19
Dearest Marin,
Thank you for your most recent letter, you know I’m always thrilled to hear of life outside the vine forest – do not worry yourself about ‘bothering me with childish tales of college life’. Truly, my dear, your letters are a highlight, especially as it’s picking season and dear Ezion has a bigger pea-bug up his arse than usual.
I was particularly interested to hear of the ‘incident’ at your college. I am assuming that the young woman would have been around sixteen or seventeen years of age (if she shared classes with you). It is very unusual for a fell-witch to avoid detection for that long. She must have been very careful, and I can only imagine her despair when they finally caught up with her. Yes, I’m sure that your tutors have told you over and over how much safer you will all be now that the fell-witch is off to the Winnowry, but I ask you, Marin, did you feel in danger before you knew what she was? Were you, at any point, burned alive or did you have any part of you blown off? Of course not. I’m sure you would have mentioned it in your monthly letters.
I sense that you want my opinion on the Winnowry, Marin, but don’t quite want to ask me. I suspect that their agents made quite an impression on you. Well, from what I can tell, they do a very good job of telling us that fell-witches are dangerous and must be controlled at all costs – there is good evidence for this, of course. We’ve all read the stories. It is like a terrible illness, they tell us. But in truth, we know very little about fell-witches – where the power comes from, why people are born with it, or why it only ever shows itself in humans (there have been no Eboran fell-witches). What I ask you to bear in mind, Marin my dear, is that when they have hurried these women off to their fortress in the south, do we believe they are treating them as victims of a terrible illness? Or are the more tractable ones used to keep the Winnowry powerful? They make their drug there, for one thing, via ‘purging’ (it seems awfully convenient to me that purging just happens to produce the most lucrative drug Sarn has ever seen); they hire the most controlled of their women out as mercenaries to any war or border dispute, and it seems to me that their agents – the same ones you will have seen whisking away your colleague – are the dangerous ones. Even the proposed winnowline (I sent you the sketches of the engine last year) relies on the indentured servitude of women who wouldn’t see the outside world at all without it. What do I think of the Winnowry, Marin? I think we need to keep a beady eye on it – power and money, and not salvation, lie at the foundation of it.
Do burn this letter if you feel safer doing so, Marin. Not everyone is as critical of the Winnowry as I, and your college elders may be feeling a little twitchy.
Extract from the private letters of Master Marin de Grazon, from Lady Vincenza ‘Vintage’ de Grazon
Agent Lin hung suspended in the sky over the lights of Mushenska. The clouds and rain of earlier were gone, chased away by the incoming sea wind, and she was left with a clear night of stars and chill air. The bat she had been loaned for this mission was a source of warmth beneath her, its wings beating so fast that they were a blur. She had been told that its name was Gull, and indeed the name had been stitched into its leather harness. Someone cared for this creature enough to name it and personalise its belongings. She wondered if it had been the boy called Lusk – he had the look of sentiment about him. That was probably why he’d let Fell-Noon get away so easily. When she had left the Winnowry he had still been alive, although she didn’t think he’d be stitching names into anything for a while.
‘The rain will have washed away her scent by now, of course.’
She had been methodically sweeping the city for days, asking questions, looking for clues, and so far she hadn’t turned up anything. Agent Lin tugged on the reins and they swept down low over the city. The smell of wood smoke and cooking food, old hay and wet stone enveloped them, and Lin smiled slightly to herself. It was a dirty business, being the Winnowry’s attack dog, but you didn’t get smells like this in a poky little cell, and you didn’t get to feel the wind in your hair either. Most people, she suspected, didn’t understand quite what a boon that was, but most people weren’t wrestled from their crying mothers and locked up in a damp room for the majority of their lives. Fresh, clean rain was a thousand, thousand miles from the trickled moisture of damp down a rock wall.
‘Let me know if you smell anything.’ She leaned down close to the bat’s great ears. ‘I reckon you can smell your own kind better than anything else.’
She gave Gull the lead, letting the bat flitter back and forth over the city. She had never been particularly fond of flying with the creatures – they had a powerful odour all of their own, and the bunching of muscles and flapping of wings meant it was hardly a restful experience – but it was useful, and generations of careful breeding meant that these giant bats were the best of their kind available: clever, obedient, strong. The Winnowry held the secret of their bloodline, of course. Something else they were very careful to keep to themselves.
Eventually, Gull made several tight circles over a certain roof, and she took him down, landing with a clatter of claws against clay tiles. It looked like the roof of a tavern of some sort, judging from the busy chimneys and the faint smell of food and ale. Climbing down from the saddle, she caught some laughter and the sound of several shouted conversations floating up to her. Laughter was something else you didn’t hear much of in the Winnowry, of course. There was a small garden up here, she realised, where someone was growing vegetables and herbs, and a raised part of the roof revealed a small door. The scent of harla root and fever-leaf was faint, but Agent Lin had an appreciation for these things.
‘Why have you brought me here, Gull?’
The giant bat was shuffling about with its head down, its huge ugly nose wrinkling and snuffling. Out of the sky, they were awkward, ungainly creatures, spindly arms reaching through the webbing of their wings like a child caught in a sack. Agent Lin frowned slightly.
‘Do I need to remind you that Fell-Noon gets a little further away every moment we stand here?’ She paused, pursing her lips. Why was she talking to a bat? There were many advantages to being an agent of the Winnowry, but they mostly worked alone. This is what it led to: talking to bats. Better, she reminded herself, than decades shut off from the world entirely.
At that moment, the small door behind them clattered open, and an older woman with wild red hair streaked with grey stepped out onto the roof, lit by lamps in the room behind her. A strange parade of emotions showed themselves across her tanned face: surprise, mild annoyance, and then a deep wariness.
‘Here, what are you doing up on my bloody roof?’
Agent Lin stepped into the light, letting the woman see the bat-wing tattoo on her forehead and the green and grey travel tunic she wore. Winnowry colours.
‘Nothing to concern yourself with. You can go about your business.’
The woman was watching her closely, and she looked a great deal more worried than Lin would necessarily expect from a civilian with nothing to hide. That was interesting.
‘Huh.’ The woman lifted her chin, attempting defiance. ‘That’s all very well, missus, but my business is those bloody herbs your giant bloody bat is stamping all over.’
Agent Lin looked back. Gull was busily nosing around in the far corner of the garden, huffing to itself. Ignoring the woman and her look of outrage, Agent Lin approached the bat and pushed his big head away from the earth. Splattered across the top of the thin layer of mud was a dried streak of bat guano, white and chalky in the dim light. Just next to it was a tomato plant, which was missing most of its fruit, and looked like it had been enthusiastically chewed on. She kicked at the guano with her boot, watching as it broke up into crumbling pieces. It was a few days old at least.
‘The girl was here, then.’ Agent Lin straightened up and turned back to the woman, who was watching her with her arms crossed over her chest. ‘You own a tavern?’
‘You’re standing on it. The Frog and Bluebell. The ale’s not bad but we do decent pies, which is what them herbs are for.’
‘Any unusual visitors lately? A young woman, travelling alone, nervous?’
‘Not that I’ve noticed.’ The woman’s face suggested that she could have an entire tavern full of nervous young women travelling alone and she wouldn’t breathe a word of it to her.
Agent Lin turned away and looked across the city. Without another word, she walked back to Gull and climbed into the saddle, twitching the reins so that the bat tramped around in a circle twice before reaching the edge of the roof. She looked back, seeing with satisfaction that the plants were squashed into the mud, and then they took off.
Dawn had turned the sea to the south a beaten silver grey by the time they had found what they were looking for. Fresh guano, no more than half a day old, streaked across the balcony on the top floor of an expansive inn. The owner was already up, baking bread for his guests’ breakfast, but his face was a closed book, and he would tell her nothing but generalities. Frustrating, perhaps, but his silence told her more than he could know: he had been paid to be quiet, and that was significant enough in itself. She had excused herself and hung around the alley behind the inn until the midday sun was high in the cloudless sky, and listened to the staff arriving for the day. As well as learning that Rufio had been out all night and had lost his shirt playing cards, and that Sara had a new bag of akaris ready for her week off, she also heard that one of their most eccentric guests had packed up her things and left, taking with her the Eboran bodyguard – the women took pains to describe his extreme beauty and to speculate on his prowess in bed – and a young woman who wore an unfashionable hat and didn’t speak much. She was new, apparently.
Lin took the silver whistle from inside her tunic and summoned Gull. Within moments they were back in the air, northern Mushenska falling below them. The eccentric woman, one Lady de Grazon, was considered eccentric for her interest in the worm people, and because she had invested an outrageous amount of money in the winnowline, which the maids of the inn distrusted, partly because one of the engines had exploded not more than a moon’s cycle ago, killing fifteen people. De Grazon had her own carriage on the contraption.
Gull circled around, and the lands north of Mushenska came into view, hazing into purple hills in the far distance. The land was dark with the Wild, and dividing it like a long silver spike was the winnowline. The bright midday sun caught it and danced along its edge, almost like a message from Tomas himself. Agent Lin smiled to herself. As if she believed in that old fraud.
Touching her hand to her side, where her pack sloshed with water and supplies, Agent Lin considered her options. Fell-Noon wasn’t in Mushenska any more, she was fairly sure of that. It was the first place you might go on escaping the Winnowry – the nearest city, the closest place to get a hot meal – but if you were on the run, Agent Lin thought it unlikely that you would stay. You could attempt to lose yourself in the streets, perhaps, hope that your ‘talent’ was never noticed, and lead a quiet life. Or would you try to get as far away as possible? How far would you have to go before the Winnowry stopped chasing you? Sarn was very big, after all. Perhaps there was such a place.
But then, Agent Lin was a patient woman. She guided Gull up into the clear sky, the corpse moon hanging ghoulish to their right, and she began to follow the winnowline north.