by Kate Elliott
He recognized his mistake at once. He’d thought Master Feden’s bluster was born out of obliviousness mixed with arrogance and conceit, so his feint hadn’t been subtle enough. The gaze turned on him now measured him shrewdly, eyes narrowed with a dawning distrust. Joss knew that look well. Reeves saw it all the time, though not from the innocent. Master Feden was smarter than he chose to seem.
“Where are any of us headed, in times like these?” mused the merchant. “We stumble in the dark hoping to find any light that may guide us to a safe haven. We are desperate, truly. Folk are none too careful what well they drink from if they’ve had no drink at all for many days. That’s just how it is.”
“True words,” said Joss, thinking of the commander’s agreement with Master Tanesh. He glanced at the lord of Iliyat, but the man made no polite reply to this heartfelt comment. He didn’t even look up, as if bare dirt were the most interesting companion a man could have. Joss had an idea that Lord Radas was about his own age, more or less forty, although the lord looked younger. Some men had all the luck, although the lord of Iliyat did not seem to be the kind of man who coaxed women, not with those reticent manners. “And you, Lord Radas. How do you keep the valley of Iliyat at peace in these troubled times?”
“With a fence,” said the lord curtly. “A wall at our borders, strong guards, a vigilant eye, and respect for the law. Within Iliyat, we hold to the law.”
There was a passion in the lord’s voice that surprised Joss, even pleased him, yet also, and all at the same time, the skin at the base of his neck tingled with an uneasy shiver, the way it did when his instincts warned him that something wasn’t right.
“The Hundred is fractious,” the lord went on so softly that Joss strained to hear him. “Too many fight, too many argue, too many look away because they have it well enough, although others struggle. Alone, each is frail and selfish. Each town, each clan, each hall lies separate, suspicious of the others, clutching tight to their own small field. Some hold to the law while others give themselves leave to do what they wish while justifying their actions by lying to themselves and to others. Some have already stepped into the shadows.” He looked up, and met Joss’s gaze.
Hammered as by the sun. A vivid flash of memory: Five years after Marit’s death, Joss stands under the humble thatched awning that shelters Law Rock. Drunk, grieving, and angry, he stares at the first lines, hewn long ago into the pillar of granite:
With law shall the land be built.
The law shall be set in stone, as the land rests on stone.
The rock into which the law is bound shall be set aside, in a separate precinct.
A bridge shall guard access to this precinct. Both rock and bridge shall be inviolate.
Here is the truth:
The only companion who follows even after death, is justice.
The Guardians serve justice.
The reeves serve justice.
The reeves serve justice, and so he would. He had nothing else to hold to. Then Lord Radas’s soft voice tore him out of the memory.
“While some, for all their weakness, remain incorruptible.”
Joss blinked, fighting back dizziness. The filtered light cast all things sheltered under the Ladytree in a gentle glow. Feden was sipping at his tea, as though he’d noticed nothing. From all around murmured the sounds of folk at rest, eating, chatting, burping, chortling, while farther out beasts lowed and whuffled, a dog barked, and—there—Scar called out an interrogatory yelp, as if the raptor had been caught in that vision and needed to know Joss was safe.
Lord Radas was staring at the dirt again, eyes half closed, as though he were about to fall asleep. Behind, a youthful slave raised and lowered the large fan like the steady, hypnotic beat of a wing. The air stirred by that fan stung Joss’s eyes, raising tears.
Shaken, he made his courtesies. He went out beyond the Ladytree to let Scar see him, then walked aside to take a piss, to collect himself, to breathe the air although the heat was itself a hammer. No wonder he’d gotten dizzy.
At length, he retreated back to the cooling shelter of the Ladytree and approached the forester and cart master with some trepidation. The cart master had a pair of medium-sized dogs who, as Joss walked up, pulled back their lips to display big teeth. Their ominous growl rumbled so low that he barely heard it, although his neck prickled. But when their master made his greetings, the dogs shimmied over at once for a friendly rub. They had expressive ears held at point when they were alert and flopped over when they relaxed, and their short gray-wire coats were unexpectedly soft.
He and the two men visited for a while, sharing rice wine and dry rice cake, all of it musty, the remnants of journey food. The wine was good, and he nibbled at the rice cake for courtesy’s sake as they discussed the day, the season, the dead year and the new one, and the lands all around.
“Nah, I haven’t seen nothing of raids where I’m from.” The forester had a clipped accent and a strange way of pronouncing some of his words. He was human, though. Not everything that came out of the Wild was. “My fields are the forest. I keep to my place there in the skirts of the Wild, and the wildings keep to theirs in the heart. I’ve never gone farther north than Sandalwood Crossing, for that matter. Once a year I do walk down into Toskala to the Guild Hall on behalf of my clansmen in the Wild. We keep a steady harvest of logs coming out of the Wild, according to our charter. We keep to the boundaries, as the gods did order when the world rose out of the sea.”
“I have a hard time thinking that outlaws would shelter in the Wild,” said Joss.
“If they did, they’d not come out again,” said the cart master with a laugh. He patted his dogs. They wagged their tails.
“What about the Hi Cutoff?” Joss asked.
“She’s safe enough. I run this route every month. I’ve not had trouble, not compared to other tales I’ve heard tell, but I keep my eyes open and you can see also that my good dogs do keep the alert.” He pointed. Two others of the same breed stood guard, almost hidden in the outer branch-roots of the Ladytree, watching over the wagons and the road.
Under the Ladytree, folk dozed as the heat grew more stifling. Joss yawned, and caught a quick nap. Shade Hour drew to a close; the heat lessened as the angle of the sun shifted.
At length, the cart master got to his feet. “We need to get another mey of journey in before sunset, if we want to make River’s Bend in five days.”
Joss drained another cup of wine, made his courtesies, and returned to Scar. A pair of local lads were sitting in the shade of a mulberry tree, watching the eagle from a safe distance. He paused to chat with them; they had more questions than he could answer, and in return they chattered freely about their village and the habitations nearby. Master Tanesh, it transpired, was well known in these parts as a wealthy landholder who treated his hirelings well and his slaves poorly, a man you didn’t want to cross who tithed generously at the local temples and had even set aside land for a temple dedicated to Ilu, the Herald, on his own estate.
Behind, the wagons rolled. Joss made his courtesies, and the boys tagged after until Scar, seeing them coming, raised his proud head and stared them down. The boys stopped dead.
“Nah, come on,” said Joss. He whistled Scar down from the rock, then coaxed the boys forward to stroke the raptor’s copper plumage. This attention the bird accepted with his usual aloof resignation.
“Best go now,” said Joss, and the boys scampered back to the tree, to watch as Joss fastened into his harness. Scar lifted heavily, beating hard with slow wing-strokes, seeking an up-current. Finding it, the eagle rose swiftly. The ground dropped away.
As the eagle began quartering the ground, Joss’s thoughts quartered the afternoon’s conversations. Talk refreshed him as much as drink and food and a nap. He turned the words over and over, seeking patterns, seeking hidden meaning, seeking that which was not meant to be said aloud, but he found nothing yet beyond that strange hammer of memory that had briefly shaken him. Anomalies would co
me clear in time; they usually did. You just had to be patient, let them work free in their own manner.
No one crosses the Liya Pass anymore.
It had become a land of shadows. He’d known that the morning he and the others had found Marit’s gear and clothing, the very clothing she’d been wearing when she and Flirt had flown away from him, the last time she’d been seen alive. He’d known that when they’d found the remains of her mutilated eagle, and months later when he’d flown Flirt’s sun-bleached bones to Heaven’s Ridge and scattered what was left in the valley of silence. Gone altogether. Gods, he’d been so young.
He turned his attention, again, to the lands below.
This region of Low Haldia, still close to Toskala, was well cultivated and closely settled, villages and hamlets strung along trackways. Seen from the height, the many trackways interlaced across the land, reminding him of the nets he’d cast into the sea when he was a lad, living on the coast. Those days seemed dream-like, seen from the height of his life now, many years later. The cordial made by his aunts had tasted sweeter. His mother’s rice porridge had never congealed into lumps. No one had ever gotten hurt, except that time when he and the blacksmith’s son had gotten into a fistfight over pretty Rupa. They’d all been—the hells!—just twelve, celebrating their first return to their birth year. Those days sparked so clear and bright in his memory; all days did, until that day he and Marit had met in the Liya Pass and he had talked her into breaking the boundaries. After that, the curse had settled; he knew it for a fact, because his life had become dulled as with a stain, changed, lessened, corrupted, shadowed. Nineteen cursed years. Better he had stayed home and married pretty Rupa, who had been pretty enough but with a decided lack of interest in anything except her clan’s fish ponds along the bay. For her, the rest of the Hundred might just as well never have existed. No doubt she was still wading thigh-deep in seawater, with a grandchild tied in a sling to her back.
Gods, he was getting old. And inattentive. Scar was circling, waiting for him to make some signal, choose some direction. The commander was right. He’d gotten unreliable. Too much drink. Too much anger. Too much regret.
A company of men marched briskly along a track off to the east. They had weapons enough that the glint of metal gave away their position.
“Come on, old boy.” The eagle took the signal eagerly; he was always keen to go.
They glided on the wind. A man in the company lifted his head and saw them. Others pointed. As they passed over, Joss saw a flag painted with Master Tanesh’s mark and, behind it, the master himself, riding a rangy bay gelding. Ahead lay the tidy fields of a splendid estate, ranks of orchard, a tea plantation, dry-field rice being dug for sowing, mulberry trees, flower beds, and a string of ponds like gems surrounding the whole. This was evidently Tanesh’s original holding, not one of his satellite estates like Allauk, which lay farther north. The temple dedicated to Ilu, the Herald, was sited in a hillier area, unsuitable for agriculture. Skimming over the temple, Joss spotted apprentices striding across the temple grounds and a few envoys in sky-blue cloaks. Strange, now that he thought on it, that there had been no envoys traveling with this train. Normally every merchant train had an envoy of Ilu alongside, carrying messages according to the ancient charters that designated a holy task to each of the priests of each of the seven gods.
With dusk closing in, he returned to the road and followed it west until he found the company, lanterns lit and the wagons arrayed in a closed square, a fence against the night. Landing, he sprung Scar’s harness, examined his feathers, then released him to hunt. The eagle would find his own roost for the night and return at dawn when Joss whistled.
The cart dogs greeted him first, barking happily and pushing in to get pats on the head. The cart master waved to him, but the man was busy with the evening’s settling-out, so Joss strolled through the encampment as it set up for the night’s rest. Nothing of interest. Folk greeted him, he greeted them, and passed on. There was one face he did not see.
“What happened to that merchant out of the south?” Joss asked the cart master later. “Feden, his name was.”
“He turned back after Shade Hour. He didn’t go any farther than those Ladytrees where we took our rest. Did you not see him go?”
“I did not,” said Joss, taken aback. “I flew straight east, I admit to you. Then north. I didn’t cross back that way except the once, and saw nothing on the road then, but I might easily have missed him. Did he go alone?”
“He had a ten of guards with him. They had the look of ordinands. Disciplined, well-trained lads.”
“He left, just like that? What did he come for? It’s a cursed strange thing to travel along all this way, and then turn around without even having reached a market.”
The cart master scratched his chin. “Well, now, that I don’t know. He sealed some bargain with the lord of Iliyat, for as we made ready to leave, he turned right around and announced himself satisfied with the bargain—whatever it was—and was going home. It seems he got what he came for, and so he left.”
AT RIVER’S BEND, reached midway through the fifth day of the journey, a cohort of armed men who had marched down from the valley of Iliyat met Lord Radas to escort him the rest of the way home. After some negotiation, the Herelians paid to accompany them, and Lord Radas allowed it. The cart master had already been hired to go all the way to Iliyat, and he was eager to continue on while there was still daylight. Stopping only to water the dray beasts and purchase provisions, the main portion of the caravan moved on.
Across the river lay the vanguard of the Wild, the towering forest that engulfed all the land to be seen on the other side of the River Hi. Figures on the far shore greeted the forester and his pair of apprentices with a wave, then got back to work lashing together logs for the float downstream. The forester made his courtesies and took the ferry across to join them.
That left Joss with a much smaller company, the four merchants headed north and northwest into western Low Haldia. With the Iliyat contingent shorn away, the company had a much more vulnerable look, and it was clear that the remaining merchants were nervous. They had a dozen local lads out of Low Haldia to guard them, but any experienced band of thieves could make short work of this crew. In truth, Joss had no obligation to go farther. The commander had ordered him to return after escorting the company safely to River’s Bend. But he had come to like the way the foursome gossiped without much malice, just in the way of trading information. They were generous with their food and drink. Udit had been looking him over with increasing interest and making the kind of jokes that indicated she might be willing to indulge in a little night play. He wanted to get a good look at the hinterlands, anyway. He might hope to meet another reeve on patrol, exchange news, trade intelligence. There were many villages and hamlets in these parts that waited patiently for a reeve to fall out of the sky so they might put to that reeve certain complaints and questions that the local officials were unable to deal with.
It was the task he was best at, the one he craved because out there in the isolated hamlets was the one place where he felt he was doing some good.
“I’ll travel a bit farther with you,” he told them.
Udit smiled. She had a pleasing figure, if a little thin for his taste. They decided to rest for the night within the safety of the town’s palisade rather than risk an extra night on the road. The foursome sat him down in the local inn and plied him with cordial, as their thanks.
Later, after nightfall, the innkeeper in River’s Bend gifted him with a soft corner in the hayloft over the stables for his rest. As he stripped off his reeve leathers and lay down on his cloak, his head reeled from the many cups of cordial he had downed with the evening’s meal. Strange, now that he thought on it: Master Feden had offered him no hospitality, nothing to drink or eat. Nor had Lord Radas. It was cursed rare for a reeve to be refused hospitality.
The air under the stable roof was stale, and the scent of musty hay tickled his throat. I
t was entirely black, no light at all even where he could see through the gaps between the boards in the loft. No flame burned, no lamp illuminated the night. He had been in the last group of drinkers, a passel of middle-aged and elderly locals who had done nothing but jaw on about a recent marriage between a local girl and a lad come from Farsar because, he’d said, there was no work to be had in Farsar, no apprenticeships open except binding oneself to the temple past the usual youth’s year of service. In the north, he’d heard, you could get work, but the locals considered this statement at length and found it lacking, except that it was true that a young man might hire himself out as a guardsman to a well-to-do clan. That was what the world was coming to. No one to do the real work; all those young men lounging around with spears in their hands, some of them with the debt mark tattooed by their left eye and no proof they’d served out their debt. Meanwhile, they pretended to be ordinands dedicated to Kotaru the Thunderer without taking on the true dedicate’s responsibility.
Weren’t old men and women always complaining about how much better the old days were? And hadn’t they been, truly? Eyelids drooping, body growing heavy, he sank under, sliding into sleep.
The dream always unveils itself in a gray unwinding of mist he has come to dread. He is walking but cannot see any of the countryside around him, only shapes like skeletal trees with leafless limbs and branches—cold-killed, as they call them in the Arro highlands, where, beyond the kill line, the trees wither in the dry season and are reborn when the rains come. In the dream he is dead, yet unable to pass beyond the Spirit Gate. He is a ghost, hoping to awaken from the nightmare nineteen years ago, but the nightmare has already swallowed him.
The mist boils as though churned by a vast intelligence. It is here that the dream twists into the vision that is agony, the reason that even after all these years he cannot let go. The mist will part, and he will see her figure in the unattainable distance, walking along a slope of grass or climbing a rocky escarpment, a place he can and must never reach because he has a duty to those on earth whom he has sworn to serve.
