Steerswoman - 01 & 02 The Steerswoman's Road

by Rosemary Kirstein

  He was cautious, too. He had not been, when he was very young, but experience had taught him harshly—taught him to think carefully, move slowly, control as much as possible. One had to take risks to learn, but he discovered that if he was careful about everything else, then the one risk he took would not hurt him. He could do almost the same thing, over and over, taking just one different risk each time, and in the end he learned what he wanted to know. And he knew it all the way down to its bones.

  Other people didn’t think like that, he knew; they acted, for the most part, on impulse and emotion. Perhaps that was why what he did was so incomprehensible to them, and sometimes frightening. Still, when they needed something special, it was to him that they came.

  But magic did not help him on the road. His bow helped him. And caution.

  Caution told him to stay to the back trails as long as he could, then caution told him when it was better to take a main road. Unfortunately, by that time, he was lost.

  Leaving his village, he had struck northeast, taking his bearings from the Eastern Guidestar at night, doing the best he could by guesswork during the day. Eventually he met the river Wulf. Actually, he thought he had met it a dozen times; any river he crossed was the Wulf to him, until he reached the next one. When he finally did come to its banks and stood gaping in astonishment at its wild speed and impossible width, he felt more than a little like an ignorant village boy. Bitterly, he reminded himself that that was exactly what he was. However fantastic his mission, however high and mighty his plans, it was best to keep that fact in mind.

  A riverman took one of Willam’s small supply of coppers in return for a trip across, and Will spent the passage carefully protecting his pack from the spray slapped up from the windy water. On the other side, a careful check proved that the contents were safe and dry.

  From there he began to travel due east, and within the hour he was hopelessly adrift in the trackless woody uplands. He beat his way cross-country for a full day until he found a path. It went south, but he took it.

  But soon he was no longer traveling alone. He met a merchant on the path, and she had a very good idea: travel south to the main road and try to connect with an east-going caravan. Will did not have the fare, but no one would stop him if he wanted to tag along. Naturally, he would not be under their protection, but it would take quite an attack to really threaten a caravan. Will was glad of the suggestion; perhaps a bit less glad at the company.

  As they walked along, the little donkey kicked up a bit, and Willam danced to the left, out of the way of the hooves. Astride it, the merchant struggled with the reins and cursed in quiet aggrieved tones. Will smiled. He liked the donkey, and he didn’t like the merchant.

  “Attise, can’t you control that beast?” the merchant’s bodyguard complained. Attise sent back one of her flat glances and said nothing, still maintaining her precious dignity. Willam hoped the donkey would throw her.

  “I can’t see why he should complain,” the bodyguard continued to Will. “Her master used to ride him, and from what I hear, Attise is a feather by comparison.”

  Willam spoke from the side of his mouth. “Give her time. She’ll catch up.”

  The bodyguard looked at Will in surprise, then threw back her head and laughed. “Ho, Attise!” she called. “Why aren’t you fat, like the other merchants?”

  “I’m not a merchant,” Attise replied in a carefully indifferent voice. “Technically.”

  “She’s a clerk,” the bodyguard confided to Willam. “Technically.”

  It was the bodyguard, Sala, who made the traveling enjoyable. She was cheerful and absolutely straightforward. She said exactly what she thought. Perhaps it was her skill at arms that gave her confidence, but it seemed to be more than that; she was a woman who looked the world straight in the eye.

  She reminded Will of a cat who lived in a gristmill in his hometown. The cat, small and solid, all efficient muscle, greeted visitors with benign good nature and loved to be petted and entertained. But its greatest delight was battle; it killed rats and thieving birds with heart-stopping speed and precision, and it was always on watch for more opportunities for murder. Sala was like that, Wiliam thought: cold-bloodedly amiable. He wondered with a trace of boyish excitement if he would ever have the opportunity to see her in action.

  But remembering the cat made him remember his little sister. She had loved that cat, and she would squeal with glee whenever she saw it, toddling toward it on her chunky legs. The cat, perhaps wisely, stayed just out of her reach, friendliness struggling against natural caution at the girl’s awkwardness, and the pair would weave their way endlessly about the room, to the amusement of onlookers. She was the only girl in the family, and so bright, so mischievous, a constant amazement. Will’s love for the child was total, unconditional.

  He had often asked his father if they might find a kitten for her, and he really believed his father was about to, just before that day when two of Abremio’s men appeared. Then the girl was gone, kittens were forgotten, and Will was left with only his ever more silent father, a brother too old to feel close to—and a dark, obsessive hatred for the wizard who had stolen the only person he truly loved, confiscating her as if she were some object.

  It occurred to Wiliam that if the people in The Crags and the surrounding villages were more like cats, more like Sala, Abremio could not simply do whatever he pleased.

  The people in The Crags were like Attise, and perhaps that was why he disliked her so immediately: he had the villager’s disdain for the folk of the city proper. They never said anything directly but always danced around the subject with flowery phrases, looking down their noses at a country person as if he smelled bad but they were too polite to tell him. They were more concerned with how they dressed and how they seemed, than with what they really were, or what they could do.

  Attise spoke plainly enough, when she spoke, but she had that same way of seeming to watch and judge a person, and watch and judge herself, as if matching her behavior with some rigid internal standard. It made him uncomfortable. And she was never spontaneous; everything she did seemed planned. Will had the feeling that it was all for show.

  For instance, Attise had a map, and a good one. But whenever they came to any crossroads absolutely nothing else would do but that they all stop while she carefully dismounted, drew the map from its place in her baggage, and laboriously consulted it. Why she did not keep it more convenient, or why she did not try to memorize part of the route, Will had no idea. She would study it at length, no trace of confusion or uncertainty tainting her expression, pack it away, remount, and say, “This way,” in a voice of absolute authority. The exercise soon became tedious, and Will became more and more certain that she did it only to appear important.

  “You shouldn’t be so hard on her.”

  Will came back from his thoughts and found that Sala was walking close beside him, Attise and the donkey some dozen feet ahead. “What?” He had been watching the merchant, and his distaste must have been showing on his face.

  “Attise. She’s really not so terrible. She’s just in a bad situation.” Will glowered at the merchant’s back again. “More like she carries a bad situation around with her.”

  Sala considered. “The problem,” she said carefully, “is that she doesn’t know how to act.”

  “You’d never guess it.”

  She nodded. “That’s the idea. She’s really just a clerk, as I said. She’s used to traveling around in her master’s wake, doing his figuring, keeping his accounts. She knows about his business, but she’s never had to deal with people, or decide anything. But when her master broke his leg, just when he was about to expand his business—” She paused, looking confused at the complexities of finance. “I don’t really understand how it works. Somehow, they have the money now, and they won’t have it later ... I don’t see how that can be ...” She gave it up and shrugged. “Well, Attise knew the right things, and no one else did. So he sent her.”

 
; “And you went along?”

  Sala shifted her pack to a more comfortable position and tested the convenience of her sword hilt. “I’m for hire. And a merchant doesn’t travel alone. Not if she likes living.”

  Up ahead, Attise was affectedly scanning the landscape, her face carefully impassive. “Well, she doesn’t act as if she does,” Will said. “I mean, she doesn’t seem to enjoy anything.”

  “She doesn’t,” Sala conceded. “She’s too worried. If the new customers thought she was inexperienced, they’d try to take advantage of her. So she has to look as if she knows what she’s doing, and act like a merchant, but she’s never had to consider that before. She doesn’t know how. And she doesn’t like it, not at all. She likes numbers.”

  Will thought about it. Sala’s explanation made sense, a little. If the merchant acted as she naturally did, she would give herself away.

  For a moment, the whole thing looked different, as if he had a bird’s-eye view. Attise actually was watching herself and putting on a fake manner. It showed, really, when he thought about it.

  But did she have to make everyone else unhappy? “She’d probably do better business if she let people like her,” Will grumbled.

  The bodyguard tilted her head and gave him a lopsided grin. “She has money. She doesn’t need friends.”

  But Willam still did not like the way Attise looked at him. At first, Will had tried to engage her in conversation, but finally gave it up; not that she would not reply, but she didn’t seem to encourage it, answering in the shortest phrases possible, with no proper opening for reply. And sometimes she would give him a strange look, a slow calculating stare, as if she were adding things up, then turn away silently. It was Sala with whom Willam conversed.

  When they first met, she had asked him where he was traveling from, and he had replied in what he hoped was an offhand manner with the name of one of the towns he had passed through. Over her shoulder Attise gave him that look and then went back to blandly viewing the scenery, and the conversation lagged, then limped in the wake of her brief attention. It was nothing more than one look, but it acted on Willam like a bucket of water over his head. Sala was amused.

  Somewhat later the merchant spoke up casually. “I’ve been through your town, with my master. Late last year. Do you know Corey, the blacksmith there?”

  Will had prepared for that sort of thing. “No, I didn’t often get into the town proper. There was a lot of work on the farm, and not much time for what my dad calls ‘foolishness.’ But when I was little, my mother sometimes sent me in to the weaver’s there. Perhaps you met him? He’s a tall thin man, with dust-colored hair. Michael.” Will had carefully studied the town as he passed through, thinking it would be a good place to claim as his home, once he was far enough from it.

  She looked at him. “No.” Then she turned away, and Will was briefly disturbed. He could not tell if she had made up that business about the blacksmith just to test him, or if she believed him about the weaver. It gave him a turn; his own father was a blacksmith.

  At one of the crossroads they came across a party of tinkers, with racks of wares on display. Attise halted the party and made a great show of examining everything the tinkers had, though her utter disinterest was deadeningly obvious. The tinkers saw that immediately and matched her for bland disdain. Willam found the whole thing tiresome.

  But at one point she was studying a beautiful embroidered blouse, and she turned to him almost casually. “What do you think of this?”

  The weight of the fabric in his hands, the stiff, intricate embroidery, brought a rush of familiarity to Willam, and a touch of homesickness. It was the work of the Kundekin, the kind of lovely handwork with which those mysterious craftspeople filled their idle hours. But for all its beauty, it was common in their opinion, mere exercise to sharpen the eye and hand. Near their enclave in The Crags it could be got cheaply. It was practically given away, else their closets would be full of the stuff. The tinker was charging twenty times its worth.

  Wiliam felt brief pleasure at seeing such a familiar item, then a small shock when he realized that Attise had chosen to ask him about it.

  He saw that she was giving him that look again. He said nothing, but she returned the blouse to the tinker. “I believe,” she said, “that I’ll do better by going directly to the source.” Her mouth made a smile, but her eyes did not, and she turned away.

  As they continued down the road, Willam’s mind was spinning. Attise suspected he was lying, that he was not what he claimed, even knew he was from The Crags. But she was doing nothing, saying nothing. Why? Was he truly so obvious? Was she sneering at him, inside? At that thought Will flushed, first in embarrassment, then in anger. Sala threw him one speculative glance, threw Attise the identical glance, then became lost in her own thoughts.

  They made a camp that night in a stand of oak off the west side of the road. Sala efficiently scouted the area, pronounced it safe, and set to making a small fire to dispel the cool of night. Attise settled down to study her damnable map and let her bodyguard arrange their sleeping rolls.

  Wiliam hung back from the fire. It wouldn’t do to bring the charms in his pack close to the flames. He was not certain how much distance was actually required, but if he erred, it would best be on the side of caution.

  He carried his pack some twelve feet away past a small crowd of ferns and began to pull out its contents. Finding his sleeping roll near the bottom, he spread it out on the ground.

  Sala watched in puzzlement. “Here, boy, what are you doing?” Will looked up sheepishly. “Well ... I thought two ladies might not like a man to spend the night so close ...”

  Sala laughed in good-natured derision at his manly conceit. “I think our virtue is safe with you. Come here, you’ll be glad of the fire later tonight.” Will grinned with seeming embarrassment, gathered his gear untidily in his arms, and set it up close to Sala’s roll. The charms he left behind, masked by the ferns. He could retrieve them in the morning.

  But when he looked up from his arrangements, he saw that Attise had abandoned her study and was giving him that look. “Wiliam,” she said slowly. “Obviously we don’t feel any threat from you. But you don’t return that regard.”

  “What?”

  She pointed with her chin toward the ferns. “Whatever you left back there will certainly be safer close to hand.”

  Will was speechless, wavering between denial and disbelief.

  Attise tilted her head. “Why don’t you let me see it? If it’s so valuable, perhaps I’ll want to buy it.” Her face was blank, but her eyes watched him.

  Suddenly he hated this woman, hated her silences, her disdain, her air of superiority. She was toying with him! She believed him not at all, and she had spent the day teasing his lies out of him. It was all a game, to make him squirm for her amusement.

  And for that one moment, his fury made him rash. He drew himself up slowly and stood, and let her look at him for a long moment, matching her gaze unwaveringly with his own. “Very well,” he said at last. “I’ll be glad to show you. Perhaps you will want to buy one.” He sneered that word, with a sudden release of his helpless anger. “But you’ll have to step away from the fire to see them. It isn’t safe, otherwise. They’re magic, and fire releases the spell.”

  He knew how events should run. They would be impressed, like the people at home. They might even be frightened; they would try to make peace with him.

  But it did not happen that way. Instead Willam suddenly realized, quite clearly, that he was in terrible danger.

  12

  Bel’s sword was in her hand. She spoke carefully. “Don’t move, boy. Not a single move.”

  Rowan sat, her map abandoned in her lap. Her sword was by her right hand, but she did not take it. She stayed completely still, her eyes never leaving the boy’s, her body alert and ready for any change in the tableau.

  Willam had traveled from The Crags, by his accent, his manners, his recognition of the distinctive wor
k of the Kundekin. She knew which wizard held that city, and he was the most infamous. Appalled, she breathed, “Abremio.”

  The boy jerked at the sound of that name. His young face was pale, and he trembled, but his beautiful copper-coin eyes did not waver from Rowan’s face. At last, through clenched teeth, he said to them, “Do it, if you’re going to.”

  Bel was in sudden motion, and Willam made half a step back toward the ferns, and then she was on him. One hand gripped his shirtfront and swung him off balance; the other brought her sword around. Then he was sprawled, half-suspended from her clenched fist, the point of her sword at his throat.

  “I say we don’t bother to question him first,” Bel said mildly. Rowan was beside them, her own sword in hand. She stood between the stand of ferns and the locked pair, blocking the way. “Wait.”

  “He’s a wizard!”

  Rowan gripped Bel’s arm, delaying the thrust that would have followed the words. She said to Willam, “Boy, were you boasting? Tell us, and on your life, you’d better believe I’ll know if you lie.”

  He gasped, astonished, “I’m not a wizard!”

  “Then he serves one,” Bel said.

  “What did you leave in the ferns?” Rowan said; she saw him glance in that direction and hesitate. “You haven’t the time to think of a lie. Answer!”

  “It—it is magic, but—”

  “I knew it!” Bel snarled.

  “But it’s nothing! It’s—it’s just—” His face worked, then, as if it pained him to admit the truth. “A real wizard would call them just toys ....” He looked up at Rowan, astonished—pleading, and he seemed to be a person unused to pleading. “Please, let me go. I’m not worth his notice.”