Havenstar Read Free Page B

8-11
     
     
    On the
outskirts of Kibbleberry village a party of Tricians rode past the
mapmaker’s shop at a brisk trot: six women and five men, guarded by
twenty of the Defenders and followed by a baggage train of servants
and kinesis-chantors. The Tricians might have been clad in the
normal brown and gray of the unencoloured, but their clothes were
of the finest deer leathers, soft linens and plush goat wool; the
domain-symbols they wore around their necks were of gold, some even
studded with jewel-stones although it was doubtful Chantry would
have approved of that. The Defenders, all of them as noble as those
they guarded, were lavishly accoutred and armed.
    In the shop,
Keris Kaylen laid her work aside to watch them pass. Even the
servants are better dressed and mounted than anyone in
Kibbleberry , she thought. She felt no envy. Tricians and their
retinue were as remote from her as the forests of the Eighth
Stability, even though fellowships such as this one passed along
the road often enough. She’d never spoken to one of their number
and had no reason to think she ever would; none of them ever
stopped. If they had needed a map, the purchase would have been
done long since through an intermediary. Tricians rarely made
commercial transactions themselves.
    These were
bound for the Unstable, yet they seemed happy, laughing and joking
and flirting and never thinking about the dangers ahead once they
crossed the kinesis chain. They were young, they were beautiful,
they seemed carefree—yet Keris would not have changed places with
any of them. Too many of these same young men would lose their
lives one day as Defenders; too many of those young women would
raise their children alone, only to see their sons die or be
tainted in the Unstable just as their husbands had been. The very
word ‘Trician’ was derived from some longer and more ancient
expression supposed to have meant ‘of my father’s arming.’ Tricians
were born to bear arms, or to marry those who did, just as their
parents had. It was not a life Keris envied.
    Better, she
thought, to be a canny ley-lit mapmaker like her father, who was
scornful of noisy young Tricians and their arms and their
delicately-bred horses. ‘In the Unstable they and their chantors
just attract trouble,’ he had remarked once. ‘Better to be
solitary. Wiser to be quietly elusive, than to be challenging.
Never take your pilgrimage with a guide that hires Defenders, Keri.
It means the fellow doesn’t know his job.’
    One of the
young men saw her looking out of the shop door and winked. The girl
next to him giggled and said something that made him laugh, then
they were all gone from her sight. With a shrug, Keris lowered her
eyes once more to her work. None of them mattered.
    And then her
head jerked up again as she realised what she had just seen—beyond
the road, beyond the fields and the wood. Or rather what she had
not seen.
    There was a
line of mountains beyond the stab, and on a clear day it was
possible to see the whole range from the shop. Keris had been able
to name all the main peaks since she was just four years old: the
Jag, the Oven, the Shadow…the Axe Head…the Snood and the Wimple.
All told, they were the Impassables. And now the Axe Head was
missing. For three days they’d all been hidden by cloud, but now
that the weather had cleared—
    In a daze she
slipped off her stool and went to stand in the doorway, to stare.
It was true. It really had gone. There was the range, there were
all the other peaks, but the Axe Head had vanished. There was a
space on the skyline that gaped vacantly like the cavity left by a
pulled tooth.
    She whirled
from the door, wanting to run inside to tell someone, but then
stopped. There was only her mother, and it would be better if she
was not bothered. Not now. Keris sighed. Not for the first time,
she wished her father was home.
    And then she
remembered the roof-mender at work returfing part of the barn roof.
He wasn’t a learned