“No, the new Pateros Brigade.” By his voice, he didn’t think much of it.
The rain let up enough so umbrellas were folded up and hoods shoved back. I heard a rumble in the crowd over toward the Starhall, like the shadow panther’s snarl. The Guard frowned, though he wouldn’t leave his post.
I couldn’t see anything from here. “What’s in the wind?”
He frowned harder. “Hard to say. There was some action by the western ferry last night, a bunch of those Brigade kids and some ramblers. Kids’d heard they might be norther spies and jumped them. Ramblers, they’re pretty tough. You bash them, they bash you back.”
“Standoff.”
He grunted. “Bashed heads all round.”
“Northers wouldn’t hire Laurean ramblers for any reason,” I pointed out.
“That’s what I would’ve said. I get along fine with anyone who stays on his own side of the border.” His eyes narrowed. “But now I think we trusted them too much.” He didn’t have to tell me who he meant by them.
I glanced toward the platform. “Any chance of getting me through?”
“Nope. What do you want?”
“To see Esmelda.”
He laughed. “Double not a chance.”
I waved, half-salute, and wove back into the crowd. Maybe if I got close enough, Montborne would clear me through the Guards. But then... How could I tell Esmelda about Avi with him there?
I came to a standstill, sweating and muttering curses. Quick short breaths, trying to calm down enough to think —
It happened suddenly, practically under my nose. Shouts and scuffling. Guards jumping up and pushing people aside. “What’s happening? What? Where?”
“Traitor!”
“They’ve caught a traitor!”
“Sold us out to the northers!”
The next instant everyone was screaming and running, nobody knew where — eyes wide, elbows and fists and folded umbrellas everywhere. The air stank of panic.
“Help! Help!”
“Out of here! I’ve got to get — ”
“Get him!”
“Traitor? Where?”
“TRAY — TOR!”
Then there were no more words, only deafening noise. Bodies slammed into me. I twisted away, staggered, and somehow kept my feet. There was no direction to this thing, no focus I could see. Nothing to draw a knife against.
I heard a high-pitched scream like a hamstrung brush-sheep, and remembered stories of them stampeding, trampling each other to bloody shreds. For the first time, I felt the clear danger in the crowd.
I pushed my way past the Guards and on to the platform, just as if I were sent there to help. From even this little height, I saw them, east of the platform — the knot of struggling bodies, maybe a few people fallen, Guards and Pateros kids striking out with their batons, others with bare fists. Everyone else was trying to get out of the plaza.
I glanced back. The Senators and Inner Council people looked frightened. The gaea-priests called for calm. Montborne had gone off to one side, giving orders to his officers.
He gestured to the dignitaries. “My people will escort you back to the Starhall.”
“My place is here — ” began the head priest.
“It’s too dangerous, Markus,” Montborne said. “The crowd is unpredictable and dangerous. My men and Orelia’s are trained to handle situations like this.”
“But — ”
“Just go.” He shoved the priest down the steps at the back of the platform and into the arms of two uniformed men. The Senators filed down, glancing around them anxiously. Montborne spotted me and motioned me over.
I took the arm of the nearest, a woman in Inner Council green. The same red-haired woman who’d tried to save Pateros. Her face looked chalky, her eyes wide. I helped her down the steps.
A hand, fingers thin but sinewy, touched my arm. I looked down into Esmelda’s gray eyes. I saw a strange expression in them, a hardness like granite but also a questioning, as if she almost recognized me. Me or the Ranger’s vest?
Her chin moved imperceptibly toward the mob below. “My son’s down there.” Her voice was grim and low.
The boy with rainwater eyes and Avi’s black hair...
Then she would owe me, this formidable old woman. Then she would have to listen to me. I nodded, got her down the steps, and blended back into the throng.
This time I saw the crowd for what it was, an enemy with no real weapons and no brains to speak of, only the weight and number of its bodies. Only its flash-flood shifts in mood and direction.
I’d learned a trick on the Ridge, how to focus my will as if it were a physical thing. I saw an invisible spear-point, my body at its base, one hand stretched in front of me with the outside edge like a knife chop. I moved rapidly through the milling people. They drew apart for me. A stick swung at me at head-height, not a Guard’s baton but a thick length of wood. I slipped past and it didn’t even touch me.
A knot of bodies lay at my feet, curled up and screaming, a few lying flat, others bending over them crying, calling for help in voices that couldn’t be heard above the racket. More men and women on their feet, pushing their way toward the nearest street.
A boy, a boy with rainwater eyes...
He wasn’t down, not in this bunch. Quickly I searched the others before they surged away. The crowd, the many-headed enemy, shifted direction. It moved toward the center of the plaza. Behind me, up against the base of the platform, I heard more screams and curses. I ignored them. Over by the grave site, I saw another struggle. Instinct drew me toward it. Once or twice, some head-blind fool barreled into me. I bruised a few ribs and twisted a few shoulders keeping free.
A man in rambler’s coveralls, who reminded me a little of Westifer at his worst, had squared off with a red-faced boy in the Brigade uniform. People scrambled out of their way, leaving a little open space. Swinging a homemade baton, the kid screamed the man was a spy and a traitor. A fighting madness ran all through him that no words could cool.
The rambler roared like a cornered bull elk and bunched his shoulders. A knife slipped down the back of his sleeve. The hilt smacked into his cupped palm, the blade tight along his forearm so the kid couldn’t see it.
I shoved through the throng just as the rambler, his back to me, drew back for a killing sweep. The kid was wide open, throat and belly, no sense of what was coming, all blind devil-dare with his friends shouting him on.
I sprinted for the rambler and kick-stomped the back of one knee. It broke his stance long enough for me to land a knife-hand chop to the nerves in his forearm. His fingers jerked open. I slid my hand down his wrist and twisted the knife away. The next moment, the three Brigade kids rushed him.
Then I was fighting for my own skin, the rambler’s buddy after me with a long curved knife, a sword, really. The rambler’s knife was badly balanced, but I had no time to change it for one of mine. I spun and landed a side kick in one kid’s solar plexus. Mother, he had a knife, too, and no sense of how to use it. But in these close quarters —
The rambler somehow got another knife and held it horizontal, backhand grip, blade level with my throat. Crazy in his eyes.
I pivoted and raised my knife for a down-stab, moving slow so he would see it, would react and be drawn away from my real target — the man with the curved sword. I lunged sideways, past his reach as I reversed my stroke. Curved-sword saw it too late and jumped back. My knife-tip ripped open the side of his thigh. A heartbeat later, I reversed again, same arc, other blade edge, slashing for his hamstrings. He jumped away again, blood drenching his coverall leg, and stumbled up against the edge of the crowd. A young woman in full skirts screamed as he landed on top of her. Two Brigade kids, knives raised, dove for him.
“Behind you!” someone shouted.
My body moved before I could think. I swerved to one side and pivoted around, one hand up in guard, the other holding the knife low by my leg. I sank slowly, gathering strength from the earth. My thighs t
ingled, ready to explode.
It was the rambler again, one shoulder cut open, coverall sleeve in strips. His eyes met mine, reading me. Breathing hard, his chest heaving. He was no fool and he’d seen blood before. He’d seen death. But he’d never seen me. Never seen the steppe knife-forms, honed by Brassaford and all those years on the Ridge.
The tip of his knife wavered. His eyes darkened, searching for a way to back out. There was a brief, sudden quieting of the crowd.
I forced myself to think. Not feel, not act — think. Pateros or Montborne or even Derron back on the Ridge would have found something to say — ”I’m not your enemy” or “Let’s all back off” — and then this whole damned showdown would be over.
The moment passed before I could wet my lips. Screams and cries rang out behind me. The rambler’s eyes went wide and white. The knife disappeared back into his coveralls. Cursing, he pushed past me. I turned just as he hauled a Brigade kid off the tangle of bodies.
On the ground, Curved-sword rolled to his side, moaning. A wound bubbled from his upper thigh, up near his groin. The rambler knelt above him. His hands dripped with the bright, copper-stinking blood.
I dropped the knife and shoved him aside. Grabbed a scarf from a shock-eyed woman clambering to her feet. Wadded it over the spurting blood and leaned on it with all my weight.
Someone shrieked for the medicians. The scarf was already slippery under my hands. A sickening quiet settled over the crowd. People watched me with drawn, horrified faces.
Mother, let it be a nick and not cut through. I saw a man once cut like this and live, but it was a small artery in his shoulder.
The medicians couldn’t save Pateros — what can they do for this poor fool?
Just beyond Curved-sword’s outstretched arm, I noticed a black-haired boy on his knees, cradling a young woman in his arms. Dark brown curls spilled out beneath her orange kerchief. Her face was white except for wine-dark lips and the ashy smudges beneath her closed eyes. There was blood everywhere, but I couldn’t tell whose.
The boy looked up with eyes of rainwater and steel, so like Avi’s and yet not like. Except for a bruise on one cheekbone, he looked soft and pale, as if he’d never faced anything harder than how to open a book. Even so, the light in those eyes was as hungry as any I’d ever seen.
“Your mother sent me,” I said.
He couldn’t hear my voice above the crowd but he understood me well enough. His face, locked in ice one moment, turned fluidly expressive the next, but so tangled I couldn’t read it. I could only imagine what Avi would have said in the same situation.
Now the City Guardsmen came pelting through. I got to my feet and smelled the shift in the crowd. Someone said, “Medician’s station this way.” People helped the injured to their feet and Guards cleared them a path. They carried the bleeding man, keeping pressure on the cut.
The boy — Esmelda’s son, Avi’s brother — tried to pick up the girl. He had no idea how to lift her. I could have slung her across my shoulders like a dead gazelle, but something held me back.
A medician, older man, bent over her, shook his head, covered her face with another woman’s fringed shawl. The boy stood up. He watched as two women from the crowd lifted the girl and carried her off, then turned, scanning the platform. His mouth twisted, his eyes dry as the steppe, and again I couldn’t read him.
I jerked my head toward the Starhall. His eyes narrowed — good, he’d understood. He took a quick breath, gathering himself, and walked away from me.
Chapter 12
Esmelda’s house, a homely, squarish lump of stone, paled in the glow from the solar lights along the walkway. It seemed to me to have pulled itself upright, as if it didn’t want to get too close to its neighbors, shivering in a cold no one else could feel. It was an extravagance, even I could see that, two stories for just a single family — if you counted these three a family. Esmelda. The boy with eyes the color of Avi’s. And someone else I hadn’t seen clearly, only as a blurred back-lit shadow against the half-drawn curtains.
The sky had gone lightless hours ago. I watched the house from the shelter of a tree on the opposite side of the street. The leaves hung thick and low, bitter-clean after this morning’s rain. The smooth bark invited me to lean against it. In Laureal City, even the trees presented temptation.
For all my hours of waiting, I still didn’t know what I was going to say. Everything I’d rehearsed was no dumbshit good. But the time for waiting had passed.
A few strides brought me to the walkway. The door was smooth wood with no fancy carvings. Beside it hung a ceramic bell shaped like a hang-me-down flower, with a wooden stick to tap it. The sound was full and mellow. A moment later I heard footsteps inside.
A woman opened the door, small and tight-faced beneath a coil of white hair. Eyes with hidden light, we’d say on the steppe. Her gaze flew to the empty sheath on my thigh, for I’d left the long-knife with the gray mare’s gear. I needed a different sort of weapon tonight.
“Yes?”
“I’m here to see Esmelda.”
She blocked the opening with her body.
“I know she’s here.” Lie to me, mouse, and I’ll break your neck.
“She sees no strangers.” She slurred the word so it sounded like Rangers.
The woman pulled back a fraction to close the door. I slammed one shoulder into it and the next instant I was inside. On one side of the narrow entry sat a table littered with papers. On the other, a staircase with a carved bannister and a corridor leading beyond it. Two doorways, everything low-lit except for the right-hand room.
Before I could head for it, she darted in front of me again, grabbing my arm. She had courage, this Laurean mouse.
A woman’s voice from the lighted room: “Lys?”
She faltered and I jerked away, an easy disengage that sent her staggering. The next moment I was through the doorway.
The room was bright after the dim light of the entry. White walls with woven hangings in sand-blown color, soft upholstered furniture. A low table with more papers and books, candles adding to the glow from the panels of solar lights. A carpet with a graceful, muted design. A room, I thought, for people who didn’t get dirty.
Esmelda sat bolt upright in one of the chairs. The boy, on the sofa, jumped to his feet. His eyes had the look of someone too shocked to cry yet, and I thought of the dead girl in the orange scarf. She must have meant something to him. Behind me, the mouse-woman said, “I tried to stop her — ”
“It’s all right,” Esmelda said quietly.
Suddenly the room went still, except for my breathing, rasping as if I’d run all the way here from Pateros’s grave. My head filled with the honey-sweet smell of the burning wax.
Esmelda waited, her eyes never leaving mine, metal gray that no candlelight could ever warm. Behind her, the boy was as tense as a coiled viper. The mouse-woman disappeared back into the shadows.
“So, Kardith of the Rangers,” Esmelda said. “Kardith of no place but the Rangers.”
A hard one, this old woman.
The boy’s eyes flickered — to me, back to her again. Wondering how she knew my name. So did I.
“Have you come to collect a reward?” She meant, for looking after the boy this morning.
I shrugged. The boy was a faceless, voiceless nothing. Like the young Guardsman who couldn’t find the courage to ask how Pateros died. To hell with both of them. I wasn’t here to play nursemaid.
But I didn’t expect how hard this would be. For a moment, I couldn’t make my tongue move. Something rose up inside me like freezing mud, choking me, drowning me. When I forced the words out, they sounded barely human.
“For Avi — I’ve come for Avi.”
She watched me, still unmoving.
Not going to make it easy for me, are you, you old she-dragon? If it were just me, I’d walk out of here now.
“Avi,” I repeated. “Your daughter.”
For a moment I thought she would say, “I have no
daughter.” Avi told me that Esmelda cared more for power than her own family, that she sucked people dry like a bloodbat. “Not me,” Avi’d said. “I’ve got my own life.”
My own life. Mother-of-us-all!
“When my daughter left my house, she made it clear she no longer wanted anything to do with me. No obligations either way. Those were her very words. Has she changed her mind?” A hint of scorn for such weakness of will. Or maybe triumph, that Avi would be so desperate to come crawling back, she had to send a messenger to plead for a truce first.
“Never!” I stammered, sweating, all the words I’d rehearsed outside forgotten. “But she’s gone. Disappeared. Out on the Ridge. Two weeks gone and no sign. She could be hurt, dying, killed by northers.”
One eyebrow lifted. And you expect me to do something about it?
“I went looking on my night shifts until the Captain — he put me on double to stop me. I couldn’t get far enough from the fort between shifts and I knew I’d be caught if I missed a go. It’s not as if none of us cares. We all — Avi’s one of us. She fished one man out of a norther ambush — took a spear-point meant for someone else.” And me, never mind about me. “A dock in pay or a week’s fort duty, that’s easy for someone who’d risked her neck for you. We wouldn’t stop looking until — but there’s orders, new orders.”
“Orders?” Again that whipcrack voice. Her eyes glittered as they went hard and narrow.
“From Montborne. Six months ago. Pull back the patrol lines. No wandering, no ‘unauthorized expeditions’, no exploring, no provoking — no searching.”
She stared at me as if I were a gutless sandbat.
“If it were just a pack of Mother-damned rules, do you think I’d be standing here now? I’d be out there searching and to hell with them. But the new penalty for insubordination, it’s — handing!”
Now the room turned cold and still and dark, despite the candles and the solar lights. The old woman sat like a shadow panther watching a gazelle. But I was no gazelle.
“Handing?” the boy asked, flat voice.
“The loss of a hand — usually the right,” she said. “It’s said to be a norther custom.”
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