An untrained Sasturi might fall into a trance for hours after eating a ghost, but Martiveht was an adept. Her fingers raced along the strings of her hand loom. The ghosts of the bandits were tethered in the cloth, not in her consciousness. And Iyedraeka stepped forward to steady her. The princess faced her and stroked her hair and said, “You are Martiveht of Raensapal. You love the fruit of the vashdand tree. You own five fine combs and always keep your hair neat. Whenever you pass by children who are playing with a ball, you stop to play with them. Or you want to, and you look sad if some duty keeps you from joining them. You wore a golden mask with pahrsochna feathers at the New Years festival before we came north to Rahasabahst. Three gallants flirted with you, and I was very jealous. You danced the carahnaheicho with two of them, and the third swore that he would never dance again.”

  The scream slowly faded from Martiveht’s face. Her beautiful features rearranged themselves, and they seemed to catch the light from some other reality, perhaps from the dance that Iyedraeka was describing, performed under a sun that burned hotter in far off Raensapal. The Martiveht whom Iyedraeka described, the playful, dancing woman, was not the Martiveht I knew, although I have to admit that I didn’t know her well at all. Not then. It made me uncomfortable. I was beginning to wonder if I knew anyone.

  Yaendrid was also studying Martiveht closely, and as soon as the scream faded from her face she said, “We shouldn’t waste time.”

  “Don’t rush her,” Iyedraeka hissed, and I had never seen her express anger before.

  But Martiveht had recovered. She blinked at Yaendrid, then grimaced, and the cloth on her handloom gave a little twitch. That was all we knew of the ghosts, but Martiveht’s hard eyes and stern expression told us that she’d sent them out ahead of us, to survey our path.

  Vaenahma and I rolled the dead bodies into the underbrush. The prince helped with one of them, and then decided that he needed to go back to comforting Iyedraeka. That’s the way with princes. They’ll join you in the real work, but only as a symbolic gesture. Never mind.

  We resumed walking, only now Yaendrid stayed close to Martiveht. The Sasturi seemed to accept her presence, and murmured little reports as we walked. I was the rearguard again. I didn’t like that Vaenahma had killed those boys. It was true that they were bandits, and I have already stated my dislike of bandits. But it is also true that some who start as bandits grow into fine adults. For some, banditry is just a moment of life, not much different from getting your menses for the first time or having your balls drop. Maybe the boy with vomit down his robes would mend his ways. Perhaps he had some future as an arborist or a riverboat man. Thoughts of the river made me remember Cloehen, and I hoped that the boy and his elephant had made it through.

  Our little column came to a stop. I went forward to see what was happening. “There’s an inn up ahead,” Martiveht was saying. Her long fingers were plucking at the threads of her loom.

  Yaendrid nodded. “Loesohso’s Grove.” She glanced at me and explained. “Neutral territory. All of the bandit kings and queens leave the Grove alone. It’s the only place to get a good drink in the forest.”

  “Do you drink there often?” I asked, trying to keep my tone casual.

  Her big features sharpened. “Don’t be angry with me, Haendil. You know my history.”

  “I didn’t realize that you were still mingling with the bandits. Still doing research, are you?”

  “Don’t be bitter. There isn’t time. Listen, Sasturi, can you tell what’s happening in the grove?”

  Martiveht plucked at the loom. “The inn is nearly empty, but there are a lot of people about. There are beer barrels stacked everywhere. As if they’re preparing to hold a feast.”

  “Someone’s using it as a base,” Yaendrid said.

  “There’s a big man sitting at the bar in the inn.”

  “What does he look like?”

  “Big, like I said. He’s drawing something on some paper.”

  “Paper?” Vaenahma interjected, and their tone was surprisingly sharp.

  “Yes. He has an ink pot and a stylus.”

  “Is he drawing cats?” Yaendrid asked.

  Martiveht was quiet for a moment, concentrating. Maybe trying to force the ghost to go closer. Vaenahma grew impatient. “Have the ghosts been there before? Surely they know what’s going on. They probably came from there.”

  “Leave her alone,” Iyedraeka said.

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  “In the old days a sasturi would receive a ghost’s memories.”

  “And she could,” the princess said sharply, “if you wanted us to rest here for hours, or even days. But that’s not what you wanted. You wanted scouts.”

  The sweet, innocent princess was growing sharp, there on that forested path, with her face speckled by leaf shadow and the scent of decaying tree trunks in the air. Sharp because she was protecting Martiveht. Sharp for the right reasons, that is. She would have made a very good queen.

  I’ve only seen a sasturi trance once, and I was glad that I wasn’t forced to see it again, there in the Singing Woods. When I was a young guardsman, a widow was murdered in an attic, and our captain insisted on calling in a sasturi. One of his lieutenants pulled him aside to argue with him, moving a hand up and down as if he could sand the captain’s foolishness away. But the captain’s intentions weren’t worn down by the lieutenant’s words, and the sasturi was called.

  Now, everyone knows that no one remembers their own death. I asked my boys about this once when we were having dinner together in the garden. Nolio told me that we don’t really have direct memories. He said that when something happens to us, we need to figure out what it means. So we talk to our friends about it, or tell ourselves a story about it, and it is only when we’ve made a decision about the meaning of events that the memories get written in our minds. Thaeto didn’t like this, and he argued with his brother. Of course we have memories, he said. If we didn’t we wouldn’t have anything to talk to our friends about. We have to remember that something happened to us if we’re going to make meaning of it. Grandahlae rolled her eyes, and my oldest granddaughter threw a piece of biscuit at her younger sister. But my sons were well and truly at it, fencing through ideas, as they liked to do.

  Nolio conceded that we experienced an event. But we experience a lot of events every day, and not all of them become memories. What did you eat for breakfast? Who was the first person who spoke to you yesterday? What did they say? Who did you meet on the road, or speak to in the market, or nod to in the wine shop? Do you really remember all of it? And that was just yesterday. What about a nineday ago, or a moon cycle ago? If you remember anything specifically, it’s because it meant something to you. Some event rose above the clamor of your days because you gave it meaning.

  Thaeto pointed out that one could just write things down. Keep a log of all of the events of one’s days. Nolio, who is always conciliatory, agreed that it would help. But the dead can’t write anything down about their deaths. They can’t chat about their deaths, or muse about their deaths, or sing little ditties about their deaths. Their ability to make meaning is ended, and memory ends with it.

  That’s when I told the story of the murdered widow, and horrified my grandchildren, so that Grandahlae became annoyed with me and slapped at my arm.

  The sasturi that our captain summoned was a rogue, one of the old Scribe Sasturi that Libreigia had created almost three hundred years before. I don’t know why the captain chose a Scribe Sasturi for the task, as they are all mad and it’s hard to pick apart their ravings and discover the truth. Maybe no Loom Sasturi would come, as they tend to eschew murder investigations and anything else that might make them insane. This particular sasturi wore a black lace veil, with large gaps between the tatting, windows into her madness. She had welts all over her face, and no teeth, and as she shuffled into the room she picked a strand of hair off of the captain’s shoulder and ate it. It was probably the hair of the dead widow, whose body was naked on the bed. A pretty woman of middle years, who wore rings on her toes. She had been stabbed three times in the chest. I had glanced at the wounds once and then stared at those toes, trying to keep from vomiting. As I said, I was very young.

  Now, all sasturi use some method of binding their minds to this world, so that they don’t become lost in the memories of the dead. The Loom Sasturi use their weaving, and the Poison Sasturi use potions, of course. The Scribe Sasturi use writing, and their incoherent scribbling was much prized by collectors, and distracted the scholars of Haunts and Scribbles for many years. This particular medium had a stylus and a roll of paper that had already been written on many times. It was torn in places and black with ink, and not one word was distinguishable from another.

  We couldn’t see the widow’s ghost, of course, it being daytime, but we sensed its presence, and when the sasturi opened her toothless mouth and stretched her face into a rictus expression, we felt an easing in the atmosphere of the room. But that ease was broken within moments, for the old medium fell on top of the dead woman in the bed. She began to writhe there in the most unseemly and terrifying way. It caused all of us to panic. I can still remember the captain barking orders, telling us to tear the old crone away from the corpse. We managed to get her onto the floor, where she shook for hours, the front of her foul robes covered in the widow’s blood. We took turns watching over her, and I hate the memory of that terrible room, of standing by the window as the sasturi thumped and squirmed on the floor, her face stretched into that horrible expression and her robes turning white, so that the widow’s blood showed stark against the cloth.

  Only, if Nolio is right, these events, in themselves, were not really a memory. We were all very angry at the captain afterwards, and he was very shame-faced. But we did catch the murderer. When she returned to that scrap of mind that could be called her sanity, the Scribe Sasturi told us that the widow had three lovers, and that one of them carried a long knife at his hip. Of course, we might have found this out just by asking the neighbors. After the miscreant was hanged, we gathered in our favorite tavern and hashed it all out. We argued over what had happened, and many of us said that it was time for the captain to retire. He had probably only summoned the old hag to fulfill a kind of fantasy that many guard captains have. We all speculate about the usefulness of mediums in our work, and it doesn’t matter if someone tells us about the many failed experiments that have gone before. Perhaps everyone should see a Sasturi become well and truly possessed once in their lifetime. At any rate, this tavern argument settled the memory in my mind. Or created the memory, maybe. I probably told the others about how terrible it was to wait alone in that attic room, and they probably told me about how terrible it was for them. Maybe I wasn’t even the one who was on guard as the color leeched from the medium’s robes. But in my memory, I was.

  This is all to explain why Martiveht didn’t just call one of the ghosts back to her and force it to give her a true lay of the land. Vaenahma was right. It would have been safer if we had known for certain who that figure at the bar was. And why Loesohso’s Grove was full of bandits. But Martiveht was much practiced in not going insane. The ghosts who ride the sasturi take too much. They steal part of a sasturi’s essence away with them when they leave. And maybe that’s why we all lose pieces of our memory if we don’t trap them by talking about them. The ghosts of time flit through us too quickly, stealing much of what has happened to us.

  When Might a Hero Find His Rest. If you want to read the little world-building stories I'm writing as I go along, go to my Patreon page.

  Copyright KPB Stevens, 2025

  The Dancing Masks of Raensapal

  from The Letters of Mahrmets Buefol