2

He did not go back to the farm that day, or the next. Only a fool would go back to be found among corpses.

Instead Cahan waited until the villagers of Harn had found the bodies, which took them not a fourday or even an eightday, but two eightdays. Then the villagers waited another fourday before doing anything, fearful the troops of the High Leoric in faraway Harnspire would return. Eventually they cleared the bodies, took down the warning flags. Cahan worried they might take everything of value from the farm, but they did not. He watched their monk, Tussnig, an undesirable sort in a filthy grey smock and a hat made of twigs woven to resemble the eight-branched Star of Iftal, if you squinted. He pronounced the area cursed and haunted by the dark spirits of the Osere, for which Cahan was thankful as it meant nothing would be removed. He worried that Tussnig would set the earth-house alight but he did not, probably because the monk was lazy and earth-houses are hard to get burning. Cahan gave it another week before he called Segur and they moved back in.

He was pleased to find the previous owners had done little damage, mostly because they had done very little.

It took him a week to clean the house, remove the bloodstains and get it back to how he liked it. Segur spent most of that time sniffing and growling at unfamiliar scents. He thought of rebuilding the small shrine to Ranya but decided against it. He had another that was better hidden, and the Rai might always come back.

On the last day of cleaning he found a small wooden model of a crownhead; it must have belonged to one of the children. Cahan sat and looked at it for a long time, turning it over in his big, rough hands.

Was it his fault? If he had interfered he would have died.

We would not.

He ignored the voice. That was the ghost of another life, another person. Someone dead who should stay dead. Someone who had brought nothing but pain where he walked.

He took the crownhead toy to the woods and buried it in the small, hidden grove of his own making that he had dedicated to Ranya, the lady of the lost. No doubt the family had worshipped fiercer gods, Tarl-an-Gig, or maybe Chyi, though he doubted they would have admitted it in the north. They were not gods Cahan could find any truth in, or believed there was any truth in. He had been raised for Zorir, a fire god who he had been told was the only true god.

Another lie.

Travelling through Crua, selling his anger, he had heard monks of Chyi and Tarl-an-Gig preach. What they said, it was not that different from what the monks of Zorir had told him. Names changed, stories differed slightly, but the end was the same. Bow down and give of yourself, or be denied the Star Path and paradise when you die. He knelt before the shrine to Ranya, a rough pyramid of found wood strewn with colourful flags, and placed the toy within it. This was the best he could do for the child.

Cahan hoped it woke in gentler lands than these. It was not the first life laid down in the grove, but it was probably one more deserving of mercy.

That done, he headed back to the farm to do what must be done to restore order. The fields would need digging over. The family had planted root crops which were, as he warned, rotting in the ground and good for little else but providing compost for next year’s planting. He worried he might find traces of bluevein in them, but his land looked clear. The water pool had run dry. He hoped they had simply let the wetvines run from Woodedge heal, but if they had destroyed them then it was a long job to fix, not only growing them thick enough to keep the pool filled but digging channels to keep them safe from the crownheads, who would gladly chew through them for a drink rather than walk a little further to a pool. They were stupid, obstinate animals, but they were his livelihood. The people of Harn called him Forester because he did not fear the woods, but the truth of it was he was a farmer. The crownheads were what brought in enough money for him to survive the months of Harsh without having to leave the farm he had been born on and live off the forest.

And though he knew the forest and its ways, it was not always a welcoming place.

He whistled for Segur and set out with his staff to find his lost creatures.

While he searched, he had to force into the back of his mind the voice of the thing that lived beneath his skin.

Those soldiers came for you, Cahan Du-Nahere.

Had they? No names had been asked. It could simply be that word of someone clanless owning property had reached the ears of those who ruled Harn-Larger, or Harnspire. They would be aggrieved by such a thing. Cahan would not put it past Harn’s monk, Tussnig, to tell tales on anyone who he thought threatened him or Tarl-an-Gig. Cahan spat. The Rai were cruel and they kept power not only with their cowls but by dividing the people, and most were too foolish to see it.

Cahan had heard it said, among those that knew, that the more a cowl was fed the crueller the user became. But the truth was the people of Crua were cruel to begin with, and maybe they deserved the Rai and all they brought.

He took a deep breath and fought down the writhing of the thing beneath his skin. The man who had taken his farm was dead. Even if they had been looking for him the Rai would consider their job done. He would be safe to continue his life here.

One of many lies he told himself.

He knew the family had killed one of his crownheads for food, which annoyed him though there was little he could do about it. Cahan considered the animals far too valuable to eat, especially when the forest and fields were full of histi, delicate raniri and burrowers that could be caught with traps. Even more annoyingly, they had lacked the skill to smoke or salt the meat to preserve it. They had eaten the choice cuts and the rest was wasted. He wondered where those people had been raised, no doubt in the crumbling tops of a spire city among the poor where the skills of the forest were never needed. They had not killed more than one crownhead, probably because crownheads could be hard to catch once warned you might hurt them. He had a suspicion as to which they had taken, which made him a little sad. Even crownheads, stubborn and often foolish as they were, had personalities, and Cahan had his favourites.

Nasim, a good man who had tended gardens for people who considered themselves wise, had told the forester that only a fool borrows trouble. In the whole of the fire god’s monastery Nasim’s garden was the only place he found any real wisdom. So Cahan tried not to be a fool and not to mourn the loss of his favourite, and most valuable, animal without being certain it was gone.

He found two crownhead corpses, one just within Woodedge. It had become caught in a trapvine and as it had not been freed had simply continued to struggle, driving the thorns deeper into its flesh. It was not a kind way to die but it had happened long enough ago that the corpse was mostly bone now. Cahan gathered the bones up into a bag; they could be ground into bonemeal for the crops and the horns had many uses. The next dead crownhead was nearer the farm clearing, not bone yet but dead long enough that there was no good meat to recover and many-coloured mushrooms were fruiting from it. Cahan made a mental note of the place so he could return later.

The rest of the flock had fled into the forest and Cahan would never have found them without Segur; the garaur was invaluable when it came to crownheads. It could always find them and enjoyed imposing its will upon them. When it had gathered them together and driven them back towards the farm Cahan realised, with a sigh, that he was correct about which animal had been slaughtered. The family had killed his only male. It had always been more friendly than the females and the easiest to catch for those unskilled in looking after the beasts. He cursed the man and his wife to the Osere for being so short-sighted. He would have to go into Harn. If the male was not replaced there would be no young come Least. A visit to Harn meant a day of shearing the remaining crownheads so he had wool to sell.

Though if someone in Harn had told the Rai about him going into the village could end up bringing the soldiers back. Not that it mattered, or that was what he told himself, without a male crownhead he was done anyway.

He sheared the crownheads. It took him long into the dying light of the second eight of the day and brought only an increasing sense of disappointment. The fleeces were of poor quality: the beasts had spent too long in the forest using twigs and branches to scratch at their wool, filling it with burrs, thorns and tags. If it had been shedding season at least he would have had the skins to sell.

When he had the fleeces, he bound them tightly with floatvine into a pack that bobbed above the ground at head height. It was too late to go into Harn, so he tethered the package and went to sleep.

In the morning he tied the bundle onto his belt and set off through Woodedge towards Harn. It was not a long walk; the light barely moved across the sky, but the pack kept catching on the branches of trees and the smell of the wool attracted the tiny biting flyers that usually followed the crownheads about. Segur happily snapped at them, but it made the journey a frustrating one and he was in a poor mood by the time he saw the village through the trees.

There were many who would say he was never in a good mood.

A ring of wooden walls, built from trees cut and split and twice the height of a person, surrounded Harn. In front of the walls was a further ring of stakes, facing outward. They looked fierce but were placed too far apart to be of any real use as a defence, and up close the wood was mostly rotten. At the far western edge of the clearing was a gasmaw farm, the creatures contained by huge nets of woven vine. Gasmaws were forest creatures, but the whole of Crua relied on them. They came in many colours and sizes: some were huge, others so small they could barely be seen but the form was nearly always the same. A gasbag made up most of the body, long and triangular shaped with two vents the animal could open and close to control its height. The front was a head with a powerful beak for cutting through vegetation. Two large main eyes on either side, and four eyes facing down and four facing up. Around the beak grew tentacles, four that they used for grasping and movement when they were not jetting through the air, two longer tentacles with flatter ends that could be used to manipulate things and two stinging tentacles they used for defence or to catch prey. Gasmaws generally fed off vegetation but would take meat if they could, and their relatives, the spearmaws, ate nothing but meat.

Farmed gasmaws had the stingers cut from them when they hatched, and these domestic gasmaws never grew quite as big as their wild cousins, though they were also never going to sting you either, which Cahan thought a worthy trade-off. The stings were painful at best, lethal at worst.

At the northern edge, outside the wall, was the tanners’ house, a circular earth-house much like Cahan’s farm, surrounded by tanning pits and supplied by multiple wetvines that ran into a small lake to feed the pits. Tanners were always on the northern side of a settlement as the circle winds blow the stink away, except in the south of Crua, where everything was the other way around.

Harn had two gates, like every other village. The Forestgate faced north towards the forest and the tannery, and the Tiltgate faced south towards Tilt, the centre of Crua where the new Cowl-Rai ruled and from where they continued the war with the old Cowl-Rai. If they won they would tip the world once more and the north would be warm and the south cold.

As Cahan left Woodedge, Segur whined. He stopped.

“They are only people, Segur,” he said, leaning on his staff. “They will not hurt you while I am there.” The garaur hissed at him and Cahan laughed at it. “Very well, go and hunt in the forest, and join me when I leave.” It whined once more and then vanished into the undergrowth.

Though Harn was a small settlement, little more than a hundred and fifty people in it and the surrounding farms, it was too many for Segur, and more than Cahan was comfortable around.

A pair of guards stood at the Tiltgate. They wore armour made of wool soaked in sap and dried until it became hard. It was old armour, the chest plates fraying and cracked, the helmets long ago softened by moisture into little more than uncomfortable hats. Each held a spear of hardwood in their hand and a wooden shield on their arm. They had the white face paint and black swirls common to the clans of Harn, subtly different on each of them. The one on the right was missing a hand; the wars of the Cowl-Rai had left few of fighting age untouched.

“Forester,” said the one-handed guard, “I thought you gone.” Cahan recognised the voice, even though he had done his best to avoid the place knowing the gate guards were unavoidable. As was paying the sacrifice they asked of any visitor.

“My farm was taken, Gussen,” Cahan said, “but those who took it must have been criminals, as the soldiers of the Rai came for them.” He stared at the guard, wondering if she would give something away. “But I have taken my farm back, though it is in a poor state.” She stared at him.

“You’ll be wanting in then?” said the other guard, Sark.

“Guard duty, Sark?” said Cahan. “I thought you were a hunter?”

“We must all do our bit for the village,” he said, and the gate guards crossed their spears to bar him entry. “Outsiders who do not contribute are not welcome in Harn.” Cahan had, long ago, decided that if the people of Harn were going to consider him an outsider then he would be one. He felt no guilt for not paying the village tribute or refusing to do guard duty or help build walls and houses or the hundreds of other tasks they found to do.

“You know me,” said Cahan, “I come here to sell my wool, and your village will make good profit from it.” Sark looked away.

“We’re being extra careful now, Forester,” said Gussen. “The Forestals have been preying on our merchants when they set out for Harn-Larger. They’ve got much braver. You aren’t one of us, Clanless, you could be here to scout out the village for them.” She stared at the long staff in Cahan’s hand. “Long staff that you have, just for a walk.”

“It is useful to have a stout staff if you venture into the forest.”

“Reminds me of them forestbows the outlaws use.” She stared at him. “Bows are against the law.”

“Then it is a good job, Gussen, that this,” he lifted the finely carved wooden shaft, “is a staff and not a bow.” The guard stared at it but said nothing. Cahan waited, but when the silence continued he sighed and went into his purse, taking out a shiny wooden coin.

“Will this help you trust me?”

“Might help,” said Gussen. “But Sark,” she nodded at the other guard, “he’s a suspicious one.” Cahan took out another coin and passed it over.

“There,” he said, and they uncrossed their spears.

“Iftal’s blessings on you, Forester,” said Gussen, “it’s a pleasure to have you back in Harn.” Cahan did not answer, only pulled his floating bundle of wool on into the village.