The Steerswoman's Road (20 page)

The sudden change in their mood made him no less uncomfortable.
“No,” he admitted, studying each of them in turn. Something in Rowan’s watching
and waiting expression made him amend his statement. “That is, perhaps. If I
caught him by surprise. But I can’t count on that. And I’d never get him alone.
I don’t want to hurt anyone else.” He spoke with intensity. “That’s his way,
not mine. I’ve never used it to hurt anyone.”

“Except yourself,” Bel pointed out.

He was embarrassed. “I don’t think that counts.”

“It’s not a game, and no one’s counting,” Rowan said. “Abremio
can do as he pleases.” If Willam did join the ranks of the wizards, Rowan
suspected that he would soon learn to do as they did.

“But—they’re not all like him!”

Rowan gestured vaguely; it seemed to her that it was only a
matter of degree. But she admitted, “He’s the worst of them.”

“Stealing women?” Bel asked. “What does he do with them?”

“Children,” Rowan corrected. “Of both genders. And no one
knows.” Before leaving the Archives, she had spent two intense hours with Hugo,
as he briefed her on the known details of the six major wizards. Hugo had
learned in his own travels that Abremio occasionally sent a pair of soldiers
to confiscate an infant or a young child from its family. It occurred rarely
enough to seem a unique event to the folk involved, yet often enough to form a
habit recognizable to someone who observed widely. “Was there something
different about your sister?” Rowan asked Will. Often, though not exclusively,
that was the case.

He was puzzled. “No ... small for her age, perhaps. She
spoke early and walked late, that’s all. Why do you ask?”

But to answer would be to admit a larger scope of knowledge
than she was supposed to possess. As had often happened on this journey, she
found nothing she could safely say, and so said nothing. It was the worst
sensation, to close the lid on her knowledge, a wrenching unpleasantness. She
set her mouth in a grim line to keep from speaking and looked away, trying to
control her instincts.

“I wish you wouldn’t do that!”

She turned back and found Willam glaring at her in fury.

“You—you treat me like I’m stupid, or like I’m nothing. But
I can figure things out for myself. I know that you’re both spies, from a Red
wizard.”

Bel and Rowan exchanged a startled glance, then Rowan seized
the idea and turned it over and over in her mind.

It was the perfect answer. It explained all their actions:
their original deception, their reaction to Will’s claims of magic, their attack
on him, their unwillingness to explain themselves. Will had assumed that they
served a Red wizard because of their fear of Blue Abremio.

They did not have to lie at all; it was deception by
silence. Without a word passing between them, Rowan and Bel agreed on their
new identities.

As spies, they would hardly admit to being spies. They both
sat simply looking at Willam, waiting for him to realize that. Eventually he
did, and grudgingly let his temper cool.

“We’re not enemies,” he pointed out. “I hate Abremio, I don’t
want anything to do with any Blue wizard. I’m looking for a Red. So, we’re on
the same side.”

“It would be a good idea if you forgot that we’re anything
but a merchant and a mercenary,” Bel said. Rowan could not help but smile; the
statement was perfectly true on every level, yet served only to reinforce the
credibility of their new deception. Even her smile, she realized, added to the
effect.

“I won’t give you away,” Will assured Bel, and included Rowan
in his glance. “But, well ... maybe we can help each other.” Bel looked at
Rowan. “It might be a good idea ...”

Rowan’s humor vanished. “I don’t like it.”

“But if his magic is any good—”

“We don’t know that it is.” Rowan was reluctant to have anything
at all to do with magic, but as the supposed servant of a wizard, she could not
admit to that. She hoped Bel could follow her reasoning without prompting.

But Bel turned back to Willam. “Show us this magic, then,”
she suggested.

The boy hesitated. “But you don’t want people to notice us ...”

“And it would attract attention?” Rowan asked.

He nodded. “It’s rather loud, most of the time.”

“You can’t do it quietly? Put a spell of silence on it?” Bel
wondered. “There’s still a lot about it that I can’t control.” He rubbed his
damaged right hand, an unconscious, musing gesture.

“What does it do?” she asked. “What do you use it for?”

He looked a little sheepish. “I can dig wells. And help
clear boulders and stumps from new farmland.”

“The boulders vanish?”

“No ...” He searched for words. “Sometimes they break apart.
Sometimes they just ... leave. Very fast.”

“How is that dangerous?”

He looked at her darkly. “It’s not good to get in the way.”

“I believe that’s true of every sort of magic,” Rowan said.

But Bel was delighted. “It sounds very useful,” she said,
ignoring Rowan’s interjection. “I think this is a good meeting. I’m sure we can
help each other.”

“No!”

Bel and William looked at Rowan, startled.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea at all.” She wanted to say:
If the wizards are ignoring their own lines to cooperate against us, if every
wizard is our enemy, then we do not want one of their fledglings at our side.
We don’t know enough about them; we don’t know why they act as they do. This
boy wants to learn their ways, and their ways are all against us. We would
never know when he might turn.

She could say none of that. All she could say to Bel, in Willam’s
presence, was: “Think about it.”

Bel shook her head, a broad emphatic gesture. “If you find a
perfectly good sword by the side of the road, you don’t throw it away.”

“What if you suspect it’s cursed?”

Bel replied, stressing each word, “You use what comes to
hand.” Will nodded, watching Rowan for a response.

Rowan took a breath, trying to calm herself. She turned to
Willam. “And how would we help you?”

“You take me with you,” he said. “And when we return to your
master, you tell him about me.”

“A recommendation?”

He nodded.

“And what makes you think we carry any influence?”

“Perhaps you don’t. But it’s better than me just showing up
on his doorstep. And if I really do prove myself ...”

“Where’s the harm?” Bel asked. Rowan saw that Bel was trying
to suppress amusement. “If we have the chance, we let it be known that Willam
helped us, and that he’d make a good apprentice.”

Willam was waiting for Rowan’s answer, his face open, sincere,
eager, guileless ... and for a moment, she cared about him and what might
happen to him. “Will,” she said honestly. “You shouldn’t become an apprentice.
I hate to think what it will do to you. No good will come of it.”

Something in her expression reached him, and he was taken
aback, suddenly uncertain. Then she understood; it was her sincerity. Never
before had he seen sincerity in her face, and it broke her heart to realize that.
“Trust me,” she said to him, knowing she had never given him reason or evidence
to trust her.

“My sister ...” he began.

“Do you realize you’re not the only one?” Rowan asked. “He
didn’t single you out; it’s simply something that he does, periodically. Does
that make any difference to you?”

“No ...” he said at last. Then he became more certain. “Maybe
it makes it worse. And it’s not the only evil he does. I’ve seen how he works,
a bit. I lived near his city, The Crags—but you knew that.”

Rowan called into her mind a detailed map of that area. Willam’s
village had to be on the near side of the drawbridge, far enough from the city
proper that he had not acquired its involuted manner of speech, but near enough
that pronunciation of individual words was the same. He had lived close enough
to the city to be familiar with Kundekin handiwork, and that eliminated the
farther-flung villages under the city’s direct influence. Also, he had been
near enough to enter the city on occasion and see Abremio’s daily manner of
rule at first hand.

She hazarded a guess. “Oak Grove.”

He stopped short, disturbed. “That’s very close. Langtry.”
He went on. “Anyway ... I guess I have to stop it, if I can.”

She nodded, comprehending. “You’ve been working on this for
a long time.”

“A long time ... working so hard ...”

“Attise.” It took Rowan a moment to remember that that was
her name. “Maybe we
can
help each other.” Bel said it simply, watching
Rowan’s expression, and it occurred to Rowan that the statement might carry
more than one meaning.

“You’re from the new holding, aren’t you?” Willam asked. “The
one they fought the war for, with those two wizards together?”

“Shammer and Dhree,” Rowan supplied without thinking, then
realized that her reply would be taken as an admission that he had guessed
right.

“Do they have an apprentice?”

“No.” She sighed and spoke to Bel. “If either of us has the
opportunity, we’ll put in a good word. That’s the only promise we can give.”
It was a true statement, as true as she could make it, and still it carried in
its heart a hundred unspoken lies.

But it satisfied Will, and he laughed with happy relief.

“I would very much like to see what he can do,” the steerswoman
said.

Bel looked back at Willam, who was chatting with one of the
caravan’s mounted guards. The man was riding a rather bedraggled horse, and
extolling the romance of his lifestyle, with expansive gestures and more than a
little condescension.

The boy ambled along beside him, with his odd, distinctive
gait. His strides were slightly longer than his height would suggest, and he
walked smoothly and jarlessly, as if he were carrying a load of eggs in his
pack. It seemed easy and natural.

The donkey trotted along beside them in cheerful high
spirits, due simply to the fact that it was no longer carrying Rowan. It had
protested being ridden from the first, and now that it carried only her baggage
and Bel’s pack, it seemed to feel that its little universe had been restored to
rightful order. Its bad temper had completely vanished.

Bel added to Rowan’s statement. “Without attracting attention.”

“He did say it was loud.”

“I wonder what sort of noise it makes?”

“I can’t imagine.” Like the donkey, Rowan had been restored
to a more natural mode—she was walking. Her clothes were not the best for such
exertion—the wide split skirt hissed around her legs annoyingly, and the boots
were too new to be comfortable—but she walked and felt easier in her mind for
the swinging familiarity of it.

There were two main roads running east and west in the Inner
Lands. One, the Shore Road, stretched east from Wulfshaven and eventually ended
in Donner; but it was an ill-kept route and wasted many miles by laboriously
tracing the northern shoreline of the sea. It served mainly to connect the
little villages each with its neighbor. Only by happenstance did it form a
continuous road with both ends terminating in major towns.

But the Upland Route, which they had chosen to take, was centuries
old, a good and dependable route east. It crossed the Wulf some miles north of
Wulfshaven, dipped south to the city itself, skirted the hilly country that
ranged down from the north, and traveled northeast and then due east to Five
Corners. It was part of the major caravan route, and from Five Corners
transported goods could continue in several directions.

But that town was too likely to recognize Rowan and Bel from
their earlier visit. They planned to leave the caravan long before that point
and wend their way across country and along less direct roads to the Outskirts.

The day had turned warm early on, and both women had added
their heavier outer clothing to the donkey’s burden. They walked in the midst
of a faint haze of road dust raised by the travelers ahead of them. Rowan
breathed it in as if it were sea air.

She was using her resurrected sense of freedom to engage in
her normal activity: she was finding things out. Denied the direct approach of
questioning the travelers closely, she was utilizing a combination of close
observation and the normal degree of idle curiosity she might be expected to
display as Attise. Her restrictions took on the aspect of a game, and she
ranged up and down the caravan’s length.

A pair of point riders headed the line, on hard-worked,
scruffy ponies. A horse-mounted scout periodically came into view in the distance,
signaled them, then disappeared again.

A charabanc drawn by a team of donkeys came next, carrying
the well-to-do who did not wish to exert themselves unnecessarily. A party
atmosphere suffused the group of strangers, but Rowan found them disinclined to
indulge in idle conversation with a walker. She recognized their origins by
their accents, and rightly identified one narrow gentleman from the upper Wulf
valley as escort to the six oxcarts of tin ingots that followed a few spaces behind.
Tin was mined in the hills of the upper Wulf, by one of the two known enclaves
of the mysterious Kundekin, and the man’s sentence structure showed the
influence of long conversation with those normally reclusive people. Rowan
speculated to herself on the effects of so large an import of tin on the
metal-poor economy to the east.

The carts were followed by a handful of young horse-mounted
travelers, all of a group, jesting with one another. They chatted freely but
superficially and seemed more interested in a series of pranks played by one of
their number. The most frequent victim was a lone Christer pilgrim, an
attractive target due to his air of blind self-confidence and his unvarying
reaction of dull puzzlement.

In all, some twenty wagons and carts made up the main body
of the line, interspersed with riders and walkers. Some, like the tin importer,
were planning to travel all the way to the junction at Five Corners. Others
took advantage of the caravan’s protection for local trips, the fee for such
participation being minimal. Still others traveled with the caravan for some
significant segment of their journey, separating again when necessary; Rowan
and Bel belonged to that category.