The oak tree standing in the elbow of the river was old and beautiful and, in the stark winter light, its five main limbs resembled the frozen fingers of a dead hand. Fia had seen many hands like that; on many battlegrounds and in many alleyways over the past eleven years. Whether hacking away on a contested field, or walking along the dark side of some moonlit street, she would watch broken warriors––Frekirie, Mistrovers, the painted Kyn, whoever––grasping vainly for the undersides of the bloated, heavy clouds.
Crooked, desperate fingers. The hands of dying men clawing heavenwards. As if, in the desperation of their final throes, they thought they might be able to find purchase on the sky and pull themselves back to their feet.
Fia was yet to see it.
The oak was bare of leaves now. The biggest, strongest, most majestic tree for miles around, standing by a ford on the main road, it was where the tribeland of Arifold’s recalcitrant and criminal were left to dangle and die.
Fia ran a callused, gentle hand over the rough bark of the hanging tree. Looked up at the two corpses swinging from it; eye sockets gaping empty, tongues swollen and black, shit caked down the inside of their naked legs.
The shit might have stank once. The blood too. Both were too dry now and the smell had faded.
She tucked the letter she’d written for her brother back into her coat. Sighed out through her nose. Cast an eye over to where her horse, a hardy brumby tamed by the horse-breakers of Skyvolla, was hobbled.
“I wager it reminds you of your family tree, does it not, lass?”
Fia’s eyes were a mixed mess of deep blue and light jade. Big, honest and perceptive. Patient. Unafraid. Survivor’s eyes. She revolved slowly on one worn boot heel and turned them on the stranger.
“How so?” she asked.
He was a bandy-legged cove with a dishonest and crooked cast to his features. Crooked so that if Fia had had a mind to follow his tracks she doubted she would’ve been able to tell if he were coming or going. He leaned upon a tumbledown stone wall as if he were lord of the river and the hanging tree both. His sneer ran both deep and wide.
“Full o’ nooses!” he crowed, and then laughed as if he’d set a new benchmark for witticism.
Fia’s face remained impassive. She had a pale countenance, heart-shaped and framed by mousy brown hair that she’d cut uncommonly short to just below her ears. It was down now, her hair, and mostly hid the swirling tattoos that were etched along the shaved sides of her head. She regarded the cackling man thoughtfully.
Here was a thinking man. Here was an adder. Here was a man who watched and waited for an excuse to cause trouble and strife. Who enjoyed small cruelties like other men enjoyed snuff or drink. The sort of bastard that’d slip a snake into your pocket and then ask you the loan of a copper.
“I can’t say that I recognise your face, man,” she said. “What makes you think you know my history?”
“The fuck has history to do with it? I know you, Fia McCrae. How can any man in these parts not, eh? I don’t think there are any folk in this bit o’ country that haven't heard tales o’ you.”
The man spat with marksman’s eye into the grass at Fia’s feet.
“The quiet lass who comes and goes, who sees faeries and boomen and bodachs, and has even crossed seas to argue with the devils of Toropuku.”
Fia frowned and tilted her head to one side. So, here was another one who’d heard some yarn or other. Who had listened to the gossip in the alehouses, the ignorant insults of the idle, and the rhymes the children sang.
“Ain’t no point arguing with the likes of them,” she said evenly. “You barter and you cajole with those nutters, and you try and answer their riddles while they speak lovely sentences telling you terrible things.”
The crooked, dirty man let out a laugh that crackled up from his chest.
“You’re as mad as they say!” he said. He sounded pleased.
“As you say, stranger. Though my name ain’t all black.”
The stranger spat again. He was good at spitting. Fia got the idea that he could keep it up all day.
“Black enough. Black as the Earl of the Pit’s waistcoat some say. They say you hunt children,” he said abruptly.
Fia snorted softly. “Aye. I hunt them. Find them. Bring them back to their parents. Not just children either; there are the lost loves, treasured heirlooms that go walkabout, and kine too. I’ve a knack for finding that which has been taken or has lost itself. That’s why some call me the Magpie, I suppose.”
The laughter died on the man’s lips. Fia did not mourn its passing.
“Perhaps. Or perhaps they call you that because you pick at the bones and pockets of those that fall in battle?” he asked slyly.
The honest clarity in Fia’s teal-coloured eyes was unwavering as she scrutinised the foul man in front of her.
“Wherever it is the dead go,” she said, “whatever road they walk, they do not need things.” She conjured a copper from nowhere and ran it along the backs of her knuckles before vanishing it into her coat. “They have more pressing matters upon their minds––and a gal’s got to make a living.”
“If you’re not mad or a thief, maybe you’re a bloody witch,” the stranger said in a soft voice. His eyebrows rose, as if this was a reasonable and intelligent deduction.
It was a dangerous thing to say. Even now. Even after the High Seat of Fallaros had deemed witches legitimate thaumaturgists, distrust of the uncanny could manifest itself in fire and blood.
“What makes a witch?” Fia asked.
“One such as you.”
“You don’t know me, friend.”
“I ain’t your friend.”
“Ain’t my enemy neither,” Fia replied calmly.
“Comes to the same thing, don’t it?”
“Friend or enemy, I am no witch.”
“Prove it,” the bandy-legged man said scornfully.
“Prove to me that the gods exist,” Fia shot back, her tone still level and cordial.
Hard thing, to bristle while slouching as heavily as he was against the stone wall, but the crooked man managed it. Fia pondered on how it was often those men and women who acted the most pious that turned out to be sheep-killing dogs.
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Fia shrugged. Put up her hands placatingly before the man could vent his spleen. “I cannot—prove or disprove that I'm of the witch persuasion, I mean. But I’ve found much of folks’ fear is often born of superstition. Their cruelty too.”
It was clear to her that she had lingered in this bit of country for too long. She had become too familiar. But the place, with its rocky gorges, lazy winds that cut through you instead of going around, and emerald oceans of grass called to her. She had spent many nights out in the tors here with only her horse and a fire for company. She had seen things that many regarded and talked of as if they were myths.
She had never understood that. Never understood most folks’ inability to see the many awful and wondrous things just under their noses.
Fia touched the pocket where the letter for her brother rested. Had been a long time since she’d felt at home, but in these Arifold hills she’d come close.
The man tapped a couple of fingers against the polished handle of the dirk at his belt. Watched her through narrowed eyes. “Look at you, strutting around like a bantam cock in your damned gambeson. Like some sort o’ gentleman of fortune!” he muttered darkly.
Fia looked down at the long, sleeveless gambeson that she wore under her slightly open coat. It was a padded body armour used mostly to absorb slashes and stabs, though this one also had small, invisible steel plates sewn between layered and woven cloth to help keep out pistol rounds. She had stripped it from a gentleman she had found upon the deserted western road to Kynthwaite. His horse had fallen on him. Broke his back and killed him dead. Well, if not exactly dead, certainly past objecting to being relieved of his fancy armoured jacket. It had been slightly too big for her, but a bit of deft needle work had seen to that.
“Keeps out the cold something wonderful,” Fia replied reasonably. “You should get one yourself.”
The man spat again and pushed himself up from the wall. “You stride about the dales and the tors, peerin’ into matters that don’t concern you! As if you belong here.”
Fia realised that this shite-for-brains had obviously been passing a few over the hind teeth––and more than a few. The glassy, determined look in his eye and his jerky gait told the story. She pushed her wide-brimmed hat––a fashion affectation she had picked up down south in sunny Keldland––back from her face with a finger.
“Are you tight?” she asked.
“As bark on a log, girl,” the man leered. His teeth were brown and his lips were cracked. “What’s it to you?”
Fia sighed. Few things more stubborn than a determined drunk. Few things dumber either. It was hard to reason with someone who was oblivious to the fragility of the present and who cared fuck-all for the future.
“Nothing to me. I’ll ask you to keep your distance though, if you don't mind,” she said.
“Pah! Maybe if you kept your distance from normal, peaceful folk, p'rhaps if you watched your step in these parts, lass, you'd have kept your nose free of trouble."
“You’re trouble, are you?”
“I’ll do to be goin’ on wi’,” the inebriate said.
Fia replied with an airy amiability. “Talking to me of normal, decent folk as if there are such creatures. I’ve known nothing but distance for over a decade. Distance from most others. And it’s not her steps that a lass must watch in this world, but the fiends that dog them.”
The little man with the dishonourable eyes licked his chapped lips. Fia thought then, just for a moment, that he’d let her be, but she wouldn’t have been prepared to wager a purse on it.
“Your broken past hovers over you like... like a crow!” the man muttered, almost to himself.
“Funny things, pasts,” Fia said, watching him closely. “They can elude some people for so long that one day they wake and find they’re no longer interested in finding out the truth of ‘em. Others, they run from ‘em for years only to find out they’ve been running in a circle. Once you give up on your past though, you almost never get it back.”
The man was moving closer despite Fia asking him not to. Maybe that was where she kept going wrong––asking and hinting and giving people the benefit of the doubt, when she should really have been pulling steel from the outset.
The man licked his lips again. Ran a hand through his greasy straw-coloured hair.
“Salt your grievance and serve it up, man,” Fia said. “I’m tired of smelling it and listening to it simmer.”
The greasy drunk eased another couple of paces forward. Fia noticed that he’d a tarnished silver tribeland pin in the collar of his coat; the fang of Aldinfang in the west. She wondered whether this thin streak of piss was one of the Fangfolk or had just stolen the pin. She wondered if he’d stand fast if he forced her hand.
The man was close enough now for Fia to smell the whisky crystallizing on his breath like hoarfrost. She could hear the river running on, a constant music that had been playing since the beginning of things. Could hear the creak of the rope as the corpses turned slowly, sightless eyes gazing over the quiet country.
“Listen,” Fia said quietly, the word issuing from her lips in the space between one heartbeat and the next. “Get this into your head––right through the fucking granite––you really don't have to bother yourself with little old me."
The drunk fellow hissed through his teeth and lunged at her. Hands outstretched, fingers contorted like the branches of the tree above her.
He might have only wanted to beat her, but he had the petty, pinched, vicious look about him of one who wouldn’t know how to stop once he got the bit between his teeth.
Fia moved sideways. Her coat swirled. Her right hand reached for her boot, came up clasping her staghorn-handled black dagger––the knife with the blackened blade she used for dark work. She grabbed the furious man by his collar, pulled him off balance while she twisted away. Fast as a stoat she punched her three-inch blade three times into the soft, yielding flesh of his skinny side, where she knew the liver to be. She felt the blade scrape on bone only once, as it rasped along a rib.
The man squawked and stumbled away. Turned a slow pirouette and fell back against the stone wall on which he had so recently been lounging. He grimaced as he hit it and his knees sagged. He clutched his side, eyes wide. He had the look of a man who’d spent his life knowing the sweetness that accompanied whisky, and the heady power that went hand in hand with carefully threatening only those he deemed weak and inferior, and the comfort to be found in a good knife.
This evening though, the only comfort the knife had delivered was that final kind that waited for everyone.
Fia hadn’t wanted trouble and, in the end, the man had given her none. She’d found though, trouble was like a blister; it only really showed up once the work had been done. That’s when you felt the rub of it.
Where it had only looked prudent for her to move on from these Arifold tribelands, it had suddenly become imperative.
The drunk dropped onto his arse. Leaned against the tumbled stone wall. Wheezed like a broken bellows.
“You’ve done for me…” he groaned. Fia could tell he didn’t believe it, but the words were pulled from him anyway.
She knelt and wiped the dark blood from the blade of her black knife on the trailing end of his oversized coat. The stranger reached for her with the hand that was not trying to staunch his wound, but Fia slapped it away.
“I’ll be dead come mornin’!” he sputtered accusingly.
“Maybe. But if you keep that hand pressed there tight like, you might just see the dawn. It’s pretty here.”
“Where’s the comfort in that, ye bitch?” the man blubbered at her. A fat tear sat on his cheek like a drop of molten iron in the flat, hard light of the westering sun. His blood seeped through his fingers from the wound in his side. Bright and vital against the windswept grass. A colour that spoke of secrets and the fragility of man.
Fia could smell the coppery tang of it. Had always been able to, ever since she could remember––and that competency had been growing as of late. It was how she often managed to arrive first at the scene of a good fray. There she would loot what she needed to survive in the brutal and astonishingly beautiful highlands of Arifold or Kynthwaite; coin, food, cloth, powder, teeth. She’d dug more than a few teeth out of the heads of dead and dying men with her dagger. Good teeth were fetching a premium with the surgeons and apothecary buggers down in Keldland. There were men there who would pay silver for clean, strong gnashers and use them to craft new sets for the rich and toothless.
“I said, what fuckin’ crumb o’ comfort is to be found in dyin’ with the dawn, ye ragged wanderin’ whore?” the wretched man said, spit spraying from his contorted lips.
Fia McCrae looked past the ancient oak with its brace of shit-stained bodies spinning peacefully in the slight easterly breeze. The light was bleeding out of the evening sky, leeching the colour from the yellow gorse that covered the southern hills in such profusion. Away to the west, the meadowland was a sea of heather waving and hissing in the gentle breeze, purple fading to grey. The heady, honeyed scent of bog myrtle came to Fia’s nose from where a patch of it grew in the waterlogged ground that bordered the far side of the river, which chattered on, unconcerned with the dead and dying that adorned its banks.
Fia pulled her cloak about her and set out westward into the gloaming, towards the Arifold-Kynthwaite border town of Last Hallow.
“Where’s the fuckin’ comfort in dyin'?" the bleeding man bleated miserably.
“Well, you’ve a fine evening for it,” Fia said over her shoulder as she walked away.