Free Tortall by Tamora Pierce Page A

our host’s wife. As always, I found her in her kitchen, having tea with friends. Hurriedly they fastened their veils. Among strangers, even women, we all kept our veils on during these meetings. We needed only one weak or frightened soul to report our true names and faces to the priests for there to be a burning that would be remembered for centuries.
    “Excuse me,” I said politely, keeping my eyes down, “but I know it is hard to hear at the windows and doors. There is no reason why your thirst should go unslaked while men drink. Would you like for me to read more of the Books to you?”
    Someone gasped. They all drew back as if I were a viper.
    “How did you know we listened?” my hostess demanded. She trembled all over.
    I passed my hand across the veil over my mouth, the sign that showed I was smiling. “We survive in a man’s world by learning all we can,” I reminded them, just as I had reminded my father in my grandmother’s voice. This was an old, old ritual for me. I followed it in every new village. “Knowledge keeps us ahead of them and better able to guide them, is it not true, my sisters? Will you not drink more from the Oracle’s well of knowledge?” I asked, and raised the Books in my hand.
    And so we fell back into our routine, which was thesame, but changed. The story of Qiom and Fadal raced ahead of us. It was autumn, then winter, but people traveled, just as my father and I traveled. Temple priests were more suspicious of newcomers as the story grew in its spreading. We no longer dared stay for more than a few days in each village, though those who came to hear us grew in numbers. For my father, the change was noticeable, though not startling. But for me …
    For every three new men who came to hear my father, I met five new women and girls. In some villages, it might be seven and eight more women than I might have seen before. In December we stayed in a town for ten days, the longest stay since Hartunjur. I remembered it not only because a man and five boys came to hear
me
, leaving my father’s lesson when I did, but because it was there that my father’s cough returned.
    We left the town because a delegation from the temple court at Kenibupur was expected to arrive within days, to honor the town by celebrating the Longest Night festival there. We dared not stay with so many temple priests on their way. Instead, despite my father’s worsening health, we took the road to the next village. I had thought the boys in that place would be different. They would not be so bored, or so used to following their mothers, as to be curious about my lessons. I was wrong. Two grown men from that tiny village joined three boys to hear my teaching on the Oracle’s law concerning their wives and daughters.
    We traveled on three days later, with the priest practically snuffling at our host’s door. My father’s voice was ragged and cracked from coughing, despite the good healerwho had attended him there. Putting her herbs and medicines away, she had shaken her head at my father. When he glanced over to see if I had seen, I pretended to do something else. He
must
get well, I told the god. Who will teach them if he dies?
    That night I heard the god’s voices again and saw the field of veiled women. “What do you see?” asked the god.
    “People who can do nothing for my father,” I said in bitterness, and turned my back on them.
    “Then you are blind,” said the god.
    Two villages later, I was teaching the women, all of their children, and an old man about a daughter’s right of inheritance when a boy came to fetch me. My father had lost his voice as he was teaching. “You will answer the questions for me, Teky,” he whispered in my ear.
    “I think you should stop!” I whispered back, frightened. His chest clattered softly like dried leaves stirred by the wind. “You are ill, you should rest.”
    “When will another of us wandering priests come?” he whispered. “You will tell them my