‘Challenger throws the third.’ Fowler’s voice had an edge in it. ‘You sure you want to go through with this?’
Father did not speak, simply gathered up the pieces.
‘So be it, then. When you’re ready.’
In the silence before the throw, it seemed nobody breathed but me, and mine was the shallow, uneven breath of utter panic. Make this not be happening, oh please, please . . .
‘Flame!’ came the hooded man’s call, and an instant later the stones hit the tabletop. I heard the universal gasp of horror and knew without the need to look that Father had lost.
No time. No time for anything. Father shouting; a bench toppling, a fist connecting with someone’s jaw, a string of oaths. Now several men were throwing punches, knocking over seats, grappling with one another, as if they had only been waiting for an excuse to fight. Someone crashed into me, sending me reeling into the red-faced man, who grabbed me and seized the opportunity to clamp one hand around my breast and slip the other between my legs. In the press of bodies, nobody noticed. In the general din, my protest went unheard. The man’s hand was creeping up my inner thigh. I put my hands against his chest and pushed, and he laughed at me. Struggling in his grasp, I heard Father’s voice raised above the others: ‘Filthy cheat! Liars and swindlers, the lot of you!’ A pair of combatants lurched across the cabin, scattering others in their wake, and the fellow who was holding me let go abruptly. I staggered, caught off balance, and fell to my knees. The fighters reeled into me, crushing my hip and shoulder against the wall; in a moment I would be trampled. The cabin was full of surging bodies and flailing arms. I struggled to catch my breath. Out. Oh, please, let me out.
A hand reached down, fastened around my arm and hauled me upright. Someone interposed his body between me and the crowd, then shouldered a way out of the cabin, drawing me along with him. As we stepped out into the cold quiet of the night, I saw that it was the hooded man, the man who had just won me in a game of stanies. I shrank away, but he kept hold of my wrist. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘Make haste.’
‘No! You can’t make me go! He didn’t know what he was doing. He’s not in his right mind! You can’t –’
The man headed across the plank, his hand a manacle around my wrist. Rather than topple over and fall into the water, I followed. Above the noise from the chancy-boat I heard my father’s voice, shouting.
‘Please,’ I gasped as we reached the shore and my captor marched on toward the settlement without so much as a glance at me. ‘You must know how wrong this is. He didn’t mean it. He needs me. Please don’t do this.’
The man stopped so abruptly that I crashed into him. He spoke in a sharp undertone.
‘That’s what you want, is it? A life on the road, a father who’s prepared to sell you to a stranger for the price of a few jugs of ale?’
I stood shivering and silent in his hold, for the moment unable to answer. My life had shrunk to a wretched thing indeed. I had let this happen. I had passed the bag of coins over to Father. I had become as weak and hopeless as he was. ‘He needs me,’ I whispered. ‘Don’t make me go, please.’
‘Move,’ the man said, and strode on, pulling me along with him. ‘And keep quiet.’
Gods, he was going through with this, the wager, the win; he was taking me with him and I’d have to share his bed and do his bidding and . . . It was unthinkable. ‘But –’ I began.
‘Shh!’ He made a sharp gesture, drawing his fingers across his throat.
After that I did not try to talk. Besides, I needed all my breath to match his pace. We strode through the settlement in silence, passing between the houses and up a steep path toward the deeper darkness of the forest above. The noise from the chancy-boat faded away behind us. I managed a glance back over my shoulder, but the jetty looked deserted. Nobody was coming after me. I thought of Father waking in the morning and realising he had gambled away his only daughter, the last of his family. I could not find tears. I could not find words. I was hollow as a gourd, a rattling, empty thing that had lost all its meaning. With my captor’s hand a tight bracelet around my wrist, I set one foot in front of the other and moved on.
We were almost in the shelter of the trees when a new sound came up the hill, a sound that froze the blood in my veins. My companion halted and turned, still holding on to me. Thundering hoof beats; jingling metal. A troop of riders came into view, moving fast along the road into the settlement. The moonlight made them spectral and strange in their dark cloaks and concealing masks. I had not thought I could be any more afraid, but I was. I must have made some small sound, for my captor hissed sharply in my ear, ‘Shh!’
It was early for the Cull; barely autumn. But there they were, hammering on shutters, kicking in doors, riding to every hut in the settlement to rouse its occupants with barked commands and – now – flaming torches that revealed here a cottager being dragged out by his hair, there a child snatched from its screaming mother; here a pair of household goats being unceremoniously put to the knife, there a furiously protesting dog silenced with the kick of a booted foot. The king’s Enforcers. Three years ago they had destroyed my grandmother for her canny wisdom; three years ago my brother had died in a valiant attempt to defend our village from the cruel and arbitrary violence of the Cull. Three years ago my father’s heart, already weakened by the loss of my mother, had finally shattered under the grief of those deaths. Dear gods, how many such tales unfolded down there tonight? How many years of sorrow were being wrought before our very eyes?
My companion tugged at my arm, jerking his head toward the darkness of the pines a little way up the hill. He was right: if we had any sense, we would vanish now, in silence, before the king’s warriors had the chance to notice us. But –
I motioned, pointing to the jetty, the boat, the men probably still brawling on board, unaware of the dark thing unfolding not far away. Perhaps the fellows I had thought to be fishermen had wives and children in those cottages, little families even now being torn asunder. And my father . . .
Someone had seen the boat with its lanterns alight. Someone was striding down the jetty toward it. Another man came up with a lighted torch and a moment later a flaming arrow arched through the air, flying over the inky waters of the loch to land on board the chancy-boat. A scream welled up in me. Before it could burst out, a hand clamped itself over my mouth.
The boat went up like a midsummer balefire, hot and bright and all consuming. Perhaps men dived overboard, their bodies aflame; perhaps I just imagined that. My gorge rose; my eyes felt as if they were bulging from their sockets. My knees sagged.
‘No sound,’ the man whispered in my ear. ‘If you scream, they find us.’ He took his hand from my mouth.
‘Father!’ I whispered. ‘He can’t swim! I must save him, you must let me go –’
His voice was a murmur. ‘Go back down there and you add the two of us to tonight’s toll. Come. We must move on.’
I couldn’t drag my eyes away; my feet seemed rooted to the path. The fire was raging, burning the chancy-boat to the waterline. If Father survived that, he would drown in the depths of Darkwater. If by some miracle the water did not take him, the Enforcers would. I stared at the bright flames, aching to do the impossible, to fly down there and snatch him from certain death, to spirit him away to a safe place, the kind of place that didn’t exist any more.
‘Come,’ whispered my companion, and instead of seizing my wrist again he offered his arm as support. ‘Quick.’
A little whimper came from my throat. Gone. All gone. I was the last of my family. I remembered my grandmother telling me, You must be the woman I cannot be, Neryn.
‘Come,’ said the man again. I took his arm, and together we fled into the darkness of the forest.
CHAPTER TWO
The night was half over before we stopped walking. What kept me going, I did not know, for I had been dropping with weariness when Father and I came into Darkwater. It was not Neryn, fifteen years old, an orphan and possessed of
a perilous gift, who climbed the hill above the settlement and descended a path skirting fields where cattle stood dreaming in the moonlight, then headed up again, up and up by a precipitous track that took us right over into the next valley. Neryn was too drained, too forlorn, too shocked to put one foot in front of the other. The girl who walked on, following the man who had won her in a wager, was a shadow, an empty carapace. She went by instinct, the shouts of the Enforcers still ringing in her ears, the flash of the fire still dazzling her eyes, anticipation of what was to come a cold stone in her belly. She went on because there was no going back.
We stopped at last in a sheltered clearing with three big stones in the centre. Pines stood tall and shadowy around the perimeter, keeping watch in the night. Everything was moving around me, as if I were drifting in the middle of the sea or caught up in a mass of swirling black clouds.
‘Sit,’ said my companion, at which point my legs gave up the effort to hold me and I collapsed beside the rocks where he had put down his pack. My body began to shake, its trembling quite beyond my control.
The man busied himself while I huddled into the meagre warmth of my shawl and watched him. Now that my mind was not entirely bent on keeping my body moving, I remembered that I was this person’s property, to do with as he pleased. It seemed he was making camp – he was gathering fallen wood, building a fire, getting out various foodstuffs as if he planned to prepare a meal. Perhaps there would be no more walking before dawn.
I could think of only one reason why he would have accepted the wager, and that reason clawed at me, a terrifying prospect. I had never lain with a man before. Although Father and I had been living rough, his presence had protected me from unwanted attentions. Long ago, I had dreamed of meeting a man I could love and being properly hand-fasted with prayers and blessings. The world in which such dreams were possible was long gone. And here I was with this taciturn stranger, who would expect me to lie down with him by this campfire and let him do what he wanted to me. He did not seem a gentle sort of man.
Evidently he was in no hurry for it. The fire was burning steadily now, and despite myself I edged closer to its warmth. He had water in a skin, oats stored deep in his pack. I watched as he mixed these in a little iron pot, which he then balanced on a strategically placed stone in the fire. Every move was practised and purposeful.
‘You’ll be hungry,’ he observed.
‘I’m not – I can’t –’ My teeth were chattering, and not only with cold.
‘Sit closer.’
‘I – I don’t –’ I stared down at my hands, unable to put into words what held me trembling and incoherent. The porridge was starting to cook; the smell made my mouth water.
I heard his footsteps as he approached me; I shrank into myself. A moment later his cloak dropped down around my shoulders, heavy and warm, and the footsteps retreated. When I looked up, he was seated on the other side of the fire, facing me. I blinked. It was the first time I had seen him without the deep, concealing hood. What I had expected, I was not sure. Certainly not that he would be so young. He looked no more than five or six years my senior. It was not a handsome face. His nose had been broken at least once, and there was a puckered scar on his chin and another from a wound that must have come close to taking out his right eye. His scalp and chin wore matching dark stubble. A pair of deep-set grey eyes looked across at me, offering very little.
I pulled the cloak around me, but its comforting weight and the warmth from the fire failed to keep out the chill in my bones. I cleared my throat, making myself speak. ‘Wh– what do you want from me?’ I managed, and saw something change in his face, as if, remarkably, it had not until now occurred to him why I was so scared.
‘You have nothing to fear from me,’ he said. ‘Neryn, is it?’
‘Mm.’ I drew a gasping breath. ‘So you – you – ?’
‘I have no designs on your person, believe me.’
‘There were other men there who wouldn’t have hesitated.’ A profound relief swept through me as I remembered the touch of that red-faced man’s hands. ‘I’m in your debt.’ If he had not accepted Father’s challenge, if he had not escorted me off the boat and out of the settlement, I would have been burned, drowned or taken by the Enforcers.
‘My existence holds sufficient complications without adding that particular one,’ my companion said evenly. I did not know if the complication he referred to was being owed a debt, or taking an untouched girl of fifteen summers to his bed. ‘Warm yourself, eat, sleep. With me, you’re safe.’
‘Then . . .’ I watched as he retrieved the pot and poured half the porridge into a metal pannikin. ‘Then why did you accept the wager? Why didn’t you leave us alone?’
He brought the pannikin around the fire to me, offering a bone spoon. ‘Eat,’ he said. ‘It’s not much, but it’s hot.’
Lumpy and undercooked as it was, the porridge tasted like food for the gods.
‘Take it slowly or you’ll burn your mouth,’ the man said. He was eating from the pot, using a piece of bark as a spoon. ‘How long since you last had a hot meal?’
‘I can’t remember.’
‘Been on the road awhile, then.’
I did not answer. Questions were dangerous even when a person didn’t have secrets to hide. A person could be killed on the strength of giving the wrong answer or revealing a little too much information.
‘Do you have kin? A home, somewhere to go?’
It was hard to believe I was safe here, though the food, the fire and the warm cloak were conspiring to lull me. The knowledge of loss, the sick, bleak thought that I was all alone in the world, lay inside me somewhere, alongside an image of my father burning, his mouth open in a silent scream of pain. The sight of the Enforcers in that settlement, doing their cruel work, had awoken dark memories of another time, another raid. But my body was a traitor; it soaked up the warmth and tugged me toward sleep. ‘No,’ I said. ‘If I had, I wouldn’t have been on the chancy-boat.’
‘Worldly goods? Did you leave them on the boat?’
I motioned to the small bag I had carried over my shoulder. ‘That’s all I have.’
He used his fingers to wipe the last of the porridge from the pot. My share was already finished. ‘You asked me before why I took the wager. Let’s say I did it to give you a choice. Where were you and your father headed?’
‘Nowhere. You saw what he did, how he was. We’re wanderers. We go where we might find food and shelter for the next night.’ And keep one step ahead of the Enforcers. I would not say that aloud. If those years on the road had taught me anything, it was that nobody could be trusted. Nobody.
‘Mm-hm,’ muttered my companion. ‘You plan to keep doing that now he’s gone?’
That was blunt to the point of cruelty. What could I say? I hardly knew what tomorrow might hold, for tonight my world had turned upside down.
‘Why wouldn’t I?’
He gave me a penetrating look. ‘If you’ve been on the road awhile, you already know the answer to that.’
Even as he spoke, an idea formed in my mind, born of something my brother and his friends had mentioned in hushed voices. A secret. A secret too perilous to share with this stranger, even if he had saved me from dying in flames along with my father. There was a place I could go. A good place. A place that might or might not be real.
‘North,’ I said, giving him a small part of the truth. ‘There’s a place a kinsman of mine once spoke of, in the mountains. I will head that way.’ Something made me add, ‘I’ve had enough of this realm of distrust and fear. I’m coming to think rocks and trees make better companions than men and women.’
‘Mm-hm.’ I could not tell what he thought of my statement. He passed me his water skin. I drank and passed it back. ‘North,’ he said eventually. ‘On your own. How far?’
‘Far,’ I said. ‘I’ll cope. I know how to look after myself.’
‘Mm-hm.’ He regarded me levelly. In his eyes I saw my ragged, weary, half-starv
ed self, a pitiful stick of a girl with defeat written all over her.
‘Without Father it will be easier,’ I said, and to my surprise hot tears began to run down my cheeks. I had thought myself beyond weeping. ‘He was once a fine man,’ I murmured, wiping my face with a corner of the cloak. Stop talking, Neryn, I ordered myself. Don’t speak about the past. Don’t tell him anything at all. ‘I should thank you,’ I said. ‘What is your name?’
He threw a handful of twigs onto the fire, watching them flare up. ‘That’s of no importance.’
‘You know my name.’ But then, he only knew it because he’d heard Father use it, back on the chancy-boat. And there were many reasons why a person would want to withhold his real name. ‘Never mind,’ I said quickly. ‘I shouldn’t have asked.’
‘Flint,’ my companion said, not meeting my eye. ‘That’s what they call me.’
If I had been asked to pick a name that suited him, I could hardly have chosen better. ‘Then thank you, Flint,’ I managed before a yawn overtook me. Gods, I longed to lie down and rest. I needed to let the tears fall freely, without anyone watching. I wanted to think of the good times, before the shadows engulfed my family. I needed to remember Father as he had been, a bright-eyed, clever man who used to whirl me around in his arms, laughing.
‘Don’t be tempted to go back down there.’ Flint’s tone was sombre. ‘There’ll be Enforcers on the lookout for a few days at least, in case someone they missed tries to slip back in to check on family or lay the dead to rest.’ He glanced at me and I thought he guessed how much I longed to do just that. It was wrong to leave Father’s body, drowned or burned, perhaps both, to drift alone in the depths of Darkwater. Perhaps he would be washed ashore, carrion for wild creatures to feed upon.
‘I won’t go back,’ I said, and it was the truth. I knew how hopeless a quest that would be.
‘Listen,’ Flint said, not meeting my eye now but stirring the fire with a stick, making sparks rise into the night. ‘You know, and I know, how hard it is to make a journey like that alone. Summer’s over and the Cull’s under way. You should be safe enough here for a day or so; this spot’s well off the known tracks. Tomorrow I have to attend to some other business, but I can be back before dark. It happens that I’m going north too. Travel with me until our paths part ways and you’ll have protection on the road.’ He sounded diffident.