Page 22 of Fate's Bane
“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 thosehe 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.
THECLANMOOT
Sunstead next brought the clan moot, and I spent the months in between Ha’night and Sunstead giddy with the possibility of seeing Hadhnri and terrified of the foot-snag currents flowing between the clans.
Members of the other clans who I had first met as Ward Pedhri Clan Aradoc came to visit Garadin Clan Fein’s roundhouse. They ate at his fire, drank his mead, and departed in the night. They looked hard at me before they left. They’d all sat kitten-meek under Pedhri Clan Aradoc after he defeated Clan Fein, but now their discontent shifted like silt underfoot.
With the Sunstead sun hanging at its zenith, we gathered in the land of Clan Pall to discuss the fate of the Fens. I arrived with my father and Onsgar and our elder and middle father-sisters. We of Clan Fein were a rangy lot. My father had been right; the Aradoc bounty did soften them. I looked for a glimpse of that softness in the crowd of other clans, but I could find Hadhnri nowhere—just once the back of a head, broad, cloaked shoulders, and a particular walk.
“You’re not looking for an Aradoc girl, are you?” Onsgar said, catching my glances. He had a sharp eye and sharper elbows.
I nudged him in his own ribs. In the last few years, he’d grown taller than me, and I’d grown fond of him. It was a different thing, to have younger brothers. It lessened the sting of losing Hadhnri and Gunni and sharpened it in the same bite.
“Mind your own beard,” I muttered as we found our places in the center round outside the roundhouse. Onsgar scratched his pitiful chin hairs protectively.
Beneath the bright sun, surrounded by their picked men and women, the clan leaders bickered back and forth over what was to be done with the Fens, and who was closest in the lineage to Bannos the Clever, Bannos the Bold, and thus had claim to what land.
