The Steerswoman's Road

by Rosemary Kirstein

  He was holding his breath. He looked down. Then he dropped his point and turned away.

  Mander appeared. Fletcher had fainted; the healer tried to examine the wound that Averryl was pressing with bloody hands, laid his fingers against Fletcher’s throat, and peered at his eyes. He called for help, and the wounded man was carried away.

  Rowan watched them depart, noting the event as pure fact, mere information. She remained where she was.

  Warriors muttered and mertutials cast sidelong glances at each other. Abruptly Jann stepped forward, reached down. “Here,” she said to her son, and handed him what she had retrieved.

  Fletcher’s fine steel blade. Jaffry looked at it. “It’s yours,” Jann said to him.

  He seemed not to want it; then he took it from her hand, and tossed aside his own weapon.

  It fell three paces in front of Rowan’s feet. It lay in the trod mud, its edging battered, its wood face nicked and gouged, its leather-wrapped hilt worn black from use. Amid the noise of the Outskirters,

  Rowan stood as if in a small, silent room, gazing at the weapon, not seeing it.

  There was argument: Garris, declaring that the sword challenge had been improperly conducted, that Jaffry’s victory was void; Jann, disagreeing, calling for someone to bring Kammeryn to decide.

  The steerswoman did not wait. Within her perfect, emotionless isolation, she had discovered a requirement, clear, airy, intellectual: a mathematician’s need for completion.

  She stepped over Jaffry’s discarded sword, unbuckling her own weapon, unsheathing it, and dropping the sheath to the ground. “Jaffry,” she said.

  Discussion ceased. The young man turned. Rowan said, “That’s a fine weapon you have. I’d like to see how you use it.” She stood with her sword point-down, waiting.

  Garris looked from one to the other. “Rowan, you should wait; Kammeryn will be here soon—”

  “No.”

  Catching her empty expression, he ceased to protest, and stood watching her, with a warrior’s respect.

  Bel came to her side. “Rowan, are you sure of this?”

  “Yes.” The crowd was silent. Jaffry hesitated, confused; Jann was aghast, and then anger slowly reshaped itself on her face.

  “Is it against custom,” Rowan asked Bel, “to challenge him so soon after another fight?” She did not look at her friend, nor at her opponent; she could not move her eyes from the steel sword in Jaffry’s hand.

  Bel glanced back once, to where Fletcher had been taken, then took a step away from the steerswoman, studying her. “No,” she said slowly. “Not unless Jaffry were wounded, or exhausted.” He was neither. “But you’re using the wrong words. For revenge, for a blood duel, you should say, ‘Stand and die,’ or ‘Face me, if you dare,’ or something of that sort.”

  Rowan’s face was unchanged. “No blood duel. Call it another sword challenge.” The spectators became perplexed, disbelieving. She ignored them. “Jaffry,” Rowan said. She did not shout; her voice was mild, empty of emotion. “Use your sword, or I’ll take it from your hand.” She took five steps forward, leaving Bel behind.

  Jaffry looked at his new weapon, then at the steerswoman. Jann’s expression was narrow, suspicious.

  “She’s a fool,” Jann said. “Her sword is as good as Fletcher’s. There’s no point to this.” She slapped her son’s shoulder, to urge him forward. “Go ahead. It hardly matters who wins.”

  They assumed their positions and waited for the signal. Then they began.

  It was no contest.

  They fought at first wide, Rowan striking at Jaffry’s sword between its midsection and point, over and over, backing and circling to maintain her chosen strategy. She saw Jaffry’s surprise at the first blow, saw him falter at the next, try to recover at the third. It was no use. He could not send his strength down into his new blade: its flex dissipated his power, its faintly vibrating recovery confused him. He began backing himself and twice lost his rhythm. Rowan used the advantage to press him.

  She entered a drill, like a dance to the singing and hissing music of the steel. Jaffry knew the steps with his body; but his sword wanted other steps.

  He had practiced before with borrowed steel swords; he knew how to change strategy from that required by wood-and-metal. Rowan watched him using exactly the correct maneuvers for fighting with a metal blade, and against metal. Again and again, he tried to unify his actions to his familiar perfection. He failed. He worked wildly, but he was divided: his body constantly seeking balance, his blade constantly refusing it.

  Jaffry’s grace of violence had vanished.

  The steerswoman needed neither grace nor violence. There was nothing in her but intellect, mathematics, logic, proof—and memory. She recalled the moves Fletcher had made in panic and reflex, the moves that had failed him. At the right time, in a moment of close fighting, she used one, copied exactly from Fletcher’s final, losing maneuver. At that close instant, she stepped closer still—into a space that should not have existed.

  She found it: exactly twice as much free room as the flex in her own sword would have provided.

  The blade seemed to leap from Jaffry’s hand, of its own accord. It spun away, toward one side of the crowd; the spectators on that side scattered.

  Jaffry stood looking at his own left hand. He made a single sound, the closest to a full laugh that Rowan had ever heard from him. He gestured at the weapon. “It’s yours.” Someone near it picked it up, to pass to her.

  Rowan found it difficult to speak; her proof was achieved, further action meaningless. She forced a word from her lips. “No.”

  “What?” Jaffry was puzzled. The man who had retrieved the fallen weapon paused with it half held out.

  “The winner,” Rowan said with painful slowness, “gets the choice of weapons.” She reversed her grip on her own sword and held it up, hilt first. “I choose this one.” She turned and walked away.

  The shocked crowd was disinclined to part before her. She shouldered her way through.

  Someone put a hand on her arm as she passed—a member of Kree’s band. “Rowan ...”

  “Let her alone,” Bel said, close behind. Rowan ignored both. The hand vanished. She continued walking away.

  But the next touch was a grip of iron that clutched and spun her around. She was face-to-face with Jann. The warrior’s eyes were small with fury, her brows a straight black slash. She spoke through her teeth. “If your intention was to dishonor my son, you’ve done it.”

  That had not been the intention; but Rowan could not reply. She was empty. Words had fled; there were none left in her. The steers-woman stood silent, looking out through her eyes, from behind her face.

  Jann’s grip faded, and her expression altered. She read something in Rowan’s eyes—what, Rowan had no idea. The warrior grew puzzled. She looked as though she felt she ought to pity Rowan, without knowing why; she became confused and dropped her hand.

  Rowan turned and walked away.

  Reaching the edge of camp, Rowan wished not to stop, wished to continue out onto the veldt. She was moving, and there was relief in motion. She was walking away from something, something better abandoned. There was no place to go, and nothing ahead; and she liked that very much indeed.

  Her body was wiser than her heart; she stopped at the edge of camp.

  She heard Bel following behind, pausing as she paused. Rowan remained, looking at nothing. Eventually, after some minutes had passed, she heard Bel drop to a seat on the ground.

  An uncounted measure of time later, Rowan did so herself.

  Much later, Rowan decided to speak. She drew a breath and turned to Bel.

  The Outskirter was seated on redgrass stubble, a mottled gray-andbrown tent rising at her back. There was anger on her face, but not anger at Rowan; it was a fury deferred, a waiting hatred.

  Rowan released the breath and did not speak after all. Bel’s mind was as quick as her own. Bel did not need to be told.

  The Outskirter said, “Fle
tcher is a wizard’s man.”

  “Yes.”

  43

  “I didn’t see it when you did,” Bel continued, “when he was fighting Jaffry; but when you used your sword against his, then I saw ...”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s a wizard-made sword Fletcher was carrying.”

  “Yes.” Rowan’s own sword was of wizard make. When Fletcher fought well during the duel, he used the same techniques that Rowan would have used. But more than that:

  When a fighter became panicked and desperate, when he lost the ability to think clearly, he would most often revert to instinctive maneuvers, imbedded in him from his earliest training. When Fletcher had reached that point, he used, again and again, moves that assumed his opponent possessed a weapon with the same virtues as his own.

  Not only was his sword of wizard’s make; all of Fletcher’s training in swordsmanship, before entering the Outskirts, had been against a sword of the same type.

  It was Fletcher’s undoing. The moves he had used were not suited to fighting against an Outskirter weapon.

  And that was the test Rowan had made, the equation of action that had provided her final proof: when Rowan fought Jaffry, when it was wizard blade against wizard blade, those same maneuvers succeeded.

  Fletcher was a wizard’s man.

  “He told me,” Rowan managed to say, “that he had had the sword constructed for him, by a swordsmith in Alemeth.”

  “That’s a lie.”

  “Yes.” If, by some miracle, the swordsmith had known and used wizards’ methods, Fletcher would have learned his skills against a common blade only. He would not have been betrayed by his training. Fletcher had acquired his weapon by no such innocent means.

  “What’s he doing here?”

  What would a wizard or wizard’s minion be doing in the Outskirts? “He was sent.”

  Bel nodded, fractionally. “By Slado himself.”

  “Quite likely.”

  “What do you think his plan is?”

  “Plan?” Rowan had not thought so far.

  “He’s here in the Outskirts. And you show up, the very steers-woman that Slado tried to kill. He gains your confidence—”

  No emotion reached Rowan’s awareness; but of itself, her body shuddered, and her arms wrapped themselves tightly about her, and she doubled over where she sat, shaking in unfelt hatred. Lies, she thought. She had been fed lies, had trusted lies, had built a world of joy on lies.

  She was a steerswoman; Fletcher, who had known this, and claimed to care for her, had given her lies. Fletcher himself was a lie. She had given every part of herself to a lie. No part of her body or spirit was untouched by the lie.

  Eventually, she stilled. She sat up and drew a breath of cold air—and cold air pressed like ice everywhere upon her.

  Bel eyed her. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes.”

  The Outskirter nodded. “Then, what’s his plan?”

  “Not to kill me. He’s had endless opportunity.” They had been alone together often: out on the veldt; among the flocks; in Kree’s tent, under the most intimate of circumstances.

  Bel was considering the same events. She said, hesitantly, “Perhaps he really cares about you.”

  “No.” Rowan gave a short, harsh laugh. “Wandering in the Outskirts, I happen, by purest coincidence, to bump into a wizard’s man—no. He knew I was coming. This was intended. We should tell Kammeryn—”

  “No.”

  “Why not? This concerns him, and the tribe—”

  “But what is Fletcher doing here at all?”

  Rowan forced herself to think, rubbing her forehead with her fingers. “He’s been here for over a year.”

  “That’s right. He wasn’t sent here after you. But once you were here, he found you.”

  “How?” She was still rubbing her forehead; she took her hands from her face and interlaced the fingers in her lap to keep them still. “How could he find me? How would he know I was here at all?”

  The Outskirter threw out her arms. “He’s a wizard! Wizards can see things far away, sometimes; Corvus told people that he saw us die in Donner.”

  And Corvus’s information had been only slightly inaccurate. “It’s called scrying,” Rowan began inanely.

  “But why is he here?” Bel was urgent, insistent—and was repeating herself. From this, Rowan understood that her own mental processes were slowed, stalled.

  She was behaving like a person who had witnessed the shocking, gruesome death of a loved one. And she understood that, in a manner of speaking, she had.

  She separated her hands carefully and placed one on each knee. She sat up straight, only now realizing that she had not been doing so before. “Very well. What is this wizard, or wizard’s minion, doing in the Outskirts?”

  Bel did not reply, but only watched her.

  “He can’t have caused the famine on the Face,” Rowan began,

  “that’s been building for years. Perhaps he caused the return of the killing heat to the Face; that’s more recent.”

  Bel continued to wait.

  “But there’s no way for us to know that, for certain. Other factors may be at work.”

  Bel said nothing.

  Rowan sighed. “We need more information.”

  “Exactly. How do we get it?”

  “Certainly not by asking him. Nor by telling the tribe that there’s a wizard’s man in their midst. They might act against him. He might be forced to strike back at them ... At the least, he would flee, and we’d learn nothing.”

  “We watch him,” Bel told her. “Now that we know, we have the advantage. We keep our eyes on him; sooner or later, he’ll do something that will only be explainable in one way—and that’ll give us our clue. Enough clues, and we’ll know something of what Slado is up to.”

  Rowan did not reply. Bel, aggravated, rose and came to her side. “Rowan, this is a chance to find things out. Don’t you want that?” Rowan looked up at her. “How bad is his wound?”

  “I don’t know,” Bel said. Her mouth twisted. “Let’s go and see.”

  “You go.”

  “Rowan—”

  “Do you think he’ll die?” Rowan asked mildly. “I rather hope that he does.”

  Bel stood silent a moment, studying her friend’s face. “I can’t say I blame you. In your place, I might kill him myself. But what’s important now is that he doesn’t suspect we know what he is.”

  “How can we prevent him suspecting?”

  “He’ll have to think nothing has changed.”

  “I’ll need to lie.”

  “That’s right.” Bel nodded, then caught the steerswoman’s expression. The Outskirter was briefly angry, then immediately, reluctantly, sympathetic. “Rowan, I know it’s hard for you to lie—”

  “For a steerswoman, impossible.”

  “Then resign!” Bel dropped to a seat close beside her. “You did it before, for perfectly good reasons. It was the only thing you could do. This is the same. Rowan, you have to do it again.”

  The steerswoman said carefully, “I have to make him believe that absolutely nothing at all has changed?”

  “Yes—” Bel began, then broke off as she realized exactly what would be required of the steerswoman to maintain the deception. Despite her acceptance of deceit as an often-useful tool, Bel’s honor balked at the concept. She continued, but with the greatest reluctance. “Do you think you can?”

  “You know me,” Rowan said. “What do you think?”

  Bel studied her for a long moment, then turned away to think for a longer one. “Not you,” she said at last, with a wry expression. “If you resign the Steerswomen, yes, you can do things like give a false name, pretend you’re some other person, refuse to answer a question, answer a question with a lie. But when it comes to how you act, and the look on your face—you can only deceive when the lie fits in with your natural reactions.”

  “In normal, daily activities, perhaps I could fool most peop
le, or even Fletcher. But even if I did manage to force myself to make love to him, he could not fail to notice some difference in me.”

  Bel’s mouth twisted one way, then the other, as she considered. “End the romance.”

  “I’d need some explanation. Everyone will wonder.”

  “No one will wonder.” The warrior gave a short laugh. “In fact, they’ll think better of you.”

  Rowan puzzled. “How so?”

  “When you watched Fletcher fight,” Bel said, “you knew what you were seeing. No one else did. What they all saw, and what I saw, was this:

  “Fletcher began by fighting badly, but managing by some trick or by luck to hold his own; Jaffry got angry and fought worse, and Fletcher gained some ground; then Jaffry became furious, fought better, and Fletcher got frightened, lost all control, and made the stupidest, most ridiculous errors possible, doing things any idiot could see were useless, and proving that he was entirely incompetent.”

  Rowan considered. “And?”

  Bel threw up her hands. “Who would want a man like that? Not me.”

  “You’re thinking as an Outskirter.”

  “Yes. And so will everyone else. You fought Jaffry not for Fletcher’s sake, but for the sake of your own honor. Even if Fletcher wasn’t worthy of you, he was your lover at that time. Jaffry dared to injure your lover in what should have been a bloodless competition. So you fought him, but you didn’t call it a blood duel, you named it a sword challenge; then you defeated him so easily it was laughable, and refused to take his sword, proving that you weren’t interested in it in the first place. You did it to shame Jaffry, and it worked. No one will blame you; he should be ashamed for losing control as he did.”

  “People will accept this?”

  Bel was definite. “Yes.”

  “Not Fletcher himself,” Rowan pointed out. “He doesn’t think as an Outskirter. And he won’t believe I do.”