Son of Avonar Read online

  The next morning, when I woke from an uncomfortable few hours on the floor, Aeren was sitting up, his eyes fixed so intently on my face that I could almost feel their heat on my skin. Sitting on the side of the bed, I removed the bandages and was astonished to see the horrid wound well on its way to healing, only a bit red and slightly tender. Youth has distinct advantages when it comes to recuperation. “So, you’re better this morning,” I said. Fires of Annadis, why did he stare so?

  Once I had renewed the dressing and tied up the bandage again, I busied myself about the cottage, trying to break the lock of his gaze while tidying up the remnants of my herbs and pots.

  After a wobbly visit outdoors—I did not even consider following him out—he seated himself at the table. With one hand he gestured at his stomach and his mouth, while with the other he pointed accusingly at the idle pots beside the hearth. Though sorely tempted to grant such rudeness the empty reward it deserved, I threw onions, cheese, and my last five eggs into a skillet on the fire. He’d been none too well fed when I’d found him; after his fever, he must be weak as an infant, and I wanted him to put leagues between us today. “Sorry, I’m not adept at bludgeoning rabbits. You’ll have to do with what I’ve got.”

  I was convinced of his recuperative powers when I saw what he ate that morning: an entire round of hearthbread and every bite of my eggs. No encouragement to moderation had any effect on him, and when he emptied his bowl, he banged it down on the table in front of me, pointing a reproachful finger at its desolation. When I refused to cook anything more, he ate all the wild plums from the basket on the table and used his spoon to break off great slabs of cheese. Before I could get it wrapped up and stowed back in the stone-lined hole in the bank behind the cottage, he had eaten a quarter of the pale yellow wheel that I had planned to last until autumn.

  Astonishingly, Aeren was pacing the floor by midday, restless with inactivity, not fever. I shoved a pail into his hand. “Fetch some water and I’ll heat it, so you can wash before you go.” But either he didn’t understand my gestures or didn’t want to understand. He dropped the pail at my feet, retrieved the dwindling cheese yet again from my crude larder, and sprawled on the woven rug beside the hearth to eat more of it. Grinding my teeth, I fetched water from the stream for my own washing, seriously considering whether it was enough to drown the brute. When I returned to the house, he was rummaging through my things again, just as he had on the first day.

  “Get out of there,” I said, slamming the lid of the clothes chest. Only quick reflexes saved his fingers from being crushed. “What are you looking for?”

  With precise and insistent gestures, he demanded a sword.

  When I made it clear I had nothing of the sort, he stomped away angrily and sat sulking by the pail of water, dabbling his hand in it and watching the dirt swirl around his hand as he rubbed two dirty fingers together. “That’s mine,” I said, moving the pail away from him and setting another log on the fire. “I’m no serving maid or bath-girl. You’re quite well enough to take care of yourself, and you smell like a stable.” I held my nose to illustrate my point.

  He looked me in the eye and kicked over the pail, spilling the water all over my floor.

  “As you wish. I’ve no time for spoiled children.”

  I began to sort the burdock, scabwort, sparrow-tongue, and bristling spur nettle that I would trade for eggs and butter in the village, purposely ignoring Aeren and the mess he had made; I would not give him the satisfaction of watching me clean it up. A childish response to match his childish behavior. But the hostility in his gaze told me that his anger was anything but childish. The swelling in my throat was only now subsiding, and the slightest touch reminded me of the bruises that remained. Whyever had I brought him here? Never again. Never.

  When the plants were clean and bundled, I snatched up my sewing things and a shift that needed mending and moved out to the bench outside the door. The sun beat softly on my face, and the rasp of bees in the clover was the only disturbance on the hot, still morning. Aeren followed me out, slouching in the shadow of the doorway for a while. Then, abruptly, he strode to the center of the meadow and began to wave his hands about in jerking motions, like a scarecrow come to life. Soon he was whirling and thrusting, bending and kicking, rolling onto the ground, and then picking himself up again.

  Dropping my work in my lap, I watched in fascination, certain he’d gone mad.

  But gradually his movements lost their insistent frenzy and became more fluid, and I at last recognized their patterns: lunge, spin, slash, parry . . . Swordplay: graceful, powerful, masterful. Whoever was chasing him had better make sure the man never got his hands on a sword. I glanced uneasily about the boundaries of the meadow. Who was he? Why was Darzid after him?

  The display ended abruptly when Aeren stumbled over a rock and fell to the grass. Bent over his knees, chest heaving, he slammed his fist to the earth, then dragged himself to his feet, trudged back up the path, and flopped wearily to the ground in front of the cottage. Without favoring me with so much as a glance, he began tracing his finger in the dirt, drawing a rough geometric pattern of lines, curves, and arrows or cross-marks with a crude beast to each side.

  I twisted my head to see from the proper angle. Something about the arrangement of it whispered at me of familiarity. “What is it?” I said, tipping my head at the drawing.

  He ignored me.

  But the exercise gave me a thought. I sat down beside Aeren and began drawing in the dirt myself. “This is the house.” I pointed to my picture and to the real one. He nodded, frowning. “This is the ridge.” I marked on my map the place where I’d found him, the trail to the village, the river, the bridge, and the road. He waited for more. “Isn’t any of this familiar? Where do you come from?” I added more features. “Montevial is to the north,” I said. “King Evard’s royal city.”

  He just shook his head and looked blank. Then he began drawing a map of his own, adding roads, towers, mountains, then furiously erasing and changing them. It was no geography I recognized.

  How was I ever to get him gone if he couldn’t tell me where he was going or where he’d been? We needed words. So I began to call out objects around the cottage and to name the things I drew. He learned incredibly fast. When I quizzed him, saying door or sky or sword and having him point to the object or the picture of it, he always got it right. He was either deceiving me that he didn’t understand Leiran or his ranked among the quickest minds I’d ever known.

  I tried writing words, but he couldn’t read them. I tried to think of a way for him to tell who he was or who were his people, but he could not. I pointed to myself and to my house, then tried to find out where on his drawing was his dwelling, but he shook his head angrily and kicked dirt over his attempts. Perhaps he had been banished or disinherited. I tried drawing the devices of prominent noble houses, but he recognized none of them. And then I drew Evard’s royal dragon ensign, but it evoked neither fear nor loathing nor any sense of familiarity, and I began to wonder if he had lost his memory along with his voice. After an hour of this his lips were thin and hard, his nostrils flared, and his knuckles white. I went back to teaching him words, and he liked that better. Unfortunately, though he didn’t seem particularly happy, he didn’t look in the least inclined to leave.

  By midday I’d had enough, so I packed up my knife and my bundled plants and started down the track toward the village. Aeren wanted to come with me, but I waved him away. I could just imagine the uproar if I took a half-naked stranger into Dunfarrie.

  “They’ll arrest you. Put you in the pillory to wait for those who were hunting you, and all of this will be for nothing. If you want to leave, then by all means go, but take a different way at least.” I’m not sure what my gestures communicated. He pouted like a spoiled child. Maybe he would be gone by the time I came back.

  The path from my cottage entered Dunfarrie behind Gareth Crowley’s pigsties. Crowley’s hovel and its collapsing fence poked up from his
muddy barnyard, all of it sprawled across the foot of the hill as if a particularly nasty avalanche had buried a respectable dwelling. I circled wide and came to the dirt road that meandered past the sorely overgrown statues of Annadis and Jerrat—no priest from any temple could be bothered to come and tend so small a shrine as Dunfarrie’s—and through the jumble of tired wood-frame houses and shops to the Dun Bridge. The afternoon was still and warm, the stench of barnyard filth hanging over the stifling village.

  The few people I passed hurried by with averted eyes or touched their fingers to their brows without speaking. The villagers tolerated me and my unsavory past out of respect for Anne and Jonah, but they kept a wary distance. I was well content to do the same. Life was difficult enough without moping over other people’s hardships.

  Jacopo, of course, was different. If it hadn’t been for Jacopo, Jonah’s younger brother, I could never have survived in the valley after Anne and Jonah died. He had no family of his own, and he came up every few days to help me cut firewood or work the garden, or to make soap or candles. He had taught me to snare rabbits and squirrels, and to make jack, the thin, tough strips of smoked meat that would keep forever. Every fall he helped me make the cottage tight against the coming cold. Jaco was all of my family and all of my friends together.

  Eyed suspiciously by a bronze rooster, I picked my way through a cramped chicken yard to the back stoop of a tidy, sod-roofed house, where I traded my bundled dye plants to Mag the weaver for ten eggs and a fist-sized lump of butter wrapped in a rag. Jaco’s shop was not as tidy as Mag’s house. The outside had not been whitewashed since King Gevron’s father ruled Leire, and the dirt- and soot-grimed window allowed little daylight inside. I pushed open the door and three cats made a break for freedom across my feet. “Jaco, are you here?”

  Jacopo had taken up shopkeeping after thirty years wandering the world as a sailor. An Isker saber had slashed the muscles of one leg, leaving it too stiff for scrambling in a ship’s rigging, so he had made his way home to Dunfarrie. Out of this dusty room he sold all manner of things: old boots, clothes, anchors, rusty lanterns, cracked bowls, farm implements. Anything he could find or trade for, he would set in his shop, and someone would want it eventually.

  “What’re you up to in town this day, girl? It’s not your usual.” Jacopo emerged from the back room carrying a crate of rusty nails. He was very much like Jonah, wispy white hair and kind brown eyes. Though no taller than I, he had broad shoulders and a barrel chest, and the hands that gripped the heavy crate were wide, with short, powerful fingers. He set down the crate, then wiped his forehead with a rag. “Summer’s on us today, for sure.”

  “Jaco, we need to talk. Privately.”

  “Not a soul in town to hear, I’d wager. Everyone’s gone out to Augusto’s. With the eviction tomorrow, everyone thinks either to help him move out or to steal whatever they can get their hands on. After the flogging, Augusto can’t move fast enough to keep up with his children, much less his belongings.”

  I drew a pair of rickety stools close together where we could see the shop door. Jacopo pulled a wadded leather pouch from the pocket of his worn blue sailor’s coat, extracted a pipe, and filled it from a battered tin.

  “Yesterday a stranger showed up on the ridge. . . .”

  When I was done, the pipe remained unlit. “And he can’t speak at all?”

  “Not a syllable. But he’s not accustomed to it nor to rough living or having to do for himself. I can’t seem to convince him to leave. So what am I to do with him?”

  “Give him over to Graeme Rowan. That’s the only way to stay clear of trouble.”

  I shook my head. “Darzid’s surely spoken with Rowan. Our upright sheriff would turn Aeren over straightaway. I won’t do it.”

  “But if he’s a thief—”

  “We’ve no evidence this man has broken any law, and whatever his crime, I’ve doubts he can remember it. He’s not even sure of his name.”

  “Perhaps he’s not the one the captain’s hunting. Likely he’s just a fellow wrecked himself on the Snags and wandered up the ridge. I’ve seen many a body with the clothes washed right off them after getting caught up at the Snags, though mostly they were dead.”

  “I won’t believe that. It’s too much of a coincidence.”

  “What if I was to trot down to the docks and have a smoke with Graeme, see what he knows?”

  “You won’t mention Aeren or me?”

  “I’ll be as clever as a boy when there’s work to be done.”

  “I’ll watch the shop.” I had to offer, though I thoroughly disliked the task.

  “Right then. Have a look through my bins and see if there’s aught to dress the fellow in. I’ll be back in a bit.”

  I delved into the three great wooden clothes bins. That the contents of the bins were entirely dead people’s clothes didn’t bother me. Dead was dead. The former owners weren’t going to come back and haunt those who found some use for their breeches. I came up with gray underdrawers, a long tunic of russet, some worn and greasy loose breeches of brown kersey with a drawstring to hold them up, and canvas leggings. Aeren was clearly unused to going barefoot. His feet were soft, battered by the stones and sticks of the forest path, and the lack of calluses told me he was accustomed to boots that fit, not these hobnailed monstrosities the rest of us wore that weighed like oak and were no more yielding. The only thing Jacopo’s bins provided were sandals that looked as if they’d been chewed by a goat.

  I had watched the shop for Jacopo on other occasions. I wasn’t much good at it. Jacopo could talk to a customer for an hour about nothing, and before you knew it, a woman who had come in search of a spoon would leave with two crocks, a bowl, three shirts, and a ladle. I rarely managed to get past “Good day.” Fortunately, only two people came into the shop while Jacopo was out.

  Mary Fetterling, a bony woman of indeterminate age, brought in a tidy bundle of clothes: a thin summer cloak, a boy’s stiff jacket, some stirrup-footed leggings, and a pair of patched and baggy farmer’s trousers. Her graying hair flew about her head in distracted tangles, and her eyes darted from here to there, never fixing on anything. “I’ve Tim’s things. He won’t be needin’ them no more. And I could use a penny.” Tim was the last of Mary’s four sons, one of thousands of Leiran conscripts dead from Evard’s determination to conquer the desert kingdom of Iskeran, the only one of the Four Realms not under Leiran rule. Mary’s husband had been lost in King Gevron’s campaign against Valleor, and her other three boys in Evard’s conquest of Kerotea.

  I had grown up with soldiers, but they were men hired by my father to defend his house and support his obligations to his king, not conscripts. Conscripts were necessary in a war—I understood that—but at the least they deserved good officers and reasoned strategies. And for a family to lose all of its sons . . .

  “Jaco isn’t here, but I’m sure he’d give at least two coppers.” The clothes weren’t worth so much, but Jacopo had taught me his ways.

  The woman dipped her head. “Thank you, ma’am. A fella that was with him come to tell me of him. It’s been nigh on two years that it happened, and I didn’t hear of it till this week. But I wasn’t surprised. A mother knows. Tim was my youngest. He would always come—”

  “I’m sorry about your boy.” Useless words. Not worth the effort to voice them. But I didn’t want to hear of her sorrows. I swatted at a fly buzzing about my face.

  “They say he died brave,” she said. “Blessed Annadis will remember his name.” She clutched her pennies and went on her way. Neither my words nor Jaco’s coppers would keep her fed for long. And I’d seen no evidence that having either of the disinterested Holy Twins remember a dead soldier’s name benefited his family in the least. Mary would end up harnessing herself to a plow on some noble’s leasehold east of Dunfarrie and pull until she dropped dead from it. I hated working the shop.

  An hour later, a ragged boy barged through the door carrying a wad of dingy rags, shouts of “Ru
n, Donkey” following him. Underneath a scraggly mop of honey-brown hair and thirteen years’ accumulation of dirt were a thin freckled face and ears that seemed too large for his scrawny frame. One of his legs was shorter than the other, and he loped through the village with an off-kilter gait that left one expecting him to crash into the nearest obstacle at any moment. Paulo was his name. Almost everyone in Dunfarrie called him Donkey.

  The boy pulled up short when he saw me, and he quickly stuffed his bundle behind his back. “Where’s Jaco?”

  “Out. Do you have something for him?”

  “Nope. Nothin’.” He ducked his head, touched his forehead, and backed toward the door.

  “Come, what’s in your hand? You know I work the shop when Jacopo’s away.”

  “Nope. I’ll wait.”

  “Wait for what?” Jacopo stepped through the doorway, pipe smoke curling about his head.

  The boy looked from Jaco to me, hesitating.

  “I think Paulo has a treasure for you, Jaco.”

  “What’ve you got, boy? Out with it. I’ve no time to dally.”

  With a sideways glance at me, the boy unfolded the filthy cloth. Between the stained folds lay a silver dagger half again the length of Paulo’s hand. The guard was a simple, elegant curve, and both guard and hilt were densely filled with intricate engraving that glittered as it caught the light.

  Jacopo voiced our mutual astonishment. “Where in perdition did you come up with such a thing?”

  “Found it, Jaco. Honest. Left on the ground. Nobody about.” The boy held it well out of my reach. “Didn’t steal it. I promise.”

  “Not saying you did.” Jaco stroked the gleaming blade. “Just trying to figure out where such a fine thing might have come from.”