Brian Ruckley - Exile

Wren could feel the damage as she cupped her brother’s face in her hands. There was a softness, a yielding in the cheekbone beneath her fingers. His nose was split and had poured blood over his mouth and chin. He was blinking slowly. She did not think he could even see her. One of his eyes was bloodshot; the other almost obscured by the swollen and torn lid. She was kneeling on his spilled teeth. They dug into her skin. She barely noticed.

He was not dead, but he had been beaten a good half of the way there. Her beloved younger brother. He had always thought he should try to look after her, even though she was the older – sixteen to his fourteen – and the stronger. Sometimes she let him think she needed his help because it made him feel good. Their parents knew what she was doing, and knew just how little of his protection she really needed. They said nothing.

Now Wren held him, broken, in her arms and understood that nothing was ever going to be quite the same. Today was the day she was finally going to spread her wings and fly, because how could she not? They had left her brother bleeding, barely alive, in a ditch at the side of a field. She had to answer that.

She knew who had done this. The Larkanen family tenanted the fields adjoining her father’s. For years, a feud had been rumbling over straying cattle, misappropriated land, stolen crops. Anything and everything, with its origins all but forgotten. It had never before reached the point of violence but the Larkanen sons had just started to come of age. There were three of them. Big, strong, angry and with a fiery desire to prove their manhood.

Wren had spent years denying the power within her the kind of release it demanded. Kneeling at her brother’s side, hearing his ragged breathing, she was possessed by a fell and hot intent. The time for denial was gone.

She half carried, half dragged her brother back to their cottage through the gathering dusk. Her father was not there. He had taken some piglets to the market in the nearest village. He would not be back until tomorrow.

Her mother tried to keep her there. In later years, Wren would understand the agonies of those moments: a bloodied son in need of tending; a daughter about to undo her whole life. At the time, she was only dimly aware of what was happening. She pushed away her mother’s hands, ignored her anguished pleas.

Wren went out into the fields and stood amid the barley, staring at the Larkanen house. It sat atop a slight rise. It was larger than her own family’s but still hardly opulent.

She had not allowed the entelech to stir within her for years. In that field, beneath that moon, she spread her arms wide and let it come. She gave herself up to it and let her rage determine what followed. What she remembered of those intoxicated moments was not rage though. It was joy. Exultation in the power surging through her, in the breaking of a dam that had held for so long. Nothing had ever felt so deeply, definitely right.

Every Clever was bound most closely to but one of the four entelechs. Wren’s was the Autumnal. That was the force and flavour of her vengeance. The ground under one half of the Larkanen house turned to loose, liquid mud. Part of the slope just slid away, taking walls and roof and floor with it. She let loose rot in their fields for a hundred paces around the house. She spun the storms of autumn into a knot and cast them into the shattered building and blew out roof shingles and all the windows. She called rain to fall and told it to change into hail that beat an ecstatic drum rhythm out of the earth and the wreckage.

Then she vomited and fell. She crawled back through the barley stems to her own house, dizzy and half delirious.

Lying in her bed later, barely aware of what was happening around her, there was only one thing she remembered clearly. Her mother’s voice, all pain and love and grief woven together: ‘You must run, my most beautiful girl. You must run.’

And she had run.

NINE YEARS LATER

There was a Clever in the river. That was the only explanation Wren could imagine, for who else but a Clever would be floating there, splayed out on his back in the cold waters muttering to himself all but inaudibly?

His left ankle was tethered to the bow of the barge. The current was spreading his brown hair like weed. By rights, he should have been shivering. The Hervent was a huge, wide river, loaded with the memory of the mountain snow that fed its headwaters. He did not shiver though.

His eyes were closed, and Wren had little doubt that he was barely aware of all that cold, all that water flowing around and beneath him. He was doing what only a Clever could do: channelling the essential entelechs that underlay – and made – the world. That tended to distract from more trivial concerns.

Wren knew as much because she was a Clever too, but a secret one. A hidden one. Hidden partly because of what she might do if she let loose that turbulent power, partly because of what others might do. Experience had taught her to conceal what she was. Not something that worried the waterlogged man in the river evidently. He had a protection that she did not. He was of the Free.

There were precious few in the entire Hommetic Kingdom who might dare to question the Free, and none of them were on this barge. There were only a handful of passengers. They were villagers, petty traders, impoverished fugitives. The sort of folk, in other words, to whom the Free were the stuff of legend: the last and by far the greatest of the mercenary companies that had shaped the world’s history.

The Clever floating and muttering in the Hervent was not the only one of the Free here. There were two more. A tan-skinned archer was leaning against the prow, his attention switching back and forth between his comrade in the water and everyone else on the barge. He was calm, his face quite placid. A long stalk of grass he must have plucked from the bank before boarding was clamped between his teeth, its seed-head nodding gently. Wren was not fooled by his relaxed manner. Hawk not dove, she knew. The Free did not employ doves.

A woman of indeterminate age was sitting on the deck at the archer’s feet. Her knees were drawn up, enfolded by her arms. She was unremarkable and, as far as Wren could see, unarmed. Another Clever perhaps.

‘You should sit down with the rest,’ the archer said to Wren around the grass stem.

He jabbed with the end of his short bow towards the other passengers. They were keeping themselves well away. They busied themselves arranging their few goods on the deck, pretending to doze or to talk softly among themselves about entirely inconsequential things.

Wren glanced at them and then looked back to the archer.

‘What’s he doing?’ she asked. ‘Your friend in the water.’

‘Having a wash,’ the archer said levelly.

The woman at his feet snorted in amusement.

The archer had the look of the far south in his skin and hair and face. A man of sun and sand. Perhaps where he came from manners and humour ran a little differently, but Wren rather doubted he was fumbling an attempt at friendliness. She wrinkled her nose in mild irritation. It occurred to her that getting annoyed with one of the Free was exactly the kind of silly incaution her mother had spent years arguing out of her. Still, she did not like to be dismissed so casually. Not when the subject at hand – a Clever, the entelechs – was so important, so personal to her.

‘He’ll be all clean in a moment or two,’ the man said with a pleasant enough smile. ‘Then they’ll be casting off and we can all go where we want to go. Sit yourself down and don’t fret.’