The Country Girl
The Falcon's Children, Chapter 2
This is the second chapter of The Falcon’s Children, a fantasy novel being published serially on this Substack. For an explanation of the project, click here. For the table of contents, click here. For an archive of world building, click here.
Rowenna of Balenty, Rowenna of Balenty, Rowenna of Balenty. That was how she thought of herself, all the long bumping way by wagon from their farm to the familiar sights of Bluehaven — the hard earth of the crowded marketplace where for years she had watched her da dicker in the summer, the familiar sprawl of docks on the south shore of the Mering, the duke’s castle rising on the bluff above, for all fourteen years her only idea of what a city meant, even if her aunt-by-marriage Alfreya liked to talk about her native Felcester as though it were Mandor itself and Bluehaven was just pigshit beside its glories.
Rowenna of Balenty. Balenty, their little village, three days ride behind them now, an hour’s hike from their farm for all her childhood. A dozen buildings higgledy-piggledy around the shrine and the ford in Roren’s Stream — the tollhouse and the smithy and the tavern with the baking shed, the farrier and the weaver and the dairy, Doblen’s store with its stalls of vegetables from the town’s garden plots. Then the sweep of the common where the poorer folk kept their flocks — a long rise of land, always herd-speckled, green or brown or white depending on the season, with huge oaks here and there whose branches offered summer shade to herdsman and, bare of leaves, filled with clouds of blackbirds in the winter.
Her sister Hilwen, three years older than Rowenna — Hilwen the favorite, Hilwen the bitch, even if you weren’t supposed to think that way about your sister, the angels wouldn’t like it, the old priest always said so — Hilwen hated Balenty. She hated it for being (she said) small and shabby, she hated it for being (she said) full of drudges and shrews and gossips, she hated it for always being the same, always the same faces, the same talk, the same younger boys and girls playing the same stupid childhood games, the same older boys and girls flirting and groping and falling into marriage by the time they were seventeen.
The only exceptions to her hatred were the twins, Dort and Danner, the big sons of Egred the farrier. They both paid a certain attention to Hilwen, though Rowenna couldn’t tell which one her sister favored, and when they both signed up with the legion recruiter and went off to Bluehaven, then Eastmark, and then north to the frontier without ever making promises or asking her da for an understanding, you would have thought that it would have soured Hilwen on both of them.
But instead it just soured her further on Balenty. If the village had more to offer, Egred’s sons wouldn’t have left; if the village had more to offer maybe one of them would have wanted to marry a farmgirl instead of setting their sights higher. And then when the news came that Dort was dead of a camp fever it was just more vindication. It was Balenty’s fault for being such a useless place that he’d felt impelled to leave, Balenty’s fault that he was dead at nineteen, untouched by battle, untouched by her.
Hilwen worked on their father, Rowenna could see it. They were always close, so very thick together, like there was some crucial secret they shared from which she would always be excluded. It had been that way as long as she could remember, back to the days before her poor little sister came, tiny squalling Willa who took their mother’s life and lasted, sickly and half-orphaned, for eight months before it was time to bury her in the village graveyard as well, under the old priest’s weary, sympathetic eyes.
Rowenna went to the graves whenever she could, when she helped the hired men take their surplus to be sold or bartered and when she made the hour’s walk herself. Her da and sister went almost never, and lingered little when they did, as though Willa and her mother together bore some taint, something disreputable that filtered up through the earth from their coffins and turned the air around their headstones sour.
It wasn’t that she didn’t love her da, and even Hilwen in some way. He could be good to her; he didn’t strap her the way she knew other girls were strapped. It was just that she had eyes to see how cool the two of them were to her, how much their family was really just their shared father-daughter world and then her somewhere just outside — closer than their scattered relatives or the hired hands on the farm, but not really inside, where the real love and affection could be found, the kind she’d felt for her first five years from her ma and never ever since.
But familiarity and kindness were almost as good, and their accumulation in Balenty, the same faces buying and selling and greeting and gossiping and worshiping around the smoke of rabbits and fowl on the altar every tenday, even the promise contained in the horseplay and teasing of the boys her age … all of this made her love the village, made it feel much more hers than the farmhouse where her da and Hilwen kept their confidences, made her imagine a future where she would walk from their farm to town and find her own house waiting there, new-built with a garden out behind, stretching toward the fringe of forest, beneath her favorite kind of high-blue summer sky.
But Hilwen had worked on their da. Their farm had always prospered, in a way that seemed its own secret: Without appearing more hardworking than any of his neighbors, her father always seemed to come through hard times without having to crimp and pinch or sell off extra livestock, let alone leave their table all-but-bare at mealtime or ask for help from the shrine’s common store.
Reckon I’ve just a mind for money, he liked to say, and when Rowenna was little she had been proud of him and repeated the phrase until a girl whose father had lost half his flocks in that winter’s bitter Raguel-month spat in her face in one of the abandoned barns where the children liked to gather.
But with time and maturity she had wondered, since his supposed mind for money never seemed to show up when she was watching. He needed help with sums when they traded and bartered, and he relied on Hilwen to keep track of their dealings with their neighbors. And yet still they survived the hard times and had plenty in the good years, their lands expanding now and then at the expense of some unlucky neighbor, a new barn going up when she was seven, and three years later a larger flock of sheep and two new hirelings to keep them …
Yet it did not seem to satisfy him, and over the years he complained about the labor, the early frosts, the neighbors he disliked, the flooding in the south pasture every spring, the ache of his hands after shearing, a litany as long and familiar as the orisons at the shrine. And Hilwen wore away at him, her carping and complaining, her idea of escape, until at last the day came when he gathered them at the long table in the farmhouse and told them — though plainly her elder sister knew already, and part of Rowenna knew what was coming too — that it was his intention to make a different life for them, to sell the farm and everything on it and start fresh with the money as a trader in Rendale.
“What kind of trader, Da?” she asked, instead of asking what he knew of trade, which was her real question.
“I know the trade in woolens well enough by now,” he said sharply. “Ten year at shearing and selling teaches a man. We’ve sold enough wool upriver to Aldermark and past it all these years. Why shouldn’t your da be the one to be dealing in it, instead of the one selling at one end and letting folk in cities get fattened-up as middlemen?”
“But why Rendale? Why not just try Bluehaven, first? Or why not Felcester, where we’d have some family, at least?”
He had friends in Rendale, he said, old friends from his own soldiering days. “A couple done right well for themselves, and stand open to taking on partners, so long as you come heavy with some coin. That’s what we’ll bring from here, turn all this” — a sweep to encompass the room, the house, the land — “into something to start fresh with, something to make a man rich instead of just a-grinding all his life.”
He barely ever talked about his time in the legions, let alone mentioned the kind of friends who might set a man up in business, but Rowenna knew better than to challenge him on the subject. That part of their family’s past lay behind a curtain heavier than the brocade in Bluehaven’s temple, and the things hidden on the other side — her parents’ meeting, her mother’s family, Hilwen’s birth — were almost like the angels themselves: Invisible presences that you knew had to be there, because otherwise there wouldn’t be a world at all, but no less distant and abstract for that certainty.
Her father was allowed to pull the curtain back from time to time, like a priest slipping back and forth from the altar of sacrifice to the altar of repose. But she was no more allowed to follow him, or ask for a glimpse into the veiled depths, than she could ask the archpriest of Bluehaven to let a country girl perform the Great Orison.
So they had sold their farm and everything on it, and quickly — the north pasture to Red Dicken who had always coveted it, the rest to a younger man named Seofen, a legionnaire who had fought in Brethony and taken his discharge in coin rather than in Brethon land.
“Making my same mistake,” her da said of him sourly. “Take the coin instead of the land, that’s smart, but then spend it right off on land, then you’re a fool. They tell you there’s naught better than land, so you think you’re clever if you don’t just take what they give you, but go find some on your own. But at least if you took their land, when you wake before the sun to stumble out and grope some sickened animal, you can blame them instead of your own fool self.”
Seofen had a round face and a plump wife and the accent of Sheppholm, and Rowenna would have liked to show them around the farm, all the places she’d worked and all the secret places where she imagined their children playing one day, even the shrine to Jophiel she and her mother had made in the fringes of the forest that she’d kept supplied with sacrifices whenever she could — mice the tomcat trapped, birds fallen early from the nest, all of them dead already when she laid them on the altar, but she hoped the Archangel understood.
But when they came to take possession, the priest and Lord Garent’s reeve standing witness, her da kept the whole thing to pleasantries. The new owners were keeping on their hired men, at least for a season, which meant that Hern, who had been with them for three winters, could tell Seofen much of what was necessary, and experience would teach the rest. So there was nothing for them to do expect bob curtsies and listen to the reeve, rheumy-eyed and harelipped, making a joke about the big boots the new owners had to fill, since Edferth here never begged off his taxes, not once in all these years, mind you keep to that standard, now!
And then there was nothing to do but clamber into the wagon, barely filled by all their remaining earthly goods, and let their father ply the whip while Hilwen sat simpering in her bright skirt, and she looked back, back, as the track met the road and they turned north instead of south, Bluehaven instead of Balenty, the land that was no longer their land passing on her right, passing, passing, gone.
The undulating country was somewhere between yellow and green, between the first of spring and the fullness, and a falcon followed them lazily for a little while until the road went down, across a bridge, into the depth of a sudden forest, and to the shadows and ferns and whispering leaves she whispered I am Rowenna of Balenty and made certain, absolutely certain, that her sister couldn’t see her cry.
In Bluehaven they sold half the contents of the wagon to a thin shopkeeper named Mordaunt with whom she remembered her father dealing in the past, and the wagon itself to a merchant headed across the Heart to Cranholt.
“Farm wagon’s not really what I need,” he said, scratching at a few days growth of beard. “Only interested because I want to be on the road quick, but if you want more than three crowns you’ll have to wait till the farmers come in and sell it then.”
Rowenna looked to Hilwen then, to help their da with the bargaining, but her sister was too flushed with the excitement of the journey to be interested in haggling, not with all the crowns they already carried from selling off the farm. So the merchant got their wagon for just three crowns, not a copper more, and all three were immediately taken by the captain of The Green Trout, the riverboat headed upriver to Aldermark and then Rendale, who gave them passage in a cabin with two hammocks and a thin pallet where, inevitably, she slept.
The cabin was way in the back of the boat — in the stern, she heard the sailors call it — and set on the same level as the oarlocks and the crew’s hammocks, with the Green Trout’s cargo, trade goods and dried herring from Sheppholm and squawking chickens taken on in Bluehaven, packed down in the hold below. The smell was a thick and noisome blend of fish and spices and sweat and chickenshit and wood and damp and sawdust, maybe no stronger than the barn smells Rowenna had grown up with, but brutal in its unfamiliarity and inescapable so long as they remained below deck.
To go above, though, was to go among the crew, who were unfamiliar and brutal in a different way. The males of Balenty had been for the most part fumbling boys or circumspect older men, with the few lechers well known and easily avoided. The crew of the riverboat were something different — a frightening pack, shirtless half the time and feral, grinning and rude and ribald when she was with her father and quick to crowd her when she went up and down the stairs alone, apologizing casually as though their hands or hips somehow had a will all their own.
She wanted to tell their da to make the captain set them back on shore, to hire a wagon to replace the one they’d sold, to make the rest of the trip overland; the pace couldn’t be that much slower than their upriver crawl. But he was proud of their accommodation, proud of the way the captain called him Master Edferth and invited them to eat at his (meager) table in his (cramped and smelly) cabin, pleased to stand at the bow and watch the countryside slide ever-so-slowly by. So he just didn’t see what the sailors were doing, didn’t hear what they were saying, didn’t give any opening for her to even begin to tell him what was wrong.
Meanwhile Hilwen acted as though her little sister was a child who just didn’t know what men were like and how to handle them, even though Rowenna could see the sailors scared her too, enough that she changed into her highest-neckline dress on the second day and kept to their cabin as soon as the afternoon shadows started to fall.
Whereas Rowenna herself stayed as long as she could on deck, sitting way down aft, concealing herself amid barrels of wine stamped with a red bird — her father said that meant they were from Pegosa — and waiting for the moments when the woods on the north shore suddenly cleared and someone’s fields ran down to the water’s edge, and she could see a distant farmhouse, a white square daubed against the green, and imagine being seen by a different version of herself, so that she was both the girl on the boat and the Rowenna on the farm, carried along by the river and watching and wondering as the flotsam of the wider world went by.
Sometimes she missed the captain’s supper table deliberately, and only went back belowdeck when the sun fled and the shadows became the whole of night — slipping past the humped shapes of sailors in their hammocks, to throw herself on her pallet, grope for whatever she’d saved from luncheon, and murmur the night’s orisons to Raphiel and Azriel before she slept.
On the fifth day the rains came, a curtain dropped across the river, a constant pattering on every surface of the boat. From then on they were in their cabin for hour upon hour every day — the stench now more familiar, her father and sister playing cards across a chest, Rowenna joining them from time to time but still braving the dampened decks whenever the drumming sound above them waned a little bit.
On the seventh day Aldermark loomed up, a blur to their starboard side in the drizzle — a hulking fortress, far bigger than the duke’s castle above Bluehaven, but with a town around its skirts that wasn’t so much, even to Rowenna’s country eyes. There was some kind of taking-on and taking-off there, some of the wine barrels exchanged for crates that left a trail of damp sawdust across the boards of the deck, the men shirtless and singing in the haze, almost charming, still frightening. She thought again of asking her father if they might disembark. She said nothing.
It took a whole afternoon of hard rowing to turn them through the joint of the Mering and the Mersana and start the boat upriver toward the capital. Then there was a wind, southerly, billowing the sails so they could move against the current without rowing for a little while. The Rendale wind, the captain called it, common in late spring, maybe the only thing linking Rendale and the lakes to the Heart once upon a time, before the Mandorans hacked and paved their way through the Guardian foothills so that trade could go north without any breeze at all.
The wind carried them for several days, the land rising on either side as they slid north — green hills and white mountains, whitewashed villages, legion watchtowers flying the falcon, distant columns moving on the road, almost-summer dust, cloudless skies. Then the Rendale wind died and the men were back at their oars, the river coiling through its valley, past a towered castle that was really a monastery, someone said, past sky-blue streams that plunged from distant heights and churned eagerly to join the larger river.
Then on the fourth day from Aldermark a sailor pinned her against a beam when she slipped through the darkened underdeck to bed. She had been trying to imitate Hilwen’s façade and treat the leers and brushes and eyes on her as simple flattery, as welcome as the admiring eyes of certain boys on her as she crossed from the Balenty shrine to their wagon on a tenday. But there was nothing of flattery or admiration in the hand that seized her elbow and push it hard against the wood, or the other hand running roughly up her hip and around behind, or the stench on his breath and the predatory press of his mouth, her own face pulling back too late, the beard and stubble crushing her and something horrible, a flopping fish, trying to force its way between her tight-squeezed lips …
She had one hand free, she tried to slap him as Hilwen claimed to have slapped boys who went too far, but it was a limp blow and now he released her buttocks and grabbed that hand too, both her arms pinned as he pressed and pressed and she felt it stab against her too, probing somewhere in between her waist and breasts.
With a desperate downward twist she got her face free of his, the roughness on his cheeks scoring her softer ones as she dropped her head against his chest, and while his mouth went for her ear, her neck, she managed to gasp in a breath of air and gasp out what she meant to be a scream.
Like the slap it was weaker then she hoped and for an instant she thought it had been useless, as he yanked her face back up, her head thumping the beam, and squeezed her lips together like a man trying to close a purse and leaned in again —
— and then suddenly his weight was off her and she slid down the beam to hit the deck, gasping again, seeing his shape blur into others in the faint moonlight, a play of silhouettes from which a few fragmentary sounds slipped free, snarls and curses and then, clearer, you sot, Lewal, you fucking sot, you’ll get yourself flogged. And before she was able to really understand anything one of the shadows lurched back toward her, her scream gathering again as its hand went for her mouth — but not to grab or squeeze this time, just a single finger pressed hard against her lips, and she recognized the thick-bearded face of one of the mates, Rez they called him, and he hissed at her and for a moment she couldn’t understand him through his accent and the hiss
Youjafy youjafy thessagurl
but before she screamed again the sounds condensed into syllables:
“You’re just fine, you’re all fine, there’s a good girl, don’t be shouting now, don’t be shouting …”
“He attacked me. He attacked me. My father …”
“He snuck some drink aboard in Aldermark, hasn’t got the head for it, he just thought you’re pretty, you are pretty, don’t take it wrong, he meant no harm, just wanted a kiss, we’ll deal with him …”
“The captain …”
The bearded face swung back and forth, no, no. “There’s nothing in this for them to know about, he’s sorry, we’ll make sure he’s sorry, but he’d be whipped and put off the ship, you don’t want that for him, not for just stealing a kiss from a pretty girl …”
“I do want that,” she said, and she realized that she’d said the first thought in her mind and she wished she hadn’t, because now his hand was on her arm and his face was close to hers, his breath cleaner but still threatening, and his hiss was angry now:
“Saved you and that’s the thanks we get? He’s a drunk but he’s our mate, didn’t mean no harm, didn’t hurt you, just wanted a girl’s kiss — you get him flogged and you’ll be sorry, girl, you won’t see Rendale, you’ll go over the side in the night and never mind who did the pushing, you hear me, you hear?”
She was gasping again, she heard the lap of the river, she imagined the darkness going over her, she whispered back:
“I hear you.”
“You hear me? You get to bed now, nothing happened, all’s well, nothing happened. Agreed? Agreed?”
“Agreed.”
“Say it true, girl. Say the word true, by your Archangel …”
“By Raphiel, I swear …”
“You swear what …”
“I swear I won’t say … I swear nothing happened, nothing happened, all’s well.”
“Good girl. Good girl.” And then his hand was off her, his face was back in darkness, and he reached out once more and gave her a soft push — “and so to bed. So to bed.”
She went, but no sleep came to her that night, and when the moon was high through the porthole she saw on its shadowed disc a sailor’s face, bearded and ragged, leering one moment and just watching her and watching her the next.
They were three more days on the river before the Mersana narrowed, the banks steepening into cliffs whose dark stone was veined with white and pink, sometimes hung with red-mottled vines, always fringed on top with evergreens. They passed other boats coming downriver, riding the current easily while their own oarsmen pulled and pulled below.
Then the wind returned, the sails bellying in a cool evening, and when Rowenna came up on deck the next morning the cliffs were slopes again, wooded with clearings for farms and once a snug-looking village, with the mountains higher than ever behind them, the white peaks staggering her a little every time she really looked at them.
There were hills rising straight ahead of them, the river running down from a cleft between their green slopes, a joining that came closer, closer, all that long morning and early afternoon. A white line appeared against the deep green and became a white stone spire, a thin tower circled with a low outer wall like a spear planted in a bucket. The tower overlooked the river as it passed between the hills, facing across to a far shore where a sprawl of huts and cottages lay beneath a forested ascent. The men were back at the oars, singing now as they pulled, and the river twisted a little as they reached and passed the tower and suddenly the world opened up and there was no river anymore.
She had seen only a few paintings in her life — dim frescoes of the archangels above the altar in the Balenty shrine, a blessed’s portrait being carried through the market square at Bluehaven, and then most memorably, on the ceiling of the Bluehaven temple, a vision of the heavenly city as a white-walled palace surrounded by a sapphire sea.
That vision, that heaven, was what came back to her now as Lake Orison opened before her and she saw the whole of it — the unfathomable blue of sky and depths, the steep green heights on either side that made a bowl for all the waters, the white-peaked mountains half-encircling the lake to east and north with tips flashing in the sun, the darker highlands jumbled to the west in counterpoint.
There were riverboats just ahead, a trio of them, bigger than theirs with wide sails blown back by the same southerly breeze that buffeted her face and lifted up her tresses. They had sigils stitched across the canvas, a beast, what was it — a boar, rampant, and pennants in red and green and yellow flapping from bright-painted decks.
She felt the pace of their own oarsmen slow, the Green Trout bending rightward to avoid the oncoming craft, and she twisted against that turn to watch them pass, their course steady, serene, armed men on the decks, a glimpse of colorful livery … great lords, she heard a sailor near her say, someone said something about Felcester, and there was some cursing as their boat bellied a bit in the wake of the larger crafts.
For another moment her eyes followed them, watching them beat southward toward the white tower and the cleft and the river they had left behind. Then she turned back rightward, as the boat course-corrected starboard-way, so that her eyes and the prow both pointed once more to the city.
The city. The buildings climbing from the harbor to the Castle, the temple dome catching the sunlight, the boats thronging the harbor and spilling out southward along the lakeshore — it was the completion of the painting, the crowning touch, and it was all enough to make her forget the eyes and hands and stink of Lewal and the frighteningly watchful gaze of Rez, enough to make her believe fleetingly that her father wasn’t being reckless, that her sister hadn’t bullied him into some folly, that this would be a good place and a good life and everything she had hoped for in Balenty might actually be waiting here for her.
Rowenna of Rendale, she thought, and it almost sounded right.