Farewell to the Liar by D.K. Fields

Author:D.K. Fields [Fields, D.K.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781789542554
Publisher: Head of Zeus
Published: 2021-08-04T20:00:00+00:00

Eighteen

‘Hope this is a cheerier tale than the one you told for the election,’ Captain Luine shouted from the wheel.

Nullan smiled, for possibly the first time since Cora had met her.

‘Who could tell a sad story on a day as beautiful as this?’ Nullan called back, lifting her inked arms to the sky.

‘I’m sure you’d find a way,’ the captain muttered, and Cora tried to hide her own smile.

Nullan stood at the edge of the deck, her back to the water, while everyone else, bar Captain Luine, took up seats facing her. Harker stayed on the barge roof, and when Marcus tried to climb up to join him, the Casker took hold of her shirt collar and hauled her up as if he was plucking a fish from the river. She sat cross-legged beside him, triumphant yet still as grimy as ever. Not that Cora could say much about that, the state of her clothes. She’d been about to ask Nullan for something to wear from the barge’s stores when the figure had appeared on the hill.

Cora looked back at that bank. Nothing. No, that wasn’t true. There were people on the road that ran next to the river, people on the grassy slopes that led away from the road, people beyond that, in the fields. West Perlanse was full of people, none of them paying any attention to the barge sailing past.

‘Got somewhere to be, Cora?’ Nullan said softly.

Cora turned. The Casker storyteller was waiting to begin, her audience sitting ready, waiting, staring at Cora. Even though they were far from Fenest, and not in anything like an official story venue – with no purple tunics in sight, no garbing pavilion, no black-robed voters wearing the masks of the Audience – even without all that, the special hush of the election had descended. That was what happened when you spent too much time with storytellers. At any moment, they could change the air around you into something almost hot with expectation.

‘Sorry,’ she mumbled. With a quick glance at Serus beside her, she knew she was forgiven for snapping at him earlier.

Nullan closed her eyes. The world quietened, even the river beneath them. The creak of the barge’s planks – a constant since they’d got underway – stopped. The birds criss-crossing the rich blue of the sky above were silent, only shapes. And Nullan began.

‘Ralli’s tea kettle was famous. Upriver and down, those who sailed the Cask, the Stave, the Tun, from shore to shore at Bordair, the tea kettle was known to them all. People said, if anyone had ever managed to cross Break Deep and were still living on the other side of that graveyard then they, too, would have heard of Ralli’s tea kettle. They might even risk the crossing back if they knew they could drink the wonders it brewed.

‘And the reason Ralli’s tea kettle was famous on every waterway in the Union?’ Nullan said. ‘It was known that tea brewed in Ralli’s kettle had the power to make two good hearts fall in love.

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