She was very young; she didn't even wear the earring that marked her Youth's Crown, although she had breasts and curves enough that she was no doubt meant to dance into the Crowning Feast at midwinter with the rest of the youths ready to don their Lover's Wreaths and enter halfway into the adult world. No more than fourteen years, then. The remains of a sleeveless silk shift that once had been gold in color draped her body. Over it she wore an embroidered silk cloak, the kind of elegant accessory jaryas displayed while riding across town to an assignation or performance. It was a spectacular orange, now ripped and grimy; she'd used it to wipe up blood, likely her own. But as shocking as the sight of her was, with her curling black hair unbound and falling in matted tails and strings to her waist, and her arms and legs stained with dirt and blood and worse things, Marit had seen worse; reeves always saw worse.
Yet she'd never seen a girl dressed in the acolyte robes of the Devourer manacled by the ankle. The chain snaked back to the base of a huge tree, where it was fastened around a stake driven into the ground. The trunk was that of a massive death willow, immeasurably ancient. The trunk had grown up around the head of a tumbled statue. Wood encased the stone so that the grainy face peeked out and the crown of the head and the sculpted ripples of its hair were swallowed within the tree. The stone face stared at nothing. Lichen blinded both eyes. Streaks of white-she couldn't tell what they were-mottled the chin. The lips were darkened with the residue of blood or berry juice. An awful stench boiled out of the ground at the base of the trunk, something stinking and rotten.
The willow's green-yellow canopy concealed the sky and shaded both reeve and girl from the sun. Marit lay on a carpet, and when she turned her head she saw the curtain made by the willow's drooping branches, many of which swept the ground. Beyond, out where it was light, figures moved, but although she opened and closed her eyes three times she could get no good look at anything out there, as though magic hazed her sight. Beneath the death willow, they were alone.
'Do you want to be free?' whispered Marit, sensing her chance.
'Please let me go,' the girl whimpered. 'Please. Please.' The words sounded well rehearsed; she'd said them frequently. Her dark eyes, like those of the stone head, had a kind of blindness to them, although she tracked Marit's face and movements well enough.
'Is there another way out of here? What lies beyond the willow, that way?' She indicated direction with a jerk of her chin.
'No one goes that way,' murmured the girl. 'That's where he goes when he comes visiting.'
'Does it lead into the forest?'
The girl stiffened, head thrown back, lips thinning, and she sniffed audibly, taking in the air like a starving man scenting food. 'He's coming.' She scrambled to the base of the trunk and tugged hopelessly at the stake, but it didn't budge. Finally she curled up like a turtle seeking its shell, trembling, arms wrapped around her chest.
Voices reached her from beyond the drooping branches.
'My lord! I did not expect you so soon.'
'Have you accomplished what I asked of you, Milas?'
Marit knew that voice.
The baritone hemmed and hawed in reply. 'Not as we expected, my lord.'
'Leave off your excuses!' The curtain of branches was swept aside, and a man ducked in under the canopy. He looked, first, directly at the stone head and the girl cowering there, rocking back and forth on the balls of her feet, staring at him in terror. Marit got a good look at his face: that of a man in his early twenties, with broad cheekbones, a mustache and beard, and astonishingly long lashes above deep-set eyes. To her shock, she recognized him.
Radas, lord of Iliyat. He held one of the local authorities under whose auspices order was kept in the Hundred, and he was unusual only in that lordships-local chiefs whose right to office passed through a direct bloodline-were rare, an artifact, so the tales sang, of ancient days and even then known almost exclusively in the north.
His gaze flicked down to her. When he saw that the blindfold had been tweaked aside, annoyance narrowed his eyes.
'Have you touched her?' he said to the girl. Although he did not raise his voice, the change in his tone made Marit shiver and the girl quiver and moan.
With a snort of disgust he let the branches fall and vanished back into the light.
'She'll have to be killed,' he said. 'She's seen me.'
'Right away, my lord,' said the baritone.
'Nay, no haste. It would serve my purposes best to let the men do what they will. It's necessary that they understand that reeves aren't to be feared or respected. After that, if she's still breathing-slit her throat.'
'Yes, my lord.'
'Where's the eagle?'
'This way, my lord.'
They moved away. In the camp, the noises of men at their tasks trickled back into life. Evidently the woodsmen feared the lord of Iliyat as much as the girl did-and yet, Marit could not fit the two pieces together. She'd seen Lord Radas at court day in Iliyat, a mild-spoken young man passing judgment and entertaining merchants. Less than a year ago, she'd brought in a criminal to Iliyat's assizes, a thief and his accomplices who had raided two warehouses. The ringleader had been sold to a man brokering for Sirniakan merchants; he'd be taken out of the Hundred into the distant south, into a life of slavery far from home with no hope of return. No worse fate existed. The accomplices were young and foolish; they'd been given eight-year contracts to serve as indentured servants, slaves of the debt they had created through their crime. It was a merciful sentence.
She could not reconcile that man and this one, yet they were clearly the same.
'Hsst. Girl.'
The girl looked up. Her eyes were dry but her expression was that of a child who has given up crying because she knows comfort will never ever come. Her eyes were bruised with shadows; her cheeks were hollow, and her complexion more gray than brown.
'Come closer.'
She shook her head. 'I shouldn't have touched you. Now he'll punish me. He likes to punish me.'
'What's your name?'
'I don't have a name anymore.'
A stubborn one. 'I'm called Marit. Reeve Marit. If I can free you, will you help me?'
'We are all slaves to the will of the Merciless One. There is only one road to freedom.'
There wasn't time to be subtle.
'There's a knife hidden in my right boot. I can't reach it, but you can. Then you can free me.' Marit wiggled her shoulders and hips and rolled onto her left side to display her bound arms. Her shoulders were aching badly, but that was the least of her worries. She knew better than to think about the problem posed by that chain and that stake. When she won free, she had to alert the reeve halls to this blasphemy and Lord Radas's treason. She wouldn't have time to struggle with the stake. It was a cruel decision, but necessary.
'A knife!' The girl crawled forward. Her expression changed, but the disquiet raised in Marit's throat by Lord Radas's frown tightened, and she had to cough out a breath as the girl tugged off Marit's right boot and swiftly, with strangely practiced hands, probed the lining. Faster than should have been possible her nimble fingers extracted the knife. It was a slender blade, meant for emergencies.
'The Merciless One has smiled on us.' The girl kissed the blade. 'She'll grant us freedom!'
'Quick! They could come at any moment.'
Indeed, she heard a buzz of noise out beyond the willow's canopy as though a mob gathered, with stamping and hollering and wild laughter brought on by waste wine and khaif: men working up their nerve to indulge themselves in their worst nature; men being worked up by a chieftain or overlord as music is coaxed out of an instrument by a skilled musician.
As the captain's wife said in the Tale of Fortune: Make them ashamed of themselves and they will not betray you, because they will know they have stepped outside the boundaries and made themselves outcast by their deeds.
The girl mouthed a prayer of thanksgiving, then sidled closer, right up against Marit's torso. She spun the blade with the skill of an expert trained to handle knives and touched the point against the cloth of Marit's tunic. It
