Pryn had assumed Fox, Badger, and Wolf had seen them too — but the horses, grown skittish at the traffic, must have distracted them. And the women’s course veered closer than even Pryn had expected —
One of the servants gave a small shriek.
The horses reared.
The white-haired woman turned in startled anger. She stepped back, hands down in blowing blue. The woman with the red scarf at her waist took the older woman’s shoulder and gave a wordless shout of her own. Servants scrambled. One dropped a parasol. The woman with the scarf turned from the older to grab it up.
The horses reared again.
Pryn clutched the Fox and clamped her knees to keep astride. Forehooves clattered to the street. The manservant shouted: ‘Country ruffians! What’s wrong with you! Out of the street, now! Out of the street! Don’t you know enough to let a woman of Madame Keyne’s standing in this city have the right of way? Rein your horses back! Rein them, I say — !’ The Fox’s horse started to rear again, but jarred, stopping.
Pryn felt it ankle to jaw. It was as if a dragon in airborne career had suddenly smashed rock. What had happened was that the small, cream-haired woman had grasped the horse’s bridle and, with a jerk, brought the beast up short.
The little woman’s gray eyes were suddenly centers where lines of effort and anger met. The horse jerked against her grip three times, then stilled. ‘Stupid — !’ the woman got out between tight teeth. The angry eyes swept up by the Fox to meet Pryn’s. The horse quivered between Pryn’s legs. Under Pryn’s hands, the Fox’s scarred shoulder flexed and flexed as he tried to rein his animal from her.
Suddenly the little woman released the bridle and stalked off after the others, who had collected themselves to hurry on, again deep in their conversation. Servants hurried behind them, parasols waving.
The horses moved about one another. Fox, Badger, and Wolf were all cursing: the women, the city, the sun above them, the people around them. Swaying at the Fox’s back, Pryn tried to look after the vanishing group. Now and again, across the crowd, she thought she caught sight of the cream-haired woman behind the party, off in some alley with sea at its end.
‘Get down!’
Pryn looked back at the dirty headdress, scarred shoulder right, unscarred left.
‘Go on, girl!’ the Fox demanded; the horse stilled. ‘We brought you to the city, where you wanted to go. Get down now! Be on your way!’
Confused, Pryn slid her foot back, up, and over, then dropped to the cobbles, with the sore knees and tingling buttocks of a novice rider — dragons notwithstanding. She stepped back from the moving legs, looking up.
The three above her, on their stepping horses, looked down.
The Badger, with his tightly-curled beard, seemed about to ask something, and Pryn found her own lips halting on a question: What of the Blue Heron and Liberator? Despite her anger, her impressment had at least provided a form for her arrival. Aside from roving hands, she’d believed there high-sounding purpose. But as she ducked back (someone else was shouting for them to move), she realized they were, the three of them, country men, as confused and discommoded by this urban hubbub as she was.
‘Are you going to kill her now?’ the Badger blurted, looking upset.
‘She’s no spy!’ The Western Wolf leaned forward disgustedly to pat his horse’s neck. ‘She’s no different from you, boy — a stupid mountain kid run off from home to the city. I’ve a mind to turn you both loose and send you on your ways — ’
Pryn had a momentary image of herself stuck in this confusion with the young dolt.
But the Fox said, ‘Come on, the two of you, and stop this!’ He turned his horse up the street; the two turned after him.
Pryn watched them trot off — to be stopped another half-block on by more people crossing. People closed around Pryn. After she had been bumped three times, cursed twice, and ignored by what must have been fifty passers-by in the space of half a minute, she began to walk.
Everyone else was walking.
To stay still in such a rush was madness.
Pryn walked — for hours. From time to time she sat: once on the steps in a doorway, once on a carved log bench beside a building. The tale-teller’s food had been finished the previous night and the package discarded; so far she’d only thought about food (and home!) when she’d passed the back door of a bread shop whose aromatic ovens flooded the alley with the odor of toasted grain.
Walking, turning, walking, she wondered many times if she were on a street she’d walked before. Occasionally she knew she was, but at least five times, now, when she’d set out to rediscover a particular place she’d passed minutes or hours back, it became as impossible to find as if the remembered landmarks had sunk beneath the sea.
Several workmen with dusty rags around their heads had opened up the street to uncover a great clay trough with planking laid across it, which ran out from under a building where half a dozen women were repairing a wall by daubing mud and straw on the stones with wooden paddles. (Now, she had passed them before…) A naked boy dragged along a wooden sledge heaped with laundry. A girl, easily the boy’s young sister and not wearing much more than he, now and again stooped behind to catch up a shirt or shift that flopped over the edge, or to push the wet clothes back in a pile when a rut shook them awry.
Pryn found herself behind three women with the light hair of southern barbarians, their long dresses shrugged off their shoulders and bunched down at their waists, each with one hand up to steady a dripping water jar. Two carried them on their heads; one held hers on a shoulder.
They turned in front of her, on to a street that sloped down from the avenue, and, as the shadow from the building moved a-slant terracotta jugs, thonged-up hair, and sunburned backs, Pryn followed. (No, she had never been on this street…) There were many less people walking these dark cobbles.
‘…vevish nivu hrem’m har memish…’ Pryn heard one woman say — or something like it.
‘…nivu homyr avra’nos? Cevet aveset…’ the second quipped. Two of the barbarians laughed.
Pryn had heard the barbarian language before, in the Ellamon market, but knew little of its meaning. Whenever she heard it, she always wondered if she might get one of them to talk slowly enough to write it down, so that she could study it and learn of its barbaric intent.
‘…hav nivu akra mik har’vor remvush…’ retorted the second to a line Pryn had lost.
All three laughed again.
Two turned down an alley that, Pryn saw as she reached it, was only a shoulder-wide space between red mud walls. With the sun ahead of them, the two swaying silhouettes grew smaller and smaller.
Ahead, the remaining woman took her jar from her shoulder and pushed through the hanging hide that served for a door in a wood-walled building.
Pryn walked down the hill. Here, many cobbles were missing; some substance, dark and hard, with small stones stuck all over it, paved a dozen or so feet. A woman overtook her. Pryn turned to watch. The woman wore a dirty skirt, elaborately coiffed hair, and dark paint in two wing shapes around her eyes. It was very striking, the more so because Pryn — looking after her narrow back — had only glimpsed her face. Two boys hurried by on the other side, arms around each other’s shoulders. One had shaved his head completely. Both, Pryn saw, wore the same dark eye-paint — before they, too, became just backs ahead of her.