The Hidden City (12 page)

He walked out, and heard something hit the counter heavily. Probably her fist.

 

It had to be tonight, he thought, as he inhaled. The slender stem of pipe was crooked in the corner of his mouth; pipe weed burned in orange embers, and he watched the smoke leave his lips. He sat on the floor of the largest of the three rooms, missing his furniture. He would have to get a desk. Another chair. The small table, he had taken with him.

Tonight, or never. She wasn't going to stay for much longer; even if she collapsed two blocks from the apartment, she was going to try to leave.

He had thought she might try, instead, to stay.To make a life here. She was such an odd child. Or perhaps, he thought, with a tinge of bitterness, she was too damn new to the streets.

Or she didn't trust him.

That, he could understand. There were whole weeks when he didn't trust himself, and she would not be the first person that he had disappointed bitterly in his long life. Nor, probably, the last, if it came to that.

She knocked at the closed door, and he rose to open it. Her hands were balanced beneath a large basket; she had cut bread, made sandwiches, sliced fruit. The waterskin hung over her left shoulder like a huge sack; everything about his life seemed designed, in that moment, to make her look smaller and weaker.

He gestured to the table, where the magestone lay exposed, and she marched past him, and put the basket down, mindful of its contents. Then she stood there, uncertain.

“Sit down,” he told her, motioning with the pipe.

She looked at it, and a smile, brief and slightly pained, changed the shape of her mouth; her angry defiance ebbed. She picked up the basket and brought it with her, placing it carefully between them.

“I have my Oma's temper,” she told him. It was obviously something she had heard often, in her childhood.

“Then it's a good thing I have no dishes. I imagine you would have thrown a couple.”

“At the wall.”

He nodded, as if this were normal.

She said, as she had said once before, “I like your pipe.”

The words were not wrapped in fever, but memory gilded them.

“Your father smoked?”

She shook her head. “My mother never liked pipes much. My Oma smoked, though.”

“Your Oma sounds like a remarkable character.”

She looked suspicious, and he could see her repeating the words to herself, sifting them for mockery. She came up with none, and nodded. Guileless, this child.

He took a sandwich out of the basket, and after he did, she followed suit. She ate slowly, watching him, her eyes dark in the room. “We never bought much fruit,” she told him, eyeing the contents of the basket with open suspicion.

He offered no response, and after a moment, she shrugged. “I try not to steal from people who need the money.” Clearly, the presence of fruit made him one of those people. He didn't bother to mention the gold. He was fairly certain she wouldn't touch it. But she was a child; he wasn't at all certain she wouldn't mention it. And he now lived in the thirty-fifth.

“I know. You told me. I've heard it before,” he added, “but in your case, I find myself believing it.” He stopped eating for a moment to put the pipe out.

She watched him.

The fever had earned him some leeway; she wasn't so wary as she had been. That would, no doubt, change.

“Jay,” he said quietly, “I have a few questions. I want you to answer them.”

She nodded.

“You gave me a warning, a few days ago.”

Nodded again.

“Why?”

She shrugged awkwardly and put the sandwich on the floor before her feet. He would have to buy plates. Or napkins. Or something.

“I didn't want to be in your debt,” she said at last. “And it was the only thing I could think of. To pay you off.”

He nodded. “How did you know that I would be followed?”

She winced and looked away. “I'm not—”

“I don't care what the answer
is
. I'm not a magisterian; I'm not your father. I will trust you not to lie to me. But whatever it is that you say, say it without fear; I only want the answer as you see it.”

“I'm not supposed to talk about it,” she told him, voice low. Her hands found her feet and she bent over them in a remarkable display of flexibility. It would have made him feel old, but he doubted that in his youth he would have been able to do the same.

“Your Oma told you this?”

She shook her head. “My mother.”

“And your father?”

“I don't think he—” She looked at Rath, and then away. He guessed, correctly, that she would do a lot of that before he'd finished. “He never talked about it.”

“Why?”

“It didn't matter.” There was a curious flatness to the words. Like the flatness of a door that had been slammed shut, and locked for good measure. Rath had doors like that; he let it be. “It didn't matter, to him.”

“What did your Oma say?”

“She called it—she said it was—” Jewel shrugged, and shoved her hair out of her eyes. It was a nervous habit, he realized, because there was very little hair in her eyes. “Thunder and lightning.”

He frowned a moment, assessing the words. “You mean because lightning comes before thunder?”

She nodded. “I think so.” She wasn't going to eat.

Not while he talked. He cursed curiosity and necessity, because he had no intention of stopping. “Did you often . . . see things? True things?”

She met his gaze, held it, examining him. Looking, he realized, for signs of mockery. He was deliberate and careful; he offered none.

“I saw a dog die, once. With my mother.”

“Before it died?”

She nodded. “My mother couldn't even see the dog. And after, when we found him dead, she was upset. She told me—she told me that I was never to speak about it.”

“Why?”

“She thought I—she thought people would blame me.”

“Your mother—did she grow up in Averalaan? Was she born here?”

Jewel frowned. “I . . . I don't think she was born here,” she said at last. “Why?”

“Because there are no witch hunts in Averalaan,” he replied. “People might think you strange, but they wouldn't—” He stopped himself. The god-born, people knew and trusted. The fortune-tellers that cropped up like boils during any festival season of note in the city, people considered charlatans. At least publicly. Privately, they sought them out, exposing hands for their inspection, dumping damp tea leaves, shaking canisters of old bones—probably chicken bones, he thought bitterly. One or two of the fortune-tellers were expensive; they had crystal balls, and possibly some minor mage-talent that they had managed to develop without the tutelage of the Order of Knowledge. But they spoke in the pleasant riddles most likely to part people from considerable sums of money, and they told them more or less what they already knew, adding, at the end, what they
wanted
to hear.

Rath had visited them on a lark when he had been a younger man. A much younger man.

Experience had taught him many things about people, and one of them, time and again: no one liked to listen to something they didn't
want
to hear. Not about the future, if it involved them.

“Let me rephrase that,” he said at length. “People couldn't blame you for whatever it is that you see.”

“My mother—”

“Your mother was a superstitious woman.”

She bristled.

“I'm sorry. I did not know your mother. It may be that she was worried about you; that she wanted to make sure you were safe.”

This comforted Jewel enough that her eyes lost that spark that spoke of incipient rage.

“But . . .what you told me was true. Is it always that way?”

“What way?”

“True?”

She shrugged and looked away. Ill at ease. “I don't know,” she said at last.

Something occurred to him. “The first day we met—”

She shrank in, her shoulders curling down.

“You knew that I would try to cut your hand.”

She swallowed.

“Can you always do that?”

And shook her head. “No.” Her voice was a little girl voice.

“What you told me—did you decide to look?”

She shook her head again, looking even more miserable.

“So you can't do it on command.”

“On command?”

“Whenever you want.”

“I
never
want,” she said, the words low and intense. “You don't know what it's like—”

He held up a hand, to forestall the words.

But she shook her head. “You can't know what it's like. To tell people things. To have them not
listen
. To watch them go away and die forever.”

He didn't have the heart to correct her usage of “die” and “forever.” He waited a beat, and then said, as casually as he knew how, “So you can see when people die?”

“No.”

“But you just said—”

“I can't see it,” she continued, as if the words were burning the inside of her throat, her mouth. “I can't always see it.” She ran her hands through her hair and shoved it to one side. “Only sometimes. Sometimes I can see it.”

“When?”

“I don't know,” she said bitterly. “It just happens. Sometimes I just see it. I can look at you, and I can see you dead. It doesn't last,” she added. “And I can't just call it back. And sometimes I
don't want to look
.”

He could well imagine.

“I know if it's going to happen to
me,
” she added, and there was more bitterness in the phrase than in any other he had ever heard her utter.

She waited. Was waiting, he realized, for his reaction. As if she knew what it would be.

He picked up the emptied pipe and went through the motions of filling it, not because he wanted to smoke—although in truth, he didn't mind—but because he sensed that this would set her at ease. Inasmuch as she could be.

“But I don't see it, not always, when it happens to other people. Not even the people I care about. I
know
when they're dead,” she added bitterly. “I know, then. But sometimes, not even then.”

“So.”

“It's worse when I'm dreaming,” she added, and at this, she shuddered. “I see things, and I
know
they're true, but I
don't understand them
.” She swallowed. “Sometimes my Oma would try to help me. Sometimes she would tell me it was just a nightmare. I knew it wasn't,” she added. “But it didn't matter.

“Sometimes,” she added softly, “I know when something bad is going to happen to me—and it doesn't matter then either. I can't get away.” Her eyes closed, pale lids. He wanted to touch her then, but he thought if he did, he would never let her go.

And neither of them would be free.

“Eat,” he told her, instead, and far more gruffly than he had intended.

Chapter Four

THE TALENT-BORN.

Rath waited until Jewel had finished eating. This, combined with the earlier foolishness of cleaning the kitchen—which still inexplicably enraged him—had exhausted her, and she was nodding off, her legs crossed, her hands barely able to keep her head and shoulders off the ground. He told her to go to her room, and she nodded listlessly, failing to notice—as Rath had—that he had called it hers.

But although she agreed in principle, she had had some difficulty in practice, and in the end, he had scooped her up off the ground and carried her there. In the dark, punctuated by his pipe's scant light, he had tucked her in.

“Promise,” he told her softly, “that you'll stay in bed.”

“Rath—”

“Promise that you won't leave without saying good-bye. In person. I don't want a letter—you'll make a mess if you try to find ink, added to which, I don't have enough paper, and I hate to lose it when words will do.”

“My Oma said—”

“I
know
what your Oma said, Jay. You told me, remember?”

But she clearly didn't. The fever had taken much, hidden much. “I can't,” she said forlornly.

“You can, or I won't leave.”

“Ever?”

“Ever.”

She considered this for a moment, a sleepy drawn-out moment, and then she whispered the promise. It was the last thing she said before sleep overtook her.

 

Bard-born. Mage-born. Healer-born. Maker-born. These were the common talents; one could not live in a city as cosmopolitan as Averalaan and fail to at least have brushes with men and women who were born with these gifts. Any of the four, if discovered, could lead to prosperity and safety.