Mapping Winter

by Marta Randall

  A cake maker passed by, hawking tiny sweets “They’re good! You should!”

  A brewer’s wagon forced a path through the crowd, all its bells jangling. Giggling urchins clung to the back bench.

  “Icy treats for girl and lad! If you don’t you’ll wish you had!”

  Three dancers twined about each other to the staccato music of a clay drum. Nearby, under a bleached awning, a brazier glowed. Kieve smelled spiced meat-sticks and, stooping from the saddle, bought a handful for herself and the boy.

  As they sat on their horses, eating, a dilapidated street magician set up shop in front of them. His apprentice squatted at his feet, playing a mouth organ and keeping an eye on the coins in the magician’s bowl.

  “Rider,” the magician said. He bowed, made apples disappear, and pulled eggs from people’s pockets. Kieve glanced over the crowd, rubbing at her cheek below her eyepatch. Children laughed, a thin woman said she’d seen better back home, a man in a knitted blue cap stood on tiptoe to see over people’s shoulders. The magician produced a dove from an empty box. He filled the box with water, shook it, and pulled out a jug of cider, a cake, and a patched cloth with gravy stains along one side. He spread the cloth over the air and put the jug and cake atop it. The dove flew into his hair. He cursed and reached for it while the apprentice stole the cake and ate it. The thin woman snorted. In a tangle of curses and spells and faded sleeves, the magician freed the bird, scolded the apprentice, and upset the cider jug. “Falenka falepa!” he cried, producing the cake from Pyrs’ boot top. The boy laughed with surprise. The crowd shifted, growing and diminishing, but the man in the blue cap stayed. Kieve dropped a coin into the magician’s bowl. He bowed as she urged Traveler and Myla into the traffic again.

  The market ended just before the civic dignity of City House. They hitched the horses to a railing under bare trees and went up past a pair of city constables. Kieve reached the doors first and held them, turning, for Pyrs to enter. The tower bells tolled the noon hour and the man in the blue cap stood engrossed before a message board. She closed the door behind them, shutting him out.

  The doors opened on another flight of stairs, sleek and cool. The boy’s footsteps clattered as he followed her up and into a broad corridor lined with wooden benches and little else. Scribes and collectors, bundled and capped, moved at speed along the corridor, trying to outrun the cold. Kieve followed a pair of them through a heavy door and into the Registry, and showed the clerk her papers. He traced the Marubin seal with a finger and jerked his head nervously and produced the delegate roster. Pyrs stood behind her while Kieve went through it. When she glanced at him he was turned away, as though by not paying attention he could force reality to do his bidding and not hers. For a moment she thought she heard an echo of Daenet’s voice: is all the world governed only by what we believe? The tilt of the boy’s chin promised that if longing could make it so, then so it would be. She turned back to the roster and ran her fingertip down the pages.

  She found Minst between Marog-on-Mountain and Peves Landing. The villagers had sent one Sadik Shepherd to council and he listed as local residence the Inn of the Boar near Palisade Gate.

  “Did you find him?” Pyrs said as they went down the stairs.

  “Yes.”

  “Sadik?”

  She nodded.

  The boy’s lips pinched down. She cupped her hands for him and watched his face as she boosted him onto his horse. The skin around his eyes looked bruised with weariness and, she supposed, with fear. He had spent a terrifying night. She mounted Traveler, thinking about that, and led the way into the maze of streets stretching between City House and Palisade Gate.

  She saw the man in the blue cap two streets later, as she turned down Market Road. She let her gaze pass over him, expressionless.

  The stablehand at the Dagger and Plow pocketed a coin and found room for their horses. Bredda stood supervising the movement of a beer keg from the cellar to the tap room. She wiped her hands on her apron and came across to them.

  “I need a shortcoat,” Kieve said by way of greeting. “And I need to hide the horses and my guild cloak for a few hours.”

  Bredda raised her eyebrows and led them down the back corridor into her room. “Want to tell me why?”

  “Someone stole Pyrs last night,” Kieve said. She lifted Bredda’s extra shortcoat from its hook and put her papers in its pockets. Her fingers touched her notebook. She hesitated before putting it in the shortcoat pocket. “Someone believes that he can be used to force my cooperation.”

  Bredda raised her eyebrows at this, but she said, “Your eyes?”

  “Better, better, almost healed,” Kieve said with impatience. She thrust her arms into the coat. “I’ll find a way to get him back to Minst. He should be safe there.” Kieve put the eyepatch in her pocket.

  “You’re being followed,” Bredda said.

  “I think so. The patch is like a signboard.” She buttoned the shortcoat and took the cap Bredda offered. “You wanted that, to see Pyrs sent home.”

  The innkeeper looked at him. He sat before the fireplace, his hands between his thighs.

  “Well, Master Pyrs?”

  Pyrs refused to look up. He had taken off his overgloves. His fingers were white where they locked together.

  “I don’t see the attraction,” Bredda said. “Were I her bondslave, I’d take the first chance to run.”

  The boy didn’t move. “We don’t have much time,” Kieve said and took the cap across the room to the boy.

  “I don’t suppose Jenci said anything about my money,” Bredda said as Kieve pulled the cap over Pyrs’ bright head. He jerked away and smoothed his hair under the cap with his fingers.

  “No. Not a word.” Kieve pulled up her shortcoat’s collar.

  She took Pyrs through the kitchen and opened the back door. They went out between piles of garbage and two arguing cats. The narrow track opened into Brassmakers Alley. A few citizens poked among the polished wares. Kieve and Pyrs joined them. Mud sucked at their boots where footsteps had softened the slush.

  “The horses?” Pyrs said.

  “I’ll deal with them later.” She stopped to look at a pile of trays. “Keep close by me,” she murmured. “If I say to run, go fast and get back to Bredda. If you can’t find her, find a soldier somewhere and say who you are. You still have my guild token, I think. And keep your hair covered.”

  He looked up at her. “Who is following us?”

  “A man in a blue knit cap. I don’t know who sent him.” They walked around a large, brass washtub filled with kettles. Pyrs ran his finger along the tub’s rim. “With luck, he’s still waiting for us at Bredda’s.”

  He wasn’t. Kieve saw him come around the corner from Tinkers Lane, intent on the inn’s back entry. She took Pyrs’ shoulder and pulled him into a shop. Bells jangled as she closed the door. Pots gleamed in the shadows. The shopkeeper bustled in from the back room, wiping lunch from his blond moustache.

  “A chamberpot,” Kieve said. “But something solid, hear me? None of this thin stuff you palm off on the provincials.”

  “Only the best,” the shopkeeper said, insulted. He crossed to some crowded shelves. “The finest brass, the finest workmanship in Dalmorat Province. You’ll not find better brasswork outside of Koerstadt itself, I promise you. Here, for example, is a fine piece, as you can see, with a slight raised frieze of leaves and flowers, a tribute to the Mother and none finer or, may I say, more reverent.” He ducked his head to show his reverence, and looked at Kieve through bushy eyebrows.

  “You worship the Mother by crapping in a chamberpot?” she said. It was a gaudy thing. He launched into a long exposition on the importance of piety in all things everyday and otherwise. She held the chamberpot to the light and, glancing alongside it, saw the man in the blue cap hesitate in the street outside.

  “I want to see that.” Kieve nodded toward a top shelf.

  “Oh, that, yes, mistress, my finest inlay work, made for Lady Drysi that�
�s up castle, perhaps to be the new Lord, indeed, designed especially for the Lady Drysi herself as she is fond, you see, of little things that move and so I have let her tastes govern my design, of course. It has bells, you see, and little animals that come in and out—”

  “Good. I want to see it.” She took Pyrs’ hand.

  The shopkeeper grimaced. “But you see, it is for the Lady Drysi—”

  “She has commissioned it?”

  He glowered.

  “Then show it to me, shopkeeper. Perhaps you might even make a sale.”

  He pushed a rickety ladder against the shelves. “It’s that I haven’t shown it to her yet,” he said, reluctant to ascend. “It’s by way of a surprise, you understand—”

  “Now,” Kieve said.

  His mouth turned down but he began climbing shelves. She let him mount three rungs before she sprinted for the back room, pulling Pyrs. The shopkeeper shouted, bells jangled, and the family jumped up from their meal, startled. The back door opened on the muddy yard of the workshop and that, in turn, on a deserted alley. Kieve pulled Pyrs across the track and boosted him to the top of a wall. She vaulted up after him, inspected the small, snow-covered garden below, and dropped to it. Pyrs landed beside her and opened his mouth.

  “Hush. This way.”

  A narrow passage connected the garden to Market Road. They came through and fitted themselves into a group of mountain folk headed in the direction of Palisade Gate. Clouds massed overhead. She watched carefully but the man in the blue cap had disappeared.

  Abermorat, the second city to bear the name, had been laid out in great plain grids made by the intersections of the boulevards. Within the grids, alleys and smaller streets knotted together at communal wells or small markets. The mountain folk kept to the main street, timorous of the mazy alleys; when they stopped to argue stivers and hunger before a bakeshop, Kieve and the boy moved on.

  At the next intersection she paused, looking for the man with the blue cap, but could not see him. The sky had darkened further. Beside her, the boy had hunched into his shortcoat and stood staring at the cobbles.

  He wanted adventures. So far, she had given him a small taste of the strange, a sufficiency of ill-temper and, unwittingly, a night of fear, and now she was proposing to send him back to his bondslavery, to strip him of a decent future. Did it matter that she did it to save his life? She drummed her fingers along her thigh, looking away from him and down a side street. The street ended at the alley running along the grey stones of Old City’s lower walls.

  “Come, I want to show you something,” she said. “We go down here. Be in front of me. When we come to the street’s end, turn left and stop by the wall. Watch out for the constables. Go!”

  They went quickly down the alley. At its end, Kieve looked over the boy’s shoulder at Old City’s decaying walls footed in rubble.

  “Look, see the mouth of that alley, across and to the right? It looks like a shadow.”

  He nodded.

  “We’re going there.” She put her hand on his shoulder. “Move with me. Hush. Wait.”

  She glanced behind them and, seeing no one, gave Pyrs a little push. He moved forward under her hand like an extension of herself; they dashed across the alley and came through the narrow gap in the rubble. The cold stone walls of Old City closed around them.

  “Good. Now fast, up this alley.”

  The alley narrowed, the sky a scrap of clouds above. She spread her arms to touch the walls with her fingertips. The ancient grey stones of the curtain wall to her right matched the ancient grey stones of the castle wall to her left. Just around the next bend the alley would narrow into a sharp point, a nasty trap for running invaders, but before then she reached for Pyrs’ shoulder and turned him neatly into another hidden gap in the castle wall. Kieve whispered, “Up!”

  The steps turned and turned again, thrust from the sides of a narrow, open shaft. The boy almost flew up the stairs, through bars of sunlight from the high windows. The stairwell rose a few feet above the rooftop, so that any enemies who survived the hail of arrows and oils from the windows were forced to perch for a precarious and usually fatal instant, outlined against the sky for the benefit of archers on the shaft’s other side. The steps leading from there to the roof had disappeared. The boy hesitated and leaped down, Kieve behind him. He saw her lifted hand and froze, and she listened. The sounds of the new city rose in the distance, but all else was silence.

  “Good,” she said. “The constables have not seen us.”

  His eyes widened. “This is forbidden?”

  “In a way. Everyone knows Old City is haunted. They’ll think we’re ghosts.”

  His eyes widened more.

  Across the roof, an empty doorway framed blackness. He followed her in and down a short flight of steps to a dark corridor.

  “Let me go first. The floors are rotten.”

  They walked toward a distant haze of sunlight. Kieve counted paces silently. Eleven, twelve, there was the hole in the floor. Fourteen, fifteen, and out into another alley and narrow sunlight.

  “Rider?” He came up beside her. “What is this place?”

  “Marub Castle,” she said. He turned his wide hazel gaze to her. “The first one. Built a thousand years ago, before anyone even thought of nesting on Sterk. The King—there was a king then—enlarged the caves along this side of the Palisade and built walls to protect the openings. Here, watch where you’re going.” He obediently faced forward. “When the builders ran out of caves they put up rooms and palaces along the face of the cliffs, and more walls in front of that. The castle is never more than about twenty to thirty paces wide, maybe fifty in a few places. And all of it deserted.”

  Another narrow alley turned sharply left and she turned them with it. Within a few paces they were in darkness. She had not been this way for a few seasons. She put her hand behind her to touch his shoulder.

  “Hold my shortcoat,” she said, and waited until she felt the boy’s grip on her. Outstretched fingers touched the walls on either side. Her feet tested each step, until she felt the regular dips of stone meeting stone give way to smoothness. She relaxed.

  “Almost there,” she whispered.

  The wind moaned a little down the alley. She took Pyrs’ hand and led him farther into the cave. Light smeared the darkness ahead and to the right. It spread as they approached, lighting the floor and lapping up the walls until they stepped out of darkness into an immense cavern. The roof had long ago caved in at its apex, leaving a ragged gap high overhead. Trees grew from the centuries’ accumulation of dirt and duff and their own fallen selves. Visible between their naked trunks, stone walls sported columns and arches fraught with weathered gargoyles or friezes of leaves and skulls. A small stream, now gleaming ice, branched through the interior forest. Pyrs gasped and made to step forward but she stopped him.

  “Look how the leaves are deep underfoot, and stiff with ice,” she said. “It is treacherous to cross them. They disguise rotten places.”

  He twisted to look up at her, then back at the trees.

  “Still, our way lies on the other side,” she said. “So there’s no help for it. Up we go.”

  “Up?” he echoed.

  “Like squirrels.” She lifted him onto a low-hung branch.

  The trees crowded together, thick with ropy vines and reaching for the light. They moved along the winter network, limb to branch to vine to limb again, deeper into the hall. He faltered a little, and at one high, hidden tree crotch she touched his shoulder.

  “Here. Rest. Lay down and hold the vines.”

  She swung herself into a tangle of branches and limbs beside and a little below him. The wind’s voice shifted and filled with angry muttering. Pyrs stiffened.

  “What’s that?” he breathed. “Ghosts?”

  “No,” she said. “People say that the old Kings are still here, angry that their bones weren’t taken to Sterk. They call that grumbling the Voice of the Dead. The voice of the angry kings.”
Pyrs was silent. “But it’s not,” she continued. “It’s wind in a tower room, at the very top. It comes in through tall, narrow windows. You can stand in the windows and make the song change—playing the Voice like a flute.”

  After a moment he said, “If I stayed with you, if you didn’t send me back to Minst, you could show me that.”

  “If you stay with me, you’ll likely be killed,” she said. “And then you’ll never find a place, find a guild. You made me swear to you. You can’t have forgotten.”

  He was silent for a moment. “I remember everything,” he said finally. “I remember my parents being Taken. I remember it.”

  Kieve turned her head to look at him. He lay in a cradle of branches, staring at the stone sky.

  “I was asleep. I woke up and heard banging, and I saw a light and I hid under the blanket. Then the door broke. My father cursed and there was more banging and shouts. My mother screamed and I put my head out and saw someone carry her out and then they dragged my father away, he was limp and his face bled. Someone stood against the wall, someone in a black cloak like yours. He had his hands over his face, then he took them away and he saw me. I tried to hide but someone grabbed me, someone else, and threw me up over his shoulder and then all I saw was the ground far away, moving, and my mother screamed my name until she stopped.”

  His hands were white on the grey vines. Kieve could not stop looking at him, as though he showed her something she had not seen before, or chosen not to see.

  “I dream about it,” he said. “I see the ground moving and I hear her voice, and then everything is silent and all I see is nothing at all. In my dreams.”

  Wind moved through the naked vines, brushing their rough bark against the rough bark of the tree trunks. Vine and tree whispered together, under the mutter of the Dead. Pyrs put his hands around his branch. He looked like a small boy in a small boat made of twigs and vines.

  “Why did Lord Cadoc kill my parents?” he said.

  She looked away. “I don’t know.”

  The silence this time was different. When she looked back at him, he stared at her, his eyes wide.