Since hearing of the pestilence at the Swift Water Inn just after the tournament, she had thought about it in odd moments, and had sought out any who might bear tidings from that part of the land. Word from so far off was hard to come by, but occasionally she found merchants, many of them Qirsi, who had journeyed from the West. She generally avoided white-hairs-her family had fought against the Fal'Borna for centuries and though she had never so much as had an argument with one, she hated them for what they had done to Deraqor. But she would have spoken with the a'laq of her beloved city if only he could tell her something about what was happening on the plain.
From what little she did learn, it seemed that the pestilence had struck most fiercely at the Y'Qatt settlements near the Companion Lakes, but that it had spread westward as the Harvest went on. She had not heard of it striking any villages to the east of the Silverwater.
On this morning, she had circled twice through the marketplace looking for merchants to question and was debating whether to walk around a third time or return home to snatch a few hours of sleep before beginning her next patrol. She had nearly made up her mind to make her way to bed when she saw another merchant steering his cart into the market. He was an older man, Eandi, with brown hair that was thinning and turning silver. His cart looked to be nearly as old as he, and his horse could hardly be called young. His clothes fit him well, but they were plain and threadbare. In short, there was little about him that would have caught her attention on any other day. But she noticed immediately that he carried animal skins prominently displayed on his cart. Rilda skins.
She watched as he selected a spot to stop his cart-a narrow space between two other Eandi merchants, both Qosantians by the look of them. The newcomer looked to be one of the Wolf People as well. He had the fair complexion of the lowlanders, and his horse, a small roan, also put her in mind of the mounts she had seen from Qosantia. As he began to set out his wares, Tirnya approached him.
One of the other merchants must have said something to him, because he turned quickly and smiled.
"What can I do for you, Captain?" he asked, his accent subtle, but definitely Qosantian. "A sword perhaps?" He began to search through those items that he had yet to remove from his cart. "I've shillads, Aelean steel, bodkins from Tordjanne." He glanced back at her, a conspiratorial grin on his angular face. "I even have a few daggers forged by the T'Saan. Very rare in these parts."
She shook her head, wondering if there were really Eandi soldiers who would deign to carry a white-hair blade into battle.
"No," she said. "I'm not looking for a new blade."
"Of course. Jewelry then. A woman as lovely as you-surely there's more to your life than training and battles."
"No, I'm not interested in jewelry either." Tirnya raised a hand to keep him from offering more goods. "I need information."
His face fell, and he went back to sorting his goods, setting some out on his blankets, leaving other items in the cart.
"I have precious little of that," he said, his voice flat.
Tirnya grinned at how quickly he'd gone from charming to sullen. "You've been in Fal'Borna land."
"What makes you say so?"
"The rilda skins. Only the Fal'Borna can tan so well."
The man straightened, smiling again, perhaps sensing that he might make a sale after all. "They are fine ones, aren't they? Four sovereigns apiece, and that will also buy all that I know about the Fal'Borna, and anything else you might ask."
"Four is high, for the skin and the information." She scanned his blankets quickly, her gaze coming to rest on a curved knife with a polished stone handle. She pointed at it. "But I'll give you two for that. And some answers."
He shook his head and frowned as if the tale he was about to tell her was too sad to bear. "Would that I could sell it for so little, Captain," he said. "But that's as fine a blade as you'll find in Qosantia, and what's more, it may well be the last of its kind. The man who made it, a smith named Clarton, died this past Growing. Tragic tale, actually. His poor wife and children-"
"I haven't time for tales, tragic or otherwise," Tirnya said. "And I won't pay more than two. Now, I can ask you questions with your blade on my belt and my gold in your pocket, or I can simply ask. One way or another, I intend to have answers. It's your choice."
"He had children, you know," the merchant said, looking wounded. "Now they're orphans."
She raised an eyebrow. "His widow died, too?"
"What?"
"The children are only orphans if both parents have died."
He opened his mouth, then faltered, his brow creasing.
"You might want to work on your story a bit more," she said. She heard one of the other merchants snickering.
He stared at her another moment, his mouth twisting sourly. Then he picked up the blade, handed it to her, and held out his other palm for her coins. "What do you want to know?"
She didn't give him the money right away. "Where were you before you came to Stelpana?"
"The plain, just as you said."
"And you were trading with the Fal'Borna?"
The man nodded. "I was after skins: rilda, wildcat, wolf. Didn't find much by way of cats or wolves, but they had plenty of rilda. I also found some wooden bowls and a good deal of the grain the white-hairs grow. It fetches a fair price as you head farther east. I had some blankets, beaver and stoat pelts, baskets, even a bit of Tordjanni wine. I did well, considering."
She narrowed her eyes. "Considering what?"
The merchant shrugged. "Considering that I was trading with the Fal'Borna. They're a difficult people."
That much Tirnya knew. "Was there any talk of the pestilence in the septs you visited?"
"There's always talk of the pestilence, Captain, particularly when it's been found in other places, like the Y'Qatt villages." He frowned. "But now that you mention it, I did hear, a few days after stopping in one sept, that it had been destroyed by disease of some sort. They weren't calling it the pestilence. It was some white-hair plague that they talked about."
"Who talked about it?"
He shrugged. "Other merchants. They say it strikes at their magic. It makes them sick-the white-hairs, that is-and then it attacks their magic, so that they destroy themselves and their homes." The man shook his head. "Bad business, if you ask me. I'm no friend of their kind, mind you, but I'm a merchant before anything else, and I'm telling you that if we can't trade with the Qirsi, there's going to be a good deal less gold in the sovereignties."
"You can't expect it to kill all the Qirsi," Tirnya said, thinking that the man must have been listening to some wild tales.
"No, I don't. But I know for a fact that the Fal'Borna are starting to turn merchants away. They think that the plague is being spread by Eandi traders."
Tirnya shivered in spite of herself, as if a frigid finger had traced the length of her spine. "Why would they think that?"
"Because none of us even gets sick, and all of them die."
"None of us…?"
"By all rights, I should be dead, Captain," the merchant said. "I was there just before the outbreak started. I heard things about it-" He broke off, swallowing and looking away briefly. "I should be dead," he finally said again.
Tirnya wasn't certain what to say. In the end, she merely nodded once, placed the coins in the man's hand, and walked away.
She didn't have long before her next patrol was to begin, but still she returned to her home and lay down for a time, hoping to sleep just a bit. She barely even closed her eyes. It didn't help that Zira, her mother, made no effort to lower her voice when speaking to Tirnya's brothers. But Tirnya doubted that she would have slept in any case. She spent the entire time turning over in her head again and again all that the merchant had told her. As when she first heard of this outbreak of the pestilence, she couldn't say why it occupied her mind so. There seemed to be little danger of the disease coming to Qalsyn; the Companion Lakes, where it seemed to have begun, were far from here, and the disease was spreading westward, away from Stelpana. She wasn't afraid, either for herself or for her people.