[Lanen Kaelar 01] - Song in the Silence (5 page)

Then he began to talk.

“I was born in the North Kingdom in the
village of Arinoc, near Eynhallow at the foot of the mountains, hard by the
border with the East Mountain Kingdom. I spent most of my youth there, getting
into fights like most young men and doing badly at learning my father’s trade.
My parents died when I was fifteen, old enough to do without them but young
enough to miss them. I found myself working in my father’s stead for a while,
but I was the worst cobbler the world has ever seen.” A corner of his
mouth lifted. “A lot like you and horses. I could do it if I forced
myself, but I never liked it.”

“A few years later came a series of battles
along the eastern border. Seems one of the richer and bolder nobles from the
mountains wanted a bit more fertile land to farm, so he sent raiders. When that
didn’t work he sent soldiers; and our King started recruiting his own. I joined
up. I was out of money, and l’d have done anything that took me away from the
cobbler’s trade.”

“I learned fast, what little they took the
time to teach us. We managed to keep the raiders off, and it was all over in a
year and a half. But by then I was changed. When our captain asked us to follow
him to fight another rebel in the western half of the Kingdom; I was the first
in line. I was nineteen and immortal and I hadn’t the brains of a
cabbage.”

Jamie paused to wet his throat. I sat consciously
holding my mouth shut for fear I’d let flies in, I had pestered Jamie about his
past for most of my youth and finally given up; it was as if you had spent
years battering your head against a wall, finally turned away, and heard behind
you the soft sound of it crumbling into dust.

“Well, that battle led to another, and
another, and in a few years I found that I was a mercenary. A good one, mind.
By then we had fought together for a long time. l’d been trained by the best
and I enjoyed it. We went wherever the battle was—and there are always battles,
these little lordlings are always after more land and none of the Four Kings
are strong enough to stop them without help.” He sighed. “They were
the closest I had to friends, those men. We fought together eight years,
sometimes on land for petty barons, twice on the sea—once with the corsairs and
once against them. But I grew weary of seeing my comrades killed, one here, two
there and finally I was badly wounded myself.” His eyes were a thousand
miles away. “It was the first time I had faced my own death, and I didn’t
like the sight of it. The Captain realised it and decided to send me on a very
particular mission to shake me out of it. We’d been paid to stop the Baron of
Benin, in the southern half of the East Kingdom. He was a particularly vicious
bugger, the kind that kills women for the fun of it. ”

And there it was again. Jamie’s voice had gone
hard and cold, unforgiving, strong as a mountain’s root and distant as forever.
I shivered in the warm tavern.

“If ever a man deserved death, he was the
one. He had a bunch of louts fighting for him, the Captain said it was cruel to
kill the poor bastards. He decided to send in a small force to kill the Baron
as a way to end it. He chose me. We went in at midnight, me and two of my
comrades to watch my back.”

Jamie closed his eyes and fell silent. I knew
sure as I breathed that he was reliving that night, step by step, thought by
thought. He opened his eyes slowly and looked straight at me, and his eyes were
the eyes of one who has lost forever some part of his soul. “I killed him,
Lanen. It was so simple. I slit his throat as he slept. No noise, you see, with
a cut throat.” His voice was full of loathing, and I knew it wasn’t for
the Baron. “We slipped out the window and past the guards, and the battle
was over. No sense working for a dead man. We’d won.”

He drained his tankard, filled it and drank it
half down again before he went on. “When word got out—a careful word here
or there, you understand, nothing in the open—we began to be hired to do it
again. And again. There’s quite a call for paid killers, if they’re good at
what they do.”

He looked at me again, almost as if seeing me for
the first time. “If you are wondering, Lanen, then yes, I hated it. And
myself,” he said, and dark bitterness dragged at his voice. “But even
in such a profession there can be pride. I never caused pain once I learned how
to avoid it; I never killed women or children; and I did not take just any work
once I could pick and choose. Some I refused if I knew the victim, or if I felt
in that small core of soul I had left that the death was undeserved. I was not
always right, and I could not al ways choose—but when I could, I tried to keep
some part of myself intact.” He closed his eyes briefly and went on.
“I lost the friends I had made in the company. Eight years of living and
working together, and overnight they saw me as a creature they could not bear
to speak to—one who killed in secret.”

“I lived at the whim of those who paid me
for many years, now on my own, now with others of like profession, and as time
went on I grew harder of heart and smaller of soul, until I could barely stand
to face a glass long enough to shave. I gave up the work—just for a while, I
thought—and lived on my earnings for as long as I could, travelling where I
would, working my way slowly back to the only place I thought of as home.”

“When I finally got to my village, the first
person I saw was Will Tanner, who used to sell hides to my father. He was old
and half-blind, and I walked towards him about to speak. Then I realised what
it was I had to say, and I knew I could not bear to corrupt this place with my
presence. I left before sunset and never went back.”

“I found I had nowhere particular to go, and
even if my village was closed to me the countryside was mine to explore. So I
wandered as the whim took me, learning more about the Kingdom of the North than
I had ever known when I lived there. It took longer than I thought to go
through my money, but when I was just turned thirty, not long past Midsummer’s
Day, I found myself without a copper to my name in a small town called Beskin,
in the Trollingwood west of Eynhallow. Jamie’s face relaxed, and the ghost of a
smile crossed his face. “There was a man there, a blacksmith named
Heithrek, with a good wife and many children. The eldest was a daughter he loved
more than life. She had the height of the women of the north like her mother,
though her hair was more golden than most. She was very like you, indeed, save
for her arms.” Even as he spoke his voice grew softer and his smile more
his own. “She was truly her father’s daughter! He had taught her the art
of the forge and it showed. She was easily the match of any man in that village
for strength and skill, so she would have none of them. She was leaving her
home to seethe wide world. Ever she longed to see what lay beyond the
horizon.”

He glanced at me as if to ask had I heard the
like before. “Her father hired me for a year, as a guard, to look after
his daughter Maran Vena. It was a welcome change.”

Maran Vena. That was my mother’s name. My mother,
who left me to shift for myself as best I could at Hadron’s cold hearth. Jamie
had been bodyguard to my mother.

“Old Heithrek was lucky to find me. I’m from
those mountains myself, as I said. A man from anywhere else would have been
horrified. In the North Kingdom the women are equal with men, sometimes rulers
in their own right, but in the other three Kingdoms most men think of women as
things to be protected, not people with their own ways. The idea of a woman
setting out thus on her own would be scandalous.”

“The mother was resigned, and it seemed to
me almost glad to get this wild girl off her hands. But the blacksmith knew his
daughter, and she knew her own mind. He never even thought to fear for her
safety from me. I was no fool, I knew well enough those arms could fend me off
even without the steel she bore. But she must sleep sometime, and there are
rogues enough in the world.”

“So, as I was down to my last few coppers, I
swore fealty for as long as I had been paid, and we were ready to leave.”

“I tell you, Lanen, I hope never to see
another such farewell in this world. Both she and her fire-blackened father
wept bitter tears as they embraced. As it happens it was a meet parting, but at
the time I thought them the world’s own babes. He was dead within the year, it
was their last sight of each other. Somehow they both knew.”

“We left at sunrise, headed east. She wanted
to go explore the mountains, fool girl,” he said, with a quiet smile,
“so we set off while the good weather lasted. We tramped from foothill to high
peak until autumn caught up with us.” Jamie grinned. It was amazing to
watch him, to see the pain that had so filled him leave as it had come. “I
never did find out why she wanted to go up there. I suspect she thought if she
got high enough she could see all of Kolmar spread out below her.”

I kept silence, for I had had the same thought.
More than once.

“We must have wandered over most of Kolmar
in those three years. We joined a party going south to Elimar and travelled
over the plains for a month, just so she could see the silkweavers at their
task. We went north and walked the Trollingwood end to end—now there is a tale
and a half for a winter’s eve—then down to Sorun for Midwinter Fest, then over
to Corli and up along the coast, then back across the width of the Four
Kingdoms to the East Mountains.”

“And through all our adventures, and they
were a good many, she softened my hardened assassin’s heart and broadened my
shriveled soul. I came to love her, Lanen, as I have loved none but you
since.” He glanced shrewdly at me. “And you are well old enough now
to know she loved me as well. She would not marry me, though I asked her many
times, but we shared a bed for more than two years, and I have never known such
joy before or since.”

A wild hope rose in my heart, piercing and
unexpected. Perhaps Hadron never loved me because I was not his daughter.
Perhaps Jamie, all this time it was Jamie—

It was as if he read my thoughts. “And it’s
sorry I am, lass, but she was wise and never quickened from all our loving in
those days. Ii was best for her, I suppose, but I have regretted it all my
life.”

My newfound longing died a swift death.

“Yet after three years, I knew her not half
so well as I thought. We left the mountains to travel west again for the Great Fair
at Illara in the autumn, and I swear we had no sooner arrived than she fell
into Marik’s arms.”

I stared at him. “Marik? Who’s Marik?”

“Marik of Gundar,” said Jamie, his
voice deepening with anger. “Son to Lord Gundar, a very minor noble in the
East Mountain Kingdom. Marik’s own father had thrown him out of the family, and
Marik was just beginning to make his way as a merchant. I know only a little of
what has become of him since, but I can’t tell you for nothing that he was as
nasty a son of the Hells as ever escaped the sword.”

“What happened?” I asked. I was like a
child at the foot of a bard, spellbound, listening to the tale of my mother’s
life unfold like a ballad. I had forgot Jamie’s killing of the ruffian for the
moment, forgotten all but the weaving of my mother’s past.

Jamie sighed. “It’s not a tale I relish
telling.” He poured himself the last of the ale—a small matter indeed—and
glanced mournfully into the depths of the jug.

Despite myself I laughed. “You old liar!
This is your way of getting another round out of me.”

He smiled. “True enough, it wouldn’t go
amiss. But I’ll have to get a few rounds out of me to make room first.” I
couldn’t help myself, I grinned as I called for the ale. I stood and stretched,
checked my still-damp clothes before the fire and turned them over, and visited
the necessary myself. When I returned Jamie was seated at the table again, and
as I sat down he leaned forward on his elbows, gazing into my eyes, searching
for I know not what. He must have found it, though, for without further words
he poured a fresh tankard for us bothand took up his tale.

III

JAMIE’S TALE

“Marik. Well, he was a handsome youth, I
suppose—when we first ran into him, he was in the center of a bevy of young
beauties. Give him credit, the beggar, he saw your mother and the others
dissolved like the dew.”

“Was she beautiful, then?” I asked in a
whisper. I had heard all my life, from Jamie and Hadron both, how much I looked
like my mother, but that was always where it stopped. And to be so tall,
man-height they called it, and strong with it—“look twice to see you’re a
woman,” indeed! It cost me the world to ask, but I had to know why this
handsome young man had been so drawn to the mother I was so like.