Dangerous Waters (25 page)

Corrain sat staring at the rune bone, unable to look away, until a maidservant came bustling in to rake out the stove’s cold ashes. The rattling roused him with a shock like another bucket of water. Realising he was thirsty, he went out into the compound and headed for the well.

‘It’s Corrain, isn’t it?’ A thickset man was already busy lighting the smithy’s hearth. ‘I’m Sirstin. Do you want rid of that?’ He gestured towards the broken manacle on Corrain’s wrist. ‘Let me get some long-handled pincers and I’ll have you free in no time.’

Corrain didn’t recognise the smith. He wondered what had happened to Pask. Twisting the manacle around his wrist, he contemplated the man’s kindly-meant offer. He looked up with a forced smile. It was as much as he could muster. ‘Thanks but no. I think I have another purpose for this.’

‘As you like.’ Sirstin shrugged and returned to the business of firing up his forge.

Corrain hauled up the well bucket and dipped water with the cup chained to the handle. Yes, he decided. He had another purpose for that manacle.

The household was beginning to stir. He nodded as lackeys and maids called out their greetings but didn’t slow as he loped across the cobbles towards the manor’s shrine. He didn’t want anyone engaging him in conversation. He had a task in hand.

The manor shrine door was closed but unlocked as was customary. Men had nailed their pennies to the outside in token of their oaths. Whole pennies, Corrain noted, some even silver. None of the usual cut-pieces that everyone ended up with in their purse, when hard bargaining drove merchants to cut pennies into halves and quarters, which prudent goodwives hoarded against the day when they had nothing else left to buy bread.

The inner face was soft with countless scraps of ribbon and lace, even humble calico, the women’s oaths no less sincere. Corrain closed the door behind him. He had something far less reverent in mind.

The shrine was dimly lit by a single lamp. It stood before a funeral urn of costly green crackle glaze. It could only be Lord Halferan’s. Corrain nodded an acknowledgement before turning to Talagrin’s statue.

‘I won’t thank you for seeing me home safe. Not till I see Hosh at his mother’s fireside and that’s not likely to happen. But what about seeing this land and its folk safe from those cursed corsairs? No, I don’t ask you for that boon. But you can witness my oath to make sure of it without any god’s assistance and without any poxed Archmage!’

He brandished his fist at the god, the shackle’s chain rattling. ‘When I’m done, you can have this iron and I’ll tell everyone who cares to hear that you’ve done nothing to earn it. No more than you did anything to save my lord from being murdered. We’ll see who reveres you then!’

As he stormed from the shrine, the sun was rising over the manor wall. Blinded, Corrain very nearly walked straight into Captain Arigo.

‘Well now.’ The old man shook himself like a fat hen in a dust bath. ‘Good day to you.’

Corrain contemplated Arigo’s broad shoulders and the flesh rolling generously over the top of the wide belt buckled tight around his hips. As long as he could remember, Arigo had been counting off the days till he could lay down his sword to sit in the sun and fish in the brook above the village.

Arigo looked Corrain pointedly up and down, his gaze lingering significantly on his mane of unkempt hair. ‘Do you want to rejoin the Halferan guard? Will you toe the line this time?’

If that was supposed to be a challenge, it sounded more like an appeal. Corrain could see some of the younger men, Reven in particular, watching from the gatehouse archway.

Corrain was sorely tempted to make the old man look a fool by shrugging off any such notion. But he couldn’t contemplate doing that even for a joke. Where else could he possibly go?

‘Yes Captain, I do and I will.’ He nodded dutifully.

Arigo’s relief was tempered by some consternation, before the old man got his expression in hand. ‘Then you must come up to scratch, groomed as befits the barony’s dignity,’ he said sternly ‘Get your hair cut and get rid of that slave chain.’

Corrain looked down at the manacle. ‘No, captain.’

‘What did you say?’ Arigo wasn’t feigning the question. He was taken aback. A moment more and he coloured, enraged. ‘If you expect to claim the privileges of food, fuel and shelter—’

‘I’ve sworn an oath to Talagrin.’ Corrain looked up at him. ‘I’ll lay this chain and my hair on his altar when the corsairs are defeated.’

He knew the old bladder of lard couldn’t argue with that. A vow was sacred, though Corrain did not propose to detail his angry impiety. A gust of wind drew a knotted lock of hair across his eyes and he regretted that impulse to claim his hair as well as the manacle, as he threw the fat old man’s orders back in his face.

No, he was glad he’d done it. Who did Arigo think he was to scold Corrain like some soil-stained ploughboy?

The old man narrowed his eyes, before glancing over towards the guard hall. A worm of doubt gnawed at Corrain’s certainty. He had been away for so long; did he have any allies left in the barracks? What about those men who’d been quietly satisfied to see him brought low after the utter folly of slipping between Starrid’s bed sheets?

Because fat old man or not, Captain Arigo didn’t seem ready to back down. Well, Corrain wasn’t going to. If he did, he might as well leave here and keep walking.

‘Captain!’

Both men turned their heads at the shout from the gatehouse. Fitrel was hurrying in, dragging a pimpled youth with tousled brown hair and on the verge of weeping.

‘Corsairs!’ Fitrel called out. ‘No,’ he added scornfully as two maidservants fluttered their white aprons like ducks catching a fox’s rank scent. ‘They won’t come this far inland. But the lad brings news from the shore.’ His glance swung from Arigo to Corrain and back again.

‘Inside, boy.’ Arigo flung his hand towards the guard hall door, convincingly commanding.

Corrain let the old man go ahead and followed after with a handful of other guards hurrying from all over the compound. He wondered privately if Arigo was as relieved as he was. They could have ended up stood there, like duelling swordsmen with their hilts in a bind, until the sun went down again. Corrain wouldn’t have thought old Arigo had that in him. He decided he could show the fat old man some respect, at least.

‘Fetch me the map!’ Arigo was calling out to one of the guardsman over by the shelves where such things were stowed, along with whetstones, oil for weapons and leather, waxed thread and anything else a trooper might need.

Corrain went to search the shelves. The lad Reven came to what he sought. ‘What do you want?’

‘An almanac.’ As Corrain searched the next shelf, he caught sight of Kusint. Freshly shaved and with his hair cropped back to coppery fuzz, the Forest youth was eating a hearty breakfast of fresh bread, cheese and bacon. One of the kitchen maids was idling beside him.

Meantime, the messenger was telling Arigo of a raid on a village to the south and west of the manor where the farmland met the saltings. Seven or eight leagues away. Corrain could see the map where the old man scratched a careful mark with his charcoal. Raided the day before. Corrain tallied up the charcoal marks. Already far too many and increasingly too close for comfort.

Over the next few days, more frightened boys like this one, from villages further afield, would straggle in. By the time the final reports of remotest theft, rape and murder arrived, ten and fifteen days later, the next high-springing tides would almost be upon them, promising fresh waves of raiders.

This was the endless litany of misery which had driven Lord Halferan to the desperate act that had been the death of him. With every man he trusted to tell of it encouraging him, Corrain included.

He needed an almanac, curse it. Corrain shoved rags and other detritus along a shelf. He’d lost track of the days and, besides, the parliament decreed the turn of the seasons from year to year, in between the fixed points of Solstice and Equinox. Every so often the barons added a day or so here and there when the calendar had to be rebalanced.

‘Here.’ The lad Reven offered him a little book printed on familiar coarse paper and bound with imperfectly shaped boards.

‘What day is it today?’ Corrain leafed swiftly through it, looking for the pages charting the phases of the moons. With the Greater circling the sky eight days faster than the Lesser, keeping track of both waxing and waning in relation to the other was a complex business. Easiest by far to look it up. ‘When’s the turn of the season?’

‘Forty first and For-Summer’s four mornings from now.’ Reven peered at the crudely printed pages. ‘What’s to do, captain?’ He sounded as frightened as the lad now weeping into Arigo’s ample embrace. ‘It’s been a bad year so far. Is it going to get worse?’

Corrain studied the course of the moons laid out on the smudged page, from full round to curved paring and back again. Never mind Archipelagan superstitions about coloured jewels in the sky. If the blind corsair had his fingers on the beat of this heavenly dance, no wonder he was promising a summer of plunder for his galleys.

From the start of For-Summer and right through the Solstice into the aft-season, the highest tides would surge time and time again. This summer the moons would favour the corsairs like no other year until their five year pattern had run its full course again, the end and new beginning marked by that rarest of nights, one with no trace of either moon.

So much for that. What use was him knowing that such tribulation lay ahead? Caladhrians had no way to know where the corsairs would land.

‘Captain? I mean, Corrain?’

He looked up at Reven. The lad’s resemblance to his dead uncle was more striking than ever and, worse, he was of an age with Hosh. It was too much to bear.

‘I need some air.’ He shoved his way out of the crowded barrack hall into the courtyard. But there was no escape for him there.

‘Corrain, is it?’ A woman had entered through the wicket cut into the double gate beneath the archway. ‘I’m Abiath—’

‘I know.’ Corrain wished he could walk away but his cursed boots felt nailed to the ground.

‘What of my boy?’ The woman looked at him. Not with any hope or even a hint of appeal. Her resignation was ten times worse.

‘I—’ What could Corrain tell her?

Then Kusint was at his side. ‘He was alive, the last time we saw him,’ he told Abiath. ‘More than that?’ He shook his head with honest regret. ‘We cannot say.’

‘The thirty first of Aft-Spring,’ Corrain managed to tell her. ‘He was alive then.’

‘Ten days?’ Abiath pressed the back of one shaking hand to her mouth. ‘Ten days since and my boy was alive? Saedrin save him—’

She hurried away, first walking then running for the manor shrine, skirts and shawl flapping frantically.

Corrain couldn’t watch. Turning away, he saw Kusint’s gaze following her, his green eyes hooded with sympathy.

‘How did you know she was Hosh’s mother?’

Kusint shrugged. ‘She has the look of him. Or rather, he has the look of her.’

Corrain realised the Forest youth was right, at least around Abiath’s eyes. Personally he’d always thought that Hosh favoured his father more; a demesne labourer who’d died, struck by a falling tree when the lad was barely out of leading strings.

‘Bread?’ Kusint offered him the heel of a loaf fresh from the oven, lavishly smeared with butter. ‘And you should get your burns cleaned and salved.’ He showed Corrain his own hands swathed in gauze sticky with ointment.

Corrain looked at his forearms, realising for the first time how sore the cracked and oozing scabs were. Salt water, wind and sun had saved his raw flesh from festering but that was all that could be said for it.

‘You’re making yourself at home here.’ Despite his grudging words, Corrain took the bread. It was marvellous beyond words. He’d never thought to taste butter again and this was its finest season, with the cows grazing on the richest grass.

‘They’re making me welcome.’ Kusint was watching Abiath, now the centre of a cluster of women by the manor shrine door. ‘Since there’s nothing they can do for their loved ones lost to slavers or worse. Doing what they can for me is better than doing nothing.’

Corrain realised the red-headed youth was right. That lass from the kitchen, she was Orlon’s sister’s girl. Theirs was a large and loving family.

‘Don’t you have kin to welcome you home?’ Kusint picked a shred of bacon from his teeth.

‘No.’ Corrain shrugged. ‘My mother died in childbirth, along with a sister, in the year of my ninth summer. Yellow ague killed my father a few years after that.’ He looked around the compound. ‘That’s when Fitrel took me in. I signed on the Halferan muster as soon as I was tall enough.’

His gaze strayed to the measuring post secured to the wall of the shrine. The crowd around Abiath was growing.

‘What use is such news to her?’ he demanded angrily. ‘She’ll never see her son again. You heard what the Archmage said.’

‘I did,’ Kusint said thoughtfully, ‘and there’s something we should discuss.’

Corrain looked at him, nonplussed.

‘I want to help you and these good people,’ Kusint said with growing passion. ‘You freed me from those slave chains when I thought that I would die in those accursed islands. Everyone here has welcomed me, a stranger, a wanderer, as though I were one of their own. I cannot bear the thought of more lives or livelihoods being lost to those foul raiders.’

‘Then what do you suggest?’ Corrain felt the first stirrings of hope and fresh purpose in his heart.

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