The Season of the Plough

by Luke R J Maynard

  “What did you talk of?” asked Poe.

  “Mostly he did the talking,” said Aewyn, “and the others too. I don’t know. They were on the verge of fighting about it. Old Orin said there was a monster in the woods, so horrible that if you even look upon it, you fall sick and die, or go mad. They talk of big things—of stories I have heard only distantly. Stories of the sort men come to Widowvale to forget. And already I sense I am at the center of it all.”

  “No good can come from this,” said Poe.

  “And you?” she asked. “They called it ‘Aldwode,’ this fevered madness that took the Reeve. What did you see? What drove you from the cottager’s hut in such terror?”

  Poe snorted and looked away. “It is stupid,” he said. “I fell to panic at the silk lining of an old cloak,” he said. “Nothing more than that. You speak of true evils, and the Great Darkness, while I cower behind your bed, affrighted at nothing, like a beaten cat.”

  “Then you must stay with me the night,” said Aewyn, patting the straw mattress, “for you are my beaten cat.”

  “Always in my darkest hour,” said Poe, “you find new ways to bring me no relief at all.” But he lay down in spite of himself, and slept with his massive head on the edge of her mattress until well into the morning. She awoke in his arms, unsure if the great karach had held her close to protect her from all danger, as a mother might hold her child, or only cradled her for his own comfort as a small child might cradle a doll.

  SEVEN

  Your welkin is woven of silver-grey silk

  And the white moon is fair, fully swollen with milk,

  And the red moon is painting with brushes of gold

  As she hushes and hushes the babes in the fold.

  The summer is come in the cole and the corn,

  And the morning sun whispers and waits to be born;

  She is hale under hill, where the fae-rivers flow,

  Where she hushes and hushes the world in its woe.

  THE LADDER WAS OLD and tended to creak, so Karis sat silently in the loft when her song was ended, waiting until the air was so thick with sleep that she dared climb down. Rinnie was not even the last of them to fall asleep. For all of her worry he seemed untouched, unconcerned with the day’s adventures. And Arran was grown now, and old enough to drink with the men; he had done his duty, and taken his due revelry, and come home late and drunk, and passed into sleep straight away. He seemed to have heard nothing at all of Rinnie’s disappearance. It was her second son, Glam, golden-haired like the others but more like her in face than his father, who lay restless long after the song was over, his dark eyes watching her until they, too, were too heavy with sleep to be held open by care. The middlings, Gray and Ali and Martyn, had sworn themselves too old for her songs; but always she sang to Rinnie, and in the months since Grim’s death she sang again to them too. Only Glam was well and truly beyond the reach of her rhymes, now. He shared with Arran the hard responsibility seeping into his growing bones, though he was not yet old enough to do a man’s work for man’s pay.

  The winter would be hard, perhaps. It would be hardest for him: he was old enough to know all things, but not to understand as Arran did. The passing of the last generation was always hardest on the secondborn. These things a mother knew.

  The soft, unsteady footfalls of an approaching figure echoed on the hill outside as Karis climbed down in practiced silence. By now, she knew the sound of Bram’s approach, and could tell him apart from any other visitor at any hour of the night. His steps on the rough stone path leading up to Grimstead were light but uneven, and there was always a lengthy pause at the door before knocking as he collected himself. Having spent her unmarried youth in a Travalaithi alehouse, Karis considered herself a good judge of men, and a better still judge of drunkards. By counting the space between his steps and his knock, as she taught the children to do between lightning and thunder, she could reckon within a half-mug, give or take, how much wine was in him as he gathered his composure.

  On this long night of the fair, she heard him stop as she came down, then counted five, then five again. She stilled herself, too, then took a deep breath, and pulled open the door just as Bram raised a fist. He knocked once on the door anyway as its timbers drew back from him. It was not the first time the door seemed to move as he knocked.

  “You’re come at a very late hour,” said Karis.

  Bram swallowed and took a breath. “Have you slept, Lady Karis?”

  She shook her head and stepped back from the threshold. “Come in if it suits you,” she said. “But mind your step, and keep your voice low. The children are fast asleep.”

  “Don’t worry about ’em,” said Bram, slumping onto the small bench at their table. “I’m not here to wake ’em.”

  “I’ll keep my own counsel,” she warned him, “on when to worry about my children.” He raised his eyebrows but said nothing as she rummaged in the small pantry for a mug and an earthenware bottle.

  “Will you take a drink?” she asked him, after she had already half-poured it.

  “Thank you,” he said, “but I’ve had enough.” She tilted the bottle back, caught off-guard for a long moment, then finished the pour and took the mug for herself. By some trick of the pantry, the wine was cold and refreshing after dark, when the sun had gone from the west wall.

  “You’re out of sorts,” she said, fixing him with suspicious eyes. “That unsettles me. What fell wind blew you in tonight, Bram?”

  “I know not,” he said. “It seemed the place to come.” He folded his hands in his lap, at a loss for what to do with them.

  “Always has been in times of trouble,” she sighed.

  “I’m truly sorry,” he said. “About Grim.”

  “You would be,” said Karis. The remark seemed not to sting him.

  They sat in silence a long time.

  “He was my friend,” said Bram at last. “My only friend.”

  “He was my only husband,” she countered.

  “I don’t ride with the Havenari anymore,” he said. “Even my sister is lost to me. She grieves in her own way, I suppose. A more noble way than mine.”

  “You’ve come here to speak nonsense, then” said Karis. “You might do that anywhere.”

  “You’ve never liked me,” he replied, almost flippantly.

  “I don’t care for a drunkard around my children,” said Karis.

  “I don’t care to be around children,” he shot back. She had a retort for that, too. But she was, as she fancied herself, a good judge of men, and there was some deeper sorrow in him that stopped her. Best customer or no, Grim had been kind to him. She nearly felt his broad gentle hand on her shoulder, and her throat was too tight for words then.

  “In the spring thaw, when they rode out,” Bram said suddenly, “Grim would come to the house once they had gone, and bring me my wine. We’d open a fat jar together, and talk, every year. He’d tell me about them—the children, I mean. How they’ve grown. That was enough. Then we’d talk about—other things.”

  Karis sighed. “I know it,” she said. “He had to tell someone, I suppose. Had to let out the things he wouldn’t even tell his own wife. Someone he was sure would forget it by morning, maybe.”

  “Some things you never forget,” said Bram, wringing his hands. “They have your hair, you know. Pure gold, like a gull penny, like a pre-Imperial sovereign, before they put the copper in. They’ll be golden-haired when they’re grown too, like you. Rare beauties, tall and fair. More often, young children go a sandy brown, like Robyn, if they live long enough.”

  “You’ve never raised a child,” said Karis.

  “Nor will I.” Karis drained her mug and set it on the table; that seemed a good enough thing to toast.

  “Why are you here?” she asked him flatly.

  “I just thought,” he began, then seemed lost for a moment behind his eyes. “I just thought you might like to know.”

  “Know what?”

  “About Grim,” said
Bram. “His right name. Where he came from, and why. It’s a burden, is all.”

  “Then it was his burden,” said Karis. “I know it, Bram. Some of it, leastwise. And what he kept from me, what he saw unfit to tell his own wife—that’s a story he’d never want told again. And it’s not for the likes of you to tell.”

  Bram nodded with respect, then moved to stand. He tested his legs gingerly, but they held him.

  “I knew it,” said Bram, “and he knew mine.”

  “Stories,” scoffed Karis. “Would you care to know mine? I was a kitchen wench in Travalaith. Parents dead, saddled with a grandfather who fought in the Siege, still lost to the Aldwode fifty years on. Brother gone to seek his fortunes in the mines and send me money for the old man, and I took up as a cook at the Black Bridge Inn, just at the foot of the Stair. Mostly Grand Army soldiers at muster, a few travelers. Grim comes in. He’s passing through. Brazen fool comes back in the small hours, wants me to leave with him.”

  “And you left?” Bram asked.

  “What? No, I didn’t leave,” Karis answered. “Had my grandfather. ‘I’ll wait,’ he said. And three years he was ‘passing through’ the Iron City, almost to the day. Three years he put away his travels and his future. Then the old man died in the night, and I left with Grim in the morning.”

  “I never figured you for a scullery maid,” said Bram.

  “Kitchen maid,” she corrected him. “Scullery’s for washing up. I could cook, and do it well.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” said Bram. “But just the same, if you need anything—around the house, I mean—another pair of hands in the coming seasons—”

  “I have five boys and a strong girl,” she snapped. “Two girls, if Aewyn sees fit to come back to me, now that her indenture’s done. We’ve hands aplenty. We’ve hands enough. You can take your hands and your Grim-stories and…take them away, I suppose. Take them away.”

  Bram shuffled to the door, not quite defeated. “You have my sympathies,” he said, “and my highest respect. If I had a wife of my own, I’d be glad at the end if she was so content to let my secrets stay in the tomb where they belong.”

  Karis rose and took her mug to the wash-basin at once, as if to wipe away any trace of the visit. “You’ll never have a wife,” she scoffed.

  Bram nodded silently, weighing something in his mind on the threshold.

  “Not again,” he said simply, and shut the door. It was the last time they would ever speak.

  Dawn, when it came, was hardly noticed. The roosters in a few farmyards crowed up the sun, for they’d had nothing to drink and seemed none the worse for the night of revels. But the sleep of the villagers was long and dreamless, and when they woke under a high sun the events of the previous night seemed as if they had faded into a distant past. Most assumed it had been the grandest festival the town had seen, and prepared to meet the afternoon with groggy optimism, hoping for more of the same.

  Word had got round, at least, that Marin had gone missing for a time, and that he had fallen violently ill, but few of the details lingered. He awoke on the long table at Alec Mercy’s house in time to empty his stomach onto the floor, and then laid there in a swoon, too weak to walk, though the stranger who cared for him promised he would find his legs again in a day or two. He ordered the stranger away, though, as soon as he had the strength to shake his fist: he swore by all the gods, and by his beard aside, that he would never again take liquor from a stranger, for he recalled a few glasses of the visitor’s brew, and a fitful night of unspeakable nightmares had been his reward for it. Orin, who had drunk away the sorrow of his lost son, awoke with no memory of the past day, or of tending the Reeve, though his aid had been invaluable.

  To Aewyn and Poe, who had shared only a small cup between them, events were clearer. Aewyn recalled the presence of Celithrand, though little of what he said, and made her intent to seek him out. She roused Poe from a fitful slumber, and gently lifted his great head off of her, and he snorted as he came to.

  “Never have I slept in a house on a bed,” he said at first—and then, “I have done a terrible thing.”

  Aewyn sat up and eyed him quizzically. “It’s a bed. Just a bed. It’s not going to kill you.”

  “I have told you many woman-stories of my tribe,” he said. “Those stories are sacred, not to be told…I have pack-bound you to a tribe that does not exist.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Aewyn, but Poe was loath to discuss the secrets of his stories further.

  “Neither do I,” said Poe. “My head is full of fog. I think some sorcery has been worked on us, and I would have words with the sorcerer.”

  “We’ll find him together,” said Aewyn. “There are too many questions without answers.”

  They rose and made their way to the village green, where the banners and pavilions of the Fair were still assembled, awaiting a second day of less festivity and more commerce. A few grown men and women dozed lazily in the grass. By the spice wagon, Robyn was half-awake, still in her muddy green dress, in quiet conversation with a hooded figure that could only have been Celithrand. He leaned hard on a crooked walking-stick and the bow he had won the previous day was slung over his shoulder. Even its polished nocks shone, carved of something unknown that glistened in the light.

  “Good morning,” said Aewyn, seeing no need to be uncivil.

  “It is good enough,” said Celithrand. “Alec and I have been all night with the Reeve. He will survive, and be none the worse for his encounter in a few days.”

  “Your drink has put a spell on us,” Poe accused, never one for small talk.

  “Perhaps, of a sort,” said Celithrand. “There is nothing unnatural to it.”

  “There is nothing unnatural to being poisoned, either,” answered Poe.

  Robyn eyed him warily—but no less warily turned her gaze on the old man. For the moment she said nothing.

  “Why did you do this?” asked Aewyn.

  Celithrand cleared his throat.

  “These are times of great importance,” he said, “and of grave danger as well. I travel now under a veil of secrecy. Any memory of me may well put these people in danger.”

  “If that is so,” said Aewyn, “you would not have come, except at great need. And it means you have not come to stay with us.”

  The old aeril looked away to the sun, well above the horizon now, but not so high that he could not bear to look. Even under a mask of the wrinkles so uncommon to his kind, his cheeks for a moment seemed to shimmer like the skin of a fish.

  “No one ever really stays for long,” he said. “But you are right. I had not intended to be seen even as much as I have.”

  “It’s good that you were here, I suppose,” said Robyn. “The Havenari are trained to resist the Aldwode, not to cure it in others. But if you’re a danger to us, my lord, these people have a right to know why—not to be tricked, or drugged, or spellbound, or worse.”

  “I am a wanted man,” said Celithrand. “Marked for death in Travalaith.” Aewyn gasped.

  “On what grounds?” Robyn asked, eyes narrow with suspicion.

  “On charges of treason, I’ve heard.”

  “Charges mean nothing without evidence,” said Robyn. “Is there any?”

  “My answer depends on who’s asking,” said Celithrand, suddenly wary. “Are you Veritenh’s sworn spear still? Do you serve the Vigil? Or are you the law in Haveïl now, answering to the vasil of Haukmere and harrying down every Imperial fugitive who runs afoul of the Kelmors?”

  “I’ll do both with time to spare,” said Robyn, “if they protect the people of the border towns. This one, especially.” Celithrand smiled and relaxed his weight onto his walking-stick.

  “You’ve grown into that armour very well indeed,” he said. “The petty politics of men have interfered, it seems, with the Godswar. The Mages’ Uprising stirs in the East, and now in the South. Jordac grows daily in his power. The Imperator’s position weakens, and the mission of his Empire falters. Those
who united the Northlands to stand against evil have had a taste of power, now, and are loath to relinquish it. The four of us who founded that Empire—who founded it, I fear, for a purpose lost on the powerful—are surely the greatest threat to its legitimacy. Valithar rules from Cîr-Valithar—but atop the Black Spire he is far from the people and their daily politics. Garim the Mad is lost on the Deep Road, consumed by Horrors or become one himself. Janus Veritenh is dead, and rules only the tomb of his ancestors now: you, my lady, and a few scattered companies like you, are all that is left of his storied Dragons and their Vigil against the Splintered Shadow.”

  “And then there’s you,” Robyn said.

  “Then there is me,” Celithrand conceded. “I am a relic of a dying age. In my time I performed wonders, and men called them magic. Those who sing to their children of the Company of the Owl remember me as a mystic who roams the Outlands in secret. And now a rebellion rises in the Outlands, fuelled by strange magics that frighten the peaceful citizens of the Empire, and the Imperator’s servants have no doubt seen their chance to make an end of me.”

  “They think you’re allied with the Mage,” breathed Robyn. “Are you?”

  “I’m not Jordac’s teacher, if that’s what you’re asking,” said Celithrand. “It’s a popular rumour, though his lore may already eclipse my own. No, I’ve nothing to do with the Uprising. But there are enough who’d believe it—and I’m the last rival claimant to the Spire. Eighty-seven years, now, Valithar has reigned as Imperator. He has outlived all opposition. And when I am gone, when his personal scourge has hunted me to the end, his grip on the North will be absolute.”

  “I thought he was your friend,” said Aewyn. “You were Companions of the Owl together. Why would he turn on you?”

  “I cannot say for certain,” said the old man. “Perhaps he is dead, too, and only his name rules the Empire now. Perhaps cruel advisors have turned his heart. What I do know is this: the Splintered Shadow, the Second Craftsman, is an insidious Enemy. To oppose him by force—to make war against him who created war—it changes you. Though we win what victory we may, some part of it will always serve him, in the end. If ever I had a friend in Travalaith, he is now lost to me. That, sometimes, is the cost of war. We knew it, even then.”