Heroes Adrift (20 page)

“Hm.”

“Just a little more,” he muttered, and the tremors grew hard enough to be easily felt before I could make any objection. “There she is.”

“She's channeling?”

“Aye.”

I felt a spurt of panic. I couldn't help it. “She doesn't have a Shield.”

He caught my wrist before I could dash back to the tent. “She says she doesn't need one.”

“Children lie a lot.”

“She's doing fine.”

“You can't feel what's going on inside her.”

“No, but she's not dead yet, is she?”

“We just started.”

“She's fine. Leave it. She'll pull out if she gets into trouble.”

“She can't pull out once she's engaged.” Her instincts wouldn't let her. He knew that. What was he doing?

He growled in annoyance, but the tremors faded, then, and halted.

I was still annoyed. “We could have killed her.”

“Calm down. I was right there, taking over when she was overwhelmed.”

“So she was overwhelmed?”

“Aye, but not for the lack of a Shield. She's just not very strong.”

“She couldn't channel that herself?” That had been so minor. Probably no one had even noticed it.

On the other hand, she'd done it without a Shield. That was amazing enough.

He shook his head. “Maybe she could have if I'd let it go longer, let her build up to it. But something that mild, it should have taken only a few moments.”

So she could channel alone, but she was bad at it. Would she do better with a Shield? Would she do better with training?

Damn. This meant we had to take her, didn't it?

“Think we should sleep on it?” Taro asked.

“Is there really a point?”

He offered me a bent smile. “Not really.”

Damn.

What the hell were we going to do with her for the next two years?

We looked at each other, realizing together that we had just let ourselves in for a horrific, gargantuan task we had no idea whether we were up to performing.

“All right. So.” He pulled in a deep breath and let it out. “All right,” he said again. “Let's go tell her.”

We returned to the tent. The girl didn't appear to have moved, not even to pick up the items she had dropped from her bag onto the mat. She was coated in sweat, however, and when she looked at us, her eyes were tired.

“Well?” she asked.

“Sit down,” I said.

She melted into a sitting position on the mat, a strangely fluid and appealing motion. She rested her head on her hand and looked up at us.

“We are prepared to take you with us, under certain conditions.”

“I can get you coin,” she said.

“We're not interested in that. More importantly, you are not interested in that.”

“Oh.”

“I mean it. You steal a single item—”

She rolled her eyes.

“—and I will beat you within a breath of death.”

She shrugged and grinned, and at this first nonsullen expression, I saw how truly beautiful she was. Why did I have to put myself in the company of such people? “I been beat before.”

Sad as that was, I wasn't going to let it sidetrack me. “Then I will find something that will torment you and dig right in. And I will find it. I'm smart.”

“Kai, kai. I figured.”

“I mean it. Not a single, solitary thing. We won't bail you out. There will be no second chances. If we so much as suspect you of lifting anything, we will ditch you, whether we are in the middle of a city or the middle of nowhere. Understood?”

“Understood,” she echoed, mimicking my accent right down to the final over-articulated “
d
.” Cheeky brat.

“And that's not all.”

“'Course not.”

“We are taking you only on the understanding that once we hit the Northern continent, you are going straight to the Source Academy.”

“The what?”

“Where Taro went to school. Where all Sources go to school.”

“I'm not going to any school!” she protested, her lower lip protruding in a pout.

“That's the only way we're taking you.”

“Then you can go to hell!”

“Fine.” I gestured at the entrance flap. “You can leave now.”

She bit that lower lip and stared at me.

“I think this might be my job,” said Taro.

“Convincing her to go?”

“More like explaining to her what the Academy is like, and why it's in her best interest to go.”

“Like I can believe you,” she muttered. “You'll say anything, won't you?”

“I've got no reason to lie,” he told her. “I really don't care whether you go or stay. In fact, it's much easier on both of us if you just disappear.”

She glared at him.

He was spectacularly unmoved.

He looked up at me. “You might want to talk to Atara.”

“Why?”

“I imagine we need her permission to take on someone new.”

Oh. Right. I'd forgotten about that.

So I was the one who got to convince Atara that we should introduce a thief to the troupe. “Thank you so very much.”

He smiled before blowing a kiss at me. The prat.

“Tell her I've got good doings for her,” Aryne said.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“That snake that bit that man, it wasn't natural.”

“Wasn't natural how?” For Zaire's sake, could she not just spit out the whole story instead of doling it out in tiny morsels?

“It was put there. By some man. He had it in a bag, and he released it on the ground.”

“And no one saw him do this?”

“Everyone was watching you,” Taro said.

“He wasn't with the other speccies,” Aryne added. “He was hiding in the trees. He threw something on the ground, but I couldn't see what. Then he threw out the snake. He left before it even bit the other fellow.”

“You saw this and you didn't think to warn anyone?” Taro demanded.

“Snake struck too fast. No time. No one'd believe me, anyway.”

Of all the—What kind of prank was that, setting a poisonous snake among a crowd? Thought it was funny, did he, risking the lives of performers and their audience? Sometimes people infuriated me.

I went to Atara's tent and sought entrance.

She granted it most regally.

“Good evening, Dunleavy,” she said, surprising me by using my proper name. I'd practically forgotten what it sounded like. “Why do you look for me?”

She was still seated at her table, but the beads were gone, replaced by a black piece of parchment. She had a fistful of what looked like purple sand, and she was carefully sprinkling it over the parchment, lining it next to a long sinuous shape of light blue sand. There was a silver glint to the sand, and against the black parchment it looked stunning. “May I ask what you are doing?”

“Sand painting,” she said. “It is one of our arts. People like to buy them.”

I hadn't noticed her selling such things. “It is beautiful.”

“It also speaks of the future,” she said.

“Does it?” I was careful to keep the disbelief out of my voice, and that, I was finding easier and easier. These were their beliefs. I didn't agree with them, but they did no harm. “How?”

“I think about a person, and their future, and the colors come. The colors speak of the paths the person's life will take. Not small details, such as whether someone will fall in love, or be wealthy. The larger paths. Will someone be happy? Healthy? Will they shape the lives of others?”

“I see.” What a wonderful thing for an artist, to find so much inspiration in so many places.

“What do you think of this person's future, Dunleavy?” Atara brushed off the last of the blue, and dug her hand into a jar of dark red.

“I have no skill in such things.”

“Try. There is no harm in trying. Except, of course, appearing incorrect. And you do so hate to appear incorrect.”

Wench.

She trailed the dark red across the two streaks of lighter color. The red, while pretty in itself, was harsh against the other colors. Violent, almost, and painful. And the lighter colors below the red suddenly seemed pale, while above the red they seemed vibrant. How could that be, when they were the same colors?

“From what I see here, if I had to guess…” This was stupid. I knew nothing of such things. “I would say the person is coming up against some kind of change, or shock. And it will hurt. A lot. But afterward, I don't know, it seems their life will be the better for it.”

“You are not incorrect.” She smiled. “Though you are not complete, either. Still, for a nonbeliever, a remarkable job. Now, can you guess who this is for?”

“Me?” Because why else the abject lesson?

She tsked. “So you are not perfect after all.”

And I was embarrassed by my self-absorption. It appeared that not everyone else was as fascinated with me as I was.

“No, this is your thief.”

I hated when people did things like that. Knew things before I told them.

“She is facing a very difficult task,” she said. “Be gentle with her.”

“You don't object to her joining the troupe?”

“I do not.”

A part of me was almost hoping she would, so we could cut the girl loose with no responsibility. But things never turned out so simply. “Thank you.”

Atara nodded, choosing a dark, heavy blue to trace immediately beside the red. It emphasized the differences in the lighter purples and blues even more dramatically, giving the appearance of brutally cutting them in half.

“She mentioned seeing someone set the snake on Panol.”

Atara looked up at me swiftly, her eyes narrowed. “Do you believe her?”

“I have no reason not to. She has no reason to tell me such a story if it isn't true.” No more reason than a person would have to toss a snake among people in the first place.

“Did she know him?”

“She didn't say, but I think she would have if she did.”

Atara looked grim, but not shocked.

“Has this sort of thing happened before?”

Atara shrugged. “Players are not welcome by everyone.”

“So they try to kill you?”

“Not usually.”

Not usually. Wonderful. But that was all Atara was prepared to say, and there was nothing I could do about any of it anyway.

I left Atara, feeling unsettled.

I was always unsettled. I hated this island.

I lingered away from the tent, to give Taro plenty of time to convince Aryne she had to go to the Academy. And she did have to go. I had been told stories of people, Sources and Shields, who had managed to grow up outside the academies. They were old stories, and Aryne seemed to be doing all right, but I had no way of knowing whether Aryne could stay sane if she progressed into adulthood without the direction of the Academy.

Besides, whatever the failings of the Triple S, Aryne would always have enough to eat and a roof over her head.

Unless some crazy Empress sent her off on a fool's errand in the middle of nowhere.

Eventually, I went back to our tent to find the girl gobbling down rice and fish, prepared for her by Taro, who was watching her lack of eating manners with an aristocratic curl to his lip.

“Well?” I said to Aryne.

“I'll go to your blasted school,” she said through a mouthful of food.

I reached down, put a fingertip under her chin, and closed her mouth.

She was lying.

But she couldn't complain when we dragged her to the Academy whether she liked it or not. After all, she'd been warned.

Kabis, I had learned, was the word for the entrance flap of the tent. Each piece of a tent had its own name. And if the same piece of fabric made up the eastern wall—or skevin—of one tent, but was later used as part of the ceiling for another, its name was changed to sheder.

I was learning this from Aryne. Having a Southerner living in our tent was quite the education.

It had been a week since she had joined us, and a tense week at that. For all sorts of reasons. Panol had arranged for another length of fabric to enable Aryne to have a “room” of her own. There was little space, and days when we were stuck inside due to rain were tortuously slow. And, of course, there was absolutely no privacy. After Aryne had walked in on no less than three conversations pertaining to the Empress's descendants, we decided we couldn't speak of them at all.

The lack of privacy had other ramifications. There was no way I was having sex with nothing more than a thin piece of fabric between us and the girl. Taro wasn't too keen on it, either. During my less mature moments, I railed at the inherent unfairness of life. I had only a short period of time when I would hold Taro's attention. It was being squandered due to the presence of the girl.

Plus, I was waiting for her to steal something. I knew she was going to, sooner or later. A person couldn't change a lifetime habit just like that. She, of course, claimed she hadn't been trying to steal from me that day at the market, she had only fallen against me accidentally. She had never stolen anything in her entire life. I, of course, didn't believe this revision of history, but I wasn't prepared to call her a liar. Not out loud. All I could do was wait. Wait for her to do something stupid, and figure out how I was going to handle it when she did.

How to handle it. How to handle her. Aryne was baffling. Although she was quick with an objection or a cutting remark, she was reticent about her personal information. She claimed to have no last name. She claimed both her parents were dead, though she didn't know how they died, or even what their names were. She didn't know where she had been born. She had been following the medicine man—whose name was Leslie Border—around the island all her life.

The medicine man suddenly disappeared, it seemed, for we no longer saw him at the villages at which we stopped. I had feared he would come after us, but Aryne claimed his traditional route branched west as we went east and that was one of the reasons she had chosen the time she had to come to us.

Apparently, she had been planning to chase after us from the moment she had first encountered us. She claimed that at the market, she had noticed something different about us and had been determined to find out what it was.

She was a driven little thing, for a child.

She was skilled as well, for one so young. She had spent her life cleaning and repairing clothes, valuable talents for a troupe such as Atara's. This was the source of the coin she had claimed when convincing us to take her with us, not the more nefarious routes my mind had leapt to.

She also knew how to whip together medicines that looked good, felt effective, and accomplished nothing. She claimed they did no harm. I'd forbidden her to make them and had so far caught her selling them to Rinis twice. No one else would back me up on the snake oil ban, and Aryne purchased the ingredients with her own funds—acquired through the sales. I had to give up on it.

She had settled in too easily, with too little disruption to everyone else. Something had to snap. It was inevitable. Waiting for it, however, was enough to make me snap.

She did not appear to be a typical Source. Well, obviously she wasn't, in that she didn't need a Shield, but it was more than that. I witnessed no emotional extremes in her. She didn't display any weird tricks with speech. She did, however, stumble too close to the fire and was a little slower about getting away from it than I liked. There was no noticeable expression of pain, either, as I spread on the burn the gel I got from Kahlia.

We, Taro and I, were stunned by her reaction to music. One morning, after a performance, a shaken Taro briefly described having to drag an extremely amorous adolescent back to the tent. He refused to tell me of the other difficulties he had experienced, and teasing him about it had earned me nothing more than a very curt dismissal. He banned Aryne from attending any more of my performances. As he threatened to leave her tied up in the tent if she didn't comply, that was a ban that stuck.

I didn't know what to think of our newly discovered Source displaying clearly Shield traits.

She had taken to following me around, all day, every day. I couldn't say I cared for it. “Run off. I have to go to the challenges.”

“Can I come watch?”

“No.”

“Why not? There's no proper music. Just the drums.”

“I don't want to be distracted.” And I didn't want her stealing from such easy targets whom she'd likely never see again.

“I should learn how to do this, if I'm going to be going to that school of yours.”

“You won't be going to my school. You'll be going to the Source Academy, and they don't dance the benches. Not much, anyway.”

“Then I want to go to the Shield school. I want to do the dancing.”

“You're not a Shield.”

“Aye, I am.”

I looked at her curiously. “You're a Source.”

“I'm a Shield, too.”

“You can't be both.”

“Why not?”

“Because it's impossible.” I made an effort never to use that word. It was too uncompromising. But of course she wasn't both Source and Shield. That was just…impossible.

“I feel music like you do.”

“Not like I do.” No one, it seemed, felt it like I did. “Most people are sensitive to music to some extent. Regulars, Sources and Shields.”

“Not like me.” She grinned.

“It's nothing to be proud of.”

“I want to go to the Shield school instead.”

“Let's say you were both Source and Shield, and could choose which school to go to. You'd want to go to the Source Academy. You'd want to be a Source.”

“Why?”

“Because—”

And I froze. Because…why?

I could say that Sources were rarer, and were more desperately needed, and that would be true. But that wouldn't be the reason why I said what I said.

I said what I said because I thought it was easier to be a Source. Because I thought Sources were treated better by everyone else. Because Sources didn't seem to worry so much about things, about whether they did their tasks properly. No one really expected them to memorize the maps and read the reports and do anything, really, but channel forces. Whereas Shields had to do so much more than Shield.

I liked being a Shield. I was too proud of it, and of how seriously I took it.

But my automatic reaction to the possibility of being able to choose whether to be a Source or a Shield, was to suggest the choice be a Source.

Was that what I really felt? Really?

I didn't want to think about it. I had enough to think about as it was. Shelve that.

“Because why?” Aryne prodded.

“Because there are fewer Sources, and we need more of them.” There was a sharpness to my voice that Aryne didn't deserve. “You'll be going to the Source Academy. You don't need to learn how to dance.”

“Dunleavy,” she whined.

“This is not the proper way to be learning anyway. I'll show you at a better time. Go find something to wash.”

She scowled and stomped off with a sullen look.

Well done, Lee.

Zaire, I was always in a bad mood.

Once the challenges were over, I hunted up Taro. He had been helping Leverett grease his drums and was in the process of scraping the clinging stuff off his hands. “I need to talk to you,” I said to him.

He nicked a towel from Leverett's pile, and followed me as I looked for a place where we could possibly speak without arousing anyone's attention or being overheard. “Something wrong?” he asked after we'd crashed through a stretch of undergrowth to get away from the camp.

“We're getting close,” I said.

“Close to what?”

“Golden Fields.” He still looked blank. “Golden Fields. The whole reason for this whole thing. From what Atara says, we'll get there in a little over a week.”

His mouth opened on a silent “oh.” Then he closed it to a thin line. “We're going to have to start thinking now, aren't we?”

“Unfortunately.”

“It may take us more than a week to…figure out what we want to figure out.”

“Aye.”

“I won't be able to work while we're looking. And you won't be able to practice or perform.”

“Aye.”

“Are we leaving the troupe, then?”

I didn't like that idea. First, we still owed them a pile of money. Second, we still had to make our way from Golden Fields back to the harbor to catch a ship to the mainland. “We told Atara we were looking for family in Golden Fields. This won't come as a surprise to her. We could ask her to be excused for a while, tell her we'll catch up again after we've made our investigation.”

“What do we do with them if we find them?” he asked.

“Huh?”

“The line. What if there are dozens of them? The tent can get only so big.”

I stared at him. “Hell. I never thought of that.”

“How are we supposed to manage all of them?”

“Maybe they won't all want to go.”

“Aren't we supposed to bring them all?”

“She didn't say.” The Empress had said very little. For something that was so important—and it had damned well better be important if she sent us out there—she had given us precious little information. I would have hoped the ruler of our world would have been better at giving directions.

“So, what do we do?”

“Not panic until we know what all the problems are.”

He scowled. “I am not panicking.”

“I'm more worried about actually finding them, rather than their number.” I still had no idea how to begin, once we were there.

“I told you. We go there. We ask what happened to the Bryant family. We move from there.”

Right. Who cared about discretion?

But what I thought in sarcasm was probably actually true. I doubted word of anything we did on the island would follow us back to the mainland.

“So we have to tackle Atara.” Again. I hated having to account to her for everything. “Rather, you should.”

“Me?”

“Aye. You know. Lay on the Stallion charm.”

He glared at me. “The people here are immune to my charm.”

“Only because you haven't really used it. And that's dangerous. If you don't keep it in use it'll fade away altogether.”

“Will you stop?”

We found Atara in her tent, as usual. It seemed the woman never left it unless we were trudging somewhere. This time she was reading, however, instead of doing something discomforting. She had lit only two candles. Black, as usual.

“Good afternoon, Atara,” said Taro. “You are looking particularly elegant, today.”

She raised an eyebrow at him. “What do you need?”

Huh. She could at least pretend to be charmed.

“I believe Dunleavy spoke to you about Golden Fields?”

Atara closed her book and set it aside. “We were discussing when we would arrive there.”

“You may recall that when we first met, we told you we were looking for someone in Golden Fields.”

“Did you?”

Yes, we did.

“We need to be free to look for them.”

“What do you mean, free?”

“Free from our obligations to the troupe for the time it takes to find these people.”

“So you want to be able to benefit from our protection without having to contribute to it.”

“Well—”

“Yes,” I said.

Karish looked at me, which transferred responsibility for this conversation over to me. Prat. Though I supposed that was my fault for opening my mouth in the first place.

“This is the reason we came to the island in the first place.”

“And if you find this person you're looking for, you'll leave Flatwell.”

A statement, not a question. “We have every intention of paying off the debt we owe you,” I promised her.

“That wasn't what I asked.”

Damn it, she wasn't supposed to notice that. “Maybe not the words, but that's the meaning.”

“So what is your meaning?”

“That the debt will be repaid.”

“You seem to forget,” Atara drawled, “the reason I allowed you to join our troupe was because you were to be good omens. It is not merely a matter of the debt.”