Debris (32 page)

  I knocked again; my hand shook so much I wasn't sure I could control it. A long breath of darkness, of quiet and cold, and I started to doubt this was the right house. Started to believe I was standing in front of some deserted ruin knocking my way into a cold and endless sleep.

  Then voices murmured behind the door, and I heard shuffling. A light peered out of a gap between door and top step. Keys rattled.

  The door opened with a groan, exhausting to hear. It split the darkness with a crack of lantern light that hurt my eyes. And Kichlan was there. Only half of his face, the rest of him was hidden. And that half a face was squinting and scowling, concerned and angry all at once.

  Perhaps intended to frighten off an intruder.

  Or confuse them.

  "Who's there?" His voice cracked. He had been asleep, I realised. A sleep he dearly needed and I had pulled him from it.

  "I have a problem," I stuttered. My words jumbled over my rattling teeth, and my breath wove a thick haze in front of Kichlan's widening eyes. "I have... a problem."

  I wasn't really sure what else to say, there on the doorstep. Without my jacket.

  "Tanyana?" Kichlan opened the door wider, saw me properly. "Other! What are you doing?" He grabbed my shoulder and pulled me into the house.

  Eugeny and Lad waited behind him. The old man held a fire stoker above his head as though ready to strike. Lad sat on the stairs, chin in his hand, eyes drooping and expression bored.

  "Tan!" Lad stood when he saw me, all sleep falling from his wide eyes. "Kich! Tan is here!"

  "Yes," Kichlan's gaze took me in with one long, unimpressed sweep. "I can see that. Give me your hands."

  I blinked at him. "Hands?" I pried them from my pockets, and still trying to hold the book firmly beneath my left arm, held them out for him. My fingers were blue, the colour broken only by white beneath my nails and red where the door knocker had nipped me.

  "Other's eternal darkness, girl." Eugeny joined Kichlan in peering at my frozen, battered skin. "What happened to you?"

  I stared at the old man, his scowling tenant, and the younger brother's unconcerned grin. "It's very hot in here." Sweat was running beneath my uniform, itching where it trickled between my breasts.

  Eugeny placed a rough hand on my forehead. "Other," he snapped. He turned to Kichlan. "Get her warm, that's a fever I can feel. Lad!" He drew Lad's willing and now firmly wide-awake attention. "Help me, boy. Tan needs medicine or she will be sick."

  "Oh!" Lad, shocked, went a strange shade of mottled green and white. "Oh... oh no!" He ran off into the kitchen, overtaking Eugeny.

  "Lad locked himself out of the house one Rest a few moons ago, gave himself a fever." Kichlan shook his head. "He hasn't forgotten it. Trust me, he'll hover over you and feel every ache and pain."

  "Why is everyone calling me Tan?" I asked him. The idea of a fever was too difficult to understand. It wobbled away in a fog somewhere in my head, ineffectual and quiet.

  Kichlan gave me a strange, tilted-eye look and didn't answer. "Why don't you sit down, Tanyana?" He still held my hands and tugged on them gently. I hissed through my teeth. My fingers were numb, but the back of my hands felt fiery beneath his touch. "Come and sit down."

  He drew me into the drying room, where I had slept the last time I came here. I suddenly realised how exhausted I was. But Kichlan didn't let me lie down. He found a collapsed couch somewhere behind the forest of hanging clothes and bed sheets. He propped me up in its cushions, drew a blanket from a line close to the dim fireplace and draped it around my shoulders.

  I struggled against its weight. "Hot," I murmured.

  "No, Tanyana. It isn't. Not really." He wrapped long fingers around the book under my arm. "Give me that. You can sit, then, and have a nice drink."

  Was I thirsty? "No." Maybe, it was hard to tell. My mouth felt dry, but the thought of anything in my stomach made me nauseous. "You can't take it."

  Kichlan leaned very close. His breath smelled of cinnamon. "It's me, Kichlan. I'm not going to take it away, I'm going to look after it."

  Kichlan. That's right, it was Kichlan. Not Barbarian lying on my floor, not Comedian clutching his wrist and howling. Kichlan. Kichlan I could trust. I eased my arm open and he slid the book out. He gave it half a moment's glance and placed it on the floor.

  "Be careful," I whispered. "That's all I have left."

  Eugeny entered, a tray in his hand and Lad at his heels. Lad carried a mug, steaming faint trails of haze over his face, with a reverential delicacy.

  "Drink." Lad bent at the waist to hand me the mug. His eyes were focused on the surface of its dark liquid so intently they nearly crossed.

  I tried to take it from him but Kichlan was much faster. He took the cup with a click of his tongue. "Fingers like that, you'll spill it all over your own lap."

  "Don't want to do that," Lad told me, solemn. "Need to drink it all."

  Kichlan held the mug up to my lips. I scowled at him. "I'm not a child, I can hold my own drink."

  "Don't be stubborn." A firm light came into Kichlan's eyes, the kind I had seen when he spoke to Lad in one of his moods. "You came here for help, didn't you? So take it."

  Help involved a roof and a space away from the snow. It didn't involve being fed like an invalid or a child. But as I opened my mouth to protest, Kichlan pressed the mug against my lips, and I ended sipping something hot and bitter instead.

  I coughed, and Lad gave me a knowing smile. "I know it tastes bad," he lectured me in a fair imitation of Kichlan's voice. "But you need to drink it all."

  "What is it?" I made a face at Eugeny, certain he was the cause of this particular problem. "Not another gold plant."

  He lifted his eyebrows at me. "Golden roots of the waxseal plant? No, not this time. Hyssop, liquorice root, thyme."

  Words in a language I didn't understand. So I glared, puzzled, at him over the rim of my mug as Kichlan – with gentle, but inexorable hands – forced me to drink.

  Eugeny shook his head. "You always come here in a state, girl."

  I swallowed and leaned my head back long enough to gasp some much-needed air. Kichlan's idea of drinking, it seemed, did not involve enough time to catch one's breath. "Here is a good place to be in a state," I said, before I finished the drink's grass-murky dregs.

  "Bro?" Lad, having satisfied himself that I would in fact finish the disgusting but no doubt beneficial brew, collected my book from the floor. "What is this, bro?"

  Before I could move, Kichlan smoothly turned, stood, and took the book from his younger brother. "It's Tan's. She brought it with her."

  Lad seemed content to peer at the cracking leather cover from over his brother's shoulder. "A book!" Excited, he clamped his fingers over Kichlan's upper arm. Kichlan winced. "What does it say, bro? Do you know what it says?"

  Kichlan ran his finger below the embossed lettering on the jacket. It had once been gold, I had been told when given the gift, but years and use had eroded the title to the point where it was almost illegible. "Its title says
Principles of Architecture
, by Eldar Velchev."

  I waited for the gasps, the wide eyes, the "How ever did you come by such a remarkable piece?"

  Lad leaned back again, and wrinkled the skin at the top of his nose. "Oh." His eyes slid sideways to his brother. "That's not very interesting, is it?"

  With a chuckle, Kichlan shook his head. "Not really." He turned the book over in his hands. "But it is very old. Isn't it?" His gaze flicked to mine in a question.

  "Yes," I said.

  "Old things can be valuable. Can't they?" Again, that quick, but searching and suspicious glance.

  "Yes," I said again.

  Lad bobbed his head as he searched for something valuable in the old book. "Doesn't look it, bro. Doesn't look it."

  "People with too many kopacks have strange ways of seeing things," Kichlan said, grinning.

  "Oh." Lad squinted at the book and leaned even closer to it.

  I scowled between the both of them. "If this becomes a morality lesson, I'm going outside again."

  "No, you won't." Eugeny, who had remained silent and in the background, pushed his way forward. He rested the tray on my knees, and a far more appetising bowl of soup stared up at me. "You're going to sit and eat, and Kichlan will put that somewhere safe. Where hands, unwelcome or simply curious, won't find it."

  My gaze followed the book as Kichlan took it from the drying room. My life was in those pages, all that was left of my memories, my ambition and achievements. Something wrenched in my gut as I watched it go, but it was in Kichlan's hands and strangely that was enough. I knew it would be safe, because he carried it.

  Eugeny watched me; I caught his pursed lips in the corner of my eye. Then he placed a spoon in my hand, and I was occupied by rich vegetable-and-grain stew.

  Without anything new to excite him, Lad drooped. When Kichlan returned he managed to convince Lad to go back to bed. I received a wet kiss on the cheek before Lad was led upstairs, stumbling on the way.

  By the time my bowl was empty I was feeling warm – no longer hot while tickled at the extremities by cold – tired and comfortable. I sat among the cushions and closed my eyes to the quiet conversation between Kichlan and Eugeny. Whatever decision they came to, I didn't hear it. For the couch was soft, the room was warm, and for the first time since I had unlocked my front door, I felt secure enough to fall into an easy sleep. I felt like I was home.

 
 
 
 

We kept the details from Lad. All he needed to know, Kichlan said, was that I had left my old home and needed a new one. He didn't need to know about large and violent men who burst into the one place you're supposed to feel safe, and take your life away. I rather thought I didn't need to know about such things either, but the choice had, unfortunately, been long taken away.

  Wetday and Thunderday I spent under Eugeny's herbobsessed supervision, not allowed to move, not allowed to do much other than drink strong doses of various herbal tea and eat stew until I was tired of the very sight of it. For Frostday and Olday, Eugeny pronounced me well enough to join Kichlan and Lad in the collecting field. The team showed me small sympathy.

  "About time you toughened up to the cold," Sofia told me with a superior sneer.

  "I've spent half of my life with a fever because of this Otherdamned collecting," Natasha muttered. "Get used to it."

  I gathered Kichlan hadn't told them the whole story, and rather marvelled that Lad hadn't let my homelessness slip. I felt a deep thankfulness to both of them.

  By Rest, I was chafing to be free of Eugeny's scrutiny and stew, and wished to be a burden on Kichlan no longer.

  Lad woke me early, tangling and stomping through the drying clothes. "Tan! Early morning, Tan! Time to get going."

  My bed had once again been made before the fireplace. I levered myself up on my elbow and squinted at him. "Today is called Rest, Lad. Rest. Don't you get the hint?"

  He blinked at me, bird-like, studying me separately with each eye. "But it's time to go. Kich said we won't have time if we don't go."

  "Go where?" I sat up and stretched. No amount of use could make this temporary bed comfortable.

  "To find you a home, of course," Kichlan said, from behind veils of drying sheets. "What did you think we were going to do?"

  In all honesty, I hadn't considered it. I scooped my clothes from the floor and struggled into them. After my late-night flight, two days of rest and two days of collecting, these clothes needed a wash the way a drowning woman needs air. Unfortunately, they were the only ones I had.

  "Continue to enjoy my company for a little while longer?" I swept past the clothes, Lad in tow, and smiled at Kichlan where he leaned against the door frame.

  He flashed a grin that reminded me, for a moment, of Devich. My stomach lurched and I wondered if he was missing me. If he had called at my apartment and found the place ransacked, blood-splattered and empty. If he feared for me.

  "A man can only do that for so long." Kichlan chuckled. "Before he starts to lose his mind."

  Lad let out an explosive laugh, although I wasn't entirely convinced he understood us.

  "No houses on an empty stomach!" Eugeny called from the kitchen. As Lad ran in, the old man peered at us across the hallway. "And if you two keep that up I'm going to lose my appetite."

  I felt hot and flushed as I spooned runny, honey-drizzled porridge into my mouth. Judging from Kichlan's red face he felt much the same, but I could guarantee he wasn't as confused about it. That he didn't have Devich, out there, somewhere.

  Once we were fed to Eugeny's satisfaction, he tipped us out of the house in a way that made me feel like a child sent to play. "You remember what I told you?" he asked Kichlan. "Here." Eugeny placed a heavy bundle, wrapped in felt, in my hands. "I'm afraid you'll need that." Then he closed the door on my forming question, and left us milling on the step.

  "Shall we?" Kichlan gestured to the street, as I pried the edge of the material apart, and recognised my book nestled within.

  I covered it, and ran a hand slowly down the spine. It was worth enough kopacks to build a life with, surely. And in a way, it was a fair bargain. An old life for a new one.

  "You know you don't have any choice." Pragmatism was somehow better than sympathy, at least coming from Kichlan.

  I held the book tightly against my chest, and said, "I know."