The Seer - eARC (74 page)

Chapter Forty

Amarta dismounted, aware that the many uniformed riders dismounting around her were attracting a good deal of attention in this seaside town. Some townspeople stood and stared. Most backed away.

She inhaled the scents of the town in summer: hot stone roads, rotting garbage, sluggish sewers. Then the winds changed: sea breezes, woodsmoke, baking breads. A strange world, where things could change so quickly and thoroughly.

She thought of the Lord Commander and their last conversation. He had held the reins of the horse on which she sat. A gift, he told her.

“Stay,” he had urged. “Your queen and empire still need you.”

“I can’t, Lord Commander. And I will not.”

“Seer, things are very different now. Your family—free to come and go. You, likewise, at full liberty. Stay with us, Amarta al Arunkel, as our guest. I can offer you—”

“I want none of it.”

He nodded, seeming unsurprised. For a moment he studied her closely, and she had the odd feeling he was seeing her now. For the first time. “What, then?” he asked, voice low. “Some apology or reparation? Would that change your mind?”

She thought of the years behind her. Of being hunted. Of being afraid. Of the lives she had cost.

“Or perhaps this?” He held something up to her, and she took it. For a moment she didn’t recognize it. Then she did.

A blue and white seashell. Her mother’s seashell. She found herself smiling. “No, ser. You can’t give me what I want.”

“Name it.”

She looked at the squadron of guards he had put at her disposal and thought of all the things she could ask for, and how each one would bind her more closely to him and his queen.

“I want to be free of all this, ser.”

“Ah.” He took a deep breath. “So be it. One last question, then: what do I most need to know about my future?”

Amarta had come to very much doubt that answering this question did anyone any good at all. Even when she saw the future clearly, even when it changed little between prediction and outcome—even in those rare cases where people did as she directed—what did they gain?

Were they not then her tools, as she had been his?

In any case, people usually did what they wanted to, regardless of what she said.

And there was wisdom in that, perhaps.

As she considered how to answer him, she looked into the future and what was to come for Innel sev Cern esse Arunkel. Images of him with his queen. Of Arunkel soldiers alongside Teva on striped shaota. Of Houses of metal and stone and ocean, of people and colors moving across the land. Children to be born, deaths to come. A rich tapestry.

But she was done being one of its threads.

As he waited for her answer, she realized that no matter what she said now, whether based in vision or fully invented, whether smoothly spoken or absurdly clumsy, her words would carry influence far beyond anything she might expect or intend, and once said, they were out of her hands entirely. What could she possibly say to him now that would do more good than ill?

She laughed a little. “Listen, ser. Try to understand.”

He was silent a time. Considering, she hoped.

“The crown offers you hospitality, Amarta al Arunkel,” he said, handing her the reins. “We welcome your return.”

Her return. She did not want to think about that, but as long as Dirina and Pas were here with Nalas, she would feel the pull. But for now—

She had left the palace, then, and the city, with a guard of red and black trailing her along the Great Road, past houses and hovels, shipyards and markets. The ocean was to one side, sometimes close enough to be booming with surf, other times only sending a distant salt breeze her way.

But always the gulls overhead. She remembered once envying them their freedom.

And now Amarta stood on a cobblestone street, one hand on the warm neck of her mare, the summer sun in her eyes, the distant roar of the ocean in her ears.

The captain of her guard dismounted, strode to her.

“Go back to the palace, ser,” she told him. “You and all your men.”

“Are you sure, Seer? We can wait on you, as long as you like. The Lord Commander instructed us to—”

“Give him my thanks, but no; I no longer need your escort.” She could not imagine the world was more dangerous to her than an army camp, or a battlefield. But if it were, so be it.

“Seer, we were told to make sure you—”

“And you have. Now you are done. Go home.”

“If you’re sure, ser . . . ?”

“I am.”

With reluctance he mounted and led his squadron away, looking back repeatedly at her until they were out of sight. Amarta led her horse to the inn’s stable, leaving it with the hands there, and walked inside the many-colored inn and upstairs to the rooms where she knew Maris would be.

She knocked, and the door opened. A young man she had never seen before stood there.

“Yes?” he asked, seeming as startled by Amarta as she was by him.

Are you ever surprised?

All the time.

Maris appeared at his shoulder. “Amarta, come in. This is Samnt, my”—she laughed a little—“apprentice. Samnt, go downstairs to the kitchens and arrange dinners for the four of us.”

“Arrange? What? But I don’t know how to—”

“What a good time to learn,” Maris said, putting coins in his hand, closing his fingers around them, and pressing him outside while bringing Amarta in. Maris closed the door on the bemused young man.

“You probably already know this,” Maris said to Amarta, “but he’s here.”

At the far end of the room by a draped window Tayre stood.

Maris was right, she had known. But she had stopped looking at the future, the moment she saw that much. Some things, she had come to realize, were too important to foresee.

Even knowing he’d be here, she felt a shock go through her at the sight of him. Knowing the future, it seemed, was nothing like living it.

Her left hand still ached where he had broken her fingers. Her bruises were almost entirely healed. She worked her fingers, remembering the things that had been said in that room.

“Hello, Seer,” Tayre said. “I have come to speak with you, if I may.”

Maris looked at Amarta, a deepening frown on her face, and made a displeased, thoughtful sound. “If you want privacy, Ama, I can stand outside yet still protect you.”

From her tone, Amarta realized that somehow Maris understood the connection between Tayre and her various bruises and breaks.

“I think you should stay, Maris,” Tayre said.

“Yes, I think I should, too.” Maris said, pulling a chair around to sit.

“You came with a royal guard,” Tayre said to Amarta. “Is your contract with the Lord Commander intact?”

“It is finished. He released me,” Amarta said. “But now, of all things, Dirina and Pas want to stay at the palace, while I am free to go.”

At this he gave a small laugh. “Are you? Have you done what you came here to do?”

Had she? She had changed the Lord Commander’s path, for a time, anyway. If stability and peace across the empire were truly her goal, possibilities existed for both where they had not before.

And Dirina and Pas, well. They were as secure as they could be, if they were going to stay in the queen’s palace. After all Amarta’s efforts to keep them safe, leaving them in Yarpin seemed the strangest of outcomes, but she could not argue with her sister’s determination to find her own way. Amarta would not tell Dirina where she should go, or what she should do. Or whom she should do it with.

She exhaled. “I think so.”

He pulled the drapes back and glanced outside. Through the window, the ocean bay glittered. “There are curious tales being told on the streets. Large sums of coin being offered for news of the true fortune-teller. Rumors of a young woman with the queen’s ear who has fortified the treasury and secured the borders.”

“That’s absurd,” Amarta said. “That’s not at all how it happened.”

“It rarely is.” He looked back at her. “So, Amarta, what will you do now?”

She wanted to go away, far beyond the red and black. “I don’t know,” she said. “What will you do?”

“That’s why I’m here, Seer. To find out what I do next.” He took a step toward her and paused. “Do you,” he said, advancing another slow step, “still want my help, to learn to live in the world?” Another step. “To help you understand what you are?” One more step, and he stopped. “And, should you decide, help you to die? Do you still want all that from me?”

Flashes of metal points in candlelight. The smell of hot iron. The sound of a knife being sharpened.

A palm-sized, glinting coin on a table top.

His finger on her lips.

“If you have a contract to offer me,” he said. “Now is the time. If not, I will leave you in peace, and never trouble you again. On my word and oath before a mage who I am certain will hold me to it.”

The room was very quiet. She could hear her own breathing.

“How much?” she asked, her stomach trembling.

“What do you offer?”

Her heart sank. In all the time she had been at the palace and at Otevan, she had taken nothing of value. She had refused the Lord Commander’s offers of payment, had stood watching the mine swirling with vast quantities of gold, had walked across flakes of gold fallen on the battlefield like bright snow.

She had taken nothing, had asked for nothing. It had not even occurred to her to do so.

In desperation she reached into her pocket, felt something hard, and pulled out a single copper nals, the very one the Lord Commander had given her to seal their contract. The Grandmother Queen sat dour, a dog at her feet. On the other side, the great Sennant River, the very river down which she and Dirina and Pas had fled years ago.

Fled this very man.

She held it up for him to see. “I can get more.” How, she wasn’t quite sure, but there must be ways to get the sort of coin someone like this would require. “Just give me some time.” She looked at Maris. Perhaps the mage would help her.

Then she looked back at him. His hand was out, palm up. Her breath caught.

He could not possibly mean that he would accept a single nals for this contract. That would be absurd. Unthinkable.

Was that what he meant?

“For how long?” she asked.

“As long as you need me. Until you release me.”

“No. You can’t possibly accept this for that.”

“Yes, I can.”

She rubbed the coin nervously, feeling the imprint there. What to do? Put the coin in his hand or tell him to go away? What might happen?

No, she thought firmly, pushing vision away as it tried to answer. She would not look to see what she would do or what might happen. She would decide for herself.

He had given her a promise to leave her in peace. She could be free of the Lord Commander’s hunting dog. Truly and finally. Did she want that? To never see him again?

Still he waited, unmoving, hand outstretched. How long would he stand there?

He would not move, she realized. Not until she answered.

She stepped close, close enough to see the scar on his face, the gold flecks in his light brown eyes, the stubble on his cheeks. To taste his breath on the air between them. “As long as I need you?” she asked. “That could be years.”

“Then it will be years.”

Fear is a shadow.

So be it.

Holding his gaze with her own, she put the coin onto his open palm. He curled his fingers around the coin and her smaller hand. With his other hand he covered them both. “Maris,” he said. “Will you witness?”

“I will,” Maris said, surprise in her voice.

“Are you ready, Seer?” he asked her.

Again she held herself back from foreseeing. To glimpse what might come was nothing like being prepared for it. To be sure you could face the future was—what?

An impossibility, is what it was.

“There are things I can’t be ready for,” she said.

He had a hint of a smile on his face. “Many of them.”

“Then . . .” She glanced at Maris and back at him and took a deep breath. “Then our contract is made, Tayre. Enlon. In all your names and appearances.”

“Our contract is made, Amarta al Arunkel. Seer.”

And what now? There were places she wanted to visit, things she wanted to understand, far away from this land of red and black. This man, this hunting dog, this shadow made real, would help her find them.

Despite how Amarta’s heart was speeding, despite how tight his hands were clasped around hers and the coin, a smile spread over her face.

“I am,” she said. “ready.”