by Tanya Huff
“Sleep on it?”
“Use it as a pillow.”
“Why don’t you use it as a pillow?”
“They can’t sneak up on you.”
Tomas wasn’t sure who they were, but since no one could sneak up on him—at least no one in the shelter with them—he tucked it up against the wall. Without the hard ridge of the telescope, it wasn’t entirely uncomfortable.
“I think there’s bugs in the carpet.”
“There were bugs in the straw.”
“It’s not the same.”
“Risking the curfew’s looking better, isn’t it?”
She shot him a look of such exaggerated disdain that he snickered. The Sisters were a little crazy, but it could be worse. They had food and shelter. They were a day closer to Karis and while he could have played hide and seek with the Imperials all night, Mirian couldn’t.
People were muttering and shuffling into different positions all over the room. Someone growled a profanity. Someone answered with a louder one. The air was fresher than he’d expected by the floor, less stagnant, and he wondered if Mirian had anything to do with that. Did she think about blowing out a circle of candles?
Mirian was…
Still sitting. And not looking as though she were about to lie down any time soon. Tomas pushed himself up on his elbows. “What?”
“I’m not putting my head on that carpet.”
How was he supposed to sleep if she sat there looking disgusted all night? He couldn’t change, so there seemed to be only one solution. Lying down again, Tomas patted his right shoulder.
Her brows went up.
She’d had no difficulty sleeping next to him in fur. Even though he was exactly the same person, she’d been willing to trade society’s opinion for warmth and comfort. If it came to it, he’d rather be in fur. In fur, he was content with physical contact. In skin he could only hope the surrounding scents would prevent any embarrassing reactions.
Of course that wouldn’t matter if Mirian kept acting like she’d been out shopping with her mother when they were introduced instead of tied to a tree. Wait…was it because there were people around them tonight? First, how could the opinion of these people matter? And second, given Mirian’s earlier behavior, they’d no doubt already assumed the worst.
Tomas suspected neither point would provide a winning argument. He had to be…
…sensible.
Pushing himself back up again, he leaned in and whispered, “If you don’t get enough sleep, you’ll slow us down tomorrow.”
She looked annoyed, probably because he was right, but a moment after he lay down, she settled her head on his shoulder, one hand gripping the edge of his jacket. Her sigh had a certain sound of surrender to it.
He wouldn’t have been able to stop himself from pressing his lips against the top of her head had her hair not been so disgusting.
Chapter Eight
“WAKE! WAKE AS THE STARLIGHT fades and we are given over into the care of the one Sun!”
Mirian jerked her head up off Tomas’ shoulder and stared blearily across the room at one of the Sisters. She thought it might be the Sister who’d let them, in but they’d done such a good job of making themselves “…as similar as the stars in the sky…” that she couldn’t be certain.
“Wake!” the Sister declared again. “And bid the stars farewell!” Overdress flapping, she hung a lamp on the brass hook by the door and disappeared back into the kitchen.
Surrounded by grumbling and wet, hacking coughs, Mirian sat up and yawned. Even as exhausted as she’d been, the sounds coming from the people around her had chased sleep off four or five times in the night. Creaking. Snoring. Moaning. Muttering. Once she’d woken to the sound of wet, ragged breathing moving closer. Tomas had growled, a low rumble deep in his chest she felt as much as heard, and the breathing had moved away.
Tomas didn’t seem to want to meet her gaze as he stiff-armed himself into a sitting position, shoulder blades against the wall, knees up. While he’d offered his shoulder as a pillow, two nights had been enough for her to grow used to the liberties fur allowed. She had a horrible feeling, given the position she’d woken in, she’d crossed the line between keeping her head off the carpet and cuddling.
“I’m very sorry for not allowing you personal space,” she murmured, already so close she didn’t need to lean in or raise her voice.
His cheeks flushed, and he pulled the bedroll out from behind him onto his lap. “You couldn’t put your head on the carpet. I understood.”
“It’s different when you’re in fur. You’re more…” Perhaps more wasn’t the right word. “Or you’re less…” No, that wasn’t right either. She sighed, gathered her skirt up out of her way, and rolled up onto her knees. Assuming that bidding the stars farewell meant it was dawn, the curfew had ended. Only a single bolt secured the door. “We should go.”
“Go?” Tomas looked startled. His head whipped around toward the kitchen door as it opened. “Porridge!” And back to her. “I smell porridge. We should eat.”
Ignoring, for the moment, that it was a long walk to Karis, Mirian couldn’t understand why he’d want to stay. “We can eat while we walk.”
“Eat what? Hunt Pack rules, eat when you can. This is free porridge, Mirian. Porridge doesn’t grow on trees.” He sounded as though he were babbling even though individual words were clipped off short.
“Their church says you’re an abomination,” she hissed under the rise in noise as the three Sisters and their cauldron appeared. “It’s dangerous to stay.”
“It’s stupid to starve!”
Her stomach growled and she sat back down. “If they drag you off to the fire, I’m not going to rescue you.”
“I don’t need you to rescue me.”
“Fine!”
The porridge was terrible. Plain boiled oats with no honey or cream and given the amount of grit, Mirian suspected the Sisters had bought the last sweepings off the millstone. But Tomas was right, it was stupid to starve, and the only money they had to buy food was in the purse taken from the dead soldier. She tried to swallow without tasting, mushing the lumps against the roof of her mouth to save her teeth. Across the room, a man with a long stained beard coughed and splattered porridge over the woman next to him; two of the Sisters had to stop praying to break up the fight.
Four days ago, she’d been eating eggs and kidneys and toast in the breakfast room, wondering how anyone could think of going to the opera when the Imperial army was marching on the border. Her father had already left for the bank and she could hear her mother’s voice in the distance demanding to know where her green silk shawl had gone. The very next morning her mother had called her an unnatural child, and maybe she was because she missed the comfort, but not her parents.
She missed the chaos of the university dining room more than her parents. Or at least the porridge in the university dining room. She’d never been fond of the chaos.
Tomas ate with the bowl balanced on his raised knees, head down, and it wasn’t until he finished that he sagged back against the wall, sighed in what sounded like relief, set the bowl and bedroll aside and stood. “We should go.”
“Go?” If he recognized his tone echoed back to him, he gave no indication. Mirian was tempted to just sit there. To ask the Sisters for seconds. To make a privy run.
Actually…
She took his hand, let him pull her to her feet, and handed him the bedroll. “I’ll be right back.”
To his credit, it only took him a moment to work out where she was going. “What’s wrong with…?”
“It has a door I can close. Bushes don’t.” She had to curl her toes inside her boots to keep the leather from rubbing against abraded skin. Every step over and around other people in the room felt as though she had hot coals pressed against her heels. By the time she reached the privy, she was breathing short and sharp through her nose, in too much pain to appreciate morning air only moderately tainted by old sweat and grime. And
if she used the privacy of that closed door to let a few tears fall, well, that was the point of privacy.
When she emerged, Tomas was waiting for her outside the door, standing a little apart from a trio of women who also waited, ignoring a fourth who flashed a gap-toothed smile and pushed out breasts covered in torn cotton as aggressively as any of society’s daughters with all their teeth and clothed in silk. With neither power nor fur, she didn’t stand a chance and Tomas looked bored rather than interested or embarrassed, either of which Mirian could see the woman would prefer.
Their imaginary, blind, one-legged priest from the woods could have seen it.
Aggressive flirting would become aggression in a minute—no one liked being ignored—and aggression directed at Tomas would end up with him outing himself as Pack.
As Mirian saw it, she had two options. She could claim Tomas as her own, redirecting the aggression and probably resulting in having to defend her claim physically, or she could direct the woman’s interest elsewhere.
If you can light a candle…
No.
Air and water; first levels were useless. Putting the woman to sleep would cause new problems. She couldn’t see a way metal-craft, even at second level, could be applied. Pushing the tangle of blackberry canes to bloom and then fruit would require touch and Mirian refused to move closer to the man currently urinating on the garden in direct contradiction to the Sister’s instructions.
Fortunately, before she’d been accepted at the university, she’d had another teacher.
Closing the distance and raising a hand to keep Tomas quiet, she murmured, “I heard the man with the green kerchief say your breasts had to be false. Is that true?”
The woman’s eyes were so bloodshot Mirian almost mistook the red for mage marks. “He said what?”
“That you stuff rags in your bodice.”
“That fucking bastard!” In spite of missing teeth, her snarl was impressive.
“He said they were too perfect to be real.”
“That flaming piece of shi…” Her eyes widened. “Too perfect? Did he now…” Tomas forgotten, she shoved Mirian aside and strode across the garden to apply her charms to the man in the green kerchief. Who cowered in the face of the sudden onslaught of smiles and breasts. He could consider it payback for urinating on the blackberries.
My mother would be so proud.
Tomas merely continued watching her like she was the only thing worthy of his attention in the immediate area. That was so Pack. Arrogant and secure in their power. It seemed she’d have to remind him daily that they weren’t in Aydori and that, although he could still invoke terror in fur, in skin he was only a young man who was going to attract attention for his looks and who couldn’t let anyone know he was Pack and, honestly, what had he been thinking just standing there looking superior?
“I traded the fire-starter for these,” he said, holding up a pair of wooden clogs. When surprise kept her from an immediate reply, he ducked his head and added, “We don’t need it and you can’t walk in those boots.”
Mirian actually felt her mouth open to point out wood didn’t go with her outfit, but managed a slightly strangled thank you before sinking to the ground and struggling with her boots. Wood didn’t go with her outfit? Lord and Lady, that was her punishment for allowing her mother back into her head. Before she could untangle the knots, Tomas knelt at her feet, set the bedroll on the ground, and dealt with them.
“Let me…”
As he peeled the first boot off her foot, she clenched her fists so tightly that the broken edges of her nails cut into her palms. The second either hurt less or couldn’t possibly hurt more.
Her heels looked like raw meat, the scabs scrapped off, the flesh below red and oozing. They felt as bad as they looked. In a just world, they’d at least distract her from her aching legs, but in a just world it was still too early for the maid to have opened her curtains.
“Can’t you…” Tomas waved a hand. “…fix them?”
They looked a lot worse than they had when she’d first exposed them. “No. That’s third level healing.”
“Have you ever tried?”
About to remind him one more time of why she hadn’t been returning for a second year of university, Mirian frowned. In fairness, she hadn’t ever tried. She’d been tested for second levels of everything save metal a hundred, a thousand times, to no effect, but she’d claimed sleep on her own. Twice. And she’d called metal to her. So why not a third level in healing? The damage was a little more than the tiny wounds the students learned to heal on themselves, but the principle was the same and she’d be no worse off if she failed.
Logically, her ability to perform the first level body equilibrium meant she knew her body. She knew it whole and undamaged. Water wanted to be water, her professors had said, and her body wanted to be whole. She could, logically, return it to that condition.
Logic, her professors had also said, is not applicable to mage-craft.
In this case, it seemed they were right.
They were alone in the garden when she looked up and shook her head.
Tomas closed a warm hand around her ankle. “It’s okay…”
She didn’t need to be comforted. She was familiar with failure.
“…the clogs won’t touch your heels. And they’re easy to kick off if we need to run.” He stood and held out his hand. For the second time that morning, she let him pull her up.
The clogs weren’t terribly different than last season’s summer shoes. Wood, rather than leather, and a lot heavier, but easy to kick off was, after all, fashion forward in Aydori. She wouldn’t call them comfortable, but the inside had been worn smooth and, while they were grimy, nothing stuck to her feet. She frowned as she realized the people who took shelter with the Sisters of Starlight had only what they wore and now one of them had even less.
“The fire-starter’s worth more than new clogs,” Tomas told her, as though he’d heard her thought. “We don’t know where to sell it and wouldn’t have the time even if we did.”
The color of the sky said it was no longer dawn, but early morning.
“Out! Out!” One of the Sisters stood in the doorway and Mirian got her first well-lit look at what they were wearing. In the lamplight, all that white had turned their bodies into featureless blobs. Mirian knew they couldn’t possibly be wearing nightgowns under the long white tabards, but the shapeless style was similar. No one would be joining the Sisters of Starlight for the uniform; that was for certain.
The Sister took a step toward them, waving both hands. “You must be gone!”
“Your boots?” Tomas asked, hanging the bedroll over his shoulder.
Mirian glanced down. A pair of well-made boots would no doubt come in handy, but it hurt just thinking of putting them on. “Leave them.”
All three Sisters flapped them through the kitchen and into the outer room where the door stood open and the air was distinctly fresher than it had been.
“What about…?” Tomas paused on the threshold, circling his hand.
Mirian had forgotten entirely about having set the air in motion. She’d been nearly asleep when she’d done it, certain that if the assault on her nose was any indication, Tomas must be truly suffering. Air drifted up the first spiral then across into the second where it spiraled back to the floor then crossed back to the beginning. Both spirals rotated slowly around the center of the room. Technically, the mage-craft was nothing more than blowing out a thousand specifically placed candles, but she had to admit she was impressed by the complexity she’d managed while unable to sleep. Except…“How did you know?”
Tomas tapped his nose. “Even with the door open, the scent’s so strong I can tell when I’m crossing the streams. And the power is unmistakably you.”
That made sense. Mirian had half thought she’d smelled the spirals while crossing them. “I’ll leave it. It’ll run down eventually…” Everything did. “…but until it does, this place needs all the help it
can get.”
In spite of the early hour, the street outside the Sisters’ shelter was empty of everyone but a few stragglers heading toward the northeast. Toward the pall of smoke already building. Toward the factories.
“They’re going in the right direction.” Mirian turned on the ball of one foot, the clog pivoting easily over the cobblestones. “We could follow them.”
“Or we could go back to the market to pick up the road we know goes through the city.”
They didn’t know it, not for sure, but she had to admit that the odds were higher. Tomas’ nose was next to useless in the city, and the factories would have guards, and the coach had very certainly not gone by way of the factories unless factories in Abyek came with livery stables.
Tomas rocked back and forth, his clogs ticking against the cobbles. He shifted, created a different rhythm, and grinned as it became the same song the 2nd had been singing on their way to the border. About to ask what he was doing, Mirian realized he was waiting on her decision.
Still, she’d already acknowledged his nose was next to useless here. “Back to the market, then.”
The shelter stood nearly in the center of a long block of two-story houses, white-painted bricks standing out against the red—although most of the red, especially on the upper levels had been blackened by smoke. Mirian hadn’t seen a set of stairs in the shelter, so they were probably behind a door in the kitchen. She wondered if the Sisters used the second floor for arcane rituals or rented it out to pay for the cauldrons of food. She could hear babies crying and a man shouting, could smell food cooking and old urine. Three small children sat on a threshold eating porridge from bowls in their laps, a wet stain against the wall next to them. A pair of small dogs standing in one of the upper windows yapped hysterically at the world until Tomas glanced up, then they tumbled over each other in their haste to disappear.
How did people live like this?
