The Steerswoman's Road (16 page)

Henra nodded to Rowan. With all eyes on her, Rowan pulled
out the little leather sack, lifted its string over her head, and opened it. “Here’s
the other new variable in the equation,” Henra said.

Hugo took the jewel and scrutinized it while the Prime recounted
Rowan’s story with perfect accuracy.

“Wizard’s make, for certain,” he said when she finished. He
turned it over in his hands again. “I can’t think of any jeweler’s process that
could do this. Sarah—” He passed the jewel down across the table to the elderly
steerswoman on Arian’s left.

She peered at it closely. “It’s built in layers—the
silver-colored backing, then the gem. The lines are etched, so that the metal
lies both on the surface and into it.” She scraped the edge of the fragment
with one fingernail. “The last surface is like very thin glass, but no glass
can be made that thin. Strange texture ...” She passed it diagonally.

The next woman was pale and delicately beautiful, the only
sign of her age the silver glittering in her ebony hair. She looked at the
jewel carefully, then closed her eyes, rubbing her thumb across the smooth
surface. “Oily ...” She looked at it again. “It’s made of oil, somehow, or has
oil in it. If fine olive oil were perfectly clear, and somehow made solid, it
might be like this.”

Sarah took the jewel again, cleared a space in the center of
the table, and placed it there, standing to get a better vantage. The other
steerswomen shifted and leaned closer. “That’s a good point. You can’t polish
anything to this smoothness. I believe that top surface was poured on as a
liquid, then solidified, somehow.”

“Magically,” Bel put in confidently.

“Perhaps,” Sarah admitted.

The Prime spoke to Bel. “May we see your belt?”

The Outskirter stood to remove it, and it was passed around.

“They were all found in the same place, far in the
Outskirts,” Rowan explained. “It’s the largest concentration I’ve heard about;
I think something could be learned by going there, to see.”

“With a wizard on your trail,” Berry observed. Josef winced.

“One or more.” Every face turned to Hugo. “Think for a moment
about Jannik. His control over the dragons isn’t complete, but it’s almost so.
Could another wizard send a spell to break it? Sometimes one or two nestlings
can escape and cause trouble, especially the tiniest ones. But Saranna’s Inn
was—where, the center of town?”

“Not far from the harbor,” Rowan said. “Tilemaker’s Street.”

“And the mud flats are at the edge of town. That’s seven
miles they had to travel, through the streets—no, isn’t there a shallow gully
that runs near Tilemaker’s Street?”

“That’s right.”

“And how many dragons were there?”

Rowan counted. “Seven, that I saw myself. More outside,
which I didn’t see. Someone reported fifty, but the layman’s eyes can fool him,
in emergencies. At a guess, at least twenty-five, total.”

Hugo shook his head fractionally. “I don’t believe that can
happen.” Bel looked around the now-silent table. “Then Jannik was in on it,
Rowan guessed.”

“I saw it was a possibility,” Rowan said.

Hugo was deep in thought. “Two wizards, cooperating across a
line of mutual hatred ...”

“We need to decide what to do,” Henra said.

Arian was surprised. “Decide? One decides when one has options.
Where are there options here?”

“Are there none?” She concentrated on Arian. “Very well,
what do you see happening next?”

“Rowan continues her investigations. She’ll have to be very
alert, if she’s attracted the wizards’ attentions ..” He trailed off. “But if
they’re determined, they’ll get her eventually.”

“Then we must make this move more quickly,” Sarah put in. “If
we
all
work on it, and if we send out word to those on the road—”

Berry interrupted. “Then we each become the same threat that
Rowan is. And, collectively, the entire order of Steerswomen becomes a threat.”

“But if we work fast enough—”

“How fast is fast enough?” Keridwen challenged. “It can’t be
done instantaneously.”

Watching the Prime, Rowan realized that Henra saw an answer,
but was patiently waiting for the rest of the steerswomen to duplicate her
reasoning; she wanted the chain of thought to be clear in their minds, wanted
it to be each person’s own possession.

“What is the most basic statement of the problem?” Rowan
asked, half to herself, musing.

That was an often-repeated phrase in the early education of
a steerswoman-in-training, and conversation stopped in surprise at Rowan’s
presenting it to steerswomen of such advanced experience. But Berry, not many
years from her own traineeship, caught the mood. “Investigating the jewels is
dangerous.”

Henra encouraged them. “Two options, on this level.”

“Work in danger,” Rowan said, “or abandon the investigation.”

Response was immediate, from several corners. “We mustn’t
abandon it.”

“We have to learn all we can.”

“We can’t let the wizards rule us.”

“No one controls us.”

The Prime nodded. “That choice is rejected. We work in danger.
The options are two ...”

Keridwen considered. “Accept danger, or change the situation
...”

“Accepting the danger is accepting death—and incidentally,
an end to any investigating,” someone noted.

“The first choice is rejected. How can we change the situation?”
Henra prompted.

“Find the source of the danger and counter it,” another
steers-woman offered.

“The source of the danger is the wizards,” Hugo noted. “We
can’t counter them.”

“No,” Rowan realized. “The source is their knowledge of our
actions.”

There was a silence. Bel looked around the table in
perplexity. Annoyed, she said, “It’s obvious. You have to work in secret. Why
is that so hard to see?”

“Because it is so hard to accept,” Henra replied.

“It is absolutely opposite to everything we do and believe
in,” Hugo expanded.

She would have to deny information, Rowan realized. She
would have to refuse questions, or—worse yet—give false answers.

Henra surveyed every face around the table, then spoke carefully.
“Rowan would have to travel to the Outskirts under an assumed identity. No one
must know who she is, what she seeks, or that she’s a steerswoman.”

No one spoke, and Bel looked at them in confusion. “But what’s
the problem?”

Abruptly, Rowan said, “I won’t do it.” Faces turned to her. “Lady,
I understand, truly I do,” she continued, half pleading, “but I can’t agree.
There must be some other way. To lie, to walk the earth
lying ...
Humankind
needs truth. We all know that; we need it like air and water and food, to
survive, to function in the world ... I’d be like a poison, twisting things
everywhere I went,
hurting
people.” She laid her hands against her
cheeks and shook her head. “No.”

Henra took it all in, considering. “Arian? Would you do it?”

“Me?” He looked up, surprised. “Well, I don’t like the whole
idea, but I do think it’s the best solution. And someone has to do it.” Then he
smiled. “Oh, you’re clever, Henra. Most of the folk don’t even know there are
steersmen among the steerswomen. I’d never be suspected. But when it comes down
to the actual doing of the thing ...” He thought. “I feel much as Rowan does. I
think it would ... pain me. And my work here ...” He sighed. “Try to find
someone else. Please, exhaust every possibility, and if you find no one, then
yes.”

Henra nodded, then looked to her left. “Berry?”

She was startled. “What?”

“Would you do it?”

She stared around in stunned disbelief. “Me?” Then, slowly,
she said, “Yes ... yes, send me.” She spoke to Henra, her voice urgent. “I’ll
do it. I’ll do anything. I’ll lie a thousand times. I’ll steal if you ask it.
Anything! Please, send me ...” She gazed up into the sky, her dim eyes bright
with tears. “On the road, one last time ...”

“She’s blind,” Sarah protested.

Berry turned on her. “I’m not blind, not yet! I can see
shapes and colors. I won’t walk into a tree; I won’t fall off the edge of the
road.” She addressed them all. “And I know those roads, and I can read a map,
held close.”

“But she can’t observe,” Arian said. “And she couldn’t spot,
say, a jewel imbedded in a cliff. In new territory she could get lost.” The
Prime said nothing; she was looking at Josef.

He nodded slowly, then turned to his wife, taking both her
hands. “When the time comes for eyes, you’ll have mine.”

“You’d go with me?”

“No.” He laughed a little. “I’d stay with you, wherever in
the world you may be. You and me, we’ll walk under the stars together.”

She touched his face and moved close to study his
expression. Then she leaned her bowed head against his shoulder.

Josef’s eyes met Henra’s, and his face was full of calm
entreaty.

Henra spoke. “Josef is not a steersman, but with Berry to interpret
what he saw, something could be learned. Perhaps not enough, but something. And
no one would guess that she was a steerswomen.

“Rowan.”

Rowan turned to the Prime.

“You’re still the best choice,” Henra said. “You’re familiar
with the jewels, you’re highly observant, flexible and imaginative in thought.
We would learn the most, if you were the one to go.” She held up her hand. “I understand
your disagreement. But I want you to consider this: It will be done. Won’t you
help us do it the best way we can?”

The Prime stood. “Don’t answer. Please think. We’ll all
speak again this evening.” The chairs shuffled, and the steerswomen dispersed
one by one, until there was only Bel, watching Rowan, and Rowan, silently
watching Josef whispering gentle words to Berry.

At last Rowan rose and walked away.

“I don’t see what the problem is.”

They were walking down the winding dirt path that led from
the Archives to the riverside below. Oak trees surrounded them, gnarled roots
invading the edges of the path.

“Don’t you want to find out about these jewels?” Bel continued.
“Yes. But I’m just not willing to lie.”

Bel snapped a twig she was carrying and tossed the pieces
into the underbrush. “I don’t understand you. You were willing to learn about
them, even if it put you in danger. But you won’t do a simple thing like lying.”

Rowan felt a return of the sudden, sharp need that had sent
her out of the stone walls of the Archives, a need for a sweep of air that knew
no obstructions, for the unbounded sky above her. She walked a little faster,
to escape the net of tree branches overhead. “It’s not such a simple thing.”
Of its own accord, a part of her began trying to formulate an explanation, a
calm steerswoman’s explanation; but the part of her that held the information
for that answer was churning with confused emotion.

“Ever since I became a steerswoman—no,” she stopped, surprised.
“Ever since I was a child ...” Her voice trailed off, her mind sifting through
memories like hands sifting through chaff, seeking a single grain of wheat.

When had it happened, when had she learned to care what was
true and what was not? Children lied, they all did, and ranks of casual lies
crowded into her thoughts. No, I didn’t drop the eggs. No, I didn’t tell
Father. Yes, I finished all my work.

One single lie stood in high relief, not a great lie, but
one that had lasted long into her adolescence. Periodically, she would leave
the house and fields, taking some small bit of food, and make the long trek to
the farthest of the funeral groves, the last bit of green before the desert
took true possession of the land. She would explain that she was going to visit
her uncle’s tree, and the family would say quietly to each other, “Poor Rowan,
his death affected her so badly.” But it was not true. She went from a need to
see something other than the house, the yard, that dusty path leading to the
town of Umber. She knew everything in her world, knew it too well, and there
was nothing more that her mind or heart could do with it.

But north ... Past the groves, there was land no hands had
touched. Raw earth, lacking only water, fertilization, and seed. It waited
there, waited out the centuries for the slow spread of humankind. It was
emptiness to the limits of the sky. At last that view, too, became familiar,
but she still returned, without clearly knowing why.

She needed to see different things, change in the land and
in the faces of people. But there was a stronger need, one she discovered the
day that Keridwen had come to Umber in her own travels. Rowan discovered that
the steerswoman knew things, and speaking to her, she realized that there was
another landscape, one to be traveled endlessly, the limits of which she could
never exhaust.

So Rowan and Keridwen had sat together late into the night,
Rowan asking first about places, then about people, then about the ideas of
people, then about the idea of ideas ... And Keridwen’s answers had grown
richer and deeper, as her expression changed from indulgence, to surprise, to
interest.

Sometime near midnight Rowan had realized that the aspect of
the discussion had changed to that of a conversation between equals; not equals
of knowledge or of experience, but of method of thought. They shared a perspective,
a deeply rooted way of approaching life. The night ended with Keridwen telling
her of the Academy to take place in Wulfshaven some four years from that time.
Rowan spent those four years learning to read and write, to do sums, and
scrupulously attempting to chart the land she knew, in the hopes of gaining
some skill for her training to come.

She had spent her life alone in her strangeness, and had met
only one other person like herself. When she joined the Academy, she was like
an exile who had returned home.

Looking around, Rowan discovered that she and Bel had arrived
at the riverbank and were seated on a rotting log near its edge. The Wulf
spread out before them, flat and serene. A thin haze of clouds was moving in
from the west, and high above, a mere dark speck, a hawk hung motionless.