Sing the Four Quarters (48 page)

Only three days before, Annice had Sung her voice to a rasping croak. It couldn't have fully healed. He thought about stopping her, then he thought about what would happen if Olina closed off the keep with him still outside, and he let her Sing on.

Annice could feel her voice sliding from her control as the pain became harder to ignore. She struggled to hold the Song, allowing it to drift into a lower key, whispering the same request over and over. Stasya had been in that pit for six days. There
would not
be a seventh. Finally, the whisper faded and the kigh, taller and darker than when she began but still very small, disappeared.

The sky behind the mountains had lightened to a hazy blue-gray.

Wrapping her hands around one of the heavy iron bars, Annice yanked at it with all her strength. Was that movement or had her imagination supplied what she so desperately desired? Adjusting her grip, she yanked again. It was movement, definitely movement. The bolts were loose but still a long way from free.

Turning to explain, she saw the expression on Pjerin's face and silently moved out of his way.

Bracing his feet on opposite sides of the pungent mud in the center of the gully, Pjerin threw his weight against the grille. Flakes of rust dug into his palms. The bolts rocked in their anchorage, but held.

Breath hissing through his teeth, he continued to pull. The veins stood out on his forearms, muscles knotted across his back. The new tissue closing the hole the crossbow bolt had left in his shoulder tore and it felt as though hot knives were twisting in the wound. He bit off the cry of pain, couldn't stop the sudden blurring of his vision.

Then over the roar of blood in his ears he heard a single low note throb in the stone.

The grille began to shake.

Slowly, the bolts began to pull free.

One inch. Two. A handbreadth.

Panting, Pjerin collapsed against the bars, drenched in sweat, muscles trembling. Forehead resting on his arm, he managed to turn in time to see Annice break down her flute and slip it back into its case. "I thought," he gasped, "that you had… to Sing the… kigh."

"You do." He had to strain to hear her. "But the right notes will call them." She swallowed, wincing as the motion wrenched abraded flesh. "I thought calling them back might make room around the bolts."

"Seems you were right." Grunting with pain, he straightened, shifted his stance, and made ready to pull again. A handbreadth's worth of space between the grille and the mountain would do them no good at all.

"Pjerin?" She poked at one sweat damp arm. "Wouldn't it make more sense to use a lever now?"

He looked at the grille—at the space between the grille and the mountain—and allowed his hands to fall to his sides.

"Yes," he sighed, "it would."

Although the valley still lay in the mountain's shadow, a cock had already crowed in the village when the grille finally slid down to rest in the mud.

Pjerin squared his shoulders and turned to face the greater challenge.

"It's all right," Annice told him, the stiff line of her back clearly stating how little she liked what she was forced to admit. "I'm not going with you. Not," she added hoarsely, "because of a few bad smells." She chopped a gesture at the dark hole. "I can't bend. And what's more, there's too much of me sticking out—I couldn't climb up into the keep at the end. Happy?"

He was.

Her hand came up to hold her throat, as though to lend strength to her voice. "Swear to me you'll get Stasya out first."

"Annice, if Olina…"

"Swear!"

He could see whites showing all around her eyes and her palms pressed against his arm were far too hot. "Annice, the baby…"

"Swear!"

"All right! I swear." She took a deep breath and Pjerin watched, relieved as she calmed. "If I go up the laundry drain, I can get to the cellars without being seen. I'll free Stasya and then take care of Olina."

"And Lukas?"

"Without Olina, Lukas is nothing." He pulled himself up into the drain. "Will you be able to get back to Bohdan?"

She nodded. "Be careful."

"Don't worry."

As he disappeared into the darkness, she closed her eyes and murmured, "Soon, Stas. Soon."

Although masking shadows grew fewer with every step, Annice made little effort to hide while returning to Rozyte's house. Without Pjerin, she was completely unrecognizable as the bard who'd visited the keep back in Third Quarter.

Just another pregnant woman waddling about on business of her own.

The ache in her temples finally forced her to unclench her jaw. Pjerin had given his word. Stasya would soon be free.

But what did Pjerin know about bards? Stasya needed her and here she stood, helpless on the sidelines. It made no difference that her own somewhat latent good judgment had placed her there or that honesty and near exhaustion combined forced her to recognize that she needed to lie down.

Then she saw the small basket of potatoes tucked up against a low stone wall.

Pjerin couldn't just walk in the front gate of the keep. But nothing said
she
couldn't.

Just another pregnant woman waddling about on business of her own… We'll look like a villager, delivering something
to the kitchens, baby. I can't be the only person in Ohrid shaped like a gourd.

With the village coming awake, she had no time for deliberation. Any hesitation and this chance would be lost.

Stasya's going to need me. I can't not be there.

Already sprouting, the potatoes had obviously been saved from last year's harvest and, now that the ground had warmed, would probably be planted any day. An-nice squatted and awkwardly stood again. A chicken, scratching in the garden, paused long enough to give her a stupidly superior stare, but no one else appeared to have seen.
When this
is over, I'll see that these are returned
, she promised silently.

With the basket balanced on one shoulder, screening her face from watchers on the walls of the keep, Annice picked her way onto the track and began the long curving climb up to the gates.

Sarline quietly pulled the heavy wooden door closed behind her and shoved her feet into her clogs. It had taken her until dawn to come to a decision. Lying in the darkness beside a sleeping Rozyte, she'd weighed the alternatives.

Pjerin a'Stasiek was neither oathbreaker nor traitor, and he was their rightful due.

But Pjerin a'Stasiek supported the dangerous belief that the kigh were enclosed in the Circle and he had fathered a child on a bard.

While Sarline by no means approved of everything that had allegedly been happening over the last two quarters, she could not allow the kigh to return to Ohrid in such strength.

Lukas a'Tynek was her cousin. As he was still steward of Ohrid, she'd give him the information she had and wash her hands of it.

Bare feet making no sound against packed dirt, Gerek ran to the shelter of a building and peered out at his quarry.

Sarline had thought he was asleep, but he'd seen her staring at him with her face all twisted. He'd been frightened, for she'd looked a bit like Lukas did and he knew now that Lukas was a bad man.

When she'd snuck out of the house, he'd got his bow and arrows from his papa's pack and followed her.

Pushing his quiver back behind his hip, he dashed forward and ducked behind a garden wall as an early riser called out a greeting. Sarline answered without stopping.

Eyes narrowed in an unconscious imitation of his father's glare, he watched her pass the last house and head up the track toward the keep. When the curve took her out of sight, he raced for the narrow twisting path under the thornbushes.

Calves burning, Annice sagged against the cool stone of the gatetower. Buildings swam across her vision, then steadied into the solid black rock of the keep. She'd never wanted so desperately to sit down.

"You don't look so good."

Somehow, she managed to turn to face the owner of the voice.

Sandy brows drawn into a deep vee, he took the basket from her slack fingers and set it at her feet. "You shouldn't be carrying stuff like this. Here, let… Hey! You're not…"

As the realization she wasn't who he thought replaced the concern in his eyes, Annice caught his gaze and snapped,

"Go on with what you were doing."

The young man shook his head. "Not until I get you where you're going. You really don't look like you should be walking around on your own. Are you Anezka's sister? I heard she was visiting from Adjud."

Annice knew she was staring at him and tried to stop. Her voice hadn't been strong enough to carry the Command.

Hand on her throat, she sank back against the wall, hoping she didn't look as frightened as she felt. What if her voice was never strong enough again? "You're, uh, not… that is…" She dropped her gaze to follow his line of sight and forced herself to think. The baby. He thought she was having the baby. "Uh, no. Not now. Soon."

"Soon?" The word slid up an octave and shattered. "Look, you stay right here. I'm going to go get the mid wife."

Before she could protest, he was gone, bounding down toward the village.

The baby twisted and Annice clutched at the curve of her belly.
Not now
, she pleaded silently.
Not now
.

Abandoning the potatoes, she moved as quickly as she could toward the laundry, hugging the shadows morning had left along the walls.
Hang on, Stas. I'm coming
.

In another quarter when the rains hadn't been so frequent and the overflow from the cisterns hadn't regularly washed through the drains, it would have been worse. Knowing that didn't help much. Pjerin tried not to think about what squashed beneath his boots or knees or hands, but he couldn't stop breathing and every breath told him unmistakably where he was. The complete lack of light helped and when he began to pass the privy holes, he looked up, not down.

Fortunately, he'd stopped gagging although his ribs burned and his stomach was a tightly knotted ache. Without a healer, the shoulder wound would have to be cauterized to prevent infection.

Nice to have something to look forward to
, he mused darkly.

He'd never thought of himself as having an overly active imagination, but he couldn't banish the screams of soldiers from his mind—their scalded skin sloughing off their bodies as they drowned in boiling water. If they'd been seen as they freed the grille or Annice had been taken on her way back to Bohdan… Even now fires could be burning under the huge kettles in the laundry, the water steaming gently, Olina waiting for just the right moment to pour an agonizing death into the drains.

Not fond of small, enclosed spaces at the best of times, which this most assuredly was not, he held a picture of Olina in his mind's eye, his hands crushing the ivory column of her perfect throat. The image pulled him forward, teeth gritted, muscles tight. She'd pay for what she'd done to him, and to Gerek, and to Ohrid.

The Ducal sword scraped along the stone as he crawled through a puddle less foul than the rest and smelling faintly of lye. He'd long since lost his bearings in the darkness and the stench but he was sure he'd passed the kitchens, so the laundry had to be close.

Had to be.

A strand of hair stuck to his cheek and he fought the urge to yank free his dagger and hack it off short rather than consider what agent plastered it to his skin.

Up ahead he could see the graying that meant another opening into the drain. Eyes streaming, he scuttled for the circle of dim light and thankfully sat back on his heels trying to work the painful kinks out of his back. The stone was damp and cold under his bruised and filthy legs, but that was all. When he stretched up his arm, he could touch the grate over the opening.

The laundry. The drain ended just beyond it at the cisterns. Moving as quietly as he could, Pjerin unbuckled his swordbelt and rehung the weapon around his waist. Up on one knee, he paused, head cocked to one side, straining to hear any sound from above. Nothing. Not that there would be if Olina waited, bow drawn, for his head to crest the stone.

Rising to a crouch, the steel grid pressed against his shoulders, he straightened bent legs.

Tried to straighten bent legs.

As far as he could remember, there were no bolts. The skin between his shoulder blades crawling with the thought of arrows trained on his back, he shifted position slightly and tried again.

The instant age and rust finally released their hold, he threw up his good arm, toppled the grate, and vaulted stiffly out of the drain. If this began the moment when Olina made her move, he'd have less than a heartbeat's grace to defend himself.

The laundry was empty, cool, and clean. A shuttered window laid only broken bands of light against the smooth stone floor, but he'd been in darkness so long the room seemed brilliant. Water dripped from a loose tap into the massive copper kettle, but no fire burned beneath it and the two huge cedar tubs standing beside it on the platform against the cistern wall were dry.

His sigh of relief nearly choked him with his own stink.

What good secrecy when they could smell him coming in Marienka? Climbing into one of the tubs, he stripped off his shirt and opened the cistern spout, ducking down under the gush of cold water,

"What are you doing?"

Heart pounding, feeling like an idiot, he stood in the laundry tub flourishing the Ducal sword, water slamming against his back and rapidly rising up around his feet. "What am I doing?" he snarled. "What are you doing
here
?"

Annice clutched at the wooden rim and glared up at him. "This is not the time to be…" Then she gagged and turned away, hand clamped over her mouth. "You're covered in shit."

Somehow he resisted the urge to scream at her. Grabbing up a boarbristle brush, he scrubbed violently at skin, clothes, and hair until he felt flayed and blood dribbled from the edge of the purple scar in the hollow of his shoulder. With as much of the encrusted filth removed as quickly as possible, he slammed the spout closed and clambered out onto the floor.

"All right," he growled, water streaming from breeches and boots and hair and running for the open drain, "let's try this again. What are you doing here? I told you to go back to Bohdan's…"