South.
The word echoed in her head like a great bell that had been rung just once in an immense canyon. South. There were many things in the south, many places to lose herself. Scrymgeour Weger lived in the south, on an island, or so it was rumored. She didn’t suppose he would have an army at his disposal.
But he might be able to tell her where to find someone who could do what needed to be done.
“Tell no one of your errand or of your homeland.”
She looked at the peddler. “Not even the mercenary?”
He shook his head. “Have him meet me at Taigh Hall three months from today.”
“And you think he will come?” she managed.
“He will, if he wants the rest of his money.” He gestured to the pack. “The first half of his incentive is in there. He can name his price for the rest when the deed is done. Now, go. The sands have already begun to fall. Three se’nnights, Aisling, and no longer.”
She turned and peered into the darkness, looking for a different means of escape. Unfortunately, it seemed her only escape lay along a path that was intertwined with the fate of her homeland, a land that had hosted her birth and now would be the reason for her death.
She turned back to the peddler, but he was gone.
Guards shouted in the distance. Aisling felt torn for a moment or two between two terrible alternatives. Then she took a deep breath, turned, and stumbled into the darkness.
South.
A blond man stood in the shadows that were unrelieved by even the faintest hint of moonlight and watched the carriage roll away. He turned his head and looked at the peddler who had appeared next to him.
“So, it is done,” he said slowly.
“Finally,” the peddler said with a gusty sigh.
The first man frowned thoughtfully. “It goes against my upbringing—”
“Damn your upbringing and all your bloody ideals,” the peddler snapped. “I arranged this end of it. If you tell me all this work has been for naught, I will kill you.”
The blond man stared off into the darkness, seeing things the peddler couldn’t. “Nay,” he said slowly, “the pieces are in place.”
“I still say a firm hand in the backs of the players wouldn’t go amiss.”
The other shook his head. “I have prepared my side as I could, as have you. There is nothing else to do but wait.”
“I hate waiting.”
“Which, if memory serves, landed you in a spot of trouble quite a few years ago with a particular member of your father’s family.”
The peddler cursed him, then turned and stalked off. The blond man, ageless, having watched countless souls take their turns on the world’s stage, looked off into the distance. He forced himself to simply observe. Wringing his hands wasn’t in his nature.
Then again, neither was interfering. The world was full of good and evil and both were necessary. After all, if there were no evil, what would there be for good men to fight?
He had already interfered more than he could bear to, even if his only contribution to the upcoming events had been a casual remark about the desirability of sword skill, made to a man who certainly would have agreed. But it had been more interference than he was comfortable with, which meant that he would be stringently limiting himself to nothing more than observation in the future, no matter what hung in the balance.
It was up to others now to see to the measure.
Two
The carriage lurched to a stop, but given that it had lurched almost continually since Aisling had climbed inside it, breathless and convinced she wouldn’t live to see the end of the night much less the end of the journey, another bit of jostling wasn’t terribly surprising.
The door was wrenched open.
“Last stop,” a deep voice said shortly. “Everyone out so as I can be cleaning the seats ye’ve no doubt befouled.”
Aisling found herself taken by the arm, pulled from the carriage, and sent on her way. Sent was perhaps too polite a term for it. She was hurled away from the door. She caught herself before she went sprawling, then turned around, intending to protest her treatment, only to find her arms full of her pack that had been sent her way from its recent position on top of the carriage.
Perhaps sent was still the wrong word to be using. It had been flung at her so forcefully that she had caught it out of instinct, then found herself knocked off her feet by the weight of it. Perhaps that wouldn’t have been so bad in and of itself save for the fact that she had been knocked not only upon her backside but upon her backside in a puddle of—
She looked down, then decided perhaps it was best not to examine too closely what she was sitting in. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t seen muck and horse leavings in the street before. Somehow, though, sitting in it and wiping it from her eyes whilst trying to recover from a journey that had seemed to go on forever left her wondering why it was she had been so desperate to leave the Guild.
After all, she had been weaving for so long that it took no thought. She could have been sitting comfortably—well, uncomfortably, actually—on a hard wooden bench, creating rough cloth for equally oppressed seamstresses who would in turn fashion it into equally ugly clothes to be worn by those who couldn’t afford better. At least she would have been warm—mostly—and dry—definitely—and not hungry. Well, not too hungry. It was true that after years and years of nothing but gruel and the occasional bowl of rather nasty vegetables to stave off scurvy that she had begun to crave even the cheapest of pub fare. It was astonishing, actually, that somehow that seemed preferable to sitting in the middle of a muddy street that was sporting smells she couldn’t—and didn’t want to—identify.
Not to mention the fact that the weaving mistress would have still been alive…
Aisling heaved her pack aside and crawled to her feet. She was in Istaur and there was no turning back. All she could do was press on, see to her quest, then take the rest of her life and do something with it worth the sacrifice that had been made on her behalf.
And when she was capable of thinking on it, she would wonder why the weaving mistress had been near the border at just the moment when she had been most needed.
She thought without fondness about the events that had followed that bit of unexpected aid. Just getting herself and her heavy pack to the carriage had been almost impossible. She’d run along a deeply rutted road in utter darkness, cutting her hands and knees when she’d fallen, wrenching her back when she’d dragged herself upright. The carriage had indeed been waiting, along with an angry, impatient driver who had jerked open the door, pushed her up the step, and shoved her inside.
She’d never been inside a covered carriage before and hadn’t known what to expect. She’d fallen into the only open spot, a wholly inadequate space between a very large, fragrant man suffering from gout and a woman who whispered about spies and coughed incessantly, necessitating the windows being up and the blinds being drawn the entire way lest the dust enter and make things worse for her. Aisling thought there might have been a trio of silent men with business of their own facing her, but she couldn’t have said because, again, the blinds had been drawn.
Perhaps that had been just as well. She could honestly say she had never wept in the whole of her life, not even during the only other ride she’d ever taken, a journey in a rickety wagon that had left her hanging her head over the side and heaving continually until she’d been put into the care of the Guildmistress. She hadn’t wept as she’d realized that her parents hadn’t put her there on trial, they had left her there for good. She hadn’t wept a fortnight ago either as she’d stumbled in the dark to the carriage waiting for her, even though the vision of the Guildmistress holding triumphantly aloft a sword stained with blood had certainly been fresh in her mind.
Instead, she had simply counted the days and greeted the approach of each new dawn with increasing dread.
She hadn’t dared sleep at first, on the off chance that someone from Bruadair—no doubt an assassin tra
ined in the art of following his countrymen to slay them outside the border—had followed her. After that, she had scarce managed to stay awake. Thankfully the gouty gentleman from Gairn, who was traveling to take the waters in Meith, had happily provided her with what his swollen foot told him was an accurate count of the days.
By her count—and this she could hardly believe—by nightfall, she would have been journeying a full fortnight plus a bit. That left her almost another se’nnight to get from Istaur to Gobhann. The peddler’s bag of gold was heavy enough that she supposed she might even manage to hire a carriage of some sort to take her from the port of Sgioba to Weger’s gates. Though she was well read thanks to Mistress Muinear’s insistence, details about Melksham Island had always been rather sketchy, so she could only hope to find what she needed.
Sgioba was the farthest point on the north side of the island where she could make port. If she could find a fast ship, she could make the journey in three days, leaving her ample time to reach Weger’s gates, get herself inside, then negotiate with him for the sort of lad she would need.
She pushed herself back to her feet and spared a thought for what sort of decent bread might be purchased at dawn in a port town. Perhaps the leftovers from the day before. They couldn’t be any worse than what she’d had at the Guild.
She brushed her filthy hands on her leggings and was grateful that at least the front of her was fairly clean. She reached down for her pack—
And found herself suddenly sprawled face down in the muck.
It took a moment or two to get far enough past the shock of that assault to catch her breath—and that she had to do carefully. She lifted her face out of the mud and tried to blink away the layer of slime that was now covering not only her back but her front. She wiped her eyes on her sleeve, but that did nothing but smear more unidentifiable substances all over her face.
She blinked enough to see a circle of lads surrounding her, pointing and laughing at her. She could hardly blame them, though she didn’t care to endure any more of their sport than necessary. She pushed herself to her knees and looked around her quickly for her pack. No sense in losing that to the giggling fools continuing to mock her.
She blinked, but her surroundings were the same: smelly and empty of her pack.
She scrambled to her feet and spun around, looking for the rucksack that contained everything she owned save her book, which she had kept tucked into the waistband of her trousers. She could scarce believe her eyes. All her food, her spare clothes, her gold, everything gifted her by the peddler was gone.
One of the lads gestured back over his shoulder. “He went that way with your gear,” he said helpfully. “Don’t think you’ll catch him, but you might try.”
Or words to that effect. Aisling realized that her life—however long that life might be—was going to be made substantially more difficult by the fact that it was a struggle to make out what was being said. Perhaps Bruadair was less provincial than she’d imagined, for the speech there was rather more refined than what she was hearing at present. The accented common tongue she was listening to currently sounded as if the speakers were attempting it with pebbles in their mouths. Then again, they were a rough-looking lot, so perhaps they simply didn’t know any better.
She pushed through the small crowd gathered there, then realized immediately there was no point in attempting to run after what was rightly hers. The press of humanity, some of whom smelled even worse than she did, was too thick. She pulled her cloak more closely around her and looked at one of the least grinning of the lads standing there.
“Docks?” she asked.
He waved expansively. “You’re there, my lad. You might be overdressed, though. Perhaps we can relieve you of your very fine cloak—”
“Oy, there’ll be none of that,” said a loud voice from behind her.
Aisling found herself taken by the scruff of her neck. She didn’t have time to protest that before the possessor of that gruff voice had dealt out several hearty shoves and a cuff or two. Lads dispersed without hesitation. She opened her mouth to offer thanks, then got a good look at the man who had rescued her. Her jaw continued on its way to her chest.
She had never seen anyone that large before in the entirety of her life. Perhaps her life that consisted of the society of women at the Guild and the odd lad down at the pub had ill prepared her for anything else. The Guildmistress might have been almost as tall as the man before her, but she was half his weight. Aisling was profoundly grateful he seemed to be friendly.
“Where’re you off to, la—” He paused, then frowned. “I mean, er…lad?”
Aisling shut her mouth before untoward substances found their way inside. “Sgioba,” she mumbled.
Then she froze. Aye, she had business in Sgioba that consisted of getting off her ship and beginning a frantic run to Gobhann, but given that all her funds had just been stolen from her along with every other item of value she possessed save the book of Scrymgeour Weger’s strictures hiding in her trousers, she wasn’t going to be indulging in that journey as quickly as she would have liked. She didn’t even have anything to sell. She couldn’t imagine anyone would even care about her book.
She was beginning to wonder, not for the first time, if she’d made a terrible mistake leaving her homeland.
She was currently friendless, fund-less, and covered in the muck of scores of horses and heaven only knew what else. Even if she could find work she was capable of doing—which would consist of weaving cloth and sewing the most rudimentary of straight seams—it would likely take her several fortnights to earn enough for her passage. She didn’t have that much time. In fact, she had less than a se’nnight before she was dead.
And at the moment, she realized she wasn’t feeling very well, so perhaps the peddler had overestimated the time left her.
“Sgioba, eh?” her rescuer said, looking at her with a thoughtful frown. “Nothing sails there but cargo ships and ruffians.”
Aisling wasn’t a very good weaver, all her years at it aside, but she was rather skilled with a map. At least she was in theory, and theory told her that even if she managed to sneak aboard a ship that would take her in a direct line across the strait to Bere, it was still a se’nnight’s journey on foot to Gobhann. That was time she didn’t have. Sgioba was where she would have to go.
She looked at the man. “I have no choice.”
He considered. “You’ve no gear, I see,” he noted. “Nothing to be done about that, I suppose. Perhaps you would welcome a wee wash, though. Then we’ll see what a bit of pretty speech does for your passage.”
Aisling could hardly believe she’d found a friendly face in a sea of faces that didn’t look particularly friendly. She took a deep breath, then coughed out what she’d ingested. “Thank you,” she wheezed.
The man winked at her. “My good deed for the day. What’s your name?”
“Aisling.”
“Interesting name,” he said. “Where’re you from?”
The peddler’s warnings were uppermost in her mind at present, which left her even more unwilling than she usually was to divulge details. “Too obscure to mention,” she said, gesturing vaguely behind her. “My village is, I mean.”
“Many are, my lad,” the man said with a smile. “Let’s be off, shall we?”
Aisling nodded and followed him, trying to ignore her smell and pay attention instead to her surroundings. A sentence of death hung over her, true, but still she couldn’t help but marvel that she was walking down a street half a world away from where she’d recently been, as freely as if she were simply out for an afternoon stroll. She was aware of the undesirables her companion pushed out of their way as they walked down a long, worn dock, but for the most part she simply walked and breathed air that was full of things she’d never smelled before.
“In a bit of a hurry, are you?” the man asked, taking a rather persistent lad and tossing him into the water without apology.
“Aye,” she said, hearing
the words come out of her mouth with less haste than desperation.
“Then you will certainly need a very fast ship.”
“Is there such a thing?” she managed.
He glanced at her. “If you don’t mind a bit of something added to the sails, as it were, aye, there is a particular ship fast enough to see you where you are going.”
She had no idea what that extra bit of something might be, but as long as it didn’t consist of her flapping her arms, she was all for it. “I don’t mind, sir.”
“Then we’ll see what we can find. Clean up a bit here, lad, and we’ll carry on.”
Aisling paused in front of a wooden barrel and didn’t dare ask where the water had come from. It was cold and mostly clean, something for which she was very grateful. She was happy to use it to wash the grime from her skin, but not her clothing. It was cold, so she thought it best to smell rather than freeze to death. She dried her face on the inside of her cloak, then looked up at her rescuer.
“Thank you.”
“No need to, little one.” He pointed toward the end of the dock. “Keep going until you can’t go any farther. Ask for Captain Burke. Tell him Paien of Allerdale sent you. I’ve a bit of business back in town—buying pretties for my lady wife, you see—else I would come with you. Tell him I’m sorry to forgo the pleasures of his ship, but I’ve sent you instead.” He laughed a little. “I’m sure he’ll thank me.”
Aisling had no idea why he found the thought so amusing, but she wasn’t going to ask. That might have been because there was a sudden and quite annoying lump in her throat at the sight of the gold coin Master Paien was holding out toward her. She met his eyes quickly.
“I couldn’t—”
“Of course you can.” He smiled, a warm smile that left her unaccountably comforted. “Do a good turn for someone else when you’re able. I’ve had more than my share done to me of late. And some passing fine victuals at places I thought only existed in—” He paused, then laughed a little. “Never mind my ramblings. Be off with ye, little one, and catch yer ship.”