The Last Mercy

The Hedge-Woman

A grey rime lay on the green grass in August, and Eira Brennick knelt at the spring with her tongue thick and her cup shaking, drinking water gone wrong.

She knew it was wrong before it reached her mouth. The smell came first—a low mineral sourness, like a coin sucked too long, like the breath of a beast she had hoped never to smell again. Then the cold. The spring rose from under the green shoulder of the fell where it had risen since before there was a Wethergill to drink from it, and it had always been cold, the clean cold of deep stone. This was a different cold. It bit. It held a small cruelty in it, the way a knife held one. She had cupped her hand and brought the water up and the rime had crackled off the grass-blades as she leaned, frost in the high gut of summer, white feathering the green, and she drank anyway because there was nothing else and her head was a split log full of last night's borrowing.

The water tasted of ash and of pennies. She spat the first mouthful and drank the second, because a body could be particular or a body could be poor, and she had not been able to afford both for some years now.

When she sat back on her heels the fell swam and steadied. Below her the village lay in its hollow, a scatter of low grey houses with the smoke just starting up from them, and beyond the houses the dry-stone walls ran out across the dale like old stitches in old cloth, and beyond the walls the moor went up and up into a sky the colour of a drowned man. The grass at the spring's lip was dead. Not browned, not cut—dead, and greyed, in a ring perhaps three paces wide, every blade furred with that small white wrongness, and where it stopped the world was green again as if a line had been drawn. She put two fingers to the dead grass and it broke like something burnt.

Witherfrost. She had no other word for it and did not want the word she had. She got her staff under her and stood, and the knee took her weight the way it always took it now, grudging, with a hot wire run through the joint, and she breathed out through her teeth and let it settle and did not make a sound. There were two cottages with a view of the spring. Someone was always at a window of a morning, watching to see if the Brennick woman would fall down at last.

She did not fall down. She filled the cup, and stoppered it in her kit, and went down off the fell with her staff and her bad leg and her bought water, and she did not look at the dead ring again because she knew what it meant and she was not yet drunk enough to think about it.

The track into Wethergill ran between two walls and the walls ran with the cold. She passed Mother Sike at her door with a basket of grey wool and the old woman drew the wool to her breast as though Eira meant to take it, and gave her the look they all gave her now, the look that was one part fear and three parts the wish that she would simply go somewhere else and finish dying where it could not be watched over a garden wall. Twenty years gone, this same woman would have stood in the rain for a day to touch the hem of her. Brennick of the clean mercy. Brennick who never once let one suffer. They had hung garlands of bog-myrtle on her bridle when she rode through. Now Mother Sike clutched her grey wool and said nothing, and Eira touched her brow to her, mockingly, courtly, the way a knight greets a great lady, and the old woman shut her door.

That was the trouble with a small place. It remembered you both ways.

The ale-house had no name but the Slate, for its roof, and no virtue but that it was the only one, and Hesk who kept it owed her nothing and was owed by her a sum that had stopped being funny around the spring thaw. She put her hand to the door and the warmth came out to meet her, peat-smoke and old ale and wet wool steaming on three or four bodies who had come in from the byres, and she went in out of the wrong cold into the right kind of dark.

"No," said Hesk, before she had got the door shut.

"Good morning to you too."

"It's morning, I'll grant you that." He was wiping a cup that did not need it, a big slow man gone grey, and he kept the bar between them like a wall he was glad of. "You're at four and a half marks, Eira. I can't. The wife's counted it. I can't carry you into winter again, I've my own."

"Water, then." She set the cup of bad spring-water on the bar between them, and saw him understand, and saw him not want to, and saw him pour her a half-measure of the small ale anyway and push it across without meeting her eye, because for all of it he was not a cruel man and four and a half marks was not worth a soul.

"Half," he said. "And that's the wife's kindness, not mine, so don't thank me."

She did not thank him. She drank it slow, which was its own discipline, the warmth going down to meet the cold she'd swallowed at the spring, and the split log of her head began, grain by grain, to knit. The men by the fire talked low about the cold. About a ewe found dead with no mark on her and the milk soured in the churn overnight and the way the becks were running foul up the high dales, a taste in them like a forge. About Brae Fell. They did not say the word that all of them were not saying, and they kept their backs a degree turned from where she sat, the way you keep a turned back to a dog you are not sure of.

She was three slow mouthfuls into the half when the rider came.

She heard the horse first, a shod horse ridden hard on a track that knew only ponies, and then the door banged and the cold came in with him and the talk stopped. He was a lowland man in the Reeve's grey and green, splashed to the thigh, young and pleased with his errand, and he had a hammer and a fold of stiff vellum and a fistful of iron nails, and he did not ask leave. He went straight to the great roof-post by the door, where notices were nailed and rotted and nailed over, and he set the writ against the wood and drove a nail through the head of it with three hard strokes that went through the quiet like a man knocking to be let into a house.

"By the Reeve of the Nether Dales," he read out, loud, to the turned backs and the fire, "Aldous Tregarne, his seal hereunto." He let them look at the seal. It was a fat red wafer of wax and it caught the firelight. "A bounty is set and posted on the beast presently harrying the high steadings of Brae Fell, which has taken stock past counting and slain the shepherd Iorath Bryn at his fold, may he rest. The said beast to be killed on sight. The carcass to be burned where it falls. The head to be brought down to the Reeve's hand at Annis Cross for the purse. No questions asked of the bringer, and none answered." He rolled the empty phrases off like a boy saying his letters. "The purse: forty marks of silver, weighed."

Somebody by the fire breathed out a soft oath. Forty marks. It was a year of a good man's labour. It was a flock. It was a wall built and a roof mended and a girl married off respectable. It hung in the smoke of the room like a smell.

"Forty," said Hesk, despite himself.

"Forty," said the rider, smug as if it were his own. "And the beast a true one, mind, not your fox or your tup gone savage. Iorath Bryn was burned, what they found of him. Burned, in his own fold." He let that lie there too. Then he looked round the room, at the byre-men and the old men and the keeper, and you could see him sorting them and finding nothing, and his eye came last and careless to the woman sitting alone with a cup of small ale and a staff leaned at her knee, a lamed grey-streaked woman in a coat gone the colour of the moor, and slid off her as off a stone.

He did not know her. That was the thing. He was too young to know her. There was a whole generation now that had been got and born and grown since the Wyrmwars, that had drunk the songs in with their mothers' milk and never once put the songs to a face, and to that generation Brennick of the clean mercy was a name in a verse, a giant, a thing out of the old time—and the old time did not sit in a wet coat in the corner of the Slate at Wethergill drinking water bought as ale. She watched him not see her. It was, she had found, the one mercy left to her, and she took it where she could.

He read out the rest of it, the where and the when, and nailed a second copy by the door, and drank a cup standing that no one offered to pay for, and went back out into the cold, and the shod horse went away down the dale at the same stupid gallop.

The talk did not start again. They were looking at the writ, and then, one by one, not quite looking at her.

She finished the half. She made it last. Forty marks. She did the sum she had done a thousand times and never once been able to make come right: the stone, the mason's fee at Annis Cross, the cart to carry it up the fell, the carved name. Maelin Brennick. Eighteen years she had lain up there above the spring in the pauper ground with nothing over her but turf and a field-stone Eira had set herself with her own two hands the week she came home from the last cull and found the small grave already three months old and grassed over, the fever having taken the child while her mother was away making the world safe from beasts. Eighteen years of meaning to. Of the marks slipping through, into Hesk's till and into the dark, every spring a worse spring, the want of the stone become a kind of low constant grinding in her, a tooth that would not come out. I will buy you a name, she had told the turf, drunk, more times than she could hold. The turf had never answered. The turf was patient.

Forty marks would buy the name and the cutting of it and enough over to keep her in shame for a year, and all it cost was one more killing, and she was the only one in this dale and likely the only one left alive in the whole Reach who could walk up a fell to a fire-beast and walk back down.

She knew what they were not saying. She had been listening to it her whole life. The high becks running foul, a taste like a forge. Witherfrost on the spring in August. Stock taken and a man burned in his fold. Down off Brae Fell something had come that should not be, in a year when the world itself was going wrong, and they had nailed a fat purse to the post and called it a bounty when it had the shape, to her old eye, of something else—those terms, kill on sight and burn the carcass and bring only the head, no questions asked and none answered, the Reeve's seal pressed hard. You did not write a bounty that way for a wolf. You wrote it that way when you wanted a thing not killed but gone, and unspoken of, and the proof of it ash.

She had stopped asking why men wanted things gone. It had never once made her richer to ask.

She stood. The knee bit and held. She left the cup of bad water on the bar—Hesk could pour it out or drink it himself—and she went up the single street to her own door at the top of the village where it leaned against the open fell, and she went in.

She had not lit a fire. She did not light one now. She knelt by the cold hearth and pulled her kit from under the cot, the long roll of waxed canvas she had not opened in she could not say how long, and the smell that came up out of it stopped her hand. Oiled iron. Whetstone-grit. The particular old reek of the trade, ash and steel and the lanolin of a hundred sheepskins, and under it, faint, the iron-and-cinder ghost of the beasts themselves, soaked so deep into the canvas that no airing had ever fully taken it. She breathed it and was, for one swimming moment, eight-and-twenty again and unbroken and feared across four duchies, and then she was forty-seven again and the knee was on fire and she did the rest of it quickly so as not to feel it.

Wrapped at the very bottom, in its own square of oilcloth gone stiff with years, was the scale. She did not need to open it. She opened it anyway. It lay in her palm the length of her hand, green going to black, the green of deep water over the black of deep stone, and along its edge a sheen that the cold light from the door caught and ran along like oil on a puddle, undimmed. Eighteen years and it had not dulled. She had taken it from the great mother-wyrm at Wyrmfall the last morning of the last cull, while the others smashed what was in the nest under the old creed—leave no seed, every clutch, every egg, leave nothing to grow up and remember—and she had not been able to say, then or since, why she had pried this one scale from the cooling hide and kept it, when she had never once kept a trophy in twenty years of doing the thing cleanly and walking away. She only knew she had not been able to leave it, the way she had not been able to leave the small field-stone unset, and that the two things lived together in her somehow, the scale and the grave, the beast she had killed and the child she had not been there to keep, both come on her in the same grey ruined season and never once let go.

She wrapped the green scale back in its cloth.

She got herself up by the door-jamb and reached over the lintel, where the old soot had drifted and settled for eighteen years undisturbed, and her fingers found the cold familiar shape of it and she lifted Quench down. The sword came away trailing a small fall of black dust. It was a plain thing, no jewel, no song cut in the blade, heavier than it looked and balanced wrong to any hand but a culler's, forged for one purpose and one only: to put out fire. To find the heat of the beast through the dark and the smoke and quench it at the source, clean, in one stroke, so the great body went down without a scream. The mercy, they had called that stroke, and she had been famed for it the realm over, that in twenty years and a hundred beasts she had never once failed to give it, never once let one of them die slow.

She wiped the soot from the flat of it with her sleeve and laid the cold iron a moment against her cheek, the way she had as a girl, and then she shouldered the kit and slung the blade and turned in the doorway to the bright wrong cold of the morning and the fell going up and up beyond.

She had given a hundred beasts their mercy. One more would buy a stone.

Brae Fell

The dead grass gave way to dead heather, and the higher Eira climbed the colder the August air ran, until her breath smoked and she knew, professionally, that nothing natural made a summer like this.

She had walked the droving track out of Wethergill before the sun cleared the eastern shoulder, Coll's lead-rope slack over her shoulder and the pony picking his half-blind way behind her. By the first hour the going was peat and stone, the wall-line gone to ruin, and the heather underfoot had begun to fail. Not the honest brown of a hard winter, that. This was the grey of old ash settled on a hearthstone, the bell-flowers shrivelled black on the stem in the height of their blooming, and where her boot came down the stuff crumbled to powder and did not spring back. She crouched once and rubbed a sprig between finger and thumb. It smeared like soot. She wiped her hand on her thigh and said nothing, because there was no one to say it to, and Coll had no opinion on heather.

By noon her bad knee had begun its slow argument with the slope, and the cold had stopped being weather and started being a thing with edges. It came up out of the becks. She had crossed these waters before, years back, chasing other beasts up other dales, and she knew the sound a summer beck made—the hurry and chuckle of snow-melt over stone. This one ran slow and thick and silent, a black ribbon laid in its bed, and when she knelt to it the breath off the water was a January breath. A skin of ice clung in the shadow of the stones. In August. She did not drink. She watched a leaf turn on the surface and not rot, only go grey, the way the heather had gone grey, and she stood with her knee cracking and led Coll wide of it.

The tarn was worse. She smelled it before the track brought her up over the lip of the corrie and showed it to her—a flat black eye of water under the screes, and the reek off it was the reek of a midden left too long, sulphur and rot and something under both that she had no honest name for. Dead things floated at the margins. Not drowned sheep; the small dead, frogs and a hill-hare and the little brown birds, as though they had come down to drink and the drinking had done for them. Nothing moved on it. No fly, no skater, no ring of a rising trout. A tarn was a loud place in summer. This one held its breath.

She found the sheep a furlong on, three of them in a huddle behind a peat-hag where they had gone for the wind's lee and not come out. She turned the first over with her boot. Old ewe, good enough condition, fleece unspoiled. No wound on her. No tooth-mark, no claw, no scorch, no swelling of the belly that sickness leaves. The eyes were filmed and the lips drawn back, and the tongue, when she pried the jaw, was grey. The same grey. As if the cold had simply walked into them and sat down and would not get up. She crouched there a long while with her forearms on her good knee, reading the three of them the way she had once read sign for a living, and what they told her made no sense she could use. Beasts she understood. A beast killed for hunger or for fear or, the worst of them, for the joy of it, and every kind left its own hand on the world, plain as a signature. This left nothing. This was the country itself dying from the spine outward, and that was not a thing a culler's eye was made to see.

The Wakestone stood where the old road crossed the high col, and she had forgotten it was there until it was in front of her.

It came up grey out of grey, a single monolith twice her height, leaning a hand's breadth off true, lichened on its weather side and bare on its lee. The drovers' track ran straight at it and bent around it as tracks will bend around a thing older than themselves. She knew it for what it was the way you know a face you have not seen since childhood—not the name first, but the feeling, and then the name. Wakestone. There was a string of them down the whole length of the Reach, her grandmother had said, set on the old roads that ran where no sensible road would run, over the cols and through the bogs, vent to vent. The stones keep the roads, the old woman had told her, a child on a stool by a peat fire, and would say no more than that, only that you laid your hand flat to a Wakestone passing and gave it good day, because once they had stood warm to the touch, warm as a loaf, warm in the deep of winter, and a stone that kept its own warmth was a stone that kept watch, and you did not pass a watcher rudely.

Eira laid her hand flat against it.

It was cold as a grave. Colder—the chill of it climbed her wrist and into the bone, the dead mineral cold of any stone on any hillside, and there was nothing in it, no pulse, no breath, no give. She had not expected there to be. A child's tale was a child's tale. But she stood with her palm to it a moment longer than she meant to, and found she had bowed her head, as if to something that had died, and she took her hand back and felt foolish and then did not. The stone leaned over the empty road. Whatever it had watched for, it watched no longer.

The steading was over the next rise, and the steading told her she had come hunting the wrong thing.

It was a herd's bothy and a fold, low stone under a turf roof half fallen, the sort of place a man kept through the high summer to mind the flock on the tops. The door hung open on a leather hinge. She tied Coll to the fold-wall, well downwind, and went in with Quench loose in her hand out of long habit, and read the place as she had read a hundred kills.

It read wrong.

The fire first. There was scorch, yes—a black bloom up the gable end and across the turf, the thatch gone over a span the width of a cart. But she had seen a grown wyrm's work, had made enough of it herself, and a grown wyrm did not scorch a wall; it took the whole roof off in one breath and left the stones glazed and weeping. This was the size of a kitchen accident. A hearth-fire knocked over and let run, near enough. She put her hand to the worst of it and the char came away soft and shallow. A small fire. A short one. A frightened one, if fire could be frightened—the work of something that had loosed it once, in terror, and fled the noise of its own making.

No roost-stink. That stopped her where she stood. A grown wyrm fouled a place within an hour of taking it; the reek got into the stone, the iron-and-ash and the carrion-sweet, and it did not leave for years. She had tracked beasts by that stink alone across miles of fell. Here there was woodsmoke and wet wool and the ordinary mustiness of a herd's hut, and under it, faint, only the once, a thread of the true smell—hot iron, scorched air—but old and thin, a thing that had passed through and not stayed, not nested, not made this its own. It had not come to claim. It had come and snatched and gone.

The bones lay by the cold hearth. Two sheep's worth, she judged, and a third dragged half out the door. She turned a long-bone with her boot and crouched to it. Gnawed. Not torn the way a beast tears in plenty, the rich middle taken and the rest left to the crows. These were stripped. Cracked for the marrow, the ends splintered and worked, gnawed down past any sport or sense, the way a starving dog works a bone, the way a thing eats when it does not know where the next will come from or whether it will come at all. She set it down gently. She had not meant to set it down gently. Something in her had decided, before the rest of her caught up, what it was looking at.

The shepherd she found outside, and the shepherd settled it.

He lay at the foot of the scree-bank below the fold, fifty feet down where he had gone over in the dark, and the rain and the crows had been at him a day or more. She climbed down to him on her bad leg, sliding, and she did not need to climb down to know. No scorch on him. No char, no tooth. He had run. He had run out of his own door in the black of night with the roof catching behind him and the noise of God-knew-what in his ears, run blind for the track he knew, and missed it, and gone off the bank in the dark and broken on the stones below. The beast had not killed him. The fear of the beast had killed him. There was a difference, and Eira had spent her life inside that difference, and it had never once before turned her stomach the way it turned now.

She climbed back up to Coll and stood with her hand on the pony's warm neck and the cold coming up out of the ground, and she put it together because she could not stop herself.

A small fire. No roost. Bones gnawed in hunger, not in sport. A killing that was not a killing but a man falling in the dark. She had been hired to slay a monster, and there was no monster here. There was something small, and starving, and so frightened it had burned a wall and bolted, and it had come down—down off the high screes into the steadings where men were, which no beast did that was not driven, because the high tops were a beast's safety and men were a beast's death and it had chosen the death over whatever was above it.

That was when she knew she was being watched.

She had known it, truly, since the steading—the prickle between the shoulder-blades that thirty years of hunting and being hunted does not let you ignore—but she had let it lie while she read the ground. Now she let her hand fall off Coll's neck, slow, and turned slow, and pretended to study the col, and on the third sweep of her eye she caught the watcher: a smudge of brown behind a boulder up the scree, too still to be a sheep and too small to be a man.

"You can come down," she said to the hillside, "or I can come up. My knee says you come down."

Nothing. Then the smudge resolved, and a child stood up from behind the stone.

A girl, twelve or thirteen, though it was hard to say under the dirt; barefoot, in a man's shirt cinched with cord and a cut-down sack for a cloak, hair in a felted rope, all of her the colour of the hill. Half-feral and wholly wary, weight already on the back foot to run. Her eyes went to Quench in Eira's hand and stuck there, and the fear that came up in her was not the ordinary fear of a stranger. It was older and more particular than that. It was the fear of a thing that has been caught before.

"I'm not the Reeve's," the girl said, before Eira had asked anything at all, the words coming fast and flat. "I'm not anybody's. You can't take me back. I'll go off the bank like him before I go back." Her chin jerked at the scree, at the dead shepherd below.

Eira crouched, which her knee hated, to put her eyes below the child's. "I'm not the Reeve's either," she said. "I don't take anybody back. I came up for the beast."

That was the wrong word, or the right one. The girl's whole face changed—not toward Eira but past her, toward the high screes, and what was in it was not what Eira had paid her purse-worth of hope to find. There was no horror in it. There was something near to grief.

"It's not a beast," the girl said, low, as if it cost her. "Not like they're saying. It—" She stopped, mouth working, fear of the blade fighting something stronger, and the something stronger won by a hair. "It cries," she said. "At night. I've heard it, up under the screes. It doesn't roar. It cries. It sounds like a bairn. Like a little one that's hurt and can't say where." Her arms had wrapped around herself. "It came down. Three nights gone, off the high tops, fast, like the Dwellers were behind it. Nothing comes down off those tops. There's worse up there now than it. I've felt it." She said felt and then looked frightened of having said it, the way she'd looked frightened of the blade.

Eira sat with that. The sword had gone heavy in her hand. It sounds like a bairn. She did not let her face move.

"Where," she said.

"What's it worth." The fear was still there but the bargaining came up through it, hill-sharp, a child who had learned early that nothing was given. "I show you the way and you don't take me anywhere. Not the almshouse, not the Reeve, not down. I'm done being took places. You swear it on—" she cast about, "—on whatever you swear on."

"I swear it on my daughter," Eira said, and did not know she was going to until it was out, and the girl heard something in it that made her stop bargaining.

"Tam," she said, after a moment, as if surrendering a thing she'd been keeping. "I'm Tam."

"Eira. Lead, Tam."

The light was going by the time they crossed the last of the col, the sun lost behind the western fells and the cold coming up thicker with the dark, and Tam led her down off the track and along under the foot of the screes where the stones were big as houses and the shadow already full night. The girl went silent and small, treading where the scree would not speak, and Eira followed on her ruined leg with Quench level and her heart going slow and hard.

At dusk Tam stopped, and put out a thin arm, and pointed to a black slot under the screes—and from inside it came a sound that was not a roar. A wet, rasping, almost human breathing, dragging in and shuddering out, the breath of a child too sick to cry.