‘Who are you?’ I asked. ‘Why are you and the boy here when everyone else has left?’
She moved protectively in front of the boy. ‘My name is Rhissa. The boy is Tam. As to your other question, go fuck yourself.’ Her bravado lasted a few more seconds before she broke. ‘Do what you must with me, but I beg you, let the boy go free – I don’t have much, but I won’t resist if you—’
‘We’re Greatcoats, woman,’ Morn said angrily. ‘We don’t harm innocents.’
Despite the fear and pain on her face, she spat on the ground. ‘Greatcoats! How many good and decent men and women of Orison have you killed in the name of your child Queen?’
‘None,’ Kest said. ‘We didn’t—’
‘Where do you think all those soldiers come from? When you and your Trattari thugs attacked our Duke last year, who do you think bled and died for him? Did you think he summoned demons from the pits of the thirteenth hell to fight you? When there is war, it’s always the common people who pay the price.’
‘Duke Perault was trying to help Duchess Trin take the country,’ Kest explained.
‘Politics and power – what the hells do we know of these things?’ she snarled. ‘And why should we care?’
I felt a powerful desire to argue with her, to tell her how wrong she was, but hadn’t I just been thinking the same things?
‘My mother needs a salve for her arm,’ the boy said.
I reached into my coat. ‘I have something that will help.’
‘We have our own medicines. Why would we want yours?’ He didn’t wait for an answer but instead took his mother’s left hand and led her past us and into the cottage where he’d been hiding.
‘What now?’ Morn asked.
I rubbed at the spot on my chest where the arrow had struck. It was going to be bruised and painful for a long time. ‘We still need answers,’ I said, and turned to follow the boy and his mother into their home.
*
‘What happened to the rest of the villagers?’ I asked as Rhissa spread a clear, sticky salve on her wound. With visible reluctance, she accepted a length of bandage from Brasti.
‘They left,’ she said.
Morn’s voice was impatient. ‘Yes, damn you, we got that part. But why?’
‘This is a mining village,’ she said. ‘The mines produce good iron ore, but it’s not a place for raising crops or beasts. Duke Perault took all of the ore we dug out of the mountainside, and in return he made sure we had food and supplies and the equipment we needed. Then he died, and everything vanished: no one sent us beef and barley, and there were no traders, neither. We nearly starved last winter.’
‘But evidently, you did survive,’ I said. ‘How?’
She eyed me suspiciously. ‘We had help.’
‘Yes, but from whom? Was it—?’
‘Avares,’ Morn said. ‘The help came from Avares, didn’t it?’
Brasti snorted. ‘What would they provide? Goat turds to eat and jars of their own piss to drink?’
‘Tomatoes,’ Rhissa replied, ‘and bush beans. They brought us meat, too, when they could.’ She stretched out her right arm to test it and winced. ‘Some of us hunted – there are mountain goats up there, if you’re lucky. It was a hard winter, but our cleric kept telling us the Gods would protect us. He said everything we needed to survive was waiting for us in those mountains.’
‘And was he right?’ I asked.
‘Not at first. We were having to go further and further to find anything, until one trip we realised we’d gone too far and we didn’t have the food or the strength to get back home. When the men from Avares found us, we were starving, huddling like children in the snow, waiting to die. They could have killed us, but they didn’t. Do you know what the phrase “tennu ti sinne” means in Avares?’
‘“Brothers and sisters”,’ Morn replied.
‘Yes. “Brothers and sisters” is what they called us. I suppose many people here are just that: there’re plenty of folk in Orison with more Avarean blood than Tristian.’
‘We’ve been at war with them for more than three hundred years,’ Kest said.
‘Your war, not ours. They could have killed us and taken what little we had, but instead they called us “tennu ti sinne” and gave us food and drink. They made dozens of trips across the mountains over the next months, and thanks to them, we survived the winter.’
A chill breeze seeped through the gaps between the wooden slates of the window set into the stone wall of the cottage. ‘And with winter coming again?’
‘The men from Avares said we could move, live in their villages – maybe just for the winter, maybe longer.’
‘That would . . .’ Kest looked at me. ‘Wouldn’t that technically be a crime? We’re still at war with Avares, theoretically, at least . . .’
Rhissa snorted. ‘Go and arrest them if you want.’
I turned my attention back to the question of Avares. What did they have to gain by giving away their own resources? Were they nobler than we’d ever been led to believe? Somehow, I doubted it.
‘The mines,’ I said. ‘Are they empty now?’
Rhissa shook her head. ‘There’s plenty of iron ore left, but the equipment needs replacing and men need full bellies to work.’
‘Who makes your equipment?’
‘We do, given time and supplies, but much of our gear is broken and we’ve been waiting for someone to send us what we need, but no one has.’
‘So they all went?’ Morn asked. ‘Every one of them?’
‘Not everyone; some went east, to family in Orison or Hervor or Pulnam. Most, though . . . they took the trip over the mountains.’
I looked at her, sitting here in this dark cottage with her boy. ‘But you stayed.’
She gave a strangled laugh. ‘I’m not even from here, you know? I came from Domaris, years back, with my father – he was a trader. I met a man from the village who fancied me, and I him, and soon we had Tam.’ She looked away, but I’d already caught sight of the expression on her face.
‘My husband was a strong man,’ she said. ‘When they came looking for soldiers he had to go.’
‘But that was well over a year ago,’ I said. ‘He must be—’ I shut up abruptly.
She glanced briefly towards her child and muttered, ‘I’m not stupid. I know the odds. But there’ve been other men who’ve come back, as recently as six months ago. He might have been injured and still be making his way home. If . . .’ She started to cry, then managed, ‘He’ll be tired, hungry, hurt . . . I’ll not have him be alone.’
It was a foolish dream; the man was almost certainly dead – and yet weren’t there widows all over the country still waiting for their loved ones to come back? And if you let go of the dream, what was left?
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, but even as I spoke, I sensed Rhissa was holding something back, using her tears to keep me from pressing further. There was a practicality to this woman that reminded me too much of my wife to believe she would stay here this long merely on a false hope.
‘What else holds you here?’ I asked bluntly.
She looked at me as if waiting for some sign of deceit on my part to reveal itself. After a few seconds she rose from the narrow bed and gestured for us to follow her.