The Hidden City (61 page)

Amarais of Handernesse had been fascinated by them as well. She did not tell herself their stories; did not dream herself in the meanness of their odd exile from food, warmth, clothing, but like Rath, she did not turn away from the chance to cross the bridge in the Handernesse carriage, accompanied at all times by at least two guards.

What had she seen?
he thought bitterly, gazing now upon the wealth that had been so commonplace.
When had it started?

There,
he thought. The buildings here were now widely and evenly spread, but although the ocean's presence could be tasted—it could always be felt—he could not see its lapping water against the farther shore; he could imagine it, and would once again dwell upon it when he found the bridge.

Imagination was treachery of a different sort, and his weakness was such that the question drove him back, to the past, to his sister, younger yet older than he; to the carriage, out of whose windows she perched, on elbows, to the consternation—and resignation—of their guards.

Yet she made no sounds of delight, that day, no cries of joy, nothing at all that implied happiness or discovery. She was still, perched there as if carved, and Rath, at her side, felt a twinge of worry.

The guards rapped the roof of the carriage; they wore mailed gloves, and didn't need to hit more than twice to get the driver's attention. The carriage slowed—although it never drove at great speed along the Old City roads.

Rath, peering out of his own window, could see that people were standing on the side of the street, as if waiting; it could have been the Kings' Challenge season, if it weren't the wrong time of year for it.

“What's happening?” he asked one of the guards. He had known the man's name, once, but the name—like the face—had receded into a place that only dream could recall. This waking reverie ceded nothing.

“The Mother's Children,” the guard replied quietly. “They're coming down the street.”

Being younger and less well behaved than Amarais, Rath thrust himself up under the thin perch of his sister's arms, craning out of the carriage for a glimpse of what had silenced her.

And he saw them: the Mother's Children, in their plain, harvest robes, green and brown, sun-faded and sturdy. They carried baskets on their arms, as they often did, but these baskets looked empty, they swayed so easily.

He could see the underside of his sister's face, the line of a jaw that had not yet become pronounced, let alone elegant. “Amarais?”

She said nothing. Just watched.

And behind the Mother's Children walked children. Some hobbled, working their way with crutches or canes upon the gentle slope of the Common street; the great leaves were in bloom, then, gold upon the heights of their thick and ancient branches. The youngest of the children gathered those leaves, slowing the procession; they were nudged back into line by acolytes, novitiates, and the older children nearest them.

They were not well dressed; they wore clothing that was striking in its lack of uniformity, its mismatched colors, its obvious age. But they were all thin as birds' legs, their cheeks hollow, their eyes dark; their hair was often long, but it had that wild look that reminded Rath of the coats of hungry dogs.

Amarais watched them walk, and her silence grew more oppressive, and at last Rath broke it. “They're poor,” he said softly, as if only then realizing that poor was not a romantic story.

He reached into the thick pouch that lay twisted round his waist; it wasn't hidden, then; it didn't need to be. Guards were proof against the boldest of thieves the Common boasted. At least guards of the stature and build of Handernesse guards.

From this, he drew coins.

Amarais, taking this as her signal, opened the latch of the door; it creaked, but the familiar noise was lost to the protest of the guards. Amarais, young then—how old, Rath thought? How old?—had silenced them with a glance. He had thought her magnificent, then.

Now?

Now he remembered his own actions with an embarrassment that bordered on humiliation. He had taken the money, and he had run, his short burst of speed all but winding him, toward the elderly woman that seemed to head this procession. Her eyes, he recalled, were the color of pale honey, and there were creases around them, worn by smile or care or seawind. She had let him drop his coins in the basket, and she had nodded gravely when he had told her—ah, the pain of his self-importance, then—that this money was for
children
.

But Amarais, coming up behind him, had placed a hand over his shoulder; she did not stop him from giving away all of his money, but she did not offer hers.

Instead, she looked long at the matronly woman who led this odd parade, and she said, “Why are they on display?”

And the woman's eyes had narrowed, the lines there definitely verging on frown at this impertinence. But she searched his sister's face, and found no scorn in it. No ready emotion either. Even then, Amarais could be guarded.

“People forget what they cannot see,” the woman replied.

“People forget what they can.”

“They do. But these children—they are from the hundred holdings; they are without family and without guardians. We tend them and we teach them, and once a year we walk, here.”

“Why here?”

“The Common—”

“Why not on the Isle? That's where the money is.”

The woman's eyes were gold, and they were an odd shade of gold. Not the cold of money, no, but they were no longer so warm or so sweet. “We could not afford the price of that passage,” was the calm reply.

“What price?”

“There is a toll to be paid for all those who walk the bridge. And that toll would feed each child for a week. Perhaps more.” She turned and said something that Rath couldn't hear.

“Should I have kept the money?” he asked, anxious now.

Amarais had smiled at him. But it was not a happy smile. “No,” she told him quietly. “They need it.”

“Then I did a good thing?”

“Yes,” she said. “But it was an easy thing.”

“But if everyone gave—”

“Yes,” she said again. “But it's not enough, the money.”

The Priestess looked down at Amarais. “You are not as young as you look,” she said wearily. “But if the money is not all that they require, it is still needed. Let the boy feel generous,” she added softly. “Generosity is never to be despised.”

Amarais had nodded quietly.

That day, and the day that followed, she had spoken for a long time to their grandfather, the doors closed so that Rath might be spared the discussion. She had emerged from those closed doors and she had smiled at Rath, and she had asked him to join her in the garden, but she never spoke about what Grandfather had said, and Rath was too wary to ask, for Amarais did not look happy.

And Rath, now standing at the farthest edge of the fence that girded the greatest of all the mansions owned by House Terafin, looked up at the heights of that flat, wide building. At its stonework, its great, vast wings, its huge, sprawling gardens with their perfectly tended grass, their leaf-shorn trees.

Are you happy now?
he thought bitterly.

And thought, too, that were he a different man, he might approach the guardhouse that was just barely visible from his position in the street; that he might announce himself, enter into that coveted manse with its name, its law of allegiance defying and denying the loyalty owed blood and birth, and ask her.

But he was not that man.

And if he could now, at the remove of age, see the day on which his sister had begun to take her first steps away from Handernesse, the knowledge offered no comfort, and only a bitter glimmer of understanding.

Chapter Eighteen

FOUR HOURS LATER, Rath returned with boots. They were not perfect, but they were infinitely better than the bare feet or exposed thongs that the four newcomers were otherwise faced with. He offered them without comment, and when Jewel tried to ask him how he'd managed to pry them from the mendacious grip of the cobbler, he had stared her into an almost withered silence before retreating to the privacy of his rooms. He did not emerge from them in the following hours.

Around the ominous silence radiated by his presence, even hidden as it was behind the wooden panels of a flimsy door, the children moved in cautious silence. The rain on the window wells had grown loud, and often heavy. Jewel brought lit candles to the boys and, for herself, used the magestone that had been Rath's gift to her; Duster whistled when she saw it. Finch said little. They ate, divided blankets between them, and tried to sleep.

Finch succeeded.

Jewel tried to keep her breathing even in the darkness of the dimmed magelight, but she couldn't help listening to the breathing that wasn't hers. Finch's changed slowly, deepening and flattening into something that sounded like sleep. Duster's didn't.

Minutes were hard to mark, at night. Jewel didn't usually try; in fact, she usually tried to do the opposite. Sleep wasn't generally something that eluded her. But she hadn't slept well on the banks of the river, beneath the scant cover of Summer bridge. And she didn't sleep well, here, with a stranger in her room.

Which, given that she'd slept like a log—if logs had nightmares—when Arann, Lefty, Carver, and Finch had been pressing in on all sides, said something. She missed Carver and Arann, here, and that annoyed her enough that she sat up.

Duster was lying on her side, face propped up by a hand above bent elbow. Jewel could see her almost clearly; the magestone was like unveiled moonlight, here. Had she wanted it, she could have had sun.

But the dark of silvered light suited Duster better.

“They wanted to keep me,” Duster said quietly. As if the light was just poor enough that speaking was safe. It was hard to see her expression, and she knew it; she must have, because Jewel's was likewise near-invisible.

“But not Finch?”

“Not Finch, no.” Duster's brief snort of laughter was cold and ugly; it was an utter dismissal. “What could they have made of Finch that would have done them any good?”

There was only one question that the statement allowed, but Jewel was good at finding back entrances and exits that weren't as clear. “What did they intend for Finch?”

“She was going to disappear,” Duster replied quietly. “Four other children did, in the month. Some of them were probably happy to go by the end of it. But those, they often kept. Like Lander,” she added, her voice almost disappearing for the stretch of syllables. “It was the ones they didn't touch, didn't sell, that they took away.”

And they had kept Duster.

“You were special,” Jewel said. And the moment she said it, it was
true
.

Duster's head bobbed slightly as she shifted position, sitting in a curled hunch made of knees and bent back. “I was special,” she said. The words were harsh, almost vicious. “They said that. Of me. That they could see me. See what I would become.”

Jewel had always trusted her instincts. She trusted them now, speaking quickly. “They saw only
some
of what you could become,” she said, a little too hotly.

Duster was utterly still. “What do you mean?” she asked, her first casual words of the evening. Casual and Duster were not a promising combination. Not even Jewel's optimism could paint it in different colors.

But she'd blurted it out, and having started, she struggled to continue; struggled to ignore the tension that was Duster, in a room that should have been safe haven.

“They saw the killer in you,” Jewel said quietly.

Duster shrugged. She didn't even attempt words.

“They saw it.
I
see it,” she added evenly. Not trying to ameliorate damage, but trying to be as clear as she could. Because this was important, and if she botched it, she'd already lost.

She had never questioned her visions before. She had viewed them not as possibilities, but as certainties. And for the first time, she saw that certainty was, like anything else, a blind. Duster was poised on an edge, and what Jewel thought she had seen clearly—no, damn it, what she
had
seen clearly—had not yet come to pass.

And it might not.

And this, too, she knew as truth. It was both unsettling and somehow liberating. She could be
wrong
. Even when she had seen something clearly, it could be
wrong
.

Had Duster been anyone else, Jewel might have told her. But Duster was Duster, Duster was the girl the mages had chained to a wall in a special room. The locks that Jewel had picked to gain entrance, the lock that she had picked to open the single shackle around her bruised ankles—they had been the least of the locks she would have to pick. And only by acknowledging what Duster was—by understanding
everything
that Duster was—did she have any chance at all of doing so.