The Steerswoman's Road

by Rosemary Kirstein

  Surprisingly, Attise made no protest against the comment, but only stirred uncomfortably. “I don’t have enough information.”

  Suddenly Willam noticed that Attise was tired—no, exhausted. She seemed weak and worn, and her expression bleak. She turned away. “Willam,” she began, not looking at him. “I’m sorry that you think I’m being unfair. It’s not my doing, it’s the situation.”

  “You mean that because of your mission, you get to push me around.”

  Her voice was flat. “I don’t mean to push you. I simply do what I need to do. It’s because I don’t do what you want me to that you have a problem. Now, please leave for a while, so that Sala and I can discuss this.”

  Watching her, Willam slowly recognized again what Sala had pointed out to him once: that this woman was doing something against her own will, acting in a way that she hated. Sala had meant it differently, but now he realized it was true in a deeper sense. Somehow, in some important way, Attise was helpless.

  His anger evaporated, and what was left, surprisingly, was pity. “If you don’t like working for Shammer and Dhree,” he said, “why don’t you quit?”

  She closed her eyes and shook her head, and Willam could not tell if that meant that she could not quit, or that she could not tell him why, or that she did not want to talk about it. He began to wonder if it was possible to quit the service of a wizard, if it was permitted at all. Perhaps Shammer and Dhree would do something terrible to her if she tried. Perhaps they were no better than Abremio—maybe there was no difference between the behaviors of Blue and Red. But that could not be; there had to he some difference.

  Suddenly he wished, truly and sincerely, that he could do something to help Attise. Without preamble, he said, “When I’m a wizard, I won’t do this to people.”

  She understood. But she turned back, and amazingly, he saw pity for him on her own face. “When you’re a wizard,” she told him sadly, “you’ll do what wizards do.”

  The front door thumped open, and a thin voice demanded, “Have you seen him?” Carroll’s slatternly wife stormed out, fists on her hips, glaring up and down the damp sunlit street.

  Startled, Attise looked at her once, blankly, then rose and turned aside to deal with her own dark thoughts.

  Sala exchanged a glance with Wiliam. “Meaning your husband?”

  “Who else? Slippery devil, saying he’s off visiting, saying he doesn’t know where the money went.” She whirled on them, shaking her fist vehemently. “All the good coin you gave me, gone! Never drinks, doesn’t touch a drop, he says! Well, I’ll catch him at it, one of these days, and when I do he’ll be as gone as the moon. I tell you ...” She wandered back into the house, muttering, leaving a large silence behind her.

  Will tried to find something to say, to recover from the unresolved, interrupted discussion. Something comradely. “I’d drink if she was my wife.”

  Sala glanced at Attise’s back and played along. “Never marry. Or marry someone more entertaining.”

  “Or smarter; you’d think she’d have it figured out by now. I guess she doesn’t look at the trash heap much.”

  “Trash heap?”

  Attise had turned back and was looking at him as if he had said something astounding.

  He paused, puzzled. “That’s right,” he told her, confused. “Out back. There’s a dozen broken jugs in the trash. And some not very old, either. She doesn’t have to try to catch him at anything—those jugs tell the story themselves.”

  Attise looked at the house, then the other houses, with a faintly stunned expression. “This town doesn’t have a communal trash area.”

  He could not tell if she was asking him or telling him. “No,” he confirmed. “From the yard, you can look along the whole row of houses—”

  But she had swept into the house, through the front room, past the still-grumbling wife, and toward the hall to the back door. Will hurried after. “Where’s Bel?” she asked when she saw he was still with her.

  That was Sala’s real name, he knew; but Attise only slipped and used it when she was excited or upset. The mercenary caught up. “Here.”

  As they emerged from the rear door, Attise turned left, ignoring the trash heap Will had mentioned, and hurried on, intent.

  “What’s the matter?” Will asked. They had crossed the back garden and were passing through the next yard. An elderly woman emerged from a chicken coop and stared in bleary confusion as they swept past.

  Attise made an offhand apology to her and continued on to the next yard. “Either nothing, or everything,” she said to no one in particular.

  “What do you mean?”

  But she was absorbed in her urgency and did not reply until Sala repeated the question. “Contradictions. That’s what’s wrong with this town.” Attise stopped and scanned the area. “We have a saying,” she continued distractedly. “‘There are no contradictions.’” She spotted her goal and hurried on.

  “Who’s ‘we’?” Will asked Sala, but she waved him silent and followed Attise, fascinated.

  To Will’s amazement, they stopped by a pile of trash behind one of the shops. Sala peered at it while Attise stooped and began rummaging through, heedless of the dust and dirt.

  “What are you looking for?” Sala asked.

  “Nothing specific.” Attise pulled out a pair of wood laths connected by an odd rusty hinge and examined them closely. “But I shall be very interested in what I do find.” She dropped the laths and was briefly absorbed in the study of a tangle of string. The mercenary dropped down beside her and watched as she extracted from the tangle a short white splinter.

  “Contradictions,” Sala hazarded, “between what you know and what Ingrud said.”

  Attise kept the splinter and moved to another side of the heap. “And,” she said, poking at some potsherds, “between the way the people of this town act, and what they tell us.” She found a boat-shaped piece of dark wood as long as her hand, cracked down its length. She stopped and gazed at it, lost in thought, then looked up at Sala and Willam as if surprised to find them there. Hefting the wood, she studied the shuttered windows at the back of the shop. Will realized that the shop was the jeweler’s, and as he watched Attise, he found himself reminded of the careful, thoughtful expression Ingrud had worn when he had asked her questions.

  “What sort of trash does a jeweler leave?” Attise asked.

  Sala paused in surprise. Then, inexplicably, she laughed. “Not the sort you have there?”

  Puzzled, Will recognized one item. “That’s a shuttle, a shuttle from a loom.”

  Attise had returned from her thoughts strangely lighthearted. She grinned up at him, and he found the expression incongruous on her face. “That’s right,” she said. “And this—” She held up another item. “—is half of a bone needle, broken.” She pointed at parts of the heap. “Rather many bits of string and thread, too short to be of use.” She reached in, pulled out a potsherd, and indicated it. “Stained on the inside; that’s from dye.” She dropped the items and stood, dusting her hands. “Until very recently, the jeweler’s shop was held by the weaver.”

  “He moved his shop?”

  “I think that if we ask, we’ll be told that he didn’t. He’s a recent arrival. And here’s the proof.” She pointed with her chin at the heap.

  “But,” Will said, “the potter said he’s always been here. Was he lying?”

  Attise nodded.

  “What happened to the weaver?” Sala wondered.

  Attise pointed down the row of shops. “She moved onto the cross street, to that new house on the end. It’s not a proper shop at all; it’s not set up correctly. It’s just a dwelling, pressed into use.” She turned back to the jeweler’s. “He took this one because it’s one of the oldest buildings in town, supporting the claim that he’s always lived here.”

  “But why would the people lie?” Willam asked.

  “Why does anyone do anything?” Attise replied. “To make their lives better, or to prevent
them from getting worse.”

  Sala nodded. “Rewards or punishments.”

  “In this case.”

  “The jeweler is a wizard’s man.”

  Attise held up a cautioning finger. “And we mustn’t let on that we know.”

  “And this was all designed—”

  “To convince me that I’d been mistaken. That I’d been ... chasing the moon.”

  Sala laughed a little. “We have that saying, too.”

  “That surprises me not at all.”

  Will looked from one woman to the other. They ignored him completely.

  “And here we stand in full daylight, in sight of the back windows of the jeweler’s shop,” the mercenary said.

  Attise was amused. “He’s visiting Ammalee, who is a housemaid for an invalid living at the first farm up the main road.” Will remembered the conversation.

  “So his shop stands empty.”

  The merchant made an airy gesture. “Convenient for us to break into and discover all sorts of fascinating items pertaining to the making of jewelry.”

  “Which you’d recognize?”

  “Some. Not all, because of his ‘secret process’—”

  “But they’d be the sorts of things that make sense.”

  “Exactly. It would be the sorts that were important. Items unidentifiable in specific, but recognizable as to type.”

  “To someone used to thinking that way ...”

  “Such as myself.”

  The jeweler might be a wizard’s man, Attise had said. “Are you going to kill him?” Will asked.

  They turned on him in surprise. “No,” Attise told him. “We’re going to act naturally, and leave here.”

  “And report to your masters?”

  A quick glance at each other, another glance toward the shuttered shop, apprehension on their faces, and suddenly it was as if a toy house of twigs collapsed inside Wiliam, revealing something hidden within, something startling. Everything was changed.

  He said in slow amazement, “That jeweler was sent here by Shammer and Dhree themselves. You don’t serve them at all.”

  They faced him. Attise was wearing her watching-and-waiting look, but, strangely, Sala was standing as if ready for sudden action, dark eyes full of danger. A memory came to him unbidden: When he had first met these two, it had been Attise who had saved his life.

  She spoke. “Wiliam, if you want to find Shammer and Dhree, follow the main road north to Lake Cerlew. Make your way along the shore to the east; someone there will know where to send you. I don’t recommend you approach the jeweler. It’s best you’re not connected with us.”

  Sala listened in growing astonishment, then turned on her. “You can’t mean that. We mustn’t let him go!”

  “It will take him some time to reach the wizards. We can vanish into the woods.”

  “It’s too risky.”

  This was impossible. Attise, whom he hated, was trying to save him from Sala, his friend.

  “I won’t have the boy hurt, Bel. He’s innocent. And you said it yourself: The more magic the common folk know, the better things will be for everyone.”

  By that statement, Wiliam identified another change, but it only added to his confusion. “You don’t serve a Blue, either. You—you don’t serve any wizard at all.”

  Sala narrowed her eyes and shifted, but with a gesture Attise asked her to wait. Attise turned to the boy, spreading her hands in a wide gesture of honesty. “Wiliam, I’m not a spy. I’m a steerswoman.”

  “No,” he said immediately. “Steerswomen never lie.”

  She nodded, and her mouth twisted a bit. “True. Say, then, that I’m a lapsed steerswoman. I was one, until the time came that I needed to lie, to save my life. I’ll be one again, when that time is past.” She shifted uncomfortably, but her gaze remained steady on Wiliam. “The wizards want me, Willam, all of them. They’re hunting me. Don’t betray me.”

  And then he finally realized that it had to be true. Ingrud had recognized her, had been distressed, had talked about that steersman who had quit the order. Attise had needed privacy to explain something to her. And Attise sometimes knew things she should not, recognized connections invisible to others, and pieced things together in a way unlike other people. Nothing was as it had seemed.

  To a steerswoman, lying must be like torture. Attise must have been dreading every day, suffering through every conversation with a stranger. It would make her quiet, so that she would not lie unless she had to. It would make her angry, to go against her training so. And she would be bad at it, as bad and as transparent in deceit as Attise was.

  And it had to do with wizards. Attise was in danger from the wizards; she was somehow a victim of theirs.

  The steerswomen never used their knowledge or their intelligence to hurt people. They knew more than anyone except the wizards, and they never used it to control, never tried to have power over others. They were not like most people.

  They only cared about learning and discovering, and they shared their knowledge joyfully. In that they were as innocent and direct as children. Wiliam knew well the evil of using power against the innocent. He had been helpless that time; this time, things stood differently.

  Attise was watching him intently, without annoyance, without anger, without fear or discomfort, without deceit. She was watching him like a steerswoman, but her eyes held a question, and a steers-woman’s questions had to be answered.

  “I won’t tell anyone about you,” he said. “I won’t betray you. I’ll help you, if I can.” And he could, he realized, perhaps better than anyone else. He lifted his head a bit higher. “But, tell me, lady ... tell me all about wizards.”

  17

  It was as easy as laughter, as natural as breathing, as joyful as the swing in her step on the road. Attise the reluctant merchant fell from her mind like a muddied cloak, and Rowan felt right in her heart for the first time in what seemed like a lifetime. It did not matter to her that she walked in danger; it only mattered that she could speak and act freely again, and that the power given to her by her training and nature need not be hidden like some secret sin. The one true concern she had was that she might die before the puzzle was solved, and that would be tragedy indeed.

  To protect the hope of an answer: that was the goal, the duty and the pleasure. She felt it with more urgency than even the need of preserving her own life. To stay alive served the goal.

  And in the meantime, as she and her comrades clambered alone, up and down the hilly countryside, she was doing what her spirit had designed itself to do. She was answering questions.

  “Since as far back as the Steerswomen’s records reach, there has always been a wizard resident in the city of The Crags. This probably accounts for the heavy-handed control Abremio holds; The Crags has never been without a wizard. It depends on its wizard to a degree not found in any other holding. Its politics depend on his decisions, and its workings depend on his magic. How long this situation existed before our records, we don’t know.

  “We do know that sometimes thereafter, a wizard became established in Wulfshaven, on a far less formal basis. The log-books of the first steerswoman, Sharon, make some oblique references to the event. In fact, it was clear that she approved of it.”

  “More fool she,” Bel muttered. The Outskirter fussed a moment with the frogs on her cloak as the wind picked up and whirled it around her legs. She had never resigned herself to the loss of her own piebald cloak, left at the Archives because of its conspicuousness.

  Willam looked at her, then checked Rowan’s reaction to the seemingly heretical statement. But Rowan merely nodded.

  “Yes. Sharon herself said that, over and over, at a later date. A lot of her logbooks are filled with complaints about her own misjudgments. But humans aren’t infallible, and conclusions depend on the knowledge at hand.”

  She gathered her information and continued. “So, those two holdings are the oldest. For many years there were only two wizards, and believe it or
not, there was no animosity between them.”

  Willam was puzzled. “But they fight all the time, now.”

  Rowan held up a finger. “That’s not quite true. They fight periodically.”

  “Same thing.”

  “Not at all.” Rowan was annoyed at that twisting of facts. “Get your information right. They clash, regularly. In a large way, once a generation. In a small way, several times, and you can count on two shifts of alliance each generation.” Rowan found that the information that Hugo had given her at the Archives was falling more clearly into place in the retelling, and she reminded herself that such was often the case.

  “So. That’s how matters remained, for nearly two hundred years. Around that time, the lands around the Greyriver began to increase in population. As the town at the river’s mouth became an important port, dragons appeared, first in small numbers, then greater.” She noticed Bel’s sidelong glance and continued. “At the same time, two new wizards established themselves. One took residence in the port and immediately took the dragon problem in hand. No one contested his holding, least of all the townspeople, and the town even took its name from its first wizard.”

  “So there was a wizard Donner who did what Jannik does now?” Bel asked.

  “Who’s Jannik?” Will queried.

  “The wizard in Donner,” Bel supplied. “He controls the dragons there. Or doesn’t, depending on his mood.”

  The boy turned his wide copper gaze back to the steerswoman. Despite herself Rowan felt a shift in her breath. Those eyes, so strange in color, were so beautiful. He was a beautiful boy, and would be a handsome man one day soon.

  “But which wizard is after you?” Willam pressed.

  Rowan had explained her mission to him. “We don’t know for certain. But there’s good reason to suspect that it’s Shammer and Dhree.”

  “And that’s where we are now, in their territory.” He seemed to give the fact careful consideration.