What? Forgive me. I had tasks to do, and I did them as always, mucking out stalls and filling mangers, laying down new straw, combing burrs out of manes and tails— even trimming a few hooves, depending on what the beasts’ owners had required of me. Karsh set me to work in The Gaff and Slasher’s stables when I was five, and I am good with horses. I can’t even say whether I actually like them or not, to this day. I am just good with them.
Karsh had gone to town, to the market, not long after the women left. Gatti Jinni usually runs things in his absence, but Gatti Jinni gets drunk one night in the month, without any particular pattern or regularity to it. One night in the month, and last night had been it—I know, because I helped him to his room, cleaned his face of tears and slobber, and put him to bed. So I was keeping an eye on the inn as I worked, and I saw those two men follow Marinesha to the door. Nothing out of the way there, but when they went in alone and she came flying back to her laundry-basket, trembling so hard that I could see it from where I was, then I dropped my spade and went to her. I did turn back and pick the spade up again, after a few steps—even a dungheap warrior needs his lance, after all.
She could not speak, which had nothing to do with the fact that she had not been speaking to me for two days, or whenever it was that I’d said something admiring about Lukassa in the taproom. When I touched her, she clung to me and whimpered, which frightened me in turn. Marinesha is an orphan, like me: we may adopt obsequiousness as a condition of survival, but we have never been able to afford terror, any more than we can certain kinds of courage. So I patted her back and mumbled, “It’s all right, just stay here,” and I hoisted my trusty spade and. went inside.
They were on the second floor, just coming out of the little room where Karsh had put two old pilgrims from Darafshiyan. I don’t know if they’d been in the women’s room or not. Small men and slender, graceful in their movements, almost dainty, their plain brown clothes fitting them like fur. They reminded me of shukris, those hot, rippling little animals that follow the smell of blood down holes, up trees, anywhere, endlessly. I said, “May I be of service, gentlemen? My name is Rosseth.”
At times it’s an advantage not to know your true name, since you should never tell it to strangers anyway. The two men looked at me without answering for what seemed a very long time. I felt myself trembling, exactly like Marinesha—the difference between us was only that my fear made me angry. “The patron is not here,” I said to them. “If you want a room, you will have to wait until he returns. Downstairs.” I made my tone as insulting as I could, because my voice was so unsteady.
The blue-eyed man smiled at me, and I wet myself. It is the truth, no more: his lips stretched and thinned and a sudden wash of absolute terror sluiced over me like the blast from an open furnace. I fell against the wall. If it had not been for my spade, bracing myself with it, I would have collapsed completely. But I didn’t; and I have just enough of Karsh’s idiot-stubbornness to behave like him, like an idiot, like a rock, when my bowels are falling to the floor. I said again, gasping, I’m sure, “You will have to wait downstairs.”
They looked at each other then, and I suppose it was kind of them not to burst out laughing. The one whose mouth broke upwards on one side said, “We do not wish a room? We seek a woman?” Later it seemed to me that I almost knew the accent—all I thought at the time was that fire would speak like that if it could make human words.
The blue-eyed man—and I should tell you that in this country blue is the color of death—came to me in two strides and lifted me by my throat. He did it so daintily and tidily that I barely had time to realize that I was strangling before I was. He hummed into my ear, “A tall woman with gray eyes? We have tracked her here? Please?” I heard an irritating sound, somewhere very far away, and somebody realized that it was my heels kicking at the wall.
I would have told them. Nyateneri said afterward that it was brave of me to keep silent, but truly I would have told them anything if they had only let me. I saw the other man’s lips move, though I couldn’t hear anything anymore except the howl of blood in my ears and that thin, caressing voice saying, “Please? Yes?” Then Karsh came. I think that’s what happened, anyway.
THE INNKEEPER
I should have married when I had the chance—then at least there would have been someone instead of me to do the marketing. Now and then I take on someone just for that purpose, and I always regret it. No one who wasn’t born to it can deal with those old thieves in the Corcorua stalls; anyone else comes home with a cartload of rotting vegetables, maggoty meat, and salt fish you can smell before you hear the wagon wheels on the road. I manage well enough, but I don’t like it, never have, even when my father used to take me with him to teach me the trade. He loved it as much as they did, the butchers, the fishmongers, and the rest of them—he loved the yelling and haggling as much as finding the first fresh melons off the ship from Stimeszt, and he would have died of contempt instead of drink if people had stopped trying to swindle him out of his shirt. I am not like that.
So I came home that day as I do every market day, tired and disgusted, breakfast going rancid in the back of my throat. There have been times when I wouldn’t have minded walking into The Gaff and Slasher to look up the stairs and see that fool of a boy pinned to the wall with his neck half-wrung, but all I wanted to deal with then was a gallon of my own red ale, and this was one plaguey annoyance too many. Especially from outlanders.
I roared, “Put him down!” in a voice to rattle crockery—how else would you make yourself heard across taprooms for forty years?—and the one who had the boy said, “Ah? Certainly?” and dropped him. They turned toward me, smiling as though nothing in any way unusual were going on, smiles to scrape your bones. “At last the patron? The master of the house?”
“My name’s Karsh,” I said, “and no one but me lays a hand on the help. Come down here and talk to me if you want a room.”
They did not move, so I climbed the stairs to them. Pride is not my problem. Close to, they were older than I’d thought, though you had to stare to be sure of it. Long necks, triangular faces, light brown skin so tight over the bones that the lines were no more than tiny pale grooves. I felt their faces would rattle like kites if I touched them. The one who’d been choking the boy—yes, yes, he was already on his feet, coughing a bit, no harm done—told me that they were looking for a woman, a friend of theirs. “A good, good friend? It is most, most urgent?”
A southern voice, like hers, but with something else to it, a kind of restless twitch that isn’t southern at all. I knew whom they meant, of course, and saw no reason not to tell them she was staying here. No, I didn’t care much for their manner, nor for their way of taking liberties in my house without so much as paying for a bottle; but I’d put up uglier sorts many a night, and besides, I had no worries on Miss Nyateneri’s account. She would have made two of them, and she’d likely enough teethed on that dagger and that bow of hers. I said to the boy, “Is she here?”
I can read his mind sometimes, more often than he likes, but never his face, not for years. The way he looked at me, I couldn’t have told you if he was grateful for my showing up when I did, angry because I didn’t pay his squeezed windpipe enough mind, or alarmed—or jealous, for that matter—because these dubious customers were claiming intimacy with Miss Nyateneri. He shook his head. “They went out this morning. I don’t know when they’ll be back.” Voice just a bit hoarse, but not bad at all—air flowing up and down his neck like anyone else’s. I put up with worse, from worse, at his age, and here I am.
Half-Mouth said, “We will wait? In the room?” No question about it, as far as that pair were concerned—they were halfway down the hall by the time he was done speaking. I said, “You will not wait in the room,” and though I didn’t shout, that time, they heard me and they turned. My father taught me that, how to catch a guest’s ear without losing either the guest or your own ears. “The rooms are private,” I told them. “As yours would be, if you were staying here. You may wait downstairs, in the taproom, and I will stand you each a pint of ale.”
I added that last because of the way they were looking at me. As I have told you, I am not brave, but doing what I do for so long has taught me that a joke and a free drink take care of most misunderstandings. Few people come to a crossroads inn like this chasing trouble—not with trouble so handy in town, less than five miles away. There’s a dika-wood cudgel behind the bar that’s come in useful once or twice, but these days I’d have to dig for it under dishrags and aprons and the tablecloth I keep for private meals. The last time any eyes made me as uneasy as this pair’s, they belonged to a whole roomful of wild Arameshti bargemen with ideas about the barmaid who worked here before Marinesha. Half-Mouth shook his head and half-smiled. He said, “We thank you? We would prefer?”
I shook my head. Their shoulders went loose and easy, and the boy moved up alongside me—as though he would have been any more use than a hangnail. But Gatti Jinni came in just then, with a couple of those actors, trying to cozen them into a game of bast. I never let stable-guests into the house before nightfall, but I greeted this lot like royalty, calling down that their rooms were ready and dinner already on the hob. They were still gaping at me when I turned back to my precious little southerners and beckoned to them. No, I jerked a finger—there’s a difference.
Well, they looked at each other, and then they looked down at Gatti Jinni and his new pair of marks (I cuff his head at least once a month over this, but he still regards it as his legal, sovereign right to skin my guests at cards); and then they looked back, sizing up the boy and me again. I hadn’t yet seen a weapon on either of them, mind you, but there wasn’t a doubt in my belly that they could have killed us all and barely raised a sweat. But it clearly wasn’t worth the sweat to them, nor the clamor. They came toward us, and I pushed the boy aside—him waving that spade of his to scatter muck all over the hall—and they passed by without a sound or a glance. Down the stairs, across the taproom, and on out into the road. The door never even creaked behind them. When I went myself to look outside, so as to be sure they weren’t bothering Marinesha, they were already gone.
The boy said, “I’ll go after her.” He was red and pale by turns, sweating, and shaking, the way it happens when you’re either going to soil your breeches or kill people. He said, “I’ll warn her, I’ll tell her they’re waiting.” I almost didn’t catch him at the door, and me with the slopjars not even emptied.
NYATENERI
The boy was watching us from hiding as we rode out that morning. I found that odd, I remember. There was never anything in the least furtive about Rosseth when it came to us: he wore his worship as a bird wears its feathers, and it gave him color and flight, as feathers will. The other two did not see him. I would have said something about it, but Lal was riding ahead, singing one of those long, long, incredibly tuneless songs of hers to herself; and as for Lukassa, there is no way to tell you how her presence changed even my smell and set the hairs of my body at war with each other. I know why now, of course, but then all I could imagine was that I had been far too long away from ordinary human company.
Corcorua is the nearest to a proper town that I ever saw in that wild north country. City folk would think it hardly more than an overgrown fruitstall, a bright spatter of round wooden houses all along the dry ravines that pass for streets and roads. There are more of those houses than you first think: more horses than oxen, more orchards and vineyards than plowed fields, and more taverns than anything else. The wine they serve tells you how tired the soil is, but they make an interesting sort of brandy from their pale, tiny apples. One could come to like it in time, I think.
The townspeople are a low-built lot in general, dwarfed by the wild generosity of their own mountains and sky, but they have something of that same honest wildness about them, which at times restores me. I was born in country like this—though taken south young—and I know that most northerners keep the doors of their souls barred and plastered round, turning their natural heat inward against a constant winter. These folk are no more to be trusted than any other—and less than some—but I could like them as well as their brandy.
The marketplace doesn’t fit the town, and yet it is the town, really, as it must be the trading center of the entire province. According to Rosseth, it is open all year round, which is rare even in kinder climates; and it is certainly the only market where I ever saw the woven-copper fabric they make only in western Gakary on sale next to crate on crate of limbri, that awful tooth-melting candied fruit from Sharan-Zek. They even sell the best Camlann swords and mail, and half the time there’s no finding such work in Camlann itself, so great is the demand. I bought a dagger there myself, at a price that was shameful but almost fair.
I rode up beside Lal as we trotted straight through (skirting the town to pick up the main road takes you the better part of two hours, which no one had bothered to tell us the first time). I said to her, “Northerners can’t abide limbri. I’ve never seen it north of the Siritangana, until now.”
Before I came to know Lal, I most often took her laugh for a grunt of surprise, or a sigh. She said, “He always did have a revolting passion for the stuff. And he likes places like this, plain dust-and-mud farming country. Did you ever know him to live for long in a real city?”
“When he first took me up, we lived in the back of a fishmonger’s in Tork-na’Otch.” Lal made a face—Tork-na’Otch is known for its smoked fish, and nothing else. I said, “He may be gone, but he was here, and not long ago, everything says it. He may have sent you dreams because they could find you most easily in your wanderings, but I was in one place for many years, and to me he wrote letters. I have them still. They came from here, from Corcorua—he described the market and the look of the people, and he even told me what his house was like. About this, I cannot be mistaken. I cannot.”
My voice must have risen, for Lukassa turned in her saddle and stared back at me with those light eyes of hers that were always wide and always seemed to see, not me now but me then, me peering over my own shoulder in time. Lal said, “I take your word, but you can’t find the house, and we have been everywhere twice between the market and the summer pastures. Now I follow Lukassa’s fancy back to the old red tower, as you suggested, because I do not know what else to do. If we find no trace of him there, then I will return to the inn and get drunk. It takes me a very long time to get drunk, so I need to start early.”
I had nothing to say to that. A young merchant caught my stirrup, holding up a cageful of singing birds; another, a woman, was plucking at Lukassa’s bridle, crying a bargain in silken petticoats. “Two for hardly more than the price of one, my lass—a sweet snowdrift of ruffles for a lover to wade through!” Lukassa never looked at her. We followed Lal down the lines of vegetable barrows, wove single-file between the wine vendors and the stalls drifted high themselves with sheepskins and carded wool—our horses held motionless at times by the crush of trade and the fear of treading down one of the market brats who squalled and scrambled between their legs—until a narrow cobbled alley opened to our left, and there were orchards, and the white road away to the yellow hills. We let the horses run for a while then. It was a pleasant day, and I hummed to myself a little.
When Lal drew rein, we were almost to the hills, within sight of houses we had already searched twice over, more or less with the consent of their inhabitants. These are larger than the dwellings below in town, mostly of wood still, save for the occasional stone or brick mansion. They keep to the round design, though, with painted, high-arched roofs that make them look just a bit like muffins beginning to rise. Dull as muffins, too, to my taste: an afternoon of all that snug rotundity, let alone a week, and you begin to pine for eaves, gables, crests, ridges, angles. Of course, the mountains beyond must provide as much edge, even to contentment, as anyone could use. They eat too much of the sky, even at this distance, and snow does not soften them: it is ice that shines like saliva down their lean sides. They look like great wild boars.
Lal touched Lukassa’s shoulder and said, “Today you are not only our companion but our leader. Go forward and we will follow.” She said it with careful lightness, but there came such a look of terror and revulsion into Lukassa’s eyes that both Lal and I turned quickly to see what danger might be slinking upon us. When we turned again Lukassa was already away, and we were well into the hills, far past the first houses, before we caught up with her.
I had been tired and irritable the night before, and suggesting that we return to the red tower had been as much an angry joke as anything else. Lal had given Lukassa neither orders nor directions, but she turned off the road at the only path that could have led her there, as though she knew the way of old. Nearing the place, she drew her horse to as slow a walk as it had been held to in the Corcorua market. Her eyes were empty, and her mouth loose—I have seen diviners look so, in realms where the art is honored, tracking the scent or sense of water to a place where water cannot be. Behind me Lal’s breath, quick and shallow.
The red tower was as much a ruin as a building can be without falling down, but it would have stood out as absurdly among these bitter gray mountains if there hadn’t been a single brick out of place. This country runs to endurance, to keeping your head down and well swaddled: a grand manor here is just a crusty muffin; a fortress just a stale, stone-hard one. A tower—a tower with an outside stair, windows at every turning and what must have been an observatory of some kind at the top—belongs strictly to southern fairy tales, to nights and lands where you can actually see the stars long enough to make up stories about them. It was just the sort of thing he would have set up for himself, that impudent, impossible old man. I should have realized it yesterday, before Lukassa, before anyone.
She dismounted in the tower’s shadow, and we crept after her—at least, it felt like creeping, somehow, still as the day was and slowly as she passed through the great shambly entranceway. The gate was flat, with ground vines lacing over it, but we had already proved the place safe enough to enter, else we would never have let her go ahead of us. She paid no heed to the stair but went straight to an inner wall, opened an all-but-invisible door that neither of us had ever mentioned to her, and unhesitatingly began to climb the steps within, never speaking, never looking back.
We followed silently, Lal swatting spiderwebs aside and I covering my face against the owl and bat droppings that Lukassa’s progress dislodged, and which made the shallow steps treacherous. It was just as long, tiring, and smelly an ascent as it had been the first time. I thought often of the look in the boy Rosseth’s dark hazel eyes as he watched us pass that morning, so clearly imagining us on our way to the wonderful adventures with which he so busily endowed our lives. Too much going on in his head, and no idea of his own worldly beauty—no combination more attractive. As though I needed more trouble than I had.
Dark as it was, both Lal and I knocked our heads—as we had before—on the sudden low ceiling that ended the steps. Lukassa did not. Moving easily, despite having to bend almost double, she slipped away to the left, so quickly that we lost her in the darkness for a few moments.
When I had caught my breath, I whispered to Lal, “Whether or not we ever find our friend, sooner or later you will have to tell me how she knew. You owe me that much.”
