said Celithrand. “If he lives, he will remember only nightmares. Dreams. Fleeting impressions, the ghost of a memory at worst.”

  “Then you admit what it was he saw.”

  “What…did he see?” asked Aewyn.

  “A Horror,” said Orin. “A nameless creature of Darkness. A beast of the Second Craftsman, who brought Travalaith to ruin. To look upon a Horror, let alone meet it in battle, is to go mad with fear.”

  “Don’t frighten the girl,” said Alec dismissively, putting a hand on Aewyn’s back.

  “I’m as serious as an axe to the face,” said Orin. “You tell her, m’lord Celithrand. You fought them. For a thousand years in the Deep North you crossed swords with the Horrors.”

  “You have read too many storybooks,” said Celithrand. “Nothing is exactly what the hero-tales make it out to be.”

  “I stand by what I said,” Orin told Aewyn. “I served my time in the stables of the Grand Army, when I was a lad. I’ve known old men who saw a real Horror. Not like they were in the Age of Sun, mind you. No dragons left in the world, no sea serpents or titans. But even so, there were plenty of things it’s not natural to see. None of those men were ever the same again. They were skittish the rest of their days, like a horse with the panic. Marin’s father lost his mind to them, if I remember right. Makes it a special tragedy if he’s about to follow his old man out the same way.”

  Marin groaned in his sleep, tossing fitfully.

  “He’s not about to leave us,” said Celithrand, suddenly impatient. “But there is a way to tell Aewyn what she must know, and this is not it. Nor has the hour come for stories.”

  “Celithrand,” she said, “why…why must I know these things?”

  The druid frowned. “You are Chosen. We have spoken many times of such things.”

  “When is the hour for stories?”

  “That is a complicated question.”

  Robyn sighed. “My town is fuller of complicated questions than I would like it,” she said, so sharply that even Celithrand paused. Then Marin began to moan and convulse in his sleep, and the lot of them had to sprawl across him until he settled.

  “You’re hiding something, old one,” said Orin.

  “These are delicate matters,” Celithrand protested. But Orin, who had some of the old man’s liquor in him, was far freer with his tongue than usual.

  “You’re as false as trueblack,” he declared. “We’ll see your right colour soon as you hit hot water—and if this is how you travel, I think you’re in hot water already.”
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  “Aewyn—” the druid began.

  “Aewyn is a child of Widowvale now, outsider,” said Orin. “And we don’t take well to outsiders who speak crooked.”

  “We are not working at cross-purposes,” Celithrand insisted. “We are allies, all of us. This man’s sickness should make us so, even if the circumstance of Aewyn’s miraculous birth did not already bind us.”

  “Orin,” Robyn said softly, laying a hand on the old man’s shoulder.

  “I see no us,” said Orin. “I see only a small man with a large shadow, blown in from a faraway land and a faraway time, come to us with faraway words. It could be you brought the Aldwode on us yourself. You’re running from something, by my bones. And whatever trouble you bring, if you think we’ll let this girl, our own girl, be a part of your—” He stopped suddenly, turning about the small house. “Where is she?”

  “Gone, it seems,” said Alec, who turned just in time to see the heavy door swing shut.

  Through the darkest minutes of the night, Aewyn ran, crossing road and fence, passing gossiping wives and concerned friends still waiting for word on the Reeve. She bolted past trade-wagons shut up for the night, and was finally and truly out of breath when she reached her little window in the home of Darmod Pick.

  The framed bed he had made up for her had been moved closer to the wall. A hulking shape crouched behind it in the shadows.

  “Otabia?” she asked.

  “It is possible I never eat again,” said Poe. “I thought you would never come.”

  “The Reeve is very sick,” she began to say, then thought better of it and settled onto her bed. “I am here,” she said, forgetting her own questions in her friend’s distress. He seldom came indoors for long, and never to where she slept.

  “I do not like these dwellings,” said Poe. “But there has been enough ill will in the forest tonight already. I go to the fair at sunrise. I cause no trouble here, you have my word.”

  “You are no trouble, my friend,” said Aewyn. “Even Celithrand brings trouble. I had thought I would be happy to see him. It has been so many years since I was a child.”