Thief With No Shadow (29 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

B
ASTIAN COULDN’T SIT,
couldn’t stand still. Time was too short. He paced the floor, restless and edgy, impatient. His head jerked around as he heard footsteps. “Liana!” He crossed the kitchen in three strides.

She had a frown on her face and a teapot in her hand.

“What did he say? Is she ready to go?”

Liana’s frown disappeared. She put down the teapot. “Good morning, Bastian.”

“What has he said?”

Liana laughed faintly. She rose on tiptoe and pressed a kiss to his cheek. “Always so single- minded, Bastian.”

“Yes,” he said impatiently, not really hearing her words.“
What did he say?
”

Her face sobered. “Nothing yet.”

“What? Nothing?” Bastian turned towards the door. “I’m going to—”

“No.” Liana stopped him with a hand on his arm, firmly. “Having you in there won’t help.”

“But—”

“No, Bastian. It must be slowly. He hasn’t the strength for you to shout at him.”

“I won’t shout,” he said stiffly.

Liana’s eyebrows rose a fraction of an inch. She said nothing.

Heat flushed his cheeks. “Curse it, Liana, we don’t have time for—”

“Patience, Bastian.”

He bit back a snarled retort and watched as she prepared another pot of tea. Something bubbled inside him, as water bubbled in the pot on the stove. It wasn’t patience. “Liana.” Frustration and urgency were sharp in his voice. “The psaaron may come as early as—”

She picked up the teapot. “I know, Bastian. I know. Just give us a few hours. Please.”

He shut his eyes. If anything happened to Liana...

“Please, Bastian.”

He opened his eyes. “Very well.”

“Thank you.” Her hand lightly brushed his cheek.

He watched her leave the kitchen. Patience. He wasn’t good at patience.

Work helped, though. He doled out grain for the sheep. They were survivors these two, thin and with their fleece as gray as the hard-packed dirt.

Hay next, for Gaudon. The horse would come with them, Bastian decided, as he smoothed his hand over Gaudon’s warm flank. If they had to leave Vere. The ewes could go to Arnaul. Eight miles, but still closer than the town. They would probably survive the walk.

He hauled water from the well for the sheep and Gaudon, and then cupped his hands and drank some himself. He almost spat it out. It tasted like mud. He scooped another handful from the bucket and looked at it. Cloudy. Dirty.

Bastian let the water trickle back into the bucket. By the time the moon was full, there’d be no water left on Vere.

Bas?

His head swung around. Endal stood on the doorstep. Which meant that the female wraith was in the kitchen.

Bastian strode across the yard. He laid a quick hand on Endal’s head as he pushed through the doorway. “Well?” he demanded.

“Well what?” The wraith’s voice was cool.

His eyes adjusted to the dimness. The wraith ladled something into a bowl. “What’s that?”

“Soup.” She indicated a pot on the stove. Her voice was polite, mocking. “Would you like some?”

Bastian brushed the offer aside with his hand. “What has your brother said? What has he told you?”

Her expression didn’t change, but something altered in her face. There was a closing, a drawing in, as if she pulled her skin closer to herself.

“Well? What?”

“I know how to enter the salamanders’ den without them knowing.” Each word in the sentence was precise, without inflection.

Relief swelled in Bastian’s chest. “You can steal the necklace.”

She looked away, at the steaming pot of soup. “No. I don’t know how to do that yet.”

The words left him breathless for several seconds. “What?”

“My brother can’t remember everything,” the wraith said. “It will take time.”

“Time?” His hands clenched, in fear, not anger. “We don’t have
time
.”

“The psaaron won’t come today, will it?” the wraith asked, meeting his eyes. “Or tomorrow. Or the day after.”

“It might come then.” His voice grated like stone in his throat.

“But it’s not until night that it requires someone to punish.”

The remembered scent of the psaaron, deep and wet, took Bastian’s breath away. The brittle terror in the house. His father’s anguished face.

“Is it?”

Bastian swallowed. “Not until night.”

The wraith nodded. “You will have the necklace by then.” She turned back to the stove.

“Will I?” His voice sounded hollow in his ears.

He saw her shoulders straighten, saw her chin lift. “You have my word.”

“But you don’t know how—”

“I will know.”

“Will you?” The words were flat and bitter.

The wraith turned her head and looked at him, the ladle held in one hand. “Yes,” she said.

B
ASTIAN TOOK HIMSELF
to the bridge next, although the two mile walk did nothing to ease the prickling sense of urgency. He strode, his boots stirring dust.
Someone to punish.
Fear choked in his throat and clenched beneath his breastbone. He could do it, if the choice was between himself and Liana—however much it terrified him. He
had
to.

But the choice was the psaaron’s. What if it chose Liana?

They wouldn’t be here. They’d be gone.

There was more fear at the bridge. The river was higher than it had been two days ago. The bridge bowed in the current, swaying to the push of water. Its timbers creaked.

Bastian stood and looked, while the weight of Vere pressed down on him and urgency screamed in his chest.

Fear. So much fear.

He raised his face to the sky. The blue was so thin that it was almost white, high and pale, bright. He was a fool to let fear ride him like this. It pushed him close to panic.

Patience
, Liana had said. And the wraith:
You will have the necklace
.

Patience.

Bastian stood for a long time at the bridge, his hands in his pockets, his eyes following the river’s swift flow. The sound was odd in his ears, unfamiliar, a soft and muted hiss. Cool air rose and breathed against his skin. He inhaled the scent of water, of moist earth and green plants.

His skin drank the dampness of the river. If only Vere could have this water. Cool and wet and alive.

He wanted to touch it, to scramble down the bank and plunge his hands under the water. To bury his face in it and open his mouth and gulp deeply.

He dared not. This was a hungry river. It ate sal Veres.

When the sun reached its zenith in the sky, Bastian turned away from the bridge. The wraith had given her word. It was foolish perhaps, as foolish as panic, but he would trust her.

W
HEN HE CAME
into the yard the wraith was sitting on the kitchen doorstep with her chin in her hand. Endal lay at her feet.

She gave you a bone?

Yes
. Endal’s voice was smug.

She looked almost human sitting like that, in her blue-gray blouse and dark skirt. Not haughty or cold or disdainful, just...worried.

Foreboding stirred beneath Bastian’s breastbone. “What? What’s wrong?”

The wraith glanced up and took her hand away from her chin. “Hantje doesn’t remember everything.”

He looked down at her, seated on the step with her black hair and pale skin and a tiny frown between her eyebrows. The sense of foreboding grew like a thunderhead gathering in the sky. “What specifically can’t he remember?”

“Specifically?” The repetition wasn’t mocking. Her voice lacked the cool, overly polite tone he was familiar with. “He can’t remember how the salamanders knew he was there.”

There was silence. Endal gnawed on the bone.

Bastian cleared his throat. “They felt him walk past,” he suggested. The thunderhead inside him swelled, gray and black, piling higher. “They shivered.”

Even sitting on the doorstep the wraith managed to look down her nose at him. “A fishwives’ tale.”

His teeth clamped shut. He clenched his jaw briefly. “They’re salamanders, not men.”

She shook her head. “No. They were at a distance from him. He remembers that.”

The foreboding pushed out through his pores and crawled across his skin. “You can’t get the necklace back.”

The wraith’s chin lifted. “I didn’t say that.”

“But if your brother doesn’t remember—”

“There is an answer,” she interrupted, leaning forward. “I know there is. I just haven’t asked the right question yet.”

Bastian shook his head, his mouth tight.

“Yes.”

“No,” he said flatly. “Tell Liana to pack. We’re leaving.” He turned away from her. Gaudon could carry the—

“No! Give me this afternoon.”

The fierceness of her voice halted him. He turned his head.

The wraith stood on the step. “Give me this afternoon,” she said again. “What can it matter? The psaaron won’t come tomorrow, will it?”

She was no marble statue now, but a passionate woman. The transformation was startling. There was color in her cheeks. Her eyes were as fierce as her voice. He read determination in her face, in the set of her mouth.

Endal had abandoned the bone. He stood with his muzzle raised, watching the wraith.

Bastian turned around fully. He folded his arms and looked her. She was as tall as he was, standing on the step. She didn’t flinch from his gaze.

The silence stretched, while heat shimmered up from the bare dirt and harsh sunlight glinted on Endal’s black coat, on the wraith’s hair.

She was right. The psaaron wouldn’t come tomorrow. And it probably wouldn’t come the day after that, when the tides began to swell, and probably not even the day after that.

Probably.

But it might.

It had never come so early before.

Bastian swallowed. He uncrossed his arms. “Very well.”

A flicker of something crossed the wraith’s face, too swift to recognize. The tension eased in her shoulders. “Thank you,” she said, cool and polite. A statue again.

Bastian said nothing. Was he a fool to hope so much?

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

T
HE SICKROOM GREW
stuffy, despite the wide-open window. A thin breeze stirred the faded curtains. The touch of it was hot and dry on Melke’s skin. Endal lay in front of the empty hearth, asleep.

“Let’s try again,” she said. Tension knotted in her chest and belly, but her voice was calm and her fingers, holding Hantje’s hand, were loose and relaxed. “Close your eyes.”

“But—”

“Please, Hantje.”

He hesitated, and then shut his eyes.

“Think back, carefully. You’re standing at the edge of the chamber. The salamanders don’t know you’re there. You watch them.”

Hantje’s grip was tight.

“What are they doing?”

“Eating.”

“Now remember carefully, Hantje. What happened? How did they know you were there?”

“They stopped eating,” he said flatly. “They turned their heads. They knew.” His eyes opened.

“No.” Melke kept her voice calm. “More slowly, Hantje. How did they stop eating? All at once? Gradually?”

“There’s no point.”

“Please, Hantje.”

He shook his head. There were lines on his face that shouldn’t be there, etched into his skin. Bitterness. Despair.

“How did they stop eating? Please, Hantje.”