Oath Bound (Book 3) (8 page)

The world’s loss had
snuffed it.

Vandis turned away from
Kradon’s temple and slouched between weathered wooden pews, up the aisle in the
open yard of HQ. At this hour of the night, nobody hung around, protesting or
otherwise—more was the pity. He would’ve liked to give them all a piece of his
mind, dangerous be damned. He stopped at the front to touch the eroded shapes
of little oak leaves on the stone incense burner, thinking,
If it were only
me—

But it isn’t.

I know.
 

They need you.

I know.
He
straightened a little.
First Hjaldi, then the office,
he decided, and
just then the hair on the back of his neck prickled. Eyes on him. He paused,
just for a moment, to ensure his path was clear; his impulse was to stop, to
turn and shout, “Show yourself,” but he denied it. Instead, he hurried to the
double doors and ducked inside.

Perching high above on
one of Hadrok’s angular gargoyles, a figure in dark gray leathers watched Vail
disappear into the building. He failed to see why he should keep vigil, or what
was so special about one little cleric anyhow—but pay was pay. He propped his
back against the spire and settled in for a long night.

Windish

There was even more
exploring to be done in Windish than in Seal Rock. Everything Dingus saw
interested him. The night Vandis left, Tikka had invited him and Kessa to stay
in her house, and in the morning they went out to the campsite. She’d lent him
two small books that she herself had written. They were in Traders’: guides to
the flora and fungi of Windish, with color plates, which pleased him on account
of he’d been wondering what they could gather to eat.

Kessa had moaned about
that. “Couldn’t we just
buy
food? You’ve got money!”

“Yeah,” he’d said, “my
money. Why should I spend on food when we can eat just fine?”

All the same, he’d spent
three sovereigns trying the local cuisine. The best thing about Windish, bar
none, was the food. The morning they woke up in Tikka’s house, she’d fed them
what she said was the traditional Windish breakfast: silky red smoked salmon, a
thin slice of purple onion, and soft white goat cheese between two halves of a
wheat roll. It was about as far from pickled herring on rye as breakfast could
get, and Dingus and Kessa both got sorely addicted, to the point that they were
in the little marketplace nearby every afternoon to buy cheese and rolls for
the morning.

Tikka gave them a
comfortable place in a clump of hemlocks, with tall cedars thrusting above. A
big cedar had fallen through the middle of the site. Moss and seedlings
carpeted the trunk, and if you didn’t mind your ass getting damp, it made a
cushy seat. Somebody, probably Tikka, had already dug a nice firepit and lined
it with stones, and there was a storage pit in the ground lined with cedar to
keep out the wet. Dingus had found a canvas awning in there, to cover the fire
and keep the drips out, and two small tents—a little short for them, but
serviceable. They pitched the tents on the fire side of the log, and used the
other side for exercise and tasks that weren’t cooking. He spent a little time
examining the hammock, netted out of the same kind of rough bark twine he
carried everywhere, and made another one so things would be fair.

Kessa liked sleeping
late. When they were on the road, it was Dingus’s job to wake her, and she
slept hard. Here, they weren’t on Vandis’s schedule, so he got up right before
dawn like always and let her waste half the day if she wanted—which meant he
never had to share the early morning. He liked to lie in the hammock munching
on salmon buns at daybreak. The light would stream through the gaps in the canopy
to strike the morning fog, so thick it looked like swirling smoke; birds and
waking animals would trickle sound into his ears. Alone with it all, Dingus
could relax. He loved it.

It would’ve been better,
so much better, if Vandis were here to share it, but there was plenty to
distract him. Inside of four days, he’d searched out almost everything in the
little guidebooks. Early one morning he’d climbed to the very top of one of the
cedars. The tree swayed gently in the breeze, and being so far off the ground
made him kind of nervous—but once he popped his head out of the canopy, the
view stole both breath and anxiety. Like rolling waves of green, the treetops
spread out over the hills all around him, lined deeply, like an old man’s face,
by the rivers. Diaphanous drapes and shreds of fog floated gently along the
top, and thin tails of smoke rose from the little tin chimneys that poked up
here and there. Out to the west was the great wide bay, misty in the new light
and dotted with small green islands. The scents of smoke and cedar and ocean
blended deliciously on Dingus’s tongue, fresh and dark at once.

He hadn’t had any of his
bad dreams since they’d been here. Sure, it’d only been about a week, but in
the space of a week he’d come to expect at least a couple of nightmares, and
he’d slept easy instead, the whole way through. Even with his worries over
Vandis’s safety, Dingus enjoyed a measure of peace.

When Kessa woke—well,
that was pretty okay, too. Not as good as being alone, but if he had to have
company, he would’ve picked her. Eventually, she’d get up and crawl out of her
tent with her hair exploding from her head every which way. It made him smile,
but she’d spend about an hour trying to get it into braids, without much
success. It was the dampness in the air, she said, and she also said that she
hated her hair—but she always said that. He’d never tell her so, but he sort of
liked it. She called it “a frizzy orange nightmare,” but to Dingus it looked
bright and fluffy and cheerful.

This morning, she complained
nonstop while he relaxed in the hammock. “I can’t fix it!” she growled,
throwing her comb to the ground and crossing her arms.

“Why not just cut it
off?” he asked. “I could do it for you.”

“Um, no. I do not want
mine like yours.”

Dingus laughed and passed
a hand over his own hair. He used a knife on it whenever he happened to notice
it was getting too long, which made it shaggy and uneven, but who cared? It was
just hair. “I wouldn’t make it like mine. I did a pretty good job on your ears
the other day, didn’t I?”

She touched the tiny gold
otters in her earlobes, which he had bought her in a wild fit of niceness,
because they reminded him of her. Only later, when she’d told him, had he
realized her ears weren’t pierced. She’d demanded he do the job so she could
wear them. “It’s not the same.”

“You let me stick a
needle through your ears, and you don’t want me to cut your hair? Hair grows
back
.”

“It’s just not the same!”

“Well, I’ll help you if
you want, that’s all.”

“Thanks,” she said, with
absolutely no sincerity, and stretched out for her comb. After another ten
minutes, she threw it again, clear across the camp. “I hate my hair!”

He didn’t even bother to
open his eyes. “Looks fine the way it is. You don’t gotta put it in those dumb
braids if you don’t want, or do any damn thing with it.”

“It’s not proper
otherwise. I’m not married.”

What about Kessa was
proper? She ran around the wilderness alone with two older, unmarried men,
wearing breeches and boots. She’d stumbled across Vandis naked twice over and
come running back into camp both times, swearing her mind was broken and she’d
be blind forever. Going along like they did, there was no way to avoid seeing
something you could never unsee. “So you’re gonna try braiding it every day ’til
you get married?”

“I’m
never
getting
married.”

“Okay, the whole rest of
your life, then? Just tie it back if you don’t like it.”

“People will think I’m
loose!”

“So what? You’re a
Squire. People don’t expect you got your legs glued together.” He paused.
“Except me and Vandis.”

She growled at him, and
he slid out of the hammock.

“Come on, Kess,” he said,
trying to turn her up sweet. He didn’t know why he tried, ’cause it never
worked. She threw him a dirty look, and he crossed to the nurse log and snatched
up one of the leather thongs she used to tie her braids.

“What are you doing?”

He pulled her hair back
from her face and square-knotted the thong tightly around it. It looked like a
carrot-colored puffball mushroom stuck on the back of her head, but whatever.

“Oh my gods,” she said.
“It looks like a big orange puffball, doesn’t it?”

“Naw.”

She twisted to look at
him. “Liar.”

“It shows your earrings,”
he pointed out. “Now can we please go?”

She moaned and covered
her face. “You go.”

“You’re the one that wanted
to go in the first place!” Poking around big, central Sodee Marketplace sounded
unutterably boring to
him,
but he’d agreed because what he wanted to do
bored
her
, and happy Kessa was far and away better company than grumpy
Kessa.

“I changed my mind.”

He shoved her off the
nurse log. She squawked, and he laughed at her when she popped up like a
thunderstorm. “You’ll have fun and you know it,” he said, swung his legs over,
and grabbed her arm before she could sit back down.

“I’ll get you for this.”

“I don’t doubt it.” He
dragged her off toward the nearest river anyway. He didn’t know its name, but
it eased along inside its banks, almost too wide for a bridge, and though it
sparkled in the morning light, the water was muddy-looking and unfit to drink.
Ish rowed their canoes past, and sometimes a flatboat would drift by, pulled by
a team of oxen. To either side of the river, the trees were cleared away a bit
from the banks and the broad, cobbled byways. It’d be a fine, sunny day; the
fog had already burned off over the roads. Dingus pulled Kessa in to join the
traffic.

The market was about two
miles downriver, and spread out from it on either side deep into the trees,
sunny by the banks and shady under the canopy. The place would’ve been peaceful
if it hadn’t been for all the people, hundreds of them on at least three
levels, buying and selling and moving and shouting. People stared, sometimes
even stopped to stare, but they probably couldn’t help it, since Dingus and
Kessa were head, shoulders, and chest above everybody else, and ginger besides.
Carrot orange and flaming red weren’t common hair colors even among humans, and
rarer yet among the Ish, although a good number had bright yellow crests or
sunset-yellow fur. “I feel like a standard on a pole,” Kessa complained, which
made Dingus laugh again. He’d had the same feeling, but at least nobody
bothered them.

He enjoyed it more than
he’d thought he would. There was a lot to see, even if it wasn’t exactly what
Dingus would’ve chosen to look at. The market stalls and sellers’ baskets
overflowed with bright blankets and rugs like Tikka had, woven into religious
symbols; with beautiful, patterned baskets, some huge, some tiny and woven from
pine needles; wild masks like stylized animal faces; and tons and tons of jewelry
for wrists, ears, tails, ankles, and crests. If it stuck out, the Ish would
decorate it. There was even a stand selling penis jewelry. When Dingus saw it,
he hustled Kessa past, red in the face. Everything was for sale here, even
carved, brightly-painted canoes set out on long stands.

They bought food:
vegetables, fruits, and flour for noodles, which Dingus put in the twine bag
he’d knotted a couple of mornings back, and also a little more of the soft cheese
for salmon buns. They picked up a few skeins of plain yarn so they could knit
more stockings. Dingus’s were in terrible shape, with growing holes that let
his heels and toes stick out. His boots were getting too small, but Windish
lacked cobblers. Most everybody went barefoot to make good use of their long,
dexterous toes.

After hardly any time at
all, their stomachs started to growl for dinner. “Let’s go to that noodle stall
we saw,” Dingus said. “It smelled the best.”

Kessa laughed. “We’ve
seen about two score noodle stalls.”

“Yeah, but that one
smelled like rosemary. I like rosemary. It was back on the other side of the
river.”

“I don’t remember, but
let’s go try it,” she said, bumping her shoulder into his. They set off toward
the bridge. “Do you really smell that good?”

He made a show of
sniffing his pits. “Nope, I smell terrible,” he said, and she giggled and gave
him a play shove, which knocked him sidewise a pace or two. If she’d really
meant it, he’d be on his ass.

“Gross! You know what I
mean,” she said through her giggles.

He steadied himself on a
cedar and opened his mouth to mess with her some more. Something brushed in the
vicinity of his belt, and without thinking, he snapped his hand out and
grabbed. He meant to pull whatever it was away from him, but he got something
like a furry twig in his fist, small and thin and warm. When he turned his head
to see what it was, a raggedy, scrawny Ishling glared at him from partway up
the tree, just above his waist. It skinned its lips back from its teeth. “If
you bite me, you’ll regret it,” he said, real quick. It went to bite him
anyways and he flicked with his thumb and finger square in the middle of its
forehead.

“Ow!” it squalled,
rubbing the spot, and gave him a credible stink-eye—for something the size of a
barn cat. It was young enough that it had a wide strip of longer fuzz over the
round crown of its head, instead of a crest. It absolutely reeked. “What, you
gots a problem?” it demanded in a piping voice, still clutching his purse. Boy
or girl, he couldn’t tell; before they got to a certain age, everybody had a
kid smell anyways. Then it kicked, and its ragged tunic went up a little bit.
Boy.

“I don’t like it when
people try to steal from me.”

“You is take me to the
Hops now?” The boy wore a defiant expression, but his voice shook the tiniest
bit.

“No, but you take your
hand off my purse or I
will
make you sorry,” he warned, even though he
wasn’t sure how he’d do that. What could he begin to do to a kid who lived like
this? When the tiny knife stabbed for his hand, Dingus almost missed seeing it.
With less than an inch to spare, he snatched the Ishling off the tree, wrapping
his hands around the little torso and pinning the twiggy arms. “No,” he said.
“Kess, take his knife.” The boy struggled, kicking out for Dingus’s face with
filthy, long-toed feet. “Relax. She’ll give it back.”

“What’re you thinking?”
Kessa asked as she pried the delicate fingers apart and took the knife.

Dingus didn’t know.
Well,
here’s a nice corner you painted yourself into,
was what he thought. The
boy had stopped struggling, and his hollow chest heaved in Dingus’s grip. He
stared at Dingus out of huge eyes black as coal with the whites showing all
around. His face was so dirty the color of his fur couldn’t be told, and Dingus
felt every last bone in his arms.

“Please,” he whispered,
“you isn’t hurt me, please, I is sorry, I isn’t try to take from you anymore.
Please…”