IMPORTANT NOTE: Since I am currently in the process of heavily editing this story, there are some irregularities in the text, such as incorrectly numbered chapters (from joining chapters that were previously separate) and some minor logical errors.

I started writing this story a number of years ago, without any real plot planned out and very little detail as far as the whole world was concerned, and most of the backbone of the story has come to me very late, like hundreds of pages after I first started writing. I ended up with this uneven, overlong, garbled mess, and must now take the time to rewrite certain parts altogether as well as move some plot devices around and flesh them out.

This will be noticeable, since my writing skills have improved somewhat since then – one chapter might be sufficiently un-crappy, while the next one is, well, crap. In the end it will all be more streamlined and consistent (I hope). Meanwhile I will replace with updated chapters, since I can’t bear the thought of taking down the whole thing while I finish editing.

Chapter 1 – Sleepless

*

When he awoke, it was with reluctance. He knew, the moment he became aware of himself, that it had returned. The sleeplessness. Insomnia, as the scholars called it. He wanted to curse out loud, but the silence outside his eyelids stilled his tongue. It was night still. Without opening his eyes, he rolled over onto his side and made a vain attempt at going back to sleep. After abandoning this task, as he always eventually did, he rubbed the sparse hours of precious sleep from his eyes and sat up. Swinging his tired legs over the edge of his bunk, he gazed blearily into the shadows of the slave quarters, knowing at once that he was the only one not asleep. The feathery sound of deep, steady breathing and the occasional snore were the only signs of life in the surrounding bunks. Mirren was the only one wasting time awake.

For a moment he couldn’t muster the energy to do anything but stare into space. Weak light pierced the grime in the little window on his right, and he was momentarily transfixed by the pattern it painted on the blankets covering an old woman. She slept only feet away, a young child sheltered in the crook of her arm. Glancing over his shoulder, Mirren realised that he had slept in that very same manner only moments ago. The other slave hadn’t noticed when his bunkmate awoke. His name was Jimm, and he could sleep through a passing cattle stampede if he put his mind to it. Mirren envied him this. He always had.

Almost never being able to enjoy a full night’s sleep was a great inconvenience for a slave. Mirren couldn’t remember the last time he had slept for more than a few hours, at least not since that memorable occasion when Carlo had flogged him into unconsciousness over some matter of irrelevance. And somehow, he didn’t think that counted.

Heaving a long sigh, he climbed to his feet. After gently rearranging the tangle of blankets over Jimm’s sleeping form, he crossed to the washbasin that sat on a low table by the hearth. He fell to his knees here and sighed a second time upon discovering that it was empty. Sitting back on his heels, he hung his head and allowed himself, silently, the curse he had suppressed earlier.

Too tired to express further irritation, he picked up the heavy clay basin. As he pushed through the door and out into the small, fenced-in backyard, he reminded himself, grudgingly, that he had nothing better to do.

Moonlight showered him as he stepped out into the yard, and he turned his eyes on its source for a moment, tracing the soft curve of the silver crescent in the sky. It was a cloudless night, and the stars twinkled down on him as if in welcome as he slowly made his way across the cluttered plot of cobbled ground to the water troughs. Placed along the right-hand side of the yard, these modest facilities were refilled twice a day for want of a water pump, and the resident squadron of slaves found it quite comfortable. They were to wash their clothes and cutlery as well as themselves in the troughs, but unless there was blood or the like to soil the water they had little difficulty keeping decent and clean.

Mirren swiftly replenished the washbasin and put it aside. Then he knelt by the nearest trough and dipped his hands into its depths. The water was murky, having been replaced most recently the previous afternoon, but it was cool and felt good against his skin. The night was chilly, and he knew he would be cold, but he took his tunic off nonetheless and slowly cleansed the sweat from his skin. No matter how cold it got outside, it was always stifling in the slave quarters this time of year, and it was nice to have a little scrub upon waking.

Pouring water over the long scars that crisscrossed his back, he tilted his head and observed the patterned sky, trying not to think of how heavy his limbs felt. The stars were a comfort, somehow; countless silent companions whose beauty made a welcome distraction from his sleeplessness. The moon would slowly and unnoticeably slide across the night’s vaulted ceiling, and the sun would take its place. In only a few hours’ time, the rest of Rivernest Keep would be as wakeful as Mirren.

When he was finished, he dried off as best he could with his filthy, sweat-damp tunic and climbed to his feet. Tossing the tunic into the large wicker basket next to the trough with one hand, he tightened the lacing in his trousers with the other. They were baggy and patched, the linen faded to a pale shade of mud, but they didn’t smell and could be worn another day.

He stood quite still for a moment, fingers still tangled in the lacing at his hip, and looked into the black sky. He felt utterly alone, and he relished it. It was the one good thing about his sleepless nights. Escaping the closeness of the slave quarters and the remaining existence in which he would be confined to it.

There was a long wooden bench at the other end of the yard, and after a quick visit to the privy he sank down onto it, folding his legs underneath him.

He regarded the stars in silence, his chin resting on his knees, his mind blissfully empty. Admiring the stars was one of his favourite nightly pastimes. The seeming randomness, as though someone had sprinkled them like seeds in the dark earth of the sky; the unknowable mystery they posed; their simple, uncomplicated beauty. It was fall now, and he knew the starlit nights would be increasingly infrequent, so he was grateful for the ones that still remained. It was good to have something to focus on, something to do. He would be lost without something to do.

The Keep was silent, slumbering on the hillside. Only the grasses whispered softly in the gentle breeze, crickets chirping in the distance. If he listened hard, Mirren could hear the call of night birds on the wind coming from the woods across the lake. Voices on the battlements, perhaps, guards passing somewhere far above him. A raccoon sneaking across the lower rooftops.

As the last of autumn, the past few weeks had been busy. A month ago the Lord Evariste had departed for the seaside, not to return until next year. The summer had passed in a rush of banquets and balls and conferences, and Mirren felt as if it had all lasted an eternity. With court now back in session the Keep was emptying of people, and the slaves were busy clearing the courtyards and gardens for winter – it was a matter of stowing away the deck chairs and tables, inspecting the state of the roofs and seeing to the windows and doors. They were tedious chores, but heavy and sometimes hazardous, and some of the women and children were now nursing injuries. Mirren and Jimm had been working the gardens the past few days, where the balconies, summerhouses and terraces needed to be secured from the oncoming cold.

The scholars had said there might be snow this year, or so Mirren had heard. He hadn’t seen snow since he’d been a child on the Northern frontier, and that was too long ago to remember. It hadn’t snowed in this part of West Darra since before the war, and Mirren rather doubted the scholars were right. The small group of them who never seemed to leave Rivernest Keep were more famous for their drinking contests than their recent academic achievements, anyway, so he saw no reason to take their word seriously.

He wondered how long he would have to wait for morning. Judging by the position of the moon he still had several hours to himself. He was glad. Just some peace and quiet. He could pretend for a moment that this impractical condition of his was no more than a means by which to acquire some leisure time; that he had chosen to sit under the wide open sky like a free man might and wonder at the beauty of the night. He could pretend that Carlo would not come for him at dawn, that there was no work awaiting him…

A sharp noise came suddenly from behind him, and he started, jerking his head up and twisting to look over his shoulder. He didn’t expect to see anything out of place, as everyone but he slept like the dead after a long day’s work – it was an ancient keep, the slave quarters housed in an old outbuilding, so strange noises were par for the course even in the dead of night. They said that the keep was haunted, and although Mirren, who had lived here a decade of his life, had never seen anything, he couldn’t help but wonder during his long waking nights if there wasn’t some truth to it.

But he was no longer alone in the backyard. The noise had been the door, a heavy crooked thing, slamming shut. Mirren had left it open in the hope of tempting in a night breeze, but now it was closed, and someone was picking their way across the yard towards him.

He shifted on the bench, unfolded his legs and put his feet to the cold cobbles. The figure heading towards him was moving in a lazy, bent shuffle, long arms swinging wearily at their sides. Still cloaked in shadow, it lifted a hand to its face as if to scratch a stubbly chin.

Mirren, who had for one terrified moment believed it to be Carlo taking a late stroll, instantly relaxed. Jimm came into the cold blue light, yawning widely and rubbing one thick finger under his nose. He lumbered over to the bench and flopped down on it with a small grunt. Mirren sat back against the stone wall behind him, retrieving his feet once more from the cold ground.

“Can’t sleep?” said Jimm in a gravelly voice, now scratching his armpit through a large hole in his tunic. He looked exhausted. Most of his long black hair had come loose from its braid and now lay in tousled ropes down his back, and there were dark shadows under his sleep-swollen eyes. Jimm was of Southern blood and had a deep coppery complexion, but he looked pale now, and Mirren, who always looked white as the snow that hadn’t fallen in Darra in a hundred years, thought it must be a trick of the moonlight that put such pallor in his cheeks.

“Go back to bed,” he told the other slave firmly. “You look like you’ve been trampled by a horse.”

“Thanks,” snorted Jimm. “I was cold, and Wynn’s started wailing again.”

Mirren looked dubiously at him, not believing for a second that he had been cold. Even without a fire in the grate, the slave quarters remained warm and stuffy throughout the night, only becoming even remotely chilly in winter. And Wynn had been sound asleep, doused with wine that someone had stolen from the kitchens, when Mirren had risen. Even if she had since woken from the pain in her broken leg, he very much doubted her cries would be enough to wake Jimm. No, he was well aware why his friend was up, and it annoyed him that Jimm would be so condescending as to assume otherwise.

“Well,” he muttered, unsure whether to speak his mind right away or to play along. “Give her some more wine,” he advised quietly, deciding on the latter. “She’ll probably pass out again soon anyway.”

“More wine! She’ll have more than a broken leg to worry about tomorrow if I give her more wine.” Jimm followed Mirren’s gaze up to the moon above, squinting at it as though it were bothering him. “Why don’t you come back to bed yourself? Maybe you could get some sleep if you tried.”

“You know I can’t,” replied Mirren, tearing his gaze from the sky and meeting Jimm’s black eyes. Suddenly sheepish, the older slave shrugged his broad shoulders.

“I know,” he admitted. “But it’s cold out here. Come back inside, at least.”

“No.” Shaking his head slowly, Mirren wrapped his arms tighter about his legs. “I don’t want to waste this view.” Nodding up at the sky, he felt Jimm shift beside him.

“The stars aren’t going anywhere, you know. They’ll still be there tomorrow night.”

“Yes. But I still want to watch them now.”

Jimm said nothing, nor did he go back to bed. Mirren was no longer certain he wanted him to. The faint irritation he felt was greatly overshadowed by a warm rush of affection.

They sat together in silence, Jimm seeming to come awake in the chilly night air. Awkwardly angling his long frame on the bench into a passably comfortable position, he muttered ceaselessly under his breath in that absent, unintelligible way of his. Mirren thought back, as he often did in his sleepless hours, on the first time they had met. It had been in summer, almost a decade ago now. Mirren couldn’t recall what the weather had been, but the feel of Jimm’s strong hands hoisting him off the back of a wagon returned in sharp detail. They had been large, too large for his age, just like the rest of him. A burly boy of about twelve, Jimm had flashed him a startlingly white smile as he gently put him down on the cobbled ground of the stable yard, and Mirren remembered the calluses on those hands clearly, the pressure of his fingers as they dug into his ribcage. Jimm had ruffled his hair, and Mirren, a child of six or seven, had thought it strange, for no one ever touched his hair. The farmer who had owned him before, in the North, had seen to it that it was cropped close to his skull, but the journey south had allowed it to grow, and Jimm had ruffled it playfully as though its colour didn’t bother him. Mirren had been suspicious; his first impulse had been to bite that hand, but something in the friendly brown face had stopped him.

That had been the first time Mirren had set foot at Rivernest. Like then, Jimm was still very tall and broad and muscular, and Mirren, being stronger than his slight build suggested, had ended up sharing much of the heavy labour the big slave was often assigned. Since that summer’s day ten years ago, they had been more or less inseparable. Other slaves, older slaves must have taken it upon themselves to raise him and see to his wellbeing, but he could only ever recall being nursed through the sleepless nights of his childhood by Jimm’s slow, deep voice and callused hands. How it had come to be this way he couldn’t say, but it was the reason for the big slave’s presence on the bench beside him when he should’ve been asleep in his bunk – to this day, he would wake and worry.

The moon seemed not to have moved. Jimm was still and silent beside him, and he appeared to be completely captivated by a spider spinning a web underneath the bench. He sat doubled over, long legs thrown out lazily before him. He was wearing socks, and Mirren wondered why hadn’t thought of that himself. He had a pair hidden in his pillowcase, and resolved to put them on in the morning.

“Do you think they’re born knowing how to do that, or do they learn it?” said Jimm suddenly, his voice low and ponderous. Mirren frowned, completely lost, before realising that he must be talking about the spider. He gave a little snort of laughter at the question, leaning over to look past Jimm at the glittering web.

“I think they learn it,” he said, fleetingly imagining the scholars drunkenly discussing the same matter in the shadowy halls of their library. “Aren’t they just tiny little miniature spiders when they hatch?”

Jimm grunted, “I’ve never seen a tiny spider spinning a web.” Sitting up straight, he abruptly stretched his arms high above his head and yawned. “But who bloody cares?” he added and got to his feet. He turned to look down at Mirren, crossing his thick forearms over his chest and narrowing his eyes.

“What?” said Mirren after enduring his stare for several seconds.

“I think you’re worried about something.” Jimm spoke with such uncharacteristic shrewdness that Mirren had to hold back a frustrated groan.

“Jimm…” he began, unfolding his legs from under him and turning pleading eyes on his friend.

“No, hear me out,” said Jimm, raising a hand. “You could be worrying about something you’ve forgotten. You know, something in your past or something.”

“Oh, shut up,” snapped Mirren impatiently. “I don’t have anything to worry about except breaking my back lugging any more of those bloody crates into the cellars.”

“That’s not what I meant. I mean like something whatsit…subconscious, like. You know?”

“No, I don’t. And there’s no use talking about it, I’ve told you.” Mirren ran a hand through his hair. “I can’t sleep, and that’s all there is to it. I’ve never been able to sleep. I was probably born this way.”

“Like the spider, you mean?”

“Didn’t we just agree that the spider probably learnt it?”

“Well, whatever. It’s just strange, is all. Bloody strange.”

Mirren was aware of this. One would think Jimm must lose interest in discussing the matter after ten years, but no such luck. Once in a while he’d do what he was doing now and bring it up, and every single time he ended up repeating himself like an old drunkard, twisting and turning the same ideas as though something new was bound to appear. All those years ago, when Mirren was a fresh purchase, he’d believed it to be nerves, and Mirren had to explain that he’d been born a slave.

Jimm remained standing, his brow furrowed in concern. Mirren ignored him, turning back to the twinkling curtain of stars above. Soon losing himself in their familiar beauty, he barely registered it when Jimm went back inside without saying goodnight.

Mirren remained on the bench for the remainder of the night, watching the heavens’ black ceiling and thinking about spiders. The sky paled to a dark, velvety blue, then to a dense grey. The moon’s crescent sank into the horizon. It was soon nearing four o’clock in the morning, and in half an hour Carlo would come to wake the slaves.

Mirren tipped his head back to rest it against the stone wall. He closed his eyes briefly, summoning some determination to stave off the exhaustion deadening his limbs. His body felt a heavy, cumbersome thing, and he knew the approaching day would be a long, nasty, sweaty business. Again he sighed.

Like all other days.