The Gathandrian Trilogy 03 - The Executioners Cane

cave’s shifting shadows.
    She laid her hand upon his shoulder. “Do? We must fight back, that is what we must do.”
    “How can you fight thought-power when we have none of such magic?” he snorted. “The one who holds the mind-cane is the one who wins. Look how today the bastard scribe has come back from the dead where I sent him. Nobody should have been able to live with the rope I tied him in or the winter-sour beer he drank, and I have not seen anyone come back from the unknown before today. It is a curse and an evil.”
    With that, Thomas spat on the rock floor, causing the night-woman to cry out before stifling her cries with her hand. Jemelda shook her head.
    “You do not need to be afraid,” she told the trembling woman. “You are among friends here and no-one shall harm you. Is that not so, Thomas?”
    A slight pause, and the blacksmith nodded. She could see the gesture in the half-light, and knew as clearly as if he had spoken it to her that Thomas had lain with this woman, and in the recent past too. Perhaps he had cursed and spat at her then, because she was not the woman he had loved and lost, and because of what he had done with her to ease his grief. By the stars, how this war and the scribe had brought them to such a state, but she would fight until things were as they should be again. Today, this bleak winter afternoon, these people had become her people, of a sort, and she must take care of them.
    “What is your name?” she asked the woman, and then wondered if the question was an insult if the woman had never had one. She had not stopped to think before speaking.
    She was about to apologise and speak of something else to prevent kneading in the woman’s shame when she spoke. Her voice was low and quiet.
    “My name is Corannan,” she said.
    Corannan . One who suffers, in the old Lammas tongue. Jemelda thought the night-woman’s family must have been poor but with enough dignity not to forgo the naming ceremony. Still, Corannan had been forced to sell herself to live, an act which made poverty an evil master.
    “Where do you come from?” she asked. “I know you were not born in Lammas.”
    Corannan hesitated. “I come from the White Lands, but my mother was half of the marsh people too.”
    Jemelda couldn’t help herself; she shuddered. The people of mixed breeding were viewed with suspicion and she had heard tell they never lived long. Another legend which had turned out to be a lie and, now she looked at Corannan, she saw the tell-tale paleness of the White Lands folk and a hint of the Marshlands in her brown, gentle eyes. She’d never truly looked at the woman before the war due to her profession, and an urge to ask her why she did such acts overwhelmed the cook, but it was not the time-cycle for that. She would have to work with Corannan from now on, so the questions she burned to ask must remain unspoken.
    “You are welcome here,” she said. “Now, for the rest of you, tell us your names so all of us here may know them. For I too, who have lived so long at the castle, do not know every one of you.”
    For a while the small gang of rebels talked, telling their names and something of their history. Jemelda realised one of the farmers, Matthus, and the young boy too had been amongst her regular customers for the left-over bread and cakes from her kitchen. She had never liked the practice in other countries with lesser lords of merely leaving the waste food outside for people to take it, so she had put the abandoned morsels on the central table and left the kitchen curtains open, even in winter, so they might come in and take some warmth from the hearth before eating what they might. As they spoke, the boy haltingly, she recognised them although they were far thinner, and the man greyer also, than they had been. Then again, the war had changed everyone, hadn’t it?
    Others of the Lammas folk she found familiar also, particularly the women whom she must have seen on market days back in the day-cycles they had been held, but she had not known their names until this afternoon.
    Thomas the Blacksmith, spoke last, even though he had no real need to do so as all knew who he was.
    “My name is Thomas,” he said, “but that is not the most important fact about me. No, what matters is this: I have come with Jemelda to fight the evil man who has returned to us and I will continue to fight him and his murderous magic until he is dead, or until I myself die. There are no other