Dust and Light (12 page)

S
hivering until my bones near rattled, I dragged myself uphill, wondering if every day was to be so draining as these first two. Yet I could not but feel a joyous awe that soothed long grievance. My second bent was not entirely dead. No matter the complications if the Registry found out, the fullness of the gods’ gift lived in me. Using both had never felt wrong or aberrant. And my grandsire had encouraged that belief—until my fall from his grace.

The mystery of the child murderer must await the morning. The Temple heights lay just above the hirudo. Nobles, members of the Sinduri Council, Karish hierarchs, and other people of wealth and influence made their homes in the district. But even if I could find the exact street on a starless, moonless night with snow threatening, what excuse would allow me to barge in and ask who lived there? The villain would likely have
me
dead before I could muster an accusation. Observing Bastien had given me a useful lesson in subtlety when pursuing a murderer. It would certainly help if I could handle a sword.

Palinur’s streets were deserted. Cold seemed to have driven every honest man and beast under cover, and I kept my eyes open for the dishonest. Taking lodgings nearer the necropolis could be helpful for many reasons.

Every day we remained in our town house ate into our pitiful treasury. Tonight, without fail, I must give Soflet and the others notice. And though the thought of asking galled beyond words, perhaps our faithful steward would know where I might find cheaper lodgings. No pureblood acquaintance would.

Despite my weariness, I took a short detour through the Clothmakers’ District. Nowhere close to riots or burnings, it might be a respectable place to seek a house we could afford. Juli’s safety was paramount.

My magelight revealed a dreadfully grim prospect. Dark, cramped tenements overhung the dye shops and merchant stalls, almost touching above the rivers of slop that served for lanes. Stretched ropes crisscrossed the narrow space between, hung with lengths of new-dyed cloth or displays of some weaver’s art.

I could not imagine life in such a place. Even at summer’s height no sun would reach the ground. No leaf or blade of green would sprout, nor could a breath of fresher air ever sweep the acrid reek of dye pots and wool finishers from between the close-packed buildings. I’d never considered how our house in the Vintners’ District was so well positioned to catch Ardra’s golden sun and fairest breezes . . . did those ever come again.

Even as I mourned summer, the scent of honey clover wafted round me on a tendril of warmth. My skin prickled oddly of something that was not frost, more the sensation of balmy nights than any familiar magic. Glancing round, I glimpsed a slight movement a few quercae behind me. Probably someone late home to supper, as I was.

I quickened my pace. Encounters with smirking Cicerons and corpses frozen in ditches and coal scrapes had done no good for my already fractured nerves. It was likely a fox or a cat I’d seen. Who could traverse these tarry districts without cursing when his boots filled with icy muck or slipped on frozen ruts?

The lane opened onto a small cobbled square, where all the district’s streets and alleys came together. Here one would find a font fed by one of Palinur’s twelve wells and graced by some sculpted figure from Aurellian myth. One would also find a pillory and flogging post. Ever-practical King Caedmon had believed justice should be administered within sight of a man’s home. He’d said it required fewer strokes to properly chastise a villain when his neighbors’ wives and children could witness it.

I hesitated. If some rogue was indeed following me, I might lose him easier in the darker edges of the square. But instead I struck out across the cobbles as fast as I could manage, straight through the center, using my last whimpers of magelight to avoid crashing into the posts and pillory. When I reached the far side, my light was dead.

From the shelter of a drying frame I peered back across the square,
squinting. Wind gusts sucked fat snowflakes from the heavy sky and set them dancing, thicker by the moment. And yet . . . My stomach lurched.

Two tall slender shapes stood beside the font—I’d swear the same two I’d glimpsed that morning, naked, one male, one female, their exquisite markings gleaming bright against the pitchy night.

I squeezed my eyes shut. Surely this was but imagining wrought by exhaustion and nerves and a craving for beauty that seemed lost from the world. When I looked again, the two were vanishing into a dark alley.

I charged after them.

Three strides into the alley and a rope across my shins sent me face-first onto hard-frozen muck. Air escaped my chest in a great burning whoosh. As I fought to reclaim it, someone sat on my hind end. Firm hands—warm—dragged my wrists behind and pressed them to my back at the waist.

My feet scrabbled for purchase. The pressure was not so great. If I could just get my knees under me, maybe I could lunge forward . . . throw him off.

Only I couldn’t.

Angry and humiliated, I growled. “Who are you? What do you want?”

I didn’t believe in Danae any more than I believed in angels or water sprites. This was someone’s trick, an elaborate illusion.

“Thou’rt dull as mudstone, human.” His words slid into my hearing like warmed oil. “Spirit bound by walls of iron. Ears plugged with tree sap. Blind, too, art thou, save with thy hands and feathers, so I am told. So we must descend to brutish grappling to force thy attention.”

The scent of rosemary filled my nostrils as he leaned closer, hot breath on my neck and ear.

“Heed my word, Remeni-son. Delve not so deep. Some boundaries are not meant for human trespass. Is the world not broken enough that thou must seek out dangers beyond thy understanding?”

“I’ve no idea what you mean.”
Feathers
 . . . my quills? “Do you speak of my drawings?”

He sighed, breathing the scent of honey on my cheek, then shifted his weight. “How can we warn one who refuses to see? Thou shouldst destroy him and be done.” He was not speaking to me this time.

“Prideful are those humans who touch the heart of the Everlasting.” A woman’s voice, scarce more than a whisper. Why did it set my every nerve
aflame? “But they learn. Adapt. This one will. Thus, I choose not. Not this day.”

“Tell me,” I said, trying to lift and turn my head to see. “What are you talking about?”

The one on my back shoved my head to the cold ground. Blue markings gleamed from his long fingers like twined strands of sapphires embedded in his skin, yet I could sense no magic.

“We say this only,” said the male. “Heed thy workings; learn of the true world. Trespass the boundary again, and thy wit is forfeit. We have forged a weapon apurpose to chastise thee.”

A different finger touched my cheek, gently this time. The markings were coiled patterns of azure and indigo, and the scent—
her
scent, for I knew this was the female—was meadowsweet and sun-warmed grass.

“Gentle Lucian . . .”

A sweet, piercing ache near stopped heart and breath, no matter years, no matter disgrace and punishment and grieving. She sounded so like—
Impossible.

By the time I groaned and named myself an idiot, a man celibate so long he knew only one name to call a woman, my hands were free, the weight gone from my back. I scrabbled up, but I was alone in the deepening snow.

The storm worsened as I walked home. The wind howled, driving the snow before it like wild dogs. Feet and hands grew numb. Had I encountered living Danae? Every word the two had spoken was burnt into my spirit, yet even ten times over I could make no sense of it. A
weapon
readied to destroy my wits. But for what crime?
Trespass. Delving too deep.
What
boundaries
could they mean? Certainly if I told anyone of the warmth that lingered on one cheek or of naked bodies scribed with blue markings that spoke naught of magic, I would be judged mad.

And yet . . . the power of childhood memory was astonishing. My grandmother’s stories had told that the trickster Danae relished pureblood children born with two bents and would steal them from their families, bind them with stems of meadowsweet, and carry them off to the kingdoms of the night to be their slaves. For years the scent of meadowsweet had left me anxious.

Every few steps I spun around. At every turning I peered behind as far as the blizzard would let me see. Were they yet following me? Surely they
were proof that my sensations of being watched were true. Unless I was already witless.

I refused to believe that. The two of them, at least, were real. My hand clutched a finger-length bit of woven rope that smelled of green vine, rosemary, and meadowsweet, of sun-warmed grass . . . and Morgan.

“S
he’s gone,
Domé
Lucian!” Soflet’s
panic dragged me out of my frozen, half-blind stupor the moment I stumbled into the house.

“
Gone
? Goddess Mother! Not—” The word slammed into me like a mountain of midnight, threatening to split head and heart. After a day submerged in corpses, I could not think of any other meaning. “My sister?
Dead
?”

“Vanished.” He could not have spoken
dead
in any more hopeless a tenor. “We cannot find her anywhere.”

Vanished, lost, run away? In this city on such a night? Holy, blessed gods!

“Maia set out her supper tray, but the young mistress threw it on the floor. When we came with mops and rags to clean up the mess,
Doma
Juliana was gone. We mustered everyone and searched house and gardens, even the street. I sent Filip to other houses on the street, inquiring about a lost hound, thinking she would hear him and make herself known.”

“No sign of her? No word?” Light of Deunor, if she’d run away . . . Anger, horror, and fear rose in tandem, indistinguishable. Images of the strangled girl child threatened to choke me.

“None. We didn’t know what else to do. Without your permission we did not presume to approach the three blood families, but every other house . . .”

“Yes, good.” I fought away visions of Juli wandering the dark, filthy lanes in such villainous weather. I needed my wits. “Well done.”

Three pureblood families kept houses in the nearby streets. I didn’t know them, only touched a finger to brow as protocol demanded when we passed in the street. But whether Juli had merely gone out unchaperoned or something worse, we could not allow the Registry to catch a whisper of it until we had exhausted every other remedy.

Simple indiscipline would complicate our lives beyond bearing, compounding our already wretched family reputation. But if Juli had truly run away and the Registry discovered it, her life was ruined. They would name her
recondeur
—renegade. When they found her—and only the infamous Cartamandua
recondeur
, still running or dead, had ever eluded
capture for more than a few months—she would be subject to unrestricted contracts. Contracts without protections—enslavement. She would never be permitted to marry or have children, nor would I, like as not. It would be the end of our bloodlines. And I’d likely never see her again.

My lungs would scarce pump at the thought, the massive hurt that had existed in me since Pontia risen again to squeeze life’s breath from my chest. To lose Juli, the last of us, was a grief unimaginable, even after our hard tutelage in grieving. I had to find her without involving the Registry.
Think, Lucian!

The storm raged with a malevolent fury, rattling the glass windows and banging the shutters as if the Harrowers had roused the blade-keen wind to raze all human works. Even if Juli’s perversities drove her to such mad rebellion, she would never pick such a night to run. A fall, an injury—gods save us, an assault that left her lost or hurt—and she would die before morning. She, a girl who constantly named me miser for rationing her fire, would know that. She could not have left voluntarily.

“No one came here? Invited her to visit? Could someone have breached the house wards and abducted her?”

“The wards did not trip,
domé
. And no one came. None she would speak to, certainly, or—” Soflet’s broad brow, so rarely anything but smooth, drew into tight furrows, and a crimson flood washed his age-mottled cheeks. “I saw no one.”

“But you suspect someone.”

“Last winterset, a linkboy started coming round to light the gate torches at dusk. Filip’s always run to the market for Maia about that time, and my rheumatics have been fitful—”

“She’s spoken to a
linkboy
?”
Oh, great gods,
serena
! Didn’t my stupidity teach you anything?

Soflet released a deep sigh, as if expelling a demon. “I warned her not,
Domé
Lucian. Locked the doors when he was about. Sent him off and told him I’d have the constable on him did he show his face here again. But I’ve suspected he’s come back since.”

More than
suspected
, from the rue that wreathed the old man’s face. “And you didn’t tell me? Soflet, I trusted you. My parents trusted you. You know the consequences for her if she’s seen flouting such discipline.”

But he couldn’t know, really. Soflet wasn’t pureblood, though he had served in pureblood houses since well before my father’s birth. And I knew exactly what he was going to say.

“She was so very lone,
domé
. And the boy was mannerly and respectful always. Sometimes I pretended not to see. When your trouble came down, day before this, I told him
no more
 . . . and warned her, too.”

And she had been livid. Last night she had bartered a sleep charm for my promise to forbid Soflet from locking her inside. Which I had done.

I sagged against the wall. “Where did they go on these visits?”

Please all gods, let it not have been to his bed.
Not even a month past, I had tried to warn her about low men. But bound up in my own embarrassment, I’d stammered like an idiot and left her mystified. I’d gone promptly to Maia and asked her to see that Juli knew whatever was seemly for a maiden—whatever my mother would have wanted her to know—but I’d never asked what had actually transpired.