“Every time you try to do something, you get stomped on by our friend Lijjen, right? So just stop doing the job, Saarg. Just do the paperwork like you’re some clerk in a business somewhere. Read some books, use that swimming pool I hear they’ve got. Take up poetry, or a lover. Or explore Sumad in your plate armor, but don’t expose your face. If you’ve done everything here to your own liking and it hasn’t worked, stop fighting.”
He sat back as far as his tiny chair would let him. “Why do you think I didn’t let you go running off to YanderWall with those painted fools?”
“I was being a Seeker, Patzer, and yes I know we’ve got a priority mission. But being a Seeker is what I am. I knew I wanted to be a Seeker the first time I ever saw my father’s Missionary plate lying around our apartment and I crawled inside it. Look, I know you need me to focus on our hunt, and me using my Seeker senses on a night-time defense at YanderWall would cut into our daylight searching. But it’s who I am.”
Patzer spread his hands. “And look where being ‘who you are’ got you. Treated like a drooling reprobate barely capable of cleaning her own bedpan. Don’t deny it.” He waited.
Everything Patzer said was simultaneously right and wrong, and she had no answers, Gods help her. She couldn’t meet his eyes, so she said the first thing that came to mind.
“Do you still want me to ask them in the women’s hut if they’ve heard accents like mine? Or is that being too much a Seeker?” Her words tasted bitter.
“While you’re with me, Saarg, you’re a Seeker. I know you’re capable. So please, if you can learn anything from the pilgrims, I’d like to know.”
She pressed her hands on the table. “Patzer, look. Why do the Sumadan women treat me like that? I know how Cenephans are treated here, but this rudeness is uncalled for.”
Patzer shifted, avoiding her gaze.
“Well, they don’t know accents. They think you’re Cenephan.”
She squeezed the table’s sides. “So what if I was, Patzer? What is it?”
“Yes, Patzer, it’s best she knows.” He swirled the drink in his cup a moment, as if sifting the words to use, then said. “They think you’re a whore.”
“What?”
He sighed. “There’s a set of beliefs that Cenephan women may be… less pure than those further in. Sumadan children grow up with their parents telling them that. It’s the same thinking that tells us Polis Narmarikesh shopkeepers all keep unbalanced scales, or that young people from Polis Warnimor resent wearing clothes.”
“But… but that’s impossible. What? Do they think every single Cenephan woman in the Territories is a whore? How would that even be possible?”
“Keep your voice down. I’m not defending it.” He met her gaze. “Why do you think I always have you sit far away when I speak to Sumadans near the border?”
Terese gaped. “You mean, you and me, walking around the Territories together, people think, what we’re really doing, is you’re in charge of my… they think…” She couldn’t say it.
Patzer took a longer drink than necessary.
“But, but what if a group of women were traveling together?”
“A group of whores.”
“A family?”
“A family of whores. Saarg, stop.”
She’d opened her mouth to yell, though she had no idea what to say. She dropped back into her seat with a thump and although the seat didn’t give way, something inside it popped, a small hinge forever broken.
Patzer’s gaze fixed her in place. “I grew up running back and forth… trading over the border. Bad jokes about my mother, sisters, and my non-existent daughters were so common I’d think something odd if I didn’t get one lobbed at me every time I crossed over. The women of the Territories? Some are whores, but most aren’t.” He gestured toward the Polis’s inhabited areas, away from the Territories. “The further-in Sumadans need to believe we’re out here, suffering, dying young, because we’re worse humans than them. That we deserve it. That the border needs to be there to protect them from us, Saarg. Now, obviously, not all of them believe the ‘whores’ rubbish. And some recognize that those rumors are fear speaking, not common sense. But enough do believe the improbable, because they want to. There’s enough of those who do believe the stories, to make those who don’t, scared of treating us normally, where others might see.”
The heat in her lessened to something despondent and small.
“There’s nothing the women of Ceneph can do to prove their virtue. Stop fighting a battle that can’t be won.” His eyes were the sanest she’d seen them. “I hate this Polis too. I hate the life it’s forced on me. I hate the heat, the thirst and bowing to fools. So, count yourself lucky, finish your time and go home to your daughter. And leave us here with… bloody HopeWall! We’re doomed if those women who go to HopeWall are our best.”
He took any excuse to curse the old Cenephan weaving academy, HopeWall, somewhere off to the west. He wouldn’t tell, precisely, why he resented HopeWall. Something about harboring monsters and murderers. And typically for Patzer, only he could prove it.
She traced the circular stains on the battered tabletop with a fingertip, then wrapped her hand around her pack straps. “I’ll see you in the morning,” she said to the floor.
“Sleep well, lass,” he said. “And stay away from that hill.” He wagged a finger at her. “And those bloody fairies,” he muttered, possibly to himself.
Her throat tightened and she rushed out the door, into the cold night.
9
Terese coughed at the shock of cool, clean air entering her lungs, then crossed the dusty open space in front of the monk hill: a tall, swiftly rising clay mound ringed by a fence
