by Kate Elliott
As easily as Miravia had taken to walking in public with her face exposed after so many years locked behind walls and veils, she was not ready to brave the market alone. Her smile was wan as her flush faded. “I’ll go back with you.” She clutched Mai more tightly. “Without you, I would be in Nessumara now. That you gave me shelter . . . I can never repay you.”
Tears slipped down Mai’s cheeks, but she never minded these swells of pure emotion, which like the wind off the mountains came as if from the heavens, a blessing from the Merciful One. “This is not a matter of exchange. We are sisters. I would no more be here without you than I would be without my husband.”
“Mai!”
“You don’t need to thank me any more than I thank you for welcoming me into your heart when I first came to Olossi, when I was alone and without a sister.”
Miravia choked down her sniffles under broken laughter. “Now we will fall upon each other wailing and moaning.”
Then they laughed so hard Chief Tuvi looked puzzled as he climbed down the ladder. But he did not react as a love-lorn man would; he neither sighed nor smiled to see their laughter. If she meant to coax this match into existence, she would have to work carefully.
“Let’s go up,” he said instead, brow wrinkled. “The captain will be wondering what became of you.”
21
AT THE BASE of Liya Pass lay the town of Stragglewood, so called for the way the woodland was cut in strips and spurs into the hills where folk had taken the easy routes to collect and transport wood. The town was a way station for trade over the Liya Pass, which connected the region of Herelia to the main road leading southeast to Toskala along the Ili Cutoff.
Approaching on the road at dawn, Marit surveyed markedly tidier surroundings than those she recalled from the last time she had come through, twenty-one years ago. Every field boasted recently erected boundary stones. Young orchards were laid out in ranks spaced so evenly she guessed they had been paced out by the same person. She passed ruined foundations marking where poor clans’ hovels had been demolished. A livestock fence ringed the garden plots, and compounds like a tannery, lumberyard, and byres whose stench and noise were kept outside the town. An imposing inner palisade circled the actual town buildings; at its gate a pair of middle-aged men stood on a platform that allowed them a view of both fields and forecourt.
Their gazes, briefly met, betrayed minds dismayed to see a cloak riding up to their town in a month in which an assizes court was not scheduled. A very bad omen. They shielded their faces behind hands.
“Holy One.” The shaven-headed elder spoke through his hands. “Forgive us. We had no word or expectation of your coming. The assizes is not readied for your pleasure.”
For my pleasure?
Warning snorted, tossing her head.
“What awaits me at the assizes?” she asked, cautious in her choice of words but sure she must speak boldly if she meant to continue the ruse.
Beyond the gate, people gathered in the forecourt, the squeak of leather rubbing, a rattling cough, a capacious yawn.
A man called out. “Heya, Tarbi! It’s past time to open the gates and let us out to our labors, eh?”
The shaven-headed man climbed out of sight. Hands fumbled at chains; bars scraped; the gates were pulled open. In the forecourt stood at least fifty folk carrying hoes, spades, axes, and other implements. More were walking up. Seeing her, half the folk dropped to their knees as if they’d been felled by a sledgehammer. All raised hands to shield their faces. It was a practiced response the obeisance of which chilled her more than the cursed dawn wind. She turned Warning in a sweep that sent folk scuttling away from her.
“Finish with your duties,” she said to Tarbi. “Then escort me to the assizes.”
“You are gracious, Holy One.” He unhooked a basket from under the eaves. Every farmer and woodsman, carter and tanner, elder and child filed past to hand him a pair of discs strung on leather straps. He examined them, tossed one in the basket, and returned the other to its bearer, who then slung it around the neck and hurried out the gate, careful never to look Marit’s way.
When the first rush was past, Tarbi called down the other guard to take charge. He walked ahead; she led the mare. Children fled into their houses. Women flinched away, shielding their faces in the gesture Marit was beginning to loathe.
“Are there bandits hereabouts, that you lock your town gates at night?”
“Of course not, Holy One. The land is at peace.”
Stragglewood had a central square fronted on two sides by capacious clan compounds ostentatiously renovated. Along the northern front of the square ran a long, low building that she remembered as the council hall. She was shown into its courtyard. The traditional elders’ benches had been removed. A colonnade opened into an open hall whose elders’ benches had been removed in favor of a chair built to outsize proportions and raised on a dais with a pair of smaller chairs set below to either side as obsequious attendants.
“Where are the assizes?”
“They are here, Holy One. We captured a gods-cursed demon. She’s confined in a cell along with unclean ones awaiting judgment. She and two of the unclean ones will be sent to Wedrewe for cleansing when the chain comes through at the Lamp Moon.”
“You’ve confined a gods-touched person?”
“According to the statutes.”
“The law? Aui! And what in the hells are ‘unclean ones’?”
“The criminals, Holy One.”
She clamped lips closed over a furious reply and took a few deep breaths. The rafters of the hall seemed ominous; she did not want to walk under a roof where shadows spilled over the floor like the pooling of blood. “Where are the elders’ benches?”
“Removed, according to the statutes, Holy One.”
“Who judges the cases, then?”
His head remained stolidly, stubbornly, bowed. “You’ll want to discuss these matters with the clerk, Holy One. I am only in charge of the gate passage.” His fear trembled on the air, as delicate and complex as a spider’s web. “We are always posted in pairs at the gate, Holy One. Hodard may come under suspicion if he remains there too long alone.”
“Under suspicion of what? Allowing someone out without taking their token?”
As soon as the words left her mouth, she regretted them. For that was precisely what was going on: no one could enter or leave town without the act being marked. The tokens and palisade had nothing to do with protecting the town from bandits.
Tarbi’s gaze skipped over her face so quickly she caught only a glance of a memory: a sobbing woman being flogged in the town square as prosperous-looking clans-folk shouted questions at her, “where has he fled to? where has he gone?”
Yet his thoughts were as clear as speech: How is it she does not know this? It is exactly as we were warned! An impostor will come.
He wrenched his gaze to the dirt.
She’d betrayed her ignorance. “Fetch the clerk.”
With a haste that betrayed his eagerness to flee, he scrambled onto the porch and kicked off his sandals, calling out as he slid open a door. “Osya! Come quickly!”
Marit dropped Warning’s reins and walked after him, pausing with one foot on the ground and the other braced on the lower of the two steps. A body appeared in the gate. She turned, but it was only a little child come to stare at the winged horse. Its open mouth and wide eyes, all wonder and excitement, made her smile. Then it caught sight of her, and it dropped so quickly to its knees, head bowed and hands raised in an obscene imitation of the adults’ gestures, that she felt mocked. It bolted away into the square without a word.
Feet scraped along plank flooring. She overheard their voices because her hearing was so uncannily keen.
“Why aren’t you at your post, Tarbi? You’ll be flogged.”
“Keep your voice down. There’s come one of the impostors we were warned to watch for.”
“There’s never been such a sighting. Sky-blue, mist-silver, eart
h-clay, bone-white. Those are the ones we’re to look for, neh?”
“Bone-white the cloak she wears. Send Peri to Wedrewe, as we were commanded.”
“This is a bad omen! What if the lords cleanse the entire town, thinking us corrupted? We’ve followed all the statutes. It’s not our fault!”
“Send Peri to the gate after me and I’ll get him mounts and send him on his way. Meanwhile, flatter and favor the cloak, persuade her to bide here as long as possible. There’s a reward if she’s delivered to the Lady. We’ll prosper, you and me.”
Marit stepped away from the porch as she heard footsteps approaching. She walked Warning over to a watering trough set under the shade of an open roof. Over in this corner, she smelled sour sweat and the ripe stench of human waste; a woman was sobbing softly. A man’s raspy voice croaked out a whisper, “Shut up, will you, you bitch? If you’d just slept with Master Forren like he asked, you wouldn’t be stuck in here. At least you’re not being sent to Wedrewe to be cleansed, eh? What do you have to complain about?”
“Holy One.” Tarbi hurried out into the courtyard, so flushed with fear and nervous hope that he smelled as ripe as the manure. “The clerk is coming.”
“Best you return to your posting,” she said before he could babble on.
“Thank you, Holy One.”
He ran out. Not long after, a burly woman emerged from the hall with a very young man in tow, him with head bowed so deep Marit wondered he did not ram the top of his head into every pillar. He slunk out the gate as the clerk came forward with face shielded by her hands.
“Holy One. How may I serve you?”
Marit wanted to ask where Wedrewe was, but she had already roused their suspicions. “There is a woman here, imprisoned for not having sex with Master Forren. I heard of the matter and have come to adjudicate.”
The clerk, visibly startled, forgot herself enough to glance look into Marit’s face.
Master Forren hadn’t any right to try to force the girl to bed him. Just because he’s the richest man in town, and connected to them who built Wedrewe, he thinks he can have what he wants. Things like this never happened before Ushara’s temple was shut down.
She threw an arm over her eyes, and groaned.
“I’ll take those keys!” Marit yanked them out of the woman’s fingers and crossed into a narrow courtyard that ran between the back of the building and a high wall. The cells were a row of twelve cages set against the wall, with no roof to shelter the prisoners from the rain and no ditch or gutter to sluice away their waste whose stench clawed into her throat. She halted on the edge of the porch, surveying a sludgy waste baked to a paste under the sun. She did not want to step into that.
The prisoners roused. Two stared boldly; five hid their faces. One woman was sobbing, crammed into a cage with an even thinner girl lying unhealthily still beside her. The last prisoner huddled in the farthest cage, back to Marit, unmoving, possibly dead.
The first man whose gaze she met had a steady stare; she tumbled into a morass as filled with muck as the ground beneath and around the cages. He holds a stick with which he is beating beating beating in the head of an old man all for the scant string of vey lying in a heap on the rain-soaked earth.
“That one is a murderer,” Marit said.
Osya cowered on the threshold. “So he is, Holy One. He’s not from here. He came as a laborer walking the roads. You may wonder, for it is not permitted to walk the roads without a token, but he carried a token so we gave him work repairing the palisade. Then he murdered old Hemar for a mere twenty vey to drink with, and so we come to discover he had stolen the token months ago. That’s the holy truth, Holy One.” With her body hunched over in fear, she resembled a crabbed old crone rather than a stoutly healthy woman.
That he was guilty was evident. “What of the others?”
The clerk trembled as she indicated each one in turn.
This woman had cheated in weighing rice—
“I did it, Holy One,” the woman gasped. “Please forgive me. My children were hungry. Now they’ve been sold away as debt slaves to pay for my crime.”
This man had stolen two bolts of cloth from the town warehouse, claiming it rightfully belonged to him and had earlier been purloined by the town’s militia captain at a checkpoint between Stragglewood and Yestal.
“It’s a lie, what I said before. I was so fearful when they caught me, for fear they’d cleanse me right there, that I said anything that came to mind. I’ll never steal again, I swear it.”
Two young women had gotten a visiting merchant drunk and robbed his purse.
“We never did any such thing, Holy One. We let him buy drinks for us, because we hadn’t any coin, so maybe we was taking advantage. But he claimed we’d robbed him, and we never touched his purse! And when they brought us up in front of Master Forren, then he said he’d dismiss the charges if I had sex with him. Have you ever heard of such a thing?”
“And you refused?”
“Of course I refused! He’s a gods-rotted pig, meaning no offense to pigs. But we’re poor folk, our people, no one to speak for us in council. We’ve been locked in here a year or more and Stara is so ill, you see how she can’t even stand any longer. Now she’s going to die, just because I wouldn’t have sex with him! They won’t let our kinfolk in to see us.” It was all true, and no one in town had done a cursed thing to stop it.
An old man, too weak to raise his head, was a beggar.
“Why is he here?” Marit demanded. “Can’t his clan take care of him?”
“He’s got no clan.”
“No one can have no clan.”
“None who will claim him.”
A young woman in the far cage pushed up to sit as she looked over her shoulder. It was difficult to tell her age because her face was smeared with muck, but she met Marit’s gaze with her own wide brown one. And that was all it was: a look passed between two women. Her heart and mind were veiled to Marit’s third eye and second heart. After all these months, the blank wall of a gaze hit hard.
“She’s a gods-cursed demon, Holy One,” said Osya.
“You put her in a cage?” Marit’s hands tightened over the keys until the pain bit her and she remembered where she was.
The caged woman watched with the resigned calm of a person who has already given herself up for dead. Her stare was as even as sunlight on a clear day, almost brutal in its intensity.
“According to the statutes. We sent word to Wedrewe last month that we’d captured one, for we’re required to alert the arkhons about any gods-cursed or outlanders.”
“What do the authorities in Wedrewe do with the gods-touched and outlanders?”
“I suppose they judge them at the assizes, Holy One. As required by the statutes.”
In the cage beside her, a burly man called, “I’m not afraid to be judged! They’re the ones who should fear, for they have condemned me to the cleansing just to get what is mine.”
“He’s a liar,” said Osya in a shaking voice. “He killed a man.”
But he wasn’t a liar. He met Marit’s gaze willingly. He was not pure of heart; he had a temper, easily roused, and he’d gotten into his share of fistfights after an evening of drinking, and he had slapped his wife and been slapped by her in turn, a turbulent pair who didn’t like each other much. But he worked hard, and he’d discovered an unexpected vein of iron in a shallow drift up in the hills on which he’d placed a claim according to the law. Forren had set four men including his own nephew to ambush him on the trail and it wasn’t his cursed fault that he’d killed the nephew, who everyone knew was a clumsy foul-tempered lunk. He’d been defending his own life and his legal claim.
“He killed a man, it’s true,” said Marit. “But why aren’t the men who ambushed him being held for assault and conspiracy?”
“He attacked them, unprovoked,” said Osya. “It was pure spite on his part, him with his short temper.”
The man stared accusingly. He was ready to be ill-used.
He would never get a fair hearing.
She handed the keys to Osya. “Let him free. He’s telling the truth.”
He grinned, baring teeth. “Nay, I’ll take the punishment, for otherwise the town council will take their revenge on my clan, and there’ll be nothing I can do to spare my kinfolk. Knowing one Guardian heard and acknowledged the truth is enough for me. As for these poor lasses—” He indicated the sobbing young woman. “You can be sure she never said one word to encourage that asstard Forren, but the piss-pot would have her just to prove he can have what he wants, and leave her and her cousin to rot to death when she had the belly to say no to him. Hear me, Holy One. Maybe it’s true we have fewer small troubles than before, but why is there no justice when those who hold the reins in this town do as they wish and get legal rulings out of Wedrewe to support them? They enforce the statutes among the rest of us, but hold themselves above because they were appointed by the arkhons out of Wedrewe.”
Marit turned to Osya. “Is the town council appointed, not elected? Do they enforce the law on others and ignore it themselves?”
She hid behind her hands. “I just record the hearings and the deeds and the legal rulings set by the council according to the statutes of the holy one.”
“You’re a clerk of Sapanasu?”
“The Lantern’s temple is closed, Holy One. That happened the year after I served my apprenticeship, twelve years ago now.”
The words rasped out of Marit before she could bite them back. “Temples are closed? What have you become?”
“We are at peace, Holy One,” whispered the clerk. “We are a peaceful place.”
Marit sucked in a grunt as pain racked her torso. But the spasm passed, and she recognized not physical pain but the horror of knowing she had walked into a situation she had no power to alter. Maybe she could execute Master Forren or his cronies on the town council for their crimes, but she had no clear idea how her Guardian’s staff—the sword she carried—sealed justice if she could not actually stab a person with it. Anyhow, if she condemned Lord Radas’s justice, done at his whim, how could she justify her own?
