Shadow Gate (5 page)

“You've seen it?”

He laughed. “Not myself. My uncle claims to have climbed the Wall, to see onto the deadlands. He said they stretched for a thousand mey, farther than he could see even from the mountains' edge, nothing but pale gold to the flat horizon. Maybe it's true, or maybe he just said so to impress the woman he wanted to marry. He did bring back a shard of an eagle's egg. From a nest, so he said. Said he climbed to it, and fetched it out. But he did talk blather. I bet he just found it on the trail, fallen from a high place.”

He carefully asked no questions, plying her with highlands hospitality, offering a second flask of cider. He was an open lad, sure she wasn't a bad person because the dog—whose name was Nip—tolerated her. She was just utterly stunned to be having a commonplace conversation.

“I see you've a lute there. Have you always played?”

“Surely I have, since I could pick one up. Would you like me to play for you?” He was sure she would like to hear him; everyone always enjoyed his playing.

She nodded, settling more comfortably cross-legged beside him. He plucked a pair of tunes and hummed a
melancholy melody that made her eyes water. Thin clouds chased across the high landscape. As the sun passed into shadow, she shivered at the unexpected draft of cool air seeping down from above and pulled her cloak more tightly around her torso.

“Listen, ver. I'm called Marit. I'm lost, truth to tell, and I got lost by running from a nasty pack of bandits who aren't too far from here by my reckoning. I'm not sure it's safe for you. You might be safer walking back to your village, wherever you came from, and warning them that dangerous men are wandering out here looking to make trouble.”

He shrugged with a peculiar lack of concern. “We've had trouble for years with that crew, most of them out of Walshow and other places north of here. But we've made our own defenses.” With a sly grin, he indicated Nip. “You'd be surprised what that dog can do when he's roused. We've learned to defend ourselves. It wasn't so bad before, when I was a nipster—a toddler, like. The elders say it was peaceful then. Still, the troubles are all I've ever known. But your bandits won't be finding this pasture. I'm surprised you did.”

“How long have bandits been wandering up here? How can they feed themselves? How do you know they're come from Walshow? How far is it to Walshow from here?”

He snapped his fingers. Two more dogs appeared out of the grass. They were bigger than Nip and had massive muzzles and powerful chests. They loped over to sniff at her, then slipped away to resume their patrol. “You're a reeve, aren't you?” he asked. “We see them now and again, hunting around here.”

“Do you? Where do they hail from?”

He shrugged. It was obvious he was telling the truth and never thought once of lying to her. He didn't even feel he needed to lie, he was that confident. “I don't know. They keep to themselves, although it's true that a time or
two we've had a bit of help from them when packs of men came drifting down out of Walshow.”

“They're not patrolling out of Gold Hall? Clan Hall hasn't the resources. I suppose Argent Hall or Horn Hall might fly these parts. Don't they oversee your assizes?”

He looked at the ground, dense with the green growing breath of plants feeding on the early rains and the promise of a fresh year. It almost seemed that he darkened in aspect, pulled shadows over himself as he changed his mind about trusting her. He was hiding from her, flashes that pricked at her vision

what if she knows?

a snake winds through underbrush, tongue flicking

keep a vessel as of clay about your thoughts, it is the only protection against the third eye

She blinked back tears and realized he was not speaking.

Fear makes you cold. Shivering, she clambered to her feet. Nip barked as the other dogs circled in. There were five dogs that she could now see, but three wagged their tails tentatively. None threatened her; they simply remained vigilant.

“You're one of them, seeing into me,” he said in a hoarse voice. “You're death. Have you come to kill me?”

The speed of his transformation from pleasant companion to frightened lad shocked her. She took a step away from the ugly emotion she had roused in him. “What do you mean?”

He scrambled to his feet and backed away, holding the lute as if it might shield him from attack. “She hides us, it's all she can do against the others, for they have all become corrupt and soon their shadow will darken every heart. It's just that the dogs didn't bark at you. Why is that? What power do you have that can charm the dogs? Is it all for nothing, all that she has done for us to spare us?” Tears ran down his cheeks. He wept for what his
folk had lost. And he continued backing away, angling so she had to turn to keep facing him.

Desperately, she said, “I don't know what you're talking about. I'm seeking answers. I'm lost.”

“That's what they all say. That's what she warns us they will say, trying to get inside us, to get past the defenses she taught us to build. Nothing is safe. Nothing.”

For so many years the protection had held. Now, in an instant, all had fallen, fallen. The shadow will grow, and in the end it will consume even those trying to hide from it.

Marit swayed, struck by the hammer blow of his fear and grief. The sun cleared a cloud; its light forced her to raise a hand to spare her eyes. He had turned her, so the sun's glamour blinded her.

He whistled. The dogs bolted into action, rounding up the bleating sheep. He grabbed a pack that had lain concealed in the grass. Silver ribbons to mark the new year fluttered from the buckle of the pack where he had tied them. The Year of the Silver Deer followed the Year of the Black Eagle, only in that case why weren't there only two ribbons tied to his pack, appropriate to the Deer? Why were there eight ribbons, the number of the Fox? He loped away from her with his lute in one hand and the pack bumping up and down on his back.

The Year of the Silver Fox would fall nineteen years after the Year of the Black Eagle. So why was he celebrating it now?

She didn't call after him. She recognized futility when she saw it. Anyway, she was still trembling with a fear that penetrated her entire body. She hadn't “seen” into him. It was a trick, him speaking and her too tired or anxious to notice, or maybe a kind of magic she'd never heard of except in the tales: the magic of misdirection common to clever thieves and cunning jaryas. But he had recognized the change. He'd known she was doing it. That's when he had run.

The lad and his dogs drove the sheep out of the
meadow while she watched. The dogs yipped excitedly, eager to be on the move. Behind her, a creature stamped through the grass on her trail. She spun, grabbing at her knife. The mare trotted up beside her, wings furled.

“You warned me,” she said. “I just didn't know what you meant.”

The horse nosed in the grass. A surface glinted, and she crouched to investigate as the mare chopped at the earth. An ornament had fallen among the grass, frayed strands of silver ribbon caught in a tiny leather loop that had once fastened the ornament to another object. It was a cheap replica of a fox, no longer than her thumb and rendered out of tin: a poor man's year medallion, the kind of thing, like the eight ribbons, given out by the temples at the feasts dedicated to the year's beginning. The Year of the Silver Fox.

Maybe she was still dreaming.

The mare lifted her head, left ear flicking back. Her stance changed. She stared toward the tree line off to the north in the opposite direction to which the youth had fled. Clutching the fox medallion, Marit rose.

A spit of movement made the mare shy, and Marit jumped sideways. An arrow quivered in the earth.

“The hells!”

A punch jabbed her body. Gasping, she looked down to find an arrow protruding from her belly, low by her right hip. The mare spread her wings. Gagging at the sheer utter knife of red-hot pain, Marit snapped off the haft and tossed the fletched end aside. With a shout, to pour out a breath's worth of pain, she hauled herself into the saddle. The mare sprang into the air. Marit gripped the saddle horn, sweat breaking over her as she resisted screaming, as the point jabbed and ground inside her gut. Armed men ran into the meadow, bows raised and arrows rising in high arcs after her. These were the same sullen bandits who had first chased her, their ruthless captain identifiable by the lime-whitened horsetail ornaments dangling from his shoulders.

Then they were clear. Her vision blurred. Hills rose and fell on every side like an ocean spilling and sighing beneath her: highlands pine, vistas of grass and heath and bitter-thorn and later moss and lichen with no sign of the youth and his dogs and sheep. She concentrated on clinging to the saddle. Hold on. Hold on. Let the horse take its head and run the straightest course away from danger.

They will never stop hunting me.

“You're death,”
the lad had said.

Blood leaked down her belly and spilled over her thighs onto the mare's gray flanks, to drip-drop into the air like rain. Her hands went numb as feeling left them. The cloak wrapped her so tightly she could not even see the landscape passing beyond, shrouding her in the same way the white shroud of death drapes the dead. But she was still breathing, each breath like flame sucked into her body. The pain of burning kept her alive for a thousand years with each lift and fall of wings, and she hung on forever wishing that oblivion would claim her, but it never did.

With a jolt that made Marit cry out, the mare clattered to earth. She spread her wings, and Marit tumbled out of the saddle and fell hard on her back. Pain blinded her, or she was already blind with night suffocating her. She choked on air. Better dead than this. Desperate, wild, she fixed hands around the broken shaft and yanked.

A stink of blood and effluvia gushed free, warming her hands. The gods heard her pleas. A roaring like a storm wind battered through her. Rising out of that gale, the white cloak of death smothered her in its wings.

After a certain point death is a peaceful condition, but a bit uncomfortable if your one leg is twisted beneath you, and if your shoulder, pressed into rock, is beginning to feel the pinch, and if your hip aches. She shifted, because it irritated her that minor twinges must plague her when she had earned the right to rest. Once shifted, she realized she was awake and her mind was full with questions.

Why were those men hunting her? Why did Lord Radas want her? Was it not enough to murder Flirt? Must he torture and abuse her as well, as he had that poor Devouring girl? Yet he had not questioned her when she had claimed her name as Ramit. Did he seek Marit, the reeve, or Ramit, the unknown woman walking an altar? What had the shepherd boy meant when he had called her “one of them”?

So many questions, and not a single answer in sight.

She groaned and rose to her knees. A sticky dry substance flaked from her hands as she pushed up to stand. Blood stained her tunic and leggings; her hands were grimy with dried blood and slime, but the smell had faded. She raised her hands to rub her eyes, then recalled how disgusting her hands were, and looked around bleary-eyed as her skin went clammy with fear.

The mare had brought her back to a Guardian altar.

The cursed horse sucked noisily from a pool, tail swishing. The stupid beast paused to snap at a fly.

The hells!

Marit tugged at the stolen tunic, but the worn linen weave ripped right away. Below, her dark belly rounded in a curve dimpled by the Mother's Scar, her navel. A paler line, smooth along the skin but ragged in its journey, marked a scar just below and to the right of her navel. Had she earned that scar in her days as a reeve?
Had she only dreamed the arrow that had punctured her abdomen? She probed along the scar, but felt no tenderness and no pain.

“What am I?” she said in the direction of the mare, who lifted her head at the sound of Marit's voice. “What has happened to me?”

The cursed animal gazed at her. What did she know about horses, really? Stubborn, unpredictable, skittish, narrow-minded, fixated on the familiar because the unfamiliar is a threat to them, they were prey, born to run from that which pursued them.

As she was running. She was no longer a reeve, bound to her eagle, free to hunt. She was the hunted. Like the deer, she fled the arrow meant to kill her, and when the next flight struck, she probably would not even have seen it coming.

“You'll give me warning, won't you?” she called to the mare.

The cursed beast flicked its ears.

“I'll call you ‘Warning,' just to call you something. I'll hope you grow into your name.” She dusted flecks of grime from her ragged clothing. “Why in the hells do you keep bringing me to Guardian altars?”

The wind hummed across the pinnacle of rock on which they stood. She was panting with anger, furious and scared together, but even so the rose-purple light of a setting sun caught her attention. She spun slowly all the way around, because when beauty awes you, you must halt and try to catch your breath and your staggered heart.

The wind was light this evening, a constant blowing presence but easy enough to stand upright in despite that she stood on the very top of a vast pillar of rock. Broken contours suggested that a low wall had once rimmed the edge. No craggy peak loomed above. No overhang offered shelter within. She stood a few steps from a sheer drop-off; she might easily stumble over tumbled stones and fall to her death because the ground was a long, long way down. There was no way down except to fly.

To the west, a range of hills was painted by the colors of the falling sun. Below the pillar, a ridgeline snaked out from the hills. The ridgeline terminated in a bulge where a ruined beacon tower stood, a complex of abandoned buildings arranged at the base of the spire on which she and the horse perched. To the east, the ground dropped away so precipitously that even a reeve with her experience of heights felt her breath taken away by the grandeur of the scene: A wide basin of land darkened as the eastern sky faded into purpling twilight. Clouds drifted like high islands above the land. Out there beneath the sea of night, a few lights glimmered, village watch fires lit against the gloom.