“Skater! Sight!” She shouted the stable keepers’ names imperiously and added a loud whistle. The pair of squat, Bonded men scrambled into view from between the oxen’s fat bodies. “I need the sledge. Let’s get it done.”
They passed their hands briefly in front of their eyes and sprang into action. With whistles and wordless shouts, they bullied a quartet of oxen into place and started strapping them to the yokes while Cor knotted and buckled the leather reins into place. She tried not to think about how the oxen’s eyes looked so much like Skater’s, or how once upon a time she never would have ordered another person around like that.
I am not here to judge. I’m here to learn and get the news out so they can all join the Family.
Except they’re not going to get to.
It’s still got to be better than this. She caught up the driving stick and slapped the rump of the left, rear ox.
“Move, you lumps!” she hollered. The sledge scraped forward over straw and mud out onto rutted dirt and rock.
Jay jogged up to the sledge and swung himself clumsily up next to the driver’s stand before she could call the team to a halt.
“Keep going,” he said, clambering back to sit on the crates.
Cor managed to keep the reflexive jerk in her arms from tightening the reins. The oxen plodded forward toward the main gate.
“What’s with you, Jay?” She tried to catch sight of him out of the corner of her eye, and still keep her other eye on the approaching gate.
“I think I know where that missing hundred went.” He was looking past her shoulder, toward the heights. His face was still strained as he scanned the tops of the roofs and the distant walls.
“Are you going to tell me, or are you seeing scars on my hands?” The saying popped out before she could stop it. Her knuckles tightened on the reins and she had to just nod at the guards at the gates. Only one of them looked up. The other five had their eyes fixed on the commander coming down from the staircase alongside the wall.
The sledge jostled through the gate and Cor had to keep her eyes on the ruts in the half-dry road as well as the walls of the houses that defined the narrow streets. She pulled on the reins and whistled to the oxen to steer the sledge in something approaching the right direction.
“They’re here,” said Jay.
“What!” Cor glanced wildly from the street, to Jay and back again. She meant to tell him he had lost his mind, but her surroundings were beginning to penetrate through acclimatized eyes and her brain was starting to realize something was wrong.
Narroways was a noisy place, and this afternoon was no exception. There was noise and plenty of it. Shouting and hollering bounced off the close-packed buildings and cut through the steamy wind. Every blacksmith in the city seemed to be at his forge, hammering away. But there weren’t any children on the stairways, just the tops of heads and glimpses of faces bobbing to and fro on the roofs. No pedestrians crowded the streets. No soldiers on their oxen jostled them aside. There was just the shouting and the clattering and …
“Skyman!” shouted a voice.
A stone whizzed past and Cor ducked. The oxen halted in confusion. Jay hauled open the sledge’s canvas cover. The missing people spilled into the street like a flood down a canyon, driven by soldiers in the First City uniform. The noise hadn’t been blacksmiths, but swords. People ran into the houses, trying to get out of the way of the fray, but some were making a stand, with whatever they had at hand. Bodies draped in ponchos so she couldn’t tell if they were men or women surged around the soldier’s oxen waving sticks and hatchets. The soldiers flailed with swords and clubs. Stones from slings shot through the air indiscriminately.
The lead oxen bellowed and reared, giving Cor something she could concentrate on. She hauled hard on the reins and whacked their broad backs with her stick, poking and shouting, reminding the stupid beasts that they were more afraid of her than of anything in front of them. The sledge lurched forward.
But there’s a truce! her mind cried.
First City is a bunch of sticklers for …
First City is losing. Badly. But they knew Narroways couldn’t afford to prolong the war. They were ready to risk two minor members of their Noble house in a gambit to knock what was left of Silver’s support out from under her.
And they wouldn’t feel it was much of a risk if they knew that Heart of the Seablade was a Heretic.
Cor shouted at the oxen and smacked at them with the reins. The big, stupid beasts bellowed and stamped forward. Hands grabbed her arm and for a split second she saw an angry round face and felt herself dragged off-balance. Jay almost fell forward and smashed a heavy fist across the stranger’s mouth. The hands fell away and Cor regained her footing.