Catling's Bane (The Rose Shield Book 1) Read online

  She clutched Raker’s shoulder, kicking to stay afloat. “A waterdragon?” The creature’s rayed wings fluttered frantically at the surface, its wide fluke slapping the water.

  “We need to free it.” Raker gently pulled the yearling in. Catling swam for the raft as Jafe poled it closer.

  Something brushed Raker’s leg. A razorgill if he was lucky. Birds cawed overhead, the banks stirred, and water rippled. “Crajek!” Jafe yelled.

  “Get her out,” Raker barked. His hands wheeled faster. The waterdragon flailed, its scaled neck craning sideways, long tail coiling and churning the mud. Despite its small size, it matched his strength. Spined fins slashed the air, flinging water in his face.

  “Raker!” Jafe grabbed Catling by her garment’s shoulders and plucked her from the water.

  Raker hauled on the line. He glanced toward the banks, on the lookout for predators. Gods drifted toward the spectacle. The goddess hovered above the waterdragon, delighting in his heroics. “Your blood spills,” she warned.

  “Give me time,” he growled.

  “Raker!” Jafe pointed down the channel “Crajeks sinking.”

  “Do you trust me?” the goddess asked, kneeling on the water’s surface, her gown of mist spreading like spilled milk, hair spiraling above her head. Jafe held the pole ready to strike.

  “Do I have a choice?” Raker grabbed the wing and worked the hook. The waterdragon reeled, squealing. Its spiked head bashed him in the jaw, cutting his cheek on his teeth.

  Nearer the bank, another pair of knobby eyes blinked and a head the hue of wet bark sank beneath the surface. Jafe shouted, “Crajek, Raker!”

  “Goddess?” Raker murmured, ready to let go and scramble for the raft.

  “Do you trust me, my love?” she persisted.

  His gaze snapped to her face, the daring smile, the eagerness flickering in her eyes. “Yes.”

  She flew through him into the luminescence. He gasped at the sensation. The waterdragon ceased its thrashing. Raker exhaled and worked the hook, ignoring the whorls of movement purling around him. The crajeks failed to attack though they surely tasted his blood.

  The hook’s barb tore a gash in the fin and slipped free. Raker let the wing go and the waterdragon dove. In one smooth movement, he spun to the raft and leapt. Jafe snagged the back of his trousers and hauled him up.

  “The crajeks.” Catling pointed to the water swarming with greedy beasts.

  Jafe shook his head and slumped down, the pole across his knees. “I’ll never understand your kind.”

  ***

  Evening fires flared on the hummocks. Smoke eddied with the rising mists and foggy dampness. As the rain retreated, burnished rays sliced through the caliph trees and the channels gleamed, the swamp bathed in an ethereal glow.

  Catling stood behind a mossy tree and pulled on the loose trousers, snug shirt, and long jerkin of a rafter. Her modesty earned her puzzled glances, the tribes far less timid about the presence of breasts and bottoms than she. She supposed they all had similar interesting parts and her reserve was needless, a matter of mere custom.

  Little distinguished fenfolk clothing as belonging to a man or woman. The people were uniformly tall and long-limbed, the clothing bleached brown and festooned with pockets. Catling’s slender frame had required a trade: her embroidered jacket, underdress, and leggings for a child’s attire.

  What she received was far cleaner than the clothing she gave away. She smoothed out the wrinkles and folded her underdress as if Vianne peered over her shoulder. Her jacket had served as her pillow and fared better than the rest. She lifted it by the collar to shake it out, and carefully flicked off bits of fish scale and flecks of debris from the overhanging boughs.

  Her fingers brushed something hard in one of the pockets. She dug into the fold and pulled out the key to Ava-Grea’s pylons. Gannon’s stealthy departure stung, but perhaps he had thought of her in tendering the gift. How long had he planned to abandon her? From the start?

  She jumped from the bank to the floating village, a patchwork of watercraft tethered together and crowding the swamp’s serpentine channels. Fire-winged blackbirds perched on overhead branches, seeking a meal of beetles and careless rats. Rafters had claimed the abutting hummocks, clearing the damp land of shy lynx and crajeks too young or quick to eat.

  The patient owner of her Ellegean garments, a young and unabashedly naked girl, grinned as Catling handed the folded stack over and bowed. As the girl wriggled into her new clothes, Catling hopped from raft to raft to the opposite bank, scanning the numerous heads for the one man with the fall of straight black hair.

  Raker sat outside a larger gathering on a fallen log, sucking the seared meat off river rat bones. At the circle’s center, a fire cast sparks to the mossy canopy and a skinned and headless crajek roasted on a spit. Jafe, his body silhouetted against the flames, stepped the slow snaking dance of a storyteller. A young woman pursued, swaying on his heels. She too wore clay paint, and she carried the skull of a large crajek, the jaws snapping and terrible teeth clacking.

  Raker waved Catling over.

  “Is he dancing our morning?” She sat beside him, nodding toward the performance.

  “You missed his depiction of your swim.”

  “Who plays the crajek?”

  “Leena.”

  Catling smiled as the crajek’s jaws snapped at the firelit faces. The children screamed and giggled while the elders laughed. Then Jafe was Raker as he worked to free the waterdragon, his antics frantic, the crajek circling and nipping. Jafe talked to himself in imitation of Raker’s strange ways. “Yes!” he shouted and held up the imaginary hook.

  The fenfolk hooted and clapped. Jafe and Leena jumped from the circle, leaving the fire and its burden to other hands. Jafe caught Catling’s eye and leapt over to her as if the story had another chapter to tell. Timed to perfection, he fell to his knees in the loam and grinned. Leena walked up behind him and swatted the back of his head.

  “Show Leena your leg,” Jafe said to Raker. “Where the razorgill sliced you.”

  “Nothing to wonder at,” Raker said. He stretched out his leg and yanked up this trouser. The wound curved downward on the outside of his calf. Catling stared, the gash reduced to a raw scar. “It’s the half-blood.” He lowered his trouser leg over the wound.

  “Another stray?” Leena’s slanted eyes swept Catling from head to toe. “Did the river send this one too?”

  Catling struggled for a response. The woman’s caustic tone left no doubt of her opinion, but the two questions raised more questions. Raker’s attention drifted before his gaze returned to Leena. “She’s tied to Whitt.”

  “Whitt?” Catling swiveled from Raker to Jafe. “Whitt was here?”

  “He hunted crajeks,” Jafe said with a grin.

  “Whitt from Mur-Vallis?” She reeled with the news. “When?”

  “Two summers ago.” Leena squatted next to Jafe, the challenge in her voice losing its edge.

  Catling furrowed her brow and propped her chin in her palms. That was before their meeting in Elan-Sia. He hadn’t mentioned the swamp just as he hadn’t told her about the stead. The intimacy of their nest in the hayloft seemed a dream. What other secrets had he hidden when he severed their connection?

  “I’m not a stray,” Catling informed the woman. “I’m returning to Ava-Grea.”

  “You should stay with us.” Jafe put an arm around Leena and pulled her off-balance. “No worries. No Ellegeans trying to kill you.”

  “Not all Ellegeans are murderers.” She swatted at a bug. “And we don’t have crajeks biting our legs.”

  “If you did,” Jafe said, “you would hunt them instead of each other.”

  A smile tugged up Catling’s lips. “I suppose that might be true.” She glanced at Raker, the man studying the ground as he listened.

  “Why kill you, a child?” Leena’s eyes tightened into slits.

  Raker looked up. “She has power.” He removed the leather patch hi
ding the damage to his face. Scar tissue puckered and rutted the flesh in place of his eye.

  Out of sheer instinct, Catling covered her unmarked eye. She expected influence, threads of power emanating from Raker’s old wound and touching her emotions. Instead, the eye socket glistened as if he’d dabbed it with luminescence.

  “You glimpse what other’s fail to see,” he said and replaced his eyepatch.

  She bit her lower lip. The urge to share her secret stewed in her chest. Raker possessed a gift, a strange singular ability setting him apart even in the isolated world of the shifting swamp. His power didn’t matter; its mere presence entwined her in unexpected kinship.

  “I see influence.” She touched the edge of her rose eye. “I can’t influence, but I see it. Or envision it in my mind. Once I needed to cover my good eye and unravel it. In Ava-Grea, I learned to control it, not merely to shield people from its effects, but to block it, or let it seep through. I’m the only one.”

  The three rafters stared at her. She waited for a response. Jafe scratched his chin and glanced at Leena. The two of them shrugged; the significance lost on them. “You should stay here,” Jafe said.

  Raker shook his head. “She says you need to return to Ava-Grea.”

  Though the nature of his gift remained a mystery, the strangeness of his statements no longer confused her. He saw or had access to hidden knowledge. “I will when the heiress arrives,” she said. “I’m sworn to her. I need to stay near the city.”

  “We will hide you from the Ellegeans.” Jafe nudged Leena.

  Raker raised an eyebrow. “In plain sight.”

  ***

  Leena smeared clay on Catling’s bug-stung arms and mashed it into her hair before twisting her locks into a loose braid. Catling grimaced as the red muck painted her cheeks, nose, and forehead.

  “No one will mistake you for one of us.” The woman sat back on her heels and smiled at her handiwork. “But no one will hook their little Ellegean fish either.”

  “Now for the eye.” Catling knotted a strip of cloth around her head and snugged it over her eye. “How do I look?” she asked Raker.

  He loaded gear on his raft and grunted when he looked up. “The heiress won’t be there yet.”

  “You don’t know, and I can’t risk missing her.” She couldn’t cast off her curse or bring anyone back from the dead. She’d sworn an oath to the heiress. Before that, she’d sworn an oath to herself. Vengeance beckoned from somewhere on the horizon, and she would find it.

  His gaze returned to the stack of wooden crates and clinking bottles. “The influencers will flock to the luminescence like fire-wings to river rats. Keep your head down.”

  “They won’t know I’m there,” she assured him.

  Near midmorning, the flotilla of rafts drifted from the gaps in the caliph roots and broke into the hazy sun. Paddles scraped through the water, battling the Slipsilver’s tug toward the sea. Clay-stained backs bent to the work, muscles straining and spotted skin streaked with muddy sweat. Catling sat at the raft’s center, surrounded by glass bottles of glowing luminescence. The fenfolk had topped every container they’d collected over the season. Other rafts carried baskets of fish, trussed up crajeks, rare mosses and lichens, snakeskins and furs, buckets of snails, and other oddities yielded by the swamp.

  The rafters jostled for room at the piers, tying up and lashing their crafts into an undulating island. Men and women on the outer fringes passed their cargo forward. Jafe and Leena hoisted everything up onto the pier while Raker scowled, leaning against a piling, arms crossed like a Mur-Vallis enforcer.

  Catling’s bare feet hung from the raft’s edge, the current tickling her toes. She fished with a barren hook and watched as the merchants, traders and tier servants noted their arrival. Guards strolled the girding dock and influencers went about their business with an equal lack of suspicion. Only when she exhaled was she aware she’d held her breath.

  The unusual foods attracted servants from the upper tiers with lists scrawled by their masters. Skins, shells, and anything carved of caliph lured in the Trade-Crafter and Merchant Guilds. Catling paid little attention until the influencers swept onto the pier. Raker’s advice to keep her head down didn’t prevent her heart from hammering in her ears.

  The group of five heading her way wore the unadorned jackets of aspirants. Influence radiated around them like sunlit streamers. Tunvise shuffled in their midst, leaning heavily on Minessa’s arm.

  Catling turned her face aside, a smile for her friend sneaking to her lips before she donned her shield and willed herself invisible. Disappearing came naturally, practiced long ago when Keela’s pique was up and hinting at violence.

  The unwelcome memory pushed from her heart, Catling lifted her gaze. Of all her peers, Minessa and Kadan would be most apt to recognize her, and Kadan wasn’t there. Or wasn’t alive? Her stomach rolled, ugliness elbowing her fondness for Minessa aside.

  “Fungi, lichens, and alga,” Tunvise instructed, his hand patting Minessa’s. “Occasionally the border between toxic and curative blurs. Influence may be used in conjunction with either depending on whether the aim is to heal or kill.”

  Minessa eyed him, her lips curving down. “I’m interested in their healing properties.”

  “And you’ll learn both,” he assured her. “Consider the hypnotics.” He held up a piece of sallow lichen the texture of wrinkled flesh. “Godswell is effective as a sleep aid, a narcotic, anesthetic, and in sufficient doses a source of painless death. The twitchers’ downfall.”

  Minessa sighed before releasing his arm and inspecting a bowl of slimy, scarlet mushrooms. “Falwart?”

  “Excellent,” Tunvise looked over her shoulder. “That will cleanse the system or dissolve the liver.”

  “The dose to cleanse?” she asked.

  “That depends on the body.” He chuckled and scanned the other bowls, fingers stirring the crusty lichens and eyes searching the mushrooms for signs of rot. “Pick out a few samples of each, a copper’s worth,” he instructed his charges.

  As he said those words, he plied his trade. Heady strands of influence threaded through the fenfolk. They smiled, eager for the sale, happy to serve, to give away the coveted medicinals and bottled luminescence for copper coins, barely enough to cover the cost of the glass.

  The deceitfulness bristled the hair on the back of Catling’s neck. She glanced at Raker, and he grinned at her, his green eye glittering. He never grinned, the sight as unnatural as it was unnerving. She shifted her shield and broke the influence swaying him before casting it over the rest of the fenfolk on the pier.

  A smile tickled her lips, her feelings no longer her own. Tunvise’s congenial influence swung her emotions, her fondness for Minessa growing thick as honey and equally sweet. If the guild possessed more aspirants like her, perhaps it might serve justly, shift hearts for the betterment of Ellegeance after all.

  Minessa presented a coin to the ivory-haired woman selling medicinals.

  “Two whole coppers,” the rafter corrected her.

  “Two?” Minessa blinked.

  “Two.” The rafter’s slanted eyes narrowed as she grinned. Tunvise frowned and shuffled over. The old man’s influence bloomed, a merging of good will tinged with fear, a combination Catling recognized as authority. The urge to please him blended with dread of his displeasure, and she almost dropped the shield.

  Leena joined the debate. “If we sell to the merchants for two, they will ask you for three. Buy now or pay more tomorrow. ”

  “Three?” Tunvise balked. “We never pay three.”

  “Buy from us now and pay two,” Leena said.

  “Two is too high,” the doyen sputtered and pursed his lips. “This is highly peculiar.”

  “Our prices rise with the sun,” Jafe declared, squinting at the sky.

  Raker shifted his stance, shoulder resting against the piling. He cast Catling a suspicious eye.

  She smiled in return, embraced by the influence, feeling w
onderfully genial and generous. In another few moments, Jafe would have his coins.

  “Winterchill isn’t far off,” Leena said. “We need supplies.”

  “It’s mid-Summertide.” The old man furrowed his brow.

  “We can purchase less and share,” Minessa said.

  “No, no,” Tunvise waved her offer away and emptied the coins from the purse at his waist. “Ten whole coppers. You take advantage of us, rafter.”

  Raker nodded. “A strategy you’re familiar with.”

  The doyen frowned at the rich swamp luminescence swirling in nearly two hundred stoppered bottles. “I suppose the price has gone up here as well?”

  His eye on the stacked crates, Jafe grinned. “A whole gold for the cargo.”

  “Gold?” Tunvise blanched. “That’s robbery.”

  A bolt of fear and pain ripped through Catling. A cry exploded from her throat as her body contracted. The fenfolk jolted to attention. Raker shoved Tunvise on his hollow chest, blocking his view and demanding his attention. “Stop, or I’ll drown you!”

  Catling gasped, every spear of influence vanished. She crawled to the raft’s far end, breathing hard and watched through the wall of clay-painted bodies.

  “I… I… only tested.” Tunvise staggered backward, and Minessa caught his arm.

  “What did you do?” Minessa asked him. “Did you harm someone? Why?”

  “My influence.”

  Minessa’s forehead creased. “Why use your influence?”

  The doyen ignored the question. “I’m not fooled, rafter.”

  “You’ve discovered the knife is double-edged,” Raker growled. “Would you prefer the luminescence delivered to the tier or will you send porters?”

  Tunvise studied him. “Porters.” He unstrung his purse and placed a whole gold in Raker’s palm.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Gannon’s skiff wended from the swamp’s channels into the Slipsilver and a windy gray rain that lashed his face and soaked his clothing. Rushing currents clutched the craft, ferrying it downriver. His long pole no longer plowed the bottom, but rested across his knees, on hand to shove the craft from shallow hazards and return him to the river’s center.