The Lost Steersman (Steerswoman Series)

by Rosemary Kirstein

  Her short hair looked like it had been trimmed with a knife; and it was a dry, harsh yellow on top, darker under. Her skin was sunburned and weather rough. And at first Steffie had thought her much older than he, from the lines about her eyes. But close up, you could see that the wrinkles weren’t real— just pale lines on darker skin, as if she had spent a long time squinting into long distances against bright sunlight. She looked like a woman from a land with no shadows.

  And there was something about the way she sat, too, forward from the back of her chair, both her feet on the ground. It was like she figured she might need to move somewhere else quick, and she thought she should stay ready. Except, not really thinking about it, because her mind was all on her work, you could see that from her face. So it was like her body had a mind all its own, and by itself it made her sit that way, all ready to go, just in case.

  And that sword— seemed like her body really wanted to keep that sword nearby. One time Rowan was reading at the table, got up with the book still in her hand, went to the sword where it leaned against the hearth, brought it back, and laid it right down on the table in front of her— and never stopped reading once all that time. It was spooky.

  It was like some kind of instinct. It was like she had taught her body to take over and protect her whenever her mind was busy someplace else.

  It made Steffie queasy to watch her. It made him remember that there were places out in the world where life was not safe.

  But he did watch her— he just couldn’t help it, it was all so odd— so now, when the front door opened with a bang and the steerswoman looked up, Steffie saw that her hand went right to the hilt of her sword, slung on the back of her chair. He couldn’t help wondering what trouble it was that her body, if not her head, expected.

  But it was only Gwen, lugging the bucket she’d filled from the well out in the square and trailing a half dozen children of all different ages, each toting a jar or pot. “I found help,” Gwen said gruffly, and she led her helpers in like a stream of ducklings up to the hearth, where each one added to the cauldron.

  The steerswoman had a way of smiling that happened in two steps, all most too quickly to separate: first her eyes, then her mouth. It was when her mouth smiled that her hand left the sword, and Steffie was surprised to see a big grin.

  She liked the children; you could tell. “Thank you so much,” she said to them, like they were each special. “That’s very helpful.”

  They shuffled their feet, made shy smiles, then lined up in front of her, waiting.

  Rowan glanced at Gwen. “They’re expecting a reward,” Gwen told her.

  I see … One girl spoke. “Mira used to give us sweets.”

  Rowan winced. “Are there any on hand?”

  “None,” Steffie said.

  “Or beer.”

  “Beer!” She leaned back in her chair. “Are the people of Alemeth in the habit of giving their children beer?”

  “Yes,” Gwen answered straight off, and Steffie nodded along. And there was plenty on hand, since Brewer had taken to sending over Mira’s usual daily ration, which Rowan hardly touched.

  But you have to be honest with a steerswoman. “Well,” Steffie said, “I guess really, it depends on the parents … Some do and some don’t …”

  Rowan nodded and turned back to the children. “I’m sorry, I can’t give you beer unless I know that your parents approve. But here— ” She shuffled the papers before her, found one that was blank, and began to fold it. It grew smaller and smaller in her scarred and stained hands, until at last she held a little triangle.

  “Like this.” She moved her hand: a sharp downward flick. The thing let out a sudden loud pop, and everyone jumped. The children shrieked and giggled, and nothing else would do but that Rowan make one for each child. Then the whole bunch of them boiled out into the street, snapping and popping like chestnuts in the hearth.

  Rowan watched them go, smiling a little, like she was thinking of something similar but from long ago, or maybe very far away. “Well.” She turned back and looked down at her work, and her mouth twisted. “I’m getting nowhere with this.” She pulled the pages together, stacked the books, and stood up. “I think I have time to see about organizing that second shelf. Gwen, please let me know when the water is ready. I can’t have you scrubbing all those dishes by yourself; you’ve done far too much already. I hardly know how to thank you.” She turned away and took a half dozen steps toward the aisles of dusty bookshelves that filled the rest of the room, then stopped. She looked like she thought something might be lurking back there, and frankly Steffie didn’t blame her.

  He took the chance to say, “I think we should give up on that rug. Just chuck it out.”

  “It’s just as well,” the steerswoman replied, sort of far-off. “Unfortunately, we can’t chuck out the entire house.”

  Steffie jumped at a clang from the bathtub. Gwen had kicked it. “Mira liked things just the way they are!” she declared.

  In the space of that clang, Rowan had come back to her chair, putting her right next to her sword again. “I’m sure she did,” she said to Gwen, seeming not to notice where she was or how she got there, “but I don’t, and no good steerswoman would. However much you may have liked Mira, the truth is that she simply wasn’t doing her job.”

  She waved one hand at the shelves behind her. “Taking care of the Annex is an honor and a trust,” she said. “All of these books are careful copies of books in the Steerswomen’s Archives. If something should ever happen to the Archives, these books may become the only place where this information is held. The steerswomen have worked hard to gather all this.” She was angry now. “There are facts in these books— there are lives in these books,” she told Gwen, “years— centuries of individual human lives. Look— ” She stormed over to one shelf in the first rank and came back with a book that she had put by earlier. She opened it toward the middle and held it up for Gwen to see. “There. That’s me, at the age of twenty-two. My first year as a steerswoman; and everything I learned or discovered in that year is right here.” Gwen gave the book a blank stare. She couldn’t read.

  “The original is in the Archives,” Rowan went on. “There’s a copy here and another in the Annex in the western mountains. And that is all.” Then she riffled the pages at Gwen. From the middle of the book, all the way to the back, the pages were moldy and bored through with wormholes. “That’s what Mira thought of my life.”

  She put the book down and rested one hand on it, the hand that had the scars. “Most of the books are in that condition, or worse,” she said, still looking down, like she was talking to the book. “They’re moldering in dust; they’re fused shut with damp. There are entire cratefulls still in the boxes they arrived in. They’re not cleaned, they’re not shelved, and nothing’s been catalogued for what looks like thirty years.”

  She looked up at Gwen. “And in return for this service, Mira received a home, a stipend— and apparently a position of some respect in this town. Had Mira not been a steerswoman, I would care not at all how she lived her life. But apparently her work, and her sisters’, meant nothing to her.”

  But trust Gwen to give no ground. She tossed her head. “Paper and ink and books aren’t lives. Mira’s life was her own, and she was alive and living it, and that’s more important than dusting and organizing. It’s mostly dead people’s lives in those books, isn’t it? Dead and gone, and who cares what they did?”

  The words seemed to surprise Rowan, and she stood with her brows knit, thinking hard. After a while, she said, “Mira was a steerswoman, correct? And if you ask any steerswoman a question, she must answer, isn’t that true?”

  Gwen crossed her arms. “She always did.”

  “That’s the rule,” Steffie put in. He couldn’t see what Rowan was driving at.

  The steerswoman drew in and let out a long breath. “I,” she said, “have questions. I have a great many questions. And, unfortunately, the people I would most like to ask them
of ”— and here she threw out her arms suddenly— “happen to be dead!” She snatched up one of the other books on the table, held it tight in her two hands. “The steerswoman who wrote this book traveled more in one year, and saw more, than either of you will in your entire lifetimes. Somewhere in here or there”— and she turned back toward the shelves, angry— “someone might have an answer for me, or part of an answer or a clue or even a rumor … They’d tell me if they could.”

  Dead people, talking; the idea sent a chill up Steffie and down again.

  “If the catalog and indexes had been kept up,” Rowan went on, “I might have a chance of finding likely subjects quickly… proper abstracts would give me some idea of where at least to begin looking … even shelving the books in chronological order would help. Instead”- -and she set the book down with a little slam— “I’ll have to look at every book that comes to hand, one by one, and set them in order myself. A proper search would take years. I’ll be doing Mira’s job at the same time I’m doing my own.”

  Dead steerswomen, still answering questions. Like ghost sailors still sailing, ghost blacksmiths still pounding away, invisible. But think of that: imagine liking something so much that you’d keep right on doing it, even after you were dead. “Does Mira have a book in there?”

  “Possibly.” The steerswoman did not sound much interested. “Very likely, I suppose. Something from her early career, perhaps. I certainly haven’t found her current logbook about anywhere.”

  “Waste of time, if you ask me. Mira had other things to do,” Gwen said. “I never saw her bothering about writing in some old book!” Then she snatched up the kindling carrier from the hearth and stomped straight out the back door.

  “And I am not in the least bit surprised!” Rowan snapped back; then she stormed off herself, not down the bookshelves but upstairs. Steffie heard her feet crossing Mira’s room overhead and then some bangs as she shifted something or other, more footsteps, creaks, and then nothing. Leaving Steffie standing alone in the middle of the empty room.

  “Right,” he said to no one in particular. Two women arguing; leave it alone. He’d learned that one early on, house full of sisters and all.

  That sword had gone upstairs with Rowan, somehow. He didn’t see it happen, but it was gone now. Figured.

  He went back to sweeping.

  After a while, Gwen came back in with the carrier jammed full of kindling— which they didn’t really need, because there was plenty by the hearth. And she bumped right into Steffie on the way, too, and shoved him aside with her shoulder, even though there was plenty of room to go around him.

  Which naturally sent his mind off in a whole other direction, knowing her like he did. As signals go, that one usually worked pretty well, and he started laying out a few plans in his head. Gwen peaceful was nice enough, but Gwen angry could be really interesting, if you came at it right.

  Of course, Rowan was up in the bedroom. Still, she had to leave it sometime …

  So Steffie played innocent while Gwen clattered with the kindling, grumbling and sounding like she was making a mess of it, which she never did for real. He let it go on for a while, sort of building up to a nice boiling point, and just when she got to sounding really frustrated, he set his broom aside and made to go over and help her—

  Overhead, Rowan started moving again, toward the bedroom door. Good timing, Steffie thought.

  But then it came to him that while Mira never minded when he and Gwen slipped upstairs, Rowan might be a whole other matter …

  Better Not, he decided. So he just stayed put. Which wasn’t easy, now that he’d got his mind set on things, so to speak, but there you are.

  Then Rowan came down the stairs, slow, carrying something, and using both hands to do it, even though it was small enough to carry in just one.

  “Gwen,” she said, when she got to the worktable, “I’m sorry we argued.” She sounded a bit stiff, but she went on. “It was entirely my fault. Mira’s choice of habit had nothing to do with you. The fact that it makes my own work difficult isn’t your fault or your concern.” She put the thing in her hands down on the table, but carefully, like there was a spider inside. It turned out to be a little, dusty box.

  The sword was slung over her arm by its belt; she put it back on the chair. “The Annex seems to be a second home to you, to both of you, and I hope you’ll continue to consider it so. I’m sorry you lost Mira; I hope she was as good a friend to you as you are to her. It was very kind of you to give so much help to an elderly woman.”

  It was a pretty speech, but Steffie still wished Rowan was someplace else— out of the house altogether, in fact.

  Gwen straightened up from the hearth and eyed her. “Mira was a steerswoman. You’re supposed to help a steerswoman.” Her head tilted, one eyebrow up, and she looked Rowan up and down. “Any steerswoman.”

  Steffie could see something go thump inside Rowan, and right then he wondered if maybe it was him who should leave the house. Out the back. Fast.

  “Yes,” Rowan said, even stiffer than before. “Well.” Then— moving so small and careful that Steffie just knew she really wanted to do something big and wild— she turned the box around so it faced Gwen, and lifted up the lid. “A steerswoman,” she said, “cannot do that,” and she pointed inside, “and remain a steerswoman.”

  Then, like something inside of her let go, she was moving quickly, snatching something up off the table— a wrapped package— and then she grabbed her sword and was gone, straight out the front door.

  Leaving a lot of silence behind. Which went on for a while.

  Then Gwen walked wide around him to get to the table, so wide he couldn’t have touched her even if he reached out. “What’s this, then?” she said.

  “A box,” Steffie said stupidly, feeling all off balance; but the mood was gone, now, he knew that. He looked again. “A trinket box?”

  A cheap-looking one, at that, and little and dusty, though not as dusty as most things in the house. Remembering how Rowan had acted with it, he stayed far back and had to lean way over to look inside …

  What had Rowan just said? “Does it mean that?” he asked out loud, “if you take them off? That you’re not a steerswoman?”

  “Make sense,” Gwen told him, and picked up the box and dumped it out, exactly the way he hadn’t.

  There on the tabletop: puddle of gold, twist of silver. A steerswoman’s chain and ring. “Mira took them off,” he said.

  “Never. We buried them with her, like we’re supposed. I should know, I helped lay her out.” Gwen picked up the ring, looked at it closer, and made a noise. “Not Mira’s, any fool could tell. it’s too big.” And with a flick she tossed it up in the air toward Steffie.

  “Whoa, hup!” He snatched at it, missed it with his right hand, caught it with his left.

  But when his hand closed around the ring, it didn’t feel big at all. He opened his hand and looked; and it seemed normal sized, lying on his palm.

  Which was funny; so, sort of to prove it to himself, he slipped it on. And, sure enough, it looked just right on his own big hand—

  Then he slipped it off again quickly, feeling spooked, like it might be haunted.

  Thing was, though, it fit. “Well, that’s a man’s size,” Steffie said. Had to be. Big for almost any woman’s hand; not big for his own.

  Gwen laughed out loud. “A man steerswoman?”

  “Well. Guess not.” But too big for Mira, that was sure.

  Then the water was hot, and Gwen rolled up her sleeves and set to work, ignoring Steffie just like he wasn’t there at all. Which put an end to those plans he’d been laying, no doubt about that.

  So Steffie gave up, heaved a sigh, and went back to work himself. But first he put that ring and chain back in their box, wiped the dust off the box with his sleeve so he wouldn’t be told to do it later, and put it up on the mantelpiece.

  And he forgot all about it, until much later.

  2

  How do you f
ind a man?

  The steerswoman moved quickly down the street, long, angry strides.

  How, if you have never seen him, never heard him described, did not know where he lived? How, if he wished not to be found?

  And how, most especially, if he were the most powerful wizard in the world?

  For all Rowan knew, the wizard Slado might dwell on the opposite side of the world; he might assume any number of disguises; he might render himself invisible or so cloud Rowan’s mind that he could stride down the street at her side, unseen, undetectable—

  This thought brought her up short, and she stopped in the middle of the street. She looked about.

  On one side of Old High Street, four houses attached each to the other, with four doors in four different, faded colors; on the other, single houses, of plastered brick washed with pale colors.

  The street was empty. There was no one else present.

  The steerswoman took the moment to set her package on the ground, then carefully strapped on her sword, recovered the package, and resumed walking, somewhat more slowly.

  No person could render himself invisible; she was certain of it.

  But, magic, a far corner of her mind reminded her.

  To be unseen was to be either absent, blocked from view, or somehow disguised—

  But, it came again, magic.

  For most of her life, Rowan had doubted the very existence of magic. She had been proven wrong, again and again: a tiny statue that moved without life, a room that filled with light at the turn of a wheel, gates that opened in the presence of an amulet—

  The great fortress of the wizards Shammer and Dhree, shattered by the touch of a flaming arrow sent by a boy only fourteen years old—

  And Slado’s killing heat, pouring down from the sky.

  Magic was real. And the steerswoman must believe.

  But surely— and Rowan held tightly to this thought— surely even magic must have limits. If an invisible watcher were nearby, his or her presence must still leave some clue.