"There were witnesses to his arrest. Questions will be asked."
"Look at me!"
He met the lord commander's gaze. A stone might have dropped into the pit of his stomach. He was stricken with an intense fear that the cloth walls and ceiling would fall inward, wrap him, choke him, all his breath sucked right out of him by that touch until he was only a dead husk, withering into bones.
He thought he heard a woman's voice speak a single word. The lord commander's gaze shifted away, and Horas dropped hard back into himself. He was sweating, and trembling. The other three men-three dressed in soldier's jackets and short cloaks and one dressed in humbler garb-were staring at their feet. They were afraid, too. Everyone was afraid. Even, strangely, the lord commander, who brushed his chin with the back of a hand and came a step closer, with a gesture as if he meant to thrust the point of the arrow into Horas's eye.
"That's not good enough. Why haven't they killed him?"
"They mean to bring him up on trial at the assizes, that's all," Horas said in a rush, tripping over the words because if he directed the lord commander's anger elsewhere then the man would not be mad at him. "They were waiting for that border captain to be dead, so they'd have a charge to lay on the reeve and evidence to go with it. Now that they have the body, the hearing and trial can go through the proper assizes ritual. That's how they plan to discredit the council faction that is trying to take over."
"It's taking too long."
"Oh, eh, yeh, of course! Clumsy oafs! No wonder they need a new governor. They're not fit to govern themselves. But I've got the Devouring girl with me, the one that killed the border captain, so she claims. She tried to kill the reeve, but failed. She's saying she'll go back and finish him off. Not much he can do when he's stuck in the pit, eh?"
The lord commander's gaze sharpened. He sniffed, as if taking in a scent. His teeth showed as lips parted, and his tongue flicked out. "A Devouring girl? Where is she?"
Horas shuddered. Spiders might crawl on his skin so, to make him shrink away in fear. The man had a cruel voice.
"Lord Radas. Enough."
The words came from beyond an inner wall of gauze. As if in response to that quiet voice, a wind caught the filmy hem of that inner wall and lifted it enough to give him a glimpse into a second chamber hidden away within this temporary shelter. A woman was seated at a low writing table, with her back to him. Just before the curtain fell back into place she raised her left hand and curled her fingers in toward her palm. Then the gauze slid back, and he could not see her.
He hesitated.
"Go on," said the lord commander, voice tight with suppressed fury.
Horas figured it best to move fast. He had trouble finding the opening. The cloth seemed heavier than it should have, the air so thick it was almost liquid, but he squeezed through and came into a cooler zone. The awning overhead rolled in waves as the wind stroked it. All trace of the outer chamber and the outside world was erased. The isolation made him twitchy.
She sat cross-legged on a pillow, back board-straight, her hair bound in a single thick braid running true down her spine. The blackness of her hair blended with the night-black cloak hanging from her shoulders, its lower portion draped in graceful folds around her hips and legs. She seemed to be sitting on a spear whose haft and point stuck out on either side. A table rested in front of her. Her body blocked his view of the table except for a few items lined up straight, and parallel to the table's edge, to her right side. There lay a common dagger, nothing ornamented or fancy, but it looked serviceable; you could stab a man in the guts with such a dagger if he pushed you too far and it would kill him if you got it in deep enough and in the sweet spot. There was also a sharpened, hollow green stick, recently cut from a stalk of pipe-brush, the kind of thing you could use as a stake or to stab through the flesh of a moonfruit and suck out the juices inside. Closest to her elbow lay a narrow wooden box that contained four writing brushes resting on a silk bed with an empty space where a fifth brush must normally reside. That fifth brush was in her hand. The paper on which she was writing was hidden by her body. There was no one else. Perhaps she was the lord commander's private clerk, his secretary, who took down his decrees and pronouncements and orders.
Without looking at him, she spoke in a pleasant, friendly, warm voice.
"Reeve Horas, I am relieved and pleased you have come so promptly. What is your report?"
He repeated what he had told the lord commander.
For a while she did not reply. He couldn't see her writing hand, but that arm rose, bent, retreated, and shifted forward, as she brushed down words. He shuffled his feet, scratched at a bug bite on his jaw, and, thinking of the Devouring girl, gave a reflexive nudge to his crotch.
"Come around where I can see you."
How was it that such mild words could dig into a man's worst fears? Hot tears filled his eyes, and he hated the Devouring girl, for she had brought this on him, surely. But he walked around to the front of the table, sure that his legs weren't shaking. He wasn't weak like those men who pissed themselves, or who fell begging to their knees. He hadn't even met this woman before. This was just spillover from being on the ugly end of the lord commander's annoyance, a dangerous thing, truly, but he was a reeve and therefore he had stature no common soldier could possibly gain.
Aui! After all she was a woman not much older than he was, one who had celebrated three feasts but still waited on the fourth and fifth feasts of life. She was ordinary in all ways, with the ample body best suited to a woman of her years, a round face with regular features such as any hardworking and prosperous householder might have, and confident hands. She was obviously no warrior trained, not like the lord commander, whose sword could stab a man through the guts, whose captains would order men strung up by their thumbs or tongues or ears if they displeased the lord.
A writing mat had been rolled out on the table and paper placed upon it, weighted with a stone in each corner. The long stick of ink, carved in the shape of a crane with head bent back as if looking over its shoulder, had not been cut, and the ink basin with its sheen of water was clear. The paper remained blank. The hairs of the brush she held in her hand were dry.
This much he glimpsed before he placed himself directly in front of the table and cast his gaze down because aunties liked young men to stand humbly before them. It was the coin they demanded, if you wanted to eat and be clothed and get work in the village. He clasped his hands behind his back to hide that humiliating tremble.
"Look at me," she said kindly.
Surprised at the request, he looked up into her steady gaze.
At first he was reminded of the nicer aunties who lived in his village, the ones who swept their porches and weeded their gardens and washed and cooked and spun and tended their silkworms and engaged in their small crafts and gossiped by the well. The ones who said it was best to give a rebellious boy a second chance, because such high spirits might mark the sign of a lad destined for greatness. She was just such a woman, come from a humble background, no different at all.
No different.
Not at first. Not until it seemed you were being twisted inside out and your secrets pulled like fish from water to gasp out their lives at the mercy of the fisher. Her gaze was a hook caught in his head. The world was clear but it was also swallowed in a haze he could not penetrate. He drowned in memories, each one plucked out and set before him like a gem for sale in the marketplace. Forgotten voices roared in his ears, and every spike of fury and prod of lust and cut of greed and claw of envy stormed in his heart and he was ashamed of it until he thought he would pass out. But he did not pass out, though he wished he could.
"Assault, rape, murder," she said with the same matter-of-fact tone an auntie in the market points out which vegetables she wants. "That is just what lies at the surface. A rough start in your life, Horas."