Starcrossed (9 page)

“Why did you help me?” I said abruptly.

“What do you mean?”

I waved an impatient hand at him. “You couldn’t possibly have known my father.”

He sighed and met my eyes. “I guess . . . you looked a little like I felt.”

“Miserable?”

“And scared, and lost, and desperate, like you were running from something and couldn’t get far enough away.” He looked out over the tangled landscape below us. “I don’t think anyone should have to feel that way.”

“You don’t know anything about me.”

A shrug. “I don’t have to.”

“I could be dangerous.” Why was I pressing the point? A conversation like this was likely to get me killed.

A smile played at his lips. “No, you looked more
in
danger, than dangerous.”

I turned back to the distant Decath fields, washed with moonslight and shadow. The silence grew too comfortable. “Are you really getting married?”

He barked out a rough, abrupt laugh. “I really am. To the indomitable Talth Ceid — a great wooden block of a woman fourteen years older than I am. With four children.”

“That explains the drunken flight from Gerse.”

“Yes, yes, it does.” He shifted against the cold stone walls. “It’s a good match, all things considered. Both families will be strengthened by the alliance. What about you?” he said. “Any prospects? That brother of yours hasn’t cast you up on the marriage block yet?”

I coughed back a laugh at the image — then remembered I had invented this persona. “Much cheaper to sell me to Celys, and he gets to look pious. So devoted to the Goddess, he tithed his little sister.” There was a strange note in my voice I couldn’t quite shake.

Durrel eyed me sidelong. “Do I detect a somewhat less . . . robust devotion in you, Celyn Contrare?”

This time my laugh broke free. “Maybe.”

“So, have you really decided to leave us tomorrow, then?”

“What?”

“The caravan to Bryn Shaer leaves in the morning, as you’d have known, if you’d stayed for dessert.”

“Tomorrow?” What was wrong with me? Yesterday I couldn’t get out of here fast enough. “I guess so,” I said.

“I wanted to see you before you left. I have something for you.” In a sleight of hand that would have done a thief proud, he produced a slip of night-black, and held it out to me in his open palm. “It’s cold in the Carskadons in winter; you’ll need these.”

Gloves. Almost invisible in the growing darkness, black lambskin with embroidered black vines running along the cuffs and up the thumb. Fitted snugly to my small hands, even the fingertips smooth and supple, they might have been made for me. A thief’s gloves. I wanted them. “Thank you,” I said before I forgot myself.

As I lifted my arm to admire them, Durrel said, “Meri gave you her bracelet?”

I looked at it, embarrassed. “I couldn’t get her not to.”

He was nodding. “No, it’s good. I’m just surprised. Sometimes I forget she’s not a little girl anymore.” He looked off into the distance for a long moment. “There’s something else.” This time there was a strange note in his voice. I’d heard that sort of tone before — just before someone asked me to do a job that might cost me my head.

“This is where I repay you for saving me?”

A laugh. “Something like that. I’m glad you’re going home with the Nemair. They’ll be sympathetic to your situation. Believe me, my aunt and uncle are the last people who would send you back to that convent.”

I eyed him warily. I didn’t say I was taking my gloves and running the instant we hit the road to Yeris Volbann.

“But more than that, I’m glad somebody will be there for Meri. She may be legally an adult, almost, but she’ll always be like my little sister. She’s lived with the Decath since she was eight years old. We’re the only family she remembers. I’d be grateful if you’d keep an eye on her — be a friend to her.”

“Milord, I — that is not my skill.”

“Really?” he said. “Now why do I doubt that? I have a feeling about you.” He held out his hand again, this time with a sheathed dagger balanced in the flat of it. The scabbard was ornamented in silver, the hilt a swirl of pearl inlay. I shook my head and took a step back.

“Take it,” he urged.

A dagger was valuable. And I needed one, after losing my own blade. I took the weapon from his hands and drew it. The steel glinted in the light of Zet’s moon, and I saw the crest of a crowned dog bowing in red enamel on the hilt. This was a Decath weapon. This dagger was
very
valuable. “They’ll think I stole it,” I said.

“No, they won’t.”

“Why would you give this to me?”

He gave a little grin. “A stray cat needs her claws.” Durrel bent low over me, until his mouth was very near my ear. “Stay with them, Celyn.
Please
.”

I clutched the dagger tight in my gloved fingers. I had a feeling Durrel did not often have to beg a girl for something, and I was starting to feel the weight of all these gifts. Damnation. Every instinct I had was telling me to run, but if there was one thing even a thief believed in, it was that you did not turn your back on someone who’d pulled you out of a scrape. That was a debt you honored. With your life, if need be.

Finally I nodded.

“Are you — a Sarist?” I scarcely whispered the words into the night.

He looked surprised. “Not me. I wish I had their conviction. I’m just a pawn on the vast Decath game board. I’m not allowed to have thoughts of my own. But I have a feeling it took a great deal more courage than I lay claim to, to do whatever you did in the last few days.”

Courage
. To leave Tegen behind in the hands of the Greenmen? “I’m no hero.”

“Just staying alive’s heroic these days.” He drew back and took my shoulders in his hands. They were warm and strong. “Be well, Celyn Contrare.”

Something was following me. I ducked behind a corner and listened for the footsteps. Light, scuffing — in the dark I couldn’t be sure whose. I pulled myself tighter into the shadows and held my breath. The footsteps slowed, turned. Fifteen feet away, maybe closer. Searching.

I cast about for an escape. Any move would put me straight in my pursuer’s vision, but was I fast enough to scale that wall? Would the trellis hold my weight? Could I make it across the road and into the sewers before he grabbed me?

Should I turn and fight?

Pale fingers traced along the shadowed walls, searching for gaps. I held my breath until my chest was bursting, counted footsteps, weighed my options.
Stay hidden. Don’t call attention to yourself
. But the tension was unbear able. I ran.

I was almost at the sewer when fingers brushed my neck, caught my belt. I swallowed a yelp and spun around, jamming the heel of my hand upward. It hit something hard and sharp, sparking pain through my forearm. I struggled, turning left and right, trying to pull free. Finally I ripped my knife from its sheath and sawed at my belt.

Too slow. A long arm curved around my face, and I had to bite — hard. My knee jammed upward, and my attacker doubled over in the street. I resisted the urge to kick him while he was sprawled in the gutter, but cut the turquoise scarf from his face with my blade. I shoved my trophy into my sleeve and scrambled up the side of the tavern.

Wintry sunlight spilled through the leaded glass and throbbed against my aching eyes, and for a moment I couldn’t remember where I was; my dream and its memories seemed more real than the last several days had been. I had known I was in trouble as soon as I breezed into the Mask & Barrel that night, brandishing the kerchief.

“Damn it, Digger, you weren’t supposed to hurt anybody!” Tegen had said. He held a rag to his chin; his lip was swollen. I might have felt penitent, but not with that crowd assembled.

“You grabbed me! What did you expect?”

“I caught you! You were supposed to surrender! Pox, I think you broke my damn jaw.”

I pulled off my cap and shook down my hair, sliding up toward the bar. His strong arm blocked my progress. “If you’re caught by the City Guard, do you plan to beat the hell out of them until they let you go?”

I scowled. “I don’t understand. Of course. You don’t expect me to let them catch me, do you? Isn’t that the first rule? Don’t get caught? Stay alive, no matter what?”

I pressed my fingers against my eyes, trying to blot out the memory. I was alone in the bed; Meri was in her dressing gown, staring out the tiny window and its view of nothing. The country outside Favom had given way to a dark, forbidding forest, and this roadside inn was apparently the last habitation that dared to push back against Celys’s demesne.

Meri turned from the window. “Bad dreams?” she asked.

Her eyes went past me, to the bed. “Oh.” The bedclothes were a tangled mess, stripped from the mattress. My pillow looked as though I’d fought a battle with it. I shimmied to the side of the bed and swung my feet to the ground.

“I have bad dreams too, sometimes,” she said softly.

I withheld my snort. What kind of nightmares could haunt pretty Meri’s sleep? Someone taking away her pony privileges?

I had been included in the party to Bryn Shaer after all. Merista’s parents didn’t just resemble their daughter physically, they also shared her easy sympathy, and when Meri recounted my harrowing escape from the Celystra, they insisted I stay with them. The only snag had come when Lady Nemair insisted on sending a letter to my “brother.”

“The convent will surely have reported you missing by now, dear. We must let him know what’s become of you.”

I couldn’t help protesting. “I’m an adult.”

“Well, of course you are, but I’m sure he’s still worried about you.”

“My brother stopped worrying about me a long time ago. Milady.”

She just clucked and petted and wrote the damn letter. I scrambled for an address to send it to, then realized it didn’t matter. Deliver a letter to any house on — what was it, Ruby Lane? — and the recipient would merely be perplexed and bemused by the news of Celyn Contrare. Nobody would have any reason to put her together with the thief on the run from Greenmen. And I could manage a man’s handwriting well enough, should a return letter ever be required. I finally agreed, inventing a direction. I even consented to put down a few lines of my own, apologizing for my impulsiveness and begging my dear indulgent brother’s forgiveness. Marau’s balls.

Lady Lyllace briefly glanced over the letter. “Merista tells me you were a manuscript copyist at the Celystra,” she’d said. “You have a very pretty hand.”

I did, but it wasn’t my own. I wasn’t sure I’d know what my own handwriting looked like, I’d spent so much time perfecting the script of others.

Now, in the face of our expedition’s waning comforts, my promise to Durrel Decath was starting to lose some of its weight. Last night we had managed to find lodging, but the first night we had
camped.
Along the Oss, in a big jolly caravan like a band of Tigas Wanderers. Phandre had seethed until the very roots of her tawny hair turned pink, but Meri had reveled in it, in the breezy night and the lumpy earth and the giant starlit sky with Celys’s moon staring down on us enormously. I had shivered, my back to the dying campfire, and prayed to gods I wasn’t sure had ever been listening.

Hopping on the icy inn room floor, I climbed into my borrowed dress and hiked my skirts into my belt. We’d leave the main road today; if I wanted to light out for Yeris Volbann on my own, the moment was close. If I could slip away from the ever-watchful Nemair and their equally attentive retinue. So far I’d not had even a moment’s privacy among these people, let alone a full hour when nobody was paying attention to me.

Seeing me dressed, Meri dutifully held out her arms to receive her own traveling costume, mimicking the arrangement of my skirts. She had started off full of excitement, delighted by the grand adventure, but the farther we moved from the familiar safety of Favom, the more anxious she seemed. I couldn’t blame her: She was leaving the Decath, the only family she’d known for the last five years, and I knew she wasn’t sure exactly what to make of the ones who’d come to take their place.

I’d be grateful if you’d be a friend to her.
Pox. I slipped beside her and put a tentative hand on her shoulder, steeling myself to keep it there as a swirl of magic flared up around my fingers. I had discovered that even wearing Meri’s silver bracelet, I could still see the magic on her whenever we touched. The silver didn’t seem to inhibit how magic reacted to me, or my ability to detect it. She turned her gaze from the window and tried to smile, but a quivering lip betrayed her.

“All right!” I backed off. “Let’s fetch some breakfast.”

“I’m not very hungry,” she said.

Meri could afford to skip a meal or two, but some of us woke up starving as a routine and knew that you ate when you had the chance. “I’m getting food for us. Don’t eat if you don’t want, but who knows what they have planned for lunch.”

The inn’s common room was surprisingly crowded. This place was remote, and the season for travel was waning, but apparently the colorful wagons and the knot of retainers camped outside with our cargo had drawn out the neighborhood curious. Mostly forest folk, in for a nip before heading to do whatever it was forest folk did. Not the richest pickings, unfortunately. A couple of the liveried Nemair guards sat together at a table near the door. I recognized the big young one from yesterday. Phandre had spent almost the whole day trying to get him to help her forget Raffin.