Sword and Sorceress XXVII (22 page)

The thief opened her mouth to reply,
when a thunderclap shook the house. She jumped and then squinted at the seaward
wall. “Are you sure the ocean isn’t about to invite itself into your living
room?”

Zair rose to stir the fire. “I told you,
we don’t often get a storm that big. Might see one this year—the weather’s been
rough. But we normally have enough warning to get to high ground.”

“Warning from what, the little weather
birds?”

“You don’t live by the ocean all your
life without learning to read it.” Zair frowned down at the thief. “You aren’t
used to the water. You must come from someplace inland.”

“Very clever, sheriff,” the thief said,
but there was no rancor in it. “Yes; I grew up in a little dirt plot in the
middle of potato fields. Nothing for miles but potatoes.” She shuddered. “Sometimes
I still have nightmares about sorting potatoes. Just piles of potatoes without
end.”

Of all the things the thief had said
about her past, Zair believed this one. “You left to seek your fortune
elsewhere, did you?” she asked, and the thief nodded, so Zair pushed a little. “Is
this the life you wanted?”

The thief looked up, and for a moment
her face was open and hurt. She really was quite young, Zair thought. Then her
eyes shuttered and her mouth quirked in the familiar mocking smile. “No. I
learnt I was a baron’s long-lost daughter, and he sent a carriage for me.
Couldn’t stand the life of luxury for more than a night, though. I stole a
casket of gold and my father’s finest horse, and took to the road.”

Zair’s lips pressed to a hard line. “You
wouldn’t have so much trouble in life if you’d give back a little.”

Nothing seemed to change in the thief’s
posture, and yet it was harder, somehow. “I don’t know what you’re talking
about.” She smiled thinly. “Do you want to hear about my flight from my father’s
captivity? The children liked this story.”

“Not tonight. I’m an old woman and I
have work to do in the morning.” Turning away, Zair said over her shoulder, “You
can sleep by the fire tonight. If you take anything of mine, you’ll learn some
other knots I can make. You won’t like them.”

“I won’t steal from you,” the thief
said, behind her.

Zair wished she could tell substance
from lies in the thief’s pebble-smooth words. She lay awake for a long time as
the dying fire made patterns on the ceiling, listening to Shadow’s slow
breathing and the rain battering the hut’s walls.

#

“Hope we’re not making a mistake,” Deke
said, leaning against Zair’s wall in a precariously tipped-back chair,
balancing his wine cup on his stomach while he carved a chunk of driftwood into
a new shuttle for Zair’s netmaking. “She’s got clever fingers, and she’s not
stupid.”

Outside, the waning half-moon
illuminated the thief leaning on the goat pen, studying the knotted rope that
kept the goats in. She was just looking at it, occasionally poking one of the
knots gently with her long fingers.

Zair shrugged and turned a seine in her
lap, checking for weak spots with sure, callused fingers. “Worst thing, she
unties herself and runs off.”

“No, worst thing she wrecks our village
knots, and us with storm season coming. Or she comes back with five burly
friends and cleans us out. You heard about those pirates up the coast, right?”

“Pirates again,” Zair sighed.

“My cousin heard from my nephew, heard
it in Trenza. They burned out Hammer Bay, killed half the men in town, and the
less said of the women, the better.” Deke twisted the knife in the
water-smoothed wood a little harder than necessary. “Maybe she’s got friends
like that.”

“I’ll shore up the defensive knots
tomorrow. They need checking anyway.”

“Just don’t let her watch you do it.” He
refilled Zair’s wine cup and his own.

Zair squinted out the window at the
thief, who had given up poking at the knot and instead reached down inside her
collar for whatever she wore there. Fishing it out, the thief cupped it in her
hand and studied it in the moonlight.

“What’s she looking at?” Deke wanted to
know, peering over Zair’s shoulder.

“Don’t know. Some kind of necklace. It’s
hers, I think, not ours. As much as anything she’s got is hers. Caught her
looking at it a few times—more so lately.”

“Ask her about it?”

Zair lifted a shoulder in a shrug. “Not
our business, seems to me.”

#

Three days before the new moon, the fall
rains came, flattening the sedge and glistening on thatched roofs. Everyone was
wet and testy.

The thief fell in step with Zair on her
way to the vegetable patch beyond the midden. “I have a problem.”

“Other than being tied to a goat pen?”

“Well... no, that’s pretty much it, or
at least part of it.” Shadow rubbed at the twine around her wrist, a reflexive
habit she’d developed. “See, I didn’t think you’d actually—I mean, I thought I’d
be long gone by now.”

“Surprise,” Zair said dryly, squatting
by the turnips. “Pull some of those onions.”

The thief sighed and obeyed, but
continued to speak. “There’s something after me, and it’s getting closer. Much
as it pains me to admit it, I’d really hate any of you to get caught in its
path if it does find me here. Granted, I’d hate to see
me
in its path
quite a lot more.”

“Uh-huh,” Zair said. Sorrel and
lambsquarters went into a pile for the stewpot, the other weeds into a bucket
for the goats. “You also said your rich uncle wants to cart you off for a wedding.”

“All right, yes, granted, that one may
have been slightly less than true—”

“And you have four kids about to starve
without you.”

The thief sighed. “Are you going to hold
everything I’ve said against me?”

“When it’s a lie, yes.” Zair frowned as
something nagged at her memory. “Didn’t you say something to Deke about a
dragon?”

“Yes!”

“There’s no such thing.”

“There’s no such thing as knots that can’t
be untied, either,” the thief said, tensing her narrow shoulders.

“It’s just a matter of tying them properly.”

“Yes, whatever. Anyway, the point is you’re
all in danger if you don’t let me go.” The thief reached down her collar and
hooked the thong. Zair got a better look at the pendant this time: a stone in a
roughly forged metal setting, more blue than green by daylight. The thief waved
it at Zair.

“So?”

“This morning, it was green. Now look at
it. There’s only one thing could make it turn this color.”

“Dragons?” Zair said.

“Yes!”

Zair sent her down to the goat pen with
the bucket of weeds.

#

The thief grew more insistent after
that. It was impossible to make her do anything useful.

“I think she really does believe
something’s out to get her,” Deke said, helping Zair drag a fishing boat out of
the mud. He paused to squint at a low dark mass of storm clouds burgeoning over
the sea. The rain had stopped, but the air felt heavy, expectant. “And us,” he
added.

“She’s a liar, Deke.”

“I know. But what if she’s not lying
this time?”

Storm weather always made everyone
tense. Today was worse than usual. They’d started putting out the gill-nets for
the fall mudfish run, but they brought them in early and dragged the boats up
the hill.
Going to be a bad one,
Zair thought, shading her eyes and
looking down from her yard at the wind raking long sweeps through the marsh
grass. The sky was the color of a bruise, lit with the clear glow of
stormlight.
Maybe take the kids up to the caves if it doesn’t break soon.

Evening came early and ominous. The wind
rose, banging shutters and bringing cold spatters of rain. Zair was precariously
balanced on a stool, taking in the washing, when Solya barged into her yard. “You
have to do something about that townie!”

“You young people—so polite.” A sharp
gust of wind almost sent Zair sprawling, and she turned her attention back to
her task. “What’s she done now?”

Solya planted her hands on her hips. “That
thief, Shadow or whatever her name is, she’s got my kids running around like
headless chickens. I caught Cheri trying to steal my good fish-gutting knife
for slaying dragons!”

“There’s no such thing as dragons,” Zair
said, for the twentieth time that day.

Solya threw her arms up in the air. “I
know, but try telling the kids!”

“Fine,” Zair said, “fine.”

After a quick stop by Orrel’s house, she
stumped off to the goat pen, where the thief and some of the village boys were
hauling the goats into shelter. The thief kept looking up nervously at the sky
and then at the coast road to Trenza. Gusts of wind flattened her patched coat
against her narrow body. Zair got her attention by grabbing one bony wrist, and
deftly untwisted the cord tied there. Then she threw the thief’s knife at her
feet.

“Go. It’s only two days ‘til the new
moon, anyway.”

The thief rubbed her bare wrist. “Is
this a trick to make me fall down so that you can all laugh at me again?”

“No,” Zair said. “You aren’t as funny as
you think, and anyway, you paid your debt. So get going. You best get under
shelter before the storm breaks.”

The thief stared at her for a long
moment, and then looked around at the goat pen and the goggling kids. Her mouth
worked as if she meant to say something else. Then, without a word, she
snatched up the knife and took off running into the growing gloom, headed for
Trenza.

“Did I tell you to stop working?” Zair
snapped at the boys, and tromped back to her house. She kept glancing at the
road, but the thief was already gone from sight.

She forced herself not to look over her
shoulder for imaginary dragons.

#

As darkness fell, the storm hit the
shore like a fist, driving towering waves before it. Zair listened to the roar
of the high surf from behind closed shutters, her hands wrapped around a mug of
tea. She could hear it through the walls, over the cheerful jabber of her
nieces and nephews and their kids, all gathered in her house to wait out the
long wet night.

“Sounds bad out there,” her nephew Rig
said, leaning against the wall. “Already washed away the east weirs when I came
in. I say we take the kids up to the Scarp. Some of the families already did.”

His cousin Linnie shook her head, and
picked up her infant son as he began to cry. The shutters thumped in the wind. “Shoulda
gone up to the caves before the storm broke, if we were gonna. And there are
the goats to think of.”

Deke, who had made himself at home in
the corner by the fire, raised his head and snorted. “This is nothing. Gonna
blow itself out by morning. Let me tell you about the storm we had back—was it
the year the mudfish didn’t come in? Yeah. That year, the wet season started in
the month of roses, if you can believe it—”

There was a chorus of groans. “This was
when Great-Auntie Korie’s outhouse washed away, right?” Rig said.

“The wind was like a herd of stampeding
goats,” Linnie took up the familiar tale, speaking along with Deke.

“—stampeding goats—hey, I’m telling this
story, aren’t I?”

Through the pounding of wind, rain and
surf, it took Zair a moment to realize that someone was beating on the door.
She cautiously unbarred it, leaning her weight to keep it from being snatched
out of her hands.

The thief tumbled through the door on a
wet slap of wind, so sodden in her water-heavy coat that she looked like a pole
with a rug draped over it. Zair slammed the door. The room fell silent.

“What are you doing here?” Zair asked
for all of them.

“Yes. Well.” The thief straightened and
wrung out her ragged hair. “I wanted to return something.” From under her coat,
she produced a silver plate and a handful of flatware.

“Hey,” Deke said. “That’s my daughter’s
good table service, the one her no-account husband left behind when he went
back to Bonolevi.”

“All I know is that it was in the last
house on the way out of town,” the thief said.

Zair took it, angry but unsurprised. “Do
we need to shake you and see if you rattle? And why are you back? Sudden attack
of conscience, I presume?”

“You presume correctly,” the thief said,
“but it’s not just the silver. I was halfway to Trenza when—well—” She glanced
in the oceanward direction. “Do you have any idea what it’s doing out there?
Why are you people still down here, by the water? You need to get up to those
caves you talked about.”

“This isn’t bad. Like I told you, just a
storm.”

“You also told me it washes away the
village sometimes! You people have to get out of here.”

“And you told
me
there were
dragons after you,” Zair said. “What’s the matter, can’t they fly in this wind?”

The thief scowled at her, then gave a
little half-smile. “There’s no such thing as dragons.”