‘Stand down!’ Santiren snapped, and Marcantor scowled at her. She was nobody he should need to take orders from. Paladrya was gone.
‘Marcantor,’ the boy heard his own voice shake, ‘please, stand down.’
The tall Dart-kinden regarded him archly for a moment, seeing in the boy only the cause of his banishment to this alien place, then something broke inside him. He grounded his spear, its tip rattling branches, and for a moment his long face held nothing but an exhausted sadness.
‘Cynthaen,’ Santiren interrupted. ‘You know me.’
The knife was gone from the strange woman’s hand. Dismissing Marcantor entirely, she focused again on the Dart-kinden woman. ‘You I know – these others, not so much.’ The boy had to pass her words back and forth in his head before he could interpret them.
‘We have our compact,’ Santiren said, ‘and you understand what I mean. We call upon you.’
The boy watched curiously. This was something he knew nothing of, this touching of fingers across the shoreline. Santiren’s kin, though, had come from strange places before her mother made a home within the colony. Paladryra had known. Paladrya always knew.
The land-kinden woman’s harsh stare turned suddenly towards the boy. ‘You, I know,’ she repeated. ‘This other, he’s like your brother, so I know him, but not this child. Not the woman who was with you. You cannot think I’d help Spider-kinden. No compact binds me to that.’
The boy just stared at her, and he was thinking, To be all the time in this cold and tangled place? All the time, and never once to step into the waters? How can she live? How can anything live here, exposed to this awful openness?
‘What is Spider-kinden?’ Santiren asked. ‘We know of no Spider-kinden.’
The land-kinden’s eyes flicked in her direction without ever ceasing to look at the boy. He saw the likeness, then, in the way she stood, in that hard-edged face. She is like the Swiftclaw, I think, save that she has hair and they have none. Is it just the likeness, then? Or is she a killer, inside, like them?
‘Boy,’ the land-kinden woman addressed him directly. He saw Marcantor shift, angry at this lack of respect, but that knife was still somewhere, and now the woman was very close to his charge.
‘I listen,’ the boy said to her. She crouched a little, staring very closely at his face.
‘Spider-kinden,’ she spat, ‘you and that woman. I should kill you here. Were she still here, I would kill her without a thought.’ Her eyes, slanting and brown, bored into his. ‘You fear me.’
‘Why should I fear you?’ he got out. He hoped she took any shivering for the cold. For I can show no fear, not to the Swiftclaw-kinden, nor to her.
‘I can kill you,’ she hissed. ‘I’ve been killing Spider-kinden since before you were born. I need no reason.’
He stared into her face, exotic and uncompromising. ‘I have been driven from my home into this dark place by my enemies, yet I do not fear them. How could I fear you, who can do so much less.’ His voice was definitely trembling by the end, beyond his control.
He noticed the smallest tug at the corner of her mouth. ‘No Spider-kinden ever knew such eyes as you, boy. So large, such a colour.’ She straightened up. Without any concrete change, the threat had evaporated from her. ‘I am Cynthaen,’ she told them. ‘Santiren knows me, and we have our compact.’ The boy saw Santiren sag with relief at that statement, although she had masked her worry well.
‘You cannot stay here,’ Cynthaen added, ‘not amongst my people. They will not be as restrained as me. They will kill the boy, or give him to the beasts of the forest. He looks too like our enemies.’
‘But our compact-’ Santiren started to say, and Cynthaen cut her off with a short gesture.
‘Our compact holds. I will find your boy somewhere to hide.’ A smile made it to her face at last. ‘I know just the place, but you must be swift. Follow me and never leave my presence, or you will surely die, compact or no.’
‘What’s in it for her?’ Marcantor demanded, following Cynthaen as closely as he could, through the tangle of roots and branches.
‘Quiet, Marcantor,’ Santiren warned him from the back.
‘Tell me. What’s this compact?’ he pressed. He was in a foul mood, cold and scratched, limping like all of them. This new place was not kind to bare feet.
‘I’ll tell you,’ came Cynthaen’s voice.
Marcantor hissed at her angrily, but the boy said, ‘I would hear it, if you would tell us. You are helping us, and therefore we have no right to an answer, but I would hear it.’
The land-kinden woman stopped at that, turning back to gaze at him with a slight smile on her face. The boy decided that she was pretty when she smiled like that. Not beautiful like Paladrya, but there was something in her exotic features that could be appealing, when she tried.
‘I’ll tell you,’ Cynthaen said, turning and heading off again. ‘Only a little. What little there’s left. Go back long enough, you know, we were the masters of everything, or our masters were. Better times then. Age of Lore. Everyone knows it.’
The boy had to strain to hear her, to sieve the words from the quick, accented speech.
‘Then it all went to the pyre. We used to roam everywhere. Now, just a few places left where we can keep them out. So many traditions lost. What was a whole Hold once, now just a few families to it. The old ways, gone now, most of them, or going. We’re all on each other’s toes. Can’t keep hold of what used to be the important things. The differences. The traditions.’
She led them on for quite a while without speaking further, and the boy tried to work out if she had answered him somehow, lost in those rapid, disjointed phrases, or not. Then she said: ‘They still call us Fisher- kinden sometimes. My family and a couple of others who keep the Sea Watch. We’re all that’s left of the original Felyal, before all these other types ended up here. They think we’re strange. They don’t care about us. Still, there’s none that can bring in a netful like us. That’s right, isn’t it, Santiren?’
‘That’s right,’ came the Dart-kinden woman’s patient voice. The boy was still trying to come to some understanding of what was being said, the ‘Felyal’ and the ‘netful’ and the rest.
‘When we go to the beach on the last moon,’ Cynthaen went on more slowly, sounding wistful, ‘when we dance and cast our gifts, when our seers close their eyes they hear your folk down below. The compact is made again. The others don’t understand.’
I don’t understand, the boy thought, but he thought again of Santiren’s kin, the nomad places where her family hunted. Magic, he knew. Magic was in it, this talk of dancing, the magic of the turn of the year: longest night and shortest day, last full moon and winter tides. He was no magician but he realized there was magic in all these things.
Marcantor stumbled and cursed, clutching at his ankle. Cynthaen turned and regarded them pityingly. ‘You people never heard of sandals, I’m gathering.’
The boy, whose own feet were sore and raw, said, ‘What is sandals?’ That took her by surprise, for it was clear she had not been serious. She studied them again, the thin cloaks covering light armour for two warriors, – armour that left thighs and upper arms bare, to move more swiftly. The cloak covering a kilt and then bare skin, for the boy. Something of the strangeness of them – such as they had already seen in her – touched her, and she shivered.
We are strange reflections of each other, the boy thought. And the mirror is the sea’s edge. By force of habit, he tried to fashion a couplet from the thought, but the cold and the pain and the yawning sky robbed him of the power.
‘You stay here, now,’ she told them. ‘Can you hide? Hide, if you can. Don’t come out for anyone but me.’ She made a spitting noise. ‘Fact is, if my people find you, like as not you’ll be dead anyway.’
She was gone abruptly, slipping off through the forest of stiff, interweaving trees and into the dark. So still, here, the boy thought. Everything is so still and rigid and heavy, frozen and cold.
‘Hide,’ Santiren urged him. ‘Marcantor and I will stand and watch.’ She hefted her spear, even though, in the close clutter of branches, it would be an awkward weapon.
The boy called upon his Art. That took a few moments, in this unfamiliar place, but he found it calmed him, as the colours rose within his skin, flowing over his arms and legs, matching themselves to the plantlife around him – at first awkwardly, then more and more naturally. He let out a long, calm sigh.
The night forest around them was full of noises. It was another jarring, alien aspect of this place. Things
