'Are you the outlander who has come to save us, verea?' asked the girl, eyes wide.
'Mai!'
The women melted back to make a path for Anji to stride into the garden. His gaze made quick work of its narrow confines, pinning each point where an assassin might hide and determining that they were not, at the moment, at risk.
'I didn't see you come in-!'
'The council raised the message flag,' he said. 'It seems you impressed them favorably enough that they agreed to meet with me and Commander Joss.' His expression was so flat she understood he was very very pleased, and she could not restrain a smile of triumph, not for herself precisely, but for their cause. Or perhaps it was just for her personal victory, winning them over. She hardly knew.
'Calon and Jodoni lost track of you,' he added with a frown as he studied her.
'I came here to pray. Then I was talking to these women.'
He measured the company, acknowledging the older women with nods and ignoring the young ones, and indicated that Mai should accompany him. 'We'll go back.'
'Do you plan to fight them what have driven so many refugees out of Haldia and Istria, with such horrible tales they have to tell?' asked the old woman while the younger girls hid their eyes and one of the women with a fresh tattoo wept silently as at remembered pain.
'I plan to fight,' said Anji.
His words made Mai's chest tight with despair, and fear, and pride. She followed him out and the others trailed after them, all but the youngest girl. Only when they entered the council square where Joss was already speaking passionately to the gathered council members and more folk besides coming up from the city to hear did she remember she had forgotten the cup.
25
The closer Shai and his escort of a dozen wildings got to the edge of the deep Wild, the fewer trails offered passage. As he hacked at a vine wrapped stubbornly around his ankle, he heard frantic
voices. A scream pierced the forest's veil. Shoving past a curtain of leaves, he stumbled down a wet-season gully sucked dry at this time of year. The gully offered a trail of a kind, and he splashed through isolated puddles, slipping twice along its slick pavement of damp leaves. Brah and Sis kept pace in the branches. The adult wildings had vanished.
The forest wasn't silent, which just made tracking more confounding: insects buzzed; birds chirred sweetly or squawked raucously; a larger animal cracked dead branches as it fled. He could never tell where the noises were coming from. Where the gully turned in a sudden bend, a bush had thrown tendrils across the depression. Shoving through this he slammed into the back of a man kneeling on the ground beside a child sprawled flat on its back.
The man toppled sideways with a yelp. Folk, unarmed and lugging only sacks and baskets and small children, huddled in a hollow sticky with the muddy remains of a wet season pond. At Shai's entrance, they shrieked. The surrounding canopy bent to dancing although the wind had not risen.
Shai leaped up, waving his arms. 'Don't kill them! If you honor me, let me first speak to them!'
The man sobbed as his companions stared in horror at a sight behind Shai. He turned. The child had begun to leak blood from its nose and mouth; it twitched weakly, sucking for air, then was still.
Mist rose from the body. A shape congealed, casting around.
'What happened? That hurt!' Its cloudy gaze fixed on Shai. 'You're an outlander! I never saw an outlander before!' He was sure the lad smiled as at a good joke, but abruptly its attention focused past him. 'I see there — so bright!' the ghost cried, and the boy fled through Spirit Gate, folding away into nothingness.
The trees ceased their movements. Had the wildings seen the ghost as well?
'Is that your child?' Shai asked.
'Neh.' The man rubbed his forehead as if to wipe away blood or anger or dirt or grief. He had an ugly wound above his right ear, and his left arm ended in a stump wrapped with the bloody remains of a jacket. 'He went by the name of Gelli. He was one of the children that came with us out of Copper Hall, but he had no family left. Said they were dead or scattered. No trouble at all, that boy. Even tempered and lively. He kept us smiling with his lokes and antics.'
'Surely you know it is forbidden to cross the boundary of the Wild.' He crouched beside the body. The boy's right hand bore a pair of purpling puncture wounds. 'Snakebit!'
'It was dangling in those vines when the boy pushed around,' said the man helplessly. 'Impossible to see, it being green like the vines. How was anyone to know a small creature could be so deadly?'
No wonder the darts of the wildings were so effective.
'Did you not see the poles with skulls set atop them?' Shai demanded.
They stared at him with the speechless intensity of folk who are hungry, thirsty, lost, and without hope except maybe for that given them by the antics of a lively boy now lying dead at their feet. Most were young, like the prisoners Shai had been held captive with, although these hadn't the battered, bruised, stunned look of the abused. These were merely starving, frightened, helpless refugees, swatting listlessly at bugs come to feast on warm bodies.
Finally, a very young and quite pretty woman stepped forward, clutching the hand of a boy no older than the lad who had died. She eyed him as warily as if he might be a snake about to strike. Not one seemed aware that they were surrounded by wildings.
'We're all that remains from those fled from Copper Hall,' the girl said.
'Copper Hall? In Nessumara? Has the city been attacked?'
'That I don't know. I meant the other Copper Hall, the main reeve hall north of the city on the road to Haya. A cohort come and burnt the hall.'
'Copper Hall is burned?' The simple words were so sharp a shock that he felt strangled.
Their tale spilled like rain: a cruel army rousting folk from their villages; farmers and villagers fleeing into the countryside and some coming to rest at the reeve hall where old Marshal Masar offered a haven. Then the reeve hall had been attacked and burned, eagles killed, the reeves fled. The old marshal had left behind his own grandchildren.
'He had to do it,' said the young woman gravely as she blinked away tears, 'because they could only carry one extra person each. If they didn't save the fawkners, who would care for the eagles? If there's none to care for the eagles, and the reeves die, then who will protect us?'
'The reeves haven't done a cursed lot of good protecting us, have they?' objected the man, waving a hand to clear away a cloud of gnats. 'They saved themselves and left us behind to die.'
'There was nothing else they could do!' cried the girl indignantly.
So many spoke Shai could not make out the speakers among the angry group.
'They could have fought against that cursed army, eh? Instead of flying up there out of reach and watching as the rest of us got hit over and over and over again!'
Houses burned. Captives taken. Men killed. Storehouses looted. Children and elderly dead of sickness and starvation.
'How are you come into the Wild?' he asked.
The girl took up the tale. 'A sergeant discovered us hiding in the wine cellar and convinced the cohort captain to let us go. But after we traveled for some days, other soldiers harassed and chased us. They drove us in here. They killed them what would not go past the poles. We had no choice but to die at their hands, or hope to escape. We thought maybe we could walk a ways through the Wild and leave with none the wiser.'
'That one sergeant,' added the man with a weary kind of rage, 'she did more than the cursed reeves ever did by hauling you children out of your hiding place and getting you out alive instead of giving you over to be slaughtered. Those poor cursed hirelings and assistants who got left behind were killed outright. Folk I knew well, every one of them. Think of it! It was that one sergeant, enemy as she was, who saved us. Not the gods-rotted reeves.'