Endurance (3 page)

“Much cannot be,” she said, voice muffled.

“Much can never be,” I replied. The moment spun between us like a dropped wine glass. “This is not to despair.” I grasped her forearm with my left hand and squeezed it. If only she would turn me that we might hug or kiss! Still, I didn't move for fear of upsetting the mood.

“I worry for your child.”

This feeling I understood. Ilona rarely showed me anything save practical strength, but I also knew how she regarded Corinthia Anastasia with a deep and helpless love. The same maternal aspects that drew me to Ilona were brought out in rare force by the prospect of her own daughter.

My own child … Well, a bastard at the least. Neither fully Selistani nor entirely Stone Coast; not with poor lost Septio's seed long since quickened inside of me. If only I'd understood then what lay ahead.

Despite a lack of invitation, I summoned the nerve to squirm about in Ilona's arms and take her in the embrace I'd been craving so long. She pressed her body against mine, and we leaned into the kiss, finally.

Then Corinthia Anastasia spilled out of my cupboard bed with a giggle. I broke away from Ilona, my breasts aching, to turn urgently to my bread. A blind man would have known my heat was up from the scent flooding the air.

My would-be lover stroked my hair a moment, before stepping away with a secret smile into her daughter's needs.

*   *   *

Ilona frowned. “I think it important that you make an effort to speak with Mistress Danae.”

In truth, I would much rather have spoken with the Dancing Mistress, had she not vanished into the distant country of her kind. Teacher, trainer, friend, sometime lover—I missed her fiercely, especially when I ran through the woods, working my body hard. And I felt little guilt concerning the Dancing Mistress, for everything that had passed between us both good and ill had been wrought equally by the pair of us. Whereas Mistress Danae's current, broken state was entirely my fault, if not my actual doing.

I had never much minded my dead. Which was fortunate, given their restless numbers. It was the living who had the power to haunt me.

“Yes,” I said, summoning a smile.

The little bundle I would take up onto Lady Ingard's Hill was nearly complete. The butt of my garlic-rosemary loaf, still hot from the oven, steamed at the top of the pile within. Mistress Danae would quite possibly eat better than I today.

She had been just one of the Factor's constellation of women, captive to whatever money or penalty or stranger currency of trust the old schemer had used to buy each of them off one by one. She had taught me my letters, and through them much of the history and philosophy of these people who had fathered my child.

I could not imagine spending a lifetime working at the training of unwilling children into pliant women. At my most mercenary, it was obvious to me that teaching anyone to read and think ran directly counter to an expectation of unquestioning obedience. Even beyond the brutal practicalities of educating a hostile student, what of the damage to each teacher's own soul when they bent an unwilling child to their devices?

As I tied off my bundle, I wondered if I would manage any better with my own daughter. Surely her personality, her needs would run counter to my desires for her. That was the fashion of children everywhere. Whom was I to trust? Whom to believe?

“It must have been difficult, to be Mistress Danae,” said Ilona from behind me.

“Not so difficult as to be the girl under the lash,” I replied with more bitterness than I intended. Ilona had shared my early fate, though her path was different. How could she bear such sympathy for our tormentors?

“You have no idea where she began.” Ilona's voice was soft but carried a strange edge.

I turned to her, bundle in my hand. “I used to wonder if the training mistresses were failed candidates themselves. But Mistress Tirelle always made such grave threats against me that I could not believe it.”

“You were surely a special case, Green.”

I forced another smile to my face. “Always. But now I must depart, if I wish to be home again prior to sundown. Then I will ready myself to return to Copper Downs before more of those men come finding you up here.”

Ilona leaned forward and kissed my forehead. “That is well enough, dear. You will always be welcome.”

“Save me some bread for tonight, then.”

“Perhaps not
that
welcome.” Laughing, she saw me off into the day's weak light. I waved to Corinthia Anastasia, who was weeding in the little garden along the south wall of their cottage. She threw a clod at me by way of response, then bent again to her work.

I headed uphill through the orchards, careful as always not to take the same route twice to minimize any visible trackways.

*   *   *

Mistress Danae had moved up on to Lady Ingard's Hill shortly after my arrival at the cottage in the late summer. Ilona reported that she'd been lurking down among the Adamantine Graves before then—all the ridges and upper slopes in this part of the High Hills were dotted with necropoleis—but my presence, even unseen, seemed to have disturbed her.

I'd since watched from a distance as Ilona took food and supplies up to Mistress Danae, and twice had stalked my old teacher for the practice, but the sheer cruelty of that was quickly apparent. She was wounded, frightened, and scarred so deeply that no words or deeds of mine could ever heal her. All I would do was reopen the injuries to her heart and mind. Now, perhaps, I might be wiser and so behave more kindly to my fallen teacher, but I was still very young then.

When I'd brought down the Duke of Copper Downs four years past, all of his powers had unraveled at once, like a storm cloud at dusk. This included the money and spells binding the guards he'd placed on the Factor's house. I'd been safely away by then, sprinting toward a ship and flight from the erupting chaos in the city. The girls of the other courts and any of their Mistresses who happened to be within the Factor's bluestone walls were slain by his guards in a rampaging orgy of rape and flame. Of them all, only Mistress Danae had escaped with her life.

The gods had granted her no favor in this.

I wondered if one of the Lily Goddess' sisters had spared Mistress Danae for some future purpose. Desire, their mother-goddess, watched over women, it was said.
Protected
was too strong a word, though. Women were so obviously unprotected in this world, unless they stood very close indeed to a divine altar, or ran with the Lily Blades.

Mistress Danae had been protected from nothing, in the end. Not even the elements up here, that I could see, though Ilona said she'd passed the last four winters on these mountaintops. Somehow my former teacher survived. That required more than Ilona's little packages.

All this on my mind, I climbed the shallow cliff that led to the slopes of Lady Ingard's Hill. Once long ago a road had wound up this face. Its piers and footings were still somewhat in evidence, though most of the collapsed stonework had long since been hauled off for other purposes elsewhere.

Mistress Danae had climbed this as well. How, I wondered? She had the use of her arms and legs, but the few times I had seen her, the woman had been so visibly confused as to seem trapped senseless within her pain.

I slipped over the crumbling edge into the meadows above. I had no idea who Lady Ingard had been or why this was her hill; my extensive history lessons in the Factor's house had not once concerned the ancient graves of the High Hills. The usual scattering of turved mounds and little stone death-houses covered this whole area. A squat tower rose near the ridge of the hill, half a mile's walk upslope from me, like the king on a chessboard.

Ilona had left her gifts for Mistress Danae there before. It was the only real building up here, as most of the graves were either sealed or shattered. The tower stood roofless and doorless so in the winter it would likely be even more miserable than the leeward shelter of one of the mausoleums.

I headed upward in long, ambling switchbacks across the slope. The air was clear and sharp, as if it had abided upon some higher, colder mountain before blessing my lungs. Grasses nodded in the wind. The fat red bees also did their patient work here. I startled up quail, rock doves, and swift little green snakes as I strode among the graves.

As always, those were interesting in their own right. Much like the miniature Smagadine temple I'd noted the day before, these mausoleums, monuments, and cenotaphs constituted a condensed history of architecture and ornamentation of Copper Downs. Several sported tiled domes of a style that were almost certainly imported from Selistan somewhere down the long ages. That lent a flush of pride to my sunstruck southern heart.

Very few of the graves were marked to tell who lay within. This seemed odd to me—most cemeteries I knew of featured little biographies of their inmates, as if knowing the year a baby had died would make the child more real to a passerby of a later generation.

Markings or not, these graves were decorated in a manner that had clearly once been lavish. Jewels and metal chasings had for the most part vanished uncounted generations past. Carvings remained. Details. Images cast in tile, or painted underneath a sheltering roof. That a person was buried here at all stated “I am wealthy” in the manner of distant Copper Downs long before the rise of the Dukes. These graves dated from the time of Kingdoms, and some from the Years of Brass prior to that, when the mines beneath the city were active and stranger things had walked the streets than did today.

At least for the most part, given that Skinless and Mother Iron inhabited the city now.

Wordless, the graves still offered their tales. This one featured small bat-winged children, like demon messengers, with a hint of torment on each tiny, wind-worn face. That one's pilasters were bundles of sheaves, wrapped in vines, as if the dead had been overlords of some great swath of farms or vineyards. In this manner, each crypt told its silent story. Some were little more than threadbare memories; others shouted from beyond death's veil.

The whispers I ignored. I was not here to treat with ghosts. Nothing of my experience with the Factor after his death lent me any desire to pursue their fickle company.

I paused a few dozen yards from the battered tower. Up close, the structure looked as if it might at one time have been besieged. Why anyone would invest a grave site with force of arms was beyond me, but fire scars surrounded the narrow tunnel of the door, while shallow dents in the stonework testified to the impact of projectiles hurled in blunt anger. Nowadays moss and tiny grasses grew in those hollows, a scattering of eye-blue flowers lending them a melancholy air. The top was eroding, only a third of the crenellations remaining. The remainder of the circle of stone dipped like a dancer beneath her partner's arms.

“Mistress Danae,” I called in a gentle but carrying voice. My judgment was that it would not be meet to shout, either for the dignity of the place or for the sake of her fragile mind. “Green is here.” I took a deep breath and uttered a word I'd long ago sworn away amid blood, pain, and murder. “Emerald. You knew me as Emerald. Of the Pomegranate Court.”

I received no answer but the wind, which took little note of my name—either of my names. A bird trilled nearby. Clouds sighed slowly across the sky, dragging their shadows behind them here upon the ground. Flowers and seed-heavy grass stalks nodded. In time, I tried again with cupped hands and raised voice. “This is Emerald, Mistress Danae. I am here. Ilona sent me.”

Then I picked up my bundle and trudged to the tower's broken entrance. I could leave the food in the shadows within the shattered door, look about for any sign of her as news to bring to Ilona. After that I would be free to return to the necessities of my life, those violences and demands that I'd had no business bringing into these High Hills and laying upon my hostess' quiet hearth.

*   *   *

The tower's interior was a domain of bats and spiders. Something occluded the open roof above, though my eyes could not make out what within the shadows. A crosswork of sticks and branches, up here so far from the trees? The dirt floor was scuffed and tamped down, confirming Mistress Danae's at least occasional presence.

I had bent to lay the bundle just inside the door when I realized the floor was not dirt, but rather soil scattered over stone. Washed in by generations of rain, spread by the tracks of animals, and finally carried upon the feet of this broken woman I sought.

Tracing my fingers through the layer of grime, I found marble beneath. Of course this was a tomb—everything was in the grave-meadows of the High Hills—but instead of a mound or a mausoleum, whoever was buried here had caused a tower to be built in his name. This left no doubt that he was a man.

“Erio,” croaked a voice in the inner darkness. I jumped so hard I banged my shoulder against the rocky jamb of the doorway.

“Erio?” I slipped my long knife free from my thigh scabbard.

“That is who abides here.” The voice …

“Mistress Danae,” I gasped, fears of ghosts slipping from me with an overwhelming sense of having simply been
silly
.

“She has died.”

My eyes were already adjusting to the shadows within. A small, pale figure huddled bent-limbed and askew not four yards from me, at the back wall of the tower, surrounded with lumpy mounds of scavenged belongings.

“Ilona sends food, and needful things. Stockings for your feet at night, and a small comb.” After a moment I added with a shyness that surprised me, “I baked the bread for you.”

Some insect whined close to my ear for a moment before she replied. “Danae is dead.”

“I-I'm sorry to hear that.” I didn't know what more to say. My failure of words shamed me. I could not thank this woman, or apologize to her, or heal her in any way. A gulf opened in my heart then, as I realized once again that some wounds were too deep to treat. “Mistress Danae was kind to me when I was young.”