The child who opened the oval door was so small and so wide-eyed that at first, despite herself, Sister Utta could nearly believe the Skimmers were indeed a different kind of creature entirely. She was still shaking badly, and not just because of her encounter with the street bullies. Everything was so strange here, the smells, the look of things, even the shapes of the doors and windows. Now she stood at the end of a swaying gangplank on the edge of the castle's largest lagoon, waiting to be admitted to a floating houseboat. How odd her life had become!
There were no Skimmers left in the Vuttish Isles of Utta Fornsdodir's childhood, but they still featured heavily in local stories, although those in the stories were far more magical than those who lived here beside the la¬goon. Still, they were strange-looking folk, and Utta realized she had spent almost twenty years in Southmarch Castle without ever really speaking to one of them, let alone knowing them as neighbors or friends.
"H-hello," she said to the child. "I've come to see Rafe."
The urchin looked back at her. Because the child had no eyebrows, hair pulled back (as was the habit for both male and female Skimmers) and a face still in the androgynous roundness of childhood, Utta had no idea whether it was a boy or a girl. At last the little one turned and scuttled back
inside, but left the door open. Utta could only guess thai was an invitation of sorts, so she stepped up onto the deck and into the boat's cabin.
The ceilings were so low she had to bend over. As she followed the child up the stairs she guessed that the cabin had at least three stories. It definitely seemed bigger inside than outside, full of nooks and narrow passages, with tiny stairwells scarcely as wide as her shoulders leading away both up and down from the first landing. Her guide was not the only child, either-she passed at least half a dozen others who looked back at her with no sign of either fear or favor. None of them wore much, and the youngest was naked although the day outside was cold even for Dimene and the houseboat did not seem to be heated. This smallest one was dragging a ragged doll by the ankle, a toy that had obviously once belonged to some very different child since it had long, golden tresses. None of the Skimmers Utta had ever seen were fair-haired, although their skins could be as pale as any of her own family back in the northern islands.
The first child led her up one more narrow staircase and then down an¬other before stepping out onto the deck on what she guessed must be the lagoon side of the houseboat. Utta could not help thinking they seemed to have reached it by the most roundabout way possible.
The young Skimmer man looked up from the rope he was splicing. The little one, apparently now relieved of responsibility, skipped back into the boat's ramshackle cabin. The youth looked up at her briefly, then returned his attention to the rope. "Who are you?" he asked in the throaty way of his folk.
"Utta-Sister Utta. I come with a message for you. Are you Rafe?"
He nodded, still watching the splice. "Sister Utta? I thought you smelled a bit unmanly, even for that place." He meant the Inner Keep, she guessed, but he said it as though he were talking about a prison or a forest full of unpleasant wild beasts. "Did someone tell you we'd be after any woman, no matter how old?"
l am old, she reminded herself. Surely I can't take offense. She looked at him; he carefully did not look back. He was as young or younger than any of the Skimmers who had come into the alley, and his arms seemed long even by the standards of his folk. He had slender, artful fingers, and a firm, good jaw.
"I was sent by the Duchess Merolanna of Southmarch," she said. "She was given your name as someone who might help us. We need a boatsman."
"Given?" He raised a hairless eyebrow. "Someone's been free. Given by whom?"
"Turley Longfingers."
He snorted. "Would be. He'd be happy to see me get myself killed on some drylander errand, wouldn't he? He knows Ena and I will be hanging the nets come springtime and she'll be old enough then he can't stop us." He stared at Sister Utta now with something like curiosity. "Does it pay well, still, this errand?"
"I think so. The duchess is no pinchpurse."
"Then tell me what she wants done and what she'll pay, Vuttswoman."
"How did you know?"
"That you're Vuttish?" He laughed. "You smell Vuttish, don't you? Still, you're better than most. Compared to a Syannese or Jellon-man, you're spring seafoam and pink thrift-blossoms. Jellon-folk eat no fish, lots of pig, don't they? You can smell one a mile distant. Now, if we've finished talking on how folks smell, let's speak of silver."
36
The False Woman
Suya wandered long in the wilderness and suffered many hardships until at
last she came to the dragon gate of the palace qf Xergal, and there fell
down at the verge of death. But Xergal the Earthlord coveted her beauty,
and instead of accepting her into his kingdom of the dead he forced her to
reign beside him as his queen. She never after spoke a word.
— from The Revelations of Nushash, Book One
THERE WERE SKULLS FOR SALE in all the marketplaces of Syan, some baked of honey-glazed bread, others painstakingly carved from pine boughs, and even a few shaped out of beautiful, polished marble for nobles and rich merchants to put on their tables or in their family shrines. Sprigs of white aspholdel were set out on tables to be bought and then pinned to a collar or a bodice. Kerneia was coming.
Briony realized with astonishment that she had been traveling with the players for a full month now, which was nearly as strange as what she found herself doing most days-namely, acting the part of the goddess Zoria, Perin's daughter. In truth, it was stranger than that: as a character in Finn's play, Briony was a girl pretending to be a boy pretending to be a goddess pretending to be a boy, an array of nested masks so confusing she could not concentrate on it long enough to waste much time thinking about it.
Makewell's Men had not yet performed the whole of Teodoros' rewrit¬ten play about Zoria's abduction, but they had worked up most of the main scenes and tried them out on the rural population of northern Syan
as the company moved from place to place. It had been strange enough for Briony to speak the goddess' words (or at least such words as Finn Teodoros had given her) in the muddy courtyard of some tiny village inn. Now the players had begun to follow the green course of the Esterian River and the towns were getting bigger as they traveled south. Audiences were growing, too.
"But there are so many words to remember," Briony complained early one evening to Teodoros as the others trooped back from their afternoon's sightseeing. "And I have memorized only half the play!"
"You are doing very well," the playwright assured her. "You are a cun¬ning child and would have done most professions proud, I'll warrant. Be¬sides, most of your speeches are in the parts of the play we have performed already, so there is not much left for you to learn."
"But still, it seems so much. What if I forget? I almost did the other night but Feival whispered the words to me."
"And he will again if you need him to. But you know the story, my girl-ah, I mean, my boy." He grinned. "If you forget, say something to the point. Hewney and Makewell and the rest are experienced mummers. They will come to your aid and put you back on the track."
It was the sort of thing old Steffens Nynor had always said to her about court protocols, and as with the castellan's instructions about the intricate details of the Smoke Ceremony she had been forced to learn for the Demia's Candle holidays, she suspected it wasn't going to be quite as easy as everyone was telling her.