Traitors' Gate (68 page)

She stopped before she began prating on about there being food for everyone. Weren't there always children who were starving and folk passed for sale from one hand to the next?

The younger girl crept forward again, not without a furtive look toward the older woman and her cane. She extended a hand—clean enough—then withdrew, and Mai laughed and beckoned her closer to let her touch the best-quality cornflower-blue silk with its cunning embroideries worked in the same color thread into the fabric.

“Are you the outlander who has come to save us, verea?” asked the girl, eyes wide.

“Mai!”

The women melted back to make a path for Anji to stride into the garden. His gaze made quick work of its narrow confines, pinning each point where an assassin might hide and determining that they were not, at the moment, at risk.

“I didn't see you come in—!”

“The council raised the message flag,” he said. “It seems you impressed them favorably enough that they agreed to meet with me and Commander Joss.” His expression was so flat she understood he was very very pleased, and she could not restrain a smile of triumph, not for herself precisely, but for their cause. Or perhaps it was just for her personal victory, winning them over. She hardly knew.

“Calon and Jodoni lost track of you,” he added with a frown as he studied her.

“I came here to pray. Then I was talking to these women.”

He measured the company, acknowledging the older women with nods and ignoring the young ones, and indicated that Mai should accompany him. “We'll go back.”

“Do you plan to fight them what have driven so many refugees out of Haldia and Istria, with such horrible tales they have to tell?” asked the old woman while the younger girls hid their eyes and one of the women with a fresh tattoo wept silently as at remembered pain.

“I plan to fight,” said Anji.

His words made Mai's chest tight with despair, and fear, and pride. She followed him out and the others trailed after them, all but the youngest girl. Only when they entered the council square where Joss was already speaking passionately to the gathered council members and more folk besides coming up from the city to hear did she remember she had forgotten the cup.

T
HE CLOSER SHAI
and his escort of a dozen wildings got to the edge of the deep Wild, the fewer trails offered passage. As he hacked at a vine wrapped stubbornly around his ankle, he heard frantic voices. A scream pierced the forest's veil. Shoving past a curtain of leaves, he stumbled down a wet-season gully sucked dry at this time of year. The gully offered a trail of a kind, and he splashed through isolated puddles, slipping twice along its slick pavement of damp leaves. Brah and Sis kept pace in the branches. The adult wildings had vanished.

The forest wasn't silent, which just made tracking more confounding: insects buzzed; birds chirred sweetly or squawked raucously; a larger animal cracked dead branches as it fled. He could never tell where the noises were coming from. Where the gully turned in a sudden bend, a bush had thrown tendrils across the depression. Shoving through this he slammed into the back of a man kneeling on the ground beside a child sprawled flat on its back.

The man toppled sideways with a yelp. Folk, unarmed and lugging only sacks and baskets and small children, huddled in a hollow sticky with the muddy remains of a wet season pond. At Shai's entrance, they shrieked. The surrounding canopy bent to dancing although the wind had not risen.

Shai leaped up, waving his arms. “Don't kill them! If you honor me, let me first speak to them!”

The man sobbed as his companions stared in horror at a sight behind Shai. He turned. The child had begun to leak blood from its nose and mouth; it twitched weakly, sucking for air, then was still.

Mist rose from the body. A shape congealed, casting around.

“What happened? That hurt!” Its cloudy gaze fixed on Shai. “You're an outlander! I never saw an outlander before!” He was sure the lad
smiled
as at a good joke, but abruptly its attention focused past him. “I see there—so bright!—” the ghost cried, and the boy fled through Spirit Gate, folding away into nothingness.

The trees ceased their movements. Had the wildings seen the ghost as well?

“Is that your child?” Shai asked.

“Neh.” The man rubbed his forehead as if to wipe away blood or anger or dirt or grief. He had an ugly wound above his right ear, and his left arm ended in a stump wrapped with the bloody remains of a jacket. “He went by the name of Gelli. He was one of the children that came with us out of Copper Hall, but he had no family left. Said they were dead or scattered. No trouble at all, that boy. Even tempered and lively. He kept us smiling with his jokes and antics.”

“Surely you know it is forbidden to cross the boundary of the Wild.” He crouched beside the body. The boy's right hand bore a pair of purpling puncture wounds. “Snakebit!”

“It was dangling in those vines when the boy pushed around,” said the man helplessly. “Impossible to see, it being green like the vines. How was anyone to know a small creature could be so deadly?”

No wonder the darts of the wildings were so effective.

“Did you not see the poles with skulls set atop them?” Shai demanded.

They stared at him with the speechless intensity of folk who are hungry, thirsty, lost, and without hope except maybe for that given them by the antics of a lively boy now lying dead at their feet. Most were young, like the prisoners Shai had been held captive with, although these hadn't the battered, bruised, stunned look of the abused. These were merely starving, frightened, helpless refugees, swatting listlessly at bugs come to feast on warm bodies.

Finally, a very young and quite pretty woman stepped forward, clutching the hand of a boy no older than the lad who had died. She eyed him as warily as if he might be a snake about to strike. Not one seemed aware that they were surrounded by wildings.

“We're all that remains from those fled from Copper Hall,” the girl said.

“Copper Hall? In Nessumara? Has the city been attacked?”

“That I don't know. I meant the other Copper Hall, the main
reeve hall north of the city on the road to Haya. A cohort come and burnt the hall.”

“Copper Hall is burned?” The simple words were so sharp a shock that he felt strangled.

Their tale spilled like rain: a cruel army rousting folk from their villages; farmers and villagers fleeing into the countryside and some coming to rest at the reeve hall where old Marshal Masar offered a haven. Then the reeve hall had been attacked and burned, eagles killed, the reeves fled. The old marshal had left behind his own grandchildren.

“He had to do it,” said the young woman gravely as she blinked away tears, “because they could only carry one extra person each. If they didn't save the fawkners, who would care for the eagles? If there's none to care for the eagles, and the reeves die, then who will protect us?”

“The reeves haven't done a cursed lot of good protecting us, have they?” objected the man, waving a hand to clear away a cloud of gnats. “They saved themselves and left us behind to die.”

“There was nothing else they could do!” cried the girl indignantly.

So many spoke Shai could not make out the speakers among the angry group.

“They could have fought against that cursed army, eh? Instead of flying up there out of reach and watching as the rest of us got hit over and over and over again!”

Houses burned. Captives taken. Men killed. Storehouses looted. Children and elderly dead of sickness and starvation.

“How are you come into the Wild?” he asked.

The girl took up the tale. “A sergeant discovered us hiding in the wine cellar and convinced the cohort captain to let us go. But after we traveled for some days, other soldiers harassed and chased us. They drove us in here. They killed them what would not go past the poles. We had no choice but to die at their hands, or hope to escape. We thought maybe we could walk a ways through the Wild and leave with none the wiser.”

“That one sergeant,” added the man with a weary kind of rage, “she did more than the cursed reeves ever did by hauling
you children out of your hiding place and getting you out alive instead of giving you over to be slaughtered. Those poor cursed hirelings and assistants who got left behind were killed outright. Folk I knew well, every one of them. Think of it! It was that one sergeant, enemy as she was, who saved us. Not the gods-rotted reeves.”

He had a debt mark at his left eye, easy to overlook because that part of his face had been scraped to bleeding.

“You'll not speak of my grandfather that way!” shouted the girl.

“Enough!” Shai glared until folk fell into an anxious silence. “There are wildings in the trees all around you, ready to kill you with darts soaked in snake venom like what killed that poor lad.”

Some wept, shaken by fear. Others wore a look of glazed indifference, people pushed past their limit.

“Should we just lie down and die?” said the girl, her chin jutting in a desperate display of bravado. “If the wildings are so cursed deadly—if they even exist except in tales—then why haven't they killed
you
?”

Their despair made him reckless. “Because I'm not human. I'm a demon.”

“I never heard that outlanders are demons. They're just people, like us, only they look funny.”

“Hush, you idiot girl!” the man hissed.

Shai laughed. “What's your name?”

She slanted a look at him as if she had just discovered that he was a young man and she was a young woman, and things might go as they might go if things went. As he felt himself flush under her bold scrutiny, she smiled, flexing her power to disturb him. She knew men admired her, even as ragged and hungry and dirty as she was. Surely she'd not been assaulted and abused in the last weeks. She showed no fear, as if the thought of such a threat had never occurred to her. “I'm called Jenna. It's short for Jennayatha.”

Someone sniggered. Others hissed. He was meant to understand the reference, but he did not.

“I'm an outlander. I don't know your tales, if you meant to
convey some meaning by your name, verea. Tell me more about Copper Hall. What happened with the sergeant?”

The tale was neatly told, for the Hundred folk did know how to spin tales from any least event, and this was a story that could easily become woven into a true tale to be told to grandchildren should any of these survivors survive to dandle grandchildren on their laps. Barrels of wine and cordial had distracted the first lot of soldiers come to explore the cellar, but a sergeant had shined a lamp's light onto the faces of frightened children and withdrawn without betraying their presence. She had returned and marched them past ranks of corpses to join village refugees and hall slaves who were to be allowed to live while the rest were put to the sword. Each word was a blow to Shai's hopes. How was he to reach Olossi if he could not reach a reeve?

“That sergeant was a hierodule once,” said the boy suddenly, speaking past his sister's grasp.

“A hierodule? What makes you say that?”

The lad looked around to make sure everyone was listening. “She said she was an acolyte of the Merciless One. That's how she knew there were times to show mercy and times to withhold it. No use killing children.”

“That's what she said,” his sister agreed, canting her hips as if to mimic the way the other woman had sauntered. “She had knives. And she ordered that lot around, didn't she? I liked her. Even if she was one of the cursed army.”

Maybe it was the way he'd had of sensing a coming storm when he was up at the carpentry shop on Dezara Mountain. Maybe it was the way ghosts called to him. “Did she say her name?”

“She called herself Zubaidit,” said Jenna. “But if I were marching in that gods-rotted army, I'd call myself something different than my real name, just for being ashamed!”

“Which cohort? Is there any way to identify it?”

“They had a banner . . . six crossed red staves on black cloth.”

“That's right,” the man agreed, and others nodded. “We saw those banners flying as they advanced. The soldiers what
chased us into the Wild carried a banner with eight white nai blossoms on a green field. What will happen to us now, demon?”

“Can you return to your villages?”

Their laughter was harsh; their tears shamed him. “How can we go back? They have the weapons. We have nothing.”

“Where did you last see the cohort with the six crossed staves?”

They spoke of landmarks, streams, a burned Ilu temple, the sea.

“Rest you here while I talk to the wildings. Don't try to run away. If you run, you'll be killed.”

He batted at the leafy curtain with his walking staff, thinking of the green snake that had bitten the lad. When no snake twisted, he ducked through. Wildings blocked his way in the gully. Above, Brah and Sis swayed on branches, their grimaces of dismay easy to interpret.

One of the wildings, an older woman, gestured.
Must kill. Forbidden.

“Listen to me, honored one.” He, who had never spoken up in his long and dreary childhood, was learning how to speak. “They are not your enemy. They were forced to cross into the Wild. This war is your enemy. The Star of Life army is your enemy. The corrupt cloaks—the Guardians who walked under the Shadow Gate—are your enemy. Once they have burned villages and killed folk who respect the old ways, what is to stop them from pressing their attack into the Wild?”

Her hands spoke sharply.
We kill humans when they come across the boundary.

“Maybe the first ones. But more will come. They will chop down and burn the forest. They are already breaking the boundaries elsewhere, killing the gods-touched who you call demons. By killing these villagers, you act as the army's allies. You bring your own death.”