A Magic of Nightfall (17 page)

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Authors: S. L. Farrell

BOOK: A Magic of Nightfall
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“Did Vatarh tell you who was doing the whispering? Where did it come from?” Allesandra asked. She had to ask the question. She shivered a little, hoping he hadn’t noticed. “Did Vatarh tell you who had said this?”
But Fynn only shook his head. “No. No names. Just . . . that there were those who would oppose me. If I find them . . .” He took a long breath in through his nose, and his face went hard. “I will take them down.” He looked directly at her. “I don’t care who they are, and I don’t care who I have to hurt.”
She faced away from him so he could not see her face, looking at the fog drifting among the pines just below.
Good. Because I know some of them, and they know me. . . .
“You can’t punish rumors, Fynn,” she said. “You can’t put chains around gossip and imprison it, any more than you can capture the mists.”
“I don’t think Vatarh was deceived by mists.”
“Then what do you want of me, little brother?”
That was what he’d wanted her to ask. She could see it in his face, in the dimming light of the sky. “At the Besteigung,” he began, then stopped to put his hand atop hers on the railing. It did not feel like an affectionate gesture. “You’re the one that everyone looks to. You’re the one who could have been Hïrzgin had Vatarh not changed his mind. The ca’-and-cu’ still like you, and many of them think that Vatarh did wrong by you. The rumors always circulate around
you
, Allesandra. You. I want to stop them; I want them to have no reason at all to exist. So—at the Besteigung—I want you, and Pauli and Jan also, to take a formal oath of loyalty to the throne. In public, so everyone will hear you say the words.”
They would
only
be words,
she wanted to tell him,
with as much meaning as my saying now “No, Fynn, I’m not your enemy,” Words and oaths mean nothing: to know that, all you need do is look at history . . .
But she smiled at him gently and patted his hand. Perhaps he really was that simple, that naive? “Of course we’ll do that,” she told him. “I know my place. I know where I should be, and I know where I want to be in the future.”
Fynn nodded. His hand moved away from hers. “Good,” he said, and the relief sang a high note in his voice. “Then we will expect that.”
We . . .
She heard the royal plural in his voice, all unconscious, and it made her lips press tightly together. “I like your son,” he said unexpectedly. “He’s a bright one—like you, Allesandra. I’d hate to think he was involved in any plots against me, but if he was, or if his family was . . .” His face tightened again. “The air’s chilly and damp out here, Allesandra. I’m going inside.” Fynn left her, returning to the warmth of the palais’ common room. Allesandra stood at the railing for several more minutes before following him, watching until the mists were nearly level with her and the world below had vanished into gloom and cloud.
She thought of being Hïrzgin, and it came to her that the High Seat in Brezno would never have satisfied her, even if it had been hers. It was a hard realization, but she knew now that it was in Nessantico that she’d been most happy, that she’d felt most at home.
“I know my place, Brother,” she whispered into the hush of the fog. “I do. And I will have it.”
Nico Morel
N
ICO HEARD TALIS SPEAKING in the other room, even though Matarh had gone to the square to get bread.
Matarh had kissed him and told him to nap for a bit, saying that she’d be back before supper. But he hadn’t been able to sleep, not with the sounds of the people in the street just outside the shutters of his window, not with the sun peeking through the cracks between the boards. He was too old for naps now anyway. Those were for children, and he was becoming a young man. Matarh had told him that, too.
Nico threw the covers aside and padded softly across the room. He leaned forward just enough that he could see past the edge of the scarred, warped door that never closed tightly—making sure he didn’t touch it, since he knew the hinges would screech a rusty alarm. Through the crack between door and jamb, he could see Talis. He was bent over the table that Matarh used to prepare meals. A shallow bowl was sitting on the table, and Nico squinted in an effort to see it better: incised animals danced along the rim, and the bowl had the same hue as the weathered bronze statue of Henri VI in Oldtown Square. Matarh didn’t have a metal bowl, at least none that Nico had ever noticed; the animals carved into it were strange, too: a bird with a head like a snake’s; a scaled lizard with a long snout full of snarled teeth. Talis poured water from Matarh’s pitcher into the bowl, then untied a leather pouch from his belt and shook a reddish, fine powder onto his palm. He dusted the powder into the water as if he were salting food. He gestured with his hand over the bowl as if smoothing something away, then spoke words in the strange language that he sometimes spoke when he was dreaming at night, cuddled with Nico’s matarh in their bed.
A light seemed to glow inside the bowl, illuminating Talis’ face a sickly yellow-green. Talis stared into the glowing bowl, his mouth open, his head leaning closer and closer as if he were falling asleep, though his eyes were wide. Nico didn’t know how long Talis stared into the bowl—far longer than the breath Nico tried to hold. As he watched, Nico thought he could feel a chill, as if the bowl were sending a winter’s breath out from it, frigid enough that Nico shivered. The feeling became stronger, and the breath Nico drew in seemed to pull that cold inside with it, though somehow it felt almost hot inside him. It made him want to breathe it back out, like he could spit frozen fire.
In the other room, Talis’ head nodded ever closer. When his face appeared to be about to touch the rim of the bowl, the glow vanished as suddenly as it had come, and Talis gasped as though drawing breath for the first time.
Nico gasped, too, involuntarily, as the cold and fire inside him vanished at the same moment. He started to pull his head back from the door, but Talis’ voice stopped him. “Nico. Son.”
He peered back in. Talis was staring at him, a smile creasing the lines of his olive face. There were more wrinkles there, lately, and Talis’ hair was beginning to be salted with gray. He groaned when he stood up too fast and his joints sometimes creaked, even though Matarh said that Talis was the same age as her. “It’s fine, Son. I’m not angry with you.” Talis’ accent seemed stronger than usual. He gestured to Nico, and Nico could see a smear of the red dust still on his palm. He sighed as if he were tired and needed to sleep. “Come here.” Nico hesitated. “Don’t worry; come here.”
Nico pushed open the door—the hinge, as he knew it would, protesting loudly—and went to Talis. The man picked him up (yes, he grunted with the effort) and put him on a chair next to the table so he could see the bowl. “Nico, this is a special bowl I brought with me from the country where I used to live,” he said. “See . . . there’s water in it.” He stirred the water with a fingertip. The water seemed entirely ordinary now.
“Is the bowl special because it can make water glow?” Nico asked.
Talis continued to smile, but the way his eyebrows lowered over his eyes made the smile look somehow wrong in his face. Nico could see his own face staring back from the brown-black pupils of Talis’ eyes. There were deep folds at the corner of those eyes. “Ah, so you saw that, did you?”
Nico nodded. “Was that magic?” he asked. “I know you’re not a téni because you never go to temple with Matarh and me. Are you a Numetodo?”
“No,” he said. “I’m not a Numetodo, nor a téni of the Faith. What you saw wasn’t magic, Nico. It was just the sunlight coming in the window and reflecting from the water in the bowl, that’s all. I saw it, too—so bright it seemed like there was a tiny sun under the water. I liked the way it looked, and so I watched it for a while.”
Nico nodded, but he remembered the red dust and the strange, grassy color of the light and the way it had bathed Talis’ face, as if a hand of light were stroking him. He remember the cold fire. He didn’t mention any of that, though. It seemed best not to, though he wasn’t certain why.
“I love you, Nico,” Talis continued. He knelt on the floor next to Nico’s chair, so that their faces were the same height. His hands were on Nico’s shoulders. “I love Serafina . . . your matarh . . . too. And the best thing she’s ever given me, the thing that has made me the most happy, is you. Did you know that?”
Nico nodded again. Talis’ fingers were tight around his arms, so tight he couldn’t move. Talis’ face was very near his, and he could smell the bacon and honeyed tea on the man’s breath, and also a faint spiciness that he couldn’t identify at all. “Good,” Talis said. “Now listen, there’s no need to mention the bowl or the sunlight to your matarh. I thought that one day I might give your matarh the bowl as a gift, and I want it to be a surprise, and you don’t want to spoil that, do you?”
Nico shook his head at that, and Talis grinned widely, as if he’d told himself a joke inside that Nico hadn’t heard. “Excellent,” he said. “Now, let me finish washing the bowl—that’s what I was starting to do when you saw me. That’s why I put the water in it.” Talis released Nico; Nico rubbed at his shoulders with his hands as Talis picked up the bowl, swirled the water inside it ostentatiously, then opened the window shutters to dump it into the flowered windowbox. Talis wiped the bowl with his linen bashta, and Nico heard the ring of metal. He watched as Talis put the bowl into the pack that he kept under the bed that he and Nico’s matarh shared, then put the pack back underneath the straw-filled mattress.
“There,” Talis said as he straightened again. “It’ll be our little secret, eh, Nico?” He winked at Nico.
It would be their secret. Yes.
Nico liked secrets.
The White Stone
T
HEY CAME TO HER AT NIGHT, those who the White Stone had killed. In the night, they stirred and woke. They gathered around her in her dreams and they talked to her. Often, the loudest of them was Old Pieter, the first person she’d killed.
She’d been twelve.
“
Remember me . . .
” he whispered to her in her sleep. “
Remember me . . .
”
Old Pieter was their neighbor in the sleepy village back on the Isle of Paeti, and she’d known him since birth, especially after her vatarh died when she was six. He was always friendly with her, joking and gifting her with animals he’d carved from oak branches, whittling them with the short knife he always carried on his belt. She painted the animals he gave her, placing them on a window shelf in her little bedroom where she could see them every morning.
Old Pieter kept goats, and when her matarh would let her, she sometimes helped him tend the small herd. The day her life changed, the day she started on the path that had led her here, she’d been out with Pieter and his goats near the Loudwater, the creek falling fast and noisy from the slopes of Sheep Fell, one of the tall hills to the south of the village. The goats were grazing placidly near the creek, and she was walking near them when she saw a body in the grass: a doe freshly killed, its body torn by scavengers and flies beginning to buzz excitedly around the carcass. The doe’s head, on the long tawny neck, gazed forlornly at her with large, beautiful eyes.
“If ye look into that right eye, ye’ll see what killed her.”
A hand stroked her shoulder and continued down her back before leaving. She started, not realizing that Old Pieter had come up behind her. “The right eye, it connects to a person’s or an animal’s soul,” he continued. “When a living thing dies, well, the right eye remembers the last thing they saw—the last face, or the thing that killed it. Look close into that doe’s eye, and ye’ll see it in there, too: a wolf, p’raps. It happens to people, too. Murderers, they been caught that way—by someone looking into the dead right eye of the one they killed and seeing the killer’s face there.”
She shuddered at that and turned away, and Old Pieter laughed. His hand brushed wisps of hair that had escaped her braids back from her face, and he smiled fondly at her. “Now don’t be upset, girl,” he said. “G’wan and see to the goats, and I’ll carve ye something new. . . .”
It was later in the afternoon when he came to her again, as she sat on the banks of the Loudwater watching the stream tumble through its rocky bed. “Here,” he said. “Do ye like it?”
The carving was a human figure, small enough to hide easily in her hand: nude, and undeniably female, with small breasts like her own budding from the chest. It was the hair that distressed her the most: a moon ago, a ca’ woman from Nessantico had passed through their town, staying at the inn one night on the road to An Uaimth. The woman’s hair had been braided in an intricate knot at the back of the head; entranced by this glimpse of foreign fashion, she had worked for days to imitate those braids—since then, she had braided her hair every day the same way. It was braided now, just as the nude figure’s was, and her hand involuntarily went to her knot of hair on the back of her head. She wanted, suddenly, to tear it out.
She stared at the carving, not knowing what to say, and she felt Old Pieter’s hand on her cheek. “It’s you,” he told her. “You’re becoming a woman now.”
His hand had cupped her head, and he brought her to him, pressing her tight against him. She could feel his excitement, hard on her thigh. She dropped the doll.
What happened then she would never forget: the pain, and the humiliation of it. The shame. And after it was over, after his weight left her, she saw his belt lying on the grass next to her, and there in its sheath was his knife, and she took it. She took the hilt in hands that trembled and shook, she took it sobbing, she took it with her tashta ripped and half torn from her, she took it with her blood and his seed spattering her thighs, and she took it with all the anger and rage and fear inside her and she stabbed him. She plunged the blade low in his belly, and when he groaned and shouted in alarm, she yanked out the blade and plunged it into him again, and again, and again until he was no longer screaming and no longer beating at her with his fists and no longer moving at all.

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