The Lost Steersman (Steerswoman Series) (25 page)

Perhaps he had been trying to do exactly that.

She found she could not speak; and in the rapidly gathering dark, she could not read his face.

But now she saw his stance: one hand loosely holding his sword, the other arm wrapped tight around his body. Words came by themselves. “Are you hurt?”

“No.” Then: “You are.”

She looked down. In the failing light, her own blood looked black against Arvin’s pale shirt. “A bit.”

“Have Jilly see to it.” He brushed past her.

She watched him go; and all around, in the darkening field, people were moving, calling out. Family, comrades, friends, looking for each other, finding each other, laughing relief, and already telling the tale of Janus’s mad attack. Some people were carrying lamps, like small searching stars.

“Rowan.”

“Steffie.” He was beside her, and had a small star of his own.

“Oh— ”

She recovered her wits. “No, I’m all right. For the most part. Merely some bad scratches.”

“Oh. Right. Let’s get you to Jilly’s.” And he walked beside her, lighting her way.

14

H
e thought he’d just check.

The steerswoman didn’t strike Steffie as the kind of person who’d take it easy after being hurt. Not that she was hurt bad, not like Lark. But still.

He put his lunch pail down by the door of the Annex and sort of slipped in, not wanting to make a noise in case Rowan was sleeping.

But she was up, eating breakfast, though she already had a whole big stack of books beside her on the floor, tall as her chair, and three more open and spread on the table all around her. Which you did have to expect, he supposed.

When he saw her, she was moving her hand away from her sword, hung at the back of her chair, as usual. Which meant that when the door opened, her hand had gone near her sword, same as it always did, until she saw it was just him.

That used to bother him. Didn’t anymore.

“I hadn’t expected to see you. Aren’t Lasker’s worms still hungry?” She looked tired, dog tired. And she held herself sort of stiff.

“I expect they are,” he said. “Hungrier than usual, I guess, ’cause when that demon was in the field, all the shed workers got so scared they hid behind the racks.” He came over and sat. “I’ll bet a bunch of them died waiting for their suppers. The worms, I mean. And some probably got so thrown off, they won’t go up the hill at all, when the time comes.”

She pushed a plate of gummy-looking rolls toward him. “That will be soon, won’t it?”

“Any day. Don’t mind if I do.” But he minded after he took a bite, because it was the worst roll he ever ate. It needed to be baked a lot longer. “Anyway, thought I’d stop by. You know.” He tried to think of a polite way to get rid of the roll, but he couldn’t, so he kept eating it.

“Thank you, Steffie. But I’m doing well, really. Although, I did get no sleep.” Up close, she didn’t look just tired; she looked dark, somehow, like she’d been far away, to somewhere not very nice, and was going back there soon.

“Me neither. Not much.” He’d kept hearing demons in his dreams. “But it’s over now.” All of a sudden, Rowan’s face changed, as if that dark place she was thinking of was a lot closer than she liked. He went cold. “Isn’t it?”

“I hope so. But four demons is far too many.”

Four? He counted them up: three yesterday, one before, and the first one— the one she’d cut up. “No, that’s five, all together.”

She didn’t answer straight off. “I mean,” she said, “four yesterday.”

He dropped the roll. “Where was the fourth one? When? Was anyone hurt?”

She put up one hand. “No, no one was hurt— unless you count the fourth demon itself. I found it, what was left of it, residing in the stomach of demon number three.”

He calmed down. “It got ate up?”

“Apparently.”

“And when did you find that out?”

“Last night. I took a lantern, sometime before dawn. Since I couldn’t sleep, I thought I’d do something useful.”

Well. He was right about her not resting when she ought to. Still . . . “Just for something to do, or did you have some idea in mind?”

“I had an idea.” She ate a few bites of her eggs. “There are two places that I’ve heard of demons living. One is in the salt bog, hundreds of miles north of here— but the stories about them are old, and no demon has been seen there in living memory.” She put down her fork. “The other place is the Outskirts— where they are so exceedingly rare that the arrival of even one will inspire people to write a song to mark the occasion.

“But life native to the Outskirts and to the lands beyond is very different from Inner Lands life. The two types don’t coexist easily. And the largest reason is that most living things of one type cannot eat living things of the other type. It made me wonder how demons coming in from the Outskirts could survive long enough to reach Alemeth.”

“So, they did it by eating each other?”

“One of them did.” She went back to her eggs.

“Well,” he said, “I guess that makes sense. If you’re going someplace where there’s nothing to eat . . . bring friends.”

The steerswoman laughed so suddenly and so hard that she spit egg straight across the table at Steffie, which made him laugh, too; and seeing him laugh made her laugh more. Then she got some egg down her windpipe, which made her cough, and up her nose, which made her sneeze four times in a row, just like a cat— which made Steffie laugh even harder. And then they both had to hurry to get the egg bits off the pages of the books on the table, so they wouldn’t be there for the next person to find, maybe years later. Which, when Steffie pointed it out, made them both laugh all over again; and the steerswoman said that maybe she ought to label the stains, so that the next person wouldn’t be confused and spend years trying to figure them out. Then she described something called a catalog entry and cross-reference for the egg bits, of which Steffie didn’t understand a single word; but just the way she said it, so serious and formal, made them both laugh so hard that they had to sit back down and wait until they were done.

And when they were, Steffie said, “I think I should stay by the Annex today. Just to do this and that for you, ’cause you’ve been hurt and you’re tired, and I’m not, not so much.”

“Lasker won’t give you the sack if you miss a day?”

“No. It’s not so strict. Whoever shows up gets to work, and since almost everybody does, he’s almost never short. He won’t miss me.”

And that’s what he did. She went back to her books and writing, and he got going on the dishes from breakfast. And then he thought maybe he could give those rolls another chance in the oven, but they were low on wood. So he left the steerswoman pulling books off some shelves and putting other books up on others, and went and got some logs. And when he got back, she’d fallen asleep in Mira’s chair.

So instead of moving around the house, where he might wake her up, he took the two smallest logs out back, to split into kindling.

Which was what he was doing when she came out later and sat on the back steps, looking sort of bleary and stubborn, too, both at the same time.

She sat there, thinking for a while, before she said anything, and she was smart enough to wait until after one chop and before the next. “Steffie?”

“Hm?” He was down to taking one piece and making it into two, and taking one of them and making that into two, over and over, which he always found sort of interesting.

“Can you read?”

“More or less . . .

“That’s rather vague. Can you be more specific?”

“Well . . .” And he put down the axe. “I suppose I can puzzle out words, with enough time. If they’re written clear.” He started gathering up the kindling. “Anyway”— and he turned to Rowan— “I don’t get much practice.”

She was looking at him just like his words made no sense at all. He was suddenly ashamed, knowing what she was thinking, clear as if she said it:
How can you spend all your time in a house full of books and not read them?

But she sighed. “Well, come and take a look at this.”

He brought half the kindling to the stove and put the other half by the hearth. Rowan was at the table, pulling out a clean sheet of paper. He went over.

She picked up her pen, dipped it, and started writing something. “Now, I don’t need you to read these words, exactly— I just want you to be able to recognize them. You can hold them in your head like pictures, if that works for you.”

His ears went hot, but she didn’t really mean it as an insult, so he didn’t say anything and just watched her write. “Demon,” he said when she finished the first word.

Her quick smile was back. “Very good.” She did another. “But I know that name for them because it was told to me; someone else might not call them that . . .”

He sounded out the second word. “Mmm, mm, mon, monster.”

The third word was a long one. Steffie was at sea, with no idea at all how to even begin. “That’s a
q
,” the steerswoman said, “and that’s a
u
after it. Together they sound like
kw
. . .”

“Qua,” Steffie said. He felt like an idiot. “Quad, quade, quadey— ”

“Quadrilateral,” Rowan said. “That’s the most important one. Demons have quadrilateral symmetry, meaning that they have four sides, each the same as the others. Very few living things are quadrilaterally symmetrical, so any steerswoman who saw a demon, or heard one described, would be certain to include the fact in her notes.”

A bad suspicion started to grow in him. “What notes?” And her glance told him. He turned around.

And there they were, five big aisles of shelves, up to the ceiling, back twenty, thirty feet to the end of the long room. “Oh, no.”

“You don’t have to read everything,” she said in a rush. “just look at each page, and bring me any book or piece of paper that has any of those words on it. Too many demons have come to Alemeth; I don’t like it. We need to know more about them— their habits, their life cycle, migrations. Perhaps . . . somewhere, at some time, some other steerswoman has seen a demon, or spoken to someone who has— and she put it in her logbook. We might learn something we can use.”

He wanted to help, but: “Every single page . . .”

“It’ll go faster than you think, if you just look for those words.”

Demons.

He
hated
demons. And he couldn’t fight them with a sword, like Rowan, or with a bow, like Arvin. Maybe he wasn’t any better with words than he was with a sword or a bow, but he wouldn’t die if he tried and failed at it. Which he might, with a sword or a bow. “Right.”

She clapped him on the shoulder, like he’d seen the militia do with each other. “Good man. You start on one end, I’ll start on the other.”

“And we meet in the middle?”

She stopped short, opened her mouth, then closed it again. “I sincerely hope,” she said, “that it won’t take
that
long.”

She gave him the front aisle, where light from the windows made it easier; she lit a lamp for herself and went off to the other side, the darker one.

Steffie just stood there dumb, with three words on a paper in one hand, and the books all lined up on the shelf, just like little faces looking at him. Then he shook his head, took one deep breath, and dove in.

He thought he’d been at it all day, but the sun out in the street said it wasn’t even one hour. Not this page, not this page, not this . . . At last he was done with the one book, and he put it back.

Then another book. Every page.

It was hard.

But the thing to do when you have to do something hard is just dig in and do it. After a while, it being hard doesn’t matter anymore. It’s just what you’re doing, and you keep on doing it.

He dug in. Another book, every page, one by one, checking to see if any words matched the ones on the paper.

And then another book— and he did find
monster
, but he didn’t want to waste the steerswoman’s time, so he stopped to figure out the whole page, and it was just some steerswoman saying how rotten some local guard captain was. Then later, in another, he found
quadrilateral
and even
symmetry
, which took some figuring; but it turned out the writer was talking about a tree that some wood carvers were forcing to grow into a special shape for a special room in a special house, and that was interesting, think how long that’d take, your father would have to start the work for your son to finish . . .

He made himself go back to his job. Another book. And then another; but instead of going faster, he was going slower, or he seemed to be, because he wasn’t turning each page over so quickly anymore . . .

Rowan came and got him around noon, and he was surprised to see her; he had got to feeling like he was all alone, sitting on the dusty floor by the sunshiny windows.

They brought out cold food for lunch, and when they sat down to eat it, Steffie said, “You didn’t tell me.”