His eyes flared as his hand tightened on hers. He whistled sharply; Tuvi looked up, then gestured to the escort to make ready.
'Have you seen all you wished to see from this pleasant vista?' Mai asked innocently.
He tugged gently, but firmly, on her hand. Hu! She knew that look and felt her own cheeks flush in response.
'Remind me never to negotiate with you, Mai. On this field, I am not your match.'
She laughed and allowed herself, this time, to be led.
Marit left the shore of the Salt Sea on the western edge of the Hundred and traveled east-southeast. Sardia, Farhal, upper Haldia fell away beneath and behind her as the moon waxed and waned in its full cycle of twenty-four days. The paths of air concealed her, so she rode low to the ground and measured the army's occupation. The land lay in a kind of enforced quiescence. In her time as a reeve she had seen children stand in such stillness, heads bowed, hoping to avoid a beating from angry parents by avoiding being noticed. Stillness never helped, not when the fault lay not with them but with those who had the strength and reach to abuse them. Along major roads or outside town gates rose cleansing posts, always under guard, a warning and threat to those who might consider rebellion.
If she stopped to free the hanged from the posts, she would reveal her presence; she knew the news would eventually reach one of the cloaks she was trying to avoid. If she did not stop…
The hells!
She stopped each time, and commanded the guards to release those of the condemned who weren't yet dead. She told the guards that cleansing was meant to refine the heart and that those who had been hanged from the poles were now cleansed, that you did not have to be dead to be cleansed.
Not as she was dead, her old life ripped away, lost forever.
Because she was thinking of Joss, she journeyed across the mouth of the vale of Iliyat to spend a night up on the Liya Pass, at Candle Rock, the last place she and he had embraced the Devourer. Twenty-one years ago.
Candle Rock was too stony to harbor trees; a few hardy tea willows grew out of deep cracks where water pooled in the rainy season, and spiny starflowers flourished on the steep northern slope. She came to earth on the summit of the rock and released Warning. The mare flew off toward Ammadit's Tit, but, like Jothinin and Kirit, Marit avoided the altars; her footsteps on the labyrinth would alert any cloak who, at the same time, stood on any other altar anywhere in the Hundred.
Walking down to the craggy overhang where she had stacked firewood when she'd come here over a month ago, she observed the land in the drowsy light of a cloudless late afternoon. The Liya Pass ran from the northern slopes of the vale of Iliyat over the Liya Hills into Herelia. The road ran below the cliff face, empty of traffic. As she crossed from sunlight to shade under the
overhang, she stopped short at the sight of stacked firewood and kindling braced between unsplit logs. Someone had come here after her last visit weeks ago.
A hatchet, a wedge, and a sledgehammer had been laid across logs. The old axe she had used was gone. The oldest wood had been moved to the front and freshly cut wood stacked behind in alternating pairs exactly the way Joss had always stacked wood. Outside, a trail of dust led to bands of starflower where the remains of wood too punky to burn had been dumped. Down in the hollow where reeves jessed their eagles to one of several rings hammered into the rock, the dirt had been recently raked.
She drew her sword. She listened, but heard only the pee-wit of a fly catcher and the whine of the wind. When she had stopped here weeks ago, the patrol station had looked abandoned. Why had reeves abandoned it, and why had they come back? What in the hells were the reeves doing these days? She was twenty years out of touch.
It was getting dark. Wind died as the sun set.
She sheathed her sword and toiled back up the slope to the overhang. After collecting an armload of wood and kindling, she trudged to the summit. Joss was not the only person in the Hundred who stacked wood in that manner. It was just that she was thinking of him. She grinned, remembering how they'd kissed by this very fire pit. The dry season was creeping in on the last kiss of the Whisper Rains, and though it wasn't yet cold, she appreciated the fire as a friendly companion. It was funny how after only a few days in company with Jothinin and Kirit she sorely missed them, the envoy more than the girl, for there was no denying that the girl was not quite right. It wasn't just the way she looked, although that was disturbing enough. It was the way she acted.
As her gaze skipped around the circle of white rocks, she noticed a crevice gaping within the curving wall of stones opposite her, a pair of flat stones stacked within.
She grabbed a stick out of the fire and beat it on the ground until the flames died. With this tool, she poked into the crevice to make sure no creeping stingers.dwelt within. Then she reached in for the stones. The one on top had been painted white on one side and black on the other; the white had caught her eye. The stone beneath was also painted in white and black, but on one side as a Sickle or Embers Moon and on the other as a Lamp or Basket Moon, just past the half. Reeves often left each other stones
painted with the phases of the moon as a way to arrange meetings. So she and Joss had communicated. At Candle Rock, more than once.
When the pulse races, the world can grow hazy. At length her breathing steadied, and she smiled wryly. She had not yet let him go. No shame in that. Folk would hold on in their memory to what they had lost. In time, the attachment would fade, as attachments did. Even if twenty-one years had passed in the world, to her the wound was still fresh. Anyway, Joss was in the south, marshal over Argent Hall. Every reeve left such messages.
She considered the clear sky, lighter in the west and purpling in the east as the first bright stars penetrated the veil of daylight. The waxing Sickle Moon lingered in the west. The moon would lamp to the full in about ten days.
Was it time to talk to the reeves? Or was it only Joss she trusted? All the events that had transpired before her awakening, while she lingered on the threshold between death and life, were not even dreams to her; they were a hall devoid of light, a place in which she was blind.
Aui! She and Jothinin and Kirit were not alone in fighting the cloaks. They had to cast a net of alliance, because they would assuredly never succeed alone. She found another flat stone and stacked it beneath the others, leaving the white surface facing up: Meet at the full moon.
18
The prison in which he was being held, Shai reflected, had the pleasing symmetry of a well-tended garden. It was walled on all sides, and the cells were tiny barracks rooms, each with a barred and locked door that swung on hinges rather than sliding, and on the opposite side up very high there was a long slit of a window, too narrow to squeeze through. His window overlooked another garden within whose greenery folk sometimes walked, conversing or arguing; occasionally, he overheard the sounds of a man and woman having sex. He preferred the arguments, because the other forced him to remember that time with Eridit. Yet memory — a thorough consideration of the events that had led him here — helped him endure.
He had a bucket to eliminate in, porridge to eat, and watered-down cordial to drink. Day after day he had nothing to do except eat and sleep, so he trained his body in a fierce discipline, running in place until a trance gripped him, grasping the rim of the window and pulling his weight up and easing it down over and over until sweat made his fingers slick. Once a day at dusk he — and only he of all the prisoners — was allowed into the courtyard with its raked gravel and pots of blue and white flowers whose fragrance was the greatest pleasure of his day. There, he was allowed to bathe by pouring buckets of cold water over his head while the guards made jokes and the hirelings who hauled water from some cistern elsewhere said nothing.