Northlight (42 page)

“The daggers were forgeries,” Terris said. “But that's only Kardith's word and mine.”

“We don't need an irrefutable case right now,” Esmelda said, “only enough evidence to indict in the public's mind, to cause them to question their loyalty to him. There's more than one way to do that. Montborne could not have acted alone. Those daggers, for example, required fairly sophisticated metallurgy. It'll take a bit of investigation to determine the connection, but I doubt he's been able to cover
all
his traces.”

“Or someone along the line may panic,” Avi said, nodding, “once they see the great Montborne himself under suspicion, and we'll be watching.”

Esmelda turned to Terris. “Where is this second dagger now? Does Montborne have it?”

Terris paled visibly. “It was in my pack.”

“There's a good chance he's destroyed it, then,” Avi said. “He can't risk it coming to light at some future point. Either way, it's beyond our reach.”

Esmelda picked up her cup and swirled the steaming tisane meditatively. “What else did you tell him?”

“Not much,” Terris said with a fleeting curl at the corners of his mouth. “I was so determined to get him under the Starhall, that's all I would talk about. He was still acting friendly...” His face went grim. “Trying to win my trust.”

“So he doesn't know those two northers are here and ready to begin negotiations?”

“They were at the barricades with us,” I pointed out. “The Brigade kids could have reported seeing them.”

“Even if they noticed them in the shadows,” Terris said to me, “it's you and Avi they'll remember.”

“He'll find out about them soon enough, but on
our
terms.” Esmelda set down her cup with a clatter. “Today I plan to introduce Jakon to the full Senate as the envoy whose mission is to open formal diplomatic channels.”

In the pause that followed, I slipped the Guards knife out of its sheath and held it under the table and ready. Avi noticed the movement. Her eyes widened as she heard the faint, whispery footsteps along the corridor.

Jakon and Grissem stood at the door, and Mother knows how much they'd already heard. Both of them wore their elkskins and quilted vests. Jakon's hair was wet and freshly plaited. They didn't smile as they came in.

The steward woman bustled after them, almost on their heels. She looked distrustful and motherly and exasperated at the same time. It took her only a moment to clear the dirty dishes and stack the papers in a tidy pile in the center of the table.

Following Esmelda's invitation, the two northers helped themselves to bread and fruit, and gingerly settled themselves in chairs at the table. For Jakon, who was used the drum stool, it was awkward enough, but Grissem looked like he'd never sat in a chair in his life.

Jakon examined his peach before biting into it. He chewed slowly, tasting its ripeness with a wondering expression.

Avi got up and took a paring knife from the sideboard drawer. She handed it, hilt first, to Jakon. “You can peel it if you don't like the fuzz.”

Jakon raised one eyebrow, glancing from the simple blackwood handle to her eyes. For a long moment he didn't move, and I remembered how fast he'd brought the poisoned dagger to my throat. This was no simple offer of a paring knife, this gesture of Avi's. I wished her joy, because with him, everything would always be some demon-cursed test.

Avi knew exactly what she was doing. She was a Ranger, forged at Brassaford and honed on the Ridge — and more than that, she was Esmelda's daughter.

Jakon reached out his right hand, not to take the knife but to enclose her hand in his. Then he slid the knife out and placed it on the bare table.

Avi sat down. “It occurs to me,” she said, just as if they'd been talking all along and this was the continuation of their conversation, “that we're going to need more than a treaty to smooth over the decades of conflict between our nations. Trade will help, of course. But so would a marriage.”

“That has been a traditional way for us to unite families,” Jakon said gravely. I thought his expression a shade too wellcontrolled. “I think my grandfather would welcome it as an honorable solution. But we're only one clan of many in the north. The other chiefs may follow us, but they're not bound to do so. If my grandfather asks it, they will stop raiding long enough to listen. The question is whether your people will do the same.”

“You mean how much time it will take us to reverse the effects of Montborne's war propaganda,” Esmelda said.

“Ah! And what of your general?” Jakon glanced over at Terris. Then back to Esmelda. Mother knows what he saw in those ice-colored eyes of hers, the slash of her mouth, those bony shoulders hunched forward, fingers tipped together like a house of claws. As she outlined her plans for the morning's meeting, he nodded at each point.

“Ah!” he said when she'd finished. “So
that's
the way of it!”

These two understood each other well, I thought.

Etch chose that moment to make his entrance, looking very much like a weather-faced horse doctor despite his borrowed city clothes. He nodded a greeting to Esmelda.

“Excuse me, magistra,” he said, “I don't mean to interrupt...”

“Come in, have some breakfast,” Terris said. “No horse tonic on the menu, I promise.”

Etch shuffled forward. “Ah — if we're going to stay here in the city, there's some legal charges we'll have to get cleared. To begin with, there's the minor matter of a jailbreak... “

“That,” said Aviyya, laughing, “we can deal with.”

It was a scramble to get us all organized for the meeting, what with Esmelda rattling off orders and sending messages by way of the small troop of Senatorial pages who'd appeared on the doorstep, Avi and Terris hurrying back and forth, and Annelys asking people to move here or there or to please get out of the way. In the middle of it all, a City Guard arrived with our weapons, my Ranger's vest, and an official release from Orelia. Our jailbreak was, if not pardoned, at least erased. Forearm knife, boot knife, and folding utility to go in my vest pocket, they were all here.

I slipped the long-knife back where it belonged, handed over the “borrowed” Guards blade, and settled myself in a corner from which I could keep an eye on Terris. Sometimes I glanced at Avi, her hands full of papers, and I hardly recognized her. She paused in midstride, as if she were going to say something. But what was there to say that we didn't both already know?

Esmelda wasn't sure what to do with Etch except ignore him, but he commented to me that he was much happier going off to check on the horses, anyway. Doing something useful. He'd catch up on the news later, he said. He walked out the front door, his shoulders bowed just a fraction, as if the city weighed too damned much. Watching him go, I missed what had grown up between the three of us and later between the six of us. We'd counted on it for our lives out there, but here it was nothing. In some crazy way, I'd come to care about these people, and that caring had stopped me running, stopped me hiding in the Rangers. Would that all be nothing, too?

I wondered if it was worth it to come back.

Esmelda wrapped the two northers in long hooded cloaks and sneaked us into the Senate building through the back way. I wouldn't have said
sneaked
to her face, but it sure felt that way to me, winding along the back corridors. She stuffed us all in a little room underneath the spectator's balconies, one of several such waiting areas, a bland and modern cave — pasty yellow walls and furniture just uncomfortable enough to keep you from getting too cozy.

Two old men had already arrived, Esmelda's witnesses, I guessed. One wore ordinary clothing but held himself as if he were in uniform. From the shift of his eyes, the spark as they passed over my knives, the hidden ones as well as the visible, and the careful way he placed his own hands, I guessed he knew more than a little about weapons. I'd also bet his loyalty and qualifications were above suspicion. The second man, in scholar's robes, beamed as he was introduced to Jakon and Grissem. With undisguised eagerness, he asked if he could just please ask them one or two questions about their clan traditions.

“For what purpose?” Jakon asked.

The scholar didn't seem to notice Jakon's tone of voice. “We know so little about your culture. We're anxious to fill in the gaps, to do a little impromptu field work, so to speak. This is such an opportunity, to have two native informants — ”

“We are not specimens to be examined,” Jakon snapped, “to have the living heart of our people imprisoned in your books.”

“Yet if there is to be a new understanding between these people and Clan'Cass, we must learn about one another,” Grissem said. “Why else did you build the trading post? Why else let the Ranger woman and her friends live, instead of killing them as your grandfather would have done?”

Jakon's chin came up and his nostrils flared. The tendons in his neck stood out. I could not tell if he were more angry or terrified. I knew the temper of his courage, the passion to lead his people in new and dangerous ways. Isolated in the heart of his enemy's stronghold, he was near his limits. The moment passed, and he held out one hand. “Come, then, and let us learn about each other.”

Esmelda and Avi took up the long benches in the opposite corner, heads together, going over procedure, scheming and such.

Me, I'd rather sit on the floor if I had to sit at all, but this was Laureal City, so Terris and I settled ourselves on two chairs around a table bearing a particularly scabby-looking succulent plant. Terris had that pinched, white-around-the-mouth look again.

I knew I should keep my mouth shut, but I couldn't stop thinking about Montborne loose in the city. If I'd learned anything about killing, it was that the first time was the hardest. Montborne wouldn't rest easy as long as Terris was alive. He'd learned one final way of solving his problems. And even
I
had to sleep sometime.

Terris listened to what I had to say. He leaned forward, and for a fleeting moment I saw the boy he used to be — earnest, impulsive, loving. It came to me that he didn't know why he'd let Montborne live; he'd acted on trust and instinct, as if some god had moved him to it.

If that were true, it better not have been the demon chance.

My muscles itched, wanting to hit something. “You should have left him in that swamp, let him and the things with the light beams fight it out between them. They deserve each other.”

He shook his head at my words, laughing humorlessly. “You sound just like Avi.”

“Avi's got the right idea about Montborne.”

“Avi thinks only in terms of what's good for Laurea. That's not so bad, since she'll be Guardian of Laurea after Esme. But Laurea and Harth are not the same thing.”

My eyes rested on the ring he wore, the one he'd scooped up from the charred bones of the gate world. Not just the gate world, I thought, the home world, the one we'd come from. The one we must remember, so that the same thing did not happen to our own Harth.

The ring bore the symbol of a doubled circle surrounding a single dot. He wore it openly, as Esmelda wore hers. Mother knows what they'd said to each other about it. Avi might be the next Guardian of Laurea, but Terris had taken on a far heavier burden with this ring.

The Senate chamber's walls were covered in polished stone instead of wood. Some kind of marble, I thought, cold and echoing. Solar lights, high on the ceiling, cast muted shadows everywhere. Above us in the galleries, people hurried to claim the last few seats.

I followed Terris and the old dragon through the double doors and down the wide central aisle. An oval table had been placed at the front of the room, with chairs for the Inner Council and their aides. Avi, Jakon, and Grissem stayed behind in the little room, along with the two expert witnesses, to wait for Esmelda's signal. The rest of the Council filed in from the side, wearing their long green robes, surrounded by their pages and adjutants. Last came the gaea-priest, carrying a silver bowl of water and a dwarf tree in a planter.

As I stood with Terris behind Esmelda's chair, my eyes jumped around the room. I glanced from the half-circle of clear space around the table to the low railing and then the rows of chairs for the Senators with aisles running up to the crowded public sections, the balconies above them, the doors now being closed by uniformed Senate ushers. I marked where the City Guards stood, the extra security around the oval table, how Montborne had placed his own men. They were too few for the coup Avi had feared, but enough to cause trouble. I recognized a big-shouldered man as Montborne's bodyguard from the day Pateros was killed. There was no sense of immediate threat from any of them, just waiting and watching, marking my presence even as I did theirs.

The gaea-priest took his place at one end of the table and Montborne at the other. Esmelda, as Guardian of Laurea, stood in the center, facing the audience. At her signal, the gaea-priest began the opening ceremony. He must have done it a hundred times, but for me the ritual held a fascination — the way the room fell still, the way the priest set down the bowl and planter, the musical clinking of his amulet charms. The way he dipped his fingers in the water and touched it to his lips, then dipped again and sprinkled the drops over the tree.

“In the name of all oneness,

Which we pledge to preserve

In thought and deed.

May the cycle of life

Bless these proceedings.”

His voice sounded a little quavery, and not just with age. I hated priests, but how could I hate him? He was nothing more than an old man who'd spent his life in wishcrap rituals like this one, believing with all his soul that some Laurea-loving god was up there listening to his prayers.