Mulberry Wands (23 page)

“It says that?” Susan touched it, wishing she
could read it herself to verify.

The girl stroked her hair again, gently. “The
scars aren’t very bad. You’re still beautiful.”

“Um, thanks.” She moved away. She was
uncomfortable with how close the girl was to her. “Why have I never
seen any of you before?”

The men chuckled.

“None of us are married,” the hot young guy
said. “My brother didn’t want us to fall in love with a huge-man
woman.”

“Or Tuusit want love himself,” said the guy
with the scarred foot.

They laughed again. She blushed. She was
going to protest that was ridiculous, but any protest would just
convince them they were right. “I need to go find him. Do you know
where he is?”

“He’s out hunting,” the young woman said. She
was looking at Susan in a very direct way. “He’s sure to find you
as soon as he comes back.”

“Find you soon. You came to here. He not
like,” said the man with the scarred foot.

They all laughed at this, as though he’d made
a very funny, dirty joke. Susan blushed again and murmured a
goodbye as she left. She paused outside the door to listen, but as
soon as the bark door dropped shut, they switched back to their own
language.

She found where the water was kept and helped
herself to a cup of it. The cup was made from an aloe’s seedpod,
waxed to retain water, but the water storage tank was of human
make, a metal can with enamel on the inside as though it had
contained tomatoes. It had a flat stone on top to keep insects out,
and more stones around it, perhaps to keep the water cool, or
perhaps to hide that they had cheated and used human trash.

After she’d drunk her fill, she took another
cup of water with her back to the infirmary where Tuusit’s sister,
Reela, had a smooth dense grinding stone that she used to make
poultices. Susan poured the water into the depression and carried
it over to the shaft of sunlight streaking through the dust in the
corner of the room. When she angled it right, the light bounced off
the surface of the water. She wasn’t great at scrying, especially
not without a silver bowl or the aid of a manceogenic ointment, but
she was desperate to find out what was going on at home. With
mage-craft, unlike with love, desperation helped.

After perhaps three minutes of staring at the
shimmering water and breathing slowly, a vision came into
focus.

Sphinx was sleeping on her bed. The rest of
her stuff had been cleared out of her room, which may have meant
that Zoë was going to redo the floor soon.

She shifted the image. Some guy had moved in
next door. His walls had been painted a dark, rich color, which
meant that Zoë had bullied him into her taste in wall paint. She
wondered who the guy was, and if he was cool or not. She wished the
new house had only three rooms so they didn’t have to live with
another roommate. It was hard enough to keep from getting on each
others’ nerves when it was just the three of them. She tried to
shift the image to show whether Brian had hired someone to replace
her, but just then Tuusit came into the room and she lost her
concentration.

When she was with the other translators, she
could almost forget that she was naked, but when Tuusit came in the
room, she just wanted to cover herself. She picked up the feathered
blanket she’d been using earlier and draped it over her shoulders,
even though it was now mid-morning and the sun shining on the
cinderblock wall had warmed the room up.

“I’m glad you have sense enough to come back
here and rest. All Reela’s efforts to heal you will be wasted if
you go and get yourself sick again.” Tuusit didn’t look like he was
attracted to her, not with the way he glared.

“When can I go home?”

“Not yet.”

“Can’t I at least visit and tell Darius and
Zoë that I’m okay?” When he didn’t reply, she continued, “I’ll be
quick, just run up, leave a note, then run away again. We can go to
the front door.”

“It’s not safe for a woman outside.”

“Felia went.”

His scowl got deeper, which she didn’t think
was possible. “She had a man to protect her.”

Susan stepped closer and balled her fists. A
woman didn’t need to be all that much of a feminist for a comment
like that to irritate her. “I don’t need a man to protect me. The
women in my family have always done everything without men to
‘protect us’, and we’ve managed just fine.”

“No men at all?” he said, scowling. “I had
heard you were not married, but I assumed you lived with your
brother or father’s family.”

“No. My brother is dead, and my father
couldn’t pick me out of a lineup. He’d like to pretend I don’t
exist.”

“Who is the head of your family?”

She’d never been asked that before, and had
never really thought about it, but she knew the answer quickly. “I
am.”

“You?” he said.

“Yes, me. I have been for years, since I was
a child.”

“A child,” he scoffed. “A girl child.”

“Yeah, that’s right. Me. I’m the one who made
sure that everyone ate, that the bills got paid, everything. And
that’s bullshit about it not being safe for a woman by herself. If
it’s not safe for a woman, it’s not safe for a man either.” And
besides, she wanted to add, a gun doesn’t care which gender wields
it, though of course having a gun didn’t do her any good when she
was so tiny.

“Since you have no man to protect you, I will
have to teach you to protect yourself until you get married.” He
stroked his chin as if concentrating, as if her fate were
automatically his responsibility.

It made her furious. She wanted to kick him,
or bite him, or maybe just scream a lot. While she was trying to
make up her mind what kind of angry she wanted, he turned back to
her. She started to shout something about his previous comment, but
when she drew in her breath, it made her cough. The cough turned
into a fit.

He handed her the rest of the cup of water to
drink. She meant to refuse it, but she needed it too much.

She swallowed, and got her voice back. “Why
is it so hard for you to believe that women can be
independent?”

“A woman shouldn’t be alone. A woman without
a man is like …” he waved his hand in small circles as he fumbled
for an analogy. “Like a man without a woman.”

“And you said you were a liberal?” Susan
scoffed. “You have a lot of nerve talking to me that way. It’s none
of your business if I’m married or not. I swear, you’re worse than
Ruby.”

“You should have a husband,” he said.

“Well, it’s not like I’ve had a lot of
proposals.”

“Human men don’t know a good mate when they
see one, then. If you were of my people, you would have had many
proposals, and mine would have been the first.” He looked at her
directly. “If you were of my people I would have asked you to be my
wife. I need someone strong, someone young and healthy enough that
even an infected scratch couldn’t kill her. If I had a woman
running my home again then Reela would be able to leave and find
another husband.”

Susan just gaped at him. Men didn’t talk like
this. They didn’t just talk about marriage and family, especially
not before they’d slept with you. Sometimes they didn’t even talk
like this when you had your first broken condom or late period.

“But you are not of my people,” he said.

She swallowed, uncomfortable. She needed a
subject change, and fast. “Do you have any news about my case? Do
you know when the trial is?”

“On the night you were attacked by your
beast, you did some sort of offensive spell. What was it?”

“What?”

“You did something like this?” He flicked his
fingers towards her eyes.

She nodded, and flicked her fingers to
demonstrate.

Tuusit blinked, then resumed his scowl. That
particular scowl seemed to be a scowl of grudging approval. “Yes.
That one. Why did you not do it on the day that Felia and Hastuur
took you into custody?”

She shrugged. “I guess I didn’t think of
it.”

“Didn’t think of it. Hmph. Are there any
other spells you haven’t thought of? Something you can use to
fight?”

“I have a gun,” she said. “And you still
didn’t answer my question.”

“What kind of a mage are you, that you can’t
defend yourself from a cat?”

“I’m a good mage, that’s what I am. I don’t
need spells to defend me from cats.”

“What kind of things can you do? Can you
fly?”

“No, of course not,” she said. “Where are you
going with this?”

“Can you shapeshift?”

“Look, it doesn’t matter what kind of
mage-craft I can do, because I can’t do it when I’m small. And I
can hardly do anything without consulting my notes, except easy
stuff like scrying and the finger flick.”

“You’re dependent on us, then,” he said.

She looked at his face, trying to figure out
what he was thinking. Despite his scowl, he wasn’t good at hiding
his emotions. He was worried, pitying and resentful, as though she
were an orphan child who had suddenly become his responsibility.
“Dependent on you?”

“Because you can not make yourself big, and
you can’t do spell work when you are small.”

“I’m not going to be small forever,” she
said. She had a sudden, horrible thought. What if he hadn’t really
been on a hunting trip for the past couple of weeks? What if he had
been at her trial? What if they’d already come to a decision? “They
haven’t had the trial yet, have they?”

He didn’t answer. He stared at the shaft of
light inching across the infirmary wall, as if he too were scrying.
He sat on one of the bird-skin hassocks, and gestured to the other
one. Uh. Oh. A sitting-down conversation.

“Have they?” she demanded.

“It’s being appealed.” By the expression on
his face, releasing that information was as enjoyable as losing a
permanent tooth.

“They found me guilty?”

“The judicial committee decided that the
owner of the cat is responsible for Garaant’s death,” he said,
gesturing again to the other hassock. “I have been trying to
convince them that you are not the owner.”

“Tell them I am.” She folded her arms and
stood in front of him. “Or better yet, take me to the trial, and
I’ll tell them myself.”

“But you are not.” He looked up at her. “You
don’t know what their sentence will be.”

She flinched. “I don’t care. As far as this
judicial committee is concerned, the cat is mine, and Zoë has
nothing to do with it. I’ll take the fall. Tell them the cat’s
mine.”

“That’s not justice.”

“I already lost Jess and Christopher. I’m not
losing anyone else.”

Tuusit took a deep breath, and as he exhaled,
he nodded. “My wife was like that. She was a strong woman.” He
stood and walked out of the infirmary, pausing only long enough to
duck under the door at the far end.

Paul went back to the wall where he had met
the translator woman. It was sunset, and the moon was just rising.
He had to switch with someone else at work to get the night off,
but this was the first night of the full moon. He was pretty sure,
anyway.

The translator woman didn’t show up until the
last rays of sun had disappeared from the horizon and the
streetlights flickered on. She came alone, climbing up the wall
from the far side as though trying to hide which direction she
lived in.

“Where’s Susan?” he asked.

“I couldn’t bring her. She’s sick, she can’t
walk this far,” she said. “You’ll have to come back in another
week.”

The translator swung herself over the wall
and started to climb down, but Paul stopped her.

“No.”

She looked up. It was hard to see her
expression, but she looked patient yet condescending, like when
someone knows they have something you need and they plan on
savoring the power balance. “She’s sick, I couldn’t bring her.”

“And then next week you’ll come up with some
other excuse.” He’d seen workers do that with bosses they didn’t
like. They called it the mañana mañana.

“The place she’s living is far from here, it
would take too long to get there.”

“Then I’ll start walking now.” He picked her
up. She squeaked as he grabbed her, like a mouse in an owl’s
talons, but he held her gently and didn’t hurt her. He slipped her
into the front pocket of his shirt. “You’ll tell me how to get
there.”

She clenched the pocket’s fabric. “It’s south
of here.”

He had to cross the ASU campus first, which,
like everything else in this city, had grown bloated and modern.
The campus was empty at night, except for the odd student walking
bent over hunched against his backpack, and some security guards
zipping around on golf carts. It felt like an abandoned futuristic
city, like a set from a creepy television show he’d watched when he
was younger.

They came out the south side of campus
through another construction zone, and into a neighborhood not too
far from where Susan’s new house was.

“We’re almost there. Turn right here at this
next street.”

“You just had me go down that street.” He’d
been taking a winding path through the back streets, and couldn’t
shake the feeling that he was walking into an ambush. This wasn’t
the first time she said they were “almost there” either.

“I’m trying to remember where it was,” she
said, in a cringing voice.

He grumbled, and turned right at the next
street. At the next block, she had him turn right again.

“We’re walking in a spiral,” he said. “If I
were an owl, I’d have eaten you already.”

“It’s here, it’s here,” she protested. “Under
that juniper.”

“Under the what?”

“The tree, over there. Hide in the darkness
and I’ll go and get her.”

Paul walked casually across the lawn and
under the tree. It was as tall as the house, some kind of pine-y
smelling thing, with branches that brushed the ground. He snapped
away the dead branches underneath it to make a place for himself.
Then he scooped the translator out of his pocket and set her gently
on the ground.