Bells of the Kingdom (Children of the Desert Book 3) (59 page)

He awoke to cream-pale walls and the shifting of early morning sunlight through fine glass windows. The scent of gardenias hung in the air, and the bed under him was softer by far than anything he’d ever rested on before. He lay still, disoriented; at last, memory sorted itself out, and he sat up—too quickly: his head swam, and he nearly pitched off the bed before he caught his bearings.

A moment later, the door opened and a familiar figure slipped into the room. Wian stopped, biting her lip, on seeing him already awake and sitting up; then, shyly, advanced and set a neatly folded stack of clothes on a chair near the bed.

“They might be a little large,” she said, “but they’re clean. I—guessed at the size.” Her face tinted, turning a palette of relatively fresh bruises into a mottled mess. “Your clothes are being cleaned, and I thought you’d like something—a little nicer. While you’re here.”

Tank glanced down, realizing for the first time that whatever servant had put him to bed had stripped off all his clothes in the process. He looked up, already wincing. Wian was studying the floor, her face bright crimson.

“There’s a—shortage of servants here, just now,” she said. “I’ve been—helping out.” She ducked her head, backing up two steps, then turned and left the room.

Tank let out a long breath, not sure if he should be relieved. At least she wasn’t likely to gossip over what she’d seen. Unless it gave her a benefit, he corrected himself wryly; and realized that her embarrassment had been entirely feigned. He sighed and reached for the clothes.

Someone—probably, again, Wian—had made an effort to wipe most of the trail dirt from his riding boots, but they still clashed with the more elegant trousers and shirt. The shirt hung a bit loose over the shoulders, and the trousers ran generous in the leg, but they’d do for a day. His belt and pouch didn’t look entirely idiotic against the outfit, as far as he could tell. He didn’t particularly care if others disagreed—he never went anywhere without his belt pouch near to hand. Just in case.

That done, hair brushed out and secured into a triple-bound tail, he looked around, uncertain as to the next step. If his clothes were being cleaned, that implied an invitation to stay at least for another day; and he didn’t have enough spare sets to abandon any lightly. Dasin wouldn’t catch up with him until tomorrow at the earliest, and while there were other things he could do in Bright Bay, none, at the moment, seemed as appealing as climbing back onto that wonderfully soft bed and going back to sleep for a while longer.

His stomach suggested other ideas.

He cast a wistful glance back at the bed, then shrugged and opened the door. Wian—of course—stood in the hallway, waiting for him. As he stepped out of the room, she cast her gaze to the floor.

“S’e
Tank,” she murmured.

He regarded her with a mixture of bemusement and annoyance, and said, “Wian, stop it.”

She straightened and met his gaze, but her shoulders shifted as though uncomfortable with that directness.

“Sorry,” she said. “I want you to think well of me.”

“Putting on fake ways won’t do that,” Tank said. “Something to eat around here?”

She hesitated, then nodded and said, stiffly, “This way.”

Very probably she’d wanted or expected him to ask after how she came to be here, and whether she’d escaped Seavorn’s tender care. Tank grinned at her back as they walked and kept his silence.

“You saved my life, you know,” she said over her shoulder after a few steps.

Tank deliberately misunderstood, hoping to keep things dry. “By kicking Dasin off you? Naw, he wouldn’t have gone that far—”

She turned to face him, real color flaring in her face. “No,” she said. “By listening. By—by caring. It was the first time someone treated me
—right—
in a long time.”

She paused, as though expecting a response. He shrugged, not sure how to steer her away from the maudlin speech he could sense coming, particularly as he suspected it wouldn’t be entirely genuine.

“I’ve been thinking it over,” she said, crossing her arms and not, to Tank’s relief, in the least soppy. “And it wasn’t only that you were decent. It was—like you
knew
me, knew all about the worst of me, and you accepted it. Like it didn’t matter to you. And I thought about the nightmare, and how you listened to me tell it, and I remembered you said something. I got stuck on a word, and you said it for me. But you couldn’t have known.”

“It was an easy guess,” Tank said, glancing away.

“No,” she said. “See—I know how to spot a lie, myself. You didn’t guess. You
knew.
As though you’d—seen—the dream. And it seemed to me that I’d—felt—someone beside me, during that nightmare, that night; someone watching alongside me. And I think it was you.”

Tank glanced along the hallway, suddenly anxious—and not only because her tone had begun to waver from matter-of-fact to emotion-laden. “Not so loud—”

“There—see?” Wian said. “It
was
you!”

“Was or wasn’t, doesn’t matter,” Tank said. “Talk like that and you’ll get me hung as a witch.”

She laughed. “Not so much, these days,” she said, her tone steadying back to dry cynicism. “Not in King Oruen’s court, and with all the desert lords parading about Bright Bay these days.”

“It’s not all that safe out on the Coast Road yet,” he said, “and gossip flies faster than a horse gallops. So if you don’t mind, drop that talk. I don’t see where it matters, anyway.”

“It matters because it changed me,” she said. “It made me realize that you were right. I can change
my
part in the world. I can change
my
life.
You
did.” She paused again, her dark eyes searching his face for reaction: he gave her his best blank stare in return.

He wasn’t about to explain how he’d done it. He had no intention of telling her that Allonin had bought him out of a katha village and invested considerable time and effort in breaking him from that mindset. Had no interest in pointing out that it had taken a team of ketarch healers and the teachings of an old woman who wasn’t, in Tank’s retrospective opinion, nearly as simple as she’d seemed at the time—in short, if not for the hard work of a number of dedicated people over the course of months and years
—he
wouldn’t have changed one bit.

Except in the strictly physical sense: because by now, he’d have been dead. So it wasn’t at his feet that the change ought to be laid, but to Aerthraim efforts, much as he hated to admit it—and he wouldn’t, to her. It wasn’t any of her concern, and her efforts to change herself weren’t any of his.

She went on in spite of his lack of reaction: “I begged sanctuary from the king. He granted it. And now—well, Seavorn’s dead, and Kippin’s on the run, and I have a chance at starting over. Because of you. Because you
listened.”

Tank shrugged, deeply uncomfortable. The only thing he could think of to say was
So what do you want from me now, then?;
which seemed tactless at best and an invitation to emotional ranting at worst.

In the distance, something smashed. Wian jerked, her attention focusing on that noise, then grabbed Tank’s wrist and cried, “This way!”

He let her drag him into a dead run; managed to jerk his wrist free after the second turn, but by then he was so hopelessly lost that following her seemed the safest course.

Gaudy, intricate decorations caught Tank’s eye as they ran: a spray of long, crimson feathers, their quills dipped in fine silver, arced along one wall. A mosaic of moon-silk shell pieces, each smaller and thinner than Tank’s littlest fingernail, glittered along another. He slowed to take a second, astonished glance at that as he went by, unable to believe not only the intense amount of craft that had gone into that decoration, but that someone had spent so much time building something so useless.

“Come
on,”
Wian called. She’d stopped at the last door in a long hallway and was waving him forward.

“This isn’t the kitchens, is it?” he said, knowing it for a stupid comment. She ignored him and pushed through the door. Moments later, someone screamed from within: a woman, tortured and fierce.

“She’s awake!” Wian cried.

Something else crashed. Someone swore. Wian yelped.

Tank went through the outer room, compelled, impelled by something he had no words for. Not Wian—no. There was a
smell
in the air, tantalizing, vague,
demanding—

The door to the inner room of the suite hung half-open. Tank saw glimpses of movement through it, and heard another heartrending scream. Sense said
Walk away
and
Not my business;
something more reckless and primal drove him to peer through the doorway.

A tall, dark-haired woman marked by a horrifying array of bruises, cuts, and weals stood, naked, in the middle of the room. Lord Eredion and a strange dark-skinned man, both fully dressed, stood against the walls to either side of her. Glass fragments were scattered across the floor by their feet.

Wian knelt before the woman, dazed, hand to her head; surrounded by more broken glass and shards of pottery. Blood trickled down her neck.

“Gods damn it, Alyea!” Lord Eredion said. “We’re not going to hurt you! Deiq, can’t you—”

“She’s too fragile,” the other man said. “There’s nothing for me to grab hold of. She’s still raving with dasta.”

Dasta—
the word set off an unexpected cascade of connections and memories. Tank’s vision went hazy, tremors rippling through his muscles; he fisted his hands, fighting the all-too-familiar feeling: the beginning of a fit.

He couldn’t move. Couldn’t even reach for the belt pouch with the all-important
chich
sticks. A sharp whine began to build in the back of his head, emerged as a broken whimper: somewhere distant, someone cried, “Get out of here, you idiot!”

Another voice said something about
helping
and
Tank.

He tried to shake his head, not understanding:
Tank
meant nothing to him,
helping
was a word without a meaning—all that existed was the
pain,
the
fear,
the
anger—

The dark-haired woman turned and looked at him, looked
through
him, looked
into
him.

I see you,
she said.

Her mouth didn’t move. The words unrolled directly into his mind, a series of language-images that wove through the mist, pushing it aside, locking his attention wholly onto her.

I see you. I can’t see anything else—where am I? What’s happening to me? Why am I so angry? Why are
you
so angry?

He opened his mouth to say
I don’t know
to at least one of the questions. Before he could form the first breath of sound, he felt her shove aside the mist for a better look at his anger—

Glass crunched under his knees. A howl ripped from his throat. His childhood rose behind his eyes in a flurry of images he’d worked for years to forget. Defiance and rage shoved her back with feral strength:

GodsdamnitIdonotwanttolookatthat—and you have no
right
—no!
Enough
. Stop. Get
out
!

She sucked in a shattered-sounding breath and cried out without words: images unrolled into his mind, a series of crystalline moments from her own memories—

—her head snapped to one side so hard she saw stars... He’d almost broken her neck with the blow—

—Cabe, kill them... A sharp blade, a gout of blood... Thick perfume, sweet-sick, the world going black... Waking to blue and white curtains and a familiar stare—

He didn’t know the man she showed him, but he knew that stare, oh gods yes, he knew that look: the look of someone who was
curious,
gods help him,
curious
as to what would happen if he bent a boy’s pinky finger
just so
or laid a hot iron j
ust there—

Ohholygodsno—Idon’twanttoseethis—no—please—

The images rolled on, unstoppable as a sandstorm, eroding the boundaries he’d built between past and present, destroying his self and turning him into an amalgamation of
alyea/tank/littlered—

—her defiance:
Just kill me...
dryly amused answer:
Oh, no, no... That’s silly. And no fun at all...
her temper, blazing back:
Go fuck yourself!...
a sentiment
littlered/tank
empathized with completely—

—branded... I’ve got my own scars... so what?
Only it wasn’t
so what,
not now, not with her pain ripping open the closed doors he’d long ago, with Allonin and Teilo’s help, locked tight and sealed, so he’d thought, forever—forever
safe,
forever
normal,
forever
notthatpersonanymore—

Pressure. Warmth. She was in his arms now, weeping uncontrollably; he’d come to his feet at some point. Something tickled his knees with a feathery touch. Ignoring that, he wrapped his arms around her, even as his own pain/rage screamed
Throw her across the room, get her away, get clear, run, run,
run—

—then his rage was subsumed in her own, and the pain-memories kept unrolling—

—she tried to punch out... to spring, to claw,
anything—

—littlered, limp, helpless against that different face wearing the same detached, amused stare... You don’t have to take the dasta every time,
Tan said.
Palm it. Dump it on the floor and kick dirt over it... But then what they do will hurt more,
littlered said...
So?
Tan said.
You’ll be awake. You’ll be
yourself
... Pain isn’t that important. Being awake, being alive,
is.

—hold her, Tevin—

—a thick miasma of rosemary and garlic—
Tank gagged on the memory of that smell, staggering back to a dizzying awareness of the room around him: from the boots on his feet to the dawn light frosting the drapes to the severe glares of two men nearby, at least one of whom raw instinct demanded he run from
immediately—

—and back into the swirling maelstrom of shared/tangled memories once more—

One thread of the agony, at least, he understood, could do something about, could
grasp:
dasta. He worked a trembling hand free and pawed into his belt pouch until his fingers wrapped around a thick stick of
chich;
pulled it out, heedless of spilling anything else from the pouch, simply not caring about anything but getting some fraction of their shared pain to
stop.