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.
III
Wren could guess why the Free were here: there was battle and chaos loose in these parts.
She was not clear on all the whys and hows of it, but a people called the Huluk Kur were on the march. She had overheard someone in a resthouse saying they had been driven from their own lands by the Empire of Orphans. Whatever the reason, they were raging through the north along the border of the Hommetic Kingdom. Trying to come south. Trying to seize new lands to make their own. Above all, according to the gruff captain who had taken the last of Wren’s coin before he would let her aboard this very barge, trying to get across the Hervent.
Which was exactly what Wren was trying to do, except that where the Huluk Kur meant to come south, she meant to go north. Into wild lands she was not even sure were really part of the Kingdom, precisely the places the Huluk Kur were wrecking and ruining. She was trying to get closer to the trouble everyone else was fleeing. Everyone apart from the Free, no doubt. She doubted whatever they were up to involved trying to get out of the path of trouble.
Her fellow passengers whispered about the Free as night came on and the barge slipped easily down the current. How could they not when legends were among them?
‘King’s levy went north of the river to try to stop the Huluk Kur, I heard,’ an old and thin man murmured to his wife. ‘Got chewed up and spat out. They say the Huluks floated a thousand corpses down the river the next day. Half of the levy still alive ran off south. Plenty more just plain wouldn’t fight.’
‘’S’true,’ another man – eavesdropping like Wren – interjected. ‘I saw them scuttle back down the Wardle Road.’
‘So, the King’s paid the Free to come up here and put some spine into things,’ the first went on. ‘Word is these ones here’ – he flicked his chin towards the silent figures by the prow – ‘already threw down the Wardle Bridge. Just the three of them.’
The part about the bridge’s fall, at least, Wren knew to be true. She had meant to cross it to carry her lonely search into the north. Word of its destruction had forced her onto this barge, drifting downriver towards Hamming Ferry. There were supposed to be boatmen there who might take her to the distant northern bank of the Hervent. Not that she had any coin left to pay for such a service, of course. But that, as her mother would say, was a bridge for another day.
‘The Free’ll cover the hills with Huluk Kur dead,’ the old man continued, not hiding his pleasure at the thought. ‘You could wager your life on it.’
‘Maybe, maybe not,’ his wife grunted. ‘Mara Red at the wayhouse said there’s ten thousand of them out there.’
The woman gazed into the night, northwards towards the snow-dusted peaks and ridges standing silent beneath the moon.
‘That’s a lot of savages to get in the way of, if they’re really set on going somewhere,’ she mused. ‘She said they’re eating folks.’
‘Mara’s an empty-head,’ her husband snorted. ‘They ain’t eating anybody. They’re slaving them and killing them. Ain’t that enough?’
Wren watched the three mercenaries thoughtfully. They were little more than shadows in the gloom. The archer sat with his back to the gunwale, only the occasional glint of reflected lamplight in his eyes betraying his watchfulness. The other two – the Clevers – were lying beyond him. They had not stirred for a long time.
A rumble of her stomach reminded her that she had not eaten since boarding the barge. She had not seen any of the Free eat either. She had seen no sign that they even had any food with them. Her own stock of supplies for the journey was meagre, but she might spare a little if it won her favour or information.
‘You look like you might be short on food.’
The archer – Hamdan, the Clever had called him when he came up out of the river – regarded the bread in Wren’s hand. Then he looked up into her eyes.
‘We had plenty, but most of it was on a horse that got loose.’
‘Got shot full of arrows and threw itself into the river, you mean,’ the male Clever observed. Wren had thought him asleep, and even now he did not move or open his eyes.
‘There was a lot going on, Kerig. I thought it might be more important to keep you alive than the horses.’ Hamdan smiled at Wren and shrugged one shoulder. ‘Didn’t have time to consider the choice as fully as I might have liked.’
He reached out and took the bread from Wren, nodding in thanks.
‘What were you doing in the river?’ Wren asked.
Hamdan raised his eyebrows, and she could not quite tell whether he was perturbed by her temerity or merely surprised by it. Kerig, the Clever, just lay there.
‘Is she talking to me?’ he grunted without cracking an eyelid so much as a hair’s breadth.
‘She is,’ Hamdan confirmed, taking a bite from the bread. He sounded vaguely amused now. ‘She did feed us. You could trade a word or two for it if you want.’
Kerig sighed and sat up. His movements were stiff and laboured. He took the bread from Hamdan’s hand just as the archer was about to have another mouthful.
‘She’d have gone away by now if you hadn’t been so friendly,’ he said. ‘You talk too much.’
Kerig looked at Wren for the first time as he chewed. He was a handsome man, she thought. His use of the entelechs had not aged or marred him too much. Not outwardly at least.