Cordimancy (6 page)

“And now you live here?”

Kinora’s head bobbed. “Except when I bring my coin back to Tat, I’m here all the time.”

“Do you like it?”

“They make me take lots of baths. And I hate brushing out my hair. But I guess it’s nice.”

“And do they have you sing in the kitchen?”

“Cook says to sing every time she makes blackberry tarts, and Semya says he can tell whether my song is good by how sweet his dessert is. But I think he’s teasing me, ‘cause cook always uses the same cup of honey.”

Malena laughed. “Maybe.” She stood and gestured to the darkened doorway that separated the sleeping area from the rest of the apartment. “You didn’t light any lamps in there.” She had just noticed a familiar trunk beyond the washstand; had her other things been moved up here as well? When? By whom?

Kinora shook her head, looking embarrassed. She had not moved from her hair-maintenance post by the chair.

Malena read the girl’s body language, the bright lamps near the door, the shadows beyond. Her lips twitched. “Let me guess. You don’t like dark corners any more than I did when I was a girl.”

Kinora shook her head again. “It’s… scary.”

“Well, Kinora, now you’ve got someone to keep you company. Let’s finish the tour.” She lifted a lamp.

The walls in the inner room were whitewashed and bare, except for a long pegboard that held belts, hats, and two well-worn leather slings. A wardrobe in one corner contained a stack of wool blankets, a cape, a few underclothes, a coat, half a dozen shalwar and kameez of various cloths, and a pair of tall boots still stiff from the cobbler. Her own clothing, in three large trunks opposite, looked disproportionate by comparison. Whoever had brought her things had found no logical place to put them, and had left the conundrum for her to resolve.

A rocking chair filled one corner by the fireplace, a flame-colored afghan draped over one arm. Its handrests and wicker seat were smooth from years of use, but it seemed too delicate and feminine to be a favorite of her husband. Perhaps a legacy from his mother, added in anticipation of her arrival?

Her eyes flitted to the bed. So narrow—no room to be strangers...

She noticed a flash of white and yellow on one pillow and bent, exhaling softly.

“What is it?” Kinora asked.

Malena held a daisy aloft, twisting the stem so the petals would spin.

5

stonecaster ~ Toril

“Hear something, boy?” Toril asked, pulling back on the reins to bring his mount to a standstill. Twice now the horse had broken the rhythm of his otherwise steady trot and shied to the right.

The sun was just beginning to brighten the sky at his back, leaving the road in pre-dawn dimness deepened by pockets of mist. The clop of hooves from the page’s mount beside him petered out. He listened, trying to ignore birdsong and the steady bellows-like exhalations beneath his saddle, so he could isolate whatever had caught his gelding’s attention.

He was late, and anxious to make up time. A night of switchbacks on narrow Kelun trails had just ended as he joined the main route that ran between Merukesh and Bakar. As an artery for commerce and travelers, the road he now followed allowed faster progress, but it was also a favorite haunt of brigands, especially here near the high point of the southern pass. Toril worked the sling loose from his belt.

After a few heartbeats he saw the horse’s ears flick forward, and he heard a growl from a nearby ravine.

Toril’s posture shifted. “Cat,” he said.

The page nodded. Such predators were dangerous to sheep and sambar deer, but they were unlikely to attack two men on horseback; certainly this one wouldn’t advertise its presence if that were its intent. It was probably chasing a wild dog away from a kill. Toril patted the horse’s neck and was about to prod him forward again when he heard another growl, followed by what sounded like a high-pitched human shout.

The hairs on the back of his neck rose. “You hear that?” he asked.

The page shrugged uncertainly.

Lifting the staff that he’d been resting on his boot, Toril swung a leg out of the saddle and led the horse into cover behind the nearest tree, waving his companion to follow. He lashed the reins and pushed through the scrub oak at the top of the ravine, branches whipping against his shoulders.

Perhaps a hundred paces from the road, trees began to thin out; the mulch of old leaves gave way to talus. Screams from the cat and shouts from a person reached Toril’s ears now. The ravine bent, exposing a rocky shelf jutting over a brook, and giving an open view of leagues of shadowed highlands.

He caught his breath.

Only a stone’s throw downhill, the lithe outline of a clouded leopard crouched near a gnarled pine. It was facing a man-shaped blur in the mist, and its teeth were bared.

A few paces to the right, the page knelt and pulled an arrow from his quiver.

Concerned about accuracy, Toril signaled him to wait. From the page’s angle, the leopard and the man would be almost indistinguishable. Instead, Toril fitted a stone to his sling.

Timing with care, he whipped his arm around and released, leaning into the motion to get more power. The projectile hummed out into the dimness. Almost simultaneously, the cat twitched, and the air was rent by a feral yowl.

He cursed under his breath. If he had hit his mark, the animal would be dead, not angry.

“Hey!” yelled the page, kicking gravel down the slope. “Up here!” He was hoping for some movement to give him a better shot, but the cat merely turned its head and laid its ears back.

“
Maurozh!
” Toril whispered.
Death
was a simple word he’d learned long ago. He waited until its bitterness swelled in his mouth, then spat on another stone and loosed it with a snake-strike motion of wrist and shoulder.

This time his aim was true, and the leopard slumped. Toril clambered down the shale, the page close behind.

As he drew closer, he could see that the figure on the far side of the leopard was small, juvenile even. “Move away. Now’s your chance!” he hissed. There was no response except a moan and some sluggish movement that rustled the pine.

This close, the sling could be quite lethal, but having used his two heaviest stones, Toril’s pouch now held only the pebbles he reserved for light game. Not wanting to bloody his staff, he turned to the page; in a moment feathers protruded from the cat’s neck and chest.

A new groan from the youthful shape refocused Toril’s attention. He stepped into the grayness downhill of the pine and knelt. It looked like a boy, maybe ten or eleven years old. “The cat is dead,” he began.

“Hands.”

Toril caught his breath. He had thought the boy was clinging to the trunk in terror, but now he could see coarse hemp binding his wrists. Slashes along the thigh of his britches were stained, and one arm bent at an odd angle between elbow and wrist. The eyes that met Toril’s gaze were adult and calm, even if clouded with pain.

“You’re osipi!” Toril exclaimed. He drew a knife and began to slice away the cords.

“Yes.”

So this was no child, whatever his years might be. He had the same kind of alertness, the same self-possessed maturity that his brother Amar had radiated years before.

The man’s chest was bare, his skin shiny with sweat. He was breathing hard.

“How long had it been after you?”

“Since the moon set.”

“That long? I wasn’t sure I’d heard anything till just a few moments ago.”

“It angered when I broke its ribs.”

“With your feet?” Toril asked in disbelief. Osipi were said to have the reflexes of a hummingbird, but it was hard to imagine anyone tied by his hands to a tree, keeping a hungry leopard at bay and inflicting damage with only heel and toes.

“Need sharpens the dullest blade,” the man quoted with a sigh. He sagged as the last of the ropes parted.

“You’ve lost some blood,” Toril said, eyeing the wound above his knee. “And I think your arm is broken.” Not for the first time, Toril lamented the limits and cost of healing magic. He could kill a cat or conjure an itch with the right word; why did restoring even a small amount of vitality to another’s body have to sap his own so deeply?

A breeze swayed the treetops, and the man began to shake. “I’m cold,” he murmured.

“I’ll make a fire.”

Toril turned to the page. “Run back to the horses and fetch the medicines in my pack. And some food.” It would be easier to take the man to the horses, but he didn’t want to make a fire on the road. The ravine provided better cover.

“Did brigands do this to you?” Toril asked. “Are we safe here?”

“Bandits have left the pass,” the man said, his teeth chattering. His eyes glazed for a moment, and he shivered abjectly. “I’m s- so c- cold.”

Toril took off his cloak and handed it to the osipi, then busied himself gathering pine needles and dry branches. A spark from flint and steel, augmented by a whispered incantation, conjured flame by the time the page returned with arms full. The stranger crawled to the fire and leaned close, stretching his uninjured arm into the waves of heat.

“I need to clean the gashes on your leg,” Toril said, rummaging in his saddlebags. “And straighten the bone in your arm.”

“Let me warm first.”

“It’s not that cold,” the page responded, offering a waterskin.

The stranger drank greedily. “I’m Oathizhi,” he gasped after a series of swallows. “Or just Oji, if you like.”

Like all of his race, his skin glinted gold, and his build was slim and wiry. His hair was short and ash black, with a clan insignia cut into one of his sideburns, and a spare mustache on his upper lip. He wore an ivona—a battle collar—of braided leather around his neck, but it contained none of the glass beads that indicated experience. His face suggested young adulthood.

Toril studied him with mixed feelings. He rejected the prejudice common among border folk. How could he not, knowing Amar? Yet Toril had to admit the osipi complicated life for everyone. They looked different. They spoke with a strange twang, when they weren’t using their secret sign language. And they wandered where they weren’t wanted.

But mostly, their differentness was disquieting. Bound by magic that they either chose or inherited, time ran faster through their veins than it did for ordinary people. Toril had felt it himself, for a few moments, on his naming day; he still remembered the strange explosion of senses, the dilation and connectedness, the intensity.

It was alien. Even if it had once kindled in his own heart. Even if his brother, Amar, had walked this path.

Osipi were constantly hungry. If they lived to old age, they died at twenty or thirty. They napped multiple times a day. Toril had heard that they could outrun horses over short distances.

They made fierce fighters, but they fatigued easily, and the churn of rearing children and new initiates left little time for aggression. It was a struggle just to feed a population with unnatural appetites. By the end of the winter rains, when they would tolerate weather in the north again, they had depleted their homelands of any easy game, and they pressed through Tirin Pass with gaunt faces and bows at the ready.

Osipi were tolerated because of shared genealogy. His parents had loved Amar when he went down into the water; how could they stop when he emerged, glinting?

But emotions were complicated. Besides regret at the loss of a common future, families and friends felt… betrayal, perhaps, or rejection. Was humanness not good enough for the osipi? How many other values did they see differently?

“How did you end up tied to a tree?” Toril asked, as he knelt with some of the salve he used on injured livestock. It stung bitterly, he knew, but Oji merely winced when it touched his leg.

“
Agiruhir
?” Oji asked.

Toril nodded. The herb was used to prevent gangrene. “You know of it?”

“I’m healer trained.”

“A healer with a battle collar?”

Oji gazed into the flames for a moment, then shrugged. “Rare combination, I grant you.”

“You have not fought much,” said Toril, gesturing to the unadorned leather.

Oji looked down and fingered it with a half smile on his face. “I’m not roostering my honor, you mean? This ivona holds tales.”

“Tell me.”

Oji leaned back until his shoulders touched gravel and lifted his crooked arm. “Set this first. I can’t think while it throbs. Besides, the break’s too old. I fear it healing wrong.”

Toril raised his eyebrows. “You didn’t break it in the fight with the cat?”

Oji shook his head. “Foot-step my shoulder. Grip my hand and pull. You must use strength, but do it steadily, so the muscle stretches.”

Soon, Oji’s face was pale and bathed in sweat, but the arm was straight. Toril hesitated, then gritted his teeth and whispered a quick incantation to alleviate the pain. It left him swaying on his feet, but he was pleased to see his new friend’s face relax.

He caught his breath, then began to apply a splint, using the cords that he’d cut from the pine to bind it in place. Oji’s wrists, he saw, were crisscrossed with deep, bloody chafes.

“Who tied you?”

“I came with ... a handful of others.”

“How many?” asked Toril quickly. The last thing he needed, when he was headed for debate with warmongers, was a large, organized band of ivona-wearing osipi on the road to Bakar.

Oji sighed. “Nineteen, besides me.”

“Also warriors?”

“All of them.”

Toril whistled. “They’ll run afoul of the Guard if they linger,” he warned.

“The Guard already caught us.” Oji’s voice was full of disgust. His eyes were closed—to avoid eye contact, Toril thought.

“Here? I didn’t see any signs of battle up on the road.”

Oji shook his head and sighed. “No, stonecaster. Guile snared us long ago. We came here at their bidding.”

“I don’t see what you mean.”

“My clan pacted Gorumim generations ago, when he was young. For years his promises brought us hope and prestige. But this spring he contacted us and asked a ... favor.” Oji spat the final word, his face full of revulsion.

Toril’s brow wrinkled. “What favor is that?” he asked, as he extended a hand with
bafla
and some dried tomatoes.

Now Oji met Toril’s gaze. “I cannot reveal it without dishonoring my clan,” he said. “Besides, why should I? I thank you for your help, but I don’t even know your name.”

Toril introduced himself and the page. “We are traveling to Bakar,” he added. “We could probably fit you on one of our horses, if you feel up to the ride. But we have to leave quickly.”

The osipi was wolfing down the food, but he swallowed and paused long enough to purse his lips. “Son of… Hasha, I’m guessing?”

Toril raised his eyebrows. “How did you get that?”

“You’re used to authority, and you travel with an escort, on a valuable horse. Your accent says either Kelun or Umora.”

“What do you know of my father?”

“I’ve never been to the Crown,” Oji said, using the osipi name for the circular ring of mountains around Kelun holdings. “But his name is familiar. Your clan has been kinder to my people than most.”

“We have no quarrel with you.”

“No. But you ride to a war council.”

Toril blinked. “How did you jump to that conclusion? I’ve said nothing about my business.”