The Soul Weaver (9 page)

The silence was deep. Only the pop and hiss of the hearth fire convinced me I hadn't suddenly lost all hearing. The story itself carried little weight with me. To lose a son young, whether to disease or drink or to the ever-present Leirans who snatched boys to serve in the army was common among the poor of the Four Realms. And to blame the child's fate on fairies or monsters was the usual practice. But I felt the father's grief vividly. Until those years in Zhev'Na when I had watched the Lords stealing Gerick's soul, I had thought seeing one's newborn infant dead the most grievous of sorrows. But far worse was losing a child nearing adulthood, seeing life's fullest promise dashed so bitterly.

In selfish relief, I reached for Gerick's hand that lay on the scuffed table. His fingers were stone-cold. I glanced up quickly. His skin was chalky, his eyes huge and dark. “Gerick, what is it?”

“Nothing,” he whispered, pulling his hand from mine and averting his eyes. “Nothing. It's just a story.”

Though the old man was a mesmerizing storyteller, the tale of a drunken sheepherder's son paled in comparison with Gerick's own strange adventures. “I think the boy ran away,” I said. “There was violence between him and his father. Perhaps this tale is the man's way to explain it. What do you think?”

Gerick shrugged, color rushing back into his cheeks. “I suppose I'd run away if I was beaten like that or tied to my bed. Can we go up now?”

I laid down a coin for the landlord, and we climbed the stairs, leaving the laggards draining their mugs and mumbling about getting home before the sun came up.

Sleep would not come. The rope bed and its straw-filled pallet seemed to develop a new lump or sag wherever I settled. I drifted in and out of dreams and worries and plans that seemed important, yet were indistinguishable by morning. Every time my eyes flicked open, I saw Gerick sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall, wide awake. His elbows were propped on his drawn-up knees, his hands clasped and pressed to his mouth.

When I woke from my last fitful nap, just after sunrise, Gerick was not in the room. I gathered up our last pack and hurried downstairs to find him. The Fire Goat's common room was bustling with every sort of person, from tradesmen to officials with ruffled silk doublets and gold neck-chains.

“Two for Vanesta. Anyone here bound for Vanesta?”

“Party of six for Fensbridge, looking for a strong swordsman.”

The shouts came from every corner of the room. Concern about the bandits who plagued the mountain roads prompted travelers journeying any distance to join with other groups for mutual protection. Evard's soldiers were off fighting the war in Iskeran or hunting down those who failed to pay their taxes and tributes to support the interminable conflict. None were left to keep the roads safe from highwaymen, and the number of highwaymen increased every day that men got more desperate to feed themselves and their families. Local officials like Graeme Rowan were outmanned, their territories too large to patrol in a year of trying.

“Two women for Yurevan. To accompany a family or larger mixed party. No ruffians. No peasants.”

I pushed through the smoky, crowded room toward the door, fending off a disheveled man who smelled of wine and leered broadly at me, saying he'd take me wherever I wanted to go. I pulled my widow's cap down lower and escaped into the yard, searching for Gerick.

The muddy yard was packed with horses, wagons, baggage, and even more people, generally of poorer aspect than those inside. A familiar lanky form moved down a string of eight or ten horses, offering each a private word along with a handful of grain from a canvas bag slung over his shoulder. I would have sworn each beast looked more cheerful after Paulo had stroked its neck and whispered in its ear. One of the string was Gerick's gray gelding, Jasyr, and another was my chestnut mare, Kelty, brought along not to sell, but to be available if Gerick and I should choose to ride.

Across the yard by the fence, Radele was helping a young woman load several heavy boxes into a wagon. He shared a laugh with her, then tugged his soft-brimmed hat down low over his face and slouched against our cart. The rugged little pony was harnessed and ready. I waved to get Radele's attention. He saluted and tipped his head toward a far corner next to the stable, where Gerick was engaged in earnest conversation with the despondent storyteller from the night before. My fists and stomach unclenched.

As I hurried across the courtyard through the people tying baggage onto carts and ponies and bawling mules, a burly drover leaped onto a heavily laden wagon, whistled loudly, and yelled, “Moving out for Montevial! We wait for nobody.”

Radele gave me a hand into the pony trap, then swung gracefully into his saddle, nudged his mount forward, and accosted the drover. Gesturing toward my cart, he dropped a few coins into the drover's hand as I had instructed. The drover signaled me to take up the position just behind the lead wagons, and then, with a loud bellow, he headed his own wagon out the gates.

Gerick's seat was still empty. But Radele rode directly across the path of the wagon next to me, causing the driver to pull up sharply and curse when he couldn't squeeze in ahead of me. The young Dar'Nethi gave me a grin and a flourish of his hat. I reciprocated.

Just as I thought I might have to forfeit Radele's advantage and relinquish my desirable place near the head of the caravan, Gerick sprinted across the yard and leaped into the seat beside me. “Sorry,” he said, as I snapped the reins, and we rolled through the gates of the innyard.

Once we were past the town walls, most of the sizable party stretched out behind us on the road. “So,” I said, keeping my eyes on the road, “has he news of his one-eyed jongler?”

Gerick shifted beside me on the thinly padded seat. “No. I just—I just wanted to tell him I hope he finds his son. I said that I knew someone who'd been stolen away like his boy and had come home again, so that he shouldn't give up looking.”

“Any price he has to pay is worth it.”

But when I turned to smile at Gerick, his thoughts were very far away, and when I asked what troubled him so about the man's story, he averted his eyes and sat up straight. “Nothing.” The set of his face told me not to bother asking more.

 

Our road wound through the green foothills of the Cerran Brae, sweeping gently upward toward the Leiran border. Some forty people comprised our party. The three principal drovers were Leiran, and six Leiran soldiers, two mounted and four on foot, guarded their three heavy wagons—some Vallorean province's tax levies of money and grain.

Just behind us rode a pair of hunters leading five pack mules heavily loaded with skins to sell in Montevial's market, and a vintner's party hauling a valuable cargo of Vallorean wine to a Leiran baron. The vintner's men had most likely been delighted to hear that a tax-levy shipment was in their party. Either the soldiers and the gruesome penalties for interfering with a tax levy would scare off any bandits, or the bandits would be so intent on the chests of gold and silver buried under the grain sacks that the wine might escape their notice.

Behind the vintner's men rode a delegation of four Vallorean magistrates hoping to gain tax preferences for their towns, a standoffish Leiran man, his wife and two grown sons, and a belligerent Leiran stonemason and his assistant who had been participating in the continuing effort to remove the names and likenesses of Vallorean royalty from the public buildings in Vanesta. The party was filled out with local people traveling to Leire in search of work or missing relatives. Paulo and his string of horses had been relegated so far to the rear, I couldn't even see them.

Scarcely able to keep up with the rest of us were a gaunt Vallorean and his family. The man carried a small boy on his shoulders and pulled a wheeled sledge by a rope tied around his broad chest. His wife carried an infant lashed to her back with straps of cloth, while three other children, none more than ten, trudged along beside their pitifully few household belongings, helping steady the sledge over rough places in the road.

At our first rest stop of the morning, I learned from his weary wife that the man was a master smith. Smiths were prized in every land, but the Leiran governor of Valleor had recently decreed that no Vallorean crafts-man could practice his own trade until he had apprenticed to a Leiran master. As we prepared to resume our journey after the horses were rested and watered, I offered to let the children take turns riding in the trap with Gerick and me. When the smith heard my Leiran accent, he bluntly and unequivocally refused.

The first stretch of the afternoon was a short steep pitch over a low ridge. The Vallorean family quickly fell behind. When I slapped the reins harder than necessary to convince our pony to make the climb, Gerick eyed me curiously. “What's wrong?”

“There are more lost souls in the world than just the mad sheepherder's son,” I said, relaxing my grip a little. “And I would dearly love to make Evard walk with them a while.”

“Is it true you almost married King Evard? No one ever mentioned that at Comigor.”

“Has Tennice been telling you stories?”

“Some. When I asked him why you looked like you were going to spit every time you said the king's name, and how you always called him Evard and not King Evard, Tennice said you were going to be queen.”

As we rolled through the hazy afternoon, I told Gerick about the beginnings of Evard's and Tomas's friendship, and the understanding between the young King of Leire and my brother about me. And in order to explain how Tennice had used his knowledge of the law so I could choose for myself whom I wanted to marry, I had to tell him about my cousin Martin, Earl of Gault, and his magnificent country house called Windham, and how I'd met Karon there, falling in love with him before I'd known he was a sorcerer.

Gerick listened, but made no comment.

It felt good to be on the move. For all its beauty and comfort, Verdillon was only a temporary home. My home was with Karon, but I wasn't at all sure where. The rose-colored palace in Avonar was D'Natheil's place, not Karon's . . . not
my
Karon's. Despite what I'd said to Radele, I couldn't envision myself living there, and that left me feeling rootless and more uncertain about the future than I had ever been. Yet my unease could be only a small portion of what Gerick must feel. That consideration gave me patience with his silence and his moods when I had patience for nothing else in the world.

The air grew cooler as we moved slowly upward, and for the first time in weeks no storm broke in the afternoon. A breeze rippled the leagues of grass to either side of the road like an emerald sea. Gerick took over driving the cart, and despite the constant jolting, I fell into a drowsy reminiscence of Windham. Telling Gerick about those days had made the memories incredibly vivid. I could almost hear Karon's robust baritone harmonizing with Martin's off-key bass on a particularly bawdy song at a Long Night fete. When I laughed aloud at the memory of it, I felt Gerick's eyes on me. My skin grew hot. Certain that he would ask what amused me so, I tried to decide if telling him the words to the song would be at all proper for a mother to a youthful son.

But his question, when it came, was very odd. “Why do you wear your hair so short?” He was gazing at me with the strangest expression—part curiosity, part wonder, part terror—and had let the reins go slack. The cart was rolling to a stop.

“Here, you'd best keep us moving or the others will pull their wagons around, and we'll have to eat dust.” I snatched the reins from his still hands and gave the pony a flick so that we started moving again.

He continued to stare at me, his question hanging in the air like an annoying bee.

“On the day they executed your father, they cut off all my hair,” I said at last, trying to shove aside the accompanying images of fire and horror. “It's the Leiran custom for public penance. By the time it grew back again, I was living in circumstances that left me no leisure to take care of it. It was easier to keep it short.” I had never let it grow past my shoulders again.

“You wore it very long before they cut it.”

I couldn't tell whether that was a statement or a question. “It had been cut off so short only once before, when I was six and Tomas stuck tar in it.”

Gerick didn't laugh, nor did he ask any more questions that day. He pulled his cloak around his shoulders and rode in tight silence, jerking himself awake whenever his head nodded. Radele rode just behind us, his eyes fixed on Gerick's back.

 

Eight days into our journey, our road crested the Cerran Brae. The climb, though not horribly steep, was long and steady, wandering alongside a marshy riverbank between enclosing ridges. Grumbling that the pleasant early days of the journey had left us laggard, the drovers pushed the party hard, as we would find no ground suitable for making camp until we reached the drier Leiran side of the pass. But the failing light forced them to call a halt soon after we'd crossed, rather than farther down the Leiran side as was usual.

We camped in a long, narrow meadow, hemmed in by steep ridges on two sides, and by the pass behind us. The little valley necked down tightly, the lower end of the road and a dribbling stream crowding between the encroaching ridges before passing into the thickly treed forest of Tennebar. Early summer was cold so high on the mountain, and a blustering wind funneled through the pass and the valley, setting shirts and cloaks billowing wildly.

“Pull up there in that hollow,” said Sanger, the principal drover, whose neck was as wide as his head. He sat his horse across the road while directing each of the groups of travelers to follow his wagons into the meadow. “The vintner and the trappers will set up between you and my wagons tonight.”