Kate Elliott - Shadow Gate

used to smear my face with dirt.' She faltered, staring at her hands. The two leftmost fingers on her left hand had been broken and healed crooked. 'Are you the one others fear so much?'

'I'm not one of them,' Marit repeated, teeth clenched. 'What "ceremony of cleansing" do you mean? I've never heard of such a thing.'

Sediya sang in a thready voice a horrible desecration of a holy chant. ' "The weak die, the strong kill, and the cloaks rule all, even death."'

'Sheh! That's not a proper chant.' But seeing the woman cringe, Marit forced her shoulders to relax and her hands to uncurl, trying to appear less threatening. 'How did you manage to escape?'

She brushed her belly, caught herself doing it, and winced. 'After a while they get careless. They thought I was grinding grain over behind a tent. I just walked away.'

Marit knew the signs. She could evaluate people quickly. 'Had they just raped you? Is that what made you run?'

She started talking, fast and low, her shame like a rash. 'After a while you get torn and you never heal. Now I bleed and pee all the time, it leaks out of me, there's nothing to hold it in. Maybe it would be better to be dead after all. What clan will ever want me as a wife for one of their sons? I have nothing to hope for. I'll go back with you. Please don't let them kill me.' She never once looked up.

'We'll find a place for you to shelter,' said Marit, so furious she had trouble tugging in air. 'We'll go back the way I came, to the southwest. It's safe there.'

Sediya heaved a sigh, then settled to sit crookedly along one thigh as if it were uncomfortable to sit straight down cross-legged in the normal manner. She plucked a strand of grass from the ground and wound it around her crooked fingers. 'Where are you from?'

'I was born in a village in southeast Farsar. Very isolated, quite poor. My family was too poor to keep me, so they gave me a month's worth of rice and put me on the road. I walked to Toskala looking for work as a laborer. But I became a reeve, instead.'

'Where's your eagle, then?'

The memory was still fresh. Marit shuddered. 'My eagle is dead. She was murdered. By men under the command of Lord Radas of Iliyat.'

Sediya showed no reaction to the name, her gaze still bent on the grass she was winding around her deformed fingers. At last she said, to the dirt, 'I'm a Black Eagle. Born during the season of the Flood Rains.'

Mark shut her eyes. 'That's the year I-' But she could not say That's the year I was murdered. Ghosts didn't sit on the ground with the damp soaking through their leggings and have conversations with brutalized young women. 'I'm a Green Goat.'

The statement made Sediya's eyes flare as she murdered the earth with her gaze. 'You'd be counting forty-seven years. You can't be that old. You don't look it.'

'Did you serve your apprentice year with the Lantern?' asked Mark, laughing. 'You sorted those numbers quickly.'

'I did not, though everyone thought I should,' said Sediya with a grin. The change of expression betrayed a friendly spirit with a lively manner, hiding beneath the grime. 'I served my year with Ilu, because I liked the thought of getting to walk to the nearby towns and see a bit of the countryside. Afterward, the temple wanted to keep me for the eight years' service, and my brother would have tithed me out to them in exchange for freedom from the yearly tithings, but I wouldn't go.' Her expression darkened, cutting to a dull gray bleakness with the speed of a machete hacking off a rains-green tree limb. 'This is the gods' way of punishing me for not taking the service.'

'What was done to you has nothing to do with the gods.'

'Doesn't it? What are you, then? What are the others like you, the ones who see into your heart, who ride the winged horses? The cloaks are the Guardians, the servants of the gods.'

'That can't be. Guardians bring justice. That's what the gods decreed.'

'The gods turned their backs on us.' She pulled the grass off her finger and pressed it into the dirt, pushing and pushing until earth buried that frail strand of green. 'The Guardians aren't people. They're demons.'

Mark remembered — felt to her bones — the poisonous air that swirled around the quiet voice of Lord Radas, speaking to her across a Guardian altar.

'Don't be angry, I didn't mean it. Don't hurt me.'

We're both afraid, thought Marit. Fear drives us.

She rose. 'We travel at night. Can you ride?'

Sediya rose awkwardly. A trickle of liquid slipped down her ankle, and shook out as a drop to vanish on the soil. 'It's easier to walk.' She drew the back of a hand over her eyes. Healed scratches laced the skin of her arms. Her right shoulder had a gouge in it, knotted with scar tissue. Using the movement as hesitation, she straightened her taloos, which had gotten twisted. She bit her lip, puffed out breath, found her courage and her strength.

'We're not going to Walshow,' said Marit. 'We'll go to Sohayil, try to find you refuge there, maybe at one of Ilu's temples. I know a place.'

Sediya followed obediently, head down, mouth tight.

They walked in silence along the deserted road. Sediya stared at the glimmer that marked the horse's path, that gave them light to see by. She trudged along as if walking barefoot on nails, so clearly in pain that at length Marit called for a halt and found a sheltered spot to sleep.

The woman fell asleep, but Marit sat awake beneath the trees.

'I have seen four with my own eyes, but there's another one they speak of, the one even the rest of them fear.'

She leaned her head back against a tree trunk, shutting her eyes, breathing in the sting of sharp night-wand and the odor of intermingled rot and growth.

She considered her options. To ride into the north, to make her way to Toskala through lands controlled by this mysterious army watched over by folk who wore Guardians' cloaks, was foolhardy. Most likely she would blunder into the nest of demons and get chopped up first thing. Even if she reached Toskala, no one at Clan Hall would have any reason to know and trust her. She'd been gone for nineteen years. There was no reason for anyone to believe she was who she claimed to be, or to believe her story of Lord Radas's treachery and an army led by five people pretending to be Guardians. No reason at all.

Not without proof.

An owl skimmed low. A night-flying insect whirred among branches that ticked in the steady wind. Water dripped. A creature rustled away through bushes heavy with damp leaves.

She opened her eyes.

Sediya was gone. Mark tracked her with her hearing. First the woman crawled — not a likely way to be creeping off to relieve yourself — and when she got far enough away from the night's encampment, she eased to her feet and trotted with an awkward rolling gait, now and again stumbling but picking herself up and going on with admirable determination.

Mark sighed. She stood. Sticks and scraps of vegetation tangled on her ragged clothes. She whistled. Warning came alert from her equine doze. She raised her hand and called light.

Sediya screamed when they caught up to her, and fell sobbing to her knees, beating her fists against the ground, praying, pleading, weeping.

Pain twisted in Mark's chest. She's that afraid of what she thinks I am.

'I meant what I said. I'm taking you to a safe place.'

Sediya refused to answer.

At the temple of Ilu in the village of Rifaran, Sediya went mutely as an apprentice led her off to the baths. She did not offer a parting glance and certainly no thanks. It was likely that, whatever she said later, no one would believe her.

The envoys in charge gifted Marit with clothing in good repair in exchange for bringing one of their injured daughters to a place where she might find healing. The old woman who stood gate duty gave Mark a mended but otherwise stout cloak of a faded green color more appropriate to and practical for journeying.