He passed his days much as he had in Imisna—arguing, bargaining, taking hospitality as he found it; a barn here, a bed there. He lost some of his newer pots, and gained some more old, holed ones, which he disposed of as scrap metal to a smith south of Hasmë. His mind was less than completely on his “work”, though, for all around him was the constant distraction of country he knew much better than the high south. He had not been this way since his mother rode down this way with him, to take him to be fostered out.
It was one of the few times she had ridden any distance with him—one of few memories he had of her any more, and one of the clearest. She had always been delicate. At least, that was the word they had always used when talking to him about it. Whenever people in Kynall mentioned his mother, it was always as “the good Queen”. But always the voices went hushed, as if there was something wrong, as if someone might hear something they were saying, someone of ill intent, some thing— Even then, when he was young, it seemed that people knew she was not going to be with them for long. He knew, because he had been told later, that his was a hard birth. There was a question, though no one ever said it to Freelorn’s face—he put it together for himself, slowly, over time—that somehow his bearing did something to her. Maybe that was the cause of the delicacy, the long wasting. It was hard to tell.
She had not seemed particularly delicate on that ride, when she took him out to foster. He hadn’t wanted to leave Prydon at that point. He was seven, with a castle for his playhouse and a city to run amok in. But his mother had insisted that he would go out and be fostered like anybody else of good house. She had ridden with him, along with his father, down to Hasmë, where they stayed in an inn that fell far short of Freelorn’s princely expectations. He remembered being shocked when his mother remarked on how nice it was for someplace so far out in the country, and that the beds had sheets. Lorn wondered where he was going that beds didn’t have sheets.
But all during that ride, she had seemed unusually robust. Lorn had been used, all during his childhood, to seeing her tire easily, even just after going down to see about marketing in the town, or after a ride in the plains outside the city. On this ride, though, it seemed impossible to pry her out of the saddle, practically from dawn until sunset. She rode like the crazed teenagers Lorn had seen and envied: like a farm girl. She took mad jumps over brooks, and galloped, and laughed as she galloped, leaving Lorn and the rest of the entourage far behind, puffing and trying to catch up.
“I grew up here,” she had said. He had known that—but the way she said it suddenly made him listen. It was the same tone of voice she used when she told him she loved him. It came as a slight shock to him that there might be something else she loved as much. He was unnerved. “This is a wonderful place, Lorn… you’re going to like it here. The fields, the sky…. the way it is in the summer.” He had his doubts. But he worshiped his mother; he was willing to believe anything she told him.
They passed through Hasmë, and fetched up, after another day’s ride, in a village so small that Lorn barely recognized it as such, having lived in a city all his life, one of the two great cities of the world. The place they came to was five houses and six farms, and a tiny market square: not much else. “You’re going to love it here,” his mother said. Lorn looked at the dirt street, and had his doubts. He had missed her bitterly when she left. But what ashamed him to this day was that he hadn’t missed her more. Belatedly, perhaps, the excitement of being in a new strange place took hold of him. He was so excited about the dirt and the cows that he could actually run up and pat—or hit with a stick, and in fact he was shortly given the job of bringing the cows in from pasture at the end of the day—that he was almost anxious that his mother should go ahead and leave him with his foster-mother and his foster-sisters, the whole crowd of them. That excitement, the old bite of that shame, now both came back, and fastened on him hard, as he sat ahorse outside Elefrua, and saw the patch of tall trees that marked it. He was as afraid to go in now as he had been all those years ago. More so because it was mostly unchanged. The trees were taller, there were a few more houses, but everything else was the same. The way that light fell was the same. And his first love —
She wouldn’t know him, of course, because of the disguise. Was she even here? Slowly he rode in.
It was market day here, as he had known it would be. Small point in stopping in Elefrua otherwise. He was rather late—the market had been going on since dawn, and the most choice goods had already been snapped up by the country people who came from as much as several leagues away. They would have left home hours before dawn, many of them, had by now disposed of their own goods—the pick of a kitchen garden, a choice chicken or shoat—and were now in the browsing stages, wasting time until a couple of hours before noon, when the house that doubled as Elefrua’s brewery, tavern and cookshop should open up for business. Most of them would be in no mood to buy, already having spent whatever they intended to.
He rode down into town, looking at the fieldstone walls. There was the one he hid behind when he helped Mirik and Lal steal the neighbor’s cow. The road curved, leading into the market square. They had cobbled it since he had been here last. Ten years? he thought. No, eight. He swung down from Blackmane’s back and looked around at the stalls for a place to stand.
“Are you selling this morning, friend?” said a voice at his elbow. The hair stood up all over him as Lorn turned to see Orl standing there, the neighbor whose cow he had stolen. Lorn went hot with embarrassment, then remembered that Orl would be unlikely to recognize him. It was time as much as Eftgan’s disguise that made this so, for Lorn saw to his shock that Orl was old. One of his eyes was gray with cataract, and his back was bent with the onset of bone trouble. But what did I think? Was time to have stood still while I was gone?
“Uh, yes,” Lorn said, trying not to stare at a man that by rights he should never have seen before. But Orl seemed not to have noticed anything amiss. “Usual fee, then,” he said. “Three pennies, and a tenth of your take in goods or silver.”
“Three?” Lorn said, in good-humored scorn, for he knew perfectly well it had always been two. “Listen, friend—”
Orl glanced ever so slightly off to his left and behind him. Lorn followed the glance, then looked away quickly. Against the wall of Marbhan’s house, the cookshop, three men were lounging. Their cloaks were shabby, but under them were black tunics that Lorn recognized. The White Lion badge was embroidered on the breasts of them. The men were all armed, two with swords, a third with an axe with a notched edge. Their expressions were bored, and Lorn immediately thought it best that they should stay that way.
“I see,” he said. “Three it is. … How long has this been going on?”
Orl rolled his eyes, a gesture which the cataract made both dreadful and funnier than usual. “Just this last year. Used to be they just passed through. Now they live here. A lot more of them in Hasmë.”
His tone of voice, very restrained and resigned for Orl, who had always been able to generate great volume and venom about anything that bothered him, said a great deal to Lorn. Someone’s beds were being taken up by these men, and someone’s food being eaten without payment: and then came this unofficial wage, or protection payment, on top of it all. Doubtless they called it a tax of some sort. Lorn worked to keep what he thought out of his face. “Where do you want me?” he said.
Orl looked around. “Over there by the shambles, if you like.”
Lorn wasn’t wild about the flies that would come of being put by the butcher, but at least he was in the shade of the wall that surrounded the tavern’s garden. He led Blackie and Pebble over there, past the three soldiers, and itched at the feel of their eyes on him, dismissive, and on Blackmane, vaguely interested. Lorn hobbled the horses, and started unloading them, spreading out his wares.
To his great relief, the soldiers showed no further interest. They had the look of men waiting for drink, and as soon as Marbhan’s place opened its big iron-bound front door
, in they went. Lorn began calling his wares, and one by one people began drifting over to see what he had.
He did better than he had in many other places. Lorn was unsure whether this was because he was getting better at being a tinker and a salesman, or whether his secret familiarity with many of the faces made him friendlier to them, and they to him. There was Marbhan, in his big grey-stained, yeast- smelling apron, utterly unchanged after seven years, even the close crop of his hair the same. There was big fat Ulaidth, easily the jolliest woman he had ever known, and not much different now except for hair gone streaky silver; and Curc, with the gap between his teeth and his soft way of speaking; and Bim, and Darrih, and many another. Some completely changed, some no different at all, as if time had bounced off them and struck the person next to them with more force as a result.
He was praising a pot to Arvel at one point, and with good cause; it was an excellent pot, with a concave lid so that you could heap embers on top of it as well as piling them up around the sides—good for baking bread. Arv was nodding, and Lorn half thought he had a sale, if not to Arv, then to one of the women standing behind him. And he looked up, and saw Lalen there. She was changed, yes, but not as terribly as some here. The red hair was what caught his eye at first, and her eyes, brown, wide-set and big. They had been what he noticed about her first, twenty years ago, when they were both young… those thoughtful eyes, and the blazing hair, now streaked ever so slightly with silver, like fire under ash. Otherwise she was as she had been: petite, sturdy, solid. She glanced at him, a calm, impersonal, uncaring look. Lorn swallowed, nodded at her.
She reached between Arv and someone whose name Lorn couldn’t remember, an older woman from the townlands, and stroked a small iron pot. “How much, sir?” she said.
“Three in silver.”
She snorted at him, and Freelorn almost burst out laughing. He had not heard that sound from her in a long time. It was the first thing he had learned to love about her—she refused to take him seriously, no matter what he did. Princes of Arlen had cut no cheese with her. Nor did his prices now, apparently. “Too damned much,” she said.
“Don’t buy it, then,” Lorn said, and turned away from her to Arv again. She stared at him in mild surprise, and Lorn restrained his smile. He had long since learned that rising to Lalen’s bait was useless—the best tactic was to give up the game immediately, cheerfully; or just refuse to play. She could never resist that. Lalen never believed in allowing people to quit playing before she was ready.
“Why shouldn’t I buy it? What’s wrong with it?” she said.
Arvel made an amused face as Lalen shouldered in beside him. “Everything,” Lorn said. “Look at the rust on it. And it’s obviously much too big for a lady like you, who eats like a bird. Here now, sir, look at this one—” he said, turning ostentatiously back to Arvel.
There were chuckles coming from the people gathered behind Lalen. It was unfair of him, actually, for he knew Lalen’s appetite, having cooked for her in the past. If she ate like a bird, then the bird in question was the Darthene dragon-eagle, the kind that carries off whole deer when the mood strikes it. Lalen was amused, in the grim, wry sort of way that came of being the butt of the joke.
“I might give you two for it,” she said.
Lorn looked skyward in comment. “Madam, no one’s buying today,” he said. “I’m not even going to be able to cover my expenses, at this rate.” Just a flick of glance, here, at the doorway where part of the “expenses” lounged; other eyes followed his look, and looked amused or annoyed in their turn. “And you’re asking me for discounts.” He sighed. “Two and three-quarters.”
“Do I look like I’m made of money?”
“Poor tradesmen like me can only live in hope.”
She laughed at him. “Two and one, and not a brass scraping more.”
They argued over the last quarter-piece, back and forth, and finally settled on two and one-and-a-half. The small crowd muttered approval at Lalen for having gotten the best of the deal, and then began to drift away at the sound of the iron bell ringing at Marhbhan’s for the beginning of the nunch-meal.
Lorn nodded to Lalen, watched her go off down the street to the house at road’s end and to the right that had been her parents’. Are they even alive, I wonder? he thought, suddenly feeling tender and sad. Is she alone? Or has she found someone? No way to ask, of course…. Lorn repacked his wares, but didn’t sling them on the horses, merely hobbled Blackie and Pebble to them and put on the nosebags. Then he went to see about his own feed.
Marbhan’s was just as it had always been; the main room low-ceilinged, smoky with the hearthfire and the cookfire, strings of onions and sausages and sides of bacon hanging all around the big chimney off to the right. The flagged floor was covered with the same ancient oaken tables, knife-scarred and sand-scoured pale. The big shuttered windows were open to the noon, and there was a faint sour reek of spilled wine, not entirely unpleasant against the fresher, more assertive aromas of meat roasting and vegetables boiling, and the waft of new- baked bread. One of Marbhan’s cats, an ancient, battered tabby, was wandering around among the tables, examining the floor for anything edible that might have fallen on it.
Lorn found a spot near one of the windows and waited to be noticed. Eventually Marbhan wound his way over to Lorn, having just dealt with the Arlene soldiers over in their corner. “What’s your pleasure?” he said.
“A cup of wine, please. And is there bacon today?”
“Pig trotters and roast turnip,” Marbhan said.
“Please!” Lorn said, his mouth watering with the taste of old memories. Marbhan, not noticing, muttered agreement and lurched off.
“Come on then, give Marbhan the dish,” said Lalen’s voice from the door. “Come on— Oh well, please yourself.”
Lorn looked up. Lalen was standing with Marbhan at the door, their heads bent down together, discussing something for a moment: then she straightened, looked around the room with the bored expression of someone trying to work out the least objectionable place to sit. One of the Arlenes looked up at her and was opening his mouth to say something when Lalen spotted Lorn and began moving toward the table at which he sat.
“Any new face,” she said in a low voice as she sat down, “is Goddess-sent around here. May I?”
“Do,” said Lorn. He did not look in the soldier’s direction as he said, “A problem?”
“For the last few months, yes. Used to be we didn’t have to bother with people from Prydon but once a year. Now—” She shook her head, and looked at him less tensely, and more curiously. “Do I know you from somewhere?” she said.
Lorn’s throat went dry in barely a breath’s worth of time. “I used to pass through here every now and then,” he said. “You didn’t mention your name?”
“Lalen d’Ramien,” she said. “And you’re—”
“Arelef, they call me.”
“What did you order?”
That was Lalen all over: managing the lives of the people around her, even if she’d only met them a minute before. “The trotters.”
“Oh, then you’re all right. It’s just that some of the things Marbhan cooks have been— Oh, no, where has— “ She twisted around in her seat. “Nia! Will you—” She started to get up, then sank back into the seat again as a dark-haired little girl, barefoot and wearing a dusty wheat- colored smock, came in through the door, carrying a covered earthenware dish with exaggerated care. She headed back toward the kitchen with it: it was plainly someone’s dinner, which Marbhan would put in the bread oven to cook, for the cost of the fuel.
“That’s all right then,” Lalen said. “No, I was saying about Marbhan’s cooking, he leaves the beef dishes too long sometimes, it’s just that he’s a pork cook, really…. ”
She said a great many other things, too, babbling on in the pleasant and inconsequential way that Lorn remembered well, until their wine came: then she pledged Lorn amiably enough, and said, “Welcome here.”
“Thank you,” he said, and drank, and stole a glance toward the Arlene soldiers.
She caught it. “They’re manageable enough,” she said; “… there are a lot more of us than there are of them, and they don’t want to risk being staked out on a hillside for the crows. But at the same time, we don’t bait them. Some nasty stories have been coming down from Hasmë.”
Lorn nodded. “Things are moving out east,” he said. “I suppose they’ve been getting nervous in Prydon.”
Lalen looked out at him from under her brows, a resigned expression. “Makes you wish for the old days, when things were settled. Ah well: a long time ago now, and no sign of it changing, really. Not for us, wars or no, since… since some time back.”
The food arrived, and Lorn’s stomach did a fair imitation of the roar of a young lion. “Too long since breakfast,” Lalen said to him, amused, and drank her wine as Lorn reached for the first of the pig trotters. They had been boiled with sage and bay, then soused in cider, from the divine smell of them, and afterwards burnt brown under a hot iron, until the skin had gone crisp. The roast turnips in their bowl were swimming and simmering in a lake of butter and ground berry-pepper. “Can I interest you?” Lorn said, desperately hoping she would say no.
She smiled at him and shook her head.
He pulled the first trotter apart as delicately as he could, but there was really no way to eat this food delicately, especially considering how it smelled, and the presence of many small bones to be gnawed clean of succulent, herb-scented, beautifully greasy meat. Lalen reached out as Marbhan went by, and yanked a clean linen towel out of his belt, putting it down next to Lorn’s plate. “He always forgets. Now then,” she said, turning her head. “How long did he say?”