A Bitter Brew Read online

  A

  BITTER

  BREW

  GREG

  CURTIS

  A Bitter Brew

  Greg Curtis

  Copyright:

  Digital Edition – August 2017

  Cover Credits

  The Book Cover Designer

  https://thebookcoverdesigner.com/

  Artist: Victoria Cooper

  Acknowledgements

  As always this book is dedicated to my family for their love and support over the years. I could never have written a single word without them.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Chapter Twenty Four

  Chapter Twenty Five

  Chapter Twenty Six

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  Chapter Twenty Eight

  Chapter Twenty Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty One

  Chapter Thirty Two.

  Chapter Thirty Three

  Chapter Thirty Four

  Chapter Thirty Five

  Chapter Thirty Six

  Chapter Thirty Seven

  Chapter Thirty Eight

  Chapter Thirty Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty One

  Chapter Forty Two

  Chapter Forty Three

  Chapter Forty Four

  Chapter Forty Five

  Chapter Forty Six

  Chapter Forty Seven

  Chapter Forty Eight

  Chapter Forty Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty One

  Chapter Fifty Two

  Chapter Fifty Three

  Chapter Fifty Four

  Chapter Fifty Five

  Chapter Fifty Six

  Prologue

  The sun was warm on Hendrick's back as he worked in the garden, turning the soil with a hoe, and that pleased him. He didn't know why he had to do this – they had a gardener after all and the hoe was too big for his hands. His mother said it was something about building character and showing that he would make a good prince when he grew up, though he didn’t really understand how. Princes weren't gardeners. Still, at least it could be fun. There were worms in the dirt and he liked to play with them. He liked the way they wriggled in his hands. And Dara said that if you chopped them in half they actually became two worms. Dara should know. After all he was the Royal gardener. And he was old. Maybe he should try it?

  Behind him Dara was supervising his brother Myka, making sure that he pulled all the weeds out by their roots, and telling him off when he got things wrong. Myka was older so had to do the harder work. But that was good Hendrick thought. Myka was bigger than him and kept pushing him around. Just last night he had tipped a bowl of stew over his head and then told their mother that he was clumsy. He should be told off Hendrick thought. But their mother never did.

  Hendrick looked over his shoulder just then to see if his mother was watching him. She was still sitting on a garden bench in the shade, supposedly watching out for danger. But her eyes were focused on nothing more than the tapestry she was currently working on. Some great danger, he thought. She was always going on about these supposed dangers about, but never said what they were. Only that they had to be careful – and circumspect – whatever that meant. But what danger could there be when there were palace guards all around? When the garden was on the roof of the castle and surrounded by stone walls?

  Hendrick's thoughts were suddenly taken away from his family though when he turned back to the bit of garden he was weeding and spotted something shiny in the dirt. Curious, he bent down to take a closer look.

  It was a pebble. A shiny, silver pebble. And when he brushed some more of the dirt away he found two more just like it. Hendrick picked them up, rolling them round in the palm of his left hand and then held them up to the sun to see them properly. They seemed to sparkle in the light.

  Three silver pebbles! They could be worth something! And he'd found them – not Myka! Naturally he had to show them to his mother. She had to know that he'd found them, not his big brother. Because otherwise Myka would steal them from him like he stole all his toys.

  “Mother! Look!” Hendrick held his hand out to show her what he'd discovered, feeling really proud of himself. This would show her he would make a good prince one day! He'd found silver!

  “Don't shout Hendrick,” his mother looked up from her tapestry and stared at him disapprovingly. “You're not a commoner so don't act like one.”

  “But I found silver!” Hendrick shouted at her, forgetting her words immediately. “We're rich!”

  “Silver?” She looked over at him, confused. “Where would you find silver in the royal gardens?” She put down her tapestry and stood up.

  “Right here!” Hendrick turned and pointed at the ground. And then he noticed something odd about the silver in his hand.

  “Mother it's melting!” He didn't understand that. Silver wasn't supposed to melt, was it? And yet as he stared he could see the silver forming into a puddle in his palm.

  “Melting?” His mother said nothing for a heartbeat. And then she suddenly yelled at him. “Throw it away! For the love of Tarius throw it away!” She started running toward him.

  “Throw it away?” Why would he want to do that? It didn't seem dangerous. It wasn't hurting him. It wasn't even hot. It was just melting.

  “It's not silver! It's Mithril! It's an affliction!” Hendrick's mother again yelled – and she never yelled. She never ran either, but she was doing that too.

  Affliction?! That was bad! Hendrick knew that. Affliction was magic and magic was bad. A poison of the soul. And it was in his hand! Immediately she said it he knew what he had to do. And he did it, flicking his hand trying to get the silver puddle out of his hand. But it wouldn't flick off. He tried again, but it simply wouldn't go. And when he looked he realised the puddle was smaller. It was soaking into his skin.

  “It won't go!” Hendrick started panicking. He didn't want to be poisoned. He didn't want to become evil. He scrubbed at his hand even harder. But it still wouldn't go.

  And then, just as his mother reached him he saw the last of the silver puddle vanish into his hand and the beginnings of lines starting to spread up his arms. They looked like the branches of a silver grey tree curling up his arm, and they were growing inside him. It was too late! He was afflicted!

  “Mother?” He called to her. He needed to hear her say something. To tell him it was all going to be alright. That they could fix this.

  But she didn't answer him as she knelt beside him holding him around the shoulders. Instead she began yelling at the guards to arrest Dara. Saying that he was the only one who could have planted the Mithril fragments in the ground.

  “Mother!” He tried again, really frightened now. But she was still yelling at the guards as they ran after Dara. The Royal gardener had started running, fleeing as fast as he could on his ageing legs.

  What was going to happen to him? Because as he watched the sparkling grey branches spreading up his arm, Hendrick knew he was in trouble. He
wouldn't be allowed to live in the castle anymore! Not even in the city. No afflicted were allowed to live in Styrion Might and so he knew he would be sent away! Did that mean he was also no longer going to be a Prince? He didn’t know.

  “Mother!” This time Hendrick really yelled at her, too frightened to care about whether he was being circumspect or not.

  “It's alright,” his mother told him. “I'm going to get that bitch Marda for doing this to you! I'm going to make sure she regrets ever being born!”

  “But –.”

  Hendrick didn't care about Lady Marda just then. He just needed to know that everything would be alright. But as the lines grew past his elbow and she still said nothing he realised she wasn't going to do that.

  Because it wasn't going to be alright!

  “Mother?” He tried again, starting to become really frightened.

  “At least she didn't get Myka,” his mother told him. “Your brother's safe.” And then she turned and called to Myka, telling him to drop his tools and stand very still. And above all else, not to touch anything.

  Meanwhile Hendrick was left standing there, wondering how far up under his sleeve the lines were going to go. He was starting to feel funny, weak at the knees. And the sky was going dark for some reason. Was that his soul being poisoned? Was he going to die? Be really, really sick? All he wanted was to be told that this would be fixed. Or if not that, that at least she loved him.

  But he realised as the sky finally turned black, that she wasn't going to do that. She was never going to do that. It wouldn't be circumspect.

  Chapter One

  It was hot in the ost house, and Hendrick was hard at work. Sweat glistened on his arms and soaked his back. His breathing came heavily as he flung pitchfork after pitchfork of the hops up into the tower above his head. He was in a hurry to finish this job. Because once this was done his work would be finished and he could spend the next few weeks away.

  He was lucky in that. Many other brewers used a kilning technique to dry their hops and so had to remain around while the fire burned in the tower below. He however, used the power of the sun shining on a dark tin roof above them. It took longer – it was often several days before the hops were properly dry. But the result was a stronger ale which he personally thought had a better flavour. The final brew fell somewhere between a beer and an ale, but he liked it. Others did too. There was no shortage of alehouses wanting to purchase his brew.

  Knowing that he had to leave had left Hendrick in a sour mood. Even though he would only be gone for a few weeks, he didn’t want to go. But despite being afflicted and declared an outcast, it seemed he didn’t get out of all official responsibilities. It seemed unfair. Since his life as a prince had been taken away from him at the least he could have been spared the pointless officialdom!

  Hendrick stared down at the tracery of lines that had marked his left arm shortly after his seventh birthday. Three little sparkling grey stones. It was such a small thing to ruin a life. People had treated him differently ever since it had happened. Some said he bore the mark of a demon. Others that he was rotting from the inside out and that if they came too close he might infect him.

  Afflicted!

  That was what people like him were called. They were claimed to have an affliction of the soul. A rot that made them untrustworthy. As if the tracery of lines beneath his skin was some sort of disease. But the truth was that he was a normal man with a gift bestowed upon him by those three sparkling grey stones.

  Certainly the markings didn’t make him feel sick. And despite the claims, he didn't feel as though his soul was in any peril let alone rotting away. But what he thought hadn't mattered.

  Hendrick had been banished from the city of Styrion Might within a matter of days of his being afflicted. The capitol was for important people like the King and his Court; for the nobles and the heads of guilds. His mother had explained that those people could not be placed at risk by having one of the afflicted living among them. It would be too dangerous.

  They'd imposed other restrictions on him too as they did for all his kind. He was a prince and yet he couldn't enter the local Council Chambers, just as he couldn't enter the Capitol – and for the same reason. He couldn't ever be given a position of responsibility – the afflicted couldn't be trusted. Not even those of royal blood.

  Of course, those who created the rules also made sure that if the spell given to the afflicted person was useful, they would still reap the rewards. So if one of his spells could provide some service to others, then he was expected to provide it – for free. And if those in authority had need of his magic, he had to provide it immediately and without complaint. Refusing to do so would see him locked away. Becoming one of the afflicted had reduced Hendrick from prince to one step removed from indentured servitude.

  He was the King's son – seventeenth in line to the throne anyway – and he was also an outcast. A pariah. Picking up those three stones as a seven year old had completely changed the course of his life.

  But had his life been ruined? He asked himself that as he worked, shovelling the hops into the drying tower above his head. Certainly it wasn't as easy as he remembered it having been when he'd lived in Styrion Might. He didn't have servants running around after him. He didn't dine on the finest foods and wear the finest clothes. No one addressed him as Prince Hendrick. And he had to work hard every day. Brewing wasn't a job for the lazy. But it was still a good life he thought.

  After all, even if he hadn’t been afflicted, he still would never have become King. Not when he was only the second son of King Orston’s fifth wife and seventeenth in line to the throne. Daylon, the oldest son of the King's First Wife, Marda, would be King.

  And Marda and his mother had been at war for decades. A polite, civilised war of words, lawyers, spies, persuasion and bending the King's ear, but none-the-less a war. Even if by some terrible tragedy all the other princes ahead of him had been killed leaving him as the heir apparent, he still wouldn't inherit the throne. The four wives ahead of his mother would see to that. Or rather Marda would and the others would follow her lead. She ruled the Royal household. Neither he nor his elder brother Myka would inherit. Marda would rather act as a regent until a better, more suitable prince was available, which meant anyone other than his mother’s offspring.

  Being raised as part of the royal family wouldn’t have been all that wonderful he supposed. But still the tracery of sparkling grey lines on his left hand and running up his arm had been the final nail in the coffin of that dream.

  Nor had his affliction stolen a normal family life from him. Even before he’d been afflicted, he'd only seen the King – his father – half a dozen times at most. He hadn't seen his mother that much more often even though he had lived with her. She had been too busy with affairs of state to worry about either of her sons. If he had been allowed to remain he would have been raised by the servants.

  In sooth the only thing his affliction had done was to steal him away from his private chambers and place him in a room with other children, and swap those palace servants in Styrion Might for the priests in the Abbey of Tarius the Benevolent One in Burbage. And that wasn't a terrible swap.

  The priests had been good to him. They had treated him fairly and taught him what they could along with the other orphans in their care. And he had made friends in the abbey with the other children. In fact he had become so close to some of them that they could have been his brothers and sisters. The Abbey had been a good place to live for a child with no real parents. Better perhaps than the Court. And their teachings had been more useful than those his tutors in the Court could have provided. They had given him a trade. And it in turn had allowed him to find his own place in the world.

  The mithril hadn’t made his life as terrible as it could have been, he supposed. Some considered his affliction minor. A few even thought his spells could be beneficial. Not many perhaps – most still claimed he was cursed by the Goat Footed God and some even said he was dang
erous. Still some said his affliction was a gift. Mainly mist breathers who followed Ri Altenne – the Goddess of Magic.

  But even if they were mist breathers, other people had been afflicted with far more frightening spells. But gift or curse, it could sometimes be useful. It allowed him to learn new skills quickly. And if he was ever attacked he could defend himself using his affliction if he had to. Or escape danger if necessary. He was lucky. Most of the afflicted didn't have even vaguely useful spells.

  Sadly, for the most part the magic was of little practical use to him. He learned quickly anyway, and no one had ever attacked him. He didn't need to run or fight.

  What mattered most he thought, was that he had magic and could do things that others couldn't. Things that defied understanding. Wondrous things. And that made him feel good.

  Would he really want to be without that? Even if it meant he never had to shovel hops into the drying tower above his head again and could return to the life he had been born to? He wasn't sure. Not even as the sweat poured off him and his arms and back screamed at him about being overworked.

  It was a pity the spells he had received couldn’t aid him in his work. That he couldn't summon a spectral beast to do the hard work for him perhaps. If there had been such a beast. Or if he had been afflicted with Illuminium instead of mithril. A few spells of life could have been very useful. Something to make him stronger or healthier. Summoning the beasts of this world instead of the other worlds. A spell to summon a horse would have been welcome from time to time instead of having to hire a horse and cart when he needed one. And if he'd had a spell of healing, he would have been more welcome in the town. They might be afflicted and they couldn't charge for their services, but everyone valued a healer.