by Brandon Sanderson, Mary Robinette Kowal, Dan Wells, Howard Tayler
Katin grabbed his arm and yanked him into the shop. He looked over his shoulder and pushed her farther into the shop, until a set of shelves filled with pastries hid them from the street. Standing in the shop with sweat-slick skin, Katin tried to master her breathing and look less suspicious. She inhaled deeply and stopped with her ribs expanded as a tantalizing fragrance caught her attention.
A stupid reason to think this shop was safe, but it was the first familiar thing she’d encountered here. It smelled sweet and spicy, and of dough that had been dipped in fat to fry until it was golden. She could almost taste the crust of sugar that would cling to the top.
“What?” Lesid whispered, still glancing back to the street.
“It smells like rolada. A pastry we make for the Harvest Feast in autumn.” She inhaled again, savoring the comforting scent of home.
On the street, the blue-clad Factors ran past, pushing through the pedestrians without a glance into their refuge. Katin let out a breath and thanked the Sisters for guiding her here.
From behind the counter, a slender young woman was watching them with furrowed brows. She fiddled with a bell on the counter, as if on the verge of ringing it. Maybe it just brought someone from the rear of the shop, or maybe it called the Factors back. Either way it was best if she didn’t ring it.
Katin smiled and stepped to the counter, looking for the crescent-shaped rolada. Hoping that the word wouldn’t have changed much since they left the homeland, Katin cleared her throat. “Forgive me my trespasses.”
“Excuse?” The young woman let go of the bell and cocked her head.
Katin made note of the short form of the apology and ducked her head to look at the pastries. Pale gold dough filled with some red jelly stood in rows next to a flatbread sprinkled with nuts. Heavy dark loaves glistened in the light from the ever-present windows. She did not see any crescent-shaped confections. “Are there rolada here?”
The baker stared at her. “What?”
“Rolada. A . . .” She winced, trying to think. What was the word for pastry in Old Fretian? “Bread? Hot oil . . . cooked in?”
The woman’s brows came together in concentration and she repeated the words back to Katin. “Bread? Cooked in hot oil? What’d you call it?”
“Rolada?”
“Rolada.” She said the word again, as if she were chewing it. Then her eyes widened. “Oh! Rolada!”
Katin blinked at her. What had she said, if not that? “Yes. Do you have them?”
“Aye.” Hopping off her stool, the woman bent down to a lower shelf and pulled a tray out. Upon it were a dozen flat crescents of pastries, crusted with caramelized sugar. Peeks of color from the dried berries embedded in the dough made Katin’s mouth water. “Just came out of the oil. How many?”
“Two, please.”
The pastry cost less than the fruit, which said something about how the fruit was valued here. In a few moments, Katin had a handful of small coins in change for her single musan. The woman wrapped a sheet of waxed paper around the pastries and handed them to Lesid, who inhaled with a slow smile as he took them.
Katin almost snatched hers from him. The paper was already warm from the pastry within. She broke one horn off and the crust made a soft crack as the sugar broke. A sweet and spicy steam curled out of the flaky interior. She sent up a silent prayer that it would taste right, then felt silly for asking the Sisters to intervene in something so trivial. It either would or it wouldn’t.
The crust dissolved against the roof of her mouth, carrying rich butter and the tang of spice. It was almost right, but in the way that pastries are different when someone else’s grandmother makes them. The overall sensation was of comfort and home. Memories of being a little girl on her mother’s lap, eating a pastry as the shadow play showed the Sisters’ flight before the storm. A glowdisc behind a sheet had stood in for the light of Musa, but it had given her no preparation for the reality.
Katin’s eyes watered with longing. Home. When had she started thinking of Marth as home? To be certain, she had been born there, but always, always she had been taught that it was not home. That their true home was across the ocean and that Marth was only a resting place until they could find their way back. There had to be more comfort here than a pastry. She just had to find it.
“Gods. That’s good.” Lesid sighed beside her. “Can we get some more to take back to the ship?”
Katin nodded and wiped her eyes. “Yes. That’s a good idea.”
They meandered back to the ship, following a circuitous route that took them far from the university, just to be safe. The baker had wrapped up a bundle of the rolada in heavy brown paper. It had cooled as they walked, but Lesid said the sailors would just be happy to have something that wasn’t salted fish.
His pace slowed as they walked down the dock to the ship, so Katin pulled ahead of him a bit. Lesid shifted the pastries to his left arm. “Hold on.”
At the foot of the ramp of The Maiden’s Leap, the captain was speaking heatedly to a man who blocked his path. The man wore a blue armband like the official who had let them dock.
More troubling though were the two enormous bodyguards with him. They were the Factors who had chased them from the university grounds. Katin backed up. They would return later, after the men had gone.
“Katin!” The captain’s voice boomed down the dock. “Thank the gods you’re back. I can’t make a seabound dog of anything the fellow is saying.”
Sisters take them. Katin gestured Lesid to leave before she stepped toward the captain. Maybe Lesid could slip away in the crowd. With a smile, she faced the ship again. “I’m happy to help.”
One of the guards nudged the other. At the same time, Katin felt Lesid’s presence at her elbow. Curse him for being a stubborn gallant. The captain beckoned her, so Katin slipped past the guards and onto the gangplank. Remaining on the pier, Lesid watched her with the bundle of pastries still under his arm.
Clearing her throat, Katin marshaled the Old Fretian in her mind. “I give you greetings.”
The official stared at her and said something very rapid. She could not even tell where one word ended and the next began. His voice slipped like oil upon the water.
“Speak slowly please.” She slowed her own speech to demonstrate. “I do not understand.”
His lip curled and he spoke slowly, mockingly, as though she were a damaged person. Still she caught only a few words, making her aware of how kind the other people had been to use simple words. “Name” and “travelers” and then “oxtail.”
“Did you say ox-tail?”
“Yes. Show me your oxtail.” Then his speech exploded into a confusion of words. “Oxtail” again and then “center” or perhaps “middle.”
“I am sorry. I do not understand.”
The man threw his hands up into the air in an obvious sign of aggravation. He turned to one of the bodyguards and gestured toward the ship imperiously. “Take it.”
The bodyguard to his left stepped toward the ship and unsheathed his sword— Except it was not a sword. It was a hollow tube, which he pointed at the captain.
“Move.” The bodyguard gestured roughly, making his meaning clear.
The captain put his hand on Katin’s shoulder. “What is happening?”
“I—” She did not know. This was not what she had studied for. Katin turned to look over her shoulder at him. “They want something. He keeps asking for an ox-tail. Maybe it’s an offering of some sort? And now, I think—but I don’t really understand. It sounds like they want the ship. But I might be wrong.”
Lesid shouted, “Hey, there! None of that.”
Katin grabbed for the rough rope rail as the gangplank shuddered. She turned back in time to see Lesid grab a bodyguard by the arm and pull him back from the ramp. The huge man looked astonished and angry. He pointed the tube at Lesid and then—
There was a flash and a clap of thunder. Smoke billowed from the end of the tube. On the docks, people screamed and ran from t
he sound.
Lesid took a step backward and then sat heavily. Red stained the front of his jacket. He toppled to the side and fell into the water.
“Lesid.” The captain pushed past her and stared at the spot where the sailor floated facedown. Blood curled around him in the water. “I need a lifeline!”
No. No! What had happened?
The blue man on the dock said something and it took Katin a moment to realize that he was speaking to her. “I do not understand.”
“No one move.”
“He’s dying!”
“Dead. Already. Stay still. Tell them.” He spoke with exaggerated care.
Swallowing, she said, “Captain. He wants everyone to stay still.”
“No. I have a man down.” He bellowed back to the ship, without taking his eyes off Lesid. “Where’s that rope?”
A sailor ran to the edge and wrapped a coil around the rail. His fingers tightened a knot.
The blue man spoke again, in that strange sliding Fretian. “I said, no one move.”
“A man drowns!” Katin pointed at Lesid. The water was so red.
He snorted and turned to the bodyguard. “Make it two.”
The weapon flashed and thundered again. Katin covered her ears, shrieking at the noise. Below her, the captain jerked and stumbled. He grabbed the rope railing with both hands.
“No!”
His feet went out from under him and he dropped to his knees, still clutching the railing. As the acrid smoke curled around her, Katin found herself behind him, pulling him back before he could fall into the water.
She wrapped her arms around him, feeling the blood soak into her tunic. Her scarf of office fell across his chest. “Stop. We do what you say.”
“Good.” The blue man’s teeth glinted in the sun. “Good.”
The bundle of pastries sat on the pier beside him, still perfectly wrapped.
Katin sat by Captain Stylian’s cot and dipped a cloth in the dish of water she had begged from the guards. “The guards tell me that we will have titam and kalcoist this afternoon for lunch.”
He grunted and shifted on the cot. “Dare I ask what that means?”
“Titam are potatoes and I think that kalcoist is lamb. At any rate, it seems to share a root with kalca, which is the word for sheep. Ist should be a diminutive, so . . . lamb. I think.”
A man came every day to give them language lessons. Proctor Veleh was patient to the point of seeming a machine, but she was the only one of the crew that made any effort. The others all muttered about escape, as though getting past the guards and their hollow tubes were a possibility.
“Any luck finding out what our crime is?”
She shook her head. In the fifnight since they had been taken, her grasp of Setish had improved enough to almost understand. Almost. Or rather, she understood the words “shy of an ox-tail,” but the meaning eluded her. “When I ask what an ox-tail is, Proctor Veleh says that it is the tail of an ox.”
“Next time I’ll have one pickled.” He shifted again on the cot and hissed. Stylian closed his eyes, breath held between tight-pressed lips. He let it out slowly. “So . . . lamb tonight, eh?”
“Yes.” She dipped her cloth in the water again and looked across the dormitory. The first mate stood in a tight cluster with three other crewmen.
She kept imagining Lesid in the corner of her eye, jacket stained red. Katin swallowed and focused on the living crewmen. One of them seemed to be blatantly counting the number of times the guard walked past the door. “Proctor Veleh says that they would normally provide a translator for the trial, but no one knows Markuth. Or Old Fretian really for that matter.”
One of the sailors broke away from the group and crossed to the captain’s cot. “I can take over, if you like.” It was not an offer.
The captain raised his eyebrows at the man’s tone. Katin bit her lips and put the cloth back in the basin. “Of course.”
She stood and strolled away, trying to linger long enough to hear what they were going to talk about, but the captain said only, “Katin tells me that we’re having lamb tonight.”
Scowling, she squatted by one of the walls and smoothed her scarf of office. With her arms crossed, she took the ends of the scarf between her hands, symbolizing the path the Five Sisters took through the heavens, and began rolling the beads between her fingers. Each Sister had a separate role in guiding a person’s behavior through life. Katin appealed to Nofar, the middle Sister, to grant the captain resiliency. He must get well and do nothing foolish. She sent a plea to Abriel to guard Lesid’s soul. Though, if the Sisters cared for an unbeliever, they should have granted him favor for rescuing her book.
Briefly rescuing. The guards had taken it from her and presumably back to the library to be destroyed.
“What are you doing?”
The man’s voice called her back to herself. She opened her eyes, ready to scowl at the crewman who had disturbed her before realizing that the question had been in Setish. Proctor Veleh stood in front of her. It was not his day to teach.
“I am praying.”
He frowned. Lines creased his face more deeply than they should have in one so young. “No, you are not.”
“What—? I— Yes. Yes, I am praying.” She held up her scarf. “This is how we pray where I come from.” Or rather, it was how the followers of the Five Sisters prayed.
“I have studied all six of our provinces, and no one prays to the moon squatting.”
“It’s not the position, it’s the—” Katin bit her explanation off. If she drew attention to her scarf of office, they might take it from her. “I have told you. We are not from one of the provinces. We are from the other side of the sea.”
He lifted his chin. “Stand. The Apex Councilor has decided to hear what you have to say.”
The Apex Councilor sat in a squat room, not at all grand, with a broad table in front of him. Yet even here, in the most utilitarian of chambers, great windows stood behind the councilor and cast light across his table. Stacks of paper crowded the surface in front of his aides, piled in neat right angles, every corner squared to the edge of the table.
On either side of the door stood guards with tall spears. Tassels hung from the shafts, making the weapons look almost ornamental, but the light that gleamed from the edges made it clear that these were honed and sharp. Their breastplates were painted with a lacquered rendition of the full moon, with silver rays blending into the metal of the armor. The velvet of their livery was a blue so deep as to be almost black. Tied around their upper arms were blue armbands, which appeared light only in contrast.
As Katin was brought into the room, the councilor shifted a pile of paper closer to himself. “You have been accused of being shy of an oxtail. How do you respond?”
“I do not know what an ox-tail is.”
Silhouetted by the window, his face was not visible, but the sharp jerk of his head was unmistakable. “Do not toy with me.”
“I am not! I have no understanding what you are speak of.”
“Every citizen must have an oxtail to travel outside their city of birth.”
“Perhaps that is the problem. I am not citizen. We are from Marth, across the sea.”
The councilor broke into laughter at this. “Even if there were land across the sea, there is no way to navigate outside the light of the eternal moon. The fine for being without your oxtail is not so egregious that you must make up fairy stories.”
“I am not! We have been trying explain since we got here that we are explorers from the other side of world. Where I come from, an ox-tail belongs firmly on an ox.”
He cocked his head. “Are you saying ‘ox-tail’?”
“Yes.” Katin slowed down and tried to adjust her speech so it was more accurate. “That is what the man at the ship asked us for.” Before he shot Lesid.
He uttered a noise that sounded as though he cursed. “You were supposed to have had language lessons.”
“I did.”
&
nbsp; “From a historian. Your province speaks a particularly backward form of Setian.” He rubbed his forehead. “Still, that might explain some of the confusion. You are saying ‘ox-tail’ but what I mean is ‘oxtail.’”
Aside from a slight change in emphasis, Katin could hear no distinction. “What is the difference?”
“One is the tail of an ox. The other is a license to travel.”
She gaped at him. Lesid had been shot . . . “One of my shipmates was killed because we couldn’t understand what the man at the dock was saying.”
“All provinces have the same requirements. You should have undertaken this before leaving your home.”
Katin lost her temper and felt the touch of Dorot on her soul. “I told you. We are from across the ocean. We could not possibly have gotten an oxtail before leaving because we didn’t know that there was such a thing. If you tell us where to go to get a license, I’m sure we’ll all happily pay the fee.”
One of the aides scribbled something on a piece of paper and passed it to the councilor. “I understand that you first disturbed the library with a prank.” He studied it for a moment. “Why do you keep insisting on this fiction? Navigation is not possible out of the sight of the blessed moon.”
“We navigate by the stars. Really, have you had no one else visit your shores?”
“Castaways from one of the lower islands.” The councilor stroked his chin. “The stars move. How do you propose that one navigate by them?”
Katin faltered. She knew nothing of the subject beyond seeing the captain do it. “I . . . I am not certain.”
“Because it cannot be done.”
“No. Because I am not a navigator. If you were to ask our ship’s husband, I am certain he could explain. I am here solely because I have some ability with your language.”
“And to what do you attribute that?”
“It is related to our holy language. I am a priest and required to be versed in it.”