Michelle West - Sun Sword 04 - Sea of Sorrows Page 7

  "Some man? And what if that man has a little boy, like you? What if he has a bunch, eh? What if you just stole the food off their plates?"

  He was silent. It had never occurred to him to wonder.

  "I want you to be bigger, to be stronger. I want you to be better than that. You grow up, you can join the Kings' army. You can make an honest living. But they don't take no thieves, and I don't want no thieves in my house. You want to stay with me? You don't steal." She spit. "You can beg, if you want. You can sit in the streets with your hands out. But you take what they give you, you understand?"

  He nodded, because nodding was safe.

  And she looked as if she was going to cry. "You're the only thing in my life I've done right," she told him, touching his hair and his face with her shaking hands. "The only one. Don't break my heart. Don't make a lie out of all the work I done."

  But it wasn't, in the end, his choice; it wasn't in the end, hers. That was the lie.

  "Teller?"

  He looked up. The surface of the kitchen table was as clean and polished as the counters. They were never this clean. It was a bad sign. Where was the inkwell, the messy blotters, the quills that, time and again, Jewel ATerafin destroyed?

  She had packed them away. Had cleaned house. Had left. That was the plan.

  She'd done everything she could to make them a home in House Terafin. They had jobs now. They had more money than he had ever dreamed of having. They had responsibilities that they could be—that they were—proud of. Jewel's little den of thieves. Jay's misfits.

  Because of her.

  Where was she?

  He didn't want to talk to Finch. He didn't want to talk to anyone. But he looked up and nodded when she called his name again.

  Didn't much like what he saw there. Hadn't really expected to. "What—what's the news?"

  She was so pale, so gray; he had learned to hate those colors when they resided beneath the soft peach tones of skin.

  "Half the Common's been destroyed."

  "We knew that."

  Finch swallowed. She started to speak, but the door banged the wall behind her, and they both looked up. Angel was in the door, hands on either side of the frame as if—as if he were trying to shore up his own weight. His hair was in full spiral, his one conceit.

  Finch gave conversational ground as easily as Teller did. "Angel?"

  "She wants us."

  For a moment, Teller felt a wild hope, but he killed it quickly.

  "Who wants us?"

  "The Terafin." He turned to look at the frame six inches above his hand. "Jay was in that market, as far as anyone's been able to tell. We've got her movements down just that far."

  Teller ATerafin lowered his head to the surface of the kitchen table and let it rest there, against the cool wood.

  "We're supposed to help her," Angel continued. "Word's out for Arann as well. Carver's already left with Jester."

  The gates of the Terafin Manse passed by him like a dream. He had seen them for half of his life, but every so often he would pause in front of them, to the amusement or the consternation of the House Guard, and touch their polished rails. Nothing encroached upon that brass patina, that endless shine; whole days were spent tending to their appearance, as if they were the House armor.

  Whole days, and more money than he and his mother would see in a month, when they had lived in the twenty-third holding, in the hundred, in the old city.

  He tried not to steal. He really did try.

  But there were nights when his mother came home emptyhanded, and her face was sallow with exhaustion and fear, her voice hoarse. He hated that fear. She would go to bed, and he would join her, and they would wake hungry and go to bed hungry until she left again.

  When he was seven, those nights came more frequently. She said it was because of her teeth, because she had lost two. It was true. Her teeth, her lack of teeth, changed the way she looked. But she was his mother, and he loved her fiercely, and with a child's terror.

  Those days, he would go to the streets himself—never at night, never then. And he would spend the day begging, and if that didn't go well, he would try his hand at worse. He always lied to her, though. He always told her that he had come by the money honestly.

  He thought she believed him, because she didn't beat him. He would take her out to the market. He would give her the money. She would choose the food they ate, as she always did, and they would go home.

  "One day," she would tell him, "you'll laugh at all this. You'll be the Kings' best man, mark my words. You'll make me so proud of you."

  If she could see him now. If she could see him—if he could walk up to her and tell her that his name was Teller ATerafin—she would be more than proud. But she was wrong about one thing: He never did learn to laugh about their life together.

  Finch tried to keep an eye on Angel. Arann was fine; quiet, worried, but very much the House Guard he had become. Carver and Jester were already gone, and Kalliaris knew, maybe they were even being useful. But Angel was… Angel. The only one of the den who had refused to take the name ATerafin when it was offered. Jewel had been pissed. But Angel had been Angel. I'm your man, not hers. You become The Terafin, I'll take the name. But not until then.

  Teller had been almost embarrassed at how readily he'd accepted The Terafin's offer, but it had been too late to back down; he didn't want to look as if he were following Angel's lead. None of them did. And what difference did it make? They were all hers.

  Until now.

  "Look, if the two of you can't keep up, you can meet us there, all right?"

  Teller was quiet. Finch looked pained. But after another city block had passed, they let him go. Let him go. They had miles to cover.

  When Teller was eight and a bit, his mother went out for the evening, as she often did. He hated that she went out at nights, because more and more often she came home exhausted and angry and frightened. Just two days previous, he had tried to convince her to let him do what he could. Beg, he'd said. Let him beg. Maybe she knew. Maybe she just didn't trust him. Maybe so many things, all incomprehensible, their lives were now so different. She had gone out, as she always did.

  But by morning, she hadn't returned. Morning.

  He woke and he was alone. They only had one bed. He thought, for a moment, she might be in the kitchen. But she wasn't there, and that was worse. He waited for an hour, trudging in an endless circle between the two rooms, bed and table. It felt like a day.

  Footsteps came and went, but he knew the sound of hers, and hers were absent.

  When the sun was high in the sky, when all trace of dawn had vanished, he left the apartment and headed through the warrens to the Mother's small church. The priests and priestesses there sometimes offered a hand to those who were sick or injured—when it wasn't too crowded. When it wasn't winter, and the lines didn't twist round the building like a cat's tail, twitching to and fro.

  He recognized the frail old woman who answered the door; she had that weary smile that all of the Mother's children had.

  "My mother didn't come home last night. Did she come here?"

  The woman's eyes widened slightly. And then they came down at the brow, not narrowing exactly, but changing in every other way. "Why don't you come in and check?" She said.

  And he knew that she wasn't there. He backed away from the old woman, turned and ran.

  Because he didn't know where she was. He only knew where she was supposed to be. At home. With him.

  His mother had always told him to stay close to home, where people knew her. Where people knew him. She had made him promise, time and again, to be careful.

  But at eight years old, all he knew that day was that his mother was gone, that she was somewhere else, and that he needed to find her. He needed to find her.

  7th of Scaral, 427 AA

  Averalaan, the Common

  The Common. Teller had always counted the trees in the Common as he passed beneath their ancient bowers, had let his gaze dr
ift up and up until his chin was almost a continuous line with his neck. He'd loved them, and Jay had loved them, although neither could quite say why.

  He noticed their loss first. At a distance.

  "Teller?"

  No one had ever asked him about his life. Not even Jay. He had never asked Finch about hers. It came to him that he did not know who any of them were outside of their life together. But some things came from that life, that outside life.

  "Mother's blood," Finch whispered.

  He looked. The Merchant Authority, grand old building that was a city block unto itself, had been staved in on the east side; great stone walls were crumpled like the thinnest of thatch. Men toiled in the rubble, like an army of workmen, their shadows short compared to the shadow cast by the destruction.

  He did not want to go there.

  He did not want to search the streets of the city—any city—again. Not like this. Not this way.

  It's not the same, he told himself this as his steps grew smaller and smaller. I'm not a child. This is not the twenty-fifth holding.

  But he had been a child.

  And he had run, from the twenty-third to the twenty-fifth, with no clear idea of when he had crossed two boundaries. He had asked questions, endless questions, talking more in those hours than he had in months. Have you seen my mother? Have you seen my mother?

  On that day, he had discovered that he was an orphan. He had looked death in the face, and he had sat by its side, crying in bewildered terror. He still woke sometimes, sweating, the cold, gray flesh of his mother's cheek beneath his hands. He had shaken her. He had shaken her body and when she hadn't responded, he'd hit her. To try to wake her, although he had never seen sleep like this. He had tried to drag her body home. He remembered that as well, because it was on the way home that he understood how helpless he was.

  And it was on his way home that he had been saved by an angry angel, a stranger who inexplicably showed the kindness not even his mother had shown.

  Had he been suspicious? Gods, yes.

  But there was something about her narrowed eyes, her hunched shoulders, her liberal cursing, and the hair—which hadn't changed at all, even if she'd smoothed the rough edges off everything else—hanging in her eyes no matter how often she shoved it aside, that made her seem less auspicious than a miracle.

  There was also something about the people she gave orders to that was less than angelic. He remembered Lefty best of all because it was Lefty who held the dagger. Duster hadn't come yet, although Jay'd found Arann and Carver by then. In just a few more months she would have almost all of the men and women who were Teller's family in everything but the flimsy tie of blood.

  Lefty hadn't made it out of the twenty-fifth holding. Teller was certain, that day, that he probably wouldn't either—but anything was better than dying alone in an alley of starvation or worse.

  And Jewel had offered to help him take his mother home. She made Arann do most of the heavy lifting because he was the biggest, even then, and while Teller cried, they'd followed his steps, had lifted his mother's body, had carried her into the building that had been his home for as long as he could remember.

  They put her in the bed. Teller tucked her in. And then he'd fallen over, hugging her, terrified. Hugging her. She never hugged him back; that had been the last time.

  Jay'd waited for him, outside. And when it had been long enough, she'd come back to get him. And he'd let her take him away.

  Now, now he would have insisted on burying his mother.

  Over time he had learned that Jewel was magic, and her magic took two forms, both of them equally precious, both intangible but unshakable. One: she could sometimes see the future. It hit her in dreams, in nightmares, in moments of sudden spasm as she walked at the heart of the den— protected on all sides by Angel, Arann, Carver, and Duster—through the city streets. And two, more precious: she was loyal. She chose her den for reasons no one ever questioned out loud, and she would never desert them.

  Not while she lived.

  He had been so terrified, that first year, and the second, that she would die like his mother had. That had been his nightmare, before he had become the keeper of hers: of wandering in terror through the city streets, searching for her the morning after she hadn't come home on time. Searching, and afraid—gods, paralyzed now—of what would end that search.

  When had he gotten so complacent? When had he let go of that fear until it wasn't even a distant nightmare?

  He should have known better.

  He felt the tears start down his cheeks, and he was so numb with dread he didn't realize what they were until Finch touched them gently and wiped them away.

  "Teller. Finch." The Terafin was dressed in the plainest of robes; those robes were lined with dust and splinters. She was comfortable on horseback; she had been here for the better part of an hour, searching as if she were the least of the members of House Terafin, and not its Lord.

  But Teller understood it the moment he saw her face. She needed to do something.

  "Angel and Arann are to the west. Carver and Jester are just up ahead, near the permanent stalls. Near where they stood. Bodies are being brought to the west end of the Merchant Authority; there are healers there in number. Morretz is there. Daine is with him. So far no one has unearthed Jewel. Join Daine if you like. Join the others if you feel that you're better used in the search, And if you discover anything—let me know immediately. That's all."

  "Terafin," they said, speaking—and bowing—in unison.

  There were so many bodies.

  To his left, men and women were grunting under the weight of stone and wood. Fabric, stretched between poles, awaited whatever it was they could retrieve from beneath that burden. They didn't judge the condition of whatever it was they found. They left that to the healers.

  But in some cases, it was impossible not to know death.

  He looked across what had been the beginning of the Common's circle. The ground was broken now, like dry, old loaves.

  At a distance, across the fissures made by split earth and ruptured stone, he could see the royal blue of the highest ranking Kings' Swords. He could not tell what their relative ranks were, but years ago, rank would have meant nothing: they served the Kings. Their job, he thought bitterly, being to protect the people who had money and means from those who didn't.

  The momentary resentment surprised him; it was so old, he had thought it buried by the present. Destroyed.

  The rubble. The wood. The bodies.

  But so many things were coming back to him. The feel of stones like this beneath his feet, the harsh, painful dryness that grew in the walls of his throat, the unseasonal, bitter cold. Even then he had had the wits to take what little of value his mother owned; a dagger, a knife, a small handful of coins. He had never intended to desert the room he had shared with his mother.

  Death changed all plans.

  Jay.

  The Kings' Swords were not here on their own; they did not venture out of Avantari in these numbers and these uniforms unless they accompanied a member of the royal family. From where he stood, he could not see which member, but he was fairly certain it would be the Princess of the blood, Mirialyn ACormaris. The Kings themselves rarely left the Isle; the Queens only slightly more often, and usually for functions that involved the powerful guilds or the churches. Ah, yes. There she was. She wore armor, although the day was warm; her visor was up, her face exposed. The horse beneath her moved carefully over the rubble of broken street, upturned cobblestone, soft dirt. He had never much liked horses.

  "Carver, shut up." He was brought back to himself by the sharp crack of Finch's high voice.

  Here and there, Arann, Angel, or Carver stopped to lend arm and back to the lifting of heavy stone; they worked in silence at the side of the magisterial guards, as if they were part of the Terafin House Guard. Once, they would have run from them, and with reason; the magisterial guards were not paid to smile cheerfully at hungry thieves.
br />   The other Houses had sent small contingents to represent their interests—or their concerns, if one was not being cynical—but only one House had lost one of its governing council in the inexplicable attack on the market.

  Years ago, fifteen or more, on a Henden as dark as any story could make it, demons had dwelled beneath the city of Averalaan, in the tangled web of tunnels and ancient passages at the heart of the old city. The fear their presence evoked had nearly broken the city's spirit. Then, he thought, the princess had ridden, in the Queen's party; so had Commander Sivari. They had drawn swords; they had taken arms; they had spoken against an enemy that could be seen by no one, and felt by all. Songs were still sung of that ride, fiercely, passionately, tearfully. Teller sang them. How could he not? He had been alive in that Henden; he had heard the demonic voices. He had seen the demons in the flesh.

  Princess Mirialyn ACormaris presided, as she had then, over ruins. The city had seen its demons, and it knew, it knew now, that they had returned. He wondered, idly, if the magi were clever enough to make political use of the fear. The old woman who ruled the Order was, to listen to Jay talk.

  Jay.

  He did not run. He felt no need to run. He knew that whatever there was to be found would be found here. And he wasn't alone here; he was a man of means, surrounded by his den, with a House name to back him up. But, as if he had run the same frenzied run as he had the day he became an orphan, his throat was constricted and dry; breath came with difficulty.

  The men led by Mirialyn ACormaris pulled a body from beneath the fallen slats of what had been a permanent stall in the Common. Stalls such as these were handed down from parent to child; they were rare and highly prized, although from the wreckage it would not be clear why to a casual observer. Wood had splintered, cloth had torn, both acts revealing color the sun seldom saw: pale, unstained wood grain, unfaded burgundy.

  Other things caught and held his attention. Not the stall itself, but the flagpole that had made its presence known from a distance: metal, not wood, the pole looked as if it had been crumpled, like so much cloth or paper.