by Glenda Larke
“Threw a dagger into his back when he was fleeing, that right, Jet?” Rubric said, accompanying the statement with one of his mocking smiles.
Lord Jade looked from Terelle to her sons, horrified. Jet grew even angrier. His wife—who had not said a word—took one look at his face, released her hold on his arm and quickly drew the children from the room.
Snarling at his brother and speaking in Quartern, Jet said, “Shut your bleeding mouth, ye fool!”
Terelle shifted her gaze to Lord Jade and waved a hand at the brothers. “The Verdigris men murdered Feroze and six guards. Jet came to kill me. Tried and failed. I am safely waterpainted.”
As she struggled to find more words, Jet launched himself across the room and smashed a fist into her nose. It happened so fast, she was only beginning to react when his fist connected. She heard her nose break, the crunch of it grating inside her ears. Pain exploded across her face, and an instant later agony radiated outwards into every part of her skull.
She was lying on the floor, blood everywhere, with no memory of falling. Choking and trying to breathe, she strove to conquer the engulfing pain. Jet stood over her, his sword in his hand. His face was contorted with murderous rage. Her first coherent thought—as she swallowed her blood and started dragging in air through her mouth—was that he would be successful this time.
Then Lord Jade’s voice, filled with outrage. “Put your sword away, Jet!” The ringing in Terelle’s head wouldn’t let her understand the rest of what the woman said, but it was clear she was berating her middle son in no uncertain language. She had not raised her voice, yet her words seemed to fill every corner of the hall.
Rubric bent over her and helped her to sit up. “Are ye all right?” he asked. For once, he sounded genuinely concerned.
“Hardly,” she said, spitting out blood. “De bastard broke dy dose.” Speaking hurt so much that tears ran down her face.
“Ye’re braver than me,” Rubric said cheerfully, “poking Jet like that until he reacted. He’s not known for the sweetness of his temper. We tend not to be provoking him.”
“Oh, frizzle you,” she said, nauseous and dizzy. She clutched at him to pull herself to her feet. Moaning, she wiped away the tears with the back of her hand, to see that Jet had vanished. Lord Jade pushed a kerchief into her hand and she used it to stem the bleeding. Touching her nose started the tears flowing again. Blighted eyes, but that is weeping painful. She couldn’t even think straight.
“So, Mother,” Rubric asked, “where do we imprison this vicious enemy of ours, my cousin Terelle? I believe Jet was suggesting the ice house.”
Terelle glared, but doubted he noticed her expression behind the now-bloodied kerchief. Withering shit, this is agony!
“Certainly not,” Lord Jade said. “Take her up to the tower room. I will bring my paints.”
Rubric seized her by the elbow. “Let’s go,” he said. “It’s a long climb.”
“Goin’ t’be sig,” she said.
“Sig?” he asked, puzzled.
She took a deep breath and enunciated carefully. “Sick.”
“Do ye think you could wait till we reach the garderobe?” he asked in Quartern, but the last word he used was a Khromatian one she didn’t recognise. She nodded anyway.
Disoriented, she leaned on his arm, too ill even to notice the way they took. Something told her she should be paying attention, but her head was spinning too much to obey her instinct. She was vaguely aware they crossed a number of rooms before they arrived at the foot of stone steps spiralling upwards. Every step sent pain stinging into her cheekbones. The steps were too narrow for two people, and only his solicitous hand on her back as he walked close behind her enabled her to continue upward.
At last they stepped onto a landing at the top. In front of them was a thick wooden door with a bar on the outside.
“This is it,” Rubric said. “Your home for the remainder of your life. Used to be the lookout post for our sentries in days gone by. When we had enemies.” He unbarred the door and made an extravagant bow to usher her in.
“One od dese days summun is goin’ t’wring your deck, Rubric,” she told him.
“Not sure what ye just said,” he responded, still infuriatingly cheery, “which I suspect is probably just as well.” He took a look around. “Ah, I’d better send up a few comforts I suppose. Like linen and firewood and a lamp. No glass in these windows unfortunately, but the shutters close tight. Only thing is it’s rather dark with them shut. Ye won’t go jumping out, will ye? I mean, ye wouldn’t want to oblige my father by committing suicide, would ye? There’s the garderobe over there in the alcove behind the curtain. When she looked blank, he said, “Ye know, outhouse. Or whatever ye barbarians call it.
At least he wasn’t using Khromatian. She didn’t think her brain could cope with their language right then. Abruptly, she sat down in the room’s only chair.
“Do ye still want to be sick?”
She shook her head, which was a mistake.
He turned as a servant girl stepped through the door carrying a bundle of bedding. “Ah,” he said. “Mother is one step ahead of me, as usual.” He looked Terelle up and down in assessment. “Can ye survive a moment longer while Vittia here makes up the bed with mother’s best lavender-scented linen? Ye do look awful!”
Tentatively, she removed the cloth she had been holding to her nose to see if it was still bleeding. It was.
Vittia busied herself with the bed, every now and then shooting interested glances at her, and looking away immediately if she caught Terelle’s eye.
“Ye were terribly muckle-headed to bait Jet like that, ye know,” Rubric said. Arms folded, he was leaning against the fireplace. He sounded irritatingly smug. She closed her eyes, not caring. When she opened them again, it was to find a succession of servants parading in and out of the room, bringing oddments Lord Jade evidently thought she needed. Besides the bed and chair, the room already had a floor rug and a small table. To this was now added a wash stand with ewer and bowl and towel, a bar of soap, a jug of drinking water and a mug, a lamp, all Terelle’s baggage, wood for the fireplace and a tinderbox with its own flint and steel.
When the servants stopped coming and Vittia left as well, Rubric helped her over to the bed and she lay down. A moment later, Lord Jade entered, carrying a paint tray and other painting paraphernalia, which she placed on the table. She filled the tray from the ewer and began to sprinkle the water with the motley.
Terelle’s mouth went dry with fear. She could kill me so easily… I said dreadful things about her sons and her husband. They were true, but that wouldn’t make them any less hurtful.
“Don’t look so nervous,” Rubric said. “I imagine Mother is just going to mend that nose of yours.”
What if something went wrong? “We doan use wadderpaiding to heal,” she said. “How duz id work?”
He relayed the question to his mother, but left Terelle to understand her reply. “You can’t make the impossible possible,” Jade said. “The bone in your nose, if it is broken, will mend in its own good time. But using waterpainting magic, I can immediately set the bones in their right place, reduce the swelling and stop the bleeding. I do it by painting your nose looking normal. Vittia is bringing up a herbal drink to ease the pain. Ah, here she is now.”
The servant came in and gave the mug to Terelle. Rubric raised her up enough for her to drink. “All of it,” he said. “Remember the adage—if it tastes like poison, it’s a medicine. If it tastes like honey, it’s poison.”
I do want to wring his neck, she thought, deep in her misery. He’s a snide, sarcastic little pest.
She drank the medicine, trying not to pull a face at the awful taste, because that hurt, and trying not to wince at every swallow because that hurt too. When she lay back on the pillow, she watched as Jade painted with quick sure placements of colour, then concentrated to shuffle up. From where she was lying, Terelle couldn’t see the artwork. Through the haze of her discomfort
and nausea, she wondered if she ought to be scared silly. This woman could do whatever she wanted, and who would report her if it was against the law?
As if Lord Jade understood what she was thinking, she caught and held Terelle’s gaze. “Do not fear me. Healers swear not to kill or harm. First, I want you to look at yourself. At your face.”
She held out a looking glass, the surface so beautifully wrought that when Terelle gazed on her own image there was no distortion other than the damage Jet had inflicted.
“Weebing shid,” she said. “I am such a mezz!” Her nose was swollen, misshapen, red and crooked. Her top lip was split, which she hadn’t even realised. She handed the mirror back, not wanting to see.
“I have to wash off the blood,” Rubric said. “It’s going to hurt, but I’ll try to do it gently.”
While he was dabbing at her nose and she was wincing, Lord Jade reached up and took an intricately woven gold and silver chain from around her neck. She dangled it on her fingers, showing it to Terelle. “This is my holdfast. The magic won’t work until I place it where it is in the painting.” She laid the pendant on the pillow next to Terelle’s head, once Rubric had finished cleaning her skin. “Understand?”
She’d never heard the word “holdfast,” but she’d used similar items to create a unique situation. “Yes.”
“I’m afraid it will hurt. You must not touch your face. You must try not to move.” She aligned the holdfast perfectly, so that it matched her picture.
Terelle tensed. It didn’t help. Her nose felt as if someone had pushed a hot poker up a nostril. Her cheekbones screamed their agony. Beneath her skin, bone took on a life of its own and moved like worms writhing. She wanted to scream, to snatch at her face.
Jade placed a hand over hers. “A little longer.” Her voice, her beautiful voice, was sad, yet firm. “Keep still.”
She struggled against her desire to scream. And then Rubric was on the other side of her, calming her with gentle words so different from his usual snide cynicism. She felt his hand on hers, comforting yet steely, stopping her from raising her fingers to her face. Her eyes watered, and she looked at him through the blur of tears, his features softened by the mistiness of her vision. He was beautiful, and she felt an urge to paint him one day.
Then all stilled. Her skin stopped crawling. Slowly, oh, so slowly, the pain began to diminish. She could suddenly breathe through her nose, and the drip of blood rolling down the back of her throat stopped. She closed her eyes and relaxed for the first time since she had entered the manor.
“It looks good,” Rubric said. He sounded pleased. “You were never exactly pretty, but at least you don’t look like a goat’s arse any more.”
“Rubric!” his mother said, shocked.
“Sorry, Mother.”
To Terelle’s surprise, he did sound contrite. She opened her eyes, to find Lord Jade handing her the painting, freed from the tray. It showed only her face, and a little of the pillow, with the chain resting next to her head. Lord Jade had portrayed her much as she would normally look, although with a healing cut on her lip, and with her skin discoloured over a slightly swollen nose.
“To lessen the risk of anything going wrong, I made the area of the painting no bigger than is needed.” When Terelle looked blank, she added, “I only portray your face and the pendant. Nothing else.”
Rubric explained more fully. “If she was to include more stuff—the bed, your body—then there would be more opportunity for something to go wrong with the magic. Healers paint only the area to be healed, detailed enough to identify the person. Plus the healer’s personal holdfast, which fixes the moment the painting becomes the truth.”
“Now look at yourself,” Lord Jade said and gave her the mirror.
Wonder consumed her. Her nose was almost the right size. The skin was discoloured as if bruised, but her nose was as straight as it had ever been. The cut on her lip was still there, although it seemed to have closed up. She was the woman in the painting.
“Thank you!” Her delight and wonderment momentarily overwhelmed her commonsense and she asked, “Could you teach me to be a healer?”
A shadow passed across Lord Jade’s face as Rubric translated. She replaced the pendant around her neck, picked up her painting things and left without a word.
“I’ve upset her,” she said to Rubric, her enthusiasm draining away. “Didn’t mean to.”
He was scornful and this time he did not deign to use her tongue. “Terelle, since you arrived, you have told her things she didn’t want to hear about her husband and sons. On top of that, she’s had to imprison you, knowing that you are either going to die horribly or—according to your version anyway—cause the fall of her family. She’s a healer, sworn to help the ailing; yet her husband has asked her to play a part in a murder. And she just watched her son hit a woman and come close to following that up by plunging his sword into her. How did you think she was going to feel about all this?”
And in all that, you didn’t tell me what in particular I said to upset her. He was hiding something. “I didn’t insult your father or your brothers. I told the truth. And surely she knows it. She can’t have been married to a man—for what, thirty years?—and not know the sort of person he is. And I think that Jet at least proved what sort of monster he is.”
He looked at her with a half-smile. “And what about me? Am I one of your murderers too?”
She knew what he was now. It came to her in one revelation, the explanation for the things that had puzzled her about him, what he’d referred to when he’d been talking to Jet. It was if a mist was wisped away and she could see him clearly for the first time.
I do know what you are, Rubric. Or at least, what you were.
Jade had once hankered for a child who would become another waterpainter in the family, but Rubric’s desire was to be as his brothers, an armsman. That was why Jade had been upset: Terelle was an outsider gifted with something Jade had desired—in vain—for one of her own children. But Terelle’s understanding encompassed more than that. So obvious. How had she not seen? She, snuggery handmaiden and waterpainter, should have realised; Rubric’s past had left its history. So much about him suddenly began to make sense. And Jet had mocked him, asking if he was interested in her because she was the only woman around who didn’t know his past.
Rubric Verdigris had once worn another body.
But now is not the time to mention it.
She chose her words carefully. “Marchford. I watched from upstairs. You were outside the stables while your men tried to batter down the door. You say you tried to kill the Alabasters and couldn’t because my magic wouldn’t let you. But, Rubric, I hadn’t done my painting then. It wasn’t the magic that stopped you.”
He paled, then colour rushed back into his face.
“It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
“Ah,” he said. “I guess you’ve just answered a question I had about myself.”
For a moment she thought that was all she was going to get in answer, but then he continued, his words tentative, stumbling, apparently irrelevant.
“When I was young I watched my brothers learn their sword play. I longed to join them. Mother wanted—she wanted me to be her assistant, even when it became obvious I was not a waterpainter. But me—I wanted to be my brothers. I argued with my parents for years. In the end, my mother—she, er, helped me and I joined my father’s guards. I am quick and skilled, a clever swordsman rather than a powerful one, but mostly we are a peaceful land, with not much call for an armsman’s skills. The occasional rape or murder or theft to investigate, the occasional hunt for a criminal. And then came the first time I was asked to kill my fellow men.”
His gaze held hers, and she heard resignation in his voice, as if he had lost the idea of hope. “There, that night, in the barracks and the stable as you saw—that was the first time, and it was in an unjust cause.”
He peeled himself away from the wall. “But armsmen aren’t supposed to ques
tion causes. They are supposed to obey orders. So I tried to use my powers to kill men who didn’t deserve to die, and I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. At the time I did think it was my failing. Later it was easier to think it was your painting making a different future for those Alabasters. That it was their luck they were needed to get your two Scarpen guards back to Samphire. Now you tell me that wasn’t so.” He paused, looked away, embarrassed, and then back again. “Make no mistake Terelle, I’m no innocent standing here. My water skills made it easy for others to do the killing.” He gave his irritatingly sardonic smile, but this time the sadness in it made her heart turn over. “I did find out one thing that night: maybe I’m in the wrong trade.”
With that parting shot, he let himself out and closed the door. She heard the bar across the door fall into place. In her head she heard what he hadn’t said: he’d thought he’d wanted to be an armsman, when what he really wanted was to be his brothers.
Rubric Verdigris had been born a woman and had grown up to know himself to be a man.
She sighed. Life was so stupid sometimes, and so unjust.
She considered getting up to explore her room, but the moment she lifted her head from the pillow she felt so bad and the pain was so severe, changed her mind. Not long afterwards, the soporific properties of the posset took effect and she slept.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Scarpen Quarter
Breccia
Level Two, Breccia Hall
Sunlight streamed into the stormquest room. Amberlyn was in her cradle, enjoying the feel of the sun on her bare legs, while her father just enjoyed watching her. He could tick off the precious moments of wonder: the first time she stopped crying the instant he picked her up, the first time she turned her head to look at him when she heard his voice, the first time she smiled at him and captured his heart all over again, the first time she made a wild clutch at his face and bopped him on the chin. Every moment was magical.
