Shadowplay

fist, another tapping a long wooden club against his leg, grinning toothlessly.

“Merciful Zoria,” Utta breathed. They’re going to kill each other.

“You lot shouldn’t be past Barge Street,” said the man who had accosted her. He was grinning, too, and he and the first Skimmer had begun to circle each other, one lazy step at a time. “You shouldn’t be here. This is ours, this is.” He spoke slowly, like an invocation—he was summoning the powerful mystery of violence, Utta realized, with as much careful method as a priest used to call the attention of a god. She could not help staring at the circling pair, her skin feverchilled.

“Get out,” someone said from just behind her—one of the other Skimmers. She felt strong hands take her and pull her away, then another hand shoved her in the small of the back. She took a few stumbling steps away from the center of the now-crowded alley, slipping and tumbling into the mud. She looked back, half-expecting one of the men who had accosted her to try to stop her, or one of the Skimmers to shout at her to run away, but she was out of the center of the violence-spell now and she might as well have ceased to exist. The two main antagonists were feinting gently and almost lovingly at each other with knives she had not seen before. Their comrades were silently facing off, ready to throw themselves at their opposites when the first blow was struck.

Slipping in the wet street, clumsy as a newborn calf, Utta struggled upright and hurried away even as someone let out a shout of pain and fury behind her. A larger roar went up, many voices shouting, and people began to step out of the tiny, close-quartered houses to see what was the matter.

The child who opened the oval door was so small and so wide-eyed that at first, despite herself, Sister Utta could nearly believe the Skimmers were indeed a different kind of creature entirely. She was still shaking badly, and not just because of her encounter with the street bullies. Everything was so strange here, the smells, the look of things, even the shapes of the doors and windows. Now she stood at the end of a swaying gangplank on the edge of the castle’s largest lagoon, waiting to be admitted to a floating houseboat. How odd her life had become!

There were no Skimmers left in the Vuttish Isles of Utta Fornsdodir’s childhood, but they still featured heavily in local stories, although those in the stories were far more magical than those who lived here beside the lagoon. Still, they were strange-looking folk, and Utta realized she had spent almost twenty years in Southmarch Castle without ever really speaking to one of them, let alone knowing them as neighbors or friends.

“H-hello,” she said to the child. “I’ve come to see Rafe.” The urchin looked back at her. Because the child had no eyebrows, hair pulled back (as was the habit for both male and female Skimmers) and a face still in the androgynous roundness of childhood, Utta had no idea whether it was a boy or a girl. At last the little one turned and scuttled back inside, but left the door open. Utta could only guess that was an invitation of sorts, so she stepped up onto the deck and into the boat’s cabin.

The ceilings were so low she had to bend over. As she followed the child up the stairs she guessed that the cabin had at least three stories. It definitely seemed bigger inside than outside, full of nooks and narrow passages, with tiny stairwells scarcely as wide as her shoulders leading away both up and down from the first landing. Her guide was not the only child, either—she passed at least half a dozen others who looked back at her with no sign of either fear or favor. None of them wore much, and the youngest was naked although the day outside was cold even for Dimene and the houseboat did not seem to be heated. This smallest one was dragging a ragged doll by the ankle, a toy that had obviously once belonged to some very different child since it had long, golden tresses. None of the Skimmers Utta had ever seen were fair-haired, although their skins could be as pale as any of her own family back in the northern islands.

The first child led her up one more narrow staircase and then down another before stepping out onto the deck on what she guessed must be the lagoon side of the houseboat. Utta could not help thinking they seemed to have reached it by the most roundabout way possible.

The young Skimmer man looked up from the rope he was splicing. The little one, apparently now relieved of responsibility, skipped back into the boat’s ramshackle cabin. The youth looked up at her briefly, then returned his attention to the rope. “Who are you?” he asked in the throaty way of his folk.

“Utta—Sister Utta. I come with a message for you. Are you Rafe?”

He nodded, still watching the splice. “Sister Utta? I thought you smelled a bit unmanly, even for that place.” He meant the Inner Keep, she guessed, but he said it as though he were talking about a prison or a forest full of unpleasant wild beasts. “Did someone tell you we’d be after any woman, no matter how old?”

I am old, she reminded herself. Surely I can’t take offense. She looked at him; he carefully did not look back. He was as young or younger than any of the Skimmers who had come into the alley, and his arms seemed long even by the standards of his folk. He had slender, artful fingers, and a firm, good jaw.

“I was sent by the Duchess Merolanna of Southmarch,” she said. “She was given your name as someone who might help us. We need a boatsman.”

“Given?” He raised a hairless eyebrow. “Someone’s been free. Given by whom?”

“Turley Longfingers.”

He snorted. “Would be. He’d be happy to see me get myself killed on some drylander errand, wouldn’t he? He knows Ena and I will be hanging the nets come springtime and she’ll be old enough then he can’t stop us.” He stared at Sister Utta now with something like curiosity. “Does it pay well, still, this errand?”

“I think so. The duchess is no pinchpurse.”

“Then tell me what she wants done and what she’ll pay, Vuttswoman.”

“How did you know?”

“That you’re Vuttish?” He laughed. “You smell Vuttish, don’t you? Still, you’re better than most. Compared to a Syannese or Jellon-man, you’re spring seafoam and pink thrift-blossoms. Jellon- folk eat no fish, lots of pig, don’t they? You can smell one a mile distant. Now, if we’ve finished talking on how folks smell, let’s speak of silver.”

36. The False Woman

Suya wandered long in the wilderness and suffered many hardships until at last she came to the dragon gate of the palace of Xergal, and there fell down at the verge of death. But Xergal the Earthlord coveted her beauty, and instead of accepting her into his kingdom of the dead he forced her to reign beside him as his queen. She never after spoke a word.

—from The Revelations of Nushash, Book One

There were skulls for sale in all the marketplaces of Syan, some baked of honey-glazed bread, others painstakingly carved from pine boughs, and even a few shaped out of beautiful, polished marble for nobles and rich merchants to put on their tables or in their family shrines. Sprigs of white aspholdel were set out on tables to be bought and then pinned to a collar or a bodice. Kerneia was coming.

Briony realized with astonishment that she had been traveling with the players for a full month now, which was nearly as strange as what she found herself doing most days—namely, acting the part of the goddess Zoria, Perin’s daughter. In truth, it was stranger than that: as a character in Finn’s play, Briony was a girl pretending to be a boy pretending to be a goddess pretending to be a boy, an array of nested masks so confusing she could not concentrate on it long enough to waste much time thinking about it.

Makewell’s Men had not yet performed the whole of Teodoros’ rewritten play about Zoria’s abduction, but they had worked up most of the main scenes and tried them out on the rural population of northern Syan as the company moved from place to place. It had been strange enough for Briony to speak the goddess’ words (or at least such words as Finn Teodoros had given her) in the muddy courtyard of some tiny village inn. Now the players had begun to follow the green course of the Esterian River and the towns were getting bigger as they traveled south. Audiences were growing, too.

“But there are so many words to remember,” Briony complained early one evening to Teodoros as the others trooped back from their afternoon’s sightseeing. “And I have memorized only half the play!”