Havenstar (6 page)

‘No, Master
Ketter, he’s not. And my mother is ill. You had better tell me
what’s happened.’

He untied his
kerchief, mopped the back of his neck with it and then twisted it
through his fingers, stalling for time while he decided what to
say.

Sick in the
pit of her stomach, unable to wait even to hear what she did not
want to know, she helped him out. ‘Is he—? He can’t be— He’s—he’s
dead, isn’t he?’

Bleakly,
Ketter nodded. ‘Sorry.’

And even then
part of her would not believe it. Piers? Piers Kaylen? Never! Not
her father, with his slow smile and lightning quick reflexes, not
Piers Kaylen, with his rough tongue and decent heart. She did not
move, but instinctively lowered her voice to be sure her mother
would not hear. ‘What happened?’

‘Pickle’s
Halt. He was attacked. Died right away.’

She stared at
him, still unable to accept that Piers was dead, and certainly not
comprehending what she was hearing. She’d never been into the
Unstable, but she knew enough to know that halts were generally the
safest of places anywhere outside a stability. ‘He died in a
halt
?’

He nodded.
‘Sorry, lass,’ he mumbled. ‘Now I got to go. Got deliveries to
make. Brought back his horses. And his things, what was left of
them. Pretty torn up, they were.’

Still
stupefied, she repeated the words without understanding them. ‘Torn
up?’

He nodded.
‘Got to go. Got packages for the Rule House in Kt Beogor. And
letters for Drumlin. Perfumes for the Margrave’s daughter there
from the son of the Domain Lord of Salient Meadows. Courting her,
they say.’

She stared at
him, unable to believe he was passing on gossip about Tricians when
all she was interested in was what had happened to her father.

‘What killed
him?’ she asked. Piers? Dead?

‘Uh—a pet, I
heard. Had to have been. The way he was ripped up, you see.
Crushed. Never had a chance.’

A pet? She did
not want to hear—yet she said, ‘Can’t you be more—more specific?
About how it came about, I mean.’

‘Wasn’t
there,’ he said simply. ‘Lass, better not to ask. He’s dead. Chaos
got him in the end. Happens out there. Piers was one of the best,
but even the best get caught sometimes. Got to go. I’ll unload the
horses and put them in the barn for you.’ He left the room,
scarcely concealing his relief.

None of it
made sense. A
pet
? Died in a halt? Pets did not enter halts.
She took a deep breath, tried to control the enmeshing grief that
threatened her calm—and failed. She cried noiselessly, helplessly;
cried for a man who had been many things to her: mentor and
inspiration; detractor and disparager, friend and advisor. Piers
Kaylen, master mapmaker, was dead. The best of fathers, sometimes.
And an indifferent parent too, often. Always away, or too busy,
skilled at leaving discipline problems to Sheyli, or ignoring what
he did not want to see. But still her father. Living, he could have
been more to her; dead, he could only be loved for being exactly
what he had been.

By the time
Blue Ketter returned carrying her father’s packs, she was composed
again, sitting quietly in the shop with her hands folded in her
lap. The sun had retreated; her skirt covered her legs, but still
she felt cold.

‘Thank you,
Master Ketter,’ she said politely. ‘Doubtless we owe you
something—’

‘Nay, lass,’
he said in deep embarrassment. ‘Couldn’t charge Piers’ family for a
service, not with him gone. Wouldn’t be right. Besides, Pickle of
the Halt gave me a bit for my trouble. Not that it was a trouble
really,’ he added hastily. ‘Glad to do it. Good man, your Dad.’ He
took a deep breath and plunged on. ‘Best maps in the business, you
know. Accurate. And clear. Last few years, well, they’ve been
better than ever. Coloured, you know. Better than before. Easier to
follow, better drawn. He was improving all the time. Not often you
get a mapmaker like that. Best maps of all, Piers Kaylen’s.
Everyone knows them, you know.’

She looked up
at him, and her tear-streaked face betrayed her doubt. He said,
‘True. Wouldn’t say that just cos he’s dead. Piers Kaylen made the
finest maps in all the stabs and it’ll be a long time before we see
his like again.’

Bitter
laughter bubbled up from within her, coupling with an ambivalent
grief. Piers Kaylen had not drawn a map in almost five years. She
had been the draughtsman in the family. He had given her his
sketches and his notes, the cross-staff and theodolite and compass
readings, and from them she had created the maps to scale, even as
he had concealed her talent. ‘No one will buy a map if they know it
was drawn by a woman,’ he had said. ‘Don’t ever let anyone see you
working at a chart, or we’ll be out of business, there’s a good
girl.’ They had been a good team, each complementing the other, but
no one outside the Kaylen family knew the truth of it.

Now he was
dead, and his daughter laughed and grieved and—in the deepest
recesses of her heart—hated, just a little, the father she had also
loved, because he had hidden her talent from the world, because he
had used her but never publicly acknowledged his debt, because he
had never truly admitted her potential even in private.

Piers Kaylen,
Master Mapmaker.

~~~~~~~

And all this
was displeasing to Lord Carasma, so he looked for ways to unravel
what the Maker had ravelled, until he found what he sought: the
imperfection of humankind’s greed was in the warp just as human
goodness was in the weft.

And so it was
that when Goodperson prayed for an end to the Chaos that ate
Malinawar, the Maker replied: ‘I gave you choice, but some of you
chose the Unstable. Therefore has Chaos cut a hole in the fabric of
my Creation and torn the weave of your world asunder.’

—The Rending I:
1: 10-12

Two days later,
when the immediate shock of Piers’ death had subsided to a vague
awareness of loss, a sort of grumbling pain that would not ever
quite go away, Keris was sitting in the main room beside her
mother’s bed. She had the cat sitting on her lap and was searching
absently through its fur for fleas. Yerrie submitted, unprotesting.
Thirl, polishing his boots on the other side of the room,
occasionally glanced at his sister with disapproving eyes. Only the
presence of an outsider, a village woman called Helda Pottle,
stopped him from telling Keris exactly what bothered him.

Mistress
Pottle was folding the washing, and prattling. The first she did
because she was paid to help with the housework now that Sheyli was
ill; the prattle was freely bestowed and habitual. ‘Well, Sheyli, I
must say I enjoy those frill flowers you got planted around your
washhouse, but I shudder to think what’d happen if old Mistress
Quint saw them! She’d be off to tell the Rule Office, sure as her
face is as sour as a green plum. Mean-spirited old bag, she’d be
sure to notice you’ve changed the garden there. ‘S’posed to be
cabbages along the washhouse, right? Oh, and that reminds me, Adarn
Morl—you know him, Sheyli? That hulking farm labourer who got
himself wed to Chickee Oster? Well, their son’s got hisself
tainted, they say. He’s excluded, and Chickee was howling fit to
bust her laces. Went for the Chantor at evening Prostration, saying
it was all Chantry’s fault!’

The woman
flapped creases out of the sheet and slapped it down on the table
as she spoke. The loose furls of fat on her upper arms wobbled in
sympathy. ‘Dunno what the world’s coming to, meself. What with
mountains disappearing and so many not coming back from the
Unstable. Your Piers, Adarn and Chickee’s son, that lass over Upper
Kibble way—’ She shook her head. ‘They say a live Wild turned up in
the Flow last month near Drumlin city. A water monster. The
Defenders slew it, but Chantry’s none too popular for letting that
one in, you can be sure. And then right here in Kibbleberry the
rule-chantors came and took one of Maree’s twins last week, just
like they done to your Aurin, Sheyli, all those years back. T’ain’t
right.’

Sheyli
shivered and turned her face to the wall.

‘Watch your
tongue, Mistress Pottle,’ Thirl said. ‘That kind of talk doesn’t
do, you know.’

‘Ah, bah!
Which one of you lot’s going to tell on me? Chantor Nebuthnar knows
what I think, anyways. I tell him to his face, the silly old chook.
Let me tell you, Master Thirl, if Chantry wants us to follow the
Rule, then they ought to make sure they give us summat in return.
But mountains disappear from right on our doorstep, and lasses and
lads get tainted, and they take our children, and monsters come
down the river. What’s the Stability coming to, eh? Things like
that never used to happen when I was a gel, let me tell you.’

She gave a
self-satisfied grunt, as if her youth had once been responsible for
keeping the Unstable at bay. ‘Nowadays, all Chantry seems good for
is spiriting away bairns, and making life difficult. Why, only last
week they were telling my nevvy that he can’t put plain glass in
his window, cos it’s allus been bottle glass, and that even though
the window was shattered by a runaway cart last week. And there was
old Marcun the Cooper wanting to root up his apple tree cos it
ain’t had an apple on it for two seasons, and plant a pear instead,
and they was saying the Rule won’t allow it. Pah!’ She took a
breath and regarded the clean laundry. ‘Anyways, there’s the
washing folded, and I’ll be on my way for today.’ She undid her
pinafore and went to the door. ‘Be seeing you all tomorrow,
then.’

‘Stupid old
biddy,’ Thirl said when she had gone. ‘As if Chantry could ever
have stopped the Axe Head from vanishing. Which reminds me,’ he
added, taking the opportunity to mention what was irritating him,
‘you should be working on the maps, Keris.’

‘You’re the
mapmaker,’ she replied, knowing she sounded sullen, and not
caring.

‘You do a
better job. Listen, Keri, it’s got to be done. Why don’t you do the
master charts, using Father’s notes and figures, and once you have
the first one ready, I’ll start work on the copies. I’ll do all the
ink work and leave the final colours and artwork to you.’

Sheyli roused
herself enough to endorse Thirl’s suggestion. ‘Your father gave his
life to gather the necessary information,’ she said, her fingers
fluttering over the bed covers like the fragile wings of an injured
butterfly. ‘The maps must be made. Don’t let his death be a waste,
Keris. He gave his life to serve Unstablers and the
Pilgrimage.’

Not quite
right, that, she thought. Her father had died not because he
dreamed of a life of service, but because he couldn’t keep away
from the Unstable. It drew him to his death, just as he had drawn
him to live dangerously for thirty years. The moth, finally
consumed by the flame.

Thirl nodded.
‘The Unstablers will be coming in to buy the new maps as usual;
they’ll expect them to have been done.’

She tried to
maintain a stolid complacency. ‘That’s right. They will expect
you
to have done them.’ Her faint emphasis on ‘you’ lingered
on into the silence.

Thirl changed
the angle of his argument. ‘People will die out there if accurate
maps are not available. From the gossip I’ve been hearing from
pilgrims, there’s been considerable changes in the ley lines since
the autumn surveying.’

Mother’s aged,
Keris thought inconsequentially. She looks a hundred, yet she’s
only forty-four. Her illness, knowing father’s dead—she looks
desiccated, sucked dry of life. She dragged her thoughts back to
mapmaking. Thirl was right, blast him. ‘Yes, all right. I’ll start
on them.’ And then, just so he knew she saw through his righteous
reasoning, ‘Although I doubt if your motives, Thirl, are as pure as
you would have me believe.’

‘So we need
the money,’ he said. ‘There, does that please you?’

She gave him a
level look.

‘Have you
found Father’s notes?’ he asked.

‘I haven’t
unpacked his things yet.’
I haven’t had the heart
—

‘Do it today.
Harin Markle is coming to see you later on, by the way.’

She bent back
to her task. ‘Whatever for?’ She found a flea and chased it through
Yerrie’s fur with a dab of lard on her finger ready to smother
it.

Thirl waved an
exasperated hand at her. ‘Because he’s interested in you, that’s
why. Disorder be damned, Keris, do I have to spell it out for
you?’

‘No.’ She
flattened the flea with grease then looked up at him. ‘But maybe I
have to spell it out for you, Thirl. I. Am. Not. Interested. In.
Harin. Markle.’ She put the cat down on the floor and went to wash
her hands under the sink pump.

‘Well, you had
better get interested,’ he said harshly.

She turned to
face him, expression blank. ‘Pardon?’

‘I am
promoting his suit.’

‘Promoting his
suit? What
is
this? Your brains are tainted, Thirl Kaylen!
Have you forgotten that I still have a living parent? I may be
legally under your protection in some respects, but Mother heads
this family now. It is none of your business whom I choose to have
court me and I can’t imagine why you have developed this sudden
interest in having me wed. Nor can I imagine why Harin is
interested anyway. He never used to even
like
me.’

Thirl flushed
slightly under the intensity of her gaze.

‘I’ll be
tainted,’ she whispered finally. ‘You’ve told him I have a proper
dowry, haven’t you?’ Fifty golds, saved by her parents over the
years, to provide for her. Sheyli had insisted on it, even though
other girls in the village normally brought no more than the
mandatory two golds to their marriage in addition to a trousseau of
the practical items listed in the Rule.