“He left this for you.” She fumbled in her apron pocket and produced a small, cloth-wrapped package. Kieve turned it over. The wax seal, intact, bore no stamp.
“He said it was from Master Jenci. And he said, he said—” She screwed her eyes closed. “‘She’ll know what to do. And if she has sense, she’ll do it before she gets another present. Something less easily spared’.” She opened her eyes. “He made me say it to him, again and again, until I had it by heart. He had a, he had a knife, mistress. And then he, he pushed me against, against the wall and he put the knife—” Her fingers spread over her belly and she sobbed.
“Hush. Wipe your tears. No harm done.”
“But he came again,” Gaura wailed. “In the night and he kicked, he kicked on, and I let him in, and he, he left another thing, on your work table. And he said he’d kill me, first my baby and then me, and I, and I—” She wept into her apron.
Kieve took the second package from the table and balanced it in her palm. “No message with this one?”
Gaura shook her head.
She put the second package aside and lay the point of her belt knife against the seal of the first one. The wax clicked as it broke. Within the cloth was a twist of paper, and within the paper, its chain tangled, lay Jenci’s guild token. She put it on the table and looked at it, her stomach cramped and cold. Jenci’s name and the date of his first oathing were incised on the worn metal.
“Is it...” Gaura whispered.
Ignoring her, Kieve took up the second packet and broke the seal. The opened cloth revealed a small wooden box, its top closed by a little catch. She flicked the catch with the tip of her belt knife and raised the lid. In the box, nestled in blood-soaked cloth, was a finger, intricately and artistically covered with blue tattoos.
She was halfway down the treacherous stairs before she finished closing her guild cloak. The storm had lightened from black to grey but within four steps the castle walls disappeared. She pushed toward the Scholars Garden, letting the wind shove her along the wall until she fell through the opening. She took a moment to orient herself, then fought her way to the narrow alley and through the first door. In the classroom behind it children crowded together on benches. They goggled at her as she ran through and into the dark, angled passageway beyond. The hallway turned, leaving the scholars’ quarters. Her pace picked up. Birds shrieked in an aviary. A tailor popped his head from a doorway and popped back in again.
“Samit Tailor,” she called, slowing. He looked out at her, white-faced.
“You must send to Ilach Commander and to Master Adwyr. Tell them that Jenci Guildmaster of the Riders has been harmed. Tell them they must meet me in the guildmaster’s chambers.”
The old man gaped at her.
“Repeat it,” she commanded. He did so, stuttering.
“You go to Adwyr. Your daughter, she is here? Send her to Ilach. Now!”
He nodded and jerked back into his rooms. She rushed along the hallway, past the pale, inquiring faces of Samit Tailor’s neighbors, and down a flight of stairs into a room crowded with footmen and valets in the colors of a handful of provinces. The servants barely had time to move out of her way.
“Rider!” someone shouted. “Is it Cadoc?”
After another flight of stairs she came through a narrow doorway and into the corridor above and behind the Great Hall, past eagles and ravens and darkened guest flags. Jenci’s door was closed. She stopped in front of it, dragged air into her lungs, and pushed the door open. Lapsi, lying in front of the fire, leaped to his feet.
“Where is he?” the boy demanded. He jumped around Kieve and grabbed the door, peering down the corridor. “Where is he?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“You do,” he insisted, furious. “He went to see you and I waited all night for him and he didn’t come back. You’re not his apprentice any more, I am, and I was waiting for him, right here, waiting for him and he never—”
She grabbed his shoulders and shook him. He gasped and in that moment Kieve said, “Be quiet, apprentice. Speak only if I tell you to.”
He stared at her, eyes stretched wide.
“Now. Where is your master?”
“You—with you. He went to see you.” She shook him again and he cried out, “It’s the truth, Rider. You sent a message and he went to you, immediately, without pause. He told me to go to Master Adwyr, he was to share a meal with Master Adwyr but he didn’t go, he made me go and tell Master Adwyr that Master Jenci regretted but was detained and Master Adwyr was angry and I came back here and—and—and he never came back.”
Kieve stared hard at him. “I sent a message. How?”
“There was a note, Rider. A servant brought it.”
“Who? Which servant?”
He shook his head.
“Show me the note.”
He paled. “I thought that he—I thought that you and he—but he was my master, and still you—”
“The note, Lapsi.”
“I burned it,” he whispered.
Kieve cursed and pushed him so that he stumbled backwards. She knelt at the hearth, raking the ashes with her fingertips. In one corner she found a grey, furred rectangle, draped over the charred butt of a log. When she touched it, it floated into ashes.
She remained motionless, measuring her breathing until it steadied. She rose and turned toward the boy.
“What did it say?” she said.
He shook his head. “I didn’t read it, mistress.”
She waited a beat. “Tell me what happened. All of it. There was a knock on the door? Who opened the door?”
“I did. There was a servant, a woman, she was wearing a cloak, a brown one, and she asked if this was where the Rider Guildmaster stayed, and I said it was.”
“Go on.”
“She said she had a message but she had to give it to the guildmaster, and I said she could give it to me and she wouldn’t and I said she had to and then Master Jenci came and he took it. He put his arm over my shoulder and she reached up and gave it to him and she said it was from you—”
“Tell me what she said.”
“‘From Kieve Rider for the Rider Guildmaster’, that’s what she said, and he gave her a coin and she bobbed and went away. And he took the paper over by the fire and opened it up and read it and he frowned.”
“Did he say anything?”
The boy frowned himself, deep into his memory. “He said you should be gone by now, and he called you a fool, and he said he had to go. He took up his cloak, then he said I was to go to Master Adwyr and say he couldn’t come, that he was detained, that he regretted, and then I was to come back here and wait for him. And I did,” the boy said, growing angry again. “And I waited and he never came back.”
“What time?”
He looked at her face and paled. “Just before midday, Rider. That was when he was to see Master Adwyr.”
She remembered the bells of City House tolling above her. “At the noon hour I was in the city. I sent no message to the guildmaster.”
A gust of wind reminded her that the door was open. When she turned to close it, she heard a distant commotion and saw Master Adwyr and two companions striding toward her. She held the door open, waiting for them.
Adwyr started talking the moment he saw her so that as he approached she heard him say, “... intrusive nonsense meant to demean my Lord’s passing with petty details. There is nothing to merit this concern, absolutely nothing at all. Rider!” He stopped in front of her, face damp. “What is this foolishness?”
Kieve refused to say anything until Adwyr hunched his shoulders and stamped into the guildmaster’s quarters. Taryn Steward followed him in, followed in turn by a man in Guards’ brown and brick red. She closed the door behind them.
“The Rider Guildmaster is missing,” she said before the Chancellor could speak. He snapped his mouth closed and glared at her. “He received a message asking him to meet me yesterday at the noon hour. Yesterday at noon, I was n
ot on Sterk. He has not returned to his rooms.”
Adwyr flicked his fingers. “We were to lunch together yesterday and he sent an excuse. I assume that he is busy at his own business.” He arched his eyebrow. “I am sure that the guildmaster is quite safe, Rider, and all this agitation for nothing. You have created quite enough commotion this morning already.”
“I am not done,” she said. The door opened to admit Ilach and a woman who, after a moment, Kieve recognized as the castle apothecary.
“The Guildmaster?” Ilach demanded.
“All for nothing,” Adwyr announced. “Gone off for one night, in somebody’s bed doubtless. Or even hiding here.” He gestured at the table, where breakfast dishes lay untouched. “Certainly not evidence of any wrong-doing.”
“Be quiet!” Kieve roared. Adwyr blinked at her and his face reddened, but before he started yelling Kieve had the two bundles laid on the table among the covered dishes.
“He was given a note yesterday, supposedly from me but I was off Sterk.” She said this to Ilach, who stared at her across the table. “He sent his apprentice to cancel his meeting with Master Adwyr and left his rooms, for my apartment, I think, but the note is burned and we cannot know.” He nodded. She took a deep breath. “Just past midday, a man came to my rooms and terrified my servant. He came back a little later and left this.” She flipped open the wrappings of the first package, and lifted Jenci’s guild token by the chain. Ilach cupped his hand around it and squinted at the back, then let it swing free from Kieve’s fingers.
“What is it?” Adwyr demanded. “I am Cadoc’s Chancellor and you must tell me—“
“It’s his guild token,” Ilach said. “With respect, Master Adwyr, you must be quiet now.”
The Chancellor’s jaw whitened as he clenched his teeth.
“Later the same messenger came back,” Kieve said. “With this.”
This time her hand hesitated. She held her breath and opened the catch. Ilach leaned over the box and was still for a moment.
“What is it?” Adwyr said again. “I demand to see—”
Ilach stepped away. Adwyr stared into the little box and chewed his lip.
“You have no doubt?” he said.
“They are his tattoos,” Kieve said. “The boy Lapsi can identify them, too.”
She turned to find that Lapsi had backed himself into a corner by the hearth and was staring at them all, eyes huge in his pale face.
“Why?” Adwyr said.
“To force my cooperation, I think.”
Nobody asked the next question.
“Then it was the Guildmaster,” the apothecary said. She had pushed back the hood of her heavy cloak, revealing the tight grey knot of her hair. “It is good you sent people,” she said to Ilach.
“Tell me,” Kieve said.
“The wind let up for a little at dawn and I went to the herb garden, to see how my plants were in the storm. When I finished I came back along the high terrace and I saw someone on Lord’s Walk, near the edge. A black figure, moving as though blind.” She passed her hand before her eyes. “I called but I don’t think he heard me. When I tried to reach him I couldn’t for the ice and wind. So I went to the barracks. I was with the commander when Samit’s girl brought your message.”
“My climbers will find him,” Ilach said. “They’re used to mountain work, to storms and hard climbs. If he can be found, they will find him.”
“They’re on the Walk now?” she demanded as she scooped up the token and box. She was gone before he finished his nod.
Nobility and servants and guests crowded the corridor, eager for any break in the storm’s monotony. She pushed between them, bolted down the broad stairs, and ducked through the door at the base of the tower into Hueil’s Garden. She scuttled along the lee side of the wall until she came to a service door. A moment’s work popped it open; a service door on the other side of the Snake yielded as easily and she was in the black supply channels below the apartments of the nobility, running through the damp stone lanes, her fingers trailing along the walls. Twenty-three paces. Forty-six. A door resisted her, not with locks but with the pressure of wind. She forced it open and came into the eastern edge of the Garden of the Lady. She pushed through the wind. Dark figures moved at the far end of the Walk.
The figures became Ilach’s searchers, bearing an awkward load bound to a board and wrapped in a black guild cloak. Kieve turned back and led them through the Garden and into the supply channels.
“We found him just at the edge,” said the search leader as torches were lit. She put out her hand to stop Kieve from pulling open the cloak. “Rider, he won’t last.”
The searchers staggered under Jenci’s weight as they carried him through the labyrinth of corridors behind the Crescent Bathhouse and around the White Tower, over the stone bridge above Hueil’s Garden, down the corridors of the main wing to his rooms. The halls were thick with people, as was the main room of the suite. Asgaut waited before the fire, his hands in his sleeves, and followed the litter into Jenci’s bedroom. Daenet entered just before Kieve dropped the curtain against the press of eager faces in the outer room. The search leader cut the ropes that bound Jenci to the litter and Asgaut reached for the cloak. The searcher cleared her throat.
“Rider, we tried—”
“I know. The guild is grateful. You will be remembered.” The words came to her by rote and she barely paid attention to them. “Please, go now.”
The woman held open the curtain for her team, then nodded at the bed. “Ilach will need to see him.” She dropped the curtain behind her.
Jenci groaned. Kieve moved forward and took his right hand.
“Master,” she whispered. Asgaut lifted the hood from the guildmaster’s face.
What remained did not look much like Jenci, or any human thing. The face was battered to shapelessness, one eye missing and the other hidden under a caul of frozen blood, teeth broken, the nose flattened. Daenet choked and turned away. Jenci turned his head a little and groaned again, then said clearly, “No,” before muttering a stream of words that Kieve finally understood as Akeguruk, something indistinct about supper and the shape of mountains, about the elevation of the Eye in the northern sky, about wind.
Asgaut had uncovered the rest of Jenci’s body, exposing a network of cuts and bruises and a concave place where his ribs were crushed. Jenci shouted but the shout came as a wheeze. A red froth dribbled from his mouth.
Asgaut shook his head and covered the guildmaster and stepped back.
Jenci said something about an ocean at the distant borders of Uruk and something about a river, and then he stopped talking entirely and he died. Kieve held his hand, listening to the shuffle of footsteps as people left the room, and the rushed murmur of shock from the people outside.
She filled her lungs and opened her eyes. Daenet stood at the far side of the bed, hands at his sides, watching her.
“You don’t need to stay,” she said to him.
“He was my guildmaster too,” Daenet said.
Kieve looked away. Taryn lifted the curtain and came in.
“Kieve?” he said.
“We are waiting for Commander Ilach,” she replied. Daenet went into the other room and came back with a cup of apato, but she shook her head. After a short while Ilach came in and nodded at Taryn.
“We will need a witness,” he said. Taryn stood back against the wall. Ilach put his hands to the cloak and pulled it open. He inspected Jenci’s face and body, then put his hands under the guildmaster’s right shoulder.
“Daenet. Help us.”
Together the three of them turned the body a little. His skin was still warm. The guild-mark was intact, including the mole just below the pen’s point, the mole Jenci, laughing, had called his drop of blood. Kieve traced the tattoo with her fingertip and let the body roll to its back.
“Look,” she said.
She and Daenet moved the body again to reach Jenci’s left hand, wedged between his thigh and the bed
. The fingers were broken, palms slashed and gaping, little finger gone. She laid the hand over Jenci’s belly and reached into her cloak for the wooden box. When she laid the severed finger in Jenci’s palm, Daenet stepped back abruptly.
Ilach said, “Whoever did this thought the storm and the fall would hide what damage they did to him, except for the breaks on his face, and the long cuts on the thighs. No storm did these. See, there is no bruising on the face, around the eyes. This was newly done, soon before he died. But not by falling. Someone blinded him. And the finger. That could never be an accident. A stupid move.”
She nodded and put the finger away again. Daenet, watching her, looked pale. Ilach lifted the curtains. Faces turned to him, curious, avid, horrified.
“The guildmaster is murdered,” he told them. “You must notify Koerstadt.”
One of the waiting shadeen said, “When the storm is done, commander.”
“Where is his apprentice?” Kieve said, coming out of the room behind Ilach.
“Asleep, Rider. He was given a draught.”
Kieve nodded. “I want hot water and cloths.” She paused. “Go away. All of you. Now.”
They left, jostling each other at the doors. Kieve went back into Jenci’s room and stared at Taryn.
“Get out.” Daenet raised a hand in protest, but she shook her head. “Not you.”
“Kieve...”
She held the curtain open. Taryn walked around the bed and out of the room. As he passed her he put his finger to her cheek, then to her lips. She didn’t understand why she tasted salt.
* * * *
They hadn’t let her do this for her father, years ago in that high, cold valley beyond Myned’s borders. The raid had been swift and brutal, Lady Esylk’s retaliation for a Trapper raid the month before on an outlying village. A different tribe, a different squad of shadeen, a different part of the outlands, but it didn’t matter. The random attacks and counterattacks were part of a struggle ancient long before Kieve’s birth, and might well continue, tribe for village and life for life, long after her death.
She knew they were not yet Inguruki, her father and herself. Their hut, their kamak, sat at the edge of camp, their places in the communal kamak-inguruki farthest from the fire, but she tumbled in the deep snow with the Inguruki cubs while he hunted with their parents and struggled with the language. She spoke both tongues with ease and could not remember a time when she knew only one. She did not know why her father had brought them out of Cherek. She knew that she had been born there and her mother had died there, but otherwise her history extended no further back than the seasons of the past year. It seemed sufficient.
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