Exiles of Forlorn (6 page)

“If you choose to stay and cannot abide by our laws, you are free at any time to take the White Road. At the end, you’ll find a second settlement called Drullcove. It is made up of far less savory company who will share your lack of respect for rules and order.” He looked at Sharkhart, his pale lips framed by the straw-colored goatee turned to a grin. “
If
you survive the walk.”

Two sunburned men with stone-tipped spears shoved the gate along the ground with a heavy groan from the aged iron hinges. I heard rust grinding off in little red flakes as it shut. Once closed, they secured the gate with a long wooden plank that barred the way from wall to wall. Then the skiffs left, unoccupied but for their crewmen who gave us not so much as a glance. I caught one of them, the oarsman who’d told Blackfoot to piss off the side of the boat, meet my eyes for a second. I thought maybe I saw pity.

I swallowed and looked away. First at my new home, until I could stand it no more, and then at my fellow newly-arrived exiles, all lined up for examination by the Sand King and his little court of misfits. I’d seen most of them on the ship. Fully half those who’d booked passage were bound for Forlorn. There were nineteen outside my circle, including the Brontish cityman Stree, who stood near the end of the line. When they came to him, Arn gave him a look-over and asked his trade. He told them he’d been a soldier, but wasn’t much good at it so he’d become a miner. They didn’t have mines on Forlorn, so they made him a farmer.

There were four like me, lesser sons of minor lords who had refused to fight. There were three daughters of lords as well, though they were here for different reasons. It was difficult for women to get exiled. They didn’t have to fight in the war, and they rarely achieved the positions of power that led to acts worthy of exile. Still, there were some things that could get a noble woman kicked out of the country. Infidelity against a noble husband, violating a marriage agreement after a dowry was paid, or just getting on a powerful rival’s nerves too much. Most commonly, it was for inducing a miscarriage, which the king considered infanticide. A common woman would have been hanged, but a noble so caught had two choices; become a cloistered cenobite daewife in a convent, or go into exile. Most chose the former.

I grinned, thinking about Reiwyn becoming a daewife. Likely, the stuffy robes alone would be her undoing. My little river woman had a sparse wardrobe, and I often wondered if she would have rather gone without clothing at all. It was a pleasant thought. Regardless, she hadn’t gotten that choice. Reiwyn was taken prisoner as a pirate, and spared only because she was so young and a woman. They’d given her the choice of hard labor or exile. Lucky for me, she chose exile.

Not surprisingly, few of the nobles had any useful talents for exilitude. Two of the men had been soldiers and were still in relatively good shape, so they were assigned to guard duty. Guarding against what I didn’t know, but we apparently needed guards, so they got drafted. One of the other men was too fat to fight, so he got sent to the kitchen. I guess they assumed a man who liked to eat knew how to cook. He didn’t seem happy with that assignment, but with Sharkhart hovering over, he didn’t complain.

The three ex-noblewomen were all put on kitchen and steward duty. “He better not put me on any of that,” muttered Reiwyn. “I’ll swim back to the ship if he puts me to making beds or stirring soup.”

I smiled and looked back at the line. Next came the two Volteri, one man and one woman, both the same age, with the same general look about them: tall, pinkish skin with shaved heads and sharp noses. They could have been siblings. Their black-feathered, white-collared robes were ill suited to this climate, leaving their already flush skin moist with sweat. The female was somewhat attractive, if not for her shaved head and the grisly necklace of finger bones she wore. The male was a grim fellow with dark yellow eyes that reportedly left their targets uneasy, according to those on the trip who’d come close to him. Neither of them had said anything to us on the voyage.

Not surprisingly, when asked, the male told Arn he was skilled in corpse-tending. Not everyone in Morment burned their dead, among them being the Volteri. Also known derisively as vulture people, the people of Volter lived in a city of black and red brick on the southernmost edge of the Great Gray Plain. Beyond the city bordered the Frozen Marsh, a largely unexplored expanse of ice, frozen jungles and ancient ruins. It was from these ruins that the Volteri had come, thousands of years ago. Also from these ruins came their ancestors, though not quite in the same state as the Volteri. This was why there weren’t any soldiers from Volter among the ranks of Morment’s army; they spent most of their time stemming the flow of ghastly walking corpses from the marsh. How did they do this? With their own army of ghastly walking corpses. It wasn’t pretty. As such, they weren’t terribly popular with non-Volteri.

When addressed, the female did not reply. Arn addressed her again, but she only stared.

“She’s deaf,” said the other vulture, “And I think she’s mute.” His voice was high for a man his size, but had a hint of gruff to it, like he’d had a pox in his lungs when young.

“You don’t know her?” asked Arn, still watching the little Volteri woman. The vulture man shook his head. “Does she have a name?” She remained silent.

“Her name is Hratoe,” said the vulture man.

“I thought you said you didn’t know her,” snapped Ferun, getting in his face as well as he could, the vulture man was nearly as tall as Uller.

“I don’t.” He looked into Ferun’s one eye, undaunted. Volteri were difficult to frighten. “I just know her name.”

“How?”

He groaned in reply and grabbed the girl’s arm. She didn’t resist. He pushed the sleeve of her robe up past her elbow and held out her arm out for them to see. I couldn’t tell from where I stood what it was, but she appeared to have a long, twirling tattoo lacing up from wrist to bicep.

“She has an indelible.” He ran his skinny fingers along it. “See? Hratoe Matgortius, daughter of Panen.” He let go of her arm and yanked back the black-feathered sleeve of his own robe. “And here is mine: Gargath Dantumia, son of Konst.” He released his sleeve and dropped his arm. “It makes it easier to identify the corpses if their previous occupants label them.”

Ferun seemed displeased with the tone and tenor of Gargath’s explanation. He kept staring at him with that one eye. Arn chuckled.

“That actually makes sense.” The Sand King nodded. “We’ve never had a vultureman before so we don’t know your ways. We usually send our dead to ashes. The corpse-handlers of your city clean the dead for . . . reuse, is that correct? You bind wounds and make the bodies whole so they can be reanimated?”

Gargath ignored the looks of disgust on several of those around him and nodded. “Though I am not a necromancer, I can’t actually make them walk—”

Arn stopped him with a wave and a quick nod. “That’s fine, we don’t need that. I figure if you can clean and stitch wounds on a dead body, you can do something similar to a live one?” Gargath took a second before shrugging his shoulders, making the soft black feathers running down his robe shiver. Arn nodded and looked at Ferun. “Tell Nol he’s got a new healer.”

They spent a little time talking to a half dozen Illyrvolk—ethnic Illyrians who defected to Morment, likely to escape the taxes or the draft. In Morment, they tended to be farmers, and without surprise that was what they were assigned to do here, except for one. Following them was a family of savage Plainsfolk, two grown men, a half-grown boy and a pair of women, one with a baby in her arms. One of the men was older by far, so he was made a farmer. He seemed pleased with this assignment. The half-grown boy and the other man were made guards. The woman with the child was assigned to the nursery, while the other was given her choice of cooking or farming. She chose the former.

Then they came to us. “What do you do?” asked Arn, looking down at Reiwyn with a grin. She put her hands on her hips.

“I don’t cook.” That got some chuckles from Melvon and Ferun, and a little grin from Sharkhart.

“No, I don’t suppose you do.” Arn scratched his beard and smiled. “You’re here for . . . what?”

“I was a sailor—”

“Sailor?” Melvon snorted and laughed. “You ain’t no sailor!”

“She’s a pirate, sir,” came Ferun. His one good eye scanned Reiwyn’s little body so fast she couldn’t have noticed. I noticed, though. “She’s got the look of a crow-nester.”

I had no idea what that was. Ships weren’t really my thing. Reiwyn knew, though. Just hearing him say it seemed to make her go a little limp. I watched her enough to notice. I watched her a lot.

“He’s right.” She nodded.

Arn apparently knew what that was too. He nodded and looked over his shoulder at Ferun. “Give her Banny’s old hornbow. He isn’t using it anymore.” He looked at her again. “Can you fletch your own arrows?” She nodded. “We don’t have much steel, but you can get the fishers to give you some gar scales. They’re plenty sharp, and lighter than flint.”

Reiwyn seemed more than happy with that arrangement.

“And what do you do?” Arn asked when he stepped to Blackfoot. He towered over him like a tree and gave him a wry grin.

“What does it look like I do?”

“Hmmm . . .” Arn stroked his short, yellow whiskers. “I bet you were a barber.”

“What? No—”

“No, no I can see it.” Arn waved a finger at him and glanced over each shoulder at his companions. Of the three, only Ferun didn’t grin, he was busy watching Reiwyn, and her him. “You gave some noble too short a trim and he had you carted off with all these thieving, treasonous dregs.”

“I’m not a barber!” Blackfoot tried kicking sand, but it was thick and dry and didn’t budge. He ended up just denting the ground a little. “And I don’t know what ‘tree-season-us’ means, but I’m ten times the thief of anyone here!”

Antioc and I chuckled. Uller placed his face in his hands and Reiwyn giggled, much to the delight of Ferun, who watched her still. The Sand King smiled.

“You have nimble fingers, do you?” Blackfoot nodded. “Good. Melvon, you were saying something about catching crabs?”

“Longcrab, aye.” The little round fellow’s voice was a croak. “They’re too big for the traps, and strong enough to break the nets. But if we could have more of them, we’d have a lot more meat to go around.”

“What do you think . . . what’s your name?”

“Blackfoot.” He demonstrated the origin of his name by lifting one of his feet and pointing at the thick, black bottom.

“Blackfoot, yes. What do you think; are you fast enough to catch a crab, and to show others how to do it too?”

“I’m fast enough.”

“We might make him take a bath.” Ferun winced at the little thief with his one good eye. “Lest the crabs have noses.”

Arn moved to Antioc next. “You don’t look like a barber either.”

“No, my lord.”

Arn sighed. “A pity. We
really
need a barber.” He scratched his chin. “And don’t call me lord. There are no lords here, soldier. You were a soldier, weren’t you?”

“I still am, my lor—sir.”

Then he looked at me. “So were you.”

“I—well, not a very good one.”

Arn laughed. “But you were in the service together, I can tell. It’s the way you two stand. Like one of you is waiting for the other to tell him what to do.” His eyes passed between us for a moment. He seemed so familiar; not just his look, but the way he spoke and carried himself. He was no common man; that was certain. He spoke well and seemed aware of his posture, though he wasn’t overbearing about it like many noble sons.

I realized then that he wasn’t the only one looking me over. Sharkhart had apparently taken an interest in me as well, and I found that more than a little disconcerting. I managed to get a closer look at the thing on his belt, though. The coil I thought was a rope turned out to be a whip, but the little white studs were actually teeth. Shark teeth, by the look of them, and they lined the leather strips of the whip from carved bone handle to the weighted end. Seeing it made me nervous, so I looked at Arn instead, and tried to pretend I didn’t notice Sharkhart hovering over me.

Arn looked about to speak when Ferun cut him off. “We’ve got lots of soldiers. More than we know what to do with.”

“Yes,” Arn replied, “but what we don’t have a lot of are officers.” He looked at me. “You were an officer, right?”

“After a sort, I suppose. I was—am an engineer, though. I wasn’t a comb—”

“And you were a footman, aye?” He looked at Antioc, but went on before he could answer. “Probably fresh from a battle when they put you in irons, taking orders from bloated secondsons and gouty old knights. You likely know more about battle formations than all those idiots combined.”

Antioc stifled a grin.

“You’re both lieutenants now. Congratulations. Sorry we don’t have any ribbons or medals to pin on your chests.” He gestured over his shoulder with a thumb at some armed men at the gate. “They answer to you, you answer to Ferun, and Ferun answers to me. Any questions?”

Ferun had a question. “Arn, I didn’t say I needed—”

“You said you’ve got more soldiers than you know what to do with,” Arn interrupted. A tense moment was shared between them. “You’ve said it numerous times . . . all I ever hear about is how hard it is for you to keep track of them.” He gestured to us with open hands. “Well, now you’ve got help.”

“Sir,” Antioc gestured to me. “He’s got more command experience than me. I was just a footman.”

“I was an engineer.” I didn’t mind being an officer, I just didn’t want people expecting things of me that I couldn’t deliver. “I built walls. Or, ordered people to build walls . . . ”

“Fair,” Arn said with a wave. He looked at me then Antioc. “You’re a captain and you’re a lieutenant. Everyone happy?”

Ferun’s eye widened. “I’m a captain. That makes him of a rank with me.”

“Well, now you’re a general. Is all fair now?” Everyone got quiet.

Melvon smiled. “Congratulations.”

“Stow it,” growled Ferun.

Arn exchanged a look with Sharkhart, and for a moment I could swear I saw the savage crack a smile. Ferun wasn’t smiling. He wasn’t looking at Reiwyn anymore, either. He was looking at me, and not nearly as lustily. He couldn’t blame me for this.