J. Calvin Pierce, page 46
The tea was even stronger than it smelled. Marcia found that it both cleared her head and let her feel the pain more intensely.
Egri smiled at the woman. “Chanced?” he said softly.
She glared at him. “Don’t you start that with me,” she said. She looked at the bloody marks on his arms. “Do you want a draught of something?”
He shook his head.
“But,” said Breksin, “the poison.”
The witch looked up at him. “You sound just like a physician,” she said. “If a medicine is good for one, it’s good for all. Little wonder their patients die so often.” She looked over at Marcia. “Drink all of that, please.” She sounded like a school nurse. She turned back to the men. “You two go ahead to the inn.” Breksin looked at her in astonishment. He began to straighten up. “Mind your head!” she snapped.
“What about Marcia—Miss Marcia?” he said.
“She’ll be along shortly. I’ll walk with her to show her the way.”
“What do you mean? She can’t walk.”
The witch folded her arms and leaned back to look up at the giant. “I don’t see why not,” she said. “She has legs and feet.”
Breksin began to speak, but she interrupted him. “And order a big dinner. This invalid of yours is going to eat like a pair of twins.”
The cleansing of the bite on her shoulder was unpleasant but soon over. Afterward, the pain was lessened by an icy compress and by a draught of a peppery infusion that Marcia took reluctantly, and out of politeness.
When she remembered Father, she jumped to her feet. She felt slightly dizzy, but ignored it.
“The old man. Where is he?”
The witch looked up calmly. “Egri said the old man, the one they call Father, went ahead on the road, and by the time the two of them had tended to you, he was nowhere to be seen.”
“The vampires got him?”
The witch shook her head calmly. “Egri says not. He said they fled when the old man joined you, and that he saw him alone after the vampires were gone.” The witch dropped her glance to the table beside her. “I had thought you would be able to tell me more, lady.”
“Me?”
The witch looked up again and spoke in a quiet, matter-of-fact way. “I see your aura, I see the ring you wear. I know that the poison of the vampires is not having the effect on you that it would on another.”
Marcia said nothing. The witch waited for a moment and then went on.
“Very well. But still I may ask how there come to be monsters in this land that have been unknown but in fables.”
Marcia remembered Hannah’s aura. The one that clothed this witch was, by comparison, quite ordinary, one that might easily be mistaken for the aura of a woman unconnected with the occult. At first she had hoped the witch would be able to answer some of her questions. She could see now that that was not to be, and further, that it would be improper to speak to her of the things she had done, places she had been. Marcia had not been sworn to secrecy, but it was clear that the affairs of the Sisterhood were not to furnish material for idle chatter.
“I’m sorry,” said Marcia, “but I truly do not know.”
“But will we now be rid of them?”
Marcia looked apologetic and made a helpless gesture.
The witch nodded sadly. “All right,” she said after a moment. “I know the rules. Come, I’ll show you to the inn.”
They walked out the short wooded lane to the road. The lights of the town could be seen a short distance ahead. Marcia even thought she heard a snatch of song, doubtless from the inn. Her spirits raised at the thought of cheerful company, music, and especially a good meal. As the witch had predicted, she was ravenous.
They had almost reached the brook at the edge of the town when Marcia noticed the shadowy form standing just across the footbridge.
She pointed it out to the witch. “If you’re sure you won’t join us, I can just go on from here.” The witch bid her good night and set off back toward her cottage.
“I just thought I’d wait for you,” said Breksin as she joined him.
Marcia took a deep breath. “You’re a good friend.” To his inquiries about her shoulder she was able to reply that the pain was now much more bearable.
“Any sign of Father?” she asked.
“Not yet. But he’ll show up. Egri saw him up ahead after those things were gone. You know how he wanders off.”
The inn was bright and cheerful. At one of the tables a gray-haired woman was playing an instrument that looked like an undersize guitar and singing in a voice that, though she seemed scarcely to be exerting herself, filled the room with a honeyed alto.
Egri stood inside the door wearing an unreadable expression that didn’t change when he saw them enter. Marcia smiled at him. How odd, she thought, to have comrades. And how foreign to her experience. A guilty thought of Annie crossed her mind. If only Annie would come through the door. She entertained the idea for a moment and concluded that if Annie did show up, the first thing she would see was her partner Marcia collapsing from sheer relief. She thought again of Father, but pushed that care from her mind. She knew enough about him to be pretty sure he wasn’t in danger. Her worry was that she would lose track of him permanently. But right now there was nothing she could do anyway, and dinner seemed more important.
As usual, the appearance of Breksin drew glances. As always, he took no note of them. Marcia looked up at him. He was not a handsome figure, or a graceful one, with his alarming width and rather stooped posture, but he had a natural air of placid imperturbability that was positively regal.
Marcia was intensely interested in the trays of fried yams and roast fowl that were being served throughout the room. Her sense of smell had become suddenly acute. She found she could detect the aromas of the individual herbs seasoning the flesh, though she couldn’t name them.
Why, she wondered, had Egri not secured them a table? As she looked around the room, her eye was caught by an elderly gentleman making his way in her direction. In a room where the women’s clothing ran to primary colors and the men’s was uniformly an all-purpose dun, his light pastels were as conspicuous as Breksin’s bulk. He was dressed like someone from the Hollywood of the 1930s. He smiled and nodded to her as he came closer.
Marcia did not catch his words the first time he spoke. His voice was soft, and did not compete well with the singer’s. He moved closer and Marcia leaned toward him.
“Is that Master Breksin?” he asked a little above a whisper.
As Marcia answered him, the singer finished her song. Breksin bent to greet the man.
“Master Breksin, my name is Alexander. I was told at the chapel in Ambermere that if I took this road I might meet you. I hope that you and your company will dine with me.”
The table was in a quiet corner. It was supplied already with wine. Marcia sat across from Breksin, and between Alexander and Egri. When they had made their introductions, Alexander filled their glasses.
“Your shoulder, my dear girl,” he whispered. “What has happened to you?”
Marcia was still trying to decide what to say when Breksin answered for her. “We had some trouble on the road,” he said softly. “She and Egri were scratched up a bit.”
Alexander was looking at the compress. “You have seen a witch,” he said. Marcia nodded. “May I look? I have some knowledge of healing.” Before Marcia could reply, he had gently raised a corner of the cloth. He lowered it almost at once. Marcia saw his eye go to her ring hand. “I see,” he said, looking directly at her for an instant before glancing briefly at Egri’s scratches.
He raised his glass. “To successful journeys,” he said in his quiet voice.
“Indeed,” echoed Breksin. “Successful journeys.” He raised his glass, then lowered it quickly after a swallow. Marcia couldn’t imagine there was anything wrong. The wine was the best they had been served.
“They have ice,” he said reverently. “The provinces are surpassing the great cities.” He looked at Marcia. “This,” he said earnestly, “is exactly how this wine is meant to be served, but you’ll not have it so again any time soon, I promise.”
All Marcia could really think of was food, but she tried to look as though the temperature of the pale wine were important to her. She raised her glass and buried her nose in the fragrance. At the same time, she listened to Breksin’s voice, trying again to figure out what was different about it.
“Where is your home, Master Alexander?” he was saying. “You are Alexander of …?”
“California.”
Marcia was trying to assimilate too much data. At the precise moment she heard Alexander name the Earthquake State, she figured out what had been bothering her about her friend’s voice. She decided to tackle the simple proposition first. Her hand was trembling as she set her glass carefully on the table and turned to Alexander.
“Are you talking about the California that’s south of Oregon?”
“Yes.” Alexander did not look surprised.
Marcia stared at the table for a moment. “Okay,” she said. She peered at Breksin, who was opening his mouth, doubtless to ask about California, but stopped at her look. Now for the real puzzle.
“Breksin,” she said.
“Are you all right?” The giant looked concerned.
Marcia nodded impatiently. She raised her glass and spoke from behind it. “An excellent wine, you say?” she murmured.
“Yes,” he answered. “Especially chilled like this. Mind you”—he lowered his voice to a confidential tone—“I’ve some in my cellar that is much like this but from grapes grown in salt air, which gives it more tooth.”
Marcia spoke more softly, still with her glass raised. “Would you say it is unusually noisy in here?”
“Huh?” Breksin looked around the room. “Yes, it is, now that you mention it. A lot of clicking and clacking. Are you sure you’re all right?”
Marcia drained her glass slowly. Ever since the cave, Breksin had been talking in a normal tone of voice—no shouts in her ear, no asking her to repeat things two or three times. Something in the cave had cured his deafness. She should have realized it when he was able to hear the pipes. She recalled the eerie melody, the shadows on the walls, and remembered also how Father had stood behind him, insisting that he would hear the music.
She watched Alexander refill her glass. Breksin could hear whispers, and they were dining with a man from California. Even without the vampires this would qualify as quite a day. The wine began to warm her blood. The pain in her shoulder was about like that of a headache, dull and insistent. The poison had been neutralized, according to the witch. She looked down at her ring. No mystery there, at least. Then she thought about the monsters. She had felt the force of the ring—had seen it briefly, or so she thought. But it had been insufficient to repel the attackers.
She raised her hand to her cheek. Her scar was back to normal now, but she could still feel the memory of the burning. She couldn’t escape the feeling that her cute little scar was something of a liability. She had been impetuous—gripped by a frightening anger. Behaving like a maniac had established one thing, though: she could not count on Elyssa showing up every time she got in trouble.
Breksin went outside to see if the old man might be there. “You can’t be sure he’d have sense enough to come in,” he explained to Alexander as he left the table. While he was gone, the food arrived. Marcia had to restrain herself from starting without him and from eating with table manners like Father’s. But even though she waited for his return, she was almost ready for a second helping while Breksin was just beginning to savor, and explain in detail, the effect upon a capon of basting it with an herb-flavored butter. Alexander and Egri ale sparingly. The old gentleman comported himself like someone accustomed to taking his meals with titled ladies or writers on etiquette. Egri looked as if he wished he were elsewhere. Once in the course of the meal he went outside to look for the old man. He took longer than Breksin had, and returned to report that Father was nowhere nearby.
Once she had eaten enough to satisfy the more desperate pangs Marcia began to think again about the events of the day. Except there were too many to think about. Since this morning so much had happened that it should have taken a week to do it all. Marcia was quite certain that she had passed entire years that were not so eventful as the previous twelve hours had been. She tried without success to figure out the date, but in the process realized that only three nights ago she had been at Arrleer, which meant that four nights ago she and Annie had been in the cottage on the mountain, which in turn meant that it was only four days ago in the afternoon that she had been in the office wrestling uncooperative data from a spreadsheet and daydreaming about a nice quiet evening at home. Now her shoulder hurt because she had been bitten by a vampire.
She glanced at Egri. His arms were scratched, deeply in a few places. No bites, though. No wonder, he had been moving like a dervish among the little monsters. Breksin, she supposed, had been too busy to notice, but there had been something downright uncanny about the way Egri moved. Uncanny, but not in any way magical. On the contrary, it had been intensely physical, like some violent form of dancing.
“Little Egri,” the witch had called him, and she had been completely unconcerned about his scratches, while very worried that Breksin’s skin might have been broken in even one spot. Egri’s aura was strange. Marcia couldn’t examine it without staring rudely, but it was much more off than, for instance, hers or Alexander’s.
As a person who could move between Regions, Alexander would of course be a bit out of the ordinary, which would be reflected in his aura. Beyond that, all Marcia could tell was that there was no malice shown there. This was more than could be said for the colors surrounding Egri. There was something in his aura that she could not fathom, some undertone of implacability. She would not have called it an evil hue, but its presence made her uncomfortable. It gave her an impression, somehow, of amorality.
Breksin was, once he stopped analyzing the cookery, utterly enchanted by the singer. “She’s so clear,” he kept on saying in a tone of wonder. “And she doesn’t swallow the words the way they all do in Ambermere.” Marcia wondered what he would make of the remarkable improvement in vocal technique when he got back home and listened to the singers.
Marcia made a conscientious effort to worry about the old man, Egri’s aura, and Alexander’s business, but she was too tired and sore to manage it properly. She looked around their table. Outwardly, they were three ordinary citizens in the company of a giant. In fact, the giant was the only one among them who was not radically extraordinary. The colors and conformation of his aura were normal for an intelligent, generous person with an open nature. As for the rest of them, there were two interlopers with casts to their auras, and one—she looked at Egri’s bizarre hues—who was impenetrable.
Egri noticed her glance. He smiled at her in a very non-impenetrable way. “You are doing well, aren’t you? Healing quickly?”
Marcia nodded. There was something very appealing about this young man, despite his rather distant air. He seemed self-contained in a way that was totally admirable.
“I was stupid today,” she said.
“You were angry. That’s never useful, but it didn’t matter in this case; there were too many of them. If you hadn’t struck at them, they would have been at us anyway. The only real way out was to run, but …” He shrugged.
“But you helped us.”
His look was direct and frank. “I always had the option of running.”
“What happened when the old man came?”
“They scattered and ran. After that, I don’t know. We were busy with you. The old man went on by himself.” He glanced across the table at Breksin. He and Alexander were talking about something involving wine. “The giant was sure you were dead,” Egri said softly.
For a time, Marcia and Egri were drawn into a discussion on the merits of the singer. Marcia noted, if no one else did, that Egri, though he was polite, in fact had no opinion whatever on the music. Or the wine, she thought, noting that his glass still contained most of what had been poured for him when they were first seated.
Breksin had arranged for lodging as soon as they arrived. On the way to their rooms, he stopped to praise the landlord for serving chilled wine.
The man looked up from his pouring with a distracted air. “Iced, you say? A marvel. Unless it was in the mountains, of course. Where did you have it?”
“Why, here,” said Breksin. “Tonight.”
There followed a long and inconclusive conversation in which the landlord refused to admit he had served chilled wine.
“It’s just cool from the cellar,” he insisted over and over.
“Well,” said Breksin in an impatient rumble, “it must have been iced by magic, then.”
“Oh, don’t say that, master.” The man looked around the room anxiously. “It’s bad for business.”
Marcia turned to Alexander. He glanced at her guiltily, then looked away.
Her room was much like the one she had stayed in two nights before. One thing, though, was different: this room had a mirror that was not flawed and darkened. Marcia looked at herself as best she could with the light of a single candle. She looked tired, even lifeless, but her face seemed a little fuller than it had been a week ago, and at least in the dim light she could not see the lines and wrinkles that she had been acquiring ever since she had turned thirty. At this moment, and in this bad light, she could imagine why Breksin thought she was younger than she was. In the daylight, she promised herself, she was going to have a good thorough look.
But now she was going to sleep. Marcia wanted, of all things, to pass a restful night. This morning, for no reason, she had awakened tired and out of sorts. Perhaps tonight, with every reason for worry and restlessness, she would have a refreshing sleep. If her shoulder got no worse, she might have a chance.
She was startled by the quiet tap at her chamber door. She wrestled her top back down past her elbows and her sore shoulder and opened the door. Alexander, dapper in his pastels, stood in the dark hallway. He was holding a glass of amber wine. Marcia’s thoughts were drawn to embarrassing memories of Lord Shilmer. Was she to be the scourge of the elderly and the lame-brained? Virgin warrior was definitely to be preferred.
