Initiate’s Trial: First book of Sword of the Canon

Quick to seize advantage, the elusive creature slipped past, light of step as a thief, or a ghost. He crouched by the sharpening wheel, hefted the knife, and industriously started to dress out his game.

‘The man will have breakfast,’ Tarens said, calm.

‘We still can’t upkeep him!’ Kerelie whispered, remorseful for the tight-fisted need to hoard their dwindled resources.

‘We’ll discuss that,’ Tarens temporized. ‘Inside.’ The cold numbed his unshod feet, and coatless, his unlaced shirt made him shiver. Time enough later to broach the matter of coins: the gifted silvers left stacked by his pillow added up to a threefold repayment, though he feared the sweet little cache had been stolen.

As though the wary thought had been spoken, the beggarman stiffened. Though the distressed reaction was swiftly curbed, the subtlety did not escape Tarens’s notice.

Recognition followed, as both men locked eyes. Then the vagabond drew an offended breath. He laid aside his half-gutted hare and gently set down the knife. Deliberate, he wiped his blood-smeared fingers clean on a twist of dry straw. Then he stood. Reproachful, his attention on Tarens’s broad features, he cocked his head to one side.

The large-boned crofter was swept by raw chills. Raked over like prey by a raptor’s inspection, Tarens tightened his grip on the poker.

But the beggarman only dug into the patch pocket stitched to his threadbare breeches. He fished out a creased paper. The unfolded sheet was offered to Tarens, distinct in respect for the threat of cold iron poised yet for a defensive strike.

Muscled enough from the plough to break oak, the blond crofter towered above him.

‘What does the note say?’ prompted Kerelie.

Tarens risked a look downwards. The inked scrawl was the brewer’s, and the words a receipt for three silvers, paid labour, with the outstanding promise for a pint of beer at the Candle Mark Tavern.

The supplicant hand was a beggar’s, the broken nails rimmed black with dirt. But the courtesy was not commonplace that tucked Tarens’s fingers over the written proof, then emphatically shoved off his fist with the voucher nestled inside.

Crisp as any statement, the stranger’s stung pride.

Shown an astringent reproof to strip skin, Tarens gaped, as awkward with shame as the sister caught aback before him.

Then the pause broke to the whiff of smoke wafted on the morning breeze.

‘Breakfast!’ yelped Kerelie. ‘Plaguing fiends take it! I’ve stupidly scorched Efflin’s porridge.’ Skirt stoutly bundled, she bolted for the cottage, still railing over her shoulder, ‘I’ll serve a fourth portion. But over my last shred of common sense, yon shifty fellow’s not coming inside!’

Tarens chose not to mention the snag, that her adamant boundary had been crossed already.

He grinned at the odd little beggar, then shared a wink of conspiracy. ‘Don’t make my mistakes, man. She barks and she bites, though you’ll find her bluster hides a soft heart.’ Just as mindfully fair, he placed his appeal for forgiveness. ‘I’ll wager your generous portion of beer that Kerelie’d bunk in the hayloft herself before she makes a destitute visitor shiver out in the cold.’

The stranger laughed, a strikingly musical sound that belied his feral appearance. Perhaps, Tarens thought, he was a born mute, until in forthright honour he touched his closed fist to his forehead. The quaint custom suggested disturbing origins. Barbarians who trapped for pelts in Tornir Peaks used the same gesture to seal their agreements.

Tarens frowned. The last dedicate purge to clear clanblood had happened before his sister’s birth. She did not share his graphic memories from early childhood: of dead men roped by the heels behind horses; or the riders, who boasted the gory tatters of scalps cut for bounty, then sewed as trophies onto their saddle-cloths. The head-hunters’ leagues still patrolled the wilds, though clan numbers had yet to recover. Everywhere persecuted by the Light’s True Sect, the secretive few who survived skulked deep in the high country. They showed themselves rarely, and only in dire hunger, when their gaunt men dared the illicit trade of raw furs to garner provisions. The penalty upon capture brought them swift execution by public dismemberment.

Tarens gripped his poker with redoubled unease. Kerelie’s fears were ­misdirected, not groundless: the cagy vagabond might play at speechlessness to conceal a clan accent. Certainly his practised skill with a snare suggested a forester’s upbringing.

‘How much are we at risk by your presence, my friend?’ Tarens asked, very softly. Town law on the matter was ruthless: to knowingly shelter an old blood descendant was to risk being branded as heretic, then outlawed, with the forfeit of all goods and property bound over by temple decree.

His shaken question received no reply. Not deaf, perhaps circumspect, the odd man retired to his unobtrusive place by the whetstone. There, he bent to his diligent work, deboning the meat from his carcasses.

Tarens stayed reluctant to voice his concern on return to the warm, cottage kitchen. Amid the wax polish of Aunt Saffie’s plate cupboards, surrounded by limed brick and the comfort of the faded braid rug patched with sun through the casement, his sister’s sensible antipathy towards rootless beggary seemed uncharitable.

‘We don’t know what connection he may have with the Koriathain. Or why his own kinsfolk abandoned him.’ Determined to worry the subject to closure, Kerelie removed the tin spoon from the pot of singed oatmeal, then stomped outside in prim displeasure. She left a scorched portion slung up on the meat-hook under the eave by the threshold.

She returned with a scalded palm wrapped in her skirt. ‘Let that starveling bolt down the miserable fare with his hands. He’ll learn fast enough we can’t pay him for field work. I’d have him shove off to a wealthier croft. Surely it’s better that his earnest work should receive a fair daily wage.’

She banged the door closed, shot the bar, muttering, and flung the clotted spoon into the wash-basin. Spattered by dish-water, Tarens collected his abandoned stockings and boots. Aware he rightfully should feel relieved that his sister’s position stayed adamant, he sat at the plank table and gouged his soles with large thumbs to ease his numbed feet. Against his straight grain, he silenced his doubts, while Kerelie scooped a new measure of oats and ladled fresh water into the spare cauldron. She swung the replenished pot over the coals, stirring with fierce concentration. Sun through the window-panes lit her savaged cheek, striped by the shadows of the mulberry boughs outside the whitewashed cottage. Within, the awkward, sealed quiet extended, cut by the rasping cough that laid Efflin low in the next room.

‘Divine Light keep us!’ Kerelie snapped. Exasperated by the worry that cramped her preferred generosity, she grabbed a wooden bowl, dipped her ladle, and plonked the steaming gruel onto the trestle in front of her brother. ‘I’m not being a pinch-fist! We’ve got to recoup from our losses and heal before we sweat over strangers!’

Tarens swallowed his food, left with nothing to say. Self-reproach made his limpid blue eyes seem accusing as his sister unsealed the last crock of summer honey and consigned it to the tray for the sick-room.

‘Quit moping, can’t you?’ Kerelie sighed. ‘The harder heart would have tossed that burned meal in the hen coop to fatten the poultry.’

She was right. Tarens ate and tried not to dwell on the penalties meted out to sympathizers who treated with renegade clanblood. Kelsing fell under the long shadow of Erdane, temple seat of the True Sect’s high priesthood. Here, a man upheld canon law if he valued his family’s prosperity. Yet hard common sense failed to ease his torn conscience concerning the wretch sheltered inside the barn.

Though today’s breakfast might soon be a luxury, Tarens scraped his bowl clean without savour.

When he arose and tramped out to split wood, he found the black pot on the porch left untouched. Past question, the stranger had noticed the offering. In an irony much too pat for coincidence, his neatly cleaned meat swung beneath, hung to season. Yet the hunter himself appeared nowhere in evidence. Two hours later, the cut fuel was stacked. Tarens sharpened the axe. He strode to the shed to stow the greased tool and caught Kerelie, angrily flinging the cold, congealed oatmeal into the pen for the chickens.

Startled, he laughed. ‘I see your rude table’s been spurned by the starving?’

She glared. One meaty fist stayed cocked on her hip, while the other threatened to shy the scorched pot at her brother’s insolent head. ‘See for yourself.’ She sniffed, her chin jerked towards the back of the barn, which cued Tarens to go and investigate. He encountered the ashes of a frugal fire, then the green stick lately used as a spit to roast the haunch of the hare.

‘Resourceful wee chap, I’ll give him that much. Goes out of his way not to take advantage.’ Tarens rubbed at a crick in his neck, sunk in thought, when Kerelie arrived to a bustle of skirts and stopped at arm’s length in distress.

‘How do you throw out a squatter who’s so damned resourcefully self-sufficient?’

‘You open your door to him?’ Tarens measured her sidelong.

But the lines fretted into his sister’s brow stemmed from another quarter. ‘I need you to go back to Kelsing and fetch a tisane for Efflin.’

Tarens’s startled glance met her anxiety straight on.

She added, upset, ‘His fever is soaring. Worse, that wet cough’s settled into his chest with a speed that is dreadfully frightening.’

Tarens’s blunt features drained, his bruised eye tinged grotesquely purple and yellow beneath his rumpled, fair hair. ‘Can’t be the same fever!’

Kerelie chewed her lip.

‘Can’t be!’ Tarens insisted, rock stubborn. ‘Efflin’s always been strong as an ox. Surely he’s just stuffed up and grouchy.’

Kerelie shook her head, then spun, blinking back desperate tears. ‘Not today.’

Tarens stifled the surge of his helpless anger. Bad luck was too busy, and setting a clutch, if the malady that had reaped half of their family struck again and took their older brother.

‘You know the Light’s priests claim we owe retribution,’ his sister said, muffled. She swiped at wet eyes, then knotted her damp palms in her skirt. ‘Grace fled, they say, since corruption divided the faithful.’

Tarens slammed the axe into the top of a fence-post with the raw force to split oak. ‘I won’t swallow the doom in the priest’s windy scriptures! Or their guilt, which wrings piteous offerings out of the masses.’ He rejected the afflicted belief, that the blight of disease was justified punishment for the Great Schism caused when heaven’s sent avatar turned apostate and denounced the blessed Light’s doctrine. ‘Cattle sicken,’ he added, ‘in years when they’re stressed, or when a fulsome herd overgrazes their pasture.’

Other rumours sprung from barbarian sources claimed the ailments stemmed from the waning surge of the flux lines. The land’s health, they held, was starved thin near the towns, where the flow of the mysteries no longer flourished. But no initiate talent from that ancient heritage dared to step forward or challenge the fires of rampant theology. Not with the practice of herb witchery and magecraft crushed under an interdict with a death sentence.

‘Just go,’ Kerelie urged, breaking off the debate. ‘Tell the apothecary we also need a flask of syrup to ease a raw throat.’