Thief With No Shadow (43 page)

B
ASTIAN TOOK SOME
of the coins back to the farmhouse with him, a fistful in each pocket. Clouds drifted over the sun. A light drizzle began to fall. The first rain on Vere in years.

He thought that the cracked ground inhaled at the gentle touch of moisture, that it gave a sigh of pleasure.

Bastian climbed the stairs to the sickroom. Hantje didn’t notice his arrival. He sat watching Melke, his face haggard. Endal opened his eyes. He didn’t lift his chin from Hantje’s feet.

How is she
? Bastian asked, looking at Melke. She lay unmoving. He’d have thought her dead but for the flush of fever in her thin cheeks.

The same.

There was no point in opening his mouth to tell Hantje that the curse was lifted. It was unimportant. What mattered was the battle being fought in this room. Life or death.

Bastian turned away from the door.
It’s raining.

I know. I smelled it.

He nodded, and walked slowly back down the stairs. In the kitchen he lit the stove and the candles, and then sat at the table and laid the coins out and stared at them. How many deaths were too many? When did it simply become too much?

He’d throw the money away, just as his great grandfather had done, if he knew it would save a life. Her life.

Bastian turned a gold coin over in his fingers. If Melke died, it would be too many deaths. He’d walk away from Vere. Let someone else put fresh slates on the roof and new glass in the windows, let someone else restore the house and farm to their former glory.

Too many bad memories, too much death.

Bastian sat looking at the coins while night fell, and then he pushed them away and made dinner and climbed the stairs to the little bedchamber, where he lay on the bed and stared up at the ceiling in the dark.

Too many. Too much.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

T
HE INFECTION RAN
in Melke’s blood, black, streaked with fire-red. In Liana’s mind it was alive. It twisted and knotted and dug in with sharp claws, refusing to leave.

Liana placed a hand on Melke’s chest, where her heart beat feebly. She closed her eyes.
Leave her. Let her be. Go away.

Tonight she was stronger than the fever. Perhaps it was the sound of gentle rain falling outside, so miraculous and beautiful. Perhaps not.

Hours passed while rain fell softly and the infection struggled against her. The knots unraveled slowly, the claws loosened their grip by tiny, grudging increments. Melke’s heart began to beat more strongly, more steadily. The black faded to gray and the fiery streaks dissolved and at last Melke’s blood rushed inside vein and artery, warm and rich and clean.

Liana opened heavy eyelids, exhausted and elated. She smoothed strands of black hair away from her patient’s brow. “All’s well,” she told her. “You will live.”
And Hantje will smile again.

Melke sighed in her sleep. The heat of fever was gone from her cheeks.

The candles flickered, casting shadows over Melke’s face, illuminating the pulse that beat steadily at the base of her throat. How like Hantje she was, inside and out. Honor and despair.

Outside, the wondrous rain fell. It was a night for miracles, a night when wishes could come true. “I want you to stay,” Liana whispered. “Both of you. I want this to be your home.”

She closed her eyes, and woke to find Bastian standing over her and Endal pressed against her leg.

“How is she?” Bastian’s voice was rough.

Melke’s fingers lay slack in her hand, warm and full of life.

“She’ll be fine.”

For a moment it seemed that Bastian didn’t breathe, and then she heard him inhale, hoarsely. His eyes glistened in the candlelight. “Are you certain?”

“Yes.”

One of the candles had guttered. The others wavered feebly. “It’s still night. Why aren’t you—”

“I couldn’t sleep.”

Liana nodded, and yawned.

His expression changed, the curious tightness of his face softening. “You’re tired.”

He carried her to bed, as he’d done when she was a little girl. Liana’s eyelids slid shut. She rested her cheek against his shoulder, safe.

She was dimly aware of Bastian laying her down, of the sheet and blanket being pulled up around her chin. She tried to open her eyes, but couldn’t. “Melke. Who’ll—”

“I’ll sit with her.” He kissed her brow. “Sleep, little one.”

B
ASTIAN LIT NEW
candles and placed them in the holder. His gaze slid away from Melke. Everything was suddenly all right and he was afraid it would evaporate if he looked directly at her.

It was all too sudden, too incredible.

Relief swelled inside him until he thought his chest would burst with it. The curse was broken. Vere would live. Melke would live. Everything was all right.

The book of tales lay on the bedside table. Bastian picked it up and touched the leather, worn with age. He would be able to read these stories to his children.

Joy gleamed inside him as bright and hot as candle flames.
I will have children.

He sat in the wooden chair beside the bed. Endal lay down with his chin on Bastian’s feet. He felt the dog’s contentment. It hummed beneath his skin.

Everything was all right.

The gardens would flourish again. There’d be flowers and fruit trees and vegetables, sheep and cows grazing and horses in the stable yard, green grass and trees with leaves. But that would take time, years. The house he could do now. Fresh slates and window panes and paint. Furniture. And the bathhouse. It was frivolous and unnecessary, but he’d like to restore the bathhouse.

Bastian wanted to laugh, he wanted to cry. Instead, he opened the book and turned the pages, searching for a tale that expressed the lightness he felt.

There is a little magic left in this world
, he read.
It runs in certain bloodlines.

He looked at Melke fully for the first time since he’d heard she would live. Magic ran in her bloodline, just as it ran in his.

Her magic wasn’t evil; it was simply magic, as his own was. For generations sal Veres had spoken with horses or dogs. One of his children would likely have the gift.

With magic often came beauty. He’d heard it said about Bresse’s ruling family, who undoubtedly possessed the gift of peace. A gift that spread beyond Bresse’s borders with each royal son and daughter married. And the same had been said about his own family, the sal Veres.
A handsome family, gifted, but cursed
, he’d overheard when he was a boy. Handsome and gifted, cursed.

No longer cursed.

What would it be like to have a gift that others feared? A gift that could be abused by the unscrupulous?

In Stenrik they burn wraiths.

He looked at Melke and remembered how she’d tilted her chin, how she’d refused to show that she was afraid. Bravado and haughtiness, to hide vulnerability, to hide fear.

Wraiths were always ugly in the tales, but Melke wasn’t ugly. Bastian stared at her, lying pale and still, her hair raven-black on the pillow. Elegant. That was the word that fitted best. The arch of eyebrows and the straightness of her nose, the angle of jaw and cheekbones, the line of her throat. Elegant. And her earlobes, softly rounded, her slender fingers, the feet she’d drawn for him on the back of the map. Elegant.

This at least wasn’t a fishwives’ tale: magic and beauty went together.

Bastian jerked his gaze away from her. He looked back down at the page. No, not that story. He turned more pages, searching. The word
Stenrik
caught his eye. He smoothed his hand over the parchment.

“Stenrik is a land of dark fir forests and tall mountains and icy seas,” he read aloud. “And lamiae asleep in deep, cold caves.”

He glanced at Melke. Did she miss those forests, those cold seas?

Bastian looked down at the page again and cleared his throat. “As everyone knows, it is wisest to turn one’s back on what might be a lamia, however beguiling and beautiful she is, and to hurry as fast as possible in the opposite direction, for serpent-women can be dangerous creatures. But not all men are wise. This is the tale of one man, Janne, who was very unwise.”

Endal’s tail thumped on the floor. He liked the sound of Bastian’s voice.

“Janne was a nobleman, as handsome as any man might hope to be, and vain and proud with it. He was betrothed to a baron’s daughter who had hair as dark and glossy as a ripe chestnut and eyes as blue as a summer sky. The baron’s daughter (whose name was Britta) was a good-hearted girl, and it was widely said that she was as lovely as she was sweet and kind. Only the most mean-spirited of people noted that pox scars were faintly visible on her pretty face.

“Janne was well aware of his worth, and knew that he was due a baron’s daughter as a bride. He never noticed Britta’s sweet temper and kind nature. When he looked at her he saw only her father’s wealth and the pock marks on her face. The wealth he knew he deserved. The pock marks annoyed him. So perhaps it is not surprising that when he came across a serpent-woman reclining on a bed of moss in a glade in the dark forest, he didn’t turn and leave.

“The lamia wore a gown that was as fine as gossamer and a necklace of rubies that hung to her waist. She was beautiful, as all lamiae are. She had lips as red as blood and skin as soft and smooth as white rose petals. Her hair was more lustrous than black opals and her teeth gleamed like pearls and her golden eyes were dark with the sort of knowledge that gladdens a man’s heart.

“Here, finally, was a woman worthy of Janne’s interest. And so, heedless of danger and without thought for Britta and their betrothal vows, he entered the sunlit clearing.

“Time has a way of sliding past when one is in the company of a serpent-woman. It seemed to Janne that he had barely sat down beside the lamia, had scarcely raised her hand to his lips in greeting, had spoken no more than a few words to her, than the sun sank below the horizon.

“‘May I see you tomorrow?’ Janne asked. The lamia smiled a slight, secret smile and disappeared among the tall fir trees, as light and graceful as thistledown in her gauzy white robe.

“Janne came at sunrise the next morning and again the time slipped between his fingers as swiftly as water. A wise man knows to turn away from such haunting beauty, and knows to value such simple things as home and hearth and the warmth of a sweetheart’s kiss, be she pretty or plain. But Janne wasn’t wise, for all his pride, and he had never valued simple things.

“Sometimes a serpent-woman finds it hard to weave her spell. Sometimes the man she has chosen laughs in her face and her magic shatters, but Janne was greedy for what the lamia offered. He was easily snared. He forgot his bride-to-be, forgot her father’s fortune, forgot even his own name.

“When the lamia asked Janne to come with her on the night before his wedding, he went willingly. He knew that a serpent’s heart beat in her breast and that if he asked to see her pretty tongue it would be forked, but he didn’t care. He wanted only her.

“Britta searched the forest for her unfaithful bridegroom. She climbed the dark slopes every day for a month, calling his name. Then she went home and packed her bridal clothes away in a trunk. A year later she married a baron, a plain, honest man who was happy with his lot in life. The baron didn’t see the pock marks on her face. He thought his wife was the loveliest woman in Stenrik. Together they had seven children, each as kind and sweet-natured as their mother and as honorable and faithful as their father.

“Janne was seen in the forest from time to time. He had dank hair and hollow cheeks and skin as pale as a corpse’s, and his breath smelled like a dark cavern. But he was as proud and vain as he had ever been, for he slept on a bed of golden coins and his bride was more beautiful than any woman in the world.”

B
ASTIAN HAD READ
three tales and started on the fourth when lightness behind the curtains signaled daybreak. Rain still fell softly outside. He wondered how soon it would begin leaking through the broken slates. Perhaps it did already.