The Outskirter's Secret (24 page)

Kammeryn raised one hand. "I cannot force the
steerswoman to be silent; and I will not try to. The tribe has one
leader: the seyoh. I am not divided. You may leave."

F
letcher and
Rowan were seated on a rug before Kree's tent.

Bel had decided to walk the area between the
camp and the inner circle of defenders; she was composing a poem,
she explained, and walking helped her to think.

The morning had passed, and the noon meal.
Rowan and Fletcher's food, however, still sat before them: Rowan's
because she could not speak and eat at the same time, Fletcher's
because partway through the tale he had forgotten that it was
there.

He shook his head slowly, blinking as he
gazed about, as if Rowan's story had transported him to the far
lands where the events had occurred, then abruptly dropped him back
into the Outskirts. "Falling Guidestars, and intrigue, murder, and
wizards . . ."

"Yes. It's hard to believe." Told in words,
the events seemed hardly credible.

But Fletcher was deeply disturbed. He turned
to her. "Do you really think this wizard, this Slado, has some
interest in the Outskirts?"

"I don't know." She picked up the bowl of
stew that sat before her; it was long cold. "Perhaps he hasn't,
yet. But everything Bel said makes a great deal of sense to me. If
he keeps expanding his power in the Inner Lands, then yes, he'll
turn this way someday."

"I don't know . . . The wizards, they don't
only do bad things, do they? They help, too. I've heard that the
people in The Crags live very high, thanks to their wizard. And
that woman wizard, does something with the crops . . ."

"Isara, in the upper Wulf valley. And Jannik
in Donner keeps the dragons under control. Or doesn't, if he takes
a disliking to you." She used a piece of sour flatbread to scoop
the thick stew. "And they have their little wars; not so little if
you find yourself conscripted into one. I think you'd find all this
likelier if you knew wizards as I do." She studied him a moment.
"There's no wizard in Alemeth," she observed.

"Alemeth?" Fletcher came back to his
surroundings quickly and shot her a bright, amused glance. "Now,
what made you say Alemeth?"

She smiled. "Your accent."

"You've been there?"

"Never. And I've never heard an accent quite
like yours, either." Fletcher's consonants were slurred and soft,
his intonation light and mobile, far different from the clearer
rhythms and flatter tones of the Outskirters. "I tried to place it,
and I couldn't. I thought it might be The Crags, because of the
lilt; but the pattern is too different. That left only accents I've
never heard at all, and that left the western mountains, or
southeast, around Alemeth; Alemeth seemed likelier. And now," she
said, settling back with her bowl and bread, "now I want your
story. What's a silk-weaver doing in the Outskirts?" Alemeth was
famous across the Inner Lands for the quality of its fabrics.

"Weaver? Ha! as we Outskirters say. Never
touched a bobbin in my life." He adopted a haughty demeanor and
held it just long enough to impress it upon her. "We were bakers.
My family, that is."

She coughed stew. "Bakers?" She could hardly
imagine a more unlikely profession for a man become a wild
barbarian.

He shook a finger at her. "I can make a
custard tart you wouldn't believe."

She laughed, long and freely. "Do you know, I
could use a custard tart just now." After long traveling through
strange, grim lands, she found Fletcher's foolishness
refreshing.

"Ah, well, there you are, you see. No likely
chance of that out here." And he glanced about disparagingly; but
the glance turned into a long gaze of pleasure, at the tents, the
veldt, the windy white sky. He seemed to forget her and sat looking
at his world with deep satisfaction.

"You like it," Rowan observed.

"No place I'd rather be." Fletcher took a
deep breath, blew it out, then gave an embarrassed wince. "I guess
you'd have to blame youth," he said, "or adventurousness, or a
sense of romance . . . I don't know. But my grandfather was an
Outskirter, and from the time I had enough words to ask him to tell
me, he'd tell me. The most astonishing tales—do you know, half the
town thought he was a born liar, made it up as he went along. But I
knew, because I listened all the time, put it all together, until I
felt like I could pick out of a crowd all those people I'd never
seen"—he indicated spaces in the empty air—"his family, his war
band, tribemates, all those fierce women he loved . . .

"It was so much bigger than the way I lived.
Nobody's life depended on what my family did. If we didn't bake,
well, someone else would—not so well, perhaps, but no one would
starve. But you see, everything he did mattered. Life and death. I
wanted—" He looked sheepish. "I wanted to do something big."

"Why did your grandfather leave here?"

He shrugged. "Hard times drove his tribe
inward, they raided a village and lost, he lost a leg, a village
girl nursed him, one thing led to another."

Rowan noted again the object he wore on a
thong around his neck: a cross, some four inches tall, made of
Inner Lands wood. "Are Christers so forgiving that they'll help a
man who attacked their town?"

He gave her a mock-pious look. "It's true. My
grandmother was a Christer, and once my grandfather was hurt, he
was helpless. We don't kill a helpless man."

Rowan was both interested and dubious. "Can
you be a Christer and an Outskirter at the same time? Isn't there
some conflict?"

"Not so far." He pursed his lips. "We've
nothing against defending ourselves; I can manage to do my duty to
the tribe. All I ask is privacy to say my prayers, and a chance to
render a little kindness now and again." He laughed. "You watch,
I'll have all these barbarians converted, eventually." He assumed a
sudden expression of panic, glanced about as if expecting attack,
and showed relief at finding none. "Well, perhaps not," he
conceded.

"Anyway," he went on, gesturing with one
hand, to paint the picture, "so there I am, young weed of a boy,
head full of tales. I try the family business, and it's, let's say,
less than fascinating. And the little boy grows into a very bored
man, head still full of dreams.

"So eventually I figure out that I can damn
well do as I please, and what I please is to become an Outskirter.
Told the parents and the uncles and the aunts, and you can believe
I didn't hear the end of it until I'd walked off out of earshot,
and over the horizon." His hand made an arrow to that
direction.

"And what did your grandfather think?"

"Well, he was gone by then. But he'd helped
me before, learning swordplay and such. I guess I must've had the
idea before I knew I had it. It was already somewhere in my head
that I'd see the Outskirts someday.

"And, do you know, it's exactly like I
thought it would be—and not."

"How so?"

He thought long, several varieties of
puzzlement crossing his face. "Well . . . I expected it to be
exciting, and it is. And I expected there to be monsters, and
enemies, and comrades, and there are. And I expected to love all
that, and I do . . ." He struggled to find an explanation, his
brows knit so tightly that his entire face became a single squint
of concentration.

Then the answer came to him. Abruptly, he
grabbed a fistful of the patterned carpet and held it up to show
her. "I didn't expect to love this."

She was bemused. "You love the rug?"

"Yes! Look at it, someone made it;
Deely
made it And that!" He pointed
to the neighboring tent. "See that patch, on the left? Last winter,
it was so cold, and the coals were left too high under the tent
floor; that whole corner got singed. That's Orranyn's tent. And
that." A train. "The wheel sticks on that one, you have to give it
a solid kick before you pull first time, then it's fine all day.
And look at this." He picked up the rough pottery bowl that held
the remains of his stew. "The clay; I found that, in the banks of a
stream we passed six months ago. I had to tear out the
lichen-towers over it. Now it's a bowl." He put it down slowly,
puzzling over it, puzzling over himself. "It's strange. I do love
these things: little things, daily life . . ." He looked up and
pointed. "See how the sun comes over the tent?" They were sitting
in its dim, peaked shadow. "And there's a hawkbug." Above. "And
Chess!" The mertutial was stumping along between the tents,
gathering empty bowls. Fletcher flung himself to his feet, throwing
his arms out dramatically. "Chess," he declared, "I love you!"

The old woman grunted. "Ha. It's all talk.
Come to my tent at sundown. Bring a present." Taking the remains of
their meal, she wandered off.

Fletcher watched her, with a smile of
affection and something like pride. He looked down at Rowan from
his gangling height. "Am I a lunatic?"

"No . . ." She gazed around, at the world he
had come to see and had learned to care for more than he expected.
"I feel that way sometimes, as well. It's the large things in life
that drive us, that we measure ourselves by; but it's the small
things, the daily things that—that become precious to us."

"That's it." He dropped to sit beside her,
quieter now. "That's the very word; they're precious." He cupped
his hands, a tiny, cherishing gesture. "I want to hold on to them,
somehow. I want them safe. I want them to be this way forever." He
shook his head, amazed at himself, and opened his hands to free
their contents. "And it wasn't for the small things that I came to
the Outskirts."

"Was it the small things that brought you
back to this tribe?" Rowan asked him. He turned to her, suddenly
blank. "In Kammeryn's tent," Rowan went on, "you said that you
weren't sure you wanted to come back from walkabout."

The expression remained, identical to the one
he had worn while helping with her charts; a wordless emptiness
lying immediately behind his eyes.

She instantly, deeply regretted broaching the
subject. She found it hurt her to see Fletcher so, to see someone
so alive and lively driven to sudden stillness. Fletcher did not
speak, but nodded infinitesimally.

"I'm sorry," Rowan said sincerely, "I can see
that's a bad memory. If it's nothing I need to know, I won't ask of
it again."

He sat motionless, expressionless. Eventually
words found their way back to him. "Thank you," he said.

After evening meal, as the falling sun faded
the western sky to pale pink, faint green, clear blue, Bel recited
her poem to the tribe.

It was a tale of wizards and magic in the
distant Inner Lands, of small people standing against mighty ones;
of a woman who held to truth against the lies of the powerful; of
another who set cunning and violent skill against cruel force; of a
boy with a secret talent and a need for justice—all three brought
together by glittering chips of blue that had fallen from the sky .
. .

Rowan listened, fascinated, hardly
recognizing herself in the tale. Bel depicted the steerswoman as
different than she felt herself to be: more innocent, more
intransigent, purer, perhaps, and certainly wiser. Young Willam
seemed darker than he had been, suffused with fate, choosing danger
for the sake of honor. And Bel, as the speaker of the tale, was
never described, and so only seen by her actions: she became an
elemental force, a wind from the wildlands driving its way to its
goal.

There was nothing in the story that was not
true. Rowan could match each event to memory. But Rowan had not
seen herself like this at the time; had not, she realized, seen
herself at all. She had seen only the things she needed to do, and
how to do them; the things she needed to know, and what kept them
hidden; and, in the end, a small piece of the truth.

When Bel spoke of the Guidestars, the tribe
looked up, although the sky was too light to see them. When she
spoke of the steerswoman, faces turned toward Rowan, speculative,
then nodding. Through the art of her words, Bel caused Outskirters
to understand a steerswoman.

And when Bel told of the deceit and cruelty
of the wizards, some brows were knit in thought, and some eyes were
wide in astonishment; but by the end of the poem, Rowan found in
the faces of many of the warriors a mirror of her own anger and
resolve.

"I was wrong."

Rowan turned around. Kree was sitting behind
her, with young Hari asleep across her lap, his arms and legs
sprawled with a child's disregard of comfort.

"If those evil people are going to come
here," Kree told Rowan, "everyone needs to know. We'll need to act
together."

"Can different tribes learn to act
together?"

Kree was definite. "Yes. They'll follow their
seyohs, and stupid people don't become seyohs. They know a threat
when they see it. When something threatens a tribe, the warriors
fight. If something came to threaten all tribes, we'd all fight. We
attack. We protect." She ran one callused hand down her son's back,
and he stirred in his dreams, shifting into a position even less
likely. "Kammeryn is very wise," Kree said.

There was another sleeping face among the
people: Averryl's. He had emerged, shakily, from Mander's tent just
after the meal. Sometime during Bel's poem, exhaustion had
overtaken him, and he had leaned back briefly to support himself
against Fletcher, there to fall asleep against Fletcher's chest.
Fletcher had moved only once, locking his long arms in front of his
friend's body, to prevent him from falling, and had remained in
that uncomfortable, protective position for the rest of the long
evening.

When darkness approached, the fire tenders
hurried to bury the flames. People began to disperse, several
pausing at the far side of the fire pit to exchange a few words
with Bel, whose every reply seemed to include a definite, affirming
nod. Yes, Rowan imagined her saying, everything I said was
true.