The Witchwood Crown
“Then you may continue.” The sergeant turned and signaled to the guardhouse. A moment later the portcullis began to creak upward.
“What in Brynioch’s name has happened?” Aengas wondered as they drove through.
“We shall know soon enough.” Tiamak’s heart was pounding.
It seemed to take a very long time for the carriage to make its way through the gates of the two inner baileys, but as they approached the front of the royal residence, Tiamak saw even more guards posted outside. To his slight relief, he also saw Pasevalles in urgent conversation with Zakiel, the guard captain.
“Lord Chancellor!” Tiamak called as the carriage rolled to a halt on the broad drive before the residence, and a half dozen Erkynguard moved forward to surround it. “What happens here?”
“Praise be to Elysia and her saints,” Pasevalles said as he approached. His face was pale and his hair was wet, as if he had been called directly from his bath. “I’m glad to see you are well, Lord Tiamak. The king and queen were most concerned when we could not find you.”
“I have been at the docks, saying goodbye to one friend and discovering, quite to my surprise, that another has arrived. Lord Pasevalles, this is Aengas, former Viscount of Carpilbin, now First Factor of Abaingeat.”
“I have heard of you, my lord.”
“Forgive me for not bowing,” Aengas replied.
“But what is going on here?” Tiamak asked. “You said the king and queen—they are both well?”
“In fact,” said Pasevalles, “everybody is well, except for the poor fool who tried to kill Count Eolair. And even he is not too badly hurt.” His expression belied his casual words. Tiamak had never seen the stolid Lord Chancellor so upset: his anger was obvious, fierce, and also new to Tiamak. He was glad he was not its target.
“What?” Tiamak could only stare. Suddenly Pasevalles’ pale features and disheveled appearance made sense. “Was Eolair harmed?”
“A stab wound near his shoulder that struck bone or it would have been worse. Some cuts to his hands,” said the Lord Chancellor. “We are fortunate his attacker was no soldier. He seems to have been a madman—he has worked here in the castle for more than a year. A Hernystirman.”
It sank in after a moment, and seemed to settle in Tiamak’s guts. “A Hernystirman? Did he work in the kitchen? Is his name . . . oh, what was it? Is his name Riggan?”
“Yes, I think that’s what someone said. Do you know him?”
“I know of him. My wife tended him once.” He was in no hurry to tell the rest of the story, of the man babbling about the Morriga, the Mother of Crows.
“Has he been questioned?”
“Yes, but he speaks no sense,” said Pasevalles. “You may see him later if you wish. I would be pleased to have your thoughts.”
“But who was he?”
“Come inside and you will have answers to all your questions,” Pasevalles told him. “The king and queen will want to know you have been found alive and hale.” He waved, signaling to the guards that the carriage’s occupants were welcome inside the residence. At Tiamak’s request, Captain Zakiel picked out four strong soldiers to carry Aengas’s litter into the throne hall.
As he limped after the litter, ignoring the murmurs of the soldiers as they struggled beneath Lord Aengas’ considerable weight, Tiamak found his thoughts swirling like a flock of marsh teal startled into flight. On the one hand, the attack had apparently been the work of some kind of lunatic, one of Eolair’s own countrymen with who knew what kind of mad, festering grudge—likely a meaningless, and fortunately bootless, crime. But it also felt like the vision of disaster that had come to him on the plains of the Frostmarch, showing its true form at last.
Evil times, he thought helplessly, almost as if someone else spoke in his head. With so many strange signs, how can I doubt that evil times are truly upon us? He Who Always Steps On Sand, please guide me now, because I feel the ground turning treacherous all around me.
39
A Grassland Wedding
It was hot again, very hot for the Third Green Moon. The air seemed to crackle, as if someone had rubbed a dry fleece across it, and when Fremur looked through the wagon’s small window he could see no clouds anywhere. He felt as though some fell creature breathed on his neck, but he knew he could not delay going out to join the clan any longer. His sister was being married to Drojan and his brother Odrig was giving the feast.
He untangled the ribbons of his best shirt one last time. Before the day was ended, he knew, the full-sleeved white garment would be dripping with his sweat and muddy from the hands of others, from being clapped on the back and dragged into unwanted wrestling matches with drunken guests. His aunt would have to sew on new ribbons, because half of them would be torn off during the festivities.
It would all feel different, he thought, if Drojan was not such a pig.
Fremur saw nothing wrong with a woman, even his sister Kulva, being given away in marriage to a man chosen by the head of the family, especially when the head of the family was also the clan’s thane. That was how it had always been done. But when their father Hurvalt had been thane, before he had been struck dumb and crippled by the gods, he would have balked at giving one of his daughters to a swaggering fool like Drojan, whose only accomplishment was that of being Odrig’s crony. And in fact Hurvalt had given their oldest sister to a man she cared for, although he could have chosen a richer suitor.
“The clan’s happiness is more important to a thane than it is to any other clansman,” his father had told him once. “A thane must always think with two minds, both his own and the wisdom of his ancestors. And the ancestors care only that the clan survives.”
His father was one of the first people Fremur saw when he stepped down from the wagon onto the grass of the paddock where the wedding feast was to take place. Hurvalt sat on a bench in the scant shade of the wagon, wrapped in blankets despite the heat, his body as curled and useless as a fallen leaf.
Fremur kneeled at his father’s feet. “May the Sky Piercer watch over you. And may he bring you joy on your daughter’s wedding day.”
His father rolled his eyes in Fremur’s direction, but otherwise gave no sign of having heard. He had not spoken for seven summers, but he had always been a strong man, and even though he could not speak or feed himself and could not walk without two men supporting him, he lived on. Fremur wondered what the Sky Piercer, the clan’s guardian, meant by the terrible exercise of letting Hurvalt go on breathing long after he had lost his manhood.
We are Crane Clan, he reminded himself. We do not question the Sky Piercer.
The expanse of grass, with Odrig’s herd of horses fenced at one end, was surrounded by wagons of all sizes. Every member of Clan Kragni was there—no, Fremur corrected himself, almost every member—as well as important folk from neighboring clans like the Dragonfly, Adder, and White Spot Deer, with whom the Cranes often intermarried. Fremur’s family, at least the women and his many nieces and nephews, had already taken their places near Thane Odrig’s wagon. As usual, the younger boys were playing at men’s work, straddling the wooden paddock fence as though it were a horse’s saddle, smacking at each other with long sticks, and of course ignoring all warnings from their female relatives. Several of Fremur’s aunts and cousins whistled to him as he walked past. He nodded, but did not stop, even when some of the boys begged him to.
Most of the rest of the clanfolk had gathered in the center of the paddock, where a tent had been erected for the bride to wait, and where food and drink were laid out on colorful blankets and covered with fairy-nets to keep the flies away. Although Odrig had not stinted, buying several barrels of stone-dweller beer to swell the happiness of the feast, those barrels had not been breached. That did not mean that the day’s drinking had not begun: many of the clansmen had brought their own yerut, the fermented mare’s milk that the Thrithings-folk had drunk si
nce time before time. The number of snoring, bearded men scattered across the grass, along with the sour smell of vomit, told Fremur all that he needed to know.
Odrig stood near the tent with Drojan and several others, passing a skin of yerut and playing a knife-throwing game directed at the paddock’s nearest fencepost a few dozen paces away. Fremur knew he should stop and speak the Blessing of the Sky Piercer to his brother the thane, but at that moment he did not want to talk to Odrig, still less Drojan, whose charms were not improved by the crimson flush of drunkenness or the gap-toothed bray of his laughter. Fremur made a wider circuit out into the paddock so he could reach the tent from the other side without having to talk to the thane and his closest supporters. He was not particularly successful.
“Hoy, there, little brother!” Odrig shouted. “Where are you going? Not to the bride’s tent to sit with the women, I hope!”
“He wants you to choose him a husband, Thane!” bellowed Drojan.
Odrig enjoyed this jest, and grabbed Drojan’s scarred face and squeezed it as if it was a child’s. “Mark your new brother, Mouse!” he said. “Come and drink his health, or must I start looking, as Drojan says, for a strong man to take care of you? I do not think I could get many horses for you, though, scrawny thing that you are.”
“That’s what a veil is for,” suggested another of his brother’s friends, and they all laughed.
It was no use trying to avoid them completely; ignoring Odrig only made him more determined. And, in truth, Fremur himself was not entirely certain what it was that filled him with such unease and disgust today. Drojan was a pig, but as Odrig’s friend he would prosper and their sister would be well-kept, with thick blankets and a fine wagon. Kulva might not like him, but that was often the case among Thrithings brides, and more often than not the wife learned in time to care about her husband as well as care for him.
“I will join you in a moment,” he told Odrig. “I wish to give our sister a blessing.”
“I will give her something more than that tonight!” crowed Drojan. “Like the rabbit who married a bear, she will be limping tomorrow morning!”
Odrig seemed to find this even funnier than the others did. Again he gripped Drojan’s face with drunken fondness, wiggling his friend’s head from side to side like a father with a beloved child. “Unless the bear drinks too much,” Odrig said, “and can only offer his bride a limp willow branch as his wedding gift!”
More hilarity. Fremur waved, doing his best to smile, and continued on his way.
The wedding tent was a precious thing made of true Khandian silk, or so his mother had once told him. She had awaited her own marriage in it, as had her mother and grandmother before her. The outside walls were stitched in an ornamental pattern of blue rivers and lakes and green grass, a sort of map of their family’s history in the land the stone-dwellers called the Lake Thrithings. A red pennant festooned with crane feathers and daubed with the symbol of the Sky Piercer waved at the top of the conical tent, and ribbons fluttered from every corner and all around the doorway.
Two men called Bride Guards, clothed in leather armor and holding long spears, waited outside the tent on either side of the doorway. One of them tried to stop Fremur as he approached, but the other said, “He can go in. He is the bride’s brother, and the shaman is already there.” Fremur had guessed as much. Because the shaman was male, the women’s sanctuary of the tent had been pierced and legitimate male visitors were now allowed. Still, he stopped before the doorway and wiped the sweat from his face, then murmured his apologies to the Mother of the Green for entering her territory before lifting the flap to step inside.
It was dark within the tent, and hotter inside than out. In the moments it took his eyes to make peace with the darkness, he thought he saw a hunched, two-headed figure wearing a face out of nightmare. His heart sped for a moment before he realized it was only the shapes of his sister and old Burtan the shaman as he bent over her to perform the ritual purification with ash and salt. It was strange that Burtan, whom Fremur had known his whole life, should become such a fearsome figure with only the donning of a headdress and leather mask, but so it was. When he saw the priest look up at him, Fremur felt a moment of superstitious terror, though he knew that the old shaman only stared because he was nearly blind.
“The blessings of the skies upon you, Grandfather,” he said, as was expected, and pulled a small silver coin from his pocket he had brought for just this moment. “I would speak with the bride. I am her brother.”
“I know you, Fremur,” said Burtan, his voice reedy but his annoyance plain. “Do not think me so old, so foolish . . .” Only at that moment, as it came close to his face, did he notice the coin in Fremur’s fingers. “Ah, so. Of course. But do not take long. The horns will sound at sun-high, and that is not long now.”
How the old man knew that after sitting in a darkened tent all morning, Fremur was not sure. “You are wise, Grandfather,” was all he said. Even an old shaman with milky eyes should never be mocked or angered. In fact, as his sister had once pointed out, the older ones were closer to death and thus closer to the gods, and so should be humored whenever possible. Both gods and shamans could easily bring down bad luck on those who displeased them.
The shaman whispered something to Fremur’s aunt, who laughed quietly. She sat beside Kulva in place of their mother, who had died in the Year of the Autumn Floods, two winters before Odrig first became leader of the Crane Clan. Five other female relatives were also crowded into the small tent, which smelled of sweat and the scented oils burning in small clay lamps. The lamps were not meant to provide light—the top of the wedding tent where the poles came together was open to the bright sky—but to entice the spirit of the Sky Piercer to swoop low to smell their sweet odor and bless the coming marriage.
“Are you well, Kulva?” Fremur asked his sister.
She stirred to life only slowly, as if she had been thinking of something or someone quite different than her surroundings. She wore the full curved headdress and veil, so that only her eyes were visible. Again, Fremur felt a quiver of superstitious discomfort: In her white blanket and white veil, his sister looked like a ghost. He thought she also looked bleary, as though she had been drinking, too. It was not impossible to imagine her female relatives giving her a few sips of yerut for courage on this important day.
“Is that you, Fremur?” she said at last. “How is our father? Is he happy?”
It seemed an odd question, all else considered. “I saw him. He appears no different than he did yesterday, or will tomorrow.”
“I was wondering what he would think. To see me married to Drojan.”
“He would be happy to see you given to a man with a brave future in the clan, I’m sure.”
“Would he?” She sounded weary, distant. “Perhaps. It must be nearly time.”
“The shaman will call you when the sun is at the top of the sky.”
“So little time left,” she said. “So little time!”
“Because you are married does not mean you will be a different person. You will still be Kulva, still gentle as the dove for which you were named.”
“And doves are often shot by men with bows. Brought home in a sack to the cookfire. Given out to the thane’s favorites.”
“Do not speak that way.” Despite the fact that her disquiet echoed his own, Fremur turned to his aunt and the other women. “Why do you let her go on like this? Isn’t it your job to prepare her for her wedding day, to bring her to her husband in good cheer?”
One of his female relatives made a noise in the back of her throat. “Oh, yes. Like a lamb to the sacrificial stone.”
“Quiet, you,” said Fremur’s aunt. “She will be well, Nephew. She will bring the family honor. Crane women are strong.”
“Strong,” said Kulva, and began to laugh quietly.
Fremur was taken aback. He had hoped in part that se
eing his sister dressed in the old manner, in the company of women who had themselves been readied for their own weddings, would make him feel steadier, might even puncture the grim mood that hovered over him like a thundercloud. Instead it had made things worse, or at least it had revealed to him things he had not wanted to know.
“Are you unhappy, sister? But what you do is blessed. The Sky Piercer wants you to be fruitful. The Sky Piercer wants you to enlarge the clan. Are these such terrible things for a woman to do?”
“Oh, no,” she said. “Does not every woman wish to be married? Does not every woman want a husband, who can tell her what to do after she leaves her father’s house?”
“Girl, you walk on treacherous ground,” one of the women said.
“Leave us now, Fremur.” His aunt’s face seemed to show both amusement and concern. For a moment, and it was only a moment, Fremur had a vision of a world he had never quite imagined before, the world of women when no men were present. It felt as though a familiar path had suddenly turned to slip-sand beneath his feet.
He again asked for the Blessing of the Crane, although his sister was still laughing quietly to herself, and he felt sure she did not hear him. Then he went out into the strong, bold light of the sun again. No clouds hung in the sky, but he could still feel his own cloud hovering close.
• • •
Standing at the paddock’s gate, which was festooned in ribbons and draped with a fine carpet, the three callers lifted horns to their lips and blew—three short bursts then three long. They repeated the call, which hung over the paddock like something tangible, as if the hot air was too thick to allow the sounds to disperse entirely. Drojan and Odrig, who had gone out of the gate only moments before, now returned, Fremur’s brother dressed in the full finery of a thane, with a fur cape over his shoulders and the ancient signet of the Crane Clan hanging on a thong around his neck. Drojan, his mustaches extravagantly oiled, was wearing a bridegroom’s decorated shirt and a wide sash around his waist that were already rumpled and stained.