River Secrets (4 page)
“It’s a strange city, no mistake,” said Razo the fourth night he and Finn camped out on Enna’s floor. “In Bayern, it feels like the city wall was built to keep the Forest from marching back in, but Ingridan forgot there was ever anything but city. The only bits of dirt I’ve seen are the fighting circles near each barracks. Still, you’ve got to admit that paving everything keeps it clean—”
“I don’t have to admit anything,” said Enna.
Razo sighed. In the past, Enna had been treated vilely by a Tiran man and apparently still had not healed from it. Razo could not help wondering if that old hurt might not provoke her to do stupid things. To change the subject, he brought out a dry plum cake he had swiped from the dining hall. When Enna pestered him to fetch some milk to wash it down, he threw a pillow at her face.
“I brought the cake! Why don’t you or Finn go?”
“Because sometimes Finn and I want to be alone.”
“Oh, I see, you two become all lovey and then Razo’s left in the cold.” Razo meant his tone to be playful, but it was not quite.
“I don’t want any milk—” Finn started.
“It’s fine, never mind.” Razo dragged himself off the floor, opened Enna’s door, and bumped right into Lady Dasha of the orange hair and pleasant ankles.
“Oh, excuse me,” she said, “I was looking for the ambassador.”
“Wrong door,” said Razo. “Lady Megina’s one room down.”
The girl turned away without meeting his eyes. Razo left in the opposite direction and peered back once. She had passed Megina’s apartments and continued on.
Razo’s stomach was squeaking, his intestines knotted and shivering—the Tiran food made his gut as sore as his heart felt when he thought of his ma and Rin and the Forest. He left off keeping an eye on Enna for the first time in a week to report for sword practice and found himself still holding on to a tangerine peel left over from lunch, just to look at some color. Everything else on the palace grounds was so muted—white clothes, white stones.
“You going to play?” asked a sharp-jawed soldier named Veran.
“Oh, yes, sorry.” Razo dropped the peel so he could pick up a practice sword. The orange against the pale dirt was as vibrant as the sound of thunder.
After an afternoon of bashing wooden swords with Bayern’s Own, and with dinner still hours away, Razo went hunting for a crumb of something familiar lest he cave in on himself. He was wandering near the dining hall when he discovered a passage filled with affable smells.
That could lead to lower kitchens. Or to death,
he thought dramatically, then discovered that playing mock terror did not help him shake off the real dread much. He wished Finn and Enna were with him, but he supposed they wanted to be
alone.
Besides, they most likely would not agree to do something as stupid as enter the bowels of the Tiran palace just hours after Lord Belvan had warned about whispered threats to Bayern lives.
Don’t be stupid,
Razo warned himself.
Taking risks earns you
scars, and the next could be the one that ends you.
But Talone had chosen him, and his brain was sore from trying to imagine how he could ever prove his captain had not made a mistake. Besides, how were they ever to make friendly with the people of this country like Isi wanted if they were always locked up and afraid to say “hello there”?
So to disguise the extremely minor tremble in his hands, Razo sauntered in with his hands in his pockets, whistling through the space between his front teeth. (He’d always liked the space, believing that it gave him a roguish appeal.) Several voices gasped at once.
No windows peered into this kitchen with its yellow bricks stained smoke black, squat ceiling, and sulking fires. Nearly half the eyes watching Razo were glittering with glares. Razo shifted his feet.
“You’re a Bayern.” A freckled serving girl gaped, a smear of something fluffy across her cheek.
“I am?” Razo took the metal spoon from her hand and looked at himself in its silvery bowl. “Nah, I couldn’t be. Bayern aren’t this good-looking.”
She giggled.
He kept the spoon and took over whipping a bowl of cream. Other girls neared, cautiously, like birds toward fallen crumbs. He thought of Isi saying,
It’s easy to believe complete
strangers are your enemies. If they knew us…
He smiled and did his best to exude harmlessness. Several girls stayed working in their corners, their looks as dark as soot stains, but others began to question him.
“So what is Bayern really like?”
“I heard your babies are not born properly but crawl out of the earth.”
“Did you bring your fire-breathing horses?”
“Do the Bayern really eat Tiran babies?”
“Where are your horns and tail?”
Razo was sorely tempted to assert that all was true and he’d lost his horns and tail in a tragic childhood accident, but he bit his tongue.
When offered bits of misshapen cakes (he was delighted to discover he’d found the pastry kitchen), he regaled the dough girls and tray girls with details of wintermoon festival, Isi and Geric’s wedding, the deeps of the Forest, the muddled pranks he and Enna battled during their animal keeper days, anything of interest that weighed his tongue.
The pastry chef had huge knobs for knuckles, reminding Razo of his own mother who worked too hard. When he dried dishes for her, the chef peeled him a tangerine.
“My first day here,” said Razo, “a boy chucked one of these at my face. So how come you don’t hate me for being Bayern?”
“The war was none of my business,” said the pastry chef. “I’ve still got blisters on my heels and spasms in my back. What goes on out there doesn’t change much down here.”
One of the girls in the corner sharpened a knife emphatically, and Razo did not need the chill zipping down his back to know that not all the girls agreed with the pastry chef.
Leaving the kitchens a couple of hours later, Razo played with the skip in his step, his tongue lingering on the sharp, cold flavor of tangerine. His belly was full of cake and fruit, and he was feeling halfway to peace with Tira when a howl ripped the evening air.
Razo was running toward the sound before thinking twice. Others were running, too, soldiers and sentries, all drawn to the noise of death. The movement slammed to a stop at the Bayern barracks, where Brynn, Talone’s second-man, was standing with drawn sword over the body of a Tiran. Blood stained half the blade. Slumped behind him lay Veran, one of Bayern’s Own, motionless, blood pooling on the pale stones.
Then shouting. So much noise, Razo could not hear words. The Bayern drew their swords, their backs against the barracks. A mob of Tiran soldiers separated Razo from his countrymen. He cursed himself for leaving his sword at the practice ground and stayed as still as his pounding heart would allow.
Don’t notice me, don’t notice,
he thought, wincing away from the screaming Tiran all around him and for once blessing his unobtrusive stature. He wished for Enna and Finn, then undid that wish with a crossing of fingers. If Enna were there, she might have to burn.
“I said, silence!” Lord Belvan was pushing through the crowd, Talone in his wake.
“What happened, Brynn?” asked Talone.
Brynn’s voice was hot, scratched with anger and grief. “That man”—he pointed to the splayed body of the Tiran—“broke into the barracks, shouting, ‘Long live His Radiance,’ calling for the Bayern ambassador to face him. Veran”—his voice softened on the name, and he gestured to his lifeless comrade—“came forward to reason with him, pulled him outside, said the ambassador wasn’t in the barracks. The Tiran screamed, ran his weapon through Veran, and swung at me. I got my sword into the murderer before he could swing a third time.”
Shouting again. Curses, weapons raised, shouts of, “Liar! He lies! Kill them!” A Tiran worker had noticed Razo. He elbowed the soldier beside him, pointing. Razo gripped his sling and started to back away.
“Were there any observers?” Belvan shouted, his impressive nose pointed at the crowd. “Any besides the Bayern?”
Please let there be Tiran witnesses.
Razo wiped sweat from his forehead. Four Tiran grounds workers were glaring at him, hands hovering over the hilts of daggers. A soldier stood at his back, blocking his escape.
“I saw it, Lord Belvan.” A sentry dragged himself forward, then yanked another by the arm. “And so did Weno here. It happened as the Bayern fellow said.”
Mournful calls of doubt replaced the shouting, but the witnesses stood firm.
“Thank you for your courage,” said Belvan. “I declare no harm done by this Bayern man but in self-defense and order this crowd dispersed.”
Razo saluted his new Tiran acquaintances. They glanced at Belvan as they released weapons and stepped back, giving Razo space to tear through the crowd and into the barracks, joining the rest of the Own.
“He wasn’t a soldier,” one of Belvan’s men was saying. “I don’t know who he was, my lord. His clothes are fine, but he has no mark of identification on him, just a copper ring.”
“Thank you,” said Belvan. He turned to Talone with an exhausted expression. “This is a disaster, Captain. I had thought keeping to the grounds would protect you from any armed groups bent on murder, but we met with a fool willing to sneak in and attack on his own. I cannot guarantee Thousand Years safe from more slippery little fellows like this one.”
“We will not be moved,” said Megina, arriving, her face full of the fresh news. “We must show that we’re here to stay, that despite such threats we trust the Tiran people with our safety.”
Enna and Finn trailed her, and Razo saw Enna take in the sight of Veran. He knew her thoughts—if she’d been there, she might have saved him. Then again, Razo thought, she might have not only revealed herself as the fire-speaker, but broken her promise and killed again.
“As you wish, Lady Megina,” said Belvan. “But to ease my own mind, I will transfer Captain Ledel’s company to the barracks beside yours. Their presence should help deter future attacks.”
Lord Belvan did not seem to notice how that news failed to buoy the Bayerns’ spirits.
Through the window, Razo saw sentries carrying Veran’s body away. Two dead. Razo’s throat was too stiff to swallow, and he spat at the ground and closed his eyes. Sliding behind his lids was a memory of the war—the Battle of Ostekin Fields, dead too numerous to bury, bodies stacked together and set aflame. One face in twenty had been a friend.
Razo returned to the pastry kitchen two days later, when the haunting feeling of men slain had started to lift. The mystery behind Veran’s attacker had irked him in his sleep, and he had an inkling that the best and truest gossip trickled down to the lowest kitchens.
“Was he a friend of yours?” asked the pastry chef.
“I knew him well enough and liked him, too. Lord Belvan and his men are running around with eyes closed, trying to figure out who it was and if there’re more like him, but I told myself, if anyone has any ideas, it’d be the pastry girls.”
The freckled girl laughed high and staccato like a marsh bird. “This city’s secrets are like a farmer’s animals—not a one but will one day end up in the kitchen!”
A few girls volunteered this idea and that, all nonsense, until a usually quiet girl with smooth yellow hair looked up from the washing.
“Any of you heard of Manifest Tira?”
“That a city out east?” asked another.
“It’s some group who wants the war back again. My cousin’s a part of it. He’s war hungry because he didn’t get a chance to fight, but I gather the leaders of the group think Tira’s destiny is to own Bayern and everything else.” She shrugged. “You should watch out for them, Razo. Last time I was at my mother’s house in the city, I ran into some of my cousin’s new friends, the sort who would skin a cat squealing if they thought it the patriotic thing to do.”
Razo stuck his hands in the suds to wash trays beside her. “Do you know who they are or where they meet? Maybe I should warn Lord Belvan.”
The girl’s eyes widened. “Do that, and I could be their next cat.”
“Then I won’t say a word about you. I promise.”
The girl looked ready to scurry under a table, so he cleared his throat and tried to change topics to something harmless—how wretched his Bayern wool clothing was in the bursting spring. The freckled girl claimed to know the palace thread-mistress, another worked as a morning maid for Lady Dasha, and within hours he had permission for new clothes and an appointment for a fitting.
That night as he entered Enna’s room, he felt as splendid as one of the peacocks in the palace garden.
“What on earth are you wearing?” Enna’s face scrunched as though she smelled something foul.
Razo raised his hand as if requesting silence. “I’m pretty sure I can guess your opinion of my new wardrobe, but nothing you say’ll make me toss it. What we need in all this gloom after Veran’s death is a bit of Bayern and Tira playing together nice, that’s all I’m saying.”
The thread-mistress had made him loose-fitting leggings and a white tunic. The chest cloth most Tiran wrapped around themselves was called a “lummas,” and Razo discovered it had some practical purposes, such as wiping sweat or pulling onto his head for shade. Instead of a sash he tied his distance sling around his waist, and he kept his same boots. It was a curious blend of both countries’ styles, and he thought it quite natty. He wished only that he could get his hands on the Bayern dyes brought for trading. His eye missed bright colors.
“You look ridiculous…,” Enna started.
Razo raised his hand again. “That’s not what the girls in the pastry kitchen say.”
“Really?” Finn grinned.
Razo laughed suggestively. “Indeed. Well, some I’d give a wide berth while they’re sharpening a chopping knife, but others… let’s just say that my fingers and toes can’t keep track of all the winking. Too bad I can’t go out in the city tonight and show off my new goods.”
Ingridan was celebrating one of its feast days, which the pastry chef claimed were as common as raisins in a raisin bun. Some of the girls had invited Razo to join them in the streets, draped in flowers and dancing until the moon was high, but Megina had judged it too dangerous yet.
How are we ever going to make them our friends,
Razo wondered,
if we can’t run out into the streets and dance?
“I’m sure we’re not missing much,” said Enna, but Razo thought she sounded sorry not to swathe herself in flowers.
The door burst open. Razo flung himself behind a table while scrabbling for his sword. It was only Megina, and Enna laughed at him.
“A bit jumpy, are we?” said Enna.
“You can poke fun when Tumas and all his friends want
you
dead.”
Megina shut the door behind her. “Unbelievable. A maid mentioned she thought two boys were sleeping in my waiting woman’s room, and here you are, bedrolls on the carpet as if setting up a war camp. How does it look for my waiting woman to have boys sleeping by her bed?”
“Lady Megina,” said Enna, “I’m not really your waiting woman—”
“I know that, but it matters what
they
think. We can’t give the Tiran any cause to doubt our character. You two, join the others in the barracks.”
Finn argued silently with a firm stance, but Razo gathered both their bedrolls, put a hand on Finn’s back, and led him from the room.
“We’ll appeal to Talone tomorrow,” said Razo. “He’s likely to oppose anything Megina says, as they’re not exactly grand pals, and besides, I think he’ll see good reason to keep someone near Enna.”
Finn did not ask why. It made Razo wonder how much he knew.
The snores of the barracks shoved and rattled Razo all night, and on top of that, those crazy Tiran were always ringing bells to tell the hour, as if time were more important than sleep. The twentieth instance he woke, Razo decided to just get up.
The moon slumped low and fat on the horizon. He had been trying so hard to sleep, his body still felt heavy and worried with the idea, and he stumbled on the paving stones and tilted to one side. The sentries he passed frowned at the Bayern sun and crown on his cloak, and Razo felt a warning throb in his side where Tumas’s friend had notched him. But he was tired and awake, an unhappy combination, so he decided to ignore his mild dread and practice his sling on the training ground until dawn kicked the day awake.
Besides, Captain Ledel’s men are near, so I’m safe,
he thought, just to tell himself a good joke.
The night was full of contrast—warm air tingling with a cold chill, dark sky and a bright moon, his sleepy eyes and alert mind. The trees and buildings sloughed their heavy shadows on the dirt, and Razo pushed through them as through a shallow stream, until his boot struck something solid.
One shadow was not shadow. He tapped it with his toe and heard the crackle of burnt cloth. That sour smell gushed down his throat.
Razo looked south, to the dark spot that was Enna’s window, and wished for a river at hand.