He began shaking, exhausted by the long years of running and hiding and by the terrible hope that this precious ghost girl would not turn away from him on the day she came fully awake.
“I’ll tell you this,” said Marit. She wasn’t one to give up easily. “Myself, that’s one. I heard of your existence from others, not from others wearing the cloak but from a reeve who spoke to a hieros, who spoke of how you came to the temple and claimed that girl. That’s why I sought you out, and how I found you. You’re two more. That makes three Guardians. Lord Radas makes four. And I have encountered three others who I believe are allied with Radas. One is called Hari, one is Yordenas. The third is a woman wearing a cloak of night. That makes seven. But there are nine Guardians. Where are the other two? What are we, if we are not the Guardians spoken of in the stories? If we are not the Guardians who sit in authority at the assizes, who guard the law on which the land is built? What happened to the real Guardians? Why did they vanish, and why are you and I here now? Do you know the answers?”
For once it was easy for him not to speak. Without trust, there can be no free exchange. Without trust, there can be no answers that have a hope of sounding out the truth.
“What can I do to earn your trust?” Her gaze burned, but he would be veiled to her just as she was veiled to him. The third eye granted to the Guardians by Ushara the Devourer allowed them to see into the hearts of mortal men, not into the hearts of other Guardians.
“Kotaru the Thunderer gave each Guardian a staff,” he said. “Where is yours?”
“I don’t know. I never had one.”
Maybe she was a very good liar. Maybe she was as ignorant as she seemed. He had no way of knowing, and no way of finding out.
How sad, really, that he sought to teach the girl to trust him, while refusing to trust this woman who was, after all, asking of him nothing more than he was asking of the girl. If she was what she said she was, then they might join forces. There was strength in numbers. There was hope in numbers. Alone, he and the girl could do nothing but run. Here she came, offering the thing he desired most. No doubt his enemies knew that. So easily they could tempt him, snare him, and destroy him. Take the girl for themselves. And plunge the Hundred so deep into the shadows that he couldn’t see how the land could ever recover.
“The hells!” she said at last. “Can you not help me? Will you not?”
Weary, he remained silent.
“Eiya!” Then she laughed. She wasn’t a fragile creature, one crushed by a single blow. He could well believe she had been a reeve. She had a reeve’s confident physical stance, and measuring, deliberate stare. A good reeve was stubborn and observant. “Aui! The man I loved—and love still—now thinks of me only with regret and pain, while it’s another, younger, woman who he burns for in his thoughts with passion and longing. While you won’t talk to me at all. So be it. I’ve wandered too long hoping to find someone to tell me what I am and what I must do now. You’ve taught me something, ver, by just standing there with your friendly smile and wishing me gone. I have to find out the truth where it lies within myself. I must walk into the shadows, and see if I am strong enough to come out unscathed, with the truth fixed in my heart and my duty carried in my hands.”
She waited a moment longer. When he did not answer, she led the mare away into the trees. The rattle of their leaving faded. The wind sighed in the underbrush.
Seeing whinnied, and the other horse—now out of sight—called in answer.
“Have I made a terrible mistake?” he said to the air, to the sky, to the earth, to the water.
The girl looked at him, her gaze a question, perhaps even an act of trust.
He nodded. “We must pack up. It’s time to move on. Quickly now, lass. Quickly.”
19
After the gates were unlocked, the women who had been waiting all morning on the hot Olossi street were herded into a courtyard surrounded by high walls. Avisha trudged in, carrying Zianna and holding Jerad by the hand. Their keepers, a foursome of militiamen hired to maintain order, kept up a running patter of crude jokes.
“Heh. I wonder if those Qin soldiers have swords or prickles, eh?”
“Sharp as their swords, eh? I wouldn’t want one swiving me.”
“This lot hasn’t much choice. Heya! Rufi, look there. Isn’t that your mother? Eihi! No call to go hitting me, just a joke.”
Avisha kept her head down. Fortunately, she was not the only woman here burdened by children, so perhaps that wasn’t an immediate disqualification for marriage. Her arms were numb from the weight of holding Zianna. Jerad was sniffling.
She pushed him over toward a small door set into one wall where the tops of pipewood rising on the other side of the wall offered a sliver of shade. A beggar in a red cap and ragged kilt who was leaning against the door in that shade kindly moved away as she and the children approached. She sagged against the door, wiping sweat from her neck as she looked around.
The court’s stone pavement and high, whitewashed walls suggested it was either an unloading ground for wagons, or an open space for people to work. She had no idea how things worked in a city as big as Olossi, with its crowded streets and aggressive inhabitants as likely to shove you out of the way as wish you the blessings of the day. Her eyes watered from all the cook-smoke and from ash that still drifted off the burned sections of the lower city. Clouds were piling up in the east, and she was sure that on top of everything, it was going to rain.
“Vish.” Jerad’s voice threaded into a whine. The sad little sprout sagged against the wall, his legs crossed.
“You have to be patient, Jer.” She shifted the sleeping girl, Zianna’s weight aching her shoulder. The little girl’s naming-day clothes—the nicest garments anyone in the family had ever owned—were dirt-stained and stinking from being urinated in more than once; the once-precious orange silk was probably beyond salvaging after all those days on the road. “Just a little longer. See those double doors, there?”
She pointed with her free elbow.
The women pressed forward to cluster around the impressive wooden doors that gave access into a building bigger than Sapanasu’s temple hall in the village. There was a door in each wall of the vast courtyard. To the east, gates led to the street. The warehouse entry doors carved with elaborately twined salamanders were set in the western wall. To the north stood a gate trimmed in iron, big enough for wagons. The small door against which Avisha and the children huddled was the kind of entrance regular people passed through. The trees rising on the other side of the wall meant there was a garden beyond, filled with cool shade and, perhaps, a fountain. She licked dusty lips with a parched tongue.
“Don’t crowd!” shouted one of the militiamen as he reined his horse in a mincing circle, whip raised.
There were about fifty women, with perhaps twenty children in arm or in tow. Most of the women were young; some were older. Most were wrapped in a plain cotton taloos or dressed in the linen tunic and trousers worn by farmers and artisans and laborers. Poor clans desperate enough to send their daughters and sisters to make a marriage with outlanders; impoverished widows eager to find a home with their children. The beggar shuffled through the crowd, trolling for alms among folk likely as poor as he was!
A pair of elegant city girls passed him a few vey and returned to their conversation.
“My uncle told me to demand nothing less than forty cheyt as a marriage portion. They can afford it. They took the whole treasury. Greedy bastards.”
“Forty cheyt? Whew! You could never hope to see that much coin in your whole life. Who’s being greedy?”
“It’s fair payment for having to marry a dirty out-lander.”
“Best make sure they don’t find out about—” Their voices dropped to a whisper.
A girl with a bright red birthmark splayed over one cheek kept lifting a hand to cover her face. “Auntie, don’t you think they’ll turn me away the instant they see me? Can’t we just go home? I’d rather go to the temple than
be scorned again.”
“Quiet! The dowry the temple is demanding is more than we can afford. We’ll offer you to the outlanders with no request for a bride price at all. That might induce them to take you.”
A middle-aged man fussed over two girls dressed neatly in farmers’ best, each in a cotton taloos, one dyed a calm sorrel green and the other a reassuring bracken orange-brown. “Be polite. Be respectful. It’s a good opportunity but there’s no need to sign any contract unless you’re truly willing.”
“Papa, you’ve said this twelve times.”
He smoothed down the hair of one, twisting the end of her braid, and tugged out a wrinkle in the cloth draped over the shoulder of the other. “They have to prove themselves to you, girls, in the same way you have to prove yourselves to them. They’re folk just like any other, even if they look different than we do and have different ways.”
Avisha wiped her forehead again. Taru have mercy! It was so hot. Thunder rumbled, but the clouds hadn’t yet gotten to the city. Her hair felt stringy and tangled, however much she had tried to keep it combed and clean. She’d washed out her one good taloos a day ago, in a stream, but it had gotten stepped on and there was a big smudge of red clay dirt smeared across her hips. She hoped her face was clean, but Zianna would keep rubbing her hands in the dirt and then patting her big sister’s cheeks.
“I have to pee.” Jerad’s body was jiggling as he tried to hold it in. Tears dribbled down his face. “I don’t want to wet myself out here in front of everyone.”
If only Nallo were here!
But Nallo had been marched off to the reeve hall. They’d probably never see her again.
A shout from the gate startled her. A troop of grim Qin soldiers dressed in black rode into the courtyard from the street. She’d seen them during the long march from the Soha Hills to Olossi with the other refugees, but except for the day she and Nallo had encountered them on the trail, she’d not spoken to one. Every gaze shifted to stare with fear or apprehension at the newcomers.
If Nallo were here, Avisha knew what she would do.
“The hells!” She grabbed the boy by the wrist. “Come on.” She jiggered the latch and found the door unlocked. They slipped through while every eye in the courtyard was fixed on the Qin soldiers.
She closed the door behind them and sank against it, breathing hard. A stand of hatmaker’s pipewood screened the door. Jerad fumbled at his trousers—she’d made him put on his only pair so he would look respectable—and with a snivel of relief let go of his water. The spray rattled so loudly Avisha thought the whole city must hear, but the clamor of horses in the courtyard drowned him out. Her arms ached, and she looked around to see if there was anywhere she might put down Zi.
They stood in the shadowed corner of a walled garden. A larger garden lay beyond a second wall, green with fruit and nut trees, but this modest garden was laid out in a square with beds and troughs for medicinal plants, now overgrown and neglected, and stands of pipewood or shrubs of rice-grain-flower and purple-thorn and other such useful plants set against the walls. In the corner opposite her hiding place, a second door stood ajar. Just a few steps from it, a young woman sat on a bench. With her shoulders bowed, she was weeping too softly to be heard, but weeping nonetheless, wiping her face with the back of a hand as she lifted her head.
She was an outlander! She didn’t look like the Qin, with their flat faces and broad cheeks. She was some other breed of outlander. She wore sumptuous silks, the kind of cloth only a rich woman could afford or that, if the stories were true, a rich man would lavish on a valuable bed slave. A broom lying slantwise across the walkway and a hem of dust on her silks betrayed that she’d been sweeping.
Avisha gaped. How could she risk dirtying such magnificent silks by wearing them to sweep in? What manner of person was she? Had she tried her luck at a marriage contract only to be rejected? Or did she live in this grand compound?
Jerad coughed as the river slacked to a trickle, and ceased.
“Who’s there?” said the girl in a cool, firm voice. You’d never have guessed she’d been crying.
Avisha stepped out from the pipewood, trying to keep her voice calm and her hands from shaking. “I’m sorry, verea. I was just waiting out in the courtyard with the others when my little brother had to pee. He’s just nine, you know how it is, and tired from all the waiting.”
The girl examined Avisha and the sleeping Zianna critically. “Where is he?” she asked with a pretty smile but a searching gaze.
“Here, Jer, come out,” said Avisha.
The boy stumbled out to the open square, still tying up his trousers. He saw the other woman, and his mouth dropped open. “Her eyes are pulled all funny. Is something wrong with her?”
“Hush! Don’t be rude! I’m so sorry, verea. He’s just a sprout. We’ve never been to the city before. We don’t see outlanders where we come from.”
“No offense taken,” said the girl as her shoulders relaxed. She squeezed back the last of her tears and sniffed hard, then wiped her nose with the back of a hand. The more she spoke, the more you could hear the funny way she had of speaking, the sounds squished tight so it was hard to understand her. “What is your name?”
“I’m called Avisha, verea. This is my brother Jerad, and my little sister Zianna.”
“You are here for the interview?”
“Surely I am. There’s quite a few out there, truly.”
“That’s a surprise. In the first five days after the announcement in the markets, only fourteen women came to the gate. I do not know why so many crowded in today.”
“Do you live here?” Avisha gestured to the peaked roofs that marked the buildings of the greater compound.
“I do.”
“Sheh! Whoever is gardener of this place should be hauled out and whipped. No one is taking care of these valuable plants!”
“It has been neglected, that is true.” The girl examined the garden as if she was really getting a good look at it for the first time. “Why are they valuable?”
“To start with, that’s a nice stand of hatmaker’s pipewood, although it needs thinning. My mam would crush the seeds of purple-thorn—there—to kill insects in the storeroom. You can perfume clothes with the rice-grain-flower . . .” Now that the girl’s flush of tears had faded and her face was more at ease, Avisha saw that she was lovely despite her odd features. She had lustrous black hair bound into a long tail with a ribbon; the tail hung to her hips. “Or you can put a spray of the flowers in your hair, like an ornament.”
All at once, she felt sorry for the other girl. No one rich enough to wear silks of such quality would also wield a broom. She knew the tales as well as anyone. A rich merchant house could afford foreign slaves, and of course a life slave had no rights at all. Nothing about them belonged to themselves, not like a debt slave, who might hope to pay off the debt and walk free of all claim. No wonder the poor girl had been crying. “You’re from the south, aren’t you?”
The girl had been scrutinizing the rice-grain-flower, brushing at her hair where an ornamental flower might adorn her, but she turned back to Avisha. “I am, that’s true.”
“You have a funny way of pronouncing things.” The idiotic words sounded worse now that they hung in the air, awaiting an answer, so Avisha stumbled on. “I’m sorry for your trouble. I saw you were crying. We didn’t mean to interrupt. It’s just the boy had to pee so badly and didn’t want to wet himself.”
“Vish!” hissed Jerad indignantly.
“No, I’m glad you came.” The girl patted the bench. “Sit beside me. I am glad of a girl my own age to talk to.” As Avisha approached, the girl indicated a shady spot in one corner of the paved square.
“Ooof!” Jerad stopped short with a squeal of outrage followed by a childish giggle. “Did you see what she did?”
“What did I do?” asked the girl, alarmed.
Avisha wanted to slap the runt, but he didn’t know any better. “Nothing, verea. It’s just rude to p
oint with your finger like that.”
“Ah.” The girl stared at her for a moment with her mouth open in a smile that wasn’t quite sincere and wasn’t quite false; anxious, maybe, or embarrassed. She had all of her teeth, and they were as white as the landlady’s string of precious pearls, so perfect that Avisha felt a stab of ugly jealousy for the careless beauty she would herself never ever possess. Then the smile faded, and the girl rose, with dignity, revealing a shawl that she had draped over the bench and on which she had been sitting. This she spread in the shade. “The little one can rest here.”
“My thanks!”
It was such a relief to have Zi’s weight off her arms and back that Avisha almost wept, but instead she sank down on the bench beside the outlander and rested her head wearily in her hands. Still suspicious, Jerad sat down cross-legged beside Zi. His head drooped, his eyes closed, and he dozed off.
“Why do you want to marry one of the outlanders?” the girl asked. “Most Hundred folk don’t seem eager.”
“There’s a good group waiting out there today.”
“Good, or numerous?”
Avisha laughed. “There are a lot of them. There were two women there, dressed as fine as ever I did see, in city fashion, nothing like we’d ever see in my village. All they could talk about was how much coin they mean to demand in exchange for marrying. I didn’t think that was nice. But there was a nice father, telling his daughters they’d best be polite, and that they could look things over and make their own choice if they wished to wed an outlander. That was kind of him, for usually the clan gives you no choice. You know how it is.”
Only what a stupid thing to say to a slave who was no longer her own person!
The girl smiled softly. It was hard to tell if she was happy or sad. “Truly, sometimes a person isn’t given a choice.”
Impulsively, Avisha reached toward her, but drew back before she touched the other girl’s arm because the gesture seemed so intrusive, so bold, so intimate. “Eiya! I shouldn’t chatter so much. That’s what Nallo says.”