The Steerswoman's Road (98 page)

Bel looked from side to side. “I’m alive,” she began, as if
it were the start of a longer statement; but no other words followed.

Rowan waited, then nodded. All about, people were stirring,
tentatively, calling to each other, reassuring themselves that they lived.

Ignored, Fletcher sat alone, repeating his sentence. Rowan
crossed over to him.

Fletcher’s guards had abandoned their duties, more concerned
with each other. Efraim was still huddled into a ball, rocking; Garvin was
holding him in his arms, stroking his back, his own eyes squeezed shut tight.
Orranyn was moving about, checking the state of each of his warriors.

When Rowan reached Fletcher’s side, he seemed relieved to
find someone to whom he could say his words. “I didn’t know.”

“You’ve done what you could,” she told him. “Fletcher, you
did everything you possibly could, and if we live, it’s entirely due to you.”

He seemed not to hear her. “I didn’t know,” he repeated.
Then, with a visible effort, he regathered himself, speaking more cogently. “Rowan
... I thought I was just collecting information. I didn’t know what it was used
for, who needed it. I didn’t know it was for—for this ...” And he looked at the
ceiling.

“You tried to help,” she said. “To help Kammeryn, the tribe,
me. You watched when you could, warned when you could, joined the warriors in
defense ..” She abruptly recalled what Kammeryn had said: that the tribe of
Face People who had attacked Kammeryn’s tribe had later been killed by
Fletcher, alone. “And ..” An entire tribe, destroyed. It seemed an act of
typical wizardly cruelty; she could not reconcile it with her recovered
understanding of Fletcher’s character. “How did you destroy the Face People’s
tribe?” she asked.

Fletcher found the memory distressing. “The link has a
weapon in it ...”

“A destructive spell?”

“Yes.”

Rowan had had experience with destructive spells. “Why didn’t
we hear it?” In the Inner Lands, the boy Willam’s destructive spell had made a
sound like a thousand thunders.

“It’s silent.” A different sort of magic. “It spreads a sort
of fire ...”

“You burned them to death.”

“Yes ... I didn’t want to ... But they would have attacked
again. They had almost no herd. And they couldn’t leave, they were boxed in,
and they didn’t even know it. Ella’s tribe to the east, ours to the south,
another northwest ... They would have hurt my people again;

I couldn’t let that happen.” The roof began to shudder,
silently, then snapped and settled into rhythm as the wind began to rise.

“You saw all that through the Guidestar?” Rowan thought it
strange, very strange that she should care at this moment about any such
distant thing as a Guidestar.

“Yes,” Fletcher replied.

“Why didn’t you see them before the attack?” Just at the threshold
of hearing, there came a distant rising tone, joining the sound of the wind.

“I did.” Thunder rolled briefly, distantly. “That morning,
during my report and reconnaissance. But I didn’t know who or what they were
then; they just looked like a small tribe. You don’t understand, I can’t—” He
amended his words. “With my link, I couldn’t actually see them, not as if I
were a bird. I saw ... notations, like on your charts. I could tell that they
were people, because they were arranged like a camped tribe, but they weren’t
deployed like attackers, not when I looked. That happened later ...”

Rowan thought long; and as she did, the rising tone became a
far-off, approaching scream. “But this magic weapon ... You could have used it
to stop the battle.”

He closed his eyes. “Yes. And given myself away. Anyone who
saw would know I had magic. They’d assume I was a wizard. I couldn’t know how
they’d react. And in my training ... the rules said to protect my cover, at
any cost. If people see you using magic, the simplest thing to do is kill the
witnesses.”

How many people might have been looking in Fletcher’s direction,
Rowan could not guess. But she herself had been at Fletcher’s side.

He would have needed to kill her; and any nearby warrior;
and any relays watching; and any person to whom the relays spoke. Kammeryn.
Perhaps the entire tribe.

In that frozen moment, with the Face People bearing down on
him, with his link in one hand and his sword in the other, Fletcher had been
faced with a choice. And he had abandoned his magic powers, taken up his
sword, and thrown himself into a battle that he was certain he could not
possibly survive.

He had been willing to die rather than harm Kammeryn’s
people. “That’s why you didn’t use the spell to help your walkabout partner,”
she said.

He turned toward her; but his eyes were blind, his face
suddenly, shockingly empty. His mouth moved once. “Mai,” he said, but too
quietly for her to hear the sound.

It was the expression she had seen before—emptiness, a
silence of body and mind. But now she understood it. “Fletcher,” she said, and
of itself, her hand reached toward his shoulder.

But he pulled back violently, twisting away from her hand as
if he could not at that moment bear a single touch. The mask of emptiness
writhed on his face, shattered, and fell away, and for the first time Rowan
could see what he had kept hidden behind it: it was horror.

“Dear god, Rowan,” he said. “It happened so fast.” The
terror on his face was so great that it drained all emotion from his voice, his
body, so that he was sitting perfectly still, speaking almost inaudibly, and
rapidly, without will or control. “I heard her shout,” he said in that quiet
voice, with that face of horror, “and I ran to her, and then—”

“Fletcher, don’t ...” She reached toward him again, but
slowly. “That’s past, you couldn’t help it.”

He did not hear her. “And then she was screaming, and when I
cut down that
thing—”
His voice came alive again with the saying of the
word, with the force of the memory, and his body twisted, as if trying to
escape the very words he spoke

Rowan froze.

“And then,” he went on, his voice becoming wild, “and then
it was thrashing on the ground, burning, between us, and she was standing
there, blood all down one arm,
looking
at me, and the look on her face,
and she was saying, over and over,
‘What are you?’”
He jerked once, as
if from a sword thrust, and wrapped his arms about himself. “She was shouting
at me,
‘What are
you?’”

He quieted, slowly, shuddering. Rowan tried to speak his
name, failed; she could make no sound.

“And I,” he continued, in the empty voice again; and she
wished that he would stop, stop now—“and I didn’t know what to do ... I just, I
couldn’t think, and it happened so damned
fast ...

“And then, after ... when I saw ... I wanted to die. And I
thought, I’ll just go away, I’ll just walk away and die ...”

Rowan spoke at last; but now it was against her will. “You
killed her.”

He looked up at her, into her eyes, and he seemed puzzled. “And
I walked. I think I walked forever. I didn’t die. And then, somehow, I was
walking back.” He reached out and clutched her wrist, held it tight. “Mai was
gone. But if
I
died—Rowan, don’t you see that if I died, it would be
like losing them
all ...”

“Fletcher.” But it was not Rowan who spoke. Fletcher was
slow in comprehending, slow in turning to the speaker.

Jann was a shadow, a quiet voice. “Fletcher,” she said, “your
life is mine.”

And it was done quickly.

The tornadoes in the west did not strike the tribe but
slowly worked their way northeastward and dissipated.

The tribe lasted through two tornadoes that writhed toward
them from the east, through hail, debris, and through three full days of trailing
high winds at mere hurricane force.

The weather never ceased; but there came a time at last when
it slacked, when the boiling clouds above emitted no lightning. And hesitantly,
cautiously, small groups of people emerged from the shelters to make their
reports to Kammeryn. Chess stayed at his side, urging him to eat when he forgot
to, to sleep when necessary.

The tribe had lost one shelter. Rowan herself went out to
view it. It had become a hole in the ground, with a ten-foot length of lichen-tower
core wedged inside. The tent skin, the poles, the internal and external bracing
wires, and all the people who had been in the shelter were gone. Rowan stood
gazing at it, wondering stupidly how Outskirters would handle funerals in
which the corpses had already been cast across the land by the wind itself.

There were other dead. A warrior had been killed when a
stave was pulled by its line out of the earth behind her, striking and crushing
her skull. A mertutial had died at the height of the first tornado, apparently
from terror. One young boy succumbed to exhaustion and pneumonia, contracted
after one side of the children’s shelter tore, letting the driving rain soak
all the inhabitants.

And there was Dane.

Zo and Quinnan had returned two days after the last tornado;
they had been sheltering among the rocks in the ridge to the north. They were
wet, half-starved, and at the end of their strength, and they were carrying the
girl between them.

Dane was unable to walk, could not control her own body. She
trembled and spasmed constantly; she recognized no one.

Zo and Quinnan, going against Kammeryn’s command, had dared
to enter the near edge of the zone of heat. But the air was not hot, not even
warm. Instead, they began to feel ill, first Zo, then Quinnan; nausea, fits of
trembling, blinding pains in the head. They struggled onward and found Dane,
crawling toward them; of Leonie there was no sign.

Dane’s hands and knees were raw and blistered. When Zo and
Quinnan bent to raise her, they found that it was the ground itself that was
warm, some of the stones hot, and that the grass was almost brittle, as if
drying from within, in a slow, flameless heat.

Dane lasted one day in the camp; Mander could do nothing for
her. Zo’s headaches did not abate, and she sat huddled in pain, Quinnan caring
for her, never leaving her side.

And with the weather slackened, the people had time to deal
with their dead.

Rowan and Bel stood out on the slope, gazing across the land.
The wind was stiff and steady, southwest and northeast. “Fletcher said it would
change,” Rowan said. The weather was following the course he had predicted. It
felt strange to her, as if his remembered words somehow controlled instead of
reflected events, as if he were perhaps still present, waiting to tell her
more, his long form standing just behind her, just past the edge of her sight.

“He’s gone,” Bel said.

“Yes ..”

Bel took three aimless steps, looking down, looking at the
sky. “We need him and now he’s gone.” Her voice was expressionless.

Rowan understood that Bel’s distress had a different source
from her own. She roused herself from her thoughts. “He helped us, yes. If he
were here, he would keep helping us ...”

“He knew magic. We need magic.”

“Perhaps not ..”

“We’re useless without it.” Bel suddenly took five strong
paces forward, spun back to the steerswoman, and stretched her arms out to indicate
the entire visible world. She stood so, with the rolling roof of clouds above
her; with the earth torn in freakish lines from horizon to horizon, where
tornadoes had riven it; with fragments of lichen-towers, fragments of goats,
splintered bushes, redgrass crushed flat, all about her, a hole that had once
contained human beings at her feet. “Look at it, Rowan!” she shouted. “Look!”

Rowan looked—at all of it. Bel dropped her arms as if she
had not the strength to hold them up, sat as if she could no longer stand.
Rowan went to her side.

“If Slado sends soldiers,” Bel said quietly, “we can fight
them, face-to-face. And if he sends too many soldiers to face, then we can
fight them from behind: hiding, sneaking.

“If Slado sends wizards, we’ll face them until we learn the
limits of their magic; and then we’ll vanish into the landscape, strike when
they’re not looking, or bait them until they fall into some trap.”

She raised her hands, made them into fists, and drew them
down as if forcibly, to rest on her knees. “If they build fortresses,” she
said, “we’ll break them down. If we can’t, then we’ll infiltrate. If they take
up residence, we’ll become their servants and their lovers and murder them in
their sleep ...” The rain returned, spattering, hissing. Bel ignored it.

“Rowan,” she said, water trailing down her face, “I can
fight people; any people that he sends here, I can find some way to fight. Any
wizard who comes here, despite magic, despite guards—if they come, I can strike
them. Anything that I can touch, I can fight ...”

And she gathered her strength and shouted, as if it were the
last shout of her life: “Rowan,
I cannot fight
the
sky!”

And the warrior sat silent on the torn earth. She dropped
her head and closed her eyes.

The steerswoman gazed down at her. “I can.”

Bel looked up.

“One person has caused this, Bel,” Rowan continued. “One
single man: Slado. And I can fight him.

“I’ll find out what this is all for, what it’s meant to
accomplish. I’ll find out how it’s done—and put a stop to it.” She dropped to
her knees beside her friend. “I need to know more. I need to learn, to learn
everything I can. And when I know enough, then will come the time to act.”

Bel gazed at her. “Can you learn where Slado is?”

The steerswoman nodded. “Eventually. Yes.”

“We’ll find him, and kill him.”

“If that’s what it takes.”

“If it’s not what it takes, it’s still what we’ll do. I’ll
slit his throat myself. He’s a murderer, Rowan. Murderers die.” And the
steers-woman could not argue.