Karis groaned pathetically.
“I’m done lecturing,” J’han assured her. His probing fingers paused. “Spasm. I guess that hurts.” He leaned all his weight into the heels of his hands and shoved the breath out of Karis’s chest.
Emil sighed. “The methods by which we divert ourselves are rather peculiar.”
“Eccentric, even,” said Medric.
“Desperate,” said Norina, who had gotten the abnormally passive child into the washtub.
Both men blinked at this. Emil said, “Desperate. And bookbinding is next. If you thought printing was dull…”
“I won’t do it,” Karis said, her voice strangled by the pressure on her back. “All that fussing. I need to move more.”
“Deliveries after that,” said Medric. “Lots of moving.”
“Oh!” said Karis.
“There,” said J’han in satisfaction, apparently addressing Karis’s anatomy. “That was very obedient of you.”
Karis took several deep breaths, but seemed disinclined to move otherwise. J’han began methodically to work on one muscle at a time, and Karis grew so limp that Garland wondered if she might simply slither off the table like a very slimy fish.
Eyes closed, she mumbled, “Emil, are you still there?”
“Still here, and still diverted. But now it’s by envy. Why has J’han never done that to me? Obviously, I’m not as beautiful to look at—”
“Where are we going?” Karis asked. “Have we decided?”
“Oh, while you were down in the cellar we did take a look at Norina’s maps, and we figure that we only actually need to visit some ten people—the right ten, of course, who know a lot of other people—but I’ve got a good idea of who the right ten people are. So we can walk right across the middle of Shaftal, west to east, with a certain amount of meandering north and south. The weather will be terrible, I suppose, but you’ll help us dodge the storms. Do you want to see the map?”
“I put them away,” said Norina, busy with the wash cloth. Leeba peered, rather trapped looking, from behind a mask of soap bubbles.
Garland fetched the map case, and took out a roll of several maps on heavy, sturdy paper, the most remarkable maps he had ever seen, for they appeared to be marked with every single road and path, village, hill, waterway, and stand of trees in the entire country or Shaftal. He held up the maps one by one before Karis’s eyes until she reached with an ink-black finger to point at an undistinguished area. “What’s here? I can’t read it.”
Emil took the map from Garland to bring it closer to the lamp. “I think you were pointing at a sheep-shearing station. It’s pretty far from anywhere, and surely it’s not even occupied at this time of year.”
J’han had switched his attentions to Karis’s shoulder blades. She had shut her eyes again. She said, in a heavy, exhausted voice, “No, Emil. Mabin is there.”
Mabin, Garland thought. Councilor Mabin, general of Paladins. The one with the spike in her heart.
“Do you want to visit her?” Emil’s tone was neutral, but Garland noticed a sudden liveliness in his face.
“Want?” Karis said. “No, of course not.”
“Ought,” Emil corrected himself patiently.
“Ought,” said Medric firmly.
The Truthken briskly rubbed her shivering daughter with a towel. “Karis will protect you, Garland, so don’t go into a panic.”
Garland realized then that panic was exactly what he felt.
“The earth will open its mouth and chew up that woman alive if she even threatens my people,” said Karis. “And she’ll begme to let her heart stop beating.”
Her tone was so hard, and so matter-of-fact, that Garland said in a small voice, “Literally?”
Emil said, “Earth logic, you, know, is awfully literal. And Karis, well, she’s always been a bit—” He paused, apparently to hunt down and capture the most exact term. “—Definite,” he said. “When she does something, she does it. And you know she’s done it. And you never forget it.”
“And it can really hurt,” said Medric.
Karis raised her head. She looked at Medric, and then at Emil. “You two can hardly wait,” she said.
The parlor had become a makeshift bindery, lit by the household’s entire collection of lamps. Norina stood in the corner, methodically folding and slashing sheets of paper. Emil sorted and ordered the pages and then, like Garland, plied a heavy needle and thread to sew the pages together. Finally, J’han and Leeba glued on the paper covers, and yesterday’s ink-child had been transformed into a glue-child. After an entire morning of sewing, Garland still could not quite believe that books are held together at their centers by needle and thread. Such a homely thing! His fingers hurt, and he was glad to abandon the sewing occasionally to check his stewpot.
In the afternoon, Medric came down the stairs, and Leeba, who had gotten very bored with painting glue on paper, leaped up with a cry. “Medric! I have a surprise!” She produced with a flourish a very crooked, glue-blotted, ink-smeared book.
“Is that it?” said Medric. “My book?” He swept her up, book and all, and went twirling up and down the hallway with her in a dizzy dance, while she recounted, between shrieks of laughter, her very important role in the construction of this first book. Medric said, “I know exactly where this one is to go.” He poked his head into the parlor. “Stop slaving away in the gloom! Let’s give this book a proper send-off.”
But first the book had to be wrapped in oilcloth and tied with twine, and the knots sealed with red wax. The resulting package was carried outside in triumph, with Medric waving it proudly, and the rest of them following in grimy procession: J’han rubbing his sticky hands ineffectually with a rag, Garland sucking a needle-pierced fingertip, Emil playing a riddle game with Leeba, Norina intent as a cat stalking a mouse. Out they went into the cold, bright day and Karis came up the slope to greet them, pulling a completed sledge. To get the wood she had dismantled every cupboard in the house, leaving Garland’s kitchen in complete disarray as a result. A hammer was tucked into her belt, and her pockets bulged with pegs or nails. Planes, a brace-and-bit, saws, and mallets scattered the porch where she had been working.
“What’s that?” she said, when Medric waved his package at her.
“A book,” he said importantly.
“Just one?”
“The firstone,” Leeba said.
“Well, put it in the sledge. And then go make four hundred and ninety-nine more.”
“You have no sense of ceremony,” grumbled Medric. “Now listen! This book shall not be hauled across the snow. No weary journey ‘cross hill and dale, no hostile, porridge-eating farmers to be tempted to use it to start their breakfast fires. No, that may be its brother’s fate, but not this one. Not this one!” He held it up, and shook it for emphasis. “This one shall be delivered by ravens!”
“Give it to me,” Karis said.
Medric came down the porch steps and handed it to her. She weighed it in the palm of her hand. “You should have written a shorter book. How far do you expect it to be carried?”
“To Watfield.”
The amusement faded from her cold-flushed face. “Medric—”
Medric gave an elaborate shrug, that seemed to begin with his feet, and traveled upwards in a loose-limbed movement that made him seem on the verge of collapsing into a pile of disconnected bones.
She looked at him, eyes glinting, mouth drawn tight, Garland suspected, to keep herself from uttering words that might at best be discourteous. When she spoke at last, however, it was to say prosaically, “Fortunately, Garland has been stuffing the ravens with corn bread.”
The ravens arrived as she spoke: dropping from the roof, from the treetops, from the cloud-draped sky. “What—what—what?” they cried.
Medric turned completely around, a giddy man in a maelstrom of flapping wings. “You’re sending them all?”
“I have to, so they can carry your heavy book in relay.” With a very small, ver
y mocking bow, Karis returned to the seer the packaged book. He lifted it over his head, balanced on his fingertips. The ravens rose up again in a flapping cloud that briefly cloaked him, and then he was empty handed, and one of the departing ravens dangled the package from its claw.
“Good-bye!” Medric cried. “Good luck!” Leeba, and then the rest of them, joined him in shouting their farewells. But Karis stood silent, monolithic, with her hands jammed in her pockets, squinting in the light as she watched the ravens fly away.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The door latched softly. Clement, who had fallen asleep with the baby in the crook of her arm and a nippled milk bottle resting precariously on her chest, slitted open her eyes to see that it was the storyteller, slipping in unhindered and unescorted, pulling the hood back from her sharp-edged face. Clement mumbled, “Is it day or night?”
“Almost suppertime.”
“Where have you been?”
“I owed Alrin a story.” The storyteller hung her cloak on a hook and began stripping off and folding her plain wool clothing.
“How is she doing?” said Clement with surprise.
“She’s dead. Since yesterday.”
The storyteller had been telling stories to a dead woman.
Clement looked down at her son, who blinked at her as though in abject amazement. She felt a sensation she could not put a name to; it seemed too unfamiliar to be called, simply, sadness.
The room was dark, the storyteller an indifferent shadow, doing up the buttons of her silken performance clothes. Clement had hardly slept in two days. And she was shaken by the enormity and suddenness of the catastrophe she had brought upon herself. Clement let a few tears fall, a luxury so long forbidden she wasn’t even certain how to do it. The storyteller, if she even noticed, offered no comment.
Before the woman left for the evening’s performance, though, she put a fresh bottle of milk on the windowsill to keep cold, then came over to the bed to check the baby. She had drilled Clement in feeding and diapering as determinedly as Clement had ever drilled a soldier. Clement said, “Do you approve?” Her voice was still rough with tears.
“I visited the midwife,” the storyteller said. “The nurse will come tomorrow morning.”
“What has taken so long?”
“She’s very young. Her parents are reluctant.”
Clement thought of a young woman, as young as Kelin, maybe, arguing angrily with an array of disapproving parents. “Hell,” she muttered. “Will you tell Gilly that she’s coming? And ask him to visit me after the night bell.”
After the night bell, Gilly arrived with the storyteller and an aide who was carrying a precarious supper tray. The stew had gotten stone cold on its journey from the refectory, but at least there was some meat in it. Clement ate, and Gilly said, “Cadmar complains that he is unattended.”
Clement crushed a fragment of frozen butter onto her cold bread. “He knows I’m leaving in just a couple of days. What does he want from me?”
The storyteller approached them and handed the baby to Gilly, who accepted the bundle with some surprise. She silently left the room.
“Where is she going?” Gilly held the baby awkwardly, looking unnerved.
“She’ll sit on her heels in the hallway. Gazing into space.”
“Peculiar.”
“But it does give me some privacy. Are the soldiers now letting her wander the garrison unescorted?”
“I’ll look into it. She mentioned that the nurse is finally coming tomorrow. Are you thinking that the four of you can live in this one room, in harmony?”
“Won’t the nurse will take the child away?”
The baby was uttering rhythmic grunting sounds. Gilly looked down at him with a puzzled expression, as though the arrival of this small person were nearly as dismaying to him as it was to Clement. “A young woman, unmarried, no household of her own, apparently acting against her parent’s wishes? She’ll expect you to provide for her. She’s got nowhere to take a child.”
“Someone might have told me!” Clement smeared more butter onto her roll. “The storyteller could have told me, if she knew how to volunteer information.” Then she mumbled, her mouth full, “I feel like I’m eating frozen sawdust.”
“It goes well with that frozen mud puddle.” Gilly indicated the gelid bowl of brown stew.
Reminded, Clement swallowed a few chilling spoonfuls. “Fortunately, I know you’d never point out a problem until you’d thought of a solution.”
“There’s a place available not two buildings away from the gate.”
“Keep my own establishment?”
“I would hardly call two rooms an establishment.”
The baby uttered a cry, rather experimentally, but Gilly gave a start, which in turn caused the baby to cry in earnest. Clement shoveled in a few more mouthfuls, then took the baby, and admonished him, “Listen, little soldier, we’re strategizing your future, and strategy requires concentration.”
“The storyteller could also live there,” said Gilly, speaking loudly over the baby’s wailing. “I’ll help with the cost, of course. I’ve always wanted to be somebody’s uncle.”
Clement said, “I’m not sure I heard you, with that shrieking in my ear. Did you say you want to be an uncle!”
Grinning, Gilly stood up and leaned upon his sturdy cane. “I’ll check those rooms in the morning, and if they look passable, I’ll rent them on your behalf.”
She opened and held the door for him. Out in the hallway, the storyteller rose up lightly from where she had been squatting with her shoulders against the wall. “Let’s get some sleep if we can,” Clement said to her. “Will you be all right on the stairs, uncle?”
Gilly gestured crudely and shuffled into the shadows.
When Clement first set eyes on her son’s new wet nurse, she was flirting with the soldiers at the gate: a plain, thin, sullen girl, younger than Kelin had been. She unbuttoned despite the chill to display her swollen, milk-leaking breasts. “Satisfied?” she asked sharply, then added placatingly, “Madam.” “What became of your own baby?”
“He went to the father’s family.” Winking at the goggling soldiers, the girl did up her buttons.
No doubt that this girl would be a trial to Clement, just as she surely had been to her recently discarded parents. In the rented rooms, though, where at Gilly’s instigation the plaster was being repaired and furniture was being delivered, the girl sat down beside the glowing coal stove and demonstrated that she could suckle, though the baby appeared to need some training. The storyteller squatted on her heels and watched this amateur performance with what seemed to Clement a healthy skepticism.
Clement squatted beside her. “If this were your son, would you leave him in this girl’s care?”
“I cannot answer that question,” the storyteller said.
Clement hired the girl only because she had no choice. That night she lay in her own room, alone, trying to convince herself that she appreciated the luxury of an uninterrupted night. At sunrise she was in the rented rooms again, holding her son beside the newly lit stove, having a quiet conversation with him while the nurse and storyteller slept.
“Acquiring a child is no different from acquiring a horse,” she said to him. “For every Sainnite but me.”
The baby lay in her arms, an unopened package, a blinking, sleepy stranger. “For me,” Clement said, “it appears to be a shocking occasion. Perhaps as much as it is for you.”
She glanced at the door that hung half ajar to let in the heat, beyond which the storyteller slept on a pallet on the floor. “You can thank the storyteller for this. Or curse her, if you like. Whatever you think she deserves.”
The baby uttered a small burbling grunt.
“No, I can’t make up my mind either,” she said.
The day of Clement’s departure for the children’s garrison had arrived too soon. “Where did all those ravens come from?” said Gilly from the back of his horse, as he escorted her to the garr
ison gate.
Black birds swarmed above the garrison gate. As Clement watched, their flying mass compressed together, then exploded upward, uttering eerily gleeful rattling cries.
The forty gloomy soldiers who awaited Clement at the gate watched the departing birds with undisguised anxiety. “Hell,‘
Clement muttered. Ravens were battlefield birds; Sainnites loathed and feared them. “They’ll be thinking those birds are an ill omen.”
Gilly was usually contemptuous of soldier superstitions, but now he looked worried.
The gate captain was approaching. Though he was one of the most dispassionate soldiers in the garrison, even he looked discomforted. He carried an unlabeled package wrapped in oilcloth, sealed with red wax, tied with twine, and smeared with bird droppings. “What is it, captain?” asked Clement sharply.
“Lieutenant-General, this thing seemed to fall from the sky.”
Involuntarily, Clement looked again at the disappearing flock of ravens. One had separated from the group and now swooped down to land on the peak of a rooftop. Gilly’s voice spoke harshly. “Keep your imaginings to yourself, captain!”
It was what Clement should have said to the gate captain. She turned to him belatedly and said, “Morale is going to be tricky enough without the soldiers thinking we’re getting packages from ravens.”
“Yes, ma’am. But what should I do with this?”
“Give it to me,” Gilly said. In a low voice he added to Clement, “Go talk to your soldiers.”
She stepped forward to greet Captain Herme, and with him beside her walked through the ranks of the gloomy company, greeting every soldier by name, enthusiastically touting the inevitable success and importance of their venture. By the time she had finished trying to raise their spirits, she could see Cadmar and Ellid arriving for the official departure. She hurried back to Gilly.
Looking both unhappy and unwell, he briefly held up a slim book for her to see, then hid it again in its dirty oilcloth wrappings.
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