by CJ Arroway
‘Are you going to kill me?’ she asked, trying hard to let the anger show in her voice more than the fear.
‘If I was, darling, you’d be dead now,’ he said, spitting out the hard parts of the berry. ‘If that makes you feel any better.’
It didn’t.
She opened her mouth to speak again and in an instant the feather-like sword, that a second ago had been at the man’s side, flew narrowly past her right cheek and embedded itself with a dull thud in the bark of the tree she was propped against.
‘I just need you to be quiet now, sweetheart, if that’s alright.’ The man spoke even more softly than before. ‘You can ask them any questions you like when you get there, but we need to move on.’
The man stood up, tied his pouch carefully to his belt and stretched slowly, smiling. Then without warning he pulled hard on the rope and Evie was dragged forward, her arms jarring up and pulling her nearly completely over before she could get to her feet.
Without speaking, the man threw the rope over his shoulder and began to walk – half-leading, half-dragging Evie with him as he strode down the unlit track, as sure of his step in the dark as if he were strolling down the village lane in summer sunlight.
The rope dug into Evie’s wrists and unbalanced her, the pace of the man’s movement pulled her off her feet and she stumbled face-first into the trunk of a rough-barked oak that grew arrow-straight and limbless up to the high canopy top.
‘That looked painful,’ the man laughed, as he yanked again on the rope to drag Evie back into the centre of the path.
She looked down at her wrists and even in the fragment of light that found its way into the forest she could see the red marks growing where its rough fibres rubbed hard against her skin.
It was clear that the scentless man must be a very good hunter – she could almost admire the way he’d tracked her through her own woods and tricked her into building her own trap, how easily he moved through the darkness.
But it was also becoming clear that he was not quite as assured when he didn’t have a prey to follow. At least not in an unfamiliar forest. Several times she expected to be led out of the wood to whatever he had waiting for her, only for him to walk past the paths she would have taken. He was taking the long way out, and that was giving her more time to think.
‘I’m dizzy. My head hurts. I need to stop,’ she shouted, slowing down so the man was forced to pull on the rope to hurry her up.
‘Just keep moving,’ he barked – touching the scabbard of his sword to reinforce his order.
But she’d smelt something. A strong musk on the air. Not the men from earlier – something more familiar, something she’d smelt many times before.
‘I’m scared.’ She said it quietly, almost at a whisper.
‘What did you say?’ The man sneered savagely.
She closed her eyes: ‘I feel scared and alone and I need my mother. I’m going to die. I don’t want to die.’
The hunter laughed. ‘If you think I’m going to feel sorry for your little girl act you really have picked the wrong man to try it on.’
She opened her eyes and fixed his coldly. ‘I wasn’t talking to you.’
The hunter’s name was Skavan, and he was the very best. He would boast that he never failed to catch a man he hunted and he never lost a man he caught. He could see you in the dark and hear you in silence, and when you ran he knew which way before you even knew it yourself.
The knots that bound Evie’s hands were those of a master – only he knew how to tie them and only he knew how to untie them. But rope has a mind of its own, if you let it. Its thin fibres once fed the leaves of a lime tree and, like so many things taken from nature, they longed to get back to what they once were – to soften and swell, untangle and be free. They just needed time.
Evie opened her arms and the rope dropped. Skavan stared for a second in bewilderment, before his hand reached again for the blade, and in that instant a force like a rolling rock crashed through the thicket into his left side. His legs buckled in on themselves as the impact threw him his own height into the air, hurling him down into the tangle of undergrowth.
Another rush and Evie jumped, grabbing tightly to the rough, bristling fur of a huge sow boar, clinging on as it charged through the dense thickets which tore at her skin and clothes. Around her she saw the other boars running. Young ones – a family she thought.
She clung on as tightly as she could, her head resting on her powerful back, listening closely. She clung tighter, repeating in her mind, softly, clearly, so that it could be felt: ‘I feel scared and alone and I need my mother. I’m going to die. I don’t want to die.’
The Well
Luda had wanted to protest, but there hadn’t been time. And besides, he knew there was little point in arguing with Evie even at the best of times.
So he ran, head down, not looking back. Not to the village, as Evie had said, but just where the path and his legs took him – downhill, his feet barely skimming the ground so it seemed to him he almost floated over the natural steps the trees had built into the hillside with their roots.
Down to the scramble and the scrub that marked the entrance to the ancient quarry. Only when his feet were flat on the solid surface of yellow-brown rock did he look back. The slope seemed impossibly steep now and he wondered how he’d ever kept his feet. But no one was following.
He looked up and saw the spot where, what felt minutes ago, he and Evie had been standing. He’d come to a stop in front of a place Uish children called Giselle’s Bed – a huge, crudely cut stone, half split and abandoned by the ancient hands who wrenched it from the hillside. Local legend said the split was where they found the poor woman who gave it its name; her body resting as though she were just asleep, after she threw herself from the ledge above over some faithless soldier from Myria.
When they were younger, the children of the village would dare each other to lie in the rock when the moon was new; to see if you really could see her rise from her bed. Evie had scared him with stories of a ghostly infant’s wailing, and Luda had wept so the other children teased him and called him crybaby. He had sworn he would show them by being the first of them to spend the night in the Bed. Now he would finally get to do that, but it wasn’t ghosts that scared him anymore.
He crouched down into the crack and tucked his legs into his chest, staying as low as he could in its dark shadows, and he waited. He listened for the crack of footsteps on the forest floor, or the calls of men – any noise that would tell him of danger. The sounds of the forest at night were unfamiliar and the stone walls of the quarry seemed to bring every rustle of leaves or animal call down into the small space where he huddled. A vixen’s scream turned his blood cold and he sank deeper into the rock and thought of Evie.
* * *
Luda remembered his mother. Mrs Gadd told him later that he must be imagining her because she died just days after bringing him into the world.
But he believed he remembered her – he could almost picture her face, her eyes; though the foggy image would always evaporate just at the moment it started to take form.
What he did know for certain was that she was bound to Mr Gadd and, because of that, so was he.
He had reason to be grateful, they told him. Not many families would have taken on the burden of an orphan Daw child for the years when it could do no work in return.
They had treated him as well as he could have hoped, he thought. He had his own bed in the sunken hut he shared along with the house servant and a Gatish slave who had no tongue and so could neither speak nor understand a word, except by reading hands. The hut had no wooden floor like those in the master’s house, but the roof was good and the straw and the heat from the animals kept them warm in all but the worst weather.
The Gadds were one of the few People in the village. They had owned nearly all of the valley when the Daw had been settled there, and still held the rent on most of the usable fields around the village. While their fortunes and land had dwindled
over the six generations since then, they were still wealthy by the standards of the valley.
The house was in the old village centre, separated from most of the other dwellings by its broad paddocks. The only other house still standing on that side had been built by Evie’s grandfather.
Luda started to earn his keep when he was about five years old. He would fetch and carry mostly – food for the goats, drink for the master and water from the well.
The village centre had moved many years ago, when the old well turned sour. Four cows had died and an old widow who was said to practice small magic was accused of using bitter herbs and singing a curse. She was hanged from the beam of the well and a new one was dug where her house had stood.
On his heavy trips to and from the well he would sometimes see the Daw girl – a year or two older, thin as a willow cane but almost swinging her bucket compared to his stuttering carry-and-drop. She’d nod at him sometimes, or would exchange a cursory ‘hi’ if there was a wait at the wellhead.
And then one day she stopped coming and he found he missed having someone to nod to.
He didn’t see the girl again until the next summer, when he started helping the Gatish slave with the goats in the lower paddock. He’d learned to read the man’s hands by then and now knew him as Brawen. He said he came from the far west, from where you could see the sun fall into the sea each night and hear the hiss of its steam; and where great fish, the size of mountains, would swallow ships whole.
She would cross from the back yard of the little house that adjoined the paddock and around the back of the blackthorn hedge – just a few steps and then she was out of sight. On the third day she passed, Luda asked Brawen if he could manage on his own for a short while.
Hidden by the blackthorn, which was still holding on to the last of its delicate white blossoms, Luda watched as the girl carefully pushed aside the rotten cover of the old well. She threw a small wooden pail fastened by a rope down into the water then leaned back and, with a little effort, pulled it up again. She scooped her hand in and brought the water to her lips.
‘Stop! It’s poison!’ Luda pushed his way through the blackthorn, its hard needle thorns scratching at his face and hands. The girl turned to him in shock and threw the bucket back down the well, rope and all.
She turned to run back to the house but span too sharply and caught her ankle in the hollow of a missing flagstone. She fell to the ground, clutching her leg, her face scrunched up in pain.
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you,’ Luda rushed. ‘It’s just – the water is really bad. I thought you were going to drink it.’
So Evie showed him how she sang it sweet again. She didn’t have to but something about him, the way he had cared perhaps, made her trust him. And she had wanted to tell someone – someone who was not her family – for what seemed like a very long time.
‘I swear on my life and my mother’s grave I will never tell a soul,’ Luda had promised. Evie made him repeat it three times before she was satisfied.
He kept Evie’s secret, even from those who already knew. Jennet taught him about the Daw. She even remembered his mother, though she didn’t know her well.
She told him how the Daw had come to the valley many years ago when their houses in Wyrra city were burned, and how they had come to The Home long before history began.
‘Luda,’ Evie had said one autumn evening when they were picking field mushrooms amid a swarm of biting flies and late evening sun haze. ‘Did you know, you’re the only person I don’t mind being around when I’ve been doing small magic. It’s like – I don’t feel bad about it when you are there. You make me feel like I’ve not done anything wrong.’
Luda had just said: ‘That’s good then.’ But that evening, after he’d finished putting out the fires in the kitchen and taken his master his evening drink, he sat alone on the overturned water trough outside his sunken hut and watched the stars emerge one by one from the darkening sky, imagining that he conjured each one into life.
* * *
The morning sun had risen about two hours before but it only now reached into the depths of the quarry where Luda was still huddled in the rock. The night hadn’t brought any sleep and his body now cramped so badly he could hardly stand.
But he knew that even if the men were still around he had to try to get back to the village. That was where Evie would be – if she had survived. He shook his head rapidly from side to side to rattle out the dark thoughts that had started to fill it and carefully lowered himself over the side of the rock. A sweet, sickly smell of smoke still hung in the air as he made his way back up the same steep embankment he had flown down the night before, the lack of sleep punishing his breath and his legs as he climbed.
In the daylight, he thought, he would be able to see if they were still there and he would have time to run if they were. But he needed to find Evie and get back to his home. He found his way back down the path, where he and Evie had run together before she disappeared into the trees, and out to the opening where the road to the village lay. By the gap in the trees he saw Elmet. The hunting beasts had started their work; a tear in his doublet showed where they had broken the skin from his belly. Luda turned his head back to the road.
From the lip of the forest he could see down into Uish and the devastation of the night before. There were men in the village – men with spears and swords – and the streets were filled with the litter of houses turned inside out. Some were little more than blackened piles, stuck with charred beams protruding like the ribs of the bloated sheep carcass they had found caught up in the eel traps after last winter’s flood.
He froze at the sight of the armed men, and his eyes flicked back to Elmet and then to the forest roads. He looked back down, trying to see some way through or some sign of hope, and his heart jumped back into place as he saw the men carried the banner of a white dragon – the symbol of The Wyrran. Help had come, he thought. But too late – among the smoking ruins below he saw Evie’s shattered home.
In the Gadd’s paddock the goats were loose. Spread out among them, on the mottled turf, he could make out the shapes of four bodies that weren’t animals.
He ran down from the forest, not stopping as two soldiers standing at the bottom of the road called out to him. Down through the wreckage of the village street to the paddocks and the two houses that now revealed their full devastation. Evie’s house was almost razed by fire. The stone hearth where Luda had enjoyed warm evenings with Evie and her family was the only part still recognisable among the blackened, still-smoking ruins.
In the lower paddock Luda recognised the broken body of Brawen – surrounded by the corpses of three men dressed in heavy clothes. He had not given his life cheaply, but from the wreckage of the Gadd home it seemed he had given it in vain.
‘This your master’s home?’ A man’s voice pulled Luda back into the world again.
‘Err… yes. Yes it is. Was. Is,’ Luda stammered. ‘Is anyone…’
The man shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, we got here as soon as we saw the smoke but they’d mostly gone by then. We caught a couple of stragglers, but that’s it. They took people, some of the women. There’s no one left in that house. Alive.’
Luda wandered back to the remains of Evie’s house. He hadn’t wanted to look inside his own. If Evie was still alive, he thought, this is where she’d come. He stood for a while, watching the smoke rise and the occasional brief flare as a last fragment of unburnt timber suddenly ignited among the smouldering pile of ash and cinder of what had been her house.
‘They’ve taken her, Luda.’ Evie’s voice startled him, and when he turned to see her he instinctively threw his arms around her and pulled her close. She kept her arms to her side and waited until he loosened his grip.
‘They’ve taken my mother. They’ve taken everything.’
‘Oh Evie.’ Luda sighed, and his narrow chest shook. ‘I thought you might be dead. What are we going to do?’
Evie’s face
betrayed no emotion as she kept her gaze on the smoking ruin. ‘We’re going to find her, Luda. I’m going to find her.’
The War Room
Rachlaw paced impatiently outside the door. The guard threw him a nervous, apologetic glance that he barely acknowledged. He dug his heel irritably into one of the small hollows that years of footfall had made in the black stone of the anteroom floor.
Finally the door cracked. ‘You may–’
Rachlaw barged the heavy door open and strode in. The room was small, but well lit by a wall of narrow arched windows at the far end and hung heavily with rich tapestry on three sides. In the centre was a solid table of dark wood, its sides and legs carved with images of beasts cowed beneath the perfect forms of idealised Wyrran youth. Around the table sat four old men, only one of whom looked up as Rachlaw entered.
‘Lord Dawhl.’ Rachlaw acknowledged the grey, gaunt man at the head of the table.
Dawhl was Alderman of The Wyrran – the most powerful noble in the richest county of The Home, and chief minister of King Quist. He spoke for the King in matters of war: a job Rachlaw felt he was well suited for as both had equal understanding of the subject and both could be relied on to do just the wrong thing.
‘Lord Rachlaw,’ he replied, ‘good of you to join us. We’ve just been finalising our strategy for dealing with this latest Sea People trouble. Your input would of course, as always, be extremely valuable.’
‘Finalising?’ Rachlaw’s face betrayed his anger. ‘With respect Lord, I have not yet presented the information my men have gathered, nor had any–’
‘Rachlaw!’ Lord Dawhl’s smile forced itself uncomfortably against the natural creases of his thin, worn face. ‘Your information will be invaluable, I am sure. Lord Venner will explain what we plan and there will be time afterwards to give your input.’
Dawhl gestured to the man on his right to stand. Lord Venner was a good foot taller than his superior, who immediately sat down. His demeanour and build spoke of the battles he had fought, while his white hair told of time that had passed since he last thrust a spear. He had Rachlaw’s respect, but he knew Venner was as much bound to the wishes of King Quist as the fool who commanded him was.
