The Gathandrian Trilogy 02 - Hallsfoots Battle

so it would be ready for…
    “By the gods!” Simon gasped and leapt to his feet. He must have followed her gaze. The cane rolled off and landed with a clatter on the stone cobbles of her kitchen floor. It hissed and spat, sparking wild flame for a terrifying moment before dancing as if insulted into the shadows of the room. The scribe rubbed his legs as if he’d been burnt. The blue shade on his flesh faded from sight.
    “Are you all right?” she asked him.
    “Y-yes,” he stammered before blushing. “Annyeke, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to…”
    “No, please.” She brushed away his apologies. There was no need for them, after all, and, in any case, she hated an embarrassed man. They were always harder to deal with that way. “I think you might be right. Perhaps we should try another approach to your meditation training. The mind-cane seems to think so, anyway.”
    They stared at it but it didn’t react so Annyeke opened her mouth to continue. However, it was Simon who spoke first, and not aloud.
    Show me the justice and anger in your fear of the raven , he said in his thoughts.
    No. Her refusal was instinctive but, even before its echo had died away, she sensed her resolve vanishing. What gave her the right to assume that only she knew the road to their destination? When she stared at the scribe, she could see he was shaking, but at least he’d had the courage to share his mind with her. She, Annyeke Hallsfoot, was not going to let a day pass when a man had acted in a braver fashion than herself. Not while she still breathed.
    “Perhaps you are right then,” she said, with a wave of her hand. “I will tell you. Though I cannot see how the themes of the Second Legend can fit with my own simple tale—one of childishness and cowardice, I should warn you.”
    Her companion smiled. “Believe me, I’m used to both those attributes.”
    She thought he might be about to say something else, but when the silence drifted back, she nodded and drew up a stool to the table. For telling one’s life to a near stranger, it was always important to be comfortable.
    As she arranged her skirts and prepared herself, she gazed round at the familiar surroundings of her cooking place. Green and yellow walls, shelves of herbs and spices—most empty now, unstocked since the war and the land’s despair—a scattering of pots and dishes for baking, some that had once belonged to her mother. She liked the direct simplicity of it. In the past, Johan had sometimes wondered why she didn’t change it to keep up with the latest Gathandrian fashions, in the days when fashion had been deemed important, but Annyeke marched to a different beat. The ease of her kitchen and, indeed, of her whole home, gave her the freedom to be herself. Besides, she had never yet allowed a man to dictate to her in matters of style—only, perhaps, in matters of the mind or the heart.
    I think you shouldn ’t tell your story out loud , Simon said. I think you should tell me directly.
    That must have been what he’d wanted to say in the silence, she thought, and smiled as he nodded his agreement.
    As you wish, she answered him. It begins like this… And then, suddenly, and without fully expecting it, she was there, back in her early childhood memories, back with her hatred of birds.
    *****
    Annyeke’s first memory was not of her parents, but of her grandmother. Her name had also been Annyeke, a name that meant song of grace in the old languages. Unlike Annyeke herself, her grandmother had always been known as Yeke. Song. A word the woman had never lived up to, and neither had Annyeke, whose singing voice could, at best, be described as gravelly. But at least she’d kept the true length of her name. She felt she deserved it.
    Yeke had been born in the Region of the Winemakers in the city but had moved to live with Annyeke’s parents in the area of the Chair-Makers before Annyeke was born. That house was only a few streets away from where she was living now, but had been destroyed early on in the War. She could not fully grasp her response to that loss, even now. It was not, after all, as if it had been personal; her parents had been dead for five year-cycles by then. They had not been young when she was born. The deepest impression Annyeke had taken from her childhood was the power of her grandmother and how much they had clashed together during the early part of her life.
    Her first memory was of pain in her arm and a spark of fire in her mind,