The Returning (22 page)

“Your Downlander is back.”

“Yes, Mother.”

“You have a most untoward method of managing him.”

“I am curious, to see . . . I am not sure.”

She led him to the altar room. One wall had a niche built into it, with a lamp burning. “Gyodan.” Mother reached up and smoothed Gyodan's painted hair. “My shrine-son. He was my baby, once. But he is dead, and he is not reborn in this Downlander.”

Gyaar could not, for a moment, speak. “I did not think—”

“You do.” She laid her hand on his arm for a moment, a brief, delicate touch, the only way she had ever touched her children. “I am your mother and I may say this to you.”

They returned to the keep, walked the garden, his mother's arm through his, the ever-present ladies trailing them, their voices
tink
-
tink
-tinkling.

 

GYAAR SAT ON a dais, in the inner courtyard, gazing down on a wall of clerks on low wooden stools at low wooden tables. Long lines of townspeople, brought and kept there by Ryuu soldiers, were feeding them information. Name, age, birth month, family, address, property and assets, employment—every single person in Dorn-Lannet. The clerks worked in shifts, but Gyaar spent the day entire watching the proceedings. Spent days. He looked for the Downlander, and looked, but saw nothing of him.

Information
, wrote Gyaar, and found he was listening. This many goats, chickens, sacks of grain, bolts of cloth, brothers, sisters, children. Downlander and Uplander. Who worshipped at which shrine. Who came willingly to the census, who resented coming, who had to be forced to it. Who made trouble.
Our people
, he thought.

At the council following, he stood up. “I would report to you personally the results of the census.” He did so, at length.

“Where does it come from, this excess of energy and interest?” Father asked of him when they sat as they always did after the meeting had finished.

How to explain that part of this place had become his? Gyaar sidestepped. “I had thought you would be pleased by it.”

“Hnn.” Father was watching him, the corners of his mouth turned down, his upside-down smile. At length, he shifted his gaze from Gyaar, rolled the papers from the morning's meeting together tightly.

Gyaar untied his sash and drew a full breath. Lying back on the cushions, he looked up at the ceiling, the dark wood and the boxlike pattern of the rafters. The morning sun brushed the undersides of the beams with pale yellow light.

“Enough of this,” said Father abruptly. “Bring him in or I will.”

Gyaar started. “He is mine, Father, you said so.”

“You have three days more, and then I'll have the guards put an arrow in him and he can join his fellows under the plain out there.” Father thwacked the rolled papers on the table.

 

THREE DAYS MORE. Gyaar went directly to the Guard Captain's office, his steps sounding a rhythm that fitted the words:
three, days, more.

Urasu offered his chair, but Gyaar waved him into it, chose to stand.

Urasu leaned forward. “We found him—where he hides when he isn't spying on us.”

Gyaar turned and paced out the room, to hide the moil of fear and excitement that leaped in him. “Well?”

Urasu looked up at Gyaar, quickly away. “We tracked him to an inn. The White Mule, it's call—”

“Does he know he's being trailed?” Gyaar was too astonished to put the pieces he had together in any order.

“Hard to say, My Lord. He slips away from us, just turns to smoke and wafts away. I don't know if it's because he knows, or because he's careful.”

“What of the innkeeper? Have you questioned him?”

“Her.”

Gyaar waved a hand, impatient. “I would see her. It can be done discreetly, can it not?”

“There's further information needed from her to complete the census, I would think.” Urasu winked.

Gyaar gave the man a cold look, then turned away to grin. “Arrange it.”

 

LONG BLACK EYES, long graceful hands, gray heavy in the black hair, and a voice straight from the taproom.

“You got it in the census,” she said. “Why ask me again, sir?”

The guard was a junior, helmet jaunty on the back of his head, whipping his sheathed sword about. “Just tell my superior what you told me, when we spoke a two-day ago.”

She shook her skirt out and smoothed her hair. “He comes and asks to work his board.” She shrugged. “Now he works here, for me.”

“And what you did not tell me.”

“Bossy snippy thing, aren't you?” She smiled at the young guard until he reddened, then she turned to Urasu, folded her arms, and looked him up and down. She nodded, slowly. “He's real interested in this place here.” She stuck a thumb in the direction of the keep, behind her. “I ask him about it, but he won't be drawn. Rises early, before sunup, and takes that long pull up the Mount.”

“Mount Lannet,” the young guard murmured for Gyaar's benefit.

“I see him go up the track that way. Some days, he's not back until sundown. Some days, he's around the day long, working.” She looked at the guard. “Does a good job too, when he does do it.”

“Tell me about your other guests.”

“No.”

“Only him?”

“Only that one.”

“May I ask why?”

“You can ask.”

“I am asking.”

“Think I'm a traitor, do you? Turning in information on people who trust me?”

“This Downlander, he does not trust you? Is that why you'll tell us about him?”

“Need the money, don't I?”

The guard turned to the Guard Captain. “Sir, she won't be drawn.” Gyaar had to wipe his hand over his mustache to hide his smile.

“I think . . .” The landlady of the White Mule did that, for some while. “I think I'm helping him, doing this.”

“You can help him some more, Mistress Innkeeper. He has three days. After that . . .” The guard drew his finger across his throat. “Help him a little more, and see he comes to the keep.” He set a bag of coins down on the table. “There'll be more, if he comes within that time.”

The innkeeper pushed the money away from her, roughly enough that the bag fell to the floor. “I'll tell him if he'll be safe.”

“He's dead if he doesn't; he lives if he does. Is that safe enough for you?”

 

THE NEXT MORNING, Gyaar changed his ritual, ignoring the tower and instead walking out under the setting moon and standing upon the bridge, in clear view of the hillside. A breeze blew inland from the sea, carried the salt smell with it as it ran invisible over the water, riffling the surface.

Father's voice sounded in his head—
Of what he intends you cannot be sure
—and Gyaar wondered,
What does he intend, this Downlander? What?
He weighed that against the image he carried of the boy in the marsh, lowering his bow, sparing his enemy. There had been a trust seeded in that moment, Gyaar was sure, and he would not betray it.

He would not? Was the Downlander watching? Did he understand the message Gyaar was sending? Tomorrow would be the third day.

Faint color washed into the garden, with the dawn. It was like the census: The more time Gyaar spent here in the garden, the more he grew into it, and it grew into him. He thought of the new laid over the old, lawn and trees over the gray gravel that had been here before. Uplander over Downlander.

 

“AN UPLANDER TAVERN girl raped, and a Downlander man butchered in front of his family. Retaliation for the rape, so it is said.” The councilor reporting sat down.

“We cannot split the town and give them half each.” Father sat very still. The stiller he was, the greater his anger. “We—What is it?”

A page knelt at the door. “My Lords, the Guard Captain sent to say we have Lord Gyaar's Downlander.”

“Where?” Gyaar spoke over the top of his father. “When?”

“At the gatehouse,” said the page.

“Have him brought here.”

The Downlander was manhandled into the hall. Released, he bowed to the ground. Father did not move, nor did he speak, and the Downlander remained on his knees, eyes upon the floor, hand upon his thigh, calm.

Father lifted the little finger of his right hand. Mailed guards thumped to attention, the clashing of their armor bringing sweat out on the Downlander's skin.

Gyaar walked a circle around him, the clack of his boot heels reminding him of Gyodan, though he did not know why. He swallowed. “How did you get in?”

“On this occasion, I knocked at the gate.” The Downlander slid a glance up at Gyaar, and away. A guard struck him to the floor, then pulled him back onto his knees.

“Dangerous pastime, the trespass into Ryuu land.” Gyaar trod a second circuit about the prisoner. “Death is the penalty for that.”

“If it were so, I would be dead now, My Lord.”

Father spun on his heel and walked to the window, where he stood motionless.

“You offend my father.” Gyaar stood over the Downlander, who was wise enough to keep his gaze bent downward now.

“I am sorry.” His speech was fluent, but marred by his strong Downlander accent.

“What do you think you do, playing at hide-and-go-seek?”

The young man's left hand came up to the stump of his right. “When I left, last time, I was offered service. I did not take it then, but I would now.” He glanced up again, and it was Gyodan's eyes, but never their expression.

The room was very, very quiet. “I . . .” Gyaar had to clear his throat, speech was so unwilling to come. “I must make a decision, death or service. You will hear from me.” To the guards he said, “Take him back to the gatehouse.”

They went in procession, a dozen men to hold a cripple who had volunteered himself up to their keeping in the first place.

Gyaar poured tea for Father, who sat with his arms folded across his chest and refused to take it.

“What will you do with him?”

Gyaar did not know.

Father rose up, kicking his cushion out of the way. “Born for the shrine, you.” He left the council chamber.

That Father could still say that—Gyaar waited while the room emptied, then dropped his face into his hands.
He thinks me weak
, thought Gyaar,
or soft, or womanish, or some such un-Ryuu-like thing.
He drew himself up, and folded his arms, and pondered how to show Father that tolerance, patience were not weaknesses, but strengths.

 

“PHEEW”—URASU ROCKED HIS chair onto its back legs—“but he's like to Gyodan! What will you do with him?”

“Do with him?”

“You can't keep him shoveling horseshit, beg pardon, Lord Gyaar, but you can't. He's a fighting man. Out of practice, but that's what he is.”

“Have him practice, then.”

The man stared hard at nothing, and chewed at his bottom lip. “Bow's out of the question with a one-armed man, likewise the quarterstaff.”

“Put him to learning the sword.”

“If that is what you wish, Lord Gyaar.”

“It is. Where is he?”

“Mucking out stalls in the stable, like you said.”

Gyaar strode down the long central aisle of the stable to speak to his Downlander. In this he had taken Father's advice:
If you must take him on, have him make his way up from the bottom.

“Ver-cam-er Att-ling.”

Shirtless and sweating and stinking of horse dung, the Downlander bowed.

“Verucam—pah.” Gyaar spread his hands. “You Downlanders speak with your tongues between your teeth.”

“Cam will do,” said his Downlander. “If you can manage that.”

Gyaar did something that he did rarely. He laughed.

 

THE GUARD CAPTAIN was warming one hand at the brazier, against the autumn chill, the other tucked into his armpit, then swapping them around. “He's wasted on this, your Downlander.”

“He's no good?” Gyaar touched his own, whole, right arm.

“It's not that, Lord Gyaar. He's shaping fine, not brilliant, but fine. Ha-ha. Not too impressed at first, he wasn't.” He tucked his right arm behind him and became Cam: “
From the beginning? You want I learn sword-fighting from the beginning?
” Dropped his arm and the accent and was himself again: “The very beginning. What do you think? You're learning it left-handed, it's all new.” Muttered under his breath, swearing in Downlander.

Gyaar grinned.

The man hesitated, opened his mouth, frowned and closed it. “He was watching the keep for half a month, longer, before we were ever aware of his presence.”

Gyaar hoped his face did not show the extent of his shock. “A half month!”

“He has an instinct for it.”

“For what?”

“You know how Downlanders fight, all creep and prowl and ambuscade. He's got that. He knows . . . who is there and where, and who should not be, what they intend.”

“What are you telling me, Urasu?”

“Personal Guard, My Lord.” The Guard Captain propped his foot on a stool and crossed his arms on his thigh. “Let us look at it . . . he'd need support—another handful of men to back him up, of full strength and full capability, but—”

“I see.” Gyaar nodded.

“I do see.” He slapped the Guard Captain on the shoulder. “It's worth thinking on.”

Urasu stood very straight, and looked Gyaar in the eye. “You're shaping all right, young Lord Gyaar.”