Exile

VII

When Wren opened her eyes she saw a dark rock dressed in slick, wet green slime. It was so close that her eyelashes almost brushed it as she blinked. She smelled vomit: her own, spilled among these jumbled boulders.

She made to rise, and her body shook and creaked in protest. She had to give up that first attempt and sink back into soaking, aching immobility. There was a dangerous appeal to the idea of just lying here, letting the sleep she could sense in the cloudy corners of her mind wash over her. Not a sleep she was likely to wake from, she knew. The air had a cold edge to it, sharpened by a fluttering breeze, and she was as wet as it was possible to be. Her clothes felt like iced lead on her back.

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.