Heroes at Odds (21 page)

“I don’t know all that spells can do,” I said. “That’s only the most minor of tasks. But I have good reason to believe that the contract has the power of a cast supporting it.”

“What have you been doing?” my mother demanded. She looked at Taro. “What have you gotten her into?”

“Hey hey hey! This has nothing to do with Taro.” How dare she blame Taro for this? For anything? “He can’t perform spells. Only some people can perform them. I’m one of them. And spells work only in certain places. Flown Raven is one of them. And more than that, I can feel when spells are being cast. I felt something this morning, during the race.”

Mother closed her eyes for a moment. “All I wanted—” She cut herself off, then started again. “It isn’t enough that you’re a Shield. You have to be involved in . . . in . . . that sort of thing as well?”

Amazing. She’d learned about spells and decided there was something wrong with casting them in under a minute. And since when did she have a problem with my being a Shield? She’d always acted as though she were proud of me for it. All those visits, the letters, nothing had hinted that my family was disturbed by my status, or annoyed or disappointed.

Was this yet another effect of the contract?

Please let it be just another effect of the contract.

I took a seat and let the scroll open to the floor. I read the first paragraph. It was about two trees, one an ancient specimen, the other a young stripling, braiding their branches in order to create healthier, more glorious fruit. It was poetry of the saccharin sort, and while its meaning was clear, it wasn’t the sort of thing I’d expect to see in a contract. Not even a marriage contract, which might tempt one to emotional terms of expression.

What followed was more mundane language, listing my mother and Marcus’s mother as the parties of the contract, Marcus and me the fruit of it, and summarizing the purpose of the contract, which was to join our families and finances through marriage. It listed the payments the Prides were to make, the connections they were to share. These same ideas were repeated in the following paragraphs, to a degree I thought unnecessary, though the exact wording changed with each iteration.

From there, the language swerved back into metaphor. Should the Prides fail in their payments, no future grafting would be successful. I read those words out loud. “What does that mean?”

“I understood that to mean connections with other families,” my mother said. “Marriages or financial alliances.”

There followed a list of communications and meetings that were to take place, gifts to be exchanged, certain trading processes, which I didn’t understand, to be completed. None of this occurred, I assumed, as I had been sent away by then. For each requirement, there was a punishment—described in bad poetry—for those who failed to fulfill it. “Do you remember your wells drying up when I was around six?” I asked my mother.

“No.”

“You don’t even have to think about it?”

“No,” Mother snapped. “We never experienced dry wells on any of our properties. To my knowledge.”

“And what about clause number—” I cut myself off. I couldn’t ask my mother if she had ever miscarried, not in front of the boys.

But my mother appeared to know what I was referring to. “No.”

That provision was horribly harsh. And there was a comparative punishment on the Prides’ side, namely Cars suffering sterility. I wouldn’t be able to find out whether that happened. There was no way I was asking him.

The obligations and forfeits went on. It was quite a list. I went through each item and each sanction. According to Mother, none of the conditions had been met after the initial gifts and contacts had been provided by the Prides, and none of the punishments had occurred. Which was probably one reason why my parents had been able to dismiss the contract as invalid.

And then Marcus had extended his challenge, and Taro had accepted. I couldn’t be sure the sanction for failing to provide the Prides with housing had actually come to fruition. While I had never witnessed the bickering I had seen between Dias and Mother, I’d never really seen a lot of them throughout my life. But I couldn’t dismiss it altogether. I’d seen what spells could do.

And the tension was still there, though Mika seemed to have escaped most of it.

The list ended with the wedding. If Marcus didn’t comply, he would lose the person most important to him. The contract didn’t say how. If I didn’t . . . “What does it mean, that I would lose my identity?”

“There are certain sanctions that are described in very vague terms,” Mother said. “The matchmaker said the nature of such provisions would be determined by future events. I thought it might refer to your status as a merchant’s daughter. That something would happen to separate you from the family.”

Something had, though I had never considered that a negative event. “How could you see these clauses and not think something was odd?”

Mother shrugged. “Every contract includes consequences for failing to comply.”

“Things like wells drying up? Losing identities? That’s normal? How were these sanctions to be enforced?”

“It didn’t matter. We weren’t going to fail to meet our obligations. We never had before.”

That seemed overconfident and careless. But then, it had been over twenty years before that the contract had been created. Maybe my parents had been less savvy back then. “How was the marriage contract created?” I asked.

“Their solicitor contacted our solicitor,” said my mother.

“Was your solicitor new to the position?”

“No. She had been with us for, I don’t know, about four years at that point.”

“What about the Pride solicitor?”

“I have no idea. I had no reason to ask.”

“Was there anything unusual about how they contacted your solicitor?”

“No. Their solicitor sent our solicitor a letter. She showed it to us. There was nothing that struck me as strange.”

“All right. So what was the next step?”

“We agreed on a matchmaker, and he—”

“Why would you need a matchmaker when the two parties had already been chosen?”

“Matchmakers also draft marriage contracts.”

“Huh.” I never knew that. “I would have thought your solicitors would draft the contract.”

“The solicitors draft business contracts. They know nothing about marriage contracts.”

“I see.” A contract was a contract, wasn’t it? “How was the matchmaker chosen?”

“He was recommended by our solicitor, and the Prides agreed to our choice. Matchmaker Jong-il was well known for producing excellent contracts.”

“What made his contracts so particularly sought after?”

“They could never be broken. That was the reputation, anyway.”

Oh, hell. Oh, hell. “And then what?”

“I and Holder Pride met with the matchmaker to sign the contract.”

“And how was that done?”

She looked surprised to be asked, and then she thought about it for a few moments. “After we entered the room, we stood on opposite ends of it. At the matchmaker’s prompt, we each announced our full titles and names. We took one step forward. We each named the child to be bound by the agreement. After another step, we announced what each of us wanted from the contract, and the next step, our obligations under the contract. And so on, until we met at a small table in the middle of the room. There were three goblets on the table. One goblet had red wine, the other white, the third one was empty. We each took a sip from the goblet closest to us. The matchmaker then poured the wine from both goblets into the empty one. Holder Pride and I each took a sip from that goblet. Then we signed the contract.”

I stared at her. “You went through all that and you didn’t think it was strange?” I demanded incredulously.

Mother looked impatient. “It’s a ritual, Lee. All important events have ritual. Births, deaths, weddings. That’s just the way of things.”

That was true, I supposed. If I had heard of this ritual before I had learned spells were real, I would have thought it nothing more than another ridiculously elaborate procedure to do something relatively simple. “So that’s all normal?”

“It’s not identical to how a business contract is finalized, but there are similarities. The only significant difference was that there were no witnesses. Usually people who are not signatories observe the proceedings and sign the document as proof that everything was aboveboard. But the matchmaker didn’t allow anyone else in the room.”

“Did he say why?”

“Only that it went against tradition to do so. Something along the lines of a marriage contract being much more intimate than business arrangements, and as in most intimate situations, the fewer the participants, the better.”

My stupid mind went to examples of intimate situations that my mother probably hadn’t intended. I could be immature at times.

“What is this all about, Dunleavy?” my mother asked.

I told them what Browne told me, leaving out her identity.

Taro looked horrified, learning that his actions might have resurrected a contract that could have been left dead.

Mother appeared disheartened as well. “And you believe this woman?”

I nodded. “I can sometimes feel when spells are being cast. Have been cast. I felt something when the race was finished.”

Taro suddenly tilted his head, frowning. Listening to something by the looks of it.

“What’s going on?” Mother asked the room at large.

I could hear it, then. People running around the house, pounding through the halls, talking and shouting over each other. Mika opened the door. “What’s going on?” I heard him ask.

“The village is on fire!” someone female answered.

“Hey! Wait!” my brother said, but no one answered.

My gods. It just didn’t stop. One piece of bad luck after another. How much was Fiona supposed to take? How much were her tenants?

I headed for the door.

“Where are you going?” my mother asked.

“To see what I can do to help.”

“That’s not one of your responsibilities.”

I stared at her, appalled.

She seemed a little appalled, too. “No, you’re right. But fighting fires is dangerous. Can you really blame me for wishing you to stay out of it?”

I chose not to respond to that, and the others followed me out of the room. We all ran through the halls and down the stairs. Once we were outside, we could see people riding from the stable toward the village. I had no doubt Fiona was already on her way.

I could see the smoke against the sky, shades from white through gray to black. A fine dust floated in the air, and I could smell the bitter scent of burning wood. People were running, but one man was standing in the middle of everything, shouting, “You’re all idiots!” His face was red and he was waving his arms, almost hopping about. He looked ridiculous. “It’s all hopeless! Good fortune has been drained from this land! You are charging to your deaths!”

A woman paused by him and slapped him, a solid crack against the cheek. I didn’t know who was more shocked, him or me. He put a hand to his cheek and stared at her. “You’re making a fool of yourself,” she sneered. “Do something or get out of the way.”

“You’re going to risk your life for a titleholder who can’t protect us.”

“
She’s
not a coward.” And then she ran off.

He didn’t move. He just watched her go.

I started running. My boys ran ahead of me. I did my best to keep up, but it wasn’t long before my breath was burning in my throat and I was working hard to keep my legs moving. I’d be useless by the time I got there.

I ran over a swell on the ground and then down the following incline. That was when I could see the dye maker’s cottage, built a little distance away from the rest of the village. The roof was gone; the glass had popped out from the window frames. Some of the flames were pure pink. The smell was horrific.

There were a handful of people throwing buckets of water that accomplished nothing. The dye maker was one of them, tears pouring down her cheeks. Though that may have been due to the smoke rather than despair. The smoke hovered thick and low to the ground. It made my eyes sting and I couldn’t help coughing, thereby dragging in more smoke.

Feeling any contribution I made to the effort to save the dye maker’s home would be useless, I moved on to the rest of the village.

There were dozens of bucket lines, manned by everyone but the youngest of children. The tiny, temporary streaks of water looked pathetic against flames that stretched up so high into the sky. I had a feeling everyone was motivated more by desperation than any real belief they were going to be successful.

The heat was blistering; my skin seemed to ring with it, stretching painfully over my bones.

I noticed that not all of the cottages were on fire. I also realized that the cottages that were on fire weren’t necessarily next to each other. One cottage would be on fire, the next one wouldn’t and the one after that would be. How did that work?

Marcus and Cars were in one of the lines, hauling water. I found that particularly decent of them. I saw Daris, too. That floored me. She didn’t seem to be too useful, though. She kept dropping the buckets.

I joined a bucket line. I accepted a bucket from one person, than ran to the next. The buckets were heavy, the contents slopping against me, the constant running was exhausting, and I was sure it wasn’t doing any good. If only it would rain.

If only it would rain.

I knew of a spell that could call rain. I didn’t have the ingredients for it on me and, in my experience, I could successfully cast weather spells only when working through Taro as he channeled. I was currently useless.

I shouldn’t have run to the village when I heard about the fire. I should have stayed behind and kept Taro with me and performed the spell in our suite. It would have been a hell of a lot more useful than carrying little buckets of water.