Free The Assassins of Tamurin by S. D. Tower Page A

because she was several years our elder. She was not unfriendly, but she maintained a cool reserve with everyone except Mother and rarely spoke to us—or to anyone, for that matter. Dilara said she’d always been like that, because of something horrible that had happened to her before she came to Mother’s school. I asked Dilara what it was, but she didn’t know; and I certainly wasn’t about to ask Tossi.
    I also got acquainted with Sertaj. He was the junior man of the escort, though he seemed very grown-up to me, with his armor and weapons and his muscle-corded arms and sweeping mustache. He was the fourth son of a landowning family in a village near Tamurin’s capital of Chiran, and his skill with horses and archery had secured him a place in the Despotana’s personal escort. This escort was called the Green Heron Guard, because of the insignia that appeared on its battle standard. It was a hundred and twenty men strong, but when the Despotana set out for the south, she had taken only its best thirty troopers, a sign of her friendly relations with her neighboring Despots.
    For a day and a half we rode across the valley, the mountains looming ever nearer. I was now a very long way from Riversong, for I had seen my native Indar fall far behind as we rode into the Despotate of Brind, and then left Brind behind for Guidarat. I'd seen thatched roofs change to shingle or tile, timbered houses and bams replace those of plastered mud brick, and bullocks and dray horses at work in the fields instead of marsh oxen. I had now eaten beef, carrots, leeks, and wheaten bread for the first time, and I now knew that the north had four seasons, rather than the three I was used to. I'd grown up with the south’s rainy spring, dry summer, and the cool of its harvest; but here they didn’t have harvest, but autumn and winter instead.
    Northemers also wore more clothes than people in the south. Women put sleeved bodices over their tunics, and men wore not only loose trousers and shirts but also overtunics. In cooler weather they added long jackets or mantles and, on wet days, rain cloaks. Some better-off adults wore knee-length hose and shoes or boots instead of sandals.
    Most people dressed simply, but at the courts of the Despots, and among the rich landed families and the big merchants, things were different. I knew about luxury now, for the Despots of Indar, Brind, and Guidarat had made us their guests, and wealthy people along the way had been eager to have a Despotana under their roofs for a night. Such people wore clothes of fine linen or shimmering gossamin, in hues of cobalt blue, crimson, yellow, silver, midnight black, and sunlit gold. Woven or dyed into the fabrics were intricate designs of flames, mnning water, clouds, bees, swallows, and long-finned fish. As for jewels, the price of any of the women’s necklaces would have fed Riversong for a year.
    But I was too young to realize who paid for this glittering sumptuousness. I did not think about the bent and aching backs of the Erallu and Durdana field hands, on whose labors our hosts grew rich but who had almost nothing for themselves. I did not wonder why the towns and cities through which we passed were so ramshackle and decayed, while the palaces of the Despots and their families glowed with opulence. Nor did I wonder why so many farming villages lay abandoned or sunk in poverty, though they lay within sight of the splendid manors of the local magnates. In short, I did not see how the riches of the land and the people were being sucked into those few greedy mouths, as a man would suck barley beer through a hollow reed and leave the jar empty of all but sodden husks.
    Late one afternoon we came to the edge of Guidarat and the southern border of Tamurin. If I had been a moon stork, the bird that flies higher than any other, I could have seen the Despotate laid out before me, like a plump, beckoning finger that stretched two hundred miles northward into the sea. On the