The Season of the Plough Read online

  “The far North has ten thousand fairy-stories,” he told the hushed assembly. “In the Age of Sun, the elders say, the world was hot with magic, like a pie fresh from the oven. A hundred fairies lived in every house, they say, and I’ve no reason to disbelieve them.”

  At the side of the hall, far from the fire and swathed in shadow, Tsúla watched him with what looked like approval. Bundled in the young outrider’s cloak, draped in a set of farmer’s clothes too big for her, the little white-haired girl listened to the stories with awe even though she seemed not to understand the words. Such was the power of Grim’s voice when he was deep in his tales.

  “Some of your grandsires, no doubt, were children of the Occupation,” he went on. “They remember the Horrors that came to Travalaith. Men like Toren know of no magic but black magic—and who’s to blame them? Not I, for one. But I tell you, north of the river Ban, there’s magic a hundred colours thick. Wise women and fairies, seal-spirits and ghost bears and the restless dead, too. It’s said the wastes of Cuinen get so cold at night that even Tûr and the Ten are afraid to walk there. But there are older gods than the Ten, and the dryads of old come even before them. They lived in the First Forest, and played among the vanished trees before the ice came. And mark my words, in your lucky summer lands, they live here still.”

  “A fairy-child, then,” said one of the skeptical farmwives. “An estrel of the wood. This is your explanation?”

  “Let him speak,” said the Reeve.

  “I’m sure your Southern tales warn you about the dangers of inviting a spirit into your home. But in the Banlands, to this very day, travelers live or die by the custom of hospitality. Many’s the story of a family cursed when they let in a fairy. But those tales are outnumbered a hundredfold by the curses laid on families who turn away a traveler in need. You say she’s fairy-touched? I’m no skeptic. I’ll have you at your word. But if you say we take her in at our peril, I tell you all, you turn her away at yours.”

  The assembly murmured at that, and were still restless when the heavy door edged open just wide enough for Venser and Robyn to slip in. Robyn crept round to Tsúla’s side like a cat, but Venser was too big for such tricks, and Grim waited for him to nudge his way through the crowd before he began again.

  “She might grant us wishes,” a woman called, “if we find the right kind of rope to bind her.” A few chuckled uneasily; some gave it serious thought. Tsúla scoffed at the notion as Robyn, who seemed not to hear it, slid onto the bench beside him with a loud creak.

  “Hush up, if you’re joining us,” snapped Karis, Grim’s wife. “You all talk about this little girl as if she’s some fairy you caught like a firebug in a glass lantern. Even you,” she added to Grim, nudging her husband in good humour. Great talespinner though he was, Grim stumbled over a reply, the villagers laughed, and the tension in the room eased just a bit. He edged aside, gave her a little room at the fire.

  “She’s a living, breathing child,” Karis went on. “Whatever else she may be, she’s that above all else. I’ve six children myself; I know one when I see one. Forget what ought to be done with a fairy-blooded foundling. That’s talk for other seasons. Ask yourselves, tonight, what ought to be done with an abandoned child. Start there.” She moved to sit down, before turning back to the muttering assembly.

  “And if it turns out you do get some wishes granted out of it,” she finished, “ask the Lord of Forests for a little compassion, maybe.”

  “An ordinary child, then,” shouted another voice. It was Darmod, the farmer whose ewe had been stolen, and whose poacher the Havenari had failed to catch on account of the girl. “And who will feed her, then? I’m in for a third lean winter, now. You’ve six little mouths of your own to feed, Karis. Can you afford a seventh?”

  “If need be,” she said proudly.

  “Perhaps we’ll raise the price of wine,” said Grim, which took the wind out of Darmod’s sails straight away.

  “Now hold on,” said Bram, who had crept in with the Havenari almost to no one’s notice. “Let’s not be hasty. I’ll help you raise her before that happens.”

  “I’ll not see a foundling raised by the town drunk,” Karis snapped—but Grim, surprisingly, contradicted her.

  “We’d be grateful for the help, lad,” he said. There was always a natural friendship, to be sure, between the town vintner and the town drunk, but there was something more behind Grim’s sad grey eyes that made even Karis reconsider the harshness of her words.

  “The Havenari cannot offer much,” said Robyn, “but when we winter in Widowvale, we’ll do what we can.” She hesitated. “I mean—those who’ll stay with me.”

  The Reeve raised an eyebrow at the woman. “And you speak for the Havenari?”

  Robyn swallowed hard. “I do,” she said. Grim thought she looked terrified.

  “We’ve no money,” said one farmer.

  “Neither have we,” said another. “But we have a dry roof, and she’s welcome to that—till it caves in, at least.”

  “We can spare a silver rider a year,” came another voice. “Two, if my husband hits that vein he’s going on about.”

  The clamour of the hall quickly grew as some villagers offered to pool what goods and coin they could for her welfare. Others, offering nothing, felt the need to be heard offering nothing as loudly as possible. The Reeve took the opportunity to whisper something to his sister Karis before thumping his staff on the moot-hall floor and demanding silence.

  “I’ve heard enough,” he said—then, stroking his chin, “nearly enough. Who’s the clerk for the miners this year?”

  “The foreigner,” shouted Darmod.

  “We’re all foreigners,” Tsúla snapped, his nerves struck. “His name is Fen’din.”

  “Fen’din,” Marin repeated. “Where is he?”

  “He hasn’t come in for the season,” said Grim. “None of them have.”

  “We should wait for the men,” said one old woman. “It should be the villers and the hillers making these decisions together.”

  “We’ve had first snow,” said Marin. “The census-tellers came and went weeks ago. There’s not many who’d care to winter in the south hills, beyond the comfort of the village. They were late last year, and came home, every one of them, rich as border vasils. I’d like to think it’s happened again.”

  A low murmur of approval went through the townsfolk.

  “We’ve been uncommonly prosperous,” said Marin. “And the miners have been uncommonly lucky when it comes to dodging the Imperial tax census. Widowvale indeed! We’ve made a good life here, and I’ve heard it said that we’d all be more noble if only our conditions were better. Well, conditions are fair to good. I think we can spare the cost of a child between us—and if your house will take her in, Grim, we’ll see to it no one family shoulders the burden.”

  “Six children, seven children,” muttered Karis. “It’s not as if I’ve got any leisure to lose.”

  “Then I’ve made my judgment,” Marin said. “The girl will live at Grimstead, for as long as the house of Grim can feed her. The town will furnish any expense beyond what they can bear; the hillers shave more than enough off the Imperial Tax to absorb the cost.”

  A murmur of approval sifted through the crowd. The women seemed pleased enough with the idea of spending their husbands’ coin before it was mined.

  “You can all help save a poor orphan’s life,” Grim told the assembly, “by drinking all the wine you can.”

  At that, the townsfolk cheered. Marin cast a sideways glance at his brother-in-law, but a thin smile cracked his round face.

  “It’s settled,” he said. “She goes to Grimstead. We’ll revisit the matter in a year. When she’s old enough, any of you willing to foster her to a trade will be compensated for your time.”

  “What if someone comes looking for her?” called Darmod.

  “The Havenari will see to them,” Robyn answered.

  “Aye, and if they come in the summer while you�
��re on the move?”

  “It’s been decided,” Marin insisted. “We’ve other matters to discuss—unless the sheep-lord himself would prefer we forget the matter of the poacher who, it seems, has eluded old Toren again.”

  “Toren is gone,” said Robyn. “He won’t be back.”

  The crowd hushed itself at that. They had anticipated his parting of ways for some time, but its abruptness still shocked them into silence.

  “Now, that’s news to us all,” said Marin. “I’d hear more of this sudden change.”

  Toren had been something of a necessary evil among the townsfolk, but he was not well-loved, being the sort of man many in Widowvale had come west to avoid. When the business of the girl was decided, the rest of the Havenari came in from the cold, though two men had already deserted straight away. As the moot wore on, the town sought reassurance that the remaining Havenari would not abandon them as Toren and the others had. Robyn did much of the speaking for them, and by the end of the night she had convinced a few of the skeptical young outriders that she might not collapse under the mantle of leadership. Only those who had aspired to First Spear themselves still bore her ill will: they would not follow, and even their own brethren did not expect them to last the season.

  The discussion soon cycled back to the matter of the poacher, and at this many of the village women returned to their homes. In Toren’s absence, and with the unity of the Havenari suffering in light of the little band’s crisis of leadership, it was Venser who advised them not to chase the poacher too far into the heart of Haveïl. The Reeve agreed that the town, flush with the hillers’ wealth and underreporting their Imperial taxes, could afford to compensate Darmod for his loss—a conceit contrived mostly to quiet the old man’s complaints that the militia was not sent off into the deep woods at their peril for his own personal benefit.

  Since the whole town had gone to the trouble of assembling on a cold night, the Reeve followed up the matter of the Havenari’s change of leadership with some dull business about the partitioning of fields and meadows; a plea from the true-widow Oltman, who had taken sick and whose sons were not yet grown, for help in repairing the roof of her barn; and a few scattered rumours about a renewed uprising on the far east side of the Travalaithi Empire, which amounted to nothing more than gossip. It was past midnight when Grim and Karis trudged home to Grimstead with a new child in tow. She rode high on Karis’s hip, shivering against the night’s chill as if she had never known cold before.

  “What do you make of the business with the Havenari?” Grim asked his wife.

  “It’ll do them some good,” said Karis, “having a woman in charge.”

  “I’m inclined to think so,” Grim agreed. “Half the men won’t be able to stand it. Probably the half I like least. They’ll likely stay the winter, ride out in the spring, and never come back. The rest will be the stronger for it.”

  “I worry about Toren,” Karis said. “He was not a kind man.”

  “That’s precisely why I don’t worry about him,” Grim said. “Rascal take him, for all I care.”

  “In the Iron City,” said Karis, “there’s plenty of pomp and politics to keep distasteful men in power. Out here in the thick, there’s no such thing. I’m surprised he’s lasted as long as he has, without the others jeering him out of command.”

  Grim nodded. “You think there’s something to his worry?” he asked. “You think we’ve taken a dangerous monster into our home?”

  At Karis’s side, the little girl yawned.

  “You remember when Arran and Glam were this age,” she said. “All children are monsters, deep down. Her more than most, maybe.”

  Grim snorted with laughter. “Then why’d we take her in?”

  “I’d sooner her be the monster,” said Karis, “than me myself.”

  “I love my wife,” said Grim, helping her through the snow.

  “You’re wise to,” she said. As they trudged up away from the torches, her smile was hidden in the dark of night.

  By Imperial reckoning, the year of Aewyn’s arrival was 3407 in the Age of the Moon. At the last harvestmoot before her discovery, the Reeve had declared it the Year of High Trees, but by the time another harvest season had come and gone, it was known locally as the Year of the Child in spite of what was written in the town chronicle. In the season to come, many remarkable discoveries about Aewyn set the villagers’ tongues wagging, and renewed their speculation that in spite of Karis’s urging, she was no ordinary girl, but a strange fey creature from beyond the mortal world.

  She was a talkative little thing, though none could understand her; and though she taught the children a few words of her curious tongue, she was slow to learn the Tradespeak that united the exiles and foreigners of Widowvale under a common language. When she had learned it well enough to answer questions about her origins, her cryptic stories were fairy-tales in themselves, so full of nonsense that the villagers wondered whether Grim had put her up to spinning tall tales.

  Grim was known in Widowvale for two uncanny talents: first, he was a master vintner and grower of grapes, able to call up rich vines from the ground as if by their own tongue. He sang to them, it was said, in a language old as the rocks, and where many had tried to coax hardy cold-weather grapes out of the unforgiving soil, only Grim had succeeded. But it was the second of his talents, as an unmatched liar and spinner of falsehoods, that the townsfolk heard echoed in Aewyn’s mysterious tales. When she had learned the words to speak of her past, Aewyn told them that her mother had been a dryad, a fairy-spirit of unearthly beauty who dwelt still at the heart of the deep wood. She spoke of growing up under a massive, wounded tree—a towering oak with a missing limb—and of riding through the forests on the back of an immense beast called Poe, though what manner of creature it was she could not explain.

  She spoke, too, of an old man named Celithrand who visited her in the woods as the seasons changed, teaching her the ways of the wood and bringing her little gifts from distant lands. These stories drew the most attention, for Celithrand’s name was known to almost all who had grown up under the banner of the Travalaithi Empire. The Imperator himself, in the dark days of the Occupation, had fought alongside a druid of that name—an ancient advisor from across the sea who served at his right hand after the Siege of Shadow, then disappeared altogether. Aewyn’s stories of the old man held just enough fact to be true, maybe. But then they remembered Grim’s stories about the dragon he had slain in his youth—or the time he ate an entire sabercat, raw, in a single sitting—or the time he would have perished in the Hinterlands of Cuinen if the God of Forests had not personally brought him firewood.

  Over time, the townsfolk came to discount most of her stories as they did Grim’s, imagining that he put her up to them as an elaborate prank. This they did not begrudge him, for he was kind to her and they were glad to see her flourish in his care. But Grim was tormented that first year by the mysteries of her stories: he knew with certainty which tall tales he had put in her head, and which had come to her by unknown roads of the mind. Were they inventions of a child’s imagination, tinted by unreliable memories? Or was there a true magic in her words as well? There was a veil of sorts, it was said, between the mundane world and the world of fairy-folk; and though she tried to articulate her memories of her mother, the longer she lived at Grimstead, the harder it became to put them into words.

  It unsettled Grim that she claimed to know so much about Celithrand, as the druid was most known to him as a political figure, and he distrusted Imperial politics immensely. He was more alarmed yet when she described the skills in hunting, foraging, and woodcraft he had taught her—and when the Havenari, in the spring, took her out and tested these skills, and found them to be true. The Havenari spent much of the year on the move, making their way from town to town along the old forest trails, and even the youngest of them was something of an expert in woodland survival. Even so, Aewyn taught them the names of many new plants, and many new uses for old ones, and how to r
aise storm shelters of wattled wood with such haste and efficiency that it was how they built their temporary shelters ever after. In her surprising skills they took much delight, but every new discovery put Grim a little more out of sorts.

  It was discovered one spring morning, not long after the Havenari had ridden out, that Aewyn’s white hair had taken on a tinge of pale gold that deepened as the year went on. Like a ripening berry, she waxed from snowy white to the colour of corn, and after the last frost, as the carrots started to come up, it darkened further, first to a sandy brown, then to a deep chestnut in the height of summer. It was wondrous to behold, and the first true evidence beyond her fairy-stories that she was more than an ordinary girl. The absurdities Grim might have spun about her then would have been great indeed, but he was too unsettled by her mysteries to take much sport in her strangeness.

  In the autumn, her hair turned the bright ginger colour of a Nalsian milkmaid’s, before greying and going shock-white with the arrival of the frost, as it had been when they first found her. By the anniversary of her discovery she was speaking Tradespeak almost like a native, playing and sporting with Grim’s natural children, who with the eyes of innocence had accepted her strangeness without judgment, and saw nothing magical in her queer appearance or the changing of her hair. But the census-tellers who rode out every year from the vasily of Haukmere would not be so quick to accept her, and the shadow of their visit hung unsteadily over Grim for weeks before their arrival. The roving merchants who found their way to Widowvale for the Harvest Fair had brought word of a full-blown rebellion in the East; rebellions were expensive, and the town’s independence and continued prosperity depended in large part on Marin’s ability to cheat the Imperial taxman by decrying the existence of the “hillers,” the fifty-odd miners who lived and worked the hills south of Minter’s Rock. It was imperative that the special attention of Haukmere’s Censor not be drawn to the village. And so Grim wrestled with the many stories he might tell in the weeks leading up to the census about his new, strange child, who must have sprung fully-formed from his wife on the brink of adolescence, with hair as white as his grandmother’s.