The Seer - eARC (49 page)

That man there, who rode before her. She could have killed him that day.

No, she could not have. It had not been in her to do so.

Would it be now?

He led them off the main road where he had once chased her, a side road, up onto a hill. There they stopped in a wide ring of alders, small buds dusty mauve and green with early spring, and dismounted.

Through the trees and down the hillside, through pine and bare branch, she could see bits of Enana’s farmland and house.

“Is that it?” Maris asked.

Amarta nodded.

“Know this, Seer,” he said, “before you go to them: you risk them, doing so.”

“What do you mean?”

“It is likely we are being tracked. Any who follow us will ask them questions. Less skillfully than I did.”

“Or maybe you don’t want me to see what you did to them.”

“They are your friends; risk them if you wish.”

“Why should you care?”

“I care about getting you safely to the capital, and I prefer not to leave behind a trail of signposts. If your friends have not seen you, they can’t tell anyone you were here.”

“I want to know if they are well.”

“And you won’t believe whatever I tell you, so—” He stopped, made a thoughtful sound. “Perhaps you can find your answer without risking them.”

“What do you mean?”

“Decide to see them. Then look into the future and see what would occur when you go to the house. If they are well, change your mind and decide not to go. If you can do such a thing.”

“Maris?” she asked.

“He’s likely correct,” the mage said, “that we are being tracked and your friends would be endangered if you went closer.”

She felt a vast longing to see them, but that was not reason enough to put them at risk. Surely she had already cost enough people so much.

Leaning against a tree, she stared at the distant farmhouse and tried to ease her mind into placidity. She closed her eyes, pushed herself into the future.

She would, she resolved, go to the farmhouse. In a few minutes. She would do this.

And then . . . ?

A walk down the hill, leaving the others behind. A scrape of the back of her hand on a thorned brush she had not seen, wrapped around a trunk. She would wipe the bit of blood on her trousers. A knock on the door. There was Cafir, Enana’s youngest, now with a full beard, filled out solid across the shoulders. It would take him a very long moment to recognize her, and she would be smiling so wide, and then he would call out excitedly to his mother. Enana would run, and she, too, would smile, and Amarta’s heart would swell with joy as she swept her into a hug, and—

She pushed further, days hence.

Would someone else come, asking questions?

A boot on the ground, one she did not recognize. A hand on a tree trunk, examining a broken thorn. A heavy knock on a door. The look on Enana’s face as she opened it to see the men who stood there.

Amarta opened her eyes, blinking away vision, struggling to come back to this moment. The one in which she would not go to the farmhouse.

Tayre had been telling the truth. And that meant what?

It meant nothing.

“Amarta?” Maris asked softly.

Taking the reins of her mare, she put a foot into the stirrup, pulled herself up into the saddle. “I don’t need to see them,” she said.

More days of travel took them back to the Great Road, having circumvented Chimash and the trouble there. More nights in inns, more days of riding.

In the evenings, Maris often left them for a time to go walking by herself. Tonight Tayre was performing his usual movements, his stretches and twists, turns and jumps, drops and rolls. He would start slow then speed up, the fast, flexible motions sometimes hard to follow. A lethal dance with an invisible attacker.

It was stunning to her, what he could do with his body. Until she had seen him do all this it had not even occurred to her that he would need to practice. Nightmare creatures did not need to practice to be what they were.

When he finished tonight, his face damp with sweat, he sat and drank water, turning his chair slightly to face the door.

Guarding her.

“You have been south of Kelerre? To Dulu? To Timurung?” she asked.

“I have.”

“What are people like in other places?”

“Strip away language and dress and they are much the same. They eat, sleep, make babies, and die. Some talk, some dance, some do fancy tricks with rows of beetles, some sit burning thin scented sticks, waiting for the day when their luck will change.”

“I would like to see all that.”

“Perhaps you will.”

At this her smile vanished.

“Look what I found,” Maris said cheerfully when she returned. She set a carafe of wine and some small ceramic cups on the table and poured, handing the cups around.

“Do we celebrate tonight, Maris?” Tayre asked.

Maris downed her cup and poured another. “I have come rather farther north than I intended to, my friends. But now that I am satisfied that you”—she gestured at Tayre with her cup—“will see Amarta safely to that wretch Innel, it may be time for me to go. I thought we could all use a little help brightening the prospect. That is, unless you’ve changed your mind, Amarta, and will return home with me?”

Amarta felt her stomach go leaden. She had come to like this, she realized, being in company with Maris. And, yes, even Tayre. It had become easy to forget what this was about, where she was going. And why.

For a moment she let herself imagine returning to warm lands. To Dirina and Pas.

“No,” she said softly. They would not be safe with her there. She took a sip. “Oh,” she said, her mind suddenly and entirely on the rich, smoky wine. “How marvelous.”

“It had better be, for what I paid for it.”

“So like a Perripin to pay too much for wine,” Tayre said.

“Certainly not,” Maris said. “Just enough.”

It warmed her throat and stomach, easing the ache of sorrow she felt deep inside. She held out her hand for more. Maris refilled.

“Aren’t you having any?” she asked Tayre.

A shake of the head. “It would slow me.”

“You don’t have to be fast, at least not tonight.”

“It’ll slow me tomorrow some as well, and who knows what I’ll have to be tomorrow?” He smiled.

Maris chuckled at this, and for some reason it struck Amarta as funny, too. “He’s fast,” she said. “Have you seen him move? So fast. Like that time with the dart.”

“Not fast enough, though, was I?”

“That wasn’t you. That was me. I saw it coming. So I”—He had come so close that day. So close. Now she was willingly going to the man who had sent him. She had reasons, she reminded herself. Good ones. “What will happen to me at the palace?” she asked.

Maris snorted softly. “Why ask us? Don’t you see the future?”

“I don’t, always. It’s”—she exhaled frustration, trying to clear the haze of her thinking enough to explain—“too much. So many images I can’t make sense of them. Or understand how one thing that only might happen could lead to another that only might happen, if that and tens of other things happen in just the right way.”

The future was always shifting. Trying to hold it was like trying to hold a live fish with greased hands.

“But sometimes you know,” he said.

She looked back. “Sometimes most paths lead to the same place.”

“What do you see now?”

She took another sip and another and put the cup on the table. The truth was that her dreams had been full of horrors. She picked one.

“We ride through a smoking town. On the ground someone’s been cut open from neck to groin, skin pulled back, still alive. Making a horrible sound. Then we pass a barn with smoke coming out of the windows. Soldiers in red and black stab anyone who tries to get out the door or windows, throwing them back inside. At the edge of town are heads on the point of the gate. So much screaming.”

She inhaled raggedly, looking down at the red liquid in her cup.

“A hard future you see, Ama,” Maris said softly.

Swallowing the rest of what was in her cup, she held it out for more.

“The wine does not interfere with your foresight?” he asked, pouring.

“Not enough.” She shook her head, which made her feel a little dizzy, but was also sort of pleasant, so she did it again.

“Empty,” Maris said dourly. “I’ll be back.” She took the carafe and left.

Amarta stared at him. He looked back. Her and the hunter. Together. Again.

“You’re not so frightening anymore,” she said, feeling oddly accustomed to this shadow man. Comfortable, even.

“A pleasant change, I would think.”

“Yes,” she said adamantly. “I know what you are, but now, just now anyway, you seem almost like . . . I don’t know. Not a nightmare creature. A person.”

“I am glad to hear it,” he said.

“Or am I saying that because of the wine?”

He was watching her, but his only answer was an easy shrug, as if to say that it didn’t matter. He was right; it didn’t. Not anymore. Her path was set.

It would be nice to lie down and forget all that for a while. But the bed was all the way across the room. It seemed very far.

Surely not so far. She stood and was suddenly dizzy. Grabbing for the edge of the table to steady herself, she missed, knocking her cup into his full and untouched one. As one cup began to topple into the other, both heading for the edge of the table, he reached out both hands and took one in each, setting them back aright.

Not a drop had spilled.

“Oh,” she said. “That was clumsy of me. I—”

She stared at the cups he had set upright, imagined the red wine splashed across table and floor. He had caught them barely in time. She could never have done such a thing, not feeling as she did.

Or, really, ever. She was simply not that fast. Not that alert.

“Oh,” she said again, more slowly.

Why he hadn’t had any wine. What he really was.

The chill cut through the warmth of the wine, the warmth of the room, the comfort she had been feeling a moment ago. She remembered a frozen day on the banks of the Sennant on a raft. A hot afternoon in a thick, green canopy of forest.

He was no friend. He was not an ordinary person. She had let herself forget.

Slowly and with great care she walked over to the bed and sat. He was no longer watching her, but she was sure he knew exactly where she was and exactly what she was doing.

When Maris came back, Amarta did not drink any more wine.

“I leave tonight,” Maris said as she stepped into the inn room, setting her pack by the door. With a long look to Amarta, she said, “It is time.”

Amarta sat heavily on the bed, watching as Maris took Tayre by the shoulder and spoke softly and earnestly to him in Perripin.

The capital was less than a day away. Tomorrow Tayre would bring her to the man she had truly been fleeing all these years.

She hugged her legs, put her head down on her knees.

And then?

She saw things, certainly: high ceilings, endless questions, a room that locked from the outside. Flashes of color: red and white walls, the pink of slices of meat. The green of a shirt, the feel of fine linen.

Beyond that little was clear; there were too many crossroads and too many people who must yet decide to walk them.

This room in which she would sleep tonight—the last night she would be free, she realized—was as lavish as anything she had ever seen. Windows of clear glass showed a colorful, busy street below. A stone fireplace kept the room warm. Tapestries lined the walls with images of flowers and swords. The furniture was carved in similar patterns, the table decorated in red and black woods.

It was astonishing. Yet she would have traded it all for a packed dirt floor, a hungry belly, and windows and doors that leaked cold air, if it put Dirina and Pas by her side.

Until the moment Maris left—fast approaching—she could still change her mind.

Maris walked to her and drew her to her feet, taking her by the shoulders, looking into her eyes. “I ask you one last time, Amarta dua Seer: Are you set on this course? Innel will not treat you gently. You can still return with me to Perripur.”

It was so very, very tempting. She thought of Dirina and Pas.

No, nothing had changed. War was coming, a war so wretched and sweeping that it would threaten even her family, far away as they were. And even if she could do nothing to change it, they were safe only as long as she was not with them.

She looked at Tayre and wondered, without any real intention of finding out, what he would do if she left with Maris right now.

Follow, no doubt.

It didn’t matter; she knew her course.

“I must do this.”

“So be it.” Maris closed her eyes a moment then touched Amarta’s forehead with two fingers. Amarta felt something, then: a calming, a soothing. “Courage to you, Amarta, to go where your path takes you.”

Amarta nodded, blinking back tears.

Maris nodded at Tayre. “He has given me his word he’ll see you safely to the palace. It’s as much as I can ask of him, and as much as I could do for you myself.”

Amarta wondered what Tayre’s word was worth to someone who did not hold his contract, but saw no reason to ask.

Then, wrapping her in one last embrace, Maris spoke softly in her ear. “Innel is formidable and clever. But you, also, can be these things, Amarta.”

She nodded slowly, soberly. “Will you take care of them for me?” Dirina. Pas.

“I will.” Then Maris picked up her bags, spoke sharply to Tayre in Perripin one last time, and left.

Amarta exhaled slowly, softly, as she listened to the footsteps fade in the hall outside, letting fade the final imaginings of opening the door and calling after Maris that she had changed her mind and would go with her.

When it was silent at last, she turned to look at him. She should be afraid, perhaps. Or even just wary. But he’d done his work so very well. She cursed herself for letting his pretense fool her so completely that even though she knew what it was, what he was, she still felt at ease now with him.

He smiled a little.

“What did she say before she left?” Amarta asked.