The Language of Power

by Rosemary Kirstein

  Rowan could not help leaning forward eagerly. “Do you know that for a fact, or are you reasoning it?”

  “A little of both, maybe. She was mad at him, I knew that.”

  “Really?” This was unexpected. “Why?”

  “For dying. That’s how she said it. She was angry, underneath, the whole time she was here, and I couldn’t help noticing it. So I asked her straight out: Tell me, lady, what’s made you so angry? And she said: Kieran. And I asked: What did he do? And she told me, He died too soon.” He thought long, and hard, and Rowan waited; but at the end of his thoughts, he only shook his head. “If the conversation went on from there, lady, I don’t know what was said. It’s a long time ago, and really, I was just listening to her voice.”

  Rowan said: “Something about Kieran brought her to Donner.”

  His gaze became sharper. “And it’s brought you, too, hasn’t it?”

  She sighed. “Yes. But I have no idea what, or why.”

  Returning from the orchard, Rowan caught sight of a pair of figures standing on a bridge that crossed one of the many streams flowing down from the hills. Even from so great a distance, Rowan easily recognized Bel and Dan. The two seemed to be conversing idly, but Bel had arranged it so that she was facing the orchard.

  From Rowan’s vantage on the low hill, she could see quite a distance across the flat land: down toward the stream, across northeast to where Greyriver curved around the city. In the fields and in the visible streets, there was no sign of either the beggar or the stout gray woman.

  The steerswoman continued down into the city.

  The owner of the next name on Rowan’s list was not at home, the house shuttered and apparently abandoned. Instead of proceeding directly to the next address, Rowan rambled, in a widening circle, turning left and right in the close streets, occasionally pausing just past corners to glance back. Neither of her suspected followers was present, but eventually Bel and Dan appeared in the street ahead. They stepped into a pawn-shop, which reminded Rowan that she ought to see about replacing her sword. She decided not to enter the shop while Bel was there; tomorrow would do.

  But she could not resist, as she passed the open shop front, glancing inside. Dan was in some discussion with the shop-keeper; Bel leaned back against the counter, as if idly gazing out into the street. Rowan caught her eye, as was apparently Bel’s plan, and the Outskirter leaned slightly forward, so that her face could not be seen by the shopkeeper. So swiftly that it would have been easy to miss, Bel’s face showed a knit-browed half squint of uncertain suspicion, and her right hand flashed three fingers. Then she turned away and joined Dan’s conversation.

  Rowan passed on by.

  Three. Maybe.

  A third watcher?

  It was a busy street, with shops and shabby residences crowded against each other. Many people were about. Rowan mentally subtracted the obvious residents: half a dozen children; the tinsmith lounging outside his own shop front; the woman who came out to berate him, apparently his wife; three men and a woman absorbed in decorating a horse cart with festoons of flowers and ribbons, for what reason Rowan did not know; and a young woman of obvious mental deficiency, sitting half sprawled on a doorstep beside a disgruntled young man of about eighteen, who was feeding her soup.

  Rowan cataloged the remaining persons; she would know if she saw one of them again.

  At the next house Rowan found herself trapped for the better part of two hours. The old couple who lived there answered her questions cheerfully, but provided no new information; and then they began questioning her in turn.

  As a steerswoman, Rowan was required to answer. Apparently the couple’s many children and grandchildren had dispersed themselves across the entire Inner Lands, and after determining that Rowan had not actually met any of them, the pair interrogated the steerswoman as to details of the areas in which they had settled.

  Eventually, she managed to extricate herself. At least, the tea had been good this time.

  The last address provided by the bricklayer’s grannie brought the steerswoman to the harborside, and Rowan arrived at a prosperous-looking three-storey building, clumsily and ostentatiously decorated in the native Donner style. She climbed the front stairs and entered, leaning aside to allow three ledger-carrying clerks to brush pass, nattering numbers at each other.

  Inside: a murmur of quiet voices, an air of constrained bustle. The first floor was a single large room, with counters and open storage areas to the right, cabinets and worktables to the left. Rowan sidled past persons obviously intent on their duties, trying to sight someone who seemed to have a spare moment.

  The person she found proved to be a secretary. When Rowan asked after Marel, he led her behind a rank of tall filing racks that obscured the rear of the room, their pigeonholes bristling bits of colored paper.

  Beyond: more light, from broad, unshuttered windows at the back of the building. A huge open yard was visible outside, with a warehouse behind. Horse carts were being loaded with new-made crates, the wood yellow-fresh.

  Marel occupied a corner of the main room, with open windows to both sides behind him. He had three tables for his work, set up on three sides of him with ledgers, loose sheets of figures, and on one table a bamboo box with many compartments, all empty.

  The old man divided his attention among three different tasks, turning from table to table and back again, and work seemed to progress at equal speed on each. Rowan and the secretary stood quietly, waiting for him to take notice of them.

  “I hope I’m not interrupting something important,” Rowan said after introductions were made and the secretary had retired. “I could as easily come back later, or tomorrow, if that’s better.”

  “Not at all.” Marel was bone-thin, but moved with crisp efficiency. His scalp was bare and pale, and, it seemed, a bit dusty. Nose and eyebrows jutted; green eyes in which the squint of hard thinking had become a permanent feature now showed pleasure and interest. “I do it all by rote. Five minutes after you’ve gone, I’ll have caught up again, without a moment’s strain. I hardly have to pay attention to myself at all.”

  Rowan liked him immediately. “Your business seems to be doing well,” she commented; the secretary returned with a tall stool, and Rowan perched herself on it, leaning her cane against the central worktable. “I’ve just come from Alemeth; I can’t help wondering if the silk that rode with me is coming through your offices?”

  “Silk.” He blinked twice, then became animated. “No, more’s the pity! Dunmartin’s got it, I’ve heard, and it’ll caravan up the Long North Road.”

  She nodded. “I’d like to ask you about some events that occurred in Donner some years ago.”

  He spread his hands. “If it’s after eighty years ago and before today, I’ll know about it! Although, I admit, I’m a bit hazy on the first three years . . .”

  “The wizard Kieran.”

  His brows rose. He leaned back in his chair, steepling his fingers. “Strange for a man to change like that,” he said.

  Rowan leaned forward, hands on her knees. “Did he change?” she asked intently.

  “Oh, yes. Yes, indeed. Never saw the like. When I was a lad, one steered clear of Kieran. A strange, grim man, as I recall. But just before he died . .

  “Star parties for the little children.”

  “Yes.”

  “Didn’t people think it odd? After what happened to Nid’s sister?”

  The old man’s brows rose higher; he whistled silently. “Now, that is going very far back indeed. I was just a lad myself. Just turned thirteen, and Nid a year or two older.”

  “I’m surprised anyone permitted their children to associate with Kieran at all.”

  “That’s the thing, do you see? We were all so very young when Ammi died, and later, when Kieran started being friendly . . . well, most of us hadn’t seen the business personally, just heard about it. I hardly knew the girl myself. But Nid was my friend, so perhaps it stayed with me more.”

&nbs
p; “Did you keep your own children away from Kieran’s parties?”

  He scratched his ear. “No, they were grown by the time those started. My youngest was eighteen, nineteen. They weren’t invited to the sky parties.”

  “Did Kieran actively keep them away?”

  “I don’t think so .. . Here, boy!” He called across the room, and gestured someone over.

  The “boy” addressed was a tall and angular man in his fifties. Marel continued when he arrived: “Now, those old star parties that Kieran the wizard hosted; your lot never went to them yourselves, did you?”

  “No. We weren’t invited.” He turned an uninterested pale green gaze on the steerswoman, then back on his father. “Stupid, really, to bother a wizard uninvited.”

  “It was only the little children he asked, then?”

  The son considered. “He would make a great show of performing formal and gracious invitations. But as I recall, any little child could show up, anytime, whether she’d been asked or not.”

  Rowan nodded. “We’ve met,” she said suddenly.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Reeder, isn’t it?”

  His gaze remained impassive. “Yes.”

  “I was on Morgan’s Chance with you, six years ago, traveling from here to Wulfshaven.” His expression became even more blank, and intentionally so. Rowan instantly regretted reminding Reeder of the circumstances of their meeting, but found she could not gracefully exit the conversation without some further, more formal comment. “I was sorry when I learned what had happened to that boy who traveled with you. He wasn’t your son, I hope.”

  He paused before replying. “No. The son of a friend.” And he departed without another word.

  Rowan watched him cross the room to return to his own work, and turned back to find Marel studying her sadly. “A lively lad, and quite a handful,” he said; and she was a moment realizing that he was not referring to Reeder. “We thought to bring him into the business; no one else in the family seems interested in the daily running. His dad and my son were very close.”

  She nodded, but chose not to mention how near she had been to the events that caused the boy’s death. She was quiet for a long moment; Marel sat watching her, patiently. In the pause, a stocky, disheveled woman hurried up to Marel, an open ledger with two bookmarks clutched across her breast, a sheet of paper filled with close writing in one hand, and a bolt of cloth jammed awkwardly under one arm; Marel gestured the clerk away without shifting his gaze.

  When the steerswoman completed her own train of thought, she returned her attention to Marel, but he spoke before she did. “And now that’s twice we’ve talked about children being killed by magic, I can’t help noticing. Is that coincidence?”

  “Nothing else,” she informed him. “In fact, such things are common enough to make me wonder why Kieran suddenly became the exception. I can’t help but wonder at his sudden interest in children.”

  Marel mused, pursing his lips. “Age, perhaps. When you can see the end of your own days coming, you become more interested in the young. There’s an impulse, I think, when you know that you won’t see the future yourself, to start recruiting ambassadors . . Rowan made a sound of amusement; Marel put up a hand. “But no,” he went on, “it wasn’t only children, really. He became . . . nicer, in general. Took more of an interest in people . . .”

  “Suddenly, or slowly?”

  He puzzled, blinked, shook his head. “Not easy to answer. I noticed it suddenly, myself; but maybe some others noticed little things, slow trends, earlier. As for me, he came right here one day, asked to talk to me, confidentially. He told me that I should get ready to absorb some losses, because a shipment of embroidery and glassware from The Crags had just gone down in a storm.”

  “And it had, I assume.”

  “Oh, yes indeed. With the warning, I was able to do some creative borrowing, invested here and there . . . by the time the news reached Donner in the normal way, I’d even managed to turn it to my advantage.” The thoughtful squint appeared. “And I couldn’t help wondering: What’s in it for him?”

  She twitched a smile. “Spoken like a merchant. Perhaps, nothing more than the pleasure of doing a good turn?”

  He smiled himself, broadly and with deep insincerity. “And you believe that?”

  “I do not,” she assured him.

  “Nor I.” He became intent. “Lady, in my experience, there are very few people in the world who do things out of pure goodwill. Maybe he was one. Probably not.”

  What does one gain from acts of general goodwill? What does one gain from kindness to children?

  Nothing tangible. Friendship? Amusement, perhaps? Admiration? Loyalty? “Perhaps he felt regret at murdering Nid’s sister, and was trying to . . . atone, somehow?”

  “Twenty-five years later?”

  “That does seem rather long.”

  “A man of slow conscience, perhaps. Still, I first noticed the change when he did something nice for me personally.”

  “And did he continue to do you favors?”

  “Oh, no. Not directly, that is. When the East Well went dry, he set it going again, but that was good for everyone. And he suggested we dig another, right outside Saranna’s old inn. Pulling up old cobbles, quite a job; but we did it.” He squinted again. “And he had us, that is, he made us change over all the outhouses around Tilemaker’s Street. From pit-style to pot-style.” He was suddenly amused. “Old Greydon—he’s dead twenty years now—he decided that he wasn’t going to do it.”

  Disobeying a wizard—but Rowan was reassured by the humor in Marel’s green eyes. She gave an anticipatory wry smile. “And what happened?”

  The green twinkled. “Greydon gets a knock on his door one day, and he opens it up—and it’s the wizard himself. And Kieran just pushes by him, walks straight into the house, straight through it, straight out the back—by now the whole family’s following behind—and straight to the outhouse.

  “He gets in; he shuts the door.

  “A few minutes go by. Then the wizard comes out, and looking neither left nor right, walks straight through the family to the back door and out the front again. But he says to Greydon as he passes by: ‘Don’t go in there.’ ”

  Marel chuckled. “And they all just stood there in the back yard, staring at the outhouse . . . and then—”

  He clapped his hands suddenly, causing Rowan to startle. “The whole thing went straight up in the air! Over the roof-tops, and flying in a hundred pieces!” He laughed openly now, and Rowan could not help but do the same. “What a mess! Everyone in the neighborhood was a week cleaning it all off the roofs! We had a few words to say to Greydon, I’ll tell you! Oh, and we never let him forget it, either; for years after, we all would show up on his doorstep on the anniversary of the date, and force a celebration on him, willy-nilly. ‘Flying Turd Day,’ we called it.” He gave himself over to laughter, eventually pulling a neat white handkerchief from a drawer to wipe his eyes. “Ah, me.”

  The steerswoman found the tale more than simply amusing. It was not safe to have pit-style outhouses anywhere near wells or other underground water sources; contamination could pass through the ground into the water, especially in a damp environment. The well water would be foul at the least, and a source of disease at the worst.

  Kieran had done the city a kindness. And interestingly, he had done it in a way that provided amusement to the residents, a tale to tell to others—long past the wizard’s own demise. It seemed almost an intentional augmentation of the wizard’s personal legend. “Do you think,” Rowan asked, “that people in Donner tend to remember Kieran kindly rather than otherwise?”

  “I don’t know . . . some do, certainly. I expect, if he’d lived longer, we all might have come to.” And it seemed that this thought had not occurred to him before, and he gave it some consideration.

  Rowan said cautiously: “How did he die?”

  “How? Old age, or so we were told. He seemed elderly.”

  “Can
you remember whether Jannik appeared in town before, after, or at the same time as Kieran’s death?” If Kieran’s death had not been natural, Jannik, as the next master of this holding, seemed a likely suspect.

  “Jannik? Oh, after. Hard to pin down, but I’d say, at least a month, maybe two.”

  Rowan was taken aback. “So long a gap? How did you deal with the dragons, with no wizard to keep them in check?”

  “Oh, there was no problem with the dragons, none at all.”

  “I find that rather interesting . . .”

  “Still,” Marel said, “I expect they were never completely uncontrolled, really. I have to assume the apprentice took care of that.”

  “Apprentice?” Rowan asked. Wizard’s apprentices were, if possible, even more mysterious than their masters. They appeared, apparently from nowhere, served and studied for a length of time, and then vanished. Some resurfaced as wizards elsewhere, years or decades later; most were never heard from again. But she had not heard of Kieran possessing an apprentice . . .

  Her puzzling stopped short; she felt cold. “Apprentice?” she said again.

  “Oh, yes,” Marel continued. “In fact, we’d assumed that he would stay on; but when Jannik showed up, there was no argument at all—”

  “—What was his name?”

  Marel waved his son over again. “Reeder, I can’t recall; what was the name of Kieran’s apprentice? You spoke to him a few times, didn’t you?”

  Reeder flicked his pale, bland gaze from his father’s face to the steerswoman’s, and Rowan thought: No. It cannot possibly be this easy.

  But it was.

  “Yes,” Reeder said. “You mean Slado.”

  4

  Marel maintained an apartment on the third floor of the building and among the chambers, a private study: small, slant-ceilinged, comfortably appointed. The single unshuttered dormer window faced west, where now the yellow-brown roof tiles of the city of Donner were tinged red where they faced the sunset, smoky blue in the shadows. The window threw a glowing orange rectangle up onto the opposite wall, like a tilted doorway composed of insubstantial light.