Blade of Dream, page 8
The man sitting on the wall leaned back and looked down at her. He was her age, or nearly so. Sharp cheeks and hair that, with the moonlight, could have been any color. The vast amusement in his expression would have made him handsome in another situation.
She raised a finger to her lips—be silent—and then clasped her hands to her breast.
Please.
When the whistles sounded, Garreth stood and started pacing. The distance between the cistern wall and the boathouse was short enough he could have crossed it in seconds. Voices rose. A woman shouted. Whatever they’d found, Kannish and Maur were facing it, and he was standing in the dark instead of being at their side. His fingers tapped against his thigh, drumming as fast as raindrops in a storm.
Two of the whistles went silent, and there weren’t any answering calls. No other bluecloaks were in earshot. This wasn’t going to work. He’d give his friends to the count of twenty, but then he’d go in. Staying in place was too much to ask of him.
A door opened in the boathouse. Light spilled out. Silhouettes moved in the frame, each dissolving into the other until Kannish appeared, sword in hand. His back to Garreth, he gestured with the blade, and a young man came out and knelt on the cobblestones. Then another. A woman in what looked to be an expensive dress. From inside the building, Tannen’s voice barked something that sounded like a dog herding sheep. Kannish looked over his shoulder, a grin folding his cheeks. He lifted his sword to Garreth in salute. Garreth bowed and sat back down.
As Maur and Tannen brought the prisoners to the street and put them on their knees, Garreth waited and watched. It seemed to go on forever, but eventually the last emerged and Kannish shut the door behind them. Maur started binding the prisoners’ hands while Kannish and Tannen walked with blades out, intimidating the prisoners into submission. Tannen said something, and Garreth’s friends laughed.
The girl came up from the south, bare feet slapping the road. Her dress was wet and stained, her hair plastered to her neck. When she saw the prisoners, she seemed to soften. Lines of fear erased themselves from her mouth and eyes, and Garreth remembered an old story he’d heard as a child. The spirits who lived in the river and tempted boys out to their death.
“Hey! You!” Tannen shouted, turning to the newcomer. “Stop where you are! In the name of the prince!”
A roar came among the prisoners, spinning Tannen back around. A huge and vastly naked man had knocked Maur to the street. Kannish started toward the runner, but the other prisoners began to rise. It was lose one, or lose all. Tannen waded into the kneeling crowd, slapping at them with the flat of his blade as they rose. Kannish hauled Maur to his feet…
… and the girl bolted. At first, Garreth thought she was running at him, but she was only taking the shortest path to the wall. She cleared it as gracefully as a dancer, folding herself into the shadows on the far side. Garreth leaned back to find her staring up at him. The moonlight silvered the curves of her face, and he could imagine better how drowning spirits could lure boys into rivers. She put a finger to her lips, and then clasped a hand at her breast, begging his complicity.
“What is the fucking matter with you!” Tannen shouted.
Maur was on his feet now, but there was a smear of blood on his face, and he was staring down at the street in shame. When he shrugged, his lips moved, but Garreth couldn’t hear what he said.
“That’s a ripe turd of an excuse,” Tannen said.
Kannish stepped between them, scowling, and said something to Tannen. Maur went back to tying the prisoners together, but Garreth knew him well enough to see in how he moved and the stiffness of his face that Tannen had humiliated him. Tannen muttered something inaudible but clearly obscene and turned back, his eyes sweeping the night street. He raised his sword toward Garreth in command. “You! Where did the girl go?”
The lie came easily. He pointed south. “Back the way she came. She was limping. Badly. You could probably catch her.”
In the dark, Tannen’s frustration and anger seemed to light him from within. “Kannish. You and that one finish here. I’m tracking the bitch that jumped.”
Kannish nodded sharply and turned to the people kneeling in the street. “I can’t kill you all, but I swear by every god under the sky that I will kill the first one of you that stands without my permission.” Tannen ran south, his sword at the ready like he’d murder the girl if he saw her. Like she was a threat. Garreth leaned back and let what he’d just done settle into him. His chest felt wider than he remembered it feeling in weeks, and he had to fight to keep from grinning. After a few moments, he glanced down and to the side. She was still looking up at him. When he smiled, she relaxed a degree. He shifted his head to the side, pointing with his chin. She frowned her confusion.
“Hey,” Garreth called. “I’m going to leave you two to this.”
“Fair,” Kannish replied. “Don’t expect there will be much more to see tonight. Stay out of trouble, yeah?”
Garreth stood, spreading his arms like an actor. He turned north, which wasn’t the fastest way home, but his friends didn’t take notice. He walked slowly at first, and heard the scuttling following along behind. When he reached the end of the wall, he turned back. Maur had moved on to tying the second line of captives, and Kannish’s whole attention was on keeping them from rising up. Garreth might almost not have been there. A narrow street led east, away from the river and into the quarter.
“Come to me,” he said. “I’ll see you safe.”
He walked into the night, and for a moment, he thought he was alone. Then the slap of bare feet on stone pattered up behind him, and she was at his side.
“Nice evening for a walk,” he said.
She looked at him like he’d grown another arm, then a few steps later, laughed. She had a good laugh. Complex, and deeper than he’d expected. “Better for staying home,” she said, “but it’s too late for that.”
“I’m Garreth.”
“Thank you, Garreth,” she said. She didn’t offer her name, and he didn’t press.
Elaine understood intellectually that she was in danger, but it was hard to feel it. Yes, she was on the wrong side of the river with no way home. Yes, Theddan—the only one who knew that she wasn’t safe in her rooms in Green Hill—was spending the night in gaol and facing the magistrates in the morning. There was nothing keeping her maybe-savior from slitting her throat and dropping her corpse in an alley except his amiable nature. She was cold, she was out of her element, and she had nothing to protect her but her wits and good fortune.
But she also wasn’t drowning. She wasn’t at the wrong end of a guard’s sword. She was walking down the nighttime streets of Riverport with the sort of man Theddan would have called a wool seller’s son with a perfect ass. The night was warm. Her clothes and hair were drying. The city around them was quiet and brighter in the moonlight than she’d expected. And, except for the soles of her feet burning and abrading from walking bare against the stone, it was pleasant. More than pleasant. As the panic settled, there was even a strange beauty to it.
One day, she would rule this city. The streets she was walking through now, nameless and in darkness, were her streets. They didn’t know it yet, but more to the point, she didn’t know them. She wondered if her father had ever found himself unguarded in Kithamar. If he had ever seen the shutters open to welcome the night breeze or the cats shifting in the midnight shadows. It might have changed how he saw his city. It might change how she did.
“Did someone know Ognan?” Garreth asked.
“Who?”
“Ognan. That was his boathouse.”
“Oh. I don’t know. Maybe.”
“How did they get the keys?”
“I don’t know how any of it works. It was my first time at one of these. My last too.”
“Not impressed?”
“Oh, impressed,” she said. “Not favorably.”
His smile was easy, but there was a sorrow in it.
“Do you know him?” she asked. “Ognan?”
“He’s married to my mother’s cousin.”
“Odd coincidence.”
“Not really. Everyone’s connected somehow. If it wasn’t that, he’d be in a fraternal order with my father. Or my uncle. Or he’d go to the same priest. Or fortune-teller. Everyone knows everyone. We’re all trying to destroy each other, and we all have each other’s backs.”
They turned east. The street was wider here, and the shadows in the doorways and alley mouths seemed not as dark. Someone had left a wooden chair leaning against a wall.
“Strange choice,” she said. “Being loyal to someone, but not too much.”
“That’s commerce. Everyone wants to win. Everyone wants to have more power and influence. And we also all rely on each other. If everyone decided to stop taking contracts with a particular carter or wouldn’t trade with someone’s warehouse… It doesn’t matter that you’re hip-deep in Gaddivan silk and Omresh dye if no one trades with you.”
“Was that what happened tonight?”
He looked over at her.
“You knew the guards by name,” she said. “You fooled them because… there was something in it for you?”
He was quiet for long enough she thought she’d made him angry. “You mean why am I helping you.”
“That, yes.”
“Well, it was spite at the first. Kannish and Maur have been my friends forever, but Tannen, the one who came for you, isn’t someone I know. And he was cruel to Maur, and… I don’t like him.”
“Well, I’ll burn incense to the god of spite, then. I assume there is one. But once he was gone, your friends were still there.”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t point me out to them.”
“I wanted…”
Elaine felt a little twinge of anxiety and waited for him to finish the thought.
“I wanted something of my own?” he said. “I hear about all the events and adventures they have. Most of it’s lies and the rest is exaggeration, but there’s no space for me in it. I’m not a guard.”
“Why not?”
“What?”
“Your friends are. Why aren’t you?”
“Neither of them have a place in their family’s work. Or not high enough that they could take it and still stand proud. The guard’s an option for them. I only have one brother. I have a duty to my family… Did I say something funny?”
“No, I just understand that.”
They walked in silence a little way more. They had fallen into step.
“Do they know you miss them?” she asked.
“Maur does,” he said.
“Not the other one?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe they’re angry because I don’t have to give up all the things they do. I don’t answer to the magistrates or the guild contracts. I can sleep when I want to. Work when I choose. Eat something other than what they’re serving at the guard kitchens.”
“Take a wife,” Elaine said.
“Guards can take wives. They can rent rooms outside the barracks. There’s not enough money in it to buy a house of their own, though. Even the bribes aren’t that good. It’s stupid, I know, me being jealous of them… But I may be stupid.”
“Incense for the god of stupidity too.”
“What about you?”
“It’s not wrong, wanting a moment that no one else has claim to,” Elaine said.
“You’re kind to say so,” he said, angling them along another street. The moon had drifted while they walked. Not far, but enough that she could tell. “We’re almost there.”
“There?”
“My family’s house. I didn’t think you’d want to walk back across the river without some boots.”
“What makes you think I’m from across the river?”
“You’re not from Riverport or Newmarket. I’d know you. That dress is too well made for Seepwater or the Smoke, much less Longhill. That cloth and seam work? That’s money. So Stonemarket. Am I right?”
“Yes,” she lied. “Just southwest of Green Hill.”
“It’s too late to get a favor from a carter, so that makes a long, long walk. Tannen and the others probably won’t be looking for you, but if they do, they’ll be watching the bridges.”
“I’ll need a disguise. I had a cloak with a good hood on it, but…”
“We’ll figure it out,” he said, as if assistance in sneaking back home across a whole night-drunk city were the most normal thing in the world to ask. He touched her arm and pointed to a low wall behind a tall compound, four stories high. The shutters were all dark. “There’s a place right here we can hop over the wall. Watch me, and I’ll show you the trick of it.”
He lifted himself up, swung over into whatever was on the far side. She only hesitated for a moment before she followed.
The girl landed gracefully in the kitchen garden, but he put a hand out to steady her anyway. The house was dark. The ground floor would be empty, and the servants were all two flights up. Yrith and her chaperone were in the guest rooms on the west of the house across from his father’s. If they went up the main stairway, they’d need to pass the door of Vasch’s rooms, but not Uncle Robbson’s.
“Smells good,” she said. And then, seeing his face, “It smells good here.”
“Herbs for the kitchen.”
“Oh,” she said.
“There aren’t kitchen gardens in Stonemarket?”
“I’m sure there are, but I don’t see them.”
He leaned over and started pulling off his boots. She steadied him, her hand on his shoulder. “We need to be quiet,” he said.
“I understand.”
He left the boots where they were. He could come get them in the morning. The servants’ door was bright red in daylight. The moon made it darker. He opened it carefully. It creaked, but only a little. He listened for voices or the sounds of footsteps besides their own. The house was silent. He drew her in. Their bare feet made the faintest tapping against the stone floor. Any other time, it would have been silence, but his senses had all been sanded raw by the danger of being found. He moved slowly past the blue doors that led to the dining hall. Even the moonlight was gone now, and the darkness was profound. Her hand found his, and he held her fingers, guiding her through the house that he knew and she didn’t.
At the stair, he slowed, taking the first step up slowly, and then the second. Showing her through his movement where the risers were, how high each was. This was no time for a stubbed toe. The slight shudder of her breath and the rustle of their clothes were the loudest things in the world as they ascended.
On the second floor, windows that looked down over the kitchen garden let in a spill of light that made him think of swimming underwater. The wood floors were solid, and creaked almost not at all. The pair moved past Vasch’s doorway, down the hall a little. When they reached the door of his room, he squeezed her fingers in reassurance and let her go. With one hand on the handle and the other pressed against the wood to muffle any sound, he opened the door and stepped in.
Both sets of shutters were open to let in the cool night air and the moonlight. He imagined how she would see it. The four-post bed with the fly netting. The flowers painted on the wall, hardly more than complications of shadow now. His little desk. It was the room of a merchant’s son: not cramped but small, not squalid but unassuming. The air smelled of the soap Serria’s cleaning servants used, and of the street. The kitchen gardens had been better.
He closed the door behind her and lowered the latch. She moved through the room, touching one thing and then another with her fingertips—the wall, the desk, the window, the netting—like she was trying to decide if it was real or all of this was a particularly implausible dream. He went to his bed, knelt, and pulled open the drawers that were built there. His clothes were stacked, folded, and ready, fresh from the launderer. He started pulling out what seemed best. There was a shirt that had been his favorite when he was younger that had never been given down to Vasch. A pair of brown working pants that were a little too short for him. A cloak that was too heavy for summer, but that had a hood.
She leaned over him as he knelt, her wrist brushing against his ear. “What are these?” she whispered.
“Your disguise, I hope.”
“Mine?”
“They’re looking for a woman without shoes in a ruined dress. With any luck, they’ll see you as a young man out on other business. The boots are going to be too big. I can’t do anything about that. But we can put some extra cloth in the bottom and keep the laces tight. You shouldn’t wind up with many more blisters than you already have,” he said, tapping the bare and street-blackened foot beside his knee. “You’ll want to wash those with good soap when you’re safe.”
“There may not be enough soap in the world.”
He pulled the last of the clothes onto the bed. “Try these.”
“All right,” she said. And then a moment later, “If you don’t mind.”
“Yes. Of course.”
He went to the window, set his back to the room, and looked out over the street. The familiar walls and roofs of Riverport looked like a painting of themselves done in blue and grey. From where he stood, he could see dozens of other windows that opened into other rooms, other houses. No one was looking back at him. The city was so deep in its sleep that it might have been empty.
He heard the sounds of her behind him. The hush of cloth. The creak of the bed frame. An exhalation with some effort behind it. He felt his body responding to the fact of her nakedness and fought to take his thoughts elsewhere. He put his hands at the small of his back, wrapped his right hand around his left wrist, and dug his nails in until it was distracting.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“Fine,” he said.
“Really?” There was a hint of teasing in her voice.
“I’m having a strange night.”
