‘Good journey to you, then, Kenton.’ The smuggler bent to put the coins in the shadow under the bench, sat up, and flicked the reins. The cart rolled forward.

  Stepping awkwardly back, one shoe tied and one loose, the student called, ‘Thanks. And good journey!’

  The smuggler’s cart rolled on among huts, by a pile of baskets, past a broken loom in an overgrown yard. (I’m a good and honest smuggler. Yes, I’m a very good and a very honest smuggler. Rehearsing it to himself, he smiled and shook his head. Someday, sometime, believe me, my young student, I’ll say it to someone. But, oh, he thought, what a decent, law-abiding boy like you won’t do to get away with a few coins from a good and honest criminal like me!) The road was empty; a chicken pecked lazily at his left, and, as his cart rounded a curve, to the right and curled under a bush, a sleeping dog swished its tail once, shivered below the leaves, and stilled. But the smuggler was beyond the enclave before he had any picture of its products or processes, the work of its quiet days or evenings.

  Leaves pulled their shadow over the road to break up sunlight on the beast’s back, to shatter it on the smuggler’s knees and shoulders. An hour later, he paused in his dialogue, still rambling on with the imagined student: between the leaves the sky had confounded to one gray. The air was cooler, thicker, heavier. Glancing at a break left by a fallen tree, he saw that the sun-saturated blue had given over to tarnished cloud, like silver lapped about with hammer marks.

  Out of sight, lightning flared. As his cart rolled under branches he heard drops batter leaves. Leaves shook, shivered, and—seconds later—splattered down on him. The ox moved her head left, right, looked up, then plodded on as the road became pocked mud about her hooves. The smuggler leaned forward to take the rain on his back. Water ran from his hair, dripped off his eyebrows.

  All right, he admitted to the phantom Kenton (who, because of his incorporeality, could still sit tall on the bench despite the peppering), do you want me to say it, then, young student? There’re some things you do know better than I! (He jumped down from the cart to walk beside it along this sloppy stretch, laughing aloud in the rain.) Yes, and I’ll say this too: I’d give you your three coins back for your aunt’s roof, a bowl of hot soup, and a pallet to stretch out on for the night. Good and honest smuggler that I am, I must still be the kind of fool I’m always saying, for not taking up your offer. Well, then; I’ve said it.

  Are you satisfied?

  Apparently he was; for after that, pulling his bare feet from the mud beside the creaking wheel, the young smuggler walked his cart through the torrent more or less alone.

  Once the rain stopped for twenty minutes.

  Once it stopped for ten.

  Once the smuggler (back on the driver’s bench, for here the road was irregularly paved, its slight slope keeping it moderately free of water) looked up to see the trees to the left had given way to rock. Here and there to the right he glimpsed a storm-lashed valley. But rain obscured distances, distorted boulders and pines—it was hard to look up long with the drops beating eyes and cheeks and lips. By now the smuggler was unsure if he were still on the right back road. Perhaps the last town had put him on a side path. He should be going due south, but there was no finding the sun for confirmation.

  When the rain stopped again, the trees had closed him round. The smallest breeze splattered his arms and knees so that, by now, it was debatable whether rain really fell or the leaves only shed their leftovers (and an old woman, a young girl, and some elderly farmers whose names he had forgotten years ago debated it). You are lost on a side road that has detoured you into the unrectored chaos where anything may happen and any lie, falsehood, illusion, or reality is game, he said to himself. And a god, who, though she has no name as you have, is still as concerned with smuggling as you are, will find any play of yes and no prey to attach herself to all entire. He countered himself: You are on the right road, headed south, only wet, cold, and uncomfortable. How many times have you prayed, ‘All the dear gods, please make something happen?’ As he answered back, ‘Not many,’ lightning flashed again behind leaves.

  It was raining.

  The cart rolled.

  Foot propped on a slant trunk, and sword drawn; that’s what he saw first, when the voice barked, harsher and louder than the falling water. ‘Hey, pretty man! Give a tired traveler a ride…?’

  Looking up, he thought to ask for iron. But rain splattered his face. Looking down again, he called: ‘Come on! Climb up! You going far?’ Calling, it occurred to him the figure vaulting the log to slog up the sloppy shoulder might be a bandit. There’d been something odd about the blade—which slid back into its soaked scabbard. But water blurred all, made him blink. The figure came on with swinging arms, behind wet veils, which, as the smuggler turned away, thickened.

  A rough hand grasped the seat beside him. The cart rocked. The other hand grasped his shoulder (which was how he knew the first was rough). The traveler (or bandit) rose with a snort and a chuckle. ‘Get your ox going! Curse this weather!’

  Still hunching, he flicked the reins. A warm interruption in the streaming cold as he rocked forward, the hard hand stayed high on his arm; his new companion’s side hit his, swayed away, hit him again. ‘Where’re you traveling?’ The smuggler glanced over.

  There was something tied across his seat companion’s face: a rag through whose two holes, even in this shadowed splatter, he saw blue eyes. A bandit? Behind the rag mask, affably enough she…well, grinned.

  He’d been trying to see those breasts as the muscles developed over the chest of some swaggering country man, distorted by blown water; but here, with her sitting up close and leering against the torrent (still holding his shoulder), behind her mask she was, he realized once and for all as he blinked in falling water, a woman.

  He started to speak, but an indrawn breath as a gust blew drops into his mouth made him cough—which only saved him embarrassment, he decided. He had nothing to say. Wiping his face with his wrist, he turned to his beast.

  They rocked on through the rain.

  Perhaps the seventh rock jarred her hand loose. He glanced up. With both, now, she grasped the bench by skirted hips, leaning forward to gaze through masking cloth, pelting drops, raging leaves. Half an hour later, when the rain stopped again, she was still silent.

  Decisively (though the reasons for the decision he could not have spoken), he looked at the brush and rubble on both sides of the road before he said: You from around here?’

  ‘Do I look like a native of this wet and woebegone land?’ She snorted with an expression below her mask that, on a man, he would have known as a laugh. ‘And where do you come from? You look like you might be bringing your cart down from Kolhari. What are you hauling? No—’ She leaned away from him. Within the frayed holes, her lids dropped halfway down eyes of ceramic blue. ‘You don’t really want to tell me about what you carry, do you? I don’t blame you—though I could give you some advice on how to ease your load along its way. You’re probably in a profession I know more than a little about.’ She laughed again. ‘My name’s Raven.’ She put out her hand.

  He dropped one rein and reached across to shake.

  What are you called? But no…’ She held his in a hard grip, her small fingers more callused than his own, fleshy and thick-knuckled. ‘You pretty men of this country, the ones with enough meat on you to make it look as if you might be comfortable to cuddle after sunset, you’re too modest to tell every wandering woman your name. Well, that’s as it should be, even in a land like this, where the men act as odd as you do—and the women are too beaten down to be believable.’ She pulled her hand from his and looked around at streaming pines, at leaves all droplet struck.

  A black-haired, blue-eyed, be-masked woman; as far as he could tell she didn’t have a freckle on her. Tell her my name…? And having committed himself to withholding it, he felt a sudden surge of camaraderie. ‘You’re a foreigner, yes? I couldn’t say for sure, and foreigners—I admit it—are nothing I know much about, but you look as if you find the most ordinary thing we do here in Nevèrÿon odd.’ He grinned. ‘Is that it?’

  ‘My home is in the Western Crevasse. Now, what I find odd the little woman said, all grave behind her mask, ‘is that the terribly odd things you do here all the time, most of you find so hard to laugh at.’

  ‘What do you find laughable here?’ He was prepared to chuckle at whatever serene normality she might cite under the salting drops.

  ‘Well,’ she said, serious as the rain, ‘now you surely look like a young man on his way to fight beside the Liberator, whose cause is noble and necessary. He’s assembled his forces just east of here. Well, myself, I’ve fought at the Liberator’s side three months now. And I’ve grown tired of his campaign—noble as it is—and have decided to rejoin the sane and sensible women of my homeland and to pursue our sane and sensible ends.’ She paused, drawing back. (He thought she was about to narrow her eyes again, but under and through her mask she gave him a great, sampaku grin.) Above, the trees roared. Rain redoubled. ‘Now you see, I would have expected a man of my own country to find a speculation such as that worthy of a chuckle at least. But you sit on your bench, staring at me with your eyes wide between wet lashes and your mouth hung half open, and not a giggle anywhere in your pretty beard. Of course—’ and here she assumed a lighter tone—‘in my country, sometimes it seems that the men can do nothing but giggle. They laugh at everything and anything, morning and night, as if they believed nothing in the world worth a true thought. Well, perhaps they’re right. Our philosophers are always saying so. People say men don’t have to think for the same reason they don’t have to have babies. But though one doesn’t want to insult you with the point, you have to admit it’s reasonable, yes? Still, lost in this strange and terrible land, sometimes a woman wants to see a man with a little flesh on him act just a bit silly, once in a while…? Say, I bet you’ve been driving that ox in this downpour all afternoon. You look tired to death. Here, give me the reins and rest.’ She leaned forward, reaching out as if he’d directly ordered her to take the ox’s leads.

  The smuggler snatched them aside, so that she looked at him with the puzzlement she no doubt turned on all this gray-green country. ‘The Liberator…’ he said. ‘You mean the Liberator—Gorgik the Liberator—is fighting near here? To the east?’

  ‘I’ve been with his forces three months.’ She pursed her lips and nodded. ‘His troops are assembled on the Princess Elyne’s ancestral lands. She allows him to use her ancient halls for his headquarters. From it, sometimes with his one-eyed lieutenant, Noyeed, sometimes with his most trusted followers, and sometimes totally alone he scouts the land about here, making maps, marking out trails to forage against the earls and barons who still maintain their slave pens. He’s a very clever man, this Liberator. When the evil lords expect an attack from his massed troops, he sends in only a single spy to provoke internal upset. And when the lords have doubled and quadrupled their vigil on their own households and have sent their own spies among their own laborers and infiltrated their own enterprises with invisible ears and silent eyes, paid to report by whisper and writing any and all sedition, driving themselves and all who work for them mad under the anxiety that circles like a kite over the house where betrayal is hunted, then the Liberator’s troops descend on the demoralized estate. Oh, he is a very clever man. But—’ (Her frown, the smuggler saw, was actually a strained smile, showing small teeth behind dark lips.)’—I grow uneasy with your Liberator. Certainly he’s a moral and meritorious man. And his cause is reasonable and right. But I do not like fighting for a man among men.

  ‘You must understand—’ She laid a hand on the smuggler’s forearm, where his muscles moved as he moved the reins—‘this is not the misandry of some fledgling warrior whose breasts are no bigger than two handfuls of sand one teasing boy might spill on the chest of another asleep on his back at the beach. “No man can wield a blade; no man can be as strong, as agile, as honest, or as brave as a woman.”’ She laughed. ‘Well, when the little hawks have never flown further than the horizon of some fussy father’s eye, what more can you expect of them? I say, if a man can fight like a woman, respect him as a woman. And I admit: I’ve met more than one in this tortured and terrible country whose single blade I’d think twice about crossing my own honed twins with—though that admission would get me only laughter in the warrior barracks of my home.’ (Her accent, he began to hear, was not the slurred elisions and apocopations that, as he moved further and further south, became the barbarian tongue. Apparently, he had been imposing barbaric expectations on an accent that, as he listened to it, began to distinguish itself on his ear.) ‘No, that’s not what bothers me.’ She let her knees fall wide and ran her hands out on her wet thighs. ‘Once all that’s accepted—that a man can be the equal of a woman in war—you still find yourself uncomfortable fighting amidst a bunch of them, relying on them, knowing your life depends on their bravery, commitment, honor, and skill. And always in the off-hours around the cook-fire or in whatever quarters we can commandeer for ourselves on the march, there are the jealousies and minuscule hostilities, over which they laugh and try to mask under the warriors’ bluster they all wear so uneasily. But one can sense in them the same male sulks and uncertainties you find in the men of my own home—where, at least, those uncertainties and sulks can come out honestly and openly and speak their own names, and the men do not have to disguise them as displays of reason and rational right. Now you must know, I’ve fought alongside men in this country who were true fighters and soldiers, yes. But a woman among them always has the feeling that, for all the well-fitted skills they may have been practicing for months or even years, still they haven’t been real warriors for more than a week, so that one begins to realize their laughter and horseplay is to hide the fact that, under all, they remain true sons of Eih’f, still carrying Eih’f’s shame. Oh, the Liberator’s cause is joyous and just. I respect it (and I respect him!) as much as anyone’s (or anyone) I’ve found in this odd and eccentric country. ‘I first met him many years ago. It was on a clear spring night, with not a trace of halo about the moon. And his plans and ambition were clear and sharp as the moon-shot dark. I was sympathetic, certainly. Still, I only trust such clarity about such basically muddled matters just so far. But as the years went, and in my own travels I heard more and more of him, nothing contradicted what I thought was most valid in what he’d said that night. So, finally, some months back, I came to him to offer my fighting services.’ She grunted. ‘I don’t think he even remembered me. But that’s no matter. Still, it’s been rain and fog and mist for the whole time, I tell you!

  ‘Well, he’s still as fine a fighter as a woman. What’s more, he has something more than dragon droppings between his ears. And I fought my best for him when I was with him.

  ‘But rumor came by, three days ago, that women of my own country have been sighted traveling through this part of Nevèrÿon. And I grow tired of foreign foibles and failings, and long for familiar ones. I’ve decided to seek the rumor’s source and join them. They say that they were seen in Vinelet. That’s where I’m headed.’

  The young smuggler heard this with a controlled and guarded bemusement not much different from yours and mine. It was much the feeling that a point was being put too bluntly, at too great a length—not at all in a ladylike way. But because, for all his disparagement of students, he was not really so far from a student himself, he said: ‘If you want to find your friends, better not go to Vinelet. Not if the rumor’s been about for three days. I’m no certain judge of these parts, and I’d think twice about anything the likes of me said; and I do. But would they likely be traveling north or south? Three days south of Vinelet is the Argini. Three days north is the port of Sarness,’ for in the past two years he’d delivered sacks in all those places.

  The masked woman, who was not tall, leaned away from him with an appraising eye. (Just then the rain really stopped.) ‘For such a pretty man, you have a pretty mind. That’s as rare in your country as it is in mine.’ Below her mask, her lips’ set told him he should feel complimented. And because he was a friendly sort, the young smuggler smiled. Me? he thought. Pretty? Well, I wouldn’t go to bed with one like her if she paid me. Unless of course (and found himself wondering what in her unsettling presence he might be responding to) she really would pay. But it was hard enough to pry coin from the men on the bridge. How did one even ask it from such a manly woman, and a foreigner at that, on the road? Still, he pondered, it would be interesting, probably, and different, certainly.

  Would that she had a speckle or five.

  Raven said: ‘This time of year, they’d be coming north of course. And by now, you’re right, they’d be at the port of Sarness. That’s no more than three hours’ ride from here.’

  ‘Is it?’ He would have thought it a town for the next day’s stopover. But one always mistook distances in this geography whose organization, if not its very existence, invariably came from the hearsay of strangers. And this masked woman was certainly among the strangest. ‘But you know this part of Nevèrÿon,’ she said with certainty. ‘When we reach the high crossroad, we’ll point out the sights and wonders of Sarness to each other. With the boats set along its waterfront and its houses spread on both sides of the Dragon’s Way the town is beautiful from the hillcrest at sunset. It’s a sight to tell your granddaughters about.’ The woman grinned wickedly. ‘And I’ll find my landswomen there.’

  Laughing, the smuggler shook his reins—though the red beast’s gait stayed the same.

  They rolled on.

  Thrice in the past five summers he’d looked down on Sarness’s collection of seaside huts and warehouses. Twice, he’d actually taken his cart into the sleepy port and driven along its somnolent waterfront, looking to buy beer. Under a shoreside canopy at a long wooden table with several landbound fishermen, he’d drunk up four or six or ten mugs of it, while the waters flickered brighter than lightning between the knocking dories. Then, with a light head and a bloated belly, he’d let his ox pull him and the cart back up across the main highway to the side-path, which then, as now, he’d been traveling.