Tarens swallowed his food, left with nothing to say. Self-reproach made his limpid blue eyes seem accusing as his sister unsealed the last crock of summer honey and consigned it to the tray for the sick-room.
‘Quit moping, can’t you?’ Kerelie sighed. ‘The harder heart would have tossed that burned meal in the hen coop to fatten the poultry.’
She was right. Tarens ate and tried not to dwell on the penalties meted out to sympathizers who treated with renegade clanblood. Kelsing fell under the long shadow of Erdane, temple seat of the True Sect’s high priesthood. Here, a man upheld canon law if he valued his family’s prosperity. Yet hard common sense failed to ease his torn conscience concerning the wretch sheltered inside the barn.
Though today’s breakfast might soon be a luxury, Tarens scraped his bowl clean without savour.
When he arose and tramped out to split wood, he found the black pot on the porch left untouched. Past question, the stranger had noticed the offering. In an irony much too pat for coincidence, his neatly cleaned meat swung beneath, hung to season. Yet the hunter himself appeared nowhere in evidence. Two hours later, the cut fuel was stacked. Tarens sharpened the axe. He strode to the shed to stow the greased tool and caught Kerelie, angrily flinging the cold, congealed oatmeal into the pen for the chickens.
Startled, he laughed. ‘I see your rude table’s been spurned by the starving?’
She glared. One meaty fist stayed cocked on her hip, while the other threatened to shy the scorched pot at her brother’s insolent head. ‘See for yourself.’ She sniffed, her chin jerked towards the back of the barn, which cued Tarens to go and investigate. He encountered the ashes of a frugal fire, then the green stick lately used as a spit to roast the haunch of the hare.
‘Resourceful wee chap, I’ll give him that much. Goes out of his way not to take advantage.’ Tarens rubbed at a crick in his neck, sunk in thought, when Kerelie arrived to a bustle of skirts and stopped at arm’s length in distress.
‘How do you throw out a squatter who’s so damned resourcefully self-sufficient?’
‘You open your door to him?’ Tarens measured her sidelong.
But the lines fretted into his sister’s brow stemmed from another quarter. ‘I need you to go back to Kelsing and fetch a tisane for Efflin.’
Tarens’s startled glance met her anxiety straight on.
She added, upset, ‘His fever is soaring. Worse, that wet cough’s settled into his chest with a speed that is dreadfully frightening.’
Tarens’s blunt features drained, his bruised eye tinged grotesquely purple and yellow beneath his rumpled, fair hair. ‘Can’t be the same fever!’
Kerelie chewed her lip.
‘Can’t be!’ Tarens insisted, rock stubborn. ‘Efflin’s always been strong as an ox. Surely he’s just stuffed up and grouchy.’
Kerelie shook her head, then spun, blinking back desperate tears. ‘Not today.’
Tarens stifled the surge of his helpless anger. Bad luck was too busy, and setting a clutch, if the malady that had reaped half of their family struck again and took their older brother.
‘You know the Light’s priests claim we owe retribution,’ his sister said, muffled. She swiped at wet eyes, then knotted her damp palms in her skirt. ‘Grace fled, they say, since corruption divided the faithful.’
Tarens slammed the axe into the top of a fence-post with the raw force to split oak. ‘I won’t swallow the doom in the priest’s windy scriptures! Or their guilt, which wrings piteous offerings out of the masses.’ He rejected the afflicted belief, that the blight of disease was justified punishment for the Great Schism caused when heaven’s sent avatar turned apostate and denounced the blessed Light’s doctrine. ‘Cattle sicken,’ he added, ‘in years when they’re stressed, or when a fulsome herd overgrazes their pasture.’
Other rumours sprung from barbarian sources claimed the ailments stemmed from the waning surge of the flux lines. The land’s health, they held, was starved thin near the towns, where the flow of the mysteries no longer flourished. But no initiate talent from that ancient heritage dared to step forward or challenge the fires of rampant theology. Not with the practice of herb witchery and magecraft crushed under an interdict with a death sentence.
‘Just go,’ Kerelie urged, breaking off the debate. ‘Tell the apothecary we also need a flask of syrup to ease a raw throat.’
Tarens cupped her harrowed cheek in rough hands. ‘Calm yourself. Our straits will come right. I’ll have the remedies for Efflin’s sniffle back here before sundown. Just don’t wear yourself to exhaustion, shut in with his carping complaints.’
‘He’s too sick to grouse,’ Kerelie snapped, stressed enough to shake off his comfort. ‘Take the coppers I’ve saved in the crock. We’ll let Efflin haggle over the tax we can’t pay after he’s back on his feet.’
Since the oxcart was too unwieldy and slow, Tarens ran the errand to Kelsing on foot. He left their scant hoard of pennies untouched, and instead tucked the coins from the vagabond into his jacket. He covered the leagues by road at a jog, spurred on by brisk anxiety. Yet despite his diligent care to make speed, ill fortune delayed his timely return.
The muddy road froze iron-hard after dark, and a mis-step twisted his left ankle. He limped into the yard weary and empty-handed under the icy glow of the late-risen moon.
He expected a chill house, kept dark to spare fuel, as his numbed fingers fumbled the latch. Not the blast of close heat that burnished his face when he opened the door. The fire built up to nurse a fevered invalid clamped fear like a fist in his gut. Efflin’s condition had worsened, proven out by the sick pallet made up in front of the hob. His brother lay limp as wax under blankets, with Kerelie’s stout form stamped in bleak silhouette as she spun from his side in frustration.
‘Tarens! What’s kept you? The kettle is filled. Get that dose of cailcallow leaf heating. The cough syrup’s no use. Efflin’s weakened. His breathing’s too laboured to swallow.’
Tarens faltered, rocked short, his desolate news fit to shatter her. ‘I have no remedies.’ Ahead of Kerelie’s searing reproach, that he must have indulged himself drinking, he blazed, ‘The Mayor of Kelsing’s formally listed our family name on the debt rolls.’ Which twist of fate meant no merchant in town had the right to accept honest coin from them before the treasury received its lawful due. ‘I tried to bargain!’ Dropped to his knees, Tarens closed his strong arms around his disconsolate sister. ‘Folk believe our luck’s left us. My plea was not heard. The apothecary slammed his shop-door in my face. When I argued, he claimed that his cailcallow stores were too low to waste on a grown man with a sniffle. The new leaves won’t sprout in the wild until spring. There’d be babes with the croup far more needy. Could I guess? I’d have battered my way in had I known Efflin’s straits had turned desperate!’
Further lament would not stem the crisis. Kerelie’s tears were not frightened hysteria. The laboured rasp of Efflin’s clogged chest ripped through the thick, humid silence. Four times before, that sound had heralded death for a beloved relative.
‘You’re shivering!’ Kerelie chided at due length. ‘Light above, Tarens! Take care for your health.’ She pushed him away, the surge of her anger turned to drive off futility. ‘Doubtless, you won’t have eaten a thing. Bless your vagabond friend. We have him to thank for the gift that tonight none of us will go hungry.’
That moment, belatedly late, Tarens smelled the aroma of wild leeks and savoury stew. Astonished, he blurted, ‘You let that shiftless rascal inside?’
Kerelie dabbed at her wet lashes, defeated. ‘I had little choice, didn’t I? By afternoon, Efflin was unconscious and shivering. Someone needed to help me shift the mattress and move him in here by the fire. Your crazy fellow spent the rest of the day by the well, washing himself and his clothes. He’s too thin.’
‘He was naked? In this chill?’ Despite harrowed upset, Tarens snorted and grinned. ‘How long did you stare?’
Kerelie slapped him. ‘And I should
have fed all the livestock blindfolded, while the imp stitched the holes in his breeks with the harness awl?’ She added, ‘I looked the other way, best I could. He’s shameless as a creature born wild. But not uncivilized. He also scoured the scale off my pot. By the time I finished up in the barn, he had diced up his game and hung the filled cauldron on the pot-hook to simmer.’
Tarens inhaled in appreciation. ‘Rosemary and sage? And fresh leeks? You hate cooking! Aunt Saff always claimed you couldn’t tell a sweetening herb from a grated red pepper!’
‘Your scampish guest must have scavenged the lot,’ Kerelie retorted, offended. ‘Who knows from where? He was busy foraging. Somehow, he found plants that the frosts hadn’t touched. Just hope his filched cache was honestly abandoned.’
‘Resourceful of him,’ Tarens declared. While his sister treated his brother’s clogged chest with goose grease and a hot compress, he unfolded stiff legs and arose to help himself from the bubbling cauldron. No one would profit if he should fall sick. Neither could a weary man get himself warm on a rumbling belly. Somehow, some way, he would find the means to reward the stranger’s persistent kindness, though at the moment the odd little man was not present to receive his thanks.
Through a savoury mouthful, Tarens accused, ‘You didn’t send the poor vagabond packing? Or make him sleep out in the hayloft?’
‘I didn’t,’ cracked Kerelie, stung to reproach. ‘He left on his own. I brought him a blanket to bed down in the pantry, but if he understood, I’ve not seen him. He slipped off again and made himself scarce since the sun set.’
Tarens considered the fellow’s rag clothing, and shivered. The night was bitterly clear, the freeze lent a harsh bite by the wind since the rain-storm. Unkind weather for a thinly clad wretch, turned out of doors without shelter. But a search at this pass was not practical with a sprained ankle, and the chill that still gripped him bone deep from his errand. Kerelie looked thrashed. Her sore need for relief could not wait. Tarens begged her to rest straightaway, then rose from the trestle, tossed his dish in the wash-tub, and shouldered his turn with the invalid.
Nothing prepared him. Even Kerelie’s urgent distress failed to brace his nerves against the sick-room fetor of purged broth and excrement. Too well he recognized the sunken cheeks, waxy sweat, and flushed skin of the dying, tucked limp in damp sheets. This was the face of the fever that killed, with the terrible, clogged rasp of breath the sole assurance that life had not fled untimely.
Tarens’s fortitude failed him. Crouched by the mattress, he gathered his brother’s slack, clammy hand into trembling fingers. ‘Efflin, Light save us, don’t bring us to this!’ If his brother did not know he was loved beyond measure, he must recognize he was needed! The croft would be forfeit to Kerelie’s marriage if her blood family could not provide two adult hands to manage the fields. As things stood, she must wed before the spring planting. Her scarred face already spoiled her chance for a comely match. Let her not be forced to the joyless choice of a suitor who preyed on the fact they were desperate.
The night passed as it had too often before, fighting the malady that had reaped aunt and uncle, and cruelly robbed two young nephews’ exuberance. Tarens changed his brother’s soaked bedding and hung the damp linen to dry. He plied Efflin’s forehead with cold compresses in a tireless, vain effort to draw down the fever. Left nothing else but to stroke the screwed hair from his brother’s furnace-hot temples, he tried to banish the creeping fear that such diligent effort was useless without stronger remedies from the apothecary. Efflin would waste away until death, with another pyre and body laid out for the True Sect priest’s final blessing.
Bitter, as the hours wore on, Tarens rested his cheek on crossed arms, helpless to stave off the turn of Fate’s Wheel. No older brother to stand at his shoulder would cripple him worse than the loss of a limb. Tarens covered his face with strong hands, unable to stifle his anguish.
Soft footsteps arrived. A comforting hand clasped his shoulder. Kerelie pulled up a stool and sat down, a fresh bucket of ice set between them. She retrieved the damp rag left draped on his knee and methodically started to refresh the cold compress.
‘Tarens?’ she said, hushed.
He did not turn his head, taut fingers in place to hide his sudden, useless tears.
‘We can’t give up.’ Kerelie rearranged the damp hem of her night-rail, huddled into the mantle thrown overtop, sharp-scented with outdoor air. The sheepskin slippers on her large feet were caught with moist leaves from her foray to skim off the bucket left by the well.
If Tarens believed the fight was not lost, his black despair whispered otherwise. Their late aunt had insisted the bountiful luck had deserted the croft years ago, when their father was conscripted to bear arms for the Light. No word of him had ever come back. No letter to say if he survived the harsh training, or whether today he still served, sworn to a dedicate’s term of life service guarding the sealed border of Havish.
‘We will weather this. No matter what comes.’ Kerelie’s chapped fingers tucked the packed cloth into folds and plied the wrapped ice to Efflin’s flushed forehead. ‘I’ll call if I need you. Best sleep while you can.’
Tarens lifted his tousled head and regarded his sister’s profile. By the seeped light from the fire’s banked coals, her unspoiled cheek wore the sweet flush of youth. Her upturned nose bespoke the light humour and innocence remembered from better days. Tarens chided gently, ‘Did you rest yourself?’
She sighed. ‘I couldn’t.’
‘Then I’m sitting with you,’ Tarens insisted. ‘I’ll be at hand’s reach because I know you won’t leave Efflin’s side to ask for assistance.’
‘Ought to help yourself,’ Kerelie retorted. ‘At least strap that sprained ankle. Draw down the swelling, or else, come the morning, you won’t manage to pull on your boot.’
‘I’ll borrow your slippers.’ Already stiffened and not inclined to move, Tarens slept in the end, propped against the oak hob. Because he was peaked with exhaustion, his sister could not bear to roust him.
Kerelie nodded off also in the bleak hour before dawn. Despite the best intent to kick her brother awake to look after the livestock, she never opened her eyes until sunlight streamed through the casement. The astringent scent of cailcallow and wintergreen scoured her nostrils and shot her up straight.
‘Tarens!’ She reached out to shake him, only to find he had risen ahead and gone outside to mind the chores. Efflin languished, still gripped by high fever. But his tormented breathing had eased just a bit. An empty pan and a spoon at his bedside suggested that someone had dosed him with a strong remedy. The reek of herbals wafted from a second brew, brought to a low boil over the fire.
Kerelie paused and made certain the sick man’s sheets were not clammy. She tucked the blankets up to Efflin’s chin, then straightened her night-rail and crossed to the hob, prepared to return the profuse word of thanks to the charitable neighbour who had sent the bundle from town.
But no kindly matron’s unpacked basket rested on the kitchen trestle. Kerelie saw none of the apothecary’s phials of oil, and no string-tied packets of purchased herbs. Instead, the boards were spread over with root-stock, cut fresh from the bush, stripped of bark, and pungently grated. Also wintergreen berries and leaves, several rose hips, shredded willow bark, and two other twiggy plants that her country-bred knowledge failed to identify. The collection had arrived at the cottage bundled inside a frayed rag. She still stared, overcome by surprise, when Tarens ducked through the doorway.
He had been mucking stalls, by the barn reek breezed in with him. He also carried two muddied shoes and a bunched wad of damp, tattered clothing, which he unburdened into her dumbfounded hands. ‘Hang these up to dry.’
‘They belong to the vagabond?’ Not indignant so much as undone by the strain, she scolded, ‘Tarens! You didn’t –’
Her brother cut in, ‘Yes, I did. The fellow’s wrapped up in my second-best shirt. Asleep. I gave him my bed. Kerelie, be quiet! We
owe him that much! He stayed out all night to bring Efflin those simples. You know the creek’s swollen too high to wade over. He must’ve stripped down and swum! I found him frozen nigh onto death, burrowed into the oat straw stacked in the hayloft.’
‘Where did he find these wild rose hips?’ Mollified, Kerelie ran on as Tarens stamped to the hob and shrugged off his cloak. ‘While you explain, give the pot a good stir. Use the wooden spoon. These rags must be wrung out before they’ll dry properly.’
‘I don’t know where the man found any of this,’ Tarens said, willing to do as she asked with the remedy but otherwise stiffly reticent. The apothecary had held his dried cailcallow dear, since the bush would not leaf over winter.
‘This paragon tracks down rare plants in the dark?’ Kerelie’s nagging sharpened in pursuit of the uneasy discrepancy. ‘Where under sky do you think he was trained?’
‘I have no idea.’ Tarens added, ‘He’s got a field-worker’s hands. I saw that much.’ The horn callus left by the scythe never lied. ‘The fellow’s mowed barley. And he’s got straw cuts from tying up corn shocks.’
‘Well, he’s done a countryman’s labour, perhaps.’ Kerelie eyed the worn garb in her arms, too concerned to let sleeping dogs lie. ‘Yet he wasn’t born to the life. Whatever mother gave birth to him, the specialized study of herbals is not common knowledge for farm help.’
Tarens kept his mouth shut, in dread of the day she encountered the shackle scars that marked the fellow’s ankles and wrists. Since Kerelie’s prying overlooked that detail, he might keep that questionable bit of the stranger’s personal history quiet. But the dangerous threat to his family’s security forced him to broach his earlier concern. ‘He might be clanblood, perhaps, from the deft way he snares wild game.’
Kerelie tossed the dreadful rags on the bench. ‘Look again!’ she demanded in withering scorn. ‘Tarens, you mean well, but are you stone blind? No clanborn ever wears woven cloth! Why would a skilled trapper not have deer-hide breeches at least, or a jacket of cured fur at this season? These shoes were not cobbled by free-wilds barbarians. I know my sewing. Have you found the seams in a field-hand’s dress done in a whip stitch? Or a shirt collar and fitted cuffs, laced with a pattern as these are? More likely we’re harbouring a simpleton servant, escaped from the Koriathain!’