Elemental (33 page)

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Authors: Steven Savile

BOOK: Elemental
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As they passed under the arched wagongate of the inn's walled yard, Kade said quietly, “Tell your stories of someone else, Giles. I can be dangerous when I'm embarrassed.” She added ruefully,
And I've embarrassed myself enough, thank you, I don't need any help at it.
He smiled at her good-naturedly, not as if he disbelieved her, but as if it was her perfect right to be dangerous whenever she chose.
The inn was two stories high, with a shaded second-story balcony overlooking outside tables where late afternoon drinkers gathered with the chickens, children, and dogs in the dusty yard. A group of travelers, their feathered hats and the elaborate lace of their collars and cuffs grimy with road dust, argued vehemently around one of the tables. To the alarm of bystanders, one of them was using the butt of his wheel lock to pound on the boards for emphasis. Kade recognized them as couriers, probably from royalist troops engaged in bringing down the walls of some noble family's ancestral home. Months ago the court had
ordered the destruction of all private fortifications to prevent feuding and rebellious plots among the petty nobility. This didn't concern Kade, whose private fortifications rested on the bottom of a lake, and were invisible to all but the most talented eyes.
Kade took a seat on the edge of the big, square well to watch Giles approach the locals. The men seated at the long plank table eyed him with suspicion as the balladeer started to open the leather case he carried. The suspicion faded into keen interest as Giles took out the viola d'amore.
Traveling musicians were usually welcomed gladly, balladeers who could bring news of other towns and villages even more so. Within moments they would be fighting to tell him their only news—the grim story of the potter's death, or at least what little they knew of it. Kade stirred the mud near the well with her big toe. She was disgusted, mostly with herself. She knew why the potter had been killed well enough—to attract her attention.
In the old faith, the villages honored the fay in the hopes that the erratic and easily angered creatures would leave them alone. Riversee was dedicated to Moire, Kade's mother, and Kade could only see the death of the village's sacred potter as a direct challenge. A few years ago it might have pleased her, this invitation to battle, but now it only threatened to make her bored. She wasn't sure what had changed; perhaps she was growing tired of games altogether.
 
 
That night, seated atop one of the rough tables in the inn's common room, Giles picked out an instrumental treatment of a popular ballad, and watched Kade. She sat near the large cooking hearth in the center of the room, regarding the crowd with an amused eye as she tapped one bare foot to the music.
The inn was crowded with a mix of locals and travelers from the nearby post road. Both the magistrate and the elderly parish priest were in attendance; the first to count the number of wine jugs emptied for the
Vine-growers' Excise and the second to discourage the patrons from emptying the jugs at all. Smoke from clay pipes and tallow candles and the heat of the fire made the room close and muggy. The din of talk and shouted comments almost drowned the clear tone of the viola, but whenever Giles stopped playing enraged listeners hurled crockery at him.
If Giles hadn't known better he would've thought the dim flickering light kind to the rather plain woman who called herself the old potter's daughter. But when firelight glittered off a wisp of pale hair as she leaned forward to catch some farmer's joke, he saw something else instead.
The daughter of the spirit dame of air and darkness, and a brute of a king
, Giles thought, and added a restless undercurrent to the plaintive ballad. Smiling at his folly, he bent his head over the viola.
Over the noisy babble and the music there were voices in the entryway. Two men with a party of servants entered the common room. One was blond and slight, with sharp handsome features and a downy beard. His manner was offhand and easy as he said something with a laugh to one of the servants behind him. His companion could not have been a greater contrast if nature had deliberately intended it. He was tall, muscled like a bull, with dark, greasy hair and rough features. Both men were well turned out, though not in the latest city style, and Giles labeled them as hedge gentry.
He also had a good eye for his audience, and saw tension infect the room like a plague in the newcomers' wake. There was muttering and an uneasy shifting among the local people, though the travelers seemed oblivious to it. In Giles's experience the nobility of this province were little better than gentlemen farmers and usually got on quite well with their villages and tenants, except for the usual squabbles over dovecotes and rights to the mall. Obviously the relationship in Riversee was somewhat strained.
Seated at the table Giles was using as a stage were the grizzled knife grinder who worked in the innyard, a toothless grandmother who might have been a hundred years old, and a farmer in the village to sell pigs.
Giles nodded toward the new arrivals and asked softly, “And who is that?”
The knife grinder snorted into his tankard. “The big one is Hugh Warrender. Some distant kin of the Duke of Marais.”
“Fifth cousin, twice removed,” the piping voice of the old woman added.
The farmer said, “Fifth cousin … ? Quiet, you daft old—”
“The boy is Fortune Devereux,” the knife grinder continued, oblivious to his companions' comments. “He's a brother from the wrong side of the bed, come up from Marleyton.”
“From Banesford,” the old woman put in, almost shouting over the farmer's attempts to keep her quiet.
“He first came here two years ago.” The grinder shrugged. “Warrender's not well thought of, but Devereux's not so bad.”
“Wrong!” The old woman glanced suspiciously around the room and lowered her voice to a shriek. “He's worse, far worse!”
 
 
Kade watched as a table was cleared for Warrender and his men near her seat beside the hearth, a process which involved a good deal of shouting, jostling, and imprecations. As the group argued with the landlord, her eyes fell on the blond Devereux. He was an attractive man, but she wasn't sure that was what had drawn her eye. There was something else about him, something in his eyes, the way he moved his hands as he made a placating gesture to the ruffled landlord. Whatever the something was, it made the back of her neck prickle in warning. She was so occupied by it that she was caught completely unawares when Warrender turned with a growl and backhanded a grubby potboy into the fire.
No time for thought or spell, her stool clattered as Kade launched herself forward. She landed hard on her knees, catching the boy around the waist before he stumbled into the flames.
Thwarted, Warrender snarled and lifted a hand to strike both of
them. Kade knelt in the ashes, the fearful boy clutching a double handful of her hair. “Yes, it would hurt me,” she said quietly to the madness in Warrender's face. “But it would also make me very, very angry.”
Something in her face froze Warrender. He stared at her, breathing hard, but didn't drop his arm. The moment dragged on.
Then Fortune Devereux stepped forward, catching his brother by the shoulder. Past Warrender's bulky form Kade met the younger man's gaze. Though his expression was sober, his eyes danced with laughter.
Yes,
she thought, her grip on the boy unconsciously tightening,
Oh yes. And now I know.
The tension held as Warrender hesitated, like a confused and angry bull, then he laughed abruptly and let Devereux lead him away.
Kade felt the potboy shiver in relief and released him. He scrambled up and darted away through the crowd. She was aware that across the room Giles was on his feet, that an older man had him by the wrist, trying to pry a heavy wooden stool out of his hand. As Warrender and the others moved away, Giles forced himself to relax and let the man take the makeshift club. He retrieved the viola from the table where he had dropped it and sat down heavily on the bench. She saw his hands were shaking as he rubbed at an imperfection on the instrument's smooth surface.
As the rest of his party took their seats, Devereux strolled over to the balladeer's table. He spoke, smiling, and tipped his hat. Giles looked up at him warily, gave him a grudging nod.
Kade looked away, to keep from betraying any uneasiness. Devereux had marked Giles's reaction, had seen him ready to leap to her defense.
That,
she thought,
cannot mean anything good.
 
 
“What did he say to you?” Kade's voice floated down from the cavernous darkness of the stable's loft.
“Nothing.” Giles had finished wrapping the viola d'amore in its oiled leather case. He was not sure when Kade had gotten into the loft or how.
The stable, the traditional sleeping place of itinerant musicians and entertainers, was warm and dark except for the faint glow of moonlight through the cracks in the boards. The horses and mules penned or stalled along the walls made a continuous soft undercurrent of quiet snorts and stamping as they jostled one another. Straw dust floated down from above and into Giles's hair. He stretched slowly, trying to ease the knots out of his aching back. This had not been one of his better nights.
He knew he was a fool, but he would rather no one else know it; when Warrender had been a breath away from knocking Kade into the fire, he had come dangerously close to exposing his feelings.
She's the most dangerous woman in Ile-Rien,
he told himself ruefully.
She doesn't need your defense.
Except in his songs maybe, that spoke the truth about her when others lied.
“I know he said something to you, I saw his lips move,” she persisted impatiently.
“Nothing that meant anything. Only gloating, I think. He said he was sorry for the disturbance.” Giles hesitated. “What would you have done?”
“When?”
Irritated, he replied more sharply than he meant to. “When that hulking bastard was about to push you into the fire, when do you think?”
“I wouldn't turn to dust at the first lick of flame, you know.” There was a pause. “I did have in mind a certain charm for the spontaneous ignition of gunpowder. And considering where he carried his pistol—” She added, “Devereux made his brother do it, you know.”
Giles turned to look up at the dark loft, startled. “What?”
“Warrender's under a binding spell. You could see it in his eyes.”
“Devereux is a sorcerer?” Giles frowned.
Her voice was lightly ironic. “Since he can do a binding spell, it's the logical conclusion.”
“But why would he do that? Did he kill the potter?”
“Assuredly.”
Giles gestured helplessly. “But why?”
She sounded exasperated. “I'm only an evil fay, ballad-maker, I don't have all the answers to all the questions in the world.”
Giles drew a deep breath, summoning patience. Then he smiled faintly to himself. “My lady Kade, the playwright Thario always said that it was how we behave in a moment of impulse that told the true tale of our souls. And you, in your moment of impulse, kept a boy from being pushed into a fire. What do you say to that?”
An apple sailed upward out of the loft, reached the peak of its ascent, then dropped to graze his left ear. There was a faint scrabble and a brief glint of moonlight from above as a trap door opened somewhere in the roof. “My mother was the queen of air and darkness, Giles,” her voice floated down as if from a great height. “And darkness … .”
 
 
Giles rolled over, scratching sleepily at the fleas that had migrated from his straw-filled pallet. The stable had become uncomfortably warm, and the summer night was humid. The sound of a woman sobbing softly woke him immediately. Wiping sweat from his forehead, he sat up and listened. It was coming from the stableyard, the side away from the inn.
He pushed to his feet and pulled his shirt on. Moonlight flickered down through the cracks in the high roof. As he crossed the hay-strewn floor, a horse stretched a long neck over a stall and tried to bite him.
The sobbing was slightly louder. It seemed to blend with the whisper of the breeze outside, forming an ethereal lament. Giles stopped, one hand on the latch of the narrow portal next to the large wagon door, some instinct making him wary.
Even through tears, the voice was silvery, bell-like. Odd. If the woman was under attack by whatever had killed the potter, she wouldn't be merely crying quietly.
On the chance that this was some private lover's quarrel and that interruptions, no matter how well meant, would be unwelcome, he groped
for the rickety ladder in the darkness and climbed to the loft. The window shutters were open to the breeze and the big space was awash in moonlight. The hay-strewn boards creaked softly as Giles crossed it and crouched in front of the window.
A woman was pacing on the hardpacked earth in front of the stable, apparently alone. Her hair was colorless in the moonlight, and she wore a long shapeless robe of green embroidered with metallic threads. She swayed as the wind touched her, like a willow, like tall grass. Behind her the empty field stretched out and down toward the trees shadowing the dark expanse of the river.

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