Not for the first time, Wren wondered if she had made a terrible mistake. Not that she could tell what that mistake might have been. Perhaps running for the north in the first place. Just as easily, it might have been running too late. If she had made for the Hervent years ago, the Wardle Bridge would still be standing and the Free would not be blithely commandeering barges without regard for anyone else’s intent.
All in all, she felt a powerful urge to break something. She doubted that would please the crew, so she contented herself with staring fixedly out over the water. She glared at the innocent landscape as if it were to blame for all of this.
The contrast between the north and south banks of the Hervent was marked. South, for almost as far as the eye could see, lay wide fields. Hamlets and farmsteads, trackways and barns. To the north, nothing but hills rising steadily into dim and distant mountains patched with pockets of snow.
Wren would be seeing plenty of what lay to the north before very long if all went according to what little remained of her plan. So she faced south and watched the villages drift by.
Eventually, what drifted by was an array of wooden quays jutting out into the river like fingers, and a cluster of stone buildings behind them.
‘Hamming Ferry,’ one of the passengers leaning against the gunwale muttered.
Wren glumly noted the many little boats lining the quays and drawn up on muddy beaches beside the village. Any of them might have been the one to carry her across the great Hervent and send her on her way. As it was, she was condemned to float along, impotently watching all that might have been pass her by.
Had she not been so preoccupied, she might have realised what was happening rather sooner. She might have had time to prepare herself, or consider what to do more carefully and calmly. Instead, by the time she noticed that a long, thin boat had put out from Hamming Ferry, it was already cutting across the current, carving out a course to intercept the barge.
Her first thought was to rush to the prow and hail it. Promise whatever it took to somehow get the oarsmen to rescue her from this moving prison and take her ashore. That notion died like a snuffed candle flame when she saw who manned the approaching boat. Saw the colour of their raiment, to be precise. They wore light blue tunics. That meant the Clade, and the Clade meant the School. And the School… Wren had spent most of her life hiding from the School.
In all the land there were only two great warbands that were beyond the King’s control: the Free and the School’s Clade. The School might have begun as just that – a school for the care and training of Clevers – but it had long since become something much more complicated and powerful. Along the path of its ascent it had acquired, in the Clade, an army all its own.
Now Wren watched half a dozen of those blue-shirted warriors closing quickly on the barge and felt fear like a hollow in her gut. Things, as it turned out, could always get worse.
Six months ago she had killed two Clade men. That, more than anything, was why she was here now. She had looked down at their rotting corpses and known that she had slain not only them but any hope of continuing her own furtive, itinerant existence in the Hommetic Kingdom.
She was a Clever unsanctioned by the School, one who did not serve or submit to their purposes. One guilty – by their definitions – of grave crimes. Those two Clade spearmen had meant to make her a prisoner, or quite possibly a corpse. When the first of them set his hand on her, she had called up from the Autumnal entelech the very essence of decay and set it loose within the bodies of those two men. A mistake perhaps; done out of instinct and desperation. Panic. She was not certain she had even intended to do it. She regretted it. Part of her did at least. Not all.
Even as the stench of the corruption that consumed them filled her nose, she had known she had to run. Make of herself an exile and seek out one who had done that before: Lame Ammenor.
Now, seeing the comrades of the men she had killed drawing near, her mind raced. It raced uselessly, like a dog chasing its tail. No plan or stratagem emerged. She found herself turning and bending to gather her blankets, her few modest possessions.
If the Clade found and recognised her for what she was, they would kill her or – little better – make a captive of her. Or she would have to kill them, unleashing the entelechs here on a floating splinter with only innocents and the Free for company. That was unlikely to end any better than was capture by the Clade.
The barge’s master was shouting, ‘You’ve got to let me heave to! It’s the Clade, man!’
He was up near the prow, gesturing frantically at Hamdan and Kerig and Ena Marr. The Free appeared entirely unconcerned.
‘Not much I can do about it,’ Wren heard Kerig saying. ‘What’s done is done, and I can’t just unpick it like a little loose stitch.’
He was smiling, Wren realised. He found all this amusing: the captain’s panic, the frustration of the Clade warriors as they watched the barge surging on.
Wren slung her rolled blankets and her sack of rations over her shoulder. She tightened her grip on her walking staff. There was no real reason these Clade men should know she was here, or what she had done. Their comrades had found her by chance, and she had hidden their bodies as best she could. Buried them a yard down. They’re not here for me, she told herself. They can’t be. But they were here nonetheless, and they served the Clevers of the School. Anything was possible.
It seemed for a moment as if her luck was going to take an unexpected turn for the better. No matter how the oarsmen heaved, the barge was going to rush past the Clade boat. Perhaps even ram it and brush it aside. That was how it looked to Wren at least.
The two vessels were so close she could see the faces of the Clade men quite clearly. Their smaller vessel rocked and trembled in the spreading bow wave of the great barge. Then came grappling hooks. One bounced away and splashed into the Hervent. Two took hold and ropes sprang taut. Which as far as Wren was concerned should have been enough, in any just or gentle world, to overturn the Clade boat and spill its blue-clad occupants into the river. They were whalers, anchored to a vast and remorseless beast by carelessly thrown harpoons, and they should have paid the price, but they did not. They knew their business.
Men hauled on the ropes; the tillerman leaned and heaved; the oarsmen strained. The Clade boat came swinging into the flank of the barge, crashed against it and stayed there. The two boats raced on down the Hervent, locked together.
Wren was still struggling with her disbelief at that when they started to come over the side. One, then two, then three vaulting up and over and landing on the deck with swords already half drawn, fierce intent in their piercing eyes.
The barge’s captain approached them, hands raised. He looked like a man resigned to a sorry fate.
‘What’s happening?’ one of the Clade warriors snarled.
‘The Free,’ the captain blurted out, glancing towards the three figures still standing, still quite calm, at the prow.
‘Always a delight to come across the Clade in the course of our labours,’ Hamdan said, yet there was nothing of delight in his tone or expression. Only ice; only a hard contempt.
The Free were no friends to the School. Everyone knew that. Wren clung to it, a raft in the flood. Perhaps the Clade were here for the Free. Perhaps larger, fiercer contests than her own little adventures were being played out. She shrank back among the other passengers, edging her way as far from those blue tunics as she could without attracting notice. So she hoped.
‘We’re on the King’s commission,’ Hamdan said loudly. ‘Not to be stayed or delayed. This barge serves our need.’
Kerig and Ena Marr were moving just as slowly and carefully as she was herself, Wren noted. They were not retreating or hiding though. They were giving themselves room. Arraying themselves to face the three Clade warriors. It seemed absurd that anyone would offer violence to the Clade, but then the Free wrote their own rules. It was their nature. Their purpose, perhaps.
The Clade men did not quail before the challenge. Nor did they take it up.
‘We’re not here for old arguments,’ their leader said.
‘They’re not as old as you think,’ Kerig muttered, but he was ignored.
The blue-shirted warrior turned away from the Free and looked towards the little crowd of passengers and nervous crew.
‘There’s people think the wild times up here give them shelter and disguise,’ the Clade swordsman said, drawing his blade and taking a long step closer. ‘Smugglers and fugitives and thieves. Every boat on the river gets searched. Every pack gets emptied.’
And Wren felt the lurch of the world turning against her once more. Felt the trap closing. It showed in her face, that feeling. She could not help it. It showed in the slumping of her shoulders. She betrayed herself.
‘You,’ – the Clade man stretched his arm and pointed levelly at her with the tip of his blade – ‘Stand still.’
He twisted his head slightly, calling over his shoulder without taking his eyes off Wren.
‘Captain, who is this?’
The other passengers were drifting away from her. Abandoning her. As she would have done, she supposed, if someone else had drawn this terrible attention.
‘I don’t know,’ the barge captain stammered. ‘Just that she wanted to go to Hamming Ferry.’
Wren took a step backwards.
‘Let her be,’ Hamdan said.
The Clade ignored him. The three of them advanced over the deck.
‘Stand where you are,’ one of them told Wren. ‘Set down your staff.’
Kerig tripped him just as he completed the command. The Clade man toppled in a blue-tinged flurry of loose arms. He fell heavily, cracking his knees hard on the planking.
‘Sorry,’ Kerig said.
Again, Clade faced Free, and this time the air all but sang with imminent violence.
‘Will you test the Clade today?’ the man Kerig had felled demanded as he got lithely to his feet.
He leaned in close to Kerig, and the two of them locked gazes, neither flinching.
‘Is it to be today?’ the Clade man shouted into Kerig’s face.
Wren saw Hamdan looking at her. He was frowning slightly. Then his mouth twitched, and he hung his head.
‘No,’ he said.
He did not sound cowed, or defeated. If anything, there was perhaps just a hint of disappointment.
‘Not today,’ he said quite clearly. Which to Wren sounded like the end of hope.
She moved back as the Clade came on. The barge, which had seemed so huge when she first saw it, now was small and tight. She felt the gunwale against the small of her back. Nowhere else to go. She turned and faced the huge expanse of the Hervent and beyond it the high, snow-crowned ground of the north. She threw herself over the side of the barge.