The Wizard Hunters (48 page)

He took the documents, his brows quirking. He said with a trace of amusement, “One is usually more circumspect. You imply the document is a folio of historical interest which you want me to value for you, for example.”

“I don’t have time for that. Oh.” She dug in her other pocket and pulled out two of the gold coins she had removed from the deposit box. She knew that after the next few days paper royals would only be good for starting fires but gold ones should still be worth something. “This enough?”

He sighed, apparently at the impatience of youth. “We can discuss the fee when I produce the finished result, in ... ?”

“An hour.”

He lifted his brows. Tremaine met his eyes. “An hour,” she repeated.

He sighed again, nodding. “Very well.”

She went back to the outer room where the female clerk had retreated into a corner and the bullyboy was on the floor, nursing a bloody nose and what were going to be two wonderful black eyes. Ilias was studying the bookcases. He glanced at her inquiringly and she nodded. He was relying on her, she realized suddenly. To get them through this, to get him back home. At the moment she didn’t feel very reliable.

As Tremaine made her way through the piles of books, the bullyboy said thickly, “Has he got brass knuckles?”

“No, that was all him,” she replied, patting her pockets to make sure she had everything, trying to gather her thoughts. She was tempted to tell the bullyboy that if he tried rowing a galley on the open ocean, he might develop hands that hard too, but there didn’t seem to be much point in it. She asked Ilias, “You want to get something to eat?”

I
lias followed Tremaine back up toward the huge street with the trees, where they stopped at a place with little tables and chairs under a dark green awning. There were a few other people already seated there, some with bags of belongings piled around their chairs, looking at papers or maps and talking in urgent voices. As they sat down a man in a white shirt brought them two more cups of the horrible stuff everyone drank here. Tremaine held a brief conversation with him, then as he left reported, “He says they’ve still got food. They don’t want to leave any for the Gardier, so they’re trying to use it all up before they go.” She propped her chin on her hand. “I haven’t had mutton stew with truffles in forever.”

Ilias had time to notice how drawn her face was before she dropped her eyes and said suddenly, “I have to tell you something. I’m not—” Her fingers tapped at the table, impatient with herself. “I’m not as reliable as you think I am. If, that is, you think I am—”

Knowing the tangent might go on for a while, Ilias interrupted quietly, “You’re fey.”

She frowned slowly, not meeting his eyes. She had a shadow over her right enough. He could understand it, at least partly; her home was about to be destroyed. Ilias had seen cities lost in war, villages falling prey to outlaws or wizards, and this place had that same air of dying desperation. It stank of fear worse than it stank of smoke. But it was the same for all the others, Florian and Gerard and Ander, and they hadn’t had that fey light in their eyes. Tremaine’s shadow was more complicated than that. “I saw it in the caves,” he told her. He tasted the drink absently. It was still awful, but not as awful as the last one. “Gil was too, for a long time.”

Tremaine looked at him narrowly, as if trying to gauge his sincerity. “Gil was? Because of his sister and the others Ixion killed?”

Ilias nodded. “Gil blamed himself for that, though it was just as much my fault. Gil thought he should have recognized what Ixion was. But when we met him, and he was pretending to be normal, he didn’t use any curses. We didn’t know Gil couldn’t tell a wizard was a wizard unless he was doing a curse.” He hesitated, absently turning the cup around. “And he blamed himself for me ending up with this.” He touched the symbol burned into his cheek.

“Dyani told us it was a curse mark.” Tremaine paused, obviously weighing how far to pry. “How was it Gil’s fault?”

Ilias had promised himself if any of the Rienish ever asked, he would tell them, even though it couldn’t mean to her people what it did to his. “When we followed Ixion to the island, he caught me.” He glanced up warily, then reminded himself that none of the people at the other tables could understand their conversation. “He cursed me, a transformation curse. Gil thought he’d have to kill me. But when Gil killed—cut Ixion’s head off—it went away.”

He knew it wouldn’t mean the same thing to Tremaine, raised not to see wizards as a corrupting evil, but she still managed to surprise him. Instead of revealing even mild shock, she looked at him, her eyes assessing. “The scars on your back. That’s where they came from. They didn’t look like normal scars.”

He nodded, distracted by the realization that it was easier to tell her than he thought it would be. “Years ago in most of the cities of the Syrnai, if you survived any kind of a curse, the lawgivers would kill you. They were afraid the evil was still inside you, even if it wasn’t on the outside anymore. Now they don’t, but you still have to wear this mark. And any obligations toward you, family or marriage, don’t count anymore.”

Tremaine’s brows drew together. “But Halian and Karima and the others didn’t. . .”

“No, they didn’t. But they’re different.”

She studied the tabletop a moment, then asked carefully, “Why did you have to get the mark? It seems like Giliead could have prevented it.”

That one he had no moral obligation to answer, but he had the feeling that she was seeing past his words a little deeper than he intended. In which case there was no point in not answering. He looked down, rubbing idly at one of the stains on the much-abused wood, hunting for the right words. “I didn’t have to get it.” No, it was all his own choice.
Be very clear about that
. That mix of willful pride and self-hate and self-pity was something you could manage only all on your own. “I thought it would make me feel better. I hated the way I felt, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I could have left Andrien, gone somewhere inland where nobody had ever heard of us all, but I didn’t want that, either. So I went to Cineth and got the curse mark. Gil caught me halfway there and practically went crazy trying to stop me. I didn’t think he was going to feel the way he did over it.” He hadn’t thought about anything except himself. But he still didn’t exactly regret it, maybe because it was a lesson he had had to learn and it was just as well he had finally learned it and got it over with.

She lifted her cup and put it down again, apparently just to examine the brown ring it made on the table. Her gaze had turned abstracted, as if what he had said had sparked some new thought and she was turning it over carefully, examining it from all angles. “You wanted to change everything.”

Ilias hesitated. “What do you mean?”

“When everything hurts too much, you want to get away from it but you can’t, because it’s inside you. So you do something drastic because you know it will change everything.” She shrugged slightly, her eyes on the street. “Doing something drastic like that usually does.”

“Maybe you’re right,” he said slowly. He waited until she shook herself slightly and her eyes were seeing him again. He asked, “So why are you fey?”

Tremaine gave him that unexpected, faintly self-mocking smile. “I don’t know.” She looked out at the rainy street, her expression turning sober again. “I lost a lot of people in this war, but so has everyone else. I lost my father. Not that I was that close to him. He’s not somebody anyone gets close to. Because of him, of what he did, I was accused of being crazy once, and locked up. Though not for very long.” She let out a frustrated breath. “Maybe that’s not it. A lot of people found out about it and it was humiliating, but it doesn’t sound like much compared to ...” She shook her head wearily. “If I knew, maybe I wouldn’t be fey.”

“You had plenty of opportunity to die,” Ilias pointed out. “Maybe you’re not as fey as you think you are.”

“Maybe.” But her eyes were opaque again and he couldn’t tell if she believed it or not.

T
he rain was still falling as they returned to the bookbinder’s. The bullyboy was there but instead of starting trouble he seemed more inclined to slump against the wall and study Ilias with hostility and poorly concealed admiration. Tremaine went to the back room again, leaving Ilias in the foyer.

Tremaine’s thoughts were still mostly on their conversation. The reflective pain etched in his face, and all the torment that lay under the simple honesty of the way he had spoken about it, told her it was all so much worse than he was making it sound. It made her own problems seem more like a failure of resolve than anything the world had done to her. Maybe she just needed some perspective. She needed something, she was pretty sure of that. But talking to Ilias had given her a wariness about reaching for that something without being absolutely sure it would do the trick. If it looked easy, then it probably wasn’t an answer at all.

Preoccupied with that as she stepped into the inner room, she wasn’t aware of anything out of the ordinary. Then a man stepped out from behind the door, shoving it closed behind her and turning the lock. She stopped, eyeing him thoughtfully. He was another version of the bullyboy in the outer room, though a little older and bigger. He sneered nastily at her, an expression that began to turn a bit disconcerted under Tremaine’s steady regard.

She looked at the old man, still seated at his desk. He smiled thinly, saying, “I think perhaps I would like a little more for my work. You understand.”

This close to her goal, Tremaine was tempted to just grab the marble paperweight on the worktable and beat him to death. But she supposed that since Ilias had objected to the entire scheme on principle, he would also balk at allowing her to kill a sexagenarian. She raised her voice slightly and said, “Ilias.”

The door slammed open, the broken lock hanging by one screw, and Ilias strolled in. The older bullyboy looked him over, then backed away slowly, absently studying the ceiling as if he was standing on a corner waiting for an omnibus. “What’s wrong?” Ilias asked. The light rain had flattened his hair down and he didn’t look nearly as fluffy. With the dark clothes, his scar and the strange silver mark on his cheek, he did look exotic and dangerous.

The old man wet his lips. “I didn’t realize you had company. My mistake.”

Since it had worked the first time, Tremaine just stared at him. The Valiarde name combined with the appearance of actual muscle had convinced him he had made an error in judgment, but she wasn’t in that good a mood. She took the document off the desk and read it over in silence broken only by the old man’s nervous wheezing. Satisfied, she tucked it into the dispatch case, tossed one of the gold coins onto the desk, then told Ilias, “Let’s go.”

She didn’t realize the younger bullyboy from the front office had followed them out into the street until Ilias suddenly whipped around and grabbed him by the collar.

The bullyboy winced, holding up his hands in surrender. “You a Valiarde? You hiring?” he asked Tremaine hurriedly.

“He wants a job,” she explained to Ilias in Syrnaic.

He lifted a brow and released the boy, who stepped back, selfconsciously tugging his jacket back into place. It was nice to know somebody considered them the winning team, but Tremaine wasn’t so sure. She told the boy, “You don’t want this job. Do what the government says and leave town.”

He watched them walk away, scuffing his boots in the dirty puddles on the sidewalk.

S
omeone was waiting for them when they got back to the car. Leaning casually against the passenger side was an older man with long graying hair. He was dressed in an expensive greatcoat over a dark suit that made Niles’s careful style of dress look cheap. His arms were folded and he was holding an ebony walking stick topped with a silver lion’s head. As they drew near, Tremaine frowned, trying to remember if she had seen him before. Despite his age he was a very handsome man and she was sure she would have remembered him.

He watched her approach with a thoughtful expression. “Tremaine? I’ve been waiting for you.”

She glanced uncertainly at Ilias, who said pointedly, “I’m not going to beat up an old man either.”

“I didn’t bring you along to— Never mind.” She addressed the stranger, switching back to Rienish. “I don’t believe I know you?”

He smiled. “I’m your uncle Galiard.”

“Oh.” Tremaine stared at him, nonplussed. She had long wondered who her other guardian was, but she had never expected him to simply wander up one day and introduce himself. Particularly this day. “Is that your real name?”

“Of course not. I’m actually your uncle Reynard.” He pushed away from the car, leaning on the cane, and eyed Ilias with a hint of challenge. “And this is ... ?”

“This is my friend Ilias. He’s ... not from around here. He doesn’t speak Rienish.” She turned to Ilias to explain in Syrnaic, “It’s all right; he’s an old friend of my father’s.”

This caused Ilias to eye Reynard warily. He jerked his chin toward the other side of the street. “There’s two men watching us from over there”—his eyes moved over the passersby, settling on a man standing near the lamppost on the corner—“and one more up there.”

Tremaine turned back to Reynard, who was waiting with polite curiosity. She said, “He’s spotted three of your bodyguards. Any others?”

Reynard’s blue eyes were amused. He stroked his neat mustache. “No, he got them all. Very good. He’s much better than that playboy you used to go around with.” He lifted his brows inquiringly. “Whatever happened to him?”

“He’s a captain in the Army Intelligence corps, and I wasn’t ‘going around’ with him.” Tremaine cocked her head, finally remembering where she had seen him before. The newspapers. He was Reynard Morane. “You should know; you’re Captain of the Queen’s Guard.” She hoped she was keeping her face expressionless but she wanted to reel. It was hard to believe that this man had ever known Nicholas, except in a superficial social way. She could see them as opponents, but not as allies, friends even, with Morane privy to all of Nicholas’s secrets. And to be her other guardian, Morane must have known everything there was to know.