Troubled Waters (20 page)

S
he spent the night at the inn, taking a small, cramped room that seemed infinitely luxurious after the sleeping mat laid between crates and boxes in Barlow’s wagon. As much as anything, she wanted to wash away the grime of travel, to beautify herself for Christara’s house, much as she had beautified herself for Barlow that last evening in Chialto. She paid extra money to have hot bathwater brought to her room, and she took extra time to wash her hair and rub oil into her hands and feet. As Sima had showed her, she tied her damp hair in scraps of rags so it would froth with curls in the morning. She lay down on the narrow bed and slept fitfully, and the seductive murmur of running water ran all night through her dreams.

In the morning she dressed in her most formal black trousers and her favorite purple top. It was too warm to need an overrobe, but she carried her festive jangling shawl with her anyway. She did not want to approach her inheritance destitute and pitiful. She would bring with her whatever wealth she already owned, and a lifetime’s worth of pride.

The innkeeper arranged for her to hire a driver and a small cart to take her to Christara’s house, perched halfway up the mountain on the other side of the Marisi. She sat motionless in the back of the cart and watched the house as the driver negotiated the short, narrow streets of the town—as they took the bobbing ferry across the gurgling waters—and as he began the winding ascent up the pine-scented road. Now and then the house disappeared from view, only to reappear larger and closer. It was a long, three-story structure built of yellow stone that so closely matched the color of the mountain that sometimes only the blue shutters, the blue flags, and the great double-hung blue entrance door distinguished it from its surroundings. The entire bottom story featured what seemed to be an unbroken line of windows, higher than the height of a tall man. From any room with a southern view, Zoe knew, you could look out and see the river.

She could feel the pressure of elevation singing in her ears by the time the road leveled off and took a straight line toward the house. Almost immediately, the sound was accompanied by the cheerful patter of falling water. The entire estate was ringed by a fountain—a narrow band of ornamental stone set into the ground and concealing jets of water that leapt and danced in a choreographed display. Only one twenty-foot section of the fountain was habitually turned off to allow carriages to pass through without getting soaked, but at night even that section was usually spouting water.

As they trotted through the break in the fountain, catching stray droplets on their faces, the driver was moved to speak. “They say old Christara Lalindar could turn that water against someone if she didn’t like whoever was arriving at her door,” he said. “She could call up streams of water so hard they could wash a man right off of his horse or out of his coach.”

“Did you ever see her do it?” Zoe asked.

“No, but I believe it.”

“I believe it, too.”

He pulled up at the doorstep and helped her out. She gave him a quint-gold, far more than the transportation service was worth. He widened his eyes, and then narrowed them to give her a more thorough appraisal. She merely smiled and turned toward the door. Carefully climbed the five steps. Pulled three times on the rope that sent chimes chasing each other through the house.

When the door opened, she saw eight servants lined up just inside. Seven were bowing; the eighth held his hand out in a gesture of welcome.

“Zoe Ardelay Lalindar,” he said. “It is good to have you home.”

F
or the first nineday back in her grandmother’s house, Zoe spent most of her time in the
kierten
. It was an enormous, high-ceilinged space with ten-foot windows on three sides and wood floors so brightly polished she could see her blurred reflection.

Now she stood in the center of the bank of windows that overlooked the river and did not think she could ever look away. From here, by turning her head a little to the right, she could see the headwaters of the Marisi, jetting up with a joyous rush. The river still churned with delight, but was already much tamer, by the time it passed directly before the Lalindar house. If she turned her head to the left, she could watch it for another mile as it curled and lapped along the base of the mountain range, as if eager to explore but unwilling to travel too far from familiar paths.

At every time of day, it was a different color—frosty silver in the morning, luscious blue at midday, glancing gold at dusk as the sun laid down horizontal bars of fire. On nights when the moon had much shape or substance, the river sparkled with random lights that seemed to skate along its moving surface.

Zoe felt as if the blood in her own body mimicked the river’s surging currents. As never before, she sensed the headlong flow down through artery, back through vein, bubbling up through her heart like the waters themselves. She could picture every inch of land that the Marisi traveled through, knew every juncture where it skipped under a bridge or coiled around an outthrust foothill. She was almost dizzy as she felt herself plummeting down that long fall of stone behind the royal palace to collect and swirl and calm herself in the deep pool nearby. She wanted to wave and call out greetings as she flowed past her friends on the river flats, but she was in too much of a hurry; she had to pick up speed and race down those final miles to the sea. Then came the plunge into icy water, the shock of brine, the disintegration of self.

And suddenly she was back at the headwaters again.

Had anyone tried to describe this sensation to her, she would have believed he was mad.

But it was this remarkable connection with the Marisi that finally began to convince her that she was indeed prime. She was certain Christara must have had the same visceral bond. She wondered if it was something that came awake in the dormant blood only when the new prime stepped for the first time into the ancestral home. She wondered if she would lose that awareness of water, of blood, when she left this house and traveled down the mountain.

She could not decide if it was something she would welcome or fear.

Quiet footsteps behind her signaled that Hoden had entered the room and wanted to speak to her. In truth, she had caught the pattern of his pulse before she heard the slight sound of his shoes. She supposed it should be more eerie, this sudden ability to know where all the servants in the house were located merely by the sound of their heartbeats.

All this time, she had remembered she was
coru
, but she had forgotten that her gift was blood as well as water.

Indeed, in ancient days, when people first identified themselves by their five intrinsic traits, it was believed that men and women were blessed with distinct and complementary strengths. Men were known by the elementals—air, water, wood, earth, fire. Women claimed the corporeal—soul, blood, bone, flesh, mind. A
coru
woman might be a midwife or a healer; she would work in blood. A
coru
man would be a fisherman or a sailor who loved the sea. Zoe had forgotten all that—and, indeed, these days the traits seemed so blended together that no one separated them out by gender anymore.

But she was reminded now of where her separate strengths lay. And—at least while she resided in this house—she was unlikely to forget.

“You have company,” Hoden said.

She remembered Hoden from her grandmother’s day, or perhaps she remembered his father, for his family had served her family for as long as the river ran through Welce. He was neat, small, unobtrusive, efficient, and utterly indispensable. It was Hoden who had escorted her through every room of the house, explaining what work had been done since she had been there last, more than ten years ago; it was Hoden who had sat down with her in her grandmother’s study to show her how her accounts stood, which investments had prospered. She was, it turned out, a very wealthy woman.

“Why didn’t you send for me after my grandmother died?” she asked him that first afternoon.

“I didn’t know where you were.”

“But you knew I was alive. And that I was prime.”

He paused a moment, as if at a loss for how to explain. “The house knew,” he said at last. “Both of those things.”

And though he served a
coru
family, Hoden was a
hunti
man. Wood spoke to him as water called to Zoe. Naturally, he would believe whatever story it had to tell.

“You have been so faithful. I am not sure how I will repay you for your years of exceptional service to the house while I was away.”

His face had flickered with surprise. “There was nothing else I could have done.”

She believed that, too.

Now she turned slightly to see him standing motionless by the doorway. “Yes, I heard someone approaching,” she said.
Heard the heartbeats of the horses and the humans. Four horses, two humans, one no doubt a coachman.
“Who is it?”

“Keeli Lalindar.”

Zoe’s eyebrows rose. Aunt Sarone’s daughter. “My cousin. I thought she was living in the city.”

“Yes. She is here visiting her uncle Broy. His estate, of course, is an hour south of the village,” he added. It was something she ought to know, but probably didn’t; that was what Hoden meant every time he dropped a smooth
of course
into their conversation. She appreciated his tact.

“By all means I will see her.” She glanced around. “Here? Or is another room more appropriate?”

He never seemed discomposed to be consulted even on such tricky matters, and during the past nineday he had answered dozens of odd questions. “To receive visitors in the
kierten
is to indicate that you wish them to acknowledge your status and your power,” he said. “It might not be a hostile reception, but it is not a warm one. It signals that you might not trust them. That you judge their worth to be less than yours.”

“Ah,” she said. “Not the message I want to send to Keeli.”

“Perhaps the green sitting room that overlooks the garden,” he suggested. “I will bring refreshments.”

She smiled at him. “That sounds perfect.”

A few minutes later she was standing in the green room, a place that seemed to exist for no other purpose than to provide people with somewhere to sit. There were two chairs drawn up before the tall windows—which did indeed provide a view of the garden, which no one looked at because the windows also provided a view of the river—and a narrow table between them. The rest of the room offered more chairs in small groupings, some accompanied by footstools and occasional tables. That was it. No bookshelves, no statuary, no musical instruments. Zoe thought it might be almost as much of a statement as the
kierten
, with its vast expanse of wasted space. Only this room said,
I am so wealthy, I am so pampered, that I need do nothing all day but sit and stare.
It was not a philosophy that generally appealed to Zoe.

She heard Keeli’s heartbeat coming closer—and then suddenly it was overlaid by the sounds of rustling clothing and hasty footsteps. “Keeli Lalindar,” Hoden announced at the doorway, but the visitor brushed past him to step impatiently into the room.

Then she came to a dead halt and simply stared. “They were right,” she said. “It
is
you.”

Zoe signaled to Hoden to withdraw, and for a moment the cousins gazed at each other in silence. Keeli didn’t look much like the playmate Zoe remembered from childhood. She was taller than Zoe, heavier, with a voluptuousness not at all concealed by the ornate gold jacket and wide-legged gold pants that Zoe guessed were the epitome of fashion. Her heavy hair was also golden and pulled back from her face in a thick, braided knot adorned with jeweled flowers. Her eyes were river blue, her skin sunrise pink. By now Zoe knew enough about footwear to realize that the beaded leather flats she wore had probably cost an entire gold coin.

Thanks to Hoden, Zoe’s appearance was not quite that of a river squatter attempting a masquerade. The day after she arrived, he’d brought in the house seamstress to take her measurements and alter a few of the more classic pieces from Christara’s wardrobe. So now she wore an embroidered red tunic over matching trousers with a narrower silhouette than the ones Keeli wore. She’d put a few clips in her black hair and brushed rouge onto her cheeks, but she knew her appearance could not compare with Keeli’s. Anyone would know, just by looking at them, which was the cousin who had grown up with all luxuries at her command and which one had grown up in exile.

“Hello, Keeli,” Zoe said. “Yes. It’s me.”

Keeli came forward into the room, still staring. “Christara always said you weren’t dead, but nobody knew where you were,” she said. “Where have you been all this time?”

“With my father,” Zoe replied.

Keeli shook her head wonderingly. “Banished. Away from all your family and all your things. And the
house
. Didn’t you miss it? Didn’t you want to come back?”

Zoe wasn’t sure how to answer.
No one invited me back.
“I thought it was important to stay with my father. I thought he needed me.”

Keeli’s pretty face drew into a frown. “Is he dead now? That’s what Uncle Broy said.”

Unexpectedly, Zoe’s throat closed, choking down the words that would confirm the news. She merely nodded.

“Well, I’m sorry to hear it,” Keeli said. “My mother said he was the most interesting man any Lalindar had ever married, even though Christara hated him.”

And that—even more unexpectedly—made Zoe laugh. “He certainly was, even at the end.”

Now Keeli offered a tentative smile. “When you laugh, you look just like I remember you,” she said. “I think I was only ten the last time I saw you. We were running through the fountains, trying to time it so that we would jump out onto the grass before the water shot up again.”

At the description, Zoe suddenly had a complete memory of an afternoon she had wholly forgotten. “Yes! And we were absolutely drenched!”