by Kate Elliott
“The hells!” Marit knelt beside her. “What’s wrong?”
The tears ended as abruptly as they had begun. Sediya wiped her cheeks with the back of a grubby hand.
“You’re one of them after all,” she said without looking Marit in the eye. “Are you going to kill me now, or after you’ve taken me back to Walshow, in the ceremony of cleansing?”
“I’m not one of them!”
She indicated the mare. “You ride one of the holy ones, the winged horses.”
“These others do, too?”
“Yes.”
“How many are there?”
Sediya glanced sidelong at her, then away, but Marit caught that awful need to believe that all might be well when after everything the woman had seen—really, it was a stupid thing to hold to but she couldn’t help it. She couldn’t help wanting there to be hope.
“I have seen four with my own eyes—twilight, sun, blood, and the one who wears green—but there’s another they speak of, the one even the rest fear. They come and go out of camp. The one wearing the Sun Cloak is the worst, that was the rumor among us slaves. I used to smear my face with dirt.” She faltered, staring at her hands. The two leftmost fingers on her left hand had been broken and healed crooked. “Are you the one others fear so much?”
“I’m not one of them,” Marit repeated, teeth clenched. “What ‘ceremony of cleansing’ do you mean? I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
Sediya sang in a thready voice a horrible desecration of a holy chant. “ ‘The weak die, the strong kill, and the cloaks rule all, even death.’ ”
“Sheh! That’s not a proper chant.” But seeing the woman cringe, Marit forced her shoulders to relax and her hands to uncurl, trying to appear less threatening. “How did you manage to escape?”
She brushed her belly, caught herself doing it, and winced. “After a while they get careless. They thought I was grinding grain over behind a tent. I just walked away.”
Marit knew the signs. She could evaluate people quickly. “Had they just raped you? Is that what made you run?”
She started talking, fast and low, her shame like a rash. “After a while you get torn and you never heal. Now I bleed and pee all the time, it leaks out of me, there’s nothing to hold it in. Maybe it would be better to be dead after all. What clan will ever want me as a wife for one of their sons? I have nothing to hope for. I’ll go back with you. Please don’t let them kill me.” She never once looked up.
“We’ll find a place for you to shelter,” said Marit, so furious she had trouble tugging in air. “We’ll go back the way I came, to the southwest. It’s safe there.”
Sediya heaved a sigh, then settled to sit crookedly along one thigh as if it were uncomfortable to sit straight down cross-legged in the normal manner. She plucked a strand of grass from the ground and wound it around her crooked fingers. “Where are you from?”
“I was born in a village in southeast Farhal. Very isolated, quite poor. My family was too poor to keep me, so they gave me a month’s worth of rice and put me on the road. I walked to Toskala looking for work as a laborer. But I became a reeve, instead.”
“Where’s your eagle, then?”
The memory was still fresh. Marit shuddered. “My eagle is dead. She was murdered. By men under the command of Lord Radas of Iliyat.”
Sediya showed no reaction to the name, her gaze still bent on the grass she was winding around her deformed fingers. At last she said, to the dirt, “I’m a Black Eagle. Born during the season of the Flood Rains.”
Marit shut her eyes. “That’s the year I—” But she could not say That’s the year I was murdered. Ghosts didn’t sit on the ground with the damp soaking through their leggings and have conversations with brutalized young women. “I’m a Green Goat.”
The statement made Sediya’s eyes flare as she murdered the earth with her gaze. “You’d be counting forty-seven years. You can’t be that old. You don’t look it.”
“Did you serve your apprentice year with the Lantern?” asked Marit, laughing. “You sorted those numbers quickly.”
“I did not, though everyone thought I should,” said Sediya with a grin. The change of expression betrayed a friendly spirit with a lively manner, hiding beneath the grime. “I served my year with Ilu, because I liked the thought of getting to walk to the nearby towns and see a bit of the countryside. Afterward, the temple wanted to keep me for the eight years’ service, and my brother would have tithed me out to them in exchange for freedom from the yearly tithings, but I wouldn’t go.” Her expression darkened, cutting to a dull gray bleakness with the speed of a machete hacking off a rains-green tree limb. “This is the gods’ way of punishing me for not taking the service.”
“What was done to you has nothing to do with the gods.”
“Doesn’t it? What are you, then? What are the others like you, the ones who see into your heart, who ride the winged horses? The cloaks are the Guardians, the servants of the gods.”
“That can’t be. Guardians bring justice. That’s what the gods decreed.”
“The gods turned their backs on us.” She pulled the grass off her finger and pressed it into the dirt, pushing and pushing until earth buried that frail strand of green. “The Guardians aren’t people. They’re demons.”
Marit remembered—felt to her bones—the poisonous air that swirled around the quiet voice of Lord Radas, speaking to her across a Guardian altar.
“Don’t be angry, I didn’t mean it. Don’t hurt me.”
We’re both afraid, thought Marit. Fear drives us.
She rose. “We travel at night. Can you ride?”
Sediya rose awkwardly. A trickle of liquid slipped down her ankle, and shook out as a drop to vanish on the soil. “It’s easier to walk.” She drew the back of a hand over her eyes. Healed scratches laced the skin of her arms. Her right shoulder had a gouge in it, knotted with scar tissue. Using the movement as hesitation, she straightened her taloos, which had gotten twisted. She bit her lip, puffed out breath, found her courage and her strength.
“We’re not going to Walshow,” said Marit. “We’ll go to Sohayil, try to find you refuge there, maybe at one of Ilu’s temples. I know a place.”
Sediya followed obediently, head down, mouth tight.
They walked in silence along the deserted road. Sediya stared at the glimmer that marked the horse’s path, that gave them light to see by. She trudged along as if walking barefoot on nails, so clearly in pain that at length Marit called for a halt and found a sheltered spot to sleep.
The woman fell asleep, but Marit sat awake beneath the trees.
“I have seen four with my own eyes, but there’s another one they speak of, the one even the rest of them fear.”
She leaned her head back against a tree trunk, shutting her eyes, breathing in the sting of sharp night-wind and the odor of intermingled rot and growth.
She considered her options. To ride into the north, to make her way to Toskala through lands controlled by this mysterious army watched over by folk who wore Guardians’ cloaks, was foolhardy. Most likely she would blunder into the nest of demons and get chopped up first thing. Even if she reached Toskala, no one at Clan Hall would have any reason to know and trust her. She’d been gone for nineteen years. There was no reason for anyone to believe she was who she claimed to be, or to believe her story of Lord Radas’s treachery and an army led by five people pretending to be Guardians. No reason at all.
Not without proof.
An owl skimmed low. A night-flying insect whirred among branches that ticked in the steady wind. Water dripped. A creature rustled away through bushes heavy with damp leaves.
She opened her eyes.
Sediya was gone. Marit tracked her with her hearing. First the woman crawled—not a likely way to be creeping off to relieve yourself—and when she got far enough away from the night’s encampment, she eased to her feet and trotted with an awkward rolling gait, now and again stumbling but picking herself up and going on
with admirable determination.
Marit sighed. She stood. Sticks and scraps of vegetation tangled on her ragged clothes. She whistled. Warning came alert from her equine doze. She raised her hand and called light.
Sediya screamed when they caught up to her, and fell sobbing to her knees, beating her fists against the ground, praying, pleading, weeping.
Pain twisted in Marit’s chest. She’s that afraid of what she thinks I am.
“I meant what I said. I’m taking you to a safe place.”
Sediya refused to answer.
AT THE TEMPLE of Ilu in the village of Rifaran, Sediya went mutely as an apprentice led her off to the baths. She did not offer a parting glance and certainly no thanks. It was likely that, whatever she said later, no one would believe her.
The envoys in charge gifted Marit with clothing in good repair in exchange for bringing one of their injured daughters to a place where she might find healing. The old woman who stood gate duty gave Marit a mended but otherwise stout cloak of a faded green color more appropriate to and practical for journeying.
For her own part, Marit thanked the envoys properly and retreated, alone, to the glade where Warning rested out of sight.
But when she unclasped the cloak to take off the rags and put on decent clothing, the cloak slithered back to clutch at her calves as if it were a living thing. She began to heave, sucking and coughing. She could not get air. The cloak poured up her body, wrapping her until she was too tangled to stand. She sprawled, vision fading . . . choking, she grasped the clasp and fixed the cursed thing around her neck. She lay for a bit, skin clammy and hot by turns. After a while, she got to her feet. The cloak swagged around her like ordinary cloth, draping to mid-calf.
An ordinary piece of cloth in every way, you might think, except it never became grimy. It never stank. The clasp did not rub raw her skin. Magic infused it. Death’s cloak, she might call it, and it was true enough. Death’s cloak had risen off a Guardian’s bones to smother her that day up on Ammadit’s Tit when she and Joss had broken the boundaries and invaded a Guardian altar. A day later, death’s cloak had claimed her in truth, when the knife had pierced her heart in the woodsmen’s camp. If she was dead, then it was appropriate that death’s cloak wore her and would not let her go.
“What are you, if you aren’t one of them?” Sediya had asked.
Maybe she was just asking the wrong question. Not “Why did the Guardians vanish, and where did they go?” but “What is a Guardian, after all? Therefore, what am I?”
SHE RODE TO Olo’osson and made her way via back roads and isolated irrigation berms to Argent Hall, the westernmost reeve hall, on the shore of the salty Olo’o Sea. She released Warning to fend for herself, as the mare had done for an unknown time before Marit found her. She hid the harness and saddle in an abandoned shack and walked to the gates to ask for work in the lofts as a fawkner’s assistant’s assistant. Remarkably, they took her on.
They assigned her to the most menial of tasks: sweeping, cleaning, hauling. Maybe later, they told her, if she proved herself, they might let her start working with the harness.
She had to keep her eyes lowered at all times, so no one could possibly suspect how much she could really see. She pretended to be a woman fallen on hard times who had become suspicious and unfriendly because of the beatings she had endured from an angry husband and his unsympathetic relatives. It was a situation she’d encountered all too often as a reeve. They accepted her odd manners because she did her work, and because they were so poorly supervised and understaffed that many of their long-term hirelings had recently quit. Because the reeve halls tended to attract people who didn’t fit into the daily life of the village.
With her head hunched and her gaze lowered, and her cloak tied up out of the way and layered beneath the old green cloak, she observed.
Marshal Alyon was an ailing and ill-tempered old reeve poorly suited to manage such a roil. Half of the reeves stationed at Argent Hall had transferred here from other halls in the last few years, and they were malcontents and loose arrows to a man and woman, the kind of reeve Marit despised, the ones who kept taking more than they needed, the ones who got to loving their baton and the power they wielded more than the law they served. Marshal Alyon could not control them. There was at least one fist fight a day in the exercise yard. She kept her chin down and her eyes averted, but she saw everything. She heard their whispers. She knew how many stank of corruption, and how many fought for a restoration of the old order but kept losing ground. The newcomers were waiting, but she wasn’t sure for what.
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 noti
ce 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.