Then the gloomy inn, the barefoot old man shuffling out of the rooms at the back carrying the honey beer called stedleihe, and the way that Miros made us pause before we drank, our eyes closed, Kestenyi fashion, “allowing the dragon to pass.” And the way we banged on the table until the old man brought the lentils, and later heard a moaning from the kitchen and learned that there was a shaggy cow tied up among the sacks of beans and jars of oil, with garlics around her neck to ward off disease. And the old man seemed so frightened of us and waved his hands explaining that he kept her inside to prevent the beshaidi from stealing her. And later we saw him taking snuff at a table with some Tavrounis; he was missing all the teeth on one side of his mouth.
Darkness, smoky air, the dirty lamps on the rickety tables and outside a mournful wail and a rhythmic clapping, and we all went to the door and watched the bride as she was carried through the streets in a procession of brilliant torches. The wind whipped the flames; the sparks flew. The bride was sitting on a chair borne on the shoulders of her kinsmen. I supposed she was the unhappy girl who had traveled with us on the ferry, though her face was hidden beneath an embroidered veil.
But I waited for another, as impatient as any bridegroom. And at last she came. We had then spent six days in Klah-ne-Wiy. She came, not carried by eunuchs and decked with the lilies sacred to Avalei but packed in a leather satchel on a stout Tavrouni’s back. They slunk to the door, two of them, looking exactly like all the others except perhaps more ragged, more exhausted, their boots in stinking tatters. They had walked a long way, through the lower hills of Nain, where it was already winter and freezing mud soaked halfway up their calves. And now they were here, at home, in Klah-ne-Wiy. They sat down at a table, and the one with the satchel laid it on the floor beside his feet. Auram put his hand on my arm and nodded, his eyes drowned in sadness. I swallowed. “It’s not her.”
“Oh yes! Oh yes!” whispered the priest.
My insides twisted.
“Here,” said Miros, alarmed, his hand on my back. “Have some stedleihe. Or perhaps something stronger. You! Odashi kav’kesh!”
“No,” I said with an effort. “No.” The satchel was small, too small for a human being, unless—and my stomach heaved—unless she was only bones.
“It’s not her,” I repeated. And then, impelled by some mysterious force: “Jissavet.”
“What?” said Miros.
“Quiet!” hissed Auram. “He’s calling her!”
“Jissavet. It’s not you,” I said. The priest whipped his head about, his eyes drawing in light, hoping to glimpse a shadow from the beyond.
“It’s not you.”
“There,” said the priest, alarmed in his turn, “not so loud, we mustn’t appear to notice them.”
He bent close to me, smelling of powder and cloves, his fingers fastened on my sleeve. “When they go,” he whispered. “When they go to bed, in the back. Their room’s in the northwest corner. I know it. I’ll get the package for you. And perhaps…” His tongue, hungry and uncertain, darted across his lip. “Perhaps—now that you have grown stronger—perhaps you’ll address her again. Once—or twice. A few words, a few questions. It would mean a great deal to us…”
I laughed. Pure laughter, for the first time since the Feast of Birds. “Oh, veimaro,” I chuckled, seizing his face, wrinkling it in my hands. I brought it close to my own, so close that his great eyes lost their focus and went dim. “Not for an instant,” I told him through my teeth. “Not once.”
I released him abruptly; he fell back against his chair. The odash arrived, a heady liquor made from barley and served with melted butter. I gulped the foul brew down, fascinated by the battered satchel visible in the light from the dying fire. It lay there, stirring sometimes when one of the messengers touched it with his boot. Her body, rescued from the Olondrian worms.
“Jissavet,” I murmured.
And then the door, always bolted, shivered under a volley of blows, and a voice cried, “Open in the name of the king!”
We stared at one another and Auram took my arm, not in panic but with deliberate softness, almost with tenderness. His voice, too, was soft, yet it penetrated beneath the pounding and the shouts at the door, boring straight into my heart. “The road behind the market,” he said, “will lead you to the pass. When you have crossed the hills you will see a small river, the Yeidas. Follow that river and it will take you to Sarenha-Haladli, one of the prince’s old estates. Stay there. Our people will come for you.”
“What are you saying?” I murmured in a daze. The door swelled inward.
The High Priest laughed, shrugged, and brushed the side of his vast brocaded cape. “A marvelous journey. Marvelous and terrible. And perhaps we will go on together. But it is possible that this is, as it were, the last act.”
He nodded to the landlord. “Open the door.”
The old man lifted the bolt and sprang back as four Valley soldiers rushed into the room. Shadows leapt on the walls. All my thought was for the body, the weather-stained leather satchel that held the key to my future. I ducked beneath the table and scrambled toward it over the earthen floor, but it was gone, swept up on the back of one of the Tavrounis. “Sit down, sit down,” the soldiers shouted. But my companions faced them squarely, Auram with his thin hand raised.
“Stand back in the name of Avalei,” he commanded. There was a pause, a slight uncertainty on the part of those fresh-faced, well-fed Valley soldiers. Still on my knees, I grasped the Tavrouni’s belt. “That’s mine!” I hissed. “It’s mine! You brought it for me! Give it to me, quickly!”
One of the soldiers looked at me, frowning; Auram stamped his foot to draw his attention. “What do you mean by harassing a High Priest and his men? What has the king to do with me? I am Avalei’s mouthpiece. I am prosperity. And, if the hour requires it, I am evil itself.”
Even in my dread I admired the old man. Straight as a young willow-tree he stood, his head thrown back, his nostrils curling with disdain. One arm was drawn across his chest, upholding the carmine brilliance of his cape. The hand behind his back, I noticed, clutched a knife.
The soldiers glanced at one another. “We mean no dishonor to Avalei or your person, veimaro,” one of them grumbled, scratching his neck. “But we have come for a man, a foreigner.” He scanned the group and pointed to me with his sword. “That one. The islander. We’ve come for him.”
“That man is my guest,” Auram said icily. “An insult to him is an insult to me and through me to the Ripener of the Grain.”
“Our orders are from the Telkan,” said another soldier, not the one who had spoke first, his dark face swollen with impatience.
Auram smiled. “Our speech begins to form a circle, gentlemen.” His finger twirled in the air, its shadow revolving on the ceiling. “Round and round. Round and round. You invoke the king, and I invoke the goddess. Which do you think will prove the stronger?”
“Priests have committed treason before,” shouted the dark-faced youth. And it was then that one of his fellows gave a start and dropped his sword. The weapon landed with a thud, and as if a spring had been released a whirr split the air and Auram’s knife lodged in the dark soldier’s eye.
“Run, Jevick,” Miros shouted. “It’s over now.”
He raised a chair in the manner of one accustomed to tavern brawls. One of the soldiers struck it with his sword, and the light wood cracked and splintered. Miros ducked, fine chaff in his hair.