The weasel attempted to end the altercation by turning back to engage the flour vendor. But the woman with the basket grabbed him and pulled him around more roughly than before.
The rich man’s factor jerked free of her grip, shouted, and waved his hand. Two men wearing the hand-and-rose emblem left off loading a wagon and strode in his direction with the obvious intent of forcing the woman to leave him alone.
But the woman had plenty of sympathizers among the onlookers, and several of them planted themselves in the way of the weasel’s subordinates. By calling for help, he’d only succeeded in creating a second confrontation.
Other servants moved to reinforce their beleaguered fellows. Their problem was that they couldn’t do that and look after the wagons, too, and a boy a year or two older than Stedd darted toward the one with the radishes and pears. His mother yelled for him to stop, but he didn’t.
Perhaps it was her cry that alerted the servant who lurched back around. He rushed the boy, tackled him just short of the wagon, and bore him down on the wet cobbles. The man’s fist swept up and down as he repeatedly punched the child in the face.
Someone shouted, “Get him!” and people rushed to drag the servant off the boy and beat him in his turn. They were so eager to vent their outrage that no one offered further aid to the child. In fact, his rescuers stepped on him as, dazed and bloodied, he tried to crawl away.
Stedd missed seeing where violence erupted next. Seemingly in the blink of an eye, it was everywhere.
People punched and tried to grab the servants in livery, who, outnumbered, fought back desperately. But there was more to the fracas than that. Following the thieving boy’s example, other folk shoved their way toward the wagons or overran the vendors’ stalls and battled one another for the spoils to be found there, overturning bins and baskets in their frenzy and tumbling onions and snap beans to the ground.
Horrified, Stedd realized his own precarious circumstances didn’t matter; this situation was bad enough that he felt compelled to intervene.
Ahead of him, an itinerant vendor simply abandoned his pushcart and ran before the spreading chaos could overtake him. Stedd dashed to the cart and climbed on top of it. Trinkets, including starfish on thongs, trident badges, and similar ornaments, snapped and crunched beneath his feet.
All right, now what? Stedd couldn’t just start preaching the way he had dozens of times before. With all the yelling and crashing going on, no one would even notice, let alone stop looting and brawling to pay attention.
He pictured a golden sunrise and reached out to the god enthroned at the heart of the light. And an idea came to him, although not in words. He’d never heard Lathander’s voice as such. It was more like the Morninglord’s grace quickened his own capacities to perceive and to plan.
He took a long breath and raised his hand to the sky. Flowing from east to west, a wave of light and warmth swept across the marketplace and the dozens of vicious scuffles in progress there.
The glow didn’t stop the rain, and the cloud cover walling away the sun remained unbroken. But it was still daylight brighter than the folk of the Inner Sea had experienced in a year. Startled, the brawlers stopped fighting to look around.
When they did, they beheld Stedd on his makeshift dais with his arm still dramatically upraised. He was no mountebank, but since coming south, he’d addressed enough crowds to learn a little showmanship, and as long as it helped him deliver Lathander’s message, he didn’t see any harm in it.
“Please,” he said, “for your own sakes, don’t fight one another, and don’t steal. It’s not who you are nor who you want to be.”
“Did you make the light?” called a woman with blood trickling from a split lip. She clutched a half-gobbled pear in her hand.
“Lathander made it,” Stedd replied. “He’s come back to tell us the Great Rain won’t last forever, and we don’t need to turn on each other to survive it. In fact, the way to make it through is to do the opposite: Stand together, and help folk in need.”
“That’s not what Umberlee teaches!” shouted one of the men wearing the blue-rose emblem. His eyes were so wide that white showed all around, and the whip he’d likely grabbed from one of the wagons trembled in his grip.
“Umberlee’s just one power among many,” Stedd replied, “and you can choose which one to follow, the same way people always have. She’ll never be supreme in Westgate or anywhere else unless people lift her up with their belief and their obedience.”
“That’s blasphemy,” declared the man with the whip, “and everyone who’s watched the sea rise knows it! Just like anybody who’s even heard the name knows Lathander’s dead. He died in our great-grandfathers’ time with a dozen other gods.”
As the servant offered his retort, the magical light faded. It did so simply because it had burned through all the power Stedd had channeled to make it shine, but the timing was unfortunate. The returning gloom felt like validation of the Umberlant’s assertion.
Mouths twisted and scowled as disappointment and disgust replaced the hope that had momentarily brightened haggard faces. A major port like Westgate no doubt saw too much magic to be easily impressed by it, and, deciding Stedd was simply a charlatan or deluded wretch with a mystical trick or two at his disposal, people went back to the grim business of snatching any food within reach, which sometimes devolved into playing tug of war with bins, baskets, and even individual pieces of produce. Subjected to such rough handling, a sack split and poured flour onto the pavement, depriving both contenders of the contents. A man cried out when, shying at all the commotion pressing in around it, a draft horse set its hoof down on his foot.
It was plain that renewed violence was only a breath or two away, and this time, some of it was likely to involve Stedd. The servant with the whip started toward him, and so did two other men. Either they’d heard something about a reward offered for a boy prophet or they simply meant to punish him for proclaiming a message they considered pernicious nonsense.
When Stedd reached out to Lathander, the contact clarified his thinking and buttressed his faith. But it didn’t turn him into a different person, and on the human level, he was as alarmed as any child would be at the prospect of three grown men pummeling him, flogging him, or worse. His heart pounded, and his mouth was dry. The fear made it hard to think about anything but running away. But that would mean leaving his work undone.
Should he lash out at his assailants with magic as the village waveservant had struck at Anton? It might be possible, but he didn’t know for sure. He’d never tried to use his gifts for fighting. From the beginning, he’d sensed that the Morninglord wanted him to give people help and hope, not punishment.
That, he decided, was what he still needed to do, and he thought he saw how. Once again, he fixed his inner eye on the dawn that flowered eternally if a person only knew where to look, and prayed for an infusion of its glory.
Lathander answered with such an abundance of power that for the first time, the channeling hurt. Stedd’s insides burned like fire. Only for a moment, though, and then the pain became ecstasy. That, however, made it no less imperative that he turn the force he’d received to a sacred purpose, and with a strangled cry and a flailing wave of his arm, he hurled it forth.
At the same instant, the whip curled through the air and lashed him across the chest. The stinging blow staggered him, and he fell off the pushcart onto the cobbles. The impact smashed the wind out of him.
He tried to scramble up. The lash cracked down across his shoulders, and the stroke knocked him back down onto his hands and knees. He lunged, and a hand caught hold of his cloak and threw him back to his starting position. Dazed, he cast about for a way past his tormentors but couldn’t spot one. The bullies’ legs and the pushcart had him surrounded.