The Ladies of Mandrigyn

8

The rain that slashed against the bolted shutters of the Brazen Monkey made a far-off, roaring sound, like the distant sea. With her boots extended toward the enormous blaze that was the only illumination in the shadowy common room, Starhawk scanned the few travelers still on the roads in this weather and decided that she and Fawn would take turns sleeping tonight.

Inns in this part of the mountains were notorious in any event, but during the dry season, when the caravans from Mandrigyn, Pergemis, and the Middle Kingdoms filled even this vast common room to capacity, there was some degree of safety. Most merchants were decent enough fellows, and no traveler would suffer to see another robbed, if only from the knowledge that it could happen to him next. During the rains it was different.

Opposite her, on the other worn and narrow plank bench, an unshaven little man with a loose mouth and a looser eye kept glancing over at Fawn, who stood at the far end of the long room, haggling with the innkeeper. Two others were hunched over pewter mugs of beer and the remains of a haunch of venison at one of the tables, oblivious to their surroundings. The Hawk wasn’t prepared to bet on any of their help, if there were trouble.

In a businesslike fashion, she began reviewing exits from the common room and escape routes from the inn.

Down at the other end of the room. Fawn was still nodding, the occasional sweetness of her low voice punctuating the innkeeper’s ingratiating whine. They’d been haggling about the price of rooms, food, and supplies for the last Fifteen minutes, a protracted process that Fawn was capable of continuing for upward of an hour without ever losing her air of grave interest. The heat of the room was drying her great plaid cloak; in the smoky amber of the firelight, Starhawk could see the steam rising from it, like faint breath on a snowy night.

From Kedwyr, they’d journeyed through the olive and lemon groves of the brown hills to the poorer inland cities of Nishboth and Plegg. Those cities had long ago knuckled under to Kedwyr’s dominance and had shrunk to little better than market towns, with their decaying mansions of stone lace and the crumbling ruins of their mosaic cathedrals dreaming of better days. After two days on the road, the rains had hit, freezing winds roaring in from the sea and torrents of black water pouring from the skies, flooding the roads and turning innocuous streams in the barren foothills behind Plegg into boiling, white millraces.

They had climbed toward Gaunt Pass and the wide road that twisted through the gray spires of the Kanwed Mountains from the East to the Middle Kingdoms. Snow had caught them three days from the pass itself, and for days they had plowed and floundered their way through that icy world of winds and stone, discouraged, exhausted, making sometimes as little as five miles a day. From the pass, they had taken the road along the rim of the mountain mass, with the tree-cloaked shoulders of the main peaks towering thousands of feet above them, invisible in the gray turmoil of clouds.

Through it all. Fawn had never complained and had done her loyal best to keep up with Starhawk’s surer pace. For all that she had spent the last two years in the soft living of a concubine, she was tough, and the Hawk had to admit that the girl was less trouble than she had at first feared. In Plegg, where they’d sold her jewels, she’d gotten a far better price than Starhawk had expected that sleepy, half-deserted town could have paid; and she’d shown an unexpected flair for bargaining for food, lodging, and fodder for the donkey along the way. Starhawk didn’t see how she did it—but then, like most mercenaries, the Hawk had always paid three times the local rate for everything and had never been aware of the difference.

She had asked Fawn about it one night, when they’d been camped in a rock cave above Gaunt Pass, with a fire lighted at the entrance to frighten away wolves. Blushing, Fawn had admitted, “My father was a merchant. He always wanted me to learn the deportment of a lady, to better myself through an elegant marriage, but I knew too much about the cost of things ever to appear really well bred.”

The Hawk had stared at her in astonishment. “But you’re the most ladylike person I’ve ever met,” she protested.

Fawn had laughed. “It’s all the result of the most agonizing work. I’m really a storekeeper at heart. My father always said so.”

Fawn came back across the room now, the fire picking smoky streaks of red from the close-braided bands of her dark hair. The greasy little rogue in the inglenook looked up at her, and even the two blockheads at the table raised their noses from their beer mugs as she passed.

“You want to bet you get an offer of free room?” Starhawk asked as Fawn seated herself on the worn, blackened oak of the bench at her side.

“I’ve already had one, thanks,” the girl replied in a low voice and glanced across at the greasy man, who met her eyes and gave her a broken-toothed leer. She looked away, her cheeks even redder than the firelight could have made them. “I’ve paid for supper, bed, breakfast, bait for the donkey, and some supplies to go on with.”

Starhawk nodded. “He have any idea how far to the next inn?”

“Fifteen miles, he says. The Peacock. After that there’s nothing until Foonspay, twenty-five miles beyond, and that’s a fair-sized village.”

The Hawk did some rapid mental calculations. “Tomorrow night in the open, anyway,” she said. “Maybe the night after, depending on the road. If this rain turns to snow again, it’s going to be hell’s own mess.”

Movement caught her eye. The greasy little man had shuffled over to the bar, where he stood talking in a low voice to the innkeeper. Starhawk’s eyes narrowed.

“Did you ask for the supplies tonight rather than in the morning?”

Fawn nodded. “He said yes, later.”

She sniffed. “We’ll make damned sure of it, then. I’m going out to the stables to collect the packs. I don’t want there to be any reason we couldn’t get out of here in the middle of the night if we wanted to.”

Fawn looked unhappy, but Starhawk’s wariness was legendary in the troop and had more than once saved the lives of scouting parties under her command. She left the common room as quietly as possible, crossing the soup of mud, snow, and driving rain in the yard only after she was fairly certain of the whereabouts of the innkeeper and the slattern who did his cooking. The Brazen Monkey boasted no stableman. Inspecting the interior of the big stone stables built into the cliff that rose from the muck of the inn yard, the Hawk thought the place rather too well stocked and kepi for the little traffic they must have had in the last few weeks before these late rains.

She collected all the supplies and equipment except the actual packsaddle itself, slinging them by straps over her arms and shoulders, and waited in the darkness of the big arched doorway until she saw both the innkeeper’s shadow and the woman’s cross the lamplight of the half-open door. They’d be going to the common room, with supper for Fawn and herself. Picking her footing carefully, she slipped back into the inn by way of the shadows along the wall and up the twisting stairs to their room.

Seeing the damp and bug-infested mattresses on the two narrow cots, she was just as glad she’d brought up their own bedding. The room itself was freezing cold, and the roof leaked in two places. Nevertheless, she wrestled the bolt of the shutters back and looked out into the streaming darkness of the night. A foot or so below the sill of the window, the thatch of the kitchen roof was swimming like a hay meadow in a flood, steam rising from it with the heat below. Satisfied, she closed the shutters again, but did not bolt them; she checked the door bolt, shoved the supplies well under the beds, and went downstairs.

The greasy little man was leaning against the table, talking to an unhappy-looking Fawn. Starhawk crossed the room to them, looked him up and down calmly, and asked, “You invite this cheesebrain to supper, Fawnie?”

The man started to sputter some kind of explanation. Starhawk looked him in the eyes, calculating, fixing his features in her mind to know again. His eyes shifted. Then he ducked his head and hastily left the room, the rain blowing in from the outside door as it opened and shut again behind him.

Starhawk slid onto the bench opposite Fawn and applied herself to venison stew and black bread.

Fawn sighed. “Thank you. I couldn’t seem to get rid of him...”

“What did he want?” the Hawk asked, around a mug of beer.

“He came over and offered to tell me about the road ahead. And I—I thought he sounded as if he knew what he was talking about, but I couldn’t be sure.”

“More likely he’s trying to find out which way we’re going and where we’ll be by dark tomorrow night. How much did that robber want for the kennel he’s stuck us in?”

As Starhawk hoped, Fawn cheered up at that. She’d talked the innkeeper down to half the asking price; recounting it brought a sparkle to her soft eyes. They spoke of other inns and innkeepers, of bargaining and prices, swapping stories of some of the more outrageous payments that Sun Wolf or other mercenaries they’d known had either asked or been offered. Neither spoke of their destination or of what they would do when they reached the impenetrable walls of Altiokis’ Citadel; by tacit consent, each kept her own hope and her own fear to herself.

In time, another man came down from upstairs, a wizened, spade-bearded little cricket in black who looked like a decayed gentleman from one of the more down-at-heels cities of the Peninsula with his starched neck ruff and darned, soot-gray hose. He settled himself beside the two blockheads in the padded coats who were drinking ale and talking in quiet voices; eventually they all went upstairs to bed.

Starhawk became uncomfortably aware of how her voice and Fawn’s echoed in the empty common room and how dark were the shadows that clotted under its smoke-blackened rafters. Outside, the wind groaned louder over the rocks. Its sound would cover that of anyone’s approach.

She was glad enough to leave the hall. By the light of a feeble tallow dip, she and Fawn climbed the narrow corkscrew of stairs to the cold room under the rafters.

“Well, these beds will have a use, after all,” she commented wryly as she dropped the door bolt into its slot. Fawn laughed and pulled one end of the heavy log frame away from the wall. “Not like that—here. We’ll lift. No sense telling that old cutthroat downstairs what we’re doing.”

It was a struggle to barricade the door quietly. Halfway through their task, a sound arrested the Hawk’s attention; she held up her hand, listening. The inn walls were thick, but it sounded as if others in the place had the same idea.

Fawn unrolled her bedding along the wall where the bed had been, carefully arranging it to avoid the major leaks in the roof. “Do you really think they’ll try to rob us in the night?” Her voice had gotten very quiet; her eyes, in the flickering light of the already failing dip, had lost the ebullience they’d shown downstairs. Her face looked shadowed and tired. Starhawk reflected that for all her bright courage, Fawn did not travel well. She looked worn down and anxious.

“I almost hope so,” the Hawk replied quietly. She blew on the flame, and the room was plunged into inky darkness. “I’d far rather deal with it here than on the road tomorrow.”

Silence settled over the inn.

Between her travels, wars, and the long watches of ambush, the Hawk had developed a fairly clear estimate of time. At the end of about three hours, she reached over and shook Fawn awake, talked to her in the darkness for a few minutes to make sure that she was awake, then lay back and dropped at once into the light, wary, animal sleep of guard dogs and professional soldiers. She surfaced briefly when the rain lightened an hour and a half later; she heard the drumming of it fade to a soft, restless pattering in the dark, like tiny feet running endlessly across the leaky thatch, and, below that sound, the soft murmur of Fawn’s voice, whispering the words of an old ballad to herself to keep awake and pass the time. Then she slept again.

She wakened quickly, silently, and without moving, at the urgent touch of Fawn’s hand on her shoulder. She tapped the knuckles lightly to show herself awake and listened intently for the sounds that had alerted the girl to danger.

After a moment, she heard it: the creak of a footstep on the crazy boards of the hall. It was followed by the sticky squeak of wet leather and the clink of a buckle. But more than any single clue, she could sense, almost feel, the weight and warmth and breath gathered in the darkness outside their door.

Starhawk sat up, reached to where her sword lay beside her on the dirty floor, and drew its well-oiled length without a sound. With luck, she thought. Fawn would remember to have her dagger ready; she wasn’t going to warn anyone that they were awake by asking aloud.

A single crack of light appeared in the darkness, a thin chink ! from the yellowish glow of a tallow dip. In the utter darkness, even that dim gleam was bright as summer sun. Then she heard (he scraping of a fine-honed dagger being slid through the door crack under the bolt, pushing it gently up. There was a soft, distinct plunk as it dropped backward out of its slot. Then came another long and listening silence.

Fawn and the Hawk were both on their feet. Fawn moved back toward the window, as they had previously agreed; Starhawk stepped noiselessly toward the barricaded door. The slit of light widened, and bulky shadows became visible beyond. There was a jarring vibration, followed by a soft-voiced curse, rotting their eyes for a pair of impudent sluts. A heavy shoulder slammed against the wood, and the barricading bed grated and tipped back as the huge shape of a man slid sideways through the narrow gap.

The door opened inward and to the right. The intruder had to enter left shoulder first. Killing him was as easy as sticking a frog. He gasped as the sword slid in, and his knees buckled; there was the stink and splatter of blood, and Starhawk sprang back as others slammed and pushed the door in, cursing furiously, falling over the body and the bed, and dropping the light in the confusion. The Hawk went in silently, hacking and thrusting; voices shouted and cursed. Steel bit her leg. She thought there were three still living, blundering around in the darkness like blind pigs in a pit.

Then she heard Fawn scream, and a man’s heavy rasp of breathing where she guessed the girl would be. A body tangled with hers, hands grappling her legs and pulling her off balance. A hoarse voice yelled, “Over here! I got one!” She cut downward at the source of the voice, then swung in a wide circle with her sword and felt its tip snag something that gasped and swore; the man pulled her down, clutching and grappling, too close now for the sword to be of use. She dropped it, hacking with her dagger; then light streamed in over them, and more men came thundering in from the hall.

The light showed the raised knife of the man who clutched her thighs, and Starhawk cut backhand as he turned his head toward the newcomers, opening both windpipe and jugular and spraying herself in a hot fountain of blood. The first man through the door tripped over the corpse there, then the bed; the second man clambered straight up over all three, his huge bulk blotting the light, and threw himself like an immense lion on the only bandit left standing. He knocked the man’s blade aside with a backhand blow that would have stunned a horse, caught him by the throat, and slammed his head back against the stone wall behind with a hideous crunch. Then he swung around, his square, heavy-jawed face pink and sweating in the faint gleam of brightness from the hall, as if seeking new prey. Past him, Starhawk saw Fawn standing flattened against the wall by the shuttered window, her face white and her disheveled clothing smeared with dark blood. There was a dagger in her hand and a gutted robber still twitching and sobbing at her feet.

The big newcomer relaxed and turned to the jostling scramble of his companion in the doorway. “Don’t drop the light, ye gaum-snatched chucklehead,” he said. “We’re behind the fair.” One step took him to Fawn. “Are you hurt, lass?”

The man who’d tripped unraveled himself from the trampled remains of the collapsed bed and stumbled again over the dead bandit in his hurry to reach Starhawk, who was still sitting, covered with blood and floor-grime, beneath her slaughtered assailant. He knelt beside her, an even bigger man than the first one, with the same lock of brown hair falling over grave, blue-gray eyes. “Are ye hurt?”

Starhawk shook her head. “I’m fine,” she said. “But thank you.”

Much to her surprise, he lifted her to her feet as if she’d been a doll. “We’d have been sooner,” he said ruefully, “but for some shrinking violet’s wanting to barricade our door...”

“Violet yourself,” the other man retorted, in the burring .accent of the Bight Coast. “If we’d been the first ones they attacked, you’d have been glad enough for the warning and delay—if the sound of their shoving over the bed had waked you at all.”

The bigger man swung about, like a bullock goaded by flies. “And what makes you think any bandit in the mountains is something you and I together couldn’t handle without even troubling to wake up?”

“You sang a different tune night before last, when the wolves raided—”

“Ram! Orris!” a creaky voice chirped from the doorway. The two behemoths fell silent. The scrawny little gentleman in the starched ruff whom Starhawk had seen briefly down in the common room came scrambling agilely over the mess in the doorway, holding aloft a lantern in one hand. The other hand was weighted down by a short sword, enormous in the bony grip. “You must excuse my nephews,” he said to the women, with a courtly salaam appallingly incongruous with the gruesome setting. “Back home I use them for a plow team, and thus their manners with regard to ladies have been sadly neglected.”

He straightened up. Bright, black eyes twinkled into Starhawk’s, and she grinned at him in return.

“Naagh . . .” Ram and Orris pulled back hamlike fists threateningly at this slur on their company manners.

The little man disregarded them with sublime unconcern. “My name is Anyog Spicer, gentleman, scholar, and poet. There is water in the room next to us, since I’m sure ablutions are in order. . .”

“First I’m going to find that damned innkeeper, rot his eyes,” Starhawk snapped, “and make sure he doesn’t have any other bravos hiding out around here.” She looked up and saw that Fawn’s face had gone suddenly from white to green. She turned to the immense man who still hovered at her side. “Take Fawn down to your room, if you would,” she said. “I’ll get some wine when I’m in the kitchen.”

“We’ve wine,” the big man—Ram or Orris—said. “And better nor what this place stocks. I’ll come with you, lassie. Orris, take care of Miss Fawn. And see you don’t make a muff of it,” he added as he and Starhawk started for the door.

Orris—the handsomer of the two brothers and, Starhawk guessed, the younger by several years—raised sharply backslanted dark eyebrows. “Me make muff of it?” he asked as he gently took Fawn’s arm and removed the dagger that she still held in her nerveless hand. “And who fell over his own big feet blasting into the room like a bull through a gate, pray? Of all the gaum-snatched things . . ,”

“Be a fair desperate gaum would take the time to find your wits to snatch ’em . . .”

Starhawk, who sensed that the brothers would probably argue through battle and world’s end, caught Ram’s quilted sleeve and pulled him determinedly toward the door.

There were no more bandits at the inn. They found the innkeeper, disheveled and groaning, in the room behind the kitchen, amid a tangle of sheets in which he said he had been tied after being overpowered. But while he was explaining all this at length to Ram, Starhawk had a look at the torn cloth and found no tight-bunched creases, such as were made by knots. The woman said sullenly that she had locked herself in the larder from fear of them. Both looked white and shaken enough for it to have been true, but Starhawk began to suspect that by killing the bandits, she had demolished the couple’s livelihood. She smiled to herself with grim satisfaction as she and Ram mounted the stairs once more.

“You’re no stranger to rough work, seemingly,” Ram said, his voice rather awed.

Starhawk shrugged. “I’ve been a mercenary for eight years,” she said. “These were amateurs.”

“How can you tell?” He cocked his head and gazed down at her curiously. “They looked to me as if they were born with shivs in their fists.”

“A professional would have put a guard on your door. And what in the hell does ‘gaum-snatched’ mean? That’s one I never heard before.”

He chuckled, a deep rumble in his throat. “Oh, it’s what they say to mean your wits have gone begging. Gaums are—what you call?—dragonflies; at least that’s what we call ’em where I come from. There are old wives who say they’ll steal away a man’s wits and let him wander about the country until he drowns himself walking into a marsh.”

Starhawk nodded as they turned the corner at the top of the stair and saw light streaming out of one of the rooms halfway down the hall. “In the north, they say demons will lead a man to his death that way—or chase him crying to him from the air. But I never heard it was dragonflies.”

They came to the slaughterhouse room. By the light of the lamp she’d appropriated from the kitchen, Starhawk saw that the greasy little man who’d spoken to Fawn was the one Orris had brained. It was a good guess, then, that the innkeeper had indeed been in league with them. Ram jerked his head toward the door as they passed it—“What about them?”

“We’ll let our host clean up,” Starhawk said callously. “It’s his inn—and his friends.”

Orris and Uncle Anyog had moved the women’s possessions to their own room while Ram and the Hawk were reconnoitering. Beds had been made up on the sagging mattresses. Fawn was asleep, her hair lying about her in dark and careless glory on the seedy pillow. By the look of his boots, Uncle Anyog had been investigating the stables. He reported nothing missing or lamed.

“Meant to do that after we’d been settled,” Starhawk said, collecting spare breeches, shirt, and doublet from her pack and preparing to go into the next room to wash and change. “Maybe they didn’t mean to take you three on at all. If you asked after the two of us, the innkeeper could always tell you we’d departed early.”

“Hardly that,” Orris pointed out. “Else we’d overtake you on the road, wouldn’t we?”

“Depends on which direction you were going in.”

In the vacant room, she took a very fast, very cold damp-cloth bath to get the dried blood out of her flesh and hair, cleaned the superficial gash on her leg with wine and bound it up, and changed her clothes. When she returned to the brothers’ room, Uncle Anyog was curled up asleep on the floor in a corner; Ram and Orris were still talking quietly, arguing over how good a bargain they’d really gotten on some opals they’d bought from the mines in the North. Starhawk settled herself down with a rag, a pan of water, and a bottle of oil, to clean her weapons and leather before moving on. The night was far spent and she knew she would sleep no more.

Orris finished pointing out to his brother some facts about the fluctuation in the price of furs and how opals could be held for a rise in prices—neither argument made any sense to Starhawk—and turned to her to ask, “Starhawk? If you don’t mind my asking—which direction were you bound in, you and Miss Fawn? It’s a rotten time to be on the roads at all, I know. Where were you headed?”

“East,” the Hawk said evasively.

“Where east?” Orris persisted, not taking the hint.

She abandoned tact. “Does it matter?”

“In a way of speaking, it does,” the young man said earnestly, leaning forward with his hands on his cocked-up knees. “You see, we’re bound for Pergemis, with a pack train of fox and beaver pelts and opals and onyx from the North. We’ve met trouble on the road before this—the man we took with us was killed five nights ago by wolves. If there’s more trouble with bandits along the way, we stand to lose all the summer’s profits. Now, I make no doubt you’re a fighter, which we could do with; and neither of us is so bad at it himself, which Miss Fawn could do with. If you were bound toward the south...”

Starhawk hesitated a moment, then shook her head. “We aren’t,” she said. Pergemis lay where the Bight washed up against the feet of the massive tablelands that surrounded—the Kanwed Mountains, far to the southwest of Grimscarp. She continued, “But our road lies with yours as far as Foonspay. That will get us out of the mountains and out of the worst of the snow country. If you have no objection, we’ll join you that far.”

“Done,” Orris said, pleased; then the light died from his honest, slab-sided face, and his eyes narrowed. “You’re not ever bound for Racken Scrag, are you, lass? It’s a bad business, all through that country, mixing with the Wizard King.”

“So I’ve heard,” Starhawk replied noncommittally.

When she said no more, but returned to cleaning the blood from the handle of her dagger, Orris grew fidgety and went on. “Two girls traveling about alone...”

“Would probably be in a lot of danger,” she agreed. “But it happens I’ve killed quite a few men in my time...” She tested the dagger blade with her thumb. “And since I could probably give you five years, I’d hardly qualify as a lass.”

“Yes, lass, but...”

At this point, Ram kicked him—no gentle effort—and the two brothers relapsed into jovial bickering, leaving Starhawk to her silent thoughts.

In the days that followed, she had cause to be thankful for their partnership, for all that the brothers periodically drove her crazy with their fits of chivalry. Orris never ceased trying to find out the women’s destination and objectives, not from any malice but, what was worse, out of the best of intentions to dissuade them from doing anything foolish or dangerous. Starhawk admitted to herself that their journey was both foolish and dangerous, but that fact did not make it any less necessary, if they were going to find and aid Sun Wolf and learn what, if any, designs Altiokis had toward the rest of the troop. Orris’ automatic assumption that, having met them only a day or so ago and being completely in ignorance of the reasons for their quest, he was nevertheless better qualified than they to judge its lightness and its possibilities of success alternately amused Starhawk and irritated her almost past bearing.

Likewise, the brothers’ good-natured arguments and insults could be carried far past the point of being entertaining. When they weren’t poking fun at each other’s appearance, brains, or social manners, they joined verbally to belabor Uncle Anyog for his habit of reciting poetry as he walked, for his small size, or for his flights of rhetorical eloquence, all of which Anyog took in good part. Around the campfires in the evenings, the brothers listened, as enthralled as Fawn and the Hawk were, to the little man’s tales of heroes and dragons and to the silver magic of his songs. Years in the war camps had given Starhawk an enormous tolerance for the brothers’ brand of bovine wit, but she found herself more than once wishing that she could trade either or both of them for a half hour of absolute silence.

But, she reasoned, hers was not to choose her companions. Noisy, busy blockheads like the brothers and the hyperloquacious Anyog were far preferable to travelling through the mountains in winter atone.

The Peacock Inn, when they reached it, was deserted, with snow drifting through the windows of its shattered common room. In the stable, Starhawk discovered the bones of a horse, chewed, broken, and crusted with frost, but clearly fresh; the splintered shutters and doors of the ground floor had scarcely been weathered. With thick powder snow squeaking under her boots, she waded back across the yard. In the common room, she found Fawn and Uncle Anyog, huddled together, looking uneasily about them and breathing like dragons in the fading daylight. Orris and Ram came down the slippery drifts of the staircase.

“Nothing above stairs,” Orris reported briefly. “The door at the top’s been scratched and pounded, but no signs that it was forced. Whatever’s done this| it’s gone now; but we’d probably be safer spending the night up there.”

“Will the mules go up the steps?” Starhawk asked. She told them what she’d found in the stables. There were six mules, besides her own little donkey.

Orris started to object and lay out a schedule for double watches on the stable, but Ram said, “Nay, we’d best have ’em up with us. If any ill fell to ’em, we’d be fair put to it between here and Foonspay, never mind leaving behind the pelts and things.”

It was a stupid and ridiculous way to spend an evening, Starhawk thought, shoving and coaxing seven wholly recalcitrant creatures up into the chambers usually reserved for their social superiors. Uncle Anyog helped her, with vivid and startlingly elaborate curses—the elderly scholar was more agile than he looked—while Orris and Ram set to with shovels to clear a place around the hearth for cooking, and Fawn gathered straw bedding in the stables and kindling in the yard.

As night settled over the frozen wastes of the mountains and they barricaded themselves into the upper storey of the inn, Starhawk found herself feeling moody and restless, prey to an uneasy sense of danger. The brothers’ boisterousness did nothing to improve her temper, nor did the grave lecture Orris gave her on the necessity for them all to keep together. As usual, she said nothing of either her apprehension or her irritation. Only Ram glanced up when she left early for her watch. Fawn and Orris were too deeply immersed in a lively discussion of the spice trade to notice her departure.

The silence of the dark hallway was like water after a long fever. She checked the mules where they were stabled in the best front bedroom, then followed the feeble glow of the tallow dip to the head of the stairs, where Uncle Anyog sat before the locked door.

His bright eyes sparkled as he saw her. “Ah, in good time, my warrior dove. Trust a professional to be on time for her watch. Are my oxen bedded down?”

“You think Orris would shut his eyes when he has an audience to listen to his schemes for financing a venture to the East?”

Though she spoke with her usual calm, the old man must have caught some spark of bitterness in her words, for he smiled up at her wryly. “Our pecuniary and busy-handed child.” He sighed. “All the way from Kwest Mralwe, through the woods of Swyrmlaedden, where the nightingales sing, through the golden velvet hills of Harm, and across the snow-shawled feet of the Mountains of Ambersith, he favored me with the minutest details of the latest fluctuations of the currency of the Middle Kingdoms.” He sighed again with regret. “That’s our Orris. But he is very good at what he is, you know.”

“Oh, I know.” Starhawk folded her long legs under her and sat beside him, her back braced against the stained plaster of the wall. “To make a great deal of money, a person has to think about money a great deal of the time. I suppose that’s why, in all the years I’ve been paid so handsomely, I’m never much ahead. No mercenary is.”

The salt-and-pepper beard split in a wide smile. “But you are far ahead of them in the memory of joy, my dove,” he said. “And those memories are not affected by currency fluctuations. I was an itinerant scholar all over the world, from the azure lagoons of Mandrigyn to the windy cliffs of the West, until I became too old and they made me be an itinerant teacher, instead—and I’ve been paid fortunes by universities of Kwest Mralwe and Kedwyr and half the Middle Kingdoms. Now here I am, returning in my old age to be a pensioner in my sister’s house in Pergemis, to stay with a girl whose only knowledge ever lay in how to add, subtract, and raise big, wayfaring sons.” He shook his head with a regret that was only partially self-mockery. “There is no justice in the world, my dove.”

“Stale news, professor.” The Hawk sighed.

“I fear you’re right.” Uncle Anyog extended one booted toe to nudge the stout wood of the door. “You saw the marks on the other side?”

She nodded. Neither Ram nor Orris had identified them.

She herself had seen their like only once before, as a small child. “Nuuwa?”

He nodded, the stiff white petals of his ruff bobbing, catching an edge of the light like an absurd flower. “More than one, I should say. Quite a large band, if they were capable of breaking into the inn.”

Starhawk’s face was grave. “I’ve never heard of them running in bands.”

“Haven’t you?” Anyog leaned forward to prick up the tallow dip that sat in a tin cup between them on the floor. His shadow, huge and distorted, bent over him, like the darkness of some horrible destiny. “They get thicker as you go east—didn’t you know? And they’ve been seen in bands since early last summer in all the lands around the Tchard Mountains.”

She glanced sideways at him, wondering how much he knew or guessed of her destination. Down below in the inn, she could hear the soft scrabbling noises of foxes and weasels quarreling over the garbage of dinner. For some reason, the sound made her shudder.

“Why is that?” she asked, when the silence had begun to prickle along her skin. “You’re a scholar, Anyog. What are nuuwa? Is it true that they used to be men? That something—some sickness—causes them to lose their eyes, to change and distort as they do? I hear bits and pieces about them, but no one seems to know anything for certain. The Wolf says that they used to appear only rarely and singly. Now you tell me that they’re coming out of the East in big bands.”

“The Wolf?” The little man raised one tufted eyebrow inquiringly.

“The man I’m—Fawn and I—are seeking,” Starhawk explained unwillingly.

“A man, is it?” the scholar mused, and Starhawk unaccountably felt her cheeks grow warm.

She went on hastily. “In some places I know, they say that a man has only to walk out in the night air to become a nuuwa; I think your nephews’ tale about gaums—dragonflies—may have something to do with it. Not true dragonflies, but perhaps something that looks or moves like them. But no one knows. And I’m beginning to find that fact in itself a little suspicious.”

He looked sharply across at her, his dark eyes suddenly wary. Starhawk met his gaze calmly, wondering why she had the momentary impression that he was afraid of her. Then he looked away and folded his fine little hands around his bony knees. “A wizard might know,” he said, “were there any left.”

The memory came back to her of the eyeless, mewing thing that had beaten and chewed at the Convent gates; she remembered Sister Wellwa, flinging fire from her knotted hands, and a sliver of mirror angled in the corner of a room. She recalled Little Thurg’s speaking to a man who was not what he seemed.

“Anyog,” she said slowly, “in all of your travels—have you ever heard of other wizards besides Altiokis?”

The silence stretched, and the flickering gleam of the tallow dip outlined the scholar’s profile in an edge of gold as he continued to look steadily away from her into the darkness. At length he said, “No. None whom I have ever found.”

“Are there any yet alive?”

He laughed, a soft, cracked little chuckle in the dark. “Oh, there are. There are said to be, anyway. But those who are born with the Power have more sense than to say so these days. If they learn any magic at all, they’re careful to make their staffs into little wands that can be hidden up their sleeves, if they’re men, or concealed as broom handles. There’s even a legend about a wizard who hired herself out as governess to a rich man’s children and who kept her staff hidden as the handle of her parasol.”

“Because of Altiokis?” Starhawk asked quietly.

The old man sighed. “Because of Altiokis.” He turned back to her, the dim, uncertain glimmer making his face suddenly older, more tired, scored with wrinkles like the spoor of years of grief. “And in any case, there are fewer and fewer wizards who have crossed into the fullness of their power. They have the little powers, what they can be taught by nature or by their masters, if they have them—or so I’ve heard. But few these days dare to attempt the Great Trial—even such few as are left who remember what it was.”

He got to his feet, dusting the seat of his breeches, his scrawny body silhouetted against the dim light from the room where Ram and Orris were arguing over the time it took to sail from Mandrigyn to Pergemis in the summer trading.

“And what was it?” Starhawk asked curiously, looking up at Anyog as he flicked straight the draggled lace at his cuffs.

“Ah. Who knows? Even to admit knowledge of its existence puts a man under suspicion from Altiokis’ spies, whether he knows anything about wizardry itself or not.”

He strolled off down the hall, wiry and awkward as some strange daddy longlegs, whistling an air from some complex counterpoint sonata in the dark.