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"You're not taking her where Kashi'll see her?"
Pavek didn't need the half-elf's indignation to tell him that it was a bad idea. He knew enough about women to know there were some you didn't put together unless you wanted to witness a tooth-and-nail fight. If he had half the wit of a stone-struck baazrag, he'd haul himself into one of the empty saddles and head south with Lord Hamanu's message and the New Race woman in tow behind him, but having only the wit of a man, he lifted the woman and started toward Quraite instead.
"What about the kanks and the corpses?" Zvain and Ruari asked together.
"What about them?" Pavek replied and kept walking. They caught up soon enough, amid a chorus of bells that alerted the village and brought everyone out to the verge. Akashia stood in front of the other farmers and druids. Between Guthay's reflection and a handful of blazing torches, there was enough light for Pavek to read her expression as he drew closer; it was worried and full of doubt. There was silence until the two of them were close enough to talk in normal voices.
"The rest are dead. This one's the one you heard. She's unconscious." Pavek glanced over his shoulder, where Ruari stood with seven kank-leads wound around his wrist. "We thought it would be best if you roused her. She's New Race."
It was going to be as bad as Pavek feared, maybe worse. Akashia's eyes widened and her nostrils flared as if she'd gotten whiff of something rotten, but she retreated toward the reed-wall hut where she lived alone and slightly apart from the others.
"What about all this?" Ruari demanded, shaking the ropes he held and making a few of the bells clatter.
Akashia gave no sign that she had a preference, so Pavek gave the orders: "Pen the kanks. Feed them and water them well. Strip the corpses before they're buried. Bundle their clothes, their possessions—everything you find—carefully. Don't get tempted to keep anything. We'll take the bundles back with us."
" 'We'll take them back'? You've already decided? Who's 'we'?" Akashia asked, walking beside him now without looking at him or what he carried.
"We: she and I, if she survives. Lord Hamanu sent her and the escort—"
" 'Lord Hamanu?' The Lion's your lord, again?"
"Have mercy, Kashi," Pavek pleaded, using her nickname as he did only when he was flustered. "He knows where Quraite is: He's proved that, and he's proved he can send a messenger safely across the Fist—"
"Safely? Is that what you call this?"
Akashia waved a hand past Pavek's elbow. Her sleeve brushed against the dark cloth in his arms, loosening it and giving her a clear view of the New Race woman's masked face. Pavek held his breath: the woman was unforgettable, if there would be recognition, it would come now, along with an explosion.
There was no explosion, only a tiny gasp as Akashia pressed her knuckles against her lips. "What manner of foul magic has
the Lion shaped and sent?"
They'd reached the flimsy, but shut, door of Akashia's hut. Pavek's arms were numb, his back burned with fatigue. He was in no mood to bargain with her outrage. "I told you: she's one of the New Races. They come from the desert, days south of Urik. The Lion has nothing to do with their making and neither did Elabon Escrissar."
Pavek waited for her to open the door, but no such gesture was forthcoming—and no surprise there, he'd been the blundering baazrag who'd dropped Escrissar's name between them.
"What's he got to do with this?"
Pavek put a foot against the door and kicked it open. "I don't"—he began as he carried the woman across the threshold—"know."
"She's a rotter," Ruari interrupted, adopting Zvain's insults as his own. Heroes didn't have to pen kanks or dig graves. He did unfold a blanket and spread it across Akashia's cot, but that was probably less courtesy than a desire to prevent contamination.
Zvain slipped through the open door behind Akashia. Timid and defiant at the same time, he found a shadow and stood in it with his back against the wall. Scorned boys didn't have chores, either. "I saw her there," he announced, then cringed when Akashia spun around to glower at him.
But there remained no recognition in her eyes when she looked down at the woman Pavek had laid on her cot.
"What did she do there?"
"She came at night. The house was full at night. All the rooms were full—"
The boy's voice grew dreamy. His eyes glazed with memories Pavek didn't want to share. "She was—" he groped for the word. "They're called the eleganta. They entertain behind closed doors."
"A freewoman?" There were gold marks on the woman's skin. Pavek hadn't seen anything like them before, but he knew they weren't slave scars, and Akashia knew it, too.
"I would die first."
Pavek smiled, as he rarely did, and let his own scar twist his lips into a sneer. "Not everyone is as determined as you, Kashi. Some of us have to stay alive, and while we live, we do what we have to do to keep on living." Ruari spat out a word that belonged in the rankest gutters of the city and implied that the New Race woman belonged there as well. Without a sound or changing his expression, Pavek spun on his heels. Before he left the city, there were those in the bureaus who said Pavek had a future as an eighth-rank intimidator, if he'd ingratiate himself sufficiently with a willing patron. He was a head shorter than the half-elf, and there was a clear path to the open door, but Ruari stayed right where he was. Once learned, the nasty tricks of the templar trade couldn't be forgotten. Pavek subjected his friend to withering scrutiny before saying:
Akashia placed her hands on his arm and tried, futilely, to turn him around. "Stop, please! You've made your point: we don't understand the city the way you do... she does. Stop. Please?"
