Spirit Gate: Book One of Crossroads (3 page)

“I’ll come. No use courting trouble. They’ll not kick with two eagles staring them down.”

Abruptly he sat up, tilting his head back. “Ah. There he is.”

A shadow covered them briefly. The big eagle had a deer in his claws. He released it, and the corpse fell hard to the ground at the eastern edge of the rock, landing with a meaty
thunk.
Scar landed with a soft scrape and after a silence tore into his prey. Bones cracked. From across the height Flirt screamed a challenge, but Scar kept at his meat, ignoring her. Flirt yelped twice more, irritated, but she wouldn’t be particularly hungry yet. She’d settle and sleep. Marit yawned.

Joss wasn’t done worrying over the problem. “I have to go back in two days to see if the man died, and then what’s to do? I’m to conduct a hearing? They’ve no captain, and the arkhon at the nearest village—Sandy Falls—told me he’ll have nothing to do with the matter. Maybe the lord of Iliyat will agree to sit in judgment.”

“That’s a long way for Lord Radas’s arm to reach. He’s young in his position, too. His uncle died just two years ago, and he’s still testing his wings. I don’t expect this will fall under his authority. We should be able to handle it. Honestly, sweetheart, no matter how ugly a murder is, it won’t be the first time two drunk men settled their argument with a knife.”

“I know,” he said a little more desperately than the situation seemed to call for, “but reeves aren’t meant to judge. It’s the place of the Guardians to hold assizes to settle such grievances and disputes, those that can’t be resolved by local councils.”

“True enough,” she agreed. “I had to mediate in a boundary dispute this morning. I’ve shifted a hundred stone markers in the last ten years, and I don’t like it any better now than I did the first time. Half of them don’t like that I’m a woman, but they’ll say nothing with Flirt at my back. Still. No Guardian’s been seen for—oh—since my grandfather was a boy. Maybe longer.”

“The Guardians don’t exist. They’re just a story.”

She gave him a light shove, because his words disturbed her. “Great Lady! That’s nineteen years’ bad luck for saying such a thing! Anyway, my grandfather remembered the assizes from back when they were held properly. He saw a Guardian once, who came to preside over the court. Do you think he was lying to me?”

“He was a boy then, you said so yourself. He listened to, and danced, the tales, as we all do. Stories blend with fragmented memories to make new memories. He came to believe as truth what never really happened. No shame in that.”

“Joss! Sheh! For shame! The hierophants preserve in the Lantern’s libraries the old scrolls that record the judgments made in those days. Judgments made by Guardians. How do you answer that evidence?”

“What is a name? I could call myself a ‘Guardian’ and my attendance at an assizes court would show in the records that a ‘Guardian’ oversaw that day’s proceedings.”

She squeezed him until he grunted, air forced out of his lungs. “Say so if you must! But my grandfather had the best memory of anyone I have ever known. He could remember the time when he was a lad when the first Silver merchant came through the village, with two roan cart horses and a hitch in his stride as if he’d broken a hip and it had healed wrong. He could remember the names of all his clan
cousins, even the ones who had died when he was a lad, and the folk they married and which temple their children were apprenticed to. If we see no Guardians now, that doesn’t mean there were never any.”

He sighed as sharply as if he’d gotten a fist in the belly. Twisting, he looked eastward, although it was by now too dark to see anything but stars and the dark shadow of the towering spire that gave Candle Rock its name. “Ammadit’s Tit is a Guardian’s altar, it’s said. What’s to stop us flying up there and looking around?”

“Joss!” Startled and shocked, she sat up. She went cold, all goose-bumped, although the wind hadn’t gotten any cooler. “It’s forbidden!”

“No Guardian’s been seen for seventy winters or more, you said it yourself. What if you’re right, and there were Guardians once? Shouldn’t we try to find out what happened to them? Maybe we could find clues at their altars. Maybe someone needs to find out why they’re gone, and if we can do anything to bring them back. You didn’t see the look of those woodsmen. They scared me, Marit. Even with Scar glaring at them, I knew they’d kill me if I took a step into any corner where they didn’t want my nose poking. They hadn’t even a headman among them, no arkhon, no manner of priest. No Lady’s cauldron. No Lantern. No dagger or key or green-staff or anvil. Not even an offering bowl for the Formless One.”

The crawling jitters prickled up and down her back, a sure sign of danger. “Maybe this is what Marshal Alard was warning us about. You’d best not go back there. Fly to Copper Hall and give a report. If there’s trouble brewing . . . men like that . . . men who would run away from their legal obligation . . . they could do anything if there’s nothing to check them.”

“Anything,” he muttered at last. He began to speak again, but choked on the words. He was quiet for a long time, arm around her, head still thrown back as he gazed up at the span of stars and the Herald’s Road whose misty path cut across the heavens. “Is this what Marshal Alard meant by a shadow?” he whispered. “It seemed to me there was a shadow in their hearts. Like an illness.”

“Hush,” she said, because he was shivering even though it wasn’t cold. “Hush, sweetheart.”

MARIT WOKE AT
dawn as the sun’s pale glow nosed up to paint rose along Ammadit’s Tit. Joss still slept, hips and legs covered by her cloak. A blanket was rolled up under his neck, cradling his head. Sleeping, he looked younger than ever, barely more than a child, although he was twenty. A man might hope to celebrate five feasts in his life; Joss was barely six winters past his Youth’s Crown, while in another year she would have to lay aside her Lover’s Wreath for the sober if invigorating responsibilities represented by the Chatelaine’s Belt. Your thoughts changed as you got older. Your hopes and dreams shifted, transmuted, altered into new shapes.

He cracked open an eye. The early-morning sunlight crept up to spill light over his smooth chest. She saw him examining her warily.

“What are you thinking?” he asked.

“If I’m going to have a baby, I have to have it soon. Would you—” She hadn’t known how tightly the wish had knotted up inside her; it unraveled in a rush.
“Would you father it, Joss? No need to handfast, if you’ve no mind to. You’re young yet.”

“Do you mean to give up patrol?” he asked unexpectedly.

The pang struck hard. “Why do you say so?”

“It’s unfair,” he mused.

“Which part of life?” she said with a grin, but a sour taste burned in her throat.

He stroked her arm thoughtfully. “I could father ten children and no one would speak one word about it, or think it made me unfit to patrol. But I’ve seen how reeves who are women are told in so many ways that they’d best be a reeve only and not think of ever bearing children. It’s true that when a baby is nursing, the mother must stick close if she wants to keep her milk running. But after the child is weaned, he’s cared for by his older cousins anyway. That’s how it was in my village. No one would have dared to tell any of my aunties what they could or could not do with their businesses or their labor, and then pretend it was for their own good.”

“You say the most unexpected things!”

He looked at her, silent, for the longest time, and fear curdled in her stomach as his dark eyes narrowed and with a flick he tossed the blanket aside and gathered up his clothes. “I’m going up to the altar.”

“Joss!”

His expression was set, almost ugly. He pulled on his trousers while she sat there, still naked, and stared at him. “Who made all those rules? We don’t even know, or why, or when. We just follow them without thinking. We see a fence around our village but we never go out to make sure it’s still in good repair. Maybe that’s why there are shadows. Maybe that’s why the woodsmen live in that camp like beasts. They don’t see the point of mouthing the same words their fathers did, so they’ve cast them aside. And if the fence around your pasture looks sturdy from a distance but is falling down, that’s when wolves come in and kill the lambs. I’ve got to find out.”

“Joss!”

The sun illuminated the curve of his handsome chest, the taut abdomen, his muscular shoulders made strong by two years controlling an eagle, the handsome, angular tattoos—covering his right arm and ringing both wrists—that marked him as a child of the Fire Mother. His chin had a rebellious tilt. He threw his tunic over his head. As he wrestled it down, she shook herself and leaped up, groping for her clothes. She always tossed everything all this way and that in her haste to get undressed but at some point during the night, while she’d slept, he’d recovered it and folded it neatly and laid it on her pack, off the ground. She’d not even woken. He might have lain there for many watches brooding over this madness and she never knowing.

“You’re crazy,” she said. “It’s forbidden.”

“You don’t have to come with me. I know the risk.”

“Do you?”

“Are you going to report me to Marshal Alard?”

“He’ll flog you and throw you out of the reeves, no matter what Scar wants.”

“Go, if you have to. Report if you must. I won’t blame you. But I’m going up there.”

She paused, shading her eyes as she squinted toward Ammadit’s Tit. The black knob thrusting up at the height of the rounded ridge gave away nothing, although—just there—she thought a flash of light or metal winked as the sun rose just off to the southeast behind it. “The Guardians guard their secrets. Marshal Alard won’t have to punish you. They will.”

“The Guardians are gone. And if they’re not gone, then maybe it’s time someone kicks them in the butt.” His voice was shaking but his hands were steady as he gathered up his harness. “I didn’t tell you what else, Marit. I couldn’t say it when it was dark out, I just couldn’t. They had a Devouring girl at that woodsmen’s camp. They tried to keep her hidden, but I saw her.” Catching her eye, he held it. His gaze was bleak. “She was
chained.”

That was what decided it, really. The thought of any man chaining one of the Merciless One’s hierodules made her stomach churn, but her heart’s courage stiffened with anger. It was blasphemy to chain one who gave freely.

She was trembling as she harnessed Flirt, and the eagle caught her mood and pulled this way and that, fussing and difficult, scratching at the rock with her talons and slashing at her once, although not determinedly enough to connect. Marit thrust the staff up to the eagle’s throat and held it there, pulling the hood back over Flirt’s eyes. Her heart pounded as she listened for Scar’s cry, for Joss departing impatiently, but she held the discipline for the correct thirty-seven count before easing the hold. Flirt gave her no more trouble. They walked to the rim of the bowl, she swung into the harness, and the raptor launched out into the air, plunging, then catching a draft to rise.

Scar and Joss were circling, waiting for them. Before departing, he had doused and raked the fire and split wood for kindling to serve the next reeve who camped out on Candle Rock. Now, seeing her catch the airstream, he rose higher as Scar caught an updraft. She and Flirt followed, up and up, gliding south before turning to come up along the high ridgeline. The mountainous mound of Ammadit’s Tit was covered with pine and spruce but the actual black knob—the nipple itself—was as bare as the day the Earth Mother molded stone into mountains. The rock gleamed in the morning light, almost glinting. As she circled in more closely, she saw that it was pitted with crystalline structures—sacred to the Lady of Beasts—shot through the stone. She shivered, although the wind was hot and strong. That knot at the hollow of her ribs burned.

At first glance the knob looked too smooth for any creature as large as they were to find a landing spot. Relief flared, briefly, brutally; then Joss hallooed just out of her sight, and she and Flirt rounded through eddying currents to see him banking in toward a cleft situated below the summit.

“Great Lady, protect us,” she whispered. “Don’t be angry.”

She followed him in.

The cleft was about as wide as the feasting hall in Copper Hall was long: forty strides. It was surrounded by a rim cut into the rock, then dropped an arm’s span to a flat floor beneath, open to the air but with a sharply angled slope of rock offering a lean-to of shelter to the north. It was difficult to maneuver Flirt in, especially with Scar already claiming territory, but the raptor landed with a cry of protest, opened her wings to give Scar a look at just how big she was, then settled.

Whoof.

Marit sat in her harness as a chill whisper of air brushed her face, like fingers searching, like a sculptor’s probing hands. To her left, the sun shone full on Joss. The floor of the cleft was level but scarred by the glittering path of a labyrinth scored into the rock. The pattern took up half the open space; Flirt’s open wingspan brushed the path’s outermost edge, but both eagles shied away from actually crossing onto the crystalline markings. The space was otherwise empty, just the ledge and the eddy of air swirling around the knob. The northern face ended in that angled wall that shadowed the deepest part of the cleft.

Joss coughed, then slipped down from his harness. He landed so softly she couldn’t hear the slap of his feet. He paced the rim, and back again, as she looked about nervously, but she heard nothing but the bluster of the wind. She saw nothing at all, no offerings, no altar post, no Guardian’s silk banner fluttering in the constant blow. He stopped at the curving edge of the labyrinth closest to the rim wall.

The outer shape of the path was an oval. Within those boundaries, the shining pavement twisted and turned and doubled back until it was impossible to know how to reach the center, where the ground dipped into a shallow bowl big enough to hold a man and horse together.

“This is the entrance,” he said.

“Joss!”

He set his right foot on the glittering pavement, then his left.