Free Shadow Gate by Kate Elliott Page B

road. The tales of the Hundred told the story of humankind and the other children born to the Four Mothers. It was natural that some succumbed to the shadows.
    Maybe it was unnatural that any did not.
    â€œWhere are the reeves who should be aiding you? Isn’t Gold Hall patrolling? Isn’t there a temple of Ilu nearby that can send an envoy to Clan Hall in Toskala to ask for help?”
    He laughed recklessly. “The reeves can’t help us. You can walk out of our town and never come back, but we have to live here. No matter what you said to him, they will come back. It’s us will have to face them. Not you.”
    â€œThat merchant,” she said. “You said he was from Olossi. Did he give you a name?”
    â€œQuartered flowers were his house mark. Is that enough? Will you go?”
    Marit followed the sniveling girl into the narrow living quarters, tromping through in her outdoor sandals like the rudest kind of intruder. There was a single table and two cupboards, everything put away neatly except for a single ceramic cup filled with cooling tea set on the table. The floor was swept clean, and this homely indication of a woman doing her best to stem the shadows by keeping her home tidy made Marit hurt as if she’d been punched under the ribs.
    She shoved open the back screen and clattered onto the porch and down three steps to the courtyard. The damp of night rains still darkened the ground. The gate that led to the alley was tied shut. She fumbled with the knot, her hands clumsy.
    Where were they hiding the fugitive sister?
    She paused to scan the yard: the squat house with scant room above the eaves; the small grain storage up on stilts; a pit house with the sticky scent of incense drifting; the henhouse, an empty byre, and the surrounding wall too high to see over. She clambered up the ladder to the grain storage and tugged out the smallest sack of rice, something easy to carry over a shoulder.
    Stillness was settling over the village as folk assessed the damage and checked their injuries after the abrupt departure of the soldiers. There, after all, she heard the shallow breathing of a woman trying to make no sound: the sister was hidden in the henhouse, scrunched under the nesting shelf and by now smeared with fresh droppings and the filthy wood shavings strewn on the floor to absorb the waste.
    Marit took a step toward the henhouse, mouth open to speak. But she said nothing.
    She hadn’t the means to support a traveling companion.It was difficult enough dealing with the cursed horse. A hundred other reasons aside told her she had to move on alone. This wasn’t the time to try to save a woman here and a man there, like trying to hold your hands over one beautiful flower in a driving hailstorm while the rest disintegrate under the onslaught.
    â€œThe hells,” she muttered. She said, in a low voice meant to carry no farther than the courtyard walls, “I’m a traveler, and I’m headed out of town. The soldiers have gone for now, but they’ll be back. If you want, you can travel with me. I offer you such protection as I can, and insofar as I am capable, I will get you to a place of safety. If there is such a place any longer. I can’t make you come, and I can’t promise you much. There it is. Take it or leave it.”
    Her offer was met with a resounding silence. Thank the gods.
    She turned back to the gate and fumbled with the knot, sure she had tugged on it the wrong way and caused what ought to have been an easy slipknot to jam into itself. She’d never been good with rope, not like Joss, grown up on the sea’s shore where every child learned a hundred cunning knots . . .
    â€œI’ll go.” The voice was soft and female, and not a bit tentative.
    Marit turned. A woman crouched in the low entrance to the henhouse. Her hair had matted into clumps now streaked with white droppings; her face was patched with muck and dotted where