An unshaven black tangle of beard buried most of his features. Not the whites of his eyes, distinct with alarm as he stared in blank shock. Despite his sad state of frightful neglect, his manner seemed too confused to be dangerous. His empty hands dangled, unthreatening.
Nonetheless, Efflin reached for the cudgel wedged behind the cart’s buckboard.
‘That’s no marauding bandit.’ Tarens’s urgent grip on his brother’s wrist checked the move to brandish the weapon.
‘You’re that sure he’s not been sent out as bait?’ Brass chinked, as Efflin tipped his hatted head towards the wood, where late-season briar laced the dense undergrowth, dank with fog, and impenetrable. ‘If that’s a tinker, then someone unfriendly’s already lifted his pack.’
‘Here?’ Kerelie scoffed, too riveted to brush out the hen feathers snagged in her sleeve. ‘Don’t be a fright-monger!’ Astute when it counted, she gestured towards the tipsy stone finials that loomed through the murk a stone’s throw to the left. Those moss-splotched markers were well-known, even feared, where the overgrown track branched off the trade-route.
Efflin’s ruddy face flamed. The site was no place for wise folk to linger. Travellers avoided the tangled lane, which led into the ancient ruin. Oftentimes, Koriathain practised their uncanny rituals there. When the enchantresses pitched their silken pavilions amid the tumble-down walls of the grounds, or if birch smoke rose from the crumbled chimneys, the charcoal men who cut trees for their kilns did their rough-house drinking in taverns, safe behind Kelsing’s brick walls. They spoke of queer doings in whispers, while the ivied remains of the Second Age hall were reclaimed by the order’s sisters. Nobody dared to stray past the wood or till the rich soil of the fallow pastures.
This had been true well before the Light’s avatar had tamed the Mistwraith’s malevolence. Older legends held that the place harboured haunts from the days before Mankind settled Athera.
Like most Taerlin crofters, Efflin and his family were blessed for the Light since their birth. They went out of their way to avoid the wild places where the mysteries were believed to linger. Such arcane trouble as walked in the world was best left to the dedicate priests. Sound sense suggested their wagon ought to be set rolling at once.
Except the bewildered man in the way displayed no inclination to move.
Efflin shook off his brother’s clamped hold. ‘Why not make yourself useful? Step down and shift that seedy fellow aside.’
‘I say he isn’t right in the head.’ Tarens flexed his shoulders to mask his uneasiness. Deliberate, as if nonchalant, he arose, ahead of the moment his sister lost patience and fetched him a kick on the backside. He slid to the ground. His solid build should deter anyone’s urge to pick a fight or try robbery.
‘Don’t place undue trust in mild appearances,’ Kerelie blurted, concerned.
‘Who’s the fright-monger, now?’ Yet Tarens honoured her anxious prompt and lifted his quarterstaff from the wagon-bed. Step by easy step, as though stalking a poised hare, he closed on the befuddled stranger.
The brazen creature regarded him, motionless. Close up, his eyes were a startling green, brilliantly clear, and focused to a frenetic intensity. Drilled by that keen survey, Tarens felt the bristle of hair at his nape. ‘Who are you?’ he asked, cautious.
The stranger presented his opened hands. If he understood language, he chose not to answer. His fixated regard never left Tarens’s face. Diviners who owned arcane Sight had that look: as though they could read a man, past and present, then project the unwritten course of his fortune and sense his future demise.
‘Who are you?’ Tarens repeated.
The man’s uncanny regard showed him emptiness. As though human speech chased his thoughts beyond desolate, he seemed absorbed by an unseen inner vista that stretched forlorn and unutterably lacking. He might stand on two legs as a man. But the rapt poignancy of his expression suggested he grasped no firm concept by which to define himself, or anything else in the world he inhabited.
Tarens shivered. Distrust dissolved to heart-rending pity, he pronounced in swift reassurance, ‘He’s a lack-wit.’
The queer fellow listened, head tipped to one side, but without sign of comprehension.
‘I mean you no harm,’ Tarens added, contrite. ‘I only thwap others who cross me, besides. Mostly, after my brother hammers me, first.’ Aware that his purpled eye lent him a frightening aspect, Tarens slowly shifted the quarterstaff into the crook of his elbow. By nature, he was prepared to be gentle as he eased the odd vagabond clear of the road.
‘Any idea where he came from?’ Kerelie ventured from her anxious seat in the wagon-bed.
‘No.’ Tarens grasped the man’s ragged shoulder. The unsavoury shirt was too thin for the season, and the bony frame, disgracefully underfed. Outraged, he exclaimed, ‘Wherever that was, naught can forgive the wrongful fact someone was starving him.’
‘We’re not hauling a stray!’ Efflin bellowed, at once shouted down by Kerelie’s protest.
‘For shame! Would you turn a blind eye on misfortune? If the man’s a simpleton, how can we not show him kindness?’
Efflin grumbled, unmollified, ‘You’re that sure he’s not one of the ungrateful orphans, scarpered from the witches’ protection?’
‘Nonsense!’ Kerelie batted his arm. ‘Since when has a boy ward of theirs grown a beard?’ Truth disarmed the argument. Koriathain always placed their male charges with an honest apprenticeship before they reached virile manhood.
‘Worse,’ Efflin persisted, ‘we could be caught harbouring one of their order’s half-witted servants.’
Which cruel guess was the more likely prospect. Rumors and grannies’ tales said Koriathain coveted idiots for the brainless service of fetching and carrying. Coin endowments, word held, were awarded for deaf-mutes. Ones unable to read or write could not betray the order’s secretive business. ‘If that creature’s stumbled away from such keepers, we’re not safe assisting a runaway.’
Tarens overheard. Susceptible to soft-heartedness, he jumped at fresh cause to brangle with his older brother. ‘I wouldn’t leave my worst enemy, here!’ If his prized bull must be condemned to the knacker’s knife, he had never allowed better sense to abet any form of mistreatment. Nor would he stand for the callous abuse of a person luckless enough to be moonstruck.
Efflin understood well enough when to humour his brother’s obstinacy. ‘Lead the wretch here, then. We’ll grant him a ride into Kelsing and leave him the coin to buy a hot meal.’ He set the brake, resigned, looped the reins, and climbed down to restrain the bull, while Kerelie pulled the latch pins and lowered the tail-board.
If the creature had been a witch’s familiar, he stayed docile as Tarens boosted him into the wagon. He curled up by the chicken crates, knees hugged to his chest, soothed by the ponderous rumble of wheels, and contentedly pleased to watch the autumn landscape pass by. When the ox-wain trundled into the sprawling farm market, shadowed beneath Kelsing’s walls, he observed with bright eyes as Efflin hauled the ox to a stop. Before Tarens could hitch the draught beast to a rail, the fellow leaped out, saw where he was needed, and with no one’s asking, helped Kerelie unload the baskets and poultry. His small size masked an unexpected, fierce strength. He hefted the heaviest crates without difficulty and arranged them as she directed for display and sale.
While Efflin took charge and untied the bull, Tarens dug into his scrip. The last silver left to his name, he placed in the vagabond’s hand. Sadness struck him afresh, that the man’s nails were dirt-rimed, and his palm, welted over with callus.
Peculiar, how those oddities niggled. Tarens had never heard mention that Koriathain worked the land or kept destitutes for field labor. He shrugged off curiosity, aware by the heat on his back that the risen sun burned through the mist. Already he risked being late to nose-lead the beeve to its fate at the butcher’s. Loose half-wits were scarcely his problem, besides. At