Sorcery Rising by Jude Fisher

thought that each day might bring new discoveries about the world and your life in it.
    He watched a nomad woman stride past in her voluminous silver-threaded robes of yeka wool; a man with his face tattooed from crown to chin; young lads laughing and running with a crew of mangy dogs. Little black goats and exotically feathered chickens. Whole tribes of children – all brown and gold skin and hair and flashing white teeth. A mule swayed past, burdened with saddlebags bulging with candles in every imaginable hue and shape, accompanied by a sharp-faced man carrying a dozen yard-high paper lanterns. However he had managed to keep them intact in the high winds of the Skarn Mountains, Aran could not imagine. He stared and stared and after a while became aware that something about his face felt stiff and odd. It took him a moment or two to realise that all this time he had been grinning from ear to ear.
    ‘You look to be enjoying yourself, Da.’
    He spun around. It was Katla, with butchered hair and a filthy tunic.
    ‘What will your mother say when she sees you?’ He looked her up and down in dismay. ‘It was all I could think to do.’
    Katla ran her fingers through the sweat-streaked crop. ‘I quite like it, actually. It doesn’t get in my eyes when I’m running.’ She grabbed his arm. ‘Aren’t they fine, the nomads, I mean? I saw them arrive from the top of that hill back there – they came down over a mountain pass!’
    ‘Aye.’ Aran scanned the passing procession. ‘They’re remarkable people, the Footloose. True explorers. Nothing can stand in their way once they’ve decided on their route, not mountains, nor forests, nor deserts.’
    Katla watched as his eyes went misty with longing. He was a frustrated nomad himself, she thought then, remembering the tales he had told of his ancestors’ travel into the wild parts of the world as they sat around a winter fire, and seeing his yearning burn so clearly, she felt as close to him as she had ever done in her life. ‘Imagine – crossing a desert, on the back of a yeka, with the sun on your face and the hot wind at your back,’ she said. ‘Or climbing up into the mountains where the snows never melt and you can see across all the continents of Elda.’
    But her father was not to be drawn. He hunched his shoulders as if he felt the burdens of his life pressing down on him. ‘You’re a lass,’ he said unnecessarily. ‘You’re not for exploring.’
    Distracted by the unfairness of this, his daughter bridled. ‘Why not? There are many women among the nomads: riding yeka, driving carts and wagons; and up there—’ she indicated the stockades ‘—I saw a woman in leather armour who looked as tough as any man. Why cannot I choose such a life? I can run faster than a man; and climb and swim and break a horse; aye, and fight, too.’
    ‘The nomads are different to us, Katla. They live by different rules. And as for sell-swords: they live by no rule at all.’
    Katla’s eyes flashed. ‘That sounds like freedom, to me.’
    Aran turned to face his daughter. ‘Eyran women run farms and houses and raise families. What greater power is there than to make a haven for others, to cultivate the land and bring new life into the world?’
    ‘Power?’ Katla sneered. ‘Eyran women get traded by their menfolk to the most convenient partner and put a good face on it; they bear child after child, only to lose them to the cold, or the fever, or to evil spirits – and if they grow to men they’ll only lose them to blood-feuds or the oceans! Women drudge from dawn to dusk and then till midnight, and have never a moment to themselves. That’s not the sort of power I ever wish to claim.’
    ‘Brave words, little sister!’
    Fent threw an arm around her shoulders. ‘Perhaps you’d rather marry an Istrian lord, like the fellow who just caused our da to cut all your hair off?’
    ‘Fent!’ Aran’s voice was sharp, but his younger son took no notice.
    ‘Darling