No Quarter (5 page)

*What is it about you and old ladies?* Gyhard wondered as they followed the captain around the edge of the Dock Market, the roar of buying and selling making audible conversation impossible. *All of a sudden, you seem to be attracting them.

First in Pitesti and now here.*

*Maybe it's something Bannon left behind. He was always the one getting pinched and patted.*

*Probably enjoyed it, too.* He watched through Vree's eyes as Liene exchanged noisy greetings with half a dozen people, questioned the price of a pound of jasmine tea, and arranged for it to be delivered to the Bardic Hall at the lower price all without breaking stride. *I'm curious about why the Bardic Captain herself came down to meet us.*

Vree glanced up at the stone towers of the Citadel rising from the center of Elbasan like a crown. Although the steepness of the hill made an estimate difficult, it looked like they had some distance to cover and, with the captain's age slowing them down, they were going to take a while to cover it. *Seems like we'll have plenty of time to find out.*

*Remember you've got to…*

*… make a good impression with the bards.* She sighed. *I know. But I can't be something I'm not.*

*Be yourself.*

*Yeah. Right.*

The bitterness took him by surprise.

The noise of the market became a background growl as the two women turned onto a narrow avenue and started the long climb up the hill.

"Cotton Street," Liene explained, following Vree's gaze to where thick skeins of thread dyed all the colors of the rainbow hung twisting in the breeze between the open shutters of a shopfront. "Use to be West Wharf Street, but about fifteen years ago every-one started calling it Cotton Street and about five years ago the city council finally changed it. They buy bales of the stuff raw off the ships from the South, spin it, dye it, weave it, and sell it all around here. Don't sell a lot of it, mind, as the price is one unenclosed amount higher than the linen coming locally out of Vidor. The cloth doesn't last as long either." Then her voice changed, and it suddenly became impossible not to pay attention to what she had to say. "Lower Dock Street, then Hill Street to the Citadel would've been more direct, but at this time of day there'd be people all around and we need to talk without being interrupted. What do you want from us, Vree?"

"Karlene…" Vree began defensively.

The Bardic Captain shook her head. "No. I've heard her version, now I want yours."

"Gyhard…"

"Forget Gyhard," the older woman commanded. "Or if you can't forget him, disregard him for the moment. What do
you
want from us?"

I
want everything to be like it was before
. Except she didn't. Not really. Or she'd have let Gyhard disappear into oblivion.

"I want Gyhard to have a body for his own." Ignoring Gyhard's soft,
*Of his
own,*
Vree clutched the hilt of her dagger with her left hand, fingers opening and closing convulsively, and added, "But no one can die for it."

"Why not?"

She saw the face of Edite i'Oceania, a crimson line of death across her throat; Commander Neegan's face, her father's face, finding his only possible peace as her blade found his heart; Avor's face, a friend's face, as he realized he was going to die; too many faces to remember the names or the reasons. Her own face, reflected in a polished shield.

*What do you think you're going to see?*

*Who I am.*

*Who I am…*

"Vree?"

She blinked and realized that she'd stopped walking. The captain had moved a few paces ahead, had turned, and was watching her. She couldn't read the expression on the older woman's face and had no better idea of the expression on her own. Her arms were folded tightly over her stomach, as though she'd been slashed in the belly and had to hold in her guts. Slowly, she released the white-knuckled embrace she had on each elbow and held out her hands. "There has been enough death. I don't want to see death when I look at him."

To her surprise, the Bardic Captain took a step forward and enclosed her fingers in a gentle grip. Vree found herself looking into a dark gaze that reached past all the years of blood and all the training that had come before to find a seven-year-old who was suddenly no longer a child. It hurt more than any wound she'd ever taken. Somehow, she found the strength to drag her eyes away.

Liene released the girl's icy fingers and began walking toward the Citadel once again, her only outward reaction to the pain she'd seen a spasming of the hand that held her cane. Never good with emotions unconfined by chord and chorus, this was far more than she was capable of dealing with. More, she suspected, than the Healers' Hall could deal with.
Karlene has a greater perception than I gave her
credit for. This child is so tied in knots she's no danger to anyone but herself.

She'd intended to ask a lot of other whys, but they were no longer necessary.

"
I don't want to see death when I look at him
." It was a love song with enough tragic potential to rip out hearts and tear them into tiny, bleeding pieces. Teeth clenched, Liene wished she'd sent Kovar to the docks so that she could've received these first impressions filtered through his recall.

Gyhard felt Vree tremble and silently cursed his inability to hold her, to comfort her. He hated the Bardic Captain for what she'd done and his anger sizzled around the parameters of his existence. If only he had hands…

*Don't.*

He forced himself to withdraw although he knew at that moment she couldn't have stopped him from taking control.

The moment passed.

*Are you all right?* he demanded, fighting to suppress the anger for both their sakes.

Don't leave me.

If he'd still had a body, that quiet plea would've left him struggling to breathe.

This was the first time, since the initial impulse that had gathered up his kigh, that Vree had shown him her heart. If confronted, she probably wouldn't admit to the thought but he'd heard it—felt it—and nothing, not hatred, not anger, was worth hanging onto in the face of it.
Don't leave me
. Catching hold of them before they could fade, Gyhard gathered the words up and locked them away in his memory.

Then he waited.

He felt her chin rise. *I'm fine,* she told him, lengthening her stride to draw even with the Bardic Captain again. Her tone implied she didn't care if he believed her or not.

"I half expected that you'd be carried off the
Fancy
on the shoulders of her crew," Liene observed, stepping aside to allow a tailor's apprentice, arms loaded with a bolt of sea-green fabric, to pass. It suddenly seemed important she find a subject with a little distance.

Vree shrugged. "They were happy to come home. They made me a hero in the Broken Islands. That was enough."

"From what Tomas told me, I imagine it must've been." The image of a row of hastily-constructed gallows, filled as quickly as they were built, rose in Liene's mind. The crowd of dead behind the young assassin grew. "You speak Shkoden very well," she said, searching for yet a safer topic.

"Gyhard taught me."

The older woman stifled a sigh. It appeared there were no safer topics. "Well, he did a good job. I assume he translates for you, too?"

"Less now."

Liene grinned at Vree's tone. "Don't like depending on other people, do you? I can appreciate that." Then she frowned. "Gyhard hears through your ears? Sees through your eyes?"

"Yes."

"Then we shouldn't talk about him as though he isn't here." She turned that over, examined it from all sides. When she spoke again, they'd moved some distance up the hill. "From what Karlene has told me, I think you and he and your brother have proved that the body is merely meat worn by the kigh and that what we all consider the person,
is
the kigh. So." She took a tighter grip on her cane, forcing herself to give credit where credit was due. "Gyhard, thank you. Although a number of the bards speak Imperial, none of the healers do. You've made all our lives less complicated." Sweeping a piece of trash into the gutter, she snorted.

"Well, less complicated as regards language, at least."

*I'm not sure that granting me any kind of individuality is such a good idea.*

Gyhard lightly touched the place where he ended and Vree began, felt her recoil, and drew back. *If I'm given a little, I may be tempted to take the rest.*

*You can try.*

*Vree, I'm serious.*

*Then we'll deal with it ourselves because I'm not going to tell her. It's obvious she thinks I'm, we're, unstable. We don't need to prove her right.* Conscious of Liene's gaze, Vree added aloud, "He says, you're welcome."

The Bardic Captain shook her head. "No, he doesn't. Didn't Karlene tell you that you can't lie to a bard?" With everything filtered through Vree, they'd have no way of telling if Gyhard was lying—a realization that left the captain feeling distinctly less than happy—but they could certainly tell when she was. "Now then, what did he actually say?"

*Okay. That's it.* Ever since Ghoti, Vree'd had to continually draw lines between herself and the world. Time to draw another one. *How do I tell her that's none of her slaughtering business?*

*Vree!*

*Never mind.* This woman was the head of all the bards; Vree'd dice with the gods on the odds the Bardic Captain understood Imperial. "That's none of your slaughtering business," she repeated aloud, glad to be speaking her own language again and discovering an unexpectedly pleasant freedom in no longer being bound by the rules of rank. A similar response to an Imperial Army Captain would've resulted in six lashes and time in the box.

The Bardic Captain understood Imperial. She stopped in the middle of the street. Her cheeks flushed an alarming purple as she spun around and glared into Vree's face. "If you want our help—" she began.

Vree cut her off. "If you want to study the fifth kigh, we're going to have to trust you enough to let you poke around in our lives. If you want that kind of trust, you're going to have to give it in return."

"Gyhard i'Stevana has removed himself from the Circle!" Liene snapped.

"And we're asking you to put him back in. Doesn't that count for anything? All we want is a chance to start over, and if you're not willing to give us that chance, then we're on the first boat out of here and you can whistle up information on the fifth kigh without us."

It wasn't a bluff. Liene suspected assassins were unable to bluff. And, it was the truth. All they wanted was a chance to start over. At least, it was all Vree wanted and if it wasn't what Gyhard wanted, she believed he did. Still standing in the middle of the street, disregarding the audience they'd attracted, the Bardic captain drew in a deep breath and released it slowly, releasing her anger and her suspicion and her fear at the same time.

Then she held out her fist. "Liene. Bardic captain."

Vree stared at it for a long moment. "Vireyda Magaly. Vree," she said at last, touching it lightly with her own. "Gyhard i'Stevana."

"Welcome to Shkoder."

"Thank you."

"That Southerner giving you trouble, Bard?" a heavyset woman called from a second-floor window. "You want I should come down there?"

"No need," Liene replied, her tone suggesting the curious return to what they'd been doing before the shouting started. "But thank you for the offer." She waited until her champion waved cheerily and withdrew, before turning her attention back to Vree. "Are we all right, you and I and Gyhard?"

"I think so."

"And what does Gyhard think?"

Muscles still tensed, Vree's gesture took in the end of the argument. "That starting over's a good idea."

We'll have to play a careful melody here
, Liene thought as they continued up the hill, squinting in the late afternoon sun.
This child has been tuned so tightly
she's going to start breaking strings. I guess it's a good thing I
didn't
let Kovar
meet her at the dock
, she decided silently to herself.
If I don't stay on top of this,
it's never going to work. Someone's going to have to remember there's more
involved here than the fifth kigh
.

"She threatened you?"

Liene drummed her fingers on the edge of her desk. "She threatened to leave.

Which is her right, she's not a prisoner."

The waxed ends of his mustache twitching, Kovar slapped his palms down on the polished wood. "But she lied to you!"

"If someone called me an unmitigated horse's ass— which, upon reflection, is how I was acting—would you tell me?"

"Of course not."

"You'd lie to me."

He didn't pretend to misunderstand. "It's not the same thing."

"Ah." Liene nodded. "One rule for you. A different rule for her."

Kovar sputtered for a moment and finally grabbed onto the one affront he was certain of. "She is voluntarily carrying the kigh of a man who removed himself from the Circle!"

"True. Which means there's a great deal we can learn from them concerning the fifth kigh." She leaned back in her chair, considered putting her feet up on the desk, and reluctantly decided her hips weren't up to it. "They help us, we help them

—which, if you'll recall, was the whole point of them coming here—and we all act like civilized people while we do it."

"How civilized is assassination?" the younger bard demanded.

"How civilized is prejudice!" Liene snapped. Painfully conscious of how her own preconceptions had caused her to react, she was determined Kovar would be less inflexible. The bards had not come across in the best of lights this afternoon.

"Are you trying to tell me that you met this woman completely unconcerned about her past?"

"I'm trying to tell you that after I met this woman, her past became unimportant. She followed orders, exactly as she was trained to. Frankly, I'm a lot more concerned about the people who trained her."

"You have a point," Kovar murmured after a moment's reflection. Liene was pleased to note that he'd stopped reacting and started thinking. "But what about the past of the kigh she's carrying?"