House War - The Hidden City Part 58

But Amarais, coming up behind him, had placed a hand over his shoulder; she did not stop him from giving away all of his money, but she did not offer hers.

Instead, she looked long at the matronly woman who led this odd parade, and she said, "Why are they on display?"

And the woman's eyes had narrowed, the lines there definitely verging on frown at this impertinence. But she searched his sister's face, and found no scorn in it. No ready emotion either. Even then, Amarais could be guarded.

"People forget what they cannot see," the woman replied.

"People forget what they can."

"They do. But these children-they are from the hundred holdings; they are without family and without guardians. We tend them and we teach them, and once a year we walk, here."

"Why here?"

"The Common-"

"Why not on the Isle? That's where the money is."

The woman's eyes were gold, and they were an odd shade of gold. Not the cold of money, no, but they were no longer so warm or so sweet. "We could not afford the price of that pa.s.sage," was the calm reply.

"What price?"

"There is a toll to be paid for all those who walk the bridge. And that toll would feed each child for a week. Perhaps more." She turned and said something that Rath couldn't hear.

"Should I have kept the money?" he asked, anxious now.

Amarais had smiled at him. But it was not a happy smile. "No," she told him quietly. "They need it."

"Then I did a good thing?"

"Yes," she said. "But it was an easy thing."

"But if everyone gave-"

"Yes," she said again. "But it's not enough, the money."

The Priestess looked down at Amarais. "You are not as young as you look," she said wearily. "But if the money is not all that they require, it is still needed. Let the boy feel generous," she added softly. "Generosity is never to be despised."

Amarais had nodded quietly.

That day, and the day that followed, she had spoken for a long time to their grandfather, the doors closed so that Rath might be spared the discussion. She had emerged from those closed doors and she had smiled at Rath, and she had asked him to join her in the garden, but she never spoke about what Grandfather had said, and Rath was too wary to ask, for Amarais did not look happy.

And Rath, now standing at the farthest edge of the fence that girded the greatest of all the mansions owned by House Terafin, looked up at the heights of that flat, wide building. At its stonework, its great, vast wings, its huge, sprawling gardens with their perfectly tended gra.s.s, their leaf-shorn trees.

Are you happy now? he thought bitterly.

And thought, too, that were he a different man, he might approach the guardhouse that was just barely visible from his position in the street; that he might announce himself, enter into that coveted manse with its name, its law of allegiance defying and denying the loyalty owed blood and birth, and ask her.

But he was not that man.

And if he could now, at the remove of age, see the day on which his sister had begun to take her first steps away from Handernesse, the knowledge offered no comfort, and only a bitter glimmer of understanding.

Chapter Eighteen.

FOUR HOURS LATER, Rath returned with boots. They were not perfect, but they were infinitely better than the bare feet or exposed thongs that the four newcomers were otherwise faced with. He offered them without comment, and when Jewel tried to ask him how he'd managed to pry them from the mendacious grip of the cobbler, he had stared her into an almost withered silence before retreating to the privacy of his rooms. He did not emerge from them in the following hours.

Around the ominous silence radiated by his presence, even hidden as it was behind the wooden panels of a flimsy door, the children moved in cautious silence. The rain on the window wells had grown loud, and often heavy. Jewel brought lit candles to the boys and, for herself, used the magestone that had been Rath's gift to her; Duster whistled when she saw it. Finch said little. They ate, divided blankets between them, and tried to sleep.

Finch succeeded.

Jewel tried to keep her breathing even in the darkness of the dimmed magelight, but she couldn't help listening to the breathing that wasn't hers. Finch's changed slowly, deepening and flattening into something that sounded like sleep. Duster's didn't.

Minutes were hard to mark, at night. Jewel didn't usually try; in fact, she usually tried to do the opposite. Sleep wasn't generally something that eluded her. But she hadn't slept well on the banks of the river, beneath the scant cover of Summer bridge. And she didn't sleep well, here, with a stranger in her room.

Which, given that she'd slept like a log-if logs had nightmares-when Arann, Lefty, Carver, and Finch had been pressing in on all sides, said something. She missed Carver and Arann, here, and that annoyed her enough that she sat up.

Duster was lying on her side, face propped up by a hand above bent elbow. Jewel could see her almost clearly; the magestone was like unveiled moonlight, here. Had she wanted it, she could have had sun.

But the dark of silvered light suited Duster better.

"They wanted to keep me," Duster said quietly. As if the light was just poor enough that speaking was safe. It was hard to see her expression, and she knew it; she must have, because Jewel's was likewise near-invisible.

"But not Finch?"

"Not Finch, no." Duster's brief snort of laughter was cold and ugly; it was an utter dismissal. "What could they have made of Finch that would have done them any good?"

There was only one question that the statement allowed, but Jewel was good at finding back entrances and exits that weren't as clear. "What did they intend for Finch?"

"She was going to disappear," Duster replied quietly. "Four other children did, in the month. Some of them were probably happy to go by the end of it. But those, they often kept. Like Lander," she added, her voice almost disappearing for the stretch of syllables. "It was the ones they didn't touch, didn't sell, that they took away."

And they had kept Duster.

"You were special," Jewel said. And the moment she said it, it was true.

Duster's head bobbed slightly as she shifted position, sitting in a curled hunch made of knees and bent back. "I was special," she said. The words were harsh, almost vicious. "They said that. Of me. That they could see me. See what I would become."

Jewel had always trusted her instincts. She trusted them now, speaking quickly. "They saw only some of what you could become," she said, a little too hotly.

Duster was utterly still. "What do you mean?" she asked, her first casual words of the evening. Casual and Duster were not a promising combination. Not even Jewel's optimism could paint it in different colors.

But she'd blurted it out, and having started, she struggled to continue; struggled to ignore the tension that was Duster, in a room that should have been safe haven.

"They saw the killer in you," Jewel said quietly.

Duster shrugged. She didn't even attempt words.

"They saw it. I see it," she added evenly. Not trying to ameliorate damage, but trying to be as clear as she could. Because this was important, and if she botched it, she'd already lost.

She had never questioned her visions before. She had viewed them not as possibilities, but as certainties. And for the first time, she saw that certainty was, like anything else, a blind. Duster was poised on an edge, and what Jewel thought she had seen clearly-no, d.a.m.n it, what she had seen clearly-had not yet come to pa.s.s.

And it might not.

And this, too, she knew as truth. It was both unsettling and somehow liberating. She could be wrong. Even when she had seen something clearly, it could be wrong.

Had Duster been anyone else, Jewel might have told her. But Duster was Duster, Duster was the girl the mages had chained to a wall in a special room. The locks that Jewel had picked to gain entrance, the lock that she had picked to open the single shackle around her bruised ankles-they had been the least of the locks she would have to pick. And only by acknowledging what Duster was-by understanding everything that Duster was-did she have any chance at all of doing so.

And what if she did? What would she set free then?

Because she knew what the mages had seen in Duster. Killer. Death. How could she not? She'd seen it herself. She knew it was true.

So.

"You talked about that before. You asked me. If I'd killed."

Jewel nodded.

"And I answered."

Jewel nodded again.

"Did you like the answer?"

"Not much," Jewel replied. "Did you?"

Duster's eyes rounded slightly. Which meant they rounded a lot, if Jewel could see it this clearly in the level of light she allowed the magestone. She shrugged. "I didn't hate it," she said at last. "And I meant it." Defiance in those words, and a h.e.l.luva lot of pride. She was proud of what she'd achieved. Because killing, for Duster, meant not being killed.

No, Jewel thought, seeing clearly in ways that she hadn't for some time. It had meant not being killed. What it meant now, she couldn't say with certainty.

"They thought they could turn you into their killer," Jewel said softly.

"I would have killed," Duster said, with a shrug. "I wouldn't have killed for them."

"I don't think they would have cared why," Jewel answered, seeing now, as she had been born to see, but in an entirely new way. "They would have only cared that you did. That you killed. Their way."

"You think you know a lot," Duster said slowly. Jewel could feel the anger and the contempt in those words. She'd done nothing to earn contempt, but she understood its source: Jewel had found friends. She had been protected. She could never have survived alone.

And Duster had.

Even in that place, Duster had survived. She hadn't gone mad; she hadn't given into despair, sinking slowly into herself until she could barely see what pa.s.sed beyond her. Either were options, and neither were ones she had taken. Instead, she had nursed the anger she now held against Jewel as a shield.

"Do you know what they were?" Duster whispered, moving closer, threat in the subtle grace of her slender limbs.

"No."

"I thought they were demons," the wild girl told her.

Demons were Southern stories. Demons were nightmares. Jewel had seen men.

But she had seen men with eyes of shadow, who walked and spoke in a voice that she would have said only death could use. If death walked these lands.

"They said they could see my soul," she added bitterly. "And they told me what they saw. How it changed, each time they gave me to someone. They promised that I would have a chance to kill my visitors."

"And them?"

"Them?"

"Your captors. Your demons. Could you have killed them as well?"

"I wanted to," Duster whispered. "But nothing could kill them."

And Duster had learned, in the streets of the holdings, that you could join or die. Jewel couldn't offer her that option. It wasn't in her. It wasn't what she wanted.

"We killed them," Jewel told her quietly.

"I know." So much in that word. So much anger, so much malice, so much hope. Twisted, all of it, around death and killing. Had anyone else spoken those words, Jewel would have shuddered. Here, in her place, she couldn't afford to.

And her Oma had taught her how to be practical.

"We didn't come to kill them," she added softly, not much caring that they had. "When we came to the-that place. We came for you."

Duster spit to the side. "You came back for the others."

"I didn't know for certain that there would be others; the only person Finch knew there was you. We came for you," Jewel said again, forcing the word to have the strength of conviction.

"Then you're an idiot. A pathetic idiot." Duster lay back against the blankets that rested on a flattened, old bedroll. She turned her back to Jewel, to the faint, pale light of magestone, and did not speak again.

But it was enough, for now. That she turned her back. That she could. That she considered Jewel-and Finch-so beneath contempt they couldn't possibly be a threat.

You had to start somewhere.

Lander spent only the first night with the girls, as the boys called them. After that, Duster led him to the room that housed Arann, Lefty, Carver, and Fisher, and she told him that it would be safe. She said other things, her lips at his ear, her face so close to his she might have been kissing him. He didn't appear to hear her, but he didn't try to stop her from leaving.

Maybe that was a good thing. It made their room more crowded, but the heat of bodies made up for the lack of other warmth.

Water was not in short supply. Rath had, reluctantly, purchased a rain barrel, and the trips to the well that afforded Jewel time with the people of the holding dropped sharply, which turned out to be a good thing. Rath made it clear that he was not precisely happy with the number of children she had chosen to take in, and he had also made it clear that he did not-yet-trust them enough to leave them unattended in his home.