ALTDORF (The Forest Knights Book 1)

Chapter 8

Chapter 8

 THE FIRST HEAT of summer was upon them by the time Thomas and Pirmin finished work on the ferry. Thomas had his first customer the same day they completed rigging the sail; a goat herder moving his herd to new pasture. He paid with a bag of green apples, and the goats left their own payment all over the ferry deck. It took Thomas and Pirmin the rest of the day to scrub down the wooden planking.

 That was enough of the ferry business for Pirmin. He began hanging out more often at Sutter’s inn doing odd jobs for the family. Sutter would usually pay him with food and ale, which suited Pirmin just fine. But Thomas knew Pirmin would have done the work for nothing, so long as he could sit in the evenings drinking and talking with the inn’s patrons. It did not matter whether they were traveling merchants or the local regulars.

 Thomas had never seen another man like him. So huge and terrifying on one level, but if left in a room for an hour with total strangers, they would part as the closest friends, slapping each other on the back, and swearing to get together soon.

 Pirmin set up a bed in Sutter’s hayloft and Thomas saw him less and less. At first Thomas would go to the inn every other day, but lately his trips had grown less frequent. Unlike Pirmin, Thomas found little pleasure in the company of strangers. Where Pirmin saw the good in people, Thomas was deeply suspicious of almost everyone, and he found being in large groups of strangers exhausting. So he spent more time alone working on a cabin near his ferry, seeing one or two people a day, many of the locals as wary of the new ferryman as he was of them.

 Thomas stood on the wharf originally built by a ferryman long before the time of the one he had bought the barge from. He wrapped the ends of a rope, making a mental note that he should replace it the first chance he had enough coin, and stowed it on the bottom of the barge.

 His eye caught something moving up the road. Whoever was coming, was not moving fast. He continued with his inspection of every sheet and halyard on his ferry, and when he next looked down the road, the lone figure began to take shape.

 It was an old woman, hunched over by the years and rail thin. Her threadbare cloak flapped around her bones in the breeze like a flour sack snagged on scrub brush. Slung across her back, threatening to topple her with every step, was something heavy. Her eyes were fixed on Thomas as she stepped onto the dock and made her way to the side of the ferry. Thomas picked up another rope and began running the length through his hands.

 The old woman halted in front of Thomas and pushed back the hood of her cloak, letting much-needed light into eyes whitened with age. She kinked her neck up at an awkward angle to look at Thomas and stared at him, her eyes scrutinizing his face and coming to rest on the pale jagged line running down the left side. For all her physical ailments, her voice was surprisingly strong and clear.

 “You would be the one they call the ferryman. They said I could tell by the scar.”

 “Or the ferry,” Thomas said, nodding at the barge he stood on. “You looking to go to the other side old woman?”

 “Not yet,” she said, offended. “I have a few more years in me.”

 She continued to stare at the scar on Thomas’s face and did not say anything else. The silence was uncomfortable. Thomas leaned over and tucked away his coil of rope, then stepped onto the wharf. When he faced the woman again he had his left side angled away.

 “Something I can do for you then, grandmother?”

 “Came to give you something,” she said.

 “Oh? And what might that be?”

 The woman reached to her shoulder and struggled briefly to duck her head under the shoulder strap. She held out the pack with both hands.