Some ‘Good-night’s’ chorused beyond the flare’s glow. An arch, and she entered it. Smoke trickled from the brand to lick back on the ceiling, already ribboned with soot from how many years’ sleepy travelers’ lighting their way to bed. A stone doorway inches lower than the top of her head, and she ducked through.
The cell seemed much higher than she remembered; but it was the right one: there, in brand light, were her boxes and sacks. Through a window high in one corner she could see brand-lit leaves and beyond them faint stars. A bed; a metal wall-holder for the flare; a three-legged amphora of water, a standing basin for washing.
She put the brand in its holder.
When—after washing, after plunging the brand in the washed-in water, after dripping water on the tops of her bare feet in the dark while she tried to get the extinguished brand back in its brace, after turning once and then turning again on the fragrant bed—sleep came, she was not sure.
She woke at a strangled gasp, not hers; something fell down to hit the bed’s edge, thudded to the floor. Blinking, she pushed herself up, started to swing her feet to the stone—
‘Don’t, or your toes will be a-wash in blood,’ followed by a barking laugh above her—but a soft bark.
Norema looked down: someone lay with arms and legs at awkward angles, while wetness crawled out across the flags. She looked up; blocking moonlight, Raven squatted in the window. She put one leg in and let it hang.
With a shudder, Norema curled her feet up under her—and Raven dropped down on to the bed’s foot.
‘What’s happened …?’ Norema whispered hoarsely.
‘Well, Heathen Woman,’ Raven whispered back squatting on the rumpled blanket and folding her arms, ‘someone was going to kill you. So I killed her—or him, as the case may be.’ She bent forward, rolled the body back—‘Him … but I should have expected that by now in your strange and terrible land—’ and pulled something from the flank. An arm flopped on the floor; blood welled, Raven turned her two-pronged sword, examining it, wiped it on the bed, examined it again.
‘Kill me?’ Norema demanded, trying to match Raven’s whisper. ‘Why on earth …?’
‘Most probably—’ Raven, still sitting, managed to get the sword, after several plunges, into its shaggy sheath—‘because you were going to go on looking for Lord Aldamir and they don’t want you to find him—or rather they don’t want you to find out something about him once you start looking.’
In the silvered dark, Norema squinted; ‘But how did you know I was going to go on? You’d already left before—’
Raven laughed again. ‘After I left, I doubled back. Oh, I stayed around, lurking outside, spying from dark niches, even got in and hid in one of the chapels. I must have heard everything the bunch of you said this afternoon.’
‘You did?’
‘And you know what they did, these wine-bibing feyers? Sent a little herd of men out after me, very much of the cut of this one here. With orders to do me in.’
‘What did you do?’
‘Pretty much what I did to this one. Snuck up behind, got one, then another. Quick and silent.’ Raven put her feet on what was presumably drier stone and stood.
‘Bayle,’ Norema said suddenly. ‘What about Bayle?’
‘Well, I couldn’t keep guard on both your cells at once. When this one here climbed up into your window with a knife in her—in his teeth and a garrote cord knotted around his wrist, I was up behind and—’ Raven made the jabbing motion Norema supposed would sink a sword in a kidney. ‘Fell in down across your bed and on to the floor there. Are you ready to get out of here?’
Norema looked for a place to stand, saw it, stood on it. ‘Don’t you think we should check to see if Bayle’s alive or dead?’
‘Now why should these priests want to kill some poor, pudgy daughter of Eif’h? He was going home in the morning, and unless I miss my guess, if you’d volunteered to do the same, no one would have wanted to kill you either. But then, you had money. Look, if he’s alive, there’s nothing we have to do about it. If he’s dead, there’s nothing we can do. Get into your pants.’
‘I still don’t—’
‘Come, Eastern Heathen.’ Raven turned, stepped back on the bed, leaped for the window, and scrabbled up the wall; a moment later she was again perched in the moonlight. Turning, she reached down her hand. ‘Come on.’
Somehow, pants and sandals were gotten into.
Norema had to jump three times before Raven’s rough hand grappled hers. With her toes in the wall’s deep mortices she scrambled up to crowd beside the small masked woman on the sill. ‘Where are we going?’ Norema asked of the frayed black rag, inches from her face and punctured by eyes still indigo in the moon.
‘To visit Lord Aldamir’s great rubber orchards. And his magnificent castle,’ and she was off the sill on to a branch, climbing down. Norema was after her—it was longer down to the ground than it had been up from the bed. As Norema’s sandals hit the pine needles—Raven had already taken several loping steps down the slope—there was a crashing in the brush beside them, and a creature jumped out, to land in a crouch, knuckles on the ground: ‘Raven, the coast is clear!’
‘Ha, ha!’ said Raven. ‘But we’re not going to the coast. It’s inland for us right now, back toward the castle.’
Norema took her hand from her mouth and asked, with thudding heart: ‘Who’s she?’
Raven said: ‘It is very hard in this strange and terrible land to be a true daughter of Jevim and not pick up little girls—like honey picks up flies—who desperately want to help.’ She reached down and tousled the curly hair of the crouching youngster. ‘Some of them are pretty plucky too. This one is even useful.’
The girl, who was clearly local, grubby, and about twelve, stood up and said: ‘Who’s she? The lady we’re saving?’
‘Lo,’ said Raven, ‘she is already saved, Juni. Norema, that’s Juni. And she’s smart,’ though Norema was not sure which of them the last sentence referred to. ‘Hurry up, both of you.’
They followed the masked woman down the tangled slope, minutes at a time scrambling by vine-laced trees that, for all the moon, were lightless.
The two women and the girl, now grunting, now whispering for one or the other to step this way rather than that, leaves a-whisper about them, small branches a-crackle under foot, made their way, now down, now up.
‘What’s that?’ Norema asked, as they reached fallen stones, those stones still standing covered with ivy.
A wing of moonlight flapped on Raven’s face. (A branch among blowy leaves above them bent and bent again, revealing that grin below the mask.) Raven chuckled.
Juni said: ‘This is the wall around the Dragon Castle’s parks and orchards.’
‘Lord Aldamir’s castle?’ Norema asked.
Juni blinked.
Raven nodded. ‘Let us examine them.’ She swung her leg over the lowest rock.
Juni vaulted over, then turned back to give Norema a hand. Norema grabbed among the leaves either side of the fissure—one hand closed on stone, the other, just on leaves—and pulled herself through.
They stood at the edge of a brambley field in moonlight. There were only one, two—no, three trees. One leaned almost to the ground, half its branches bare as pikes.
On the other side of the field, looking like a small mountain, parts of which had been quarried vertical, other parts of which sloped irregularly, was a castle.
Norema said: ‘This orchard—or park—doesn’t seem to be in use right now.’
Juni looked at Raven and said: ‘You’re right. She doesn’t know.’
Raven said: ‘All the grounds within the walls look like this. Or worse.’
‘Then perhaps the orchards that give the sap that makes the balls are outside the walled grounds—’ She frowned. ‘Raven, are you trying to tell me there aren’t any orchards?’
‘Come. Let’s go across into the castle.’
Norema frowned again: ‘Won’t some of the gu
ards or servants …’
Raven said: ‘They didn’t when I was here earlier today.’
Juni said: ‘There are no guards. Or servants,’ then looked quickly back and forth between the two women.
‘Come,’ Raven said again and started through the brush.
Once Norema nearly tripped over some fallen piece of statuary, then again over a plow-head on cracked shafts. A ditch wormed through the meadow with silver trickling its bottom. Norema, Juni, then Raven leaped it, Norema’s sandals and Raven’s and Juni’s bare feet sinking in the soft black bank.
A balustrade rose, cleaving the moon.
‘That door’s open.’ Juni pointed.
‘How do you know?’ Norema squinted at shadowed stone.
Juni said: ‘My aunt says it’s been open since before I was born. I live with my aunt up on the hill,’ said this ragged little thing who had to be at least twelve. Again they were both off after Raven.
It was attached only by the top hinge and leaned askew, its gray planks scratched and carved at. The steps behind it were a-crunch with leaves; and the crunches echoed ahead of them up the stone corridor.
‘Won’t somebody … hear us?’ Norema asked once more with failing conviction.
Neither Raven nor Juni answered. Norema hurried up behind them. They ducked through another arch: more moonlight, leaves, stone. They stood in some roofless hall, its pavings webbed with grass. Here and there the flooring was pushed aside by some growing bush. Broad steps near them went up to what may once have been—yes, that was certainly some ivy-grown dragon, carved and coiled about some giant seat.
‘Now,’ said Raven, ‘doesn’t this look exactly like what you’d expect of the castle of a great southern lord who had just taken a trip south only three days ago on an unexpected mission?’
‘No one has stayed in this castle for years!’ Norema said.
‘My cousin stayed here once. For a night. With two of his friends—five years ago. They dared each other to sleep here. Only just before sunrise, they got scared and all ran away, back to their homes. That was when they were as old as I am now. But nobody lives in Lord Aldamir’s castle.’
‘You mean there is no Lord Aldamir?’ Norema asked. ‘But what’s happened to him? And how did he send Bayle’s master a message to come?’
Raven’s laughter cackled in the hall. ‘The balance between the various aristocratic factions in your strange and terrible country is far too complex for the likes of me or you ever to unravel. Clearly it suits someone to have various factions in Kolhari—probably factions beneath the Eagle—think that there is still some heat left to the dragon in the south. Perhaps they pay our little feyers there to dispatch the occasional messenger to Nevèrÿon with an invitation to join in some profitable scheme with the great southern Lord. A naïve child like Bayle journeys down to the Garth, and here is told that his Lordship was unexpectedly called away; and the youngster returns by the next boat with tales of the absent Lord’s might, given over to him throughout a day of entertainment by a host of drunken, garrulous priests.’
‘But they didn’t expect me,’ said Norema.
‘Nor me,’ said Raven. ‘Unless, as the lady said, Lord Aldamir expects everyone.’
‘Now Bayle will carry the tale of Lord Aldamir back to Kolhari—’
‘—where no doubt,’ said Raven, ‘rumor will wind its way, up from the ports to the High Court of Eagles itself, that various business operations have been briefly delayed between Lord Aldamir and a waterfront potter. And for business relations to be delayed, there must be businessmen to begin with. The one thing that the rumor will not make them doubt is Lord Aldamir’s existence.’
‘But what do we do with this information now we have it?’ Norema asked. ‘Wouldn’t it be dangerous to carry it back to Kolhari?’
‘Ours is a very strange kind of information.’ Raven went over to the wall, folded her arms, and leaned there. ‘It is far easier to argue that something nobody believes in actually exists than it is to argue that something everybody believes in is unreal. And the general consensus in Nevèrÿon is that there is a Lord Aldamir. I would not want to be the one to have to return to Lord Krodar and tell him that the man he sent me to assassinate is a figment of his imagination. And if you tell your mistress that, you just see what happens: first, she will say you had the wrong castle, then the wrong seaport, or even the wrong boat. I’d say, rather, stick to the tale we were told to tell—that Lord Aldamir was suddenly called away and we could gain no audience. Now come and let us wander these deserted halls, these abandoned stairs, these cramped and damp cells and high chambers where history has left off happening. I want to explore this absent aristocrat from every side—in case I ever do meet him and need to jab a blade into his absent gut.’ Raven uncrossed her arms and started off across the littered floor.
Juni and Norema looked at each other. The little girl darted forward after the masked assassin. Norema, chills prickling thigh and shoulder, followed.
For the next several hours they wandered into this room and that one, nearly silent the time. In one cell Juni accidentally kicked up an old tinder box; in another, Norema recognized an oil jar, still sealed with wax. So they made brands and carried them, flickering and smoking, through the darker chains of chambers.
In a kitchen midden they saw old pots and knives. Minutes later, Raven, standing in the small kitchen garden (a few vegetables were still recognizable in the moonlight despite the weeds), announced she was hungry, pulled out her sword, and turned to hack the head from a rather large hare that had leaped on to the stone wall to watch them.
‘Juni,’ Norema said, astonishing herself with the authority she mustered, ‘run back inside and get that pan I was just examining. Here, no, give me your torch,’ and, with two torches in one hand, she bent to yank up some tubers whose taste she knew. ‘Those rocks will make a fireplace—and Juni, bring back a jar for water. I’m sure that stream down there is fresh …’
Raven sat down on a flat rock to watch, her hands on her knees, while Norema, in a panic of relief, now that she had something to take charge of, to organize, to do, began concocting an ersatz meal of rabbit, parsnips, and kale.
‘Throw me the guts,’ Raven said suddenly, while Norema, with a knife whose handle was as ornate as the feyer’s cups that afternoon, was busy sawing joints.
Juni, returning with the water jar on her hip, asked: ‘Can you read the future in the guts of hares?’ Water sloshed from the brim, wetting the girl’s thin, knobby wrist in moonlight.
Raven said: ‘I am going to make a length of cord. There’s no need in letting such things waste in this strange and terrible land,’ and she fell to work over the bloody offal, milking out chyme, plucking away vein-webbed peritoneum, and stretching out the wet intestinal tract, thinner and thinner—which made Norema busy herself the more intently with the stew.
Juni, after watching Raven and ignoring Norema for fifteen minutes, said: ‘You have hands like a man.’
Raven’s bloody knuckles slipped one on another as she stretched and flexed and stretched. ‘No. In this strange and terrible land, most men have hands like women.’ A masked monkey, she squatted, pulling and pulling, the thinned gut growing in a coil on the stone between her feet.
In Norema’s pan, oil sputtered and frothed as handfuls of cubed meat went in; bubbles sped to the copper rim and burst. Norema put in a handful each of white and green vegetables that had been cut up on the flat rock by the fire, which left a large spot of gray, darker than the rock around, irregular as a mapped island.
Grayed in moonlight, with a few orange tongues chattering over the pan’s edge, the food went golden.
Raven laid one stained hand on her cabled thigh; with the other she picked up the coil to examine it.
Juni said: ‘My mother, when she was alive, said girl children were a curse and a burden to a poor widow.’ Then she asked; ‘Did your mother weep and curse at your birth because she wanted a boy?’
The dark
lips and chin—all that was visible under the fraying rag—turned to the girl, looking far more serious than eyes alone. The nostril edges, with threads hanging beside them, flared; the lips pulled back from stained teeth, and laughter suddenly barked. ‘My mother, when I was born and she saw I was a woman-child, got up still dangling the bloody rope between her legs—which could not have been easy, as I am supposed to have come out sideways—took up her ceremonial plow blade (and those things are heavy) and beat twelve times on the bronze gong that hangs on the wall. (We only beat it once if it’s a boy.) Then she went back to her pallet, cooing and cuddling and proud as a tiger. Outside in the hall, her men ceased their chanting and gave a yowl of joy, and for the next three days walked around clicking their long nails on every pot and pan in the place. They’d yowl for a boy, too. But they wouldn’t click their nails!’
‘Then why,’ asked Juni, as if it followed logically, ‘do you wear that mask?’
‘Oh.’ Raven turned the coil of string in her hands, then put it down. ‘I suppose because I grew up short and scrawny, like the smallest and thinnest of my mother’s men. Ah, yes. I remember that man, too. He was a shy, tiny, beautiful man. He tried to teach me to be an acrobat. Almost succeeded, too. Oh, I loved him, and he was always kind to me. Sideways … that’s probably why I’ve never wanted a baby. It’s a hard way to do it and they say such things are passed down among women.’