Rosemary Kirstein - Steerswoman 04 (46 page)

During this, Bel had seated herself on the floor, and was
now looking up at him. “What a clever plan,” she said quietly. “And you
couldn’t trust us enough to share it?”

“It was safer that you didn’t know,” he said.

“How would ignorance protect us?”

“Not us, Bel,” Rowan put in. “Safer for Corvus.”

Rowan expected anger again; but from her place on the floor,
Bel looked up at Willam, showing only deep sadness. “You think we’d betray
you.”

“I think you wouldn’t have a choice. If the wizards thought
you knew something—”

“You don’t know me very well.”

“I know them,” he said simply.

From where she stood, Rowan could not see Willam’s expression,
but Bel could. Whatever the Outskirter saw there gave her pause.

Then abruptly Bel stood, reached past Willam, and picked up
the sky images. She brushed into him as she did it; Willam did not startle, nor
shy back. He seemed beyond action.

The Outskirter fanned the three images in front of the apprentice’s
face. “One man saw this, and turned good. Another man saw it and turned evil.”
She paused. “Which way will Corvus go?”

“I don’t know. I can’t know, without knowing what they
mean.” And he saw the disbelief on Bel’s face; it seemed to break his heart.
“Bel, I’m not lying!” he said desperately. “I don’t know! I’d tell you, if I
did.”

The steerswoman said, “I believe him.”

Bel turned to her. “He deceived you worse than me. You’re
the steerswoman.”

“Corvus never knew that I was in the room.” Bel was surprised,
and her eyes narrowed in thought. Rowan went on. “Corvus could hear and speak,
but not see. Willam never betrayed my presence. And, Will—Corvus never knew
that you were using Kieran’s clearance, did he?”

“No,” Willam said. “I don’t think he should know about
that.”

“Are you playing your own game, too?” Bel asked him.

He sighed. “I don’t know what it is that I’m doing anymore.
I think I’m just trying to help.”

Bel held up the images again. “What about these? Will you
show them to Corvus?”

Will regarded them, and was a long time replying. “Let the
steerswoman keep them.”

“Good,” Bel said. “One Slado in the world is enough.” She set
them back on the table. “So, that’s it. Now you run back to your master.”

“I can’t go back.”

“Why not?” Bel spoke bitterly. “Slado doesn’t know about you.
He thought it was Jannik working all those spells—” She stopped. “Slado can’t
admit that he killed Jannik.”

An escaped apprentice; a center of magic, destroyed; a
wizard, dead.

Slado needed a scapegoat. Willam was convenient. Willam
could not go back to Corvus.

“Well, you’re a runaway apprentice, after all. You don’t
have a choice, do you?” Then Bel’s voice lost its irony. “You’re better off
away from Corvus,” she said. “I don’t think it’s been good for you.”

Willam had in fact chosen, Rowan realized, but not here and
now.

Corvus, when the updates were about to end, when continuing
to work meant having no protection: I
can’t risk being connected with this.
If you do this, you can’t come home.

Do you
want to
go
on?

Will had gone on.

Now he could not return. And—whatever else life under the
wizard’s command might entail—home, to Willam, was with Corvus.

Willam looked, at that moment, very alone.

Rowan stepped past the Outskirter, sat down on the bed near
Willam. He glanced at her, said nothing.

“They’re going to be looking for you.”

He nodded.

Come with
me,
she wanted to say; but: “I have to go
to the Archives.” A letter would be insufficient. “That’s … too close to
Wulfshaven.”

Another nod. “I understand.”

Alone in the wide world, after all. “You’ll have to run.”

“Or hide somewhere.” He made a small movement with his shoulders:
not quite a helpless shrug. “Which is better?”

She twitched a small smile. “I prefer to keep moving, my—

self. Although …” And she considered. “Establishing
oneself in a small corner of some quiet place … making friends, accumulating
a second history … It’s good to have people around you, Willam. If trouble
comes, you may find you have more allies than you knew.”

Bel leaned against the wall, made a wry noise. “Well, pick
one. He can’t stay in one place and keep moving at the same time.”

Rowan looked up. “Actually,” she said, feeling a great
relief at the idea, “actually, I believe he can.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

Willam joined the crew of
Graceful Days.

Of the ship’s crew members, only Gregori, Enid, the first
mate, and the navigator knew of Willam’s presence during Jannik’s gathering in
the Dolphin, and his connection with the events surrounding the wizard’s death.

“But the others will know that something happened,” Bel
pointed out as they walked down the street to the harbor. The day was bright,
brilliant and clear, but the weather had become even colder. Rowan was warm
under two sweaters and a scarf, with her steerswoman’s cloak drawn about her.
Bel had unearthed from her gear her piebald goatskin Outskirter cloak and
boots. Gregori and the navigator had earlier spirited Willam away for an
outfitting, and now he was dressed in secondhand sailor’s clothing: a short,
warm coat, heavy wool trousers, a rough gray scarf, and a knit stocking cap. He
carried a battered duffel bag.

“The story has already flown around the city,” Bel went on.
“I’m sure the sailors have picked it up by now. They’ll probably talk of
nothing else for months.” She spoke seemingly to the air; she rarely looked in
Willam’s direction.

“I’ll try to act all agog when they tell it to me.” Will
spoke with a forced cheerfulness. It was a poor attempt, and Bel did not respond
in kind.

They went on in silence, along the twisting streets, into the
clamor of the harborside. When they reached the near end of the long loading
wharf, Bel paused, and the others did as well.

Bel turned to Willam, and after a moment’s awkwardness on
both their parts, she put out her hand. Willam took it. “That actually was a
clever plan that you and Corvus put together,” Bel said, looking up at Will
uncomfortably.

“I’m sorry it had to include deceiving you—”

“It didn’t. It didn’t have to.” She released his hand, and
stepped back. “You’re away from them now, Willam. Try to remember what you
are.”

“I will,” he said; but she had already turned away.

Rowan and Willam watched her as she walked off some distance,
pausing before the open front of a ropewalk, as if idly, as if interested in
the work going on inside. She waited.

“I don’t have very many people in my life who are important
to me,” Will said. “I’d hate to lose one.”

“It will be all right, Will. She just needs time.”

“Yes. I wish we had some.” He sighed, and turned to the
steerswoman. “We always seem to be saying good-bye,” he said. “Why is that?”

“I don’t know,” she replied, honestly puzzled. “It’s only
the second time we’ve ever done so.”

He thought. “I guess it’s because it’s the last thing I
remember, of you and Bel: us saying good-bye. For all those years with Corvus,
whenever you came into my mind, we were saying good-bye.”

“Whenever you came into my mind, I was wondering what
fantastic spells you were learning.” At this, his face fell, and he glanced
aside for a moment. “You’re going to miss it,” Rowan said.

“Yes …” Spoken with regret, a trace of longing. “Some of
the things I’ve seen, the things I’ve done … you can’t imagine it.”

“Stranger than the spells in Jannik’s house?”

He nodded. “Stranger. More beautiful.” Then he laughed a
bit. “Not to mention light when I wanted it, music from the air, and a hot bath
every single day. Yes. Yes, I’ll miss it.”

She almost did not ask, but then did: “Will you miss
Corvus?” His expression became mixed, far too complex for her to decipher. “Was
he … ,” she asked, awkward, “… was he a friend to you?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes I thought that he was. And sometimes
… sometimes I just couldn’t tell at all.”

“Hey! Ho! Attise!” They both turned.

It was Enid, leading two sailors jockeying a sack-laden wheelbarrow
onto the wharf. “Move it,” Enid said as the three passed by. “Last barge.”

“I’m coming!” Willam called after her.

Rowan turned back, bemused. “‘Attise?’”

“I thought it would be a good idea to use a different name.”

“And you chose ‘Attise?’” It was the alias Rowan herself had
used, when she had briefly resigned from the Steerswomen: the name she had been
traveling under when Willam first met her. “I thought you hated Attise!”

“Oh, I did!” he said. “She was dull, rude, closemouthed, and
condescending. But since then I’ve learned that she has a lot of good
qualities, which it might be wise for me to emulate. Besides, someone once told
me that if you use a false name you should pick one that, when you hear it
unexpectedly, you just naturally turn around to look.”

And this would be a good moment, a graceful moment, for them
to part, and Rowan knew it. She discovered that she cared not at all for grace.
She cast about for more to say, some way to delay events. “You’re going to have
to think of an explanation for your white hair,” she pointed out. “And please don’t
blame it on a fright; you’d just be promulgating old wives’ tales.”

His mouth twitched. He pulled off his hat.

After a moment, he said, “No, go ahead and laugh. You’ll
just hurt yourself, holding it in like that.”

She succumbed to a fit of hilarity. He was completely bald.
“It will grow back in its natural color,” he said.

“And,” she said, when she had enough breath to speak, “in
the meantime, how will you explain—”

He put on a serious expression. “Lice.”

She surrendered to laughter again. “But,” she said, fighting
for composure, “but, Willam, a person with one sort of lice might be suspected
of having another sort—”

He held up his hands. “Let’s just say I’ve done what’s
needed to keep up the deception, even in the close quarters of a ship, and
leave it at that, shall we?”

“Oh, yes, let’s.”

He put the hat back on, much to her relief. “But speaking of
close quarters …” He knelt by his duffel bag, untied it, reached in. “I’m
going to keep the tools—I’ll find some way to explain them—but I thought that
if somebody got into my things, I’d have a hard time explaining the rest.” He
held out to her a small bundle: his burlap sack, now nearly empty, wrapped
around the last objects tucked far in the bottom. “I thought you might want to
study these. The card reader should work for a while, if you don’t use it too often.
You’ll have to reattach the speaker.”

She took the bundle. “The ‘speaker’ is the paper cone?”

“Yes.”

They were quiet a moment; Rowan wondered if, like her, he
was searching for some reason to stay for just a few more moments.

But she really must keep him no longer. “Well,” she began—

“Are you going to put me under the Steerswomen’s ban?” The
beautiful copper gaze was both pleading and resigned.

“Oh, Will, I don’t know,” she said helplessly. “I’ve had no
time to think this through. Everything has happened so quickly.” In fact, their
entire time together in Donner totaled less than four days. “But it seems to
me, whenever I recall some of our conversations—I’m not certain that you ever
did actually lie to me.”

“I tried not to,” he said earnestly.

“Yes. You spoke so carefully, sometimes.” All the pauses,
the obvious internal readjustments before speaking. “I really ought to have
wondered …” And she ought to have mentioned it. Somehow—and she could not
identify why she felt this—she knew that if only she herself had spoken of it
first, and if she had used exactly the right words, Willam would have been able
to tell her everything.

A call, inarticulate in the distance, but definitely the
voice of Enid. “You have to go.”

They embraced. Bundled against the cold as they were, the
contact seemed muffled, distant. When they released each other, Rowan found and
held his hand: a touch more formal, but by contrast far more intimate, far more
real.

His fingers were cold. Three fingers: it was his right hand
she held, the one he damaged as a child, by a moment’s carelessness in the use
of magic.

“Don’t dwell on partings, this time,” she said, and released
the hand. “Think ahead, to the next time we say hello.”

“That will happen,” he replied, and shouldered his duffel
bag. “The world is a much smaller place than you think it is.” And he walked
away; but once on the wharf, he turned back to call: “And when she’s ready to
hear it again, give Bel my love!”

When he turned away, he became unrecognizable: merely another
of the many people on the wharf, a tall, broad-shouldered man in a blue coat
and a stocking cap.