Deep Water (57 page)

“My mother was a Valuer,” was all he said.

Martine nodded, once, and looked away. If she maintained that gaze any longer she would drown in it. Valuer mother or not,
he was a warlord and no concern of hers. The thump her own heart gave at the thought surprised her.

“Let’s get going,” she said.

Arvid nudged his horse into a walk and somehow managed to get it next to Martine’s chestnut. “The Plantation for the night,
and then Foreverfroze,” he said companionably. Martine turned to look at him, making her eyes as unreadable as she could.
He smiled, nonetheless. “I’m not a despot,” he said quietly. “Don’t condemn me without evidence.”

She sniffed in exaggerated disbelief, but her hand went to the pouch of stones at her belt for comfort. She wished that she
could cast the stones for herself, to see what he would mean to her. The last time her heart had beaten this fast for a human
man was when she was a girl, with Cob. That had led to heartbreak, and he had been one of her own kind. No good could come
of encouraging Arvid. But she let him ride beside her, with Safred, Cael and Zel behind, and she was aware of every movement
of his thigh against the horse, every shift of his hands on the reins. She was glad when Trine took a dislike to Arvid’s horse
and surged forward to kick it, because it made Arvid give a rueful shrug and move up the column to get away from her.

Martine had heard about the Valuers’ Plantation all her life and had, as most Travelers had, imagined living here in comfort
and beauty. But it was just a farm. A very big farm, admittedly, with quite a number of houses and sheds and barns, and dairies
and forges and one big meeting hall.

A tall, solid woman named Apple, with graying yellow hair, met them with a smile and arranged for them to have lunch in the
meeting hall with the Plantation council, but there was no special banquet organized. The councilors came from the fields
in their work clothes, and Arvid was treated the same as the other guests. Children ran in and out of the hall constantly,
cajoling food from their parents and from other people, including Arvid, who sat up one end of the table with the councilors,
engaged in serious discussions.

Martine noticed that the children looked up into the adults’ eyes, instead of down at the ground in respect as they did in
other places. She mentioned it to Apple as she passed a plate of ham and pickles to go with her bread.

“They’re taught that they are the equal of all. To look up, not proud, or cheeky, because that means you are more important
than the other person. But of equal value.” The words came easily to her, and it was clear this was a lesson she had recited
many times to her own children.

“
Thinking
you’re equal won’t stop the warlords’ men from beating you if they think you’re disrespectful,” Martine said.

Holly, Arvid’s guard, laughed, unoffended.

“Aye, in other places, that’s so, and we’ve all had cause to know it,” Apple answered around a mouthful of ham. “But Arvid
is a Valuer himself, or as good as one.”

“His mam was raised Valuer, just like mine,” Safred said unexpectedly. “But she stayed with her lord. She’s still alive. Almond,
her name is, but they named the baby Arvid after his grandfather, instead of Cedar, like she wanted.”

There was a brief, uncomfortable silence. Safred grinned.

“The gods didn’t tell me that. Almond did.”

Cael laughed and had to cover his mouth to stop crumbs flying out. Then he winced, and his hand went surreptiously to his
chest, as though to ease the pain of the wound there. Safred noticed and her face tightened, but she said nothing.

Martine turned to look thoughtfully at Arvid, who was smiling courteously at an older man as he laid down the law about something,
poking Arvid in the chest with one bony finger as he spoke. She couldn’t imagine a warlord like Thegan even sitting at the
same table as a farmer in dirty boots. Anyone who poked him in the chest would be poked back with a sword through the heart.

They were parceled out among the cottagers for the night, and Martine was placed with Apple. She was grateful when Martine
offered to cast the stones for her, but refused.

“There’re questions which shouldn’t be asked, and there’re questions which aren’t worth asking, and those are the only two
kinds I’ve got,” she said, smiling, but with a tightness behind the smile that told Martine she’d seen some pain in the past.

Apple sent her son, Snow, over to stay at a friend’s place, and Martine slept in his bed, in clean sheets scented with the
rosemary bushes they had dried on. The Plantation wasn’t paradise, and no doubt they had a long, cold winter of it so far
north, but Martine thought as she drifted off to sleep that it was the best life she had seen so far in a warlord’s territory.

She dreamt of Arvid. They were naked, encased in flames that did not burn, but sent impossible heat through every nerve. Her
hair floated about her as though they were in water, and he tangled it in his hands and brought her head toward him, seeking
her mouth as though frantic for her, as she was for him. She woke the moment before their lips touched and lay, aching, staring
at the window, wanting him to climb through like a lover from a story.

I must be mad, she thought. This is more than the normal backwash from the Equinox. Perhaps it’s punishment from the fire.
Lord of Flames, she prayed, forgive me and set me free from this. But her skin was tender as though exposed to too much heat,
and every movement of her breath rasped the sheet across tight nipples. She had to curl up in a ball, like a child, for hours
before she fell asleep again.

She dreamt of Arvid.

W
HAT GOOD WAS
it? Where was the use? I had served, worked, been loyal — for what? An empty alleyway. Yet now they expected me to go on.
To serve, as if nothing had happened. As though the alleyway still led home.

I stood with the tray in my hands, looking over at the glass table.

“You’re lucky to still have a job,” the cook said gently, “Go on. The lord is waiting.”

Let him wait, I thought. Let him wait until the giants eat the sun.

I put down the tray and walked out of the hall, straight out of the fort enclosure and down the hill to the gibbet and the
pressing box. The guard on the gate called out as I went, “I’ll be closing up in a few minutes, girl,” but I ignored him.
I was not coming back.

I went to the gibbet. The crows had had three days at Lidi already, and I didn’t want to look. I watched the gallows instead,
and I was ready when his ghost quickened.

Lidi came back not in midair, where I’d been expecting him, but on the platform, which meant that he hadn’t had the quick
death I’d thought. He rose, slowly, knowing where he was, knowing what had happened, and I went forward so that he could see
me.

He reached out to me, and I to him, but what good was that? His hands and mine passed through each other with a chill that
went to my bones. It’s a cruelty of the gods, that they let us see our dead, but not touch them.

“They will not offer reparation,” I said, and only as I said it did I realize that I was crying, hiccuping with a tearing
grief. “They never do. But don’t let them condemn you in the next life as well. Cheat them. Go onto rebirth.”

He reached for me again, his face bereft. I put my hand up near the side of his face. He pointed at me and spread his hands
as though asking a question.

“I’m leaving,” I said. “I’m going to the Plantation.”

He stilled and nodded, and then tried to smile. He raised his hand and blew me a kiss, and that was the hardest moment of
all, I remember, because it was a thing he never did. I used to do it to him as I left for work every morning, but it was
a joke between us, that he would never copy me. “It’s a girl’s thing to do,” he’d say. So he blew me a kiss and smiled and
faded, gone before I could return the kiss, and I sank down at the foot of the gibbet, my legs unsteady. His body hung above
me, laced in chains, three days’ dead.

I couldn’t touch his ghost, but I could touch his body, for the last time. So I reached out and put my hand on his foot, still
in the shoes he had made himself. I didn’t mean to, but I set him swinging and his chains rattled. It was like he was sending
me a message, and the message was:
Run!
So I ran. I ran back through the alleyway to the rooms we had called home and I packed everything I could carry into his
old backpack and I left, right then, no thinking about it, no planning, I just left and headed north. I spat on the road that
led to the fort as I passed. They said he had withheld taxes, but the truth was that he had not bowed low enough. That he
was disrespectful.

So he was, and so he should have been. What was there on the hill to respect? I’d always said, “No, love, don’t anger them,
just look at the ground as they pass by,” but now I was filled with the anger that had filled him, the anger that had pushed
him too far, pushed him right to the gallows.

So I went to the Valuers. We’d talked about it, Lidi and I, in the winter nights, snuggled under our thin blankets. We’d talked
about making the trip north, to the Plantation. But I was still in tax bondage, from the bad summer when Da’s crop failed,
and they would have chased me and brought me back and branded me too, like as not, if not condemned me to the pressing box.
So we stayed, and worked, and saved until I had worked out my tax bondage. We were planning to go that summer. It was Lidi’s
dream, not mine, but I would have gone anywhere with him.

Now there was just me, and I was going for him.

Well, it’s a long trip and it took me a good long while to do, and made no easier by the fact that a month out of Whitehaven
I found I was carrying. I sat by the side of a stream, my road-sorry feet in the water, and took a moment to count the days.
Then I realized — understood that my tiredness wasn’t just from walking so far. Lidi’s baby. Oh, gods rest him, he’d wanted
a child so much. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so I did both. I was more determined to get to the Plantation, so
that Lidi’s baby would grow up without any overlord, free in mind as well as body.

But it took a long time, and I had to winter over in Pless. I got work as a maid in the clothier’s on the market square. One
of the women spoke up for me, said that I was just traveling, not a Traveler, that they should let me stay long enough to
have the baby and recover. I don’t know why she did it, but it was life itself to me. Maude, her name was, she was kindness
itself. Had no children, she told me, and always wanted one to fuss over, so she helped as though she’d been the aunty. She
was a seamstress for the clothier and she made a whole set of baby clothes for me. So beautiful. Fit for a — I was going to
say a warlord’s child, but sackcloth would suit one of those better. Fit for a prince from the Wind Cities.

My own little prince was born in the middle of a winter storm, when the wind howled against the shutters and the snow blew
sideways down the city streets. So I called him Snow, and it was a good name for he was as fair as Lidi had been. I was glad
of that. I’m red-blond myself, but my great-grandmother had been a Traveler, and they say the dark hair can skip generations
and appear at any time. I knew it would go harder for a child with black hair, and it had been worrying me — one of those
silly worries a pregnant woman gets, yet real for all that. Life is harder for a dark-haired child, there’s no doubt. But
my Snow was a tiny blond scrap with long fingers that clung to mine and a cry that went right through your head and out the
other side. Oh, he was a cryer, that one! Just as well I was living at the back of the workshop and not in someone’s house,
for he would have woken the dead with his bawling. But it was just colic, and he got over it after a month or so, though for
that month I walked around like one dazed and the seamstresses were lucky if they got anything to eat or drink, let alone
what they’d asked for. But they paid me, and I saved every skerrick.

When spring came, I decided to head north again. Maude tried to get me to stay. “It’s a free town,” she said. “He’ll be as
free here as on the Plantation.”

Maybe she was right, but I’d promised Lidi’s ghost. So I went on, through the spring and summer. I made it as far as the North
Domain just as autumn was closing in, through a small pass that the stonecaster who came to cast for the seamstresses had
told me about. It was harder but faster than going all the way around to Golden Valley. I climbed steep goats’ trails that
I would never have dared if I had not needed to get Snow safe to the Plantation before winter set in. I saw no one.

On the evening of the second day after I cleared the pass, I came down from the foothills into a small, wooded valley, no
more than a dale full of upright birch trees, where the first autumn colors were late appearing so that the trees seemed like
green pillars with a faint veil of yellow fire at their tips. It was a beautiful place. I was glad, because I could hear a
stream trickling nearby. I had slung Snow across my chest in my shawl, and now he woke and began to cry for his feed. I drank
from a cup made of birch bark, and I was so thirsty I forgot to ask the tree for permission to strip the bark. I drank and
sat and fed my babe and was smiling at his tiny fingers kneading my breast when I realized someone was standing before me.

My heart thumped in surprise. I hadn’t heard any sound. I looked up but there was no one there. A trick of the light. I looked
down to Snow and again, the figure stood in front of me.

I had known terror, when they came for Lidi, when they killed him, but this fear was different. A holy fear. I have never
had the Sight, or heard the gods, but I knew that whatever I had seen was from the other world that they inhabit.

Snow finished and burped, loudly. I flinched and looked down at him without thinking, and again I saw the figure. This time
I kept my head down. The edges of the figure were shimmering, moving yet anchored, as leaves move but the trunk stays still.
It was not green, though, or any color I knew. More like a lack of color, like heat haze over rocks in the summer. I couldn’t
see through it. It was solid, but — not there. Not wholly here, in this world.