The Hidden City (55 page)

“Jewel—”

“I know we can't stay here forever,” she added. She seemed oddly deflated; her words had a peculiar flatness to them that he associated with—with vision. “You'll make us leave,” she added. “I don't know why. I don't know what we'll have done wrong. But you'll make us go.”

Although it was a future he had contemplated, and in earnest, he himself could not see the manner of its arrival. He said nothing. Instead he rose, and moved both paper and ink, setting them on the desk. They were there, after all, more as companions than as useful tools. He had not touched them at all, save to place them where they might be touched should he need them.

He took the daggers last, and set them on the bed.

“What information do you think you have that's worth another four people?”

She put the bundles down, and lifted only one; its edges were darkened. “These,” she told him, and she laid the one she held flat against the table, where it draped on all sides like a thick cloth meant for no other purpose. He would have spoken, but she continued.

“I think this is magicked, somehow.”

“You can see that?”

Her frown added lines to her face. “No. Not—not like the doors.”

“The doors, Jewel?”

“The ones that were barred. You didn't get out through the doors,” she added.

“Arann seemed to think it unwise.”

She smiled briefly at that, some echo of his own sense of pride, given the quiet giant was nowhere in sight. But brief was the correct word; the smile vanished. “They were . . . orange. They glowed orange.”

Not to his vision. Not, certainly, to Arann's. He said nothing, however.

“It's a map,” she added.

He looked at the parchment, the hide upon which so much had been drawn. He did not touch it, however; he was aware that he had not yet finished the negotiations she had begun, and he was willing to let her continue, although the presence of the lines and the words beneath them, the large ovals, the squares, and the odd, small circles, made it difficult.

“I thought it would burn. When I threw it over the mage, I thought it would burn.”

He nodded.

“But it didn't. I think these were important,” she added, “to the mage. Or the mages. I think they were willing to burn the house down because they knew these wouldn't burn with it.”

“And you took them.”

She nodded quietly. “I wouldn't have, if it weren't for—” She shook her head. “They looked like maps to me. But I've seen the maps of the city, and this isn't them.”

He knew; they were his maps. “You didn't seem so eager to study my maps,” he said, with a hint of wry humor. “I wouldn't have guessed you would choose to take maps from the manor; there were other things of value there.”

“I took everything of value there,” she replied quietly. “And these, as well.”

It wasn't subtle, but then again, Jewel never was.

“It would cost much to magic something of this size,” he said, his eyes on the lines that denoted streets. She was, of course, correct; this was not Averalaan. “Minor magics, some scrambling, perhaps keying the maps to individual eyes—those would be less expensive. But to protect such things against destruction?”

“You said people do it. For paintings. And other stuff.”

He nodded. He had. But these were not the same. He stared at the map that lay there, following a line that plummeted off the table's edge. “What do you think these are, Jewel?”

Her hesitation was awkward; silence was as close as she came to a lie. But she wouldn't lie to him in his own house; he had set that ground rule early, and she abided by it. “The undercity,” she said at last. “I think these are maps of the undercity.”

“What makes you say that?”

She wanted to shrug; he saw it, and knew why: she wanted to appear to be in control of this exchange. And she so seldom wanted that control. But in her mind, lives depended on it, and he let it pass without comment, curious to see how it would play out.

But her answer was not the answer he wanted. She bent at the knees and retrieved another of the three maps; this she laid over the first. He could see where they'd cut it down, and wondered what type of magic had been placed upon them; certainly, the ability to be impervious to edged weapons had been demonstrated clearly by the man who had almost killed them all with his flame.

And by the others.

But that enchantment was absent, had to be absent; he could see where daggers had done their sloppy, quick work.

When she had flattened the map, and centered it, she touched its surface.

The lines beneath her finger began to glow. Jewel frowned; it was clear that she was uncertain as to whether or not Rath could see the effect. But it didn't matter; the line took pale blue light and spread it in a thin wedge. Her fingers ran along it, and stopped at a large rectangle that receded for some distance, bound on the other side by another line that sloped in a gentle curve. The map continued its odd glow, and Rath realized that the lines touch invoked did not conform entirely to the lines drawn on the parchment itself. Magic indeed.

“I think,” she told him quietly, “that this is the stone garden.”

He nodded; he could almost see it. A rough series of calculations might tell him the scale the cartographers had used. He bent over the map, and she stopped him; she rolled them both up, lifted them, and waited. Solemn child.

“They're ours,” she told him quietly.

“Ours, now?”

“I didn't take them down on my own; I couldn't have carried them out on my own. Carver helped. Finch helped.”

“You could sell these,” he began.

But she shook her head, her expression wary. “You wouldn't let me sell them,” she told him. “And because you won't, it means they have value, but only to you.”

He nodded, and then he graced her with a rare smile. “You've done well,” he told her quietly. “And yes, Jewel Markess. In exchange for these, I will allow you the use of two rooms.”

“Rath?”

“Yes?”

“Will you let me look at them, sometimes?”

He started to say something clever, but her expression stopped the words. “Yes,” he told her quietly. “While it is safe, I will let you look at them.”

Her shoulders seemed to collapse a fraction, and he realized, with surprise, that the act had been no act; she did value the maps in and of themselves. Under other circumstances, she would have kept them.

And she would have accepted his refusal to allow her access in return for the rooms that would house far too many of her wayward children. Her den.

He smiled.

“What's funny?” she said sharply.

“Your den,” he replied.

“My what?”

“They're yours, Jewel. To heal or to lose.”

She shook her head.

But this, he would not allow. “Whether you accept it or not, you've already become their leader. Arann would follow you anywhere now. And I think young Carver as well, although I'm less certain why. Finch wouldn't follow you into a fight—but that's not her gift.

“And the others? They'll come to you, sooner or later. They'll learn to trust you. And you, little Jewel, will understand how much of a burden that trust can be.”

“Trust is a gift,” she began.

“Only until you fail it,” he replied. “And at your age, I think failure is certain. Remember that. Remember, the first time it happens, that it is only one failure. And remember this as well: How you deal with that failure will define not only your life, but theirs.”

He would have said more; he meant to. But he had come close to skirting the sharp edge of his own past, and the words that he had offered were not his words; they were his grandfather's words, come back to haunt him in the only way they could: from his lips.

And they were true—but Rath's truth was not, yet, Jewel's. It was bitter, and darker.

“Go,” he told her, more harshly than he had intended. “I have business to attend to.”

“Here?”

“I'll go out in an hour or two.”

She nodded.

Duster wore a russet shade of brown, and it didn't suit her. The sleeves of the winter tunic were rolled up at least twice by the look of them, and the hood that hung from the shoulders seemed to have a spine, it stood so stiffly behind her messy hair. She wore pants that didn't match, but these were both tighter and shorter. Her feet were still bare. If Helen could be cajoled into parting with clothing that had yet to find a wearer, if she could be talked out of the need to use her measuring tapes and sticks, her wealth of straight pins, the cobbler wasn't so generous.

The other three were dressed in a similar fashion; the clothing was obviously meant for small adults, and little thought had gone into color or size; they were either green or brown. But it was better than what they almost weren't wearing, and they all knew it. They knew, as well, that clothing that actually fit would be waiting, soon.

They looked up as she entered the room.

“I'm Jay,” she told them quietly. “Did everyone else introduce themselves?”

Lefty nodded, and then frowned. “This,” he said, nodding to the redhead, “is Jester.”

She raised a brow. “Jester?”

“What, it's worse than
Carver
?”

Jewel shrugged. He had a point. “I don't care if you call yourselves Mouse and Rat,” she replied. “I don't care if you want me to call you Mouse or Rat. I don't care how you wound up at that place; it's gone, you're not going back. But if you've got someplace else to go back
to,
that's fine as well. It's awfully crowded here.” She waited.

No one volunteered the location of a home. She hadn't expected they would, but had to make the offer anyway.

“Jay
is
my name,” she added quietly. “It's short for Jewel.” She lifted a balled fist in warning. “It's a Southern name, sort of. And it could have been worse. I wouldn't bother to tell you about this, but Rath uses it when he's annoyed. Which is often.”

“Finch is my name,” Finch said quietly. She looked lost in this crowd. Or almost lost. But her quiet had no fear in it, at least not for herself.

“Arann's mine. Lefty's not—”

Lefty kicked him. Arann didn't appear to notice.

Jewel turned to look at the other two boys. One, silent in a way that implied the remnant of defiance, finally said, “Fisher.” His face was almost all jaw, and his eyes were small and bright; blue, which was a bit startling given the darkness of his hair. He wasn't tall, but he didn't give the impression of being small or underfed either.

Jester. Fisher. Duster. She turned to the quiet boy and almost turned away. There was food in his lap. The fact that it was there at all meant he hadn't touched it. Jewel looked at Finch, and Finch looked at the floor. As if his lack of appetite was her failing, somehow.

Jewel made a note to herself: Don't put Finch on kitchen duty. But Finch was good in the damn kitchen; she was neat and very tidy, and she organized space; she also took up so little of it you could actually stand beside her without having to dance around the jut of her elbows. Jewel made no guesses about what she'd done when she'd had a family. She didn't even wonder how big—or how close to starvation—it must have been.

She just hated them blindly.

And if Finch did, she wasn't about to say it. Not yet. Maybe never. It was hard to tell—Finch had been on best behavior, at least by Jewel's standards—since she'd come to Rath's. Maybe in time, when she was truly at home here, she'd let go.

But maybe this was just the way she was.

The boy who was silent was also dressed in Helen's half-price castoffs. She wondered if he had struggled or argued or ignored what had been offered. Asking was awkward, so she didn't, but she stored that one for later as well.

“He's hurt,” Lefty said quietly, nodding to the silent, motionless boy. “He just sits there, staring at the wall. He doesn't like loud noises,” he added, as if that were helpful. As if it weren't obvious.

But loud noise had defined Jewel's life with her Oma, so maybe it wasn't.

“How hurt?” she asked softly.

Lefty glanced up at Arann. Arann's silent expression was enough of an answer. “We could take him to the Mother's temple,” he said at last.

She started to say no and stopped. The Mother's temple, according to her Oma, was a place that you went when you had no other choices; when you were so down on your luck, all you had left was pride or death.

But she'd never seen anyone like this boy before either. She started to ask another question, and then stopped. Duster had crossed the floor; Duster now knelt by the boy. Jewel wanted to grab her by the shoulder and drag her away, and curbed the impulse with difficulty.

She didn't trust Duster.

But Duster had made clear how much of a burden she thought trust was. How much of an insult.

“He was there for longer than I was,” Duster told them all, her eyes on the boy's profile. His hair was a pale gold, and his eyes were a more natural blue; his cheek was bruised, his lips were slightly thick, and purple to one side.

“What was he like, when you first saw him?”

Duster looked up. The warning in her expression was sharp as a knife. Then again, everything about her was.

Jewel accepted the criticism; she'd broken one of her own rules, without thinking. What he had been didn't matter; what he was, did. She nodded quietly at Duster, and Duster's response to the silent apology was an odd frown; it was a tightening, a whitening, of lips. An expression of pain. She hovered there, as if it were the only place she was at home. “He tried to help me,” she said, after a long, long pause. “I owe him.”