I prayed that when I died the Wheel would swiftly take me up and pass me onward. Their fate seemed immeasurably sad.
Scrambling down the cliff from Lady Ingard’s Hill, I fell almost two body lengths. I knew how to take such a drop, and managed to protect the baby, though I wrenched my left shoulder doing it, and surely collected some bruises. I might not yet be showing much of my pregnancy to the casual eye, but my balance was clumsier than ever it had been. Ilona had already let out my leathers once, which embarrassed me to no end, even just between the two of us.
The Dancing Mistress would have known what to do. For a moment I mourned my absent teacher and friend; then I limped down through the woods and into the apple orchard, careful as always to make no path where I could help it.
Approaching Ilona’s cottage, I heard adult voices. Living voices. That put me very much in mind of Corinthia Anastasia’s report of someone searching for me down at Briarpool. I crouched lower, moving now as I might have running with Mother Shesturi’s handle. Blade training was never far from my mind; though I had been lazy enough in my months up here, I still maintained my form. Even with my poor balance and aching shoulder.
I drifted into a stand of brambles that would afford me a view of the house. A dark-haired man stood in the open doorway, his back to me. I could hear Ilona’s voice from within. Her tone did not sound panicked or afraid, though the rise and fall of argument was clear enough. And the visitor’s accent held the familiar rhythms of Seliu. The searcher from Briarpool was here! Carefully I scanned for guards, for watchers, for reinforcements.
Had this one come alone?
From the tenor of the conversation, their contention seemed likely to continue, so I slipped to my left and carefully circled the house from about a dozen rods into the trees. I would have to cross the gardens outside the south wall, or considerably widen my arc of travel, but otherwise I could flush out whatever wards the visitor had set. It was the work of twenty minutes or so to creep full circle. I found nothing except a fox and a few angry jays bickering amid the fall corn.
Now was time to face whatever hunted for me. While I was skulking in the woods, the intruder had gained access to the interior of the cottage. Not gone, certainly, for I would have marked his departure, but Ilona had admitted him within. Or she had been forced.
Abandoning caution, I sprinted for the door and burst through, short knife held low in my right hand. Ilona jumped up from the kitchen table, dropping her second-best crockery bowl to shatter in a shower of beans on the flagstone floor, while Chowdry stood to meet my attack.
I turned my blade in to the wood, unable to stop from slamming bodily into my old friend and sending him flying across the table. Grabbing the edge to right myself, I gasped several short, sharp breaths to regain my usual calm.
“What in the name of the Wheel are you doing here?” I shouted in Seliu.
Chowdry picked himself up and wiped beans from his hand and arms. He bled from several cuts. Ilona rose to stand beside him, her skin flushed. My heart missed several beats at the fear and panic in her face, though she smoothed her expression swiftly enough. “He was looking for you, Green,” she said slowly, picking up my meaning without understanding the language.
“Endurance asks for you,” Chowdry said by explanation, answering in Petraean for the sake of politeness.
Onetime sailor, cook, and reluctant pirate-or at least coastal raider-I had left this man in charge of the cult I had accidentally founded in the process of bringing down the bandit god Choybalsan. Many prices were paid that day. One of them was that I had made this man who he was. How dare he come to fetch me?
“I do not answer to you,” I snapped.
“And you are not answering to the god either,” Chowdry replied mildly. “But he asks for you anyway. Your work in Copper Downs is in danger.”
“That is the second time I have been told this thing today,” I muttered. “It is not my city, and there are tens of thousands living there. Surely someone among them can step forward.”
“You sulk, Green,” Ilona said mildly in her most maternal voice, as if chastising Corinthia Anastasia. “It is unbecoming.”
I whirled away from both of them to regain my composure. “S-sorry about the bowl,” I told the fireplace.
Chowdry touched my shoulder, a brief gesture of comfort or camaraderie. “I know how you are,” he said in Seliu. “I was wrong not to wait outside where you could see and hear me.”
“You don’t assassinate someone for the sake of a bowl of beans and a conversation,” Ilona added, though I knew she had not taken the meaning of Chowdry’s words.
“I have killed for less,” I said in my smallest voice, and screwed my eyes shut against the tears. My breath shuddered in my chest, and I was shamed that the two of them could hear it. When I turned back, the compassion in their faces stung me even more. “Why did you come up for me, Chowdry? Your man at Briarpool was already looking.”
He glanced sidelong at Ilona before answering. “I am not knowing of Briarpool. I am sending only me. I knew you would listen to no one. You never do. Especially not me. But I can be arguing with you. Anyone else is too frightened.”
Ashamed all over again, I leaned forward and snatched my short knife from the tabletop. I was not a difficult woman! “If you were not frightened, you weren’t paying attention. And who was looking for me at Briarpool?”
“More Selistani have arrived in Copper Downs from across the sea. Kalimpuri high-noses with their city ways, wearing their money as if it was being power. They prepare for someone greater. I do not yet know who.”
I was momentarily distracted by the political issue that implied. The number of Selistani back in Kalimpura who spoke Petraean was quite small. Who was coming, with the power to scour the merchant families and counting houses for those people? Not Mother Vajpai, or anyone from the Temple of the Silver Lily. Wealth and influence we-they-had. But not sufficient to compel unwilling persons on an adventure across the Storm Sea. Our writ was mighty, but definitely limited to the bounds of Kalimpura’s city walls.
Oh, how much I later paid for lacking sufficient foresight then.
“It is time for me to leave here.” I nodded at Ilona. “If such people are seeking me, I cannot stay. But I resent being pushed into the service of the city once more.”
“There is no pushing here,” Chowdry said. “All I am asking is that you come to speak to Endurance.”
“The god is mute,” I gently pointed out. I had made him so myself.
“The god is wordless. He still has much to say at times.” The pirate-priest smiled. “Born of your deeds, how could he be otherwise?”
I had to laugh at that. To my immense relief, Ilona chose to laugh with me. We bent to cleaning the scattered slops and ceramic fragments, while I furiously wondered what was so bad that both the god Endurance and the ghosts of the High Hills should care that it be me who stepped into it.
Return to Copper Downs
C OMING DOWN OUT of the hills with Chowdry, I decided to follow the route I’d taken while fleeing Choybalsan’s army at the beginning of the summer. This was a rough track, so I carried only my knives, some small essentials for cooking and sleep, and of course my belled silk with the needles, thread, and cache of bells. That line of work had been broken too often. I would not abandon it yet again. I did roll the cloth carefully so as to pad the bells that I did not jingle as I walked.
I stayed away from the Barley Road and the banks of the Greenbriar River, and instead traveled along the ridges following goat tracks, tracing the crumbling high road of former times where possible, and indulging in a fair amount of plain old bushwhacking. Following me, Chowdry was not so pleased.