Heaven's Needle (7 page)

Heradion shrugged. He was not as young as she'd initially guessed. Closer to twenty than fifteen, if not a little older. “Rich friends.”

She wasn't in the mood to deal with a crowd. “Will they be here?”

“Doubtful. We only come here to play cards, and it's not Godsday.”

Asharre snorted. “You play cards on Godsday?”

“Best time to do it. All the pious people are at services, so there's no one to look down their noses at you. I'm not Blessed; I'm allowed my sins. And I must say, right now, a tall mug of Tarrybuck brown sounds like a good one.”

“Agreed.”

Only half the common room was full. This early in the year, few merchants were on the road, and farmers were busy turning the fields before spring planting. They had their choice of tables, so Asharre picked one that commanded a view of the door and set her chair's back to the wall. It was a little chill so far from the fire, but the hearth was crowded and she had a good cloak. She tossed a silver shield to the nearest serving maid. Even at the White Hound's prices, that would keep them in ale for the night.

“Not the friendly sort, are you?” Heradion commented as he took the chair opposite. “Seems like the only way you could get a table farther from the crowd is if you carried it outside.”

“I'm not in the mood for company.”

“I hope that doesn't last. I don't love the sound of my
own voice
quite
enough to want to listen to it all the way up to Carden Vale and back.”

“I could gag you, if that would help.”

“Ah, the lady has a sense of humor! I'd begun to wonder.”

So had she. There'd been little room for laughter in her life before Oralia died, and none after. She had almost forgotten what it was like. The simple pleasure of a good ale shared with friends was not one Asharre had often enjoyed; she had no gift for words, much less the aimless chatter that summerlanders seemed to love. But Heradion had an easy manner, and a stock of stories from growing up with three troublemaking brothers on a farm, and he did not seem to mind that she said little herself. She drank and listened, and once in a while she laughed.

Finally, Heradon pushed his empty cup aside. “Enough about me. Will you tell me a little of yourself?”

Asharre shrugged, gazing into the last of the ale sloshing about in her chipped mug. She wasn't drunk, but three tankards of Tarrybuck brown and the evening's conversation had left her with a pleasant muzziness. “What do you want to know?”

“What do you want to tell? I don't mean to pry. It's just that if we're to travel together, it would be nice to know something about my companion. Beyond your formidable skills with a sword, of course.”

“Not that formidable.”

“You're too modest. I've seen you in the yard. If I had a third of your talent, I'd hie myself off to Craghail and fight a Swordsday melee. Win myself a princess, a fortune, and the right to bore my listeners senseless with bragging until I was a graybeard.” He grinned. “Well, I have the last already, but it'd be a good deal more impressive if I'd
won
something first.”

“They don't give away princesses anymore.”

“No? I suppose it's back to hard work and humility then. Curses.”

She grunted and finished her drink in silence. Then Heradion suggested: “Tell me about your scars. What do they mean?”

Her first instinct was to refuse. The marks of a
sigrir
were not something to be discussed with summerlanders. She had never done so before. It was a fair request, though, and he was right: if she was to travel with these people, they should know something about her.

Asharre traced her scars with a fingertip. “That I have bad luck.”

“All scars mean that. Take this one here”—Heradion touched a crooked white line across the back of his wrist—“
that
was a spot of bad luck, thinking Merilee's brother was joking when he said he'd cut my nose off if I tried to kiss her. Fortunately for me he was drunk and his aim was bad. I suspect your story's more interesting than that.”

She managed half a smile. “I had a different sort of bad luck. My mother had no brothers. She bore four daughters, but only one son. He died of fever when I was eight. My father was killed in a raid when I was twelve. After that … after that there was not much choice, really. Among the White Seas clans, women have little privilege. They cannot defend the family's honor in feud, cannot hold property … cannot do many things. Someone had to negotiate my sister's marriages, and there were no men left in the family. So I became
sigrir.
”

“Siegrar?”

She corrected his pronounciation, emphasizing the second syllable. “
Sigrir.
You have no word like it. ‘Honorable virgin' might come close. Among the tribes it is an ancient
custom, although one that is fading. I cut my hair, swore never to marry, and took the brand; then I was allowed the rights of a man. I was thirteen.”

“That's why you have those scars?”

“That is why I have this one.” She touched the center sigil etched on her left cheek, just below the eye. The ridges were old and familiar under her finger; she had worn the mark for more than twenty years.

“What about the rest of them?”

“Those came later.” Asharre's mug had gone empty. She leaned back in her chair. The happiness seemed to have drained out of the evening; a great weariness had settled in its stead. “Most
sigrir
take only the first oath. The clans do not feud as they once did. It is not necessary for most girls to fight, only to handle property and find good husbands for their sisters.”

“What was different for you?”

“Oralia … the youngest of my sisters was Blessed. By Celestia.” The smoke was stinging her eyes. Asharre rubbed it away irritably. “The Frosthold Skarlar live in the true north, close on the shores of the White Sea. We keep to the old ways. Split Pines Skarlar do not even have
sigrir
anymore; they have taken to summerlander customs, and are barely worthy of their clan name. In the true north it is different. We still have wildbloods and white ragers.

“There is—there has always been a great enmity between wildbloods and the servants of your goddess. The wildbloods believe that there are only a few souls in the clan strong enough to join them. When such a child is called to Celestia as Blessed instead, that is a theft from our faith: a strong soul, one that should have belonged to the old spirits, leaves our people for a foreign temple—and, to the wildbloods' way of thinking, is turned against them.
For this reason they hate Celestians. I remember once, when I was very young, they took a solaros in a raid against a summerlander village. The warriors brought him back with them to die in the snow, far away from his goddess. All the children were called to watch.”

It had been the first death she'd seen, and it remained one of the ugliest. They had broken his teeth and smashed his face into a slimy red pulp. Unable to scream, the priest had moaned instead: a hideous whistling sound that lasted long into the dark and echoed in her nightmares. In the morning he was silent, and the meat of his face was black with mosquitoes.

An old memory. She put it away, as she had done a thousand times before. Heradion was still watching her, waiting for the end of the tale.

“If she had stayed there—if what she was became known—Oralia would have ended like that priest. She had to go south. But I knew that it would not be easy, that many might try to stop us. So I learned to fight.” Her fingers traced three more sigils in a line down her right cheek. “Sword, spear, axe. This one, for reading the stars and the waters as dragonship guides do. This one, for tracking and trapping prey in the snow. So that we would not get lost on our way south, you understand, or starve as we traveled. For every man's secret I wanted to learn, there was another scar to take.

“I might have had more, but by then Oralia was losing control of her power. There was no one to train what she was. So we left. In time we came here, and she was able to become what her goddess wanted her to be.”

“That is an extraordinary sacrifice,” Heradion said quietly.

“It was a long time ago.” She shrugged. The preparation was the easy part; it was the journey that had been hard.
And she'd failed in the end anyway. “I was sworn as
sigrir
already. There was no reason not to use the privileges of the oath, and no sacrifice in it.”

“Some might disagree. All the same, it will be an honor to travel beside you. Although, I hope, we won't have anything half that dramatic on the way to Carden Vale. A couple of cowardly bandits with sticks for swords might do. Maybe an old toothless dog.”

“No taste for adventure?”

“Adventure's the story you make up after the fact. You just get us there nice and boring, if you please. I'll embroider on enough ‘adventures' to make Rwen the Dragon-slayer blush … once we're all safe back home.”

I
t was raining when Corban returned to Cailan: a late-summer downpour that washed over the streets and whipped the Windhurst River into a gray churn. The dockhands cursed the storm for making their work more difficult, but Corban was glad for it. As long as the rain went on, there would be fewer people in the streets, and fewer curious eyes to see where he took his blackfire crates.

There were a few porters waiting by the wharves, their heads bowed against the weather. Corban flipped a silver shield to a big fellow whose eyes were dull under his dripping hood. It was a generous payment, just shy of extravagance, and it caught the porter's attention at once.

“Greensmoke Alley,” Corban told him, naming the crime-ridden warren where the city's alchemists and apothecaries plied their trade. It was a dismal neighborhood. Few who could afford to live elsewhere wanted to stay near the odd sounds and odder smells that accompanied the alchemists' work, and dark rumors abounded about kidnappers
who stole people off the street to sell for necromancers' experiments. Ridiculous as such stories were, they terrified the gullible.

The porter either didn't believe such things or was willing to brave them for the silver. He grunted in acknowledgment and hefted two of the blackfire crates waiting on the pier. Corban carried the third himself, cradling it close to his chest as he splashed through the crooked streets toward the safe house he'd chosen.

Two blocks from the safe house he stopped. A sign showing a bearded hydra swung outside the shuttered windows of the nearest shop. Corban lowered his crate onto the cobblestones by its door. “This will do. Take care with the boxes. Smokepowder can be dangerous to an ungentle hand.”

The porter's eyes widened, but he nodded and set down the crates with exaggerated care. Once the boxes were out of his hands, he backed away as if he half-expected them to chase after him, and he asked no further questions before making a hasty retreat around the corner.

Corban chuckled, as amused by his own cleverness as by the porter's fear. The smokepowder story explained why he'd paid the porter a full silver shield—it was the least a man could expect for lugging around a box that would reduce him to red vapor and boneshards if he dropped it—and if the porter's nose was sharp enough to pick up the blackfire stone's scent of sulfur, the story would explain that away too.

When the porter was well out of sight, he adjusted his grip on the first crate and hurried past the shop into a twisting alley. The rainwater that skipped down its cobblestones wore a scarf of acrid orange foam—a gift from the neighboring alchemists, whose runoff funneled down this alley
to the sea—while the stones themselves were pitted and oddly soft, eaten away by years of such corrosive floods.

His safe house was here, down a poor street in a poor neighborhood where people were in the habit of ignoring strange doings. Ten or twelve years ago it had belonged to an apothecary, but the man had been hanged for dealing in poisons. After his execution, the Royal Justice had posted a ban on his shop and ordered that it be torn down.

It was never done. The shop sat at the end of a mazy warren confusing even to the denizens of Greensmoke Alley. Its destruction promised to be an unpleasant, unprofitable job. Amid the press of more urgent matters, it was easily forgotten—by the Royal Justice, if not by the people who had to live in Greensmoke Alley.

Over the years, the apothecary's hovel took on an ominous cast in the collective imagination. Eye-watering smells wafted out of its alley on rainy nights. Fish pulled from the waters nearby sometimes came up scaleless and slimy, their deformed fins grabbing at the air like soft pink hands. Rumors about the curse on the house, and what the apothecary had
really
been doing behind those blind, crooked windows, proliferated with each new sighting. Soon people avoided its alley altogether, turning away out of habit, almost instinct.

Corban had seen the opportunity at once. And seized it.

No one would trouble him here. He could leave his blackfire quarrels safely hidden in the apothecary's cellar—the man had been a smuggler as well as a poisoner, and had dug out a secret sea access under his shop—and no one would think to look for them, or connect Corban to the quarrels if they did.

He didn't expect that to be a worry. No one had visited the shop in a dog's age. Bird droppings crusted the
stoop in speckled white. A sun-bleached ribbon, showing a weary remnant of pinkish red at one end, flapped on a scabby-barked tree outside: the last legacy of the posted ban. The door, lifted off its hinges by would-be thieves, leaned against a crooked square of darkness.

Corban moved the door out of the way, slipping it to the side until it was no longer in danger of breaking the soggy piles of bird droppings. It didn't really matter, of course. Rain would cover some of the disturbance, and the birds themselves would soon cover the rest, but Corban wasn't a man who liked to take chances. He wanted to leave as few traces of his visit as possible.