Well of Sorrows (2 page)

“You may as well come in, Colin. I can see your shadow.”

Colin gave a guilty start. He’d been hovering outside of the ramshackle hut they’d claimed in Lean-to, listening to his mother hum softly to herself as she worked. But now he sighed and shoved aside the ragged blanket they were using as a door and entered.

He halted just inside the entrance, not quite able to look at his mother, and waited for the lecture to begin, as it had the last two times.

Instead, his mother simply said, “Oh, Colin. Not again.” The defeat in her voice forced him to look up.

She sat before the circle of stones that made up their fire pit. Wood had been set, ready to be lit, and the tripod braces his father had constructed to hold the pot over the flames were out and waiting. His mother held the pot in her lap, her arms resting on its edges as she sliced a potato to add to the water. The skin around her hazel eyes appeared bruised with exhaustion, her face gaunt. She’d pulled her long black hair back and pinned it to keep it out of her face while she worked.

They stared at each other. Colin felt tears begin to burn his eyes again, but he clamped his jaw tight and forced the sensation back, his gangly body going rigid.

His mother smiled tightly, and then she set the black pot to one side and stood.

“Well, come here,” she said, moving toward the table against one wall, where she picked up a cloth and dipped it into water. “We’ll get you cleaned up as much as possible before your father gets back. He’s down at the docks, looking for work.”

Colin could hear the snort in her words. His father had been down to the docks looking for work for the past eight weeks but had found nothing so far. Nothing of significance.

His mother turned, wringing out the cloth, then paused when she noticed the stain on the front of his breeches. Her sudden frown almost brought the tears back, but then she knelt and looked up into his eyes, pressing the damp cloth to his face, wiping away the blood and dirt, and the tracks his earlier tears had made.

“Was it Walter and his cronies?”

“Yes. They caught me on Water Street. They dragged me into an alley.”

“And no one saw you?”

Colin didn’t answer.

His mother sat back. “People saw you, but no one came to help?”

He nodded.

His mother stood abruptly, threw the cloth back onto the table as she stormed over to the pallets and one of the small chests they’d carried with them all the way from Trent. “Were they townsmen who saw you?” she snapped as she dug through the chest, lifting out clothes and setting them to one side. “Were they from the Carrente Family? Sartori’s people?”

“Yes.”

She muttered something under her breath, then pushed back from the chest and stalked across the room. “Here. Get out of those breeches and linen and into these. Your father should be here any minute.”

Colin moved to the corner of the room and stripped off his soiled breeches and underlinen, his back to his mother. He shoved his feet into the new clothes hurriedly, head ducked and body hunched. He didn’t like to be naked in front of his mother any longer than he had to any more. Even the thought made his cheeks burn, his chest and stomach tingle.

He had just cinched the ties of the breeches together when his father stepped into the hovel.

He swore under his breath the minute he saw Colin, his eyes going black. “Walter?”

Before Colin could nod, his mother spat, “Of course it was Walter! Who else would it have been?”

“Any of the goddamned townspeople who were here before us.”

“Don’t you dare curse in front of Colin.” His mother’s voice had gone soft and flat; Colin involuntarily took a step backward, edging to the right. He hated it when his parents argued, but his father still stood in the doorway, blocking any exit. “And the townspeople here treated us fine when we arrived. They even gave you a job on the docks after the guild turned you away. A job you’d still have if you hadn’t been so arrogant!”

“It was the arrival of the
Breeze
—”

“No!” His mother sliced the air with one hand. “No! You will not blame the loss of your job on the arrival of more refugees from Andover. Yes, more and more of them arrive, practically each day. Yes, they’re fleeing Andover and the Feud. And yes, there are others being shipped here as well—prisoners given a second chance, Armory discharged for suspect reasons, and others. But that is
not
why you lost your job. You lost your job because you couldn’t stand the fact that you were a guildsman, a carpenter, and you were doing ‘menial’ labor on the docks because the guild here is Carrente and refused to accept a Bontari Family member into its ranks. You had to let everyone know that the work was beneath you. You had to put on airs. And you wonder why the regular dockworkers turned on you, why they made your life even more miserable. You let them goad you into a fight! Forget the fact that it was the only work available at the moment. Ignore the fact that you have a wife and son to support, that we barely have any funds left from Andover. Forget that—”

But here his mother halted. Colin could see the redness around her eyes, could see the watery tears that she tried to hide by raising a hand to her quivering mouth and turning away. His father had straightened, hands fisted at his sides, but now, staring at her shaking shoulders, he faltered.

“Ana—”

“Don’t.”

His father shifted up to his mother’s back. Reaching for her, he began again. “Ana, I don’t know—”

But his mother flinched away before he could touch her, and he stiffened. His hands hovered for a moment, then closed into fists and pulled back in frustrated, impotent anger.

He turned, stared at Colin, his expression tortured, jaw clenched.

Then, without a word, he ducked through the door, the blanket falling back into place with a rustle. His mother sobbed, hunching forward over the lone table in the room.

He
hated
it when they fought. He
hated
it when his mother cried.

Colin slid toward the door and shoved his way out into the late afternoon sunlight, hesitated, trapped between frustrated anger at his father and his mother’s sobbing. He glared at the woman sitting outside her own door across from them, at her sympathetic frown, then spun and stormed off into the warren of narrow pathways between the shanties and huts, dodging men and women and children, all of them dressed in what had once been decent clothing but that now looked used and worn, most of them thin, those that had just arrived on ships gaunt or emaciated from the long journey or illness. He ignored them all, ignored the lost look in their eyes, the desperation, a look that had crept into his father’s eyes in the last few weeks, a look that had died in his mother’s eyes months ago.

Colin dodged a pack of smaller kids, most of them half naked, and wound his way to the center of Lean-to, a small rounded area of land with a large plinth of natural stone thrust up through the packed dirt. The sounds of the refugees from Andover surrounded him—shouts, the barking of a dog, the screams of children, the wailing of babies—all filtered through the sunlight and the stench of too many unwashed bodies pressed too closely together. He considered heading back into Portstown, back to the streets, but the fear of running into Walter and his gang again forced him to turn in the other direction, out toward the plains to the north and east of town.

A breeze gusted in from the ocean as soon as he moved outside the rough but growing boundary of Lean-to, pushing Colin’s dark brown hair down into his eyes, bringing with it the taste of seaweed and salt. The ground began a slow incline, so unlike the sharp cliffs and terraced land around Trent, and within moments Colin found himself traipsing through grass, the stalks reaching up beyond his knees, the unripe grain pattering against his thighs. He reached down to run his hands through the grass, but the edges were too sharp, the seed heads too prickly.

He trudged up the crest of land to the north of Portstown and took a moment to stare down at the port, at the narrow docks that struck out into the water, the scattering of wooden buildings that made up the town’s center, and the large stone building that belonged to the Proprietor, a low wall surrounding it. A second stone building stood off to one side, almost as large as the Proprietor’s house: the church, its small spire topped off with the tilted cross of Holy Diermani. Only a few streets cut between the buildings, one running along the docks, one down to the warehouses to the south—Water Street, where Walter and his gang had caught Colin that afternoon—and three jutting out into the land and the twenty or so buildings that had been erected further inland. Homes and cottages and barns given by the Proprietor to the more prominent people in town continued out beyond where the streets trailed into dust and grass, most of them with small patches of plowed land, early spring crops already growing.

Lean-to had formed over the last few months to the north of the main portion of Portstown. At first nothing more than a few hovels on the bluff overlooking the port, with the influx of hundreds from Andover it had grown into a mass of huts and shacks and tents, all crammed against one another. From this height, Colin could see the section that housed most of the craftsmen, people who’d belonged to a guild in Andover but who weren’t part of the Carrente Family or any of its allies. These huts and tents appeared more orderly, with clothes hung out on lines, flapping in the wind, and smoke rising from cook fires. The majority of the tents farther north were ragged, dirtier, barely standing, and haphazardly placed. Most of the prisoners given clemency if they agreed to help settle the New World had ended up there, along with anyone else who had caused problems after arriving in Portstown. And people from all over Andover had arrived, representing all of the twelve Families of the Court, from all walks of life.

Except that here in Portstown, here in the New World, there was no Court, there were no Families. At least, that was what they’d all been led to believe in Andover: that the New World was full of possibility, of riches, of dreams.

Colin snorted. That hadn’t been true. There was a Proprietor in every settlement on the new coast. The Proprietor held the power in each of the towns: power sanctioned by one of the Families. The Proprietor of Portstown owned the land for as far as anyone could see, in all directions. He and the townspeople—the men and women who’d founded the town and all of their descendants fifty years back—were beholden to the Proprietor’s Family, to the Court, an extension of Andover.

And over the past few months, they’d made it clear that those fleeing the Feud in Andover who were not part of the Carrente Family weren’t wanted.

Colin turned his back on the town in disgust and faced east, out across the plains, at the smooth folds in the land covered in grass, dotted here and there with copses of trees or broken chunks of stone like the one in the middle of Lean-to. He struck off farther north, toward where one of those stones cut through the earth in a flat shelf, and sat down, legs crossed beneath him.

He’d found this place within the first week of arriving in Portstown, when the excitement over the new town and the new land had still been fresh, when he’d been trying to forget the death and disease that had plagued the three ships during the trip across the Arduon. He’d come to this rock and simply stared out over the grass that seemed to stretch forever, rustling in the wind, rippling in various shades of green and gold and yellow, dotted with the shadows of scattered clouds.

Now, he leaned back on his arms, stared up into the blue sky, watched the dark circling of a hawk high above, and slowly the tension in his shoulders ebbed. The sun beat down with soothing warmth, and heat radiated up from the rough granite beneath his palms. He closed his eyes, breathed in deeply, smelled the grass, the earth, the stone, listened to the shriek of the hawk above, faint with distance, to the wind as it rustled in the stalks surrounding him. The shame over pissing his breeches drained away, along with the anger at his father and his hatred of Walter and Portstown and the Carrente. All of it faded, even the throbbing of the bruises in his arms and on his chest.

Relaxed, he opened his eyes and gazed into the distance, to where the rumpled land met the sky.

The openness of that world called to him. If he breathed slowly enough, if he grew still enough, he could almost hear it.

His father returned to the hut after dark.

Colin sat before the fire. His mother sat on one of the sleeping pallets, Colin’s torn shirt in her lap, her needle and thread flashing in the light as she mended it. A pile of assorted clothes sat next to her: shirts and breeches and linens from a few of the other members of Lean-to that also needed repair.

His parents looked at each other a moment after his father ducked through the entrance, his mother pausing in her work. Then Tom’s gaze fell on Colin.

He moved toward the fire, reached forward to ruffle Colin’s hair, but Colin ducked his head and shifted out of the way.

“Colin, come here.”

When Colin didn’t move, his father squatted down next to him by the fire with a grunt and held out his hand. “I have something for you.”