"What then?" she asked.
Anji remained silent, watching.
He shrugged, and offered her a wry smile that made her want to cry for his pain. "Most likely we'd both be dead. Her eagle was found. Not just dead, but mutilated."
She had a nasty, prickling feeling along her back, as if someone drew cold fingers laced with slivers of glass up and down her skin. "What of her?"
He shifted his gaze to the leaping flames, his head canted and jaw tight, and continued speaking. "Her body was never found, but we found her clothes, her boots, a belt buckle, her knife, items she carried in her pack…"The fire sparked as a soldier shoved a pair of branches into the flames. The reeve winced back from the flare, then caught himself and went on, although his voice seemed flatter and more distant. He might have been reciting from a scroll. "Her boot knife was found on a girl, one of the Devourer's hierodules. The girl had been stabbed in the heart. That girl's corpse lay there with the rest of the discarded gear. It was only her body we did not find, nor them who did it, as they had all abandoned the camp."
"She might not have been taken away with those who killed the other one?" Anji asked.
"We searched, but there was never any sign of her. No, she's dead. I knew it as soon as I saw what remained of Flirt-that was her eagle. A reeve doesn't survive her eagle's death. An eagle can survive through the lives of four or five reeves if it's particularly long-lived, like my good Scar, but for the other way, no. Better dead than no longer a reeve, so we say." His smile was a ghost's smile, without life, but he struggled with it and shook his head and said, "It still hurts. A few years later, bones were found in an unmarked grave up beyond that abandoned camp. Perhaps that was her, hidden because they feared our revenge. I try to leave it behind." He blew breath out through his lips and shook himself in the manner of a duck shedding water. "I keep thinking I have."
"I'm so sorry," said Mai, wiping away a tear. "What was her name?"
"Reeve Joss!" A voice hailed him from the darkness. "Best come see this!"
"Excuse me." Joss left.
"Every young man loses his first love," remarked Anji to Mai, "but most get back in the saddle and keep riding. He's tethered to one post."
"Is it fair to say so? You don't know what he's done in the years since, only that speaking the tale makes him sad. The storytellers in the marketplace would make a song out of it, like in the tale of the Rose Princess and the Fourteen Silk Ribbons. She ran off with her lover, and he left her by the riverside while he went into town to buy her silk ribbons, and she was eaten by a lion that had been sent to earth by a demon jealous of her beauty. Afterward he wore her bloodstained rags and went on pilgrimage to the fourteen holy temples, one for each ribbon he had bought for her, but he could not calm his heart and after all he turned back to seek revenge, but the demon seduced him and made him steal back the ribbons from each temple and. .. It's a terribly sad tale!" she finished indignantly, seeing that he was trying not to laugh. "He dishonored himself! What could be worse? There is a song, but it always makes me cry."
"I would gladly hear the song. You sing with sincerity and a true voice."
"Maybe not such a strong one," she muttered. "But the tone is good, so I am told."
"You are still angry. I do not laugh at you, dearest Mai. I just have no taste for such tales. To me, they seem ridiculous."
"How are the tales ridiculous?"
He laughed. "Any man knows better than to leave a beautiful woman alone by the riverside in the middle of wilderness! Wild beasts and demons stalk everywhere, and not least among them the sort of bandits we drove away in Dast Korumbos. No, I have no patience for those stories."
"Mistress." Sheyshi came out of the dark carrying a copper basin filled with water. "Here is warmed water, if you want to wash your hair and face."
"Captain!" The reeve reappeared, barely visible in the gloom, and waved a hand. "If you will. There's something I would like you to see."
Anji nodded at her and went after Joss. Mai watched them fade into the twilight. She scanned the clearing and the trees but could see nothing exceptional, only merchants fussing at their wagons, soldiers grooming horses, and a dog slinking under the wheels of a cart. Guards ringed the prisoner's wagon, but they showed no sign of alarm as they maintained their vigil.
Movement beside one wagon attracted her gaze. Canvas had been stretched by means of an internal scaffolding to make a cabin over the bed, and two young women knelt beside a small fire, feeding sticks into it and stirring in a pot that hung on an iron tripod over the flames.
"Look there," said Mai to Priya. "I've noticed them before. They look a little like Sheyshi, don't they?"
"Slaves," said Priya. "See the bracelets and anklets, hung with bells so they cannot run away without alerting their master. Someone means to sell them here in the north. So it happened to me."
Mai took the other woman's arm, looking for the mark of shackles. "You have never worn such bracelets, Priya!"
"It is not the custom in Kartu. They were taken off me before I came to your father's house."
"Still." Mai scratched a forearm carelessly. "There's something about those two-or that wagon, anyway-that makes me itch. I don't know what. Like that time keder oil spilled on Ti's hand and made it blister. There's something hidden, but I don't know what."
A young man appeared by the fire, speaking to the girls, and he looked up as if he felt Mai's gaze. She had seen him before, among the merchants. He was young, with thick, curly black hair, and vivid with a kind of hunger of the spirit, a thing which gnaws at the underbelly and never lets up. He noted her, as men always did, but looked away quickly as if to say, "You cannot feed me, so I have no interest in you!"
"Find out his name," said Mai to Priya.
Priya brushed her fingers across Mai's knuckles. "You shouldn't stare at young men. Best we go on. Your water is ready."
She followed Sheyshi behind a canvas screen set up for privacy and, with the aid of her two slaves, stripped and had them pour the water over her just for the feel of it. It wasn't a true bath, with a scrub and afterward a hot soak, but she rubbed and soaped and afterward Sheyshi brought two more basins and rinsed her, and anyway it was better than the constant smear of dirt on her skin. She had dried and dressed and was sitting on a stool, sipping at this nasty drink called cordial while Priya combed out her hair, when Anji returned, accepted a cup from Sheyshi, and drained it without even a grimace at the sour taste.
"What was it?" she asked him.
"Just in the trees, a man found two skulls, bones scattered. Wild beasts got into them, but it isn't clear if the dead men were murdered or just died from some other cause-starvation, illness. Or where they came from or why, nothing but the bones, not even scraps of clothing, pieces of gear, nothing."
"It doesn't seem likely that naked people would go wandering in the forest. Unless these Hundred folk have strange customs."
He smiled, but sobered immediately. "The reeve tells me they have no holy followers of the Merciful One at all."
"No followers of the Merciful One? How can that be? We saw a shrine to the god, but it contained no statue, nothing but withered flowers."
"He kept thinking I was saying the Merciless One. It took us a while to sort it out. He had never heard of the Merciful One."
"You might as well say you have never heard of the color blue, or the sun and the moon!" she protested. "Surely all creatures know the Merciful One."