Steel Sirens Read online

  Steel Sirens

  Steel Sirens is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual places, events, or persons living or deceased, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 by Maxx Whittaker

  Copyright © 2019 Saving Throw Ink

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Publishing Partner,” at the email address below.

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  First Printing June 2019

  Table of Contents

  1 The Masked Runaway

  2

  3

  4 The Clever Mercenary

  5

  6 The Twenty of Flails

  7 The Thief of Opals

  8

  9 The Gem of Dissent

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15 The Cowardly Widowers

  16

  17 The Emperor's Suicide

  18

  19

  20

  21 The Ambitious Temptress

  22

  23

  Slender, creased hands shuffle cards with practiced ease. Candlelight dances across the frayed blue cloth in a pagan celebration. Beyond a wide table set out for the cards, shadow and incense smoke gently devour the tent’s interior. One by one a Seer lays out the fate of a stranger...

  1

  The Masked Runaway

  This card has a border of mirrors. A boy is flanked by two large shadows. It is associated with a revelation, a secret, and dreams. Inverted, it represents violence, an act of cruelty, doubt, and a rebellion. The card is creased along its length as though it’s been hidden up a sleeve. Its reverse is bright blue with a gold braid and an elaborate water droplet drawn in the center.

  Death is in the Fortingall Wood.

  Kneeling beneath the Fortingall Oak, the oldest tree of the wood, I inhale. My senses touch the scent like exploring fingers. Nothing strange pricks my awareness. Loam, sap, animal shite. Reaching further, I peer along a bear track I’ve followed all morning. His ursine musk has faded despite the still air. The wood is a panorama of gold and green and ochre as I pass beneath its canopy a slow step at a time. It’s the same forest, but I know something is wrong. So did the bear, whose track has faded so fully he must be running full bore.

  So do the birds, silent enough for me to hear the River Hye. Usually it’s dampened by the trees and a steep bluff and the forest’s ambient song. Now its waters call to me with a frantic rush of escape.

  I was born here in the Upper Swell and lived in the Wood before I could form memories. If anyplace can be in my blood, it’s here. Seasons, sunsets, droughts. They are a part of me. I knew a day before our constables caught mercenary poachers hiding on the wood’s edge and abusing travelers. I knew because the forest spoke differently to my ear.

  I squint, try to discern what it’s telling me now. Kneeling, I bury fingers in the cool, damp soil of early autumn. Not so much as an earthworm.

  I rise, grabbing my father’s bow, and give up tracking the bear any further. Its scent is long gone. Tonight is the harvest wassail, and the first apple crops will be off the tree and sent to the cider mill in Whidby. Last year’s pressing is due to be paid back today, ten crates of sweet-spice liquor, but so far, I haven’t heard the cart.

  I’ll just cut back through Braemar. There are boar in the underwood along the Hye and going through the village is faster than scaling crags above the Upper Swell.

  This is what I tell myself, picking back across the forest floor and almost dreading the snap of each twig. I don’t know why it’s hard to admit the truth at times like these: I have to know. Have to check. It’s not enough to trust everything’s all right.

  A cry splits the air above the treetops. My startle isn’t masculine, worse because I should have expected the sound. I raise my left arm, but Talos hurtles past his usual perch and skids through the leaf litter. He releases the hare in his talons and does a celebratory hop.

  “Well, look at you…”

  My grey hawk preens, looking like a plump lord in black-striped pajamas and a great coat.

  “Now catch me nine more and we’ll be set.”

  Talos raises his wing like a goodwife lifting her cooking spoon for a swat.

  “Hey! Don’t kill the messenger. Thom wants a spread and he’s getting a spread...One way or another,” I mutter to Talos, who flaps up to take his place on my shoulder as I gut the hare. Sometimes I think Thom should have been the portreeve of a bigger village, a proper city. We’d be the worse without him, but sometimes I wonder if we’d be better off, too.

  ***

  Braemar’s gates stand wide. Bren and his woodsmen drag seasoned timbers from a cart tethered outside, the men’s hands transformed into pitted iron hooks that stab and pierce the bark. I can already see a tripod skeleton of tonight’s bonfire, pyre jutting up from the cobble of the market square.

  Thom and his page hold the square’s far side. He puppets everyone with a smile, shouting, and each time he raises his arms, it looks like smoke from the bakery billows from Thom’s slender hands like he’s a bread-scented wizard. He really is wasted on the Upper Swell.

  Maybe, if I skirt the wall of trestle tables being stacked–

  “Ewan!” Thom spots and intercepts me in the space of my name, moving on long legs that have never forgotten how to be an officer. Maybe he should do the hunting today.

  He nods to the hare. “Our ranger, off to a promising start.”

  I roll my shoulder under the clinch of talons. “Ser, we’ve talked about this; you can’t eat Talos.”

  Talos squawks and puffs out his wings.

  Maybe laughter will soften my news or at least Thom’s energy. “Something off in the wood today.”

  “Ach. I’ve watched you at this for what...six years? Nothing in the Fortingall can get the better of you.”

  “And you’ve watched me long enough to know I know that forest.”

  “A storm, a bandit crew.” He waves me off. “Nothing to interfere with our night.”

  “I’m stopping at home, then I’ll try my luck in the eastern outwash.”

  Thom grins like he thought of the plan. “Hull needs your catch by mid-afternoon; you have time.”

  I know how long it really takes the butcher to do his roasting. I also know that Aram has a new wife at home and can’t be bothered to remember the world doesn’t turn by his watch.

  Thom stands, hands at his hips, smiling and nodding. He’s not waiting for anything but his own approval; I throw in my two cents anyway. “I think this is shaping up to be our best wassail, at least in my memory.”

  “Really? Oh. That’s...do you think so?” Thom says this like he’s never been a soldier. “The governor of Castle Combe is supposed to be here tonight.”

  Thom has pestered the governor and his earl for years to elevate Braemar to a real parish, with a real mayor. I assume a mayor named Thom Bandragan. I don’t have to ask why Thom waited to tell me. I don’t have to ask if the village knows about our guest of honor; put-out expressions say better than words no one understands why Thom’s cracking the whip over this year’s wassail.

  And I don’t need to ask why he hasn’t told them. The last time Governor MacTallum wrote Thom a passing serious letter about elevating Braemar, it was made clear the first thing to go would be our village name. Something less pagan-Albion. It was s
uch a fantasy back then, hardly worth our alderman getting indignant. Now Braemar jingles with Whidby gold and our fate is on a collision with Thom’s ambition.

  “You’re not angry…” whispers Thom.

  I mull his words.

  He scoots close to make way for the unfurling of a striped marquee, but his body lowers, tenses as though waiting for the decree of an oracle or sage.

  I hear my father’s answer, but I can’t quite see his face anymore. He’s a close, brown beard and sad-soft brown eyes. He’s more a feeling than a memory, strength and warmth and discipline and wistfulness. “I just think there’s a hidden trade in any bargain.”

  “Ach!” Thom waves me off, as he has countless times before, and takes such a long stride back that he stumbles on the marquee’s upright. He smiles at the blunder as if to say, I had to go that far. I had to put that much space between myself and how mistaken you are.

  I don’t think I am wrong. Braemar has agreed with me for nearly five hundred years. Then I think, we’ve only lived here for twenty so what do I know?

  “Game won’t snare itself,” I muttered, giving Thom a wave before slipping through the square.

  Men sing in a low, sonorous rumble while women hand off the apple baskets. A task that’s been drudgery for as long as Braemar has stood is a kind of dance. It’s Thom’s relentless self-promotion that’s brought us the best wassail and the contracts with the Whidby cider mill and brewers. He makes us great so he can be great; maybe there is no hidden trade. Maybe some things are as good or, at least, as honest as they seem.

  ***

  “What’s the matter?” my sister asks before I’ve shut the door.

  “Nothing.”

  Her eyes stay on me just long enough to speak doubt, then she turns back to her knitting. “That all you’ve got so far?”

  “Aye.”

  “Don’t let Thom see.”

  “He’s already seen.”

  “Of course he has.” Briet sets her knitting aside. “He’s everywhere today.”

  “Why does it smell like stew in here?”

  She nods to Keldan, bent over the kitchen table with knife and pot. “I’m in charge of the pies now. Linna Dalaigh had her baby last night.”

  I pause, hand halfway to a basket of plums tucked up on a shelf. “Since when is she having a baby?”

  Briet snorts and shakes her head.

  “And about Thom,” I fumble on to change the subject, “I think he just wants to prove himself.”

  My sister gets up, folding the long sleeves of her faded indigo dress in a warning that work is about to happen. “He’s proved himself a hundred times over, I should think. The orchards, the cider mill. The coin.”

  “I don’t think it’s us he’s trying to convince. Thom is always falling short in Thom’s eyes.”

  “And Marrin’s,” Briet ads softly, arms limp at her sides a moment.

  “What about Marrin?” asks Kel.

  I wonder how many people remember. Thom imagines everyone does. Who remembers the war-tormented general who drank until he pissed himself in a stranger’s undercroft? Until he struck his wife Marrin, thinking her a pick pocket when she tried to drag him home. The aldermen voted to banish Thom. Marrin asked my father to intervene. Why my father? Probably his enduring level-headedness. Marrin thought Thom could be saved and maybe my father did, too. She was right; she made it clear he couldn’t come home until he’d been a year without drink. Thom never slipped once. They only had a few months together after he moved back, but Marrin lived long enough to see her husband changed.

  I don’t want to waste this story on a nosy, fourteen-year-old boy.

  “What’s the boy doing here?” I hand my sad lone hare off to Briet and nod at Keldan.

  Briet clucks, at me or my sad haul I’m not sure, her blue eyes wide. “It’s the wassail, Ewan! Half day at the forge.”

  “And the boy has a name,” pipes up Keldan.

  “Can’t work him properly?” I raise Talos to his perch. “And I know the boy’s name. It’s Pain in My Arse.”

  Keldan chuckles.

  “He’s an apprentice, Ewan, not the blacksmith.”

  “You’d never know it with the way he struts about banging his hammer on everything.”

  I follow her out the back and into the kitchen house that occupies one corner of our garden. Briet lays the hare out on her board and draws a knife from her belt.

  “Don’t let him sit idle,” I say loudly toward the open door. “He’ll sit about sleeping or touching him–”

  “Ewan! Gross.”

  “I’m not idle! She’s had me chopping and cutting all bloody day!” Keldan shouts back.

  “That’s a lie.” Briet looks up at me, eyes dancing, and swipes a stray blond lock from her cheek. “He wouldn’t know the difference between cutting and chopping if it bit him in the arse. He’s mangled vegetables and complained and that’s it.”

  “I heard that!”

  “Ugh! Enough of you.” Briet stamps to the kitchen door. “Take the coins from my jar and go ask Goodwife Rell for more salt.” She passes me the hide. “This falls to your lot, ser.”

  “I’ll deal with it when I get back.”

  “Speaking of...Take Kel with you.”

  I stop rolling the hide. “What for?”

  “You know what for.” Briet is suddenly little rougher than I’d like with my day’s only kill. “You can apprentice him just as well.”

  “Briet, blacksmithing is a real skill. Keldan will earn a living at something that doesn’t ride on the seasons, on drought or herds.”

  She slams her knife so hard it spins atop the cutting board. “And it has nothing to do with Hager having no son, no heir, and no apprentice…”

  “What does that -”

  “Hager will take Keldan as a partner, then barter him the forge, house, and–”

  “Nothing you’re saying sounds like a problem.”

  “And Keldan will spend his whole life in this village. Trapped by the decisions someone else made. Suffocated.”

  My words about hidden trade some back to haunt me.

  But suffocated? She’s wrong. There’s nothing sinister in Keldan’s trajectory. I have no use for a helper. A fourteen-year-old boy is supposed to take an apprenticeship and I found him the best one I could. I can’t believe Briet, old and wise for nineteen, can’t understand this.

  “You’re twenty-three and a landowner. That gives you a right to vote this autumn.”

  “Aye.” I keep the word as non-committal as I can. Briet is graceful, a luminous angel three-quarters of the time. It’s that remaining quarter that makes it clear now and then I’m not the sole head of the family.

  “I know Thom plans to hold a vote if MacTallum likes what he sees in the streets and in our ledgers.”

  “How do you know that? Thom hasn’t told a soul.”

  “I must be the only woman in Braemar with two eyes, then. His jump-about pond frog antics for three whole days could be a banner declaring his intent.”

  “Towns and cities are out there for anyone who wants them, Bri.”

  This time when she sets down her knife it doesn’t make a sound. “Are they?”

  “Mother and Father came here to leave that life, and that says a lot in my mind. We traded silk merchants and patisseries for clean air and a dearth of cutpurses.”

  “You can’t hide, Ewan.” Briet looks so old when she says this. Beyond age, beyond time. It’s just the day I’ve had.

  “I’m not...I’m not hiding.”

  “Tear the old house down. Sell the land.”

  I take too long finding my reason and my words tumble into the brief, deep silence. “It’s collateral. The land has value.”

  “It’s a burned out house and fallow fields. You already said Keldan won’t need it; he’ll inherit Hager’s cottage.”

  “Maybe...there’s always your dowry to –”

  “Not on your life, Ewan Cuinn! I’ll not be born, married, and dead
all in Braemar.”

  “That’s not kind or fair, Bri. Braemar has her share of brave, hard-knuckled -”

  “And she can keep them!” Briet runs the hare through with her skewer in one thrust. “And you, too, and your deaf ears. I’m not living Mother and Father’s life. I don’t want to live on their sad land. I don’t want to wither away with my feet smelling of apple juice and my hands pickled in game salt.”

  Keldan saunters in to give her the salt; Briet’s look sends him right back out.

  “I don’t know what it is you run from, Ewan.”

  “I’m not running –”

  “Why you keep to yourself in the wood. Why you hide here in Braemar.” She sprinkles salt over the hare with a mystical trill of her fingers. “You can’t keep us hostage here. And you can’t hide. The world is out there, and by Thom Bandragan or some other prophet, it’ll come to our border sooner or later.”

  Why do I shiver at this? For five-hundred years, the world has hardly cared about the northern point of the Albion lands, and I can’t imagine why that would change. The firm line of Briet’s usually full mouth, cheeks the color of her lips, tell me now isn’t the time to say so. We grew up close enough in age that I know when to pick my battles.

  “We’ll see how the wassail goes, what Governor MacTallum has to say.”

  Briet turns her back and goes to work spitting the hare, poking at the coals. She’s not going to answer me.

  “I’d better head back out. Thom wants two herd of deer and a score of wild pig. I spent the morning looking for a witch to turn that hare into one or the other and…” My laugh is too loud in the small dirt-floored kitchen, showing me out.

  Keldan has flopped down in the high grass that borders our home’s back wall. He fiddles with a piece and chews a piece. “Why are you fighting with Briet?”

  “Uh, I think Briet was fighting with me.”

  “You know what I mean, Ew.”

  Why were we fighting? “Kel, do you want to stay on as Hager’s apprentice?”