Kate Elliott - Shadow Gate

For her own part, Marit thanked the envoys properly and retreated, alone, to the glade where Warning rested out of sight.

But when she unclasped the cloak to take off the rags and put on decent clothing, the cloak slithered back to clutch at her calves as if it were a living thing. She began to heave, sucking and coughing. She could not get air. The cloak poured up her body, wrapping her until she was too tangled to stand. She sprawled, vision fading… choking, she grasped the clasp and fixed the cursed thing around her neck. She lay for a bit, skin clammy and hot by turns. After a while, she got to her feet. The cloak swagged around her like ordinary cloth, draping to midcalf.

An ordinary piece of cloth in every way, you might think, except it never became grimy. It never stank. The clasp did not rub raw her skin. Magic infused it. Death's cloak, she might call it, and it was true enough. Death's cloak had risen off a Guardian's bones to smother her that day up on Ammadit's Tit when she and Joss had broken the boundaries and invaded a Guardian altar. A day later, death's cloak had claimed her in truth, when the knife had pierced her heart in the woodsmen's camp. If she was dead, then it was appropriate that death's cloak wore her and would not let her go.

'What are you, if you aren't one of them?' Sediya had asked.

Maybe she was just asking the wrong question. Not 'Why did the Guardians vanish, and where did they go?' but 'What is a Guardian, after all? Therefore, what am I?'

She rode to Olo'osson and made her way via back roads and isolated irrigation berms to Argent Hall, the westernmost reeve hall, on the shore of the salty Olo'o Sea. She released Warning to fend for herself, as the mare had done for an unknown time before Marit found her. She hid the harness and saddle in an abandoned shack and walked to the gates to ask for work in the lofts as a fawkner's assistant's assistant. Remarkably, they took her on.

They assigned her to the most menial of tasks: sweeping, cleaning, hauling. Maybe later, they told her, if she proved herself, they might let her start working with the harness.

She had to keep her eyes lowered at all times, so no one could possibly suspect how much she could really see. She pretended to be a woman fallen on hard times who had become suspicious and unfriendly because of the beatings she had endured from an angry husband and his unsympathetic relatives. It was a situation she'd encountered all too often as a reeve. They accepted her odd manners because she did her work, and because they were so poorly supervised and understaffed that many of their long-term hirelings had recently quit. Because the reeve halls tended to attract people who didn't fit into the daily life of the village.

With her head hunched and her gaze lowered, and her cloak tied up out of the way and layered beneath the old green cloak, she observed.

Marshal Alyon was an ailing and ill-tempered old reeve poorly

suited to manage such a roil. Half of the reeves stationed at Argent Hall had transferred here from other halls in the last few years, and they were malcontents and loose arrows to a man and woman, the kind of reeve Mark despised, the ones who kept taking more than they needed, the ones who got to loving their baton and the power they wielded more than the law they served. Marshal Alyon could not control them. There was at least one fist fight a day in the exercise yard. She kept her chin down and her eyes averted, but she saw everything. She heard their whispers. She knew how many stank of corruption, and how many fought for a restoration of the old order but kept losing ground. The newcomers were waiting, but she wasn't sure for what.

She'd not been there ten days when she woke one day to voices all aflutter.

'Garrard is back from Clan Hall. He says Clan Hall won't help us. We're on our own.'

She washed her face and slouched to the eating hall. The nai porridge tasted particularly bland today, no spice at all, but as always it was filling. She sat with the other menials, who had learned to ignore her beyond a perfunctory greeting.

At the next table, the loft fawkners were whispering fiercely, heads bent together.

'Yordenas has returned, still with no eagle. I've never heard of a bird nesting for so many seasons. I don't like him. I don't trust him.'

Heads went up as six reeves wearing gleaming reeve leathers sauntered into the eating hall. Marit shuddered; a red haze washed her vision, and the last smears of porridge turned as pink as if mixed with blood. She blinked, and after all it was only her eyes playing tricks on her. The porridge had no color at all, just a few grainy lumps stuck to the sides of the bowl.

She looked up, and saw a man wearing a Guardian's cloak.

He wasn't looking her way, or he would have known instantly, as she knew instantly. She ducked down, pretending to fiddle with her sandal's lacing. He sat down with his companions at a table well away from the one where she sat, because certain of the reeves strutted an attitude that they were better than the rest and certainly did not want to associate with the menials or even the fawkners, although the health of their eagles depended on the fawkners.

He sat with eyes downcast, listening more than he talked. His cloak was red as blood, somber rather than bright. It made her think of seeping wounds that never heal.

He did not eat, only made his presence and his allies known to all. Eventually, he left the eating hall. As he walked to the door, she bent down to let the height of those sitting at her table shield her from view. As soon as he was gone, the fawkners began whispering.

'Hsss! You see how the conflict will fall out. Yordenas means to become marshal in Alyon's place. He'll poison him.'

'Poison Alyon! Even I don't believe that, Rena.'

'You're a cursed fool if you don't believe it. It's going to get ugly, when Alyon dies, and he will die because he's weakening fast. Then it'll come down to a fight between Garrard and the outsiders, and that'll get even uglier. If we were any of us smart we would just up and leave like the hirelings keep doing.'

'We can't abandon the eagles. They need us.'

'That's right,' the others murmured. The eagles needed them. For a dedicated fawkner, it was all the cause they followed.

The moment enough menials got up to go to work, Marit rose and kept within the pack of them, and with gritted teeth walked at their ambling pace along the aisle and out the door into the exercise yard. She slunk immediately to the barracks, where she gathered her few possessions and tucked them into the feed bag. Then she went to the pits to relieve herself, and afterward she hauled up two waste buckets and swung them on a pole over her shoulder and walked out the gates toward the dumping pit as if she had been assigned to clear out night soil. The dumping pit lay a good long way away from the reeve hall. The distance seemed even farther with that stench swinging to either side, always in your face. But it was far enough away that when she set down the buckets next to the stinking pit, she could keep walking because no one was likely to run out to question her or even notice her at all from the distant walls.

A man wearing a Guardian's cloak sat in a reeve hall, pretending to be a reeve. When she thought about it, it was a good strategy. If you want to build an army and terrorize the countryside, then corrupt the reeve halls first so they won't interfere. Yet what did Lord Radas want in the end? Was it greed that drove him? Perhaps it was as simple as lust for power, as it says in the Tale of Honor: 'The first

man bowed before him, and at this sight his heart burned and his lips became dry, and then all the men must bow or he could not be contented.' Did he simply want to rule the Hundred?

She kept walking, lugging the feed bag. Storm clouds advanced over the Olo'o Plain, and a thunderstorm boomed, soaking her as she trudged. As the clouds spilled away toward the salt sea and the first cracks of sky appeared, firelings sparked in the heavens. She stared, raising a hand to shield her eyes from the last drops of rain, but the blue lights were already gone. Thunder rumbled in the distance, and she grinned, thinking of the time she and Flirt had flown through a massive storm like the complete and utter idiots they had been because they were young and full of glee. Thinking of how a fireling had winked into existence less than an arrow's shot below them, eyes afire and translucent wings a blaze of light. And cursed if Flirt hadn't stooped, and pulled up when the fireling had winked out before her talons struck. Only the blue light had flashed again below, and Flirt had stooped again, and then again and again, and for a brief wild insanely glorious passage she and the raptor had engaged in a game of chase with the one creature in the worlds no eagle can catch.