“I don’t care what you do,” Uljas said, “unless you kill Burkut trying to drag him up to the steppe just to atone for your own past mistakes. I like Burkut. We used to be friends. I’d rather he not freeze to death in a snowstorm while his failed-bandit rescuer insists that she knows what she’s doing.”
My face burned so much that I started to sweat. “You have a point,” I said, the words sticking in my throat. “It would be easier if I go to Burkut’s farm next. But it could be dangerous. I guess I didn’t want to make you come along.”
“I thought you weren’t making me come anywhere.”
“Do you want to walk from here to the steppe? It’s a long way.”
“No,” Uljas said. “I want to help free Burkut.”
I glanced up at him; his eyes glinted a little in the dark. “All right,” I said. “We’ll head back south tomorrow.”
It took a long time to go to sleep that night; Uljas snored. When I finally fell into a doze, I found myself by the fire in my room back at the inn. Zhanna sat across from me. “What an interesting place to find you,” she said.
“It’s the inn I stayed at with Tamar,” I said.
“Are those cakes? And tea? My goodness, it’s warm in here.” She looked around. “I guess I didn’t need to worry about you after all.”
“Well, I’m not here now. This is just where I stayed for a couple of days. Then we had to leave.”
“How are you doing?”
“I’m not alone,” I said.
“Who are you with?”
It wasn’t Zhanna’s voice. I looked at the chair again, and Kyros was there. “Wait, wait, don’t go,” he said, as if I was going to disappear like Zhanna had. “This is such a comfortable spot, so warm.” I did feel warm; the fire leapt on the hearth, casting strange shadows on the hangings that covered the walls. “Let’s chat for a few minutes.”
“Send a djinn,” I said, backing away.
“Yes, yes, but I need to know where.”
“I don’t want to talk to you,” I said. “This is my dream, I shouldn’t have to talk to you if I don’t want to.”
“With whom would you prefer to speak?”
“No one,” I said.
“How about your mother?” Kyros was gone, and my mother waited in the doorway of her apartment.
“Come here, darling,” she said. “Let me comb your hair.”
I touched my hair, shorn to chin length. “There isn’t much to comb.”
“That’s all right. Come here, darling, and let me comb it.” I settled myself warily at my mother’s feet. She took out a comb of carved bone and began to run it carefully through my hair, making little fussing noises over the dirt and sweat and tangles. She pulled me back against her, and whispered in my ear, “Do not trust Kyros, even here, even when you think we’re alone. He watches, he always watches. He hears my words.” She raised her voice to a normal pitch. “Darling, I miss you, please come back to me. Kyros says you can. Come back. Come back.”
“I can’t,” I said. “Tell him I can’t. Tell him he has to trust me.” I caught her hand in mine. I need to warn her. “I think Kyros will use you against me if he can. Don’t trust him.”
“When has Kyros not done right by you?” She was combing my hair again, speaking loudly like she thought she was being overheard. “Just come back. I’m sure we can sort this all out.”
“How did you get here? I’ve never dreamed of you before. Who brought you here?”
“I’m always here. Always,” my mother said, but her hand was slipping away from mine. I felt a feather-light kiss brush the top of my head and then I woke to the sound of snoring in my ear. Let it be morning, please, I thought, and it was.
CHAPTER THREE
Burkut’s farm was in a temperate area south of Daphnia, along the Chirchik River. Canals diverted some of the water through fields that grew lush and green even in the worst heat of summer; this time of year, the farms along the Chirchik were the muddy green of plants that were getting plenty of water but not enough warmth. Soon, though not yet, they’d be covered in snow.
Burkut’s farm, like many in this particular area, was owned by the Sisterhood itself, and managed by a steward; its fruits were used to feed the garrisons along the northern border. There were enough other people on the road that we attracted no special attention. I had ridden this route any number of times for Kyros, but for the first time I found myself noticing every slave I saw: the muddy column of men and women marching under guard from the market where they were purchased, the line of slaves chopping frost-killed vegetation in the fields so that it would rot and enrich the earth for next year’s growing season, the slaves in an orchard gathering up the wind-fallen apples. The guards looked different to me, too. I noticed their weapons, and found myself nervously avoiding anyone’s gaze. There was no reason to expect to run into someone I knew, but I still worried about it every time we passed soldiers.
The trip took several days. We were fortunate enough to have a spell of beautiful fall weather. The sky was blue and cloudless, the sun warm, and the breezes gentle. I wanted to conserve the grain for our trip to the steppe, so we stopped each day in midafternoon to let our horses graze. Krina was busily showing the other mares that she was boss; that was fine with Kara and Kesh, who’d been anything but dominant back with the Alashi herd. Still, Kara seemed to miss me; I had Uljas ride her, and used the other horse we’d bought at the market to carry some of the food.
It was a quiet trip. Uljas was not inclined to talk to either of us. Instead, after we stopped for the day, he would go for a walk, apparently just to avoid us. After the first day, I found myself wishing that Uljas would ask me again why. I wanted to tell him my story. I wanted him not to hate me, and I knew that he did. Maybe after I get Burkut out . . .
We moved off the road as we got close and camped about an hour’s ride from the farm where Burkut had been sold. I knew right where it was, though not what Burkut was doing, exactly, or whether he was even still owned by this farm.
I’d carried messages to this farm for Kyros a couple of times. The steward, Lycurgus, was Kyros’s cousin. He was also a habitual drunkard, though I didn’t imagine that his superiors were acquainted with that fact. Kyros was fond of him mostly because they’d played together as children, and had me visit occasionally to keep an eye on things.
The farm itself wasn’t walled in, but there were guards. If I approached Burkut during the day, they’d notice. During the night, the slaves were shut in to windowless bunkhouses. If I tried to get Burkut out of a bunkhouse, that would also be noticed. My instinct was to try during the night; that’s when I’d freed Uljas and Nika. But in Burkut’s case, it might actually be easier to get him away during the day.
There were always occasions when the guards’ attention wandered. They were thinly spread. With a little luck and a distraction, I could approach Burkut and get him out without anyone noticing, probably until the next head count. On the other hand, my luck had been mixed so far. If I asked Tamar to create a distraction and things went badly, we could all end up caught. And head counts of field slaves were pretty frequent, since the opportunity to simply walk away—as Burkut had already done once—was there.
I mulled my options as I watched the horses graze. The last time I’d come, I’d ridden Zhade, first of all, and I’d come with a letter from Kyros. Lycurgus had treated me as a guest rather than a visiting servant because he knew Kyros liked me, and he wanted to stay in Kyros’s good graces. We’d had dinner together, and although he’d tried to impress me with his competence, he’d gotten himself so completely drunk over the course of the meal that he’d had trouble standing up by the end. I’d wondered just how drunk he got when he wasn’t trying to impress someone, and had said as much to Kyros. Kyros had responded by dispatching the competent son of a friend to be an “assistant” to the steward—someone young enough not to try to get the steward removed, at least not for a few years, but old enough to run the place on his own. Sol
on, that was the name of the assistant. I’d never met him.
What if I went and asked Solon for a job?
Working for them—at least for a few days—would give me the leisure to figure out exactly where on the farm Burkut worked. I could approach him without exciting suspicion and probably even take off with him and no one would notice until evening. The risk of being recognized by anyone other than Burkut, even without face paint, was low. Certainly lower than my chances of being caught if I simply approached Burkut in the field and attempted to spirit him away. I’d steer clear of Lycurgus, just in case, but as he would probably be drunk most of the time, I didn’t expect that to be too difficult.
I chewed on my fingernail. My hands were filthy. I would need different clothes; mine were too new to fit my story. Maybe I could trade with Uljas. His showed about the right amount of wear. The big farms preferred to hire Greeks as guards, but free people of mixed Greek and Danibeki blood, like me, often found themselves in positions like the one I was going to ask for.
I took Tamar aside to tell her my thoughts. “How are you going to let us know if you need help?” Tamar said. “You might want us to create a distraction.”
“I’ll slip away, I guess. Unless you think you’ll be able to come talk to me in my dreams—Zhanna said we ought to be able to do that.”
“I’ll give it a try, but I’ve been trying to talk to Zhanna and it hasn’t worked yet,” Tamar said. “Are you going today or tomorrow?”
I looked up at the sky; the sun was still pretty high. “Today,” I said.
“Riding or walking?”
“Walking. I need to look poor.” I turned toward Uljas. “This will work better if we trade some of our clothes,” I said. “Shirts, at least, so that not all of my clothing is new.”
Uljas looked me over, then shrugged. I’d expected him to step into the tent, but instead he pulled his shirt over his head and handed it to me. His scars, in the afternoon light, stood out in sharp relief. They were bad scars, the kind that would go down through the skin and ache when you did hard labor. He didn’t have to say anything for me to know that they were from the beating he was given after I had brought him back. I swallowed hard, then pulled off my own shirt for him to wear.
My coat was old; my boots were reasonably well worn. I put my coat on and started digging through the saddle packs. A person looking for work wouldn’t show up utterly empty-handed; I needed a reasonably convincing travel pack. I put in a blanket, one of the cooking pots, a little food, and a few coins from the remaining money. The rest of the money would stay with Tamar. “Take good care of the horses.”
“Good luck,” Tamar said, and gave me a tight hug. “Prometheus and Arachne go with you.”
I felt perfectly calm, and at the same time far more nervous than I’d felt when I’d gone after Uljas and Nika. This isn’t like going to Sophos’s, I told myself. I was posing there as a slave. My stomach was still churning. I squeezed Tamar’s hand and started back toward the road.
A rutted wagon track led from the road back into the farm. There was a little shack for a guard post, but it was unmanned. I walked along the wagon track, trying to stay out of the mud, and reciting my story to myself as I went. My name is Xanthe. I’m out of work and need a job. I used to work for a sorceress in Daphnia, but she killed herself in her melancholia and her nephew who inherited her estate didn’t want to hire me. I don’t have any references because of that, but I’ll work for room and board through the winter and if you don’t like my work, you don’t have to keep me on in the spring . . .
“My name is Xanthe,” I said when I was shown into the office of the assistant steward. It had to be Solon, I thought. He was young, sober, and a bit harassed-looking. “I need a job.”
“Where are you from?” he asked.
“Daphnia. I used to work for a sorceress there.”
“Did she fire you?”
“No, she died.” I bit my lip. “It was sudden. She—well, you know how sorceresses are. And her nephew didn’t want to keep me on.”
“Was she killed by an aeriko?”
“No, she killed herself.” I flushed and swallowed hard. “Her nephew kept me on while he settled the estate and then let me go. I’ve been looking for work ever since.” My hand strayed to my nearly empty purse, and I firmly put it back at my side.
“What can you do?” Solon shoved aside his stack of papers and looked at me with some interest.
“Well, I can use a sword and I ride well. I’ve managed slaves, both in the house and in Hypatia’s stable. I can keep accounts. Almost anything, really, though I don’t know a whole lot about farming itself.” He was still looking a little skeptical so I added, “I really need a roof over my head right now. I’ll work for room and board through the winter, so long as you promise to feed me well and give me a bed somewhere warm.”
Solon’s eyes brightened. “You’re hired. The account books are in that room.” He pointed to a door. “The head steward has been . . . Well, his handwriting isn’t the best. If you can make any sense out of them by spring, I’ll keep you on permanently.”
The door led to a room crammed with shelves full of paper. Account books, ledgers, lists of purchases, bills of sale . . . all crammed together in an unsorted heap. Just looking at the mess gave me the beginnings of a headache. I tried to look undaunted; glancing back, I could see that Solon was looking at me. I summoned up a confident nod for him, and he chuckled to himself and went back to his own stack of papers.
What I really wanted to do was start looking for Burkut. In an hour or two, I’d tell Solon that I wanted to walk around the farm and get a sense for what they grew, how big it was, and so on—that seeing it would help me make sense of the books. Which was true, actually. But first I should probably at least poke through the mess a little bit. I pulled down one of the books at random. This one had been neatly kept and was easy to understand, but from the dates it was several years old. I looked at the book next to it on the shelf and it was much more recent, and utterly haphazard. Well. It had been obvious that Lycurgus had been going downhill.
I looked through the rest of that shelf. Things were in no particular order. If I were doing this for real . . . I felt a weird pang. If I had been the cast-off faithful servant that I was pretending to be, I would be truly grateful to Solon. Unraveling the messy accounts would be tedious but satisfying. And my life would be so very much simpler.
Well, if I were doing this for real, I’d probably decide that only the last two years were really important. And that’s probably when things really started to go downhill. I pulled everything down from that shelf and started to sort. Older than two years went back on the shelf, newer went in a pile for me to sort through later. I was startled to realize that I was having to strain to see the books; I had gotten so absorbed in my task that the afternoon had slipped away. Damn. Well, I would go out to survey the farm early in the morning. I hoped the weather would be fair, or at least dry.
I came hesitantly out of the room. “How’s it coming?” Solon asked.
“I think I should at least have everything sorted in a month or two,” I said.
He laughed shortly. “That’s farther than I’ve ever gotten,” he said. “Why don’t you go have some dinner? There’s a meal hall in the next building over, the one with the brick. Most of the guards will be eating soon. Why don’t you go join them? As for sleeping . . . I don’t want to put you in with the guards for the night; half of them snore. There’s a little room over the kitchen that should be pretty warm. It’s used for storage. Take a pallet out of the guards’ bunkroom and put it up there for now. We’ll figure out something better tomorrow.”
“Thank you,” I said, and headed off to get something to eat.
The clamor when I opened the door was almost overwhelming; I paused for a moment to get my bearings. Both guards and slaves ate here, apparently; slaves filled most of the tables, but a table of Greek and mixed-blood men near the kitchen were obviously the guards.
It was a big stone hall, with rough walls of dirty plaster and a floor made from even dirtier wood; the tables were equipped with long benches, and the guards ate the same fare as the slaves, though their table was closest to the warmth of the hearth. The hall was well lit with oil lamps, and the clamor was just the sound of cheerful conversation. It was overwhelming only because I’d spent the afternoon in a nearly silent closet, and the last few days on the road. And because it had been a long time since I’d taken a meal in such a loud, crowded, raucous environment, unless you counted my beer with Myron.
If Burkut saw me, he might recognize me. Well, he had no reason to know that I wasn’t here on Kyros’s behalf. And I remembered him as being fairly timid. I thought it was unlikely that he would draw attention to himself by shouting my real name out in the meal hall.
I tried to slip quietly into the kitchen to ask for some food, but that effort was doomed to failure; I was new, and a stranger. “Hey lady!” One of the guards stood up as I passed by. “We heard you spent the afternoon in Solon’s office! Is he as stiff from the waist down as he is from the waist up?”
This will go better if I can laugh it off convincingly. “All I can tell you is, he’s not much of a bookkeeper,” I said with a cheerful shrug. “Can you tell me where to get something to eat?”
“I’ll show you.” The dirty-minded guard stepped over the bench and offered me his hand. “I’m Demetrios.”
I shook his hand. “Xanthe,” I said.
“The kitchen’s this way.” We went through a doorway; the kitchen was warm and smelled like goat stew and fresh bread. A young girl jumped up to fill a bowl for me and tear off a piece of bread; Demetrios filled a cup of cider for me from a large barrel, and refilled his own cup while he was at it. I investigated the stew with my spoon and found meat, cabbage, carrots, and beans. “Solon may be wound tighter than a bowstring, but he feeds us well,” Demetrios said. “Come sit down.”
The guards scooted over on the bench to make a spot for me; I found myself wedged between Demetrios and his neighbor. “I heard you came from Daphnia; how’d you end up here?” someone asked. I gave them an edited version of my story; they nodded sympathetically and some of them chimed in with stories of their own. I made sympathetic noises and then bent my head over my food, listening to the conversation as I ate. It turned to the harvest; it was mostly in, but the rain had delayed some of the fall work. Not all the apples were picked yet, and windfall apples were rotting on the ground because no one had had time to gather them up. Demetrios thought that Solon would probably send everyone to the orchards in the next day or two. Once all the apples were in, it would be time to start making cider, which was good news to the guards, as supplies from last year were running low. I took a sip of my own cider. It was sour and strong, and I put the cup down. I’d need to finish it or Demetrios would comment, but I’d have to drink it slowly. I wanted a clear head.
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