The Shades of Winter a Novel of Averraine Read online

  “Right,” I said, once we’d gotten the sail stowed. I unbuckled my sword belt and laid it at the centre, at the foot of the mast, along with my knife.

  “We need to disarm. All the weapons in the centre, where they can be seen.”

  To say that there were objections would have been being kind. It was very likely that the entire kingdom of Keraine heard the whole thing. Well, I had known this wasn’t going to go over very well.

  “You’re mad as a dung-beetle, Tam.” That was Ingvold, trying to be tactful.

  “She’s more than mad,” Oddhi said. “She’s going to get us all killed, and for what?”

  “Look,” I said, after I’d decided they’d run out of the easy insults, “Arvid was quite clear. They don’t generally attack the unarmed. It’s some kind of honour-point for them.”

  Sigurd made a rude noise. “That’s just moon tales, Tam. Who does such a stupid thing, letting the weak and the careless set the rules?”

  “They do. They think a fight is no glory, if you don’t fight as equals. Arvid says that’s the only reason he was able to get into their ports. You have to let them know you mean no violence.”

  Ingvold shook his head. “Oddhi’s got the right of it. You’ll get us all killed.”

  “Well, what are our choices?” Raisa asked. “We’ve no food, no water. One more good squall, and I wouldn’t give a naked man’s odds in winter that we’d all get home in one piece. We’ve come this far on Tam’s advice. We might as well take this to the end.”

  She laid her axe and her short-sword down beside mine.

  “All of them, Raisa. Your dagger, too.”

  She grinned and tossed it down.

  After a moment, Audric pulled out his long knives and added them to the heap, and slowly, still grumbling that I was a demon-dragged madwoman leading them to death’s doorway, one by one, they all piled their weapons carefully together.

  We unshipped the oars, I reeled in and stowed the drift line, and then, for one fraught moment, we were caught turning sideways into the waves, with the water washing in over the strakes again. I managed, with some effort, to heave on the steering oar and the little boat turned back towards the shore.

  This was it. If Arvid had been mistaken or had been pulling my leg, we were done for. If not, well, it was beginning to dawn on me that this could still be the very definition of a fool’s errand, and that all the wise of Keraine might not be able to help us, even if their warriors let us live long enough to ask.

  The current dropped suddenly, and the fight against the waves eased. We were rowing steadily, evenly, and now the vague outlines of the port were resolving themselves into a jumble of wharves and jetties, and long, narrow, thatch-covered buildings.

  And people. A lot of people. I was aiming for the centre of the river-mouth and concentrating on looking straight ahead, but out of the corner of my eye, I could see crowds assembling on the wooden docks, watching us as we came ever closer to Keraine.

  They didn’t seem frightened. Well, who would be scared of a bedraggled bit of flotsam like this? No matter how out of the ordinary our sudden arrival was, there wasn’t enough room for a little fishing boat like this to house any real danger, even if it had been crewed entirely with heroes out of the oldest legends.

  “Ware,” Elke said. She couldn’t row, obviously, in her condition, so we’d left her propped up against the side, with a clear view of the eastern shore.

  Two wide boats, both much bigger than ours, had slipped in silently to either side of us, their rowers matching our speed to a nicety, and I was doubly glad, now, that I’d insisted on disarming. The weapons pile would be clearly visible to them.

  We must have looked singularly unimpressive, anyway. We were stringy-haired, filthy, exhausted and unbelievably tense - I don’t think any of us had ever felt so vulnerable in years.

  “Don’t look at them,” I said, low-voiced. “Just keep to your oars. They won’t do anything to us if we don’t give them a reason.”

  We were past the main part of Dungarrow now. The buildings were further apart, and there were only a few small, wooden docks jutting out into the river. Beyond that, it was all open farmland. It looked so vast, miles and miles of rich, green pastures and fields of grain, stretching out to the horizon. It would take all your time just to till it every year.

  No wonder they didn’t go raiding.

  I squinted. The island could now be seen on the horizon. I hoped the landing places were obvious. It would be awkward to have to ask, at this point.

  I needn’t have worried.

  • • •

  People have always told stories of the holy isle of Braide, even in Raeth. In my mind, I had seen it as impossibly high and grand, some kind of gleaming city of pale stone and tall spires. A child’s vision, if you will, of the great cities of the south, but more perfect, more beautiful, more filled with riches and mystical lore.

  I was surprised, therefore, that it appeared merely as an ordinary island. Greener, perhaps, and in the sudden sunlight, somehow much less mighty than I’d imagined. Many of the buildings I could see were low, only a storey or two high, made of white-washed daub and wattle, and roofed with thatch, for the most part, although a few sported dark red tiling.

  The landing place was the only real mark of grandeur, and fortunately obvious: a series of huge stone piers reaching towards the eastern shore, and above us, on those smoothly cobbled spaces, a group of people were waiting for us, looking improbably cheerful in brightly coloured clothes, when they weren’t flashing with polished ring-mail.

  Well, I’d have a tale to rival Arvid or Bolle, if ever I saw home again, anyway. At the single-chain mark, the Kyndred pushed mightily on their oars to slow our forward surge, and smoothly, without words, shipped them, and slid the craft into the mooring place below that crowd.

  One of the assembled came to the bottom of the steps and reached down for the rope Lavran offered up. I had scrambled to the bow to stand beside him, and the man nodded to me and jerked his head towards the short flight of stone steps beside us.

  I stepped lightly over the side and onto the stone pier, and then stopped. The tension in the air was a tangible thing. I could have cut it with my eating-knife.

  The group at the top of the stairs moved slightly, and I saw above me a woman in a long blue robe, not old, not so much older than me, at least, but old enough, strong-faced and giving nothing away.

  This would be one of their wise. One of their important wise, if the respectful distance the rest of them were giving her was anything to go by.

  For a long moment, we merely looked at each other, both wondering, I suppose, just what the form was for this completely unbelievable event. For hours, I’d been rehearsing in my head the words I needed to say in Averran, the words that might get us a hearing instead of an execution.

  My mouth was dry. I swallowed, and hoped for the best.

  “Please,” I said. It came out like a frog’s croak. I swallowed again, licking my wind-cracked lips, and repeated, a little more evenly, “Please. One of us is badly hurt in a way we do not understand, and we seek aid and counsel of the wise.”

  The woman at the head of the stairs tilted her head a little to one side, as if she could not quite take in my words.

  My heart sank. This wasn’t going to work, and I couldn’t blame anyone but myself for a useless gamble. I might have felt the same as her, if a boatload of warriors out of Keraine had rowed up to Dyrsholt out of the blue.

  But then she surprised me.

  “I see,” she said, in careful, perfect Istraan. “Yet, it seems strange. Why should we give counsel and aid to a pack of pirates?”

  It was a good question, I thought. I had asked it of myself, a few times, in the last hours.

  “Well, as to that, Raeth doesn’t raid into Keraine.”

  “So you say. What difference is one thief or another, for the robbed?”

  She had a point. It had sounded pretty feeble, even to me.


  “There is,” I said, reluctantly, “another thing. A thing that may be connected to this. Something that might threaten your lands, too, if left unhindered.”

  She was studying me hard. They all were, and on top of that, I could feel a few sets of eyes boring into my back. The Kyndred hadn’t wanted me to mention this, and I hadn’t quite disagreed.

  Still, if we wanted their aid, we had to give the wise something, even if that something was an unbelievable tale of a curse long dead and buried.

  She turned away and said some things in Averran, rapid and soft. I couldn’t catch the words. Several of the people around her left, looking confused and somewhat discontented.

  She turned again, and moved back towards the stairs. The mail-clad man closest to her reached out, laying an almost reproving hand on her upper arm and said, “Great Mother! It isn’t -”

  The look she fixed on him was glacial.

  “Were my words unclear?”

  His hand fell away. “No, Great Mother.”

  If you throw yourself on someone else’s mercy and ask for aid, of course, you lose the right to pick and choose as to what form that aid comes in.

  And from the moment her feet hit our deck, we were powerless. In less than the time it took for her to walk the length of the little craft, two other wise ones arrived and began to carefully untie and move a suddenly quiet and acquiescent Njall away up the steps.

  Then she noticed Elke’s obvious weakened state and her eyes met mine in a look of barely-concealed irritation, as if I were a wayward child. My muttered excuse that we could manage Elke’s wound well enough did not impress her. On her barked command, another pair of wise came down the steps and took Elke into their charge, while we stood open-mouthed and fairly witless.

  At her impatient gesture, we stumbled obediently up onto the quay. It didn’t seem that they would be killing us out of hand, not immediately anyway, given the gentle care with which they’d handled Njall and Elke, but what, precisely, this woman meant to do with us was still unclear.

  “Faelan, take these ones to the guesting place,” she said to the man who’d tried to stop her from boarding our boat. “See them settled. And you,” here she fixed her stern gaze on me, “You seem to be the voice in this. You can come and explain yourself.”

  I nodded. She wouldn’t know how we were, amongst ourselves. To her, I was some kind of leader here, and at this point, it looked as if my Kyndred agreed. None of them objected aloud, at least, although they gifted me with sardonic smirks as they passed; better you than me being the gist of it. If it got them out of trying to explain the last few entirely ridiculous days we’d spent, well, they were all for that.

  And I couldn’t quarrel with them. They were right enough, and if it garnered them a little food and some longed-for sleep, they deserved it.

  Besides, I found that I trusted this woman, perilous stranger of a perilous country though she was. It took me a good few minutes to understand why: I followed her away from the landing stones, across a wide, open, green space and along a tree-lined pathway, to one of the grander looking buildings. We walked up a wide stairway into a sunlit room that seemed to be some kind of place for keeping those odd calfskin bundles and other arcane things that southerners are so fond of, but it wasn’t until she had cleared the room of its occupants after some incomprehensible conversations, and motioned me to a low-backed chair beside a table covered with those vellum leaves and other strange objects, that I understood why.

  She reminded me, rather forcibly, of my mother.

  Chapter 15

  She’d had a hard time breathing, those last few days, my mother, but it hadn’t stopped her from giving me a detailed list of my new obligations, and telling me in rather accusatory accents that it was high time I took over attending to my lands myself. And then, remarkably, she said she had every faith in me.

  I wanted to ask her why she suddenly thought so. Dyrsholt had been her whole life: she had put her entire self into saving what she could from rack and ruin, had done everything she could to restore not merely our clan’s fortunes, but our reputation, or so she had always said. No one else, not even Rei, had prised even the tiniest bit of power from her grip.

  I wanted to ask her why she was abandoning us. Why she was abandoning me. But I couldn’t find the words. I had never been able to find the words.

  We’d propped her body up in the stone boat of her burial mound, her back as weaving-rod straight as it had ever been in life, and all around her we placed the things we thought would please her, and we’d covered it all over with wood and then earth. By the following spring, it was covered with new grasses and wildflowers, but the sheep refused to graze there, which struck me as fitting. Even in death, she was a formidable presence.

  And the woman seated across from me now? Power sat on her as comfortably as a favourite winter cloak. It had been a long time, I reckoned, since anyone had seriously questioned her judgement or her decisions. She wasn’t someone you could lie to, either, not easily or without danger, that was certain.

  “The healers,” she said, briskly, “say they need more knowledge of what ails your friend. He speaks no Averran, I gather?”

  “No. It wouldn’t help if he did.”

  “Well, then?”

  “He doesn’t know who he is. He thinks he is someone else. Someone impossible.”

  “You can’t be a little more forthcoming? Look,” she leaned forward and spread her hands out in front of her on the table. “I understand your problem. It’s hard enough to trust anyone these days. But you trusted enough to come to us. What have you got to lose?”

  Everything, I thought. Everything, and then some. But I couldn’t debate this, because my mind was racing. I had no idea of what the wise of Keraine might need in order to unchain Njall’s clouded mind. Did I really know, even now, all that they’d done to him, down underneath the fortress on Alvandir?

  I was saved, for just a little while, by a scratch at the door, and then a young boy appeared, advancing nervously into the room.

  He didn’t look at me at all. He didn’t speak. He came just far enough into the room to manage his task, which consisted of setting a cloth-covered tray on the edge of the table as far away from me as physically possible, and the instant that the woman nodded to him, he fled.

  It occurred to me that he had briefly been caught between the wind and the waves: two fierce old women, both as dangerous, in his eyes, probably, as any winter’s storm. I wondered, amused, which one of us had frightened him more.

  There was a cup of wine in my hand. There was some bread, and a soft cheese, and two thin slices of grilled mutton on the plate in front of me. I didn’t stop for so much as a moment of thought or courtesy. I ate and drank, conscious of her eyes watching me, but uncaring, because at least while I was chewing, I wasn’t telling her anything I might later regret.

  I tossed back the last of the wine and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. Took a deep breath. Well, in for an ounce of silver, in for a pound, as the saying goes, and maybe a little deference wouldn’t come amiss.

  “Great Mother,” I began, and then stopped, because her expression was so comical. Half sympathy and half holding back unseemly laughter, I reckoned. “Is that not the right phrase? I thought…” my voice trailed off, embarrassed.

  “No, no,” she said. “It isn’t quite - well, I can see how you might have understood it so. But not quite that.”

  She paused, searching for the right words in Istraan. “More like ‘respected’, I think. And, perhaps, a little more.”

  “Ah,” I said. “I see.” I didn’t, not entirely, but Averran was a twisty thing. They had a dozen shades of meaning to every word, according to Arvid.

  “The thing is, I don’t know what’s to the point. I mean, it’s a damnable business, and I’m no wise one, to tell what matters in this. I’m not sure where to start.”

  “Start at the beginning, then. That’s the customary place, I believe.”

  I look
ed at my feet. There was a rip in the leather, just beginning to show near the toe of my boot, and the absent thought that I would need to sweet-talk Raisa into mending it for me before it got worse crossed my mind.

  Where does anything truly start?

  Chapter 16

  We were young, and we thought we would die.

  Almost before the embers of Katla’s funeral pyre had cooled, Raeth had been at war with Istara, although for the first year, no outright violence occurred.

  The Kyndred spent this time going from hall to hall, and steading to steading, shoring up support for the new king, warning of dangers, counting warriors’ noses and then reporting back to Njall on what he could rely on. In this, Hrolf was our best weapon. His loyalty and trust in his brother shone out like a beacon. We could see that for the older landholders and Jarls especially, this counted for a lot. They could remember the blood that had been spilled when Katla inherited, you see, and they didn’t want to go back to that.

  Njall, born after Katla had outfought, outwitted, and outlived anyone who thought to challenge her, was in a wholly different category. He was young, to be sure, and that was held against him by some, but he had the ability to seem as uncomplicated and sunny as his mother had been hard-headed and cunning.

  We knew him differently, of course. He was in some ways much shrewder than his mother had been, and he saw into the heart of things in a way that was sometimes uncanny, but then again, he wasn’t untried in the way Katla had been when she was merely her father’s heir. She had made sure he was seen as an authority in his own right early on. She knew too well the chanciness of fate.

  So the folk were halfway on his side to begin with, and we were ready when the ice melted and the winds changed. We had honed our weapons, we had sharpened our spears, and we knew what to expect.

  That year, it was just the usual stand-off. Istara raided a number of places. We fought them off, and raided a few of their places. Then they fought us off, and the whole thing was repeated until autumn, when even the hardiest warrior remembered that icy decks and frozen sail ropes would be a bloody nuisance, and that they would be smarter to go home and get the harvest in.