Rowan smiled at her. “Fine greeting. You’re looking well. Yes, I want to see her too, but first, have you noticed an Outskirter going by, or perhaps in the libraries?”
“An Outskirter? What, a shaggy barbarian here?”
“Not too shaggy; she’s a woman. Well, shaggy perhaps, if you consider her clothes. But you haven’t noticed her, then.”
“Hardly! Is she dangerous?”
Rowan considered. “Under certain circumstances.”
She left by the doors Berry had opened and looked down the passages. The one on the right led to the Prime’s study and residence. After a moment’s consideration, Rowan went left.
She passed a study and paused to check inside. Two women and a stocky man of middle age were gathered around a worktable. Graphs, some of startling configuration, were pinned up haphazardly around the walls of the room.
Rowan made to leave, but the man caught sight of her. “Rowan! You’re back before your time. Come, take a look at this.”
“I’m sorry, Arian, I’m looking for a friend who may be lost in the passages.” But she found herself intrigued and stepped inside. “Are you making progress?”
“None to speak of. Still, surprises keep coming up.” One of the steerswomen with him looked up suddenly, as if remembering something. “Henra is looking for you,” she told Rowan.
“Yes, I’ve been told.” But she suddenly recalled the calculations she had made on the road to Donner. “Wait, I have something.” She came to the table and found a blank sheet of parchment. “Look at this.” Sketching quickly, she briefly explained the problem of the dispersal of the jewels.
Arian tapped the rough chart. “With an area that wide, your imaginary giant would have to stand very far back.”
“And be very tall indeed,” one of the steerswomen noted. Rowan laid a straightedge across the scales, indicated a number. “That’s too tall,” Arian said.
The other steerswomen spoke up. “The ground would never support him, do you see? He’d sink in. He couldn’t eat enough to live.”
Rowan was annoyed at the digression. “It needn’t be a giant, a tower will do. It’s a giant for the purposes of the problem.” She turned back to the chart. “So. He stands this far away, he’s this tall, and throws parallel to the ground. The area his throw covers, assuming, shall we say, twenty objects in his hand ...” She read off two numbers from the right-hand scale and made a simple calculation.
Arian looked at the result. “Straightforward enough.”
Rowan held up an index finger. “But.” Turning over the sheet, she redrew the chart with greater precision—and with its elements at slightly different aspect to each other. “He throws again, this time—” She paused significantly. “Angling upward.” She handed the straightedge to the steersman.
He laid it on the chart. “The area covered ...” He looked up. “But the path doesn’t intersect with the ground.”
“Look at the time it takes to fall.”
The straightedge swept across the scales. “Infinite?”
“Look again.”
A shift. “Zero?”
“The objects never come down.”
He leaned back. “That’s impossible. They have to come down.”
“Of course it’s impossible,” Rowan said. “Of course they have to come down. Do you see? I’ve found a situation where our usual methods fail.”
Squinting in thought, Arian studied. “No,” he said at last. “It’s not the method that’s at fault. It’s the problem. You’ve set up an impossible situation.”
“We don’t know that.”
“Impossible giants—”
“Or very possible towers!”
The second steerswoman spoke again. “Be hard to build a tower that high.”
Rowan threw up her hands. “But we’re not concerned with the difficulty here—”
“You can’t ignore crucial elements,” Arian put in.
“That’s hardly crucial—”
“There is obviously,” he stated carefully, “something wrong with the problem. We know that the techniques work, but we’re getting an impossible answer. It can’t be our method that’s at fault, so it must be the problem itself.”
Rowan drew back. “Arian, that is backward reasoning, and you know it well. You mustn’t deny information simply because it differs from what you expect. You’re not thinking like a steersman—”
He interrupted, his voice stony. “Rowan, I do not need your instruction in how to think like a steersman.”
She stopped short, curbed her temper, then began again. “We know that the approaches handed down to us always seem to work, but we can’t always see why—”
“Exactly what I’ve been working on these years, with my ‘backward reasoning’—”
“But there may be different ways to look at it. You’ve been working from the inside out; but if we can—” She sought an analogy. “If we can map the edges we may be better able to see the whole. We may be able to work from the outside in.”
The other steerswomen exchanged glances. One shook her head minutely, but the other tilted her head in Rowan’s direction. She obviously agreed but was unwilling to enter the argument.
Rowan prepared to speak again but was interrupted by an arrival at the door. “Rowan? Do you know the Prime is waiting for you?”
She grit her teeth, unwilling to leave battle. “Arian, you must excuse me,” she said. She exited with exaggerated dignity.
As she turned toward the Prime’s offices, the messenger tapped her shoulder, then pointed in the opposite direction. “The garden,” the woman corrected, then disappeared on further errands.
When Rowan arrived at the herb garden, the fact of the season’s change asserted itself, the blooms of late spring already giving way to those of early summer. A tall patch of knapweed raised shaggy purple heads by the door; the rosemary beside it was past flowering.
In the distance Rowan heard not conversation but music. Surprised, she threaded her way on the flagstone paths to the garden’s center.
There stood, among the plots of herbs and flowers, four pear trees, set each in a corner of a patch of marigold. The path between was widened there and curved. At the intersection of the crossing paths stood two low stone benches.
Henra, the Prime, sat on one. Beside her sat Bel the barbarian. They were singing together.
Rowan approached slowly, fascinated.
They were singing an ancient song about a knight lost in a magic forest. Both sang the melody, though Bel added an occasional ornate turn that pleasantly countered Henra’s steady note. They reached a point where their words and melody diverged. The Prime interrupted, saying, “I learned that part differently. Teach me how you know it.” Bel sang on alone. Her voice was strong and mobile, not deep, but with a husky dark edge to the tone.
Henra then sang her version in a voice clear and pure as fresh water. When she reached a familiar section, Bel joined her again, eyes closed, head tilted back.
As Rowan reached the benches, the song ended. Bel opened her eyes and spotted something among the branches of the pear tree. “Ha! There’s one of them!” She leaped up, then scrabbled among the loose stones by the walk. Above her, a wood gnome began flinging down poorly aimed bits of twig, hooting and jeering.
Rowan restrained her. “There’s no need to worry. They’re harmless.”
“Harmless, ha! Look at those teeth!” These the gnome bared yellowly.
Henra was signaling up to him. “Stop, stop. Woman not hurt you. You come down now.”
“No. Bad woman, dirty.” He spoke in broad emphatic gestures, then hugged himself to a branch, rocking.
“This woman my friend,” the Prime told him, but he shrieked fury. The sound attracted the attention of another gnome, who abandoned his inspection of the rain gutter to investigate.
“The gnomes are friendly,” Rowan told Bel, but the Outskirter shouted “Ha!” and struggled to aim her stone. A steerswoman on the other side of the
garden noticed the ruckus and began to approach.
Henra caught one of the gnome’s hands and shook her index finger in his face admonishingly. Rowan clutched at Bel’s throwing arm and stepped in front of her, blocking her aim. Outskirter and wood gnome uttered near-identical sounds of frustration.
Abruptly, Rowan and the Prime stopped and looked at each other. Henra began laughing, then Rowan joined her. “I think we’re doing similar jobs,” Rowan noted. They released their respective charges and helplessly dropped to the bench.
Bel glowered down at them. The gnome leaped to the ground and escaped.
Wiping tears from her eyes, Henra leaned back at last and examined Rowan. The Prime was a small woman, shorter than Bel, and fine-boned and delicate. She had a grace and presence beyond her size, and Rowan, at average height, had always felt huge and clumsy beside her. She seemed half-magical, like an elf out of song, with angular features and long green eyes. Her face was a lined map of wisdom, but age had neither grayed nor grizzled her waist-length hair. Instead, it was laced with silver; no longer plain brown, it was the exact color of smooth sunlit water pouring over dark earth.
“Your friend has mentioned that you’ve had some trouble,” Henra said.
Rowan’s mirth faded. “That’s right. It’s going to take some explaining.”
The Prime considered, assessing Rowan’s demeanor. She turned to Bel. “If you cross the garden to those doors,” she said, indicating them, “you’ll find yourself in the dining hall. There are some at breakfast already, and others will be along soon enough.” She smiled. “I think you’ll find the company enjoyable.”
Rowan followed the Prime back into the cool corridors to her office. Inside Henra seated herself in a massive armchair by the cold hearth. From a stool beside her she picked up a blue knitted lap robe; so deep in the Archives, in the central room, the stone walls were an effective barrier against the warmth of day. Wrapping the robe around her legs, she gestured for Rowan to take the chair on the opposite side of the low wooden table before her.
Rowan went to the chair but did not sit. She felt as if she needed to move. She wanted to pace; she wanted to stride to some open window and view the forested land rolling to the horizon. She wanted her charts, her book, her pen and calipers in her hand—but they were gone.
She saw that the Prime had noticed their absence and was waiting for her to speak. Rowan shifted her weight back and forth. “I was attacked on the road to Donner,” she said at last.
Henra tilted her head. “One of the hazards of traveling.” She still waited; an unlucky encounter on the road was not, in itself, enough to send a steerswoman back to the Archives.
“It was a wizard’s man,” Rowan said. Suddenly she felt she could sit, and she did.
Henra leaned back slowly. Her emerald gaze flickered as she sifted possibilities and implications, then fell on Rowan. “The one thing we do not need is the active enmity of a wizard. We take pains not to cross them.” Rowan knew that well. It had been stressed in her training, passed on to her, along with an unexpressed, slow-burning anger against the wizards’ secretiveness, their refusal to impart information.
Rowan shook her head. “I had no idea I was working on anything to interest a wizard.” She pulled out the little leather sack, opened it, and removed the glittering fragment. “I was investigating this.” She passed it to the Prime.
Henra studied it, turning it over in her hand, and Rowan began to speak. She described its history, detailed her findings, and gave her justifications for straying from her assigned route. Maps were brought out, and with them spread out on the low table, Rowan sketched the pattern of dispersal, that narrow oval that stretched from the eastern curve of the Long North Road into the heart of the Outskirts. She reconstructed the graph she had made during her conversation with Bel on the road to Donner, and described Arian’s indignation at her speculations.
The Prime considered the information, questioning her carefully. At some point a tray of tea was brought in, along with rolls and honey. At some other point, the remains were removed. Lost in the exchange of information, Rowan did not notice the intrusion until Henra graciously thanked the woman, who smiled and exited wordlessly.
At last Henra leaned back in her chair. “And at no point did you encounter any wizard? Or any person known to work with a wizard?”
Rowan examined her memory again, wishing she had her logbook. “Not to my knowledge, not until Five Corners. And those men never spoke to me. Nor asked about me, as far as I know. I think someone would have mentioned it if they did.”
“Which means,” Henra said carefully, “that they already knew all they needed.”
“Exactly.”
“Then they know more than we do.”
“That’s not all.” Rowan recounted the dragon attack on the inn in Donner, and Corvus’s surprising knowledge of the event. She added Artos’s conviction that she was in danger even in Wulfshaven. Artos, and his skill in warfare, were known to the Prime.
Finally Henra sighed. “The obvious solution is to abandon this investigation,” she began.
“No!”
The Prime glanced at Rowan, then smiled. “That doesn’t suit you.”
“We’ve never been a threat to any wizard. I can’t believe this jewel can be that important. It doesn’t do anything, not that I’ve seen.”
“Perhaps you haven’t seen all there is to see.”
“We can’t let them limit us!” Rowan was on her feet, pacing. “Isn’t it enough that they won’t share their knowledge with us?”
“Their secrecy is their strength,” Henra reminded her. “If everyone had access to their knowledge, the folk and the wizards would be equal. And if we had that knowledge, it would be free for the asking.”
Rowan stopped short. “Then this must have something to do with their power.”
“Possibly.” Henra turned the jewel over in her hands; it caught the light from a high-set window and flashed, once. “Or, they may see that the course of investigating the jewels will lead you to other avenues, that may in turn lead you to their secrets.” She handed the blue shard back to Rowan, carefully folded her lap robe, and rose. “This is a large decision. Let’s join the others.”
Rowan watched her cross to the door. “Do you know what we’re going to do?”
Henra turned back to her. “I know what we have to do. I don’t know that we will do it.”
Rowan and the Prime found most of the Archives’ inhabitants lingering over bits of breakfast in a hall whose tall windows looked out to the garden on the one side, to a sweep of woody hills on the other. Bel was seated near the head of the table, and eager questioners on all sides were taking the opportunity to ply her with queries about her exotic background and the customs of the distant Outskirts. The steers-woman at the head shifted her seat in favor of the Prime, and Rowan found a chair on her right, across from Bel.
“There’s our wayward child,” an elderly woman beside Rowan greeted her affectionately. “It’s good to see a young face again.”
Bel took in the comment, then looked around the table. “Are there no other steerswomen Rowan’s age?”
“Steerswomen begin by traveling,” Rowan replied. “The largest part of our work is done on the road and the sea, observing and learning. Most steerswomen travel all their lives.”
“Until they get too old,” Keridwen put in, from the end of the table. “Or,” Arian added, “until they find some particular area of study which no longer depends on constant fact-gathering.”
Bel’s glance went to his ring. “You’re a steerswomen?”
“Steersman,” he corrected. “Yes, there are a few.”
“It’s not forbidden?”
Several laughed, and Arian snorted derisively. “Most men seem to be satisfied to live by their muscles. Well,” he admitted, “to be fair, most men learn to live by their strength early on, and never lose the habit.”
“Very few men apply when the Academy is held,” Rowa
n added. “And few of those complete the training. Those who do, manage quite as well as the women. In fact,” she said with a nod to Arian, “at present we have more steersmen than ever in our history. Three.”
Someone shifted uncomfortably. Rowan looked around the table. “What is it?”
The steerswoman beside her placed a hand on her arm. “Possibly only two, dear. We’ve lost track of Janus.”
“Last year we heard of a ship lost at sea,” Henra added, “sailing from Donner to Southport.” Southport, Rowan knew, had been on Janus’s planned route.
“Was he on it?” Rowan asked.
“We don’t know.”
Rowan digested the information, then found Bel watching her. “It happens,” Rowan explained.
Bel turned to Josef, seated two spaces to her left. “Are you the third steersman?”
He put up his hands in protest. “No, not me! A simple groom, beast-tender. Wouldn’t be here at all but for the love of my life.” He made a nimble snatch at Berry as she passed with a pitcher of water.
Berry made an equally nimble dodge. “As you can tell, my husband learns his manners from the beasts, as well.” But she smiled.
“But you’re Rowan’s age. Shouldn’t you be traveling?”
Berry placed a pitcher of water carefully on the table and took her seat next to Josef. “I’m going blind,” she explained matter-of-factly.
Bel was appalled. “How awful! But can you still be a steerswoman, blind?”
“If there’s a way, we’ll discover it,” Henra said.
“Work of the mind, that’s what you want,” Arian advised. “Some huge, rare, imaginative problem.”
Berry nodded at him with suppressed amusement. “That’s a good idea. Perhaps I’ll join you in your math ...”
“Skies, no, girl, you’re not good enough—oof!” The elderly steers-woman next to Arian had elbowed him mightily in the ribs. “But it’s true. 1)
“Of course it’s true,” the woman said. “But you needn’t beat her with it. She has other strengths.”
Steerswoman - 01 & 02 The Steerswoman's Road Page 11