“The hells!” she said at last. “Can you not help me? Will you not?”

Weary, he remained silent.

“Eiya!” Then she laughed. She wasn’t a fragile creature, one crushed by a single blow. He could well believe she had been a reeve. She had a reeve’s confident physical stance, and measuring, deliberate stare. A good reeve was stubborn and observant. “Aui! The man I loved—and love still—now thinks of me only with regret and pain, while it’s another, younger, woman who he burns for in his thoughts with passion and longing. While you won’t talk to me at all. So be it. I’ve wandered too long hoping to find someone to tell me what I am and what I must do now. You’ve taught me something, ver, by just standing there with your friendly smile and wishing me gone. I have to find out the truth where it lies within myself. I must walk into the shadows, and see if I am strong enough to come out unscathed, with the truth fixed in my heart and my duty carried in my hands.”

She waited a moment longer. When he did not answer, she led the mare away into the trees. The rattle of their leaving faded. The wind sighed in the underbrush.

Seeing whinnied, and the other horse—now out of sight—called in answer.

“Have I made a terrible mistake?” he said to the air, to the sky, to the earth, to the water.

The girl looked at him, her gaze a question, perhaps even an act of trust.

He nodded. “We must pack up. It’s time to move on. Quickly now, lass. Quickly.”

19

After the gates were unlocked, the women who had been waiting all morning on the hot Olossi street were herded into a courtyard surrounded by high walls. Avisha trudged in, carrying Zianna and holding Jerad by the hand. Their keepers, a foursome of militiamen hired to maintain order, kept up a running patter of crude jokes.

“Heh. I wonder if those Qin soldiers have swords or prickles, eh?”

“Sharp as their swords, eh? I wouldn’t want one swiving me.”

“This lot hasn’t much choice. Heya! Rufi, look there. Isn’t that your mother? Eihi! No call to go hitting me, just a joke.”

Avisha kept her head down. Fortunately, she was not the only woman here burdened by children, so perhaps that wasn’t an immediate disqualification for marriage. Her arms were numb from the weight of holding Zianna. Jerad was sniffling.

She pushed him over toward a small door set into one wall where the tops of pipewood rising on the other side of the wall offered a sliver of shade. A beggar in a red cap and ragged kilt who was leaning against the door in that shade kindly moved away as she and the children approached. She sagged against the door, wiping sweat from her neck as she looked around.

The court’s stone pavement and high, whitewashed walls suggested it was either an unloading ground for wagons, or an open space for people to work. She had no idea how things worked in a city as big as Olossi, with its crowded streets and aggressive inhabitants as likely to shove you out of the way as wish you the blessings of the day. Her eyes watered from all the cook-smoke and from ash that still drifted off the burned sections of the lower city. Clouds were piling up in the east, and she was sure that on top of everything, it was going to rain.