“Whole town figured you for dead,” said Kellan. “I got you inside. Dug out what I could. Cleaned out your eye-hole—whatever you call an eye-hole, I don’t know. I’m no physician, and no great healer like the cellwives you’d find in the Capital. But I know enough to burn a bad wound with a hot iron before you bleed to death. Men lose an arm or a leg in the field, it can save their life. I imagine an eye’s not much different. They’ve got an old man who cares for the horses. He’s helped keep you alive, too, though I don’t think it pleases him.”
“This can’t be,” said Castor.
“I felt the same way,” said Kellan. “Thought we were done, both of us. An ambush like that, caught completely unprepared. You straight in the eye, me close by the heart. Like I say, we’re lucky men. Fearful ugly, the both of us. But I got used to being ugly years ago, and so will a pretty man like you, in time.”
Castor tested an arm to wave feebly at his bandaged face. “You call this lucky?”
Kellan undid the lace at the neck of his black tunic in response. There, partially obscured by the thick black hair of his chest, a small brown scab had formed over a nasty wound to his chest muscle.
“This could have gone one inch deeper,” he said. “One damn inch. Ended my tale right there. You, my friend, didn’t have another half an inch to spare. But by the grace of whatever god you take serious, some backwater village yantan with a weak arm weights his bows here for gamebirds, not for war. Another five pounds on that string would’ve done us both. D’you know there’s some bone back in there?” He gestured at Castor’s eye. “I didn’t know that. Thought it was just a big hole till I saw yours. Learn something every day.”
Castor frowned. “Must you keep talking?” he asked.
“You rest up, then,” said Kellan, seemingly unoffended. “I’ll be here, by the fireplace. If you want for anything to get healthy, just call out.” Castor shut his eye and felt the big man’s shadow begin to drift away from him.
“Bread,” he said at last, though he hadn’t even meant to say it. “Bread. And some weak wine.”
Kellan smiled. “You’re a harder man than I gave you credit for,” he said. “Won’t underestimate you again.”
The days ahead (there were already three behind, Castor learned) were patchy and surreal. Kellan hardly left his side, except to bring him food and water, and never left him alone with the townspeople. One of the villagers, a smaller man named Alec, came and went with hot poultices that smelled of honey and forest herbs. The pain never really went away, but in time he began to adjust to the sight of one eye, though the dead socket burned like a pitch fire anytime he moved his good eye inside his head. He found his balance greatly disturbed, and could not walk but a few steps, and those with a cane. But as the days passed and more of the townsfolk marvelled at his survival, Castor Stannon began to understand just how close to death he had come.
The soldiers he had been assigned were furiously combing the forest for the karach, but found no trace of him. The Havenari, concerned with the people, lent no men to the search, but set about raising defenses in case the karach returned for more blood. The taxation matter had been all but forgotten; tracking down the traitor and Derec’s killer was now the highest priority, though perhaps (Castor hated to admit it) the hunt was a personal one. All of the men, men who had mocked his command under their breath all the way from Wescairn, were astonished to see him alive. More than one of them had seen men take an arrow to the eye, and all agreed it was not the sort of thing most men could survive. The Censor had some degree of respect after that, even from the seasoned warriors—but from no man more than Kellan, who seemed convinced that all men were marked for death, and seemed genuinely pleased to watch him cheat it.
“Tell me about your family,” said Kellan one night, quite unexpectedly, as they were sitting up in Robyn’s house. Castor had, by then, regained his usual calm, though perhaps the loss had not yet fully sunk in.
“You’re asking because you presume a Censor to be an important person,” said Castor.
“Absolutely.” Kellan saw no need to hide it. “I don’t want any reward from you, don’t you worry. But you’re no doubt a rare prize to House Kelmor. You’ve held your post a long time, and you’re made of better stuff than ever I reckoned.”
“And you mean to collect for saving me,” Castor said. “And what do you suppose I’m worth? A good pension, paid out in gold sovereigns? Some pretty, fat-boned Kelmor cousin arranged for your wedding-bed?”
“Women I’ve no use for,” said Kellan. “If it's got to be something, I suppose it's men for me. But even they can't be trusted, and Kelmor men least of all. I’ve no desire to share a bed with Ashimar's kin. I’ll take your gold in a pinch, but even gold invites trouble. I’d sooner see it in silver, or wax iron, or weedmead if it please you.”
“I’m a censor,” said Castor. “Nothing more. My life’s not worth a pension to them.”
“Then you’re undervalued,” said Kellan. “You’re made of solid stuff, little man. Don’t forget, the Imperial Harper himself was born a censor’s son. If some fat Kelmor treasurer won’t unlock the family coffers, maybe Ashimar will, ere this is over. Your life is worth that much, I swear, if it’s worth a shaved farthing.”
“Ashimar is not the giving sort,” said Castor coldly. “Nor has he any claim to Haukmere. He gave that seat up forever when he became the Imperator’s personal scourge. You’re stuck dealing with Lady Esha and Arin Kelmor, I’m afraid; and those two are tight-fisted. Believe me, for I’ve kept their accounts.”
“We’ll see,” said Kellan. “They may change their mind when they hear the tale of how I fought off a mighty karach to save your hide.”
“Suppose I tell them how it really happened,” Castor suggested.
Kellan shrugged. “Yeh, you might at that. I suppose I’ll have to share my reward with you to keep you quiet. You back up my story just once, my Lord Censor, and I’ll be able to afford to bribe you to back it up forever.”
Castor tried to shake his head, but thought better of it. “No,” he said. “You mistake me for a different sort of man—aside from which, I don’t trust you. For a man greedy enough to cheat the Kelmors out of a reward, you are too ready to give up your claim to half of it.”
Kellan seemed to consider the remark a long time. He returned to Alec’s shelf (for it was his house where he lay), selected another book, sat down again before answering.
“I like money well enough,” the big man admitted. “But I’d sooner have half the money, and half the enemies, than an abundance of both. Taking on enemies for coin is a popular business these days, but it’s how too many people end up dead.”
“I have a wife,” said Castor. “Corinne. I’ll tell her you saved my life. We’re not close, but she might cook you a pheasant for it. Not much else.”
“I’m frightfully fond of pheasant,” said Kellan.
After some days, the last of the year’s strangers came to Widowvale. Two riders from the Kelmors’ seat of power in Haukmere, light scouts, had come in search of the soldiers who were due back from Wescairn some time ago, and became lost themselves in the woods where the trail had somehow grown over. The Havenari picked up their trail and brought them to town, where they marvelled at the disarray of the scattered soldiers, who seemed as much defeated by the forest itself as by the karach who was surely beyond their reach by now. They asked Kellan for his version of events—as the constant companion of the censor, they seemed to mistake him for the highest ranking soldier, and he told them the whole story as the village had come to accept it. While he distinctly remembered his fleeting glimpse of the young red-haired girl who had shot him, he made no mention of her, for reasons he could not quite understand.
When Castor was well enough to sit up and write with a pen, he first sentenced the karach to die more officially, then passed his summary judgment on the matter of taxation, hobbling carefully to the moot-hall to deliver it to Marin himself.
Although the penalty was not as
severe as many feared, it was a final affront to the carefree spirit of the last festival days of Widowvale’s year. For the Year of Strangers, numbered 3413 in the Age of the Moon, taxes were ferociously high: the miners, all able-bodied men, swelled the head count of the town considerably. Despite all their time in the mines and camps to the south, the miners were treated as residents; this seemed fair enough, as they were the unsung source of the town’s prosperity. For concealing their relationship to the miners, and presenting themselves as a town composed largely of widows, spinsters, and old men, the township itself was fined two dozen pounds of silver, and ten times that weight in lead.
Marin arranged to see the amount paid over the course of several years, contingent on a survivable yield after taxes, and a writ of censorial order to this effect was negotiated before the people, signed and sealed by Reeve and Censor alike. After the mad events of the weeks prior—a traitor at large, a public hanging, a desperate attack and the furious hunt that followed—the quiet formal drudgery of these civil negotiations seemed to reassure the skittish townsfolk, who were utterly divided on the matter of Poe, that things were returning to normal. After commandeering a small wagon for the soldier with the broken leg and those whose horses had been killed, most of the Imperial soldiers set out to return home the day after the contract was signed and sealed. Three men, Kellan among them, remained behind with Castor until he was well enough to travel, and they observed with wonder that a few days returned to the world of figures, contracts, tax edicts, and Imperial law seemed to do more for him than all the kindness and shared meals of the townsfolk put together.
“When you’re ready to travel,” said Kellan, “it’s best I take you home to your keep and your coins. They’re what’s healed you this past weeks, more than anything I’ve done.”
Walking restlessly from one end of Alec’s house to the other, Castor tested his stride without the cane. His legs were strong enough; from the beginning, they were never really hurt. Only his balance was off, but it was rapidly returning.
“I shall be ready in another day or two at most,” he said. “But all you want, I think, is your reward.”
Kellan shrugged. “I just don’t like to be stationed in a place I don’t belong. If that karach is out there, his fear won’t last forever. If he’s there at all, he’ll start hitting back at the patrols. We’ll be throwing good men after bad before the end of it.”
“I never expected to hear sound command strategy from a footman,” said Castor.
“Been a footman a long time,” said Kellan. “Learned that lesson firsthand from the Ghosts of Draden.”
“You fought with the Old Wolves? I didn’t think any of their lot survived.”
“I was eighteen,” said Kellan. “They needed men, and they paid, and they were a road away from a home I didn’t much care for. The fighting in Selik was fine. But turning on our own nobles, the havoc we made in Creslyn Wood and the folk we killed—that wasn’t fine. We were never meant to be there. Stick your neck out long enough, and Dagan always notices. Necks are sacred to the God of Death, so they say.”
“You don’t believe in the gods,” said Castor. Neither did he, particularly.
“I believe Harrod’s Wolves should’ve left Draden Castle well enough alone once all the men were dead and the castle burned,” Kellan said. “I believe, gods or no, the old catacombs were no place for dumb shites looking to make an example or a romantic evening out of the survivors. The house was gone. The point was made. Every one of those men could have done their job, taken their coin, and gone home to Travalaith, as I did. Only they didn’t. They let their loins, or their swords, or their wolf brains get the better of them, and the ghosts got them, and now they’re all ghosts themselves.”
“I don’t think you believe in ghosts either,” said Castor.
“What I believe,” said Kellan, “is that men are fools, especially smart men, and it more often than not gets them killed. Whatever happened down there, it’s because men who had no business there didn’t know enough to leave things well enough alone. I mean not to make that same mistake. Soon as you can ride straight, I’m done with this town, and I’m not coming back.”
“Send for the horsewife,” said Castor. “See if that old man thinks I’m ready to have done with these bandages.”
“As you will, sir,” said Kellan with a nod of thanks.
When the bandages finally came away, Jerrold the Mercer sewed an elegant eyepatch to cover the wound, adorning a cupped patch of black leather with a button made from a small silver coin where the iris would have been. Even Kellan praised it as a dramatic improvement—though he was quick to add that covering any part of Castor’s face, maimed or otherwise, could only be a change for the better. It was not until some days later, after he had grown well enough to make the journey home, that Castor observed the coin to be a pre-Annexation silver rider, sewn with the horse on the inside and Celithrand’s oak-wreathed profile, stern and sad, looking toward Castor’s good eye with wisdom and regret. He laughed at it coldly when he saw it, so hard that his wife rushed upstairs from the street to see what had happened.
“I think I’ll keep it,” he said. “Some things a man cannot afford to forget.”
ELEVEN
WITH THE DEATH OF DEREC, the loss of the horses, the wounding of Aewyn, and the escape of a traitor to the Imperator, Poe was swiftly marked for death as well, and there was little the Havenari could do about it, except to enforce the Censor’s decree as lazily as possible. The outcry when Aewyn came home on a dragged litter was worse than it was over the hanging, and there was no shortage of homes who offered to care for her while the Havenari went to work finding the fugitives. She stayed next to Robyn and Bram’s house, at the home of Aeric and Alys and their daughters, and for weeks she wasted in bed but was always kind to those who visited. As the days wore on and the manhunt proved fruitless, she was touched and horrified to hear that Darmod Pick had ridden to Wescairn himself, and put a private bounty of three gold sovereigns on the karach’s head for what he had done. It was a princely sum for a shepherd, and fronting it in gold, he said, would bring the sort of mercenaries and bounty hunters that could see it done.
With mock concern for the town’s well-being, Robyn stationed nearly all of the men in Widowvale for the whole time of Castor’s recovery. At her direction, they raised muddy ramparts and a low, hasty palisade of sharpened stakes, in case the karach returned to menace the village. None of the Havenari dared to admit what they all knew—that the defenses would prove just as useful against the Grand Army troops, if it came to that.
She listened with some amusement to the reports as Castor’s soldiers tramped endlessly through the bush, looking for some sign of Celithrand and Poe. They came across the deserter’s hut, and ordered his remaining belongings returned to Travalaith, but what few tracks that they found seemed to lead nowhere: she was sure they had picked up their own trail more than once. Her men were swamped entirely with the raising of the town’s defenses, and there were none to spare to lend the soldiers aid. Of all the men, Fletch alone she dispatched, to ride west through the forest at all speed and notify distant fellows among the Havenari of the goings-on at Widowvale. It was only with this mission that Aewyn realized there were other bands of the Havenari throughout the wood, and perhaps even beyond. To her they had seemed like little more than a town militia; now that her friends were marked for death, their invisible numbers and reach seemed truly terrifying. But Robyn assured her that Fletch’s report was kind to them, demanding that the other cells of the Havenari take up the pursuit with minimal, even cursory effort. Aewyn wondered how the other bands would respond to the demands of a woman—whether her rank would be enough to satisfy them. She wondered, then, whether she too might someday make something of herself with them, and hoped Robyn would tell her more about the organization in time.
Fletch was a small, slim boy and a fast rider, but the other camps were many leagues distant, and it was several days before he retur
ned. Castor Stannon was already taking short, stumbling walks around Alec’s house in the cool of the evening when Fletch came up the village road, drenched in sweat and looking as if the horse had dragged him the last mile. The horse, too, was slick with sweat that foamed at the saddle, and it snorted unevenly as he pulled it short. Robyn, shaving down stakes for the palisade with some of the others, set down her tools and motioned to the others.
“Tsúla, fetch some water,” she said. “Venser, go find Orin and bring him.”
Fletch’s legs barely held him as he dismounted. “Came as fast as I could,” he said.
Robyn took the reins from him, looking the horse over. “I see that,” she said. “This is no way to treat a horse.”
“There’s news from the Surreach,” he said. “Conscriptions…of the Havenari. Many of the old bands are gone, joined up with the Grand Army to fight in the East. Not by their choice.”
Robyn sighed. “Did you find any of the rest?”
Fletch nodded. “At Cloverheart, on the edge of Orrath. They weren’t wearing the Leaf, but I know my own kind when I see them.”
She ruffled his raven hair affectionately; even his head felt loose on his skinny neck. “Good man,” she said. “We’d best get you watered, too. That’s a savage ride.”
Orin was brought, and took no joy from the state of Fletch’s horse. He set the men about washing her, then scraping her dry, then washing her again, and so stern was his glare that they dared not question him. Robyn and Fletch, both eager to escape the blame of that gaze, retreated to her house to speak.
“Start from the beginning,” Robyn said at last, once a mug of weak ale was in his hands.
“There are no recent signs of our quarry on the forest roads,” he said. “I do not fear for the fugitive, or the karach. If they can get across the Iron Road, the lands south of it are unpatrolled.”
“You’re very sure of that,” said Robyn. “Surely you didn’t comb the whole forest.”
The Season of the Plough Page 25
