The Steel Remains

Out of the corner of one eye, Ringil almost thought he saw the corpse shake its lowered head in sanguine and slightly weary denial.

“Right.” He ignored the outstretched hand, gestured at the blanket laid out by the wall and the other old woman sitting on it. “I’m curious, madam. Could you read me my future?”

“Oh yes, my lord. For no more than . . .” Her eyes flickered about. “Seven . . . florins, I shall cast the scrying bones for you.”

“Seven florins, eh?” It wasn’t quite daylight robbery.

The woman lifted one grubby, sunburned arm so her shawl fell back from it. She touched a long vein in her wrist. “The blood that flows here belongs to the marsh clans at Ushirin, the children of Nimineth and Yolar. I am not a cheap spell-chanter from the stalls at Strov.”

“You’re certainly not cheap, no.”

It was water off a duck’s back, no impediment at all to the fortuneteller’s pitch now it was rolling. As he watched, she freed her other arm from the wrap of the shawl and crossed her wrists in front of her, palms cupped upward. “I trace my family line back eighty-six generations, undiluted, to those among the People who mated with the Aldrain. I have the eye. The shape of things to come opens before me, it is no more mystery than the shape of that which has already been.”

“Hmm. Pity you didn’t throw the bones for your son-in-law then, isn’t it?” Ringil nodded up at the corpse. “He could have used a little insight into the shape of things to come, don’t you think?”

It brought the woman up short. Her eyes narrowed, and he saw the hate come up in them. No surprises there, he was almost pleased to see it. Beneath their garish, played-for-the-crowd affectations of fey, the true marsh dwellers had a thin spine of pride that was mostly extinct in the rest of the Naom clans. They lived outside the city in more senses than the merely physical, and that brought its own detachment. There was a marked lack of deference in their manner when confronted with the trappings of wealth or political power. It was the one quality that Ringil could find to admire amid what was otherwise a fairly grubby and brutal cultural hangover from Naom’s pre-urban past. Like most kids, he’d dreamed often enough, smarting from a tanning Gingren or one of his tutors had given him, of running away to live out on the marsh with the dwellers. Often enough, he’d seen the faint flickering lanterns of their encampments out across the plain, had felt the distance and escape under open sky that they promised, just like any other kid.

Nice image. But the reality was altogether too backbreaking, damp, and smelly to seriously entertain.

And fucking freezing in winter.

The fortune-teller dropped her crossed wrists abruptly. Her arms hung at her sides, her shawl fell back and covered her hands. Her eyes nailed his. Nothing of her moved but her lips as she spoke.

“I’ll tell you what,” she said softly. “I’ll tell you what I see, and at no charge. You know much of war, you carry its spirit stabbed deep inside you, just as he up there has the steel within him. Just as deeply buried, just as hard and unyielding to all the softer things you are and want and own to. And just as bitter in its wounding. You think you’ll be free of it one day; you carry it as if the wound will someday heal. But for you, just as for him, there will be no healing.”

“Wow.” Ringil reached up left-handed and tapped the pommel of the Ravensfriend with his fingers. “Nice guesses. I’m sorry, Granny. It’s still no sale.”

The old woman’s voice rose slightly. “Mark me. A fight is coming, a battle of powers you have not yet seen. A battle that will unmake you, that will tear you apart. A dark lord will rise, his coming is in the wind off the marsh.”

“Yeah. I lost a pocketknife a couple of weeks ago. I don’t suppose you’d know where that is?”

She bared teeth at him.

“Among the dead,” she said savagely. “Forgotten.”

“Right.” He made her a brief bow, began turning away. “Well, I have to be going.”

“You have killed children,” she said to his retreating back. “Do not think that will heal, either.”

He stopped dead.

Once again, his vision seemed to burn out and be replaced. He stood in the courtyard again, amid a thin crowd of rubberneckers at Jelim Dasnel’s dying. The viewing stand had been taken down, the cage hoisted high. The stains on the stonework below were drying.

Day two.