The Saga of the Renunciates (107 page)

But Jaelle was perfectly serious.

“I do not know at all what it is that we will find. The legend says that what each person finds is different, and suited to his needs. There was an old story my nurse used to tell me—oh, I was very little then, a tiny child in the Great House of Shainsa.” Magda could hardly keep from staring at her freemate. Only once before in all the years she had known her freemate had Jaelle referred, even fleetingly, to her childhood in the Dry-Towns, and never to anyone in her father’s house there. She could tell from Camilla’s eyes that this was equally astonishing to her.

“The story said that three men went out to seek good fortune,” Jaelle said, in a faraway voice, “and one married a beautiful wife with much gold and treasure, and thought he was fortunate. And the second found an abandoned homestead where he pruned the trees and they grew fruits and mushrooms for him, and he tamed wild cattle, and fowl, and as he labored night and day to build his farm by the hard work of his hands, felt himself the most fortunate of all men. But the third, they say, sat in the sun and watched the clouds, and heard the grass grow, and listened to the voice of God, and said, Never was any man so fortunate and favored as I.”

There was a long minute of silence. Then Cholayna said, determinedly practical, “As long as I find Alexis Anders alive and unharmed, I have already enough notes on this country and have seen enough strange things that I should be the most ungrateful of women to complain if I find nothing more.”

“I would hope for a mountain to equal Montenegro Summit,” said Vanessa, “but one can’t have everything.”

“Be careful what you pray for,” Jaelle laughed, “you might get it. There are mountains here, I tell you, much higher than Scaravel—though, after this, I could live richly content if I knew I would never again travel above the treeline. Margali, what do you want from that city of legends, should we be guided there?”

“Like Cholayna, I’ll be content to find Lexie and Rafaella safe and well. Somehow I can’t imagine either of them being very interested in ancient wisdom—”

“And as for legends,” Vanessa said cheekily, “you yourself are the legend against which they are measuring themselves, you, Lorne—”

Magda flinched as if Vanessa had struck her. She needed no reminding of that—that in a sense she was to blame that these two women, who should have been her friends, had risked this desperate and dangerous journey.

For all that, would I have wished this road untraveled? I have tested my own strength and found myself stronger than I ever believed. Would I wish this undone?

Leaning back in the clouds of steam, her body at ease in the hot bath, she realized that it did not matter a particle whether she wished all this undone. It
had
happened; it was a part of her, whether for good or bad did not matter either. It was up to her to learn what she could from the experience, and pass on to the next thing in her life.

Just as she suddenly knew that she felt free of the “Lorne legend” which had pursued her for so long. No one, least of all Magda, had required of Alexis Anders that she try to equal or surpass Magda’s achievements.
It had been Lexie’s own doing, not hers
! Magda felt as if a burden heavier than the chervine packloads had fallen from her back and dissolved in the hot water. She would still help Lexie when she found her; the younger woman had gone into deeper waters than she was trained to handle. Magda was obligated to do anything she could to help her. But only, as her vow required her to be… in the words of the Renunciate Oath…
mother and sister and daughter to all women
. Not from guilt, not because it was her fault Lexie had done this rash and stupid thing. She sighed, a long sigh of pure relief.

“I am getting soggy,” Vanessa said. “I think I will get out, and try some of that hot wine they offered us.”

“Enjoy yourself,” Jaelle said, “but I must have Rafaella’s message as quickly as possible.”

Clean clothing was as great a luxury as the bath; Magda had saved one set when she let the laundry women take away hers for washing. Food had been brought and smelled most appetizing; but Jaelle hurried off to Arlinda for Rafaella’s message.

“Forgive me,
breda
. But Arlinda has known me since before I took Oath as a Renunciate, and she may talk more freely with me alone than with someone else to hear. Save me some of the roast rabbithorn I can smell on those platters.”

Magda conceded the good sense of this, but felt troubled as she watched Jaelle go off alone. Her Amazon trousers had gone for cleaning and she was wearing her old fur-lined bathrobe; she looked small and vulnerable, and Magda wished she could protect her. But Jaelle was not a child to be protected. She went back and watched the others taking covers off dishes with frank greed. Even Cholayna succumbed to a dish of boiled whiteroot seasoned with cheese and pungent spices, with a great dish of four kinds of mushrooms and a side platter of stuffed vegetables. Although she did not touch the roast rabbithorn, she did eat some of the stuffing of dried apples and bread soaked in red wine.

Magda set aside a haunch of the rabbithorn and plenty of the stuffing and vegetables for Jaelle. All through the meal she kept expecting the door to open and her freemate to return, but they had cut into the dessert by the time Jaelle came back.

“I thought I would never eat redberry sauce again, after that place,” Vanessa said, dribbling the sweet red stuff across the surface of a smooth custard. “But I find it tastes as good as it did then, and this time, at least, I am sure there is no noxious drug in it.”

They all turned to look as Jaelle came in.

“We saved you plenty of dinner,” Vanessa said, “but it’s probably cold as a banshee’s heart.”

“Banshee heart, boiled or roasted, is a dish I would never cook,” said Cholayna, “but if the rest is too cold, we can probably have it heated up in the kitchens.”

“No, that’s all right. Cold roast rabbithorn is served at all the best banquets,” Jaelle said, as she came and sat down and helped herself to rabbithorn and mushrooms. It seemed to Magda that she looked cold and constrained.

“What was Rafi’s message, love?”

“Only to come after her as fast as I could manage,” Jaelle said, “but there was another message which Arlinda gave me.” But after this she was silent so long that Vanessa finally asked belligerently, “Well? Is this some great secret?”

“Not at all,” Jaelle said at last. “Tonight, so Arlinda told me, one will come, supposedly, from that place, and she will speak with us. And I could tell, from the way Arlinda spoke, that she was afraid. I cannot imagine why, if the Sisterhood is as benevolent as I have always heard, a woman like Arlinda would have anything to fear from her. What Arlinda has managed to do, in a city like Nevarsin, is all but unbelievable. Why should the Sisterhood frighten her?” Jaelle poured herself some of the spiced wine, and sipped at it, then shoved it away.

“So, we are to be tried,” said Camilla. “That is a part of every search, Shaya, love. The Goddess knows you have nothing to fear. Do you truly think they will find us wanting?”

“Oh, how am I to know that, how do I know what they require?” Jaelle munched cold rabbithorn, as uninterested as if it were packaged field rations, her face stolid and closed-in, betraying nothing. “They will judge me in the name of the Goddess and I do not know what to say to them.”

Camilla said, and to Magda she sounded fiercely defensive, “You are what you are,
chiya
, like all of us, and none of us can be otherwise. As for me, I have no more reverence for these women of the Dark Sisterhood than for their Goddess, who thrust me unasked and uninvited into a world which has treated me as I, who am no more than human, would not have treated the meanest of creatures. If their Goddess wishes me evil, I will demand of her why, since when it befell me I was too young to have done anything to deserve it; if she wishes me well, I will ask why she calls herself a Goddess when she was powerless to prevent evil. And when I have heard her reply, then I will judge her as she or her representatives think to judge me!” She poured herself another glass of wine. “Nor should you fear anything from these women who presume to speak in Her name.”

“I don’t fear,” Jaelle said slowly. “I wonder why Arlinda fears, that is all.”

Cholayna had spread out her sleeping bag—the single one of Terran make—on the floor, and, using her saddlebag and her pack as a pillow, was leaning back, writing in a little book. She had, Magda thought, admirably recovered the habits of a field agent. Vanessa was meticulously combing and sectioning her hair for braiding.

Magda was debating following either example, and had started to get her sleeping bag out of its pack when one of the young apprentices came in, carrying an embroidered leather hassock, an elaborate guest-seat. Behind the girl came Arlinda herself. Although Magda expected that Arlinda would take that seat, she did not; she backed against the wall and sat down there, legs crossed beneath her heavy canvas apron, her brawny arms akimbo, bristling all over with expectation.

Then a woman came into the room, and they all looked up at her.

She was not exceptionally tall, but she seemed somehow to take up more space than she physically occupied in the room. It was a trick of presence; Magda had met a few people who knew how to use it, but they were seldom women. She had dark-auburn hair, twisted into a tight coil at the back of her head and fastened there with a copper pin or so. She was dressed in clothing of rather better quality than anyone Magda had seen at the baths or in the leather-worker’s shop so far, and it fitted her well, something unusual for women in this chilly city of
cristoforos
where women were expected to efface themselves. Her eyes were pale gray, looking out with an imperious commanding presence from under her piled hair.

She took the elaborate seat quite as if it was the expected thing. Magda glanced at Arlinda and noticed that the brawny woman’s arms showed signs of goose-flesh, as if she were cold.

What in the name of all the gods on all the planets in or out of the Empire has
she
got to be afraid of
? Magda had not believed anything could make this old Amazon— better fitting the name than any Renunciate—afraid.

“I am the
leronis
Acquilara,” she announced. She looked them over, one by one. “Will you tell me your names?”

With one accord they waited for Jaelle to speak.

“I am Jaelle n’ha Melora,” Jaelle said slowly. “These are my companions.” One by one she repeated their names. “We are from Thendara Guild-house in that city.”

Acquilara heard them without motion, not a flicker of muscle moving in her face or a flicker of her eyes. An imposing trick, Magda knew. She wondered how old the woman was. She could not guess. Her face was less lined than Camilla’s; yet the boniness of her fingers, the texture of her skin, told Magda this was not a young woman. When she moved, it was with an air of complete deliberation, as if she moved only when she had decided to move and never for any other reason.

She swiveled her head to Cholayna and said, “I have known a woman with your skin color. She was poisoned in childhood with a metallic substance. It is so with you, is it not.” It was not a question but a statement. She sounded very self-satisfied, as if waiting for them to acknowledge her cleverness in solving such a riddle.

But Cholayna spoke with equal composure. “It is not. I have known such cases of heavy-metal poisoning, but my skin was this way at birth; I am from a far country where all men and women are like me.”

The eyes of the
leronis
flickered and jolted abruptly to Cholayna again. Her face was so motionless otherwise that Magda knew they had really taken her by surprise.
We were meant to be impressed and we spoiled that for her
. Arrogance was a part of the woman. Somehow Magda had expected that envoys from the mysterious Sisterhood would be like Marisela, benevolent and unassuming.

Was this some form of test? The words formed in her mind without volition. She looked at her freemate, trying to send her a warning;
Be careful, Jaelle
!

But she knew Jaelle had not received the warning, her brain felt dead, the air in the room an empty void that would not carry thought.
So we have had a demonstration of her powers, if not the one she expected
.

Arlinda was still cowering by the wall, and Magda looked at the old Amazon with displeasure, not at Arlinda for her fear, but at the arrogant
leronis
for imposing it. Why should an envoy from the Sisterhood try to terrify them? Suddenly Magda remembered the old woman of her dream in Ravensmark Pass. But she was more afraid of this Aquilara than she had been of that old woman.

Acquilara began again.

“I have heard that you are searching for a certain City.”

Jaelle did not waste words. “Have you been sent to take us there?”

Magda knew, without being sure how she knew, that Jaelle had displeased the woman. Aquilara shifted her position; after her stillness this motion was as surprising as if she had leaped up and yelled aloud.

“Do you know what you are asking? There are dangers—”

“If we were afraid of the dangers,” Jaelle retorted, “we would not have come so far.”

“You think you know something of dangers? I tell you, girl, the dangers you have met on the road— banshees, bandits, all the demons of the high passes— they are nothing, I tell you, nothing beside the dangers you still must face before you are taken into that City. It is not I who impose that test on you, believe me. It is the Goddess I serve. You call upon that Goddess, you Renunciates. But will you dare to face Her, if She should come?”

“I have no reason to fear her,” Jaelle said.

“You think you know something of fear?” Acquilara looked at Jaelle with contempt, and turned to Camilla.

“And you. You are seeking that City? What for? This is a City of women. How shall you, who have renounced your womanhood, be admitted there?”

Camilla’s pale face flushed with anger, and Magda suddenly thought of the Training Sessions in the Guild-house, when the young women, newly admitted to the Guild, were incited to anger and put on the defensive, to force them to clarify their real thoughts; to get beyond what they had been taught as young girls that they ought to think and feel. Were they being subjected to some such process now, and why? And why at the hands of this woman, this
leronis
, if she was a
leronis
at all?