Carol Berg - THE SOUL WEAVER

As I hurried across the courtyard through the people tying baggage onto carts and ponies and bawling mules, a burly drover leaped onto a heavily laden wagon, whistled loudly, and yelled, “Moving out for Montevial! We wait for nobody.”

Radele gave me a hand into the pony trap, then swung gracefully into his saddle, nudged his mount forward, and accosted the drover. Gesturing toward my cart, he dropped a few coins into the drover’s hand as I had instructed. The drover signaled me to take up the position just behind the lead wagons, and then, with a loud bellow, he headed his own wagon out the gates.

Gerick’s seat was still empty. But Radele rode directly across the path of the wagon next to me, causing the driver to pull up sharply and curse when he couldn’t squeeze in ahead of me. The young Dar’Nethi gave me a grin and a flourish of his hat. I reciprocated.

Just as I thought I might have to forfeit Radele’s advantage and relinquish my desirable place near the head of the caravan, Gerick sprinted across the yard and leaped into the seat beside me. “Sorry,” he said, as I snapped the reins, and we rolled through the gates of the innyard.

Once we were past the town walls, most of the sizable party stretched out behind us on the road. “So,” I said, keeping my eyes on the road, “has he news of his one-eyed jongler?”

Gerick shifted beside me on the thinly padded seat. “No. I just - I just wanted to tell him I hope he finds his son. I said that I knew someone who’d been stolen away like his boy and had come home again, so that he shouldn’t give up looking.”

“Any price he has to pay is worth it.”

But when I turned to smile at Gerick, his thoughts were very far away, and when I asked what troubled him so about the man’s story, he averted his eyes and sat up straight. “Nothing.” The set of his face told me not to bother asking more.

Our road wound through the green foothills of the Cerran Brae, sweeping gently upward toward the Leiran border. Some forty people comprised our party. The three principal drovers were Leiran, and six Leiran soldiers, two mounted and four on foot, guarded their three heavy wagons - some Vallorean province’s tax levies of money and grain.

Just behind us rode a pair of hunters leading five pack mules heavily loaded with skins to sell in Montevial’s market, and a vintner’s party hauling a valuable cargo of Vallorean wine to a Leiran baron. The vintner’s men had most likely been delighted to hear that a tax-levy shipment was in their party. Either the soldiers and the gruesome penalties for interfering with a tax levy would scare off any bandits, or the bandits would be so intent on the chests of gold and silver buried under the grain sacks that the wine might escape their notice.

Behind the vintner’s men rode a delegation of four Vallorean magistrates hoping to gain tax preferences for their towns, a standoffish Leiran man, his wife and two grown sons, and a belligerent Leiran stonemason and his assistant who had been participating in the continuing effort to remove the names and likenesses of Vallorean royalty from the public buildings in Vanesta. The party was filled out with local people traveling to Leire in search of work or missing relatives. Paulo and his string of horses had been relegated so far to the rear, I couldn’t even see them.

Scarcely able to keep up with the rest of us were a gaunt Vallorean and his family. The man carried a small boy on his shoulders and pulled a wheeled sledge by a rope tied around his broad chest. His wife carried an infant lashed to her back with straps of cloth, while three other children, none more than ten, trudged along beside their pitifully few household belongings, helping steady the sledge over rough places in the road.

At our first rest stop of the morning, I learned from his weary wife that the man was a master smith. Smiths were prized in every land, but the Leiran governor of Valleor had recently decreed that no Vallorean craftsman could practice his own trade until he had apprenticed to a Leiran master. As we prepared to resume our journey after the horses were rested and watered, I offered to let the children take turns riding in the trap with Gerick and me. When the smith heard my Leiran accent, he bluntly and unequivocally refused.

The first stretch of the afternoon was a short steep pitch over a low ridge. The Vallorean family quickly fell behind. When I slapped the reins harder than necessary to convince our pony to make the climb, Gerick eyed me curiously. “What’s wrong?”

“There are more lost souls in the world than just the mad sheepherder’s son,” I said, relaxing my grip a little. “And I would dearly love to make Evard walk with them a while.”

“Is it true you almost married King Evard? No one ever mentioned that at Comigor.”

“Has Tennice been telling you stories?”

“Some. When I asked him why you looked like you were going to spit every time you said the king’s name, and how you always called him Evard and not King Evard, Tennice said you were going to be queen.”

As we rolled through the hazy afternoon, I told Gerick about the beginnings of Evard’s and Tomas’s friendship, and the understanding between the young King of Leire and my brother about me. And in order to explain how Tennice had used his knowledge of the law so I could choose for myself whom I wanted to marry, I had to tell him about my cousin Martin, Earl of Gault, and his magnificent country house called Windham, and how I’d met Karon there, falling in love with him before I’d known he was a sorcerer.

Gerick listened, but made no comment.

It felt good to be on the move. For all its beauty and comfort, Verdillon was only a temporary home. My home was with Karon, but I wasn’t at all sure where. The rose-colored palace in Avonar was D’Natheil’s place, not Karon’s… not my Karon’s. Despite what I’d said to Radele, I couldn’t envision myself living there, and that left me feeling rootless and more uncertain about the future than I had ever been. Yet my unease could be only a small portion of what Gerick must feel. That consideration gave me patience with his silence and his moods when I had patience for nothing else in the world.

The air grew cooler as we moved slowly upward, and for the first time in weeks no storm broke in the afternoon. A breeze rippled the leagues of grass to either side of the road like an emerald sea. Gerick took over driving the cart, and despite the constant jolting, I fell into a drowsy reminiscence of Windham. Telling Gerick about those days had made the memories incredibly vivid. I could almost hear Karon’s robust baritone harmonizing with Martin’s off-key bass on a particularly bawdy song at a Long Night fete. When I laughed aloud at the memory of it, I felt Gerick’s eyes on me. My skin grew hot. Certain that he would ask what amused me so, I tried to decide if telling him the words to the song would be at all proper for a mother to a youthful son.

But his question, when it came, was very odd. “Why do you wear your hair so short?” He was gazing at me with the strangest expression - part curiosity, part wonder, part terror - and had let the reins go slack. The cart was rolling to a stop.

“Here, you’d best keep us moving or the others will pull their wagons around, and we’ll have to eat dust.” I snatched the reins from his still hands and gave the pony a flick so that we started moving again.

He continued to stare at me, his question hanging in the air like an annoying bee.

“On the day they executed your father, they cut off all my hair,” I said at last, trying to shove aside the accompanying images of fire and horror. “It’s the Leiran custom for public penance. By the time it grew back again, I was living in circumstances that left me no leisure to take care of it. It was easier to keep it short.” I had never let it grow past my shoulders again.