The Ferryman - Book 1

Chapter 50:

Dead Prince

The only thing Moth could do was think. The ferryman’s question was ever present in her mind; would she help Hiren if it meant giving up nearness to her family?

The question picked her apart like a seam ripper, stitch by stitch – she didn’t know who she was if she wasn’t a Hevwed. The ground she grew up on had been in their name ever since the first of them walked down the mountain. They were one of the oldest families in Hiren – the graves were full of her ancestors, the region full of her cousins. She had lived her entire life holding Clement’s hand – she couldn’t let go now.

But she was afraid of returning to Hiren as anything other than a bride – what would she tell those who had witnessed her offering? Would she say that Lord Correb had rejected her?

Humiliating though that was, she couldn’t bear giving up her family for Hiren.

Still, she reminded herself, the ferryman had not said she would never see her family again. But she could only visualize it as a brief, almost formal reunion – a reunion that would have hundreds of eyes watching and scrutinizing her. The less she saw of her family, the better she would be established as Lady Correb.

These thoughts, and hundreds more, wormed through her brain. She paced and paced in the gatehouse, the glow of the day coming through the stained-glass windows. She didn’t want to go work in the greenhouse with the eyes of her ferrier watching – she told him she would do anything to help Hiren. She now knew was a liar.

Moth turned her eyes to the windows to look out at the forest. She was on Tiding Range, she was on Cenning. Behind a mysterious veil – a membrane – was her home.

She was snapped out of her brooding when she heard voices, and the door of the gatehouse open.

“Mere, are you ready?” Lander asked, holding up a basket. Vincent, crowding behind her, waggled a bottle of mead and a kantele.

Moth nodded glumly. She had asked Lander two days ago – when she was in a joyful mood – to show her the abandoned hedge maze, and Lander had chosen to turn it into a picnic, and they both invited Vincent.

Moth didn’t want to cancel the plan and explain why.

“You alright there, Lady?” asked Vincent, noticing Moth’s expression as they headed from the gatehouse towards the hedgemaze. “Is it too violently sunny for you to handle?”

Moth cracked a smile, glancing up at their ever-present ceiling of fog. “No, no, I just…I have so much on my mind. I’ll be returning to Hiren in a week.”

“Oh, I hadn’t realized it was so soon. A lot to prepare for, I imagine.”

“Are you not up for the hedgemaze?” asked Lander. “We can just sit outside of it and drink instead. Less like a picnic and more like getting tipsy on a lawn.”

Moth assured her she would be fine.

They were approaching it now. Though sections of it had been partially choked by the ivy, most of the original hedgemaze was what had grown into a tangled mess; claustrophobic passageways remained, snaking tunnels through the shadowy growth.

Moth could not imagine it had looked friendly and lovely even in its prime. She stared down the entrance with a scrunched face.

“Just a little inside is a clearing. We’ll stop there and have our picnic,” offered Lander. When Moth agreed, her tall cousin happily led the way.

The suffocating hedge hallways were partially rose – the thorns scraped at Moth’s clothes, and she had to wriggle and duck to avoid getting scratched, though it bounced off Lander and Vincent’s leathery skin.

Soon they emerged into a clearing. There was an ancient fountain in the center – it sputtered out intermittently, and had a few feet of scummy water and plant life growing in it, as well as a collection of the boldest frogs Moth had ever encountered.

The frogs barely bothered to jump away when Moth sat on the edge of the fountain. Some even hopped up on the lily pads and waited expectantly with moist, unblinking eyes, until Lander pulled out a jar of worms and began throwing handfuls out.

“You come here often?” Moth asked.

Lander grinned as a particularly giant frog caught one of the worms. “Oh yes. You see that one? He’s my favorite, I call him Poyaka.”

It was lovely in their secret hedge nest, with the gentle splashing of the frogs, a faint smell of roses drifted up from somewhere deeper in the maze, the mead was cold and poured out – but despite it all, Moth’s mind was too full of worries.

I can’t be Correb’s ambassador, she thought morosely, staring without seeing at the fountain, as Lander waded through grabbing frogs, and Vincent lounged on the edge picking out a tune on the kantele.

It was one thing to give up herself for Hiren – she couldn’t give up her family.

As a child, Moth had worried she might fall in love with a man who wasn’t from Hiren, and she would end up leaving the family she’d always known.

But that idea had always seemed like an exchange – leaving her family and starting her own.

Here, she was asked to give up her family without starting a new one. Though she enjoyed Lander and Vincent, and many of the other guiles she was starting to know, like Oliver and Dueluck – and though it was fascinating to know more about Lord Correb – it was nothing like a real husband or children.

She would be giving up everything she loved, for a room in the house of the dead in the half-alive world of the marches.

You’re not giving it all up to live here, she reminded herself. But for a Hiren that’s safe from fog.

“Mere,” said Lander, loudly, and Moth looked over. “I said, ‘are you hungry’?”

“Sorry – yes I am.”

The picnic basket had been opened, and there was a simple spread of smoked white cheese, peaches and grapes, and cured duck. A smaller section, packed by Dueluck for Moth, was of soft honey goat cheese, dried fruit, and dried lamb jerky.

They ate and chatted, washing it down with more mead. Moth could barely focus on the conversation at hand as her mind kept drifting to the swirl in her mind. She only focused on what was being said, as Lander was saying to Vincent, “And she’d always think every event was worth marking down, I swear everything was so important, everything an exscuse to celebrate. I remember at my lay lopsi she invited over fifty people.”

“She had me stand and recite the co dalmede treaty.”

“Who is this?” asked Moth, amused.

“Our great grandma,” said Vincent.

Moth looked from Vincent to Lander, and said, delighted, “I didn’t realize you two were related.”

“Didn’t I say? My ma was Pahkinna before she was Hevwed,” said Lander.

Vincent swallowed a mouthful of bread and cheese. “I’m born and bred Pahkinna, direct from ancient Lep Pahkinna.”

“I was spared that misery,” said Lander.

The Pahkinna branch lived many days travel from Moth’s corner of Hiren – though she had heard of Pahkinna, and their tendency to produce redheads, she had never met the chief family.

“We may not share blood, milady, but we share Lander,” said Vincent, sipping on his mead.

Lander laughed. “I really looked up to you, but god it was hard to be compared to you at every gathering. So musical, so good with people, so athletic, so smart. Quite a relief when you finally went mad and ran away.”

Moth looked curiously at Vincent, who muttered, “I really couldn’t take it anymore.”

Lander said in a loud whisper to Moth, “Matriarch Pahkinna had no children, no heirs, and so it was well known one of her nieces or nephews would inherit the title and land and storehouses – vicious competition arose amongst the immediate cousins, fueled by the parents. Vincent was everyone’s choice, all set up for success.” She said louder, “Go on, Vincent, tell Mere about how you went mad.”

Vincent took off his boots and rolled up his pant legs so he could soak his feet in the fountain. “I really don’t want to talk about it.” He drank the rest of his mead, and said, “So this is what happened. I had a sliver of a minute to myself in between my archery lesson and my history lesson, and before my math lesson, and before my ancient language lesson and I thought – if I just walk away, what will happen? So I did. I was amazed to find myself, without telling anyone, without a plan or an idea, grabbing my horse and going that day – to have a few hours to myself.”

“What were you then, twenty?”

“Yes about…” Vincent squinted. “Eleven years ago?”

“Aye, sounds right.”

“Well, I kept riding, and I went straight into the forest and rode until I was lost, and while I was there I met a shaman,” said Vincent, chuckling. When he saw Moth’s expression, he said, “Not a real powerful one, with the blood and the rabbit torture – no, just a low-level con artist, the ones with the incense and the shiny red tree stand and the bird fortunes. It was stupid, but I paid her all the money I had for a fortune. She had me choose a pellet from a tray, and I did – it was a heron pellet, which she told me is very good. She took it apart and read the bones, and other bits, and told me I was like the dead prince from the fairy tale – having all this splendor around me but too dead to enjoy it. She said the leg bones meant I should go on a journey, and the teeth in the pellet tells her I should take up a new calling – a soldier’s path, and it would bring me happiness.”

Lander grinned. “And would you believe what this idiot did?”

“I listened to the penny huxter!” exclaimed Vincent, laughing merrily. “I didn’t even go home to tell anyone – I rode straight to Wuce and enlisted in the king’s army for a two-year stretch as a lowly foot solider. God it was so miserable, but…it was so good. I had made a choice for myself. I wasn’t surrounded by comfort and burdened with a thousand expectations; it refreshed me. With my years of training in longbows and most polearms, and my education, my superior officers invested in me. I ended up being there eight years and was promoted. I was on my way to city guard captain but…the fog, and the tin cries were increasing, and Commander Waden was desperate. Because I was a native of Hiren, they shipped me wholesale right back to my home and put me with the agricultural sentries.”

Moth covered her mouth.

Splashing his feet around, Vincent nodded seriously. “You cannot imagine how awful the reunion was. They had known by now I ran away, and I was in the army, but for me to be a dirt guard? Oh, I really was the dead prince to them – I tried to make amends, I showed up for gatherings and birthdays and celebrations, but my father wouldn’t see me and my mom was so sad I couldn’t bear talking to her. Other old friends were friendly to me, like the Herdson’s, but in the end it all was wasted, since I died a few years later.”

Moth still felt startled when guiles talked so casually about their death. She waited, but when Vincent was quiet, she hesitantly asked, “How did you die?”

Realizing she didn’t know, Vincent, pulled his legs out of the water and showed Moth. His legs were snow-gray, like her hand. He lifted his shirt and showed how far up it reached – right up to his rib cage.

“We were going to do a prescribed burn on a fog site, on a hillside. As a lieutenant I was surveying it to make sure everything was ready and, well, the earth gave way, just a little, and a second fog burst came up. Like I’d awoken some

slumbering ghost and fell into its mouth. I was dead within half an hour, couldn’t get my lungs to move much – longest thirty minutes of my life.”

“Does it…hurt?” Moth asked, staring at him.

He shook his head. “Apparently my soul thinks this is what I look like now, half gray, so my body molds to that memory – but it’s not like Oliver, who’s been without a tongue so long his soul sees itself that way, can’t speak even with a new body.”

Moth’s eyes were transfixed on his fog-touched skin.

Lander cleared her throat. “I’m sorry, I thought the first half was a funny story – I mean, Vincent is why I became a city guard – I didn’t mean to bring up sad topics. Don’t want to make you afraid to return to Hiren, Mere.”

Moth still stared at Vincent’s legs, as he rolled down his pants and put his shoes back on.

“That could have been anyone,” said Moth quietly.

“Well yeah – it could’ve been you, and I guess it was,” said Vincent gesturing to her fogspot. “Well, yours was just a hand – guess I won the whole prize.”

“But it was you, and it could’ve been anyone at all,” said Moth, desperately. “It could’ve been Lander. It could’ve been Mrs. Tunhofe, or Nehem, or…” her voice broke, and she said with a burning throat, “Ama.”

Vincent hastily took her mead from her trembling hand and said, “You’re right, but what’s the good of worrying over something that hasn’t happened? Even if it does, we can’t stop it.”

Moth clenched her jaw. She stood up, startling some frogs, and smoothed her skirt. “Thank you for showing me the maze, Lander, but I need to go talk to our ferryman.”