Northlight (15 page)

I jerked my head toward the Starhall. His eyes narrowed — good, he'd understood. He took a quick breath, gathering himself, and walked away from me.

Esmelda's house, a homely, squarish lump of stone, paled in the glow from the solar lights along the walkway. It seemed to me to have pulled itself upright, as if it didn't want to get too close to its neighbors, shivering in a cold no one else could feel. It was an extravagance, even I could see that, two stories for just a single family — if you counted these three a family. Esmelda. The boy with eyes the color of Avi's. And someone else I hadn't seen clearly, only as a blurred back-lit shadow against the half-drawn curtains.

The sky had gone lightless hours ago. I watched the house from the shelter of a tree on the opposite side of the street. The leaves hung thick and low, bitter-clean after this morning's rain. The smooth bark invited me to lean against it. In Laureal City, even the trees presented temptation.

For all my hours of waiting, I still didn't know what I was going to say. Everything I'd rehearsed was no dumbshit good. But the time for waiting had passed.

A few strides brought me to the walkway. The door was smooth wood with no fancy carvings. Beside it hung a ceramic bell shaped like a hang-me-down flower, with a wooden stick to tap it. The sound was full and mellow. A moment later I heard footsteps inside.

A woman opened the door, small and tight-faced beneath a coil of white hair. Eyes with hidden light, we'd say on the steppe. Her gaze flew to the empty sheath on my thigh, for I'd left the long-knife with the gray mare's gear. I needed a different sort of weapon tonight.

“Yes?”

“I'm here to see Esmelda.”

She blocked the opening with her body.

“I know she's here.” Lie to me, mouse, and I'll break your neck.

“She sees no
strangers.
” She slurred the word so it sounded like
Rangers.

The woman pulled back a fraction to close the door. I slammed one shoulder into it and the next instant I was inside. On one side of the narrow entry sat a table littered with papers. On the other, a staircase with a carved bannister and a corridor leading beyond it. Two doorways, everything low-lit except for the right-hand room.

Before I could head for it, she darted in front of me again, grabbing my arm. She had courage, this Laurean mouse.

A woman's voice from the lighted room: “Lys?”

She faltered and I jerked away, an easy disengage that sent her staggering. The next moment I was through the doorway.

The room was bright after the dim light of the entry. White walls with woven hangings in sand-blown color, soft upholstered furniture. A low table with more papers and books, candles adding to the glow from the panels of solar lights. A carpet with a graceful, muted design. A room, I thought, for people who didn't get dirty.

Esmelda sat bolt upright in one of the chairs. The boy, on the sofa, jumped to his feet. His eyes had the look of someone too shocked to cry yet, and I thought of the dead girl in the orange scarf. She must have meant something to him. Behind me, the mouse-woman said, “I tried to stop her — ”

“It's all right,” Esmelda said quietly.

Suddenly the room went still, except for my breathing, rasping as if I'd run all the way here from Pateros's grave. My head filled with the honey-sweet smell of the burning wax.

Esmelda waited, her eyes never leaving mine, metal gray that no candlelight could ever warm. Behind her, the boy was as tense as a coiled viper. The mouse-woman disappeared back into the shadows.

“So, Kardith of the Rangers,” Esmelda said. “Kardith of
no place
but the Rangers.”

A hard one, this old woman.

The boy's eyes flickered — to me, back to her again. Wondering how she knew my name. So did I.

“Have you come to collect a reward?” She meant, for looking after the boy this morning.

I shrugged. The boy was a faceless, voiceless nothing. Like the young Guardsman who couldn't find the courage to ask how Pateros died. To hell with both of them. I wasn't here to play nursemaid.

But I didn't expect how hard this would be. For a moment, I couldn't make my tongue move. Something rose up inside me like freezing mud, choking me, drowning me. When I forced the words out, they sounded barely human.

“For Avi — I've come for Avi.”

She watched me, still unmoving.

Not going to make it easy for me, are you, you old she-dragon? If it were just me, I'd walk out of here now.

“Avi,” I repeated. “Your daughter.”

For a moment I thought she would say,
“I have no daughter.”
Avi told me that Esmelda cared more for power than her own family, that she sucked people dry like a bloodbat. “Not me,” Avi'd said. “I've got my own life.”

My own life.
Mother-of-us-all!

“When my daughter left my house, she made it clear she no longer wanted anything to do with me. No obligations either way. Those were her very words. Has she changed her mind?” A hint of scorn for such weakness of will. Or maybe triumph, that Avi would be so desperate to come crawling back, she had to send a messenger to plead for a truce first.

“Never!” I stammered, sweating, all the words I'd rehearsed outside forgotten. “But she's gone. Disappeared. Out on the Ridge. Two weeks gone and no sign. She could be hurt, dying, killed by northers.”

One eyebrow lifted. And you expect me to do something about it?

“I went looking on my night shifts until the Captain — he put me on double to stop me. I couldn't get far enough from the fort between shifts and I knew I'd be caught if I missed a go. It's not as if none of us cares. We all — Avi's one of us. She fished one man out of a norther ambush — took a spear-point meant for someone else.”
And me, never mind about me.
“A dock in pay or a week's fort duty, that's easy for someone who'd risked her neck for you. We wouldn't stop looking until — but there's orders, new orders.”

“Orders?” Again that whipcrack voice. Her eyes glittered as they went hard and narrow.

“From Montborne. Six months ago. Pull back the patrol lines. No wandering, no ‘unauthorized expeditions', no exploring, no provoking — no searching.”

She stared at me as if I were a gutless sandbat.

“If it were just a pack of Mother-damned rules, do you think I'd be standing here now? I'd be out there searching and to hell with them. But the new penalty for insubordination, it's —
handing!
”

Now the room turned cold and still and dark, despite the candles and the solar lights. The old woman sat like a shadow panther watching a gazelle. But I was no gazelle.

“Handing?” the boy asked, flat voice.

“The loss of a hand — usually the right,” she said. “It's said to be a norther custom.”

What was the old dragon thinking now, sitting there not even breathing? The boy watched her, too, and in his face I glimpsed something dark and nameless. Reckless, unformed. But hard, hard like steel.

“Aviyya left my house to make her own life,” Esmelda said. Her words were slow and final as the Laurean river bells, tolling through the night-long fogs. The bells that Avi always said sounded like the souls of drowning men.

Cold trickled through me. I had no answers for her, no pleas, no honey-tongued persuasion. For a moment I cursed myself for not having the right words, as if there were some magic in them to unlock her heart. But it was impossible. Even if he were still alive, not even Pateros could have moved her.

“I know you and Avi didn't...agree,” I stumbled on, cursing myself doubly for my weakness. “But she's your own, your child — that's got to count for something!”

Avi told me again and again that her mother's heart was harder than any stone, but in the end there must have been a link between them. I remembered my stepfather singing to me and my brothers through the howling, sand-swept nights. I remembered how he defied the Tribal ban and taught me knife-forms, saying I was his daughter as much as if he'd truly fathered me and he meant to give me the means to protect myself. I remembered the first time I held my son in my arms and such a feeling came on me, the tie between us that neither water-plague nor raiders could ever break. Surely Esmelda must remember something of that.

She shook her head. “Give it up, Ranger.”

“At least tell me why!”

“I can take no action. None.”

“What if it were me, lost out there?” the boy asked in a low, tight voice. “What then?”

“My answer must be the same.” She turned to face him, a feral movement quick as a striking snake. There was something in the way she held herself, some hidden passion. “There are some things that go beyond personal loyalties, beyond even love.”

“What things?”

A tightening of her lips as she weighed what she should say, what she
could
say. Ay Mother, so much going on here I could only guess!

“What things?”
he repeated, his voice breaking. “More of your damned secrets, like the ring? Are you saying the fate of all Harth is balanced against my sister's life?”

Quick, he was. From her expression, he'd hit too close to something he shouldn't know. She placed one hand on his and for the first time I noticed the ring she wore, heavy gold, the deeply incised design of two concentric circles around a single point. Nothing of the desperate tension in the boy's body lessened.

“Avi made her choice,” Esmelda said. “She knew the risks. She didn't want my help.”

He leapt to his feet, her hand thrust aside as if it might bite him. Me, I wondered just what sort of viper's nest I'd stumbled into.

To hell with them and their secrets!

Waiting wouldn't get me any help for Avi, only deeper into this quick-mire. I turned and headed for the door. Behind me I heard the boy's voice, muted. There would be no screaming fights like Avi told me about, not for him. I didn't think Esmelda would tell him why, either, only to keep his mouth shut and his nose where it belonged. Hell, Avi was his sister, what else should he do? But he'd lived his whole life in the shadow of the dragon; he was probably halfway to being just like her.

Outside the door, the mouse-woman waited, her little hands knotted into fists. She shot me a look of pure hate.

“I didn't lay a finger on your precious magistra.” I pushed past her, through the still-darkened entryway. She slipped around me and had the front door open before I could reach it.

The night swallowed me up.

I cut across the streets through the stench of crushed flowers, my running feet as sure as if they had eyes of their own. The night surrounded me, filling me with a broken darkness, a madness almost. It would pass, I knew, this dawn or the next. Or the next. Until then, I would do whatever I had to do to survive, just as I always had.

The next moment, it seemed, I was standing in the plaza in front of a newly planted tree. The place was not yet deserted, even at this hour, with late mourners still drifting by. Before my eyes, the Starhall blazed as if on fire. Everything looked pale and sickish in its light, like things grown too long underground.

It came to me that whatever was broken inside me happened not this night, nor even this week, but a long time ago. On a night lit with torches instead of candle-lanterns or those Mother-damned solar lights. The wind blew in fitful gusts up on the funeral mount. I still heard it in my dreams.

I still felt the blood streaming down my back to lure the bloodbats down to me.

Mother, why must I still remember? I've run, I've killed, I've frozen in that damned Kratera mud. And still it comes back to me, that night!

There was no answer. There never was. Or maybe the demon god of chance knew and kept it to throw in my face as I died.

Now I knelt on the smooth Laurean stone, jamming my knuckles into my eyes as if to gouge out the visions there. For the first time, I noticed the smell of the new-turned earth. The slender trunk, the leaves glimmering in the unsteady light of the candle-lanterns set about the shrine.

One by one I opened my fingers, each joint a slower heartbeat, a steadier breath. I held my hands out in front of me and they did not tremble.

I was not alone. I froze, searching for the shadow behind me. A man, I thought, from the feel of him. I slid a knife-hilt into my palm, body-warmed and solid. I could spin around, be on my feet and the blade halfway through his guts before he knew I'd even moved. Blood smelled better than flowers or grave-dirt.

I wouldn't do it. This was Laureal City, after all, not the Ridge. Not the steppe. Pateros promised me it would be different here.

Is it? Is it ever different anywhere?

Slowly I rose, slowly turned. The boy's face shimmered in front of me like a polished skull. No more rainwater eyes but pits of darkness.

Movement at the edge of the plaza. More mourners, still too far to hear more than their murmured voices. The skull-faced boy followed me into the night.

“Look,” he said when I paused. For an instant I heard steel in his voice and then it was gone. “You need —
Avi
needs help.” One shoulder jerked back toward the big, empty house. “I don't know what the hell is going on or why — but I'll find a way to get it for you.”

“Wishcrap.” Even the mouse-woman would be more use than this pale, city-soft boy.

“I'm her brother, damn it!” His body tensed as if he'd like to grab me and shake me. He didn't — the first sign of sense he'd shown yet. “There's got to be — I'll find something. I swear I will!”

“Forget it, cub. I'm leaving at dawn.”

But his curses, shouted into the night, brought me a strange and unexpected comfort.

A solar lantern brightened the usually dim entryway. The rest of Esmelda's huge house lay dark and silent, except for the faint, almost secretive creaking as it surrendered its warmth to the night. Just inside the door, beside the table piled with notebooks and correspondence, a travel pack sat on the floor. It was made of soft, oiled leather, with buckled outer pockets and felt-padded shoulder straps. Alongside lay a woolen cloak, neatly folded, and Terricel's best pair of boots.