"We're not Koretian," Carle pointed out. "We're not subject to the gods' law."
"Yes, but— Carle, the lieutenant sent us back to this hut to stay. We can't just leave here without permission."
"Who's speaking of leaving? We'll be back in a short time. And Quentin wants us to gather information regarding the Koretian border guard, doesn't he? That's what he told us before we arrived here. How better to gather information than to try to slip past the Koretian border guard?"
For a moment, my heart thumped; then I sobered, saying, "The lieutenant will hear us breaching the border."
"Will he?" Carle's smile quirked as he waved his hand toward the border.
I looked, and then I stared. Quentin was gone; so was the subcaptain. The only men left were the bottom-ranked soldiers, who looked very bored.
Carle laughed at my expression. "It's the custom for the subcaptain of the Koretian border patrol to treat visiting guards to an hours-long dinner on their first night here. If the lieutenant hadn't sent us back, we'd be having dinner with him and the subcaptain now, at a small inn that's only a spear's throw from the border, and no doubt we'd spend the night at the inn. As it is . . ."
"You know," I said, beginning to smile, "I'm sure that the subcaptain's failure to invite us was simply an oversight. That being the case, he certainly wouldn't mind if we dined ourselves."
"At a Koretian place of dining," Carle suggested.
"Of course. And since we are, as the subcaptain recently reminded us, below the rank of lieutenancy and therefore ill-qualified to take part in high-level discussions—"
"—then we really must not disturb the subcaptain and the lieutenant at their high-ranking discussion," Carle concluded. "We need to find a place to eat on our own."
"Over the border."
"Over the border, in Koretia. Purely to fulfill the subcaptain's promise of hospitality, of course."
We grinned at each other. Far away, to the south, I could hear the sound of the Koretian border-breachers, making their blithe way toward the border mountain patrol. For a brief moment, I pitied them.
o—o—o
We delayed only long enough to find disguises for ourselves.
"Make yourself free of anything you want here," the subcaptain had said in an expansive manner when we first arrived at the hut, before the subcaptain had learned of Carle's skill in asking pointed, uncomfortable questions about the Koretian border guard's techniques. Now we made good the subcaptain's promise by rummaging through the chests where the civilian clothes of the on-duty guards were kept. After a few minutes of trying on this and that, Carle and I managed to find Koretian tunics that fit us. We could do nothing about our boots, but Emorian-style boots are not uncommon in the Koretian borderland, and it was easy enough to set our swords aside in favor of the Koretian daggers we found in the chests. Without bothering to discuss the matter, we kept our thigh-pockets strapped underneath our tunics, hiding our thigh-daggers.
Then we breached the border. It was no harder than convincing my mother to forgive my cousin Emlyn after he placed goldfish in her fresh vat of lime juice.
Half of an hour later, we were strolling along a woody path, chatting about how I had conceived a desire for Daxion nuts on my previous birthday. The path we had chosen leads to Blackpass, which lies only a mile from the border. The moon was up, laying a snail-silver trail for us through the dark leaves. I kept a careful watch on the bushes we passed, but if any bandits were lurking there, Carle and I evidently looked too young to be holding any wealth upon us, for we arrived at the town gates unmolested.
These were just being closed for the night, and all visitors were being carefully questioned, but we managed to slip past the guards by hiding amidst a group of young men who were returning from an evening of country revelry. Carle made a manful effort to pretend that he had visited this town dozens of times, though he kept glancing at the moat surrounding the town wall, as we walked over the bridge to the gate.
"Fire barrier," I explained when we had travelled beyond the town guards, who all bore black-and-forest-green badges, showing they were Blackwood's men. "The King is particularly skilled in fire feuds."
Carle muttered something under his breath, but made no other comment, for now we were amidst the early evening crowd gathered in the square by the prison next the gate – a thinning crowd, for with the sun down, people were beginning to make their way home. I spared no glance for the town prison, where Blackpass's apprehended criminals were housed briefly before their branding or beating or death or – in the worst cases – enslavement. If Carle and I were arrested as foreign border-breachers, it was far more likely that we would be taken to the army prison, which was at the other end of town. The army prison, unlike the town prison, was run by men who were trained to question prisoners.
This unhappy thought of mine was raised by the sight of a group of soldiers, making their way slowly through the crowd and stopping men occasionally to quiz them. No doubt they were seeking kin of the King's bloodline, in case such men had come to fulfill their blood vows against the baron's kin, but since I held the wrong lineage, I was no more eager to be questioned by the soldiers than if they had suspected that Carle and I had breached the border.
Carle, without needing to be told any of this, steered us out of the square, into one of the dark alleys. This, I could have told Carle, was no safer a place at night than the square had been. I pulled my belt-dagger from its sheath.
Carle, raising his eyebrows, did the same, and we made our way cautiously to the end of the alley, my gaze flicking back and forth between the dark doorways we were passing. I had only been foolish enough to enter a Blackpass alley once after dark, when I was young, and on that occasion, Hamar, who had just been taught his blade skills, had bravely held off our attacker while I ran for my father, who had settled the matter by sword-skewering our attacker. That a seven-year-old boy had been able to hold back a grown man did not say much about the blade-skills of Blackpass's thieves, but I did not want to chance the possibility of meeting a thief whose manner of greeting us would be to stab us in the back.
We made it safely to the end of the alley. Carle and I had no sooner slid our daggers back into our sheaths than, stepping out of the alley, Carle bumped into a Koretian carrying an armful of crates.
Without a word, I spun and thrust Carle back into the alley. I heard him sputter, but I had no time to explain. By the time the Koretian recovered from his near fall, I was the only man standing in front of him.
The Koretian carefully placed the crates on the ground and stood looking at me. We did nothing but eye each other for a moment. He was perhaps ten years older than me, and not hot-tempered, for he was watching me with due consideration. But he was frowning, which was not a good sign.
Finally, delicately, he placed his fingers over the tip of his sheath. "You should have watched where you were going."
I copied his gesture, keeping my gaze fixed on his. "I took a wrong turn. I am not familiar with the pattern of this town."
"Then you should have learned it before you came here." As he spoke, he slid his hand up toward the top of the sheath.
"Blackpass is known for its welcome of strangers. Is that reputation undeserved, then?" I asked. This time I went beyond his gesture, sliding my hand straight up onto my hilt.
His eyes flickered, but he did not hesitate to move his own hand onto his dagger hilt. "That depends on the behavior of the stranger."
"And if the stranger were to apologize?" I kept my hand unmoving on the hilt, waiting, my heart beating.
For a long moment, we both stood there, hands on hilt, while I tried to calculate my chances if he drew his blade. Then, with a smile, he let his hand fall from his dagger. "No need. I should have been more alert. May I give you directions to your destiny?"
"The market," I replied as I gratefully took my hand from my dagger. It was the first thought that came to my head; many people visited Blackpass merely to see its market.
"Ah, of course. Well, to avoid the alleys, you need only turn here, make your way to the end of the street . . ."
Within a short time we had exchanged first names and promises to host each other for dinner, and I had received a delicate suggestion from the Koretian that he had a younger female cousin who would be not unwilling to meet a handsome young man like me. This offer made me laugh so much that the Koretian's mouth quirked. "Don't tell me," he said. "You're of the wrong lineage."
"Very much so. —Not," I added, as I saw his brows rise, "that I'm here to cause trouble. It's just a friendly visit."
"Sneaking in to see forbidden territory?" he suggested with a smile. "How I remember that impulse. I was not so much younger than you when— Ah, well, the older one gets, the fewer opportunities one has to play pranks. I miss them sometimes. . . . By the way, you can tell your friend to come out of the alley. He's likely to be robbed of the tunic on his back if he stays in there much longer." And with a wave of the hand, he gave me the free-man's greeting and departed.
Carle, staring at the Koretian's back, waited until he was beyond hearing distance before saying, "The Chara should recruit him as a spy. I'd swear that he didn't have time to see me before you shoved me in there."
"I'm sorry," I said.
Carle turned to me with a smile. "I'm not. I've always wanted to see how Koretians duel."
"We weren't duelling," I explained as he and I began to walk down the street in the direction that the Koretian had pointed us. "We were trying to
keep
from duelling."
"Why not apologize at once, then?" Carle asked. His gaze started to drift toward a masked slave who was passing us; I quickly took hold of his arm and pulled him past this danger.
"Because he might have regarded that as a weakness," I said, trying to distract Carle from the slave. "You're expected to protect your manhood against challenge here."
"Mm." Carle mused on this a moment, then said unexpectedly, "I can understand that, to a certain extent. It's how Emor treats foreign powers: we show them we're strong before we negotiate for peace. Even so . . . Am I miscounting, Adrian, or have our lives been in danger four times since we arrived in this town a quarter of an hour ago? How do Koretians manage to survive to adulthood?"
We were still laughing – a rather dark laughter that released us from our earlier tension – when we reached the market.
I don't suppose that, back in the days when I was writing this journal for my imaginary Emorian reader, I ever bothered to explain about the market in Blackpass. It's the only market of its kind in the world: it is located underground. It was built that way because it's the northernmost of Koretia's town markets; occasionally the winter will grow so chill that it's warmer to be undercover in Blackpass than to be outside. The earliest inhabitants of the borderland, realizing this, dug a tunnel right through a hill in the village that grew to be the town of Blackpass. The town market is thought to be older than Koretia itself – older even than the man-built caves in Capital Mountain, for the borderland was settled many years before southern Koretia was.
The market walls, which are made of quarried stone, have been rebuilt countless times; I could see, as we entered into their shelter, that the walls had recently been renovated by Blackpass's energetic baron. The market shone bright with lamplight, and its stalls were still filled with food and goods, even at this late hour. Carle, his eyes lively with curiosity, led us from stall to stall, unnoticed by any but the boys hired by some merchants to prevent thieves from taking goods.
Before long, my stomach was snarling. Carle, with a grin at me, launched without preliminary into a long, fiery negotiation with a cheese merchant. I watched the passersby somewhat nervously, but no soldiers walked by, and Carle's Border Koretian was good enough to pass with the merchant, who – his accent and his taciturn manner clearly told – was a native of central Koretia.
"Done!" said Carle finally, having driven down the price for a wedge of cheese and two hunks of bread to the four coppers that were, in fact, all the Koretian money we carried in our thigh-pockets. "Now, you will, of course, grant us the courtesy of a flask of water . . ."
The second negotiation was even more fiery than the first, but Carle emerged triumphant, while I offered a bland, reassuring smile to a couple of soldiers who glanced our way as they passed us.
"Five," said Carle, his mouth full of cheese as we walked.
"Five?" I replied, looking left and right for a place to sit.
"Those soldiers represent our fifth brush with death. Unless you count my atrocious attempts to speak Border Koretian."
"You'd pass as a borderlander to a central Koretian," I assured him.
"But not to a borderlander? I was afraid of that. Quentin has helped me to brush up my skills over the years, but since Fenton knew the tongue only from book-learning when I was a child— Ah, here's a place."
We had reached the far end of the market, an area that had evidently only recently been added to the underground tunnel, for there were tree stumps on the floor. We made our way to a trio of stumps and sat down on two of them. For a while, there was no sound as Carle and I eagerly filled our stomachs with the good country cheese and fresh-baked bread and clear well-water.
The area where we sat was surrounded on all sides by stalls. Dimly, far beyond us, I could see the whitewashed stone blocks that held the earth back from smothering us, but the looming presence of these blocks was less obvious than the bright lamps, the cheerful calls of stall-hawkers, and the laughter of men and women and children who were fetching their meals after their day's work. Soldiers passed by from time to time, but most of them were off-duty, their hands filled with food or goods.
One of them, after glancing round the stumps, came over to stand beside us. "Mind if I join you, sirs?" he said.
I hesitated, thinking of Carle's not-quite-perfect Border Koretian, but Carle filled the silence. "By all means," he said in Common Koretian that sounded as though he had learned that dialect in his cradle. "I was just telling my new acquaintance here" – he nodded toward me – "that we have nothing like this in the south."
"Oh?" said the soldier blankly as he sat himself down on the third stump and began spreading out his meal on his lap: some cornbread and beans. "Well, I suppose there aren't many markets this big, are there?" He squinted uncertainly at the stalls.