Feet scraped along plank flooring. She overheard their voices because her hearing was so uncannily keen.
'Why aren't you at your post, Tarbi? You'll be flogged.'
'Keep your voice down. There's come one of the impostors we were warned to watch for.'
'There's never been such a sighting. Sky-blue, mist-silver, earth-clay, bone-white. Those are the ones we're to look for, neh?'
'Bone-white the cloak she wears. Send Peri to Wedrewe, as we were commanded.'
'This is a bad omen! What if the lords cleanse the entire town, thinking us corrupted? We've followed all the statutes. It's not our fault!'
'Send Peri to the gate after me and I'll get him mounts and send him on his way. Meanwhile, flatter and favor the cloak, persuade her to bide here as long as possible. There's a reward if she's delivered to the Lady. We'll prosper, you and me.'
Marit stepped away from the porch as she heard footsteps approaching. She walked Warning over to a watering trough set under the shade of an open roof. Over in this corner, she smelled sour sweat and the ripe stench of human waste; a woman was
sobbing softly. A man's raspy voice croaked out a whisper, 'Shut up, will you, you bitch? If you'd just slept with Master Forren like he asked, you wouldn't be stuck in here. At least you're not being sent to Wedrewe to be cleansed, eh? What do you have to complain about?'
'Holy One.' Tarbi hurried out into the courtyard, so flushed with fear and nervous hope that he smelled as ripe as the manure. 'The clerk is coming.'
'Best you return to your posting,' she said before he could babble on.
'Thank you, Holy One.'
He ran out. Not long after, a burly woman emerged from the hall with a very young man in tow, him with head bowed so deep Marit wondered he did not ram the top of his head into every pillar. He slunk out the gate as the clerk came forward with face shielded by her hands.
'Holy One. How may I serve you?'
Marit wanted to ask where Wedrewe was, but she had already roused their suspicions. 'There is a woman here, imprisoned for not having sex with Master Forren. I heard of the matter and have come to adjudicate.'
The clerk, visibly startled, forgot herself enough to glance look into Mark's face.
Master Forren hadn't any right to try to force the girl to bed him. Just because he's the richest man in town, and connected to them who built Wedrewe, he thinks he can have what he wants. Things like this never happened before Ushara's temple was shut down.
She threw an arm over her eyes, and groaned.
'I'll take those keys!' Marit yanked them out of the woman's fingers and crossed into a narrow courtyard that ran between the back of the building and a high wall. The cells were a row of twelve cages set against the wall, with no roof to shelter the prisoners from the rain and no ditch or gutter to sluice away their waste whose stench clawed into her throat. She halted on the edge of the porch, surveying a sludgy waste baked to a paste under the sun. She did not want to step into that.
The prisoners roused. Two stared boldly; five hid their faces. One woman was sobbing, crammed into a cage with an even thinner girl lying unhealthily still beside her. The last prisoner huddled in the farthest cage, back to Marit, unmoving, possibly dead.
The first man whose gaze she met had a steady stare; she tumbled into a morass as filled with muck as the ground beneath and around the cages. He holds a stick with which he is beating beating beating in the head of an old man all for the scant string of vey lying in a heap on the rain-soaked earth.
'That one is a murderer,' Marit said.
Osya cowered on the threshold. 'So he is, Holy One. He's not from here. He came as a laborer walking the roads. You may wonder, for it is not permitted to walk the roads without a token, but he carried a token so we gave him work repairing the palisade. Then he murdered old Hemar for a mere twenty vey to drink with, and so we come to discover he had stolen the token months ago. That's the holy truth, Holy One.' With her body hunched over in fear, she resembled a crabbed old crone rather than a stoutly healthy woman.
That he was guilty was evident. 'What of the others?'
The clerk trembled as she indicated each one in turn.
This woman had cheated in weighing rice-
'I did it, Holy One,' the woman gasped. 'Please forgive me. My children were hungry. Now they've been sold away as debt slaves to pay for my crime.'
This man had stolen two bolts of cloth from the town warehouse, claiming it rightfully belonged to him and had earlier been purloined by the town's militia captain at a checkpoint between Stragglewood and Yestal.
'It's a lie, what I said before. I was so fearful when they caught me, for fear they'd cleanse me right there, that I said anything that came to mind. I'll never steal again, I swear it.'
Two young women had gotten a visiting merchant drunk and robbed his purse.
'We never did any such thing, Holy One. We let him buy drinks for us, because we hadn't any coin, so maybe we was taking advantage. But he claimed we'd robbed him, and we never touched his purse! And when they brought us up in front of Master Forren, then he said he'd dismiss the charges if I had sex with him. Have you ever heard of such a thing?'
'And you refused?'
'Of course I refused! He's a gods-rotted pig, meaning no offense to pigs. But we're poor folk, our people, no one to speak for us in council. We've been locked in here a year or more and Stara is so ill, you see how she can't even stand any longer. Now
she's going to die, just because I wouldn't have sex with him! They won't let our kinfolk in to see us.' It was all true, and no one in town had done a cursed thing to stop it.
An old man, too weak to raise his head, was a beggar.
'Why is he here?' Marit demanded. 'Can't his clan take care of him?'
'He's got no clan.'
'No one can have no clan.'
'None who will claim him.'
A young woman in the far cage pushed up to sit as she looked over her shoulder. It was difficult to tell her age because her face was smeared with muck, but she met Marit's gaze with her own wide brown one. And that was all it was: a look passed between two women. Her heart and mind were veiled to Marit's third eye and second heart. After all these months, the blank wall of a gaze hit hard.
'She's a gods-cursed demon, Holy One,' said Osya.
'You put her in a cage?' Marit's hands tightened over the keys until the pain bit her and she remembered where she was.
The caged woman watched with the resigned calm of a person who has already given herself up for dead. Her stare was as even as sunlight on a clear day, almost brutal in its intensity.
'According to the statutes. We sent word to Wedrewe last month that we'd captured one, for we're required to alert the arkhons about any gods-cursed or outlanders.'
'What do the authorities in Wedrewe do with the gods-touched and outlanders?'
'I suppose they judge them at the assizes, Holy One. As required by the statutes.'
In the cage beside her, a burly man called, 'I'm not afraid to be judged! They're the ones who should fear, for they have condemned me to the cleansing just to get what is mine.'
'He's a liar,' said Osya in a shaking voice. 'He killed a man.'
But he wasn't a liar. He met Marit's gaze willingly. He was not pure of heart; he had a temper, easily roused, and he'd gotten into his share of fistfights after an evening of drinking, and he had slapped his wife and been slapped by her in turn, a turbulent pair who didn't like each other much. But he worked hard, and he'd discovered an unexpected vein of iron in a shallow drift up in the hills on which he'd placed a claim according to the law. Forren had set four men including his own nephew to ambush him on the