You ask me, dear Marin, how I could get involved with so obvious a trouble-maker (with your usual tact, of course – I’m glad to see that my sister is still wasting money on your finishing school). I found him, if you must know, drunk as a lord outside a tavern, several empty bottles beside him in the dust. It was a sweltering day, and he had his face turned up to the sun, basking in it like a cat. Lying on the ground, a few inches from his long fingers, was the finest sword I had ever seen, thick with partially congealed blood. Well. You know how rare it is to see an Eboran, Marin, so I said to him, ‘Darling, what by Sarn’s blessed bones have you been up to?’ He grinned up at me and said, ‘Killing wild-touched monstrosities. Everyone here has bought me a drink for it. Will you buy me a drink?’
I ask you, how could you not love so obvious a trouble-maker? Sometimes I wonder that we are the same blood at all.
Extract from the private letters of Master Marin de Grazon, from Lady Vincenza ‘Vintage’ de Grazon
Vintage brought the crossbow up, relishing the familiar weight in her hands. She had, after some scuffling, secured a seat on a thick branch halfway up a tree and, some fifty feet away, she could see the pea-bug in the vine tree opposite, with no obstacles between it and her crossbow bolt. It was a big, slow-moving bastard; rather like an aphid, but the size of a tom-cat, with dark green blotches on its glistening skin – some Wild-touched abomination. It was hanging from the vine, translucent jaws busily tearing into the fat purple grape it had fixed between its forelegs. Her grape. One of the grapes she had spent, oh, only nearly thirty years cultivating and growing, refining and sorting, until her grapes and, more importantly, her wine, were considered the very best to come out of the vine forests.
And the little bastard was munching on it mindlessly. No appreciation at all.
Vintage took aim and squeezed the crossbow trigger, anticipating the shudder and jump in her arms. The bolt flew true and easy, and the pea-bug burst like an over-filled water skin, pattering the tree and the vine with watery guts. Vintage grimaced, even as she felt a small flicker of satisfaction; the crossbow, designed by her brother so many years ago, still worked.
Vintage secured the weapon to her belt, before shimmying down the trunk with little concern for her patched leather trousers. She picked her way through the foliage to where the pea-bug had met its messy end. Judging from the damage to the plant around it, the creature had spent much of the day munching through her grapes, and had had a decent gnaw on the vine itself for good measure. This was gilly-vine, a particularly robust plant with branches as thick as her thigh in places, and grapes that grew to a full hand span across, but even it couldn’t survive a sustained attack from pea-bugs.
‘Trouble,’ she murmured under her breath. ‘That’s what you are.’
There were no more pea-bugs that she could see, but even so, the sight of her decimated grapes had put a cold worm of worry in her gut. There shouldn’t be any pea-bugs here, not in the untainted part of the vine forest. This was a quiet place, as free from danger as anywhere could be in Sarn – she had spent many years making sure of it.
Pushing her wide-brimmed hat on a little firmer, Vintage turned away and began to head to the west, where she knew a particular lookout tree to be located. She told herself that she was worrying too much, that she was getting more paranoid the older she got, but then she’d never been very good at resisting her impulses.
The forest was hot and green, and humming with life. She felt it on her skin and tasted it on her tongue – vital and always growing. The tall, fat trunks of the vine trees rose all around her, most of them wider than two men lying head to toe, their twisting branches curled around each other like drunken lords holding each other up after an especially hard night on the brandy. And the vines twisted around them all, huge, swollen fruit wherever she looked – purple and pink and red, pale green and deep yellow, some hidden in the shade and some basking in the shards of hot sun that made it down here, glowing like lamps.
She had just spied the looming shape of the lookout tree ahead, with the band of bright red paint round its middle, when she heard something crashing through the undergrowth towards her. Instinctively, her hand dropped to the crossbow at her belt, but the shape that emerged from the bushes to her right had a small white face, and blond hair stuck to a sweaty forehead. Vintage sighed.
‘What are you doing out here, Bernhart?’
The boy boggled at her. He was, if she remembered correctly, around eleven years old and the youngest member of their staff. He wore soft brown and green linen, and there was a short bow slung over his back, but he’d forgotten to put his hat on.
‘Lady Vincenza, Master Ezion asked me to come and find you.’ He took a breath and wiped a hand across his sweaty forehead. ‘They have business up at the house that they need you for.’
Vintage snorted. ‘Business? Why would they need me for that? I told Ezi years ago that he could handle such things.’ She narrowed her eyes at the lad. ‘They don’t want me out here in the vine forest. Isn’t that right, my boy?’
His sweaty face turned faintly pink and when he spoke he stared fixedly at her right elbow. ‘They said it was really important, m’lady.’
‘Bernhart, on moon festival eve, who makes sure there are honey pastries on hand for all you little ruffians?’
Bernhart cleared his throat. ‘They said you’d been out here for days now and it wasn’t seemly for a lady of your years. M’lady.’
Vintage barked with laughter. ‘Bernhart, promise me that when you’re a grown man you’ll have the good sense never to refer to a woman of forty with the phrase “a lady of your years”. I promise it won’t end well, my dear.’ She sighed, looking at his pale face, already much too pink in the cheeks. ‘Come on. I’m going to have a peek from the lookout tree. Will you accompany me, young man? It seems my old bones might require your assistance.’
Bernhart grinned lopsidedly. ‘Can I have a go of your crossbow?’
‘Don’t push your luck.’
The lookout tree had a series of rough wooden planks fixed to its trunk, so climbing it was easier than her previous perch, although this one was much taller. When eventually they emerged onto the simple lookout bench, they could see far across the forest, the dark green of the canopy spreading out below them like a rucked blanket and the distant mountains a grey shadow on the horizon. And in the midst of all that growth, a vast tract of twisted strangeness. Vintage didn’t need to look at the boy to know he was looking at it too.