With this thrilling fantasy debut, Jude Fisher has created nothing less than an epic masterpiece.

Filled with magic and magical quests, war and deception, sex and romance, and painted on a canvas rich with different fantastic cultures and exotic landscapes, and with one of the most dynamic and charismatic heroines to ever grace the pages of a fantasy novel, Sorcery Rising is a true blockbuster.

1

Sacrilege

KATLA Aransen stared out across the prow of the Fulmar’s Gift as it ploughed through the gray waves, the foam from the ship’s passage spraying back into her face and wetting her long red hair, but Katla did not care. It was her first long voyage and they had been at sea these past two weeks, but she was nineteen years old and hungry for the world; she could not bear to miss a moment of it.

Behind her, she could hear the great greased-wool sail cracking and roaring in the stiff wind, the wind that carried away her father’s voice as he shouted orders to the crew. Many of them, she knew, would be hunkered down amidships amongst the cargo and sea chests, trying to stay warm around the tub fire. A sudden hissing signaled the start of preparations for the evening meal: they stored their meat in leather buckets full of sea water till it tasted more of brine than anything else, and cooking it by putting it directly onto the embers was the only way to make it palatable.

A warm hand on her shoulder. She spun around, to find her twin brother, Fent, beside her. His long red bangs were plastered to his face; the rest he had bound up with thongs to stop it whipping into his eyes.

“Listen to this, small sister,” he said teasingly, bracing himself against the gunwale with a knee, “and tell me what you think.” He pulled from his tunic a length of twine that had been knotted at intervals in the complicated Eyran fashion that served both as memory aid and language. Moving his fingers nimbly up and down the knots he began to declaim:

“From Northern Sea to Golden Sea

Smoothly swam the swan-necked ship

On the backs of Sur’s white horses

On the line of the lord’s moon path

Easily from the Eyran Isles

Came Rockfallers to the Moonfell Plain.”

He wrapped the twine around his hand and into a loop and folded it carefully back into his tunic before looking to his twin for approval.

“You repeated ‘moon,’” Katla said with a grin, and watched Fent’s brows knot in consternation. “And I’m not sure about ‘Rockfallers,’ either.”

“I couldn’t fit ‘the Rockfall clan’ in,” Fent said crossly. “It wouldn’t scan.”

“I’d stick to swordplay, if I were you, brother. Leave the songmaking to Erno.” Their cousin, Erno Hamson, for all his skill at weapons, was at heart a quiet and serious young man, and he was currently conveniently out of earshot.

“As if you’d know a well-made verse from your ar#&151; Ow! What?” Her fingers were suddenly tight about his biceps, digging into his skin even through the sturdy leather of his jerkin.

“Land: I can feel it.”

Fent stared at her, his pale eyes mocking. “You can feel land?”

Katla nodded. “There’s rock ahead. My fingers are tingling.”

Fent laughed. “I swear you are a troll’s get, sister. What is it with you and rock? If you’re not climbing it, you’re divining it from the depths of the whale’s path! We’re miles north of Istria yet: father reckoned on landfall at first light.”

But Katla was shrouding her eyes with her hand, gazing intently at where a dark smear lay between sea and sky on the horizon. “There#&151;”

“A cloud.”

“I’m sure it’s not...”

There were clouds aplenty, piled up above the horizon in great lumps and towers, strewn about the upper reaches of the sky, which was darkening already and streaked with red, the sun having lost its daily battle with encroaching night: a blood-sky, as Erno would term it.

A shrill cry broke into their reverie. Above them, suddenly, a white bird veered past the ship, banking sharply. Fent watched it go, his mouth a round “o” of surprise. “A gull,” he said, like a simple child. “That was a shore gull.”

Katla squeezed his arm. “See?”

And now the outline on the horizon was becoming clearer by the minute; not a cloud bank, after all, but solid land#&151;a long, dark plateau, bordered to the west by higher land misting away into the distance.

“The Moonfell Plain.”

She could hear the delight in her father’s voice without even having to see his face; even so, she turned around at once, eyes alight with excitement, seeking his attention. “Land, father: I saw it first.”

“And sensed it before that,” Fent muttered, clearly put out.

Aran Aranson grinned, revealing sharp white teeth amid weather-darkened skin and a close black beard barely touched by gray.

Ahead of them, the dark shape began to resolve itself further so that tiny dots of color against the stark black gradually revealed themselves to be brightly hued pavilions, the more vivid pinpricks of light between them as campfires. As they sailed into the sound, they could see a whole host of other vessels bobbing quietly at anchor off the shore. “Istria: can’t you smell it? That’s the smell of a foreign land, Katla; that’s the smell of the Southern Empire.”

All Katla could smell was salt and sea and the sweat of bodies that had lived for a half-month in close quarters without fresh water to spare for washing, but she wouldn’t say so.

“A foreign land...” she whispered, awed.

“Aye, and a load of bastard Istrians,” Fent said under his breath.

“To the south, sweet and fair

They lie, slumbering and fat

Ripe meat for the wolf.”

He didn’t need a knotted string for that one. How his father could be so blithe at the sight of the old enemy’s land, he could not understand. A pulse beat violently in his head at the very thought and he turned to make further comment, but Aran was already calling for the rowers as he ran back along the deck, nimbly skirting the boxes of cargo, the cook-fire; the startled crew. With a dark look at Katla, Fent followed his father and took up his place at the oars with the others.

Katla watched as the great striped sail was taken down and furled as they came into the shallower waters. All over the ship, men leaped to their tasks. She saw her father take his customary position at the steerboard to guide them in through the reefs and the long, gray breakers and turned her face back to the new land.

The Moonfell Plain.

A place from legend.

It had taken hours, it seemed, to make camp. By the time they had unshipped the two skiffs and put in to shore, the Navigator’s Star was shining brightly in the sky. Lying on the strangely still ground, tired to the bone, Katla had been unable to sleep for the sheer novelty of it all. She’d heard about the Allfair for as long as she could remember#&151;all the lads’ tales of horse fights and boulder throwing and swordplay; the gossip, the trading stories, the marriage makings, the lists of extravagant-sounding names and internecine political allegiances. And she’d seen with her own eyes the intricate silver jewelry her father brought back for her mother when trading had gone well for him: and the monstrous, shaggy yeka hides that covered their beds at home in the winter months#&151;but this was her first Allfair and she could not wait for it to begin.

Wrapped in a sealskin with the pelt turned to the inside for warmth, she peered over the snoring bodies toward the distant campfires of the fairground and gazed again in awe at the great rock that rose steeply from the plain, illuminated by the flickering light. That was what she had felt, all those miles out at sea; she knew it now, twisting around to stare at its massive presence. It must be, she realized with a little thrill of excitement, Sur’s Castle: hallowed ground. It was here#&151;according to her folk, the Eyrans, the people of the north#&151;where their god Sur had first taken his rest (having fallen from the moon onto the surface of Elda) and surveyed his new domain. And having contemplated the whole great vista and found it sadly wanting, he had waded into the sea, thinking that by following the track of the moonbeams on the waves he might somehow find his way back home. The moon path, Katla thought, remembering Fent’s verse. Poor Sur, lost and lonely in an empty land. The god had marched right across the Northern Ocean, skimming stones on his way to take his mind off the numbing cold (and of such great size were the stones that he cast about him that they formed the islands and skerries of Eyra) until at last he had disappeared into the fogs at the edge of the world of Elda. There, resigned to the fact that he would never find his way back home, he had raised a great stronghold beneath the waves, deep down on the ocean bed. This, the Eyrans called “the Great Howe,” or sometimes “the Great Hall.” Lost sailors shared the long table there with Sur, it was said: and once one member of your clan had drowned and gone to the Howe, it was well known others would soon follow.

Katla had heard that the Istrians had a different tale to tell. They had no love of the sea, and did not believe even in the existence of Sur, an appalling heresy of itself. Instead, they prayed to some fire-deity, a creature#&151;a woman#&151;rumored to have come walking naked out of a volcano in the Golden Mountains, unscathed by the lava, leading a great cat on a silver chain. Falla the Merciful#&151;that’s what they called her: a misnomer if ever there was one, since in her name the southerners burned unbelievers and wrongdoers by the thousand, sacrifices to appease her and hold at bay the molten heart of the world.

Sur’s Castle. Her fingers began to itch. She’d go and look at it first thing the next morning: there would surely be a route by which she could climb to the top. Fighting and jewelry and monster skins#&151;and a new rock to climb: truly the Allfair was a wondrous event, to encompass such diversity.

She lay there, smiling at this thought, until she became drowsy. When at last she closed her eyes, she dreamed that she could feel the pull of the great rock deep inside her, as if it was somehow a part of the Navigator’s Star and she nothing but a lodestone, drawn to it through a dark sea.

At first light the next morning, Katla kicked off the sealskin and crept away from the camp like a fox from the coop. In this area of the shoreline, no one else stirred. Up the shore she went, as fast as she could, the loose black ashy ground loud beneath her feet. In the shadow of Sur’s Castle, she stared up. The great rock reared over her, enveloping her in its chill shadow, seeming higher, suddenly#&151;and steeper, too#&151;than her first assessment of it from the beach. Dark clouds had gathered above it, promising rain: she’d have to be quick. Her stomach fluttered and her heart gave a little thump: a familiar reaction before she attempted a climb, but a useful one, she’d found: anxiety tended to sharpen her concentration. Above her stretched a vertical chock-filled fissure#&151;the most obvious line of ascent as far as she could see. It looked wide enough in places to jam a knee for balance, narrowing down to a crack that should accommodate a fist above the halfway mark. On either side of the line, little rugosities could clearly be seen where the crystals in them caught the early light: useful footholds, Katla thought. She reached up and found her first handhold: a jagged flake just inside the crack. It felt cold and a little damp beneath her fingers: sharp, too, but solid. As she took hold of it, a line of energy ran through her hand and jolted up her arm. For Katla, this had become a familiar sensation: this magical connection with rock and stone and the minerals they bore. She waited until the burst of energy had charged through her chest and up into her head, waited for the disorienting buzz to die away, and then gave herself to the rock. Letting the hold take her weight, she swung a foot up into the crack.

The move off the ground was always the hardest. Once established in the fissure, she readjusted her balance and went easily upward, hand over hand, methodical and careful, occasionally stepping outside the crack for better stability when the angle became too steep. The texture of the stuff reminded her of the sea-eaten cliffs back home: all pitted and sharp-edged from the corrosive appetite of the waves, and as painful on the skin as barnacles. She could feel it biting into the soles of her feet even through the leather. Sur knew what her hands would look like by the top, even though she’d been placing them with more consideration than usual. It was not that she was a vain girl#&151;far from it: but there would be awkward questions to answer if she came back covered with cuts and scrapes.

The sheer pleasure of the climb soon erased any sense of worry: past the halfway mark it started to rain; but the angle of the rock eased so that she was able to stand in balance and look around, taking in the brightly colored tents of the other Fairgoers, their wax-treated surfaces repelling the drops of water that pattered down upon them. She had never before seen such vibrant shades: in the islands the only eye-catching dye you could produce was a rather putrid yellow that appeared to have been obtained by soaking your clothes in pig’s urine but actually derived from an innocuous-looking lichen, scraped painstakingly and in vast quantity from the granite cliffs that formed the bones of her homeland. (Though it had to be said that even then, you did actually need a bit of urine to fix the color so that it didn’t bleed down your leg in the first storm. It didn’t smell for too long. Only a week or so.)

It was among these granite cliffs where Katla had first learned the magic that lay in the veins of the rock. It was there she had started to clamber around in such a casual fashion, barely conscious of the yawning gulf beneath her feet, the sucking maw of the ocean; the bone-shattering consequences of a fall. There, she’d collected gulls’ eggs in late spring; samphire in the summer. She’d fished from precipitous ledges and pulled line after line of iridescent mackerel out of secret zawns. And sometimes she’d just scaled the cliffs for the sheer pleasure of being somewhere no other person had set foot.

Two more moves and she had her hands on the flat summit. Using a sharp incut for her right foot to gain more height, she pushed down hard till her arms could take her whole weight, skipped her feet up the remaining stretch of rock, and suddenly she was on top of Sur’s Castle, on top of the world.

Sitting there, with her feet dangling over the edge, with the Moonfell Plain stretching away below, a glorious sense of well-being descended upon Katla.

So she was surprised and not a little dismayed when someone started shouting, apparently at her.

“Oi, you there!” The second shout was in the Old Tongue.

She looked around.

At the far western edge of the rock, a couple of elderly gentlemen were climbing, haltingly and with great puffs of effort, a line of carefully-chiseled steps. Someone had thoughtfully arranged a pair of taut hemp handrails on either side of the stairs, and the gray-hairs were hanging onto these even as they bellowed at her. They both wore long dark red robes with elaborately worked brocade facings; even from her perch seventy yards away, Katla could see the silver thread glinting in the weak light. Rich men, then, she thought. Not Eyrans; at least like none she’d ever seen. The northerners could never afford clothes like that#&151;they’d be worth a ship’s cargo apiece#&151;and even if they could, they’d never climb a rock in them....

“Get down from there at once!”

The first of the old men had reached the top step and, lifting his voluminous skirts, was picking up speed.

She cupped her hand to her ear and shrugged: the universal gesture for “can’t hear a word you’re saying.”

Infuriated, the gray-hair waved his stick.

“The Council and the Allfair Guard#&151;”

“Of which we are on the ruling committee#&151;”

“Indeed, brother. Of which we are on the ruling committee, have declared Falla’s Rock as sacred ground!”

Falla’s Rock?

The second had almost caught up with his fellow. He was shaking his fist at her. “You’ll pay for not showing the due observances, young man!”

Young man? Katla’s mouth fell open in amazement. Young man? He must be blind. She stood up, and with aggressive haste unbound her hair. She always tied it into a tail when she climbed: otherwise it could be a damned nuisance. Unconfined, it fell around her shoulders in tumbling waves. At the same moment, as if to emphasize the point, the sun came out, so that the slanting rain became a shower of silver and Katla’s hair a fiery beacon.

The second old man cannoned into the first.

“Oh, Great Goddess, Lady of Fire#&151;it’s#&151;a woman#&151;”

They looked extremely unhappy.

Katla, deciding not to find out exactly what it was that pained them so badly about the situation, made her excuses and left, reversing with considerable alacrity and no little skill the crackline she’d just ascended.

There was a saying that the old women had in the north (they had a saying for everything in Eyra: it was that sort of place): the heedful outlive the heroes. Like her brothers, she’d always thought it cautious nonsense; but it was possible in this particular case that they had a point.

SARO Vingo emerged, blinking, from his family pavilion into the light of a day still making its mind up whether to rain or shine. His head hurt as if someone had trampled on it in the night. For some reason his father had decided that Saro’s first visit to the Allfair should be marked by a major araque binge, and his uncle and cousins and older brother, Tanto, had all conspired to line up glass after glass of the vile smoky stuff for him and watched him down each one in a single swallow until every flask was dry. They had matched him glass for glass; but they had had a lot more practice. He had left them all sleeping it off, tumbled on the floor amid the dogs and the vomit; collapsed upon silk-strewn couches, snoring their heads off in the pile of rich tapestries and shawls they’d brought as a gift for the northern King at this, his first Allfair. Though why the people of the Empire should bother to flatter a barbarian, he could not imagine. Falla knew what he’d make of the gorgeous Istrian fabrics, now reeking of araque and bile. Still, the Eyrans were known to be very unsophisticated people: he’d probably think it had something to do with the dye process.

Saro was curious to set eyes upon the women of the north. All the lads whose first Fair this was were equally fascinated; it had been their major topic of conversation on the journey here from the southern valleys. King Ravn Asharson was coming to the Allfair, it was said, to choose himself a bride; so the Eyran nobles would surely be bringing their daughters and sisters in hopes of making a royal match. As far as Saro was concerned, it was the focal point of the Fair: not for him the dull complications of deal making and point scoring with a load of fat old merchants who knew exactly what game they were playing with one another and making him feel a complete fool for not being a party to their subtly coded rules and haggling. The women of Eyra were rumored to be among the most beautiful women on Elda, and that was interesting. Although he would be the first to admit that he had no real idea of what a woman looked like; let alone how to assess her beauty. At home, the women were hidden away for most of the time. Since he’d turned fifteen, some six years ago now, and had been initiated into the sexual world, he had barely even seen his mother.

He thought of her now; how, swathed from head to foot in a fabulously-colored sabatka, she would flutter silently from room to room, with only her hands and mouth showing, like some wonderful, exotic butterfly.

A moment later, and he was remembering the encounter that had brought him to manhood: how his father had paid for him to enter that darkened room in the backstreets of Altea; the smell of the woman inside it#&151;musky and rank; the feeling of her cool hands and hot lips upon him; his uncontrollable climax, and the shame that followed.

Yet it was rumored that not only did the men of the northern isles allow their women to wander freely, but also that they showed off not just their hands and mouths, but their entire faces, and occasionally even their limbs and chests. The thought of such sacrilege made Saro’s heart palpate. And not just his heart.

His fair cheeks were still flushed from these unclean thoughts when he heard a shout. Turning around, he saw in the near distance how two of the Istrian elders who sat upon Istria’ ruling council of city-states#&151;Greving Dystra and his brother, Hesto#&151;were laboriously climbing the stairs to the summit of Falla’s Rock. They seemed to be waving their arms around and calling out. Intrigued, Saro made his way between the pavilions grouped below the rock, and, shading his eyes, stared up. Atop the rock sat what appeared to be a young man dressed in a homely brown tunic and long boots, who even now had scrambled to his feet, clearly embarrassed at being caught in this serious act of trespass. Greving was shaking his fist at the intruder and Hesto was just clearing the last stair, when the young man turned to confront them and with an impatient#&151;indeed, rather extravagant#&151;flick of the wrist pulled loose the cord that held back his hair. The light struck suddenly off a face revealed to be too finely structured for any boy’s, framed by a flamboyant fall of blazing red, and Saro found that he could not get his breath. Even at this distance he felt the shock of seeing a girl#&151;with bare legs and arms; and not just any girl, but a barbarian creature in defiance of all observance and decency, on top of the sacred Rock#&151;like a physical blow. Quite unexpectedly, his knees became unreliable, and he sat down hard upon the ashy ground.

When he looked up again, she was nowhere to be seen.

IF Katla had hoped to sneak back among the Rockfall clan unnoticed, she was soon to be disappointed. Cresting the ridge of the shore, she stared down across the dark and gritty sand to where the faerings and their snoring crew had lain like beached whales only an hour before; only to find everyone up and about and as busy as ants, under the watchful eye of her father.

“Sur’s nuts,” she cursed softly. “Now I’m in trouble.”

The Fulmar’s Gift lay anchored a hundred yards offshore, bobbing in the pale light of the newly risen sun. At this distance she looked graceful and sublime, her clinkered hull as elegant as any swan’s breast. But close up, Katla knew, she was a more impressive sight by far, the fine oak of her strakes marked by years of voyaging in rough northern waters; her gunwales gouged and split by rocks and collision and the violent grip of enemies’ ax-heads; the soaring neck of her ornamented prow culminating in the fearsome shape of a she-troll’s head, mouth agape and every tooth sharply delineated with loving, superstitious skill. But of course they’d taken down the provocative figurehead before entering the neutral territory of the Moonfell waters and laid it in sailcloth alongside the lowered mast. It would hardly do, Aran had said, to remind their old foe of worse times when you were preparing to fleece them blind.

A dozen or more of the crew swarmed over her, manhandling great wooden chests and barrels from their stowage places and lowering them one at a time into one of the narrow faerings, which shuddered and rocked under the weight of the heavy cargo.

The second of the ship’s boats was even now beaching in the shallows. Four men in the bows leaped out in a flurry of surf, stark white against the black of the land, and hauled the little boat up the gentle rise as if it were as light as a mermaid. Katla could make out her elder brother, Halli, and her twin, Fent; the second pair comprised Tor Leeson and their cousin, Erno Hamson.

“That’s all I need,” she groaned. “An audience.”

Chin up, she strode resolutely down the volcanic dune to face the inevitable chastisement, the ashy sand crunching unhelpfully underfoot. Before she had got within even ten feet of him, her father turned around and regarded her grimly, his gnarled, weather-beaten hands on his hips.

“Where have you been?”

Aran Aranson was a big man, even by Eyran standards. His wife, Bera, often joked that before they were married, whenever her mother had spotted him riding up to their farm to pay court on his sturdy little pony (his feet so close to the ground despite its zealous efforts that it seemed that the pair of them might at any moment trip each other up and fall in an undignified heap) she would say, “Here comes Aran Aranson, that great ogre of yours again, Bera. If you have children#&151;hear what I say#&151;they’ll turn out trolls and you’ll be split in two like a piece of firewood!” And then she’d cackle fit to bursting and fuss over him till the poor lad turned red, knowing that somehow he was the butt of her teasing yet again. She still had a robust sense of humor, Gramma Rolfsen, and her laughter could often be heard on a smoky night pealing out from the steading at Rockfall; but her son-by-law had never quite learned the trick of such humor, and as he stared at his errant daughter, he showed not even the trace of a smile.

Katla, having spent years learning to charm her father over her minor misdemeanors, took in the single-browed line of his frown and the flint in his eye and quailed. Her lips blue with the telltale signs of a fruit pie swiped from an unattended table, she racked her brain for a suitable falsehood.

“I just went for a walk#&151;to watch the sun come up over Sur’s Castle,” she said, careful on this occasion not to present him with an outright lie, for the expedition had almost started so.

“We’re not in Eyra now,” he said grimly, stating the obvious. “You can’t just wander around on your own at the Allfair. It isn’t safe.”

So it wasn’t anger, after all, but worry! He was worried about her. Relief swept over her: she laughed.

“Who’s there to be afraid of? I’m not afraid of anyone, especially not men.” She grinned, teasing out the emphasis on the last word. “You know perfectly well I can defend myself#&151;didn’t I win the wrestling last summer?”

It was true. Slim and swift and lithely evasive, there had been no one who could pin her down. Wrestling Katla was like trying to wrestle an eel.

She bared a bicep and flexed it as if to prove her point. Hammering metal and manning the bellows at the smithy had had its effect: a hard, round ball of muscle popped impressively into view. “Who’s going to tangle with that?”

But her father was not to be deflected. Moving far more quickly than you’d imagine likely for a man of his size, Aran lunged forward like a wolf going for a rabbit and seized her arm so hard that she winced. When he let go, the marks of his fingers were clearly visible in the smooth tan of her flesh. The smile faded from Katla’s face and an angry flush rose up her neck. An uncomfortable silence fell between father and daughter. Katla, afraid of her own temper, stared hard at the ground between her feet and started sullenly to trace a knotwork pattern in the black ash with her toe. As the silence lengthened, she found her unpredictable mind considering how she might incorporate this pattern into the hilt of the next seax she worked.

“They’re odd about women, the Empire men,” Aran said at last. “You can’t trust them#&151;they have bizarre customs and it can make them behave dangerously. A few country grappling tricks won’t see you through. Besides, you’re here on my sufferance. There was no need for me to bring you to an Allfair: it’s a waste of a fare for me. Two stone of sardonyx I’m down because of you, with Fosti Goatbeard desperate to come this year. Could have bought your mother a nice shawl and some good jewelry with the proceeds. So having deprived your mother of her Fair-gift, and old Fosti of his place on the ship, you can repay my generosity by doing nothing, and I mean nothing, without my permission. Is that clear? And you stay always in my sight.”

Katla opened her mouth to protest, then thought better of it. She’d wait until he was in a lighter mood, and then work her wiles on him, she thought with sudden savage resolve. Even in the islands, where women labored as hard as men and were considered their equal in most things, Katla had found that her wiles provided her with a delightfully unfair advantage over her brothers.

“Yes, father,” she said with apparent docility, and looking up through her lashes was gratified to see his expression soften.

“Well, mind you do,” he finished lamely.

Daughters. Why were they so much more difficult than sons?

At that moment one of his male offspring came crunching up the strand to join them. His brother and cousins were not far behind. Tall lads, and well put together, the Aransons and their cousins made a striking group. Halli took after his father: big and dark, with a nose that in age was likely to become as hooked as a hawk’s. Fent, like his sister, had Bera’s flaming hair, fine bones, and skin#&151;and their vanity, too, for he shaved like a southerner; but hard work had made whipcord of his muscles and packed his light frame with enough energy for three. As if to provide the greatest possible contrast, or to demonstrate the various appearances to be found in the Eyran Isles, Erno Hamson and Tor Leeson were so blond that their hair and beards shone like silver. Erno, whose mother had recently died, had plaited a complex memory-knot, complete with shells and strips of cloth, into his left braid. After two weeks at sea, the scraps of fabric were salty and faded, but the knots were as tight as ever. At night when he had sat his watch at the tiller, Katla had heard him quietly reciting the word-pattern he had made for his mother when first weaving the braid, his fingers retracing the loops and bindings to fix the pattern in his head#&151;

“This cloth the blue of your eyes

This shell your openhandedness

This the knot for wisdom given but never compelled

This knot for when you nursed me from fever...”

#&151;and she had been surprised how one who by day could be so distant and diffident could in the night hours become so tender; and for this she almost liked him.

“So the wanderer returns!” Fent beamed. “Thought you’d escape your chores, did you?”

“Shirk your family duties?” Tor made a face at her.

“Leave it all for the boys with the muscle?” said Halli, whose sharp eyes had not missed the flexed-bicep exchange between his father and sister.

Erno said nothing: he was always tongue-tied in Katla’s presence.

Aran looked impatient. “Did you bring the tents and the stalls in with this load?”

The lads nodded.

“Right, then#&151;Fent and Erno, and you, Katla, come with me to get the booths set up. Halli and Tor, you keep the crew working to unship the cargo. I’ll be back in an hour and we’ll get the sardonyx weighed in and registered.”

Fent grinned at his sister, his incisors as sharp as any fox’s. “You can carry the ropes,” he said. “Since you’re only a girl.”

He dodged her swinging fist with ease and jogged down the beach to the piles of equipment. There, light ash frames rested amongst rolls of trussed skins, waxed woolen cloth and coils of rope. Two huge iron cauldrons, together with their stands and pothooks, lay amid a welter of bowls and dishes, knives and hand-axes, where someone had thrown them down on the sand in a hurry to fetch the next load.

Fent swept an armful of the clutter into one of the cauldrons until a strange assortment of blades and bowls stuck out of the top. “There you are,” he said to Katla. “If you think you’re hard enough.”

An iron cauldron this size was fantastically heavy#&151;let alone one filled to the brim with kitchen implements. Katla knew this to be so: one had fallen once from a rusted-through hook and had almost crippled her: she’d danced aside quickly enough to avoid a crushed foot, but even a glancing blow had caused her to lose a toenail to it, and she’d had to bind her foot in cloth for a week, since she couldn’t get her boot over the swelling. With a grim look at her brother, she hefted the thing two-handed and managed to stagger half a dozen paces with the cauldron skimming the surface of the sand, before staggering to a halt. Every fiber of her arms protested at the weight: they felt as if they’d stretched a knuckle-length already.

The boys burst out laughing. Even her father was grinning. She watched them, narrow-eyed, then picked it up again with one hand, her other arm waving wildly for balance, this time straightening the carrying arm and her back to keep the tension running through the bones rather than the muscles, a trick she’d learned from climbing overhanging rock. The cauldron lifted reluctantly and bumped painfully against her leg. Katla bit her lip and soldiered on. When, after some minutes of sweaty effort, she reached the crest of the beach, she set down the cauldron and looked back. Taking her obstinacy for granted, the men were no longer watching her: instead, they had gathered up the rest of the equipment and were trudging in her footsteps. When they caught up with her, Aran took the cauldron away and exchanged it for a tent roll.

“You have nothing to prove to me, daughter,” he said gently, and his eyes were as green as the sea. “I know your heart to be as great as any man’s.”

So saying, and as easily as if it had been a wooden bucket, he picked up the cauldron, and strode quickly past her.

Aran and his family worked quickly and efficiently together, with barely a word of instruction passing between them, and less than an hour later they had erected a pair of tents, which would provide their living space for the duration of the Allfair. And while the Eyran tents might not be as plush or as colorful as the rich Istrian pavilions Katla had seen at the foot of Sur’s Castle, they were both weatherproof and spacious, almost twenty feet long, fourteen broad, and over ten feet high at the center#&151;large enough to house family, crew, cargo, and wares.

A cold onshore breeze seemed to have sprung out of nowhere while they were working, making the tanned leather of the roof bell and flap. Katla, her hair having long since escaped its braid, ran to tension the wind-ropes, and found herself confronted by an Empire man in a rich blue cloak. With his dark complexion and cleanshaven chin, it was clear at once that he was not an island man. He wore a thin silver circlet in his black hair, which complemented the dusting of gray above his ears, and his skin was so smooth as to look like polished wood. He was taller than she was, but only just, yet he stared down the length of his thin nose at her as though she were something unpleasant he was about to tread in.

She stared back at him enquiringly, not sure, for once in her life, what to say.

Aran stepped silently to his daughter’s side. “Is there something I can help you with?” he asked.

The foreign lord’s eyes swept insolently over Katla’s bare arms and wild hair, resting for a moment longer than propriety required on the hint of cleavage visible at the top of her sweat-streaked tunic, then turned to Aran. “I believe you sell fine knives,” he stated smoothly. His voice was silky and light, and he spoke the Old Tongue with barely a trace of Istrian.

Aran nodded. “But we’re not open for business until after noon.”

“I would like to be your first customer, to ensure I have the pick of your wares.”

“Then you’ll need to be here when we open up,” Aran said shortly. Katla could tell from his tone that something about the foreign lord irked him.

The Istrian raised an elegant eyebrow. “I see.” He paused. He took a pouch from his belt, weighed it thoughtfully in his palm. “Might I not persuade you to open your stand now, for a sum to be mutually agreed?”

Aran laughed. “No. We won’t be ready till noon,” he repeated.

The foreigner’s eyes flashed. He adjusted his cloak to one side so that his house insignia was for a second apparent, then let it fall back.

“It is imperative that I have the pick of your wares. Only the best will do.”

“I’m flattered that our reputation has reached the far countries,” Aran said with care. “We could, perhaps, open just before noon for your convenience, and Katla here will take you through her finest blades. They are pattern-welded to the highest#&151;”

“This#&151;woman?” The Istrian seemed appalled. “You let a woman show your daggers for you?”

Aran looked wary. “Of course. They are Katla’s own work, the finest in all of Eyra, even though it might not be seemly to boast of my daughter’s skills#&151;”

The lord took a step backward as if Aran had fouled the air between them. He made a complicated sign with his left hand and said something in his native language that was quite unintelligible to Eyran ears. At last he said: “I cannot buy a weapon touched by a woman, it would be quite unthinkable. Good day.”

He turned on his heel. Then, as if he had had second thoughts, he turned back again and addressed Katla directly. “There is a rumor circulating that a young Eyran woman was caught on top of Falla’s Rock at dawn this morning,” he said, and his voice was cold and dangerous. “I hope, for your sake, and the sake of your family, whom I am sure are most fond of you, that that person was not you.”

Katla stared at him. “Why, no,” she said at once and looked him right in the eye. They hadn’t caught her, after all: so it was no lie.

“Because,” he went on, “for a woman to trespass on Falla’s Rock is a capital offense. The Rock is sacred terrain, sacred to the goddess. For any other female to set foot there is the deepest desecration.”

Fent stepped forward then, his face furious. “The Rock is Sur’s own ground#&151;” he started, but his father interrupted, his face grim: “It could not have been my daughter, for as you can see, we have been laboring together for many hours, and she has not in all that time left my sight.”

The Istrian lord looked somewhat appeased. “My apologies.” He made as if to leave, but Aran said quickly, “Might I ask why you suspected the transgressor might have been my daughter?”

“Why, her hair of course. The two lords who came upon her described her most carefully. Long red hair, they said, long hair in a braid that she took down and flaunted at them.”

Aran laughed. “It is our custom in the north, as well you know, my lord, for both the men and the women to wear their hair long; and many#&151;like my son, Fent here#&151;have hair both long and red. I fear the gentlemen who came upon the trespasser may not have been in the first flush of youth nor have possessed the keenest eyes.”

The Istrian thought for a moment. He inclined his head. “That is indeed possible, sir. The Dystras are quite elderly men. Maybe they were mistaken. I hope so for your daughter’s sake, for the tale is becoming quite widespread and the officers are searching for the trespasser. She may encounter certain...difficulties around the Fair if others leap to the same conclusion.”

Aran held his gaze with complete composure, then the Istrian lord nodded. “May you have a fortunate Fair,” he said formally, and walked away. His fine blue cloak rode the breeze behind him as if by elegant design.

The Eyrans watched him go. When he was well out of earshot, Aran grabbed Katla by the shoulder. “You little witch! I promised your mother I would not let you out of my sight, and already you’re in the deepest of trouble.” He looked her up and down, taking in her short tunic, her bare legs and unkempt mane. Then, without a word, he caught her in an armlock and grabbed the ornamented knife Katla wore always at her waist belt. “Hold her hair up for me, Fent,” he said in a tone that brooked no refusal.

Erno, standing behind them, gasped. Katla, realizing what her father was about to do, struggled. But her father was more than a match for her in comparison to the untrained lads against whom she had wrestled and won at the summer games. Tightening the hold with one arm, he sawed at the handfuls of flaming hair that Fent, with a pained expression, held up taut for the knife. The tempered blade, one of the best Katla had ever made and of which she was inordinately proud, proved its worth by shearing through her tangled locks as if through finest silk. Great swaths of hair floated to the ground to glow like the fire that had once created the black ash upon which it fell.

“Gather it up,” Aran said to Erno, who hesitated, then dropped to his knees and started to stuff it into his shirt.

Seconds later, Aran let his daughter go. She stood there for a moment like a cornered bear, the fury emanating from her in waves. Then she turned and ran as if all the devils in the world were after her.

Fent stared at the piece of hair he was still grasping#&151;warm in his hands, like a little living creature of flame#&151;then dropped it slowly to the ground. He looked up at his father.

Aran grimaced. “It’s for her own good. If they find her, they’ll want to burn her.”

He stuck the dagger into his own belt and rubbed his hands conclusively on his leather jerkin. Fine strands of red gold drifted away on the breeze. Aran watched them spiral away with an unreadable expression on his face, then with a barked order to the lads, started down to the strand to see to the sardonyx.

Erno exchanged glances with Fent, his face grim and strained. Fent stared back, his fair features in sharp contrast to his father’s. “You heard what he said.” And when Erno hesitated, “It won’t come to that. If they try to take Katla, all of Eyra will be up in arms.” He kicked dust over the lock of hair, then stowed the mallet and remaining pegs swiftly inside the tent. “Come on.”

They ran to catch up with the receding figure of the clan leader.

"This series opener sports unusual characters and intriguingly contrasts two societies' treatments of women." -Booklist

"The characters are well drawn and complex, making it hard to tell who is the true hero and who is a vile villain."-BookBrowser