by Kate Elliott
So the journey passed.
One evening, riding through a series of isolated valleys, she spotted a campfire in the trees. After dismounting, she led Warning under the cover of pine and tollyrake. Alone, she walked forward alongside the road. Night wrens queried, cicadas buzzed, evening chats chivered. Her hearing had sharpened so much that it seemed she could hear every mouse creeping and night cat padding through the undergrowth.
Ahead, the forest was cut back into a clearing rigged out as a caravan rest point with troughs, hitching posts, fire pits, and a pair of corrals. She surveyed the open space. Aui! Two eagles slumbered upright on opposite sides of the clearing, talons fixed around logs mounted as perches. One wore a hood; the other did not, but its head was tucked against a wing.
The campfire burned well back in the trees. She approached cautiously. Because of her newly acute vision, she was able to step around clumps of thorn-fern and whispering thistle and avoid roots grown out from the earth or branches torn free in the recent storms.
A man and a woman sat on either side of a briskly burning fire, their faces in light and their backs in shadow. Short cloaks hung from their shoulders to keep off the rain, should it come. By the cut of their leathers and the tight trim of their hair, they were reeves.
The man gesticulated as he spoke, hands cutting circles in the air. “I say we abandon Argent Hall. There’s nothing we can do, Dov. Nothing. Garrard is dead. We get out while we still can.”
“We can’t just abandon people. The fawkners will never go. They won’t leave eagles with no one to tend to them. There must be something to salvage. Something left we can do.”
He laughed bitterly. “We lost. Argent Hall is the playing ground for bullies, cowards, thieves, and murderers now. You would think that every crooked reeve has flown in and made himself a cozy nest in our lovely hall.” He choked down a sob.
She reached out to touch his hand. “Garrard’s death isn’t your fault.”
“If I’d called out sooner—” he whispered.
She slapped him under the chin. He reared back, and she jumped to her feet. “There’s nothing you could have done! How many times do I have to tell you?”
He rubbed his jaw. “We could fly to Clan Hall, give them our report. Surely they ought to have sent someone to investigate. They should want to know why Yordenas swings the marshal’s staff yet we’ve never seen feather or talon of his eagle.”
The woman slumped down on the log. “Clan Hall! Didn’t they authorize half the transfers of those criminals into Argent Hall? Maybe they’re up to their beaks in the whole corrupt enterprise.” She shoved a stick into the fire, then cursed when the edifice of burning scaffolding cracked and tumbled, spilling sparks and spits of red-hot wood everywhere.
They both leaped up, stamping and laughing in the way of old comrades who can down a mug of ale and enjoy a bowl of porridge after exhuming a rotting corpse from the pit where the murderer buried it.
“Eridit’s Tit! That’s burned my arm.” The man brushed himself down. His face, turned into the light, had a grim pallor. “Eiya! Dov, what will we do?”
She sat back down, kicked a charred stick into the fire pit, and picked up a new branch to poke around until she rousted fresh flames. “See if it’s true that this Captain Beron is in league with Argent Hall in some murky doings. I just don’t get it.”
“What’s to understand? There’s a larger conspiracy boiling under our noses. Yordenas is taking orders from the north. He’s got his cronies hunting into the Barrens for this ‘treasure’ everyone is whispering of. Gold. Gems. Silk.”
The woman shook her head. Like the man, she had the look of an experienced reeve not much older than Marit had been, in the prime of her reeve service. Tall and lean, she had a firm grip as she grabbed his wrist.
“Teren. Listen. Maybe it isn’t an object. Maybe this ‘treasure’ everyone whispers of is a goal. Why take over Argent Hall with their thugs and their squirks if they didn’t want the power to twist the hall and the eagles and the reeves to their own purposes? To rule the Hundred?”
“Neh. I think it’s an object, all right. I think they’re the greediest scum that ever mucked a pond, looking to make themselves rich. I think—”
“Hush.”
She rose and drew her short sword. He eased back and picked up his baton from the ground behind him, held it under his cloak. They were not looking toward the place Marit had hidden herself.
The faint sounds of animals at their nightly rounds had ceased. Nothing moved. At first, Marit saw only the blink of late-season fireflies twinkling in the trees opposite her, but it was actually a woman stepping out of the shadows and blinking as her eyes adjusted to the firelight.
“I saw your fire,” she said. “You’re reeves out of Argent Hall.”
“We are—” began the man.
The other reeve cut in. “How do you know?” She did not lower the point of her sword. “You don’t mind my wondering why you’re wandering out here in the wilderness alone, I am sure.”
“Teren, son of Filava. Dovit, daughter of Zasso.” She had a mild voice and a mild face, round like the moon and pleasingly dark.
Teren choked out a word and stepped back, stumbling over the root he’d been sitting on.
Dovit said, in a quavering voice, “Who are you?”
The woman wore an undyed linen tunic with leggings beneath, humble clothing that was also practical for a traveler. The cloak she wore was so black it seemed it might dissolve to become the shadows. Oddly, she carried a writing brush and a scrap of rice paper. Without answering, she bent her gaze to the paper and scratched a few efficient lines.
Like rag dolls let go by a careless child, they dropped: first Teren, and a breath later Dovit, her sword clanging on a rock as it fell from slack fingers. The pen ceased scratching. From the clearing, two angry squalls erupted. Wings beating, an eagle chuffed in distress. Afterward, everything settled back into an uncanny stillness.
The reeves lay with limbs asplay, Dovit’s face pressed into the ground and Teren’s hidden by the hump of root over which he had collapsed. Branches snapped on the fire. Flames hissed.
“Who is out there?” asked the woman in a sharper voice. It wasn’t fear that edged her tone but a complex pressure of emotion rather like a cook who surveys her well-ordered kitchens with the sudden suspicion that a mouse is hiding behind one of the pots and means to nibble at the feast she has so perfectly prepared and laid out for her guests.
Marit sure as the hells did not reply, or move, or even breathe more than a shallow breath held, leaked out, and held again. She thought of how bright her cloak was, white as death, and she willed it to be as still and silent as the death that creeps unawares, never seen before it enfolds its unsuspecting victim.
How long that woman stood there Marit could not guess, but it might have been half the night. Cursed if Marit was going to reveal herself no matter how badly her legs ached from standing in one place. She could be more stubborn than anyone, and in the end she was.
Finally, the woman moved away into the trees, and Marit allowed herself to lean against a tree trunk, not a single step, until the world grayed toward dawn. She heard a crackling beyond the trees, and an eagle passed low over the forest. With a grimace, she popped the worst kinks out of her stiff limbs, then ventured cautiously to the dead fire.
The two reeves had no pulse and no breath, their spirits utterly vanished. They had flown beyond the Spirit Gate. She searched their bodies but could find no dart or needle that might have pricked poison in them. They had packs set on the ground and now crawling with bugs; inside she found a blanket, reeve’s gear for tending harness, a set of clean and mended laborer’s clothing for off-duty wear, and travel food: rice balls wrapped in se leaves, nai paste, a pair of sprouting yams, and a pouch full of nuts.
“May your spirits go gently under the gate,” she whispered. “My thanks for this gift. I’ll seek justice for you, comrades.”
She hoisted the pac
ks and backtracked cautiously until she saw Warning trotting toward her along the road. Well enough. She took the mare’s lack of concern as a good omen. She scrambled up to the road and caught the reins. “Dead,” she said to the mare. “I hope you don’t mind the extra weight.”
She could not get out of her mind the way they had both simply fallen, as though that woman was a demon in truth, a lilu who had sucked their spirits right out of their bodies even though she hadn’t been touching them. Gods, that was a frightening thing!
Aui! And what of their eagles?
The hooded eagle lingered in the clearing, unable to fly because it was blind, but the other eagle had vanished. No doubt it was the raptor who had flown at first light. Eagles were not sentimental beasts. Reeves often joked that eagles jessed their reeves, not the other way around, since everyone knew that an eagle chose its reeve. Once a reeve had died, her eagle did not maunder or grieve. They departed for Heaven’s Ridge, and in time—weeks or months or years—they might return to jess a new reeve.
The hooded eagle could not fly. It was in distress, calling out, wings extended, hackling and feathers flushed. Marit had lost her own eagle. She was not about to let this raptor starve or be slaughtered.
She balanced her staff in a firm grip in her left hand and fixed her knife in her right.
“Here, now, sweetheart,” she said in her most soothing voice, but an unjessed eagle is a wild eagle. The raptor struck at the sound of her voice or perhaps a tremor felt in the earth. Marit danced aside. She lunged for and grabbed the slip. No time to strike the hood properly. She slashed with the knife, and cursed if the eagle didn’t hook the plume with a talon and cast the loosened hood straight to the dirt.
They stared at each other, Marit standing stock-still and the eagle glaring with utter fury from under her ridged brows.
The raptor struck so fast Marit didn’t even have time to scream.
RAIN POURED INTO her mouth, pounding the earth on all sides, hammering her flesh. She cursed and rolled over, spitting out a throatful of water. A big body appeared out of the storm, and suddenly the rain lessened because she lay in a rain shadow under the shelter of pale wings.
She sat up, opening and closing her hands. She sat in a puddle of slop. Her butt was cold, and her feet were bare. Several horrific rents had been opened in her clothing, and her skin beneath the ripped fabric was scarred. But she was whole. She was breathing. She was alive.
If she could call herself alive.
The eagle had flown.
The rain slackened, quieted, ceased. Wincing, she got to her feet. The eagle’s hood lay on the ground about five strides away, covered with mud and scraps of vegetation but a good cleaning and oiling and a new slip would fix it. Her sandals were gone. She wiped water out of her eyes. Warning folded her wings and flicked her ears as though to say, “Can we go yet?” The two reeve packs remained fixed to the saddle where Marit had tied them to the feed bag. In the clearing, all the flowers were gone.
“Lady’s Tits,” she swore under her breath. She walked back into the forest, marking a forked tollyrake here and a tall pine there as landmarks to make her way back to the campfire.
“The hells!”
Animals and rain and wind had reached them first, but not even animals and the Four Mothers worked this quickly. Two greasy skeletons lay tumbled in the undergrowth, bits of soft tissue and fibrous muscle still attached but most of the flesh gone. One was headless, but she located the skull about five strides away. It was missing teeth, and she backtracked and found them beneath the neck of the remains. Their leather vests and trousers were in remarkably good shape, smeared with dirt and layered with foliage but otherwise intact. The woman’s sturdy reeve boots still had foot bones—and scraps of desiccated flesh—inside them. Cursing, she emptied them and measured the boots against her own bare feet, and when she saw they would be a fair fit, she stumbled off to one side and vomited. The good ale in her drinking gourd had soured. The rice balls in the nai leaves had turned to mold.
“What is happening to me?” she cried, slapping a hand repeatedly against the ground, but her tantrum accomplished nothing except to make her hand hurt.
She rested her head against the bole of a tree, trying to get her breathing under control. The rain cleared off, and as night fell, a cold and bitter wind blew down off the unseen mountains to the southwest.
The season changes. Only late in the year do you feel the chill all the way down to your bones.
Marshal Alard used to say, “If you have to choose between what seems the most reasonable explanation, and what the cold, hard evidence reveals, go with the evidence.”
The reasonable explanation was that she had slept through a day and a night recovering from the shock of what she had seen and from the eagle’s attack.
When she thought it through, she had to believe that the eagle had killed her in its fury. The evidence of the corpses and the weather bore out the unlikely supposition that months had passed.
Guardians can’t die.
They can kill, but they can’t be killed.
Now, there was a recipe for corruption.
She rose to shake out her clothing. Why, in the tales, were the Guardians always honorable and upright, the upholders of a justice that is never disturbed by their own petty jealousies or grand descents into lust and greed? How honest were the tales, really?
What had Sediya sung? The cloaks rule all, even death.
Who would believe her, if she walked in off the street into Clan Hall and claimed to be a woman murdered nineteen years ago? Who would even remember her?
One man might.
PART TWO: CUPS
In the Year of the Red Goat
6
JOSS WOKE UP in his private chamber in Argent Hall to find a woman lying beside him on the sleeping mat, naked, tousled, and barely covered by the thin cotton coverlet. He sat up cautiously, rubbing his aching head. He had no idea how she had gotten there.
With a sigh, she rolled over, exposing a face he recognized and eyes that, opening, were clearly alert. She’d been awake for some time.
“The hells!” he muttered, staring at her in shock.
She sat up, exposing a pleasing, muscular figure ripped by healed scars. The worst ran from her left shoulder across the mauled remains of a breast and down past her ribs to pucker to a finish by her belly button.
“Regrets already?” she asked with a smile half of amusement and half of a woman thinking of giving an idiot man a slap to the face.
“Verena,” he said, glad that at least he remembered her name and feeling ten parts stupid and ten parts hungover. Last night’s activities surfaced in his memory as he woke up fully. Oh, yes, he remembered it all now.
She chuckled.
“No regrets at all,” he said feelingly. “It was well worth the doing. I just suddenly realized that I am marshal of this hall now and you are a fawkner here, working under my authority. I’m not sure I should have—I’m accustomed to being a simple reeve—what I’m trying to say is—”
“That you don’t want it said you took advantage of your position to get a woman into your bed?” she asked with a laugh. “Rest easy. You took a lot of coaxing, and an entire pitcher of cheap rice wine before I managed to talk you into it.”
The chamber was strewn with clothing. This scene and its musky aftermath were nothing new, but with the weight of his new authority it didn’t seem as carefree as it once had.
“Heya, Joss! Listen. We’re of an age. I have living a twenty-year-old son and fifteen-year-old twin daughters, may the gods give me patience. My husband has been dead these ten years. It was a marriage arranged by the clan. He and I were never close. I have no wish to remarry, and since the clan got what it wanted from the match—my son has followed his grandfather into the guild—they have no further claim on me. My work and my life are here at Argent Hall. Still, I’m not dead. Yet. You’re an attractive man. If you’ve a wish for this to end here, then say so. I’ll swallow my a
ging pride and say nothing more of it.”
It was true she wasn’t a young woman with the breathtaking lithe charm granted by youth and worn by youth so carelessly. But women who had experienced the world possessed confidence and humor and wisdom, a sense of perspective that very young women lacked, so on the whole he preferred older women. She wasn’t pretty, but she was attractive in every way that mattered: clear eyes, a good face, a love for her own body and its pleasures, and the strength of mind to match the rest. She knew what she wanted and she wasn’t afraid to try for it. She reached out to find the dregs of the wine, poured him a tumbler, and handed it over. She’d been raked across the back, too, the wound treated so well the scars had remained supple.
“Where’s that one from?” he asked.
“Which?” she asked, twisting to display first her back and then the horrible disfiguring gash across her front. “These are the two worst. The others—” She had a nick on her chin, another nick on her right shoulder, and a single white line running down one forearm. “These are like kisses. Sometimes those cursed eagles try to be affectionate and don’t know their own strength. Even this one, the back, that’s when U’ushu was trying to play and missed his aim. He’s dead now, poor thing. He was a good bird. They all are, mostly, as long as you know how to handle them.”
He gently traced what remained of her left breast. “What about this one?”
She said nothing for a moment, face pensive. She took the tumbler out of his hand and drained it. “Sheh! You need a new stock of wine. This is bitter even for being so cheap. Anyway, that’s a gift from an eagle named Tumna. She’s the worst-tempered raptor I’ve encountered, although I will tell you I put a lot of the blame on her reeve. He was an altogether foul character and he didn’t care for her as she needed. He was one of those who transferred in during the bad years leading up to the days when Marshal Yordenas held sway here.”
