Endurance (2 page)

Ever since my previous stay here at the cottage, Corinthia Anastasia had made it her ambition to be a Blade like me. Though I was secretly flattered, I had absolutely refused to teach her anything about the business of violence and intimidation. This of course had not stopped her independent experiments in the matter.

“Fair enough.” I shuddered to think how far I'd run, only a little older than the girl was now. At least Copper Downs had been no nest of child thieves and youth gangs, as Kalimpura was. We tended to other vices here. The idea of Corinthia Anastasia trying her hand at political assassination made me vaguely ill. Yet slaying the Duke had seemed so needful to me at the time.

Another lesson there, I was sure of it, but I
was
heartily sick of lessons. Even now, I must laugh to admit it has ever been my habit to follow the long path to understanding. Instead I grasped Ilona by the hand and drew her across her own threshold. The overlay of my deep brown skin against her pale ruddiness was a blessing, a pair of contrasting gems, each highlighting the beauty of the other.
If only she would see it.
“Surely we can find some way to pass the time alone together?”

“Yes. You may chop the potatoes, and I will check how the quail stock is coming.”

I gave off a halfhearted attempt to squeeze her close again and went to look for a knife that was not intended for killing.

*   *   *

Corinthia Anastasia returned breathless and reeking of onions, with her feet caked in mud, and rain upon her face. “There's a dark brown man down the hills looking for Green!” the girl shouted as she burst into the small cottage. “I was going to give him a good kicking to, but I ain't got my knife-toed boots!”

“You don't
own
any knife-toed boots,” I said sharply from my place at the table. I was shredding carrots with a too-short, too-safe blade. The nonweapon made my fingers twitch. “And even if you did, your mother wouldn't let you wear them.”

Ilona abandoned the pot over the fire and knelt close to her daughter. The line of her thigh pulled my eyes, until I looked away again, torn between embarrassment and lust.

“Who is looking for Green?” Ilona demanded, her voice low and fierce. “Did he see you?”

“No, Mama.” Corinthia Anastasia stared at the floor. “I followed the Little Bright all the way to Briarpool hunting onions, and the man was down there talking to the Saronen brothers. I listened from the bushes, which I think maybe Eller Saronen saw me. But maybe not. He didn't say nothing if he did.”

Ilona's eyes met mine over her daughter's head. No accusation glittered in her expression, but this problem was mine, following me into the High Hills. No question. I draw trouble the way a honed edge draws blood—fast and all too easy. I turned to fetch my long knife, the fighting blade I would choose every time over most Stone Coast swords, at least in the hands of most Stone Coast swordsmen. Ill-trained brutes, one and all, in this part of the world. With my long knife and the two short knives, I could bring a swift end to almost anyone's regrets.

“
Wait
,” said Ilona in a voice straight from the Factor's house. We had both been trained there, at the hands of women focused on molding girls into a certain kind of female. Ilona had grown too plump for the role and been cast off, while I had slain my way out some years after her time.

As with so much of my life, that was another memory not bearing close examination, for behind it lay so many deaths. And worse, the broken terror of Mistress Danae, who
did
sleep among the graves of the High Hills. The horrible fractures in her mind were slowly being replaced with the horrible fractures of stronger wills long dead but yet restless.

Ilona turned back to her daughter. “Describe the man.”

“He was dark, like Green.” Corinthia Anastasia touched her own face, as if the freckled paleness of her skin were in doubt. “Brown skin, brown eyes, black hair. He talked funny.”

“A Selistani?” I blurted. “Here in the High Hills?”

“More than one, I'd say.” Ilona's voice was dry but loving. “
You're
here, after all.”

I collected both my thoughts and my better judgment. At that time, I was still blind enough to believe the Bittern Court was
not
after me here, protected as I was by the width of the Storm Sea. With equally foolish certainty, I assumed that the Temple of the Silver Lily would not pursue me into the exile they'd laid upon me, either.
Not with
male
agents, in any case.
“What did these Saronen brothers tell the searcher?”

Corinthia Anastasia shrugged. “I don't know. I left after a while.”

Ilona cast her eyes toward me once more. “They will not speak of you,” she said with confidence. “Still, your time of shelter here is nearing an end.”

I touched my growing belly. Within, my daughter stirred. Uneasy, already. Five months I'd spent up here, right into the margins of winter. I'd grown so. I blew out a long, slow breath before replying. “I'd hoped to wait until the baby came.”

“That day is three months away, on the other side of winter yet to come. You barely show even now, and your body has not yet begun forgetting the things it needs to forget in order to learn what it must know for the baby to arrive.”

Despite myself, I bristled. “I can still run and climb.”

“Exactly.” Ilona smiled.

“You'll always run and climb,” Corinthia Anastasia added with a sturdy loyalty.

“As may be.” Her mother's voice snapped though her eyes were still merry. “Now wash those onions. And for Green's sake, keep your eyes and ears open.”

*   *   *

That evening while I sewed another day's bell to my silk in the manner of the people of my birth, Ilona sat beside me on the split-log bench outside the little cottage. A starveling moon rode thin-bellied at the bottom of the eastern sky amid ragged, icy clouds. Corinthia Anastasia was already snoring faintly in the wall bed I normally used. The notion of simply sharing Ilona's cot seemed warmly inviting, but distinctly improbable. That border had not yet been crossed. Perhaps it never would.

Still, our thighs pressed together. Her scent filled my nose—musky, rich, traces of salt and spice and that sweet-sharp honey of a woman with love on her mind. The evening air carried the cutting odor of windfall apples on the rot, overwhelming the host of small changes night brought to the forested hills. Ilona twined my fingers within her own, causing the silk to shiver and chime, but turned her eyes away from me.

“I shall not tell you to leave. But I am certain you will soon need to return to Copper Downs, regardless of either of our intentions.” She sighed. “You cannot bring them so close to the edge of their own disasters, then walk away.”

“Of course I can. That is not my city.” Even I did not believe that. Inasmuch as I
had
a city, Copper Downs was it. Or so I understood at the time. In my earliest youth, I had been stolen from a rural backwater, where a settlement of a hundred people would have been considered a vast, brooding metropolis teeming with sin and darkness. As to the only other candidate for my city, I'd been banished formally from Kalimpura, Selistan's capital and home to the temple of the order that had trained and sheltered me. Otherwise, none of the wretched towns and villages I'd visited on either side of the Storm Sea had any claim on the loyalty of my heart.

“You slew their Duke. By some lights, that makes you responsible for them.”

There was nothing wrong with her command of history, but Ilona's grasp of politics seemed to be lacking. “I was
eleven
years old. No one sane would have handed me the throne, then or now.”

“That is not my point, as you well know.” Her grip on my hand tightened. The baby stirred within my belly. She moved so much, for such a small thing. “This is not a matter of ruling, this is a matter of repairing what you have broken.”

I glanced downslope in the direction of the beechwood grove and the bandit graves. “
That
repair is already beyond the work of a lifetime. And I did not inflict the break, only the final blow to what was already rotted. It took the people of Copper Downs four hundred years to dig the hole they find themselves in now.”

She followed the line of my gaze. “You are no bandit yourself, girl.”

Tugging at Ilona's hand, which suddenly seemed heavy, I brushed the fingers to my lips. All I wanted was to stay here. To love and be loved. To put away my knives and open up my fists and simply cook and clean and live.
Quietly.

“I will not go back,” I whispered, trying to swallow the quaver in my voice.

Ilona squeezed my hand once more. “As you will, Green. You are always welcome here.” She stood, the hem of her dress brushing my thigh. “Tomorrow, will you take some food up to Mistress Danae?”

“She will not be approached by me.”

“Perhaps. In any event, you can leave it at one of the sheltered graves up on Lady Ingard's Hill.”

“You think it good for me to be among the dead,” I muttered. We had discussed this before.

Ilona smiled and swept into her house.

I sat in the wan moonlight awhile. It had paled Ilona's skin, rendering her nearly into a ghost. My own fine dusky hue simply darkened until I was almost no one at all. Not Selistani, not of the Stone Coast, of neither divinity nor womankind.

Just a shadow girl hidden in a shadow world. As ever, for me, both then and now.

In time, I stretched upon the bench and took my rest. I couldn't bring myself to displace Corinthia Anastasia. If Ilona had wanted me in her bed, she would have invited me. Still my hips twitched and rolled as I settled in toward sleep. The scent of rotting apples was my lullaby, the night mists my blanket.

*   *   *

Morning brought a pale sky almost brittle blue. The early sun lifted my fey mood of the previous evening into the autumn air. I shook off the veils of gloomy anticipation that had settled upon me, stretched my aching limbs, and ventured forth among the frosted golden grass to capture a hare for breakfast. They were numerous enough in the meadows above the neglected apple orchards, and slow with the summer fat they had not yet lost to winter's coming.

Prowling slowly among the late wildflowers, I realized that Ilona had the right of it. Even if no one had come asking after me, I could not stay here in the High Hills. The declining weather would strike a wound in me as deep as any blade might hope to cut. Even the chill coastal fogs of Copper Downs froze and shrank my soul with little more than a graying damp that numbed the fingers. Snow up here would pile eaves-high on the north side of the cottage. The streams froze for months.

This was no place for a child of the sun.

I touched my belly again. Just a bump, not so much more than an overlarge meal might leave me with. Other women showed far greater than I, six months pregnant. Ilona had said I'd probably carry well nearly to the end. I am not a large woman, and was not even quite to my full height at that time, but she placed much faith in the strength of my frame and the fitness of my body.

“Will you grow here and be happy?” I asked my baby. I didn't know if I meant the High Hills, Copper Downs, or the world at large. And with Septio dead well before her birth, what would my baby miss about her father? I had been raised by and among women, but Papa had been there first, along with my grandmother.

At that moment two hares emerged from a gorse bush. My chase was on. It is a simple enough affair. You close in sufficiently to overtake them; then, when you judge the moment correct, you break right. A hare will randomly break either right or left, but you cannot outthink an animal with little sense of its own. I always break right. Half the time I have my chance, and I never worry overmuch.

So I ran, scooping up a good-sized rock as I did, watching for the twitch of their stride that meant the escape attempt was coming. I broke right with one of my targets, while the other headed left. Short knife in my off hand, I went for him with a swift toss of the stone. I tripped on something in the grass. Still I caught him, but I
lost the blade
.

Stunned by my throw, my prey managed to kick, clawing my neck and arms, though I kept my face away until I could break his neck in return. I rose, found my weapon glistening in the damp grass, and paced back a few steps to see what had grasped at me from the earth.

Nothing, in truth. Nothing but my own clumsiness.

I patted my abdomen again. “You do me no favors, little girl,” I told the baby. “I cannot feed or protect either of us if you steal my balance away.”

*   *   *

Once I had returned to the cottage, I dressed the hare in the work area out back. The pelt I left for Corinthia Anastasia to prepare for tanning. The offal I dumped in the cracked clay pot we kept outside against such uses, for later disposal. The prepared carcass I carried inside to place in Ilona's smaller iron pot with a goodly portion of well water, some of the previous night's onions, a very generous pinch of salt, and a pair of gnarled carrots that I shredded. As Ilona still slept, or at least rested, I set about making the day's bread. My earliest lessons with Mistress Tirelle back at the Pomegranate Court had included cookery, and those memories were among the few that I treasured from the years of my enslavement. Dried rosemary and fresh chopped garlic went into the dough along with the leavening, and I worked it just so. The loaf would not rise and bake in time for the breakfast stew, but we would eat well this afternoon, especially with butter or honey.

As I folded the dough back into the crockery bowl to rise, Ilona's hands snaked around me. I stiffened and almost pushed her off out of sheer reflex before stopping myself.
Fool!
She hugged me tight, just below my breasts, before pressing her head against my shoulder.