House War - The Hidden City Part 66

"How do you know?" she had whispered. She couldn't talk in more than a whisper; the Winter fog was in her throat and chest, and her breath was weak, a rasp. Her mother's had been like this, but worse.

He placed a hand on her head, pushing aside dark curls; he left it there, as if she were an anchor. "Mandaros," he said quietly, "is the G.o.d who sits in judgment, and he loves his people."

"Who are his people?"

"The dead, Jewel. He lives in halls so large that the entire City could be built between the first columns, and he sits on a throne that can be seen for miles."

"Like Averalaan Aramarelas?"

"Like the High City, yes."

"Is it beautiful?"

"It is beautiful," he told her quietly. "But sometimes it is very far away."

"As far away as the High City?"

"For us? As far," he said. He smiled. It was not a happy smile. His hair was wild, fringed in white, his cheeks hollow. Cold Winter, and lean. His sweater was threadbare. Oma had done all the knitting, all the mending, and all the scolding for the family, and when she had died? Her mother had tried.

"For some of us," he continued softly, "the throne is so far it takes years and years to reach. We walk," he added, ruffling her hair, "and sometimes we run. But it is distant, that throne."

"And the G.o.d?"

"He waits."

"Is he angry?"

Her father shook his head. "He is seldom angry, Jewel. He is often sad."

"Will he be sad for Momma?"

"He will be sad for you," he told her. "And for me. But not for Momma. She was very tired."

"Did he take her away?"

"No."

"Will he keep her there?"

"He will let her stay by his side for as long as she wants," he replied.

"Will she wait for you?"

His brows drew close together. He paused a moment, and then said, "She will wait for you."

"Why?"

"How could she not? She will miss you, and even if she can never come back to you here, there's a place where you'll meet her again. You have to be good," he added.

"I was good. But she died anyway."

He said nothing to that. Nothing at all.

Jewel had never seen a ghost, and she didn't believe in them. Her father hadn't either. Her Oma had-but her Oma's voice was still, this day. Still, cold, distant; death had silenced her. Jewel wanted to believe in ghosts. Even angry ones. She had seen all of her family angry at one time or another, and if she hadn't enjoyed it-and she hadn't-it would still be better than this: silence.

She had lived with her father for years. He had struggled to teach her what he thought she should know: How to read. How to write. How to count, how to meld one number into another, as if they were liquid. He spoke sometimes in Torra, her mother's tongue, and sometimes in Weston.

It was hard, to be alone.

She learned to cook, and to mend, where it was possible. She learned to keep the room clean, for when her father returned from his day's work. She learned many things, in this place. The names of the G.o.ds. The names of the days, so like the G.o.ds; the names of the months, so different, that pa.s.sed, one after another, in slow concert. This was time.

But as the years pa.s.sed, she learned that there were things her father could not teach her; things he feared to speak about. Her strange vision was one of those things. Only Oma had listened, had cared to listen. Only Oma had given her advice when it could be offered, and even Jewel's mother had been uncomfortable when she did-but no one argued with Oma. Not and won.

The sight came and went, like seasons, but less predictable. She learned not to speak of it; not to her father, not to anyone. She learned to keep things hidden, to keep them secret.

Five days before her father died, she knew.

She sat in bed crying, disconsolate, and her father had come to her side; they shared the room, after all. It was only a few steps. He was not sick, not as Oma had been, not as her mother had been.

Her father had taken her in his arms, drawn her up across his lap, found a place for her beneath his chin, although she was ten, and too large to fit easily. She had babbled into his chest, and he had cradled her, rocked her, whispered into her hair. About nightmares. About fear.

She had tried to tell him. That she knew. What she knew. He had both listened and failed to listen.

He is a man, her Oma's memory whispered. He's not one of us; he can't be. He is not a bad man, but he is not a woman. And because he wasn't, she knew that he would hear nothing.

Jewel knew how to count. And she counted the bitter pa.s.sage of days. She cooked for her father, and cleaned, and wept; she begged him not to go to work. But the words were poor words, and useless. It's just one day, she said. If I miss one day, he told her quietly, they'll find someone else to take my place. Hush. If it's death, it's a faster death than starving. Work was life, in the twenty-fifth holding.

It's death, she tried to tell him, and when she met his gaze on that last day, when she ran to him, hugged him, squeezed the words out of his lips, she thought he must know.

But he kissed the top of her head, disentangled himself, and left her anyway.

She had waited in the cavernous, empty room, the table clean, the floor clean, her few possessions gathered on the far corner of her bed in disarray. She had slate, and some chalk; she had clothing, three days' worth, before it had to be beaten with stone and soap. Food? Not much. And no money.

The knock came at the door. She rose to answer it.

A tall man stood in the frame, hat in hands, his face grave. "Jewel Markess?" he said. Her whole name. She looked up, and up again, until she saw the end of his beard.

She nodded. She didn't ask him to come in, because she knew he wouldn't. She'd seen it, seen this.

"I'm sorry, la.s.s," he said, bending, his broad shoulders folding slightly, his beard drawing closer. "There was an accident at the port. A timber beam fell."

He must have thought her cold, uncaring. She had nodded, but she hadn't said a word. She'd listened, but the words had already been said, already been heard.

She didn't ask about the money. He gave it to her anyway; three days' pay. Her father's. This man, bearded, tall, was a good man; he could have kept the money.

But he looked beyond her into the empty room, and his face twisted. He mumbled something. Gave her an address. Told her to come to him if she were ever in need. They weren't empty words. Not yet.

But they would be, come Winter. He was married, and he had several children. She waited for him to leave, and after the door closed, she looked back.

Thinking about the sounds that she had once heard, here. The things she had seen. The people she had touched, and the people who had loved her. Everything was gone; soon enough, the room would be gone, too, home to another family, a larger one. Home to people who could pay the rent.

And Jewel?

She ran to the windows, threw them wide, looked down into the streets below. They were busy; carts and wagons rolled past, men and women shouted at each other, children played in the lee of the building opposite hers.

If she had a home, it was there.

She didn't weep; she didn't cry; she didn't pray. She just watched people pa.s.s by, as if this were any other day, as if her father had not died across the distant city, within sight of Averalaan Aramarelas. After some time had pa.s.sed, the shadows growing, the sunlight fading, she returned to her bed and began to pack the things she owned into a sack.

Then she found the other items that she thought she might need: old needles, half-b.a.l.l.s of carded wool in the least expensive of colors, the single-edged knife that her father had used for carving when the Winter was cold. She bound these in cloth, depositing them with care into her sack. Last, she took a box, her father's box, from its hidden place beneath the false bottom of a dresser drawer. Old and tarnished, it had become the center of their lives in many ways; it was where he put the coin he earned. She opened the lid with care, and put three days' worth of pay into the hollow, dark interior.

He'd taught her well enough; she knew just how far that would get her.

What was the point of knowing? Of seeing things before they happened? She hated the vision, the helplessness that came with it, the utter failure that marked her whenever it came. Why had she been cursed this way?

And yet, she had an answer, now, in the streets of this holding, her father-her whole family-nothing more than memories, some bitter and some sweet. No one listened to a child. No one heard what a child said clearly. No one but other children.

And Rath, maybe.

Her Oma was gone, and her mother, and her father, all of whom would have stopped her from her headlong flight into Winter streets. They would have held her back, held onto her, kept her safe from the cold and the danger.

She missed them bitterly. She missed the safety of their arms, the warmth of their stories, even the heat of their anger, the bitter sting of their worry.

And yet . . .

She didn't. Because the safety they offered had been a type of cage, and she understood that now. The cage came with love, was born of it, but in the end-in the end, had she still been under its lock and key, Finch would be dead, and Rath would be dead and Arann and Lefty, and Lander, Fisher, Jester. Duster would be something else, and might still become that.

And this boy?

She knew his fear. Felt it as if it were her own because it was her own. He spoke to her, wordlessly, and she, unable to speak in kind, spoke in a different fashion, running faster and faster as his fear peaked, as it shifted, as it grew so d.a.m.n big he could no longer contain it.

It would devour him. It had already begun.

She cried out, she couldn't help herself; what he couldn't contain, she didn't even try. She stumbled in the snow, her hands plunging through it to the hard, frozen dirt beneath. She tasted it, felt it melt against her hot cheeks, her warm skin.

Arann was there in an instant, and he hauled her to her feet as if she weighed no more than Lefty. Carver waited in silence, and Lefty stared at her as if-as if this were normal.

Quiet, succinct, he said, "He found her body."

Jewel swallowed and nodded. It was true. He had.

They didn't ask her why.

Why this boy? Why this one? She had no time to think it, although she knew-who better?-that there would be many deaths in the city over the next few days. She couldn't save them all. It had never truly occurred to her to try.

And how did the gift-the cursed gift-choose?

Like this, instinct and more driving her, herding her, taking her through twisting lanes of the oldest part of the City. Tears had frozen, had stopped; everything had stopped. The world had ended.

She made no noise because he made no noise. It was trapped inside him, as if, by silence, he could stave off knowledge. She stopped a moment, hand against a wall that was leaning at an awkward angle. Cold wall, snow running between her fingers like a winter web.

Lefty caught her elbow. Arann caught her shoulders.

She started to speak, but Lefty spoke instead-in silence, in the language of hands and fingers dancing across palms. As if she were Lander.

And as if she were Lander, watching his hands, his missing fingers some part of their movement, she understood what he was saying, and she swallowed. She could breathe now.

She had found him.

But as she turned the last corner, as she came shoulder to almost-shoulder with Carver, it was almost too much.

He was a boy. Smaller, she thought, than Finch. Possibly younger, it was hard to tell. His eyes were ringed with dark circles, his hair darker with snow, wet and flat against his unadorned head. No hat, of course. No heavy sweater. She couldn't see his feet, couldn't tell if there was anything between his soles and the snow.

But she could see that he was struggling with a burden several times larger than he; that he was trying to pull that burden across the snow, toward the mouth of the alley in which they all stood in silence, bearing witness.

He looked up as he approached them, struggling, pulling. She met his eyes, thought of them ever after as a brown so dark it was almost black. He did not let go of his burden.

His mother.

And Jewel found herself kneeling in the snow. She didn't know what had killed his mother; whether it was the cold or something else was impossible to tell at this distance. Nor was it important; it was fact, it was the past.

The present was here.

She held out a hand to him, both hands, palms out to show that they were empty. She might have approached a starving or injured dog in the same way, but it was the only way she knew to approach; she was afraid he would startle, or run, and if he did-he would be lost.

Lost to snow, an orphan among orphans.

She said, distinctly, forcing her breath to even out, "My name is Jay. These are my friends. We've come to help you."

He stared at her as if she were speaking a foreign language. And she was; she was speaking in Torra. Her Oma's tongue. The language of comfort and disapproval. She shifted into Weston, spoke again, slowly.

He said, "My mother's not well. She has to go home."

No one spoke.

He knew now. He had to know. But knowing something wasn't the same as accepting it; never had been. This boy-she shook her head. Lifted it, made certain he could see her eyes as clearly as she could see his.

She could have asked him what his name was; she didn't. Instead, she said, "If you'll let us, we'll help you. We'll help you take her home." And she turned a pleading gaze on Arann, the only one of her den that might be able to make truth of the statement.

Arann didn't even blink. He nodded, but he approached the boy very slowly, and his hands, as Jewel's, were exposed and empty.

The boy was beyond shivering, and his skin was so white it was almost blue. His hands were bunched in fists, frozen in shape.

Arann knelt, slid his hands and arms into the snow that surrounded the body, and lifted; he tried not to grunt or stagger. He did them all proud. But Carver understood and moved to help him anyway, handing Lefty something as he did.

Lefty held Carver's dagger in his good hand; his maimed hand he had slid into a pocket rather than under his armpit. The boy watched them all, but his gaze was like a trapped b.u.t.terfly, a frantic moth; it came at last to rest upon the thing that burned.

His mother's face, her open, sightless eyes, her slightly parted lips.