Pamra chewed thoughtfully, lulled by his informality into an almost social feeling. “I sort of like recruiting. It’s a pain dealing with all the crazy stories they have about us, of course, but I guess I heard the same ones when I was that age.”
“Better you than me, young one. I hate mixing with the damn other-castes. You’d think they’d been touched by Potipur not five minutes before, the way they look and act.” His face was hostile, nostrils pinched.
Pamra shrugged. “Nobody could be any worse than my father’s family was. I just ignore them.”
“Well, you can’t ignore them on recruitment duty. You’re expected to be reasonably diplomatic, and that’s what pisses me off most about it.” He flushed, abruptly aware of his manner, not the appropriate one for a mentor to a junior, certainly. “Why were you so late?” Now he was her mentor once more, demanding an accounting.
“I shouldn’t have been. Except Delia was after me Senior Ilze. May I not be judged harshly if I ask a question which may be … not in accord with doctrine?”
He gave her a dramatically astonished look, lifting one eyebrow. “A question, Pamra? From you? Are the final days upon us?”
She flushed. “I know I don’t ask many. I wouldn’t ask this one, either, except for old Delia. She came from the next town east, Wilfom, many years ago. She has a sister there, or thinks she does. She’d be a very old woman … “
“And Delia wants to go east to see her sister?”
Pamra nodded, relieved not to have had to say it. “She says some do.”
Ilze nodded. “It’s quite true. If you asked an occasional question, you’d have known it. It’s common talk.”
“Where? How? There are guards! There’s a fence!”
“Through the workers’ pit at night. They go in there and sneak up the other side of the pit where there’s no fence.”
Pamra’s face wrinkled in concentration. At the other side of the pit, marked by a burning lantern, was the Sorting place. Surely … “But they might encounter the Sorters on the Sorting ground! That’s sacrilege!”
He paused, eyebrows drawn together almost as though she had angered him. He seemed about to say something, and then changed his mind. “I’ve answered your question, Pamra.”
“That’s the only way?” She was disappointed. “Isn’t there some way to send a message?”
“That’s much easier. You go to the east gate and pay one of the gate guards on the Wilforn side of the fence to take the message into his town, and you tell him you’ll pay him that much again to bring you an answer. That’s not really licit, but it’s not heretical, either. It’s quite common. Even if it’s reported, it would only count a day’s duty against you. The gate guards might abuse an old woman, but they will not trouble an Awakener. You can tell your old nursemaid that after recruitment tomorrow.”
But she could not wait until then. She went early in the morning, moved by an urgency she did not try to identify, to explain how a message could be sent.
To which Delia nodded, frowning a little vacant frown, as though this was not what she had wanted at all, as though this new suggestion had come between her and the comfort of some long decided action with which she had reassured herself in time of pain.
“Just get the message written, Delia. Exactly what you want to say, just as you’d like to say it to your sister-Miri, wasn’t it?-and I’ll take it to the border either tonight or tomorrow. Tonight, if I can. Much better to do that than go sneaking off through the worker pits in the dead of night. That’s not something I want you to do. I’ll be back as soon as I can, and you have it ready.” And she went off, late already, looking over her shoulder to catch that same expression of stubborn puzzlement, which she saw with a catch in her throat, wondering if she could not somehow have been more convincing and more hopeful.
But then it was all driven from her mind by the day’s work, so different a day from the one before. As she went toward the plaza she passed the merchants’ hall and the gardeners’ mart and the guildhalls and artists’ council houses, and from each of them representatives were coming out in the customary garb of their professions and guilds, all wandering in the same direction. They took no notice of her, or she of them, but each one of them had to give way when she came by, and she knew it ate into them like acid. “Scoff and sneer,” she murmured to herself, “but stand aside when I come by, other-caste.”