The Shattered Vine (5 page)

Jerzy looked back involuntarily. Their masthead was a living thing, dark-skinned hands stroking a wreath of vine leaves, the unexpected result of Jerzy’s spell of protection when they had to leave the ship anchored and unguarded in Irfan. He did not know if the figurehead actually invoked any particular protection . . . but anyone looking at it would certainly assume that it did. They were counting on that to keep the ship safe again, since they did not have the additional funds to hire guards.

Jerzy touched the marker still hung around his neck. Once, merely showing it within the borders of The Berengia would buy him whatever aid he needed, on his master’s reputation. Now, his master was gone, and he himself could not stand surety, not when he did not know if he would have anything to repay it with.

“Jer?”

“Yes, all right,” Jerzy replied, finding the wine sack he needed and weighing it in his hand, estimating how much liquid remained within. The masthead had been unexpected, to say the least, and it still disturbed him to think about too closely. In contrast, what they were about to do wasn’t even outside the realm of the usual . . . if anything these days could be considered usual or common. He unstoppered the wine sack, and then offered it to Ao.

“Me?” The trader looked half-horrified, half-fascinated. Behind them, Mahl let out a muffled laugh.

“You. You’re the one the magic will be working on.”

Ao swallowed hard, his throat working noisily, and then nodded.
Like the Kingdom of Caul, although for different reasons, his clan eschewed the use of spellwines. Even though Ao had become comfortable with what Jerzy could do, the thought of it being worked directly within him was only now sinking in. The realization made him clearly uncomfortable.

When he was a slave, Jerzy had been forbidden by law to so much as taste an unripe grape, or breathe too deeply of the fumes during crush. He had some sense of what was in Ao’s mind.

“It will do only what you tell it to do. That’s how spellwine works: the incantation frames the magic the . . . the same way you frame an Agreement, so that every detail is considered and every eventuality taken care of.”

The explanation seemed to soothe the trader. In truth, it was more complicated than that, but Jerzy rather suspected a trader’s Agreement had loopholes, too.

“So how do I . . .”

“You’ve seen me do it often enough. Take a sip, just a small one, and hold it on your tongue. Let it sink into the flesh, and the aroma rise up into your mouth . . .”

He watched, his gaze intent as Ao did as he was instructed. The other’s movement was awkward, too aware of being watched, and he took too much wine with the first sip, choking a little as it ran out of his mouth and down his chin.

“It’s all right. Everyone does that the first time.” He hadn’t, but he had made a fool of himself in other ways. “Hold it, and then say the decantation, the way I taught you.”

Ao swallowed again, letting only a little of the liquid run down his throat, and then his lips moved. The words were barely audible, as he tried not to spill more spellwine, but that didn’t matter. Loud or soft, the spellwine was crafted to respond to the shape of the words as much as the sounds.

“To the legs, flow. The legs, lift. Carry me, go.”

The look on Ao’s face as the windspell rose to do his bidding, lifting
him upright as though carried on invisible legs, was worth every penny the spellwine had cost them.

“It won’t last long,” Jerzy cautioned him. “And you’ll ache when it’s done. But for a while, you’ll be able to move by yourself.” Enough to get them through the crowd and, with a carefully placed cloak over Ao’s shoulders, without anyone seeing that the man was a cripple. The arrival of the Washers, and their demands, had changed plans beyond the need for haste: they could afford no indication of weakness, no hint of vulnerability others might try to use—or use against them.

Ao took a gleeful step forward—and pitched over into Jerzy’s arms.

“Carefully!” the Vineart said, setting him gently upright. “Carefully. You’re out of practice and these aren’t your legs.”

Ao nodded, and took another, more cautious step.

“But it doesn’t last?”

“You know it doesn’t,” Jerzy said, picking up his own rucksack, keeping his free hand on Ao’s arm to steady him. The words lingered in his mouth, like the feel of a spell, an ominous warning. “So don’t waste it. Let’s go.”

T
he dockside, like
most fishing villages of any size in The Berengia, was a bustle of people minding their own business, intent on their own problems. Jerzy noted a few older men, able-bodied enough to be out fishing, instead mending nets. They sat not down by the water’s edge but up higher, where they had a clearer view of the horizon. As their small party passed, Jerzy saw fish spears on the ground next to them, and horns or drums at their feet. Sentinels, ready to warn the village should anything come at them from the sea. Serpents . . . or men? Jerzy felt a shudder of anticipation run down his spine.

Although a few folk stopped to watch them go by, curious, no Washer appeared to stop them. Despite that, all four were tense until they were out of the village itself, far enough along the rise and fall of the road that a man on foot could not catch up with them. Mahl relaxed first, settling deeper into her saddle with a sigh as they crested the first hill, while Kaïnam’s shoulders eased a fraction with every step they took.

The ocean was hidden behind the ridge, although the tang of seawater and fish still carried in the air, when the spell wore off. Ao felt
it just in time to brace himself, and then collapsed a little on the wagon’s bench.

“Are you all right?” Jerzy, next to him, glanced sideways with a worried frown.

“Yes. Ow. No. You said ache, not . . .”

“Bad?”

“It could hurt less. It could hurt more.” Ao’s cheerfulness was strained enough to let them know that, in fact, it hurt a great deal, but he waved off any assistance, leaning against the cask packed up behind him and tucking the blanket around the stubs of his legs with a forced casualness.

The cart they had hired was larger and far more comfortable than the one they had been offered in Irfan; a full wagon, in fact, large enough for all their belongings and the remaining half-casks of spellwine they had taken from Vineart Esoba, from the now-fallen House of Runcidore. Jerzy held the reins of the placid piebald draft horse that pulled the wagon, barely having to guide it along, while Mahault and Kaï rode alongside on slighter-built brown geldings, their blades now lashed to the saddles, in reach—and, more important, in clear view, despite the apparent ease of their departure.

The others might have relaxed, but Jerzy found himself growing more tense as the road passed under their wheels. Once, those working in the field would have stopped to watch when a stranger passed by, their curiosity an open, easy thing. Jerzy himself, moving back and forth between the smaller yards owned by his master, rarely received more than a lazy wave if recognized, a long stare as he passed if not. Even the occasional troop of soldiers under Lord Ranulf’s command, the lord who claimed these villages and fields, did not excite comment; there were enough villagers who had served, or sent their sons to serve, that the sight was familiar, if never entirely comforting.

In the time Jerzy had been away, that had changed. The few stooped figures working the fields now were conspicuous in how they did not look up, not ignoring the wagon and horses clattering by, exactly, but giving the strangers no cause to stop and notice them, either. There
was a tension in their bodies that should not have been there, not here, where Sin Washer’s Commands had kept strife to a minimum for more than a hundred years.

These were not trained warriors ready for battle, but ordinary folk, fearful of things they did not understand and could not predict. Unlike the fisherfolk, alert for trouble, Jerzy realized, these folk held themselves like slaves, aware that at any moment, without warning, the lash might come down on their heads.

Once Jerzy saw that, other changes were impossible to ignore. The comfortable, sloping fields and thick-leafed groves that Jerzy had grown up with remained . . . but it wasn’t the same. The colors of encroaching autumn were the same, and yet the leaves seemed duller, the villages seemed more tightly built, once-open meadows now fenced to keep livestock contained, the areas between houses smaller, the herds grazing closer in, and more than one child visible, tending the flock or herd.

In less than a ten-month, the land had shifted.

“Something’s wrong,” Jerzy said, his voice tight as they left one such village, a cluster of a shared barn and five houses, three of them with their shutters closed against the mild weather. “The villagers . . .”

“They’re afraid,” Kaïnam said, swinging his gelding around to ride alongside the wagon. His voice was low, his free hand resting on the hilt of his blade. Mahault fell behind slightly, on the other side of the wagon, keeping pace with the back wheel, her sword now ready on her hip.

“They’re not afraid,” Jerzy said. “They’re hungry.”

Kaïnam was a princeling, Mahault grew up in a city, and Ao had more experience with roads than roots. But Jerzy had spent his entire life working the land, his fingers and toes in the dirt, and he could feel it oozing out of the land, and in the faces of the people they passed, their eyes too wide, their mouths too tight. He had thought to return home to gather strength. Instead, that strength had been sapped away.

“The crops are failing, the livestock not grazing the way they should,”
Jerzy went on, voicing what he saw so clearly now. “The land is under a blight.”

A sudden fear for his vines shook him to the bone, and the urge to gather up the reins and cluck the beast to a faster pace had to be fought down: it would do him no good, not now. He had been away this long, another day would change nothing.

And yet, the feeling remained: unsettled and anticipating all at once, like hunger spiraled around his rib cage, the almost-forgotten wait for the overseer’s crop to land on unprotected flesh. How could he not have felt it, before? Was it . . . was it because of Master Malech’s death?

Even as Jerzy considered it, he rejected the thought. Vinearts died; the land lived on. This was Ximen’s doing: the land itself sensed unrest.

They rode in silence, each wrapped in their own thoughts, the only noise the calls of birds overhead and the comforting sound of hooves on the packed-dirt road, and Jerzy had almost managed to convince himself that the fear was merely his own uncertainty and exhaustion playing tricks on him, when Mahault’s voice carried forward from her post behind them.

“We’re being watched.”

“What?” Jerzy’s entire body tensed up again, and he felt Ao shift in the wagon behind him, bracing his body against the sudden jolt of the wagon as the horse, sensing the change, slowed down.

“Don’t stop, don’t look around,” Kaïnam said. Then, backward over his shoulder, still quietly, to Mahault. “Yes, I know. One?”

“One,” she confirmed. “Hanging back a bit. On horseback, but staying off the road. I think he’s one of our Washer friends. They can’t seem to let go of the red, even when they’re trying to be stealthy.”

Jerzy chewed at his lower lip, instinctively pulling a hint of spittle from the flesh there into his mouth, feeling the bitter tang of quiet-magic waiting to be called. “Oren didn’t like my leaving without an answer.”

Kaïnam did not look impressed. “He’s going to follow us all the way
back to the vintnery? Poor use of available men. Why merely shadow us, if they’re that worried? Why not force the issue?”

“They don’t have the authority.” It was the only thing that made any sense, their meeting him at the docks, using surprise and his own exhaustion against him, hoping to catch him off guard, before he realized that they could not force him to do anything. Whoever wanted him did not have the entire Collegium’s support. But the thought raised another worry: if a smaller group within the Washers was looking to claim a Vineart of their own, if control of magic had become that contested . . . they would not rely merely on someone like Oren to woo him. What might a Washer with more authority do to those who rejected their offer?

True, Washers had always stayed clear of the battles other men might engage in; that did not mean that the Collegium could not be deadly in its own right. Even though Jerzy had been cleared of charges they had levied, he did not trust that would keep him or his companions safe if the Collegium again deemed him a danger. Or a risk.

“Lurker up front, too,” Ao called, hard on that thought. Sure enough, a man had come to the side of the road, still as a tree. Unlike their follower, he was in clear sight, and obviously waiting for them. He wore a leather smock over his clothing, and his hair was close-cropped and gray, his face clean-shaven and jowly with muscles beginning to age.

“Blacksmith?” Kaïnam asked, squinting a little.

“Farrier,” Jerzy said. “And he brought friends.” There was a group gathered farther off the road, four figures . . . no five, although one was slighter than the others—a child, or a dwarf, perhaps, standing by a slight rise that looked recently built rather than natural, as though ready to duck behind it if they should prove unfriendly.

“Mahl. Come front. Ao, are you ready with that bow?”

“I haven’t learned how to use it yet,” Ao said, even as they could hear him pulling the small crossbow Kaïnam had given him during the voyage home. It looked like a toy, but Kaïnam claimed it was deadly, and more to the issue, did not need the archer to be standing.

“They don’t need to know that,” Kaïnam said, urging his horse forward a pace. Jerzy noticed, as he would never have months earlier, that Kaï’s new position blocked Jerzy from a direct blow from the newcomers. Without turning to look, Jerzy suspected Mahault was guarding their rear in the same manner. The weight of the wine flask hanging from his belt and the warmth of quiet-magic ready in his mouth, waiting to be called upon, reassured him that he was not without defenses of his own, if need be.