I didn’t think it was possible to feel bored so soon after having nearly died, but the Argosi proved me wrong. I’d assumed her version of ‘negotiations’ would amount to a few carefully worded threats. It turned out to be a verbal contract that must have been almost as long as the final peace treaty that ended the last war between the Daroman empire and the Jan’Tep arcanocracy. By the time the two mages had started making their way back down the road, I was fairly sure they’d forgotten why they’d come here in the first place.
My own legs and back were stiff from sitting silently next to Seneira for the past two hours. She’d dozed off a couple of times, leaning her head against my shoulder. It felt odd to be so close to someone about whom I knew nothing – especially someone who seemed quite convinced I was the local village idiot. For her part, she seemed to have decided that life was already as unpleasant as it could get and she might as well sleep through as much of it as she could.
‘What’d I miss?’ Reichis asked, dropping a partially eaten rabbit carcass on the ground next to where Seneira and I sat.
‘Oh spirits of earth and air, what is that smell?’ she asked, pushing herself up and swinging her stick in wild arcs as she stumbled away, swearing about idiot farmhands and their stupid talking animals. I didn’t bother mentioning that I’d never been to a farm in my life.
Reichis was profoundly offended by her outrage. He picked the rabbit back up in his mouth and muttered, ‘None for her, I guess.’
‘Will you people keep it down?’ came a weary, croaking voice from near the campfire. ‘Can’t a body die in peace?’
I jumped to my feet and ran to Ferius. Her face was pale and her hair lank, but when her eyes found me she gave me a little smirk that loosened the clamps around my chest and let me breathe easier for the first time since the fight. ‘Hey, kid,’ she said, reaching up a hand to put it against my cheek. Her eyes narrowed as she listened to the incessant stream of Seneira’s swearing. ‘Your little friend’s got quite the vocabulary.’
‘Her name’s Seneira,’ I replied. ‘She doesn’t think much of me.’
‘Well, you take some getting used to.’ Ferius passed a hand over her ribs, her fingers stopping at the bandages wrapped around her torso. ‘Did you take up medicine ways while I was napping?’
‘Hello, sister,’ the other Argosi said, coming to stand next to me. She reached behind her neck and unfastened the clasp holding the wide strip of cloth that hid the lower half of her face. I guess I’d assumed she must have some kind of disfigurement, but underneath the covering she looked perfectly ordinary to me. Her skin was darker than Ferius’s, more Berabesq than Daroman, but she could just as easily have been Jan’Tep or one of the borderland folk. Centuries of migrations across the seas had led to a mix of cultures on this continent, bonded more by purpose than by racial origin.
‘Kid?’ Ferius asked.
‘Yeah?’
‘During the fight, did I get hit on the head real hard?’
‘Not that I saw.’
She sighed. ‘That’s what I figured. Hey, Rosie.’
I turned to the other Argosi. ‘Rosie? That’s your name?’
The woman looked pained. And annoyed. ‘The Path of the Wild Daisy is one that too often takes solace in simple amusements.’
‘Got that right,’ Ferius said. She reached out a hand to me. ‘Help me up, kid. No sense putting this off.’
Something about her expression made me wary. ‘Putting what off?’ I asked.
She struggled just to sit up, wincing from the pain. ‘Gotta kick Rosie’s ass.’
‘Wait – what? You can’t be serious. She helped save us! Besides, you have three broken ribs. You nearly died!’
‘Yeah, well, life is short. Gotta get to the important things while you still can.’
I glanced over to where Seneira was running a brush across the donkey’s coat. Maybe she can tell me what the hell’s going on.
The other Argosi seemed neither concerned nor amused. ‘I’m afraid we’ll have to put off our – what is that word you find so entertaining? “Wrastlin’”?’ She knelt down and reached into the folds of her garments once again, this time pulling out a deck of cards. ‘I have news.’
Ferius pursed her lips, staring at the cards, then reached into her black leather waistcoat and pulled out her own deck. This one I recognised as her true deck – each suit a representation of a people and its ways, the ‘concordances’ as she called them. The deck held other cards too, special cards that Ferius said were unique to each Argosi; the so-called ‘discordances’ that depicted people or events that could change the course of history. ‘Let’s get to it then,’ Ferius said. ‘But next time you and me are goin’ round and round, Rosie.’
The other woman sat opposite her and began laying cards from her deck face down between them. Ferius did the same.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked. ‘A minute ago you were ready to fight and now you’re—’
Ferius looked up at me. ‘What does it look like we’re doing, kid? We’re playing cards.’
The first time I’d met Ferius she’d taught me dozens of card games. I had a good memory for this sort of thing, and I was pretty sure I remembered them all. Whatever game she played with Rosie was something I’d never seen before. It seemed to consist of picking up seven of your opponent’s cards at random, examining them and laying them out in a pattern. The other player would then do likewise. The process would repeat itself with new cards and, once they ran out, they would reshuffle the decks, never seeming to arrive at an end point.
Seneira sat next to me. ‘Don’t suppose your Argosi ever told you why they use the cards instead of talking to each other like normal people?’ she asked.
‘I think … I think there’s more in the images on the cards than we might recognise,’ I said, my eyes still glued to the strange game playing out before me. ‘And the patterns they use when they’re arranging the cards … maybe they can convey things that can’t be spoken with words.’
Seneira groaned. ‘Now you sound like one of them. I was really hoping there would be someone sensible I could talk to.’
‘She can talk to me,’ Reichis chittered, sauntering over to sit next to us. ‘I’m the most sensible one here.’
‘Reichis says you can—’
‘Please don’t tell me when your squirrel cat speaks to you,’ Seneira said.
‘Um, okay. Why not?’
‘Because I’m pretty sure squirrel cats don’t actually talk and I was hoping to pretend you weren’t crazy for a little while longer.’
Reichis snorted. ‘She has a point, Kellen. I always thought you were a bit—’
‘Shut up, Reichis.’
The bizarre card game went on for another hour or so. Periodically Ferius would break the silence with some offhand comment like, ‘Well, well, who knew the Gitabrian merchants’ guild would ever sort that mess out,’ or, ‘Figured some Daroman general would get to that old fool eventually.’
The other Argosi – I was still having trouble picturing her as a ‘Rosie’ – seemed to prefer silence, so much so that after Ferius had spoken aloud for the ninth or tenth time she asked, ‘Does it serve some purpose to go on prattling like this?’
‘Serves me just fine. You feelin’ a touch antsy? You could always get on that donkey of yours and ride into town to find us some liquor.’
‘Liquor. Smoking reeds. This silly borderland slang you put on. You lose your way, sister.’
Ferius set her hand of cards down on her lap. ‘A body don’t get lost unless it gets too fixed on one destination, sister.’
The other woman gave a soft snort that managed to convey an ocean’s worth of derision as she nodded towards me. ‘Is this how you teach him the Argosi tenets? By turning them into country sayings and amusing anecdotes?’
‘You think if I say them fancier it’ll make some kind of difference?’
‘From what I’ve seen of your student, I doubt it will make any difference at all. He used magic when he shouldn’t have, drawing the Jan’Tep mages right to this area and risking my charge’s life in the process. Then he panicked in the fight, and all of you would have died had I not been there to save you. Were he to live a hundred years I doubt you’d make an Argosi out of him.’
Reichis pawed at my leg. ‘Hey, Kellen, I think that Argosi bitch just insulted you.’
‘Yeah,’ I whispered back. ‘I don’t think she likes me much.’
‘She likes you just fine,’ Ferius said. I always forget how good her hearing is. ‘Rosie’s just trying to distract me so I won’t figure out that she’s been holding back a card this whole time.’
A hint of a smile crept over the other Argosi’s features. ‘And you seem to think you can goad me into ignoring the fact that you’re obviously holding back one of your own.’
‘What, this old thing?’ Ferius flicked her wrist and a card appeared between her thumb and forefinger. ‘Must’ve fallen into my sleeve when I was shufflin’ the deck.’
She handed the card to the other woman, who examined it for a long time before turning it over and dropping it to the ground. It was one of Ferius’s discordance cards – the one she’d painted to look like me, the one with the word ‘Spellslinger’ written at the bottom. ‘You’ve given it the right image, but the wrong name. That’s the difference between you and me, sister. You follow the path of sentiment rather than enlightenment.’
‘Yeah? Why don’t you enlighten me then?’
The other Argosi held a card in the palm of her hand. She flipped her hand over once … twice … on the third time the card was face down. Even I could see from the back that it wasn’t the same card that had been there a second ago. ‘This is the sign we must follow now.’
Ferius started to reach for it, but then pulled her hand back. ‘The difference between you and me, sister, is that I’ve never needed to pretend to see the wind in order to know which way it’s blowin’.’ She called over to Seneira. ‘Hey, little miss. How about you come on over here for a proper introduction?’
Seneira complied, standing up and swinging her stick in wide arcs as she slowly approached them. I followed along, nervous that exhaustion and the uneven ground might lead to a fall – though absolutely determined not to repeat my previous disastrous attempt at chivalry. Ferius watched me with a raised eyebrow and asked, ‘You really buying the whole blind thing, kid? Thought you were sharper than that.’
‘What? You mean she’s—’
‘Blind people get real good at making their way through the world – they don’t stumble around the way she does. They find themselves a proper cane, not some broken stick they picked up off the ground.’ To the Argosi she said, ‘You told a falsehood a minute ago, sister. It wasn’t Kellen who drew the bounty hunters here; it was the girl they wanted. You brought this trouble to us.’
Seneira stopped a few feet away. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean for anyone else to get hurt because of me.’ Tears began to appear at the bottom edge of the cloth covering her eyes, sliding down her cheeks.
‘Ain’t nobody’s fault exactly,’ Ferius said, slapping a hand against the bandages covering her ribs. ‘I don’t reckon you asked for this trouble any more than Kellen did.’ She nodded to Seneira. ‘You can go ahead and take that silly blindfold off now, girl.’
‘Wait … What’s going on here?’ I asked.
Ferius reached over, plucked the card from the other Argosi’s hand and sent it spinning high up into the air at the same time as Seneira untied the knot holding the cloth around her head. Just as the blindfold came loose, the card landed at my feet, face up. It depicted a girl with black marks twisting around her right eye. When I looked up, I found myself staring into Seneira’s green eyes and found those same markings.
‘Told you I wasn’t blind,’ she said, letting the strip of cloth fall to the ground. ‘I just couldn’t see.’
I reached down to pick up the card, the discordance that the Argosi woman had painted because she believed it signified a force that could change the course of history. I saw now the word she’d written at the bottom of the card.
‘Shadowblack’.