The Outskirter's Secret (58 page)

Bel twisted her hand around and clutched
Rowan's desperately, with fingers strong from years of wielding a
sword. She turned her gaze on Rowan, and the steerswoman saw the
look she had seen only once before on the Outskirter's face, when
she and Rowan had sat helplessly silent, listening to the approach
of a demon: terror.

And Rowan understood that here was the only
thing that her warrior friend feared: helplessness. When the demon
had approached, Bel could do nothing; she could not attack or
defend, but only wait for whatever fate would occur. And she could
not strike at these tornadoes. She could do nothing. Her skills
were useless, her will impotent, her own life, and the lives of her
comrades, completely out of her hands.

It became difficult to breathe, and Rowan
gasped through her open mouth. Her ears popped. The roof belled up,
taut against its braces. Light vanished—

—and returned. Rowan found herself braced
against the wall, her fingers driven into the earth. Against her
back, the wall itself was shaking.

And rapidly, so rapidly she could hardly
believe it, the scream faded.

The air became still. People slowly raised
their heads, gazing at each other in disbelief.

Chess pulled at Jaffry's arm. "Check
outside." She had to shake him to get him to heed; then he
recovered himself suddenly and hurried to obey.

Across the tent, Fletcher was seated upright,
shaking his head slowly; he was saying something, apparently one
single sentence, over and over. Rowan felt just as dazed and wished
she herself had something coherent to say, that perhaps could bear
infinite repetition. Beside her, Bel sat leaning slightly forward,
very still, and seeming very small. Rowan gripped the Outskirter's
shoulder. "Are you all right?"

Bel looked from side to side. "I'm alive,"
she began, as if it were the start of a longer statement; but no
other words followed.

Rowan waited, then nodded. All about, people
were stirring, tentatively, calling to each other, reassuring
themselves that they lived. Ignored, Fletcher sat alone, repeating
his sentence. Rowan crossed over to him.

Fletcher's guards had abandoned their duties,
more concerned with each other. Efraim was still huddled into a
ball, rocking; Garvin was holding him in his arms, stroking his
back, his own eyes squeezed shut tight. Orranyn was moving about,
checking the state of each of his warriors.

When Rowan reached Fletcher's side, he seemed
relieved to find someone to whom he could say his words. "I didn't
know."

"You've done what you could," she told him.
"Fletcher, you did everything you possibly could, and if we live,
it's entirely due to you."

He seemed not to hear her. "I didn't know,"
he repeated. Then, with a visible effort, he regathered himself,
speaking more cogently. "Rowan . . . I thought I was just
collecting information. I didn't know what it was used for, who
needed it. I didn't know it was for—for this . . ." And he looked
at the ceiling.

"You tried to help," she said. "To help
Kammeryn, the tribe, me. You watched when you could, warned when
you could, joined the warriors in defense . . ." She abruptly
recalled what Kammeryn had said: that the tribe of Face People who
had attacked Kammeryn's tribe had later been killed by Fletcher,
alone. "And . . ." An entire tribe, destroyed. It seemed an act of
typical wizardly cruelty; she could not reconcile it with her
recovered understanding of Fletcher's character. "How did you
destroy the Face People's tribe?" she asked.

Fletcher found the memory distressing. "The
link has a weapon in it . . ."

"A destructive spell?"

"Yes."

Rowan had had experience with destructive
spells. "Why didn't we hear it?" In the Inner Lands, the boy
Willam's destructive spell had made a sound like a thousand
thunders.

"It's silent." A different sort of magic. "It
spreads a sort of fire . . ."

"You burned them to death."

"Yes . . . I didn't want to . . . But they
would have attacked again. They had almost no herd. And they
couldn't leave, they were boxed in, and they didn't even know it.
Ella's tribe to the east, ours to the south, another northwest . .
. They would have hurt my people again; I couldn't let that
happen." The roof began to shudder, silently, then snapped and
settled into rhythm as the wind began to rise.

"You saw all that through the Guidestar?"
Rowan thought it strange, very strange that she should care at this
moment about any such distant thing as a Guidestar.

"Yes," Fletcher replied.

"Why didn't you see them before the attack?"
Just at the threshold of hearing, there came a distant rising tone,
joining the sound of the wind.

"I did." Thunder rolled briefly, distantly.
"That morning, during my report and reconnaissance. But I didn't
know who or what they were then; they just looked like a small
tribe. You don't understand, I can't—" He amended his words. "With
my link, I couldn't actually see them, not as if I were a bird. I
saw . . . notations, like on your charts. I could tell that they
were people, because they were arranged like a camped tribe, but
they weren't deployed like attackers, not when I looked. That
happened later . . ."

Rowan thought long; and as she did, the
rising tone became a far-off, approaching scream. "But this magic
weapon . . . You could have used it to stop the battle."

He closed his eyes. "Yes. And given myself
away. Anyone who saw would know I had magic. They'd assume I was a
wizard. I couldn't know how they'd react. And in my training . . .
the rules said to protect my cover, at any cost. If people see you
using magic, the simplest thing to do is kill the witnesses."

How many people might have been looking in
Fletcher's direction, Rowan could not guess. But she herself had
been at Fletcher's side.

He would have needed to kill her; and any
nearby warrior; and any relays watching; and any person to whom the
relays spoke. Kammeryn. Perhaps the entire tribe.

In that frozen moment, with the Face People
bearing down on him, with his link in one hand and his sword in the
other, Fletcher had been faced with a choice. And he had abandoned
his magic powers, taken up his sword, and thrown himself into a
battle that he was certain he could not possibly survive.

He had been willing to die rather than harm
Kammeryn's people. "That's why you didn't use the spell to help
your walkabout partner," she said.

He turned toward her; but his eyes were
blind, his face suddenly, shockingly empty. His mouth moved once.
"Mai," he said, but too quietly for her to hear the sound.

It was the expression she had seen
before—emptiness, a silence of body and mind. But now she
understood it. "Fletcher," she said, and of itself, her hand
reached toward his shoulder.

But he pulled back violently, twisting away
from her hand as if he could not at that moment bear a single
touch. The mask of emptiness writhed on his face, shattered, and
fell away, and for the first time Rowan could see what he had kept
hidden behind it: it was horror.

"Dear god, Rowan," he said. "It happened so
fast." The terror on his face was so great that it drained all
emotion from his voice, his body, so that he was sitting perfectly
still, speaking almost inaudibly, and rapidly, without will or
control. "I heard her shout," he said in that quiet voice, with
that face of horror, "and I ran to her, and then—"

"Fletcher, don't . . ." She reached toward
him again, but slowly. "That's past, you couldn't help it."

He did not hear her. "And then she was
screaming, and when I cut down that
thing
—" His voice came alive again with the saying
of the word, with the force of the memory, and his body twisted, as
if trying to escape the very words he spoke—

Rowan froze.

"And then," he went on, his voice becoming
wild, "and then it was thrashing on the ground, burning, between
us, and she was standing there, blood all down one arm,
looking
at me, and the look on her
face, and she was saying, over and over, '
What
are you?
' " He jerked once, as if from a sword thrust,
and wrapped his arms about himself. "She was shouting at me,
'
What are you?
' "

He quieted, slowly, shuddering. Rowan tried
to speak his name, failed; she could make no sound.

"And I," he continued, in the empty voice
again; and she wished that he would stop, stop now—"and I didn't
know what to do. I just, I couldn't think, and it happened so
damned
fast
. . .

"And then, after . . . when I saw . . . I
wanted to die. And I thought, I'll just go away, I'll just walk
away and die . . ."

Rowan spoke at last; but now it was against
her will. "You killed her."

He looked up at her, into her eyes, and he
seemed puzzled. "And I walked. I think I walked forever. I didn't
die. And then, somehow, I was walking back." He reached out and
clutched her wrist, held it tight. "Mai was gone. But if I
died—Rowan, don't you see that if
I
died, it would be like losing them
all
. . ."

"Fletcher." But it was not Rowan who spoke.
Fletcher was slow in comprehending, slow in turning to the
speaker.

Jann was a shadow, a quiet voice. "Fletcher,"
she said, "your life is mine."

And it was done quickly.

T
he tornadoes
in the west did not strike the tribe but slowly worked their way
northeastward and dissipated. The tribe lasted through two
tornadoes that writhed toward them from the east, through hail,
debris, and through three full days of trailing high winds at mere
hurricane force.

The weather never ceased; but there came a
time at last when it slacked, when the boiling clouds above emitted
no lightning. And hesitantly, cautiously, small groups of people
emerged from the shelters to make their reports to Kammeryn. Chess
stayed at his side, urging him to eat when he forgot to, to sleep
when necessary.

The tribe had lost one shelter. Rowan herself
went out to view it. It had become a hole in the ground, with a
ten-foot length of lichen-tower core wedged inside. The tent skin,
the poles, the internal and external bracing wires, and all the
people who had been in the shelter were gone. Rowan stood gazing at
it, wondering stupidly how Outskirters would handle funerals in
which the corpses had already been cast across the land by the wind
itself.

There were other dead. A warrior had been
killed when a stave was pulled by its line out of the earth behind
her, striking and crushing her skull. A mertutial had died at the
height of the first tornado, apparently from terror. One young boy
succumbed to exhaustion and pneumonia, contracted after one side of
the children's shelter tore, letting the driving rain soak all the
inhabitants.

And there was Dane.

Zo and Quinnan had returned two days after
the last tornado; they had been sheltering among the rocks in the
ridge to the north. They were wet, half-starved, and at the end of
their strength, and they were carrying the girl between them.

Dane was unable to walk, could not control
her own body. She trembled and spasmed constantly; she recognized
no one.

Zo and Quinnan, going against Kammeryn's
command, had dared to enter the near edge of the zone of heat. But
the air was not hot, not even warm. Instead, they began to feel
ill, first Zo, then Quinnan; nausea, fits of trembling, blinding
pains in the head. They struggled onward and found Dane, crawling
toward them; of Leonie there was no sign.

Dane's hands and knees were raw and
blistered. When Zo and Quinnan bent to raise her, they found that
it was the ground itself that was warm, some of the stones hot, and
that the grass was almost brittle, as if drying from within, in a
slow, flameless heat.

Dane lasted one day in the camp; Mander could
do nothing for her. Zo's headaches did not abate, and she sat
huddled in pain, Quinnan caring for her, never leaving her
side.

And with the weather slackened, the people
had time to deal with their dead.

Rowan and Bel stood out on the slope, gazing
across the land. The wind was stiff and steady, southwest and
northeast. "Fletcher said it would change," Rowan said. The weather
was following the course he had predicted. It felt strange to her,
as if his remembered words somehow controlled instead of reflected
events, as if he were perhaps still present, waiting to tell her
more, his long form standing just behind her, just past the edge of
her sight.

"He's gone," Bel said.

"Yes . . ."

Bel took three aimless steps, looking down,
looking at the sky. "We need him and now he's gone." Her voice was
expressionless.

Rowan understood that Bel's distress had a
different source from her own. She roused herself from her
thoughts. "He helped us, yes. If he were here, he would keep
helping us . . ."

"He knew magic. We need magic."

"Perhaps not . . ."

"We're useless without it." Bel suddenly took
five strong paces forward, spun back to the steerswoman, and
stretched her arms out to indicate the entire visible world. She
stood so, with the rolling roof of clouds above her; with the earth
torn in freakish lines from horizon to horizon, where tornadoes had
riven it; with fragments of lichen-towers, fragments of goats,
splintered bushes, redgrass crushed flat, all about her, a hole
that had once contained human beings at her feet. "Look at it,
Rowan!" she shouted. "Look!"

Rowan looked—at all of it. Bel dropped her
arms as if she had not the strength to hold them up, sat as if she
could no longer stand. Rowan went to her side.