Aloren (22 page)

Sal and Wille left Padlimaird with a bucket of water and a few shreds of Sal’s petticoat. 

Padlimaird scraped away an M and threw his rag into the bucket.  “Hasn’t even said his vows and he’s already acting like an old wet fart.”  He walked jerkily away, and I doubled over in a bout of nausea. 

When I righted myself he’d disappeared around a corner, and the dizziness traveled to my head so that all was confusion for the next few seconds.  A low horn sounded far off, muffled in the fog, or maybe it was a moan; and I jumped a foot in the air.  All four windows had shattered behind me.  Heart leaping, I glanced through the window, saw the smooth, green stone. 

I stepped away from the glass.  “Aloren,” Max called, “get out of there, idiot.”  I should have taken his advice, but my head was ringing and I looked around for him––and a big grey dog jumped onto my shoulders.  I pushed him away, and Floy was there, picking at the dog’s nose and eyes. 

He snapped at her.  Scared, I batted her behind me, and the dog pushed me into the shop door.  Someone called something, some foreign word, and the beast stood guard before me with hot breath and raised hackles. 

A thick man in a black cuirass grabbed my hair, pulled me against him.

“
Obid
,” he snapped at the dog, who in turn snapped at my legs.  I stopped kicking.  Omben soldiers made a dark circle around us, and I ground my heel into the human’s boot.   His grip tightened painfully.  “Anger ill becomes you, little dove.” He pushed me towards the shards on the pavement as if to grind me against them; but Floy got at his nose, and the dog turned from me to leap at something else.  I twisted away.

“Call off your dog,” said a man.  I knuckled sweat from my eyes and made out Max fending off the dog with his cloak, and Andrei behind him, struggling with his horse’s leads.  Max fell over backwards.  Sandal jolted the leads from Andrei’s hand, and Andrei pulled a dagger.  “Call him off or I’ll rip out his throat.” 

The man barked at his dog, and the dog shrank and crawled to his side.  He kept tight hold of my hair, and Floy hid in the collar of my tunic.

“He’s a hangnail,” she said, “with perfect timing.”  I told her to shut up.

The man eyed Andrei’s broach; his posture tightened, looked almost resentful  “She was breaking windows.”

Andrei wiped rain out of his eyes, looking at the glass.  “You broke these?”   

I forced my face into a blank.  Max climbed to his feet.  “No, she didn’t,” he said loudly, half to Andrei and half to the soldiers.  “I saw the ones who did.”

My captor coughed, and shoved me forward.  “Nonsense.  Look at her hands.”

“What?” Andrei took one up and dangled it in front of him.  It was ragged and oozing, as usual.  “Give her here,” he said.  “This one’s wanted specially, and you’re not familiar with the system.”  The officer gave me a lecherous look, as though he were indeed familiar with the system, and Andrei took my hair from his fist.  “If you’d excuse us––Max,” he yelled over his shoulder

“Yes?”

“There’re little insurrections popping up all over the square, probably.  Would you take the horse and put them down before more people die?”

“Aye, m’lord,” said Max cheerfully, and he prodded Sandal before him out of the crowd of soldiers.  They scattered at the officer’s word, and Andrei shoved past him and dragged me down a side street by my hair.

“Max broke that window, didn’t he?” he said.  “This is strike three.”  He trapped me in a corner.  “So we’ll stand here until you give me a explanation for this––this silently reaping the consequences of other people’s idiocy.”  He crossed his arms.  “We’ve got all day.” 

I turned around and studied the threads of water darkening the wall. Floy’s claws ran over my feet.

“What should I tell him?” I asked her.

“Damned if I know.”

I bent over to retch, turned to face him, wiped my mouth, and said, “Piss off.” 

But he just stood there, his jaw ticking.  “You think I had a say in it,” he said, “pleasing the Southerners.  That’s impossible, though, because I’m not sixteen yet.”  His voice cracked.  “I know nothing.  And it’s driving me to distraction, see, because I’m on the outside of everything, losing sleep, because of you, mostly.  You’re so dumb you cause me indigestion––and this!”  He held up and looked at my forearms, and his face took on a color that roiled my stomach.  “What is this
from?
” 

I looked past him––at Wille Illinla, who was lugging his bucket from the harbor.  Water sloshed over his pants.  He marched over and poured the water over Andrei’s head. 

It crashed on the pavement, ran down the gutter, and there was a short silence. 

“Thought I wasn’t wet enough?” said Andrei.

“It did put a damper on things.”  Wille clobbered Andrei in the left eye.  The street corner was ill lit, and I don’t believe the boys recognized each other even after Andrei recovered enough to punch Wille in the stomach.  Wille staggered into the wall. 

“Thank you,” Andrei said, “for doing your utmost to keep me clean and fit.”  He blinked rapidly with his left eye.  “Now do let me finish my conversation with this block of wood.” 

He walked back to me, hair dripping over his face, and continued right where he had left off: “You never tell me anything.  You never tell anyone, and you never––It’s as if you think it’s horrible or wrong coming to your own defense, talking about yourself, even.  But you’re stubborn as a bad smell and very loud, so I don’t get it––why do you act like half a person?”  He turned to Wille, who had sat down against the wall and was watching interestedly.  “You know her, obviously.  Have
you
ever heard her do it?”

“Do what?”

“Defend herself.”

“She can’t.”  Wille rubbed his jaw.

“Why?”

“I dunno.  In’t allowed to say that either, I suppose.”

Andrei chewed on his tongue.  I stepped out, but he held me against the wall. 

“Then say this, Aloren.” His eyelid looked very swollen.  “Do you really want me to piss off?  Did you want to be smeared into the pavement back there?  Raped by a bunch of drunk rubes?  Your hand cut off?  If that’s so, you’d better make yourself scarce, because I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, stand by and watch you be tormented.” 

His hand fell to his side and hung there.  I thought I might laugh at him.

Instead my face crumpled.  I turned into the dark of the corner and sat.  Neither of them looked away, so I pressed my head into my knees, and felt the tears come.  Big tears, running down my nose and into my mouth.  I took gulps of air, and to my great shame, wept heartbrokenly, harder than I had in three years.

I smeared my tears with the back of a hand, and when Wille couldn’t find it in himself to watch anymore he climbed to his feet, I thought, to leave.

Instead, he walked over between us, knelt down, and lifted my chin.

“I’ll always come to your defense,” he said.  “Until you can.  And even then I’ll still do it, cause you’ll be so out o’ practice you’ll be telling folk you’re the one strangled the big owl with my bootlaces, when it’ll really’ve been me did it.”  He grabbed my wrists and swung me to my feet.  And then, clicking his tongue at Andrei, he walked back the direction he had come with his empty bucket. 

Andrei had resolved not to look me in the eye. He moved his hand very slowly, until it disappeared inside his cloak.  He pulled out a handkerchief and gave it to me.  It was wetter than my face.

“I’ve been looking for you,” he said.  “I wanted to ask you––”  He broke off with an ironic look.  “I need your help stealing something.”

“Ghast, Andrei,” I said immediately.  “This is an awfully one-sided relationship.”  He shoved me, and must have miscalculated his strength because I went running backwards.  “Stealin?”

“Stealing something back.”

“From who?”  I ran a hand over my sticky face.

“Daifen.”

“Who’s he?”

“The former Chancellor.”

“Oh.”  I remembered now.  “He tampered with laws about weapons.  Folks’ right to carry weapons.”  I remembered writing that letter to Ederach.  “And the garrison confiscated em.”  I put my hair out of my eyes, and said sharply, “Which led to organized resistance.”

“If you’d call Celdior’s raid on the armory organized.”

“It was stealing something
back
.  And they hain’t been re-confiscated.”

“You strike fear in me,” said Andrei, smiling.  “But isn’t that more because Ederach questioned the law?”

“Ederach’s dead.”  I sighed, wiping my runny nose.  “No one’s left to question anythin.  Opens the way for more organized resistance.”

“There’re quieter ways of getting what you want.” 

Rain slid down my back, and I moved under an eve. 

“That’s what Daifen thought, and the Queen, and Herist and Caveira.  All you courtiers think alike.”

He shrugged.  “Then there’s little difference between a courtier and a thief.” 

I couldn’t decide if he was lowering himself to my level or raising me to his.

“What’s Daifen stolen?”

“You’ll help?”

Neither of us answered the other’s question, and after setting a later date to meet up and connive, we parted in the rain, which had begun to pour.

Twenty-Three

Floy was uneasy for the rest of the day, and even I felt oddly agitated as I went about my business of finding a meal.  Because the dark was less friendly than the light, I went to sleep at sundown at the foot of the old Llenad Bridge, where the grass grew tall and thick.  It wasn’t raining when Floy woke me in the morning for weaving.

I could line up the tunics in the water from smallest to largest.  They seemed more netting than weave: Leode’s lacking gentians, Tem’s in even more need of saxifrage and columbine, and the rest just as bony.  But that they could hold through to another season I didn’t doubt, so long as I remained exhausted.  Energy poured through my fingers when I touched the shirts.  The plants sapped my strength and ran with it, broken stems never growing grey or brittle, budding and flowering into new growth when the old fell away.

Floy became an excellent storyteller.  She’d made it her task to recount the history of Eastern Estralony.  She began with the second long night, when people ran over the waves and wove crowns of starlight.  Then she brought sunlight into it, and progressed all the way to the Calabren djain’s capture and ravishing of the Twilen Simargh, which caused the earth to roll northward and give birth to the Southern Confederation, the countries of which were growing more irksome. 

This morning Floy talked about Lorila’s old ports, bellicose city-states before they had been swallowed by land, and I felt as though I might be swallowed by sea as I pickled my knickers in the brackish water.  I knotted my tongue into a ball, and wound a nettle stem through Arin’s collar, and all at once Floy stopped her mincing detail.  I looked up and went still. 

Andrei stood in front of me, horror on his face, and the water lapping at his legs. 

I saw it all: saw him shadowing my steps all day, and saw him watching me go to sleep beneath the bridge.  I climbed to my feet, holding the shirt. 

“Is this your secret torture?” he said.  His lips barely moved. “You’ve lost your mind––you’re tearing your hands to shreds.  This”––he looked around him.  “It’s sick’s what it is.” 

Sick?
  “Leave,” I said.

Instead he walked up and tore the shirt from my hands.  I collapsed and vomited.  He backed away, still holding the thing, and it felt as though his hands were on me, in me.  I heaved with every step he made, and he noticed, or else felt the wrongness, the profanity of it. 

He dropped the shirt into the water. 

“Marionin––”  His hands shook.  “Is that your Marionin?” 

He was right on that count, and the other––I’d quite lost my mind.  “Get out!” I fought to my feet and gouged at his chest; and wonders never ceasing, he allowed me to shove him through the archway and clear across the beach.  “Get out!”

I turned around and sat astride a hollow log fallen over the strip of pebbles, head in hands, concentrating on my breathing for the five minutes it took Andrei to walk stubbornly back down the hill. 

He straddled the log across from me, and the light grew above his head.  I stared at him with such loathing I was surprised he didn’t melt into a puddle of innards.

“I’ve been told a story before,” he blurted.  “It was disturbing, so very disturbing, but I was made to study the––the spiritual things.  It was about a year ago, I think. I couldn’t get it out of my head.  I don’t know if you’ve heard it, but it went something like this.” 

And bold as the noon sun he began talking.  I considered running off, but in a short while he’d hooked me better than Floy ever had.

“A Gireldine mother of three did a terrible thing to her two eldest sons––can’t remember what––and for fear of being mistreated in her old age, she designed for the birthright to fall to her youngest.  Knowing where her children’s Marione were growing, she traveled to the place and pulled up her eldest sons’ flowers.  She was crazy, I think.

“Anyway, The two boys survived.  This was because, rather than dying as she hoped they would, they’d become sort of beast-like––not quite people anymore.

“Now it happened that one of the two boys had followed the mother.  He saw the breaking of his spirit, and went straight to his older brother and told him what he’d seen and where the mother had cast aside the flowers.  But as soon as he said this he went mad. Because he’d acted too much like a person just then, and his crippled spirit snapped completely off him.”  He shook his head, looking as though he were about to laugh.  “Least, that’s what they say happened.

“The older boy, at a loss for what to do, went to the place, collected the seeds of his dead Marionin, and sowed them.  When this did nothing for his broken spirit, he sought the advice of a saebel.   She said that in order to mend his spirit he must ‘weave shrouds for the murderers with the victims’ choices.’  Saebels know something, so he decided to follow her direction, but he misinterpreted somewhere: He thought one of the murderers was his mother, though she hadn’t killed anyone; he thought he and his brother were the victims, and that ‘choices’ were the same thing as ‘Marione’; and he also thought that a shroud was for the use of a corpse.  So he grew a crop and wove a shroud of his and his mad brother’s Marione, and supposed he needed his mother’s dead body to put the shroud over.  Not wanting to kill her himself, he ripped his youngest brother’s flowers from the ground, and promised the youngest he should have his seeds if he killed their mother.  I warned you, it’s a horrible story. 

“So the youngest murdered the mother and the oldest covered her corpse with the shroud.  But all this did absolutely nothing, and five years after the original breaking the oldest boy went as mad as his brother.  And the youngest eventually went mad, too, after trying to commit suicide. 

“This story,
The Oredh Brothers
, it’s supposed to be pretty old, and the Girelden––they say the youngest and oldest were the murderers, and that they, all three of the brothers, were victims.  So there should’ve been two shrouds made up of all three of the brothers’ Marione, and the shrouds should’ve been cast over the two sane brothers.  And about the word ‘shroud’––if the saebel’d been speaking in Gireldine, she probably used a word I’ve forgotten.  A tunic woven from the family flowers.  I’ve seen people wearing them at weddings.  And they definitely weren’t dead.”  He looked at me straight in the face.  “You were weaving one of those, weren’t you?” 

The sun blinked over the cliffs. I remembered the
baridarm
my brothers and I had failed to weave for our dead father.  I remembered Father mentioning the Oredh brothers.  But most of all I was astounded, almost angry, that Andrei, of all people, should know the story, and I shouldn’t.   

“I don’t know who broke your spirit,” said Andrei. “For the best, probably.  Otherwise I’d have to find him and kill him, which is an awful lot of work.”  I studied the shingle.  “You remind me of a bird,” he said.  “A wren, with those rings under your eyes.”

“Sweet blessed earth,” I said.

“You do this at dawn every day?  No wonder you’re so tetchy.  Need a proper sleep.”  This merited argument, of course, but I was groggy, and fed up with arguing, and instead I thought how his hands had trembled after holding my spirit.  And I dropped my head on his shoulder and went to sleep.

***

I came to at midday, curled on the ground, and saw that Andrei had scrawled, with giant characters of chalk on the cliff-face, the date and time of our next meeting.  There was a question mark next to it, denoting humility, so I followed through.

He never mentioned my spirit.  He explained how his mother had been gravely ill, and how Daifen had come in for a last visit.  She died right then, and Daifen stole the family heirloom off her neck.  The culprit must have been Daifen; the necklace was gone after he’d left. 

I was a bit amazed.  “Did Daifen kill her?” I said.  “Maybe he just up and strangled her with it.”

Andrei started laughing, and then he got red and turned his head, and I could tell he was crying because his laughs got slobbery.

I waited for a while.  Then I told him he was being awfully cold, jumping right from his mother’s death to his mother’s jewel.

“You didn’t know my mother,” he said, “and she would have rather I mourned the jewel.”

“D’you
have
to thieve it back?  You could start an inquiry––”

He said no, absolutely not, he didn’t want to draw other people into it.

“Not sure they’ll take you serious?” I said.

He gave a terse nod.  He was being very close-lipped.

“What about your sister?  Does she know?”

Natty was aware that her social status was at stake.  “That’s all she knows,” Andrei said. “And believe me, it’s enough.”

“That must be some feck-all great heirloom,” I said. “To ruin a girl’s status.”

“Enough about Natty.  Natty’s better off not knowing.”

But it turned out Natty would need to know something.  Because a secret search for hidden valuables at Daifen’s house was best undertaken if one were invited there under an innocent pretext, a pretext that would occur that year at the Daifen residence only for one night––the gala on the eve of the new year; and in order to mingle with the nobles invited, I had to pass for a one. A challenging job, Andrei agreed, and one that fell naturally to Natty.

Besides that, I had research to do.

I pleaded with Floy to spy on Daifen, but she refused for a week.

“Tell me, Reyna, why, by the green goats of Gaverdeen and all the necessary things you haven’t yet accomplished, did you agree to do this?” 

“All those times he’s saved my arse,” I said.  “It’s embarrassing. Please, Floy, don’t make my lot any harder.”

“Trying to make it easier’s what I’m doing.”  But she consented when my whining became unbearable, and it took her but a day to root out the significant parts of the problem.

***

“Daifen’s hall,” said Floy, “is famous for sitting directly above an ancient well.  Ocling’s Well.”

“It’s sacred,” I said, skipping shards of stone across the grey surf.  I tried to recall why.  “They say it goes far below the bottom of the sea, where the sweetwater collects.  But wouldn’t it take days to draw water?”

“Don’t know.”  Floy nestled in a chink in the sea wall, twisted her neck, and preened.  “Daifen’s in control of it, though.  I went inside.  The well comes up in a cave, and a very important person must have built the house––the cave opens right into the master chambers like it’s part of the house.”

“I know.  Some idiot Lauriad thought the well was running dry and hid it beneath his house.”  I shrugged, glancing up at a silent birch reaching over the wall.  “And now I bet Daifen has the only sweetwater well left in the country.  The only one that in’t dry.”

“He doesn’t use the well for water so much as he uses the cave for a safe-deposit.  So I’ll warrant your weasel’s heirloom is tucked away in the cave somewhere.  But the cave has a locked door, and it’s a strange lock, right enough.  Saw it.  It’s
square
, and you’ll be able to rotate a square within a square as soon as break down the door with your head.”

“I’ll find out when I see it.”

“I’ve a better proposition,” said Floy, alighting on a long pile sticking from the water.  “How about using the key?”

“Saw that too, did you?”

“Beneath the flagstones under the man’s wash-stand.”

“How do I get into his rooms?”

“You don’t––it’s heavily guarded.  And he only lets his closest lackeys anywhere near, unless you’re Grulla the chambermaid or one of the two pageboys who carry him his bathwater.”

“Ugh.” I wrinkled my nose.  “How much did you see, Floy?”

“I flew a perilous mission.  Do I get a thank-you?” 

She hardly needed one; missions were a thank-you in themselves for Rielde. 

“Thank you most graciously,” I said anyway, throwing water at her.

***

I reached up and took a cannister from the self.  It was an odd looking one: iron glazed with enamel so that the acid wouldn’t burn through the metal.

“Ain’t going to drown yer troubles with that?” Nefer said.  I looked sheepishly over at him.  “That don’t work half so well as Tuley’s whiskey.  Help me build this fire up so’s I can anneal this.” 

I slipped the can into my pocket, took up the bellows, and pumped until the flames leapt in the furnace.  My trousers felt crispy, and I stepped back.  Nefer hung a chalice bowl over the anvil horn and plannished it smooth.  He sang boisterously as he did it. 

Padlimaird was at his brazier, shaking his head, fitting together the chalice’s stem.  It was fashioned like a tree, boughs cupped to receive the bowl. 

I walked closer, saw the snakes creeping through the roots and the raptors roosting around the top––kestrel, osprey, eagle, kite––and noticed a familiar hallmark near the foot: a fish eating its tail.

I burst into laughter.  Padlimaird flipped the thing over with his pliers.  “Were the roots supposed to go on top?”

“You’re paying Dick Dagerleon a high compliment,” I said to Nefer.  “Why’re you giving him the credit?”