2188 words (8 minute read)

Chapter 3

The town by morning light was groveling and dull. Stalls lined the streets, haphazardly stacked with produce and handicrafts. As Leaf crossed to the main road through the place, an ancient man with glazed, pale blue eyes hawked scrawny, mottled chickens to passers-by, guttering in a harsh rasp about their size and plumpness, though the things were clearly little more than sinew and tendon beneath their grubby feathers. She passed with a mute shake of her head, then continued past long troughs and barrels full of rutabagas and radishes, long, spidery carrots and whiskerish haruti that were gray and full of knots.

To Leaf’s eyes, the market was slipshod and careless. The land about the place was too sandy for good crops and too sparse for cattle. Fairer fields lay hard to the south, but here the land yielded little and it seemed that Lord Prathiori did not bring much trade through the town. In the past four days she had seen ornamented wagons toiling up to the keep and some estates on the hillsides, but they did not pass here.

Nor did the baron shepherd his people overmuch. Beggar children ran the streets, squealing swirls of rags and dirt that appeared in one moment and disappeared the next with a pouch full of some irate merchant’s goods or a stroller’s purse. Hard men walked the lanes, hirelances lounging in tight clusters in alleyways, poking at the crumbling earthen streets with disused swords, radiating a kind of tense impatience and throwing out a curse or a blow to any who took note of them. A great many of them were about, Leaf thought, for such an inland district, which could not have seen war for years. There was work to the east for men of the blade; pirates and swagmen were ever making raids on the lands of the coastal barons. Even here the peasants muttered about the blind priests of Illistris stealing the unwary traveler from the northern roads, and fierce bands of desert men always pressed westward, spreading year by year the sands that blighted their own lands. Leaf had heard that talk everywhere all her life; there was no shortage of battle for those looking to fight.

Leaf wove through such chatter along the streets, her ears catching the odd phrase and argument amidst the general uproar of a town on a market day. There was no proper square, but merchants congregated at whatever road-meeting afforded. A white-robed pardian of Hechramon strode steadily through the crowds, his staff with its ever-lit lamp held forward at an angle to deflect folk from him. Leaf picked out the high roof of his chancellum further up the road and the sellers out before it hawking quills and ink, beaten paper and vellum scraps; a cacophony of scribes called out from the chancellum of Hechramon next to it, offering to write each man’s secret sins onto sacrificial scrolls. At the highest end of the town was a chancellum of Chakron, surmounted by the icon of the dead uzman’s broken haft. It was the largest Leaf had ever seen; she was surprised at the devotion the slain warrior received here. Chakron’s green-cloaked pardians were thick in the streets, armed and solemn, as always.

A fearless company of crows rousted about the feet of the masses, snatching up refuse from between the cobbles of their courtyards. The calls of vegetable merchants and sellers of sackcloth, iron pots, woven baskets, clay jars of fermented meat, scents, woolen cloaks and milled grain resounded about the streets, all underscored by the creak of cartwheels slogging across damp soil and the snorting and lowing of tsak, oxen, and goats.

It was only the baron’s free hand with his folk that made Leaf comfortable enough to come out in the daylight. She had counted Prathiori’s men and seen but a few dozen—far too few to comb the town. If the jewel was valuable to the lady, notice might go up, but Leaf did not expect it. Even if it did, such notice would take time to post, and that time was hers. Still, her mind gnawed and scratched with worry. She had thought to spend at least a week in this place, but after the keep, her sinews would not let her rest so long. Today she needed food, for the moment and for journeying; tomorrow she would move south, perhaps on a farmer’s cart, or continue westward as she had been.

Leaf kept to the lee of the crowds as naturally as she had sought the hollows in the walls of the keep. Her hair was still loose from the night before and fell to her shoulders, hiding her. Her brown skirts, rough and unadorned, came to her shins, and she wore heavy moccasins of tsak hide lashed up to her knees. Her pale tan shirt billowed in the damp breeze, tied tight at the neck and wrists, surmounted by a gray tunic. A wide brown belt hung at her hips. She ducked and nodded, keeping her head low but her eyes up, barely needing to watch her footing. She was just one more woman on the streets: a plain, thin girl making her way to market. Leaf smiled within, but kept it from her lips.

A broad washerwoman with a hard, chapped face and eyes squinted nearly shut brushed her aside without noticing. A carter with a wagon full of greens saw her duck toward his wheels and pulled his reins hard to the left, his thick-coated tsak pulling up its spade-shaped hooves and keening, but when the carter turned back to curse at her, she was already gone. A few masande with shaven heads and cuffs on their wrists followed their well-dressed masters, carrying bundles or children, their leashes keeping them close; Leaf’s jaw tightened every time she saw one. They never looked into the eyes of strangers.

The merchants of the town did not miss the small items that disappeared from among their wares as she passed: a pair of radishes from one, a loose onion from another, a half loaf of grainy buckbread from a third. For these small stealings, without art, she muttered forgiveness as she ate. It had been almost a full day since she had last supped.

By midmorning she found what she had sought: a quarter darker than the others, its buildings fallen or hastily repaired, the streets foul with muck and no trenchmen to dig it away. Ragged folk walked with sidelong glances and stealthy step, or else looked not up at all but stared at the ground before them. Here Leaf, too, hunched inside her clothes, matching the people and the buildings.

At one poor corner sat a squat, rounded building, half its roof stuffed with old rags and straw where the slates had fallen away. Piles of rocks littered with refuse stood about it. She pushed inside, ducking under the archway and low-beamed roof. The floor was a foot span lower than the street outside, as if the whole structure were slowly sinking into the earth, and the dirt of the floor clung to the soles of her boots. It smelled of rotted cabbage and meat heavily spiced with onion and ykellar to hide its flavor.

A nearly skeletal man with gray blotches on his umber skin and a choking high collar peered at her from behind a heap of broken baskets. After a moment, he called out “Oy?” in a rasping voice. He had the lilt of an easterner.

Leaf, her head bowed, acted startled at his word. “Ah... I am sorry, cavatane… I...” She let her speech trail off, glancing up from behind her hair.

The keep frowned. “Well, come here, then, if you have some business. If you have none, you cannot use my place as refuge, and I will take the hand of any thief. And I have eyes like a falcon, I let you know now.”

Leaf almost smiled but kept her face sorrowful and ashamed. “Oh, no, sir. It is just that I... I have some things to sell.” She let despair drip from the words.

For a second his red-rimmed eyes squinted further, and then he smiled, showing narrow, yellow teeth. “Then again, I say, come in. No need for cowardice. I’m an honest man, as you’ll find, and I turn not down my eye at any custom. Come here and show me what you have.” As she approached, he added, “Not that it is like to be worth anything.”

Leaf tugged at the cloth bundle she brought forth from her skirts, and from it drew a few of the things she had collected in the last weeks. The shopkeep took each and examined it, the tip of his purplish tongue sticking out between his lips. He pressed each piece for its blemishes: “This candle-cup is tarnished like a soldier’s codpiece”; “Look at this—a crack as wide as my finger”; “These spoons are dull. Must be false-silver; like as make me go blind for touching them.” At each pronouncement Leaf nodded; at each, her shoulders sank further.

Finally the keep scattered the pieces on his tall wooden clerkstand. “I will give you a dozen kitt for the lot, and that is a kindness I will regret later, I doubt not. Tell another soul of my free hand and I’ll have the baron’s men after you for thieving, which is how you got these; do not tell me else.” For a moment Leaf’s muscles tightened until he continued, “I know not what house you serve in, or what your master will do when he finds these pittances missing, but I know hunger, and I am kinder disposed than I ought.” And though she could get twice as much, at the least, from a reputable merchant, Leaf only nodded mutely and held out her thin hand.

The keep’s smirk was full of sly triumph as he dropped the irregular brass coins into her palm, one by one. She wrapped them carefully in the same cloth and buried it beneath her belt. She nearly dropped to the floor in her curtsy, and he snorted a laugh as he ducked his head in the smallest possible acknowledging nod.

As Leaf shuffled out of the shop, with her back to him, she let her smile climb to her face. Knocking gently against her leg was the smaller bundle in her folded sash, and in this were her better pieces. These would go to some other merchant in some other town, one more disposed to real charity, who, thinking of his own children, might slip her a hunk of bread with her coin for pity.

For now, she stepped without the shop and stole toward the brighter squares where a dinner might be had before the lowering clouds let loose their rain.

*    *    *     *     *

Leaf woke suddenly in the darkness, and already she knew there was someone outside the door; she felt the sureness of it like bees humming against every inch of her skin. The air smelled of lightning. There were men in the hall.

She rolled from the bed and crouched next to it. Without standing she pulled on her worn breeches and pulled her shift back down over them, then yanked her tunic on over that; always she faced the door. Her hands moved unerringly in the darkness, putting each piece in its place: the dagger this time into the crude loop cut in her belt; her pouch at the back of the belt and down into the breeches; the second pouch into the pocket sewn in the sash, and that around her waist. Thin shoes onto her feet and her satchel near at hand. She tied her hair back with the leather thong once more.

Leaf crept to the window crab-like, but knew before she peered over the sill that there were others there, too. The single lantern by the main door shone dimly from under the eaves below. Between the mist in the streets and the dirt on the thick, wavy glass, she could see nothing else.

She stilled herself, listened for the voices, and stood, turning again to the door.

It erupted inward as her gaze lit on it, and in the light of a carried torch stood a broad-shouldered man in a thick leather coat to his knees, finding his feet again after having kicked the door. The stylized symbol of a dog and a stag locked in battle—Lord Prathiori’s standard—was painted on the round shield he held before him; his eyes over its rim were heavy-browed and narrow. Two more men crowded in from the sides as he launched himself through the doorframe and barreled toward her.

Leaf’s hand flew to her dagger’s hilt, hard under her shift, but the man came too quickly. She let herself go limp just before he crashed into her.


Next Chapter: Memories: Irich’s Moon