He gaped, speech squeezed out of him by the force and content of her words. Her speech was fluid and easy although her vowels were clipped, very short, and she coughed certain consonants and slurred others. Had she known the language of the Hundred all along, or had it poured into her when her destiny enveloped her?
Telling neighed. Seeing raised her head to look upstream.
The girl rose, grabbing the captured bow and a handful of crude arrows, shafts with sharpened points. She pushed her cloak back over her shoulders, to leave her arms unencumbered. He stood, too, gripping his staff.
'What cursed use is it,' he muttered, 'to wait so patiently, to spend these days in silence so the child wakens a little more — with such triumph! — only to be caught yet again by those hells-bitten criminals?' He was shaking, even angry, really just entirely twisted dry of the good humor he prized most of all as a Water-touched Blue Rat sworn to serve Ilu the Herald.
Dusk had crept over them without his noticing. The gleam of their cloaks gave them an aura, and made them targets. The horses, of course, could barely be seen. He saw an inconstant pattern of light fading and waxing by the nearest thicket of chamber-bells; their delicate tinkling caught in the wind.
A woman stepped into view, wrapped in a bone-white cloak. He knew that cloak. Once, he had known the man who wore it.
'Who arc you?' she demanded. 'What are you?'
The girl nocked an arrow and drew back the string with thumb and forefinger.
The woman shifted, not moving closer but not retreating. 'Nay, that was ill-said. I am here to talk with you, nothing more. Do not think I am here to threaten you.' Yet her tone was that of a woman accustomed to ordering people about. 'I would know who and what you are, for others have spoken of you, and I think you are not what you seem. Oh, the hells!'
Almost he chuckled, to hear the voice of authority break with frustration.
She continued. 'Are you Guardians, or are you not? I beg you, tell me what you know so I can understand what has happened to me.'
The girl glanced at him as a soldier looks to her captain for the order to loose, but he shook his head, yet raised a hand to show that she must stay ready.
'Show me your staff,' he called, 'and we can talk.'
'I have a walking stick.' She held out a trim pole. 'I can defend myself, lest you believe otherwise!'
His disappointment was sharper than he expected. Also, he recognized the stab of fear that pricked his breast, but he smiled to show a bland face. 'No need to quarrel with me. I am a peaceful man, camping here in the wilderness where I had hoped to bide undisturbed.'
'You don't trust me!'
'It seems you are standing a long way from me.'
'I want to trust you. But I don't know who to trust. I have seen others…' She glanced at the girl with a shake of her head. Then she clucked, and a pale shape moved out of the shadows: a horse.
Telling snorted, as in greeting, and the other horse replied with a whinny and a toss of its head. Seeing flicked her ears dismissively.
'What others?' he asked, because, alas, he knew now what she was. She belonged to his opponents, her staff held by them as hostage to keep her a prisoner to their will. They had sent her to hunt him down.
'There's no point in loosing that arrow at her,' he said to the girl, 'because even if you hit her squarely, you cannot harm her.'
She nodded to show she'd heard, but her gaze, and the arrow, remained fixed on the target.
'There are others like us,' said the woman.
'How do you know?'
'I have spoken to them within the labyrinth.'
'Have you approached them, as you approached me?'
She smiled, an ironic quirk that made him want to like her. But he must not succumb to congeniality; he had made that mistake a long long time ago.
'No, for it seemed to me that they smelled sweet with corruption. I am a reeve — that is, I was a reeve — so I knew better than to trust them.'
'Tell me your story. Don't come any closer. I can hear you perfectly well from here.'
She laughed bitterly. 'There! I'm told by your words what you think of me. Yet what choice have I?'
Her horse nuzzled her arm. She fished in a sleeve and plucked out a turnip. This delicacy the mare peeled daintily from her hand. Telling and Seeing watched the exchange with interest; was that an accusatory gaze Seeing turned on him, as if to say Where's my treat?
She went on. 'My name is Marit, if indeed I am still who I once was, which I at times doubt. I was a reeve, out of Copper Hall. My eagle was called Flirt.' At the name her voice hardened, choking down anger. 'I believe I must be dead. I was stabbed in the heart twenty years ago when I was taken prisoner by men under the command of Lord Radas. It surprised me then, for I'd seen Lord Radas stand in authority over the assizes in Iliyat some months before that day, and he seemed a man like any other. I understand now that he had changed to become something other than what he was before.'
'He had become a Guardian.'
She covered her eyes with the back of a hand, then lowered the hand. 'Yes, that's what I have had to come to believe. For a long while after I was stabbed I was not awake, not aware, but not asleep either. Dead, yet I never passed the Spirit Gate. I have been alone since that day'
'Why would you trust me with this secret?'
'You don't have the stink of corruption that the others do. You know what I am, don't you?'
'In some ways I may, but in more ways I do not. Therefore, alas, I
cannot trust you. She has been trying to find and destroy me for years, but I have so far eluded her.'
'Who is she}'
He waited, to see how she would answer herself, but she only watched him with a hard stare. Eager to hear. Desperate to understand. Aui! He wanted to like her. It was true there was no taint to the air, no vile taste on his tongue, nothing to suggest that she had turned on the path away from the lit road and walked into the shadows. That she was what she claimed to be was inarguable. The cloak at her shoulders gleamed with the pallor of bone. The horse — he'd not seen this mare before, or if he had he did not recognize its markings and face — tolerated her; maybe it even liked her.
Taking pity, he said at last, 'If you don't know who she is, then I will not tell you.'
'What then?' she demanded, goaded to a burst of temper. 'How can I gain your trust? I need allies. And I am guessing that you do, too, for you speak of opponents. Meanwhile, not all the Guardians are accounted for, are they?'
He began shaking, exhausted by the long years of running and hiding and by the terrible hope that this precious ghost girl would not turn away from him on the day she came fully awake.
'I'll tell you this,' said Marit. She wasn't one to give up easily. 'Myself, that's one. I heard of your existence from others, not from others wearing the cloak but from a reeve who spoke to a hieros, who spoke of how you came to the temple and claimed that girl. That's why I sought you out, and how I found you. You're two more. That makes three Guardians. Lord Radas makes four. And I have encountered three others who I believe are allied with Radas. One is called Hari, one is Yordenas. The third is a woman wearing a cloak of night. That makes seven. But there are nine Guardians. Where are the other two? What are we, if we are not the Guardians spoken of in the stories? If we are not the Guardians who sit in authority at the assizes, who guard the law on which the land is built? What happened to the real Guardians? Why did they vanish, and why are you and I here now? Do you know the answers?'
For once it was easy for him not to speak. Without trust, there
can be no free exchange. Without trust, there can be no answers that have a hope of sounding out the truth.
'What can I do to earn your trust?' Her gaze burned, but he would be veiled to her just as she was veiled to him. The third eye granted to the Guardians by Ushara the Devourer allowed them to see into the hearts of mortal men, not into the hearts of other Guardians.
'Kotaru the Thunderer gave each Guardian a staff,' he said. 'Where is yours?'
T don't know. I never had one.'
