Returner's Wealth Read online

  ‘Hold still, Micah, and put those hands of yours to your sides where I can see them.’

  Micah chuckled. As he’d stepped inside the threshing barn, two arms had enfolded him from behind and a blindfold had covered his eyes. ‘Seraphita?’ he said. ‘I might have guessed! What fool notion is this?’

  ‘I told you to drop those hands, farmboy!’ she said sharply.

  Micah obeyed.

  ‘That’s better,’ she said, her tone more amenable. ‘Now, don’t you move.’

  He heard her strain softly as she reached up, and felt her elbows lightly graze his shoulder blades, a sensation that sent a shiver of anticipation through his body. She tugged hard at the blindfold, jerking his head back, then pressed her thumb firmly against the silk and knotted the two ends securely.

  ‘How’s that feel?’ she asked, taking a step back.

  ‘Tight,’ he said. ‘So tight I can’t even open my eyes.’

  ‘You’re not supposed to open your eyes,’ she said, and his head turned, following the sound of her voice as she moved round him. ‘You’re not meant to see a thing, Micah. I want you as blind as old Jeptha for what’s about to follow.’

  Micah swallowed. ‘What is about to follow, Seraphita?’

  ‘Wait and see,’ she said, laughter concealed just behind her words.

  He felt her hands reach for his own. They were cool and soft where his were hot, calloused and clammy, and her manicured nails dug softly into his rough palms. He let himself be guided by her, stumbling slightly as she pulled him towards her.

  ‘At least tell me where you’re taking me,’ he said.

  ‘And spoil the surprise?’

  Taking small cautious steps, he allowed her to lead him outside, noting how the straw underfoot gave way to irregular cobblestones, and that the dust-filled air of the threshing barn had been replaced by the sharp tang of the ox-yard.

  A while later she spoke again. ‘Nearly there.’

  He pictured her heart-shaped face, her full lips, her delicate upturned nose. And those eyes, so dark in candlelight that the pupil and iris seemed to fuse together to form two bottomless wells of blackness. When amused, she would toss her long hair, so black it looked blue, back behind her head and laugh like a stipplejay. When angered, she’d sweep it forward like a glossy curtain, through which she’d stare with a smouldering intensity; one hand gathering her bright red cloak at her neck, the other balled in a fist …

  ‘What are you wearing?’ he asked, surprised to hear his thoughts finding voice.

  Seraphita giggled. She pushed her face into his, and he felt his cheeks redden under her hot spicy breath. ‘What would you like me to be wearing, Micah?’ she breathed.

  Micah swallowed, flustered. ‘I … N … nothing, I wasn’t …’

  ‘Nothing, Micah?’ she broke in. ‘That’s very forward of you … ’

  ‘No, I didn’t mean that,’ he protested, his scalp prickling. ‘I just wondered …’

  ‘Whether I might be standing before you, naked?’

  When he protested a second time, she hushed him softly and squeezed his hands in hers, a motion that made Micah feel as weak-kneed as a new-born foal. They came to a place he did not recognize. It was cool and fresh, and he noted how their footsteps echoed softly from all sides as though they were in a walled courtyard.

  Seraphita let go of one of his hands and took him by the arm.

  ‘Take a step backwards and set yourself down,’ she said, steering him as she spoke.

  The backs of his knees came into contact with something firm, and he eased himself down onto a hard seat. It had a high back and straight arms, and he rested his own arms upon them and gripped the smooth carved bearpaws at the ends. Seraphita took a hold of both of his forearms with a firm grip, skin on skin, and Micah trembled as she leaned forward and he felt the warmth of her body so close to his.

  ‘The trial is about to begin,’ she announced. Her breath was sweet and moist.

  ‘Trial?’ he said. ‘What trial?’

  ‘You’ll see,’ she said. ‘Or rather, you won’t,’ she added, and laughed. ‘Just mind you don’t touch that blindfold, Micah. I don’t want any peeking.’

  He nodded. She pulled away. The residue of her touch lingered on his arms like fingerprints on a windowpane.

  ‘Don’t move,’ she told him. ‘I shall be ready for you directly.’

  Micah remained where he was, sitting bolt upright in the highback chair, his own arms as rigid as the wooden arms he gripped. He could hear faint birdsong, and the distant creak and grind of the ploughs working the fields; there was water splashing into a pool somewhere behind him. And when he breathed in, he detected the fragrance of rose blossoms on the air.

  ‘Open wide.’

  ‘No,’ he muttered through clenched teeth. ‘Why?’

  ‘Just open your mouth,’ she replied, a wheedling element creeping into her voice. ‘Trust me.’ She paused. ‘You do trust me, don’t you, Micah? Just open that mouth of yours.’

  He sensed something hovering close by his lips.

  ‘What is it?’ he said. ‘Is it something nice, Seraphita? Will I like it?’

  ‘Why, Micah,’ she cried out, the time for wheedling abruptly over, ‘I swear you are acting as hickety as a pack-mule in a paddy-saddle. Now, I do not want to have to tell you again, open your mouth, and hold your tongue – and I don’t mean that literal. For the duration of the trial, Micah, your tongue belongs to me.’

  He parted his lips a little, and smooth metal clinked against his bottom teeth. It was just a spoon, though there was something upon it, and his face screwed up in mistrustful anticipation.

  ‘Well?’ she said gleefully. She pulled the spoon slowly from his mouth.

  He frowned. ‘It’s sweet,’ he said.

  ‘Sweet,’ she repeated. ‘Is that all?’

  The liquid coated his tongue. ‘It’s thick and sticky … is it maltsyrup?’

  ‘Maltsyrup?’ She laughed. ‘It’s a might better than maltsyrup, Micah.’

  ‘It’s good,’ said Micah, and nodded earnestly, his nose crinkling with pleasure as the sweet viscous liquid slipped down his throat. ‘Could it be honey?’

  ‘It could be and it is!’ she exclaimed. ‘The finest honey from my father’s hives, served only at the top table – and then only on feast days!’

  Micah nodded. ‘I don’t believe I have ever tasted anything so good.’

  He felt a soft finger remove an errant drip of honey from below his chin and pop it into his mouth. He sucked the finger clean.

  ‘Did you like that, Micah?’

  ‘I did,’ he replied. ‘I liked it a lot.’

  ‘I told you to trust me.’

  ‘I know it,’ said Micah, ‘and it is to my shame that I did not.’

  He reached up for the blindfold, only for Seraphita to grasp him by the wrist.

  ‘The trial’s not over yet,’ she laughed, and Micah felt the ends of her hair sweep across his arm. ‘Did you think I would set everything up so orderly for a single spoonful of honey, however fine it might be?’

  This time Micah heard the chinking of glass on glass. He opened his mouth unbidden, and waited.

  ‘You’ll end up swallowing flies if you’re not careful,’ she laughed. ‘Now hold still.’

  He felt a glass press against his lower lip and his mouth filled with a cold liquid. Micah swallowed.

  ‘Aaah!’ he breathed. ‘Seraphita, this trial just gets better and better.’

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘Liquor, of course,’ he said.

  But not just any old liquor. The only liquor Micah had ever tasted came from the clay jars at the back of the oxsheds, rough and home-distilled. It burned like the devil and tore at the back of the throat like a cornered wildcat. The liquor Sera­phita had given him was smo
oth and warm and aromatic; it set his mouth to tingle and chest to glow.

  ‘From my father’s cellar,’ Seraphita laughed, and Micah caught the smell of the liquor on her own breath. ‘Older than both of us, and kept in a vessel of green glass with a waxen seal …’

  ‘You stole it?’

  ‘What my father doesn’t know can’t vex him,’ she told him. ‘It’s time for your next challenge. Open wide.’

  Micah obliged, and was rewarded by the touch of Sera­phita’s finger and thumb resting lightly on his lips. They probed his mouth and deposited something upon his tongue, then withdrew. Micah closed his mouth.

  What new and exciting luxury might this be? he wondered.

  ‘Well?’ she said, excitement in her voice.

  ‘Well,’ said Micah, rolling it slowly around his mouth with his tongue. ‘Is it some kind of fruit?’

  It was the size of a grape, cold and waxen smooth. And when he breathed in, he got the faintest hint of mown grass.

  ‘Chew it,’ said Seraphita. ‘There’s no use on earth you trying to suck the taste out of it, Micah. You gotta crunch down with your teeth.’

  He did so, and a sour liquid squirted from the ruptured skin. He chewed some more. Leathery seeds got between his teeth and under his tongue. It was a vegetable …

  A moment later, he felt an explosion of burning pain. With a cry of distress he bent double and spat the mushy, half-chewed boll from his mouth and tore the blindfold from his eyes.

  ‘Chilli …’ he gasped.

  That was what it was. A cheap old black chilli pepper, fiery hot and fit only to spice half-rotten meat.

  Seraphita’s peals of laughter echoed around the courtyard. Micah’s eyes watered, and he spat and spat, but not sufficient to spit away the burning sensation. Worse, it was on his lips now, making them feel like they had been freshly branded. He climbed to his feet, sucking in the cool air, trying to douse the fire in his mouth.

  He wiped his streaming eyes and looked round. Seraphita had stopped laughing and was now staring at him.

  ‘Why did you do that, Seraphita?’ he asked her, his voice wounded and cracked.

  ‘I …’ Seraphita fell still and lowered her head. Her dark eyes glittered from behind a veil of black hair.

  Then, suddenly, she was upon him, burying her hands in his matted hair and pulling his face to hers. He felt her lips pressing against his lips, sharing his fiery pain, her tongue grazing his lower lip and probing his mouth, soothing the chilli pepper’s fire. He closed his eyes, and as their tongues touched, he was pitched into a seething confusion as another fire raged through his body. It was excruciating and unendurable, intoxicating and bewildering, painful and delicious, and he never wanted it to end.

  It was Micah’s first kiss.

  Five

  From up ahead, the water sang out, siren-like seductive.

  Micah twisted round and continued sideways on, but like a tightening vice, the walls of the crevice pressed in against his back and his chest until he could barely fill his constricted lungs. With a sickening lurch of panic, Micah realized that if he continued, he might end up wedged stoppertight and unable to wriggle free.

  Go back, his fear advised him. Go on, his thirst beseeched.

  Gasping for breath, Micah skitched his way forward until, with a dry gritscratched heave, he wriggled free of the tunnel and found himself in a vast cavern. He paused to catch his breath, his heart beating against his ribs like a caged crow.

  The cavern was illuminated by a faint chink of light that penetrated from somewhere in the vaulted roof high above his head. For countless millennia, water must have seeped through the rock above, depositing particles of limestone that had built up to form a forest of bleached rock extrusions; fluted trunks, latticed branches and stippled roots …

  And there, spiralling down a glistening white stalactite at the centre of the cavern and trickling into a vast ink-black pool below, was the water Micah craved. At last. His parched tongue scraped across his flaking lips. He fumbled for the gourd at his side and was about to rush forward when a scratching, scuffling sound, like a rat in a corn barrel, and just as unwelcome, stopped him in his tracks.

  Something was there.

  Cussing his poor fortune to hell and back, Micah retreated into the shadows, pressed his back hard against the roughness of the cold rock and drew his hackdagger. He kept rigid still, scarcely daring to breathe as chilled sweat trickled down the back of his neck. Eyes slit narrow, he scoured the dimly lit cavern before him.

  It was an angular snout he saw first, followed by a paw, tipped with curved talons that glinted as they reached round from behind a low limestone-glazed mound on the far side of the dark pool. The snout jerked upwards and a long tongue, black and forked, flicked out and lapped at the air. The next moment, with a thin wheezing cough, a pale runty-looking wyrme, knee-high and pot-bellied, scuttled out into plain view.

  Micah held his breath.

  Tarnished scales, cracked and misshapen, gilded the wyrme’s skin, which hung in folds on its bony frame like an outsized oilskin. It was limbwithered and shrivelwinged. Thin twists of pus-coloured smoke dribbled from the scabbed nostrils of its bony carapaced skull. On the end of its thin twisted forepaws and spindly hindlegs, vicious curved talons gleamed like rapiers, and looked as though they came from a creature ten times its size.

  But more than anything else, it was the creature’s eyes that filled Micah with horror. They were huge and cataract-white, swivelling independent of each other in their scab-pocked sockets.

  Bile rose in Micah’s throat. He tried in vain to press back further into the rock, as though he hoped the shadows might swallow him up and make him disappear completely. But he could still hear his heart thumping; still smell his own fear.

  And, as its tongue flicked in and out with a horrible probing delicacy, so too, it seemed, could the wyrme.

  Tentatively it started forward, clattering on those tottery dagger claws. Glistening strands of drool spilled from the corners of its mouth and hung trembling from its chin. It wheezed and coughed, its scrawny neck extending and contracting with each lurching step as it skirted the rim of the ink-black pool and headed slowly but remorselessly towards the spot where Micah stood, wrapped in shadow.

  He wanted to turn and run, but knew he had already left it too late. The wyrme would give chase and Micah had no desire to get caught in the narrow confines of the black tunnel with a rapier-taloned wyrme slashing at his heels. He would have to stand and fight.

  On the nearside of the lake now, the white-eyed wyrme, guided by its flickering tongue, came inexorably closer. Crossing the cavern floor in short skittering steps, the wyrme gulped at the air, and Micah caught the sour whiff of dead meat. It paused, its bony skull tilted to one side as if listening.

  Micah gripped the shaft of his hackdagger. Suddenly, the wyrme reared up on its bony hindlegs, the keening whine coming from its gaping jaws rising to a high-pitched screech as it sprinted towards Micah and lunged …

  Six

  The kingirl leaned easily to one side of the whitewyrme and looked down, the long lance she held trembling in her grasp as the wind seized a hold of it. Far below, their single elongated shadow swept smoothly over grey slabs and black fissures, and the glistening waters of a broad turquoise lake, fringed with sparkling crystals of salt.

  The wyrme peered back at her through dark questioning eyes. The jagged scar on his sinuous neck was black against the white scales. The girl returned his gaze, and nodded.

  The great white creature tipped his wings, folded them close to his body and dived. The girl straightened up, raised her lance in both hands and braced it at her shoulder. As the clear water came closer, the wyrme unfolded his wings and glided over the lake at a shallow angle, just above the surface.

  ‘Steady, Aseel. I see them!’ said the girl.

  Her voice was
low and even, though creaked slightly through lack of use. The wyrme and the girl were kinclose and had no need for words. She had spoken not for the wyrme, but so that she might hear the sound of her own voice and remind herself that she still could speak.

  The girl braced herself against the creature’s clavicle and vertebral spur. A ripple of acknowledgment passed along the creature’s neck as they plunged into a swarm of giant damsel flies hovering low over the surface of the water. The insects had bright jewel-like bodies, long tails of iridescent blue and four gossamer wings that buzzed in a whirr of motion as they hovered above the water.

  The girl gripped with her thighs, her muscles tensing beneath the tight silken soulskin that encased her body. She leaned forward and aimed the slender lance with both hands. With the brittle sound of cracking carapaces, the girl neatly skewered three of the damsel flies on the end of her lance before the whitewyrme pulled out of the dive and soared back into the sky.

  The girl held the lance out to the whitewyrme and, arching his neck, the creature nibbled delicately at the tender morsels until the shaft was clean. Then, listing to one side and angling his wings, he wheeled round in the sky and flew back down.

  Again the whitewyrme skimmed the lake while the girl expertly speared the damsel flies hovering above its surface. The girl proffered the skewered insects to the whitewyrme once more, but this time the creature did not eat. Instead, with a guttural roar, a jet of white flame emerged from his parted lips and enfolded the laden lance-tip. The wings, carapaces and legs were incinerated in an instant, and the girl judged the toasting of the damsel flies by the charred fragrance that wafted back.

  When they were done to her liking, she pulled the lance away and wedged the shaft back under her arm. She pulled off the pieces of charred meat with her fingers and ate hungrily. Sated, the girl licked the grease from her fingertips and pressed back with her heels.

  The creature beat his vast leathery wings in response and soared higher still, veering eastwards in the sky towards a thin ravine that sliced through the heart of the imposing wall of mountains ahead. The girl noted the clusters of stunted trees far below, their gnarled roots clinging to the bare rock; the blind gulleys, overhanging bluffs, rockfalls and shattered buttes. The next moment, as the wyrme listed to one side, his left wing dipping and right wing raised, she pressed in hard with her legs and braced her body, and the pair of them whistled into the narrow ravine.