The man behind the stall looked up in time to see the stick come whistling through the air and land with a sharp crack on his forehead. “A child!” the Lady Marche said fiercely, landing another blow above the man’s ear. “Not yet seven! For shame!”
The stick flew again, hitting across the man’s wide back as he crouched behind the stall.
“Naaaww!” howled the man, covering his head with his hands.
“Fer God’s sake, I didn’t chuck the damn thing at the kid!”
“Shame enough that it should be done in front of you.” The stick’s point jabbed into the pavement.
A snickering laugh sounded from a few feet away. A boy, three or four years older than Daenek, stepped into the path from around the corner of another stall. A grin seemed to almost divide his broad, pale face in two. Another of the rotten fruits was cradled in his hand.
The older boy stared boldly at the woman as she strode towards him, his confident expression not changing until a second before the stick whipped across his shoulders. He shrieked, his face rushing full with blood as he fell and scrabbled on the pavement.
“Think better,” said the Lady Marche, giving a perfunctory rap for the stick on the bobbing head, “of flinging refuse at anyone, let alone a ward of the throne.”
“A traitor’s son,” muttered a voice from the crowd of villagers that had gathered from all over the marketplace.
She turned around, sweeping her cold gaze across the sullen faces. “A protectee of—” Her voice hesitated, then continued at a lower pitch. “—of the Regent.”
A few of the faces in the crowd bent into smirks, as if a small triumph had been acknowledged.
“And a child,” she said, her voice sharp with authority, “like other children. Pity those who could fear one!”
“Yahhh,” screamed the older boy, now crouching on his knees.
His red face was wet with tears. “You better watch out! My father’ll getcha—he’s the subthane, and he’ll do it, too! Just you wait!”
“Child,” said the woman, extending the tip of her stick towards him—it transfixed his glassy eyes, “you may have inherited your repellent nature from your father, but his is at least somewhat tempered with age. He knows what is expected of him, and better, what would happen to him should he forget.”
She looked over her shoulder at the crowd behind her, including them in her speech. “There is a court in the capital, and this child—” The stick swung to indicate Daenek. “—is under its protection.” She turned to Daenek and spoke quietly to him: “Let’s to home.”
The crowd parted, backing up against the stalls as the lady and the boy passed through them. The faces of the crowd were still set in their expressions of dull resentment and repressed anger. One of them found his voice, a tall youth dressed in the same black fabric as the boy who had thrown the fruit, but with a short, rust-pitted knife tucked in his belt. “Ah, Someday,” the youth whispered as they went by him, “his protection ends. And then he’ll get it like what his father did.”
The Lady Marche either did not hear or chose to ignore him.
She and Daenek reached the other side of the marketplace, the boy half-running to keep up with her quick strides. They passed quickly through the squat village buildings and out to the open spaces beyond.
Chapter II
Where the hills above the village levelled off, the narrow trail ran straight as a knife edge pressed into the ground. The fields were covered thick with weeds, taller than Daenek could reach, and dried stiff and golden by the summer sun. The stalks rustled in the wind and bent over the path.
Daenek stopped and craned his neck to watch a field bat flap upwards, its belly yellow with pollen, like a fur sun. Then, cradling the net bag stuffed with the purchases from the marketplace, he hurried to catch up with the Lady Marche.
“Fools,” he heard her say as he came up behind her on the path. With each step she planted the silver-headed stick firmly into the dirt. “A fortunate breed whose crime is its own punishment.”
The words crime and punishment intrigued him. “Lady,” he spoke up—it was what he had always called her, could ever remember having called her. Not mother, although he knew that was what she was to him. “Is that part of the Descending Law? That there’s fools?”
She stopped and looked for several seconds into the boy’s face, then sighed and went on, her steps a little slower. “No,” she said.
Daenek could barely hear her words. “No law other than what the tragedies have.” She said nothing more all the way home, and Daenek knew better than to ask questions that would go unanswered.
The Lady Marche did not turn as Daenek lagged a few paces behind, then plunged into the thick growth at one side of the path. The yellow stalks brushed over his head as he ran among them, carrying the net bag high up against his chest. A group of insects flew up in front of him, then re-united and drifted off in a lopsided O.
The field ended at the edge of a cliff overlooking the quarry, an enormous rough-sided pit chewed into the center of the hill range, a concave world all to itself. It was quiet now, no noise or motion perceptible, as Daenek looked down into its grey depths.
The quarriers had all gone into the village on their day off, to spend their wages on the street women or, with the old ones, for a few sweets to add to their bland dormitory meals. The unpainted doors of the metal-roofed buildings at one side of the quarry swung open, revealing their unlit spaces inside.
Daenek’s gaze moved away from the floor of the quarry, with its clutter of rubble and machinery, all covered with the veined stone’s dust. He looked up the sides of the chasm until he finally spotted the figure for which he had been loooking. Squatting on the far edge of the quarry, seeming more like a boulder himself than anything human, was the hulking figure of the man the Lady Marche had driven away from the house. That had happened several weeks ago, but Daenek had known for a long time before that there was someone that hid in the fields and watched them and the house—he had even caught sight of the bulky, shambling figure, squatting or moving furtively among the weeds.
But then the Lady Marche had found the watcher, sitting on his haunches at the edge of the cleared space around the house.
Daenek had watched and listened as she had stood in front of the figure, his wide face turned with an odd, mute dignity up to hers as he sat on the ground. She pointed with her stick and spoke to the watcher in a language different from what she spoke with Daenek and the villagers. The words flowed, a sternly graceful song. Her voice lost the stiff intonation with which she had always spoken before. After a few moments of her talking—at the end the strange words became gentle, a blessing—the watcher nodded slowly, his eyes cast to the dust in front of him. Then he stood up and pushed his way through the field in the direction her stick had pointed, leaving a trampled path that slowly healed as the weeds sprang back.
Over two months, and the Lady Marche had never explained who the man was or what she had said to him. Or what the language was. The buskers had their own tongue, Daenek knew, that they used only among themselves. And so did the mertzers, when they came every other year. But this had been neither of these.