Thirty-Three

B E T R A Y E R

 

They escaped by the eastern watchtower, leaping and hopping along the rooftops to cross the city. They felled a pair of watchmen and lowered themselves partway down the twenty-foot drop with a cart rope before climbing the rest of the way, digging and clawing into the narrow sills of the stonework like apes and scampering away into the Bulapa Lake forest to wait and rest in silence, nothing to say, too much to say, their presences surreal to one another. Familiar strangers.

“You never liked Yannick,” Neythan said eventually, breaking the lull. They were both lying on the grass, face up beside a clutch of shrubs and bracken, staring at the blue-green gloaming overhead. He said it as much to spoil the silence as anything. Nearly two months of wishing her dead, it made any shared quiet, at least for now, feel itchy.

“I didn’t trust him.” She said it calmly, as though the words were a discovery, floating up from some great distance within her she’d only just realized was there. “And with good reason it turns out,” she added.

“So you say.”

“Yes, so I say. But it’s funny how quickly a blade at your throat can help you make your mind up about someone.”

“And that’s what you saw, Yannick with his dagger at your neck.”

“Yes. That is what I saw.”

Neythan didn’t answer. They stared at the sky. The leaves of the forest shivered in the breeze like the sound of pouring rice. Part of him couldn’t believe they were lying here like this, speaking, and not engaged in mortal combat. For weeks he’d foreseen nothing else.

“The strange thing,” Arianna said, her words still floating, calm and deadpan, “was afterward I liked him more… I mean just sitting there like that at breakfast, the morning we left Ilysia, same as always, quiet as always, and all the while plotting how best to kill me… You think about that afterward, you know. You wonder, was he thinking of it then, killing me? When we ate? When he went to his bloodtree? When he greeted me?”

A long cloud was drawing slowly along the sky above them in the shape of a hare.

Arianna marked his silence. “You blame me,” she said.

Neythan thought about it. “He is dead. You are alive.”

“You’d rather it the other way around?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You think me a liar.”

“I think you could’ve been mistaken.”

Arianna laughed. “You see, that’s the problem with you, Neythan. You do not see things as they are, you see them as you’d like them to be. I tell you Yannick tried to kill me, you say I must be mistaken.”

“He could have been confused.”

“No, Neythan. He was not. It was his decree.”

“He actually said that.”

“Yes. The only time I hear him speak and it’s so he can tell me that killing me is his decree. He told me as I tried to wrestle the blade from him. It was as though he was trying to convince me to let him do it – it’s my decree, it is the will of the elders. As though that should make me willing to die… Well. I am not willing.”

“If that’s true, then he was not at fault.”

Arianna sat up and looked at him. “For trying to kill me?”

“He had no choice.”

“There’s always a choice, Neythan.”

“What would you have done, had the decree been yours?”

“What would you?”

Neythan thought about it.

“See?” Arianna said. “You, Josef, Yannick – you’re each the same that way. That’s why I didn’t wake you.”

“Because you didn’t trust me.”

She didn’t answer. He could hear her getting up, moving around. He kept watching the cloud. It was more the shape of a house now.

“You used to trust me,” he said. And there it was, that thing they never spoke of, the thing that years ago had changed everything between them. He could feel its gravity opening to them in the silence.

Arianna’s movements slowed.

Neythan sat up and looked at her. She was tearing at the hem of her dress; stale sweat steaming from her shiny thighs. It was getting cooler, and darker. She looked up and saw him watching, waiting for an answer.

“Your uncle used to trust you too,” was all she said, and let the silence do the rest.

Neythan, to this day, could never fathom why Uncle Sol told him the things he did: his visions, his beliefs about the Brotherhood. Neythan had been just a boy. How could he know that telling, when asked, of the things his uncle shared would also mean his uncle’s exile? How could he know that it would be his own divulgences that would banish his only remaining bloodkin?

“I loved Master Sol as a father,” Arianna said. “He was the only one who understood me. You knew that. And then he was gone. Because of you.”

“It wasn’t my fault.”

“Then whose fault was it?”

“He should never have told me the things he did.”

“He told you because he trusted you. Like I trusted you. But you chose to betray him. You chose to tell the elders.”

“They came to me. They demanded the truth. I was a child. What was I to do?”

“Lie, Neythan.”

“It was forbidden.”

“Just as it is forbidden to turn our swords on one another, and yet here we are. Yannick did not hesitate, and neither did the elders, to turn their swords on me.”

She was right. Truth was he’d always known she was right. He’d known it when she changed toward him those years ago, making herself a stranger to him, breaking the furtive bond they’d known, that nameless thing forever marked by that one night of words unspoken by the Great Dry Lake. It was then Neythan discovered it was not just his uncle he’d unwittingly exiled, but also himself. The only two people able to dent the solitude he’d known since Father and Mother died were now gone from him, one by the Brotherhood’s edict and the other by her disgust at his part in it. Everything changed from then. Afterward, sometimes, they would bicker, they would banter, but they would never talk, not like they had that night with their feet dangling above the Dry Lake, as though they were the last ones left in the world, as though possessors of some shared secret only they could understand.

“Look.”

Arianna was brandishing her palm. She’d been using the rag she’d torn from her dress to wipe it.

“That’s where I caught Yannick’s blade,” she said. “When he tried to slit my throat as I slept.”

Neythan looked at the thin line of rouged, shiny flesh that crossed her palm.

“It’s healed well now, but it wasn’t easy to hide. The apothecaries in Hanesda ask a fortune… Touch it.”

Neythan did, and then looked up at her. She held his gaze.

“You see?” she said. “I am not lying. I was not mistaken.” She sat back on her haunches, still watching him. “We’ve no kin but each other now.” Her eyes were staring into his, waiting for him to acknowledge the truth she’d always wanted him to, the truth he’d always resisted. “The Shedaím are not our kin,” she said. “They never were. The Brotherhood is not true.”

Neythan, after a long pause, nodded.

Arianna continued to watch him, then rose from squatting beside him and stepped away, sitting down again by the bushes.

“I never blamed you, Neythan,” she said quietly as she tied the rag around a wound on her calf. “For your uncle, I mean… It’s just, I didn’t trust you anymore. I couldn’t.”

“And what about now?”

She glanced at him, and then away through the forest trees, toward the city in the distance where the cityguard and watchmen were no doubt still seeking them. “Now?” She shrugged, wry smile. “The elders seek my life, and you’re the only one who knows the truth of it. And you’ve chosen to hear my side, in spite of everything. What right have I to not trust you now?”

“I suppose that will have to do.”

Their tacit covenant hung in the quiet between them for a moment before she paused and turned to look back at him again. “Why have you chosen to hear my side?”

The forest was beginning to chill further. The sun had receded toward the horizon, peeping out from behind the city watchtowers. Neythan let out a long sigh and decided. “The Watcher you spoke of… I have seen one too.”

She stared at him, then smiled, then laughed. “Is that so?”

“Yes. It is… I need you to tell me what she said to you.”

“‘She…’” Arianna’s smile faded. “You have seen her.”

“Was she the reason you were in Hanesda?”

“Yes… Yes.” She shuffled on her seat to face him now, newly fascinated, excited even. “She visited me, in my dreams… I thought I was going mad but when she spoke to me that night in Godswell, told me of what Yannick was going to do, that I needed to wake up… after seeing the truth of what she said I knew it wasn’t madness… And so I went to the place she called me, to a waterfall. That’s when she told me.”

“Told you what?”

“That I’d find the answers in Hanesda. She told me what to do. She provided everything. The clothes. Silver. Everything. And then… took me there.”

“Took you.”

“Yes.”

“To Hanesda.”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. She showed me… it was like a door. When I stepped through to the other side I was by the main road, a mile from Hanesda. I could see the city before me…”

Neythan’s head wagged slowly.

“She did not do the same for you?”

“No. She did not. She spoke riddles. I cannot remember half of them. She told me where to find you.”

Arianna nodded thoughtfully to herself.

“What else did she say?” Neythan asked.

“That was all. When I came to the city I made it my aim to meet the sharíf, to try and discover his involvement, why my death had been ordered.”

“And did you?”

“No… I don’t know… I don’t think he knows anything. I tried befriending him, prompting him, seeing how he’d respond. But he is as he appears.”

“What of those around him, his counsellors, his courtiers?”

“His chamberlain, Elias. He was different. He knew things. He was not like the sharíf. He is not as he appears at all. I’d catch him watching me sometimes. I think he knew I wasn’t as I appeared too. So I began to watch him back, just little things, slipping into his bedchamber when he wasn’t there, looking around. His letters and so forth. After a while I began to follow him, sometimes out of the palace. Sometimes I’d see him meeting people – judges, governors, vassals. Just him. A chamberlain. They’d come to the city, visit with the sharíf awhile, eat with him, then later, when I followed Elias, I’d find them meeting with him in a cornerhouse or grove, or often in the old man’s vineyard or some other place. They’d meet so long I’d have to leave for fear of being missed from the palace.”

Neythan’s turn to nod and think.

Arianna looked at the grass again, trying to remember anything else. She laughed to herself.

“What?”

“Strangest thing was… well… one night I followed him. I’d thought he might meet a vassal from Hikramesh who’d visited with the sharíf the day before. So I follow him. He goes along toward the city baths where his cornerhouse is. I’m expecting him to stop there, as is his custom when meeting these people, but he doesn’t. He continues on to the east quarter and stops at a brothel instead, a whorehouse… I mean, the man is old, Neythan. I was told he was once cupbearer to Sharíf Kosyatin. He must be at least ninety years. Maybe older. You’d not think him… well… able… What? I’m just being honest. At that age you don’t think a man can–”

“No. It’s not that. The elder.”

“What elder?”

Neythan stared hard at the ground. “I was in Hanesda, during a new moon. I went to a brothel.”

“You went to a brothel?”

“It wasn’t like that. I was… Just listen. One of the harlots there told me she’d seen an elder once.”

“What would a harlot know of elders?”

“No, I mean she saw a woman, but an old woman, well aged, frail, and blind, but like one who could see. The way she moved, the girl said, was like one who could see. She said that had she not seen the woman’s eyes for herself she’d have not thought her blind.”

Arianna understood. “Elder Safít?”

“She described her likeness, at least from what I can remember. I’d taken wine.”

“You’d taken wine? What’s happened to you? What else have you been up to?”

“I had no choice… I… Look. Never mind that. Think about what I am saying. For Safít to depart Ilysia is forbidden. She is Eye to the Brotherhood, sworn to abide the temple. To consort with anyone other than Shedaím would defile her visions. For her to be in Hanesda, and in a brothel of all places…”

“She’d never go to such a place. No Shedaím would. Apart from you, it seems.”

“But that is what any Shedaím would know and say. What better place to keep yourself from being seen by those of the Brotherhood? What better place would there be to meet with someone you’d not want it known you’d met?”

“Elias. The chamberlain.”

“Exactly. Elias.”

“But why would they meet?”

“I don’t know.”

“So we take him? Question him?”

“We’ve stirred a hornets’ nest now. He’ll be at the sharíf’s side, right at the heart of it.”

“So, what then?”

“Ilysia,” Neythan said. “We go to Ilysia.”

“You’ve just said you think it likely Safít has met with a member of the sharíf’s house, a forbidden act. And I’ve just told you Yannick’s decree to kill me was given by the elders. And you want us to go to Ilysia? More peril lies there than here.”

“No. The Shedaím hunt us now. There will be no Brothers there.”

“What do you mean, they hunt us?”

Neythan paused. “Yannick is not the only Shedaím to have fallen. There have been others.”

“What others? How many?”

“I don’t know. Many, I think. Maybe six. Seven perhaps.”

“Seven? How?”

“I don’t know.”

“And they think it is us? The Brotherhood. They think we could do that?”

“Yes… I thought you had done it.”

“But I have been here.”

“Yes, I know. I believe you. That’s the problem.”

“And now believing me is a problem?”

“Yes… No. You don’t understand. All this time I’d thought it was you. I didn’t have to think of how or by what means. I’d seen what you did to Yannick. It made sense to think you were somehow finding the others and doing the same. That you’re not means there’s some other who is. Some other hunting Shedaím, hunting us, slaying Brothers one by one.”

Arianna sat there, taking it in. She stood again, pacing around the small clearing where they’d been sitting. And then, abruptly, she shrugged. “You know what? I don’t care. The Shedaím have made themselves my enemy. If anything, this heretic is my friend.”

Neythan shook his head. “That’s just it. I’m not so certain it is a heretic.”

She stopped pacing and faced him. “There’s none but a Brother who’d be able to do what you say has been done, Neythan. If there was, we’d know. The Shedaím would know.”

“Perhaps they do.”

“If that’s true, then why hunt us?”

“I don’t know. Why decree for Yannick to kill you?”

Arianna thought about it. None of it made sense.

Neythan looked at the sky. The house-shaped cloud had passed on. “It will be dark soon. We’ll need a fire to sleep by.”

“Sleep? Here?”

“We can’t leave yet.”

“Why not? They will soon discover we’re not in the city. I’d rather not be here when they do.”

“They will think us far away by then. They won’t hunt us here in the forest.”

“Why take the chance?”

“We need to wait for someone.”

“Who?”

“A friend. He’s still inside. We need to wait until they open the gates again. He’ll know I’m waiting for him.”

“You told him that?”

“No. But he’ll know.”

Arianna stared at him.

“We need to wait for him.”

“Fine,” she said finally. “One night.”

“And then we go to Ilysia.”

Arianna’s look was dubious.

“There will be no fruit in seeking Elias,” Neythan said. “He and the sharíf will be surrounded by an army after today, and there is no guarantee of answers with him even if he were not. Ilysia is where we will find the elders. It is where we will learn the truth.”

“And you would enter the temple?”

“I will,” Neythan said. He rose to his feet and went toward the fringes of the clearing and began to forage for firewood.

Arianna just looked at him. “You’ve changed.” Which made Neythan stop and look back at her. “I think I like you better this way,” she said.

Neythan gave a brief uncertain smile.

Arianna just stood there appraising him, and then turned to the thickets to gather more wood. Neythan did likewise.