The Lost Steersman (Steerswoman Series) (35 page)

Most of the fishers were out fishing already. But Zenna looked around, spied some oldsters, and struck up a conversation. The oldsters knew some old fishers, and there were a couple other sailors around, too.

Pretty soon Zenna had a whole troop of people around her, and they were talking over each other, and she took it all down. She had her charts on a crate, and she drew and listened and asked, all at the same time. They talked winds and currents and seasons and weather, and a lot of sailing things Steffie didn’t know anything about; but at the end of it
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got written down, with a lot of numbers around it, on three or four different-sized charts of the same part of the water.

When they were done and the sailors and fishers wandered off, Zenna rolled the maps and put them in that leather tube steerswomen carried. She’d tied a strap to it, so she could carry it slung across her back, the way Rowan sometimes carried her sword.

“Do you have a sword?” Steffie asked. He hadn’t seen her with a sword yet.

“In my trunk. Why? Someone you want me to do in for you?”

“Well, no. But Rowan, she never sets her sword aside. Except once. And she was sorry after that.”

“I’m not Rowan,” Zenna said.

“I guess.” And Rowan wasn’t Mira. Looked like no steerswoman was like any other steerswoman. Not even Janus. Especially Janus, come to think of it, him even being a man and all.

But the reason Janus came to mind was that right then Steffie was looking at him.

He was over at the cooper’s, where there was a cart and a line of people loading empty crates into it; and Janus was in the line, toward the middle. It was a ways away, but Steffie could still tell it was him.

Zenna had her back to it all, closing her map case. “Janus is over there, on shore,” Steffie told her.

She didn’t turn; she just went ahead and slung on her map case and slipped into those straps on her crutches. “How close?”

“At the cooper’s. That’s Harbor Road, three buildings down from New High.”

“Can he see me?”

“His back’s turned. And he’s busy.”

That’s when she turned around herself and watched the people loading. There wasn’t any expression on her face, none at all. “I see him. I suppose he must know I’m in town by now ‘. . .”

“Maybe not. Keeps to himself a lot, these days. Talks to no one.”

She was quiet for a bit. “Steffie, are you up for a little subterfuge?”

“Might be, if I knew what that was.”

“In this case, it’s this: You and I are going to walk down the wharf together as if we’re heading for New High, but when we get to the corner, you turn left and stroll along casually past the cooper’s.”

“And what’ll you be doing then?”

“I’ll be right behind you. But ignore me.”

He shrugged. “I’m game.”

And that’s what they did; and when he turned left at the corner, he couldn’t see her anymore, because she was walking in that place right behind you where you can’t see if anyone’s there. Except he could hear her. The way she walked gave her a sound all her own. Which was when he figured out that she was keeping him right between herself and Janus. If Janus looked this way, he might see some of her, but he wouldn’t see all of her with Steffie in the way.

So Steffie ignored her, strolled right up to the cooper’s, nodded hello to Dan, and strolled right past. A few steps on, he didn’t hear Zenna behind him anymore. Then, he couldn’t help it; he stopped and looked behind.

Zenna was in that can’t-see-you place again, but now it wasn’t Steffie’s, it was Janus’s. A couple of the other workers looked at her sidelong, and Dan saw her and made a move to go and talk to her; but Steffie got to him and pulled him aside.

And it was right then, with Janus having just let go of one crate and about to get another, that Zenna tapped him on the shoulder.

Steffie couldn’t see all of Janus’s face, and he wished he could, because he wondered what it was doing right now.

But what Zenna did was look right up at Janus and say, loud enough for everyone else to hear, “What do you know about demons?”

Janus tried to take a step forward, but he stopped, because that was when he saw that Zenna was on crutches. But Zenna swung one step forward herself, which made her tilt her head back further to look him in the eye, and she said, “Why did you resign from the Steerswomen?” And she didn’t stop there. “Why didn’t you explain yourself to lngrud? Why are you spreading lies about Rowan? What happened to you when you were shipwrecked? Where did you end up? What did you see? Where do you sail when you sail away? Why does your boat have a copper bottom? What are you
hiding?
” Then she did stop, except she said one extra thing, in a casual-sounding voice. “Answer the questions in any order you like.”

But Janus didn’t answer them. He stood there with his bones hanging funny in his body, like maybe they would all let go at once. And then he twisted sort of sideways, like he wanted to leave and he wanted to stay, both at the same time. And Steffie wouldn’t have been surprised if Janus had split right in half, because the hand on the staying side actually started to reach out to Zenna.

Then he got himself all together at once, and he turned, and he shoved right through the other workers, who were all gathered around, and he ran, just like it was a demon behind him instead of Zenna. When Janus ran by him, Steffie got one good look at his face, and that’s exactly how he looked.

When he was gone, Zenna swung herself around and went off in the opposite direction back toward New High. Leaving everyone standing there looking at each other. Not saying anything.

Except they would soon, and Steffie didn’t really want to hear any of it, so he left them all behind, and Dan, too, who was huffing out his cheeks and building up to saying something.

Zenna wasn’t running, but she was moving pretty fast and in a jerky way. Steffie caught up to her. “I guess that didn’t do much good.”

“It’s too soon to tell.” And she stopped all of a sudden. “Is there a place nearby to sit down?”

Steffie looked around for a barrel or a crate or something; but then he saw her face.

He got her into the Mizzen, which was empty, it being early still; and as soon as they were in the door, Zenna sat right down on the first chair she came to, put her face in her hands, and cried. Steffie just stood there.

Young Acker was on the other side of the room, starting to lay out the tables for lunch, and when he saw them he started to come over and see what they’d like. Steffie waved him away; but he saw what was up and came anyway, not to take their orders but to slip a nice linen napkin into Steffie’s hand; and then he left the room.

Steffie looked at the napkin; then he sat down next to Zenna and handed it to her. She took it and held it against her eyes; and when she’d got enough voice back to speak, she said, “That was not easy.”

Steffie tried to think of something to say, but he couldn’t, because no words came into his head, none at all. But words came out of his mouth anyway. “I guess you still love him.”

“I love the boy I knew in Wulfshaven. I’ll always love the boy I knew in Wulfshaven. But I don’t know if Janus is still him.” And saying that got her crying all over again right from the start.

Steffie wished he knew her well enough to give her someone to hang onto while she cried, but he didn’t, so he couldn’t. But he sat by her, quiet and not hurrying her, until she was all done, which sometimes is the only thing you can do.

At last she wiped her eyes in a way that said she was just about finished, and she looked at the napkin. “I really hate to blow my nose in anything so nice.” Then she went ahead and did exactly that.

“Do steerswomen always have to make things hard on themselves?”

“It depends on what they’re trying to accomplish.” She set to folding the napkin and unfolding it, over and over. Her eyes were shiny and dark at the same time; and suddenly Steffie wondered how old she was, because she looked very young right then. “I wanted to shock him.”

“I guess you did that.”

She took a few deep breaths and went on folding the napkin. “When people are really, really shocked, they either start thinking very clearly— or they stop thinking altogether.”

He started getting it. “And you want him to think clearer than he’s been.”

She nodded, not at him, it seemed, but at the napkin. “That would be best. The other would do. With any luck, Janus will soon either do something intelligent or something very stupid.”

Owning up and getting it all in the open would be the something intelligent. “That’s the good of him doing something stupid?”

She looked up at him; and all of a sudden she stopped looking small and young and hurt and started looking small and sharp and angry. “He’ll slip. He’ll give himself away. And then Rowan and I will figure the whole thing out for ourselves.”

That’s when people started coming in for their lunches, the ones who could afford to eat at the Mizzen just for lunch. Steffie and Zenna went back to the Annex, where they ate their own lunch, not talking much. But Steffie talked a lot later, up in the fields, because everyone’d heard that a new steerswoman showed up yesterday.

He had to tell everything he knew about Zenna, which, when he thought about it, wasn’t really all that much— not most of the things they all wanted to know, like where did she grow up, who was her family, how old was she? But he did tell how her leg got broke so bad it had to come off, because that was the one thing he’d asked her over lunch. The only reason he told it was because he knew someone would ask her later, and he didn’t want her having to say it again, ever.

When he’d finished telling it everyone went dead quiet, and all the women looked at all the men hard, like they hated them, and all the men looked at nothing at all, hard, for a long time.

Then, more or less to change the mood, Steffie told about Zenna being interested in the
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place.

And he told about how she knew Rowan, them being old friends who had taken their steerswoman training together.

And he told about Zenna cornering Janus with all those questions; but he didn’t tell how she cried after nor why.

Later they went into the sheds and couldn’t talk any more. And even later, everybody got more interested in something else, because Auni stopped working and went and got Lasker, and they both came back and stood looking at one of Auni’s racks. Then Lasker made everybody stop and told them to start making the reed hills.

Which is what they did; and when Steffie put the little hills among the worms in his racks, most of them didn’t seem interested. But a couple of them reared up on their hindquarters and waved their heads at the hills, with a hello-what’s-this-then? look about them. So maybe it wouldn’t be long.

Then the night workers came in, and Steffie and the day workers started walking home. Gwen was there, and she ran and caught up with Steffie. She’d been working in the opposite order from him, and hadn’t heard what he’d told the others, so he told it all over again, to her and everyone else nearby. Gwen didn’t even bat an eye when Steffie said again about Zenna and Rowan knowing each other. She just laughed, tossed her head, and said that with a new permanent keeper at the Annex, maybe everything would get set right again, and about time. She acted nice toward Steffie, funny and flirty and sassy, just like old times; and he thought, well, maybe she’s right about that.

So they stopped by the Annex on the way home, but Zenna wasn’t there.

It wasn’t until a lot later, in the middle of his own dinner, which he was eating with the family, that Steffie remembered about Dan and Zenna having dinner at Brewer’s. So he told everyone; and they all hurried to get done, and went up to Brewer’s themselves, except Steffie went to Gwen’s home and got her first.

When they got inside Brewer’s, they found out that the whole town had the same idea, and the room was filled up with people who looked like they planned to stay a long time, just like nobody had to work the next day. If Dan had been hoping to have Zenna all to himself, he was right and wrong at the same time. Because even though they had a little table all to themselves, and no one else was talking to them, everyone was paying attention to nothing except Dan and Zenna. Although they all pretended they weren’t.

There were no free seats. But Gwen went up to young Acker, who was at a table right next to Zenna and Dan, and she started talking to him; and then she started teasing and flirting with him, while Steffie stood not far off, looking the other way, because he knew this trick.

Then all of a sudden Gwen tickled Acker, then dashed back, and Acker was up out of his chair to snatch at her— and Steffie got right behind him and sat down. And Gwen slid around, and sat in Steffie’s lap and he put his arms around her. And they both sat looking up at Acker, smiling, and everybody laughed. But they kept the chair.

They were close enough to hear whatever Dan and Zenna were going to say; but Zenna was waving at Brewer across the room. Brewer saw and waved to one of the servers to go over there. But then Zenna waved bigger, meaning she wanted Brewer in particular, so he edged over.

When he got there, Zenna said, “I’m going to be inviting a few people over to the Annex for an evening, and I suspect that in Alemeth you’re the person to hire to provide food and drink. Am I right?”