Shadow Gate (72 page)

On one side, an overhang offered shelter. Coals and ash smoldered in a fire pit, wood stacked neatly against one wall. Someone was living here, where all were forbidden to walk. All except Guardians.

“The hells! Move! Move!” She tugged on the uppermost jesses.

Tumna thrust, and they were up again, battered in the swirling currents, turning toward the sea. The winds fronting the storm buffeted them as they glided east, and once over the water the eagle had to beat her wings. It was getting dark, the setting sun occluded by the storm rolling out of the Spires. She banked, and ahead Nallo saw the flickering lights of watch fires and of scattered lamps and torches being lit against the gloom.

They sailed in over the settlement, and with a dainty dip Tumna landed by the reeve quarters. Nallo pulled her feet up out of reflex and, slowly, lowered herself within the angle of the harness to stand, legs shaking, on earth.

She swayed there, dazed, as folk called and Arda came out with a pair of fawkners to tend to the bird. They unhooked her and led her, unresisting and unable to speak, to a big tent covered in canvas, just in time, because rain began to fall, drumming on the taut canvas roof. Nallo hoped that everyone working in the conduit was out for the night but she didn't say so because she could not talk.

Arda sat her down on a bench and handed her a cup. The sharply spiced cordial scalded her throat. She coughed, blinking away tears.

Reeves—mostly young men and a few women and older men—came running in under cover. Out beyond the roped-back entrance a stocky black-haired young man who looked remarkably like one of the Qin soldiers—only he was dressed in reeve's leathers—was speaking with evident intensity to a pair of black-clad Qin soldiers. They shrugged and turned away, leaving him alone in the
rain while everyone else laughed and talked around plank tables set up as an eating hall.

“You don't have to fly again if you choose not to.” Arda poured cordial from a pitcher into the empty cup and sipped.

“I—I—I saw—” She wiped rain from her brow and blinked as another pair of lamps flared. The gods! This place was lit like they had oil to spare, and surely they did. Thunder boomed. “I saw a fireling, just like in the tales. It boomed, like thunder only so much smaller. Like it was laughing at me.”

Nallo hadn't thought she could say anything that would surprise that competent woman, but the trainer's face went blank as she blew out breath between pursed lips. “Eihi!”

“You don't believe me!”

“Don't snap at me! I'm shaking my head because I do believe you. Here, now.” Her gaze slipped away and her eyes narrowed. “What's he doing here?”

Nallo turned.

Volias sauntered up. “Greetings of the day to you, too, my darling Arda.” He made a gesture of rudely passing a kiss before turning to Nallo. “Listen, Nallo, I have a proposition.”

“Volias,” said Arda with a sour grimace, “why you think she'd be interested in your ugly—”

“Neh, neh, not that kind of proposition. I'm not Joss, am I? Listen, Nallo.” With a bright grin, like Jerad when he'd caught a fish, he straddled the bench, grabbed the cup out of Arda's hand, and drained it in one go. “Whew!” He screwed up his mouth, squinting. “That's strong stuff!” He set down the cup. “Listen, Nallo, I know you're angry about Joss and how he handled things, so I had a talk with the commander in Clan Hall. Plus in addition this trouble with Pil has got to be solved, so—”

“What are you doing here?” demanded Nallo.

He shut his mouth, ceased talking, and flushed.

Arda smirked. “Heard we'd tracked Tumna, did you,
Volias?” She looked at Nallo. “He's been flying in and out of Argent Hall for weeks now, riding messages down from Clan Hall. He has become a pest, always asking if there's been any news of you and is anyone looking, like he thinks we're cursed fools who can't do a thing right. You followed me here!”

“I can't help worrying,” muttered Volias without looking up. “Just like Joss to use too tight a rein. He must be honest in the very wrong way when maybe it would be better to let a person work things through with a bit of—I don't know—”

“A bit of dishonesty?” asked Arda with a laugh.

Nallo didn't know who to warm to, and who to snap at. “You knew, didn't you?” she said to Arda. “That once I flew, I would want to fly again.”

Volias let out a whistle of breath. “So that's how you did it.”

Arda said, “It does happen that way, often enough. How do you suppose I feel, Nallo? I'd have given anything to be chosen by an eagle. It's all I ever wanted. But it never happened. So I've dedicated my life to training those lucky enough to be jessed.”

“To be slaves?”

She raised her hands, palms out, in the exact gesture she'd used to signal Tumna to lift. “I'm not treading that path, girl. Don't even try me.”

Volias poured the last of the cordial into the cup and shoved it in front of Nallo. “You refuse to become a reeve because you say it's like being forced to sell your labor as a slave. And yet you go ahead, so I hear, and sell your labor as a slave, working for the outlanders. So wouldn't it make more sense to have remained a reeve, with autonomy, a hall filled with comrades, responsibility and authority?”

Nallo did not take the cup. “I myself chose to sell my labor. You at the hall—the marshal, everyone—made the choice for me.”

“We made no choice. The eagle made its choice.”

She shook her head. “Do you know how I got married? My father came up to me when I brought in the goats one afternoon and said, ‘Nallo, the clan has sealed a contract for you to marry a ropemaker in a village on the West Track. About ten days' walk from here. You'll leave tomorrow.' ”

Arda shrugged. “A story heard a hundred times. How are you different from most other lads and lasses married out to benefit the clan?”

Volias picked up the cup, thought better of drinking, and set it back down, turning it halfway and leaving his hands cupped around its curve. “I can see you may have felt roped—heh—into a bad situation. But Arda is right, as much as I hate to admit it.” Arda rolled her eyes. “That's how contracts are arranged between clans.”

She was boiling now, remembering the way her father had turned away with relief at finally being rid of her. “I didn't even get to meet him beforehand. No one asked if it was what I wanted.”

“Was he cruel?” asked Arda suddenly. “Did he mistreat you?”

Volias pushed the cup closer to Nallo and removed his hand.

“No. He was a good man.” She picked up the cup and gulped down the cordial, glad of how the spicy aftertaste burned her mouth and made her eyes water. “The truth is, he got the worse part of the bargain, but he never said one word in complaint.”

“Ah,” murmured Volias.

“Ah! What's that mean?”

“The hells! Just a way of making noise come out my throat. No need to rip my head off.” As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he winced.

“A smooth talker,” said Arda, “which accounts for his success with women.”

Nallo said, “Tumna killed her reeve.”

“Yes,” said Volias. “And from everything I hear, he'd
earned death. I am not a good man, not like your dead husband, may he rest beyond the Spirit Gate. But I do not fear Trouble.”

“These days everyone fears trouble,” said Nallo tartly.

“No, I mean, my eagle. Her name is Trouble. Now I admit she is a particularly good-natured bird, besides being as everyone acknowledges the most beautiful eagle known to be alive in the entire Hundred.”

Nallo laughed. “You're boasting.”

Arda sighed.

“It is not boasting if it is true. Like that Qin captain. You have to admit his wife is a lovely creature.”

“I never saw her,” said Nallo, thinking of Avisha and the children, and finding another tear on her cheek.

“And by all accounts a canny merchant,” added Arda, “capable of twisting the knife with a smile and a compliment that makes you not even feel the pain. I think what Volias is saying is that no one could believe Trouble chose
him
when she could have had her pick of any decent person.”

Volias grinned, and Nallo saw that he cared nothing for what people said about him and Trouble, because he had her, and they didn't. “Listen, Nallo. As I said, I have a proposition. I'm taking Pil back to Clan Hall to get his training. You come, too. Then you're away from all this, and you can make up your own mind. I admit that Arda is the best trainer we've got, but Ofri's experienced and cursed mellow, and a good man, for that matter.”

Arda propped her chin on a hand as she examined Volias with a frown. “What's your angle?”

He wasn't a handsome man, but when he wasn't sneering, he had a nice face. “Get her away from Joss. He's the one who put her back up.”

“You two must give up your feud. It bores the rest of us.”

He turned a shoulder to Arda and fixed so warm a gaze on Nallo that she tried another swallow just to get
the cup between her and his face. Arda reached across the table and patted Nallo's other wrist, stroking it teas-ingly, and Nallo shifted, feeling in that touch a promise that pleased her.

Volias sighed and rose. “I guess I'm too late.”

“No,” said Nallo, without pulling away from Arda's pleasant touch. “Just to be clear, I don't want any other kind of proposition from you. But if I go to Clan Hall, then maybe it'll seem like I'm starting new, of my own choice.”

Thunder boomed overhead, and the rain pounded harder. Laughing reeves and hirelings dashed in under the cover of the canvas hall. Even Pil slouched in, looking like a drowned Rat, and with arms folded across his chest sank down on a bench alone, brooding.

“To be up there like that—I can't imagine never going aloft again.”

“Jessed,” said Volias, without heat or mockery. He was just speaking the truth.

Tumna had chosen her, and now they were bound.

T
HE BOOM OF
thunder and the downpour that followed came as a relief to Mai after weeks enduring the dusty heat and dreary isolation of the Barrens, all too similar to the days of her childhood in Kartu Town. How far away the markets of Olossi seemed now. She pressed a hand over her swollen abdomen. The baby lay quiet, undisturbed by the storm. But she sighed, clutching a message brought midday by a reeve from Argent Hall.

She sat on a humble bench on a raised porch in the shelter of one of only four proper buildings in the entire settlement. From this vantage, sited advantageously on the slope, she watched rain make a haze of air, listened to its drumming on tile roof, on canvas, on dirt. Water tracked runnels into every crack and low spot, headed for the flat plain beyond the lower berm where in years
to come fields would flourish if the massive irrigation project proved successful. An eagle spiraled in, battered by turbulence as it made for the training ground on Eagle Hill to the north. The rain was so dense she could not even see the hill where ancient ruins surrounded a rich vein of naya sinks. Water rushed down the gully, a muted roar rather like the thoughts in her head.

Soon it would be too dark to see. But since she could not read, it scarcely mattered. Priya had twice read out Miravia's message.

“ ‘Strangely, the terrible situation in the Hundred in which so many suffer works to my benefit. Contracts can be delivered by paying a fee to reeves flying between the halls, but bodies must travel by land. The uncles will not risk bodily harm coming to me by sending me on unsafe roads, even if they think nothing of those other harms that may come to me when the marriage is finally sealed. It's true that it says in the law that a girl must not be forced into marriage against her will, but were I to refuse, that would ruin my hopes of marriage forever, since no one else will want me because I will have proven myself to have a rebellious temperament. It will furthermore put a stain on my family's trading contacts with other Ri Amarah houses, and in the hopes my cousins cherish of contracting respectable marriages. For me to refuse would be to betray my family. My despair must remain in my heart. Yet while a person may hope to hide their face from the presence of the Hidden One, we are not hidden from that gaze even if we believe that because we cannot see that which is hidden, that it therefore does not exist.' ”

Priya pushed past the curtained entrance—there were no actual walls, only canvas strung from beams—and offered Mai a bowl of rice covered with bean curd, slip-fried vegetables, and a red sauce swimming with slices of fish.

“Here, Mistress. You must be hungry.”

“I am.” She tucked the folded rice paper into her belt
and accepted the bowl. Although the smell made her mouth water, she did not eat.

“You are still upset about the message.”

“I am.”

“Yet you accepted a marriage not of your choosing.”

Mai looked up. Sheyshi shivered behind Priya, holding a burning lamp whose light spilled around them. “Did you become a priestess at the temple by your choice, or of your clan's choosing?”

“A meaningless question, Mistress. I came to the temple because it was the will of the Merciful One that I offer prayers there. Who spoke what words means nothing.”

Lightning flashed, and thunder cracked right over them. They all jumped, and Sheyshi yelped in surprise, bringing Avisha running from inside.

“What happened? Sheyshi, what did you
do
? Here, let me take the lamp. You're shaking so hard you're going to drop it.”

“No!” Sheyshi jerked the lamp away, and oil spilled, hissing on the planks.

“You two go inside and see after the children,” said Priya sternly, taking the lamp from Sheyshi. “The noise has woken them.”

Mai ate, listening to the anxious questions of children as rain pounded on the roof and spat in under the porch's eaves. Canvas thrummed, tugging on ropes.