Shattering the Ley (34 page)

Kara pressed a hand against her chest, above her heart, and squeezed her eyes shut. It felt as if a stone had lodged itself beneath her throat. Her breath came in hitches, her pulse raced. Her face was flushed and her sinuses clogged with snot. And she couldn’t keep the last image of Ischua from appearing through the blur of her tears, that last order.

Go
.

He’d died to protect her in some way. She didn’t know how, didn’t know why he hadn’t fled for Halliel’s Park like he said he would. But she knew he’d done it for her.

Gathering her strength, she pushed herself up from the crouch and met Marcus’ concerned gaze.

“I’ll be fine,” she lied.

Marcus didn’t believe her; she saw it in his eyes. She saw something else as well. Something had hardened inside him, as if he’d come to a decision, made some sort of resolution. But he laced the fingers of one hand with hers and said, “Come on. We have to warn Timmons and the node.”

Dalton slipped from the market square, headed south toward Confluence, before suddenly changing his mind and angling west. The crowds of the market would only slow the Dogs, not stop them. He wasn’t certain they would detain the Hound at all. As he moved, picking up his pace as the concentration of people eased, he checked back over his shoulder repeatedly. He heard the start of the uproar in the market, nothing more than a background rumble of defiance, like distant thunder. Five blocks farther on, he stepped into a shadowed alcove as whistles pierced the air and a group of five Dogs and three city watch charged past. Dalton watched as pedestrians ducked out of the way, then returned to the street to watch the distance in consternation. Hushed conversations began, most returning to whatever task had been interrupted.

But not all. Some of them shared dark glances and began walking toward the square, hands falling to where weapons were concealed in belts or boots or pouches.

Dalton edged out of the shadows, lips pressed tight. In the distance, a pillar of smoke had started to rise and it sounded as if the riot had spread beyond the square.

Perhaps what the Kormanley hadn’t been able to achieve with their bombs, the Baron would bring about with his Dogs.

The thought made him smile.

Then he turned and moved on. The back of his neck prickled with urgency. He had no time to savor the violence. If he’d succeeded, his visions would end and he could finally rest. Until then . . .

Until then, he still had to escape the Hound.

He mulled that problem over as he headed toward the bridge across the Tiana, continuing to check over his shoulder for pursuit.

He’d begun to relax, still two blocks from the bridge, when his skin began to crawl between his shoulders and he spun, lowering into a half crouch. His gaze flicked between the buildings behind, passed from face to face—

Then settled on the lean features of the Hound, stalking down the center of the road directly toward him.

A wave of weakness passed down into Dalton’s legs, but he stumbled back, twisted, and hustled toward the bridge. He had no weapon, knew it would have been useless even if he held one, but still wasted time searching for something of use in the shops he passed, or what his fellow citizens were carrying. It was instinct. But there was nothing. Sweat broke out as he picked up speed, crossing the first intersection. He could see the bridge ahead, the huge marble pedestals to either side depicting rearing horses, the stone arching up slightly across the expanse of the river. Ley carts and wagons clogged the entrance, but the footpaths to either side with the grand stone railings weren’t as busy. He headed for the left walkway, nearly getting hit by a cart as he crossed the last intersection. The rearing horse loomed over him and he risked a glance backward, catching sight of the Hound now less than half a block behind. Breath catching in his throat, he dodged past a woman with two children in tow, skirted the stone division between the pedestrian walkway and the road, and trotted out onto the expanse.

He was halfway across, the Candle District in sight on the far side, when he realized the Hound was less than twenty paces behind.

He panicked, his heart thundering in his ears, and lurched toward the roadway, searching for a cart to jump onto, a horse to steal. But there was nothing, everyone moving too fast. He backed up, the Hound now ten feet away, a knife glinting unobtrusively in his hand. Dalton swallowed, a sinking sensation filling his chest—

And then his back bumped into the stone railing. He glanced down, the drop to the dark waters of the river making him dizzy.

Water.

He stilled.

Water hid scents. Isn’t that how prey got lost during a hunt? He wasn’t certain. He’d grown up in the city, had lived here his entire life. But he thought so. He thought he’d read it somewhere. But even so, that was for regular hounds. Would it work against a Hound?

He didn’t know. But he didn’t think about it either. It was his only option.

He glanced up, the Hound five paces distant, and smiled. “Give my regards to the Baron.”

Then he leaned backward, slipped over the railing, and fell to the river below.

Kara pulled the trunk out from beneath her bed and began packing—clothes, odds and ends she’d picked up in Eld or her time in Grass, other objects she’d been given by the shopkeepers she’d helped as a Wielder. There wasn’t much. The node provided most of what its Wielders needed in terms of food, accommodations, and other essentials. But she had made the little stone bedroom her own in small ways.

She moved from bed to dresser to table rotely, her mind elsewhere. She knew the rest of the Wielders, and Marcus in particular, were concerned. It had been four days since Ischua had died, two since the riots that started in the Eld market square had finally died down, although the tension and clashes within the city itself had only heightened. People were revolting in the streets, in what many had begun calling the Purge. Pillars of smoke from burning buildings and riots had become commonplace. During all of that time, Kara had performed her duties as Wielder without fail, but she’d been withdrawn. She felt as if she were removed from her body, hovering slightly above her own shoulders, watching as it lived her life for her. She’d gone with Marcus to search out a small apartment that they could afford, one not that far from the node or the ley station. Timmons had informed her that she’d be shifted to another node at the end of her second year, but he didn’t know which district yet. He’d been apologetic about the transfer, but happy that she and Marcus were finally moving forward with their relationship. He still expected them to arrive for their patrols on time, of course. He’d said it with mock sternness, hoping for a reaction, but when Kara had merely nodded, he’d cast a worried look at Marcus.

She saw all of the looks, noted all of the touches of comfort that Kyle and Katrina and the others gave her, recognized their attempts to draw her out, to make her laugh. But she wasn’t ready yet. Her chest was hollow. Ischua had been a surrogate parent for her after her real parents had died at Seeley Park. He’d been her support during her years at the Wielders’ college, her strength, emotionally as well as academically. He’d been her . . .

Stone.

She paused, her heart wrenching as she caught sight of the stone—blue-black, with swirls of white in it. Picking it up, she rubbed her thumb over its river-smoothed surface, thought about the test in Halliel’s Park with her father and Ischua watching, about Ischua handing her the stone at the secret tavern reserved only for those who’d achieved their purples.

The tears stung. She thought she’d cried herself out over the last few days, but apparently not.

Stepping back, she slumped down onto the bed, clutched the stone to her chest, and let the wrenching, hitching sobs claim her.

Marcus moved among the patrons of Bittersly Street, mouth turned down in a frown, brow creased in deep thought. He’d left Kara packing at the node, after days of attempting to keep her active and involved. But nothing had worked. She’d participated, but her expression was vacant and dazed. She’d sunken into herself, retreated, and he hadn’t been able to bring her back.

Timmons had told him it would take time, that there was nothing to be concerned about. But his skin itched and his muscles twitched. He needed to do something, something to bring the Kara he knew back, something to make everything better.

Something to make those who’d hurt her pay.

He halted across the street from the Tambourine, uncertain. He didn’t know if he trusted Dierdre, didn’t know if she was Kormanley or not, although he suspected she was. But even if she were, the Kormanley had never targeted Kara’s parents. From everything he knew, they’d simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. It had been an accident.

Ischua’s death wasn’t an accident.

And then there was the Kormanley’s stance on the ley. The Primes were abusing the system, hoarding it, misusing the resources by creating the Flyers’ Tower and then ignoring the consequences, such as the distortions that were still plaguing the city.

His fists clenched as he thought of how the Primes had treated Kara during their interrogation, how they planned to accelerate her ascension to a Master and a Prime so that they could use her power for themselves.

They needed to be stopped. The Baron and his Dogs needed to be stopped. And the Kormanley were the only ones willing to stand up to them all.

Forcibly relaxing the tension in his shoulders and hands, he stepped across the street and into the Tambourine. The man serving customers inside—dark-haired like Dierdre, with similar features—looked up with a smile.

“Can I help you?”

“I’m looking for Dierdre,” Marcus said tightly. “She told me I could find her here.”

K
ARA KICKED IN THE DOOR,
stormed into the flat she’d shared with Marcus in the Eld District for the last twelve years, and headed straight for the bedroom, touching the ley globe alight without thought. She’d known something was up, had known it for the past two years, but she’d ignored it . . . or tried to. But accidentally seeing him at the Tambourine, sitting at a table and laughing with that damned dark-haired woman—

She slammed open the trunk at the end of the bed, rifled through the contents, removed anything belonging to Marcus, then began searching the room for her own possessions. She packed her clothes in tight, tucked a few objects—the stone Ischua had given her, a blown glass bottle the woman on the corner had gifted her, a few well-worn books from Cory—into the side, then stood, hands on her hips, and scanned the rest of the room.

The bed sheets were tousled as usual, a few random clothes hanging from a chair or the corner of a table. The posts where they hung their purple Wielder’s jackets were empty, although she didn’t think Marcus had been wearing his at his . . . meeting; she’d come from the node and her stint in the pit with the ley, so she had hers on. The table to one side was littered with trinkets gathered or given to them from around Eld—necklaces of beads, a Gorrani sash, a pair of jade earrings that Kara retrieved and tossed in the trunk—for services rendered or simply because they were Wielders. An empty mug rested beside a plate full of crumbs from a hasty meal. More clothes were stacked on top of additional trunks, but there was nothing on the walls except a trailing vine painted in one corner long before they’d arrived.

Satisfied she’d missed nothing, Kara closed the trunk and hauled it out into the main room, letting it fall with a thunk, then began collecting items from the kitchen. Her favorite cup and saucer for tea, the packets of expensive jarkeeling from the southern continent, plates, the earthenware bowls she loved, the mug that was really Marcus’ but she wanted anyway, and some of the rice and beans, just because—all of it added to the trunk. She did a run through the main room, picking out a few odds and ends, then moved to the window and stared out into the back gardens below the building, where the neighbors had planted herbs, tomatoes, peppers, and corn. Peas climbed strings running up the far wall, the one receiving the most sunlight during the day. She crossed her arms over her chest and waited, her anger growing as the sun shifted. A Gorrani woman appeared, face covered in a bright scarf, her two small children in tow. They giggled and cavorted as she tended the garden, then were herded back inside.

She heard Marcus in the hall outside, his voice loud as he spoke to someone downstairs, so she stood facing him when he entered. He noticed the trunk blocking his way first, then her standing at the window. Confusion flickered in his eyes, followed by irritation, then anger. He tossed his jacket over the trunk.

“What’s this?”

“My things,” Kara said, lifting her chin. “I’m leaving.”

“I see. Make certain you leave the key.” He stepped around the trunk and into the kitchen, plates rattling as he began preparing dinner.

Coldness sank into Kara’s gut at the flippant response and she flinched. But he’d meant it to hurt. It was how he controlled her, controlled everyone around him. He would hurt her, then claim she’d hurt him first, and she’d feel guilty because she’d never intended to hurt him. She’d apologize, or break down and cry, and he’d comfort her and tell her he loved her and everything would be all right, and then somehow whatever had prompted the argument would be lost and forgotten amid all the emotions; they’d continue on as usual, nothing changed, nothing fixed. She knew it because it was how all of their arguments had ended the last few years.

But not this one. She crushed the hurt and stoked her anger.

“The key’s already in the kitchen.” She moved forward and grabbed his jacket, tossing it to the floor. “I only stayed long enough to let you know I was leaving.”

“Why stay at all? You’ve obviously been thinking about this for a long time.” He appeared in the door, cup in hand, and watched her struggle with the trunk. “I don’t think you really want to go.”

She glared at him, gave up trying to lift the trunk, and opened the front door instead, grabbing the trunk by one handle and dragging it across the floor.

“You’re wrong,” she huffed, already feeling tears beginning to burn at the corners of her eyes, even though she’d vowed she wouldn’t cry. “I’m done. I don’t want to compete with her anymore.”

Marcus looked honestly confused, but then his eyes widened and he pushed away from the wall. “You mean Dierdre?”

“If Dierdre is the black-haired woman you met today at the Tambourine, then yes.”

She didn’t miss his guilty twitch.

“It’s not—that isn’t—Kara, Dierdre’s nothing!”

“Nothing?” She’d managed to drag the trunk out into the hall, could feel at least two pairs of neighbors’ eyes on her where she stood, her chest tight from exertion and pain. “You’ve been meeting with her off and on for the past two years at least, and you never mentioned her. You’ve spent more time with her at cafés and taverns than you have with me. That’s not nothing. So tell me what it is?”

Marcus, his blondish-brown hair ruffled and out of place, his blue eyes cold and concealing, said nothing.

Kara glowered, clenched her jaw, and reached for the trunk again, hauling it down the hall. It felt lighter now, her anger taking over almost completely, but she still couldn’t lift it by brute force.

“Kara,” Marcus said, but she ignored him, heading for the stairs. “Kara!”

She turned back, let him see her rage, even though she knew her eyes would be rimmed with red and her face splotched. “What?”

He stood in the door to their loft, body tense. For the first time during one of their arguments, he appeared lost. He groped for a response, but the hardness in his expression never changed.

Finally, he said, “It isn’t what you think.”

She answered by jerking the trunk down the first step with a solid thunk.

A wave of sickening despair hit her when she reached the street, but she sucked in a deep breath and held it, used it to keep back the pain and the tears both. She needed to think. She needed somewhere to stay, somewhere away from Marcus, a place he wouldn’t look for her right away, until she could get settled. A move to another district might be best, but she wasn’t familiar enough with housing in any of the others to know where to go or who to speak to, not even the five districts she’d worked since the Primes had started transferring her every two years in preparation for becoming a Prime herself. Hedge—and Tallow, her current district—would likely be the best options. She knew their streets intimately, but not the Wielders who worked there or the citizens who lived there, even though she’d dealt with them on a daily basis for four years combined. Her strongest ties were still in Eld. The nearest districts—Stone, Green, Leeds, and even Confluence—were mostly main thoroughfares in her head, the only points of interest their nodes and ley stations. That was how the Primes wanted it—distinct and separate, no one Wielder familiar with enough of the ley system to be able to map the whole. Even though she’d worked more than one district, her picture of the ley was still fractured, none of the districts where she’d worked adjacent to each other. But Marcus knew Eld as intimately as she did. He’d know all of the places she might run.

Except possibly one.

“Cory.”

She chewed on her lower lip, uncertain she wanted to risk giving Cory the wrong impression. They’d met on numerous occasions, but her relationship with Marcus had kept them distant. She knew he still had feelings for her. But she couldn’t think of anywhere else.

She contemplated the trunk. She couldn’t drag it all the way to Confluence.

“Need help with that?”

Glancing up, she met the speaker’s eyes. She didn’t recognize him, but he had a horse, a cart full of musk melons, and a nice smile.

“I’m headed toward Confluence. Is that out of your way?”

The man shrugged. About forty years old, his hair was streaked with gray, wrinkles just beginning to form around his eyes and mouth. “Doesn’t matter. One of you Wielders saved my boy from one of those distortions a few years back. If it hadn’t been for that, he’d be dead.”

He hopped down off the cart, shifted some of the melons around, then hefted the trunk into the back, grunting with its weight. Dusting off his hands, he motioned her onto the seat and climbed up beside her.

“Where to?”

“Moat Street, on the edge of Eld.”

The man nodded. “I know it. Outside the walls of Confluence and the University.” He hied the horse into motion, the animal flicking its ears as it struggled forward under the new weight, and they merged with the traffic on the street.

He didn’t ask any questions as they made their way down from the nest of streets surrounding the node into the less tangled section surrounding the walls that partitioned Eld from Confluence, but he kept up a steady stream of light conversation, as if he sensed the tension thrumming through her body. Kara let him ramble, realizing he didn’t expect her to respond. She wondered if her misery was that easy to spot and scrubbed at her face self-consciously. Her fury had ebbed, simmering low and deep, replaced with a hollow emptiness. She felt untethered, listless, the juddering of the cart on cobbles somehow remote, even though it rattled her bones. What would she do now? Where would she go? She didn’t want to move to Tallow. The streets were rough, the residents mostly Gorrani who’d moved in after the candlemakers that gave the district its name had moved out. The Gorrani had different views on women and their place in society; they only tolerated Kara because she was a Wielder. No, not Tallow. Besides, her two-year stint in Tallow was nearly over. She needed to stay in Eld for now. But what if she ran into Marcus on the street? What if she had to work with him? She shuddered, revulsion and rage spiking, twisted with a pang of longing and loss.

“Which way?”

She jumped when the man touched her arm and suddenly realized he’d been speaking to her. They’d reached Moat Street, the wall that had once been the limits of ancient Erenthrall—back when it was nothing more than a town and a baronial estate—rose before her, one of its gates standing wide as people streamed in and out around them. She glanced toward the old stone of the gate’s arch and noted the crest at the apex—a horse rampant, the tertiary gate—and oriented herself. “Left. It’s only a few streets beyond the gate.”

Twenty minutes later, the man waved as his horse cantered off down Moat Street, leaving Kara at the bottom of a short flight of steps leading to another set of flats. The building was old, perhaps as old as the walls themselves, but nearly everything this close to Confluence was. Made of quarried granite, with small windows and carved sills, intricate stonework edging the roof, Kara thought it must once have been a trading house. She glanced down the street, noted the University scholars in their variegated tan- and dun-hooded robes mixed in with the regular inhabitants of Eld, then sighed and dragged her trunk up the steps and into the building. Cory lived on the second floor.

By the time she’d reached his landing, she was sweaty and the anger had returned. She was not surprised to find Cory was not home.

Hours later, she heard the door below open and feet trudging up the stairs. She raised her head and watched as Cory emerged on the landing, his dirty blond hair too long and curling out from the sides of his head. His brow was furrowed in thought and he didn’t notice her until he’d almost reached the door.

“What in hells—” He jerked back, nearly dropping the books and papers he carried in one hand. He caught them with an awkward grab and curse, then straightened as Kara stood. “Kara? What are you doing here?”

“I didn’t know where else to go. I left Marcus.”

Cory’s gaze dropped to the trunk and Kara watched the emotions cross his still boyish face, even though he was now twenty-five—puzzlement, realization, a sudden spike of hope and glee carefully hidden beneath a thick layer of genuine concern. “I see.” They stared at each other a moment, the air between them crackling with the unaddressed, impulsive moment on the rooftop fifteen years before when he’d kissed her, and then Cory ducked his head and shifted the weight of the books so he could reach out and touch the lock of the door. Kara felt a knot of tension in the Tapestry loosen and release. Cory opened the door and held it, motioning her inside with his head. “Come on in.”

She pulled her trunk in behind her.

The flat comprised two rooms. The first large, with an area to the side that served as a kitchen, chairs around a table covered in papers and books in the center, another table against the far wall beneath a window serving as a desk. A door led to the second, what Kara assumed was a bedroom. Even though she and Cory had stayed in touch during her years at the college and her time as a Wielder, she had only ever met him here once or twice before heading out to a local tavern or café. Cory crossed the room and dumped his books and papers on the chair to the desk while she hovered by the door, glancing around at the mess. It wasn’t the same type of mess left by Marcus, with clothes left lying and dishes sitting unwashed. Everything was in its place here except the books and papers, materials she assumed Cory needed for his graduate studies at the University.