Brian Ruckley - Exile

Against all the outraged protests of her limbs she levered herself up onto her hands and knees. She twisted to look back across the great expanse of the Hervent. What she saw there was enough to banish any thought of sleep or rest. The barge was a distant fleck, far off down the river. The lean boat of the Clade was a good deal less distant, and coming towards her. Its oarsmen were fighting the mighty current, making slow progress. But progress was progress, slow or otherwise.

Wren gathered up her walking stave from where it lay among the rocks and staggered away from the riverbank into the concealing brush.

She knew what it was to journey over hard ground. The roughest and most remote corners of the Hommetic Kingdom had often been her territory in the last few years. They were the only places where a Clever who wished to avoid the attentions of the School might pass unnoticed. This going was as hard as any she remembered.

Her boots were thinning and beginning to split, much like her feet within them. She had not eaten well for a long time and the walk north to reach the Hervent had taken its toll on her body. All of that had been before she’d plunged into the river and before she’d let the entelechs loose.

She had no memory of what exactly had happened, how the Autumnal and her unthinking mind had conspired to save her, but it had damaged her. She could not tell how far the damage went. It was all mixed up with the cold, the hunger and the bruises she had acquired in the Hervent’s embrace. But she could feel, in a way only a Clever might have understood, her own lessening. There were moments of confusion when her mind itself seemed to thin like mist in the morning sun. There were moments when she was not certain her hand even had the strength to keep its grip upon her staff. Some of this would pass; perhaps not all of it.

No matter how weak she felt though, or how unforgiving these lands were, she had the knowledge that the School’s Clade might be on her trail to keep her moving forward. That, and the hope that somewhere ahead of her, somewhere amid the rising ground and the forests and the rocks, Lame Ammenor was waiting for her. He might not know it yet, but he was.

Wren had first heard whispers of Ammenor when she was young, not long flighted from her home. They came from hedge-witches, selling paltry magics in the far parts of the Kingdom. Wren had never followed that path but she shared with them a longing to escape the clutches of the School, with all its rules and bonds and cruelties. She had resisted for a long time, but eventually had come to hear the faint murmur of hope in the stories about him.

Those stories said he was the only Clever alive to have been raised within the suffocating confines of the School and then cast them off. He had fought the School and escaped and disappeared into self-imposed exile in the north. Where, some whispered, he still lived, and might aid and guide another of his kind. If they could find him.

‘He’s an Autumnal of strength unequalled,’ a ragged man had told Wren in an abandoned barn somewhere near Mondoon. They had both been in there sheltering from an unseasonal downpour. ‘Knows more about the entelechs than half the School. That’s how he beat them. They came after him – howl, howl – and he cast them down and rent them and killed them, the dead-hearted piglings they are.’

The man had been at least half mad, Wren suspected.

Finding Lame Ammenor meant climbing through these sparse forests, stumbling over the uneven ground. It meant one foot after another, on and on, without allowing the bone-deep weariness and pain to get a hold on her mind. Wren had always had a gift for the stubborn.

Stubbornness could only take her so far. Fear of those who might be at her back and what they would do if they caught her let her push herself a little bit beyond that limit. She had not waited to see if the men of the Clade came ashore on this northern bank, or ventured away from the river. Perhaps they had turned back for their hearths and beds once they realised she was not washed up among the rocks; or perhaps they pursued her still, tracking her on and up into the wild north. That possibility gave her the steel it needed to battle against exhaustion. It was not a war she could win, but she fought it for a long time. Into the dusk and the darkness.

She was shivering violently by the time she conceded defeat. She staggered to a halt in a sheltered dell. There were willow trees by a tiny brook, the ground beneath them dense with fallen branches and twigs. She made a rough low shelter – angled branches overlain with rushes and grass – of a sort she had used once or twice before when she wished to remain unseen. No one would even notice it in the dark. So she told herself at least.

She stripped off her still-wet clothes and lay wrapped in her blankets. It was cold and uncomfortable. Even so, as she surrendered to sleep, it was not despair she felt but relief. She was where she wanted to be, moving in the direction she had chosen for herself. Whatever might come tomorrow, she was not dead yet. Undefeated.

Wren slept much longer than she had intended: it was already full daylight by the time she woke. Her eyes ached. Rising out of sleep was like struggling up and out of cloying mud. Her body and mind, still enfeebled by her use of the entelech, wanted no part of it. This was why even the strongest Clevers were so miserly in the use of their powers. It could be a crippling business even when it went well. If it went badly it could be fatal. Or worse.

‘Still alive,’ Wren murmured, addressing the School, the Clade, the entirety of the Hommetic kingdom. The whole world, entelechs and all, in a way.

There were no tracks or trails that Wren could make out as she struggled northwards. She did see an occasional sign of human presence. An old campsite, a few felled trees. Slashes cut into a pine to harvest resin. But no paths, as far as she could tell. That would have been too easy.

Nobody had been able to tell her precisely where Lame Ammenor might be found. The closest she had ever come to directions was ‘Over the Hervent from Hamming Ferry. A couple of days into the wilds from there’.

She followed the narrow valley of a stream into a fold in the hills. Gloomy woods lay across the slopes. She had to rest often. Blisters on her feet broke and bled. Birds she did not know chittered in the trees. Far, far away she heard a wolf howling for a time. No others of its kind answered it, and she wondered what chance she had of finding someone to guide her if even the wolves travelled alone here.

In the afternoon she wearied of the oppressive trees and climbed up onto an open ridge above them. She sat there on the wiry grass, a blanket wrapped around her, and ate shrivelled little brambleberries which she had gathered on the way.

Squinting into the glare of the low sun, she saw something off in the distance, back towards the river, that made her pause. A fleck of blue which moved for a moment among dark trees and then was lost to sight.

She spat half-chewed berries from her mouth, slapped her thigh in frustration. The Clade, across the river. Fanatics and fools, chasing a single errant Clever into the wilderness. It was beyond all wisdom and sense that they should still be coming after her, into this land where there was no food or shelter and where the Huluk Kur roamed. But perhaps other things drove the Clade than wisdom. Very well. Other things than wisdom or sense or caution must drive her too if she was to finally escape the clutches of her past and her fears. She must go higher, faster, away into places even the Clade would not follow her.

Black forests swallowed her up. She stumbled through them without care for the scratches and thumps from branches and coarse trunks. There was no point, to her way of thinking, in trying to hide her trail. She was already weak, already slow. If she delayed, the Clade would be on her in no time. Her best chance was to simply go further than they were willing to go; make herself more trouble than she was worth to catch.