Proud and courageous she was, but also young. With quick, jerky movements, she pulled a pair of shabby packs out from under the bed. She tied the first one shut for travel, and retrieved clothing out of the other. Using her night rail as cover, she put on a pair of loose pants and a long, dark-colored tunic. After stuffing her sleeping shift back in the second pack, she secured it, too. She stood up, glanced out the room, and froze.
"Ushireh," she said and added with more urgency, "he's alive!"
Tier looked out and realized that the room looked over the square, allowing a clear view of the fire. Clearly visible in the heat of the flames, the dead man's body was slowly sitting upright - and from the sounds of it, frightening the daylights out of the men left to guard the pyre.
He caught her before she could run out of the room. "Upon my honor, mistress, he is dead," he said with low-voiced urgency. "I saw him as I rode in. His throat was cut and he was dead before they lit the fire."
She continued to struggle against his hold, her attention on the pyre outside.
"Would they have left so few men to guard a living man?" he said. "Surely you've seen funeral pyres before. When the flame heats the bodies they move."
In the eastern parts of the Empire, they burned their dead. The priests held that when a corpse moved in the flame it was the spirit's desire to look once more upon the world. Tier's old employer, the Sept, who had a Traveler's fondness for priests (that is to say, not much), said he reckoned the heat shrank tissue faster than bone as the corpse burned. Whichever was correct, the dead stayed dead.
"He's dead," Tier said again. "I swear to it."
She pulled away from him, but only to run back to the window. She was breathing in shaking, heaving gasps, her whole body trembling with it. If she'd done something of the same downstairs, he thought sourly, they wouldn't be looking to ride out in the rain without dinner.
"They were so afraid of him and his magic," she said in a low voice trembling with rage and sorrow. "But they killed the wrong one. Stupid solsenti, thinking that being a Traveler makes one a mage, and that being young and female makes me harmless."
"We can't afford to linger here," he said briskly, though his heart picked up its beat. He'd gotten familiar with mages, but that didn't make them any more comfortable to be around when they were angry. "Are you ready?"
She spun from the window, her eyes glowing just a little with the magic she'd amassed watching her brother's body burn.
Doubtless, he thought, if he knew exactly what she was capable of he'd have been even more frightened of her.
"There are too many here," he said. "Take what you need and come."
The glow faded from her eyes, leaving her looking empty and lost before she stiffened her spine, grabbed both bags resolutely, and nodded.
He put a hand on her shoulder and followed her out the door and down the stairs. The room had cleared remarkably - doubtless the men had been called to witness the writhing corpse.
"Best be gone before they get back," said the innkeeper sourly, doubtlessly worried about what would happen to his inn if the men returned after their newest fright to find the Traveler lass still here.
"Make sure and burn the curtains, too," said Tier in reply. There was nothing wrong with any of the furnishing in the room, but he thought it would serve the innkeeper right to have to spend some of Tier's money to buy new material for curtains.
The girl, bless her, had the sense to keep her head down and her mouth shut.
Out of the inn, he steered her into the stable, where the stable boy had already brought out his horse and saddled it. The Traveler handcart was set out, too. The girl was light, so Skew could certainly carry the two of them as far as the next village, where Tier might obtain another mount - but the handcart proposed more of a problem.
"We'll leave the cart," he said to the boy, not the Traveler. "I've no wish to continue only as fast as this child could haul a cart like that."
The boy's chin lifted. "M'father says you have to take it all. He doesn't want Traveler curses to linger