The Steerswoman's Road

by Rosemary Kirstein

  “True.”

  “You’re small for a warrior.”

  Bel acknowledged it. “I’m closer to the ground, and harder to knock over.”

  “That’s a large sword for so small a woman.”

  “I swing it two-handed.”

  He nodded, his wariness tempered by interest. He leaned back against the table. “That’s good. But then you can’t carry a shield.”

  “Ha. My sword is my shield.”

  “Bel has been traveling with me,” Rowan said. “She’s an honorable person and has given her word not to lay waste to the Inner Lands while she’s in my company.”

  The duke laughed. He had a huge laugh, as big as his person, honest and uninhibited. “Then you’d best not separate. I believe this woman could do more damage than her size might suggest. Let’s sit by the fire and wait for Maranne, and you can tell me the story.” He looked around and found Joslyn standing uncertainly by the fire. He dropped into graciousness easily. “I hope this is no inconvenience to you. Pour some tea, and please sit with us.”

  Joslyn complied, hesitantly, and pulled up a stool, but Rowan noted that the herbalist kept a bit of distance between herself and the visitors. Joslyn found the situation uncomfortable, and Rowan realized with regret that at some point in the past Artos had ceased to be a frequent casual visitor to Maranne’s house.

  But Bel was completely at ease and settled into a chair, tucking up both legs as if she were seated on the ground. “I’ve heard something about these dukes and barons and squires you have in the Inner Lands,” she said. “How is it that a steerswoman knows one so well? Are you all of the same class?”

  Artos gave a half smile. “They say that the steerswomen are the only aristocracy open to the common folk.”

  “That’s not true at all, and it’s a bad saying,” Rowan put in with some vehemence. “We come from all classes before we join, and belong to no class when we’re accepted.”

  “You’re certainly well treated by the people,” the duke pointed out. “And they defer to you, grant you certain privileges ....”

  “The people treat us well of their own accord. There’s no law that compels them.”

  “Custom can have the force of a law.”

  “Not at all. There’s no punishment, no soldiery involved—”

  He held up a hand. “Now, let’s not get into one of our discussions. We’ll be at it all night.”

  Remembering, Rowan laughed. “Talking until dawn ...”

  “Often, right by this very fire ..”

  Joslyn looked about the room in wonderment. Rowan said to Bel, “The Academy’s not a place, it’s an event, and the year I trained it was held here in Wulfshaven. Artos was forever haunting our classes.”

  “So many strange people,” he said, and his gaze turned inward at pleasant memories. “From all the Inner Lands. Candidates from far-off towns, teachers, experts in the most peculiar things. So much to see and hear about. I never knew the world held so many things, such strange thoughts ...”

  “He looked so fascinated, and so lonely, that I took pity on him at last and started a conversation. It was easy to become friends. He has a quick mind, as it turned out, and I practically recited my daily lessons to him, most evenings ...”

  “A steerswoman can take pity on a duke?” Bel was amused. “I wasn’t a steerswoman, yet ..”

  “And I wasn’t a duke,” Artos said. “But my uncle died near the end of the training, and I”—he made a deprecating gesture—“ascended to my position.” Then he looked a bit regretful. “I’d like to have seen it all, you know. I learned a lot in my haunting, as Rowan calls it. I know I’m better for it.

  “Well.” He slapped one knee and leaned forward. “Now you must tell me how our Corvus can be so far off the mark. What happened to you?”

  At the duke’s insistence, Rowan began with the fire at the inn. As it was not the true beginning of the tale, she found she had to keep backtracking and filling in, responding to peripheral questions as they occurred. The story wound its way through events almost haphazardly, but at last Artos had the whole tale of her jewel, and of her suspicion about the interest of a wizard. She showed him the glittering fragment.

  He fingered it, musing. “I’ve seen this before. That witch-woman, at the edge of town.”

  “Yes, you were with me. That was the first one I’d seen.”

  He nodded vaguely, his eyes on the fire. From the depth of his concentration, Rowan suddenly realized that he was thinking in his areas of greatest expertise: violence and defense. Her thoughts ran ahead of his. “You can’t be serious,” she said.

  He looked up. “You could always read my mind.”

  “The wizard could hardly harm me at this distance.”

  “How can we know? Corvus saw you all the way off in Donner. And those dragons—that must have been done at a distance. Unless your Red wizard followed you.” He returned the jewel.

  “Or,” Bel put in, leaning forward, “unless it was done by Jannik.”

  “Help a Red? Not likely. The Blues and Reds hate each other, only the gods know why.” And with that, the duke grew silent.

  Rowan watched his face, suddenly disturbed. “Something has happened?”

  He nodded. “A nasty little war, last year.” Avoiding Rowan’s face, he addressed his explanation to Bel. “Corvus turned from Red to Blue, and six months later someone’s trying to establish a new Red holding just northeast of us. And our helpful Corvus requested—” He spat the word, and abruptly his composure vanished. He slammed the arm of his chair and was on his feet, pacing like a beast. “‘Requested!’”

  “Requested how many soldiers?” Rowan asked.

  He flung his arms wide. “All of them! All of my regulars, all of my reserves, and—” His mouth twisted. “—as many impressed from the citizenry.”

  Rowan made a calculation against her estimate of the area’s population. “And how many came back?”

  “I lost twenty of my regulars. Of the rest—” He paused for effect. “Half returned.” He watched the steerswoman’s reaction, then continued in a flat tone. “Wizards. Sometimes I think they’re all insane.” He brought himself back to his chair but did not sit; he gripped the back with his large hands. “Did you know, one of them even brought a basilisk onto the battlefield? Can you imagine it? The damned thing killed as many on their side as ours.”

  Bel looked at Rowan. “What’s a basilisk?”

  “A magical creature, usually disguised in some fashion.”

  “That’s the thing of it,” Artos said to the Outskirter. “If it looks at you, you die, sooner or later, and how can you tell if it’s looking at you when you can’t recognize it? It wiped out a squadron on their side, and one on ours. And the ones that lingered, they had it worst. We brought some of them here, no one else wanted to help them. That Red captain, what was his name?” he asked Joslyn.

  “Penn,” she supplied quietly.

  “You should have heard him curse his masters. The poor bastard scarcely looked human at the end.”

  Joslyn was sitting silent on her stool by the fire, her cup in her lap, her head bowed.

  “Your father?” Rowan asked.

  The woman looked up slowly. “Tell me,” she said carefully. “Have you seen the magic lamps by the harbor?”

  Artos spoke through his teeth. “A gesture of thanks.”

  Bel sipped her tea. “It’s trouble if you cross a wizard, trouble if you help a wizard, and trouble if you don’t have a wizard, for things like dragons and hurricanes.” She put down the cup. “That’s altogether too much trouble.”

  The duke sat down again abruptly. “Rowan, who else knows you’re in Wulfshaven?”

  “I’ve made no secret of it.”

  “Of course not. But Corvus thinks you’re dead, and probably Jannik, too. With any luck, your Red wizard does, as well.”

  “So there’s no reason for him to look this way, to scry or try to divine my fate.”

  “Word ma
y reach him. There may be spies—I’ll let it be known that the steerswoman on the ship from Donner turned out not to be you.”

  Rowan was offended. “Artos, I won’t have you lying on my behalf.”

  There was a shift in his demeanor. Suddenly he was not only a friend, but a duke, a man who gave orders and who chose his own behavior. “I’m no steerswoman. I’ll lie if it suits me, to protect whomever I damn well please.” He thought briefly. “You’re going to the Archives?”

  “In the morning.”

  Artos stood. “Leave now.”

  “We’ll have to wait. It’s a full day’s journey, and this rain—”

  “Take my horse. You’ll be there by midnight.”

  “Artos—”

  “No, he’s right,” Bel said. “The sooner we get to where we’re going, the better.”

  He looked around, and found Joslyn. “Pack them a meal for the journey. And does Maranne have an extra cloak for Rowan?”

  “No. Take mine.” She went to make the preparations.

  “I hardly think this is necessary—” Rowan protested.

  “Rowan,” Bel said. “Shut up and let your friends help you. The duke knows more about such things than you do, and so do I.”

  It was true. Rowan was familiar with violence; it was part of the world. But the violence she had met had been random, small-scale—the occasional road bandit, a fleeing criminal. She had defended herself and even killed in defense.

  But this—If in fact there was a pattern to the recent events, if there was a single will behind them, then it pointed to the existence of an enemy. She stopped to absorb the idea: I have an enemy.

  Bel and Artos understood enemies.

  9

  Rowan awoke to find a wood gnome regarding her from the foot f the bed. He was perched on the footboard, peering down with droll interest, munching some bit of fruit. When he saw she was awake, he stretched out one long arm to offer her a taste. She accepted politely but only gave the piece a token nibble, as it seemed to have been dragged through several different kinds of dirt. It proved to be a slice of winter apple, identifiable only by flavor. Wood gnomes had no more than a vague recognition of cleanliness.

  She looked around the room. The other four beds were empty, but Bel’s fur cloak lay on the floor next to one. Bel herself was nowhere in sight.

  They had ridden through the long night, with storms gathering around them, gathering, then breaking. They ran Artos’s fine warhorse through rain along the north-going river road, a smooth clear track, until the rising hills forced them to walk. Bel rode behind

  Rowan, clutching her waist. Though the Outskirter never complained, Rowan felt the tension in her arms at each jolting misstep. But when the sky cracked lightning, the horse remembered battle and cried out challenge to the sound, and Bel, in kindred spirit, sat straighter, balanced, and echoed with a warrior’s laugh. Later they wearily dismounted and guided the horse in booming thunder and dancing wind up the rocky, wooded path to the stables nestled under the overhang of the Archives’ stone walls.

  The wind snatched the stable door from Bel’s hand as Rowan brought the horse in, and the slam summoned Josef, the groom, from sleep to amazed discovery of the exhausted women. He led them upstairs to the transients’ dormitory, lit a fire, then left them to collapse into the chilly beds.

  Now spots of sunlight climbed the far end of the room. Rowan turned back to the wood gnome and addressed him in the language of hand signals that his people shared with humans. “Where woman?” she gestured.

  “Woman in bed,” he replied, obviously meaning Rowan.

  “No. Other woman.” She pointed to the bed with Bel’s clothing.

  “Fur-woman. Noisy woman, gone. Throw rock at me.” With an expression of vast melancholy he indicated a spot on his shoulder. Rowan made sympathetic noises. She could easily imagine the Outskirter’s reaction on waking to find a strange creature on her bed.

  She rose and rummaged through a wardrobe until she found a clean shirt that fit her, then added her trousers. The wood gnome watched, rocking on his perch, long toes gripping the bedstead as easily as if they were fingers. He munched his apple. “Time for breakfast, hurry,” he advised.

  “I go to find fur-woman first.”

  He eyed her sadly. “Watch out for rocks.”

  At the door, Rowan paused. Slanting beams of light from the high, small windows fragmented the corridor into shapes and angles of alternating light and dark. If Bel was wandering out of curiosity, in which direction would she go? Right led to more residences—another transients’ dormitory and the permanent quarters. Rowan guessed that if Bel found that those were private rooms, she would double back. The steerswoman went to the left, retracing the path they had taken the previous night; around a corner, then up again to the gallery. Bel might sensibly have done the same, to impress a known route on her memory in a strange place.

  The gallery led her back to the entrance hall. A quick check of the stables downstairs showed them to be deserted. Rowan climbed the narrow stairs again up to a lookout room above the entrance: empty, the dusty close air cool and motionless, windows still shuttered against the previous night’s rain.

  She descended and entered the informal hall on the left. A series of great double doors filled the wall on the right. When open, they communicated on a cool stone courtyard. They were closed now, and the high-ceilinged room stood in darkness but for the far end, where a door stood open to the next chamber; a rectangle of light, where faint voices could be heard.

  Crossing to it, she entered the map room. The room was tall and long, slanting at an angle away from the entrance where she stood. Cool, clean air circulated freely through the tall open windows. Morning sunlight fell on the three ranks of long tables, whose surfaces tilted up to take advantage of the illumination.

  On two walls, between the windows, the stones had been plastered, then papered and transformed into huge maps. One was a rough working chart, drawn as accurately as current information permitted, but hastily, with much amendment and many hand-scrawled notes. The opposite wall was currently blank, freshly papered; it served as an alternate when the first needed to be redrawn more concisely. Usage switched between the two with predictable regularity.

  But it was the great master chart at the far end of the room that drew Rowan. Her eyes went to it as she approached, passing between the worktables.

  The map ran from floor to ceiling. The wall there was curved concave, so that a person standing at a certain point could see all the map’s expanse without the distortion of visual foreshortening. The point of best vantage was outlined on the stone floor in a brass rectangle.

  The floor was slightly raised in the area before the master chart. Rowan climbed the three steps and moved to the rectangle.

  In a single glance, she saw the areas of change: positions corrected, details where none had been before. For a moment she felt an internal shift, as if she were on a deck that tilted to a wave too small to change her direction but large enough to alter her perspective. “What do you see?”

  She turned. Below her was a woman twice her age, dark-haired, dark-skinned, blue-eyed. Keridwen, the chartmistress.

  Rowan laughed happily. “I see lakes in the mountains. A stream runs from one—that contributes to the Wulf. Another fjord south of The Crags.”

  “And three new towns on the Shore Road.” Keridwen climbed the steps. “You’re not due back until next year, Rowan. Is there trouble?”

  “Perhaps,” she replied. “But I’ve found something. I need to talk to the Prime.”

  “She heard you were in. Someone was sent to wake you.”

  “I woke before she arrived. Or perhaps I missed her in the corridors. Unless it was a wood gnome that was sent?”

  Keridwen laughed. “They returned early this year. A very mild winter.”

  “Not where I was traveling.” Her mind returned to Bel. “But I’m looking for a friend of mine, who woke before me.”

  “I’ve
seen no strangers today. Perhaps she found the kitchen, and breakfast?”

  “Or upstairs?” There was a high, bright chamber above the map room, used in fair weather to copy charts for storage.

  “I came from there.”

  “I’d better continue, then. She may find this place ... strange.”

  Rowan left by the door opposite to the one she entered. It gave onto a short passage whose right wall held tall doors. She swung them open and looked out; the courtyard revealed was empty.

  Rowan found herself pausing, struck by a feeling that had been growing, unnoticed, in her. She stepped into the courtyard and then realized: it was familiarity. She felt like a person returning to a place of her childhood, finding it familiar yet strangely altered. But the place was the same, and some subtle change was in herself.

  It had been well over three years since last she had been at the Archives. She had traveled long and mostly alone, over lands unknown to her when she met them, then well known to her through scrupulous observation. Her logbooks had returned to the Archives by other hands, and news of the place had reached her through the words of others. And yet, across that distance, she knew where every room lay, knew the names of all who dwelt there. She could walk into the Greater Library and place her hand immediately on the shelf where her own writings were stored.

  This small courtyard had been a particular favorite of hers. It was cool even in high summer, and always sheltered on windy days. She remembered bringing old logbooks there to study, and reading them with fascination; then, sensing a presence behind her, turning to see the smiling wrinkled face of the very steerswoman who wrote them. She remembered an evening celebration not long after the arrival of herself and her fellow trainees from Wulfshaven; nine of them gathered in the courtyard, Janus playing flute, herself talentlessly struggling with a mandolin, Ingrud plying her squeeze-box with gusto; others laughing and conversing, sound echoing off the ancient walls ...

  On an adjacent side another door opened, then another, and the passage on that wall was transformed into a veranda on the courtyard. A woman peered at her, then approached: Berry, tall and dark-haired, recognizing her nearsightedly. “Rowan, is it? The Prime is looking for you.”