The Returning (19 page)

The clouds thinned and broke apart as he approached the keep wall. The wet ground and the roofs steamed.

During the war the guards had catcalled down at the passing crowd from this wall, spat on them, worse. Now they stood spear-stiff, two by two: at the base of the stair to the keep; at the two right-angle turns the stair took to the gate; on either side of the open gate; and more, Cam knew, within.

He was one of a crowd who had come to see the keep; stood with them and gawped at the guards, gawped up at the wall, the stone base four or five times his height, the wall atop it now rendered that stark white. Everything about it was wide, high, thick.

Among the throng, Cam glimpsed red—the red of Gyaar Ryuu's armor. Sweat broke out on his skin, and his stomach churned so that he thought he would be sick. People seemed to push him in from all sides, and he could not see, could not think how to get out; then in front of him they cleared, and it was not Gyaar Ryuu, it was a girl. She wore the trousers and long jacket of an Uplander man, in the same glaring color as the Lord's armor. And just as he stared at her, she stared at him . . . stared, and snapped her fingers.

“Seen enough? Yah.”

Cam whirled about and bulled through the jostle of people, ran from her, from the keep. Just a maid, a maid in a red robe, and he so distressed he couldn't think clearly. Shame rode him.

 

HE WALKED INTO THE taproom thinking his landlady would likely turn him out, for the woodpile stood untouched and here he was turning up for a second night, for food, for ale.

“I will,” he said, gesturing toward the yard and the mound of wood.

The innkeeper said nothing, lifted her brows. She put a wooden bowl into his hand and dipped soup into it. “Been looking at the new Lord's keep?” Cam spilled hot soup over his fingers, swore. “So does everyone that comes to Dorn-Lannet. All crushing up around the gate to stare. Huh.”

“It looks like Lord Ryuu expects another war, the way he's built up those walls, reinforced the gate.”

“That's Lords for you. Any so how, I can sleep easier knowing those walls can't be beaten down.” The innkeeper laughed.

Cam nodded. “Only way in would be to fly over them.”

“Uh-huh.” His landlady spread her hands on the bench and leaned her weight onto them. “Siasen—he was my husband—he always used to say you Downlanders were a witchy kind of folk, so castle walls are probably real easy, huh?”

“I fought down here during the war,” said someone. “And I saw some things.”

Cam put the bowl down and licked soup from his fingers. “Saw what?”

“One night, hunting for the pot, I shot a rabbit. When I got up to it, there was no rabbit, but a young woman, an arrow through her throat.”

“Siasen said he knew a man got lured off the road by a beautiful maid, who turned into a soldier and killed him.”

Us.
Cam turned his bowl in circles, the soup untouched.
They mean us, Downlanders.
He thought it should make him laugh, but it did not.

The stair to the guests' sleeping loft was a cupboard, crafted to form a miniature staircase, with storage inside. Cam, obedient to his landlady's direction, took off his boots and padded up the tiny steps in his stockings, she wiping the wood with a cloth after him. He had been given a candle but chose not to light it, instead opening the shutter to the starlight. His bed was like to his one at home: a straw-filled pallet on the floor. Crouching, he propped his elbow on one knee and wound his fingers into his hair, pulling it until his scalp burned, but it was not enough to take his mind from the track it was wearing.

Gyaar Ryuu. That one visit to the infirmary, when Cam was fevered and dazed with pain, then nothing further. They had walked the same ground, he and the Uplander Lord's son, but never once did their paths cross, save at a distance, remote. What would he say?

Bah! What do you think, Cam Attling? Clap eyes on the man and the answers to all your questions are writ on him?
He stripped and lay down, spent the night watching the slow spin of the stars past his window.

 

THE KEEP WAS spread across the feet of Mount Lannet, gray in the pre-dawn light: tower and hall, barracks and stables, storeroom, smithy, weapons house, cookhouse, bathhouse, women's quarters and men's, all wrapped about by the first of the great walls. Between the inner and outer walls to the north was the garden: a pond fed by a stream, all with bridge and island; a wide sweep of lawn; a belt of woods about its outer edges, and flimsy wooden palings—decoration, not defense. The keep lofted tower and gables over it all.

In Lord Garaman's time, the bailey had stretched empty all the way from outer wall to inner. By the time Cam left after the war, Lord Ryuu had begun planting saplings, diverting the stream so it ran across the garden, and digging the pond. Now trees and pool looked as if they had always been here, as if the Uplander Lord had always lived here.

This early, no one was about in the bailey—none but the guards patrolling the inner wall. Cam watched them pace east to west, west to east, spaced so that one was always within sight of the next, all the way around. The outer wall, though, was manned only at its three gates.

Even here there was construction under way. The tower, mostly hidden beneath scaffolding, was growing both wider and taller. It would, when finished, stand nearly as high as the point on the hill where Cam now hid. He would be able to look straight into its windows, and anyone in it would be able to see him. Cam sank lower behind the mad lacework of whippy spring branches, stretched out on his belly, chin propped on his forearm, and watched the sun lift into the sky.

He felt as if his eyes and ears were wide open, every sense—smell and touch and taste. His mind. The smell of the smoke that he watched pile into the morning from the keep's kitchen chimneys stung his nostrils; he tasted it in the air, air that stirred against his sweating skin. He did not know why it should have his heart drumming, but it did.

Maids and menservants began to appear, moving about their work, all order and purpose. Guards started practice, and the rhythmic clash of arms, voices and laughter and shouts, the sounds of people being, wafted up to Cam in his hiding place.

A girl burst out of the woods and ran across the lawn, as if all the beasts of the Afterlife bit at her jacket-tails. Cam yelped aloud with fright, flattened himself against the ground, for he knew her, knew her by that jacket bright as blood against the green of the grass: the girl from the keep gate. She pulled up short of the border of trees and stood rigid, as though she had been turned to stone.

After a time, she made her way to the pond and began to pace the water's edge. As she paced, the girl sang. Something of it carried up the hill to Cam. It drew at his heart so that he could not bear to listen, yet he found himself edging forward, to hear her better, see her. Not until her singing stopped did Cam wriggle back through the trees and steal away.

 

CAM WATCHED THE keep, staying longer each day, as if by spying he would know how to walk in the gate, what to say, to do . . . what would be said to him. What would be done.

Lord Ryuu was often in the garden. He had a favorite place, a flat-topped rock on the edge of the pond, where he would sit for hours at a time, looking around, always alert. An older woman walked the grounds. Lady Ryuu, Cam guessed, although he had not seen her before. She was always surrounded by girls, all of them tall and dark. And were they her ladies or her daughters? If her daughters, that made them sisters to the Lord's son, which had Cam thinking of his own sister, Pin. They stalked the garden in formation, like parade soldiers. The men and women of the court were ever about, taking the air, talking and laughing, singing and reading aloud from books or papers. But Gyaar Ryuu . . . though he waited and watched, Cam did not lay eyes on him.

In this way Cam let a handful of days wear away, and another, following a pattern. He would creep to watch the keep at dawn, then ramble about the town, from docks to marketplace to square, until he tired of walking, and of the curious way they had here of staring him in the face. Often he would sit the remainder of the day away at a small shrine he'd found, a pond at its center, the one tree fingering the water with sweeping branches. Here Cam would rest, watch the fish lolloping through the water, until the lilies fisted themselves up against the coming dark. The quiet stillness of the place steadied him. His nights were spent more in waking than sleeping, until he rose to creep across the hillside to watch the keep again.

 

CAM HUNG OVER the stone basin at the entrance to the shrine, made faces at his reflection. He stabbed the water with the dipper and watched his face shatter into a thousand fragments, washed his hand and entered the yard; stretched out by the pool, on the only grass allowed to grow in this place of scrubbed stone, and watched the fish. For all the banners on the walls that proclaimed the Lord's son was resident in the keep, why had Cam not sighted him?
Free.
He could not imagine the Lord saying it.

The nights of sleeplessness weighed heavily. Cam closed his eyes, and the sun-warmed quiet wrapped him about.

“Yah!” Something had stung him on the face. Cam lurched up onto his elbow and saw that the sun was right overhead—he had slept the morning away.

The red-robed girl stood above him, feet set square, eating a cherry. She spat the pit into her hand and aimed exactly between Cam's eyes. He came up onto his heels, suddenly wide awake.

“Followed you,” she said. “Master Sneak.” Cam's heart jumped in his chest. She threw the pit. “Think you're clever, slipping around like a ghost,
aiii
. I follow you and do you even know? Hah.”

Cam flicked her pits back at her. “Leave me be. Get about the business you should be about and leave mine to me.”

“What you in a snit about? Because I followed you? Or because you didn't know I was following?”

“I said, leave me be.”

She didn't. She plunked herself down next to him. Cam ripped up handfuls of grass, glowering at the water.

“Them.” The girl pointed to the carp. “They're given, see, on the birth of a son, to make him strong and bold. I know a lot about koi. I know a lot about that place.” She pointed to the keep. “You know why?” She leaned close. “Sing the fish, I do.”

“Followed me?” Cam shook grass blades from his hand.

“From the marketplace. And you never knew. You know how I came to be singing for the Lord?”

“No.” Cam folded his arm across his chest. “But I will soon, will I not?”

“One day there I am fishing in the river, and a woman comes up, speaks to me, a Downlander this woman, and her speaking was like a spell. When she stopped I found myself in the dark. A small dark wooden room that rocked. Can you guess?”

“You tell me.”

“A boat, slave trader. The dark was so heavy that it squashed us silent. Day or night, no telling, I just lay in the dark and my gut was peeling I was so hungry and scared. Then I did what City people do when things turn bad. I sang. Well, they pulled me up to the captain's table and made me sing to him.
Don't lay a hand on her
, he says.
She's worth something, this one.
I didn't go back to the hold, and when we docked I didn't have to go up on the blocks at the market. That captain knew the Lord had been looking and looking for a Koi-boi, ever since the last one had died.”

“Koi-boi?”

“A Koi-boi's got to sing the fish, so they'll be-strong, grow-happy, so the Lord's son will too. My song is what they eat, in the keep.”

Cam grinned.

“There's more than that.” The girl held up her hand. “You look.” Between each finger the skin grew right up to the first knuckle, webbed. “Part fish.”

Cam held his hand up and they looked each at the other's and laughed.

“Why?” he asked her. “Why follow me?”

“I got to go.” And she did.

 

“IT NEEDS SHARPENING.” Cam showed the landlady the blunt edge of the ax head.

“Yes, well, I've not the money for that.”

“Have you a grindstone? I could sharpen it.”

“No.”

She does want me to go
, he thought.
Does not like having me here.
He pushed his thumb against the edge of the ax head. “I can do it.” Pushed harder and watched the skin break and a thin line of blood mark it. He wiped it off, placed a log on the chopping block.

“Not out and about today, then?” She was leaning against the wood heap.

Cam took another log. Split it. “Thought I'd get this done.”

“You'd want to. You're a two-day over your week already and that”—her clog tip-tapped the base of the woodpile—“that but half done.”

“Then best you find some other task for me, if you want me to pay my way, for I'm not leaving, not yet.”

“Huh.” She moved so that she stood right by the chopping block, right by him. “What you doing here, soldier-boy?”

“Chopping wood.”

“You know what I mean. How old are you?”

“Nineteen.”

“I was once nineteen. Married. One babe in arms and another on the way.”

Cam grinned, swung, and watched the two halves of the log split, clean and pale inside. “Where are they now?”

“Oh, my girls live in—” She jerked her head southward, in the direction of the town.

“Husband?” said Cam.

“The war.”

“I wonder . . .”

“What you wonder, soldier-boy?”

“Why do you prick and prick at me?”

“What you doing, huh? Killing time, or going to kill the Lord? Don't think folk haven't noticed you, skulking about up on that hill.”