The Nethergrim (5 page)

“I don’t need a stone to make a wish.” Tom answered from somewhere over the wall to the north.

“Fine, then!” Katherine looked at Edmund. “But you’ll do it?”

“Oh, yes.” Edmund put his hand to the cold, blue-gray stone—it was so old that whatever had once been carved on it had weathered away to the mere suggestions of shapes, though he always thought he could trace the outlines of some of the oldest and strangest symbols he knew.

“My father burned all my books this morning.” He spoke it in a blurt, then cursed himself. The last thing he wanted was to seem like a sap in front of a girl who trained warhorses, a weedy little boy who cared only for books—and just then the sting of Father’s punishment seemed blunted to nothing.

“Oh, Edmund, that’s awful! I wish he understood you—oh, no!” Katherine let go of the stone. “I just made my wish!”

“I still have one.”

“Go on, then.”

Edmund shut his eyes. It might not be strictly fair to relate exactly what it was that he wished for.

“And I hope you get it.” Katherine stepped away from the stone, looking up at the tallest tower—a grand, imposing structure twice as wide as the shattered ruins of the other three. “I forgot—I was going to bring some rope this time. I want to climb that someday.”

Edmund drew in a breath. He rolled back his shoulders and stood as tall as he could.

“Katherine—” His voice came out as a squeak.

“Though we’ll have to be careful. That’s how Nicky Bird got his name, you know, back when he was our age. They say it’s a miracle he survived the fall.” Katherine picked up a rain-worn shard of wall. She flipped it over in her hand, then hauled back and tossed it on a high, sailing arc. The rock struck what was left of the battlements—the impact smacked and resounded between the walls.

“The feast tomorrow, after the fair.” Edmund got control of his voice. “Since Father’s on the village council now, he got invited—so I can go, too.”

“Oh, good.” Katherine reached down in the straggled grass and plucked up another rock. “I was afraid I’d get bored.”

“And there’s a dance.”

“You know we’re supposed to get all dressed up?” Katherine took aim at the tallest tower.

Edmund approached at her side. He shot a glance back at the Wishing Stone. “And so I was wondering, when we’re there—”

Katherine judged her mark and threw, striking the tower a few feet from the top. “Ha! Close!” She reached down. “I’m aiming for the arrow slit. Want to try?”

“When we’re there—” Edmund wrung his hands, then thrust them behind his back. “If I could have the honor—the great honor of asking you—”

“Katherine.” Tom’s voice cut across Edmund’s words, not least because it came as near a shout as Tom ever got and carried with it a tremble of fright. “Edmund, please come here. Please hurry.”

“What is it?” Katherine turned to dash for the entrance. She was over the scrabbled stones and gone before she said, “Tom, where are you?”

Edmund shut his fists—for a moment he wanted Tom to just go jump off a cliff. He hurried after Katherine, clambering over the stones, but found neither of his friends on the other side. He looked about him, at a loss. The trail dropped away before a view of their home that was half the reason they risked so much trouble to come up there. The course of the broad river Tamber could just be guessed by the folds of the silver-lit valley around it, but that deep in the night there was no sign that anyone lived down there—not a light, not a sound. The river bent just before it reached the village, turning from its western rush down from the grand far peaks of the Girth to a more stately flow south, almost but not quite navigable by boat. Eastward the moon sat on a throne of cloud above the flat nothing of the moors. North, past the last of the fields, the broad line of the Dorwood bounded the world to the horizon and over. The sight had always filled Edmund with the urge to pack a store of provisions and walk, to see what lay beyond the edges of the world he knew—but just then it made him feel exposed, a foolish little mouse in sight of owls. The breeze blew up stronger, and rather too cold.

“Over here.” Katherine spoke from somewhere west along the wall. “Have you got a knife?”

“Why?” Edmund drew his work knife from his belt. He felt his way in near-blackness along the shadowed strip between the foot of the wall and the eaves of the nearest trees. He found his friends crouched by the crumbled ruin of the northeastern tower over a pile of something nearly white.

“Bones.” Katherine held one up. “Pig bones.”

Edmund knelt at her side. “Not a wild boar?”

Tom shook his head. “Pigs.”

“So a dead pig.” Edmund shrugged. “A long-dead pig.”

“Pigs—three of them. And piglets—they weren’t born yet.” Tom placed a bone in his hand. “Feel that.”

Edmund rubbed a thumb on the surface of the bone. “What am I supposed to be feeling?”

“It’s greasy, not dry,” said Tom. “This pig was alive yesterday.”

Edmund took a closer look down at the pile. Even in the feeble light the bones had the yellowish tinge of a freshly dead animal—but there was not a speck of flesh on any of them.

“Bossy,” he said. “Bessy and Buttercup.”

Katherine glanced at him. “Hugh Jocelyn’s pigs?”

“He was looking for them, said he’d lost them.” Edmund gripped his knife and looked around him. “There must be wolves!”

“Not wolves,” said Tom. “These teeth marks are too long for wolves—and wolves don’t make a pile after the kill. They like to drag bits away.”

The last tingle of thrill left Edmund, replaced by a true and present fear. “What are you saying?”

“Look at this skull.” Katherine held it up. “Broken right in half and the brains scooped out. Those are hack marks—an axe or a sword.”

“Cracked every bone to get at the marrow.” Tom dropped the bones in his hands. “Crunched the piglets to bits.”

Edmund swallowed hard. His friends looked just as frightened as he felt.

Katherine stood up first. “We should go.”

Chapter
4

L
ook inside the flame.

Edmund stared. He tried. The candle before him flickered back and forth. It fizzed and guttered, its light drowned in the sunshine flooding through the opened window of his bedroom.

Look inside the flame.
Somehow he had to see the flame and know it. Somehow a wizard could know, just by looking, exactly what the flame would do, how it would move with every moment. Somehow a real wizard could ask it to change, and it would obey.

He strained to remember what his books had taught him:
Fire is the right hand of the Wheel of Substance. Its color is red, it is both dry and hot. In its true form it is entirely red, entirely dry and hot—only in the lost and muddy world in which we live can it be any less than its perfect self. Do not see the flame before you. See Fire.

“See Fire. See Fire.” Edmund gazed at the candle until it hurt his eyes. “See Fire and see Light. Fire makes light, but it is not Light.”

The rickety stair outside the bedroom creaked. Edmund let the sound come and go in his thoughts.

Bits and pieces of the next lesson returned, things he had read in the last pages of
The Seven Roads
:
Light, in its true form, is a crack in the darkness. It is the flaw in the tyrant’s perfect plan. It is hope flowing in with a dying man’s last breath. It is a sound, a harmony. When you wish to call on Light, do not see what meets your eyes. See Light, the crowning Sign of the Wheel of Essence.

Wait—maybe that worked. The flame seemed to move the way he guessed. He raised his right hand in the Sign of Fire, his left in the Sign of Light.

The stair creaked again. Edmund glanced aside.

No! He snapped back. He had it—he almost had it! He could feel it, his mind moved with the dance of the flame. He had to get it right this time—good tallow candles cost a whole penny for a pound, and there were only so many he could sneak from the cellar before his father noticed the loss.

One more sign: Quickening.
The first kick of a baby in her mother’s womb. To be surprised by joy. The world flows past in a ceaseless rush—Quickening, the right-hand sign of the Wheel of Change.

He almost had it! He was sure—now all he needed were some words. The words would seal it, make it his own.

“Fire is a quickness. Fire—” Edmund paused to think. “Fire within makes—”

A hand snaked into the room. Edmund caught the sight from the corner of his eye. He could not help but look.

The hand seized Edmund’s longbow from the wall, then his quiver of arrows.

Edmund jumped up. “Hey!” He doused the candle and sprang from his bedroom, taking the stairs in threes. “Where do you think you’re going with that?”

Geoffrey rounded at the front door of the inn. He scowled, defiant. He reached out to open the door a crack.

“That’s mine!” Edmund knew better than to simply stand and shout. He stepped quick across the tavern. “Give it back.”

“I’m a better shot than you!” Geoffrey held Edmund’s unstrung longbow like a sword, and wore Edmund’s quiver of arrows on his back. “You stink at archery—you don’t even practice! Why should you get to have it?”

“Because you’re a kid.” Edmund advanced to charging range. “You want your own longbow, go buy one when you’re older.”

Geoffrey shook the whippy shaft in Edmund’s face. “You didn’t buy this! Father gave it to you!”

“Which means it’s mine, so hand it over.”

“He gives you everything.” Geoffrey threw the bow and quiver at Edmund’s feet, then flung back the door to stomp outside. Sharp white sunlight cut through the middle of the tavern.

“Shut that, will you?” Wat Cooper raised a hand to shade his eyes. He sat with Hob Hollows by the fire, their feet up on benches, ales in hand.

Edmund pulled the door to, muffling the happy chatter and the tramp of feet on the Longsettle road. He bent to gather spilled arrows back into the quiver and laid it on the tavern’s best table. He considered giving the spell one more try, then changed his mind and reached for his best new shoes by the door, the ones he had haggled hard for at market. The last thing he wanted was to keep Katherine waiting.

“It’s burning low.” Hob waved a hand at the fire. “Fetch us some wood, there’s a lad.”

Edmund raised the lid of the pot that hung over the hearth. An odor of garlic and onions stung his nose. “Mum!” He aimed his shout at the closed door to the kitchen. “I’m going early!”

“Edmund, did you do the threshing?” His mother’s voice rose from somewhere out back. “Your father said you have to get the threshing done before you go.”

“Geoffrey hasn’t done anything, and he already left!” Edmund took up a spare bowl and spooned out a few globs of barley porridge from the pot. The new shoes pinched his toes painfully tight, but he supposed that was the fashion.

“You can’t just leave it sitting on the stalks, Edmund!” His mother spoke over a swirl of clucks. “You get that threshing done or you’ll catch it from your father when he gets back!”

“All right, all right.” Edmund ate standing by the pot, scooping down the porridge as fast as he could. He nudged a bit of charred leather with his foot—the binding from one of his books. It had fallen off onto the hearth, preserving with it the torn, burnt corner of a single page.

Hob Hollows shouldered him aside and reached for the ladle. “So then, Edmund.” He slopped himself a huge helping of porridge. “Going in the archery tourney today?”

Edmund eyed up at him. “Maybe I am.”

Hob looked over at Wat. They broke out in peals of drunken laughter.

Edmund chewed at his gummy porridge. He pointed at Hob with his spoon. “Are you going to pay for that?”

Hob dug out one last spoonful, put it in his mouth and belched. “I’m good for it, lad, no problems.” He regained his seat by the fire. “I’ll bring a good chicken by tomorrow, settle it all up proper.”

“That’s what you said last night.”

“Did I?”

“Edmund!” His mother sounded louder and closer amidst the clack of bowls being stacked for the wash. “Did you hear me?”

Edmund thunked down his breakfast and reached for bow and quiver. “Yes, Mum!”

“The threshing, Edmund, you see that done before your father gets back. If he catches you—”

“Just going now!” Edmund did not stay to hear the rest. He thrust back the door and leapt into the sunshine. Almost everyone was going south, dressed up in their humble finest, but Edmund turned north up through the square. Short and shaggy Nicky Bird lounged at his ease on the steps of the hall. Martin Upfield leaned against one of the yew trees—Katherine’s cousin on her mother’s side, a great bush-bearded hulk of a man almost twice Nicky’s size.

“No, he’s just sitting up there with his head in his hands.” Nicky whittled at a stick of wood. “No helping him.”

Martin looked up over Baldwin Tailor’s roof toward the distant top of Wishing Hill. “So who found ’em, then?”

“Your cousin Katherine. Says she was giving one of the horses a run about this morning, and—Edmund! Did you hear about the pigs?”

“No.” Edmund kept moving, unwilling to stop in case he betrayed too much of what he knew. The day promised to be fine, as fine as anyone could ask so late in the year, and he would not waste a moment more.

By the time he had gone half a mile up the Dorham road, he had come to regret his choice of shoes in bitter earnest. He jogged awhile, then loped, then walked. The country north of the village broke up into hills, banded rows of crops rolling eastward to the river and pasture rising west into the foothills of the Girth. The village was halfway through harvest, half the fields cut to stubble but the rest still bursting with growth—acre after acre of wheat, oats and barley mixed in the furrows with beans and pulse. Tomorrow they would all be back to it hard, bent first in the lord’s fields, then their own, trying with all their might to reap and bind and thresh enough to last them through to spring. Knowing it gave the day a special shine—for the sheer stupid joy of it he nocked and loosed an arrow. It shanked and spiraled in the wind, landing sideways in the pasture. The cattle nearest by spared him a look, then got back to grazing.

Edmund followed the inside wind of the road, between a pair of pasture hills crowned with oaks going scarlet with the dying days. He caught a blur of motion just beyond them—Katherine hurtling at a full driving gallop through a strip of open pasture on the back of a dark gray horse. Her hair streamed out behind her, nearly the same shade as the horse’s mane and tail, a triple banner giving full account of their speed. She held a lance couched in the crook of her arm, which she lowered in one smooth action to point at the cross-shaped device at the near end of the pasture. From one arm of the cross there hung a weighted sack; a round shield had been bolted to the other with a red dot painted on the boss. She leaned into a crouch, bracing herself in the stirrups—and struck the target square in the middle, swinging the weight out, up and over her ducked head as she thundered past.

The horse saw Edmund coming first. He twitched his ears and snorted, thumping one great hoof into the turf.

Katherine raised her free hand. “Edmund! Sorry—I suppose I must be late.” She tightened the rein and rode over to the railing.

Edmund looked over at the device, still spinning from the impact. “What happens if you miss?”

“I don’t miss.” She handed him the lance butt-first. “You remember Indigo, don’t you?”

Indigo’s massive flanks heaved in and out. His mane hung damp with sweat down his hard-muscled neck. In full sun his coat had a sheen like blue slate from the white hairs that grew amongst the black. Edmund was no more a horseman than most peasants, but he knew perfection when he saw it. He considered reaching out to stroke Indigo’s long, straight nose, but one look into the stallion’s eyes told him how very bad an idea that would be.

Katherine leapt down. “I like your shoes.” She hooked a finger in the reins and led Indigo back across the pastures, to the stables and cottage at the heart of the farm. Edmund walked alongside, savoring the feeling of carrying her lance, still warm on the end from her grip.

“Papa, Edmund’s here!” Katherine pushed back the stable door.

“Over here, child.” Katherine’s father, John, the Marshal of Elverain, stood in the middle of a paddock, walking a very young horse in a wide circle on a lunge line. He twitched a whip, no more than a touch, and the horse changed his gait, bringing his hooves up high in a handsome trot.

“Papa.” Katherine sighed. “You are still not dressed for the fair.”

“Not yet. You go on ahead with Edmund.”

“It’s in your honor, Papa!”

“Yes, yes.” John clicked his tongue. The horse on the lead reversed his course, stepping back around the circle in the opposite direction.

Indigo whickered and stamped. He pricked his ears toward the stable, then ducked his head and walked in on his own.

“Well, don’t be too long.” Katherine followed Indigo inside. “Stay here a moment, Edmund. I’ll be right back.”

Edmund leaned Katherine’s lance by the door, his mind racing through grown-up and manly things to discuss. As lost for words as he got around Katherine, he had an even harder time with her father, a real and proper hero from his younger days, though you could never tell by looking.

“Good morning to you, Edmund.” John Marshal flicked the whip behind his horse to correct the stride. “I see that you are entering the tourney.”

“Oh. Well—I’d been thinking about it.” Edmund had thought only to keep his longbow from his brother’s greedy clutches. He had not considered what carrying it with him would mean.

“I wish I had time to watch, but I’m sure Lord Aelfric will be dragging me about all day, trying to press my hand with every noble guest in the hall.” John gathered up the whip and brought the young horse to a stop. He looked down at Edmund’s shoes. “I must say I don’t agree with these new fashions you young folk wear. You could take out someone’s eye with those things.”

Edmund shifted from foot to foot. “I liked that horse Katherine was riding, Master Marshal. He looks ready to be given as a warhorse any day.”

“Oh, he is.” John Marshal led his horse to the paddock gate. “I’ve only seen his like once before in my life. He’s only four, though, and we usually pass them on to Lord Aelfric when they turn five.”

He reached down for a canvas bag and fed his horse a carrot. “Between you and me, it will be hard on Katherine when the day comes. That horse loves her and cares nothing for anyone else in the world. My only fear is that the knight who finally gets him will find he’s got himself a steed who will resent him all his life.”

Katherine came around the side of the stable, on the path that led down from the cottage. “I had no time to do much with my hair. Do I look all right?”

She had woven a bright blue ribbon into her braid that matched the color of her dress. Edmund tried to speak. He thought for a moment he would find the right words, some compliment that would not come out a blurting jumble. The moment dragged.

Katherine smoothed down her dress. “I don’t?”

“You look lovely, child.” John led the yearling to the stables. “You two go on ahead and enjoy yourselves.”