Sword and Sorceress XXVII (23 page)

“I know that and you know that.” Zair
nodded at the thong around her neck. “So what’s that
really
for, and why
are you back?”

Reluctantly, the thief pulled it from
her collar and twirled it. The stone was vivid blue. “It was a gift,” she said,
and paused. “No, that’s not right. When I was a kid and fresh from the potato
fields, a man up Dresderi way ‘prenticed me. Bought me, more like. Name of
Bredon.” Her words faltered, then came surer and stronger with every sentence,
a rural accent slipping in. “He made each of us carry one of these so he could
find us if we run off. He’s got a rock like this himself, and it changes color
when the stones draw close together. Me, I ran, eventually. I wasn’t the only
one.”

Zair studied her long, earnest face. “Why
do you still have it?”

“Because it works the other way, too. I
can tell if he’s nearby.” She held up the stone and let it spin. “I always kept
moving, but staying in one place—I didn’t think he’d find me so quick. I almost
ran into him and his gang on the road, actually. I hotfooted it back here as
soon as I caught sight of them.”

A low murmur of voices rose around the
room. Zair just snorted. “They’re coming here, in a storm like this?
Ridiculous.”

Shadow curled her lip. “Bredon and his
bunch—they
like
working in this kind of weather. It means no one will
see the smoke and come to help. They’ll clean out anything valuable, burn your
houses and kill anyone who complains about it. They must figure that if I’m
here, there’s something worth stealing—”

She stopped talking, because the
cacophony of wind and rain had died with the suddenness of a handclap. In the
silence, the loudest sound was the drip of water falling from the eaves.

“It does this when the wind changes
direction. It’ll be back soon,” Zair said. “And worse. Much worse. Are you
telling the truth, girl?”

“I am. I swear that I am.”

Zair stared at her for a long moment.
Then she turned, stabbing a finger. “Rig, Orrel, Linnie—go tell everyone. Get
them ready, kids all together, everyone in position, just like when those
smugglers tried to rob us back in—no, you’re too young to remember, but your
parents will know what to do. Get the nets, the best ones. None of Rukah’s;
that girl’s knots never hold. Hop to it!”

Shadow seized her arm. “You can’t fight
them; are you crazy? You don’t know what you’re dealing with! You have to get
everyone out of the village—”

“You,” said Zair, “shut up. I’m taking a
big risk believing you, girl, after all your lies. You never gave us nothing
but grief, and if you brought this Bredon down on our backs, you
owe
us.
Now shut up and help me get ready.”

The thief opened her mouth, then closed
it. She swiped her ragged, sodden hair back from her forehead with one long
hand, and when she raised her head, her eyes were steady. “I still think you’re
all going to die, but tell me what you want me to do.”

#

The village lay in wet, wracked
stillness, runnels of muddy water twisting between the houses. The goats
huddled in their shed, not one of them visible outside. Faint stars glimmered
through the thinning clouds.

Zair could hear rough laughter and
hoofbeats on the coast road. Shadow hadn’t been lying after all.

“Are you sure it’s not over?” the thief
panted as she helped Zair wrestle the wet, reeking mass of a seine into
position. “The storm, I mean.”

“No. It’s coming back.”

As if summoned by her words, a low wind
keened through the village, an advance scout for the oncoming maelstrom.

Under Zair’s direction, Shadow hoisted
the net so that Zair could secure it to the corner of the last house with a few
deft twists of rope. Working together, the villagers had surrounded the village
with a hastily erected fence of the long nets that they used to fish for linget
in the marsh channels. The nets were strung between houses and privies, even
around the goat pen. It wasn’t a tall fence—no more than waist high on Shadow.

“This isn’t going to stop determined men
with swords, Zair, no matter how strong your knots are.”

“That’s not what it’s going to stop.”
Zair bit off a length of twine. This was the tricky part, and she didn’t have
much time to do it. “You’re about to find out what our knots can do, Shadow.”

“Dorsag,” the thief said.

Zair looked up at the bony, sharp-edged
face.

“My name. The one my mother gave me, I
mean. Even Bredon doesn’t know it. I told him I was called Lally.”

Zair jerked her head in a terse nod, and
said, “We’re going to kill these men, Dorsag. We have to. It’s them or us. If
this is another lie—if these are farmers you swindled—”

“They’re not. I swear it.” She paused,
and added, “Kill them? Really?”

“Are you changing your story now?”

“No. But... not all of them are like
Bredon. Some were my friends once.”

“Then give them a chance,” Zair said. “Same
one you got. If they lay their weapons down, they can come in. But go, be quick
about it. We’re running out of time.”

The wind had picked up, swirling in the
space between the houses. Zair could feel the strain on the knots, feel it in
her brittle old bones. This had been easier when she was young. She breathed
deeply, seeking calm. It didn’t do to rush knotwork, especially with this much
riding on it. Kneeling in the mud, she began working on a tangled mess of wet
twine.

Deke arrived, breathing hard. “Everything’s
ready. Linnie and Therin are waiting for your okay. What can I do?”

“Help me up,” she said absently, her
fingers and her mind busy with the complexity of her working. The nets hummed
with tension in the night. The moon was dark, the stars gone behind looming
clouds. All around her, she could feel the storm—a vast presence in the night,
neither friend nor foe, slightly bemused at this tiny village on the marsh,
this tiny woman who would attempt to buck its might for even a moment or two.

We only need a moment.

“The longer you hold it back...” Deke
murmured into her ear as he helped her around the perimeter of the village.
Tying knots. Everywhere, knots.

“I know.” It was a dangerous game she
played. But she had always been the best with knots, the best in generations.

The wind brought her a man’s voice, a
stranger’s. “Lally,” he said, and that voice crawled with a possessiveness that
turned Zair’s stomach. She risked dividing her attention, turning her head to
see Shadow—Dorsag—standing just inside the net fence. There must have been
thirty men and women massed on the other side, all on foot but for one mounted
on a shaggy moor stallion. The big man and the horse made the thief look even
more spindly than usual, despite her height.

“Bredon.” The thief’s wet coat slapped
her legs as the wind changed direction. “I’m supposed to tell you to surrender.”

Bredon laughed. “Sorry, what?”

Dorsag pointed past him. In the
ever-deepening gloom, Zair could no longer pick out men and women; all she could
see were the glints of weapons. “Lay down your swords and bows, and refuge is
yours. Eirin, are you still with this bunch? Glester! You always had more
brains than the rest of this lot put together. Any of you who trust me, come
quickly. Join me. Us.”

Bredon’s laugh rang out again. “Join you
and what? Die with these fish-eaters? You with the bow—shoot her.”

More than one “you” answered his
command, and Zair saw the flash of two arrows, one narrow and fletched, the
other a stubby crossbow bolt. Zair’s breath caught, but the net held true: the
arrows twanged off the air—she felt it, a frisson across her taut nerves—and
tumbled to the ground.

Silence held for an instant. Sweat
trickled down Zair’s face despite the night’s damp chill. Her heart was racing.
The tension of the knots thrummed in her.

“Surrender or these people will kill
you.” Dorsag’s voice was so soft that it could barely be heard above the rising
wind. “They know what you’ve done, what you’re capable of.”

No one moved. Then Bredon drew a long,
gleaming pistol from his belt, the first real one Zair had ever seen.

Deke’s hand closed over Zair’s clammy
one. “Enough time. We’re ready. Let it go.”

Zair drew a breath, enough to shout, “Now!”
Her voice was a thread of sound, but Deke bellowed for her, “Linnie, Therin! Do
it!”

Zair pulled the string, unraveling the
complex knotted structure in her hands. She felt the pent-up strain sing
through the nets. Felt the snap as it let go.

The longer you hold it back,
Deke
had said. And indeed, the storm’s ferocity had built like water behind a dam,
and it crashed down on the hill, seizing the village in its foaming embrace,
picking up the men outside the nets like leaves on floodwater. Deke pushed Zair
to the ground as the wave broke over them, and she dug her fingers into the
mud, holding fast to the twine like the lifeline it was.

#

“I really, truly cannot believe we’re
alive,” the thief said.

The storm had pounded the village all
night, and finally spent itself on the marsh and blew back out to sea, leaving
a fresh-washed morning sky behind. The apron of sand below the hill now pointed
eastward like a great, sweeping hook. Down on the beach, children scurried to
and fro in the morning sunshine, picking up driftwood for the cookfires and
taking the opportunity to search for treasures that might have washed ashore.

The sedges of the marsh lay flat and
mud-colored. The village was a wreck—thatch torn apart, shutters hanging loose,
gardens ruined—but it still stood.

Nothing remained of Bredon and his men.
Zair thought she saw a glint, here and there, among the shifting marsh
channels, where a sword or a breastplate might be half-buried in the mud. It
had been so after the smugglers came, though the villagers had called up their
own storm that time, and it hadn’t been so fierce.

Their deaths weighed on her. But she
felt worse about the poor horse. Unlike the people, it had no choice.

“Some of those waves looked higher than
this hill,” Shadow said.

“Prob’ly were. The ocean respects our
knots. We have an understanding.”

The thief stared at her. “Are you saying
the storm—what, bent
around
the village?”

Zair nodded. “Good way to put it.”

“That’s crazy.”

“It’s just a matter of—”

“Tying good knots, yes, I know.” The
thief shook her head. Her hair had dried in stiff spikes. “You people could
take over the world.”

Zair laughed. “Young people. Always
trying to capture the moon. Knots are very good for a few things, it’s true,
but useless for all else. Besides...” She let a smile peek through. “Who
wants
to own the world? It’s full of dangerous sorts, like that Bredon person.”

Dorsag sighed. She pulled the cord out
of her shirt and cupped the pendant in her hand. It was green as glass. “I wish
at least
one
of them...”

“They made their choice.”

“I know.” But she looked truly despondent
about it.
A thief,
Zair thought,
but not a killer.

“They didn’t believe me,” Dorsag said. “And
I can’t blame them; I don’t think
I
would have believed me if I hadn’t
seen a little of what you can do.”

“You can lead the goat to pasture, but
can’t make it graze. They made their choice. As did you.” Zair slapped the
thief’s bony shoulder and pointed up to the roof, where a mess of loose thatch
spilled over the edge. “Will you make yourself useful, or should we flap our
gums ‘til the next storm?”

Dorsag gripped the edge of the roof and
boosted herself up with the nimbleness of one who has climbed many rooftops
before. “Don’t think you’re getting another loop of rope around my wrist.”

“I untied you fair and square.” Zair
tilted her head back, looking up. “And you came back of your own free will. If
you want to leave, you can—though we might have to search you at the edge of
the village. On t’other hand, we can always use strong backs about.”

The thief stood on the wet thatch in the
sunshine, looking down. “This place doesn’t even have a teahouse, decent or
otherwise. Or a theatre. This is why I left the potato fields.”

“Thought you wanted to learn to tie
knots.”

Dorsag’s face lit up. “You’d teach me?”
Her eyes narrowed a bit. “You trust me?”

“Of course not, but I’m not getting
younger, and so far no one ‘round here has shown much skill for making truly
secure knots. Some do decently, but I could use someone with strong fingers who’s
willing to work hard. Don’t steal the silver and we’ll get on fine, Dorsag.”

“I’d really prefer Shadow, if you don’t
mind.”

Zair shrugged. “Nothing wrong with
Dorsag. Could be worse. There was a girl in my age-group named Loonwit.”

“
Why
?”

“Grandmother’s name.”