River Secrets (7 page)
When she had disappeared into the group of Tiran, Razo looked back at Enna and Finn. Both were staring at him, mouths agape.
“What?” he said.
Enna laughed and started back up the beach. “Razo, you’re a picture.”
“I am?” He turned to Finn. “Is that good or bad?”
Finn shrugged. “I’m still trying to figure out
squirrels.
”
On the ride back, Razo contemplated being a picture, and being a tree rat, and the way Dasha had walked up the beach, and the rustling of the ocean. He was feeling pretty good, which made the scene at Thousand Years all the more abrupt.
It was a hornets’ nest.
Clusters of Tiran citizens mobbed outside the palace gates. When they saw the returning Bayern soldiers, the excited shouting turned to anger. Fists pounded the air.
A mounted Tiran guard rushed through the gates and toward the Bayern. Razo loosed his sling and urged Bee Sting closer to Enna and Finn, saying, “I’m sorry,” because he had promised his horse that he would keep her out of another war.
Lord Belvan rode at the head of his own group of soldiers, holding up his bare hand. “Quickly! Captain Talone, let’s get your people into the safety of Thousand Years.”
Talone cantered his horse forward, shouting, “Follow Lord Belvan!”
“What’s happened?” Conrad asked.
No one answered. Lord Belvan’s soldiers surrounded the Bayern, separating them from the citizens on the streets, and led them through the gate. The sun, glaring above the horizon, fumed in its sizzling spring heat.
Inside the grounds, sentries stood with drawn weapons and courtiers and palace workers with unsheathed glares. The Bayern rode past the stable where Razo had followed Enna the day before. Amid a throng of watchers, three men carried something heavy wrapped in a blanket. One man was jostled by the crowd, and he leaned to the side to catch his footing. From beneath the blanket a blackened leg dropped into view.
Razo could not catch his breath, and his jaw tightened as if he would throw up.
How can she do
this?
Lord Belvan’s men led the Bayern to a back stable, where they tumbled off their mounts and fled into the palace. They ran down a corridor, Belvan barking commands, splitting the Bayern into smaller groups, stuffing them into various rooms and posting guards “until it quiets out there.”
“What do you think’s going on?” Enna asked.
“It’s pretty clear,” Razo whispered. He would not look at her. “Talone and I found the first two, Enna. Or were there more? I should’ve been watching better, but I never could stop you. You’d run off a cliff if the idea took you.”
“What’re you talking about?” asked Finn.
“That was another body they just found out there. Burned brittle.”
“And you think Enna—”
Razo glared. “Who else, Finn?”
Lord Belvan urged Razo into the next room. Razo glanced back at Enna—she was neither furious nor devastated. She was dazed. Stunned to silence. The door shut.
Razo sat on the floor. In memory, her look pierced him like the long, thin thorns that slip deep into skin. He knew now that if Enna had burned those people, she did not know she had.
Razo shared the space with three of Bayern’s Own, who spent an hour chewing over the ugly situation.
“If a war starts and we’re here…,” said one.
“Prisoners for the duration, if not executed on the spot.”
“Do you think Lady Megina’s to blame? Who is she, anyway? I never heard of the king’s cousin till she was suddenly ambassador.”
Razo kept quiet, picking at the wood grain. Enna’s face had sent him tilting, and he seemed to rock as though unaccustomed to still earth after hours on horseback.
After a second hour, the noise outside their window lost its urgency and dwindled to the hum and rub of every day. When his three companions left to find Talone, Razo stayed.
He was sitting in an abandoned chair before the hearth when Enna burst into the room, slamming the door behind her. She set a fire blazing in the hearth, spitting sparks.
“Watch it, Enna!” Razo leaped from his seat and hopped about, slapping at his clothes.
“You think I didn’t know you were there? You think I’d burn you by accident?”
Razo brushed off his lummas, petulant that there were no burned spots to account for his yelping. “You could’ve—”
“You’re fine, Razo.”
He barely breathed the question. “Enna,
are
you burning again?”
“No.”
“I saw you sneak into that stable yesterday, and I thought—”
Enna put back her head and laughed, but it came out hard, as though the laugh burned her throat. “I was shortening the stirrups on your horse’s saddle!”
“My stirrups… that was you!”
“Of course it was, you dolt.” She tried to sound casual, the kind of voice she used for throwing around insults, but her words were strained. “I didn’t burn anybody.”
“Are you sure? Not by accident? Not in your sleep or… or anything?”
She sat on the floor before her fire. Her fingers rubbed the hem of her tunic, her eyes followed the flames, and Razo thought how Enna, like fire, like wind, could never hold completely still.
“What happened with me and Isi on our journey—I never told you much. Maybe if I had, if you’d understood, you’d know that I’ve changed, that I…” She paused as though she struggled with words. It made him feel proud, that Enna would care what she said to him, that she worried what he thought.
“Isi and I went to Yasid,” she continued in her artless voice. “We learned how to share our knowledge of fire and wind languages with each other, so that we’d have balance. I form fire out of the heat that rises off living things, and during the war, that heat was gathering around me constantly, pressing in, demanding. But now that I have wind speech, too, the wind’s always nearby to blow off the heat so it can’t overwhelm me. Same with Isi—the wind used to hound her with its speech, with the images of what it had touched. But now that she understands fire speech, too, the heat’s always there to break up the wind.”
Enna cleared her throat. The sound made her seem young, just a little girl. “What I’m trying to explain is, I’m not the fire’s puppet. I can’t lose control anymore. So if you still think I’m burning people, you’d have to believe that I’m doing it on purpose. That I want to.” She looked now at Razo, and he imagined that because she had been staring at the fire so long, her gaze was hot on his skin. “I don’t want to, Razo. And I’m not. And I won’t. Burn another person. Never again.”
Razo’s hands were orange and strange in the firelight. He turned them over, looking for an answer. Something to say. He settled on, “I’m sorry.”
Enna frowned. “I guess if people suspect me, it’s my own fault.”
“But, Enna, if you don’t burn, if you won’t let yourself, then what good…I mean, why are you here? Why’d you demand to come when—”
“During the war, it took me just a few moments to burn down homes that took weeks to build. I ended lives like snapping a twig in two. That can’t be all I am, Razo! There’s got to be ways I can help without… without hurting.”
“Isi thought it was too dangerous.”
“She worries too much for me, but she believes I can do it, too.” She bit her lip. “Do you?”
I want you to,
he thought.
I hope you can. I’ll help you try.
He just nodded. “If it’s not you burning people, that means it’s someone else.”
“Brilliant,” said Enna. “You always were the brightest sheep boy I knew.”
Razo gave her a playful knock with his elbow and tried to enjoy the moment, but he had just accused one of his best friends of murdering three people in her sleep.
Finn was waiting outside the door, his hand on his sword hilt, and Razo greeted him without meeting his eyes.
“I’m sorry, Finn. I’m a wooden-headed dummy.”
“Don’t be so hard,” said Finn. “You’re just a straw-brained scarecrow.”
Razo left hurriedly, claiming an urgent need for a privy, and went to find Talone on his own. It frightened him a bit to face his captain. What could he possibly do to earn his place among Bayern’s Own after being so wrong about Enna?
He’d turned a corner in the quiet corridor when he saw Tumas. Razo cursed into his teeth, wishing Finn and Enna would come this way, and in a hurry. He started to turn back, but Tumas grabbed his shoulder.
“Well, if it isn’t the knee biter,” Tumas said in his stuffed-nose whine. “Care for a rematch? Come on, right now, you with a sword and me with a feather.”
Razo kept his eyes down, as he would if running into a Forest wolf. He stepped to the side, and Tumas followed, blocking his way.
“Don’t think I forgot how you pushed my friend Hemar into scratching you. He didn’t deserve a slow death in a desert.”
From behind a closed door came muffled voices laughing, and Razo let himself believe they were laughing at him, too. He took those laughs like punches, absorbing their impact, feeling the ache they left behind. He sidestepped again, and Tumas blocked.
“If you wanted to dance, you could’ve asked,” said Razo, eyes still down.
“Bayern scum.” Tumas glanced around as if afraid that others might come this way any moment, and he let Razo sidle by.
Razo was going to let it go, he should have let it go, but he was so tired of rolling over for the bullies, belly up like a puppy. As he walked away, he said, “You still sore that a Bayern boy whipped you with a wooden sword? Pathetic.”
The strike hit Razo’s back. A fist? A boot? He crunched to the floor, his breath in knots. Tumas picked him up by his tunic and yanked him into a dark room.
“Pathetic?” said Tumas.
A punch to the belly. A deep, groaning kind of pain.
“Pathetic?” said Tumas.
A jab to the nose. A shattering pain, piercing, blinding.
Razo’s voice was caged—he could no more yell for help than he could stop the low moaning in his gullet. He thought he’d been knocked around enough by his brothers to take any good pummeling, but there was murder behind Tumas’s strikes that left Razo breathless. He tumbled to his feet, pitching about, desperate to hit back before the next blow killed him. Laughter rumbled through the walls, and a single set of footsteps passed by the door.
Tumas spat a curse. “This is not over,” he said.
It was many dizzying moments before Razo realized that he was alone, slumped against a wall in a dim room, and, if the pain was any indication, still alive.
“Pathetic,” he whispered, wiping blood from his nose.
Talone was in his chamber with three soldiers when Razo burst in. After a glance at Razo’s face, he told the men to leave.
“What happened?” asked Talone.
“Nothing.” From a very young age, Razo had learned that tattling was a way to invite a worse thumping. “Just send me home.”
“No.”
Never before had Razo wanted to strike Talone.
“Why’m I here, Captain? To humiliate myself at sword practice? To go crazy thinking my best friend is a murderer? Which she’s not, by the way. I was wrong. This whole city is crossing its fingers for war, and I’m just tinder for the fire. Why me when you’ve got Enna and Finn and Conrad and all the best of the Own? I’m just…” He punched a wall. “I’m not deaf, I hear what everyone thinks of me, and they’re right, I’m no Bayern’s Own. My brothers always told me I’m slow in the head, my arms are wet rags, I’m only imposing to a bunny rabbit, I’m—”
“Who has ink-stained hands?” Talone interrupted.
Razo could not have been more stunned to stuttered confusion than if Talone had danced a jig. “I’m telling you that I’m pathetic, and I’m through here and … Ink-stained hands? What’re you—”
“Don’t think, soldier, just answer my question. Who has ink-stained hands?”
“Uh, Geric does, sometimes, on his right hand. But why do—”
“Who often has candle wax dripped on her dress?”
“I’m not in a gaming mood, Captain.”
“Candle wax.”
Razo threw up his hands. Talone was a boulder too heavy to push out of the way. “Isi’s waiting woman, the one who wears her braids in loops.”
“And who wears sandals far too long for his toes?”
“I guess that squat-nosed page does, the one who brings you messages from Lord Belvan.”
“Not everyone has such observation, or such memory, and you do it without seeming to pay attention to anything beyond dinner.”
Razo sniffed, and a grating sound and prickly pain made him wish he had not. “I don’t think it’s such a big thing. You noticed those things, too.”
“I had to probe my memory pretty thoroughly to come up with something to challenge you.” He’d been cleaning his boots and only now looked up. “You always were a good scout, Razo, and I have long believed that you have the makings of a very good spy.”
“Spy?”
“You fell into that role without my prodding. To answer your question—you are here, Razo, to continue the work you did for me during the war. Instead of scouting Tiran camps for troop numbers and locations, you will scout information: Who is trying to respark the war? Who is burning bodies?”
“You’ve had me in mind as a spy all along? Since Bayern, even?”
“I waited to give you your assignment until the need presented itself. In the sword match, I set you up against Tumas because I don’t want the Tiran to think of you as a threat. If you seem weak, your invisibility increases.”
“You humiliated me and could’ve lost me an eyeball, and on purpose?”
Talone nodded.
Razo made a sound of exasperation and fumbled for words. “You … you know … back home, that kind of underhanded trickery would get you wrestled facedown in goat dung.”
Talone smiled. He actually smiled. And Razo smiled back. Foolishly, no doubt. He felt as though he had brought a fat hare back to his mother’s stewpot and been cheek kissed and head patted. This was usually the part where his brothers would jump him as soon as her back was turned, but there were no brothers around.
Here, Razo was a
spy.
“So, you believe Enna is innocent? That is good news,” said Talone, accepting Razo’s assessment without further inquiry. “I suspect you have already latched on to new suspects.”
Razo realized that he had. “There’s Tumas, old pork-chop head.”
“Pork-chop…? Ah, his ears. Yes, that firebrand has not been coy. There’s not a body in the city who doesn’t know he hates Bayern.”
“He had opportunity.” Razo played with a javelin, digging the tip between the tiles. “With the first murder, he could’ve ridden ahead of the Tiran escort and left that body by the river. But his captain, Ledel, he’s a strict fiend. I don’t think any of his men would scoot a toe over a line without his consent. Except maybe Victar. He doesn’t seem to give a rat’s tail for anybody’s authority. And then there’s Manifest Tira, that group I told you about who think Tira ought to return to war. Lord Belvan turn up anything about them?”
“Not yet. Any other suspicions?”
“Well, um, maybe, it’s not likely, but maybe…Dasha, the Tiran ambassador’s daughter?” Razo sniffed to show that he was not in the least convinced it was she, and his nose throbbed anew. “Ow. Once I found her prowling outside Enna’s room, and she was sneaking near the stable the day before they found the third body. She’d have to be working with someone else to have arranged the drop of the one by the border, and no way she could carry the bodies herself.”
“Hm,” said Talone. “Belvan mentioned that she was eager to volunteer as our liaison and live at Thousand Years. If it is Dasha, then she and her father might be conspiring together to sabotage peace. Our queen and king could be in peril. You said she was interested in Enna? If she knows that Enna is the fire-speaker, she may be targeting Enna herself.”
Panic swooped in Razo’s belly. “Isi was right, it’s too dangerous for Enna. I mean, I’m her
friend,
and I thought she was a murderer. If any Tiran even suspects that she was the fire-witch, she’ll be trussed and hanged by sundown.”
“You’re right,” said Talone. “Which means Dasha may not know.”
“Send Enna home.”
“No. We may need her. Besides, she won’t go.”