Traitors' Gate (57 page)

Who had the means and the motive? Who might think that, by killing the eagles first, they would not only kill reeves but ruin the eagles' ability to reproduce, thereby destroying the reeve halls forever. “Did you ever see another person wearing a cloak like mine? A cloak like the sun, or night?”

The lad's sobs washed over her like a wild wind, but she could not succumb to panic, to rage, to despair.

“Listen! How long ago did this happen?”

He sucked down a few gulps and steadied himself. He'd grown up with women scolding him with sharp words; he knew how to listen and answer when listening and answering was preferable to a smack. “M-Maybe a year ago. It was the dry season. Just like now.”

The eagle's shadow slid off her, as though it had decided she was no threat, and the raptor bent over its reeve, head twisting first to this side and then the other as it examined the young man. It was a young bird, still changing color, as inexperienced and naive as he was. Satisfied he was not injured, it moved off to the center of the parade ground, tail feathers swiping the ground.

“I'm called Marit. What's your name?”

The manners taught him by his aunts and grandmothers ruled him. “I'm Badinen, honored aunt.”

An old-fashioned name, in keeping with this gods-forsaken isolated wilderness. “Where did this eagle come from?”

“I don't know.”

“How does it happen that she jessed you?”

“I couldn't bear to leave even after they were dead. She just flew out of the sky one day. She'd been left behind, like me, I guess. We've been together ever since. I fish. There's plenty of game for one eagle.”

She asked more questions, but he knew nothing of the world beyond his humble fishing village south of here. In truth, he was hard to understand, even after the assizes had accustomed her to the northern way of talking.

“Clan Hall must be told that an entire reeve hall fled here and was betrayed and massacred.”

“What is Clan Hall?” He sat up cautiously, glancing toward his eagle, who had opened her wings to sun. “I know the tales. Clan Hall isn't one of the six reeve halls.”

“They are the seventh hall. They supervise the other six halls.”

“That's not in the tales. Maybe they're the ones who did the murder. If my reeves trusted them, they'd have gone there, wouldn't they?”

It was a good question. Why hadn't Horn Hall gone for help to Clan Hall? Why flee here?

“Anyhow,” he added, “if we leave here, them ones who killed the rest might see us and kill us, too.”

“You've already been seen. They're already coming for you. I came to warn you.”

He frowned, a simple lad forced to comprehend twisted minds. “You might be luring me away to kill me. Best I stay where I know the land. I have hiding spots. No one will find me.”

“I found you.”

“I swore I'd watch over this place, for it's their Sorrowing Tower, isn't it? The gods have scoured them clean. Their spirits have passed the gate. I'm the watchman. It's a holy obligation. I have to stay, and you can't make me go. Why should I trust you, anyhow?”

She rose. Why should he trust anyone? Yet the folk at that assizes had trusted her, because they still trusted the old ways. As he might.

“Badinen, have you not yet recognized what I am? I am a Guardian. I've come to take you where you need to go, for the sake of those who died.”

•  •  •

T
HE VAST FOREST
known as the Wild breathed with a hidden heart. Born and raised in the desert, Shai choked on the thick green canopy that surrounded him. Vines tangled on every trail, and even so the deer tracks were the only way to get around if you were stuck walking, as he was, scraping his way through branches, leaves, ferns, and the trailing threads of barbed vine the wildings jokingly called “oo!-aa!” He wiped his brow clean of the moisture that dripped from leaves above, then thrust the tip of his staff into a curtain of dangling vines as thick as a woman's arms. His probe rousted no snakes or stinging wasps or biting lizards.

He wiped his brow again, more from nerves than moisture. Had they actually lost track of him this time?

With the staff angled to part a way, he plunged forward through the ropy vines, their smell as cloying as rotting pears. The vines began writhing along his back, and one leaped as might living creature and looped once twice thrice around his shoulders until he was trapped.

Whoop! Whoop!

Chortling and hooting, Brah and Sis slithered down from above and slapped Shai on the ass as they untangled him. Resigned, he allowed them to escort him back the way he had come.

Today's attempt to flee had ended, as usual, in failure.

They were so cursed good-natured about it.

They chattered in their way, oo aa ee ai eh, gesturing with their hands, and he could no more fathom what it all meant than understand the forest's complex net of life.

Go home
, he signed to Brah.
I want go home.

You wait
, Brah replied in that patient way he had, like talking down to a child.
More come. We talk.

They drank from a stream, hands cupped in the cold water. They threw stones at a gourd-fruit dangling high above although
either of the wildings could have shimmied up the trunk and fetched it, but Shai's aim was getting cursed good, almost as good as theirs, and when his cast stone brought it down, they whooped and shoved him to show what a good job he'd done. Sis slipped her flute out of its sheath on her back and, as they walked on, played a tune that ran like water, as an afternoon breeze rolled through the high canopy and the blue sky flashed in and out of view as branches swayed. Birds fluttered in the canopy; butterflies flared bright colors; insects hummed and lizards chirred as they leaped from bole to bole. His left shoulder still bore a scar from his first encounter with one of the lizards, and he had been stung by wasps several times. As for snakes, those he'd only seen lying in a stupor at the wilding village, glands being pumped for the milky liquid the wildings used to poison their darts.

The wildings placed no fetters on Shai. The forest imprisoned him more effectively than chains.

They came to the margin of a rocky hollow deep in the breathing heart of the Wild where the stately crowns of grandmother trees rose above the cliffs. Home was a complex structure of nets and roofs and platforms strung together throughout the hollow's glades that it seemed the wildings were constantly constructing and reconstructing.

In the third glade, he had shaped a platform in the crook of a tree using deadwood lashed together with rope. He hadn't any privacy, of course. He set his staff against the crossbeam he'd wedged in place for a ladder and scrambled up. A swarm of young ones followed. They brought scrips and scraps of deadfall—never greenwood—for him to carve with the fine iron knife they'd given him to replace the ones he'd lost. Everyone wanted a figure. As he began carving, the children settled respectfully to watch and a few elders with coats going silver dropped in. With ears flattened in greeting, they gestured to ask permission to sit while he worked. He could carve for the rest of his life and not satisfy them.

It was odd to be treated something like family and something like a hostage and something like a captive. He'd been
all these things, but he wasn't sure what he was to them, nor could he figure who the “more” were who were coming. As for the message he so desperately needed to get to Anji, it was certainly too late to prevent Hari tracking down the captain, yet he had much to report about Wedrewe and the Guardians. Day after day he fretted over the ambush in which the rebels had been killed. Had Hari betrayed them in a selfish and vain attempt to save Shai, or had he meant all along to betray Shai? Had Marit freed him for Hari's sake, or his own? Where had she gone afterward? He wished there'd been time for her to seduce him!

Smiling, he sat, shaping a horse with the stocky frame of the Qin horses, creatures with little beauty but immeasurable toughness. The wildings had the gift of stillness and patience, just as he did, and the afternoon passed as he shaped the muzzle and flanks with particular care, recalling the horses he had ridden when he had traveled with Captain Anji's troop from Kartu Town into the Mariha princedoms and thence over the border along the northwestern borderlands of the Sirniakan Empire and over the high Kandaran Pass into the Hundred.

So much had happened in the Hundred that it was difficult to recall his colorless life in Kartu Town. How had Vali and Judit and the other children fared, the ones he'd struggled to save? Would he see Tohon again? Was Zubaidit still alive? Was Mai happy? How strange it was to think of her in a peaceful house with a doting husband, given how Father Mei and his married brothers had treated their wives. Had she birthed a healthy baby?

Without warning, the wildings leaped into the trees. He set down the carving in its nest of wood flakes. The clearing lay half in shadow stretching from the west over cropped ground cover of springy dense leaves and tussocks of grass. A pair of redbirds scratching for insects on a sparse patch took wing. Not a single wilding was in sight.

He rose, knife in hand, and abruptly two older wildings dropped out of the trees and pulled him firmly behind a shield of leaves. A winged horse cantered down out of the sky as if
following a track visible only to its eyes and solid only under its hooves. The cloak, a rust-orange-brown color, rippled in the lazy wind, and where it parted it revealed a woman so very old Shai was amazed she had the strength to ride. Yet when she dismounted, she moved with remarkable agility for one so aged. She wore a thick brown-colored neck piece wrapped at her shoulders. The horse furled its wings and moved away.

As the shadows overtook her, the colors within her cloak changed subtly, turning deeper and richer in hue. She sketched the subtle gestures known to the wildings. These gestures, Shai thought, were those copied in less complex form in the tale-telling of the Hundred. What she spoke with her hands was far too complicated for him to follow, but a trio of elderly silver-haired wildings ambled into the clearing and replied with an elaborate greeting. They did not bow their heads or avert their eyes. Like Shai, wildings could face a cloak directly.

Even the incessant forest voices had fallen silent, only the wind speaking. They finished by displaying their hands, palms open, and raising eyes toward the forest canopy. A sturdy basket dropped from one of the grandmother trees, and she nodded, acquiescing, and climbed into it. As she was pulled up, the wildings climbed so swiftly after her it was as if the foliage swallowed them.

The two wildings released him and sped away into the gloom as night-watch fires were lit under the trees in stone hearths. Shai cautiously stepped into the glade. The mare, now cropping at the grass, bore a faint gleam as if its coat were burnished with sparks. In the corner of his eye, he caught the suggestion of a glimmering path, a road in the air, a tracery visible because of the contrast between its misty light and the coming night. Footsteps whispered on the earth, and Brah padded up to stand beside him and pat him companionably on the arm:
Here I am.

“She's a Guardian,” said Shai, knowing Brah could understand every word Shai spoke, even if Shai could understand so little of the wildings.

Yes.
The gesture was accompanied by a roll of the eyes as if to add:
Isn't that obvious?

“Why has a Guardian come to the Wild? Why didn't they want her to see me?”

Brah mimed a knife drawn across a throat.

“Because cloak of Night and her allies kill the gods-touched?”

Brah gave a little jump, a silent whoop, as if after all this time Shai had finally shown signs of intelligence.

“They're afraid this one who came here will kill
me
?”

Brah shrugged, looking skyward. A conclave had taken life in the highest reaches of the nets, an assembly lit by the tapers woven out of wood litter and soaked in oil that were used around camp. The lights made constellations within the trees, and beyond them, as in a dark mirror, stars kindled. Shai glanced at Brah, who was shaped in some manner like humankind but in other ways was entirely unlike. He breathed as Shai breathed. He stared overhead at the lights of the conclave and at the spray of stars, just as Shai did. He licked his lips as though tasting the night.

“The Hundred is a strange place,” said Shai in a low voice. “In Kartu Town, where I came from, folk would have named you wildings or the lendings as demons, but here it seems demons have a human face.”

Brah indicated Shai and circled the oval of his face.

“A human face like mine?” said Shai. “Except I'm not a demon.”

Brah nodded.
Yes. You.

“I'm not a demon!”

Sis trotted out of the darkness and grabbed Shai's arm, swinging him around. A taper was descending from the canopy. A mature wilding appeared in its aura and indicated a basket. Brah and Sis, much subdued now, led Shai over and watched as he settled in. He was lifted, the basket swaying as it rose higher and higher until he wondered if he would reach the stars. Fortunately it was too dark for him to see the ground, but the night-watch fires were growing frighteningly small.

The basket lurched to a halt and strong wilding hands helped him clamber onto a net. His right foot slipped through
the netting and he caught himself on his knees, gulping. There was nothing below him but air. He murmured a prayer to the Merciful One and slowly his racing heart calmed and he raised his eyes. The conclave flowed away along the net like a festival of lights. He crawled to get away from that horrifying edge before settling cross-legged. The wildings appeared as smudges against the canopy, but the old woman was clearly lit by tapers hung from even higher branches, as if they wanted to keep her well in sight.

Her voice, like her frame, was thin but her gaze was bright in the manner of a crow's. “Outlander, I journeyed a long way in desperate circumstances to ask my cousins the wildings for aid in finding a safe haven for innocent folk who are in danger. But they refuse to hear me or heed me. Instead, these cousins have accused me of coming to kill you. Is it true you witnessed a woman wearing a Guardian's cloak give the order for a demon to be killed?”