Northlight (18 page)

When they reached the crest, Kardith mounted up without a word. Terricel followed, and they began a slow, steady descent. At first, he found it a welcome change, then an unwelcome one, then a torture devised specifically for the male anatomy, as his weight shifted forward against an unforgiving leather pommel. As soon as they began to climb again, they dismounted.

Uphill, walk. Downhill, ride. Each direction brought its own particular agony.

Once past the first ridge of hills, there was less and less traffic, once a caravan of pannier-laden mules, and a metal trader with two well-armed bodyguards. The caravan leader waved in greeting as Kardith and Terricel rode by, he and his drovers too busy keeping his animals in line to do more. The trader, headed toward the city, stopped for a few moments to exchange reports on road conditions. He'd heard about the assassination but not the funeral riot, and he glanced uneasily toward the north and said he'd be glad to get back.

Late in the afternoon, two men passed them without pausing. They were traveling separately, one on a spotted horse and one on a rusty black. Kardith commented that the black wasn't trail-hardened enough for the pace his rider set. As the horse galloped out of sight, Terricel noticed the foam around its mouth, flecking its neck and flanks. He knew exactly how the laboring animal must feel.

By the end of the first day, Terricel's thighs felt as if they were encased in molten chains. He had not known there were so many places capable of pain between one knee and the other. In the last few hours, he'd clung to the grim determination not to disgrace himself by falling off his horse at the first available opportunity. As it was, he could do no more than grunt in agreement when Kardith suggested stopping at the inn that had just come into view, rather than camping their first night out.

They walked their horses into the big central courtyard. The hooves clattered on the cobblestones, a contrast to the muffled sounds of the dirt trail.

On one side of the yard stood the stables, with a few tired-looking horses tied to a rail by a watering trough. The main building sat opposite; a bank of solar water-heating panels covered most of the roof. Terricel thought immediately of hot baths and cooked food, although just being able to bring his knees together and stand rather than sit would be sufficient luxury for the moment.

“Unh,” he said, seeing by the look in Kardith's eyes that she knew exactly what his condition was.

“You stay here,” she said, swinging down from her saddle and handing him the mare's reins. “Water the horses.”

After Kardith disappeared inside the main building, Terricel sat wondering how he was going to force himself to move. He didn't want to be sitting on his horse in a stupor when she returned, not that it would lower her opinion of him significantly. At the moment, that didn't seem possible.

This isn't going to be easy, he told himself. But it is possible. And next time will be easier. It had better be.

His hip joints twinging in protest, Terricel dragged his right leg over the gelding's rump and slid to the ground. He clung to the stirrup as the horse looked around and touched his shoulder with a soft, whiskery muzzle.

Nosey, that's what I should call you. Terricel patted the horse.

Kardith's mare threw her head back when he tried to lead her. Her eyes bulged, ringed with white, and her nostrils flared wide. The corners of her mouth were criss-crossed with fine, whitened scars.

Like her owner,
Terricel reflected.
Headstrong and...scarred.
He spoke soothingly to her, called her Gray Lady and Battered-by-Life and several equally ridiculous names, but she would not move until his gelding, impatient to get to the water, began walking forward on his own.

When Kardith came back, he was standing at the trough between the two horses, attempting to scratch behind the gelding's ears. A boy with an open, weather-reddened face and straw-flecked clothes followed at her heels.

“I spent some of your money on care for the horses. I thought you'd like not having to unsaddle and rub them down the first night on the trail,” She grinned as she untied her saddle bags and slipped them over her shoulder. “Maybe I was wrong.”

Terricel's pride evaporated on the spot. “Not if it means I can be soaking in a hot tub any sooner.”

“That is the most sensible thing I've heard you say yet.”

The boy took the horses' reins and led them off toward the stable, clucking encouragingly to them. Terricel picked up his travel pack and followed Kardith to the inn itself. He tried to walk with some approximation of normal movement.

“That's a nice mare you have,” he said conversationally. “What's her name?”

“Name? Who gives horses names?”

Nobody but me, apparently.

“By the way,” she asked, still not looking at him. “What's yours?”

For a moment he was too surprised to answer. Avi hadn't mentioned him, then. “Terr — Terricel.”

Kardith shook her head. “Terricel, he's that pasty-faced book boy we left back in the city, clinging to his mother's robes. Me, I'll call you Terris.”

As the inn door swung shut, Terricel paused, his eyes straining to adjust to the dimness. The wooden walls and rafter beams were smoky-dark, lit only by the narrow windows. The smoldering embers in the patch-stone fireplace added a thin blue smoke, almost masking the smell of stale beer. Benches and trestle tables filled the low-ceilinged room, many of them occupied. Terricel made out farmers and herders in their sheepskin jackets and rough-spun wool breeches over knitted leggings, a sharp contrast to the sprinkling of travelers in finely-woven cloaks and high riding boots. A few of the locals glanced his way before returning to their drinking. Several of the tables had games of cards or dice going.

Kardith pushed past Terricel toward the bar, which was no more than another table covered with a cloth, separating a cabinet of kegs and bottles of various green and amber liquids from the rest of the room. Behind it stood a woman in a leather apron, her sleeves rolled up to reveal muscular forearms, her gray-streaked hair slicked back and anchored with a long tassel-headed stick.

“I'm sorry, Ranger, there's just the one room. We can bring a cot in for...” she glanced fleetingly at Terricel, “or he can sleep down here by the fire. Either way, we'll throw in the private bath, clear.”

“One room,” Kardith said, shrugging.

The inn-woman nodded. “You'll have a drink or two first, won't you? Relax in the common room after a long day's journey?”

The smells of the ale and food made Terricel's mouth water. The noon meal of bread and cheese, eaten while the horses watered at a farmer's stock station, had been a long time ago, and on top of no breakfast. His stomach rumbled and the muscles in his thighs began trembling.

“I've little taste for company tonight,” Kardith remarked, as if discussing the weather. She rubbed the side of her nose. “Two meals, in my room. Meat if you've got it.”

“But of course, what would you think of us, not to have meat for our hungry guests? And a jar of our best ale?”

“No yak-piss, just water.”

The woman's mouth assumed the shape of an “O”. She gestured to a younger woman standing by the staircase, who bobbed her head and disappeared into the lightless bowels of the inn. Then she fished into one of her capacious leather pockets, extracted a key on a loop of multicolored twine and handed it to Kardith.

Terricel trudged up the bare wooden stairs after Kardith. His legs felt so heavy he could hardly lift them, but the tremors stopped as long as he kept moving. There seemed to be an unreasonable number of steps to the second flight, each one steeper and farther from the warmth and cheer below. It wouldn't have been so terrible to have some ale and something to eat first, would it?

Yet it seemed to him that Kardith had deliberately avoided lingering below, just as she'd suggested to the innkeep that he, Terricel, was a person of no account, to be safely ignored. As he dragged one foot after the other up the stairs, he thought dispiritedly that he'd probably concocted the idea from his own bone-tiredness and the paranoia he'd absorbed like mother's milk from Esmelda.

Whatever was going on, Kardith clearly assumed he'd follow her lead in dealing with it. All day long she'd been testing him, pounding away at his resolve, giving every indication that the most he could expect from her was scornful silence. Maybe how she'd just treated him was no more than a carefully studied insult. But maybe she was giving him a chance. That was all, just a chance. An honest chance, perhaps the first in his whole life.

Terricel hitched his travel pack over his shoulder, gritted his teeth, and kept climbing.

The room was the size of a closet, hardly big enough to hold the narrow bed, a rickety-looking cot, two straight-backed chairs, and napkin-sized table on which stood a decrepit but functional lamp. It was an inner room with no outside windows, but well-aired. The ale might be yak-piss, as Kardith said, but the chambermaid knew her business. Towels lay neatly folded on the bed, along with a block of yellowish sheep-tallow soap, and the wood floor still bore damp traces of its last scrubbing. Ocher paper covered the walls, the pattern long since scoured off. At the foot of the bed was another door, presumably to the private bath.

Kardith put down her saddlebags, examined the inner door and bathroom beyond to make sure there was no other way into the room besides the outer door. This she opened and closed several times, testing the hinges and the bar latch.

“Hunh! They call
this
a lock?” She closed the outer door, wedged one of the straight-backed chairs against it, sat down on the other chair, and drew her long-knife.

Terricel stared at the knife in fascination. He'd never seen a blade like that close up, the metal a rippling blue-white, the hilt wrapped in narrow leather strips patterned like a head of ripened wheat. It looked well worn, as if it bore the permanent impression of her hand.

The blade flashed, and for a moment he was back in the plaza, his head filled with the smell of blood. As he remembered, his mouth turned dry. He knelt, Gaylinn's head and shoulders across his knees, holding her as she stiffened and went limp.

Gaylinn..
. In a few days, there would be a funeral for her, along with the rest of the riot victims. They would dig up another paving stone and plant another tree, facing the one on Pateros's grave. Her family would be there, come all the way from Raimuth at the western branching of the Vision River. They'd stand together in the plaza, holding each other, her father with his bushy black eyebrows and printer's hands, her mother with tears streaking the faded beauty of her face, the older brother who'd been the first to see the genius in her art, all her other brothers and sisters. If he were there, he would stand with them and they would enfold him as if he were one of them, simply because Gaylinn had once loved him.

He remembered one morning, walking along the banks of the Serenity, remembered the smell of the curling fog, the water as glassy as if it were covered with a sheen of oil, the bells tolling in the distance. Gaylinn's hand felt warm and strong in his. They'd been lovers for only a little while and her nearness still had the power to shake him. He ached with longing to give her something secret of himself. There was one thing, all his, that Esmelda had never found out about.

“What are you thinking, so grim, so serious?” Gaylinn had laughed.

“When I was little,” he began slowly, “I used to tell myself stories. About the usual things kids imagine, but also...sometimes...they were about my father. I never knew him. I was just a baby when he died.”

“Tell me,” she said.

Some twisted thing inside let go and out flooded the vision, as vivid as when it had first come to him. “I'm floating in the middle of a warm, yellow light. Candlelight. The smell is so sweet it fills my head. In the corner there's a bed. I can't see it clearly, but I'm moving toward it, closer and closer. I can see the blanket I'm wrapped in, white with a flower pattern...and now I see that on the bed there's a man. His face is red and dark, as if the light doesn't reach that far. He reaches up and touches my head. His hand is hot, it's shaking. He's...I don't know. I couldn't have...have remembered him, could I?”

Gaylinn put her arms around him. Her hair smelled like dayflowers. “It's the heart that sees these things, not the mind.”

Remembering, he thought of the painting she'd done of him, her master's-work. Of the paintings she would never finish now.

He slumped to the cot, letting the travel pack slide to the floor. The pad made rustling noises under him and smelled like dried flowers. Straw, probably. He was so tired he didn't care if he had to sleep on the floor.

Kardith, on the other hand, looked ready to jump the first person who opened the door. She laid the long-knife across her thighs, her fingertips a hair's breadth above it.

Terricel lifted his head and looked from the naked blade to the barricaded door. “Are you always this...suspicious?”

 “Mmm. Could just be a coincidence.”

His adrenalin level took a sudden lurch, as if he'd been shoved bodily through the Starhall doors and all the eerie twistedness of the place flooded through him. “What coincidence?”

“Maybe nothing.” She shrugged. Her hands didn't move.

“My mother dumps batshit like that,” he said with sudden passion. “Nothing but hints and maybes. Who am I going to tell
your
secrets to, my gods-damned
horse?
”

Kardith's brows drew together, shadowing her eyes. “It's not
you
I don't trust, Terris, it's
me.
”

“But you — you're a
Ranger.
” He shifted forward on the cot. “You saw the man who killed Pateros — you knew it was going to happen. I heard you shouting. I saw you running across the plaza. No one else even noticed, but you did. You
knew.
”