The Ladies of Mandrigyn

11

It was raining in Pergemis. The hard, leaden downpour beat a fierce tattoo on the peaked slate roofs of that crowded city with a sound almost like the drumming of hail. The cobblestones of the sloping street, three stories below the window where Starhawk sat, were running like a river; white streams frothed from the gutters of the roofs. Beyond the close-angled stone walls, the distant sea was the same cold, deep gray as the sky.

Starhawk, leaning her forehead against the glass, felt it like damp ice against her skin. Somewhere in the tall, narrow house she could hear Fawn’s voice, light and bantering, the tone she used to speak to the children. Then her footfalls came dancing down the stairs.

She is on her feet again, the Hawk thought. It is time to travel on.

The thought pulled at her, like a load resumed before the back was fully rested. She wondered how many days they had lost. Twenty? Thirty? What might have befallen the Wolf in those days?

Nothing that she could have remedied, she thought. And she could not have left Fawn.

By the time they had reached the crossroads, where the southward way to the Bight Coast parted from the highland road that led to Racken Scrag and eventually to Grimscarp, the mauled flesh of Fawn’s arm and throat had begun to fester. Starhawk had done what she could for it. Anyog, whose hurts by chance or magic remained clean, was far too ill to help her. There had been no question of a parting of the ways.

By the time they had reached Pergemis, Fawn had been raving, moaning in an agony of pain and calling weakly for Sun Wolf. In the blurred nightmare of days and nights that had followed, in spite of all that the lady Pel Farstep could do, the girl had wandered in desperate delirium, sobbing for him to save her.

During those first four or five days in the house of the widowed mother of Ram and Orris, Starhawk had known very little beyond unremitting tiredness and fear and remembered clearly meeting no one but Pel herself. The mother of the ox team was ridiculously like her brother Anyog—small, wiry, with hair as crisp and white-streaked as his beard. She had taken immediate charge of Fawn and Starhawk both, nursing the sick girl tirelessly in the intervals of running one of the most thriving mercantile establishments in the town. Starhawk’s memories of that time were a blur of stinking poultices that burned her hands, herbed steam and the coolness of lavender water, exhaustion such as she had never known in war, and a bitter, guilty wretchedness that returned like the hurt of an old wound every time she saw Fawn’s white, drawn face. The other members of the household had been only voices and occasional faces peering in at the door.

Her only clear recollection of the events of that time had been of the night they had cut half a handful of suppurating flesh from Fawn’s wound. She had sat up with Fawn afterward, the girl’s faint, sleeping breath the only sound in the dark house. She had meditated, found no peace in it, and was sitting in the cushioned chair beside the bed, staring into the darkness beyond the single candle, when Anyog had come in, panting with the exertion of having dragged himself there from his own room on the other side of the house. He had shaken off her anxious efforts to make him sit; up until recently he had been worse off than Fawn and still looked like a corpse in its winding sheet, wrapped in his draggled bed robe.

He had only clung to her for support, gasping, “Swear to me you will tell no one. Swear it on your life.” And when she had sworn, he had sat on the edge of the bed and clumsily, with the air of one long out of practice, worked spells of healing with hands that shook from weakness.

Pel Farstep had remarked to Starhawk after this that her brother’s sleep seemed troubled. In his nightmares, he could be heard to whisper the name of the Wizard King.

In addition to Pel, the family consisted of her three sons—Imber was the oldest, splitting the headship of the Farstep merchant interests with her—Imber’s wife Gillie, and their horrifyingly enterprising offspring, Idjit and Keltic. Idjit was three, alarmingly suave and nimble-tongued for a boy of his years and masterfully adept at getting his younger sister to do his mischief for him. In the spring, Gillie expected a third child. “We’re praying for another lassie,” Imber confided to Starhawk one evening as she played at finger swords with Idjit before the kitchen hearth, “given the peck of trouble this lad’s been.”

The household further boasted a maid, a manservant, and three clerks who slept in the attics under the streaming slates of the roof, plus two cats and three of the little black ships’ dogs seen in such numbers about the city. Pel ruled the whole concern with brisk love and a rod of iron.

It was a house, Starhawk thought, in which she could have been happy, had things been otherwise.

There would be no glory here, she mused, gazing out into the dove-colored afternoon rain; none of the cold, bright truth of battle, where all things had the shine of triumph, edged in the inky shadow of death. There was none of the strenuous beauty of the warrior’s way here and no one here who would understand it. But life in more muted colors could be comfortable, too. And she would not be lonely.

Loneliness was nothing new to Starhawk. There were times when she felt that she had always been lonely, except when she was with Sun Wolf.

These days of rest had given her time to be alone and time to meditate, and the deep calm of it had cleared her thoughts. Having admitted her love to herself, she did not know whether she could return to being what she had been; but without the Wolf’s presence, she knew that it would not much matter to her where she was or what she did. There was the possibility—the probability after so much time—that he was dead and that her long quest would find only darkness and grief at its end.

Yet she could not conceive of abandoning that quest.

It was nearing lamp lighting time. The room was on the south side of the house, facing the sea, and brightness lingered on there when, in the rest of the house, Gillie and the maid Pearl began to set out the fat, while, beeswax candles and the lamps of multicolored glass. The hangings of the bed—the best guest bed that she had shared with Fawn for the last week, since Fawn’s recovery—were a rich shade of red in daylight, but in this half-light they looked almost black, and the colors of the frieze of stenciled flowers on the pale plaster of walls had grown vague and indistinguishable in the shadows. Opposite her, above the heavy carved dresser, a big mural showed some local saint walking on the waters of the sea to preach to the mermaids, with fish and octopi meticulously depicted playing about his toes.

Sitting in the window seat, Starhawk pulled the thick folds of her green wool robe closer about her. Her hair was damp from washing and still smelled of herbed soap. She and Ram had taken Idjit and baby Kiltie down walking on the stone quays after lunch, as the gulls wheeled overhead piping warnings of the coming storm. The expedition had been a success. Idjit had induced Kiltie to fetch him crabs from one of the tide pools at the far end of the horn of land that lay beyond the edge of the docks, and Starhawk had had to slop to the rescue, with Ram hovering anxiously about, warning her not to be hurt. A most satisfying day for all concerned, she thought and grinned.

For a woman who had spent her entire life in the company of adults—either nuns or warriors—she was appalled at how idiotically fond she was of children.

It would not be easy, she knew, to leave this pleasant house, particularly in light of what she and Fawn must face.

Yet the days here had been fraught with guilty restlessness; nights she had lain awake, listening to the girl’s soft breath beside her, wondering if the days she spent taking care of Fawn were bought out of Sun Wolf’s life.

But she could not abandon her among strangers. And this knowledge had made Starhawk philosophical. There had been entire days in which she had been truly able to rest and peaceful evenings in the great kitchen or in the family room, listening to Genie play her bone flute and talking of travel and far places with Ram. When Fawn was able to come haltingly down the stairs, she joined them. Starhawk was amused to see that she had won Orris’ busy heart with her quick understanding of money and trade.

For Starhawk, at such times, it was as if she had refound her older brothers. After Pel and Fawn and Gillie had taken themselves off to bed, she had spent evening after evening drinking and dicing with the three big oxen, telling stories, or listening to them speak of the northeastward roads.

“You aren’t the only ones who’ve spoken of the nuuwa running in bands these days,” Imber said, tucking his long-stemmed pipe into the corner of his mouth and gazing across the table at Starhawk with eyes that were as blue, but much quicker and shrewder, than those of either of his brothers. “After these gomerils left for the North, we had word of it, before the weather closed the sea lanes. I had fears they’d come to grief in the mountains.”

Orris frowned. “You mean, others have seen bands as big?”

“Eh-twice and three times that size.” Imber leaned forward to his carved chair and pushed his glass toward Ram, who had charge of the pitcher of mulled wine. “Fleg Barnhithe told me some sheepman from the Thanelands said there’d been a band there numbered near forty...”

“Forty!” the others cried, aghast.

“They’re breeding up in the mountains somewhere.” Imber sighed, shaking his head. “It’s made fair hash of the overland roads. Them and other things, other kinds of monsters...”

Starhawk frowned, remembering her words with Anyog in the half darkness of the corridor of the deserted Peacock Inn. “Breeding?” she said softly. “Now, I’ve heard tell they’re men—or were once men.”

“That’s impossible,” Orris stated, a little too quickly. “Blinding’s a punishment that’s practiced everywhere, and those who are blinded don’t even lose their reason, much less turn into—into those. And anyway, a blinded man doesn’t follow the way they do. Nor has any man that kind of—of insane strength.”

But his eyes flickered as he spoke, and there was a touch of fear in his voice; if the nuuwa had once been men, the hideous corollary was that any man stood in danger of becoming a nuuwa.

“I’ve seen men close to that kind of strength in battle,” Starhawk objected. She folded her long, bony hands on the waxed oak of the table top. “I’ve met men you’d have to kill to stop—men driven by necessity for survival out of all bounds of human strength.”

“But if it was a thing that—that happened, as if it were a sickness, wouldn’t it happen to women, too? I don’t think anyone’s ever seen a woman of ’em.”

“But that goes double for them breeding,” Ram pointed out. filling the glasses with the wine like molten gold in the gleaming lamplight. “Anyroad, they’d never reproduce—they’d eat their own young, as they do everything else they come on.”

“The Mother doesn’t mold them out of little clay bits,” Starhawk said.

Orris laughed. “You’ll never convince our Ram of it.”

“Nah, just because he didn’t have no schooling, bar what the wardens of the jail could give him...” Imber teased, his eyes sparkling with mischief.

“Better nor what the kennelman gave you,” Ram retorted with a broad grin, and the discussion degenerated into the rough-and-tumble kidding that Starhawk had grown used to in that boisterous house.

But the memory of that evening came back to her now as she thought of taking the road again. She shivered and drew up her knees under the soft folds of the robe, resting her chin on her crossed wrists. Neither she nor Fawn had spoken to any of them of their destination; not for the first time, she was thankful for the brothers’ collective denseness that prevented them from guessing what Anyog had known. She had no desire to deal with the overwhelming rush of protectiveness that even the suspicion would have brought out in them.

From somewhere below, she caught Fawn’s voice, like a drift of passing perfume; “... if that’s the case, then keeping a fortified post in the North open year-round would pay, wouldn’t it?”

Pel’s brisk tones replied, “Yes, but the returns on the trade in onyx alone...”

It must have been years, the Hawk thought, since Fawn had been in company with the kind of people she had grown up with, years since she had heard that clever, practical language of finance and trade. Starhawk smiled a little to herself, remembering Fawn’s shamefaced admission that she was a merchant at heart. Her father—whose bones had been lying these two years, bleached where the robbers had scattered them—had tried to make a great lady of her; Sun Wolf had made a skilled and practiced mistress of her; it was only now, after trial and struggle and desperate adventure, that Fawn was free to fly her own colors. In spite of what she knew to be their rivalry for the same man, Starhawk was proud of her.

Heavy footfalls creaked in the hallway. Ram’s, she identified them, and realized that the room had grown dark. She got to her feet and lighted a spill from the embers of the glowing hearth. She was touching the light to the wick of a brass lamp in the shape of a joyous dolphin when the footsteps paused, and Ram’s hesitant knock sounded at the door.

“Starhawk?” He pushed it shyly open. He, too, was sleek and damp from his bath, the sleeves of his reddish-bronze tunic turned back from enormous forearms, the thin, gold neck chain he wore like a streak of flame in the lamplight.

She smiled at him. “The infants all bathed?”

He laughed. “Aye, for all that Keltic wailed and screamed until I’d let her bathe with Idjit and me. It was a fine, wet time we had in the kitchen, let me tell you. It’s like high tide on the floor, and the steam like the fogs in spring.”

Starhawk chuckled at the thought, noticing, as she smiled up at him, how the rose-amber of the light put streaks of deep gold in his brown hair and tiny reflections in his eyes. She saw the graveness of his face and her laughter faded.

“Starhawk,” he said quietly, “you spoke this afternoon of moving on. Going away to seek this man of Fawnie’s. Must you?”

.. .this man of Fawnie’s. She looked away, down at her own hands, spangled with the topaz reflections of the lamp’s facets. Trust Ram, she thought, to go protective on me... “I’ll have to go sooner or later,” she replied. “It’s better now.”

“Must it be—sooner or later?”

She said nothing. The oil hissed faintly against the cold metal of the lamp; the smell of the scented whale oil, rich and faintly flowery, came hot to her nostrils, along with the bland smells of soap and wool. She did not meet his eyes.

“If the man’s been missing this long, he’s likely dead,” Ram persisted softly. “Starhawk, I know you have vows of loyalty to him as your chief and I respect that, I truly do. But—could you not stay with us?”

The drumming of the rain on the slates crept into her silence, and the memory of the bleak cold of the roads. She felt the bitter, weary knowledge that she would have to find a wizard somewhere, if she wanted to have any chance at the tower of Grimscarp at all, and that the going would be harder now, with maybe only that final grief at the end.

If it’s this hard for me, she thought, what will it be for Fawn, alone?

Doggedly, she shook her head, but could not speak.

“In the spring...” he began.

“In the spring, it will be too late.” She raised her head and saw his face suddenly taut with emotion, the big square chin thrust out and the flat lips pressed hard together.

“It’s too late now,” he said. “Starhawk—must you make me write it all down, and me no good hand with words? I love you. I want to marry you and for you to stay here with me.” And with awkward passion, he folded her in his great arms and kissed her.

Between her shock that any man would ever say those words to her and the rough strength of his grasp, for a moment she made no move either to yield or to repulse. The two affairs she had had while in Sun Wolf’s troop had been short-lived, almost perfunctory, a clumsy seeking for something she knew from the start that she would never find. But this was different. He was offering her not the warmth of a night, but a life in this place at his side. That, as much as the shape and strength of a man’s body in her arms, drew her.

He must have felt her waver, unresponsive and uncertain, for his arms slacked from around her, and he drew back. There was misery in his face. “Could you not?”

Shakily and for the first time, she looked at him not as a traveler like herself nor as an amateur warrior to her professionalism, but as a man to her womanliness. It had been comforting to rest her head on that huge barrel of a chest and to feel the massive arms strong around her, a comfort like nothing else she had known. She found herself thinking, He is very much like the Chief... and turned away, flooded with a helpless sense of shame, bitterness, and regret.

Silently she damned Anyog for doing this to her, for making her aware of herself as a woman and of his nephew, that good, deserving ox, only in terms of the man she truly wanted and could never hope to have.

She heard the rustle of his clothing and stepped away from his hand before he could touch her again. “Don’t,” she murmured tiredly and looked up, to see the hurt in his eyes.

“Could you not give up the way of the warrior, then?” he asked softly, and the guilt that burned her was all the sharper for the fact that she had never spoken to him of another love. The very genuine liking she had for him made it all the worse.

But she loved him no more than she loved Ari; and she could not conceive of herself marrying a lumpish, earnest merchant and having to deal with his clumsy efforts to protect her and to rule her life.

“It wouldn’t be fair to you,” she said.

“To take me a warlady to wife?” A faint smile glimmered in his eyes. “But you’d no longer be a warrior then, would you? I’d be the mock of my brothers, maybe, but then you could protect me and lay about them for me, you see.”

And when she said nothing, the flicker of mischief died from his face.

“Eh, well,” he said after a time. “I’m sorry I spoke, Hawk. Don’t feel you need leave this house before you wish, just to get clear of my ardor. I’ll not speak again.”

She lowered her eyes, but could find nothing to say. She knew she should speak, and tell him that, though she did not love him, she liked him hugely, better than either of his brothers; tell him that were she not struggling with a love as hopeless as it was desperate, she would like nothing better than to join his loud and brawling family... But she could not. There was no one, in fact, whom she could speak to of it—there was only one person whom she trusted with her feelings enough to tell, and he was the one person who must never know... this man of Fawnie’s.

She changed her clothes and went downstairs to supper. She had little idea of what she ate or of the few things she replied to those who spoke to her. Ram was there, pale and quiet under the gibes of his brothers. Though she was past noticing much, Starhawk was aware that Fawn, too. had very little to say. Pel Farstep’s sharp, black eyes flicked from face to face, but the shrewd little merchant made no mention of their silence and was seen to kick her youngest son under the table when he bawled a question to Ram, asking, was he in love, that he couldn’t eat?

They always said that love affects women this way, Starhawk thought, fleeing the convivial clamor in the supper room as soon as she decently could. Great Mother, I’ve eaten hearty dinners after sacking towns and slitting the throats of innocent civilians. Why should saying “No” to one lumpish burgher whom I don’t even love make whatever it was that Gillie spent her time and sweat in the kitchen for taste like flour paste and ash? The Chief would kill me.

No, she thought. The Chief would understand.

She paused before the mirror in her room and stood for a long time, candle in hand, studying the pale, fragile-boned face reflected there.

She saw nothing that anyone by any stretch of courtesy would call pretty. For all the delicacy of the cheekbones and the whiteness of the fair skin, it was a face cursed with a chin both too long and too square, with lips too thin, and with a nose that was marked with that telltale, bumpy crookedness that was the family resemblance of fighters. Fine, pale hair caught the candle’s light, which darkened it to the color of corn silk—in sunlight it was nearly white, tow and flyaway as a child’s. It had grown out some in her journeying, hanging wispy against the hollows of her cheeks. Sunlight, too, would have lightened her eyes almost to silver; in this light, they were smoke-colored, almost as dark as the charcoal-gray ring that circled her pupils. Her lashes were straight and colorless. There was a scar on her cheek, too, like a rudely drawn line of pink chalk. In her bath, she had noted again how the line of it picked up again at her collarbone and extended for a handspan down across pectoral muscle and breast.

She remembered a time when she had been proud of her scars.

Who but Ram, she wondered, would offer to take a warlady to wife? Certainly not a man who had his choice of fragile young beauties like Fawn.

The door opened behind her. The liquid deeps of the mirror showed her another candle, and its sheen rippled over a gown of brown velvet, tagged with the pale ecru lace such as the ladies of the Bight Islands made, with a delicate face lost in shadow above.

She turned from the mirror. “How do you feel?” she asked.

Fawn shrugged and set the candle down. “Renewed,” she replied quietly. “As it—oh, as if spring had come, after a nightmare winter.” She crossed to the small table that stood beside the window and picked up her hairbrush, as was her nightly wont. But she set it down again, as she had set down untasted forkfuls of flour paste and ash at tonight’s supper. In the silky, amber gleam of candle and lamp, her fingers were trembling.

“Ready to take the road again?” the Hawk asked, her voice ringing tinnily in her own ears. This man of Fawnie’s, Ram had said. But that, she told herself, was nothing that she had to burden Fawn with. It was no doing of hers that she had been stolen away from her family and had taken Sun Wolf’s fancy. The Wolf was lost and in grave danger, and Fawn had put her life at risk to find him.

Fawn was silent for a long moment, staring down at the brush, her face turned away. In a muffled voice, she finally said, “No.” She looked up with wretched defiance in her green eyes. “I’m not going on.”

Even Ram’s unexpected proposal of marriage had not struck Starhawk with such shock. For a moment, she could only stare, and her first feeling was one of indignation that this girl would abandon her quest for her lover. “What?” was all she could say.

Fawn’s voice was shaking. “I’m going to stay here,” she said haltingly, “and—and marry Orris.”

“What?” And then, seeing the girl’s eyes flood with tears of shame and wretchedness, Starhawk crossed the room in two quick strides and caught her in a swift hug, reassuring her while her own mind reeled in divided confusion. “Fawnie, I—”

Fawn began sobbing in earnest. “Starhawk, don’t be angry with me. Please don’t be angry with me. Sun Wolf was so good to me, so kind—he saved me from I don’t know what kind of slavery and misery. But—but Anyog was right. I was there at the inn when he said we would never enter the Citadel without the help of a wizard—I was listening in the hall. And he’s right, Hawk. We can’t go against Altiokis by ourselves. And there are no wizards anymore. He’s the last one left, the only one ...”

Not if I can put the screws to Anyog in some way, he’s not, Starhawk thought grimly. But she only said, “We’ll find one.” Her honesty drove her to recognize Fawn’s love for the Wolf to be as valid as her own, even as it had driven her to allow the girl to accompany her in the first place.

“No,” Fawn whispered. “Hawk, even if we could—it isn’t only that.” She drew back, looking earnestly up at the older woman with those wide, absinthe-green eyes. “Starhawk, it isn’t enough. I want a home; I want children of my own. Even if we find him, even if he’s not dead, I don’t want to live as a mercenary’s woman. I love Sun Wolf—I think I’ll always love him. But I won’t go on being a glorified camp follower. I can’t.”

Her trembling fingers gestured at the dim room, with its curtained bed and softly shining lamps, its stiff-robed, ridiculous saint preaching to the mermaids in the sea, with their weedy hair flowing down over their breasts. “This is the sort of house that I grew up in, Hawk. This is the life I know. I belong here. And believe me,” she added with a wry smile, “marrying into a firm of spice merchants is a better thing, in the long run, than being mistress to the richest mercenary in creation.”

Flabbergasted, Starhawk could not speak, but only look in puzzlement at that beautiful, secretive face and wonder that anyone who actually had Sun Wolf’s love could give it up for a bustling, pompous busybody like Orris Farstep.

Fawn disengaged herself quietly—from Starhawk’s grasp and walked to the window. The lace at her throat almost covered the bandages that remained over the wounds that the nuuwa had left; like Starhawk, she would carry scars to the end of her days. Her voice was soft as she went on. “I spoke to Pel about it this afternoon. I know Orris is fond of me. And I—I want this, Hawk. I want a home and a family and a place; I want to know that my man isn’t going to get himself killed in a war next week or discard me for someone else next year. I love this place and I love these people. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” the Hawk said, her voice so low that she was almost not sure that it could be heard over the clamoring sounds in her own heart and mind. “Yes, I understand.”

Fawn’s back was a shape of darkness against the deep well of the window’s shadow; the candle threw a little wisp of light along the edge of the lace and on the halo of her hair. “What will you do?” she asked.

Starhawk shrugged. “Go on alone.”

She took her leave of them next day. Pel, Orris, Gillie, and the children went with her to see her off at the city’s land gate, wrapped in oilskins to keep off the rain. Anyog, though he was able now to get about, had remained at home, as had Ram and Fawn, each for a different, personal reason.

All the way through the steep-slanted cobbled streets of the town, Orris had kept up a worried stream of caution and advice regarding the roads through the Stren Water Valley that would take her northeast to Racken Scrag, about the bandits who were said to haunt them, and concerning the dangers of Altiokis’ lands. “It isn’t only the bandits stealing your horses you’ll have to worry about, lass,” he fretted—Pel had given Starhawk a riding mare and a pack mule. “That Altiokis, he’s hiring mercenaries, and the countryside’s stiff with them. They’re dangerous fellows...”

The Hawk sighed patiently, glancing sideways at Orris from beneath her streaming hood. “I know all about mercenaries that I need to.”

“Yes, but—”

“Leave the poor woman alone,” Pel ordered briskly. “By God, how she put up with you all the way from Foonspay I’ll never know.” Her smile flashed white in the gypsy brown of her face. Her hood was of the fashionable calash type—under its boned arch, the piled braids of her widow’s coif gleamed faintly in the rainy daylight. She quickened her step to where Starhawk, walked in front of the little cavalcade of led horses and took the Hawk’s hand in her own little square one.

In a softer voice, she said, “But we’re all glad that you have been here, child. Your staying made all the difference to Fawn. In the pinch, it may even be that it saved her life to know that she had not been abandoned in a strange place.”

Starhawk said nothing. She felt uncomfortable about Fawn, almost guilty. But her impassive face showed nothing of the turmoil within her as she looked around at the bright-painted walls of this rain-drenched, fish-smelling town. Pel seemed to accept her silence for what it was and moved along briskly beside her, keeping her heavy black skirts lifted above the runnels that trickled among the cobblestones.

Orris persisted. “But mercenaries—they’re a bad breed, Starhawk, begging your pardon for saying so. And they say the Dark Eagle whom Altiokis has put in charge of all his mercenaries is the worst...”

“The Dark Eagle?” Starhawk raised her dark, level brows.

“Aye. He’s a wicked man, they say...”

“Oh, bosh,” Pel retorted. “Our girl’s probably served with him; haven’t you, child?”

“As a matter of fact, I have,” she admitted, and Orris looked shocked.

From the saddle of the riding mare, Idjit announced, “I be goin’ with the Hawk.”

“Say, ‘I am going with the Hawk,’” corrected Gillie, who was leading the mare. “And in any case, you aren’t, laddie.”

“Then I maun’t say’t,” the boy retorted in the broad Bight Coast dialect that his mother was laboring diligently to erase from his speech. Keltic, perched amid the packs on the mule, watched her brother with worship in her round, blue eyes.

Their mother looked annoyed with this challenge, but Starhawk only said, “That’s all right, Gillie. Even if I could take a child along—which I can’t—I wouldn’t have one with me who talked like a fisherman.”

At this rebuke from his hero, Idjit subsided, and Pel hid a grin. They had reached the squat towers of the city gate. Amid the crowds of incoming countryfolk and local farmers, they said good-by, Starhawk lifting the children down and mounting in Idjit’s place, leaning from the saddle to clasp their hands. She missed them already—and more than these who had come to see her off, she missed Ram and Anyog and Fawn. But there was nothing that she could have said to them in parting. What could she say to a man she was leaving to seek another, or to the woman who had abandoned that quest? And though in the end she had not had the heart to speak to Anyog of her desperate need for even a cowardly and unfledged wizard’s aid, she knew that Anyog knew it. She did not blame him for his fear, but she knew that he blamed himself.

“The Stren Water Valley will be in flood this time of year,” Orris advised. “Best go up it by the foothills.”

The mare shied, more offended than afraid, as a market woman chivied a herd of geese through the gate; in the shelter of the gatehouse eaves, a boy was selling roast chestnuts out of a brazier full of coals, his thin, monotonous song rising above the general din. Light and steady, rain drummed on the shining slates and on Starhawk’s black oilskin cloak. The sound of rain and the smell offish and the sea would always be twined in her mind with these people—with the two children hanging onto Gillie Farstep’s hands, with the monumental Orris, fussing at her to watch what inns she put up at, and with Pel Farstep, like a little brown sparrow, reaching up to take her hands in farewell.

“Keep yourself safe, child,” she said gently. “And remember, wherever you are, there is a home here for you if you need one.”

Starhawk bent from the saddle and kissed the brown cheek. Then she turned the horse’s head; the mule stretched out its neck to the full extent of the lead before it followed. She left the Farsteps in the crowded shadows of the noisy gate and did not look back.

You have parted from so many people, she told herself, to still that treacherous ache in her heart. In time, you got over all but one and you’ll get over these.

She made herself wonder if the Dark Eagle would take her on as a mercenary; that would get her into the Citadel, without the need to search for a wizard to aid her. From things Ram and his brothers had said, most people didn’t believe in the existence of wizards anymore—only in Altiokis, inhuman, deathless, undefeatable, coiled in the darkness of the Tchard Mountains like a poisonous snake beneath the kitchen floor.

The wet wind lifted her cloak. Shreds of white cloud blew, unveiling the distant foothills of those mountains and the rolling uplands, stony and deserted, that guarded all approaches to them on this side. How long would it be, she wondered, before Altiokis turned his energies toward the Bight Coast, as he had turned them toward Mandrigyn and the straits of the Megantic?

Once she would have watched the proceedings with interest, as Sun Wolf did, gauging the proper time to apply for work amid the chaos. She had burned and looted many cities—this was the first time, she realized, she had dwelt in one in peace. Pel, Ram, and Orris were the burghers she and her men had helped kill; Idjit and Keltic were the children who had been sold into slavery to pay them.

She shook her head, forcing those thoughts into the background of her mind. One thing at a time, she told herself, and the thing now is to figure out what I’m going to do when I reach the Citadel walls. The Dark Eagle would know of her unshakable loyalty to the Wolf—he’d seen them work together when they’d all been fighting in the East. Even if she came up with a story of disaffected loyalties, the timing, with the Wolf, being a prisoner in the Citadel, would give the game away.

She had to find a wizard—one who was not too terrified of Altiokis to admit his powers, preferably one who had passed this Trial that Anyog had spoken of. But there was all the Mother’s green earth to search in and all the days that she had lost in Pergemis pressing on her, reminding her how little time it took for a man to die.

Damn Fawnie, anyway, she thought, exasperated, and then felt a twinge of guilt. She did not rationally expect that the girl would have known at the outset that she would not be going on from Pergemis; and in any case, Pel Farstep might very well have been right. It would be easy to die, lying friendless among strangers. Yet knowing Fawn for her rival, Starhawk could never have abandoned her to her death.

Hooves clattered on the hard surface of the highroad. Starhawk swung around in the saddle, the freshening wind blowing the hood back from her hair. It was a single rider, wrapped like herself in a black oilskin poncho, the folds of it whipping like the horse’s black, tangled mane and tail in the moist chill of the air. They drew up beside her, horse and rider steaming with breath.

Starhawk said, “Are you out of your lint-picking mind?”

“I suspect so.” Uncle Anyog was panting, clinging to the pommel of the saddle for balance, his face white against the darkness of his salt-and-pepper beard. “But I couldn’t let you go on, my warrior dove. Not alone.”

She regarded him from beneath lowered lids. “You going to start calling me ‘lass,’ as Ram does?”

He grinned. She reined her mare around and started up the road for the foothills and the way to the Tchard Mountains, Anyog jogging at her side.

“For that matter, did Ram put you up to this?” she asked suddenly.

“It would do my wits greater credit if I said he’d threatened me with a horrible death if I didn’t go to your aid.” The old man sighed. “But alas, in old age one learns to take credit for one’s own follies. None of them knows a thing, my child. I left Pel a note.”

“It must have covered three pages,” she remarked.

Anyog was recovering his breath a little. She could see, under the oilskin, that he was dressed as he always was—as a gentleman—in his drab and sober black, the starched white lace of his ruff like petals around his face. “In the finest iambic pentameter,” he amplified. “My dove, I know why you refused our Ram’s hamlike but gold-filled hand—and I suspect I know why you left the Convent.” Her head swiveled sharply around, her gray eyes narrowing. “Oh, yes—I have seen you meditate and I know you didn’t learn that as a mercenary... But why did you become a Sister to begin with?”

She drew rein, meeting that bright, black scrutiny with cold reserve. “I never turn down an offer of help,” she said. “And now that you have offered, I won’t send you back, because I need you. But that doesn’t mean I won’t gag you and pack you up to Grimscarp, the way we packed you into Pergemis, if you ask after things that are none of your affair.”

She clucked to the mare and moved off.

“But it is my affair, my dove,” the little man said, wholly unperturbed. “For I think we are more alike than you know. You became a Sister, I suspect, for the same reasons that you later became a warrior—because you would not tolerate the slow breaking of your spirit to the yoke of a house and a child and some man’s whims, and any life seemed preferable to that—because you need a life of the brighter colors, because you prefer lightning-edged darkness to an eternal twilight. My child,” he said softly, urging his bay mare up beside hers on the narrow road, “I could no more have remained a pensioner in my estimable sister’s house than I could become a warrior like yourself.

“I have lived with my fear a long time,” he continued, drawing the oilskin closer about his body as the wind turned chill once again. “Not until now had I realized how it had come to rule me.”