Reeves could accept tithes, receiving from those they aided the necessities that allowed them to live. She grabbed what she wanted: a feed bag, a pair of brushes one stiff and one softer, a hoof pick, a lead line, rope, and a bundle of tough rags.
She paused with the goods stuffed into the feed bag. What if a reeve became greedy? It happened; they took more than they needed, or they taught themselves to take what they wanted and told themselves they deserved it all. 'He passed under the gate into the shadow.' In every one of the Ten Tales of Founding, more than one man and woman crossed the Shadow Gate to the other side, where corruption takes hold in the heart. With each step, the path got smoother as you told yourself why it was acceptable to walk farther down this road. The tales of the Hundred told the story of humankind and the other children born to the Four Mothers. It was natural that some succumbed to the shadows.
Maybe it was unnatural that any did not.
'Where are the reeves who should be aiding you? Isn't Gold Hall patrolling? Isn't there a temple of Uu nearby that can send an envoy to Clan Hall in Toskala to ask for help?'
He laughed recklessly. 'The reeves can't help us. You can walk out of our town and never come back, but we have to live here. No matter what you said to him, they will come back. It's us will have to face them. Not you.'
'That merchant,' she said. 'You said he was from Olossi. Did he give you a name?'
'Quartered flowers were his house mark. Is that enough? Will you go?'
Marit followed the sniveling girl into the narrow living quarters, tromping through in her outdoor sandals like the rudest kind of intruder. There was a single table and two cupboards, everything put away neatly except for a single ceramic cup filled with cooling tea set on the table. The floor was swept clean, and this homely indication of a woman doing her best to stem the shadows by keeping her home tidy made Marit hurt as if she'd been punched under the ribs.
She shoved open the back screen and clattered onto the porch
and down three steps to the courtyard. The damp of night rains still darkened the ground. The gate that led to the alley was tied shut. She fumbled with the knot, her hands clumsy.
Where were they hiding the fugitive sister?
She paused to scan the yard: the squat house with scant room above the eaves; the small grain storage up on stilts; a pit house with the sticky scent of incense drifting; the henhouse, an empty byre, and the surrounding wall too high to see over. She clambered up the ladder to the grain storage and tugged out the smallest sack of rice, something easy to carry over a shoulder.
Stillness was settling over the village as folk assessed the damage and checked their injuries after the abrupt departure of the soldiers. There, after all, she heard the shallow breathing of a woman trying to make no sound: the sister was hidden in the henhouse, scrunched under the nesting shelf and by now smeared with fresh droppings and the filthy wood shavings strewn on the floor to absorb the waste.
Mark took a step toward the henhouse, mouth open to speak. But she said nothing.
She hadn't the means to support a traveling companion. It was difficult enough dealing with the cursed horse. A hundred other reasons aside told her she had to move on alone. This wasn't the time to try to save a woman here and a man there, like trying to hold your hands over one beautiful flower in a driving hailstorm while the rest disintegrate under the onslaught.
'The hells,' she muttered. She said, in a low voice meant to carry no farther than the courtyard walls, 'I'm a traveler, and I'm headed out of town. The soldiers have gone for now, but they'll be back. If you want, you can travel with me. I offer you such protection as I can, and insofar as I am capable, I will get you to a place of safety. If there is such a place any longer. I can't make you come, and I can't promise you much. There it is. Take it or leave it.'
Her offer was met with a resounding silence. Thank the gods.
She turned back to the gate and fumbled with the knot, sure she had tugged on it the wrong way and caused what ought to have been an easy slipknot to jam into itself. She'd never been good with rope, not like Joss, grown up on the sea's shore where every child learned a hundred cunning knots…
'I'll go.' The voice was soft and female, and not a bit tentative.
Marit turned. A woman crouched in the low entrance to the henhouse. Her hair had matted into clumps now streaked with white droppings; her face was patched with muck and dotted where wood shavings had stuck to the damp. The color of her cheap hemp taloos was concealed beneath a coat of red clay and paler mud, sprinkled with more droppings.
The woman looked right at her.
An assault of images: a weeping girl with hands bound; the ruins of a village smolder as the line of captives staggers past, but they're too exhausted to do more than cover their noses to ease the smell as the soldiers drive them on; an unexpected moment of laughter when eight of the captives, wary comrades now, splash in a pond; stumbling in mud while somewhere out of sight a baby cries and cries. She had lied about her name, because then all the things that happened to her were really happening to someone else, someone she was not.
Marit said, 'Your name is Sediya.'
Wearily, the woman said, 'You're one of them, one of the cloaks who pin us. The soldiers are their slaves, and we're slaves to the soldiers. Now I guess I'm your slave.'
'I'm not one of them,' said Marit fiercely.
'You're not going to kill me? Punish me? Take me back to Walshow?'
'The hells! Did you walk all the way here from Walshow?'
'Not really. I was swapped out to a scouting patrol, to service them while they were ranging, cook their rice, pound their nai. We walked for weeks and weeks, and I was too scared to run away. Then I got to seeing places I recognized, and that's when I ran. They'll kill me when they catch me. That's the promise they make you.'
Marit swiped a hand through her grubby hair, and cursed, the biting words taking the edge off her anger.
The woman had the numb gaze of a person who has learned to gauge how close she is to the next time she'll be hurt.
'Stupidest cursed thing I've ever done,' muttered Marit as she turned back to the gate, but she thought of the Devouring girl in the temple up on the Liya Pass and she couldn't take back what she'd offered.
'Here, let me.' Sediya had a funny way of walking, favoring both legs, trying to hide that each step pained her. But she had clever hands; the knot fell away.
The door to the house scraped open. The shopkeeper stuck his head out, saw his sister, and blanched. 'Sedi! If they see you, if they know I sheltered you – you've already brought trouble down on us. Can't you think of anyone but yourself?'
Sediya wrenched open the gate. 'I'm leaving.' She bent her head just as Mark caught a flash of dull fear. 'May the gods allow that you fare well, Brother.'
Marit took a step out into the alley and glanced up and down the narrow lane. 'No one's moving. Let's go.'
4
When Sediya saw Warning, she sank to her knees and wept.
'The hells!' Marit knelt beside her. 'What's wrong?'
The tears ended as abruptly as they had begun. Sediya wiped her cheeks with the back of a grubby hand.
'You're one of them after all,' she said without looking Marit in the eye. 'Are you going to kill me now, or after you've taken me back to Walshow, in the ceremony of cleansing?'
'I'm not one of them!'
She indicated the mare. 'You ride one of the holy ones, the winged horses.'
'These others do, too?'
'Yes.'
'How many are there?'
Sediya glanced sidelong at her, then away, but Marit caught that awful need to believe that all might be well when after everything the woman had seen really it was a stupid thing to hold to but she couldn't help it. She couldn't help wanting there to be hope.
'I have seen four with my own eyes – twilight, sun, blood, and the one who wears green – but there's another they speak of, the one even the rest fear. They come and go out of camp. The one wearing the Sun Cloak is the worst, that was the rumor among us slaves. I