City of Night
Page 38
When the door opened into the apartment, silence started and spread in a wave. Jewel heard it, and rose, leaving her table and its endless slates behind. She took one look at Arann, and then glanced at Carver and Duster, who were supporting him on either side.
Carver shook his head. “It’s not bad,” he told her. “It’s better than it looks.”
“But it’s going to cause problems,” Duster added.
“What happened?”
Arann looked at her, and then looked away.
“Carver?”
He shrugged. “We ran into Carmenta.”
“His whole den?”
“No.”
“One-eye, Asshole, and Dog,” Duster said.
“And they attacked the three of you?”
“Not . . . exactly.” Carver glanced at Arann.
Jewel looked at Arann. “Come in. Arann, sit down in the chair.” She walked, stiffly, to her room. Picked up the bandages and the small jars that she had taken with her from Rath’s, and headed back out. It was always bad when the den wasn’t talking. It was worse when they weren’t even signing.
She helped Arann out of his shirt; there were two gashes, both on his arms, and they weren’t very deep. He sat there, shoulders slumped, staring at the hands in his lap as if he were surprised, somehow, that they belonged to him. Jewel set about cleaning and dressing the wounds he did have. Even if the bleeding wouldn’t kill him, infection could.
He let her move his arms, let her lay them against the table beneath the glow of diffuse light, and didn’t even wince when she started to clean them. He said nothing, did nothing; even his breath was quiet. If his eyes hadn’t been open, he might have been sleeping. They were, and he wasn’t. Nothing, in the end, was as easy as that.
Finch brought water and the scraps—the clean ones—they used as towels. Jewel grimaced and added Arann’s shirt to the scrap pile. He had another, although it was smaller. How much smaller? It was money. It always came back to money. To money and the lack of an easy way beneath the streets. She finished binding the cuts. Arann didn’t move. After a moment, she did, gesturing to Carver and Duster.
They went outside, into the hall. The bedroom door, such as it was, couldn’t even muffle the squeaks of mice.
“What happened?”
Duster and Carver exchanged a glance, and she tried not to let this irritate her. When had she become the person they had to hide things from?
“Carver?”
He shrugged. “Carmenta mentioned Lefty. Arann—”
She lifted a hand. “Never mind.” She looked at the closed door.
“Jay.”
She didn’t look at him. “What else can he do? He can’t shout at me. He can’t hit me. He can’t find Lefty, and he can’t bring him back.” She turned to them both, then, her hands shaking because she could not stop them. “What can he say to me that will do him any good? What can he say to me that I’m not already thinking? He knows,” she added, shoving her hands back to her sides, and turning away. “He knows, but it doesn’t help.”
“Time will.”
Jewel looked at Duster. They both seemed surprised that Duster had spoken at all.
“Give him a couple of months. Give him something to do.”
Jewel said, “there’s almost no work at the Port Authority, not even for Angel. There’s no work in the Common. He can’t steal for crap.”
Duster shrugged. “He can fight, though.” A lopsided grin turned her lips up at the left corner.
Jewel laughed. It was a little too loud, a little too hysterical. But better, in the end, than nothing.
12th day of Scaral, 410 AA The Common, Averalaan
Farmer Hanson stopped asking after Lefty when Arann was around. Jewel knew it was unfair, but she wished he would stop asking, period. It was hard to go to the Common, with what little money they could prize from pockets and purses. The only thing of value she had was the magestone, and she didn’t trust herself to sell it.
But Rath was never home, and getting to his home, the hard way, was almost a full-den outing.
“Getting colder,” Farmer Hanson said. He had taken to slipping extra food into the basket, and Jewel’s pride wasn’t up to the task of refusing. He said nothing when she thanked him, but his face was careworn.
“It’s colder,” Jewel told him. There was little chatter that wasn’t teeth. “Is it—”
“No. It’s going to be a mild winter, this year.” By which he meant no snow, and therefore none of the inevitable deaths that snow brought when it fell this far south. Her breath came out in a thin stream of mist as she exhaled.
He hesitated, started to speak, stopped himself. She let him. She had no words to offer that he’d believe, and she didn’t feel like making the effort for so little return. But it was Farmer Hanson.
“It’s been a tough autumn,” she told him, meeting his worried gaze and holding it. “But we’ve all seen worse. We’re okay. We’ll be okay. The port’s still open, and we’ve got some work there.”
“And Arann?”
She sucked cold air between her teeth. “He’s—you’ve seen him.”
“Aye.”
“He’s been better, but he’ll be okay.” She didn’t believe it, but that might be guilt talking. Guilt talked a lot, these days, albeit seldom with simple words.
Words you could fight. Or argue with.
“Take care of him, Jay,” the farmer said quietly. Echo of older words, when she had been younger and she could believe, for weeks at a time, that things would work out well.
And they had. For a while, they had. She tried to remember this as they turned away from the stall, carrying baskets that were half the weight they had been scant months ago.
Carver and Duster joined them as they headed toward the gates, signing.
Money, Jewel thought. She nodded.
You do what you have to do, her Oma said quietly, and in that tone of voice that meant there was to be no back talk without pain. You do what you have to do to keep your family going.
She nodded to herself, and to her dead—all her dead—and she tried not to think of how the other people who now, because of Carver and Duster’s successes, had less money than expected were going to make up for it; if they went hungry, or if their children did, in a holding very much like the twenty-fifth, but with different names across the streets.
And her Oma said, It’s a hard world. You do what you have to. You don’t choose strangers over your own.
She wanted to believe it. She must have, because she wasn’t.
But it was bitter, this necessity. What she wanted to be, and what she was, were so far apart she had almost lost sight of the former. She struggled to hold it, somehow, even though she didn’t deserve it, didn’t deserve the hope and the belief that somehow, someway, she would get there.
But she watched their backs as they left the Common, seeing Angel’s spiked head, and Carver’s black hair, Duster’s, braided because they didn’t know when a fight would be around the corner and they had no easy way to dodge it anymore.
Duster had been right. Carmenta’s den caused more trouble. She understood why Arann had snapped; she understood where the rage and the despair had come from. Wasn’t it her own? But it didn’t matter why. Carmenta knew two things: That the den was now picking through the streets, looking for the same things Carmenta needed to survive, and they were there a lot more often.
His den took to traveling the routes that Jewel’s den did, spoiling for trouble. Once or twice, they got it, and Jewel got to see, firsthand, what Arann looked like in a fight.
Except it wasn’t a fight.
Yes, he used his fists, his hands, his head—but it wasn’t like watching Duster or Carver; there was no thought behind it, no intent. If Rath had insisted on training them—and he had, in the early years—he had mostly given up on Arann and Arann’s instincts, and while he was frustrated with Arann, Jewel had always privately thought he liked Arann the better for it.
&nbs
p; But he would have been angry, had he seen Arann like this. Angry, and silent, the way he was. Even knowing why. She couldn’t be. But she was terrified, watching him go away—or emerge. She wasn’t sure what would call him back.
Finch had, that time. Jewel didn’t like to take Finch with them, because Finch was too small, too slight, and she didn’t want Finch there if things went bad.
But there was something incandescent about Arann’s inarticulate fury; it burned them all, even Carmenta’s den. Carmenta? He was used to fighting—when the odds favored them—like a jackal. He wasn’t used to fighting people who simply did not care about odds or weapons or threats. Fighting between dens was almost like courtship. There were rituals, words spoken, subtle physical negotiations, before they closed. There was warning.
With Arann, there was none. He snapped from one state to the other in an eye blink. He put them off their stride, but it put Jewel’s den off theirs as well. And soon, if he did this enough, Carmenta’s den would figure it out, and their fear, the shock of Arann’s brief cry, wouldn’t be enough to make them clumsy or stupid.
After the second such fight, Jewel left Arann at home with Teller and Finch. She had to; she wasn’t willing to watch him die, and she knew where the fighting—the graceless surge of rage, shorn of anything that resembled thought—would lead. Rath had told her, time and again, that anger was not her friend. He had told them all, but he had never had such a striking example to offer.
She took Angel, Carver, and Duster everywhere she went, sometimes taking Lander and Jester, and sometimes leaving them with the others; on those days, Teller was to teach them more reading, and more writing. When she was in, they went out in groups of four. Duster chafed at the restrictions. No one else said a word.
Through it all, Arann said almost nothing.
She understood this, because she didn’t either. Shock—the shock of seeing him for herself—did not yield, as it usually did, to anger. It led, instead, to guilt, and a slowly growing fear that was almost, but not quite, panic. She’d led them this far, but it had been easy. Now, faced with hard, she was failing them.
Because she had already failed, she had no words to offer. And no comfort either, and she wanted both.
Kalliaris, she thought, as she walked, or studied, or ate, or tried to sleep. Kalliaris, smile.
21st of Scaral, 410 AA Thirty-fifth holding, Averalaan
Rath had, for years, prided himself on his ability to compose. To compose specifically with words. Spoken, or written, he could massage them and lay them out in exactly the right tone for his intended audience. He could feign ignorance, or knowledge, with the same ease, without—quite—lying. He could change the style of his writing script, from the precise and perfect letter forms the Order employed to a bold scrawl that traveled in slanted lines across the page.
But the letter that held his attention, now, was work. He labored over it. Scattered around the inkstand were various iterations, some three lines long, some almost a full page. It was difficult because there were two letters written, the obvious letter, and the subtle one. If the person for whom it was intended could find—and read—its contents, she would give it, in the end, to another, and it was the second reader that caused him so much grief. Amarais Handernesse ATerafin. The Terafin.
It had been years—decades—since he had corresponded in the Handernesse style. If he had found the den and their sign language amusing, he too had been young once, and impressed with his own cleverness. They had had no specific code for apologies; in the Handernesse household, apologies were given silently, if at all. Even had they, he would have gone out of his way to avoid them. Had, in fact, already done so, discarding anything that even faintly implied it. He did not, and could not grovel.
But it was hard.
Because on the other end of this letter was Jewel Markess. He had seen her, at a distance, over the past month. He had watched the den, and he was aware that Lefty no longer ventured out into the streets. That blow, he thought, might break her.
What he wanted for her was not complicated. Achieving it might be. It was not in his hands, now; it had never truly been in his hands. But he placed it in the hands of the sister he had not seen for decades.
He paused, rose, and stretched his shoulders, lengthening his arms to either side. He disposed of the failed attempts, burning them in the grate, one sheet at a time; watched paper curl in a dark lip over the background of words, before the words themselves were consumed.
If he were honest—and when had he last been an honest man?—he might admit that he labored over this letter, this last communication, because he feared to reach the end. Three days, four, it had taken him, and he was not yet done; he could not think of another letter that had occupied so much of his undivided attention. He returned to the desk, and the letter, and he resumed his seat. The light of the stone made the ring on his hand glow. He tried, and failed, to ignore it. It was not his ring to wear; it was not his ring to keep.
But he made no effort to arrange for its disposition, and that said much, both to and about himself. He took up quill again, and wrote. The absurd desire to explain his life came and went, like waves. This was the last thing that he would say to Jewel—and one of the few that he could say without any interruption, any diverting questions.
When he heard the creak of floorboards, it was almost a relief. It was also a threat, and he rose, quietly, turning as he did, the seat of his chair against his knees. He had heard no key, no movement beneath him, and he slid his hand across the hilt of a dagger that was only useful for fighting one type of opponent.
But his hand stilled, and he did not draw the dagger.
A few feet from the door—on the inside of a room—a figure stood. The light in the room was dim, but not so dim that it was incapable of casting shadow, and shadows darkened the floor beneath the draping fall of a cloak. Rath whispered the light to brightness; the figure did not move.
They stood in silence for a long moment, and then the figure reached up with both hands and drew back the folds of a hood. As it fell, it surrendered a face to the light; a woman’s face. Her hair was darker than Duster’s, except for one prominent streak of white, which reminded Rath, incongruously, of the marking on his favorite horse in the stables of Handernesse.
She was younger than he was, but not, he thought, by much; it was surprisingly hard to tell. Her lips were almost the same color as her face, both pale, adorned by violet eyes; her hands were long and thin, and she wore no rings, no bracelets.
“Can I assume,” he said quietly, “that you are Evayne?”
Her forehead briefly gathered in lines as her brows rose; the lines faded as they fell. “I am,” she replied. “And you are Ararath Handernesse, forsworn.”
“I am.” He lifted his hand, catching the light that shone on the desk below his shoulder.
She nodded. Waited. So, too, did Rath. The moment stretched. Thinned. Broke when Rath decided that he could not afford the time taken to win such a pointless contest. He turned away from her, and toward the letter across which ink had already dried.
“It is not often,” he said, as he sat, “that I have visitors, and I’m afraid I will be a very poor host, this eve.”
He heard the rustle of her robes as she moved, but he did not turn. She was a danger. He knew it. But he did not feel threatened by her.
She did not speak, but came to stand on the opposite side of the table.
“Where,” he asked, dipping quill into ink, “did you get this ring?”
“From Handernesse,” she replied.
He did not ask her how; if she could enter his home, a manse the size of Handernesse, with its many entrances and exits, would be no difficulty.
“You mistake me,” she said.
He moved the quill so that it rested above a desk that was already somewhat blotched with ink. “How so?”
“I did not steal the ring. I came to Handernesse, and I was given it.”
“Impossible.”
“And he gave you the Handernesse crest?” It was hard to keep scorn from the words, and Rath was famously lazy.
“He did. I told him why.”
“Why?”
“Why it was needed. I told him for who.”
“And he countenanced this?” Rath lifted his hand, sharply, in denial.
“He was an autocratic man.” Evayne was still. “But he was not a cruel one. I understand that he valued your sister highly. But in his fashion, Ararath, he loved you. He knew that you would never again cross the threshold of Handernesse.”
“You told him this?”
She nodded.
“But he knew, in the end, that the threshold you finally crossed in its stead would be the more difficult. He did not greet death with any great peace.”
And there it was. Spoken by a stranger.
“He knew, as well, that you would cross it. He understood, in the end, the need, and understood that you would—against the bitter disappointment of his expectations—do what was necessary, at the right time. It had to be that ring. Because that ring, in the end, you would wear.” she added softly.
“You could both be so certain of that?” It was a bitter question.
“He was.”
Ararath looked at the stylized H, and remembered, briefly, the man who had worn it. And the boy who had watched him. Both were dead.
“I told him,” she continued quietly, “how you would die, both with and without his . . . intervention.”
He flinched. He had resigned himself to his fate. Once a night. Twice a night. On bad nights, several times in an hour. “And how,” he asked, forcing a lightness to his voice that he would never feel again, “will I die?”
“With or without the ring?”
“Without it. Let’s start with that.”
“The kin,” she replied.
“They have not managed to kill me yet.”
“No. But they will kill you, and you will not fight it. What they do before they kill you, however, we cannot afford.”