‘All right, we’ll go on, then.’ Elaira picked her way to the next hummock without any thought to remount. Footing was chancy in the fens, where falling snow and fog could blend with Desh-thiere’s mist and turn visibility to a wall of featureless white. A traveller could stray from the trail between one step and the next and stay lost, to die of starvation or drowning. Sometimes old bones resurfaced in the sink-holes, clean-picked by scavenger fish.
Elaira slogged through a hollow, her boots already sodden from the iced-over, peat-brown puddles that never quite managed to take her weight. The cold was so bitter it hurt. To take her mind off discomfort, she noted the plants as she passed: the fibrous, half-rotted stems of marshmallow and sword-blade stands of cattails. Her mind catalogued them all, from the renwort whose berries brewed poison, to the cailcallow and willow bark valued to ease fevers. She saw through winter’s sere mantle where watercress would flourish and which hollows, clear of snow, held hotsprings that might harbour green felscrine. Healing herbs were part and parcel of Koriani learning, and lately Elaira had devoted herself to memorizing tedious recipes for tisanes.
As if with the annals of granny-lore and crumbled texts passed down by generations of dead herbalists she might help to bury the memory of one inopportune encounter in a tavern hayloft.
So intense was her concentration, and accustomed as she had become to the startling, raucous calls of marsh pheasants and the whirr of their wingbeats as they flew from her step, that she failed to notice the children until they were nearly upon her.
A motley band of seven, they were flying across the frozen streambeds on skates, clad in the same buff and browns as any other native creature of the fens. Yelling, screaming for pure pleasure, they raced and jostled through the stands of willow and mudbrake, until the mare shied back from their exuberance.
The snort of a horse where strangers seldom passed startled them. Heads turned, half-seen through the stands of silver-barked, vine-choked maple; then a chickadee’s trill cried warning. Their play ended in a scraping slide of bone runners as they whirled into hiding behind the thickets, hushing the youngest, who was frightened and starting to cry.
‘It’s all right!’ Elaira’s call raised no echo across what now seemed empty marsh. The pools lay pewter-grey against peat-black verges and the snow like salt-rime on the hummocks; the sleet had let up to a whisper. Through streaming shreds of mist, even the sedges did not rustle. ‘I won’t harm any of you. I don’t even carry a weapon.’
‘Show us,’ shouted a boy whose voice had just finished changing. ‘Throw off your cloak.’
Elaira swore under her breath. Wet as she was, the cold would cut through to her skin. She unhooked her ring brooch and shed the heavy wool, in time to get a drenching as the ungrateful mare shook her mane.
The enchantress wore no belt beyond a sash of knotted wool. The only metals on her were three talisman buttons fashioned of copper coins, charms she still wore out of sentiment from her days as a street thief, for luck; and the hunting knife last used to strip branches for snares that most maddeningly had trapped nothing. Yesterday’s supperpot had stayed empty.
‘Turn around,’ said the boy.
Elaira held her arms outstretched, and did so, though briars caught at her clothing. ‘I could use a dry place to sleep, and fresh supplies.’ Fighting a shiver that made her teeth chatter, she added, ‘I can pay.’
Around her, the children had begun to creep from concealment. They ranged in age from ten years to late teens, the bloom on their cheeks the only bright colour about them. Their clothing was fashioned of leather, small furs stitched together, and the woven fibres of fenland flax, all undyed. If most of them were dirty, their hair was brushed or braided, and each one carried little talismans of feathers, believed to be ward against drowning. Elaira threw on her cloak, which had fully had time to grow cold. She confronted a closing ring of wide, curious eyes, and said, ‘Of course, you do have a village?’
They led her off the trail, their shyness loosening into chatter. By their accent, Elaira guessed them to be descendants of farmers displaced by the rebellion; survivors sometimes banded with exiles, outcast from the coastal settlements for some petty misdeed committed forgotten generations in the past. Refuge could be found in the fens, or the mountains, or the wilds too open or too barren to support the more numerous clanborn. Forage in such backlands was scarce and the trust of the inhabitants reserved; yet they understood the grace of hospitality more than rich families in the towns. By the time Elaira had reached the circle of huts built of mudbrick and thatch, her mare carried two boys and a girl, all solemnly trying in their excitement not to spur the beast who bore them with the bone-bladed runners of their skates.
‘Traveller!’ shouted the oldest boy, and out of the huts came the fen-folk.
Reed-thin, gnarled as swamp roots, they looked unremittingly dour. Their generosity was not. Like their young ones, they made Elaira welcome once assured she was unarmed. Within an hour, her mare was settled in a pen of woven withies, and she, blessedly bathed and dry, sat before a peat fire sipping tea brewed from plants she had heretofore torn clothes on. The children stayed clustered around her, asking questions and staking buttons on the game of knucklebones she had taught them. Too young to be fascinated by gambling, the youngest squatted on the furs at her feet, picking up the unlaced ends of her bootlaces, and trying to stuff them in his mouth.
‘Come away.’ Elaira reached down through the press to raise the baby clear of temptation. ‘I don’t think the mud will help the taste.’
The thwarted child shrieked. His noise did nothing to obscure another, louder scream, this one issuing from outside.
Elaira startled to her feet. The cry repeated, now identifiably the voice of the hut matron, gone out at dusk to haul in fresh water for the stewpot.
Elaira set the boy child aside on the stool, while the others ran like rabbits into the crannies between tied coils of basket reed. Trouble was no stranger to them, and even the little ones did not whimper. Grasping the crystal that hung at her neck, the enchantress leaped over the boys’ abandoned knucklebones and burst out into icy winter air.
There she poised. Behind her, the hut door creaked closed on leather hinges. While the slush slowly numbed her dry toes, she struggled to fathom the source of the trouble. For off in the fens where the springs rose warm from the ground, the woman still screamed, wrenchingly, piercingly panic stricken.
The sleet had stopped; the wind smelled oddly sharp. Elaira blinked. Her eyesight was all wrong.
The shadows lay everywhere, crisp as knives and too blue. The diamond whiteness of the drifts hurt the eyes. Against them, reeds and winter-stripped thickets seemed to leap out, starkly honed as sword-edges. Maples, swamp-oaks and willows showed their details in unnatural sharpness, their top branches delineated like entangled skeins or blown ink. Elaira gulped a quickened breath. The mist had gone. Vanished. Around her, the night was
