Jimmy the Hand (41 page)

‘I want
you to kill them!’ Rip said after a moment, wiping at his face
with his palms. ‘They’re . . . they’re evil!’

‘That they
are,’ Bram said. He clanked his chains a little, ruefully. ‘But
I’m a bit tied up at the moment.’ His smile turned to a
frown. ‘I still don’t know why they’ve taken you,
or me,’ he went on. ‘Even a baron can’t do this
sort of thing for long. Stealing children—there’ll be
rebellion if it gets out. Parents won’t wait for the Prince’s
Magistrate to come down from Krondor. Those who’ve already lost
children will be the first to riot.’

‘They had
kids before us,’ Mandy said in a small voice. ‘After a
while they’d come and take them away and they didn’t come
back.’

Rip swallowed.
‘I think . . . I think one of them is a magician,’ he
said.

Bram frowned.
‘And the old man—

‘The
Baron? I don’t know. Everyone does what he says, though.’

‘The
Baron,’ Bram confirmed. ‘Baron Bernarr of Land’s
End.’

‘And . . .
Bram, there are . . . things here.’ Rip looked around at the
shadows; he could feel them. ‘Wrong things.’

Bram nodded, and
his voice went hard and grim. ‘So now we know what he’s
been doing with the silver we sweated to give him all these years,
bought with the good bread we didn’t eat and the cloth we
didn’t wear come winter; not paying men-at-arms to keep us
safe, or to hold court and give justice, or patch the roads. Yes, I
felt it too. Even the cut-throats who brought me here did. There’s
something bad here, something rotten.’

He looked up,
almost bristling, bruised lips curling back from his teeth. A breeze
they could all feel cuffed at their heads, stirred the dark air.

‘What was
that? Who calls?’

Impressions
blurred and memories returned.

The children!

They were not
where she had seen them last. She didn’t understand the cycles
she endured, pain, blackness, being in her body, being out. Forces
tugged at her and sometimes she ached just to remain in oblivion.
There were times she raged in frustration at her inability to
interact with those around her, and she often felt confused by the
sudden jumps from night to day and back, and the rapidly changing
light outside the windows, sometimes the cold and foggy skies of
winter common to this coast, other times the brilliant golden sun of
summer. It confounded her senses as much as anything else, not
knowing how long she had lingered in this state since the baby was
born. She floated away from her body, looking for the children.

The girl, the
one the others called Neesa, she was almost able to talk to Elaine,
and Elaine hungered for some human contact. No matter how long it had
been since the birth of her son, it felt as if she had not known the
touch of a hand or the sound of a voice in a very long time. She
sensed the children had moved to another room, and she hastened
there. As she entered, she saw the black cloud, the spirit presence
of some unnamed evil that had avoided her for so long. It hovered
over the children.

Elaine swept
toward the black cloud furiously, snatching at one of its tendrils.
It pulled back, retreating slightly, then it fled. Rather than waste
her energy chasing it, Elaine hovered protectively over the children,
pleased by their presence, delighted with the littlest one, the boy,
and feeling a connection with the girl.

Then she
realized something had changed. There was a new presence! It was . .
.

Zakry!
Elaine called.

They had brought
Zakry—chained him, beaten him. Her rage swirled about the man
she loved, and they retreated before it, afraid, drawing back their
looming presence like the fading of the stench of rotten meat.

Her anger was
palpable, enough to ruffle their hair and stir the burlap sack on the
floor beside him. Beaten! Chained!

Then she heard
what the children called him. Bram. She looked—somehow, like
this, she could look deeper into a man than she’d been able to
do before, see the links between things.

Not Zakry.
Although the image of him; but he was younger, ten years younger, and
different. Features softened a little, and hair a deeper yellow, not
quite so fair. Eyes a darker blue. Shoulders broader and arms
thicker.

My son!
The knowledge hit her, impossible to deny.
My baby, Zakry’s
son!
Despair threatened to overwhelm her.
How many years! How
long have I lingered in this place between life and death?
Clarity arrived and she understood now; those darknesses, those times
when she thought she had slept for minutes, those had been days,
weeks even. The changing light had been the passing of seasons. She
had been trapped in this horrible state of not-living, not-dying, for
years. Years when she had thought it but days! Rage rose up.
Who
has done this thing to me?
She wailed a soundless cry of pain,
and Neesa seemed to sense she was near. She looked right at where
Elaine floated, and there was sadness in the girl’s eyes. She
inclined her head toward Bram, as if saying, See, this is what you
came for. Elaine looked again at her son and a soft yearning began to
replace the anger. She wanted to hold him in her arms, to comfort
him, to tell him of her love. And she wanted to protect him, for now
she understood the presence of the black tendrils of evil, the need
for a child of hers, and she knew without doubt Bram’s life was
at risk. Someone must warn him.

Tell him,
boy! Tell him!
Elaine shouted.

‘Tell him,
boy,’ said Neesa, as if listening to another voice. ‘Tell
him!’ she repeated softly.

‘Bram . .
.’ Rip said.

‘Mmm?’
Bram said, his strong white teeth tearing at the bread.

It was stolen
from a guard’s table while the man went to use the privy, and
it was tough and black, made from mixed barley and rye and full of
husks. That didn’t disturb either Rip or the young man; it was
much like what they ate every day.

‘Sorry,’
Bram said when his mouth was free; he took a long drink of water and
a bite of smoked pork. ‘Right hungry. Haven’t had much to
eat today, except hard knocks.’

‘Bram, the
old man—the Baron—said something really strange.’
Rip frowned, remembering. He couldn’t stop remembering. It
played over and over again in his head. ‘And the oily man. He
said you were the Baron’s son, and the Baron said not to say
that, because you’d killed his lady.’

‘Me the
Baron’s son!’ Bram laughed. ‘Baron Bram of the
Barn! My lord of the Muck-heap!’ Then his face changed. ‘What
did he say about a lady?’

‘That
you’d killed her, and that was why he wanted the bag over your
head.’

Kay cut in. ‘It
is like the Wicked King and the Good Prince!’ he said. ‘The
evil stepmother wants to kill the Prince, and the King hates him
‘cause his mother died having him, so she puts him out in the
woods, but the woodcutter finds him and fights the wolves and takes
him home to raise him as his own!’

‘That’s
just a story, youngster,’ Bram said uneasily. ‘Right now,
we’re in the part before the happy ending.’

Rip looked at
him.
Bram doesn’t think we will have a happy ending,
he
thought.
But we will! Bram’s a hero!

‘What are
they doing?’ Flora asked curiously, pointing.

Lorrie goggled
at her, and then at the field beside the road. The strong sweet scent
of the cut hay drifted over to the two girls in the dog-cart, and the
scythes flashed as the mowers moved down the flower-starred field.
Birds burst up out of the grass before them and circled above, diving
at the buzzing insects that the blades disturbed. The mowers were
singing as they worked—that made it go easier, as she well
knew, with memories of days at hatchet and churn and spinning wheel
and hoe and rake—until one of them called a halt. He unslung a
little wooden barrel he wore around his neck on a cloth sling, pulled
the bung with his teeth and tilted it back until a stream arched into
his upturned mouth; cider, probably.

She could see
the worn shirt sticking to his back with sweat; he looked up as he
passed the little barrel on and waved at her with a grin. He’d
be the farmer, the Lord of the Harvest. She knew she was right when
he gave the signal to start work again a moment later.

There were six
working with scythes, five men and a woman: swinging a scythe took
strong arms and back, much more than harvesting grain with a sickle.
Women and girls and youths followed them, raking and turning the cut
hay and pushing it into a long roll on the ground, a tad. They’d
be back, of course, to keep turning it until it cured, and then to
pitch it onto a cart and bring it home to go under cover and feed
stock through the next year.

‘Why,
they’re cutting the hay,’ Lorrie said, conscious of the
long silence of her astonishment. ‘First cutting, but a bit
late. Haven’t you ever seen hay cut before?’

Flora shook her
head, and Lorrie almost lost control of the reins as she gaped.

They were going
along at a slow trot: Aunt Cleora’s carriage-horse was a big
glossy gelding, far finer than poor old Horace, but not noticeably
faster. Leather slings gave the dog-cart an odd greasy sway too, not
like the forthright jouncing and jolting of a farm-cart, but she had
to admit it was easy on her leg, which pained her little more than it
would have done while she lay on a featherbed in her friend’s
house.

‘Never
seen hay cut?’ she cried.

‘Well,
you’ve never seen the Prince’s men parading through the
streets of Krondor,’ Flora said.

‘Oh, I
wasn’t mocking you,’ Lorrie assured her. ‘It’s
just . . . well, I’ve never met anyone who’s not seen
haying, before. That’s all.’ She sighed. ‘That’s
when Bram kissed me first,’ she said shyly. ‘At a dance
at the end of a haying-day, last year.’

‘So you’re
going to marry Bram?’ Flora asked, plainly glad to change the
subject.

‘Well, I
think he wants to,’ Lorrie said shyly, keeping her attention on
the reins and the horse.

‘Gods of
love, he’s handsome enough!’ said Flora with a giggle.

Lorrie giggled
in return. ‘He is, isn’t he?’

She felt a spurt
of happiness, absurd under the worry.
He isn’t dead,
she
thought.
He cant be dead!
But if her mother and father could
die, the pillars of all her life, what was safe? Resolutely she
pushed that aside, enjoying the day. She looked at Flora. ‘Flora,’
she said suddenly. ‘Why are you helping me?’ Then,
hastily: ‘Not that I mind! But you and your foster-brother,
you’ve treated me like your own kin—and I’m just a
girl from a farm with four cows and one horse, not a fine lady like
you.’

Flora had been
frowning, slightly thoughtful. At that she laughed. There was an edge
of bitterness to it. ‘Fine lady!’ she said.

Lorrie blinked
at her, confused. ‘Well, you are,’ she pointed out.

The furnishings
in Aunt Cleora’s house alone were worth a decade’s rent
for any ten farms in her home valley, with the inn at Relling ford
thrown in, and possibly the gristmill.

‘I’m
Aunt Cleora’s sister’s daughter,’ Flora said
slowly. ‘But she ran off with a baker. Ran off to Krondor.’

‘Ah!’
Lorrie said, understanding. ‘And your father’s Da cut him
off?’

That happened
sometimes back home, too. Young men seemed made to quarrel with their
fathers about the time their beards sprouted, and sometimes it grew
hot. Even Bram, good-hearted and willing, butted heads with Ossrey
sometimes, like rams in spring. That was one reason he had hired
himself out to merchants’ caravans as a guard and wrangler now
and then, besides the cash.

‘Right.
And then the baker . . . my father proved his judgment right and my
mother’s wrong when he crawled into a brandy-barrel, and stayed
there.’

Lorrie nodded.
That certainly happened back home, too. ‘Ah, you’ll have
had to work out,’ she said. ‘Do laundry and sewing and
suchlike.’

Vaguely, she
knew that was one of the things poor women in towns did; she didn’t
suppose they could hire themselves out as maids of all work or
dairy-hands.

‘Yes,
suchlike,’ Flora said shortly, then chuckled. ‘A town can
be a hard place for a young girl. All alone, and everyone a stranger.
I . . . came back to Land’s End, and things worked out for me,
but you didn’t have anybody.’

They drove on in
companionable silence. After a while the land rose; they went through
a patch of forest, cool grateful shade that reminded Lorrie painfully
of her day hunting. Beyond that there was a man bent nearly double
under a load of faggots, his axe on top thrust through the loop of
twisted bark that held it together. The woodsman set it down as they
passed, rising to rub the small of his back and look—a dog-cart
and fine horse with two pretty girls in it wasn’t something
that he saw every day. He took off his shapeless wool cap. ‘Missies,’
he said respectfully, bowing slightly.

Lorrie felt
embarrassed by that: if she’d been walking by the road in her
own clothes and met him back home, he’d have called her ‘lass’
and waved instead.

‘We’re
looking for a young man,’ she said.

At the sound of
her voice the man relaxed a bit; they were twenty miles from Relling
and his own accent was slightly different from hers, but nobody could
hear her speak and doubt she was a commoner too—perhaps a
well-to-do farmer’s daughter, at most. Just as he would have
placed Flora as city-born and gentlefolk, if she’d opened her
mouth.

He not only
relaxed, but also grinned as he straightened. ‘Not a young man
any more m’self, miss, but I could wish I were, seein’
the two of you pretty as the spring daisies,’ he said. ‘From
over to Relling, are you then?’

Flora laughed,
and Lorrie felt herself smiling despite her worry.