CHAPTER TEN: SOUTHLANDS
We come from the lands of the ice and snow,
of the midnight sun, where the frost wind blows.
-Rurik Ogre-fist, from 'The Epic of Rurik'
The south-men, who called themselves Soenmen, did not come from these lands, sailing across in great ships, their hulls protected by the runes of foreign gods. They sailed upon the Nortian continent and raided along its southern coast. Eventually, they set up settlements, expanding their raids but squabbling amongst themselves enough that their expansion was slow. It was a generation before they swarmed to the west, to the borders of that secretive mountain kingdom from whence the wandering monks came, and to the marshes, beyond which they seldom ventured until Rurik Ogre-fist defeated Folnir Yronshield and named himself koenig. This, at least was what Thea gathered between Maddie and Svilga.
"Why did Rurik send Igna to take Rouentz?" she asked the girls.
"Lord Igna said..."
"Don't call that dead man 'lord'," Matthias said. "Do you hear me, Maddie? No one is lord over you - you're free."
Maddie shrugged. "Fine. Dead-man Igna said these lands were weak and too rich for their own good, fertile farmlands and towns and villages without any king to unite them. He said it's the right of the strong to rule the weak. He had Erik Wyrlock show him the path through the marshes, and he marked it with rune markers to show the way." She pointed to a wooden post jutting out of the ground, its surface patterned in blue woad.
"That one says... northwest?" Thea said.
Maddie nodded. "That's the way to Rouentz."
They'd been riding for two hours, trotting southeast through the homesteads of Rouentz and into the rocky, barely-arable hills beyond. There were wild orchards out there that people sometimes ventured to, and a few wild hermits (and, some said, fen witches), but nobody really lived out there. At least nobody had lived out there, not in Theo's lifetime, but the Soenmen had gradually crept northward. Their little group passed one or two encampments of Soenmen - not permanent settlements, but posts for several dozen men to encamp before raids. One of the ones they passed was trailing gray firesmoke - these were probably the survivors of Thea's retribution retreating to familiar lands.
Thea took her axe - claimed from Igna's stash, the weapon was a bit too heavy for her but she could swing it well enough - and proceeded to chop the rune marker down. Beyond marking the way back to Rouentz for the Soenmen to follow, something about the symbols vaguely bothered her. Something in her bones told her the runes didn't belong here. The five of them continued on, soon riding into the miles and miles of impassable wetland beyond. But Igna's wizard, apparently, had found the way through.
"What happened to this wizard?" Larian asked. "I'd think we'd know it if he'd fought us or died in the battles."
Svilga looked at her like she was daft. "Igna sent him back to send Rurik news of his victory. Wizards can see the paths within the wilderness... nobody can move faster than a lone wizard."
"I bet Heath can," Thea said. "I wish I knew where he went..."
"I don't know," Larian said. "He should be here. I thought we were close."
"When I saw you huddled up with one another in the hollow, your head cradled under his, I thought you'd paired up," Thea chuckled. She chuckled again, but not for any particular reason. She liked her laugh - it was silvery and light and something in its tone reminded her of the chiming of solstice bells.
"Um..." Larian said.
"What?"
Larian blushed - and she didn't often blush. "Heath and Cano..."
"Heath and Cano both love you?" Matthias asked. "Or they love one another?"
"Um," Larian said, her blush spreading. "All of the above? We were kind of fooling around in the woods the night of the raid... we didn't want anybody to find out. The people in Rouentz don't quite appreciate any combinations beyond a man and his wife… my mother might appreciate different pairings of love… but, well."
"It's okay," Thea said.
"I'm going to wait until I care less about getting scolded before I break the news to her. I might not ever tell her. And I guess I might not ever have to let her know her daughter's a harlot since Heath abandoned the both of us."
"Larian!" Thea reached out and squeezed her hand. "Stop it - it's fine. You're a good person no matter what… but I thought Heath was, too, and I guess I was wrong about that."
"Some men flee at the first whiff of commitment," Matthias said. "Sometimes not the ones you'd expect. But if it's eager bucks you want, you'll have the lads beating a path to your door in no time."
"Maybe," Larian said. "But I don't want 'overeager bucks'. I want Cano and Heath."
They continued along, riding through barely-navigable tracts of wetland, interspersed by the occasional copse or grassy meadow. Whenever Thea saw one of Erik Wyrlock's post, she'd deface every last rune on the thing, chopping the posts into mulch for the wetlands to swallow, erasing the path back to Rouentz.
"How, exactly, are we going to get back?" Matthias asked.
"I'll remember," Thea said, tapping her forehead. She'd remember the position of each post and each rune, the strange symbols etched into her memory.
"Let's hope you stay safe then," Matthias said, and they rode on.
+++++
The marshes seemed to stretch forever, mile after mile of stinking, squishing soil, and Thea was worried they'd have to stop in the wetlands for the night. Even if they found a convenient and semi-dry copse to stop in, the smell and the insects were enough to make staying there unpleasant. But the wetlands transitioned into rolling hills as evening approached and, before they could decide upon a place to stop for the night, Thea spotted the light of a village in the distance... a Soenmen village. As the crow flies, they'd ridden just under twice the distance between Rouentz and Nortsair, made more distant only by the unnavigable terrain.
"We should stop in the village," Matthias said. "It'll be better for the horses to stop somewhere with stables, and maybe they'll even have proper beds for us..."
Larian objected before Thea had a chance to. "Is that safe? These are the south-men, the people who invaded Rouentz and who were going to sacrifice you to their god and take Thea and me as slaves? These are savages. I say we ride into the hills and find somewhere safe and secluded."
"Wise as you may be, you've never traveled farther from your village than Nortsair. These past few years, I've traveled for my livelihood - I've journeyed between Rina-dur in the high mountains and Faal-a-basqa in the north sands, and I've met my share of south-men. Are they barbarians and conquerors? Of course - you'll get no argument from me. But they're also traders and farmers - they're people. They have homes and families, and up until they decide you're ripe for conquest, their hospitality isn't half bad. Better than most."
Thea thought about that - even though she had very bad associations with these people, what Matthias said made sense. And if he thought sleeping in the village was safe enough for Maddie, it was probably pretty safe. Certainly, it meant he thought it was safer to bring the girls into the village than to try to rough it in the open for their first (and hopefully only) night in foreign land.
"If we sleep well and the horses are fresh, we'll have a better chance of rescuing Cano," Thea reasoned. "Let's do it."
Larian relented and they rode into town - a frontier town smaller than Rouentz, perhaps two hundred people, but it had a stables and a common house. The architecture was strange, the buildings having thatched roofs and many of the buildings fashioned from rough-hewn logs daubed with clay. It had the look of an actual frontier town and not one that was on the edge of civilization but had been allowed to settle for two centuries or so, as Rouentz had. The place had no defenses to speak of, not even a little fence-style wall, so anybody, man or animal, could simply walk into town. They rode in unopposed and trotted up to the stables, situated their horses, and had the groom point them to the common house. Not a soul made a move to stop or even question them.
"Mind you, it's close to Purgistok, so some of the folk in there are bound to be drunk. Best you watch your women," the groom said to Matthias - he was the only man in their group, and also the only one of them who didn't speak near-fluent Soetic.
"We're looking forward to Purgistok, too," Thea said before Matthias made a fool of himself. She was, after all, the only adult who looked like a passable Soenwoman with her pale skin and blue eyes. Larian would pass if you ignored her bronze skin tone, which was about three shades too dark, and Matthias couldn't pass in a million million years. His skin had grown dark like ebon oil.
They sauntered toward the common house, past a practice yard and a group of men going through the steps of some sort of ritualized axe fight for the holiday. All of the men stopped to watch them pass, paying far too much attention to Thea and Larian.
"That's too big an axe for you, girl," one of the men called to her. And, when Thea didn't respond, he approached and shook the wooden fence between them. "Didn't you hear me? A girl shouldn't carry a weapon... not if she can't use it."
Thea glared at him, and the man took a second to recover from the sight of her. Her frown could be formidable in of itself. "I'm not a girl!" she said reflexively. She'd meant it in the literal sense - that she wasn't female at all - but that was obviously untrue. She managed to recover. "I'm a grown woman, sir, and I can use my weapon well enough," she said.
"Oooh," the man said, shaking his knees and feigning fear. "I've crossed a pretty yeoman's wife and her northern coterie! Shame on me, I should run to the hills!"
"We apologize, sir," Larian said. "We're tired from our journey... we'll be on our way."
"I can use an axe," Thea said. She pushed past Larian and looked her detractor in the eye. Big Theo couldn't boast many marketable skills, but axes, hammers, and shovels he'd had plenty of practice with. Thea could no longer swing one of the big mallets that weighed half what she did, but she could certainly swing an axe. She'd hacked a dozen rune posts to pieces earlier today. She balled her fists and was about two seconds from hopping into the yard and proving herself.
"Let it go," Larian whispered.
Thea huffed and stomped off, the hooting laughter of the men echoing behind her. She pushed her way into the common house, with Matthias jogging to catch up. The place was raucous with singing and drink, men and women dancing and downing beer and mead with abandon, so their arrival was scarcely noticed. When the proprietor wandered back to fetch more beer, Matthias caught his attention.
"How much... two rooms?" he asked, his Soetic halting and heavily accented.
The man's glance wandered between all of them, from Matthias, tall and dark, to Thea, then Larian, then the two girls.
"Are the women for sale?" the man asked.
"We are not!" Thea said. "We're on a pilgrimage to Purgistok and had hoped for some hospitality!"
The man raised his hands, an instant of fear flashing across his expression. "I meant nothing by it, mistress," he said. "It's usually when north-men come with pretty ones in tow... you know how it is. We're always looking for more women to warm our hearths. Four browns for two rooms, and you'll make tell of our hospitality?"
Matthias nodded and fished around his pouch, visibly surprised to have pulled out a silver coin and not a cupra. "Two rooms and a round for all the fine people here."
The barman announced, "A round from our visiting pilgrims!" and the whole room cheered and saluted with their cups. Thea grabbed an unattended beer and helped herself to it, needing something to take the edge off of her annoyance at the whole affair.
They crammed their way up the narrow stairwell to the rooms. Matthias fished around his coin purse. "I have no idea where that silver came from. I haven't had any southern coinage in weeks."
"Convenient that you did, though," Larian said. "You might want to check all your pouches."
Matthias did so once they reached the cramped cupboard of his room, dumping the contents of his pouch and gasping at the fortune in silver and gold that spread out on the mattress. Svilga plucked up one of the gold coins and held it in her small fingers, bringing it close enough to her face that she had to squint.
"I've never seen a real gold talent before," she said. "That's worth a fortune. Lord Igna... um, dead-man-Igna was always telling the yeomen they'd get some when they conquered the north. He said they'd have so much gold they could eat it."
Matthias was clearly shaken. He took the coin back and turned it over again and again, as if it might turn into a ruddy little cupra as he watched. "Don't ever flash gold around," he said. "It's dangerous enough to pluck out silver solvar or argento like it's nothing. But... how?"
"How do our clothes change without our even being aware of it?" Thea asked. "Is there really any sense in asking how magic works?"
"Everything follows rules," Larian stated. "Some of the rules we might not understand, but that doesn't mean they aren't there. To chalk something up to 'just' magic is to give up on ever really understanding it."
"Perhaps," Matthias said. "I suggest we ponder the greater mysteries of magic over a good night's sleep. I assume the two of you are fine with rooming together?"
Thea shrugged. "I suppose we'll have to be."
She would have preferred to spend the night with Matthias. Though, as before, Thea was worried. She worried that if Matthias grew amorous, she might share his desire and drain the life right out of him through a magic that she most definitely didn't understand the rules to. But Matthias seemed adamant to sleep with Maddie and Svilga. The girls weren't likely to be plagued by visions of ghosts and death tonight, but Matthias was still understandably protective of the daughter who'd been taken from him and enslaved for three years. So Thea roomed up with Larian and pondered the mad sequence of events that had led her here.
"Pondering the deep secrets of magic?" Larian asked her.
Their room was small, lit by a single rush candle and furnished with two bunked pallets, a tiny end table, and a rickety wooden chair. Thea disrobed down to her smallclothes, her back to Larian, and stared into the candle's flame.
"I'm worried about a lot of things," she said. "This is really dangerous, what we're doing, isn't it?"
"Absurdly dangerous," Larian agreed.
"I can't even defend myself, not really. When those men were laughing at me because my axe is too big for me to properly handle... is this how it always is? Feeling foolish and helpless?" Thea started sniffing back tears. "When Igna had me in his room, he pinned me down and there wasn't anything I could do. I… I wanted to fight, but he was so much stronger. I'm not sure there's anything I could have done to stop him."
Larian hugged Thea from behind and spoke into her ear. "It's all right. It's not always like that, and it's not your fault."
Thea was doubly ashamed - ashamed that she felt so helpless and ashamed that she couldn't stop herself from crying. She felt like a child, and Larian running her fingers through Thea's hair and whispering "shh" into her ear wasn't helping. She continued anyway. "He said he'd have me, whether I wanted him or not..."
Larian stopped for a moment. "And then you killed him and his men, stormed into the jail, rescued us all, and resurrected Matthias's daughter," she said. "If that's helplessness, it's not a definition I'm familiar with - and I'm familiar with all of them."
Thea wiped her eyes, the tears gradually coming to an ebb. "But… but it's not me. I can't control it," she said.
"Not yet," Larian said. "But, if I had to guess, you're the strongest of all of us. Stronger than me. Stronger than Cano. After all, we are the ones coming to his rescue. Our Adonyx in distress. I know you're scared, but I promise you'll feel better if you let yourself feel better."
"Thanks," Thea said. She turned around and hugged Larian back, giggling at how her height made her substantial breasts smoosh into the young woman's chin. "I'm... I think it's going to be a while, but I'll try to be strong."
"You will be strong," Larian said. She stood on her tiptoes and kissed Thea's cheek. "Get some sleep, okay? I promise you'll feel better in the morning."
+++++
Thea did feel better in the morning. She awoke to Larian snoring in her ear. They'd gone to sleep on separate pallets, or at least Thea thought they had. But now, Larian was curled up behind her, warm and snoring in her ear. The closeness felt nice but not, she realized, arousing. She wondered if anything was arousing to her anymore - she frankly didn't know. She felt something for Matthias and a different something for Larian, and a different something yet for the others, and none of those somethings struck her as being necessarily erotic. That was curious, but not something she wanted to worry herself with - not now. If she was destined to be a sexless scion to Astrilla, so be it.
She decided to let Larian sleep for a little while - that little while being about five minutes, because Thea's leg was cramping up and she had to pee. Thea shifted off the pallet and padded across the room to her clothes, sniffing herself before putting them on. She didn't stink, but scions still had bodily functions - a bath would be nice... and she suspected that baths were probably uncommon in their current locale. The Soenmen weren't a slovenly people, but baths probably consisted of a once-weekly trip to the nearest brook.
"It's morning already?" Larian mumbled.
"Same time it usually is," Thea said. "We should head out soon if we're to get there in time to save Cano at sundown."
"Right! That's tonight!" She shot Thea a nervous glance. "Do you think we'll get there in time?"
"Igna expected that Cano would get to Rurik in time without especially hurrying and that there'd be time enough for the koenig to decide his fate. Hopefully, the Soenmen aren't much better riders than we give them credit for."
They met Matthias and the girls in the hallway and headed to the common room for breakfast. Some of the patrons below were the same revelers from the night before... some had gone home and returned, and some had stayed for the night. Some of those were still sleeping on the benches and tables despite the clatter of plates and the din of conversation. Now that there were fewer bleary eyes and jubilant voices in the establishment, the five of them attracted their share of attention, and at least two of the patrons tugged on Matthias's shirt sleeve, asking how much he wanted for the women. Apparently, human chattel were not an uncommon trade in these parts.
"I feel like a piece of meat," Thea said.
"Me, too," Matthias said. "And maybe some bread and eggs." That hadn't been what she'd meant, and from his consoling look, he knew it, too. But now wasn't the time to draw the ire of the locals.
Soon enough, breakfast in their bellies, they were back on the road with the Soenmen village retreating behind them. Behind, with its men who hooted in laughter at Thea's axe and who kept asking how much to own her. The sooner they could get out of the south-men's lands, the happier she'd be. If she had her way, she'd have driven them right back into the sea. But first they'd have to go much deeper, into the very heart of their kingdom. Larian pointed to a group of townspeople trailing off down a side-path, rune-sticks held high and banners waving in the breeze.
"I'll bet we can follow them to Purgistok," she said.
"Not the right one," Maddie said. She pointed to the mountains before them, hazy in the distance. "Each town has its own celebration, but Rurik Koenig holds his in the hallowed grounds."
"That's where Soenim lives," Svilga added. "Below the mountain."
So they headed up into the foothills, following a rocky path, at times indistinguishable from the patchy grass and scree about them. The girls seemed to know where they were going, conferring with one another at times with whispers and pointing. It was a good thing they had guides, too, because they didn't encounter a soul on their way and Thea wouldn't have been able to point out the path if you'd offered her ten times the wealth of Matthias's golden pockets. But their horses plodded along without complaint, and soon they were high enough into the foothills that Thea could see the whole spread of the grasslands below them, dotted with small farms and patches of trees and trailing off to the expanse of wetlands they'd crossed the day before. And cool, too. With a shiver, Thea wondered whether her wardrobe would sprout a coat if she grew chilly enough.
The way was rough, but it never grew so rough that they couldn't continue by horse. But they had to stop frequently, and soon the shadows grew long and Thea worried that they wouldn't make it by nightfall, that Cano would be sacrificed to the south-men's bloody mountain god before they could so much as attempt a rescue. Indeed, the path was winding and it seemed to go forever... but, just as she was dipping into despair, they rounded a ridge and the mountains opened into a great gentle valley with a thousand firelights below, the tiny distant figures of people and horses bustling about like ants beneath the vast, dark shadow of the mountain. They'd arrived at Purgistok.
