Chapter XVI : A Flake of the Withered Root

  All through the morning, a recurrent chipping was heard across the terrace. Gentle as a moulting tick, from a scurrier in its thicket. When the brothel’s backdoor swung wide, it ceased, guarding its silence as the ledge streamed with grasping tongues, that whirl of felt hips. The dance of simmering envies, grinding warmths were silhouettes before sunrise, blurred so in Eritle’s chrome gloom. There rubbed drudgeries, corporeal as fictitious loves, imagined more than admired. Most shut their eyes. The prisoner listened. Slurpings. Flat-hand strikes.

  A pleasant vigour possessed, then the morose recollection, then its scattering. Wearily, after the terrace drained of its denizens and the brothel’s door came shut, the sound of scraping resumed. That noise, subtle as the strike of a clock’s hand, was an iron resonance, dangling low. Rust chittered, by day degrading. A bar most wilted manned the jail’s front, marred by the streaks of white, raking labours. Over it hunched a goblin-like, polluted skin stretching tight to frame and dark, conniving eyes prying upon it: grubby as a ghast’s obsession.

  Against that bar, again and again, under nascent moonlights through to the jousting sheens of day that did temper iron’s sting, a lone tooth was slid, sharpened. Again and again, while the belly’s demand loudened, fingers pinched to seize that little white drop. The nails came crooked and befouled, the eyes fell sewn to that rod of cold iron. Rain assailed, fled, fell again, though the work did not relent.

  It was midday when the last chip sounded. A moment passed of quiet inspection. The bald cretin curved around her prize, as if it were more precious than even a king’s ransom. It could not be lost. Ander found in her hands a tooth no more, and instead a fang, with a thin nick at its end. She grinned, with delight bright in her eyes.

  Her hands cradled the tiny thing, tremoring through her starving and dread of release. It was the last morsel to her name. She snuck it between the bars, pressed her shoulder to the cage, bent her arm in, then picked at the lock. Ravenous, nearly by the daydream consumed, Ander snatched, tugged until its socket was found, then in crept the tooth. Her gut was tightening. Thrice she missed her mark, quivering at the failed jab and imagining failings into dooms. Her grip kept to that key of dregs, and on her fourth effort she discovered the socket, as a cold sweat took her. With a strain, she thrust, shimmied, twisted; softly first, then fast the other way, repeating and trading speeds until—in that tiny block of metal, under the frantic ear’s alarm—she heard a click.

  Ander paused where she sprawled, shoved halfway through the bars. Awe congratulated her, as even in scrupulous efforts she presumed her schemes could not suffice, but that tiny pop was freedom’s call. Its promise celebrated any suspense. Over her left shoulder she peeked, to the alley adjacent, seeing silence and still shadows, then over her right, where the brothel bustled with muffled shouts, though its doors kept tight against it. She took a breath, carefully unslung the lock, checked both ways again for a witness or wrongdoing, and, seeing naught, burst forth from the cage.

  The weight of her leave rattled it, cast a mean coiling that creaked and snagged. The iron squeal beckoned her back, though even starved and sleepless did her soles find righteous speed across the slickness of poured-over stone. Above did the depraved, diseased glare low, captive but agog, though those that sought to earn from a shout were drained below the breeze, muffled. To most perceivers amidst the gaols of Eritle’s tops however, Ander’s escape came barred behind a most bilious coat, and so she snuck out from alow death’s hand unseen and swift.

  Her stride was hobbled, terrorized. She trembled, awaiting the clasp and then wayward in the blistering cold. Only free did she realize that chill reaper that long hungered for her. Free? Every crevice, every call was a hunter’s mark. Every step that was not her own was a predator gaining upon her. Free. First came fear, for the whistling, splashed vows of penance, then shock without felt retributions, and long did that wonder carry with her, riding along the ridge of each roof and the shade of each alley passed. Free! It was a trek of slips, brittle sprints before, at last, Ander understood, in the echoes of her patter, that she was free.

  Then she paused, dropped her back against a wall of wood in a narrow, puddled path, and slid down to a seat amidst its filth. There she regained her breath. Her legs still shook, her stomach growled, but her mind could care not for either. She was free. Free, she told herself, eager to convince, and for what? Winds howled, distant chatter echoed through the roads, the scent of a passed storm filled each breath. The day was young and grey, and Ander held it in the palm of her hand. Without a right way or waiting solitude. Without the closure of a grin to find her in the winds. She did not realize how thinly the world resisted her spring, as if the clouds were too busy gossiping to ever gaze down.

  “Thought it’d be sweeter,” Ander whispered.

  Time passed. Day waned. Each dint in the wood was learned to her. She could trace every etch of the stone below, count every crack in the oak. There was no scamper of pursuit, no wails for avengeance, no bells to toll and alert. Perhaps no one had even noticed the cage stood empty. Perhaps they did, and they did not care. Her face dipped and her eyes flattened of their surprise, their tension. Ander, crumpled in that alley with her legs bent in rainwater, felt ashamed. Her hands clawed into her almost bald skull, where she felt now a brown fuzz gather: the hundred nubs of forming gold.

  Out from death, she thought, in sight of Eritle’s walls rising above her. Out and? Onto what? My second, bleaker destiny, yes…? She could not laugh. Is this where I find my reason? Wood and rainwater…

  Of course, there was no answer. Eritle was silent. The skies were calm. She was gaunt, isolated, a ghost of the crawls between homes, amidst shut-door sanctuaries. It sickened her, worse so than her time in iron had, more viscerally and charging some contempt in her batting nails. What possibly could there be beyond the bars? What sweetness was there in that vast, grey world that was simpler in its virtues than empty-handed death?

  Ander did not have the explanations, but in that isolation of her gutter she realized she must have a cloak, or guards and the cold would steal her away again. Wearily, divided, but sure of need, she shambled up to her feet, then worked her way between shacks, down each backalley, away from every light.

  Through the dark did she come upon a lower ledge of Eritle, open to a steep and a winding road both. Two cobbled homes concealed her there and at their backs sat a pair of wagons, both reeking of dead flesh. Crows idled themselves upon the ragged yard. Rakes, shovels, pickets and boards laid about the space. The stench promised greater seclusion than real barriers.

  Hanging over the box-seat were old stirrups, loose reins, a brown, flat cap, and a coat of grey—worn and wide-hooded, donned often to stave off the storms.

  Once more, Ander armed the narrow eye against her peripheral. In seeing nothing stir amidst the shuddered windows overhead, she crept to the first wagon, plucked the hat from its mantle, thieved the coat beneath, then returned the cap to barren wood. It was creased, smelling of manure, but resolved she dove one arm into it. The second sleeve was thrown over her shoulder just as a voice beseeched her, and her spirit leapt from her bones.

  “What’s a lady like you doing out in the back’ens?”

  The chirp seemed youthful, but coarse. Spinning on her heels, Ander found the speaker. There was a boy in rags, slung over the side of the other wagon, with his arms swinging limp in the wind.

  “You’re not from ‘ere,” he guessed, pleasant. “Tad too tan.”

  And Ander was pale, but the flesh of the child was ill and white, and his eyes half-clouded. She wagered he was diseased or dull to remark on a thing so meagre, to fetch a conclusion so unwhole.

  “Taking a walk, is all,” said Ander. “It’s rare enough, on our cliff, to see a day without its rain. Where by fogs we are not devoured… Foolish to waste it indoors, no? What’re you in a carriage for, anyway?”

  The youth smiled, showing bent, perky teeth, and leaned near excitedly. “What?” he asked, waving his arms at the bleach of his wagon. “You can’t see it? It’s a digman carriage! For the wounded, whatnot.”

  Ander took a long look at the boy. Aside from the wildness of his glare, she found no injury nor ailment. The digmen hauled off the dead or deathly injured in their little chalk carts, spending their days faraway from living things, amidst the rot, working shovels in distant swards. The boy was without stains or open cuts. She could not believe he belonged aboard such a morbid ferry.

  “You don’t seem to be dying, little man,” said Ander. “And a digman’s carriage is no place to play.”

  “The front’s my handsome side, you ask my mother.”

  He shimmied from where he sat and showed Ander his back. A slash of flesh lacked, like a duvet peeled messily apart. The gash brought his spine—bleb-dressed, askew—to the wind. It seemed unearthed and by a hammer bashed. So crooked and vivid was his wound, Ander almost gagged. There was a malign flavour to her belly. Clearly, infection took to the gash, though he watched her unbothered, smirking all the same.

  Disturbed truly, but in certain obliging curiosities, Ander again took him under her detached insights, sharpening her care. In the sway of his hands she glimpsed his wrists, where tiny black holes sat, pierced once by a thing sharp and thin and gliding clean, that left loose flesh by seafoam-greens discoloured. The veins lined dark and blue, like in the pits pooled poison. His vitality was dispersing, slipping off its muscle. In Eritle’s cabins, she surmised, had a cleric of the backroad dispersed their miracle, fed the wrist swill. The remedy rejected only the odds of the boy’s return. Ander’s shoulders sank. She lost any wish to gaze upon that ailed child, though his eyes were too giddy to elude, and his time too short to spurn.

  “That’s quite the wound,” said Ander, dejected. “You must be a fighter… I’ve seen soldiers laid low by less.”

  “Sagans say I’ll fight it back, say I’m strong,” remarked the boy, offering up a shrug. “Sagans lie.”

  She nodded, though no words could leave her lip. No kindness could repair him, no gentle touch could stave off the bleak or renew his faith. It seemed that the only thing she could do—the only human thing, empathetically helpless—was to watch him, smile with him, and hope he might wither unafraid.

  His smile faded, perhaps in recompense for his imagined misgivings, his natural dilapidation of her ease. He felt that his eye’s return was untoward, so gave his sights to the horizon. It laid buried, across an endless stretch of fields and brawling winds that irritated the willows. His squint found the clouds where sun did not breach, brushing on to envelop Eritle. Again, did the grey emerge to pout across their cliff.

  “Day’s end,” he realized. “You oughta’ head indoors soon. Out ‘ere ain’t no place to be once there’s thunder.” The boy bit his lip. “Ain’t no place to be at all.”

  Turning to Ander, he grinned again, remembering his courtesy and the batterings of its lesson, though his gaze was dim then, without young expenditure to its watch.

  “After all, wayfarer, soon there won’t be none out ‘ere but the dead!” he laughed, though it turned to a red hack.

  Stiff, they saw one another. His giggle was conquering, a defilement to the sure ear. His head fell low and his jaw stretched out, spraying the mad cacophony up into the air. There was life in his flailing anew.

  Ander propped her chin high, gave the boy a last endearing look, then sealed her heart away and by a swivel deserted his climb. She could not banish the knowledge that by morning he would be fed to distant rock. Slow, uneven steps carried her away from that unnerving laughter. Laughter that, somehow, she envied. Laughter that she silently prayed she might hear again, alongside the blackbirds of dawn. Some farewell was uttered under her breath, then was the sound of the doomed child drowned in the wood her walk laid between them.

  She coveted a distraction, and it was then that her ribs wheezed. At once, hunger was again absolute. Ander had forgotten how many days she had dined on bugs come to eat her, drank of rain while passersby laughed. It seemed astonishing that her legs could keep her sickly frame afloat, and the idea of keeling over, to be dragged to the same wagon as the child, shot fire through her feet.

  Through some shoddy bizarre she tread, with her thieved hood brought low to mask her. The sky was gone under canopies of brown, guarding against the elements for their packed amble but rendering it lightless, in infant-night. Some half dozen booths lined the corridor, but there was but one customer for every two stores. The clutch could fit no more.

  Among them was a furrfiend, made by his surcoat: burgundy, antiquated, with a ravening motif of some many plumes and mauls. Under was steel, unalloyed, and too at the helm shaped to a mammoth’s likeness. Skulking decrepitly from stall to stall, vendors made no efforts to tempt him.

  Two cloaked commoners rifled near, bartering and poking. Before them sat an aged woman behind her wall of cobblery, tiredly awaiting a buyer. To her side, a younger man wasted the day cleaning spotless tools of oak and iron. An unfriendly fellow watched them both, over his squabble of fruit baskets. Much of his harvest was of a lesser colour than what the earth would readily emit, more touched by mold. It was habit to cut around rot in Eritle, however.

  Ander strolled through, certain she could afford not even the dust of their wares with all the emptiness of her pockets, but keen to seem belonging. The old lady shot her a cold glare, disapproving so as if she knew Ander strode in stolen garb or guessed that she strode penniless. It was such a constant discontent however, that Ander knew she went unrecognized. She ignored the crone, ignored too the hecklings of the fruitman when he hassled for her eye. Before a low booth, clouded over by cheap tapestries, she stalled, in sight of its drab reds and greens. The banners seemed woven in the man’s own yard, who stood tall and smirking, with a sooted apron upon his breast. Each bore stringy trim, tatterings of oil and the creases of disproportion, yet it was what laid upon the table between the banners that made her halt.

  Four short swords were laid out on the wood. They were thin, of indelicate steel, and one wore a coat of rust. The smith’s grin steadied towards her.

  “Need steel?” he asked. “Ah, but of course you do. Whilderwheats blow as they oft again do. The homewife or the cripple can do without, granted. You do seem short of any folk so drab, friend.”

  “Drab, is it?” she asked.

  “Take to your home, bar your door, then others must up and keep the road, no? Bow your blade, means another’s ought to raise theirs in your stead,” he said, shaking his head. “Not a thing’s more drab than that, not on our rock. Living, the onus of your fellows. Day after day, spent serf-like. Blades like mine, they rid you of such guilts. Bloodily. Quick.”

  “Well, least they needn’t suffer the fields, to toil with the rest of us,” said Ander. “I’d choose these nooks over the plains, any day my wits were with me. Sooner be bored, yes, than… than that.”

  And at that he laughed. “Spoken like a man unlearned to the wild’s riches! But you’ll be hopeless to ever lay claim to them unarmed, friend, this we can both hold certain.”

  “Hrm,” Ander scoffed, and raised her chin to him so that he could see the truth of her face, the scraggly but acute complexion. “Spoken as a man who’s never had his riches lost.” She picked up one of his blades. It was broad, slightly curved at the tip, and deeply she gazed into it. It was too light to the touch, too wieldable, forgoing any forceful investment to devastate. “Home does seem a modest lounge, yes, till you’ve been too long without. Far too long, then it’s all you’d ever dare crave. Then, your riches come plain.”

  The sight of the blade took her, and so her final words drew faint. The steel was enticing, the hilt so smooth in her fist.

  “And yet each day,” he said, “our furrfiends march out again.”

  “And each night,” said Ander, “they speak a little less.”

  “True, though not all prove apt for the challenge.”

  “Not all know it,” she said, and her gaze warded him off.

  Freed of his pestering, she fell to the sword, then a warmer thing. It enveloped her by the weight, soothed an aching through its convivial returns, of gleam and straight, as does a friend long apart. Frail as her fingers were, it was without strain that they curled fiercely to a grip. Its solidity absconded with hunger. For an instant, she felt whole, resumed from long tenebrosity. The stagnancy lifted. But the sword’s familiarity, a heat as it was, held memory’s singe. The comfort of old touch was vanquished and all was recalled. The mercenaries, the mines, Harlm then the Morlen Saints. The sins, the sins so many, inexorable. Or was that the coward’s word? She faltered, fell aghast. That blade could not belong to her, for before was the one entrusted sharper, sturdier, forged of finer steels. It made her no more able. The hilt was a sickness. It did not belong with her, she knew. Ander could not believe she was worthy enough to again be culpable.

  Like a hand brushed against the brazier, her fingers snatched and she tossed the blade back to its table, keen to be rid of it.

  “Not to your liking?” asked the smith.

  “No,” said Ander. “I’m rich enough already.”

  She left, through a quiet that deserved guards. The road that stretched to the main square daunted her, teased discovery, so instead Ander strode up a winding back-path. The streets seemed evacuated of their securities, as if the bells had tolled and the boys gone to war. Where once furrfiends would waft and bladesmen mingle, there were desolate corners, vacant shutters. A power had been stripped from the cliff-town.

  Her alley was isolated, squeezed between the tilts of jagged homes, deformed by the upward screech of bedrock. Above, clothes hung over a wire. They were drenched and had been forgotten for days. Murals of chalk scratched the walls, by rain were faded. A doll sat in a puddle, bashed, gutted of its stuffing. Its beady eyes held her for a moment, then Ander splashed past it.

  The corridor became a climb, eerily unvisited. A creek of ramshackle boxes and barrels led forth. Beyond were sacs, split and festering, homes for only insects, clutter to be webbed. Where not sodden, they were splintered. Bugs or grain, she was starving. The thought felt putrid, was loathed by its difficult dismissal. There was the honour of a tradeswoman, then there was demise on the morrow, in the wet heap of a once-town.

  She pulled the tops off the barrels and wedged off the boards of each box, clawing through cobweb and strapping. The wood was so cheapened and by the weathers brutalized that it cut her in the search, and so scrawny had her skin become that it bled. A red-fingered hermit, taken to the backstage of seclusions, Ander could not let her pain dissuade.

  Then, like a foul breeze, the taint of rot touched her. Her nose scrunched and she jerked aside. A cough came, then a second sniff, then she froze in her labours as the body revealed.

  There he laid: a feather fallen from Eritle’s imperiled spirit; a flake of the withered root. A man was crumpled against the walls in the alley’s end, behind a fortress of bags and barrels. Either the cold or the hunger took him. Grey skin clung around his bones, entrenched his cheeks. He seemed to be carved out from the gutter itself, and great black flies buzzed about to call his corpse kingdom.

  At his feet sat a little cup. In it was a handful of copper coins. Cold killed him, thought Ander, with a hand over her nose. She heard a clap high above. Windows had shut to the finding. Perhaps in her rummaging she had again stirred the scent. The feat was disconsolate, proving the town’s terrible stakes. Her want was to turn and leave, but a shame too reluctant reached for the cup. Ander lowered herself by his toes then scraped out the coppers: chilled, light. They were an insignificant sum, instantly robbing the effort of its desperate worth. The shame was tenfold. Her stomach alone forced her onward, away from his dead, judging gaze. The whine of her gut was the drum to her step, and both beat glumly until the alley was behind her.

  With those spare coppers in her pocket, she restored a hope upon that sorry cliff, and hastened to Ellimon’s Bale. Somehow, the sad thought of spending her wealth seemed able to renew the dead man’s efforts, as if Ander might eat in his stead and honour him, but it was naive, she knew, to name her chore anything but the theft of a grave, to buy broth for dignity.

  She liked to think, on her path apart from him, that he might have been content, if only partly, begrudgingly, to know in death he achieved the provision his kinfolk failed him in life; knowing his final deed was perhaps to save a fellow. Her fret was—and such haunted her all the while up and low to the tavern—if the life preserved was even worth as much as his tomb’s pride. A thought for fuller stomachs, she thought to herself, before arriving at Ellimon’s Bale.

  At the mantle of a lower bluff, overshadowed by steep homes that circled its back, sat the tavern of Eritle. It was the prize of an open path, cutting right of the main road. The exterior was shoddy. Mud entrapped and glass shards dressed it. A deep puddle took its first step, and often was bad ale poured down into it from the second-floor balcony. A trio of labourers stood there and drank daylight away. One shouted to her, though it was indiscernible and she did not care to guess. Through the puddle she went, then into the darkness beyond the door of Ellimon’s Bale.

  First that drew her eye was the mantelpiece, where to the left wall, kissing the tallest flames and glowering against the hearth, perched the head of a rodent fury. It was eyeless, wore fangs in its sockets. The whiskers were netted and bore a crust of blood. About it was a wrathful eminence.

  This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.

  The bar slouched to the far end, tended by a dirty, mean-eyed woman. Behind her, stairs snuck up and down. The rest of the chamber was consumed by roundtables, topped by lanterns yet to be lit, dented iron tankards, and wooden bowls full of either porridge or stew.

  A scraggly grouch faced the fire, an old man hunched at the bar. Within were the weary, toasting to done, tireless days. Their cheers were low-spirited harrumphs. Elsewhere tables were left empty, to allow a lone guard his corner. He was face-down in a dew of his own ale, and had been for some time. Even in the tavern, he wore his blue-gold metals, as if believing without he would go accosted. His helmet was on the table, upturned, with a flute in it, wrapped in laundry.

  Ander kept her head low, her feet quick, and took a seat at the bar, a stool apart from the older man. She nodded to the barkeep.

  “Stew?” Ander guessed, then placed down two coppers.

  The barkeep’s gaze was solid and she said nothing. She vanished to fetch a bowl. Ander was surprised to have made it so far, still anticipating that boom of punishment, guessing when the guard would rouse and strike her, when the barkeep would chuck back her pay and name it fake, yet the space was silent. She belonged like ice in gin. At last she would eat, and surely even slosh or elkfeed would sit sapid in her belly if it were only dumped in a bowl. Her stomach came near a burst. Anxious, she skittered her fingers over the counter, caught one in a spill of ale, and, ravenous, brought the taste to her lip. It was bitter, ravishing; she staggered under the bludgeon of cotton fists, mean reliefs.

  “Have you an affliction?” asked the older fellow to her side.

  His hair was pulled back to the scalp and there it sprawled, grey and weathered. Plain brown eyes watched her, swollen by some sudden insight or glee. He was dressed cheaply, as a dirtied and diligent farmhand. Ordinary and welcoming. He may have been on entertainment’s hunt, but his pleasantry was abnormal and, Ander, suspicious of it.

  “Eh?” she asked, confused.

  “You sport a clean head, girl,” he answered, as if it were as obvious as the distinction between seasons. “So, are you afflicted? A curseback, hrm? What took your hair, is all I mean…”

  “Have you some affliction?” asked Ander in turn. “To sit here abandoned, with stew in your teeth, speaking to bald women?”

  “Right!” he chuckled, then a bulge merry and gruff. “What, then? You think an old cur could do better in Ellimon’s?”

  “In this crawl?” she asked, glaring vaguely about the room. “I’ve faith you could do worse, man.”

  “Aye, that I’ll drink to,” and up came his tankard, and when it bowed a foam was wet on his lips. “Right, it is. You’ve the eye for it. I’d wager my days galavanting are done, now behind me. Not any damsels about praying for wrinkles, no? Lest they might be tended to with the shovel and rake,” he chortled.

  “You needn’t cheapen yourself so,” said Ander, amused but unenthused. “Even the shovel asks more than most can answer. We go among those of the cup, now, who might only beg and shiver. You see it about you. Those who hack, scratch at their skin. Tending the fields, well, that’s more than worthy enough.”

  The barkeep smacked a bowl and spoon down upon the wood, and slid them sluggishly over to Ander. She grasped both, gave thanks, then poured her sights and smell into that steamy heap of broth. The water was dark and chunky cuts of potato floated through. Ander tore in. She chewed fast, gulped loudly, much like a wolf bent over its sheep, with jaws dribbling. The bowl was half empty before she realized the immense scent of onion drifting up.

  “Been some time,” he began, “since I’ve seen anyone eat Gaerhild’s stew like that. Lest they went too drunk to taste.”

  The barkeep leveled him with a hard glare, but he laughed through it, then her watch turned curiously to the bald woman.

  “We’re upon prewinter,” said Ander between bites. “I’ll not turn my nose from a hot meal. Not with frost in the wind.”

  “Well, don’t let me slow you,” said the old man. “Keep up like so, we might even prove the tales true, and find Gaerhild’s smile. I’d say that’s a sight worth two drinks.” He took a swig and Gaerhild shook her head at him, then through the reek of ale came his rebuttal. “Though I’d wager your scowl would be the less frightening.”

  “Don’t get Odirn too drunk, stranger,” said Gaerhild, eyeing Ander. “Or it’ll be you who tosses out the old bastard.” Then she turned away from them both and took to cleaning tables, but over her back her gaze kept, to Ander, and the curiosity of all she was.

  “All-Father’s eyes,” said Odirn. “The hag loves you.”

  “That, or mayhaps she hates you so that the plain tongue seems pleasant,” answered Ander, filling her cheeks with hot brew and sensing her stomach swoon.

  “She was at a time more spry, if you might fathom. Lighthearted, even. Once ago, each cup she filled with a grin. Threw a kind word to all past her door. Now, Gaerhild’s come bitter, sorry but sensible as it is. Ellimon’s Bale, come darker. And Eritle weeps, so they say. Weeping Eritle. Rubbish little saying.”

  “Was it you that at last wore her down?”

  “Her mate,” he said bluntly, earning Ander’s gawk. “A winter back, he passed on. Strayed far from the cliff, near the Haddlebush. Some coloured, pretty little berry he sought to pick out there. Strayed too far, clearly enough. Peddler found him torn to three parts. Work of a beast without name and oft is the same story retold. ‘Course you’d never speak of it to Gaerhild. She’d gut you. Or sob, mayhaps. That’s a far uglier thing. Worse than blood spilt, no? Alas, she’s seen enough of both, so we speak of it none. Bale keeps quiet, that way.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” said Ander, unsure if she was supposed to coddle or challenge his doubt. “Vile workings, out in the wheats. Land’s always wilder than we remember. Seems as if… as if once there was more earth to share, mayhaps.”

  Odirn took her in his stare, smoothed over her frame with the arid lure of his eye. It faltered, flared up from its dryness. Something gleamed then in his gaze. He discovered his smile, as if hearing again a fond tale of childhood. She held an independent wisdom, not without ancestry.

  “You remind me of my son, y’know,” said Odirn. “Well, I’d wish you and him could meet. There is that unnamed colour to the two of you. Dull as Arakvan keeps us, we mustn’t discern it. But it’s keen to lend its hand where needed, and that you sense. Keener still to take a leap, if only to see where the foot lands.” He took a long swig, swallowing some reflection. “Aye, I see it clear in you.”

  “You think more of me than I’ve earned,” said Ander, queasy under the weight of a compliment. “I’m not the kind compatriot in your ale’s vision, Odirn. I can be uncaring. Cruel, even. I’d wager what’s left of this stew that your son’s of a finer ilk.”

  “He’s my kin. How good could the bastard be?” Odirn laughed, before solemnly he settled. “But aye, he was no saint neither.”

  At that, Ander went silent, to see the old fellow anew. There was a woe basking in his soft eye’s ebb. She let him speak.

  “Liked to roam, that fool,” Odirn recalled, his voice grave, but learning to bleat. “He’d wander south, what seemed seconds ‘fore nightfall, dreamspeaking of hills to climb, storms to see, whatnot. Speeches for fools. And I told him as much. Wanted the world under him, oaf he was. Rain hadn’t the power to dissuade such heart. Night neither—even twilight was bright and possible in his watch. Hadn’t fear for the beasts, nor the cold, nor the worser dark below our lands. None of it.” Odirn shook his head. “The time did come, as it comes to all errand soldiers, when he at last thought himself ready. Wasn’t long ago—a week past, even—my boy went to Fjordrun. Planned to leap the old rift, ‘gainst all heed, of course. Always ‘gainst it all. And what’s he find? Horrid devil; an aetroll, he called it, though already did it lay butchered. Some warband fell upon it, no doubt. Ah, the reek of it, of its insides what seeped, of all the fur bled through, threw him back home. Cast him off his adventure.” Another swig, another hard swallow. “He weren’t ready, the little fool. Couldn’t stomach what’s out there.

  “Yet it dwelled on him, yes. Like a week in the palace, but your gown didn’t fit. Back home he came, and the smell came with him.” What seemed a frailness wobbled in his squint, though it was rather the hate of such. “Learned he weren’t the hero, my boy did. Not the adventurer, nor the furrfiend, despite all his after-dinner ideas. The boy was only that—a boy. My boy. But when’s that ever satisfied our seeking youths? So, he tries his damndest to find the same thrill here, at home. The same thrill of Fjordrun and leaps and aetrolls. Ha! What hope of that is there in a place like this? He climbs, he picks pockets, he taunts off. He seeks, again for the taste of that meal what soured him.

  “So the time comes, as for all it does, when his hand nicks the wrong purse, and a man in blue and gold strings him up in a cage. Little iron cell, what teetered in the breeze. Still red, with the last bastard what died in it. Hung right over my street, it did. And what could I do? I can’t climb anymore… I can’t rally ‘gainst soldiers. I’m old now, you see? My only powers were to watch, pray, try as I might to chuck food up to him and speak with him when the night drew lonely. Ah, but the boy didn’t want it. None of it. I was plain to him, you see? Plain as the town what caged him and the guards what turned the key.”

  Odirn finished his drink, sucked the liquor that glazed his lips, then anxiously he blinked about for more. There was a clear drip to his left eye and an ache to his throat. His wrinkly cheeks trembled with words yet formed. There was a jitter in his roving grasp.

  “It was cold last night. C-colder than usual. So…” A curse tempted his tongue. It lost and in his stool he slacked. A decided and pretend complacency enveloped him. “So my boy froze to death,” said Odirn, stilted. “In the rain. And Eritle weeps, they say. And so it does.”

  The stew felt cold in her throat. That hunger at last appeased was at once unearned. Her meal was sullied. Her friend was sagging. She felt rotten potatoes swim in her gut and onion choke her. They both pictured then the cage, home to the body that would never descend, imagining which way limped arms dangled, where ended the laurelling of the prewinter. She herself seemed a rare contrivance of decay, a rebel of the deadened heights. Yet if otherwise, none would mourn her and beg sympathies bar-side. There would be an unchanged Arakvan. Despite those ironies at work in the cobwebbed rafters, she sat free to sip hot stew in Ellimon’s Bale, while Odirn’s child started to reek.

  “And for what…” she whispered under her breath, distant, with a gaze imbued to her bowl’s bottom.

  “And for what…” Odirn echoed, equally faint.

  They were the patrons, hunched over, of a formless prejudice, shuddering at only illusions of shouts. Tapping tankard-rims, scratching out those incidental italics of oak. Chains could be cherished at least for their brace, their unquestionable counsel. Free, she was. Free to be accountable, to be attended to. Ander struggled to see what virtues liberty had ever bestowed upon her. Her velleities were then lachrymose, but by onion and ale cauterized.

  “I’m sorry for your son,” she said, nodding, gaining force in her teeth. “I’m sorry for the man he could never grow to be. And you, who could only watch him die. And I’m sorry for Gaerhild, this saddened camp of hers, and too her mate I’ll never meet. Sorry for Eritle, its rains, the ill in its fogs, and the beasts below it, and all who march out to cut them away and all who cower and turn to their feed. For damned all of it, I’m sorry!”

  Before Odirn’s own wetted eyes, he beheld in the alehouse a ferocity take his friend. It melted away her composure, startled him by its rage of exhales. Ander slapped the spoon back into the bowl, splashing stew onto the counter, and rose with a stomp and a slashing glare.

  “But I’ve been sorry for so long,” she hissed, “and I’ve helped nothing! So you are wrong, Odirn, again with me as you were with your fool’s boy. I am no kind heart, to dare and take leaps and test Fjordrun! See me now, man!” she snarled, as if by her lean unveiling his fable’s monster. “I’m but another hood in your cold street, who ducks her eyes from the dead same as all others, and I’ve laid in this mourning far too long!”

  Her cloak whipped away and to the door she strode. Odirn’s chest was tight, and airless he watched. Unflinching, she passed the hooting, chugging crowds. Ander came to the guard, whose face was still pressed to his table, and dove a hand down at his belt. She plucked the hanging purse, silent so as to rouse no alarm, skilled enough to not stir him, and within another moment was beyond the door. Odirn frowned at her passing, though the frown was weak and ashamed. Ellimon’s Bale had never seemed more quiet to his half-deafened ears.

  Ander hurried through the streets. Thunder sounded. The storm had drawn very near. A first drizzle fell over Eritle, so much like a weary alert, so akin to a weep. For her deed and departure, she held no prides. When her hustle gained and the distance grew and rain assorted her breaths, the reality of the words spoken hardened upon her. A shadow, from the tavern doors, sprawled to envelop her. Near a fright, she moved apace. Her own cruelties perplexed the rushing mind. How could she abandon him to that barren woe? How could she in any esteem survive thieving the fill of beggars’ cups and thirsting for ales through dim alleys when above, by the thunder, a dreamer laid dead. How was it fair and how might mortal hands make it right, that in a prison of no viler dimensions a soul so brighter lost?

  Furious, she bounded down a quiet crawl, displaced amidst the backside of cabins. The rain gained weight and dug in at her nape. Cabalder hissed under the hail and up went yellow fumes. The call of the storm frenzied, a wrathful symphony over her charge. The cold was no burden. The wet was unnoticed. Only the cages above, could Ander perceive. Odirn’s damp eyes, Gaerhild’s scowl, cracks in clouds that looked like legs. Ander gave up a cry—savage—like her own vengeful resign, full of impure longing, that the thunder drowned and the rain ran from. She closed a fist and it flew against the wood before her. Bone or oak cracked, splinters burst out. Only by the pain of her knuckles did the ache of her head dampen.

  “Sorry again,” was her lament.

  Red split her right hand. There was a quaking at the wrist, a throbbing imprint over bone, but rain proved swift to carry the blood away. It did not matter to her. Her spirit was then spent. Sore, eyeless, she shambled out from that alley, through the gaining torrent. Ander passed a myriad of hustling hoods who made for indoors, and upon that cliff of dreads she seemed an aberration. In the puddles she saw anger on a round head. All she could realize was how dense her fuzz had come and how undeserving she was of its gold.

  Time drained unnaturally while she wallowed; it may have been hours bleeding or days or a blink. Gradually, through the mirth of the storm, she did indeed bring herself before a cutter, who of course hid indoors. Her hair was the singular truth. It was arriving again, condemning. There was a rickety sign showing scissors somewhere in the roads, slick and dark and almost menacing under hail.

  She pushed in, was greeted but failed to hear it, dropped a couple coppers upon the counter, then fell into a low chair. The air was stale. The interior was tight and chilly. Through the cracks of oak, the storm breathed, hinting at its reserved, impatient damnation. A lone candle gave light to a cloth and bowl of water, beside scissors and short knives. It was homely enough and without a scent.

  The cutter, Toarelda, thumbed through the few coins discharged at her door, though could find no patch of hair upon Ander worth its sum. Speculatively, she guessed that Ander wanted that short blonde fuzz shaved from her scalp, and without meeting her eye Ander nodded. Toarelda shrugged, collected a flat knife, wetted her fingers and the blade both, then dashed water over Ander’s head. Her gaze was in her lap, though Toarelda pulled her up by the chin. Ander was forced to behold the old mirror set in the wall before her. Its frame was chipped, its glass smeared, and the bottom left corner was cracked, but the image remained. Her sights dove back into the safety of the floor.

  Insects, wormy and dark, weeded through the boards. Filth filled the cracks. The wood was stained and battered. Somehow, it brought greater comfort than what lived in the glass.

  “From whereabouts do you hail?” asked Toarelda, in a temerarious, yet casual inquiry. “Long have I lived in little Eritle, and I count no years where bald women walked her streets.”

  “And none will,” said Ander. “As long as you do as I’ve paid you for.”

  “That is a fair thing. Yet I’m an honest woman, girl. You must then know you’ve paid too much for a thing as quick as this. Why, I’ve more hair under my arm than what you sit before me today.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Ander murmured. “I’ve little use for coppers.”

  “The wheats have treated you justly, then.”

  “Justly? They do not know the word.”

  “Young, but with resent already,” chuckled Toarelda. “Then let me not waste my cheap wisdoms on your ears, girl. I wager you know what’s worth knowing on our hill, and of that there’s little. But I must wonder, and call such curiosity the extra copper’s fetch, but why is a girl so eager to appear otherwise?”

  “Why is a cutter so spent to steal her own fee?” Ander countered.

  “Hair is my trade, measly as it might seem, though for my doings it does suffice. I have learned through an age to spot a strong root. Why, your roots are strong indeed. Strong and gold. You’ve good hair here, girl, and it yearns to grow long and sway. In a battle it could be your burden, true, but you come storm-touched with no blade. Why then cut it?”

  Ander considered it, as she often did when the razor felt her scalp. Why cut it? It had been so very long since last she felt blonde locks by her ears. It made folk simper when they passed. It animated her in the river’s ripple. It was silk under water, a shawl in wind: a part of her, perhaps that most rapt, though ancient was its disseverance. She could not remember its amity, its load. Then why cut it? Ander thought to snicker, for the answer was so plain and time and again provided, though to Toarelda she felt compassion in brevity.

  “My hair…” whispered Ander. “‘It was too beautiful, I ‘spose.”

  Toarelda boomed with laughter at that, but Ander’s face kept stern. Ander was mute. In recollection of the perished golds, she found the mirror again, though then could not look away. By its centre, she was seized.

  The razor was swift and the work limited, so soon her head was smooth again. She saw a patch of pale skin, hairless, veined, rasped and made red, as if in perpetuity strained. There was a lurch of fastened skin, hugging low cheekbones; small, dark lips in illiberal performance for their sharp, worsted chin; a meandering set of teeth between them, its smile desecrated by one black slot. Above lurked the eyes, much different than how they had last appeared to her, militant in their return of gaze. In the dismemberments of Toarelda’s mirror, they seemed so anfractuous, diverted, so grizzled and so old. So experienced and dissatisfied with their proficiencies, like the smoldering aftermaths of foul educations. Ander looked into herself then with a child’s eyes, but her stomach dropped to behold a woman looking back: A woman garnished by red slits and bedraggled pleats. An umbra under her stare and cruds across her scowl. A woman witness to the hideous strictures of earth and returned with souvenirs. A woman starved, scandalized, with two insensate eyes and one grim frown.

  A woman she did not recognize.

  “Thank you,” said Ander.

  She arose from the chair, turned deaf to Toarelda’s pleasantries, and was gone into the storm again. The mirror was a basin of gloried plights, her own, then branded she did not skim the puddles underfoot. Each shard of her solicitous self gave her speed. By night, her shins ached and Eritle’s haunts were at last encumbered, weighed down and drowned. Through the townsquare she strolled, delighting in the emptiness. Businesses sat shut, amber smokes broiled. There was serenity swashing atop the cobblestones. An epic of desirous fumes and hails swirled, battling through grey ages.

  At the centre of the clearing, overseen by shack-clusters and boarded windows, flickering with their subdued brights, sat a fountain, made of marble. Bouncing blues filled the bowl, wrought rapid by the rain that knew no relent. There was a bird akin to an eagle, with its wings sprawled and its hooked beak crying. Water fell in a low arch from its jaw, amidst a glistening whirl of feathers, hennaed: The Amber Falcon, who watched over Eritle amidst its storms.

  She leaned against the rim. Sprinklings dashed her back. Ander explored her surroundings, unmoving. Eritle had fed, clothed, and shaved her, though now she knew not where to go. She felt as if her heart was pending an inspirer’s touch, to lead unto a nobler beyond. Last, her roaming led her to a gaol, like penance for a vain wager. Amidst the lightless gurgling of the square, she maundered that dreary gift of a second liberty.

  Ander jerked back, nicked by a knife in her gums. Dabbing her ache, she found the empty slot in her smile then blood under her nail. For whatever reason, it was humourous—hilarious, wildly so. A grand jest was unveiled in her lordly thunder and as a prophet taught again she cackled. Yet steps sounded then, quite suddenly through the hail, and knowing the square was shared her laughter died out.

  “Another madman taken to the storm, eh?” asked a dark, hooded woman, who drew from an alley to her flank. “Seems to be Eritle’s bloody sigil…”

  Ander recognized the voice, and over her shoulder she too recalled the face. It was the same woman who had stood upon the cliff, nights prior, beside the kinnit Veil Nadaar. Arawn did not seem to recognize the escapee. Arawn was cloaked in midnight, by the clouds spat over; an erect pigment of the lustrous dark. Ander saw a scabbard beneath the bellows of her garb. A scorching stare was under the hood. Ander pulled her own lower and ducked her eyes.

  “To live in a place such as this…” she said. “It’d be madness to stay quiet under the endless sleet. My err was in thinking, at least, there would be none to begrudge me… in storm and night. But our day is not yet done, and I have already been wrong many a time.”

  “Oh, how very forlorn is this? You speak like the accursed,” mocked Arawn. “I seem the least of your ailments, tonight. But if they are so profuse, why bother? The gate is low. Your leave of little Eritle—its weeping—sits no more than a splash away. At dawn, the Scourge will sink back to its pits. Yes? Go laugh in your wild night. Be free of the rain and let none begrudge you your madness again.”

  “But it is not so simple as that.”

  “Of course it is,” declared Arawn. “I’ve been here longer than I should wish. No less the fool than you, doubtless. In the wrong dark, no less brazen. Many nights I’ve gone to the hill’s top back to its doored bottom, and each morning I awake still in Eritle. First, I called it duty. Then, happenstance. Lies, lies again.”

  “Then what is the real reason?” Ander asked, turning bold to find Arawn. “Why do you suffer it, stranger?”

  Arawn scoffed, idled herself before the Amber Falcon, lent it displeasure, then took to the square’s brim. “Why do you imagine?” she asked. “For the same reason as you, I’ve no doubt. Look out there, to the lower black.” The horizon was unseen, gorging on wayward ambition. “Where the turf is shuffling. Where wealth’s but swinespeak. You do see it,” said Arawn, disgusted by herself or them both. “Simply, I’m too damned afraid to face those fields alone.”

  Then Arawn Dandril laughed, loudly, fearlessly, and before her chant little lights went out behind doors. She saw them, saw all the fright surrounding her, the nervous eyes that thought evil of her, and the chuckle came glum. There she stood, in the lowest drudge of a well of madmen and cowards, somehow feeling as if she belonged.

  “Is that it?” she asked Ander, a tinge more fierce. “Are you here, now, stumbling through the night, because you’re afraid?”

  Ander winced, as if the accusation were an affront upon her. Was it only fear? Fear, crippling good self-possession in that wider world? Fear, casting even inaction in shame? Fear, burdening each free step with accountability for the caged? No, she thought to herself. It sounded much more like despair.

  “I’ve seen the fields,” she confessed, doleful. “I’ve seen what walks them. There is nothing there worth running from.”

  “What is it, then?” Arawn asked, quickly coming disdainful. “Have you a father who won’t approve? A lover, who so desperately needs you? Or are you such a fool that you have no answer?”

  “I have my answer,” she stated, stern. “I’ve had it for years.”

  “Oh? Good,” said Arawn, stepping closer. “Then speak this truth of yours, or with the steel you feign your blind eye to I’ll see you bloodied.”

  Ander seemed surprised, so Arawn spoke on.

  “Yes, yes, you are not so subtle as you wish. Though I will admit, you blend in better now than you did in your cage.” Arawn grinned, eased back, and the smile faded. “But fret not. I am no dog of Galehaven that wants all under its collar. But an answer indeed I crave, and that I will have before this night is done and blurs with all the rest.”

  Her threats did not rattle Ander. The clear strength, the obvious swordsmanship, the lethal advantage. Though with Arawn, her status was clear. She did not need to give assurances or apologies, to hide her eye or tug her hood. To be kind, to seek out sympathy. Indeed, Ander knew no company where she felt less restrained than beside that fiendish warrior.

  “You’ve spent too much time along kinnits, Arawn,” said Ander, earning her a crude watch. “They have so sharpened your tongue. But if in this storm are to be our truths, then so be it, and let us forgo more secrecy. I tire now of lies.” She turned to the broader street, where a winding slushed on toward the gate. The night was drooling, the day’s obscenities were carried away. “I cannot fear these fields. There is no lie in that. Their beasts, neither. Oh, but of course am I slow to walk them. You have seen the fields, Arawn. Wander long enough, you glimpse true horrors. And not the hog or the blairhound, but that true and awful, so low in the earth. Stay long enough under Arakvan’s sky, you see too the horrors that become of men, out amongst them. Good men, I’ve witnessed. Women of courage. Kinnits even, with their wits and whatever scale or slime runs between their legs. I’ve seen it—tenfold what our land might do to its kind souls.”

  Then Ander turned, mulled heavily over Arawn’s visage, who in bitter investment straightened and tilted back.

  “And to a soul such as mine…” began Ander. “Oh, but you know it, do you not? You stood upon that cliff. Sentenced to die in iron, pulled up to the unfathomably lesser poverty, to neighbour witches and our blighted. A soul so already poor… What manner of horror could those lands achieve in me?”

  Dandril’s gaze fell upon the puddles underfoot. She waded through them, scrounged for some truth. Then she scowled at Ander, and shook her head.

  “Such insight, and such gall, yet still you manage to disappoint. So it is always a tedious night, on this bastard cliff,” said Arawn. “You are all you denied. You’ve wasted our quiet thinking yourself otherwise. But you know it, of course? You are afraid.”

  Arawn was then disinterested, or at least worked ardently to appear so, and gave Ander her back, then carried on with whatever task she first entered that storm to carry out.

  Ander hardly noticed her leave. She warred with her own and Arawn’s words too. Measuring them, a hundred means across a hundred times, desperate to see the slithering telltales of a perhaps-truth. She did not know with any certainty what that affliction in her heart could be called, though not knowing was a sense then familiar, and it made anger swell in her fists.

  Though when her fingers curled shut, her knuckles flexed, and she felt the wound of her last rage. Suddenly, she did indeed seem a fool: another madman taken to the storm.

  “Afraid?” she asked aloud, then laughed at a whisper.

  ____

  Darkfall.