“How can ye fight?” said the blacksmith with a curt laugh. “Best to give them what they want and see their backs as they are leaving.”
“Words can fight when enough people know there can be another way,” I said.
Vai said, “Let fire mages and cold mages work together, and we can break down the power of mage Houses and princes.”
The blacksmith’s sneer stung like the ashy smoke of the forge. “And raise up ourselves in their place? A friendly offer, lad, but this thing cannot be done. We of the brotherhood hold our secrets close to keep ourselves alive. We who live with the fire burning within us live one breath away from our death. This ye are knowing, and likewise I have said more than enough. We are wanting no trouble here. Begone, and we will pretend we never saw ye if any are come to ask.”
“I do not know by what secrets and rituals blacksmiths protect themselves from the backlash of fire, but I do know there is a way for cold mages to protect fire mages. If they trust each other.”
Several of the old men laughed, as if this were the greatest joke they had heard in an age.
The blacksmith’s frown made me think he might melt into white-hot slag just from anger. “Ye’s a tale-teller, lad, is that it? A wanderer trying to taste a piece of bread with what words ye have to spend. The two lasses’ pretty looks are a better lure than yer blasphemous promises.”
The old men gestured for the villagers to move away as from a fight.
Vai did not budge. “You know better than to speak insultingly of another man’s wife to his face, much less to hers, so I will let that pass for this once. This is what I know: Cold magic feeds me, but the backlash of fire magic devours itself. Yet I can teach you how to pour the backlash of fire through the threads of my magic and thus harmlessly into the bush—the spirit world—where it cannot harm you. This is the truth. I swear it on my mother’s honor.”
By no other vow could he have so forcibly impressed them. The blacksmith looked startled, but the outright hostility drained from his face.
“I will talk to ye in the forecourt of the temple of Three-Headed Lugus,” he said at length, “if ye are willing to enter the god’s sanctuary.”
“I am a carpenter’s son. My father and uncle made offerings to thrice-skilled Lugus, whom they called Shining Komo with three hands and three birds.”
The man indicated me. “This one? She is truly yer wife?”
“She is. And the other is her cousin.”
“My apologies,” he said as politely as anyone could please. He beckoned Vai over and spoke in a whisper, but of course I could hear them perfectly well. “To enter the forecourt of the god, ye must abjure the touch of woman.”
“For how long?” Vai asked with perfect seriousness, as if the request were not at all unreasonable.
I knew that hunters held various proscriptions, as well as hanging amulets about their bodies before they entered the bush to hunt, so I felt it prudent not to listen to their secret business. Instead, Bee and I introduced ourselves to the women.
In a village like this, still fixed in the traditional ways, women and men kept most aspects of their lives separate. The women took Bee and me to a little temple dedicated to Mother Faro, the name they gave the deity of the river, where we poured libations over the stone altar. Afterward we settled into a common room lined with pots made by the most prestigious woman in the village, a potter who had married the blacksmith. The potter was black in complexion, a woman of renown married in from another prosperous village. Food and drink she offered in plenty, although no beef, as that was reserved for the men at this time of year. Women and children wandered in and out to observe us. I brought out my sewing kit, and they exclaimed over my steel needles, commonplace in Expedition but precious here. I sewed while Bee talked.
It was just so interesting to watch how Bee coaxed people into thinking about things in a new way. The women had never heard of Expedition or the Antilles, nor even of General Camjiata, although they had all heard of the Iberian Monster, known as a marauding general whose troops ate babies and who magicked women into men to make more soldiers for his army.
“All this talk of an assembly in a far country makes little difference to us,” said the potter. “What I want to know is how a man can write a law code and suppose any mage or prince will care what it says? They can ignore it easily enough.”
“Not if you do not ignore it!” said Bee.
“Words scratched on paper do not a binding make. Only blood makes a binding.”
“We are bound if we believe there is only one way things can be,” said Bee.
“Do you think we can stand against their soldiers?” asked the potter as others nodded. “You are young and innocent to not know the way of things.”
Regardless of how little agreement Bee fostered among the women who stayed up late to listen, she kept them listening, even if only for the novelty. She and I slept together in an alcove bed tucked into the wall, with a pair of dogs curled at our feet. In the morning I gave the potter a steel needle, and the women provisioned us with enough barley-cake, turnips, and beans to last three days.
“What did you discuss?” I asked Vai once we were back out on the river.
“I can’t speak of it.” To a man raised as he had been, such secrets were sacred. He was careful not to touch me. Even Rory was unusually solemn, in a mood I might have called brooding.
Bee said, “I did not see you, Rory. Were you with the men?”
“I don’t like temples. They make my skin itch.” He perused our faces as if he expected to uncover a rebuke. “I saw a terrible thing while you three were about your feasts and friendly talk! These people wish they were not bound to the mage House, but they bind people in their turn, don’t they? While they feast and sing and sleep, aren’t there people who serve?”
“Everyone must work,” said Vai, with a shake of his head.
The river’s voice almost drowned out Rory’s words, for he could barely choke them out. “I heard a noise in one of the byres as I was sniffing about as I like to do at dusk. There was a man handling a woman who did not want him. He pushed her down into the dirty straw and pulled up her skirt and shoved his part into her. She did not cry out for help or fight but I could smell her humiliation and shame. So I pulled him off. I told him I was the spirit of vengeance visited upon men who abuse helpless women. He laughed at me. He said the woman is a slave and thus a whore because slaves have no honor. So I showed him my true face. And he pissed himself and ran off. Then the woman reviled me. She said she was taken from her village by soldiers when she was young and sold months later to the blacksmith’s father. Any man in the village can use her as he wishes, just as he said. She will be punished now for what I have done. So I was ashamed for having done a thing to bring trouble on her. I told her she could escape with us.”
“Lord of All,” muttered Vai.
“But she refused! She said she has a healthy boy child who has been adopted as a son by a village man who has only daughters. He means the boy to marry one of the girls and inherit his cottage. If she runs, the boy will be turned out. She cannot let the chance go that he will have a good life. How can this be true? How can people live, with their spirits crushed day after day?”
“Blessed Tanit protect her!” murmured Bee.
Rory trembled with hissing fury. “I thought the radicals mean to free people who are bound to serve others. But what of people like her? I should have stolen the boy and made them both come with us, but I was a coward.”
For a long while we floated downstream in silence.
At last I said, “You’re not a coward, Rory.”
“Such a woman would fare worse as a stranger in a town with a child in tow and no family to protect her,” added Vai. “That the child may flourish gives her hope each day.”
Bee said, “You can’t save every mistreated person, not alone and with the law against you.”
Rory shifted onto the bench beside Vai. “I want to row now. I’m too angry to talk.”
Though our hearts felt wintry, signs of spring had crept into the landscape: buds greening on trees, violets in patches of color beneath the stark woodland, birds flocking north as they honked or trilled. In this flat country the river split into channels separated by long, flat islands. We passed several villages. At midday we saw riders on the eastern shore. Later in the afternoon a man with a spear watched us pass. Sheep worked their way over a
