~Meriel~

Oh, pity the cows at their rest, in fields open to the elements. Autumn had threatened to end for a week now. The night, like each of the last four nights, was filled with the freezing rain that heralded a coming winter—great icy lashes which batted hard on thatch rooftops and kept Meriel from sleeping easily. By morning, though, the sun was out. There was no trace of the night's storm but the damp earth on the ground.

After a breakfast of a worm-ridden heel of bread and a spreading of grease, Meriel dressed for the day: a pale red dress, spangled with patches of miscoloured fabric where it had been repaired half a hundred times, the sleeves folded back to bare her forearms and keep the grime of the day from staining fine cloth. Beneath it she wore a thin slip, for warmth, but forewent the cowshide shawl. It wasn't yet cold enough for that. Best not to wish winter upon her too soon.

Mud squelched beneath her boots as she started on her day's errands. There were no paved roads in the Village. There was precious little of anything, in fact, apart from the smattering of aged farmhouses that sat together between thick woodland to the north and the River Jale to the south. Even some of these were abandoned. Creeping ivy and cracking flagstones marked their forfeiture to nature. Meriel had come to find charm in the Village. Sparse as it was, it was home.

The Village didn't have a name. Names were for the great cities, where kings and queens and fancy lords lived; the folk who lived in the Village were far from fancy, and they saw no need to give their humble home a name. They just called it 'the Village', and that was that. People seldom left the Village, and outlanders very rarely came to town for more than a day. As far as the people of the Village were concerned, the troubles of the world were for the world to deal with, and nought to do with them.

Meriel had always lived in the Village, though she often wished she didn’t. Working the fields was hard, and boring to boot. When she was old enough, she’d be compelled to marry one of the village boys. She’d have to give him children. That all sounded ghastly! It's why her fancy was taken by her stories; her father had read to her every night when she was younger, tales of princesses and faeries and mages and knights, and she was ever grateful for that. She often found herself envying the people who inhabited those stories. City-dwellers seemed to lead such fascinating lives. Imagine if she had been a city girl. She could become a courtesan, or a mercenary, perhaps even a dark assassin!

When she was younger, once, she’d prayed that she might turn out to have some untapped spark inside her. Oh, her father insisted that it didn’t exist—that magic was something that existed only in the stories—but Meriel hoped that if she wished hard enough she might find herself whisked away by a travelling Magus, taken to the Octal Tower. That was where the Magi trained. They were all women, according to some of the stories, and they lived their lives together without ever being made to marry some horrid boy.

Meriel had never seen a Magus. Few in the Village reckoned they had, except while drunk and making outlandish claims. Not even Rochard Ebelred, who in younger days had travelled south as far as Essetiel and found work in the buttery of Ashtimber Hall, ever claimed to have actually spoken to a Magus. Everyone knew Magi were a solitary folk; they rarely messed in the affairs of the common folk, and they certainly didn’t waste their time on out-of-the-way villages so insignificant they didn’t even have a name.

Come to that, Meriel supposed that the Village must have a name, somewhere. On occasion, men came to collect taxes for the local Lord, to whom the whole area belonged. If they knew where to find the Village, it must have been on a map somewhere, and therefore it must have a name—but nobody had seen fit to tell the people who lived in the Village, and the people of the Village hadn’t ever bothered to pick one for themselves.

There was a chill wind today. Turning up the collar of her woollen shawl, Meriel crossed the muddy road that ran the spine of the Village. The sound of plentiful laughter came from the walls of the tavern, and through its grimy windows she could see the inviting glow of a lit hearth. She put it all out of her mind. Later, maybe, she could warm herself by the fire, and drink a mug or two of Fer Bentore’s best ale, but for now she had chores to attend to. Father had broken the head of one of his hoes on a firm rock, and he needed Dam Huradon the blacksmith to repair it for him. That was a nice enough task, exactly the sort of thing Meriel craved in weather like this—Fer Huradon’s forge made the whole of his shop warm, and she could usually talk to her friend Cad, Fer Huradon’s apprentice, while she waited.

As expected, she found Cad in Fer Huradon’s shop. The lad didn't have the build of a blacksmith. Sure, he'd apprenticed for long enough now that the muscles on his arms had grown thick, but he was a beanpole, lean and lanky, and no amount of smithing had broadened his chest. His was a boyish face, a soft countenance, unchanged from childhood and seemingly incapable of bearing even the slightest scrap of a beard. Meriel had heard some of the boys of the Village laughing about that. If Cad had ever heard them, he didn't seem to mind a jot. As always, he worked with a grin on his face. He was holding in his hand a hammer, an overly-heavy thing, with jewels encrusted into the handle. Far too expensive for Cad. “Who did you rob to pay for that?” she asked him, stifling a grin.

Cad turned to her, eyes wide. “Meriel!” He thrust the hammer hurriedly onto a rack on the wall behind him. “Uh… I was just checking it, that’s all.”

“Is that why you couldn’t put it down fast enough when you saw me here?”

“It’s a leftover,” said Cad defensively. “Fer Huradon made it for an out-of-towner, four months back, but by the time it was done the man had gone.”

Meriel dropped her father’s broken hoe on a wooden table. “Of course he was. Nobody stays more than a day. I’ll need this fixed up. Father says he’ll arrange payment with Fer Huradon tomorrow.”

Cad studied the broken hoe, and a grin appeared on his face. “Your father needs to be more careful what he’s tilling, Meriel. That’s the third one this year.” Lifting it up, he suddenly paused. “Did you know Fera Heddorel’s left town?”

Meriel's eyes widened. "When?"

"This morning," said Cad. "She was in the tavern taking breakfast, and suddenly she just took off. Muttered something about a forge, so Fer Bentore says—he came by earlier to ask whether she'd been here, that's how I know—but sure as like she never came by here."

"Who says she left town? Maybe she just went home."

Cad shook his head. "I'd say that's hardly likely. She went by the south road, Ancie Bayren saw her go. Hired one of Fer Garren's fastest horses, too. Hired or stole."

"She's no thief," said Meriel.

"She's no friend either, from what I've heard." Cad shrugged. "I guess it don't matter too much, though. She's gone."

But gone where? It was a fact of living so far away from the beating heart of civilisation that people rarely came to the Village, or at least they rarely stayed more than a day—but those who were here almost never left. In fact, apart from the twice-annual market run to Camistane in the north, Meriel wasn't sure when someone had last left the Village. She knew there was a man who'd been exiled some years back, for crimes so vile none of the women had been allowed to attend his trial; had it really been nine years already?

"Do you mind if I leave this with you?" Meriel pointed to the hoe. "I'll come back and get it before your suppertime. Promise." Cad grunted his assent, and Meriel kissed his cheek. Then she stepped back out into the wind, and started on the road north.

Telis Heddorel lived in a small house right up against the edge of the woods, where the soil was too tangled up with knotted tree-roots to make good farming land. It was a small parcel, smaller even than the one Meriel shared with her father. The Village hadn't allowed Telis to have a larger plot. She was an outsider, not a trueborn resident of the Village, and so the idea of giving her some of the best land in the Village was unthinkable. In fact, she was the only outsider to choose to stay in town in fifty years at least. Where most were gone in a day or two, and even the most stubborn fled for the comforts of bigger places within a month, Telis had been in the Village for near enough eighteen years now. She'd arrived more or less the same time as Meriel was born. Old Idden Baltly, the hard-faced malingerer who spent his days dosing up on ale and passing judgement on everybody else, had insisted for as long as Meriel could remember that it was only a matter of time before Telis Heddorel had enough. At last, it seemed, Idden Baltly was right.

Meriel was rather fond of Telis, truth be told, even if only in that strange way whereby they seldom interacted with one another unless an errand happened to send Meriel to the woods. If she was passing, especially on a rainy day, Meriel was always invited in to share a pot of tea with Telis. The way the older woman made it, it was sweet and hot, but never too sweet or too hot. Telis Heddorel doted on Meriel. Their occasional tea meetings were their little secret.

Many in the Village seemed not to trust Telis. Meriel's father had expressly forbidden her from going too close to her, and gossip-mongers such as Idden Baltly or Mordecai Farn believed that she was some form of witch. Not a Magus—quite apart from their lack of concern for out-of-the-way villages, Fer Farn would have it that you could always tell a Magus by their face, and Telis Heddorel did not have the face of a Magus—but rather some kind of malevolent woodswitch. Seven years back, Addeor Colsor's little brother had vanished. Whipped up by rumours spread from Fer Farn, half of the Village had gathered whatever sharp implements they could get hold of and prepared to kill poor Telis for the crime of harming the young Colsor boy, before Addeor got cold feet and admitted that he'd hidden his brother in the hayloft of the family barn. Despite that, Telis had stayed. Meriel had assumed, then, that nothing would drive Telis away. She'd hoped so.

Idly, she wondered what had caused the woman to leave the Village when even the threat of mob justice could not.

Well, perhaps there'd be something in her house to give a hint. Meriel wasn't sure what she was expecting to find, if anything at all, but it wasn't too far to walk, and there were no rainclouds in the sky. And if Telis was gone for good, it would only be a matter of time before her cottage was given to somebody else. Now might well be the last chance for Meriel to see where the woman had lived. It was funny, really: Telis might have been a strange woman who lived on her own at the far end of the Village, who gave Meriel tea now and then, but she was as close to a mother as any woman in town. Not even Fera Bentore, the innkeeper's wife who was so generous with the other children, had many kind words to say to Meriel. For a week when she was a little younger, Meriel had taken work as a serving girl at the tavern. Fera Bentore had found fault in everything Meriel did, even when the other serving girls were guilty of far worse. And the other women were often even worse. She still remembered the time Fera Taruli, the seamstress, had chided her for a disgrace because her dress was too short, when Fera Taruli had finished sewing it only the day before. Telis' house was the site of near as many of Meriel's happy memories as her own home. 

She must have had a real mother, once. That was how children came to be. Perhaps her mother had been a kind woman—Meriel didn't remember her, and her father never spoke of her. In fact, she'd never heard anybody in the Village talking about her mother in any great depth. Carrette Loghire told her once that her mother had died when she was very small, and that was the only time anybody had given voice to the woman's existence in Meriel's hearing. And in any case, Meriel couldn't be sure it wasn't just words to spare her feelings. Fera Loghire's daughter Helicent had spent that day tormenting Meriel about her mother's absence, bringing her to tears.

The Village was top-heavy. Most of the houses had been built nearer to the river; the land along the water's edge was the most fertile, so the first farms had been established there, and much of the town's other facilities—the tavern, Fer Huradon's smithy, Jol Bardle's butchery—kept to where there were already buildings. Closer to the woods, the houses were fewer. Once you got fifty yards north of Fer Huradon's shop, the Village was just a single road, with farmsteads dotted about it. There were usually five or six houses in a rough cluster, all belonging to different branches of the same family that all worked the same land, and after them there'd be no buildings at all on that side of the road for sixty-five yards or more. It was a good hundred yards between Telis' house and its nearest neighbour, an ivy-licked cottage where one of Bart Phale's sons lived with his sickly wife. Today, the drapes in the windows were drawn. The poor woman was having one of her bad turns. When her health allowed, she was usually at the upstairs window watching for passers-by, and she usually waved when she saw Meriel.

By the time Meriel reached Telis Heddorel's cottage, the clouds above had taken on a brooding greyness. Instinctively she pulled her shawl tighter around her. The rain might not have started yet, but it would come, and she didn't want to be caught out in it. She pushed on the little gate at the front of Telis' property, which creaked as it opened, and walked towards the house. Something made her hesitate for a second. What if Cad had got it wrong? What if Telis hadn't gone after all?

Well, she'd never complained about house guests before.

In any case, there was no sign of life inside. On a grey day such as this, Telis would have lit a candle or two, and the warm glow would be visible through the windowpanes. That was not the case. Inside seemed just as dark as out. Oddly, the door wasn't fully closed. It was pulled to, enough that it would look closed to somebody just passing by, but up close it was obvious. A jute sack had been wedged in the doorframe, just enough that the door wouldn't quite click into place. There was some mystery in that. It almost seemed to Meriel as though Telis would have had to make a conscious effort to have the door be balanced in just such a position, and that didn't tally with what Cad had said about her disappearing in a hurry.

Whatever the reason, the open door gave Meriel an opportunity, and she took it. Silently she went inside.

Telis had never been one for lavish decoration. Her house, at least the lower floor, consisted of two rooms, plus a narrow stairwell. In one room she had nothing but a firepit in the middle, over which a brass pot hung empty, and a stone table adorned with a basin and some various utensils. Sacks of food were balanced beneath the table, each one tied at the nape with twine so rats and other vermin wouldn't get inside. The other room was clearly where Telis spent most of her time. Three spindle-legged chairs were arranged around a darkwood table—even though in all her life Meriel had never known Telis to entertain any guests other than Meriel herself, and she didn't remember ever seeing a third chair before. Around the room, on shelves built into the panelled walls or on smaller tables, a number of candle-holders were arranged. Each held a candle, and each was unlit.

The curiosity lay on the darkwood table. A heavy book lay there, bound in thick red leather, as wide in the spine as Meriel's hand. Telis seldom read, and never indoors. "A good book is to be enjoyed out on a sunlit meadow, with tea and sweetcakes in great plenty," Telis had once said. Meriel couldn't recall ever seeing a book in this house before, though she knew that Telis owned a few—maybe even as many as Fera Taruli, who had a collection of twelve books and considered herself a rare scholar indeed. She presumed that Telis kept her books in the upstairs room, where she slept, and where Meriel had never had cause to go. It wasn't so much the presence of a book at all that struck Meriel as odd, but its place downstairs. Plainly it was a heavy tome, not likely the sort of thing to be lugged up and downstairs for the sake of it, but summer was gone, and it had been at least a fortnight since the weather had been clement enough to risk taking a book out to the meadows. Books spoiled if they got wet. By rights, this book should probably have been in the upstairs room—not resting on the table, as though Telis had intended to read it after her breakfast.

Meriel squinted to read the title of the book. The words had been debossed into the leather and painted in gold trim, but the gold had been covered in dust, and it was hard to make them out from a distance. Bending down, she blew some of the dust away. Just enough to make out the title. A Treatise on the Sidereal Portents. She opened the pages, but the text was small and plentiful, and many of the words had no meaning to her. Reading was one of those skills which appealed to Meriel, but which her father regarded as unnecessary for young women. She knew what the letters were, and she could do a passable job of putting words together—you had to, if you didn't want to be ripped off whenever you did a trade with anyone else in the Village—but a book like this was far beyond her skills.

She could understand pictures, though, and there were a few in the book. Their coloured inks had been ravaged worse by time than the words—but there was a diagram on one of the pages, and Meriel was worldly-wise enough to recognise it immediately. It was the stars, the way they appeared in the sky at night. She could make out all the different shapes that her father had pointed out to her.

But the stars were only little lights in the sky. What could possibly be said about them to fill a book this size? Were Telis here, Meriel would have asked her, but Telis was not here. She thought for a time to take the book with her. That way, she could at least take the time to look through all of the pictures and see what else she might be able to glean from it. She changed her mind the moment she tried to lift it. It was definitely a heavy tome, far heavier even than she'd expected it to be. She was convinced that the book had something to do with Telis' sudden departure, but unless she'd ridden a horse into the night sky, Meriel was unlikely to learn where Telis had gone from it, and in the time it would take her to figure out the words—if she ever did; her progress in learning to read had slowed some in the past year or so—Telis would have forgotten she and the Village ever existed. That, or she'd return to retrieve the book, and grow cross when she learned it was not where she'd left it.

In the event, Meriel's decision not to take the book proved a wise one. While she was in the house it had begun to rain, and quite heavily. It was some walk home. By the time she'd made it, the book would almost certainly have been ruined for good.

She drew her collar tightly around her, clutching it tight and regretting the decision to forego her shawl, and started for home. Her boots suddenly made her conscious: it had been a while now since she'd visited the cobbler, and if today was the day she found out that they'd begun to leak, she'd be in for an unpleasant journey indeed. But luck was on her side. No water found its way through the leather toes, and they remained nice and dry.

The deluge had hit harder than she'd anticipated. Instead of mud, the road through the Village had become a lake; every step saw her legs slip ankle-deep into the sludge. Her boots would need a thorough scrubbing when she got home, and the stockings beneath were probably good for nothing but the midden-pile now. She shivered. What a miserable afternoon.

Suddenly, she heard the sound of horses' hooves behind her. Turning, she ducked out of the way. Whoever was riding the horse—somehow, even in this rain-drenched terrain—they were unsighted. If Meriel kept to the middle of the road, they might not even notice her until they ran her down. Squinting, she ran a hand through her hair, pushing it out of her face. When she moved her hand away, it somehow felt wetter than it had done before. She edged to the side of the road and watched the horse and rider pass.

The horse didn't pass. Instead it slowed, the rider drawing reins. Covered completely in a riding cloak, with the hood pulled all the way up, it was hard to make them out properly, but the rider leaned towards Meriel. "You're looking a bit wet, El!"

There was no mistaking the voice. Meriel grinned. "Helicent. What are you doing all the way out here?"

"Getting home," said Helicent. "I got the trail of a hart and didn't notice the rainclouds. Til it was too late, at least. Worst of all, I didn't manage to catch it, so now I'm sopping wet and I've got no dinner either. I've half a mind to pick a different trade."

Meriel laughed. There was no finer hunter in the Village than Helicent Loghire. She could wield a bow as well as any, and she had some preternatural talent for finding creatures in the first place. Meriel had once asked her if she was secretly a Magus, but Helicent had scoffed at that. "It's not magic," she'd said. "Just paying attention. You can follow anything if you actually take the time to look at the land." She took pride in her work, and seemed to enjoy the dice games being a hunter gave her invitation to play at the tavern. Sure, she might grumble, but there was no way in the world Helicent would ever give up her hunting, not while she had two hands to hold her bow.

"I'd ask you what you're doing out here," said Helicent, "but I know you'll just get broody, so I shan't bother. But I'm certain you won't say no to a ride back."

"Two riders on one horse?"

"Ensha can handle it," Helicent giggled, rubbing her horse's mane affectionately. "She's more god than horse."

"If you're sure," said Meriel. She gratefully accepted Helicent's outstretched hand to pull her up, and was glad to have her boots free of the mud. Helicent, as always, was keen to get moving again. Before Meriel had properly adjusted herself so her skirts weren't hiked up to her waist, Helicent had kicked in her heels and set Ensha moving again. It was all Meriel could do to cling on, and not be hurled bodily into the mud.

She spent the ride holding tightly to Helicent's waist, and wishing the rain would stop so that Helicent might slip off the hood of her cloak and Meriel could watch her chestnut hair bouncing with every one of Ensha's steps. But raining it was, so instead she thought of Telis, and wondered what the woman might have wanted with a ragged old book about the stars.