“Didn’t that bother you?” Arlyn tried to control his tone, but I heard judgment underlying the curiosity.
I waited for my heart to slow down and my breathing to regulate before I turned to face him. “Of course it bothers me.” My voice felt rough so I cleared my throat. “That’s the point. To bother me enough that I do something stupid and let it in. It certainly wasn’t here to make me happy.”
“What did it think was your fault?”
I raised my left eyebrow.
“I withdraw the question.”
* * *
Arlyn
Fenra was quiet the next morning, evidently turning something over in her mind. She’d respond if I spoke to her, but she volunteered nothing. Even the horse looked at her sideways once or twice, nudged her in the back with its long nose as she went around our camp releasing the wards.
So I let her be. If she needed to process what had happened in the night, who was I to interfere?
Late that afternoon, when we’d reached a proper shelter, she stopped and let herself down from the horse’s back with the clear intention of going no further.
“There’s an inn just ahead,” I said, before she could start unpacking. “If we keep going, we’ll get there before dark.”
She looked at me a little as though she was sorting beans and had come upon a pea. “I had not realized we were so close to the edge of the Mode.”
I’d heard that flat tone in my own voice. I swallowed. “You’re not low, are you?”
She closed her eyes, shook her head, sighed. “Just a little sad,” she said. “So you can relax.”
Sadness, unhappiness, they go away by themselves when what’s causing them is dealt with, is what she meant. Lowness is an illness, not a state of mind. It has to be treated, like any other ailment. Something I know very well. That didn’t change the shot of fear that rose into my throat. If Fenra was low, I wouldn’t be able to level her, and then who would level me?
Yes, I know. Selfish. But there were bigger things than the two of us at stake.
“So, there’s an inn?”
I smiled with relief. “Real food, cooked by someone who knows how. Hot water. Real beds.” Her eyes narrowed, but she looked away into the distance, as if she hadn’t actually heard what I’d said. The horse snorted. Fenra looked around as if she were waking up, and picked up the pack she’d taken off the beast, settled it again behind the saddle.
We reached the inn with the sun low, but still in the sky. Fenra went with the horse to make sure the stable kids took care of him properly, while I bargained with the innkeeper. I thought about asking for two rooms, but I decided to save our money, even though he changed my letter of credit without questions. When she saw the room, Fenra didn’t even blink, she just chose the bed closer to the window. I remembered the fetches and didn’t argue with her.
Sometimes you can be more private in a crowd than you can be when there’s only you, your companion, and a horse. Something about being alone in a noisy group makes it easier to talk about certain things. As if the presence of others will keep matters from getting out of hand.
“What was his name? Hal?” We sat in a corner table, small enough that we’d be left to ourselves. We had bowls of lamb stew in front of us, full of big chunks of carrot, and potato, and I’m pretty sure some salsify. Two big slabs of bread came along with the stew, dense, heavy with grains and wheatberries. “Beer bread” the landlord had called it. A little heavy for a supper, but then, we hadn’t had much in the way of dinner. Fenra swallowed, put down her spoon, picked up her bread, tore a piece off.
“Halkutniarabol, actually,” she said. “But no one called him that more than once, not even the instructors. Just as no one called me ‘Fen’ a second time except him, and then only when he was trying to rile me.”
“From the Solni Desert, judging by the name.”
She stopped dunking her bread in the stew and looked up at me. “That’s right. I was the only other one from so far away, so they roomed us together.”
“Where were you from?”
She bit off the soaked end of the bread, chewed and swallowed. “You have never asked me that before.”
I put my spoon down on the tabletop, drummed the fingers of my practitioner’s hand. “In the village, our pasts were never important. Now something from mine is taking me—us—to the City, and something from yours tried to kill us last night.”
“I am from Ibania.”
“Merchant’s daughter? Tradespeople?”
“Landowners.”
“Landowners? How did you manage to escape marriage? Persuade them to let you go to the City?” It’s only by going to the City that you find out you’re a practitioner. If you never go, you never find out.
She pushed her right leg out from under the table. “It’s hard to get someone to marry a cripple. What if it gets passed on? It’s not like I was the heir.”
“And you never got it fixed . . . ?”
“They sent me to get it fixed. They sent me to the City, where I was welcomed into the White Court.”
“But your leg—”
“The Court told my escorts that it couldn’t be fixed, and they were sent home to my father. Under the circumstances, my family was happy that I had my future provided for by someone else.”
“You mean, if you’d had the leg fixed you might have had to go home?” You didn’t have to become a practitioner, though it meant, among other, less cheerful things, never traveling again.
“And marry someone for the alliance, for the family.”
“But you couldn’t go back to that, not once you knew you were a practitioner.” Not after being on the Road had shown her what she was.
“Exactly.” She lowered her eyes to her food, dug in with her spoon.
I changed the subject to the only other one I could think of. “So what happened with Hal, then? How did the fetch know to use him?”
She tilted her head, looked at me sideways. “As I said. It was stupid to use someone I knew to be dead. And to imply that he was somehow in some sort of torment was even more ridiculous.”
“How so?”
Fenra turned her spoon over and over in the stew. Finally her fingers stilled, but she didn’t let go of the spoon as she sat back. “We were rock climbing. That was another thing that set us apart from the other apprentices. Rock climbing isn’t done in the City, not for fun, anyway. But it was where we came from, even though we came from different provinces.”
“He fell?”
“Or I dropped him is another way of looking at it.”
I almost reached across the table to put my fingers on the back of her hand, but I thought better of it. “Tell me, then I’ll know how to look at it.”
“We were not supposed to be out that day, the day before an important test. We should have been studying. Fact was, we had done all the studying we needed to do. Throwing a glamour wasn’t one of Hal’s strong points, and all the studying in the world wasn’t going to make him better at it.”
“And you?”
“It was one of my strong points, so studying wasn’t going to make me any better at it either.” I waited until she picked out a bit of carrot, looked at it, and set it back in the bowl. “We had climbed this particular face before, so perhaps we were not as careful as we should have been.” Here she paused again. “Or rather, there was no ‘perhaps’ about it. We were in a rush to get down. We were not late, exactly, but if we stayed out much longer we would miss supper, and be caught. We tried to take a shortcut.”
“And he fell.”
She moved her head up and down. “I was going first, and I remember him laughing, saying I would be there to cushion his fall. About a third of the way down, he slipped somehow, and started to slide past me. I managed to catch hold of his sleeve—our uniforms were made out of this really tough fiber, meant
to withstand anything an apprentice could throw at it.”
“I remember.”
“We managed somehow to link hands—”
“Wrists would have been better. Sorry, sorry, I won’t interrupt again.” You could have frozen a skating pond with the look she’d given me.
“Linking hands was the best we could do, and lucky to do that much. I had a good solid grip with the fingers of my right hand, but the crevice where I had my toes crammed in wasn’t really large enough, and my left foot kept slipping. Enough for a quick hold as I was climbing, but not enough to carry any real weight, for any real time. Then my right leg began to twitch.” She looked at it. “I was gathering my strength, but you know, while you are still learning how to practice, you can be easily distracted, and every time my leg twitched I lost focus.” She paused, but this time I knew better than to say anything. “When I slipped the third time, he let go of my hand.”
I waited again, but clearly she was finished. “So, not your fault.”
“Most definitely not my fault.” She lifted her eyes to me without moving her head.
“A tragedy,” I said. “He sacrificed himself so that you wouldn’t fall.”
“He did. But the real tragedy is that if he had been a bit more patient, we would both be alive.”
“But he couldn’t know that.”
“No. That’s what makes him the hero of this story.” She smiled into her mug of ale, as if she saw something there. “To impatience, the leading cause of heroism.” She picked up her spoon again and finished eating her stew, even though it had gone cold.
* * *
Fenra
I had expected to feel self-conscious the next morning, but luckily Arlyn gave me no sympathetic looks, asked me no solicitous questions. The courtyard was fairly crowded, and a courier rode through while we were waiting for them to bring us Terith. He would change horses here, and eat in the saddle. And sleep there as well.
Arlyn gave me a leg up on Terith’s back without any sign of extra care or gentleness. I saw no change in stirrups, saddle, bridle, or reins, but then again, I hardly expected to. These were among the items that didn’t change much from Mode to Mode. Medlyn Tierell theorized that once there had been a Mode where horse furniture didn’t exist, or at any rate was more primitive, but if he was right, it had to have been long before our time. According to another instructor, there hadn’t been any major changes since records were made of such things.
Once we were on our way, it struck me that Arlyn must have lived alone for a long time. He was not much good at keeping his emotions off his face, and not nearly as careful to govern his reactions as most. For example, we left the inn walking on a rough-cobbled Road, where yesterday it had been nothing more than pressed earth with the occasional support of logs set into low areas. Ordinary people—mundanes—do not notice these changes.
It was clear that Arlyn not only noticed, but that he planned to say nothing about it. He looked at the paving with the kind of abstracted half smile you see on someone’s face when they return to their home village for the first time in years, pleased to see and recognize even something unremarkable. He really saw it, no doubt of that, yet he said nothing.
I came to the obvious conclusion.
Two
Arlyn
THIS MORNING FENRA’S clothing changed to the White Court’s tall black boots, buttercup yellow trousers with two rows of buttons in front, white shirt and cravat, crimson waistcoat, and black frock coat with crimson reverses. Rich green stones in her ears where she’d had silver knots before. The very model of a City practitioner, down to the gray gloves, the silver-headed stick, the black, flat-crowned, curly-brimmed hat.
Even her hair was behaving itself.
I offered her the reins once we were both seated in the barouche. She refused with a polite smile and settled herself into her corner, spreading the lap robe over both of us.
“Have I got something on my face?” I asked her once we were a good piece away from the inn. I know the horse doesn’t change, but somehow the beast seemed sleeker, livelier.
“No.” Fenra took a deep breath, shifted in the seat until she could face me more easily. She had a look in her eye that promised me nothing good. “I have been watching you react to things.”
“It’s been a long time since I traveled, I can’t enjoy the scenery?”
Her expression didn’t change. “Ten days ago you smiled at drainage ditches. Yesterday you smiled at gutters. No one smiles at gutters. You looked at my hat this morning as though at a long lost friend. I think you see what I see. I think you are a practitioner.”
Her tone was dry enough I had to lick my lips to answer. “If I am, why don’t my clothes change?”
“If you are not, how do you know that clothing changes?” She folded her hands in her lap, tapped her thumbs together, like a teacher waiting for an answer from a backward pupil.
“My cousin might have given me the gift of a practitioner’s sight.”
She snorted. “Not much of a gift if you never travel. And yes, I did think of that, but it’s improbable. As the philosopher Jennock says, the simpler solution is almost always the true solution.”
“It’s simpler if I’m a practitioner?” I made my tone as sarcastic as possible.
She sighed again, turned her head away from me, spoke as if to the horse’s rump.
“You knew there was an inn up ahead and that it had hot water. You knew where the Solni Desert is. You remembered the colors of the apprentice uniform. You knew that there was a time fetches didn’t appear close to the Road. You knew that practitioners are discovered when they travel on the Road.”
“My cousin could have told me all of that.”
“You saw the lines of light between my fingers when I banished the fetch. No matter what your cousin might have told you, you would not have been able to actually see that. And you saw.” She looked at me sideways, the brim of her hat casting a shadow over her eyes. “You could have been told many things, but you saw what you saw.”
I had no answer.
“Was there any truth in what you told me? The highwayman and the cousin who rode to the rescue?”
“All of it was true.”
“Just not for you.”
“Just not for me.”
“You are not the highwayman, you are the cousin.”
“I’m the cousin.”
“Why?”
I decided to misunderstand her. “He was a little older than I, funny, and smart and charming. And he’d been very good to me as a child. He was the only one in the family besides my mother who was pleased for me when they found I was a practitioner. The others were pleased with the advantage they thought it might bring the business.” I glanced at her and she nodded. It didn’t work that way, but people always thought their own case would be different.
“I loved him, but the others all said he would never amount to anything, that he was born to be hanged.”
“And he was hanged?”
I nodded. “I got there too late. I was angry with the family, bitter, most of all because they’d been right.” I gathered the reins into my practitioner’s hand, rubbed at my face with my right. A gentle touch of her fingertips and Fenra took the reins from me.
“So you pretended you had been on time? That you had saved him?”
“In revenge on them. It sounds childish now.”
“Not really. You loved him, and he loved you. The rest of them?” She made a flicking motion with the fingers of her right hand, not unlike the one she’d used against the fetch. “Much sillier things have been done for love.”
“I did more. I kept him alive—at least in the eyes of the world. I pretended he’d reformed, set up his own small business in a far-off village, was doing well. I sent letters to him, pretended to get letters back. I even arranged for letters to be sent to th
e rest of the family, sometimes with money in them. Repayment of loans.”
“So when you wanted to disappear, you had a ready-made life to step into.”
I spread my hands. “Xandra the practitioner became Arlyn the carpenter.”
* * *
Fenra
I pursed my lips. I was not so easily distracted. “You still have not answered my question. Why did you hide? Oh.” My throat stiffened and made my voice flat. I felt stupid. “The lowness.”
“The lowness,” he agreed. “At first.”
“A practitioner with lowness.” I shook my head. “Between apathy, despair, and sudden rages, you could have destroyed so much . . .” I touched the back of his right wrist. “Is that why you tried to kill yourself?”
He sat back against the barouche’s green leather upholstery and crossed his right leg over his left. “Turns out we can’t.”
Again, not an answer. “Practitioners can be killed.” That, after all, was why I had been preparing to leave the village—in case things got out of hand.
“By others, yes. Apparently we can’t kill ourselves.”
I had certainly never heard of a practitioner committing suicide. On the other hand, I had never seen a case of the lowness before Arlyn. “You believed you would do less damage in an outer Mode? In a small village?” I glanced at him again but his color was no better and he had a bitter smile on his face. I remembered what he had been like when I first saw him. “You would still have had to be very careful.”
“No, actually.” He looked ahead, mouth in a straight line, eyes focused on Terith’s ears. “I don’t have any power.” I must have made some protesting sound because he brought his gaze back to me. “The Godstone took it.”
Something in his face, his tone, the whiteness of his scarred knuckles made me shiver as though our carriage passed through a mob of ghosts. “Is that the dangerous artifact you have hidden? A ‘Godstone’?”
The Godstone Page 3
