by Kate Elliott
The abandoned patrol stations needed to be put back into use as observation posts and havens. It was the kind of thing the commander of the reeve halls could order done.
He lifted his gaze east to the ridge held by the hierarchs to be sacred to the Lady of Beasts. The distinctive spire called Ammadit’s Tit loomed, but he had no desire today to scout the Guardian’s altar where he and Marit had made their fateful discovery over twenty years ago. That’s where it had all started to go so terribly wrong.
It was time to head south toward Argent Hall. He whistled Scar down and hooked in. Wind buffeted them as Scar plunged into a powerful updraft. They climbed until the air he sucked into his lungs seemed as thin as his memories of the past, falling away below. His eyes watered, but surely that was the wind.
8
ROLLED UP IN a carpet Shai endured, sucking at such air as he could pull in. The carpet was carried for some ways and then deposited, he guessed, in a wagon. In Kartu Town he’d heard a story about the Qin: rather than shed the blood of Qin nobles deemed rebellious by the Qin var, the offending personages were rolled up so tightly in carpets that they suffocated. He calmed himself by focusing on the scrape of wheels.
How long they traveled he did not know. He dozed, and startled awake when they halted. The carpet, and other goods, changed hands as coin clinked. The carpet was lodged in another vehicle with Shai wedged uncomfortably as a scream crawled up his throat. His mouth and tongue were so dry he could not even moisten his chapped lips. But he could not die now. He must survive and escape to warn Captain Anji before Hari found him. The rumbling journey went on and on as Shai’s thoughts churned. His favorite brother Hari would never kill Anji. But the creature Hari had become, would.
They stopped. A hard drop to the ground winded him. A shove unrolled the carpet. He lay gasping on his back as a shod foot prodded him.
“The hells! This one’s an outlander.”
He rolled over, fixed trembling arms under his body, and shoved up to hands and knees, heaving as the dust coating his mouth gagged him. A sharp point pressed into his back.
“Here, now, my friend. Give us no trouble, and we’ll give you none.”
“Heya, Laukas! What’ve you got there?”
“A cursed outlander!”
Shai raised his head. Two other carpets, unrolled, had sheltered two women, just now twisting to rise as about ten armed men and women gathered around, all as ragged as bandits and twice as surly. The older of the newcomers made a gesture with her right hand, middle fingers bent in, thumb and little finger raised. Seeing it, folk relaxed.
Cautiously, Shai sat on his heels, aware of a bristling circle of spears, staves, and sharpened sticks surrounding him. His neck hurt, his head ached, but he was breathing fresh air in a clearing surrounded by trees.
“I need to get to the nearest reeve hall,” he croaked. “Can you help me?”
They laughed.
“That’s right,” said the stocky young man called Laukas. “You say you want to reach Copper Hall, but you’ll drop out of sight the moment our backs are turned and go running back to give your master a full accounting of our numbers and disposition.”
“I need to get to a reeve hall. I am not—” In truth he was a spy, and if he got back to Olossi he would certainly give Captain Anji an accounting of the numbers and disposition of even such a ragtag group. “I am not from the army. I am fleeing the army. They want to kill me because I am an outlander.”
A shout of joy cut through his stumbling words and Laukas’s skeptical expression. A man pushed through the circle of spears to embrace the older of the women. When they parted, she introduced the other refugee, a young woman wearing the blue cloak of an envoy of Ilu.
“The Ilu priests asked us to get Navita out of the city. She’s gods-touched, and all the gods-touched and outlanders are being hauled in for interrogation.” She indicated Shai. “Although I’ve never seen that one before. Maybe a kind master wanted to spare his life, eh? He’s not bad-looking.”
“Eiya! You’ve not changed,” retorted her exasperated brother. “Now he’s seen us, we can’t leave him. Place a guard on him at all times, Laukas. Let’s move.”
They rolled up the carpets and slung them into the back of carts, which were hitched to mules. Laukas and another man helped him up, not kindly but not roughly.
“Who are you?” Shai asked.
“Who do you think we are?” asked Laukas with a barked laugh. “We’re the cursed resistance, aren’t we? We’re all that stands between Haldia and that cursed army.”
“It’s enough to make a strong man weep,” remarked his companion.
“That explains why you’re not crying.”
“Sheh! Who was it won our last arm-wrestling contest?”
“Only because you had Geda shoving down on your hand, eh? Two against one, and her with her tits in my face, distracting me.”
“Piss-head, you’ll face me again, or I’ll have the whole camp calling you an ass-licking coward.”
“Depends on whose ass. Geda’s been giving me the look—” With a laugh, Laukas dodged a swipe of the other man’s spear.
“And when I tell Geda what you’ve been saying, she’ll chop off your eggs with that axe of hers and cook them for her supper.”
“Now, that I would believe.”
They followed the carts along a rutted track into tangled forest where shadows lay heavy even with the sun shining overhead. Four men trailed their party, sweeping away such tracks as they could, scattering leaves across the path to make it look as if no one had passed this way recently. After some time, the track by now barely wide enough to accommodate the wagons and increasingly uneven, they halted and with practiced ease unhitched the mules, loaded them with the goods, and concealed the carts beneath undergrowth. On they walked. Laukas and his friend Ketti kept so casual a guard on Shai that he began to wonder if they were hoping he would bolt just so they could have a bit of excitement chasing him down. The leader dropped back to walk beside them.
“Greetings of the day. I’m Tomen.”
“I’m called Shai.”
“Shayi?”
“Shai.”
Laukas shrugged. “These outlanders have cursed strange names.”
Ketti murmured the name a couple of times, trying to get the vowels right.
“Who was willing to take the risk of smuggling you out?” Tomen asked. “You’ll understand we have to be suspicious of anyone we don’t know.”
Shai considered his options.
With a tight smile, Tomen went on. “While you’re thinking up a likely story, try making it an entertaining one.”
They trudged in silence but for the weight of feet and hooves on the trail. It was cool under the leaves; with only a vest and trousers, Shai found himself suppressing a shiver. Mud coated his bare feet. His toes were cold.
“I am a scout,” he said finally. “But not for the army. I am spying on them. I was pretending to be a slave. Then the call came that all outlanders must be interrogated by the cloaks. So I had to get away.”
“Not a very colorful account,” observed Tomen.
“No fights, no devouring, no wine,” agreed Laukas.
“I’ve heard my little sister make up better tales,” added Ketti.
“Who are you spying for?” Tomen continued. “How did you contact the smugglers? Why did they agree to help you? You can see these are questions we’ll need answers for.”
“If you’re captured, anything I tell you can be taken from you.” He coughed the last bit of dust out of his throat. “By the Guardians who command the army.”
“I’ve heard it said the commanders of the army wear cloaks and call themselves Guardians. But Laukas here could wear a cloak and call himself a Guardian.”
“Still wouldn’t help him get women to sleep with him,” added Ketti. “Him with that—problem—he has.”
“You wish you had my problem,” said Laukas with a laugh, slapping Ketti on the ass. “They’re
all afraid of me because I have such a masterful tool.”
“Call them demons, then,” said Shai, over the banter. “They look into your heart and eat your memories.”
That made them frown. Tomen strode ahead to talk to his sister and the young envoy. They walked along casually enough, but Ketti looked over his shoulder whenever the men walking as rearguard fell out of sight behind a bend. Some of the group carried regular weapons, spears with iron points, short swords, but the rest made do with hunting bows, scythes, axes, or stout walking staffs with one end sharpened to a point. He might outrun them, Shai thought, but then he’d be lost, weaponless, and without food or shelter. They hadn’t killed him yet. He still had a chance to enlist their help.
Through the afternoon they stopped twice to water the mules and drink from leather bottles filled with a sour-sharp juice that made Shai’s mouth pucker as Laukas and Ketti laughed.
Late in the day Tomen dropped back with his sister, who had a roving eye that took in Shai’s form from toe to head, lingering on his hips and chest in a way that made him blush.
“It could be true,” she said. “He could be a scout come to spy on the army. I never saw any outlanders marching with the cursed occupiers. Still, there’s a tale in the street that a second army was sent to Olo’osson but got whipped and its remnants sent crawling home. That might be a story people tell to themselves to gather hope where there is none, or it might be true. What do you say, Shayi?”
“Let us say I tell you who I am and where I come from. Let us say you are captured. Then if they take you in front of one of the cloaks, all the things I tell you, the cloaks will come to know. Better I keep silence.”
“Can these cloaks eat our hearts?” Tomen asked his sister.
“Folk are terrified of them, that’s certain. I never faced one. Let’s see what the honored ones say.”
They camped that night on the edge of open ground, sleeping among the bushes with guards set over Shai. At dawn, two strangers were led blindfolded into the encampment. Coin changed hands, and the two men led away the mules, the carpets, and certain of the heavier encumbrances, while the remaining baggage was distributed among the group.
“I can take more,” Shai said, after they’d burdened him with bolts of cloth lashed together, an awkward bundle whose weight drove down his back.
“Wsst! Look at him, showing off,” said Laukas.
Ketti snorted.
“Quiet,” said Tomen.
All morning they slunk along the verge of cleared fields, neat orchards, a small lake with shores grown heavy with rushes and several wooden piers built out into the shallows, a cluster of villages ringed by carefully husbanded woodlots. About midday, they crept through the abandoned ruins of an old waterwheel housing half-collapsed over a stream. A spur of woodland had grown into decaying outbuildings that had been left to rot long years ago. Moving away from the stream’s splashing chatter, they picked their way through underbrush toward a massive tree of a kind Shai did not recognize. Below branches thick as roof beams, a path had been cleared, hard to see unless you were right on it but well maintained along its twisting length. Now they picked up the pace, stopping twice to take swigs of the juice which was only growing more sour as time passed. After a while they left the path and splashed down a stream until Shai thought his feet would freeze.
“You’re tough, I’ll give you that,” Laukas said when they climbed onto a sliver of trail. “Not one word of complaint.”
Birds whistled in the canopy as they followed the trail through branches and dragging vines as likely to slap you in the face as part gracefully at your passing. When twigs snapped or leaves rustled, he could not see what had made the noise. His bundle got caught several times in vines or limbs, forcing him to wait for someone to chop him free. It was as if the forest were clutching at him.
At last he stumbled into a clearing overtopped by trees whose canopies spread like roofs. A fire burned in a brick hearth, two big blackened pots hanging over coals and meat sizzling on a spit. Hammocks swung from the lower branches of trees, while canvas roofs were slung higher up where huge limbs branched and boards had been hammered between to make platforms.
He had expected a larger group, but once he sorted out the faces he already knew from the unfamiliar ones, he counted only thirty-seven fighters. They greeted each other with jostling, hugging, and kissing while he stood in their midst with all that weight on his shoulders, forgotten except for Laukas with an eyebrow cocked toward him. Ketti had his arms full with a tall lass.
She looked over his shoulder at Shai. “What’s this? A new mule?”
“Ouch,” remarked Laukas to Shai. “You must admit I’ve been hells more polite to you, eh? That’s Geda. Tongue like a dagger.”
“What else it’s good for you’ll never know,” she retorted, releasing Ketti and circling Shai with the same hungry look Tomen’s sister had used, the one that made color rise to his cheeks. Women in Kartu Town never looked at men like that. “Well built, I must say.”
“Heya!” said Ketti. “You’re my girl.”
“I’m not your girl. I’m just sleeping with you.” She dismissed all three men with a shrug and walked over to greet Tomen and his sister.
Laukas helped Shai out of the straps. “Poor Ketti. Oof! That’s heavier than I thought.”
An elderly woman took charge of the goods with the measuring gaze of an experienced merchant. In the clearing, logs made benches, and folk settled with pleasure to take a meal. Someone with plenty of time on her hands had carved trenchers enough for every two or three to share, using carved spoons to scoop nai porridge and sticks to pluck scraps of meat sliced from the haunch. To Shai’s surprise, there was plenty. He ate until he was full, and they begrudged him none of it even as Laukas kept a seat to one side and Ketti to the other. Talk poured like rain; Shai, exhausted, had trouble following it. There fell laughter and songs, and afterward as he nodded in and out of a sitting doze, men pulled out a table and set it on flat ground. The arm-wrestling began, first among the women—Geda won this tournament—and afterward the men took turns in a complicated system he was too tired to sort out.
Laukas pulled on his arm. “Up, Shayi. It’s your turn.”
“My turn?” He rubbed his face. “But—”
They steered him to the table and sat him cross-legged in the local way. They’d pitted him against a weedy young man who was no struggle, a pop down to the table, which made them roar with laughter and sit down another volunteer. He demolished nine before Ketti sat down with a good-natured smile that tightened at the corners of his eyes to betray a man who did not like to lose. It occurred to Shai that he needed to shake off his wool-headedness. An odd scent tickled his nostrils as if in a stinging wind off the sandy desert; he could not identify what it was. Branches swayed, but he felt no wind.
He fixed hand to hand with Ketti. Geda was bent so far over to watch that her breasts seemed likely to pop out of her tightly laced vest right in his face.
Laukas, standing as referee with a hand resting atop their clasped ones, laughed. “Careful, Shayi. If you win, then you have to sleep with Geda. Enough to suck away a man’s strength, eh?”
“I don’t have to sleep with anyone,” said Shai, thinking of Eridit.
That set them whooping and laughing. Laukas released their hands.
Eihi!
One thing Shai was, was stubborn. Ketti was as strong, but he’d never learned to focus in and endure. To wait for the opening.
At a wavering in Ketti’s grip, Shai pushed, and Ketti’s arm sank backward. Catching the tipping point, Shai slammed Ketti’s hand onto the table top to a chorus of hollering and clapping and jeering.
The noise ceased between one breath and the next.
Ketti released Shai’s hands and sat back, swiping sweat off his forehead as he looked nervously to his left. Folk melted back as a creature glided through the gathering and halted by the table. Ketti scrambled up, and the creature settled into the vacant place.
The creature set its right elbow on the table, hand up, with the left lying beneath. Laukas backed away.
Naked to the waist except for its leather forearm guards, it was quite obviously female, although its broad shoulders and muscled chest made its small breasts seem insignificant in contrast. He forced his gaze up to the face. Although it had lips, nose, and face molded in a familiar form, it was not human. Its skin had the color of leaves, a downy growth of hair also tinted green, and yet as he cautiously grasped its hands, its palms felt exactly like human palms. Its hair dangled in vine-like ropes, as though its head sprouted a garden rather than hair. Its ears were tufted and set slightly away from the human-shaped head. Its eyes were not ordinary eyes: they were many-faceted. When it blinked, a sheer inner lid flicked down; a second more ordinary eyelid flashed and opened. Its eyes had changed: what stared at him now shone black, like polished jet. As he recoiled, it tightened its grip on his left hand.
None in the assembly spoke. No one moved.
Its smell had a humid savor, like the forest.
Hu! The others did not fear it, although their silence implied respect. He shifted his seat to ground himself. It grinned to display a remarkably human set of teeth.
“He’s done for now,” whispered Laukas, dropping a hand over their clasped hands and, after a count, releasing.
Shai braced, but was driven down, the press against him. The creature was simply so much stronger that he might have been a child testing its strength against a patient adult, one who didn’t want to smash his hand down lest it wound his pride.
He was a fist’s-breadth away from defeat.
Its ears flicked.
It released him and rose so quickly that one blink it was braced before him and the next was leaping into the trees as a faintly heard and very low rumble trembled in the air: a horn.
Tomen pushed through the group with a stream of orders: “Laukas, ten on the path. Archers, to the trees. Ketti, pull the elder back to the cave. Geda, have your slings and nets ready.”
They moved.
