House War - The Hidden City Part 65

Arann snorted; mist, like dragon's breath, fled his mouth and nostrils. He bent himself, and picked up a handful of snow.

"You're not going to throw that at a cripple?" Lefty shouted.

"No," Arann replied, his smile slightly lopsided. "I'm aiming at you." And he did.

To Jewel's surprise, Lefty's was the better aim. And Lefty danced back and forth across the snow, moving the group who followed his leaps and little rushes away from Rath's place. Their place. She was almost silent in her astonishment, for here, Lefty was transformed. By snow, still falling.

They must know, she thought. How deadly it is. How many people it will kill.

But if they knew it, it didn't matter; they found a gift in its presence that fear didn't dislodge or dampen. It was snow, she thought. Winter. And even falling, it was peaceful.

Carver bent. He came up with snow, with a smile not unlike Arann's, and he sent a ball of white in an arc through the air. It was a slow, lazy arc, and Lefty avoided it with ease. Both hands in play, she thought, and realized that she so seldom saw him use both of his hands. When was the last time? With Lander.

But the weight of Lander's isolation had left him; the concentration with which he sat by Lander's side, hour by hour, speaking in silence with the deft, swift movement of hands, no longer weighed him down. He seemed younger.

Stronger, somehow, for the youth.

It helped that the streets weren't so crowded; there was no one to run into, no one to run away from, except each other. She wanted to join them, but d.a.m.n it, the snow was cold.

Still she watched, and laughed, and walked.

When it came, it caught her by surprise; it was like a physical blow. She buckled at the knees, and Arann, walking by her side, stopped, catching her shoulders before she could fall. She shook him off, covering her eyes against the glare of sun on snow. Breath was shallow, uneven; her cheeks were wet.

Just like that.

"Jay?" Arann asked. Not more than that, just her name.

Lefty caught Arann's sleeve and shook his head. This much she saw without seeing, shadows and habit blending into something just shy of certain knowledge. "Let her think," Lefty said quietly.

"Let her see," Carver added.

They knew. They waited quietly, while she struggled to breathe. Wiping her eyes with the back of her hand, she straightened slowly.

"Jay?" Carver, this time.

She said, "We need to take a slight detour on the way to the market."

"How slight?"

"I don't know."

"Now?"

"Now or never," she replied.

"You lead," Carver told her, his hand falling to the hilt of his barely visible dagger. "We'll follow."

"I don't think we need to worry about fighting," she replied, glaring his hand off the hilt.

"What do we need to worry about?"

"Snow," she said bitterly. "Cold. The normal things."

The silence was broken by Lefty. "But, Jay," he said quietly, "You're crying."

She would have slapped him if she could; her Oma had not been a woman who could abide the sight of tears, and for this reason, Jewel had learned not to cry where anyone else would see her. But she held her hand, held her temper, and looked at his face.

"Not my tears," she said at last.

"Whose are they?"

"Don't know. His."

"Should we go back for Finch? If-"

"No. If we get Finch, we might get-"

"Duster."

"Duster," Jewel said heavily. "And Duster-wrong person. For now. We'll do this without. I'll have to be more Finch-like."

Carver coughed. Lefty surprised Jewel by kicking him.

But she felt it now; the cold, the terror of it, the anonymity of white changing streets and the shape of the City seen at dawn.

"Who are we looking for?"

"You'll know," she said curtly. "You'll know, one way or the other." She should have given a better answer, but she didn't have one. She expected only that she would know, and that had always been enough for her. In a very short time, it had become enough for these three.

Fear didn't lessen the cold. Fear that remained unnamed made it worse. She had no specific vision to guide her; this was visceral, a thing of gut and emotion, unadorned by external reality. Had she had so little to go on, she would never have been able to save Finch's life. But Finch had been days away; this was now. The imperative needed no images, and no thought.

She followed streets made unfamiliar, and all play, all joy, was buried, like the city itself. Behind her, beside her, white clouds of mist flitting past from their open mouths, ran Arann and Carver and Lefty. Snow was both blessing and bane; at no time of day was it usually safe to charge headlong through these streets, this holding.

But safety was not a concern, couldn't be-there wasn't room for it. Someone was running through these streets the same way she was-but dressed so poorly for them, his feet had pa.s.sed over the bridge between pain and numbness. He didn't notice. Jewel did.

She had to. She had to. She was Jewel. The stranger-the boy?-was not. His fear was overwhelming, and hers couldn't be. Couldn't be allowed to become so. Different fear, she told herself. She wasn't running through the streets in growing terror. She wasn't searching for- The dead.

Arann skidded to a stop, snow spraying airward in his sudden halt. Carver stumbled. "Jay?" Urgent question.

"He's lost," she whispered. Hard, to whisper or to speak, her throat felt so thick.

"We're not much better," Carver told her, looking around him at the tall buildings that were wedged together in narrow peaks, like a man-made gully.

But Arann said only, "What is he looking for, Jay?"

And she answered before she could think of finding different words. "His mother."

Lefty and Arann exchanged a glance. They left it to Carver to ask. "She's dead?"

Jewel nodded.

"He knows?"

She shook her head. "Not yet," she whispered. "Not for sure." She felt so cold it seemed strange to see mist rise from her lips. "But he'll know. We have to find him," she added.

"We got that."

She hadn't run like this when she had lost her Oma, or her mother. She hadn't run like this when she had faced her father's death, her last link to family and the bloodline that her Oma had placed all trust and faith in. She had felt the fear, but it was a fear that was imbued with certainty. No hope was in it; no room for hope. She had known. Her father was dead.

She had waited. She hadn't run like this. She'd had a lifetime to get used to knowing.

When her Oma had pa.s.sed away, her life had become so silent. Not even her mother's tears could be heard, although they could be seen, touched, and even tasted. Her father had been absent, away at work-because work wouldn't wait and it didn't come often enough.

"She's gone to join your grandfather," Jewel's mother had said, rubbing her eyes with the mound of her palms, spreading her tears, with dirt, across her cheeks. Those cheeks, lined, had been pale.

Jewel had been six. Or seven. It was hard to tell; hard to mark the pa.s.sage of time by something as singular and final as death. That would come later.

"How can you tell?" she had asked.

Her mother said nothing, holding her grandmother's hands. Those hands had shrunk and dwindled with the pa.s.sage of time. It was the High City fashion to be slender, but in the streets of the hundred holdings, and especially in the poorest of those holdings, it was a mark of poverty and hunger.

Her mother struggled for an answer. Jewel recognized the expression; her mother's words were heated, but unlike Oma's and her father's, they were few, and chained to the service of the practical. Not for Jewel's mother the flights of fancy, the lively delight of the old, grim stories that her grandmother had so relished; not for her mother the steady, fanciful optimism of her husband.

After a while, she said, "I just know it, that's all."

And Jewel, tainted by the gift and the curse of the foresight her grandmother had called thunder and lightning, saw nothing, knew nothing, except this: her Oma was gone. She would not smoke a pipe or sit in the corner chair again, would never offer her lap, her stories, her bitter advice. That she would never again raise her hand in anger was no comfort.

The apartment was quiet when they had at last taken her body away. Jewel had never asked where it had gone.

She knew that it was consigned to flame; that there was marker and no grave. And she knew why. They were poor.

One day, she vowed, but quietly, that would all change. She would be rich. She would have money. She would buy a big house-on the Isle-and everyone she loved could live there with her, even if they were poor.

This boy, this stranger, this impulse who had as yet no face, no name, nothing but a growing frenzy too strong to be simple worry, was poor. Poorer, Jewel was suddenly certain, than even her family had been. She could almost see him, for a minute; could almost see his home, small and narrow, defined as it was by only one other person.

He wasn't Jewel. He couldn't be certain his mother was dead. There was hope, but it was a hope of dread, of terror. There were some certainties that were almost more than she could bear, but she understood at this moment that uncertainty was worse.

And in the Winter, with death hovering in the air, it was a bitter gift, and came wrapped in memory. She accepted the memory; it was strong and it kept the cold at bay.

The first time: "Mommy?"

Jewel's mother had stopped beneath the huge bower of the ancient trees that lined the Common. Her basket half-full, she had frowned, turning to the side to let people pa.s.s her by. The trees provided some cover, but in truth, not much; it was a market day, and while there was sun, there would be crowds.

Her mother's frown had deepened. "Jewel, what is it now?"

Jewel pointed. "The dog," she said. "The dog will get hit by the wagon."

Her mother looked, and failed to see, the white dog across the crowded thoroughfare. Market flags flew above the crowd, and the crowd moved, one long, loud mix of color, voice, height. "There's no dog," she said at last, grabbing her daughter's hand and holding it too tightly. "And if we don't get to the farmer's stall soon, all of the good vegetables will be gone, and we'll be left with the spoiled." No need to add what would happen in that case.

But Jewel looked over her shoulder, seeing the white flash of fur, the triangular head, the big, dumb, friendly face of the old dog. "He's there," she said, pulling against her mother's hand.

"Jewel, I can't see a dog, and even if it's there, there is no wagon. Now come." She had dragged her daughter from the shade of towering trees and into the crowd, holding her carefully, balancing the weight of one hand against the weight of the other, basket laden with some of the food they depended on.

On the walk back to their apartment, Jewel saw the dog again. Across his body, in furrows, the long mark of wagon wheels.

Her mother saw him this time as well. She looked at her daughter's face, her own pinched with worry. "Don't," she whispered, as Jewel tried to free her hand. "It's too late."

"But-"

And her mother shook her head again. "I told your Oma," she whispered, shaking her daughter's hand. "Do not speak of this," she told Jewel in a louder voice. "Never speak of this. They'll call you bad names, here. They'll blame it on you. They'll say you caused it."

But Jewel knew she hadn't.

She just hadn't been able to stop it.

Not the first time that she'd failed. Not the last time that she'd tried. But that one stayed with her, like a scar. Her Oma had had scars. On her wrists, on her arms, one on the side of her neck. They fascinated Jewel; they were always white, even when her Oma's skin was at its most sun-dark.

Her Oma, smoke spraying from the corner of her mouth, had snorted. "These? Feh. These aren't scars," she told her granddaughter. "They're marks, that's all."

"But how did you get them?"

"How does anyone?" But the old woman had lifted her wrists to the light, and her expression shifted, the way it sometimes did when she was about to tell a story. "These," she told Jewel, "are for the Lady."

"The Lady?"

"Aye. In the South, we call the Lady. In the North, you call the Mother. They're almost the same." She shrugged. Inhaled acrid smoke and closed her eyes. "Sometimes if we bleed-if we choose to bleed-it's enough. We offer the Lady our thanks that way. For life," she added. "For our lives."

"But the scars-"

"You'll learn, girl. These aren't scars. They're nothing. The scars you carry with you? The ones that never leave? They're all in here." She'd tapped her chest. "Regret," she said softly, "for the things you didn't do. Or the things you couldn't do. They haunt you enough, and you see things like this," and she put her hand to her neck, "and they mean nothing."

"What things do you regret?"

But smoke answered; smoke and silence. The old woman had finally smiled, but it was a bitter smile. She pulled Jewel into her lap. Held her there.

And Jewel, curious, knew better than to speak. But it frightened her anyway; until that moment, she had always believed that her Oma could do anything.

Oh, the boy made it hard to breathe. She had never, ever felt vision as strongly as this; it was as if they were joined by experience-by lack of experience-and nothing would separate them. She was weeping, and she was not; she was breathing too heavily, too shallowly, for the running. Her legs were numb with cold, her feet worse; the shadows the sun cast, short, were all that she could see.

When her mother had pa.s.sed away, Jewel had been older, but not by much. The air in the room had been cold and damp; the windows, open to Winter, let in the sounds of the street below. The room was close to the market.

Her father, unemployed now that the port was closed, had been with her mother, with them both. He was grave and silent.

"Will she go to see Oma?" Jewel had asked him.

He had nodded quietly. "Oma," he said, "and her brothers."

Jewel had never met the mythical uncles of whom her mother had so infrequently spoken.