Blood Ties (20 page)

Saker

E
ACH NIGHT,
Rowan, Swallow and Cypress found a place to perform, usually in an inn. Where they were known from past visits they were welcomed, and got beds in the stables. “But no lights, understand,” the innkeepers said. “We don’t want any fires.”

Most of the time, Rowan would make sure they performed at least one song from the distant past, usually about the invasion of the area or town they were in. The customers loved them, banged their tankards on the tables in time with the drumming, and slapped Rowan and Cypress on their backs afterward. While Swallow and Cypress sang, Saker would take notes.

In the vale of Wooding, in the forested valley,

six hundred were slain by the sword-wielding few.

Aelred, he led them, through clearing and coppice

Through river and rushes to victory sweet.

“Six hundred in Wooding,” noted Saker. “Near the river.”

By ford of the Sprit where water sprites lurk

great-hearted Garlok gathered his men,

led them to raven’s nest, glade in the woods.

There were the enemy ranged up against them,

There were the enemy, mighty and strong:

Seven and forty the enemy fallen

By Garlok’s strong blade and the blades of three friends.

“Spritford,” wrote Saker. “Forty-seven. Raven’s Nest Glade.”

On nights when they were not performing, in between villages, Rowan and Swallow would perform some of the history songs that were not popular with Acton’s people. Some had been written by Travelers. Saker prized these the most as they often contained detailed information about the victims of an attack: ages, burial and battlegrounds. Rowan’s flute cast a high lament into the night for those songs.

Sometimes Rowan would sing in a firm, mellow voice, and Swallow would drum quietly on her knee, showing Cypress the rhythm. Cypress listened as hard as Saker, but Saker could tell that all he really cared about were the rhythms and words, not what they meant.

Each night was precious to Saker because each song brought him closer to his goal, but other things were precious, too. Swallow’s calm grace called up long-buried memories of his mother, who had been neither calm nor graceful, but who had shared Swallow’s coloring and litheness.

Saker wept quietly into his pillow on the first night a memory returned to him. He saw his mother rushing around the house with a broom after his older sister, threatening retribution for some chore, he couldn’t remember what, left undone. His sister shrieked with laughter as she scurried around the table, and his mother was trying not to laugh, too, but shouting, “You’re lazy! What are you?” His sister answered breathlessly, hiccuping with laughter, “Lazy!” and finally his mother flung herself down on the settle by the fire, and giggled. He remembered laughing, too, laughing so much his eyes watered. But he couldn’t remember when it had happened . . . how long before they were all dead. But it was a happy memory, and after the tears he went to sleep peacefully.

There was only a handful of memories, and each new one was priceless. To remember his father hale and strong and whole again just fed his resolution. He had only been able to remember his father after the attack, his head half crushed by a sword blow and the flesh ragged on his shoulder from the spur.

One night, after six long, sorrowful songs, Rowan stopped. “That’s all,” he said. “You have heard all of them now.”

“
All
the old songs?” Saker asked, feeling strangely bereft.

“All the history songs. The others aren’t of interest to you.”

Saker sat quietly with his notebook on his lap. He looked at its fat pages, almost filled. He looked at Rowan and Swallow, then Cypress.

“Thank you. Then . . . I must be leaving you soon.”

“We’ll be in Carlion in a few days,” Rowan said.

Saker nodded. The future looked curiously empty, despite all the work he had to do. He would need to go back to the enchanter’s house, his house, and work on the map . . . There were to be no more companionable nights by the fire, no more buried memories surfacing like flowers in a cesspit. Over the last six months he had grown accustomed to being Penda, the student, one of a traveling group. It would take a little time to remember how to be alone again.

“It’s been good, having you with us,” Rowan said. “Like having our son back.”

Swallow frowned. “Nothing like it!” she said sharply, but then smiled at Saker. “But good, nonetheless.”

“So your work’s over then, cully,” Cypress said.

Saker looked at his notebook again, and slowly shook his head. “It’s just beginning.”

Bramble

G
ORHAM TOOK HER
out to the farm the next day early, after a breakfast of thin porridge, which wasn’t half as good as Maryrose’s. She turned out the roan in a small field next to the cottage, and set to work.

Cleaning out the cottage took most of the morning. They’d brought an old bed, which Osyth had produced from an attic somewhere, to save having to buy a new one. It was creaky with woodworm, but Gorham lashed it tight with greenhide strips, and with the new ticking (which he’d insisted on) stuffed with fresh straw, it was comfortable enough.

Bramble and Gorham had sat at the kitchen table the night before and made a list of the things she’d need at the cottage: cooking pans, bed linen, dishes, broom, scrubbing brush . . . Osyth sniffed as they wrote down each item but a few moments later she would appear with a tattered or half-broken or
almost
worn-out version. Bramble had to suppress a fit of the giggles. The shagging woman never threw anything out — not even a badly chipped chamber pot! It’d cut your bum to ribbons if you chanced to sit on it.

“Thanks,” Bramble had said when she’d offered that, “but I think I’ll buy one of my own.”

So the cart had been packed with almost everything she’d need, even if most of it was in poor condition. Gorham fixed a broken leg on the table while Bramble cleaned, but she didn’t want to waste too much time with the cottage. Maybe she would get around to prettying it up later.

Sitting on cords of wood at the newly mended table, she lunched on cheese and pickles with day-old bread (“No sense wasting it on the pig,” Osyth had said). Gorham had fresh bread, and offered to share it, but Bramble shook her head; she didn’t care much anymore. Her sense of taste was dull. She wondered, sometimes, if she would ever really enjoy anything again.

“No need. Besides, you want to be able to tell her that I ate it all up.” She tilted her head sideways at him with no smile at all, careful to keep her face straight.

Gorham nodded.

That set the tone for all their exchanges about Osyth: tacit acknowledgment that she was, well, difficult, but never discussing it.

In the afternoon Gorham introduced Bramble to her new job.

She had never been employed before; she hated the idea of taking orders, of being subservient. She wondered if the fog that had surrounded her since the roan’s jump would deaden her resentment of being bossed around. But Gorham didn’t bark orders. Arriving in the morning, he might say, “I thought we’d see if the chestnut will eat from the hand today.” Over those first two days he explained everything that had to be done to keep the farm operating, and what her part would be. And then he generally left her to it.

There was only one exception. She learned to wear boots because Gorham insisted on it. “If a sixteen-hand stallion trod on your bare foot, even accidentally, you’d be off work for weeks.” With a stout boot it was merely temporary agony. The first time it happened, the pain cut through the fog all right, although only for a few moments.

She also learned to keep to a routine after she realized that animals thrived when their lives were predictable. She even learned to bite her tongue when clients tried to talk as though they knew one end of a horse from another, when clearly they had never really looked at their own animals.

It was a life they could bear, she and the roan. It made no demands on her that she couldn’t fulfill, even with the cloudy glass of death between her and the world. Maybe the sense of detachment made her less restless. What did it matter where she was, after all?

She and the roan explored the countryside each morning before work, and in her time off — usually in the middle of the day — she roamed the forest that bordered Gorham’s land. It was a remnant of the old forests that had covered the land before Acton’s time: oak, mainly, and pockets of beech and elm, alder and willow along the streams, holly and rowan in thickets where old trees had fallen. She found much of her own food there, trapping rabbits and birds, searching out greens and berries in summer, nuts, acorns, mushrooms and truffles in autumn. She had always helped to fill her family’s table and it had satisfied her deeply to sit down to a full meal of her own providing. She’d lost a certain sense of that satisfaction, but it was still good. She supposed that gardeners felt like this about fruit and vegetables they had grown, but why garden, she thought, when the forest did all the work for you?

Besides, what would she do if she didn’t roam the forest? Sit in the cottage and knit? As she’d received her pay week by week, she’d replaced most of the broken-down things that Osyth had given her (giving them back punctiliously). Beyond utility, she had done almost nothing to the cottage: there were no curtains, no special plates or dishes, no rugs except one made from rabbit fur that she’d tanned herself. She had never cared about indoor things, and finally she didn’t have her mam nagging, “Make your room look nice.” Aside from housekeeping, she left the cottage alone and found a new kind of freedom in the unadorned walls and paucity of possessions. She felt light and almost free whenever she thought about how little she owned.

Gorham made her responsible for the physical care of the horses that were brought to them from all over the country for gentling, and mostly that meant becoming very well acquainted with manure and currycombs. But Gorham was a generous man and the day after she arrived, he began to teach her his craft. He was a renowned horse trainer, although by the end of the second year after Bramble joined him, he acknowledged that she was his equal. She might have taken the Road before that. She had certainly intended to. But that was before she saw the chases.

Pless was a famous center for chase races, and they were run at the Autumn and Spring Festivals — after harvest, and after sowing. That first autumn, Gorham took her to see a horse that he’d trained race in the biggest chase of all, the Pless Challenge.

She’d never seen a chase before, didn’t even know the rules. The area around Wooding was too hilly and the gullies and chasms too frequent for chases. But she knew, of course, the superstitions.

The Autumn Chase was the oldest, the tradition going back since before Acton came over the mountains. The Kill, who led the chasers over the course, represented the death of the year, her grandam had told her once, and the chasers were the hunters who harried the year to its death. The red scarf the Kill carried was the symbol of its blood.

The Spring Chase was much younger, only a hundred years or so on horseback, although there had always been a footrace in spring to celebrate the new year. The Kill in spring represented new life and it was considered very good luck for one of the riders to actually catch the Kill before the finish line and grab the red scarf. If someone could do that, they became the Kill Reborn.

Although now it was more a sport than a ritual, many still believed that a rider who grabbed the red flag from the Kill in the Spring Chase was someone special, someone marked by the gods. But it was very unlucky for someone to catch the flag in the Autumn Chase. Then it was said that he or she was marked out for death within the year.

Bramble stood with Gorham on a hill a mile from Pless, along with the rest of the spectators, half the town at least, and watched as the riders gathered at the town gate. Among the swirling crowd of horses and riders, each with a brightly colored handkerchief around his neck, there was one, on a stocky gray, with a red scarf tied to a lance.

“That’s the Kill,” Gorham said. “He sets off before the others, then there’s a count to fifty, and then the eight riders go. They have to follow his path exactly, over the obstacles he picks, and the first back to the finish line wins.” He pointed to a fence a mile or so on the other side, where there was a small group of men waiting.

“That’s it?”

“That’s enough.” Gorham smiled. “We’re looking for Golden Shoes — his rider’s wearing a blue kerchief.”

She picked out Golden Shoes, a sprightly chestnut shying sideways, away from the Kill’s red scarf. It had energy enough, she thought.

The Kill set out. The spectators on the hill spontaneously started counting in unison as the rider set his horse to the first fence, and at “. . . forty-eight, forty-nine, FIFTY!” the horses at the gate surged forward, fighting for position. They took the first jump over an easy post-and-rail fence, but as they scrambled up the hill toward the crowd Bramble caught her breath. She hadn’t realized how fast they would go.

The Kill swept past in a gust of wind, red scarf fluttering, and after him the pack of horses came. She could hear the rumble of their hooves on the ground, then felt the ground start to shake.

The pack went over a stone wall and then a fallen tree. By now the best four riders were out in front, and Bramble was beginning to realize that it took more than a fast horse to win.

“They have to go over the same obstacles as the Kill,” Gorham said in her ear, “but they can go over them at any point. The good riders take the straight line, even if it’s more dangerous.”

She could see that the leaders were not jumping their horses at exactly the same place as the Kill. They cut corners even if it meant setting their mounts at a higher section of a fence, or worse, a stone wall, where they couldn’t see what lay on the other side.

The pack thundered up and flashed past them too fast for Bramble to take in more than a confusion of colors, shaking ground, flying dust and riders’ shouts.

Bramble realized that she was shouting, too, that all of the spectators were urging on their favorites. She wasn’t yelling for any horse in particular, she wanted them all to go fast — to go even faster. Her heart was pounding, her fists were clenched, and her body was leaning after the pack as though she could fly across the fields with them. For the first time since the jump across the chasm, she felt alive.

“Golden Shoes was second, did you see?” Gorham’s hand gripped her shoulder. “There she goes!”

Bramble could just see the blue kerchief around the neck of the second rider. Coming downhill, the pack picked up speed. The next jump was over a stream. It looked deceptively easy, but it was muddy with autumn rain on both sides, and with the extra momentum the footing was treacherous. The first rider made it across safely. Golden Shoes slid a little on landing, but her rider gathered her nicely and she kept her feet. The third rider went down sprawlingly, and the horses behind were coming too fast to stop. Two riders managed to wrench their horses around to jump at a different angle, so they landed on either side of the fallen horse, but two others crashed straight over and were collected by the muddy bank.

The spectators on the hill froze with a collective gasp, except for one woman who cried out “Robbie!” and started running down to the stream. The others took breath and followed.

There were four horses down, three of them struggling back to their feet. The fourth, the bay, which had been the first to fall, was rocking backward and forward, trying to get his feet under him, but without success. His rider had been thrown off to one side, and was sitting with his head in his hands. The other riders were already standing by the time the group from the hill arrived.

The crying woman hurried through the stream careless of the wet and embraced the seated rider. “Gods, Robbie, gods,” she said, again and again. “I thought you were dead.” It was clear she was his mother.

Gorham had gone straight to the bay’s head and helped him up, but it was now walking with a pronounced limp.

Using his mother’s arm to stand, the rider came over, his face full of concern. “Is it broken?”

Everyone quieted for the answer. Gorham felt the fetlock carefully, his face grave, and then smiled. “Just a sprain,” he said. He looked over toward the finishing fence and the others turned with him, curiosity rising now their worst fears had been allayed.

“Who got the Kill?” the rider asked, but no one knew.

Gorham cupped his mouth with his hands and shouted to the judges, “Who won?”

“Golden Shoes,” came back the reply.

Gorham thumped Bramble on the shoulders. “I knew it,” he said exultantly. “I knew that one had it in her.”

Bramble looked at the four horses that had made it to the finish fence. They were circling, cooling down. Golden Shoes’s rider raised the lance with the red scarf attached, clearly the symbol of victory.

She looked back at the riders leading their horses to and fro, checking their legs and their wind, seeming to have forgotten the fall already. One of them had blood coming from his nose, but he wiped it away with the back of his hand and examined his horse’s off-hind hoof.

She looked up at the clear autumn sky, felt the thundering pulse in her blood begin to calm down, and smiled. The fog was gathering again, the glass clouding. But now she had a remedy.

“When’s the next chase?” she asked Gorham.

“Not until next spring,” he said with a knowing grin. “Got you hooked already, have we?”

She tried to seem unmoved, but found herself smiling in a way that was anything but calm, and said, “Next spring. Good. That will give me time to get the roan ready.”

He was startled. “Ready for what?”

She gestured to the horses at the stream, to the finishing fence, to Golden Shoes and her rivals. “Ready for this. Next spring I ride.”

Once he got over the surprise, Gorham was enthusiastic, although cautionary. “That roan’s a good, strong horse, even though he’s old enough that you’ll only get a few years out of him,” he said as they strolled back to the town gates. “He’s got the bone for it, and he’s got the hindquarters. But some horses aren’t jumpers, and some horses aren’t chasers, and you can’t change that. It’s in the blood.”

“He can jump when he wants to,” Bramble said drily, remembering the chasm beneath her and the jolt as they had landed. The gods may or may not have helped them over, but that first leap had been prodigious.

“Most horses can jump when they want to,” Gorham said. “But will he jump when
you
want him to, and where, and at the right speed?”

He went on for some time like that, to prepare her for disappointment, but he could feel his own excitement rising. He’d trained others’ horses to chase, but never one of his own. Well, the roan wasn’t exactly his, but it would race from his stable, which was much the same thing. He had a brief vision of Bramble handing him the red scarf from the Kill’s lance in front of the townsfolk, and smiled inside. Then he sobered, remembering the duties still awaiting him at home.