The Assassins of Altis (20 page)

“I could be a good mother, if we’re ever blessed with children. Maybe. At least I can try my best.” She turned her head to look directly at Alain. “Do you still want to get married?”

The clearest smile she had ever seen on him illuminated Alain’s face. On an average person, it would have been a small bend of the lips, but from someone trained as a Mage it was amazing. “Yes.”

Mari kissed him long and deeply, having to pause afterwards to catch her breath. “Then I’ve made up my mind. I’m going to promise myself to you. I tell you that right now. We’ll be married. I can’t believe it took me this long to be willing to say that. I can’t remember where or when it happened, but at some point I stopped being able to imagine life without you in it. And though I don’t know why you like me so much, and I don’t know what I’ve ever done to deserve your love, you’ve shown that you love me more than I ever thought anyone could. So I’m proposing to you now even though you proposed to me back in that inn west of Umburan. I want you to know that I want this as much as you do. Nobody and nothing will ever separate us.”

When Alain finally spoke, his voice was rough with more emotion than she had ever heard from him before. “I will never leave you. I wondered if your fears were about me, if my being a Mage was still something you could not overcome, or if you found other things about me wanting.”

“Stars above, Alain, you’re perfect. Except for little things. I looked for flaws, believe me. I wanted to run when I realized I was falling in love with you. But I guess this destiny of yours had its little joke with us.”

“I hope you retain this illusion about my perfection,” Alain said. “And I will remain certain that you are indeed perfect. Except for little things.”

“I think there’s a few big things, but we just resolved the biggest. You do realize that I’m getting the better deal, don’t you?” said Mari, fighting back tears again.

“On that we must continue to disagree.” Alain looked behind them, toward the east. “It will be dawn soon. Shall we watch the sun rise together, on this first day of a new day for us?”

She sat next to him, gazing eastward where the sky was beginning to show the tint of dawn, half afraid this was a dream as well. “Right now I don’t care if I never bring a new day to the world. This new day for us is enough.”

“That may be out of our hands,” Alain suggested.

“We could always give up, but I guess you and I aren’t the kind of people who give up. It does scare me, Alain, that…” She braced herself, then said it. “That I am the daughter of Jules. That I actually have a chance to overthrow the Great Guilds. Because there are so many things that could go wrong, and so many people could be hurt. I don’t know if you heard what that apprentice in the far-talker room on the ship said, but apparently there are Mechanics who are starting to believe things about me, too. It’s just crazy.”

He smiled at her again. “You are more than you think you are.”

“Says the man who thinks I’m more beautiful than Asha,” Mari replied, “who herself must be getting burned by the intensity of my bonfire right now.”

“You are more beautiful than Asha,” Alain began to protest.

“And you are delusional. Sometimes I wonder if you believe that I’m just one more imaginary thing in a world you believe to be an illusion, and you’re thinking you can change me just like you can change other things.”

He sounded puzzled by her statement. “What would I want to change about you?”

“How long a list do you want?”

Alain actually laughed for a moment, for only the second time since she had met him. “I am afraid my fate is to love you as you are.”

She grinned. “Another word for fate is doom, you know. Or destiny. Should we invite destiny to our wedding?”

The sun peeked up over the horizon in a sliver of dazzling brightness as Alain answered. For the moment, there was no hint of a storm threatening. “I have a feeling that destiny will be there whether we invite it or not.”

#

The rays of the rising sun brought light to the sky and shone on the peaks of mountains rising from the sea ahead of them. Mari used the sight of those mountains to adjust the course of their boat, her eyes sometimes distant as if she were trying to recall old memories.

Alain knew that feeling well enough.
Strange how, given the differences in our lives before we met, so many things are similar between us even if the reasons are not the same.
He watched her, thinking that Mari looked more relaxed than he had ever seen her.

At one point she gave him a half smile, eyes sad. “There are some walls I need to knock down before we get to the island. I’ve been building them for about ten years, so they’re pretty strong.” Mari paused as if gathering resolve, then spoke hesitantly. “Alain, what would you have done if your parents had lived and you’d gone back to them, and they’d rejected you like you said your grandmother did? You don’t have to tell me, if it’s too hard to think about, but I guess I’d like to know how you might have dealt with that.”

“I am not that good with people,” Alain said, his own reluctance probably obvious to Mari. The idea of that happening—of his parents rejecting him as his grandmother had—hurt a great deal even to think about. “I have too little experience with expressing feelings.”

“You’re a lot better than you think you are, Alain.” She forced another smile at him. “Can you try to imagine what you might have done? Please?”

Alain nodded to her. “I…think I would have told them that I had done as they wished, that even though I had become a Mage, I had remembered them. I would have told them that even though they rejected me now, I would always remember them.”

He had to pause then to control the feelings which rushed back upon him. “If they had spoken to me as my grandmother did…it…would have been very hard. But I would have known they still lived, and they would have known I had not forgotten them.” Alain met Mari’s eyes. “It would have been easier than learning that they were dead.”

Mari reached to touch his hand. “I’m sorry I made you think about that. You’re so right that I’m lucky to have the chance to fix this. If they do reject me…well, I’ll know I tried, and they’ll know I tried, despite everything.” She relaxed for a while after that.

But Mari grew tense again as the shore of the island rose over the horizon, the sand shining white under the morning sun. “Two things, Alain. No, three things. We can’t bring the rifles with us. There’s no way to hide them in our packs, and commons do not just walk around with rifles. I hate to leave them, if for no other reason than that they’re worth a great deal of money if we could sell them, but that might attract my Guild’s attention. Also, I can’t bring us in to the port. I’ve tried steering more that way, or what I think is that way, but I don’t know enough about sailing to get the boat to go in that direction. And while we have good reason to assume that our Guilds and the Imperials will take a while to figure out we might have gone to the island anyway after escaping from the Mechanic ship, we can’t linger here. I want to be away before nightfall if we can manage it.”

“What of the other thing?” Alain asked. “Are you still resolved?”

Mari took a deep breath before answering. “Yes, we will make every effort to see my family. I have no idea where my mother and father work. We’ll have to go by my old house,and hope they still live there, and that one or both of them are home. And it may be that you have to physically drag me to the door of that house, Alain.”

The wind drove the lifeboat ahead quickly as Mari aimed for a stretch of sand backed by dense growth with no signs of human presence. They ran the lifeboat onto a narrow beach before the sun had risen far in the sky, splashing ashore through the surf onto soft sand, then with difficulty pulling the weight of the boat a bit farther up onto the beach. Mari gazed back at the boat, her expression thoughtful. “What do you think our chances are of hiding it?”

Alain considered the large object. “Burying it would take a long time. It is too heavy for us to haul into the brush ahead, and covering it with brush on the beach would only make it more obvious. It is painted white, so at least it does not stand out too clearly against the sand.”

“We could set it on fire. I can’t see any sign of people nearby, and it shouldn’t generate much smoke.”

Alain looked out to sea. “Is there any chance the Mechanic ship we damaged will see it and come here?”

Mari grinned in a wicked way as she considered his question.

He had seen that expression before, when she was watching the smoke rising from the ruins of the Ringhmon City Hall. Alain realized that Mari looked unusually attractive when she was contemplating the results of major sabotage she had committed against people trying to imprison her. That probably ought to concern him, but it did not.

“No, there’s no chance of that,” Mari finally said. “As far as we could tell before we lost sight of it, the ship didn’t sink. That ship is very valuable, so there is no way the Mechanics aboard would abandon it unless they had no alternative. But that boiler isn’t going to be working for quite a while. I’m guessing that, being Mechanics, they rigged some sails on their masts and are painstakingly making their way either here or back to Landfall. Most likely Landfall, since they last saw us headed that way and the Mechanic repair facilities are probably a lot better there. With the big far-talker on the ship out of order, they’ll be dependent on their hand-held far-talkers, which means they’ll have to get close to shore to tell anyone what happened. So, short answer, there’s no way that ship could be close enough to see any smoke.”

“In that case, I agree that we should burn the boat. Sooner or later someone will find the remains, but it will take time to identify them and by then we will be long off the island.”

“Sounds good to me.” Mari pulled her pack out of the boat while Alain got his, then she hefted both Mechanic rifles, looking resigned. With a grimace, she took one by the front, whirled it around in a wide swing and hurled the weapon out into the surf. A moment later the second weapon followed it, disappearing with a splash into the incoming waves. “Let me spare you extra effort for once, especially since a spell might alert other Mages that you’re on this island.” She gathered some dry wood, pulled down the sail and bundled it on the bottom of the boat, then used her Mechanic fire-starting device, clicking it so that sparks flew onto the wood and the sail. Alain watched, fascinated, still unable to understand how the thing Mari called a flint worked to create sparks. In a short time a fire was rising in the center of the boat, the flames pale in the bright sunlight and only a thin thread of weak smoke rising into the sky.

“Good bye, little boat,” Mari said in a guilty voice. “Thanks for getting us safely here, and sorry we had to do this.”

Alain gave her a surprised look. “You speak as if the boat is alive.”

“Well, maybe it is in some way. Maybe it’s just a Mechanic thing, but we tend to think of what we create as having some sort of life.” Seeming embarrassed, Mari hoisted her pack, then turned and led the way through the undergrowth on the far side of the beach. “Unless things have changed a lot, there should be a coastal road running just inland from here. We should be able to catch a ride into Caer Lyn proper pretty quick.”

“They will not wonder who we are, out here with these packs?” Alain asked.

“No. Our clothes have dried. We’ll tell them we’re students from the college in Caer Lyn who were backpacking through the upcountry. I think students did that when I was young, because I recall my mother talking about it a few times.”

“Your mother worked at this college?”

“I guess maybe she did. When you’re eight years old, you don’t really notice all that much about your parents.”

Mari’s prediction proved to be accurate. They reached the road within a very short time and not long afterwards waved down a horse-drawn wagon heading south toward the city. “How far are we from Caer Lyn?” Mari asked.

The driver scrunched up his face in thought. “Not too far. We’ll be there well before noon. Looks like you two have had kind of a rough time. Been out a while?”

“Um, yeah,” Mari agreed, accepting Alain’s hand up into the back of the wagon.

Alain sat down among the parcels in the back. “There should be time for the visit.”

Mari nodded, her expression tense. “If I try to change my mind, don’t let me.”

“I have promised to drag you to your parents’ house.”

“You might have some trouble doing that, but I’ll try not to fight you too hard.”

He thought she needed something to lighten her mood. A joke? Alain tried one. “As long as you leave no new scars on me.”

That earned him a startled look, then a sad look, then some puzzlement. “Why did you say that? Every time I see your scars I think of what they did to you when you were learning to be a Mage.”

“I thought it would…relax you,” Alain said.

“Oh. Um…all right.” She gave him a smile that was obviously forced and then lay back, gazing up at the sky.

He decided it would be wiser not to attempt any more jokes.

It was just short of noon when the wagon dropped them in Caer Lyn. Mari spoke with the driver briefly, then came back to Alain as the wagon drove off. “He gave me directions to…where we need to go. It’s not far, so we have time.” Linking her arm in his, she started off down the street, breathing slowly, her tension radiating so clearly that Alain could feel it. After walking for a while, they reached a winding street that wove its way down a low hill, the roadway lined with narrow two-story houses set side-by-side, every house presenting brightly colored doors to the world. “It’s a custom in the Sharr isles,” Mari explained, her voice too fast and too high in pitch. “They paint the doors bright colors, for luck and…and…other things. This is the street we want. About halfway down. The…the door was green. I remember how pretty it was.”

As they walked down the slope, Mari began dragging back, her steps slowing, but Alain held her arm in his and kept her moving. Looking over at her, Alain could see Mari’s eyes darting about as if trying to spot landmarks from a memory dimmed by too many years away. “I was only eight when the Mechanics took me from here,” Mari murmured as if she had never told Alain before. “I can still see my parents in my memory, though, standing in our doorway as I was taken away. I could never forget that.”