Yet Lark had survived, even prospered. There were times when she had to endure cold glares and insults. Men who found her too unyielding in striking a bargain often walked away bitter, their pride wounded. Over the years, some had called her a whore. A few had threatened to kill her and one, a young warrior in a village near the Fallow Downs, had tried to make good on his threats. Only the timely intervention of an older Fal'Borna who knew her from her previous visits had kept him from succeeding. She still bore a scar on her breast from the first thrust of his blade.
Over the years, she had learned the ways of the Fal'Borna. She always sought out the a'laq-the sept leader-sometime on the day of her arrival in any settlement. She suffered the tales of men who thought it amusing to recount their romantic conquests in vivid detail, and on those occasions when she found herself haggling with Qirsi men, she always did so in even, respectful tones. On the other hand, she no longer lowered her eyes when dealing with Fal'Borna men. Early on, she had done so as a matter of course, thinking it safest to appear respectful, lest the men think that she was challenging them. She had learned, however, that the warriors often took this as a sign of weakness, as license to treat her as they would a Fal'Borna woman. By meeting their gazes straight on, by letting them see the dark brown of her eyes, she reminded them of who and what she was. You may not like me, she told them with her directness, but you will not take advantage of me.
Perhaps as a result, she had earned something of a reputation among the septs of the Central Plain, not only for the quality of her wares, but also for her courage. Her friends among the other Eandi peddlers might have called her Lark, but to the Fal'Borna she was K'Lahm, so named for the small, wild dog of the highlands known for its fearlessness.
On those few occasions when she returned to her native Stelpana to visit with family and old friends, her conversations turned invariably to the difficulties of trading with the Qirsi.
"Why would you want to do business with the white-hairs," her father often asked her, "when you can just as easily trade here, with your own kind?"
She always responded the same way. "There's more gold to be made on the plain than in any Eandi city."
This was true in a sense. Certainly there were riches to be made in the large cities of Stelpana, but there were also far more merchants there, competing for their share of the gold. Out here, on the plain, she was one of only a small number of Eandi merchants bringing Eandi goods-Qosantian blankets, Tordjanni wines, smoked fish from the shores of the Ofirean-to the Qirsi clanfolk. She would have to work harder, travel farther, endure hardships unknown to the merchants of the sovereignties, but she would grow rich more quickly here than she could anywhere else.
Her father could only shrug when she argued thus, because he knew she was right. But this wasn't the real reason she returned to the plain again and again. The truth was, she liked the challenge, the danger. She enjoyed returning to her home village with tales that left her father and brothers wide-eyed, wondering that their little Lariqenne should see and say and do such things. The scar she still bore high on her breast had been enough to win her brothers' unwavering admiration. Trading in the cities of Stelpana would have bored her to death, so instead she risked her life trading with the Fal'Borna.
Her goods were always of decent quality; not to the level of Torgan Plye, or even Brint HedFarren, Young Red, as he was known in their circle, but good enough that she was now known as a merchant who could be trusted, no small thing among the clans.
Today, though, she was carrying in her cart items of such quality that she didn't quite know how to trade them. When she first saw Young Red's baskets at the bend in the river, where she often gathered with her fellow merchants to share food and wine and good conversation, she had been overwhelmed. Never had she seen baskets of any sort, Mettai, Aelean, or B'Qahr, that could match these in both color and tightness of weave. Usually Lark wasn't one to carry items that would fetch too high a price. She preferred to turn over her stock with some frequency, as opposed to someone like Torgan, the one-eyed Eandi trader, who was willing to hold on to goods for several turns, even as long as a year, until he got the price he wanted. But these baskets had called to her, and she had purchased sixteen of them from Young Red, at a price of one and a half sovereigns apiece.
It had been an extravagance, one she had regretted ever since. Such baskets made the rest of her wares appear coarse by comparison, and if she were to make any profit at all, she'd have to charge at least two sovereigns for them, making them easily the dearest items in her cart. And so, she'd kept them packed away in the first two settlements she visited. Better to save them for the proper setting, she told herself. But really she was afraid, though she couldn't say why. Maybe she feared that she'd been duped by young HedFarren, though she knew the man better than to think that he'd take advantage of his friends in such a way. But what if she had made an error in buying them? What if she had squandered her twenty-four sovereigns on baskets that looked pretty, but were worth only a fraction as much? Or what if they were just as fine as Brint and the others had said, and she sold them for too little? What if she got her two sovereigns for each, only to learn later the Stam Corfej had sold his dozen for twice that amount?
She kept them hidden away, pretending she didn't have them, only taking the time to look at them again when she was alone on the plain. In truth, she would have liked to keep them all. Regardless of what they were really worth, she thought them beautiful.
At last, though, she resolved to sell them, or at least to try. She was close enough to the Thraedes that she could venture all the way to its banks and stop in some of the larger established settlements there. Selling such finery in the septs might have proven difficult, but the men and women of the Qirsi cities were every bit as willing to spend their gold as those who lived in the largest cities of the Eandi sovereignties.
On this morning, the third of the waxing, she had come within sight of S'Vralna, one of the more hospitable cities in Fal'Borna lands. It seemed as good a place as any to try to sell the baskets.
Like so many of the fortified settlements in the central plain, S'Vralna had once been an Eandi stronghold. Silvralna, the Eandi had called it, until it was taken from them during the last of the Blood Wars. As with most other cities lost by the Eandi-Ubrundai, Deraqor, Raetel-Silvralna had been renamed by its Fal'Borna conquerors. Not drastically, but rather just enough to be familiar and yet clearly Qirsi. It almost seemed that the white-hairs sought to taunt the former denizens of the settlements. "It was yours once," these new names said, "but now it belongs to us."
S'Vralna, or Silvralna, as Lark preferred to think of it, sat at the elbow of a small bend in the Thraedes, its stark white walls ghostlike against the dark clouds that hung overhead. Gates along the north, south, and east walls, six in all, were guarded by armed Fal'Borna warriors, though no army had threatened the city in more than a century. Towers rose above each gate and also above each of the four corners of the city walls. Two archers stood in every parapet. Lark couldn't help feeling that all these guards and weapons were merely for show, and yet she also couldn't deny that she was impressed by the Fal'Borna's continued vigilance, even in the face of more than a hundred years of peace. It bespoke a strength and discipline that her own people would have been hard-pressed to match. And the thought came to her with the power of a revelation: This is why we lost.
As she approached the east gate, Lark noticed that the guards were stopping peddlers' carts and searching them and for a moment she thought about passing the city by and continuing on to the south, toward Deraqor. But the guards appeared to be making quick work of their searches, and she had already come a long way in the past few days. She needed food and wanted to find a bit of wine as well, something other than the pale Qosantian honey wine she was selling. Best just to remain here.