Farris reached for a small bag of silver stags concealed in one of his inside pockets.
I’ll need to find him. I’ll need to meet him and impersonate him well enough to get on board.
Getting by as a passenger would have been a challenge enough, but to act as Chester the Lucky for a whole day, surrounded by his peers and crewmen….
“Where can I find him?” he demanded, thrusting the bag of coins into Donal’s hands.
“He drinks at an old tavern not too far from here. The Gutted Fish. You can reach it by heading—”
Farris already knew the location of every public house and brothel in the city. He stormed off into the dusk and vanished before Old Donal noticed he had been paid four times as much as usual.
Chapter 5:
Harvest
“I told you, I don’t want to talk about it.”
The Pyromancer, Fionn, crossed his arms, ignoring Morrígan’s gaze. She scowled.
How could anyone be so stubborn?
“Leave him be,” said Yarlaith. The old healer walked ahead of Morrígan and Fionn as they made their way through the Square. All around, the villagers made preparations for the Harvest Moon festival later that night.
“I don’t have time for this,” said Fionn. “I need to reach Point Grey by nightfall if I’m to catch the last ferry to Penance.”
What are you hiding? Morrígan studied the Pyromancer’s face. The more she did, the more she doubted he actually was an adventurer. He certainly didn’t look like one, with his silky red robe and his soft, porcelain skin. His eyes looked as though they had never seen battle, and his lean body was more like a dancer’s than a warrior’s.
But his arm…. His right arm was twice as big as his left: a hulking mass of muscle sprouting from a slender shoulder. Morrígan had first wondered if he had been a blacksmith; the Reardon brothers of the forge had once told her that this was a typical trait of a blacksmith, spending all day hammering away with one arm. They claimed that they too would be grotesquely disproportionate if it wasn’t for the hours of weight-training they did every other night.
This explanation didn’t suit Fionn, however. His arm looked unnatural, as if it didn’t belong to him at all.
“Why are you going to Penance, Fionn?” asked Morrígan, despite another irate look from her uncle.
Fionn didn’t answer immediately. His lips moved slightly, as if mouthing the words he wanted to say, but a sharp voice cut him off.
“That’s enough, Morry!”
“But Yarlaith—”
“I said enough! Can’t you see he’s in shock? Leave him alone!”
Morrígan stood dumbfounded. He never so much as raised his voice before. She watched in silence as her uncle placed a hand on Fionn’s oversized shoulder. The young mage looked up at the healer.
“Yarlaith?” he said with a quivering tone. “The voices… will they ever stop?”
“Quiet,” whispered Yarlaith. “You’re going to be okay.”
***
That night, the Harvest Moon loomed over Roseán, full and red; it illuminated the night’s sky and would have allowed the farmers to spend a little longer tending to the final crops of the season if weren’t for the festival. Though the sun had set less than an hour ago, the revellers were already in a drunken stupor, dancing in circles around a bonfire in the centre of the Square.
Morrígan sat alone next to a long wooden table lined with bottles of cheap ale and wine. Peadair had taken it on himself to provide alcohol for the evening, free to all who yearned to forget that their beloved Bear would be in hibernation for the unforeseeable future.
Many in the village had blamed Peadair for being so submissive to the king’s orders but seemed happy to forget all about it with a free pint of ale in their hands. Morrígan had even overheard the Reardon brothers complain about the battlemage’s presence a few nights previously.
They curse the soldiers and their magic, yet they’re happy to use Yarlaith’s fire-crystals to kindle their forge.
Morrígan turned her attention back towards the villagers. There was a band of musicians by the bonfire, playing merry songs of folk heroes triumphing over greedy noblemen.
I wonder if the nobility sing similar songs about the small-folk?
She watched the villagers dance and sing. Around the perimeter of the Square, a group of battlemages stood guard, with green hoods pulled low over their shadowed faces.
“Geomancers,” muttered Yarlaith, approaching from behind. “Do you know much about them, Morrígan?”
Morrígan didn’t answer right away. She hadn’t forgotten how he had yelled at her earlier, even if he wanted to pretend he had.
“They manipulate the earth,” she answered, refusing to look at her uncle. “They can move soil and sand.”
“Well, that doesn’t sound very useful.” He chuckled softly to himself. “What use is a full battalion of soldiers playing with dirt? Is there anything else in the earth they could manipulate?”
She would have preferred to walk off, to leave him standing alone, but the answer suddenly came to her.
“Metal,” she said. “Geomancers can manipulate ore, can’t they?”
“The Firstborn’s weapons couldn’t penetrate Simian plate-mail during Móráin’s Conquest,” said Yarlaith, the bonfire dancing in his eyes, “but their magic was capable of bending and twisting it. I can’t imagine it was a pleasant experience for the Simian soldiers inside.”
