Читать книгу Initiate’s Trial: First book of Sword of the Canon - Janny Wurts, Janny Wurts - Страница 18

Late Autumn 5922

III. Change

Efflin’s recovery did not progress despite the efficacy of the remedies that broke his runaway fever. Constant dosing with cailcallow infusions, and the use of strong wintergreen poultices eased his wet cough for a time, even helped soothe his laboured breathing. Yet each hard-fought improvement failed to take hold. Days of diligent care did not lift his spirits or unseat the entrenched grip of his lethargy. Night after night, his reddened eyes dulled, until the once-vibrant spark in them faded to absence.

Since Tarens could not win this fight with his fists, he vented his helpless rage in the field, where hard labour behind the ploughshare granted his fury a harmless outlet. When the ox balked in the traces past sundown, he returned to the cottage, sore and snappishly tired.

Kerelie shouldered the burden of nursing, as well as the tiresome task of heating the gruel and bread sops for the listless invalid. Mostly, the trays returned to the kitchen with their picked-over contents untouched. Desperation led her to swap a precious crock of summer jam for a marrowbone from a neighbour. She soaked barley meal in the enriched broth in a hopeful effort to perk Efflin’s flat appetite.

The beef in the soup became equally spurned. Driven fuming out of the kitchen, Kerelie smashed the clay bowl against the back step in a fit of exasperation.

‘He’s not trying!’ she ranted to Tarens, drawn by her noise at a breathless sprint, with a stick snatched up as a cudgel to beat off a hostile assault.

But the only rescue his sister required was respite from an onslaught of tears.

‘Unlike you and me, Efflin’s not fighting!’ Swept headlong into her brother’s embrace, she pounded his arm in despair. ‘Why, Tarens? Why? He knows our family inheritance cannot be salvaged without him!’

Tarens held her close. Heedless of the barley mush strewn down her skirt, he pressed her marred cheek against a worn jerkin that smelled of sweat, harness leather, and turned earth. ‘I don’t know, Kerie.’ He let her sob, quite aware of the clean spoon and napkin that told over the source of her grief. Painfully wretched himself, he had little comfort to offer. ‘Efflin’s not been right for quite some time. Not since the misfortune came on us. But whatever afflicts him isn’t your fault, Kerie. He’s a grown man. Maddening as his behaviour can be, as hurtfully as his wasting straits try us, while he won’t speak, there’s no helping him.’

Kerelie sniffed, caught aback by the hiccup muffled into his sleeve. ‘I’d rather you whacked him outright with a fence-post for acting the brainless fool!’

‘Chin up,’ Tarens chided. ‘I’d prefer to keep the pasture intact and just break his head with my knuckles.’

Clinging to each other in harrowed dread, sister and brother stifled the thought that Efflin might easily die of the rancour sealed beneath his stark silence. Life, meantime, would not pause for his obstinacy, nor would Kelsing’s mayor forgo the debt set against their name on the town tax-rolls.

Kerelie’s exhausted weeping ran dry. While thin sun bleached the frost-burned grass in the yard, and the gusts scattered raced leaves between the straggled stakes in the fallow garden-patch, Tarens sighed and circuitously broached the idea that nagged at his uneasy mind.

‘Survivors don’t quit without reason,’ he said.

Somehow Kerelie sensed the root of the tension that upset his natural complacence. ‘Don’t even say what you’re thinking!’ she snapped.

When Tarens returned no argument, she pushed him off, angry, her raw cheeks flamed pink and her swollen eyes bright as north sky. ‘You daren’t tell me I’ve driven away the one person who might have changed Efflin’s condition!’

Tarens set his strong jaw. Prepared in his way to smooth her nettled anguish, he pointed out, ‘You have eyes. Tell me you haven’t seen the same evidence? Or haven’t you noticed that the scrawny hen we dragged back from the market is now eating her silly head off? She’d bring double the price now, restored to good flesh.’

‘Doesn’t mean the useless fowl will ever lay, or hatch a new brood come the spring.’ Kerelie belatedly dabbed her wet lashes on the inside of her cuff.

‘Well, the sheen on the bird’s feathers belies that.’ Tarens dug into his breeches pocket and offered his crumpled handkerchief. ‘Here. Don’t mess up your blouse. You’ll bleed the dye out of your pretty embroidery, and if not that, we’ve all heard in steamed language how much you love ironing wrinkled linen.’

‘You’re dead right. I hate laundry, never more than while Efflin’s flat on his back and quite busy wrecking what’s left of our sorry lives!’ Kerelie honked noisily, huffed, and shoved a frizzled wisp of hair behind an ear the chill had buffed scarlet. Then she pinned her critical gaze on her brother. ‘How could we have hidden that vagabond, anyhow? Did you honestly think he was innocent? By the rude way we were questioned, the high temple’s examiner sent that diviner to ferret the poor creature out. If we chanced to harbour a heretic, wherever he is, you have to agree he’s better off gone and, safest of all, well forgotten!’

Tarens looked away.

Kerelie’s eyes narrowed. Fists set on her hips, she stared at her brother until his blunt silence piqued her suspicion. ‘You know where that man is!’

‘No.’ Tarens blinked through his unkempt forelock. ‘I swear on the graves of our dead, I do not.’

‘Then what aren’t you telling me?’ Kerelie crushed up his soggy linen and hurled it down like a duelist’s thrown gauntlet.

‘I’ve not seen the fellow, hide nor hair!’ Tarens protested. ‘Not since the evening we aired our crass fears bare-faced in his living presence.’ Stung, he poised for a wary retreat: his sister in a high fettle was wont to clout back with the first handy object within reach. The soup-bowl was broken. Left nothing else, she would pitch the available cutlery at him before the innocuous napkin.

Yet Efflin’s wasting illness had sapped the spunk from Kerelie’s spirit. ‘Tarens!’ she pleaded, wrung beyond fight, ‘at least grace me with a civil answer.’

She would give him no peace. Warned by raw experience, Tarens sat down on the step and laced his big hands over his patched knees. ‘I don’t know where the little man went. But you’re right. He has not gone, exactly.’ The admission emerged in careful words: of fences repaired in the dark of the night; of water drawn to fill troughs for the livestock and small repairs done in the barn; of the fruit trees and vines pruned with expert skill where the untended tangle of last season’s growth threatened to choke the next harvest.

More, Tarens acknowledged the signs of a talent beyond anything known to farm husbandry. ‘If you saw the mends in the hedge by the wood, you’d see he’s got yew twining into itself with a purpose that’s frankly uncanny. That’s not done without use of the secret lore kept by the charm makers.’

‘Few dare that practice, far less in the open.’ Kerelie shoved the sick tray aside with her foot. Frowning, she gathered her splattered skirts and settled next to her brother. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

Tarens regarded her with wide-lashed candor. ‘What would you have done, Kerie? Driven him out? Or could you lie to a temple examiner if one returns with more suspicious questions? Worse, could I lay us open to blackmail, that any unscrupulous suitor might pressure us for your hand in marriage? I couldn’t abide the chance that might happen! But without Efflin’s help, in flat honesty, I can’t work the croft by myself!’

Kerelie stood. Tight with hurt, she spun and picked up the tray. The clean spoon beside the untouched cloth napkin sharpened her to accusation. ‘You were risking our landed heritage, Tarens.’

‘Set against Efflin’s life? Does our titled right to till these miserable acres even signify?’

‘More than our brother’s health may be at stake,’ Kerelie pointed out, tart. ‘Or does the fact each of us was declared for the Light since our birth have no meaning?’

There, even her brother’s mild nature lost patience. ‘Your prim faith in the True Sect’s canon serves naught. The temple preaches a loveless morality that cares not one jot for the plight of our livelihood. The priests are fat parasites, theosophizing on their rumps while folk like us break our backs, milked dry by their tithes and their rote obligations. Where does their doctrine show the least concern for our chance to enjoy the fruits of our happiness?’

Kerelie banged down the tray and confronted her brother, her work-worn hands as chapped as his own, and her eyes just as smudged with relentless fatigue. ‘Do you honestly believe that mad vagabond has the gift, or the know­ledge to enact a deep healing? Even the Light’s priesthood don’t flaunt such arrogance! They warn against undue interference. Could you take the risk that an invasive power of Darkness might ensnare a man’s defenseless soul? Or that a madman with a rogue talent could invasively damage a wounded spirit?’

‘That fellow is not crazy!’ Blushed under her censure, Tarens amended in heart-felt conviction. ‘No, I don’t know everything. The Light’s policies confuse me. But if Efflin dies, our family holding is lost to us anyhow. Should we act on our unseen fears before the virtue of human kindness? Who’s given us more, the Light’s faith or that stranger? And if you choose to reject generosity, then what standing do we have left in this world, or in the hereafter, for that matter?’

Kerelie turned her back. Palms pressed to her face, her hunched shoulders quivering, she lashed out and kicked the tin tray. The spoon flashed air-borne and tumbled into the garden, while the napkin, wind-chased, fluttered across the sere ground and caught like a forlorn flag of truce in the rose trellis. A moment, she stood, her vulnerable fragility fit to shatter at the next breath. Until the surfeit of grief overset her distress, and she broke into snuffles of laughter.

‘Well,’ she gasped presently. ‘I never did want to marry. Or bear the brood it would take to upkeep this sprawling place properly. If you think that scruffy creature might help, go ahead and try to find him.’

Late night made the vigil the hardest to bear, when the candle carved harsh shadows that rendered Efflin’s wasted face cadaverous. He had not touched the stew brought for his supper. The sorry, cold mass congealed in the bowl, that hard straits and poverty saved to reheat for Tarens upon his return. Since the plan to seek help must wait for the vagabond to emerge from his hidden cover, the lonely watch extended far into the night.

Kerelie fetched a rushlight for thrift, and her osier work-basket. She stretched new linen onto her embroidery hoop, then snatched for the illusion of solace by plying her needle. Against the laboured breaths of a brother’s decline, she sewed life: small birds, brilliant butterflies, and entwined summer flowers. The simple beauty that nurtured her delight bloomed under her hands in lovingly set, intricate stitches. Frantically as she sought to escape from her grief, the pervasive astringency of cailcallow tea and the bitter aroma of willow bark made the sick-room oppressive.

Religion had never founded her peace, but nothing else fed her stark absence of hope. She lacked the wisdom to tell if the vagabond was in fact a rogue sorcerer. Her prayer to the Light appealed for clear guidance, or lacking that, the gift of clemency. Should the human heart be asked to choose between a blind adherence to faith, or succour for a dying brother? Hours passed to the whine of the wind through the eaves and the bang of a loosened shutter. The northerly cold that brought in early blizzards seeped through the casement and flared the coals as the kitchen fire subsided to ash. Kerelie arose and piled on fresh logs. Almost, she wished Tarens would be unsuccessful, that the gall of her doubts might stay the brute course on known ground, without liability. Perhaps the refuge of belief was best kept unchallenged by troublesome questions that bordered on heresy.

The latch clicked in that moment of harrowed uncertainty. Kerelie met Tarens as he stepped in, bone chilled but triumphant. The disreputable vagabond dogged his heels, slight and graceful in step as a ghost.

Kerelie’s start of jangled trepidation met green eyes, oddly sparked by ironic hilarity. Then the wafted stink brought indoors with him assaulted her nostrils. Her mouth, just opened to scold, snapped shut against sudden nausea. Hurled beyond dignity, Kerelie back-stepped, hands clutched to her middle.

For of course, denied any civilized shelter, the vagabond had been forced to survive on snared game. Necessity made him fashion his jerkin and jacket from green hides, skinned off the animals he trapped for sustenance.

Kerelie whirled, forearms braced on the window-sill until her shocked spasms subsided. ‘Light’s grace attend us!’ she gasped. ‘Your sorry friend will breed rampant pestilence, reeking of rot as he does!’

Before Tarens managed a heated response, she collapsed on the bench, flushed bright pink. She drew several taxed breaths, then abandoned propriety and curled up, not sick, but helplessly laughing.

‘My fault, I admit, for pinch-fisted thriftiness since I refused to spare any other warm clothing for someone so desperately needy.’ Her contrite change of heart came on as the spring storm, without apology and brisk enough to level pride and presumption. ‘Tarens! Fetch in the wash-tub and draw water for bathing. Then ask that poor creature to strip to the skin! Burn his unholy mess of raw fur out of doors and throw the ashes onto the midden. I’ll fetch the good soap and scrounge proper dress from Uncle’s left things in the cedar trunk. Be sure of this! I won’t let that appalling charnel stench anywhere near Efflin’s sick-bed.’

Scoured clean by his own hand, also shaved and refreshed by the scent of lavender soap, the vagabond soon passed the sister’s critical muster to be admitted to her brother’s bedside. Kerelie ensconced herself in Aunt Saffie’s rocker, once used to settle her infant sons after nursing in the late hours. Now, the worn cushion held a bristle of jabbed pins to take in Uncle Fiath’s good winter jacket. Tarens tucked cross-legged on the window-seat, reluctant to rest and abandon the beggarman to his sister’s prickly temperament.

Efflin alone showed no apprehension. Bone-pale, he lay lifelessly still, the smoothed quilts on his chest scarcely stirred by his shallow breaths. His cheeks were sunken into his skull, with his half-opened, flint eyes glinting empty and listless. He seemed to have drifted past Fate’s Wheel already, with naught but a shell left behind as his sturdy frame wasted.

The vagabond absorbed the cadaverous flesh at one glance. Restless or driven, he retreated into the kitchen and slipped back out into the night. A taut interval passed. Before Kerelie loosened her guard in relief, and while Tarens wrestled impatience, the fellow returned with an armload of logs from the wood-pile. His hand-picked cache contained only birch. The sweet fragrance lightened the air as he built up the kitchen fire.

Once the crackling flames caught from the embers, the ruffian stood up and quartered the croft cottage, length and breadth. His industrious survey peered into crannies and touched random objects with an interest that ran beyond curiosity. His rapt manner frayed Kerelie’s already rattled state of anxiety. She dropped the distracted pursuit of her needlework, stalked into the kitchen, and hovered over his shoulder, though Tarens chastised her rudeness.

‘Let him be, Kerie! He isn’t a thief.’

‘What’s he doing, then?’ Trailed after the man’s furtive step up the stair, she bridled as his brazen exploration turned down the second-floor hallway. Before he presumed the unthinkable and breached the shut door to the boys’ empty bedroom, she called downstairs, benighted, ‘Shouldn’t somebody check to be sure he’s not up to mischief?’

Which comment froze the snooping stranger at the forbidden threshold. His head turned. Kerelie caught the brunt of his razor-keen stare, charged by a contempt that prickled her hackles. Then, undeterred, he spun on his heel and invaded the family’s most sacrosanct shrine. The room was pitch-dark. He carried no light. Since Kerelie could not bear the desecration, she refused the loan of a candle. Instead, she fled headlong downstairs and collided with Tarens, who captured her into his steadfast embrace.

‘You know where he’s poking his inquisitive nose,’ she objected, muffled by her brother’s warm shirt.

‘Let him do as he must,’ Tarens urged, also shaken, but unready to surrender his last glimmer of hope to the stifling shadow of grief. ‘Everything that man’s done has held purpose! I’d place my trust in the same goodwill that spared you from Grismard’s clutches.’

Kerelie sniffed. She conceded the point, enough to suppress her outraged nerves until the intrusive, quick footstep re-emerged and descended the stair. Her stare still shot daggers for flagrant presumption. Worse yet, the glow from the kitchen fire brushed the tell-tale gleam of polished wood in the pilferer’s hand.

Rankled, Kerelie shouted, ‘He’s got Paolin’s flute! Efflin’s going to be furious!’

Tarens clamped her arm, curbed his own blast of temper, and whispered a plea for restraint. ‘Efflin’s riled nerves might be for the best. Force him to take a stand and maybe he’ll rejoin the living.’

If the vagabond noticed their umbrage, nothing deflected his course as he poked through the cottage kitchen. No pot and no spoon on the rack went unfingered. He laid his ear to the trestle, eyes shut, as if the scarred planks spoke like a book’s riffled pages, scribed with the past layers of ingrained conversations.

While Kerelie glowered with prim disapproval, he moved on and ran a near-reverent hand over the contents of Aunt Saffie’s dish cupboard. As if the tactile slide of bare fingers garnered the nuance of buried impressions, he lingered, drew in a satisfied breath, and savoured a pause before he pressed onwards. Glimpsed by the frangible gleam of the fire, his eyes appeared softened from focus. Bemused as a dreamer’s, the slight tilt of his head suggested he listened to strains far beyond natural hearing.

Kerelie’s impetuous tongue blurted outright what Tarens was thinking: ‘Either your creature’s as daft as the moon, or we’re watching a sorcerer work.’

‘I fear the temple’s meddling examiners far more,’ Tarens snapped. ‘If harm comes to us by this man’s hand, I’ll shoulder the blame. But without a shred of contrary evidence, my mind is going to stay open.’ Deaf to debate, he pos­itioned himself to shield against his sister’s untoward interference. When at last the vagabond made his way back into Efflin’s chamber, the shortened candles cast fluttering haloes over coverlet and furnishings, and pooled yellow light on the braided-rag carpet. Kerelie beat a nettled retreat to her chair and retrieved her dropped mending like armour. Tarens stationed himself by the door, despite his stout claim of unshaken faith, poised to move fast if need warranted.

The vagabond drifted onwards to the bed and extended the hand-made flute, balanced across his open palms. There, he waited until his planted stance forced Efflin’s blank stare to a flicker of confrontation. The moment faded. Indifference resurged, then subsided to flat rejection. The inflamed rims of the sunken lids lowered, sight shuttered behind adamant, closed eyes.

The vagabond bowed his head, not resigned. He laid the flute across Efflin’s stilled knees. Left it there, gleaming atop the plain coverlet as he leaned forward and ran his expressive fingers over the bedstead: the same that Aunt Saffie and Uncle Fiath had shared through their eighteen years joined in marriage. He stroked the carved wood, engrossed: as if his engaged survey of another’s belongings scrutinized intimacies that even kinsfolk had no right to rifle.

‘Feels like an invasion of somebody’s privacy,’ Kerelie grumbled with self-righteous heat.

Her intrusive comment offended at last. The vagabond’s chin snapped up from absorbed contemplation. His disturbed regard raked her soul-deep with reproach. The effect all but flayed skin, as he left Efflin’s bedside and advanced on her chair, his stalker’s step primed for a challenge.

Her fierce courage met him straight on. The fears that edged Kerelie’s outbursts never had stemmed from concern for herself. Aware she would stand her adamant ground, Tarens looked on with choked breath as the vagabond squared off against a loyal sister’s disapproval. The hands he raised could have belonged to an artist, but for his broken nails and chapped knuckles. Firmly, he tugged the bastion of fine needlework out of her defensive fingers. Then he gathered up her emptied palm, and cupped her own flesh against the old scar that disfigured her cheek.

His clasp guided, only. She easily could have yanked free. Yet as though anaesthetized, she did not jerk away, but looked upwards into his angular features. His green eyes captured hers, deep beyond measure, impenetrably calm and unthreatening.

And something inside of her burst the rigid dam that constrained a violent torrent of feeling…

She was three on the day the neighbour’s cranky mule lunged with flattened ears and nipped at her arm. Open-hearted and innocent, she had leaned over the fence-rail to plant a kiss on its whiskered muzzle, eager to grant any creature who wronged her that earnest gesture of forgiveness.

Such a simple mistake to have scarred her for life. The pain as the mule’s blunt teeth crushed her cheek had been brief, and the pinprick trauma of stitches, a pittance. The damage that crippled struck later, inflicted by endless humiliation.

Hurtful memories rushed through in a cruel cascade: of her mother’s exasperated anger and resigned pity; then the remorseless jeers of the other children who poked fun at her welted face. She shrank into self-consciousness, then scourging embarrassment, as puberty delivered the blow that her blemish made her undesired by the young men. She endured the torment of her uncle’s strained silences, then the helpless resignation that drove him from the room each time her aunt broached her dim prospects for a good marriage. The westlands tradition of chaperoned courtship made her teen years a punishment as she sat through the dances, or waited forlorn at an empty table. Shunned, she had watched the lit candles burn above the baked sweets that hopeful youth had laid out for young suitors who failed to appear. Or worse, she had struggled to make conversation, when callers were sent by their insistent mothers as a hollow gesture of conciliation.

Seared to her core, Kerelie ached for the flaw that could not, in this life, ever leave her. Her spoiled features could not be restored. She lived, day on day, as separate as though sealed behind a pane of marred glass. Except for her brothers, no one she met ever saw her: until a wild vagabond, chance-met on the road, had bridged the gap of her isolation. No person, ever, had soothed her raw nerves with the tonic of clear understanding.

The first sob tore from Kerelie’s chest with a sound like rent cloth, coarse and alarmingly primal. Tears followed, a wracking catharsis of shame that alarmed Tarens to witness. The spate passed without incident. Limp, drained to emptiness in release, Kerelie made no effort to disentangle herself. Bent forward, leaned into the vagabond’s support, she allowed him, that gently, to ease her soaked fingers back into her lap.

Now, his weathered touch cradled her scarred cheek directly. The drawn flesh with its whitened, hard knot of tissue did not repulse him. His contact stayed steady, an unpretentious acceptance beyond any banal word of comfort.

Unthreatening, tender, he lifted her chin. He brushed the brine from her lashes, and gazed into her eyes until the flood brimmed again, spilled, and emptied. Something uncanny quickened the connection: a bloom of spring warmth, or a balm on the spirit. The spark ignited change that rippled beyond mere sensation, too ineffable to be captured by language. As though she received the live pulse of his thought, Kerelie experienced a view of herself that transcended flesh and shattered the framework of outward appearance.

She experienced a redefinition of value, as if a veil lifted, or the dross had been razed at a stroke from an unfinished sculpture. Where strangers complained of her carping tongue, this touch spoke of a vulnerable heart, defensively guarding a family. She saw, in the stitches of her busy needle, a glow that whispered of happiness so delicate, she had never risked its fragility to outside expression. The caring she could not expect, from a man, was twined into her embroidered flowers and birds, and the ebullient scrolls of spring vines. These quiet gifts were bestowed on close kin, and more shyly, to the rare few who showed her a constant friendship.

No one before ever spoke of her grace as she moved. None mentioned her staunch strength, or complimented the confidence she brought to the mindful tasks of plain living.

Through the stranger’s eyes, which mirrored her self, she saw her steel core and encountered the person she was: a being devoted to kindness, who would not forsake the living trust of another. The monstrous shadow thrown by her scar no longer eclipsed the inherent treasures of the virtues she brought to the world.

The bubble of startled laughter began in her chest and burst from her throat. Remade inside, she gave rein to the joy unleashed from the locked prison within her. Hurled into a freedom too large to cram back into her former shell, she revelled in the vibrancy of her wholeness. The mask people viewed was not who she was. Her inner light shone with a rarefied brilliance beyond any flaw to extinguish.

The vagabond quietly withdrew his hands. Deferent, he smiled and ducked his head to forestall her effusive thanks. He bowed instead to show honour to Kerelie, which restraint let the unfolded changes within her smooth into resettled alignment.

When Tarens’s anxious query broke in, puzzled and sharply insistent, Kerelie answered, astonished to wonderment. ‘Be still! All is well. I’m quite fine. More than that.’ She paused, drew a breath, and tingled from head to foot with exhilaration. ‘Now I know how your beggarman healed the old hen.’ Hesitant, she touched her ridged cheek. The ugly scar remained as prominent as ever, but its blight on her spirit had lifted. The entrenched belief she was hideous no longer smothered her under the patent falsehood of unworthiness. The blemish on her self-image, which had strangled the fearless intimacy of her innate joy, was cleansed.

She pronounced at due length, ‘If this man’s talent is considered black sorcery, then the temple and the Light’s priesthood are wrong to forbid us the benefits of such practice.’

‘He might heal Efflin’s ailment the same way, you think,’ Tarens ventured, afraid to hope.

As fresh tears brimmed her luminous eyes, Kerelie nodded with encouragement. ‘Let him try. I can assure the attempt is unlikely to cause any harm.’

The vagabond accepted her tone as consent and resumed his disputed place at the invalid’s bedside. Efflin’s eyes remained stubbornly shut. Inert to the life in his presence, he languished amid the unwrinkled sheets, motionless but for his slowed breaths. He seemed a being sucked empty: except that the dark-haired healer surveyed his slack frame with undaunted focus. As though attentive to registers too refined to be heard, he studied Efflin’s unresponsive condition.

No word did he speak. No demonstrable feeling moved his expression. Yet after a searing, stopped interval, the vagabond reached out and claimed the wood flute.

The oiled surface had been polished by love. Beyond that, the toy ­instrument was unremarkably plain: a fancy fashioned by country-bred hands for a child, whose sprightly laugh and innocent pleasures had perished of sickness untimely. The drilled stops were spaced for a little boy’s hands. But the stranger’s slight fingers danced over them, silent, as if the wood sang, quite alive to the sensitivity of his inner mind. As Kerelie and Tarens watched, their strange visitor did the unthinkable: he raised the heirloom flute to his lips and sounded the lowest pitch.

The bass note that emerged should have been nothing special. Yet his extraordinary, expressive breath shaped a tempered statement that raised the small hairs at the nape. The vagabond’s regard stayed riveted upon Efflin’s form, dull and abandoned to listlessness under the blankets. The ferocious attentiveness brought to bear bespoke nothing else but an awareness of the uncanny.

The flute’s voice dwindled like a cry into nothing. In fixed focus entrained upon Efflin’s blank face, the dark-haired fellow paused once again, then un­covered the next hole and ran up the scale. The highest tone faded. This time the silence hung like blown glass. Head tilted, he engaged the small instrument, and by tentative phrases, began to unreel an evocative melody.

Ragged nails and rough callus had hidden the fact that those fingers belonged to a talent: his touch on the flute spoke, exquisitely sure, and laced calm through the stuffy room. The outlay of music refigured the senses, until familiar perceptions acquired a chisel-punched clarity. The neat, coloured petals in Kerelie’s embroidery glowed, alive in the handcrafted counterpane. Fire-light shimmered like a warm caress over the quaint patterns carved into the pine bedstead. Moonlight glittered the frosted window-panes to opalescence, and buffed a sheen on the grain of worn floor-boards. Vitality became magnified, until the clean sigh of the onlookers’ breaths flowed like spun silk, entwined and then braided by the intimate love expressed between them as a family.

The vagabond took charge of his composition and wove in the flicker of a sprightly lilt. All the while his gaze stayed locked upon Efflin’s features. Change had crept in, almost unseen: the invalid’s brow was no longer smooth, or the lips, slack with bitter indifference.

Soon the furrowed frown deepened. As if the happy lift in the tune somehow chafed, Efflin gritted his teeth with annoyance.

Like the hook of a burr, the musician seized his bold theme and expanded its rankling influence. His melody soared into foot-tapping joy, then took flight with grace notes that skittered with laughter. Caught up, then wound in and gripped by his spell, the listeners smiled as the tonal harmonics seized their hearts and flung open the gates of remembrance.

Swept away, they relived the forgotten cadences of better times, when an older brother’s mature strength had worked the croft side by side with their uncle. The lost days of their childhoods re-emerged, before the high temple’s decree had seized their father as a troop conscript. The ribald jokes, the wry pranks, and the long, summer days spent lazily fishing, while Aunt Saff smoked the beehives to harvest the honey, and the sun-drenched barley fields ripened to yellow. The crushed scent of greenery, and boiling jam, and the spike to Fiath’s jack whiskey brewed in the cold snap of autumn – the ease of those gilded years flooded back on a poignant wave of nostalgia.

Efflin’s eyes were closed still. But his wracked fight to stay separate now became a pitched battle that rammed his frame rigid.

The musician played on. Tempo quickened as he sliced golden showers of sound out of silence. His merry measures described Efflin’s grace, until none watching could deny the sorrowful ache of a lifetime laid down by abandonment. The brother who wasted in bedridden inertia became an agony to behold. Kerelie fought the fierce need to shake him, and Tarens shuddered with clenched fists, raked by the urge to pick a rife fight.

But the voice of the flute raised a wall in restraint, fashioned to smother harsh action. Bright as the struck peal of bronze chimes, the notes quickened with shimmering urgency. To Efflin’s being, as once he had been, the musician added a descant theme teased in counterpoint through the base melody.

Kerelie whitened, first to identify the uncanny source of the tune’s inspiration. ‘He’s playing the boys! Paolin and Chan, do you hear? Light above,’ she gasped, aching, ‘Make him stop! I can’t bear it.’

Her appalled shock only spurred the musician to seize on the fuel of her distress. He reached into that molten core of sheer agony and played love, his tender measures swelled to a shout that scalded with more brilliance yet. Two deceased children were respun from the grave. Vibrant, as though living – almost! – the eye saw them in etheric vision beside Efflin’s bed. Their young spirits would have showed laughter and verve, unmarked by the loss of their mother. With all of life’s wonder undimmed, their memory beseeched the grown man to open his jaded eyes and acknowledge them.

The insistent demand: to be what they were, must crack, through a fiercely kept isolation and loose the agonized grief kept imprisoned by steel reservation. The music commanded, until stone itself could have wept in unbridled sympathy.

The musician dared further. Theme and playful embellishment flowed into refrain, and resounded, more haunting yet. The pervasive gloom of the sick-room air parted before the sweet scent of Aunt’s cherished roses.

Which lyrical impact raised Kerelie’s tears and winded Tarens like a punch in the chest. But Efflin’s response outstripped them both: quaking as though seared inside by hot iron, he bit his lip to the verge of drawn blood.

This time, Tarens unriddled the astonishment. ‘Light’s own grace,’ he whispered, appalled. ‘Efflin! Aunt Saff! For mercy, how deeply he must have loved her!’

As if his cry unleashed comprehension, the innocent melody that bespoke the two boys reached consummate pitch. All three of the musician’s laid lines became welded into a harmonic nexus. Imperative artistry cascaded, peaked, and stripped bare an indelible truth: that Efflin’s theme was the backbone that cradled the effervescence of both little boys.

‘The children were Efflin’s!’ gasped Kerelie, rocked by the bolt-strike of epiphany. ‘Paolin and Chan! Bone and breath, they were Efflin’s!’

Facts fit.

With a sting like the snap of a brittle stick, the flute’s call destroyed all reserve. On the bed, Efflin turned his head into the pillow and buried his ravaged face. He groaned, stricken through by stark anguish. Then his bent shoulders shook to a sob as though his very spirit had shattered. The sorrow never expressed leaped the breach, dredged up from his locked well of silence. He wept for a loss that no other but Saffie could have understood. His blessing, and his curse, that she had not lived long enough to share his distraught pain as he served the last rites for their two little sons.

Hammer to anvil, past memories reshaped: of Uncle’s seamed face, eased from years of pent strain in the delight brought by Paolin’s birth. Fiath could not have known. Saffie and Efflin had never been seen to touch hands, not within anyone’s presence. But the hours spent whistling in quiet content as he hauled the mulch and manure, built and bent the arched trellis, and dug the beds for Aunt’s roses: hindsight unveiled all of his secret regard, lavished onto her garden in tender devotion.

Tonight, shown the shocking depth of his wound, Tarens and Kerelie bestowed no blame. Aunt Saffie was not their blood relation, except through the kin ties of marriage. The indiscretion just bared to light could not provoke a betrayal. They knew Fiath’s contentment had hidden no falsehood. His presumed paternity never had been under question throughout the boys’ raising. No harm could befall the dead, after all. But for the benighted siblings left living, the course of bereavement changed shape. Shared grief emerged that broke like a squall and closed the familial circle. Sister and brother piled onto the bed. They held Efflin together, as if their clasped arms could bind up a fissure that, till this night, had been as the abyss, wide and deep and beyond insurmountable. The cankered sore that had tormented a bereft father no longer lay gagged under honour-bound silence.

Efflin wept, freed. Bonded once more into seamless fellowship, none noted the moment when the flute player ceased his infallible effort. Amid softened quiet, gently fire-lit and warm, the three siblings revisited their sorrows in depth, and together shored up the wreckage of a brother’s unconsoled spirit.

‘If my act was wrong-doing, no one took hurt,’ Efflin murmured at due length, replete. His exhausted defiance asked for no forgiveness. ‘Uncle never knew. Aunt Saff asked for nothing, nor begged a thing more beyond her sore need that pined beyond hope for the chance of conception. She had sensed my indecent feelings, I’m sure, although I never broached a word to her. When she realized her fertility might pass her by, she pleaded with me, and begged not to make use of a stranger. She was that desperate to give Fiath the children they both ached to rear. And for all our sakes, the croft demanded a secured future, besides.’

‘Efflin, hush,’ murmured Kerelie. ‘No need to explain. With Saff and Fiath both gone, it is meet that we share your burden.’

Tarens swallowed, unable to speak. Embarrassed at last for his kinsfolk’s breached privacy, he turned his head, first to notice the empty room at his back. The child’s wooden flute, that Efflin had carved for a son who called another man father, rested abandoned on the window-seat. The stops were silent. Smoothed wood gleamed in the etched spill of the moonlight, never to sound the like of those piercing measures again.

Only the partially re-tailored jacket had been removed from the arm of Aunt’s chair.

The night was the family’s to rejoice in relief for the gift of Efflin’s recovery.

The bleak hour before dawn brought the True Sect’s temple examiner, arrived in a ground-shaking thunder of hooves with a lathered entourage of mounted lancers. Elite dedicates, drilled lifelong to bear arms, they poured down the lane without warning, polished to a frost glitter of armour and headed by the pomp of their Sunwheel standards. They carried a warrant to shackle the guilty, verified by a vested diviner sworn to uphold the faith. A blessed talent who served divine Light, he claimed to have sensed the emanations raised by a minion’s dark practice.

Tarens wakened to the commotion. Still halfway clad in yesterday’s clothes, he grabbed his boots and charged downstairs, just as the double column of horsemen crammed into the cottage yard. Indoors, the candles were long since pinched out. Ghostly in her night-rail, Kerelie poised in blanched dread at the kitchen casement. Tarens crossed the rug and peered over her shoulder, then swore through his teeth as the arrogant brutes trampled their shod mounts over the rose-beds. He yanked on his footwear, further enraged as they commandeered Efflin’s trellis to snub the lance captain’s makeshift picket line.

‘You can’t stop them, Tarens,’ Kerelie said, frightened. Her alarmed grasp sought to restrain his tense wrist, shaken off in savage rejection.

Outside, the steamed horses jostled and stamped. Steel jingled to someone’s brusque demand to form up a cordon. ‘Quickly, mind! Strike to kill if anyone tries to escape.’

Efflin slept on through the upset. Dreamlessly convalescent, he never stirred as the flare of held torches speared through the front windows. Nor did he hear the marched scrape of boots on the frosted ground as temple guardsmen with ready weapons surrounded the house, then a smaller group detached under orders to move in for the shake-down.

‘What should we do, Tarens?’ Kerelie fretted.

A last-moment evasion was already futile, with Efflin too weak to stand upright. To move him at all would require a litter, and even unburdened, a hale man on foot would be ridden down as a marked target.

Tarens faced the bad call. His questionable traffic with the vagabond cornered them all, with barely seconds left to forestall the sure threat of disaster.

Flooded light through the panes juddered over the pots by the chimney as the dedicates’ advance crunched up the garden-path. As their tread boomed in step up the planked stair to the porch, Tarens grabbed Kerelie and forcefully dragged her into the downstairs bedchamber. ‘Stay with Efflin.’ A snatched view from the window-seat let him measure the strength of the temple’s invasion: eight sword-bearing heavies in gold-and-white surcoats flanked the entry, backed by two more bearing brands. At ground level, poised before the placed cordon, the talent diviner stood rapt as a ferret, his stainless white cowl and blazon lent a sulphurous tinge under the flame-light.

This was not a warrant for inspection but a company dispatched to seize custody.

The lance sergeant’s fist hammered into the door. ‘Open up! Or the Light’s protectors will claim their due right!’

‘Tarens!’ cried Kerelie from Efflin’s bedside, ‘Unfasten the bar straightaway, or they’ll break it.’

‘More like fire the thatch in their zeal to flush heretics,’ Tarens snapped, grim. He shoved from the window-seat and plunged back towards the darkened kitchen, still talking. ‘Let them have their way. After all, what ugliness can they find?’

‘Go after him, sister!’ The rushed plea was Efflin’s, croaked from the pillow. ‘Whatever he’s planning won’t be to the good.’

‘Tarens! Hold back!’ Kerelie’s appeal raised no answer, an ominous sign. Worried, she bolted a scant step behind her impulsive brother’s intent. The banked hearth shed no gleam on his purpose. The sultry glow of the torch-flames through the mottled glass only dazzled her vision and swathed his quick movement in velvet shadows.

‘Wait, Tarens! I beg you!’ Her appeal stayed ignored.

Already, Tarens had flung wide the door. He hoisted the trestle bench as a shield. His other hand brandished the poker snatched from the hearth. Head down, shouting curses that blasphemed the Light, he clouted his way through the startled dedicates placed to secure the entry. Several crashed over, yelling. Their fallen weight staggered the torch-bearers backwards. Mazed in the swoop and flicker of confused light, the lancers left upright scrambled and surged forward to stop him, too late.

Tarens bulled onwards down the porch stair. His leveled spike gaffed the partridge-plump breast of the Light’s diviner. Blood blossomed. The gush smirched the sacred Sunwheel emblem and spread scarlet over the spotless robes of divine office.

Kerelie’s scream overpowered the stricken man’s grunt of agony. Those lancers still astride roared in black rage and raked spurs to their idle mounts, while their foot-bound comrades charged to retaliate. Tarens moved faster, grabbed the speared victim, and hauled his collapsed frame upright by the collar.

‘Spying scum!’ The crofter jerked out the impaled barb of the poker and flung the gored implement end over end. The tumbling length of iron spun into the forelegs of the inbound horses. Half of the beasts shied, which broke and unravelled the concerted attack. Exposed, made the target of two dozen swords, Tarens dumped his grisly trophy into a sprawling heap at the feet of the horrified temple examiner. While the corpse writhed in the throes of fatality, the brazen crofter dropped to his knees in surrender.

Arms outflung, head up, Tarens’s burly form invited the vengeful lance, or the punitive blade to strike downwards and finish him.

‘No!’ pealed the command of a ranked authority. ‘Take the murderer alive!’ Emerged to the fore, the speaker wore the hooded regalia of the True Sect’s temple. ‘He shall die for his crime. But the execution will take place in public as a moral example!’

Life dedicates trained to unquestioned obedience, the men pulled their steel. En masse, they slammed into Tarens and wrestled him prostrate on the frosted ground. Their captain attended the savaged diviner, whose blessed talent would track no more minions of Shadow for the faith.

While the men on the porch pinioned Kerelie’s struggle to rush down the stair to her brother, Tarens cried, ‘I’m the only one guilty! The others knew nothing.’

‘I’ll be the one to determine the charges,’ declared the Light’s Lord Examiner. A vigorous official, ablaze in white cloth and the rippling glitter of diamond-set appointments, he gestured. ‘Set the criminal in manacles. He must face the scaffold, but all in due time. His kinsfolk will stand trial on their own merits. My official inquiry begins immediately.’

‘You’ll find nothing!’ yelled Tarens.

A mailed fist cuffed him silent. Hardened to Kerelie’s weeping, and roughshod before Efflin’s mortified weakness, the dedicates invaded the cozy croft cottage with their hobnailed boots and pine-torches. They tore through each room, upended the furnishings, and bashed over the plate cupboard. Smashed porcelain became ground into the braided rug as they raked kettles and ladles from their rowed hooks and slashed into the flour-sacks hoarded for winter until the puffed contents emptied. Against Efflin’s desperate, sensible pleas, they demolished the larder. Jars of preserves were smashed to the floor, and the waxed cheeses pulped underfoot. When the exhaustive search found no artifacts of dark practice amid the litter of wreckage, men rifled the wood bin and barreled upstairs to kick through the contents of clothes-chests and closets. Room by room, the desecration proceeded, cloth goods and belongings savaged to destruction, and floor-boards mauled into splinters.

When the invasion burst into the sick-room, Kerelie’s outraged language met deafened ears. ‘Where is mercy? Have you no care for illness?’

Efflin’s blanketed form was thrust into a chair. When his tattered bedding yielded no hidden cache of arcane talismans, he was forced to endure the further brutality as the lancers secured Tarens by stringing him up by chained wrists from the rafters.

There he swung, bashed and bleeding, worried by the point of the sergeant’s sword at his throat.

He railed, nonetheless. ‘Leave my family be! They’ve done nothing wrong.’

‘Clap a lid on your noise!’ the sergeant cracked.

Tarens spat, which earned a back-handed blow to the face that pulped his nose and set Kerelie shrieking.

‘Silence that bitch!’ snapped the captain, annoyed. His sideward glance cut through the turpentine taint of the torch smoke. ‘There’s a dish-rag? Then gag her.’

But Kerelie quieted, before being forced. Against the shocked quiet, Tarens unclenched his bruised jaw. Shaking, he spoke through the slur of split lips and the jet of streamed blood from crushed nostrils. ‘My sister and brother are innocent! Until tonight, they had no knowledge I sheltered a fellow who trifled with sorcery!’

But his confession brought his siblings no exoneration.

Too haughty to soil his temple finery, the Lord Examiner served his rebuke from the cottage doorway. ‘The Light’s justice acts with infallible equity. Punishment only follows due cause, and mercy rests upon no one’s insolent claim or false testament! Before you burn for a liaison with evil, you will bear truthful witness! Divine law also must vouchsafe the fates of your brother and sister. They will be condemned or set free only under the burden of proof.’

To the dedicate lancers, the Lord Examiner said, ‘Bind the pair of them with their wrists at their backs. I will verify whether the works of a sorcerer were made welcome under this roof!’

‘Don’t fight them!’ begged Tarens. ‘Just give what they ask!’ Shivering now, sick and cold and in pain, his voice cracked at last under punishment.

Efflin slumped, wrung limp, the glisten of tears dammed behind his shut lashes. He could not speak for the horror, that his younger brother had tried such a desperate measure to take the blame as their scapegoat. The croft would be lost. Westlands land law adhered to the True Sect Canon. But the fragile hope to spare the rest of the family from the fires of heresy might yet be raised from the ashes of a brave brother’s sacrifice.

All their fates rested under the provenance of the Light’s Lord Examiner. A fleshy man with sandy hair and cream skin, he minced across the breached threshold in his rich robes and jewelled insignia. Even in the dimmed kitchen, he glittered. Wrists tied, tongue stilled behind his locked teeth, Efflin winced at the heavy-set tread that chinked the sadly smashed fragments of Saffie’s glass honey jars and painted plates. He reeled, wrung faint, unable to watch as the dedicate who had just clouted his brother moved in and vised Kerelie’s face between bloodied gauntlets.

Tarens thrashed in trussed rage. His irate howls raised chilling indifference as the examiner’s pitiless eyes locked onto his sister’s pinned features. No matter whether she shrank in shame, supremely unconcerned as her bound body arched backwards in fear, the examiner bore in with the conviction of a man possessed. Cold rings flashed as he aligned his pink finger-tips against her pale forehead. A pause ensued while he intoned a prayer, ‘Oh omnipotent Light, may the powers of goodness prevail. Grant my faithful service the humility to rise above all mortal frailty.’

Lips curved, but not smiling, he focused his talent. His temple mission to eradicate Darkness invoked the trained reach of a power enhanced far beyond the empathy of the born healer. The inquisitor’s probe he unleashed lanced into Kerelie’s personal memories. The raw violation made her cry out as shocked nerves exploded to sparkling pain.

He dug deeper, thrust past her vulnerable, raced thoughts and pulled apart layer on layer of her natural resistance. Deaf to her screams, he ripped through and dismembered the emotional tissue of her family loyalty. The relentless ordeal gouged up every nuanced scrap of experience her shrinking terror strove to keep hidden.

Sharp-tempered she had been, even prudently critical of her brother’s impulsive charity. But nothing amid the shreds of exposed memory unveiled concrete evidence that she had sheltered the foot-loose beggar who dabbled in simples.

‘Innocent!’ the Light’s examiner snapped. ‘This woman has not pretended her ignorance. Her consent was not given; neither did she welcome the Dark’s practitioner under this roof.’ He lifted his touch. While Kerelie’s head lolled, and her frame quivered in traumatized spasms, he stepped back in contempt, then gestured for the dedicate sergeant to sever her bonds. ‘Obstructive defiance is scarcely a crime worthy of death on the scaffold. The temple does not punish fools or set irons on persons not guilty!’

Perhaps angered that his effort disclosed no overt wickedness, the True Sect’s high officer spun and confronted Efflin with a narrowed stare. ‘Your sister’s testimony appears to support the claim that your bedridden illness kept you from involvement.’

‘I submit myself anyhow,’ Efflin demurred. ‘As head of my household, and a man of true faith, I insist that your divine calling ought to make sure.’ Tears streaked his cheeks openly. For grief, he shouldered the practical choice: if the loss of a brother could not be salvaged, reprieve must be secured for the sister who might still be saved.

Tarens acknowledged, with desperate relief, that his ruinous action had not gone for nothing. Through blood and hazed pain, his stolid calm bolstered Efflin’s selfless courage.

The examiner’s search was dismissively cursory, a corroboration less exhaust­ive than a ceremonial inquiry processed by a formal trial before Kelsing’s temple tribunal. The sentence was read straightaway, the harsh quittance pushed through in the heated rush to bring Tarens’s act of slaughter to punitive justice.

‘This croft will be sold at auction,’ the True Sect official declared. ‘Of the proceeds, one-third share will go to the temple coffers as due forfeit for the guilty party. The other two-thirds stay reserved in trust for the sister and brother surviving, provided they shall be exonerated by the heretic murderer’s sealed proof in confession. They will suffer penance. Let them serve the temple as forced labour for the term of one year and count themselves graced by my leniency. For the fact that their traffic with a suspect herbalist flouted the temple’s authority is a misdemeanour that narrowly skirts the more dangerous charge of complicity with the forces of Darkness.’

As the sergeant bent to free Efflin’s hands, the examiner snapped final orders to his dedicate captain at arms. ‘Hitch up the croft’s bullock. Load our wrapped dead in the cart along with the chained prisoner, and choose eight lancers as escort. A temple processional will meet their arrival at Kelsing’s front gate. By then, I’ll have the diviner’s widow informed and peal the bells to honour her husband’s passing. The murderer’s trial will be held today, with the formal sentence by sundown and execution by fire at dawn tomorrow. This family stays in close custody, meantime. Let them bear witness to their brother’s fate as a lesson against the taint of consorting with Shadow.’

The arms captain saluted. ‘What of the rest of my troop? We still have a renegade sorcerer at large.’

‘Dispatch them for the man-hunt, of course.’ The examiner’s words faded into swished silk and torch light as he made his way out of the cottage door. ‘I will assign you another diviner and also requisition a league tracker with dogs. Quarter the district and find Shadow’s minion. Drag him back dead if his viciousness warrants.’

Kerelie sank to her knees beside Efflin. Shock and terror left her in shreds. Her older brother’s trembling arms closed around her, fever-thin and bereft of comfort. Too easily, their desperate stay of reprieve could lapse back into deadly jeopardy. Tarens had yet to surmount the extraction of his final confession. Sister and brother could do nothing but cling to each other, meantime, helpless except to endure on the chance their lives might be spared in calamity.

Naught could be done to ease their cruel anguish as the dedicates hauled Tarens away.