“A book?” said Clement. “In Shaftalese?”
“It purports to be written by Medric.”
“That’s a Sainnite name,” she said. Then she remembered who Medric was. “The one who claimed to be a seer? The one who disappeared from Wilton Garrison? He’s written a bloody book?”
“Not just a book, Clem. It’s about the Sainnites. And Medric is in fact a seer—a true seer.”
“How can you be certain of such a thing?”
“Because he knows the numbers.”
She stared at Gilly, dumbstruck. She knew perfectly well what numbers he meant: the secret numbers, which Gilly had ciphered only once and then had burned to ashes. The numbers that were only known to the two of them and to Cadmar.
Gilly continued, “This seer can cipher too. And he has a printing press. No doubt this book is right now being read all over Shaftal. And that seer is taunting us by sending us a copy! Because he knows there isn’t a thing we can do about it!”
Clement took in a breath and let it out. “There’s nothing we can do,” she said. “So don’t tell Cadmar.”
“Clem—”
“He’ll prevent me from going on this mission!”
They stared at each other, then Gilly said grimly, “And that would only compound the disaster.” He tucked the grimy package inside his coat. “I’ll give you a day.”
“Two.”
His gaze briefly focused over her shoulder, then he smiled stiffly at her, apparently trying to pretend this was a pleasant conversation. “He’s coming over to us.”
“Two days, Gilly. I can’t be out of his reach in one.”
“Right,” Gilly said. “Well, I certainly look forward to hearing about all your adventures, and wish you a safe journey.”
She turned around and found Cadmar and Ellid had come within hearing. “Well, General, will you wish us well?”
He did. She saluted. He saluted. Ellid saluted. The gate was opened. The soldiers marched out, snowshoes on their backs, dragging awkward sledges that would soon be gliding on snow. Clement followed them out the gate, reeling.
Ten days later, in the teeth of a howling snowstorm, her company arrived at the children’s garrison. As Clement explained to Commander Purnal why she had returned, and with such a large escort, his astonishment soon turned to sarcastic appreciation. “So, your bungling has turned our garrison into a symbol! And now you’re finally forced to take us seriously! Well, it’s six days yet until Long Night, and there’s plenty of roof repairs needing to be done in the meantime.”
“We’re going to remain invisible indoors. You will continue your business as though we were not here. And I’m placing those soldiers I left behind under Captain Herme’s command.”
“It’s only what I expected of you,” Purnal said bitterly, and stumped off in a temper.
An experienced Paladin commander who was planning an attack would keep a watch on his target for days beforehand, so to keep their arrival unnoticed Clement’s company had avoided roads and farmlands as they neared their destination. Snow-covered streambeds had often offered the best paths as they navigated through the woods by compass and dead reckoning. One glorious day, they had followed a frozen river and had been lucky to find shelter in an empty building with its dock pulled onto the riverbank to keep the ice from destroying it. Most days, though, had been grueling, and at night they sheltered themselves in makeshift constructions of snow, branches, and tarpaulins. It took two days by the hearthfires of the children’s garrison for the soldiers to thaw out. But every night, once full dark had fallen, with an audience of fascinated children they rehearsed the battle.
As she endured the empty days, Clement desperately wished she could distract herself. Her room had one small window, and often she opened the shutters and peered out at the pristine snow, sunlit or starlit. Sometimes there were children out in the snow. Watching them, Clement felt a pulling in her chest, as though some physical pieces of her had been left behind in Watfield.
With the visiting war-horses as allies, the children beat down a circular track along which they marched, or chased each other, or pulled each other on makeshift sleds. Around and around the garrison they went. So also Clement’s thoughts circled around and around, but they circled a distant place and time, five years in the past: the seer Medric’s most recent posting, Wilton Garrison, in South Hill, the summer after Cadmar became general.
That summer, Wilton garrison had been attacked and burned by rockets. The rockets had been invented by Annis, a Paladin woman of South Hill Company. Those same rockets had burned down Watfield.
The leader of Death-and-Life, Willis, had also come from South Hill. If he had learned from Annis how to make the rockets, he must have been a member of South Hill Company—the same company that had held firm in the face of what should have been an overwhelming force of soldiers.
Medric had been a resident of Wilton garrison when it was burned, an attack he inexplicably failed to predict, even though, according to Commander Heras, under whose command he had served, his previous predictions had been devastatingly accurate. Later that summer, he had disappeared.
Willis disappeared. Annis disappeared.
The longtime commander of South Hill Company—a formidable leader, respected even by Heras—disappeared.
Heras reported vague rumors of treachery, of a mysterious member of South Hill Company who Paladins thought was a Sainnite spy. But she also, it seemed, had disappeared.
Surely all these disappearances mean something!Wildly, desperately, Clement wore away the floorboards with her pacing. In the dead of night, in a building filled with sleeping children, she spoke aloud to her empty, solitary room: “What happened in South Hill?”
Some hours later, she asked the question again, differently: “What beganin South Hill?”
Then it came to her: in the autumn of the same year, a gigantic woman had supposedly plunged a spike into Councilor Mabin’s chest without killing her. She had done it because of a mysterious woman. And then the so-called Lost G’deon had disappeared.
Had all these people disappeared together? Would they also reappear together? Annis had reappeared—or at least her devastating rockets had. Willis had reappeared as the leader of Death-and-Life. Medric had reappeared, to blithely publish the Sainnites’ most dangerous, most closely kept secret. And a mysterious woman was telling stories in Watfield garrison.
Some hours before dawn, Captain Herme sat up in startlement as Clement walked into his room. “Lieutenant-General, what is wrong?”
She wanted to say, I am trapped ten days’ hard journey from Watfield, and I am going mad.
But instead she said apologetically, “I’m having a bad night, captain. And it’s occurred to me that we’ve got to capture the leader of this group alive, somehow.”
Herme groaned.
“I know—to kill a cage full of rats is easy. To kill all but one is practically impossible.”
He groaned again, his hands rasping loudly on his unshaven cheeks. “Can I ask why?”
“I need to ask the man a question.”
“But to try to keep him alive will risk our success. Is it that important?”
She wanted to say, Perhaps it will spare us from being completely exterminated.But instead she said, “Yes, captain, it is that important.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
They were huddled around Karis, in the single room that had been afforded them by the farm family on which they had imposed themselves. Leeba, on whom the great adventure of this winter journey had quickly palled, had whined herself to sleep. The rest of them, blistered, frostbitten, and still chilled to the bone, clustered together in their underclothes. A fire burned in the fireplace, but its heat was blocked by drying boots and breeches, long shirts and wool coats. Karis was on her knees before Emil, with his frostbitten foot clasped in both her big hands. His boot, having developed a leak, was in the kitchen being repaired by the farmstead’s cobbler.
“You know how still Z
anja could be,” said Karis.
Emil said, “If Zanja were thinking, or waiting, or listening, she could almost seem absent.”
“She is like that all the time, now. Present, but absent. Visible, but invisible. Listening, and silent. I see her form, her flesh, but I don’t see her.”
Emil said, “Perhaps a part of her has replaced the whole.”
J’han, who recently had come in from attending an ailing member of the household, got under the covers with Norina and Leeba. Norina asked, “What else do the ravens see? What do they see this woman doing?”
Garland, against whose back the exhausted Medric had companionably curled, watched Karis shut her eyes so she could look through the eyes of her raven. She said, “She is inside the garrison, in a building, where the raven can’t see her now. But I can hear her voice.” A silence, and she said, “‘… Frost sparkled on the stones … The crack was wide as a hand … It seemed to go on forever.’”
“Apparently, tortoise-woman has just noticed that the world is splitting in two,” said Emil. “The woman is telling stories to the Sainnites, as Medric dreamed she would.”
Garland wrenched some of the blankets from Medric so that Emil could tuck himself in. The three of them would share the single narrow bed, a feat they had accomplished several times now, in several different beds, though each time it seemed quite impossible. Karis, too big for the rooms, the doorways, and the furniture, had no choice for a bed but the floor.
Medric, his face buried in the pillow, mumbled, “What about the book?”
“The ravens dropped the book inside the garrison gate, like you said to do,” said Karis. “Zanja—or rather whoever she is now—was standing on the other side of the gate. On the garrison side, many soldiers were gathered, with sledges and snowshoes. A soldier picked up the book from the snow, looking puzzled. He gave it to a woman, who gave it to a man on horseback. A very ugly man, terribly deformed.”
“That must be the general’s Lucky Man,” said Garland. “He uses a tincture for pain for his twisted back.”
“He’s a Shaftali,” said Medric.
“But they say he’s privy to all the general’s secrets.”
“Still, he’s Shaftali.” Medric smiled smugly, with his eyes still tightly closed, his spectacles safely put away for the night. “Did he like the book, Karis?”
“He and that woman, they had an exceptionally dismayed discussion.”
“Oh, very good! And what is the woman doing now? That woman was Lieutenant-General Clement, by the way.”
“She left the garrison with the soldiers. I don’t know where they went.”
“I think you’d better keep an eye on her,” Medric said.
The work of travel was far from easy. But neither was it as grueling or frightening as Garland had feared. Some of the ravens had returned from Watfield, but their aerial scouting was no real necessity, and only rarely were Norina’s maps unpacked. Because the land revealed itself to Karis, the travelers never took a wrong turn, and were never surprised by the weather, though their hosts were certainly surprised by their arrival. Day after day, the load of books grew lighter.
Leeba wore red, like most children, to make it easier to find her when she got herself buried in snow. Karis also wore red: a coat of red felt, exuberantly decorated with red tassels. She looked magnificent in it. When she first put it on, Garland thought such a coat contradicted everything he understood about her. Someone else must have bought the coat for her, someone who saw her differently from how she saw herself. Zanja, he thought.
“Yes, it was a gift from Zanja. I’ve never seen Karis wear it,” Emil said, when Garland finally asked. “Perhaps she was afraid she’d wreck it, as she wrecks all her clothes. Did you see the spot where Norina clipped off the tassel that she tied in Zanja’s hair? Oh, our Truthken was thinking like a fire blood that day!”
In his wandering years, Garland thought he had learned something about winning the trust of Shaftali farmers. A sober decorum and a distinct sense of shame at one’s landless state had proven essential. But this garrulous group strolled into a farmstead like a bunch of holiday-makers: oblivious to danger, indifferent to their lack of food and shelter, radically unconventional and making no attempt to seem less so. Then Karis took out her tool box, J’han his medicine chest, and Garland his rolling pin. Leeba would make instant friends with the children, who knew a mischief-maker when they saw one, Emil and Medric coaxed the elders to talk about the past, and Norina kept out of the way with her mouth shut. The skeptical farmers were more than won over: they were astounded. This visit became an event, a progress, a performance. Whole families stayed up late and wasted precious lamp oil so they could gape a little longer at their amazing guests. Sooner or later, Emil would read part of Medric’s book to them. Sooner or later, someone looked at Karis a little too long or deeply, and would suddenly find a Truthken whispering in his ear, and then there would be a pale and thoughtful silence.
Sometimes, though, the entire performance proved unnecessary. One day, with the wind coming bitter from the north, and the clouds piling up in the sky like dumplings in a stew, they reached the untidy edge of a sprawling town and slipped in under cover of an early twilight, dragging their sledges up a narrow alley from which no one had bothered to clear the snow. Leeba had lapsed into the incessant whining that was the warning that they had better stop soon. They paused at someone’s back wall, which looked like all the others except that it had a few stylized glyphs carved into the stone. Medric read the glyphs for Garland while Emil let himself in the gate, waded through the snow-choked kitchen garden, and knocked on the back door. “It’s the owl glyph, which can mean searching or restlessness, and the glyph that’s called Peace, combined with Come-to-Rest. It’s pretty unambiguous, for a glyph sign. I guess that this used to be a healer’s hostel, or at least that this wall used to enclose one.”
“There was one around here once,” said J’han, who had plucked his irritable daughter from her sledge and was rocking her vigorously to make her be quiet.
The back door opened. Emil talked, with his hat in his hand, and then waited, and then someone flung open the door, crying, “Emil? What in the name of Shaftal… ?” There was much energetic embracing, and Garland caught glimpses of a stout, brightly dressed woman, who eagerly started for the back gate when Emil pointed.
“What’s this?” she cried. “A circus troupe?”
Karis, Medric, and Garland all started laughing and could not seem to stop. “Come in!” the woman said. “Books, you say? Well, say no more! Goodness, look at that bright little girl. I’ll bet you run your parents ragged, don’t you?”
“Yes,” said Leeba proudly.
“So did I, and look at how I turned out. Come in, will you? Well, I don’t know what we’ll do with all your gear, but we’ll figure something out. Quickly, since there’s a storm brewing. I guess you’ll be staying a while? I hope you don’t mind sleeping on the floor. Well, get busy. You look strong enough.”
This last she said to Karis, who was still struggling to compose herself, wiping her eyes on the end of her muffler.
The whirl of words fell silent. Norina took a step forward, but Karis lifted a big, black-palmed hand and the Truthken stopped in her tracks. “I’m Karis.”
The woman put her hand in Karis’s: stunned, amazed, then suddenly in tears. She said to Emil, who had come up beside her. “I should have known she’d be with you! Where anyone with any sense would be! The one everyone is looking for, you already found her!”
“I found her before anyone started looking,” said Emil. He added somberly, “You need to keep this secret. Not even your family can know. Can you do that?”
The woman turned again to Karis. “Yes. Yes, but…”
“I am a Truthken,” Norina said, “and by your oath I bind you.”
The woman replied fearlessly, “May I not ask a single question? I will go mad!”
“A shame,” said Norina.
“Shaftal!�
� the woman breathed. “Well, what am I supposed to say?”
“Say, ‘Madam Truthken, by the land I accept the binding of an oath of silence.’”
The woman said her part, obedient, ecstatic, like an actor rehearsing a play.
Hers was a family of tailors, it turned out, who were as appalled by the state of their guests’ clothing as Garland was by the state of his hosts’ kitchen. When they left after the storm had passed, every last one of the travelers was wearing a new suit of clothes, though their old clothes had also been so finely mended that to replace them hardly seemed necessary. And they left behind at least a hundred books, which the tailors swore would be scattered through four regions by day’s end, and as far as the southern and northern borders within a week.
The travelers would soon run out of books.
The day before Long Night, they came through the hills on a sunless afternoon, a ragtag collection of wool-dressed wanderers with chillblained, blistered hands. They had tied their snow shoes atop the sledges, for the snow had crusted enough to bear even Karis’s weight. Leeba had played like an otter all morning, sliding hilariously down every icy slope. She played without her regular playmate, for Medric was utterly worn out. Now, she rode in state in her sledge, blanket-wrapped in a pillowy nest.
Medric wiped his frosted spectacles for the fiftieth time. “Maybe I’m just too old to play with Leeba. Maybe it’s time we had another child.”
Norina said, “I hope you’re volunteering to be the mother, little man. I’m sure Karis could alter your equipment.”
“Never mind,” said Medric hastily.
They had seen no signs of settlement since dawn, when they staggered forth from the abandoned shepherd’s hut in which they had spent the night. A barren land: open, rolling, practically treeless, with boulders poking through the snow like broken teeth. Sheep country.
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