Then the kitchen door opened and Alrin, dressed in gorgeous silk, bustled in. She stopped short in surprise at the crowd. The storyteller leaned towards Gilly, as though to directly address him. “I will tell you a tale of a people who live on the sea, whose harbor is called Dreadful because so many boats have been wrecked going in and out of its narrow entrance. Within the harbor, though, the water is still as glass, and the boats must be rowed because no breath of wind ever stirs there. The people walk from boat to boat to go visiting and never set foot on land at all, except to fill their water barrels. A woman of these people was so ugly that no one could bear to look at her, and she lived by herself without even dog or cat for company. No one would fish with her, either. So no one could explain how she came home, day after day, with her hold full of newly caught fish.”

Clement had heard Alrin take in her breath, and looked at her in time to see her glance with horror at Gilly, and then open her mouth as though to stop the story. But Gilly’s ugly face was decorated with a delighted smile. Clement whispered to Alrin, “Leave it be.”

The storyteller’s tale slowly, quietly, became hilarious. She told of the various, increasingly absurd ways that the fisherwoman’s kinfolk, jealous of the ugly woman’s wealth and success, tried to trick her into revealing her fishing secret. Then, they began to offer bribes, and finally offered her the one thing she did not have, and could not get for herself: a loving husband. But first she demanded that her potential husband prove his love (here the tale became as salacious as any soldier might wish) and, to his surprise, the potential husband managed to do this. And so, in the end, it was revealed that the ugly woman was sticking her face into the water, and the fish, fleeing the sight, were swimming directly into her nets.

The kitchen had echoed with laughter, and even Alrin wiped her eyes and exclaimed, “Well! Who would have thought!”

Iness, the soldier, told his own tale, but with a certain self‑deprecating air, for he was a mere amateur and Alrin’s servant clearly was a master.

In the crush of the hallway, as the soldiers wrapped themselves in capes and pressed out the narrow door, Gilly, Alrin, and Clement were trapped together into a corner. Alrin said rather anxiously, “I had no idea she spoke Sainnese. Or that she was a storyteller. She’s just a tribal woman who’d been set upon … I found her by the roadside.”

Gilly said, “What is her name?”

Alrin hesitated. “I don’t know. She seems a bit addled.”

“Really! But she tells a good tale. Perhaps we might hire her to tell tales in the garrison on these long winter nights.”

Out in the rain again, once Gilly had been hoisted into the saddle and had wrapped himself thoroughly against the wet, he said ironically, “Now what do you suppose got your courtesan so flustered, eh? I’d have thought she’d have nerves steady as my horse’s.”

“Perhaps she feared the servant’s tale had offended you. People are always assuming you to be short‑tempered.”

“Like that ugly woman’s fish, they flee my ugly face! Ha!” He chuckled to himself all the way to the garrison.

Chapter Nineteen

It was snowing: a light snow, like powered sugar sifting down from the shimmering dawn sky. It glittered, casting a dazzling haze like dust, or mist. Shivering and sleepy, Garland picked up the milk can that Karis had hauled up the mountain the night before and left out on the porch all night, and felt that its contents were frozen solid. The four ravens muttered restlessly on the protected perches Karis had built for them, then one came flapping out and asked, “Will you feed us?”

“Be patient. I’m baking you some cornbread.”

The raven flew up to the railing. “Here, here, here, here, here!” he called. Black shadows flapped in the shimmering mist of snow, and three more ravens landed on the rail in an icy spray of slush. So many ravens! Garland stepped backwards into Karis, who was just coming out the door with her head buried in an enormous knitted jerkin.

Her tousled, sleep‑flushed face emerged. Her eyes, which had been stark, now glittered at him with something resembling humor. “You don’t have to cook breakfast for the birds.”

“But they’re people.”

“Created people? They’re so alike, even I can’t tell them apart.”

“They talk,” Garland said. “So they’re people.”

Karis jammed a cap onto her head, pulled on a sheepskin jerkin, and took some heavy knitted gloves out of the pocket. “Well, you’ll also have ten human people for breakfast. Six of them have been on the road all night, running before the storm. They’re at the foot of the mountain now, with three heavy wagons and a lot of exhausted horses, and a very slippery road ahead of them. Raven, go tell them I am coming to help.”

The raven that had asked about breakfast leapt off the railing into the snow.

“Will you take these three raven‑people inside to get dry?” Karis said to Garland. She looked ruefully at the moth holes in her gloves which left large portions of her fingers exposed. “I hope they brought the rest of my clothes.”

As Karis set forth after the bird, into the snow, Garland offered his arm to the nearest sodden raven. “I’ll take you in to sit by the fire.”

The raven stepped from the railing to his forearm, and thanked him politely.

The day after Karis had finished the beds, she had made mortar out of sand and slaked lime, and with scavenged bricks had built into the kitchen chimney the sweetest oven Garland had ever baked a pie in. By the time harnesses could be heard jingling in the yard, two pans of cornbread were cooling for the ravens, and the oven was full again, this time with eight loaves of bread that puffed up in the heat quite satisfactorily. Applesauce bubbled in the pot on the fire, and a pan of pork sausages kept warm on the hearth. Garland heard the front door open, and swung the teakettle over the hot part of the fire. He did not have enough plates or cups to go around, but few travelers show up without their own tableware.

A cold draft washed in, and Garland heard the grunts and curses of weary people moving heavy objects. A slim young man came blundering down the hall to the kitchen doorway, where he paused vaguely, blinking snow from his lashes and polishing his spectacles on the front of his rather dirty shirt. “I’m all snow,” he complained. “There you are,” he added, as he perched his still‑dirty spectacles on his nose. “My brother!” He clasped Garland’s hand in his own very cold one. “So happy to meet you!” he said in Sainnese. “I get so lonely for my own language, don’t you? Even though I don’t miss those bloody, boring soldiers the slightest bit.”

Apparently oblivious to Garland’s stunned surprise, he unpeeled from himself several layers of dripping jerkins, still talking.

“That’s my books they’re swearing at. The damned things are no end of trouble. And of course, they’re going all the way up to the attic.” The young man paused to peer closely at Garland through his smeared lenses. “Thank you for feeding her.”

“Are you Medric?”

“For feeding Zanja,” said the very peculiar young man.

“The one who’s dead?” Garland felt quite bewildered now.

“In the woods, late in the summer. A rabbit stew.”

Garland remembered a silent, remarkable, solitary, well‑armed woman who had walked through the pathless woods as though she had been traveling there since the beginning of time. She had not been of Shaftal; she had, it seemed to him, not even been of that world. Wholly preoccupied with some massive mystery, she seemed to scarcely notice Garland. But when, along with the stew, Garland had cooked pan bread for her, with wild herbs in it, she had come out of her preoccupation to say to him, “This is the best meal I ever tasted.”

“It wasn’t just a rabbit stew. There was bread …”