Shadow Gate (10 page)

She'd not been there ten days when she woke one day to voices all aflutter.

“Garrard is back from Clan Hall. He says Clan Hall won't help us. We're on our own.”

She washed her face and slouched to the eating hall. The nai porridge tasted particularly bland today, no spice at all, but as always it was filling. She sat with the other menials, who had learned to ignore her beyond a perfunctory greeting.

At the next table, the loft fawkners were whispering fiercely, heads bent together.

“Yordenas has returned, still with no eagle. I've never heard of a bird nesting for so many seasons. I don't like him. I don't trust him.”

Heads went up as six reeves wearing gleaming reeve leathers sauntered into the eating hall. Marit shuddered; a red haze washed her vision, and the last smears of porridge turned as pink as if mixed with blood. She blinked, and after all it was only her eyes playing tricks on her. The porridge had no color at all, just a few grainy lumps stuck to the sides of the bowl.

She looked up, and saw a man wearing a Guardian's cloak.

He wasn't looking her way, or he would have known instantly, as she knew instantly. She ducked down, pretending to fiddle with her sandal's lacing. He sat down with his companions at a table well away from the one where she sat, because certain of the reeves strutted an attitude that they were better than the rest and certainly did not want to associate with the menials or even the fawkners, although the health of their eagles depended on the fawkners.

He sat with eyes downcast, listening more than he talked. His cloak was red as blood, somber rather than bright. It made her think of seeping wounds that never heal.

He did not eat, only made his presence and his allies known to all. Eventually, he left the eating hall. As he walked to the door, she bent down to let the height of those sitting at her table shield her from view. As soon as he was gone, the fawkners began whispering.

“Hsss! You see how the conflict will fall out. Yordenas means to become marshal in Alyon's place. He'll poison him.”

“Poison Alyon! Even I don't believe that, Rena.”

“You're a cursed fool if you don't believe it. It's going to get ugly, when Alyon dies, and he will die because he's weakening fast. Then it'll come down to a fight between Garrard and the outsiders, and that'll get even uglier. If we were any of us smart we would just up and leave like the hirelings keep doing.”

“We can't abandon the eagles. They need us.”

“That's right,” the others murmured. The eagles needed them. For a dedicated fawkner, it was all the cause they followed.

The moment enough menials got up to go to work, Marit rose and kept within the pack of them, and with gritted teeth walked at their ambling pace along the aisle and out the door into the exercise yard. She slunk immediately to the barracks, where she gathered her few possessions and tucked them into the feed bag. Then she
went to the pits to relieve herself, and afterward she hauled up two waste buckets and swung them on a pole over her shoulder and walked out the gates toward the dumping pit as if she had been assigned to clear out night soil. The dumping pit lay a good long way away from the reeve hall. The distance seemed even farther with that stench swinging to either side, always in your face. But it was far enough away that when she set down the buckets next to the stinking pit, she could keep walking because no one was likely to run out to question her or even notice her at all from the distant walls.

A man wearing a Guardian's cloak sat in a reeve hall, pretending to be a reeve. When she thought about it, it was a good strategy. If you want to build an army and terrorize the countryside, then corrupt the reeve halls first so they won't interfere. Yet what did Lord Radas want in the end? Was it greed that drove him? Perhaps it was as simple as lust for power, as it says in the Tale of Honor:
“The first man bowed before him, and at this sight his heart burned and his lips became dry, and then all the men must bow or he could not be contented.”
Did he simply want to rule the Hundred?

She kept walking, lugging the feed bag. Storm clouds advanced over the Olo'o Plain, and a thunderstorm boomed, soaking her as she trudged. As the clouds spilled away toward the salt sea and the first cracks of sky appeared, firelings sparked in the heavens. She stared, raising a hand to shield her eyes from the last drops of rain, but the blue lights were already gone. Thunder rumbled in the distance, and she grinned, thinking of the time she and Flirt had flown through a massive storm like the complete and utter idiots they had been because they were young and full of glee. Thinking of how a fireling had winked into existence less than an arrow's shot below them, eyes afire and translucent wings a blaze of light. And cursed if Flirt hadn't stooped, and pulled up when the fireling had winked out before her talons
struck. Only the blue light had flashed again below, and Flirt had stooped again, and then again and again, and for a brief wild insanely glorious passage she and the raptor had engaged in a game of chase with the one creature in the worlds no eagle can catch.

Eiya! Grief is a mire.
She put her head down and kept walking.

Slowly, the skies cleared to a patchwork. After a day and a night she reached the abandoned shack and sank down, exhausted, beside the dusty harness. Her thoughts chased in circles. She was alone, just as the blood-cloaked Guardian had been alone even though he was sitting in the eating hall among reeves who identified themselves as his allies.

What is a Guardian? she might ask, and she had found one of her answers: A Guardian might walk among humankind, but she was no longer one of them. She never would be again.

M
ARIT WOKE AT
dawn when Warning shoved her nose into her face and slobbered on her. The cursed mare's coat needed brushing, and her mane was tangled, but her hooves were clean of stones and debris and she was otherwise healthy. By all appearances, the mare was as happy to see Marit as Marit was to see her, curse it all, for there were tears in her own eyes.

“Here's your pay,” said the stable master, holding out a string of vey. He cleared his throat, shifted his feet, scratched an earlobe. “You're a good worker, no complaints there. You don't make any trouble. But I have to ask you not to come back tomorrow.”

“I see,” said Marit to her feet. She knew what was coming. She had been through this conversation six times in the weeks she had been in Olossi.

He spoke quickly, to get through the distasteful job. “Custom is off, and that's besides it being the Flood Rains and fewer folk walking about this time of year due to the weather. Someone is causing trouble on the roads for carters and stablekeepers, for all us honest guilds folk, so we can't keep our hirelings as we might otherwise want in a better year.”

“Custom does seem low. What do you think is causing the trouble?”

He cleared his throat. She glanced up, meeting his gaze.

Images and words churned:
she's got that northern way of speaking; what if she's a spy for one of the Greater Houses; I don't trust 'em; they're trying to corral all the trade for themselves and their favored clients; anyway, there's something about her that creeps everyone and no surprise . . .

She dropped her gaze. He took a step away, as from someone who stank.

“Might be anyone,” he said, backed up against the closed door, “ospreys diving for a quick snatch, criminals wandering down from the north, folk wanting to drive a wedge into the carters' guild and make trouble for them.” His tone picked up confidence. “So there it is. Someone has to go. The other hirelings are, eh, well, it's your—ah—northern way of speaking. Makes them uncomfortable. I've had them on hire for years now, so that makes you lowest roll.”

“First to go,” she agreed with a twisted smile. She had replaced the old sandals she'd taken from the shepherd's hut with better ones, but after weeks in the city keeping her gaze down she had memorized every stain and nick in the worn leather. Her feet were dirty again, toenails black with grime from stable work. “My thanks. You were a fair employer, I'll give you that.” She took the vey
from his hand, trying not to notice how quickly he pulled his hand back, hoping not to touch her. As if she was a demon walking abroad in human skin.

Who was to say she wasn't?

Keeping her head down, she walked through the lower city of Olossi toward the baths she favored. Mud slopped over her feet. At the trailing end of the season of Flood Rains, every surface was layered in muck. The clouds hung low and dark, threatening to spill again.

She paused at the edge of Crow's Gate Field. In the dry season, commerce through the gate would be brisk, and the guards and clerks busy. Today, Sapanasu's clerks lounged under the shelter of a colonnade, seated in sling-back chairs, sipping at musty bitter-fern tea. They laughed and talked, teeth flashing, voices bright. One slapped another on the arm teasingly. A trio had their heads bent close, sharing secrets. One dozed, head back and mouth open, and the others were careful not to jostle her. Their easy camaraderie reminded her of her days at Copper Hall among her fellow reeves. Those had been good days. She'd been happy there. She'd had friends, colleagues, a lover.

Some things, once lost, can never be restored.

Bear this grief, and move on.

She walked toward the river along the wide avenue that paralleled the lower city's wall, such as it was, more a livestock fence than a wall to halt the advance of an army. Her sandals shed dribs and drabs with each step. Aui! Everything stank. Everything dripped. Rich folk hurrying home before dusk made their way through town in palanquins carried by laborers whose brown legs were spattered with mud. The streets in the upper city were paved with stone, so presumably there was less Flood Rains filth there, but the one time she'd ventured past the inner gates she had felt too conspicuous. The lower city hosted all kinds: laborers, criminals, touts and peddlers, country lads and lasses come to make their fortunes in a trade, outlander merchants come to sell and buy, slaves and
hirelings and shopkeepers and craftsmen and folk who would sell anything, even their own bodies, as long as they could grab a few vey from the doing. She might make folk uncomfortable, but in the lower city the watch would not drive her out unless she actually broke the law.

On a street on the river side of Harrier's Gate stood two ranks of bright green pipe-brush, ruthlessly cut back, which flanked an ordinary pedestrian gate set into a compound wall. A bell hung from a hook on the wall. She rang it, keeping her gaze on her dirty feet.

The door was opened from inside. “You again. It's extra for a bucket and stool carried to your tub.”

“I know.”

He held out a hand, and she pressed vey worth a week's labor into his very clean palm. He led her along a covered walkway raised above muddy ground and lined with troughs of red and pink good-fortune trimmed into mushroom caps. Water flowed smoothly alongside them through split pipewood. The attendant gave her a sour look when she bypassed the usual changing rooms and common scrub hall.

The private rooms were a series of partitions separating filled tubs heated by hot stones and stoked braziers. In the dry season, awnings could be tied across the scaffolding of the tall partitions for shade. The smallest and cheapest private room lay closest to the entrance and the common baths, where everyone must tramp back and forth; the more expensive were larger and sited at the end of the walkway. The truly wealthy could purchase relaxation at one of five tiny cottages situated within the pleasant garden with its manicured jabi bushes, slumbering paradom, and flowering herboria.

He showed her into the smallest of the private chambers, and watched to make sure she removed her filthy sandals before she stepped up on the raised paving stones alongside the slatted tub. He left the door open until he brought back a bucket of water and a stool.

“You pay extra for pouring bowl, scrub brush, and changing cloth,” he said.

She showed him the ones she had purchased from a peddler, items not too worn to keep in use but certainly nothing a prosperous clansman would carry. The attendant inspected the items, touching the cloth only at the corner, pinched between thumb and forefinger.

“You want the lamp lit?” he asked.

“No. I've light to make my own way out.”

He tested the water with an elbow, sniffed to show it was satisfactory, and finally cut off a sliver of soap. When he shut the door, she had, at last, a measure of peace.

She stripped of everything except her cloak, scrubbed, rinsed, scrubbed, and rinsed, and climbed into the tub. The heated water was not hot enough to redden her skin, as she would have liked, but it was satisfactory. She draped the cloak over the rim, and sank in up to her chin.

The heat melted her. She tilted her head back to rest against the slats and let her senses open.

Someone lit lamps in other chambers, oil hissing as it caught flame. Folk passed clip-clop on the walkway, treading heavily or lightly according to their nature. Business increased at dusk, as the shadows gave cover to men and women who didn't want to be recognized.

She tasted the powerful scent of night-blooming paradom like cinnamon kisses on her lips.

A pair of lovers whispered in one of the cottages, words of longing and promise poured into willing ears. How fiercely they yearned! She sank into memories of Joss, made more bitter and more sweet because she knew he might well yet be alive, older than her now although he had once been younger. She had to let go of her affection for him. He had lived for twenty years without her, grown his own life without her. And anyway, was it even possible to love where there are no real secrets, where no part of your lover is thankfully hidden away from you?

She accepted the grief, and set it aside, because there
was work to be done and she had never once in her life turned away from any task laid before her.