'We weren't sure what happened to the other cloaks. But we're the ones responsible. For we — Jothinin and Kirit and I — told him what he needed to know to kill Guardians.'
Kirit said, 'But the bad ones are gone now. Isn't it better they're gone?'
'So there we lie, between the sea and the shore, just like in the tale.' Marit turned to Joss. 'What if it is better that they're gone? It seems the Hundred is settling into peace again. Folk can labor and live without the fear they had before. Because the outlander rules with his army. They rule the roads, the gates, the assizes, the markets. You see where I'm going with this. He's not a cruel master. Life prospers. The crops are good. The roads are safe. Children sleep in peace. But we daren't get close. His soldiers and his reeves are hunting us. Hunting Guardians. Now that he knows he can kill us, he means to rid the Hundred of Guardians. And what if he's right to do so? Who among us is free from the threat of corruption?'
Jothinin scratched his head. Kirit stared into the gulf of air, as if the night held answers.
'No one is,' Joss answered. 'Not us. Not Anji. Not any man or woman. What are you all looking at me like that for? It wasn't that cursed wise a comment.'
Kirit's eyes had gone wide and she shrank down as if to curl herself into a ball. Jothinin shifted to place himself between the girl and the fire. Marit rose as the ground made an odd shushing sound behind him and a light tremor vibrated up through the stone into Joss's body. The horses woke, and one — two — three they spread their fine bright wings and galloped off the cursed ledge and into the night.
'Why are there only three horses, if there are four of us?' he asked.
'Aui! That was the other shock, the one we've been waiting to drop on you. Just stand slowly, and turn around.'
He obeyed her, for he felt an odd monstrous presence looming behind him like the charged breath of a late season storm prickling his neck.
'No one truly understands the bond between eagle and reeve, what invisible leash jesses one to the other. We guessed you must have died because your eagle died. For I am cursed sure living eagles don't fly at night and seek out Guardian altars, not as this one does.'
The old raptor lowered his head to Joss's level, an uncanny glamour in those huge depthless eyes.
'How can this be?' Joss asked, as Scar offered a series of chirps in greeting.
'In a way,' said Marit, 'you died together.'
Joss was left to wonder if it was he, or Scar, who had died fighting for justice. Or maybe after all it was the two of them in partnership, just as it had always been.
When a pregnant widow and her household move into town, the event is certain to be talked about for days. When the widow is young and beautiful, the gossip will spread across weeks. And when she opens her own emporium that competes successfully with local warehouses and merchants who have lived for generations in the bustling port of Salya on Messalia Bay, then it is likely that rumor will mildew into the kind of antipathy that flourishes for months in shadowed corners and uncleaned cupboards.
And yet, stage by stage, week by week, month by month, it did not.
Mistress Karanna, the head of Seven Cups clan, was won over when the young widow advised her on the quality of silks and which hues were more appropriate to her particular complexion and personality. Master Dessottin of Merling's Gift clan discovered that the widow's married sister — not that anyone believed they were actually sisters — not only shared his obsessive interest in plant lore but actually knew how to play an obscure game of counters called 'emperors and warriors' which he had long studied in equally obscure texts first encountered when he'd served his apprenticeship as a clerk of Sapanasu; that she beat him more often than not did not lessen his enjoyment of the matches. His influence brought round several local clans, one of which was doubly charmed when the married sister specifically requested a formidable aunt to attend the birth of her daughter because of the aunt's long experience in midwifery.
The farmers and artisans and laborers appreciated the widow's fair prices and willingness to dicker at length and to trade in kind, if that was all they had to offer. A few hired daughters and sons into her household, where they were fairly treated and well paid, although there were a few complaints about the widow's clerk, who had such an exacting eye for detail that he spared little patience for people who made even trivial mistakes.
The local secretive Ri Amarah household, after substantial initial resistance, made some manner of deal regarding import of certain hard-to-acquire precious oils. And when the Four Petals clan began to simmer with resentment, seeing their trade in oil cut into, the widow befriended their unmarriagable eldest daughter and within two months had helped them open up a promising negotiation with an upcountry sheepherder's clan that included the promise of an expansion of the wool trade.
Even the horribly crippled and notoriously solitary marshal of Bronze Hall began to fly in once a week with certain of his senior reeves to take tea on her spacious porch right out in public view, the only place in her compound she ever met with men.
So when after the course of seven moons the widow gave birth
to a healthy baby girl, only two important holdouts remained: a branch of the White Leaf clan out of Arash, who were in any case only third-generation local with therefore the usual insecurities of newcomers, and the hieros at the local temple of Ushara.
The White Leaf clan was dispatched with a ruthlessness that had the town laughing for days: she simply asked the old widower, whose temper was infamous, to stand with Bronze Hall's marshal and a senior reeve named Peddonon as one of the uncles over the delicate newborn, whom the cranky old man certainly must hold. Wasn't she precious and darling even with her unmistakably out-lander features? Who could say no to such a request, coming as it did from a young woman so very lovely who no longer, alas, possessed the extended family with which to comfort and influence the baby?
Three months passed. She made a thanksgiving offering at each of the temples, and laid flowers on Hasibal's stone together with prayers no one had heard before. But she did not make the traditional procession to the Devourer's temple. She never went there at all. The young man who assisted the head gardener got drunk one night and told a friend, who told a friend, who told her cousins, that he had once overheard the mistress say there were spies in the temple keeping an eye on her, which was a very odd sort of thing to say even for a beautiful and mysterious young widow with an air of tragedy cloaking her like first-quality silk.
Or so folk whispered, until the day the Qin soldiers rode into town.
It was clear she had been warned ahead of time, likely by the Bronze Hall reeves, because she appeared midmorning on her porch dressed in a rainwater-blue taloos of such exceptional silk that a girl passing by on the street actually went running to Seven Cups clan to fetch Mistress Karanna so she could see it for herself.
But Karanna no more dared approach than did anyone else when a cohort of black-clad soldiers — the very black wolves who, it was said, ruthlessly hunted down criminals and kept the peace in the Hundred, not that they'd seen any such soldiers down here in the isolated and peaceful backwater of Mar — rode into town, their horses filling the streets and their blank expressions frightening children. About a third of them were outlanders, solemn as herons, so easy astride their horses they might have been born in the saddle.