Weight of Stone (40 page)

The idea that, in these lands, a woman traveling with males clearly unrelated to her might be a problem occurred to him only now. Ao, on the other hand, appeared greatly unconcerned, and Jerzy took some comfort in that. If they had trampled on some local taboo, surely Ao would know?

“This woman is yours?”

Or maybe Ao wouldn’t.

Mahl opened her mouth to say something, inevitably blistering, then her training took over, and she halted herself, even as Kaïnam stepped forward. “She travels with me,” he said. “I am Kaïnam, Named-Heir of the Principality of Atakus.”

“My prince,” the Vineart said, his voice sliding back into a pleased tone, although Jerzy suspected that he had never heard of Atakus. “Of course. My people will make sure she is most comfortable, and that none give offense.”

A woman stepped forward, presenting herself to Mahault. She was young, her hips wrapped in a dark red fabric, but the rest of her
body bare, showing off strong, ropey muscles under dark skin. Her head was lowered, but she looked up at Mahault with clear curiosity in her gaze.

Mahault looked first to Jerzy, then, recollecting herself, to Kaïnam, as though asking permission. He nodded, and she followed the female slave through the hallway and out through the left-side arch.

“And now, my brother, your companions, too, to come with me, and we shall have talking, and seeing, and you will tell me where you have coming from, and telling me the news I have not been hearing …”

In actuality, Vineart Esoba seemed remarkably uninterested in any news other than his own. Since that suited Jerzy well, he let their host do most of the speaking, with Ao asking the occasional ingenious question that led Esoba down another trail of chatter. Once he started, Esoba’s command of Ettonian improved.

“We are small, small yes, but much quality,” the Vineart said as they left the House after a brief tour that showcased clean, whitewashed rooms and low, comfortable-looking furniture, but no tapestries or silver such as Jerzy was accustomed to in his master’s House. There were slaves—no servants, only dark-skinned boys with the mustus mark on the inside of their wrists—and a handful of guards, who seemed to sleep while standing upright.

“And here is my joy, my heart.” They stopped at the outskirts of the yard, and Jerzy blinked. He had been right: the vines grew in a mad tangle, barely any distinction where one began and the other left off, low to the ground like creeper leaf, not proper spellvines.

The fruit had been harvested, as he had suspected, and the magic within the vines had already begun to slumber in anticipation of the Fallow season, but the invitation to wander in among them was there, the faint whisper of welcome, and he was barely able to resist.

“They are lovely,” Jerzy said, forcing his body to remain still. “You have finished Harvest?”

The question seemed to discomfort Esoba, who nodded after a brief hesitation. “Yes, picked and pressed and readying themselves.
We produce not much here; as I said, we are small. But we do well for ourselves.”

“Vineart Esoba?” Ao asked, pointing down at the ground where something was half buried in the soil. “What is that?”

“Ah.” Esoba sounded delighted to have something other than the vines themselves to discuss. “That is our irrigation plank. Here, let me show you….”

“I
CAN’T BELIEVE
Esoba is guilty of anything other than mediocre Ettonian,” Kaïnam said, several hours later, after the Vineart had brought them back to the House, personally showing them the rooms he had set aside so that they could freshen up before the evening meal. There was a main room, and three small bedchambers off it. Their belongings had been unloaded from the cart and placed in the center of the main room, to all appearances untouched and unsearched. Jerzy did a quick check of his pack and found nothing missing, none of the spellwines disturbed.

“He seems like a pleasant sort to me,” Ao agreed. He had claimed the long, low seat, his legs up and his head resting against the cushion at the other end, a goblet of Esoba’s
vina
in his hand.

Even Mahault, who had been waiting in the room when they were escorted there, having been given rooms in another part of the House, seemed to think well of their host.

“You’re not annoyed, that you weren’t allowed to join us?” Jerzy asked.

Mahault poured herself more of the
vina
from the chilled clay pitcher on the center table and took a sip, nodding her approval of it. “My father once hosted a delegation from one of the Highmark kingdoms, north of Caul. They were shocked that I was allowed to be seen in public at all. In their home, a well-born female was never seen in public rooms from birth until death—she remained in the family home until it was time for her to go to her husband’s house.”

She shrugged, and went to sit on another chair, this one round,
without any arms or back. All the furniture was low to the ground, made of a simple dark wood, and covered with cushions of the same colorful fabric as the clothing they saw around them. The walls had no coverings, but the simplicity of their surroundings made the colors that much more vibrant, more exotic.

“If I had to live like this, I would throw myself into the river,” she said. “For a short time, to see what we are seeing? I don’t mind. But I agree with Kaï. I can’t see Esoba as the source of the evil you’ve described.”

“He isn’t.” If Jerzy had been able to sense even the faintest trace of that dark taint within either the Vineart or his vines, he would never have let them touch the wine, even an
ordinaire.
The truth was that, in their entire tour, Jerzy had found nothing to frown over, and much—especially the curved wooden planks they used to bring water to the vines during the dry season—of interest. And yet he was uneasy, restless.

He lifted his own goblet and took a small sip. The
vina
was bright and clear, the color a pale ruby red, and it splashed on his tongue lightly, bringing the aroma of warm spices and a soft, sweet fruit. “The vines we saw? They had barely any magic in them at all, that I could sense. Spellvines, yes. But not strong ones.” That explained why Esoba had not taken care of the people beyond his House, the villagers. He did not have the ability to do so. Jerzy shook his head, feeling oddly saddened. “That is what happens when you grow vines outside the Vin Lands. The fruit may grow, but the magic is not there, the spells will not incant.”

“So he is not a Vineart?” Ao asked.

Jerzy leaned against the wall and looked down into the cup. “He has the training, from somewhere.” That much was clear from what they had seen; Esoba’s vintnery was impressive, the details all correct. “And he does craft an excellent
vina
….

“In fact, I’ve never tasted a
vin ordinaire
like this,” he said. The goblet was a thin-walled cup with a properly narrow lip, but Jerzy did not like that he could not see the clarity of the
vina
in the cup’s depth. “Have you, Kaï?”

“No. But my father bought only spellwines, not
vin ordinaire,
preferring to drink those we grew within our own borders. It pleased Master Edon, and saved us considerable costs.”

“It is good,” Mahault agreed. “It has a lovely taste, crisp and clean, but with a great deal of flavor. But if he’s not the source, why are we here?”

“Oh, the taint is here,” Jerzy said. “It’s simply not in his vines.” It was the same as in Aleppan, the sense of it in the air around them, not a specific source. That meant the taint had already established itself within the House somehow, attacking the Vineart, not arising from him.

If the taint was coming from elsewhere, then Esoba was a target. Worse, he was a target who did not seem to know there was a danger.

He looked around, waiting for some reaction to his words, but the others seemed to be perfectly relaxed, accepting everything as though it was only to be expected. It made his skin prickle and his uncertain mood take a dark turn.

“We need to find out where the taint is,” he said, fighting to keep calm, summoning the memory of the Guardian’s cool stone against his fingers, his master’s hard voice telling him to breathe and relax, to feel the mustus, the magic within.

“Of course,” Kaïnam agreed, leaning back in his own chair, a narrower version of the seat Ao had claimed. His legs were stretched out in front of him, and he looked as relaxed as Jerzy had ever seen him, as though there were no worries in his life at all.

Their behavior puzzled Jerzy. “Are none of you worried?”

“Of course we are,” Mahl said, suddenly glaring up at him. “I know what this taint can do, Jerzy. If this man is the target of it, then we need to find it and root it out before it can do to him what it did to my father. How dare you think that we don’t care!”

Ao picked up on Mahault’s tone and glared at Jerzy as well. “Is that what you think? Or is it because we’re not magic, that we are missing something?”

Kaïnam sat up suddenly, looking between the two of them and Jerzy, his handsome face now marred with a frown. “Is that what you think?
That we are somehow less involved in this that you are? You aren’t the only one with losses, Vineart. My entire land is at risk, my people, if I don’t discover who is doing this. We will be forever cut off from all of the lands, if I cannot reverse what was done. You think I am not worried?”

“You are now,” Jerzy said, taken aback by their sudden anger, and feeling his way delicately. “You weren’t, just before. You each looked as though you had no worries in the world, relaxed when we should be up and doing.”

“I was not,” Mahl exclaimed, and Ao looked equally indignant.

“When was the last time you put your feet up, Ao?”

The trader looked at him as though he had lost his mind, and then looked down at himself, supine on the couch. He stared at the toes of his boots as though he had never seen them before. “You still have no right to say that—”

“That what? What did I say? If you really think that I think less of you because you can’t sense magic, if you think I abandoned my yards, left everything I know and care about, because I don’t care, why are you here? Why did you come back to The Berengia for me?”

Jerzy turned to Mahault, now angry himself, at their ingratitude and their lack of understanding. “Why did you come back? You’d gotten the connection you needed; you could have stayed there, could have earned your way to the solitaires. Your father disowned you; you had no need to set his name clean, or save him from his own mistakes. They abandoned you, cut you off. You owe Aleppan nothing.”

Her face paled under the sun-coloring, and her eyes went wide, as though he had slapped her. He found himself panting, he was so angry, and his fingers clenched on the polished wooden stem of the goblet.

The goblet.

He looked down, and in that unguarded instant, everything changed, as though a firespell had suddenly illuminated the darkness they had been walking through.

“Put down your wine.”

“What?” Mahault still stared at him, her anger slightly tempered by confusion now.

“Put down the wine,” he snapped.

It should have been impossible. It was impossible, what Jerzy suspected. And yet, everything he had sensed, felt, since they walked under that wooden gate suddenly made sense.

“Mindspells. That rootless bastard crafts mindspells.”

I thought that you
said this was
vin ordinaire,
” Kaïnam accused Jerzy, tossing his goblet onto the floor in disgust. The liquid spilled onto the tiles, the goblet rolling away to rest against the leg of a table.

“I did. It is.” Jerzy was certain of that. Mindspell or no, there was no way that magic could hide from him, not when he was drinking it. Was there?

He did not know aetherwines, save the single weak one Master Malech had given him to clear the air in the workroom with. A mindspell was an aetherwine of such potency … there was no way it had come from the vineyard they had seen that afternoon. Not unless Esoba had some way to mask his vines …?

He instinctively reached out to touch for the Guardian, then stopped. If this Vineart could hide magic from him, then who knew what else he could do. It should not be possible for another to hear his link to the Guardian … but it was not possible to hide magic from a Vineart, either.

“What is a mindspell?” Ao asked, setting his own goblet down, more
carefully than Kaï but with equal distaste. “Obviously, it affects the mind, but—”

“It can make us do something we didn’t want to do?” Mahault had stood up and was pacing around the room, clearly agitated. Only Jerzy appeared calm, as he searched through his memory for what little he knew.

“My master told me that there is no spellwine that can make you do anything you do not want to do. The only spellwine that can affect a man in his thoughts is Lethá. It causes memories to fade or disappear entirely, and it is grown only in Altenne—the conditions are not right, here.” Altenne was cooler, its yards higher up on the mountain slopes.

But it might be some variant? Malech had told him that vines, transplanted by students taking on new yards, often changed their properties as well, to suit the needs and the desires of the land they grew in. The Altennese scholars called it Sin Washer’s Left Hand, that change. Could someone have planted Lethá here, and had it go left-handed? Could it hide its own nature even from another Vineart?

What sort of vine would do that? A dangerous one …

A Vineart crafts more than spells, Jerzy. He crafts solutions, possibilities. Some are good. Some are … not good. Some heal; some cause harm. None of them are anything more than tools.

His master’s voice, from the first days of his lessons. Think, it urged him. Understand. The magic was in the mustus, yes. But even the strongest spellwines were only tools, the same as a sword or a hammer or a carefully chosen word. If this spellwine were grown from the same aethervine as Lethá, a change in growing conditions and a different incantation might … what? Make those under its sway forget why they were here? Make them less inclined to search?

Or make them inclined to argue amongst themselves, leaving them open to outside attack, or being wooed to another thought?