Tarens, who crouched in the lee of the collapsed foundation, bruised and pained by every drawn breath. At each turn, his friend’s resourcefulness displayed a flagrant proficiency.
‘You’ve done this before,’ he broached at a hitched whisper.
The beggarman returned a luminous smile, unapologetic as he dished out two savoury servings into his scavenged jam crocks. Carmine-lit by the embers, he was raffish again, his dark hair in tangles and his sharp-cut features blurred over by several days’ stubble.
Tarens accepted his portion, moved to trepidation by the messy prospect of eating while strapped in the dressing that splinted his nose. A touch on his wrist dispelled that apprehension: he was offered a wooden spoon, crudely whittled. Not by the artifact blade from the diviner but with a plain harness knife, too likely filched from the inn’s cranky stableman.
‘Thank you,’ he rasped, grateful in spite of the suspect case of petty theft. ‘You must have a name?’
The question incited a glance, with raised eyebrows. The vagabond set down his meal. He retrieved the stick implement from the emptied pot and scraped three antique Paravian characters on the slate apron. A pause followed. After a frown of intense concentration, he surrendered his effort, left a gap, and inscribed a last cipher with an irritable flourish.
‘I can’t read the old runes,’ Tarens pressed gently.
The stick moved again, the inscription redone in the common characters used by town commerce. ‘ARI,’ the string began, followed by the same annoyed space, then the dangling character ‘N,’ finished off with a flick.
‘Arin will do, then,’ Tarens declared, tactful enough not to stir the frustration behind the peevish omission. ‘Unless you wish otherwise?’
An open-hand gesture gave resigned assent. Then hunger eclipsed the token exchange. Both men ate quickly. Before darkness fell, their coal-fire was doused, the swept ashes flung into the river. Arin smothered the blackened hearthstone under mouldered leaves, cleaned the jam-jars, and removed the one rigged to the well chain. Satisfied that no trace of their presence remained, he chased Tarens into the root-cellar. Huddled amid the chill influx of draughts and blind in the dank, cobwebbed darkness, the injured man wrapped up in the moth-eaten horse-blanket.
Nothing spoke but the outside whine of the wind, and the fitful scrape as dry leaves scratched across the overgrown entrance. Denied simple conversation, the crofter wondered what trauma incited his companion’s reluctance to talk.
The elusive answer remained unsolved since Arin slipped back outdoors in pursuit of unspecified business. Nocturnal by habit, he might stay abroad until after the storm broke. Tarens was left stranded with his own thoughts, wakeful and alone for the first time since the fraught peril of his deliverance.
Crops had failed here. The awareness tingled through skin, bone, and nerve, from the finger-tips pressed to cold earth with intent to detect the drummed vibration of hoof-beats. But no patrol of white lancers pursued his battered friend. Not yet; the certainty that such searchers would come cranked a relentless tension through his viscera. The man who failed to recall his true name, for convenience addressed as Arin, expelled a vexed breath and stood up.
He could not have explained how he sensed the imprinted presence of subtle disharmony. Only that, between the snow scent on the wind and the rustled chatter of frosted grasses, a lingering blight threaded through the innate fabric of this remote patch of farmland. Like dissonance, some long-past event spun a kink in the natural currents that nourished the life in his surroundings.
He had no memory and yet, he knew. Once, long ago, he may have spun music to remedy such an imbalance. But not here: the pulse of this place did not rise in his blood though he could trace the stagnated eddies and define where ragged constrictions marred the rhythmic flow of its melody.
The upset was an entrenched affliction. Through the whine of the wind and the pressure of pending storm, he noted the absence of owls and the scarcity of the field-mice. The plentiful hare bespoke sparse herds of deer, which should have browsed on the unmown pastures in their drab winter coats. These fields were not, and never had been home to him. Still, if he let his attentive pause lengthen, the subtle symphony of deeper nuances gradually would be unveiled.
He shrank from the prospect. The stretch to access such uncanny awareness bristled him to instinctive recoil. Who knew what other dread fact might emerge? What firm assurance did he possess, that some ugly circumstance from his blank past might not resurface and shatter his equilibrium? Someone had chained him, once. He bore the scars. Trauma from an incorrigible imprisonment made him flinch, until the evidence haunted him: that somehow he might be a danger to others, and the cruelty of his past shackles might prove to be justified.
Fires never burned without smoke. The placid country-side was being swept to flush out a sorcerer maligned for foul practice. Frightened talk between the travellers on the thoroughfare had shared the same terrorized undertones overheard at the inn-yard. Worse, he had tended the hideous injuries inflicted upon Tarens by the brunt of hysterical consequence.
The inner dread had to be faced: his unknown past might hold criminal acts. If so, he deferred the crippling horror of digging for self-discovery. His gifted talent could not be denied. The evident power he carried, untapped, burned like molten flame under the skin. Scruple kept that frightful well-spring untested. He would not sound those depths. Never, until the kind-hearted crofter could be delivered to safety. That feat must be done on his upright human merits, if only to bear out an honest man’s faith in him.
Therefore, his finely tuned senses searched only for warning of inbound lancers. No such intrusion disrupted the night. Pending snow whetted the air to shaved ice, and stiffened gusts clattered the branches. He moved through the ruin softly as a wraith, while the promised storm stole in like snipped lace and paled the darkness with flurries. Content for the nonce to wear Arin’s identity, he combed through the graveyard ruin of the village for anything useful. He finished fast, stripped off his jacket, and wrapped up his picked stash of oddities. He returned to his chosen bolt-hole before the dusted ground showed his tracks.
The shelter enfolded him, pitch-black and silent, but not peaceful, as he expected. Instead his companion’s inconsolable grief pounded with breaking force against his unshuttered empathic awareness.
Arin dropped his wrapped cache. Reeled as though struck by a mortal blow, he could not move, could not breathe, could not think. Only feel, quite helpless to stem the flash-point shock of the other man’s raging emotion.
Entangled, Arin lost the wits to recoil. He had spent too many traumatic years pitched to the razor’s edge, his survival pressured to split-second response through the soul-naked handling of free wraiths. His ingrained, urgent reflex sorted the wrack, already driven to seek the needful pattern to uplift and heal…
Images of family burst through in a flood, stamped with the loss of unbearable parting: a thousand desolate imprints of love wrenched into abrupt separation. Some faces he recognized. Beside Efflin and Kerelie, he picked out the two deceased children whose spirits once spoke through a borrowed flute. The sad barrage also encompassed lost parents: a boy’s eyes watched a father leave home, conscripted to arms by a temple muster; this triggered a spinning, prescient rush into an unformed future, which showed Kerelie, convulsed with laughter while sewing a rich lady’s ruffled silk dress. Then that image faded into another, of Efflin bent over an open account book. Both scenes yet-to-be stretched like gauze across the torched biers that had consumed the wrapped casualties of summer’s fever. Amid the crackle of flames from past pyres, other layers of charred bones whispered through the endemic malignment that wracked the country-side to disharmony…
The paroxysm of visions flayed through as a rip tide that broke, ebbed, and stranded him. Arin came back to himself, his eyes streaming the tears of fierce heart-ache. He tasted the tang of death and despair, and ached for the bleak damage yet to occur. Once while caged in crystal, assuaging a wraith, he had translated such findings to music, then lifted the tissue of pain to a gentle requital through resonant melody. But Tarens was a being of flesh, prisoned inside the range of his cognizant senses. Lacking an instrument, speech only remained: and the stark terror