Chapter 2

Sometimes a man wakes with a start, his sleeping thrown from him like a blanket. Sometimes it is with a sudden breath as if their dreams were drowning them. Jac, though, gathered himself piece by piece. First in the darkness of his mind, seeking a centre and a name. Then, with his centre to hold him, his eyes grew wide and a deep blue sky filled them, fractured by hundreds of black lines. Jac built himself. He began separating out the pain into its components and assigning them here and there. The red agony was his hand, the throbbing ache came from his side just below the ribs, and the white needles ... those were jabbing through the back of his skull.

Still lacking context he struggled up and found himself within a hedgerow. Where his head had lain a dull grey rock rested, splashed with crimson. He tore free then stopped, held by the ruin of his hand. Three fingers were missing, though he felt them clenched tight against the pain. The lane before him looked normal enough save that dark splatters decorated the mud and stones.

"Catalin!" In an instant everything returned to him. He stood, cradling his maimed hand beneath his other arm as though both light and air might wound it further. There was no sign of the Sverlanders, no bodies, his sword was gone too. The terror that had left an echoing hole in his mind surged back to refill it. The fear for his son and daughter proved larger and harder to contain than the fear for himself ever had.

"How long..." They had taken their fallen. The raiders always did. But did they chase Catalin, Gaia and the children first?

Jac staggered along the lane. A black pall of smoke hung over the village now, the flames beneath oddly pale in the daylight. He came to the Cotters' gate and found their cottage ablaze. Out on their pasture field, in the direction Catalin would have taken to reach Hermit's Ridge, lay a dark shape. As he drew near enough to the object to see that it was a body Jac spotted a second shape close to the far hedge.

He approached the first, his feet slow and unwilling. The child lay on her back, opened by the blow of an axe, sightless eyes fixed on the blue sky. The sun shone brightly on her as if to underscore the gods' indifference to human affairs.

A crimson handprint marked the girl's face.

"Rula." Gaia's older daughter, disfigured by a red birthmark. But as he looked Jac realised the girl was too small and that the crimson fingers were not a birthmark but where a bloody hand had touched her. Sharli, the younger girl.

He ran now, despite the pain in his side and the bleeding. At the far hedge he found Milo. His son's body seemed unmarked at first and Jac tried to gather the boy to him, but his ruined hand was unequal to the task. When Milo fell back and his hair, as fair as a Sverlander's scattered across the mud, Jac saw the wound. His son had been run through with a single sword thrust that skewered all his days, past and future.

"No." Jac roared something wordless at the sky and ran on, clutching at his side. The leader of those men had done this, left him for dead and killed his sweet boy.

Hermit's Ridge lay five miles north of the village, and there were no settlements of any note beyond it. Those lands would be claimed and farmed one day, for the empire grew as blood spreads through cloth, but for now they were wild, home only to wild things and the hunter-clans of the Forgotten. Jac didn't know how long the hermit had lived on the ridge. Long enough to give it its name for certain. He crossed the open heath, half-running, half-staggering, trying to see what lay ahead but being drawn into the small world of his own pain and the rasp of his breath in and out of tortured lungs.

As the world grew tight around him Jac's thoughts retreated from what he might find and returned to his only previous visit to the ridge. He had been ten or eleven and it had been shortly after his mother brought him to the village. They had come to join her brother who had been one of the founding settlers. Jac had gone to see the hermit as a dare with Devid Smith, and the Coker boy who had died of fever the next winter.

The boys had ventured out on the feast of Amnor when the priests said that no one was to work, though they conveniently exempted those who had to cook and serve the meal. Jac's mother said that Amnor, The God Above, was watchful on his feast day but so was Caenor, The God Below, and boys should never stray too far on such a day. Was five miles too far? It hadn't seemed so until the ridge loomed above them, black against the sky.

Jac hadn't felt scared. What was there to worry about? An old man living on berries and rabbits. He hadn't felt scared until he approached the cave mouth itself. The place smelled bad, but not just bad. It smelled wrong. And the day seemed to shiver as though nothing, not even the bedrock, was quite sure of itself.

Jac had called out a "Hello?" and the cave swallowed his voice, the velvet silence seeming to hardly notice.

The other two boys, peering from behind rocks further down the slope, said that when they had taken their turn the previous year they had had to creep into the cave to catch a glimpse of the hermit. No amount of shouting, they said, would coax him out into the day. They claimed that despite a dozen and more tales of similar visits no one had ever found him absent, out gathering his food. Which was odd when you considered how hard it was to feed yourself, even with fields and a plough to till them.

And so, with less confidence now that the heat of the sun was gone from his back, Jac had crept into the cave, searching for sight of the man.

"What a strange skin you wear to my door." The hermit had taken him by surprise despite Jac's watchfulness. He had seemed to unfold from the side of the cave, all bones and rags and dirt. Jac had leaped back as fast as if he'd found a corn-spider on the back of his hand.

"Which are you?" The hermit tilted his head, a mixture of curiosity and caution in the way he stole to his feet.

Jac continued to back away, hoping to escape the shadow of the ridge. "I'm Jac." He would feel safer in the sunshine, and perhaps a creature like the hermit wouldn't dare to leave his hole until nightfall. "My name's Jac!"

"Do you say so?" Under the dirt and rags it was hard to tell how old the hermit might be or how fast he could run. The man showed his teeth, long and yellow like a rat's, but it was his eyes that held the boy. Jac could never say afterwards what colour they were but it seemed that something watched him through them from very far away.

"Do you mean to kill me?" Jac stuttered the words out without knowing what he was going to say.

The hermit had drawn his head back in surprise then moved forward with renewed curiosity. "Never that. You must be lost indeed if you would think me so foolish." He tilted his head again. "You'll be wanting someone to kill you soon though."

Jac had taken to his heels at that, sprinting down the slope, and passing his new friends without pause. He only stopped when his lungs demanded it and his legs began to buckle.

Looking back, as he had many times through the years, Jac had always puzzled over the hermit's words. Although they were horrifying, they had been spoken so matter of factly and without threat that he often wondered if had misheard them. "You'll be wanting someone to kill you soon." What kind of a thing was that to say?

Jac came to himself as the ground began to rise and oppose his progress. The day had darkened toward twilight and the sun rode the ridge above. A sudden panic gripped him. Were there more bodies? Had he passed Catalin and Baya unseeing, locked in his pain and memories?

They were dead, taken, or up there waiting for him on the ridge? He glanced at his butchered hand and looked away, repulsed. His side had stopped bleeding but the wound was deep and open. It didn't matter. He thought of Milo still lying back there in the Cotters' field with a hole through his chest. Anger warmed him and with a snarl Jac began to climb.

The cave mouth was just as Jac remembered it, only darker, and with the bodies of two raiders sprawled on the rocks in front it. He approached cautiously, half expecting the men to leap up. He could see no wounds on either raider. One seemed frozen in mid-scream, the other had his face to the stony ground. Neither had dark hair and Jac couldn't tell if they were among those who had faced him in the lane. He only remembered the man who murdered his son, and the boy he himself had killed.

"The rest ran then," Jac muttered. Sverlanders didn't leave their dead, not while there were men to carry them to the ships. "Or these were all that came." He stooped to take one of the axes lying beside one of the fallen men. It felt awkward in his left hand, but then even if he had had his right hand it had never swung an axe against anything other than logs.

"Catalin?" Jac called into the darkness of the cave. "Baya?"

Only silence. Not even an echo. He went in, assailed by old fears but driven by a new and greater one. "Catalin?"

The darkness became near absolute within ten yards of the entrance and Jac stumbled on blind, tracing the rough wall with the blade of the raider's axe. "Catalin?"

He tripped on uneven ground and nearly fell, splashed through a freezing pool that reached his knees, and followed the turn of the curving passage until he lost all sense of direction.

"Baya!" A shout now, at the top of his lungs. The name echoed away, taunting.

Shouting and stumbling Jac pressed on, only to find himself looking at a circle of evening sky framed by the cave mouth through which he had entered. He went toward it, cursing. He must have missed something.

At the entrance he stood, gathering his courage. From the vantage of the ridge he could see a smudge of smoke that must be the village, still burning. Something closer to hand caught his eye, fluttered by the wind. A faded red ribbon caught around a small rock. He knelt beside it. Gaia's ribbon, and pinned deliberately by the stone. A message! They had been here, and were now gone.

Standing again Jac scanned the horizon. Did the hermit take them? And if so, where? They would not have returned to the village. It must be somewhere further inland, away from the raiders' predations. "Renstown?" The settlement lay another fifteen miles further from the sea, another ten miles south, deeper into empire's arms, and it had grown well beyond what could be called a village. There would be safety there, at least from the raiders.

With a sigh Jac bent to search the bodies. Renstown's reputation among the villages was not a good one. He had avoided it for six years now. A lawless place where only money spoke and where the destitute begged in the streets.

Jac took a good knife from one man, a pack from the other with blanket, tinderbox, and dried meat. They had a handful of coins between them, silver and copper, no two the same, showing the heads of strange kings or stranger gods. Some empire pennies lay among the mix but from generations back, and there was a silver crown showing the current emperor, regal in his chariot. Although few in number in value the coins amounted to a hundred times what Jac had ever owned. Enough to buy back the things that had been lost. "Milo." The grief hit him in the chest, stealing his breath. No weight of gold could ever buy back his boy. Sorrow burst its dam, and for a time all Jac could do was lie upon the cold stone weeping as he hadn't since he was a small child.

Jac walked through the night finding that the strength for running had leaked from him along with too much of his blood. By the light of a quarter moon Jac discovered the tinkers' lane and let it lead him to the Stonewash River. From there a beaten path followed the river's course southward.

After some miles clouds covered the moon and it began to rain, an icy downpour that stung Jac's wounded flesh. The pain became a deep ache in his side and a sharp one in his hand, and with each step he gasped or groaned. But the miles surrendered to him, one by one, and hours before dawn he passed the first river mill and saw a scatter of lights ahead proving beyond doubt the village rumours that Renstown never slept.

Jac smelled the town before he saw anything but the pinpricks of lantern and lamp. A sewer stink as if even the swift current of the Stonewash couldn't carry the foulness away fast enough. Far sooner than he expected Jac found himself hobbling between shacks. The settlement had grown hugely since his previous visit, spreading out along the river. When at last he came to where a lantern hung beneath a dripping awning he saw that many of the dwellings were little more than sticks and sacking. His pigs lived ... had lived ... in better accommodation.

"Take an ale, traveller." The woman beneath the awning sat beside an open barrel, a ladle in her lap.

Jac stepped into the light and the smile she had manufactured turned sour. She ran a tongue over yellowed teeth that reminded him of the hermit's. "Had some trouble." Not a question. The dark beads of her eyes regarded him without sympathy.

"Did women come by here? Women with young girls? From Cove Village?"

"Ale's two ladles for a quarter penny, or one ladle if you want a cup, or a penny if you take the cup with you."

"My wife and daughter..." Jac faltered. The woman wasn't much more than half his height, scrawny, with iron grey hair, a grandmother perhaps, but though he held a raider's axe in one hand and wore mud and blood in equal measure, she gave no sign of either fear or curiosity. "I... I have money." He leaned the axe beside him and reached awkwardly into his shirt, drawing out a handful of coins. Someone passed behind him, he turned, but it was only a stumbling drunk, ale-bellied and bound for his bed.

"Money's why I'm up burning oil when I should be sleeping. Will you be drinking?"

"Ale in a cup." Jac stepped in from the rain and shook a penny into her palm, closing his hand again around the glinting silvers. He waited until she had poured a ladle into a clay mug, making it foam, then passed it to him. "And my wife. Did you see her? She had a girl ... this tall." He measured Baya's height with his maimed hand, wincing. "And a b-" He bit the word off. There was no boy. Not anymore.

"Lots go past here." The woman shrugged, then raised her hand as he made to speak. "Could have seen them though. Village woman and a young girl. Looked tired out. Both of them weeping. I recollect something like that a little after sunset."

The hope that sprung in his chest was as painful as the wound beneath it. "Did you see where-"

"Into town." She waved along the track to where more lights burned.

Jac downed the sour ale as swiftly as he could, stowed the cup in his pack, and moved on. He gritted his teeth against the hurt and held his axe just below the head. The street grew a little busier, the lights more frequent, the buildings less ramshackle. Faint tendrils of warmth spread from Jac's stomach where the ale warmed his chilled flesh.

A large man using a crutch overtook Jac, splattering mud. Seeing the man's peg-leg and the grey hair plastered across the soaked leather of his jerkin Jac realised quite how slow he had become. Where it was clean his flesh was marble-white and numb. He paused, tried to pull his sodden coat about him with one hand, then moved on.

Just a few yards further down the street in a dark spot between two lanterns he found his path blocked by the man who had overtaken him. Jac opened his mouth to speak but before the words could emerge someone behind him stepped up and shoved him to the side. He went sprawling into an alley that he hadn't realised he was standing beside.

"Wait! I-"

The man with the crutch was on him in two quick steps, throwing his bulk down with such force it drove all the air from Jac's lungs. Jac lay blind in the darkness, his good hand pinned beneath him. He couldn't tell if it was still clutching the axe or not. The man's weight was as frightening as Jac's weakness.

"I won't hurt you." The big man hissed. But a moment later Jac felt something tug across his throat followed by a sharp pain and a wash of warmth. Suddenly despite his panic Jac became intensely aware of his blood on the stranger's hands, burning there, soaking into the skin. The sensation faded, overwhelmed by pain and fear. Hot blood soaked him, pulsing from his neck. He struggled but couldn't win free. His notion of time grew fuzzy, the hurt distant, the fear losing its hold.

The weight lifted from him. He could feel himself being pulled about as they searched for his coin. But his body lay far from him now and the darkness that had been total began to crowd with images: white sails, black smoke, six Sverlanders filling the lane, a boy falling back with his throat gone, Milo in the mud, Gaia's girl, a faded ribbon. The ribbon held him, fluttering, a message in it that he couldn't quite grasp.

The ugly sound of his last breaths diminished into nothing. Anger and fear paled away. He tried to hold on to the faces of his wife and children but they fell into shadow and were lost. And in the end even the already faded ribbon faded further into nothing.