“Yes, he really does.”
“Good. Mira may be a brat at times, but you should have seen Markus the last time they let him come home. That’s no way to treat a child.”
When we got back to the Foundation that night, Nico and I asked to see the family’s debtor’s boards. And Ines had it right: we already owed eight copper marks altogether. Not a princely sum, perhaps, but more than we could afford to pay.
“You’d almost think they had gone through our purse before coming up with the amount,” I told Nico.
He looked thoughtful. “Maybe they did,” he said. “While we were bathing that first day.”
“This place is a trap,” I said bitterly. “They invite you in with open arms. And then they have you.”
The next couple of days, Nico and I went along to Silver Street every morning—me to build them their new and larger coach shed, Nico to see if he could make the necessary words stick in Mira’s stubborn head. When the weather was decent, he usually came out into the yard to share whatever Ines gave us for lunch.
“They teach the children strange things around here,” he said. “Look at what they want her to copy out.” He gave me a piece of parchment with some awfully curlicued letters on it.
“Errm, it might be faster if you read it out loud,” I muttered.
Nico looked at me for a moment. “Are you sure you don’t want me to help you study a bit yourself?” he asked. “At some point? It’s quite a useful skill to have, and we needn’t tell anybody.”
“I can read!”
“Yes, I know. But if you never practice, you might forget.”
“Go on and read it, Nico,” I said. “You can make a clerk of me some other day.”
“You? A clerk?” Nico laughed. “I don’t think so. It’s just not in your nature, is it?”
“Read the stupid paper,” I said, brushing a few crumbs off my shirt.
He smoothed the paper and read it to me.
“Who is the Ruler of the land? Arthos Draconis. What are the true names of Prince Arthos? Courage, Wisdom, and Justice. What is the will of the Prince? The health and happiness of his citizens. What is the will of the citizens? Their proper service to the Prince. What is the fate of those who do not serve? Ill indeed. What manner of enemies exist? Those within and those without. What is the fate of the enemy without? To be stricken by the Prince with terror, swords, and blood. What are the enemies within? Traitors all. What is the wage of treason? Death.”
He paused. “Is that a proper thing to teach a six-year-old girl? No wonder she finds it hard to remember.”
“But this is what they want her to know?”
He nodded. “Or they will send her to be schooled by someone they call the Educators.”
“The black men.”
“Yes, they wear black robes. And Mira is scared witless of them. She saw what happened to her brother.”
“Why do people put up with it?”
Nico shook his head. “There are actually quite a few people in Sagisloc who send their children to the Educators of their own free will. Because if you want an important office, or the right to trade in cloth or copper or something else that can make you rich, well, then you have to be a graduate of one of the Draconis Academies.”
“He has it all figured out, hasn’t he? This Prince Arthos. Anyone you know?”
Nico grimaced and looked about quickly. The groom was wiping one of the carriage horses dry, but he paid us no heed. We were graylings, he wasn’t—he put some store by that.
“Actually,” said Nico, “he is sort of my uncle. Or whatever you call it when he is my aunt’s father.”
“Your aunt’s… do you mean Dama Lizea? Drakan’s mother?”
“Precisely.”
“Nico, remember Valdracu?”
“I certainly do.”
“How is he related to Prince Arthos?”
“As near as I can make it, his grandchild. His son’s son. So it might not be a good idea to talk too loudly about the fact that you killed him.”
I looked down at the paper with all its words about enemies without and within, and terror, swords, and blood.
“That’s what I was thinking,” I said.
DAVIN
The Telltale
I found myself whistling as I walked. Not loudly and piercingly, so that people would turn and stare, but a quiet, nearly tuneless sound. Things were definitely on the mend. Melli’s cough was all but gone, I was nearly finished with the coach shed, and Mesire Aurelius had praised my work and given me five pennies “for yourself,” as he put it. He was paying the Foundation a much larger sum for my work, I discovered. But the best of it was that he had promised Nico twenty silver marks if Mira passed her test today. Twenty marks! With that money, we could pay off the Foundation and still have something left so that we would not be beggars “without means” wherever we went next.
“She will pass, won’t she?” I asked Nico, who was walking next to me.
“I think so,” he said with what I thought was heartening confidence. “She knows her lessons when I test her. But I still think it’s awful to force children to learn such things.”
“As long as she knows her stuff.” Twenty marks. That money could save us all.
“She does.”
I whistled a little louder. Secretly, I had begun to savor the thought of leaving Sagisloc and its Foundation for good. We could go south, toward Campana. Someplace where Prince Arthos’s shadow did not fall quite so heavily upon the land. On a clear day, you could actually see the Sagisburg, where he lived, in the mountains across the lake.
“Come in,” said Ines. “Markus is coming home today! Mesire has gone to fetch him, and Medama is beside herself with the whole thing.”
We sat down on the kitchen bench and ate the breakfast leftovers with Ines. We didn’t have to wait long before we heard Mira’s rapid clattering steps on the stairs.
“Nico!” she called, and practically flung herself into his arms. “Sing me the frog song!”
Nico laughed. “If My lady insists.”
“If I what?”
“If you say I must.”
“I do!”
And Nico sang the frog song. I knew it well, it was an old one about a clever frog who cheated the stork, but between stanzas Nico had changed it so that the stork questioned the frog: “Who is the Ruler of the Land?” and the little frog in its croaky voice said, “Arthos Draconis,” and so forth.
Aha. So that was how he had coaxed the impertinent little miss into learning her lessons, I thought. Though that probably wasn’t the entire secret. Nico liked children, that much was obvious. And I didn’t think Master Rubens did.
“Mira? Mira, my sweet, where are you?”
“She is down here, Medama,” called Ines. “Nico and Davin are here.”
“Oh, good,” said Medama Aurelius, coming down the stairs. “Mira, let me look at you.”
Mira obediently bounced off Nico’s lap and turned around, pirouetting like a dancer. She was wearing black velvet this morning, with a starched white collar that practically reached her ears. Medama Aurelius fiddled with the collar and brushed a bit of lint off the black velvet.
“Aren’t they back yet?” she said anxiously. “We really can’t be late today. We really can’t!”
At that moment, we could hear trotting hooves and the rattle of carriage wheels outside.
“Papa!” cried Mira happily. “Papa and Markus!” She rushed to the kitchen door, tore it open, and shouted, “Papa! We’re down here!”
Mesire Aurelius entered. He, too, was stylishly dressed, in brown velvet with silver hooks. At his side was a boy of about nine, fair-haired like his sister, but with the hair so closely cropped that his skull seemed almost naked. He looked strangely formal and serious for a child.
“Markus!” Medama Aurelius reached for the boy and hugged him tightly. “My sweet boy, how have you been?”
For a few moments, the small form yielded to her embrace. Then he fre
ed himself.
“Excellently well, Mama,” he said.
“Better than last time? You look so pale, my love.”
“I am quite well, thank you.”
Why did he sound as if he was lying? Possibly because the words seemed much too grown-up for him.
Ines wiped her hands on her apron and held out her arms.
“Come here, you rascal!” she said, moving forward. “Give us a hug.”
She clearly expected him to come running to meet her. But he stared at her with a chill that made her halt abruptly.
“I do not associate with the likes of you anymore,” said young Mesire Markus. And when I saw Ines’s face, so crestfallen, so deeply hurt, I wanted to take hold of that pompous little Master Prim-Face and whack his behind for him. But it wasn’t really he who deserved the beating. Someone, somewhere, in the time that had passed since his last visit, had taught the boy that graylings weren’t people. At least not people of the kind you could have feelings for.
Even Mesire Aurelius looked taken aback. “Really, Markus,” he said. “You may say hello to Ines.”
The boy merely held his arms stiffly along his sides, as if they would snap if he had to hold them out to anyone. And Ines turned away quickly and began fumbling with the cups from the breakfast table.
“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “If the young master doesn’t want to, I’d as soon he didn’t. Besides, I have work to do.”
Markus’s face was masklike in its blankness. It was impossible to tell what went on underneath it.
“Ah, here is my star pupil,” said Mesire Aurelius and lifted Mira up to stand on the kitchen table. “How fine you look. Well? Let me hear you.”
Nico gave Mira a slight nod, and Mira rattled off the whole thing, flawlessly.
“Who-is-the-Ruler-of-the-Land-Arthos-Draconis, what-are-the-true-names…” and so on and so forth. Without hesitation. Without stumbling at the difficult words.
“Bravo!” said the proud father. “She certainly knows her lesson.” And then, more quietly, to Nico, “But why does she say quack-quack at the end?”
“Errrm, perhaps you had better not do that, Mira,” said Nico. “The Educators might not know that song.”
“Markus,” said Mesire Aurelius. “This is the man who has taught your sister. It is thanks to him that we are allowed to keep her at home for another year.”
Markus turned his cold stare on Nico. His face was still expressionless, and yet I could almost see the cloud of hostility that radiated from his thin body. Was it Nico’s gray shirt, or was Markus jealous because he had to go off to school while his spoiled little sister got to stay home?
Mesire Aurelius seemed not to notice his son’s coldness. He watched Nico for a while and then extended his hand the way he would to an equal.
“My thanks, Nicolas,” he said. “I have to admit that I doubted my wife’s plan at the outset, but you have put my doubts to shame. And when Mira has passed her test a few hours from now, I will keep my promise to you.”
The whole family left. For the first time, Nico was beginning to look nervous, but then, he had nothing to do for the next few hours except sit in the kitchen with Ines and bite his nails. I was happy enough that there were still a few things to be done in the coach shed, so I wouldn’t have to sit and think.
Finally, though, there was nothing left that needed sanding or planing, and not a single shaving that hadn’t been swept from the floor. And still no sign of the Aurelius family. I went back to the kitchen, where Nico had begun pacing the floor.
“She knows it,” he muttered. “I know she knows it.”
“Will you sit down?” I said. “Watching you is enough to make anybody seasick.”
He sat. And began drumming his fingers against the tabletop.
“Do you suppose she forgot the words after all?” I said. “Or lost her nerve in front of a bunch of strange old men?”
“How would I know?” snapped Nico. “I’m not psychic.”
How on earth had we reached this point, I thought, with our whole future hanging on a six-year-old girl’s ability to remember a meaningless rigmarole?
“Settle down, Nico,” I said. “If she flunks, we’ll think of something else.”
He stared at me. “If she flunks, they’ll take the poor girl away from her family and her home and put her through—through—through whatever they did to the other one. Her brother. Didn’t you see him? That’s no child, that’s a dead thing. If you think it’s the twenty marks that’s making me sweat, think again!”
My conscience smarted at that, because I had to admit I hadn’t thought beyond the money.
There were footsteps outside, but it wasn’t the family returning. These sounded more like the tramping of soldiers’ feet.
We heard the street door open. A lot of boot heels rapped against the floor above our heads, and I was beginning to get a really bad sense of trouble.
“Nico,” I whispered. “Something is wrong. I think we’d better get out of here.”
He still sat unmoving at the table. “Why?” he said. “We haven’t done anything wrong.”
Ines laughed bitterly. “Think that matters? In this city, graylings are always guilty until proven innocent.”
Steps on the kitchen stairs now.
I latched on to Nico and pulled him to his feet.
“We’re leaving,” I said.
Finally, he moved. I opened the door to the courtyard.
And found myself facing a couple of uniformed guards who were apparently quite aware that a fox’s hole has more than one exit.
Behind us, more guards were already filing into the kitchen, along with Medama Aurelius and Markus. Medama was pale as death, and of Mira and the master of the house, there was no sign.
“Who is it, then?” asked the guard captain.
“Him,” said Markus, pointing at Nico. “There is the grayling who has poisoned my sister’s mind!”
DAVIN
The Court’s Justice
They dragged us through the city in chains. It was hard to believe that I had walked through the same streets a few hours earlier, whistling.
“Why couldn’t you stay out of it?” Nico hissed at me. There was a cut above his left eye, and a thin thread of blood trickled down the side of his face. “Why did you have to start a fight?”
Was that all the thanks I was getting?
“I only wanted to help!”
“Right. And what about your mother? What about the girls? Who is going to look after them now?”
“But they’ll have to let us go,” I said. I was having a hard time breathing; there had been a bad kick to the ribs, and I wasn’t over it yet. “We didn’t do anything wrong!”
“Oh, apart from head-butting the guard captain, you mean?”
Yes, well, that might not have been the cleverest thing I’d ever done. But when two soldiers are hanging on to your arms, it’s the only way you can fight back, and when he had begun hitting Nico, well, what was I to do? Nico hadn’t even resisted. He was just trying to talk his way out of it, until that bastard of a captain started shouting about “grayling impertinence.” And hit Nico. More than once. Which was when I butted him.
Clutching his nose, the captain had roared even louder. He swung at me, but I pulled away from one of the guards holding me and stumbled back so that he missed me entirely. The table was overturned; bowls and cups went sailing through the air and hit the tiled floor with a crash. Potsherds everywhere, and total confusion. The guards were trying to catch me, and I was trying to avoid being pummeled half to death. Nico had begun to fight back as well, now, but there were six soldiers in all and not much doubt about the outcome. They wrestled me to the floor eventually, on top of all the shards, and chained my hands behind my back. And the bloody-nosed captain kicked me in the ribs with a vengeance. I was almost sure one of them was bent or broken.
Which was why we were now being marched through the street in chains, guards on both sides of us, for th
e good citizens of Sagisloc to stare at. And Nico was right. I had been stupid. If they locked us up for a couple of weeks, or whatever they usually did to graylings who dared resist, who would look after Mama and the girls?
They locked us up in some basement room beneath the courthouse. There weren’t any windows, and they didn’t bother to leave us a light. A tiny crack of daylight showed beneath the door, and that was that.
“Are you hurt?” asked Nico.
“I think I may have broken a rib,” I muttered. They had left the chains on, so I couldn’t even touch my ribcage to find out. “What about you?”
“No,” he said. “Nothing much.”
“How long do you think they’ll leave us here?”
“I have no idea. I don’t even know whether graylings get a trial the way citizens do, or whether they just hand out your punishment without further ado.”
We were both of us quiet for a while, and I don’t think Nico’s thoughts were any more cheerful than mine.
“I don’t understand,” he finally said.
“What?”
“Why they came to arrest us. What is it they think we’ve done?”
I sighed tiredly. “You heard him. The pale little rat. Markus. Apparently, a grayling is not allowed to masquerade as a tutor. Or maybe they don’t like it when you turn the Draconis rigmarole into a song about a frog. What do I know?”
“But how was I supposed to know that? Not even Mesire Aurelius knew.”
“You think they care?”
There was nothing to sit on except the floor, which was gritty and cold. I tried to pull up my knees to keep warm, but it hurt too much. Every time I moved, those damned chains clinked so that I felt like a donkey or a chained watchdog, or whatever. Something less than human, at any rate.
I heard Nico move in the darkness. He was pacing. Back and forth, from one wall to the other.
“They might have left us a light,” he said, hoarsely. “They didn’t have to leave us here in the stinking dark so that we can’t even see where we are!”
The Serpent Gift Page 13
