by Unknown
The thief grew more insistent after that. It was impossible to make her do anything useful.
“I think she really does believe something’s out to get her,” Deke said, helping Zair drag a fishing boat out of the mud. He paused to squint at a low dark mass of storm clouds burgeoning over the sea. The rain had stopped, but the air felt heavy, expectant. “And us,” he added.
“She’s a liar, Deke.”
“I know. But what if she’s not lying this time?”
Storm weather always made everyone tense. Today was worse than usual. They’d started putting out the gill-nets for the fall mudfish run, but they brought them in early and dragged the boats up the hill. Going to be a bad one, Zair thought, shading her eyes and looking down from her yard at the wind raking long sweeps through the marsh grass. The sky was the color of a bruise, lit with the clear glow of stormlight. Maybe take the kids up to the caves if it doesn’t break soon.
Evening came early and ominous. The wind rose, banging shutters and bringing cold spatters of rain. Zair was precariously balanced on a stool, taking in the washing, when Solya barged into her yard. “You have to do something about that townie!”
“You young people—so polite.” A sharp gust of wind almost sent Zair sprawling, and she turned her attention back to her task. “What’s she done now?”
Solya planted her hands on her hips. “That thief, Shadow or whatever her name is, she’s got my kids running around like headless chickens. I caught Cheri trying to steal my good fish-gutting knife for slaying dragons!”
“There’s no such thing as dragons,” Zair said, for the twentieth time that day.
Solya threw her arms up in the air. “I know, but try telling the kids!”
“Fine,” Zair said, “fine.”
After a quick stop by Orrel’s house, she stumped off to the goat pen, where the thief and some of the village boys were hauling the goats into shelter. The thief kept looking up nervously at the sky and then at the coast road to Trenza. Gusts of wind flattened her patched coat against her narrow body. Zair got her attention by grabbing one bony wrist, and deftly untwisted the cord tied there. Then she threw the thief’s knife at her feet.
“Go. It’s only two days ‘til the new moon, anyway.”
The thief rubbed her bare wrist. “Is this a trick to make me fall down so that you can all laugh at me again?”
“No,” Zair said. “You aren’t as funny as you think, and anyway, you paid your debt. So get going. You best get under shelter before the storm breaks.”
The thief stared at her for a long moment, and then looked around at the goat pen and the goggling kids. Her mouth worked as if she meant to say something else. Then, without a word, she snatched up the knife and took off running into the growing gloom, headed for Trenza.
“Did I tell you to stop working?” Zair snapped at the boys, and tromped back to her house. She kept glancing at the road, but the thief was already gone from sight.
She forced herself not to look over her shoulder for imaginary dragons.
#
As darkness fell, the storm hit the shore like a fist, driving towering waves before it. Zair listened to the roar of the high surf from behind closed shutters, her hands wrapped around a mug of tea. She could hear it through the walls, over the cheerful jabber of her nieces and nephews and their kids, all gathered in her house to wait out the long wet night.
“Sounds bad out there,” her nephew Rig said, leaning against the wall. “Already washed away the east weirs when I came in. I say we take the kids up to the Scarp. Some of the families already did.”
His cousin Linnie shook her head, and picked up her infant son as he began to cry. The shutters thumped in the wind. “Shoulda gone up to the caves before the storm broke, if we were gonna. And there are the goats to think of.”
Deke, who had made himself at home in the corner by the fire, raised his head and snorted. “This is nothing. Gonna blow itself out by morning. Let me tell you about the storm we had back—was it the year the mudfish didn’t come in? Yeah. That year, the wet season started in the month of roses, if you can believe it—”
There was a chorus of groans. “This was when Great-Auntie Korie’s outhouse washed away, right?” Rig said.
“The wind was like a herd of stampeding goats,” Linnie took up the familiar tale, speaking along with Deke.
“—stampeding goats—hey, I’m telling this story, aren’t I?”
Through the pounding of wind, rain and surf, it took Zair a moment to realize that someone was beating on the door. She cautiously unbarred it, leaning her weight to keep it from being snatched out of her hands.
The thief tumbled through the door on a wet slap of wind, so sodden in her water-heavy coat that she looked like a pole with a rug draped over it. Zair slammed the door. The room fell silent.
“What are you doing here?” Zair asked for all of them.
“Yes. Well.” The thief straightened and wrung out her ragged hair. “I wanted to return something.” From under her coat, she produced a silver plate and a handful of flatware.
“Hey,” Deke said. “That’s my daughter’s good table service, the one her no-account husband left behind when he went back to Bonolevi.”
“All I know is that it was in the last house on the way out of town,” the thief said.
Zair took it, angry but unsurprised. “Do we need to shake you and see if you rattle? And why are you back? Sudden attack of conscience, I presume?”
“You presume correctly,” the thief said, “but it’s not just the silver. I was halfway to Trenza when—well—” She glanced in the oceanward direction. “Do you have any idea what it’s doing out there? Why are you people still down here, by the water? You need to get up to those caves you talked about.”
“This isn’t bad. Like I told you, just a storm.”
“You also told me it washes away the village sometimes! You people have to get out of here.”
“And you told me there were dragons after you,” Zair said. “What’s the matter, can’t they fly in this wind?”
The thief scowled at her, then gave a little half-smile. “There’s no such thing as dragons.”
“I know that and you know that.” Zair nodded at the thong around her neck. “So what’s that really for, and why are you back?”
Reluctantly, the thief pulled it from her collar and twirled it. The stone was vivid blue. “It was a gift,” she said, and paused. “No, that’s not right. When I was a kid and fresh from the potato fields, a man up Dresderi way ‘prenticed me. Bought me, more like. Name of Bredon.” Her words faltered, then came surer and stronger with every sentence, a rural accent slipping in. “He made each of us carry one of these so he could find us if we run off. He’s got a rock like this himself, and it changes color when the stones draw close together. Me, I ran, eventually. I wasn’t the only one.”
Zair studied her long, earnest face. “Why do you still have it?”
“Because it works the other way, too. I can tell if he’s nearby.” She held up the stone and let it spin. “I always kept moving, but staying in one place—I didn’t think he’d find me so quick. I almost ran into him and his gang on the road, actually. I hotfooted it back here as soon as I caught sight of them.”
A low murmur of voices rose around the room. Zair just snorted. “They’re coming here, in a storm like this? Ridiculous.”
Shadow curled her lip. “Bredon and his bunch—they like working in this kind of weather. It means no one will see the smoke and come to help. They’ll clean out anything valuable, burn your houses and kill anyone who complains about it. They must figure that if I’m here, there’s something worth stealing—”
She stopped talking, because the cacophony of wind and rain had died with the suddenness of a handclap. In the silence, the loudest sound was the drip of water falling from the eaves.
“It does this when the wind changes direction. It’ll be back soon,” Zair said. “And worse. Much worse. Are you tellin
g the truth, girl?”
“I am. I swear that I am.”
Zair stared at her for a long moment. Then she turned, stabbing a finger. “Rig, Orrel, Linnie—go tell everyone. Get them ready, kids all together, everyone in position, just like when those smugglers tried to rob us back in—no, you’re too young to remember, but your parents will know what to do. Get the nets, the best ones. None of Rukah’s; that girl’s knots never hold. Hop to it!”
Shadow seized her arm. “You can’t fight them; are you crazy? You don’t know what you’re dealing with! You have to get everyone out of the village—”
“You,” said Zair, “shut up. I’m taking a big risk believing you, girl, after all your lies. You never gave us nothing but grief, and if you brought this Bredon down on our backs, you owe us. Now shut up and help me get ready.”
The thief opened her mouth, then closed it. She swiped her ragged, sodden hair back from her forehead with one long hand, and when she raised her head, her eyes were steady. “I still think you’re all going to die, but tell me what you want me to do.”
#
The village lay in wet, wracked stillness, runnels of muddy water twisting between the houses. The goats huddled in their shed, not one of them visible outside. Faint stars glimmered through the thinning clouds.
Zair could hear rough laughter and hoofbeats on the coast road. Shadow hadn’t been lying after all.
“Are you sure it’s not over?” the thief panted as she helped Zair wrestle the wet, reeking mass of a seine into position. “The storm, I mean.”
“No. It’s coming back.”
As if summoned by her words, a low wind keened through the village, an advance scout for the oncoming maelstrom.
Under Zair’s direction, Shadow hoisted the net so that Zair could secure it to the corner of the last house with a few deft twists of rope. Working together, the villagers had surrounded the village with a hastily erected fence of the long nets that they used to fish for linget in the marsh channels. The nets were strung between houses and privies, even around the goat pen. It wasn’t a tall fence—no more than waist high on Shadow.
“This isn’t going to stop determined men with swords, Zair, no matter how strong your knots are.”
“That’s not what it’s going to stop.” Zair bit off a length of twine. This was the tricky part, and she didn’t have much time to do it. “You’re about to find out what our knots can do, Shadow.”
“Dorsag,” the thief said.
Zair looked up at the bony, sharp-edged face.
“My name. The one my mother gave me, I mean. Even Bredon doesn’t know it. I told him I was called Lally.”
Zair jerked her head in a terse nod, and said, “We’re going to kill these men, Dorsag. We have to. It’s them or us. If this is another lie—if these are farmers you swindled—”
“They’re not. I swear it.” She paused, and added, “Kill them? Really?”
“Are you changing your story now?”
“No. But... not all of them are like Bredon. Some were my friends once.”
“Then give them a chance,” Zair said. “Same one you got. If they lay their weapons down, they can come in. But go, be quick about it. We’re running out of time.”
The wind had picked up, swirling in the space between the houses. Zair could feel the strain on the knots, feel it in her brittle old bones. This had been easier when she was young. She breathed deeply, seeking calm. It didn’t do to rush knotwork, especially with this much riding on it. Kneeling in the mud, she began working on a tangled mess of wet twine.
Deke arrived, breathing hard. “Everything’s ready. Linnie and Therin are waiting for your okay. What can I do?”
“Help me up,” she said absently, her fingers and her mind busy with the complexity of her working. The nets hummed with tension in the night. The moon was dark, the stars gone behind looming clouds. All around her, she could feel the storm—a vast presence in the night, neither friend nor foe, slightly bemused at this tiny village on the marsh, this tiny woman who would attempt to buck its might for even a moment or two.
We only need a moment.
“The longer you hold it back...” Deke murmured into her ear as he helped her around the perimeter of the village. Tying knots. Everywhere, knots.
“I know.” It was a dangerous game she played. But she had always been the best with knots, the best in generations.
The wind brought her a man’s voice, a stranger’s. “Lally,” he said, and that voice crawled with a possessiveness that turned Zair’s stomach. She risked dividing her attention, turning her head to see Shadow—Dorsag—standing just inside the net fence. There must have been thirty men and women massed on the other side, all on foot but for one mounted on a shaggy moor stallion. The big man and the horse made the thief look even more spindly than usual, despite her height.
“Bredon.” The thief’s wet coat slapped her legs as the wind changed direction. “I’m supposed to tell you to surrender.”
Bredon laughed. “Sorry, what?”
Dorsag pointed past him. In the ever-deepening gloom, Zair could no longer pick out men and women; all she could see were the glints of weapons. “Lay down your swords and bows, and refuge is yours. Eirin, are you still with this bunch? Glester! You always had more brains than the rest of this lot put together. Any of you who trust me, come quickly. Join me. Us.”
Bredon’s laugh rang out again. “Join you and what? Die with these fish-eaters? You with the bow—shoot her.”
More than one “you” answered his command, and Zair saw the flash of two arrows, one narrow and fletched, the other a stubby crossbow bolt. Zair’s breath caught, but the net held true: the arrows twanged off the air—she felt it, a frisson across her taut nerves—and tumbled to the ground.
Silence held for an instant. Sweat trickled down Zair’s face despite the night’s damp chill. Her heart was racing. The tension of the knots thrummed in her.
“Surrender or these people will kill you.” Dorsag’s voice was so soft that it could barely be heard above the rising wind. “They know what you’ve done, what you’re capable of.”
No one moved. Then Bredon drew a long, gleaming pistol from his belt, the first real one Zair had ever seen.
Deke’s hand closed over Zair’s clammy one. “Enough time. We’re ready. Let it go.”
Zair drew a breath, enough to shout, “Now!” Her voice was a thread of sound, but Deke bellowed for her, “Linnie, Therin! Do it!”
Zair pulled the string, unraveling the complex knotted structure in her hands. She felt the pent-up strain sing through the nets. Felt the snap as it let go.
The longer you hold it back, Deke had said. And indeed, the storm’s ferocity had built like water behind a dam, and it crashed down on the hill, seizing the village in its foaming embrace, picking up the men outside the nets like leaves on floodwater. Deke pushed Zair to the ground as the wave broke over them, and she dug her fingers into the mud, holding fast to the twine like the lifeline it was.
#
“I really, truly cannot believe we’re alive,” the thief said.
The storm had pounded the village all night, and finally spent itself on the marsh and blew back out to sea, leaving a fresh-washed morning sky behind. The apron of sand below the hill now pointed eastward like a great, sweeping hook. Down on the beach, children scurried to and fro in the morning sunshine, picking up driftwood for the cookfires and taking the opportunity to search for treasures that might have washed ashore.
The sedges of the marsh lay flat and mud-colored. The village was a wreck—thatch torn apart, shutters hanging loose, gardens ruined—but it still stood.
Nothing remained of Bredon and his men. Zair thought she saw a glint, here and there, among the shifting marsh channels, where a sword or a breastplate might be half-buried in the mud. It had been so after the smugglers came, though the villagers had called up their own storm that time, and it hadn’t been so fierce.
Their deaths weighed on
her. But she felt worse about the poor horse. Unlike the people, it had no choice.
“Some of those waves looked higher than this hill,” Shadow said.
“Prob’ly were. The ocean respects our knots. We have an understanding.”
The thief stared at her. “Are you saying the storm—what, bent around the village?”
Zair nodded. “Good way to put it.”
“That’s crazy.”
“It’s just a matter of—”
“Tying good knots, yes, I know.” The thief shook her head. Her hair had dried in stiff spikes. “You people could take over the world.”
Zair laughed. “Young people. Always trying to capture the moon. Knots are very good for a few things, it’s true, but useless for all else. Besides...” She let a smile peek through. “Who wants to own the world? It’s full of dangerous sorts, like that Bredon person.”
Dorsag sighed. She pulled the cord out of her shirt and cupped the pendant in her hand. It was green as glass. “I wish at least one of them...”
“They made their choice.”
“I know.” But she looked truly despondent about it. A thief, Zair thought, but not a killer.
“They didn’t believe me,” Dorsag said. “And I can’t blame them; I don’t think I would have believed me if I hadn’t seen a little of what you can do.”
“You can lead the goat to pasture, but can’t make it graze. They made their choice. As did you.” Zair slapped the thief’s bony shoulder and pointed up to the roof, where a mess of loose thatch spilled over the edge. “Will you make yourself useful, or should we flap our gums ‘til the next storm?”
Dorsag gripped the edge of the roof and boosted herself up with the nimbleness of one who has climbed many rooftops before. “Don’t think you’re getting another loop of rope around my wrist.”
“I untied you fair and square.” Zair tilted her head back, looking up. “And you came back of your own free will. If you want to leave, you can—though we might have to search you at the edge of the village. On t’other hand, we can always use strong backs about.”
The thief stood on the wet thatch in the sunshine, looking down. “This place doesn’t even have a teahouse, decent or otherwise. Or a theatre. This is why I left the potato fields.”