cart stayed unobtrusively parked, removed from the torch-lit bustle that ebbed and flowed through the crowded front inn-yard. The dusk shadows rapidly deepened to felt. By night, someone was bound to come on the sly to collect the black-market kegs. Before then, the stowed fugitives must make themselves scarce, a pressing urgency that Tarens grasped even while beset by relentless discomfort. His companion helped free him from the wrapped tarp. The crofter forced his battered body to move, shoved off through the loose hay, blundered over the casks, and clumsily crashed against the fastened tail-gate. He struggled to hoist his stiff frame overtop. The effort went badly. He dropped, his feet jolted into the ground, and crashed heavily to his knees. Light-headed dizziness crumpled him there, shuddering with his forehead pressed against the frigid cobbles.
‘You may have to leave me,’ he groaned in despair.
The sound of his voice raised a fearsome, low growl from the back of the stable. Apparently the inn kept a mastiff to forestall sneak thieves and chase off any freebooters who sought to bed down in the hayloft. One bark of alarm, and a heavy-set bloke with a cudgel would be drawn at a run to investigate.
The vagabond forsook Tarens’s side. The charmed touch that once mollified scrawny hens also settled the dog, which presently leaped on him, nuzzling. He scratched beneath its studded collar, then left it wagging its stub tail. He collected the furled tarp. A patience that did not seem hurried steadied Tarens’s tormented effort to stand. Unbalanced, the large man leaned on the smaller. Together, they managed the agonized shuffle towards the rear door of the stable. No one challenged their entry. The bustle at day’s end busied the staff, with the arrival of the public coach out of Cainford flooding the front yard with pitch torches and noise. A shrill woman scolded a crying child, while the head hostler’s roaring invective chased laggards to unstrap the guests’ baggage. Every groom not hot-walking outriders’ mounts became chewed over for laziness. Amid the commotion to unhitch the harness team, no slackers sidled off into the unlit crannies to loiter.
Softly as the whisper of wind, Tarens was eased in careful stages through the gloom between the dusty, back rows of stalls. Past the straight slots used to quarter cheap hacks, and the boxes for the quality livestock, the hay driver’s mules were tied up with the nags, munching nose-bags of oats. Across the aisle, a mountainously muscular bull jangled the chain that secured its nose-ring. Huge, black and furious, it pawed and swiped its capped horns, eager to trample all comers to mincemeat.
Which rampaging peril hooked the vagabond’s interest.
‘Here, let me,’ Tarens croaked. The late darling consigned to the knackers made him expertly skilled with brute-tempered bullocks. Since death by goring seemed preferable to facing the temple’s tribunal, he veered on unsteady legs and took up the goad he found hooked on a nail. Ceded the brazen initiative, one defensive arm clamped to his injured side, Tarens sucked a wheezed breath and staggered forward. He jabbed the bull’s flank. When it humped up and plunged, he judged his moment, shoved into the board stall, and dropped into a roll through the straw. Impetus carried him past the beast’s forelegs, then broke through a musty veil of old cobweb and fetched him into a huddle beneath the stout slats of the manger.
Just as agile, nipped in tight behind, the vagabond slithered into the fusty nook, still packing the tarp. While Tarens shuddered, vised helpless with cramps, his friend’s resourcefulness lined their noisome refuge with hay, then fashioned a makeshift bedroll. He tucked Tarens inside to get warm, then took charge of the goad and ducked out to pursue the necessities of their survival.
The crofter laid back his sore head, at last granted a measure of surcease. While the wind keened outside, and thickened flakes drifted into the season’s first snowfall, he gave way to the grief that seeped stinging tears through his bruised eyelids. Shortly, he slept. Or else unconsciousness granted its fugitive gift of oblivion.
Much later, he roused to the ice-kiss of snow, packed into a compress and pressed against the throb of his disfigured face. Shock drove the last gasp of breath from his lungs. Then the grate of his splintered nose drove him to whimpering agony. A warmed cup touched his lips. The vagabond gently coaxed Tarens to swallow a bitter brew of valerian mixed with willow bark. Drugged into a haze, he still had to be gagged to stifle his cries through the trauma of splinting. His crushed nose required reed straws and stuffed rags to redress such drastic damage. A skilled healer somewhere had trained the deft hands that ventured such bone-setter’s work without flinching.
The after-shock left Tarens dizzy and limp. Sweating, he languished. The oblivious bull chewed its cud overhead, while the relentless, doctoring fingers moved on and unlaced his ripped clothing. His skin was toweled clean with a wet burlap sack. Past question, the handling was expert: each cut and bruise was assessed, then plied with the strong remedies filched from the hostler’s stores in the tack room. The snow packs were replaced with a poultice of wintergreen mixed into goose grease and bound into place with the leg wraps kept for lame horses. The treatment was done in pitch-darkness throughout, quietly sure, without fumbling.
Legend held that born talent could see without light. The True Sect priesthood required no other sign to condemn any heretic charged with dark sorcery.
Tarens was too muddled to confront the dire proof or broach the issue of thorny morality. Whether spelled tricks or thievery had acquired the cup, or if dishonest practice had steeped the soporific tisane that eased him, the relief that dulled the mending sting of his cuts melted him into a stupor. As the braced flush of astringents soothed battered muscles, he swallowed the hot broth he was offered, then the second dose of valerian prepared to settle him. Adrift towards oblivion, he closed his eyes. If his soul had been traded for craven survival, his spirits were too low to care.
Deep in the night, he reawoke to the nightmare of searchers invading the stable with lanterns. This time in earnest, dedicates in white surcoats tossed through the straw in the horse stalls. Their shouts and commotion were joined by the clangour of the fire-bell, jangled to summon the hostler. The man shambled in, wrapped in flannel and beer breath. He climbed to the loft and kicked his sleepy grooms, until tousled horse-boys with hay in their hair tumbled, swearing, out of their blankets. Granted no chance to pull on their boots, they scurried on stockinged feet to fling open grain bins, lead out courier’s hacks, and shift haltered mules at the whim of the diligent task squad. More urgent outcries and pungent oaths filtered in from the carriage yard. Evidently the innkeeper’s outspoken wife fared no better in behalf of her rousted patrons as the temple’s foray swept through the tavern. Her curses blistered ears to no purpose. Pillows and blankets were put to the sword. Smoke laced by the stink of singed goose-down rolled in billows as the inn’s quilts and mattresses were torched in a heap. The fumes made the chained bullock bellow and paw. Its restive temper daunted the grooms, who cried blame on their fellows for the mislaid goad, inexplicably gone from its hook.
The troop captain gave their timid protests short shrift.
‘That vicious beast poses the least of your fears. A minion of Shadow’s at large in the district, and I’m under mandate to find him. Move that animal. Now! Or the ninny who shrinks will be put to the sword as a criminal collaborator.’
As the reluctant hostler shuffled in compliance, Tarens started to a touch on his arm, quickly followed by furtive movement in the stygian dark beneath the board manger. He had shot peas as a prank in his boyhood: often enough to know the sharp hiss of a reed being used as a blow-tube. Sliced light from a torch winkled out the flicked shine of a miniscule dart, let fly at short range.
Unseen by the guardsmen outside the stall, the missile struck the sensitive flesh of the bull’s lower lip.
The split-second glimpse as the brute backed up, snorting, showed Tarens the ingenious invention: a sliver of metal, feathered with a snippet of goose quill, affixed with a bit of wrapped thread. One recalled the old jacket claimed by the vagabond when
