The Steerswoman's Road (24 page)

She seemed unable to find a reply. After a moment with nothing
forthcoming, Sala took over. “The less you know, the less danger you’re in. And
we abandoned you because we like you, and we don’t particularly want you to die.
If you stayed with us, one day you’d follow us into a trap.”

Attise found her voice. “Perhaps today.”

Will was shocked, then thrilled, then wary. “Here?”

Sala disagreed. “If anyone wanted to harm us, they would
have tried already,” she said to Attise.

“Assuming they know I’m the right person. They certainly don’t—yet.”

“Perhaps the whole thing is innocent. Perhaps Ingrud was
right. She’s not a fool, you know.” Already, Willam realized, it had happened
again; he was once more mere spectator to some incomprehensible exchange
between the two mysterious women.

“She’s a steerswoman,” Attise conceded.

“There you are.”

“No. The conclusions one reaches depend on the information
one has. She may have been fed deceits.” Attise drummed ink-stained fingertips
on the table, considering.

“Then let’s assume that she was, and that you’re right, and
there’s nothing in this town for us. Let’s go on our way.”

Attise said nothing, but sat thinking.

“What you’re going to do will identify you, just as if you
shouted your name,” Sala noted.

To establish his presence in the conversation, Will said, “Your
right name.”

Attise’s blue-gray gaze flicked in his direction. “True.”
She tilted her head to the sound of someone dashing across the street at a staggering
run, escaping the drizzle, and turned her attention back to her bowl an instant
before the door clattered open. Their host entered, and proved to be the same
fellow Willam had met by the well. Faintly weaving, the man discovered the trio
in his front room and regarded them with a certain amount of foggy confusion.

“No, one shouldn’t make assumptions of that sort,” Attise
spoke up, fabricating a conversation to continue. “One region’s commonplace is
another’s rarity.” She gestured with her spoon at Willam, marking him the recipient
of her opinions. “Even a dreary little spot like this one; I have every
intention to visit the shops and manufactories before we leave. The
possibility always exists, and nothing’s so satisfying as cornering the market
on some lovely item that your competitors will never be able to obtain.”

Will glanced at Carroll, then tried to play along. “As long
as people want to buy it.”

“Exactly.” She nodded. “To be desirable, any product should
be either beautiful, or rare, or uniquely useful. Better, some combination of
the three.”

He made a wild guess. “And there’s shipping cost.”

Her smile seemed genuine. “Of course. The smaller, the better.”

Will began to enjoy the game, until he saw Sala’s
expression. She had her back to Carroll and so was free to let her face show
her thoughts. She disapproved. She glowered at Attise. It came to Will that
when a mercenary disapproved of something, it was something dangerous.

There was a noise: “Ah!” It was a nasal sound of discovery
and confirmation, and it came from the kitchen. Carroll’s wife swept in with a
display of self-righteous dignity, a shrewish expression, and a wooden ladle,
which she brandished at Carroll. “Look at you, this early in the day,
and
in
front of guests!”

Immediately, with perfect grace, the man corrected his
posture, composed his expression, and stood regarding her coolly. Will, who had
seen many persons drunk, marveled at his control. “Woman,” Carroll intoned in a
dignified voice. “You do carry on.”

His wife gathered herself for a reply, then wavered. His act
was perfect. She began to doubt.

He crossed his arms, perhaps a trifle slowly but without
difficulty. “Tend more to your work, and less to your—” He paused to choose the
exact word. “Intrigues,” he finished.

She squinted up at him, then turned the squint on the others
in the room, as though suspecting them of collusion. Attise watched with bland
disinterest. Sala studied the pair as if she anticipated a sporting event. Will
contrived to appear stupidly puzzled.

The woman made a throaty sound of disappointment and left
the room. Carroll sniffed wetly.

Turning to his guests, he greeted them gravely and inquired
after their comfort. Attise looked aside, as if wishing to find a polite way to
express her opinion, then gave it up. She pushed out a chair. “Why don’t you
join us for some tea?”

The man looked toward where his wife had gone, then glanced
back at the door. He stepped to it, pulled a little cloth-wrapped jug from a
hiding place behind the brick doorstop, and brought himself to the table. “Well,
thank you, I don’t mind at all.” Seated, he laid one finger aside his nose
conspiratorially and added a bit from the jug to each cup, hesitating only
momentarily before Willam’s.

Will found that the stuff evaporated on its way from the
front of his mouth to the back, and he coughed. Carroll nodded gravely at him
as if he had expressed some deep insight.

Attise tried to draw the man into conversation, but he
seemed far more interested in replenishing his cup, and he replied vaguely to
questions about the types of local handicrafts. Yes, there was a tanner, a
weaver, a potter, a silversmith. Yes, they did fair enough work. Eventually
Will, who had politely drunk three cups of the fiery tea, discovered an urgent
need to visit the outhouse and excused himself from the stilted conversation.

The back yard was as shabby as its inhabitants, unkempt,
with a large trash heap tucked in one corner. Will thought it was a shame; the
house itself was lovely, old stone and ivy. But as he looked about, he noticed
that the adjacent yards all had their own piles of odd discards, items not
useful for compost or fertilizer.

As he emerged from the bushes that discreetly screened the
outhouse, he heard a crash of pottery. Carroll was standing by the trash heap;
he looked up suspiciously as Will approached, then relaxed as he recognized the
boy, taking rather long to do so. Will glanced down and noticed the liquor jug
on the pile, smashed, and several more of its mates, some new, some of them
very old indeed. He laughed to himself and leaned toward Carroll confidentially.
“Your secret is safe with us.” The man regained his careful dignity and
wandered off on his own mission.

When Willam reached the front room, Attise and Sala were in
deep conversation, listing the different types of shops Carroll had mentioned.
Will found his chair and picked over the remains of their meal.

Pulling her purse from inside her blouse, Attise inspected
the contents. She passed some coins to Sala. “Get a few supplies, from as many
different shops as possible, and see how much gossip you can collect in the
process.”

“Are you going to try our hostess?”

Attise looked toward the kitchen and winced. “I’m not
certain I can coax her away from her favorite subject. I’ll check a few of the
other shopkeepers, in my role as a merchant. The weaver, perhaps, or the
tannery.”

“To begin with,” Sala noted.

“Of course.” She looked in her purse again, seemed to calculate,
and was displeased with the result. She returned it to its hiding place. “What
about me?” Willam asked.

“Stay out from underfoot.”

“That’s stupid,” Sala said vehemently.

Attise looked at her in surprise.

The mercenary continued. “If you must go about advertising
your presence, at least try to confuse them. If this is a trap, then they’re expecting
a woman traveling alone. They may not have caught up with the fact that Willam
and I are with you. If you keep him by your side, you might throw off some
suspicion, and they may he slower to realize what’s afoot.”

“I’d rather work with you,” Willam said to Sala.

“I don’t need help. I’ll be doing the easy part. She’s the
one who’s jumping into the fire.”

“If there is one,” Attise commented. “And that’s what we
need to discover.”

They passed the tannery by, but tucked between two houses Attise
found a potter’s, little more than a ramshackle shed. The front was constructed
of ill-sorted planks of varying ages and colors. No door was visible, but a
merry whirring was heard from inside, and Will and Attise made their way around
the side to an opening that had been created by the simple expedient of
removing several planks from one wall.

Outside the rain had stopped, but the single room inside was
dark and dank, save for a shaft of weak sunlight that descended from the
ceiling, where a section of the roof had been levered up and propped with a
pole.

In his patch of sun, the potter was happily at work, humming
a little tune, a lean, fair man with wild curly hair. He spared the visitors a
friendly glance; then a second, speculative; then, surprisingly, a third, amused.
“Give me a moment,” he called, and braked his wheel.

“Well, strangers.” He turned on his stool and leaned, elbows
on his knees, to examine them with twinkling blue eyes. “Are you lost? Looking
for directions? You can’t have come in here on purpose!” Will noticed that the
lower half of one leg was missing, replaced by a long wooden peg.

Attise laughed a bit. “Actually, I did.” She introduced
herself and Willam. “I’m a merchant, passing through on business to the south.
I thought it might be useful to examine the local wares. Occasionally one can
find something worth transporting, something unusual, perhaps, or fine work.”

“Fine work?” He leaned back and laughed out loud. “Well you
certainly won’t find any of that here.” He made a sweeping gesture to indicate
his workshop.

Attise eyed the rickety shelves and their contents with an expression
almost apologetic. “I’m afraid not.” She was acting more natural, Will noticed,
easy and friendly, without her usual, close-watched stiffness.

“No, cheap and sturdy, that’s my stock-in-trade. The things
I make are easy to replace, and people break them without a second thought.
Sometimes they do it just for fun. In fact, around winter solstice I make a
hundred plates, just for the folk to smash at midnight. You could never eat off
those plates, but they do make a lovely sound.”

Watching Attise’s reactions, Will noticed that she and the
potter seemed to have some natural affinity for each other. He wondered if she
planned to seduce him. Spies often did, he understood, for information.

But Attise inclined her head politely, with a cheerful
smile. “Well, I won’t take any more of your time.” She glanced up at the little
skylight, checking the hour, then stopped, curious. “That can’t be very
efficient.”

“It isn’t,” he admitted ruefully. “But then, neither am I,
and it suits me well enough. When the sun moves, I move too. It’s a good excuse
to take myself off for a bit of friendly conversation and a pot of brew.”

“But there’s no tavern in this town.”

“No, but we manage well enough. Old Grandfather Miller supplies
the brew, and the best conversations are always found in your neighbor’s
kitchen.”

“There is that,” she said. “But it makes it harder on the
stranger. After days traveling, a brew and a conversation are things to
cherish.”

He made a wry sound. “It’s all local gossip, local
intrigues; you’d find it boring, I’m afraid.”

“Not at all. If you travel long enough, everything feels
local.”

“There is that,” he said, and at that phrase, he and Attise
suddenly looked at each other in mutual astonishment and spoke simultaneously.
“Where are you from?”

They laughed together, and she went on. “You’re not from
here?”

“No, not at all. My town was Denham Notch, on the West Road.
It’s far north, off the western curve of the Long North Road.”

“Where the West Road turns from northwest to southwest.”

He clapped his hands. “You know it! I thought you might.
Skies above, you’re like a fresh wind off the desert. I knew I liked you as
soon as you spoke. Where’s your town?”

“Terminus, at the other end of the road.”

They were going to reminisce, Will realized; bored with the
conversation, he took himself off to one side to examine the potter’s ware.
Attise and the potter kept chatting like old friends.

“Terminus! I’ve been there a dozen times when I was a point
rider on a caravan. That was before this.” There was a thump as he slapped his
peg.

Behind one of the shelves, the wall was stone, not wood; the
outside of the adjacent building, Will realized. He reached behind a row of
pots and touched the wall. Pulling back his hand, he found it coated with a
damp powder. He smelled it, then tasted it.

“But I never saw you there,” the potter said to Attise.

“I’m hardly memorable.”

Will turned back. Attise had found a seat on a workbench and
was swinging her legs cheerfully. “You know,” Will began, and the potter turned
back, a little annoyed. “This stuff that’s growing on your walls, it’ll get on
your pots.”

The potter eyed him. “It does, sometimes.”

“Well, I could scrape it off for you. You should do that,
once in a while.”

Speaking to Attise, the man said, “Your lad’s getting bored.
Why don’t you send him off wandering for a bit?”

Attise was watching Willam with that sharp, too-intelligent
gaze. “No,” she said. “He tends to get into trouble if he’s left to his own devices.”

Will tried to look sheepish. “Really, I don’t mind doing it
for you. It’ll keep me busy.”

They exchanged glances, and the potter shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
He turned back to Attise. “No, I would have remembered you.” Willam could hear
the smile in the man’s voice.

Will found a potsherd and another stool and, moving the
items from a high shelf, began scraping the stones, using a broken jug to catch
the powder. The conversation behind him wandered haphazardly. Willam soon
finished his first section, replaced the pots, and began on the next.