Taking Flight

Well, there was nothing to be feared from a little girl. He wondered, though, why she was staring like that. It was hard to tell in the evening gloom, but she appeared to have been crying.

Maybe her mother had beaten her, Kelder thought to himself. Maybe she was out here wishing she didn’t have to go home, envying Irith her age and beauty.

Maybe she even recognized Irith; after all, as Kelder had discovered, the Flyer was well-known along the Great Highway. At the moment she had no wings, but how many white-clad blondes were there in Angarossa?

How many blondes were there in all the Small Kingdoms, for that matter?

It suddenly occurred to Kelder for the first time that Irith might not be from the Small Kingdoms at all. Perhaps she was from one of the distant, barbaric realms far to the northwest, beyond the Hegemony of Ethshar-Tintallion, or Kerroa, maybe. It was said blondes were slightly more common in the north.

Wasn’t Tintallion in the middle of a civil war, at last report?

That might explain a great deal. It could explain her references to a war, and perhaps the rules were different there, and she had been able to apprentice at a younger age than twelve, which would explain why she seemed to have done so much for a girl of fifteen. If that was it, then she must have fled to the Small Kingdoms because they were about as far away from her angry master as she could possibly get.

It all hung together.

So Irith was Tintallionese? He looked at her speculatively, listened to her chatting with the merchant in Trader’s Tongue, and wished he knew some Tintallionese himself.

He forgot all about the little girl by the gate and listened to Irith and the merchant, trying to spot clues to the Flyer’s origin. Her accent didn’t sound particularly northwestern to him, but then, he had never actually heard anyone from Ethshar or beyond, only local people imitating them. There was no reason to think that barbarians would have accents much like the people of the northwestern Small Kingdoms.

Irith didn’t seem to have any noticeable accent of her own at all, really; she spoke Trader’s Tongue with the sharp simplicity of an experienced traveler. She spoke Trader’s Tongue better than did the merchant she was haggling with, in fact.

Kelder considered. He could just ask her where she was from, of course. Asking where a person came from was a harmless and natural thing to do.

He would wait until the appropriate time, though, when he had a chance to bring it up in the course of the conversation; she was annoyed enough by his questions about demonology, and asking her out of the blue would be rude.

Irith turned away; the cloth merchant called a “final” offer after her, but she just laughed and walked away, with Kelder close beside her.

“You never did plan to buy anything, did you?” he asked.

She smiled and winked. “Of course not,” she said. “What would I do with a bolt of black brocade on the road to Shan, carry it over my shoulder?” She laughed again, then paused, and added, “If I were staying in town it might be different. It’s good fabric.”

Kelder nodded.

“The inn is down this way,” Irith told him, pointing at a narrow alleyway.

“Really?” he said, dubiously.

“Really,” she replied. “It’s a shortcut, a back way. I’ll show you.”

She led the way, and he followed. A few feet into the passage-for it was little more than that, a corridor between buildings, not a street-he glanced back at the market.

That young girl who had been watching them from the gate was now standing near the cloth merchant’s stall, and still watching them. Something about her made him uneasy.

“That girl’s watching us,” he said to Irith.

She turned and looked, then shrugged and walked on. “People do that sometimes,” she said.

He took another look, and then he, too, shrugged and walked on.

The alleyway opened out into a small kitchen yard; to one side a bantam cock stared at them through the slats of his coop, a well and windlass occupied a corner, and a big gray cat slept on the sill of a candelit window beside a heavy black door. Irith marched directly across and rapped on the door.

A sliding panel opened, and a nervous face peered out.

“Hello, Larsi,” Irith said. “It’s me.”

“The Flyer?” a woman’s voice asked.

Irith nodded.

The panel slid shut, and the latch rattled. The gray cat stirred slightly. Kelder took a look back up the alleyway.

The girl in the blue tunic was running down the passageway toward them.

The door opened, and Irith stepped up on the granite threshold. The person she had addressed as Larsi, a plump woman of forty or so, beckoned for her to enter. “I brought a friend,” Irith said, gesturing at Kelder.

Kelder saw the expression on the little girl’s face as it caught the light that spilled from the open door, and on a sudden impulse he said, “Two friends.”

“You will be a champion of the lost and forlorn,” Zindre had said, and that child certainly looked lost and forlorn.