“I can’t go back.”
“Why not?” Bel spoke bitterly. “Slado doesn’t know about you. He thought it was Jannik working all those spells—” She stopped. “Slado can’t admit that he killed Jannik.”
An escaped apprentice; a center of magic, destroyed; a wizard, dead.
Slado needed a scapegoat. Willam was convenient. Willam could not go back to Corvus.
“Well, you’re a runaway apprentice, after all. You don’t have a choice, do you?” Then Bel’s voice lost its irony. “You’re better off away from Corvus,” she said. “I don’t think it’s been good for you.”
Willam had in fact chosen, Rowan realized, but not here and now.
Corvus, when the updates were about to end, when continuing to work meant having no protection: I can’t risk being connected with this. If you do this, you can’t come home.
Do you want to go on?
Will had gone on.
Now he could not return. And—whatever else life under the wizard’s command might entail—home, to Willam, was with Corvus.
Willam looked, at that moment, very alone.
Rowan stepped past the Outskirter, sat down on the bed near Willam. He glanced at her, said nothing.
“They’re going to be looking for you.”
He nodded.
Come with me, she wanted to say; but: “I have to go to the Archives.” A letter would be insufficient. “That’s . . . too close to Wulfshaven.”
Another nod. “I understand.”
Alone in the wide world, after all. “You’ll have to run.”
“Or hide somewhere.” He made a small movement with his shoulders: not quite a helpless shrug. “Which is better?”
She twitched a small smile. “I prefer to keep moving, myself. Although . . .” And she considered. “Establishing oneself in a small corner of some quiet place . . . making friends, accumulating a second history . . . It’s good to have people around you, Willam. If trouble comes, you may find you have more allies than you knew.”
Bel leaned against the wall, made a wry noise. “Well, pick one. He can’t stay in one place and keep moving at the same time.”
Rowan looked up. “Actually,” she said, feeling a great relief at the idea, “actually, I believe he can.”
22
Willam joined the crew of Graceful Days.
Of the ship’s crew members, only Gregori, Enid, the first mate, and the navigator knew of Willam’s presence during Jannik’s gathering in the Dolphin, and his connection with the events surrounding the wizard’s death.
“But the others will know that something happened,” Bel pointed out as they walked down the street to the harbor. The day was bright, brilliant and clear, but the weather had become even colder. Rowan was warm under two sweaters and a scarf, with her steerswoman’s cloak drawn about her. Bel had unearthed from her gear her piebald goatskin Outskirter cloak and boots. Gregori and the navigator had earlier spirited Willam away for an outfitting, and now he was dressed in secondhand sailor’s clothing: a short, warm coat, heavy wool trousers, a rough gray scarf, and a knit stocking cap. He carried a battered duffel bag.
“The story has already flown around the city,” Bel went on. “I’m sure the sailors have picked it up by now. They’ll probably talk of nothing else for months.” She spoke seemingly to the air; she rarely looked in Willam’s direction.
“I’ll try to act all agog when they tell it to me.” Will spoke with a forced cheerfulness. It was a poor attempt, and Bel did not respond in kind.
They went on in silence, along the twisting streets, into the clamor of the harborside. When they reached the near end of the long loading wharf, Bel paused, and the others did as well.
Bel turned to Willam, and after a moment’s awkwardness on both their parts, she put out her hand. Willam took it. “That actually was a clever plan that you and Corvus put together,” Bel said, looking up at Will uncomfortably.
“I’m sorry it had to include deceiving you—”
“It didn’t. It didn’t have to.” She released his hand, and stepped back. “You’re away from them now, Willam. Try to remember what you are.”
“I will,” he said; but she had already turned away.
Rowan and Willam watched her as she walked off some distance, pausing before the open front of a rope-walk, as if idly, as if interested in the work going on inside. She waited.
“I don’t have very many people in my life who are important to me,” Will said. “I’d hate to lose one.”
“It will be all right, Will. She just needs time.”
“Yes. I wish we had some.” He sighed, and turned to the steerswoman. “We always seem to be saying good-bye,” he said. “Why is that?”
“I don’t know,” she replied, honestly puzzled. “It’s only the second time we’ve ever done so.”
He thought. “I guess it’s because it’s the last thing I remember, of you and Bel: us saying good-bye. For all those years with Corvus, whenever you came into my mind, we were saying good-bye.”
“Whenever you came into my mind, I was wondering what fantastic spells you were learning.” At this, his face fell, and he glanced aside for a moment. “You’re going to miss it,” Rowan said.
“Yes . . .” Spoken with regret, a trace of longing. “Some of the things I’ve seen, the things I’ve done . . . you can’t imagine it.”
“Stranger than the spells in Jannik’s house?”
He nodded. “Stranger. More beautiful.” Then he laughed a bit. “Not to mention light when I wanted it, music from the air, and a hot bath every single day. Yes. Yes, I’ll miss it.”
She almost did not ask, but then did: “Will you miss Corvus?” His expression became mixed, far too complex for her to decipher. “Was he . . . ,” she asked, awkward, “. . . was he a friend to you?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes I thought that he was. And sometimes . . . sometimes I just couldn’t tell at all.”
“Hey! Ho! Attise!” They both turned.
It was Enid, leading two sailors jockeying a sack-laden wheelbarrow onto the wharf. “Move it,” Enid said as the three passed by. “Last barge.”
“I’m coming!” Willam called after her.
Rowan turned back, bemused. “ Attise?’ ”
“I thought it would be a good idea to use a different name.”
“And you chose Attise?’ ” It was the alias Rowan herself had used, when she had briefly resigned from the Steerswomen: the name she had been traveling under when Willam first met her. “I thought you hated Attise!”
“Oh, I did!” he said. “She was dull, rude, closemouthed, and condescending. But since then I’ve learned that she has a lot of good qualities, which it might be wise for me to emulate. Besides, someone once told me that if you use a false name you should pick one that, when you hear it unexpectedly, you just naturally turn around to look.”
And this would be a good moment, a graceful moment, for them to part, and Rowan knew it. She discovered that she cared not at all for grace. She cast about for more to say, some way to delay events. “You’re going to have to think of an explanation for your white hair,” she pointed out. “And please don’t blame it on a fright; you’d just be promulgating old wives’ tales.”
His mouth twitched. He pulled off his hat.
After a moment, he said, “No, go ahead and laugh. You’ll just hurt yourself, holding it in like that.”
She succumbed to a fit of hilarity. He was completely bald.
“It will grow back in its natural color,” he said.
“And,” she said, when she had enough breath to speak, “in the meantime, how will you explain—”
He put on a serious expression. “Lice.”
She surrendered to laughter again. “But,” she said, fighting for composure, “but, Willam, a person with one sort of lice might be suspected of having another sort—”
He held up his hands. “Let’s just say I’ve done what’s needed to keep up the deception, even i
n the close quarters of a ship, and leave it at that, shall we?”
“Oh, yes, let’s.”
He put the hat back on, much to her relief. “But speaking of close quarters . . .” He knelt by his duffel bag, untied it, reached in. “I’m going to keep the tools—I’ll find some way to explain them—but I thought that if somebody got into my things, I’d have a hard time explaining the rest.” He held out to her a small bundle: his burlap sack, now nearly empty, wrapped around the last objects tucked far in the bottom. “I thought you might want to study these. The card reader should work for a while, if you don’t use it too often. You’ll have to reattach the speaker.”
She took the bundle. “The ‘speaker’ is the paper cone?”
“Yes.”
They were quiet a moment; Rowan wondered if, like her, he was searching for some reason to stay for just a few more moments.
But she really must keep him no longer. “Well,” she began—
“Are you going to put me under the Steerswomen’s ban?” The beautiful copper gaze was both pleading and resigned.
“Oh, Will, I don’t know,” she said helplessly. “I’ve had no time to think this through. Everything has happened so quickly.” In fact, their entire time together in Donner totaled less than four days. “But it seems to me, whenever I recall some of our conversations—I’m not certain that you ever did actually lie to me.”
“I tried not to,” he said earnestly.
“Yes. You spoke so carefully, sometimes.” All the pauses, the obvious internal readjustments before speaking. “I really ought to have wondered . . .” And she ought to have mentioned it. Somehow—and she could not identify why she felt this—she knew that if only she herself had spoken of it first, and if she had used exactly the right words, Willam would have been able to tell her everything.
A call, inarticulate in the distance, but definitely the voice of Enid. “You have to go.”
They embraced. Bundled against the cold at. they were, the contact seemed muffled, distant. When they released each other, Rowan found and held his hand: a touch more formal, but by contrast far more intimate, far more real.
His fingers were cold. Three fingers: it was his right hand she held, the one he damaged as a child, by a moment’s carelessness in the use of magic.
“Don’t dwell on partings, this time,” she said, and released the hand. “Think ahead, to the next time we say hello.”
“That will happen,” he replied, and shouldered his duffel bag. “The world is a much smaller place than you think it is.” And he walked away; but once on the wharf, he turned back to call: “And when she’s ready to hear it again, give Bel my love!”
When he turned away, he became unrecognizable: merely another of the many people on the wharf, a tall, broad- shouldered man in a blue coat and a stocking cap.
She would think him a sailor, if not for his stride. It was a land stride. But that would change.
She rejoined Bel, who was watching the activity inside the rope-walk. Bel eyed the sack. “What’s that?”
“Some things he couldn’t carry without arousing suspicion.” They turned away and proceeded up the street, back toward the Dolphin.
“Magic?” Bel asked, when no one was near. She seemed both suspicious and interested.
“Yes. Although not of any real use to us. Still, I believe I can get at least one of these objects to work . . .” She mentally inventoried the contents. She stopped short in the street, unrolled the bundle, and reached deep into the sack.
“Rowan,” Bel cautioned.
“I think there’s a book in here . . . Yes.” Her fingers located it. She pulled it out, stuffed the sack under one arm, and examined her find as they walked on.
It was the tiny book that protected the silvery slip. Its thong ties were loose. Rowan opened it at random, squinted at the minuscule writing. The letters were oddly shaped, and some recognizable only by context.
Bel watched her sidelong. “Any useful spells?”
“It seems to be poetry. Or songs . . . this one . . . it looks like the lyrics to ‘The Sallie Gardens’ . . .” Rowan chose another page . . .
“Ha. Now you’re going to think that it’s the common folk who were connected to the wizards.”
But the steerswoman had stopped walking and stood dumbfounded in the center of the street. Bel turned back. “What’s wrong?”
Rowan read out: “From where she stands—
—to where I stand
Is but a hand, a link, and a lock,
But there are doors, mine poor for
Being always wide—”
“ ‘—I wait in stillness,’ ” Bel said, quiet, amazed. It was one of the ancient songs of Einar, the first seyoh of the Outskirters. “ ‘I wait in the speaking of grasses, in their voice.’ ” Rowan’s eyes followed on the page, word for word. “ ‘I wait in the open of wander,’ ” Bel went on. “ ‘The world holds me, its smallest stone, but for the moment she comes.’ ” Now Bel could not help but sing it, if softly:
“The moment she comes to me,
The moment she comes,
Her eyes now light in light on dark,
Her voice a silent, known and humming
In my heart only: wider, call and empty.
Her fingers pulse the edges of the sky—”
“Not ‘edges,’ ” Rowan said. She could not decipher the word; it was no word she knew. “I don’t think it says ‘edges.’ Bel, how would ‘The Ghost-Lover’ end up in a wizard’s book?”
Bel thought long. “One of the Krue living with the Outskirters heard it and brought it back, and wrote it down in that book.”
“I suppose that’s likely enough . . .”
And they continued on up the street. But the steerswoman was thinking: Lock. Link. And a voice that came shadowing down the sky. She began to wonder at Einar’s ghost-lover, who seemed a woman with very strange powers, and whom only Einar could see, only Einar could hear.
They returned to Rowan’s room, where they had stowed their traveling gear; but when they arrived, they found that the room was not empty. Two people waited there.
One was a young woman, dark-skinned, dark-haired. She stood with one hand resting solicitously on the shoulder of an older woman, who sat wearily in the room’s ancient chair.
Ona.
“Oh—” Rowan said; and a moment later found herself kneeling on the floor at Ona’s feet, holding both the small hands in her own, looking up into the pale face that seemed, so suddenly, very old. “I’m so sorry . . .” Inadequate; but all words are inadequate, at such a time.
“It’s not your fault,” Ona said quietly.
“If, if I had known . . .” It was painful to speak. “Ona, I would never have—”
“No. It’s my fault.”
“What?” Rowan could not understand this. “Ona, no.”
“I knew,” Ona said, and closed her eyes. Light from the window behind her haloed her hair with faint blue. “When you saw those drawings, that first night . . . I knew, from what you said, from what you didn’t say . . . I knew there was more to it. I knew it wasn’t just old gossip. I should have said something to Naio. But—” Her voice cracked; she bit her lips, waited, went on: “He was having so much fun . . .”
Tears came; the dark woman beside Ona had a handkerchief ready. Ona took it, and leaned against her.
Rowan looked up at the young woman and found dark eyes, a brown face very similar to Naio’s. “Sherrie?” Rowan asked. The woman nodded: Naio’s niece.
A period of quiet, during which Bel unobtrusively sidled over and sat on the bed.
Ona sighed and straightened again, still wiping at her eyes, and carefully composed herself. “He sent for her.”
“What?” Rowan was lost.
“Kieran. He sent for that steerswoman.”
She was a moment recovering the matter; it now seemed distant, irrelevant. Then abruptly, it did not. “Latitia? Kieran sent for her?”
Ona nodded. “When yo
u left town, yesterday, Naio and I—” She paused again to master herself. “—we . . . we spent the day with old Nid. And it did take all day, Nid rambling and losing himself, and oh!” Here she laughed, the weak laughter of one exhausted from weeping. “You should have seen Naio, winkling old news out of Nid! Going over and over, circling around. It was so . . . so funny . . .” She pressed the handkerchief against her eyes again.
Rowan could only repeat, astounded: “Kieran sent for Latitia.”
“Not by name.” Ona removed the handkerchief, sat twisting it in her fingers. “Nid said Latitia said . . . There was a rider, who came across her on the road, looking for a steerswoman, any steerswoman. When she said she was one, he said there was a wizard who,” and it seemed now that she quoted, “ ‘wanted a quiet word with a steerswoman.’ ”
“He was going to tell her,” Bel said.
Rowan could hardly believe it. But: “Yes . . .” And if he had told Latitia, if Kieran had lived for just a little longer—
Whatever a steerswoman knows is freely given to all. There would be no secret. And all these terrible events might not have occurred.
Rowan closed her eyes, shook her head, sighed. She looked up into Ona’s blue eyes. “Thank you.”
“Naio wanted you to know. That’s why we were here, yesterday . . .”
Quiet dwelt in the room for a space of time. Then Rowan rose, stood looking down on the silent woman, and on impulse kissed the top of Ona’s head, gently. “We have to go.”
“So we do,” Bel said.
Rowan turned to her. “All right. Are you ready?”
“Yes,” Bel said, and nodded, and did not move from the bed.
Rowan regarded her, puzzled. “What’s wrong?”
“Where’s our gear?”
The steerswoman looked around. Their packs were not present.
Sherrie tilted her head. “Out back.”
The packs were in the yard, along with quite a lot of other gear, all of it being loaded onto the back of a horse.
Ruffo bustled up; he had apparently been waiting for them. “I was figuring,” he said, “the two of you would want to make good speed, and that meant not stopping to look for food, or getting someone to give you some, so, so, there’s all this. But it’s too much to carry, isn’t it, so, well . . . He faltered, then handed Rowan the leading-rein. “Anyway, she’s got no master now.”
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