Exile

II

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.’

Wren toyed with the idea of pushing harder. She had spent half her life wondering and learning about Clevers, trying to understand what those who shared her gifts did and how they did it.

She told herself that the Free were probably not the ones to answer her questions. They famously counted exceptionally powerful Clevers among their number, and just as famously existed outside the control of the School that governed the lives of such people everywhere else in the Kingdom. But they were not known as friends to outsiders. They were not teachers.

She gave a little shrug as if to say I meant no harm, and retreated down the length of the barge. She took a place underneath one of the crude awnings, as close as seemed prudent to the Free. Other passengers, also crowded in under that same canvas cover, had a lot of baggage with them. All their worldly possessions in some cases, Wren would guess. That was what she had with her too. Everything. Which amounted to a couple of blankets for a bed, a bag of food, walking staff, knife. An empty pouch which had held a few coins until she handed them over to the barge’s master.

She unrolled one of the blankets and stretched out on it, lying on her side so that she could watch the Free. The archer and the silent woman, reacting to some sign, leaned over the side of the barge. They heaved at the rope that tethered the other Clever.

It looked like they were hauling up a sack of rags which had been lying on the riverbed for a month or two. The man came up limp and sodden. When they rolled him onto the deck he flopped over with a wet thump and lay there without moving. Water spread over the planks around him and darkened them.

Wren knew what it did to a body to have the entelechs coursing through it. To forge some new shape or happening in the world as Clevers did was to unbalance a scale: it could not be done without letting something else, some ordered part of the world, flow back the other way into formless disorder. And the part of the world that shed order was, inevitably as far as Wren knew, the Clever’s own body or mind.

There had been times, over the years of her secretive, itinerant life, when she had come close to losing too much. The first had been that night when she avenged her brother. There had been two or three more since then. On each occasion her body had irretrievably lost some part of its essence. She had been diminished. She knew she looked older than she really was.

This Clever, this man of the Free, was perhaps stronger – more skilled, certainly – than she was. He spluttered and coughed and levered himself up into a sitting position. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and nose. Wren glimpsed blood there, just fleetingly, but the man was laughing. His teeth chattered as he did it, making the sound strange and convulsive.

‘Next time, we bring spare horses, Hamdan,’ Wren heard him stutter to the archer.

Hamdan nodded, then looked back down the length of the barge.

‘Let’s go, captain,’ he shouted.