6

 

It took the better part of an hour to cross the shallows from the loading docks to the Morgan’s Chance. Their boat-mates were all members of the ship’s crew, returning before the onslaught of passengers due at sunrise. Most were silent, watching the subsiding glow above the buildings that lined the shore. One tipsy fellow, oblivious to the chaos they were leaving behind, was singing a crude song, most of the words of which seemed to have escaped him. He improvised.

The barge was crowded with crates. Additionally, there were three goats and two wooden cages of ducks. The ducks showed great interest in the proceedings, extending their necks out through the slats as far as possible. The cages, abristle with yellow beaks, emitted a constant natter of avian complaint.

The barge rode low on the water. Where Rowan and Bel sat in the gunwales, Rowan brooding, Bel looking at the surroundings, the calm surface of the water was a handsbreadth away from swamping aboard. Bel leaned over and trailed one hand into the cold, starlit darkness. Then she pulled it out and tasted. “I heard it was salt,” she said to Rowan. Then she affected Reeder’s condescending tone. “Tell me, lady, why is the sea salt?”

The Outskirter seemed remarkably resilient; for her own part, Rowan found it impossible to take her mind off the disaster they were leaving behind. “No one knows,” she answered, half-indifferently.

“Ha!” Bel returned to her own voice. “I can tell you. A wizard had a magical box that delivered him salt whenever he called for it. But while he was out, his apprentice tried to impress some friends by demonstrating its magic. The apprentice forgot the words that halted the spell, and the box kept spewing out salt, until the whole house was filled. In desperation, the friends dragged the box to a cliff and tossed it into the sea. And there it lies, to this day.”

Rowan looked at her friend and smiled despite herself. “A possible explanation.”

Eventually the barge sidled up to the ship. Cables were tossed down for the cargo. Meanwhile, the returning sailors dragged themselves wearily up rope ladders.

Rowan noticed Bel watching the technique with a grim studiousness and realized that the barbarian had no intention of letting unfamiliarity slow her down again. When her turn came, Bel pulled herself up carefully, clearly considering every step. Rowan followed close behind, with complete ease, keeping an eye on her friend. At one point, a small swell caused the ship to tilt; for a moment, the ladder swung away to one side, hanging unsupported save at the top. Bel looked up in startlement, then down at Rowan and the dark water, then at the ladder itself. Recognizing her safety, she laughed in delight, then ascended faster.

Morgan was at the railing, shouting questions to the arriving crew. “What’s the problem ashore?”

Reaching the top, Rowan answered him herself. “Dragonfire.”

“What!”

“Saranna’s Inn was attacked by nestlings. It’s destroyed.”

He leaned farther past the rail’s edge, gazing out at the shore. A reddish orange glow marked the former location of the inn. “Gods below,” he muttered. He turned away, then came storming back. “It’s ridiculous, the dragons haven’t got out of hand for years. And the breeding grounds aren’t even near there. Where was Jannik, fast asleep? Are those fools ashore afraid to wake a wizard?” He cursed again, viciously.

“He came,” a crew member answered. “A bit too late, but he came.”

A voice spoke from behind Rowan. “You look as though you were in it yourselves.” She turned and found the officer they had seen at the Tea Shop with Morgan. “Tyson, ship’s navigator,” he introduced himself. “We’ll talk later.” It was customary for any sea-traveling steerswoman to consult with the navigator, to update the ship’s charts. “But, you’re not injured?”

“No.” She brushed her hair away from her forehead. The hand came back sooty. “Singed, perhaps.”

Bel spoke up. “But we lost our possessions in the fire. Our traveling packs. We have our clothes and my sword, that’s all.”

“I’ll have the provisions I brought for the voyage,” Rowan pointed out. “I arranged yesterday for a crate that I left at the cargo docks.”

Tyson looked distressed. “But your notes and your charts?”

“All gone.”

His brow furrowed. “I have some chart paper you can have. I’ll buy some new at Wulfshaven. And some old pens I don’t use. Some ink powder . . .”

“You’re very kind.”

“And look at you, you haven’t even got a cloak. Can’t have you catching a chill; I’ve a spare you can use.”

Rowan was taken aback. “You’re too generous.”

Nonsense, you’re one of us, and we take care of our own.” Tyson was referring to the solidarity of spirit that sailors shared with the steerswomen. He stopped a passing crewman and directed him to bring the items from the navigator’s cabin, then excused himself to oversee some of the preparations at hand.

“A pleasant fellow,” Bel commented. “Perhaps I’ll become a steerswoman, so that everyone will be nice to me.”

“Then you’d have to deal with the Reeders of the world.”

Bel made a face. “True. It’s hardly worth it.”

When the crewman returned with Tyson’s donations, Bel asked for directions to the galley. Unable to explain clearly enough for the Outskirter, he finally led her personally. Rowan remained on deck and presently noticed her crate of provisions being hauled aboard. A few questions to the purser determined the best place to stow it; Rowan made sure she knew how to find it again. Then she wandered forward, keeping out of the way of the work being done.

A handful of crew-women jogged past her to clamber up the rigging. They tugged at the mainsail halyards, readying them for the command to set the sails. The women waited at their ease, chatting softly to themselves, calling up to a pair of men working the main sky-sail, all of them visible to Rowan only as distant forms blocking starlight, shifting against the sky as the ship rocked slowly.

Rowan went back amidships, where the passenger barge was expected.

The ship’s activities slowly came to a standstill, and crew members became idle. Morgan regained his composure and sauntered about the deck, exuding a carefully assumed nonchalance. Tyson watched him with something like amusement. Eventually the east brightened.

The light revealed a vertical line of smoke onshore where the glow had been. Rowan was standing at the starboard railing, facing shore. Looking around her, she saw that most of the people on deck were on or near the starboard side: deckhands, a few officers, and three early-boarded passengers.

Presently a barge separated itself from the general harbor traffic and poled along toward the Morgan’s Chance. The sun had cleared the horizon by the time it came alongside.

The passengers took their time negotiating the rope ladders. Morgan approached when a purser’s mate clambered aboard; Rowan moved nearer and joined them.

“A whole bloody swarm of them dragons, they say,” the purser’s mate was complaining. “About fifty, tall as your waist, and smaller. Spitting and hissing, sending fire all over. Never heard of anything like it.”

“The passengers,” Morgan prompted.

“Oh. Yes, sir. None lost, sir, just all of them upset, especially the ones who’d been staying at the inn.”

The witnesses were easy to identify; they were quiet, and the purser and purser’s mates had trouble getting their attention. They tended to gaze around them as if a sailing ship were the strangest wonder in existence, and death by dragonfire were the usual human fate, escaped from only by luck. They were filled with what they had seen. Rowan decided to wait to ask them for the details she wanted—perhaps several days, until they were past their shock.

She stopped the chief purser as he hurried by. “You’d do best to tend to the people from Saranna’s Inn first. Get them into their cabins and comfortable, and most of all, away from each other. They’re standing in a clot together here, do you see? They’re just feeding each other’s distress. People can become hysterical in situations like this.”

He paused, annoyed. Morgan forestalled his protest. “She’s a steerswoman, and she’s making sense. Do as she says.” The purser hurried off.

Rowan eyed the mate who had been ashore. The man threw up his hands. “Not me, lady, I’m fine. Of course, I didn’t watch anyone die, either.”

Morgan dismissed the man, who went back to the still-boarding passengers. The captain and the steerswoman watched the activity for a while. Then Morgan regarded her a moment, looked off to shore, out to sea, and gazed up at the rigging. He said reluctantly, “If you have any more suggestions, lady, I’ll be glad to hear them.”

Rowan had many questions, but only one suggestion. “I suggest,” she said, “that we leave.”

 

It was some time after noon that Bel shambled on deck. The ship was well under way, finally past the shallows of Donner and into blue water. Bel lurched a bit on the shifting deck, from unfamiliarity or her obvious weariness. Blinking in the bright light, she found Rowan and dropped herself down to sit on the deck. She leaned back against the rail and closed her eyes, giving herself to the sunlight. She had shed the boots and was still wearing the loose yellow blouse she had purchased in Donner. Barefoot, in shirt and trousers, she could have been any sailor, but for the silver-and-blue belt. She was small and wiry and tan. She looked able, nimble, and not at all dangerous.

Rowan had spent the morning arranging her matters as best she could. She had taken the large chart papers Tyson had given her, folded them to smaller size, and cut the folds with a knife. After a visit to the sail locker, and the loan of a needle, a sail-maker’s palm, and some cord, she had a pamphlet-sized coverless book of thirty-two pages. Some canvas scraps were transformed into a small shoulder-slung pouch to contain the new book and pens.

While testing her hastily hung hammock in the women’s crew quarters, she had noticed that the gum soles of her steerswoman’s boots had worn down to the leather. The gum was the same type used by sailors everywhere, to aid in gripping the deck when not working barefoot. She had found the quartermaster, laid down a new surface on the soles, and brought the boots on deck to dry.

Then she had stopped to talk to a pair of crew members new to the trade, to show them the best way to coil a rope so that it stowed in the least amount of space but payed out easily. She hoped to find several such odd jobs to ease the duties of the officers and make herself useful. Done with her lesson, Rowan sent the two men off and sat next to Bel.

“How are you taking to your work?”

The Outskirter opened her eyes, squinting against the sunlight. “Well enough. The food is strange, but interesting. The cook knows his job, but he lacks any sense of adventure. He won’t let me experiment.”

“His loss. You seem to have an instinct for such things.”

Bel made a sound of disinterest and closed her eyes again. “Do dragons carry disease?”

“No. Why do you ask?” Rowan was briefly concerned, then quickly realized Bel’s problem. “Here. Stand up.”

“No, please . . .”

Rowan pulled her up, against little resistance. “Trust me, it’s better this way. Here.” Rowan positioned her by the railing and demonstrated. “Stand with your side to the rail and hold with one hand, so.” The ship was crossing the swell of the waves obliquely. “No, open your eyes; you need to balance.”

“I can balance with my eyes closed,” Bel said through her teeth, “when the ground doesn’t move beneath me.”

“Well, it’s moving now.” Rowan stood facing Bel, with her back to the bow. “Look past me, to the horizon. Unlock your knees . . . there. Bend them a little. Have you ever ridden a horse?”

“How will a horse help me on a ship?”

“It might be a little easier to explain . . . never mind. You have to get rid of the idea that the ship’s deck is the ground; you mustn’t try to align yourself to it. You need to find your own center of balance. Don’t make the mistake of just trying to keep your head level—”

“I have to keep my head level!”

“Yes, but don’t bend your neck to do it. Don’t put your head at odds with your body. Use your legs. Bend your knees to compensate for the change in the deck’s position . . .” She demonstrated as the approaching swells altered the deck’s angle, exaggeratedly bending her left knee as the ship rose on the wave, then straightening and shifting the flex to her right as they rode over the crest.

Bel imitated Rowan’s movements stiffly. “That’s better,” Rowan told her. “Keep your body relaxed; keep your head centered over your torso. Look past me at the waves as they approach.”

Bel kept her eyes grimly on Rowan’s face. “Must I really?”

“That’s how you can tell what changes to expect.” Bel shifted her gaze, her tan complexion graying. But as Rowan continued her coaching, the Outskirter eventually began to look more comfortable; whether from gained skill or from the distraction of learning the technique, Rowan could not determine. “Weren’t you seasick when you were belowdecks?”

“I was too busy with the cook. I had too much on my mind to notice.”

Rowan stopped exaggerating her leg movements and shifted back to her own more natural sea stance. “Then here’s something to occupy your mind: At Saranna’s Inn, what section did the dragon nestlings attack first?”

Bel attempted to make her own physical adjustments match the subtlety of Rowan’s. “Do you mean, north or south? I lost all my direction, inside the building.”

“Think about it.”

“Well . . .” Bel loosened her death-grip on the railing and tested her ability to balance without support. “As we entered the guest-room section, the corner they attacked was across from us, diagonally. On the opposite side of the open area.”

A trio of crew members jogged past aft to where a mate stood, exhorting them to some minor adjustment in the sheets. Rowan prompted Bel, “And?”

“And up. Toward the roof. The corner where our room was.”

Rowan said nothing.

Bel considered for a long time. “Did we do something to attract them? What sort of thing attracts dragons?”

“I have no idea. Very little is known about dragons. I don’t know what they like; I don’t even know what they eat.” She looked off to the side, thinking. “But I know that in Donner, the dragons are kept in check by Jannik’s powers.”

“But sometimes they get loose.”

“Sometimes. They chose an interesting moment to do so.” Around the two women, the ship’s activity rapidly increased. Without thinking, Rowan noted that the wind had shifted, and a major readjustment of the sails was imminent. More passengers had come on deck, either to enjoy the brilliant sunlight, or to observe the crew’s movements. Rowan stepped closer to Bel and, with a hand on her arm, directed her closer to the rail, away from the action. “And here’s something else to think about: The first night out of Five Corners, we were attacked by a soldier who turned out to be in the service of a wizard.”

“So you said. But he wasn’t wearing a surplice or a sigil. How could you be sure he belonged to a wizard?”

“I saw him at the inn at Five Corners, remember, and he wore a Red surcoat then.”

“Perhaps he just resembled one of the Red soldiers at the inn.”

“I don’t forget a face.” Rowan saw Bel’s dubious expression. “I don’t,” she stressed. “It’s part of my training. I could sketch his portrait, right now.”

Morgan himself had come on deck and was sending out a steady stream of shouted directions, relayed by mates to all quarters of the ship and up the rigging. Bel had to raise her voice to be heard. “Can you really think that a wizard is responsible?”

“It’s a possibility.”

“But why would a wizard care about us?”

“I’ve never attracted one’s attention before. And there’s been only one change in my activities, one new thing that I’m doing.”

Bel looked at her. “You mean that jewel. Of course, it’s magic—”

“We don’t know that—”

“But I’ve had my jewels for years, and no one’s cared. And that innkeeper at Five Corners, he’s never been bothered.”

“There’s a difference.” Oblivious to the noise around her, Rowan reviewed her speculations in her mind. “Several people have the jewels,” she said, “but I’m the first person trying to find out about them.”

Bel took a few pacing steps and found she had to grab the railing when the ship hit a sudden uneven swell. She moved cautiously away from the rail and leaned her weight against a vent cowling farther amidships. “Are you certain about this? Is this something . . . something your training tells you?”

Rowan came out of her reverie. “No, my training tells me not to be certain, not yet.” She smiled. “The steerswomen have a saying: ‘It takes three to know.’ “

“Three of what?”

“In this case, three instances. In the first instance, it’s possible that the soldier was performing a little independent banditry, for his own profit. In the second instance, the dragon’s attack may have been pure coincidence. But if anything else of the sort occurs . . .”

“Then you’ll be sure.”

“Exactly.”

Bel made a derisive sound. “Much good it’ll do, if the third instance kills you.”

“Being unconvinced is not the same as being foolhardy. The possibility alone is strong enough to make me cautious.”

Bel’s gaze narrowed as she considered the situation. “I don’t like this. It feels like we’re running away from our enemies. If we stayed in Donner, we could have found out more about that dragon attack. It would have been much simpler.”

Rowan found herself agreeing. “But I want to get to the Archives, and this is the only ship to Wulfshaven at the moment.”

“So we sail.”

“Yes.”

There was a small burst of activity, a thumping of leather-soled shoes—no sailor hurrying, but Reeder’s boy, dashing to the starboard railing, followed more sedately by a crew-woman. “There!” he cried excitedly. “It was out there!” He pointed. “But I don’t see it anymore.”

Rowan moved aft, Bel following carefully, unsure of her new sea legs. The crew member, a strong, brown, middle-aged woman, peered out to sea. “Don’t see it.”

“It was dark-colored, and small. It went up and down, on top of the water.”

“Hm. Piece of driftwood, maybe.”

“I think it was a mermaid.”

The woman suddenly dropped to the boy’s height, grabbed his shoulder with her left hand, and covered his mouth with her right, roughly. “Don’t say that! That’s bad luck on a ship! They’re evil creatures, murderous. Do you want to call one?”

“The boy spoke in ignorance,” Rowan said gently.

The sailor looked up at her. “Aye. But you know the saying, lady: ‘What you don’t know, can kill you.’ “ She released the boy but shook her finger in his face, once, admonishing.

Rowan looked out to sea, seeing nothing. “Perhaps it was a dolphin.”

The sailor brightened. “Aye, perhaps.” She scanned the waves again.

“Dolphins aren’t real,” the boy said. “They’re . . . they’re just heraldic beasts. Like lions.”

“Dolphins certainly are real,” Rowan told him.

“Lots of sailor’s tales of dolphins,” the crew-woman added.

“And the steerswomen have verified it, as well.” Rowan saw that Bel had come closer, listening to the conversation with interest. Rowan continued. “More than two centuries ago, a steerswoman went swimming off the bow of a becalmed ship. Dolphins came up to her, pushing her like children at play. They danced on top of the sea, standing on their tails.”

“It sounds like a wondrous sight,” Bel said. She had found a seat on the roof of the pilothouse. “Lady, what’s a dolphin?”

Rowan gathered her information. “A fish, large, nearly as long as a man is tall. They leap in the air as they swim along, and have a hole in the top of their heads. They sing through that hole, as you would through your mouth, but their song is like all the different birds of the air. Their tails are flat, opposite to other fish—” She demonstrated the configuration with her hands. “—and they are so strong that they can balance on top of the sea’s surface by moving only that tail in the water. They possess great curiosity, and have never been known to injure a human.”

“Are they good to eat?”

The sailor threw her hands in the air. “More bad luck!” she cried.

Bel spoke quickly. “Sea woman, I beg your pardon. I come from a far land and know nothing of the sea. If there is any ritual or obeisance I should make, please tell me now, so I can fend off the evil of my words. And, please, I ask you to teach me what I should know, so that I will never offend the sea god again.”

Rowan looked at the Outskirter in admiration. A barbarian in birth but not in attitude—or, again, there seemed to be more to the Outskirters than rumor credited.

The sailor nodded, mollified. “That was well spoken. Aye, I’ll teach you, if you need it. Between me and the steerswoman, we’ll see you safe.”

The boy sniffed disdainfully. Rowan looked down at him and recognized trouble on the way. He said, “Tell me, lady, what’s a mermaid?”

The sailor made a grab for him, but Rowan stopped her with a hand on her chest. The woman wavered, agitated, trapped between two customs of equal force.

Rowan dropped to her knees in front of the boy and spoke eye-to-eye. “Child, I will be glad to answer your question, but first I will give you information for which you did not ask. Sailors live on their ships, care for their ships; a ship is a sailor’s home. The beliefs of the sailors are like a religion. Now, when you’re in a person’s home, it is bad manners, it is inexcusably rude, to scoff at his or her religion, whatever your own beliefs. The person has offered you kindness and protection, and you cannot offer insult in return. It is outrageous, uncivilized—” She thought of Bel and amended her comments. “It is crude. It would be kinder, and inoffensive, to wait until we reach Wulfshaven, when we are in no sailor’s home, to ask that question. So tell me again, boy, do you have a question for me, at this time?”

The child stared at her, wide-eyed, and the sailor leaned close to his ear. “Say that word again, and I’ll throw you overboard.”

A voice came from behind them. “What’s this?” Reeder’s boy broke and ran, clattering down a companionway into the ship.

The crew-woman straightened, startled. “Ah. Sir. You shouldn’t sneak up on one like that.”

It was Tyson, the navigator. “Now, Marta, I can’t help if my boots are silent. You know I would never sneak up on you.”

“Aye, sir. Right, sir. Officers never sneak up on the crew.”

Bel spoke up. “The boy might have seen a dolphin.”

Tyson laughed and clapped his hands together. “Then that’s good luck!” He took a few moments to make a methodical examination of the sea off to starboard. Rowan did the same, but neither found any encouraging signs. The sailor, Marta, peered out dubiously; then, with a noncommittal grunt, she returned to her labors.

“Ah, well.” Tyson turned back, leaving one arm resting along the railing. As he tilted his head back to view the new set of the ship’s sails, Rowan discovered that she rather liked the way his auburn hair looked against the pale sky, how his light eyes contrasted with his broad brown face. She found herself watching herself watching him, a little amused.

Bel roused out of deep thought. “I like what you said,” she told Rowan. “About respecting other people’s religions. That’s very sensible.”

Distracted from her distraction, Rowan considered her answer. “I’m sorry, Bel, don’t misunderstand me. I don’t necessarily respect other people’s religions, or any religion. But the people—I respect them, and I give them the honor they deserve, whatever they believe.”

“And that boy—would you have answered his question?” Bel turned to Tyson. “He was asking about ill-omened creatures,” she explained.

Rowan leaned back against the railing and studied Tyson’s and Bel’s expressions. “Yes. I would have, had he asked again.”

Tyson nodded, with the understanding of long association with steerswomen, but Bel shook her head ruefully. “You. I don’t understand you at all, sometimes. Just when you finish saying a hundred things that are incredibly wise, you turn around and act like a plain fool.”

Rowan felt a flare of anger. In all the Inner Lands, no one spoke to a steerswoman so insultingly. She was about to retort in kind when, by reflex, her training stepped in. Everything she knew about Bel, in all her short experience with the Outskirter, came to her mind in ordered array: the patterns of Bel’s behavior, what Rowan surmised about Bel’s context of knowledge and habit, the occasional sudden swordlike thrusts of Bel’s quick mind . . .

To everyone’s surprise, including her own, Rowan replied with a laugh. “And you,” she said to Bel. “Just when I’m convinced you’re nothing but a plain fool, you turn around and say something incredibly wise.”

Bel wavered, uncertain of how to interpret this. At last she said reluctantly, “Then perhaps between the two of us, we make one very clever person.”

“Perhaps that’s the case.”

Tyson had watched the exchange with some perplexity. “You’re an odd pair of friends,” he said. “You are friends, aren’t you? Traveling together?”

“Yes.” Rowan clapped Bel’s shoulder in a consciously overacted gesture of hearty camaraderie. “And very advantageous it’s been, for both of us.”

Bel caught her mood. She said to Tyson, aside, “She covers for my ignorance, and I cover for her flaws of personality.”

Tyson smiled. “Flaws of personality?”

“She’s difficult to convince.”

“True,” Rowan admitted.

“She has no gods.”

“Also true.”

“She’s too serious.”

“A matter of opinion.”

“There’s not enough magic in her soul.”

“Well, I’m not at all certain about magic,” Rowan admitted.

Bel dropped her bantering attitude and stopped short. “What can you possibly mean?”

Rowan regretted the change in mood; nevertheless, she considered carefully before speaking. “The few times I’ve been faced with something called magical, it seemed . . . well, simply mysterious. As if there were merely something about it that I didn’t know. Understand, I’m not giving you a steerswoman’s conclusions, here. As a steerswoman, I have to withhold my decision, out of ignorance. But the fact that I can be this unsure . . . that seems to indicate something, to me.” She shrugged roughly, uncomfortable with her uncertainty. “Sometimes I feel people call it magic, because they want magic.”

“Perhaps Rowan feels that way because steerswomen are immune to some kinds of spells,” Tyson said to Bel.

She looked at him in astonishment. “Immune? Can that be true?”

Rowan made a deprecating gesture. “So it’s said. It’s supposed to be true of sailors, as well.”

“Sailors and steerswomen.” Tyson nodded. “We’re much alike. The sea in our blood, you see.”

“That’s hard to believe,” Bel said. “I know there’s real magic in the world, but would it be so . . . selective?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t enough information,” Rowan replied. “But it seems unlikely.”

Tyson clapped his hands together and laughed. “Simple way to prove it. There’s a chest in the hold; belongs to a wizard. We’re shipping it through Wulfshaven.”

Bel was suspicious. “So?”

“It’s guarded, by a simple spell. Nothing major, so I’m told. But we had to take precautions loading it. Come and take a look.” He looked at Rowan, eyes crinkling in humor. “Come, lady, let’s look at a wizard’s magic; and perhaps we can show your friend something surprising of our own.”

After pausing for Rowan to don her now-dry boots, the two women followed him. He led them down a forward hatch to a series of narrow companionways that carried them deep into the hold, far below the waterline.

The air acquired a contained feel, and the slap of waves came from somewhere overhead. They went back along a cramped passage created by the crates and bales that crowded the hold. Following last, Rowan found herself distracted by the variety of shapes, and the odors hinting at what each contained. There were dusty kegs of wine, others sending out a tang of brine, chests of some sharp spice; one bale of wool exuded a cloud of fine powder when Rowan’s hand touched it. She sneezed.

She heard another sneeze and, looking up, spotted Reeder’s boy perched on top of the bale. His eyes were wide with distress at being caught, his jaw slack. Rowan only smiled and waved, and he watched dumbly as she followed Tyson and Bel.

Tyson brought them to a corner where several chests were stacked less precisely. He leaned back against a column of crates made of some rough pale wood. With a sweep of his hand he indicated rather vaguely the general area of the chests. Rowan and Bel looked at them.

“Which one?” Rowan asked.

“Perhaps Bel can tell.”

“What, me?” Bel gave him a cautious, dubious look.

He spread his hands. “It’s a minor spell, I know. Won’t harm you, it’ll just . . . warn you. Rowan pointed out, when people expect magic, they sometimes find it when it’s not there. I’d like to see if you can find it if you don’t know where it should be.”

Bel raised her eyebrows and rocked a moment, intrigued. She scanned the area, then cocked her eye at one chest of dark wood, ornately carved and inlaid with a pattern of lighter wood. She approached it and, standing at the farthest distance possible, stretched out her left hand to touch it with index finger extended.

Rowan glanced at Tyson and found him watching Bel with controlled amusement. He so carefully kept his gaze steady that it was obvious that he was avoiding looking at the correct box. Rowan guessed from the stance of his body that it was one of a pair off to the right.

Bel’s finger contacted the chest in question. She held the pose a moment, then slapped the box disdainfully with her palm. She turned to the others.

One in the center was unadorned, but bound about with iron chains and padlocks. It was perched rather sloppily across two others. Bel stepped up more confidently and rapped it with her knuckles. “Ha!” Nothing remarkable happened, but the action caused the chest to rock back slightly, then forward. Bel took a step back, caught her bare heel on an uneven plank, and threw out her right arm for balance. The back of her hand brushed one of the chests on the right.

With a very unwarriorlike squeak she yanked the hand back violently. The sudden change of motion caused her stance to unbalance completely, and she landed on the deck, narrowly missing a small puddle. She pressed the hand against her body with her left arm. “It bit me!”

Tyson laughed without mockery and strode over to the chest. He stepped into a space behind it and, keeping his eyes on Bel and Rowan, laid his hand flat upon its lid, fingers spread.

The women watched a moment. He showed no sign of discomfort. Rowan gave Bel a hand up, and they approached.

The chest was about half as long as Rowan was tall and would have come to her knee if stood on the deck; it was standing on a wooden framework that raised it as high as Tyson’s waist. It was covered with intricately tooled leather decorated with a swirling meshlike pattern of worked-in copper. Some of the copper lines came together to consolidate into clearly marked but unreadable runes and symbols. The whole chest was strapped about loosely by plain leather bands with loops on the side, and the wooden stand was padded with leather.

Bel studied Tyson, then touched the surface with one cautious finger. She snapped it back instantly, shaking it as if from a bee sting. Rowan thought that at the moment of contact there had been a brief, faint noise, like an insect buzz, and a thin odor that disappeared immediately.

Rowan stepped up, seeing amusement and challenge in Tyson’s eyes. She carefully laid her own hand next to his. The leather felt rich, the copper discernibly cool. Automatically she ran her hand across the lid, part of her appreciating the workmanship. She turned to Bel, speechless.

Tyson tilted his head. “Try to touch Rowan.”

Both threw him glances of surprise and suspicion. Unable to resist the opportunity to learn, Rowan reached out with her left hand. With vast reluctance, then forced bravery, Bel put her hand in Rowan’s.

Quickly they pulled away from each other, Bel cursing. This time Rowan had felt it, but not from the box. It had passed between Bel’s hand and hers, not painful, but strong and unpleasant— an eerie stinging vibration.

Rowan was suddenly reminded of the feeling one got from gripping a mainsail sheet under a stiff wind: how the wrist-thick rope would be rigid as iron, yet pass into one’s hand the massive tension of the fight between wind and canvas, between sea and wood. The ship was a live thing, and holding that rope was like holding a tensed muscle.

The magic of the chest’s guard-spell was sharper, violent but somehow similar. Something living had seemed to pass between the hands. Rowan had been like that rigid rope: whatever it was had passed into and through her to reach Bel. Appalled, she stepped back from the box.

There was no apparent reason for the sensations. The power was near-silent and invisible. For a moment her thoughts swirled, automatically sifting, searching for any information that might connect to give hints or theories about the effect. But when her mind came to rest, the only possibilities that remained involved spirits and spells.

Bel was delighted. “How did you load it on the ship?”

Tyson indicated the leather straps and loops. “We had to slip wooden poles into these, then carry it by the poles.”

“It’s not a bad spell. But even though I didn’t know which chest had the spell, I knew that one of them must. For a real test, we ought to try someone totally in ignorance.”

Rowan doubted that would make any difference. Although she was immune, after a fashion, she had felt something real. She was certain she would have felt nothing, if it had been at all possible to do so.

And what was her attitude now? She introspected and found that she still possessed no solid opinion. That surprised her, until she realized that she still had not enough facts to come to a conclusion. But, with the facts and new experience she did have—all the tentative ideas and half-formed theories had re-formed on the opposite side of the issue, pointing to exactly opposite possibilities. She felt a mild internal vertigo.

Tyson stroked his beard thoughtfully. “Wait, now.” He stepped into the main passage and looked down it both ways. Something caught his attention. He called down the passage. “You! Yes, you, come here a moment, you’ll do. Come on!” Reeder’s boy rounded the corner hesitantly, his face full of apprehension.

Tyson went back to the chest and beckoned to the boy. He patted the lid. “Put your hand on this, boy.”

The lad froze. His gaze flickered among them, from Rowan to Bel, to the chest, to Tyson. His eyes widened. He glanced at the exit, then back to the chest. He clearly had no idea what was planned and just as clearly knew that it meant nothing pleasant for him. He seemed unsure whether to attempt an escape, or to obey the order of the navigator, who was, after all, a very large man. His turmoil immobilized him. He paled. He began to pant.

The three watched his performance; then Rowan laughed despite herself. The others joined in, and Bel clapped him on the back. “Go on, boy.” He fled.

Bel turned to Rowan. “What do you think, now?”

“I think . . .” Rowan reviewed her thoughts again. “I think that there is a great deal that wizards know, that I don’t.”

When they reached the open air again, night had fallen. A jumble of clouds in the west were still faintly underlit by the departed sun, and were crowding toward the zenith. No land was visible, but with a glance toward the Eastern Guidestar, Rowan offhandedly located herself in her world with perfect precision. She automatically noted the westward progress they had made since morning.

When she looked at Tyson, he was doing the same, although she suspected that his accuracy would be less than hers. Then he scanned the horizons. “Wind’ll come up before dawn. Rain, as well.” She nodded.

Bel sighed. “The crew will be crowded tonight. Well, we’ll be warm and dry, at least.”

“Overhead leak somewhere down there,” Tyson commented. “I hope you’re not under it.”

“Damn.”

He spoke to Rowan. “Lady, does this upset your theories?”

“I had no theories. Only the possibilities of some theories. There are still possibilities, just somewhat different ones.”

The three stood by the rail for an hour, watching the progress of the clouds and enjoying inconsequential conversation. Presently the first mate scurried down into the aft cabin and emerged with Morgan in tow. The captain viewed the scene, then issued orders to adjust the sail positions, watching with affected disinterest as he slowly paced the poop deck.

Eventually Bel decided it was time to turn in and made a few good-natured insults about the cook’s particularity for early hours and promptness in assistants.

Rowan and Tyson remained, talking idly and companionably. Presently Tyson put forth an invitation, which Rowan considered carefully, then declined. Uninsulted, Tyson stayed with her for another hour; then he wished her good night and retired.

Rowan wandered the deck alone for a while, enjoying the feeling of the deck as it shifted beneath her feet, the subtle changes of wind strength and direction. Eventually her mood shifted a bit, and she found herself regretting her refusal of Tyson’s suggestion. This she remedied by knocking softly at his cabin door at midnight.

 

In the morning Reeder’s boy was found dead, lying blue-faced in a puddle of water next to the wizard’s chest.

 

 

7

 

Stupid,” Morgan pronounced, shifting through the papers on his worktable. “Foolish. Stupid. He was looking for trouble, or he was too stupid to know when he’d found it. Damn!” He slammed down a fistful of notes and receipts. “Why bother a wizard’s chest? There was a warning spell on it; he must have noticed it.”

Rowan sat in a low chair across the cabin, legs stretched out in front of her. “It wasn’t particularly unpleasant. It can’t have killed him.”

“No, of course not.” He pointed a finger at her. “He tried to open it. He ignored the guard-spell and met the protecting spell. I can’t be held responsible for the idiocy of a boy.”

Her face was impassive. “He was curious. Intrigued.” To herself she added: Challenged.

Morgan grunted noncommittally. Shifting his papers into apparently arbitrary piles, he calmed visibly. “Have you gone over the charts with Tyson?”

“Yes.” The hiss of rain overhead grew louder. Someone walked on the deck above, steps slow and heavy.

“Were there many corrections?”

She shook her head. The steps above paused, apparently at the taffrail. “There was nothing incorrect on them, but you’ll find quite a few additions. Some areas where not much was known before.”

There was a creak as the person above shifted. Morgan nodded. “Good. I’d like to review them with you. Where’s Tyson, do you know?”

“On deck.”

“In this? Have someone find him. And bring the charts.” He caught himself. “Pardon me, lady. I’ll get them.”

Rowan rose. “No, Captain, I’ll go. Excuse me, please.” She exited, closing the door on his surprised expression. Wrapping her cloak around her, she climbed the short companionway to the deck.

The wind was strong but not storming. Rain fell in a solid pour, weighing down like a hand on Rowan’s head and shoulders. The deck was near-deserted. Through the shifting gray she could faintly make out the back of the helmsman, not far from her, placidly manning the wheel. She turned and went up the steps to the raised poop.

As she came to the top, the wind caught her borrowed cloak and whipped it about like a loose sail. She grabbed at the folds and pulled it close. Its protection closed about her like the walls of a room, water running off her hood in streams before her face. She had to move her whole body to direct the hood opening. She saw a lone gray-cloaked figure motionless at the taffrail, looking off astern, and she moved toward it.

She spoke, but the noise of water covered her voice. She touched his shoulder; he seemed not to notice. Using both hands, she turned him to face her.

It was Reeder. His face was pale with cold, slick with rain. Sparse hair lay wet against his forehead, like lines drawn in ink. He looked at her expressionlessly, eyes blank and bright. His eyes were a beautiful pale green color; she had never noticed that before.

Startled, she stepped back. She made to speak, but he turned away.

Rowan left him and searched every part of the deck for Tyson. The downpour limited her vision to the length of her reach, so that her scope was small, her search detailed. She began from the poop deck, where she left Reeder, and worked forward, and so at last found him up by the bowsprit.

He stood far forward at the angle in the railing. Where the rest of the ship was only dreary, here the violence of the elements showed itself. The seas were not very high, but the ship moved heavily, and the bow smashed each crest, with a noise like the absent thunder.

Tyson faced the seas. Each time the bow met a wave, the impact sent a stinging sheet of spray over the rail; he did not flinch, but only blinked against the water. His cloak was soaked through, and he wore his hood down. He was as wet as if he had been underwater. Rowan guessed he had been there since dawn.

She called out to him, but the hiss of rain, the whistle and rattle of rigging, and the jarring crash of waves covered her voice. She moved closer and shouted.

Some sound, if not words, reached him. He turned and she saw him recognize her—recognize and withdraw, his face a closed door.

A dash of spray slapped across his back and into Rowan’s face. She winced and wiped her eyes with her fingers. When she could see, his expression had changed, and he seemed surprised, as though he had thought himself alone despite her presence. It was the cold water on her own face, his realization of her pain and discomfort, that brought him back.

He grabbed her arm, put his face close, and shouted. The words came faintly. “Get out of the weather!” Beads of water hung in his beard like crystals. The cold he had absorbed drew the heat away from her face, out through her hood.

She tried to explain. “The Captain,” she began, but she could not make her voice loud enough. At last she put her hands on his arms and looked him full in the face, letting him see her utter refusal to leave him there.

Thoughts moved behind his eyes. He let her lead him away.

They went below, down to the galley. Bel was there, dealing with an immense kettle hung over the brick stove. She looked up in astonishment. “What happened to him?”

Rowan brought him into the warmth. Tyson muttered protests. “Don’t fuss, I’m all right.”

“You are soaked.” Rowan took his cloak. The shirt beneath was as wet as his face. “And frozen.” His face was white; he shivered. Bel ladled soup from the kettle into a mug and passed it to him. He wrapped his hands around it but did not drink. His eyes found the fire and rested there.

Bel watched him silently, then turned to Rowan for answers. Rowan told her about Reeder’s boy, and Bel listened, eyes wide.

“People should be careful with magic,” the Outskirter said. “He ignored the warning. It was a stupid thing for him to do.”

“Boys are stupid,” Tyson said bitterly. “It’s in them to be stupid, and to do stupid things. That’s how they learn. Adults should know better.”

“It’s not your fault.” Rowan put a hand on his shoulder and studied his face. “He was down there already. He was looking for mischief. It’s horrible, but he found it himself.”

He turned to her. “He would have left it alone, after the guard-spell warned him. But he saw us. And I—I dared him.”

She had no answer. It was true.

“Perhaps he thought he’d be immune,” Bel said. “Perhaps he fancied himself a sailor.” The idea set off in Tyson some chain of thought that forced his eyes closed in pain.

The room was thick with dampness and cooking scents. The air was dark and close. The fire painted their faces with warm light.

Rowan remembered such a light, such air, such faces.

She had been a very young girl, perhaps five years old. The harvest was in, and it was very late at night. There was still much to do, and the family had brought their work by the firelight.

Her mother and father were husking fist-sized ears of maize. A morning rain had soaked the ears, and they gave off a visible steam in the heat. Her aunt, a narrow, fragile-looking woman, was sorting beans, and her uncle sat close to the firelight, squinting as he carefully repaired a wicker basket.

Young Rowan was shelling peas, very bored. She absently counted the number of peas in each pod, wondering if they would go past ten. Ten was all she knew.

The adults’ conversation seemed not to pertain to her, and she accepted it as a dull background to a dull job. Presently there was a lull, and her aunt began to sing a little song in a high thin voice. Rowan became more interested and stopped counting to listen.

The song was about a bird. Rowan liked that, as she was fond of birds, and there were so few around. The bird, a swallow, flew alone in an empty sky. In the morning it came close to earth and flew very fast, skimming the fields. Later it began to rain, and the swallow passed a barn. Looking inside, it saw that all the animals were in their stalls, warm and safe. At night, it flew high above an empty castle and looked down on the towers, circling around. At last it found a nest and slept, while the mysterious moon crossed the skies. Rowan thought it was a fine song.

But when it was finished she happened to look over at her uncle and saw that he was silently crying. He had stopped his work and closed his eyes. Tears ran down his weathered cheeks.

Rowan was surprised. There was nothing to cry about. The only thing that had happened was that her aunt had sung a song. The other adults ignored her uncle. That upset Rowan; someone was unhappy, no one was paying attention, and it was not right.

Then it came to her that somehow the song was not about a bird but about sorrow. She was confused. There was nothing in the song except the bird, and what it had done. Still, she knew it was so.

Later, after she had been put to bed, she crept outside and stood alone in the back yard. With her back to the house, she could see out to the edge of the cultivated land, past the funeral groves, where the desert began. The sky above was wide and empty; she thought of a tiny bird high up in that sky, looking down on her. She tried to remember the song and sang it to herself. As she sang it, her own eyes filled with tears, although she could not see why they should.

It came to her that there were reasons behind events, reasons she did not know, and that the world contained many things that were other than what they seemed. She thought that perhaps if she could fly very high, she might see a great deal.

Rowan still knew the song and sometimes sang it to herself.

She took off the cloak she was wearing and wrapped it around Tyson’s shivering shoulders. He did not look at her, but he leaned back slightly, accepting its warmth.

With a glance toward Bel, Rowan stepped out of the galley into the passageway. She wound her way among the passages, back to Tyson’s cabin. Inside, she went into his sea chest and found a warm shirt of white wool. With that, and her arms full of his charts, she emerged to encounter a very surprised purser’s mate, his hand raised to knock. Offering no explanation, she told the man about Reeder, doubtless still at the taffrail in the rain. He hurried off, and she went back to join her friends.

 

 

8

 

The first sign of the approach to Wulfshaven was not a view of the mainland itself, but of one and then a series of small islands that swept south from the still-distant mouth of the great river Wulf. The islands were mostly unclaimed, bare earth and rock, but as the Morgan’s Chance neared the port itself, there were more signs of human hands. Occasionally an island would actually be inhabited, usually by a lone fisherman feeding the land by the offal of his or her trade. More often one of the regularly planned dumps of garbage or a deposit of other fertilizing substances had brought to life some still-deserted island, creating isolated spots of green, lonely but promising.

Rowan and Bel found a place on the poop, out of the way of the increasing activity. Bel sat comfortably on the deck with her back against the aft railing. She had donned her shaggy boots and cloak, to ward off the chill sweeping down from the windy gray sky.

The previous day Rowan had made her farewells with Tyson. After the death of Reeder’s boy, he had become ever more distant and solitary, shunning Rowan and conversing with the captain and crew only at need. Rowan could find no comfortable way to approach him, no way to learn why the child’s death had affected him so personally. They parted as strangers.

Now Rowan stood near Bel, watching the maneuvers with interest. Although Morgan strode about the deck with an air of nonchalance, his glance was sharp, and his orders quick and precise. The heavy ship wallowed with all the grace he could muster and, in one lovely, astonishing move, sidled up to the wharf, its sails luffing the instant it barely nudged the dock. Morgan allowed himself a small smile, then turned away as if the matter concerned him not at all.

Wulfshaven was a deep harbor, and unloading and disembarking was a far simpler affair than at Donner. A railed gangplank bridged the shifting gap between the wharf and the ship’s starboard side. With no luggage to unload, Rowan and Bel simply walked across the plank, and so arrived at last in Wulfshaven.

The steerswoman led the way, skirting a small crowd consisting of a well-dressed portly man leading a nattering group of less elegant fellows: a merchant, with clerks in tow. A number of smaller vessels were docked along the length of the wharf, some of them sailboats in such bad repair that their status had clearly been shifted from transportation to permanent abode. Children hooted and chattered and clattered past to investigate the Morgan’s Chance.

The wind picked up briefly as they reached the end of the wharf. Rowan had returned Tyson’s cloak; she shivered.

“Do you want my cloak?” Bel offered.

“And leave you with just that blouse? No, I’ll get another soon enough.” She led Bel left, along a broad, weather-beaten esplanade.

“How soon? Are we going somewhere in particular?”

“I have friends here. We’ll spend the night with one of them, Maranne, a healer. I lodged with her during my training. I think you’ll like her.” Shops lined the shore side of the esplanade. They passed a chandlery, a sail loft, and a rope-walk.

“I thought the Archives were north of here.”

“They are. One doesn’t train at the Archives.” Rowan stopped suddenly beside a filigreed iron pole. “What’s this?” The pole stood twice as tall as a man and was surmounted by a translucent white sphere. Bel paused while the steerswoman circled, studying it.

Rowan pulled aside a passerby, a fisherman by his dress, and put a question to him. He replied with surprise. “You’re new here? That’s a lamp. They’re all along the harbor.”

Rowan looked down the street and saw another at the next corner, and the next; they lined the business street along the harbor, clustering around the open square that fronted the Trap and Net tavern farther down. “But there’s no opening,” she said. “How can they light the wicks?”

The fisherman beamed with an air of civic pride. “No wicks. They’re magic. A gift from Corvus.” He hurried on his way. “Come see them at night!” he called back. “There’s nothing like it!” The women watched as he continued down to the Trap and Net, where he noisily greeted a crowd of cronies outside.

“Corvus?” Bel asked.

“The local wizard,” Rowan said, turning back to the lamp. “Blue. Though he was Red when I was here last.” Abandoning her inspection, she led the Outskirter down the street, brooding. “Why would Corvus give Wulfshaven such a gift?”

“Out of friendship?” Bel’s gait had naturally acquired a bit of a roll during their voyage, and she weaved slightly as she tried to compensate for nonexistent waves. “I know the steerswomen don’t like wizards, but surely the wizards do a great deal of good? This Corvus, doesn’t he help the town at all?”

Rain sprinkled the street briefly, then stopped. A woman pushing a pastry cart paused and viewed the shifting sky with annoyance. “Yes,” Rowan admitted, angling around the cart. “He’ll predict the weather, sometimes, and always if there’s a heavy gale. And if the fishing is poor, he’ll give advice that’s always true. Still— “ Spotting something ahead, she walked faster to the next corner.

A small man was working at the next lamppost, stooping down to deal with something at its base. On the ground beside him lay a leather shoulder satchel, and he periodically removed and replaced items in it with an air of confidence and satisfaction.

Rowan spoke as she approached him, but he cut her off cheerfully. “Hold on a bit, now, this won’t take a moment,” he said, and continued with his work. Rowan could see that he had opened a small panel, disguised by the filigree, and was involved with something inside.

“There.” He shut the panel and locked it with a tiny key dangling by a cord from his wrist. Looking up, he appraised the two women. “Now, how can I help you?”

“I’m wondering about these new lamps,” Rowan began.

“Lovely, aren’t they?” He slapped the pole familiarly. “You must be strangers.” He gave Bel’s clothing a second, squint-eyed inspection.

“We just arrived by ship,” Bel explained. “From Donner.”

“Donner, is it?” His face lit up. He stood and dusted his hands on his trouser legs. “Well, I have family in Donner. My little niece, of course she’s not so little now, she married a fellow who—”

Rowan interrupted. “I’m sorry, I’ll be glad to give you any news I have from Donner, but first I’d like to ask you about these lamps.”

“Well, Corvus, that’s our wizard, he gave them—”

“Specifically,” Rowan continued, “I’d like to know how they work.”

“Oh, no.” He clicked his tongue. “I can’t help you there. Guild rules, you see.”

“Guild? What guild is that?”

“Why, the new Lamplighters Guild. See, when Corvus gave them, he had to teach us the spells to make them work. All very secret, sworn to secrecy, every one of us—” His eyes caught the glint of her gold chain, and his speech ended with a trailing “Er . . .” He sent a confirming glance toward the silver ring on her left hand, then winced. “I’m sorry, lady, truly I am. But I can’t tell you.”

Rowan gazed at him for a long moment. At last she said, “As I don’t have much time to spare, you needn’t go into detail. The general idea will suffice.” And she waited, suddenly quite still.

The man agonized. “I just can’t.”

Rowan simply stood, silent. Bel looked from her face to the lamplighter’s in perplexity. Finally Rowan turned without a word and began to walk away.

“Lady, please, wait a moment—”

She stopped, then slowly turned around, but did not approach. “I need to know something—” he began.

“No.”

Understanding dawned on Bel’s face, and she watched the man with interest.

“Not for myself,” he continued, “but for the Guild. I, that is, they ought to know, is your ban now just on me, or will it hold for the whole Guild?”

Rowan took her time replying. “The ban holds for any individual who refuses questions.” She made to turn away again, but Bel called to her.

The Outskirter was viewing the lamplighter with concern. “Rowan, this man has family in Donner.” Rowan said nothing, and Bel went on. “They might have been in the fire at the inn—”

“A fire?” He said in shock, “My niece, she works in an inn. And her son, too—”

“Do you know the name?” Bel asked.

“No, no I don’t.” His face showed agony. “But I know the street, Tilemaker’s Street.” He looked helplessly at the steerswoman, who waited patiently for Bel, saying nothing.

At last Bel said, “Rowan, do you know if Saranna’s Inn was on Tilemaker’s Street?”

“Yes, I do know,” Rowan replied. “I’ll wait for you at the next corner.”

Down the street she found a street vendor’s stall and interested herself in a display of bone flutes and pipes. They were of remarkable workmanship. Rowan tested a flute but lacked the skill to produce any sound at all. She had better luck with the pipes, managing to elicit a mellow hoot from the low register.

Eventually Bel joined her, and Rowan led them along a cobbled street that climbed and twisted up one of the hills above the harbor. They walked in silence, and when Rowan glanced at her, she saw that the Outskirter was deep in angry thought. Finally Bel said only, “Family is important. Rowan, that was cruel!”

They turned up a side street so narrow that the overhanging second stories sometimes had planks laid from one window to the opposite neighbor’s. Some were decorated with bright flower boxes. “Bel,” Rowan said carefully. “Suppose you discovered that another tribe had stolen half your herd and refused to give you what was yours?”

Bel stopped in outrage. “We’d kill them!”

Rowan turned back to her. “Kill them? How cruel.” And she continued on her way, leaving Bel to catch up.

The street doubled back on itself, and when they rounded one last corner, suddenly the area before them opened up. The sea was visible, patched with light and dark by the heavy clouds that moved above. Before them, the roofs of Wulfshaven were a confusion of green-tiled shapes sweeping down to the harbor below.

Rowan stopped before a house on the corner, a haphazard construction of whitewashed brick. Suddenly all the previous unpleasantness was swept away in a river of bright memories. The handful of years in the life of a taciturn farm girl from the northlands, years of struggle and confusion lanced with sudden comprehension and delight, years that ended with the arrival at the Archives of a young woman of confidence, depth, and inner strength—those years were contained in this town, these streets, and one little attic room in this very house.

“Are we going in?”

Rowan smiled. “Give me a moment,” she said. “It’s been a long time.”

Inside, the ceiling was festooned with tied bundles of dried herbs sending out dozens of evocative odors. The room was dark, the shutters pulled to against the coming rain, and a small fire flickered in the hearth. A heavyset blond woman approached them. “How may I help you?”

Rowan quelled her disappointment. “Is Maranne about? I’m an old friend.”

“No, she’s off in the east quarter. Pulling a tooth and delivering some coltsfoot tea. I’m afraid she’ll be quite late.”

“Do you mind if we wait and sit by the fire? There’s rain on the way.”

The blond woman looked at the pair uncertainly: one slightly damp woman, not dressed for the weather, and another in outlandish garb.

“Rowan used to live here,” Bel said.

The woman brightened. “Rowan? Maranne speaks of you often—you’re that steerswoman. Come, I’ll make us some tea.” She closed the door against the distant clatter of hooves on the cobbles and led them to the fire. Chairs were drawn and a kettle hung. The blond woman scanned the ceiling for likely candidates. “I don’t remember you, but I remember when the Academy was here. Oh, that was a time! People from all over, all those teachers, and experts in this and that. It takes the strangest mix to make a batch of steerswomen.” She found some peppermint hanging by the window, then added a tiny sprig of comfrey.

“I remember you,” Rowan said. “You’re Joslyn. Your father was the cooper.”

Joslyn was pleased. “There’s an example of steerswoman’s memory.” The sound of hooves outside became audible again, and with it a shouting voice. “Now, what’s that?” She opened the window.

The sound stopped, and an instant later the door slammed open and a large form filled the doorway. “Rowan! I knew it!”

The man crossed the room, and suddenly Rowan found herself engulfed in strong arms and the sweep of his cloak. Joslyn said faintly, “My word, it’s the duke!”

Rowan tried to extract herself. His hug was no comradely embrace, as he had often given her, nor even a lover’s embrace, but something full of desperate relief. “I knew it couldn’t be true!” he railed. “Damn Corvus and his scrying!”

“Artos!” She managed to pull away. “What is this?”

Bel eyed them from her chair. “You know this duke, then?”

He spun aside and pounded a nearby table violently. “That lowborn bastard! How could he tell me such a thing?”

“Tell you what? Artos, calm down,” Rowan pleaded, knowing well that the duke was one man who could never be calm.

But he did stop, all his native energy held still for a moment while he looked at her and said in a smaller voice, “He said you were dead.”

She was astonished. “Corvus?”

“Yes!” He spun away and paced, more quickly than a man his size ought to in so small a room. “He said that he was scrying and saw that you’d been killed. In Donner, by dragons! He said, ‘I’m sorry to tell you, but your pet steerswoman is dead.’ ” Artos stopped and held up his hands to ward off a reaction. “I know, I understand, you’re nobody’s pet. Those were his words, not mine. But it looks like his scry-stone was mistaken.” He paused, then smiled. “Did I mention how glad I am to see you?”

Rowan laughed happily. “Yes, I’m glad to see you, too.”

Bel spoke from her place by the fire. “The scry-stone was not far off, at that. We very nearly were killed by dragons.”

Artos turned to her, seeing her for the first time. He took in her clothing, her sword, and the piebald cloak draped on the chair behind her, with a speculating gaze. “This is Bel, my friend, an Outskirter,” Rowan explained. She turned to Bel. “You should stand when the duke enters.”

“He’s no duke of mine, and he’s already entered.” Bel did stand, but it was to swing the bubbling kettle out of the fire. “Perhaps this duke would like some tea?”

Joslyn recovered some of her composure and nervously sidled over to deal with it.

Bel approached. “Well, I’d like to know how to address a duke, and also, how he knew where to find us, and when.” She looked up at him.

“I came as soon as I heard there was a ship arrived from Donner, with a steerswoman. If it was Rowan, I knew she would come here; she couldn’t be in Wulfshaven and not visit Maranne.” He paused. “And the proper address is ‘my lord.’ ”

Bel considered, then shook her head. “That won’t do.”

“Bel—” Rowan began.

“Outskirter,” the duke mused. He had finally placed the term. “That’s a warrior, a barbarian.”

“True.”

“You’re small for a warrior.”

Bel acknowledged it. “I’m closer to the ground, and harder to knock over.”

“That’s a large sword for so small a woman.”

“I swing it two-handed.”

He nodded, his wariness tempered by interest. He leaned back against the table. “That’s good. But then you can’t carry a shield.”

“Ha. My sword is my shield.”

“Bel has been traveling with me,” Rowan said. “She’s an honorable person and has given her word not to lay waste to the Inner Lands while she’s in my company.”

The duke laughed. He had a huge laugh, as big as his person, honest and uninhibited. “Then you’d best not separate. I believe this woman could do more damage than her size might suggest. Let’s sit by the fire and wait for Maranne, and you can tell me the story.” He looked around and found Joslyn standing uncertainly by the fire. He dropped into graciousness easily. “I hope this is no inconvenience to you. Pour some tea, and please sit with us.”

Joslyn complied, hesitantly, and pulled up a stool, but Rowan noted that the herbalist kept a bit of distance between herself and the visitors. Joslyn found the situation uncomfortable, and Rowan realized with regret that at some point in the past Artos had ceased to be a frequent casual visitor to Maranne’s house.

But Bel was completely at ease and settled into a chair, tucking up both legs as if she were seated on the ground. “I’ve heard something about these dukes and barons and squires you have in the Inner Lands,” she said. “How is it that a steerswoman knows one so well? Are you all of the same class?”

Artos gave a half smile. “They say that the steerswomen are the only aristocracy open to the common folk.”

“That’s not true at all, and it’s a bad saying,” Rowan put in with some vehemence. “We come from all classes before we join, and belong to no class when we’re accepted.”

“You’re certainly well treated by the people,” the duke pointed out. “And they defer to you, grant you certain privileges . . .”

“The people treat us well of their own accord. There’s no law that compels them.”

“Custom can have the force of a law.”

“Not at all. There’s no punishment, no soldiery involved—”

He held up a hand. “Now, let’s not get into one of our discussions. We’ll be at it all night.”

Remembering, Rowan laughed. “Talking until dawn . . .”

“Often, right by this very fire . .”

Joslyn looked about the room in wonderment. Rowan said to Bel, “The Academy’s not a place, it’s an event, and the year I trained it was held here in Wulfshaven. Artos was forever haunting our classes.”

“So many strange people,” he said, and his gaze turned inward at pleasant memories. “From all the Inner Lands. Candidates from far-off towns, teachers, experts in the most peculiar things. So much to see and hear about. I never knew the world held so many things, such strange thoughts . . .”

“He looked so fascinated, and so lonely, that I took pity on him at last and started a conversation. It was easy to become friends. He has a quick mind, as it turned out, and I practically recited my daily lessons to him, most evenings . . .”

“A steerswoman can take pity on a duke?” Bel was amused.

“I wasn’t a steerswoman, yet . . .”

“And I wasn’t a duke,” Artos said. “But my uncle died near the end of the training, and I”—he made a deprecating gesture— “ascended to my position.” Then he looked a bit regretful. “I’d like to have seen it all, you know. I learned a lot in my haunting, as Rowan calls it. I know I’m better for it.

“Well.” He slapped one knee and leaned forward. “Now you must tell me how our Corvus can be so far off the mark. What happened to you?”

At the duke’s insistence, Rowan began with the fire at the inn. As it was not the true beginning of the tale, she found she had to keep backtracking and filling in, responding to peripheral questions as they occurred. The story wound its way through events almost haphazardly, but at last Artos had the whole tale of her jewel, and of her suspicion about the interest of a wizard. She showed him the glittering fragment.

He fingered it, musing. “I’ve seen this before. That witch-woman, at the edge of town.”

“Yes, you were with me. That was the first one I’d seen.”

He nodded vaguely, his eyes on the fire. From the depth of his concentration, Rowan suddenly realized that he was thinking in his areas of greatest expertise: violence and defense. Her thoughts ran ahead of his. “You can’t be serious,” she said.

He looked up. “You could always read my mind.”

“The wizard could hardly harm me at this distance.”

“How can we know? Corvus saw you all the way off in Donner. And those dragons—that must have been done at a distance. Unless your Red wizard followed you.” He returned the jewel.

“Or,” Bel put in, leaning forward, “unless it was done by Jannik.”

“Help a Red? Not likely. The Blues and Reds hate each other, only the gods know why.” And with that, the duke grew silent.

Rowan watched his face, suddenly disturbed. “Something has happened?”

He nodded. “A nasty little war, last year.” Avoiding Rowan’s face, he addressed his explanation to Bel. “Corvus turned from Red to Blue, and six months later someone’s trying to establish a new Red holding just northeast of us. And our helpful Corvus requested—” He spat the word, and abruptly his composure vanished. He slammed the arm of his chair and was on his feet, pacing like a beast. “ ‘Requested!’ ”

“Requested how many soldiers?” Rowan asked.

He flung his arms wide. “All of them! All of my regulars, all of my reserves, and—” His mouth twisted. “—as many impressed from the citizenry.”

Rowan made a calculation against her estimate of the area’s population. “And how many came back?”

“I lost twenty of my regulars. Of the rest—” He paused for effect. “Half returned.” He watched the steerswoman’s reaction, then continued in a flat tone. “Wizards. Sometimes I think they’re all insane.” He brought himself back to his chair but did not sit; he gripped the back with his large hands. “Did you know, one of them even brought a basilisk onto the battlefield? Can you imagine it? The damned thing killed as many on their side as ours.”

Bel looked at Rowan. “What’s a basilisk?”

“A magical creature, usually disguised in some fashion.”

“That’s the thing of it,” Artos said to the Outskirter. “If it looks at you, you die, sooner or later, and how can you tell if it’s looking at you when you can’t recognize it? It wiped out a squadron on their side, and one on ours. And the ones that lingered, they had it worst. We brought some of them here, no one else wanted to help them. That Red captain, what was his name?” he asked Joslyn.

“Penn,” she supplied quietly.

“You should have heard him curse his masters. The poor bastard scarcely looked human at the end.”

Joslyn was sitting silent on her stool by the fire, her cup in her lap, her head bowed.

“Your father?” Rowan asked.

The woman looked up slowly. “Tell me,” she said carefully. “Have you seen the magic lamps by the harbor?”

Artos spoke through his teeth. “A gesture of thanks.”

Bel sipped her tea. “It’s trouble if you cross a wizard, trouble if you help a wizard, and trouble if you don’t have a wizard, for things like dragons and hurricanes.” She put down the cup. “That’s altogether too much trouble.”

The duke sat down again abruptly. “Rowan, who else knows you’re in Wulfshaven?”

“I’ve made no secret of it.”

“Of course not. But Corvus thinks you’re dead, and probably Jannik, too. With any luck, your Red wizard does, as well.”

“So there’s no reason for him to look this way, to scry or try to divine my fate.”

“Word may reach him. There may be spies—I’ll let it be known that the steerswoman on the ship from Donner turned out not to be you.”

Rowan was offended. “Artos, I won’t have you lying on my behalf.”

There was a shift in his demeanor. Suddenly he was not only a friend, but a duke, a man who gave orders and who chose his own behavior. “I’m no steerswoman. I’ll lie if it suits me, to protect whomever I damn well please.” He thought briefly. “You’re going to the Archives?”

“In the morning.”

Artos stood. “Leave now.”

“We’ll have to wait. It’s a full day’s journey, and this rain—”

“Take my horse. You’ll be there by midnight.”

“Artos—”

“No, he’s right,” Bel said. “The sooner we get to where we’re going, the better.”

He looked around, and found Joslyn. “Pack them a meal for the journey. And does Maranne have an extra cloak for Rowan?”

“No. Take mine.” She went to make the preparations.

“I hardly think this is necessary—” Rowan protested.

“Rowan,” Bel said. “Shut up and let your friends help you. The duke knows more about such things than you do, and so do I.”

It was true. Rowan was familiar with violence; it was part of the world. But the violence she had met had been random, small-scale—the occasional road bandit, a fleeing criminal. She had defended herself and even killed in defense.

But this—If in fact there was a pattern to the recent events, if there was a single will behind them, then it pointed to the existence of an enemy. She stopped to absorb the idea: I have an enemy.

Bel and Artos understood enemies.

 

 

9

 

Rowan awoke to find a wood gnome regarding her from the foot of the bed. He was perched on the foot-board, peering down with droll interest, munching some bit of fruit. When he saw she was awake, he stretched out one long arm to offer her a taste. She accepted politely but only gave the piece a token nibble, as it seemed to have been dragged through several different kinds of dirt. It proved to be a slice of winter apple, identifiable only by flavor. Wood gnomes had no more than a vague recognition of cleanliness.

She looked around the room. The other four beds were empty, but Bel’s fur cloak lay on the floor next to one. Bel herself was nowhere in sight.

They had ridden through the long night, with storms gathering around them, gathering, then breaking. They ran Artos’s fine warhorse through rain along the north-going river road, a smooth clear track, until the rising hills forced them to walk. Bel rode behind Rowan, clutching her waist. Though the Outskirter never complained, Rowan felt the tension in her arms at each jolting misstep. But when the sky cracked lightning, the horse remembered battle and cried out challenge to the sound, and Bel, in kindred spirit, sat straighter, balanced, and echoed with a warrior’s laugh. Later they wearily dismounted and guided the horse in booming thunder and dancing wind up the rocky, wooded path to the stables nestled under the overhang of the Archives’ stone walls.

The wind snatched the stable door from Bel’s hand as Rowan brought the horse in, and the slam summoned Josef, the groom, from sleep to amazed discovery of the exhausted women. He led them upstairs to the transients’ dormitory, lit a fire, then left them to collapse into the chilly beds.

Now spots of sunlight climbed the far end of the room. Rowan turned back to the wood gnome and addressed him in the language of hand signals that his people shared with humans. “Where woman?” she gestured.

“Woman in bed,” he replied, obviously meaning Rowan.

“No. Other woman.” She pointed to the bed with Bel’s clothing.

“Fur-woman. Noisy woman, gone. Throw rock at me.” With an expression of vast melancholy he indicated a spot on his shoulder. Rowan made sympathetic noises. She could easily imagine the Outskirter’s reaction on waking to find a strange creature on her bed.

She rose and rummaged through a wardrobe until she found a clean shirt that fit her, then added her trousers. The wood gnome watched, rocking on his perch, long toes gripping the bedstead as easily as if they were fingers. He munched his apple. “Time for breakfast, hurry,” he advised.

“I go to find fur-woman first.”

He eyed her sadly. “Watch out for rocks.”

At the door, Rowan paused. Slanting beams of light from the high, small windows fragmented the corridor into shapes and angles of alternating light and dark. If Bel was wandering out of curiosity, in which direction would she go? Right led to more residences—another transients’ dormitory and the permanent quarters. Rowan guessed that if Bel found that those were private rooms, she would double back. The steerswoman went to the left, retracing the path they had taken the previous night; around a corner, then up again to the gallery. Bel might sensibly have done the same, to impress a known route on her memory in a strange place.

The gallery led her back to the entrance hall. A quick check of the stables downstairs showed them to be deserted. Rowan climbed the narrow stairs again up to a lookout room above the entrance: empty, the dusty close air cool and motionless, windows still shuttered against the previous night’s rain.

She descended and entered the informal hall on the left. A series of great double doors filled the wall on the right. When open, they communicated on a cool stone courtyard. They were closed now, and the high-ceilinged room stood in darkness but for the far end, where a door stood open to the next chamber; a rectangle of light, where faint voices could be heard.

Crossing to it, she entered the map room. The room was tall and long, slanting at an angle away from the entrance where she stood. Cool, clean air circulated freely through the tall open windows. Morning sunlight fell on the three ranks of long tables, whose surfaces tilted up to take advantage of the illumination.

On two walls, between the windows, the stones had been plastered, then papered and transformed into huge maps. One was a rough working chart, drawn as accurately as current information permitted, but hastily, with much amendment and many hand-scrawled notes. The opposite wall was currently blank, freshly papered; it served as an alternate when the first needed to be redrawn more concisely. Usage switched between the two with predictable regularity.

But it was the great master chart at the far end of the room that drew Rowan. Her eyes went to it as she approached, passing between the worktables.

The map ran from floor to ceiling. The wall there was curved concave, so that a person standing at a certain point could see all the map’s expanse without the distortion of visual foreshortening. The point of best vantage was outlined on the stone floor in a brass rectangle.

The floor was slightly raised in the area before the master chart. Rowan climbed the three steps and moved to the rectangle.

In a single glance, she saw the areas of change: positions corrected, details where none had been before. For a moment she felt an internal shift, as if she were on a deck that tilted to a wave too small to change her direction but large enough to alter her perspective. “What do you see?”

She turned. Below her was a woman twice her age, dark-haired, dark-skinned, blue-eyed. Keridwen, the chart-mistress.

Rowan laughed happily. “I see lakes in the mountains. A stream runs from one—that contributes to the Wulf. Another fjord south of The Crags.”

“And three new towns on the Shore Road.” Keridwen climbed the steps. “You’re not due back until next year, Rowan. Is there trouble?”

“Perhaps,” she replied. “But I’ve found something. I need to talk to the Prime.”

“She heard you were in. Someone was sent to wake you.”

“I woke before she arrived. Or perhaps I missed her in the corridors. Unless it was a wood gnome that was sent?”

Keridwen laughed. “They returned early this year. A very mild winter.”

“Not where I was traveling.” Her mind returned to Bel. “But I’m looking for a friend of mine, who woke before me.”

“I’ve seen no strangers today. Perhaps she found the kitchen, and breakfast?”

“Or upstairs?” There was a high, bright chamber above the map room, used in fair weather to copy charts for storage.

“I came from there.”

“I’d better continue, then. She may find this place . . . strange.”

Rowan left by the door opposite to the one she entered. It gave onto a short passage whose right wall held tall doors. She swung them open and looked out; the courtyard revealed was empty.

Rowan found herself pausing, struck by a feeling that had been growing, unnoticed, in her. She stepped into the courtyard and then realized: it was familiarity. She felt like a person returning to a place of her childhood, finding it familiar yet strangely altered. But the place was the same, and some subtle change was in herself.

It had been well over three years since last she had been at the Archives. She had traveled long and mostly alone, over lands unknown to her when she met them, then well known to her through scrupulous observation. Her logbooks had returned to the Archives by other hands, and news of the place had reached her through the words of others. And yet, across that distance, she knew where every room lay, knew the names of all who dwelt there. She could walk into the Greater Library and place her hand immediately on the shelf where her own writings were stored.

This small courtyard had been a particular favorite of hers. It was cool even in high summer, and always sheltered on windy days. She remembered bringing old logbooks there to study, and reading them with fascination; then, sensing a presence behind her, turning to see the smiling wrinkled face of the very steerswoman who wrote them. She remembered an evening celebration not long after the arrival of herself and her fellow trainees from Wulfshaven; nine of them gathered in the courtyard, Janus playing flute, herself talentlessly struggling with a mandolin, Ingrud plying her squeeze-box with gusto; others laughing and conversing, sound echoing off the ancient walls . . .

On an adjacent side another door opened, then another, and the passage on that wall was transformed into a veranda on the courtyard. A woman peered at her, then approached: Berry, tall and dark-haired, recognizing her nearsightedly. “Rowan, is it? The Prime is looking for you.”

Rowan smiled at her. “Fine greeting. You’re looking well. Yes, I want to see her too, but first, have you noticed an Outskirter going by, or perhaps in the libraries?”

“An Outskirter? What, a shaggy barbarian here?”

“Not too shaggy; she’s a woman. Well, shaggy perhaps, if you consider her clothes. But you haven’t noticed her, then.”

“Hardly! Is she dangerous?”

Rowan considered. “Under certain circumstances.”

She left by the doors Berry had opened and looked down the passages. The one on the right led to the Prime’s study and residence. After a moment’s consideration, Rowan went left.

She passed a study and paused to check inside. Two women and a stocky man of middle age were gathered around a worktable. Graphs, some of startling configuration, were pinned up haphazardly around the walls of the room.

Rowan made to leave, but the man caught sight of her. “Rowan! You’re back before your time. Come, take a look at this.”

“I’m sorry, Arian, I’m looking for a friend who may be lost in the passages.” But she found herself intrigued and stepped inside. “Are you making progress?”

“None to speak of. Still, surprises keep coming up.”

One of the steerswomen with him looked up suddenly, as if remembering something. “Henra is looking for you,” she told Rowan.

“Yes, I’ve been told.” But she suddenly recalled the calculations she had made on the road to Donner. “Wait, I have something.” She came to the table and found a blank sheet of parchment. “Look at this.” Sketching quickly, she briefly explained the problem of the dispersal of the jewels.

Arian tapped the rough chart. “With an area that wide, your imaginary giant would have to stand very far back.”

“And be very tall indeed,” one of the steerswomen noted.

Rowan laid a straightedge across the scales, indicated a number.

“That’s too tall,” Arian said.

The other steerswoman spoke up. “The ground would never support him, do you see? He’d sink in. He couldn’t eat enough to live.”

Rowan was annoyed at the digression. “It needn’t be a giant, a tower will do. It’s a giant for the purposes of the problem.” She turned back to the chart. “So. He stands this far away, he’s this tall, and throws parallel to the ground. The area his throw covers, assuming, shall we say, twenty objects in his hand . . .” She read off two numbers from the right-hand scale and made a simple calculation.

Arian looked at the result. “Straightforward enough.”

Rowan held up an index finger. “But.” Turning over the sheet, she redrew the chart with greater precision—and with its elements at slightly different aspect to each other. “He throws again, this time—” She paused significantly. “Angling upward.” She handed the straightedge to the steersman.

He laid it on the chart. “The area covered . . .” He looked up. “But the path doesn’t intersect with the ground.”

“Look at the time it takes to fall.”

The straightedge swept across the scales. “Infinite?”

“Look again.”

A shift. “Zero?”

“The objects never come down.”

He leaned back. “That’s impossible. They have to come down.”

“Of course it’s impossible,” Rowan said. “Of course they have to come down. Do you see? I’ve found a situation where our usual methods fail.”

Squinting in thought, Arian studied. “No,” he said at last. “It’s not the method that’s at fault. It’s the problem. You’ve set up an impossible situation.”

“We don’t know that.”

“Impossible giants—”

“Or very possible towers!”

The second steerswoman spoke again. “Be hard to build a tower that high.”

Rowan threw up her hands. “But we’re not concerned with the difficulty here—”

“You can’t ignore crucial elements,” Arian put in.

“That’s hardly crucial—”

“There is obviously,” he stated carefully, “something wrong with the problem. We know that the techniques work, but we’re getting an impossible answer. It can’t be our method that’s at fault, so it must be the problem itself.”

Rowan drew back. “Arian, that is backward reasoning, and you know it well. You mustn’t deny information simply because it differs from what you expect. You’re not thinking like a steersman—”

He interrupted, his voice stony. “Rowan, I do not need your instruction in how to think like a steersman.”

She stopped short, curbed her temper, then began again. “We know that the approaches handed down to us always seem to work, but we can’t always see why—”

“Exactly what I’ve been working on these years, with my ‘backward reasoning’—”

“But there may be different ways to look at it. You’ve been working from the inside out; but if we can—” She sought an analogy. “If we can map the edges we may be better able to see the whole. We may be able to work from the outside in.”

The other steerswomen exchanged glances. One shook her head minutely, but the other tilted her head in Rowan’s direction. She obviously agreed but was unwilling to enter the argument.

Rowan prepared to speak again but was interrupted by an arrival at the door. “Rowan? Do you know the Prime is waiting for you?”

She grit her teeth, unwilling to leave battle. “Arian, you must excuse me,” she said. She exited with exaggerated dignity.

As she turned toward the Prime’s offices, the messenger tapped her shoulder, then pointed in the opposite direction. “The garden,” the woman corrected, then disappeared on further errands.

When Rowan arrived at the herb garden, the fact of the season’s change asserted itself, the blooms of late spring already giving way to those of early summer. A tall patch of knapweed raised shaggy purple heads by the door; the rosemary beside it was past flowering.

In the distance Rowan heard not conversation but music. Surprised, she threaded her way on the flagstone paths to the garden’s center.

There stood, among the plots of herbs and flowers, four pear trees, set each in a corner of a patch of marigold. The path between was widened there and curved. At the intersection of the crossing paths stood two low stone benches.

Henra, the Prime, sat on one. Beside her sat Bel the barbarian. They were singing together.

Rowan approached slowly, fascinated.

They were singing an ancient song about a knight lost in a magic forest. Both sang the melody, though Bel added an occasional ornate turn that pleasantly countered Henra’s steady note. They reached a point where their words and melody diverged. The Prime interrupted, saying, “I learned that part differently. Teach me how you know it.” Bel sang on alone. Her voice was strong and mobile, not deep, but with a husky dark edge to the tone.

Henra then sang her version in a voice clear and pure as fresh water. When she reached a familiar section, Bel joined her again, eyes closed, head tilted back.

As Rowan reached the benches, the song ended. Bel opened her eyes and spotted something among the branches of the pear tree. “Ha! There’s one of them!” She leaped up, then scrabbled among the loose stones by the walk. Above her, a wood gnome began flinging down poorly aimed bits of twig, hooting and jeering.

Rowan restrained her. “There’s no need to worry. They’re harmless.”

“Harmless, ha! Look at those teeth!” These the gnome bared yellowly.

Henra was signaling up to him. “Stop, stop. Woman not hurt you. You come down now.”

“No. Bad woman, dirty.” He spoke in broad emphatic gestures, then hugged himself to a branch, rocking.

“This woman my friend,” the Prime told him, but he shrieked fury. The sound attracted the attention of another gnome, who abandoned his inspection of the rain gutter to investigate.

“The gnomes are friendly,” Rowan told Bel, but the Outskirter shouted “Ha!” and struggled to aim her stone. A steerswoman on the other side of the garden noticed the ruckus and began to approach.

Henra caught one of the gnome’s hands and shook her index finger in his face admonishingly. Rowan clutched at Bel’s throwing arm and stepped in front of her, blocking her aim. Outskirter and wood gnome uttered near-identical sounds of frustration.

Abruptly, Rowan and the Prime stopped and looked at each other. Henra began laughing, then Rowan joined her. “I think we’re doing similar jobs,” Rowan noted. They released their respective charges and helplessly dropped to the bench.

Bel glowered down at them. The gnome leaped to the ground and escaped.

Wiping tears from her eyes, Henra leaned back at last and examined Rowan. The Prime was a small woman, shorter than Bel, and fine-boned and delicate. She had a grace and presence beyond her size, and Rowan, at average height, had always felt huge and clumsy beside her. She seemed half-magical, like an elf out of song, with angular features and long green eyes. Her face was a lined map of wisdom, but age had neither grayed nor grizzled her waist-length hair. Instead, it was laced with silver; no longer plain brown, it was the exact color of smooth sunlit water pouring over dark earth.

“Your friend has mentioned that you’ve had some trouble,” Henra said.

Rowan’s mirth faded. “That’s right. It’s going to take some explaining.”

The Prime considered, assessing Rowan’s demeanor. She turned to Bel. “If you cross the garden to those doors,” she said, indicating them, “you’ll find yourself in the dining hall. There are some at breakfast already, and others will be along soon enough.” She smiled. “I think you’ll find the company enjoyable.”

Rowan followed the Prime back into the cool corridors to her office. Inside Henra seated herself in a massive armchair by the cold hearth. From a stool beside her she picked up a blue knitted lap robe; so deep in the Archives, in the central room, the stone walls were an effective barrier against the warmth of day. Wrapping the robe around her legs, she gestured for Rowan to take the chair on the opposite side of the low wooden table before her.

Rowan went to the chair but did not sit. She felt as if she needed to move. She wanted to pace; she wanted to stride to some open window and view the forested land rolling to the horizon. She wanted her charts, her book, her pen and calipers in her hand—but they were gone.

She saw that the Prime had noticed their absence and was waiting for her to speak. Rowan shifted her weight back and forth. “I was attacked on the road to Donner,” she said at last.

Henra tilted her head. “One of the hazards of traveling.” She still waited; an unlucky encounter on the road was not, in itself, enough to send a steerswoman back to the Archives.

“It was a wizard’s man,” Rowan said. Suddenly she felt she could sit, and she did.

Henra leaned back slowly. Her emerald gaze flickered as she sifted possibilities and implications, then fell on Rowan. “The one thing we do not need is the active enmity of a wizard. We take pains not to cross them.” Rowan knew that well. It had been stressed in her training, passed on to her, along with an unexpressed, slow-burning anger against the wizards’ secretiveness, their refusal to impart information.

Rowan shook her head. “I had no idea I was working on anything to interest a wizard.” She pulled out the little leather sack, opened it, and removed the glittering fragment. “I was investigating this.” She passed it to the Prime.

Henra studied it, turning it over in her hand, and Rowan began to speak. She described its history, detailed her findings, and gave her justifications for straying from her assigned route. Maps were brought out, and with them spread out on the low table, Rowan sketched the pattern of dispersal, that narrow oval that stretched from the eastern curve of the Long North Road into the heart of the Outskirts. She reconstructed the graph she had made during her conversation with Bel on the road to Donner, and described Arian’s indignation at her speculations.

The Prime considered the information, questioning her carefully. At some point a tray of tea was brought in, along with rolls and honey. At some other point, the remains were removed. Lost in the exchange of information, Rowan did not notice the intrusion until Henra graciously thanked the woman, who smiled and exited wordlessly.

At last Henra leaned back in her chair. “And at no point did you encounter any wizard? Or any person known to work with a wizard?”

Rowan examined her memory again, wishing she had her logbook. “Not to my knowledge, not until Five Corners. And those men never spoke to me. Nor asked about me, as far as I know. I think someone would have mentioned it if they did.”

“Which means,” Henra said carefully, “that they already knew all they needed.”

“Exactly.”

“Then they know more than we do.”

“That’s not all.” Rowan recounted the dragon attack on the inn in Donner, and Corvus’s surprising knowledge of the event. She added Artos’s conviction that she was in danger even in Wulfshaven. Artos, and his skill in warfare, were known to the Prime.

Finally Henra sighed. “The obvious solution is to abandon this investigation,” she began.

“No!”

The Prime glanced at Rowan, then smiled. “That doesn’t suit you.”

“We’ve never been a threat to any wizard. I can’t believe this jewel can be that important. It doesn’t do anything, not that I’ve seen.”

“Perhaps you haven’t seen all there is to see.”

“We can’t let them limit us!” Rowan was on her feet, pacing. “Isn’t it enough that they won’t share their knowledge with us?”

“Their secrecy is their strength,” Henra reminded her. “If everyone had access to their knowledge, the folk and the wizards would be equal. And if we had that knowledge, it would be free for the asking.”

Rowan stopped short. “Then this must have something to do with their power.”

“Possibly.” Henra turned the jewel over in her hands; it caught the light from a high-set window and flashed, once. “Or, they may see that the course of investigating the jewels will lead you to other avenues, that may in turn lead you to their secrets.” She handed the blue shard back to Rowan, carefully folded her lap robe, and rose. “This is a large decision. Let’s join the others.”

Rowan watched her cross to the door. “Do you know what we’re going to do?”

Henra turned back to her. “I know what we have to do. I don’t know that we will do it.”

 

Rowan and the Prime found most of the Archives’ inhabitants lingering over bits of breakfast in a hall whose tall windows looked out to the garden on the one side, to a sweep of woody hills on the other. Bel was seated near the head of the table, and eager questioners on all sides were taking the opportunity to ply her with queries about her exotic background and the customs of the distant Outskirts. The steerswoman at the head shifted her seat in favor of the Prime, and Rowan found a chair on her right, across from Bel.

“There’s our wayward child,” an elderly woman beside Rowan greeted her affectionately. “It’s good to see a young face again.”

Bel took in the comment, then looked around the table. “Are there no other steerswomen Rowan’s age?”

“Steerswomen begin by traveling,” Rowan replied. “The largest part of our work is done on the road and the sea, observing and learning. Most steerswomen travel all their lives.”

“Until they get too old,” Keridwen put in, from the end of the table.

“Or,” Arian added, “until they find some particular area of study which no longer depends on constant fact-gathering.”

Bel’s glance went to his ring. “You’re a steerswoman?”

“Steersman,” he corrected. “Yes, there are a few.”

“It’s not forbidden?”

Several laughed, and Arian snorted derisively. “Most men seem to be satisfied to live by their muscles. Well,” he admitted, “to be fair, most men learn to live by their strength early on, and never lose the habit.”

“Very few men apply when the Academy is held,” Rowan added. “And few of those complete the training. Those who do, manage quite as well as the women. In fact,” she said with a nod to Arian, “at present we have more steersmen than ever in our history. Three.”

Someone shifted uncomfortably. Rowan looked around the table. “What is it?”

The steerswoman beside her placed a hand on her arm. “Possibly only two, dear. We’ve lost track of Janus.”

“Last year we heard of a ship lost at sea,” Henra added, “sailing from Donner to Southport.” Southport, Rowan knew, had been on Janus’s planned route.

“Was he on it?” Rowan asked.

“We don’t know.”

Rowan digested the information, then found Bel watching her. “It happens,” Rowan explained.

Bel turned to Josef, seated two spaces to her left. “Are you the third steersman?”

He put up his hands in protest. “No, not me! A simple groom, beast-tender. Wouldn’t be here at all but for the love of my life.” He made a nimble snatch at Berry as she passed with a pitcher of water.

Berry made an equally nimble dodge. “As you can tell, my husband learns his manners from the beasts, as well.” But she smiled.

“But you’re Rowan’s age. Shouldn’t you be traveling?”

Berry placed a pitcher of water carefully on the table and took her seat next to Josef. “I’m going blind,” she explained matter-of-factly.

Bel was appalled. “How awful! But can you still be a steerswoman, blind?”

“If there’s a way, we’ll discover it,” Henra said.

“Work of the mind, that’s what you want,” Arian advised. “Some huge, rare, imaginative problem.”

Berry nodded at him with suppressed amusement. “That’s a good idea. Perhaps I’ll join you in your math . . .”

“Skies, no, girl, you’re not good enough-oof!” The elderly steerswoman next to Arian had elbowed him mightily in the ribs. “But it’s true.”

“Of course it’s true,” the woman said. “But you needn’t beat her with it. She has other strengths.”

Henra looked around the table, then spoke to Keridwen. “Where’s Hugo?”

“Still in his room, I believe. On chill mornings, he’s likely to stay there until noon.”

“Tell him to come here, please.”

Keridwen hurried off, and the Prime helped herself to another biscuit. “Hugo has made a study of the wizards,” Rowan explained to Bel.

Keridwen returned presently with a frail elderly man, who leaned both on her shoulder and on a walking stick as he approached. He viewed the assemblage. “What’s this? A meal at this hour?” He squinted his watery blue eyes at the sky. “Don’t tell me it’s morning!”

Henra’s smile was affectionate. “Come sit by me. I need your advice.”

Rowan vacated her chair and pulled another close beside Bel. Hugo lowered himself down carefully. “Ah, now, lady, you don’t fool me for a moment. It’s my manly companionship you’re after, admit it. And more than mere companionship, isn’t it true?”

The Prime laughed lightheartedly and spoke as if reciting the lines of a familiar jest. “Now, Hugo, what can you mean? You know you’re far too old for me.”

“Oh, so you say now! But the gap shrinks, they tell me, as you grow older. A few years from now you’ll join me by the fireside, and we’ll toast our toes together, and dream of things we might have done. And do a few of them, as well.”

Rowan took in Bel’s astonished expression, recognizing her surprise as the same that she herself had felt when first seeing the steerswomen behave so informally with each other. She leaned toward the Outskirter. “We’re not an aristocracy,” Rowan explained quietly, “and we’re not an army, or a religion, either. Whatever doesn’t affect our work, doesn’t matter.”

As if to illustrate the point, Henra made one small gesture, and the table fell instantly to attentive silence. Hugo sat the slightest bit taller, and the wry humor slipped from his face, replaced by the intelligent, waiting expression of the perfect steersman.

Henra spoke to the group. “Rowan was attacked by a wizard’s man.”

Every face turned to Rowan. In a visible rapid wave, their shock turned to seriousness, and they waited, silently, for more information. Only Josef made a sign; his fist slammed on the table, once. No one looked at him.

Henra continued. “It was one day’s travel south of Five Corners.”

The elderly woman next to Arian spoke. “You’re certain he was a wizard’s man?”

“At the inn I saw five Red soldiers. I recognized him as one of that five,” Rowan replied. The woman nodded. No one questioned Rowan’s ability to recognize the face of a man seen once, in passing, as part of a crowd.

Henra turned to Hugo. “Which wizard controls that area?”

He sat quietly a moment, rheumy blue eyes flicking at the action of his thoughts. “That’s difficult to say, lady. Olin, north and east of Five Corners, he’s Red these days. Or was, as of winter. Five Corners, that’s at the limit of his area, as clear as these things can be made out.”

Rowan spoke up. “No one seemed surprised to see wizard’s men in the tavern.”

“With the recent clash, there must be a lot, traveling to their homes. Five Corners is a likely stop for any of Olin’s men, returning.”

“I didn’t know he kept soldiers.”

"Ah, yes, well, neither did I, until he sent troops against Corvus and Abremio. It means he must have a keep somewhere, and we’ve been assuming he didn’t.”

“Don’t all wizards have keeps?” Bel asked.

“No, not at all. Jannik, for instance. All he has is his house in Donner. Mind you, no one’s ever been inside.” He rubbed his nose thoughtfully. “Now, Olin, he’s always been especially confusing. Seen rarely, never in the same place twice, always alone. Often the only way to know he’s there is by the sudden appearance of some magical event.”

Henra leaned forward, intent. “Might Five Corners be his, these days?”

“Hard to tell. His boundaries have always been especially vague. It’s not Jannik’s; it might be no one’s, or Shammer and Dhree’s.”

Rowan remembered Artos’s complaints. “The new Red holding?”

“Right. They’re two, working together as one; I don’t understand the arrangement. They’re Red.” He turned to Henra. “They’re the culprits, I believe, or somehow wrapped up in this. I don’t know that Five Corners is theirs, but it’s possible, and they’re the only new variable in the equation.” Hugo addressed himself to Bel. “Understand, the wizards and the Steerswomen don’t like each other, but there hasn’t been violence between us for centuries. We can’t get rid of each other, so we tolerate each other. But now a steerswoman has been attacked by a wizard’s man—Rowan, could he have been acting on his own?”

Rowan thought briefly, checking over her conclusions. “No. There were five wizard’s men at the inn; there are five roads away from the inn. They left before Bel and I did; whatever road we took, we would have met one. This was planned.”

Berry looked around, as if searching the faces she could not clearly see. “There are other steerswomen traveling in Shammer and Dhree’s holding. Why was Rowan attacked, and no one else?”

Henra nodded to Rowan. With all eyes on her, Rowan pulled out the little leather sack, lifted its string over her head, and opened it. “Here’s the other new variable in the equation,” Henra said.

Hugo took the jewel and scrutinized it while the Prime recounted Rowan’s story with perfect accuracy.

“Wizard’s make, for certain,” he said when she finished. He turned it over in his hands again. “I can’t think of any jeweler’s process that could do this. Sarah—” He passed the jewel down across the table to the elderly steerswoman on Arian’s left.

She peered at it closely. “It’s built in layers—the silver-colored backing, then the gem. The lines are etched, so that the metal lies both on the surface and into it.” She scraped the edge of the fragment with one fingernail. “The last surface is like very thin glass, but no glass can be made that thin. Strange texture . . .” She passed it diagonally.

The next woman was pale and delicately beautiful, the only sign of her age the silver glittering in her ebony hair. She looked at the jewel carefully, then closed her eyes, rubbing her thumb across the smooth surface. “Oily . . .” She looked at it again. “It’s made of oil, somehow, or has oil in it. If fine olive oil were perfectly clear, and somehow made solid, it might be like this.”

Sarah took the jewel again, cleared a space in the center of the table, and placed it there, standing to get a better vantage. The other steerswomen shifted and leaned closer. “That’s a good point. You can’t polish anything to this smoothness. I believe that top surface was poured on as a liquid, then solidified, somehow.”

“Magically,” Bel put in confidently.

“Perhaps,” Sarah admitted.

The Prime spoke to Bel. “May we see your belt?”

The Outskirter stood to remove it, and it was passed around. “They were all found in the same place, far in the Outskirts,”

Rowan explained. “It’s the largest concentration I’ve heard about; I think something could be learned by going there, to see.”

“With a wizard on your trail,” Berry observed. Josef winced.

“One or more.” Every face turned to Hugo. “Think for a moment about Jannik. His control over the dragons isn’t complete, but it’s almost so. Could another wizard send a spell to break it? Sometimes one or two nestlings can escape and cause trouble, especially the tiniest ones. But Saranna’s Inn was—where, the center of town?”

“Not far from the harbor,” Rowan said. “Tilemaker’s Street.”

“And the mud flats are at the edge of town. That’s seven miles they had to travel, through the streets—no, isn’t there a shallow gully that runs near Tilemaker’s Street?”

“That’s right.”

“And how many dragons were there?”

Rowan counted. “Seven, that I saw myself. More outside, which I didn’t see. Someone reported fifty, but the layman’s eyes can fool him, in emergencies. At a guess, at least twenty-five, total.”

Hugo shook his head fractionally. “I don’t believe that can happen.”

Bel looked around the now-silent table. “Then Jannik was in on it, Rowan guessed.”

“I saw it was a possibility,” Rowan said.

Hugo was deep in thought. “Two wizards, cooperating across a line of mutual hatred . . .”

“We need to decide what to do,” Henra said.

Arian was surprised. “Decide? One decides when one has options. Where are there options here?”

“Are there none?” She concentrated on Arian. “Very well, what do you see happening next?”

“Rowan continues her investigations. She’ll have to be very alert, if she’s attracted the wizards’ attentions . . .” He trailed off. “But if they’re determined, they’ll get her eventually.”

“Then we must make this move more quickly,” Sarah put in. “If we all work on it, and if we send out word to those on the road—”

Berry interrupted. “Then we each become the same threat that Rowan is. And, collectively, the entire order of Steerswomen becomes a threat.”

“But if we work fast enough—”

“How fast is fast enough?” Keridwen challenged. “It can’t be done instantaneously.”

Watching the Prime, Rowan realized that Henra saw an answer, but was patiently waiting for the rest of the steerswomen to duplicate her reasoning; she wanted the chain of thought to be clear in their minds, wanted it to be each person’s own possession.

“What is the most basic statement of the problem?” Rowan asked, half to herself, musing.

That was an often-repeated phrase in the early education of a steerswoman-in-training, and conversation stopped in surprise at Rowan’s presenting it to steerswomen of such advanced experience. But Berry, not many years from her own traineeship, caught the mood. “Investigating the jewels is dangerous.”

Henra encouraged them. “Two options, on this level.”

“Work in danger,” Rowan said, “or abandon the investigation.”

Response was immediate, from several corners. “We mustn’t abandon it.” “We have to learn all we can.” “We can’t let the wizards rule us.” “No one controls us.”

The Prime nodded. “That choice is rejected. We work in danger. The options are two . . .”

Keridwen considered. “Accept danger, or change the situation . . .”

“Accepting the danger is accepting death—and incidentally, an end to any investigating,” someone noted.

“The first choice is rejected. How can we change the situation?” Henra prompted.

“Find the source of the danger and counter it,” another steerswoman offered.

“The source of the danger is the wizards,” Hugo noted. “We can’t counter them.”

“No,” Rowan realized. “The source is their knowledge of our actions.”

There was a silence. Bel looked around the table in perplexity. Annoyed, she said, “It’s obvious. You have to work in secret. Why is that so hard to see?”

“Because it is so hard to accept,” Henra replied.

“It is absolutely opposite to everything we do and believe in,” Hugo expanded.

She would have to deny information, Rowan realized. She would have to refuse questions, or—worse yet—give false answers.

Henra surveyed every face around the table, then spoke carefully. “Rowan would have to travel to the Outskirts under an assumed identity. No one must know who she is, what she seeks, or that she’s a steerswoman.”

No one spoke, and Bel looked at them in confusion. “But what’s the problem?”

Abruptly, Rowan said, “I won’t do it.” Faces turned to her. “Lady, I understand, truly I do,” she continued, half pleading, “but I can’t agree. There must be some other way. To lie, to walk the earth lying . . . Humankind needs truth. We all know that; we need it like air and water and food, to survive, to function in the world . . . I’d be like a poison, twisting things everywhere I went, hurting people.” She laid her hands against her cheeks and shook her head. “No.”

Henra took it all in, considering. “Arian? Would you do it?”

“Me?” He looked up, surprised. “Well, I don’t like the whole idea, but I do think it’s the best solution. And someone has to do it.” Then he smiled. “Oh, you’re clever, Henra. Most of the folk don’t even know there are steersmen among the steerswomen. I’d never be suspected. But when it comes down to the actual doing of the thing . . .” He thought. “I feel much as Rowan does. I think it would . . . pain me. And my work here . . .” He sighed. “Try to find someone else. Please, exhaust every possibility, and if you find no one, then yes.”

Henra nodded, then looked to her left. “Berry?”

She was startled. “What?”

“Would you do it?”

She stared around in stunned disbelief. “Me?” Then, slowly, she said, “Yes . . . yes, send me.” She spoke to Henra, her voice urgent. “I’ll do it. I’ll do anything. I’ll lie a thousand times. I’ll steal if you ask it. Anything! Please, send me . . .” She gazed up into the sky, her dim eyes bright with tears. “On the road, one last time . . .”

“She’s blind,” Sarah protested.

Berry turned on her. “I’m not blind, not yet! I can see shapes and colors. I won’t walk into a tree; I won’t fall off the edge of the road.” She addressed them all. “And I know those roads, and I can read a map, held close.”

“But she can’t observe,” Arian said. “And she couldn’t spot, say, a jewel imbedded in a cliff. In new territory she could get lost.” The Prime said nothing; she was looking at Josef.

He nodded slowly, then turned to his wife, taking both her hands. “When the time comes for eyes, you’ll have mine.”

“You’d go with me?”

“No.” He laughed a little. “I’d stay with you, wherever in the world you may be. You and me, we’ll walk under the stars together.”

She touched his face and moved close to study his expression. Then she leaned her bowed head against his shoulder.

Josef’s eyes met Henra’s, and his face was full of calm entreaty.

Henra spoke. “Josef is not a steersman, but with Berry to interpret what he saw, something could be learned. Perhaps not enough, but something. And no one would guess that she was a steerswoman.

“Rowan.”

Rowan turned to the Prime.

“You’re still the best choice,” Henra said. “You’re familiar with the jewels, you’re highly observant, flexible and imaginative in thought. We would learn the most, if you were the one to go.” She held up her hand. “I understand your disagreement. But I want you to consider this: It will be done. Won’t you help us do it the best way we can?”

The Prime stood. “Don’t answer. Please think. We’ll all speak again this evening.” The chairs shuffled, and the steerswomen dispersed one by one, until there was only Bel, watching Rowan, and Rowan, silently watching Josef whispering gentle words to Berry.

At last Rowan rose and walked away.

 

 

10

 

“I don’t see what the problem is.”

They were walking down the winding dirt path that led from the Archives to the riverside below. Oak trees surrounded them, gnarled roots invading the edges of the path.

“Don’t you want to find out about these jewels?” Bel continued.

“Yes. But I’m just not willing to lie.”

Bel snapped a twig she was carrying and tossed the pieces into the underbrush. “I don’t understand you. You were willing to learn about them, even if it put you in danger. But you won’t do a simple thing like lying.”

Rowan felt a return of the sudden, sharp need that had sent her out of the stone walls of the Archives, a need for a sweep of air that knew no obstructions, for the unbounded sky above her. She walked a little faster, to escape the net of tree branches overhead. “It’s not such a simple thing.” Of its own accord, a part of her began trying to formulate an explanation, a calm steerswoman’s explanation; but the part of her that held the information for that answer was churning with confused emotion.

“Ever since I became a steerswoman—no,” she stopped, surprised. “Ever since I was a child . . .” Her voice trailed off, her mind sifting through memories like hands sifting through chaff, seeking a single grain of wheat.

When had it happened, when had she learned to care what was true and what was not? Children lied, they all did, and ranks of casual lies crowded into her thoughts. No, I didn’t drop the eggs. No, I didn’t tell Father. Yes, I finished all my work.

One single lie stood in high relief, not a great lie, but one that had lasted long into her adolescence. Periodically, she would leave the house and fields, taking some small bit of food, and make the long trek to the farthest of the funeral groves, the last bit of green before the desert took true possession of the land. She would explain that she was going to visit her uncle’s tree, and the family would say quietly to each other, “Poor Rowan, his death affected her so badly.” But it was not true. She went from a need to see something other than the house, the yard, that dusty path leading to the town of Umber. She knew everything in her world, knew it too well, and there was nothing more that her mind or heart could do with it.

But north . . . Past the groves, there was land no hands had touched. Raw earth, lacking only water, fertilization, and seed. It waited there, waited out the centuries for the slow spread of humankind. It was emptiness to the limits of the sky. At last that view, too, became familiar, but she still returned, without clearly knowing why.

She needed to see different things, change in the land and in the faces of people. But there was a stronger need, one she discovered the day that Keridwen had come to Umber in her own travels. Rowan discovered that the steerswoman knew things, and speaking to her, she realized that there was another landscape, one to be traveled endlessly, the limits of which she could never exhaust.

So Rowan and Keridwen had sat together late into the night, Rowan asking first about places, then about people, then about the ideas of people, then about the idea of ideas . . . And Keridwen’s answers had grown richer and deeper, as her expression changed from indulgence, to surprise, to interest.

Sometime near midnight Rowan had realized that the aspect of the discussion had changed to that of a conversation between equals; not equals of knowledge or of experience, but of method of thought. They shared a perspective, a deeply rooted way of approaching life. The night ended with Keridwen telling her of the Academy to take place in Wulfshaven some four years from that time. Rowan spent those four years learning to read and write, to do sums, and scrupulously attempting to chart the land she knew, in the hopes of gaining some skill for her training to come.

She had spent her life alone in her strangeness, and had met only one other person like herself. When she joined the Academy, she was like an exile who had returned home.

Looking around, Rowan discovered that she and Bel had arrived at the riverbank and were seated on a rotting log near its edge. The Wulf spread out before them, flat and serene. A thin haze of clouds was moving in from the west, and high above, a mere dark speck, a hawk hung motionless.

“Truth,” Rowan said to herself, then turned to Bel. The Outskirter was watching her with concern. She had not intruded on Rowan’s thoughts, but was carefully waiting, with true warrior’s patience. She knew that Rowan had to follow her own path to her own answers, and that the answers, once found, would be shared.

“If you’re traveling down a road, and you ask for directions, and someone lies about them, what happens?” Rowan asked.

“You get lost.”

“If you want to know when to plant your fields, and someone lies, what happens?”

“You go hungry.”

“If there’s a troop of bandits coming, and no one tells you?”

“You die.”

“People need truth! They need it to be happy, to know what to do, to live!” Rowan rose. A single step took her to the water, and she stood with her gray boots mere inches away from the tiny lapping waves as she gazed out at the line of trees on the opposite shore.

“What you say is too simple,” Bel said. “Some things are less important than others.”

Rowan looked up at the clouding sky, where the motionless hawk still hung. She saw with the whole of her vision equally, and her hearing brought her what her eyes could not see, the shape of space behind her. Lightly moving wind brushed her arms, and damp air floated up from the river before her, against her face and body. She sensed the crushed weeds that lay under the soles of her boots, and the solid earth beneath. She felt the weight of her own body, muscle and bone, connecting her to that earth, the limits of her skin defining the space she occupied. Simultaneous, interlocking, all senses added up in her being to a single perception, a single clear instant. The whole of her surroundings came to her in one perfect moment, all of it real, and all of it true.

“They’re going to take it all away,” she said.

Bel said nothing.

Some wizard was changing the nature of Rowan’s existence. She could either accept an arbitrary limit to her mind’s reach, and so be less than a steerswoman, or deceive, and so be no steerswoman at all.

She loved it too much. Less was better than none.

Abruptly, inconsistency caught at her mind: the hawk—it had not moved.

Rowan began to analyze what her senses had brought her. The breeze was from the southwest. Would it be different higher up? There should be a downdraft of cooler air over the river; a hawk would have to beat and circle to maintain the same perspective. The forest was alive with small game; a hawk would have found prey by then.

“Get back,” she told Bel, and quickly moved away from the river’s edge.

They stopped among the trees, Rowan trying to see the speck through the new green leaves above. Bel had no sword, but a wicked knife had appeared in her hand. “What is it?”

Rowan spotted it. “We’re being watched. Or the Archives are.”

“By a wizard?”

“Who else can fly?”

Bel peered up. “Will he attack?”

“I don’t know. It hasn’t moved. Perhaps we weren’t seen, or weren’t recognized.”

Bel nodded. “Then it’s watching the Archives. We should tell them.”

“Yes. Let’s keep off the path.” Rowan led the way through the forest, accurately cutting around the twists of the dirt track, first walking, then running.

They entered by way of the stables, breathless from the climb. Inside, Josef was currying Artos’s horse, Berry seated on a barrel nearby. Rowan stopped, trying to calm her breathing. “Berry,” she said. “Berry, I’m sorry, I’m going to do it.”

Berry and Josef exchanged a glance; then he silently went back to his work. Berry rose. “What made you change your mind?”

“The Archives are being watched. By something that flies.”

 

“It’s not just me, anymore,” Rowan told the resident steerswomen. They were assembled in the chart room, eight women and two men, some in chairs, some seated casually on the edges of the sturdy copying tables, one standing by the window, occasionally scanning the sky. To one side of the room, Josef and Bel stood watching the proceedings.

“I was thinking about my own life,” Rowan continued. “I love the steerswoman’s life, and I wasn’t willing to change it. But first this restriction, and now this . . . spying . . .” She was standing before the three steps that led to the master chart. She spread her hands in a broad gesture. “How long before we become so changed that none of us are steerswomen anymore? The whole way of life is threatened, for every one of us. I . . .” She paused, shaping her thoughts. “I can’t stand for it. I have to try to stop it, whatever it may take. Or at the very least, I have to know why.”

Sarah smiled with a teacher’s pride. “Spoken like a steerswoman: she has to know why.”

There were quiet comments around the room as they consulted each other briefly. Suddenly weary, Rowan sat down on the lowest step and watched them, waiting.

Henra stood and addressed the gathering. “This is no small thing. We all will have a hand in this, I’m afraid, and if someone asks, it would be best if we could refrain from revealing Rowan’s mission . . .” She trailed off, uncharacteristically hesitant. Rowan recognized on the Prime’s face the same confused pain Rowan felt at the prospect of living with deceit. As Arian had said, when it came to the doing of the thing . . .

Abruptly, Rowan remembered a simple bit of medical knowledge learned from Maranne in Wulfshaven: a poisoned limb is amputated. “No.” Faces turned toward her. “Steerswomen mustn’t lie. I have to resign the order.”

Shock filled the room, followed by protests. Amid the babble of voices, Rowan felt suddenly empty, a hollow shape of flesh with no center and no identity.

Bel and Josef turned perplexed gazes at each other. Speaking above the noise, Bel asked, “But can’t she join again, when her mission is finished ?”

“It’s never been done,” Arian said.

“Not true,” Hugo put in, and the people quieted to hear him. “When I was training, there was a steerswoman, named Silva—”

Henra nodded. “Yes.”

“She mapped the nearer western mountains,” Keridwen supplied.

“That’s right. But that was later.” Hugo continued. “While on the road in the east, she fell in love with a farmer there. She left us to marry and live with him.”

“And he died,” the Prime said.

“Pneumonia. But his love was all that kept her there, and she became unhappy. She fostered her children to his sister and came back to us.”

“And did very good work,” Keridwen added, her eyes on the master chart, where the near edge of the western mountains showed clear and accurate.

The Prime turned back to Rowan, and she was like a woman released from some great pain. “Will that suit you?”

Rowan nodded mutely. She felt distant, as if she had already departed and was on some long unknown road with no guidance.

She looked down at her left hand and saw the silver ring on her middle finger, the band with that odd half twist that made it a thing both mysterious and logical: an object of three dimensions, yet possessing only one face, one edge, folded back into reality by the simple laws of geometry. Without thinking, she removed it and held it in the palm of her hand. It seemed weightless.

More quickly, as if by hesitating she would lose her commitment, she slipped the thin gold chain over her head and let it dangle from her fingers. She looked at Henra.

“Hold on to them,” the Prime said, “and wear them again when you can.”

Rowan placed them both in the leather sack on its thong, nestling beside the uncanny jewel. Tucked under her blouse, the sack felt faintly heavier, a promise set aside.

Henra sighed, then reorganized herself, efficient. “You’ll have to choose another name—and remember to answer to it.”

Looking faintly puzzled, Keridwen added, “She should wear a different cloak, as well. We’re not the only people who use gray felt cloaks, but each one of us does.”

“That green cloak she arrived in,” Hugo suggested.

“That will do,” Henra agreed. Passing Rowan as she climbed the stairs, she walked to the master chart. “Now, as to her route: she’ll have to avoid both Five Corners and Donner—”

“But that’s not enough.” Heads turned to the side of the room, where Bel stepped forward from her place by the wall. Behind her, Josef crossed his arms and nodded grimly. The Outskirter continued. “She can’t just go, and dress differently, and not use her own name. She needs a reason for going, something that no one would think twice about. She needs something else to be.” She scanned the faces in amazement. “Don’t you people know how to protect yourselves at all?”

The accusation pushed past Rowan’s weariness of spirit; she discovered herself angry. “Yes, we do,” she said vehemently, then with awkwardness corrected her choice of words. “Yes, they do. Steerswomen can protect themselves from bandits and cutpurses on the road. They can protect themselves from wild beasts. They can protect themselves from those who would abuse their good natures. We’ve never had to, never wanted to deceive.”

Bel stood before her, solid and sensible. “Time to learn.”

Suddenly, without derision, Josef laughed. “Look at you, a bunch of steerswomen,” he said. “You know so much, but the one thing you don’t know about is lying.” He held up his index finger, like an instructor. “Well, I can tell Rowan how to fool people. The best way to lie is to tell the truth.”

The steerswomen looked at each other in perplexity. Bel expanded on Josef’s statement. “That’s right, you say true things—except, you leave some things out. That way, the person takes what you’ve said and makes his own conclusions—the wrong ones, because of what’s missing.”

Josef gave her an affirming nod. “And that’s your lie. And the second best way is to tell the truth—something obvious, something the other person knows down to his bones—and add your lie onto it, so long as it fits in.”

“The person knows that the part he can check is true, and if the rest makes sense, he’ll believe it,” Bel said.

“And the last good way to lie is to say nothing. Let the other person guess as much as he likes, and when he’s dead wrong,” he said with a smile, “you tell him how clever he is.”

The group relaxed. The alien concept of deception had been reduced to principles. One thing every steerswoman understood was the application of principles.

More confident, Henra said, “Very well. Without compromising ourselves, we can help Rowan by seeing for her what’s unsaid.” She gestured. “Rowan, stand up please.” Rowan rose and stood before them, the great master chart looming at her back. “Now, everyone, imagine you’ve never seen her. Try to remove that information from your mind. What can you tell, just by looking at her? What is this woman?”

Rowan waited under their discerning gazes. What was she? Ignoring her present pain, she thought back to her childhood, before she had met Keridwen, when no one around her shared that most basic part of her nature. What had she been then?

Nothing. She felt a return of that emptiness, that blank solitude and unnamed yearning that had characterized her life before. She felt, again, like the child who saw too much, thought too quickly, and had no one who could understand her.

“She travels, constantly, outdoors,” Sarah noted. “See how dark her skin is, how streaked her hair. And she travels on foot; look at her stance, and the development of her legs.”

“The upper part of her body is not developed,” Arian said. “She’s not a laborer; she doesn’t live by the use of her muscles.”

“Her fingers are ink-stained,” Henra said. “It’s the sort of staining that lives in the cracks of one’s hands and can’t be removed. She uses a pen, every single day.”

“She might be a scribe,” Keridwen suggested.

“A scribe who travels?” Arian said. “Not likely.”

“Notice how composed she is,” Hugo put in, tilting his head in study. “This is a woman who knows she can handle whatever she gets into. And see how she watches us? She’s thinking, and she’s used to thinking. She’s used to figuring out for herself what to do.”

“That spells steerswoman to me,” the dark-haired woman noted.

“Try to put that out of your mind,” Henra said.

Rowan listened to the information, considering the clues as if they applied to some stranger, grateful for a problem to occupy her loneliness. A scribe would not travel, not often. Would a clerk? A student?

Berry addressed Rowan. “Say something.”

“Say something?”

“Anything, just speak. Describe the weather.”

Rowan looked out the window. “It’s a beautiful, cloudless day. It’s comfortably cool, but the sunlight coming in heats the stone floor. I can feel a draft from the warm air rising.” She realized that she had noticed more than the average person would, and had supplied the information casually. She would have to stop that.

Hugo made a wry face. “Well, by that voice, she’s educated.”

“No,” Berry said. “Or, not necessarily. In the north, they have that careful manner of speech, even among the uneducated. And the crispness of her consonants, and the rhythm, that confirms it. She’s from the north, past the western curve of the Long North Road. Far north, I’d say, from the sound of her vowels. I think she’s from one of the farthest settlements, by the Red Desert. I’d place the town nearest as Umber.”

Bel looked at Rowan in amazement. “Is that all true?”

Rowan winced. “Exactly.”

Henra was disturbed. “That’s far too precise. She advertises her origins.”

“But Berry’s using a steerswoman’s ear,” Arian said. “Would the average person notice this?”

Everyone turned to Josef. “Average person, eh?” he said wryly. “All right, well, she sounds a little . . . foreign, but not so much. I wouldn’t think twice. Say it again?” Rowan repeated the sentences. Josef nodded. “Maybe educated. Sort of . . . stiff.”

“Bel?’

“You all sound foreign.”

Henra nodded. “Perhaps that will do, then. As she’ll be traveling in the south, it may be sufficient to simply admit she’s from somewhere in the north. Bel, take Rowan’s place for a moment.”

They exchanged places, Bel eyeing the group with suspicion. Then she stood before them, a solid, wide-legged stance, strong arms relaxed, hands comfortably by her sides. Her chin was tilted up in unvoiced challenge.

Rowan looked away briefly, filling her eyes with the gray of stone walls, clearing her mind of preconceptions. Then she looked back, with a fresh point of view.

She saw it immediately, and her voice and three others spoke together. “A warrior.”

“Undeniably,” Henra admitted.

“A solitary warrior,” Hugo amended. “One not used to regimentation.”

“And she’ll be on the road,” Berry pointed out. “A traveling warrior; that means a mercenary.”

Rowan took that information and tried to integrate it with what had been said about her own appearance, feeling a touch of surprise, as if she had expected all her steerswoman’s abilities to vanish with her ring and chain. She speculated. What would bring two such people together? Why would they travel? What would be their relationship?

It fell together with the perfection of a discovered truth. So perfect, and yet so untrue; it was like an immense joke, and she laughed, bitterly. The steerswomen looked at her in amazement.

Rowan spread her hands and addressed the group. “I’ve got it.”

 

 

11

 

He had killed a man, his first week on the road.

He was a little surprised at how calmly he had done it. He had killed him as simply as he would kill a wolf, and it was a wolf, really, a bandit. The gods only knew what the man expected to gain from a boy like Willam; just an easy victim, perhaps. Still, Willam had heard the sound, strung his bow with a mindless speed, and let fly as soon as he saw the knife. He actually had not felt afraid at all.

He was smart enough not to trust to a speed and cold-bloodedness he had only felt the once. But he began to worry about the wisdom of keeping to the deserted back trails. Close to his home village, he had thought it best. He knew he was conspicuous: a big lad with red-blond hair, brown eyes light enough to be called copper by most, and at fourteen years well on his way to acquiring a blacksmith’s burly arms and shoulders. One sentence was enough to identify him to anyone he knew, and he surely did not want word to get back to his father. Not that he thought his father might follow. Plenty of young people left home; Will had just left a bit sooner than most.

He had been sorry to leave, and frightened, as well. Strange, how one could be frightened of something big and vague, like leaving home alone, and be calm face-to-face with a real bandit. Maybe that was how it was in life. Willam didn’t know.

Those last few weeks at home had been too strange, too busy to allow much time or space for worry: trying to go about his days as normal, doing his work, then spending every spare moment in his shack in the yard, even slipping out at night, to make his preparations. No one bothered him in his shack. There had been enough accidents over the years that people had the sense to stay away. If they wanted him, they always stood at a good distance and called out. They were cautious.

He was cautious, too. He had not been, when he was very young, but experience had taught him harshly—taught him to think carefully, move slowly, control as much as possible. One had to take risks to learn, but he discovered that if he was careful about everything else, then the one risk he took would not hurt him: He could do almost the same thing, over and over, taking just one different risk each time, and in the end he learned what he wanted to know. And he knew it all the way down to its bones.

Other people didn’t think like that, he knew; they acted, for the most part, on impulse and emotion. Perhaps that was why what he did was so incomprehensible to them, and sometimes frightening. Still, when they needed something special, it was to him that they came.

But magic did not help him on the road. His bow helped him. And caution.

Caution told him to stay to the back trails as long as he could, then caution told him when it was better to take a main road. Unfortunately, by that time, he was lost.

Leaving his village, he had struck northeast, taking his bearings from the Eastern Guidestar at night, doing the best he could by guesswork during the day. Eventually he met the river Wulf. Actually, he thought he had met it a dozen times; any river he crossed was the Wulf to him, until he reached the next one. When he finally did come to its banks and stood gaping in astonishment at its wild speed and impossible width, he felt more than a little like an ignorant village boy. Bitterly, he reminded himself that that was exactly what he was. However fantastic his mission, however high and mighty his plans, it was best to keep that fact in mind.

A riverman took one of Willam’s small supply of coppers in return for a trip across, and Will spent the passage carefully protecting his pack from the spray slapped up from the windy water. On the other side, a careful check proved that the contents were safe and dry.

From there he began to travel due east, and within the hour he was hopelessly adrift in the trackless woody uplands. He beat his way cross-country for a full day until he found a path. It went south, but he took it.

But soon he was no longer traveling alone. He met a merchant on the path, and she had a very good idea: travel south to the main road and try to connect with an east-going caravan. Will did not have the fare, but no one would stop him if he wanted to tag along. Naturally, he would not be under their protection, but it would take quite an attack to really threaten a caravan. Will was glad of the suggestion; perhaps a bit less glad at the company.

As they walked along, the little donkey kicked up a bit, and Willam danced to the left, out of the way of the hooves. Astride it, the merchant struggled with the reins and cursed in quiet aggrieved tones. Will smiled. He liked the donkey, and he didn’t like the merchant.

“Attise, can’t you control that beast?” the merchant’s bodyguard complained. Attise sent back one of her flat glances and said nothing, still maintaining her precious dignity. Willam hoped the donkey would throw her.

“I can’t see why he should complain,” the bodyguard continued to Will. “Her master used to ride him, and from what I hear, Attise is a feather by comparison.”

Willam spoke from the side of his mouth. “Give her time. She’ll catch up.”

The bodyguard looked at Will in surprise, then threw back her head and laughed. “Ho, Attise!” she called. “Why aren’t you fat, like the other merchants?”

“I’m not a merchant,” Attise replied in a carefully indifferent voice. “Technically.”

“She’s a clerk,” the bodyguard confided to Willam. “Technically.”

It was the bodyguard, Sala, who made the traveling enjoyable. She was cheerful and absolutely straightforward. She said exactly what she thought. Perhaps it was her skill at arms that gave her confidence, but it seemed to be more than that; she was a woman who looked the world straight in the eye.

She reminded Will of a cat who lived in a gristmill in his hometown. The cat, small and solid, all efficient muscle, greeted visitors with benign good nature and loved to be petted and entertained. But its greatest delight was battle; it killed rats and thieving birds with heart-stopping speed and precision, and it was always on watch for more opportunities for murder. Sala was like that, Willam thought: cold-bloodedly amiable. He wondered with a trace of boyish excitement if he would ever have the opportunity to see her in action.

But remembering the cat made him remember his little sister. She had loved that cat, and she would squeal with glee whenever she saw it, toddling toward it on her chunky legs. The cat, perhaps wisely, stayed just out of her reach, friendliness struggling against natural caution at the girl’s awkwardness, and the pair would weave their way endlessly about the room, to the amusement of onlookers. She was the only girl in the family, and so bright, so mischievous, a constant amazement. Will’s love for the child was total, unconditional.

He had often asked his father if they might find a kitten for her, and he really believed his father was about to, just before that day when two of Abremio’s men appeared. Then the girl was gone, kittens were forgotten, and Will was left with only his ever more silent father, a brother too old to feel close to—and a dark, obsessive hatred for the wizard who had stolen the only person he truly loved, confiscating her as if she were some object.

It occurred to Willam that if the people in The Crags and the surrounding villages were more like cats, more like Sala, Abremio could not simply do whatever he pleased.

The people in The Crags were like Attise, and perhaps that was why he disliked her so immediately: he had the villager’s disdain for the folk of the city proper. They never said anything directly but always danced around the subject with flowery phrases, looking down their noses at a country person as if he smelled bad but they were too polite to tell him. They were more concerned with how they dressed and how they seemed, than with what they really were, or what they could do.

Attise spoke plainly enough, when she spoke, but she had that same way of seeming to watch and judge a person, and watch and judge herself, as if matching her behavior with some rigid internal standard. It made him uncomfortable. And she was never spontaneous; everything she did seemed planned. Will had the feeling that it was all for show.

For instance, Attise had a map, and a good one. But whenever they came to any crossroads absolutely nothing else would do but that they all stop while she carefully dismounted, drew the map from its place in her baggage, and laboriously consulted it. Why she did not keep it more convenient, or why she did not try to memorize part of the route, Will had no idea. She would study it at length, no trace of confusion or uncertainty tainting her expression, pack it away, remount, and say, “This way,” in a voice of absolute authority. The exercise soon became tedious, and Will became more and more certain that she did it only to appear important.

“You shouldn’t be so hard on her.”

Will came back from his thoughts and found that Sala was walking close beside him, Attise and the donkey some dozen feet ahead. “What?” He had been watching the merchant, and his distaste must have been showing on his face.

“Attise. She’s really not so terrible. She’s just in a bad situation.”

Will glowered at the merchant’s back again. “More like she carries a bad situation around with her.”

Sala considered. “The problem,” she said carefully, “is that she doesn’t know how to act.”

“You’d never guess it.”

She nodded. “That’s the idea. She’s really just a clerk, as I said. She’s used to traveling around in her master’s wake, doing his figuring, keeping his accounts. She knows about his business, but she’s never had to deal with people, or decide anything. But when her master broke his leg, just when he was about to expand his business—” She paused, looking confused at the complexities of finance. “I don’t really understand how it works. Somehow, they have the money now, and they won’t have it later . . . I don’t see how that can be . . .” She gave it up and shrugged. “Well, Attise knew the right things, and no one else did. So he sent her.”

“And you went along?”

Sala shifted her pack to a more comfortable position and tested the convenience of her sword hilt. “I’m for hire. And a merchant doesn’t travel alone. Not if she likes living.”

Up ahead, Attise was affectedly scanning the landscape, her face carefully impassive. “Well, she doesn’t act as if she does,” Will said. “I mean, she doesn’t seem to enjoy anything.”

“She doesn’t,” Sala conceded. “She’s too worried. If the new customers thought she was inexperienced, they’d try to take advantage of her. So she has to look as if she knows what she’s doing, and act like a merchant, but she’s never had to consider that before. She doesn’t know how. And she doesn’t like it, not at all. She likes numbers.”

Will thought about it. Sala’s explanation made sense, a little. If the merchant acted as she naturally did, she would give herself away.

For a moment, the whole thing looked different, as if he had a bird’s-eye view. Attise actually was watching herself and putting on a fake manner. It showed, really, when he thought about it.

But did she have to make everyone else unhappy? “She’d probably do better business if she let people like her,” Will grumbled.

The bodyguard tilted her head and gave him a lopsided grin. “She has money. She doesn’t need friends.”

But Willam still did not like the way Attise looked at him. At first, Will had tried to engage her in conversation, but finally gave it up; not that she would not reply, but she didn’t seem to encourage it, answering in the shortest phrases possible, with no proper opening for reply. And sometimes she would give him a strange look, a slow calculating stare, as if she were adding things up, then turn away silently. It was Sala with whom Willam conversed.

When they first met, she had asked him where he was traveling from, and he had replied in what he hoped was an off-hand manner with the name of one of the towns he had passed through. Over her shoulder Attise gave him that look and then went back to blandly viewing the scenery, and the conversation lagged, then limped in the wake of her brief attention. It was nothing more than one look, but it acted on Willam like a bucket of water over his head. Sala was amused.

Somewhat later the merchant spoke up casually. “I’ve been through your town, with my master. Late last year. Do you know Corey, the blacksmith there?”

Will had prepared for that sort of thing. “No, I didn’t often get into the town proper. There was a lot of work on the farm, and not much time for what my dad calls ‘foolishness.’ But when I was little, my mother sometimes sent me in to the weaver’s there. Perhaps you met him? He’s a tall thin man, with dust-colored hair. Michael.” Will had carefully studied the town as he passed through, thinking it would be a good place to claim as his home, once he was far enough from it.

She looked at him. “No.” Then she turned away, and Will was briefly disturbed. He could not tell if she had made up that business about the blacksmith just to test him, or if she believed him about the weaver. It gave him a turn; his own father was a blacksmith.

At one of the crossroads they came across a party of tinkers, with racks of wares on display. Attise halted the party and made a great show of examining everything the tinkers had, though her utter disinterest was deadeningly obvious. The tinkers saw that immediately and matched her for bland disdain. Willam found the whole thing tiresome.

But at one point she was studying a beautiful embroidered blouse, and she turned to him almost casually. “What do you think of this?”

The weight of the fabric in his hands, the stiff, intricate embroidery, brought a rush of familiarity to Willam, and a touch of homesickness. It was the work of the Kundekin, the kind of lovely handwork with which those mysterious craftspeople filled their idle hours. But for all its beauty, it was common in their opinion, mere exercise to sharpen the eye and hand. Near their enclave in The Crags it could be got cheaply. It was practically given away, else their closets would be full of the stuff. The tinker was charging twenty times its worth.

Willam felt brief pleasure at seeing such a familiar item, then a small shock when he realized that Attise had chosen to ask him about it.

He saw that she was giving him that look again. He said nothing, but she returned the blouse to the tinker. “I believe,” she said, “that I’ll do better by going directly to the source.” Her mouth made a smile, but her eyes did not, and she turned away.

As they continued down the road, Willam’s mind was spinning. Attise suspected he was lying, that he was not what he claimed, even knew he was from The Crags. But she was doing nothing, saying nothing. Why? Was he truly so obvious? Was she sneering at him, inside? At that thought Will flushed, first in embarrassment, then in anger. Sala threw him one speculative glance, threw Attise the identical glance, then became lost in her own thoughts.

They made a camp that night in a stand of oak off the west side of the road. Sala efficiently scouted the area, pronounced it safe, and set to making a small fire to dispel the cool of night. Attise settled down to study her damnable map and let her bodyguard arrange their sleeping rolls.

Willam hung back from the fire. It wouldn’t do to bring the charms in his pack close to the flames. He was not certain how much distance was actually required, but if he erred, it would best be on the side of caution.

He carried his pack some twelve feet away past a small crowd of ferns and began to pull out its contents. Finding his sleeping roll near the bottom, he spread it out on the ground.

Sala watched in puzzlement. “Here, boy, what are you doing?”

Will looked up sheepishly. “Well. . I thought two ladies might not like a man to spend the night so close . . .”

Sala laughed in good-natured derision at his manly conceit. “I think our virtue is safe with you. Come here, you’ll be glad of the fire later tonight.” Will grinned with seeming embarrassment, gathered his gear untidily in his arms, and set it up close to Sala’s roll. The charms he left behind, masked by the ferns. He could retrieve them in the morning.

But when he looked up from his arrangements, he saw that Attise had abandoned her study and was giving him that look. “Willam,” she said slowly. “Obviously we don’t feel any threat from you. But you don’t return that regard.”

“What?”

She pointed with her chin toward the ferns. “Whatever you left back there will certainly be safer close to hand.”

Will was speechless, wavering between denial and disbelief.

Attise tilted her head. “Why don’t you let me see it? If it’s so valuable, perhaps I’ll want to buy it.” Her face was blank, but her eyes watched him.

Suddenly he hated this woman, hated her silences, her disdain, her air of superiority. She was toying with him! She believed him not at all, and she had spent the day teasing his lies out of him. It was all a game, to make him squirm for her amusement.

And for that one moment, his fury made him rash. He drew himself up slowly and stood, and let her look at him for a long moment, matching her gaze unwaveringly with his own. “Very well,” he said at last. “I’ll be glad to show you. Perhaps you will want to buy one.” He sneered that word, with a sudden release of his helpless anger. “But you’ll have to step away from the fire to see them. It isn’t safe, otherwise. They’re magic, and fire releases the spell.”

He knew how events should run. They would be impressed, like the people at home. They might even be frightened; they would try to make peace with him.

But it did not happen that way. Instead Willam suddenly realized, quite clearly, that he was in terrible danger.

 

 

12

 

Bel’s sword was in her hand. She spoke carefully. “Don’t move, boy. Not a single move.”

Rowan sat, her map abandoned in her lap. Her sword was by her right hand, but she did not take it. She stayed completely still, her eyes never leaving the boy’s, her body alert and ready for any change in the tableau.

Willam had traveled from The Crags, by his accent, his manners, his recognition of the distinctive work of the Kundekin. She knew which wizard held that city, and he was the most infamous. Appalled, she breathed, “Abremio.”

The boy jerked at the sound of that name. His young face was pale, and he trembled, but his beautiful copper-coin eyes did not waver from Rowan’s face. At last, through clenched teeth, he said to them, “Do it, if you’re going to.”

Bel was in sudden motion, and Willam made half a step back toward the ferns, and then she was on him. One hand gripped his shirtfront and swung him off balance; the other brought her sword around. Then he was sprawled, half-suspended from her clenched fist, the point of her sword at his throat.

“I say we don’t bother to question him first,” Bel said mildly.

Rowan was beside them, her own sword in hand. She stood between the stand of ferns and the locked pair, blocking the way. “Wait.”

“He’s a wizard!”

Rowan gripped Bel’s arm, delaying the thrust that would have followed the words. She said to Willam, “Boy, were you boasting? Tell us, and on your life, you’d better believe I’ll know if you lie.”

He gasped, astonished, “I’m not a wizard!”

“Then he serves one,” Bel said.

“What did you leave in the ferns?” Rowan said; she saw him glance in that direction and hesitate. “You haven’t the time to think of a lie. Answer!”

“It—it is magic, but—”

“I knew it!” Bel snarled.

“But it’s nothing! It’s—it’s just—” His face worked, then, as if it pained him to admit the truth. “A real wizard would call them just toys. . . .” He looked up at Rowan, astonished—pleading, and he seemed to be a person unused to pleading. “Please, let me go. I’m not worth his notice.”

“His notice . . .” Rowan paused in puzzlement, then began to piece together the evidence of the boy’s words and reactions. How must all this look to him?

Bel was equally confused. “Whose notice?”

Then, nodding slowly, Rowan lowered her sword. “Abremio’s. Let him go, Bel. He doesn’t serve Abremio.” She smiled a little. “But he thinks that we do.”

Bel released Willam in astonishment. “Us?”

He lay on the ground, rubbing his chest. “I thought, when you named him . . .”

“I thought I was naming you,” Rowan said wryly.

“Me?” It came out a childish squeak.

“Who knows what guise a wizard might travel in?”

Bel watched Willam with suspicion. “It still might be him.” She stepped around, so that he had a woman with a sword on either side.

Rowan studied him. His panic had eased a bit once he knew they were no minions of that wizard; he was waiting with a combination of confusion and wariness.

She considered the clues. “You’re afraid of Abremio’s attention. Is he likely to be looking for you? Did you steal something from him, perhaps?”

He sat up, cautiously. “No. He stole something from me.”

“What was that?”

“My sister.”

“This Abremio steals women?” Bel asked. She directed her query not to Willam but to Rowan, and the steerswoman saw that the boy took careful note of that. Abruptly she realized that she and Bel had ceased to be innocent travelers in his eyes. In acting to protect themselves, they had compromised the only protection they had. There was no longer an easy explanation for their movements. She cursed herself silently.

But what explanation was there for Willam? He had threatened the use of magic and was frightened at the thought of attracting Abremio’s attention. “Why does Abremio care about you?”

He thought carefully before replying. “Why does he care about you?” he asked.

He was as cautious as they. Bel smiled despite herself. “We don’t know that he does,” she replied.

He looked from one to the other. “I don’t know for sure, either. But if he doesn’t care, it’s because he doesn’t know I exist.”

“You’re a danger to him?” Rowan asked.

“No. Not yet.” His composure was returning as they spoke. Then an idea occurred to him, and he looked suddenly intrigued. “But you are, aren’t you?”

Bel’s sword was across his throat again, the guard close under his left ear. “Boy,” she said in a perfectly reasonable tone, “I want you dead. My friend”—she nodded up at Rowan—”doesn’t agree. But she’s a sensible person, actually. She won’t risk our lives on a kindhearted whim.”

“The odds are against you,” Rowan pointed out, “unless you can convince us that you’re harmless to us.”

His fear had returned. “I am!”

“The more we know about you, the better we’ll be able to judge that. The less you know about us, the less risk you are.”

“Don’t ask questions,” Bel clarified. “Answer them.”

He took a deep shaky breath and looked up at Rowan. “I won’t betray you. Because I think we’re all on the same side. I’ll tell you anything you want.”

She considered. It was difficult to believe that this big clumsy-looking boy, so obvious in his deceptions, could represent any direct threat. He looked more than a little foolish, sitting awkwardly on the ground, his possessions scattered about him; the warrior beside him could dispatch him as simply and negligently as she might snap the neck of a snared quail.

And yet—

“The package you left in the ferns contains something magical?” she asked.

“That’s right. Charms. They’re useful, in a small way. But they can be dangerous, if you’re not careful.” He held up his right hand for them to see. As Rowan had noticed before, the hand lacked its last two fingers. The underside of the arm was also scarred, as from an old burn, and his right eyebrow was faintly ragged. Abruptly the pattern made sense, and she realized that at some point in the past he had flung that arm across his face to protect his eyes from sudden fire.

“Why were they given to you?” Bel asked.

“They weren’t.” He looked stubborn, as if he had often had to defend that statement. “I made them.”

“You said that you’re not a wizard,” Rowan pointed out.

“No. Not yet.”

“Are you an apprentice?”

“No.” He looked earnest. “But I’d better become one, don’t you think?”

“Easily said, less easily accomplished,” Rowan observed. Wizards sometimes acquired apprentices; but where those young people came from, no one knew. They were never of the folk in the wizard’s own holding. They appeared, apparently from nowhere, and more often than not vanished abruptly, never to be seen again. Only very rarely was it possible to make a clear connection between the disappearance of a known apprentice in one part of the Inner Lands and the sudden appearance of a new wizard in some other region. Even in those cases, the apprentice’s antecedents were either untraced, or untraceable.

The boy went on. “I have to find a Red wizard. Abremio’s Blue; so is Corvus, nowadays. I don’t want anything to do with the Blues.”

“What makes you think that any wizard would accept you?” she asked.

“Well . . .” Willam spoke grimly. “I suppose he’d have to. It wouldn’t do to have one of the folk walking around doing magic, would it? He’d either have to take me in, or kill me.”

Bel leaned closer. “Then he’ll kill you.”

From his position he could not comfortably look her in the eye, but his expression was defiant. “Maybe not.”

But Rowan had reached her conclusions. She gestured to Bel to relax her guard, but the Outskirter was wary and did not comply. Will watched the silent argument in confusion.

Rowan casually sat down on the ground next to them, placing her sword across her lap. “You’re going to become a wizard so that you can kill Abremio, for taking your sister.”

It was an obvious conclusion, but Willam startled a bit when she stated it. Bel gave one delighted “Ha!” and released him again, stepping back to sheathe her own sword. She sat down herself, pulling her cloak under her, and viewed Willam with approval. “Can your magic do this?” she asked.

The sudden change in their mood made him no less uncomfortable. “No,” he admitted, studying each of them in turn. Something in Rowan’s watching and waiting expression made him amend his statement. “That is, perhaps. If I caught him by surprise. But I can’t count on that. And I’d never get him alone. I don’t want to hurt anyone else.” He spoke with intensity. “That’s his way, not mine. I’ve never used it to hurt anyone.”

“Except yourself,” Bel pointed out.

He was embarrassed. “I don’t think that counts.”

“It’s not a game, and no one’s counting,” Rowan said. “Abremio can do as he pleases.” If Willam did join the ranks of the wizards, Rowan suspected that he would soon learn to do as they did.

“But—they’re not all like him!”

Rowan gestured vaguely; it seemed to her that it was only a matter of degree. But she admitted, “He’s the worst of them.”

“Stealing women?” Bel asked. “What does he do with them?”

“Children,” Rowan corrected. “Of both genders. And no one knows.” Before leaving the Archives, she had spent two intense hours with Hugo, as he briefed her on the known details of the six major wizards. Hugo had learned in his own travels that Abremio occasionally sent a pair of soldiers to confiscate an infant or a young child from its family. It occurred rarely enough to seem a unique event to the folk involved, yet often enough to form a habit recognizable to someone who observed widely. “Was there something different about your sister?” Rowan asked Will. Often, though not exclusively, that was the case.

He was puzzled. “No . . . small for her age, perhaps. She spoke early and walked late, that’s all. Why do you ask?”

But to answer would be to admit a larger scope of knowledge than she was supposed to possess. As had often happened on this journey, she found nothing she could safely say, and so said nothing. It was the worst sensation, to close the lid on her knowledge, a wrenching unpleasantness. She set her mouth in a grim line to keep from speaking and looked away, trying to control her instincts.

“I wish you wouldn’t do that!”

She turned back and found Willam glaring at her in fury.

“You—you treat me like I’m stupid, or like I’m nothing. But I can figure things out for myself. I know that you’re both spies, from a Red wizard.”

Bel and Rowan exchanged a startled glance, then Rowan seized the idea and turned it over and over in her mind.

It was the perfect answer. It explained all their actions: their original deception, their reaction to Will’s claims of magic, their attack on him, their unwillingness to explain themselves. Will had assumed that they served a Red wizard because of their fear of Blue Abremio.

They did not have to lie at all; it was deception by silence. Without a word passing between them, Rowan and Bel agreed on their new identities.

As spies, they would hardly admit to being spies. They both sat simply looking at Willam, waiting for him to realize that. Eventually he did, and grudgingly let his temper cool.

“We’re not enemies,” he pointed out. “I hate Abremio, I don’t want anything to do with any Blue wizard. I’m looking for a Red. So, we’re on the same side.”

“It would be a good idea if you forgot that we’re anything but a merchant and a mercenary,” Bel said. Rowan could not help but smile; the statement was perfectly true on every level, yet served only to reinforce the credibility of their new deception. Even her smile, she realized, added to the effect.

“I won’t give you away,” Will assured Bel, and included Rowan in his glance. “But, well . . . maybe we can help each other.”

Bel looked at Rowan. “It might be a good idea. . . .”

Rowan’s humor vanished. “I don’t like it.”

“But if his magic is any good—”

“We don’t know that it is.” Rowan was reluctant to have anything at all to do with magic, but as the supposed servant of a wizard, she could not admit to that. She hoped Bel could follow her reasoning without prompting.

But Bel turned back to Willam. “Show us this magic, then,” she suggested.

The boy hesitated. “But you don’t want people to notice us . . .”

“And it would attract attention?” Rowan asked.

He nodded. “It’s rather loud, most of the time.”

“You can’t do it quietly? Put a spell of silence on it?” Bel wondered.

“There’s still a lot about it that I can’t control.” He rubbed his damaged right hand, an unconscious, musing gesture.

“What does it do?” she asked. “What do you use it for?”

He looked a little sheepish. “I can dig wells. And help clear boulders and stumps from new farmland.”

“The boulders vanish?”

“No . . .” He searched for words. “Sometimes they break apart. Sometimes they just . . . leave. Very fast.”

“How is that dangerous?”

He looked at her darkly. “It’s not good to get in the way.”

“I believe that’s true of every sort of magic,” Rowan said.

But Bel was delighted. “It sounds very useful,” she said, ignoring Rowan’s interjection. “I think this is a good meeting. I’m sure we can help each other.”

“No!”

Bel and William looked at Rowan, startled.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea at all.” She wanted to say: If the wizards are ignoring their own lines to cooperate against us, if every wizard is our enemy, then we do not want one of their fledglings at our side. We don’t know enough about them; we don’t know why they act as they do. This boy wants to learn their ways, and their ways are all against us. We would never know when he might turn.

She could say none of that. All she could say to Bel, in Willam’s presence, was: “Think about it.”

Bel shook her head, a broad emphatic gesture. “If you find a perfectly good sword by the side of the road, you don’t throw it away.”

“What if you suspect it’s cursed?”

Bel replied, stressing each word, “You use what comes to hand.” Will nodded, watching Rowan for a response.

Rowan took a breath, trying to calm herself. She turned to Willam. “And how would we help you?”

“You take me with you,” he said. “And when we return to your master, you tell him about me.”

“A recommendation?”

He nodded.

“And what makes you think we carry any influence?”

“Perhaps you don’t. But it’s better than me just showing up on his doorstep. And if I really do prove myself . . .”

“Where’s the harm?” Bel asked. Rowan saw that Bel was trying to suppress amusement. “If we have the chance, we let it be known that Willam helped us, and that he’d make a good apprentice.”

Willam was waiting for Rowan’s answer, his face open, sincere, eager, guileless . . . and for a moment, she cared about him and what might happen to him. “Will,” she said honestly. “You shouldn’t become an apprentice. I hate to think what it will do to you. No good will come of it.”

Something in her expression reached him, and he was taken aback, suddenly uncertain. Then she understood; it was her sincerity. Never before had he seen sincerity in her face, and it broke her heart to realize that. “Trust me,” she said to him, knowing she had never given him reason or evidence to trust her.

“My sister . . .” he began.

“Do you realize you’re not the only one?” Rowan asked. “He didn’t single you out; it’s simply something that he does, periodically. Does that make any difference to you?”

“No . . .” he said at last. Then he became more certain. “Maybe it makes it worse. And it’s not the only evil he does. I’ve seen how he works, a bit. I lived near his city, The Crags—but you knew that.”

Rowan called into her mind a detailed map of that area. Willam’s village had to be on the near side of the drawbridge, far enough from the city proper that he had not acquired its involuted manner of speech, but near enough that pronunciation of individual words was the same. He had lived close enough to the city to be familiar with Kundekin handiwork, and that eliminated the farther-flung villages under the city’s direct influence. Also, he had been near enough to enter the city on occasion and see Abremio’s daily manner of rule at first hand.

She hazarded a guess. “Oak Grove.”

He stopped short, disturbed. “That’s very close. Langtry.” He went on. “Anyway . . . I guess I have to stop it, if I can.”

She nodded, comprehending. “You’ve been working on this for a long time.”

“A long time . . . working so hard . . .”

“Attise.” It took Rowan a moment to remember that that was her name. “Maybe we can help each other.” Bel said it simply, watching Rowan’s expression, and it occurred to Rowan that the statement might carry more than one meaning.

“You’re from the new holding, aren’t you?” Willam asked. “The one they fought the war for, with those two wizards together?”

“Shammer and Dhree,” Rowan supplied without thinking, then realized that her reply would be taken as an admission that he had guessed right.

“Do they have an apprentice?”

“No.” She sighed and spoke to Bel. “If either of us has the opportunity, we’ll put in a good word. That’s the only promise we can give.” It was a true statement, as true as she could make it, and still it carried in its heart a hundred unspoken lies.

But it satisfied Will, and he laughed with happy relief.