The Hidden City (71 page)

But Jewel knew she hadn't.

She just hadn't been able to
stop
it.

Not the first time that she'd failed. Not the last time that she'd tried. But that one stayed with her, like a scar. Her Oma had had scars. On her wrists, on her arms, one on the side of her neck. They fascinated Jewel; they were always white, even when her Oma's skin was at its most sun-dark.

Her Oma, smoke spraying from the corner of her mouth, had snorted. “These? Feh. These aren't scars,” she told her granddaughter. “They're marks, that's all.”

“But how did you
get
them?”

“How does anyone?” But the old woman had lifted her wrists to the light, and her expression shifted, the way it sometimes did when she was about to tell a story. “These,” she told Jewel, “are for the Lady.”

“The Lady?”

“Aye. In the South, we call the Lady. In the North, you call the Mother. They're almost the same.” She shrugged. Inhaled acrid smoke and closed her eyes. “Sometimes if we bleed—if we
choose
to bleed—it's enough. We offer the Lady our thanks that way. For life,” she added. “For our lives.”

“But the scars—”

“You'll learn, girl. These
aren't
scars. They're nothing. The scars you carry with you? The ones that never leave? They're all in here.” She'd tapped her chest. “Regret,” she said softly, “for the things you didn't do. Or the things you couldn't do. They haunt you enough, and you see things like this,” and she put her hand to her neck, “and they mean nothing.”

“What things do you regret?”

But smoke answered; smoke and silence. The old woman had finally smiled, but it was a bitter smile. She pulled Jewel into her lap. Held her there.

And Jewel, curious, knew better than to speak. But it frightened her anyway; until that moment, she had always believed that her Oma could do
anything
.

Oh, the boy made it hard to
breathe
. She had never, ever felt vision as strongly as this; it was as if they were joined by experience—by lack of experience—and nothing would separate them. She was weeping, and she was not; she was breathing too heavily, too shallowly, for the running. Her legs were numb with cold, her feet worse; the shadows the sun cast, short, were all that she could see.

 

When her mother had passed away, Jewel had been older, but not by much. The air in the room had been cold and damp; the windows, open to Winter, let in the sounds of the street below. The room was close to the market.

Her father, unemployed now that the port was closed, had been with her mother, with them both. He was grave and silent.

“Will she go to see Oma?” Jewel had asked him.

He had nodded quietly. “Oma,” he said, “and her brothers.”

Jewel had never met the mythical uncles of whom her mother had so infrequently spoken.

“How do you know?” she had whispered. She couldn't talk in more than a whisper; the Winter fog was in her throat and chest, and her breath was weak, a rasp. Her mother's had been like this, but worse.

He placed a hand on her head, pushing aside dark curls; he left it there, as if she were an anchor. “Mandaros,” he said quietly, “is the god who sits in judgment, and he loves his people.”

“Who are his people?”

“The dead, Jewel. He lives in halls so large that the entire City could be built between the first columns, and he sits on a throne that can be seen for miles.”

“Like
Averalaan Aramarelas?”

“Like the High City, yes.”

“Is it beautiful?”

“It is beautiful,” he told her quietly. “But sometimes it is very far away.”

“As far away as the High City?”

“For us? As far,” he said. He smiled. It was not a happy smile. His hair was wild, fringed in white, his cheeks hollow. Cold Winter, and lean. His sweater was threadbare. Oma had done all the knitting, all the mending, and all the scolding for the family, and when she had died? Her mother had tried.

“For some of us,” he continued softly, “the throne is so far it takes years and years to reach. We walk,” he added, ruffling her hair, “and sometimes we run. But it is distant, that throne.”

“And the god?”

“He waits.”

“Is he angry?”

Her father shook his head. “He is seldom angry, Jewel. He is often sad.”

“Will he be sad for Momma?”

“He will be sad for you,” he told her. “And for me. But not for Momma. She was very tired.”

“Did he take her away?”

“No.”

“Will he keep her there?”

“He will let her stay by his side for as long as she wants,” he replied.

“Will she wait for you?”

His brows drew close together. He paused a moment, and then said, “She will wait for you.”

“Why?”

“How could she not? She will miss you, and even if she can never come back to you here, there's a place where you'll meet her again. You have to be good,” he added.

“I was good. But she died anyway.”

He said nothing to that. Nothing at all.

 

Jewel had never seen a ghost, and she didn't believe in them. Her father hadn't either. Her Oma had—but her Oma's voice was still, this day. Still, cold, distant; death had silenced her. Jewel wanted to believe in ghosts. Even angry ones. She had seen all of her family angry at one time or another, and if she hadn't enjoyed it—and she hadn't—it would still be better than this: silence.

She had lived with her father for years. He had struggled to teach her what he thought she should know: How to read. How to write. How to count, how to meld one number into another, as if they were liquid. He spoke sometimes in Torra, her mother's tongue, and sometimes in Weston.

It was hard, to be alone.

She learned to cook, and to mend, where it was possible. She learned to keep the room clean, for when her father returned from his day's work. She learned many things, in this place. The names of the gods. The names of the days, so like the gods; the names of the months, so different, that passed, one after another, in slow concert. This was time.

But as the years passed, she learned that there were things her father could not teach her; things he feared to speak about. Her strange vision was one of those things. Only Oma had listened, had cared to listen. Only Oma had given her advice when it could be offered, and even Jewel's mother had been uncomfortable when she did—but no one argued with Oma. Not and won.

The sight came and went, like seasons, but less predictable. She learned not to speak of it; not to her father, not to anyone. She learned to keep things hidden, to keep them secret.

Five days before her father died, she
knew
.

She sat in bed crying, disconsolate, and her father had come to her side; they shared the room, after all. It was only a few steps. He was not sick, not as Oma had been, not as her mother had been.

Her father had taken her in his arms, drawn her up across his lap, found a place for her beneath his chin, although she was ten, and too large to fit easily. She had babbled into his chest, and he had cradled her, rocked her, whispered into her hair. About nightmares. About fear.

She had tried to tell him. That she
knew
. What she knew. He had both listened and failed to listen.

He is a man,
her Oma's memory whispered.
He's not one of us; he can't be. He is not a bad man, but he is not a woman
. And because he wasn't, she knew that he would hear nothing.

Jewel knew how to count. And she counted the bitter passage of days. She cooked for her father, and cleaned, and wept; she begged him not to go to work. But the words were poor words, and useless.
It's just one day,
she said.
If I miss one day,
he told her quietly,
they'll find someone else to take my place. Hush. If it's death, it's a faster death than starving.
Work was life, in the twenty-fifth holding.

It's death,
she tried to tell him, and when she met his gaze on that last day, when she ran to him, hugged him, squeezed the words out of his lips, she thought he
must
know.

But he kissed the top of her head, disentangled himself, and left her anyway.

 

She had waited in the cavernous, empty room, the table clean, the floor clean, her few possessions gathered on the far corner of her bed in disarray. She had slate, and some chalk; she had clothing, three days' worth, before it had to be beaten with stone and soap. Food? Not much. And no money.

The knock came at the door. She rose to answer it.

A tall man stood in the frame, hat in hands, his face grave. “Jewel Markess?” he said. Her whole name. She looked up, and up again, until she saw the end of his beard.

She nodded. She didn't ask him to come in, because she knew he wouldn't. She'd seen it, seen this.

“I'm sorry, lass,” he said, bending, his broad shoulders folding slightly, his beard drawing closer. “There was an accident at the port. A timber beam fell.”

He must have thought her cold, uncaring. She had nodded, but she hadn't said a word. She'd listened, but the words had already been said, already been heard.

She didn't ask about the money. He gave it to her anyway; three days' pay. Her father's. This man, bearded, tall, was a good man; he could have kept the money.

But he looked beyond her into the empty room, and his face twisted. He mumbled something. Gave her an address. Told her to come to him if she were ever in need. They weren't empty words. Not yet.

But they would be, come Winter. He was married, and he had several children. She waited for him to leave, and after the door closed, she looked back.

Thinking about the sounds that she had once heard, here. The things she had seen. The people she had touched, and the people who had loved her. Everything was gone; soon enough, the room would be gone, too, home to another family, a larger one. Home to people who could pay the rent.

And Jewel?

She ran to the windows, threw them wide, looked down into the streets below. They were busy; carts and wagons rolled past, men and women shouted at each other, children played in the lee of the building opposite hers.

If she had a home, it was there.

She didn't weep; she didn't cry; she didn't pray. She just watched people pass by, as if this were any other day, as if her father had not died across the distant city, within sight of
Averalaan Aramarelas
. After some time had passed, the shadows growing, the sunlight fading, she returned to her bed and began to pack the things she owned into a sack.

Then she found the other items that she thought she might need: old needles, half-balls of carded wool in the least expensive of colors, the single-edged knife that her father had used for carving when the Winter was cold. She bound these in cloth, depositing them with care into her sack. Last, she took a box, her father's box, from its hidden place beneath the false bottom of a dresser drawer. Old and tarnished, it had become the center of their lives in many ways; it was where he put the coin he earned. She opened the lid with care, and put three days' worth of pay into the hollow, dark interior.

He'd taught her well enough; she knew just how far that would get her.

What was the point of knowing? Of seeing things before they happened? She hated the vision, the helplessness that came with it, the utter failure that marked her whenever it came. Why had she been cursed this way?

And yet, she had an answer, now, in the streets of this holding, her father—her whole family—nothing more than memories, some bitter and some sweet. No one listened to a child. No one heard what a child said clearly. No one but other children.

And Rath, maybe.

Her Oma was gone, and her mother, and her father, all of whom would have stopped her from her headlong flight into Winter streets. They would have held her back, held onto her, kept her safe from the cold and the danger.

She missed them bitterly. She missed the safety of their arms, the warmth of their stories, even the heat of their anger, the bitter sting of their worry.

And yet . . .

She didn't. Because the safety they offered had been a type of cage, and she understood that now. The cage came with love, was born of it, but in the end—in the end, had she still been under its lock and key, Finch would be dead, and Rath would be dead and Arann and Lefty, and Lander, Fisher, Jester. Duster would be something else, and might still become that.

And this boy?

She
knew
his fear. Felt it as if it were her own because it
was
her own. He spoke to her, wordlessly, and she, unable to speak in kind, spoke in a different fashion, running faster and faster as his fear peaked, as it shifted, as it grew so damn big he could no longer contain it.

It would devour him. It had already begun.

She cried out, she couldn't help herself; what he couldn't contain, she didn't even try. She stumbled in the snow, her hands plunging through it to the hard, frozen dirt beneath. She tasted it, felt it melt against her hot cheeks, her warm skin.

Arann was there in an instant, and he hauled her to her feet as if she weighed no more than Lefty. Carver waited in silence, and Lefty stared at her as if—as if this were normal.

Quiet, succinct, he said, “He found her body.”

Jewel swallowed and nodded. It was true. He had.

 

They didn't ask her why.

Why this boy? Why this one? She had no time to think it, although she knew—who better?—that there would be many deaths in the city over the next few days. She couldn't save them all. It had never truly occurred to her to try.