Pausho's mouth was dry. "You have become friends with Matthias?" she said to Tri, voicing a question she had held for almost a year now.
"We have spoken," Tri said. "We're neighbors."
"And does he stop at your forge?"
Tri shrugged, but his gaze moved away from hers. "Everyone uses my forge."
"Does Matthias?"
Tri didn't answer. Fyr stood and touched his arm. He didn't look at her. His gaze was down.
"Tri," she said. "It's important."
"Important so you can persecute a man for how he is built rather than for who he is? He became Beloved of God," Tri said. "Surely that must count for something with you."
"He renounced it," Rin said.
"And you, who believe the Tabernacle is misguided, should relish that even more," Tri said.
Pausho didn't move. She stared at him, her heart pounding. A Wise One cavorting with an outcast? Had they made such a mistake bringing in Tri? Had they hurt themselves that badly?
"What did you do for him?" she asked.
Tri raised his chin slightly. "I found him some varin."
Varin. An ore native to the Cliffs of Blood. Touched only by a handful, mined by a specifically chosen few, and hoarded by the Wise Ones in the vaults below.
"Varin," Pausho whispered.
Fyr took a step back from him as if he were somehow contaminated. "Why? Why would you do that?"
"Because he asked?" Zak said.
"Because he paid." Rin spit out the phrase. "I cannot believe you would cavort with an outcast."
"You said he wasn't an outcast," Tri said. "Not since the mountain gave him back."
"We said he could live here. We did not say he wasn't — " Pausho stopped. She couldn't explain it any better. "Don't you understand your vows? Your duty to your people?"
Tri crossed his hands over his chest in the position he held when he took his vow. " 'I promise to support, defend, and lead the people of Constant in all ways,' " he said solemnly, " 'no matter the cost to me, my family or my peace of mind.' Seems pretty vague to me."
"Vague?" Zak shook his head. "It is not vague."
But Pausho was beginning to understand. "It is vague, if you haven't read the Words, learned the history, or studied the legends."
"Have you done that?" Rin's voice was soft, but it held steel.
"We asked him to," Fyr said.
"It's required," Zak said.
"Have you done it?" Rin asked again.
Tri let his arms fall. "Some of it." His response sounded reluctant.
"What part?" Rin asked. Her voice was rising with each question.
"I have looked at the Words."
"But not read them," Pausho said. "What about the history? What about the legends?"
"They have nothing to do with now," Tri said.
"They have everything to do with now," Zak snapped. "A tall one was in the market this morning. If you don't have the history, you don't have the understanding. If you don't have the understanding — "
"I won't feel the need to murder innocent children," Tri said.
"Is that what you think this is about?" Rin asked.
Pausho's heart was beating hard. She had sensed this. She had sensed it from the beginning with Tri. And now she finally understood why he had joined them. Not to help, but to dismantle.
"Of course that's what it's about," he said. "That and leadership so old it cannot provide for Constant in any meaningful way. Of course I gave varin to Matthias. I saw no need to hide a valuable ore from someone who wanted to use it. And I would vote against killing a child, especially a newborn, simply because we do not like its looks. That's barbaric."
"And you joined us to change us." Zak sounded terrified. He looked at Pausho, his eyes red-rimmed, his skin paler than it had been a moment before. " 'When the tall ones return, the betrayals will be revealed and the mountains will crumble.' "
"That prophecy is part of the legends," Pausho said to Tri. "If you had studied — "
"If I had studied, I'd be as brainwashed as all of you. Can't you see what you've become? Murderers in the name of tradition. Don't you know what that does to all of us, how that affects this entire community? Pregnant women sneak away in the middle of the night, more willing to face the dangers of travel than to have their babies judged by you. Entire secret societies have sprung up in order to hide children from you. People watch the mountain so that the babies placed in the snow are rescued."
Pausho felt as if she had been stabbed in the heart. She grabbed for a chair, sank in it, and stared at Tri.
He seemed larger than he had before, more powerful. "And that's not all," he said. "You deny our community the coin it needs by keeping our most valuable and unique riches for ourselves. You hoard varin, give seze to the Tabernacle, and forbid the picking of blue naries. You keep us poor and isolated. You didn't even attend the ceremony for the new Prince, despite your invitation. You act as if we aren't a part of Blue Isle at all."
"We keep our people safe," Zak said.
"At great price," Tri said.
"You don't understand the price," Rin said. "We've kept our people pure. We are the only ones — "
"It doesn't matter." The sentence came out of Pausho before she could stop it. Her words silenced the room. Everyone looked at her.
Looked down at her. It felt odd to be the only one sitting, the only one who seemed defeated by Tri's words instead of challenging them.
"You can stop arguing with him," she said to her friends, to the other Wise Leaders, the ones who had voted him in. "You cannot convince him. He joined us to change us, to be silent until he was established or until he faced his first difficult choice, and then he would reveal himself for what he is, just as he has done."
"He gave varin to Matthias."
"And I'm sure he warned more than one family to sneak away into the night." Pausho clenched a fist. She knew of at least two pregnant women from families with a history of long babies who had disappeared shortly after the Wise Ones decided to monitor their pregnancies. "But it stops here. You can leave us, Tri."
"But the Wise One takes his oath for life," Tri said.
She nodded. The exhaustion she felt grew. "He takes his oath for life," she said, "And he remains a Wise Leader as long as he keeps the oath. You have never kept an oath. Not from the moment you made it. Your intent was always to break it." She ran a hand over her face. The skin was soft, the eyes so hardened by life, she had no tears in them. "You have no idea what you've done."
"I've tried to protect my people," Tri said. She could hear a ragged edge to his voice that hadn't been there before. "I think your leadership is outdated. It's based on things that don't matter any more."
"We had tall ones in the market this morning," Zak said.
Pausho removed the hand from her face and sighed. She stood slowly, feeling each one of her seventy years. "Do you know what varin is?"
"It's an ore. It has properties that make it particularly difficult to forge, but once forged, it provides a wicked blade that does not shatter with use."
"That's only a small part of it," she said. "Varin can kill with a single touch. If forged into a blade, it can slice anything with no effort at all. But it likes the slicing. It likes the blood. It will continue, unless contained by someone who knows its use, its powers, and its controls. Do you?"
He frowned at her.
"Of course not," she said. "You who hate tradition. Does Matthias know this? No. He only knows that varin is part of a recipe he learned in his position as Beloved of God."
She couldn't keep the sarcasm from the last words.
"Matthias is no more Beloved of God than I am. The position he held was not his to hold. It belongs to the descendants of the Roca's second son. It is a hereditary position, just like the position of King belongs to the descendants of the Roca's oldest son. These recipes were not meant to be known by men such as Matthias. They were meant for men who could use them, for men who had the blood of the
Roca running through their veins."
Her entire body was shaking.
"You have failed, Tri. You have no place here. The betrayal is done. You have destroyed your vow."
Zak swallowed hard. He glanced at her, then said to Tri, "You have no place here."
Rin and Fyr echoed the statement.
"If you are found here again, if you come into this place, if you touch anything within this hall, you will receive our punishment," Pausho said.
"Death, right?" Tri shook his head. "You people are sad and predictable. The bad part of this is that so many innocents rely on you. They believe in you. They let you come into their homes and steal their children. They listen to you when you deem something demon-spawn or evil or wicked. And they live in fear of you. Well, I won't live in fear of you. I'm sorry you're sending me away from here. I think I would have done a lot for our community. I would have wrenched it from the past and made it part of the present. I would have — "
"Embraced the tall ones and sealed our doom," Rin said. She crossed her arms. "Get out."
"Get out," Zak said.
"Get out," Fyr said. She moved closer to him as if to push him away.
He stared at all of them. "Don't you know that what you're doing is wrong?"
"Get out," Pausho said.
He shook his head once, then turned and left. Pausho followed him, pushed the door closed and kept her hand on it. It was ironic. Ironic and sad. In arguing with them, in admitting his betrayal, he confirmed that the tall ones had come back.
Demon-spawn.
She shuddered, then turned. The others were watching her.
"Now what?" Zak asked.
"Our numbers are diminished and so is our power," Rin said. "Right when we need it the most."
Pausho shook her head. "We are not diminished," she said. "We are strengthened. We would only have been diminished if we had allowed him to remain."
"That still doesn't tell us what to do," Zak said.
"We follow the legend," she said. "We listen to the prophecy."
"But we need a smith," Rin said.
"There are others." Pausho wasn't sure who she would hire now. She too had been counting on Tri.
"We have to find one quickly," Fyr said, "before the tall ones come back."
"If they've even left," Zak said.
"They won't leave," Pausho said. She closed her eyes against the truth of the prophecy. "They won't leave until they own us."
NINE
Adrian leaned on his pickax and took a deep breath. The sun was barely up, and he was already covered in sweat. His back and arms ached from effort, and the blisters he had gotten on his hands the day before had burst.
He had thought farming was hard work, but it didn't compare with this.
The rock quarry extended as far as he could see, and throughout it were muscular men, their shirts off despite the morning cold, breaking large ore-filled rock into smaller pieces. Other men used wheelbarrows to carry the smaller rocks into the foundry, where the experienced workers extracted the ore. The remaining rock was then broken up farther, into gravel, and used on the more important roads.
He would never get that far in the quarry hierarchy. He was a day worker — he and Scavenger and Coulter. He had flirted briefly with settling near here while they worked with Gift. They didn't have a lot of time; they had to refine Gift's powers and teach him how to lead.
Adrian wasn't sure how they would accomplish that. He wasn't sure if they could accomplish that. But they had to try.
And all the while, they had to keep Gift away from his great-grandfather, the Black King.
Adrian liked it here. He had been skeptical when Scavenger first proposed it. No one came this far east or this far north. They had reached the edge of the Eyes of Roca mountain range, the easternmost edge, where the Eyes of Roca, which covered all of the northern side of the Isle, rose into the Cliffs of Blood. They had traveled to the Cliffs by the river route, coming up from the center of the country, heading east and slightly north until they reached the Cardidas. They had had difficult times crossing it, but they had made it.
And now they were in territory most Islanders never came to. Most of the Isle knew they were unwelcome here. So Adrian had thought Scavenger a bit mad for proposing this as a hiding place. But then, he had thought Scavenger hadn't known about the unusual nature of this part of Blue Isle. Adrian had underestimated Scavenger once again.
Scavenger was Fey, but he was an unusual Fey. He had been a Red Cap, a short, squat magickless Fey. Red Caps were forced to work with the dead, carving the bodies for useful magickal parts and cleaning up after battles. The Fey thought of them as less than Fey, filthy, foul creatures who did a thankless job. Scavenger had escaped the Fey, escaped the work, and had become more Islander than anyone Adrian had ever met.
An Islander with a deep understanding of magick, for Scavenger had made a lifelong study of it. He figured that since he didn't have it, he should at least understand it.
Scavenger was the only one of the three of them who could work consistently. Since they had arrived at the quarry before the sun was up, he had broken red rock after red rock, the muscles on his broad back rippling.
Coulter seemed to be having a tougher time. He had worked hard the first day, slower the second, and his face was white with pain on this one. He wasn't used to this much physical labor.
Coulter was as tall as Adrian, which meant that he only came up to Gift's shoulders. His face was round, his eyes blue, and his hair a straw blond. He had been born six months before the first Fey invasion — and he had magickal powers that made Adrian tremble. Coulter had saved their lives twice since the Black King had come to Blue Isle, each time using magick and the power of his mind.
He was still shaky from that, not because of the magick depletion, although Scavenger said that was part of it, but because of the loss of life. Coulter was one of the most gentle people Adrian knew. The fact that he had had to kill, more than once, to save the life of a friend who didn't completely understand it, tore him apart.
Scavenger had argued that Coulter could change pebbles into gold coins, and the spell would remain until the group was long gone. But Adrian knew that Islanders would remember such an occurrence, and that would provide the Black King a trail directly to them. He worried that Gift and Leen were showing their faces in the villages, but Coulter simply didn't have enough reserves to continue making them look like Islanders. Gift was the one who finally called a halt; there were enough Fey on the Isle that sooner or later some would come here, the most hidden part of the Isle. The Black King might not guess that the first ones were the ones he was looking for.
It was a gamble the entire group decided to take.
Adrian wiped his sore hands on his filthy pants legs, then grabbed the pick and slammed it onto the rock before him. The metal edge rang as it hit, echoing with all the other clangs around him. The work was almost musical: the ring of picks against stone, the grunts of the men around him, the squeak of the barrow wheels as they moved past.
His blow cracked the stone, but did not break it. He had noted before that when the rock finally shattered, and the pieces fell to the ground, the rock's color changed from red to a dull gray. Scavenger had looked at their first broken rock with something like horror.
"I don't like the feel of this," he had said.
But Adrian hadn't pursued Scavenger's feelings any farther — they would be kicked out of the quarry if they talked too much — and by the time he returned to camp for the night, he had forgotten Scavenger's comment.
He didn't forget it now. Each time he hit the rock, a deep red line would form, and then disappear, until he hit it again.
He was glad they had agreed to only a few days of this. It was backbreaking, mind-numbing work. A few days would give them enough coins to eat for a week. By then they'd be in another town, another place. They'd find the permanent hideout Scavenger was certain they'd need, and they would be left alone.
&n
bsp; He hoped.
A hand brushed his sweat-covered arm. It was Scavenger's.
"Keep working," he said softly, "but look."
He had moved close enough to be heard only by Adrian. Then he scuttled back to his own rock. His pick had made a dent in the center, but had yet to find that perfect place in the middle, the place where the pick actually split the rock.
Adrian kept working, but he moved a bit slower as he did so. He scanned the area until he saw what Scavenger meant.
A man he had never seen before stood at the mouth of the quarry, talking to the owner. The man was wearing a sweater, warm breeches, and boots: the clothes of a mountain dweller who did not have to work hard in the cool air. He was gesturing as he spoke, his hands rising as if indicating something large.
Or tall.
"I don't like that," Coulter said. He had moved closer as well.
"I don't either," Adrian said.
"Do you think it has something to do with us?" Coulter asked.
"I think we should assume so," Scavenger said.
"But you're paranoid," Coulter said, and he wasn't joking. He had stopped joking in the last two weeks.
"I am," Scavenger said, "And I'm still alive."
"I think we need to find out what they want," Adrian said.
"I think we need to leave," Scavenger said.
"We haven't received the day's pay," Coulter said.
"We haven't worked a day," Scavenger said.Adrian felt the tug between their arguments. The hair was rising on the back of his neck. This didn't feel good, but he didn't want to leave without knowing what was happening, what was going on.
"You two go," he said softly. "Get Gift and Leen, and wait at our camp. If I'm not there by tomorrow's dawn, go on without me."
"We can't leave you," Coulter said, his voice rising.
"You can leave me," Adrian said, "And you will. Gift is the important one right now, and you know it."
Coulter shook his head. "I'll stay with you. I can defend you."
Adrian smiled. Coulter was more his son than his own son at times. Adrian had shown that by leaving Luke behind, letting him tend the farm, while traveling with Coulter. He and Coulter were bound by the Fey imprisonment and all those years they had spent helping each other.
The Resistance: The Fourth Book of the Fey (Fey Series) Page 6
