Tortall (29 page)

He is no more fitted to find his way to the Veiled City than a baby.

What is a Year of Proving about, if it proves I am a heartless person?

“Wait!” she cried. “Sunflower, wait!” She ran to catch him. She grabbed his sleeve, panting. “I want maps. Good ones, like the one you made for yourself, of our whole route south. I want trade goods to take back to my people. And you have to mind what I say.” She glared up at him, daring him to say anything that would make her ashamed of her softness.

Instead he just smiled. “This will be so much better,” he said. “And I can teach
you
what poetry is for.
That
is a fair trade.”

They shook hands on their bargain.

Only once in my life was I glad that my family was large. Until I was fourteen, the tale of my days was one of hand-me-down clothes and toys that barely lasted a month by the time they reached me, and a place to spread my blankets on the floor between my older sisters’ beds. Then came the news that the dragon that had been destroying towns to the north was just two days’ flight away.

It was time to pack. Everyone had to choose what might be carried to the caves in the mountains and what must be left behind.

With a houseful of frightened older girls and their children—my sisters were married, living with us until their men could build homes of their own—my mother had no use for me. After she had ordered me out of the way for the third time, she thrust bread and cheese into my hands and told me to go.

“Don’t stray from the village,” she ordered. “Who can say where that dragon is?”

I thought that we would know if he was near, since he was supposed to be as big as three bulls, but nobody argued
with my mother. I put my food in a string bag and left our house.

At first I thought I would go to the woods, as I liked to do, but my father saw me and told me to stay close to home. Then I went in search of my friends. All of them had been put to work packing, getting ready to run when the dragon came. Bored and lonely, I wandered into the village and found an unexpected arrival. A peddler had come and had set up in the square across from the fountain.

Her cart was scarlet with designs picked out in yellow paint on the wheels. One whole side of the cart was lowered to form a broad tray. On it were neatly stacked goods: bolts of cloth in a dozen colors, neat rolls of beautiful lace, cloth dolls as small as my fingers or as big as my hand, spools of thread, and balls of yarn. The peddler had placed a wooden bench next to the tray. She sat there, busily embroidering a square of cloth.

She wasn’t much to look at—brown and dry and thin, with dark hair tied back under a scarf. Her dress was plain brown cotton with small, dark buttons. She wore skirts as short as those of a girl my age, hanging just a few inches below the knee. They revealed scuffed, flat-heeled boots, as well worn and dusty as everything else about her. I guessed her age at a little over thirty.

There was a dragon coming, maybe, but it was still my lucky day. Normally my parents frowned on my speaking to people who came from the big world outside our village, but they were busy. I could talk to this stranger all I wanted.

I told her my name, Tonya. She gave me hers, Lindri. I
asked about what she had to sell, and she answered. She even showed me the silks she kept tucked away in the cart, for customers with fatter purses than our villagers had. The silks came from odd-sounding places, where the dyes were ten times more vivid than any we had. Lindri had been to those lands. She described them so beautifully I could almost see them.

She embroidered as she talked. Her needle darted through the cloth as if it were alive, shaping a garden of flowers on what would be a sleeve. I had never been very interested in needlework, but Lindri made it seem fascinating. I didn’t realize I was staring at the design until she patted my cheek smartly, waking me from a daze.

“Don’t watch so long,” she said with a grin. “They say there’s a plain kind of magic in needlework—do you want to end up a slave to it, like me?”

I winced. “Don’t talk of magic or slavery to me,” I growled. “I’ve no idea of what I’m doing, but people here still keep asking me for charms for everything under the sun.”

Lindri raised her brows. “You have magic?”

I nodded.

“Surely your teacher is showing you how to work.”

I laughed, bitterness choking me. “Wizard Halen? It’s like pulling teeth to get him to teach me what little I
do
know. He’s so afraid I’ll be better than him that he won’t even teach me to read.”

We continued to talk about nonmagical things. When the noon hour came, I shared my bread and cheese with
Lindri, who added some apples, jam made of a berry I had never tasted before, and mugs of cider.

While we ate, four-year-old Krista emerged from her house across the square. Bit by bit she wandered closer as we finished our meal. At last she reached the lowered tray. She stared at the brightly colored balls of yarn, with her finger in her half-open mouth, as if the balls held the answer to some great secret.

Lindri smiled at her. “Hello, young one. Can I do something for you?”

Krista was shy. She turned to run, stumbled, and fell with a shriek. When I picked her up, I had to bite my lip to keep from gasping. She had cut her palm on a rock in the street. The bones of her hand showed through the deep, ugly gash.

“Hush, hush.” Lindri took the screaming Krista from me, brushing her off with an efficient hand. “So much noise. Let me see.”

To my surprise, Krista stopped wailing. She held the bleeding hand up for Lindri to examine. Blood welled thickly from the cut, and I shivered with fear. Rot was almost impossible to avoid with such a deep wound. The chances were that pretty Krista would lose her hand.

“That’s bad, I suppose,” Lindri said. “But it could be a lot worse.” She took the girl to a water barrel fixed to the rear of the cart, holding Krista’s hand beneath the spout as she rinsed the wound clean. She whisked a strip of linen from the piles on the tray and sat down, settling Krista in her lap.

“If you’re brave about this,” Lindri told her, “you may have one of the red balls of yarn for your very own.”

Krista stuck the fingers of her good hand in her mouth and held out the injured hand. Lindri bandaged the cut neatly and quickly. She finished by tying the loose ends in an oddly shaped knot directly over the wound, tapping the knot lightly with her fingers when she was done.

“All fixed,” she told Krista, putting a crimson ball of yarn into the child’s good hand. “Keep the bandage clean, mind. When you take it off, you’ll be as good as new.”

As Krista ran home, I frowned at Lindri. It would have been rude for me to say so to an adult, but I thought it was cruel for Lindri to lie to Krista. The child would know it was a lie when she could no longer use the hand, or worse, was forced to have it cut off.

Lindri smiled at me. “You’ll see that I’m right,” she said, as if she knew what I had been thinking. “Now, tell me about the dragon who’s been preying on this valley.”

No one could have disobeyed the soft note of command in Lindri’s voice. “It first attacked villages below the northern mountains,” I began. “That was about two weeks ago. It’s been coming south ever since. It doesn’t burn every town in its way, but it’s burned enough. People who flee it come through here because we’re the last village before the pass out of the valley. But you’d know that if you came up from the south.”

“That’s right,” Lindri replied. “I drove through the pass this morning.”

Mistress Fane, the miller’s wife, came up to us and pointed to a bolt of cloth. “I’d like to see more of that, if you
please,” she ordered Lindri. The woman could never ask for anything politely.

“No one knows why it burns some villages and not others,” I went on as Mistress Fane inspected another bolt of cloth, and a third. “It was spotted near here two days ago, but we don’t know if it’ll attack us or not. Everyone hopes it will just go away.”

Mistress Fane bought the pink cloth she had been looking at, which filled me with glee. She looked awful in pink.

Lindri picked up her embroidery again. “Why are your people still here?”

“We’re too poor,” I told her. It felt odd to say such things to a stranger—I was very proud—but Lindri had a listening way about her. I went on as I watched her needle flash through her cloth. “All most of us have is our farms. We can’t take them with us, and we’ve no money to start fresh someplace else.” I sighed. “I’d
like
to start someplace else.”

Lindri glanced at me. “Adventurous, are you, Tonya?”

I felt as if she’d taken a leash off my tongue. Out spilled my dreams of leaving the valley someday, of seeing new lands and meeting new people, of simply being somewhere
different
. Then I remembered. I was Tonya, the headman’s daughter. The only place I was likely to go to was my future husband’s home. It was silly to talk of my dreams to Lindri, who had seen the world beyond the mountains. It was silly and it was senseless, because soon she would leave, and I would still be here.

“Where are you going now?” I asked.

She looked at the sun, which slid toward the western
horizon, and traded her embroidery for knitting. “North,” she replied briefly. “To the mountains, I expect.”

“You can’t!” I protested, shocked. “It’s dangerous. Wild animals live there. More dragons, and bears taller than a tall man, and giant cats—”

Lindri shrugged. “I like animals. They rarely bother you unless you bother them first.”

I was about to argue further when Riv interrupted us. He had come in early from putting his sheep up for the night, probably to get news of the dragon. “Excuse me,” he said politely, picking up a small square of folded lace. “I want to know how much this is.”

Lindri looked him over. “One silver minim.”

“For just this little bit?” Riv asked, eyeing the lace. It was beautiful, filmy white stuff. I had an idea that the price Lindri had given him was less than what she would charge somewhere else. He handed the square to her. “Hold this, please? I want to look at the rest.” He went to the small stacks of lace at the far end of the tray.

“He seems like a nice young man,” Lindri remarked softly. “What can you tell me about him?”

“He’s getting married next month,” I whispered, keeping an eye on Riv. “His girl Aura is my best friend. She’s standing over by the fountain, the one with the basket on her arm. Riv’s chief shepherd, but he hasn’t been chief through a spring shearing, so he hasn’t any money. And all Aura ever wanted was a lace veil when she marries, like the city ladies have.”

Lindri was tugging on the edges of the lace Riv had given her, which worried me. What if she got it dirty?

“Nobody else here got a lace veil,” I went on. “So people say Aura thinks she’s better than everyone else. But it’s not true! She just wants something pretty.”

Riv came back. “See anything you’d rather have?” Lindri asked.

He offered her a silver minim, his face beet colored with shame. “No. This is fine.” He was trying to smile, but it didn’t look right. “It isn’t a whole veil, but—well, it’s very pretty,” he finished.

Lindri pocketed the coin and gave Riv the folded square. “Enjoy it,” she told Riv, smiling. “And may your marriage be happy.”

Boys had come to set torches around the square. The whole village would be coming here soon, to get the latest news of the dragon. As the torches caught, they threw their wavering light over Riv as he walked back to Aura.

“It’s just not fair,” I muttered as he offered her the lace. “Old, mean people like Miller Fane and his wife have nice things, but Aura and Riv—”

Riv fumbled the lace and caught it just in time. Then the lace began to unfold, and I gasped. Length after length spilled from Riv’s hands like a waterfall, shimmering white in the glow from the torches. Riv had to raise his hands higher and higher to keep the white stuff from touching the ground, while Aura laughed and cried at the same time.

They tried to make Lindri take it back, but she refused. “That’s the piece you bought,” she told Riv firmly. “Ask Tonya if it ever left my hands after you gave it to me.”

And that was the biggest puzzle of all. I had talked to her the whole time, and the only thing she did with that lace
was tug on it. I
knew
it had been a folded square of one or two thicknesses when Riv selected it, but I couldn’t prove it. They went away at last, Aura crying on Riv’s shoulder as he carefully refolded the lace.

Lindri shook her head, straightening the goods on her tray. “People should inspect strange goods carefully,” she murmured. “They never know what they’ve purchased, otherwise.”

I was about to ask what Riv
had
bought when my father came as the village headman to meet Lindri. The other two elders, Priest Rand and my teacher, Wizard Halen, soon joined us. As Rand said polite things to Lindri, Halen started to inspect her wares. Suddenly he picked up a square of linen. “There is something odd about this piece,” he began.

Lindri snatched it from his fingers. “Don’t touch unless you plan to buy,” she snapped. “No one purchases dirty goods.”