Thief With No Shadow (28 page)

It was extraordinary. It was marvelous.

A short path paved with white and gray pebbles led back to the house and a side door. The door was locked.

Melke sat down on the step and clasped her hands around her knees. Endal sat beside her. She looked at the bathhouse. Someone had enjoyed designing it. There was a sense of whimsy in the patterns on the tiled floor and walls. A gayness. A lightness of heart.

She smoothed the skirt over her knees. “Lunch time.”

Endal’s ears pricked.

“Yes. Lunch.” Melke stood, and touched her fingers lightly to his head. “Eggs for me, and a bone for you.”

He knew the word
bone.
He pranced alongside her as she walked around to the front of the farmhouse. Beneath the empty, curtainless windows of the largest room was a small courtyard, prettily paved and with a sundial at its center.

Melke paused and looked at the shadow it cast. An hour past noon.

The tiny tiles were laid in an ornate pattern. She moved her feet to see the design. The four elements, the four magical creatures. They stood opposite one another, as divided in the mosaic as they were in reality.

Fear crawled over her skin, a pricking of hairs standing upright. This courtyard was perilously close to veneration. Representations less detailed than these had started town riots in Stenrik; statuary had been smashed, paintings torched.

But this was Bresse, where people believed that no harm came from making images of the magical creatures.

Melke bent to wipe the dust away. Her hand cringed from the task. She forced herself to brush aside the grains of dirt, to touch the tiles. Everything she’d been taught as a child told her it was dangerous.

Endal nosed at the tiles.
What?
he seemed to ask.

“Superstition,” she whispered. That’s all it was. She’d seen the statue in the square in Desmaures. It had stood for centuries, and no furious gryphon had come to punish those who dared fix its likeness in stone. Superstition, only superstition.

Even so, she shivered as she uncovered the first image.

Where she’d stood, was Earth: a lamia beneath the arch of a cavern roof. She was half-changed, a woman from the waist up, lush. A forked snake-tongue flickered from her mouth. Below the waist she was a serpent, the coils thick and sinuous.

And here was Water. Melke’s hand faltered as she wiped away the dust. A psaaron. The tiler had been skilled. She could almost see the webbing between the creature’s fingers and toes, the ridged scales that served for its skin. The psaaron stood tall, its head turned sideways so that the spiny crest was visible. Waves curled at its feet. It was neuter, neither male nor female.

Melke laid a fingertip on the creature’s chest. “You will have your necklace back,” she whispered, and then shivered.

Endal sat down and began to scratch himself.

She stepped around the hound, bent, and brushed away more dust. Air. The word was spelled out in cursive script. Beneath those letters a gryphon screamed with outspread wings and open beak.

And lastly...

It was difficult to breathe, almost impossible to wipe away the last of the dust. She smelled musk, strong and spicy. Fire, read the curling letters. A salamander stood in a circle of flames, lithe and female. Her irises seemed to burn.

Melke stepped back and averted her eyes from the salamander. She looked at the sundial, casting a spike of shade, and at the clawed feet and thick serpent’s tail that ringed the pedestal.

The differences between lamia and gryphon, psaaron and salamander, were as vast and deep as the ocean, unbridgeable. No magical creature would enter another’s territory, let alone stand like this, with only a few inches separating them. Their closeness was...it was
wrong.
The creatures’ dealings were with humans, never each other.

Dealings. She hugged her arms, cold in the sunlight. The word was too neutral for what they did: gryphons snatching away virgins and lamiae seducing the unwary, salamanders bargaining for treasures with those desperate enough to meet their price. And psaarons punishing.

Endal stretched out on the warm tiles, unconcerned by the images.

“If this was my house,” she told the hound, “I would take up the tiles and lay others in their place.”

Endal wagged his tail, stirring dust. His coat gleamed black in the sunlight.

She was glad to turn her back on the courtyard and walk with Endal around to the kitchen. The images were dangerous. They diminished the magical creatures, making them decorations instead of something to fear.

T
HAT EVENING SHE
took Hantje’s knapsack down from the hook in her room. The note he’d left for her was folded at the top. Her fingers shrank from touching it. This was the start of it all, this scrap of paper.
I’ve gone to the salamanders’ den. I’ll be back by dusk.

But he hadn’t returned. And at dawn the next day she had followed him, and learned the price of his freedom.

His better trousers were near the bottom of the knapsack. Melke held them up to her waist. She had burned the clothes she’d worn to steal the necklace; they’d been ripped and blood-stained, no use even as rags. Hantje’s trousers were too large, but with her belt pulled tight and the legs cut shorter…yes, they would do.

She laid the items on the stiff-backed wooden chair. Hantje’s trousers, her other blouse. The gray cloak Bastian had found beneath the bridge. Her belt and knife. And the new shoes, placed neatly side by side on the floor. There. She was ready. Now, she just needed her brother to talk.

In the morning, he did.

Melke heard voices before she reached the sickroom.

She halted in the doorway. Sunlight streamed in through the window, bright and warm. Hantje sat up in the bed. Liana leaned towards him, the white-blonde hair falling forward over her shoulder. Her voice was quick and light. Hantje’s was slower, but firm and steady, the sentences long. His face was alive. He glanced at the door and saw her, and his smile—

“Mel!”

Melke crossed the room without feeling the floor beneath her feet, scarcely noticing as Liana stood and moved aside. Her arms were around Hantje, her face pressed into his hair. He gripped her tightly back. He was too thin beneath the nightshirt, but alive in a way he’d not been yesterday, strong. She was aware of his health, his vitality.

She hugged him, while happiness leaked from her eyes as tears and her heart felt that it would burst with joy. Then she held his face in her hands and simply looked at him. The burns, the bruises, the torn lips and swollen eyelids, the flushed cheeks and the sweat of fever...they were gone. A dream, forgotten.

“You look well.”

Hantje took her hands, held them in his own. “I am well.”

This was her brother, the person she loved most in the world, this man with clear eyes and a laughing mouth.

And the despair that he kept hidden from her.

“Sit,” he said. “Liana was explaining, but I don’t understand. How did I come to be here?”

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

T
HE MALE WRAITH
was speaking. Not loudly enough for Bastian to hear, but definitely sentences, full sentences. He sat up in the bed, thin-faced, his hair as long as a girl’s, raven black.

He had an eastern voice, lower in tone than the sister’s, Melke’s, but with the same accent: soft
s
and purring
r
. And eastern hair too, hanging down his back. He had his sister’s features, the same line of cheek and jaw, the same blackness of hair and paleness of skin. He should look like a woman with that ridiculously long hair but somehow he didn’t.

Bastian watched from the shadows of the doorway.
Hurry up
, he wanted to shout. The tides would soon rise for the equinox and there was no time for this...this
chat
. He took a step into the room.

His boots made no sound on the thin carpet, but the movement caught Liana’s eye. She looked up and shook her head. Her mouth moved silently:
Out.

Endal thumped his tail on the floor. He wanted Bastian to stay.

Bastian folded his arms across his chest.

Liana’s eyebrows drew together.
Out
, she mouthed again, her expression almost fierce.

Bastian exhaled with a hiss, a sound that made Endal prick his ears. He turned on his heel and stalked from the room.

“W
HEN
?” H
ANTJE ASKED.

“The equinox starts in two days.”

The laughter was utterly gone from his face. There was no color in his cheeks. His lips were pressed together bloodless.

“I’ll do it,” he said, and in his voice Melke heard all the horror and shame that she saw in his eyes.

“No,” Liana said. “You can’t walk.”

He held his head slightly averted, not looking at the girl. “You said I could walk.” His words were stiff, as if shame choked his throat.

“A few steps, nothing more. Not yet.”

“But—”

“No.” Liana’s voice was firm. It brooked no argument.

Hantje turned his head and met the girl’s eyes. “It’s my fault,” he said fiercely. “
My
fault! And I will undo the harm I have caused!”

“If you wish to undo it, then tell me how to enter the den,” Melke said. “Tell me how to succeed.”

His glare swung to her. “No.”

“Hantje, there’s no time. It must be now. It must be me.”

“No! I won’t let you!”

Melke recognized the expression on his face, the set of chin and tightness of mouth, the pinching together of his eyebrows. She’d seen it when he was a child trying to hold back tears. She reached out and took his hand. It was a heavy burden he bore: guilt and shame, helplessness. “I’m sorry,” she said. “There’s no other way it can be. It must be me.”

His mouth twisted. He shook his head.

She glanced at Liana. The girl stood. “I’ll make some more tea,” she said, reaching for the teapot.

With Liana gone from the room, Hantje closed his eyes. “What have I done?” It was a whisper.

“The harm can be undone, Hantje. Just tell me how.”

He shook his head, his eyes still closed. “No,” he said. “It can’t be undone.”

Melke tightened her grip on his hand. “Yes, it can.”

His eyelids lifted. He looked at her. She saw his despair, dark and hopeless. “I tried to steal,” he whispered. Tears shone in his eyes.

“I know,” she said quietly. “But it will be all right, Hantje.”

He shook his head again. A tear slid down his cheek.

Melke reached out and wiped it away. “It’ll be all right,” she repeated, even though she wasn’t sure it would be. The necklace could be stolen back, the curse broken, but she didn’t know whether Hantje would ever forgive himself for what he’d done.

Grief was tight in her throat. “Hantje, tell me how they caught you.”

He wiped his face roughly with the back of his hand. “I don’t know.”

There was a loud heartbeat in her chest and silence, utter silence, in the room.

“What do you mean?” Melke’s mouth was dry. The words came out hoarsely.

“They knew I was there. They just
knew
.”

“The salamanders saw you?” She remembered the swift terror at the river bank when she’d thought Bastian had seen her.

“No, no. Not that.” Hantje shook his head. “They...I don’t know. They just...” His face twisted in frustration. “I don’t know!”

Melke rubbed her fingers over his clenched knuckles. “It’s all right.” Tension was tight inside her, but her voice was calm. “We’ll figure it out. Just tell me what happened. From the beginning.”