City of Night (64 page)

Moments passed, the silence swallowing Alowan’s gentle words. Jay’s eyes were red, yes, but she’d done with pride for the moment; she looked at the old man’s face, his hair, the veined, lined thinness of eyelids. Angel knew the moment her eyes drifted down from his face to the pendant he wore; he heard her breath catch, and he saw her turn her face away again.

Hope was like that, when it came unexpected. It cut.

Silence. Minutes stretching into nothing.

They wanted to ask this man if it was too late.

They wanted to preserve hope, who had almost none. If Duster had been here,
she
would have talked, because Duster was afraid of hope.

Duster wasn’t here. Would never be here again. Teller lifted his head, swallowed, and opened his mouth. Before he could speak, Alowan did.

“Come, Arann. Come home. I am Alowan. Follow me. No, do not be frightened. It is safe. Come.”

Silence fell once again, but it fell deeper this time. No one opened their mouths to speak, to ask, or to give voice to the hope that was so much like fear it was impossible to tell them apart.

Instead, they listened to the old man. He spoke seldom, and when he did, he spoke some variant of the same words, calling to Arann, wherever Arann might be. They knew, in this hush, that Arann was not—quite—here, but neither was he entirely gone.

Silence. Words. Silence. Words.

And then the words ceased entirely, and the old man withdrew the hand he had laid against Arann’s chest.

“Welcome back, boy,” he said. He rose, and then realized that Jay’s hands were still sandwiched around his.

“Jay, you must release my hand now. It isn’t safe for the healer and the healed to be too long joined.”

She looked confused, but she did as he asked. Anyone would have, really.

Arann’s eyelids began to flicker. It was ever so slight, and nothing else about his face had changed, but they noticed it anyway. They watched, bore witness, captive still to the beginning of hope, and anxious to see its fruition. He drew a sharp, audible breath, and they all breathed then, as if they were one person.

But he drew breath to moan. It was not a scream, but it was unmistakably a cry of pain. He was still for another moment, and then he opened his eyes. His tears caught the light of the lamp that Jay had set on the floor.

“Arann?” Jay spoke. She spoke for all of them.

“Jay?” He reached out for her as if she were his mother. She froze for an instant, stiff as his arms encircled her neck and shoulders, and then she hugged him back. Hiding her face.

Teller came first, and quietly; Finch came last, and hesitantly. In between, Carver and Angel joined her at Arann’s side. Jester rolled his eyes in mock contempt, grinning broadly and tapping his left foot as if to a tune.

 

Arguably the most powerful woman in the Empire stood, to one side of her desk, and observed. She was utterly silent; she might have been a wall-flower at a great ball, seeing all and interacting with nothing.

The message that Ararath Handernesse had purportedly penned lay on the ground, forgotten. It had, she thought, served the girl’s purpose. And if the girl had been foolish—and she had—she had not lied; the cause for that folly was written clearly both upon her and each of the young men, and the young woman, who attended her.

She had called herself the den leader, and it was clear that these were her den.

The Terafin glanced across the room at Torvan, and he, accustomed to her, lifted his head and met her gaze. He lifted a brow in question; she raised two fingers in reply. It was not a deliberate language; she was long past the age in which she required the delight of a hard code by which to communicate. But he understood what she meant, and he nodded.

The Terafin watched this den. She gave them the time to touch their fallen giant, and they did; his face, his hands, his shoulders. As if they couldn’t believe he was alive, as if they had never thought to touch anything of him again but his corpse.

Then, when she judged the impulse satisfied, she looked at the boy himself. He was pale, and his face, tear-stained. His forehead would not scar, but Alowan had used as little of his power as it was possible to use in a healing of this nature.

She was not, had not, been kind to Alowan, this day.

Alowan was watching her.

And he was, of course, watching the boy, the den. His expression as he did was not an old man’s expression, and the smile on his lips, if weary and pained, also held a very surprising joy in great measure. He was, indeed, happy. For them.

Which told her much. The rest, she now desired to learn. She lifted a hand. Not a single one of the strangers noticed, but all five of her Chosen did.

“Torvan, escort Alowan and the boy—Arann?—to the healerie. If our visitors are concerned take one of them with you. Any,” she added, “save the leader.”

“Lord.” He stepped forward.

“Carver.” The young woman spoke a single name without looking at anyone but The Terafin. There was, in the girl’s face, both gratitude and the weary reassumption of command. Had the circumstances been different, The Terafin might have taken the time to ask for the story behind their situation, for if it was true that many sought—and frequently attempted to demand—her attention, it was also true that they seldom came with companions who were literally at death’s door.

She had known, of course. She had seen death before, much of it in this house. At least one death in this room.

“Me?” The young man, with his ludicrous but strangely appropriate mane of hair, said, denying her the perfect obedience that the patriciate itself was accustomed to. “But—”

“Go.” Jewel Markess did not seem to be embarrassed by this denial; she didn’t seem surprised by it either.

“Yessir.”

 

The Terafin stepped forward and held out a hand. “Now,” she said quietly, “you will deliver your message without further delay.”

The girl nodded firmly, and opened her mouth as if to speak. She snapped it shut again, showing more judgment, and far more control, than she had in her wild and desperate attempt to somehow save the boy’s life.

And who,
The Terafin thought wryly,
am I to judge
? It had worked, after all. Whatever it was that Torvan had seen in this slight and silently angry girl that had caused him to speak for her, and further, to carry the dying down the length of the long halls that led to The Terafin’s day office, The Terafin could not entirely discern.

But she could not dismiss it; she saw something in the girl herself.

Perhaps, in the end, she saw Ararath. It did not occur to her to doubt that Jewel Markess spoke truth: that she knew Ararath, and he knew her. Ararath would guess that he might send Jewel to House Terafin, at least once. What she might buy here, with her presence, he could never be certain. But that he had been willing to send her at all?

Her hands closed upon the letter; it ran several pages. She glanced, briefly, at the shape of the writing, at its orderly, neat lines, its cramped and entirely recognizable style. After all these years, his hand had not changed so very much.

She stilled a moment, seeing in the shape of words, and the choice of them, one other thing that had not changed. It surprised her. The language of Handernesse, one of their chief delights in their early years, was here. She turned from Jewel, and spoke to her guard.

“Tell the secretary to continue without me for the moment; I can be found in my chambers if matters of import arise.”

To Jewel, granting her only the sight of profile, she added, “Please wait for me in the antechamber.”

 

She kept Jewel Markess waiting.

It did not take her long to read the letter, but she read it more than once, in the presence of Morretz, her domicis, and no one else. She had repaired to her rooms, and the much larger office they contained, not because she required the space—although the letter was laid out, sheet by sheet, against the perfect sheen of her desk—but because she desired privacy.

In rooms that were easily accessible to the public, privacy was never guaranteed. She seldom needed it.

Morretz was, of course, utterly silent. He was not still, but even his movements failed to create a sense of noise, or destroy the questionable peace in this room. Here, her history lay, hidden to those who had not also experienced it. She knew the stories told about her rise to power in House Terafin, because she had helped to spread them, in her fashion. She did not stoop to lie, of course; a lie was not effective, and it was easily revealed.

And only those who felt threatened, only those who felt their position was untenable, resorted to that tactic. No, instead, she selected a few truths from among all of her truths, and she allowed those few to travel unimpeded.

She did not, of course, choose to speak of Handernesse directly. On those occasions when she did, she spoke with modulated respect for the House of her birth, and with guarded affection for her grandfather, whose distant words and dismissive anger had placed her squarely upon the path that she had traveled.

In happier times, before the shadow of Terafin loomed, she had adored him. She adored little, now. It wasn’t safe.

She glanced again at the letter. She had loved Ararath. Ararath, the child, Ararath the frustrating and taunting boy, Ararath the feckless and slightly idealistic youth. But she had left him, to Handernesse.

She drew breath; it was sharp.

She had accepted his anger. She had even understood that she would face it, although its breadth and depth had astonished her. This was where worship led, for he had worshiped her. Perhaps, had she waited a few years, perhaps had she made clear the ways in which she had stumbled in her slow walk toward House Terafin, he might have ceased to worship her at all; he had not quite begun his own road to understanding, and his own idealism had blinded him.

She had been perfect, to him.

The perfect future. The perfect older sister. He had been
so proud
of her.

But he had also shown a more bitter pride, in his fashion. He had left Handernesse, in his fury, and he had never again returned. She knew, of course. She knew, as well, that Hectore of Araven still heard from Ararath on occasion. More than that, she did not trouble to discover—but it had been difficult.

Still, if she had been a woman to give way easily to impulse, she would not now be The Terafin.

So she returned, again, to a letter whose authenticity was beyond doubt.

Jewel Markess was seer-born. Ararath was certain of it. He did not detail how; the language of their youthful devising was not a complicated language. But more was here, between those words, and all of it—if true, and if she indeed remembered what the code was—was grim.

Reading between the lines—the ones he had written for Jewel’s eyes, and the ones he had written for Amarais, his lost sister—she understood that he not only valued Jewel, but loved her. He did not, of course, reveal this; no more did he reveal his regret or his apology for the past.

To do either was to expose some part of himself to the sister who had hurt him so badly, and Ararath had never been a boy to forgive and forget. But neither had be been a boy who was easily charmed or addled by youth or beauty. What he valued in Jewel Markess, she could guess at: her concern for Arann, the dying boy. The way she held her den. Her sense of duty to those she had made her responsibility.

What surprised Amarais, as she sat, considering the information, was that he had allowed this one girl—and by extension all of the others—into his life at all. Yet clearly, he had, and just as clearly, he now attempted to take responsibility for her future.

But this was, of course, his way. To accept and surrender when facing death. And only then. He had placed Jewel Markess, seer-born, and therefore of incalculable value to the House, in her hands. And he had stepped back. How far back, she could not yet be certain.

But the girl was not a gift to Terafin.

She was, Amarais thought, a plea, and delivered in the only way that Ararath was capable of; disguised as something other, something that might be tempting to a woman of power. She could have told him, absent as he was, that she owed him nothing.

But lies were a tool of the weak. She made her decision, and she looked up at her domicis.

 

“Among the domicis, Terafin retains the service of three.”

Morretz was the fourth, but he served her personally; his contract was not with the House. Of the four, Morretz was therefore the most valuable to The Terafin. She watched him, aware at this moment of all the changes in her life from its beginning to the present—and aware, as well, that he had not seen the girl she had been when Ararath had been of Handernesse.

Lines had been etched around Morretz’s eyes and the corners of his lips with the passage of time, although they were not in evidence at the moment; it was rare that he either smiled or frowned. Consummate care in his chosen profession forbade either. And yet, of the men and women whose service she had taken, he understood her perhaps better than any.

Ironic, that the two men who best did had not chosen to take the House Name. Morretz, because he was of the Guild of the Domicis, and until he chose to leave it, could not take another title or rank, and Alowan, for his own reasons, some of which she understood, and some of which she did not.

She waited for Morretz to speak, but he merely nodded at her simple statement of a fact they both knew well.

“If you were to place an untried and ill-mannered young woman with one of those three, whom would you choose?”

And there it was: a momentary frown. It was seldom that she could coax that much expression out of his watchful face. “Is the young woman to remain here under your permanent protection?”