The Hidden City (24 page)

“Rath—”

“No, I did not walk the streets of the holding with my grandfather's sword in order to leave the boy dying in the street. Two weeks, the doctor said. I give you two weeks.”

She nodded. It was more than she should have hoped for. But less than she had. Still, two weeks was a toehold in an open door. She could work with that.

“I have business to attend to. I will be in my study, and I
do not expect to be interrupted again
. Do I make myself clear?”

“Yes, Rath.”

“Get Lefty out of the kitchen. They will stay with you,” he added. “If your room is crowded, you have no one to blame but yourself.”

She nodded, striving for meek. Almost achieving it.

But when he left, she rose and retrieved Lefty. “Did you hear what he said?”

Lefty nodded.

“We'll have to find bedding,” she told him. “And in this rain, it's not going to be comfortable. But I've got some money left.”

He nodded again. Looking at her room as he did. It wasn't a small room. In her old apartment, three people wouldn't have made much dent in it. She'd lived with four in a smaller room. A colder one.

“He said you could stay.”

“For two weeks.”

She caught his face in her hands, and his eyes rounded in sudden panic. But she held him there anyway, waiting until his breath was less short and sharp. “You've lived in places for less than that,” she told him, forcing his gaze to meet hers. “And a lot of things can change in two weeks. We have to be good,” she added. “And we have to be quiet while Rath works. But maybe if we are, two weeks will be a long time.”

Lefty tried to nod, but it was hard with her hands on his cheeks. She let him go slowly.

Thinking that she should have been worried.

That it was stupid not to be worried. Rath was angry, cold angry, and that was always bad. He probably wouldn't speak more than two words to her all day. And all of the next day.

But worried wasn't what she felt. And cold wasn't there either. “You can help,” she told Lefty. “We'll take care of Arann for now.”

He was looking at her, waiting.

“I know you trust Arann,” she said, picking up the cloth from its wet resting place. “You've known him a long time. I want you to trust
me
.”

Lefty said nothing.

The words hung in the room, a simple adornment to plain, painted wood, flat slats, and the accumulation of only a few weeks of life with Rath. Blankets. Clothing. Daggers. The odd piece of paper, two slates, chalk. An empty basket, a full bucket. A lone metal box.

“Family's a funny thing,” she said, as she released Lefty, knelt, and once again began to stroke Arann's face with the towel. “I never had brothers, you know? I always wanted one. Well, an older one.

“Now I have two.”

“But we aren't your brothers.”

“Not yet,” she said, and she felt the hum in her throat, her grandmother's pensive, wordless song. “But if we stay together for long enough, you will be.”

As if he could hear the words, Arann's eyes opened. Or at least the right eye did; with the left, it was kind of hard to tell. “Lefty?” he asked. But he asked it of Jewel.

She nodded, smiling. “He's here. He's safe.”

“Why . . . here?”

“He came,” she told Arann, understanding at last the odd source of her happiness, “to get me.”

Arann's lips were also swollen; they were damp enough not to crack as he moved them. But she pressed the cloth against them, stilling his words. “And I,” she said, as she did, “came to get you.

“I always will.”

Spoken words. Intense words. A smile framing and containing them. As she said them, she knew they were true. Not in the way that she had known the wagon was coming; not in the way that she had known how little time Arann had if they were to rescue him. This was a different sort of gift.

Choice. Promise.

Her first, but not, although she did not see it clearly, her last.

The first week passed slowly. Rath would have appreciated it had it passed
quietly
. Had he been able to blame the boys for the arrival of noise, he would have thrown them out in a minute, promise to Jewel notwithstanding. They were hers. He acknowledged this because it was safe, and because it was true. She didn't see it, of course. Her ignorance was bitter, appalling, and entirely in keeping with her age.

No, the noise was hers. The chatter. The speech. The endless drone that accompanied her jaunts to the kitchen, shadowed by Lefty; the endless humming as she tended Arann. The stories that her Oma told, broken by pauses and poor memory, which she offered the boys when the night had fallen and the streets were entirely off limits. She did not have the storyteller's gift, and narrative came in fragments.

To Rath, it was almost agony.

To the boys, it was different. Perhaps they had come to the streets so young the memories of such stories and songs were precious and distant enough that these broken imitations were not insulting. Or perhaps they had never been offered them at all.

A closed door should have impeded all words.

Which meant, of course, that Rath—as if he were Arann or Lefty—was listening for them, straining to catch them even as they annoyed. It had been many years since he had killed a man. He had killed two a week past, and for what?

A crowded, noisy home.

He set his pen down; work was almost impossible. Instead of pen, he lifted pipe, packing the bowl with damp leaves. Everything in the air was damp. The farmer thought the rain would stop in a day or two, and Rath was inclined to believe him. How much of that inclination was wishful thinking, he let be. Other thoughts disturbed him.

If he had left his sword beneath his bed, if he had chosen not to become involved, Jewel would have gone with Lefty. She would not have returned.

Perhaps he could have found her; finding things of value was his specialty. But what he would have found, he couldn't say. Had she been injured, he might have brought her here, and it might be she who lay abed. She might learn, the harshest possible way, what life on the streets entailed for far too many.

But the glimmer of understanding, the stiffness of posture, that she had showed on their first meeting implied some understanding. He had never asked. Did not intend to ask now.

Restless, he got to his feet. Upon his desk, carefully wrapped in cloth padding, were two plain, gray bowls. Their basins covered both his palms when spread side by side; they felt delicate, but like so much that appeared fragile in this city—above ground or beneath it—they had had to be more; they were almost whole. One was seamed with a crack, the other was perfect. Both held a single carved rune in their center, and both were adorned with a longer series of similar runes around the edge, a circlet of words. He thought they were offering bowls, and he was not certain of their manufacture; they were so smooth, they might have been glass—but the fracture was not the type of crack that glass took.

It was a pity that they were of a single color. Still, they would certainly be of value; how much value depended on his ability to retrieve meaning from the fragmentary writing; time had worn key letters, changing their shape and meaning.

He set his jaw, sat, and began his work again.

He had traced the letters with care, choosing to use eye and hand rather than to take a rubbing. Five times he did this, substituting single characters where they were not distinct enough. In the magelight, their ridges cast short shadows; he worked by these.

As he did, he heard the whisper of a name:
Kalliaris
. His pen stopped; his chin lifted, as if he had been momentarily touched. Perhaps he had; the door surrendered syllables, mute but distinct.

Jewel was reciting the list of gods. She always started with Kalliaris; Kalliaris was the goddess of Luck, both good and bad, and it was upon her smile or frown that Jewel's life depended. He could hear neither of the boys. He could pretend that they did not exist, and perhaps that was for the best.

Rath was a rather good liar.

He woke in the morning to a sharp knock. A very sharp knock. He was out of his bed, pale blue sheets on the floor, before he realized where he was. Nightmare had come and gone; it was a graceless visitor.

“What?” The curt word was not an invitation.

Jewel knew it. Through the door, she said, “I'm going to the Common.” She paused and then added, “I've been to the well. It's not raining hard. Can we get a barrel?” and then, before he could reply, “Can you watch Arann while we're out?”

He was tired enough to say, “No.” He was awake enough to say it quietly. “I'll check in on him.”

She didn't answer. He heard, instead, the slight shuffle of her feet as they receded. Only hers; Lefty apparently hadn't accompanied her down the hall.

Rath was surprised that the boy was willing to accompany her to the Common. But as he was awake, he picked up the blankets, dumped them on the bed, and groped his way toward his chair. It was in the same position as he'd left it when he'd finally dozed off for the third time; the light in the room, never bright, streamed gray from the window well above.

He was hungry.

This was the first morning that Jewel had actually allowed him to
be
hungry.

 

Lefty's gaze was glued to the door. Jay pushed the chair to its usual position, and opened it; she pushed it aside, and waited. Lefty still stared, but his gaze now traveled down the empty hall that Rath didn't own.

“Lefty?”

And turned to the door behind which Arann slept. He slept like a dead man. It made Lefty uncomfortable. But not so uncomfortable that he hadn't thought to warn Jay about the dangers of being too close if she was going to try to wake him.

“I'm not throwing things at an injured boy,” she said sharply. But she didn't try to wake him. “He needs to sleep. The doctor said so.”

“Where are we going?” Without Arann.

“To the Common.”

“Why?”

“We need food.”

“Oh.” He looked at his feet. He was more than passingly familiar with them, and with the boots whose soles flopped open with a squelch in the wet weather. He had no socks. He hadn't had 'em for a year.

But his toes looked funny.

“And you need clothing,” she added. “And boots.”

“Boots are hard to steal.”

She nodded, expression serious. “They are. If you want them to fit.”

“You can usually only grab one.”

She nodded again. As if she'd had to. Or had to think about it. Her boots, on the other hand, were in one piece. “We don't need to steal them. Not yet.”

“And clothing?”

“Not that either. But we need to get to market before everything good is gone. It's late.” She handed him the basket that he hadn't really noticed. Given how big it was, that said something. “I'll carry it when it's full. If you're going to stay here, you have to be useful.”

He shrank a few inches.

“Lefty,” she said, drawing closer, her height greater because she wasn't slumped, “you
can
be useful. You can't be Arann. Don't try.”

“But he's big,” Lefty said, swinging the basket as he followed her. His leg hurt, but it was only bruised. His knee was swollen. He didn't tell her. “And he's smart. Smarter than me.”

“You told him to listen. To me. The first time. And you came
here,
” she added. “You saved his life twice. How is that stupid?”

The hall got shorter; the front door got closer. Jay pulled keys out of her pockets; they were shiny. New. Lefty stared at them as if they were coin. He stared, as well, at the door itself; it was thicker than any door he'd lived behind, and it seemed new. The walls here were straight. And dry. He couldn't see holes between them and the floor.

“Not stupid,” she said, as he caught up with her. The rains weren't so bad, this morning. But the air felt colder. He was shivering by the time they'd gotten most of the way down the block and had hit the intersection marked by limp trees and flattened weeds.

“No,” she said softly, her breath a cloud. “Why'd you come?”

He shrugged. “Don't know.”

She shrugged back, motion part of the conversation.

Lefty twisted the basket's handle between his hands—his good hand, and the hand that he was ashamed of. Ghost fingers ached. There were still days when it felt like the fingers were
there,
even if no one else could see them. “I thought you could save him,” he said at last. He didn't look at her face. But he wanted to. He wanted to see her eyes.

It frightened him, the wanting.

“And we did,” she replied, careful now. The streets weren't as crowded as they were when it was warmer or drier, but the wagons still passed by, and there were always larger groups of men that had to be avoided. “You were right. And you did what Arann couldn't. Remember that.”

“I did it for
me,
” he told her. “Not for him. I did it because I can't live without Arann. He's big. And he's smart. And he protects me.”

She nodded. “You protected him.”

“But I
didn't
—”

“You didn't use your fists. You didn't use a dagger. You didn't wield a sword. You ran, yes. But you ran
to
something, not
away
from it. You're not Arann. He's not you. If you were both the same, you wouldn't be friends.” She paused, waiting for a wagon to amble past. Not looking at his face, not looking at his hands.