Four Roads Cross

by Max Gladstone

  “You responded. We kissed, dammit—”

  “Don’t pretend that’s all. I tasted you. I could break that building in half if I wanted. I could fly.” She’d never heard such disgust in his voice before.

  “I wanted it. So did you.”

  “I can’t believe we’re having this conversation. I thought you wanted to fix—”

  “To fix myself? To fix what’s fucked-up about me?”

  “I didn’t mean that,” he said, too fast.

  “I see the way you look at me, like I messed up somewhere. You’re always in control, you never put a foot wrong. You never jump a ship before the signal comes. You never take a risk that’s not worth it. Unlike me. To all the hells with that. I know how the change works. I know you had to want to be what you are.”

  “I wanted not to die,” he said. “Okay? I wanted to survive. And since then I’ve maintained. I’ve managed. All this”—he waved in a big circle—“these booths and blood and just taking from one another all the damn time. So when some kid loses control and gets a stake through the heart, it’s a piece of gossip to you people. It’s my life.”

  “Is that what this is about? Brad?”

  “You have a problem. You admitted you have a problem.”

  “I’ve been working on it for a year.”

  “Great. A year.”

  “Fuck you, a year’s a long time for someone who can die. And I’m tangled, but I know enough to tell the difference between something I need and someone I want. I was wrong, fine. I’m not fucking perfect. But you’re the one who keeps pulling back.”

  He dropped his hands. “You want me to be the monster here, fine. I can do that. I’ve had plenty of practice.”

  And he walked away.

  The someone in fishnets by the trash heap had curled against the former bouncee. He passed her a cigarette. The someone took a drag and passed it back.

  Cat swore in a growling grinding language not meant for human throats. Then she turned and ran.

  23

  Tara could not take notes on Shale’s surging back, and as the moon arced through the sky, the angle from which the road sigils were visible changed too. The night ran long and late with flight and rest. They landed on an ivied university battlement at 1:00 A.M. and Shale brooded northward as Tara scratched lines in her black notebook.

  “Lady of the skies?”

  “Lady of the skies,” he confirmed.

  “All the skies?”

  “She could not be Lady of all the skies. Each sky has its own Lady. But she is Lady of all skies over us.”

  “I always thought that was weird. I mean, if we have three women of different faiths in the same army and they look up, they’re looking into the same sky.”

  “Same space,” Shale said. “Different sky.”

  “And this is her oldest epithet.”

  He nodded.

  She heard whispers from the tower to her left, and a scrape of lockpick over tumblers and teeth, and drunken laughter not quite stifled. She doubted students were supposed to climb up here—schools probably had to make rules about this sort of thing when students couldn’t fly—but explanations would be awkward. She hurried her notes. Shale’s religious signeurage did not quite mesh with modern ownership models, but she could bridge the gap. She’d learned how in the Hidden Schools, back when she wasn’t doing the same thing these kids were: breaking into places she shouldn’t be, and climbing towers not made for climbing.

  “Are you done?”

  “Done enough.” She capped her pen and slipped pen and notebook into her purse. Behind them the lockpick raked again, and a latch clicked open. “Let’s go.” She grabbed Shale. His wings spread, squeezing her ribs, and he lunged out over the city. Drunken students screamed as a half-seen shape swept above them through the dark.

  “You were angry this morning,” she said as they gained altitude. She’d hesitated on this conversation’s edge all night, unwilling to bring up a subject fraught for them both. But they had worked well enough, and she did not want to leave the wound unstitched.

  “I still am.”

  “I told the truth. We’re weak. Exposed. We need to be careful.”

  “We were made to guard this city. It is hard to hide and serve. You ask us to deny what we are. And your use of ‘we,’ there—you aid us, but you are not us. You are more at home in our own city than we are. You do not have to hide.”

  “I suppose not,” she said, remembering.

  Tara’s mom had first warned her to keep hidden. Tara had brought her a fallen star, crackling in her hand. The sky hung thunder-dark overhead, but not so dark as Ma Abernathy’s face. Tara’s mother never hit her, like most Edgemont parents hit their children. Tara had never squirmed on her village schoolroom seat from switch marks. Nor had Ma Abernathy honed a scalpel of guilt like the mothers of her classmates at the Hidden Schools. Concern was her tool.

  Tara’d run out into the rain, age ten, beneath a tornado-dark sky. She heard whispers on the wind and singing in the stars, and talked back, sang up, calling to the voices until the storm came, all spinning noise and fire, a solstice festival in the sky. She chased the voices into the fields, through sheets of rain, through broken whipping cornstalks, clothes plastered to her skin, hair a tangle of heavy rings. Then the thunder spoke, and a star fell. She caught it in her hand and brought it home.

  Her mother met her on the cornfield’s edge in the thrashing rain, as wet through as she. Her father had run into the fields after Tara and hadn’t yet fought his way out. Tara held the star. It danced as it burned. She didn’t know her mother’s story then, didn’t know about Alt Selene and the siege from which Ma’s people fled, didn’t know that to her mother the fire Tara held was a weed with roots in the guts of their history. Tara only knew that the light sang, and made her blood sing too.

  Let it go, her mother said. Let it go and don’t pick it up again.

  Tara closed her hands and the fire entered her. Water steamed from her skin and she felt herself burned dry. She fell into her mother, and looking up saw only fear. She was sick for a week afterward, and her parents waited until she got better to talk to her about the future, about small towns and discovery, about hiding. About being anyone but who she was.

  “I will ask a question of my own,” Shale said.

  Tara waited.

  “Aev stopped you from binding me at the tower this morning. Yet with your glyph, you could have found me yourself, or cursed me from afar, without her knowledge. Why didn’t you?”

  “Because Aev didn’t want me to,” she said. “And because it’s so easy for me to catch people, to force them. Too easy for me to think it’s right. But I’m still not certain I made the right decision. You’ve brought us to a dangerous pass.”

  They flew for a while in silence.

  “I have enough,” she said when she did. “Let me down.”

  “Where do you live?”

  She shouldn’t tell him, but she told. They swept above the Paupers’ Quarter market and north, where narrow brownstones flanked narrow tree-lined streets. He landed on her building’s roof. Her arms felt loose in their sockets. When she rolled them, her shoulders popped. “That makes up for skipping the gym today. Lady of Skies and Earth. I need to visit the sanctum tomorrow, do a records search.”

  “What did you learn?”

  “Why you can fly and I can’t.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t want to go into detail in case I’m wrong.” She thumbed her notebook open and added a line to the glyphs she’d drawn there. “I’ll need you later. You’re right about translation. I can report your claims, but your testimony will help. The court’s not built for gods.”

  “I noticed.” Shale let his wings furl and his arms fall and his face droop. She did not know what a sigh would look like coming from a creature without lungs, but she thought it might look a great deal like that. “If I can help, tell me and I will.” He had more to say, so she waited. “I did th
e right thing tonight, but I understand Aev’s anger. I was not selfless in my work. I wanted to help those girls, to justify their love of me. I asked the Lady if I could aid them, and She said yes.”

  Tara looked up from the book. “She said yes for her own reasons.”

  “Not entirely,” he said. “You’ll find me when you need me, I suppose. You always can.”

  He took two steps toward the roof’s edge. She wanted to reach for him but her hands were full; she snapped the book closed, let the pen fall, and caught him by the wrist as he was about to fly. “Shale.” His weight almost pulled them both over. His talons tore silvery grooves in the brick as he steadied himself. “Hold still.”

  He did.

  For this she did not need the knife. Glyphs on her hands and wrists gathered starlight. Shadow wet her fingertips. She touched his forehead, which was smooth and cold. A horse-skin twitch rippled through him—his body remembered the last time she’d touched him like this, and what she had done after. Her nails peeling back his face.

  “Trust me,” she said.

  He did.

  She painted shadows across his forehead, down cheek, beneath chin, up again, and over. Crystal lines pulsed beneath her shade: the patterns of his being. Between her and those lines lay an ugly angular mark. Its edges had spread in the last year as his soul shifted to incorporate the scar. She dipped her fingers through his skin, too fast for him to react, and caught the scar as if catching an eyelash against the white of an eye. She lifted the scar free, and let him go.

  He stared at the brand of light she held.

  “This is the tracking glyph. I’m not sorry I did it—if not for this, Kos would be dead and so would you. But I understand why you’re angry.” The next bit was hard to say. “I had to depend on myself for a long time. I got used to being right, or thinking I was, because if I doubted myself I’d break. And rightness always felt like this all-or-nothing thing. It’s much easier to think everything I’ve done is justified than that I’ve done wrong things for right reasons. I don’t regret what I did. But I apologize for it.” She tore the glyph in half. It disintegrated, and the sparks swirled back up her fingers and through her skin.

  “I understand,” he said.

  “How can I find you if I need you?”

  “Go to a rooftop at night. Speak my name. I will come.”

  He spread his wings. Their wind made her blink, and when she recovered he was a curve of arched and moonlit stone, rising.

  Okay, she told the moon. I have to admit, that was pretty cool.

  She had documents to read, contracts to hunt, records to trace. But those could wait for morning, and she’d best catch what rest she could before time started running fast. She went below, and after a while she slept, with a goddess’s laughter in her dreams.

  * * *

  Donna was waiting when Matt came home. The boys were in bed and, speaking of miracles, asleep. Donna hugged him. “I heard.” She didn’t say from whom. She looked at his bandage, not underneath it, and pressed her temple hard to his, opposite the wound. She smelled of sage.

  Before he could reply, she slipped from his arms and turned to the Rafferty girls, offering drinks, blankets, taking their threadbare coats. The teakettle cried from the kitchen and she swept back bearing a tray of mugs of chamomile and honey with a drop of whiskey in each. Ellen and Hannah accepted. Claire refused the tea, asked for water instead. Sandy Sforza waited by the front door, out of the way. Matt got her a beer. She drank half as Donna woke Peter and hustled him to his brother’s room—the oldest gives the most, Donna said when Peter groaned. The girls would have Peter’s bright green room, with its narrow bed and a low bookshelf that bore only textbooks and a heavy rubber sphere for ullamal. The bed slept one; Donna made Hannah a pallet on the floor with good blankets and a stiff pillow. Claire took the couch.

  “You’re okay,” Sandy said. Matt didn’t know if it was a question, but he answered yes anyway. “I can’t stomach the rest of this.” She passed the beer back, gave him an open half hug to spare her ribs where Corbin had hit them.

  Donna waited until they were in bed, lit by one candle and the city outside their window, to let her mask slip and the worry show. She rolled against Matt beneath their thin sheet, draped her arm across his belly, and squinted at his bandage. “He did that with a cane?”

  “He was out of his head. When Sandy stepped in, he went for her. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “The boys will tell everyone,” she said. “You haven’t fought in a long time.”

  “Haven’t had to. How was work?”

  “The usual,” she said. “Sums and more sums, and sums for dessert. Will the girls stay with us long?”

  His back hurt. Not because of the fight; his back had been hurting lately, was all. “I know quarters are tight.”

  “They can stay as long as they need,” Donna said. “I wanted to know if you saw them going back to their father.” She said the last word as if she doubted it applied.

  “He’s worse than I knew.” Which was a lie. He’d just not seen how bad. Drank with him plenty, and worked beside him, beside the girls, for years both before and after the mother left. He rolled the sheets off him onto Donna so he lay bare to the darkness of their closed room. “I love you,” he said, and kissed her.

  “Of course you do,” she said. He got out of bed. She didn’t ask why. If she’d asked, he would have said he needed a glass of water. That would not have been a lie, but it would not have been the complete truth. He did not know what he needed.

  He tied the belt of his robe and opened the door to the living room slowly so the sound of the latch did not wake Claire. He padded past the couch. She curled strangely on the cushions under her sheet, her head propped against the armrest so if her eyes were open she could see the front door, and Matt’s. But her eyes were closed, and she was still.

  He poured a glass of water he didn’t want to drink. By habit he went back to the living room to sit, then saw Claire beneath the blanket, and turned back toward the kitchen. “You don’t have to go,” Claire said. Her voice was low, but she wasn’t whispering. She sounded as flat now as she had in Sandy’s wagon. “This is your house. You can sit.”

  “This might be my house,” he said, “but it’s your room for now.”

  She shifted on the couch.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I knew he was an angry man.”

  She sat up, keeping the blankets tight to her neck like a barber’s smock. “He’s sick.”

  “I knew he drank. Looked like he kept the business together okay. That was all.”

  “I kept the business together,” she said. “And took care of him when he came home. Made sure the girls were out of the way when he got angry.” Girls, she said, as if she wasn’t one. Maybe she wasn’t. Maybe she hadn’t had room to be.

  The front door, he noticed, was ajar, as was the door to Peter’s room where the girls were sleeping. He swore. Water sloshed onto his hand; he set the glass down and reached for his shoes. “What’s happened?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “Ellen’s gone to the roof to talk to the moon. She does that sometimes. Listen.”

  He did. Donna had left the kitchen window cracked to let the apartment breathe. Outside, wind slipped between fire escape bars and kicked cans down the street. Above its whistle he heard singing.

  He started to say, she’ll wake the neighbors, or, people are trying to sleep. “She’s good.”

  “Yes,” Claire said. “I thought she made it all up at first: the moon and the prayers. I had the same dreams, but that’s all I thought they were. She was lonely. I thought she was cracked—she couldn’t handle him, she couldn’t toughen like me or hide like Hannah. But she sings to the moon, and maybe the moon sings back. What do you make of that?”

  “I don’t know,” Matt said.

  “Mr. Adorne,” she said. “When will you go to work tomorrow morning?”

  “I leave at half past three.”

  “If
there’s room in your cart, we can take deliveries together.” He did not answer at first. “Please,” she said. “I don’t know how long they’ll hold Corbin. We have stock to sell. I can pay for cart space if it’s at a premium.”

  “I don’t—we have plenty,” he said. “You should rest a day or two.”

  “Ellen sings. Hannah runs. I work.”

  “I’ll wake you,” he said, “at quarter ’til.”

  “You won’t have to.”

  He washed the glass and left it on the drying rack and walked back across the carpet to his room. “Good night, Claire.”

  “Good night, Mr. Adorne.”

  Donna wrapped herself around him when he lay beside her. The room was hot and so was her skin, but he needed her heat, and let her hold him when most nights he would have nudged her off. He stared up into the darkness, thinking about his boys and listening to the soft wordless song through his open window.

  * * *

  Cat hit the rooftops running. There was a black hot pit of rage inside her, and if she ran fast enough she could leave it behind. In the Pleasure Quarter you could run for blocks from roof to roof before you hit a street broad enough to make you jump. She wasn’t alone up here. On nights like this, roofs were balconies for drinkers and dreamdust drifters. She ran past cots where hungry dreamers twitched and rolled, adjusting phototropically to her desire.

  Oh there was a litany of curses inside her skull.

  Oh she’d needed him.

  Oh she was coursing on the cold fluid pleasant numbness that fang sent through her and oh she was hungry for more—

  But that wasn’t the source of her anger, or her loss, and he both was and wasn’t the one she hated.