The Seer - eARC (2 page)

The next morning, Dirina had woken early with a suspicion of what her uncle meant to do with her and her sister and a sick certainty that he had set the ropes to unravel. There was no proof, but she could feel it in her bones. Before dawn she had gathered Amarta and had left on forest paths under a quarter moon to they knew not where.

Days later Dirina remembered how Amarta had woken her in the middle of the night before that terrible day to tell her of a vision of wall-nests and slipping rope, begging her for help.

Dirina had told her that it was only a dream and to go back to sleep.

To know what would happen and still not be able to change it was worse than not knowing. Dirina no longer wanted to hear about the future.

Amarta stared into the light of the burning candle. Perhaps they should save what was left of it—they could not afford them as it was—but it comforted her sister, and—

He was coming back.

“Ama, is he—”

A sudden noise outside the thin walls of the cabin. An animal, perhaps, or—

She strained to hear, helpless to stop herself envisioning which of the many night sounds might be a man’s last struggle for breath.

This was the last time, Dirina told herself. No more of Amarta’s visions.

Then they would starve.

No, then she would—

There was a loud pounding at the door.

“What should I do?” Dirina asked, frightened enough to blurt out the question.

Amarta shook her head with a child’s lost, fearful look. She didn’t know. Or wouldn’t say.

The pounding came again, rattling the door frame and walls. Dirina could too easily imagine him breaking the door in if she waited much longer. She dashed to unbolt it and let him in.

He pushed past her into the room, breathing hard, hood thrown back, hair and face smeared with mud. At his look, Dirina backed away.

From the other room came Pas’s freshly woken howl. Before Dirina could move, Amarta darted to the back room, returning with Pas cradled in her arms, now quieted. Dirina felt a sick jolt at seeing her sister and son here, so near this dangerous man.

“You were right,” he told Dirina, his voice low. “I broke his neck. Hold, twist, snap.” His hands moved in the air, as if to demonstrate. “As we were taught. And yes—” He fixed a look on Amarta. “He hesitated, my brother did. As you said he would. He should have known better.”

Dirina put a hand over her mouth.

For a long moment, the only sound in the room was the stranger’s hard breathing.

His gaze wandered the room, as if seeing it for the first time. When his look came back to Dirina, he seemed to be weighing a decision.

It was slow, the motion of his hand moving out from under his cloak. He was shaking, she realized, despite that his face showed nothing. His hand went for the pile of coins.

For a horrible moment she was sure he would take all the coins and leave. It had happened before. Instead he put another coin on the table.

A gold souver. Dirina’s mouth fell open.

“My life is worth this and more to me, so I’ll give you some advice as well.” He looked at Amarta and settled a weightier look on Dirina. “Charge more.”

With that he left.

Heartbeats passed. When the cold night air finally broke her shock, Dirina went to the door, shut it, dropped the bolt. As if it would protect them from anything.

Her sister was sitting on the floor, curled around Pas, rocking, murmuring to him.

Dirina dropped down next to her, put her arms around them both.

“He’s gone now, don’t you worry,” Amarta was telling Pas.

“We’re safe,” Dirina said, knowing the lie of the words as they left her mouth.

She helped her sister stand and drew them both back to the cot and under blankets. Dirina waited until she was asleep, then wrapped Pas in a blanket and took him back to the table. She gave him her breast to feed as she stared at the coins on the table.

All they had done was to answer the man’s questions.

No, that was a lie, too; they had helped him kill his brother, a man who probably also had fine clothes, a horse, and a good deal of coin. Whoever he was.

It didn’t matter who he was. Both men were gone, and the coins remained. Coins that would buy them food to keep them from starving through the winter. Perhaps some tar and straw to seal the roof and stop the drafts. Peat for the stove. Blankets. Food and shelter and warmth.

Or maybe a start somewhere else.

That’s what they would do, she decided. At first light they would pack what little they had and leave. Begin again elsewhere, somewhere no one had heard about Amarta and what she could do.

When the coins ran out, Dirina would mend or clean or cook or whatever was needed to keep them alive. But no more answers for strangers. No more stumbling over long-held secrets or making enemies by telling people things they didn’t really want to know.

For a moment she planned furiously, thinking of what they could take on their backs.

She stopped. It would not happen. Not this season, not the next. She could not take a child and an infant on a mountain trek to another village with ice on the ground and snow on the way.

Then, she decided fiercely, she would find another way. When the money was gone, she would rent herself to the village men for more. She would count carefully this time, and there would be no more mistakes.

That is, if the village men had any extra coin in the winter months at all. Well, she would find out, she decided.

Pas reached for her then, clutching the cloth of her shirt tightly in his little fist. She raised his hand to her mouth and kissed it, allowing herself this moment of sweetness. She tucked the fallen cloth back around his little body, and his head dropped onto her chest as he fell asleep.

She was his future. His only future. She would do what she must.

In his sleep, Pas made a small sound. She rocked him gently as the room lightened with the first hint of dawn.

Gold. They had a gold souver. Dirina took the coin in hand and looked it over closely.

Larger than the silver falcons and heavier, too. Nothing like the dirty, scratched copper quarter-nals chits she knew, that if you had the right four, you could piece together to make a picture of the Grandmother Queen with her moon-in-sky through the window and dog at her feet.

It was a wonder, this coin, heavy and smooth like a river rock. She brought it close, rubbing her finger over the shining detail.

A soldier on a horse, front legs high in the air, sword raised. Behind him were snow-capped mountains divided by a river. That would be the Sennant, the great river that ran through the empire, that they had crossed to come here to this village. Behind the horse, a palace. The Jewel of the Empire, which her mother had told her stories about when she’d been small. So many rooms. Food in every one of them.

What had Amarta said to the man who had given them this coin? Something about a woman who would be upset. Something about her father keeping his word.

Dirina turned the coin over. A bearded man stared back at her with an imposing expression on his face and a circlet on his head.

A crown. That was what Amarta had said. Something about a crown.

Dirina stared at the coin in her hand, her breath coming hard and fast. She dropped the coin to the table, where it rattled and went still.

What had they done?

In the dawning day, Dirina clutched Pas tight and watched gold and silver coins take on rich color as the prisms of her tears blurred them into wild, luminescent shapes.

Chapter Two

Bound in word and blood.

The monarchy’s motto, and a part of Innel’s long oath to the king. He looked at his brother’s body in front of him, wrapped in burlap, laid across the shoulders of his mare, and wondered if he had now broken that oath.

He turned his horse from the road following along the thundering Sennant River to one that steeply ascended into the mountains. The horse snorted her incredulity at leaving the well-maintained, flat road but went where Innel directed. She was a splendidly well-trained creature with a glossy coal-black coat that he had taken in the middle of the night for the hard ride south to Botaros. Without permission. From the king’s own travel set.

One more thing to answer for.

Her ears flattened again. She did not like the bundle she carried, wrapped in what Innel could find that dark, cold night. Did not like it at all.

Nor did he.

A confrontation, yes. Sharp words, even, given the circumstances. That he might have expected.

But this?

His mare slowed on the steep incline, stepping delicately over a fallen log. He pushed aside the desire to rush her. He wanted to be done with this, but there was no room for mistakes; she was not only carrying him and provisions, but a body.

Not a small body, either. Pohut had been a large man, powerful and fast. Had the fight been fair, Innel would have been a fool to bet on himself.

Yet he had won, the body before him testimony to that. His brother and he, resolved at last.

A cold autumn wind gusted across his face.

No, nothing like resolved.

Hours later the road leveled somewhat, weaving among the pines and patches of ice like a skein of silvered yarn, sometimes following along the roaring river far below, sometimes cutting inland, sometimes so overgrown it was scarcely more than a game trail. Once he and the horse disagreed on where the road was, and only after they had to backtrack from a dead end at an overhang that dropped to the white frothing water below did he defer to her when he wasn’t sure.

The long way back to the capital, this detour from the main road, and that only to avoid the small risk of being stopped and asked what he was carrying. Growing up in the Cohort had taught him that sometimes there was a hair’s width between triumph and disaster. As always, a balance of risks.

Like arriving at Botaros minutes before his brother did, finding there a child who could truly see into the future, and taking her advice.

A tenday ago, he would have dismissed the rumor of a seer as a children’s fable, a ruse to some end. To find that his brother, supposedly aboard ship far south in the Mundaran Sea, had returned and was now en route to Botaros on a fast horse, had quickly decided him.

Deceit and treachery from anyone else, even Cohort siblings, he had come to expect. But Pohut?

So Innel had followed his brother. Hard riding, lack of sleep, and blinding fury at Pohut’s most recent betrayal had put Innel there first. By a hair’s width.

He went over the conversation in his mind, every word, how the girl had held herself. No deception that he could read, and she had known things she simply could not know. Now that he had time to reflect, he realized he should have gotten more answers, starting with what would have happened if his brother had arrived first.

No. He knew that answer.

He looked at the body in front of him again.

First he must return to the capital and find out how much trouble he was in. Then he would come back for the girl.

* * *

Innel stopped in the middle of a circle of alders and dismounted, tugging out the knots that kept the long bundle on his mount, easing his brother’s body down onto frozen mud.

The mare’s large brown eye met his in what might have been gratitude but was more likely a rebuke for putting her through this.

They had left the distant roar of the Sennant far behind. Other than muted birdsong and wind through high trees, the silence of the woods was thick and heavy. Such a contrast to Yarpin Palace, where every word, spoken or not, was loud with implication. Where the length of a shirt sleeve could spark backroom discussions and questions about one’s loyalty.

Where he would need to arrive with a very compelling story about what he had done.

They were a royal investment, the girls and boys of the Cohort, the result of decades of tutelage and housing. Innel was going to need to explain why he was bringing one of them back dead.

Ironically, he wanted his brother’s advice more than ever. What would Pohut have said now?

“You are the aggrieved party,” he might have said. “With no opposing voice, the king will believe you. If
you
believe you.”

“But what do I say?” Innel mouthed to the cold quiet around him.

“Sleep on it. You’ll think more clearly tomorrow. You always do.”

But tomorrow his brother would still be dead.

He stumbled away into the brush, hand against a tree, and leaned over to put onto the ground what little remained in his stomach. He heaved again and again.

His
brother
. He had killed his
brother
.

After a time he stood, wiped his mouth, and looked around at this too-quiet forest, dim and gray-green under frigid, flat white skies.

The past was done. Writ in blood and carved in stone. Unchangeable. No sense in dwelling on it.

He drank water and opened a bag of grain to hand-feed his mare, focusing on this simple act and nothing else; the feel of her lips on his palm, the sound of her grinding molars.

Just a package to deliver, he told himself, struggling the heavy thing off the ground and up and onto his shoulders and then across the horse, tying it securely. She snorted resentment, breath white like smoke in the chill air. As he swung up into the saddle, he resolved to have the stablehands overfeed her on their return.

A very, very compelling story.

The mutts, they had been called, from their first day in the Cohort. Together they had studied fiercely, the unspoken rules of palace life, the patterns of war, the moods of the princess. Together they had outthought, outfought, and outcourted the rest of the Cohort.

Together. Always together.

Perhaps it would be simpler for him to return to Yarpin without the body. Say he had not seen Pohut at all.

Or perhaps that his brother had cursed him and the king as well and headed for lands south, now both a traitor and a deserter.

“On a ship, Sire,” Innel mouthed, to see how the words would sound. “Ashamed to face you after drawing his knife on me.”

But no—uncertainty about Pohut’s fate led to doubt about Innel’s story, and there would be enough of that. The body had to come back with him, along with Pohut’s knife. The knife he had indeed drawn on Innel but had never had a chance to use.

Because of the girl’s prediction.

Or he, Innel, could go elsewhere. Leave the empire entirely. Find some remote place to call home. A self-exile.

He could not stomach that either. They had worked too hard, too long. Year by year, spending what little influence they had being so close to the throne, grooming contacts, building loyalties. The two of them had been generous with favors but miserly in trust; raised in the Cohort among royals and scions of the Greater and Lesser Houses, he and Pohut had long ago realized they had only one true ally.

Since he could remember, the trust between them had seemed unshakable. But it was not; these last few years, it had eroded.

The king had told him, in words he could not mistake for anything else, that there was no longer room at the palace for the both of them.

And then his brother had betrayed him.

Now there was plenty of room.

“Damn you,” he said to his brother.

There was a saying in the palace that blood speaks with one voice. It meant that what the aristo families shared was stronger than what divided them. This was why the king bred dogs and horses. It was why, when Innel’s father had died a general and hero of the king’s northern expansion, their mother and her three children were taken to the palace and inducted into the Cohort.

Breeding mattered. In dogs, in horses. In children.

As he stared at the bundle that was his brother’s body, he could see Pohut’s face and hear his voice.

Blood spoke, all right. He just didn’t much like what it was saying.

Innel arrived in Yarpin at the first hint of dawn’s light, gray stone streets and tall brick buildings engulfed in pools of shadow under fast-fading stars. The mare picked up her pace, eager to get home.

Or perhaps she was trying to escape the stink. Even autumn-chilled, the stench of trash against the wall and the sewers was a foe no arms could subdue, a pungent insult to the nose that overshadowed even the nagging scent of his brother’s body.

It didn’t matter how many sewer pipes were installed down-city if the Houses on the hill consumed every drop of water for their baths and flower gardens. The palace was no better, with glassed-in gardens and soaking tubs.

The stench did not distinguish between common and noble noses; everyone gagged on entrance. Wealthy merchants, foreign dignitaries. The Houses and the king should have been embarrassed, but they simply ignored it. As soon as he and his brother gained some measure of authority, they would do something about it.

His brother.

He could still reverse direction, find a country far away, his actions this last tenday left unknown.

Along with everything else he had labored to accomplish. A ragged mutt with nothing. Common, in the truest sense.

No. He was not ready to give up.

Around him, tradesmen and clerks were rushing out into the dim light of the streets to start their day, stumbling out of his way, then staring. He had thought to attract less attention by seeming to be a trader going up-city to deliver a rolled tapestry, his soldier’s uniform hidden under loose clothing and cloak, but it was now obvious to him that a body didn’t hang over a horse’s shoulders the way a tapestry would. A lesson that, oddly, none of his tutors had provided.

In doorways, rags moved, becoming scrawny children who scrambled to their feet and called out to him, promising everything from the impossible to the unlikely. One small boy pulled off his shirt, shivering in the morning chill, rubbing his tiny chest, describing in detail what he was offering. All, he assured in his high-pitched child’s voice, for only three nals. Less, the boy cried out, as Innel passed him by.

A girl stood on the street reciting the names of tinctures at prices far too inexpensive to be sanctioned. There was something not quite right about her expression and distant stare that put him in mind of his sister, Cahlen. Would his sister and mother survive this day, if he did not? It seemed to Innel that he should care, one way or the other, but he was not sure he did.

The king’s laws were supposed to prevent children from shielding black-market outlaws by setting the same penalties for the young as for those who hired them, yet it was still children calling from doorways, filling the prisons, and being sold to slavers when it was clear that no one was coming to pay their fine.

There was an upside, of sorts, he supposed; Innel had studied the empire’s books and knew how much of the crown’s income could be attributed to the sale of those barely old enough to count on their fingers, let alone make binding contracts. The king’s accountants were fond of joking that children were one of Yarpin’s most lucrative exports.

Except that it was true. Those backing these urchins could afford to bribe whomever they needed to. The city was soaked in such dealings, from the slums to the Great Houses. So many palms to which coin could stick.

And that was where the money went, on its way to clean the city, or to repair streets and water pipes. Another thing he and his brother would remedy when they—

Again he looked at the body in front of him.

A crow flew across the horse’s path, squawking loudly, and Innel tensed, momentarily gripping the reins. The mare stopped, and he pressed her forward again.

The scent of baking bread caught his attention, making him realize how hungry he was. Absurdly he imagined stopping for rolls and herbed butter while the challenge before him simply waited until he felt like it.

Maybe someone would steal the body from his horse while he lingered, enjoying the bustle of the morning around him.

But it was just imagination, and he did not stop.

As his horse climbed the steep hill, the foul air cleared, replaced by briny ocean breezes. The Lesser Houses rose high and wide on either side of the street. Finch and Chandler, Glass and Bell, their familial sigils worked into patterns of trim, mosaic, groundstone, the dual-color flags of their patron houses flying high and bright in the rising sun.

In this prestigious neighborhood, House patrols kept beggars and other lurkers away. One patrol watched now, not recognizing Innel as one of the Cohort. The man looked him over; the fine black horse, anonymous cloak, body across the saddle. He appeared to weigh the evidence, then nodded a little and turned away.

From the palace, deep bells chimed the hour of dawn. Perhaps he should have arrived at midnight instead of at the start of the day, which he now realized would mean far more eyes on him.

No, there was no good time to arrive with this package.

At the summit, the street opened into a huge square at the center of which was a sizable fountain. Water poured from the mouths of a hundred carved marble flowers into the open beaks of a hundred carved birds standing on rocks in the pool below.

An apt model of the convoluted House Charters, he had always thought, the many streams of water—some parallel in effort, some at cross-purposes—that assigned contracts and Lesser Houses to the Great Houses. Few could make sense of all the relationships involved, even among the Cohort, even though most of them hailed from the Houses. He and his brother, though, they—

He veered from the thought.

The side streets were lavish with rows of trees and gardens fronting the gated compounds of the Eight Great Houses, each painted and jeweled in its two-tone colors, the roof lines sparkling brilliant in the sun’s first rays.