“What of us, Jothinin?” Marit asked as the fire streamed heat and smoke over her damp cloak and wet hair. “We are met here, we three. You called us ‘the last of our kind.’ But the Guardians are spirits arisen out of the pool at Indiyabu in ancient days, raised by the gods in answer to a plea. As it says in the tale: ‘In the worst of days, an orphaned girl knelt at the shore of the lake sacred to the gods and prayed that peace might return to her land.’ Are we truly Guardians if we did not rise out of the pool at Indiyabu? For it seems to me that the others—Lord Radas, Night, Yordenas, Bevard—have crossed under the Shadow Gate into corruption. They sow the fields not with justice but with discord, hate, and cruelty.”
“They are demons,” said Kirit.
“Demons are one of the eight children of the Mothers,” objected Jothinin. “They, too, are sheltered by the Mothers’ protection. I would not call demon any human who does wrong just on account of that wrongdoing. In older days, the gods-touched were said to be demon-born.”
“You forgot Hari,” said Kirit, stubbornly sticking to the main point. “He’s one of them.”
“Hari is not like the others,” said Marit quickly.
“You hope he is not,” said Jothinin. “But if he has become their creature, then they have five. Five Guardians can kill one.”
“As the cloak of Night tried to do to me in Toskala on that night when the army attacked. But Hari wasn’t there. It was Kirit who refused to cooperate with them. She saved me. For which I hope I have thanked her enough.”
Kirit frowned, her brows drawing down. To look at her with her colorless hair and her demon-blue eyes and her ghost-pale skin was to remember she was an outlander. Easy to call her a demon, since she looked nothing like a person. Yet what was a demon, really? Marit’s father had feared demons, while her mother, like Jothinin, had believed they were no more dangerous than any other of the children of the Hundred, having merely their own ways and customs. Her mother always said humankind were the most perilous of all.
“If we are to fight them,” said Marit, “then we must find Hari and convince him to join us. We must seek out as well the cloak of Earth. Then we will have five, and they will be four, too few to hunt us down and kill us.”
He scratched behind an ear like a man trying to sort out the solution to a difficult bit of accounting. “Cloak of Earth vanished long before any of the rest of us understood that corruption was eating into the Guardians’ council.”
“She deserted you, instead of warning you!” cried Marit. “Don’t you think that’s wrong?”
“It is what it is. I am the last to judge.”
“The gods created the Guardians to judge. As it says in the tale, ‘Let Guardians walk the lands, in order to establish justice if they can.’ ”
“To establish justice. To restore peace. Do you ever suppose, Marit, that the gods never meant for the Guardians to become the final measure of judgment in the land? Of course they traveled from assizes to assizes and stood in judgment over the most intractable cases, able to see into the hidden heart of those they judged. But over time folk trusted their own courts less and began to speak as if only the Guardians could bring justice. And then perhaps the Guardians came to believe it, also. I am not so sure things have fallen out as the gods intended.”
“ ‘Who can be trusted with this burden?’ ” she said, echoing the Tale of the Guardians. “The burden of justice.”
“ ‘Only the dead can be trusted,’ ” he answered in the cadence used in the tale. “We three died fighting for justice, in one way or another. You were an honest reeve. Kirit took many opportunities to help folk more unfortunate even than she was, and it is difficult to imagine, I think, people who have endured as much as she did.”
“I found a cloak,” said the girl, her voice barely audible above the patter of rain that had started up again outside. The cloak that bound her was as pale as mist, barely visible in the gloom. “I unbound this cloak from her dead body. Was that justice?”
The words rocked Marit. “No living person can unbind a cloak. Hari told me so.”
Jothinin watched the girl, his expression creased by a fissure of doubt. “A Guardian can seem dead but merely be at rest in a healing trance.”
Marit nodded slowly. “I saw Hari in such a stupor, after he was—stabbed—punished by one of Lord Radas’s soldiers. I suspect I have fallen two or three times into such a stupor, after I was murdered, and then awakened afterward without understanding what had happened. How are we healed, Jothinin?”
He shrugged. “The land heals us.”
“In other words, you don’t know. Kirit, how did you unbind the cloak?”
She spoke in her raw scrape of a voice. “I was out hunting and found the body. We were a very poor tribe. The silken cloth of the cloak she was wearing was very rich, something I could trade with. When I touched the clasp, the metal burned me. So I wrapped my hands in cloth and undid the clasp. Then I wrapped the cloak up and carried it with my belt. I got blisters on my skin. The blisters healed after a few days. I thought she was dead.”
Jothinin frowned, fingering his clean-shaven chin, which Marit had not, in fact, observed him shaving. Just as her own hair never grew out, his beard never grew in. “The cloak would have to be in a stupor, spirit poised on the threshold of the Spirit Gate. Otherwise no person could remove the cloak without destroying herself. The cloak protects the one who wears it.”
“I thought the spirits within the cloaks never changed. Now you tell me it is the cloak that remains and the spirit that changes?”
“Yes. That must be obvious to you, who wear the cloak of Death, which was worn by others before you. Of the cloaks who stood in the Guardians’ council when I was first awakened, only cloak of Night remains for certain, unless Eyasad, she who wore the cloak of Earth, still walks somewhere in the Hundred. All the others, and some many more times than once, are new faces. New spirits.”
“It’s like the cloaks jess us? Like we’re new reeves, chosen by old eagles.”
He chuckled. “I hadn’t thought of it that way, but it’s as good an explanation as any.”
She paced to the edge of the overhang. As the first kiss of dawn lightened the sea and wide plateau beyond the overhang, a vista opened toward the south where rugged spires and crowns appeared in such distinct relief they seemed close enough to touch. Like answers.
Turning back, she paused beside Kirit, who was still turning the spit with admirable patience. “Jothinin, tell me again how the cloak of Mist came to be walking in a far distant land beyond the Hundred.”
He nodded. “Here is the tale. Nine Guardians walk the land, presiding over assizes, establishing justice. Together, they constitute the Guardians’ council. The gods understood that all creatures are susceptible to corruption—so it was explained to me—so within the council it was possible for five Guardians to raise their staffs to execute one. That way, if one Guardian became rogue, the council could eliminate that one.”
“And the cloak would pass to an uncorrupted spirit,” said Marit.
“Yes. But when the cloak of Night became corrupted, she concealed her corruption. She subverted four other Guardians and persuaded them to eliminate those she felt would not support her. Ashaya, the cloak of Mist, realized too late she had become corrupted and then used to murder holy Guardians. She fled the council and the Hundred.”
“She was a coward,” said Kirit fiercely. “Running away.”
“Was she?” he asked gently.
“Why did she leave the Hundred?” Marit asked, crouching beside him.
He rested a hand on hers, for Guardians could touch each other, offer comfort they could no longer endure from other people. They could gaze into another Guardian’s face without being overwhelmed by the emotions and thoughts of that person. “It is possible for the spirit held within a cloak to grow weary of the task and desire oblivion. To lie down and let your spirit pass away.”
“To die?”
“To release yourse
lf. It is possible, but it takes courage to embrace the second death if you have become accustomed to surviving beyond death.” He caught Kirit’s eye and held it until the girl frowned. “So Guardians have done before. Released themselves and let the cloak pass to a new spirit who might have more vigor for the task. So Ashaya meant to do. But once the cloak left her, she would have no control over what spirit the cloak would choose when it was ready to claim a new spirit. She did not want Night to have a chance of reaching that new cloak and poisoning its spirit, as she had poisoned so many others. So Ashaya walked out of the Hundred, hoping to release the cloak in a place so far away that Night could never reach her.” He removed his hand from Marit’s and, with a wry smile, indicated Kirit. “It seems the gods had other ideas. For by one means and another, the cloak returned to the Hundred.”
Marit rose. “I think the gods chose well,” she said, trying to coax a smile from the serious girl, but Kirit kept turning the spit. “Yet had the cloak of Night succeeded in having me executed by five Guardians in Toskala, she could not pass my cloak on to whatever person she wanted it to go to, could she? You said cloaks choose, just as eagles choose reeves. Otherwise you could turn any criminal into a demon with the power to kill but not be killed. So if the cloaks wrap spirits at the behest of the gods, how could any corruptible person become a Guardian?”
“Is there an incorruptible person, Marit?”
“Aui!” she murmured, with a weary smile to answer his. “Of course there is not. At best, some are less corruptible than others. For instance, what of you, Jothinin? You are a man who strikes me as having little arrogance or vanity, and a cursed gentle way of laughing at yourself, and yet it seems you have walked as a Guardian for so long that a story from your youth has become one of the ancient tales we chant at festival time.
“The brigands raged in,
they confronted the peaceful company seated at their dinner,
they demanded that the girl be handed over to them.
All feared them. All looked away.
Except foolish Jothinin, light-minded Jothinin,
he was the only one who stood up to face them,
he was the only one who said, ‘No.’”
He flicked a hand up in a gesture that softly mocked himself. “I am sure I cannot understand what I ever did beyond drinking and gossiping and gaming. None could have been more surprised than I, after the brigands killed me for refusing to hand her over, to awaken and find myself wrapped by a Guardian’s cloak. I was always the most frivolous of men.” He studied her. “Where are you going with this, Marit? You hunt like a reeve. Your questions quarter the ground as you seek your prey.”
“Is that not the best way to proceed?” she asked, surprised, and then realized he was laughing at her, as he laughed at everything. Perhaps it was the way he had managed to thwart corruption all these years. “Listen. When Lord Radas punished Hari, he had a guardsman stab him. He did not do it himself. Why not?”
“The cloak of Sun wields a staff shaped as an arrow, but its point does not pierce physical substance. Because we are ghosts, in a way, we cannot wield a blade against living flesh. Our staffs—your sword, my staff, Kirit’s mirror—sever spirits from flesh, it’s true. But we can only judge humankind and then only when guilt is laid plain. We cannot judge the other children of the Hundred, who are veiled to us. Therefore, we cannot ourselves strike or kill another Guardian. Not alone.”
“We can kill another Guardian if a majority of the Guardians’ council agrees. And we can be hurt by the swords and arrows of others. It’s just that our cloaks—or the land—will heal us if we are injured. Isn’t that right?”
He seemed about to reply but she raised a hand as thoughts cascaded. Too agitated to stand still, she ran to the shore of the sea, where water drowsed along the flats. She kneeled at the edge to pull a hand through fingers of salty foam left where the waves had receded after the turbulence of the night’s storm.
The cloak of Night had always been present at the Guardians’ council, so Jothinin claimed, and if he was indeed the Jothinin sung of in the tale of the Silk Slippers, then he was unimaginably old. Yet the first time Reeve Marit had met Lord Radas in Iliyat, he had been a man. He had passed judgment on criminals as fairly as he might; possibly he had striven for justice and mercy. The second time, when he had ordered his men to kill her and Flirt, he wore a cloak. He was already corrupted.
Night had traveled for a few days with Marit, testing her—Marit saw that now—to see if Marit, too, might be corrupted. In a way, it was good to know Night had preferred to see her killed. Which meant the cloak of Night had waited, great round of years by great round of years, probing to seek awakened hearts she could corrupt: Radas, Yordenas, Bevard. Even Hari.
The sun rose over the salty inland sea. Beyond the rim of the high plateau lay a vast gulf of air. Shimmering into the west stretched the endless desert, an outlander country where no human could live. Into that wilderness the cloak of Mist, then named Ashaya, had walked, and an outlander girl with demon-blue eyes had found what she thought was a dead body and stripped the cloak from it, hoping to help her tribe survive. The girl had not died then. She died much later, in a sandstorm, on a southern desert. Somehow the cloak had found and claimed her. In time, it brought her to the Hundred.
Marit walked back to the overhang, where Kirit was teasing the conies off the spit and splitting them with her knife. She had a neat, practiced hand. She licked her fingers and looked up at Marit. She ventured a quirk of the lips that was, perhaps, an attempt at a smile. Not friendly, precisely, but inclusive.
“The cloak of Night. Do you know her name?” Marit asked.
Jothinin shook his head. “I never did. She was best loved, you know. Always pleasant. Always helpful. Always cheerful. I never would have thought she would walk into the shadows.”
Marit smiled as she might at a child she wanted to reassure. He had that quality, that she wanted him not to fret, even if she knew he would. “Sometimes those who seem strong prove to be weakest. And those who seem weak or light-minded and foolish, are in truth strongest of all.”
He shrugged away the compliment.
“How did you discover the plot to corrupt the Guardians?”
He looked at the irregular rock wall and the shadows and light that spilled in ripples along it. “To my shame, I did not. I walked from assizes to assizes, pleased to bring justice to the Hundred. I was oblivious to the signs of trouble among the other Guardians. Ashaya was the one who warned me, before she fled.”
“How did Night corrupt the others?”
“All I know is what Ashaya told me: false words and exaggerated suspicions. Whispers that some Guardians were not doing the work of the gods and must therefore be eliminated. Too late she realized she had herself become as corrupt as those she thought to guard against. She fled the Guardians’ council, warned me, and left the Hundred. After that, I disguised myself as an envoy of Ilu and avoided the altars and my winged horse. An envoy of Ilu is a humble man, easy to overlook. I blame myself for not seeing sooner what was going on.” He sighed, shoulders drooping.
Kirit said, “Are you hungry, uncle? Here is meat.” Then, after a hesitation, “And for you, Marit.” She set down her knife and popped a strip of meat into her mouth, chewed, swallowed, and considered. “A little tough. Not bad.”
Jothinin straightened as he forced a smile. He tore meat from a steaming carcass, watching Marit. “You have a plan. I see it in your face.”
“Why did the cloak of Night turn against the Guardians? Why then destroy the other Guardians? Does she truly want chaos? Murder? Rapine? Villages burned and children orphaned? It seems unlikely, shortsighted, messy. I talked with her, traveled with her for a hand of days. She did not strike me as shortsighted or messy.”
“We must judge them,” said Kirit unexpectedly, “not by their words but by what they allow to be done under their authority. The headwoman of a tribe who shows hospitality and generosity is pouring those quali
ties into the heart of the tribe over which she sits in authority. Likewise, a headwoman who is greedy, who is already rich but allows her people to steal from those who are weak and poor, who steals children and sells them into the hands of demons, she will poison her tribe long before they become aware that a sickness has overtaken them and ruined their herds and children.”
“I may wear a Guardian’s cloak,” said Marit, “but in my heart I’m still a reeve. I’m going to Iliyat and Herelia to investigate. To see if I can find out who Night is, and what she wants. If we understand her, we may be able to figure out how to defeat her. Also, I must find Hari, and convince him to join us.”
“Is it wise to split up?” asked Jothinin.
“I won’t leave you, uncle,” said Kirit.
“Lord Radas is busy conquering Haldia,” said Marit, “so it’s unlikely they have more than one or two cloaks out searching for us. Meanwhile, you must find the cloak of Earth. It will be easier for me to convince Hari to join us if he is sure he is on a side that can win.”
“I am pretty sure the cloak of Night holds his staff,” said Jothinin. “The spear of Twilight, which penetrates from day into night and from night into day. Even if he joins us, we still cannot pass judgment if he does not hold his staff. Consider this, Marit. Once we begin to pass judgment in the Guardians’ council, we are then doing to the other Guardians exactly what the cloak of Night did to those who came before us.”
“What choice do we have?” she retorted bitterly.
“We have to fight,” said Kirit. “It is worse not to fight.”
Surprised at this unexpected support, Marit smiled at her, but the girl had fixed her gaze on the man. Grotesque she might be, with that ghastly pallid complexion and those demon-blue eyes and the serious frown of a youth who has forgotten how to play, but there was something reassuring in the way she watched Jothinin.
She is trying to remember how to be human. She thinks he can teach her how.