Page 15 of Fate’s Bane

T HE P LAN

I found my place in Clan Fein among the crafters.

Garadin Clan Fein paired me with Yordi, the squint-eyed tanner with a constant sneer from the smell.

It took some time for the woman’s hands to catch the intricacies of my designs, and she complained at first—they were impossible, too complicated, a waste of her time.

We compromised. She resisted less and I simplified my plans, or I tooled the more complicated bits myself.

I was content with the pieces, but they were nothing like the work Hadhnri and I did together.

I never tried to do a Making without Hadhnri. It ached too much to think of it, that feeling coming over me without her there.

Days passed. Weeks. Months. Seasons. A full year and I never stopped thinking of the gentle surety of her fingers. On leather. On my collar. On my skin. I wore her bracers even when I slept, as much to be close to her as for the protection she swore would be mine so long as she lived.

After another year, though, and another, time swept in like the rivers, burying the peat of my memory deeper and packing it tight.

One young woman offered me a love-lock. Solwin, the blacksmith’s apprentice.

We shared company for a time, after I’d reconciled myself to never returning to Clan Aradoc and accepted the likelihood that Hadhnri had been made to move on by Pedhri Clan Aradoc.

It was a selfish solace, though, for I refused the lock, and eventually, Solwin ceased to seek me out.

I wondered, briefly, how much of her attentions had been another attempt to keep me hound-bound at Clan Fein’s heel.

It mattered not; I was part of Clan Fein now, part of its rhythms. I had learned its twining relationships, its moods, its petty rivalries as well as I’d known Clan Aradoc’s.

Maybe I would never see Hadhnri again. I started to reconsider the blacksmith’s love-lock.

And then, one day near first Ha’night, when the flies were buzzing over the lowlands and the geese had returned from their southern winter, Garadin Clan Fein called me into the roundhouse while he was meeting with my father-sisters and his other advisers.

Dhorfnir, the man who had found me during the raid, sat beside my father, picking his teeth with a reed.

He hailed me with a grin, raising his hand, great as a wolfhound’s paw.

I had never been invited to a meeting of Pedhri Clan Aradoc and his advisers. I stood straighter as I joined my father. I was only a craftsman, but my cloak sat well over the breadth of my shoulders.

“Come, Agnir First-Born. We need your guidance.” Garadin Clan Fein poured me sweet apple mead and sat me on the bench beside him. His eyes crinkled with affection. His clan tattoo matched mine, though it was faded, bleeding soft at the edges where his skin had slackened.

I laughed, uncertain what guidance I could offer. Probably the prices our traders should ask for my next batch of leatherwork. “On my name and my clan, it is yours.” I covered an eye with one hand.

No one else laughed, not even Dhorfnir.

I paused with my cup at my lips. “What do you need?”

“What do you know of Pedhri Clan Aradoc’s plans for the Fens?” my father asked.

I froze rabbit-still, sighted by the hawk. “Nothing. Pedhri Clan Aradoc did not think me worth his confidences.”

Garadin Fein cocked one hand on his skirted thigh and stared into his cup. “You were there a long time, Agnir First-Born. You’re observant and careful. What did you see? What did you hear?”

“Tell us any small thing,” Modin, my eldest father-sister, said. “We’ll fit it where it belongs.”

The only secret I knew was my own, mine and Hadhnri’s. Did I dare tell him what she and I had done together? Hadhnri said she had done a Making on my own bracers, alone. Could I too?

I looked from one Fein to another, stroking the bracers. A nervous habit, these last years. Garadin Clan Fein’s glance dropped to them and I stopped.

“What is it you want to do?” I asked.

My father considered me, and considered again. The clan mark beneath my eye burned coal-bright with the weight of his regard.

“There will be a clan moot at Sunstead next. We are making a plan.”

I stopped breathing.

And how would my father’s regard fall, if I confessed? What would Clan Fein see when they looked at me? Would I still belong to Clan Aradoc, or would I finally be wholly theirs?

I had been silent too long. I spoke the first thing that came to my lips.

“Pedhri Clan Aradoc takes gifts from the Queen-Beyond-the-Fens.” The tale that spilled forth was not a lie, but I spoke with more certainty than my knowledge deserved.

“And he sends gifts back. Many were the work of my own hand. Someday, someone from Clan Aradoc will marry into her family, and he will cede some of the Fens to her.”

Anxious glances, angry glances passed between my father’s council. Garadin Clan Fein’s face tightened—at the eyes, the lips, the nose, a great narrowing like a wary feline.

“What lands does he plan to cede to her?” he asked me.

“Does it matter?” said Laudir, the middle father-sister. “We will not let him barter clan land away. He will have to kill us to the last before he pries it from our fingers.”

“The better question is this,” said Modin-father-sister. “What will she do with them?”

“She will drain the fens to get to the peat,” said Hal-father-sister, the youngest. “Then they will plant, and where they cannot plant, they will build roads from her lands to the coast, and at the coast, ships. That is what she wants.”

I glanced sharply to Hal. “Drain the fens?”

With a pulsing ache, my thoughts flew swift to the lowlands where I had caught leaping frogs, tickled fish against my palms, watched the herons and their elegant steps. Where would they go? I felt the wrench of the loss and I had not even lost it yet.

Or perhaps I had. I had lost the home I knew once, and then once again. Could I bear it a third time, this time to a strange woman of gold and dye who did not love the Fens as I did?

“How could he do something like that?” I asked.

Laudir-father-sister laughed at me and its bite was unkind. “You are naive, little frog. What would a man not do for power? Even Bannos the Bold was tempted.”

I ducked my gaze and stared at my own hands, brown and smooth but for a few childhood scars.

“Thank you, Agnir. You may go.” Garadin Clan Fein’s dismissal was polite but firm. “We will raise this at the moot.”

I stood and saluted, bowing while covering my unmarked eye.

“Whatever you need, Father.” I started to go, but my chest throbbed with a different ache.

I turned back to him, to them, all of them waiting for me to leave so that they might speak their secrets.

“I have—had a friend. Hadhnri Second-Born Pedhri Clan Aradoc. She would be an ally. I know it.”

Laudir-father-sister sucked her teeth.

Garadin Clan Fein simply said again, “Thank you, Agnir.”