Sword of Hemlock (Lords of Syon Saga Book 1) (10 page)

“Lady Renda—no, Gikka of—”  The boy’s shoulders slumped, and
he looked down, kicking himself automatically for his stupidity.  “Some Invader
woman.”

Aidan studied him closely.  Chul knew both names, of that he
was certain, but the boy had grown so used to hiding his intelligence, even
from himself.  The healer smiled gently.  “Lady Renda of—” But the boy’s eyes
were blank.  He would not hear it.  Aidan took the scroll case and quickly
penned her name on it, both in Dhanani script and in Syonese, with the same ink
he had used to write the letter itself.  Then he blotted it against a strip of
birch bark before handing it to Chul.  “Now when you reach Brannagh—you can
remember that much, that you seek Castle Brannagh?—just give this to the guard
at the gate.  If you go straight there, you should arrive before their
Mid-Gathering Day.  The house is still in mourning until the Feast of Bilkar…” 
He saw the confusion in the boy’s eyes.  “The Groggy Bear’s Moon,” he amended,
“but I pray they will receive you just the same.”  Aidan looked up into Chul’s
eyes.  “And Lady Renda is not ‘some woman.’  Renda of Brannagh is fully as
valiant a warrior as,” he lowered his voice, “as our own chief.  I rode with
her a while during the war, and my name will make you welcome in her home. 
Gikka of Graymonde is her squire, and it is Gikka I have asked to take you
in.” 

He had considered sending the boy straight to Graymonde
Hall; it was a day’s run closer than the castle, and he could keep to the
plains most of the way.  But if Chul should get there while Gikka was away,
which was as likely as not, he would be at the mercy of the miners—Hadrian
miners, Aidan thought with a shudder—bored, malicious men who would love
nothing better than to see how deep the Dhanani fear of the underground ran. 
Aidan shut his eyes against the horror and the rage even the memory of Hadrians
raised in him.  No, Brannagh was farther away, but the path was much safer.

“Gikka of Graymonde,” Chul repeated, turning the name quite
naturally over his tongue.  Good, thought Aidan, such a skill with accents will
serve him well.  “But why should this Gikka take me in?” muttered the boy. 
“I’m no good; I’ll probably steal from her.”

“Steal?  From Gikka?”  Aidan laughed quietly.  “I think
not.”  He looked the boy over one last time.  New leathers, knife and
sharpening stone, bow, arrows, sling, bundled furs on his back for the cold, a
few silver coins Aidan had found.  The healer stuffed a sack full of herbs and
unguents into the fur bundle and found there something that raised his brow. 
It was small, and he might not have felt it at all had he not pressed the sack
so far into the furs.  It was a ring, and pulling it out into the late
afternoon sunlight, he saw, just as he feared, that it was the chief’s sapphire
ring.  He swallowed hard, wondering if he might also find two gold armlets in
the shape of coiled serpents in that bundle.

His gaze locked upon Chul’s, and they stood a moment, both
unsure what to do.  Then quickly, Aidan stuffed the ring back into the boy’s
furs.  “You may need it,” he murmured absently.  Then the healer grasped the
boy’s forearm in a warrior’s salute.  “Now away with you, Chul Ka-Dree, and may
Anado provide for you.”

The boy nodded obediently, gratefully, then ran away across
the long shadows of the afternoon.

*          *          *

He cleaned the dead rabbit expertly, casting the clean organ
meats to the east and the foul to the west.  As he worked, he allowed himself a
quick smile of satisfaction.  He had taken the animal’s life instantly, before
it could feel a moment’s fear, and left the meat sweet with Anado’s mercy, and,
though none of the hunters were there to see it, he had passed the first of the
rites of manhood.  This rabbit was a big fat buck; the meat would last him the
entire journey if he was careful. More than that, he could get most of two fur
boots just from this rabbit’s fur, and what he lacked he could fill in with
leather strips.  Or the skin of another rabbit, he thought, licking his lips. 
Excited, he slung the carcass over his shoulder by its ears. Then he ran again,
dodging between the trees and jumping over the undergrowth, proud of his kill.

That fur’s worthless, boy.  Any fool could see that.

He stopped running and blinked into the darkness of the
shadows around him.  The voice was that of his dead father, ringing with scorn
and contempt just as it had hours ago.  Except now, it was inside his own head,
and he could not escape it.

Vaccar was dead; Chul had watched his father challenge Chief
Bakti for the right to kill him, and he had been hoping for his father to win. 
His father was right; he did not deserve to live.  If Vaccar had won, the pain
would be over by now.  But he had watched the quick, merciful strokes of the
chief’s staff break Vaccar’s neck and drop him lifeless to the ground.  In the
strangeness of the moment and the whirlwind of activity that followed while
Aidan readied him to leave the tribe, he had not had time to feel anything. 
Now, he was not sure what he felt.

Something inside him was clawing its way through his heart,
but he fought it back, desperate to keep it locked away.  He wanted only to
run, to keep the horrible voices of the afternoon away, to keep this feeling
away.  His father was dead and dishonored, and now he was alone.  Alone with
his kill.  Chul looked down, ashamed to think of what his father would say
about the rabbit he had prized only a few moments ago.

Look at it, idiot!  That rabbit was changing coat for the
coming snows.  What were you thinking?

Suddenly, he turned to look at the rabbit he had just killed
and saw that indeed the coat was a bit thin and blotchy.  He could pull tufts
of the hair out with his fingers, and below them, he could see the new cold
weather hairs at the skin surface.  They would grow a bit if he left the skin
untanned for a few days, but not enough to fill it out.  He sighed in defeat. 
The fur was worthless.

“But I killed it for the meat!” he cried into the empty
woods.  “For the meat!”  But the trees only looked down on him with loathing at
his wastefulness, and outlined in their leaves and shadows, he saw his father’s
sneer. 

This boy reasons no better than a javelin dog; he’d be better
off dead.

He ran.  His heart pounded in his chest with fear, and his
breath came in short panicked bursts, but he ran. 

Behind him, he imagined his father’s corpse with its broken
neck coming after him, a thick wooden staff in one hand and a broad homemade
candle in the other.  In his mind, he felt the sizzle of the candle’s flame
burning his flesh and the thick crack of the staff against his legs and arms,
and little gasps of pain escaped his lips.  But he did not look back.  He could
not let himself look back, because if he did—if his father was behind him, if
his dead father’s corpse was running right behind him—he would never get away. 
The rabbit fell from his shoulder, but he did not stop to pick it up.  Instead
he ran on, two miles, three.

The boy is no good.  He deserves to die!

Ten miles.  Twelve.  He cried with his fear, running
headlong through the dark forest with no idea what lay ahead of him, knowing
only that he could not look back. 

Then, abruptly, he broke into a clearing.  Some ten or
fifteen people around a campfire stopped their singing and dancing when they
heard him crash through the bushes, a few of the men rising in surprise with
weapons drawn.  But they saw he was no more than a boy and a scared boy at
that, and the men seated themselves again to resume their songs and stories.

“Come, child,” called one woman in Bremondine. She was a
young mother with chestnut hair tied in a weary bow and a harried look about
her features that seemed just now to have relaxed.  She sat with her two
children asleep on her lap and her husband’s arm thrown round her shoulders,
and she smiled invitingly to Chul, patting the ground beside her.  “The night
air’s a touch to the chill.”

The Dhanani boy only stared at her, so she rose and settled
the sleeping children against her husband’s lap before coming near him as one
might approach a strange dog.  “Come sit, lad,” she cooed.  “You’ll see no harm
here, and we’ve a bite of stew left in the pot, if you’ve stomach.”

To his surprise, he understood most of what the woman said. 
Her accents were not as clean as those of the bards who sometimes came through
the Dhanani camps, but the words were the same.

Stew, she had said.  His stomach was still tight with fear
and exertion from his run, but he could not resist the wonderful meaty smell
rising from the pot.  He took a step forward hesitantly and looked at the pot
hanging over the fire.  “I’m hungry,” he said weakly in Dhanani, hoping one
among them might understand.

The woman came closer and took his hand to lead him to the
fire.  Then she smiled again.  “Ooh, Dhanani’s no tongue of mine,” she
apologized gently, “but I know a hungry child when I see one.”  She took her
own bowl and filled it from the pot.  Then she handed it to him and watched him
accept it gratefully.  “There, now, fall to it and clean the bowl, there’s a
good lad,” she said.

“Feed a stray, Creda,” the woman’s husband muttered.

“Nonsense,” she said haughtily.  “The boy’s half-starved,
and we’ve extra in the pot.  Where’s your charity?  He’ll go his ways soon
enough.”

Chul lapped up every drop of the cold, greasy stuff so she
scraped the bottom of the pot to get him some more. Around him, a few of the
men had started singing while three of the others moved away to speak to each
other in strange heavy voices.  Plays.  They worked at plays, learning their
parts.  He watched with fascination.

“Like the plays, do you?”  Creda handed him his bowl again
and sat beside him, watching the men step through their scenes.

Chul scraped the bowl with his fingers.

“Bards and actors, us,” sighed the woman, “not that it much
matters. We’s not so much welcome as we was during the war.  No news to spread
as hasn’t been heard six times.  And of plays,” she said, brushing wisps of her
hair back from her sweaty face, “they’ve not the patience to hear one ’less it
bubble up their mirth.”  She lifted herself to take his bowl now that it was
empty.  “Me brother, Farney, that one to the left, there, he set a fine play on
the war, look you, the Fall of Kadak, with a proud Duke Brada and Lady Renda
and the knights and all, but Brannford booed it from the stage, demanding
instead the Merry Horseman.”

“Merry Horseman?” Chul repeated.  He had no idea what she
was saying.

“Aye,” answered Creda with a sideways glance at him, “can
you imagine?  No wonder it is, people think so low of us Bremondines.”

His cursed mother must have whored herself to a Bremondine.  No
son of mine is he.

He found a smile for Creda, but behind it, he felt a
seductive blackness creeping over his soul again.  An unfocused but intense
anger too dangerous to loose.  He would not let it out, could not.  Chul drew a
few quick breaths and closed his eyes, and soon the feeling passed.

“Creda,” muttered her husband shaking his head.  “The boy’d
not be understanding a word.”

“Hush, now,” she frowned over her shoulder at him as she
pulled the empty stew pot from the fire.  “So he don’t understand it, ain’t no
reason I can’t speak it to him? Sure you won’t hear it.”

“Because you cannot tell a good play from aught.”  Her
husband shifted himself against the log at his back.  “The Horseman’s true, at
least, and not half so bloody dull.”

“Who’s to say what’s true and not?  After all,” she said,
“weren’t no one there to see at the end, and with the duke dead…”  She
shrugged.  “Well, Farney’s got to fill the holes somehow, aye.”

“Holes,” he grumbled, “more like chasms, you ask me.  Do
like the way the Hadrians run away screaming.”  He laughed.  “That were funnier
than the Merry Horseman.”

“Oh,” she huffed, “you’re as bad as them at Brannford.”

Her husband only shook his head and cast a long suffering
look toward Chul.  But Chul had been watching the man’s hand absently stroking
his sleeping children’s hair, and tears welled in the boy’s eyes. Somewhere in
the back of his memory, he remembered the feeling.  His mother had touched him
that way long ago.

Creda sat beside him again and touched his arm.  “Oh, there,
there,” she soothed.  Her plump face showed a frown of concern when she looked
at the cuts and bruises of his face.  “You’ve had a hard go, haven’t you, lad? 
But it’s all right now.  You’re with us, now, and you’re welcome to stay as
long as you like.”

The boy nodded.  “Th–thank you,” he managed in Bremondine,
to the young woman’s delight.

“So you do speak, then,” the husband was saying.  “Well,
well.  Tell us, lad, whither would you go?”  He ignored the glare from his
wife.  “Considering you came from the norwest, I reckon you go southeast?” 
When Chul looked at him in confusion, the man pointed away through the forest. 
“Southeast,” he repeated.

Chul nodded.  “Brannagh,” he said simply.

“Brannagh,” laughed one of the singers, stopping in
mid-verse.  “What use has Castle Brannagh for a Dhanani, just now?  The whole
house is in mourning, what with the dead granddaughter and all.  Bad business,
that.”

“P’raps they needs of a servant?” offered a woman who sat
stitching costumes by the fire. “Though why a Dhanani…”

“Stables, maybe.  They’ve a way with horses, the Dhanani.”

“Aye.”

Creda looked up sharply.  “I’m sure it’s no business of
ours,” she scolded.  “If the lad goes to Brannagh, the gods help him there, say
I.”

“Castle Brannagh is three days’ journey afoot from here,”
said an old woman who sat casting birds’ bones on the ground between her feet. 
“Two an he runs.  Yet I sees him there by sunset tomorrow.”  She scowled up at
him, and for the first time, he could see that her eyes were clouded over with
cataracts.  Pale, colorless, the eyes of Mohoro of the Underground.  Without
thinking, he backed away from her.  “Behind him comes a storm over Brannagh,”
she said, casting the bones again.  “A terrible, terrible storm.”