The Seer - eARC (62 page)

“Is that so? Are you telling me you don’t credit her prophesy?”

“Predictions are easy to make,” he said with a wry smile. “But I must seem to believe her if I am to convince others that her predictions carry truth. Once they believe that, her presence in questioning can be of great use.”

Lismar studied him a long moment. “That is clever. You and my brother were well-matched.” At his look, she added: “My brother the king.”

“Then I am flattered,” he said. “How so?”

“You are determined to win. Even when it came to Pohut. My brother the king thought he was playing you against each other, but you saw right through it. Your willingness to sacrifice your own brother—” A soft snort and a nod. “That is the character and attitude it takes to hold an empire.” A tilt of her chin in the direction of the Teva towns. “Or conquer treason.”

Playing you against each other?
What was she saying?

“Yes, General, it is,” he said with a certainty he didn’t feel. He would consider her words later when there was time. “And what do you advise now to ferret out this treason?”

“I say the truce is broken. We should take the towns. Someone there will talk and tell us what we want to know.”

A simple, clean victory. Very tempting. But as their captives had pointed out, the Teva treaties were ratified across both centuries and monarchs. To take the towns in blood would not only bend that covenant but shake the confidence of any potential future allies.

You cannot win this, ser, not if you fight.

“Best we keep conflict as a last resort,” he said. “Give the Teva Elders a chance to consider the wisdom of cooperating with the empire that surrounds and upholds them. They’d be fools to do otherwise.”

“Fools or a people hiding something. Not too much time, Commander.”

“No, not too much,” he agreed.

Tayre crouched down in the scrub and brush, a look of bored contemplation on his face, just one of the many uniformed soldiers hovering around Food Square, waiting for the meal, as out of the corner of his eye he kept track of the master cook and her various assistants.

Something was wrong.

Nothing unusual about the cook wanting a measure of privacy in a camp this crowded. He’d watched her direct the drovers with a fair bit of grumbling to surround her cook-camp with a square of wagons, restricting access to her territory.

Again, not particularly uncommon.

She looked around, eyes moving constantly, as if she were afraid she were being watched, her movements hunched, abrupt. She tucked a good deal of henbane leaf into her cheek, and drank a fair bit of wine, easily accounting for her lurching, stumbling movements.

She was hiding something. He had a good idea what.

With no actual part in the command structure, Tayre was able to make his way around the various camps and tents. As long as he moved confidently, said the right things, made the right jokes, and occasionally passed along a wrap of twunta, a slug of henbane, or a flask of rotgut, he was only noticed when he chose to be. If that didn’t work, a bit of good jerky went a long way. All of which he had in abundance, having prepared for this campaign with quite a bit more coin than was available to the ordinary soldier.

When, on the second day, the cook’s furtive looks reached a peak, Tayre was sure she was about to act on whatever it was she had been nerving herself to do.

And then, as he watched, she did.

He roused himself from his hiding place and injected himself once again into the pattern of camp movement, taking a roundabout way to the wagon where the seer was being kept. While he had no particular desire to save the entire camp from the cook’s ministrations, and thought it likely Amarta could protect herself, he wanted to be sure.

“Hey,” one of the guards around the wagon said to him with a nod and a grin.

“Hey.”

They knew him now; he’d been here every day, having managed to replace the regular aide assigned to this task.

“Got more of your special mix? I want an aunt like yours.”

A potent in-cheek powder that was both stimulating and calming, which had been credited to a nonexistent aunt.

“I might,” Tayre said. “Play again tonight and I’ll let you try to win some.”

Another guard spoke up. “Count me in.”

“Me, too,” another said.

“So be it, then,” Tayre said with a wider smile, then let it vanish suddenly. “For now, though, I am still the clod who does the chamber pot and brings slop to the—” He thumbed at the wagon. “Lord Commander’s cousin. Or whatever we’re calling her today.”

The group had already used some rather unflattering titles for Amarta.

“She’s got hardtack and water,” said the first, “but Lord Commander said to treat her well, so—” A shrug.

“I’ll go find whatever’s being dished out and bring some back.”

“Bring us something, too.”

“I will.”

At least, Amarta reflected, her small wagon prison was no longer rattling along rutted roads. She could rest, even contemplate. She was, currently, musing on how her vision worked.

That it was sometimes wrong, she already knew. Whether this was because events were constantly in motion and what she saw one moment would simply be impossible the next, because the present had changed to make it so, or if the fault were hers because she imagined a thing rather than actually foreseeing it, like a snatch of memory that turned out to be a dream rather than a true memory, she wasn’t sure.

Or perhaps vision was not wrong, but was revealing an event so unlikely that it might as well be imagined or dreamed. Highly improbable but not entirely impossible.

Perhaps the problem was that she didn’t think about how one thing might lead to another. So much of what she knew came to her without her needing to understand anything at all. She had come to realize that if all she did was live by her visions, she would never understand such things. She must learn to reason, not simply believe anything that came through her head.

For example, right now reason told her that the brief flash she’d had of Tayre bringing her food and talking quietly to her here in the wagon was in the category of imagination. It was clearly far beyond possible. That he was on her mind was not surprising, given her broken fingers and bruises and cuts, but that was not reason enough to envision him here.

Tell me what you want most of all.

Still she had no good answer. It was almost as if wanting was the opposite of foreseeing; vision didn’t care about desire, only about action.

Not that her wants factored into things much now, captive as she was.

But she’d had a thought about that, too. In the dark of the previous night, listening to the laughing and chatting of guards outside, it had occurred to her that she might find a moment, a tiny opportunity between moments, when the guards were rolling dice and not paying close attention, the tarp perhaps not secured quite perfectly, when vision might help her find a way to open it and slip out of the wagon.

And do what? She was bound to the Lord Commander by her contract and oath, and the reasons she had come to him: to prevent death and suffering.

What do you care if strangers suffer?

All right, then: to prevent his actions from harming her family. Dirina. Pas.

It soothed her, as the heat began to ease somewhat with the coming night, to imagine them in Perripur with Maris, out in the garden, weeding or planting, eating peas and cabbage leaf, endive and luff, Pas’s smiling face and fingers smeared with avocado.

He could be there right this moment, laughing and pointing at a brilliantly colored bird or lizard, demanding Maris tell him what it was called. She smiled at this, lay back, let her eyes close.

“Sure, go on in,” said one of the guards.

She sat up, watching the tent flap open. As Tayre stepped up and into the wagon, she gaped in astonishment.

He put a finger to his lips, set the tray down, and closed the flap behind, coming to sit right next to her.

She was too startled to even be scared.

Not imagination.

“Do not eat the stew,” he whispered in her ear. “I believe it is corrupted and will make you ill.”

“I—”

Before she knew it, he had taken her bandaged hand, unwrapped it, examined her fingers, then replaced the splints and re-wrapped.

“You are healing well.”

Certainly he seemed real enough, she thought, still staring. Smelled real enough, setting her feelings into a tangle.

A dark room. Metal against a grindstone.

Could the Lord Commander mean to have him question her again?

“Another contract?” she managed.

“No. I am beholden only to myself now.”

“Then why—”

“I can’t stay long or the guards will wonder. How does it go with the Lord Commander?”

“He demands answers, doesn’t like them, then threatens me and sends me back here.”

He examined her face, and she felt his look like a touch. “There will come a time when you must show him what you are capable of, Seer.”

“My words do nothing.”

“Innel is a wolf, Amarta.”

That was so; every time the Lord Commander talked to her, she felt a rush of fear, closely followed by anger.

Fear is a shadow.

“Yes,” she said, recalling his words in that dark room. “The wolf is real. The wolf bites. But the shadow—”

“Amarta,” he said, putting his fingers to her lips to silence her, the touch a shock. “Listen: he is a wolf. But so are you. That is what I came here to tell you, and what I could not tell you before.”

* * *

The sun began to dip to the west. Innel and Lismar watched the single Teva making his way toward them, carrying a white flag high on a pole. As he arrived he said nothing, only handed to an aide a rolled message, then turned and galloped away.

The aide handed Innel the message. He read the broken Arunkin written there, and snorted, handing it to Lismar.

Release our horses and people immediately.

“Now what do you advise, General?”

“There is a time to do what is clear and obvious. No more delay. Attack.”

Surrounded by guards in the dimming light of evening, Amarta was taken from the wagon through the camp. She inhaled the cooling breeze greedily, happy to be smelling something other than herself.

They passed through a city of tents, horses, and red and black uniformed soldiers. Someone, somewhere, was sharpening a blade. She shuddered.

Vision tickled, and she pushed away the flickers. She did not want to see any of these people’s futures.

At a large pavilion she was pushed inside. Candles burned in an overhead chandelier of silver and copper. Heavy red and black silk lined the walls, embroidered with the monarchy’s sigil. Two intricately carved center poles held up the heavy canvas and glinted with inlaid gemstones.

So much wealth. It was, truly, astonishing.

Then she saw the long table, at which sat the Lord Commander and the general. Across from them sat five small men and women.

“This”—The Lord Commander waved a hand at her—“this is the seer. She predicts what will happen. To see the future is to see beyond deception. Tell me again, Teva, that you know of no gold mine.”

“Again, Lord Commander, we deny—”

Amarta met Jolon’s gaze. He paused briefly then looked back across the table.

“—violating any law, and furthermore—”

“Your girl knows this man,” the general said.

Could she hide nothing at all? The Lord Commander stood and walked to her.

“How is it that you know this Teva?”

He had saved them from the shadow hunter—from this very man before her—even at the risk of Emendi lives. He had given them the hidden city, safety, and—for a time—something like a home. He and Mara had been generous when she and her family were most desperate. He was one of the few people who had helped her who had not suffered for it.

Yet.

She remembered how they had met, as she told him his shaota was pregnant, that the baby would be a colt. It would be born and grown by now. For an absurd moment she thought to ask him whether she’d been right.

“Seer,” the Lord Commander said sharply. “I asked you a question.”

She tore her gaze from Jolon.

“Need I remind you of your obligation?” he asked, voice low.

Lifting her bandaged left hand, she said: “I think you have reminded me enough, ser.”

“Then answer.”

Fair is what you take.

“Our contract says I answer your questions about the future, ser. Nothing was said about the past.”

His eyes narrowed.

“Lord Commander,” Jolon said. “Release us. We can still calm the rippling waters, but as time passes, it will be too late.”

He turned to the Teva. “I know gold is coming from Otevan, Teva. I have enough evidence to convict you before the queen. I give you one more chance to tell me what I need to know.”

“We deny breaking any laws—”

“Seer, where is the gold mine?”

The wrong question, not the sort that she could really answer, which he ought to know by now. She thought to say all this.

“You fight the wrong battle here, Lord Commander,” she found herself saying. “It will end in death for so many—”

He turned, very fast, grabbed her shoulders, fingers gripping painfully, and shook her hard, taking her breath away. Then he released her. She stumbled backwards.

“My patience runs dry, girl. You keep your sister and nephew safe by virtue of this contract whose edges you keep testing. Very well, I will rephrase: What must I do to find the gold these Teva hide?”

He is a wolf.

Breathing hard, she sifted through the rushing roar of futures, discarding image after image of the screams of soldiers.

The feel of her fingers, rubbing together, something gritty and wet between them. It was red. It glinted.

But so are you.

Blinking in the candle-and-lamplit pavilion, she moved her fingers over each other as she had in vision, staring at her empty hand. Was there any future in which the Lord Commander got what he wanted without blood?

“There is gold here,” she said. “A lot of it.”