Warrior (7 page)

They were no longer going hungry, so Rory couldn’t understand why everyone was so upset.

Thinking it would blow over after a while, Rory was distressed to discover the situation getting worse as time went on. The whole house grew more and more tense, to the point where even the youngest children could feel something was amiss. Nobody said anything, though. They just stormed around the house and ate the food they could suddenly afford and never mentioned Patria’s unexpected wealth or what she was doing when she left the house each evening in her one good dress and why she didn’t come home until daylight.

Determined to get to the bottom of the mystery—and in the hope of maybe somehow fixing whatever it was that was tearing apart his formerly happy home—Rory decided to find out what was going on for himself. He had followed Patria one night as she made her way through the muddy streets of the slums on the outskirts of Talabar until she came to Restinghouse Street with its countless taverns and music halls and houses of ill repute. He almost lost her when she turned into the street. It was Fifthday evening and tomorrow was Restday, which meant the taverns were full of men who didn’t have to work in the morning. Pushing through the crowd, Rory hurried in Patria’s wake. As she passed one tavern after another, he began to worry. Perhaps she wasn’t working in a tavern at all. Perhaps she’d found work cleaning one of the brothels, or worse, one of the music halls. That might explain why everyone was so upset. It would certainly explain why Patria was lying about her job.

Just as Rory came to the conclusion that Patria had betrayed what little decency the family could lay claim to by working in a music hall, his cousin stopped on the corner of Restinghouse Street and the inaptly named Victory Parade. There were a number of other girls standing around, who greeted the newcomer with suspicious eyes and then turned away, intent on their own business.

Rory stopped across the street and waited, curious to see what Patria was up to. If she had a job, surely she didn’t have time to hang about on the corner with these girls? None of them seemed to be doing anything useful.

Rory was still puzzling over it when a man walked up to the brunette standing on Patria’s left and said something to her. The girl replied, coins changed hands, and the two of them moved off down Victory Parade, arm in arm.

After she was gone, Patria moved a little to the right, as if laying claim to the space just vacated by the other girl. A moment later, another man stopped and started talking to Patria. He was a big man, his bare arms covered in tattoos, his beard threaded with tiny glass beads. Rory frowned as the man placed several coins in Patria’s outstretched hand and then she walked off with him in the same direction the other girl and her companion had gone.

Rory was streetwise enough to realise what the transaction must mean, but still innocent enough to think his cousin incapable of selling herself for a few measly copper rivets. If she’d wanted a career as a
court’esa
, she should have said something sooner, he reasoned. It wasn’t unheard of for a girl from the slums to be accepted into one of the
court’esa
schools, provided she was pretty enough and willing to give up her freedom. Many young men and women signed up gladly, because a
court’esa
school meant an education and a pampered life if you were lucky enough to get a good master. To willingly become a working
court’esa
, however—untrained, unsupervised and unprotected—wasn’t so much wrong, to Rory’s way of thinking, as it was stupid.

He followed them, of course. There was no way he could just turn around and go home now, not without knowing for certain. Patria had no idea he was behind them. As she turned into a rubbish-strewn lane beside a tannery just around the corner in Victory Parade, her customer was already unlacing the front of his trousers. Patria turned to face him. The man shoved her against the wall and pushed up her skirts.

As he watched the brute manhandling his gentle cousin, Rory’s anger began to build and with it came a headache of monumental proportions. Patria didn’t complain as the man guided himself into her with a powerful thrust. Abandoning any pretence of stealth, Rory stepped into the lane behind them and stared at his cousin, his head pounding in agony. Patria just stood there, her face turned to the side, her expression one of blank resignation. The man grunted as he pressed himself inside her, pushing her against the rough wooden wall of the tannery, his other hand groping down the front of her dress. She winced as he rhythmically slammed her against the wall, but whether from the rough way he was kneading her breast or the careless way he was using her, Rory couldn’t say. All he could feel was the pain in his head, like a dam swelling to bursting point with spring melt. The look on Patria’s face hurt more than what she was doing. It was the desolation that made Rory’s temples want to explode. The anguish, the hopelessness in her eyes . . .

Rory couldn’t remember what he did next. All he remembered was the feeling that his head was going to explode . . . Then the pain went away as an anvil burst through the tannery wall behind them, striking the man a glancing blow on the side of his head. He dropped like a sack of wheat at Patria’s feet.

She stared at him for a moment in shock, then saw the blood on his head and screamed.

Rory was too shocked to know or care if the man was dead. He ran forward, grabbed Patria’s wrist and dragged her from the lane before her screams brought someone to investigate. Towing his cousin behind him, he ran down Victory Parade, away from Restinghouse Street, not stopping until the noise from the taverns had faded to silence and they were among the silent warehouses of the wharf district.

“Are you all right?” he panted, when he felt it was safe to stop for a moment.

Patria leaned against the wall of the warehouse and stared at him, her face pale in the darkness, her chest heaving. “Rory . . . what happened back there?”

“Nothing . . .”

“
Nothing
? Someone threw an anvil through a wall at my customer!” She shook her hand free and rubbed her wrist where he’d been holding her. “For all I know, he’s dead. And it’s your fault! You’ve ruined everything, you interfering little fool! I won’t be able to go back to Victory Parade again and it took me weeks to find that corner.”

Rory looked at her in shock. “Go
back
?”

“Of course I have to go back.”

“But that man—”

“That man was putting food in your belly, Rory,” she informed him coldly. “You might not like how I’m doing it, but at least one person in this family is capable of earning a living.”

Rory shook his head, unable to believe Patria was a willing participant in this awful trade.

“Maybe . . . if you spoke to Grandpa . . .”

She swore softly at him. “Grandpa! What good is he?”

“He knows people—”

“Grandpa knows nothing, Rory,” Patria scoffed. “All his tales about his rich family, and how we’re cousins by marriage to the royal house of Hythria, are just stories he makes up to keep our minds off our empty stomachs. When I was little, he used to tell me my great-great-grandmother was a Harshini, too. Do you really think he’d be down here starving with the rest of us in the Talabar slums if even one of his tall tales was true?”

Rory couldn’t really answer that. When she saw him hesitate, Patria smiled sourly. “See, even you can’t defend him, can you? Well, I’m sick of being hungry, Rory, and if opening my legs to a stranger is all it takes to fill my belly and the bellies of my family, then I don’t care how many drunks have their way with me. Not so long as they’re paying me up front.”

Without waiting for him to answer, Patria pushed her way past him and headed down the lane.

When she reached the end she turned right, heading back towards Restinghouse Street.

It was much later before Rory got home and, as usual, the only one still awake was his grandfather. The old man sat by the window, as he did every night, staring out into the darkness. When he was small, Rory used to wonder if he was waiting for someone to come walking down the street.

“Bit late for a stroll, isn’t it?”

Rory turned to his grandfather, hoping there was nobody else awake. “I had to do something,”

he replied softly in Hythrun as he closed the door. Despite almost a lifetime spent in Fardohnya, Warak Mariner spoke the language like a newly landed tourist. It was always better and easier to speak to him in Hythrun.

“How’s your headache?” Only his grandfather seemed to appreciate the pain Rory had been suffering of late.

“It’s gone.”

“Is it now?” his grandfather asked, suddenly curious. “How?”

“I don’t know.” The small house reverberated with the snores of its sleeping occupants. Rory’s younger brothers slept in this room. His father and uncles slept in the small bedroom at the rear. Patria, when she was home, occupied the small lean-to out back. Rory sat on the edge of his grandfather’s pallet near the window. The significance of his headache disappearing hadn’t really sunk in yet. “I followed Patria tonight.”

Warak shook his head sadly. “That was something you probably didn’t need to see.”

Rory stared at his grandfather in surprise. “You knew?”

The old man’s face was etched with sadness. “No fifteen-year-old girl brings home that sort of money sweeping tavern floors, lad. Why do you think your uncles and your father are so upset? They know what she’s doing, and it burns them to allow it.”

“They could stop her.”

“And watch the rest of you starve?”

Rory shook his head, wishing life wasn’t so full of unpalatable choices. “There must be some other way, Grandpa.”

“Your father would’ve found it by now if there were, Rory. Or her father. Did you want to tell me what happened?”

Rory nodded, glad of the chance to unburden himself! His headache might be gone, but he was still in pain. “I followed her. She was working the corner of Restinghouse and Victory. A man came up to her, gave her money, and they went into a lane . . . and . . .”

“And what?”

He shrugged, still not sure he believed what he’d seen. “And then an anvil came through the wall and knocked the man down.”

Warak Mariner sat up a little straighter on the pallet and stared at his grandson. “A
what
came through the wall?”

“An anvil.”

“I see.”

Rory frowned. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

Warak didn’t answer his question. Instead, for no apparent reason, he asked about the headaches again. “And now the pain in your head is gone, you say? Did that happen before or after this stray anvil came flying through the wall?”

“I don’t know,” he shrugged, wondering what the old man was on about. “I guess it happened around the same time. Why?”

Warak placed a weathered old hand on his grandson’s shoulder and frowned. “Unless there was an anvil-chucking contest going on behind that wall, my guess is that you’ve inherited some of the family talent, Rorin, my lad.”

Rory smiled sceptically as he recalled what Patria had said about their grandfather’s far-fetched stories. “The only talent I have, Grandpa, is finding trouble. You ask my pa.”

“That may be truer than you think, lad. Did anybody besides Patria see you in that lane?”

Rory shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Then you’re not to admit you were there. I’ll speak to your cousin when she gets home.

Hopefully, there’ll be no more trouble about this.”

Rory shrugged uncertainly. “You make it sound like it was my fault, somehow.”

“If it was, Rorin lad, then we’re in way more trouble than your cousin turning tricks.”

“I don’t understand.”

Warak smiled at him sympathetically. “I know you don’t, Rorin, but that’s all right. You just forget about flying anvils and what your poor cousin is up to, eh? In the meantime, I’ll write a letter to your cousin in Hythria.”

“The rich one?” Rory asked, humouring the old man. Patria might think his stories wild and unbelievable, but they were often the only escape Rory had from the drudgery of his existence and he wasn’t quite as ready to dismiss them as flights of fancy.

“Aye,” the old sailor agreed.

“Why?”

“Because if what I think happened tonight is true,” the old man replied, “you may need to get out of Fardohnya.”

That night, several weeks ago, still burned in Rory’s brain as if it had happened yesterday. Patria had come home a few hours later with tales of the unexplained death of a sailor in an alley off Victory Parade as if she was just repeating gossip and not intimately involved in the incident. The manner of his death had everyone talking, too. He’d been hit with an anvil, they claimed, and it had taken three men to lift it back into place. Already there were rumours flying through the slums, claiming the anvil could only have been moved by magic. Patria studiously avoided Rory’s eye whenever the subject came up and refused to discuss the matter.

Rory had listened to her tale and then looked at his grandfather questioningly, but the old man shook his head and warned the boy to silence. It was their little secret. They had to wait, Rory knew, until they had an answer from his cousin in Hythria, because if the rumours were true, and he really had moved that anvil by magic, then the only chance he had of getting out of Talabar, out of Fardohnya, before someone discovered his ability, was if some girl in Hythria that he’d never even met agreed to send the money for his passage.