Page 16 of Fate’s Bane

T HE R OAD

Shortly after Ha’night, I accompanied Dhorfnir and Solwin and a few others to trade with Clan Hanarin.

We traveled east and north, keeping the Baneswood to our left as we walked, one temperamental donkey to carry the load.

Clan Fein was largely isolated from the other clans, cut off by the darkness of the wood.

It made for a journey of days instead of hours.

I had prepared our leather goods, belts and boots and also a thick jerkin for Erci Clan Hanarin, their chieftain.

I’d tooled it with running wolves and leaping hinds, though I could not but remember the wolf at the herald’s man’s throat.

I tried to reassure myself: There was nothing of the Making in this work.

For all that Solwin and I were sometimes awkward around each other, it was a pleasant journey. Dhorfnir told stories of Bannos the Bold in his deep, rumbling chant, and Solwin sang in the hauntingly high voice that seemed incongruous with her thick-corded arms.

When we camped, we set watches, but instead of watching the road for raiders, Dhorfnir bade us keep just as close a watch upon the Baneswood, with its willowy shadows, deep pockets of dark between the trees.

The first night, when it was my turn, I sat cross-legged just beyond the ring of the low fire’s warmth. The seax Fein-Father had given me—the blade Aradoc-Father had refused me—was cradled in my lap. I stroked the leather of my bracers to ease my nerves and stared into the wood.

A chill shivered up my spine, but I felt it whenever I was this near the Baneswood—which was often, because Clan Fein’s meager allotment of the fens abutted its southern edge.

The shiver wasn’t the fear-chill that overtook other members of Clan Fein, who called up quick luck by covering their unmarked eye or thumbed a torc or a pocketed love-lock.

It was like something called to me, too high-pitched to be heard by anyone else.

Sometimes, I imagined it was Hadhnri, standing on the other side, thinking of me.

Other times, though, I was certain it was the fates-bane, calling to the curse it had laid upon us.

“Agnir!” Dhorfnir barked, shaking me roughly. “You tempt the luck-hound.”

I jerked out of my reverie to find that I was standing, my wool blanket hanging limply from one shoulder. This must not have been the first time he had called my name. I drew the blanket back around both shoulders and pulled my focus away from the Baneswood.

The large man stared into my eyes, looking me up and down. “What did you see, little frog?”

“Nothing.” I turned back to the woods. They were dark, forbidding, but they were only trees. The dog-whistle call that tightened my heart was gone, like the broken thread of a spider’s web.

He narrowed his eyes at me and guided me back to the fire.

“I’ll finish my watch,” I protested, but he ignored me and nudged Solwin awake with his boot.

“Watch,” he grunted.

Solwin looked to me, then to the sky above, still dark and star-speckled.

“It’s not my turn yet.” She slumped back beneath her blanket and covered her head.

“I can—” I started.

Dhorfnir jostled Solwin harder. “Watch!”

“Hie!” she yelped and jumped up with her blankets, near rolling into the fire. She scowled at the two of us as she stood. There was hint of question in her eye, but she kept it to herself and stomped away.

I took her bedroll and stole comfort from the warmth she’d left behind. I felt eyes on me even in my dreams—Dhorfnir’s or another’s, I couldn’t say.

He didn’t let me take another watch alone.

Clan Hanarin was situated on a small island in the middle of the wetlands at the head of a rivulet.

They were a small clan, and their holdings smaller even than Clan Fein’s, though their land was better.

They welcomed us with warm drinks, and we presented Erci Clan Hanarin with the jerkin I’d made.

The chieftain eyed me carefully after my introduction as Agnir First-Born Garadin Clan Fein.

She studied the jerkin with pursed lips, testing the thickness with her calloused thumbs.

She and Dhorfnir stared in wordless exchange, but that was clearly not enough, because Erci took Dhorfnir aside.

I stared after them until Solwin prodded me roughly, nodding toward the donkey and the clan members waiting to do business with us.

My leatherwork sold well, though I gave the bartering no more than half a mind.

I saw this journey with new eyes. The jerkin I had made—it was not a gift for the sake of its fineness, as I had obliviously thought.

It was armor. A gift for battle. Dhorfnir was here to recruit Erci Clan Hanarin to my father’s side against Clan Aradoc, to tell her of Pedhri Clan Aradoc’s intent to parcel the Fens away—which I had relayed to him.

I tried to soothe the thought. Fein-Father said they would discuss it at the clan moot. There need not be fighting if Garadin Clan Fein could unite enough of the clans, or if Pedhri Clan Aradoc saw sense. Unease set my stomach to a low boil.

I suddenly missed Making with Hadhnri, and not, for once, because I missed feeling close to her.

I missed our Makings because she had been right: when we Made things, I felt as if I had the power to change the world.

To bend it, even a little, to my will. I stared at the belts draped over my knees, tracing with my eyes the dancing trout I had worked.

I longed for that feeling again. I clenched my fingers tight so that my nails dug into my palm.

I would not call the fates-bane’s eye upon me again.

“Are you well, Agnir?” Solwin peered into my face with suspicious concern.

“Fine,” I snapped.

Her face flushed red. She turned back to her buckles and tools and to the man of Clan Hanarin admiring her silverwork. She was a fine smith, and a fine woman, just the kind I favored, as Hadhnri would put it. More importantly, she was a friend, whatever else had gone between us.

“I’m sorry,” I mumbled after the man had gone to fetch whatever Solwin wanted in trade. “All this talk of Clan Aradoc. It makes me uneasy to think of war between the clans.”

Solwin eyed me from the side. I waited for her to question my loyalty to Clan Fein.

Instead, she asked, looking down at her silver and iron, “Why did Dhorfnir take you off watch?”

The question caught me off guard. With no need to feign the embarrassment warming my face, I stumbled, “He—um. Caught me sleeping. Said he’d tell my father.” A damning lie, but it was better than the cursed truth, that the Baneswood had called to me and I longed to answer.

Solwin raised a skeptical eyebrow and grunted.

After that, our conversation came in drought-trickles.

Dhorfnir also grew odd with me. On our journey back to Clan Fein, he stayed close to me, as if I were a sheep and he my shepherd.

I would have been annoyed if the Baneswood weren’t calling out to me again, stronger this time.

I kept drifting unconsciously from the path, and each time he urged me back with a gentle nudge, or a word to pull my attention.

His heavy brow was furrowed with concern.

Once, he had to yank me back, nearly jerking my shoulder out of its socket.

“Into the water, is it, little frog?” he laughed.

I looked to my footing. I was one step from falling into the bog.

“Over here,” he murmured, not unkindly, moving to stand between me and the wood. He put the donkey between us to make an even greater wall between myself and the Baneswood’s call. The luck-hound’s call.

It worked. We walked on like that for the rest of the first day and all the next, and that spider silk tether that tugged my gaze west weakened. I laughed to think I needed to be blindered like the donkey.

After, I wondered if what happened next was my fault—if the fates-bane took my laughter for defiance.

We were walking and eating strips of smoked fish the next day when a heron burst up from the rushes, winging its way across our path, startling us all, even the donkey.

It jerked and shoved either way, knocking into my shoulder and throwing Dhorfnir off-balance.

Then, louder than the donkey’s braying came Dhorfnir’s scream of pain.

While someone grabbed at the beast’s halter, I ran around it to see Dhorfnir knee-deep in fenswater. I thought the worst—a broken leg.

“Solwin,” I called, “help me!”

She was already there, along with another of the men. Dhorfnir was a heavy man and he groaned through his teeth as we raised him out of the morass and set him on solid ground.

I took my seax and cut the leg of his trousers to see the break, only to find that, despite the blood, the bone felt whole.

“There,” Solwin grunted. She pointed to a puncture in Dhorfnir’s calf, half as long as finger.

I frowned, confused, but Solwin was already back at the spot where Dhorfnir had fallen, fishing gingerly in the puddle with her hand. Carefully, she pulled out a broken seax. It dripped with dark water, pitted and filthy.

Dhorfnir saw it as she brought it over and his face settled in resignation. “By the fates-bane’s tears.”

“You’ll be all right,” Solwin murmured. “Come on. Agnir, unload that stupid animal. Dhorfnir, you’ll ride. We’ll get you to Rodhi, and she’ll make you right.”

She had the sound of someone trying to convince herself. I couldn’t muster any words at all. I did as she said. Dhorfnir sagged on the donkey’s back but grimaced a smile when he saw my face.

“It’s all right, little frog,” he said.

Dhorfnir caught fever before we reached home.

Garadin Clan Fein was at his side when the fever took him. There was nothing our healer could do.

From that day on, my father’s temper sharpened. The clan feared to cross him, but there was even more swearing at the luck-hound, and worse—half whispers that the joining of the clans was cursed by the fates-bane, and that we would do better to let Aradoc have his way.

Only once did someone dare say I had brought the ill-luck upon them all.

“My heart has stopped because of you!” Thimar, Dhorfnir’s wife, spat at my feet as I was leaving the roundhouse.

Garadin Clan Fein was there in a breath. He didn’t say a word, but Thimar shrank away, and no one confronted me again. From that moment, though, I could see the doubt in my father’s eyes. The hollow ache of their silent questioning never left me.

I knew then what I was to my father. Why he claimed me when he did, why he would allow no accusations of ill-luck to smirch me.

I was a symbol to him and all those he called to him—in taking me as ward, Pedhri Clan Aradoc had wounded him, but Garadin Clan Fein had struck back.

Without me as hostage, Aradoc was no longer immune to Fein’s wrath. My father could make the war he wished.

The war I told Hadhnri would never come.