The Seer - eARC (44 page)

“Were they wearing red and black, like what I’m wearing?”

The boy looked right, left. A hard swallow, then another. He gave a single, small nod.

Most interesting; Innel had directed no military action in the province of Varo.

Of course, there should be no gold ore in Varo, either.

Innel nodded his dismissal at Rutif, who grabbed the boy and drew him out the door, a triumphant smile on his face at the credit with Innel this would have earned him.

When he was gone, Nalas made a sober, thoughtful sound. “Deserters, you think? Looting and burning the town?”

“Likely,” Innel said, not wanting to think of the alternative, that it was his troops doing a little unauthorized tax collection. To Srel he said, “Rutif knows to keep his mouth shut. Get him extra coin to make him even happier about it. The boy . . .” He exhaled. He had no choice; a child that age could only be forced to keep secrets. “Get him to the slave market, somewhere far from the city where no one will care what he says.”

“Yes, ser,” Srel said softly.

“Nalas, send some reliable and trustworthy scouts to Varo. Have them look for signs of gold.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

While the rest of the household slept, Amarta stood in the garden listening to the sounds of birds beginning their loud discussions as the morning brightened. She examined the vegetables and spices they had planted, and knelt to pull weeds, tossing them into the wild tangle of jungle beyond, where vines and grasses were ever eager to take over their garden.

Perripur was a marvel to her. Gentle rains and fragrant flowers, succulent fruits that grew wild in the encroaching forest, all just steps from the house. Warm nights and bright days. This was winter?

In only three months they were eating from the garden they had planted. The land was rich, Maris explained, the sun powerful.

A beautiful land, a comfortable home. Plenty to eat. And no winter. It was hard to imagine anywhere she would rather be.

If only she could stay.

Maris left on her own every tenday or so, returning days later with food and supplies, clothes to replace the ragged ones they had been wearing. They offered to go with her but she declined.

“Best keep you out of sight. You are safe here, and I need the time to myself.”

Dirina seemed to come into full color these months, like the flowers thick across the high mass of green that shaded the house. She looked happier each day. Perhaps it was that they were no longer hungry and tired and running.

Amarta felt her spirits lift as her sister hummed as she prepared food, as Maris showed Pas how to weed the garden. When the three of them helped Maris reassemble the pipes leading from the well to the house that gave them running water inside as well as out, Amarta could not remember being so happy.

One day Pas burst in from playing outside. He ran to Maris, grabbed her hand, began to pull. “A frog, Maris. Orange eyes. Come see. It has orange stripes!”

She remembered this moment in vision, felt a pang of sorrow amidst the sweetness. She smiled at him and asked: “Can it wait?”

“No!” he said loudly, with a face of such delight that it seemed her heart would burst from joy.

It was time.

Maris smiled and shrugged, to show how helpless she was, and rose from her chair at the table where she had been laying out strands of plants to dry, letting him tug her to the door.

“You should go see it, too,” Amarta gently urged Dirina. A look of confusion passed her face, but she, too, went to see the frog.

Alone in the room they shared, Amarta pulled out her pack and began to gather her belongings.

By the time they returned, she was packed to go. Pas’s face and hair had somehow accumulated a great deal of dirt. He was happily breathing hard from some exertion.

“Pas,” Amarta said. “Remember about wiping your feet on the mat at the door?”

“Yes. But helping in the garden. More important than feet.” He sat on the bed, saw the pack, frowned. “I don’t want to leave.”

“Good, because you are not going to,” Amarta said. “You stay here with Maris and your mother.”

“What do you think you’re doing?” Dirina demanded.

There was no way out of this moment that did not end in tears. She took her stunned sister’s hands in her own. “He will come here. Not tomorrow, not next month, but soon. He will come. We all know it.”

“Maris will protect us.”

“And when the Lord Commander hires another mage? Will she fight against him for us?”

“Yes!”

“Then shall I be the cause of another Shentarat Plains? No, I will not.” Amarta saw another shirt she should take. She stuffed it into her pack.

“But in Munasee you always knew the hunter was coming and you got away from him. You kept us safe every day.”

Her sister had known, then. All along. She sighed. Why couldn’t they tell each other the truth? “He will find a way,” she said. “And how many are looking for me now? In time, someone will silence my foresight.” Perhaps another mage, one who didn’t have the affection Maris had for them. “And then what?”

Then Dirina and Pas would be in danger again. She had to leave them while they had this chance.

“We’re safe here,” Dirina said stubbornly. “Maris will protect us.”

“Shall we risk her, too, as we have so many others? No.” Pas was determinedly untying a knot on her pack. She drew her sister to sit next to her on the bed, pulling Pas’s hand away from the pack, holding him tight. “Diri, you and Pas have a home here. I have wanted this for you, a place you could both be safe. Here it is. But only if I am somewhere else.”

“You can’t, you—”

“There’s going to be a war. I have pushed the visions away, but they haunt me every night. All across the empire. Fight and terror. Illness and hunger.”

“There have always been wars and illness.”

“Not like this.”

“You can’t prevent it.”

That might well be true. But staying here was the same as letting it happen, the same as letting her parents die.

Enana. Nidem.

Now that Dirina and Pas were safe, comfortable and happy, she would draw the hunter’s attention back where it belonged. To her.

She stood, looking around to see if there was anything else to take.

“Where do you mean to go?” Dirina asked.

Her sister surely knew this answer, at least some part of her knew, but she did not want to. Amarta understood that, all too well.

She could answer that she was going farther south to lead the hunters away from them. That she planned to cross the sea to the lands beyond, and there she would be safe from all of this.

Had it always been this way between them, pretending, telling each other half-truths to keep each other going through all the achingly wretched times? Here and now, in these last minutes together, should she say something comforting and untrue?

Amarta met her sister’s eyes, trying to be brave enough for both of them. “To the Lord Commander. To answer his questions. To stop running away.”

“No!” Dirina took the pack off the bed, hurled it to the floor, as if that might somehow stop Amarta from leaving. “We have spent years running from that monster. Enana and Kusan and Munasee—so much struggle to get this far away. You would throw all that overboard, all those who helped us? All who sacrificed?”

Her sister did not know about Nidem’s death, perhaps did not know how clearly Amarta had seen their own parents’ death. But what Dirina did not know about how many had paid so dearly to see them escape, Amarta did not intend to tell her.

Dirina’s voice rose in pitch. “You said that if we went there we’d never be able to leave again.”

We
. Dirina was not listening. Did not want to hear. Despite the warm air, Amarta felt a chill. “You and Pas will stay here.”

Pas’s arms were around Amarta’s legs, his forehead head resting on her hip.

“But we always go together.”

“Not this time.”

“You can’t go.”

“I can.”

At this Maris walked in, took in the scene. Dirina went to her. “She’s saying she’ll leave. Go back to Yarpin. Maris, tell her no.”

“I just left that stinking sewer of misery. Why would you even consider such a thing?”

Farther north than she had ever been; it seemed a very long way indeed. It was, she suddenly realized, still winter there. Real winter.

She sat down on the bed. Could this wait until spring? Even summer? Another year?

No. The longer she waited, the more likely someone would find them and hurt those she would sacrifice everything to protect. She had to get away from them.

“Maris,” she said, “when we stood on the glass plains, you told us about the many who had died there.”

“And?”

“That blood—that debt you paid against—it is in the past. I see that suffering and more in the future. If I can make the Lord Commander understand, I have a chance of changing it.”

“I know him, Amarta. He won’t change course at your words.”

“He did once.”

“He did?”

“Yes,” Amarta said, remembering the dark night in Botaros, when her words helped changed Arunkel’s history. “He might again.”

“That seems—optimistic, Ama. Even foolish.”

“If you had foreseen what made the glass plains, Maris, would you have stood by and done nothing? Even knowing that any action you took to try to prevent it might have been both optimistic and foolish?”

Maris did not reply.

Dirina’s voice cracked. “Maris, he’ll hurt her. He might kill her. Tell her no.”

Who were they talking about now? The hunter? The Lord Commander?

Was there a difference?

“Shall I guard her day and night?” Maris asked softly. “Shall I take her mind away so that she no longer has will or remembers her intent?” As Dirina seemed to consider her words seriously, Maris shook her head. “No, I will not.”

“But what will happen?”

“Why don’t you ask her?”

Dirina was silent a moment. Then: “Ama? What do you see?”

So familiar, the question, along with her sister’s faith in her answer. She swallowed a painful lump.

“And this time,” Dirina said, “you must tell me the truth.”

The truth? Could her sister bear such a thing?

She looked at Dirina, for the first time trying to imagine what it must have been like for her to leave home after their parents had died, to take a girl so young she might have been her own daughter from the only home she had ever known, in the deep dark of night, out to an unknown world, with only sense and reason to guide her. Then to flee Botaros, a baby in her arms, on the say-so of a child.

Amarta had been young enough then that Dirina’s actions had seemed—not easy, no, but surely what anyone would do.

But now she understood it was not so. She could not imagine herself having done the same.

Her sister, she realized, had courage beyond her understanding. Yes, she could bear the truth. She was stronger than Amarta had thought.

She sat on the bed, clearing her mind as the three watched. The question seemed to take a long time to arrange in her head. Perhaps because it was about herself, or perhaps because the very act of seeing made her part of much that might happen, making the threads blurry and sticky, slippery and shifting.

It was like a merchant’s scale. Herself, whole and sound on one side; on the other, the lives of uncountable peoples across the lands. One side might come out right, or the other, but both? She did not think so. Or, if it were possible, it was remote, too distant and intertwined to see. Pieces in motion that had yet to begin. Decisions by those who had no clue they would ever need to make them.

She could see this much: if she did not go, if she did not try, there would be bodies in piles, blood in the gutters.

But here in Perripur and inland to these mountains? Surely this far . . .

She looked again.

The violence would be only rumor for years: the crumbling, northern Anandynar empire, safely distant. Perripin would hear of the broken alliances, betrayals ending in burnings and slaughter. But it would be very far away. For a time.

Then it would come. She saw Kelerre’s tall silver towers torn down, their ruins a mocking tribute to the long friendship and trade ties between the two countries. Arunkin, hungry and destitute, would flee to Perripur, where the air was sweet and warm and food grew wild, fanning out along the Mundaran seashore, bringing desperation and destruction with them.

Pas would be a young man by then. Grown tall and strong, fighting for his Perripin home. A fast flash, barely there and it was gone: a Perripin force overrun by Arunkin, Pas facing death in some useless battle.

She opened her eyes, unable to keep the horror from her face. She looked at Pas, who watched her intently, his child’s eyes and mouth open wide.

“Amarta?” Dirina asked.

“There is no simple answer,” she said, looking at the three of them, Pas last of all, where her gaze seemed to stick. “This is bigger than me. I will make him listen. I must.”

Dirina’s face crumpled in agony. “I’ll never see you again.”

“You don’t know that. Even I don’t know that. Maris, will you look after them until I . . .” Until she what? Did she really expect to come back? “Will you look after them?”

“You can’t go,” Dirina said, choking back tears. “I forbid it.”

Amarta swallowed a laugh, took her sister in her arms and held her while Dirina sobbed into her neck.

For so long Dirina had been strong, keeping them fed and free. To leave her here, where she could have a sweet, warm life, was the best gift Amarta could think of. This painful day would pass.

Dirina wiped her eyes with her hands. “Maris, will you take her where she wants to go? There are so many on her trail.”

“I will be okay.”

“Maris, please?” Dirina was crying openly now. It tore at Amarta, and tears gathered in her own eyes.

Then Pas was in front of her. “Up,” he said firmly.

“Oh, sweet one—”

“Up,” he insisted.

“You’re getting so big,” she said, hefting him into her arms, where he hugged her tightly.

“I’ll take you to Kelerre,” Maris said to Amarta. “Get you some kind of passage north to the capital. If you’re decided.”

“I am.” Amarta looked around the house. “Will they be safe in the weeks you’re not here?”

“Upon my house and my land is every protection in my power to make. A fair bit. They are as safe here as anywhere.”

“But what if someone comes and—” Amarta said. “If you are not here and—”

“What, now—you, too? Nothing is certain. You of all people should know this.”

“Yes, but—”

“You’re the seer. Look. Decide for yourself.”

It was hazy, like mountains through a distant rain storm, but she could feel it: a chance for her family. A chance they would not have if Amarta stayed. That they would not have while Innel sev Cern al Arunkel sought her.

“Then,” she said, looking at Dirina and Pas, wanting to drink them in with her eyes and never forget them, “let us go. Now.”

Pas ran to his mother, who picked him up, sobbing. His expression was stark as he watched Amarta over her shoulder, then he, too, began to wail.

A winter storm, mild in temperature but very wet, delayed the boat’s departure from Dasae to Free Port. En route another storm soaked the decks, keeping the two women in the cabin.