Rosemary Kirstein - Steerswoman 04 (13 page)

“Bel,” Rowan said. The Outskirter was breathing heavily in
the dark, deep gasps. “Bel … it’s Wiliam.”

I n the wake of the white light, Rowan’s vision was a complexity
of overlapping afterimages. She could see nothing, nothing. She dropped her
cane, reached her left hand behind her, found the rags of Willam’s sleeve. His
arm turned under her hand; his fingers gripped hers.

From somewhere before her, Bel’s voice came. “… Willam?”

Willam drew a breath, released it. “You know,” he said in a
shaky voice, “whenever we’re all together, it seems like one of you has to stop
the other from killing me. I really wish we could get that sorted out.” His
voice was different from their last meeting: a man’s voice now, deep.

A weak sound of amazement from Bel. “Willam?” She started
coming forward. “Curse it, I can’t see a thing!”

“It’ll pass,” Willam said. “If your sword is up, please
lower it. I’d hate to lose any more fingers, groping for you.”

Then Bel laughed out loud. “Will!” They found each other in
the dark; but Bel gagged and stepped back again. “What a stink! When did you
last bathe?”

“I think it was Wulfshaven. It’s part of my disguise. I
can’t believe you’re both here—what are you doing in Donner?” He seemed more
than surprised: he was urgent, distressed.

“The same thing we’re always doing,” Bel told him. “Rowan is
finding things out, and I’m making sure she doesn’t get killed for it. But what
are
you
doing here? And why are you in disguise? And who were those two
trying to catch you?”

Rowan put a hand on Bel’s arm. “Quiet a moment.” They silenced,
startled. Rowan listened.

A man’s voice in the distance, another’s replying. A pause,
then both voices in conversation, approaching.

Rowan leaned in to whisper. “Anyone awake can’t have missed
that light. We shouldn’t be found in the company of corpses. And the corpses
shouldn’t be found at all.”

“They’re too heavy to carry far fast,” Bel pointed out.

Rowan looked about, blinking past the dwindling ghosts of
Willam’s magic fire. “There.” She crossed the street, tested a double gate; it
was bolted. “There are stables here.”

They used the dead man’s knife to jimmy the bolt, and
dragged the corpses inside, Willam sacrificing a layer of his rags to sop up the
worst of the blood on the cobbles, and to wrap around the man’s slashed
abdomen. Inside, they waited with their backs to the closed gate, breathing
shallowly, in the deep warm horse-scented darkness.

The voices paused outside near the scene of the struggle.
Shifting light shone from the cracks in the gate: a lamp. One man exclaimed: he
had discovered the woman’s sword. Quiet discussion as the two men examined it,
apparently pleased with their good fortune. Eventually, they departed.

They had called no alarm. Rowan released a pent breath. “We
could use a lamp ourselves,” Bel said.

“Wait a moment. There must be one about.”

Rowan moved cautiously, navigating by feel, sound, and
scent. Horses greeted her with snorts and curious whickers. She passed them by,
and eventually found the tack room. As she had hoped, a tin lamp was hung just
inside the door, but Rowan could find no tinderbox or flint. She almost left
the lamp behind, but thought twice.

Back at the gate, she located her friends, placed the lamp
in Willam’s hands. “Can you light this?”

“Yes.” He set it on the ground, scrabbled in the dirt a
moment, then rose and seemed to be fumbling about his clothing. Whatever it was
that he sought, he found; then he stooped down to the lamp again and,
unmistakable by the sound, spat.

Between his fingers, a little twist of straw flared with a
tiny white light, then immediately settled into natural yellow flame. This
Willam used to light the lamp.

Watching, Rowan said: “So … it seems you spit fire, now.”

Willam adjusted the flame low, then looked up at her.
Underlit, his face was all weird angles and slanting shadow, unrecognizable;
not the face of the boy she had known, but that of a man, a stranger. She could
not see his eyes. “No,” he said, sounding embarrassed. “I spit spit, the same
as you.” He rose, lifting the lamp, and the light rose with him. “But there are
some things that, if you wet them, they burn.”

Rowan looked up at him; he was quite a tall man. “How very
odd.”

“That explains why you don’t bathe.” Bel seemed delighted by
Willam’s new talents.

They undertook the grisly and laborious task of carrying the
corpses to the river. The steerswoman carried the lantern, shuttered to emit
one small splash of light ahead of her feet. Bel and Willam carried the woman
from The Crags, supporting her limp form between them as if she were drunk.

“We were hoping to question these people,” Rowan said, “to
find out why they were following me. But it wasn’t me they were after at all,
was it?”

“No.” Willam’s voice came from behind her, from the dark.
“It looks like they wanted me.”

No one else was about in the street; they were far from any taverns
or other places of late entertainment. It was safe to speak. Rowan said: “Why?”

A pause, long enough for Rowan to wonder whether Will intended
to refuse a steerswoman’s question. “I think the other wizards have heard that
I’ve left Corvus.”

Rowan stopped short and turned back, lifted the lamp higher.

He made a very eerie sight: a tall figure in filthy,
blood-streaked rags, and with white hair a wild tangle, supporting what was
very obviously not a drunken friend, but a fresh-dead corpse. He looked, in
fact, like a ghoul out of some macabre story told to frighten children on just
such dark nights as this.

Only his eyes, the beautiful copper-brown gaze, were
familiar, unchanged across the years, but startling in their new setting, as if
this strange creature had cruelly snatched them from the face of the boy Rowan
had known.

“Why—” Rowan began; but Bel cut her off.

“Later,” the Outskirter said, and she shifted awkwardly,
pulling the corpse’s limp arm tighter around her shoulder. “A steerswoman’s
questions can go on forever, and this woman isn’t getting any lighter. And we
have another to do after this.”

Rowan regathered herself. “Yes, of course.” She turned and
led them on.

Their grim work completed, they returned to the Dolphin, entering
by the back door; and immediately upon reaching Rowan’s room, found the
atmosphere unbearable, due to Willam’s stink. He excused himself, and when he
returned had shed several layers of rags, and many degrees of stench.

“What were you carrying?” Rowan asked him. She was vigorously
swinging the window shutter, urging the remaining traces of the odor to depart.

This was not entirely successful: the smell still lingered
on Will’s clothing. “Some fish heads and part of a dead raccoon,” he said.
“I’ve cached it all behind the outhouses.”

“An excellent choice.” Rowan abandoned her attempts and sat
on the bed, shifting herself back to lean against the wall. “How’s your leg?”
Bel asked.

“Not pleased with the night’s work,” Rowan said, rubbing her
thigh distractedly.

“What happened to you?” Will asked. “I’ve seen you using
that cane sometimes. Were you hurt?”

A bloody, ragged ghoul, asking after her health; but the
copper gaze was openly distressed. “Yes,” Rowan said, “but it’s really not so
very bad any longer; it happened more than a year ago.”

“It’s a long story,” Bel said. “And so is yours, I suspect.”
She tilted her head. “Look at you, all grown up—and stinking to the skies!” She
ostentatiously held her nose and backed off the single step that the room’s
size allowed, waving her other hand before her face. “I’d give you a hug, but
I’m afraid it would rub off on me.”

“Actually,” Will said, “I wish that you would.” He leaned
back against the table, regarded the Outskirter with an odd, helpless relief.
“I’m so glad to see you alive. After all that trouble in the Outskirts—I just
didn’t know what became of you.”

Bel opened her mouth as if to make some light remark, perhaps
an Outskirter’s
Ha!
She closed it again. She said, simply, “I survived.”

“We both survived,” Rowan said. The memory was not a pleasant
one. “And so have you, just. Those two who attacked you—are you sure they were
wizard’s minions?”

“I can’t think of anyone else who would be after me.”

Bel climbed on the bed beside Rowan, and folded her legs.
She studied Willam, dark eyes curious. “And how did you know you’d find us in
Donner?”

“I didn’t! I didn’t know you were here at all, until Rowan
bought me lunch!” He laughed. “That was a shock, I’ll tell you!”

“And you stayed close by after that,” Rowan said.

“I was trying to decide whether I should let you know who I
was …”

“Why would you not?”

Bel answered for him. “Because he’s in trouble, and he
didn’t want it spilling over onto his friends. It’s a kind thought, Will, but
if you’ve run off from Corvus, you’re going to need help. I think we just
proved that. You didn’t even know those two were following you, did you?”

“No,” he admitted reluctantly.

“What made you leave Corvus?” Bel asked.

Willam was a few moments replying; and during those moments,
his expression grew dark. He said at last: “Routine Bioform Clearance.” He
noticed the chair tucked under the table, pulled it out, turned it, and sat.

“Hardly routine, as Slado uses it,” Rowan said; and Willam
nodded silently.

When Slado had turned the spell called Routine Bioform
Clearance against the Outskirters themselves, only Fletcher’s warning had saved
Rowan and Bel, and the tribe with which they had been traveling. They and the
entire tribe had fled, and for months after, Rowan kept dreaming of that
flight, of three days of nearly ceaseless movement, by daylight and darkness,
across the dangerous Outskirts.

And after: the dark, half-buried tent; the tribe members
crowded against each other; the screaming wind, and screaming wind again, as
tornadoes, one after another, tore across the landscape.

Willam, and Corvus, knew of these events because Rowan had
informed Corvus herself—

“Willam,” Rowan said, “in my letter to Corvus last year, I
did say that Bel and I both escaped from the magic heat. That we both
survived.” What then was the cause of his concern for Bel in particular?

“Yes,” Will said. “But you also said that you’d left Bel
behind in the Outskirts.”

“But—” Rowan began; then, of itself, the answer came to her.
“Oh, no ..”

Quiet in the room. Eventually, the Outskirter said, almost inaudibly,
“He did it again?”

“Yes. Last summer.” Willam leaned toward her, the memory of
pain on his face. “And Bel, I didn’t know where you
were—”

“He did
it
again?”

Willam startled; and the very small room became a great deal
smaller.

“Where?” Bel demanded, her dark eyes darker now, and hard.

“North. Much farther north than the first time—”

“And people? Were there tribes there?”

Willam hesitated; he was not glad to tell it. “Yes. Three
tribes. They all died.”

Bel became utterly still.

Willam waited, but when Bel did not speak, he went on. “Corvus
knew it was going to happen … he said he’d seen the Clearance listed on the
upcoming schedule—I told him that we had to
do
something, we had to stop
it! But he wouldn’t. And I … I couldn’t.” Willam looked down at his two
hands, clenched them. “I watched. From the Eastern Guidestar. I didn’t want to,
but I couldn’t help it. Everything calm, everything normal, and all the people
down there, shining like stars … they do that, when you look at them right,
they shine just like stars … And then the land, lit up like it was burning.
And afterwards, everything growing dark … and all the little stars gone …”
He opened his hands, dropped them to his lap, looked up at Bel helplessly. “And
I didn’t know where you were.”

The Outskirter stared, past Willam, past the walls of the
room; stared as if blind. Rowan nearly laid a hand on Bel’s arm, to try to
comfort her, but stopped herself.

Not wise. Not when Bel was like this.

When Bel spoke again, her words were slow, her voice carefully
controlled. “Willam,” she said, “do you know where Slado is?”

“No.” Earnestly. “I’m sorry, but I don’t.”

“Does Corvus?”

“Yes … but he wouldn’t tell me.”

“And Corvus … he
could
have stopped the magic heat.
If he’d tried.”

“Not without Slado noticing—”

“He’s a coward.”

Willam did not respond immediately; and this won him a glare
from the Outskirter. “The wizards … ,” Will said uncomfortably, “… they
don’t think like we do. Things don’t mean the same to them as they do to us. I
think there are some things they don’t understand at all.” He turned to Rowan.
“Corvus
is
trying to find out more, to figure out what Slado is trying
to accomplish, with all this, this trouble. But he’s moving so slowly! He’s
being so cautious, he’s not willing to risk anything. But we can’t just wait
and see, not while people are dying!”

“And that’s why you left him, and came here,” Rowan said.

Willam’s urgency subsided. He looked distressed, then
ashamed, and Rowan surmised that the decision had not been an easy one.
“There’s a chance,” he said, “that I can find out more, right here in Donner.”

Bel’s eyes narrowed. “What chance? Why Donner?” Rowan took
her shoulder sack from the table. “Here,” she said, and pulled out her logbook,
opened it, drew out one loose sheet, and passed it to Bel.

The Outskirter took it suspiciously, regarded it briefly,
then looked up at Rowan. “Kieran’s apprentice,” Rowan said, “at eighteen years
of age, as drawn by a local girl.”

Puzzlement; then comprehension. Bel looked again. And all
that had been absent on Rowan’s first viewing—the meaning of this stranger’s
face; the sense of identification; the knowledge of what he had done; the
hatred—all
of it was there, in Bel’s eyes.