Fia walked into the township of Last Hallow, driven on the blustery wings of a rising storm at her back. It was only a little after noon, the day after she’d left the drunken assailant to bleed out under the hanging tree, but it was dusk dark and getting darker. Fia instantly saw that the settlement was in the grips of a manic, festive atmosphere, which she recognised and could instantly attribute to a single cause.
“Fucking witch burning,” she muttered to herself, absently touching the sword at her side.
It was the strange, loose madness that often overcame the villages and trading posts considered to be at the arse of nowhere whenever a witch was rooted out. Fia had seen it a few times before on her travels; a unique macabre jollity. People drinking and gorging and fucking in the streets with animalistic abandon. Fighting, cursing and laughing as if they only just realised how extraordinary it was that they should be alive at all, living in the unpredictable world of the Five Isles as they did. Relieved that it wasn’t them tied at the stake. Relieved it wasn’t their own particular brand of sin being punished.
The township of Last Hallow straddled a swift-running river that acted as a border between two tribelands; Arifold in the east of Kallaros and Kynthwaite, the home of the Painted Kyn, that snaked down the centre of the island. Like many of the border towns on Fallaros, Last Hallow was the sort of amiable backwater settlement where life might’ve been cheap, but death usually came at no cost whatsoever. A person who needed to get lost could do so with relative ease there, and that was exactly why Fia had made a beeline for it. It was the perfect place to lie low, due to the settlement being filled with a combination of tight-lipped locals, who wanted nothing more than some easy coin and the freedom to die from the bottle-rot, and the sort of swaggering, brash longriders who wouldn’t have known how to lie low even if their lives depended on it—which they often did.
Fia had hobbled her horse in a copse on the edge of town. She’d considered stabling it, but Last Hallow was unfamiliar to her except in reputation and she’d no notion as to whether any one stable she picked could be trusted not to doctor her horse and sell it to the wandering horse clans of Kynthwaite.
She hadn’t much of a plan. If she’d been any other random feral dog roaming the Fallaros tribelands she doubted whether she would have bothered to relocate after knifing the drunk. The fact was though, that it was precisely because she wasn’t just some stray that she had been obliged to. A young woman with her history, her connections, could not be expected to hang about and catch the eye of some overzealous patrolling guard captain, even if all she had been trying to do for the past ten years or so was keep her head down and do right by people who needed help.
It would only take one wanderer or soldier of Frekifold, the tribeland she’d been born and raised in, to recognise her face and she’d be caught and marched home to face whatever judgement or justice awaited her. Thunder growled lazily across the plains; the sound of demons playing skittles—or so Fia's father had always told her.
Fia strolled sedately through the main market of the heaving settlement. The scent of herbs, smoke and spilled beer was sharp on the chilly air. Most of the stalls that she passed were trying to flog bread and vegetables, chutneys and cured meats, but the ones doing the snappiest trade were those selling ale and home-brewed spirits, pre-rolled smokes, powdered rabbit’s-foot root, or the favours of desperate and amenable men and women.
It was to these kiosks and counters that Fia stayed closest to, for these booths were the homes of those with lips that were most prone to flapping. While drunken rumour couldn’t be relied on solely for veracity, Fia had found that it was a fair yardstick for the sort of shit that was generally floating from mouth to ear to mouth in a trading post. The idle talk of professional piss-artists was like a barometer for the mood of a settlement or a tribeland, and Fia was good at finding the seeds of truth that lay hidden amongst all the shit.
Fia dallied as she passed the stand of a fortune teller-cum-gin merchant. Her hat was pulled down low and her cloak pulled tight around her, but still she kept to the shadows cast by the wavering dull red light of the faerie-powered lantern.
“Looks like a bad bit of cloud blowing up,” a rasping voice said from out of the throng that surrounded the stall.
“Real gully-washer,” someone else agreed. “Comin’ out the south. Bodes ill.”
“That reminds me, Sheppard,” one grating, slurred voice said, “you’re gods-damned out of your tree if you think there’s any truth to that load of old bollocks coming out of the south. A fucking army keen on dominion of the whole of the Five Isles! I ask you, man!”
“If you could read, Del, you might run your fucking bloodshot eyes over any collection of sagas detailing the history of the Five Isles and you’d bloody well see that the waning of any kingdom’s always been accompanied by troubled times,” the rasping voice––belonging to Sheppard, so Fia reckoned––rejoined. “There’s dissent at street level; peasants rising while counts and countesses are brought to their knees, anarchy and bloodshed.”
“Always been bloodshed in the Five Isles,” someone else chimed in. “Always been warring. Fallaros, the Pearl Islands, Toropuku, Liathland, those mysterious bastards in Vansgrima. We’ve all of us been at one another’s throats at one time or another.”
“Aye, but this is different,” Sheppard rasped earnestly, and Fia detected an undercurrent of proper worriment in his voice. “Vansgrima pushing north like this… It ain’t like it’s ever been. Ain’t war like the Fallaros tribelands have ever known it. Ain’t war for the sake of land or gold or power. Sounds messy. Fucking indiscriminate. War for the sake o’ war.”
Someone snorted disdainfully.
“I’m bloody serious!” Sheppard snapped. Fia saw the back of the man’s shaggy grey head turning heatedly this way and that in the midst of the pack of drinkers. “Why’s it that you think all these witches have suddenly come unhinged like, eh? They’re smart, if uncanny folk, attuned to things normal, decent folk ain’t, so it’s said. You think it’s fucking coincidence that the further north Vansgrima push the more mad these fucking witches get? I’m tellin’ you I reckon that there’s something off about these southerners. Something bad. Something dark.”
There was another snort and a couple of half-hearted insults thrown Sheppard’s way.
“Someone’s had more gin than’s good for ‘em!”
“Or not nearly enough!”
“Excuse Sheppard, lads,” Del’s voice slurred out once more. “He’s getting on in years, ain’t he. Enough wrinkles so that he could screw his hat on!”
“I might be old, Del,” Sheppard growled, “but at least I don’t look like someone whose face caught afire and some good old boy’s come along and put it out with a rock.”
There was a chorus of whistling and cheering at this retort and the drunken voices dissolved into a good-natured disagreement as Fia ambled on by, the men lamenting Sheppard’s gullibility and weakness for tall tales and Del’s apparent unloveliness.
Fia moved steadily through the crowd, past a trio of women standing arguing around a brazier and gesturing at one another with skewers of unidentifiable meat.
“You ever meet Gunn, bitch, did ya?” one of the women barked at another.
“I met him, I ruddy well crosses my heart and hopes to croak,” her companion said. “You?”
“Aye, I met him once too.”
“Oh yeah?” said the third dubiously. “What was he like, then?”
“Struck me as the sort o’ cracked son of a bitch that’d throw rocks at the stars just to see if the fuckin’ sky would fall in. That sound about right?”
The third knocked back her drink. “Sounds like you caught him on a good day,” she said grudgingly, and the three women fell about laughing.
Fia stepped her way carefully through the massing crowd that was filling the main thoroughfare. The witch burning was turning the market into a seething, fizzing mess of debauchery and red-hot chat, churning the road to mud. Witches were rare and getting rarer, but Fia, due to her privileged education, knew there were more of them about than most suspected. It was only the imprudent or overly rich ones that got themselves caught––or the ones that had driven themselves mad through some means or another.
She pondered on the words of the old greybeard, Sheppard, as she stepped into a doorway to make way for a naked man riding atop a mule going in the opposite direction. Now that she came to think on it, there had been an increase in burnings so far as she could reckon it. If there was any factuality to the rumours that whatever was driving the southernmost isle of Vansgrima along a warpath north was also responsible for cracking the minds of the most magically capable folk of the Five Isles…
“Don’t sound promising,” Fia muttered to herself, stepping back out into the muddy street and making for a swinging tavern sign that proclaimed the inn beyond as The Rat Hole. “But not my problem.”
She found that she was itching for a drink, and that was an itch she could scratch.
“They’re damn well bad folk to get on the wrong side of, witches, o’ course,” Fia heard one shit-faced local blurt to a companion as he sucked a bump of rabbit’s-foot up his nose from off the back of his hand, while Fia sought to slip past him just outside the doorway of The Rat Hole.
“Aye, that they may, that they may,” his companion said, sagely waving a horn of wine around and baptising those that stood about him. “But look at that bastard down in the square though, eh,?The one with the lead nails driven through his knees and elbows, ankles and wrists. Screamin’ and hollerin’ like a damned loon. He’s lookin’ down a future rougher than ten miles o’ bad road, thaumaturgy or no.”
“Funny though, ain’t it?” ejaculated the first man loudly. He was grinning ecstatically, wiping pale blue powder from his top lip and blinking slowly.
“Funny how?” his mate asked, slurping wine.
“How the heathen witch cunt cracked so sudden, like,” the first man said. “One day he’s just bloody Adar, your everyday apothecary, ain’t he? Next, he’s spouting off all that traitorous nonsense about the fall of Fallaros––of all the Five Isles, for fuck sake––and about the ending of the counts and countesses of the tribelands, and the scouring of the whole fucking world, man."
The wine swigging companion guffawed.
“Yeah, who would’ve thought the fellow was crazy as an outhouse rat. Hell of a load of shit, if you ask me. Make a good bit of theatre, though."
The first man took another load of rabbit’s-foot up his other nostril. “Still,” he said in a tight voice, “he seemed so sure, you know? Damn convincing. He… Well, hold on, miss, how d’you fancy––”
This last comment had been aimed at Fia, as had the hand that pawed at her shoulder.
Barely slowing, Fia shrugged fluidly aside. The man stumbled and Fia brought her knee up hard to where his legs forked. The blow dropped him to the mud, coughing ale and vomit.
Fia looked at the floored chap’s associate with her unsettlingly honest and open, curious blue-green eyes. The other man stepped back. Fia looked down at the wheezing grabber.
“Come knocking on my door again and I'm going to open it all the way, you hear, friendo?” she said evenly. “Not just crack it a little like I did just now."
The wine drinker took a tentative step forward––to help his friend, maybe––but stopped when Fia’s gaze flicked back up to him.
“I had a dog with them coloured eyes once,” he uttered suddenly.
“Charming," Fia replied.
The man swallowed, floundering. “He was a good dog, if that makes any difference...”
Fia turned and walked into The Rat Hole, paying the two men no more mind.
All in all, they were the sort of yarns that Fia might have expected; fourth-hand intrigue woven from fragile strands of gossip. Focused as most people were on the witch due for roasting, it was the poor madman tied to the rowan stake down in the town square that occupied most minds. There could be no denying though, that Fia had heard plenty to mull over while she drank. Eyes darting and ears pricking still, she sallied up to the bar and ordered a pint of stout and two shots of red-eye.
She leaned against the counter, feeling the familiar hard glow of the first shot of red-eye fading in her guts as she waited for the stout to settle, and looked at the mob of frothing villagers out in the street, visible through the whorled glass of the dirty windows.
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It was a thief’s delight: a debauch that invited all those of an unsavoury cast to take advantage of. There were rat-arsed people everywhere; throwing up in gutters, resting against lamp-posts, lying senseless in alleys, and trying to barter drugs, sex and murder from strangers in the street.
Abruptly, ripping through the streets with an unnatural loudness that could only have been accomplished with the aid of thaumaturgy, a man’s voice rose above the din and bedlam.
“They come!” the witch cried in a harsh voice, which made Fia picture gargled broken glass, blood and rusting razors. “They come, they come, they come, they come! You moronic, clueless backwater fools, they come! They come for you and for us all! Driven like dogs, like hellhounds! Urged on by whips and promises, by the insatiable appetite for vengeance of one leader and the grasping greed of his cat’s paw! They come looking to scorch the earth of the Five Isles and set up a new empire. A single realm ruled––”
There was a rushing crackle; a dry staccato sputter audible in the silence that had seemingly engulfed the whole of Last Hallow, followed by a cry that could have torn the heart from an iron statue.
Then, a collective bloodthirsty cheer went up from the massed citizenry.
The witch was burning.
The sizzle of fat. The branch-breaking crack of blackening skin. Fia could not hear it, but she could well imagine it, having witnessed it before.
The witch was burning.
Magic and knowledge being consigned to the flames.
Fia knocked back the second shot of red-eye and reached for the stout that the barkeep slid grudgingly across the bar to her. Outside the pub the villagers were going fucking mental, as if another human being roasted alive was the pinnacle of rural entertainment.
It might just be, Fia thought.
The two inebriates outside The Rat Hole had been right, the witch’s rhetoric would’ve made one hell of a stage show.
The screams of the blazing man with the iron nails through his joints tied to the rowan stake rose, rose to mingle with the sparks of the pyre that blossomed happily into the air.
It was said that witches knew things, things about the future. It was said that they could be trusted about as far as they could be thrown. It was said that many a fortune had been made and many a maid been made fortunate by witches.
Fia took a greedy gulp of her stout, willing it to numb her, willing it to kill the thoughts that’d been plaguing her for so long. She looked around at the debauchery taking place all around her. She stepped out into the street, staying under the eaves of the pub’s roof. She couldn't see the pyre from where she was, but she could just see the sparks and floating motes of burning straw drifting around the corner at the end of the street. She smelled the scent of cooking human meat on the stormy air. The witch was silent now.
“Fia McCrae,” a voice said out of the gloom and chaos of the street.
Fia spun. Her beer was still in her hand, unspilled, but now there was a pistol in the other.
She didn’t mind dying, but she minded being snuck up on, taken unawares like a rank amateur. Her brother wouldn’t have been impressed. He hadn’t been one for learning how to play cut-throat, but he also hadn’t been an advocate for getting your throat cut either.
Standing in the lee of The Rat Hole, there was little chance of Fia making out the features of the man standing in the wavering shadows cast by an oil lantern hanging in a nook in a wall above his head and shining directly into her eyes, inhibiting her vision. Didn’t stop her trying, though.
“Fia McCrae,” the voice said again.
“Depends, don’t it,” she replied to the faceless figure.
“Don’t pitch a fit now, I’m just a messenger.”
“I don’t give a fuck who you are,” Fia said pragmatically. “What concerns me is what you want, and why you’d be throwing my name about like a fucking town-crier.”
“Perhaps you’d countenance me to suggest that you lower the flintlock, so that we may continue this discourse in a slightly less volatile atmosphere?”
“Volatile atmosphere? There’s a practitioner of thaumaturgy who’s just been cooked like a pig on a spit down the street there,” Fia said drily. “Now, there ain’t no gallery for you to play to here, stranger. Speak plain and speak fast.”
The man shifted.
The sound of the hammer on Fia’s pistol being cocked could be heard even in the raucous noise of the street. The man under the oil lantern ceased moving. He cleared his throat.
“How d’you fancy doing a favour for the High Seat, for the good Count––Countess, I should say, of course, as it stands––of Frekifold?” the self-proclaimed messenger asked.
“I’d rather shit in my hands and clap,” Fia said.
It was a knee-jerk answer, and might have gone some way to explaining her relationship with the tribeland of Frekifold––had Fia ever given anyone a chance to ask any questions about it.
“Miss McCrae,” the unseen messenger said, “I’m going to reveal myself and I would greatly appreciate it if you didn’t shoot me, or stick me, when I did. Do we have an accord?”
Fia’s strange green-blue eyes flicked around, probing the drunken crowd, and the deepening shadows that hugged the surrounding buildings ever more thickly.
“We’ve a deal,” she said. She uncocked her pistol and folded her arms so that the weapon was concealed under her coat.
The man stepped out of the wavering glare and pulled back his hood. He was older than Fia by some twenty years and heavy set. Silver hair oiled back, a neat beard, bright blue eyes under commandingly bushy brows, and a broken nose set in haste. It took every particle of Fia’s self-possession to not betray her recognition of that proud face. She knew it. As she knew the story behind the broken nose.
She took a long pull on her beer, the better to disguise her unease. “Your name?” she asked, though she knew it well enough. She’d seen the man often from afar in the life she’d lived before this one.
“Gray. Cameron Gray,” the messenger said.
Fia took another swig from her tankard. Swilled the dark, strong beer around her mouth before swallowing.
“A spirited reaction to a simple business proposition,” Gray said, peering closely at the wall of The Rat Hole before leaning against it. He wasn’t ostentatiously dressed, but the quality of his forest green coat, brown cloak and trousers was clear to see in their weave and cut.
Fia shrugged. “I’ve no love for the Counts and Countesses of the tribelands,” she said, careful to keep her tone neutral. “Hard to recall when they last did me a specific favour, so I’d rather keep my nose clean of all that. There are easier ways to make a living, and longer lives to be lived, than whoring.”
“My understanding was that whoring was the one thing you didn’t go in for,” Gray said casually.
Fia cocked her head to one side. Smiled enigmatically. “Don’t fool yourself, messenger,” she said, “we’re all of us whoring ourselves out in some way, for some price––even if it’s not silver.”
Under her coat she ran a finger over the trigger guard of her flintlock.
Gray must have seen her hand move, or else he was one perceptive son of a bitch, because he cocked one of those sapphire eyes towards her belt and said, “They’re getting more reliable all the time, aren’t they?”
“What’s that?”
“You know what.”
Fia just smiled noncommittally again.
“Thaumaturgy is dying, technology advancing,” Gray said. “Less and less people are bothering with witchcraft to murder their friends and enemies. Why expend a week’s energy and a month’s pay getting some loose-lipped thaumaturgist to cast a bit of black magic when all the energy you need to send someone to the long night is a trigger pull away?”
“A profound thought,” Fia said.
The conversation paused as a pair of male revellers staggered by, groping and fussing with one another’s belts as they disappeared down the foetid alley that ran between The Rat Hole and the neighbouring building.
“Strange,” Gray said.
“Oh, I don’t know, I’d say to each their own and good luck to them,” Fia said, looking after the two lustful blokes. “Plenty worse in this world than a good fucking.”
“Not that,” Gray said.
“What then?”
“Everything that I’ve heard tell about you––the whispered tales from toothless homesteaders who you’ve helped find lost cattle, trinkets or brats for, the anecdotal evidence of your combat proficiency that I’ve collected in some of the most repugnant temples to bottle-rot imaginable––it made you sound like any other longrider scraping a few coins together, whilst staying almost permanently in the saddle and ahead of whatever it is you’re running from.”
Fia went to take another drink. Found that her tankard was dry. “And what evidence have you that indicates I’m anything to the contrary, Gray?” she asked.
“Your speech,” Gray said crisply. “You don’t talk like most of the longriders that I’ve ever met. You don’t seem half so foolish as the majority of outlaws that call Fallaros home.”
“How kind of you to say,” Fia said placidly, “but if you’re planning on blowing any more smoke up my arse, allow me to save your breath. I ain’t interested. Not now. Not ever.”
Gray put a hand on his hip.
“Ah,” Fia said, half drawing her pistol from under her coat. Gray lowered his hand.
“The coin’s good,” Gray said.
“There might be a lot of it, but I doubt it’s good.”
“You can’t tell me you don't have need of it?”
“Let me ask you a question, Gray,” Fia replied. “You told me that this undertaking was for the gods-damned High Seat, at the bequest of the Count of Frekifold and then changed to the Countess. You telling me that the Countess is - is dead?"
Gray looked slightly uncomfortable, but only for a moment. Then he smiled a patronising little smile.
“Why’d a wanderer like you worry yourself about details like that, hm?” he asked in a knowing voice, his cold blue eyes sharpening and trying to peer under the brim of Fia’s hat.
Fia held the man’s gaze with difficulty, though the red-eye and beer helped.
“Ain’t no harm in knowing the lay of things, is there?” she said. “Besides, I’ve always liked to know how high up the shit falling on me is coming from.”
The two of them stared at one another as all around them the revels of the witch burning ratcheted up and the approaching storm pressed down.
Eventually, Gray sighed.
“Look, Miss McCrae,” the silver-haired man said, “the fact of the matter is this; I’ve been sent in the name of the High Seat of Fallaros, a position held currently by the tribeland of Frekifold, to find a man. I’ve had no luck, nor have any of my scouts. Not being one to let pride get in the way, I endeavoured to search out the best tracker I could find. That, after listening to the rumours and stories left in your wake all over the six tribelands, transpires to be you. They say you have an uncanny gift for finding that which is lost, is that not the truth?”
Fia grunted. “I’ve a knack for tracking, for obtaining the misplaced and the wanted,” she said grudgingly. “Always have done.”
“Folk say that you’ve a preternatural gift. That you never fail,” said Gray. “Not ever, as far as I’ve heard.”
“Get to your point, if you’ve a mind to make one today.”
“I do,” Gray said. “I need your skills. The High Seat of Fallaros wants what your skills can provide. Either you take the money I’m offering you, or we find out just how capable a longrider you are.”
Fia’s eyes narrowed. Her grip tightened on the butt of her pistol.
“A threat?” she said.
“An ultimatum,” Gray retorted crisply. “Do the job. Take the gold. Otherwise, I’ll make it my business to fan the flames of the rumours that your proficiency at hunting is in actual fact some eldritch thaumaturgical trick—some queer and otherworldly gift. I could make life for you very uncomfortable.” Gray snuffed at the smoky air. “What with the current uneasiness of the climate––the flare up of witches here on Fallaros, tales of marauding armies from Vansgrima sacking their way north––there’s enough happening to make even the most rational mind mistrust. And, what with that name of yours…”
“McCrae?” Fia said, feigning surprise, even as a coldness seeped through her guts.
“No, miss. Fia. It’s a name that transports me back somehow. A name I’ve heard before.”
“As have I,” Fia lied, staring steadily at Gray. “Being my mother’s and all.”
Gray stood up straight and brushed the grime off the sleeve of his fine coat. He grinned. There was no humour in it.
“As you say,” he said. “A fine name, no doubt, though in Frekifold there’s a melancholy that goes with it.” He clapped his hands and tucked his thumbs into his sword belt. “Now, what will it be, Miss… McCrae? The gold, or a hunted life spent as prey in the saddle? To put it into terms you might better understand: the shit is falling from the arses of the gods, so far as you’re concerned.”
Fia’s fingers uncurled from the white-hot grip they’d been keeping on the pistol under her coat. Reluctantly, she wedged the flintlock into her sword belt. She let out a slow breath through her nose. She was in a very tight, very dangerous spot. There was far more at stake here, potentially, than a purse of gold and a bounty to be ridden down.
“Very good,” Gray said, nodding his silver head. “You’ll meet me back here in Last Hallow, at the rooms at the top of the Three Horseshoes Inn. You’ll have my man. Alive. Must I stress the importance of him still being of this world, Miss McCrae?”
“Still breathing,” she affirmed through gritted teeth.
“Splendid,” Gray said lightly. “I don’t suppose we can seal our little pact with a drink?”
“No, Gray, I don’t suppose we can,” Fia said levelly. “I doubt you’d be drinking anyway. Not doing what I call drinking. I’m going to be doing what I call drinking after this pleasant little chat, and the last thing I want is to do it with you.”
Gray made an aggrieved face, bowed his head and made to step back into the swirling mass of smoke-wreathed humanity.
“Gray,” Fia said, “hadn’t you best be telling me who I’m looking for?”
Gray drew his hood back over his head. “That would be the second most wanted outlaw on the isle of Fallaros,” he said casually.
“And who’d have that be?” Fia asked.
Gray smiled coldly as he bowed once more. “A man you might have heard of, like many other commoners that hold this particular excrescence in erroneously high regard,” he said.
“Save the theatrics, Gray, and give me a name so that I can go and get a drink,” Fia said.
“Gunn,” Gray replied. “The man’s name is Torsten Gunn.”