The Steerswoman's Road (43 page)

The noise in the room began to lessen. Through some internal
process, the villagers were slowly coalescing into a unified group. Their
leader was not Dalen, as Rowan had half-expected, but a pale, jittery woman of
middle age with smoldering eyes, who spoke fervently, passionately, using
short, quick gestures.

“Rowan?”

Rowan turned back to the Outskirter. “Yes?”

“The war bands will come down the brook.”

Rowan sighed in relief. “I rather thought they might.”

“It leads right into town, and they don’t know they’re
expected. The idea of attacking at dawn is too attractive.”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me; I want to reach the Guidestar, and I don’t
care to watch you die,” Bel said vehemently. “You tell your villagers to use
bows, as many as they have. The Outskirters won’t have archers. An ambush with
bows, and the village will win easily, and one fighter more or less won’t
matter.” She looked up at Rowan and enunciated each word fiercely. “Now will
you leave?”

“As soon as I pass this on.”

Bel rose, and brushed her trouser legs as if they were
filthy. “You’re lucky that I like you so well.”

“Yes,” Rowan admitted. “Yes, I am.”

Bel stalked back to her position, and Rowan rapped the table
to gain the room’s attention. A hush fell instantly, and the villagers turned
to her, now a unified force with a commander and a single, all-important
purpose. They lacked only strategy. The steerswoman gave it to them.

On the evening before Rowan’s departure from the Steerswomen’s
Archives, the air had been sweetly cool outside, warm and faintly dusty in the
northeast corner of the Greater Library. Three cushioned chairs stood close beside
the snapping fireplace. Rowan sat in one—uneasily, on the edge, bending forward
again and again to study one or another of the many charts that lay on a low
table before her. In the second chair, Henra, the Prime of the Steerswomen,
nestled comfortably: a small, elderly woman of graceful gestures and quiet
self-assurance. Silver-brown hair fell in a loose braid down her breast, and
she wore a heavy robe over her nightshift, looking much like a grandmother
prepared to remain all night by the bedside of a feverish child—an appearance
contradicted by the cool, steady gaze of her long green eyes.

The third chair was empty. Bel sat on the stones of the
hearth, cheerfully feeding the fire to a constant, unnecessarily high blaze. “Enjoy
it while you can,” she said. In the Outskirts, open flame attracted dangerous
creatures by night.

The charts loosely stacked on the table had been drawn by dozens
of hands, and their ages spanned centuries. Each map showed a sweep of
mountains to the left, a pair of rivers bracketing the center, and a huge body
of water below all, labeled
INLAND SEA.
From
chart to chart, across the years, scope and precision of depiction grew: the
edge of the mountain range became delimited, the river Wulf slowly sprouted tributaries,
Greyriver later did the same, and the Inland Sea began to fulfill its promise
of a far shore by acquiring a north-pointing peninsula.

Each map also noted an area labeled
THE OUTSKIRTS;
each showed it as a vague empty sweep; and each
showed it in a different location. Set in order, the maps revealed the slow
eastward shifting of the barbarian wildlands.

Bel regarded the charts with extreme skepticism. “I don’t
doubt that the women who drew the maps believed that that was where the
Outskirts were. But did they actually go there? And were my people there? And a
word like ‘outskirts’ might mean many things. Perhaps they just intended to
say, ‘This is the edge of what we know.’ That would explain why it keeps
moving.”

“I don’t think so. Look at this.” Rowan had pulled one map
from the bottom of the stack: a recent copy of an older copy of a now-lost
chart from nearly a thousand years earlier, purported to have been drawn by
Sharon, the founder of the Steerswomen. On it, the Outskirts were improbably
shown to begin halfway between the tiny fishing village of Wulfshaven and the
mouth of Greyriver, where the city of Donner later grew.

Rowan indicated. “Greyriver, deep in what was then the Outskirts;
Sharon knew that it was there. The term ‘outskirts’ did not represent the limit
of what she knew.”

Bel puzzled. “How did she know it was there?”

“No one knows.”

“Is it shown accurately?”

“Yes.”

“She must have gone there.”

“Perhaps. Most of her notes have been lost. Nevertheless, to
Sharon, Greyriver was part of the Outskirts.”

The Prime spoke. “‘Where the greengrass ends,’” she quoted, “‘the
Outskirts begin.’ Those were Sharon’s words.”

Bel made a deprecating sound. “Hyperbole,” she said.

“What?” Henra was taken aback; Rowan was not, and she smiled
over her chart. She had learned not to be surprised when the barbarian made
use of sophisticated ideas.

“Hyperbole,” Bel repeated. “Exaggeration. The greengrass
doesn’t just end. It runs out, eventually. Either your Sharon didn’t know, or she
wasn’t talking like a steerswoman, because it’s not an accurate description.
Perhaps she was trying to be poetic.”

Henra recovered her balance. “I see.”

“Well.” Rowan sighed and returned to her work, sifting
through the charts before her, uselessly, helplessly. There was no more to be
done; all was prepared, as well as could be, all packed and ready for the first
leg of her journey. Nevertheless, she reviewed, and reviewed again.

Rowan was to leave first, and travel eastward cross-country
to a small village on the far side of the distant Greyriver; Bel would go south
to the nearby port city of Wulfshaven, there to attempt to maintain the
illusion that Rowan was still at the Archives, and later to leave
ostentatiously alone, by sea. The plan was designed to deflect from Rowan the
passing attention of any wizards.

The wizards and the Steerswomen had coexisted for long centuries;
but the wizards, by blithely refusing to answer certain questions, had
consistently incurred the Steerswomen’s ban. Their refusal had engendered in
the Steerswomen a deep-seated, slow-burning resentment that had grown over the
years, eventually becoming as pervasive as it was ineffectual. The feeling was
largely one-sided: for their part, the wizards tended simply to ignore the
order entirely.

But the previous spring Rowan herself had managed to attract
their notice, and merely by doing what every steerswoman did: asking questions.

She had not known that her investigation into the source and
nature of certain pretty blue gems, decorative but otherwise useless, would be
of any interest to the wizards. But when she and Bel were first attacked on the
road by night, then trapped in a burning building, then waylaid by a ruse
clearly designed to divert the investigation, it became obvious that the
wizards were indeed interested, and more than interested—they were concerned
enough to take action, for the first time in nearly eight hundred years,
against so seemingly harmless a person as a steerswoman.

In the course of what had followed, many of Rowan’s questions
about the jewels had been answered, although none completely. And the course of
her investigations had gifted her with answers to questions unasked and unimagined.

The jewels were in fact magical, and were used by the
wizards in certain spells involving the animation of inanimate objects; but
what the spells were, and how they were activated, Rowan had never learned.

The jewels’ pattern of distribution across the Inner Lands,
which had at first so puzzled her, was explained by a fact both simple and
stunning: They had fallen from the sky. They were part of a Guidestar—not one
of that pair that hung visible in the night sky, motionless points of light,
familiar to every Inner Lander, but one of another pair, previously unknown,
which hung over distant, possibly uninhabited lands, somewhere on the far side
of the world. Why one had fallen remained a mystery.

That the wizards, jealous and mutually hostile, should
abandon their differences to cooperate in the hunt for Rowan, seemed a fact as
impossible as the falling of a Guidestar, until Rowan learned yet another secret:
there was one single authority set over all wizards, one man.

She knew that his authority was absolute; the wizards had
sought to capture or kill her without themselves knowing the justifications for
the hunt.

She knew that they resented his control of them but were unable
to deny his wishes.

She knew his name: Slado.

She knew nothing else about him—not his plans, nor his powers,
nor his location, nor the color of his eyes.

The belt that Bel wore was made of nine blue shards from the
secret, fallen Guidestar. Her father had found the jewels deep in the
Outskirts, at Dust Ridge, which the wizards called Toumier’s Fault. It was the
largest concentration of such jewels that Rowan had ever heard of. The
description of the finding, and Rowan’s own calculations on the mathematics of
falling objects, led her to believe that at Dust Ridge she might find what
remained of the body of the Guidestar. Knowing this, she had to go there.

A current chart in her hands, Rowan retraced the long lonely
route across the breadth of the Inner Lands, to that little village past
Greyriver, where she and Bel would meet again to enter the Outskirts together.
It was the one part of the journey of which she could be certain. Beyond that
point ...

Setting the map down, she took up the top chart from the sequenced
stack and studied it with vast dissatisfaction. It differed wildly from all the
others.

Gone were the western mountains, the two rivers, the wide
sea; this map showed a single river at its left edge, running south, then
curving southwest to the edge of the paper. Intermittent roads tracked the
banks, occasionally branching east to end abruptly in small villages.

A tumble of low hills ambled vaguely across the southern
edge of the paper; a second river with a few tributaries began seemingly from
nowhere and ended without destination; a short stretch of shore marked
INLAND SEA
made a brief incursion, then stopped,
unfinished. In the low center of the chart, a jagged line trailing northeast to
southwest bore the notation
DUST RIDGE (TOURNIER’S
FAULT).

Despite its size, despite its scale, the rest of the map was
empty. Rowan glowered at it. It was drawn by her own hand.

She had reconstructed it from one she had seen as a prisoner
in the fortress of the young wizards Shammer and Dhree. While their captive,
Rowan had freely given all information requested, as befitted any steerswoman;
since neither wizard had yet lied to or withheld information from a
steerswoman, they were not under ban. Rowan herself had carefully avoided
courting the ban, by never asking Shammer and Dhree any questions she suspected
might be refused, and by this means the conversation had been able to continue
for the best part of two days.

But in their eagerness to learn, the wizards had
inadvertently revealed more than they suspected. Giving Rowan the opportunity
to see a wizard-made chart of this section of the Outskirts had constituted
one such slip. Their map of those unknown lands had been astonishingly
complete, and to a detail and skill of depiction unequaled by the best of
steerswomen. But despite Rowan’s sharp eye and well-trained memory, with no
chance to copy immediately what she had seen these few unsatisfying details
were all she could recall.

She knew her point of entry into the Outskirts; she knew her
destination; she knew next to nothing between the two.

She caught Henra watching her. The Prime smiled. “You must
add to the chart as you travel. And bring it back to us, or find a way to send
it ..”

“When I return, I’ll come out through Alemeth ...” Alemeth
was far enough south to suggest a straight-line route west returning from Dust
Ridge.

“Then send it from there. After Alemeth, I think you ought
to go to Southport, and do some work in that area.”

This was new. “Southport?”

“No one is covering Janus’s route.” Janus, a steersman, one
of the few male members of the order, had inexplicably resigned, refusing to
explain or justify his choice; he was now under ban. “And,” the Prime
continued, “Southport has no resident wizard.”

“In other words,” Bel said with a grin, “when you’re done
with this, lay low for a while.”

Rowan made a dissatisfied sound. “Keep out of sight. Hope
the wizards forget about me.”

And, for the moment, they seemed to have. How long that
might last, no one knew.

According to Corvus, the wizard resident in Wulfshaven, the
wizards had decided that Rowan’s investigations must have been directed
secretly by one of their own number. They were now involved in mutual spyings,
schemings, and accusations, trying to discover the traitor, and had effectively
dismissed Rowan as being a mere minion.

Rowan had herself disabused Corvus of the idea. He had neglected
to pass the information on to his fellows.

What Slado might do when the truth was discovered was impossible
to guess. He had motives of his own behind these events, Rowan was certain. He
had some plan.

Rowan shook her head. “We don’t know why Corvus is letting
his fellows search for a nonexistent traitor.” She found a mug of peppermint
tea on the floor, where she had abandoned it earlier, and took a sip. It was
long cold. She studied green flecks of floating peppermint, then used one
finger to push a large leaf aside. “He must gain something by it, some kind of
advantage.”

“What might that be?” Henra prompted.

Rowan made a face. “That’s impossible to guess.” Certainly,
Corvus was as interested as she to learn that a Guidestar had fallen, as
surprised that Slado had not made the fact known among the other wizards.
Perhaps Corvus planned an investigation of his own, an investigation that
confusion among his fellows would somehow serve to aid. Nevertheless, for
whatever reasons, the result was that, for the time being, Rowan was again free
to investigate as she pleased—