one-third the weight, the fellow should have been harmless. All the more, since the hand gripped to stay his loose trousers disarmed any threat at the risk of buck-naked embarrassment. Yet the feral green eyes pinned on the disgruntled suitor drained the man’s salmon flush to fish-belly white.
‘Grismard!’ Tarens opened in venomous delight. ‘Don’t you look like the bloke who just pissed his own breeks.’
‘Who’s your unsavoury visitor?’ snapped Grismard, chins quaking with sweaty unease.
‘That’s the foot-loose vendor who sold me the herbals,’ Kerelie smoothed over, shaken. The relief that acknowledged her brother’s arrival stayed charged with alarm, that something beyond a straightforward brawl might erupt in her sensible kitchen.
Tarens traipsed forward, thumbs hooked in his belt. A grin pasted over his clenched jaw, breathing fire, he kissed his sister’s scarred cheek. ‘You’ve scrounged some old clothing the peddler wants in trade?’
As though cued, the vagabond stepped back and unpinned his discomfited victim. He raised one arm and displayed his oversized raiment as if pleased by an exchange for his wares. The ferocious edge did not leave his eyes. He stayed placed between Kerelie and the importunate caller, no matter that the breached door to the kitchen flooded him with icy air or that the ludicrous fit of the breeches threatened to strand him, half-stripped.
‘I was planning to make tea,’ Kerelie announced to stem a burst of wry laughter.
Tarens snapped up the dangling line, ‘But at the moment, praise be to life’s set-backs, your sewing claims the more urgent priority?’ He strode forward, seized Grismard’s arm, and steered him on firm course for the exit. ‘Announce yourself, next time. We’ll be better prepared.’
The incensed visitor jerked himself free. ‘Best watch the quality you bring under your roof.’ He shot his cuff, yanked straight his mussed tweed, then warned in thwarted vindication, ‘Word’s hot about town, or haven’t you heard? The high temple examiner’s dispatched his diviners to hunt down a minion of Darkness.’
Before the electrified clash of bravado cocked Tarens’s protective fist, the vagabond moved. Snake quick, his slim hand skimmed the trestle and snatched up the abandoned packet of herbals. His gesture shouted scathing contempt as he tossed the spurned packet across the room. His aim could have been deadly, executed with force: the tied bundle struck the caller’s broad chest at the heart and rebounded.
Tarens’s reflex barely salvaged the catch before the gurgling flask tucked inside struck the brick floor and shattered. ‘We’ve survived very well without any help from busybodies, religion, or charity,’ he retorted, still on the muscle.
The browbeaten outsider wisely chose retreat and backed onto the threshold.
‘Don’t come again unless Kerelie invites you!’ Tarens thumped the spurned gift against Grismard’s jacket, shoved him out, then banged the door shut in his suet face.
No one spoke. The gloomy chill left in the kitchen hung on, even after the carriage wheels ground from the yard, and the fancy harness jingled away down the lane and dwindled, turned townward.
Kerelie huddled in uncle’s stuffed chair, restored to the head of the trestle. Her chapped hands gripped the tea she had brewed after all, to soothe her rattled composure. Along with Tarens, she regarded the dark, bent head of the vagabond, who perched on the left-hand bench. The naked slenderness draped in her borrowed blanket did not belong to a displaced labourer. The unsettled quiet forced both siblings to acknowledge: the thoughtless dexterity of those slender fingers was too well practised at plying the needle and thread just filched from Kerelie’s mending basket. Nor were the intricate stitches that retailored the trousers to size part or parcel of any field-hand’s experience.
At length, through unease that failed to dispel, Tarens mused, ‘Where have I seen work like that done before?’
Kerelie’s glum spirits dissolved at the question like storm-clouds chased off by fair weather. ‘Did you think I burned those vile rags with my eyes shut?’ Her devoted enthusiasm for sewing gave answer. ‘The tentmaker locks each stitch the same way when he fashions the seams in his canvas awnings.’ Her shy smile flashed, surprisingly sweet, on the side not creased by her scar. ‘Don’t imagine that I haven’t chewed over the subject until I remembered. The chap said he learned his craft from a ship’s mate who once mended sail on a lugger.’
Tarens sighed, his loose hands as browned as the soil the plough had ground under his nails. ‘We are a very long way from the coast.’
‘Well, don’t pretend Grismard won’t keep his vile promise.’ Her scowl resettled, Kerelie rapped a flaked chip of glaze from her tea-mug. ‘How long do we have, do you think, before he brings your stray guest to the notice of the Light’s diviners?’
‘I don’t care a hoot.’ Tarens stood up. His crusted boots tracked muddy prints without reprimand as he banged open the wood box and laid a split log to build up the fire. His blond hair shone against the stirred coals, crowned suddenly in bloodied light by the sparks wafted up the stone chimney. ‘I’ll never cringe from the threats of a toady,’ he cracked as he straightened. ‘Or bow one inch to the pious demands of some whey-faced temple examiner! Such sheep may preen in their white robes and pontificate. But I say human beings have purposeful brains beyond acting like flocks of scared pigeons.’
Yet as the wood caught and blazed at his back, the sudden, fierce heat lent the unpleasant reminder that brush-fires seldom burned without smoke.
Autumn 5922
Borrowed Time
Elaira braced for the next frontal attack launched against her by the Prime Matriarch. The Sorcerer’s warning, that Fellowship powers granted Arithon’s plight no further protection, woke the urgent need to unwind the riddle posed by the Biedar tribes’ intercession. Key to that answer lay three hundred leagues distant, amid the torrid black sands of Sanpashir. Already a renegade Koriani initiate, now determined to treat with the order’s most ancient arch enemy, Elaira expected the sisterhood must actively move to defend their close interests. Every hell-bent resource they owned could be unleashed to forestall her safe passage.
Therefore, she guarded her tracks and took flight through the spine of the Storlain Mountains. Travellers avoided those rugged wilds, far southward of the ancient pass at Lithmarin and well off the established route that linked land-bound trade with the deepwater harbour at Redburn. The hardy clanborn who trapped in the deep vales never ventured the high country alone. Few beyond the Fellowship Sorcerers braved the fault-line that bisected the continent where the collision of tectonic forces wrestled with titanic violence.
From the gouged channel of Instrell Bay, and against the primordial vistas of lava that bubbled the steam pots that bordered Scarpdale, the buckled strata of bed-rock ramped upwards. Towering white pinnacles scraped the sky’s roof, until the wracked terrain subsumed again and plunged into the reef-riddled fissure of South Strait. Where such mighty pressures shocked the earth’s bones, explosive shifts whiplashed the flux lines. Quakes tumbled the weathered scarps into slides, and spurts of destabilized electromagnetics erupted as howling gales.
A lone woman afoot was an insectile speck, tramping these trackless wilds. Overshadowed by clouds, or choked under the mist snagged on the vertical buttresses, Elaira journeyed where ice-falls and split rock keened to the savage winds. She laboured against the white-out blizzards that flayed her exposed skin like shot needles. Yet the same brutal elements also granted her a back-handed measure of safety. Storm and avalanche, and the roaring cataracts that tunnelled through
