Wolf's-own: Weregild (57 page)

He only watched the blaze catch and climb, tried not to gag on the thick haze of incense, and looked for Caidi's face through the flames but didn't see it, listened for her voice telling him goodbye, that he'd see her again, but he didn't hear it. He wondered if it would be unseemly for him to stretch his hands out over the fire to warm them—he was cold, all the time,
freezing
—but he didn't know, so he didn't chance it.

It took him a week to notice that all his knives were missing. He didn't care enough to wonder where they were.

A very near thing, the gut wound, Joori had told him. Another
Temshiel
had tried to heal him, but it hadn't worked until Malick shoved his magic into the mix and
made
it work. Apparently, Jacin was still mostly immune to magic. Except for Malick's. He wondered if he hated Malick for that.

Scabbed over and just raw enough that Jacin could poke and pick at it now and then if he wanted to feel something. Except Malick always seemed to show up, fussing and cursing and redressing just when Jacin got a good flow going. Like he could smell the blood or something. Jacin stopped picking at it.

The Girou went on. Malick told Jacin that Umeia would have wanted it to, like Jacin might care, told him he'd signed it over to Lex, and since Jacin had no idea who Lex was, he didn't answer. He never answered, but that didn't stop Malick from talking. Because Malick never let up.

Shig slept with Samin now, because she couldn't sleep alone, and Morin and Joori couldn't stay in the room where Caidi's first real bed sat with its pretty linens, so they shared Jacin's. Malick didn't exactly tell Jacin to share his bed with him, but it was where Jacin had woken up that first day, and it was where he always ended up shuffling back to when he was forced from its seclusion. Sometimes Malick would make him move to the couch in his little sitting room, but most of the time, he just let Jacin stare at the wall from his little cave of blankets and bedding, and ignore time.

Sometimes Jacin heard Beishin, heckling him, telling him it hadn't been the Ancestors who'd made him insane, and sometimes he saw his father, looking at him with disdain and disgust. But then there would be Joori, holding onto him, weeping into his shoulder, maybe, or just sitting quietly beside him, nudging Jacin when he forgot halfway through a bowl of rice that he was supposed to be eating. Or Morin, snarking at his idleness as Jacin lay on Malick's great big bed, burrowed in and barricaded, though it didn't keep them out. Sometimes Morin read aloud from books Samin had found for him, pretending he was just doing it because he felt like it and not because he was trying to get something from Jacin that Jacin suspected he couldn't give. He never remembered the stories.

"You would've been proud of him,” Samin had told Jacin, his gruff voice a weird anchor in the silence that had felt somewhat comfortable between them before it was broken, and now in hindsight seemed tenuous, like it had never felt with Samin. “He almost couldn't see for the tears, but I told him he wouldn't be a man if he hadn't wept, and that seemed to make him feel better.” A long, timeless pause before Samin went on, “His hand was steady. He gave her a clean end. Just like you showed him."

Jacin thought Samin made a better father for Morin than their own had done. He thought perhaps he should tell Samin this, but he lost time, and when he found it again, it had gone dark and Samin was gone.

Shig, it seemed, was always curled up in Malick's big, ugly chair whenever Malick would drag Jacin from the warm cocoon of the wide, goose-down mattress and fine, heavy linens and dump him on the couch for a while. Jacin didn't try to decide if it annoyed him. Anyway, he was forever cold anymore, and the fire was out in the sitting room.

He still had a limp, some of his wounds bone-deep, the mangled muscle of his calf beyond full healing, but the short, enforced walks didn't pain him as much as he'd pretend if Malick tried to make him leave the room for a trip any farther from its threshold than the baths. Somehow, though he always started out on the couch alone, with Shig in the chair across from him, Jacin usually managed to drift from his haze after a while to notice that she'd moved to the couch to curl up against him like a cat on a hearthstone

"Malick wants to take us to Tambalon after Yakuli's trial,” Shig said softly. She puffed a light, humorless snort, and shrugged. “I wonder if I get seasick?"

The streaks of green and blue and red weren't as vibrant a contrast to Shig's blonde hair as they'd been, like all her losses had dulled her on the outside as well as on the inside. She missed her sister. She probably missed Umeia. She missed her spirits. Jacin almost understood it. It was hard to get used to all the empty space, all the silence, when you were so accustomed to shoving your thoughts through the noise. Like trying to batter through a stone wall, and then the wall crumbles, and you go careening off the cliff on the other side of it. And you can't even pretend you're flying.

"How do you go on?” Shig asked him, her voice weirdly solid without its edge of singsong. “What do you hide behind, now that the braid can't hide you anymore?"

Jacin had thought maybe he'd like her more without all her spirits telling her how to sucker-punch him. He didn't. With the exception of a reflexive touch to the ragged ends of his now shoulder-length hair, he didn't bother to answer her.

Had he hidden behind it? He didn't think so. More like it obscured him and everything he was to the point where hiding was entirely unnecessary.

"You have to start again now too,” Shig whispered, wrapping herself around his arm like ivy. “You wanted an end, and instead you got a beginning. Poor Fen."

He almost wanted to shove her away, tell her to fuck off, but he couldn't make himself muster the will, and still, he didn't bother to answer her.

He didn't bother to answer anyone. Not even his father. Not even Beishin. He would have answered Caidi, maybe, but she never came.

Instead, always, right beside him—holding him up, pushing him forward, telling him he wasn't nothing, poking him, prodding him, annoying him enough that he was sometimes moved to growl a warning—it was Malick, tarnished bronze eyes watching, waiting for something. Except Jacin didn't know what it was, and he couldn't make himself care. But he let Malick do it, let Malick take him to bed at night and curl himself around him, hold him, warm him, and Jacin slept and felt improbably safe and distantly... something. Grateful? Surely not.

The Statehouse loomed up, a penumbra of shadow slinking down the marble steps and onto the slate path that led from the street. Jacin toed the line of sunshine that edged the shadow, peered up, and squinted, looking for the blue hulking haze of distant Subie that wasn't there anymore. Smoke still tendriled from its sunken caldera, a thin, gray line linking heaven to earth, and he fancied he could see the ghost of Wolf hovering above it, grinning, so he cut his eyes downward.

It still smelled of seaweed and rotten fish. The floods had reached right to these very steps; he could still see the mud line on the riser of the second. He imagined there was probably a great deal of detritus lingering as a result of the destruction of the Kiwa Shuua, and he also imagined they must have passed at least some of it on the way here. He hadn't looked.

"Just ignore them,” Malick told him, his arm heavy across Jacin's shoulders as he frowned at the gathered onlookers, mouth set grim. “There'll be a crowd in the courtroom, too, but they'll at least have to be quiet in there."

Jacin hadn't noticed the din. He was good at ignoring noise. He noticed the stares, though, because they were different than the brief glances, the shocks of recognition, then the quick aversion of gazes. These gazes drilled into him,
looked
at him—curiosity, hostility, sympathy, expectation. No one got too close, though, as if an invisible bubble kept them back, and Jacin vaguely wondered if Malick was doing it, but it didn't really matter.

"What do I do about the carriage?” Joori asked Malick. Jacin peered back over his shoulder, saw Asai's expensive coach hitched to Asai's expensive horse, Morin with a hand on its harness, staring about, wide-eyed. Samin—as he always seemed to be these days—was standing just beside Morin, eyes sharp on the crowd, watching for threat. Jacin really should thank him some time.

He'd been told that he'd been taken from Yakuli's and back to the Girou in that same carriage, and he supposed they must have all made the trip here in it too. He didn't remember. It should have bothered him, but it didn't.

The weight of Malick's arm shifted on Jacin's shoulders as he half turned, thin stripes of chill blooming where his warmth had rested just a second ago. Jacin shivered a little.

"Just hand it over to him,” Malick answered, jerking his chin at a thin young boy—a page, perhaps—clomping down the steps of the Statehouse, preceding a stout man with a somber smile. The man's bald head caught a stray glint of the sun-through-shadow as he descended and stepped up in front of them. The toes of the man's flat, leather shoes, like the toes of Jacin's scuffed boots, edged along the band of light and shadow on the walk.

"Fen, this is Judge Canti,” Malick said. He paused while the man dipped his head respectfully, seemingly not offended when Jacin only stared. “He'll be leading the questioning."

"Your Husao has told me much about you, Fen-seyh,” the judge said, meeting Jacin's flat stare with apparent interest, his pale-blue eyes bright with intelligence and a hint of craft. “I trust you're prepared for what is to take place today?” The upward slant of the tone made it into a question, and Canti's eyes shifted from Jacin to Malick, directing the query at him.

Malick's hand tightened on Jacin's shoulder. Jacin was tempted to shrug it off, but he didn't. “Fen will—"

"Jacin will do what he can,” Joori cut in, sliding a dark, warning look at Malick, but he didn't snarl or growl, like he might've done before. He looked at Jacin, his mouth dragging slightly upward in a grim smile. “He's had a... a bad time.” He was either talking to Malick or Canti, but he was still looking at Jacin. “We never promised anything.” Joori sucked in a long breath and turned to the Judge. “We don't know what to expect today. But Jacin... well, he's Jacin. He comes through. It's what he does."

Jacin didn't know if he was inspired or horrified.

He knew what today was about in a vague, esoteric sort of way, knew what they were expecting of him, what was at stake. He just didn't know if he could do it. Didn't know if he cared to try.

"It is fitting,” Judge Canti said with a somber smile, “that great change should come through Wolf's Catalyst."

Jacin wanted to vomit.

He'd been a catalyst. Nothing more. The stumbling, fumbling center around which great things had occurred. He hadn't saved the Jin. He hadn't saved his mother. He hadn't saved anyone. Everyone else around him had managed to walk away from Yakuli's with at least one kill to their credit, even Morin, but Jacin had failed to accomplish even that much. It had been bad enough knowing that Asai had always meant for him to fail. What was he supposed to do with the knowledge that his god had intended the same?

Meant to fail. Made for it.

Perfection at last.

They'd quarreled about today, Joori and Malick—Malick contending that Jacin needed to be pushed, Joori contending that he couldn't take being pushed any more—and Jacin had wondered if Joori realized they were bickering right in front of him, over him, around him, like Joori used to argue with their father about their mother. It was his own fault, Jacin supposed. He could have argued for himself, but he didn't feel like it.

He let everything sink into the background—whatever Judge Canti was saying to Malick and Joori, and whatever they were saying back, the steady murmur of the crowd as they watched—and let Malick hold onto his arm as he hobbled up the steps in Canti's wake. He didn't even curl his lip, just let Malick give him a little push as they stepped into the courtroom, and Canti gestured for Jacin to follow him. Canti ushered him to a small, raised platform edged with a polished walnut railing, and Jacin let his mind drift inward, let all the expectant gazes recede to irrelevance.

Found Yakuli's hate-filled glare, and let himself smile, just a little.

Remembered dark eyes and the scent of jasmine. A deep, smooth voice in the dark of night demanding magic from a maijin. The squelching
crunch
of a small body caroming into the cobbles. Remembered soft, hazel eyes, and a slender hand
touching
him when touching was forbidden.

And when Canti raised his voice, asked the Untouchable to speak... Jacin let his mouth open.

Let himself tell them everything.

The breeze was cool and crisp for all it was briny, ruffling at his fringe, obscuring his vision for seconds then blowing back and clearing it again. He hadn't gotten used to the hair yet, his head still felt too light, so he'd let Joori pull it back into a stumpy tail at the back of his neck this morning. Joori had grinned like Jacin had just asked him if he wouldn't mind taking a bag of gold off his hands.

The voyage to Tambalon would take three weeks, if the weather was good, and the captain had assured Malick it would be. A thick, swart man, pierced and tattooed and unexpectedly jolly, the captain had seemed to take great pleasure in accepting their papers when they'd boarded. It was the first time ever, he'd said, that he'd taken a Jin onto his ship without the risk of the gallows, and if there was anything they needed in the coming weeks, they'd only to ask him. Jacin didn't need anything. Jacin had spent the first week exactly as he planned to spend the rest of them—planted in a spindly deck chair, one of several on the port stern, watching the waves, smelling the sea, feeling the wind on his skin, and the vague sting of salt.

The crew was small and went about their business with comforting ease, their chatter gruff and their looks at Jacin cursory and pleasant enough. A mix of Heldes and Thecians, their mingled accents were strangely reassuring in their distant snark and banter, a soothing background hum beneath the sound of the sea and the indecipherable buzz of his thoughts. No one stared, and no one sneered. They did what needed to be done and left Jacin to his solitude, such as it was. Malick was forever hovering, poking, prodding, trying to get conversation that Jacin wouldn't give, and Jacin's brothers were almost as bad. Samin more or less respected Jacin's wish for silence, but Shig didn't. Sometimes Jacin thought she annoyed him more than Malick did.