Chapter Two

One fine day in early autumn, nine years after the fall of the House of Lilterwess, two Sainnite soldiers impatiently waited for the stablehand to bring them their horses. The cool air was freshened by winter’s distant breath, but no hint of the mud season’s first rainclouds had yet appeared in the sky. The soldiers complained about the cold, as though they had never lived through a Shaftali winter, and did not know they would soon be longing for a day this warm.

“A thankless day’s work it will be,” grumbled one, tightening the buckles on her cuirass of boiled leather.

“Is this a soldier’s work?” Her companion was younger and bulkier than she, and carried a number of weapons: swords, daggers, even a small battle‑ax, as though he intended to spend the day in grueling, hand‑to‑hand fighting. “Breaking heads to force reluctant peasants to hand over a few coins …”

“We’ll take supplies instead of money. Gladly.” She checked her three pistols to see that they were properly loaded.

“What, are we filthy tradesmen?”

“We are soldiers,” she said, “who need to eat. And the peasants–”

“–don’t know their frigging place–”

“–literally!” she concluded. “If they would just lie down and do what they’re supposed to do …”

Their conversation deteriorated. The stablehand, who had become all too familiar with the Sainnites’ assumptions about what non‑Sainnites were good for, deliberately knelt in horse dung as she checked the horse’s hooves. She was grimy already, but wanted to make certain the soldiers found her unappealing.

“How long does it take to saddle two horses?” said the man, banging his booted foot against the floor as though he were a horse himself.

“That stablehand is always slow. A simpleton.”

“All barbarians are. And they live like animals.” The soldier’s lip curled as the stable hand brought out the horses. “Look at her. She’s been rolling in horse dung. She may even eat it, for all we know.”

The woman companionably made a retching sound, and set to work checking over her mount with insulting care, testing every strap and buckle. The stablehand stood back, gaze humbly lowered. Though the soldier had found nothing wrong with the horse’s gear, she cuffed her casually on the way out the door.

As the two soldiers rode off to harass the people they called peasants, the stablehand raised her dark eyes to gaze after them. She said softly in her own language, “You two will die today.” It was no idle threat. She sensed the death awaiting them, hidden in the woods not too far out of town.

Zanja na’Tarwein’s prescience had been particularly heightened this year, for to live safely among the Sainnites required a degree of caution and conscientiousness that verged on the supernatural. For months now, she had been dodging attention as meticulously and instinctively as the rat that lives underfoot, unnoticed. The gift of prescience was a troubling talent: useful when it came to guarding her own safety, distracting and unnerving when she became conscious of pending events in which she did not care to intervene. Perhaps a dull winter at home among her people would suppress her foresight to a more tolerable level.

She had returned to the dreary work of mucking out the stalls, but paused at the thought of home. Suddenly, between one breath and the next, she decided it was time to leave the Sainnite garrison.

She had covertly learned their language, and she had learned much else that left her worried and distressed. The Sainnites were skilled fighters, accomplished tacticians, and ruthless oppressors. She did not want to know any more. She had done her duty; she had crossed into the Sainnites’ world. Thankfully, the same god that required her to travel between worlds did not forbid her to travel home again.

Zanja na’Tarwein leaned her pitchfork on the wall, fetched her money pouch from its hiding place, dropped it down the front of her filthy shirt, and left the stable. At this time of day, the garrison was lively with the orderly and energetic activity that she had reluctantly come to admire. A company of soldiers was delicately weeding a flower bed–the Sainnites loved flowers, and cultivated them in every inch of bare ground. Disabled soldiers were busy with the housekeeping: sweeping and scrubbing one or another item that Zanja would have sworn had just been cleaned the day before. Pigs were being slaughtered in the kitchen yard, and the practice field was crowded with soldiers who sweated and grunted and shouted with triumph or dismay.

That spring, when she had first presented herself at the garrison gate, a good portion of the day had passed before she was able to communicate that she had learned there might be work in the garrison for border people like herself–barbarians, according to the Sainnites, who stupidly assumed that the border people could not be spies because they had no ties to the land of Shaftal. Now, leaving the garrison in early autumn, Zanja had to wait no longer than it took the bored soldier to unlock the gate. She didn’t even have to display the empty bottle of horse liniment she had brought with her as an excuse for going out.

By contrast to the garrison, the streets of the city were practically deserted. As the work of harvest drew to a close, the city would fill with farmers. But now, Zanja walked down an empty street hung with tradesmen’s shingles, marked with glyphs that Zanja had never learned to interpret. One had an Ashawala’i rug on display that Zanja remembered selling to a northern trader the year before. She proceeded cautiously, for even though someone as ragged as she seemed an unlikely target for thieves, smoke addicts were known to steal anything from anyone, often in broad daylight. She had been forced to go unarmed all summer, and though this was not the first time she had wished earnestly for a weapon, she hoped that it would be the last.

She turned down a side street and stepped into the narrow doorway of a public bath, startling the proprietor from her doze over the account books. Surely the woman had seen plenty of dirty people come through her door, but still she wrinkled her nose. “I hope you have something clean to wear.”

Zanja said, “Yes, I stored my belongings with you in the spring. You’ll remember me when the dirt is washed off.”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “Shaftal’s Name, you certainly are changed. I’d better get the water heating. A lot of water.”

Alone in a private room, Zanja sat naked on the bench and painstakingly undid the tight plaits of her hair. When the woman and her assistant arrived bearing between them a vat of hot water, Zanja knelt over the drain and allowed herself to be doused with water, briskly scrubbed with brushes and foaming soap, and doused again. Her skin was raw before the last of the dirt had been scrubbed away. The two bath attendants chattered about people she had never met and would never meet as they washed her hair, treated it with various mysterious unguents, and combed it for her. In an ecstasy of cleanliness, Zanja gladly paid what they charged, and when she left was dressed in her accustomed goat’s wool and deerskin clothing, with a dagger at the small of her back and her stablehand’s rags left behind on the ash heap. She doubted that the Sainnites would even notice that she was gone.

The city was built on a hilltop. As she left the last of its crowded buildings behind, the land opened up below her: fields and forest bright in the vivid light of autumn. Some fields lay barren, their bounty already picked and plowed under. Some were striped with hay rows. Others were alive with industry, as wheat fell before the scythe and potato forks turned up the soil. Zanja, though her back and shoulders ached from the summer’s dreary labor, felt a moment’s guilt at her laziness in such a busy time. She decided to avoid the farmlands and sleep in the woods, lest she find herself recruited, willy‑nilly, into the frenzy of harvest. The weather would hold, she thought, examining the sky. She settled her burdens on her shoulders and started briskly northward, toward the mountains that at the moment lay far below the horizon.