Followed by Fros(31)

Lo was the distraction I needed.

“You say you study languages,” he said in Northlander, twisting his camel’s reins around his bronze fingers. “How many do you know?”

“Fluently? Only three, not including my native,” I admitted. “Four, if you count my own handtalk.”

He raised a brow. “Handtalk?”

“A signed code that I made with a friend back home,” I said, thinking of Ashlen. I wondered how her last year of schooling had gone, and whether or not she had married by now. “Most of the words are done with one hand, and there is a signal for each letter of the alphabet, so we can spell out words we don’t have signs for. It drops things like articles and auxiliary verbs, which really are more modern inventions. It’s all present tense, unless past is specified.”

I waved my hand down without thought, the signal for past tense.

Lo steered his mount around a hole in the ground before saying, “And this handtalk, you communicated efficiently with it?”

“It was as efficient as two schoolgirls needed it to be,” I said with a smile, remembering long-ago days in the schoolyard together. One time, when Ashlen took the blame for something I had done, the teacher forced her to sit on the stairs during recess while the rest of us played. We used handtalk to chat about the boy she liked—Alvin Modder—the largest boy in class and perhaps the slowest. I signed to her each small thing he did, and she signed back how they were obviously signs of his unknown affection for her.

Lo shouted an order behind him to Qisam, telling him to ride ahead and scout.

“I-I could show you, if you’d like.”

He regarded me for a moment, almost in that amused way Sadriel so often affected, and I shivered at the comparison.

“How would you say,” he began, staring ahead, “‘a bandit stands fifty paces to the left’?”

“I don’t have a word for bandit,” I said, “so I would have to spell it out”—I moved my fingers to form the letters, many of which looked nothing like their scripted forms, to make it hard for others to guess the meaning—“or create a new sign for it. Bandits . . . They wear masks even here, yes? So perhaps . . .”

I split my fingers in the middle and laid my hand over one eye, forming half a mask. I then signed the rest of the sentence slowly: “stands fifty paces left.”

“That is useful,” Lo said, winding and unwinding the reins around his fingers. “To communicate in silence, assuming there is light to see. Simple enough for a soldier.”

“Even one with only one arm.”

The corner of his mouth formed a half smile. “That it can be done one handed makes it even more clandestine.”

His vocabulary—and astuteness—amazed me. I had thought my handtalk rather clever, but already the captain of Imad’s guard saw the roots of its fashion.

I nodded.

“And the subject comes first, as in Northlander?”

“Yes, but it can be changed for Hraric.”

“No,” he said. “It is clearer this way. How do you show geography or distance?”

I began the symbol for mountain, but from the corner of my eye I caught a spot of maroon. I turned my head and spied Sadriel atop one of the steep cliffs lining our path. Though the shadow of his broad-rimmed hat hid his eyes, I felt him watching me.

“Smeesa?”

I shook my head and turned back to Lo, who scanned the area that had captured my attention.

“I’m sorry. Just . . . cold.”

I cleared my throat, arched my hand, and pointed my fingers and thumb toward the ground. “Mountain,” I said. “To indicate a direction in regards to the mountain, you move the sign itself. Over,” I explained, moving my hand in a half circle, up and down, “or under”—I again drew a half circle, down and up.

Lo mimicked my signs. I glanced back to the mountain, but Sadriel had already disappeared.





CHAPTER 13





My mother always said that God made the world in perfect balance, an idea she used to explain the smallest fortunes and mishaps in our lives. I recall a time when she dropped a plate—a piece of my grandmother’s china, which we only used at winter solstice and on my father’s birthday—onto the kitchen floor. It shattered into hundreds of sharp porcelain pieces, some scattering as far as the hearth. Instead of crying or stomping her foot, as I was wont to do, she merely pressed her fists to her hips and said, “I knew that would happen. I found two extra eggs in the henhouse this morning.”

I thought of her and my grandmother’s china often in Ir.

Where men and women had been cheering in the streets of Kittat as we rode into town, we were only greeted in Ir by scowls. The townsfolk crossed their arms and patted their shoulders to ward off my evil spirits, though nothing they did could ward off my cold. Where Kittat’s sheila had welcomed us with open arms and appointed us an inn, the one in Ir questioned Lo roughly, only offering us shelter after he was provided with a written edict from Imad himself. My snow fell heavily that first night, and while some found relief from the water, I heard rumors of many falling ill, which terrified me. I told Lo of Bennion Hutches, and though he did not seem to take my warnings seriously, we left before nightfall on the second day rather than staying the designated three. I prayed earnestly that the ill would recover, hoping that the prayers of a coldhearted woman would be enough to help them.