As the inn door swung shut, Terricel paused, his eyes straining to adjust to the dimness. The wooden walls and rafter beams were smoky-dark, lit only by the narrow windows. The smoldering embers in the patch-stone fireplace added a thin blue smoke, almost masking the smell of stale beer. Benches and trestle tables filled the low-ceilinged room, many of them occupied. Terricel made out farmers and herders in their sheepskin jackets and rough-spun wool breeches over knitted leggings, a sharp contrast to the sprinkling of travelers in finely-woven cloaks and high riding boots. A few of the locals glanced his way before returning to their drinking. Several of the tables had games of cards or dice going.
Kardith pushed past Terricel toward the bar, which was no more than another table covered with a cloth, separating a cabinet of kegs and bottles of various green and amber liquids from the rest of the room. Behind it stood a woman in a leather apron, her sleeves rolled up to reveal muscular forearms, her gray-streaked hair slicked back and anchored with a long tassel-headed stick.
“I’m sorry, Ranger, there’s just the one room. We can bring a cot in for...” she glanced fleetingly at Terricel, “or he can sleep down here by the fire. Either way, we’ll throw in the private bath, clear.”
“One room,” Kardith said, shrugging.
The inn-woman nodded. “You’ll have a drink or two first, won’t you? Relax in the common room after a long day’s journey?”
The smells of the ale and food made Terricel’s mouth water. The noon meal of bread and cheese, eaten while the horses watered at a farmer’s stock station, had been a long time ago, and on top of no breakfast. His stomach rumbled and the muscles in his thighs began trembling.
“I’ve little taste for company tonight,” Kardith remarked, as if discussing the weather. She rubbed the side of her nose. “Two meals, in my room. Meat if you’ve got it.”
“But of course, what would you think of us, not to have meat for our hungry guests? And a jar of our best ale?”
“No yak-piss, just water.”
The woman’s mouth assumed the shape of an “O”. She gestured to a younger woman standing by the staircase, who bobbed her head and disappeared into the lightless bowels of the inn. Then she fished into one of her capacious leather pockets, extracted a key on a loop of multicolored twine and handed it to Kardith.
Terricel trudged up the bare wooden stairs after Kardith. His legs felt so heavy he could hardly lift them, but the tremors stopped as long as he kept moving. There seemed to be an unreasonable number of steps to the second flight, each one steeper and farther from the warmth and cheer below. It wouldn’t have been so terrible to have some ale and something to eat first, would it?
Yet it seemed to him that Kardith had deliberately avoided lingering below, just as she’d suggested to the innkeep that he, Terricel, was a person of no account, to be safely ignored. As he dragged one foot after the other up the stairs, he thought dispiritedly that he’d probably concocted the idea from his own bone-tiredness and the paranoia he’d absorbed like mother’s milk from Esmelda.
Whatever was going on, Kardith clearly assumed he’d follow her lead in dealing with it. All day long she’d been testing him, pounding away at his resolve, giving every indication that the most he could expect from her was scornful silence. Maybe how she’d just treated him was no more than a carefully studied insult. But maybe she was giving him a chance. That was all, just a chance. An honest chance, perhaps the first in his whole life.
Terricel hitched his travel pack over his shoulder, gritted his teeth, and kept climbing.
The room was the size of a closet, hardly big enough to hold the narrow bed, a rickety-looking cot, two straight-backed chairs, and napkin-sized table on which stood a decrepit but functional lamp. It was an inner room with no outside windows, but well-aired. The ale might be yak-piss, as Kardith said, but the chambermaid knew her business. Towels lay neatly folded on the bed, along with a block of yellowish sheep-tallow soap, and the wood floor still bore damp traces of its last scrubbing. Ocher paper covered the walls, the pattern long since scoured off. At the foot of the bed was another door, presumably to the private bath.
Kardith put down her saddlebags, examined the inner door and bathroom beyond to make sure there was no other way into the room besides the outer door. This she opened and closed several times, testing the hinges and the bar latch.
“Hunh! They call this a lock?” She closed the outer door, wedged one of the straight-backed chairs against it, sat down on the other chair, and drew her long-knife.
Terricel stared at the knife in fascination. He’d never seen a blade like that close up, the metal a rippling blue-white, the hilt wrapped in narrow leather strips patterned like a head of ripened wheat. It looked well worn, as if it bore the permanent impression of her hand.
The blade flashed, and for a moment he was back in the plaza, his head filled with the smell of blood. As he remembered, his mouth turned dry. He knelt, Gaylinn’s head and shoulders across his knees, holding her as she stiffened and went limp.
Gaylinn... In a few days, there would be a funeral for her, along with the rest of the riot victims. They would dig up another paving stone and plant another tree, facing the one on Pateros’s grave. Her family would be there, come all the way from Raimuth at the western branching of the Vision River. They’d stand together in the plaza, holding each other, her father with his bushy black eyebrows and printer’s hands, her mother with tears streaking the faded beauty of her face, the older brother who’d been the first to see the genius in her art, all her other brothers and sisters. If he were there, he would stand with them and they would enfold him as if he were one of them, simply because Gaylinn had once loved him.
He remembered one morning, walking along the banks of the Serenity, remembered the smell of the curling fog, the water as glassy as if it were covered with a sheen of oil, the bells tolling in the distance. Gaylinn’s hand felt warm and strong in his. They’d been lovers for only a little while and her nearness still had the power to shake him. He ached with longing to give her something secret of himself. There was one thing, all his, that Esmelda had never found out about.
“What are you thinking, so grim, so serious?” Gaylinn had laughed.
“When I was little,” he began slowly, “I used to tell myself stories. About the usual things kids imagine, but also...sometimes...they were about my father. I never knew him. I was just a baby when he died.”
“Tell me,” she said.
Some twisted thing inside let go and out flooded the vision, as vivid as when it had first come to him. “I’m floating in the middle of a warm, yellow light. Candlelight. The smell is so sweet it fills my head. In the corner there’s a bed. I can’t see it clearly, but I’m moving toward it, closer and closer. I can see the blanket I’m wrapped in, white with a flower pattern...and now I see that on the bed there’s a man. His face is red and dark, as if the light doesn’t reach that far. He reaches up and touches my head. His hand is hot, it’s shaking. He’s...I don’t know. I couldn’t have...have remembered him, could I?”
Gaylinn put her arms around him. Her hair smelled like dayflowers. “It’s the heart that sees these things, not the mind.”
Remembering, he thought of the painting she’d done of him, her master’s-work. Of the paintings she would never finish now.
He slumped to the cot, letting the travel pack slide to the floor. The pad made rustling noises under him and smelled like dried flowers. Straw, probably. He was so tired he didn’t care if he had to sleep on the floor.
Kardith, on the other hand, looked ready to jump the first person who opened the door. She laid the long-knife across her thighs, her fingertips a hair’s breadth above it.
Terricel lifted his head and looked from the naked blade to the barricaded door. “Are you always this...suspicious?”
“Mmm. Could just be a coincidence.”
His adrenalin level took a sudden lurch, as if he’d been shoved bodily through the Starhall doors and all the eerie twistedness of the place flooded through him. “What coincidence?”
“Maybe nothing.” She shrugged. Her hands didn’t move.
“My mother dumps batshit like that,” he said with sudden passion. “Nothing but hints and maybes. Who am I going to tell your secrets to, my gods-damned horse?”
Kardith’s brows drew together, shadowing her eyes. “It’s not you I don’t trust, Terris, it’s me.”
“But you — you’re a Ranger.” He shifted forward on the cot. “You saw the man who killed Pateros — you knew it was going to happen. I heard you shouting. I saw you running across the plaza. No one else even noticed, but you did. You knew.”
“That doesn’t count. Nothing counts, not even regret, nothing except that I was too late to stop him.”
Something in her voice stung him, bleak and pungent like an echo of some long-buried sorrow.
“There wasn’t anything you could have done,” he said.
He half-expected her to curse him, tell him he didn’t know anything about it, but she said nothing. She sat motionless, her eyes clouding over as if focused on something far away. Then her face hardened again.
“If I had any sense, I’d say I was too damned jumpy for my own good, seeing connections where there aren’t any,” she said. “But the man on the black horse — he was sitting there in the common room. Right where he could watch who came through the door.”
“Black horse, the one who passed us earlier? You think he could be following us?”
Following us? Or following me? Who could possibly care where he was?
Esme? Terricel’s stomach clenched at the thought. She knew where he’d gone. Would she really send someone to keep an eye on him, like a glorified nursemaid? Or was she watching to see who else took an interest in his activities?
Montborne? Had he found out about Kardith’s attempt to go around his orders? Was it Kardith who was being followed, and not him at all?
Someone else, for some entirely different reason?
“H-how can you be sure?” he stammered.
“I can’t. Maybe there’s not another inn he can reach tonight.” Kardith curled her fingers around the hilt and got to her feet. “If he’s innocent, it doesn’t matter. I have no quarrel with him until he sticks his nose over that doorsill.”
Kardith slipped the long-knife back into its sheath on her thigh and Terricel thought crossing her might well be the last thing the poor fellow did, whatever his intentions.
“Enough.” She jerked her chin toward the tub beyond the inner door. “Go get your bath.”
The pump drawing the hot water from the underground springs creaked and wheezed as it filled the porcelain-lined iron tub. The tub was too short to do more than sit in but deep enough to fill to shoulder level.
Terricel undressed slowly, leaving his clothing in an untidy heap. He was glad there was no one to witness the gyrations needed to extract his legs from his pants. Slowly, one foot and then the other, he eased into the steaming water. There was a faint metallic odor, probably from naturally-occurring mineral salts. The warmth sent waves of relaxation through his aching muscles. He flexed his ankles and then his knees, working the stiffness out. Angry red weals marked the insides of his thighs where the saddle leather had rubbed. His sitting bones were twin lumps of excruciating sensitivity. He tried not to think about mounting up the next morning.
He startled awake from a drowse when Kardith poked her head in and said, “Get out before you fall asleep and drown.” He floundered in the tub, grabbing for a towel to cover himself, but she’d already slammed the door shut.
Later he sat on the cot, dressed in his clean change of clothing and finishing what Kardith had left of the savory meat pie.
Kardith emerged from her own bath, wearing the voluminous, ankle-length robe supplied by the inn. She’d wrapped her hair in a towel. Her cheeks were soft and flushed from the warmth, her bare toes pink like a child’s. She rummaged in her saddlebags, took out a comb and a small leather bottle, and tossed the bottle on Terricel’s cot.
“Use that on your saddle sores.” She sat cross-legged on the narrow bed, her back to him, and began rubbing her hair dry.
Terricel put the tray on the floor and unscrewed the cap of the bottle. The contents gave off a pleasantly astringent smell. With a glance back at her, he eased his pants down to his calves and began applying it along the swollen reddish areas. On first contact, the thin brownish liquid felt cool, building to a fiery warmth that just as quickly faded, leaving a slight numbness. He clenched his teeth and kept smearing.
“You did okay,” Kardith said over her shoulder. “Considering.”
“You were testing me.”
“The harder it is now, the more chance you’ll have later.”
Terricel pulled up his pants and turned around. Kardith was yanking at her tangled curls, her back still to him. “You don’t say no to a bed and a decent meal,” he said.
“There’ll be times enough to go without.”
Terricel nibbled a leftover bit of pastry crust. He thought of Aviyya on the Ridge all these years, fighting northers, “going without.” What did he know about that life? What did he know about her, for that matter? She was no longer the child who’d played adventures with him in the big lonely house or the teenager screaming rebellion at Esmelda.
Perhaps it was no more than a spark of his imagination, seeing her face streaked with blood and dirt, hearing her pulse hammering through his own chest. Seeing her turn toward him for the briefest instant, as if sensing his presence.
He blinked, all traces of the image gone. Kardith was staring at him, the hand holding the comb paused above her head. He made an apologetic gesture. “I was thinking of Avi, wondering what she’s like now. I was only nine when she left. I remember her the way a child remembers, but it’s my real sister — the woman she’s become now — that I’m going after.”
“I misjudged you, then.” Kardith put down her comb. “I thought you just wanted to get out from under your bitch mother.”
Terricel flinched as if she’d struck him. “As if I didn’t care what happened to Avi! As if...as if...”
He couldn’t go on. The truth was, he thought savagely, she was right. For all his fine words, Aviyya was no more than a boyhood memory and a vision he could just as well have invented, like the stories about his father. The truth was, all his life he’d been looking for something that was his, truly his, and wherever he’d looked he’d found Esmelda’s shadow. Now, when he could stand it no longer, when Gaylinn was gone and Laureal City a crucible, his academic career, whatever there was of it in the first place, finished, now he’d finally found something Esmelda wouldn’t do, a place she couldn’t go. It could be Avi or anyone, alive or dead. What difference did it make if it got him out of her clutches?
It makes a difference. Avi is alive, and there is a bond between us....
“If I am running away,” he said slowly, “or if I don’t know what the hell it is I want, isn’t it better I’m trying to find Avi, rather than getting into drunken fights at The Elk Pass every night? Whatever’s happened to her, whatever she’s become, she’s still my sister. There are ways we understand each other, things we’ve been through together. Don’t you see? No one else can know what it was like, growing up with Esme. Or why Avi had to leave, why I — why I have to leave.”
“That’s something Avi would’ve said.” Kardith’s amber eyes had gone dark and opaque. “If you didn’t love her, too, I would hate you for being so like her.”