The Singers of Nevya (51 page)

Iban’s eyebrows disappeared into his hair. “And lose my apprentice, when I have invested so much effort in her? I think not!”

Sira laughed despite her fatigue and worry. “Indeed, you are the kindest of all masters. I thank you, Singer Iban.”

“If only we knew . . .” Iban murmured.

Sira understood what he meant, and her smile faded. “I wish we did,” she agreed. “If we knew why they do not want us here, perhaps we could negoitate. But what can we do?”

“Well,” Iban said. “If it were I who had the ability . . .” His eyes slid back to Sira and away again. “If I could hear thoughts, like some people . . .”

Sira wriggled her shoulders, trying to release their tension. The code of proper behavior ruled her life. What would Maestra Lu have done? Once, she recalled, Cantrix Sharn had all but admitted to her that she had listened to someone else’s thoughts. In fact, it had been Rhia v’Bariken she had spied upon.

Iban looked sympathetic. “I’m sorry, but it’s a strange thing. If they were open about it, telling us they were crowded, or short of
hruss
fodder—but they’re not. It’s subtle, a sort of pressure, as if they want us gone, but don’t want to say so. Something’s afoot.”

“I suppose,” Sira said, “that sometimes—if needs must—strong decisions have to be taken.”

Iban nodded, suddenly brisk. “Exactly right! What a good idea, apprentice.” He winked at her, and rose from the table, gathering up his bowl and cup to carry to the kitchen.

From the center of the room Sira could feel Aleen regarding them, watching Iban leave the great room, watching Sira still sitting with her tea. The woman was not Gifted, of course, but her worry was palpable to Sira, a little speck of darkness like a mote of dust in the snow-filtered sunshine. Yet it did not seem serious, or important. What could it be that would so worry the Magister and his Housekeeper, yet feel trivial to her psi?

She gazed around the room at the House members talking and laughing. Everything about Tarus seemed prosperous and healthy. She rubbed her neck ruefully. Somehow she would have to justify her trespass into the Magister’s thoughts. Ah, well. She had already broken so many rules. What was one more?

It would have been easier with a
filhata
. Sira had to make do with her
filla
. In her narrow visitor’s room, she sat on the bed with her long legs crossed and her
filla
ready. She reasoned that she needed to know what troubled Magister Kenth in order to continue with Zakri. If they were forced to leave now, anything might happen. Iban’s shielding was not strong enough to withstand Zakri’s errant psi. And she meant no harm to the House. Rather the opposite.

Despite her careful rationalization, it was hard for Sira to begin. She turned the
filla
in her hand for several moments, thinking how long she had had it, and how many hours she had spent with the instrument. Never had she expected to use it in such a way. She sighed, and put the shining ironwood to her lips to begin a melody in
Mu-Lidya
. If anyone heard her, they could assume she was entertaining herself. She hoped no one would, though, especially the Cantor and Cantrix who served Tarus. They were both considerably older than herself, and had shown no interest in her presence here.

Borne on the drift of her melody, Sira’s psi reached easily through the House. As she searched for Magister Kenth, she heard the minds of workers in the kitchens and in the stables, the unencumbered thoughts of fishermen and gardeners. She intruded on none of them, needing only the lightest touch to know these were not the ones she sought. She played on, moving higher in the House, to the upper levels.

Here she encountered minds that were not so easy to hear. One was a man struggling with a column of numbers. Another was a woman concerned with some complicated House repair that had been going on for a long time. There were two glowing Gifted minds, in separate places. Sira identified and avoided them, and went on. She thought perhaps she would need to look in the nursery gardens, or the
ubanyor
. She was about to divert her psi when she touched something very odd.

It must be at the very top of the House, she thought, far from the great room and the Cantoris, away from any center of activity. It seemed to be a person, but the mind was a maelstrom, a tangle of dark and confused thoughts. Sira shied away, believing this was not her object, then came back to touch the troubled mind again, moved by both curiosity and sympathy.

It was no use. This was a mind destroyed, lost in its own twisted paths, its identity obscured by madness. Sira stopped playing and sat for some time, wondering, turning her
filla
in her fingers. The prompting of her psi told her she had found her answer. Hopeful that it was so, she tucked her instrument back inside her tunic, and went out into the corridor.

Tarus was a House full of life. Many apartment doors stood open, inviting visitors. Talk and laughter poured out into the hallways, and as Sira walked to the stairway, children dashed about her, some game leading them in and out of each other’s homes. She smiled at them as she left the lower level and climbed the stairs to the upper one.

It was quieter in the upper corridor, the sounds coming from behind closed doors more subdued. The apartments were considerably larger, spaced farther apart. She walked to the staircase at the end of the wing, where a small window looked out over the roofs of the nursery gardens. The sea was just visible past the edge of the cliff, and the ice floes floating in it glistened white under the solitary sun.

Sira had to go down the stairs and cross the back of the House, past the entrance to the gardens, past the small tannery where the smell of the soaking vats reminded her of Amric. She bowed to two people who passed her, and walked on until she found another staircase.

The tingle of her psi drew her upstairs again, then onward, until she came upon another stair that led still higher. Guided by instinct, she looked behind a cupboard filled with dusty rolls of parchment, and found a door that opened easily onto a narrow and dark stairwell. She doubted many House members knew it was there, but the stairs were clean-swept. Someone was using them regularly. Sira climbed with a quick and sure step, her psi exultant, ready to release her when she drew close to her goal.

This third level of the House was close and dark, no more than a low-ceilinged attic. Sira could barely stand upright. It lacked both windows and decoration, and the
quiru
light glowed dully on hulking shapes of old furniture. In one corner, she saw a single closed door.

Sira approached the door and listened. There was an odd sound beyond it, a snuffling breath, an inarticulate murmur. Sira reached out with her thought, certain there was a person on the other side of the door, but touching that mind was like reaching into a dark hole without knowing what was in it. Hastily, she withdrew the contact. She put her hand on the latch and pulled the door open.

For a long moment she stared at the miserable creature inside. It was a horror of long tangled hair, blotchy skin, and wild eyes. It hardly seemed human.

Mystified, Sira stepped into a little cramped room outfitted with a cot, a noisome chamber pot such as little children used, and a bare table. The odor in the room was almost unbearable. Sira was sure its occupant had not seen the
ubanyix
in a very long time.

Ubanyix
was the right choice, though. It was a woman who huddled on the cot, her lips moving in a toneless babble and her fingers raking at her hair. Sira gazed at her for a long moment. She felt a strange, brief nausea, and then she felt rage.

She knew this woman, or who this woman had been. She was supposed to be dead, exposed in the Marik Mountains by order of the Magistral Committee. She was Rhia v’Bariken, formerly the mate of Magister Shen v’Bariken, briefly Magistrix of Bariken. She had conspired to kill her mate, his riders, and the young Cantrix who traveled with them. Sira.

Sira backed quickly out of the room and slammed the door behind her. The air around her sparked with her fury, and she let it burn as she made her way back through the dark attic. She took the narrow staircase and then the main staircase, two steps at a time, and made her way with long strides to the great room.

A startled Housewoman responded to her demand to see the Housekeeper as if Sira were a full Cantrix in Tarus’s own Cantoris. Only a few moments passed before Aleen, pale and clearly frightened, bowed before her. The air around Sira still glittered ominously.

“I will see Magister Kenth,” Sira snapped, in a voice that rang across the room. “Now.”

The Housekeeper bowed again. “Yes, of course, Cantrix. This way, please. I—I think he is free.” She hurried ahead, as if afraid she might be singed by the energy radiating from Sira.

Sira followed, her lips pressed tight. Aleen cringed before her anger, but Sira was not seeing her. She was seeing again that awful scene in the mountains, five years before, and her friend Rollie dying with the others in the snow.

Magister Kenth was blond and rather young, probably no more than six summers. His skin was pale and smooth, and he turned even paler when the Housekeeper burst into his apartment with the briefest of knocks. Sira came behind her, swathed in the sparks excited by her anger. To his credit, Kenth did not shrink from her. He put aside a thick ledger, and stood to bow her to a chair. She declined with a shake of the head.

He squared his shoulders, and drew one deep, audible breath. “She’s my sister,” he said.

Then Sira remembered, could see Rollie’s face as she looked across a
hruss
’s back and told Sira that Rhia had expected to be Magistrix at Tarus until the birth of a younger brother forced her out. Tarus! How could she have forgotten? Rollie was from Tarus, had gone to Bariken with Rhia when Rhia mated with Shen. Sira’s anger evaporated bit by bit, like the morning fog burning away from the rocky coastline.

Now she did accept a chair, wearily settling into it. The air around her calmed as the sparks of her anger blinked out. “I see,” she said. “I had forgotten the connection.”

Kenth sat, too, and signaled for Aleen to leave the room, which she hastened to do. “I’m sorry, Cantrix, for what Rhia did. In a way, I’m to blame for it, all of it. And I couldn’t let her die that way.”

Sira traced her eyebrow with her finger. She felt exhausted, burdened with her knowledge and her memories. She thought of the ruined human being in the attic room. “She is all but dead, anyway.”

Kenth’s eyes were dark with grief and guilt. “I know. I think probably she would have preferred the death in the snow. But she was my sister. Everything that happened was because of me, because of my birth.”

“No, Magister. How can you take responsibility for being born?”

“I thought I could. Should.”

“I do not see how you managed this.”

“It was not easy, but there are always itinerants in need of metal. And there are plenty who care nothing for the laws of the Committee. I found one such, and he followed when the Committee sent my sister and that other woman into Forgotten Pass.”

“What happened to the other one? To Trude?”

Kenth was clearly reluctant to tell it, but Sira, having come so far, intended to have the whole story. She stared at him in silence until, resigned, he began to speak again.

“The itinerant Singer I hired had to wait until the Committee’s riders had left the Pass. When he could go to the women, they had already spent a night in the cold. Rhia—my sister—had used the other woman’s body, and her furs, as a shelter. There was enough warmth that way, at least until . . .” Kenth faltered, but pressed on like one making a confession. “At least until the other one froze to death. Rhia was half-dead herself by then.”

Sira spoke harshly. “She never stopped using people to her own ends, even then.”

Kenth had no answer for that. “I brought her here, and hid her in that corner at the top of the House. In only a few weeks she became what she is now—mindless, useless.”

They sat together in silence then, each remembering the woman Rhia had been. At length Sira sighed, and rose.

“Will you report me to the Committee?” Kenth asked.

Sira met his eyes. “I see no purpose in it. Enough suffering has come from all of this.”

Kenth stood, and bowed to her. “I’m very grateful for your understanding.”

“I am not sure I do understand. But I will not report you.”

“I thank you for that. My House is at your disposal for as long as you wish, Cantrix.”

“That may be quite some time,” Sira warned him. “You have a stableman, Zakri, who is Gifted and needs training. He is my reason for coming here.”

“I will tell my Housekeeper to give you what you need. I only wish I could in some way make up to you for what my sister did.”

“Your hospitality will be sufficient,” Sira said. “I will be grateful, too, if you will extend it to my master, Singer Iban.”

“So I will.”

Sira smiled faintly at the young Magister. “I have a friend who would say, ‘The drifts are deep in this one.’” She bowed. “But I think your House is well served by its Magister. I wish you well.”

Kenth’s pale cheeks colored, making him look very young indeed. “I thank you, Cantrix. Nothing else matters so much to me. I’m still learning what it all means, I’m afraid.”

“So are we all, Magister,” Sira said, and she left him alone.

Chapter Twenty-one

The snows had begun in earnest when the rider from Conservatory appeared one afternoon at Amric. He and an itinerant Singer were making the traditional rounds of all the northern Houses, while another pair would be going to the southern ones. Conservatory was calling together its next class.

“How many?” was the question on everyone’s lips as the rider spoke with the Cantor, his junior Cantrix, and the Magister.

Isbel knew Gram v’Conservatory from her student days. He was lined and lean, with a face burned dark from years of traveling on the Continent. He knew Conservatory’s business as well as any Cantor. He smiled warmly at Isbel and bowed low. She suffered a pang of nostalgia for the naive girl Gram had known. She bowed in return, but her answering smile was sad. Those days were past now, and the subject at hand was a serious one.