The Hidden City (54 page)

She frowned. “Rich is usually—”

“Never mind. Come. We've been too long as is.” But his gaze fell upon what she held, and in turn, he held his questions.

He almost made a detour to the Mother's temple in the twenty-fifth holding, but one look at Jewel's compressed lips told him how successful that would be. He would have this argument with her, when they reached the safety of his apartments; for the moment, he chose to retreat into the pragmatic. He counted.

Lefty. Arann. Carver. Finch. Duster. Three other boys whose names he had yet to discover. And, in their midst, Jewel Markess. Nine children. He doubted they would all fit in Jewel's room, but had no doubt at all that he was going to make her try; let her bear the brunt of her impulsiveness. Rath would.

They were silent when they left the thirty-second holding, but their silence unfolded, peeling back in layers as if it were an onion, one thin word at a time. Lefty's hand was in his armpit, its customary sheath, but his eyes were darting back and forth as if they were moving of their own accord; he practically crossed them. Arann hovered over the rest of the children by at least six inches, although Carver, in Rath's estimation, would one day equal his height.

He wasn't certain what the other boys would do or be. The redhead was chatting almost amicably with Finch, who was doing her best to keep up—mostly by nodding. The other two kept as much to themselves as it was possible to do, but to Rath's surprise, Lefty spoke to them.

Not loudly enough to be heard, and not loudly enough—at first—to get much of a response. But where Arann was intimidating, and Harald and Rath were terrifying, Lefty, his hand hidden, his shoulders hunched as if to avoid a constant rain of blows, was the opposite: he was like them. Too slight to be either dangerous or independent; too damaged to be of use.

And if Lefty felt safe enough, here, to speak, then there
must
be some safety. Rath could see the understanding, although he wasn't certain the boys themselves would have put it as succinctly. They were underdressed for the weather, and the rains—and curse the skies, it was raining—caused their thin, pale shifts to cling to their skin, exposing too much.

But Duster? She kept to herself. The boys seemed to know her, and they weren't precisely afraid of her, but they weren't entirely comfortable either. She enjoyed that; he could see the slight malice of her smile. And shook his head again, as he saw Jewel's wet curls grow tighter.

This was not the end to the morning that he had envisioned. But he was accustomed to the idea that all action had consequences, and he accepted these as his natural due; no good deed went unpunished, after all.

Harald and his friends drifted off well before they made the thirty-fifth holding. If Rath had encouraged them to leave—and he must have—Jewel couldn't quite tell how; they stopped a moment, and spoke in low tones among themselves. She couldn't understand a word they said; it was Northern, all of it, and that wasn't a language she knew.

Her Oma had always found the Northerners annoying. Or terrifying. Living in a desert, it seemed, was a good deal less difficult when the desert wasn't made of snow. To Jewel, they had seemed the same: death, either way. But her Oma had had her own ideas, and she always shared.

They made an odd procession as they walked through the streets. If there hadn't been so many of them—and if four of them hadn't been so strangely dressed—it would have been easier for Rath. As it was, Jewel could tell how uncomfortable the visibility made him; he was curt, cool, and at a slight distance for the entire walk home.

He didn't stop at the Common. He didn't stop by the well. The latter made sense—they had no buckets—but it still struck Jewel as odd. They made their way home, and only when Rath had ushered them into the hall of the apartment—and they were crushed between its narrow walls—did he seem to relax at all.

“We may have been followed,” he told her.

She winced. But she kept her peace.

“You can use the drill room,” he added, “if you need the space. It might be best for now.”

The last two words kind of hung in the air.

She did her best to ignore them. It didn't last long.

“Arann,” she said quietly as Rath made his way to his room and shut the door behind his back.

Arann nodded.

“We don't have nearly enough food for everyone. We don't have enough water. We don't have enough anything.”

He nodded again.

“We can manage food and water, for now. I need you to come with me,” she added, in case this wasn't obvious. “And I need everyone else to sit in that room—
that
one—until we're back. Leave Rath alone. Carver?”

Carver nodded quietly.

“You stay. Finch—feed the others whatever you can find in the kitchen that isn't moving.”

Duster stepped in her way. “You give the orders here?” she asked, in a voice that was quiet.

“Rath does,” Jewel replied carefully. “It's mostly his place.”

Duster shrugged. “If you say so.”

“I say so.”

“There are more of us at the moment.”

Quiet kind of grew in a ripple. “I'd like it to stay that way.”

“You work for him?”

Quiet could be so very loud. Jewel knew she'd have to have this conversation with Duster; she didn't want to have it
now
. “As much as he'll let me,” she said. “You want to talk or eat?”

Duster's eyes were dark. She would have said more; her mouth opened. But Finch stepped between them—and as there wasn't much between to step into, it was awkward.

“She saved me,” Finch said to Duster. And to Jewel.

“For what?”

Finch hesitated. “I don't know,” she replied. It was safest because it was true.

“You trust her?”

“I trust you.”

If Duster could have snarled, she would have; her whole expression twisted suddenly into something feral and dangerous. Jewel would remember it later. Wondered, now, if she would ever forget it. Trust was obviously not a word that Duster liked—either to use or to hear.

Rath was right about Duster.

Jewel knew it. “You saved her,” she said evenly. “You figure out why. Don't take it out on me.”

“You saved her,” Duster snapped back. “You know why?”

“Yes. She needed me.”

“I
don't
.”

“Probably not.” She looked at Arann, and nodded toward the door. He could reach the bolts. “Does it matter?”

“Do you know why they kept me?”

“No. I don't care either.” It wasn't true. But Jewel made it true, for now. “I didn't make the rules. I didn't follow them.”

“They'd've sent you away. Broken you, and sent you away.”

Jewel nodded. “But they didn't. And we're here. You want to be them? You want to do what they didn't?”

Duster's eyes rounded. Jewel was afraid—for just a minute—that Duster would hit her. Or try. But her eyes subsided into narrowness, and her hands uncurled. “No,” she said curtly. “Not me.” She looked at the door that Carver stood beside.

Jewel waited until Carver pushed the door open. There was another awkward pause, while the three boys whose names she didn't even know let their gazes bounce off the walls, the door—anything but her face or Duster's.

Carver kicked one of them, and he jumped, reddened, and left the hall; the others joined him quietly, which left Finch hovering by the kitchen.

“Go,” she told Carver.

“Lefty?”

“He'll come with us.”

“Right. Anything I should—”

“Don't scare them.”

Carver shrugged. “One of them—”

“Carver.”

He nodded, gave her an odd look.

Duster caught it as well. “I don't aim to start a fight I can't win. You can take your hand off the knife.”

Jewel frowned and saw that Carver's hand
was,
in fact, curved casually around the hilt of his dagger. His expression was serious; he meant to wait.

She couldn't bring herself to tell him Duster meant no harm. She even tried, but the words wouldn't work their way out.

“She's not bad,” Finch said, to no one in particular. “She helped—”

“Don't remind her,” Jewel replied.

But the words broke Duster's mood, some. The way ice broke over water that was cold enough to kill you anyway if you were walking on it.

Duster walked past Carver slowly, measuring him. He didn't take his hand off the knife, but he made no move toward her; he simply held the door until she passed through its frame.

“Jay,” he said quietly. Just her name. But it was all he needed to say.

She looked at the ground by Carver's feet. Saw what lay there, in a heap. “Leave them,” she told him quietly. “We're going to get food.”

He hesitated, and she added, “There won't be any trouble you can't handle.”

Chapter Sixteen

FOUR HOURS LATER, two candles down, Rath heard the click of the door at his back. Although he had gathered his papers in a more or less orderly pile to his left, and the inkstand, with quill to grace it, stood to his right, the only thing that occupied the focus of his attention were two dull blades. Flat ornate daggers, golden-handled, with runes that were so stylized it was almost impossible to recognize the language; they seemed to be so ceremonial no one had thought to sharpen them.

He knew; he'd tried cutting paper and cloth, and while the paper eventually gave, the cloth hadn't budged. He had studied those words, attempting to glean what information he could from their letter forms; he knew them as Old Weston, but they were a style of Old Weston that his scholarship had seldom encountered.

But there were other engravings, on hilt and handle, that gave clues. Old, old blades, these; they bore the marks of something that resembled either fire or sun, and given the shape and curve, worn in places, he chose to see them as sun's light. As, in fact, light.

“Where did you get them?” Jewel asked.

She had opened the door, of course, and she had padded in near silence across floors that shouldn't have allowed it. He felt a momentary pride in this accomplishment, and if he knew that the attempt at silence had been made because she feared his censure for this long, long day's work, it didn't lessen the pride. He wondered, briefly, if anything would, and turned in his chair to look at her.

Her arms were full.

The work that she had done, to walk into the room so quietly, was made more impressive by the fact that she was overburdened. She carried these rolled objects as if they were an offering, and he allowed it.

But when she approached the table upon which he was working, he let that go. “Jewel,” he told her quietly, his voice skirting the edge of frustration, “the decision to go was, in its entirety, mine. Two men died.”

“More than two.”

“Two of any worth.”

She nodded quietly. If there was a day to argue about the value and sanctity of life—and Jewel Markess, odd urchin that she was, might be the only child present in his home who would even think the attempt worth making—it was not this one.

“These,” Jewel told him, surprising him as she so often did, “are mine.” Her arms tightened. “I found them. I brought them back.”

He raised a brow. She seldom played games of any note, and although the daggers lay there, demanding both questions and answers, he found himself interested in this one. “Granted,” he said quietly, waiting.

“But this,” she added, rolling her head to take in the whole of his room, and by implication, the ones beyond the door as well, “is yours. You paid for it. You found it.”

Ah. He now understood the opening gambit of a clumsy negotiation. He gazed at the light that came in from the window well above, broken by bars, and landing like spokes across the surface of the desk; it was the reason he had chosen to work instead at this table. The odd breaks in light, the bars of shadow, discomfited him.

“I can't send them away,” she continued, and this—this came as no surprise at all. “You've seen them, Rath.”

“I'm not sure you'll be able to keep at least one of them. And no, Jewel, I don't mean Duster.”

She closed her eyes; her dark lashes, in the magelight's glow, made her face seem pale in comparison. Too much shadow, here. Too much odd light. She seemed to have carried it with her, and he wondered how it was that he hadn't seen it the first time they'd met.

“You want information,” she told him. “And you pay for it. I want
them,
and I'm willing to trade what I have. Let them stay with us.”