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Autumn 5922

II. Vagabond

The last of the hens to be sold from the crate squirmed out of Kerelie’s grasp. The rude creature bolted before her new owner clamped a firm grip on her struggling legs. Lest the customer grumble, or worse, accuse Kerelie as a thieving cheat, the coin just dropped into her cash-box was returned with her regretful apology. No use to pretend that sore need for the paltry half-silver did not matter. The Light’s tithe imposed by Tysan’s high priesthood already claimed the last revenue from the harvest.

Since Tarens was poking about looking idle, he became saddled with the thankless task to recover the runaway fowl. If the useless bird was too scrawny to lay, she possessed enough spiteful fight to take off as though chased by the fell powers of Darkness. Tarens pursued her cackling flight as she darted length and breadth through the stalls of Kelsing’s packed market. Jostled patrons cursed in his wake. A hand-cart of pumpkins upset. Tarens leaped, skidding, through rolling fruit. He elbowed past the irate ring of gawkers. Plunged headlong into the havoc that disrupted the vested priest of the Light at his booming recital of doctrine, while the hen flapped through the audience to outbursts of laughter that upset all pious solemnity.

Tarens missed his next pounce.

Immersed in the impassioned delivery of warnings against the subtle practice of evil, the priest glared daggers down his lofty nose. The hysterical hen back-pedaled, trumpeted in alarm, and scooted beneath the gilt rostrum.

Tarens tugged his forelock with an endearing shrug and mumbled a shamefaced apology. Then he dropped onto hands and knees in the grass. His frantic snatch under the priest’s white silk hem raised a sneeze on the cloyed reek of incense. Mortified beyond care how much he outraged the temple, the crofter damned the pea-brained wits of loose chickens to reap the fell gale winds of Darkness.

The fowl he cursed hiked up ragged wings, squawked like a jammed hinge, and indignantly pelted. Her flight skittered into the candleman’s stall, with Tarens blundering under the rails, fringed with tapers hung by the wicks. Repeatedly clubbed about his reddened ears, he ducked clear, blindly sprinting. The bird raced ahead. She jagged shy of a helpful bystander’s snatch. Plunged into the thick stand of trees at the verge, she vanished into the autumn tangles of burdock.

Tarens swore and ploughed after her, snagging up burrs and dry runners of thorn. If the silly bird thrashed beyond earshot, she would be lost for good. The fact his beset family needed her paltry worth forced him to keep on until dusk made the finicky bird come to roost. Once she tucked her head under her wing for the night, he climbed the tree and snared her barehanded. The shocked fowl emitted a curdling screech. Tarens winced, insulted by a squirt of guano that splattered his hair.

‘Fiends rise and take you!’ he snarled, then blasphemed in earnest as the sky opened into a downpour and drenched him.

Full dark cloaked the market field on his return. He slogged through the trampled mud between the shuttered wood stalls, dismayed to find even the tent merchants packed up and gone. Dripping and forlorn, their family’s rig was the last harnessed wagon tied to the empty hitching rail. The bedraggled hen was furious still. Her beating wings and manic squalls set the huntsman’s kenneled dogs barking behind the town-walls.

Efflin’s vile mood had not improved. ‘Should wring that bird’s neck before we get nailed with a fine for disturbing the peace.’

Tarens shrugged. The sluiced rainfall at least spared his sister’s tart fuss over his sopped clothes and slimed hair. Soaked and cold as he, Kerelie hunched with the open crate readied on the lowered tail-board. Efflin sneezed too hard for further complaint through the ruckus as the miffed fowl was caged. Throughout, the relentless drum of the rain pocked the puddles dammed amid the heaped tarp in the wagon-bed.

The vacated grounds lay felted with mist by the time Tarens clambered aboard. Efflin tugged the knotted reins from the rail, took the bench, and headed the steaming ox homeward.

Bone weary and shivering, no one had starch enough left for regret that in spring, their market days ended with two little boys curled up like exhausted puppies, soothed asleep by Efflin’s baritone singing. Grief flattened the family spirits too much to lament that the bull’s yield of meat had gone underpriced at the stock-yard. The meager coin hoarded in Kerelie’s chest scarcely covered the guild fee paid for their license to sell. The land tithe owed for the inherited croft remained still indebted.

The estate possessed no more excess belongings or chattel to spare. Belts would have to be tightened, again. What cloth goods and staples they gained by straight barter had to be savagely scrimped.

‘We could be facing worse,’ Tarens declared in attempt to lighten the pervasive gloom. Town law allowed a year’s grace in which to square the account rolls. A margin at least to assure them of shelter under the hardship of winter. ‘Did anyone see if that crazy vagabond found a patron to hire him?’

‘Can’t be our problem,’ Kerelie grumbled. ‘We’re too pinched ourselves to fret over another.’

Which should have left Tarens ashamed for the coin he had gifted in soft-hearted folly. If Kerelie and Efflin knew that such charity set him back more than a copper, they rightly would skewer him as he deserved. But guilt over untoward generosity did not resolve his anxiety over the strange fellow’s fate.

Softened, Efflin peered through the drizzle that streamed off his drooped hat. ‘Last I saw, your simpleton was muscling casks for the brewer.’

Tarens sighed with relief. Tafe Aleman was sympathetic towards beggars. Always gave wretches who free-loaded a beer, and ones willing to shoulder a few extra chores found dry lodging inside his store shed for a halfpenny.

‘The man seemed willing. Didn’t balk at hard work.’ Kerelie blew a strand of wet hair from her lips. ‘Careful too. He broke nothing he handled. He’s likely to fare well enough.’

Dismissed, the subject lapsed into silence. The home-bound cart creaked through three more sluggish leagues, wheels sucking through dreary mud and frothed currents of run-off. Lashed in by the storm and a cruel risen wind, the lumbering ox turned at last through the painted posts of the farm-gate. The hooked lanterns swung, darkened on their chains. The cottage at the end of the lane had no cheerful aunt waiting, with a warm supper and candle-lit windows gleaming in welcome. No uncle stepped out to take charge of the reins, or hustle them inside to warm by the fire. Efflin did not pull up in the yard but drove the wagon straight through the open barn-doors and into the cavernous, hay-fragrant darkness. The ox huffed and stopped, bawling in complaint. Everyone piled out, too chilled for the burdensome chore of unloading. The barn was pitch-dark, and wax candles too scarce. The paned lamp must be reserved for emergencies, and the risk of a pine-knot torch was too dangerous in the draughts gusted through the gapped plank walls. Kerelie hefted down the hen’s wicker cage. The dry goods, the crates, and the empty coin-box could wait until tomorrow’s daylight.

Efflin squelched in filled boots to unyoke the tired ox. While he goaded its reluctant tread to a stall, Tarens dashed ahead through the downpour, with a breathless promise to lug wood from the shed. Hungry and cold, no one lingered. Battered by the frigid wind, Kerelie shoved outside and dumped the errant hen back in the chicken coop’s pen. She fed the livestock and hastened inside to scrounge crusted bread and heat soup for an overdue supper. Efflin was left to hang up the harness. Since preservative grease could not be applied before the wet leather dripped dry, he stamped after his sister and never looked backwards.

The dreary night passed, and the icy rain stopped before anyone realized the heaped tarpaulin in the wagon-bed sheltered more than the goods fetched from Kelsing market.

Tarens woke the next morning with sun in his eyes. Or so he presumed, until he squinted and found that the dazzle that blinded him glanced off three silver coins, stacked beside his crumpled pillow. Dawn was well gone, the past evening’s storm broken to a flawless blue sky. The shaft of clear yellow light through the window burnished the placed silver like gold.

He shot upright, dismayed, the oddity of the coins eclipsed by embarrassment. A selfish indulgence to have overslept, with the winter wheat-field to be tilled and sown before the frost hardened the ground. The family prankster who needled his conscience by leaving the silver could wait; but never their jeopardized stake in the croft, strung up by hard work and a thread. Tousled hair in his face, Tarens kicked off his blankets and slid out of bed. He snatched up his dropped shirt and breeches, jolted to a hissed breath as last night’s damp clothes pebbled gooseflesh over his skin.

Arms clutched to quell the violent shiver wracked through his sturdy frame, he paused in disbelief.

Downstairs, Kerelie was busy cooking.

Plain fare, sure enough, in a house plunged in debt, and still muted by the grave-seal of grief. The upstairs felt quiet as an abandoned tomb without the boisterous yells of the boys.

Tarens bit his lip. Past was past. No use to dwell on what might have been. Quickly dressed, he grabbed his dank boots and plunged barefoot down the shadowed, board stair.

He slunk into the brick-floored kitchen, braced for a facetious scold from his sister, backed by Efflin’s bull-dog bark.

Instead, Kerelie spun from her stirred pot and glanced up. As though shocked by a haunt, she dropped the ladle of water just dipped from the bucket slung by the hearth.

‘Light’s blessing, you startled me!’ she blurted. Then her round cheeks flushed pink. ‘Tarens! Lay off your quack foolery. You didn’t wake up just this minute! Or else who’s already tended the cattle and finished the chores in the barn?’

‘Efflin, of course,’ snapped Tarens, sarcastic. ‘I notice the butcher’s knife’s gone from the peg. He’ll have fumed himself black out in Aunt Saffie’s rose patch, bent on an ambush to flense me.’

Kerelie dried her chapped hands on her skirt. ‘Efflin’s knocked flat with an ugly green cold. Which is why I’m in here, stirring up gruel to coddle him.’ She retrieved her fallen implement and plunked on the hob, blue eyes wide and lips pinched with distress.

Tarens regarded her fraught state, amazed. ‘What under sky’s strapped your tongue when you ought to be yelling fit to raise the roof?’

‘You men weren’t the only ones laggard in your blankets.’ His sister shed her awkward reluctance, and admitted, ‘I snored through the sunrise, myself. We’ve all been bone-tired! I’d planned to surprise you and muck out the barn. Give your lazy bones an undeserved rest and let Efflin’s sourpuss mood have one less target to savage. He’s been such a wounded bear since our fortune’s turned. Why won’t he tell us what’s cankered him?’

‘He’ll speak when he’s ready.’ Tarens treated her angst with the same stubborn patience that had argued the sale of the bull. ‘What’s upset you, Kerie? I’m too thrashed to guess.’

His younger sister sucked a vexed breath, her pinched forehead suddenly pale. ‘Who’s moved the ox,’ she began, ‘and the milch-cow’s been taken—’

Tarens outpaced her slow explanation. Protective to a fault, he abandoned his boots, grabbed the fire tongs, and banged open the door. He charged outside, hackled to gore any thieving intruder.

First step, his brandished tool snagged a dangled wrack of frost-burned tomato vines. As dry leaves and green fruit yoked his lowered head, he yelped, ‘Light avert!’ and thrashed the pungent stems aside in annoyance.

The uprooted vegetables had not hung there, yesterday. Since Efflin slept, and with Kerelie barely shucked out of her night-rail, who had dug the plants from the kitchen patch and strung them from the porch rafters in the pre-dawn dark? Each year, his aunt had tied the yellowed stems upside down for late ripening, a last frugal harvest snatched from fate’s jaws before winter. But Aunt Saff was dead. Two months had passed since the Light’s priest settled her with the blessing of passage and torched her remains to sad rest.

Tarens shook off his wild-eyed startlement and bashed the straggle of vine from his neck. As the wrack slithered off him, he swept a frantic glance over the muddy yard but saw no tracks left by rustled livestock.

Broad daylight revealed only the pruned canes of the roses and the crude prints left by Kerelie’s pattens.

When the dry cow and the ox raised their horned heads in the field, his glare confounded to befuddlement. The animals were as they should be: routinely turned out to pasture and chewing their cuds behind the shut gate. They had not moved by themselves from the barn, any more than a garden turned over its frost-wilted rows and laid down leaf mulch by itself.

More, the broken handle on the well’s crank had been fixed, a skilled task Uncle Fiath bequeathed to his heirs by neglect.

‘Fiends plague!’ Tarens swore. No mischievous iyat visited mankind with the untoward kindness of miracles.

Thoughtful, the huge crofter padded between the mercury gleam of the puddles. Oblivious to the cold nip to bare feet, he entered the barn and paused, impatient while his sight adjusted to the dusty gloom. The fragrance told him the stalls had been mucked. The mangers also were forked with fresh hay. More, the ox harness hung set to rights on the hook, freshly oiled, and for the Light’s sake, who bothered? Even the buckles were polished! Beside the whetstone’s damp wheel, the missing butcher’s knife showed the argent shine of a whetted edge.

Footsteps at his back, and a prim swish of skirts prompted Tarens to task his sister, ‘The vagabond did this?’

‘Had you listened and not belted off with the poker, I would have suggested as much.’ Kerelie sighed. ‘He must have trailed us back here on foot.’ Her hateful cooking abandoned for gossip, she sniffed. ‘Or else he snuck into the wagon. The empty bird crates were loosely stacked, and nobody tidied the tarp.’

‘He’s accomplished all this?’ Tarens capped his amazed gesture with a chuckle of flat disbelief. ‘One starved little wretch? Merciful Maker! The man would’ve laboured all night!’

‘In the dark,’ added Kerelie, uneasy and shaken. ‘See for yourself. The candle stubs in the lanterns weren’t touched.’

Sure enough, the horn lamp had never been lit. No spent reek of oil and charred pine bespoke the foolhardy use of a cresset.

Tarens scratched at his stubbled chin. ‘Done us ten favours, we owe him that much.’

‘Don’t be daft!’ Kerelie snapped. ‘We can’t possibly keep him!’ Since her brother would argue, she slapped him down first. ‘I don’t care how hard the miserable wretch works. Another mouth to feed through the winter will strain us nigh onto breaking. We can’t meet the croft tax on inheritance, besides. And why should a rootless man swipe the best knife from our kitchen only for sharpening? The fellow might be quite ruthlessly mad! Touched by Darkness itself and hell-bent on slitting our throats as we slept.’

The firm line of Tarens’s sealed lips gave a twitch. His blue eyes widened and glinted. Sparked into sudden, inexplicable merriness, he stifled the laughter that would only fan his sister’s volatile fury. She looked apt, as things stood, to make a quick snatch for his poker and brain him. Ever the sort to enjoy taunting fate, he outfaced her stormy reproof. ‘I don’t think it’s our necks the bloke means to cut.’

Kerelie flounced. Heated enough to pummel the fool who played her for a dreaming idiot, she glanced over her shoulder just barely in time. Her large jaw dropped. ‘You!’ she exploded, burned red with embarrassment for her feckless outburst of unkindness.

In fact, the small fellow her words had reviled crept in silently, right behind her.

Evidently, the knife had been borrowed to shave. The barbarous straggle of beard was razed off, and the matted tangles trimmed from his raven hair. The loose ends were neatly tied up with twine, snipped from one of the lengths that had strung the tomato vines. Cleaned of wild growth and masking dirt, the features revealed showed a man in his prime, taut cheek-bones and brow line distinctively angled and nowhere ill-bred or unpleasing.

Inquisitive, piercing, his vivid green eyes surveyed Kerelie’s blanched surprise. The intensity of that fixed stare ruffled her skin into gooseflesh.

Then the vagrant glanced down, disconcerted as she.

Kerelie recovered her rattled wits. Like her brother, she noticed the man’s roughened hands. His chapped knuckles cracked from the setting of his snares, he cradled a brace of limp woodcock and a fat winter hare, hung by the hind legs from another filched string.

Then Tarens gripped Kerelie’s shoulder and gently steered her aside. ‘Sister, I believe we’re blocking his way.’

The beggarman smiled, an expression so honest with contrite apology that Kerelie gasped, lost for breath.

Quick to seize advantage, the elusive creature slipped past, light of step as a thief, or a ghost. He crouched by the sharpening wheel, hefted the knife, and industriously started to dress out his game.

‘The man will have breakfast,’ Tarens said, calm.

‘We still can’t upkeep him!’ Kerelie whispered, remorseful for the tight-fisted need to hoard their dwindled resources.

‘We’ll discuss that,’ Tarens temporized. ‘Inside.’ The cold numbed his unshod feet, and coatless, his unlaced shirt made him shiver. Time enough later to broach the matter of coins: the gifted silvers left stacked by his pillow added up to a threefold repayment, though he feared the sweet little cache had been stolen.

As though the wary thought had been spoken, the beggarman stiffened. Though the distressed reaction was swiftly curbed, the subtlety did not escape Tarens’s notice.

Recognition followed, as both men locked eyes. Then the vagabond drew an offended breath. He laid aside his half-gutted hare and gently set down the knife. Deliberate, he wiped his blood-smeared fingers clean on a twist of dry straw. Then he stood. Reproachful, his attention on Tarens’s broad features, he cocked his head to one side.

The large-boned crofter was swept by raw chills. Raked over like prey by a raptor’s inspection, Tarens tightened his grip on the poker.

But the beggarman only dug into the patch pocket stitched to his threadbare breeches. He fished out a creased paper. The unfolded sheet was offered to Tarens, distinct in respect for the threat of cold iron poised yet for a defensive strike.

Muscled enough from the plough to break oak, the blond crofter towered above him.

‘What does the note say?’ prompted Kerelie.

Tarens risked a look downwards. The inked scrawl was the brewer’s, and the words a receipt for three silvers, paid labour, with the outstanding promise for a pint of beer at the Candle Mark Tavern.

The supplicant hand was a beggar’s, the broken nails rimmed black with dirt. But the courtesy was not commonplace that tucked Tarens’s fingers over the written proof, then emphatically shoved off his fist with the voucher nestled inside.

Crisp as any statement, the stranger’s stung pride.

Shown an astringent reproof to strip skin, Tarens gaped, as awkward with shame as the sister caught aback before him.

Then the pause broke to the whiff of smoke wafted on the morning breeze.

‘Breakfast!’ yelped Kerelie. ‘Plaguing fiends take it! I’ve stupidly scorched Efflin’s porridge.’ Skirt stoutly bundled, she bolted for the cottage, still railing over her shoulder, ‘I’ll serve a fourth portion. But over my last shred of common sense, yon shifty fellow’s not coming inside!’

Tarens chose not to mention the snag, that her adamant boundary had been crossed already.

He grinned at the odd little beggar, then shared a wink of conspiracy. ‘Don’t make my mistakes, man. She barks and she bites, though you’ll find her bluster hides a soft heart.’ Just as mindfully fair, he placed his appeal for forgiveness. ‘I’ll wager your generous portion of beer that Kerelie’d bunk in the hayloft herself before she makes a destitute visitor shiver out in the cold.’

The stranger laughed, a strikingly musical sound that belied his feral appearance. Perhaps, Tarens thought, he was a born mute, until in forthright honour he touched his closed fist to his forehead. The quaint custom suggested disturbing origins. Barbarians who trapped for pelts in Tornir Peaks used the same gesture to seal their agreements.

Tarens frowned. The last dedicate purge to clear clanblood had happened before his sister’s birth. She did not share his graphic memories from early childhood: of dead men roped by the heels behind horses; or the riders, who boasted the gory tatters of scalps cut for bounty, then sewed as trophies onto their saddle-cloths. The head-hunters’ leagues still patrolled the wilds, though clan numbers had yet to recover. Everywhere persecuted by the Light’s True Sect, the secretive few who survived skulked deep in the high country. They showed themselves rarely, and only in dire hunger, when their gaunt men dared the illicit trade of raw furs to garner provisions. The penalty upon capture brought them swift execution by public dismemberment.

Tarens gripped his poker with redoubled unease. Kerelie’s fears were ­misdirected, not groundless: the cagy vagabond might play at speechlessness to conceal a clan accent. Certainly his practised skill with a snare suggested a forester’s upbringing.

‘How much are we at risk by your presence, my friend?’ Tarens asked, very softly. Town law on the matter was ruthless: to knowingly shelter an old blood descendant was to risk being branded as heretic, then outlawed, with the forfeit of all goods and property bound over by temple decree.

His shaken question received no reply. Not deaf, perhaps circumspect, the odd man retired to his unobtrusive place by the whetstone. There, he bent to his diligent work, deboning the meat from his carcasses.

Tarens stayed reluctant to voice his concern on return to the warm, cottage kitchen. Amid the wax polish of Aunt Saffie’s plate cupboards, surrounded by limed brick and the comfort of the faded braid rug patched with sun through the casement, his sister’s sensible antipathy towards rootless beggary seemed uncharitable.

‘We don’t know what connection he may have with the Koriathain. Or why his own kinsfolk abandoned him.’ Determined to worry the subject to closure, Kerelie removed the tin spoon from the pot of singed oatmeal, then stomped outside in prim displeasure. She left a scorched portion slung up on the meat-hook under the eave by the threshold.

She returned with a scalded palm wrapped in her skirt. ‘Let that starveling bolt down the miserable fare with his hands. He’ll learn fast enough we can’t pay him for field work. I’d have him shove off to a wealthier croft. Surely it’s better that his earnest work should receive a fair daily wage.’

She banged the door closed, shot the bar, muttering, and flung the clotted spoon into the wash-basin. Spattered by dish-water, Tarens collected his abandoned stockings and boots. Aware he rightfully should feel relieved that his sister’s position stayed adamant, he sat at the plank table and gouged his soles with large thumbs to ease his numbed feet. Against his straight grain, he silenced his doubts, while Kerelie scooped a new measure of oats and ladled fresh water into the spare cauldron. She swung the replenished pot over the coals, stirring with fierce concentration. Sun through the window-panes lit her savaged cheek, striped by the shadows of the mulberry boughs outside the whitewashed cottage. Within, the awkward, sealed quiet extended, cut by the rasping cough that laid Efflin low in the next room.

‘Divine Light keep us!’ Kerelie snapped. Exasperated by the worry that cramped her preferred generosity, she grabbed a wooden bowl, dipped her ladle, and plonked the steaming gruel onto the trestle in front of her brother. ‘I’m not being a pinch-fist! We’ve got to recoup from our losses and heal before we sweat over strangers!’

Tarens swallowed his food, left with nothing to say. Self-reproach made his limpid blue eyes seem accusing as his sister unsealed the last crock of summer honey and consigned it to the tray for the sick-room.

‘Quit moping, can’t you?’ Kerelie sighed. ‘The harder heart would have tossed that burned meal in the hen coop to fatten the poultry.’

She was right. Tarens ate and tried not to dwell on the penalties meted out to sympathizers who treated with renegade clanblood. Kelsing fell under the long shadow of Erdane, temple seat of the True Sect’s high priesthood. Here, a man upheld canon law if he valued his family’s prosperity. Yet hard common sense failed to ease his torn conscience concerning the wretch sheltered inside the barn.

Though today’s breakfast might soon be a luxury, Tarens scraped his bowl clean without savour.

When he arose and tramped out to split wood, he found the black pot on the porch left untouched. Past question, the stranger had noticed the offering. In an irony much too pat for coincidence, his neatly cleaned meat swung beneath, hung to season. Yet the hunter himself appeared nowhere in evidence. Two hours later, the cut fuel was stacked. Tarens sharpened the axe. He strode to the shed to stow the greased tool and caught Kerelie, angrily flinging the cold, congealed oatmeal into the pen for the chickens.

Startled, he laughed. ‘I see your rude table’s been spurned by the starving?’

She glared. One meaty fist stayed cocked on her hip, while the other threatened to shy the scorched pot at her brother’s insolent head. ‘See for yourself.’ She sniffed, her chin jerked towards the back of the barn, which cued Tarens to go and investigate. He encountered the ashes of a frugal fire, then the green stick lately used as a spit to roast the haunch of the hare.

‘Resourceful wee chap, I’ll give him that much. Goes out of his way not to take advantage.’ Tarens rubbed at a crick in his neck, sunk in thought, when Kerelie arrived to a bustle of skirts and stopped at arm’s length in distress.

‘How do you throw out a squatter who’s so damned resourcefully self-sufficient?’

‘You open your door to him?’ Tarens measured her sidelong.

But the lines fretted into his sister’s brow stemmed from another quarter. ‘I need you to go back to Kelsing and fetch a tisane for Efflin.’

Tarens’s startled glance met her anxiety straight on.

She added, upset, ‘His fever is soaring. Worse, that wet cough’s settled into his chest with a speed that is dreadfully frightening.’

Tarens’s blunt features drained, his bruised eye tinged grotesquely purple and yellow beneath his rumpled, fair hair. ‘Can’t be the same fever!’

Kerelie chewed her lip.

‘Can’t be!’ Tarens insisted, rock stubborn. ‘Efflin’s always been strong as an ox. Surely he’s just stuffed up and grouchy.’

Kerelie shook her head, then spun, blinking back desperate tears. ‘Not today.’

Tarens stifled the surge of his helpless anger. Bad luck was too busy, and setting a clutch, if the malady that had reaped half of their family struck again and took their older brother.

‘You know the Light’s priests claim we owe retribution,’ his sister said, muffled. She swiped at wet eyes, then knotted her damp palms in her skirt. ‘Grace fled, they say, since corruption divided the faithful.’

Tarens slammed the axe into the top of a fence-post with the raw force to split oak. ‘I won’t swallow the doom in the priest’s windy scriptures! Or their guilt, which wrings piteous offerings out of the masses.’ He rejected the afflicted belief, that the blight of disease was justified punishment for the Great Schism caused when heaven’s sent avatar turned apostate and denounced the blessed Light’s doctrine. ‘Cattle sicken,’ he added, ‘in years when they’re stressed, or when a fulsome herd overgrazes their pasture.’

Other rumours sprung from barbarian sources claimed the ailments stemmed from the waning surge of the flux lines. The land’s health, they held, was starved thin near the towns, where the flow of the mysteries no longer flourished. But no initiate talent from that ancient heritage dared to step forward or challenge the fires of rampant theology. Not with the practice of herb witchery and magecraft crushed under an interdict with a death sentence.

‘Just go,’ Kerelie urged, breaking off the debate. ‘Tell the apothecary we also need a flask of syrup to ease a raw throat.’

Tarens cupped her harrowed cheek in rough hands. ‘Calm yourself. Our straits will come right. I’ll have the remedies for Efflin’s sniffle back here before sundown. Just don’t wear yourself to exhaustion, shut in with his carping complaints.’

‘He’s too sick to grouse,’ Kerelie snapped, stressed enough to shake off his comfort. ‘Take the coppers I’ve saved in the crock. We’ll let Efflin haggle over the tax we can’t pay after he’s back on his feet.’

Since the oxcart was too unwieldy and slow, Tarens ran the errand to Kelsing on foot. He left their scant hoard of pennies untouched, and instead tucked the coins from the vagabond into his jacket. He covered the leagues by road at a jog, spurred on by brisk anxiety. Yet despite his diligent care to make speed, ill fortune delayed his timely return.

The muddy road froze iron-hard after dark, and a mis-step twisted his left ankle. He limped into the yard weary and empty-handed under the icy glow of the late-risen moon.

He expected a chill house, kept dark to spare fuel, as his numbed fingers fumbled the latch. Not the blast of close heat that burnished his face when he opened the door. The fire built up to nurse a fevered invalid clamped fear like a fist in his gut. Efflin’s condition had worsened, proven out by the sick pallet made up in front of the hob. His brother lay limp as wax under blankets, with Kerelie’s stout form stamped in bleak silhouette as she spun from his side in frustration.

‘Tarens! What’s kept you? The kettle is filled. Get that dose of cailcallow leaf heating. The cough syrup’s no use. Efflin’s weakened. His breathing’s too laboured to swallow.’

Tarens faltered, rocked short, his desolate news fit to shatter her. ‘I have no remedies.’ Ahead of Kerelie’s searing reproach, that he must have indulged himself drinking, he blazed, ‘The Mayor of Kelsing’s formally listed our family name on the debt rolls.’ Which twist of fate meant no merchant in town had the right to accept honest coin from them before the treasury received its lawful due. ‘I tried to bargain!’ Dropped to his knees, Tarens closed his strong arms around his disconsolate sister. ‘Folk believe our luck’s left us. My plea was not heard. The apothecary slammed his shop-door in my face. When I argued, he claimed that his cailcallow stores were too low to waste on a grown man with a sniffle. The new leaves won’t sprout in the wild until spring. There’d be babes with the croup far more needy. Could I guess? I’d have battered my way in had I known Efflin’s straits had turned desperate!’

Further lament would not stem the crisis. Kerelie’s tears were not frightened hysteria. The laboured rasp of Efflin’s clogged chest ripped through the thick, humid silence. Four times before, that sound had heralded death for a beloved relative.

‘You’re shivering!’ Kerelie chided at due length. ‘Light above, Tarens! Take care for your health.’ She pushed him away, the surge of her anger turned to drive off futility. ‘Doubtless, you won’t have eaten a thing. Bless your vagabond friend. We have him to thank for the gift that tonight none of us will go hungry.’

That moment, belatedly late, Tarens smelled the aroma of wild leeks and savoury stew. Astonished, he blurted, ‘You let that shiftless rascal inside?’

Kerelie dabbed at her wet lashes, defeated. ‘I had little choice, didn’t I? By afternoon, Efflin was unconscious and shivering. Someone needed to help me shift the mattress and move him in here by the fire. Your crazy fellow spent the rest of the day by the well, washing himself and his clothes. He’s too thin.’

‘He was naked? In this chill?’ Despite harrowed upset, Tarens snorted and grinned. ‘How long did you stare?’

Kerelie slapped him. ‘And I should have fed all the livestock blindfolded, while the imp stitched the holes in his breeks with the harness awl?’ She added, ‘I looked the other way, best I could. He’s shameless as a creature born wild. But not uncivilized. He also scoured the scale off my pot. By the time I finished up in the barn, he had diced up his game and hung the filled cauldron on the pot-hook to simmer.’

Tarens inhaled in appreciation. ‘Rosemary and sage? And fresh leeks? You hate cooking! Aunt Saff always claimed you couldn’t tell a sweetening herb from a grated red pepper!’

‘Your scampish guest must have scavenged the lot,’ Kerelie retorted, offended. ‘Who knows from where? He was busy foraging. Somehow, he found plants that the frosts hadn’t touched. Just hope his filched cache was honestly abandoned.’

‘Resourceful of him,’ Tarens declared. While his sister treated his brother’s clogged chest with goose grease and a hot compress, he unfolded stiff legs and arose to help himself from the bubbling cauldron. No one would profit if he should fall sick. Neither could a weary man get himself warm on a rumbling belly. Somehow, some way, he would find the means to reward the stranger’s persistent kindness, though at the moment the odd little man was not present to receive his thanks.

Through a savoury mouthful, Tarens accused, ‘You didn’t send the poor vagabond packing? Or make him sleep out in the hayloft?’

‘I didn’t,’ cracked Kerelie, stung to reproach. ‘He left on his own. I brought him a blanket to bed down in the pantry, but if he understood, I’ve not seen him. He slipped off again and made himself scarce since the sun set.’

Tarens considered the fellow’s rag clothing, and shivered. The night was bitterly clear, the freeze lent a harsh bite by the wind since the rain-storm. Unkind weather for a thinly clad wretch, turned out of doors without shelter. But a search at this pass was not practical with a sprained ankle, and the chill that still gripped him bone deep from his errand. Kerelie looked thrashed. Her sore need for relief could not wait. Tarens begged her to rest straightaway, then rose from the trestle, tossed his dish in the wash-tub, and shouldered his turn with the invalid.

Nothing prepared him. Even Kerelie’s urgent distress failed to brace his nerves against the sick-room fetor of purged broth and excrement. Too well he recognized the sunken cheeks, waxy sweat, and flushed skin of the dying, tucked limp in damp sheets. This was the face of the fever that killed, with the terrible, clogged rasp of breath the sole assurance that life had not fled untimely.

Tarens’s fortitude failed him. Crouched by the mattress, he gathered his brother’s slack, clammy hand into trembling fingers. ‘Efflin, Light save us, don’t bring us to this!’ If his brother did not know he was loved beyond measure, he must recognize he was needed! The croft would be forfeit to Kerelie’s marriage if her blood family could not provide two adult hands to manage the fields. As things stood, she must wed before the spring planting. Her scarred face already spoiled her chance for a comely match. Let her not be forced to the joyless choice of a suitor who preyed on the fact they were desperate.

The night passed as it had too often before, fighting the malady that had reaped aunt and uncle, and cruelly robbed two young nephews’ exuberance. Tarens changed his brother’s soaked bedding and hung the damp linen to dry. He plied Efflin’s forehead with cold compresses in a tireless, vain effort to draw down the fever. Left nothing else but to stroke the screwed hair from his brother’s furnace-hot temples, he tried to banish the creeping fear that such diligent effort was useless without stronger remedies from the apothecary. Efflin would waste away until death, with another pyre and body laid out for the True Sect priest’s final blessing.

Bitter, as the hours wore on, Tarens rested his cheek on crossed arms, helpless to stave off the turn of Fate’s Wheel. No older brother to stand at his shoulder would cripple him worse than the loss of a limb. Tarens covered his face with strong hands, unable to stifle his anguish.

Soft footsteps arrived. A comforting hand clasped his shoulder. Kerelie pulled up a stool and sat down, a fresh bucket of ice set between them. She retrieved the damp rag left draped on his knee and methodically started to refresh the cold compress.

‘Tarens?’ she said, hushed.

He did not turn his head, taut fingers in place to hide his sudden, useless tears.

‘We can’t give up.’ Kerelie rearranged the damp hem of her night-rail, huddled into the mantle thrown overtop, sharp-scented with outdoor air. The sheepskin slippers on her large feet were caught with moist leaves from her foray to skim off the bucket left by the well.

If Tarens believed the fight was not lost, his black despair whispered otherwise. Their late aunt had insisted the bountiful luck had deserted the croft years ago, when their father was conscripted to bear arms for the Light. No word of him had ever come back. No letter to say if he survived the harsh training, or whether today he still served, sworn to a dedicate’s term of life service guarding the sealed border of Havish.

‘We will weather this. No matter what comes.’ Kerelie’s chapped fingers tucked the packed cloth into folds and plied the wrapped ice to Efflin’s flushed forehead. ‘I’ll call if I need you. Best sleep while you can.’

Tarens lifted his tousled head and regarded his sister’s profile. By the seeped light from the fire’s banked coals, her unspoiled cheek wore the sweet flush of youth. Her upturned nose bespoke the light humour and innocence remembered from better days. Tarens chided gently, ‘Did you rest yourself?’

She sighed. ‘I couldn’t.’

‘Then I’m sitting with you,’ Tarens insisted. ‘I’ll be at hand’s reach because I know you won’t leave Efflin’s side to ask for assistance.’

‘Ought to help yourself,’ Kerelie retorted. ‘At least strap that sprained ankle. Draw down the swelling, or else, come the morning, you won’t manage to pull on your boot.’

‘I’ll borrow your slippers.’ Already stiffened and not inclined to move, Tarens slept in the end, propped against the oak hob. Because he was peaked with exhaustion, his sister could not bear to roust him.

Kerelie nodded off also in the bleak hour before dawn. Despite the best intent to kick her brother awake to look after the livestock, she never opened her eyes until sunlight streamed through the casement. The astringent scent of cailcallow and wintergreen scoured her nostrils and shot her up straight.

‘Tarens!’ She reached out to shake him, only to find he had risen ahead and gone outside to mind the chores. Efflin languished, still gripped by high fever. But his tormented breathing had eased just a bit. An empty pan and a spoon at his bedside suggested that someone had dosed him with a strong remedy. The reek of herbals wafted from a second brew, brought to a low boil over the fire.

Kerelie paused and made certain the sick man’s sheets were not clammy. She tucked the blankets up to Efflin’s chin, then straightened her night-rail and crossed to the hob, prepared to return the profuse word of thanks to the ­charitable neighbour who had sent the bundle from town.

But no kindly matron’s unpacked basket rested on the kitchen trestle. Kerelie saw none of the apothecary’s phials of oil, and no string-tied packets of purchased herbs. Instead, the boards were spread over with root-stock, cut fresh from the bush, stripped of bark, and pungently grated. Also wintergreen berries and leaves, several rose hips, shredded willow bark, and two other twiggy plants that her country-bred knowledge failed to identify. The collection had arrived at the cottage bundled inside a frayed rag. She still stared, overcome by surprise, when Tarens ducked through the doorway.

He had been mucking stalls, by the barn reek breezed in with him. He also carried two muddied shoes and a bunched wad of damp, tattered clothing, which he unburdened into her dumbfounded hands. ‘Hang these up to dry.’

‘They belong to the vagabond?’ Not indignant so much as undone by the strain, she scolded, ‘Tarens! You didn’t –’

Her brother cut in, ‘Yes, I did. The fellow’s wrapped up in my second-best shirt. Asleep. I gave him my bed. Kerelie, be quiet! We owe him that much! He stayed out all night to bring Efflin those simples. You know the creek’s swollen too high to wade over. He must’ve stripped down and swum! I found him frozen nigh onto death, burrowed into the oat straw stacked in the hayloft.’

‘Where did he find these wild rose hips?’ Mollified, Kerelie ran on as Tarens stamped to the hob and shrugged off his cloak. ‘While you explain, give the pot a good stir. Use the wooden spoon. These rags must be wrung out before they’ll dry properly.’

‘I don’t know where the man found any of this,’ Tarens said, willing to do as she asked with the remedy but otherwise stiffly reticent. The apothecary had held his dried cailcallow dear, since the bush would not leaf over winter.

‘This paragon tracks down rare plants in the dark?’ Kerelie’s nagging ­sharpened in pursuit of the uneasy discrepancy. ‘Where under sky do you think he was trained?’

‘I have no idea.’ Tarens added, ‘He’s got a field-worker’s hands. I saw that much.’ The horn callus left by the scythe never lied. ‘The fellow’s mowed barley. And he’s got straw cuts from tying up corn shocks.’

‘Well, he’s done a countryman’s labour, perhaps.’ Kerelie eyed the worn garb in her arms, too concerned to let sleeping dogs lie. ‘Yet he wasn’t born to the life. Whatever mother gave birth to him, the specialized study of herbals is not common knowledge for farm help.’

Tarens kept his mouth shut, in dread of the day she encountered the shackle scars that marked the fellow’s ankles and wrists. Since Kerelie’s prying overlooked that detail, he might keep that questionable bit of the stranger’s personal history quiet. But the dangerous threat to his family’s security forced him to broach his earlier concern. ‘He might be clanblood, perhaps, from the deft way he snares wild game.’

Kerelie tossed the dreadful rags on the bench. ‘Look again!’ she demanded in withering scorn. ‘Tarens, you mean well, but are you stone blind? No clanborn ever wears woven cloth! Why would a skilled trapper not have deer-hide breeches at least, or a jacket of cured fur at this season? These shoes were not cobbled by free-wilds barbarians. I know my sewing. Have you found the seams in a field-hand’s dress done in a whip stitch? Or a shirt collar and fitted cuffs, laced with a pattern as these are? More likely we’re harbouring a simpleton servant, escaped from the Koriathain!’

‘Efflin needs him,’ Tarens insisted, hunched over the steaming pot. ‘Whoever he is, wherever he came from, I won’t run him out. If you aren’t willing to mind his wet clothes, I’ll handle the problem myself.’

‘I’ll waste time drying nothing,’ declared Kerelie, in her way just as mulishly stubborn. ‘Those shameful rags aren’t fit to be worn. You’ll throw them into the midden at once. Then find me something of Uncle’s that I can cut down to size. Stay out of my hair, and I’ll have the work finished before your pet visitor wakes up.’