The Hidden City (74 page)

“No one cared about
me,
” Duster shouted, and the knife left its sheath.

Quiet settled into Jewel, or perhaps it spread out from the core; she couldn't say. “I cared,” she told Duster. “Enough to go back, to put us all in danger.”

“You didn't know me.”

“I knew that you saved Finch,” was her quiet reply. “How is Finch so much different?”

Duster said nothing for a moment; the dagger didn't waver. But Jewel saw it, understood its presence, and let it be.

“If you saved her to spite your captors, you still saved her. It's not why that counts, Duster. It's what you did. Find that, here.”

“They're not here.”

“Aren't they? Why are we here, then? Why are we looking at this map, and waiting for Rath? Why are we—”

Duster drove the knife into the tabletop. Rath was going to be so pissed off. But the table was better than the alternative, and Jewel acknowledged this truth in the only way she could.

“You said they thought they could make something out of you, and you didn't like it. I don't know who they were,” she added, “but it's pretty damn clear they like pain. Yours, ours, anyone's. You need to spite them? Spite them, then.
Don't
be that person. Don't cause pain.” She paused.

“I know you think there always has to be a victim; I know you don't intend it to be you. But Lefty's important to me—to us, Duster—and in this house, there are no victims.”

“You don't slap Lefty,” Duster said.

“No.”

The wild girl smiled almost crookedly. “So even Saint Jay has limits.”

“A lot of them,” Jewel replied. “But Lefty's been hurt enough, and he doesn't need more of it. Leave him alone. You need to snap? Snap at me. I had an Oma with a tongue sharper than your knife; I can take it.”

“But I need you. For now.”

“Now,” Jewel said, “is all we ever have. I'm going to get Rath,” she added.

“He'll be worried about you.” The words were a sneer with syllables.

Jewel shrugged. “I worry about him sometimes. It's fair.”

She started toward the door, and Duster said, “The new boy.”

Jewel stopped.

“Why did you bring him home? He wasn't there. At the house. He didn't—”

“He found his mother's dead body in the snow today,” Jewel replied, snow in her voice. “And he would have frozen there with her, trying to get her to move.”

Duster said nothing. She didn't snort; she didn't make a gibe.

“Arann carried his mother to their home, and we waited for him. I brought him here because I need him here,” she added. “Same as you.”

“He's nothing like me.”

“No.
I'm
nothing like you. Arann's nothing like you. So what? If we were all the same, I'd only need one of us.”

“He's never killed.”

“He's never had to.”

Silence. Duster tried to remove her knife from its place in the table. And Jewel, aware that she had barely managed to skirt a crisis, said nothing. Nothing more. But whatever she had said was enough for now. Duster needed to hate something. Jewel had found enough of it to hold her, for now.

And now, as she had told Duster, was all they could be certain of.

Rath didn't even acknowledge the exchange when he returned. He looked bored and slightly frustrated. He failed to notice—and this took no little effort—the deep gouge in the table that happened to also coincide with a slash in the delicate map's surface. He wasn't certain what had been said—what could be said—but knew, as he entered the room, that it had been enough.

And it was not his job or his responsibility to add more.

“You are both aware that I spend much of my life cultivating different appearances.”

Jewel nodded. Duster nodded as well, but there was an edge in the way she looked, once again, over the contents of his room. “You are both untutored in the art of assuming a different station in life, and this is unfortunate. I am not by nature a patient man, and I am not a teacher. There is a man who taught me much, and I wish you to meet with him. He will explain the art of appearing to be something you are not.

“You will learn everything he is willing to teach,” he added quietly. “I am willing to help you in your errand, but I am not willing to send you into a combat unarmed and ignorant.”

Duster bristled visibly; Jewel, however, did not.

“He is a somewhat quirky man, and he was never patient. Do
not
play cards with him if he asks. He always cheats; he is never caught.”

At this, Duster perked up.

“It is not card tricks that I wish you to learn,” Rath added, seeing her expression. “You must be able to pass unseen while being seen by everyone. Wherever it is you will go, you must be both noticed and so much a part of the scenery, no one will actually pay attention.

“The Lords live in manors upon the Isle, and they leave seldom, usually on business affairs. I do not intend,” he added darkly, “to cause difficulty in the Merchant Authority; nor do I feel it wise to attempt to accost said lords in alleys in which they would not otherwise travel.

“They are, however, victims of their own proclivities.”

“
They're
victims?” Jewel said, almost outraged. The fact that she didn't know what the last word meant escaped her attention.

“Very well, they are fools. Does that suit better?”

She nodded. Duster said nothing.

“You have responsibilities here that are entirely your own, Jewel. When you have seen to your newest arrival, and you have taken the time to purchase the clothing and blankets we require—I have taken the liberty of seeing to wood—I will take you to meet the man who will be your guide.”

“What will we tell the others?” Duster asked him.

“You are not so fond of the truth that you are incapable of lying,” he replied sweetly. “Come up with a lie that suits you. I should warn you, however, that Jay is famed for her inability to lie; if it comes at all, it must come from you.”

Duster said, “You don't like me much, do you?”

“At the moment? No. But things change, and people have been known to change as well. You are not without that ability; you simply lack the desire.”

This suited Duster. Had Rath given any other answer, it would have been the wrong one. He knew it, and saw from Jewel's expression—relief—that she knew it as well.

Hate and contempt were things that Duster understood. Jewel and Rath were things she didn't—and she needed some stability.

“I will take a few days to arrange the meeting with my associate,” he added, as he nodded vaguely in the direction of the closed door. “In which time, tend to your own.”

Things were not exactly lively when they escaped Rath's room, but Duster had lost the look of anger that usually informed her face. Jewel had hit her hard, and the mark lingered like a white accusation against her ruddy skin, but Duster had forgotten it, as if it were nothing.

Jewel was ashamed of herself. And of her temper. It had taken all of her meager self-control to wait until Rath had left the damn room—but not waiting would have been worse, and she knew it.

Finch approached her quietly, as she often did. “He's in our room,” she said.

“Our room?”

“There's more room there; the other room is too crowded.”

“You don't mind?”

Finch raised a pale brow. “Not more than you do.”

Duster said, “I don't give a shit. He's just a kid.”

Jewel shrugged. “I don't mind,” she told Finch, and only Finch. “Has he eaten anything?”

“Not hardly. But . . .” Her voice trailed off, and fell until it was almost inaudible. “Lefty told us what happened. I didn't want to push him.”

Jewel nodded. “What do you think of him?”

“He seems nice,” Finch replied with care. “But quiet.”

“I think he'll always be quiet. It's when he's not that we'll have to listen.”

“He loved his mother,” Finch added. And Jewel remembered what had happened to Finch and said nothing. But she touched Finch's shoulder, wanting the contact, or wanting to offer it. Nor did Finch pull away. “He's talking to Lander,” she added.

“Talking to him?”

“Well, gesturing at him. Lefty taught him a bit, and he picked it up really quickly. I think Lander likes him.”

Jewel nodded quietly. “Lander will talk to us,” she told Finch, and knew it for truth. “In his own time, he'll talk.”

“Maybe Jester will stop,” Duster added, but without much malice. Fires banked, here. It gave Jewel hope. “We have to go to the Common,” she added, “before the day is out.”

 

To Teller, the noise was almost overpowering. The rooms were crowded, and the kitchen large compared to his home, but every corner seemed to be filled with something or someone. He wanted to feel lucky; felt, instead, a simple lack of anything but cold. His fingers ached with it, and his chest was tight. He could no longer feel his toes.

He watched them all. Especially Jay, because everyone seemed to look to her for guidance. She was dark-haired, and her hair curled around her face so awkwardly she was constantly shoving it to one side or the other; she was slender and neither tall nor short. Her eyes were dark, and her skin Southern.

And she understood his loss.

He understood hers. He had no way to speak of either, no words for the certainty. But some part of him had been waiting for her in the snow; for her or for the gods. She had come first. His mother had believed in fate, and in the malice of Kalliaris, the goddess of luck. Teller had believed in his mother, and had accepted the way her world worked. This world, however, was new to him.

New, and yet, still his own. Because Jay was here; she had found him, he had followed. He had watched the silent giant carry his mother home. He wouldn't have asked it; couldn't have demanded it—he had no words, not then.

But she had seen it and understood it, and what she asked, they offered. He labored under no illusions; he knew that she could never ask him to do what Arann had done. If he had a place here, it wasn't Arann's place. But he had one; he had to find it, and hold it.

He liked Lefty, although he thought it odd that Lefty spent most of his time with his arm wedged under his armpit. He only stopped that when he spoke with Lander, the mute, pale boy that Jewel had also taken in. Lefty told Teller how Lander had come to be here, and Finch stood by, correcting him gently when she felt he needed it. Fisher could talk, but didn't; it wasn't so much that he was quiet—you knew when he was in the room—as that he didn't feel a need to talk at all. He nodded often, grunted once or twice, ate three times as much as Arann, and kept mostly to himself.

But he was willing to learn what Lefty was willing to teach or share: the movement of hands, the silent language that Lander responded to. Not one of these children had family. Not Jay either, according to Finch.

Carver told him the story of Finch's rescue, and Finch let him talk. When he had finished, Teller said, looking up at Carver from the patch of floor he'd made his seat, “I don't understand one thing.”

“What?”

“Why you were there.”

Carver shrugged. “I don't understand it either,” he said at last.

“But you helped her—in the tavern—you started the fight.”

Carver nodded.

“Why?”

“She needed help.”

“A lot of people need help,” Teller replied quietly.

“She needed help
I
could offer.”

Teller nodded at that. It made sense. “What do you do here?”

“Do?”

“What kind of work?”

“Work?”

Finch looked at her feet. They weren't bare. “We do whatever Jay tells us,” she said at last. “She's teaching us to read. And to write. Well, most of us. Not Lander, yet. But she says he'll learn.”

“She's teaching you to
read
?”

Finch nodded.

Teller felt a peculiar hunger then, the hunger that had entirely escaped him when Finch had offered him food or blankets. “Read what?” he asked carefully.

“She says anything, in the end,” Finch told him. “But we're learning letters first. And our names.”

“Why?”

Finch shrugged. “Her father taught her, before he died. And Old Rath told her she had to keep learning if she wanted to stay here.”

“He's teaching her?”

Finch nodded.

“Why?”

“I don't know. You ask a lot of why.”

Teller smiled. “It's the only way I'll understand anything.”

“Jay would ask, too. Why,” Finch added. “I asked her why. Why she saved me. Why she saved the rest of us.”

“What did she say?”

“She didn't. I think if she could, she'd save the whole city, or die trying.” Finch's eyes were bright, and wide, as she spoke. “And I want to help her,” she added, looking down at her slender arms, her orphan hands. “Whatever she wants to do—it can't be bad. And I'd rather help Jewel than do almost anything else. If it means reading, I'll learn to read. If it means fighting, I'll learn to fight.”

Teller frowned, and Carver shook his head. “She's been trying to teach Finch and Lefty to fight a bit. Not like soldiers,” he added, “but just enough to be able to get away if they have to.”

From what?
He didn't ask. Enough, to have the questions answered. Enough, because it made him think of something other than his mother. She had died alone, in the cold; he hadn't even
been there
. He couldn't remember if he'd told her he loved her before she'd gone. He couldn't know for sure that she knew it, while she lay in the street dying.