“I’ve recently learned the value of a good bow, myself,” Rowan said, leaning back against the door. She considered his appearance, indicated the white hair. “You should get rid of that, as well.”
Will tugged at one tangled lock, and his grin became a grimace of distaste. “I think there are parts of it that will never unravel. And I’d hate to face a barber like this; I just don’t know what he’d find in there. I don’t suppose a steerswoman carries scissors?”
Her jaw dropped. “That’s . . . not a wig?”
“No . . .”
And despite the fact that it was merely folk rumor, that the Steerswomen could never verify the phenomenon, Rowan could not help but blurt out: “What frightened you?”
“Nothing.” He laughed. “Or, nothing that did this. I changed it myself. I could have done any color, but white is the easiest to do, and the easiest to keep up.”
Comprehension. “But you couldn’t change the color of your eyes.” The beggar’s blindfold had hidden the unfortunately memorable copper-brown, a color not unnatural, but very rare. Rowan had seen it in no one else.
“I could have. But it’s harder. And you need perfectly clean water, every few days. That’s hard to find on the road.”
Reasoning that it might be useful if no clue remained to connect the former beggar with the present Willam, Rowan decided to use her field knife on the worst parts of the tangled hair herself. She had Will turn the chair and stood behind him, lifting the candle high to survey the task at hand. It was daunting indeed. “I believe,” she said over his head, “that some portions of that raccoon have migrated.”
“It’s possible.”
Rowan set down the candle and picked up her comb, but found herself stymied: there seemed to be no place to begin. She lay the comb down again. “The last time we were together,” she said, “it was every wizard in the world, looking for me. Now it seems our positions are reversed, aren’t they?”
Will was silent for a long moment. “Maybe not.”
“If not yet, then soon.” Mastering her distaste, she thrust her fingers directly in amid the greasy, gritty tangles, attempting to sort them. “Surely by now they all know you’ve escaped.”
“Maybe . . . But it’s not the sort of thing Corvus would advertise. It makes him look a little foolish.”
More or less at random, Rowan selected a knot on the right side and began cutting it away, her blade crunching audibly against embedded bits of grit. “That’s good to hear. You may have some time before the rest of them join the search.” She placed the severed lock on the table, selected another.
Small movements of his head under her hands betrayed his uneasiness. “Actually . . . they might not care. The rest of the wizards don’t take me very seriously.”
With the first cut made, the rest began to move more quickly. Rowan concentrated on matching length. “Why would they not?”
“I’m not Krue.”
“I don’t know that word . . .”
“It’s the name the wizards use for themselves. Not just the wizards that you see, that the common folk know about, but all of the wizard-people.”
Rowan had known that the wizards considered themselves a separate people; it was interesting to learn their name. “How do you spell that?” She moved the candle to the other side of the table, hoping to better light her work. It was too low, and cast confusing shadows. She began again, using touch more than sight.
“I don’t know,” Will said. “I’ve never seen it written down.”
The texture of Will’s hair seemed to have altered along with the color. Between her fingers, it felt both stiffer and finer than its previous appearance had suggested, and slightly brittle. “But the other wizards didn’t believe you were capable of learning magic?” Rowan asked. “Because you’re not Krue?”
He paused, long enough for her to add two more tangled locks to the pile on the table. Eventually, she prompted him. “Will?”
“The other wizards don’t believe that Corvus would even try to teach me magic,” he said. “Because I’m not Krue.”
And now Rowan herself paused, comb in one hand, knife in the other. “But they knew you existed?”
“. . . Yes . . .”
“How did Corvus explain your presence?”
And Willam said immediately, as if it were a practiced phrase: “Corvus told me that they all assume he just kept me around as a catamite.”
Rowan laughed. “A convenient explanation.” But she could see why they might assume so. After all, Willam had been only fourteen years old when he entered Corvus’s service, and quite an attractive boy. “And,” Rowan began, meaning to say: And did Corvus never correct that impression?
She noticed that Willam had become very still beneath her hands.
She wondered—but no. She forced the question aside. Willam was a grown man, and it was not her business. A steerswoman’s privilege ought not to be used to pry into private matters. And whatever the facts may have been, Willam was now beyond the wizard’s reach.
For the moment. “Well,” Rowan said, beginning again to work at the tangled hair, “Corvus knows you’re here—assuming that those minions had a link and used it.” Will said nothing. “How soon do you think it will be before he sends more people after you?”
Will was rather long replying. “I don’t think he sent anyone after me at all.”
Rowan stopped short. “If not Corvus, then who?”
“Probably Abremio. He and Corvus are always spying on each other.”
“But Corvus himself . . . He would just. . . let you go?” She found this very hard to believe.
“Yes.”
“But, surely—” Surely an escaped apprentice, especially one who was a member of the common folk, would be far too great a threat to the wizards’ power—
Rowan abandoned her work, came around, sat on the edge of the bed. She studied Willam’s face carefully. “But Corvus was teaching you magic?”
“Yes,” Will said, immediately, definitely.
“Not merely—” She did not say: Not merely a few simple tricks to keep his pet amused?
“Rowan,” he said seriously, “I know a lot now. Not everything. You can’t learn it all in six years. But no wizard knows everything about magic. Some of it is still beyond me—but there are certain parts of it that already I know better than most wizards. And a lot better than most of the Krue.”
“How is that possible?” She discovered the comb still in her hand, and handed it to him.
He looked at it blankly a moment, then began using it. “The Krue take magic for granted,” he said. “Some spells are always there, always operating, and people just call on them without thinking about it. But usually they don’t know a thing about how the spells really work, on the inside . . .” He paused to clear the comb’s teeth of debris, then plied it again. “And because it’s all so familiar, when they do start to learn, they have to . . . to unlearn things first, and throw off old attitudes. A lot of them can’t manage to do that at all.”
She considered this. “But you started fresh?”
“More or less. I had what I’d figured out on my own. And that’s really what convinced Corvus to take me on. Ow.” This as the comb met a knot behind one ear. He used his fingers to work it apart. “It takes a certain kind of mind to make magic work from scratch,” he went on, “and you can’t always find it, even among the Krue.”
Rowan found that odd; but whatever talent might be required, Will certainly did have it. She had seen it demonstrated. Six years ago young Willam, entirely untrained, had shattered and partly destroyed the great fortress of the sibling wizards Shammer and Dhree.
She noticed that Will was growing uneasy under her scrutiny. It came to her that it must be obvious that she was now considering him in the light of the potential power he represented, and not as simply a friend.
“Have I mentioned,” she said, “how happy I am to see you again?”
He grinned, set down the comb, and p
ushed his ragged hair back with his fingers. “Not yet.”
“Well, I am. And I’m also glad to have another intelligent mind working on this problem.” He acknowledged the compliment with a tilt of his head, a small shrug. “But you: you came here all alone,” Rowan said, “with whatever magic you do know . . . what exactly are you planning to do?”
He became serious. “Find out why the Guidestar was brought down out of the sky,” he said. “Whatever else Slado may be up to now, that’s where it all started.”
She leaned back against the wall and crossed her legs on the bed. “Assuming that it was brought down intentionally.” Proper Steerswomen’s precision impelled her to state all the possibilities. “It may be that the Guidestar’s fall could not be prevented.”
“No. The Guidestar,” Willam said, definitely, “was brought down on purpose.”
“How do you know that?”
She waited as Willam took the time to think very carefully before speaking; and as Rowan watched him, it slowly dawned on her that he was organizing and preparing to communicate ideas that he believed were beyond her comprehension.
It was something the steerswoman had done herself, many times, when answering questions posed by simpler members of the common folk. She found it very strange to suddenly be on this side of such a conversation, and stranger still that it was Willam on the other.
“Well,” he began, “first off, the place where the Guidestars are—that part of the sky—if you can put something up there, it tends to just stay. Once it’s there, you don’t need magic to keep it up.”
“Motion,” Rowan said. “Mass. The Guidestars are constantly falling, but in such a wide arc that they miss the world completely, and moving at exactly the speed that keeps them in lockstep with the world’s turning. With nothing impeding their fall, they should continue indefinitely.”
He smiled as if relieved. “That’s right. So, they’ll stay, unless something else up there hits them—or if they’re told to move out of the stable place.”
Rowan found her thoughts stumbling, then halting, at the idea of something else up there. Then she recovered. Something, she decided, like a shooting star.
“But,” he went on, “if one of those things did hit a Guidestar, it would be accidental.”
The Guidestars watched, and made records of what they saw, Rowan knew. “There would be records from the other Guidestars. A wizard would be able to review the records.”
“Yes, that’s the thing.” He relaxed further. “The relay would be interrupted, there’d be queries and warnings all over, and requests for commands—someone would have to answer. All that ought to be in the records. And the falling Guidestar itself—unless it was completely disabled, it would be asking for help. And there’d be a record of that, too. But there just isn’t.”
Rowan was completely lost, left only with the image of the huge, jeweled Guidestar crying out silently and piteously for help as it fell across the sky, burning. She wondered if it felt pain.
She struggled back. “But . . . a Guidestar can be told to move out of its position.” Told, in effect, to die.
He nodded. “And if someone did that, they’d be sure to cover their tracks.”
“They’d erase the record.” She knew from conversation with Fletcher that this was the correct phrase.
“Or prevent it being recorded in the first place, if they were clever enough, and had the right clearance.”
“Clearance?” She puzzled. “Routine Bioform Clearance?”
“No, not that. It’s something different . . . Will showed a trace of disappointment. He said with such careful patience that she felt abashed: “There are some spells that are so powerful that only a few people are allowed to use them. And other spells that recognize who you are, and know whether or not you’re allowed to use the most powerful ones. And secret words you have to speak, even before trying.”
And it seemed to her that this must be a very simple idea; but she felt that she could not hold on to it. Some part of her was rejecting this.
Recognition: that was it. The idea of a spell that saw—but what was doing the seeing?—and recognized a face—but with what eyes, or by what means? Something that listened, for secret words, like a soldier on guard, challenging intruders. Who goes there?
And it was the thought of soldiers that settled her: a hierarchy, a graduated scale of authority. A sergeant could order a soldier to scrub the pots, but only a general could send the army into war.
“‘Clearance’ means authority,” she said to Willam.
He seemed a bit bemused. “Yes . . .”
“You might have said so immediately.” He was using the terms to which he was accustomed. “Forty-two years ago, Slado was an apprentice. Would he have had that much authority?”
“No. But Kieran had top clearance, the highest there is. Slado might have stolen the words from him, and somehow fooled the recognition process.”
She stumbled again at that last phrase; she could not help it. Will had spoken almost as if the very process of recognizing someone was something that could operate by itself, could exist and act independently, entirely unsupported.
A soldier, she told herself. Think of a soldier, and an intruder with a clever disguise and all the right passwords.
“Then the Guidestar was brought down intentionally. But we still don’t know why. What can you do here that you cannot do elsewhere?”
“Find the records.”
He was contradicting himself. She was lost again. She found it exhausting. She shut her eyes. “But,” she said, and rubbed her forehead, “the records were erased.”
“The records that the Guidestars made were erased.” She looked at him, now speculatively. “Some records,” he said, “are records that are shared, that all the wizards can look at, if they want to . . . as if they were written down, say, in a book, and put on a shelf for anyone to pick up and read. The Guidestars make that kind of record, and those were erased. But there are other records that a person can keep to himself, as if . . . as if that book were hidden away, in a drawer.”
And because he was stating it as a metaphor, Rowan realized, for the first time, that the records of which they had been speaking were not words on a page, not written down at all; that there existed some other way to record events; that she had been understanding even less of this conversation than she had assumed; and that even the familiar words that Willam used so casually represented concepts outside her own understanding.
Willam had not only grown up, he had grown beyond her. She wondered how great a distance now lay between them; and how hard she would have to work to cross it; and whether it were even possible to do so.
And then, quite abruptly, she realized exactly what this entire discussion had been leading toward.
She said, with no regard for the inaccuracy of metaphor: “Records in a book, the book in a drawer, the drawer in—”
“Yes.” And he leaned back, soft candlelight falling full on the serious face, the copper gaze; and Rowan saw in the man the same grim certainty, the same unwavering determination that she had seen so often in the boy.
Willam said: “I have to break into Jannik’s house.”
8
Rowan found Bel in the formal dining room upstairs from the glass-windowed parlor, seated alone at a small table by an open window. There were no other diners, but a few servers moved about quietly, clearing tables of the remnants of many early breakfasts. Rowan pulled out the chair opposite Bel, and sat.
The Outskirter glanced up from her meal. “Have you decided to let everyone know that you know me?”
“Since no one was following me after all, yes. Jannik himself won’t return for several days, I’ve learned.”
“That’s good. You weren’t very happy, sneaking around your steerswoman’s morals.”
“I never am. That smells good.” The dish before Bel held a trio of artfully circular fried eggs, each with a sprig of dried rosemary and a dollop of blood-red sauce on
its center; a single huge, fat sausage, still hissing steam, and seeming about to burst its skin from sheer enthusiasm; and a crisp triangle of cheese bread. Another small and elegant plate held an apple, rendered into slices that were half-tilted into a red-and-white spiral pattern around the upright and perfectly cylindrical core. The core’s stem held a single leaf, dry but gay.
“Dan’s gone,” Bel said around a mouthful of egg. “He’s paid for my room through the week. You can move in, if you like. The bed is huge.”
Rowan helped herself to a slice of apple. “Well. Even with no one actually hunting us, it still might be convenient to have a room so close to the back door. I think I’ll keep it.” Her wave caught the attention of one of the servers, who nodded and slipped down the service stairs leading to the kitchen.
Bel continued to eat. She was pale, her eyes were too bright, her movements a shade too controlled. A long night, with no sleep, Rowan surmised.
Bel’s responsibilities must have lain very heavily upon her at the moment: responsibility, but no immediate recourse to action. And the one thing Bel could not abide, Rowan knew, was inaction.
In the two years that Rowan and Bel had spent apart, Bel had established herself as the leader of the Outskirters— possibly the first single leader of them all ever to exist. And while Bel now traveled in the Inner Lands as apparently merely Rowan’s aide and companion, in a way the reverse was true. However strong and deep their friendship, Bel was here now, with Rowan, because it was the steerswoman who stood the best chance of learning how to save Bel’s people.
Bel’s people, and Rowan’s own as well. But to the Outskirters, the danger was far more immediate.
But now, in this quiet dining room, bright with morning light and filled with every accoutrement of civilization, there were only the two individuals, regardless of their larger roles. Rowan wished, simply, that she could say or do something to help her friend.
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