The Lost Steersman (Steerswoman Series) (7 page)

“And you look as if at some time in the past you’d been dipped in vinegar and left to dry on a rock. Tell me, did you use your knife to cut your hair, or was it actually chewed by badgers?”

She laughed out loud, discovered a wonderfully witty answer, prepared to deliver it— and only just halted its escape by sheer force of will.

They stood regarding each other across the silence. “Well. Sorry,” Janus said. “And here I’d been feeling as if the years had rolled back on us . . .”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Apparently.”

Rowan noticed that the silence that surrounded them was somewhat larger than could be generated by two people. Looking about, she discovered herself and Janus to be the center of rapt attention. As she watched, the inebriated man at the end of her former table received another nudge from his crony, and with no attempt at dissemblance whatsoever, that entire group once again readjusted their chairs to face the action, making rather a lot of noise doing so. The act was not lost on the rest of the crowd, inspiring laughter and some wry remarks that evolved into a spate of banter, under cover of which Rowan leaned close to Janus to say, “You mentioned an explanation.”

“Yes.”

“A long one?”

“As long as you require.”

“Here?”

“Preferably not.”

“Good.” At which point the crowd ran out of witticisms and returned its attention to Rowan and Janus. The steerswoman had the bizarre sensation that she was facing one single, curious, many-eyed creature.

“There’s . . . no way to exit discreetly, or unobtrusively, is there?”

Janus seemed to be enjoying himself. “If those are the only options, no.” She noticed that he pitched his voice to carry.

She ought to be playing along; she ought to try to fit in. These people meant her no harm and were giving her the opportunity to either perform or participate, as she chose. She found such ostentation difficult. “What other options do you suggest?” she said, managing a more normal tone.

He made a show of deep thought. “Under the circumstances . . . I believe ‘with dignity’ is the best we can hope for.”

She sighed, winced. “I shall follow your lead.”

5

R
owan’s last contact with Janus had been not sight but sound.

She had been walking in a forest, along a route more game trail than path, that slanted and wound up a woody hill. As she walked, a part of her mind was measuring her own steps, noting with pleasure their swing and pace; another part was studying the land about her in what was already a reflexive, half-conscious contemplation; and a third part, that part of herself to which she put her own name, was realizing with joy and wonder that this would be her life: forever walking across the wide face of the world.

It was the first time she was doing the things of which her life would now consist: it was the first hour of the first day that she was traveling entirely alone, as a newly qualified steerswoman.

Four of them, freshly graduated students all, had journeyed together from the Archives on the way to their separate, assigned routes. An hour ago, they had reached the point where they must split and continue each alone. Their good-byes had been strange and almost tentative; the fact of their separation had seemed not quite real. Then each turned and walked away, into the hilly woodlands: due north, northeast, due south, southwest.

Rowan worked her way uphill in close pine forest, and eventually reached a crest, where rock bared the face of the hill to the open sky. She paused and turned around to view the land, checking it against the map in her memory, noting elevations (that craggy hill to the south was perhaps a bit higher than charted), gauging distances (she might make that distant saddle by nightfall), marking how the little brook in the floor of the dell meandered down from the northeast (its source was unknown — perhaps Rowan would be the one to discover it!) . . .

She was completely alone.

As her gaze swept the entire landscape, there was no sign of human presence, no sign of her former companions. Even the little path where they had parted had been swallowed by overhanging pines. There was only the cloud-crowded sky above her; the soft dark green of the piney hills all around; the glitter of water far below; and close beside her, the liquid twitter of a song sparrow.

And it seemed then to Rowan that a door had closed and that she now stood on the one side, and her Academy days; the companions of her youth; the bustling seaport of Wulfshaven; the cool stone corridors of the Archives; the wise, worn faces of the elder steerswomen, her teachers, whom she loved so well— all on the other side.

She did not regret the closing of that door, but she was very surprised to find that the door existed and more surprised still to discover that, in her mind, it bore the label:
Home
.

She was leaving it behind, possibly forever.

And those who had traveled with her, who had inhabited that home with her and left it in her company, were now lost to her, vanished. She might never see them again.

At last she turned uphill to continue her journey. But before she re-entered the forest, the sparrow on her left suddenly ceased its song. Rowan stopped short. She listened.

A far-off, high-pitched piping.

From the south, a flute, blown hard and shrill to carry the distance. Janus’s wood and silver flute— and Janus, unseen, squeaking out a little jig compressed into the upper register: a tune utterly silly, completely merry. Rowan smiled.

And in her mind’s eye, as if sprung into existence from nowhere, suddenly there was Ingrud: stopping short, listening, catching the idea, throwing off her pack. An instant later— yes! A
blat!
, a
squeee!
, a continual, distant roar as Ingrud yanked the bellows of her squeeze-box, all its buttons depressed. Not music at all but the loudest noise possible, and the combination of roaring and twittering was too foolish to be borne, and Rowan was laughing helplessly.

She wished she and the fourth traveler had some way of joining in; but young Zenna had found her own solution. A sustained hoot echoed off the hilltops, then a series of yips, and then wild yelps and howls like a hunting hound. A dog, a bird, and— what was the squeeze-box? a bull moose!— all serenading the green forest. Rowan wanted to contribute, somehow, but she must first stop laughing, and she could not. The cacophony was impossible. She was gasping, and she fell to a seat on the stones, leaning back against her pack, wiping at her eyes ineffectually.

At last the noise began to die down. Ingrud and Zenna vied for the honor of making the last and loudest noise, with longer and longer pauses between. But it was Janus who ended it with a final, emphatic, almost admonishing
peep!

Then the moment was past. The last echo died. Rowan sat on the ground, hugging her knees, catching her breath. At last she rose and walked away.

Her friends were not vanished, but only out of sight, traveling to adventures of their own.

Many miles later, it occurred to Rowan that the wind had been at her back, that quite possibly her laughter had been carried on it, and that perhaps she had been heard.

She decided that she liked that very much: that the last thing her friends might ever hear of her would be her laughter.

And there was laughter again, immediately outside the tavern door.

Among Rowan’s people, when two people walked together, it was the woman’s place to offer her arm to the man; among Janus’s people, the identical offer was the man’s duty. They both stood a moment, elbows ridiculously cocked at each other, then broke into long laughter.

It was a very old joke between them. At the Academy, they had come to use the gesture in place of a greeting.

Janus recovered first and solved the dilemma by throwing one arm across Rowan’s shoulder; she slipped her arm about his waist, and they proceeded down the street in that fashion. And that, too, was very familiar.

Except that the streets were not in Wulfshaven, and the man at her side was not a handsome eighteen-year-old. She studied him sidelong. He was her age, to the month, but there was the gray in his beard, and he had a new, wiry gauntness. He caught her scrutiny and returned it. “You look very much the perfect steerswoman.”

“Despite my haircut?”

“Possibly because of it.”

He smelled of old dust and new sawdust. “You’ve been working at the cooper’s warehouse.”

“I’m impressed.”

“It’s the only current construction I’ve noticed in town.”

They reached the corner. Rowan had thought they would go right, to the Annex; but, perhaps out of habit, Janus turned them left and they went down Old High Street.

“I’m waiting for that explanation.”

“Yes. Give me a moment.”

She could feel how uncomfortable he was, and how abruptly he became so. She found it made her sad. “All I heard,” she said, “was that the ship you were taking to Southport was lost at sea; we assumed you dead. But two years later Ingrud ran into you, playing flute in a tinker’s band.”

“I wandered, for a while . . .”

She waited for him to go on; he did not. “Ingrud said,” she prompted, “that you told her you’d resigned, and that you refused to explain why. She had to place you under the Steerswomen’s ban.”

They continued walking. He remained silent. She grew disturbed. “Are you refusing to answer me?”

His reply was quick. “No, I’m not refusing. I’m . . . organizing myself.”

Old High Street descended toward the harbor. The drizzle had ceased, and the sun, on the horizon, had escaped the overhang to wash the harbor with gold light, made richer by the gray above. Janus twice drew a breath as if to speak, did not, then at last sighed. “It’s not easy to tell . . . partly because it’s not really a tale. I could lay the events out to you, one by one . . . all the way to now, but that won’t tell it. It’s more . . . internal. Plenty of things did happen, and none of them pleasant . . . but really, I just discovered that I’d gone wrong.

“A steerswoman’s life isn’t for everyone, Rowan, we always knew that. The Academy is designed to sort out those who aren’t suited, one way or another, but the process isn’t perfect— it can’t be.”

Rowan reminded herself that the sorting out continued after graduation, and that process was by far the worse.

Janus’s voice was quiet, his body tense. “The simple explanation,” he said in a voice of obviously forced nonchalance, “is that I found that I just wasn’t up to it.”

Information this scant constituted no explanation whatsoever. “Janus, you were up to it. You showed that, over and over, during our training.”

“I’m sure it seemed that way. But it’s one thing to train, another matter altogether to
do
. And I suppose I did do well enough, when it came down to it ...” He relaxed somewhat, although his voice was bitter. “When the ship came apart in the storm, I did get myself to shore, I did keep myself alive in the wild lands, I did get back to civilization . . .” He grew quiet, then went on, more uncomfortably. “It’s a question of heart, Rowan. I could do what was needed . . . but it was just . . . I found it terrible. I found I never wanted to pass through any such thing again.”

Rowan found the statement so obvious as to be meaningless. “Of course you don’t,” she said. “No one does. That’s why we learn, and plan, so that when we encounter difficult situations, or dangerous ones, we can survive them and go on.”

“That’s a very glib response,” he said, almost sarcastically, then seemed to regret his tone. “Sorry.” He was quiet for a space. “Rowan, the first time I came into any real danger— well, you were there, actually.”

She was a moment recalling. “And Ingrud, and Zenna,” she reminded him. A starless night, a dim campfire, more than a half dozen wolves. It was not a pleasant memory.

“I got the impression that you weren’t frightened at all,” he said.

This so surprised Rowan that she laughed out loud. “Nothing of the sort! I was terrified!”

“Well, you didn’t show it.”

“I suppose I was too busy to show it.”

“But it affected Zenna badly.”

It had indeed; Zenna, the youngest of them, had been nearly hysterical with fear. But: “Only after the fact.” During the attack itself, Zenna had been a small whirlwind of action and had collapsed into tears only when it became safe to do so. In retrospect, Rowan found herself admiring Zenna’s strength and control. “And you and Ingrud cheered her out of it.”

“Yes. But it affected me as well. I didn’t say so at the time. I thought it would pass. I thought I’d get used to it. The shipwreck was worse . . . I had no one to help me.” He could not meet her eye. “Rowan, I’m a coward.”

“Impossible.”

“No.” He spoke heavily. “It’s true.”

She expected him to elaborate, but he did not. “If you were a coward, you’d never have joined at all,” Rowan said.

“No. I didn’t understand. Now I do.”

“What didn’t you understand?”

He was so long in replying that she wondered if he would answer at all. “I thought it would be an adventure,” he said at last. “I never thought— I never really understood how much danger there is in adventure.”