The Returning (20 page)

Cam dropped the ax. “Kill him? Is that what you think?”

She said nothing, just looked at him.

“If Pelister Garaman had won the war, Lord Ryuu would be dead, his head on the spike over the gate.”
Lord Ryuu and his son, his lady wife, his stiff-spined daughters.
“But Lord Garaman lost Dorn-Lannet, and here to stay are the Ryuu—and with them a town of Uplanders and Downlanders both.” He bent, picked up the ax. “You have matters by the wrong end entirely.”

“Then I am right about you, and glad of it.”

“Can we be done with this now?” Cam rested his weight on the haft of the ax.

“I tell you what I wonder. I wonder why you don't just go in the front gate. They're always looking for fighting men, like I said.” She flicked her apron at him and went inside.

He shouted after her: “You're the one should be going in the castle gate.”
Don't
, he thought, but crossed the yard to the door anyway. “You're a better scout than they've got mounted on their walls.”

He turned back to the chopping block, dug at the ground with the ax. The guards, did they really not see him come and go on the hill, spying, if his landlady knew what he did?

“DIIDO!” A CREAKING voice carried clear up to Cam in his eyrie. “Diiiii-do!”

The girl in the garden slumped, then made her lagging way across the lawn. An enclosure sat on the far edge of the woods. Cam spotted gleaming disks, like outsized mirrors—tubs of water. Sapling trees stood in rows, and forcing beds; sheds and greenhouses. He'd seen the man working there before, shuffling about, recognizable despite the distance by his old-man hair that stood straight out from his brown scalp.

Cam watched him await the girl's approach now, hold her to his side by the gate. Taller than him, half his width, she listened to what he said with her head averted. When she walked back the way she'd come, the old man did not move until a curve of the path carried her out of his line of sight.

The girl began a circuit of the pond. She had a basket on one arm, the other reaching to it, then she would draw an are over the water as she fed the Lord's carp.
Diido.
Cam thought the name lilted like song in the mind.

 

VOICES CARRIED FROM the taproom into the night when Cam returned to the inn that evening. A woman screeched with laughter. Cam kept to the deeper shadow under the eaves and peered in. Sitting up at a bench was the girl, Diido. Opposite her was Cam's landlady, and between them an empty jug. They were leaning forward so their heads almost met, and Diido was speaking.

“. . . sing in the marketplace, I did, we all did. Traded our songs for our keep—and money. We could've lived high on what they threw us—”

“Where you sing? Here in Dorn-Lannet?” Cam's landlady pushed a plate closer to the girl.

“All over! We traveled from town to town. Had a fancy cart, and a horse to pull it, see—” She had looked up and seen Cam standing in the doorway.

“What?” His landlady beckoned him in. “You stuck there?”

Cam stared. He opened his mouth, closed it.

“Followed you,” said the girl in the red. “Master Sneak.” She nodded at him, then took some bread from the plate and stuffed it into her mouth, pushing at the dangling crusts that did not quite fit until they were all in and her cheeks looked ready to pop.

“I . . . I am becoming used to it.”

Later, when Cam sat with his landlady drinking a seemingly bottomless tankard, she said, “You know her then?”

“I wondered what you wanted to talk about.”

“Trading songs, my gold ring!” said his landlady. “The trade is not what she says it is.”

“Hnn.”

“I feel for her. Thank the gods my daughters were not taken up in it all like that. Who is it, who keeps her?”

It was only as she asked the question that Cam understood what his landlady meant.

“I don't know his name. He breeds up the fish for Lord Ryuu.”
And is old as her grandda.

“Tseri,” said his landlady. “She mentioned the gardener; his name is Tseri. I can read between the lines. He sees she's taken on as Koi-boi, and he holds it over her.” She sat back, arms folded, and nodded at Cam. “She's on the street, if she doesn't give out.” Cam saw with his mind's eye a girl in red fleeing something to the farthest edge of the garden; heard a voice like a leash calling,
Diiiii-do
.

 

DIIDO WAS SAT on Lord Ryuu's rock, hugging her knees and staring at the water. Cam leaned forward, caught himself doing so, and settled against a tree to watch her.

She was singing. Her voice came to him only in snatches, faint, but it closed his throat, stung his eyes. Cam rolled onto his back. The grass bobbed seed-heads above him, cut the keep off from view.
Free.
He turned his face into the rough stems and wept.

 

“I'VE A GIFT for you,” Cam said to his landlady that night. He placed a grindstone on the table and bowed. If she was pleased about it, she didn't show it.

“Where'd you get that? Steal it?”

In Cam's head, Ban's and Da's voices sounded together:
Where did you get that horse?
“W-won it.” Cam snatched the stone back up.

“What's put that look on your face?” Then she seemed to realize, and caught his arm. Cam shook her off.

“I was jesting, that's all.”

Cam thought about running again—as he had run from keep to Kayforl, Kayforl to keep—but to where?

“Where's the ax?” He settled its haft between his knees and jerked at it to see if he held it firm. The ringing of the stone against the ax head was almost musical. The rust vanished and the edge showed all bright and silver and sharp, the metal etched with a circular pattern from the grindstone. Cam stopped, put the stone down and worked his hand.

“You'd struggle, did you take up arms again,” said his landlady.

Cam blushed. He felt the heat of it, right up to his scalp. “Leave it.”

“How long has it been?”

“One year. And a half.”

“There, there,” she said. “You'll come good with a bit of practice.”

He shrugged, went back to the ax.

“One and a half years . . . that'd be the Battle for Dorn-Lannet.”

“Leave it!” Cam said it in his own tongue, shouted it. He found himself on his feet, slapping the grindstone down on the counter. “There's that back.” And he swung out of the room.

Outside, the dim cool of the evening dropped a kind of stillness over him. He sat on the chopping block, and his thoughts trudged along their old track. “Curse it!” He took up a stick, shredded it. And found his mind circling again, not about Gyaar Ryuu now but about Diido. He went back inside to finish sharpening the ax.

CAM AND DIIDO sat side by side next to the shrine's little pool. Diido stuck her skinny elbow into Cam's side. “I'm like you, I know about being different.”

“You mean your hands.” Cam held her left hand up, the webbed part of her skin reddening with the sunlight against it. Then he drew it to the stump of his right arm, pressed it there. Diido jerked, but Cam pretended not to notice. “That is not the difference.” He let her go. “At home . . .” For a moment that was all he could see, the cot on its hillock, and the seeing hurt. “At home I was never different, for all I look it. Here? I look like any of you.” He flung his arm wide. “But everyone knows I am not. Free!” He turned his head aside and spat.

“I didn't know,” said Diido. “I thought you was just another soldier. Till you opened your mouth. Your words are right but you change the sound of them.”

“Wonder how you would mangle my language.”

“Say something in Downlander.”

Cam swore in his own tongue, then translated it for her.

“What? You all speak like that down there? You know”—Diido started picking a thread out of her robe—“the first Downlander I seen, I thought she was a demon.” She told Cam how she had looked, pale hair, pale eyes, pale skin.

Cam sprawled on the grass, laughing, laughing. “Demon!” He watched Diido mince about, mimicking the Downlander she had seen. Abruptly she stopped, fists clenched against her chest.

“You done looking at me yet?”

“You . . .” Cam's breath stuck, his words. “I thought you were showing me what that Downlander—”

“I got to go.” She was up and on her feet, but stopped as suddenly as she'd done a moment before, then turned and walked backward a pace or two. “You coming, then?”

“Coming?” Cam was up on his feet in one movement. “Where?”

“Got something I'd show you, then, haven't I?”

Close by the building works for the third wall, modest behind a veil of trees, was a shrine. It was flat-roofed, all new white paint and gold leaf.

“I never knew this was here,” said Cam.

“Told you I know everything about this place.” Diido ran lightly up to the door and pushed it open. Cam, watching her, took the steps slowly, passed under a door wide and high. Sunlight, dropping through it, lit the space. He glanced up and recoiled.

It was a man, young. Cam looked again, closer, and he felt what he had felt whenever he'd beheld Gyaar: shock. Breath-hard, sweat-wet shock. “Me.” And he spread his hand on the plaster, framing one side of the portrait. “Uplander.” He let his hand fall. There could be no doubt of it. He was still a long time, looking at the picture.

“See,” Diido whispered. “Not so different at all.”

“Who is he?”

“Gyodan Ryuu, eldest son to Lord Ryuu.”

“Dead.”

“Alive again in you. When I saw you, I thought you must be a ghost. Because of this.”

“I am not a ghost.” Cam laughed. “Though I sometimes feel like one.”

Diido looked at him from the corners of her eyes.

“My . . .” Cam bit on his lip. “My mam is a Margil, from Lodden way, you know, north of Dorn-Lannet. And they are their own kind of people, known for it. I guess long ago they came . . . maybe even from this House.”

“Whatever it is, the blood runs true in you.”

Cam did not realize how he was staring at her until she began to fidget and look aside. “You . . . why did you follow me, from the marketplace?”

“You was staring at me at the wall that time. Like I was the ghost. I wanted to know why.”

Cam sat on his heels. “You have given me this, now I would give you something.”

She looked down at him, eyes narrowing.

“Tseri. I will free you from him.”

Diido went red, then white. “Yah. Downlander soldier without a brass bit to your name. I know what you mean. Free me, pah!”

He was horrified by what she did then. She bent her knees to the floor, her head into her hands, and she wept. “Get away. Leave me.”

“Don't.” He shouldered himself off the wall and sat beside her. “Please don't.” He put his arm around her and hugged her, like he would his sister Pin, and then—aware of her shoulders, slight against his arm, of his arm against her skin—not like that at all.

 

A SHADOW WAS FALLEN from the bridge onto the water, lay there rippling faintly. Even from his viewpoint on the hill, Cam could see it. A man, cloaked and hooded, one of the Lords or warriors taking some air. But something about how he moved, the set of his shoulders . . . Lord Gyaar, Cam knew it. The breath stopped in his chest and he thought he would die, it took him so long to get his wind again, his wits back about himself.
Fool, fool
, he thought,
what are you here for but to see him?
Before his mind's eye was the sword swinging down, and the spray of blood.