“Has the riverman been found?” Dalcoran asked.
Colton shook his head. “No one recalls anything beyond black hair and average height. It happened quickly, and a man was bleeding out on the pier. Catling was in the midst of it. She may know.”
The discussion drifted into another review of witness reports that proved nothing. Vianne worried about Catling, the length of her stay with the Poisoner troubling and likely concerning the other doyen as well. She hoped; she prayed Catling didn’t toy with more influence. Founders forbid she altered her eye.
Every passing hour for the past two days, Vianne battled her desire to march over there, bang on the door, and pry information from the old man. She attempted to work up the nerve but simply lacked the requisite well of courage to confront such grief. How could she dispel the vision of the delicate face and wispy curls? She hadn’t the talent to soothe Catling’s pain without plying influence, nor could she tolerate a descent into mourning for her own childlessness. She’d wait one more day and speak to the queen.
“The assailants were also familiar with the tiers,” Kadan said from the wall by the window. His face looked as ashen as the day he arrived in Ava-Grea. Minessa recovered, but the strain of her wounding and Lelaine’s orders compounded demands on his time. “They knew how to get inside the pylons. That means they’d acquired a key.”
“We’re investigating.” The captain of the city guard stood stiffly at Colton’s side. “The keys are alarmingly common among the wards and not well managed. We’ve engaged a master locksmith, but even he professes little knowledge of the Founder-made mechanisms.”
“And your inquiries into the use of influence?” Lelaine peered at Dalcoran.
He massaged his fingers. “There’s no question that we have an oathbreaker. At least one. The conclave magnifies our difficulty in weeding out our strays.”
“Oathbreaker is a rather indulgent term for a traitor,” Gannon remarked, his distaste souring his face. “Surely, you can narrow the number down. Apply a dose of torture.”
Lelaine frowned at the taunt, and Vianne tatted, thankful the rest of the room ignored it.
“Fortunately, Your Grace,” Kest said, “Catling’s talents exceed those of her peers.”
The statement regarding Catling’s skills prickled the back of Vianne’s neck, and she narrowed her eyes. Either Kest had acquired private knowledge, guessed with uncanny acuity, or rendered a perfectly innocent comment. The question was which.
***
Gannon poured Lelaine a goblet of wine, relieved that she’d waited until the noonday bell. She lounged on a divan, sipped, and dropped her head back with a breathy sigh. “They won’t find their rogue influencer, will they?”
“I doubt it.” He sat beside her, nudging her hip to gain a few inches of rump room.
“I shall give Catling one more day, and then I’m afraid her isolation will have to end. Sadly, Ellegeance waits for no one, even a grieving mother. Tomorrow, I’ll accept the doyen’s oaths, and the following day, we leave for the south.”
“It may help her to visit with Whitt.”
“If he’s returned to Guardian from the Far Wolds.” Lelaine ran her fingers up his thigh. “I warned her, Gannon. I warned her that a child was a liability, a weakness. If the confrontation on the docks didn’t unfold in our favor, she would be on her way to the Shiplord for all I know. My heart is broken for her, but there is a tiny part of me that’s relieved her loyalties are once again undivided.”
He swiveled around and frowned at her. “You didn’t arrange—”
“Of course not!” She nearly leapt from the divan. “I’m not a monster, Gannon. I merely know this world. My father raised me to understand intrigue and ambitions, how to spot fallibilities and opportunities for exploitation. People use each other; we all harbor agendas, desires, things we want and are willing to stomach unpleasantness to get.”
“You paint a desolate portrait of the world, Lelaine.” He couldn’t express how deeply disappointed, rejected, and forlorn her words left him.
She must have seen the gloom in his eyes because she lowered her voice, “I’m not suggesting we do it intentionally or that our feelings of love and kindness are false, simply that we desire things, even admirable things, and we seek them from people who can give them to us.”
“What does Kest want? You realize he will travel with us to the Far Wolds. He’s mentioned a desire to look into Kadan’s reports of Cull Tarr interference in our laws.”
She reclined, her fingers brushing his arm. “He wants what he always wants.”
“A queen for his master.” Gannon leaned over her, dark curls framing his face, a wicked grin on his lips. “Bond with me, Lelaine. My offer still stands, children and chickens, somewhere in the south where no one will find us.”
“They’ll find us.” She stroked his cheek. “I would bond with you at a moment’s notice, but you know what will happen?”
He shook his head. “We’ll grow creaky and warty together? You’ll sag to your waist, and I’ll grow a hump.”
She giggled and swatted him. “The opposite, Gannon.” She gazed up at him with a sweet smile, and for a few heartbeats, the queen vanished, leaving behind the innocent face of a girl in love. “If we bonded, they would kill you. You’d never be safe; our children would live in constant danger. I’m afraid to bond; I’m afraid to bear children. I couldn’t endure Catling’s loss or grief.”
Her revelation erased the grin from his face, the fear embedded in her words nothing he’d witnessed in her in the years he’d known her. He didn’t care for the regal haughtiness that time and again transformed her into a fist of iron, but the vulnerability struck him as dangerous. He experienced an overwhelming desire to protect her, and he didn’t have the power. “You need to produce an heir, Lelaine. Ellegeance will eventually demand an heir, or there will be nothing but anarchy.”
She laughed and drained her wine. Her arm dangled off the divan’s side, and the goblet dropped to the floor and rolled. “Now you sound like a true councilor. Where is the romantic dreamer who saved me from the shipmaster, freed the warrens, and stole my heart?”
Gannon bent down, and her lips rose to meet him. “I’m right here. I always will be. I love you, Queen of Ellegeance.”
Chapter Thirteen
Catling studied her rose eye in the mirror. The swelling had subsided, the bruising faded. What remained entranced her: shades of red velvet petals kissed by sunlight, the garnet center around her lashes dappled with gold. Markim had transformed the tattered, ragged blotch that defined her face into something exotic and exquisite. He fidgeted behind her, lips puckered, and looked down his nose in an attempt not to grin. “My best work yet, I might add.”
“In more ways than one.” She smiled, the days of comfort in the pool softening the rough edges of grief. The finality of her loss seemed a mote less final, and as long as she and Rose survived, she would cling tightly to hope. She hugged the frumpy, bent Poisoner. “Thank you for everything, Markim-Ava. You’re a sweet man for all the pain you cause.” She chuckled, and he huffed, hands held at his sides, stiff as a plank.
“I’m done with you,” he said. “No point in coming back here and taking up all my time.”
“I’ll try not to.” She let him go. “I have one more task—to learn what this eye can and cannot do. Then, I suspect I’ll find the queen and face the doyen’s interrogation.”
He winked at her. “It’s fine to keep secrets.”
“I know.” She smiled and let herself out.
Brightest night had come and gone, marking the dawn of Summertide, and the midday sun glared down with a tenacious heat. Markim’s windowless hall was dusky as a cave, and her eyes watered in the bright light. The conclave likely ended with a reordering of vows, and she wondered if the doyen gave Lelaine their primary oaths. Lelaine would be gleeful and smug. And if Catling’s shield remained intact, she would be forgiven her beautiful eye. The time had arrived to test her power.
>
She avoided the twelfth tier garden and slipped through a narrow lane used by servants to access the kitchens. It led straight to a utilitarian lift she rode to the first tier with a shy girl and her shopping basket. Catling smiled at the girl and nudged her with a drop of courage
The girl returned the smile. “Your eye is very beautiful.”
“Thank you. It’s new.”
“I’ve never seen one on anyone’s face.”
Catling sighed. “Nor have I.”
The lift slid to a stop, and Catling wended her way to the dock. She tested her influence, subtly applying balms of joy and love, pricks of discomfort and worry, blending them to create more complex feelings and sensations: frustration, boldness, passion, altruism, and itching. Her influence hadn’t changed, all elements of the emotive and sensorist spectrums intact. She would heal someone if she saw the need and simply trust that her ability to kill remained unchanged.
The Cull Tarr attack left her jittery, and she ambled along, dismissing the peculiar sense that eyes tracked her progress. A glance over her shoulder revealed nothing untoward. In all likelihood, her rose eye garnered the attention, something she would adjust to with time.
Shaking off her wariness, she browsed the dock’s market, confident in her ability to defend herself now that she alone stood at risk. Whether that was wise or foolhardy, she didn’t know or care. Death would find her or it wouldn’t. Her little Rose had escaped.
Threads of influence infused the air as the guild’s membership prepared to disperse to their home cities. Ferries filled with passengers traveling north to the canals and Elan-Sia, south to Mur-Vallis, Kar-Aminia, Guardian, and the territories beyond.
Ahead of her, Tora-Mur, another influencer from Mur-Vallis, boarded a ferry, and Catling hurried up the pier to catch her. “My respects, Tora-Mur. Have you seen Kadan and Minessa?” The woman glanced up and blinked at Catling’s altered eye.
“My respects.” Tora bowed her head. “Kadan felt a duty to return and left yesterday. He was torn, Catling, but Minessa is here. She insisted she delay her departure for you. She’s well-recovered and awaits you on the eleventh tier.”
As much as it comforted her, Minessa’s kindness reignited a surge of grief. She wasn’t prepared to talk about Rose, about the incident, to lie. “Give Kadan my regards, if you would, and relate my regrets at missing him?”
“I will.” Tora stepped back so others could board, a hand on her heart. “Catling, I’m sorry about Rose… about everything.”
Catling dipped her head and turned away, her emotions fraying and threatening to spill. She held her breath and returned to the dock. The swamp’s ripe scent rose with the humidity, and she sat on a crate to gather her wits and temper her breath.
On the next pier, two influencers heading to the Far Wolds applied pressure on a captain to accept additional cargo, the men traveling with more trunks than the queen. Their porters sweated in the sun, obstructing all but a trickle of pier traffic.
“We’re already overloaded.” The lines on the captain’s face deepened, influenced authority nettling his good sense.
“I’m certain you're overly cautious.” The shorter of the two, a man with lank blond hair, winked at the captain, his blend of influence instilling a sense of companionship.
“I’d put the ferry at risk,” the captain scratched his head, surveying the length of his craft.
“Perhaps another passenger might delay his travel.” The taller man raised his dark eyebrows. Aristocratic in bearing, he clasped his hands behind his back and exuded a cloud of influence suffused with joy, the suggestion perceived as brilliant. The party began to consider who they might usher off the ferry.
Catling shielded the captain first. The man frowned and crossed his arms. “I won’t boot off a customer who’s loaded and paid. You might find another ferry for your belongings or yourselves.”
The influencers exchanged confused glances, and the dark-haired man waved toward another passenger, flooding him with fear and love, a blend translating into a desire to please. “Here’s a fellow who might be willing to surrender his place.”
The awestruck passenger stepped back, about to succumb to their sway, when Catling blocked both influencers. Their intended victim shook his head, declined, and sauntered toward the bow. A young woman hurried up the pier dragging her single trunk. “Room for one?” she called to the captain.
The captain waved her aboard, and she jumped to the deck, wrestling her trunk down after her. The two on the pier frowned at the scene. “Ferry’s shoving off,” the captain shouted. “Polers at your stations, prepare to cast off. Stand by the oars.”
“What about us?” The blond influencer stiffened.
“We’re full,” the captain announced, accepting the fare from his latest arrival.
Catling watched the ferry depart, the two influencers left with their luggage in a pile and their snubbed noses in the air. Her ability to shield and block were in fine order. She covered her unmarked eye with her fingers to see if the threads of influence still wove across her vision as they had when she was a child.
“Oh, my!” The girding dock burst into a wild display of color, and she dropped her hand. On her feet, she retraced her steps to the ramp. Glassy-eyed twitchers slouched in the shade beneath the incline, a few peering into the sunlight and begging for a taste. She backed away from the bustle of the dock’s market to stand in the gap between the lost souls and those who kept a wary distance. She covered her eye.
The colors reappeared. Halos of emotion, all genuine sentiments, swirled around each person. They reached into the space between their hosts like vibrant tentacles, beautiful and complex, graceful and tangled. Even the most forthright feelings entwined with other emotions to create subtle and sinuous melds. Myriad webs of love and fear and ambiguity, the infinite varieties of combinations painted the air, far more intricate than the influenced blends she crafted.
Influenced emotion stood out starkly against the bewildering disarray of human feelings. It stretched farther and with greater precision despite its unnatural edges, the lack of density and sophistication. She unraveled those threads, severing the influence as she’d always done. Yet, she feared to touch the true aura of feelings. In part because she didn’t know what severing them would do, but also because they were personal, an inviolate part of each person’s experience of life. To erase them seemed intrusive, an act of violence.
She turned toward the twitchers, fingers hiding her unmarked eye. The colors around them were undefined and muted, a nebulous randomness of pleasure and despair, the persistent and terrible urgency. She understood the cravings, the utter blindness of desire that wiped away all other facets of consciousness. The memory of languid ecstasy, a dreamy state of bliss, lingered in the cells of her body.
Edging nearer, she bent to peer into the darkness, washing them with influence meant to calm and create a space of safety and trust. “May I… help you,” she asked, avoiding a promise to heal, something unattainable in one touch.
“Not bothering me, girl,” an old man said from beneath the ramp. She crouched and entered the dim space. Knife-thin blades of sunlight slanted down through the cracks between the planking. Twitchers sprawled in the shadows, dreaming or dozing. Two children played with each other as their thin parents sat nearby in half-lidded stupors. The smell of bodies drew her wince.
She squatted by the gray man, his wrists like twigs, hands shaking, beard and hair tangled. Resting her free hand on his arm, she accessed her skill as a mercy. Influence flowed from her fingers, easing the irritation in his organs, softening the damage to his gums and throat, and dispelling the fog in his brain. Through her rose eye, she saw his natural colors brighten, nothing close to those of healthy riverfolk but an improvement.
The filtered daylight under the dock dimmed. She glanced toward the bright wedge of sunshine marking the ramp’s edge. A man stood there, silhouetted, hand resting on the ramp above his head. Her hand hiding her unmarked eye,
she witnessed the hard emotions engulfing him, the ruby hue of death shading all other permutations. He bent over and crept toward her. She sent a bolt of influenced fear toward him that dissipated without halting his advance. A Cull Tarr. Fear rattled her confidence. Backing up, she lashed him with a searing pain that failed to slow him. “I can still kill you,” she warned, raising her hands. “My touch can stop your heart.”
The man paused, holding up his gloved hands, displaying the long blade that twinkled in the lancing light. “If you find my skin.” His voice sounded familiar. He advanced on her. A streak of sunlight crossed his face and rippled over the side of his head where he’d shaved stripes into his hair.
“Kest,” she whispered, receiving no reply.
He stepped forward in a crouch. Catling scrambled for the brightness at the ramp’s far edge. A handful of twitchers scurried across her path; others didn’t move, their supine bodies slowing her escape. She tripped and crawled, almost finding her feet when a hand closed on her ankle and jerked her back. She twisted around, kicking, and the old man leapt on her assailant’s back. Kest staggered backward. His knife swung at Catling and missed. He wrenched out of the old twitcher’s feeble grip and stabbed him in the chest. Catling let out a cry as the body fell across her legs. Kest lunged toward her. In a panic, she covered her good eye, shielded herself, and severed his emotions.
The ambassador dropped to his knees, his arm falling to his side, knife clattering on the planking. He gazed at her without interest, without a care, and she expected him to speak or back away and escape her. Instead, he simply kneeled, indifferent, his eyes vacuous and drifting nowhere.
The twitchers melted into the planking, sitting or lying where they were. Catling scanned the silent space, every twitcher’s emotion severed, every one of them empty of natural feelings. She’d sliced through the weave of Kest’s emotions, yet theirs disappeared as well. Everyone in sight of her had lost their expressive haloes, the space around them empty, including the children’s.
With a gasp, Catling scrambled to a girl whose head lolled, her mouth hanging open. She directed her healing influence into the waif’s body, searching for the threads of emotion, seeking anything she might reconnect and make whole. Her power streamed through the heart to the brain, firing through the connections, the interweaving of memory with relationships, the templates where emotions were stored and accessed. Nothing.
Farlanders' Law (The Rose Shield Book 3) Page 10
