His lips parted as he trembled. 'You are death. Where did you come from?'
'Answer your own question. Go from this town. Don't come back. I know you now. I'll hunt you down if harm comes to any here.'
His thoughts spilled as water over the lip of a fountain. I'll be rewarded for this message, for telling them I've spotted one of the cloaks walking abroad in daylight. Or what if she is already acting in concert with them? What if this is a test? To see if I act rightly, follow orders? What if they punish me? Aui! Aui!
'Get out,' she said, wondering if she'd have to try and grab the sword out of his hand and kill him.
But he fled.
The shopkeeper began gasping, spurts of sobs punctuated by racking coughs. The door slid back. The pretty daughter stuck her head in, eyes seeming white with fear.
He spun, hearing the door tap against the stop, and before she could cringe back he slapped her. 'Get back in the closet, you witless girl! Can't you stay where you're told?' The purse of his mouth betrayed his shame. He looked back at Mark.
An onslaught of thoughts and images tumbled: She'll run away, find a temple, any place to take her in, but what if the soldiers capture her as they did Sediya-? A young woman — his own sister — staggers into their humble house, sneaking in out of the alley and huddling in the chicken house until dawn. She's much younger than her brother, the last child of their parents. Like her niece, she's pretty enough, but haggard with misery. Her thighs are sticky with blood and she stinks of piss; she limps as her sister-in-law supports her into the house. She is crying, 'They'll come for me. I ran away. Please hide me.'
The shopkeeper jerked his gaze away from Marit.
'They'll kill us when they learn we've gone against them, that we're hiding one of the captives they took,' he said hoarsely to his daughter, but she was too stunned to speak or move with her cheek flushed red from the blow. Her silence infuriated her father. He raised his hand just as the captain had raised his sword.
'Don't take your anger out on her,' said Marit, 'or she'll run and you'll have bartered away your honesty and your honor and your good name for nothing.'
'Just get out, I beg you,' he said, his movement as stiff as that of an aged elder as he kept his gaze averted. 'Take whatever you want.'
Reeves could accept tithes, receiving from those they aided the necessities that allowed them to live. She grabbed what she wanted: a feed bag, a pair of brushes one stiff and one softer, a hoof pick, a lead line, rope, and a bundle of tough rags.
She paused with the goods stuffed into the feed bag. What if a reeve became greedy? It happened; they took more than they needed, or they taught themselves to take what they wanted and told themselves they deserved it all. 'He passed under the gate into the shadow.' In every one of the Ten Tales of Founding, more than one man and woman crossed the Shadow Gate to the other side, where corruption takes hold in the heart. With each step, the path got smoother as you told yourself why it was acceptable to walk farther down this road. The tales of the Hundred told the story of humankind and the other children born to the Four Mothers. It was natural that some succumbed to the shadows.
Maybe it was unnatural that any did not.
'Where are the reeves who should be aiding you? Isn't Gold Hall patrolling? Isn't there a temple of Uu nearby that can send an envoy to Clan Hall in Toskala to ask for help?'
He laughed recklessly. 'The reeves can't help us. You can walk out of our town and never come back, but we have to live here. No matter what you said to him, they will come back. It's us will have to face them. Not you.'
'That merchant,' she said. 'You said he was from Olossi. Did he give you a name?'
'Quartered flowers were his house mark. Is that enough? Will you go?'
Marit followed the sniveling girl into the narrow living quarters, tromping through in her outdoor sandals like the rudest kind of intruder. There was a single table and two cupboards, everything put away neatly except for a single ceramic cup filled with cooling tea set on the table. The floor was swept clean, and this homely indication of a woman doing her best to stem the shadows by keeping her home tidy made Marit hurt as if she'd been punched under the ribs.
She shoved open the back screen and clattered onto the porch
and down three steps to the courtyard. The damp of night rains still darkened the ground. The gate that led to the alley was tied shut. She fumbled with the knot, her hands clumsy.
Where were they hiding the fugitive sister?
She paused to scan the yard: the squat house with scant room above the eaves; the small grain storage up on stilts; a pit house with the sticky scent of incense drifting; the henhouse, an empty byre, and the surrounding wall too high to see over. She clambered up the ladder to the grain storage and tugged out the smallest sack of rice, something easy to carry over a shoulder.
Stillness was settling over the village as folk assessed the damage and checked their injuries after the abrupt departure of the soldiers. There, after all, she heard the shallow breathing of a woman trying to make no sound: the sister was hidden in the henhouse, scrunched under the nesting shelf and by now smeared with fresh droppings and the filthy wood shavings strewn on the floor to absorb the waste.
Mark took a step toward the henhouse, mouth open to speak. But she said nothing.
She hadn't the means to support a traveling companion. It was difficult enough dealing with the cursed horse. A hundred other reasons aside told her she had to move on alone. This wasn't the time to try to save a woman here and a man there, like trying to hold your hands over one beautiful flower in a driving hailstorm while the rest disintegrate under the onslaught.
'The hells,' she muttered. She said, in a low voice meant to carry no farther than the courtyard walls, 'I'm a traveler, and I'm headed out of town. The soldiers have gone for now, but they'll be back. If you want, you can travel with me. I offer you such protection as I can, and insofar as I am capable, I will get you to a place of safety. If there is such a place any longer. I can't make you come, and I can't promise you much. There it is. Take it or leave it.'
Her offer was met with a resounding silence. Thank the gods.
She turned back to the gate and fumbled with the knot, sure she had tugged on it the wrong way and caused what ought to have been an easy slipknot to jam into itself. She'd never been good with rope, not like Joss, grown up on the sea's shore where every child learned a hundred cunning knots…
'I'll go.' The voice was soft and female, and not a bit tentative.
Marit turned. A woman crouched in the low entrance to the henhouse. Her hair had matted into clumps now streaked with white droppings; her face was patched with muck and dotted where wood shavings had stuck to the damp. The color of her cheap hemp taloos was concealed beneath a coat of red clay and paler mud, sprinkled with more droppings.
The woman looked right at her.
An assault of images: a weeping girl with hands bound; the ruins of a village smolder as the line of captives staggers past, but they're too exhausted to do more than cover their noses to ease the smell as the soldiers drive them on; an unexpected moment of laughter when eight of the captives, wary comrades now, splash in a pond; stumbling in mud while somewhere out of sight a baby cries and cries. She had lied about her name, because then all the things that happened to her were really happening to someone else, someone she was not.
Marit said, 'Your name is Sediya.'
Wearily, the woman said, 'You're one of them, one of the cloaks who pin us. The soldiers are their slaves, and we're slaves to the soldiers. Now I guess I'm your slave.'
'I'm not one of them,' said Marit fiercely.
'You're not going to kill me? Punish me? Take me back to Walshow?'
'The hells! Did you walk all the way here from Walshow?'
'Not really. I was swapped out to a scouting patrol, to service them while they were ranging, cook their rice, pound their nai. We walked for weeks and weeks, and I was too scared to run away. Then I got to seeing places I recognized, and that's when I ran. They'll kill me when they catch me. That's the promise they make you.'
Marit swiped a hand through her grubby hair, and cursed, the biting words taking the edge off her anger.
The woman had the numb gaze of a person who has learned to gauge how close she is to the next time she'll
