Traitors Gate

20

Brah snorted and punched him on the shoulder — hard. Shai had to take a step back to absorb the blow, but he grinned. Among the Qin soldiers, he had learned that you only slugged your friends; your enemies you went after with a sword.

Sis tapped his arm three times: Alert. He checked for branches, the position of his feet, anything that might make a sound — all in an eyeblink — before dropping behind a screen of foliage just as six soldiers strode into view on the road, spears ready, swords in sheaths. Two were archers. They marched on upstream, vanishing as the afternoon shadows lengthened.

Now.

They raced across the open field, scrambled up and over the raised roadbed and down the other side through the dry stubble of a harvested rice field. As they sprinted through the grassy verge to the steep bank, a shout of alarm cut the air. Sis splashed through the swirling shallows, hands underwater as if feeling along the rocks.

A horn's call shrilled. Shouts clamored.

Sis whooped and beckoned, then plunged in as Brah dragged Shai over. Beneath the water, attached to the rock facing, was a chain. He grabbed hold and took a step, was at once in over his head, the current tearing at his body with an intensity and power as shocking as the cold of the water. His knives and baton were torn loose as he went under.

Merciful One protect me!

He came up coughing and hauled himself along the chain, kicking to keep his head above water. Twice perhaps he heard a horn's call but it was difficult to be sure with the river thundering in his ears. The blanket tangled in his arms and for a moment he thought it was going to choke him; then the current slackened and he found a toehold and clambered up the far bank, heaving. An arrow skittered over the churning surface and was borne downstream. The soldiers had returned, running toward the chain; the two archers knelt, the better to make their mark.

Brah was thrashing in the shallows and abruptly a dull snake slithered away into the current: the wilding had released the end of the chain. He climbed up beside Shai, the two wildings laughing as a pair of arrows plunked into the nearby shallows and the archers bent their strings for a new volley.

Sis whooped a warning. Downstream, a dozen men with swords drawn were running toward them on this side of the river

along a cart track. Brah and Sis broke into a run, Shai at their heels, as the soldiers pursued. The trees here had been harvested, replanted, pruned, coppiced — managed by human hands. They leaped over old stumps, crashed through tangles of woody shrubs.

A snap of breaking branch whipped Shai's head around; a body slammed into him, and he fell hard with weight atop him: that sour breath was definitely human. He shoved up with a hip, braced an arm within the gap that opened, and flipped the bastard; backhanded him with a ringed fist so hard the man grunted and went limp. Shai wrested a spear out of his hands, spun just in time to knock away a spear thrust from another soldier. Spears and staffs were poor weapons to bandy about in undergrowth. He charged, and tripped the man while catching him under the chin with an elbow strike, knocking his head back. The idiot went down hard. He hadn't even unsheathed his short sword. Shai grabbed the sword, sliced the belt, and tugged belt and sheath off the unconscious man. Then he ran, still gripping the spear in his other hand; he wasn't sure where to go, only that he must go deeper in and find a better place to hide. The wildings had vanished, and the villagers in this part of the world had done a hells lot of wood management because the woodland breaks went on and on, never quite giving him enough cover to risk a halt to catch his breath. Soon his lungs were heaving and his legs as heavy as if filled with water from the river crossing. At least his feet were by now as tough as leather.

Racing footsteps rattled through the undergrowth behind him. He cast a look back: three, at least, were gaining on him. A form hurtled out of the air and smashed into the leading soldier, the impact carrying both bodies into a tangle of vegetation. The second soldier was knocked sideways as the bare feet of the other wilding crashed into the man's shoulder. Sis somersaulted in midair, like an acrobat, and landed upright a short distance away. Shai feinted with the sword as the third man hesitated, not sure which target to strike. Shai darted inside the reach of the man's spear and struck him a hard backhand, sword hilt to temple. The man collapsed.

Whoop! Whoop!

The wildings danced out of the foliage and slapped him on the back, coughing with laughter. It was all a game to them.

An arrow rattled through leaves and bounced harmlessly on the earth. The male scooped it up and snapped it in half, still

coughing laughter as the female's ears flicked straight up. Men advanced through gaps in the managed forest.

'Where do we go?' Shai cried.

Another arrow tumbled closer, an archer getting his measure.

The male slapped Shai on the shoulder and lit out running. Shai bolted, following him, but at least twenty soldiers were swinging in to cut him off. The burn in his chest as he ran sucked away his air. A whistle fluted on the wind. Ahead rose a curtain of thorns like the end of his hopes.

Yet Brah's pace did not flag. It was not a solid wall of thorns but rather a lacework growing over ancient trees whose vast limbs traced the contours of the ground like a massive fence on which brambles twined. They ducked under a limb and skipped over a skirt of knobbled roots.

Behind, a man shouted. 'Heya! Weron! Come back! No man is permitted to cross into the wild-!'

'I've got them!' shouted a voice so close that Shai dropped to his knees, thinking it the only way to avoid death.

He rolled, but bumped against a tree as a soldier loomed with a triumphant grin, sword raised for the strike. A smear of movement flashed in the air. The man took two steps and convulsed. He was dead before he hit the ground. Seen through the lacework of the brambles and the fence of limbs, the other soldiers stumbled to a halt.

Shai had not rammed up against a tree but rather a pole decorated with a skull. In the clearing beyond the fence of thorns, each of a dozen such poles boasted a grisly head, most skulls affixed with rope but two were fresher, the eyes eaten away but sinews still making a semblance of a memory of a face. Eight wildings dropped into the clearing. The light was changing rapidly as twilight settled. The sergeant gave an order, and the soldiers fled back the way they had come.

The wildings looked him over, blinking to turn their eyes from colored facets to jet black. He glanced up at the skull. Its jawbone was missing; he spotted, in the gloom, a span of white cradled within the cushion of a fern.

Kartu Town seemed very far away right now.

Slowly, he set down sword and spear and raised his hands, palms open and empty.

No man is permitted to cross into the Wild. He had broken the boundaries, just as his scouting party had in the Lend, only this

time he had no Eridit to entertain them with a chanted tale and no horses to lose in exchange for food or his life.

One of the newcomers picked up the spear and broke the stout staff over its knee, keeping the iron point and tossing the sword to a companion. Then it gestured to Shai: This way. Come.

As night fell, he followed them into the Wild.

Ten days more it took Marit, flying into the cold and empty north. She had seen the Eagle's Claws once, at the end of her first year as a reeve when with a more experienced reeve she had flown a circuit of the Hundred so she might learn the breadth and length of the land she had sworn an oath to protect. She was not sure what she was looking for in this wild rocky outpost where forest-covered spines of land dug like talons into the windswept sea. She flew north into the Claws as dense forest gave way to sparser pine woods with an underlayer of rhododendron and myrtle. There were no villages, no goats, no shepherds or fisherman ranging, nothing but wind and waves and a lonely emptiness like the weight of a heart which knows itself to be alone without clan or hall.

Naturally the thread of smoke near the tip of the southernmost talon caught her attention. Along the ridges and cliffs rested huge nests, torn by wind and weather, evidence that the great eagles had nested here in the past. A cluster of ruins emerged, the clear imprint of an old reeve outpost, smaller than a hall but larger than a way station like Candle Rock. Training grounds and landing spaces had been cleared, grown over by a layer of rattle grass. Rubble marked old cotes and outbuildings, but the crude rock hall's thatched roof was in good repair. An odd white growth stubbled the nearby brush and rocky fissures.

In a hollow tucked away in a tiny bay below the compound, a crude stone hut sheltered against the cliff. A fire burned in a pit ringed with stones, and skewered meat raised tongues of flame where grease dropped. An eagle dove into view so suddenly she yelped in alarm and then laughed as the raptor swung up hard and thumped down on a rocky outcropping. Aui! How she missed Flirt!

A young man unhooked from the harness and dropped awkwardly to the ground, steadying a covered basket. He paused to scan sea and shore, looking past her as she approached. Satisfied, lie released the eagle's jesses and bounded down stone steps to the

cottage with the grace of a careless mountain goat. The eagle launched, found an updraft, and rose fast into the sky, ignoring Marit and Warning.

She backtracked to the ruins of the outpost and landed. A byre had been repaired with freshly cut wood, one post listing. Wind whined through the gaping doors of the rock longhouse, the kind of hall northern barbarians lived in, without proper doors and windows or even a porch. She left Warning with reins to the ground and approached the door, slowing as the musty scent of its interior assailed her.

A human leg bone gleamed in the entrance.

The wind's chill cut her as she retreated to quarter the area, seeing with new eyes the odd white growth strewn through the brush.

Human bones aplenty, arms, legs, ribs, skulls, the fluttering remains of sashes and the ribbons of belts, if not much in the way of scraps of actual clothing. But other bones, too: tumbled columns of vertebrae, huge sternums big enough to shelter under, and talons whose strength was bleached by sun and scoured clean by rain and wind. Tangles of old harness, its leather more resilient than flesh.

Hundreds of humans and eagles had been slaughtered here.

If the earth had dropped out from under her feet, she might have better known how to react: by flailing and shrieking. She stumbled back to the training ground and halted there, rocking with eyes shut until a keening wail burst from her throat.

A scuff of foot alerted her to a figure leaping behind the corner of the stone longhouse. She bolted after him, and although he was young and lean and knew the ground, she caught him, grabbed the back of his jacket, and yanked him to a halt so hard his feet went forward while his body slammed back. He rolled, kicking and grunting, and she flipped him and sat atop his chest. He'd braided his long hair neatly, and his face was scrubbed clean and his chin shaven, cuts healing in two places where he'd scraped too hard. His eyes were wide with fright as he gaped up at her.

She took in the weight of his memories like a hammer to the head: a poor fishing clan's superfluous son, restless enough to range into dangerous waters and plucked from the stormy wreck of his sinking boat by reeves. The reeves were in exile, they'd told him, fled to the uttermost north and gone into hiding from implacable enemies whose name they did not share. He'd been too

awed by the huge eagles and their fearless handlers to ask questions. What right did he have to do so, anyway? They'd taken him in and treated him well, that was enough, wasn't it? His fishing helped feed the hall, and he'd worked around the place in exchange for his keep. Once a month a ship came, its hold filled with sheep or cattle, because the Eagle's Claws did not nourish enough big prey to feed so many eagles. And one month he'd been out fishing beyond the point a day after the ship's arrival, when he heard shouting, screaming, the sharp calls of frantic eagles.

'I didn't know what to do,' he stuttered, choking on sobs. 'I was afraid to come in. After it got quiet, the ship sailed. I came back to find them dead.'

He'd seen the corpses of clansmen washed ashore after losing their boats; he'd seen elders pass over to the other side, hands limp atop frail chests; he'd seen infants washed gray by death. But he'd never seen anything like this butchery, a brutal attack by people who had lured the eagles to their death by feeding them poisoned meat and killing any who did not succumb.

'Even after they were dead they hacked them up, like they hated them. How can you hate something so beautiful?'

He flung a hand over his eyes.

She felt the wings of an eagle swell in the air and heard a raptor thump down behind her. Its shadow fell over her. She moved very deliberately, remembering the time an eagle's talons had ripped into her, and shifted to sit off to one side. No threat. The hem of her cloak flickered on the ground as the wind picked up.

'Do you know who it was who killed them?' she asked in the voice she'd used as a reeve to question people who had just faced a violent death or sudden fatal accident in their clan.

'I don't know.' He was telling the truth. He was just a village kid, way out of his depth.

'Where did these reeves come from?'

'They called themselves Horn Hall. They made a couple other outposts, in other ruins. But those others got killed, too. I went to every place. They're all dead!'

His voice raised to an edge of hysteria. He'd been living on the brink for a long time.

'They can't have all been killed. How could anyone manage it?'

'They killed the eagles first!' he cried with the frustrated disgust of youth, unable to penetrate the obliteratingly stubborn blindness of elders. 'They brought good meat for all that time and got

them into the habit of feeding it out in a certain way. And then they just did it.'

Who had the means and the motive? Who might think that, by killing the eagles first, they would not only kill reeves but ruin the eagles' ability to reproduce, thereby destroying the reeve halls forever. 'Did you ever see another person wearing a cloak like mine? A cloak like the sun, or night?'

The lad's sobs washed over her like a wild wind, but she could not succumb to panic, to rage, to despair.

'Listen! How long ago did this happen?'

He sucked down a few gulps and steadied himself. He'd grown up with women scolding him with sharp words; he knew how to listen and answer when listening and answering was preferable to a smack. 'M-Maybe a year ago. It was the dry season. Just like now.'

The eagle's shadow slid off her, as though it had decided she was no threat, and the raptor bent over its reeve, head twisting first to this side and then the other as it examined the young man. It was a young bird, still changing color, as inexperienced and naive as he was. Satisfied he was not injured, it moved off to the center of the parade ground, tail feathers swiping the ground.

'I'm called Marit. What's your name?'

The manners taught him by his aunts and grandmothers ruled him. 'I'm Badinen, honored aunt.'

An old-fashioned name, in keeping with this gods-forsaken isolated wilderness. 'Where did this eagle come from?'

T don't know.'

'How does it happen that she jessed you?'

T couldn't bear to leave even after they were dead. She just flew out of the sky one day. She'd been left behind, like me, I guess. We've been together ever since. I fish. There's plenty of game for one eagle.'

She asked more questions, but he knew nothing of the world beyond his humble fishing village south of here. In truth, he was hard to understand, even after the assizes had accustomed her to the northern way of talking.

'Clan Hall must be told that an entire reeve hall fled here and was betrayed and massacred.'

'What is Clan Hall?' He sat up cautiously, glancing toward his eagle, who had opened her wings to sun. T know the tales. Clan Hall isn't one of the six reeve halls.'

'They are the seventh hall. They supervise the other six halls.'

'That's not in the tales. Maybe they're the ones who did the murder. If my reeves trusted them, they'd have gone there, wouldn't they?'

It was a good question. Why hadn't Horn Hall gone for help to Clan Hall? Why flee here?

'Anyhow,' he added, 'if we leave here, them ones who killed the rest might see us and kill us, too.'

'You've already been seen. They're already coming for you. I came to warn you.'

He frowned, a simple lad forced to comprehend twisted minds. 'You might be luring me away to kill me. Best I stay where I know the land. I have hiding spots. No one will find me.'

'I found you.'

'I swore I'd watch over this place, for it's their Sorrowing Tower, isn't it? The gods have scoured them clean. Their spirits have passed the gate. I'm the watchman. It's a holy obligation. I have to stay, and you can't make me go. Why should I trust you, anyhow?'

She rose. Why should he trust anyone? Yet the folk at that assizes had trusted her, because they still trusted the old ways. As he might.

'Badinen, have you not yet recognized what I am? I am a Guardian. I've come to take you where you need to go, for the sake of those who died.'

The vast forest known as the Wild breathed with a hidden heart. Born and raised in the desert, Shai choked on the thick green canopy that surrounded him. Vines tangled on every trail, and even so the deer tracks were the only way to get around if you were stuck walking, as he was, scraping his way through branches, leaves, ferns, and the trailing threads of barbed vine the wildings jokingly called 'oo! — aa!' He wiped his brow clean of the moisture that dripped from leaves above, then thrust the tip of his staff into a curtain of dangling vines as thick as a woman's arms. His probe rousted no snakes or stinging wasps or biting lizards.

He wiped his brow again, more from nerves than moisture. Had they actually lost track of him this time?

With the staff angled to part a way, he plunged forward through the ropy vines, their smell as cloying as rotting pears. The vines began writhing along his back, and one leaped as might a

living creature and looped once, twice, thrice around his shoulders until he was trapped.

Whoop! Whoop!

Chortling and hooting, Brah and Sis slithered down from above and slapped Shai on the ass as they untangled him. Resigned, he allowed them to escort him back the way he had come.

Today's attempt to flee had ended, as usual, in failure.

They were so cursed good-natured about it.

They chattered in their way, oo aa ee ai eh, gesturing with their hands, and he could no more fathom what it all meant than understand the forest's complex net of life.

Go home, he signed to Brah. I want go home.

You wait, Brah replied in that patient way he had, like talking down to a child. More come. We talk.

They drank from a stream, hands cupped in the cold water. They threw stones at a gourd-fruit dangling high above although either of the wildings could have shimmied up the trunk and fetched it, but Shai's aim was getting cursed good, almost as good as theirs, and when his cast stone brought it down, they whooped and shoved him to show what a good job he'd done. Sis slipped her flute out of its sheath on her back and, as they walked on, played a tune that ran like water, as an afternoon breeze rolled through the high canopy and the blue sky flashed in and out of view as branches swayed. Birds fluttered in the canopy; butterflies flared bright colors; insects hummed and lizards chirred as they leaped from bole to bole. His left shoulder still bore a scar from his first encounter with one of the lizards, and he had been stung by wasps several times. As for snakes, those he'd only seen lying in a stupor at the wilding village, glands being pumped for the milky liquid the wildings used to poison their darts.

The wildings placed no fetters on Shai. The forest imprisoned him more effectively than chains.

They came to the margin of a rocky hollow deep in the breathing heart of the Wild where the stately crowns of grandmother trees rose above the cliffs. Home was a complex structure of nets and roofs and platforms strung together throughout the hollow's glades that it seemed the wildings were constantly constructing and reconstructing.

In the third glade, he had shaped a platform in the crook of a tree using deadwood lashed together with rope. He hadn't any

privacy, of course. He set his staff against the crossbeam he'd wedged in place for a ladder and scrambled up. A swarm of young ones followed. They brought scrips and scraps of deadfall — never greenwood — for him to carve with the fine iron knife they'd given him to replace the ones he'd lost. Everyone wanted a figure. As he began carving, the children settled respectfully to watch and a few elders with coats going silver dropped in. With ears flattened in greeting, they gestured to ask permission to sit while he worked. He could carve for the- rest of his life and not satisfy them.

It was odd to be treated something like family and something like a hostage and something like a captive. He'd been all these things, but he wasn't sure what he was to them, nor could he figure who the 'more' were who were coming. As for the message he so desperately needed to get to Anji, it was certainly too late to prevent Hari tracking down the captain, yet he had much to report about Wedrewe and the Guardians. Day after day he fretted over the ambush in which the rebels had been killed. Had Hari betrayed them in a selfish and vain attempt to save Shai, or had he meant all along to betray Shai? Had Marit freed him for Hari's sake, or his own? Where had she gone afterward? He wished there'd been time for her to seduce him!

Smiling, he sat, shaping a horse with the stocky frame of the Qin horses, creatures with little beauty but immeasurable toughness. The wildings had the gift of stillness and patience, just as he did, and the afternoon passed as he shaped the muzzle and flanks with particular care, recalling the horses he had ridden when he had traveled with Captain Anji's troop from Kartu Town into the Mariha princedoms and thence over the border along the northwestern borderlands of the Sirniakan Empire and over the high Kandaran Pass into the Hundred.

So much had happened in the Hundred that it was difficult to recall his colorless life in Kartu Town. How had Vali and Judit and the other children fared, the ones he'd struggled to save? Would he see Tohon again? Was Zubaidit still alive? Was Mai happy? How strange it was to think of her in a peaceful house with a doting husband, given how Father Mei and his married brothers had treated their wives. Had she birthed a healthy baby?

Without warning, the wildings leaped into the trees. He set down the carving in its nest of wood flakes. The clearing lay half in shadow stretching from the west over cropped ground cover of

springy dense leaves and tussocks of grass. A pair of redbirds scratching for insects on a sparse patch took wing. Not a single wilding was in sight.

He rose, knife in hand, and abruptly two older wildings dropped out of the trees and pulled him firmly behind a shield of leaves. A winged horse cantered down out of the sky as if following a track visible only to its eyes and solid only under its hooves. The cloak, a rust-orange-brown color, rippled in the lazy wind, and where it parted it revealed a woman so very old Shai was amazed she had the strength to ride. Yet when she dismounted, she moved with remarkable agility for one so aged. She wore a thick brown-colored neck piece wrapped at her shoulders. The horse furled its wings and moved away.

As the shadows overtook her, the colors within her cloak changed subtly, turning deeper and richer in hue. She sketched the subtle gestures known to the wildings. These gestures, Shai thought, were those copied in less complex form in the tale-telling of the Hundred. What she spoke with her hands was far too complicated for him to follow, but a trio of elderly silver-haired wildings ambled into the clearing and replied with an elaborate greeting. They did not bow their heads or avert their eyes. Like Shai, wildings could face a cloak directly.

Even the incessant forest voices had fallen silent, only the wind speaking. They finished by displaying their hands, palms open, and raising eyes toward the forest canopy. A sturdy basket dropped from one of the grandmother trees, and she nodded, acquiescing, and climbed into it. As she was pulled up, the wildings climbed so swiftly after her it was as if the foliage swallowed them.

The two wildings released him and sped away into the gloom as night-watch fires were lit under the trees in stone hearths. Shai cautiously stepped into the glade. The mare, now cropping at the grass, bore a faint gleam as if its coat were burnished with sparks. In the corner of his eye, he caught the suggestion of a glimmering path, a road in the air, a tracery visible because of the contrast between its misty light and the coming night. Footsteps whispered on the earth, and Brah padded up to stand beside him and pat him companionably on the arm: Here I am.

'She's a Guardian,' said Shai, knowing Brah could understand every word Shai spoke, even if Shai could understand so little of the wildings.

Yes. The gesture was accompanied by a roll of the eyes as if to add: Isn't that obvious?

'Why has a Guardian come to the Wild? Why didn't they want her to see me?'

Brah mimed a knife drawn across a throat.

'Because cloak of Night and her allies kill the gods-touched?'

Brah gave a little jump, a silent whoop, as if after all this time Shai had finally shown signs of intelligence.

'They're afraid this one who came here will kill me?'

Brah shrugged, looking skyward. A conclave had taken life in the highest reaches of the nets, an assembly lit by the tapers woven out of wood litter and soaked in oil that were used around camp. The lights made constellations within the trees, and beyond them, as in a dark mirror, stars kindled. Shai glanced at Brah, who was shaped in some manner like humankind but in other ways was entirely unlike. He breathed as Shai breathed. He stared overhead at the lights of the conclave and at the spray of stars, just as Shai did. He licked his lips as though tasting the night.

'The Hundred is a strange place,' said Shai in a low voice. 'In Kartu Town, where I came from, folk would have named you wildings or the lendings as demons, but here it seems demons have a human face.'

Brah indicated Shai and circled the oval of his face.

'A human face like mine?' said Shai. 'Except I'm not a demon.'

Brah nodded. Yes. You.

'I'm not a demon!'

Sis trotted out of the darkness and grabbed Shai's arm, swinging him around. A taper was descending from the canopy. A mature wilding appeared in its aura and indicated a basket. Brah and Sis, much subdued now, led Shai over and watched as he settled in. He was lifted, the basket swaying as it rose higher and higher until he wondered if he would reach the stars. Fortunately it was too dark for him to see the ground, but the night-watch fires were growing frighteningly small.

The basket lurched to a halt and strong wilding hands helped him clamber onto a net. His right foot slipped through the netting and he caught himself on his knees, gulping. There was nothing below him but air. He murmured a prayer to the Merciful One and slowly his racing heart calmed and he raised his eyes. The conclave flowed away along the net like a festival of lights. He crawled to get away from that horrifying edge before settling cross-legged. The wildings appeared as smudges against the canopy, but the old woman was clearly lit by tapers hung from even higher branches, as if they wanted to keep her well in sight.

Her voice, like her frame, was thin but her gaze was bright in the manner of a crow's. 'Outlander, I journeyed a long way in desperate circumstances to ask my cousins the wildings for aid in finding a safe haven for innocent folk who are in danger. But they refuse to hear me or heed me. Instead, these cousins have accused me of coming to kill you. Is it true you witnessed a woman wearing a Guardian's cloak give the order for a demon to be killed?'

'A demon? I don't know about that, but I've seen a Guardian order the deaths of many people, most innocent and some criminals. As for the gods-touched, with my own eyes I saw her captain kill a young gods-touched woman named Navita. With my ears, trapped in a cell, I heard her order soldiers to kill others whose only crime in her eyes was in being gods-touched.'

'So besides inflicting harm on humankind, this cloaked one has ordered the death of demons. Ones like you.'

'I'm not a demon! Among my people, demons are-' The word in his grandmother's tongue, the old speech of Kartu Town that had been outlawed in favor of the trade speech Kartu's conquerors preferred, had no corresponding word: evil. 'Demons are beings who are corrupt in their heart, in their flesh, in their spirit.'

Her frown cut him. That quickly, he disliked her. 'Outlanders have a perilous and imperfect understanding of the world, it is true. I suppose that is why the Four Mothers did their best to protect the Hundred against the flood of unwanted humanity that must continually wash in on the tide of years. Eight varieties of children were born to the Mothers: firelings, wildings, delvings, merlings, lendings, dragonlings, demons, and humankind. Once they were equal in numbers, and each had their role to play in the life of the Hundred: humankind, with their busy hands; the merlings in the sea and the delvings in the stone; the lendings to walk the boundary between earth and sky, and the wildings to tend the net that binds the Hundred, all that lives and grows and changes. The firelings, who are the thread that binds spirit and flesh, the keepers of the Spirit Gate. The dragonlings have vanished and are seen no more, while demons are rarest of all. It's true demons are often born to humans, and like humans may be bold or timid, cruel or kind, silent or talkative, hungry or satiated. They even look like humans. But you are veiled to my Guardian's sight.

Therefore you are a demon. Has no one told you?' Her smile mocked him.

He said nothing.

'Do you even know the tales of the Hundred, outlander?'

'One of Hasibal's pilgrims taught me a few refrains,' he said, thinking of Eridit.

'Why do youths like you blush when thinking of sex?' she said with a snort.

His flush deepened as heat scalded his.,cheeks. 'How did-?'

She was a sarcastic old woman, the worst kind. 'Easy to know such signs when you have lived as long as I have. Listen, boy, the wildings recognize a demon when they see one.'

'Is that why they rescued me?' He gestured more broadly, to show the conclave that he was addressing them, not the cloak. 'Were Brah and Sis out looking for demons to rescue?'

He waited as the old woman talked in gestures to the conclave.

She laughed curtly. 'It seems that, like many youthful ones, they ranged out'to have a little fun. An adventure. Instead, they discovered humans up to worse trouble even than usual. And they discovered Guardians killing demons, which runs quite against what the gods intended. The justice of the Guardians was meant only for humankind. That's why they brought you back. To save a cousin. They would have saved others, had they been able to do so. The elders tell me they are curious as to why you — an outlander — were spared when other demons were killed.'

The stars burned, distant lamps illuminating the mercy of the Merciful One, which is infinite. The wildings moved closer, more of them coming into view within the aura of the tapers.

'My brother Harishil is a Guardian. He wears the cloak of Twilight. Night kept me as a hostage, because Hari does not cooperate with her as she wishes him to do. Otherwise, she would have killed me as she did the others. I came to the north to find him, and he tried to get me out of the camp of Lord Radas's army before one of the other cloaks caught me. He knew they were killing those who are veiled to their sight. Hari got me smuggled out. How the rebels who took me in got ambushed I don't know. I really don't. But Night and her soldiers caught me. They took me to Wedrewe. Brah and Sis found me there.'

'How did you escape Wedrewe?'

'In the back of a wagon of corpses.'

'They say you wish to go to a reeve hall. What will you do, if

they convey you to a reeve hall? Where will you go? Back to the land you came from?'

He shook his head. 'Kartu Town is no longer my home. Maybe that's the secret of demons, that they have no true home, always wandering.'

She laughed. 'Not so witless after all. Why do you want to go to the reeves? Where do you expect the reeves to take you?'

He folded his hands in his lap, thinking of the demon who had taken the form of Cornflower and murdered Qin soldiers. Thinking of angry Yordenas, and that pervert Bevard. Thinking of Lord Radas's poisonous voice, and Night's terrible, twisted heart. Even Hari, torn between honor and fear. 'I cannot trust you, because you are a Guardian.'

On her lap a snake raised its hooded head and hissed softly, but a rustling sounded among the branches as the wildings objected, and the snake subsided at the touch of her hand.

'You say so, to me? I, who am the last true Guardian?'

'That means nothing to me,' said Shai. 'I'm just an outlander. All I can judge is by what I have seen the cloaks do.'

'Enough!' She spoke past Shai, addressing the conclave. 'I came in respect and in humility, cousins, and now I am to be subjected to this outlander's insults? What do you want of me? I beg you, you who know the map of the Hundred better than any others can, all its forgotten caves and old ruins and secret glades and hidden valleys, grant me at least this much, that you tell me of some haven where the people I have sheltered can live in peace.'

'No one can hope to live in peace,' cried Shai, 'until Lord Radas's cruel army and the cloak of Night's twisted plans are defeated! Hide if you wish. But in the end, if you do nothing, they will find you anyway. And then there will be no one left to turn to.'

The ears of the elder wildings flicked high and flattened low, a sign of displeasure, but he plunged on.

'I must leave the Wild. I did not betray the rebels, nor will I ever betray the wildings, because they saved me and have shown me hospitality. But I must go to join those who fight Lord Radas's army. To say more would be to betray their secrets. Put me on the road to a reeve hall, or a port, any place not overrun by Lord Radas's army. All of this I have said already, a hundred times. What else must I say?'

She watched the elders, then spoke. 'Where did Lord Radas's army come from?'

Startled, he tugged on an ear. 'I truly don't know. That all happened long before I came to the Hundred. There's a camp in Walshow. Isn't that in the north? And the town called Wedrewe, in Herelia. That's some kind of headquarters.'

'The wildings have never before involved themselves in human quarrels. Why should they start now?'

'If they don't wish to, they can let me go and go back to guarding their boundaries! Maybe that will protect them for now. But in the end, it's like hiding your eyes while the sand of the desert engulfs you. That you refuse to look doesn't drive away the storm.'

All at once he was seized by such frustration that he feared he would leap off the netting just to relieve the pressure. He groped in the pouch Sis had woven for him, and withdrew a small block of deadwood, caressing it and listening to what it told him. Its glossy grain shimmered in the tapers' light. He unsheathed his knife and began to carve, revealing a horse's muzzle as the conclave watched in a kind of silence. They weren't voicing sounds, but they were speaking with their hands in the most ancient language of the Hundred, the one he did not know.

'How old are you, Holy One?' he asked. 'You look older than the cloak of Night. Is she also one of the first — the true — Guardians?'

'How can she be, if I am the last of the true Guardians?'

'She told me she was responsible for the greatest act of justice known in the Hundred.' He shaved down the slope of a long, elegant neck. 'I may only be an outlander, who knows the tales poorly, but isn't the tale of the Guardians the most important tale sung in the Hundred?'

'According to humans.'

'It's humans I've walked among, demon that I am. And in the tale of the Guardians, isn't it the orphaned girl who prays for peace to return to the land? Isn't she the one the gods listened to?'

The tapers illuminated the Guardian's aged face and bitter smile. '" In the times to come the most beloved among the guardians will betray her companions." Only we did not realize then, that those of us first raised as Guardians would not remain Guardians forever. That some would grow weary and ask to be released, that one might become corrupt and need to be removed. That new faces — new guardians — would rise wrapped in the cloaks. And when she whose pleas the gods heard and responded

to became a Guardian in her turn — for did she not offer her life for the sake of justice? — how could any of us have supposed she was the one who would in the end betray us?'

'Night is that girl? The very orphaned girl from the tale?'

Wind rattled in the branches. The wildings listened intently, as if by listening they spun yet more detail onto the map of the Hundred, the unfolding tale of the land. The cloak of Earth did not speak, and for the first time Shai felt pity for her, because although she was veiled to him, as he was veiled to her, her expression spoke as any face might: it seemed to him that it was an inconsolable grief mixed with furious regret that stilled her tongue. To be betrayed by the one we have loved best is the worst pain.

'There's a way to kill her and the others, isn't there?' he asked softly as an elaborate fold of feathered wings came to life beneath his knife. 'To take their cloak and pass it to a new person. Not the Guardian council, five to remove one, but a different way. A way no one is supposed to know.'

A sigh fell like wind through the wildings.

'Tell me what it is,' said Shai, 'and then maybe I — or others like me — can stop these cloaks from killing demons and innocents. And if that's what the wildings want, that demons no longer get killed, then perhaps in exchange they'll tell you what you need to know, about a haven for your people.'

She bowed her head. Many among the wilding conclave flicked their ears, but whether to show approval or hostility he could not tell.

Without looking at him, speaking into the darkness and the silent stars, she said, 'There is a way.'