The Seer - eARC (47 page)

He made a doubtful sound, and she touched them together. Now he saw that one was very slightly thinner. Hardly perceptible. “Ah. Yes.”

“There is more gold in this forgery than there is in a standard souver.”

“More? What? But why—”

“Exactly, Lord Commander. And this is what puzzles me most: this coin would cost more to produce than a souver is worth. It makes no sense at all.”

“Not a problem.”

Sutarnan del Sartor del Elupene, recently returned from Garaya, sat in front of Innel eating boiled eggs dipped in oily saffron sauce and crab-filled pastries baked into the shapes of starfish.

“An entire city, remiss on taxes for nearly two years, and you say it’s not a problem? Care to elaborate?”

“My pleasure.” Sutarnan licked red oil from his fingers and took a sip of the black wine he’d had brought from his own collection. Then he leaned back, smug and smiling. “It’s not the merchants. Well, it is, but not the way the governor has whined to us. Oh, they’re full of spark and fury, all right, but the real problem? The governor. He’s been eating his seed corn, the bastard. Not a little, either; the entire royal garrison has been gutted, turned into an army of beggars.”

“What?”

“He hasn’t paid them in over a year. The barracks are falling down. Some of them have sold off their weapons and armor just to afford to live. Others have gone off into the countryside.”

More deserters. And close enough to the Perripur border that the word would spread.

Innel exhaled sharply. “This is why the merchants are troubled and taxes are in arrears. No one to collect and keep order. Where’s the city council?”

“Well-fed wethers. They speak his words, simper and equivocate and defer, then go back to their houses to eat and fuck. Useless, all of them. Not that I object to eating and fucking, you understand.”

“I’ll have his head,” Innel said darkly.

“A change in leadership might be just what the city needs. Even wants. Fortunately for you, Lord Commander, I can arrange this for you.”

“Explain your meaning.”

“The private militias aren’t going to want to get involved, and the governor’s guard has lovely uniforms and shiny weapons that they don’t want to dent or dirty. Still, the walls and gates are sound and solid and very sturdy. I could defend them with a hundred good men. Yes, even me.” He laughed. “Imagine. I’m starting to like the idea.”

Sutarnan had always been annoying. “Don’t let me rush you,” Innel said sweetly.

Sutarnan leaned forward, holding up a pastry then biting off one of the legs. “But the walls won’t matter. A number of merchants are good friends of mine, and it turns out quite loyal to the crown. They’ve agreed to open the poorly guarded eastern gates when the queen’s army shows its colors. You’d be surprised how many are eager for that moment to arrive.”

“You arranged this?”

“Don’t sound so surprised. It’s not only you bone-crushers who can take cities. Sometimes it requires a bit of”—he waved a hand at the food and wine—“friendly conversation.”

“I am—impressed. Well done, Sutarnan.”

The other man smiled. “And this,” he said, “is why you’re going to send me back at the head of an army to take Garaya. I’ve always wanted to be a general.”

“Ah.” A bit more of a title than Innel had intended to give him, but perhaps reasonable under the circumstances. In any case, it was unlikely Sutarnan would want to repeat this experience. “I might send someone with you. Keep you from getting into too much trouble.”

“Certainly. A little advice might be useful.”

Innel thought of who he’d send with Sutarnan and the companies most familiar with Garaya. Then he thought of Cahlen.

“One of the companies I’ll be sending with you has a corporal, named Selamu. I’d be very unhappy if something happened to him. Keep him safe. Back with the birds.” Cahlen would like that. “Understood?”

“You have a boy companion? How charming, Innel. I would not have suspected you of such—sentimentality.”

“He’s my sister’s. Just keep him alive.”

“So noted, ser,” he said, with a lopsided smile and a sloppy salute that Innel did not think was unintentional. “I’ll send my clerk around tomorrow for the writs of command. I’ll have to have a uniform made, too, I suppose, and select a new horse. My parents will be delighted. Let me know when I’m nearly ready to go, will you?”

“Of course,” Innel said wryly.

Innel went to his suite at sundown, bone-weary and aching for his bed. He was starting to make little mistakes, letting important items slip by, getting angry with people over small things.

He could not allow little slips to turn into big ones, small annoyances to ripple out into the fabric of palace politics.

As he shut the door of his suite behind him, he saw her standing by the windows, dressed in soft, flowing magenta silks. She faced away from him, looking out the window at a city bathed in a golden sunset and the dark band of ocean beyond.

“Your Majesty,” he said. She was in his room. Why?

She did not turn around. “What are you doing, Innel?”

He gritted his teeth. It was a sufficiently vague question that he could not guess at what she might mean. There was no good answer. He recognized the tactic from her father. Intended to put him off-balance. And working.

Restarn’s daughter, after all.

He started unbuttoning his vest. “Getting undressed.”

Now she did turn around. “I don’t want all the details of how you keep order, but there are some disturbing rumors.”

“Which particular rumors are you thinking of?”

“The one where you are spending a very great deal of money trying to find a young woman. A fortune-teller. Normally I ignore such idiocy, but this rumor has been surprisingly persistent.”

“Rumors are always persistent. That’s what makes them rumors. The more outrageous, the longer-lived.” Innel pulled off his shirt.

“What is the new mage doing, Innel?”

He was beyond tired. “Helping me with a number of matters,” he managed, tossing the shirt on the floor.

“Is one of them this fortune-teller?”

It was tempting to tell her no and have this done with, but if such a deception came to light, nothing would infuriate her more.

Besides, she liked to be right once in a while.

“It is.”

She growled softly. “Is this a jest?”

“It is not. Do you now want the details?” His tone was too rough, he realized, struggling for calm.

She turned away in the darkening room, standing for a moment in profile against the fast-dimming sun. She touched a low-burning lamp and it brightened the room, underlighting her sharp features, giving her a formidable appearance. She looked a lot like her father now. “I do.”

“My lady, I’m desperately tired. Can’t this wait until morning?”

“Of course it can wait,” she said, voice chillingly soft. “If you think it prudent to deny your sovereign answers when she asks for them. I wouldn’t, in your shoes, but perhaps you know better than I do.”

“Forgive me,” he said quickly, feeling his blood rush at her words, grateful for the momentary clarity it lent him. “Whatever you want to know, you have only to ask.”

“Why are you searching for this young woman?”

“Because she can see into the future.”

Cern snorted in disgust. “Must I find a new Lord Commander? What a stunningly witless thing to spend on. You’re as bad as my father.”

“I would agree with you,” Innel said cautiously, “had I not heard her speak. That she has evaded my best trackers is not coincidence.”

“Anyone can get lucky.”

“Not this lucky. Not for three years.”

“Three
years
? Fates, Innel. How much is this costing?”

One of Restarn’s faults was that he rarely asked for a close accounting. For a moment, he missed the old king. “Shall I walk you through the ledgers, Your Majesty?”

“Oh, it’s going to be like that, is it?” Her words did not invite answer, so he did not offer. Instead he sat heavily on his bed and pulled off his boots.

She sat down across from him in one of the thickly padded chairs. “You realize how witless this sounds, Innel?”

“Yes. But it is worth the cost to find her, even if all she does is sit and mumble, if our enemies believe she might be able to predict tomorrow’s weather. And they do.”

“I hear my uncle is on the Labari coast. Perhaps a royal pardon would bring him back to resume the Lord Commandership.”

Innel laughed at this weak threat, even knowing it was a mistake. He was just too tired.

“You laugh at me? You dare?”

“I’m sorry, Cern,” he said, belatedly realizing he wasn’t making things better by addressing her informally. “But the thought of Lason trying to manage the military conflicts we are juggling—he’d change every allocation, just to show he could. He’d plunge us into outrageous, costly battles that could never be won. Besides, you don’t even like him.”

“I don’t like you, either.”

“But you trust me. Because I tell you the truth. As I am doing now.”

She snorted as if in disgust and disagreement, but he saw her shoulders relax. He knew how she had been raised. When he thought about it, it was surprising that she could relax at all.

A vivid memory came to him of her as a small child, perhaps four or five, her expression one of utter, agonized frustration following some harsh and confusing conversation with her father. She had stood still and silent, small hands clenched into furious shaking fists, but eyes dry.

Now she stretched her arms up over her head, hands tightening into fists, betraying her tension. After a moment she gave him an odd look. “I went to see him today,” she said.

Despite Innel’s exhaustion, there was no question who she meant. He blinked hard, trying to clear his mind. Then, to buy a moment: “Who, my queen?”

“My father.”

She crossed a foot over her other leg, pulled off her thick slippers and began touching her toes on their tips, one by one, bending them back and forth, as if testing each one to make sure it still worked properly. Innel was one of the few who had ever seen this odd habit. She only did this in private when she was sorting out details.

He must make sure he didn’t end up as one of her details.

“That was good of you, to go see him.”

“He likes you, Innel. As much as he likes anyone. Did you know that?”

“I admit it strains my credulity.”

“You want to keep Arunkel whole, our borders strong. So alike, you two, he says.” Her smile lacked warmth.

“Similar goals do not make similar men.”

“I am glad to hear you say so.”

There was something coming. Innel could feel it, like the pressure before a storm. He inhaled and braced himself, again willing himself to focus.

“He also says you are poisoning him.”

There it was.

Someone had let something slip. The doctor? He thought of the doctor’s grandson, now two years old, walking and talking at House Eschelatine, and what might happen to the boy if Innel discovered that the doctor had betrayed him.

Or could it be the slave? No, she could not possibly know, not unless someone told her.

Perhaps, after all this time, Restarn had simply guessed. Foolish of him to voice such suspicion, but he had now been sick two years. Perhaps his judgment was fraying.

And perhaps the king had outlived his usefulness.

“Does he,” Innel said.

He met Cern’s gaze. He would not offer more. She would have to ask.

After a moment, she went back to her toes. “He wanted to talk, as if all we were was father and daughter.” Her tone was flat. “I went to leave and he—” She looked up from her toes, looking beyond Innel. “He begged me to stay. Begged me, Innel. He seemed on the edge of tears.” Now she focused on Innel again. “He said you were going to kill him. That I was the only one who could save him. That if I left, I would not see him alive again.”

Innel could well imagine Restarn enacting that particular drama. He knew how to control his daughter. “And then?”

She took a deep breath. “Then I left.”

Or maybe he didn’t.

“He isn’t at all well,” Innel said slowly. “Not thinking clearly. He could say anything. Might even believe it to be true.”

“Yes,” she said. “A very sick old man.”

And still she had not asked.

Innel had worked his entire life to win Cern’s trust. With her the coin of honesty was the hardest currency he held. Even so, now that she was a hair’s breadth away from asking, he wasn’t sure how he would answer. Some things were better left unsaid.

Standing, she put her feet back into her slippers. “Get some rest, Innel.” She walked to the door, paused. “If you were not so tired, I would ask you to entertain me tonight.”

“So very kind of you, Your Majesty,” he said quite sincerely. “Would tomorrow morning please you?”

“Yes. Come see me then.”

As the guard outside closed the door behind her, Innel realized that she was not going to ask him. She did not want to know.

He let himself fall back on the bed. Exhaustion came over him like a fog.

Chapter Twenty-six

“Ama, there is no need for this.”

Between market day and the loud masked comedy show in the courtyard of the inn, only one room remained available. An expensive one. It was huge, with a large bed in one corner.

Really, thought Amarta, there was no sensible reason not to share it with him.

He stood at the other end of the room, watching. Waiting.

“And what about later, on the way north?” Amarta asked Maris.

He had taken off the headwrap, brushing fingers through his dark hair and unbraided beard. “She makes a good point,” he said to Maris. “I can hardly protect her all the way to Yarpin from a separate room.”

But this was not merely a practical matter; Amarta had worked so hard to bring the dog inside where she could see him. She didn’t want him back on the street where he might vanish into the shadows again, watching her. Hunting her.

Maris looked at each of them and shrugged. “As you say.” At the bed Maris pulled out the cot tucked underneath, moving it to the other end of the room where he stood. Then she took a chair at the table, unlacing her boots, pausing as she realized Amarta had not yet moved. “If we are to share a room, then you must also rest. He will not trouble you tonight, that’s certain.”

Amarta watched him as he walked the room, working the locking mechanism of the door, checking behind the pictures on the walls, dropping down to examine the carved base of the circular table that sat near the bed. At the window he opened and closed the slats, looking outside where swells of laughter and applause came from the watching crowds in the courtyard and on the walkway outside the room.

Finally he sat in the chair on the other side of the table from Maris.

Amarta sat as well, dragging her gaze from him, taking off her own boots, the ones Maris had bought for her. Elkhide, heavy, and so comfortable, with horn buttons to wrap at the sides. Without question the most marvelous and expensive things she had ever owned.

One more debt she could not pay.

He spoke to Maris in Perripin and she answered shortly, clearly still annoyed. But he kept on talking, his face animated, and after a while Maris laughed, a sound that shocked Amarta. She watched as they talked, gesturing, switching between Arunkin and Perripin and back.

“The ship was sold,” Tayre was saying, having dropped the other accent entirely. Or maybe he had simply adopted a new one.

“A terrible shame,” Maris said.

“An excellent price,” he replied. “Most of it to the owner, some to me.”

“And then?”

They spoke like old friends, Maris and her hunter. The way Maris acted, as if he were an ordinary person, made Amarta feel very strange indeed.

“Spice tariffs are a symptom,” Maris was now saying.

“Then why does it cost more to transport spice legally through a few Perripin states than from Kelerre to Yarpin? That’s the Perripin confederacy in action, I’d say.”

“The states are lazy, is why. Distracted by their own political dances,” she said, then switched to Perripin again.

Amarta’s eyes wanted to close. Surely if Maris said she was safe tonight, she was.

“Have you heard,” he was saying, “Kelerre’s council levied a tax on goods in and out of Yarpin?”

Maris made a surprised sound. “That’s a change that ought to get the capital’s attention and inspire a healthy black market. Just your specialty, Enlon. Pah,” she exhaled in frustration. “I keep calling you that. How many names do you have?”

“A sufficiency.”

Maris snorted. “I don’t like it.”

Unless—the thought came to Amarta—he had no intention of returning her to the capital at all, but meant to kill her the moment Maris left. Her eyes snapped open again.

The look he was giving Maris now was full of mocking concern. “Forgive me my unintentional deception, High One.”

“Watch your tongue,” she said, but she was smiling as she said it.

“What does that mean,” Amarta asked. “‘High One’?”

Maris raised her eyebrows at Tayre, inviting him to answer. As he turned his look on Amarta, she felt a chill.

“It is the formal address for mages,” he said. “No one else uses it, not even the most arrogant of monarchs, not even the Anandynars, for fear of offending mages who might overhear. The large ears of mages.”

Maris snorted. “Yet you make it sound an insult.” To Amarta, amused: “He enjoys taking such risks.”

“As he enjoys killing,” Amarta said. In the silence that followed, she wished she’d stayed silent.

“Is that what you think? I kill for amusement?”

She gave a shrug, not knowing how to respond. He stood and slowly walked toward her, stopping a few feet away from where she sat on the bed, crouching down to bring his head level with hers.

“I take contracts,” he said. “If the work I have agreed to requires killing, I kill.”

Anger flared inside her. “You take the lives of strangers for money.”

“Would you prefer I kill only those I know?”

“You should leave the innocent alone.”

“Ah, now you want me to decide who is innocent and who is not?”

“You twist my words. You hunt those who have done nothing to hurt you, merely for coin.”

“No one suffers from your visions, Seer? You never take coin to tell people what tomorrow will bring them? All those who pay you are innocent?”

She shook her head. “I did not choose to be what I am.”

“What makes you think I did? We both use our abilities for our benefit, even when there is a cost to others.”

“No. I am nothing like you. I would never do to anyone what you’ve done to me these many years.”

“Never? Truly?”

“You’re a killer. A dog. A monster.” Years of fear and anger drove her to spit insults, but the satisfaction faded quickly.

He spoke softly. “I watched a girl wearing your cloak die near what I suspect is the hidden city of Kusan.” He paused. “Ah, you are not surprised to hear this. So I ask you: Did that moment have your touch upon it?” He watched her a moment, then nodded. “We are not so different, you and I.” He shrugged a little. Suddenly, smoothly, there was a knife in his hand.

Amarta jerked backwards on the bed.

“Enlon,” Maris said in warning.

The knife rotated in his hand like flowing water, black hilt pointing toward Amarta. He lay it on the floor by her boots and stood. “Now that we walk the same path, to the same destination, you have nothing to fear from me. You should have a knife. This is a good one. Take it. A gift.”

He withdrew to sit again in the chair across from Maris. They resumed their conversation.

Amarta reached to take the knife, turning it over in her hands, examining the sharp blade, the black hilt carved with designs of waves. This knife, she was somehow sure, was the very knife with which he had threatened her in the Nesmar forest.

She looked at him again, and he looked back, offering a small, friendly smile that from anyone else would have set her at ease.

Touching the flat of the knife blade, she failed to foresee her own blood, but she no longer found that particularly reassuring.

At last she drifted off to sleep, the two of them still talking. When she woke hours later, her back to Maris, moonlight through the slats showed her his sleeping form on the cot at the other end of the room.

He slept. Like an ordinary man.

She did not. In the morning they packed and went to buy horses.

“I will see you a ways north, I think,” Maris said, looking between the two of them.

Amarta recognized Tayre’s horse as the same one that had run along the rock banks of the Sennant River while they escaped on a raft. He was big and beautiful and dark chestnut colored, with white forelock and feet. He nuzzled her hand.

“Not your fault, to have such a monster ride you,” she whispered, petting his nose.

Maris helped her up on the spotted mare chosen for her, larger than the Teva’s shaota Amarta had once ridden before. As Amarta sat there, clutching the tawny mane in terror, she wondered how it could seem so much farther to the ground from atop the animal than it had from the ground.

They left the city, taking a smaller road north past farms and orchards. He rode in front, which suited Amarta. Better to watch him than have him watch her. After a time, Maris came even with him, and they began to talk again in that confusing mix of languages they had, telling each other stories, told so compellingly that they caught her imagination right until they continued in some other language.

At her frustrated sound, they both looked back at her.

“I can’t understand that. Would you go on, but in Arunkin?”

They did.

Light showers came and went, cooling the heat of the day, wetting the dusty roads into mud. When the sky darkened toward night, they stopped at an inn where Maris arranged for them two adjoining rooms. “One night for you to sleep without fear of him,” she explained softly to Amarta.

When trays of stew and bread came, Tayre took his into the other room. Amarta watched him go, feeling slightly less reassured than she might.

“He is no danger to you, not with me here.”

“And after you’re gone?”

Maris dipped bread in her stew, took a bite. “You’re looking in the wrong place for your problems. You should be considering the Lord Commander and what he will want from you.”

“You don’t know what Tayre is capable of.”

That earned her a sharp look. “You don’t know what I’m capable of, either. But know this: his word is reliable. If he says you are safe with him, you are.”

Amarta did not believe that. They ate in silence. When they were done, Maris said, “We have another long day’s ride tomorrow. Do you think you can rest now?”

“Yes.”

But while Maris breathed deeply in sleep, Amarta watched the door, remembering the ways and times she had fled this man, how close he had come each time. How close he was now.

This was absurd. She of all people should be able to know what he might and would do.

But his future was strange; it seemed to shift each time she looked. A fog of possibilities.

Vision warned of no particular threat from him, at least not tonight. Somehow that was not enough.

She must have fallen asleep, because she started awake from a nightmare in which he chased her across mountain paths, barely missing with each grab. In dream she scrambled up and down drifts of snow, climbing and falling, sounds of pursuit close behind. When the knife he had just given her in the waking world was in dream again at her throat, she had woken, gasping.

A bit of moonlight came through the shutters, a shining line across the wooden floor.

“Ama?” Maris asked. “What is it?”

“He is in my dreams.”

“Are my assurances so worthless? He will not touch you.”

“He has tried to kill me so many times.”

“More in your dreams than in truth, I think. Will you take some herbs to help you sleep?”

“No.”

“You must sleep.”

“No.”

Maris sighed, pulled back the covers, rose and lit a lamp. “Go talk to him.”

“What? Now?”

“We have days of riding ahead, and it will only get more difficult as we pass into Arun and onto the Great Road. I don’t want to have to tie you to your horse to keep you from falling off in exhaustion. I’m here, Ama. Even with the door closed, you could not be safer.”

“You can protect me from him, even through the door?”

“I can.”

Amarta wondered how that worked. But then, people probably wondered how her ability worked, too.

So she stood, pulled shirt and trousers over her underclothes, and walked to his door and stopped. What was she going to say? Feeling foolish as she stood there, knowing Maris’s eyes were on her, she pushed the door open, stepping into the dark of his room, and shut the door behind.

She heard nothing. Surely he would have heard her come in?

“Hello?” she whispered.

“I’m here,” he said, from closer than she expected.

She pressed back against the door, hearing him move in the darkness, his feet brushing the floor. Surely he could move more quietly than that; why would he want her to know where he was?

A flame sparked to light, the lamp in his hand, showing him standing there, dressed, eyes on her. He put the lamp on a table, still watching her. “What is it?” he asked.

There was no safety anywhere. Not in questions, not in answers.

“I have nightmares about you.”

“I know.”

“You know? How can you know that?”

“I see it in your eyes. I hear it in your tone. The way you hold yourself. I have been feared before, Amarta. I know what it looks like.”

“I want you to stop chasing me. My visions tell me you won’t hurt me tonight. That to travel with you is probably safe. But—” Her voice caught. She took a step forward, as if daring herself. “But I don’t believe it. And my dreams don’t believe it.”

“What can I do to reassure you?”

She took another step toward him. Close enough to touch. She raised a hand, then stopped, not sure what she intended.

“Go ahead,” he said.

Holding her breath, she touched his arm. Through the shirt she felt muscle, warmth. She pulled her hand back. Was he really made of the same stuff she was? Not a shadow at all? “Are you truly done hunting me?”

“You say you want to deliver yourself to the Lord Commander. As long as this is so, I have no cause to pursue you.”

She bit her lip, quick, hard. “What could I give you to make you stop coming after me and my family, forever? To give me your word you won’t ever hunt me again?”

“I only take one contract at a time. Nothing you can offer me will change that. While your intention and my contract are aligned, you and your family have nothing to fear from me.”

“But after that? You could come after me again.”

“I could, I suppose. I hope not to.”

“Why not? Because the dog can never catch this rabbit?” Her taunt felt childish. Maris, she reminded herself, would not always be so near by.

He chuckled. “In time, Seer, I would find a way.”

“Then why not?”

“As long you’re running, you’re weak. I’d rather see you strong.”

She shook her head, angry at this pretense. “You’re a liar. I don’t believe anything you say.”