fear.'
She leaned her head back against a tree trunk, shutting her eyes, breathing in the sting of sharp night-wand and the odor of intermingled rot and growth.
She considered her options. To ride into the north, to make her way to Toskala through lands controlled by this mysterious army watched over by folk who wore Guardians' cloaks, was foolhardy. Most likely she would blunder into the nest of demons and get chopped up first thing. Even if she reached Toskala, no one at Clan Hall would have any reason to know and trust her. She'd been gone for nineteen years. There was no reason for anyone to believe she was who she claimed to be, or to believe her story of Lord Radas's treachery and an army led by five people pretending to be Guardians. No reason at all.
Not without proof.
An owl skimmed low. A night-flying insect whirred among branches that ticked in the steady wind. Water dripped. A creature rustled away through bushes heavy with damp leaves.
She opened her eyes.
Sediya was gone. Mark tracked her with her hearing. First the woman crawled — not a likely way to be creeping off to relieve yourself — and when she got far enough away from the night's encampment, she eased to her feet and trotted with an awkward rolling gait, now and again stumbling but picking herself up and going on with admirable determination.
Mark sighed. She stood. Sticks and scraps of vegetation tangled on her ragged clothes. She whistled. Warning came alert from her equine doze. She raised her hand and called light.
Sediya screamed when they caught up to her, and fell sobbing to her knees, beating her fists against the ground, praying, pleading, weeping.
Pain twisted in Mark's chest. She's that afraid of what she thinks I am.
'I meant what I said. I'm taking you to a safe place.'
Sediya refused to answer.
At the temple of Ilu in the village of Rifaran, Sediya went mutely as an apprentice led her off to the baths. She did not offer a parting glance and certainly no thanks. It was likely that, whatever she said later, no one would believe her.
The envoys in charge gifted Marit with clothing in good repair in exchange for bringing one of their injured daughters to a place where she might find healing. The old woman who stood gate duty gave Mark a mended but otherwise stout cloak of a faded green color more appropriate to and practical for journeying.
For her own part, Marit thanked the envoys properly and retreated, alone, to the glade where Warning rested out of sight.
But when she unclasped the cloak to take off the rags and put on decent clothing, the cloak slithered back to clutch at her calves as if it were a living thing. She began to heave, sucking and coughing. She could not get air. The cloak poured up her body, wrapping her until she was too tangled to stand. She sprawled, vision fading… choking, she grasped the clasp and fixed the cursed thing around her neck. She lay for a bit, skin clammy and hot by turns. After a while, she got to her feet. The cloak swagged around her like ordinary cloth, draping to midcalf.
An ordinary piece of cloth in every way, you might think, except it never became grimy. It never stank. The clasp did not rub raw her skin. Magic infused it. Death's cloak, she might call it, and it was true enough. Death's cloak had risen off a Guardian's bones to smother her that day up on Ammadit's Tit when she and Joss had broken the boundaries and invaded a Guardian altar. A day later, death's cloak had claimed her in truth, when the knife had pierced her heart in the woodsmen's camp. If she was dead, then it was appropriate that death's cloak wore her and would not let her go.
'What are you, if you aren't one of them?' Sediya had asked.
Maybe she was just asking the wrong question. Not 'Why did the Guardians vanish, and where did they go?' but 'What is a Guardian, after all? Therefore, what am I?'
She rode to Olo'osson and made her way via back roads and isolated irrigation berms to Argent Hall, the westernmost reeve hall, on the shore of the salty Olo'o Sea. She released Warning to fend for herself, as the mare had done for an unknown time before Marit found her. She hid the harness and saddle in an abandoned shack and walked to the gates to ask for work in the lofts as a fawkner's assistant's assistant. Remarkably, they took her on.
They assigned her to the most menial of tasks: sweeping, cleaning, hauling. Maybe later, they told her, if she proved herself, they might let her start working with the harness.
She had to keep her eyes lowered at all times, so no one could possibly suspect how much she could really see. She pretended to be a woman fallen on hard times who had become suspicious and unfriendly because of the beatings she had endured from an angry husband and his unsympathetic relatives. It was a situation she'd encountered all too often as a reeve. They accepted her odd manners because she did her work, and because they were so poorly supervised and understaffed that many of their long-term hirelings had recently quit. Because the reeve halls tended to attract people who didn't fit into the daily life of the village.
With her head hunched and her gaze lowered, and her cloak tied up out of the way and layered beneath the old green cloak, she observed.
Marshal Alyon was an ailing and ill-tempered old reeve poorly
suited to manage such a roil. Half of the reeves stationed at Argent Hall had transferred here from other halls in the last few years, and they were malcontents and loose arrows to a man and woman, the kind of reeve Mark despised, the ones who kept taking more than they needed, the ones who got to loving their baton and the power they wielded more than the law they served. Marshal Alyon could not control them. There was at least one fist fight a day in the exercise yard. She kept her chin down and her eyes averted, but she saw everything. She heard their whispers. She knew how many stank of corruption, and how many fought for a restoration of the old order but kept losing ground. The newcomers were waiting, but she wasn't sure for what.
She'd not been there ten days when she woke one day to voices all aflutter.
'Garrard is back from Clan Hall. He says Clan Hall won't help us. We're on our own.'
She washed her face and slouched to the eating hall. The nai porridge tasted particularly bland today, no spice at all, but as always it was filling. She sat with the other menials, who had learned to ignore her beyond a perfunctory greeting.
At the next table, the loft fawkners were whispering fiercely, heads bent together.
'Yordenas has returned, still with no eagle. I've never heard of a bird nesting for so many seasons. I don't like him. I don't trust him.'
Heads went up as six reeves wearing gleaming reeve leathers sauntered into the eating hall. Marit shuddered; a red haze washed her vision, and the last smears of porridge turned as pink as if mixed with blood. She blinked, and after all it was only her eyes playing tricks on her. The porridge had no color at all, just a few grainy lumps stuck to the sides of the bowl.
She looked up, and saw a man wearing a Guardian's cloak.
He wasn't looking her way, or he would have known instantly, as she knew instantly. She ducked down, pretending to fiddle with her sandal's lacing. He sat down with his companions at a table well away from the one where she sat, because certain of the reeves strutted an attitude that they were better than the rest and certainly did not want to associate with the menials or even the fawkners, although the health of their eagles depended on the fawkners.
He sat with eyes downcast, listening more than he talked. His cloak was red as blood, somber rather than bright. It made her think of seeping wounds that never heal.
He did not eat, only made his presence and his allies known to all. Eventually, he left the eating hall. As he walked to the door, she bent down to let the height of those sitting at her table shield her from view. As soon as he was gone, the fawkners began whispering.
'Hsss! You see how the conflict will fall out. Yordenas means to become marshal in Alyon's place. He'll poison him.'
'Poison Alyon! Even I don't believe that, Rena.'
'You're a cursed fool if you don't believe it. It's going to get ugly, when Alyon dies, and he will die because he's weakening fast. Then it'll come down to a fight between Garrard and the outsiders, and that'll get even uglier. If we were any of us smart we would just up and leave like the hirelings keep doing.'
'We can't abandon the eagles. They need us.'
