Foul Tide's Turning (5 page)

Agents have arrived in Northhaven. They seek the girl.

Once they take her, they have been ordered to slaughter everyone.

They will take those you love to force you to release her.

‘The source is reliable?’ asked the guild master.

‘As good as gold,’ said Carter.

‘I know who the girl refers to,’ said the guild master. ‘Your father has taken me into his confidence on that matter.’

‘Well, I’m glad to see he still trusts someone,’ said Carter. He was finding it hard to concentrate on the guild master’s words.
They will take those you love
. What if the king’s agents seized Willow? She was in danger again. He had to see her, warn her, even if it meant breaking into the estate at Hawkland Park, Benner Landor and his money and men be damned.

‘I passed your father our guild’s seal before he left the country in search for you and the others who were taken,’ said Lucas Lettore. ‘It proved to be of some small assistance on his journey.’

‘You have my thanks for that. All in all, I’ve been a pretty poor librarian,’ said Carter. He glanced towards the courier. ‘Tom here’s a lot more dedicated to the calling than me.’

Lettore smiled thinly. ‘We’re still glad to have you returned to us, Mister Carnehan, even if the rates of transcription errors in the archives have also returned to unacceptably high levels.’

Carter passed the sheet back to the guild master. ‘Burn it.’

‘I see that you have learnt caution during your troubles,’ said Lettore. ‘An admirable trait. Your enemies will find it difficult to discover where the girl is being held.’

‘That’s what I’m counting on.’

‘Is there to be a return message, Master?’ asked Tom.

‘In due time.’

‘I need to warn my father,’ announced Carter.
And Willow
.

Lettore nodded. ‘And speaking of warnings, on the way home to Northhaven you should make a side-trip to the great forest. Your father is not the
only
one this message is intended for.’

‘Should I accompany my guild brother?’ asked Tom. ‘The roads aren’t exactly safe these days.’

‘A wise idea,’ said the guild master. ‘Go as far as the forest and return to the hold when Carter has arrived safely.’

‘My new posting is to be here?’

‘You shall remain with us a while, I think. Perhaps you will be able to use your time to tutor Carter in such skills as the accurate re-shelving of updated volumes.’

Carter wouldn’t count on it, but his failings in that regard were the least of his worries.
Slaughter everyone
. It would be easy enough for the ruthless usurper to arrange a bandit raid on the town – after all, he’d slaughtered his own brother and nephews to seize the crown. There were enough genuine, desperate and hungry wanderers on the road that would be glad to be paid for slitting the throats of every Weylander who’d escaped slavery. He thought again of Willow up in her grand mansion. How could Carter protect the woman he loved if he wasn’t allowed to see her anymore? The thugs on the gatehouse were fine for intimidating tramps, but they wouldn’t last long if a mob of marauders turned up to loot the estate. Holding on to their hostage was all that stood between them and murder.
I have to get Willow out of the park. Benner Landor will never believe the threat. She’ll be safe with me, even if we have to disappear into the wilds for a while.

Carter left the room with Tom while the guild master reset his code machine’s cylinders back to its neutral position. ‘You don’t need to travel with me to the forest; I’m not quite alone.’ Carter pulled his coat back, revealing a holstered pistol and two sheathed steel knifes. He was still more accurate with the throwing blades than the gun.

‘I’ll come anyway, if it’s all the same to you. Two eyes are better than one.’

‘What were your eyes doing on the coach when it was hit by those bandits?’

‘Closed, sleeping,’ admitted Tom.

Carter tried to smile. ‘Some sentry you make.’

‘I’ve got a strong pair of legs and some shoe leather that hasn’t been worn through yet,’ said Tom. ‘That’s the only qualification you need to be a guild courier.’

When Jacob returned to his rectory after the last service of the day, he discovered Brother Frael waiting patiently outside, visiting once more from the old monastery in the mountains. It had been Jacob’s home too, an age ago; its serene heights perched over an almost endless view across the Lancean Ocean’s jade-coloured deeps. Brother Frael seemed to bring the scent of the ocean with his humble slate-coloured habit. Below his tonsured hair – a ring of greyed silver like a low-sat halo – lay a pallid but affable face, his cheeks stretched waxen by sun and wind. Like many of the brothers and sisters from the border orders, Brother Frael had a touch of the Rodalian about him: wide, knowing eyes and soft manners combined with a somewhat candid nature. The old man was kindly enough, but his appearance was frequently the foreshadowing of a storm; though if Jacob had been in a better mood, he might have said the monk often appeared to sweep up the pieces of Jacob’s life.

‘I hear you have been vexing the bishop,’ said Frael.

‘That’s a man easily vexed,’ noted Jacob. He unlocked the door to the rectory. The tiny splinter of wood he had left jammed in the frame tumbled to the doorstep.
Alone, then. Just me and my visiting conscience
. ‘I don’t think Kirkup sits comfortable with the fact that, as the pastor of Northhaven, my name should have automatically been considered for the seat he occupies.’

‘Such a nice new shiny seat,’ said the monk, standing up and entering the hall. ‘But an easy mistake to make. When you left to pursue the slavers, the Synod in Arcadia thought you as good as dead. For that matter, so did the order.’

‘Happy to disappoint,’ said Jacob.

‘Sadly, the bishop is not the only one disappointed,’ said the monk. ‘When the order discovered you lying half-dead on the beach all those years ago, surrounded by corpses and driftwood, our healing of you went far beyond your shattered body. You were almost dead, but in the end you were reborn. It was as much a miracle as any I have seen, heard, or read of. You came into our order as one soul and left as another.’

‘I’m still the same man,’ said Jacob.

‘I wish that were true.’ The monk indicated the pair of belted pistols hanging in the hall. ‘Those are not our tools. You should have left them buried in that false grave outside.’

‘These are dangerous times,’ said Jacob. He took the monk’s simple wooden begging bowl out of the man’s hands. ‘I’m not sure how far I would have travelled on that journey shaking one of these. I’d better fill it for you, though. I’m not sure how many others around the town will honour the old hospitality of salt and roof. Many people still feel forsaken after the raid. By the lords down here and the saints up there.’

‘Blood begets blood,’ warned Brother Frael. ‘I watched you reclaim your old guns from that coffin. I watched you dig them out, unroll them, strap them on before leaving to save Carter and the other children taken by the slavers. I said nothing then. Well, Carter is safe at home again. Is it not time to rebury those hideous instruments in the dirt?’

‘You said plenty, as I recall. Carter is home, but
safe
…?’ said Jacob. ‘Which of us can say that? That damn usurper of a king down in Arcadia is less than happy I returned with a member of his family with a better claim to the throne than his, or that we’ve made a lie of the story that Northhaven was sacked by the usual pirates from across the water.’

‘When has there not been trouble in this world?’ said the monk. ‘Princes who want to be kings and kings who want to be emperors. Bandits who want to be rich and nomads who want to be conquerors at the head of a horde. There is only one choice to make in this life. Whether you are to fight or whether you are to walk away.’

‘Sometimes the fight comes to you,’ said Jacob. ‘No matter how many cheeks you turn, it comes for you and keeps on coming.’

‘Those are not your tools,’ insisted the brother, turning away from the twin pistols. ‘They are Jake Silver’s. Let that man rest, as dead as the thousands he slaughtered.’

‘I left my guns below the dirt once,’ said Jacob. ‘What peace did it buy me? My first two children taken by the plague, my town fired, my wife murdered by the skels, and my last son stolen to be a beast of burden and treated worse than any animal by the Vandians. I watched helpless. Jacob Carnehan couldn’t save them. But Jake Silver could have. Except he was gone. Hiding under
this
.’ Jacob pulled off his priest’s collar from his shirt and hurled it angrily down to the floorboards.

‘And would Mary Carnehan have wanted such a path for you?’

‘She’s dead,’ said Jacob. ‘She doesn’t want anything.’

‘Is that true?’

Jacob reached out to hang on to the banister of the staircase. He couldn’t walk into a room in the rectory without seeing her ghost. Feeling her presence. But his wife never whispered to him anymore; not like she had on the journey to rescue Carter.
Maybe rescuing Carter brought her shade to peace
? ‘True enough, Brother.’

‘This is not your punishment, Jacob,’ said Brother Frael. ‘Neither God nor his saints are so cruel.’

Maybe it only feels like it.
‘It’s not His vengeance I fear is coming upon us,’ said the pastor, ‘but a more temporal power.’

‘And how many graves do you intend to fill with your revenge?’ asked the monk, sadly. ‘How many will it take to punish those who slew your pretty wife and burned your beautiful town?’

‘And buried half my parishioners. If we’re keeping count, let’s not forget all our dead friends out there where my guns used to lie. All those good people whose houses you used to rattle your begging bowl in front of. Weyland is as wide as it is tall,’ said Jacob, ‘I reckon we’ve got space for a few extra tombstones, as long as the right boots get to fill them.’

‘And will you choose the feet inside those boots?’

‘No,’ sighed Jacob. ‘I reckon they’ll more or less select themselves when it comes to it.’
At least, that’s how it’s been working to date.

‘Put Weyland behind you,’ urged Brother Frael. ‘Cross the border and return to the monastery with me.’

‘If I do, trouble will only follow me,’ said Jacob. ‘I can promise you that.’

‘Our deaths are the rapids which await each of us behind the final bend of life’s course. All a mortal may navigate is how we choose to meet our end. The order’s offer is not unconsidered of the dangers your presence would bring. When death comes, let us meet it serenely. Let us meet it mindfully together, without fear.’

‘My fate isn’t something I can discard behind me like some old coat. I’ll never forget what you did for me. How the order saved me … and I won’t be the misbegotten soul who brings destruction down on Geru Peak. I forgot the world for nigh on twenty-five years, but it remembered me in the end. It stole into Northhaven and took everything from me.’

‘If you believe that, then perhaps it
has
taken everything.’

Jacob reached out, feeling the reassuring heft of the ivory-handled pistols.
No, not quite everything
. Six reasons apiece in each pistol’s rotating chamber; that made twelve reasons for going on. ‘I don’t fear death, Brother.’

‘Then you fear something worse. You fear
life
.’

‘Fear it?’ Jacob snorted. ‘I don’t even feel it anymore.’

‘Is that not precisely why you must return with me?’

‘A foul tide is washing in, brother,’ said Jacob. He walked from the hall into the pantry in search of a meal for the monk. Something for Frael to take on the road with him, for the brother wouldn’t want to spend the night under this roof after he’d heard what the pastor had to say. ‘Jacob Carnehan can’t turn it. But I figure Jake Silver is a man who might.’

‘There are always stealers ready to worm into our soul and hollow it out from the inside,’ said the monk. ‘Please—’

‘Maybe I could turn and run,’ said Jacob. ‘Forget who I am – was – again. But could my son? Could the woman he loves? Could the hundreds of Weylanders who escaped the sky mines as slaves? Is your monastery big enough to hold everyone in the whole nation? Because that’s where this particular cart is rattling.’

‘I can only save one soul at a time.’

‘Then save someone else’s,’ said Jacob. ‘Because I’m never going to lose my son again.’

‘If you plunge down this path you surely will, and take how many other widows and widowers with you?’

Jacob handed back the bowl, full of salt meat and dried fruits. ‘I’ve filled your bowl, Brother. Let fate fill its own as it will. I’m not going to run and hide and watch like a coward for a second time.’

‘Then you’ve chosen.’

‘Life’s chosen for me, old friend. Fate’s chosen.’ Jacob raised his hands open. ‘I’m just here waiting on the tide.’

‘Fare you well then,
Quicksilver
. It seems my brother has already departed.’

Eleanor Kaylock stared back up the hill’s stepped grass slope. The windows of the big house were orange with lamp light, warm and inviting compared to the biting cold outside. Hedges ran up either side of the hill, carefully trimmed to resemble ramparts in shape and size. They made the manor house up high look even more like a castle. Rows of trees behind the hedge stood sentry, bare of leaf and dark branches iced with snow. The maid touched the pocket of her coat to make sure she still had the envelope given to her by Willow Landor. Of course it was there. She’d hidden it inside her room in the manor house until the end of the day came and then retrieved it. Calling on the church for help and succour, or at least calling on the old dog-grizzled pastor? Well, it was probably marginally more fruitful than sending for the constables in the old town. The High Sheriff of Northhaven might not be related to Benner Landor by blood, but he knew which side his bread was buttered on, that much was certain. Eleanor comforted herself with the fact that the pastor’s son was genuinely in love with Willow … for reasons that didn’t have anything to do with the fortune she stood to inherit – not that there’d be any money for either of them if Willow defied her old man. Eleanor rubbed her stomach with her gloves. Not until they had some grandchildren to soften him up a bit. Then, the old fool wouldn’t much care if Willow Landor was married to the pastor’s son or the Grand Duke of Dedovo.