The Returning (21 page)

A long time Gyaar Ryuu stood there, as if he were waiting for someone, something. The sun cleared the walls, dappling the bridge with a shifting print of leaves and branches. Then Lord Gyaar spun abruptly about and headed brisk and businesslike for the keep.

Cam fisted his hand in the grass and watched until he was lost to sight.
What are you doing?
he asked himself.
Skulking in the trees, skulking about the inn, and watching, watching, watching.

“Go,” he whispered.
Go home, stop sitting aside from everything. Just go
. Cam got to his feet, to go back to the inn, to go . . . where? Home? He found himself moving downhill and toward the wall. His old skill of silent stalking was unblunted—
Too hard learned to ever lose
, he thought—and he slipped through the trees with no more noise than a wraith.

CLOSE TO, THE keep wall was not pure and white and smooth. It was dusty and lichened, the plaster pocked and showing the gray stone underneath. Cam took a run-up and, flinging himself at it, hung spreadeagled on its outer face, the roughness of the plaster cutting up his cheek. He found a foothold, and another, shunted himself up high enough to risk letting go and reaching for the top. Grunting and panting, he hauled himself over and let himself drop more than twice his height to the ground; lay still until his breath came evenly and his fingers had feeling in them again.

He had landed on a wedge of gravel, the wall to his back, sapling woods surrounding him. He huddled under the shadow the wall threw down, afraid to move, afraid not to. Lookout was kept from the tower. Had he been seen, there would have been guards out by now, to drag him up before the Lord. He played that through his mind, the guard clanking across the lawn for him. Would he wait for them or would he run? If he ran, would they shoot him? He stopped it there, the strange fancy, and picking himself up worked his way into the trees.

The trees clumped thickly along the western rim of the pond, their branches dangling to the water. Cam snaked through them to the enclosure on their farther side.

Bamboo stalks tied in a loose crisscross fenced off the area. This close, Cam could see the fish in the tubs, the seedlings in the greenhouses. The old man shuffled out. His round belly sagged a little over the drawstring of his trousers, the brown flesh sagged on his skinny arms. Tseri.

Cam heard Diido's voice and the blood beat suddenly in his ears so that he could hear nothing else: to see her with Tseri—if he could have run, escaped the keep grounds, he would have. But he did not think the guard could miss him. She stopped at the gate, and Cam could see their feet, Tseri's splaying over the edge of his clogs, Diido's long and thin, delicate, one toe drawing arcs in the gravel, right to left, left to right. The gate
screeeked
and Diido walked away.

Cam sagged, limp, into the earth. Though he watched and waited and bit his nails away, Diido did not come back—nor Gyaar. It seemed that the day would never crawl to an end, let him go.

 

“QUIET TONIGHT, SOLDIER-BOY, yes, no, uh-uh.” His landlady mocked him, head tipped a little to one side, face parodying his own (he knew it) sullen look.

“Don't call me that.”

“Call you what I like, while you don't pay rent.” She smoothed her skirts.

“I pay—I work for you. You're paid. So you don't call me that.”

The silence that followed was awful. Cam turned apologies over in his mind but couldn't find words to fit.

“Siasen, he never died in the war,” said his landlady at last. “He ran off with the tap-maid.”

Cam looked up at her.

“I never told a soul. They all think he's dead, a hero. Hah. You know what I do? Every year I set a candle floating for him on the sea, just as if he was.”

“That's what we do too, but on the river!”

“Here's your next job,” said his landlady. “I want you to come with me, when I set his candle off. There's all kinds of riffraff down at the waterfront. Reckon you can keep them at a distance?”

Cam lifted one shoulder. “Do you?”

He wanted to see the ocean by night, but it was completely invisible, just a darkness that could have been anything—night, hell, nothing. The lanterns of the brothels on the waterfront showed, the white-painted pier was a pale ghost pier, but the ocean simply was not. Cam held the little wicker raft steady while his landlady lit the candle. The edges of the raft curved up, sheltering the flame. His landlady hoicked up her skirts and waded thigh-deep into the water, and the receding tide took the candle from her. She splashed back to the sand where Cam waited. Side by side they walked the road back to the inn, with neither sight nor sound of the riffraff she had spoken of.

“You didn't need me for this.” He saw her shoulders lift, the movement faint in the dark. “At least you find work for me.” He laughed and the sound was hard. “My father wouldn't let me do anything around the farm. I had to leave—I was rotting, just, just . . .
You did earn it
, he said. Earn what?”

After a long time of walking she said, “Just there when the sword fell, you were.”

“How can I go in the castle gate, if that's it?” He shivered. “My only claim?”

“Then why you here?”

He remembered the swamp, the sudden, startling joy that lit Gyaar Ryuu's face on seeing him, Cam. He thought of the sword cut, turned aside, taking his arm, but not his life. “What if he says no, if he will not take on my service? What then?” He wiped his eyes on his sleeve, sniffed.

“If you keep on this way, you'll never know.”

Cam shivered, the sea breeze chill on his wet face. They walked in silence the rest of the way back to the inn.

“I've another job for you,” said the innkeeper, once they were there. She took the bench across the table from him, fussing with her apron and skirts. Cam tipped his head to catch her eyes, tried to say with his:
What?
She'd brought cups and a jug of beer, poured for him, then for herself. “Well.” Fiddled with the cup and apron again.

Cam leaned forward, laughing a little. “What?”

“It's been good having a man about the place and I thought that maybe you . . .”

He did not know what to say. She reached across the table. For the first time he saw her long black eyes and full lower lip. Long, slim hands. Her breasts. But there was Gyaar Ryuu, there was Diido, and he . . .

“I . . . I'm . . .” He looked left, right, looked at her.

She gave him a smile, small and sad. “All right, all right.” She got up.

Cam tried to explain. “When first I left Kayforl, Dorn-Lannet was the edge of the world. But that edge has moved, keeps moving.”

She had folded both slender hands about her beer cup, holding to it as if it were very precious.

“If I'd stayed there, slave to the seasons, my horizon would never have moved. If I stayed here with you, it would be a good life, but it would be like Kayforl.”

“If you thought less, you'd be easier in yourself.”

Cam caught her hand. “Tomorrow I'll try the castle gate.”

His landlady nodded, slipped her hand free. After a moment, she laughed. “About time.”

“
T
HEY HAVE BEEN burning Ryuu flags in the marketplace,” said Gyaar.

“Who,” said Father. “Who has been doing such a thing?”

“I do not know.”

“You do not know.
I
would know. I would know everything, everything!” Father struck the table with his palm and the tea bowls rattled. “Every single thing that can be known about every living body in this place, but see it done so that they know as little as possible of it.” He leaned back, flicked his hand. Where they usually wandered out in twos or threes, chatting, the councilors stalked out singly, in silence.

In his notebook Gyaar drew circles and spirals until his inkstone dried.

“And I would start here, in this keep.” Father looked at him. “In this room.”

Gyaar laid his inkbrush down, closed his notebook. He thought, but did not dare say,
You know that I kept some secret from you. Why do you not ask me? Why do you order me, come at it from behind?

“I . . . I have an odd ritual, that I have recently come into.” Every morning, before sunrise, he went to the guard tower, to watch the man that everyone called Gyaar's Downlander (never, though, to Gyaar's face) watch the keep. “Day after day, the same pattern.”

“How long now?”

Gyaar held up the fingers of one hand, with the forefinger of the other laid across his palm. “Six days.”

“And you did not tell me.”

Gyaar looked at his father eye to eye. “I did not tell you, Father.”

Lord Ryuu struck him, with all his strength. Gyaar spun from his cushion and sprawled on all fours on the mats. Righting himself, he adjusted his sash. “You will not do that again. I am no longer a child.”

Father smiled and Gyaar's heart lurched.

“What a risk you take.” Father reached and picked up Gyaar's knife, which had fallen from his sash. “He is yours, but I do not like this.” He toyed with the knife, turning it on its point, the base of its grip, its point. It made a dull light
thunk
,
thunk
,
thunk
on the wooden surface, as regular as a heartbeat. Then he spun it, a gleaming wheel, and caught it by the haft. As a child, Gyaar had loved that trick.

“He is carefully watched, Father, and I am sure means no harm.”

“Of what he intends you cannot be sure. That he is carefully watched, you must be certain.”

 

GYAAR SHIFTED IN the seat the Captain of the Guard had vacated for him.

“Were you caught playing with one girl too many, My Lord?” the man teased. He had a slab of ice brought from the cellar and made Gyaar hold it to his bruised cheek.

“Captain Urasu.” Gyaar's cheek throbbed. “We must take a census of the town.”

“Pheeew.” Urasu shook his head. “We have trouble enough keeping things peaceful.”

“So, we do it peacefully.”

Gyaar took the ice from his cheek, and prodded at the bruise until his eyes watered. “A census, and they'll think it's about taxes, increasing them. Then we work behind that front and gather the real information.”

“Easier to leave that front out, Lord Gyaar. Here, that bruise will swell right up if you don't keep the ice to it.”

There was no choice about it, but Gyaar was not going to admit as much. He put the ice in the man's hands and left.

 

“I WILL NOT RIDE in a palanquin.” Gyaar folded his arms.

“How like to your father you look when you do that.”

Gyaar let his arms drop to his sides.

Stepping closer, Mother looked at him. “Surely you cannot see out of your eye. You should have it treated.”

“Mother!”

She bent her head and stepped into the gilded box. “I would visit your brother's shrine, and I will not walk.” She rang a bell, and the carriers lifted her. Guards rode before her, and after, but Gyaar walked beside. Ahead, the road was clear, although crowds stood to either side, where the vanguard had tidied them. They waved, they cheered, as Gyaar and Mother went by—most of them. Gyaar looked closely at the unsmiling faces, tried to commit them to memory.

Gyodan's shrine had been newly built after the taking of Dorn-Lannet, but already little stone dolls lined the path, put there by people who had lost loved ones to the war. The Shrine of the War Dead, it was called in the town, though Gyaar always thought of it as Gyodan's Shrine.

As soon as he passed beneath the gate, Gyaar felt the quiet of the place work on him. He crooked his arm so that Mother could put her hand there.