by Victor Milán
Zaranda frowned and rubbed her chin. To be sure, the girl was in a hard way. It’s no concern of yours, the voice inside her said. Sometimes that voice seemed to represent good sense—sounding not unlike Goldie, in fact—and other times something darker. Just now she had to admit the truth of what it said. Yet there was something about this girl that drew her.
“Why can’t you keep an apprenticeship?” she asked.
The girl drew her head down between the shoulders of her burlap smock, which seemed to have as much filth and grease in it as jute. It had taken all of Zaranda’s skill at maneuvering to get the girl to sit downwind of her, and the occasional shift in the wind’s direction still made her wince.
“Come now,” Zaranda said in response to Scab’s mumble. “You can’t expect me to consider taking you on if you won’t be candid with me.”
“Things … happen,” the girl said, as if the words were being drawn from her on a rope knotted bigger than her throat.
“ ‘Things’?”
“Like what happened at the stable. Strange things … magic things, I guess.”
“Like spells?”
The girl shook her head. She had lowered her face, and tears dripped from beneath the obscuring curtain of her hair. “No. I only know one or two spells, little things. That’s all I’ve ever had time to learn.”
“Then what?”
“I don’t know. I get worried, or scared, or mad, and things just happen. Then I get sent away again. I can’t control it. That’s why I want to study magic. So I can figure out what’s happening to me.”
She raised her head and looked at Zaranda through lakes of tears. “It’s just as well this way. You’d just get mad and send me away too!”
No, girl! the voice in Zaranda’s head cried. Not a challenge!
She surveyed the square a final time. No sign of a one-armed man or anyone taking interest, undue or otherwise, in the tall swordswoman and her scruffy companion. She had missed the one-armed man—if indeed he ever existed.
From an alley debouching onto the north side of the square issued a party of shaggy youths in black and brown: Earl Ravenak’s toughs. Merchants and buyers scattered as the youths marched determinedly upon a Hedgeblossom crowd, brandishing cudgels and steel-singing lengths of chain.
Zaranda stood. It was time to admit she had come on a fool’s errand and get on with her business. Indeed, the vague outlines of a plan were taking shape in her mind. She would still take what steps she could to regain her lost fortune here in Zaz. But if that didn’t work, she was already working on an alternative.
That was her way: ofttimes the physical, impetuous side of her nature got her into trouble, but she had a keen eye and a quick wit, and she had long learned to rely on those faculties to get her out of whatever tight places she found herself in. Her current situation looked hopeless—but that was when she did her best work.
The Hedgeblossom orator—who did not appear to be a halfling himself—had hopped down from his wagon-seat podium. Now he threw off the canvas covering the bed, revealing a pile of makeshift shields and weapons: nail-studded staves, iron bars, a few rude short swords. Snatching these up, his listeners fell eagerly upon the surprised Hairheads and commenced to whale on them.
“Have you a name?” Zaranda asked the girl crouching at her feet.
“What?”
“A name. Surely you weren’t born Scab.”
“Chenowyn,” the girl said sullenly.
“That’s a lovely name. Chenowyn.”
“I don’t feel lovely.”
“Start using your proper name, rather than ‘Scab,’ and who knows? That may yet change.”
“What’s the good of being lovely if you’re a mage?” the girl demanded. Abruptly she clouded up again. “Not that that matters anymore. Not that anything matters.…”
“Oh, stand up,” Zaranda said. “It’s time to go.”
Chenowyn stared up at her in astonishment. “You mean you’ll take me as your apprentice?”
“No, I’m out of the magic business. But I won’t leave you wandering to starve in a gutter—or get yourself lynched, more likely.”
The girl stuck out her underlip.
Zaranda stretched forth her hand. “Now come, if you’re going to. Or stay: your choice.”
Hesitantly the girl took her hand and pulled herself upright. Zaranda grinned and ruffled her hair. “That’s the girl, Chen. And who knows? I may be able to use those wild talents of yours.”
“Don’t look now,” Goldie said as Zaranda came into the dusty day-warmed gloom of the stable. The mare had the place all to herself. “There’s a nasty derelict kobold sneaking up behind you.”
Chenowyn drew herself up to all her not-slight height. “I’m not a kobold,” she said. “I’m a girl.”
“You could have fooled me,” the mare said. “In fact you did.”
Chen’s eyes bulged as it struck her that she’d just been addressed by a horse. “It talks!”
“Goldie, meet Chenowyn,” Zaranda said. “She’ll be staying with us for a while. I just know you two are going to get along.”
Goldie rolled an eye at the girl, then peeled her upper lip away from her front teeth and bobbed her head in the universal horse gesture for you stink. “Goldie!” Zaranda said sharply. Then to Chen: “Don’t take it to heart. She’s not civilized this hour of the morning.”
Chen was staring at Goldie, with the expression one would wear looking at a captive Hook Horror. “It’s sunset,” she said.
“That’s Goldie for you.”
Goldie produced a gusty horse sigh. “I can see you’ve been terribly busy out hunting up strays to adopt. I suppose it’s no great surprise you haven’t been by earlier to find out that a patrol had come round to arrest your pet orc.”
“Shield of Innocence has been arrested?”
“Nooo,” said Goldie. “I didn’t say that. I said, a patrol had come by to arrest him.”
“How come it talks?” Chen demanded. “Horses don’t talk.”
“I do,” Goldie said with great dignity.
“What happened?”
“Now, now, Randi, you’re sounding almost petulant. Whereas you really should be very grateful to me. If it weren’t for me, complete and total disaster would have been the order of the day—no thanks to certain parties I could name.…”
“Goldie!”
The mare’s flanks swelled and a vast sigh rushed from her flared nostrils. “Not appreciated, never appreciated, but isn’t that a horse’s lot in life? Bear another’s burden all day, with never a ‘Goldie, do you feel like walking about in the hot sun all day whilst I loll about your back?’—there, there, Zaranda, don’t get that dangerous gleam in your eye. Your orc is fine. So is the ranger, and so am I, if you happen to care.”
Zaranda took a deep breath and tried to remember the spell for casting lightning bolts. She’d never been able to quite get her mind around that one. Trying to was always good when she needed distracting.
“Goldie,” she made herself say calmly, “will you please tell me what happened?”
“I would’ve long since, had it not been for your constant magpie interruptions. Along about the sixth bell after dawn a party of blue-and-bronzes came by, looking like so many cheap Calimshite knock-offs of Lantanna mechanical soldiers. They claimed to have information you were harboring an ‘unnatural monster,’ as their leader put it. Fortunately, one of the grooms saw them coming up the street and ran in to tell everybody. Divining their purpose in that incisive way I have, I quickly sent Shield off to the roof to impersonate a gargoyle. Stillhawk went along, since you’d told him not to take his eyes off the orog. The guardsmen came in, blundered around for a while, and left.”
“Where’s Shield now?”
“Oh, he’s still being a gargoyle. I took a turn in the yard about noon and had a look at him. He does a really creditable gargoyle, by the way; wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if Torm had finally revealed his true calling to him.
”
Zaranda darted into the stableyard and looked up. No, she thought, Goldie’s mistaken. There’s only one exceptionally large and ugly gargoyle up there … exceptionally large, ugly, wingless gargoyle.…
She started back inside. Then she stopped. Zazesspur was a city in which gargoyles on the roofs of hostelries wouldn’t strike anybody as odd, but she didn’t remember seeing any on the Repose’s roof before.
She looked up again. Crouched on the roof’s very verge, clawed hands on knees, cowl thrown back and mouth held wide to reveal what even from four stories down was very impressive dentition, was unmistakably Shield of Innocence.
“Gods!” Zaranda breathed, and raced inside.
“He’s been up there all day?”
Goldie nodded.
“Where’s Stillhawk?”
“So far as I know, he’s up there too. But then, of course, no one tells me anything; I’m only a beast of burden.”
“How did you know,” Chenowyn asked with disarming innocence, “that when the guardsmen said they were looking for ‘an unnatural monster,’ they didn’t mean you?”
Goldie opened her mouth. Then she shut it, and her eyes popped wide open.
“Congratulations,” Zaranda told the girl. “You must have magic: that’s the first time I’ve seen her rendered speechless.” Then she was racing for the stairs.
Stoic as a statue, Shield of Innocence sat cross-legged with claws on thighs as Zaranda applied a fragrant white balm compounded of certain soothing herbs to the blisters that made up most of his face. “I can’t believe you just sat there in the sun all day,” she said. “Paladin of Torm or not, you’re still an orc. You’re allergic to the sun.”
Sitting with his back against a dormer and his booted feet braced on the red hemicylindrical roofing tiles, Stillhawk furrowed his brow, his equivalent of an angry outburst. Like Farlorn, he still doubted the orog, and it in particular troubled him to hear an evil being referred to as paladin. Though the paladin’s path was in many ways as inaccessible to a man of the ranger’s character as it was to an orc of unrepentant stripe, he served the same ideals.
Shield’s massive shoulders shrugged. “How can one serve Light if one fears the Burning Face?” he asked, using a common orcish name for the sun.
“Easily,” Zaranda said. “Don’t you think good deeds need doing at night? Besides, you can wear a cowl.”
“Have you ever seen a cowled gargoyle?”
Zaranda stopped with a gob of ointment on her fingertips. “Was that humor? That was humor, right?”
“I did what must be done. If I suffer, it is no more than my sins have earned.” He frowned. “Though it gripes my soul to have fled from minions of the law. Did I do wrong? May Great Torm judge me harshly.”
“May Great Torm not be such an ass!” Zaranda burst out. “Those men intended you harm, and it had nothing to do with anything you’ve done, or even who you are. It was what they thought you were, and your innocence would have meant nothing to them. Is that what the law is all about?”
“Still, laws are laws,” the great orc said with childlike conviction. “We must obey.”
“It is against no law in Tethyr to be an orc,” Zaranda said. Of course, that was because for Tethyrians, such a law would be like outlawing venomous serpents or spiders. This didn’t seem the time to mention that fact. “And besides, those weren’t minions of the law; they were the servants of the city council. The city police serve the law of Zazesspur. The guard is something else again.”
“Oh,” Shield said.
Zaranda drew in a deep breath, released it in a soundless sigh. She glanced aside at Stillhawk. The ranger was rubbing the dark bristle that covered his chin if he went more than four hours without shaving. He shook his head. Well, sophistication wasn’t his strength either.
“There,” she said, putting the finishing touches on the orog. The white ointment made Shield’s face, a great pitted, tusked, and snouted moon, a truly terrifying sight, like a mask Dalelands children might put on to frighten homeowners into giving them treats at Highharvestide. “That’s done. And now—”
She turned to look at Stillhawk. “Now the two of you must leave. Right this minute. Get outside the walls and make yourselves scarce in the countryside. The scullions have packed food for you, and in the unlikely event that it runs out before I come to join you, there’s no better huntsman in Tethyr than Vander Stillhawk of the Elven Woods.”
Both her companions spoke at once, which was at least quieter than most such multiple outbursts. “I serve you,” Shield of Innocence said. “I will not leave.” For once in accord with the great orc, Stillhawk signed to the same effect.
“You cannot serve me here, Shield. What can you do for me if you’re rotting in the dungeons that surely lie beneath that vast ugly slab of a palace Baron Hardisty has built? All you can do here is increase the risks for me. So indulge my cowardice and go.”
She reached out to touch a scarred and pitted cheek. Her flesh still quailed from the contact, but only a little. “For me, Shield. Please.”
Pouting—which his tusks made a truly alarming sight—he nodded his huge head. Zaranda stood and faced the ranger.
Why—? he started to sign.
“Because someone has to keep Shield of Innocence out of trouble,” she said. “The countryside’s less risky for him, but only just. Something’s going to break soon, old friend, and whichever way it falls, I’ll have need of all the help I can get. His as well as yours.”
Stillhawk raised his head and managed somehow to look even more grimly stoic than usual—his form of outraged protest and reproach. I cannot tell you the real reason, old friend, Zaranda thought. In my selfishness I brought you here among these gray stone walls you hate. And here you can do nothing but pace like a wilderness beast condemned to a cage, feeling the pressure of those walls like acid on the skin. The least I can do is redeem my misdeed. But of course she could not say she did this for his benefit, or he would refuse to go.
“Please, I ask that you do this for me. If you would help me, this is the best way.”
Stillhawk’s brown eyes gazed deep into Zaranda’s smoke-gray ones. Then he nodded and turned to pick up his bow, which leaned against a chimney with a beaten-tin cover shaped like a wizard’s peaked hat. Shield resumed his cowled robe and strapped on the harness that held his scimitars crossed over his back. After a moment’s debate by eye, he slithered over the edge of the roof and swung in through the hallway window Zaranda had left open and under Chen’s guard. Stillhawk followed.
Zaranda stood, stretched, gazed up at the stars, treasuring an evanescent moment alone with them. The sullen light-froth from tens of thousands of candles and lanterns, the smokes of the city, and high tattered clouds skidding across the sky from the Trackless Sea hid most of them from her sight. She wished she were alone in her tower at Morninggold, with nothing to impair her intimacy with the stars, neither in the sky nor in her future.
I’ll be doing well to keep my freedom out of all this, she thought, much less Morninggold and my astronomy tower.
But she wasn’t yet dead, which meant, on principle, that she refused to give up. She turned and made her cautious way down.
“Zaranda!” A familiar call—as clear and beautiful as the cry of a soaring eagle—made her turn from the entrance to her chamber on the Winsome Repose’s third floor.
“Farlorn,” she said, shifting without thought to interpose herself between the half-elf and Chenowyn. “Where have you been?”
He caught her in an embrace that lifted her off the floor—though he’d inherited the delicate appearance of his mother’s people, he also had the strength of his father’s. “Zaranda! I’m terribly sorry. I came as soon as I heard.”
“About what?” Zaranda said. It took her a moment to make the decision to disengage herself from his arms after he had set her down again. Damn him! she thought. Or, perhaps, damn me.
“About the orc and Stillhawk! How the guard arrested the
m.”
“Stillhawk?”
He shrugged. “I know the ranger well. He cared as little for the beast as I, but he’d die before he’d fail your trust. They cannot have taken the orc without having him as well.”
“They took neither,” Zaranda said. “Both hid. I’ve sent them outside the city.”
The half-elf’s huge hazel eyes blinked. “But that’s wonderful news,” he said, “at least so far as Vander Stillhawk’s concerned, though I cannot say the same for the evil creature you insisted on adopting.”
As Zaranda wound up to unload on him, he lifted his head so that his pointed ears made him resemble a wary forest creature, sniffed the air in the hallway, lit amber by an a single ancient fly-specked lantern hung on the wall. “Whatever is that smell?” he asked before Zaranda could speak. “It’s truly prodigious. You must ask for new quarters, Zaranda; a rat—a giant one, by the whiff—has crept among the rafters and expired.”
The hair at the back of Zaranda’s neck rose. Something was gathering behind her. It reminded her of the first time she had ever felt dweomer, mustering her first halting spell under the gentle but exacting eye of Alshayn, her mentor. This was similar, yet not the same. It was power, and it was menace.
“Farlorn,” she said, taking her new charge by the arm and feeling the hairs on her own arm rise in response, “I’d like you to meet Chenowyn. She’ll be staying with us for a while. Chen, this is Farlorn Half-Elven, called the Handsome.”
Farlorn shied back, a look of distaste on his face. “Indeed? This ragamuffin’s the source of the smell, I warrant. Have you decided to open your own museum of grotesques, Zaranda?”
“Don’t take what he says to heart, Chen,” Zaranda said. “He’s a bard, and bards love the sound of their own voices too well. He doesn’t mean anything by it.”
“I don’t like him,” the girl said.
“Where have you been the past few days?” Zaranda asked, interposing herself between the two.
“I was visiting among my mother’s people. Do you know, that darkling I slew the other night matched the description of a Moon Elf maid from Tethir Forest who vanished six weeks ago? Her people were much grieved to learn of her fate.”