“They’re going to take it all away,” she said.
Bel said nothing.
Some wizard was changing the nature of Rowan’s existence. She could either accept an arbitrary limit to her mind’s reach, and so be less than a steerswoman, or deceive, and so be no steerswoman at all.
She loved it too much. Less was better than none.
Abruptly, inconsistency caught at her mind: the hawk—it had not moved.
Rowan began to analyze what her senses had brought her. The breeze was from the southwest. Would it be different higher up? There should be a downdraft of cooler air over the river; a hawk would have to beat and circle to maintain the same perspective. The forest was alive with small game; a hawk would have found prey by then.
“Get back,” she told Bel, and quickly moved away from the river’s edge.
They stopped among the trees, Rowan trying to see the speck through the new green leaves above. Bel had no sword, but a wicked knife had appeared in her hand. “What is it?”
Rowan spotted it. “We’re being watched. Or the Archives are.”
“By a wizard?”
“Who else can fly?”
Bel peered up. “Will he attack?”
“I don’t know. It hasn’t moved. Perhaps we weren’t seen, or weren’t recognized.”
Bel nodded. “Then it’s watching the Archives. We should tell them.”
“Yes. Let’s keep off the path.” Rowan led the way through the forest, accurately cutting around the twists of the dirt track, first walking, then running.
They entered by way of the stables, breathless from the climb. Inside, Josef was currying Artos’s horse, Berry seated on a barrel nearby. Rowan stopped, trying to calm her breathing. “Berry,” she said. “Berry, I’m sorry, I’m going to do it.”
Berry and Josef exchanged a glance; then he silently went back to his work. Berry rose. “What made you change your mind?”
“The Archives are being watched. By something that flies.”
“It’s not just me, anymore,” Rowan told the resident steerswomen. They were assembled in the chart room, eight women and two men, some in chairs, some seated casually on the edges of the sturdy copying tables, one standing by the window, occasionally scanning the sky. To one side of the room, Josef and Bel stood watching the proceedings.
“I was thinking about my own life,” Rowan continued. “I love the steerswoman’s life, and I wasn’t willing to change it. But first this restriction, and now this . . . spying . . .” She was standing before the three steps that led to the master chart. She spread her hands in a broad gesture. “How long before we become so changed that none of us are steerswomen anymore? The whole way of life is threatened, for every one of us. I . . .” She paused, shaping her thoughts. “I can’t stand for it. I have to try to stop it, whatever it may take. Or at the very least, I have to know why.”
Sarah smiled with a teacher’s pride. “Spoken like a steerswoman: she has to know why.”
There were quiet comments around the room as they consulted each other briefly. Suddenly weary, Rowan sat down on the lowest step and watched them, waiting.
Henra stood and addressed the gathering. “This is no small thing. We all will have a hand in this, I’m afraid, and if someone asks, it would be best if we could refrain from revealing Rowan’s mission . . .” She trailed off, uncharacteristically hesitant. Rowan recognized on the Prime’s face the same confused pain Rowan felt at the prospect of living with deceit. As Arian had said, when it came to the doing of the thing . . .
Abruptly, Rowan remembered a simple bit of medical knowledge learned from Maranne in Wulfshaven: a poisoned limb is amputated. “No.” Faces turned toward her. “Steerswomen mustn’t lie. I have to resign the order.”
Shock filled the room, followed by protests. Amid the babble of voices, Rowan felt suddenly empty, a hollow shape of flesh with no center and no identity.
Bel and Josef turned perplexed gazes at each other. Speaking above the noise, Bel asked, “But can’t she join again, when her mission is finished ?”
“It’s never been done,” Arian said.
“Not true,” Hugo put in, and the people quieted to hear him. “When I was training, there was a steerswoman, named Silva—”
Henra nodded. “Yes.”
“She mapped the nearer western mountains,” Keridwen supplied.
“That’s right. But that was later.” Hugo continued. “While on the road in the east, she fell in love with a farmer there. She left us to marry and live with him.”
“And he died,” the Prime said.
“Pneumonia. But his love was all that kept her there, and she became unhappy. She fostered her children to his sister and came back to us.”
“And did very good work,” Keridwen added, her eyes on the master chart, where the near edge of the western mountains showed clear and accurate.
The Prime turned back to Rowan, and she was like a woman released from some great pain. “Will that suit you?”
Rowan nodded mutely. She felt distant, as if she had already departed and was on some long unknown road with no guidance.
She looked down at her left hand and saw the silver ring on her middle finger, the band with that odd half twist that made it a thing both mysterious and logical: an object of three dimensions, yet possessing only one face, one edge, folded back into reality by the simple laws of geometry. Without thinking, she removed it and held it in the palm of her hand. It seemed weightless.
More quickly, as if by hesitating she would lose her commitment, she slipped the thin gold chain over her head and let it dangle from her fingers. She looked at Henra.
“Hold on to them,” the Prime said, “and wear them again when you can.”
Rowan placed them both in the leather sack on its thong, nestling beside the uncanny jewel. Tucked under her blouse, the sack felt faintly heavier, a promise set aside.
Henra sighed, then reorganized herself, efficient. “You’ll have to choose another name—and remember to answer to it.”
Looking faintly puzzled, Keridwen added, “She should wear a different cloak, as well. We’re not the only people who use gray felt cloaks, but each one of us does.”
“That green cloak she arrived in,” Hugo suggested.
“That will do,” Henra agreed. Passing Rowan as she climbed the stairs, she walked to the master chart. “Now, as to her route: she’ll have to avoid both Five Corners and Donner—”
“But that’s not enough.” Heads turned to the side of the room, where Bel stepped forward from her place by the wall. Behind her, Josef crossed his arms and nodded grimly. The Outskirter continued. “She can’t just go, and dress differently, and not use her own name. She needs a reason for going, something that no one would think twice about. She needs something else to be.” She scanned the faces in amazement. “Don’t you people know how to protect yourselves at all?”
The accusation pushed past Rowan’s weariness of spirit; she discovered herself angry. “Yes, we do,” she said vehemently, then with awkwardness corrected her choice of words. “Yes, they do. Steerswomen can protect themselves from bandits and cutpurses on the road. They can protect themselves from wild beasts. They can protect themselves from those who would abuse their good natures. We’ve never had to, never wanted to deceive.”
Bel stood before her, solid and sensible. “Time to learn.”
Suddenly, without derision, Josef laughed. “Look at you, a bunch of steerswomen,” he said. “You know so much, but the one thing you don’t know about is lying.” He held up his index finger, like an instructor. “Well, I can tell Rowan how to fool people. The best way to lie is to tell the truth.”
The steerswomen looked at each other in perplexity. Bel expanded on Josef’s statement. “That’s right, you say true things—except, you leave some things out. That way, the person takes what you’ve said and makes his own conclusions—the wrong ones, because of what’s missing.”
Josef gave her an affirming nod.
“And that’s your lie. And the second best way is to tell the truth—something obvious, something the other person knows down to his bones—and add your lie onto it, so long as it fits in.”
“The person knows that the part he can check is true, and if the rest makes sense, he’ll believe it,” Bel said.
“And the last good way to lie is to say nothing. Let the other person guess as much as he likes, and when he’s dead wrong,” he said with a smile, “you tell him how clever he is.”
The group relaxed. The alien concept of deception had been reduced to principles. One thing every steerswoman understood was the application of principles.
More confident, Henra said, “Very well. Without compromising ourselves, we can help Rowan by seeing for her what’s unsaid.” She gestured. “Rowan, stand up please.” Rowan rose and stood before them, the great master chart looming at her back. “Now, everyone, imagine you’ve never seen her. Try to remove that information from your mind. What can you tell, just by looking at her? What is this woman?”
Rowan waited under their discerning gazes. What was she? Ignoring her present pain, she thought back to her childhood, before she had met Keridwen, when no one around her shared that most basic part of her nature. What had she been then?
Nothing. She felt a return of that emptiness, that blank solitude and unnamed yearning that had characterized her life before. She felt, again, like the child who saw too much, thought too quickly, and had no one who could understand her.
“She travels, constantly, outdoors,” Sarah noted. “See how dark her skin is, how streaked her hair. And she travels on foot; look at her stance, and the development of her legs.”
“The upper part of her body is not developed,” Arian said. “She’s not a laborer; she doesn’t live by the use of her muscles.”
“Her fingers are ink-stained,” Henra said. “It’s the sort of staining that lives in the cracks of one’s hands and can’t be removed. She uses a pen, every single day.”
“She might be a scribe,” Keridwen suggested.
“A scribe who travels?” Arian said. “Not likely.”
“Notice how composed she is,” Hugo put in, tilting his head in study. “This is a woman who knows she can handle whatever she gets into. And see how she watches us? She’s thinking, and she’s used to thinking. She’s used to figuring out for herself what to do.”
“That spells steerswoman to me,” the dark-haired woman noted.
“Try to put that out of your mind,” Henra said.
Rowan listened to the information, considering the clues as if they applied to some stranger, grateful for a problem to occupy her loneliness. A scribe would not travel, not often. Would a clerk? A student?
Berry addressed Rowan. “Say something.”
“Say something?”
“Anything, just speak. Describe the weather.”
Rowan looked out the window. “It’s a beautiful, cloudless day. It’s comfortably cool, but the sunlight coming in heats the stone floor. I can feel a draft from the warm air rising.” She realized that she had noticed more than the average person would, and had supplied the information casually. She would have to stop that.
Hugo made a wry face. “Well, by that voice, she’s educated.”
“No,” Berry said. “Or, not necessarily. In the north, they have that careful manner of speech, even among the uneducated. And the crispness of her consonants, and the rhythm, that confirms it. She’s from the north, past the western curve of the Long North Road. Far north, I’d say, from the sound of her vowels. I think she’s from one of the farthest settlements, by the Red Desert. I’d place the town nearest as Umber.”
Bel looked at Rowan in amazement. “Is that all true?”
Rowan winced. “Exactly.”
Henra was disturbed. “That’s far too precise. She advertises her origins.”
“But Berry’s using a steerswoman’s ear,” Arian said. “Would the average person notice this?”
Everyone turned to Josef. “Average person, eh?” he said wryly. “All right, well, she sounds a little . . . foreign, but not so much. I wouldn’t think twice. Say it again?” Rowan repeated the sentences. Josef nodded. “Maybe educated. Sort of . . . stiff.”
“Bel?’
“You all sound foreign.”
Henra nodded. “Perhaps that will do, then. As she’ll be traveling in the south, it may be sufficient to simply admit she’s from somewhere in the north. Bel, take Rowan’s place for a moment.”
They exchanged places, Bel eyeing the group with suspicion. Then she stood before them, a solid, wide-legged stance, strong arms relaxed, hands comfortably by her sides. Her chin was tilted up in unvoiced challenge.
Rowan looked away briefly, filling her eyes with the gray of stone walls, clearing her mind of preconceptions. Then she looked back, with a fresh point of view.
She saw it immediately, and her voice and three others spoke together. “A warrior.”
“Undeniably,” Henra admitted.
“A solitary warrior,” Hugo amended. “One not used to regimentation.”
“And she’ll be on the road,” Berry pointed out. “A traveling warrior; that means a mercenary.”
Rowan took that information and tried to integrate it with what had been said about her own appearance, feeling a touch of surprise, as if she had expected all her steerswoman’s abilities to vanish with her ring and chain. She speculated. What would bring two such people together? Why would they travel? What would be their relationship?
It fell together with the perfection of a discovered truth. So perfect, and yet so untrue; it was like an immense joke, and she laughed, bitterly. The steerswomen looked at her in amazement.
Rowan spread her hands and addressed the group. “I’ve got it.”
11
He had killed a man, his first week on the road.
He was a little surprised at how calmly he had done it. He had killed him as simply as he would kill a wolf, and it was a wolf, really, a bandit. The gods only knew what the man expected to gain from a boy like Willam; just an easy victim, perhaps. Still, Willam had heard the sound, strung his bow with a mindless speed, and let fly as soon as he saw the knife. He actually had not felt afraid at all.
He was smart enough not to trust to a speed and cold-bloodedness he had only felt the once. But he began to worry about the wisdom of keeping to the deserted back trails. Close to his home village, he had thought it best. He knew he was conspicuous: a big lad with red-blond hair, brown eyes light enough to be called copper by most, and at fourteen years well on his way to acquiring a blacksmith’s burly arms and shoulders. One sentence was enough to identify him to anyone he knew, and he surely did not want word to get back to his father. Not that he thought his father might follow. Plenty of young people left home; Will had just left a bit sooner than most.
He had been sorry to leave, and frightened, as well. Strange, how one could be frightened of something big and vague, like leaving home alone, and be calm face-to-face with a real bandit. Maybe that was how it was in life. Willam didn’t know.
Those last few weeks at home had been too strange, too busy to allow much time or space for worry: trying to go about his days as normal, doing his work, then spending every spare moment in his shack in the yard, even slipping out at night, to make his preparations. No one bothered him in his shack. There had been enough accidents over the years that people had the sense to stay away. If they wanted him, they always stood at a good distance and called out. They were cautious.
He was cautious, too. He had not been, when he was very young, but experience had taught him harshly—taught him to think carefully, move slowly, control as much as possible. One had to take risks to learn, but he discovered that if he was careful about everything else, then the one risk he took would not hurt him: He could do almost the same thing, over and over, taking just one different risk each time, and in the end he learned what he wanted to know. And he knew it all the way down to its bones.
/> Other people didn’t think like that, he knew; they acted, for the most part, on impulse and emotion. Perhaps that was why what he did was so incomprehensible to them, and sometimes frightening. Still, when they needed something special, it was to him that they came.
But magic did not help him on the road. His bow helped him. And caution.
Caution told him to stay to the back trails as long as he could, then caution told him when it was better to take a main road. Unfortunately, by that time, he was lost.
Leaving his village, he had struck northeast, taking his bearings from the Eastern Guidestar at night, doing the best he could by guesswork during the day. Eventually he met the river Wulf. Actually, he thought he had met it a dozen times; any river he crossed was the Wulf to him, until he reached the next one. When he finally did come to its banks and stood gaping in astonishment at its wild speed and impossible width, he felt more than a little like an ignorant village boy. Bitterly, he reminded himself that that was exactly what he was. However fantastic his mission, however high and mighty his plans, it was best to keep that fact in mind.
A riverman took one of Willam’s small supply of coppers in return for a trip across, and Will spent the passage carefully protecting his pack from the spray slapped up from the windy water. On the other side, a careful check proved that the contents were safe and dry.
From there he began to travel due east, and within the hour he was hopelessly adrift in the trackless woody uplands. He beat his way cross-country for a full day until he found a path. It went south, but he took it.
But soon he was no longer traveling alone. He met a merchant on the path, and she had a very good idea: travel south to the main road and try to connect with an east-going caravan. Will did not have the fare, but no one would stop him if he wanted to tag along. Naturally, he would not be under their protection, but it would take quite an attack to really threaten a caravan. Will was glad of the suggestion; perhaps a bit less glad at the company.
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