hands to shield their faces. It was a practiced response the obeisance of which chilled her more than the cursed dawn wind. She turned Warning in a sweep that sent folk scuttling away from her.
'Finish with your duties,' she said to Tarbi. 'Then escort me to the assizes.'
'You are gracious, Holy One.' He unhooked a basket from under the eaves. Every farmer and woodsman, carter and tanner, elder and child filed past to hand him a pair of discs strung on leather straps. He examined them, tossed one in the basket, and returned the other to its bearer, who then slung it around the neck and hurried out the gate, careful never to look Marit's way.
When the first rush was past, Tarbi called down the other guard to take charge. He walked ahead; she led the mare.
Children fled into their houses. Women flinched away, shielding their faces in the gesture Marit was beginning to loathe.
'Are there bandits hereabouts, that you lock your town gates at night?'
'Of course not, Holy One. The land is at peace.'
Stragglewood had a central square fronted on two sides by capacious clan compounds ostentatiously renovated. Along the northern front of the square ran a long, low building that she remembered as the council hall. She was shown into its courtyard. The traditional elders' benches had been removed. A colonnade opened into an open hall whose elders' benches had been removed in favor of a chair built to outsize proportions and raised on a dais with a pair of smaller chairs set below to either side as obsequious attendants.
'Where are the assizes?'
'They are here, Holy One. We captured a gods-cursed demon. She's confined in a cell along with unclean ones awaiting judgment. She and two of the unclean ones will be sent to Wedrewe for cleansing when the chain comes through at the Lamp Moon.'
'You've confined a gods-touched person?'
'According to the statutes.'
'The law? Aui! And what in the hells are 'unclean ones'?'
'The criminals, Holy One.'
She clamped lips closed over a furious reply and took a few deep breaths. The rafters of the hall seemed ominous; she did not want to walk under a roof where shadows spilled over the floor like the pooling of blood. 'Where are the elders' benches?'
'Removed, according to the statutes, Holy One.'
'Who judges the cases, then?'
His head remained stolidly, stubbornly, bowed. 'You'll want to discuss these matters with the clerk, Holy One. I am only in charge of the gate passage.' His fear trembled on the air, as delicate and complex as a spider's web. 'We are always posted in pairs at the gate, Holy One. Hodard may come under suspicion if he remains there too long alone.'
'Under suspicion of what? Allowing someone out without taking their token?'
As soon as the words left her mouth, she regretted them. For that was precisely what was going on: no one could enter or leave town without the act being marked. The tokens and palisade had nothing to do with protecting the town from bandits.
Tarbi's gaze skipped over her face so quickly she caught only a glance of a memory: a sobbing woman being flogged in the town square as prosperous-looking clans-folk shouted questions at her, 'Where has he fled to?' 'Where has he gone?'
Yet his thoughts were as clear as speech: How is it she does not know this? It is exactly as we were warned! An impostor will come.
He wrenched his gaze to the dirt.
She'd betrayed her ignorance. 'Fetch the clerk.'
With a haste that betrayed his eagerness to flee, he scrambled onto the porch and kicked off his sandals, calling out as he slid open a door. 'Osya! Come quickly!'
Marit dropped Warning's reins and walked after him, pausing with one foot on the ground and the other braced on the lower of the two steps. A body appeared in the gate. She turned, but it was only a little child come to stare at the winged horse. Its open mouth and wide eyes, all wonder and excitement, made her smile. Then it caught sight of her, and it dropped so quickly to its knees, head bowed and hands raised in an obscene imitation of the adults' gestures, that she felt mocked. It bolted away into the square without a word.
Feet scraped along plank flooring. She overheard their voices because her hearing was so uncannily keen.
'Why aren't you at your post, Tarbi? You'll be flogged.'
'Keep your voice down. There's come one of the impostors we were warned to watch for.'
'There's never been such a sighting. Sky-blue, mist-silver, earth-clay, bone-white. Those are the ones we're to look for, neh?'
'Bone-white the cloak she wears. Send Peri to Wedrewe, as we were commanded.'
'This is a bad omen! What if the lords cleanse the entire town, thinking us corrupted? We've followed all the statutes. It's not our fault!'
'Send Peri to the gate after me and I'll get him mounts and send him on his way. Meanwhile, flatter and favor the cloak, persuade her to bide here as long as possible. There's a reward if she's delivered to the Lady. We'll prosper, you and me.'
Marit stepped away from the porch as she heard footsteps approaching. She walked Warning over to a watering trough set under the shade of an open roof. Over in this corner, she smelled sour sweat and the ripe stench of human waste; a woman was
sobbing softly. A man's raspy voice croaked out a whisper, 'Shut up, will you, you bitch? If you'd just slept with Master Forren like he asked, you wouldn't be stuck in here. At least you're not being sent to Wedrewe to be cleansed, eh? What do you have to complain about?'
'Holy One.' Tarbi hurried out into the courtyard, so flushed with fear and nervous hope that he smelled as ripe as the manure. 'The clerk is coming.'
'Best you return to your posting,' she said before he could babble on.
'Thank you, Holy One.'
He ran out. Not long after, a burly woman emerged from the hall with a very young man in tow, him with head bowed so deep Marit wondered he did not ram the top of his head into every pillar. He slunk out the gate as the clerk came forward with face shielded by her hands.
'Holy One. How may I serve you?'
Marit wanted to ask where Wedrewe was, but she had already roused their suspicions. 'There is a woman here, imprisoned for not having sex with Master Forren. I heard of the matter and have come to adjudicate.'
The clerk, visibly startled, forgot herself enough to glance look into Mark's face.
Master Forren hadn't any right to try to force the girl to bed him. Just because he's the richest man in town, and connected to them who built Wedrewe, he thinks he can have what he wants. Things like this never happened before Ushara's temple was shut down.
She threw an arm over her eyes, and groaned.
'I'll take those keys!' Marit yanked them out of the woman's fingers and crossed into a narrow courtyard that ran between the back of the building and a high wall. The cells were a row of twelve cages set against the wall, with no roof to shelter the prisoners from the rain and no ditch or gutter to sluice away their waste whose stench clawed into her throat. She halted on the edge of the porch, surveying a sludgy waste baked to a paste under the sun. She did not want to step into that.
The prisoners roused. Two stared boldly; five hid their faces. One woman was sobbing, crammed into a cage with an even thinner girl lying unhealthily still beside her. The last prisoner huddled in the farthest cage, back to Marit, unmoving, possibly dead.
The first man whose gaze she met had a steady stare; she tumbled into a morass as filled with muck as the ground beneath and around the cages. He holds a stick with which he is beating beating beating in the head of an old man all for the scant string of vey lying in a heap on the rain-soaked earth.
'That one is a murderer,' Marit said.
Osya cowered on the threshold. 'So he is, Holy One. He's not from here. He came as a laborer walking the
