Hillfast.
The soldiers did some work on me during the days we tracked the coast in an old cog from Port Carl to Hillfast, but I proved a bit too much trouble when they tried to give me a beating early on the voyage. Two of them still had wrappings around their hands; I heard one was still pissing blood, and that cheered me up. Their captain remarked on my capacity for pain before putting me in a neck trap. Now they cut my breath off whenever they’re bored, and take bets on how long I’ll last before I pass out.
There’s little left of me. Those children give me something other than myself to worry about, but now I’m facing the gallows. Fuck it.
We’re on the Gellessens’ wharf. They was tight with Carlessen. Looks like my bounty will have to be split a few ways. Shavings of sunlight flutter through the deck planks with shadows moving above me. Beyond them the dockers’ calls and greetings, the gulls will be breeding, their yakking fills the air, though the swelling around my ear makes it sound like there’s a cup over it. I’m sure my face is ruined now. I lost two more teeth, I think, but one of them was giving me grief anyway. I’ve got cuts over my eyes and cheeks—I think one of the guards had a ring on his finger.
The dockers are unloading bolts of cotton, boxes of plant and other cargo. Then the soldiers open the hatch and climb down the ladder to where I’m standing, fixed in the neck trap to two poles.
The one that’s been pissing blood, he’s in charge of the other three. I can see his jaw twitch with the need to hurt me, but there’s a shimmer to him that I’m seeing it in as well. It’s taken time for these two eyes of mine to find a way to work together. The headaches have all but gone, and yet I think I’d rather not have had both eyes replaced, for all the trouble it’s caused me. The world isn’t the same when I close my left eye. I’ve struggled to see out of the left eye anyway after the attentions of clubs and fists, and I have tried to fathom what it is this black eye sees, besides what everyone sees. It sees the story of things, or rather, the riddle, for I feel as though there’s things I sense but cannot make sense of. My eye sees intent, sees shifts in feeling. Sillindar told us of the song of the earth, a sense of our belonging and place. The Oskoro must know this in a way my one eye can only signal.
Two men unlock the poles from the beams and hold them. Their letnant steps up to me.
“I’m going to untie you. You can walk up the ladder or be choked out and pulled up it by your trap, if you want to try kicking me again. That clear?”
“I’ll be quiet.” I hadn’t spoken in days. It was a croak, lispy with my broken lips and bruises.
“Good. You look a mess.”
“Sip of water?”
“Didn’t think the dead was thirsty,” he says.
My arms and legs are untied and I’m brought out into the light. I manage to breathe a bit of the sea through my nose, the sour tang welcome on my tongue. The trap’s too tight for me to look about, and I want to look up over the dock, the port, to the Crackmore path that winds its way up the hillside to our house.
There’s a gathering on the narrow run of the quay, Othbutter’s militia waiting at the bottom of the gangplank. A number have stopped their work in the sheds facing the front.
“Gallows!” and “Hang the ugly whore!” are among the shouts, but as I’m led down the plank the spitting starts, a few stones are thrown, one of which gets me good in the back of the head and causes a cheer as I buckle for a moment. Word passes quickly along the quay that Crogan’s killer is being led along. I keep my eyes down, seeing cobbles I walked for years after I come home from Marola, inspecting cargo and running my tallies. I feel a trickle of blood running down my neck. I suppose it doesn’t matter.
“Teyr!”
The first anyone’s said my name. I look up. Tarrigsen, aghast. He’s on the steps of the guildhall with some other merchants, who look away, though Iddie Trups and Kieltsen know full fucking well who I am and how I stood for them in years past against tithes and strikes they brought on themselves with their meanness. Tarrigsen doesn’t say any more, and I can’t turn my head, pushed onwards I’m guessing to Othbutter’s chamber of justice or the Hill, the jailhouse dug into the cliffs that rose from this end of the bay.
I hear, in among the Common and Abra, many other languages: Juan, Farl, even Vilmorian.
“The tourneys been already?” I shout to the letnant in front of us.
“A few weeks ago, a success it was and all, people from all shores come for it, except for one Farlsgrad lord I heard lost his recipe book on a side bet. A recipe book! I’ll bet my balls Farlsgrad’ll be coming after whoever won it. But don’t worry, if the Hill’s fuller than usual we’ll rig up a hammock in the cess there.”
“Kiss my cinch.”
I’m shoved forward by the soldier wielding the pole behind me, and this forces me to cough.
“We’re here. Let’s see if the chief’s flag is there.” By which he means the yellow flag that showed hearings was under way at the chamber.
The chamber is set at the heart of the markets. Here all manner of catch fills my nose and makes my belly ache, but the smell of roasting nuts most of all, a smell that would have Mosa tugging my dress and pulling me over to get him some.
The letnant is talking to one of the militia at the door to the chamber, the soldiers around me taking turns to light up some pipes and fish for the attentions of women or girls unfortunate enough to get near them.
Soon enough he’s back, telling us no flag, but word was being sent to Othbutter that I was here.
I’m taken to the lower level in the jail, known as the Coffins. One of the floor grates is opened, not much more than a coffin-sized space, carved out of the stone. I’m stripped from the waist down, which gives a few in the coffins nearby a chance to ask me to join them. I’m forced down into a coffin by pressure from the poles on the neck trap. My backside is pushed against a trough carved to take down into the caves whatever I expel, an innovation that made this one of the better prison duties a guard could be put on.
The grate is pushed down over me, heavy, trapping me still as it does the others. After an hour of this weight there’s a savage sharp aching across my body, beyond which I can barely hear the noise of others telling me how they’d like to use me. They are only distracting themselves from the pain they also are undergoing. I let it fill me. It drowns out Mosa.
It makes little difference, I shortly learn, where they put your backside in relation to a channel for whatever you shit, because later that night a couple of the guards come down to the Coffins. They relieve a night’s ale over us, aiming at the faces of those sleeping especially. I guess it’s the newer prisoners that make the most noise about it, for they’re told to get used to it by others.
One of the guards kneels on my grate and starts pulling himself off over my face while the woman that’s with him is cheering him on. The woman laughs hard at this, tells me I shouldn’t feel honoured, he does it to all of them in here. I feel him finish himself on me. I tell him that I feel sorry for his keep if he’s that quick with her. He hits me once on my head with the pole end of his spear before she cusses at him to stop. Turns out they’re eating food and wine they was bribed to give me, and getting food into the Hill, down here in particular, requires some sort of clout. Tarrigsen, it must be. I feel like taunting them, but they’ve been soaking in cups, and guards fit for this sort of duty make all sorts of bad decisions when they’re soaked.
As they leave the others calm down, some muttering, some singing muke-thickened verses of old songs, and there was two kept arguing about the mistakes the other made that got them here. Tarrigsen didn’t look well when I saw him earlier. Thinner. There’s a rot gets in your pipes and eats you up from inside and I fear it’s in him. Might be he’s thinking of some way to get me off the gallows. He runs much of the dock, though these two wouldn’t have eaten what he’d sent down if they thought there was a mosquie’s chance I wasn’t going to hang.
The hours pass, shifts change, measuring the night’s coming and going. I snatch sleep between the men’s agits. One asks me if I really did kill Crogan. I tell him I deserve this, and nothing more.
The door’s bolt is drawn back with a heavy crack and it swings open.
“She’s there. Tell her Kristluk’s going to save up a big shit just for her when he’s in later.”
“Tell Kristluk that if this happens, I will end his rope, for they will no longer be able to work in Hillfast.”
“You’re a cleark, go fuck yourself.”
Thornsen, a voice varnished to a soft shine, my immaculate high cleark. My eyes fill up because he will see me like this. I had not wanted to see him for all that I loved him. That was another and better Teyr Amondsen.
He holds a torch out towards me and squats down to get closer to me. I can barely move my head, my neck seems frozen in iron. He’s typically well groomed, a clean short beard, his cap, tunic and leggings navy and grey, also clean and well sewn, for he apprenticed as a tailor for years before his letters earned him work as a cleark.
He too has tears in his eyes and he comes forward onto his kneecaps and puts his hand to my cheek. “I’m so sorry.”
I had cried enough these last few seasons since I left Mosa’s body and went south to the Mothers, but his sorrow cut me open again. I had taken our friends away and killed them.
“Please go, Thornsen, I can’t bear this.”
“Othbutter won’t return from his hunt until evening. I will petition for your release then.”
“No. No, don’t. I can’t bear to be alive. My interests, my ships, it’s yours, yours and Tarry’s.”
“But Cherry found you, she told me what you said had happened. You didn’t kill Crogan, Seikkerson did.”
“Fucking shut it!” barks the man in the coffin to my right, and he says it again and again.
“We can’t talk, Thornsen, there’s too much to say. The Kelssen children that was with us, with me, Cherry and Leyden, look out for them and prepare for war, for Samma Khiese’s coming. Now go.”
He’s about to protest when the cunt next to me who’s shouting starts a chain of others off that brings the guard.
“You’ll have to leave, your silver in’t going to cover this lot gettin’ the agits, and all the extra work swilling them out when they get angry listening to you.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow, Master.” He stands up, both knees clicking, something he used to moan about often, and the torchlight fades with his footsteps. With him goes the foul smell of the dipped torch and the fine smell of orange oil that he’s used in his beard since we first met.
“We’ll all see you tomorrow, and watch that old neck of yours snap,” shouts one of the guards back at me.
“It’ll be worth it not to have to listen to your shit any more.”
I can’t help but cry out as they unlock the grate pressed on me the next day. I cannot straighten myself, though they pull me up by my arms and slap me about, as though that will move the cramp and deadness from my limbs. I’m thrown to the ground and a robe is put over me to spare those in the justice the sight of my body, I’m sure. I shake and shiver with the effort of trying to move even slightly. A few kicks are meant to encourage me, but it takes hours for a body to set itself after being in the coffins. There’s many I’ve seen deformed by them when their punishment sent them back there too often.
It’s hard to say how I’m feeling otherwise. The end of a life, the hands of the dying I’ve held down the years, it all goes this way: a shallow mixture of the fondest memories drowned out by the unbearable vivacity of the world around you, a gluey wax of sense, the cold on my bare arms, the scratch of wool hardening my nipples, the thickness of smells: sweat, oil, wounds.
Eventually I am pulled to my feet. The guards put a shoulder under either arm and drag me out. Torches provide miserly pools of light on the worn, slick steps of this dungeon. The light of morning, when the iron-braced door is dragged open, hits me with the grace of a cooper’s mallet. I’m given many names by the guards clustered in the irons room, changing shifts over pipes and bowls of nettle tea. I’m a “bald cratch,” a “spim-drunk drooper.” “Dead cunt walking” is the truest of them. I hope they can get me in the noose before the day’s out.
There’s little fuss at the sight of a prisoner as I’m dragged more briskly out of the Hill and through the market to the chamber. I haven’t been given boots, the earth and dung are cold enough to numb my toes as they scrape the ground. It’s a blue sky; snow-white clouds thick as butter shape Aoig’s light. The black eye softens the edges of the stalls and buildings around me, the notes they sing in concord with the melodies of laughter and prices hollered.
I wonder at the beauty that must fill the days of the Oskoro who have been changed by the Flower of Fates, those who receive the seed. I wonder too if they can pass on how they’ve changed to their children as the rest of us do our noses, eyes and hair. It stops me thinking about the judgement that’s coming as I’m led into the chamber. It takes a moment to realise that the yellow flag isn’t flying. The chamber doors are opened by militiamen, and beyond the beams of sunlight draw hard sharp squares on the dark flagstones of the main floor. I’m dropped to my knees by the guards before they turn and leave. I feel like a child, but I have no choice and I cuss as I lean forward to find a way to hold myself free of the spasms of pain I’m suffering in my spine. Then, for a moment, I could believe I’d woken up from some awful dream, for Othbutter sits in the simple wooden chair, Tobber to his side, a table for a jug and a cup at Othbutter’s other hand. His hair might be greyer, he might be fatter, his belly filling his lap. His tunic is a rough woollen one, the one he’s always preferred for passing judgement on ending a life, pretending he’s a servant to the law of the land while before the poor.
But it’s not a dream. Aude isn’t standing behind me. I’m no longer full of the future I had for us.
Then I sense another here with us, in the shadows behind the beams of light, but I’m standing in one, shielding them from sight.
“Teyr, of the Jonassen clan,” begins Tobber, giving me Aude’s name since I’d become his keep.
“I’m an Amondsen, Tobber, you streak of shit, and you did me the honour of calling me Amondsen the last time I was stood here. But back then you had an agreement on my wine shipments that you kept off your scrolls, I believe.”
I hear a laugh choke itself off. It sounds familiar. Othbutter raises his eyebrows.
“Othbutter, I didn’t kill your brother, the Seikkersons did. If you won’t believe me put me in the noose and get this fucking thing over with. I’m done.”
I get a dig in my ribs for that, but I keep my eyes on him.
“Amondsen. The Seikkersons are loyal to us. Jeife Seikkerson brought my brother’s body back to his bloodlands to be buried before winter just gone. His tithe was true, generous indeed. He told me you left Crogan to the whims of this warlord Khiese.”
“He’s smoking Khiese and he’s played you. Khiese now knows your strength, or lack of it, and the lie of land from Elder Hill through here. I expect you’re recruiting for war?”
At that Othbutter looks off to his left, to the person standing in the darkened corner. “You are the only reason I’m not having her flayed where she sits.” He turns back to me. He wants to say more, but what I said about Jeife must have made him think.
“What makes you speak of war, Amondsen? What can you tell us of this Khiese?”
“What is there to say? He has the Circle united against you. He’s harder than you, cleverer. He’ll end your rope before taking the rest of the citadel.”
“You seem keen to die, Amondsen. You’ve met Khiese, assessed his numbers, how they’re armed, the way they work? Will you not show your loyalty to the staff? To me? Your knowledge could spare you the noose.”
“I’d rather the noose than a few months in a cell before Khiese takes over this port and finds me. You don’t have the soldiers or the loyalty in enough clans for the army you’ll need.”
Othbutter stares at me for a moment, thinks better of replying and reaches for his jug to fill his cup.
I remember Khiese’s words, his threat to kill Aude, but Aude would be dead now, all this time later. I can’t bear to think of him alive if I’m honest. The sun is warm on my head. I wish I could be left alone. I catch Tobber’s eye. He looks to his feet, hands clasped behind his back, clearly pleased.
“You should smile a bit more, Tobber, give your keep a shock when you go home later. You was right though, wasn’t you? I failed. And I lost Aude and Mosa, Thad, Eirin. I’d like to know if Chalky made it back with his son?”
“No sign of him, his keep or his children at his sheds or the guildhall. I’ve taken on his interests as he had no brother,” says Othbutter.
Poor bastards. Even if Khiese had truly let them go, they just wouldn’t have survived the journey back on their own—no snowcraft. They might have shared the truth about Crogan had they made it.
It occurs to me as I look about me that there can’t be more than four or five people in the room: Othbutter, Tobber, whoever it was that laughed and the guards behind me.
“Brilde, Hamskke, leave us,” says Othbutter.
I hear them turn and walk out, the heavy black larch doors closing.
“No witness to rolls? Are you going to kill me here?”
“No. We should talk about a way out of this for you, Blackeye. Isn’t that what I heard you’ve been called down in Carlessen lands?”
This voice comes from the corner. It takes me as long to place it as the speaker takes to step into the light.
“Nazz?”
Where do I begin with this fucker? I knew him all my life from the day I arrived in Hillfast on a van as a girl looking to change the world, through to the day in Marola he set me and Thad up to die. He’d shared both our beds. I’d loved him as a keep, then as a brother, and we wandered half the world with Ruifsen and Threeboots. He had longknots then, hair the colour of pine, but age has salted it all over as it has mine. He moves like he still does his Forms, but he’s a ganger now, and it doesn’t pay to look weak. Even his colour looks like it’s had a shot recently. I realise as I take him in that his skin, often so bad in the field from a reaction of some kind to guira, was less blotchy, fewer white flakes and crusts of skin mottling him.
“I’m sorry about Aude and your boy. Sorry about Thad too—I loved him. Where you been since before winter?”
“What do you want?” I want to spit on him, scream at him for how false he is in saying all this, but I’m on my knees, leaning forward on an arm, and that wobbling with the effort of keeping me in a position free of pain. It’s all I can do to keep my breathing even.
In the years since I’ve been back at Hillfast I knew he was about of course, saw him from time to time, but he lived in the nights and I the days. He wouldn’t meet my eye when we did pass in the lanes or on the quays, but I shared too many pipes with him before Marola to hold such proper hate in my heart that I’d go after him.
“I’m here to find out if you want to get some revenge on Khiese,” he says.
“Why have we lost my guards?”
I know the answer, I see it in Othbutter’s eyes. I see a flush as well, a shiver of colour of sorts, close to anger from what I’d learned of the way this black eye sees. Khiese may have spies in Hillfast.
“The fewer that know of this the better,” says Nazz.
“How much land has Khiese taken? He’s reached Elder Hill and he’s got whiteboys a few days from Port Carl. Is that about it?”
They share a glance. Their faces, eyes searching for what to say, speak of much that is left out, much they’re not sharing, but I cannot fathom what.
“I’m putting a crew together,” says Nazz. “Khiese threatens us all.”
“I supposedly killed your brother, Chief. Am I a threat to you or not?”
“Not where you’re going, to the noose or elsewhere,” says Othbutter. “I’d have you in the fucking noose, you old cratch, and I’d drag you there myself, but our mutual friend sees a use for you, maybe even recover your honour.”
“You’re right, Teyr. You were always right,” says Nazz before I can reply. “Mercs and soldiers from the north will take time to assemble. They’re being mustered, but a needle in the heart’s as good as a hammer to the head. We can be the needle, and you know all about the heart it needs to find.”
Kill Khiese.
I see him again, dirty yellow colour and copper hair. I hear his flat, calm certainty, his purpose rooted deep and cold as Sillindar’s Eye is fixed above us.
“We had near fifty, including the chief’s best, my own best, Sanger and Yalle, and Sanger and his man Jem did for near forty of them on their own trying to save the lives of my family. It did us no good, all the clans are for him. You’re against all of them, to the last.”
“Sanger was fierce, I’ll grant you, but you took a van in there, Teyr—families. We’re going in there and we’re killing everyone between us and Khiese, just a handful of us, able to ride fast, hide easily. We’ll do it better with you.” He come closer to me, to get a better look. I read all too clearly in the lines of his face and set of his eyes how troubled he was by all the damage I carried.
“What happened to you? Your eye?”
“Infection I picked up.”
He knew that was cow shit but said no more.
“Teyr,” says Othbutter, “you seem ready to die, old girl. I can give you that, out on the gallows. Tobber’d tie the knot himself, wouldn’t you, Tobber? Or you can find death yourself, if what you say about Khiese is true. The second way of dying puts a sword in your hand and gives you the chance to avenge your family. Kill Khiese, then you come back and droop yourself out on the purse you’d have earned, gold of course, fully thirty Hope pure and a stretch of Khiedsen land too for they will be punished for the sins of their son. I can’t hide that I can see the threat Khiese poses me, which is why it makes sense for me to be generous, even to you, if it’ll turn your head towards our common enemy.”
I roll my arms at the shoulders, the pain makes me hiss. I look between Othbutter and Nazz. Something’s not being said. Nazz is making coin by the barrel. There aren’t many sheds or merchants clean of him. It seems like suicide if the point of it is turning some coin. But here he is, with that sure look in his eye, that “One more brandy; what’s the worst can happen?” like we’re soaking it up way past wise in a tavern after beating some poor debtor about for Fat Steppy.
Khiese.
I don’t much give a shit, now I think about it, what it is going on between these two. My belly’s aching for something to eat, like it knows I’m no longer going to the gallows. More than that, the healing the Oskoro have done, the plant inside me that keeps me alive, tingles sharply, making clear its own need perhaps.
I think about putting a sword in Khiese, right up to the hilt. It brings a tear to my eye.
“I’ll join your crew, Nazz. I just hope you remember everything I taught you after all these years frightening poor debtors with what’s left of your colour. Chief, Tobber, I’m going to find some boots and then some wine. I’ll need some coin though.”
“Chief!” began Tobber. Othbutter raises his hand and cuts him off.
“Nazz, she’s your responsibility now. As are the others. We’ll meet once more before you leave.” Othbutter gets out of his chair with a grunt of effort and leads Tobber out to his office at the back of the hall, whispering to him all the way along.
“Yes, Chief,” says Nazz after him. He comes up to me and puts his hand on my shoulder as I kneel. I am both too sore and too shocked to react and push him off so I let it happen, feeling his awkwardness.
“I’ll have Talley, my drudha, look at those wounds,” he says, “and give you something for what the Coffins have done to your bones.”
“Not today. I just want to find something to wear, something warmer than this, get myself a bath and razor my head. You can give me some coin for that and then find me a fieldbelt and a good sword if you want to be useful. For the belt I’ll need luta leaves, whatever dayer you’ve got, preferably a galerin mushroom base. What’s the base for the fightbrew you have? Walnut and butterbur twist?”
“Something like that. There’s a spread of fireweed, bark, shiel, lark in the scabbards, arnica presses, betony mix for paying colour. Othbutter will have guards following you, you know that.”
I don’t answer, I just want to be let outside. I hold my hand up for him to pull me to my feet. He takes my weight as I heave myself up and holds me steady as I whimper at the pain in my knees and hips. I shush any words he’s about to speak and he waits silently while my body remembers its duty.
“You should come to the Mash Fist tonight,” he says. “Threeboots will be there, she’ll be cheered to see you after all these years.”
“Let me have some coin, Nazz. I want to go.” I think of Threeboots a moment, one of my old crew, but then I can’t be bothered, I can’t work up any anger, let alone regret. If she ever listened to me on a purse it was only because she loved Nazz. Betraying me and Thad down in Marola wouldn’t have caused her a wink of lost sleep.
“You made the right choice coming with me, and you’re field-ready, Teyr, deep colour, all cut stone corners as we used to say. I’m trying to persuade Ruifsen to come, Threeboots is with us, she’s on my purse anyway, and one of my cutters told me he saw Salia on the quay, which is a sign Sillindar watches over us—well, if we want to believe that shit and if she’ll take the purse. She apparently came in on a ship two days ago. There’s a few of your friends from the Coffins who know their way about arms and’ll be happy to avoid the noose. Then there’s my own people, and I’d stand my coin on them against anything in the Circle.”
I say nothing. He shrugs, takes two silver pieces from his belt, Hope stamped, a lot of coin for most who live hereabouts.
“I know where to find you, Nazz. How long before we leave?”
“How long do you need, Teyr? To recover from your stint in the Coffins and pay back in I mean, proper colour. You’ll need a few flasks and a week or so, I’d say. Stop in at shed twelve for your belt, sword and flasks tomorrow. Would you go to see Ruifsen? He’s at the farm, has been a long time, as you probably know, but I’m sure if you asked him to come he would; there’s nothing he wouldn’t do for you, and he hasn’t changed.”
“Meaning there’s nothing he would do for you. There’s a time you’d both do anything for me, Nazz, until Marola, and he had the droop for an excuse when you all rode away and left me and Thad with forty-odd mercenaries paid for a crossroads on us.” “Crossroads” meant they had to kill us or die trying. Serious purse.
I let go of his hand. I’m steady so I turn and leave him standing there and shuffle up to the doors to the just, and I open them to the day, the sea, the life of the port, salt and sweet, ignorant of what might be coming. Fucking Othbutter.
With no yellow flag flying, nobody’s slowing as they pass in the hope of seeing hangings or floggings at the stand.
I look up to the hills. I can’t help myself. I’m looking to where our house is, looking to get away from these crowds, find some sky with a flask of wine and a thick piece of ham.
I head along Ridsen, left off the justice and I walk around wagons that have got themselves in a mess, one with a broken wheel. Alik’s is open, one of the places Steppy used to run. The air’s greasy with heavy, bad bacca and rot in the mortar and wood, but that’s always been its air and it hasn’t fallen in yet. One of the silvers gets me their “finest Juan imported” brandy, a muslin-wrapped hunk of salted bacon and a half-wheel of cheese. I give a handful of pennies to go around those that serve and cook.
If I’m being followed I don’t see them. I wonder if Nazz has had a word.
I turn right off Ridsen onto Wadey and right again onto Packham, the east quay’s merchant quarter. Then I’m through the shadows of Folken alley to the tall gate, up through the farmers’ huts and the hill beyond them. The stony path is warm on my soles as I climb the hill. It quickly turns muddy and the nettles at the top catch and nip me all over. “Paths need walking,” Aude had said. “Our boots make them strong.” And I’m watching his boots a few steps ahead, his odd gait that I felt belonged to me, his fine legs. Finally I crest the hill above the harbour at Hillfast, and before me, a hundred or so feet off, is our house. I see a bright new fence post and planks, fresh and proud amid their weathered and weary neighbours, speaking of a recent repair. Thornsen. I remember now he’d come up here on his day off to give his children somewhere to run among the old apple trees, but it seems he’s also keeping the place in some order.
The path from the gate is swept, the gate opens silently, recently oiled.
“You haven’t oiled the main door though,” I say out loud, for it cracks open with a rasp. The rooms are empty, silent but for the feathery scratching of a mouse somewhere nearby as I move to the windows and unlatch the shutters. We had goat-horn plates put into a frame before the shutters, so that we could have some sunlight in my little office and our main room without the cold. These were the first such windows many had seen, though they were everywhere in Marola, a legacy of the wealthy Harudanians during their occupation of that land.
The plates bleach the sun to the colour of butter. Only two chairs remain in the room, and like the desk they’re thick with fronds of dust. Each bare nail in the walls is a marker, a needle of remembrance for the embroidery or carving that once hung there but now lies in a chest in our bedroom. I follow the nails that mark the walls through the hall into the kitchen and scullery beyond, though with the shutters fast only my black eye can see. I see instead Mosa and a kitchen girl I can’t now recall the name of watching Aude skinning a rabbit; the soft crack as the feet are severed, his swift cutting, the easy pull and twist of the fur leaving the glistening, vulnerable-looking body, the length of it always a surprise. I close my eyes to wish this memory away, but the smell of its blood is making me light-headed. Mosa is speaking, saying something I can’t quite catch, the girl’s head is tilted as though listening to Aude, who may have been instructing her.
I have to get away and walk back along the hall. I’m at the door to our bedroom. Two candles, one at Mosa’s bedside, one at ours. I’d wake earlier than them, always, the price of the colour, the pain seeping through whatever salves and kannab give me sleep. Every morning, turning back at the doorway, candle in hand, checking to be sure I haven’t disturbed them. Aude’s hand would move over the cooling fur where I’d lain, Mosa only a tuft of hair visible in a ball of wool on his own mat.
“Then I’d crack out my bones before I made the fire,” I say, “cussing and fucking freezing until it got going.” The echoes of my voice slip and slide through the house, as though the house itself doesn’t want to hold or bear me speaking to it. It makes me shiver.
“Why am I here?”
“You don’t know?”
I spin, startled, I go for my sword instinctively, my hand brushing the wool of my tunic.
“Thornsen! Fucking Sillindar, you move quiet.”
“And you’re still quick. That sword would be through me if you’d worn it, then I’d be sorry. I guessed it might be you but couldn’t be sure.”
He’s standing at the front door I left open.
“I spoke to ward off the ghosts. They don’t want me here.”
“I’ve brought up some kindling, candles, some oil and a flask of uisge. Would you sit with me, Master?” He takes a cloth from a pocket in his cloak for my tears the moment before they fall. My crying takes over and he hugs me close and waits.
“Come on now. Let’s get a fire going here, see if the house’ll remember you then.”
With some wood I hadn’t noticed was piled in the corner of the room, he gets a fire going in the hearth while I’m sitting there, breaking off mouthfuls of cheese and swigging them down with brandy. He pulls up the other chair next to me, and we watch the flames lick the bark of the bigger cuts, building its appetite.
“You bring Epny and the children here?”
“Yes, Master.”
“Fuck it, Thornsen. Teyr please, just Teyr. I’ll not be Master again.”
“Of course. We came for the apples after you’d all left last year and I thought they’d need some cropping anyway to get a good yield this year. Epny baked you some in pastry if you recall, with that bit of sugar you gave us from the Thirsty Crow’s cargo. Anyway, I wanted to keep the house in some order for you, for your return. We had some good feasts here over the years, all your crew’s children and … you showed us all such kindness.” I take his hand and hold it while I nip at the brandy, warming up my throat, filling my chest with oranges and browns. Epny was beautiful, a bawdy bark of a laugh, happiest in the vortex of their four children, the sister I never had.
I tell him what happened to us. I don’t tell him about the Mothers and the things I did there to live, only what come after, with the Kelssens and today with Othbutter.
“I’ll have Leyden visit that almshouse when he’s back at Carl, see how our coin’s being spent caring for those duts,” says Thornsen, before tipping a measure of uisge into the cap of the flask. It catches in his throat and he coughs. I never saw the appeal, but then he’s never tried to swallow the awful mulch and curd of a fightbrew, closest thing to a throatful of nettles there is.
“Is his shirt here?”
“It is, Teyr. It’s in the bedroom. I found a lovely satchel to keep it in. Do you want to see it?”
I always see it.
“No. I’m just glad it’s home. I hope he will have been able to follow it.”
The fire’s warmth is welcome, the flames echoing in the chimney. My feet are warming up.
“I want you to have my concern, Thornsen. You’ve run it, you’ve helped me and guided me all the way since I hired you. You and Epny have sacrificed so much to see it go well. I don’t intend to come back here, even if I was carrying Khiese’s head.”
“You said that to me yesterday. I’m not interested.”
“Who will run it otherwise? There’s too many good people relying on you now.”
“We can’t talk about this now, Teyr. Too much may still happen. There’s much good still to do.”
“The only good I can see is killing Samma Khiese, and who will that bring back from the dead?”
He gives me a sympathetic look, lays his arguments down and huffs his way through another mouthful of uisge.
“You’re going back to the Circle.”
“He said he would kill Aude if I did,” I says.
“Do you believe him?”
“I don’t know. Aude must be dead. It’s been so long, and we both know he’s got no wild in him.”
“Can you live not knowing? Does he think you’ll go back after him?”
“Khiese? He probably thinks I’m beaten. Always in his speaking he was sure of himself. Not sure, certain. What have you heard about matters east?”
His face darkens. He struggles to meet my eyes as he looks for what to say.
“It isn’t good, Teyr. The Crutters have been to see Othbutter, according to his guards, and his guards talk when a bit of plant is wanted of course.”
“Of course.”
“Crutter’s lost three Families now and then half his remaining men trying to claim them back from Khiese. Othbutter’s lost the Crutters and given they won’t side with Khiese the merchants are expecting a coup. Crutters and some Kreigh clans they’re tight with might well be marching in with more soldiers than Othbutter can muster, though he’s had the call out for a few months now for any and all mercenaries to come. The worst is, I’m sorry to say, Elder Hill and Faldon Ridge have fallen to Khiese.”
“Omar?”
“No word. I sent three scouts separately, none have come back. Families taken care of.”
I have nothing to say for a bit, remembering how Omar’s jokes was dry as sand and he’d always be getting our apprentices to ask the smith for a left-handed hammer or to see the carpenters and coopers for wax nails.
“Best castellan I ever saw, they all loved him at the Ridge, loved him wherever he went.”
“We took the last chests of coin only a few weeks before it went quiet. His report spoke of some trouble in the Circle—bandits—and he’d requested coats of chain and arms, ingots as well.”
I know what I’ll find when we get to Faldon Ridge. I see no point in sharing it with Thornsen.
“Othbutter’s fucked,” I says.
“Quite.”
I sip the brandy, feel him watching me.
“You should come to the house tonight, Teyr. We’ll put a bath on for you, Epny’ll take care of you.” He struggles to speak. “You …”
“Look the wrong side of sixty? I know.” I feel like a sack of gravel. I’d be worse, fingers and toes only saved from frostbite by whoever the Oskoro have that pass for drudharchs. My hands are lumpy, the colour blackened in places by bruises, cuts and whatever they put on my fingers. I haven’t had salts or rubs for a long time and I got used to everything being sore and hurting.
“I was going to say you’ll let us fit you out properly for this purse. If you have some time you should get back on the brews and the rubs, it’ll help you with your Forms so you can go and execute this bastard and bring Aude home.”
I think briefly about refusing to go with him, drink myself under and sing to the darkness filling the house beyond this room. That would be too easy, too soft. I think I’ll put up with their love for a while, straighten myself out for what’s to come.