Page 10

Chapter Ten

T he rest of the journey into the Highlands was uneventful. Tam was at first painfully bored by the monotony of the road and the ache in his thighs and backside when he dismounted Piggy in the evenings. But after a few days of it, he felt himself settling, as if all his jittering nerves were loosening and relaxing. He started to notice the birds in the trees, the wildlife by the side of the road—Ystrac’s children, as they were called. He began talking to Piggy sometimes, and as his arse and legs grew accustomed to the saddle, he experimented with occasionally encouraging Piggy into a faster pace than walking, just so he could figure out what that felt like. Catching the Ram of the Highlands, after all, would probably take more than just an amble. He looked out over farmers’ fields as he passed; he waved back if they waved to him, and then he sometimes waved first, and then...

Favored of Angarat, apparently, he thought to himself, and started to let himself be curious about what they had planted, started to say hello to people if they were working near the road as he passed, started to stop and ask whether he could eat lunch with them, started to—

“I don’t know,” said an old, sunbrowned farmer he was eating with one day. The man sighed. “The harvests get worse every year. Don’t know what I’m doing wrong. Been doing everything the same way my ma and pa did it.”

Tam eyed his field. “Grow anything besides wheat?”

“Sure, lots of things,” he said, and then named a number of crops that, like wheat, would not improve the soil.

“Ever try peas? Potatoes? Or just resting it for a year? I’ve heard that helps.”

“I don’t have enough land to rest it. Don’t have enough land to risk it on some new crop I don’t know nothing about.”

Tam nodded—those were understandable limitations. He didn’t know all that much about farming. He only really knew marrows and how to run a tea shop. Then he heard himself say, “Well, I can bless it for you, if you want.”

“Eh? You a priest of Angarat, then?”

Tam stuffed the last bite of bread and cheese in his mouth and brushed the crumbs off his hands. “Better,” he said with his mouth full. “I’m one of her favored.”

So, with the farmer’s permission, he walked out into the middle of the golden wheat field, and buried his hands in the earth and... Gods, he would be embarrassed if it failed, but he didn’t know the farmer and the farmer didn’t know him, and the worst that would happen was that the farmer would feel a bit encouraged even if nothing was different about his field.

So Tam just sat there in the field for a while with his hands in the earth, silent and embarrassed and furious at himself for reasons he could not name, and he whispered, “He’s having a hard time, okay? Just... help him out.” Mulishly, he added, “Please.”

The wind rustled gently through the wheat, just high enough to peak over Tam’s head when he was sitting on the ground like this. He didn’t notice much of anything happening, but that was plants for you. He got up, brushed only the majority of the dirt off—let it cake under his fingernails, why not—and waded out of the wheat to the farmer, watching from the edge of the field.

“Don’t know if it’ll help,” Tam said awkwardly. “I don’t have a lot of practice.”

The farmer shrugged in a friendly way. “I appreciate the thought anyway.” He peered up at the sky. “And it looks like we’ll be getting a bit more sun later, so that’ll help. We could use a few days of sunshine. Been raining a lot—but that’s the foothills for you. Rain all the time.”

The sun broke through the clouds, and... well, maybe it was coincidence, or maybe it was a little favor passed from Angarat to her brother Talesyn, who ruled the midday hours and warmth and fire, but the patch of sunlight fell right on the farmer’s field, and the breeze blew through the rustling waves of wheat again, and the farmer beamed just as bright. “See, look at that.” He clapped Tam on the shoulder. “I’ll take that as a blessing, boy. Oughta have more confidence.”

He gave Tam a few boiled eggs and a chunk of honeycomb in payment and sent him on his way.

Tam sort of... liked it. He didn’t have to talk to people much; he just told them he was favored of Angarat and asked if he could give a blessing to their fields, and they always said yes, and gave him something small in return—a sweetbun, a lump of cheese or butter, a little bag of peas, a few carrots, two fat potatoes—and he climbed back onto Piggy and kept going. He didn’t know if it was working, but he came to realize that he didn’t really care if he was failing, because regardless of the outcome, it felt good to do, and because people smiled at him and liked him for doing it.

Maybe Kel was right. Maybe he really was stupid. Only seven gods walked the roads in Avaris, and most people had a favorite or a primary who oversaw the areas or concerns their life most revolved around, and a secondary who covered the rest—for example, a sailor might habitually pray to Nevainy?, to protect them at sea, and to Angarat, to watch over their family at home.

Only seven gods, and Tam had been giving most of his attention to Brassu— who shouldn’t have been either his primary or secondary—all because he was too much of a goblin to forgive Lyford for something he couldn’t have controlled, and then for being an obnoxious teenager, and then for... for being himself, for being a choice that Tam kept saying yes to. It wasn’t Lyford’s fault, as painful and uncomfortable as that was to admit. Tam kept having to force himself to think those words, stubbornly insisting to his recalcitrant, resentful brain that it was true— it wasn’t Lyford’s fault; Tam was responsible for his own choices and the consequences thereof. He could choose differently, if only he could figure out how.

He was going to catch the Ram of the Highlands, even though it was an impossible task. He was favored of Angarat, and Angarat’s domain included livestock, and the Ram, however huge and ferocious it was, counted as livestock. He would catch it, drag it home, give it to Lyford, and prove—

He’d prove—

He’d prove that he could do it. He’d prove that Lyford should respect him. He’d prove that he was a stubborn goblin of a person, but he could choose to do something different and use it as a tool. He’d prove that he was... worthwhile.

And then, of course, Lyford would be overcome with a most ardent desire! Yes, that was the thing to focus on—he’d swoon and invite Tam to bed, and Tam would have some excellent victory sex, and he would be the hero who captured the Ram of the Highlands for the first time in hundreds of years, and then maybe finally he’d be a different person, someone he liked more than the person he was now. Someone who could let sweetness and softness happen to him without his throat closing up in fear and suspicion. Someone who could be loved.

The Highlands were, all in all, a fairly miserable place, and Tam was very glad he’d relented and brought Piggy. Lyford had been right when he’d said that Tam would stay warmer with a horse under him—he had an oilcloak to keep off the rain, and although the cold and the damp seeped in anyway, it was truly much harder for them to sink into his bones when he was riding.

The clouds were thick above, and the rain was an almost constant drizzle. The weather was much colder than it was in the lowlands; here, some of the trees were already starting to tint autumnal golden and red. There were also sheep everywhere, which was not helpful when one was looking for one particular sheep.

He asked in every inn he came to—had anyone seen the Ram of the Highlands? Did anyone know where he should look next? No, he’d just come from there. Where else?

No one had seen the Ram for a long time, it seemed, except for a few ancient old women who swore up and down that they’d spotted it decades ago, or they’d heard it bellowing up the mountains in a snowstorm.

Tam quickly discovered that finding the Ram was going to be the tricky part. Fortunately, he was as stubborn as they came.

Three weeks later, he had not found the Ram. He was running out of money for food and the inns; the weather was turning very cold; he was more tired than he had ever been in his life. He hated the Highlands. Piggy had thrown a shoe twice from walking up and down the rocky terrain, and there was nothing, nothing, nothing.

Every day he thought: I want to go home. But it was a week’s ride back home, and he was so tired, and what if only one more day’s searching turned up some trace of the Ram?

He did everything he could. He talked to everyone, begged for information, blessed the shit out of their fucking sheep in exchange for food and stories of the Ram and any hint...

“Why are ye so caught up with t’Ram, anyway?” said Gramma Bess, who owned one of the inns that Tam had stayed at several times as he criss-crossed the uplands. Well, what passed for an inn in these parts, anyway. “Ye keep sayin’ somethin’ about a quest , but where’d ye get such a harebrained idea like that?”

He wrapped his cold hands around the mug she slid to him and stared glumly into it. “A terrible man named Nicolau Lyford told me to do it.”

“He payin’ ye, then?”

“No,” Tam muttered. “No, he just wanted to see if I could.” He thought of Idunet, and added, “And I said yes, because I wanted to see if I could, because I’m constitutionally incapable of saying no to a dare.”

Gramma Bess snorted. “Remind me of my late husband, ye do. Absolute arse of a man. Stubborn as a mule. We were married forty-eight years.”

Angarat’s fucking tits , he kept thinking. Forty-eight years . How could a person be married for forty-eight years? An arse of a man and stubborn as a mule, she’d said, but she still... loved him. He could tell that she did—he didn’t know if that was his own gift for watching people that he’d learned from running the tea shop, or if it was just one of those things that would have been obvious to anyone, or... or if it was a little gift of Angarat that he could play with, the way that Kel fucking Gauda did with all those awful gifts of Idunet. That insight, that knowing.

Fucking Kel Gauda. Fucking Gramma Bess’s late husband. Fucking Ram of the gods-damned Highlands.

He wanted to go home.

He lasted another week, and then one day, quite abruptly, he discovered that the days had grown so short that Idunet’s hours had come upon him quicker than expected. He was alone, out on the uplands, and the sun had slipped away without him noticing how quick the light was going. There should have been plenty of moonlight—the two moons ought to both be full, or nearly so, but the cloud cover was just too thick. Tam could see a few flickering lights in the distance, but he’d clambered all over the Highlands for a month now—the land was treacherous, far too treacherous to be stumbling about in the dark. Sometimes what seemed like a even, gentle swell of hill dropped away into a sharp ravine littered with rocks and scrub. Even in the daylight it was often a shock.

Fuck. At least he had Piggy and his oil cloak, but the nights were very cold, and there was very little in this bleak, blasted landscape to break the wind.

He swallowed down his fear. He was favored of Angarat. He was on a quest for her favored one. He would be fine.

Unless he or Piggy fell into one of those ravines. Unless the wind ripped his oilcloak away and the rain soaked into him and stole the warmth from his body until he succumbed to exposure. He had a tinderbox with him, theoretically, but everything here was soaking wet, and there wasn’t any viable firewood for miles, just scrub and gravel and mud.

“Idunet,” he whispered. “Idunet, Lord of Choices, I made a bad one today. I fucked up. At best , I’m about to be incredibly uncomfortable. At worst, this could be... really bad. That asshole Kel Gauda says you’re the most compassionate, and it is your hours, and so—fuck, come on, milord, I’ll make a bargain—”

“Good evening, Tamerlin,” came a whisper out of the dark. “Bargaining for comfort, are you?”

Tam’s heart raced. “Oh. Uh. Hi, Idunet. I wasn’t expecting you to show up. Kel said you don’t like to do things yourself.”

“I don’t.” There was a shape there—a darkness in the dark, just the shape of a person if Tam opened his eyes wide and strained to see. “But you’re favored of my sister, and you’re being so interesting lately. We keep watching you like some kind of fascinating theatrical performance. Nearly all of us have made a wager or two on you at this point.”

Tam didn’t know whether that was terrifying or flattering. “Oh? Like what?”

“Today we wagered on whose name you would call when you found yourself in danger. You’ve been going back to Brassu’s ways lately, slogging your way up and down the mountains and refusing to give up, so we thought it might be him. Nevainy? made a case for you to call on her to protect you from the dark; Ystrac—well, he doesn’t make wagers with us, but Mategat thought you might entreat him to keep away the wolves—”

“There are wolves here?” Tam squeaked.

“And Talesyn is full of himself, so he was sure you’d ask for fire, and never mind that you haven’t ever particularly been inclined in his direction. But you’ve called on me , so I’ve just won a fistful of favors from my siblings for it. I find that I do not mind that we all agreed that whoever you called would at least show up for a chat. You’d like comfort, then?” Idunet added with some satisfaction, “ And you’re willing to bargain for it. Good boy. What’s in it for me , that would have been my first question.”

His voice was a bit... silky. Objectionable. “Well, good. Glad we’re on the same page. What do you want? More favors?”

“Perhaps one. What is it that you want, that’s the other question. We should start there.”

“I would like—fuck, I just want a safe, warm place to sleep where the wolves can’t get me.”

“How reasonable of you. Are you certain that’s all you desire? I could give you a palace with a feather bed and twelve servants, and a table groaning with the weight of a steaming feast. I could bring you a handsome man to keep you warm—”

Tam made a face. “Ew, like bloody Kel? I hate Kel. No. And I don’t care about all that fancy shit.” His soul heaved with exhaustion at the very thought. He just wanted his own bed, his own home with its the familiar smells and the way it was so good at keeping off the rain and wind... Well, he was Angarat’s, wasn’t he. “Just—take me to one of the abandoned cottages around here, I’ve seen them all over the damn place. And a couple pieces of firewood or something to put in the hearth. And room enough for Piggy.”

“And what do I get out of it?”

Tam was too tired for this. Tired and heartsore and homesick. “I don’t fucking know, maybe the heartwarming glow of having helped out your sister’s special little fellow? Failing that, shit, I don’t know what a god wants. Fuck it, I’ll ride Lyford’s dick until he calls your name, how’s that?”

“Hm,” said Idunet. “I do miss that boy sometimes. Alright.”

“Wait. Wait, that was a joke. Wait, I didn’t mean—”

“That’s your own fault,” Idunet said. “The cottage is behind you, Tamerlin.”

“I can’t find it in the dark!” Tam shrieked.

“Certainly you can. Simply go where your wanting leads you. It’s not far.”

It really wasn’t far. Tam stumbled through the dark, pulling Piggy behind him, until he crested a ridge and saw a glimmer of strange light just below him on the slope. When he came to it, he found one abandoned cottage, as requested. It was just like all the other abandoned cottages that dotted the hillside—the thatch was moldering and caving in here and there, the mortar in the walls was going to dust, the shutters were barely hanging on, and the door had fallen to pieces. On a weather-greyed table inside, a single candle burned with a pale light the color of Nevainy?’s Right Eye, the brighter of the two moons, and there was an old, broken barrel with enough rainwater pooled in it for at least Piggy to drink.

The light from the candle was enough for Tam to find a few dusty, bone-dry pieces of firewood by the hearth, and then the tinderbox in his saddlebags after he discovered that the candle’s flame wasn’t really flame at all. The light lasted long enough for him to get a tiny lick of a fire going, and then the entire candle blinked away as if it had never been there at all. He pulled Piggy in through the big ruined doorway, piled planks and the remains of the fallen door in front of the gap to keep out the wolves, and wedged the shutters closed against the wind.

It wasn’t a very large cottage. Just one room, barely bigger than Piggy’s stall back at Lyford’s manor, but the crackling fire in the hearth rose quickly, and the enclosure of the walls helped keep some of the heat in, even when the wind whistled through the gaps in the thatch. Tam thawed his hands, wearily took off Piggy’s saddle, wrapped himself up in his oilcloak, and curled up to sleep.

Tam woke up with tears cold on his cheeks, with the fire nothing more than embers in the hearth, with the grey light of misty dawn coming sluggishly across the mountains.

He’d been here a month. He’d looked everywhere for the Ram, and asked everyone, and he was tired. He wasn’t made for this. He wasn’t one of Ystrac’s favored, who made the wilderness their home. He wasn’t one of Nevainy?’s, who would have walked the dark fearlessly. He was Angarat’s, made for civilization, for cozy hearthsides, for home, for his own fucking bed, his own dishes—

But he had a quest. He got up, shivering and aching all over from the cold as he unpiled the debris from in front of the door until there was enough light to saddle Piggy and bring him outside.

The slope of the mountain dropped away before his feet, all shades of frost-touched blue in the pre-dawn light. There was just a touch of pink in the eastern sky, but the rest of the dome above was still that strange greenish-blue color. Down in the valley, the mist was thick and heavy, twining around the scraggly, twisted trees. Above, the clouds were just as thick, and it looked as though it were going to rain. Again.

He was hungry. He had no food left in his saddlebags, and very little coin left for any inns, and he was tired , and there was no fucking Ram—he’d told Lyford there was no fucking Ram—

Brassu was the god of slogging through the mud. Tam had done his fair share of that for the last month. He was bitter in his heart, cold, shaking. He turned to Piggy, braced himself for the effort of getting up into the saddle, and... promptly burst into tears at the very prospect.

Sobs wracked him. He could barely hold himself up. He let himself totter forward and lean on Piggy’s warm side, crossing his arms on the saddle and burying his face in them. There was no Ram. He’d looked for a month. He’d asked for help, and he was going to fail the quest and go home, and—and just like everything else he’d ever worked hard for in his life, this was going to end up smashed on the floor.

Pointless. Pointless.

“I can’t do it,” he wailed to Piggy, meaning both the Ram and that he couldn’t bear to climb into the saddle, that it was a task far beyond his strength or capabilities. Piggy paid him no mind, only bent his head to tear up a mouthful of grass.

But Tam was a stubborn goblin of a person, and he had spent more than ten years praying ardently to Brassu. Some of the knack seemed to have rubbed off on him: Even through all his sniffling and the absolute conviction that he couldn’t, couldn’t, couldn’t get himself up into the saddle, he miserably put his foot in the stirrup and did it .

But he couldn’t go on. He couldn’t find the Ram, he couldn’t fulfill this quest, he couldn’t bear to stay here any longer. He had come to the end of his patience and willpower and determination, and he just wanted to go home.

He tugged Piggy’s head up, pointed them both down the mountain, wiped his face off on his sleeve, and let his failure rush over him.

His misery only compounded by the end of that day. He spent his last few coins on a proper room at the closest approximation to an inn that he could find, plus dinner and a bath. At the end of it, he had enough energy to curl up in bed and have a proper sob.

He’d failed, again. He’d worked harder than he had ever worked in his life, and it had all been for nothing.

He could not even begin to think of what Lyford would say, what he would do, what it meant for Tam to have failed. Harvest-time would be in full swing by the time he got back, with autumn close on its heels—perhaps Tam would just have to sit and twiddle his thumbs miserably all through the winter until the cold broke again and he could drag himself once more away from home and back to the Highlands, away from... from Geret, and Lys and Rose, and Mrs Hart, and Lyford—

He’d failed, and it didn’t seem possible. This wasn’t how it went in the stories. When the hero hit rock bottom, that only meant that the dawn was about to break, that he would suddenly and abruptly succeed... But here he was in the foothills, in a building claiming to be an inn, with no Ram to his name, and no money left, nothing but Piggy and a hollow resignation in his heart that had been there for twenty years and yet suddenly hurt so much .

He went home. He let Piggy plod along at whatever pace suited the terrain. He kept himself bundled in his oilcloak as they descended out of the Highlands and into slightly warmer weather. He looked at the birds, at the creatures by the side of the road, at the fields as they passed...

There were some fields that were looking a little better than the others—ones he’d stopped at to give blessings. A few times, someone in one of those fields spotted him as he went past, called for him to pause, and gave him a few more gifts as thanks for the efficacy of his blessings. More food, mostly. A few scones, or a bag of dried fruit to gnaw on, or a hand-pie...

It didn’t make him feel any better. It hadn’t really been him doing anything, just Angarat. No one had told him to do it, and it would have been her decision if she answered his requests or not.

He couldn’t bear to stop at the first six or seven roadside shrines he saw. As the land sloped down into vales that began to look familiar, he found he could not put it off any longer. At the next one he came to, he slid off Piggy, broke a scone in half, and placed the pieces before each side of the standing stone, for Angarat and for Ystrac. It just seemed polite to share it between them.

His throat was thick and tight. “Sorry,” he said. “I—” He couldn’t say it. It wasn’t her that he’d have to say it to. Which meant he didn’t have anything to say to her at all.

He sat heavily on the ground in front of the standing stone, scrunched into a ball with his face in his knees, and cried for a while—hideous wrenching sobs that, by the time they’d stopped, left his ribs aching and his face sore from being twisted up in misery. It didn’t make anything better, and Angarat didn’t show up to coddle him.

He’d failed. He’d failed. He’d tried his hardest, but it hadn’t mattered, and it had all ended up smashed on the ground.