The Tyrant's Law (Dagger and the Coin)

show that this was the habitation of humanity. The path was obscure. Hidden. Sometimes the way doubled back, often under high trees where archers might perch. There were no great stone walls and no place to build them, but the forest itself was a kind of fortification.
    It seemed like half a day before they reached the first unmistakable signs of human habitation. A stone-paved yard with thatched huts all around it seemed to emerge from the trees like someone walking out of a fog. That the stone was only marked by a green patina where moss had been scraped away, that the fissures in the pavement hadn’t become home to saplings was evidence enough that the place was maintained. Holding the forest at bay, even for so small a space as this, would have been a lifetime’s work. And at the far side of the yard, a massive statue. Perhaps it had once been of a human—Southling or Jasuru or Firstblood. The long ages had eroded it until it was almost shapeless. At at its base, a larger hut with a plume of pale smoke rising from the hole at its top.
    The bowman turned to them, lifting a hand.
    “You will wait here,” he said. “I will ask our mother if she will speak to you.”
    “I am very grateful,” Kit said, lowering himself to the stone.
    Marcus sat too. The other warriors who had escorted them remained standing and armed, but Marcus felt no sense of threat from them. The way they held themselves was more proprietary, as if they’d brought some bizarre bird back from the hunt. Before long, people began to emerge from the shadows of the huts. Children haunted the doorways, wide eyes so large they seemed about to consume their faces. And then women and older men, yawning and fresh from sleep. Marcus had forgotten more than once that Southlings were more comfortable in the night. The dragons had made them that way. They came out slowly, one at at time, and then in groups, until something between thirty and forty men, women, and children talked and laughed and pointed from the edge of the yard. There were more than could have fit into the little huts, so Marcus assumed that there were structures under the ground—tunnels or old ruins or some such—where the villagers spent their sleeping days.
    He wouldn’t have been surprised to sit on the smooth stones, legs crossed and aching and the insects making a feast of him, until the middle of the night. Instead, the village mother took pity on them. The sun had sunk behind the forest canopy, the sky turned to rose and gold with only the first hints of twilight’s ash, when the bowman returned with an old man who wore a chain of gold around his neck and brightly dyed cloth around his elbows and knees. The cunning man, or anyway a Southling village’s version of one. The cunning man walked a slow circle around them, his breath thick and heavy. Marcus felt the air on the back of his neck stirring. Kit watched solemnly as the cunning man finished his course, clapped his hands together, and shouted. A burst of light and sudden, vicious cold, and then the cunning man was walking up to them, grinning. His hand touched Marcus’s shoulder, and the two men nodded to one another, smiling. A little show of magic and force to keep them in line, then, followed by welcome. Kit’s grin was warm, open, friendly. The wall of guards dissolved, and the villagers came closer, as pleased and curious as if Marcus had been a two-headed puppy. A girl of perhaps six years came up to Marcus, holding out a broad green leaf as a present. When he took it, she giggled and fled.
    “The mother rests now, but she will speak to you soon,” the cunning man said. “Very soon.”
    “Give her our thanks,” Marcus said.
    The haze went grey and then black. No starlight could fight its way through the thick air, and the moon was only a lighter quarter of the sky. Around them, the life of the village bustled. Children carried great buckets of water slung on sticks. A group of old men sat by one of the huts smoking something sweeter than tobacco and weaving long, thin strips of bark into rope. Another group of armed men arrived carrying a dead animal that looked like a longskulled boar, and for a moment the two strange travelers became only the second most interesting event of the night. Men and women watched as the animal was skinned and butchered. The carcass was being rubbed with a brown savory-smelling paste and prepared for the cookfire when the cunning man appeared again at Marcus’s