Greven looked back at the intense expressions on the couple’s faces. They were earnest. ‘Piven?’
‘No, Leo,’ Clovis said. ‘We all believe he lives.’
‘We?’
‘The Vested,’ Reuth answered. ‘Those of us who survived took a marking.’ She turned, pulling back her ear and Greven saw a crescent moon marked in ink on her skin. ‘Master Lark, I should admit to you that my curious and contrary skill is to sense when something bad might occur. It is a strong power when it speaks to me but it speaks rarely. For instance, I knew they were coming for me, even though we had hidden my talent all my life. I also knew my husband would die, no matter what we did to protect him. I sensed that the royal family would suffer—I didn’t see the deaths but I sensed there would be only misery for the Valisars who might survive. And, Master Lark, when you first walked into this courtyard I sensed a terrible foreboding. I don’t know if it is for you, or your son, or whether it is the stars aligning to bring grief to your life but something very bad is going to happen. It is not far away. You should be warned.’
Greven stood. ‘Stay away from me,’ he demanded, pointing his finger at the two of them. ‘Stay away from Petor.’
Clovis looked past Greven. ‘You’re alarming our children, Master Lark, and risking drawing attention to yourself.’
‘You are strangers in this hamlet. I am not. My son and I have lived here for—’
‘Ten anni,’ Reuth finished for him, calmly. ‘Yes, we know. And that’s the exact amount of time that Clovis has been searching for the Valisar child. You forget that we were involved in the struggle for the Valisar survival at the outset. We have never given up our fight to return the rightful king to his throne.’
Greven leapt onto what he thought could be his final diversion. ‘Except you are ignoring one very important fact.’
‘And that is?’ Reuth asked.
‘You are very clear that the child known as Piven is an invalid.’
Clovis and Reuth nodded. ‘He never spoke a word, and was very much lost in his mind,’ Clovis said.
‘Well, for your information, Petor is extremely able. He talks as any normal child of fifteen might talk,’ Greven insisted, leaning forward on the table to impress his point. ‘He is lively and animated.’
Reuth frowned, glancing at her husband.
‘Check with the townsfolk if you don’t believe me,’ Greven baited. ‘The child you seek is not my Petor. It’s just an unfortunate coincidence that both boys are the same age.’ He could almost see the disappointment emanating from them like a dark cloud.
Clovis sighed. ‘Still, I would like to see him.’
‘I forbid it. You will not frighten my child.’
‘Master Lark, how can two people like us with our young family be in any way intimidating?’ Reuth asked.
‘Well, you’ve done your utmost to intimidate me and I refuse you access to my son, do you hear? Go away and leave us in peace.’
‘I cannot,’ Clovis said. His voice sounded grave enough to chill Greven. ‘I gave my word to people who were risking their lives every hour of those terrible days of the overthrow to keep Piven alive. I promised I would find him. I think I have.’
‘Go away,’ Greven said helplessly. He turned his back on them, calling over his shoulder, ‘And stay away.’
He threw two trents onto the counter before Innkeeper Derrian Junes and didn’t pause to exchange pleasantries. He was gone in seconds, striding out of the Grape and Whistle and hurrying as fast as his long legs could carry him towards the forest, where the trees swallowed him up and, he hoped, could hide him.
Piven waited for Greven. He had filled the small sack near to brimming with fungi that would need to dry out on the hut’s windowsill, and it was now duly laid out as Greven liked. Life with Greven had been tranquil, mostly serene. Each day was similar to the previous. And he liked it that way. He liked its order, its sameness…its predictability. He didn’t call Greven ‘Father’; couldn’t call him by that name, much as he knew Greven would like him to, because he remembered King Brennus too clearly. He belonged to the royal family of Valisars—that could and would never change for him. He never wondered about his blood parents, refused to accept that somewhere in the Set a woman who had birthed him might still live or a man who had sired him might roam.
The raven had lingered, staying close as he busied himself finding the elusive fungi. He wondered if the bird—who he felt sure knew things—had sensed his change occurring. He knew Vyk could hear him; imagined the bird was capable of replying somehow, but that it had chosen not to communicate with him since he’d begun to talk. One day it would—of this he was sure. And so he talked, over his shoulder, never tiring of hearing his own voice, which had been silent for so long.
‘…and should be back soon if you’re wondering,’ he said, laying out the fungi beneath the warmth of the sun. ‘You’ll be
surprised when you see him. His face, body, arms are now all clear of the sores. The leprosy will have left him by the rise of the next full moon. It’s my greatest achievement yet,’ he murmured, not meaning to boast but needing to say it aloud, to affirm his new talent.
‘I told you about the dreams,’ he continued. ‘Strange ones. People are hunting me. I don’t know them but they want to use me and I don’t know how or why.’ Piven turned. ‘Are you faithful to Loethar, or faithful to me? Until I know, I can’t fully trust you with my secrets. One day you must choose, you know that, don’t you?’ He dragged back the flop of hair that had covered part of his face as he turned to look at the bird. ‘You will need to choose,’ he said softly.
‘Who are you talking to?’ Piven turned to see Greven approaching up the small incline that led to their hut. The man smiled. ‘Ah, Vyk. Long life to you. Good to see you back.’ Then he gave a feigned sound of disgust. ‘Piven, I’m as bad as you, talking to the bird. Well done, my boy, that’s a very good haul,’ he congratulated, spying the neat row of fungi lined up. ‘Excellent, excellent. Now, child, I want to talk to you about something.’
‘Oh?’
‘We need to move on,’ Greven continued conversationally. ‘I’m bored with this place, aren’t you? Perhaps we could look at Gormand, or Cremond, get lost in and around Lo’s Teeth or the Dragonsback Mountains. That would be quite an exciting trip. What do you say?’ Piven’s expression turned to one of puzzlement. ‘Why?’
Greven looked surprised. ‘Why not, I say? Don’t you want to see more of the world?’
Piven shook his head. ‘I want to stay here. It’s peaceful.’
‘True,’ Greven replied, thoughtfully. ‘But we can find other tranquil spots.’
‘Who are we running from?’
‘No one,’ Greven replied firmly and too quickly, Piven thought. Then his long-time companion seemed to reconsider his suggestion. ‘There’s no reason to move permanently. How about some travel? I think it’s high time I gave you an education about this fair land. It’s safe now to roam through the realms and we can do so easily enough—thanks to you that Bonny’s well. We can even use some savings to buy a mule…or even a horse and cart.’ He sounded excited but Piven heard panic driving Greven’s enthusiasm. ‘What do you say, eh? Are you ready for an adventure, boy?’
‘When?’
‘No time like the present. Come on, let’s pack up a few things. We won’t need very much. We can close up the hut and go.’
‘What about Belle?’
‘We can leave a message for Jenna. She can take Belle down to her parents’ place when she picks up the next crate of herbals for her father’s apothecary.’
‘Who will tend the fungi?’
Greven looked up to the sky momentarily as if to calm his patience, then back at Piven. ‘Come on, don’t put up barriers. Let’s just pack a few essentials and be gone this night.’ ‘You’ve always said never to travel at night unless you’re on the run.’
He watched Greven wrestle his exasperation back under control. This man he loved smiled gently. ‘I did, didn’t I? All right, why don’t we leave in the morning? How does that sound?’
Piven didn’t think it sounded good at all but he had little choice, for Greven seemed filled with a fierce drive to be gone. Already he was beginning to tidy the few items that had been left outside around the front patch of garden. Switching topics, even though he knew that lack of protest would be taken as his agreement to leave, Piven asked, ‘What happened in town today?’
‘Oh, nothing much at all,’ Greven said. He was packing planting pots into a crate.
‘Who did you talk to?’
‘I met Evelyn on the way, I spoke to Innkeeper Junes…no one in particular. All quite boring, really.’
Piven knew, without any doubt now, Greven was lying. And the lie prompted him to make his final decision.
That night Piven dreamed.
In his dream he saw a woman. He recognised her instantly; he had been dreaming about her for the last few moons. She was slim, dark-haired, and exceptionally pretty with fine features that were so angular and precise they looked as if they could have been drawn. In the dream he was hidden but he didn’t know where or why. As was usual, she seemed to sense that she was being observed; kept looking around to find the voyeur. She looked strange. No, that wasn’t right. Where she was looked strange. The setting was foreign to him and one he couldn’t comprehend. She was busy at something but he could make no sense of it. She was in a room that was predominantly white and she was tending to someone who was lying down. There were lots of other people crowded around her, all watching what she was doing. She appeared to be talking constantly.
He called to her, surprised that he knew her name, holding his breath in the hope that the other people wouldn’t hear him. The woman paused, as if a thought had struck her, and then she looked up, slightly startled, and stared straight at him.
Piven felt himself falling backwards, as if from a clifftop into a great void. He yelled his fear as winds began to buffet him, shake his bones as though he were a rag doll.
‘Piven!’
He opened his eyes, shocked and alarmed. Greven was shaking him by the shoulders.
‘What’s happening?’ Greven asked, looking suddenly old and dishevelled in his nightshirt. ‘A nightmare, I think,’ he said, answering his own question. ‘Rest easy now, boy. No more yelling. You’ve probably already forgotten it.’
Piven swallowed, alarm still clanging like windchimes in his mind. He had not forgotten any of it…or her.
‘It’s nearing dawn. We might as well call it morning and make a start,’ Greven said, scratching his chest absently. ‘I’ll get some dinch on.’
He left Piven to surface fully, rub the sleep from his eyes and drag himself upright. Lethargy pulled at him like a heavy blanket and his mood felt bleak. Greven’s bright whistling at the hearth irritated him and an uncharacteristic scowl darkened his expression.
‘You yelled someone’s name. Who were you dreaming about?’ Greven called.
‘I don’t know,’ Piven replied. ‘What was the name?’
Greven returned. He was stirring something in a small pot. Eggs, Piven thought, he’s readying them for scrambling. He was not hungry. ‘Do you know, I heard you scream it but I can’t remember now. Can you?’
Piven shook his head. Not only could he not recall the woman’s name but her features were disappearing from his mind. Suddenly he could no longer see her pretty face.
Greven chuckled. ‘Ah well, fret not, my boy. Soon you won’t be having nightmares about women. You’ll be dreaming happily about them morning, noon and night!’
Piven’s sour mood deepened.
‘Oh, would you look at that!’ he heard Greven mutter in disgust. ‘I think the wretched eggs are off.’ Piven watched Greven lift the heavy earthen jug and sniff. ‘Bah! Gone! They’re yesterday’s, aren’t they?’
Piven nodded.
‘How can that happen?’ Greven asked, and although Piven decided his question did not require a response, he had a sickening feeling that he knew the answer.
Reuth sighed. ‘Perhaps we sent word too fast,’ she said, wiping their son’s face with a wet flannel.
Clovis grimaced. ‘Too fast? It’s been a decade!’
She gave him a look of soft rebuke. ‘You know what I mean.’
He finished tying the laces on their daughter’s dress. ‘There you go. Now you look pretty enough to eat.’ He pretended to chew her neck and his little girl squealed with frightened delight. He loved to hear her voice. And far from being embittered by it, he felt blessed by Lo that his second daughter reminded him so starkly of Corin, his first beautiful—now dead—child. Whether it was fact or his imagination, they seemed to share the same tone and pitch in voice; Corin used to squeal in an identical manner when he teased her. He could not risk his precious children—or Reuth, come to that. ‘We are not wrong. We can’t both feel so strongly about this child and be wrong.’
Reuth looked over at him sorrowfully. ‘I worry that we’ve been searching for so long that we just want this to be him so badly that we’ve convinced ourselves it is so. Eat your oats, you two, they should be cool enough now,’ she said, pointing to the faintly steaming bowls in which porridge had begun to set. ‘Your father will pour the milk in, the jug’s too heavy for you.’
They’d had food for the children sent up. They would eat downstairs in the dining room. Clovis trickled the creamy milk into two small bowls and the children greedily tucked into their first meal of the day.
‘Slowly,’ Reuth cautioned their son. ‘Or you’ll spill it.’ He’d obviously heard the same cautions so many times before that he neither looked up nor slowed down; the words had become a meaningless mantra, Clovis could see.
‘Listen to me, Reuth,’ he said, once the children were ignoring anything but their bellies. ‘I could feel his fear. The boy is Piven.’
‘Well, unless we’ve been dancing to a different tune all these anni, Clovis, I could swear that the child we seek is mute, lost in his mind, even mad, some say. You yourself have told me he
couldn’t speak, communicate, showed no emotion…acted like a moving statue, you once told me.’
Clovis nodded, trying not to interrupt her but knowing his senses contradicted everything he knew to be true. ‘I did. And that is how he was.’
‘And now you accept that he talks, is able, is fully healthy and as normal as our own son?’ she demanded.
Clovis shooshed her silently with a gesture of his hands. ‘I know how it sounds. I know how incomprehensible it is. But do you deny me that you too felt something when you met Lark?’
She turned away. ‘You know I can’t.’
‘Tell me again.’
Reuth turned back to him, and he watched her quell her exasperation. ‘I had a vision. Fast, gone in a blink. Doom surrounds him.’
‘Think, Reuth. Interpret that doom for me.’
She looked lost. ‘I can’t,’ she said helplessly. ‘It didn’t just spell doom for him, though. I got the impression that it was foreboding for all of us. Where Jon Lark treads, he will bring darkness to the world.’
Clovis shook his head, and walked over to the tiny window that overlooked the main street of Minton Woodlet. A young woman was leading a cow past the inn. Beyond her, vineyards stretched into the distance. She stopped to talk to an older woman, stroking the patient beast and pointing back up the hill. She had a pretty smile even though she herself was quite plain. At last she nodded, gave a small wave as the pair of them parted and then continued along at the ponderous pace of the black and white cow. He watched her disappear from the limited view the small window afforded him.
‘What are you thinking?’ Reuth prompted from behind him.
‘I want you and the children to return to Medhaven.’
‘We’re not splitting up, Clovis.’
‘You saw foreboding. I divined that we were closer yesterday to
what we seek than we have been in the last ten anni. I sensed Jon Lark was lying. Now I don’t know who or what he is. Neither do I care. I believe that he loves his son. I think both of us could tell he was protecting the boy, not just being belligerent. But I do think the child he loves is the orphan Piven. I can’t explain Lark’s claim that the boy talks. I can’t comprehend why Innkeeper Junes should confirm the fact that the boy known as Petor is a run-of-the-mill youth. But, Reuth, you and I accept magic as easily as we breathe. We should be able to accept that some sorcery has occurred, something of an enchanted nature has affected this child.’
‘If he’s Piven,’ his wife reiterated.
‘If he’s Piven,’ Clovis repeated with resignation.
‘And we can’t be sure he is.’
‘Which is why I want you to return to our home with our children and wait for word.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘To find Kirin. He has a different sort of skill. Perhaps together…’ Clovis shrugged.
‘You’re walking back into the palace?’ Reuth exclaimed. ‘It’s your own death warrant you’re agreeing to.’
Clovis shook his head. ‘I doubt it. I shall dye my hair, shave off my beard. You agree I am only half the man I was when we met and I’m ten anni older. Different clothes, different look, different attitude. I can be someone different. And I doubt the emperor gives a fig about a man who disappeared so long ago.’
‘No, but his evil general might. Remember how he vowed to track down every Vested in the land?’
‘He will not know I’m Vested. No one will know. I will take a different name.’
‘What if they ask for papers?’
‘I’ll have some forged.’
Reuth looked pained, but remained silent.
Clovis guessed her concern. ‘Our savings will be put to good use, I promise. Besides, Freath can probably—’
‘I don’t care about money, Clovis. You are risking your life.’
‘Reuth,’ he began firmly. ‘I was a coward all those years ago. Kirin wasn’t. I have existed with the shame of my fleeing from Brighthelm to your arms. I gave my promise I would find Piven for Freath, and now that I believe I have, I intend to deliver on that promise. The least I can do is tell Freath—our only ally alongside Kirin at the palace.’