The Season of the Plough

  The Season of the Plough

  being the first book of the Travalaith Saga

  by Luke R. J. Maynard

  Cynehelm Press

  Copyright ©2019 by Luke R. J. Maynard. All rights reserved.

  Luke R. J. Maynard asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  This book is a work of fiction. All of the names, characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

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  A Cynehelm Original

  Published by Cynehelm Press

  www.cynehelm.com

  First Edition: July 2019.

  ISBN (e-book): 978-1-989542-01-9

  ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-989542-02-6

  ISBN (paperback): 978-1-989542-00-2

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  The Travalaith Saga

  Book I

  THe Season Of THE PLOUGH

  From the Uliri Imidactuai,

  the Mysteries of the Unwatchers:

  Ulira Kedwana othuriamillas

  Şar burund mi bethal kitad—

  Fusun iralila ap kirilamaillas

  Ic finiamaira golad.

  Ali li umilda êtrila havila

  Ai fulcon iarthona fenast

  Şar gurinda Ionai umaliamaillas

  Othuril Tûrtha caivectast.

  ______________________________

  The Riddle of Kedwyn was spoken

  On wind that was choked into dust:

  “The Chain of the Night shall be broken,

  And so will have earned its mistrust.

  But born of the womb of a maid of the wood,

  O, sword of the people, you stand;

  In you shall the will of all folk rise anew

  And Tûr’s will be brought fully to hand.”

  —Uliri Imidactuai Book IV:2

  ONE

  A TRAIL OF HOT BLOOD dappled and cratered the virgin snow, etching a grisly path deep into the heart of the ancient wood. Still red and gleaming, it had been warm enough to dimple the smooth surface of the year’s first squall when it fell. Robyn was the first of them to crest the hill, and she knelt so close to the poacher’s tracks that she could smell the fresh blood beneath the chill of the air.

  She put a gloved hand to her nose as she studied the marks. The smell of it called back a distant memory, threatening to lure her mind away to a place she did not want to go. It’s only sheep’s blood, she reminded herself. She grounded her restless thoughts in the sting of the wind, feeling it in her ears and the tops of her cheeks. The crisp snow crunched and squeaked beneath her boots as she rose to her feet.

  “I have his trail,” she called, but not too loudly. There was no use in alerting the quarry too soon. When it was clear the wind had drowned her out, she gripped her bladed spear low on its haft and brandished the weapon high overhead to signal the men below.

  The wickedly barbed heads of three identical polearms shot up in answer, and the men advanced. The wind howled fiercely on the crest of the ridge, whipping at their faces as they came up out of the hill’s shadow. Their cloaks of green and brown were patched against the cold with motley scraps of a dozen fabrics from a dozen lands, but few of those lands had ever faced the naked chill of a Haveïl winter: their colourful garments took the bite out of the gusting wind, but not much more.

  Only twenty Havenari remained in Haveïl now, keeping watch over the border towns. Of those twenty, only four had scaled the nameless escarpment—and not the strongest four, either. Those square-jawed, brawny warriors who were still in the bloom of their youth had taken their horses up the Serpent Trail. Eager for action, glad as falcons to be uncaged at last, the strongest men had sped along the poacher’s most likely route, fully mailed and spoiling for a fight, if a fight could be had.

  For now, Robyn was pleased to be rid of them. Most of the Havenari were noisy men, Imperial veterans weighed down by the trappings and tools of war. Life in the Havenari was nobler than desertion and paid better than retirement, and so their ranks had often swelled with the old and cowardly—neither of whom ever seemed to last the winter. The three men at her back were too young, too old, too sick to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the big men of the vanguard—but here on the hunt, they moved with an easy grace and an altogether different cunning.

  Her captain, Toren, was first up the hill behind her: he was no coward, and he was determined to prove he was a few winters yet from being old. His steps, while far from spry, were cautious and swift. His pitted coat of battle-worn Travalaithi chainmail was as much a part of him as his own skin, and he mounted the hill in silence where the younger men might have rustled and clanked fiercely on the ascent.

  “Here,” said Robyn, pointing to the blood. There were footprints, too, though a few minutes of gentle snow had started to fill them.

  Toren frowned. “I thought for sure he’d have taken the trail with an animal that size.”

  “We’ll lose the tracks if the snow picks up,” Robyn urged.

  Toren narrowed his steely eyes at the sky. “It’s about to,” he said—then, under his breath, “get your brother moving or we’re leaving him for the others.”

  Robyn met his hard gaze for a moment, but bit her tongue and moved to the edge of the plateau. Bram was predictably struggling on the slope, crawling upward with both hands in the snowy earth. Young Tsúla, barely twenty summers old with the slight build of an Easterner, was shouldering Bram’s pack and helping him over the top.

  “Get up here,” she barked. “We’re losing him.” She took Bram’s arm in hers and tried to haul him up, but in those early days she was still lean and spindly, and he did not offer much help. Bram’s hollow face was pale and frustrated as he found his footing. Tsúla, focusing quickly on the blood, was beaming with excitement.

  “We’ve got him!” he whispered sharply. “Venser’s going to be jealous.”

  “We haven’t caught him yet,” Robyn said. She clapped a hand on Bram’s shoulder and met his wavering gaze.

  “Bram,” she pleaded. “Focus. We have a job to do.”

  “I…I don’t want to fight,” he pleaded.

  She could not embrace him, not in front of the captain. But there was a firmness in her eyes.

  “You won’t have to,” she said. “But we have to keep moving. How’s your head?”

  Bram shrugged. “No worse than most mornings. I just…this isn’t how I start most mornings.”

  “Afternoons,” Tsúla corrected him, patting him on the back without a hint of judgment. He bounded toward Toren, who knelt in the fading tracks trying to make sense of them.

  “Thought he’d be dragging the sheep,” said Toren. “He’s carrying it. Big man.”

  Tsúla whistled low. “How big was the ewe?”

  “Darmod says two hundred.”

  Tsúla looked up at the treeline, his dark eyes wide. “Big man,” he agreed.

  Toren stood up as the brother and sister approached. “You two ready to move?”

  “W
e are,” Robyn told him—but Toren didn’t look convinced.

  “I’ll take point,” he said. “If you lot have any dignity left, you’ll keep up with me. At this rate, we’ll be lucky to catch him before he’s dyed and spun the wool for market.” The pace Toren set, grunting and breathing hard in his armour, was meant to punish them—and maybe, she thought, to punish himself, for doing something as foolish as aging.

  Bram took a moment to steady himself and took a deep breath. His tremors were quiet this morning, but there was an unsteadiness in him that only a sister could see.

  “You ready?” she asked him.

  “Come on,” said Bram, and started off after Toren.

  As they pushed deeper into the woods, the chimney-smoke coming up from Widowvale and the sound of the laughing river echoing up from Miller’s Riffle were both lost to the wind. They passed away from all the places that had ever been named, into the oldest part of the forest.

  “Stay close,” Toren urged. His hand brushed the side of his neck absently, as it often did when he was nervous. “And keep that one quiet.”

  Robyn looked to Bram, who was doing all right for himself. He was moving swiftly and silently now, and seemed to pay Toren no mind, but still she fought the urge to say something in her brother’s defense. Tsúla must have seen her set her jaw tightly with resentment, for he fell back from the captain and moved quietly to the young woman’s side.

  “He means well,” Tsúla whispered.

  “He’s cruel,” Robyn spat. “To both of us. To you, too. He’s been like this for months.”

  Tsúla sighed. “It’s getting colder. Could be his old wounds ache in the winter. I know mine do.”

  He pulled back his sleeve to expose the old scars that circled his wrist and forearm. In the cold, the marks stood out ghostly pale against his skin of burnished gold.

  “You see these scars?”

  Robyn nodded. “They’re looking better this year.”

  “My scars will get a little better every year,” said Tsúla. “His will get worse. They say he was ravaged by a Horror.”

  Robyn froze in her tracks for a moment. “Impossible,” she whispered. “He’s not old enough. The Siege of Shadow was eighty years ago.”

  “Sure,” said Tsúla. “But no doubt some of the Horrors escaped. It was the Havenari who hunted down the last remnants and wiped them out.”

  Robyn shook her head. “I’ve never known the Havenari as anything but mercenaries. A militia for the border towns.”

  “Then you can imagine how unhappy this life makes him,” said Tsúla.

  “I can feel it,” said Robyn. “You can feel it in the way he treats us. It’s not fair, and there’s no reason for it.”

  Tsúla put a comforting hand on her shoulder. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “Don’t do anything rash. Wait him out. Venser’s likely to challenge him for First Spear next summer, soon as he’s ready.”

  “When he’s ready?”

  “He reckons a captain of any sort, First Spear included, ought to be able to read and write. He’s working on it.”

  “That’s a long time to wait,” Robyn said, frowning. “But he’s a commander worth waiting for.”

  “He’ll call us ‘sorry rats,’ quite often,” Tsúla warned. “If you have no taste for criticism, he’ll be no better.” Ahead of them, Toren had stopped at the clearing’s edge before disappearing into the thorns.

  “Quit your chattering,” he spat. “You’re getting short-changed, Bram, to put up with a lovers’ quarrel.” He smirked at himself, then turned his back and kept up the climb, trying not to look fatigued.

  “It’s not the criticism,” she said. “It’s the disrespect. It’s the way he makes us feel small.”

  “He’s endured a lot,” said Tsúla. “It’s made him a difficult man.”

  She almost scoffed aloud. “I thought we came out here to get away from difficult men.”

  Tsúla rubbed his wrists in the cold. “We all came for different reasons, I think. Even Toren.”

  “He came,” said Robyn, “because the Grand Army would’ve flogged him for bullying his own regiment.” But Tsúla only smiled his thin smile and nodded in thought.

  “Another season,” he said. “Two seasons at most, and Venser will vie for command. He’s got the support to win it, and he’ll be a good sight more fair to everyone.”

  “I want to believe you,” said Robyn. “I really do.” She looked to Bram, who was breathing hard but keeping up.

  “Let him fade out in his own time,” Tsúla offered. “He was a great man, once. Let that go with him.”

  Robyn sighed. “Well, he’s too much ‘great man’ for my tastes.”

  “Most men are,” said Tsúla with a laugh. “Come on. Let’s catch him that poacher.”

  Even where the wood was thickest, it was veined throughout with old and secret trails for those who knew how to seek them out. Beaten down by the vanished ancestors of the Vosi people, they lay dormant beneath the snow, the last hidden scars of an ancient age. Buildings could be hewn down, barrows looted, and monuments smashed into dust. But a road, once walked, could never be fully unmade.

  Toren cared little enough for their history, but he had taken care to learn the old paths just the same. In recent years, the Havenari had seen deserters from the Grand Army and fugitives from the Iron City who thought the forests of Haveïl would bring them sanctuary. Toren delighted in outpacing them through the woods, surrounding them with his men, springing upon them when they thought they were safe. He took great pride in the rumours that his company had some hidden power to side-step, like wood fairies, through the very trees and emerge where they pleased, as he hoped to do with the poacher who fled from him now.

  As the day wore on the snow was falling more steadily, and would bury the tracks in time, but the path cut by his quarry was clumsy and straight, establishing a clear direction of travel. With practiced eyes he sought out the hidden ways, clove through the bushes, and led his three whispering subordinates onto one of the ancient trails. A half-mile on that hidden way would put them well in front of the thief, where they could make an end of his crimes in a manner worth boasting about.

  It was on this stealthy errand that the Havenari first discovered the mysterious child. Following the poacher’s tracks, they might have missed her altogether. She was naked in the snow, nearly invisible where she crouched a hundred feet up the hidden pathway. She had gathered beside her some leaves and stems from a carpet of chickweed that shivered in the breeze where she had brushed the snow off it. She was perhaps nine or ten years old, and pale as snow herself—as pale as death, with the white hair of a grandmother—and she paid Toren no mind as he stood in mute astonishment, watching her forage until the others came in sight.

  “You see something?” asked Tsúla. Jaw hanging open, Toren gripped the young man’s shoulder and turned him toward the child.

  “What is that?” Toren asked.

  Tsúla blinked his dark eyes and looked again. “That is a naked girl,” he pronounced. “I thought your years in the Grand Army would—”

  “Shut up,” Toren snapped. One hand rubbed thoughtfully at his neck, but the other tightened around the haft of his spear.

  “What’s she doing out here alone?” Tsúla asked. “She must be frozen to death. I wouldn’t last the morning out here in naught but my armed-for-birth—”

  He fell silent, voice trailing off, as he caught sight of Toren’s white-knuckled grip on his weapon.

  “That’s not a human child,” the old captain whispered. “It’s a monster.” He smoothly lowered the blade of his weapon toward the girl.

  “What are you doing?” asked Tsúla.

  “You heard me; that’s no right child,” said Toren. “Don’t let your eyes fool you. There’s some evil about her.”

  Tsúla narrowed his eyes, squinting down the trail toward her. “Is she an aeril?” he asked. “I’ve never met one, but I’ve heard a few of the Elderkin still live
and work in these parts.”

  “Something worse,” said Toren. “A witch. A fairy. Maybe a Horror herself.”

  “She’s not a Horror,” said Tsúla. “She’s a little girl. Look at her.”

  They looked. She had turned toward them, watching silently. Her eyes were a brilliant green, the only drops of colour on her whole pale body.

  “Put up your blade,” snapped Robyn. “Stop this madness.”

  Toren shot her a cold glare. “I don’t like your tone.”

  “She’s just a child.” There was a sudden steely resolve in her. Tsúla caught sight of it and stepped away. Bram saw it and shuffled closer. His hands were shaking again.

  “You’re a child,” Toren shot back. “You’ve not heard half the stories I’ve heard. You think every Horror comes at you ugly and slimy? Only those too weak to deceive you. You think the fairy-folk are weak because they’re wee? This is a bad fairy-tale waiting to happen. I’ll not go to green in these woods, never to be heard from again. We’re knee-deep in winter. No human babe could long survive out here without a stitch of clothing on her. She’s not human.”

  “She could have fallen away from a caravan,” said Tsúla softly.

  “Aye,” said Toren. “Or we could all wake up on a hillside a thousand years from now, white-haired and robbed of our souls.”

  Tsúla stood his ground, breathing slowly, forcing down the loudness of the conversation with measured calm. “I’m not prepared to discuss the life or death of a child,” he said. “None of us ought to be. Let’s take her back to Widowvale. The Reeve can decide what sort of creature she is.”

  “If we take a vengeful fairy out of her wood,” said Toren, “she might kill us all. Dryads used to live in these woods, they say. The fairies of old don’t like to leave their home. Taking her to the village is the last thing I’d do.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” snapped Robyn. “Kill us all? I’ve seen pumpkins twice her size. Even Bram could handle her.”