The Season of the Plough Read online

  “I have an intuition about such things,” said Toren. “I’ll not take any chances with the people we’re sworn to protect: our own people.”

  “Aye, that’s how it starts, isn’t it?” said Tsúla. “I’ve heard words like yours before.” He turned his dark eyes aside before Toren could see the old memories welling in them.

  “Bram, give me your cloak,” said Robyn. Her brother doffed his patchwork mantle without a second thought, shaking the snow from it.

  “She’s not coming back with us,” said Toren.

  “She is,” said Robyn. “Tsúla, go put this ’round her.”

  “Me? Why me?”

  “Because you won’t have the stomach for my part in this,” she said. She turned her gaze back on Toren, who was positively fuming.

  “I’ve made my decision,” said Toren. “I hunted the Horrors. I’m the only one left in this sad little band who has. I’ve smelt their blood, and I tell you, I’m smelling it now. There’s something vile in this little creature. Putting it to the sword is our duty as protectors of this land. I’ll do it myself, if you’re too soft for it. Stand aside.”

  “Mad,” Robyn said. “You’ve gone mad.”

  “Maybe,” said Toren. “But you’ll do as you’re told.”

  Robyn looked to the child, who watched them with a guileless, doe-eyed face, and to Toren’s steely gaze. Tsúla approached the girl, cloak outstretched, but paused in his stride, turning back to the standoff.

  “Wait for the summer,” he urged. “Wait for Venser.” But Robyn laid down her bladed spear and reached for her sword. She was still growing in those days, and did not have the muscle to move the heavy polearm with speed. But the trail was narrow and the branches close on all sides; perhaps the sword would serve her better here.

  Toren’s jaw shook and he took a step back. He set down his own spear as his longsword sprang to life in his hands. “So it’s mutiny, is it?”

  “That’s up to you,” said Robyn. “Change your mind now. We’re only following your orders if you come to your senses. The men don’t even need to know you lost your wits with fear at the sight of a child.”

  “I’ll not stand here and take—”

  “Put away your sword,” ordered Robyn. “The child comes with us.”

  “Do as she says,” Bram said softly, stepping between them. His trembling hand was on the rusted hilt of his old sword, but Toren had never seen the boy draw steel, not even in practice. The battered hilt was so ruined that the old man wondered if the whole sword would shake apart in a shower of rust flakes on its way out of the scabbard.

  “Do you need her?” Bram asked cryptically.

  “I don’t,” whispered Robyn, and Bram’s shoulders relaxed.

  Toren spat in the dirt. “You think I’m so old I can’t fight a woman, and the useless drunk she hides behind?”

  “You’re afraid of a tiny, naked, unarmed little girl,” said Robyn. “I can only imagine you’re scared to death of a grown woman in warm britches, with a sword of her own. I don’t need to hide behind a useless drunkard to deal with the likes of you.”

  “You’re too kind to me, dear sister,” said Bram.

  “Thank you for saying so,” said Robyn, without taking her eyes from Toren’s sword-point.

  Ahead of them, Tsúla had reached the girl, who had come the last few steps to him with wide-eyed curiosity. He wrapped Bram’s old woollen cloak around her tightly, and she delighted in its softness.

  “This is absurd,” said Toren. “We’ve got a poacher to find, and you’re letting him get away. We’ll leave her behind and press on, but be it on your head.”

  “She’ll be dead of cold when the sun’s gone.”

  “That’s not our concern.”

  “We’re taking her back to Widowvale,” said Robyn. “Now. We’re giving her food and shelter there, until we can find out whose child she is and where she came from.”

  “You’re willing to die over this, girl?” said Toren.

  Robyn rolled out the tension in her shoulders. “I’ll take a slim chance of it, aye.”

  “Robyn,” called Tsúla. “You’d better come listen to this.”

  “In a moment,” called Robyn. “I’m fighting to the death just now.” She raised her eyebrows at Toren, who had been holding his sword at the ready for a long moment—long enough to remind him how heavy it was. The last eight years had made it no lighter.

  “I am, aren’t I?” she asked. “Are we really crossing swords over whether or not the sworn protectors of Haveïl mean to butcher a lost child?”

  They stood for a long moment, measuring each other’s resolve. In the great war-poems of the Hanes, in sagas full of heroes, the challenge would have ended with a chorus of ringing steel. But Toren’s boasting of his glory days had not been empty. He had spent enough years on true battlefields to know that killing was not much better than dying, and that it brought no pleasure to men of reason and honour when it could be avoided. With a derisive snort, he lowered his sword-point warily. Men who boasted of killing were fiercely proud of it, Robyn knew. But men like Toren, men who had truly done more than their share of it, knew just how little that pride was worth, in the end.

  In the long silence, Tsúla had tried to hoist the little girl and carry her over, but she slipped his grasp and insisted on running over herself. Fumbling and twisting free of Tsúla’s grasp, she came directly over to the standoff, dragging Bram’s long cloak like a bridal train, hood raised over her tangled white hair.

  “My sword’s meant for better blood than yours,” warned Toren. “I’ve no weapon cheap enough to stain with the blood of a mutineer.”

  Robyn’s arms and legs ached with fear. She fought to keep her breath steady, even as it jerked and pulled in her chest like a frightened horse pulling at the reins.

  “I’m no mutineer,” she breathed.

  Toren jerked his head toward the point of her sword. “Really.”

  “I challenge you for First Spear. Fairly and formally, under the Code of Veritenh.”

  Toren, fuming, slipped his sword back into its sheath. If she had wanted to strike, that would have been the moment.

  “First Spear!” he scoffed. “You’re a stupid girl!”

  “Call muster,” she said. “We’ll see.”

  “When the Havenari muster at—”

  “I could challenge you for First Spear now,” she said. “We’ve split up. Who knows where the others are? They’re dead, for all we know. Eaten by Horrors.”

  “They’re not dead,” Toren muttered. “They’re a mile away, dragging their tails up the Serpent Trail. And don’t ever name the Horrors of Tamnor in jest.”

  “They’ve no voting rights until they return, Captain. Until they return, the four of us decide who leads, here and now. We’ll tally the votes of the men later. So says the Code.”

  Toren clenched his jaw. “The gods have cursed me with a literate woman,” he sighed. “Fine. The four of us will decide—”

  “I stand with my sister,” Bram offered.

  “Of course you do,” Toren spat. “Tsúla, put an end to this madness.”

  Tsúla shut his eyes and took a steadying breath. “I back Robyn for First Spear,” he said softly. Toren’s eyes widened with fury.

  “You’re not serious. After what I’ve done? I took you in. All of you!”

  Tsúla was at a loss to say more, but did not recant.

  “You don’t want to be First Spear,” Toren sneered. “No one wants that! Least of all you.”

  “You’re right,” said Robyn. “I don’t. When we call muster, I’m sure the other men will side with you, and give you back your command. I’ll be First Spear for all of an afternoon, I’m sure. But while the sun lasts, the girl lives, and she comes back to the village with us. The Reeve will decide what to do with her. Only when she’s in his hands, not yours, will the men decide my fate.”

  Toren threw up his hands in defeat. “So be it,” he said. “Until tonight. Even you can’
t destroy the Havenari that fast. But when I resume my command, you and your tosspot coward brother are out. Out of the Havenari and out of the villages I protect. You can go back to where I found you, begging and whoring for scraps on some deserted border road.”

  “Careful,” she warned him.

  “Tonight,” he shot back. “Till then—I await your command, sir. Savour it while you can.”

  “We return to Widowvale,” she said. “We bring the little girl with us. Alive, as if that needed to be said.”

  Tsúla bent down to the girl. “Hello, little one,” he said.

  The girl smiled. “Ru valam,” she answered.

  Tsúla looked back to Robyn with concern. “I—we don’t understand,” he said.

  “Ru valam,” the girl insisted. “Ei, ru mith, sumorim, valam.” She gestured at something—the trees, the snow, maybe the land itself.

  “What language is that?” asked Tsúla. “Does anyone know? It’s no eastern tongue.”

  “Viluri, I think,” said Robyn.

  Toren raised his eyebrows—but, cowed for the moment, said nothing.

  “The old aeril tongue?” asked Tsúla. “Are you sure?”

  “No.”

  “Can you speak it?”

  “No.”

  “Eloru, eloru anur lurit loamali,” said the girl. There was a spark of excitement in her eye that seemed, in all respects, utterly human.

  “Oh, this is absurd,” said Toren, frowning.

  “Just the same,” said Tsúla. He bent down to the girl. “We’re taking you back to our village. To Widowvale. You’ll be safe there. Do you understand?”

  She touched her chest. “Aewyn,” she said.

  “Aewyn,” said Tsúla. He pointed at her. “Is that your name? Aewyn?”

  “Aewyn,” she repeated, nodding.

  “Good. She has a name.”

  “Look at her,” said Toren. “Skinny as a wet rat. That’s probably her word for hungry.”

  “All the more reason to get her back to the village,” said Robyn. She looked up at the sky. It was not as cold as it had been in years past. Perhaps an ordinary child could have survived out here like this, at least for an hour or two. But the snow was coming down thick and heavy now, with great fat flakes clustering on their mail-coats and filling in the tracks they’d left coming onto the hidden trail.

  “We’ve lost our quarry, no doubt,” said Toren. “That poacher’s halfway to the white moon by now, so you have my thanks for that, as well.”

  Tsúla nodded. “There’s nothing to be done. This is the third sheep from Widowvale in three years. If we ride back early next year, before the first snow, we’ll see him again.”

  “You sound awfully sure of that,” said Toren.

  “I am,” said Tsúla, “unless we’ve got our little poacher right here. How about it, Aewyn? Did you carry a two-hundred-pound sheep up that hill with those twiggy little arms?”

  She shook her head. “Thirumalnu,” she said. “Lai lurit thirumalnu.”

  Tsúla held his arms wide, as if to indicate a sheep. “Baa,” he said.

  She laughed at that and bleated back. “Baa,” she replied.

  “By all the gods,” Toren spat, as he turned to begin the trek home.

  Tsúla’s hunting-horn was an heirloom of his vanished house, cut from some strange foreign beast, and sounded like no other horn west of Syrkyst. It was the finest of its kind in the West, and when he set it to his lips, its tremendous call shook the whole valley from the high plateau of the deep wood to the Iron Road far to the south. The Havenari heard it along the riverbank, where they combed the mud downstream of Miller’s Riffle for signs of the poacher’s crossing. They heard it on the Serpent Trail, the winding road that marked the only route to the other border towns without doubling back to the highway. They heard it across the sprawling floor of the little vale; and wherever they stood, they turned their horses or their feet to the great moot-hall of Widowvale. The townsfolk were hastening there, too, eager to look on the stranger who had been poaching Darmod’s sheep and to see justice done.

  From the steep slope of the escarpment, Tsúla took a quiet pride in watching them scurry across the snow-dusted fields. He led the girl by the hand for a time, until she at last suffered herself to be carried. Bundled in his cloak as they met the wind on the edge of the deep wood, she began to shiver a little—like an ordinary child, he thought, not like some fairy of another world. It brought him comfort, as did her silent, wide-eyed company. Behind them, with raw nerves and with their blood still up, the other three followed him down the hill at their own pace.

  “Don’t worry about them,” he whispered to the girl, though she did not understand. He was mostly trying to quell his own nerves. Robyn’s quarrels with the captain had never before come to naked steel—and he did not know how challenging Toren for First Spear now would affect Venser’s challenge in the summer. Both of their swords were back in their scabbards now, and their spears hoisted like walking sticks rather than brandished like weapons—but no less sharp had been their words atop the hill: sharp words were not so easily put away once they had been unsheathed.

  The village of Widowvale was larger and busier now than Tsúla remembered it. In just eight years since the first clearing of scrub, the industrious women and a few men had built a mill and a vineyard, cleared as much field and pasture for farming as they could ever hope to work, and raised an impressive grand moot-hall that could hold everyone in the village when the occasion called for it. He could spot the other Havenari at a distance, even before he could make out their faces in the snow. They were the seasonal visitors, men who took in the sights as they walked with awe. The locals hunched their heads in the cold and hurried past the rugged outriders to the warmth of the hall-fire.

  “Taking your time, Venser?” he called.

  Venser was a head above the others, a tall broad-shouldered man whose silhouette was hard to mistake. His long strides had put him well ahead of his own four-man search party as they trudged across a fallow field.

  “Tsúla? Is that you?” He put his hand to his eyes and squinted through the snowfall. “What’ve you got there?”

  “It’s a naked girl,” said Tsúla.

  “Don’t you wish,” Venser began to laugh, but trailed off as the bundle shifted in the young man’s arms.

  “A foundling child, I mean. She was out in the thick, far from any trail now in use.”

  “That’s our poacher?” asked Venser.

  Tsúla shook his head. “He’s still out there. We picked up his trail, but we couldn’t leave her to freeze to death. We’ll get her inside. There will be other chances to catch our poacher.”

  Venser seemed unconvinced. “Toren said that?”

  “Toren wants nothing to do with her,” said Tsúla, leaning in close as they came together. “Says she’s dangerous.”

  “You can’t be serious. Let me see her.”

  Tsúla pulled back the cloak from the little girl’s hooded face. One green eye peeped out.

  “Otabia?” she said.

  Venser let out a deep laugh. “Hello, little one. Truly, a worthy adversary. No wonder it took all four of you to subdue her.”

  “Enough of that,” said Tsúla. “There’s been some real trouble about it.”

  “No trouble,” barked Toren, who had caught up with them. “Just call muster outside,” he said. “I’ve got something to say when the men are assembled.” He said that word, men, with a sharp accent and a sidelong glance at Robyn, who glared defiantly back at him but seemed shaken by the whole business.

  “Something happened,” said Venser. “Something serious?”

  Tsúla pushed him away from the old captain and lowered his voice. “Toren wanted to kill the girl,” he whispered. “He would have, if not for Robyn.”

  “Three Maidens, he didn’t,” cursed Venser. “Why? He’s a hard man, but even he’s no butcher.”

  “I saw it with my own eyes,” said Tsúla. “Out of the blue. No
warning. No reason. The moment he laid eyes on her, he was ready to cut her down.”

  “That makes no sense,” said Venser, shaking his head. “Even for him. There’s something more to it; there must be.”

  “I only know what I saw. He looked ready to cut clear through us to get to her. I don’t think he would have, but all the same—”

  “Do the others know?”

  “They will soon,” said Tsúla. “Help me call muster.” The two men set about wrangling the others; Venser’s voice was as big as his broad barrel chest, and it did not take long.

  They were met at the gates to the moot-hall by the newest Reeve of Widowvale, a portly clerk named Marin who had followed his sister out from the Iron City.

  “You’ve got him!” he said with premature excitement.

  “We’ve got something, at least,” said Toren. “But not your poacher. Someone will be in to speak with you once we sort out our business.”

  Tsúla set down his squirming bundle to the Reeve’s alarm. “This little lady could use some proper clothes, if there’s anyone can spare them.”

  Marin looked down with some surprise. “I—oh, of course.”

  “Run along then, little lamb,” said Tsúla. “In you go.” She took the Reeve’s hand and followed without complaint.

  “Aewyn’s her name,” said Robyn. “At least, we think it—”

  “So!” Toren barked, even before Aewyn and the Reeve had left them. Tsúla hastily shut the door after them and took a supportive stand beside Robyn, who looked ready to be sick.

  “There has been a challenge for First Spear,” he said. The men went silent.

  “Some of you have served with me a long time,” Toren went on. “Some of you will recall I took up the Leaf more than eight years ago. I served and trained to lead under Sumac of the Fairfold, himself called by Janus Veritenh on his deathbed. I fought and cleared Horrors in the Fairfold and the Wastes—real ones, left behind after the Siege of Shadow. Ere that, I served in the Grand Army for thirty-six years. I fought for our Imperator in the Annexation. I was blooded in Estelonne, and again in the Forty-Nine Day Siege. I fought the karach in the Verdant Wastes, and unlike most of those poor souls I lived to tell of it. I achieved the rank of Marshal of the Fifth Legion of the Blade. I am a proven captain, and I have lost no man to strife or accident in my eight years of command.”