The Webbing Blade

WEIGHING IN

LOU’S TROUBLES with Herbert Junth had started all the way back at the beginning of the growing season. Like all the men in his village, he’d caught the horse-drawn cart, hours before dawn, and gone out to work Old Man Junth’s fields. He had been working Old Man Junth’s fields for several years now, ever since he’d got done with school, or too bored with it, he couldn’t remember which it was now.

This year, though, things had been different.

Lou had noticed the change right away. They’d barrelled along the rutted lane. He remembered staring off the back of the cart at the dust rising off the path, and hearing the rocks bouncing off the underside. He also remembered being pressed up against the side of the cart by a fellow working hand beside him.

He had smelled the man’s oniony breath from his morning broth, and that mingled with the sour milky taste still in his mouth, all Lou had managed that morning as he’d rushed out of the sleeping house where his ma and pa, and little sis, Syre, hadn’t even noticed him leaving.

His ma worked in the village as a medicine woman, selling her herbs about the village. She had been the one who had first told Hnet Eaemur that there was nothing she could do for his daughter, and why he’d had to leave the village to go out and seek help.

His pa worked about town as a carpenter. He helped people fix up their houses: fit new rafters, patch up leaking roofs, and sometimes, when someone had had a bumper year, help them build a house for their children to move into. He didn’t get paid enough. Not enough for Lou not to have to supplement the household income as much as he could.

One thing that made Old Man Junth a good prospect was that he paid fair. No, better than fair, he paid well. And the winter’s supplement was beyond a blessing. Old Man Junth had been a working hand too, when he’d started out, and so Lou guessed he still knew just what it was like.

Which was much less than could be said for his son, Herbert.

Lou’s little sis, Syre was much cleverer than he was. She had a big pile of books and everyday she crossed a bunch of fields to get to a nearby village where there was a wise woman, a woman that’d once worked in the renowned Ilsnare University. Syre used words that Lou just couldn’t understand sometimes. He always had to tell her to slow down.

Anyway, when the cart had pulled up onto Old Man Junth’s estate, Lou had felt funny.

Just funny.

An odd feeling he’d just never got before. Never coming to work for Old Man Junth. The only way he could think to describe it was that he knew that something was different. Everything seemed so quiet, almost deathly.

And then when he’d looked over to the path ahead he’d seen him. Herbert Junth, standing there waiting for them. He had his hands on his hips and a grimace spread all across his face. He wore nice clothes—clothes his daddy had clearly bought him. And once the cart came to a stop Herbert had barked at them, like a master would bark at his dogs, and what was worse was that all of them, every last one of the working hands, had jumped to it, bounced right down off that cart, eager to obey.

All except for Lou who’d skulked back, sat on the edge of the cart just a second, trying to position that odd feeling he was having, before going off to join all the rest. But that small act of defiance hadn’t escaped Herbert Junth.

He’d spotted it right off.

And Lou recalled him uncoiling that whip from his belt, and then letting it loose so that it lay on the ground like a snake waiting to bite.

Lou had stared at it there, wondering just what it was for. And then he’d found out.

Herbert Junth had snatched his hand back, brought that whip up into the air with almost impossible speed, and then slashed the thing through the air.