A man leaped up to the driver’s seat and took up the reins, the horses leaned into the harness, and the wagon lurched and started forward.
They came up on the city gates very quickly. Kehera got a look at the walls with their wide-open gates and thought suddenly, What if they’re searching outgoing traffic? On the very heels of that thought, she saw men in red cloaks at the gates, stopping and searching wagons as they exited. She told herself that Parren must have known about the inspection, but her heart sped anyway.
“I’ll take Geris, if you like,” she said to Reilliy casually. “She’s almost the age of my youngest sister.”
Reilliy nodded. “Good, yes, you take her! Geris, would you like to go to—?”
“My name’s Eilisè,” Kehera told her. “Geris, sweet, want to come sit with me? You’re just the age of my sister, did you know that?”
The little girl came over willingly and plumped down in Kehera’s lap. “What’s her name?” she demanded.
“Um, Taviy,” Kehera invented hastily. “Did you have any big sisters, Geris?”
“No, never!”
“Well, you should,” Kehera told her. “Every little girl needs a big sister to take care of her. Would you like me to be your sister for a little while?”
Geris laughed, pleased. “Yes! You be my sister. Can Reilliy be my sister too?”
Kehera glanced at Reilliy for permission. “Sure, why not? We’ll all be sisters.” They were almost at the gates. The first wagon had already stopped. Parren was speaking to one of the redcloaks. Kehera thought she saw something change hands. A bribe? She hoped the redcloak would stay bought. The wagon rolled to a halt.
A redcloak walked over and jumped up on the running board to peer into the wagon. He said to the driver, “What all have you got here, then?”
The driver shrugged laconically. Kehera sent a quick prayer to the Fortunate Gods and whispered to Geris, “You want to tell him?”
Geris said loudly to the redcloak, in her piping child’s voice, “He’s got us! I’m Geris. This is my big sister, and that’s Reilliy; she’s my other big sister! Big sisters take care of little girls!”
The redcloak grunted, looked them over disinterestedly, and jumped back off the running board. Kehera hugged Geris. Perfect! She promised herself that she would indeed take care of the little girl as well as she could, and hoped that the child wasn’t heading for any future too terrible.
The wagons started up again, rolling through the gates and out of Enchar. Nothing ahead of them now but the open road, all the way to Eäneté! Her heart lifted at the mere thought that she was finally moving. It felt right to be heading south toward Eäneté, as though at last she was moving in exactly the right direction.
It was hard to believe she had come so far so fast, from being a prisoner on her way to Irekay to being a fugitive on her way home. For a moment she let herself think of her father’s face when she rode safely through the gates of the palace in Raëh. The picture was so vivid it was almost like she was actually there, and she prayed to the Fortunate Gods it might happen that way.
Then, trying to be sensible, she settled down in the wagon with her arm around Geris and set herself to endure the miles and days that inescapably rolled out before that hope could become real. Eighteen days or more until they might reach Eäneté. It wasn’t so very long. With the favor of the Fortunate Gods, she might be home before the beginning of the Iron Hinge and midwinter. She wished for that, fervently.
It took eight days to reach the limit of Enchar’s precincts and the beginning of Kimsè Province. At first the days were so clear and cold it seemed that a sharp cry should shatter the air into frozen crystalline fragments. But, as often happened during the Month of Frost, the weather warmed and chilled and warmed again. That was unlucky, as the roads were much harder on the animals when the ruts thawed to ice-edged mud. But Parren seemed pleased enough with the pace by what Kehera could see.
They traveled mostly south and a little east, the road curving its serpentine way along the foothills of the Takel Mountains. Kehera watched the mountains roll slowly by on the right, all black leafless forest and sharp gray reaches of stone, and thought about home. Raëh lay just on the other side of those mountains. Somewhere on the road through Kimsè they would pass opposite Raëh, but then they would keep on south a hundred miles or more too far. She longed for the wings of a bird, so that she might fly straight west over the mountains. But the wagons only rolled south, one slow mile after another, and that was good enough. She cherished every mile.
Kehera was grateful for Geris. Looking after the lively little girl gave her full-time occupation and settled her nerves. And Reilliy was openly glad to have the child taken out of her hands. The other girls provided little enough company. Reilliy was spiteful and angry. Her parents had sold her, she said, so they would have enough to feed her brothers through the winter. A common enough story, it seemed, for Geris had become a slave in exactly the same way; but where the younger girl had a sunny disposition undimmed by her circumstances, the older seemed to have taken the transaction as a personal insult. While being sold as a slave was not a very nice thing to have happen, Kehera privately thought that Reilliy would do better to take her manners from Geris. Eight days in her company, and it was all Kehera could do to restrain herself from taking her by the shoulders and shaking the meanness out of her.
The male slaves were kept strictly segregated from the girls except at mealtimes, and even then the girls kept to one side of the common pot and the men to the other. This was a pity, Kehera thought, because though some of the men looked like the kind a girl would want to be protected from, others looked like they would probably be pleasant company. The older man with ink-stained fingers, Hallay, had an easy manner and a good voice when he sang around the fire at night, as the men sometimes did. Even the man with the chains and the crooked nose showed evidence of dry wit. The snatches of talk she overheard at suppertime suggested he had an inexhaustible supply of quite unbelievable stories.
Then they entered the province of Kimsè and the journey became truly unpleasant. All through Kimsè the road was horrible, both icy and muddy at once, churned up and then frozen and then half thawed. Everyone had to walk, the mud freezing their feet even through their boots. The male slaves were pressed into service over and over to get the wagons through muddy holes.
The guards had all along been businesslike and impersonal when they had anything to do with the girls, but now Kehera saw how ready they were to use a riding whip on the male slaves if the men failed to get a wagon out of a hole as fast as the guards thought they should. Then she guessed that only Parren’s orders made them leave the girls alone. After that, she was afraid of them—though they continued to leave the girls alone.
Kimsè itself proved to be not so much a town as a string of miserable villages, ruled over by a brooding castle and, she gathered from overheard comments made by the guards and the other slaves, an equally brooding lord. Kehera stared up at the castle when they passed it, squatting gray and heavy on its hill, and loathed the lord who would let his people live like this.
Whenever they passed through a village, gaunt dogs ran out to bark from a safe distance. The guards threatened them away with shouts and raised whips when they came too close. They warned off men, too, who now and then came out to the muddy road to hold up a coughing child or push forward a thin, frightened girl. Kehera was horrified when she realized the people of Kimsè wanted to sell their children, but guiltily grateful Parren did not seem to want to buy them. She understood now why he had spoken approvingly of the plump girls of Eäneté, if he had meant to contrast them to the poor children in these villages.
Then at last, on the twenty-eighth day of the Month of Frost, they crossed out of the precincts of Kimsè into the province of Eäneté.
They were still a week or so from the city itself, Kehera knew, because the province was a big one. But just as Parren had said, the road was suddenly much, much better. It ran sm
ooth and level, frozen hard but without so much as a snowflake to slow the wagons. Kehera almost thought she would have recognized the border without that evidence of the change from one Immanent Power’s precincts to another: she thought she could feel a faint shock of recognition in her bones, almost as though Eäneté belonged to Harivir rather than Pohorir. But perhaps it was just the way the land opened out and began to resemble more the lands of southern Harivir. They began to pass through pasturelands much like those near Coär, and here the cattle were fat and the boys who herded them far less skinny.
Parren stopped to bargain for fresh meat and good potatoes and apples from the folk of the first village they came to, as he had not done in Kimsè, and the villagers had all this to sell. Neither the animals nor the people were as starveling and poor as the Kimsèn villagers. No one tried to sell their children, and Parren made no attempt to buy any girls. Kehera supposed he meant to purchase his much-admired plump Eänetén girls in the city itself. She could imagine that perhaps girls sometimes disappeared, in a crowded city. Stealing girls would certainly keep costs down. Would Parren steal girls? Would the young man in Enchar have recommended someone like that?
Would he have known?
When they reached the town of Eäneté, Parren was supposed to help her find a money changer and supplies, and then he was supposed to let her go. Kehera was uneasily aware that she could not make him do any of this. And even more uneasily aware that it was too late to change her mind about this plan.
It would work. It had to work. All she had to do was get through the town and away into the pass, and she’d be safe. She’d come through so much already. Surely she could manage to slip into and out of Eäneté without coming to the notice of the duke.
“The Duke of Eäneté can’t be so bad. Everything here seems so much better,” Kehera said aloud that evening, when the slaves had gathered together for their soup and bread. Even the cold seemed less bitter in Eäneté, and the fire seemed to burn with more heat and less smoke.
Reilliy’s lip curled. “Better think again. The Wolf Duke is worse than the lord of Kimsè.” Her tone was almost cordial—she liked to sneer at the ignorance of the other girls, and she liked to tell them bad news.
Kehera understood that Reilliy wanted to feel superior to someone and there wasn’t anyone else she could sneer at, but knowing this didn’t make her like the other girl any better. She didn’t want to seem ignorant of things she should know, but she did want to know more about the Eänetén duke, so she raised her eyebrows skeptically.
“He is!” insisted Reilliy. “They say if you offend the duke, you’ll die screaming. That’s what my father says. He says it’s better to deal only with people in Enchar and leave Eäneté out of it.”
“It’s not quite that bad,” murmured the older man, Hallay. He looked drawn and tired. He was not the kind of man who was used to hauling wagons through frozen mud, and he had taken the brunt of the guards’ ire over the days it had taken to get through Kimsè. “The Eänetén duke likes good work. He’ll pay fair measure for it, and a contract from him is like iron. That’s what we—they—know of him, in the guilds in Enchar. You needn’t fear him unless you try to break a contract from your end, or pass off shoddy work.”
“He’s dangerous,” Reilliy insisted. “He’s horrible and cruel and it would be better to die than have him buy you—”
The big man, the one who was some kind of criminal, laughed outright at that. “A lord of Pohorir? Of course he’s dangerous and cruel and vindictive. That’s not the question. The question is whether he can be trusted. Hallay’s right. Deal honestly with the Wolf Duke and you’ve nothing to fear.”
The man’s name was Tageiny. He was the only slave the guards treated warily. As they’d passed through Kimsè, she’d twice seen him fix one of the guards with a thoughtful stare when the man raised a whip to hit Hallay, and both times the guard had contented himself with a curt order or a shove. Kehera had no idea who would want to buy a big, dangerous slave like Tageiny, who had to be kept chained up like an untrustworthy dog. But she’d noticed that the other male slaves didn’t seem to fear him as the guards did. Hallay plainly trusted his good nature far more than that of the guards, staying close to Tageiny when he had a chance. Not only that, but the young rough-looking Luad, though obviously a street tough, kept a constant eye on Tageiny, helping without comment when the chain got in Tageiny’s way—assistance that the older man accepted with a matter-of-fact patience that she liked.
And now Tageiny spoke of the Eänetén duke as though he knew him, or at least knew of him. Though she feared to reveal too much of herself, she couldn’t resist asking, “Are you from Eäneté?”
“I lived in the city for a couple years not so long ago,” Tageiny said mildly. He said almost everything mildly, as though he never saw any reason to raise his voice. He added, “You wouldn’t have wanted to catch the old duke’s eye, but the current duke is all right. You don’t see that very often, an heir that comes out better than his father and grandfather—guess he reached some sort of accommodation with the Immanent. I actually saw him once. Yellow eyes; you can see right away why they call him the Wolf Duke. He didn’t notice me. But I wouldn’t have worried if he had—unless I was stupid enough to try selling him brittle steel or spoiled grain or short measure.”
Hallay smiled briefly, something in this comment amusing him. Tageiny slid a glance his way and a corner of his mouth quirked upward. “Yeah, like you ever sold short measure in your life.”
“Ah, well,” said Hallay. “It’s an easy accusation to make and a hard one to answer—especially if the accusation’s made by Conanè Sochar, and especially for a man with a family.”
“Ah,” said Tageiny, as though this answered a question he hadn’t quite asked.
“You were working for Sochar yourself, weren’t you?” Hallay’s tone wasn’t quite casual.
Tageiny gave him a lazy look and a little shrug. “Yeah, well, that turned out to be an easy job to take and a hard one to quit. I admit, when I decided to walk away, this wasn’t quite what I had in mind.”
Luad laughed, not sounding very amused. Tageiny’s mouth tugged upward again in that not-quite smile. “Yeah. Life’s full of the Gods’ little jests, and sometimes it’s a trick to figure out whether it’s the Fortunate or Unfortunate have you in their eye.” He shied a pebble off into the dark—it got dark very early now, as the year turned toward the Iron Hinge—and said meditatively, “I can tell you, I’d rather the Wolf Duke bought me than, well—” His eye fell tolerantly on Reilliy. “Let’s just say there are several possible buyers I do not want to see bidding.”
Kehera suspected she herself had the best chance of meeting the Eänetén duke, if he caught her trying to slip through his pass.
But it would be fine. She would be careful, and quiet, and the Wolf Duke would never know she had so briefly visited his city. And the moment her foot touched Harivin soil, she would be home, and everything would be fine.
But though she told herself this as firmly as she could, it all sounded far less likely than when, back in Enchar, she had so firmly declared her intention to head for Roh Pass.
That was why she waited for Tageiny to head around the wagons toward one of the shallow trenches he and the other male slaves had earlier dug in the snow at the side of the road. Then she left the fire as though she were going back toward the girl’s wagon to get out of the cold, but instead followed Tageiny. In the winter dark, no one noticed—she hoped no one would, if she was quick. Behind her, Hallay was beginning to sing, which would probably help, too.
“I left you in the morning,
in the pearl light of morning.
I left you calling for me,
in the silver morning glow.
I came back to you in evening,
in the ashen light of evening.
I heard you calling for me,
that you would have to go. . . .”
She knew that song. Everyone knew it. Proba
bly everyone would listen straight through to the tragedy at the end, but if one of the guards did come after her, Kehera supposed she could say she had forgotten which trench was supposed to be which. The guard might be angry, but she was almost sure she could make any guard check with Parren before he dared hit her.
She was afraid she might not catch Tageiny alone, and she was afraid she might be caught herself, but she hadn’t expected him to be actually waiting for her. He was standing balanced and wary, his chained hands not making him look at all helpless. But he straightened when he saw her, his eyebrows rising. “Well,” he said. “Didn’t expect you. Thought you were that pig’s turd of a guard.” He looked her up and down, his expression neutral. “I could say this isn’t a good idea. But you already know that. So be quick.”
Kehera nodded. This was a risk. She knew it was a risk, but she’d had days to watch this man. Days in which she had come to trust him more, and Parren less. And she knew she had to offer enough to make Tageiny truly commit to helping her. She said rapidly, not letting herself hesitate now that the decision had been made to speak at all, “You were going to leave Pohorir, weren’t you? That’s what you meant when you said you’d intended to quit that job in Enchar. If I bought you from Parren myself, if I hired you to help me get through Roh Pass and into Harivir—you know you’d be free in Harivir—”
Tageiny’s eyebrows went up again. “Fortunate Gods, yes, count me in,” he said without even a second’s hesitation. “I’ll hire on for a promise and a poem—I’ll swear any oath you want and never betray you, Fortunate Gods witness! Listen, girl, if you’ve got enough, if you can get Luad away, too, I could use another man if we’re to try the pass. You think you can get that bastard Parren to let you have me and him?” He hesitated just perceptibly. “You haven’t paid him up front, have you? He’s a bastard, right enough, a bastard and a liar and not one to trust unless you’ve plenty of coin in your hand, or better still a friend with a knife standing behind him.”
Winter of Ice and Iron Page 19