“It’s done now.”
Alf did not glance back at Thea, who walked behind him still along the lighted ridge of the Middle Way. She had spoken in her own voice; a long stride brought her level with him and revealed her as herself, glaring fiercely at him. “The City has a new Emperor,” she said with more than a touch of sharpness.
“I know. The storm has broken; I can think again.” Alf halted and set Nikki down. The child stood unmoving, great-eyed with the wonder and the terror of all he had seen that night; as a wagon rattled past he started, reaching instinctively for Alf’s hand.
It shakes, he said in his mind. It hits the bottoms of my feet.
Safe in Alf’s grip, he surveyed this new and frightening world.
How ever did you manage to follow Alf so far?
He looked up at Thea. She frightened him no more than Alf did, for all her pretense of fierceness. I was busy, he answered her. I was following. I had to keep him from feeling me. But the people got to be too many and too—too pushing.
It’s a miracle you didn’t get trampled.
He shook his head. Not that kind of pushing. That wasn’t hard to get out of at all. But they were thinking so much. So many and so much and in so many places at once.
Thinking? Alf dropped to his knees, heedless of any who passed, and searched Nikki’s face with eyes gone slightly wild. You heard them thinking?
“That’s not the worst of it,” Thea broke in upon Nikki’s assent. “Humans can do that easily enough if they have to. It’s the least of our powers. But how did a human child manage to shield his mind from you for as long as he did?”
“I was preoccupied,” Alf said.
Thea made a sound that was neither delicate nor feminine. “You’re not a tenth as inept with your power as you want me to think, little Brother. He shielded from you. Which is something even I was far from skilled at when I was five years old.”
Nikki watched their faces. He could follow the thoughts behind their words, but he could not understand what they meant. They were excited and angry and puzzled and perhaps a little afraid, staring at him with eyes that were like no one else’s and looking up to glare at one another.
He reached for Thea’s hand. It was cold and tense. Carefully, covering up his thought with not-thinking, he brought their two hands together. They had clasped before they knew it, the glares turned to frank amazement.
“He did it again,” Thea said. “But he’s not one of us!”
“Are you sure of that?” demanded Alf.
“He’s human,” she said with certainty. “Do you realize what this means?”
Alf rose abruptly, letting go her hand as if it burned him. “I realize that we are in the middle of the main thoroughfare of Constantinople. And it’s begun to rain. Come, Nikephoros.”
Thea drew breath to snap at him. But Nikki shivered and sneezed. She took the hand Alf had not seized, and spread her cloak over the small cold body. Alf moved to do the same. They checked, eye flashing to meet eye; and relaxed all at once, advancing in step with Nikki warmly content between them.
o0o
Nikki accepted his punishment with new-won fortitude: abrupt separation from the two who had brought him home, a bath at Corinna’s hands, a bite or two to eat, and confinement to bed under her grim eye.
His mother, whose eye had been grimmer still, sank into a chair when he was gone and covered her face for a moment with her hands. When she lowered them, she was calm but pale. “I thought we’d lost him,” she said.
Alf paused in nibbling at the supper she had set before him, and touched her hand. “Before God, Sophia, I’m most sorry. If only I’d known sooner that he was following me—”
“How could you have known? It’s not your fault. lf it’s anybody’s it’s mine, for not realizing that he’d do such a thing. He’s not a baby any more, to hide in my skirts. And he’s not an idiot or a monster that I should keep him locked up out of sight.”
“He is certainly not either of those.”
She looked down at her hands. Without knowing it she had taken a bit of bread and reduced it to crumbs in her lap.
Carefully, fighting to keep her fingers steady, she brushed the remnants into a napkin, folded it, and laid it on the table in front of her.
Alf stopped even pretending to eat. “Sophia,” he said, “you have no cause to grieve for him. Or to blame yourself for anything he is or does.”
“He’s my son.”
“And one to be proud of.”
Her eyes blazed with sudden, uncontrollable anger. “Stop it, will you? Just stop it! I may be a weak and foolish woman, but I know the truth when it slaps me in the face. My son is a deafmute. A deafmute he was born, and a deafmute he will always be. And no amount of weaseling words can ever change it.”
“Maybe not.” His quiet voice shocked her into stillness. “But he is also a human being. I know it. I can talk to him; I can speak so that he can understand.”
“But not so that I can—” She broke off. “No. You said…of course. Being what you are, how can you not? And—can he—”
“Yes.”
That was hope, that frail battered creature which staggered to its feet and began feebly to crow. She had taught herself to forget hope. A morning of early autumn; three children with their teacher in the garden, and letters on a tablet. “All this time,” she said slowly, “and you never told me. You never even hinted.”
“It had to find its time.”
“Now?”
Alf nodded.
She had to take it in little by little. It was too much, losing her son and then finding him again, and learning that he had walked unprotected through a raging mob, and now this. “You aren’t telling me of a miracle. ‘The eyes of the blind shall see, and the ears of the deaf shall hear’—that’s not what you can offer. This is…plain…magic.”
“Power, we call it. Mind-seeing. For Nikki it’s speech.”
“But it’s not speech!” Her vehemence brought her to her feet. “It’s not speech. He’ll never talk as other people talk.”
“Maybe not.” Alf poured a cup of wine warmed with spices and set it in her hand. “He’s learning to read and to write. He knows what words are, and why people’s lips move so often and so strangely. He’s not the young animal all your wise men proclaimed him to be. He’s a boy who one day will be a man. A good man, if his promise fulfills itself. Can you ask for any more?”
“Can I—” She was perilously close to breaking. “Why can’t you make him whole? Really whole?”
Alf’s face was white and still. “I am neither a god nor a saint.”
“Then what are you?”
“I don’t know,” he said wearily. “I really don’t know.”
His words calmed her as no proper answer could have done. With calm came awareness of what she had said, of what wounds she had dealt him. He watched her with pale tired eyes, and waited for her to strike again, making no move to defend himself.
Sophia sat with care and drank deep of the wine. Its warmth gave her strength to speak. “Whenever you bare your soul to me, I trample it under my feet. How do you keep from hating me?”
“Why would I want to?”
“Oh, you are a saint!” She drained the cup and set it down. “I have to think. Will you pardon me if I go away to do it?”
“You needn’t. I can—”
“Don’t be noble. You’ve been ill and you’re still wobbling on your feet, and you have a supper to finish.” Once more she stood. She tried to smile. “When all of this has sunk in, I expect to be deliriously happy. Or absolutely terrified.”
“Of me?” he asked very low.
“Of this whole mad world. I used to think I understood it, you see. I was very young then.” She leaned over the table and kissed his cheek. “Good night, Alfred.”
o0o
He was still there when Thea found him, the wine cold in his hand and the food untouched. His face did not change as she took Sophia’s chair and began to fill a plate, although he passed the bread to her before she could ask for it.
“Thank you,” she said, biting into the loaf. “Ye gods, I’m hungry. I can’t remember the last time I ate.”
There was no stiffness in her voice or manner, no hint of coldness. He gathered himself to leave her, noting meanwhile that she had bathed and washed her hair, and that she had put on a robe that precisely matched her eyes. Bronze shot with gold, that in certain lights seemed all gold.
Strange how very beautiful she was to look on, and yet how utterly of earth she seemed when she spoke. Such beauty should never speak, or should give utterance only to the sweetest of words.
“How unspeakably dull.” Thea filled a bowl with stew. “On the other hand,” she added as she reached for a spoon, “it would suit you to perfection. Mystic stillness alternating with verses even more mystic in the fashion of the Delphic Oracle…in no time at all you’d have people pouring libations to you.”
He rose somewhat more abruptly than he had meant to, lips tight. “It’s late,” he said. “I’m tired. Good night, Althea.”
“You see?” She downed the stew with relish, helping it on its way with bread and cheese and sips of wine. “Sophia says you hold grudges and I don’t. You can certainly sit on a grievance as long as anyone I’ve ever seen. Do you intend to detest me for the rest of your unnaturally long life?”
“I do not detest you,” he said through clenched teeth.
“Wasn’t I precise enough? Very well then: I irritate you, annoy you, and drive you to distraction. In that order. You’re a frightful prig, do you know that? And a bit of a pedant besides.”
“I’m very well aware of it.”
Her eyes widened, miming astonishment. “Who’d have thought it? Brother Alfred can see his hand in front of his face. Shall we try for the arm? You’re arrogant, too, assuming I’d come to heel in the palace just because you ordered it.”
“You did, didn’t you?”
“What else was there to do? I wasn’t about to let old Beetlebrows prove me a fool and have me holding off the mob while he stole the crown. On my way to tell the truth to my friends I found you slinking about, mildly suicidal as usual and fancying yourself clever. Naturally I humored you. Why not? My mission was a lost cause in any case, and I saved your precious skin.”
His nostrils were pinched and white; his eyes glittered. She clapped her hands. “Ah, joy! At last I see you in a temper. Go on, hit me if you like. I don’t mind.”
His fists clenched, but he did not raise them.
She reached for the roast fowl in front of her, dismembering it neatly, biting into the leg. Her teeth were white and sharp; she ate like a cat, at once delicate and fierce. “The trouble with you,” she said, “is that you don’t know how to handle your temper. Either you crush it all into a tiny box and sit on the lid, or you nurse it and pamper it and tend it like a baby till it grows into a monster and devours you. Why don’t you just let yourself go?”
“The last time I did that,” he said, low and controlled, “I killed a man.”
“No.” She finished stripping the bone and turned it in her fingers. “Even that, at the last, was coldly logical. An execution, not a murder. There’s passion in you, no doubt of it, but every time it makes a move toward freedom, you either throttle it down or go out of your mind with fear of it, or escape it by telling yourself its object means nothing to you. Doesn’t it go against all your priestly training to lie to yourself so much?”
Her light dispassionate voice struck Alf deeper than any torrent of abuse. She had done with her meal; she sat back, sipping wine and watching him over the rim of the cup.
“You don’t care for me,” she said. “Oh no. You would have come to the palace for any stranger, ignoring all your instincts, that, sir prophet, should have told you there was no danger at all for me. Can it be that after all you’re blindly and hopelessly in love with me?”
He drew a sobbing breath. Without warning he struck her.
But she was not there. She stood just out of reach, not quite smiling. “So,” she observed with a world of understanding in the single word. “I’ve flattened you twice for saying the same thing to me. Do you want to try again? Do you love me, little Brother?”
“Yes!” It was a cry of pain.
Thea drew closer to him and laid her hands on his shoulders. He trembled and would not look at her, staring fixedly at the air above her head. “There now. Old grudges die hard, don’t they? And the truth can be agony. Will you believe me if I promise you that your pride will recover?”
He shook his head from side to side, tossing it. “It should die the death.”
“That’s not wise, either. Look at me, you lovely idiot. Do you know what you’ve been doing to me with all your cold-shouldering? The best friend I’ve ever had, for all your shortcomings, and you’ve cut me off as if I were your worst enemy. For nothing.”
“You call it nothing?”
“Wasn’t it? You asked me to marry you. I said no, and told you why. You stalked off in a rage. And stayed in that rage for well over a month. You’re still in it. Are you always like this when you can’t have what you want, precisely when you want it?”
That startled him into meeting her gaze. She regarded him steadily, neither yielding nor resisting. His throat constricted; he forced words through it, painfully. “You…said I had to be the one who ended this battle.”
“You came to the palace for me.”
“I didn’t intend—” That was not exactly true, and he knew it as well as she. “You were going to alert the Guard. That would have precipitated a civil war with you in the very middle of it. Could I lie here safely out of the way and let you do that?”
“By then, of course, I’d come to the same conclusion. I understand oblique apologies, little. Brother, though this one is more oblique than most. I accept it. Now kiss me, to put the seal on it.”
He hesitated. Her eyes laughed; her hands linked behind his neck. Laughter bubbled up within him for all that he could do.
With sudden resolution, he bent his head and did as she bade.