Free In Legend Born by Laura Resnick Page B

interrupted.
    "Why would the Outlookers let him carry swords?" Josarian asked.
    "Because he has promised to kill you," Jalilar said, her voice thick with fear.
    "Zimran could walk into an Outlooker outpost tomorrow and promise to kill me. Do you think they'd let him carry a sword? What's so special about this shallah , that he may bear arms based on a promise to kill me?"
    Zimran shrugged, then continued his description of the man searching for Josarian. "He wears fine foreign clothes. No one is sure, but a merchant from Malthenar thinks they're Moorlander. Someone in Britar saw the swords unsheathed and says they bear foreign writing that looks like the inscriptions carved on old Kintish temples and shrines."
    Having ruled Sileria for six centuries, from the fall of the Moorlanders until the Valdani had seized it from them two hundred years ago, the Kints had left behind many temples, shrines, and palaces. Josarian had an uncle who now stabled some of his sheep in an abandoned Kintish shrine on Mount Orlenar.
    "Kintish swords?" Josarian frowned in perplexity. "Moorlander clothes? A shallah ?"
    "Or part- shallah? " Jalilar guessed.
    "What does the jashar say?" Josarian asked Zim. Although considered illiterate by roshaheen —outsiders—the shallaheen communicated information with elaborate strands of beaded knots and weaving. Any self-respecting man displayed his identity and history wherever he went by wearing his jashar ; a woman's history was related in the woven headdress she wore on special occasions. Since this mysterious stranger wore his jashar , perhaps they could learn something useful from it.
    "He is Tansen mar Dustan shah Gamalani," Zimran said, "born in the Year of Red Moons."
    "Younger than you," Jalilar said to Josarian.
    "But not much," Zimran added.
    "The Gamalani?" Josarian sat up straighter. "Gamalan..."
    "Does that mean something to you?" Zimran asked.
    "Something Calidar told me..." He frowned and searched his memory. "A cousin... Yes, that's it."
    "What?"
    "Calidar and I had to postpone our wedding because her family went into mourning for a cousin who'd been killed by Outlookers."
    "Yes, I remember," Jalilar said.
    "The cousin had been given in marriage to honor the end of a bloodfeud. She went to live in Gamalan, which is..." He shrugged. "Somewhere near Darshon, anyhow."
    "Calidar's clan had a bloodfeud with a clan on the other side of Sileria?" Zimran asked him. "What were they fighting about?"
    "Who knows? They didn't seem to anymore." Such was life in Sileria. "The point is, Calidar's cousin died there when the entire village was slaughtered by Outlookers."
    "I remember hearing about the slaughter, but I never knew the name of the village. Gamalan?" Zimran’s dark eyes widened when Josarian nodded. "And the stranger is a Gamalani who survived the slaughter somehow." Zim shrugged. "Maybe he didn't live there."
    Individuals and whole families often spread out from a clan's village of origin to make marriages, seek new pastures for their livestock, apprentice to artisans and craftsmen, take possession of inherited smallholdings, or flee Outlookers, assassins, or bloodfeuds. Josarian had no particular reason to suppose the stranger seeking him was somehow involved in the cataclysmic destruction of Gamalan and its feud-withered clan—but he suspected it, nonetheless.
    "A killer carrying swords and employed by the Valdani," he mused. "Who knows, Zim? Maybe he survived because he helped slaughter the Gamalani. Or betrayed them to the Valdani. Maybe he revealed something so big—a secret cache of smuggled weapons, the murder of a tribute collector—that the Outlookers decided to kill every man, woman, and child in the entire village."
    " Sriliah ," Jalilar said, the worst thing one shallah could ever say about another—worse than coward, cuckold, killer, liar, thief, or whore: traitor .
    "Well, depending on who got killed that day," Zimran said, "it might explain one thing that no one