The Outskirter's Secret (7 page)

Around the circle, puzzled faces stared, pale
in the shuddering yellow light.

Rowan sat frozen in disbelief. "Bel, are you
insane?"

"No!" Bel whirled back toward her. "No, this
is too much!"

Rowan found herself at Bel's side, inside the
circle of faces, one hand half reaching out to restrain her friend,
held back only by the knowledge that such an attempt would be very
unwise. She pleaded. "No, it's a misunderstanding, it's a
difference of opinion—Bel, you can't mean to fight all of
them!"

"I don't have to. I fight one, that's law."
Bel's hand swept the circle again. "Choose your champion, if you
have one, if there's one among you can stand on two feet alone!"
The warriors had not moved.

"You insult my customs," Bel spat out, "you
insult my people, my tribe, my blood, my heroes and forebears. You
insult the Outskirts, you insult its air with your fetid carrion
breath!" She whirled in the flickering light, confronting the
impassive faces, a wild storm awaiting release. "
Choose
, you vermin, you rodents, you
dung-worms!"

From his position among the seated warriors,
Hanlys cleared his throat experimentally. "Pardon me, lady?"

Rowan could scarcely believe that she was
being addressed. "Yes?"

He gestured. "We don't need this."

"Excuse me?"

He indicated Bel, somewhat apologetically.
"Can't you control your friend?"

Rowan discovered that now it was she who was
insulted. "She's not my servant," she said, voice flat, "and she's
not my dog, either. She's a free woman and a warrior." The
steerswoman was suddenly, coldly calm. She stepped back to her
place among the warriors and sat. "I won't interfere with your
traditions." She said to Bel, "I wish you good luck."

A single "Ha!" expressed Bel's opinion of
luck.

Murmurs passed between the faces, and Hanlys
looked even more uncomfortable. "Well." He caught Rowan's eye and,
with a little shrug, rose. "I'm sorry for this, lady."

"No need. It's between you and her."

He winced. "Not quite." His gaze flicked
around the circle, and he made a rapid series of small
gestures.

Whether Bel understood the signals or merely
recognized their import, Rowan could not tell, but the Outskirter
suddenly spun and reached for her weapon. Then all warriors were on
their feet, and one pair of hands clutched for her sword arm,
another stopped her left hand an instant before it reached the
hilt, and someone grabbed her from behind with an arm around her
throat, lifting her from her feet. Bel thrashed wildly, kicking
out, and connected with one man's chest, another's stomach, and
then disappeared in a mass of struggling forms.

None had drawn a weapon.

Rowan found herself standing alone, aghast,
as a writhing crowd worked its way away from the fireside, out
between the standing tents, off toward the edge of camp. Bel's was
the only voice raised, in furious, inarticulate shouts. Then all
vanished from sight.

Rowan followed the mob to the limit of the
encampment. There it struggled to a halt, reconfigured, and a
thrashing thing was expelled into the darkness. It came back
instantly, flailing wildly: Bel, striking out with both fists
toward any person within reach. She received the same treatment as
before, as both arms were captured, by several people, and rendered
harmless. She was turned about forcibly, and again ejected. She
came back. The process was repeated.

"Lady? Rowan?"

Rowan turned. Jermyn stood before her, one
arm looped through the straps of two packs: Rowan's and Bel's. In
his other hand was Bel's sword, now sheathed.

He glanced once at the melee and had the
grace to look deeply ashamed. "You'd better take these."

"Will they hurt her?" Rowan almost believed
it might be better if they tried to.

"No. You both helped us. But they won't let
her come back."

Rowan took the equipment, looking up into a
face made large, eyes made small, by tears. She suddenly wished not
to leave him here, among false comrades who mocked his pain. She
wanted to ask him to come away.

But before she could speak, he stepped back.
"Thank Bel for the song," he said, and was gone.

Rowan made her way to the edge of camp and
circled around the mob. Bel stood, darkness at her back, frustrated
for the dozenth time. She shook with fury, eyes full of murder.

"Bel."

The Outskirter turned to her with a choked
shriek of hatred. Rowan fell back a step, then recovered, and stood
quietly, holding out the pack and sword.

Bel was a moment in recognizing her friend;
then she took the gear without a word, spun away, and tracked off
into the night, leaving Rowan to follow. Behind, the warriors
dispersed, one by one.

"
H
ow safe is
it, traveling in the dark like this?"

Bel was long in answering. "Not at all."

They had walked some time in silence. The
raider tribe's camp was already two miles behind, hidden by low
brush and a small copse of spruce. Looking back, Rowan saw no
light; the fire was either blocked by trees, or had been finally
extinguished.

Before them, the landscape was a vague
starlit sweep of hilly meadow, with a dark loom of forest to the
north, smaller blots of trees scattered to the east. Rowan followed
Bel, a half step behind and to the Outskirter's left. The
steerswoman realized that they had exactly reversed their usual
positions. In the Inner Lands, Rowan had always led, a half step
ahead, on the right.

"Do you know this area?"

Bel replied with an expressionless "No."

Rowan's step faltered. "How are you guiding
us?"

"By my ears." The Outskirter paused, and both
women listened.

A breeze rose, and the meadow grass hissed
and visibly undulated, rolling black shadows like fleeing beasts.
Behind, the spruce and brush gave out muted rattles, branches
cushioned by leaves and green needles. Ahead: a series of harsh
high clatterings, like brittle brush bare of leaves. Three sources
of this sound: one nearby to the right, one farther away and
straight ahead, one distant and slightly to the left. When the wind
shifted, Rowan could hear from the forest to the north the sound of
water over stones.

Eventually, Rowan asked, "What does a goblin
sound like?" Near the raiders' familiar fire, the threat had seemed
abstract, unlikely; here, nearly blind, in unknown territory with
both Guidestars weirdly shifted west, she found the possibility
disturbingly believable.

Bel provided the information reluctantly.
"Alone, like a man walking quickly." She led on, angling to the
right. "In a group, they call to each other." She stumbled on an
unseen tussock, and Rowan managed to catch at her arm and prevent
her from falling.

"What sort of call?"

Bel recovered, readjusted her pack, and
continued. "A sort of rasping squeal, and a rattle." A pause. "I'd
imitate it, but I might draw one."

Rowan drew up short. "Not that rattle we're
moving toward?"

"No. That's tanglebrush."

The Outskirter was disinclined to converse.
Rowan left her friend to silence, and the two continued together
into the quiet night.

Informed that Bel was depending on hearing,
Rowan did the same, and at once began feeling more and more at
ease. This was not yet the dangerous, unknown Outskirts; it was
hill and grass and forest such as she had walked on and through all
her adult life. Her night-traveling skills reasserted themselves,
and she began listening for movement, not of goblins, but of
animals large and small, of the echoless loom of unseen bushes, and
of stealthily approaching strangers. She heard the call of a
nightjar, the rustling of field mice, and once, in a lull of the
breeze, sensed the sudden breathless hush of owl's wings above. The
rattling tanglebrush was a tantalizing oddity, and she struggled
internally, resisting the impulse to approach one and kindle a
small fire by which to examine it.

A chorus of yelps rose in the distance, and
Bel startled. "What was that?"

"Foxes." Rowan discovered that without
noticing, the women had exchanged positions: Rowan was again
leading, comfortably. "They like this sort of land." In Bel's
months of traveling the Inner Lands alone, she could easily have
missed that particular sound. "They'll stay away. They don't like
humans."

Bel made no reply. They walked on, as the
land began to slope.

Rowan wished to find something to say, some
way to remove from Bel the dishonor of the raider tribe's
treatment. It seemed impossible.

She searched and considered—and soon found
herself mired in speculations based on incomplete knowledge of
Outskirter traditions and codes. She tried to form an analogy by
reference to Inner Lands groups who claimed to hold honor highly:
certain cadres of soldiers, highly placed aristocrats, priests of
some sects. Nothing seemed applicable.

Then she tried again on a simpler level, and
realized suddenly that Bel, through no fault of her own, had been
made to look a fool in front of a friend. "I don't think much of
those raiders' manners," Rowan said, spontaneously. To herself, the
comment seemed inane.

But Bel relaxed somewhat. "And that," she
said aggrievedly, "is what you Inner Lands think Outskirters are."
The matter was closed. She turned to practical concerns. "Do you
have enough water, or should we try to find a brook to camp
by?"

Rowan began to feel better. She elbowed her
shoulder-slung water bag, and it emitted a jolly little gurgle. "I
have enough."

"Then let's stop here. I only wanted to put
some distance between us and that mob. They might change their
minds and turn on us."

It seemed unlikely. "All right." Rowan
paused, and tried to scan the area. The ground had flattened again,
and was clear enough for their purposes. Only a few low bushes
sprouted in the darkness, one of them a tanglebrush clattering with
a quiet, brittle noise in the now-light breeze. The women unslung
their packs and set to flattening a section of the knee-deep
greengrass.

As they arranged their camp, another Inner
Lands danger came to mind. "The villagers mentioned occasional
wolves," Rowan said.

"And a fire would keep them away. Rowan, I
won't have a fire here."

"You'd rather meet a wolf than a goblin?"

"Of course." There was a grin in the
Outskirter's voice, and she once again became completely herself.
"I've never met a wolf." She settled her gear with a thump of her
pack at the head of her bedroll. "But just in case, we'll sleep in
shifts. You first."

The Outskirts had no border.

Despite the knowledge, Rowan had more than
half expected to be awakened to a wild endless sweep of redgrass
rolling to the limits of the horizon, cheerfully spotted with white
goats—and likely to suddenly sprout an infestation of bizarre
creatures, or a shouting horde of sword-waving barbarians.

But the pale gray light of the cloudy morning
showed terrain no different from that of the Inner Lands. The
dewless meadow was greenly carpeted with clover and one of the
various sorts of greengrass called "panic" by common folk. The land
remained flat to the east, grew hillier to the south. North, the
forest sent a long arm eastward, and shielding her eyes against the
sun as it rose into the clouds, Rowan discerned the woods curving
south again in the distance.

But close beside Rowan's resting place stood
the intriguing tanglebrush. She pulled herself from her cloak and
bedding to examine it.

Rising as high as her waist, its black
branches, randomly right-angled, doubled back and forth on
themselves, creating a seemingly impenetrable mazy dome. The
outermost twigs bore flat, narrow leaves as long as her hand, gray
on one side, blue-black on the other. Each leaf stiffly presented
its dark face to the rising sun. Beneath the edge of the dome, as
if in its shelter, grew a patch of the vermin weed redgrass.

"Do the leaves move as the sun moves?" The
leaves of some plants in the Inner Lands did so.

Bel's mood had repaired itself in the night.
Now she was occupied with rolling her piebald cloak and securing it
to the outside of her pack; the day was already warm. "Yes. Don't
put your hand in there. There are thorns, and the sap is
poisonous."

Rowan had been about to do exactly that, and
drew back sharply. She would have to learn to investigate more
cautiously than was her usual habit. They were going into Bel's
country, and anything unfamiliar should be checked against Bel's
knowledge.

"Are you ready?" Bel had already shouldered
her pack.

Rowan was dismayed. "No breakfast?"

"Eat as you walk." She passed the steerswoman
some hardbread and cheese. "We'll take a long rest at noon, with a
fire for cooking, if you like. And you can write in your book
then." Rowan was accustomed to recording her day's observations in
her logbook in the evening, by firelight. That would have to
change.

"A moment." Rowan retrieved her own felt
cloak from her bedroll, shook it, folded it, and stowed it in her
pack, using its cushioning to prop her tubular map case more
securely. Hesitating, she uncapped the case and pulled one chart
from its center, the one she and Hanlys had amended. She unrolled
it and held it up to compare with the landscape around her. Bel
moved closer.

Rowan mused over the new notations. "If we
travel due east, we'll cross through some forest before we reach
the veldt." This was the name the Outskirters gave for the wide
plains of redgrass. Beyond, where blackgrass predominated, was the
prairie. "We can reach it in less than three weeks."

Bel scanned the landscape. "I don't know
about that. We can travel quickly if we travel alone and don't meet
any trouble. But we ought to try to stay with the next tribe we
meet, even though it slows us down. The land isn't very bad
here—it's mostly Inner Lands and not much Outskirts, but that will
change. It'll be safer, and easier, to travel in a group."