As it was, Gamesmistress Joumerie returned to me that evening to say she had found the place.
“The Wastes of Bleer,” she informed me, licking her lips at the taste of the place, “lie to the north. A highland, the canyons of the Graywater to the west, the vast valley of the River Reave to the east where lies Learner or Learners, called variously. If you intend to go there, I could recommend the road to Betand and the eastern route from there over Graywater. There is a high bridge there at Kiquo, the only one for many leagues. Or, River Reave is navigable as far as Reavebridge, or even Learner in season. There are trails into the high country from there.”
“What Games, Gamesmistress?” I asked her. “Is there any troubling there? What Demesnes are active?”
She snorted. “Wary are you? You are young to be so wary. My latest charts show little enough. The Dragon’s Fire purlieu lies north on River Reave, but there is no Game there currently or presently expected. Who knows what hidden Games may be toward? Or games of intrigue or desperation?” She fixed me with an eye yellow as a flitchhawk’s. “If you are that wary, lad, best enter my School House here and learn to dissemble as these girls do.”
I flushed at that. She went stalking away to the door, making the floor shake. In the doorway she stopped to speak more kindly, seeing she had hit me fair. “There is a cartographer in Xammer, in Artists’ Street, by name one Yggery. He is honest, so far as that goes, by which I mean he will not put anything in a map he knows to be false nor leave out anything he knows to be true. This means his maps are rather more blank than most. Still, if you have treasure enough, buy a map from him before you go north. And if you take Silkhands with you (for I can see the tip of my nose in a mirror in a good light), care for her. She has had more of Gaming than many of us, and has burned herself in caring for others.”
I had not honestly thought of taking Silkhands with me until that moment. I had not thought she would want to leave Vorbold’s House. Testing this notion, I asked her and was surprised to hear her say she would have made a trip north in any event.
“I go north to escort Jinian, my student,” she said. “I need a time away from Vorbold’s House. There are some here who turn their eyes from the students to the Gamesmistresses, and I am … weary of that.”
“Have you been molested?” I was angry and therefore blunt. I should have known better, for she laughed at me.
“In Vorbold’s House? Don’t be silly. Of course not. I have been sent proposals at intervals, and I have had to listen to a few representatives for the sake of … diplomacy. The offers have not been … unflattering.” She fell silent, thinking of something she did not share with me, then.
“Save to those like us who do not value flattery. I know I do not, and I presume you have not changed.”
The expression on her face as she uttered this last was one I knew she used in the classroom, alert, polite, both encouraging and cautionary. I could hear her speaking thus to her students, “Now, young ladies. We do not value flattery…” I giggled at the thought.
She stared at me for a moment as though I had lost my wits, then giggled with me. We ended up rolling onto the carpet to end in front of the fire, heads pillowed on various parts of our anatomies as we talked it over.
“I did sound properly Schoolhousy, didn’t l?” she asked. “Well, being Gamesmistress does that to you. Perhaps I am too young for it. I am only twenty-one after all. Many of the students are older than I.” She did not consider this remark at all important, but to me it came as a revelation. Only twenty-one. I was seventeen, almost eighteen, and she was only four years older? I had thought of her as … as … well, older-sisterly at least. I was suddenly aware of her thigh beneath my head and of a quickening pulse in my ears. I sat up too hastily, dumping her.