The Seer - eARC (48 page)

“Sensible, especially with me. But don’t listen only to your fears, Amarta. Listen to your reason. Why would I lie about that?”

“I don’t know. I’m sure you have reasons. Why would you want me strong?”

“If you don’t believe anything I say, why should I answer you?”

“Tell me,” she said. “I want to hear it.”

He put one foot in front of the other and, with a startling, simple grace, let himself down to the floor, arriving cross-legged, looking up at her.

What was this? Was he trying to reassure her somehow by making himself seem smaller? That was absurd; she knew better. To show him so, she sat down on the floor in front of him, though not as smoothly.

“I’m curious,” he said. “About what you’ll do when you’re not running away.”

“I don’t believe you.”

He held out both hands, palms up, toward her. A clear invitation. She shook her head. Refusing what, she wasn’t sure.

He waited, hands held out, unmoving.

“What do you want?” she asked at last.

“Take my hands.”

“Why?”

“Please.”

His voice, so often light and even, now held some entreaty. But that, too, meant nothing—he lied as easily as he took in air. He could pretend anything.

Still he held out his hands. Would he wait all night?

Maris, she reminded herself. Near by. With a deep breath, she put her hands on his. As her fingers touched his palms, she felt a brief flash. An echo of the past, a whisper of the future.

“Are these the hands that terrify you, Amarta, that give you bad dreams?”

She nodded.

“Feel them. Are they warm? Are they alive?” He gently pressed her hands with his fingers and thumb.

Again she nodded.

“Where are these hands?”

She frowned in confusion and looked at his fingers curled up around the sides of hers.

“Here,” he answered for her. “Not in your dreams. Here. On the ends of my arms.”

She giggled and tried to stifle it, which only made it worse. He smiled in response. She felt a subtle shift inside herself, as if he were, for the first time, truly on her side. He didn’t seem the killer who chased her down forest paths, or the shadow that stalked her through the mountains.

She quickly pulled her hands back. “This is another game. You toy with me.”

“Go back to your bed and sleep, Amarta. Dream of something else. And in the morning,” he added, standing, again fluid in his motion, his hand downward in an offer to help her stand, “you’ll still be safe from this hunter.”

“You could be lying.”

“Of course. But since you can’t be sure, is it not sensible, at least for this journey, to assume I mean what I say?”

For this she had no answer. After a moment she took his hand, let him help her stand.

They rode across the border, into Arunkel, and then north through Gotar Province. At the Munasee Cut, they paused before the floating bridge, and Maris looked a question at Amarta. She looked into the near future, the one that included them crossing the bridge safely, and nodded. They walked the horses onto the wide wooden floating bridge and across without incident.

Munasee, a day’s ride east. Where she and Dirina and Pas had last fled, from the man at her side. Who was no longer, however temporarily, her enemy. Such an odd change.

From there they rode north through Olapan Province. Mountains rose to the east, snow heavy and white on distant, jagged peaks.

Day after day Amarta steeled herself for Maris to leave, but she stayed. She would leave, she kept saying, just not yet.

Waiting until Amarta was at ease with him? That would not happen, she resolved.

But Tayre was friendlier each day. A little warmer. Smiling at her. It was easy to forget the many things he had done. Too easy.

A knife at her eye. A blade at her throat.

He was right: she had no way of knowing if he meant what he said. Perhaps it was better, as he suggested, to trust that he did.

Or was he only saying that to distract her from sensible suspicion? Surely if they were aligned in purpose—at least until she was in the Lord Commander’s hands—she could trust him. Unless, of course, he was only saying that to confuse her in some way. She shook her head, unable to follow the convoluted motives she could ascribe to him if she gave herself the chance.

She found herself trusting him in small ways, to let him load her pack, to carry her things, to bring her food.

When he told Maris where he’d been since they’d seen each other last, she could almost forget where she was and where she was going, the sound of their horses’ hooves on the road lost in the howl of raging seas or storms, or the drums and pipes of distant lands that he made come alive with words. She felt a hunger to go to those places, to go somewhere out of choice, to see what was there. Not to run from—

This man. Who rode beside her.

Maris told tales of merchants and musicians and governors. “And, of course,” Maris was saying now, “the problem with providing witness for that snarled contract was that then I had to enforce the damned thing. It’s usually not worth the trouble and time.”

“And yet, it pays.”

“That it does.”

Amarta shook her head in wonder. All her life lack of money had meant hunger and cold and rank, ragged clothes. For these two, it was like drawing water from a well that never went dry. When they wanted more, they worked and were paid more than they needed. It was a mystery to her, how some could have so much while the many had so very little.

Maris was in the lead when Amarta began to recognize the hut-shaped rises of rock and scrub plants and yellow grasses.

At Tayre’s look over his shoulder she kept her face as blank as she knew how. His horse slowed to ride alongside her. Much as she wanted to look around at the deadlands that held Kusan secret, she kept her eyes fixedly on the road ahead.

At last he spoke. “The hidden city. A slave city,” he said. “Am I right?”

If only she had made the three of them leave Kusan as soon as she had foreseen the threat, he might not now know this.

“I thought so,” he said to her silence, as if she had answered.

Ksava and her baby. The elders. Darad.

As he watched her, she struggled to keep her breathing even. She had to blink to clear her eyes, lest the tears show.

“I only suspected,” he said, “until now.”

“Damn you,” she said, exhaling a soft sob.

“I have no need to tell the Lord Commander or anyone else. Provided you do not change your mind about where we are headed.”

Could he be relied upon that far? She looked at him.

“My word is good, Seer.”

“I don’t trust you.”

“You don’t have to. Stay on the course you have begun, and I will keep my silence.”

They had stopped. A distant, gray column of smoke rose into a pale winter sky.

“Chimash, I would say,” Tayre said. “A rather large town. That much smoke would mean most of it is on fire or already ash.”

So they left the Great Road for the High Traveler’s Road, a detour that twisted its way up into the mountains, taking them up steep switchbacks through forests of evergreen and bare, twisted orange and gray limbs. As they rose in the mountains, the snow deepened, and the cold began to bite.

Tall pines painted dim, cool bands of shadow across the snow-covered road, fading then coming bright as high clouds moved across the sky. Wet, cold sprinkles fell, becoming white points of snow as they rode under the intermittent light of a fading, weak winter sun.

Maris and Tayre turned their talk to the inn where they planned to stay that night.

On either side of the road, snow-crusted banks rose. All at once Amarta felt the sharp pressure of immediate warning. She cried out wordlessly, yanking her horse’s reins. Tayre snapped out his bow, notched an arrow, and turned in his saddle.

Stepping out from behind the high bank was a horse and rider, blocking their way. On both sides of the banks above them were a handful of riders and horses with bows pointed down at them. Behind them another group. Sharp whispered commands, shouted cautions. Where had they all come from?

Motion exploded everywhere, suddenly. Amarta lowered her head to hug her horse’s neck, heard the twang of arrows, of shouts and screams. Looking sideways across the tawny mane she saw a man on the rise crumple, then another.

The pressure of warning vanished even while frantic movement continued. She looked around curiously, lifting her head. The man on the horse who had blocked their way slumped over in his saddle, then slipped down onto the snow-patched dirt below.

Then Tayre was facing her, bow up. Before she could move, he let fly an arrow. She yelped and again contracted tight against her horse’s neck. Behind her someone howled in pain.

Suddenly there was silence.

Mere heartbeats had passed. Only now did it occur to Amarta to pull the black-handled knife that Tayre had helped her strap to her boot. Her hand was shaking as she reached to draw it. She sat up, feeling foolish, the blade useless in her hand.

Maris spoke. “Ama, are you all right?”

“Yes,” she croaked, trying to keep her hand steady enough to put the knife back into its holster instead of into her leg.

“You foresaw this,” Maris said.

“Only at the last moment.”

“Sufficient for our needs.” Maris said. “Don’t underestimate the value of an eyeblink’s warning.”

Why had the sense of threat vanished so suddenly, even before the motion was done?

Because of Maris and Tayre, she realized: the attackers might have put an arrow through her during that first moment, but with Maris and Tayre there, that first instant had been the only one in which she was likely to be harmed. Past that instant the danger was gone, so the warnings had ceased, even though the action had not.

Maris turned her horse around and surveyed the bodies on the ground. “Who are these idiots, Enlon?”

“You two did nothing to disguise yourselves in Kelerre. Word spreads, and Innel isn’t the only one who wants her. Mountain tribe, by the look of them.”

“Are they dead?” Amarta asked timidly.

“Asleep,” Maris said. “They’ll wake in a few hours.”

“And come after us again,” Tayre said.

“Four are dead from your bow, Enlon. If the rest don’t take that as a clear message, next time I’ll see to it that none of them wake.”

“It would be better to leave them unable to say anything about us.”

“I see no reason to take more life here.”

“We have a ways to go yet,” he said. “Let’s not make this trip more difficult than it already is. Shall I take care of it?”

Maris was silent a long moment. “No. It is done. These will tell no tales of our passing here.”

Amarta looked at Maris, realizing what these words meant. That it was easy for Tayre to kill, that she knew, but Maris as well?

She looked at each body as they passed, wondering who they were, if they had families and people at home who would miss them—surely they must—and what they had hoped to gain here by her death. Or her life.

As they rode in silence through the tall corridor of trees that darkened with nightfall, Amarta’s thoughts returned again and again to the men lying on the ground. Death seemed to come so easily. Like a sharp gust of wind taking a candle flame. How many more would die because of her?

Slush squirted out from every step of her horse’s hooves, splattering Tayre’s horse’s back legs ahead of her. Above, beyond the trees, blue sky mingled with white, hinting that somewhere there might be sunlight. How long had it been since she had looked up and seen anything but white?

From a distant hush the sound of river steadily grew into a roar. When the hillside dropped away on one side, Amarta saw the wide, broad Sennant through the trees.

“Wait,” she said, pulling to a stop. “I know this land.”

“What do you mean, Ama?” Maris asked from behind her.

Tayre looked back at them.

“Enana,” Amarta replied, looking at him. “Her family. What did you do to them?”

“Would you believe any reply I gave you?”

“Answer me anyway,” Amarta said.

He turned his horse around on the path to face her. “I told her that I had wronged you, that I sought now to make amends, to bring you an inheritance. She believed me. I left them unharmed.”

“Is it true?” she asked Maris.

“How would I know? His body has always been a cipher to my reading. I believe him, if that is sufficient.”

She stared at him, trying to see truth or lie with her own eyes, even knowing she could not. “I want to see them.”

“Where are they?” Maris asked.

“East of the Sennant,” Tayre said. “Near a village called Nesmar. I can lead you there if you wish.”

That was part answer, then; if he knew where the farm was, he had been there.

“Yes,” she said.

They continued on. The High Traveler’s Road met and followed the Sennant River for a time, veered off, snaked back.

Images of Enana and her family flickered through Amarta’s mind. The tall woman lighting the lamp at night, her wide smile, the games they would play after eating their fill of a stew that was never the same twice but was always astonishingly good.

Then: the feel of hard ground under her, a knife at her throat.

She inhaled the brisk air, put a hand on the warm neck of her horse, and brought herself back to this moment. He glanced at her.

“Why should I believe you at all?” she demanded angrily.

“You shouldn’t.”

“Then why answer me?”

“Because you asked.”

Curse him for giving her reason to hope and to doubt at the very same time. Why did he do that?

She began to recognize landmarks. There, by the bend in the road, was where he had first surprised her that warm summer day in the forest, where vision had crashed over her, impossible to ignore. There she had lain on her back under the high green canopy, then rolled him off of her long enough to rise and run.

A twisted tree, there, grown but recognizable, one that she had spun around in her dash to escape.

And there, where she had dropped to the ground, ankle in searing pain, staring up at him, his arrow aimed at her heart.