by Kate Elliott
Afterward they questioned her at length, some hot, some cool, most doubtful, others with the troubled look of people who nourish hope but fear they are naïve for doing so. Calon and Jodoni gave answers when needed; they too had rehearsed their arguments and together agreed on a plan of attack.
“Why does Olossi only approach us now?” Seyon asked. “When we have all lost so much already? Why not before?”
“I myself and a consortium of merchants from Olossi attempted to send a party to Horn last year,” said Calon, “but the roads weren’t safe, as you must yourselves recall. The party was killed by bandits.”
“Why now?” Mai continued. “Because now Olossi has acted to safeguard Olo’osson. But Olo’osson cannot stand alone. Only now are we strong enough to reach out for allies. It cannot have escaped any of you, sitting here on this hill with Aua Gap spread before you, that Horn provides an obvious assembly point for forces seeking to attack our enemy.”
“Difficult to know if we can trust an outlander,” said the eye-rolling old woman. “Yet it says in the tale that ‘an outlander will save them.’ ”
The wind had picked up, a stiff blow rumbling over the high ridge and streaming across this height like a reminder of life’s ceaseless disturbances.
“None of us can know what the future holds,” said Mai. “All we can do is decide what actions we will take. Will we do nothing as the Star of Life attacks Nessumara and spreads yet farther, stage by stage? Or will we do something?” She bent her head in a gesture meant to fall halfway between respect and dismissal. “We’ll leave you to discuss it among yourselves. Is there a place we might rest while you confer?”
That startled them!
“Of course! But if we have other questions—”
“If you have other questions,” she said in her kindest voice, “I think you might consider running up the message banner. Then you can question those who would actually prosecute the war: the reeve commander and Olo’osson’s captain.”
They responded by coming to their feet in surprise and confusion. But Seyon called a hireling to escort her and her companions to a garden attached to the assizes hall built up against Assizes Tower. On the stony ground no vegetation grew except that planted in pots and troughs: miniature fruit trees barren at this season; a hedge of thorny heal-all dusted with purple blooms; ranks of bushy green growth waiting for the rains to flower again. Mai sank down on a stone bench, wiping her forehead as Calon sat beside her.
“Are you well, verea? You’re pale and shaking.”
Jodoni was speaking with the hireling, then walked over. “I’ve asked them to bring kama juice, verea.”
She smiled weakly, feeling her energy ebb as if it had all been sucked out in a swollen rush. Her breasts felt heavy and were beginning to ache. It was well past time to feed Atani, and meanwhile the baby was safely ensconced with his aunt Miyara and Priya as nursemaid atop Horn Hall.
“Was it wise for you to dismiss them quite so abruptly?” Jodoni added.
“It makes them anxious, Holy One. Then they feel there is a sudden need to make a decision.”
“Eiya! We’ll discover soon enough.”
Two women tattooed with debt marks carried in trays with a jar of kama juice, bitter this late in the season, and a platter of rice cakes and flat bread, nothing fancy but filling to one who was hungry. Mai was always hungry, although she carefully did not eat more than her fair share.
Master Calon wanted to rehash the meeting, going over every least question and gesture to squeeze from these hints any sense of the council’s inclinations, but Mai pleaded weariness. Sipping the last juice from her cup, she wandered the angles of the garden’s paths, her sandals crunching on stony earth, and found a secluded haven. The hedge screened off a smaller garden rimmed by a low rock wall that overlooked a ravine with scrub brush. Falls of rock made the steep slopes impassable. A trickle of water, not even enough to make spray, spilled from the height down into the cut. The sparse growth reminded her of Dezara Mountain behind Kartu Town, washing her with nostalgia not for home precisely but for the landscape that once was the only one she knew.
She knelt before the wide stone wall and loosened her taloos enough to ease the pressure in her breasts by milking a bit into the cup. She straightened her clothing with a quick look around. Raptors still spiraled far overhead. From this vantage, she could see only a sliver of the city, roofs and alleys pairing light and dark. She set the full cup on the flat stone and settled back onto her heels, pressing her hands to her chest as she prayed.
“I offer this nourishment at the feet of the Merciful One. Through the merit of offering may I walk the path of awakening. The body withers and disintegrates; what power we have now may be shorn from us tomorrow. Receive this offering with compassion. May the world prosper, and justice be served. Peace.”
A whisper teased like wind through the tightly knit leaves of the hedge. Startled, she turned, hands touching her taloos, but it was safely pulled tight. Several women dressed humbly—hirelings and debt slaves—had gathered at the gap in the hedge. How long they had been watching Mai could not guess, but she composed her expression carefully as she rose.
“Forgive me if I was not meant to wander into this place, but it felt so peaceful.”
There were at least eight women, ranging from a pair of girls younger than she was to an old woman supporting herself with a cane.
The old woman came forward. “Were you praying, verea?”
“I was.”
“We never heard such prayers before, but we could understand most of them. Was that the Merciless One you were praying to? Were you a hierodule?”
She flushed. “I’m not that, nor was I praying to the Merciless One. I pray to the Merciful One, who gives us sanctuary.”
“Is that an outlander god?” asked one of the girls.
“The Merciful One rests in all places. Anywhere folk suffer trouble or despair, or wish to celebrate joy and prosperity, they can seek refuge and peace with the Merciful One.”
“They’re saying you people come from Olo’osson to offer aid and protection.”
“That’s right.” This was easier territory to negotiate. She smiled, and several smiled back at her. The younger girl skipped forward to touch her taloos, fingering the silk until the old woman rapped the girl’s forearm with the tip of her cane.
“Don’t be rude!”
“No matter,” said Mai. “No harm in her being curious.”
“It’s very fine silk, verea,” said the girl, who had a fresh tattoo at her left eye and an ugly rash like an infection spreading down from the mark, inflaming her face. She was newly sold into debt slavery, no doubt, but she had also the pinched cheeks and fragile wrists of a child who has never had enough to eat.
“So it is. It comes from the Sirniakan Empire.”
“All the best silk comes from there,” agreed her interlocutors. “But we’ve seen none here for years. The roads haven’t been safe. Trade has died. Folk are hungry.”
“If the Hundred joins in an alliance against this cruel army out of the north, then we can open the roads. Trade will flow. Merchants will haggle, and markets will spill over with wares from every town in the Hundred and even farther away, from the lands beyond. Folk won’t have to sell themselves or their children into debt slavery—”
She stopped before she began prating on about there being food for everyone. Weren’t there always children who were starving and folk passed for sale from one hand to the next?
The younger girl crept forward again, not without a furtive look toward the older woman and her cane. She extended a hand—clean enough—then withdrew, and Mai laughed and beckoned her closer to let her touch the best-quality cornflower-blue silk with its cunning embroideries worked in the same color thread into the fabric.
“Are you the outlander who has come to save us, verea?” asked the girl, eyes wide.
“Mai!”
The women melted back to make a path for Anji to stride int
o the garden. His gaze made quick work of its narrow confines, pinning each point where an assassin might hide and determining that they were not, at the moment, at risk.
“I didn’t see you come in—!”
“The council raised the message flag,” he said. “It seems you impressed them favorably enough that they agreed to meet with me and Commander Joss.” His expression was so flat she understood he was very very pleased, and she could not restrain a smile of triumph, not for herself precisely, but for their cause. Or perhaps it was just for her personal victory, winning them over. She hardly knew.
“Calon and Jodoni lost track of you,” he added with a frown as he studied her.
“I came here to pray. Then I was talking to these women.”
He measured the company, acknowledging the older women with nods and ignoring the young ones, and indicated that Mai should accompany him. “We’ll go back.”
“Do you plan to fight them what have driven so many refugees out of Haldia and Istria, with such horrible tales they have to tell?” asked the old woman while the younger girls hid their eyes and one of the women with a fresh tattoo wept silently as at remembered pain.
“I plan to fight,” said Anji.
His words made Mai’s chest tight with despair, and fear, and pride. She followed him out and the others trailed after them, all but the youngest girl. Only when they entered the council square where Joss was already speaking passionately to the gathered council members and more folk besides coming up from the city to hear did she remember she had forgotten the cup.
30
THE CLOSER SHAI and his escort of a dozen wildings got to the edge of the deep Wild, the fewer trails offered passage. As he hacked at a vine wrapped stubbornly around his ankle, he heard frantic voices. A scream pierced the forest’s veil. Shoving past a curtain of leaves, he stumbled down a wet-season gully sucked dry at this time of year. The gully offered a trail of a kind, and he splashed through isolated puddles, slipping twice along its slick pavement of damp leaves. Brah and Sis kept pace in the branches. The adult wildings had vanished.
The forest wasn’t silent, which just made tracking more confounding: insects buzzed; birds chirred sweetly or squawked raucously; a larger animal cracked dead branches as it fled. He could never tell where the noises were coming from. Where the gully turned in a sudden bend, a bush had thrown tendrils across the depression. Shoving through this he slammed into the back of a man kneeling on the ground beside a child sprawled flat on its back.
The man toppled sideways with a yelp. Folk, unarmed and lugging only sacks and baskets and small children, huddled in a hollow sticky with the muddy remains of a wet season pond. At Shai’s entrance, they shrieked. The surrounding canopy bent to dancing although the wind had not risen.
Shai leaped up, waving his arms. “Don’t kill them! If you honor me, let me first speak to them!”
The man sobbed as his companions stared in horror at a sight behind Shai. He turned. The child had begun to leak blood from its nose and mouth; it twitched weakly, sucking for air, then was still.
Mist rose from the body. A shape congealed, casting around.
“What happened? That hurt!” Its cloudy gaze fixed on Shai. “You’re an outlander! I never saw an outlander before!” He was sure the lad smiled as at a good joke, but abruptly its attention focused past him. “I see there—so bright!—” the ghost cried, and the boy fled through Spirit Gate, folding away into nothingness.
The trees ceased their movements. Had the wildings seen the ghost as well?
“Is that your child?” Shai asked.
“Neh.” The man rubbed his forehead as if to wipe away blood or anger or dirt or grief. He had an ugly wound above his right ear, and his left arm ended in a stump wrapped with the bloody remains of a jacket. “He went by the name of Gelli. He was one of the children that came with us out of Copper Hall, but he had no family left. Said they were dead or scattered. No trouble at all, that boy. Even tempered and lively. He kept us smiling with his jokes and antics.”
“Surely you know it is forbidden to cross the boundary of the Wild.” He crouched beside the body. The boy’s right hand bore a pair of purpling puncture wounds. “Snakebit!”
“It was dangling in those vines when the boy pushed around,” said the man helplessly. “Impossible to see, it being green like the vines. How was anyone to know a small creature could be so deadly?”
No wonder the darts of the wildings were so effective.
“Did you not see the poles with skulls set atop them?” Shai demanded.
They stared at him with the speechless intensity of folk who are hungry, thirsty, lost, and without hope except maybe for that given them by the antics of a lively boy now lying dead at their feet. Most were young, like the prisoners Shai had been held captive with, although these hadn’t the battered, bruised, stunned look of the abused. These were merely starving, frightened, helpless refugees, swatting listlessly at bugs come to feast on warm bodies.
Finally, a very young and quite pretty woman stepped forward, clutching the hand of a boy no older than the lad who had died. She eyed him as warily as if he might be a snake about to strike. Not one seemed aware that they were surrounded by wildings.
“We’re all that remains from those fled from Copper Hall,” the girl said.
“Copper Hall? In Nessumara? Has the city been attacked?”
“That I don’t know. I meant the other Copper Hall, the main reeve hall north of the city on the road to Haya. A cohort come and burnt the hall.”
“Copper Hall is burned?” The simple words were so sharp a shock that he felt strangled.
Their tale spilled like rain: a cruel army rousting folk from their villages; farmers and villagers fleeing into the countryside and some coming to rest at the reeve hall where old Marshal Masar offered a haven. Then the reeve hall had been attacked and burned, eagles killed, the reeves fled. The old marshal had left behind his own grandchildren.
“He had to do it,” said the young woman gravely as she blinked away tears, “because they could only carry one extra person each. If they didn’t save the fawkners, who would care for the eagles? If there’s none to care for the eagles, and the reeves die, then who will protect us?”
“The reeves haven’t done a cursed lot of good protecting us, have they?” objected the man, waving a hand to clear away a cloud of gnats. “They saved themselves and left us behind to die.”
“There was nothing else they could do!” cried the girl indignantly.
So many spoke Shai could not make out the speakers among the angry group.
“They could have fought against that cursed army, eh? Instead of flying up there out of reach and watching as the rest of us got hit over and over and over again!”
Houses burned. Captives taken. Men killed. Storehouses looted. Children and elderly dead of sickness and starvation.
“How are you come into the Wild?” he asked.
The girl took up the tale. “A sergeant discovered us hiding in the wine cellar and convinced the cohort captain to let us go. But after we traveled for some days, other soldiers harassed and chased us. They drove us in here. They killed them what would not go past the poles. We had no choice but to die at their hands, or hope to escape. We thought maybe we could walk a ways through the Wild and leave with none the wiser.”
“That one sergeant,” added the man with a weary kind of rage, “she did more than the cursed reeves ever did by hauling you children out of your hiding place and getting you out alive instead of giving you over to be slaughtered. Those poor cursed hirelings and assistants who got left behind were killed outright. Folk I knew well, every one of them. Think of it! It was that one sergeant, enemy as she was, who saved us. Not the gods-rotted reeves.”
He had a debt mark at his left eye, easy to overlook because that part of his face had been scraped to bleeding.
“You’ll not speak of my grandfather that way!” shouted the girl.
“Enough!” Shai glared
until folk fell into an anxious silence. “There are wildings in the trees all around you, ready to kill you with darts soaked in snake venom like what killed that poor lad.”
Some wept, shaken by fear. Others wore a look of glazed indifference, people pushed past their limit.
“Should we just lie down and die?” said the girl, her chin jutting in a desperate display of bravado. “If the wildings are so cursed deadly—if they even exist except in tales—then why haven’t they killed you?”
Their despair made him reckless. “Because I’m not human. I’m a demon.”
“I never heard that outlanders are demons. They’re just people, like us, only they look funny.”
“Hush, you idiot girl!” the man hissed.
Shai laughed. “What’s your name?”
She slanted a look at him as if she had just discovered that he was a young man and she was a young woman, and things might go as they might go if things went. As he felt himself flush under her bold scrutiny, she smiled, flexing her power to disturb him. She knew men admired her, even as ragged and hungry and dirty as she was. Surely she’d not been assaulted and abused in the last weeks. She showed no fear, as if the thought of such a threat had never occurred to her. “I’m called Jenna. It’s short for Jennayatha.”
Someone sniggered. Others hissed. He was meant to understand the reference, but he did not.
“I’m an outlander. I don’t know your tales, if you meant to convey some meaning by your name, verea. Tell me more about Copper Hall. What happened with the sergeant?”
The tale was neatly told, for the Hundred folk did know how to spin tales from any least event, and this was a story that could easily become woven into a true tale to be told to grandchildren should any of these survivors survive to dandle grandchildren on their laps. Barrels of wine and cordial had distracted the first lot of soldiers come to explore the cellar, but a sergeant had shined a lamp’s light onto the faces of frightened children and withdrawn without betraying their presence. She had returned and marched them past ranks of corpses to join village refugees and hall slaves who were to be allowed to live while the rest were put to the sword. Each word was a blow to Shai’s hopes. How was he to reach Olossi if he could not reach a reeve?