Kate Elliott - Traitors Gate

'Why are there only three horses, if there are four of us?' he asked.

'Aui! That was the other shock, the one we've been waiting to drop on you. Just stand slowly, and turn around.'

He obeyed her, for he felt an odd monstrous presence looming behind him like the charged breath of a late season storm prickling his neck.

'No one truly understands the bond between eagle and reeve, what invisible leash jesses one to the other. We guessed you must have died because your eagle died. For I am cursed sure living eagles don't fly at night and seek out Guardian altars, not as this one does.'

The old raptor lowered his head to Joss's level, an uncanny glamour in those huge depthless eyes.

'How can this be?' Joss asked, as Scar offered a series of chirps in greeting.

'In a way,' said Marit, 'you died together.'

Joss was left to wonder if it was he, or Scar, who had died fighting for justice. Or maybe after all it was the two of them in partnership, just as it had always been.

When a pregnant widow and her household move into town, the event is certain to be talked about for days. When the widow is young and beautiful, the gossip will spread across weeks. And when she opens her own emporium that competes successfully with local warehouses and merchants who have lived for generations in the bustling port of Salya on Messalia Bay, then it is likely that rumor will mildew into the kind of antipathy that flourishes for months in shadowed corners and uncleaned cupboards.

And yet, stage by stage, week by week, month by month, it did not.

Mistress Karanna, the head of Seven Cups clan, was won over when the young widow advised her on the quality of silks and which hues were more appropriate to her particular complexion and personality. Master Dessottin of Merling's Gift clan discovered that the widow's married sister — not that anyone believed they were actually sisters — not only shared his obsessive interest in plant lore but actually knew how to play an obscure game of counters called 'emperors and warriors' which he had long studied in equally obscure texts first encountered when he'd served his apprenticeship as a clerk of Sapanasu; that she beat him more often than not did not lessen his enjoyment of the matches. His influence brought round several local clans, one of which was doubly charmed when the married sister specifically requested a formidable aunt to attend the birth of her daughter because of the aunt's long experience in midwifery.

The farmers and artisans and laborers appreciated the widow's fair prices and willingness to dicker at length and to trade in kind, if that was all they had to offer. A few hired daughters and sons into her household, where they were fairly treated and well paid, although there were a few complaints about the widow's clerk, who had such an exacting eye for detail that he spared little patience for people who made even trivial mistakes.

The local secretive Ri Amarah household, after substantial initial resistance, made some manner of deal regarding import of certain hard-to-acquire precious oils. And when the Four Petals clan began to simmer with resentment, seeing their trade in oil cut into, the widow befriended their unmarriagable eldest daughter and within two months had helped them open up a promising negotiation with an upcountry sheepherder's clan that included the promise of an expansion of the wool trade.

Even the horribly crippled and notoriously solitary marshal of Bronze Hall began to fly in once a week with certain of his senior reeves to take tea on her spacious porch right out in public view, the only place in her compound she ever met with men.

So when after the course of seven moons the widow gave birth

to a healthy baby girl, only two important holdouts remained: a branch of the White Leaf clan out of Arash, who were in any case only third-generation local with therefore the usual insecurities of newcomers, and the hieros at the local temple of Ushara.

The White Leaf clan was dispatched with a ruthlessness that had the town laughing for days: she simply asked the old widower, whose temper was infamous, to stand with Bronze Hall's marshal and a senior reeve named Peddonon as one of the uncles over the delicate newborn, whom the cranky old man certainly must hold. Wasn't she precious and darling even with her unmistakably out-lander features? Who could say no to such a request, coming as it did from a young woman so very lovely who no longer, alas, possessed the extended family with which to comfort and influence the baby?

Three months passed. She made a thanksgiving offering at each of the temples, and laid flowers on Hasibal's stone together with prayers no one had heard before. But she did not make the traditional procession to the Devourer's temple. She never went there at all. The young man who assisted the head gardener got drunk one night and told a friend, who told a friend, who told her cousins, that he had once overheard the mistress say there were spies in the temple keeping an eye on her, which was a very odd sort of thing to say even for a beautiful and mysterious young widow with an air of tragedy cloaking her like first-quality silk.

Or so folk whispered, until the day the Qin soldiers rode into town.

It was clear she had been warned ahead of time, likely by the Bronze Hall reeves, because she appeared midmorning on her porch dressed in a rainwater-blue taloos of such exceptional silk that a girl passing by on the street actually went running to Seven Cups clan to fetch Mistress Karanna so she could see it for herself.

But Karanna no more dared approach than did anyone else when a cohort of black-clad soldiers — the very black wolves who, it was said, ruthlessly hunted down criminals and kept the peace in the Hundred, not that they'd seen any such soldiers down here in the isolated and peaceful backwater of Mar — rode into town, their horses filling the streets and their blank expressions frightening children. About a third of them were outlanders, solemn as herons, so easy astride their horses they might have been born in the saddle.

The commander at the head of the procession was also an out-lander. He was magnificently dressed in a knee-length silk jacket

sewn from silk of such a surpassingly delicate green, like sea foam under the evening sky, that Mistress Karanna actually wept. Or maybe she wept because he and all the soldiers were armed, and with his sword swinging at his side he climbed right up onto the porch as if no one could stop him from doing so, which no one could.

The widow made no courtesy, nor did she cower. She greeted him coolly, and anyone with eyes could see they knew each other.

This was not to be a happy meeting.

At first it seemed the point of contention was the baby, and that was a wonder, indeed, for anyone who had seen the infant — and most everyone in town had peeped into the emporium or porch over the last three months to take a look — must instantly recognize that the tiny face bore some resemblance to that of the Qin soldiers. Was her nose destined to grow to something like his? An unfortunate fate for a girl, perhaps, but when the widow allowed him to hold the child and examine it, which he did very carefully, one might begin to suspect she was not, after all, a widow. That he might in fact be the father of the precious darling. That the point of contention was not the child, although clearly there was something about the child which mattered deeply to him, but the woman herself.

Anyone with eyes or ears could see what kind of tale this was. Every variation on this song has been sung down the years. She retreats; he pursues. He desires; she refuses. A slave buys herself free, but the master cannot bear to let her go.

What then?

The siege lasted one full month.

He was a persuasive and extremely powerful man, a reasonable, intelligent man, who consulted with councils from villages and towns all over Mar, presided over assizes, and discussed certain efficiencies of reorganization that were proving successful in other regions of the Hundred. He examined the local varieties of wool and rice, seven times rode out hunting with local men, and once took a canoe to Bronze Hall to meet with its recalcitrant marshal, an expedition he did not repeat. All that besides the mornings or afternoons he spent dandling the baby while courting the woman, although it was noted that she never actually invited him to visit nor was he ever, for even one instant, alone with her behind closed doors.