Living With Ghosts

by Kari Sperring

  Thiercelin said, “It was my fault. I behaved poorly. I offer you my unreserved apologies.” He bowed. “And I regret this disturbance.” Behind him, he heard Valdarrien snort. Ignoring him, he added, “My cousin is too young to be aware that certain jokes lack taste. I’ll ensure it doesn’t happen again.” Daring Valdarrien to make anything of this, he held a hand out to Joyain. The latter hesitated, took it in an uncertain grip.

  Joyain looked back into the trees. Rather shakily, he said, “A joke?”

  “Yes,” Thiercelin said, firmly. Then, lowering his voice, “I may need to call again upon Iareth Yscoithi. Will that inconvenience you?”

  If anything, Joyain grew even paler. But he merely said, “Of course not,” and saluted. Thiercelin watched as he and his second made their way from the gardens.

  Maldurel said, “Never heard you had a cousin in town.”

  “He doesn’t,” Valdarrien’s light voice said. “He was being tactful. Covering for me as ever.” He bowed. “My thanks to you, Thierry.”

  “I don’t want them,” Thiercelin said. This could not be happening. He needed a drink. He needed help. Maldurel, gawping, was worse than useless. “This can’t happen, Valdin.”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  “Because . . .” Thiercelin hesitated. “I don’t know why. But it can’t. People just don’t . . .”

  “And when,” said the erstwhile Lord of the Far Blays, “did I ever do what ‘people’ do?”

  “I don’t know, but . . .”

  “Someone’s coming,” Maldurel said. “I heard the gate bang.” And then, “Come to it, Valdin, I’ll thank you to be a little more polite. I’ve stood by your good name these last years, I’ll have you know.”

  Valdarrien shrugged. “I owe you, then. How will you collect, Mal?” Something in the tone bespoke malice. Thiercelin laid a restraining hand on Maldurel’s arm. Valdarrien continued, “I don’t think Yviane will let me into the family coffers just now.”

  “It’s nothing,” Maldurel said.

  Thiercelin added, “Call it habit, Valdin. We all do it, even Mimi.” He paused, inhaled. “We’ll say good-bye, now. We’ve matters to attend to elsewhere.”

  “Oh, do you?” Valdarrien sketched a bow. “Later, then.”

  He had said that before, two nights since. Thiercelin’s skin was cold. He pulled gently on Maldurel’s arm and said very quietly, “Start walking. I’ll join you.” Maldurel looked at him curiously but didn’t protest. Thiercelin waited until he was a few yards away, then turned back to Valdarrien. He said, “You owe me, too, Valdin.”

  “Possibly.”

  Thiercelin sighed. “I want you to tell me something. Tell me about Urien Armenwy and a waterfall.”

  “Whatever for?” Valdarrien sounded surprised. Thiercelin was silent. “I knew Urien in Lunedith. We were ambushed together. What more do you need to know?”

  How these matters are involved in your presence here. But Thiercelin could not ask that. He said, “The subject came up recently.”

  “With Yviane?” Valdarrien seemed to smile. “No, she wouldn’t discuss her diplomatic work with you.” Thiercelin bit his lip. “It was Iareth, then. My Iareth kai-reth.” Again, his tone bore menace. “You’d do well to stay clear of her, Thierry.”

  “You told me to contact her.”

  “I did?” There was brief puzzlement in Valdarrien’s voice. “I don’t remember . . . There’s been a lot happening. Urien, and the waterfall . . . Kenan Orcandros set a trap for us. Alongside the big waterfall . . . Iareth said it was a special place, dangerous. We won, but Urien was badly hurt and I was shot in the shoulder. Iareth saved my life . . .” He looked up. “Forgive me, Thierry. I forget myself. You, of course, are to be trusted with her.”

  “You’re too kind.” Thiercelin could not quite keep bitterness from his tone. “Is there anything else?”

  “Perhaps.” The fog was beginning to lift. Valdarrien’s voice sounded thinner. Looking across at him, Thiercelin could see that his shape had lost some definition. Valdarrien said, “It’s hard to be sure. There’s something. Something I need . . . I can’t remember.” His eyes met Thiercelin’s and he was, for a moment, the old, beloved Valdarrien. “Help me, Thierry.”

  How many times had Thiercelin heard that? It was too familiar. It stung, the old grief like acid. He swallowed tears and said roughly, “I don’t know.” This should not be happening. He wanted Yvelliane. “It’s different now. Things have changed.” He could see almost down to the river as the mist cleared. Valdarrien’s shape was all but gone. “I’m sorry, Valdin.”

  “Yes.” The voice was a thread. “Later, then.” A few raindrops began to fall. Valdarrien seemed to turn away, toward the water. Then he stopped. Thiercelin was not quite sure he could still see him. Valdarrien’s voice said, very indistinctly, “Iareth’s father. Urien’s her father.” Then he was gone.

  Thiercelin stared after him, shaking.

  In an inn a few streets away, Joyain sat with his head in his hands and tried to control his shaking. He felt sick. The memory of Iareth Yscoithi—in his room, in his bed, in, river protect him, his arms—swam before him. He could not think. It made no sense. He could not have seen Valdarrien of the Far Blays.

  He was alone: leaving the Winter Gardens, he had shed Leladrien, pleading duty. He could not face company. He remained unsure if he could face his duty, either. Not now. Not after . . . It was hardly the kind of thing one might tell a woman, even Iareth; I have seen your lover, who is dead . . .

  Thiercelin of Sannazar had taken the whole thing in his stride. Perhaps it really had been only a jest. A dishonorable one, to avoid the duel . . . The theory sat poorly with what Joyain knew of Thiercelin’s reputation. All right, not a deliberate ruse, but the thoughtless act of a third party, of the claimed “cousin” . . . Leladrien had believed that tale, certainly, laughing at the idiocies of the aristocracy. Capable of anything, the lords from the hill.

  Joyain could choose to believe it, too. Chalk it up to the vagaries of life, ignore it, forget it. Forget, above all, two nights’ since, in his room above the shop of the sugar merchant. Forget Iareth Yscoithi.

  He could say nothing in any case. He would only look a fool.

  Business as usual, during altercations.

  It took several hours before Gracielis could bring himself to open the casement. The mist outside had turned into solid rain. To his eyes, it was heavy with pain. He was fevered, a little, and edgy. He had no desire to leave his room, to expose aching head and seared nerves to whatever lurked outside. His solitude was no protection, although he had sought it deliberately. At his own request, Thiercelin would not return before tomorrow, at the earliest.

  He wanted Quenfrida, desperately.

  He needed to see the river and the city also to discover the extent of the change he felt. In the end, he wrapped himself in his darkest and warmest clothing and forced himself to go out. The lieutenant’s ghost shadowed him, for once neither mocking nor contemptuous. Gracielis shivered and marveled at the insensitivity of the people crowding the streets. The air was full of immanent danger and yet they remained blind.

  The ghost knew. He could see the knowledge in every uncertain line of it. That was no reassurance. He knew he could simply leave Merafi. Yet images of lovers past and present danced through his memory. Lovers to whom he owed, perhaps, the chance to flee. Amalie. Yvelliane. All the others, through nine years. The air tasted foreign, weighted with a power that should not run here. A power whose course would serve all too well the requirements of his Tarnaroqui masters, if not deflected. It was not for Gracielis de Varnaq to gainsay them. He should rejoice at it.

  He could neither rejoice nor leave. He had lived too long in Merafi simply to abandon its people to their danger. He had no more desire for death at twenty-six than he had had at seventeen.

  He did not want to run away again. He was caught into this, bound almost as surely by the place as by Quenfrida. His charm was perhaps beginning to
desert him, his grace to break down and leave him open. He was ceasing to be himself.

  If, indeed, he had ever been anyone at all.

  He climbed the one hundred and thirty-two steps of the River Temple and went out onto the wet leads. The city lay all around him, mantled in rain. The river was hazy, the south channel all but invisible. The main course, which he had crossed to reach this tower, ran dark and swift. To the west the river ran high. To the east it faded into indistinctness. Clouds hung over the docks and the shantytown. The river felt wrong. It felt ominous, here in the middle of the city it sustained. Death by water, slow, sleepy, almost painless save at the last, when the body labors and panics for breath. The inhabitants of Merafi were drowning in their own complacency, and they would never know.

  The voices on the streets had held no hint of concern or trouble. People were accustomed to unrest in the docks, distress in the shantytown. No one cared. He was alone in his perception of despair.

  Perhaps he had run a little mad, in the hollow place behind his masks. Perhaps there was nothing in it beyond fear and the natural mists of autumn. He leaned on the parapet. The ghost hovered beside him. Everything was coming apart. Across the rain-swamped river, shapes broke and swirled.

  This was beyond him. Too many possibilities, too many threads of need and power and loyalty. Pain throbbed behind his temples. He rubbed them with his left, black-clad hand. Water turning bitter in the city and water falling in a dead man’s eyes.

  He took his gaze from the river and looked instead at the lieutenant’s ghost, half-hidden in the rain, a fragment of a man he had barely known. Today there was no contempt in its colorless eyes. “So,” he said to it, “what would you do? Have done?”

  It shrugged. He sighed, “It’s your city.” There was no response. He turned again and let a hand cover his eyes. It had been nine years and more since he had allowed himself the luxury of weeping. He would not weep now.

  Tell Iareth kai-reth she was right . . . Words with little meaning, little sense save to that same Iareth, who would not decode them.

  He might perhaps go to Yvelliane and warn her and watch her fail to understand him. He might go to Thiercelin, who was powerless. Iareth, then, as alien here as Gracielis, and in whose eyes lay madness, to trap him into another man’s past. Gracielis flinched from it, cold, afraid. For all her small treacheries, there remained only Quenfrida. Only and always Quenfrida.

  He left the tower, trailed back through the streets to his lodgings at the Jade Rose. His room was empty. He paced it, uncertain. He possessed no sure way of summoning Quenfrida. She only came when it pleased her, and left as lightly. A message would likely meet with silence. He might wait an hour or a week or a year, before she saw fit to seek him out.

  No means to bring her, unless . . . He was bound, in his blood and hers, to forbear from certain things. Bonds the severing of which would not go unremarked by her.

  It was wholly forbidden. There was no other way.

  His painted eyes turned to the lieutenant’s ghost.

  In the embassy on the hill, Iareth Yscoithi sat on the wide sill of a first-floor window and let her level gaze fall on the rain. She had sat thus for close to an hour, unmoving. It was not time yet for word from Urien. Her letters could not yet all have reached him. Her body was still, but her thoughts turned, and for the first time she knew regret that half her blood was Yscoithi. Not even for Valdarrien would she compromise it before, yet now with bitter hands she might have spilled it, if the loss could have released the rare power locked in the Armenwy half of her blood.

  Kenan had returned and there was joy in him like a light set in alabaster. She could find no reason for it, but he had been with Quenfrida. Alarm ran in the clan-blood of Iareth’s veins. She was not Merafien. Her calm was only skin-deep. Animal-wise, her sense of impending danger ran edged with instinct. Urien would know. Urien would see beyond the alabaster chill and the new wound at Kenan’s throat to the truth, however strange.

  She had warned him, her sire, her commander, of her failings, and he had chosen to discount them.

  It was not for Iareth to gainsay him.

  Only, perhaps, to fail.

  Gracielis did not have all he needed. No incense to sweeten the air and darken his limpid eyes. No bowl of virgin silver. No wicked bone-hafted knife to slice skin and memory. Candles he did have, for the fifteen pillars of the heavens, and a half-handful of fingernail-sized bells and a grief as deep as any trance. He had repainted his eyes with gold and emerald green, replaced wool and cotton with silk. He wore no rings on his fingers. His feet were bare on the smooth wood floor. His hair was left to fall, for once uncurled, to his waist. The lovelock, retinted forest green, kissed his cheek. His pulse points were warm and perfumed with his name. In the full rite, he should have fasted two days in advance and held silence for one. His present state would have to suffice. He was as pure as his flawed nature might permit.

  He had performed this ritual only once before. It was the fourth test of the seven and much to be feared, lest ghost-sight see too deeply into oneself. Full sibling to the act of exorcism, which might be performed by a lesser priest. An act not of interdiction, but of absolution.

  Absolution of the condemned. He sat down cross-legged and looked into the colorless eyes of the lieutenant’s ghost. It watched him with wary amusement. Across his knees he held his one and only knife, a pretty thing intended more for adornment than use. Its blade had been honed sharp by his baffled landlord. Gracielis ran a finger along the edge and watched as his blood welled from the cut, breathing slowly to master fear.

  He disliked the sight of blood. His fingertip throbbed faintly. He averted his eyes as the blood trickled toward his palm. Instead he looked at the ghost. He said, “We must be close to friendship, you and I. We have been scarcely separated at any time.” Blood from his finger dripped onto the floor. The room was quiet. No sounds drifted in from the taproom below. The ghost began to drift closer to him.

  Gracielis looked back at the knife blade. “It is strange, really, since I don’t recall ever learning your name. Although you were free enough with mine, living.” He spoke a little too swiftly. He sought mastery. He drew another finger along the edge of the blade. “We weren’t friends then, I think.” The ghost was less than two feet away, watching. The knife edge was discolored. He lifted it and looked at the point. It glittered. He shivered, throat dry. “Of course, hate is very powerful.” This time, his tone was nearly level. “Strong enough to bind a living man.” The knifepoint was against the small blue vein in his left wrist. He looked from it to the ghost. “Living, or dead.”

  The blade bit into flesh, deep, deeper, deep enough. Into the vein, evading the artery and the tendons. There came a white flash of pain, freezing his hand and knotting his stomach. He bit down on his lip, forced control. Then he spoke one word in another tongue.

  There was a moment of stillness. It lasted just long enough for him to register that the colorless eyes of the lieutenant’s ghost were actually blue. Gracielis looked into those blue eyes, drew in one long breath, and reached.

  He was forty-two years old. A soldier all his life, an officer on merit, not through birth. Tough and too proud of it, contemptuous of gentleness, of need, living to be seen to be strong; drinking hard, brawling, brutalizing where he might have been tender. And inside a bitter hollow, soured by desires that might find expression only in violence and disdain. Filtered through that bitterness, Gracielis could see himself, also, younger, foreign and vulnerable in his first days in Merafi. I remember, murmured that part of him which remained discretely Gracielis, I remember the cheapi nn, the soldiers who mocked and bullied and sometimes paid . . . But he had surely never been so beautiful? A heart-searing loveliness of grace and silken charm the lieutenant hated and resented and feared and wanted with an aching intensity. Looking back at himself, Gracielis said, “I never knew.” Felt the agreement, the confirmation of desire denied. Desire soured by fear and control into a furious conte
mpt that burned the tormentor almost as much as the victim. In borrowed memory, Gracielis watched his own eyes grow wide with alarm and shuddered with the fierce pleasure of it. So fragile. How sweet a bruise would be, worn along that high cheekbone. The lieutenant’s hand was raised to strike and Gracielis fought for control. To show kindness instead of foreign disdain. In memory, he redrew understanding and desire upon his features, in place of fear. This was almost beyond him. He lacked the strength, swamped in ancient dislike and water falling in swan eyes . . . His hand clenched about the knife blade and he rocked back with the pain, forcing clarity. Holding out the bloody hand to the lieutenant’s ghost, he said, “Forgive me. Forgive me my blindness, that I did not realize that I should come to you.”

  He felt shoulders that were not his shrug and start to turn away. Heard his own voice, all silvered over, say, “The fault is mine. Won’t you let me atone?” Felt his foreign body turn again and step forward into arms that were warm and open and then suddenly absent with the wrench of bonds tearing.

  He was flung back abruptly in on himself, temples pounding, cold, alone. The lieutenant’s ghost was gone. Blood from his wrist and hand dripped upon the floor. His eyes were muzzy and unfocused. Rain drummed against the closed shutters like a reminder. He forced himself to stand. The candles must be extinguished, and he should find a bandage for his hand. He had to wait for Quenfrida. He had to hide from her the full extent of his weakness. He expected at any moment to lose consciousness, fought it with what strength remained to him. The thin silk clung to him, clammy, uncomfortable. One by one, he managed to put out the candles, to tear a strip from a shirt to bind his bleeding hand.

  A chair stood nearby. He fell into it, locking his good hand about the arm to hold himself upright. He had to wait for Quenfrida. The room felt very empty. In all the last six years, he had never been wholly alone.

  He realized with dull surprise that he was crying.