“I think it’s a bad idea,” Chessie said stubbornly. “I said so before and I’ll say so again. It’s a bad idea.”
“I know you said so before! I heard you,” Kirila replied. “Everything along the road for the last mile heard you.”
She was washing her hair beside the road they had stumbled across a day earlier. It was a real road, rutted with wagon tracks, not just a forest foot trail. The weather was too cold for hair washing; it was, in fact, the last few days before the winter rains began, and the wind from the west was heavy with the wet smell of the coming storms. Kirila had made a fire and heated water, and she was trying to keep the water at a suitable temperature, avoid getting soap in her eyes, and hurry the shampoo along before the sun regretted its feeble winter appearance and retired behind the long gray clouds.
“We should wait until we get to Castle Reyndak,” Chessie insisted. “From what that farmer said yesterday, what can it be—three, four miles beyond the Inn? You don’t know who is likely to be at an Inn as isolated as this one.”
“You don’t know who’s likely to be at the Castle, either. And I don’t want to walk three or four more miles if it’s not necessary, if there’s a chance of buying a horse at the Inn.”
“But I told you, Kirila—the place looks dangerous. And it’s right on the river—probably full of sailors. Waterfront bars are always dangerous. You’re just not being reasonable.”
Lately she had begun to puzzle him. The gray, detached stillness was gone from her, and she was again eager and interested. It was true that at times she fell into silent reveries and a new brooding thoughtfulness appeared on her face, and at first this had alarmed him and he had held his program of ballads and chants in constant readiness, moving his lips in silent rehearsal. Covert observation, however, had convinced him that she always came out of these sessions by herself, and he had decided that they were new but not dangerous, and that she had them under some sort of control.
But then the periods of thinking had begun to alternate with a feverish reckless bravado, during which she bragged about the warriors—she barely restrained herself from saying “other warriors”— in her family who had been able to triumph over various physical and spiritual risks. One, for instance, a certain Corial Len who was a great-uncle by marriage, had craftily avoided an enslaving romantic entanglement with a Witch while simultaneously learning all her spells, and had used them to start a successful chainmail-and-used-armour shop during the Sixty Years’ War.
Now Kirila opened one eye, peering at Chessie from under soap-slippery hair.
“What’s bothering you lately, anyway? You never seemed so concerned about my being in danger before!”
“You haven’t been in any!” He thought this over a moment. “Physical danger, I mean. And that’s a rough-looking place—you haven’t seen it yet, Kirila. And you are a woman. And it doesn’t seem necessary.”
“Ah, but they won’t know that. And it is, in my opinion. And you only did in the dark, from the outside on one brief scouting trip.” They had quite suddenly developed this ability to carry on several simultaneous conversations and understand each other in all of them, but neither noticed it. “And I am armed.”
“Barely.”
“Adequately!”
She finished soaping her hair and dumped the rinse water over it. The water had gotten too hot while she and Chessie argued, and Kirila shrieked and cursed and danced on one foot while Chessie blandly offered to teach her a few new oaths if she planned on shampooing often. After the long red hair was rinsed, she braided it tightly and tied the wet braids on the top of her head, covering them with a sort of laborer’s cap she had made from a corner of her gray wool cloak.
“If you think that makes you look like a boy—”
“Wait. I’m not done.” Tying her long divided skirt around each ankle with pieces of the stolen string, she shoved the bunchy fabric into her boot tops so that the string didn’t show. A rancid-smelling mixture of boiled walnut shells, which had been simmering on the fire and discoloring their only cup, she smeared on her face and neck, after cautiously testing its temperature with the tip of one finger. The rest of the cloak had been torn and tied to make a rough, baggy tunic, and this she pulled over her head and left unbelted. It tented over her from neck to knees. Pulling the makeshift cap low over her forehead and ears, she adjusted her dagger, sticking it into the belt she wore under the tunic so that it was accessible through a rent in the gray fabric. She clenched her fists, the left one discolored with burn scars and both of them with dirty, torn fingernails. Finished, Kirila scowled forbiddingly at Chessie.
“There. Now do I look like a boy?”
Chessie walked slowly all around her. “Not,” he said fastidiously, “one I’d like in my inn.”
“Well, that’s good. You said it was a rough place.”
“Kirila, you don’t sound like a boy. Not even a young one. You flutter and gush and trill.”
“I do not!” she cried, stung.
“Well, no,” he admitted, “you don’t. But you don’t sound like a boy, either.”
“How’s this?” she asked, dropping her voice two octaves and barking gruffly. It tickled her throat and she broke out coughing.
“Now you sound like a bullfrog with pneumonia.”
Eventually she achieved a voice that Chessie said might fool exceptionally dim people who had been away from any human contact for two years and who never heard her speak more than five consecutive words, and they started out for the inn.
Kirila had been picturing an inn such as stood a few miles from Castle Kiril, on the great road that meandered south through increasingly populated kingdoms and duchies and fiefs until it reached the sea. That inn was a solid and mellow haven built of warm light-colored stone, with broad wings encircling the courtyard. On summer nights, minstrels played in the court, competing with the crickets. But this small northern inn was a different matter; she wouldn’t have recognized it as an inn at all if Chessie hadn’t slunk around the night before and overheard its identity. It consisted of one low building of rough-hewn logs, from which rose a field-stone chimney with several chinks missing. To one side stood an open-sided shed in which a few horses stamped listlessly on dirty straw, to keep warm. In back a rotting dock extended into the river, which was broader and deeper than at the bank near Rhuor where Chessie had dragged Kirila from the water.
They still had not learned the river’s name.
“I’m surprised there’s a need for an inn here at all,” she said, eyeing the weed-grown wagon track that was the only visible road. It climbed a wooded hill beyond the inn and disappeared. “There can’t be many travelers coming this way.”
“The custom probably comes by water.”
“From those few hamlets and little ox-farms upriver?”
“No, from downriver.”
Kirila squinted out over the dark smooth water. “But why would they come here, against the current? There’s nothing here.”
“Precisely. Smugglers prefer to go where there’s nothing; it greatly simplifies their lives.”
“Smugglers?” She looked with interest at the river. Malfeasance at Castle Kiril had consisted of undramatic disputes over cornfield boundaries and sales of oxen. “What do you suppose they smuggle?”
“How should I know? Silver plate, stolen jewelry, spear-running, kidnapped infant princes—it could be anything. Kirila, I really think we should leave. This could be dangerous. And stop swaggering like that; remember your fourth cousin Leofort died in that foolhardy border raid.”
She ignored him, studying the horses huddled under the rickety shed. There were a roan so sway-backed he looked like an inverted camel, a mare the color of dead leaves, and an ancient gray pony with burrs in his tangled mane.
“That mare doesn’t look too bad,” she said thoughtfully, stifling a flash of regret for the young charger left in the Quirkian Hold. “She’s not built for speed, but her chest looks sound and strong. What do you think, Chessie?”
“I think we should leave.”
Kirila strode across the muddy yard and pushed open the inn door. It gave onto a gloomy taproom half as large as the whole building, furnished with a few splintery stools and a single long table. A fitful fire of improperly-cured wood blew gusts of gritty smoke into the room, some of which blew out again with the wind sloughing through the chinks in the wall. The rest of the smoke eventually settled, covering everything with sooty ash. Two men sat by the fire, scowling at each other. Both were big, dirty, and roughly-dressed in leather tunics and leggings that carried the persistent smell of goat.
“Who owns that brown mare, and might she be for sale?” Kirila asked in her assumed boy’s voice. In the shadows Chessie rolled his eyes deprecatingly.
One of the men spat into the fire. “Who’s asking?”
“I might be willing to buy her, if the price is right.”
The man squinted at Kirila’s slight figure. River mud caked his boots, flaking off in dried gray dandruff onto the floor. “A bowl of ale,” he growled at the other man, who lumbered sullenly to his feet and left through a wooden door, slamming it behind him.
“Now, boy, what’s your price?”
“I want the saddle and harness, too,” Kirila said firmly. A strange exhilaration tingled down her arms and legs, as though she were growing taller. “In exchange for this.” Slowly, her eyes on the man’s bearded face, she unwrapped a square of cloth and held it out. In the center of the soiled gray wool lay an emerald, precise and cool, darkened by the smoky light to sea-water green.
The little eyes in the bearded face opened wide, and then the lids abruptly shot down to half-mast. At the same moment the irises also dropped, so that they could be seen completely under the drooping lids. The effect was disconcerting, as if a candle flame had slid down its taper to avoid being snuffed.
“And where might you have picked up a pretty like that ‘un, boy?”
“It’s mine,” Kirila said, flushing a little despite herself. She added in a sharper voice, “Take it or leave it!”
“Oh, I’ll take it, wherever it be from,” the man said softly, “and the rest of the pretties too!” His hand lashed out and grabbed Kirila’s, knocking the emerald to the floor.
He spun her toward him and clamped his arm across her throat, while the other hand fumbled at her tunic for the exposed hilt of the dagger, a corner of which had worked its way from its makeshift concealment and gleamed dully in the firelight. Chessie sprang at the free arm and sank his teeth into it. The man howled and kicked out at him, keeping a firm hold on Kirila but lunging with the other hand, fingers forked, at the dog’s eyes. His heavy boot connected with Chessie’s taut body with a sickening thump, but before the stiffened fingers were halfway to the purple head clamped onto his bleeding arm, Kirila gripped her dagger and thrust it, back-handed, behind her.
It slid in above the soft belly with shockingly little thrust, parting the fatty flesh like a well-ripened cheese clear to the gaily-jeweled hilt. The goat-smelling arm across Kirila’s throat jerked sharply, then let go gently as a lover. He looked at her from a dirty face full of uncomplicated surprise, then crumpled heavily to the floor, Chessie still locked on his arm. Kirila stood over him, panting.
“I saw that, lad!” The second man stood in the doorway, a bowl of ale in his hand. He stumped across the floor, not spilling a drop, his face twisted with sly, triumphant glee inexpertly cloaked with an unaccustomed look of pious justice. “I saw it all, and he asked for it, he did. Jumped you first.”
Kirila reached over and pulled out her knife, not thinking about it beforehand. The body, which had lain in a tidy if dirty lump, was suddenly covered with blood. Chessie staggered to his feet.
“Swear to it in front of the Laird himself, I will,” the innkeeper added in the same triumphant voice. “They won’t make you no trouble either at the Castle, lad. Be glad enough Egan’s setted, or I miss my guess.” He slapped his knee with his free hand, chortling soundlessly, careful not to spill the ale.
Kirila looked again at the body. Fine bits of blowing ash had already floated serenely onto it and stuck to the drying blood. The eyes were open, still surprised. She stumbled out the Inn door, standing in the muddy yard, staring at the night. Chessie limped after her.
“You couldn’t help it, Kirila,” he said gently.
“I know that,” she said, whirling around to face him, speaking more loudly than necessary. “Nobody expects to find the world free of Evil. I know that. I’m on a Quest, and even if it’s not a Quest to overthrow Evil in the classic manner, that doesn’t mean I won’t ever encounter it! I knew that!” Her voice rose in shaky fury. “I’m on a Quest, and sometimes that happens, and he attacked first! I had no choice, and I’m on a Quest, and that sort of thing happens!”
She wheeled away from Chessie and stared straight ahead, her chin lifted defiantly. Then abruptly she turned and threw up into the bushes.
●●●
No one at the Castle did make any trouble. The Lord, whose name was Kelgorn, held a perfunctory inquest at which everyone looked quietly satisfied, and afterward he presensed Kirila with the brown mare. She shuddered a little and refused it. She had been having nightmares when she slept, and during the inquest she often broke into puzzled frowns and shook her head in profoundly sad wonderment at points in the testimony that didn’t seem to warrant such behavior, as during a lengthy discussion on the name of the blacksmith who had married Egan’s only known relative, a sister long since dead. The general opinion was that the lad was a little odd.
Lord Kelgorn, however, insisted that she take the mare. The rogue Egan, he pronounced ponderously, had no known living relatives, friends, or business associates (here the innkeeper looked determinedly at the floor), and the mare would be useful to a lad traveling alone. He himself had, he added modestly, five lads of his own, although none were permitted to travel unaccompanied, without even a squire, but of course in the position in life to which Providence had been pleased to call him... Kirila accepted the mare.
Kelgorn also invited her to winter at Castle Reyndak, but this she politely refused. The weather was now wet as well as cold, settling grimly into the three-month winter rains, and it was obvious that they would have to lodge somewhere until the spring. However, she was anxious to leave behind Castle Reyndak and the growing talk of her brave exploit. In addition, she was finding it more difficult than she had supposed to keep up the pretense of being a boy. Already one beak-nosed elderly lady had spent most of the inquest squinting over the top of her knitting at this lad’s hand gestures and the way he balanced his weight on one foot, becoming so absorbed in watching these simple actions that she dropped several stitches. Another lady, considerably, younger, had gazed at Kirila sideways as they passed in the hall, then tossed her head so that her blond curls danced and the scent of rose petals drifted languidly toward the astonished Kirila. The Castle seemed crowded with visitors, and she grew aghast at the complications of sharing a room. Chessie, too, was tired of acting like a dog and of keeping to shadows deep enough to turn purple to black.
They discussed Egan only once. Kirila stopped in the middle of braiding her hair and said suddenly, “The Kiril family motto is ‘Never Look Back.’”
“Sounds like a limited precept to me,” Chessie said. “If no one looks back, how does anyone learn anything?”
“And my mother’s family, the Mareschals—theirs was ‘Never Falter.’”
“’Was’? Isn’t it still?”
“When my Great-Uncle Emol was on his Quests, he killed two wyverns, twelve knights most foul, and three demented giants.”
Chessie said nothing, waiting.
“After the giants, there was a celebration that went on for three days in the Great Hall, and Rill the Harpist wrote a new ballad about it. They still sing the ballad in Kiril. An escutcheon was added to Emol’s arms, gules, with a brandished mace, and all the ladies wept with joy when he danced with them.”
She was holding her braid, half-plaited, stiffly over one shoulder, as though she had forgotten what to do with the rest of it. Her eyes were deep as wells. Finally she whispered, “The knife went in so easy.”
“Kirila...”
“And I didn’t even know his name.”
“Kirila...”
“I should have at least known his name, if I was going to kill him.”
“Oh, for—” Chessie said. Pity for her scalded his throat and stomach, but some instinct told him that exasperation would be better. “You don’t know my real name, either, but that doesn’t stop you from associating with me.”
“Associating? Associating? I killed him!”
“Yes, you did,” Chessie said, as matter-of-fact as he could manage. “And so he’s dead. When you kill somebody, that happens. He was your knight most foul, your wyvern, your demented giant. So do you want me to write a ballad about it?”
“No!”
“Well, then,” Chessie said. But Kirila went on holding her half-braid tautly to one side, and he added, “It wasn’t your fault.”
Still she didn’t move.
“Kirila, listen,” Chessie said, though he wasn’t sure what he wanted her to listen to. After a moment he found it and sat up straight on his haunches. “Listen. What was your Uncle Emol questing for?”
“For?”
“Yes, for. What was the goal of the quest?”
“Why—to kill wyverns and giants.”
“And what’s the goal of yours?”
“To find the Heart of the World!”
“Not killing?”
“No!”
“Well, then, there you have it. What doesn’t fit, hurts,” Chessie said, and held his breath. Minutes went by. Then Kirila nodded, and he let the breath out. Holding it was turning him grey.
“I’ll be glad when we’ve left here,” he risked, gulping air. Kirila nodded again. Her eyes still looked at something he couldn’t see, but she finished her braid.
They left in the middle of a storm, riding through freezing rain for two days, not able to sleep more than a shivering hour at a time. Chessie caught cold, so they took lodgings at the next settlement. This was the small town of Klee, at the eastern edge of the powerful and far-flung Duchy of Tothis. It had been recently discovered that the exotic spice titil, previously imported from across the southern sea at great trouble and expense and so available only to kings, would grow in the soil near Klee. The town was bustling, what with titil seeds being sold and re-sold for expanding amounts of gold, yeoman farmers being made fabulous offers for their hay fields, and emissaries from the Duke of Tothis himself strolling about in dignified parties trying to levy tithes on everything. As a result, Klee had the boom town’s self-absorbed incuriosity toward strangers. Kirila and Chessie stayed the winter in an austere, clean religious house run by an order with no interest in making converts, and were patiently bored.
She exercised the brown mare, purchased supplies for next spring, and had a local seamstress make her serviceable tunics and divided skirts of brown wool. Another ruby had been pried out of her dagger—it was beginning to look pock-marked, like a survivor of scarlet fever—to pay for everything. Outside, it rained steadily. Chessie taught her several ballads, but he couldn’t help wincing at her erratic sense of pitch, and they very nearly quarreled, not speaking to each other for two days. Outside it rained steadily. Kirila played chess with herself until Chessie grudgingly agreed to play, mostly, he said, because the sight of Kirila congratulating herself on beating herself was driving him crazy. To his own surprise, he discovered that when he didn’t have to play, he liked to play. Within a month he had invented a tricky gambit he called the Purple Defense, and by the end of the winter Kirila, who couldn’t resist a wager, owed him three hundred rubies, forty horses, two castles completely equipped with liveried footmen, and her soul. Outside it rained.
Three wet, cold months dragged by, but eventually, after a few false alarms when an afternoon of tentative sunshine abruptly turned back into grey storm, the rains stopped, and again it was spring.