by Kate Elliott
Until the woman began a new song, one whose response was answered raggedly by folk still eagerly learning it: how the outlander had saved them and been rewarded with the love of a young woman as beautiful as plum blossoms shimmering dew-laden at dawn, only to have her stolen away from him by a jealous lilu.
Mai, choked and unable to breathe evenly, excused herself and returned to the tiny room. Miravia followed her and lay down beside her on the pallet they would share for the night.
“Mai . . .”
“Neh, it’s nothing. Nothing I understand. He betrayed me.”
“He loved you!”
“Maybe he did, but now I wonder if this would have happened in the end no matter what? Demons stole me! That’s one way to put it. But there’s another story, a truer tale, isn’t there? We sing the songs, and hear the tales, hoping they will have a happy ending—the bandit prince falls in love with the brick-maker’s daughter and they live forever after in harmony—or at least a satisfyingly gruesome one in which everyone dies, but that is why they are tales, isn’t it? Forever after in harmony, as long as I always did what Anji approved of. And then, when I did not . . .” She touched her cheek, the one he’d slapped.
“Folk do get angry with each other, Mai. Kesh can be so irritating, but I love him despite it, because of it, including it. If people can never be angry, then isn’t that a way of lying?”
Mai smiled, remembering how she had thrown a cup at Anji, which he’d caught. Then she wept, and Miravia held her.
People travel onward by stages. Seven months is a stage, a chasm whose loss cannot be recovered, only bridged.
Late on the third afternoon they found shelter in an outpost atop a hill, a way fort overlooking the major road across Istria called the Flats. A cadre of soldiers was stationed in tent barracks set on raised plank floors. Their commander was a Qin officer attended by four Qin tailmen whom Mai did not recognize and who did not recognize her. The soldiers recognized Kesh’s partnership with Miravia, and deemed Miyara too bored with their youth to flirt with, but Mai and Ildiya they marked as fair game despite Siras’s obvious jealousy.
“Enough!” said Miyara finally after yet another tray of cordial had been brought and hopefully presented to the young women. “Have you louts no manners? We’d like to eat in peace.”
“Neh, I was finished,” said Mai, for the sweat and rowdy clamor and the presence of Qin soldiers made her stomach knot and her eyes fill with tears. Every man, even the local ones, wore a black tabard and his hair bound up in a topknot. “I’ll just walk outside.”
Kesh jerked as if he’d been kicked. “Ow!” he cried, flashing an indignant look at Miravia. She nodded toward Mai. “Ah. Well. I’ll just walk out with you, verea. Keep you company. Guard you in case there are wolves prowling.”
Every man there, even the Qin, watched them leave the eating porch, and avid gazes tracked them out along the ridge. They reached a platform sited for an excellent view of the road running below, the distant crown of Mount Aua to the west, and a nearer view of an oddly shaped ridge, slightly higher in elevation than their own, cut by a ledge whose stony surface glittered as the setting sun caught its length at just the right angle.
“I wish you would call me ‘Mai,’ ” she said as she leaned on the railing, the wind battering against the clasps and sticks with which she armored her hair. “Miravia is my dearest friend. Maybe she is my only friend. Even Miyara can’t tell me what has happened to Priya and O’eki, only that they went away with Anji. I hate to be called ‘verea’ by you, as though we’re acquaintances in the market. I’m very angry she married you, but surely I can still think of you as my brother.” She wiped a tear.
“Eiya! Why are you crying?”
“Just missing my twin.”
“You have a twin! One as beautiful as you?”
She shot him a glance, and he blushed horribly, looking mortified, and she laughed for the first time since she had woken. “I have a twin, a brother. Maybe he grew into his looks. I hope so.” Poor Mei. Always hounded by Grandmother and Father Mei and their mother and aunt. He was no silkworm to wind a cushion of silk to protect himself. He was a fragile leaf, subject to their storms. How was he faring? Could she send him a message across the vast distance, let her family know that she was alive? Would the family ever know the full story of what had happened to Hari?
“Did you ever look in the pool, Keshad? Did you ever see the chains?”
“What chains?”
“Never mind. Did Shai truly say nothing to you, that time he came up with Anji a month after—” She rubbed a hand over her vest, feeling the scar tissue along her ribs. “After Sheyshi stabbed me?”
“He never talked to me at all, and I admit I didn’t talk to him. I was too cursed worried that Ravia would take it into her head to tell Chief Tuvi she would marry him, out of loyalty to you. So I didn’t pay much attention to his troubles.”
She rested a hand on his forearm, and he was so startled he jerked it away, then flushed again, and settled his arm back beside hers on the railing as if within the reach of a particularly fearsome snake, and endured her fingers resting lightly on his hand.
“You do love Miravia, don’t you?” she asked.
He looked irritated. Then he flung back his head as the sun winked hard on that distant ledge. “I just remembered. The captain and his men brought three small jeweler’s chests bound with chains. But they left without them. I thought they were offerings for the altar. He sent up flowers every month, plum blossoms if he could get them. But that doesn’t explain why he left those good quality chests behind, does it? Indeed, they emptied a clothes chest from the barracks shelter and took it away with them, although I never knew—nor asked—what was in it, I was that glad to see them go without taking Ravia with them.”
She changed the subject, stumbling over a momentary awkwardness by falling back on the one subject she never tired of. “Tell me again, how was the baby that last time you saw him, when Anji came to take him away?”
He had the same smile any Hundred man would have, thinking of a plump, healthy child. “An exceptionally beautiful child. He has such a chortling laugh, like everything amuses him! Very good natured.”
Four soldiers tramped up behind them, laughing in a quite different way, shoving each other and showing off, making themselves big and noticeable as they crowded against the railing two on each side.
“Heya, verea! Like the view, eh?”
“It’s a very fine view of the road. I suppose you keep an eye on travelers and caravans. Make sure no one comes to harm.”
“We do oversee the roads, of course.” They were young men, desperate to boast. “But that’s not the chief reason we’re here. We’re black wolves, you know.”
“Black wolves?”
“The army’s elite. We’re trained to hunt demons.”
“You hunt demons?” She looked at Kesh, but he shrugged.
“See that Mount Aua? There’s a demon cradle there, a place demons might try to shelter for a night, sip their demon nectar. And that ridge there—see how it glitters? That one, too. So we’re posted here to keep an eye on them. There are other outposts like this one. Chief Chartai commands the entire black wolf cohort here in Istria. We’re the second such cohort, you know. Just commissioned two months ago. See our banner?”
It flapped from a pole, two wolf’s heads grinning in the breeze.
“We figured you maybe had a brother or husband who died in the service of the wolves, verea, seeing as you wear the ring.”
She looked down at the wolf’s-head ring, sigil of the Mei clan. The necklace had slipped out from the neck of her vest and Shai’s ring dangled at the curve of her breasts, which they were staring at, as men would. It was the same head, the very same. They held up their hands to show they, too, wore wolf’s-head rings.
Her throat tightened on words she did not want to say. She slipped the errant chain and its ring back beneath her vest and was at once sorry she’d done so, becau
se they followed the movement of the ring as if with their own hands.
“What kind of demons are you hunting?”
“Any demons, really, traitors or bandits or murderers. But particularly cloaks, verea. Those ones who say they’re Guardians but are really gods-rotted lilus waiting to corrupt us and lead the Hundred back into war.” They preened, just like sunning eagles. “Only the black wolves are told the secret of how to kill demons. It’s a dangerous job. We’re not afraid.”
But now she was. Fear snapped, a wolf who had just decided to eat her up.
The fourth day they ought to have made it all the way to Toskala, but Miyara was stricken as by a shuddering sickness, and then she wept while still aloft, and afterward they sailed down and came to rest in a pasture as sheep scattered. The buildings of a substantial town rose ahead. Farmers and herdsmen came running.
“Miyara, what is it? Are you ill?” Mai was dangling with her feet off the ground, kicking a little, wanting to stand on solid earth instead of being helpless.
“I’m scared, Mai, I don’t mind saying. There’s a thing I’ve never told you. About Joss. They say Scar went after Commander Anji. They say Joss was jealous that Commander Anji was doing a better job than Joss was commanding the reeves, so he tried to kill him.”
“Joss? Reeve Joss? Are we talking about the same man?”
“The cursed handsome one.”
“That’s right. He’s an Ox, just like me. I admit he was vain, but very charming! Yet I never met a man less ambitious to puff about his own importance and authority than Reeve Joss. I mean, he seemed like a man who’d been dragged into authority and didn’t like it much.”
“That’s how I saw him, I admit. But others didn’t. It’s not what folk said afterward. I wasn’t there. But let me tell you something and I beg you never to say I mentioned it. There’s a contingent of reeves—not many, but people who were close to him—who flew to Bronze Hall down in Mar. You wouldn’t know them, they’d just be names to you. They’ve never truly confided in me, but I’ve been thinking as each month passes that once I’ve discharged the obligation I made to ferry supplies up to Merciful Valley for the one year—a promise I made to Commander Anji on behalf of the boy, who is my nephew, if you’ll recall—”
“I do recall it. I know what I owe you.”
“Never mind that. It’s nothing any Hundred woman wouldn’t have done.”
“What have you been thinking?”
“That I’d leave Argent Hall and fly to Bronze Hall. Siras is thinking of coming with me—and I suppose Ildiya will tag along with him. Anyhow, we just want to hear what they have to say. Bronze Hall’s not a member of the reeve council. They never sent a representative to the council in which Commander Anji was elected as commander over the reeve halls. They’re not subject to him.”
“And what does Commander Anji think of that?” Mai asked tartly. “That one hall doesn’t acknowledge his authority?”
“How could I know? I’m just a reeve in Argent Hall, far away from Law Rock. I know there’s been plenty of fighting up in Herelia and Teriayne and the north. The war’s not over yet. I’m sure Commander Anji is too busy to bother himself with sleepy Mar, way down on the southeastern coast.”
“Let me down, I beg you, I have to pee.”
Miyara unhooked them both, and they both went to pee in the woods. When they reemerged, the farmers were gawking from a distance at the eagle while the herdsmen and their barking dogs chivvied the sheep through a gap in the woods toward a safer clearing.
Mai was struggling with the trousers. “I hate these things. A taloos is so much easier to wear, much less pee in.”
Miyara hauled out a flag and signaled Siras and Ildiya, who headed down.
“Tell you what, Mai,” said Miyara. “Let’s shelter here for the night. Then we’ll reach Law Rock in the morning. Better in the morning than late in the afternoon, eh?”
“Why?”
She jerked the flags down and rolled them up tightly, hands tense. Her eyes had a faraway look, as a caravaner in the desert might eye a distant haze wondering if it is a killing sandstorm. “Better to have plenty of time to leave, don’t you think? If things aren’t so hospitable.”
“Reeve! Verea!”
A man and a woman came jogging toward them along the road. “We saw you come down. And here are more of you! Surely you’ll honor us by staying over. We’re a humble town, but we’ve a garrison station newly built and still empty. You’re welcome to stay there for the night. We’ll feed you gladly.”
It was impossible to say no to such an enthusiastic offer. The reeves shucked the harness from their eagles, seeing it was earlier in the day than they normally halted, and they accompanied the townsfolk along the road as the farmers gestured friendly greetings and went back to their resplendent fields, half grown in stagnant rectangles of water.
“Look at that growth! That’s our second crop this season! I don’t mind telling you, it was cursed lean pickings until the first crop was brought in. We all struggled to survive, and some of the children and elders and invalids did not, for all our stores were stolen by the demon army and some of our lads and lasses besides.” The ancient road was an astonishing landmark, smoothly paved and massively built, raised up from the surrounding countryside and flanked on either side by tracks worn into the earth by generations of trudging feet. The town lay ahead, a half built palisade now abandoned; plenty of people were out in the fields and among the orchards. “But that’s all settled now. Why, just three months ago a girl who’d gone missing fully ten months ago—given up for dead!—came riding home behind a Qin soldier. Very finely set up she was, too, for he’d taken it into his mind to eat her rice, and she’d been minded to finish the bowl he started. Her clan were nothing more than day laborers, and now they’re the third richest in town. What do you think of that!”
The abandoned palisade had been fitted with gates, set open with iron bracings. Four posts had been erected to the left of the open gate.
Four posts, from which dangled the remains of men, strands of hair fluttering where flesh hadn’t yet rotted away from the skulls, the tattered remnants of their clothing frayed and faded. So had the Qin hung out executed criminals in the sun-blasted citadel square in Kartu Town after their armies had conquered the area.
Maybe she fainted. Maybe she just tripped on uneven pavement. Maybe she just forgot to breathe.
Then she was on her knees, shaking, hands over her face.
“Mai!” Miravia steadied her.
“Why are corpses hanging from posts?” She’d never forgotten Widow Lae. On the day of the widow’s execution for treason and spying, every man, woman, and child of Kartu Town had been required to assemble in citadel square to watch. That had been the day Anji had first spoken to Mai’s father. That had been the day he’d made it clear to a man who could not refuse him that he intended to have her for himself. Of course he’d never asked her. It would have been surprising if he had!
How could she ever have thought it was romantic?
And yet hadn’t it been just as sweet and satisfying as one of her beloved songs? Up until the end, when he had killed Uncle Hari. When his mother had taken over Mai’s household. When he’d married a woman he didn’t know in capitulation to the very mother who had arranged the murder of the woman he loved.
And all for what?
For now she understood what she had been hoping for, in the last four days. The unspoken wish, the unexamined dream: that, upon seeing her, Anji would cast all the other aside, discard it without a second’s thought, and embrace her. Just as it used to be.
“Them’s the executed men, verea,” their escort was saying. “So sorry if it upset you, if it came unexpected. But surely you have assizes down there south, too, don’t you?”
“We do,” said Miyara slowly, “but I never saw such posts as these. I heard that the Star army would cleanse people, hang them up by the arms until they died of pain and thirst. It gives me a sick feeling to look
at these dead men and think of them suffering like that.”
“The hells! I know the cleansing you’re speaking of. We’re not such savages. This was done all according to the law. The assizes came through, just like in the old days. Very fair, it was. Very orderly. Because we’re so close to Toskala, we happened to host the commander himself just for the one day, a very impressive man with excellent manners. He come accompanied by judges, just like the Guardians of old with their law scrolls and each one wearing a tabard in a color that marked their specialty. You know, white for murder trials. Green for agricultural disputes. Gold for boundary disputes. Red for—Well, anyway! I don’t mind telling you the local lads had captured twelve fugitives from the demon army who’d been hiding out in the woods. The commander interviewed each one personally, in front of witnesses. Two he deemed were just young fellows, led astray but salvageable, and those he sent on to a militia training camp in High Haldia. Two were auctioned right here into debt slavery, for a seven-year term. Four were sent for a three-year term of labor on public works in Toskala, very fair, mind you. These four, though—they were the senior men, and poison-mouthed fellows they were. The judges really had no choice but to condemn them—it has to be unanimous, you know. They got a quick execution, more merciful than what things they themselves done to innocents at their own confession, I’ll tell you. Their corpses were hung up on these posts as a warning to them who might think of turning to the shadows, and as a reminder to the rest of us that justice was served.”
SHE SLEPT POORLY. Maybe they all did, for they rose before dawn and left as soon as the eagles could be whistled down.
Not long after dawn they reached Toskala. The city filled up a wedge of ground between two rivers, the breadth of its packed buildings, avenues, alleys, compounds, walls, and outer districts where the dirty work of living was carried out sprawled northward along the banks. It was almost as big as the Mariha city she had glimpsed in the distance, right before they’d been detoured up to Commander Beje’s villa where Anji had been given a reprieve from his death sentence.