Chapter 5

On their first night out of Renstown they found shelter in woodland hugging the sides of a small valley that ran through the Wendelve Hills. The land was Lord Abervan's hunting ground but so large that the chances of ever seeing a hunting party were very low. One day it would be set to farms and fields but while better soil lay unclaimed the local lord simply held it in his unfeasibly large estate. Jac supposed that when Abervan came to court it might be that the number of acres at his disposal were all he had to boast about to the lords with more wealth, older lines, and holdings that lay deeper into the civilised world.

The three of them spent the night shivering for although they had taken food Jac had neglected to secure them suitable clothing for sleeping beneath the stars. He hadn't the means to start a fire and it would have been ill advised in any event.

Jac used his knife to cut branches and fashioned a rough shelter but he had never been a hunter or a wanderer and lacked the skill to do a good job. Armston and Rennor's experience had nothing to offer. They were town-bred. They knew that for shelter on a journey a man should carry coin and stick to civilisation.

"How can you be Jacob?" It was the first thing Gaia had said to him in all the long hours of their travelling. She had gathered bracken, found fallen branches, portioned out the food, all without complaint or comment. But now as she crouched, hugging her daughter to her and watching him, she asked the question that she must have carried every step of the way. Her breath plumed before her. "How can you be Jacob? You're not him."

"I don't understand it either, Gaia, but I've known you and Artur for years. I know you left that ribbon at the hermit's cave for me to see. I know that the last thing you brought out of your house was that butter churn even though you sold your last cow before the first snow. I-" His voice caught in his throat. He steeled himself and tried again. "I saw Sharli lying dead. Killed by those bastards that killed my Milo. And I know that before I gave you that money you said the Sverlanders took Baya and Catalin." His hands made fists. "And I know that I will bring them both back."

Gaia narrowed her eyes. "You could have forced Jac to tell you those things... And it was a different man that gave us the money. The older one with one leg. The one you killed!"

Jac nodded slowly. "I could have forced all that from Jac. But why would I? This man-" He gestured to himself with spread fingers. "This man had standing and prestige in Renstown. Why would he throw that away to help a woman he had never seen or spoken to? What would he be after? Your butter churn?"

Gaia shook her head in wonder and wiped away a tear. "It makes no sense. How are you Jac?"

"I don't know." Jac chewed on a heel of bread. "The Sverlanders left me for dead. I reached Renstown with money taken from dead raiders, and Armston, the one-legged man, killed me for it."

Gaia flinched at that. Rula watched, round-eyed.

"Somehow the God Below wouldn't let me die. I found myself owning the body of the man who killed me." Jac looked at his hands. "It was something in the blood, I think. My blood as I died... I felt it on his skin, as if I were sinking into his flesh and making it my own." He raised his eyes and was glad that Gaia would meet his gaze. "And again, when Armson died and his blood fell on Rennor ... this man before you ... he was mine too."

He thought Gaia would talk about curses and dark magics, but instead she addressed the issue with practicality of someone who survives by understanding how living things work.

"It has to be the blood?" she asked. "What if the cold kills us tonight. Or you a caught a summer fever like my Artur, or they hanged you, or-"

"I don't know, Gaia. I really don't know. And I don't want to find out. Dying hurts and it's a lonely place to be." His throat closed on the words as a vision of Milo rose from the darkness. Milo lying in the dirt. He saw the pain on Gaia's face and spoke again. "I saw Sharli ... she would have gone in a moment, before she even knew it." Small comfort, but true. True for both of the children. It didn't stop his tears though.

They ate in silence after that, inching closer together as the need for warmth overcame propriety. Gaia was a good looking woman and Jac felt guilty for noticing it. It became too dark to see and for a time they huddled together blind and bound in their thoughts. Later the moon broke through the clouds to offer a confusion of edges.

Rula broke the silence. "What if I killed you?" She mimed a knife thrust. "You would be me? A little girl?"

Jac leapt apart from them, the sudden violence of the motion taking him by surprise. He found himself standing back among the trees, shaking the remnants of the shelter wall from his shoulders.

"Jac?" Gaia called, sleep abandoned, her voice scared.

"He's not Jac." Rula said. "He's Errobor. He told us."

Already the strange terror that had reached up to seize Jac's heart and yank him clear was fading. A moment later he could hardly remember it, just the lingering sensation that being killed by a child was a horror.

"It's all right," he said. "A bad dream. I'm sorry." He returned to the shelter, feeling for the scattered sticks and bracken.

He tried to repair the damage with only fragments of moonlight to guide him. As his numb hands worked, his mind whirled, trying to understand what had happened. Rula's curiosity had been innocent but of course her idea repelled Jac. The thought that a child would be destroyed so that he could live left him feeling sick. He would be a murder of the worst sort. But the strange thing, the thing that left him shuddering, was the certainty that this was not the horror that had seized him.

They left the wood as dawn broke. For the first mile all three of them were still shivering. Rula trailed her mother, plagued by a weak cough.

They crossed open heath where the wet grass left them soaking to the thighs. Further on the grass took to growing in tussocks that threatened an ankle-breaking fall with each step while the soft ground between coated their feet with mud leaving them heavy and awkward.

By noon the ground had begun to rise and the going became easier. Eventually, as they crested a ridge, the sun chose to shine and out in the distance they saw the first blue sparkle of the sea.

"Will the raiders still be there?" Rula wanted to know.

"They don't stay, dear." Gaia shook her head. "They burn and move on."

"If they stay too long Lord Abervan's riders will find them." Jac had seen what the lord's cavalry left behind them on the battlefield. "And if the raiders stood against Abervan's men then larger armies would come to throw them back into the sea. In the end the emperor himself would launch a fleet and take the war to Sverland." Jac could see those ships in his mind's eye. The decks packed with Alithan spearmen. Bloodshed and burning to be visited upon the raiders' shores. And despite all he knew of death and killing, some part of Jac that was far from small wanted to see the day those ship set sail. "Come on."

Evening beat them to the village, pushing the shadows of the hedgerows across the lane before them. Holden's place lay furthest out but even so it had been burned. Only blackened spars remained and the stone chimney column now standing as a narrow tower amid the char and ash. Jac led them by the stream that wound down through the Cotters' southern field, avoiding the pasture where Milo and Sharli had lain.

"Is that our house?" Rula seemed unsure. Not even a chimney stack remained, just a heap of rubble. The heat had ignited the outhouses and beyond their ruins the fields were scorched by it, the grass withered.

Jac left Gaia and Rula to clear the debris from Artur's headstone and went on up the lane toward his house. His eyes stung with windblown char and the stink of it was in his nose. Three of his five goats greeted him by the gate, bleating piteously. He turned from them and walked down to the smouldering wreckage of the house that he had built. Coming closer to it he could feel the heat still held in the stones. Beneath the biggest of the blackened timbers hid an orange glow, fanned into yellows and whites when the wind gusted. The flat slab that he had hauled from Cove Beach to serve as a door step now lay in three pieces, cracked by the inferno.

The hands with which Jac picked up a charred remnant of the chicken house were not his own, not those that had built it, though they remembered the labour. The burnt wood spoke to him. He heard the crackle and roar of the flames. He glimpsed the shapes of men. He saw a Sverlander emerging from the farmhouse even as smoke began to seep from the thatch. In his hand a burning brand taken from the hearth. A white grin slashed that face, twisted by an old scar. Jac marked the man's features. One of those who had stood against him in the lane. He knew it blood to bone.

The soot marks left across his palms would have meant nothing to Rennor Crow. He would not have understood the tears that fell from his eyes. Tears that owed nothing to the smoke's stinging. But it was Rennor Crow's talent for killing that Jac would turn against the men who did this. Rennor's violence and the cunning that kept Armston Smithson alive on one leg for long enough to become old.

"I'll find you." Jac let the piece of burnt wood fall and set off toward the lane.

"It's all gone." Gaia looked up as Jac approached. Her tears had cut two clean lines through the soot blackening her face. She and Rula sat to either side of Artur's headstone, Rula still with her forehead resting against the edge.

"Our place too." Jac nodded.

"What will we do?"

"I don't know." He looked to where the village lay beyond a low rise fringed with wind-stunted trees. "We should bury our dead."

No parent should have to outlive their child. Jac wore Rennor's coldness as a shield when he lifted Sharli from the ground. The rain had soaked her, she lay spattered with mud but, with so many dead to gorge, on the ravens and other scavengers had left her face untouched.

As he set his hand to the girl Jac saw the moment of her death, one raider overtaking her, spinning her as he ran past. The next catching her with a rising swing of his axe. A short man, broad, with a flat nose and the battle frenzy in his eyes. The Sverlanders took women and girls. But sometimes they didn't.

Jac carried her back, followed by Gaia and Rula, and set her beside her father's grave. He left then to let them grieve alone while he went to find his son.

Milo he buried as close to the house as he could get before the ground became too hard, baked by the fire. Lacking tools he worked free a fence post and broke the soil with it before clearing it with his hands. Even Rennor's callousness broke when it came time to set the small boy in the muddy hole and scatter earth upon him. Jac wept and saw his son through blurred eyes as he disappeared beneath the handfuls of soil. By the end of it sobbing wracked him with such violence that it hurt his chest and stole his breath. He found himself unable to rise, and stayed instead on hands and knees above the broken ground of the boy's shallow grave, gasping at the pain of his loss.

When he had first lifted son's body in his arms Jac had seen the Sverlander thrust his sword. He had seen it as if he looked out through Milo's eyes. His son had been facing the man and Jac realised that he had turned, perhaps for Sharli, or to give the raiders pause and win the time which Gaia and Rula might reach the treeline beyond the next field. He saw the boy swing with his stick and the dark beard of the Sverlander split into a laugh. The man's sword had reached down from a height and Milo had fallen back, leaving it scarlet.

The dark bearded leader who killed Milo. The stocky man with the flat nose who killed Sharli. The younger man with the scar-twisted smile who fired the house. Jac marked them all into memory. They had been in the lane. They had given chase. And while Gaia and Rula had won free they had taken his wife and daughter.

Jac scooped the last of the soil into a mound above Milo's grave.

"I can't remember the priests' words..." But even as he said it Jac realised that he could remember them. Against expectation Armston knew them. The beggar had harboured a love of words, a hunger for the shape and form of them, and in his youth had spoken lines of scripture to thank those who tossed him a coin.

"Amnor, God Above, who gave my son into this world and who has watched the course of his days, see him safely gone into the next. Give good account of him and let sin fall from his shoulders.

Caenor, God Below, receive Milo into your halls. Let those who judge see that he is innocent and free from stain. Seat him at your high table among those who came before and bear only love for him.

Beltan, Who Walks Among Us, I commend these mortal remains into your care. Let them become one with the earth and bring forth strength once more."

It offered Jac no comfort save to know that Milo would have been pleased to have the words spoken by his father. Jac looked to the sky and stared bleak-eyed, willing the God Above to show himself and account for his crimes. No answers came, only the slow passage of cloudbanks making Jac feel as if he and the whole promontory were moving steadily west into the sea.

He wanted to swear vengeance but in his head the words sounded hollow. None of it would bring Milo back. Jac turned, unwilling to sully his son's burial with vows of retribution. "I will find your mother and your sister. I will bring them home." The wind took the words and Jac stood, his back to the heaped mound of soil. He sighed, shoulders falling. Heavy with grief he walked away.

Jac came to the Coals' farm and found Gaia and her daughter as muddy handed as he was, their fingernails torn and split.

"It's done then."

Gaia nodded. "We should go into the village and see if anyone is there."

Jac shook his head. "It won't be safe for you here. The Rope will come."

Gaia shook her head in turn. "Where else would we go? And why would these people come after us?"

Her reluctance was understandable. To villagers on the fringes of the empire the Rope was as much fairy story as fact. A tale to frighten children with, or to console themselves in their poverty – at least having nothing means the Rope doesn't reach us. But with Rennor and Armston's lifelong experience Jac knew better. The innumerable crimes, large and small, that the Rope bound together generated wealth which rivalled that of kings. The organisation might be hidden but it was as real as the emperor's taxation.

"Believe me on this as you have believed me in matters that are far harder to believe."

"Where could we go?" Gaia asked. "And how? We're wearing everything we own."

"Go north," Jac said. "There are trading posts where the Forgotten bring their skins and horses."

Gaia shuddered. The North lay wild and the stories had it that the Forgotten were forever stealing women or burning settlements. "We could go south. But we'd starve. Without money it doesn't matter where we go."

Jac shook his head. Gaia was right. "I should have stolen some in Renstown."

"You haven't got any money?" Rula asked.

Jac had never had coins. In the village they bartered. The first money he had owned was the silver he took from the dead Sverlanders. "No-"

"Have you checked?" the girl persisted.

"I-" Jac's hand delved inside his shirt without instruction, following Rennor's instincts. And fished out a broad cotton ribbon into which memory informed him three silver crowns had been sewn along with four triple-weight Alithan pennies. He manged a broken laugh. "I'm rich!"

He tossed the ribbon to Gaia. "Be very careful how you spend it. And go somewhere so remote or so crowded that Rula won't bring the Rope after you."

"You're not coming with us?" Gaia met his eyes. There had always been something between them, some unspoken attraction, never acted upon, never more than a look lingering a moment longer than it otherwise might. She didn't add we need you. She didn't have to.

"I can't." Part of him wanted to. He had no idea how he would make good on the promise he had spoken at Milo's grave. On the morning the raiders came he had promised both his children that it would be all right. That had been a lie too.

"I know you want to save them. You're a good man, Jacob Summer." Gaia set her fingers to his upper arm. "I want you to do it. But it's impossible. You would have to sail to Sverland. They would kill you just for walking up the beach. You would have to go and break her out of clan slavery and bring her and Baya back, all the time with warriors ready to kill you on every side. Even if you found them you couldn't get them out alive..."

Jac flinched away. He raised his arms between them. "Look at me! Look at this man. I'm wearing him like a coat! There's a reason for it. There has to be. And as far as I'm concerned that reason is so that I can rescue Catalin and Baya." He shook his head and stepped away. "I don't care what it takes. I will find them."

"God Above guide you, Jac." Gaia forced a smile. "Where will you go first?"

"I need to find the hermit. Did he say where he was going to go? He can help me. I'm sure of it."

"He was gone by the time we got there," Gaia said. "Are you sure he can help? What if he's just a fraud Like Brone always said he was? What if he really is just an old man who lives in a cave because he can't abide people?"

"Or washing." Rula wrinkled her nose as if remembering the stink of the place.

"You saw what he did to those men," Jac said.

"What men?"

Jac frowned. "The two Sverlanders. Dead. Outside his cave. I took the silver from them."

Gaia frowned in turn. "There wasn't anyone at the cave. Dead or otherwise. It was empty. I went in."

"It was my idea to leave the ribbon," Rula said.

"But..." If the raiders had come after, following Gaia ... and then the hermit killed them ... it meant he must have been hidden when Gaia came and searched the cave. Which meant that the hermit might well have been hiding from Jac too. "He's still up there, the bastard. Hiding and watching and not helping."

"He killed two raiders, you said, and left their money for you." Rula watched him with her lips pressed together. "That sounds like helping."

"I have to go. He's still up there and he's going to tell me what I want to know." Jac shook his head, knowing that he was abandoning them, but knowing that it was to greater safety than he could offer if they stayed.

"May the God Who Walks walk with you." Gaia said it to his back. She was never pious but what else was there to say?

"He can come." Jac neither knew or cared whose voice he spoke with. He set both hands to the hilts of his knives and a flood of memory washed through him, far more than just Rennor's or Armston's – memories of blood and steel. "But if anyone gets in my way, man or God, they're going to bleed."

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