This place must have been a wonder, in its day.
“There has to be something you want,” Adaon said, coming up [251] behind Dabrena where she stood at a coppersmith’s stall, in a trance of velvet-sheened kettles and pots, platters and tureens.
Grieving spirits, she thought. I cannot wipe this irritant off even for a morning.
She hadn’t ridden six leagues from the holding, on a gelding named Vervain with a packhorse in tow, when she’d caught sight of the bald head, dark gray over light gray scholar’s garb on a short, thickset body strolling loose-limbed down the trail ahead. Now and then he’d stopped to listen, or examine some deadfall or rock formation of incomprehensible interest. When she’d come to within a ninefoot of him, he’d turned, and even from that distance his pale brows and pale eyes were startling against the dusky complexion. “Mender!” he’d said, as if welcoming her—with a forced show of delight—into his own spruce-vaulted home. “And where are you off to, packed for so long a journey? The Neck?”
It was a less than subtle gibe, with the Neck so near, and she responded coldly. Yet somehow in the next few breaths, as she walked her horse by him, he had talked her into offering him a ride. How the excess of the spare animal was understandable from one so cloistered. How a denizen of the isolated holding would naturally be ill at ease with company on the road. She didn’t know why she’d let his challenges provoke her. It meant redistributing her gear so that he could mount the hard-gaited packhorse. It meant suffering his nonstop chatter. If she’d known he’d been a seeker before he went to the scholars’ isle, she’d have ridden him down and not looked back. But she should have known. Seekers stopped at Senana when they bothered stopping anywhere, but a few had found their way into her holding, and she was familiar with their antics. She should have recognized him for what he was.
She’d seen seekers do remarkable work. She’d heard them together, honing plausibility from absurdity. They took crackpot notions and grated them down on facts. They produced, through dialogue and debate, hard results that chambers full of scribes working problems on sedgeweave could not. They had not been mages, did not think like mages; they did not even think like scholars, which was probably why Graefel was glad to see the back of this one. But there was more to their thoughts than folk credited, at least when applied to practical tasks. There might be more to Adaon than unendurable ribbing and unfathomable interests.
Not that she’d seen it if there was. What he thought was winsome had long since worn thin. She had grown accustomed to his presence on the road; he’d distracted her from guilt-ridden musings on the past and dark forebodings of the future. But she was in the Strong Leg [252] now, though still in the watershadow of the Druilors. She had work to do, a mystery to solve. And what awaited her in Glydh, in the Knee, she must face alone.
She startled as his arm reached around her to pick up a barn lantern. The round holes were of simple cut, not stars or diamonds or floral shapes; there was no patterning to anything in this town beyond the workings themselves. In the Oriels, through Heartlands and Belt and Girdle, even around the high side of the Druilors, there were decorations and designs—painted on gourds, carved in chairs, enameled on tin, hammered in copper. Everything here was plain. Reports had told her that Strong Leggers resisted the liberation of magecraft’s tools harder than most, but this was more than she expected. So much beauty wrought here, of so much talent, but none of it ornamented. It seemed strange to her, and stranger still that it should be strange at all. Mages had hoarded ornamentation for aeons. She had grown up in a dyeless, patternless world. Yet how quickly the forbidden had become the ordinary.
Except here.
“I’ve never seen such craft,” Adaon said, examining the seamless soldering, “unless it was out of a tinker’s wagon, and like as not that wagon came from here.”
Neither had she. Perhaps they diverted the decorative urge into more painstaking basic work.
The purveyor swelled with pride. “Like as not it did. We’re a metals town, copper and tin mostly and enough bronze to keep Bronze Long alive, but if it’s iron you’re after you’ll need to go up Dru Myrle way, toward the Blooded Mountains. Poor selection here.”
“Is it iron you’re after?” Adaon asked, peering at her over her shoulder, his head level with hers and canted suggestively.
Trust him to find something lascivious in an inert element.
“It’s peace and quiet I’m after,” she said, elbowing him away as she turned.
She came face-to-chest with a man wearing a blade at his hip.
“Good day, mender,” he said. “Good day, scholar.”
It sounded as though he were bidding them farewell.
“Good day,” Adaon said brightly. “How can we aid you?”
“Respect our ways,” the man said, unaggressive but firm. He was broad-shouldered, slim-hipped, tall for a mid-Legger, with the region’s impish features but no trace of humor on them. A local peacekeeper, if she remembered the nomenclature of Porfinn’s last report. Porfinn, she remembered quite well, had disappeared in this leg over the winter. “Clothe yourselves plainly, or move on.”
Dabrena gritted her teeth. Such a small thing to ask ... and yet [253] her whites defined her. In white, she knew who she was. I lost my light, she found herself thinking. You won’t have this from me too. It was absurd. She must defer to the man. She was the visitor here. It was a new world now ... and yet this vestige of the old seemed the most alien thing about it.
Apart from people roaming around bladed.
She inclined her head. “I’ll change as soon as I’ve picked up something more suitable.”
“Now would be wiser,” the man said.
She blinked at him. “Here?”
“You’re a nonned steps from any short where they trade in clothing.”
Adaon said in her ear, “I think he’s angling to see you in silks. Can’t say I blame him.”
The peacekeeper folded his arms, and Dabrena blushed to think he’d overheard. Where she came from—the Fingers, the holding—no one cared if you went buck naked. Why should this gall her so? Adaon and his blighted infantile humor!
“I was a warder once, and I wore white,” she told the peacekeeper in a cold voice. “My wearing it now will deter the light’s return no more than wearing it then effected its departure.”
Adaon clucked at her and warned softly, “Better to show the man your silks than intimidate him with holding rhetoric.”
“It’s for your own safety, mender,” the peacekeeper said, implacable. “And yours as well, scholar.”
“It’s not ‘scholar’ really,” Adaon said. “I’m a seeker by nature, you see, I only—”
“Then divest yourself of dyes,” the peacekeeper said, in deadpan mockery of Dabrena’s speech, “and you’ll be welcome to partake of the keepers’ tithe. It’s at the Tufted Duck today.”
Adaon’s eyes went wide. “I think he just told me to be a good seeker and go begging,” he said to Dabrena. Voice high and aggrieved, he told the peacekeeper, “We don’t really subsist on alms, you know, we pull our weight like any journeyfolk—”
Dabrena nudged him and lifted her chin to gesture beyond the bladed man, toward the three bladed folk who were moving to join him. A murmur rose up, heads turned in their direction. Before they knew it a crowd would form.
“Eiden’s eyes,” Adaon whispered, “next thing they’ll mob us!” He turned his broad face to her and mouthed, Run for it!
They ran for it. Down the long street, dodging drifts and clumps of customers, keeping out of the path of carts and wagons. Dabrena caught hold of his wrist when they came to the clothing-heaped street [254] and dragged him with her when he would have overshot. Abruptly a tangle of dogs and children and sticks came under her feet and sent her into a spectacular sprawl through the sticky mire of mist-damped dust. The children, unharmed, continued on in a burst of jeers and protest, leading the little dogs to jump over the sticks they held ever farther ahead.
“Get up, get up!” Adaon said, turning her over, taking her hands and hauling. She was dead weight. She could not brace herself or rise. She was laughing too hard. “They’ll string us up, I tell you! Run for your life!”
Every single thing he had said since he came up behind her at the copper stall had been a windup. He was having her on, he was having the peacekeeper on, he was having her on again now.
“Get up!” he begged, but he was losing control of his panic. His lips were starting to twitch. “By all the blessed spirits, mender, get up!”
She got her feet under her and staggered behind him to the nearest stall, gasping, “It’s all right, it’s all right, I’m not white anymore!”
He turned from rummaging through breeches to examine her with a critical eye. He brushed at the great smear of brown that was the front of her, smacked at her soiled knees, and shook his head. “Not brown enough,” he pronounced, and looked down at his dove-colored self. “Too gray!” He pulled off a boot and hopped on one foot as he haggled with the astonished trader behind the stall, then handed across his entire carry belt for collateral. Balancing with the stockinged foot raised, he fingered quickly through dun and beige linens and knits, choosing and discarding until he had two tunics and two pairs of hose in roughly the right sizes. He thrust Dabrena’s at her, stripped off his dove tunic, wrestled off the other boot, and peeled off his hose. “Go on,” he urged, “go on!”
She followed suit, standing on her toppled boots to keep her socks out of the dirt, and when the peacekeepers rounded the corner, two scratching their heads, one shaking his, she and the seeker were smoothing new garments, fastening belts, sliding back into boots, to present sober, acceptable, and utterly drab attire to the guardians of propriety.
There’d never been so much as a glance from Adaon to her silk sark and drawers.
“You could have bribed the keeper,” he said, between a slurp of greenbriar soup from a plain tin spoon and a slug of dark stonenut brew from a plain tin cup. “I know just what would have shifted him.”
[255] They had finally stopped laughing after the keepers sent them on their way, and packed their colors safe with their gear in the farrier’s barn where the horses were stabled. Then they’d returned to the inn where she’d arranged lodgings for the night, an indulgence after well over a moan on the road in miserable weather.
“If I’d known you were hoarding tallies good over half of Eiden Myr, I’d have charged you for your passage,” she said.
“I’d have worked my passage off anytime,” he replied, holding the leer for only a moment before it lapsed into a chuckle.
She flipped the spoon in her fingers and moved bits of walnut around the dregs of her cucumber soup. “What are you looking for, Adaon?”
“I’ve been looking to make you laugh for a moon now, and let me tell you, it was no easy thing.”
“What are you really looking for?”
“Do you really expect an answer? I’m a seeker. I seek.”
“Oh, please.”
“I’m looking for everything. I look at everything. The world is astonishing and wonderful. Look at this soup! The way the greenbriar thickens it, the way the vegetables soften on cooking. Why do you think they do that?”
“You filled my ears with that same babble over three mountain ranges, Adaon. I asked you a question.”
“You’ve been head of that Head holding too long, I think.”
“You think too much.”
“I talk too much, too. Wouldn’t you rather let me eat this astonishing soup?”
He held his spoon in the overhand way she’d tried to teach Kara not to. She was suddenly back in the spare lamplit dining hall where she’d eaten with her child for six years.
“And no mooning over your daughter,” Adaon added with his mouth full. He swallowed, wiped a dribble from his chin, and said, “Tell me how this is different from your journeying. You did journey after you took the triskele?”
She let him have his diversion. It diverted her from the flare of phantom pain in her missing limb, the place where there had been a child attached. It never stopped aching, but now and then, just now and then ... “Not for the full year,” she said. “I did the Heartlands, the Belt, and the Low Arm. Kept ahead of reckoners for nearly five moons before they caught me and sent me to the Ennead’s Holding. It was a game, to see how long I could elude them.”
“I knew you’d had experience in fleeing from figures of authority!”
[256] She smiled. “It took me that long to talk myself into becoming a warder. The call was inevitable. There’s not much light in the Fingers, but when it flares it flares bright. Flared, I mean.”
“Slip of the mind.”
“Mmm. I’d been harvestmaster at nine-and-eight. The next season I took the triskele. Ran off journeying that very night. Thought I’d go on forever. Thought that was what I wanted.” She’d lapsed back into the brief bursts of speech that characterised folk from home. When her own words echoed in her mind, it was the first time she’d heard that kind of speech in years.
“It’s different now,” Adaon said, and tilted his bowl over his mouth to scoop the last drops in.
“Yes,” she said. “Now I’m plagued with a rejected scholar.”
“I wasn’t rejected!”
“ ‘Bloody spirits, go on then, if you want it so much, but leave me in peace’?”
“That’s very close, Wordsmith. But Graefel affects more of a Holding accent than you do.”
“Don’t call me Wordsmith here. They’ll string me up.”
He laughed. “There’s hope for you.”
“You weren’t a mage. You went to the scholars to learn the great truths the codices would reveal.”
“Something like that. I learned to read and scribe. The codices aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.”
“So what are you looking for?”
He threw her a sly smile. “Nicely turned.”
She watched him for a long time when he spoke no further. He was waiting her out. There was no reason to play into his hands. There was no reason to trust him; there was no reason not to. There was every temptation to underestimate him. His eyes, pale as ice in the ash-skinned face, betrayed nothing he did not want them to.
He made me laugh. How long has it been, really, since I laughed?
The knowledge that he might have been working her made her abruptly, deeply, weary.
At the same moment, he gave a small nod in concession, as though she had outlasted him, and said, “I saw the child’s map, Dabrena. You don’t need to pull it from that carrybelt to show me. When I see a thing, I remember it. It’s brought us to the same place.”
She frowned, shook her head. “The map is a whimsy. Something Kara said did bring me here, and I brought you to this place. But it’s just a stop on a journey. My destination lies farther on.”
“Is it? Does it? Look at the map again. Not here—they’ll string [257] us up, remember? In the privacy of the room upstairs. That map is centered on this town. That map is of this town.”
She blew air through her lips. “I think that map is whatever your fevered imaginings want it to be, seeker. You were keenly interested in real maps we’d made in the holding. You have some idea in your head, and you think my daughter’s fantasies support it. I think this is at last where we part ways. Though I do thank you for the laughter.”
With raised brows—mocking? surprised? he had become unreadable—he pushed back in his chair and stood to gesture her toward the stairs. A movement as gallant as he’d shown her in the holding, but peremptory, and challenging. Intensity came off him like heat. He could as easily have been daring her to bed him as to disprove a theory.
She laughed aloud to think that this was seeker foreplay.
He did not laugh back this time.
“All right,” she said, and rose, but she gestured gallantly for him to precede her up the stairs, and hoped that she wouldn’t have to send him out hunched over his groin to sle
ep with the packhorse.
The slope-ceilinged room barely admitted them in addition to the two narrow beds and small chest that already occupied it. A triangular window over the chest between the beds let in a watery gray light. Adaon sat on the right-hand bed and dragged the tin chest into the light with a teeth-grating scrape. The metal bedframe whined at his weight. Though hardly more than her height, he was a broad man, thickly built. He was larger than himself. His presence made the small room smaller.
Dabrena sat lightly on the other bed and opened her carrybelt to draw forth Kara’s map and lay it on the chest. The banded surface was uneven, so she did not smooth the sedgeweave out.
“You see?” she said. “Such a fuss over a child’s invention.”
“Look at it.” He didn’t point, didn’t even touch the map to hold the curling edges down. He leaned slightly toward her, with his elbows out and his dark hands braced backward on his thighs.
She rolled her eyes, and then she looked.
“Yes,” she said after a few long breaths. “It could be here. It could also be Gir Youris, Gir Myrle, Gir Anad—any mid-Leg town wedged among hills along a river.”
“Are we in the Midlands?”
“More or less.”
“More less than more. We’re in the mid-Leg, yes. But the Highlands follow the bulge of the Knee. The Druilors have bottomed out. [258] Their foothills are away Headward of us, and the Cors are away Bootward. Below us is all bottomland. Above us is a flat stretch cut off by the Elfelirs. We are on what amounts to a plain. Yet around us are eight hills, positioned as on your daughter’s map.”
“The body of Eiden is a strangeness. Its topography isn’t a natural thing. Someone crafted it this way, some ancient folk, whoever carved out the holding in the Aralinns, whoever shaped the land in human form. Eiden himself, perhaps. Or some folk who lived here long before Galandra led her mages into exile.”
“I’m not trying to explain why these hills are here.”
“You should be.”
“And I will. But you must admit that the child’s representation can only show this place. See how vague it is elsewhere, how misshapen.”
The Binder's Road (The Sequel to 'Illumination') Page 32