He just shook his head and looked blank. Then he began drawing a map of his own, adding roads, towers, mountains, then furiously erasing and changing them. It was no geography I recognized.
How was I ever to get him gone if he couldn’t tell me where he was going or where he’d been? We needed words. So I began to call out objects around the cottage and to name the things I drew. He learned incredibly fast. When I quizzed him, saying door or sky or sword and having him point to the object or the picture of it, he always got it right. He was either deceiving me that he didn’t understand Leiran or his ranked among the quickest minds I’d ever known.
I tried writing words, but he couldn’t read them. I tried to think of a way for him to tell who he was or who were his people, but he could not. I pointed to myself and to my house, then tried to find out where on his drawing was his dwelling, but he shook his head angrily and kicked dirt over his attempts. Perhaps he had been banished or disinherited. I tried drawing the devices of prominent noble houses, but he recognized none of them. And then I drew Evard’s royal dragon ensign, but it evoked neither fear nor loathing nor any sense of familiarity, and I began to wonder if he had lost his memory along with his voice. After an hour of this his lips were thin and hard, his nostrils flared, and his knuckles white. I went back to teaching him words, and he liked that better. Unfortunately, though he didn’t seem particularly happy, he didn’t look in the least inclined to leave.
By midday I’d had enough, so I packed up my knife and my bundled plants and started down the track toward the village. Aeren wanted to come with me, but I waved him away. I could just imagine the uproar if I took a half-naked stranger into Dunfarrie.
“They’ll arrest you. Put you in the pillory to wait for those who were hunting you, and all of this will be for nothing. If you want to leave, then by all means go, but take a different way at least.” I’m not sure what my gestures communicated. He pouted like a spoiled child. Maybe he would be gone by the time I came back.
The path from my cottage entered Dunfarrie behind Gareth Crowley’s pigsties. Crowley’s hovel and its collapsing fence poked up from his muddy barnyard, all of it sprawled across the foot of the hill as if a particularly nasty avalanche had buried a respectable dwelling. I circled wide and came to the dirt road that meandered past the sorely overgrown statues of Annadis and Jerrat—no priest from any temple could be bothered to come and tend so small a shrine as Dunfarrie’s—and through the jumble of tired wood-frame houses and shops to the Dun Bridge. The afternoon was still and warm, the stench of barnyard filth hanging over the stifling village.
The few people I passed hurried by with averted eyes or touched their fingers to their brows without speaking. The villagers tolerated me and my unsavory past out of respect for Anne and Jonah, but they kept a wary distance. I was well content to do the same. Life was difficult enough without moping over other people’s hardships.
Jacopo, of course, was different. If it hadn’t been for Jacopo, Jonah’s younger brother, I could never have survived in the valley after Anne and Jonah died. He had no family of his own, and he came up every few days to help me cut firewood or work the garden, or to make soap or candles. He had taught me to snare rabbits and squirrels, and to make jack, the thin, tough strips of smoked meat that would keep forever. Every fall he helped me make the cottage tight against the coming cold. Jaco was all of my family and all of my friends together.
Eyed suspiciously by a bronze rooster, I picked my way through a cramped chicken yard to the back stoop of a tidy, sod-roofed house, where I traded my bundled dye plants to Mag the weaver for ten eggs and a fist-sized lump of butter wrapped in a rag. Jaco’s shop was not as tidy as Mag’s house. The outside had not been whitewashed since King Gevron’s father ruled Leire, and the dirt-and soot-grimed window allowed little daylight inside. I pushed open the door and three cats made a break for freedom across my feet. “Jaco, are you here?”
Jacopo had taken up shopkeeping after thirty years wandering the world as a sailor. An Isker saber had slashed the muscles of one leg, leaving it too stiff for scrambling in a ship’s rigging, so he had made his way home to Dunfarrie. Out of this dusty room he sold all manner of things: old boots, clothes, anchors, rusty lanterns, cracked bowls, farm implements. Anything he could find or trade for, he would set in his shop, and someone would want it eventually.
“What’re you up to in town this day, girl? It’s not your usual.” Jacopo emerged from the back room carrying a crate of rusty nails. He was very much like Jonah, wispy white hair and kind brown eyes. Though no taller than I, he had broad shoulders and a barrel chest, and the hands that gripped the heavy crate were wide, with short, powerful fingers. He set down the crate, then wiped his forehead with a rag. “Summer’s on us today, for sure.”
“Jaco, we need to talk. Privately.”
“Not a soul in town to hear, I’d wager. Everyone’s gone out to Augusto’s. With the eviction tomorrow, everyone thinks either to help him move out or to steal whatever they can get their hands on. After the flogging, Augusto can’t move fast enough to keep up with his children, much less his belongings.”
I drew a pair of rickety stools close together where we could see the shop door. Jacopo pulled a wadded leather pouch from the pocket of his worn blue sailor’s coat, extracted a pipe, and filled it from a battered tin.
“Yesterday a stranger showed up on the ridge…”
When I was done, the pipe remained unlit. “And he can’t speak at all?”
“Not a syllable. But he’s not accustomed to it nor to rough living or having to do for himself. I can’t seem to convince him to leave. So what am I to do with him?”
“Give him over to Graeme Rowan. That’s the only way to stay clear of trouble.”
I shook my head. “Darzid’s surely spoken with Rowan. Our upright sheriff would turn Aeren over straightaway. I won’t do it.”
“But if he’s a thief—”
“We’ve no evidence this man has broken any law, and whatever his crime, I’ve doubts he can remember it. He’s not even sure of his name.”
“Perhaps he’s not the one the captain’s hunting. Likely he’s just a fellow wrecked himself on the Snags and wandered up the ridge. I’ve seen many a body with the clothes washed right off them after getting caught up at the Snags, though mostly they were dead.”
“I won’t believe that. It’s too much of a coincidence.”
“What if I was to trot down to the docks and have a smoke with Graeme, see what he knows?”
“You won’t mention Aeren or me?”
“I’ll be as clever as a boy when there’s work to be done.”
“I’ll watch the shop.” I had to offer, though I thoroughly disliked the task.
“Right then. Have a look through my bins and see if there’s aught to dress the fellow in. I’ll be back in a bit.”
I delved into the three great wooden clothes bins. That the contents of the bins were entirely dead people’s clothes didn’t bother me. Dead was dead. The former owners weren’t going to come back and haunt those who found some use for their breeches. I came up with gray under-drawers, a long tunic of russet, some worn and greasy loose breeches of brown kersey with a drawstring to hold them up, and canvas leggings. Aeren was clearly unused to going barefoot. His feet were soft, battered by the stones and sticks of the forest path, and the lack of calluses told me he was accustomed to boots that fit, not these hobnailed monstrosities the rest of us wore that weighed like oak and were no more yielding. The only thing Jacopo’s bins provided were sandals that looked as if they’d been chewed by a goat.