Blood Ties (8 page)

Doronit had timed it carefully. She needed, she thought, to bring him closer to her before Midwinter’s Eve, so she called him into her office one morning in early autumn. The office was a plain room at the front of the house where she organized contracts with her customers. No glass or silk curtains here, she thought with satisfaction. The workmanlike wood and leather and painted shutters were a kind of disguise to reassure the merchants, who were about to entrust their treasures to her staff, that she was efficient, businesslike, although in an unusual trade for a woman. Her office looked organized, which she was, and simple, which she was not. There was a big slate on the desk, with chalk laid ready.

She gestured him to it. “Geography. I suppose you know the main trade routes, but can you draw a map?”

He grabbed the chalk and began to draw confidently, marking the outlines of the Domains, all eleven of them, and then the main rivers and towns, barely hesitating, whispering under his breath as he marked each one.

“What’s that?” Doronit asked.

“It’s a teaching song from Foreverfroze,” he said, “about Domain rivers.”

He was clearly embarrassed, using a child’s song to aid his memory, but Doronit nodded. “Useful.”

It didn’t take him long to finish the map. “Those are the main routes,” he said, dusting the chalk from his fingers. “I could put in the secondary roads if you wanted . . .”

She smiled. “So. In this I think the student knows more than the teacher. I will come to you when I want information about secondary roads.”

Doronit was more than pleased, and not just at his skill, but at the strength and surety with which he’d completed the task. For a while, while he concentrated, he had been a man instead of a boy. She sighed a little inside, imagining what it would be like to have someone she could trust, a strong man, at her back. She’d never found anyone she could rely on, but perhaps this boy would become what she needed.

“I suppose you know your history, too?” she said, and gave him a flirting smile.

He reddened a little, but sat up straight, looking her in the eyes. “Yes.”

“Are you sure?” A strong man sometime in the future was all very well, she thought, but she couldn’t afford to have him become cocky right now. “Tell me about the war between the Western Mountains and the Central Domains.”

“Which one?” She paused, unsure for once, and he smiled at her, but it was a happy smile, not a cocky one. “There have been three, in the last thousand years.”

Her first impulse was to slap him down, but she restrained herself. This could be another moment to bind him to her, to make him love her as well as want her. She laughed, making it clear she was laughing at herself, not at him.

“And I thought I knew my history!” she said. “How do you know all this?”

He shrugged, clearly pleased but trying not to show it. “There are songs. Just about every important moment in time has its own song. At least one.”

“But you can’t know them all!” This time she really was astonished.

“Maybe not
all,
” he said, being modest. “But most.”

He was close to cockiness now, buoyed up by his first sense of superiority over her. She couldn’t allow that.

“But you never sing,” she said, and watched the knife go home.

He paled, picked up the chalk and fiddled with it, marking an unimportant tributary of the Knife River.

“No,” he said quietly. “I can’t sing. But I know the songs.”

There it was, the sense of uselessness that his parents had drummed into him, the fools! But it was helpful to her. He’d soon be at the point where only her opinion mattered.

“How wonderful,” she said warmly, and he looked at her in surprise, taking self-respect from her and drawing himself up. She patted his hand and then waved dismissively at the map. “None of my other safeguarders care about the past. They probably don’t even know that there used to be only six Domains instead of eleven.”

He smiled tentatively. “North and South, Far North and Far South, Western Mountains and Central.”

She patted him on the shoulder. “Acton may have been a great war leader, but he didn’t have much imagination when it came to naming things, did he?”

They laughed together and then she sent him out to deliver a message. It was to Hildie, who had been hired out for the day to a jeweler expecting a big shipment of rubies.

The jeweler’s workshop was a simple shopfront in the middle tier of the city, two streets above Acton Square: close enough to the houses of the rich that they wouldn’t think it a trouble to walk there, but low enough down to have a reasonable rent. When Ash arrived, the counter had been drawn up and locked, so he knew that the rubies had arrived. He went in cautiously, whistling his identity code so that Hildie wouldn’t jump him as he came through the door. He didn’t see her as he entered, then felt her breath on his neck and spun around.

“Gotcha!” she said, and laughed at him. “Ya shoulda waited till I whistled back, young’un.”

He blushed. He’d never get the feel for this constant suspicion and caution. “At least I remembered to whistle.”

“Aye,” she nodded, and showed him the knife in her hand. “Otherwise you’da been whistling through a new hole in your windpipe.”

She smiled as she said it, and he wasn’t sure how true it was. She was probably just trying to make him feel even younger and stupider.

The jeweler was examining the rubies before signing the receipt. She was a big woman, tall and solid, beginning to run to fat, with gray eyes and light brown hair plaited down her back. She wore blue trousers and black boots with a gray work smock — simple, inexpensive, misleading clothes — and showed a placid face to the world, although Ash knew she was considered one of the sharpest traders in the city. The ruby seller, a thin, sharp-nosed man with an enormous mustache, was fidgeting from one foot to the other, anxious to have the gems off his hands. If they were stolen before he got a receipt, it would be his loss, Ash knew.

“Well, you’re a welcome sight,” Hildie said to him. “Better two sets of eyes and hands right now — we’s at the sharp moment now.” She grinned. “Even your eyes might be useful.”

He rolled his eyes in acknowledgment of her right to tease him, but he kept his face to the door and his eyes on the street.

“You’re to report to the town clerk at eight tomorrow,” he said, “for a meeting with some merchants from the Wind Cities.”

“Why does the old fart need safeguarding from foreign merchants?”

Ash shrugged, but the jeweler chipped in, looking up from the lens she had suspended over the tray of rubies. “Because last time they threatened to cut his balls off if he substituted second-grade iron ore for the top grade they’d paid for.”

“Ah . . .” Hildie nodded wisely, “and he’s afeared they’ll really try it this time and find out he don’t have any, right?”

They all laughed, even the nervous ruby seller.

“All correct and accounted for,” the jeweler said.

She packed the gems away into her strongbox and put it aside, then handed up a pouch of money.

The mustachioed vendor accepted the pouch and pulled something from his pocket with a flourish, all his nervous energy released once the jewels were safely paid for. “Something special,” he said. “Unique.”

He laid it out on the jeweler’s tray — a big cloak brooch that mimicked a shield in intricate metal- and enamelwork. Bronze wire turned like hearts, or maybe faces, around a central circle with three curving enamel —
What?
Ash wondered.
Claws, birds’ heads, scythes?
— coming out from the center. There was something about it that caught the eye. On one glance it looked calm, balanced, pretty; on another look it was packed with threatening shapes in a whirling dance. Unsettling.

“It’s old,” Ash said, and moved to see it better.

“Ancient,” the man said, smoothing one end of his mustache into a curling tip. “As old as the Domains.”

“I deal in gemstones,” the jeweler said dismissively. “This isn’t even gold, it’s just bronze.”

“They say —” The man paused dramatically. “That it belonged to Acton.”

“And my grandmother’s still alive and dancing the hornpipe every night at the Drunken Sailor.”

“No, really! I got it in the west, near where Acton’s people first came over the mountains. He gave it to some woman’s ancestor.”

“Why?”

The man shrugged. “Because she was a good shag, I guess. It was usually something like that with Acton, wasn’t it?”

“And this woman gave it to you?” the jeweler said. “Because
you
were a good shag?”

He sniffed, which made the mustache bounce. “Because the warlord there’s a right bastard and she needed to pay her taxes. But if you’re not interested, I’ll take it elsewhere.”

“It may be old, but it’s not in my line — Acton’s or not. I’ll just keep the rubies, thanks.”

The man turned to Ash and Hildie. Hildie hadn’t taken her eyes from the street the entire time.

“What about you two?”

“Not interested in anything of Acton’s,” Hildie said, her voice flat. Ash saw the man register Hildie’s Traveler accent and sneer a little.

“What about you, lad?”

“He’s an apprentice,” Hildie cut in. “He couldn’t afford a
fake
bronze brooch.”

“Too bad,” the man said.

“Yes,” Ash said, his eyes still on the curving bronze. “Too bad.” He was drawn to it; he wanted to pick it up and run his fingers across the intricate scrolling. What if this
had
belonged to Acton? The man who’d invaded this country and disinherited Ash’s people, turned them off their land and made them into Travelers — the man who’d changed everything. The first warlord.

Half the old songs were about Acton — about his courage and leadership and humor and, of course, his love life, which by all accounts had been prodigious. He loomed larger than life in the minds of everyone in the Domains, perhaps all the more because no one knew what had happened to him. He had ridden out one day from a camp up near the Western Mountains and disappeared. The legend said that his last words had been, “I’ll be back before you need me”; and in the countryside a surprising number of people believed he
would
come back one day, from wherever he had ridden away to, if the country was in deadly peril.

The brooch seemed to shimmer in front of Ash’s eyes, speaking of choices long made and chances long forfeited. Perhaps there had been a moment when his ancestors could have united and fought Acton off; but they hadn’t. Their settlements had been too widely scattered, the people living in the central lands had depended on the mountain people to repel any raids, so when Acton broke through that defense there was no one to stop him. There was no one who really knew how to fight and no one to rally the far-flung villages and make a stand.

So Ash stood here in a jeweler’s shop in Turvite, which had been founded by those ancestors but was a city of Acton’s people now, and he didn’t even know what the birthright was that had been stolen from him. It was so far in the past — a thousand years! — that no Traveler alive today knew the history of their people before Acton came. Not for sure and certain, although Ash’s father had taught him what was known of the old language. All they had were a few scraps of songs and stories, some of the traditions and habits and superstitions . . . and the casting stones, which predated not only Acton but Ash’s ancestors as well, and had come, they said, straight from the gods.

The man wrapped the brooch up again, tucked his purse securely inside his shirt and did up his coat over it. Ash blinked; it seemed the shop was darker than before.

“Any more business for me?” the man asked the jeweler.

She shook her head. “I’ll let you know if I have another order.”

The trader still had his hand over his pocket. It seemed to occur to him for the first time that a money pouch could be stolen as easily as a pouch of rubies. “Walk me back to my lodgings, young’un?” he asked. “Standard rate?”

“Danger rate,” Ash said. “They could be waiting for you to make the trade — most thieves prefer money to gems.”

The man sniffed, then nodded and waited for Ash to go out the door before him.

“‘Acton, lucky under the sword, lucky under the sheets, favored by gods and by all the unseen . . .’” Ash murmured.

“Huh?” Hildie said.

“An old song,” Ash shrugged. “I’ll see you later.”

He went quietly, carefully, out the door and escorted the trader to his inn with no trouble. But on the way back to Doronit’s he had the rest of that song singing in his head:
Acton, brother of horses, Acton, brother of wolves, Acton, father of hundreds, Acton, father of us!

It made him feel a bit sick. Acton, the killer. Ash had always despised him. But he was a killer himself, now. The girl’s face rose in his mind, as it sometimes did before he went to sleep or, worse, in his dreams. Such a young face. So concentrated on him, on his death. The knife in her hand, held low. Her pale hair, her pale face, relaxed after she fell, her thin chest still, her hand letting go of its clutch on the knife. What he felt wasn’t exactly guilt, more sharp regret; he regretted whatever it was — circumstance, fate, bad luck — that had brought them both to that alleyway.

Marvel’s Story

T
HE WORLD’S
full of easy marks, but I never took myself for one of them, not me, not little Marvel. That’s what they called me in the back alleyways of Turvite, a marvel ’cause I was so fast with my hands and light with my fingers. It’s not a bad life, pickpocket and thief. Gods, why should I lie? It’s shagging horrible — scary and dirty and hand-to-mouth and always scrounging. Better off dead, they say in other towns, but in Turvite we’ve too many ghosts to believe that. Not many neck themselves around here. No use complaining, that’s what I say, not when you might get an easy mark around the next corner, with a fat purse and a yellow heart.

And I was lucky enough, though I’d had to kill a few times to get that purse. Life’s not worth much in the alleyways. “Gutter” they called me, as well as Marvel. I’m not tall, see, and I can’t reach a grown man’s throat at the right angle to slit it neatly and quietly. Putting a shiv into the heart’s tricky business, no matter what you’ve heard, specially if they’re fat, so my best bet was to put the blade in just over their pubes and slit them from fork to gullet. The other thing is, if they’re wearing a winter coat, most of the time it doesn’t get much blood on it, so you can fence that, too.

It’s good, when you’re little and young, to have a reputation as a gutter. Keeps the thugs off you. Keeps the pimps away and the girlers who heave a woman or two aboard ships bound for the Wind Cities, to keep the sailors happy and sell to the brothels at the other end. One girler who tried that on me ended up with his balls in his throat, and they didn’t get there through his mouth.

Never had to shag for my supper. Not once. My brother used to earn his bread that way before the poppy juice got to him and I swore I’d never let anyone do that to me. Better kill fifty men than have one of them on top of me like that.

Life got easier after my brother died and I didn’t have to find enough silver to buy his juice. I started saving up for . . . something, I didn’t know what. To learn a trade? Start a business of my own? I thought I could maybe sell fish down at the harbor market, or make candles. It wasn’t so far-fetched. Look at Doronit. She arrived in Turvite as poor as me and now she gets invited to the Merchants’ Banquets! I wanted to be like her. Makes you laugh, doesn’t it?

Sometimes, when I was washing my hands afterward, I thought about going to the Valuers’ Plantation. I liked Valuer thinking: that there shouldn’t be any warlords or high families, that no one’s life is worth more than another’s — all valued alike — and that the rich should share with the poor so no one goes hungry. They say anyone is welcomed at the plantation, anyone at all. But I wondered what they’d say to me — I lived as though no one’s life had any value at all.

I thought, sometimes, in the early morning before I went to sleep,
I’ll save up and go to the Well of Secrets, and confess.
She can magic the blood off your hands, they reckon.
Then I’ll go to the Valuers and maybe, if I have clean hands, they’ll take me in.
It got so I was thinking about that night as well as morning, thinking through the journey up through Carlion and then inland to Pless and farther up, imagining the welcome at the end of it. I went out more than I should have, maybe, to find fat purses and yellow hearts. Took risks, like going after young men as well as old. Should have known better.

I should have smelled a rat when I saw that drunk young cully reel down the alley where I kept watch, his fat purse clinking against his side. Looking back, I realize he was a bit too young, he moved a bit too well to be a stumbling sot of a merchant’s son, no matter how he was dressed. But Shiv and Dimple had seen him, too, and started to follow him, and I thought,
Got to get to him first, got to get that juicy purse.

So I ran and I leaped, and when he turned suddenly, sharp as the knife he cocked at me, it was too late. I almost had him — I was quick, I was bloody quick. But he was quicker. I recognized him as he took me in the shoulder — Doronit’s new boy, the Traveler. His eyes were wide with fear and horror.
He doesn’t have a taste for killing
, I thought, as though it mattered to me. Not yet he didn’t. Then his knife went in again and it was over.

Surprising, there’s not so much pain when the knife goes in; it’s when it comes out again that it hurts. Wasn’t a bad death, all things considered. Quick. Clean. Over. And that was a relief. Seemed to me — at the moment when I stopped seeing anything and felt myself, my
self,
still go on — that maybe I owed Doronit’s boy for setting me free.

I’d like to get to the Valuers’ one day, though. If not in this life, maybe the next.