Aline nodded gravely. “We won’t compromise your work. You won’t endanger ours. It makes sense. But tell me this. If you hear something we need to know ...”
Usha took her hand. “Then you’ll know.”
Dez left first, but before Usha departed Rose Hall Aline asked her to wait.
“I defended him to Dez, Usha. But I haven’t spoken with Madoc about Qui’thonas. She dropped her glance, then looked up again. “I haven’t spoken with him in a long time, but I want—” Aline cleared her throat. “If I knew he would—”
“Shall I ask him?”
“Ask him to come along on another journey with me?” Aline smiled ruefully. “That’s what it would be if he agreed to work with me—another long and dangerous journey.” She looked up, and the woman who had all day been the stern commander of Qui’thonas looked like a young girl who dared not hope and yet dared to hope, all at the same time.
Dear gods, she still loves him.
“I’ll find him,” Usha said. “I’ll see if it’s safe to ask him. But if he refuses, you’ve let someone know a secret you dare not let go.”
“I trust you. If you think for even a moment that he’s unsafe, that he can’t be trusted ... ask nothing.”
Usha left Rose Hall just as the shadows were lengthening toward dusk. She went back to the Ivy alone and didn’t see Dez until well after curfew. By that time, she’d written a letter, sealed it, and put it into the hands of one of the boys in the tavern’s dooryard. He was a tough youngster with a pugnacious swagger and a reputation for being able to take care of himself. Usha didn’t doubt that he’d be able to deliver her message to the Grinning Goat and be back in good time to make curfew.
In fact, she had her reply nearly an hour before the sun set and the sounds of the night became little more than the sigh of the wind, the river, and the ring of a knight’s mail or the chime of his horse’s bridle iron as the watch took over the city.
A pair of red-headed boys went racing past Usha, chasing a ball, their laughter skirling up to the deepening sky. Like many others, these had been released from their mothers’ fretful watching. It seemed to Usha that it had all happened at once, as though the mothers in Haven decided together that things weren’t so bad after all. Or at least not dangerous enough to keep the hands of restless children clamped in their own.
It lacked a few hours yet until Sir Radulf’s curfew, and Usha strolled through the market, enjoying the sound of voices, the bright colors of wares, and the rich scents only a market can weave. There weren’t as many vendors as she’d seen on earlier trips, but those who had goods to sell set up booths and plied their wares in the shade of wide, colorful awnings. Fruit sellers did a good business in melons and strawberries. Their produce seemed fresh and more plentiful than a small patch of garden in a neighborhood common would produce. Usha found that puzzling, and as puzzling was the savory odor of roasted lamb hanging in the air.
She complimented the fruit seller’s wife on her produce and asked, “How are the shepherds getting their sheep to market again?”
The woman shook her head. “They aren’t. The knights are doing that.” She nodded to the rosy apples piled up on her table. “These aren’t mine. They come from downriver. Sir Radulf sends his men to take what he thinks the city needs. But some things come in.”
“How?”
“Look,” said the woman. She pointed across the square and Usha turned to see. “Plainsfolk.” Her glance darting to one of the two mounted knights at either entrance to the square, near the river gate. The woman lowered her voice. “They aren’t from here. They came in last night. By special pass, or so I hear.”
One of the knights dismounted. He wore no helm but his dark, cropped hair glistened with sweat beneath the coif of his mail shirt. Their glances crossed. His smile was slow and insolent. Usha looked away and crossed the dusty market to where the sun-browned people of the plains had spread their blankets in the shade of one of the many elms bordering the river side of the square. Feathers of all sizes and colors lay pinned in bunches or singly to dun colored blankets. Round, flat-bottomed baskets, interwoven with feathers in colors and patterns signifying the weaver’s history and that of her family, held down the corners of the display, weighted with fat leather water bottles. Curious, hopeful, Usha drifted around the edges of the crowd gathering by their blankets. People were more interested in knowing how the Plainsfolk had gotten passes into the city than in buying their wares, and so no one was satisfied, for the Plainsfolk said only that they had gone to the gate the night before and were admitted.
“We waited outside the wall until last night,” said the eldest, a small thin man with hands gnarled by age to seem like claws. “When the moon rose, a man came to tell us we could come in.” He looked at his kinfolk and all nodded gravely to confirm. “But we must not stay longer than today.” He shrugged. “Others came in. People with fruit and vegetables, and some men who didn’t look like shepherds were driving a flock of sheep.”
Dry, quiet laughter rustled among the Plainsfolk, and Usha guessed that the shepherds hadn’t made a skillful job of their work.
“Your market feeds a large city, Mistress.” The old man’s eyes grew dark, his expression sober. “Hungry people are angry people.” He patted his belly. “Full people don’t make so much trouble. If you look, you will see. One time or another, at night some people come in, they set up here and soldiers are watching all the time.” He tilted his head, just a little, in the direction of the river gate. The crop-haired knight leaned against the wall, picking his teeth with a knife. “The Lady Knight knows who comes in and who must leave again, and so in the morning, they go, and soldiers show them the way out to be sure no one stays behind.”
A chill skittered up Usha’s spine at the mention of Lady Mearah.
“Did you camp in the market all night?”
The old man nodded, and he said it wasn’t so bad; but the woman beside him muttered that she couldn’t wait to leave. “I do not like Haven anymore. It is a jail.”
Usha thanked them, purchased a small basket to show her appreciation, and went to the west side of the square where the hill dwarves Henge and Scur had rented enough space to throw up a three-sided booth to display their wares . Brooches, rings, necklaces, and a very few small frames into which miniature portraits could be fitted glittered in the sunlight. Here Usha was to meet Madoc.
“Mistress Usha,” said Henge, jerking his head in a nod. She no longer wondered at being recognized. Confined within its own walls, Haven had become less a city than a small town. The news that she was in Haven had long ago grown old. Henge motioned her out of the sun and made room for her in the shade of his awning. “Looking for something in particular?”
“No. I’m waiting for a friend.”
She’d have said more, but in the center of the table she saw a little easel of polished ebony, only the size of her two hands spread. It held a small picture she had painted several years ago.
“Silver Flight!” she said. “I sold that in Palanthas.”
To Elonaral, a Qualinesti elf who’d been long in exile and missed the river that ran by his childhood home. Usha had painted while the elf sat talking to her, thinking he was only there to arrange the commission. But he didn’t speak only of business—in fact, hardly of business. He spoke of his home and the river, and his childhood. When he had finished talking, Usha had finished painting, and magic had been done. The exile breathed a heartfelt prayer to a vanished god for the health of an artist who could sit in a studio in a city surrounded by stony desert and give him once again the rush of the river and the smell the freshness of wind over its silver, running waters. Looking at “Silver Flight” was like looking out a window into his beloved homeland.