The Adorned (39 page)

“Still,” I said softly, “it seems to have worked in your favor.”

He made a face. “I have tried to make the best of the circumstance. For
everyone.
”

“Did you know Arderi Finn, General?” I drew myself up, turning my face so the light hit my scars. “A brother Adorned. I saw him stripped and carved to scars as a mob cheered it on.”

“We tried to stop the violence. Things got out of hand.”

I laughed. “That is true enough.”

He paced around the kitchen. It seemed too small for him. “I am trying to make amends, Etan. When I heard you were alive, I had to come and do what I could.”

I shook my head. “General, you mean well. I know this much. But there is nothing you can do for me. I earn enough for comfort, and I have friends—family—around me. I am luckier than many in the city. For one, I am
alive.
”

“Yet there is someone you have lost.”

I went cold. Suddenly everything around me seemed sharpened—the light, the birdsong outside, the sound of Loren’s breathing. They were sharp enough to cut. When I spoke again my voice was low, and shaking with anger. “There is nothing you can give me to make up for that, General. No death price. No apology.”

“If that was all I had, I would not have come.”

My hands were shaking. “Then tell me what you have.”

“Roberd Tallisk is alive.”

I slid down onto the kitchen floor, kneeling, nearly falling. He had spoken quickly, almost cruelly; his words had hit me sure as a fist. I looked up at Loren and the hardness drained from his face; he kneeled down before me and grabbed at my hands.

“Etan? Etan, say something.”

I took my hands from his grip and laid them in my lap. They looked like a stranger’s hands, narrow and ink stained. “I searched everywhere.” My voice seemed to come from very far away, over the rush of my own blood and heart beating like the sea in my ears. “All the temples and crypts.”

“Not everywhere.”

I pulled myself back from the rushing sea in my head and forced myself to focus on General Loren. “Where is he?”

He stood, frowning, and dragged me to my feet. “He is in Ashen.”

My hands became fists. “
What?
”

“He killed a boy. Ran him through in front of witnesses.”

I shook my head. “No.”

“I know you care for him, but this chaos...it changed people, often for the worse.”

I closed my eyes. “What was his name? The boy he killed.”

“Symön Barrabar.”

Black fireworks sparked behind my eyes. I doubled over, making a harsh, wordless sound; the General backed away from me, flinching.

“A boy. Maybe sixteen.” I gasped the words out. “Symön—do you know where I last heard that name?”

The General looked at me with his grave eyes. I took a breath and stilled myself, and the tears rolled down my cheeks, scarred and whole alike.

“Symön is the
boy
who set our house aflame and shut us up to die, General Loren. He is the one who Roberd Tallisk believes killed me.”

Loren nodded, almost to himself. “Does that make his death permissible?”

The tears still rolled one by one and fell to the kitchen floor. “No,” I said finally. “No more than Count Karan’s. Does it free your conscience that his came by blade instead of poison?”

He bristled. “That isn’t—I wish—”

I cut him off. “
I
wish the dead still lived, General. And I wish I had not been burned. I wish that my house still stood, and that my best friend had not had to flee in darkness from your mobs. But what I wish most of all?” I looked up at him and wiped away my tears. “I wish to see my master.”

Chapter Sixty

They took me to the palace in a plush, old carriage, repainted a martial blue. I wore my best clothes and my hair was freshly combed. I could have been riding to a display, almost. A
first
display, judging from the rhythm of my heart. Only my scars and my unusual escort broke the illusion.

It had taken nearly a week for General Loren to arrange this. I had barely slept or eaten since he had first come to the Teinnes’ house. Only Doiran’s steady hand had kept me from storming Ashen myself—his steady hand and his quiet advice. We wrote to judges and clerks, using Deino Meret’s seal; as a master of his art, he had earned their ears. My evidence turned simple murder into vengeance; with a death price paid to Symön Barrabar’s kin, Tallisk would be free.

The year’s imprisonment that his crime required in addition to the death price, he had already served. A
year.
I could not believe it; I cried when I heard it.

Now I had arrived at last, and my every breath hurt like a blow. No one had told me how I would find him: whole or scarred, sane or mad. Whether he knew I lived, whether he knew I was coming for him, I did not know.

Loren had sent two soldiers to escort me—veterans with closed, serious faces. They had their own share of scars, old and fresh. There were guards at the palace gates, still in red: the old city watch had not been thrown out with their masters, though no one called them bloodguards anymore. They waved us through into the courtyard. We had to leave the carriage to head down the narrow, sloping cobblestone path to the dungeons below.

“Are you all right, sir?” one of the soldiers asked, and I could not help but smile. It was the first time that anyone had called me
sir.

“Fine,” I said. But I was trembling.

More guards stood at the heavy gates to Ashen, these in soldier blue. They checked our papers, stamped with the General’s seal, then searched me for weapons. Their hands were brisk and uncaring. I stared straight ahead. The doors were opened with a slow creak. The smell of the springs below the city hit me, sharp and all-encompassing. It was warm and damp; the walls were touched with mildew. Lamps burned behind wire cages in the wall, flickering with a strange, bluish light.

“In here,” one of my escorts said, and he guided me down a narrow corridor. I heard distant screams and the scrape of metal on rock. I was beginning to sweat. Down below, in the deepest cells, it must be near scalding, the very walls too hot to touch.

I thought of Isadel’s mother. How she had died here. If it were me—if I had landed in Ashen, instead of Tallisk—I knew I would be dead by now. The hot, damp air would have finished me in weeks.

He had been here a year.

They ushered me into a strange room: narrow, but long and high-ceilinged, with two doors opposite each other.

“This is the entryway. We must wait out here,” one of my escorts said. “Knock on the door when you are done. We’ll take you home.”

I nodded; the motion near dizzied me.

With a sympathetic look, he closed me in. I was alone. I looked up; there was a slit of light above, and a touch of fresh air cut the dank atmosphere. The room held a stone chair, a stone table. Wood would rot too soon here, I supposed. I took a seat; the stone felt strangely warm beneath me.

There was the metallic sound of keys turning in a lock, and then the door opposite me opened. A man entered. He was tall and stooped, with the veiny nose of a longtime drinker. His eyes passed over me and he grunted. “You must be here for the parolee.”

I stood up and bowed to him. “I am here for Roberd Tallisk, sir. Please, does he know I’m coming?”

He grunted again. “He knows he’s being released. That’s enough.”

“Please,” I said again. “How is he?”

He laughed, then—a thick and grating sound. “He’s alive. That’s enough.” He turned his head down the hall he’d come up from. “Bring up the parolee!”

I took a step back, out of the light, and turned my scars to face the wall. From the corner of my eye I saw two guards, hunched and burly, enter the room with their prisoner held between them.

“By order of the court,” the red-nosed man said in a rushed drone, “we release you, Roberd Tallisk. Restitution has been made. Do not err again.”

The guards shoved him forward and he stumbled, but did not fall. I held myself still, hands clenched. My nails pressed white lines of pain into my palms.

The guards left and shut the door. I barely saw them go.

Tallisk turned his face up to the bleary light. His hair had grown past his shoulders. He was pale and pared down, that I could tell from the corner of my eye. I wanted to turn and face him. I wanted to touch him, to make sure he was real. But fear held me still, in shadow and in profile.

“I dreamed,” he said, and his voice was rusty with long disuse, “that I was free. But you were in darkness, and I could not reach you.”

He staggered forward. I stepped back, flinching. The narrow room wavered through a teary haze.

“Etan?” He laughed hoarsely. “Are you Etan or am I mad?”

“You are not mad.” My voice came slow and halting.

He reached to me and this time I did not move; his left hand touched my scarred cheek. Two fingers—the first and second—had been truncated down to the middle knuckle, fingertips replaced by white, knotted scars.

“You live,” he breathed, and he pulled me close with clumsy strength. My cheek lay flush against his chest, and I felt the beat of his heart—a warm irregular drum. “You live,” he said again, and I called out his name; it echoed up the high walls and out into the daylight.

Chapter Sixty-One

Sun fell in narrow bands across Tallisk’s back; he had slept through the night and the morning. Noon warmed him now, and he stirred a little, not quite waking. I watched him from the doorway, not daring to enter.

We had stayed in rented rooms near to the palace. I had not wanted to take him to the Teinnes’ house; it was too full, too lively. He had spent a year in darkness with no company save the guards who brought his meals. He still flinched from the light and the noise of the world. Loren’s men had told me how they kept murderers in Ashen. Once a week they would take him up to one of those narrow rooms to stretch his legs and show him light. It seemed cruelty more than kindness, that one sliver of sun and air in a dark place.

He looked sallow and underfed; there was too little flesh on his frame. They had given him no combs or scissors for his hair, and it had grown in tangles, still a starless black.

He had not escaped without wounds. There were the foreshortened fingers of his left hand, and a spiraling scar on the wrist. His right hand was missing the two smallest fingers, and dead flesh had been cut away from its palm and his forearm, leaving them near-skeletal, all tendons and leathery skin.

My scars he had not seen, save those I couldn’t hide. We had slept in separate rooms and barely spoken. After General Loren’s soldiers had entered the narrow stone room, Tallisk had released me and moved like a ghost where they had led.

I wondered if he thought he still dreamed—if he expected to wake in darkness. I wondered how he would look at me when he knew himself awake.

With a slow groan, he turned onto his back. The familiar tattoos were all there, perfect and unmoving: the starburst at his collarbone, the weird faces on each shoulder, the cramped lines of writing around his neck. Only the blurred, elderly ink on his forearms had been touched by the fire. That, and his hands.

I bit my lip until I could no longer feel it under my teeth. I must have made a sound. Tallisk opened his eyes.

We watched each other silently for a long moment.

“I killed a man,” he said. “A boy.”

I nodded. “I know.”

“I had lost you.” He dragged himself half upright. “I woke in ash and I had lost you. I found my sword. I thought...I thought we were at war.”

With his every word I stepped closer to him, into the sunlight. He watched me with wolf eyes, hungry and wild.

“I looked for you. Hunted for you. Then I heard him. That
laugh.
” He held his hands up. “My hands. I didn’t notice they were burned. Not until after. After I had killed that boy.”

I crawled onto the bed and took his wounded hands in mine. He tried to pull away, but I held fast.

“
Look
at this,” he said. “Do you think I will ever hold a needle again?”

After a long, silent moment, I gently let his hands drop away. Slowly, button by button, I took off my shirt; with careful hesitation, I slid out of my trousers. My scars were exposed, every strange white inch of them, the ruin of his art before his eyes. Only a few curls of untouched greenery still remained, like weeds in an empty garden, still and dead.

“Look at
me
,” I said softly. “We have both been wounded, Roberd. What—what you made me... there is nothing left of it.” My breath caught in my throat at the words; a bitter fear rose in me like bile. What if he saw nothing
but
a ruin, this man who so loved beauty?

“Nothing left?” He laughed, a sound that seemed to pain him. “Is
that
what you think?” He reached out with his left hand then, to touch the flat white scars on my belly. I shuddered, and he pulled back. His eyes were dark. A corner of his mouth curled back over his teeth.

“This is my doing.” The softness of his voice was dangerous, a low growl before the kill. “Isadel was right. I should have sent you away.”

I blinked. The world became slow and clear; it was as if a god had brushed against me and given me, for a moment, a visionary’s sight.

I saw two futures laid out for us. In one, we would pretend we and the world had been unchanged by what had passed this year. That future, I thought, would be brief and bittersweet, its small joys finally swamped beneath grief for a life that never was. The other...I could not yet see its shape, or whether it was filled with joy or sorrow. I did not know whether it ended here, tonight, or in a shared ossuary long years from now. All I knew of it was its
possibility
—and that it had no room for the men we had been a year before.

So long I had lived on the edges between things. I was Gaelta and Keredy, rich and poor, canvas and artist, lover and whore. I had built a home there, on those boundaries. But here was only a choice, without room for compromise—and at least half of that choice lay in my hands.