Mapping Winter

by Marta Randall

  A moment of silence.

  “Do you see it?” she demanded.

  “Rider, it’s—it’s back side up.”

  “Then turn it!”

  He tugged at the map and she let him turn it in her hands.

  “Last night I marked where we were. A circle with peaks in it like a fire. Can you see it, near the blank space?”

  “No, I—yes! Yes, here it is.”

  She took a deep breath and let it out.

  “Listen, boy, you must use the map and the compass, to help us leave here. We must go east and a little north. We should be close to where there are marks on the map again. When we get there, we will know where the trail is. With the compass, you can take us there. Can you do this?” He didn’t reply. “Can you do this?”

  “Yes,” he said at last, and took the map from her hands. She shrank back into her hood and remembered to breathe.

  They traveled slowly, the boy stopping often to talk to her about the map, or she calling a halt to question him about the tint of a snowfield, a turning of the breeze, the pitch of the slope. It was terrifying, following an eleven-year-old bondslave in blindness through land neither of them had crossed before. Her temper frayed until she could not speak without cursing. They could die, traversing this mountain pass and the slope coming down from it. When the pain let her think, she did not understand why death continued to frighten her, when this sudden blindness frightened her so much more.

  They camped just beyond the pass that night, in another circle of rocks. She sat hunched near the fire, touching her face, while the boy prepared a meal and fed the horses. Her eyes burned and ached and teared, and her hand cramped. She flexed her fingers and realized that she had been using the abacus all the day long, counting Traveler’s steps even though, without her vision, without the compass, the count meant nothing at all.

  She ate only a little of the soup he made. The pain never seemed to lessen and then it did, enough so that she could feel her exhaustion. The boy cleared a space near the fire for her and led her to it and she lay down, the cloak wrapped tight around her. In the quiet before sleep she fell through confused images, a duplication of selves through which she watched herself move in a sightless world which she both saw and did not see. She turned, hunching her shoulders. The images slid away.

  She woke early and lay in the warm sack of the cloak, trying to believe that her fears were groundless. Traveler whickered and the boy moved about their firepit. The scent of tea drifted to her. She pushed herself up but her eyes refused to open, crusted shut with pus and salt. The boy came at her cry. When he understood the problem he warmed water and brought it to her, and she bathed the crust away from her eyes and forced them open. They both ached and stung, the right one more than the left. They ate a cold breakfast and he folded a patch for her right eye and helped her put it on before leading her to Traveler. She felt him hesitate for a moment, then he again took the reins. He described signs on the map which she identified as winter markers for a sheep trail. He thought they were close by. She didn’t answer, worried that he had misread the compass or misread the map, that he would lead them over the lip of a crevasse. Her fingers moved along the abacus, tens and hundreds and tens again.

  At mid-morning the boy reported with some excitement that he could see the markers ahead and soon they moved more quickly, along a path from the high summer pastures into the Morat Valley. She could keep her left eye open for a few moments but the world would not come into focus. The pain, she thought, must be lessening, because she could not remember being able to think the day before and now, at times, she could.

  The man who kept the guildhouse in Sorontil was blind. She thought about him moving through the heavy stone building, efficiently ordering his truncated domain and listening to the sighted Riders coming and going. Locked forever within the walls of a city, within the walls of a guildhouse, within the walls of his own darkness. Her stomach hurt.

  The foothills sloped into the valley, under a white smear of snow. They made better time now but camped that night well away from the Water Road. Dusk was easier on her eyes. She groped her way around a rock to relieve herself. With one eye patched closed her depth perception disappeared and she banged her shins against stones. Pain and tension and fear twisted into a rush of anger.

  The boy found a stream, broke the ice, and refilled their water pouches. Kieve listened to him settle the horses and prepare their meager supper, and either ignored his questions or responded to them with barbed sarcasms. Soon enough he stopped talking and kept the painful glare of the fire between them. She had to look away from it. The fire died to embers.

  “Nothing keeps you here,” she said. He had been clearing a place to sleep but now the sounds stopped. “You have my map and my compass. You have time before you would be missed. You could leave.”

  After a moment, he said, “What would you do, if I went?”

  “Why should that concern you?” She poked at the embers with a stick and had to look away when they flared up. “You could be free.” More silence. “Well?”

  “I thought about it,” he said. “But no guild would take me in, were I unknown. And you might die.”

  “Would you care about that?” she said.

  “No,” he said, but he didn’t leave. He rolled himself into his cloak and was still. Kieve sat by the fire, poking at the blotch of light and listening to the boy’s breathing. Bredda could fix her eye, once she got to the city. She wondered if she could stay in the guild, blind or half-blind. She wondered if she could hide it.

  She thought about Stormbringer and the chasm at its foot, and saw them in clean, precise detail. How long would she keep that memory, if she went blind? How long before the arc of a hawk’s wing against sky, the white brush of high clouds, the shapes of people’s faces, faded altogether? Would her mind also lose the ability to see?

  She woke to a sound so familiar that for a moment she thought she was back in the apprentice dorms at Koerstadt. She lay still, listening to the boy’s muffled weeping. She pressed her lips together. She’d never cried, at least not where she could be overheard. She pulled the hood tight about her ears but could still hear his crying.

  “Be quiet and sleep,” she said. The crying ceased. She turned onto her side, drew her legs up, and put her arms around her stomach. Bredda would take him, the innkeeper always needed a few extra hands. He would have to be content with that. She heard another smothered sob, cursed under her breath, and tried to get back to sleep. Ice cracked and her shoulders hurt.

  In the morning her eyes again needed to be bathed but she could open her left one without too much pain. Although the world was still too bright she made out the rough shapes of things.

  The boy worked in silence, handing her a mug of tea, putting a slice of meat between her fingers, saddling the horses. She regretted her meanness of the night before but when she spoke to him he answered her in single clipped syllables and she grew angry again. Her right eye stung and throbbed.

  The hills flattened to grazing land and these in turn to crop lands, wood and stone fences marching through the snow. A wind sprang up from the south as they rode beside a line of tall dark smudges. Evergreens perfumed the crisp air. A bough cracked in the cold, Myla whuffed, and the boy said, “Oh, look.” She raised her head.

  “Tell me what you see,” she demanded.

  “It’s the river. The Morat. The Water Road.” He sounded amazed. “It’s frozen and there’s snow on it. Across the river there’s lots of dark trees and cliffs behind them.”

  He was quiet for a moment. “The middle of the river is all smooth and there’s no snow, but there’s snow along the sides, and it’s rough there, like it froze over stones.”

  “It did,” she said. “The hotboats smooth it in the middle, then iceboats ridge it up, or it buckles at night. The hotboats are blue—can you see any?” She could flag one down and claim Rider’s Passage, and it would have to take them to Sterk.

  “I think—no. There
’s a big boat on our side of the river, with lots of sails. They’re all yellow.”

  “Is there a flag? Can you see what’s on it?”

  “Yes, it’s yellow too, and there’s a circle, and, wait, a sheaf? Lying over the circle.”

  “Coin and grain. The Merchant’s Guild.” Exempt from passage-rights. She tightened her lips.

  “There’s horses pulling the boat,” the boy said. “They’re on a path beside the ice. They’re pulling hard.”

  It must be a barge, overloaded with goods and bound for the city, ready to take advantage of fear during changing times. If commerce was moving it meant either that Cadoc still lived or that the sword had passed smoothly. In either event the Merchants Guild would make fat profits.

  The land road ran just above the towpath, at the edge of a small bluff. At Kieve’s direction the boy turned his horse left, upriver on the road toward Abermorat. Traveler trailed behind.

  Hovels sprang up and shouldered close to the road, mean shacks with threads of smoke rising from chimneys and dirty children playing in dirty snow by the doors. They stopped while Kieve showed her baton and negotiated for some bread and cheese. The woman was too terrified by the baton and Kieve’s guild badge to accept coins. At last Kieve flung them into the cold mud at the woman’s feet and turned Traveler away, muttering. The coins might stay there forever, tainted by her fingers. The boy broke the cheese and put some in her hands and they ate while they rode. The sun dipped toward the horizon and the land rose, farms giving way to stone hills and these to high, precipitous fingers of rock reaching inland, Abermorat cradled between them like a bright jewel in a crabbed hand. As the light dimmed she could see more clearly from her left eye but the world appeared flat, without depth.

  One of the stone fingers stretched to the river’s edge. The land road turned away from the water, seeking a pass in the natural barrier. A semaphore tower topped the ridge, its flags stowed down. The boy twisted in his saddle to watch it until it was out of sight behind the cliff.

  “Keep close,” Kieve said.

  He reined in the grey until they rode side by side. The road narrowed and ran between high cliffs, ending in a stout gate. Sentries paced the wall overhead and folk crowded below, eager to get into the city before night came and the gate closed. They fell away from Kieve, making the furca, index and middle finger forked out and the wrist twisted quickly, covertly, to flick evil away. The boy, seeing the gestures, retreated into the darkness of his hood. The shadi at the gate thrust his arm forward, barring their way without looking up.

  “Business in the city,” he said, loud and bored. “Hurry it up, state your business.”

  Kieve tapped his shoulder with her baton. She took her papers from her pocket and held them out. He jerked upward, then saw the stylized pen and stirrup of the Riders Guild embossed on the wrapper and the wax stamp bearing the Marubin arms, and gave Kieve a brisk salute.

  “Your pardon, Rider. It’s been a busy day.”

  She didn’t reply. He pulled open the cloth wrapper and paged through the papers.

  “The boy is with you? The pass is for one Rider only.”

  “He’s in bond,” she said. He slapped her papers into order, scrawled his mark on the top one, and handed them back.

  They rode into the shadows beyond the gate, along the bottom of a narrow crevice. Sheer cliffs rose from a rubble of stone. She tilted her face, feeling but not seeing the dark grey bulk of Old City high above. Carved into the stone ridge and deserted centuries ago, Old City lived in the minds of citizens as a place of superstitions and moaning winds, and the occasional rock fall that made Palisade Gate treacherous.

  “Is that the castle?” Pyrs asked.

  “No, you’ll see it tomorrow. This is Old City.”

  He didn’t reply. The darkness of the pass fell away and they rode into the late afternoon sunlight of Palisade Square. Its center was an uproar of music and animals and shouting voices and a patchwork of smudged colors. Kieve reined her horse, startled until she realized that the people had come for the Lord’s death and the sword’s passing—merchants, provisioners, entertainers, come to make what profit they could from the crowd of guildspeakers and land-barons. Somewhere in the maze of color a group of musicians thumped and banged on their protesting instruments; dogs bayed accompaniment. Traveler shied as a figure ran in front of him, clutching the bulging, squirming front of its shirt. The shirt squawked as the figure disappeared into the maze of tents. Animals grunted, screeched, called, gibbered; voices howled, wood and metal beat against each other and against themselves, reverberating through the city within the square within the city.

  Colors and darkness smeared together; the scents of a hundred different dinners competed with the stench of animal dung; a caged bird shrieked. She remembered the view from the ledge, mountains falling and soaring in clear detail and a clean wind blowing. She put the thought away. City urchins congregated near Palisade Gate, hustling the incoming crowds. They shied away as Kieve guided the horses around the eastern edge of the square and into the city. The reek and confusion of Palisade Square dropped behind them. Traveler picked up his pace; he knew this route, and the stable at the end of it.

  The sun sat low on the city’s granite barriers. Shadows reached from tall stone buildings on one side of the street to tall stone buildings on the other. Kieve stopped Traveler and waited for the boy to come up beside her.

  “This street leads to a market,” she told him. “Before we reach it we’ll pass an inn, the Dagger and Plow. Tell me when we get there.” He was silent. “Think you can do that?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  Her vision cleared for a moment. His eyes were wide and tired, mouth turned down at the corners. He flicked the reins and rode beside her down the quiet street. A murmur in the distance became the sound of busy public rooms, the banging of doors, huffing and shuffling of horses, the discordant twang of music and voices. The boy moved closer until they rode almost knee to knee.

  The yard at the Dagger and Plow was quiet. A stableboy came for the horses but Pyrs glared at him and eeled down from his horse, clenching the two pairs of reins in his fist. He swayed with weariness. Kieve took their saddlebags into the public room and dumped them near the mantel. A brief, shocked silence settled on the crowded room and a server, hands hidden in clusters of mugs, saw Kieve and shouted through the open kitchen door. After a moment Bredda entered, her wooden leg clacking against the stone floor. She put her tray down and came over, wiping her hands on her apron.

  “I thought you were supposed to be back days ago,” the innkeeper said. She glanced over Kieve as though taking inventory. “What did you do to your eye?”

  “I had some trouble. Cadoc?”

  “Still alive.” She made a quick tilting motion with her hand.

  “I need room for myself and my boy.”

  “A boy?” Bredda rocked back. “You’ve come up in the world.”

  “Do you have room, or do I get the horses and go elsewhere?”

  Bredda’s smile creased the skin around her mouth. “Who else would have you?”

  “Interesting question,” someone said. Bredda turned and Kieve saw Endres, captain of Cadoc’s personal Guard, standing at ease behind the innkeeper. One hand held a pewter mug, the other rested on his hip. He gestured with the mug, taking in her travel-stained clothing, the saddlebags, the patch over her eye. “Looks like you had an entertaining trip.”

  “A hard one,” Kieve said. “And long. You’re not in uniform.”

  “No need.” She could not see his expression. “I’m not in the city on business.”

  Kieve didn’t respond. When off duty Endres looked like a child’s stuffed animal, round and comfortable and friendly, standing on ceremony only when fulfilling his lord’s orders, fond of jokes and stories and sentimental songs. He never spoke of his origins but Kieve thought he came from one of the mountain provinces, Bergdahl perhaps, as distant from Cherek’s center as Dalmorat and perhaps even more primit
ive, where poverty drove the impatient and ambitious from the rocky fields and into distant occupations. A high proportion of them took work with the various non-guild mercenary companies scattered throughout Cherek. The guilds, particularly the Soldiers Guild, looked upon the mercenaries as upstarts and, because they were not controlled through Koerstadt, dangerous. Cherek’s lords, though, remembered the Guild Wars after Constain’s defeat and were ever mindful of the guilds’ increasing power, and hired mercenary companies at will. Endres sipped from his mug and moved his finger across his moustache. Kieve repressed a shudder. The Dagger and Plow was not one of his usual drinking places.

  “Why are you here?” she said.

  “The innkeeper’s beer is a great inducement to forgetfulness.” His cheeks rounded as he smiled. “Besides, I’d like to talk with you.”

  After a moment, Kieve said “We have nothing to discuss.”

  The round cheeks flattened a little. “But we do, Rider. You’ve been away for a while. Much has changed.” He hesitated and said, “Have you eaten? Will you join me?”

  “No.” Kieve turned to Bredda. “Is there room for me?” She didn’t wait for the innkeeper’s nod. “Captain,” she said, and followed Bredda through a short hallway, followed in turn by a maid carrying the saddlebags. She put her hand to the wall, so tired she felt dizzy. Bredda shook her grey head.

  “Will you never learn civility?” she said.

  Kieve didn’t reply. Cadoc sent her out with warrants, but it was into Endres’ hands that she delivered the ferrets’ victims. Because Cadoc had invoked her oath in this matter, she could no more tell of it than she could desert her post. She had once, on Cadoc’s orders, observed Endres oversee an inquisition. The memory sometimes haunted her sleep.

  Bredda led her to a corner of the innkeeper’s own room and cleared the top of her second bed.

  “You’ll have to share with this boy of yours,” she said. Kieve sat on the bed. The innkeeper issued instructions to the maid, who ran out. Bredda put her hands to the patch and Kieve jerked her head away.