City of Night (5 page)

“But not why you chose to take the job?”

“No.” Terrick found that even the pretense of eating was beyond him, and rose, turning away from both light and visitor so that he might look out into the summer streets. At night, they were their own landscape, as different from day as North from South. He took a breath of humid, hot air, and expelled it from his lungs with a keen distaste. The home-sickness that had characterized his beginnings here was strong, tonight. It could be laid at the feet of this boy, if he were of a mind to assign blame.

But he was practical; blame served nothing now. “They did not pass through the Authority and I cannot therefore track their journey. They could have been months tracking him down; they could have been years. Garroc came for the Kings’ Challenge,” he continued. “As an entrant, he was not invisible.”

“Wait—are you saying my
father
was in the Kings’ Challenge?”

At that, Terrick turned, a half smile on his lips. “Had he taken the challenge some five years earlier, I believe he would have won. It is often a Northerner who wins the wreath,” he added, “But if he did not win—and he did not—he was noted, and in the end, he chose to accept employment in House Kalakar.” So much effort, to say the words.

“He served The Kalakar,” Angel said, ignoring that effort without apparent awareness.

Stiffly, holding onto his anger with as much care as he had ever held anything, Terrick said, “No.”

“He did,” Angel answered quietly.

“No. He was employed—”

“He was a House Guard,” the boy replied, his face shading, in the lamplight, to a definite red. Protecting, Terrick saw, his father’s memory. Defending his dignity and his honor.

Unaware that in so doing, he was destroying Terrick’s ability to do the same. “He could not take another master,” Terrick all but shouted. “He served Weyrdon!”

The boy fell silent, and Terrick thought the matter resolved. But the boy was, in his fashion, still Garroc’s son. “You can serve The Kalakar and serve the Kings at the same time. They rule,” he added, “but they don’t demand the deaths of those who choose to pledge allegiance to the Houses who also serve.”

“You do not understand the clans. You do not understand Weyrdon.”

“No,” Angel replied, the heat slow to leave his cheeks. “But neither do you.”

 

The silence that followed the boy’s flat statement was as cold a silence as any that Terrick remembered from his youth. And in his youth, as in the occasional winter that crept in beneath the cover of the cold rainy seasons in the Empire, cold could kill. It was not, however, the only thing, and Terrick laid his palms flat against the surface of a crumb-dusted tablecloth to indicate that he had not—yet—reached for a weapon.

The courtesy—if such a thing was indeed within the purview of the Southern sense of polite behavior—was lost on the boy; he had made his comment as an observation, no more; he had no reason to understand how much of an attack it was.

Had he been, in truth, Rendish, he might well be dead, the courtesy owed guests one had offered the hospitality of the hearth notwithstanding. But he would not have offered anyone but Garroc’s son this opening—and the child was Garroc’s son. If the boy did not understand his birthright, if he did not understand his father’s senseless betrayal of their entire life, it was not, in the end, his fault.

“Be careful what you say, boy.”

Angel, eating slowly and methodically—as he had done at a lunch that now seemed in the distant past—swallowed. “It wasn’t meant as an insult,” he said carefully. “But you don’t. You don’t understand my father’s role. You don’t understand why he left, or for what reason.”

“And you do?”

Angel said nothing. But it was a nothing that held no fear, no timidity. He was not bold, this boy; he did not try to stake out space by size or temper; he did not care, in fact, to cut out a place he might stand in and call his own. This, at least, Terrick had seen clearly when he’d watched the boy on the docks and in the Port Authority. But if he did not seek his safety in this most obvious of gambits, he did not relinquish whatever it was that made him Garroc’s son.

Terrick waited.

After a long pause, the wait was rewarded.

“No,” Angel said quietly. “I don’t. I understand what he believed,” he added, and for just a moment, the boy’s loss was fresh, and his eyes, wide, were shadowed by it: death, and mourning that had not yet run its course. “But, Terrick, he was asked to leave.”

“By who?”

“Who else could ask?” The boy now placed his hands, palm down, upon the tabletop, just as Terrick had done, but without the obvious anger to make of that gesture a statement. “He loved my mother,” Angel said quietly, as if he now picked up the threads of an entirely different discussion; as if the discussion he was continuing could have the same import as the one he had—at least for now—abandoned. “And he understood the farm. He worked with the mayor, even if he didn’t like him much. He taught some of us.”

“Taught?”

“How to use a sword,” Angel said. “How to kill a man.” He looked away, his profile caught and heightened by the lamp’s light. “It saved us, in the end, but it didn’t save him.”

“They came back to kill him,” Terrick said heavily.

“They? Oh, the Northerners.” As if he weren’t one. “No. Not them. There are many things, my father used to say, that will kill a man. Most of those don’t even know that they’re killing us. The cold,” he added softly. “Water. Fire. Time. Other things.”

“He said that, did he?”

“All the time,” Angel said, his voice uninflected. “But when he taught us to use the sword? He said, in the end, that you fight the things that
can
be fought. You fight those things as if they were everything—anything—in the world that could kill you, or that had harmed you, or your family.”

Terrick nodded. “That, at least, I can believe. I can almost hear him.” “He also said that stupidity and anger aren’t the same,” the boy added, with a wince. “He had a lot to say about stupidity. Most of it ours.”

“Why did he teach you?”

“He thought we should know. My mother—many of our mothers—didn’t approve, but . . . he thought it was something we should know.” He stopped for another moment. “When the rains come late,” he said at last, “the Free Towns have problems with raiders. They cause merchants problems as well, on the routes through the Towns; if it’s bad enough, the Kingdoms or the Empire will send men, quietly.”

“And the rains came late.”

“For three years,” Angel replied. “He taught us. We learned. He wasn’t the only one to die.”

“And your mother?”

“My mother, as well. And Emily, and David—” He paused. Shook his head. “They were children. From another farm.”

“And so you came here.”

“Yes.”

“To meet the
Ice Wolf
.”

“Yes.”

“What do you hope to learn, Angel?”

“Why.”

“Why?”

“Why my father was asked to leave. Why he chose to live in the Empire. What he wanted, from Weyrdon, and what Weyrdon wanted from him.”

“And then?”

Angel shrugged. “I don’t know. It depends on his answer.” He added, quietly, “My father wanted me to do this.”

Terrick nodded. This, at least, did not surprise him. “And you?”

“Me?”

“What do you want?”

Silence again, a different silence. Terrick bowed his head. The boy had come this far to fulfill a duty that he, as a son, could not ignore. But that duty consumed all thought; it was the only future Angel could see. Beyond that? He had not considered.

“Will you tell me, in the end, what Weyrdon says if you survive?” He kept all hope and all desire from the words; only the fact that he had asked at all exposed them. But to a man from Arrend, it would have exposed everything. And perhaps, in some fashion, blood ran true, no matter where the child had been raised. The boy met his gaze, and held it, searching for something. What, at his age, and with his life, he might search for, Terrick could not be certain.

Nor could he be certain what, in the end, was found—but something was.

“If I survive,” Angel nodded bleakly. “I give you my word, Terrick. If I survive, I will tell you what I know.” He paused and tore a piece of bread into something that could comfortably fit in his mouth. “The bread here is so hard,” he added, speaking as if to himself. Sounding, for a moment, much younger than he looked.

Then he drew breath. “I will tell you what I know, and I hope it makes more sense to you than it does—than it ever did—to me.”

And after that, silence for a long stretch of time. Terrick let the oil burn; it was costly, but as he seldom entertained guests of any significance, he could afford the hospitality. There was never any question about Angel’s significance. Boy or no, he was the son of the man that Terrick had served for much of his adult life. He watched the boy eat in silence, and found the silence difficult.

But words presented a different difficulty. Were the boy Garroc, they might have spoken, or they might have passed the night in companionable silence; were he Garroc, they might have argued, raising voices as if they were blunt weapons, and words as if they were edged. Garroc and Terrick had seldom come to blows—but not never.

Service and servility were only conflated in the confusing and complicated cultural grayness of the South, and nowhere more so than in Averalaan.

But against this boy? Terrick could not raise voice; could not even imagine raising hand. They had fought no wars together, survived no conflicts, tested no loyalties; nor had they felt the keen and biting edge of an oath’s many restrictions, circling different sides of it, seeking the advantage of terrain. Seeking, perhaps, the truth that lay at the heart of all great oaths; that gave them the power to bind a life, year after year, to the Port Authority.

Terrick found himself mulling over words as if they were the sodden leaves that blanketed the Common at the start of the rainy season. They were thin and flat and limp, and they had no resonant power, not yet; power, with words, was something both given and taken—and how could one do either, when one did not have the measure, in the end, of the man?

Or of the boy.

Angel’s hair, so pale it was almost white, rose above his face and his porcelain forehead like a crown. Like, in truth, a crown that fit poorly and might topple at even the slightest of turbulence. Garroc had done this, he thought. Garroc had taught the boy how to plait his hair, how to wire it, how to mimic adulthood.

But—and this from the vantage of years—was that not what they all did? Was it not how they all learned? By mimicking adults and adult behavior until the mimicry and the fact could no longer be easily separated?

No, it wasn’t his age that made Terrick uncomfortable, for he had been such a boy, and seen many more such boys when boyhood had passed—thankfully—beyond his grasp. Not to one of those boys would he offer this embarrassing and tongue-tied silence. And why?

Because those boys were not foreigners.

This one was.

Angel could speak Rendish, and could even speak it well; he could openly declare his allegiance by styling his hair in that particular design. He could wear a weapon as if it were not a hoe, not a farmer’s tool. But all of this was superficial; what the boy was, beneath these things, was hidden. Terrick—and Garroc before him—had never trusted the superficial to tell them what they needed to know; they read a man’s intent by more than the color or style of his hair or the clan- marks, more common, that he wore across his skin.

But the boy’s caution, while commendable, gave little away; were it not for the quiet comment he had made about, of all things, bread, he might have lied about his age, either raising or lowering the number. He stood on the threshold, this one, or perhaps on the fence; one way or the other, he would have to jump off.

And he would do that, tomorrow, regardless of whether or not he understood the decision.

“Angel,” Terrick said quietly, when the boy had stopped eating for long enough that he might indeed be finished.

Angel met Terrick’s gaze and held it, an acknowledgment that younger children often failed to offer. In the face of that steady gaze, Terrick momentarily lost the words, for there was, in the lines of the boy’s chin and cheekbones, something of Garroc—the Garroc that Terrick had met in the snow and cold of a distant youth.

Angel surprised him. “You’ve met Weyrdon, haven’t you?”

“Yes.”

“His son?”

Terrick shook his head. “While he lives, he is Weyrdon. When he dies, perhaps his son, after him. Perhaps his brother, or a cousin.”

“But—the hair—” He lifted a hand self-consciously to touch his hair, as if aware that he wore the hair the way another might wear a hat—it was external, not yet of him, if it would ever be.

“It marks you as Weyrdon, yes.”