Blade of Dream, page 20
The smoke rose up like a dark pillar until it reached some invisible current of high air and was gone.
And what did you make of them, then?” Theddan asked, leaning forward like a child anticipating a bit of honeystone.
They’d met at the Temple itself this time. The vast stone tower rose above streets teeming with the harvest festival. The poor of Longhill and Newmarket were lined up for blocks to accept the charity of Kithamar, and the priests and acolytes and novices had their hands more than full keeping order. Even though Elaine and Theddan were sitting cross-legged in a storage shed at the back, between the Temple proper and the city wall, the sound of voices was like a storm without the wind.
“I don’t know,” Elaine said. “Halev told me the most, but he also made it very clear he wasn’t going to tell me all that he knew.”
“Condescending,” Theddan said, dismissing him with a wave of her hand. “The others?”
“I can’t tell how well Andomaka Chaalat actually knew Ausai. I mean, yes, she’s head of the Daris Brotherhood, and Ausai was Daris, but I can’t tell how pious he was.”
“Did she say he was distant? Strange?”
“She said she knew him well and that she hoped she still did, but then we found ourselves on other subjects. She’s… I like her. She’s easy to talk with, and she listens, and she sees the world in a very different way. Like she’s looking at everything from the side.”
“She’s the next in succession,” Theddan said. “If you and your father catch the same fever, she’s Kithamar.”
“I don’t think she cares.”
Theddan shook her head. “No feast that great goes without caring. She might be hungry and want it, she might be sated and dread it, but she cares. Count on that.”
Elaine leaned back against a pile of crates. Something in them clanged with the sound of tin against tin. “The historian was strange. She talked and told me things. At the time, it felt like she was answering my questions, but in the end, I think she learned more than I did. I didn’t come away understanding Ausai any better than when I went in. I know he had some strange books. I know he had lovers, and that he was married but without children.”
“Well, that’s certainly ominous,” Theddan said. “A man with a wife and no children must be a font of evil.”
“Sarcasm? Really? That’s what I came here for?”
“What about Kint?”
“You said not to talk with him. And that I should be barring my bedroom door in case he tried to kill me in my sleep.”
“Did I? Well, I was probably very wise. But if there’s nothing and no one, maybe it’s time to take the chance.”
“Or maybe I’m jumping at shadows. They all say that becoming prince changes you. Maybe that’s all this is. My father is learning what his life is now, and it’s not what he expected. The people he knew had secrets. The world wasn’t quite what it seemed to be.”
“And so you’re learning that too, but at a remove. All the distress and none of the details,” Theddan said. “That could be. Well, and if someone tries to murder you for asking questions, then you’ll know it was more than that.”
“So comforting.”
“My turn now,” Theddan said, and Elaine relaxed back and spent the better part of an hour hearing about the intrigues of the Temple. Which priests were meeting outside the appointed ritual times for sex or heretical conversations or to funnel stolen relics and artifacts out to accomplices in Seepwater and Longhill. The crossed loyalties, the passions both pious and otherwise, the proxy wars fought by men on behalf of gods. Theddan wove a tapestry of conspiracy and honor and magic as rich and full as anything in Palace Hill. And when she was done, it was past time for Elaine to go.
Her carriage waited for her on the street, and she hurried to it with her cloak’s hood raised to hide her face. Not that many people outside the Temple proper would have recognized her on sight.
“It may be a long ride back, my lady,” the coachman said. “The streets are full. And without the palace guard to clear the way…”
“I have to be back to the palace by nightfall,” she said. “We don’t need to run anyone down for that, do we?”
He chuckled. “We do not.”
He closed the carriage door and she latched it from within. Not that she was afraid, but it was the third and final day of harvest festival. There would be many, many people in Kithamar who’d had too much wine and too little sleep. The scraping sounds of the coachman taking his place, his voice gently commanding the team, and the carriage shook under her as she started the long journey through Newmarket, across the bridge to Oldgate, and then the vertiginous rise toward home. The clatter of wheels on cobblestones was a bright, percussive music of its own for almost five streets before they came across a crowd and had to slow.
Harvest festival was an ending to the year. A celebration of work done and also a vast communal bracing for the long, cold nights to come. By the time spring returned, they would all have forgotten what heat felt like, what a river was when you couldn’t walk across the ice of it, that the trees were sometimes green. Knowledge was one thing, but experience was something else. She could know that days grew long, and the sun grew warm, but in the darkness and the cold, it was like knowing a song and not singing it. What was true for her was true for everyone.
The faces she passed as the coachman picked his way through the streets were merry and jovial and relieved, but she imagined she saw the shadow of dread behind them. Women wore wreaths of bright autumn leaves—yellow and gold and red. Not green. The knowledge of what they would all have to endure when the winter that was only threatening arrived drove the exuberance and joy. A last dance, a last drink, a last kiss before the long duration began.
There was, she thought, a great deal to love in Kithamar. Her city could be grey and cold and distant, but she also drove by doorways where men served out soup by the steaming bowlful to anyone that passed. She saw fathers carrying children on their shoulders to give the little ones a better view of the sea of their fellow revelers. She stopped at a square where five roads met and had to wait for a great dance to finish—men and women in their brightest clothes moving together while an old man with a beard that touched his belly sang out instructions and beat a melodic drum.
Newmarket was neither the wealthiest nor the poorest quarter of Kithamar. The people dancing in the street were neither fighting to live nor trying to outdo their neighbors with vast spectacle and shows of wealth. They were taking a moment together, sharing food and a day and a ritual to remind themselves and each other that another year had passed, that they were still here, and still together. A memory stirred. The nature of gods. The creation of something when people came together. Watching as the street dance ended in embraces and laughter, she could wish that gods really were made that way. She could hope.
Once the way was clear, the coachman took them through smaller, emptier streets, travelling farther from their usual route but faster. The carriage hummed with the textures of the pavement, swaying when they turned. The hoofbeats of the team took on a hypnotic pattern, and Elaine found herself drifting into thoughts that had no coherence to them. A song she’d sung with a tutor when she was young. The view from the window of her cell in the Clovas Brotherhood. The high priest of the Temple saying that there were gods in the streets, but yoked like the horses pulling her. Constrained by the coachman of the city who had been her great-uncle and was her father. On the edge of dream, she imagined a giant form sitting on Palace Hill with its legs dangling down the face of Oldgate, a great whip in its hand…
The coachman shouted and the carriage shuddered to a stop. Elaine came back to full wakefulness and looked out her window. They were stopped on the bridge between Newmarket and Oldgate. The carriage was high enough that she could look out over the Khahon flowing down at her from the port. Dark water shimmering gold. She was reaching up to open the panel when the coachman’s muffled voice came through, but not speaking to her.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
“I’m collecting bridge tolls,” a man’s voice answered from ahead of them. “That’s what we do here. Or is this your first time crossing a bridge?”
“Do you see this carriage? You see the side? This is a palace carriage. I am carrying Elaine a Sal. Prince a Sal’s daughter. So the tolls you’re collecting are going pretty much straight into her pocket. We don’t pay tolls.”
There was a pause. Softer voices, conferring.
“I didn’t know that,” the man said.
“Your first time on a bridge?” the coachman asked.
“Sorry. Go ahead.”
The carriage shook and started forward when between one heartbeat and the next, she knew the voice. She burst up, slamming the panel open. “Stop the horses! Stop!”
The carriage juddered to a halt again. They hadn’t gone more than two or three lengths. She opened the door and leaned out. The three bluecloaks they’d passed by looked toward her with dread. Two of them might have been the ones from the boathouse. The third certainly was.
She let herself down to the pavement. Her heart felt like it was tripping down stairs, but she kept her steps even and calm. He was in a guard’s cloak with a sword at his side and a badge of office hanging from his belt. She saw when he recognized her. The other two knelt, and the smaller of them tugged at Garreth’s hem, trying to get him to do the same. Instead, he took a step toward her and they both stopped. He was close enough she could have reached out and touched his arm, but she didn’t.
“New job?” she said.
He glanced uncertainly over her shoulder as if he was still waiting for the prince’s daughter to look out of the carriage door, then turned back to her. His confusion wasn’t enough to drown his smile. “Yeah. Some things happened. It’s kind of a long story.”
She lifted an eyebrow, gave him a half-smile. “I’d like to hear it sometime.” She nodded once, turned back to the carriage, and lifted herself into it. The air on the bridge had gotten very thin, somehow, because it was hard to catch her breath. She opened the panel and said We can go before settling back in her seat. The carriage clattered and swung. She put her hands to her cheeks, and they were warm. They ached a little from grinning.
She’d found him. She’d seen him again. He knew who she was now.
Slowly, the grin faded with the joy and something unexpected and sadder took its place.
He knew who she was now.
Garreth leaned against the stone wall and sank slowly to the pavement. His mind felt like there was a wind blowing through it. The carriage reached the far side of the river and turned up the switchback that would take it, if it went long enough, to the top of Oldgate. To Palace Hill.
He rested his head on his knees.
“Garreth?” Kannish said. “What just happened?”
PART THREE
WINTER
A city without desire is not a city, nor will lust alone suffice to make it one. Desire, jealousy, triumph, spite, solace, rage, forgiveness, hope. The passion of a mother for her child. The need of a child for honest food. The longing of a man for a woman or for another man or for a past he can never reclaim. Without all the thousand hungers that our artless souls are born to suffer, a city is only a complication of wood and stone.
—From the pillow book of Anayi a Jimental, poet to the court of Daos a Sal
The first snow came early that year, white flakes bundling down from a grey-white sky that seemed almost low enough to touch. It began just after the first light of dawn, and by midmorning the streets outside House Left were bright with it. It piled onto the tops of the houses and added an inch of perfect, fragile white to the wall at the edge of the kitchen garden. All that was dark in Kithamar became for a moment softer, lighter. The shadows lost their edges, and Kithamar seemed to lean back into itself like a cat among blankets. Here and there, some small bit of color stood out, the whiteness around it making what had been there but unseen suddenly visible. The saturated redness of a fallen leaf, the yellow of a merchant’s sign, the rich brown coat of a spring-born pup discovering snowfall for the first time.
And even though the sounds were all there—horses and dogs and cartwheels and men—the snow quieted them. Vasch, standing at the front of the house and looking out at the sudden winter that had come upon them, could imagine himself removed from the world. As if his home, his little corner of warmth, had retreated from Kithamar and stood now on some other street with the same neighbors, the same landmarks, the same place on the map, but also more removed, and everywhere the sweet, bright smell of pine sap and smoke.
Vasch Left wore a high-collared black robe with silver buttons polished until they were as bright as the snow. A twig of evergreen was pinned to his breast. His breath plumed in the cold.
Down the street, a figure in black hurried toward him. The other man’s head was bowed, and flakes of snow caught in his hair. Vasch took a step toward him as if he could bring him closer by mere force of will.
When, at last, the priest reached the doorway, his cheeks and the tip of his nose were red with cold. The leather cloak that he wore against the wet was black with snowmelt. His smile was wide as the street.
“Vasch Left,” he said. “Well, what a day for you. For both of us, really. I remember your induction.”
“I’ve gotten a little better with the rites since then,” Vasch said. “Thank you so much for doing this.”
“I’m honored for the chance.”
Father stepped into the doorway and waved them in. “Please, both of you. Come in. No reason to inspire speculation, is there?”
Vasch and the priest stepped into the warmth of the house. Fires were burning in every grate, and the lamps were lit, and the glow from them seemed buttery and rich after the snow light. Father closed the door and bolted it as Serria helped the priest take off his cloak. Beneath it, he wore the blue and gold of the Odimin rites, and the jeweled silver torc reserved for the great rites: birth and death and marriage. Vasch’s father flinched when he saw it, but it was such a small gesture and so brief that it escaped the priest entirely.
“I am so glad you could come,” Father said. “You do understand that this needs to be very discreet. For the moment, anyway? It’s important that any public ceremony come later.”
“I know, Mannon. You may rely on me. I won’t say a word to anyone.”
“Good, good,” Father said, but Vasch could hear the concern behind it. “Before we start, why don’t you come have a cup of wine. Serria’s heated a pot.”
“Oh, is that what I smell? Well, I don’t see why we shouldn’t.”
Father steered the priest away with only a glance over his shoulder that said Don’t worry. I’ll take care of this. Vasch went to the front door and checked again that it was locked.
The dining room had been emptied of its table and chairs, and an altar put up in their place. It was wide and low with a statue of Reyek-Ano, god of peace and commerce. Also, in some traditions, of liars. Yrith stood before it, considering the god with quiet amusement. She wore a wedding gown of deep blue and bright white, even though there wouldn’t be anyone there to see the preciousness of the cloth. Vasch moved to her side, aware of her breath and her body like all his senses had been polished.
“Do you have Reyek-Ano? In the north?” Vasch asked.
“No,” Yrith said. “You have many gods here. It is strange to me. Do you believe in this one?”
“He’s the god of our house and our guild. What? Was that funny?”
“I ask if you believe, and you give me his label. It is a strange answer. Do you believe that this one is listening to your prayers? Is moving the world for you?”
Vasch shrugged. “Like the way I think the sun will rise in the morning or that there’ll be mice in the grain if you don’t catch them? I guess that way I don’t. It’s more like an agreement.”
“You make a contract with your god?”
“I make a contract with the people around me that we will all agree to believe something together. There are hundreds of gods in Kithamar, and all of them have someone who follows them. Or some group of them. But believing in any of them too strongly is… well, it’s rude.”
“Rude?”
“If someone is too pious or celebrates their house gods too much, it starts to feel like they’re saying their way is better than everyone else’s. I mean, there are some people who will anyway, but everyone else looks down on them. It isn’t like that for you?”
She turned toward him. “Do you have marriage the same way? Never too real. There, but not too much there?” And before he could answer, she went on, “I am not of the city. I only want to understand.”
“Well, um. There’s more than one answer, really,” he said, but even as the words came, he knew there was only one that mattered.
Her chaperone stepped into the room and said something in her native language that sounded, if he understood it, like The mice are wet and the cats have the fire, which didn’t make any sense to him. So either it was an idiom or he’d misunderstood.
Yrith fluttered her hand the way she did when she was looking for a word she didn’t know yet or couldn’t recall, then laughed at her own distress, and said, “Forgive.”
He watched her leave. The chaperone paused in the doorway and pointed all four fingers of her hand at him, bobbing them rapidly in a sign that was supposed to reassure him. It even did, a little bit. For the next hour, while his father took measure of the priest, Vasch paced the house like a dog in a new kennel. He wished his mother had come back to the city for the wedding. And that Garreth could be present for it. And that it could be done in the Temple instead of making do with the thrown-together altars and ceremonies here in the house. But he understood the need, and it was policy.
