The Windsingers (26 page)

There was a muffled cry from Ki, and then Vandien's feet also scraped bottom. A few more kicks and they were able to plant their feet securely. Janie alone made no glad sound. 'Your sister will be glad to see you alive!' Vandien tried to cheer her.

'Helti will have sent her off to bed hours ago,' she replied dully.

They staggered up on shore. Vandien sank down, gathering strength. But the wind continued to howl mercilessly; it could not forgive them for having escaped the sea. The chill of their garments soaked into their bones. Vandien felt the weight of the water and hanging wool as he arose. Ki came up beside him, fitting comfortably under his arm. He laughed softly at the solid touch of her against him. They had come through alive again. He reached for Janie in a hug, but she shrugged him away. Dark emotions radiated from her. She would have nothing from them, not even the human comfort of companionship. She staggered to her feet and limped away from them. He and Ki were able to keep her in sight until she turned into the door of a dark cottage, smaller than most in the village. The wooden door thumped behind her.

'Vandien?' Ki began softly, but 'It would take more than an evening to explain,' he said. Ki let it drop. The wind was less in the town among the houses.

The darkness still pressed upon them and the slinking cold peeled the warmth of their bodies away. Another cold welled up inside Vandien, rising to fill him. Janie was gone now; he and Ki were two, as they had been so often before. But there was a difference. Janie's wild words in the ruined temple came and fluttered darkly between them. Ki knew why he had risked all for this ridiculous quest. He was not sure how he felt about his own actions, but he could think of a dozen reactions Ki could have to them. None of them were appealing.

'How's your face?' she asked, suddenly but softly.

'Ugly,' he replied, telling her in that word things he had never said before. They did not speak the rest of the way to the inn, but her arm slipped about his waist and held him firmly.

Ki dragged the inn door open against the push of the wind. It slammed it shut again behind them. Sudden warmth and silence greeted them. Fisherfolk sprawled on benches and stools. Half-drained mugs rested on tables before them. Platters held scraps and crusts and crumbs in untidy heaps. Helti was warming his broad backside at his own hearth. He found his tongue. 'So you made it back alive!' His words were friendly if drunken.

'Aye. And Janie, too.' Vandien dropped his words into the silence, speaking more to Collie with his muted harp than to anyone else. Perhaps Collie nodded slightly, or maybe he was only resisting drowsiness.

'Well, Janie would. It would take more than a Windsinger and a storm to dampen that one. She'd be a fine woman, if her deeds matched her tongue.'

Vandien bit his lips to keep back a sour reply. It would do no good. The mumble of conversation was rising again. Most of the drinkers were too far gone in their cups to be much interested in his return. But Berni called loudly for a drink, 'For the teamster and his friend.' 'And tell us the tale of your night!' called another from a far table. A young fisherman by the fire seconded the request. Fisherfolk cleared a bench for them. Vandien sat gratefully. He reached and caught Ki's wrist, pulled her down with a tug to sit beside him. He felt her uneasiness. Left to herself, she would go to her wagon, or straight to his room above. Inns and strangers never appealed to her. Tonight that was truer than ever.

When they sat, their wet clothes streamed water onto the benches and floor. The fisherfolk paid it no heed. Ki shivered and drew closer to Vandien, as much for the comfort of his presence as for warmth. He pushed his curls back from his face and summoned up a grin. It sent ripples of pain through his scar, but he nailed it in place. Helti placed hot mugs of brew before them.

'Well, you've paid me well with your hospitality and your songs. I haven't brought the chest of the Windsingers back to you. The least I can do is give you the tale of how I failed. Right, Ki?' He jogged her elbow.

'Right!' she echoed, with a venomous smile for him. He'd best keep it short, he knew. Ki was full of words for him. The longer she honed them, the sharper they'd be. She reached for her mug and drank deep. Vandien reached up to his throat. Long habit made him lift his story-string from around his neck and loop it over his fingers. It did not matter that these folk could not understand the symbols he would weave as he spoke; he could no more tell a story without weaving it on his string than Ki could look at a horse and not guess its price. He looked down at his hands, at the twisting his fingers had put in the string, and frowned. It hung there, the crooked web that stood for scar, maim, disfigure, ruin. A snap of his fingers made the string back to a loop again. He reached and took a long swallow from his mug. It stung his nostrils and warmed the length of his gullet.

'Come on, teamster!' someone called, and Vandien sent a smile around the room. So they thought he kept silent to tease them to attention. Let them.

'How shall I start?' he asked them rhetorically. He glanced at Ki, who held her mug aloft for a refill. 'Let me ask you this. Did you folk know what an amorous beast a skeel is? Did you know of the hidden stairwell in the temple of the Windsingers? Have you ever marked how the kneeling Windsinger over the fallen altar watches one with a tear at the corner of her eye? How her hands seem to rise and fall with the waves that kiss them?'

He had them. With a few questions, Vandien had them in silence, hanging on his tale, as if the temple he spoke of was not at their doorsteps, but a mystic place a legend away. Ki listened to him, and watched his flying fingers as he wove for them a tale full of omens and misfortune, spiced here and there with knowing laughter. Vandien made himself the fool, the teamster who came not knowing of the trickiness of the task. To Janie he gave the role of courageous village girl who saves the foolish teamster at the last possible moment. Ki listened silently as he gave every fact the twist it needed to tickle the villagers' vanity most. He painted them in their best colors, a doughty folk who braved the treacherous seas that bewildered and awed a simple teamster like himself. Even Ki found herself smiling at his words as he described how his own team had nearly dragged him to his death. And if he gave Janie the credit for pulling him back from the water's grip, Ki did not begrudge it. She knew what he was trying to do, and knew that he could not succeed at it. The village would not see Janie as a plucky young woman, no matter how Vandien turned the story. He might temporarily soften their feelings for her, but he could not change how they thought of her.

'And so here I am, alive but wet!' he was winding it up. 'And if I haven't a stack of gold coins to show for it, at least I've the experience. I'll never hear a man tell me what an easy life fishingfolk have without knowing he's never braved the sea. And that's a good bit of knowledge to have, worth as much to a man as a purse full of coin.' With a grin, Vandien snapped his string back into a loop. He settled it over his head again, and drained his cooling mug.

'Another drink!' called Berni, but Vandien shook his head.

'We're for bed,' he replied, rising slowly from the table.

'Let the woman stay!' A guttural voice called from a back table. 'She shouldn't have to climb in beside you until the light's out, teamster!'

That got a general laugh. Ki narrowed her green eyes, and parted her lips to speak, but Vandien caught hold of her shoulder and gave it a squeeze that silenced her. With a knowing smile, he turned the taunt, saying, 'Not Ki. She's a wise one, and knows that handsome is as handsome does.'

'I'll wager the fisherwomen know the same,' Ki added tartly. 'For I see that you drink alone, fisherman!'

The laughter was turned upon the man at the back table now. The sound of it followed them to the base of the stairs that loomed before them. It took an inordinate amount of time to climb them. Vandien's pace and steadiness were no better than that of the revelers in the room below. Ki slipped a hand under his arm. She found him trembling with weariness and cold, but he pulled away from her support. They reached the landing at the head of the stairs. Vandien turned and gave her a smile that rippled his scar but did not reach his eyes.

They stood like strangers in the semi-darkness on the landing. All the words that Ki had prepared since Dresh had told her how Vandien had been baited here were suddenly ashes on her tongue. She thought of the days and miles they had traveled together, the times when it seemed that Vandien knew the thoughts of her head before she voiced them. She had found comfort in their long silences. She had thought that Vandien shared that comfort. In those long evenings when they had ridden in silence but for the sounds of the horses' hooves meeting the road, when Ki had been watching the fir trees turn from green to purple against a darkening sky, what had been in his mind? When they swayed together on the hard seat, their shoulders jogging companionably against one another to the rhythm of the greys' pace, had his thoughts turned to his marred face and wondered why it had to be? A cold winter memory came to her. She had wakened in the darkness of the cuddy, jarred from sleep by a dream whose ending she could not abide. When she opened her eyes, the moon was shining in the small window. Her pale light touched the objects in the cuddy without giving detail to any of them. Vandien had rolled away from her and was sleeping on his back. The moon silvered the skin of his face, making him look like a very old carving of yellowed ivory. The proud jut of his jaw and the straight line of his nose were sharply delineated, but his eye hollows were filled with blackness. His still features were an empty-eyed mask, a mocking cold thing put into her bed to remind her of her loneliness. Her half of the bed seemed chilled and empty, but she could not bring herself to move closer to his warmth. For if that warmth were not there, if his profile were only an icy sham, a monstrous cheat of some sourceless magic... she had shivered then as she shivered now, with more than cold, with the child's sudden fear that the things she knew best she knew not at all. As she had shuddered in her bed that night, he had stirred, turning his face to her, and silently pulling her into his warmth and man-smell, holding her close and making the world real again. She had never wondered, then, at his wakefulness. But now she did. What dark thoughts had he followed as he lay on his back in the cold moonlight staring at the cuddy ceiling?

She watched him walk away from her. His shoulders sagged. The short darkened hallway closed in on him, folding him away from her in its depths. Ki felt the sudden sting of tears, so long foreign to her eyes. She straightened her body and took a deep breath. I am just tired, she told herself, and I am letting my emotions run like unbroken yearlings. Vandien kicked open a door. Yellow lamplight flooded out in a folded rectangle on the floor and opposite wall. Ki hastened to follow him, but he was standing in the doorway, not entering the room.

'I've failed you, Srolan.' His words were slow and deep, sounding drunken. Ki moved up to peer past his shoulder.

A woman was sitting on the bed. The imprint of her body was on the blankets and pillows. Emotions swirled up in Ki, anger, surprise, jealousy, and then subsided as she realized the age of the woman. Her night-black hair was smoothed back from her face to hang in waves down her back, her jet eyes shone, but her mouth was framed in lines. Crow's feet bracketed her eyes. The papery skin of her cheeks had fallen, abandoning the proud bones of her face. Ki could see the beauty she had been, but youth had fled that face, leaving only the shadow of its memory and its proud lines.

Ki glanced at Vandien. He stood in the doorway, brow furrowed, staring as if he did not trust his eyes. The woman's gaze fell before his. 'So you see me. Just an old woman now. It's a hard glamor to maintain. And it grows harder with each passing year, especially before eyes as discerning as yours. You tempted me as I have not been tempted in years, Vandien. You love and hate and hope with such abandon, with such a plenitude of emotion. I could feel you burning to achieve my goals for me. You were like a hawk on my fist; I could have flown you at the sun, and you would have gone. You should be grateful to me, woman.' Srolan was addressing Ki now. 'I could have had him, you know, body and soul. I could have made him burn for me in any way I pleased. But didn't. I've that much honor left to me. As you say, you've failed me, and there is no reason to deceive you any longer. Is Janie all right?'

'She's alive, if that's what you mean. She is scarcely all right, nor do I think she ever will be. Tonight she spilled every last bit of courage she held. I do not know what she will use to face the village folk after this. Bitterness may have to suffice.'

'Well. She has plenty and to spare of that. As do you, teamster. Do not think too hardly of me, for I am not as cold as I seem. Only old and disappointed and weary. You made an effort, teamster. That's more than has been done for many years.'

'But not enough. You will keep your gold, and I'll keep my scar.'

'Yes. But take my good will with you when you go. That's not a bad thing to carry off with you.'

'And all it cost me was four skeel and a near drowning.'

'I've heard of worse bargains. It isn't as if this were done solely for amusement, Vandien. Do you think you are the only one disappointed this night? It is beyond your imagination to guess what I have lost this night. I believed you could do it, Vandien. I looked into you. You are a man whose feelings drive him to do the impossible. So I hired you. So I opened the door on my caged dreams... and now I see them, feet up in the straw. I am too old to try again. And I have so many regrets. If only I had found you years ago; if only they had left young Killian to sing the wind, instead of bringing in that Windmistress; if only I were young enough to have one more chance.'