Blade of dream, p.9
Blade of Dream, page 9
“You can turn around. Modesty is preserved.”
He shifted, trying to seem more at ease than he felt. She stood at the end of his bed. The ruined dress was a puddle at her feet. She lifted her arms, showing his sleeves on them, his cloak on her shoulder, his boots on her feet. “Well. Will I pass for a man?”
He tried not to laugh. “No. Not for a moment. Not from a street away. Not if they were blind. You look like a woman dressed as a man and nothing else.”
“Maybe they won’t think that’s suspicious.”
“Or maybe we need another plan.”
“Or that,” she said. “But I don’t know what it would be.”
He leaned against the wall and considered. “My family shares a stable with a couple other houses. It’s just a street from here. We can go at first light. I’ll say you’re a courier who brought some contracts from Stonemarket and needs to get back. The first cart that goes that way, you can go with.”
“First light.”
“It’s not that long from now. There are birds that start singing before there’s any hint of it. When we hear them…” He paused, shook his head, went on. “When we hear them, it will be time to go.”
“End of the night,” she said.
“You can’t be sorry about that.”
She paused for a moment, like she was listening to something he couldn’t hear. “You don’t have any idea who I am.”
“You’re a girl who broke into a boathouse.”
“Not my name. Not what my life is. Not if knowing me would be an advantage to you or a burden.”
“No. None of that.”
“Would you want to?”
“Want to?”
“Know.”
He looked down. His boots on her feet. “I don’t have room in my life for someone like you.”
“You don’t know what I’m like.”
“I know what I would want you to be, and I don’t have room to find out.”
“I understand better than you guess,” she said. She stepped out of his boots and leaned toward him. Cloth rustled.
His breath caught. “I don’t think you should do that.”
“If you don’t want—”
“No, I could be dead and I would want. But my family… and I’m not…”
“You can’t be part of my life,” she said. Her breath was warm. “I can’t be part of yours. All we have is from now until the birds sing. Maybe that could be for us?”
She rested her head against his shoulder. Her hair smelled like the river. She moved, but not away.
“If you,” he began, and then lost his train of thought. “If you keep doing that, I won’t be able to think.”
He felt her smile.
Garreth didn’t know at first what woke him, except that it was loud. He swam up from sleep, disoriented and confused. Light poured in through the unshuttered window. The sounds of cart wheels clattering against stones rose from the street.
The girl was sitting beside him holding his bedclothes up to cover herself. Her face was set and grim. Uncle Robbson stood in the doorway, his face pale with rage. Seeing him, Garreth remembered the shout. That was what woke him.
“What,” Uncle Robbson said, “is this… shit… that I am looking at?”
Garreth’s heart dropped.
“I think we missed our birds,” she said.
Garreth was a year and seventeen days older than his brother, and it had defined who they were to each other from the start. When they competed as brothers will, Vasch lost. When they wore their best clothes to the guild meetings and celebrations, Vasch’s were all things Garreth had worn the year before. At most, they were retailored or had a bit of ribbon replaced. When the boys’ tutors came, Garreth’s numbers and letters were a little bit ahead of Vasch’s. Garreth went out to help his father oversee the shipments coming in before Vasch. He led the family’s prayers first, he took the larger rooms, he attended the magistrates’ sessions first. No matter how hard Vasch tried, Garreth always had the edge. It wasn’t that Vasch never won anything, it was that he always lost more. And above that, they both knew that as sure as summer gave way to winter’s cold, Garreth was and would always be a little better.
Vasch, for the most part, had learned to accept it as an unpleasant truth about life. The world had illness, injury, accident, and his brother. His tolerance of his own lower status took on a kind of morose good humor. It wasn’t, Garreth was certain, that Vasch didn’t care. It was that he had learned not to show that he cared. It was policy, and it worked for them.
Usually.
Once, when Vasch was eleven years old and Garreth twelve, someone gave Vasch a pomegranate. For reasons Garreth didn’t know then or understand later, Vasch had been supremely proud of the gift. He’d strutted through the street with it in his hand like it was a magical orb made by the gods themselves, and he was the chosen. Garreth and two or three of his friends had made a game of it. One of them—he didn’t remember who—snatched the beloved object out of Vasch’s hand, and they’d started tossing it between them. Vasch had sprinted toward whoever had it and shrieked in fear every time it was passed to someone else. It wasn’t particularly cruel as cruelties went, and Garreth and his friends had laughed at the younger boy’s distress as boys had since childhood was created.
Garreth had been the first to hear the rawness in Vasch’s cries and sense that they’d gone too far. The next time the pomegranate came to him, he held it out to his little brother. Vasch grabbed the leathery red fruit out of Garreth’s hand, ripped it in two, and threw the halves to the cobblestones. He ground them into the stones with his feet, red juice streaming between the cobbles like blood, and screamed in animal rage. Though he never forgot it, Garreth hadn’t seen that feral look in his brother’s eyes since. Not until now.
“What were you thinking?”
Vasch leaned across the breakfast table, his weight on his elbows like he was one stray impulse from coming across the plates of eggs and fish like a belligerent drunk at a taproom.
“It wasn’t like that,” Garreth said.
The irony was that his father came to the same strategy he had. The girl, dressed in servant’s clothes and a hood, had been escorted to the stables by a quietly livid Uncle Robbson. The plan was to move her out as if her presence was utterly normal and hope that no one noticed or cared. That Robbson had gone an hour ago and still wasn’t back meant he was running other errands of the house—checking the warehouses, delivering the schedule of boats to the port master’s office, paying the access tax. Whatever little chores he had would keep him plausibly out of the house until he either assured himself that there was no trouble coming from Garreth’s indiscretion or calmed down or both. Their father was in his private office with Yrith’s chaperone and had been for most of the morning. Garreth didn’t know where the woman he was meant to marry was, but she wasn’t there for the morning meal.
“‘It wasn’t like that,’” Vasch repeated mockingly. “What’s that supposed to mean? You weren’t thinking? It wasn’t a thinking kind of night? You took off a day from thinking? For fuck’s sake, you brought a whore into this house with Yrith here!”
“She wasn’t a whore.”
Vasch pushed back from the table. “Oh, she’s not a professional? Just an apprentice street fuck?”
Garreth put down his knife. A poached egg bled its half-eaten yolk onto the plate. “Don’t try sarcasm. You’re not good at it.”
“Mother is trying to make an alliance. Yrith is here to marry you. She’s your wife in everything but the ceremony. How would you feel if she were dragging strange men into her bed?”
Garreth took a breath. His cheeks hurt from keeping still. He locked his eyes on Vasch’s, and there was the barest ghost of a flinch in his brother’s expression. When he spoke, Garreth said each word on its own. “Get her some. We’ll find out.”
Vasch’s face went dark. He snatched up his plate and threw it at Garreth. His speed and rage were greater than his aim. The plate shattered against the wall. A bit of fish lay on the table where it had fallen, small, shining, and absurd.
“Ah, boys,” their father said, stepping into the room. He looked at the fallen shards like they were an unexpected and not particularly attractive blossom. Vasch sat, hands in fists between his knees. “Yes, well. I was hoping to take a moment of Garreth’s time.”
“Yes, Father,” Garreth said, standing.
“Good, good, good. And, Vasch? That was the last time you will refer to this situation in any way. In the house or out.”
“Yes,” Vasch whispered.
“Yes?”
“Yes sir.” His voice trembled.
Father turned and ambled back into the corridor, Garreth following behind like he was a child again. The corridors seemed unnaturally long, and the servants were all conveniently elsewhere. There weren’t even the sounds of voices to accompany them to Father’s private study.
The study itself was a modest room with a green wooden table that had once been a door and simple wooden chairs to match. Shelves lined the walls, filled with papers and ledgers. A window let in the fresh air, and decorative ironwork drilled into the wall kept out anything larger than a fly. A lock box of iron and brass held the family ciphers, or pretended to. Garreth was fairly certain that anyone who went through the trouble of stealing them would find only gibberish. The true ciphers were locked in his parents’ heads. The chair creaked under Garreth.
“Would you like something? A cup of wine?”
“No,” Garreth said, staring at his shoes. “Thank you.”
“Well, I certainly do. And it’s early to drink alone.”
His father took two rude earthenware cups and a red glass bottle out from behind a pile of ledgers. He put one cup before Garreth and the other near himself. The wine clinked as he poured it. His father sat, drank down half of his cup, and sighed. “I have consulted on the customs of Yrith’s people. There’s no formal loss of honor to her. So that’s good. We will need to apprise your mother of the situation, though.”
Garreth picked up the cup, hesitated, and put it back down. His father grunted and nodded like he was agreeing with something Garreth said. “My understanding is that the men take these things more lightly than the women do, and the caravan master we’re negotiating with is a male cousin. But better that we be forthright, even if it is embarrassing.”
He drank again before he went on.
“Of course, what we tell her will need to be true. So. Will this be happening again?”
“No,” Garreth said.
“Is that you speaking, or the shame? The shame is going to say what it thinks I want to hear so that I’ll end the conversation and let you go.”
“I… I don’t think it will happen again,” Garreth said. “But I didn’t expect it to happen at all. So I guess I can’t be sure.”
“Who is this girl to you?”
“I don’t know her. I don’t even know her name. I met her last night.”
“Will she be discreet?”
“Yes.”
“Because you want to believe she will, or because she will?”
Garreth lifted the cup. The wine was rich and astringent. On a night of little sleep and too many emotions, it sat uneasy in his stomach. “She made it a point that there was no room in her life for me and none in mine for her. She said that. Unprompted. She won’t…” He gestured with the cup, trying to find what exactly she wouldn’t.
Father let him struggle for a moment. “Well, that’s as close to good as we’ll get. We will put her out of our minds and hope she stays there. That only leaves you.”
“Me?”
“You didn’t trip and fall out of your clothes,” his father said gently. “You misbehaved, and you know it. But again, put the shame aside and let’s talk about why you did. What you gained from it.”
“I don’t know how to answer that.”
“I’ll start. You did it because you are angry with me and your mother, and you were able to feel that you hurt us. Or you did it because you hate Yrith, and this was a bid to sabotage the marriage. Or because you’re afraid of her. Or it was a way of boasting to your friends so they’ll think better of you and you won’t feel as alone. Or you were feeling the itch and this girl was convenient. Really, it could have been anything.”
“Then what does why matter?”
“It’s a question of managing it,” his father said. “I can’t help you control it until you understand what’s being controlled.”
“I just needed to…” Garreth said, stopped, shook his head. His father refilled their cups. “I don’t like being where I’m not wanted.”
“Interesting point. You mean Yrith?”
“I don’t know her. I don’t know what she thinks or feels. Her people bartered her away to Kithamar for trade advantages, and we took her for the same reason. I’m the face of that.”
“And your response to that isn’t to know her better? Serria and Vasch tutor her. You could as well.”
“They aren’t going to be in her wedding bed. I am.”
His father tilted his head. “Guilt? You did this from guilt?”
“I did it to be someone besides myself. To be in a different life than the one I have. Just for a little while.”
Father sighed and leaned back in his chair. A smile touched his lips. “I remember when your mother and I married. It was similar to your situation now. My parents and hers saw advantage in the union. With the pair of us in control of both the Caram contracts and the warehouse, we remade my family business into something with much stronger footing.”
“And yet here we are.”
“There were some other factors working against us, and things have gone less well in recent years. But there were two decades of relative stability. That’s to be admired.”
“So it was worth it,” Garreth said. “You and Mother learned to love each other and build a family, just as Yrith and I will.”
“I’ve never loved your mother.”
It took Garreth a moment to understand what he’d heard. Father watched him as the words sank in, and nodded when they did.
“I think she may have had some affection or attraction to me at the beginning,” he went on. “It didn’t last, of course. We did what we needed to do. You’re here. Your brother. The house was strong for a generation. We are respected. That’s victory.”
“I don’t…” Garreth began. In the street, someone shouted. His father ignored them both.
“Appearance is one thing. The… I won’t call it truth. The situation behind the appearance can be very different. To the city, Genna and I are respectably wed. House Left is a machine of commerce, unified and strong. If we were anything less, we would be targeted. Weakness is opportunity. Within this house, privately, Serria and I have been lovers for the past, what, eight years?”
Garreth stared at his father like he was seeing the man for the first time. The dark hair turning to grey at the temples. The silver-and-black stubble that showed his morning ritual had been interrupted. His eyes were mild and sympathetic.
“I didn’t know.”
“You didn’t need to. Now, apparently, you do.”
He sat in silence as his father finished his wine, corked the bottle, and put it back in its niche behind the books. He took Garreth’s cup and drank what was in it as well, then put both together at the edge of the table for the servants to take away. Garreth put his head in his hands, fighting something like vertigo. His father put a hand on his shoulder and shook him gently. It could almost have been mistaken for comfort.
“You need your outlets. That’s fine. But you have to think about appearances, my boy, or you will embarrass the house. And you aren’t to embarrass the house, yes?”
“I won’t.”
“I appreciate that. I do.”
The hand left his shoulder. The door closed. Garreth sat alone in the study, waiting for his world to right itself again. Everything in his history shifted. Mother’s travel wasn’t that she loved the pleasures of the road. Robbson’s grating anger came from living with the constant grit of bearing witness to his sister’s humiliation. The iron control that Serria maintained over the servants, bringing in new help and releasing the old without consulting anyone, was appropriate for the de facto lady of the house. His family wasn’t what he’d thought it was, and he felt like a fool for not questioning it before now. The love between his parents was a show played to the world like actors on a Seepwater stage. He didn’t know why that hurt as deeply as it did, except that he had been fooled along with the rest of the city.
He rose to his feet, one hand on the table to steady him. When he was sure of himself, he walked out, down the hall. He heard Vasch talking to someone in a room nearby, and he turned away. He prayed silently that Serria wouldn’t be at the door, that he could get out of the house without seeing anyone. Whatever gods were watching him took mercy.
The street was bright. The midmorning sun had already banished the cool of night, but it couldn’t quite hide the end of the season. By reflex, Garreth noticed what the carts carried and which way they went. Rope and jute heading south, toward the port. Sacks of grain—the leavings of the last season—going east to the Temple to fill the public silo and clear out the warehouses for the crops that would arrive with harvest. As surely as leaves losing their green, the shifting of trade marked the change of the year. The end of summer was coming. The end of many things.
A boy chased a dog that was running south along the street, looking over its shoulder to make sure its pursuer didn’t fall too far behind. A flock of pigeons rose and swirled in the high air until by some invisible consensus it chose a new place to land. Garreth walked without knowing where he was walking to. Without caring. It hadn’t been a day since he’d gone out to find Kannish and Maur. In all the time since he’d met the girl, fallen into bed with her, and suffered the consequences of it, there hadn’t been a sunset. He’d barely slept. If he hadn’t felt punch-drunk, it would have been strange.
He tried to imagine the girl, what she would look like in the late morning sunlight. What she would say. He remembered what it was like, walking with her through these same streets when they’d been alone in them. What her skin felt like against his. He wished now that he’d pressed for her name. He wanted to be back in those hours more than he’d ever wanted anything.
