Henra looked around the table, then spoke to Keridwen. “Where’s Hugo?”
“Still in his room, I believe. On chill mornings, he’s likely to stay there until noon.”
“Tell him to come here, please.”
Keridwen hurried off, and the Prime helped herself to another biscuit. “Hugo has made a study of the wizards,” Rowan explained to Bel.
Keridwen returned presently with a frail elderly man, who leaned both on her shoulder and on a walking stick as he approached. He viewed the assemblage. “What’s this? A meal at this hour?” He squinted his watery blue eyes at the sky. “Don’t tell me it’s morning!”
Henra’s smile was affectionate. “Come sit by me. I need your advice.”
Rowan vacated her chair and pulled another close beside Bel. Hugo lowered himself down carefully. “Ah, now, lady, you don’t fool me for a moment. It’s my manly companionship you’re after, admit it. And more than mere companionship, isn’t it true?”
The Prime laughed lightheartedly and spoke as if reciting the lines of a familiar jest. “Now, Hugo, what can you mean? You know you’re far too old for me.”
“Oh, so you say now! But the gap shrinks, they tell me, as you grow older. A few years from now you’ll join me by the fireside, and we’ll toast our toes together, and dream of things we might have done. And do a few of them, as well.”
Rowan took in Bel’s astonished expression, recognizing her surprise as the same that she herself had felt when first seeing the steers-women behave so informally with each other. She leaned toward the Outskirter. “We’re not an aristocracy,” Rowan explained quietly, “and we’re not an army, or a religion, either. Whatever doesn’t affect our work, doesn’t matter.”
As if to illustrate the point, Henra made one small gesture, and the table fell instantly to attentive silence. Hugo sat the slightest bit taller, and the wry humor slipped from his face, replaced by the intelligent, waiting expression of the perfect steersman.
Henra spoke to the group. “Rowan was attacked by a wizard’s man.”
Every face turned to Rowan. In a visible rapid wave, their shock turned to seriousness, and they waited, silently, for more information. Only Josef made a sign; his fist slammed on the table, once. No one looked at him.
Henra continued. “It was one day’s travel south of Five Corners.” The elderly woman next to Arian spoke. “You’re certain he was a wizard’s man?”
“At the inn I saw five Red soldiers. I recognized him as one of that five,” Rowan replied. The woman nodded. No one questioned Rowan’s ability to recognize the face of a man seen once, in passing, as part of a crowd.
Henra turned to Hugo. “Which wizard controls that area?”
He sat quietly a moment, rheumy blue eyes flicking at the action of his thoughts. “That’s difficult to say, lady. Olin, north and east of Five Corners, he’s Red these days. Or was, as of winter. Five Corners, that’s at the limit of his area, as clear as these things can be made out.”
Rowan spoke up. “No one seemed surprised to see wizard’s men in the tavern.”
“With the recent clash, there must be a lot, traveling to their homes. Five Corners is a likely stop for any of Olin’s men, returning.”
“I didn’t know he kept soldiers.”
“Ah, yes, well, neither did I, until he sent troops against Corvus and Abremio. It means he must have a keep somewhere, and we’ve been assuming he didn’t.”
“Don’t all wizards have keeps?” Bel asked.
“No, not at all. Jannik, for instance. All he has is his house in Donner. Mind you, no one’s ever been inside.” He rubbed his nose thoughtfully. “Now, Olin, he’s always been especially confusing. Seen rarely, never in the same place twice, always alone. Often the only way to know he’s there is by the sudden appearance of some magical event.”
Henra leaned forward, intent. “Might Five Corners be his, these days?”
“Hard to tell. His boundaries have always been especially vague. It’s not Jannik’s; it might he no one’s, or Shammer and Dhree’s.”
Rowan remembered Artos’s complaints. “The new Red holding?”
“Right. They’re two, working together as one; I don’t understand the arrangement. They’re Red.” He turned to Henra. “They’re the culprits, I believe, or somehow wrapped up in this. I don’t know that Five Corners is theirs, but it’s possible, and they’re the only new variable in the equation.” Hugo addressed himself to Bel. “Understand, the wizards and the Steerswomen don’t like each other, but there hasn’t been violence between us for centuries. We can’t get rid of each other, so we tolerate each other. But now a steerswoman has been attacked by a wizard’s man—Rowan, could he have been acting on his own?”
Rowan thought briefly, checking over her conclusions. “No. There were five wizard’s men at the inn; there are five roads away from the inn. They left before Bel and I did; whatever road we took, we would have met one. This was planned.”
Berry looked around, as if searching the faces she could not clearly see. “There are other steerswomen traveling in Shammer and Dhree’s holding. Why was Rowan attacked, and no one else?”
Henra nodded to Rowan. With all eyes on her, Rowan pulled out the little leather sack, lifted its string over her head, and opened it. “Here’s the other new variable in the equation,” Henra said.
Hugo took the jewel and scrutinized it while the Prime recounted Rowan’s story with perfect accuracy.
“Wizard’s make, for certain,” he said when she finished. He turned it over in his hands again. “I can’t think of any jeweler’s process that could do this. Sarah—” He passed the jewel down across the table to the elderly steerswoman on Arian’s left.
She peered at it closely. “It’s built in layers—the silver-colored backing, then the gem. The lines are etched, so that the metal lies both on the surface and into it.” She scraped the edge of the fragment with one fingernail. “The last surface is like very thin glass, but no glass can be made that thin. Strange texture ...” She passed it diagonally.
The next woman was pale and delicately beautiful, the only sign of her age the silver glittering in her ebony hair. She looked at the jewel carefully, then closed her eyes, rubbing her thumb across the smooth surface. “Oily ...” She looked at it again. “It’s made of oil, somehow, or has oil in it. If fine olive oil were perfectly clear, and somehow made solid, it might be like this.”
Sarah took the jewel again, cleared a space in the center of the table, and placed it there, standing to get a better vantage. The other steerswomen shifted and leaned closer. “That’s a good point. You can’t polish anything to this smoothness. I believe that top surface was poured on as a liquid, then solidified, somehow.”
“Magically,” Bel put in confidently.
“Perhaps,” Sarah admitted.
The Prime spoke to Bel. “May we see your belt?”
The Outskirter stood to remove it, and it was passed around.
“They were all found in the same place, far in the Outskirts,” Rowan explained. “It’s the largest concentration I’ve heard about; I think something could be learned by going there, to see.”
“With a wizard on your trail,” Berry observed. Josef winced.
“One or more.” Every face turned to Hugo. “Think for a moment about Jannik. His control over the dragons isn’t complete, but it’s almost so. Could another wizard send a spell to break it? Sometimes one or two nestlings can escape and cause trouble, especially the tiniest ones. But Saranna’s Inn was—where, the center of town?”
“Not far from the harbor,” Rowan said. “Tilemaker’s Street.”
“And the mud flats are at the edge of town. That’s seven miles they had to travel, through the streets—no, isn’t there a shallow gully that runs near Tilemaker’s Street?”
“That’s right.”
“And how many dragons were there?”
Rowan counted. “Seven, that I saw myself. More outside, which I didn’t see. S
omeone reported fifty, but the layman’s eyes can fool him, in emergencies. At a guess, at least twenty-five, total.”
Hugo shook his head fractionally. “I don’t believe that can happen.” Bel looked around the now-silent table. “Then Jannik was in on it, Rowan guessed.”
“I saw it was a possibility,” Rowan said.
Hugo was deep in thought. “Two wizards, cooperating across a line of mutual hatred ...”
“We need to decide what to do,” Henra said.
Arian was surprised. “Decide? One decides when one has options. Where are there options here?”
“Are there none?” She concentrated on Arian. “Very well, what do you see happening next?”
“Rowan continues her investigations. She’ll have to be very alert, if she’s attracted the wizards’ attentions ..” He trailed off. “But if they’re determined, they’ll get her eventually.”
“Then we must make this move more quickly,” Sarah put in. “If we all work on it, and if we send out word to those on the road—”
Berry interrupted. “Then we each become the same threat that Rowan is. And, collectively, the entire order of Steerswomen becomes a threat.”
“But if we work fast enough—”
“How fast is fast enough?” Keridwen challenged. “It can’t be done instantaneously.”
Watching the Prime, Rowan realized that Henra saw an answer, but was patiently waiting for the rest of the steerswomen to duplicate her reasoning; she wanted the chain of thought to be clear in their minds, wanted it to be each person’s own possession.
“What is the most basic statement of the problem?” Rowan asked, half to herself, musing.
That was an often-repeated phrase in the early education of a steerswoman-in-training, and conversation stopped in surprise at Rowan’s presenting it to steerswomen of such advanced experience. But Berry, not many years from her own traineeship, caught the mood. “Investigating the jewels is dangerous.”
Henra encouraged them. “Two options, on this level.”
“Work in danger,” Rowan said, “or abandon the investigation.”
Response was immediate, from several corners. “We mustn’t abandon it.”
“We have to learn all we can.”
“We can’t let the wizards rule us.”
“No one controls us.”
The Prime nodded. “That choice is rejected. We work in danger. The options are two ...”
Keridwen considered. “Accept danger, or change the situation ...”
“Accepting the danger is accepting death—and incidentally, an end to any investigating,” someone noted.
“The first choice is rejected. How can we change the situation?” Henra prompted.
“Find the source of the danger and counter it,” another steers-woman offered.
“The source of the danger is the wizards,” Hugo noted. “We can’t counter them.”
“No,” Rowan realized. “The source is their knowledge of our actions.”
There was a silence. Bel looked around the table in perplexity. Annoyed, she said, “It’s obvious. You have to work in secret. Why is that so hard to see?”
“Because it is so hard to accept,” Henra replied.
“It is absolutely opposite to everything we do and believe in,” Hugo expanded.
She would have to deny information, Rowan realized. She would have to refuse questions, or—worse yet—give false answers.
Henra surveyed every face around the table, then spoke carefully. “Rowan would have to travel to the Outskirts under an assumed identity. No one must know who she is, what she seeks, or that she’s a steerswoman.”
No one spoke, and Bel looked at them in confusion. “But what’s the problem?”
Abruptly, Rowan said, “I won’t do it.” Faces turned to her. “Lady, I understand, truly I do,” she continued, half pleading, “but I can’t agree. There must be some other way. To lie, to walk the earth lying ... Humankind needs truth. We all know that; we need it like air and water and food, to survive, to function in the world ... I’d be like a poison, twisting things everywhere I went, hurting people.” She laid her hands against her cheeks and shook her head. “No.”
Henra took it all in, considering. “Arian? Would you do it?”
“Me?” He looked up, surprised. “Well, I don’t like the whole idea, but I do think it’s the best solution. And someone has to do it.” Then he smiled. “Oh, you’re clever, Henra. Most of the folk don’t even know there are steersmen among the steerswomen. I’d never be suspected. But when it comes down to the actual doing of the thing ...” He thought. “I feel much as Rowan does. I think it would ... pain me. And my work here ...” He sighed. “Try to find someone else. Please, exhaust every possibility, and if you find no one, then yes.”
Henra nodded, then looked to her left. “Berry?”
She was startled. “What?”
“Would you do it?”
She stared around in stunned disbelief. “Me?” Then, slowly, she said, “Yes ... yes, send me.” She spoke to Henra, her voice urgent. “I’ll do it. I’ll do anything. I’ll lie a thousand times. I’ll steal if you ask it. Anything! Please, send me ...” She gazed up into the sky, her dim eyes bright with tears. “On the road, one last time ...”
“She’s blind,” Sarah protested.
Berry turned on her. “I’m not blind, not yet! I can see shapes and colors. I won’t walk into a tree; I won’t fall off the edge of the road.” She addressed them all. “And I know those roads, and I can read a map, held close.”
“But she can’t observe,” Arian said. “And she couldn’t spot, say, a jewel imbedded in a cliff. In new territory she could get lost.” The Prime said nothing; she was looking at Josef.
He nodded slowly, then turned to his wife, taking both her hands. “When the time comes for eyes, you’ll have mine.”
“You’d go with me?”
“No.” He laughed a little. “I’d stay with you, wherever in the world you may be. You and me, we’ll walk under the stars together.”
She touched his face and moved close to study his expression. Then she leaned her bowed head against his shoulder.
Josef’s eyes met Henra’s, and his face was full of calm entreaty.
Henra spoke. “Josef is not a steersman, but with Berry to interpret what he saw, something could be learned. Perhaps not enough, but something. And no one would guess that she was a steerswomen.
“Rowan.”
Rowan turned to the Prime.
“You’re still the best choice,” Henra said. “You’re familiar with the jewels, you’re highly observant, flexible and imaginative in thought. We would learn the most, if you were the one to go.” She held up her hand. “I understand your disagreement. But I want you to consider this: It will be done. Won’t you help us do it the best way we can?”
The Prime stood. “Don’t answer. Please think. We’ll all speak again this evening.” The chairs shuffled, and the steerswomen dispersed one by one, until there was only Bel, watching Rowan, and Rowan, silently watching Josef whispering gentle words to Berry.
At last Rowan rose and walked away.
10
“I don’t see what the problem is.”
They were walking down the winding dirt path that led from the Archives to the riverside below. Oak trees surrounded them, gnarled roots invading the edges of the path.
“Don’t you want to find out about these jewels?” Bel continued. “Yes. But I’m just not willing to lie.”
Bel snapped a twig she was carrying and tossed the pieces into the underbrush. “I don’t understand you. You were willing to learn about them, even if it put you in danger. But you won’t do a simple thing like lying.”
Rowan felt a return of the sudden, sharp need that had sent her out of the stone walls of the Archives, a need for a sweep of air that knew no obstructions, for the unbounded sky above her. She walked a little faster, to escape the net of tree branches overhead. “It’s not such a
simple thing.” Of its own accord, a part of her began trying to formulate an explanation, a calm steerswoman’s explanation; but the part of her that held the information for that answer was churning with confused emotion.
“Ever since I became a steerswoman—no,” she stopped, surprised. “Ever since I was a child ...” Her voice trailed off, her mind sifting through memories like hands sifting through chaff, seeking a single grain of wheat.
When had it happened, when had she learned to care what was true and what was not? Children lied, they all did, and ranks of casual lies crowded into her thoughts. No, I didn’t drop the eggs. No, I didn’t tell Father. Yes, I finished all my work.
One single lie stood in high relief, not a great lie, but one that had lasted long into her adolescence. Periodically, she would leave the house and fields, taking some small bit of food, and make the long trek to the farthest of the funeral groves, the last bit of green before the desert took true possession of the land. She would explain that she was going to visit her uncle’s tree, and the family would say quietly to each other, “Poor Rowan, his death affected her so badly.” But it was not true. She went from a need to see something other than the house, the yard, that dusty path leading to the town of Umber. She knew everything in her world, knew it too well, and there was nothing more that her mind or heart could do with it.
But north ... Past the groves, there was land no hands had touched. Raw earth, lacking only water, fertilization, and seed. It waited there, waited out the centuries for the slow spread of humankind. It was emptiness to the limits of the sky. At last that view, too, became familiar, but she still returned, without clearly knowing why.
She needed to see different things, change in the land and in the faces of people. But there was a stronger need, one she discovered the day that Keridwen had come to Umber in her own travels. Rowan discovered that the steerswoman knew things, and speaking to her, she realized that there was another landscape, one to be traveled endlessly, the limits of which she could never exhaust.
So Rowan and Keridwen had sat together late into the night, Rowan asking first about places, then about people, then about the ideas of people, then about the idea of ideas ... And Keridwen’s answers had grown richer and deeper, as her expression changed from indulgence, to surprise, to interest.
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