I can read his mind sometimes, more often than he likes, but never his face, not for years. The way he looked at me, I couldn’t have told you if he was grateful for my showing up when I did, angry because I didn’t pay his squeezed windpipe enough mind, or alarmed—or jealous, for that matter—because these dubious customers were claiming intimacy with Miss Nyateneri. He shook his head. “They went out this morning. I don’t know when they’ll be back.” Voice just a bit hoarse, but not bad at all—air flowing up and down his neck like anyone else’s. I put up with worse, from worse, at his age, and here I am.

Half-Mouth said, “We will wait? In the room?” No question about it, as far as that pair were concerned—they were halfway down the hall by the time he was done speaking. I said, “You will not wait in the room,” and though I didn’t shout, that time, they heard me and they turned. My father taught me that, how to catch a guest’s ear without losing either the guest or your own ears. “The rooms are private,” I told them. “As yours would be, if you were staying here. You may wait downstairs, in the taproom, and I will stand you each a pint of ale.”

I added that last because of the way they were looking at me. As I have told you, I am not brave, but doing what I do for so long has taught me that a joke and a free drink take care of most misunderstandings. Few people come to a crossroads inn like this chasing trouble—not with trouble so handy in town, less than five miles away. There’s a dika-wood cudgel behind the bar that’s come in useful once or twice, but these days I’d have to dig for it under dishrags and aprons and the tablecloth I keep for private meals. The last time any eyes made me as uneasy as this pair’s, they belonged to a whole roomful of wild Arameshti bargemen with ideas about the barmaid who worked here before Marinesha. Half-Mouth shook his head and half-smiled. He said, “We thank you? We would prefer?”

I shook my head. Their shoulders went loose and easy, and the boy moved up alongside me—as though he would have been any more use than a hangnail. But Gatti Jinni came in just then, with a couple of those actors, trying to cozen them into a game of bast. I never let stable-guests into the house before nightfall, but I greeted this lot like royalty, calling down that their rooms were ready and dinner already on the hob. They were still gaping at me when I turned back to my precious little southerners and beckoned to them. No, I jerked a finger—there’s a difference.

Well, they looked at each other, and then they looked down at Gatti Jinni and his new pair of marks (I cuff his head at least once a month over this, but he still regards it as his legal, sovereign right to skin my guests at cards); and then they looked back, sizing up the boy and me again. I hadn’t yet seen a weapon on either of them, mind you, but there wasn’t a doubt in my belly that they could have killed us all and barely raised a sweat. But it clearly wasn’t worth the sweat to them, nor the clamor. They came toward us, and I pushed the boy aside—him waving that spade of his to scatter muck all over the hall—and they passed by without a sound or a glance. Down the stairs, across the taproom, and on out into the road. The door never even creaked behind them. When I went myself to look outside, so as to be sure they weren’t bothering Marinesha, they were already gone.

The boy said, “I’ll go after her.” He was red and pale by turns, sweating, and shaking, the way it happens when you’re either going to soil your breeches or kill people. He said, “I’ll warn her, I’ll tell her they’re waiting.” I almost didn’t catch him at the door, and me with the slopjars not even emptied.

NYATENERI

The boy was watching us from hiding as we rode out that morning. I found that odd, I remember. There was never anything in the least furtive about Rosseth when it came to us: he wore his worship as a bird wears its feathers, and it gave him color and flight, as feathers will. The other two did not see him. I would have said something about it, but Lal was riding ahead, singing one of those long, long, incredibly tuneless songs of hers to herself; and as for Lukassa, there is no way to tell you how her presence changed even my smell and set the hairs of my body at war with each other. I know why now, of course, but then all I could imagine was that I had been far too long away from ordinary human company.

Corcorua is the nearest to a proper town that I ever saw in that wild north country. City folk would think it hardly more than an overgrown fruitstall, a bright spatter of round wooden houses all along the dry ravines that pass for streets and roads. There are more of those houses than you first think: more horses than oxen, more orchards and vineyards than plowed fields, and more taverns than anything else. The wine they serve tells you how tired the soil is, but they make an interesting sort of brandy from their pale, tiny apples. One could come to like it in time, I think.

The townspeople are a low-built lot in general, dwarfed by the wild generosity of their own mountains and sky, but they have something of that same honest wildness about them, which at times restores me. I was born in country like this—though taken south young—and I know that most northerners keep the doors of their souls barred and plastered round, turning their natural heat inward against a constant winter. These folk are no more to be trusted than any other—and less than some—but I could like them as well as their brandy.

The marketplace doesn’t fit the town, and yet it is the town, really, as it must be the trading center of the entire province. According to Rosseth, it is open all year round, which is rare even in kinder climates; and it is certainly the only market where I ever saw the woven-copper fabric they make only in western Gakary on sale next to crate on crate of limbri, that awful tooth-melting candied fruit from Sharan-Zek. They even sell the best Camlann swords and mail, and half the time there’s no finding such work in Camlann itself, so great is the demand. I bought a dagger there myself, at a price that was shameful but almost fair.

I rode up beside Lal as we trotted straight through (skirting the town to pick up the main road takes you the better part of two hours, which no one had bothered to tell us the first time). I said to her, “Northerners can’t abide limbri. I’ve never seen it north of the Siritangana, until now.”

Before I came to know Lal, I most often took her laugh for a grunt of surprise, or a sigh. She said, “He always did have a revolting passion for the stuff. And he likes places like this, plain dust-and-mud farming country. Did you ever know him to live for long in a real city?”

“When he first took me up, we lived in the back of a fishmonger’s in Tork-na’Otch.” Lal made a face—Tork-na’Otch is known for its smoked fish, and nothing else. I said, “He may be gone, but he was here, and not long ago, everything says it. He may have sent you dreams because they could find you most easily in your wanderings, but I was in one place for many years, and to me he wrote letters. I have them still. They came from here, from Corcorua—he described the market and the look of the people, and he even told me what his house was like. About this, I cannot be mistaken. I cannot.”

My voice must have risen, for Lukassa turned in her saddle and stared back at me with those light eyes of hers that were always wide and always seemed to see, not me now but me then, me peering over my own shoulder in time. Lal said, “I take your word, but you can’t find the house, and we have been everywhere twice between the market and the summer pastures. Now I follow Lukassa’s fancy back to the old red tower, as you suggested, because I do not know what else to do. If we find no trace of him there, then I will return to the inn and get drunk. It takes me a very long time to get drunk, so I need to start early.”