The Nethergrim (8 page)

“Mind how you raise her, John.” Lady Isabeau drew on her gloves. “You will need to get her married off someday.”

“My lady?” Katherine’s father brought her saddle cushion and strapped it around the girth of her horse. He kept his face a careful mask.

Lady Isabeau allowed him to help her up into her seat. “The fences of this farm will not shield your daughter much longer.” She arranged her skirts to flow aside. “She must know her place in the world by the time she leaves it.”

John stared up at Lady Isabeau. His brow darkened—he very nearly glared—then he broke. “Yes, my lady. I thank you for your kind advice.”

“I say it for her good, John.” Lady Isabeau took the reins. “You must shape her into a woman while you still can.” She kicked in her heels and left the farm at a canter. Harry shot a stricken look at Katherine, then leapt into the saddle and swung his horse around to chase.

Katherine hung her head. Tears pricked out along her lashes.

Her father let his face fall into a scowl at Lady Isabeau’s retreating form. He turned to Katherine. “Are you all right, child? What did she say to you?”

“Am I an embarrassment, Papa? Are you ashamed of me?”

“No, child.” Her father took her by the shoulder. “No. You are my joy.”

Katherine wiped her face. She looked at her father and tried to return his smile.

“There now. Let’s forget all about it.” Her father took up the goblets and started off toward the house. “Tell you what, I’ll make supper tonight.”

“Papa.” Katherine tried, but could not keep the question down. “Would you have liked it better if I’d been a boy?”

“What? No!” He spun back to face her. “Never think that, child. Promise me.”

“I won’t, Papa.” Katherine felt some small relief when he turned to go inside. She hated lying to him.

Chapter
7

I
t’s the Nethergrim. I tell you folk, he’s back! He never died!”

“Oh, will you shut it?” Katherine’s cousin Martin Upfield turned around on one thick arm to glare at Grubby Hands from across the tavern. He shook his head and proffered his mug again. “Sorry, Edmund.”

The anniversary fair was already a distant memory, lost in the desperate rush of the harvest. Like everyone else Edmund had to work the fields from dawn to dusk that time of year—but then, when his neighbors came by the inn for a quiet ale before bed, he had to pick up tray and pitcher to serve. His only consolation was that no one had the strength to stay up late.

“You all know the legends, you know what is spoken.” Grubby Hands seemed to have the attention of his own party, and a few locals clustered in around his table. “As winter is the Nethergrim—he comes forever back! Spring does not know of winter but as a memory, yet winter still comes. Summer plays and winter waits, and when autumn falters, winter comes. The Nethergrim is winter; he is war and tax and death in the crib. He is age and withering!”

“It’s just a couple of dead pigs!” Martin gave up. He took his mug back from Edmund, and got foam in his beard from a distracted pull of ale. “Must be a fine thing to sit around in taverns all day making up stories instead of doing proper work.”

“Merchants. Fah.” Nicky Bird lay half across the table, using a rolled-up cloak for a pillow. “Here, Horsa, get your fiddle. Let’s have us a song.”

“Not a chance. I can hardly feel my arms.”

Edmund poured himself dry and shuffled off through the tavern, dangling his pitcher in the crook of a finger. He did not need to look where he was going—he knew every warp and bend of the floor, and on that night he had no fear of bumping into dancers.

“And there they were, fast asleep in the bushes at the end of the field, like a pair of vagabonds!” Bella Cooper leaned close in counsel with Ida, matriarch of the Twintree clan. “It looks poorly on the Bales and the Overbournes, if you ask me. Lazy sons mean bad fathers.”

Bella jumped when she noticed Edmund passing so near. “Not you, of course, Edmund. You’ve always been a good boy.” She dropped to a whisper behind him. “Do you think he heard me?”

Edmund stumbled down the stairs into the cellar, keeping one hand to the old plaster wall. The only light came down from the tavern to make a halo from Geoffrey’s red curls, showing him bent at the tap of the middle keg.

“—and if I catch you shirking one more time, just once more, you can pack up and walk, and I don’t care where you go.”

Edmund froze. Geoffrey crouched at the tap, but he was not pouring. Their father stood in shadow in the corner by the shelf of mugs.

“You think I’m joking, don’t you.” Harman Bale spoke low, too quiet to be heard up in the tavern. “You think you can just dawdle about, napping in the bushes on harvest day and making a laughingstock of this family? There’s younger boys than you out begging on the roads. You just see how far you can push me, you just see how little it will take to get you thrown out of here. And don’t think for a moment your mother can save you—I’ll toss you out on your ear if I’ve a mind to, and she can moan all she likes about it.”

Harman uncrossed his arms and stepped out from the wall. He seemed to notice Edmund only then.

“Father.” Edmund nodded at him, then swallowed without wanting to. He stood aside to let him pass.

Harman stopped on Edmund’s stair, far closer than Edmund would have liked. “It’s up to you, son, but when you inherit this place one day, I’d think twice about keeping him around.” He pushed past. By the time he reached the top, he had changed in face and voice. He called out to Horsa for a jolly song, just the one song to raise their spirits after such a long hard day.

Geoffrey turned the tap of the middle keg. “This one’s almost done.” His voice came out broken and weak.

“He doesn’t mean it.” Edmund stepped off the last stair. “He’s just trying to scare you.”

Geoffrey kept his face turned away. His skin shone pallid white between his freckles. A stream of ale dribbled out into his pitcher.

Edmund pressed his back against the cool plaster of the cellar wall. “I don’t want to inherit this place, you know.”

“Shut it. Just shut your stupid mouth.”

“I wouldn’t ever throw you out. I swear it.”

Geoffrey stomped upstairs, holding his brimming pitcher cradled in both hands. Edmund replaced him at the tap, but the flow of ale sputtered out before his pitcher was half full. He set the tap in the last keg, then turned his face from the pungent burst of air it let forth before disgorging a stream of black ale. He wiped the thick yellow foam from the brim and brought it upstairs to find Grubby Hands still at it, louder than before.

“Gray he is, and where he steps, the cold lingers.” Grubby Hands waved his fat arms all about, sloshing some of his ale onto the floor. “Tall he is, tall as houses, black of eye as deep as the end of the world! His fur is daggers, his teeth are knives, his hands blood red with a thousand crimes, and not time nor love nor bravery can stop their grasping. He cannot be slain, for he is the voice of the world when it says, ‘I love you not.’”

Edmund made his rounds, avoiding the merchants’ table—Grubby Hands had drunk quite enough for one night. As he passed the kitchen door, he caught the sounds of his parents in low argument, his mother pleading and weeping and his father growling, biting at the ends of her words.

“Did they ever tell you what it was?” Another stranger—the dusty tinker from the fair—leaned across from his table. “The Nethergrim, I mean. Did they ever tell you what they saw, what they did?”

“Three men only came back from the mountain.” Horsa Blackcalf folded his hands on his belly. “Tristan nearly died of his wounds, Vithric was delirious for weeks, and John Marshal—if you could have seen the look on his face. John only said that it was done, that’s all, and not another word about it since.”

“No, no, he said Tristan ran it through!” Nicky reached out to grab up some of Martin’s meager supper—a hunk of bread, and an onion that he bit into like an apple. “That’s what he said—the Nethergrim died on Tristan’s sword.”

Horsa scratched his warty nose. “I don’t see any gray in your beard, Nicholas Bird. I don’t recall that you were yet born when they came back.”

“Well, that’s what my gran said.” Nicky tossed the onion from one hand to the other. “Told me often, when I sat at her knee of an evening: ‘Tristan slew the Nethergrim, aye he did. Ran it straight through the heart, and nearly drowned in its gore.’”

“Your gran was naught but an old—” Horsa stopped, glanced sidelong at Nicky, and contented himself with a dismissive shake of his head.

Edmund lingered at the table. “Did Tristan ever say himself what he’d done?”

“If he did, how are we to know about it?” Horsa placed his fiddle on his knee, gave it a few scrapes, then turned the pegs to tune it. “He left Elverain that same year, and he’s not been back here since.”

The dusty tinker made bold to hop across from his table and join them. “I’ll tell you this, every bard and minstrel in every tavern from here to Anster sings it just the same, that Tristan stepped right up and struck the Nethergrim dead.” He sat down next to Martin. “You’ve heard the songs, have you not?
And Tristan drove his sword into the jelly of its eye, the jelly of its eye, so praise you all good Tristan, for he
—”

Martin held up a meaty hand. “Tell you what, stranger, stop singing and the next round’s on me.”

“But maybe that’s how it got about,” said Edmund. “Maybe Tristan told the story, back in his own lands, or maybe Vithric did, before he died.”

Horsa ran up and down the scales on his fiddle. “We’ve never pressed John Marshal for the whole of the story, though he’s lived among us for nigh on thirty years. It wouldn’t be right.”

Martin nodded. “If keeping it in is what gets my uncle John through the days, then so be it.”

“You younger folk, you strangers, you can’t know what it was like back then.” Horsa waved his fiddle bow around the room. “It was as though all the troubles from every old legend you’d ever heard came back all at once to threaten us with ruin. First it was livestock, then folk caught out alone, then farms and then whole villages—no message, no mercy, nothing sought but our deaths. It was like no sort of war made by men. We could not plead nor bargain—we could not even surrender. We were to be overrun, scattered out onto the roads and fields to be cut down one after the next, and our lords seemed able to do nothing. Then Tristan came, and Vithric, John and all the Ten. They fought for us, they died for us, they gave us hope. It’s true, stranger, that we do not know what they faced in those mountains, nor even exactly where the bodies of our fathers and brothers may lie, but since the day those three came home, there has not been a single grute nor bolgug nor any such thing seen in settled lands. They earned our faith in them, and so we give it gladly.”

“You there, the blond boy!” Grubby Hands thunked his mug. “Let’s have another round over here!”

Edmund pretended not to hear him. He slid back into the dark, serving the tables farther from the fire. He passed around the back corner, then bumped into a goblet held right at the level of the pitcher.

“Ale, please.”

A prickling chill shot up Edmund’s neck. The man holding the goblet was younger than he sounded, with thick short hair just starting to go gray over a smooth-shaven chin. He wore dark clothes fit for a prosperous merchant but without a merchant’s taste for loud color. He held up a parchment to read it by the light of a candle—it appeared to be the lineage of the royal family. Books and scrolls lay scattered all about on the table before him, beside a tray piled high with chicken bones.

A flood of memories struck Edmund dizzy. He had only just served the man—seen him, served him food and drink and then somehow forgotten he was there. Then he remembered that the man had been there for days, and then remembered that he had remembered this before and forgotten it, again and again. The rush-littered ground buckled below him. Not knowing what to do, he held out his pitcher to serve.

“On second thought, don’t bother.” The stranger shut his book. “Do these people ever stop drinking?”

“Do I—do I know you?”

The stranger favored Edmund with a chilly smile. “You do not.” He rolled up his parchment and slid it into an ivory tube. “Prepare my horse.”

Edmund looked down at the books again. “You . . . you’re a wizard.”

“And you are a peasant. My, what an enjoyable game. Now go prepare my—” The cough bubbled up from his throat. He bent and spat blood into a hand cloth.

Edmund looked up and around the tavern. No one paid the slightest notice to the stranger, despite the violence of his coughing, despite the handsome cut of his clothes and despite the tooled and decorated books on the table before him, each one of which was likely worth more than they could earn in a month.

“—my horse.” The man shuffled his books into a pair of saddlebags and dropped them over Edmund’s shoulder. “Now.”

“Yes, my—lord?”

“You will address me as ‘your eminence.’”

“Yes, your eminence.” Edmund hurried outside. The din of talk and music swung shut behind the door. The sun set low behind the far peaks of the Girth, raising shadows off the roofs of his neighbors. The saddlebags weighed heavy on his shoulder, stuffed to bursting with thick, rectangular shapes.

Edmund ran his fingers down the worked leather strap of the bag, then in under the flap. He touched board-and-leather binding, a rough run of pages, the frill of a tasseled bookmark. He looked up at the waking stars, thinking he might take a moment to decide, but he knew that he already had.

His future stretched out a hand and beckoned. He weighed it all up in moments—he might be gone for years, but when he came back, when Katherine saw what he had become, she could not help but fall in love with him. He pictured himself grown tall and stern, dressed in dark finery and crowned with hard-won wisdom, slapping a bag of gold marks in the craggy hands of Tom’s master and asking—no, commanding—that his friend be given his freedom. Yes, oh yes—and best of all, Geoffrey would have to inherit the inn. Father would have no choice.

The stranger emerged. Edmund turned to him, ready with the question that would raise him up, change his life and set him on a new course forever. “Your eminence—”

“No,” said the stranger.

Edmund’s mouth hung open. He stammered. “How . . . how?”

“You affect the posture of the supplicant.” The stranger shouldered past onto the road. “I have seen my share.”

“But, you don’t even know what I’m asking.” Edmund turned to follow. “Please!”

“Do I need to be told?” The stranger bent to cough again. “Your eyes tell me what I need to know. You want something from me and have nothing to offer in return.”

“But I have read
The Seven Roads
! I know the keys and chords of the Five Wheels, the secret names of the Three Pillars! Test me, your eminence—test me, please! I know them all!”

The stranger looked Edmund up and down. “Well, I can’t be right all the time. Here I thought you were begging to be taken as a servant, but no! You wish to become an apprentice. How old are you?”