lucky enough to be jessed.'
'To be slaves?'
She raised her hands, palms out, in the exact gesture she'd used to signal Tumna to lift. 'I'm not treading that path, girl. Don't even try me.'
Volias poured the last of the cordial into the cup and shoved it in front of Nallo. 'You refuse to become a reeve because you say it's like being forced to sell your labor as a slave. And yet you go
ahead, so I hear, and sell your labor as a slave, working for the outlanders. So wouldn't it make more sense to have remained a reeve, with autonomy, a hall filled with comrades, responsibility and authority?'
Nallo did not take the cup. 'I myself chose to sell my labor. You at the hall — the marshal, everyone — made the choice for me.'
'We made no choice. The eagle made its choice.'
She shook her head. 'Do you know how I got married? My father came up to me when I brought in the goats one afternoon and said, 'Nallo, the clan has sealed a contract for you to marry a ropemaker in a village on the West Track. About ten days' walk from here. You'll leave tomorrow.''
Arda shrugged. 'A story heard a hundred times. How are you different from most other lads and lasses married out to benefit the clan?'
Volias picked up the cup, thought better of drinking, and set it back down, turning it halfway and leaving his hands cupped around its curve. 'I can see you may have felt roped — heh — into a bad situation. But Arda is right, as much as I hate to admit it.' Arda rolled her eyes. 'That's how contracts are arranged between clans.'
She was boiling now, remembering the way her father had turned away with relief at finally being rid of her. 'I didn't even get to meet him beforehand. No one asked if it was what I wanted.'
'Was he cruel?' asked Arda suddenly. 'Did he mistreat you?'
Volias pushed the cup closer to Nallo and removed his hand.
'No. He was a good man.' She picked up the cup and gulped down the cordial, glad of how the spicy aftertaste burned her mouth and made her eyes water. 'The truth is, he got the worse part of the bargain, but he never said one word in complaint.'
'Ah,' murmured Volias.
'Ah! What's that mean?'
'The hells! Just a way of making noise come out my throat. No need to rip my head off.' As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he winced.
'A smooth talker,' said Arda, 'which accounts for his success with women.'
Nallo said, 'Tumna killed her reeve.'
'Yes,' said Volias. 'And from everything I hear, he'd earned death.
I am not a good man, not like your dead husband, may he rest beyond the Spirit Gate. But I do not fear Trouble.'
'These days everyone fears trouble,' said Nallo tartly.
'No, I mean, my eagle. Her name is Trouble. Now I admit she is a particularly good-natured bird, besides being as everyone acknowledges the most beautiful eagle known to be alive in the entire Hundred.'
Nallo laughed. 'You're boasting.'
Arda sighed.
'It is not boasting if it is true. Like that Qin captain. You have to admit his wife is a lovely creature.'
'I never saw her,' said Nallo, thinking of Avisha and the children, and finding another tear on her cheek.
'And by all accounts a canny merchant,' added Arda, 'capable of twisting the knife with a smile and a compliment that makes you not even feel the pain. I think what Volias is saying is that no one could believe Trouble chose him when she could have had her pick of any decent person.'
Volias grinned, and Nallo saw that he cared nothing for what people said about him and Trouble, because he had her, and they didn't. 'Listen, Nallo. As I said, I have a proposition. I'm taking Pil back to Clan Hall to get his training. You come, too. Then you're away from all this, and you can make up your own mind. I admit that Arda is the best trainer we've got, but Ofri's experienced and cursed mellow, and a good man, for that matter.'
Arda propped her chin on a hand as she examined Volias with a frown. 'What's your angle?'
He wasn't a handsome man, but when he wasn't sneering, he had a nice face. 'Get her away from Joss. He's the one who put her back up.'
'You two must give up your feud. It bores the rest of us.'
He turned a shoulder to Arda and fixed so warm a gaze on Nallo that she tried another swallow just to get the cup between her and his face. Arda reached across the table and patted Nallo's other wrist, stroking it teasingly, and Nallo shifted, feeling in that touch a promise that pleased her.
Volias sighed and rose. 'I guess I'm too late.'
'No,' said Nallo, without pulling away from Arda's pleasant
touch. 'Just to be clear, I don't want any other kind of proposition from you. But if I go to Clan Hall, then maybe it'll seem like I'm starting new, of my own choice.'
Thunder boomed overhead, and the rain pounded harder. Laughing reeves and hirelings dashed in under the cover of the canvas hall. Even Pil slouched in, looking like a drowned Rat, and with arms folded across his chest sank down on a bench alone, brooding.
'To be up there like that — I can't imagine never going aloft again.'
'Jessed,' said Volias, with heat or mockery. He was just speaking the truth.
Tumna had chosen her, and now they were bound.
The boom of thunder and the downpour that followed came as a relief to Mai after weeks enduring the dusty heat and dreary isolation of the Barrens, all too similar to the days of her childhood in Kartu Town. How far away the markets of Olossi seemed now. She pressed a hand over her swollen abdomen. The baby lay quiet, undisturbed by the storm. But she sighed, clutching a message brought midday by a reeve from Argent Hall.
She sat on a humble bench on a raised porch in the shelter of one of only four proper buildings in the entire settlement. From this vantage, sited advantageously on the slope, she watched rain make a haze of air, listened to its drumming on tile roof, on canvas, on dirt. Water tracked runnels into every crack and low spot, headed for the flat plain beyond the lower berm where in years to come fields would flourish if the massive irrigation project proved successful. An eagle spiraled in, battered by turbulence as it made for the training ground on Eagle Hill to the north. The rain was so dense she could not even see the hill where ancient ruins surrounded a rich vein of naya sinks. Water rushed down the gully, a muted roar rather like the thoughts in her head.
Soon it would be too dark to see. But since she could not read, it scarcely mattered. Priya had twice read out Miravia's message.
' 'Strangely, the terrible situation in the Hundred in which so many suffer works to my benefit. Contracts can be delivered by paying a fee to reeves flying between the halls, but bodies must travel
by land. The uncles will not risk bodily harm coming to me by sending me on unsafe roads, even if they think nothing of those other harms that may come to me when the marriage is finally sealed. It's true that it says in the law that a girl must not be forced into marriage against her will, but were I to refuse, that would ruin my hopes of marriage forever, since no one else will want-me because I will have proven myself to have a rebellious temperament. It will furthermore put a stain on my family's trading contacts with other Ri Amarah houses, and in the hopes my cousins cherish of contracting respectable marriages. For me to refuse would be to betray my family. My despair must remain in my heart. Yet while a person may hope to hide their face from the presence of the Hidden One, we are not hidden from that gaze eyen if we believe that because we cannot see that which is hidden, that it therefore does not exist.''
Priya pushed past the curtained entrance — there were no actual walls, only canvas strung from beams — and offered Mai a bowl of rice covered with bean curd, slip-fried vegetables, and a red sauce swimming with slices of fish.
'Here, Mistress. You must be hungry.'
'I am.' She tucked the folded rice paper into her belt and accepted the bowl. Although the smell made her mouth water, she did not eat.
'You are still upset about the message.'
'I am.'
