Fortune's Fool by Mercedes Lackey

were wooden sandals so tall she was afraid to take a step in them. Not that she could have even if she had wanted to. She couldn’t move.
    The clothing was beautiful but—
    This was utterly ridiculous.
    Would The Tradition give her another chance? She closed her eyes and tested the potential magic about her.
    There was nothing there. She’d had her chance. Now she had to find some other way of getting the job done.
    Drat.
    With a sigh, she began divesting herself of all of the many garments. She would just have to do this the hard way.
    By dusk, she was quietly moving through the underbrush at the side of a road, following her instincts into the north. She had found a peasant farmer’s house with commoner’s clothing drying on bushes outside it. Figuring that one of those silk robes was probably worth more than a hundred outfits, she left all seven of the robes neatly folded beneath the bush, with the wig on top. She kept the jeweled hair sticks, the jade ornaments attached to the sash, and the handful of trinkets she found tucked inside sleeves, in the sash. She might not need them, but you never knew.
    How do women manage to do anything in this place? she thought crossly, slipping from shadow to shadow. This did not bode well for accomplishing her father’s task quickly. If women were so confined by their clothing, what other fetters did this land put on them?
    What a confounded nuisance.
     
    The Temple was in shambles.
    Katya knew it had to be a Temple; religious structures in nearly every land she had ever been in were generally very similar, though this was very small and rather humble. Perhaps it was a Shrine rather than a Temple? This place had a very large front gate, all of wood, which stood open, and a broad avenue lined with stone lanterns leading directly to the front doors, also standing open. There was a large bell and hammer to one side of the door, although one side of the bell frame was splintered and broken. The once-manicured grounds were overgrown with weeds, and the gravel paths had bits of grass sprouting in them. Katya climbed the steps leading to a porch around the entire structure, then stepped quietly through the open doors and peered around in the gloom. The exterior walls were all of wood, and the place appeared to be just one big room with a wooden floor. There was an altar with the statue of a man seated in a cross-legged pose on it. The serenity of the man’s expression was marred by the hole gouged in the statue’s forehead.
    Violation of a sacred space. This is not good.
    The destruction was not new; in fact, it looked very much as if it had happened many months ago, and yet there had been no attempt to repair it. The Temple looked abandoned.
    She prowled around the edges of the room. It was curiously barren, but the walls behind the altar seemed to be composed of nothing but paper stretched in frames. Odd. Very odd. There were no doors, and yet there seemed to be further space beyond the paper walls.
    She examined the walls further, and her curiosity increased. It appeared that the center section of each wall moved. She gave the one nearest her an experimental push.
    It moved sideways with a faint sound, and she stared at the room beyond…
    …and the old man sitting disconsolately in the corner. He looked up at her.
    He looked like a more ancient version of the Qin sailors that she had seen, very rarely, among the crews of sailors from other lands on trading ships. He was quite small, no taller than she, and his skin was like parchment, his eyes narrow and slanted. He looked—broken. “It’s no use,” he said dully. “If you have come on her behalf, you might as well know that she has already taken the only valuable thing we had. If you have come for solace, there is none to be had here. I have tried my best, but I am old and hurt, and the others are all dead.”
    “What others, Grandfather?” she asked, coming over to help him up as he tried to stand. “I am a stranger