Son of Avonar (5 page)

“Are you ill?” Dismayed at the thought, I broke my vow of silence. “Curse you forever if you've brought fever here.”

Whether or not he understood my clownish gestures, he shook his head as if to clear it, got to his feet, and stumbled out the door into the sunny morning. Before I could even wish him good riddance, he crumpled to the dirt. I hurried to his side, experiencing a perfectly idiotic wave of guilt, as if by wishing him away so fervently, I was somehow responsible for his collapse. Moments earlier, I had been wishing him dead.

“What's wrong with you?” I said, tapping his cheek when I could get no response. He still didn't move. But when I shook his left shoulder, his eyes flew open, and he cried out with bloodless lips, almost rising up off the ground. “All right, all right. Let's get you inside.”

Once I had dragged and wrestled him onto the bed, I pulled aside the makeshift tunic. The mark on his shoulder that I remembered as a mere scratch was now swollen purple, hot, hard, and seeping a foul-smelling black fluid. I'd never seen anything like it. Dredging up what I knew of such matters, I scalded my knife and lanced the wound, trying to get as much of the vile fluid out of it as I could. Aeren almost bit through his lip as I worked. “I've got to do this,” I said, grabbing a dry cloth to blot his brow. “You've gotten something nasty in it.”

As I applied a stone-root poultice to Aeren's shoulder, he drifted off to sleep, leaving me awash in memory. How not? I even found myself whispering,
J'den encour
. The words meant
heal swiftly
in the language of the J'Ettanne. Unfortunately, the words had no efficacy coming from me.

Have you learned nothing, stupid woman?
I threw down my towels and left the man to his fevered moaning, busying myself by splitting and stacking wood, filling the woodbox, hauling in extra water, pouring water on the garden, anything to stop thinking. Flour and water, salt and millet went into a bowl for more hearthbread. I threw the rabbit bones and two shriveled carrots in a pot of water on the hearth to make broth. Starving the bastard would not get him out of my bed. I needed him away from the valley. What if Darzid decided to make another sweep?

Aeren awoke near sunset, somewhat surprised to find himself in my bed and mostly undressed again. He watched silently as I made willowbark tea, mixing it with yarrow and a spoonful of wine to ease his pain and fever.

“Don't get any ideas,” I said, deliberately and obviously holding the steaming cup above his bare torso and discreetly covered nether parts before putting it to his lips. He made no move to take the cup as he drank. “You've done yourself no service, running through the underbrush as you did.” Setting the cup aside, I changed the dressing on his shoulder. Not long after I finished, his fever shot skyward again, and he slipped back into restless sleep. I sat up with him most of that night, applying cold cloths to his face and body, dribbling willowbark tea down his throat, and cursing myself for a fool.

 

The next morning, when I woke from an uncomfortable few hours on the floor, Aeren was sitting up, his eyes fixed so intently on my face that I could almost feel their heat on my skin. Sitting on the side of the bed, I removed the bandages and was astonished to see the horrid wound well on its way to healing, only a bit red and slightly tender. Youth has distinct advantages when it comes to recuperation. “So, you're better this morning,” I said. Fires of Annadis, why did he stare so?

Once I had renewed the dressing and tied up the bandage again, I busied myself about the cottage, trying to break the lock of his gaze while tidying up the remnants of my herbs and pots.

After a wobbly visit outdoors—I did not even consider following him out—he seated himself at the table. With one hand he gestured at his stomach and his mouth, while with the other he pointed accusingly at the idle pots beside the hearth. Though sorely tempted to grant such rudeness the empty reward it deserved, I threw onions, cheese, and my last five eggs into a skillet on the fire. He'd been none too well fed when I'd found him; after his fever, he must be weak as an infant, and I wanted him to put leagues between us today. “Sorry, I'm not adept at bludgeoning rabbits. You'll have to do with what I've got.”

I was convinced of his recuperative powers when I saw what he ate that morning: an entire round of hearthbread and every bite of my eggs. No encouragement to moderation had any effect on him, and when he emptied his bowl, he banged it down on the table in front of me, pointing a reproachful finger at its desolation. When I refused to cook anything more, he ate all the wild plums from the basket on the table and used his spoon to break off great slabs of cheese. Before I could get it wrapped up and stowed back in the stone-lined hole in the bank behind the cottage, he had eaten a quarter of the pale yellow wheel that I had planned to last until autumn.

Astonishingly, Aeren was pacing the floor by midday, restless with inactivity, not fever. I shoved a pail into his hand. “Fetch some water and I'll heat it, so you can wash before you go.” But either he didn't understand my gestures or didn't want to understand. He dropped the pail at my feet, retrieved the dwindling cheese yet again from my crude larder, and sprawled on the woven rug beside the hearth to eat more of it. Grinding my teeth, I fetched water from the stream for my own washing, seriously considering whether it was enough to drown the brute. When I returned to the house, he was rummaging through my things again, just as he had on the first day.

“Get out of there,” I said, slamming the lid of the clothes chest. Only quick reflexes saved his fingers from being crushed. “What are you looking for?”

With precise and insistent gestures, he demanded a sword.

When I made it clear I had nothing of the sort, he stomped away angrily and sat sulking by the pail of water, dabbling his hand in it and watching the dirt swirl around his hand as he rubbed two dirty fingers together. “That's mine,” I said, moving the pail away from him and setting another log on the fire. “I'm no serving maid or bath-girl. You're quite well enough to take care of yourself, and you smell like a stable.” I held my nose to illustrate my point.

He looked me in the eye and kicked over the pail, spilling the water all over my floor.

“As you wish. I've no time for spoiled children.”

I began to sort the burdock, scabwort, sparrow-tongue, and bristling spur nettle that I would trade for eggs and butter in the village, purposely ignoring Aeren and the mess he had made; I would not give him the satisfaction of watching me clean it up. A childish response to match his childish behavior. But the hostility in his gaze told me that his anger was anything but childish. The swelling in my throat was only now subsiding, and the slightest touch reminded me of the bruises that remained. Whyever had I brought him here?
Never again. Never.

When the plants were clean and bundled, I snatched up my sewing things and a shift that needed mending and moved out to the bench outside the door. The sun beat softly on my face, and the rasp of bees in the clover was the only disturbance on the hot, still morning. Aeren followed me out, slouching in the shadow of the doorway for a while. Then, abruptly, he strode to the center of the meadow and began to wave his hands about in jerking motions, like a scarecrow come to life. Soon he was whirling and thrusting, bending and kicking, rolling onto the ground, and then picking himself up again.

Dropping my work in my lap, I watched in fascination, certain he'd gone mad.

But gradually his movements lost their insistent frenzy and became more fluid, and I at last recognized their patterns: lunge, spin, slash, parry . . . Swordplay: graceful, powerful, masterful. Whoever was chasing him had better make sure the man never got his hands on a sword. I glanced uneasily about the boundaries of the meadow. Who was he? Why was Darzid after him?

The display ended abruptly when Aeren stumbled over a rock and fell to the grass. Bent over his knees, chest heaving, he slammed his fist to the earth, then dragged himself to his feet, trudged back up the path, and flopped wearily to the ground in front of the cottage. Without favoring me with so much as a glance, he began tracing his finger in the dirt, drawing a rough geometric pattern of lines, curves, and arrows or cross-marks with a crude beast to each side.

I twisted my head to see from the proper angle. Something about the arrangement of it whispered at me of familiarity. “What is it?” I said, tipping my head at the drawing.

He ignored me.

But the exercise gave me a thought. I sat down beside Aeren and began drawing in the dirt myself. “This is the house.” I pointed to my picture and to the real one. He nodded, frowning. “This is the ridge.” I marked on my map the place where I'd found him, the trail to the village, the river, the bridge, and the road. He waited for more. “Isn't any of this familiar? Where do you come from?” I added more features. “Montevial is to the north,” I said. “King Evard's royal city.”

He just shook his head and looked blank. Then he began drawing a map of his own, adding roads, towers, mountains, then furiously erasing and changing them. It was no geography I recognized.

How was I ever to get him gone if he couldn't tell me where he was going or where he'd been? We needed words. So I began to call out objects around the cottage and to name the things I drew. He learned incredibly fast. When I quizzed him, saying
door
or
sky
or
sword
and having him point to the object or the picture of it, he always got it right. He was either deceiving me that he didn't understand Leiran or his ranked among the quickest minds I'd ever known.

I tried writing words, but he couldn't read them. I tried to think of a way for him to tell who he was or who were his people, but he could not. I pointed to myself and to my house, then tried to find out where on his drawing was his dwelling, but he shook his head angrily and kicked dirt over his attempts. Perhaps he had been banished or disinherited. I tried drawing the devices of prominent noble houses, but he recognized none of them. And then I drew Evard's royal dragon ensign, but it evoked neither fear nor loathing nor any sense of familiarity, and I began to wonder if he had lost his memory along with his voice. After an hour of this his lips were thin and hard, his nostrils flared, and his knuckles white. I went back to teaching him words, and he liked that better. Unfortunately, though he didn't seem particularly happy, he didn't look in the least inclined to leave.

By midday I'd had enough, so I packed up my knife and my bundled plants and started down the track toward the village. Aeren wanted to come with me, but I waved him away. I could just imagine the uproar if I took a half-naked stranger into Dunfarrie.

“They'll arrest you. Put you in the pillory to wait for those who were hunting you, and all of this will be for nothing. If you want to leave, then by all means go, but take a different way at least.” I'm not sure what my gestures communicated. He pouted like a spoiled child. Maybe he would be gone by the time I came back.

 

The path from my cottage entered Dunfarrie behind Gareth Crowley's pigsties. Crowley's hovel and its collapsing fence poked up from his muddy barnyard, all of it sprawled across the foot of the hill as if a particularly nasty avalanche had buried a respectable dwelling. I circled wide and came to the dirt road that meandered past the sorely overgrown statues of Annadis and Jerrat—no priest from any temple could be bothered to come and tend so small a shrine as Dunfarrie's—and through the jumble of tired wood-frame houses and shops to the Dun Bridge. The afternoon was still and warm, the stench of barnyard filth hanging over the stifling village.

The few people I passed hurried by with averted eyes or touched their fingers to their brows without speaking. The villagers tolerated me and my unsavory past out of respect for Anne and Jonah, but they kept a wary distance. I was well content to do the same. Life was difficult enough without moping over other people's hardships.

Jacopo, of course, was different. If it hadn't been for Jacopo, Jonah's younger brother, I could never have survived in the valley after Anne and Jonah died. He had no family of his own, and he came up every few days to help me cut firewood or work the garden, or to make soap or candles. He had taught me to snare rabbits and squirrels, and to make jack, the thin, tough strips of smoked meat that would keep forever. Every fall he helped me make the cottage tight against the coming cold. Jaco was all of my family and all of my friends together.

Eyed suspiciously by a bronze rooster, I picked my way through a cramped chicken yard to the back stoop of a tidy, sod-roofed house, where I traded my bundled dye plants to Mag the weaver for ten eggs and a fist-sized lump of butter wrapped in a rag. Jaco's shop was not as tidy as Mag's house. The outside had not been whitewashed since King Gevron's father ruled Leire, and the dirt- and soot-grimed window allowed little daylight inside. I pushed open the door and three cats made a break for freedom across my feet. “Jaco, are you here?”

Jacopo had taken up shopkeeping after thirty years wandering the world as a sailor. An Isker saber had slashed the muscles of one leg, leaving it too stiff for scrambling in a ship's rigging, so he had made his way home to Dunfarrie. Out of this dusty room he sold all manner of things: old boots, clothes, anchors, rusty lanterns, cracked bowls, farm implements. Anything he could find or trade for, he would set in his shop, and someone would want it eventually.

“What're you up to in town this day, girl? It's not your usual.” Jacopo emerged from the back room carrying a crate of rusty nails. He was very much like Jonah, wispy white hair and kind brown eyes. Though no taller than I, he had broad shoulders and a barrel chest, and the hands that gripped the heavy crate were wide, with short, powerful fingers. He set down the crate, then wiped his forehead with a rag. “Summer's on us today, for sure.”