in offence. ‘Most women turn into simpering idiots shown a damned fool with an injury!’
‘And you never dote on the lame ducks, yourself? Then I don’t smell cinnamon bread in that basket, and we all never noticed how much you loathe baking.’ Tarens’s snorted laughter transformed to a cough, as her toe poked into his banged ribs. Sobered, not chastised, he ploughed ahead, ‘A bashed eye from a bull is no hero’s fare.’
‘The damaged tomcat better make himself scarce!’ Kerelie turned her unmarked cheek and warned, ‘Forbye, who said the basket was brought for your sake?’
Tarens laughed, boyish dimples and handsome features rugged with the sunburn peel on his hawk nose. ‘Never claimed, did I, that you had good taste.’ Sheepish, he ducked Efflin’s fraternal cuff and avoided being knocked off the wagon seat.
‘You randy louts!’ Kerelie shrieked. ‘Your manners alone will wreck my last hope of netting a decent husband!’
But Efflin wheezed because he was chuckling. The three of them never could stay at odds for long. ‘Doused in beef juice,’ he quipped, ‘your smell’s about right.’
‘To impress someone’s hog? Good thing, then, we need to,’ Tarens said, suddenly serious. As his sister glared back, fair brows pinched with outrage, he winked. ‘Lure ourselves a stud pig, that’s the issue, directly. Her highness at home’s stopped producing.’ Owlish, he added, ‘That’s been true since the night Efflin downed uncle’s stash of rye whiskey. Did you know he mistook the stall with the cow? I caught him shoved in with the farrow, his lewd mitts busy squeezing the sow’s udder.’
The chickens were left their free take of the fruit as Kerelie groaned, giggles muffled behind her chapped palms. She tried not to imagine what might have prompted that odd bout of maudlin drunkenness.
‘Oink,’ Tarens gasped, then dodged like a weasel, aware he had earned another black eye from his brother’s punitive fist.
But no trouncing rejoinder hammered him flat.
Efflin was too busy, hauling back on the reins to slow the yoked plod of the ox. Abused leather harness squeaked in complaint. The trundling wagon slewed in the ruts and jerked the bullock on its short tether. Through the bucketing creak as stout wood took the strain, the vehicle ground to a stop just in time to avoid the odd fellow whose aimless stance blocked the roadway.
‘Light’s grace!’ exclaimed Kerelie, above the distressed cackle of upended hens. ‘Is that someone’s lost child?’
But the drifting mist unveiled a grown man, mistaken by his slight stature. Back turned, unaware that his loitering obstructed traffic, he wore a laborer’s seedy clothes. The hard-worn cloth had been repeatedly mended, the original color lost beneath a tatterdemalion motley of patches. His stained knee breeches, napped hose, and holed shoes were dirt-caked, their style beyond recognition. Filthy hair nested with snapped twigs and leaves hung in snarled hanks to his shoulders.
Efflin’s shout did not chase him out of the thoroughfare but raised a flinch that near startled him out of his skin. His unkempt face turned. An unshaven black tangle of beard buried most of his features. Not the whites of his eyes, distinct with alarm as he stared in blank shock. Despite his sad state of frightful neglect, his manner seemed too confused to be dangerous. His empty hands dangled, unthreatening.
Nonetheless, Efflin reached for the cudgel wedged behind the cart’s buckboard.
‘That’s no marauding bandit.’ Tarens’s urgent grip on his brother’s wrist checked the move to brandish the weapon.
‘You’re that sure he’s not been sent out as bait?’ Brass chinked, as Efflin tipped his hatted head towards the wood, where late-season briar laced the dense undergrowth, dank with fog, and impenetrable. ‘If that’s a tinker, then someone unfriendly’s already lifted his pack.’
‘Here?’ Kerelie scoffed, too riveted to brush out the hen feathers snagged in her sleeve. ‘Don’t be a fright-monger!’ Astute when it counted, she gestured towards the tipsy stone finials that loomed through the murk a stone’s throw to the left. Those moss-splotched markers were well-known, even feared, where the overgrown track branched off the trade-route.
Efflin’s ruddy face flamed. The site was no place for wise folk to linger. Travellers avoided the tangled lane, which led into the ancient ruin. Oftentimes, Koriathain practised their uncanny rituals there. When the enchantresses pitched their silken pavilions amid the tumble-down walls of the grounds, or if birch smoke rose from the crumbled chimneys, the charcoal men who cut trees for their kilns did their rough-house drinking in taverns, safe behind Kelsing’s brick walls. They spoke of queer doings in whispers, while the ivied remains of the Second Age hall were reclaimed by the order’s sisters. Nobody dared to stray past the wood or till the rich soil of the fallow pastures.
This had been true well before the Light’s avatar had tamed the Mistwraith’s malevolence. Older legends held that the place harboured haunts from the days before Mankind settled Athera.
Like most Taerlin crofters, Efflin and his family were blessed for the Light since their birth. They went out of their way to avoid the wild places where the mysteries were believed to linger. Such arcane trouble as walked in the world was best left to the dedicate priests. Sound sense suggested their wagon ought to be set rolling at once.
Except the bewildered man in the way displayed no inclination to move.
Efflin shook off his brother’s clamped hold. ‘Why not make yourself useful? Step down and shift that seedy fellow aside.’
‘I say he isn’t right in the head.’ Tarens flexed his shoulders to mask his uneasiness. Deliberate, as if nonchalant, he arose, ahead of the moment his sister lost patience and fetched him a kick on the backside. He slid to the ground. His solid build should deter anyone’s urge to pick a fight or try robbery.
‘Don’t place undue trust in mild appearances,’ Kerelie blurted, concerned.
‘Who’s the fright-monger, now?’ Yet Tarens honoured her anxious prompt and lifted his quarterstaff from the wagon-bed. Step by easy step, as though stalking a poised hare, he closed on the befuddled stranger.
The brazen creature regarded him, motionless. Close up, his eyes were a startling green, brilliantly clear, and focused to a frenetic intensity. Drilled by that keen survey, Tarens felt the bristle of hair at his nape. ‘Who are you?’ he asked, cautious.
The stranger presented his opened hands. If he understood language, he chose not to answer. His fixated regard never left Tarens’s face. Diviners who owned arcane Sight had that look: as though they could read a man, past and present, then project the unwritten course of his fortune and sense his future demise.
‘Who are you?’ Tarens repeated.
The man’s uncanny regard showed him emptiness. As though human speech chased his thoughts beyond desolate, he seemed absorbed by an unseen inner vista that stretched forlorn and unutterably lacking. He might stand on two legs as a man. But the rapt poignancy of his expression suggested he grasped no firm concept by which to define himself, or anything else in the world he inhabited.
Tarens shivered. Distrust dissolved to heart-rending pity, he pronounced in swift reassurance, ‘He’s a lack-wit.’
The queer fellow listened, head tipped to one side, but without sign of comprehension.
‘I
