5

The women thronging the common room in their finery weren't drinking, and few men braved the mass of overskirts, patterned aprons, and lace shawls to buy a mug of ale from Garric behind the bar. He didn't recall a night that there'd been a greater crowd or less custom. Even the six guards had gone out when they finished their supper.

Tilusina, Revan's wife, laughed in an affected voice and tapped her fan on the table. Her daughter Khila aped the laugh—even more gratingly, so far as Garric was concerned—and twiddled her index finger in the air: the family had only one fan, probably a wedding gift. It was sheet bronze with a punched design of the Count's Palace in Carcosa.

Liane came downstairs. She'd changed her brown tunic for a blue one of similar cut, though this time the sturdy linen had a satin collar.

The women stopped talking, but those sitting stood up and the ones already standing straightened. The rustle of stiffened, multilayered cloth sounded like roosting time in a henhouse.

Liane started as though someone had jumped at her from behind a curtain. She looked as if she'd bitten something sour. The villagers immediately began to talk again, ostensibly to one another though quite obviously none of them was listening to anyone else. Tiaras, hairpins, and rings all twitched so that the glass jewels and faceted metal would catch the light and the stranger's attention.

Liane was the first fashionable woman to arrive in Barca's Hamlet in living memory. Asera was a noble, but that in itself frightened the villagers out of the kind of display they were making for Liane. Besides, the procurator's garb had really been an offical uniform: a beige silk robe of strictly functional lines, falling from shoulders to ankles with a brown sash tucking it at the waist.

Liane was someone the local women could imagine being—if they were young, beautiful, and had more wealth than there was in the whole borough.

"Tapster?" Liane said to Garric. She raised her voice to speak over the women's meaningless chatter, but they stilled the instant she opened her mouth. The word rang in the silence like the cry of a huntsman calling his hounds.

The girl looked shocked. She flushed, then resumed in a normal tone, "I've been reading in my room and I need more candles. Wax, this time, if you have them."

"I'm sorry, mistress," Garric said in embarrassment. "Usually we would, but every wax taper in the hamlet was burned the past two days when we had a royal procurator staying here. It'll have to be lamps or tallow dips, I'm afraid."

"Well, whatever you have," Liane said in resignation. She kept her gaze fixedly on Garric so that she wouldn't have to make eye contact with the bevy of women waiting breathlessly for an excuse to speak to her.

Candles were kept in the cupboard beneath the stairs. Garric stepped around Liane to get to them, feeling her eyes on him the whole time. "What are you reading, mistress?" he asked with his head in the cupboard.

"Poetry," she said with brusk boredom. "An ancient poet named Rigal, if that means anything to you."

Garric found the candles. He brought out six of them. The wicks hadn't been cut: they dangled as three pairs, the way they'd been dipped.

He turned to Liane, smiled, and quoted, " 'Lady and your Shepherd! Grant that this boy, my son, may be like me first in glory among the men of Sandrakkan. May he be strong and brave, may he rule the Isles in majesty; and may they say one day, "He's a better man even than his father!" ' "

The girl's face changed with the gathering momentum of ice slipping from a roof in spring. "You know Rigal?" she said. "You're quoting Rigal! Oh, Lady, you've heard my prayers!"

The women surged forward, talking again. Liane jumped a step up the stairs; Garric, amazed and horrified, shifted so that he stood between the guest and the villagers. Those at the back of the room pressed those in front, threatening to push them onto Garric's toes. Apparently when the girl took social notice of any local person, she became fair game for all of them.

"Stop this!" Garric shouted. "Duzi take you all for a pack of fools! Is this what you want a stranger to think of us?"

Reise came out of the kitchen. His arms were wet to the elbows, so he must have just washed at the well after laying bedstraw for the horses and mules. "What's happening here?" he said sharply to his son.

"Innkeeper?" Liane asked in tones of icy rigor. "Might I ask your servant here to carry a lantern for me out on the beach? I'll pay you for his lost labor, of course. And I assure you, we'll be lighted at all times. I have no desire to outrage rural conventions."

"I'll handle the trade, Garric," Reise said. He looked at the abashed gathering of fancy dress. "Such as it is."

To Liane he continued, "If my son Garric chooses to escort you, mistress, I'd be glad for him to do so. But that isn't the sort of matter on which I'd give orders to either of my children."

He bowed.

"I'd be honored," Garric said. He barely avoided stumbling over his tongue. "Ah—Father? Her, ah, father is still over at the millhouse with Katchin. You'll let him know where we are if he comes in?"

Reise nodded curtly. To Garric's amazement, he thought he saw his father almost smile.

Liane skipped up the stairs. The women were leaving the common room under Reise's disdainful eye. Some talked loudly to one another; others hung their heads. They were all embarrassed, though they expressed the emotion in different ways.

Garric realized that the notion of dressing up to impress the cultured stranger had been a group thing, not an individual decision. Like other animals, the behavior of humans in a pack is almost invariably worse than the behavior of any single member by himself. Herself, in this case. The village women had made fools of themselves, and they knew it when somebody forced them to look at themselves.

At least nobody was dead, the way there sometimes was when a mob of men got a notion into its collective head.

Garric also noticed that Ilna, the one woman in the hamlet who might be able to compete with the stranger in terms of looks and style, hadn't been present. Ilna os-Kenset wasn't the sort to follow anybody's lead, let alone that of a pack of fools.

Liane returned carrying a lantern with lenses of glass, not horn or mica, and a waist-length cape of red-dyed wool. "Will I need my wrap?" she asked Garric, gesturing with the cape.

He shrugged. "Bring it along," he said. "I'll carry it for you if you think it's too warm."

He had no idea how Liane would react to the breeze down on the shingle. To Garric it would be refreshing after an evening in the common room packed with nervously alert villagers.

Garric opened the lantern's lid of slotted brass, judged the height, and trimmed one of the candles to length with the knife dangling from his belt in a sheath of elder laths wrapped with leather. He set the stub in the three-pronged holder, then lit it with a stick of lightwood from the hearth.

Reise nodded to him as he drew a pail of ale for Gilzani to take home for her husband. Garric couldn't read the expression on his father's face, but for once it didn't seem to be covering anger. Sadness, though...Perhaps sadness.

Garric opened the seawall door for Liane, bowed, and followed her through with the lantern. The tide was halfway out, and the surf was a muted rumble. He offered Liane his hand and walked down the wall's forty-five-

degree slope ahead of the girl as a brace against her slipping and an anchor if she did.

"Oh, thank goodness!" Liane said. She took the cape off and twirled it above her head when her feet touched the beach. "I felt as though I was being suffocated by those women. How ever do you stand it, Garric?"

"Well, they're not always like that," he said in embarrassment. "And it's not a matter of standing it, mistress. I'm one of them, you know."

"You're Garric and I'm Liane," she said. "All right?"

"Yes, Liane," he said. He smiled. Her tone was one he'd grown used to over the years. Like Reise, Liane didn't expect an argument when she gave directions.

They walked slowly up the beach. Garric held the lantern at waist height between them. Its haze of yellow light fell on the ground ahead, but their faces were dark except for an occasional flicker through the air slots in the lid. Liane had on sturdy sandals that crunched on the shingle. When she'd come downstairs for candles she'd been wearing sequined slippers; he was startled that she'd been able to change them so quickly.

"So," she said. "Have you read any other poets, Garric?"

"Oh, yes," Garric said mildly. He was proud beyond telling that he'd been able to impress a girl as beautiful as Liane. "Vardan, Kostradin...Most of the ancients, actually. Celondre, Hithum, Maremi the Baron..."

Liane giggled. "We weren't permitted to read Maremi in Mistress Gudea's Academy for Girls," she said. "Of course every room in the dormitory had a copy. If we'd read Rigal as diligently, I'd be able to quote him to you."

"It's just that one passage," Garric said with false diffidence. He was bursting with pride that he had anything from Rigal in a memory which he could retrieve. "Celondre's really my favorite, because—well, he writes about the way a shepherd's life ought to be, the way maybe it was in the Golden Age before Malkar."

Though they were walking slowly, they'd passed the end of the seawall. There were only a few houses beyond this point and none of their occupants could afford artificial light. The lantern was the only sign of human existence.

"Where were you educated, Garric?" Liane asked. "Carcosa? I'm amazed that they'd have a teacher so good. When I was there it seemed almost as bucolic as this hamlet."

"My father taught us, my sister and me," Garric said. He'd brought extra candles, but he had to light the replacement before the present stub went out or they'd be in darkness until they got back. "He was born on Ornifal. Are you from Ornifal also, mis—"

She tapped his arm.

"Sorry, Liane," he apologized. "Ah, I think we ought to turn around, if that's all right."

"We're from Sandrakkan," the girl said. "I went to school in Valles on Ornifal. Mistress Gudea's, as I said."

She turned on her heel. When Garric started to walk around her to put the lantern in his left hand between them again, she caught his wrist and held him until he fell into step as they stood now.

"The fashions in Carcosa are what women in Valles were wearing ten years ago, Garric," Liane said. "The people all looked at me as if I were the Lady come to save them. I couldn't go anywhere without somebody asking me about my dress or sketching it to copy and glaring at me if I made eye contact. It was like being in a cage! And then "

"Why did you come then?" Garric said bluntly. "If clothing fashion's the only thing that's important to you, then I guess Valles is the place to be."

These were his people. Sure they were farmers in the back of beyond, sure they looked like clowns to a girl like Liane when they tried to dress up. But he hadn't gone to Valles to insult citizens there because they didn't know how to shear sheep!

It was a moment before Garric realized that the sound he heard was Liane crying into her cupped hands. "Mistress?" he said. "Liane, I didn't mean..."

He had absolutely no idea of how to go on. This was as much a shock as the seawolf hitting him from behind had been.

"I'm all right," Liane said. She stopped and blew her nose on a handkerchief she'd tugged from her sleeve. "Let's stand here a moment," she said. "I don't want to go back in the light with my eyes all red and ugly."

"I don't think you could look ugly if you rubbed your face with soot," Garric said, relieved beyond words that Liane had regained her self-possession. "Not so that anythis borough would say, anyhow."

He lifted the lantern in a gesture toward the beach ahead of them. "We had a whole three-banked warship there this morning, and it didn't impress the folks around here as much as you do."

"The women, you mean," Liane said. The raised lantern painted the corners of her smile.

"No, Liane, I don't mean just the women," Garric said with a laugh. "I certainly do not."

They began to walk again. "I don't know why I'm here, Garric," Liane said softly. "Soldiers came and took me out of school eight months ago. They wouldn't tell me anything. They brought me to a nunnery of the Lady in Valles. I wasn't...hurt. But I couldn't leave my room without a Daughter coming with me, and nobody would talk to me at all. A few weeks later my father got me and said that I'd be traveling with him now."

"I—" Garric said. "I'm sorry I said anything, Liane."

"I'm just so frightened," the girl whispered. "I don't know my father anymore, and I don't understand what's happening. I'm so alone!"

Garric opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again in silence. He'd been about to say that he'd felt alone too since everything started to happen in the past week.

But the medallion was a smooth weight against his chest, and somewhere in the back of his mind King Carus was laughing.