Bells of the Kingdom (Children of the Desert Book 3) (52 page)

The serving girl eyed her curiously. “From above the Hackerwood, then, are you,
s’ieas?”

“I don’t see how that’s your concern,” Ellemoa said icily, raking the girl with a severe glare.

“What’s blessing soup?” Idisio interjected hastily as the serving girl bristled.
It’s only polite conversation,
he tried to tell his mother; found a black wall of harsh silence barring the attempt, and withdrew feeling slightly bruised.

“A bit of everything ready for harvest this time of year,” the girl said, eyeing Ellemoa with dawning disapproval. “I go by an old custom, and keep a soup simmering from birth to full of the Hope Moon to feed the field workers; we add to it day by day. Right now it’s got chicken, eel, apples, peas, rosemary, onions, garlic, and greens. Tomorrow there’s oysters going in, and a stack of shucked corn. Not everyone offers blessing-soup these days, but I like to hold to some of the old ways, myself, and I haven’t heard no complaints.” She dimpled a bit.

“That sounds wonderful,” Idisio said. “Two bowls of that, please.”

“I don’t want any,” his mother said flatly. “It sounds
vile.”

“Something else, then,
s’a?”
the serving girl said with a noticeable chill in her tone and expression.

“Not
here,”
Ellemoa said, glancing around in a way that placed her objection squarely on the tavern itself.

As the girl began to bristle, Idisio said loudly, “Thank you,
s’a,
the soup will be welcome for me. It’s been a long walk today.” He caught her eye and twitched an eyebrow. “We’re both tired,” he added in a lower voice, pitching it to her ears alone. “Forgive and forget the lack of manners, please.”

Her cheeks tinted in the lantern-light, and a smile washed across her face. “No trouble at all,” she said, then hurried into the kitchen.

Idisio blinked, a dull sense of dread settling into his chest: remembering Deiq and a servant with an adoring grin. Had he influenced this servant into forgetting his mother’s rudeness?

“Of course you did,” his mother said. “You see? You’re not above getting what you want from humans, when it matters to you. Although why her good regard should matter I can’t understand.”

“I was just keeping things simple,” he said, and heard it fall flat.

“Really?” she said. “And if she comes back and asks you to take a walk with her, you’ll refuse? Do you really think any human would be interested in you except to gratify their own needs, if they knew what you are?”

“That’s not—” Idisio shook his head, frustrated, feeling the conversation slipping off track and at a loss for how to bring it back around. “There’s no reason to be rude to her,” he said finally.

“What’s rude?” Ellemoa asked. “What’s polite? Why do you keep measuring such matters by human standards?”

“It’s all I know,” he said through his teeth.

“Obviously. Here’s
our
politeness, son: they don’t ask after our business and we don’t interfere with theirs. They give us what we want when we ask, and we don’t hurt them in the taking of it. They can ask us for aid
—after
helping us with what we need.”

“That’s—” Idisio searched for words to express his reaction to that. “That’s very—arrogant on our part, isn’t it?”

“Arrogant? They’re
insects,”
she said, leaning forward. “You keep missing that point. They’re barely sentient, most of them, and blind to the secrets of the world. Why should it matter if they think us arrogant or rude?”

“Well, they outnumber us, for one,” he said dryly.

She gestured with one hand, dismissing that statement. “No more than a colony of ants does the average human,” she said. “It’s all easily kicked over and destroyed by one person, son. The two of us could destroy this entire town, if we so chose, before the morning light.”

He felt lightheaded for a moment. The taste of blood, hot and copper, ran along the inside of his cheeks; his hands tightened into fists, and somewhere distant there was a
whispering....

“No,”
he said, as much to the whisper as to her statement. “That’s not right. That’s not
right.
They deserve better than that. They haven’t done anything to hurt us.”

“Neither did the ants a human kicked aside to till his fields,” she retorted. “It’s all a question of whether it benefits us to bother. At the moment, it doesn’t. Tomorrow, it might. You
must
grasp this, son. Whether you like the lesson or not, it’s the truth: the moment you need or want something badly enough, you’ll find justification to take it, whatever the cost to the humans. Better to face that at the front and learn to persuade instead of force, especially if you’re going to be this squeamish over necessity.”

He stared at her with a grey disquiet. “I don’t believe that,” he said. “I don’t. I won’t be like that.”

“Son,” she said, “you
are
like that.”

The girl returned with a large bowl of soup and placed it in front of Idisio. “Anything else,
s’e?”
she asked. She didn’t even look at Ellemoa.

“No, thank you,” Idisio said, without trying to be nice this time, and watched lines of disappointment briefly etch the skin around her eyes. She flashed him a quick, uncertain smile, and went to tend to another table’s requests, glancing back twice.

“If you’d smiled at her the way you did the first time,” Ellemoa murmured, “she’d have asked you to take her for a walk after dinner.”

He put his gaze on the food and didn’t answer. He didn’t want to think about her words right now. He was hungry. He focused on being hungry, on the mingling of rosemary and chicken, the sharp bite of garlic and the creamy slickness of shredded greens, the meaty coarseness of red beans, until the bowl was empty.

Sitting back, he belched with unapologetic satisfaction. “Ought to settle in along the Coast Road,” he said. “These taverns serve the best food I’ve ever eaten. Excepting Kybeach, of course.” He laughed a little.

His mother said nothing, her gaze on the flickering of the triple-wick lamp on the table.

“I’m sure it’s very good in Arason,” he added hastily, wiping a sleeve across his mouth. “Didn’t mean anything by that.”

“I don’t know,” she said, not looking up. “I haven’t been there in a long time. And I never ate with the humans the way you’ll do.” She lifted a shadowed stare to his face. “You know how to get along with humans. I never did. I never understood them. Not even the few who were kind to me. They all seem like strange, brutal animals to me, son, who lie to one another and hurt one another for no good reason.”

“You had no reason to hurt those men in the alley,” Idisio said sharply. This latest switch in temper alarmed him more than most of the others: instinct warned that the apparent weakness masked something dangerous.

“No reason
you
knew about,” she returned. “You don’t understand the half of what you see yet, son.”

He opened his mouth, then shut it; her observation was too close to Deiq’s own accusation. “So what am I missing, then?” he said finally.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “What matters is that you still don’t trust me. You still don’t
understand
that I know far more than you do.”

“From where I’m sitting,” he said, “you’re not explaining a whole lot to help me understand that you have reasons for what you’re doing.”

“Why must I
explain?”
she said irritably. “I’m your mother. I know more than you. I see more than you. I understand more than you. That’s simple fact: your business is to
listen
to me, and mind what I say. Understanding the
why
of things comes later, once you’ve grown into your shoes a bit.”

“But—”

His mother shook her head and stood. “Time to go, son,” she said. “No need for an inn. I’m tired of coddling you. We need to reach Arason before the cold weather sets in. We won’t stop again until we’re home.”

And the dangerous bit emerges.
“What happened to not ordering me around?” he said. “I thought you weren’t going to force me to do anything anymore.”

She stared at him, her eyes a dark, muddled grey color. “What happened to trusting me?” she shot back. “What happened to hearing my side and being my son? You’re treating me like a monster again, son, and I don’t much appreciate that, after all I’ve been through.”

He bit his lip, fighting to hold on to a fading certainty. “I—didn’t mean it that way,” he said. “I just—those men—you would have—”

“I would have done less to them than they’ve done to others,” she said. “They were vicious, brutal men who enjoy causing pain to others. If you’d seen them, truly
seen
them, you’d understand why removing them from the world would be a blessing to every creature in existence. But you don’t have that sight yet. You haven’t grown into it yet. You’re still fighting what you are, fighting what you can do, and I don’t have patience for that. Either walk with me, son, or go your own way; but stop refusing to believe the truth because it’s unpleasant to your ears.”

She turned away and walked to the door; paused there, looking back, and made an imperious gesture for him to follow.

I’ll meet my father... I’ll be respected... I’ll be... I’ll be loved. She cares. I mustn’t forget that. She really cares. And what if she’s right? What if those men were the monsters, and I just didn’t see it?

She’s not saying anything all that different from what Deiq said, after all.

Idisio rose, dropped a coin on the table without checking to see its color, and followed his mother out of the tavern.

Ellemoa almost purred with satisfaction as she heard the crunch of her son’s feet following her out of the tavern. Another of those tedious conversations, perhaps two more, and he’d stop questioning her. She could start teaching him about proper ha’ra’hain ways then, and arrange a safe place for him to learn about feeding; she would guide him through the final changes, keep him from going mad, just as her mother had done for her.

She began turning over possible situations in her head, ways to provoke his human-trained morals to balk so that she could demolish his misunderstandings. Perhaps arranging a show of human violence toward them would do the trick: that was never a difficult maneuver.

The tall torches bracketing the front door had been lit. Even combined, the light didn’t reach far against the blackness of full night; Ellemoa felt an uneasy shiver work down her back.
Maybe we should stay the night at a human inn,
she thought. She found herself loathing the idea of traveling in darkness. Perhaps it would be better to stay still, to rest, to gather her strength and allow her son that much more complacency and trust.

She opened her mouth to tell her son that she’d changed her mind, after all, that they would stay at the nearby inn.

A tall young man stepped into the light between the farthest torches. His attention clearly on his own thoughts, he took two businesslike strides closer before raising his head and noticing their presence. He slowed, then stopped, staring.

Torchlight caught in glimmers along his red hair.

A jolt of recognition slammed through Ellemoa’s stomach: this was the human who had attacked
teyhataerth.
This was the human who had been trained to kill ha’ra’hain.

Violence built a scant heartbeat later. As she took the first step forward, her son said: “Tank?”

She froze, watching their gazes connect: watching a bond neither was aware of flare into argent life.

“Lifty?” the redhead said, as incredulous as Idisio; then his attention shifted sideways, locking onto Ellemoa, and his side of the argent sizzled into a dangerous shade of red. “Who’s this?”

You know who I am,
Ellemoa told him.

“My mother,” Idisio said at the same time.

The redhead stared at her blankly. Either he hadn’t heard or refused to understand: but that searing color wrapped throughout his spirit warned her against taking another step forward.

He’ll kill me. But he doesn’t want to kill my son. I don’t understand! It doesn’t make sense.

She eased back a careful step, her stare never leaving his face.

“Go away,” she said aloud, scarcely audible to human hearing. His eyes narrowed: he’d heard that clearly enough.

“Mother,” Idisio said, abruptly wrapped in the murky blue-orange of alarmed bewilderment as he made the connections. “Mother, don’t—he’s not a danger.”

The redhead’s eyes narrowed. “I’m not looking for a fight,” he said, which told her that he understood the situation just fine, himself.

“Neither are we,” Idisio said, too fast and too loud; the redhead clearly registered that as a lie, and backed up a step, his hand falling to the hilt of his belt knife.

“Go away,” Ellemoa said again, unable to resist a prowling step forward in the face of that retreat. “Go
away.”

He squared his stance, shoulders rounding, and his stare changed to something less amicable. “You don’t get to order me around,” he said, flat and cold.

Fire rose in her, tinting her vision: her muscles bunched, gathering—

Her son grabbed her arm, hauling her back a step.
“No,
mother!”

She whipped round, rage driving her for a terrifying, blurred moment that ended with her son sprawled on the ground, gasping for breath. Regret set in immediately, but there was no time to offer apologies: she spun back to the redhead and found him two steps closer.

She snarled, driving him back a pace, and said, “He doesn’t want you harmed. That’s the
only
thing keeping you alive in this moment,
tharr.
I don’t like you. I don’t trust you. You’re dangerous. So
go away.”

He stood balanced on the balls of his feet for a moment, his gaze flickering to her son. The red turned to a muddied, mottled mixture of white and crimson. “I don’t much want
him
harmed, neither,” he said at last. “And you seem ready to hand out some hurt yourself.”

“He’s my son,” she said. “I won’t harm him. I
will
hurt you if you don’t leave us alone.”

Behind her, Idisio staggered to his feet. “Mother,” he said, a stifled gasp.
“Don’t.”