My Swordhand Is Singing (13 page)

“You should understand this, boy. Chust is my concern. Do not trespass on my patience. I am aware of everything, not just in Chust, but all around it. I have been discussing the threat posed by the Shadow Queen with those assembled here. These people, from the village and outside it, who are wise enough and powerful enough to act. And yet you dare to break in here and insult us all!”

She stopped for effect, and Peter took the opportunity.

“But Agnes,” he gasped, “you’ve as good as killed her! She was taken. Why don’t you—”

“Be quiet!” Anna shrieked, with such intent that the room seemed to darken. “You know nothing. Yes. Agnes is no longer where she should be. In the hut. But she was not taken. She left herself. You helped her! She has disgraced us all by breaking her honor in this way.”

“No,” said Peter. “That’s not true. She’s missing.”

“Enough!” Anna declared. “Remove him. We have no time.”

The men closed around Peter, and though he struggled, they forced him from the room easily, and dragged him back down the stairs.

In a moment he found himself sitting in the street in the snow.

“But Agnes!” he cried. “We must find her and help her.”

One of the Elders paused and considered Peter.

“You are a foolish boy. Agnes is at home. With her mother. She has disgraced herself, and you helped her do it. Count yourself fortunate we don’t punish you and your father for the shame of it all.”

“At home?” Peter could scarcely believe what the man had said. “At home?”

“Go and see for yourself.”

The man spat at Peter’s feet, and shut the door.

Peter stood up. He looked down the street that led to Agnes’s house.

He ran all the way there, skidding in the snow and ice.

He didn’t even have to get as far as her house.

There she was, up ahead of him, looking just as she always did, though Peter saw with a shiver that she was still dressed in mourning weeds. Why hadn’t she changed to her own clothes? The forty days had been broken after all. Was there still a need to dress for them?

She was crossing the street, toward her front door.

“Agnes!” he called, breaking into a run again as he saw her unlock the door.

He saw her turn and look at him, but the relief he felt rapidly turned to confusion as she saw him, then deliberately looked away.

She opened the door, and while Peter was still yards away, she slid inside.

Peter was in time to hear the door being bolted from inside.

“Agnes!” he called through the door.

No answer. He tried again, this time slamming the palm of his hand against the wood.

“Agnes! What is it? What’s wrong?”

“Go away, Peter.”

Her voice came through the wood, muffled and faint.

“What?” Peter cried. “What do you mean? Are you all right? I’ve been looking for you since—What happened to you?”

“Go away, Peter.” Once again, her voice was dull and flat.

“Why are you being like this, Agnes? What’s wrong?”

Peter strained to hear her, pressing his ear to the door to catch her words.

“Go away. I left the hut and now I’m in disgrace. My whole family. Hah! What’s left of it. Go away, Peter. I want nothing to do with you. I never did want you. You were never good enough for me. Now you are less than useless.”

“Agnes!”

“I’m well, Peter. Does that make you happy? Now go away.”

Peter stepped back from the door, looking stupidly at the wood, trying but failing to understand.

Agnes was right.

What was he good for?

He walked away.

As he went he passed again by Anna’s house, but this time could hear nothing.

Neither did he see Old Anna looking down at him, a wide smile slowly spreading across her face.

“The sword.”

She mouthed the words silently.

“The sword!”

32

Stillness

Peter brooded. Tomas drank. For days neither of them stirred from their own little island.

Something had changed.

For a year or so, Tomas and his son had enjoyed a period of relative comfort and simplicity. They had stopped running and found a place to live, with plenty of work to be done, and for some of that time Tomas had even been sober enough to do some of the work.

Not anymore. Everything was closing in around them, the way snow clouds sometimes enveloped the mountains and the forest. The flakes that fell from the clouds were the purest white, but the clouds themselves were darker than confusion, darker than death.

Tomas had spoken only once. He’d been staring out into the forest from the door of the hut, when without warning he said, “We may have to move on, Peter.”

That was all, and he would say no more, despite Peter’s questions and pleading. Peter was left running over in his mind everything that had happened, again and again, struggling for the answers he desperately craved.

The day after Peter had been thrown from Anna’s house, the day he had seen Agnes, they had a visitor.

Peter was stirred from his mood by the sound of hoof-beats on the bridge.

He went outside to find Sofia leading Sultan home.

“You didn’t come for him,” Sofia said.

Peter shrugged.

“I had things to do,” he said.

“There,” she said, smiling. “I looked after him. As I promised.”

Peter took Sultan’s reins willingly enough, but didn’t speak.

Sofia watched him stable the horse and come back to the front of the hut. She tried again.

“It was kind of you. To lend him to me,” she said. She hesitated. “It was good of you to…trust me.”

Peter turned to her.

“I did trust you, Sofia,” he said. “But then I found your uncle telling the village Elders all about my father. My father just wants to be left alone. You had no right to do that.”

“I am not responsible for what my uncle does,” Sofia snapped. “But that is not the point. It is hardly important what anyone knows about you and your father. My people went to talk to the Elders about the threat from the Shadow Queen. They went to offer their services in the name of the Winter King. You can’t hide on your little island forever, Peter.”

Peter waited for her to finish, then went back inside.

“Thank you for returning Sultan to us,” he said quietly as he entered the hut.

Through the door he heard Sofia.

“The Miorita, Peter. You should understand it.”

He heard her gentle footsteps retreat across the bridge, the bridge to their little island.

Damn her!
Peter thought. What did she mean by that? The Miorita? What had that to do with anything? And yet, it was not only the Gypsy girl who had got under his skin. That song had too.

“You should
understand it.
”

What did it mean?

After that brief encounter, Peter had spent the hours lying on his bed, ignoring Tomas as he opened jar after jar of rakia, thinking about Agnes, about the forest, and Radu and Stefan. About Sofia.

And yes, about the Miorita too.

After three days, Peter’s body rebelled. His mind might have been drifting rudderless like a raft on the open sea, but his body was used to hard work and he was restless. Finally, on the third morning, he practically threw himself out of bed and pulled his boots on so violently that even Tomas raised an eyebrow.

“What are you doing?” Tomas asked.

“Going to work,” Peter said. “It’s all I know.”

He grabbed his axe and put Sultan into the harness of the cart, and they lurched off into the depths of the snowy forest.

Peter didn’t particularly care where they went, but at the back of his mind was a tree that he and Tomas had been going to fell some weeks before. It was a huge old birch and it would take days to saw and chop it all, but Peter just wanted to see it fall, and smash to the ground. His body cried out for it. And he wanted this wood to fall, not to carve but to burn.

After an hour or so they found the tree. They were far into the depths of the forest, but it was a sunny morning, and for a short while it was possible to believe that midwinter was more than a few weeks away. Peter tethered Sultan to a tree some way from the birch, more from habit than necessity. His horse was by far the most reliable thing in his life. That, and possibly the forest, though recent events had made him begin to doubt that the forest was always benign.

Peter sized the tree. Even from the ground it looked vast, and he had learnt in his career as a woodcutter that no matter how big a tree looked in the air, it would be twice as big when it was on the ground. He tried to circle its girth with his arms, and could only just brush his fingertips against each other.

He stood back, made a silent prayer of thanks to the forest, and then swung his axe as if his life depended on it.

Wood chips rained around him, and around his feet the snow was rapidly covered with the spoil from his axe.

Something possessed him as the axe flew through the air faster and faster with each stroke. He formed a perfect undercut in less than twenty strokes, and freed the opposite side of the tree from its sheath of bark. Then he began the real work, making the cut that would bring the monster to the ground, exactly where he wanted it.

Still the blows from the axe fell, and nothing could have stood in its way, not twenty men, and least of all a tree, even one that would keep a family warm for a whole winter. A vision of his father thirty years ago came into his mind—in King Michael’s army, fighting the Turks. And maybe other, more deadly enemies.

Peter’s axe fell. Tomas’s sword swung.

Both cut their foe to the ground, blow after blow after blow.

Suddenly Peter stopped. He had been so hypnotized by the swing of his axe that he’d barely noticed how far he had cut. The trunk where he’d been chopping gave a deafening crack, as if lightning had struck nearby. The tree moved. It had begun to go.

Peter stood back, knowing he had done enough. How slowly it moved at first, its motion barely perceptible as it inched its way from the sky! There was another crack as the timber split under its own weight, and then the tree came with a rush, leaning into the air, finding nothing to support it, and accelerating downward till it hammered into the snowy floor of the forest.

The ground shook.

Sultan whinnied and Peter looked over at him.

“That’s all for today,” he said. On any other day he would have begun the process of sawing logs short enough for Sultan to drag home. The cart was empty and waiting, but Peter wanted to do no more work. He had escaped from the torpor of the hut, and felt his body come alive once more. More than that, he had been in control, and it felt good.

Peter never knew how it happened, but suddenly he saw something glinting in the snow. Looking closer, he saw it was an axe, and immediately, instinctively, he knew whose it was. It had belonged to Radu.

Suddenly he was filled with dread, seeing the axe as an omen.

His exhilaration at felling the tree evaporated, for he was certain, as certain as he had ever been of anything, that his father was in trouble. At that very moment.

Even as his blows had struck the tree.

He freed Sultan from the harness, and leaving the cart and the fallen tree where they were, galloped home.

33

Tomas

As soon as Peter saw the hut, he knew that whatever it was that had told him of the danger to his father had not lied.

Peter rode Sultan straight over the bridge, threw himself from the horse’s back, then froze. The place had been turned upside down.

There had obviously been a fight; the sawhorse lay on its side, the stable door was swinging open, the log pile by the hut had collapsed.

Then Peter saw blood in the snow. An irregular, smeary trail of it leading across the small triangle that was their island to the ditch that Tomas had dug. With bile rising in his throat, Peter followed the trail, dreading what he might find. He looked over the lip of the bank and saw a body face down in the water, snagged by a tree root.

Peter recognized the clothes. It was one of the Gypsies. He turned and ran to the hut.

“Father! Father?”

There was Tomas, lying beside his bed as if he’d been trying to get there before collapsing on the floor. Peter crouched beside him.

“I thought you were…,” Peter began, but couldn’t bring himself to say it.

Tomas smiled, but he was obviously weak. Next to him on the floor was his axe. Peter saw blood on the blade, and he knew whose it was.

“Are you hurt?”

Tomas shook his head.

“Fit as a flea. Help me up, will you?”

Peter tried to lift his father onto the bed, but couldn’t manage it. He was so heavy, now, it was hard to believe.

With a grunt Tomas sank back to the floor, and Peter knew he had been lying about being hurt.

“What did they do?”

“Nothing,” Tomas smiled. “I wouldn’t let them.”

“Wait,” Peter said, and dragged the covers from the bed. “Lie on these instead, till you’re ready to get up.”