The Gate Thief (Mither Mages) (18 page)

“No,” said Danny.

Pat nodded and sat back, facing forward, like a scolded schoolgirl.

“Oh, I want to kiss you,” said Danny. “You’re the only woman I’ve actually felt this way about, though I didn’t realize it until just now. I really do trust you and respect you and you’re my true friend, which is what you came to say and you said it and you’re right and I believe you. But here’s the thing. I’m not as good as you. I use people. I can count on you, but can you count on me?”

She gave a little shrug. “I can’t control that,” she said. “I can only control what
I
do.”

“Well, I can control what
I
do,” said Danny. “My body wants you right now. Tonight. You understand me? And if I hadn’t stopped kissing you just now, you would have let me sleep with you, am I right?”

She bent forward and hid her face in her hands again. “I’m a terrible Christian,” she said.

“But I don’t want to be that guy,” said Danny.

“What guy?”

“The guy who sleeps with a woman because he can. Like most of the guys in our Family history. Those gods who got women pregnant all over mythology. I’m not as good as you are, Pat, but I’m better than
they
are. Loving me is going to do nothing but make you miserable.”

Pat got up from the couch.

“Please,” said Danny.

“I have to get home to bed,” said Pat. “My folks will worry. They’re worriers.”

“But you would have stayed the night with me.”

“Because then
you
would be my family. But you’re not. They are. I have to go.”

“I didn’t lie to you,” said Danny. “I could have.”

She stood at the partly open door. “I know that,” she said. “You’ve been straight with me. You’re even better than I thought you were. I love you more than I thought I did. You love
me
more than either of us thought you could. We’re never going to sleep together, I’m not going to be the woman in your life, and yet right now I’m as happy as I’ve ever been in my whole life. Go figure.” Then she went through the door and closed it behind her.

I am the stupidest guy in the whole world, thought Danny. I let her go out that door without saying a single word more.

But Danny also knew that his decision was the right one. His desire for her was far more than the fleeting interest he had had in Xena, which was based entirely on Xena’s eagerness. What he didn’t know was whether his desire for Pat was also based on her availability. Maybe Pat was simply more the kind of woman that he was attracted to—quiet, smart, truthful, a little sharp-tongued but also kind-hearted. Sort of like Leslie. Sort of like Mama. Maybe that’s the kind of woman he would always fall for, and she simply happened to be the first.

He was about to do the most dangerous things in his already-dangerous life. Whether his attraction to her was just momentary or he really loved her in a stay-true-your-whole-life kind of way, this was not the time to complicate things. Besides, what if the Families had spies watching him? What if she had stayed the night? Then he’d be putting her in danger of being used as a hostage. Or of being tortured or killed because that would be a way to hurt him, the Gatefather that was always out of their direct reach.

He was right to break off that kiss and she was right to leave and that was how it had to be.

And how did it begin? With him touching her as he ushered her to sit down.

Did he unconsciously know even then where her visit to him was going to lead? Did he know deep inside that he felt something stronger for her than for any other woman he knew?

No.

He touched Pat because that’s what Marion did when he was bringing a guest into his house. Always the hand on the back, guiding them in. Marion was something of a toucher. Danny wasn’t. But without realizing it, he had picked up the idea that when you have a guest, and you want to bring them in, you put your hand on their back to guide and accompany them.

Danny had never had an actual guest at his house before, and so when Pat showed up alone, unexpected, Danny, in his nervousness, unconsciously followed the pattern he had observed with Marion Silverman.

That’s all it had been.

But where it led was to a place much deeper than that. Pat was the smartest of his friends, the most mature. Her caustic nature partly came from the fact that she stood outside everything, observing. The way Danny had always been a permanent outsider. She was the one who was most like Danny, at least in the way she dealt with people. Always detached. Always cautious, analyzing.

Except I’m not cautious. And where she’s silent, I talk, I say things. In fact, Pat is nothing like me and I’m nothing like her, but I’d be a better person if I were.

Then again, she’d be a happier person if she were a little more like me. Wouldn’t she? She always seems so sour.

Stop thinking about it, he told himself as he took his pants back off, and his underwear and socks, and slid into bed to try to sleep. Stop thinking about it.

But he didn’t stop. Pat was all over his thoughts before he slept, and while he slept, and he woke up thinking about her in the morning, cursing himself for a fool as he prepared to head over to Coach Lieder’s house. The last thing he needed was to have a woman on his mind.

10

C
ONFESSION

Wad gated to the farming village in the high country of Iceway. He appeared near the public well, so that there was no chance that his manner of arrival would go unremarked. He came showing his power: A gatemage is in the world, and he came here, and he walked from this well directly to the house where the strange woman and her two damaged, terrified sons were brought only a few days ago.

It was the house of Roop and Levet where Wad walked. Inside, he found—as he expected—that the eldest daughter, Eko, was tending to Anonoei, the onetime concubine of King Prayard, and her two sons, eight-year-old Eluik and six-year-old Enopp.

The boys had spent the past two years in total isolation, living like tortured animals. For Enopp especially, the two-year imprisonment had been more than half his life, for who remembers anything before the age of three? Their imprisonment had ended in terror and violence, with soldiers stabbing at them; and then they had been magically gated to this high mountain place, to be cared for by strangers, and their wounds healed, and their mother restored to them, and her children restored to her, and all was …

Not well. Wad did not expect things to be well at all.

The boys did not speak, but they saw him come in. They did not fear him. If they thought of him in any way, it would come from the fact that they had seen him magically heal wounds, that he had arranged for them to be fed and kept warm. They would think of him as the great mage who had rescued them from hell. If they were capable of rational thought at all.

Wad was looking at the boys, who were looking at him. Anonoei was looking down at the table, where she was chopping an onion. Chopping it very, very fine.

It was Eko, the eldest daughter of the house, who spoke first. “The man in the tree,” she said. “Have I done well with them? Do they look strong to you?”

“Yes,” said Wad.

“The boys don’t speak to me or anyone but their mother and each other. The younger one doesn’t speak even to them. The mother speaks to me now and then. I haven’t pressed them. I think something terrible has happened to them.”

“It has,” said Wad.

“He saved us,” murmured Anonoei.

“Yes,” said Wad. “I did. But before we can proceed any further, I have to make sure you understand everything that I did, and why I did it. Only then is there a chance that we can work together to try to undo some portion of my crimes.”

Anonoei looked up then. “
Your
crimes?”

“I know you remember me,” said Wad. “I know you saw me spying on you from the rafters, back when you were King Prayard’s mistress and lay with him in the castle where another woman was the queen.”

“That
was
you,” she said.

“You winked at me,” said Wad.

“You saw us, and you said nothing, though I knew not and know not why. But I winked at you, to show you that I knew you were there, and that I, too, would say nothing. That’s why I recognized you when you snatched us out of our prison cells when the soldiers were trying to kill us. When you brought us to the snow, I thought I knew you, but I couldn’t think when or how we met. I thought you were a strange kitchen boy. But you were really a great mage, a gatemage, all along.”

“I was, though at the time I barely knew it myself,” said Wad.

“A gatemage,” whispered Eko. “But living in a tree.”

“That’s one story,” said Wad to Eko. “But I’m here to tell another. About how some men came to murder Queen Bexoi and I, appointing myself as her protector, warned her and saved her life. I showed her then the kind of mage I was, and she showed me the kind of mage
she
was.”

“Bexoi?” said Anonoei with contempt. “A Sparrowfriend!”

“That was her disguise. She’s a Firemaster at least, if not a Lightrider. And she has the power to make a self-clant so perfect that not only could it speak in her voice, but also when the assassin stabbed it, it bled, and the blood spilled onto the sheets.”

Anonoei touched her fingers to her lips.

“No one knew but me. I saw it with my own eyes. I was proud that she trusted me. I became her lover. She bore my son and pretended it was Prayard’s.”

“The baby was yours?” said Anonoei. “So Prayard didn’t lie when he told me that he never put his seed in her.” She looked away.

“He was faithful to you,” said Wad. “And you joined in plotting against him and against the Queen. I know you were guilty of that, and you know what the penalty would have been, had you been caught.”

“Never against
him
,” she said. “And I was part of no plot. They told me to pack for a journey, for myself and my sons.”

“You knew what it meant.”

She did not disagree.

“Bexoi wanted me to get you out of the way. I loved her and I did her bidding. But I also distrusted her even then, and so I didn’t kill you. What I did was worse. I took you and your two dangerous sons, and I put you in the mouths of old slag tunnels in the face of the cliff, and I made gates that caught you if you fell and put you back at the top of the cave, so you lived in constant torment, always about to fall, never able to end your captivity by leaping from the cell. That was my idea, my plan. That was how I saved you alive. How I punished you and your innocent sons, because you posed a threat to the woman I loved, and to my son that she was bearing.”

“That’s a poor excuse,” said Eko boldly.

“It’s no excuse at all,” said Wad, turning to the girl. “It was a monstrous crime against the three of them, and I did it. I thought of it and I carried it out and no one knew that they were there except for me. I stole food and gave it to them. As time went on the food grew better and I made their imprisonment more bearable. When the Queen learned that they were still alive and demanded that I kill them, I disobeyed her. There are a few things in my favor.”

Wad turned back to Anonoei. “But nothing makes up for the evil that I did. I tormented you and your sons. Whatever terrors and dark visions inhabit their minds, I caused.”

Wad looked at the boys, for his eye caught some motion. It was the younger one, Enopp. He had broken his gaze at Wad and was now looking at his brother and then his mother. His face showed some animation for the first time. But Eluik remained dead-eyed, his gaze still riveted on Wad.

“Whomever you blamed and whomever you hated there in your prison cells, and whomever you feared, I was your captor, your jailer, your torturer. What does it matter that I despised myself for what I had done to you? I continued to do it.

“So let me give you some consolation. Queen Bexoi got the King to sleep with her. You were gone, and so were your sons. He believed that my boy was his own, and now he came to love the Queen, and he wanted to give her a baby. So he begot a child upon her. And then she didn’t need my little bastard anymore.

“My son, whom she called Oath and I called Trick, was now a danger to Prayard’s true son. He was also the only person that I loved, once I understood that Bexoi had used me, had never loved me. So she murdered my boy and tried to murder me. On the day I released you from the cells where I had kept you, that was when she killed my son.

“If she had killed me as she meant to, I couldn’t have saved you, and you’d be dead as well. But I escaped from her, and I rescued you. But don’t imagine that I had repented of my crimes against you. I meant to let you out someday, and I tried to make your imprisonment more bearable, but I was not about to let you go. It was Bexoi’s monstrous murder of her own child, of
our
child, and her open try at killing me that finally made me let you go.

“You see that I don’t pretty up my actions. Bexoi is a monster, but so am I. If I’m better than her it’s only because I kept you alive and didn’t murder you right out. But is that really better? Weren’t you just the prey that the spider binds up and hides away to devour another day? I kept you as a tool to use against her, when the time came.”

Wad fell silent. Eko looked at him in a kind of fascinated horror. He doubted that the boys understood, though the younger one at least seemed interested. Anonoei, though … she understood all.

“This is that time,” she said. “The time to use us as tools against her.”

“No,” said Wad. “You’re far too weak, and so am I. I was once the greatest gatemage that the worlds had ever known, but now there is a greater one than I. He took all but a few of my gates. I am no match for Bexoi now, and you are most certainly no match for her. I came here to set you free of me, since I’m no use to anyone. I came here to tell you the truth so you would know your enemies. So you would hate the right people, when it was time to hate. Prayard had no hand in what happened to you. He searched for you and he grieved for you, but you were beyond his finding, and when he came to love Bexoi it was only in the firm belief that you were dead.”