[One of my favorite stories. Power obeys a certain dynamic. EVen the best ruler must conform to it...and if he should falter, he will fall to it.]
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The night-gale had abated with the touch of the sun. Gregor stirred, slid a hand to his eyes and teased his cloak away from his face. Day was returning to the Great Waste.
He shielded his eyes from blown grit as he uncurled and stretched his cramped limbs. If Aral was correct and the wind spoke true, he would reach the next oasis that day. He fished a jerky strip from his pack and chewed it without pleasure as he set off, head bent against the wind and the sun at his back.
The sun was just clear of the horizon when he planted his staff upon the western ridge and peered down at a verdant plain.
The green expanse stretched toward the horizon. Hovels and huts dotted the land, from the foothills of the mountain he bestrode as far west as he could see. Smoke rose from chimneys and cooking fires. In the distance, beneath a belt of low-hanging clouds, lay a hint of an obstruction, perhaps another range to girdle the tranquil vale that beckoned from below.
It was a bastion against the wastes, a protected space where life yet sustained itself.
The etheric aroma of plentiful mana rose from the greensward, curled around his brain and teased at his powers, making him momentarily dizzy. He reeled with a hunger not of the body, yet as commanding as any physical humor could be.
At the center of the plain was a large structure, perhaps sixty feet square and forty feet high, apparently all of stone: a noble’s castle, small but definite. Men moved along its ramparts. Around it, a broad brown area had been trodden smooth.
Gregor’s last brush with nobles and subjects and civilization lay thirty leagues behind him, in the charnel-festooned ruins of Beluz where no living thing remained. Where he had left the greater part of his soul.
Fulfilling his charge without entering the settlement would mean considerable privation. After six days in the wastes, his food was almost gone, and his mana was down to nothing. Even so, he searched for a path around the edge of the greensward. Perhaps he might go past the town without encountering its denizens, yet still replenish his stores.
The need to see another human face welled up inside him. It beat back his fear and revulsion.
He hefted his pack higher onto his shoulders, took a firmer grip on his staff, and plodded down the shallow crevice in the mountains, toward the oasis at his feet.
Karine had been delivered of her child three days ago, and her scourging had been decreed for that day. At the appointed hour, Laella put down her hoe and summoned Marti and Luisa, and the three trudged the two miles to the square before the castle.
The square was dusty and uninviting. Nearly the whole of Anam had massed there. Most eyes were aimed at the dais and the stocks. Laella’s household joined the crowd at its rear, trying to be inconspicuous. Those who noticed averted their faces with expressions of fear and distaste.
Laella struggled with her anger. She needed no reminder of her household’s outcast status. The three women had gone a year without hearing a hundred words from any voice but their own. A hateful necessity, like the one that had shoved them to the fringe of their society, had brought them there.
The baron and his retainers had not yet appeared when an unfamiliar, roughly clothed man approached them from the east, a pack on his shoulders and a stout staff in his hand. He was tall, dark-eyed and dark-haired, broad at the shoulders and well muscled. From the dust on his clothes, he’d come over the mountains, from the wastes beyond. The weathering of his face and the squint to his eyes told of harsh sun and scouring wind long endured.
He moved up to them deliberately, with the careful step of the outsider that said greet me or shun me as you like, and glanced over the crowd to the platform that held the stocks. Laella’s gaze followed his. Baron Semmech, his retainers, and the pitiful object of the gathering were mounting the dais.
Without preliminary, the baron’s men bent Karine into the stocks and clamped the top bar securely down upon her, then yanked crosswise at her shift until it split along its back. Karine offered no resistance. Her eyes were dull and her face slack, as she’d spent her capacity for terror in anticipation and had none left for the event itself.
The stranger spoke softly into Laella’s ear, making her start. “What are they doing?”
She glanced up at him, read sincere ignorance in his eyes.
“She is to be scourged.”
“Why?”
“An unhallowed birth.”
He fell silent.
The baron stepped forward and extended his hand for the whip. A retainer darted forward and presented it to him, then slid away.
“We will have no witchery in Anam.” The burly nobleman’s deep, rolling voice echoed over the square. His eyes swept the assembled crowd, and Laella involuntarily lowered her head to avoid them. “Ye who think to bring the darkness that ate the world to this place, know by these events that I will not have it, now or ever.”
He turned to Karine, raised the whip, and swung it whistling down across her back.
The crack of impact seemed to ring from the surrounding mountains. Light flared in Karine’s eyes, and she squealed in agony. Luisa and Marti flinched in sympathy. The crowd murmured. No one looked away.
The whip rose and fell again.
And again.
And again.
The stranger’s face drained of color. He shut his eyes, bowed his head and whispered in some unknown tongue. It might have been a prayer.
When it was done, Karine hung limp from the stocks, her eyes closed. A retainer removed the pinion and swung back the top bar, and the scourged girl crumpled to the floor. The crowd dispersed in near-total silence. Few eyes remained upon the dais. No one approached it.
Presently the baron’s party turned and made for the castle. Only Laella, Marti, Luisa and the stranger remained in the square. The stranger showed no inclination to depart.
“Why are you still here?” Laella asked him.
His face betrayed nothing. “To observe.”
“To observe what?”
His mouth twitched. “You.”
Luisa and Marti’s eyes filled with fright.
“Are you a baron’s man, stranger?” Laella put as much steel into the words as she could manage.
A second twitch produced a simulacrum of a smile. “My name is Gregor. I descended the range to the east only this morning. I know nothing of your baron.”
“But you’re here to observe.”
He nodded. “What else would you have me do?”
“What else, indeed?” she said. She scanned the area. Semmech and his retainers had moved beyond earshot. Luisa and Marti appeared to have mastered their fear. Karine lay where she had fallen. “Are you competent with a shovel?”
The faint smile vanished. “And if I am?”
“We have need of your muscles, and will repay their use with food and lodging. Are you agreeable?”
A long moment of silence passed. Luisa shuffled her feet in the dust. Marti fidgeted with the buttons on her dress.
“I am.”
Before Laella could speak again, the stranger strode past her, mounted the dais, and crouched over Karine’s still form. He peeled back her eyelids and put two fingers to her neck, then slipped his arms around her and hoisted her up, cradling her pudgy body against his chest like an over-large child. He returned to stand before Laella and her gaping companions with Karine slumped in his arms, as if nothing untoward had happened.
“Lead on, Madam.”
Her eyes shuttled between his burden and his face. “What do you mean by this?”
“Your townsfolk watched a strong man ply a heavy whip on this woman’s back until she could not stand,” he said. “When it was done, no one moved to succor her. Did you intend to leave her there, as they did?”
Laella’s mouth fell open.
“The food and lodging I earn,” he said, “will be hers. Now lead on.”
She did.
Gregor stepped back from the midden he’d dug, thrust his shovel into the loam and wiped the sweat from his face. It would serve the little household for a year, at least. The dirt from the excavation had closed the previous garbage pit to decompose in peace.
His three hours with a shovel had exhausted him, but the communion with the earth had enabled him to replenish his mana at the same time. Once he’d prepared rations for the week to come, he could continue west. His map would go unaltered. No major tributaries flowed through Anam. Considering the potency of the soil, the etheric balance of the vale was strangely static.
He flapped his tunic to cool himself and strode toward Laella’s cottage.
It was a small place for three grown women. It would be smaller still for four.
He knocked at the sill of the kitchen window. “Laella?”
The tall woman came to the window with a bundle of sewing in her hands. “Yes?”
“Your midden is finished.” He swept an arm back at his handiwork. “Where might a man hire a room for the night?”
Her eyes widened. “You will not stay with us?”
“You already have a boarder. Where would I stay?”
A shadow passed over her face. “We have room enough for both of you. And there are other tasks, if you’re willing.”
He frowned. “You said nothing of other tasks earlier. I must eat, Madam.”
Her mouth drew thin. “You and Karine will eat to satiety. We have more than enough for you both. Are you willing?”
He surveyed their half-acre of garden, noted the many kinds of vegetables crammed too close together. Twenty chickens scurried about before a coop guarded by a large yellow dog.
They were doing too much in too small a space. They could triple their yield by growing one or two vegetables and trading for the rest. Theirs was the sort of farm that assumed that trade would not be possible.
Laella’s threadbare dignity was enough to wring his heart, but he forced himself to proceed with care. His conscience would not support another Beluz.
“Did you hire the labor of a stranger out of convenience, Laella, or because your townsfolk will have no truck with you? I must buy provisions before I leave your vale. Have I stained myself in their eyes by consorting with you?”
She did not answer at once.
“Come with me a moment, Gregor.”
He followed her stiff back into the house, through the commons and down the short hall to the bedrooms. Luisa sat in her own little room, laboring at something he could not make out. She glanced at him and returned her eyes to her own affairs. Through the closed door of the room adjoining, he could hear Karine’s sobs as Marti tended her scored flesh.
Laella guided him into her room and shut the door. He started to protest, but she raised a hand.
“We are women alone, and none of us is strong.” Her eyes held his as her hands undid her collar and moved to the buttons below. “Luisa joined me here two years ago. Marti, just a year past.” She undid another button, and another. “It was well that we needed little from anyone, for we got even less.” Her blouse gaped open, allowing her breasts to peek through. Her dark brown nipples were large and pointed. “But for you, I would have had to dig a new midden, and no telling at what cost to my back.” She pulled one arm out of its sleeve, then the other, gathered her wheaten hair in her hand and turned as the garment fell to the floor.
From shoulders to waist, Laella’s back was a landscape of pain. Thick ridges of scar tissue, irregularly puckered and blackened, crisscrossed to make a map of desolation. The flesh between the ridges was pale, almost translucent, as if it had never seen the sun.
“This is how Karine will look when she has healed, Gregor.” Her tone was bleak. “Her family has cast her out. The rest of Anam will endure her as it has endured us, but little more than that. I would have gone to her myself, had you not preceded us.” “Luisa and Marti too?” he breathed.
She nodded.
“For bearing children out of wedlock? No more than that?”
She turned and peered into his eyes.
“Of course it was more than that, Gregor. They were virgin births. We conceived without having known men, and the baron adjudged us witches for it.”
And he knew.
Marti laid five places at their table. Luisa brought the stew, a collation of pared roots in broth, and set the pot at the center of the table. Laella set a loaf of brown hardbread next to the pot and gestured to Gregor to sit.
“Marti, will you fetch Karine, or shall I?” she said.
“I’ll get her.” The small blonde woman scurried down the hallway.
A minute later Marti returned, urging pale, trembling Karine before her. In the firelight, the freshly scourged girl looked barely able to stand. Laella waited until they sat, reached for the ladle and offered it to Karine, who stared at it, uncomprehending.
“You must eat, dear. The cuts won’t heal otherwise.”
Karine took the ladle. They served themselves in turn. There was no conversation.
The fire had burned low when they were done. Luisa collected their bowls in silence. Marti attended to the leftover stew and tossed the end of the loaf to the dog, who settled by the hearth to gnaw it.
Karine sat slumped forward, eyes fixed on the table. Her color was returning, but she was clearly apprehensive about her place in Laella’s household. Gregor watched Laella discreetly, as if waiting for instructions. Laella caught Luisa’s and Marti’s eyes, and nodded.
With a murmur and a touch, Marti urged Karine to rise and come with her. Luisa excused herself and followed them, leaving Laella and Gregor alone at the table in the flickering firelight. His expression was solemn.
“You have a hard life,” he said.
“It’s not that hard. We’re used to being apart.”
“I see.”
“You’ve told us nothing about yourself. Where do you come from? Surely not the wastes?”
“No.” He shifted in his seat. “I’ve traveled a great deal.”
She examined him in the dim light. “You don’t look old enough to have traveled much.”
He smiled faintly. “Perhaps the marks are on the inside. Tell me of your baron.”
The swerve halted her. She considered. “He is a strong ruler, and brooks no disorder. His men are well disciplined and properly under his command. He takes a tithe, but he does not meddle with trade or trifle with the women. The people fear him, but in the main they don’t dislike him.”
“Not even you?” His eyes compelled her to candor.
Her mouth twitched. “Not most of the time.”
“Ah. There are worse rulers, then.”
“There are. We’ve known a few.”
They sat in agreeable silence.
His scars were few. The roughness of his face and hands was already fading. In their few hours’ acquaintance, he had displayed strength, insight, compassion and fiber. He said little, but omitted nothing needful.
She could not imagine what impelled him to wander the wastes, but neither could she imagine a community that would drive him from its bosom.
“Are you weary?” she said, her voice husky.
He nodded.
“Might I persuade you to stay with us a while, address some... other tasks? Or are you anxious to be off?”
Something moved behind his eyes. She waited an anxious interval before the corners of his mouth rose. “I am only just arrived. I need not hurry away. I will stay gladly, if I’m welcome.” He looked about for his pack. “Where shall I sleep?”
She rose. “Come with me.”
She led him down the hall, past Luisa’s and Marti’s rooms, their doors discreetly closed, and opened her own. She drew a slender candle from her dwindling cache of luxuries, lit it and set it by her pallet. He had halted at the threshold.
“Is something the matter?” she said.
His eyes were uncertain. “This is your room.”
She nodded. “And yours.” She gestured at the pallet. Luisa had set his pack next to it. “To share with me, if you will. For as long as you will.” She stared at the floor. “I am a virgin, Gregor, not another man’s cast-off.”
In the candlelight, his eyes looked as if they might fall from their sockets.
“Wouldn’t you rather remain a virgin, Laella?”
She barked a laugh. “Three years after bearing an unhallowed child?”
“The others—”
She flailed the air in sudden impatience. “What of them?”
He fell silent. After a moment, he approached her. As if of their own desire, her hands caught and drew him closer. He did not resist.
“You have a great strength in you,” he said.
“You have a great kindness in you,” she said. “Shall we share what we have?”
He bent and touched his lips to hers.
The candle had long since guttered out when she murmured, “Tell me of the wastes.”
He pulled her more closely against him, and she nestled her face into the hollow of his shoulder.
“Brown and dead.”
“No life at all?”
“Only husks, and not many even of those.”
“Is it hot or cold?”
“Cold.” He stroked her back, winced as his palms traveled the map of insult traced there. “The wind blows always, heavy with grit and dust. In the day I hid my eyes from the wind, and at night I hid all of me from it.”
“Why—” She caught herself, paused, and began again. “Why did you chance them?”
He kept still until his geas had counted off time enough that his words would not be taken as an answer. She shifted uneasily against him in the silence.
“You who stay in the warm lands,” he said, “have a measure of security and comfort. Fertile soil, familiar faces, a steady foothold upon the land. But such things are not for all men. For some, when they reach a certain age, a wanderlust stirs in them, and they must seek new vistas, whatever the cost.” He grinned in the darkness. “Perhaps, when the world teemed with life, it was easier to understand. But even now, the need to see more lands than one’s birthplace, more faces than one’s family and neighbors, commands some too loudly to resist.”
Her hands clasped behind his back.
“What have you seen,” she said, “worth forsaking those who loved and reared you? What have your wanderings reaped that could repay always being alone, with no home to ward you from the dark and no love to buffer you against the cold?”
He thought of Beluz, by his fright and fury reduced to a drift of ash from which new life would never spring. He thought of Malagra, where the fear of sorcery was so great that he’d never been permitted to be alone, compelled even to sleep under the eyes of a wakeful, watchful guard. He thought of Urel, perched at the edge of the Great Waste, where crooked-faced Duisenne, so old that even her wrinkles had wrinkled, had taught him to wield and pattern the powers of the earth, and where Aral the Skeptic had bound him in the truth-geas every Scholium-trained sorcerer bore. He thought of his parents and siblings, all of them dead, and of Serebal, his home forever lost to him.
“Nothing.”
“Might you be ready,” she said, arms tightening around him, “to leave off and make a new home?”
He could feel the tremor in her chest, hear it in her whispered words.
“Perhaps.”
“Here?” The tremor intensified. “With me?”
Even without the geas, he could not have lied to her. Yet he could not bring himself to dash her hopes.
“We shall see.”
Gregor was at work in the garden when Semmech’s retainers came for him.
The approach of four men at arms, short swords slapping against their thighs, could not be concealed, nor did they try. They halted before Gregor, their leader asked his name, and then demanded that he accompany them back to the castle. He put down his spade and complied. As they marched off, Laella came running to the threshold, her face a mask of fear. He bade her be calm with one raised hand.
The public places of Anam teemed with activity. Artisans labored, vendors clamored and bargained, and women and children scurried among the wagons and stalls. The townsfolk marked Gregor’s passage with furtive glances and murmurs. The baron’s men took no notice. Gregor kept his thoughts to himself.
The castle was dark and cold inside, with a hint of dampness to the air. The stone walls were unmarked and undecorated, save by widely spaced sconces in which torches burned. Gregor saw no one within except his escorts. No sounds suggested any great activity from around him.
The corridor opened onto a hall of odd proportions, unusually high and narrow. The hall was practically sheathed in iron. Dense iron lattices supported thin wooden surfaces, and were surrounded by ironwork chairs. Tall iron cages filled with pikes and swords lined the walls. It was plainly an armory, whatever else it might be.
It was the only place he’d been in Anam where the reek of luxuriant mana did not reach.
At the far end, on a shallow stone pedestal studded with iron rings and catches, stood a high-backed, thinly cushioned throne. Behind it was an unlighted opening, probably the egress to a private chamber.
On the throne, hands tight on its arms, sat Baron Semmech.
The retainers stepped away from Gregor, and their leader bade him approach the nobleman. He strode to the edge of the dais and bowed formally.
“My lord, I am honored.”
Semmech stared at him. “Are you indeed, stranger?”
“I am.”
“And your name?”
“Gregor, my lord.”
The baron nodded. “The townsfolk say you’ve been in Anam less than a week, Gregor. Yet it was time enough to form a liaison that brings you little credit with me or my people.”
Gregor said nothing.
“You have taken lodging with Laella, in the farmstead north of the smithy, have you not?”
“I have, my lord.”
“Do you know what she and her companions are?”
“I do, my lord.” Gregor kept his voice low.
The admission traced lines of displeasure across Semmech’s forehead. He looked Gregor up and down.
“You are young and strong, and your speech marks you as educated. Can you find no better associates?”
Gregor chose his words with care. “I am a stranger to your realm, my lord. I don’t know your customs, and I don’t wish to offend through ignorance. Have you decreed that no one may have dealings with Laella’s household?”
He locked eyes with the baron and willed a definite answer. Presently Semmech shook his head.
“Laella has made me welcome,” Gregor said. “She has been hospitable beyond what a traveler from the wastes could expect. I have provided her with certain services in recompense.”
The retainers brayed laughter. After a moment the baron smiled grimly.
“No doubt you have. But those women are not the choicest of Anam, Gregor. All have borne children, and all of them”—his lip curled—“died shortly after birth.”
Gregor did not reply.
“That doesn’t appear to surprise you.”
“I was aware of it, my lord.”
“Were you?” Semmech rose and stepped forward to peer down at Gregor. “Were you aware that their quickenings did not partake of man?”
“I was, my lord.”
Anger returned to the noble’s face. “Does it not disturb you to keep company with four witches, then?”
“I fear you are mistaken, my lord. They are not witches.”
The retainers murmured. Semmech’s face reddened.
“And how do you reach this conclusion in the face of what all of Anam has seen? Are you expert in such matters? A sorcerer yourself, perhaps?”
Gregor breathed deeply and braced himself. On this subject the geas would allow him no latitude at all. He marshaled his powers, let the mana he carried rise and pulse at the ready, lest he should need it to win free of that stone and iron cage.
“I am, my lord.” The retainers shouted as one. “I trained at the Scholium Arcanum in Urel, was certified a journeyman by Master Sorceress Duisenne, then was bound to speak only truth and sent west by Grand Master Aral, whom the students of the academy call the Skeptic.”
Shock displaced the anger from the noble’s expression. “You admit all this freely? To me?”
“The truth-geas compels it, my lord.”
Semmech staggered backward and collapsed onto his throne.
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The night-gale had abated with the touch of the sun. Gregor stirred, slid a hand to his eyes and teased his cloak away from his face. Day was returning to the Great Waste.
He shielded his eyes from blown grit as he uncurled and stretched his cramped limbs. If Aral was correct and the wind spoke true, he would reach the next oasis that day. He fished a jerky strip from his pack and chewed it without pleasure as he set off, head bent against the wind and the sun at his back.
The sun was just clear of the horizon when he planted his staff upon the western ridge and peered down at a verdant plain.
The green expanse stretched toward the horizon. Hovels and huts dotted the land, from the foothills of the mountain he bestrode as far west as he could see. Smoke rose from chimneys and cooking fires. In the distance, beneath a belt of low-hanging clouds, lay a hint of an obstruction, perhaps another range to girdle the tranquil vale that beckoned from below.
It was a bastion against the wastes, a protected space where life yet sustained itself.
The etheric aroma of plentiful mana rose from the greensward, curled around his brain and teased at his powers, making him momentarily dizzy. He reeled with a hunger not of the body, yet as commanding as any physical humor could be.
At the center of the plain was a large structure, perhaps sixty feet square and forty feet high, apparently all of stone: a noble’s castle, small but definite. Men moved along its ramparts. Around it, a broad brown area had been trodden smooth.
Gregor’s last brush with nobles and subjects and civilization lay thirty leagues behind him, in the charnel-festooned ruins of Beluz where no living thing remained. Where he had left the greater part of his soul.
Fulfilling his charge without entering the settlement would mean considerable privation. After six days in the wastes, his food was almost gone, and his mana was down to nothing. Even so, he searched for a path around the edge of the greensward. Perhaps he might go past the town without encountering its denizens, yet still replenish his stores.
The need to see another human face welled up inside him. It beat back his fear and revulsion.
He hefted his pack higher onto his shoulders, took a firmer grip on his staff, and plodded down the shallow crevice in the mountains, toward the oasis at his feet.
* * *
Karine had been delivered of her child three days ago, and her scourging had been decreed for that day. At the appointed hour, Laella put down her hoe and summoned Marti and Luisa, and the three trudged the two miles to the square before the castle.
The square was dusty and uninviting. Nearly the whole of Anam had massed there. Most eyes were aimed at the dais and the stocks. Laella’s household joined the crowd at its rear, trying to be inconspicuous. Those who noticed averted their faces with expressions of fear and distaste.
Laella struggled with her anger. She needed no reminder of her household’s outcast status. The three women had gone a year without hearing a hundred words from any voice but their own. A hateful necessity, like the one that had shoved them to the fringe of their society, had brought them there.
The baron and his retainers had not yet appeared when an unfamiliar, roughly clothed man approached them from the east, a pack on his shoulders and a stout staff in his hand. He was tall, dark-eyed and dark-haired, broad at the shoulders and well muscled. From the dust on his clothes, he’d come over the mountains, from the wastes beyond. The weathering of his face and the squint to his eyes told of harsh sun and scouring wind long endured.
He moved up to them deliberately, with the careful step of the outsider that said greet me or shun me as you like, and glanced over the crowd to the platform that held the stocks. Laella’s gaze followed his. Baron Semmech, his retainers, and the pitiful object of the gathering were mounting the dais.
Without preliminary, the baron’s men bent Karine into the stocks and clamped the top bar securely down upon her, then yanked crosswise at her shift until it split along its back. Karine offered no resistance. Her eyes were dull and her face slack, as she’d spent her capacity for terror in anticipation and had none left for the event itself.
The stranger spoke softly into Laella’s ear, making her start. “What are they doing?”
She glanced up at him, read sincere ignorance in his eyes.
“She is to be scourged.”
“Why?”
“An unhallowed birth.”
He fell silent.
The baron stepped forward and extended his hand for the whip. A retainer darted forward and presented it to him, then slid away.
“We will have no witchery in Anam.” The burly nobleman’s deep, rolling voice echoed over the square. His eyes swept the assembled crowd, and Laella involuntarily lowered her head to avoid them. “Ye who think to bring the darkness that ate the world to this place, know by these events that I will not have it, now or ever.”
He turned to Karine, raised the whip, and swung it whistling down across her back.
The crack of impact seemed to ring from the surrounding mountains. Light flared in Karine’s eyes, and she squealed in agony. Luisa and Marti flinched in sympathy. The crowd murmured. No one looked away.
The whip rose and fell again.
And again.
And again.
The stranger’s face drained of color. He shut his eyes, bowed his head and whispered in some unknown tongue. It might have been a prayer.
* * *
When it was done, Karine hung limp from the stocks, her eyes closed. A retainer removed the pinion and swung back the top bar, and the scourged girl crumpled to the floor. The crowd dispersed in near-total silence. Few eyes remained upon the dais. No one approached it.
Presently the baron’s party turned and made for the castle. Only Laella, Marti, Luisa and the stranger remained in the square. The stranger showed no inclination to depart.
“Why are you still here?” Laella asked him.
His face betrayed nothing. “To observe.”
“To observe what?”
His mouth twitched. “You.”
Luisa and Marti’s eyes filled with fright.
“Are you a baron’s man, stranger?” Laella put as much steel into the words as she could manage.
A second twitch produced a simulacrum of a smile. “My name is Gregor. I descended the range to the east only this morning. I know nothing of your baron.”
“But you’re here to observe.”
He nodded. “What else would you have me do?”
“What else, indeed?” she said. She scanned the area. Semmech and his retainers had moved beyond earshot. Luisa and Marti appeared to have mastered their fear. Karine lay where she had fallen. “Are you competent with a shovel?”
The faint smile vanished. “And if I am?”
“We have need of your muscles, and will repay their use with food and lodging. Are you agreeable?”
A long moment of silence passed. Luisa shuffled her feet in the dust. Marti fidgeted with the buttons on her dress.
“I am.”
Before Laella could speak again, the stranger strode past her, mounted the dais, and crouched over Karine’s still form. He peeled back her eyelids and put two fingers to her neck, then slipped his arms around her and hoisted her up, cradling her pudgy body against his chest like an over-large child. He returned to stand before Laella and her gaping companions with Karine slumped in his arms, as if nothing untoward had happened.
“Lead on, Madam.”
Her eyes shuttled between his burden and his face. “What do you mean by this?”
“Your townsfolk watched a strong man ply a heavy whip on this woman’s back until she could not stand,” he said. “When it was done, no one moved to succor her. Did you intend to leave her there, as they did?”
Laella’s mouth fell open.
“The food and lodging I earn,” he said, “will be hers. Now lead on.”
She did.
* * *
Gregor stepped back from the midden he’d dug, thrust his shovel into the loam and wiped the sweat from his face. It would serve the little household for a year, at least. The dirt from the excavation had closed the previous garbage pit to decompose in peace.
His three hours with a shovel had exhausted him, but the communion with the earth had enabled him to replenish his mana at the same time. Once he’d prepared rations for the week to come, he could continue west. His map would go unaltered. No major tributaries flowed through Anam. Considering the potency of the soil, the etheric balance of the vale was strangely static.
He flapped his tunic to cool himself and strode toward Laella’s cottage.
It was a small place for three grown women. It would be smaller still for four.
He knocked at the sill of the kitchen window. “Laella?”
The tall woman came to the window with a bundle of sewing in her hands. “Yes?”
“Your midden is finished.” He swept an arm back at his handiwork. “Where might a man hire a room for the night?”
Her eyes widened. “You will not stay with us?”
“You already have a boarder. Where would I stay?”
A shadow passed over her face. “We have room enough for both of you. And there are other tasks, if you’re willing.”
He frowned. “You said nothing of other tasks earlier. I must eat, Madam.”
Her mouth drew thin. “You and Karine will eat to satiety. We have more than enough for you both. Are you willing?”
He surveyed their half-acre of garden, noted the many kinds of vegetables crammed too close together. Twenty chickens scurried about before a coop guarded by a large yellow dog.
They were doing too much in too small a space. They could triple their yield by growing one or two vegetables and trading for the rest. Theirs was the sort of farm that assumed that trade would not be possible.
Laella’s threadbare dignity was enough to wring his heart, but he forced himself to proceed with care. His conscience would not support another Beluz.
“Did you hire the labor of a stranger out of convenience, Laella, or because your townsfolk will have no truck with you? I must buy provisions before I leave your vale. Have I stained myself in their eyes by consorting with you?”
She did not answer at once.
“Come with me a moment, Gregor.”
He followed her stiff back into the house, through the commons and down the short hall to the bedrooms. Luisa sat in her own little room, laboring at something he could not make out. She glanced at him and returned her eyes to her own affairs. Through the closed door of the room adjoining, he could hear Karine’s sobs as Marti tended her scored flesh.
Laella guided him into her room and shut the door. He started to protest, but she raised a hand.
“We are women alone, and none of us is strong.” Her eyes held his as her hands undid her collar and moved to the buttons below. “Luisa joined me here two years ago. Marti, just a year past.” She undid another button, and another. “It was well that we needed little from anyone, for we got even less.” Her blouse gaped open, allowing her breasts to peek through. Her dark brown nipples were large and pointed. “But for you, I would have had to dig a new midden, and no telling at what cost to my back.” She pulled one arm out of its sleeve, then the other, gathered her wheaten hair in her hand and turned as the garment fell to the floor.
From shoulders to waist, Laella’s back was a landscape of pain. Thick ridges of scar tissue, irregularly puckered and blackened, crisscrossed to make a map of desolation. The flesh between the ridges was pale, almost translucent, as if it had never seen the sun.
“This is how Karine will look when she has healed, Gregor.” Her tone was bleak. “Her family has cast her out. The rest of Anam will endure her as it has endured us, but little more than that. I would have gone to her myself, had you not preceded us.” “Luisa and Marti too?” he breathed.
She nodded.
“For bearing children out of wedlock? No more than that?”
She turned and peered into his eyes.
“Of course it was more than that, Gregor. They were virgin births. We conceived without having known men, and the baron adjudged us witches for it.”
And he knew.
* * *
Marti laid five places at their table. Luisa brought the stew, a collation of pared roots in broth, and set the pot at the center of the table. Laella set a loaf of brown hardbread next to the pot and gestured to Gregor to sit.
“Marti, will you fetch Karine, or shall I?” she said.
“I’ll get her.” The small blonde woman scurried down the hallway.
A minute later Marti returned, urging pale, trembling Karine before her. In the firelight, the freshly scourged girl looked barely able to stand. Laella waited until they sat, reached for the ladle and offered it to Karine, who stared at it, uncomprehending.
“You must eat, dear. The cuts won’t heal otherwise.”
Karine took the ladle. They served themselves in turn. There was no conversation.
The fire had burned low when they were done. Luisa collected their bowls in silence. Marti attended to the leftover stew and tossed the end of the loaf to the dog, who settled by the hearth to gnaw it.
Karine sat slumped forward, eyes fixed on the table. Her color was returning, but she was clearly apprehensive about her place in Laella’s household. Gregor watched Laella discreetly, as if waiting for instructions. Laella caught Luisa’s and Marti’s eyes, and nodded.
With a murmur and a touch, Marti urged Karine to rise and come with her. Luisa excused herself and followed them, leaving Laella and Gregor alone at the table in the flickering firelight. His expression was solemn.
“You have a hard life,” he said.
“It’s not that hard. We’re used to being apart.”
“I see.”
“You’ve told us nothing about yourself. Where do you come from? Surely not the wastes?”
“No.” He shifted in his seat. “I’ve traveled a great deal.”
She examined him in the dim light. “You don’t look old enough to have traveled much.”
He smiled faintly. “Perhaps the marks are on the inside. Tell me of your baron.”
The swerve halted her. She considered. “He is a strong ruler, and brooks no disorder. His men are well disciplined and properly under his command. He takes a tithe, but he does not meddle with trade or trifle with the women. The people fear him, but in the main they don’t dislike him.”
“Not even you?” His eyes compelled her to candor.
Her mouth twitched. “Not most of the time.”
“Ah. There are worse rulers, then.”
“There are. We’ve known a few.”
They sat in agreeable silence.
His scars were few. The roughness of his face and hands was already fading. In their few hours’ acquaintance, he had displayed strength, insight, compassion and fiber. He said little, but omitted nothing needful.
She could not imagine what impelled him to wander the wastes, but neither could she imagine a community that would drive him from its bosom.
“Are you weary?” she said, her voice husky.
He nodded.
“Might I persuade you to stay with us a while, address some... other tasks? Or are you anxious to be off?”
Something moved behind his eyes. She waited an anxious interval before the corners of his mouth rose. “I am only just arrived. I need not hurry away. I will stay gladly, if I’m welcome.” He looked about for his pack. “Where shall I sleep?”
She rose. “Come with me.”
She led him down the hall, past Luisa’s and Marti’s rooms, their doors discreetly closed, and opened her own. She drew a slender candle from her dwindling cache of luxuries, lit it and set it by her pallet. He had halted at the threshold.
“Is something the matter?” she said.
His eyes were uncertain. “This is your room.”
She nodded. “And yours.” She gestured at the pallet. Luisa had set his pack next to it. “To share with me, if you will. For as long as you will.” She stared at the floor. “I am a virgin, Gregor, not another man’s cast-off.”
In the candlelight, his eyes looked as if they might fall from their sockets.
“Wouldn’t you rather remain a virgin, Laella?”
She barked a laugh. “Three years after bearing an unhallowed child?”
“The others—”
She flailed the air in sudden impatience. “What of them?”
He fell silent. After a moment, he approached her. As if of their own desire, her hands caught and drew him closer. He did not resist.
“You have a great strength in you,” he said.
“You have a great kindness in you,” she said. “Shall we share what we have?”
He bent and touched his lips to hers.
* * *
The candle had long since guttered out when she murmured, “Tell me of the wastes.”
He pulled her more closely against him, and she nestled her face into the hollow of his shoulder.
“Brown and dead.”
“No life at all?”
“Only husks, and not many even of those.”
“Is it hot or cold?”
“Cold.” He stroked her back, winced as his palms traveled the map of insult traced there. “The wind blows always, heavy with grit and dust. In the day I hid my eyes from the wind, and at night I hid all of me from it.”
“Why—” She caught herself, paused, and began again. “Why did you chance them?”
He kept still until his geas had counted off time enough that his words would not be taken as an answer. She shifted uneasily against him in the silence.
“You who stay in the warm lands,” he said, “have a measure of security and comfort. Fertile soil, familiar faces, a steady foothold upon the land. But such things are not for all men. For some, when they reach a certain age, a wanderlust stirs in them, and they must seek new vistas, whatever the cost.” He grinned in the darkness. “Perhaps, when the world teemed with life, it was easier to understand. But even now, the need to see more lands than one’s birthplace, more faces than one’s family and neighbors, commands some too loudly to resist.”
Her hands clasped behind his back.
“What have you seen,” she said, “worth forsaking those who loved and reared you? What have your wanderings reaped that could repay always being alone, with no home to ward you from the dark and no love to buffer you against the cold?”
He thought of Beluz, by his fright and fury reduced to a drift of ash from which new life would never spring. He thought of Malagra, where the fear of sorcery was so great that he’d never been permitted to be alone, compelled even to sleep under the eyes of a wakeful, watchful guard. He thought of Urel, perched at the edge of the Great Waste, where crooked-faced Duisenne, so old that even her wrinkles had wrinkled, had taught him to wield and pattern the powers of the earth, and where Aral the Skeptic had bound him in the truth-geas every Scholium-trained sorcerer bore. He thought of his parents and siblings, all of them dead, and of Serebal, his home forever lost to him.
“Nothing.”
“Might you be ready,” she said, arms tightening around him, “to leave off and make a new home?”
He could feel the tremor in her chest, hear it in her whispered words.
“Perhaps.”
“Here?” The tremor intensified. “With me?”
Even without the geas, he could not have lied to her. Yet he could not bring himself to dash her hopes.
“We shall see.”
* * *
Gregor was at work in the garden when Semmech’s retainers came for him.
The approach of four men at arms, short swords slapping against their thighs, could not be concealed, nor did they try. They halted before Gregor, their leader asked his name, and then demanded that he accompany them back to the castle. He put down his spade and complied. As they marched off, Laella came running to the threshold, her face a mask of fear. He bade her be calm with one raised hand.
The public places of Anam teemed with activity. Artisans labored, vendors clamored and bargained, and women and children scurried among the wagons and stalls. The townsfolk marked Gregor’s passage with furtive glances and murmurs. The baron’s men took no notice. Gregor kept his thoughts to himself.
The castle was dark and cold inside, with a hint of dampness to the air. The stone walls were unmarked and undecorated, save by widely spaced sconces in which torches burned. Gregor saw no one within except his escorts. No sounds suggested any great activity from around him.
The corridor opened onto a hall of odd proportions, unusually high and narrow. The hall was practically sheathed in iron. Dense iron lattices supported thin wooden surfaces, and were surrounded by ironwork chairs. Tall iron cages filled with pikes and swords lined the walls. It was plainly an armory, whatever else it might be.
It was the only place he’d been in Anam where the reek of luxuriant mana did not reach.
At the far end, on a shallow stone pedestal studded with iron rings and catches, stood a high-backed, thinly cushioned throne. Behind it was an unlighted opening, probably the egress to a private chamber.
On the throne, hands tight on its arms, sat Baron Semmech.
The retainers stepped away from Gregor, and their leader bade him approach the nobleman. He strode to the edge of the dais and bowed formally.
“My lord, I am honored.”
Semmech stared at him. “Are you indeed, stranger?”
“I am.”
“And your name?”
“Gregor, my lord.”
The baron nodded. “The townsfolk say you’ve been in Anam less than a week, Gregor. Yet it was time enough to form a liaison that brings you little credit with me or my people.”
Gregor said nothing.
“You have taken lodging with Laella, in the farmstead north of the smithy, have you not?”
“I have, my lord.”
“Do you know what she and her companions are?”
“I do, my lord.” Gregor kept his voice low.
The admission traced lines of displeasure across Semmech’s forehead. He looked Gregor up and down.
“You are young and strong, and your speech marks you as educated. Can you find no better associates?”
Gregor chose his words with care. “I am a stranger to your realm, my lord. I don’t know your customs, and I don’t wish to offend through ignorance. Have you decreed that no one may have dealings with Laella’s household?”
He locked eyes with the baron and willed a definite answer. Presently Semmech shook his head.
“Laella has made me welcome,” Gregor said. “She has been hospitable beyond what a traveler from the wastes could expect. I have provided her with certain services in recompense.”
The retainers brayed laughter. After a moment the baron smiled grimly.
“No doubt you have. But those women are not the choicest of Anam, Gregor. All have borne children, and all of them”—his lip curled—“died shortly after birth.”
Gregor did not reply.
“That doesn’t appear to surprise you.”
“I was aware of it, my lord.”
“Were you?” Semmech rose and stepped forward to peer down at Gregor. “Were you aware that their quickenings did not partake of man?”
“I was, my lord.”
Anger returned to the noble’s face. “Does it not disturb you to keep company with four witches, then?”
“I fear you are mistaken, my lord. They are not witches.”
The retainers murmured. Semmech’s face reddened.
“And how do you reach this conclusion in the face of what all of Anam has seen? Are you expert in such matters? A sorcerer yourself, perhaps?”
Gregor breathed deeply and braced himself. On this subject the geas would allow him no latitude at all. He marshaled his powers, let the mana he carried rise and pulse at the ready, lest he should need it to win free of that stone and iron cage.
“I am, my lord.” The retainers shouted as one. “I trained at the Scholium Arcanum in Urel, was certified a journeyman by Master Sorceress Duisenne, then was bound to speak only truth and sent west by Grand Master Aral, whom the students of the academy call the Skeptic.”
Shock displaced the anger from the noble’s expression. “You admit all this freely? To me?”
“The truth-geas compels it, my lord.”
Semmech staggered backward and collapsed onto his throne.
* * *
