Grand Conspiracy. Janny Wurts

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ

      Pawn

      On the moors of Araethura, the stars wheeled their inexorable passage across the black arc of the zenith. Midnight gave way to the small hours of night when the child, Fionn Areth, stirred and opened his eyes, unsure what dream had awakened him. The loft he shared with his siblings hung in darkness. Two older brothers had filched the wool blankets. Left to snuggle in a tangle of stale sheepskins, the younger ones lay twined like two mop-headed puppies.

      Outside, the winds scoured over the moorlands. Drafts hissed through the boards where vermin had hollowed out nests in the thatch. The rafters smelled of damp, musty broomstraw, and the grease left from boiled mutton stew. Fionn Areth shoved back his tangled black hair. The ends needed cutting, an embarrassment he resisted, since his mother would use the same shears she kept sharp to fleece the steading’s herd of goats. Ungroomed as the wind-tousled ponies on the moor, the boy levered himself up on one elbow.

      ‘Pisshead,’ grumbled the small brother he disturbed. ‘D’you have to thrash about like a nanny with the gripes?’

      ‘Stuff your face,’ Fionn whispered. While his sibling muttered and subsided back to sleep, he listened, certain that someone nearby had just spoken and called him by name.

      Below the loft ladder, the banked embers in the grate flared sullen orange as cold air eddied down the flue. The single-paned casement held whorled scrolls of frost, etched brilliant silver by moonlight. No one else stirred. His father’s saw-toothed snores rumbled uninterrupted through the downstairs doorway.

      The call came again, no true sound, but a beckoning presence that prickled the nape of his neck. Fionn Areth shivered. He sat up. A prodding compulsion would not let him keep still. Careful not to jostle the sprawled limbs of his brother, he clutched his nightshirt against his thin chest and slipped from the warmth of the sheep fleece. His bare feet made no sound as he padded through darkness and groped his way down the ladder.

      Gripped by the force of an uncanny summons, he reached the ground floor. A pause, while the arthritic herd dog by the hearth raised her muzzle to lick at his fingers.

      ‘Stay, Bounder,’ he commanded, and crept on.

      The dog slanted her black-tipped ears and whined. She was too well trained to disobey. Quivering unease rippled her brindle coat, and her liquid, dark eyes tracked the boy’s progress past the baskets of carding left piled beside his mother’s spinning wheel.

      ‘Bounder, stay home.’ Impelled by an urge that seemed spun from dreams, Fionn Areth pushed up the door bar and latch, and silently let himself out.

      The stone step was ice beneath his naked soles. More curious than cold, the boy stooped to scratch his scabbed shin, the one he had scraped while chasing a cat over a deadfall. The wind flapped his nightshirt and tousled his hair. Dry leaves still clinging to the crown of the scrub oak stirred like the whispers of old men. The ash trees beyond were already shorn. Their shadowy, thin skeletons flung contorted silhouettes against the stone wall by the hay byre. Stars burned in the autumn-still silence, while a risen half-moon lit the grass to a glittering, frost carpet of silver.

      A little afraid, Fionn Areth fetched the stick he used to feign swordplay. His birth augury promised him battles and fame, or so he bragged when the herd families gathered and his peers drove the goats in for counting.

      Already he could swing with a force to whistle air. When he slashed against the wind he imagined the sharp whine of tempered steel. Pressed on by his spurious craving for mischief, he decided to visit the orchard. On such a mad jaunt, he could fight shadow armies and spar with the crabbed boughs of the apple trees.

      He gained a new scrape scrambling over the wall. His mother would scold if she noticed. Nor would she let him run wild at night, undressed and without his warm jacket. The gusts bit and burned across his bare skin. Fionn Areth gnawed his lip, unsure. All at once, his bed in the loft seemed more inviting than battering a stupid old branch with his stick.

      ‘Fionn Areth!’ The call came pure as struck glass out of the air just behind him.

      The boy spun around.

      A lady in shimmering violet robes stood limned in the moonlight by the hay byre. She cupped a jewel as cool as a glacier. Her long hair was braided and pinned into a coil the gloss black of a raven against her cameo skin.

      Fionn Areth cried out. His terror redoubled as the crystal in the lady’s hands exploded into blank darkness. Sight became blinded. Ears became deaf. Launched to reflexive flight, the boy dislodged a rock from his perch on the dry wall. He overbalanced, fell, while the blackness expanded. Swallowed and suffocated, he never uttered the scream that struggled to burst from his throat.

      Elaira caught Fionn Areth’s limp body before the child struck the ground. ‘Merciful maker, that was ill done!’ She glared past the dark, tousled head now cradled against her shoulder.

      Unperturbed, Lirenda shielded the Skyron aquamarine inside a fold of her mantle. ‘I’d think you would thank me. If not, then you needn’t have argued my preference for sending him out on valerian.’

      ‘You could have broken his bones, or much worse,’ Elaira snapped. ‘If he takes any harm from your cavalier handling, may Dharkaron Avenger demand due redress in his name.’

      ‘Don’t welter in pity. We have what we came for.’ Dark-lashed topaz eyes examined the child’s slack form with contempt. ‘You’d rather he shouted and roused the herd dogs to alarm? I’d thought we agreed that our task would go better if the household stayed soundly sleeping.’

      ‘The poor boy’s half-frozen,’ Elaira flared back. ‘If we had to draw him outside through a dream summons, you could at least have left him a moment of clear thought to find himself suitable clothing.’

      ‘Loan him your jacket if you fear he’ll take cold.’ In malice, her senior added, ‘You’re sure to catch fleas for the kindness. Though given the uncivilized life on these moors, I suppose you’d have memorized the sigil of remedy for vermin out of necessity.’

      ‘We don’t have your city population of rats,’ Elaira pointed out, her jacket already stripped off. ‘They breed more pests than the herd dogs.’

      Lirenda picked a disdainful course between the broomstraw and briars, skirts raised to keep runs from the silk and her work satchel slung from her shoulder. Her kid boots she could do little to spare; the path through the orchard was a rut of gouged mud, slotted by goats and heaped with dung dropped by the steading’s milch cow. ‘Just don’t lag behind. We need to be finished before Althain’s Warden completes the new seals on that grimward.’

      Elaira ignored the admonishment. ‘Shame on us if Sethvir’s awareness is all that holds our order to common decency. Forgive me,’ she added to the child as she wrapped his sturdy form in the fleece still warmed from her body. On impulse, she retrieved his dropped practice stick and leaned it against the wall where he could find it. ‘The seeress who cast your birth prophecy was most wise. You’ll need to start young to master the skills of a warrior.’

      ‘Stop wasting time!’ Lirenda poised by the canted gate of the orchard. Sulky irritation sharpened her face as the moorland elements played havoc with her costly clothes and fine grooming. ‘I want the seal wards in place before our young decoy sits up and recovers his wits.’

      ‘Should he waken, I’ll manage quite well without help.’ Mud and briars posed Elaira СКАЧАТЬ