The Very Best of Kate Elliott (25 page)

Judgment.

So, too, in this reading, does Judgment lead to the outcome.

I turn the last, the final, card to see a dead man pinned to the ground by ten swords.

“Ten of Swords,” the mage taught me so long ago, seven years ago and more, I now know.“Complete and utter defeat.”

I look at this card for a long time. Then, quietly, carefully, I gather up the cards, bind them in cloth, and hide them away.

Now, for the first time in seven years, I weep as loud and long as I wish. I do not care if the watchmen hear me. I do not care if they curse me, or gloat, or report to my jailers that I have, at long last, broken.

At dawn a messenger rides in at a gallop even before the gates are open. He shouts, jumps off his horse to pound at the gates, and finally they swing open and he hurries inside.

Later, I hear the sounds of celebration.

The woman who brings my porridge makes sure to spit in it first before she hands it to me. “There’s come news, hasn’t there?” she says, smirking. “There’s been a battle and the traitor’s folk have retreated up into the hills.”

But I only smile, take the bowl from her, and eat the food that is spiced with hatred. The cards nestle, hidden, inside my bodice.

I will be patient. I will wait. I know the usurper is fated to fail and that my brother will triumph in the end. I can endure whatever they throw at me until the day I am freed.

That is my strength, is it not? That I will never give in. That I will never give up.

T
HE
M
EMORY OF
P
EACE

SPRING CAME, AND WITH it, clear skies, clear days, and a clear view of the ruins of Trient falling and rising along the hills in a stark curve. Smoke rose near the central market square from a fresh fire sown by the guns of the Marrazzano mercenaries. Jontano crouched next to the sheltering bulk of a fallen column and watched the smoke drift lazily up and up past the wall of greening forest that ringed the city and farther up still into the endless blue of the heavens.

When it was quiet, as it was now, he could almost imagine himself as that smoke, dissipating, dissolving into the air.

“Hsst, Jono, look what I found!”

He jumped, caught himself, and managed to look unsurprised when Stepha ran, hunched over, through the maze of the fallen temple and flung herself down next to him. She undid the strings of her pack.

“You’ve never seen things like this!”

But Stepha always bragged. Jontano wasn’t impressed by the pickings: an empty glass jar, six painted playing cards, a slender book with crisped edges but no writing on its leather cover, a length of fancy silver ribbon, four long red feathers, and ten colored marbles.

“That won’t buy much flour,” he retorted. “Where’d you find this?”

“You’re just jealous I went by myself. It all came from the Apothecary’s Shop, the one midway down Murderer’s Row.”

“You idiot! Not one thing here is worth risking your life for.” Murderer’s Row had once been known as Prince Walafrid Boulevard, but no one called it that now, since the entire boulevard was well within reach of the cannon and, at the farthest end, the muskets of the Marrazzanos.

“Everyone said Old Aldo was a witch. Maybe these have some power.”

“Ha! If he was a witch, then why couldn’t he spare his own shop >and his own life?” But the cards were pretty. Jontano picked one up even though he didn’t want Stepha to think he admired her foolhardy courage.

“No one saw him dead. He could still be alive.” Her expression turned sly, and she lowered her voice for dramatic effect. “I heard a noise, like rats, when I was in the shop. Maybe he was hiding from me. Everything was all turned over and broken, except for that old painting of the forest that hangs behind the counter. It was the strangest thing, with the hole in the roof and all, but it still hung there, as if it hadn’t been disturbed at all. Not even wet.”

“Here, this isn’t wet either,” he said, showing her the face of the card, “and it has a forest painted on it.”

“You
are
jealous! Ha!” But she examined the card with him.

The colors were as fresh as if they had just been painted onto the card: the pale green buds of spring leaves, the thin parchment bark of birches, the scaly gray skin of tulip trees and the denser brown bark of fir; a few dots of color, violet and gold and a deep purpling blue, marked clumps of forest flowers along the ground.

“I don’t see how anyone could paint things so tiny,” said Stepha.

“They use a brush with a single bristle. Don’t you know anything?”

Before she could reply, the sky exploded. They both ducked instinctively. Cannon boomed. A nearby house caved in. A wailing rose up into the air, the alarm, and farther away, smoke rose from newly shattered buildings.

Stepha shoveled her treasures into the bag and scuttled down the hill, dodging this way and that. Jono, still clutching the card, ran after her, not bothering to bend over. Not even the famous Marrazzanos could aim well enough to hit them here, as far away as they were from the lines, but if a ball or shot happened to land close by, then it scarcely mattered whether you were bent in two or running straight up like a man.

He caught up to Stepha just as a great crash sounded from the ruins behind and a column fell, smashing onto the hollow where they had just sheltered. Shards flew. Stepha grunted in pain, and Jontano felt a spray like a hundred bees stinging along his back.

As they darted into the safety of an alley, a double round of shot hit what remained of the roof of the old temple. It caved in with a resounding roar. Dust poured up in the sky in a roiling brown cloud. Then they turned a corner, and another, and ran through the back alleys and barricaded streets, strewn with burnt-out buildings, fallen walls, and an endless parade of little refuges, shelters built from bricks and planks salvaged from once beautiful houses. In some of those tiny refuges people lived, but most simply served as a hiding place to any man, woman, or child caught outside when a bombardment began.

By the time they got back to their house, in the relative safety of the north central quarter of the city, Jontano could feel tickling fingers of blood running down his back. Stepha was limping.

They burst in through the gate and, panting, walked past the newly planted vegetable garden. Once Mama had grown flowers here, and it had been a lovely place in the spring and summer; she and Papa had entertained guests and laughed and talked and sung to all hours of the night while the children watched from the windows above, faces pressed to the glass. But that had been a long, long time ago. Now most of the windows were covered with boards and the flower garden had been transplanted to vegetables.

Great-Uncle Otto was standing guard over the well. He looked them over with disgust. Stepha yelped when he probed her thigh with his fingers, and Jontano saw a gaping red wound where she had been hit with shrapnel.

“Now your mother will have to sew these clothes up,” he said, looking angry as he examined the back of Jontano’s shirt. Jontano knew it ought to hurt, but he felt as if Otto’s hands probed someone else’s body, not his. “There’s little enough thread to be had,” Otto went on. “Nor do I hold with those who go looting shops. We might as well fall into the hands of the Marrazzanos as become looters ourselves. Look what barbarians this war has made of us and our children!”

Stepha, brave enough up until now, began to snivel. Otto spared her not one sympathetic word and turned his black gaze on Jontano, who squirmed.

“You’ll be old enough to go into the militia next year, but I suppose next you’ll be saying you’d rather prey on the dead than honor those who have died before you by behaving as a man ought, taking up arms and fighting nobly.”

Jontano snorted. “I don’t know what’s so noble about fighting against cannon and musket with wooden staves and butcher’s knives.”

Otto slapped him. “I won’t say a word against your sainted mother, who has suffered enough, but her mother and her mother’s mother were Marrazzanos, and I can see their dirty blood has tainted you.”

“What do I care about Trassahar and Marrazzano? I wish I had no blood of either kind! All we do is fight and die. What’s the point of that?” Jontano could not help but shout the words. His throat tightened with the familiar lump. “I’d just like to grow up to be a painter like Papa was.”

Otto swung his musket around threateningly, but in the next instant he said in a low voice, “Get inside.”

Stepha bolted in. Jontano followed her, but just as he crossed the threshold he heard a shot fired, then silence. He turned.

Great-Uncle Otto staggered and dropped the musket, left hand clutching his chest. Jontano ran out to him, shoved him aside to get at the musket, and raised it just in time to stare down the muzzle at a ragged band of men and women, armed with a single musket and several buckets.

“Give us water,” said one of the women. She was filthy, skinny, and her hands and arms were a mass of red sores. Beside her, an emaciated man reloaded the musket.

Shaking, Jontano stared them down, but by that time Mama appeared in the door with the pistol and Uncle Martin leaned out of the second-story window, his musket propped on the flowerbox, pushing aside the leafy stems of carrots. He had no legs now, but he had once been a sniper in the militia.

The ragged band retreated. Mama stuck the pistol in her belt and hurried out. With Aunt Martina’s help she carried Otto inside, leaving Jontano on guard while Uncle Martin dragged himself down the stairs and together with the two women treated Otto’s wound.

It took Otto five days to die, and because of that, everyone was too busy to scold Stepha for looting along Murderer’s Row.

“Why shouldn’t I?” she whispered to Jontano in the bed they shared with the two surviving youngest cousins, who were asleep. “Why should I care if I get killed, anyway? The Marrazzanos will never leave. And even if they did, I don’t have any friends left, and no Trassahar boy will ever want to marry me because I’m just a Marrazzano whore.”

They had saved the stub of a candle and they lit it now, while the house was quiet. Great-Uncle Otto’s body lay in state in the parlor, until the burial tomorrow. He was the last but one of his branch of the family, having lost wife, sons, and all but one of his grandchildren to the war. He and his surviving daughter-in-law had fled to the city three years ago after their village had been razed, but she had died of a fever last winter, and now only little Judit remained, snoring softly beside Jontano.

Stepha played with the marbles, turning them round so that highlights of bright color caught and winked in the light, yet Jontano could not help but be drawn to the cards once more. They were shaped like playing cards, made of stiff cardboard cut into rectangles as large as his hands, but they were like no deck he had ever seen. A plain hatched pattern of black and white was printed on the backs. The front of each card looked as if it had been painted lovingly by a gifted hand. He spread the deck out to examine them.

A crane stands on one leg in a pool, its form silhouetted in a sunset of red and gold.

A fetid marsh stretches to the horizon, marked by small hummocks and a few twisted old trees.

The restless sea, infinite, surges and swells, without any sign of the safe harbor of land.

A blindfolded woman dressed in a shift runs through a dark forest. Spiders and strange, unsightly creatures peer at her from the branches. As she runs, unseeing, she is stepping on a snake.

Two birch trees bend, their highest branches intertwining so that they form an arch, that leads . . .
but here the artist had depicted a haze of golden sunlight in which Jontano could make out only a suggestion, of Trient, perhaps, a golden city where once Trassaharin and Marrazzano lived in peace, together.

And the spring forest, his favorite, the one he never tired of looking at.

As he ran his fingers over the painted surface, he could almost feel the touch of the painter’s brush, as if by concentrating hard enough he could become the painter painting the card, as if he could see through the painter’s eyes the act of creation, the grinding of the paint, the careful preparation of the brushes and the backing, each brushstroke, each spot of color laid on with exact care.

When he touched the pale green buds of the spring forest, he could feel himself walking there along the path which wound through the wood, darting this way and that through clumps of goldenrod and violets. It sloped down, then crossed a narrow river and ascended a hillside. He walked up. Loam gave under his boots. Wind brushed his face, bringing the scents of the dense forest to him. He heard the rustle of birds above and the little scrabblings of rodents below. A spare outcropping of rock thrust from among the trees. He scrambled up onto it and, turning, saw the land below him, curved like a bowl, filling the graceful little valley with trees and emerald meadows. Suddenly he realized this was Trient—but Trient without the city, without the fighting, at peace, in the quiet of a spring morning.