Possibilities were two— no, three: It was meant for Rowan; it was meant for whichever steerswoman was custodian of the Annex; it was meant for Mira.
Could a guard spell be made so specific that only one person could get past it? “I don’t suppose you heard of Mira’s having any dealings with wizards?”
“No. She hated ’em.”
“That’s usual.”
But if Slado knew Rowan was at the Annex, and knew enough to consider her a threat, certainly some more direct and dependable means of eliminating her could be used. “I think,” she said slowly, “that I’ve simply lost my immunity. Somehow.” She made a noise of frustration. “And I don’t even know why steerswomen should be safe from guard spells in the first place. We simply are. Or ought to be.”
Gwen appeared at the end of the aisle. “I’m off,” she said, then added, “and thanks for making the dinner.”
“You’re welcome. In fact, come by tomorrow, and I’ll do better, since I’ll know to expect it.”
This left Gwen with such an ambivalent expression on her face that Rowan and Steffie exchanged a quick wry glance; then the two departed for their homes.
Rowan dreamed that Tyson, ship’s navigator from the Morgans Chance, unexpectedly appeared at the door of the Annex and that they two had a long and detailed conversation concerning the nature of guard spells. Interestingly, both of them seemed well-informed on the subject. The Rowan who observed the dream tried desperately to listen to what the Rowan who participated in the dream was saying. But, as is so often the case with dreams, the conversation proved to have no content whatsoever when examined closely.
Rowan woke to Mira’s lumpy bed and dim light filtering through the slats of the shutters.
No surprise that Rowan should dream of Tyson: it had been he who first demonstrated their mutual immunity to guard spells.
She tried to return to sleep, but was frustrated by the fact that the sheets had become so tangled that she would have to rise and remake the bed to get them right. After half an hour of attempting different postures, she gave it up and rose for the day.
She stubbornly ignored the box until she had prepared and eaten a makeshift breakfast, dealt with the dishes, planned what provisions to acquire for the evening, set out papers, ink, pens, and her logbook. Only then did she fetch the box.
She brought it back to the worktable, carrying it again by its wrappings, and set it down. Then she moved about it like a dog investigating a scorpion, crouching to view it from every possible angle, staying well back.
It clearly was meant for a steerswoman; the depiction on the lid left no question.
How had Rowan lost her immunity?
The woman on the lid was shown in typical steerswoman’s garb, with typical accoutrements: hooded cloak, trousers, high leather boots, pack with protruding tubular map case, and a sheathed sword hanging at her waist. It came to Rowan that it was only these details that enabled her to recognize the subject of the picture as a steerswoman.
She looked down at herself. She was wearing clothing salvaged from Mira’s wardrobe: a faded blue blouse of age-softened silk; moss-green canvas trousers, stiff from being stored unused for decades— and she was barefoot. Not at all the traditional appearance for a steerswoman. And how had she been dressed when she touched the box the previous day? Much the same.
Rowan brought her pack down from the storeroom and placed her map case inside; the protruding end of the case she carefully arranged to precisely the same angle as that shown on the box lid. She strapped on her sword, and arranged it with the same care. She took Mira’s cloak from its hook, swung it around her shoulders; her own she had discarded in the Outskirts, when the constant abrasion against the rough-edged redgrass had worn it down to the lining.
Then she shouldered the pack, readjusted her gear, and considered herself again. Anyone seeing her would instantly know her as a steerswoman. All she lacked were her gum-soled, gray leather steerswoman’s boots, which had suffered the same fate as her cloak; but if, as she guessed, the box was able to recognize a steerswoman, Rowan had certainly provided sufficient clues by which to be recognized
By any person of average intelligence. Rowan found very disturbing the idea of an object like a box possessing intelligence, or an inhabiting spirit.
Perhaps it was merely that certain conditions were necessary for the spell to work. Three years ago, when she had watched the boy Willam prepare to execute his particular kind of destructive magic, she had been impressed by the total concentration and utter precision of action he displayed. Exactitude had been required, exactitude in every detail. Willam’s spell had not been intelligent; the intelligence had been Willam’s, in the precise recreation of the proper conditions.
Rowan considered her own bare feet. She ought to search the house for Mira’s boots.
She sighed in impatience and doffed pack and cloak, wondering where to begin— then recalled the old boots sitting on the back stairs.
They were dank with damp, crusted with mud. Rowan spent some minutes sitting on the steps, scraping the mud with a broken broom haft. The boots were ancient and had not been well cared for even in their youth. The gum soles were worn to the leather, and apparently Mira had continued to use them in that condition, as the leather itself was also worn, nearly to the insole.
Rowan had no idea if the box’s requirements might include the soles of her feet. Still, the lack would be easy to remedy. The gum, distilled from the sap of certain trees, was available on any ship and in all seaports; sailors routinely used it to coat the soles of their boots and shoes, in order to improve their traction on wooden decks.
Rowan stopped short.
Gum-soled boots were used by steerswomen and by sailors— and by almost no one else. Those sailors most likely to wear footgear were those whose income enabled them to afford the expense: that is to say, officers. Like Tyson.
Rowan abandoned the boots, swept back into the house, scrabbled inside the cash jar on the mantel, extracted a small number of coins, and hurried out into the street.
At a harbor shop she found a secondhand pair of brown sailor’s boots with soles in good repair; the shopkeeper, knowing she was a steerswoman, offered them free.
Back at the Annex, she immediately donned the boots and turned to the table where the box still rested.
She wore no cloak, no pack, no sword. She made no attempt to make herself visibly a steerswoman. She reached out her hand and touched the lid of the box.
No effect. The steerswoman’s mouth twitched once in satisfaction and she pulled up the lid to examine the contents.
It was empty.
“Rowan— ”
And she was on the opposite side of the room, her drawn sword at the ready in her hands, her back toward the now-open door. She stood, tense, shuddering with fear, equally prepared to strike or escape. Her breath came harsh through clenched teeth.
The box sat on the table, closed; she had slammed it shut when she fled.
It had spoken to her.
She sensed a presence behind her, spun.
A little boy with a stack of kindling balanced on his head stood in the center of the street, gape-mouthed in terror. Rowan considered the sight she must present: a madwoman in a fighting stance, weapon fearsomely wielded, wild-eyed with panic.
Rowan blinked and relaxed her posture. “Excuse me,” she said, and shut the door.
There was no one else in the room; Rowan was alone with the box. She cautiously approached it again, with her sword in her right hand, and reached out slowly to open it with her left.
The box continued: “I hope you will forgive me for choosing to communicate with you in such a startling fashion.” The voice was identical to that of Corvus, the wizard in Wulfshaven. “You certainly chose to startle me with the contents of your message. I’m sure you had your reasons. And I have mine.”
Rowan found she was clenching her teeth painfully. She forced her jaw to relax, made herself take one step closer.
Corvus would hardly be likely to have magically reduced his size and traveled in a little box in the cargo hold of a ship for weeks on end, purely in order to speak to Rowan. The wizard was not present. The box contained only his voice.
Did it contain his hearing, as well? “Corvus …” she said hesitantly; but the voice spoke over hers, oblivious.
“I’m sure you know that I was startled,” it continued, “not to say shocked, to hear that you knew of the existence of the links. You neglected to tell me how you found out about them, and of course”— the voice acquired a wry tone— “I cannot ask.” It had been Fletcher who had told Rowan of the magical devices carried by the wizards’ servants stationed in the Outskirts. He had destroyed his own link before changing his loyalties.
“But I did as you suggested,” the box said in Corvus’s voice, “and you are correct. Until fifty years ago Routine Bioform Clearance was a regularly scheduled event, repeating in a twenty-year cycle. By comparing old traces and maps, it’s clear that the beam was always directed at areas just beyond the Outskirts, and the result each time was an increase in the rate of expansion of human-supporting lifeforms. We can only assume that its original purpose was to destroy the … the inimical life, so that the Outskirts could move eastward— and the Inner Lands grow behind it.”
Inimical life, such as demons. This was why demons did not exist in the Inner Lands: destroyed by magic, just beyond the ever-shifting edge of the Outskirts. And now— what would prevent the strange animals at the edge of the world from moving inward?
Corvus continued. “I still have not determined why the Clearance stopped, or whether Slado actually had anything to do with that; but you can be certain that I was concerned to hear that he had directed the beam into inhabited lands.
“I could not use my own link to communicate directly with the field agents currently working in the Outskirts, as you had requested. The action would require my messages to … shall we say, to take a route where there would be watchers. The messages might be intercepted; questions would be asked. And that’s particularly unfortunate, because some of our people did die. As you suspected, the record of the actual event had been erased, but I learned a great deal by replaying surveillance taken before and after it, paying particular attention to the flags.” Rowan wondered again how something as small as a link could possibly carry a flag large enough to be visible from the watching eye of a Guidestar and how that flag could be invisible to human eyes.
“There were four flags,” Corvus said, “in or near the affected areas. One nearby ceased to move after the gap in the records.” That wizard’s minion, Rowan understood, must have died in the bizarre weather that occurred after the heat. “Two flags directly in the path of the beam had vanished entirely after the event.” Two wizard’s servants, suffering the horrible fate of death by the magical heat; Rowan thought of the corpses she had seen, burst wide and turned hard as rock, and found herself disliking Corvus for referring to the minions themselves as flags, impersonally, instead of as people.
The voice acquired an affected innocence. “One flag, oddly, vanished more than a day before the Clearance”— Fletcher’s, Rowan thought— “and the heat track of the tribe that it was originally with showed a rather interesting pattern of motion. Due east. Very quickly. It looked”— and the voice became ironic— “like a difficult journey.” Three tribe members had died from the physical strain of that flight and more than a dozen others in the tempests and tornadoes that followed. Rowan felt her dislike begin to transform into positive hatred of Corvus for his callous manner; but abruptly, he dropped his tone and spoke simply. “Slado is not the only one who can erase a record, Rowan. The gap in the record is now two days longer than it was originally. No other wizard will know that one tribe had warning. They’re safe.”
By now Rowan was sitting on the edge of the table, sword hilt slack in her hands, absorbed in the words. “There’s no more that I can tell you— safely or wisely, I should say. But if the Outskirts are not allowed to continue to move, as is their nature, the results will be … troublesome.
“However, I still do not know why this is being done, nor whether or not some useful purpose is being served. When we last spoke, you told me that a time would come when I must choose for myself which side I will stand with. I can only tell you now that that time is not yet.”
Silence.
Corvus would provide no help. Not even so simple a fact as Slado’s location.
Still, he had not yet aligned himself with the master wizard’s purposes. Perhaps there was reason to hope.
Rowan reached out to close the box; but the spell had not run its course.
She heard the wizard’s voice again but quietly, as if from a distance: “Willam, say hello to your friend.” And then a sound, like a breath in her ear and different voice, close and loud, young and deep. “Um, hello, Rowan. I hope you’re well.” Willam, whom Rowan and Bel had befriended, now serving Corvus as apprentice. “Hello, Willam,” Rowan could not help replying, despite knowing that the young man could not hear her. Rowan understood that the message had been spoken in the past and that somehow she was magically listening across the intervening weeks.
There was silence again. Rowan smiled to herself. In her experience of magic she had seen, for the most part, horror and evil. But this charmed her, like the tiny dancing statue she had once seen, spinning with single-minded innocence. Pleasant to hear the voice of a friend across so many miles—
Then a third voice spoke; and at the sound of it, Rowan froze, her hand suddenly tight on her weapon. The voice was thin, colorless as stone, and utterly expressionless: the sort of voice a corpse might use.
It said, “This message will not repeat.”
11
It was nice to think of dinner waiting. It made the whole day go better.
They spent the morning stripping leaves, him and Gwen and Arvin and Alyssa, and Gwen’s dad, and Ivy, and a couple of Maysie’s girls, all in one group, each close enough to the next to talk if they wanted, which meant anything interesting had to be sort of relayed back and forth along the line. They could just see each other’s straw hats over the tops of the short trees, until they cut the leaves, with face after face popping up out of the green suddenly, then the whole line moving up into more green to start over again.
It was Gwen in the middle, and they’d managed it so her dad was at one end and the girls on the other. Steffie was right next to him, which was good, because when the talk got saucy Steffie could choose what got passed down to him.
Gwen picked the least and worked the slowest; but Lasker knew well enough that any group she got put in made up for it by working lots faster, and happier, with her carrying on in the middle. Sometimes you’d see hats bobbing up all across the groves, people trying to see what was so funny.
The girls were saying that they couldn’t stand being around Maysie anymore, seeing that face every day, so they were giving up the work. They were looking for husbands, now, and everyone should get the word out for them.
Gwen made like she and Steffie were going to take their places, and Steffie played along. Which was fun and interesting, too, because he had to say things that sounded normal to Gwen’s dad but had a whole other meaning when they got sent up the other way.
After lunch, they chopped for a couple hours, then spent the rest of the day in the sheds, while the people in the sheds took a turn at the groves. It was not so much fun inside, because you had to be quiet and not spook the worms.
Also, Steffie didn’t like the worms much. When they first hatched out, they always made him think of maggots. Until they got this size. Then they made him think of big maggots. And sometimes when you pulled out a rack, a couple of them had died, and then you had to get them out with your fingers. Why big maggots dead should be worse than big maggots alive, he couldn’t figure, but there it was. He always tried to get Gwen to pick them out for him, when he could, or one of the other women. The worms never bothered the
women.
And there was the noise. Thousands of worms eating sounded like nothing else in the world. All those little mouths, munching away like there was no tomorrow. The sound never stopped, and it got right down inside your head, or at least it did Steffie’s.
But the thing was, today, when it was over, everything that had anything to do with busy-ness was all done with, and that’s what was nice about dinner waiting. So it was him and Gwen, not a care in the world, just swinging along home, except not home, really: the Annex. Which was starting to feel like home. Which it had when Mira was there, too, but in a different way.
The first thing Rowan said when they got in was, “I hope you don’t mind eating by the hearth; I don’t really want to disturb this.” Her voice was sort of faraway, even though she was right there.
The “this” she meant was the magic box, except not any more. “I guess you got mad at it,” Steffie said. It looked like it had been dropped from a height, or had something dropped on it from a height, or had maybe been pounded a few times. It was all in pieces, spread out across the table, along with lots of papers with writing on them.
Steffie wouldn’t have minded a better look at it, but he remembered how it had stung people before, so he thought, Better Not. Gwen stood, half in the door, gaping, until he nudged her.
Dinner was in a pot on the hearth, and Rowan had pulled out the bench to hold bowls and spoons and plates and butter. There was bread, too, and fresh, but it was funny and flat, and not risen at all. Steffie figured Rowan made it herself, which was just as well, since no one was baking lately.
The steerswoman was in one of her states again, and Steffie was getting used to them; but she always answered if you asked her. “What happened to the box?” he asked. Gwen sat in the wicker chair and started dishing out, one eye on Rowan.
“I dismantled it,” the steerswoman said.
Gwen shot Steffie a glance, one of those glances that people give to each other when they’re both thinking the same thing. But Steffie wasn’t this time, and was still puzzling over it when she handed him a bowl. “Didn’t it sting you?” Gwen asked Rowan. There was something funny in her voice, too, but Steffie couldn’t put his finger on it.
The Lost Steersman (Steerswoman Series) Page 14