All That Glitters (17 page)

As she was considering this, the man with the chain swung it at her, so she caught it with one arm and yanked it away from him. “Why a chain?” she asked, dropping it to the ground. “Why not a knife or a rock or something? Chains are stupid.”

Before the attack could escalate further, though, another man's voice called from across the dock, “Oy! He's alive! The blighter is alive! Scatter, mates!”

The men beat a hasty retreat, giving Hool some nasty looks in the process but not stopping to explain what they meant. Hool ignored them and went to Tyvian's side. He was on all fours and coughing up a gallon of saltwater. One arm was bloody from two deep stab wounds—­one on the shoulder and one on the hand. Hool folded her arms. “What happened?”

Tyvian looked up at her, squinting in the afternoon sun. “Your son took a job with the other side, Hool.”

“What?” Hool grabbed Tyvian by his sodden shirt and dragged him to his feet. “What do you mean ‘a job'!”

Tyvian pushed her away and sat down. “Easy, Hool, easy—­I'm injured, dammit. Give me . . . give me a moment . . .” The color drained from Tyvian's face, which Hool knew meant he was about to pass out. She slapped him hard enough to knock him on his face, but it woke him up. “Damn! I'm . . . I'm surprised I'm alive.”

Hool took a bloodpatch elixir from beneath her shroud and pulled out the stopper. “Drink this. Then talk.”

Tyvian upended the small vial. The magic in the sticky liquid quickly stoppered his bleeding and shrank the wounds a bit, but he was still clearly hurt. He sat on the dock, breathing heavily and leaning against a piling.

“Those men were trying to rob you,” Hool announced.

Tyvian chuckled. “Not robbery—­salvage. Enough bodies get found floating in the river, removing them and turning them in for bounty money is a good living for the unscrupulous. Anyway, if they were thieves, the joke's on them—­I haven't got any more money.” He looked around at the remnants of his clothes that they had stripped off. “The bastards did take my boots, though. Honestly, how much money can you get for a pair of waterlogged leather boots?”

“They were trying to get your ring off. It didn't work.”

Tyvian looked at his hand. “Good thing you got here when you did. Otherwise they might have started chopping.” He sighed and patted himself down. He found Chance in its sleeve holster, and this seemed to make him relax a bit.

Hool figured she'd waited long enough. “Tell me what happened to Brana.”

Tyvian explained, and, as he did, Hool grew more anxious. “Brana is working on a
ship
that sails in the
ocean
?” She could scarcely form the words.

“Well,
I
wouldn't sail the
Argent Wind
much beyond sight of shore, but basically yes.”

“Brana is afraid of the water.”

Tyvian sighed and wrung the seawater out of a stocking. “No, Hool,
you
are afraid of the water. That isn't the same thing as Brana being afraid of it. You've been underestimating him.”

“Don't tell me about my own pup!” Hool sat on a crate. “I know my own pups!”

Tyvian shrugged, though it made him wince. “I don't know much about gnolls, Hool, but as a former rebellious young man turned rebellious adult, I do know a thing or two about adolescent behavior. Brana is infatuated with Artus—­he thinks Artus is the best thing on two legs or four.”

“So?” Hool snorted. “Artus is just a human.”

Tyvian set about ripping part of his remaining clothing to fashion a makeshift sling. “Brana is how old?”

“He has been alive four winters.”

“And he's spent over half that time surrounded by humans, Hool. He's used to them, and he sees Artus as his brother. Artus, meanwhile, is a teenager who resents being told what to do all the time, and so he's managed to get himself a job where he thinks he'll be respected. This should hardly be earth-­shattering news.” Tyvian looped his sling over his shoulder and gingerly rested his wounded arm in it.

Hool wanted to shake the smuggler until his head fell off. She wanted to howl at the world. Her pup? On a boat?
Working
for a human? How could she have let this happen? How could she
not
have seen what the human world was doing to Brana? Was doing to
her
? “We need to get them. We can't let them stay there!”

Tyvian put his good hand up in surrender. “Hool, calm down—­the boys are perfectly safe. Well, safer than they would be with us, at any rate. Andolon is working with the Prophets, and the Prophets don't like squandering assets. Right now they see Artus and Brana as an asset.”

Hool scowled. “Why would you do this? Now they are working for evil men.”

Tyvian shrugged. “I'm not such a sweetheart myself, despite what you think. Anyway, Artus is smart enough to know when he's being given a raw deal—­he'll figure it out. When he does, Brana will be back with us, too.” He gave Hool a wink. “And as long as they stay over there, we've got ourselves a pair of spies.”

Hool considered. “You are putting a lot of trust in Artus. He doesn't like you very much anymore, you know.”

Tyvian nodded. “Trust is what all great manipulations are based upon, Hool. What happened in the Famuli Club while I was upstairs talking to my brother?”

“Somebody whispered in the ear of the boy who tried to stab you when you came down.”

Tyvian grunted. “Obviously. Was it Andolon?”

“No.” Hool described the person she had seen—­a woman, thin and old, reeking of magic and wearing a blue shawl over a blue dress.

Tyvian nodded, but if he knew who it was, he did not elaborate. “Now, let's find ourselves a boat and get out of here before a mirror man comes sniffing around.”

“I am
not
going in a boat!” Hool stomped her foot. Tyvian sighed and then jumped into a small boat with a mast. Hool felt her pulse quicken as she watched the whole vessel rock back and forth in the water.

Tyvian stepped into the bow, leaning against the mast with his wounded side. Hool noted that he seemed to have no problem balancing. He held out a hand. “I promise it won't sink, Hool.”

Hool scowled at him. “Why can't we walk?”

“If I set foot on shore, the Defenders will be able to scry my location, and then we'll both be arrested. On water, which is always changing, no location is ever the same, so they can't scry here.” Tyvian smiled at her and beckoned with his hand. “Come on, Hool—­trust me.”

Hool took his hands. “There are times when I hate you.”

“I know.” He yanked her aboard and guided her to a place to sit. “Just be still. Everything will be fine.”

 

T
yvian seemed to think Hool hated boats because she was worried about drowning, but that wasn't it—­she could swim well enough to keep her head above water and she knew that boats didn't usually sink. What she hated was the way the water moved. She couldn't get her balance, she felt perpetually off-­kilter. She also didn't like how boats were able to move somebody from one place to another without making much of a sound and without leaving a trail—­the whole thing was a strange, uncomfortable way to travel.

She huddled in the middle of the little boat, knees under her chin, while Tyvian tugged on various ropes with one arm and moved the stick at the back to make the sail work. He made Hool handle some of the ropes when two hands were needed, which she did without complaint. They headed north, away from the city. Though they sailed upstream, the current was slow and the breeze coming off the ocean was good. They moved at a good pace.

The city of Saldor lined both sides of the river for several miles—­an endless series of docks, boathouses, and mills seemed to line up. There were small, half-­naked boys fishing in the river in places, water taxis rowing important-­looking ­people from one wharf to another, and several huge stone bridges, under whose arches their little sailboat easily slipped. Eventually, though, the urbanized shoreline gave way to marshy grass and enormous cypress trees, whose roots dipped beneath the water in a hundred places. The water lost the greenish-­blue tinge of the ocean and gained more of an emerald to brownish-­green tint. The air stopped smelling of salt and smelled, instead, of moss and mud. Mosquitoes buzzed around their heads in packs.

“Where are we going?” Hool asked at last.

Tyvian grimaced. “To Glamourvine—­my family estate.”

There were still ­people on the river—­­people in broad, flat-­bottomed boats that slowly drifted downstream, as well as ­people living in tight little villages on the shoreline, their houses all built on stilts. The air was heavy, quiet, and humid. Hool didn't say anything; she only sniffed the air for sorcery. She knew when she smelled it, they would be close to their destination.

She was right. Sometime in the late afternoon, after they seemed to have been aboard the little boat for a lifetime, Tyvian steered to a dock that jutted out into the river. This dock was no ramshackle affair—­it was built to withstand all the storms the sea could throw and look good doing it—­big, thick pilings larger than the massive cypress trees of the swamp were sunk into the river bottom, boards of sorcerously treated black wood laid in perfect lines to the shore. Tyvian clambered out and tied up their boat.

He pulled his torn, salt-­stiffened clothing on with some discomfort and tried to straighten out his shirt collar. “Follow me. Do
not
stray from the path.”

He led Hool through a tunnel of vegetation—­old trees covered in lively green moss, the ground thick with soft, lush grass, the sky above obscured by the dense interweaving of branches. The dying light of day bathed the path in a joyful yellow-­green glow, but Hool smelled sorcery all around them, heavy and intense, and grew ever more nervous as they walked. Tyvian didn't speak—­perhaps, she thought, he could sense it, too.

The path ended at a huge, perfectly round door. It was overgrown—­or, rather,
looked
like it was overgrown, with flowering vines—­but when Tyvian touched the golden knob at the center, the door flew open, revealing a small courtyard edged by glorious rosebushes taller than Hool in her natural form. At the center of the courtyard was a fountain featuring an alabaster statue of a cherubic boy with a sword in one hand and a rose in the other, feathery wings arcing from his back. Water sprung from his eyes as though he were weeping.

Hool felt her hackles rise at the sight of the thing. “I don't like that statue.”

Tyvian sighed. “You're not supposed to. My mother is sending me a message.”

Hool frowned, still staring at it. “What's the message?”

Tyvian took a deep breath and walked toward the huge, ivy-­covered house that stood beyond the courtyard. “The message is ‘I told you so.' ”

G
lamourvine had been the family home of the Reldamars for seventeen generations, built at a time when the nations of the West were in a state of near constant war and the world looked a lot more like Eretheria than it did presently. Saldor had begun to emerge from its vassal-­state status as merely “the region surrounding the Arcanostrum,” and the magi were becoming less like isolated monks and more like active members of the world at large. The other nations of the world didn't like this—­they saw it as the clear threat it was—­and there was much rattling of sabers and swearing of bloody oaths. Glamourvine, therefore, was built primarily for defense.

What separated it from the other defensive buildings of the world—­a veritable smorgasbord of keeps, holds, castles, and forts—­was that it was built for defense by
magi
. This meant the building itself—­an elegant, stone-­and-­lumber villa, covered in flowering ivy and filled with windows—­was comfortable, spacious, and filled with sunlight. The woods and gardens surrounding it, however, were a different matter. Glamourvine was effectively invisible to the outside world save for a few predesignated pathways, such as from the house to the dock on the river and another to the main road that led back to the city. The rituals that had made this so were of the ancient sort—­sorcery done with time and meticulous care rather than by more modern magecraft—­and as such were as firm as the ancient stones of the house itself. If Tyvian was safe anywhere in the entire world, he was safe here.

Assuming his mother didn't turn him in.

The door was open but no one met them. Once there had been a great many servants in his mother's employ, but over the years she had gradually reduced the number of actual living humans present in her home. That, of course, didn't mean his mother no longer had servants—­far from it—­just that they weren't usually human. Or living.

The River Hall—­as the entry hall by the river entrance was named—­had vaulted ceilings and cast iron and silver chandeliers of the most delicate workmanship. A sweeping staircase dominated the room, its balustrades carved from dark wood in elaborate pastoral patterns—­vines, flowers, hares, and foxes. Everything in the hall was in perfect order—­not a speck of dust, not a corner ignored. The décor was as tasteful and ornate as Tyvian had remembered it—­full without being cluttered, impressive without being gaudy. It made the
Argent Wind
look like a carnival tent.

“This is very pretty,” Hool said. It was enough to make Tyvian do a double take—­compliments were not Hool's strong suit.

Tyvian eyed the life-­size portrait of his great-­aunt Daria over the stairs. “Don't gawk, Hool—­it will only encourage her.”

Hool sniffed in its direction. “The picture? Is it magic?”

“No—­my mother. She's watching us. There's nothing that happens in this house that she doesn't know about.”

Tyvian spotted a card atop a table by the door, no doubt left there by his mother some hours ago, as she was expecting them. He picked it up and read the note, penned in the flowing, beautiful hand of Lyrelle Reldamar.

Dinner is at seven; the clothing you ordered has been delivered to your room. Please attend me in my solarium at your earliest convenience. Though I know you will refuse it, the fountain by the River Gate is enchanted to heal your wounds.

Tyvian sighed—­she even knew about his wounds. “You know, Hool, there's no reason you need to keep that shroud on here. It isn't as though my mother doesn't know what you really are.”

He had barely finished his sentence before Hool had it off. She shook her mane and breathed deeply. “I'm hungry—­how long until dinner?”

Tyvian pointed to the antique spirit clock in the corner. “It's at seven—­figure it out. I don't plan on attending, myself. I'm going to bed. You'd better come with me.”

Hool fell into step behind him as he plunged into corridor after corridor of pure, unadulterated nostalgia.

A boy in Glamourvine was a boy born under a fortunate star. Tyvian's childhood had featured every comfort, every courtesy. The ancient villa, with its long corridors and labyrinthine chambers, its wood-­carved gargoyles and secret passages, was the perfect environment to hone such important boyhood skills as hiding, sneaking, exploring, and filching dessert an hour before suppertime. As Tyvian walked, he and Hool's footsteps muted by the lush rugs into chapel-­like silence, he went back to that time. The faint smells of wood polish and dry mustiness of sun-­worn tapestries brought it all back to him in crashing waves of memory.

Gods, he should have been a happy boy. At the absolute edges of his memory, Tyvian could see his mother's smile as she leaned over his bed, hear her soft voice telling him a story as the sun went down and the shadows grew long across the gardens. He really couldn't tell when that had changed or what had happened. As he grew, the warm smiles of Lyrelle Reldamar had grown colder, sharper. She did not tell him stories anymore, but rather lectured him.
You are a bastard, Tyvian,
she had told him once,
and that means you must take your life twice as seriously as anyone else.
That had been uttered on his tenth birthday, when his mother informed him that there were to be no more birthday parties.

“What is wrong with you?” Hool asked as Tyvian paused by a door—­a door he hadn't opened in over a decade.

Tyvian shook his head. He felt foolish moping over a loss of birthday parties, when there were boys like Artus, whose own mother had banished him to a foreign country so he wouldn't have to go to war at the age of thirteen. “This is my room,” he said.

Tyvian's chambers were as spacious as they were comfortable—­anaglypta wallpaper in baroque swirls, thick velvet curtains for the broad windows, a balcony overlooking one of the gardens, a bed the size of a wagon, satin sheets, mattress stuffed with down. Nothing seemed to have changed except Tyvian himself.

Hool grunted. “How many of your brothers and sisters slept in that bed?”

Tyvian laughed. “If Xahlven had tried to slip into bed with me, I would have murdered him.”

Hool shook her head. “No wonder you don't like ­people. Rooms like this made you think you were important without you even doing anything.”

Tyvian shrugged—­thanks to his injured shoulder, the gesture hurt a great deal, but he swallowed the pain. “Yes . . . yes, well, I'd best get out of these rags. Some privacy, if you don't mind?”

Hool's ears went back. “Why? I've seen you naked before. I can handle it. Besides, you might need help with your shirt since you were stabbed all those times.”

Tyvian scowled. “Just get out, will you please?”

She left.

He tried taking off his shirt, only to discover how right the gnoll had been—­the experience was excruciating. Were it not for the rather impressive pain tolerance he had developed while burdened with the ring, he might have screamed aloud. As it was, he resorted to drawing Chance and using the blade to cut the shirt off rather than try to remove it normally. In his armoire he found the clothing he had purchased that morning in the Old City. He pulled on a fresh shirt—­a weirdly easier process than getting one on, though still painful.

Feeling halfway normal again, Tyvian sighed and walked out on the balcony. The garden beneath him was a museum-­piece of sorcerous horticulture—­flowers of impossible colors growing in perfectly geometrical beds among slender dwarf yews clipped into improbable curves and spirals, trellises of wisteria vines in full bloom, their chains of lavender blossoms dangling artfully over groomed pebble paths. The scent of damp soil and flowers was so thick, the air was like soup. In the distance he could see a beefy gardener—­one of the few remaining servants, apparently—­clipping a hedge. The man looked familiar, but Tyvian couldn't place him and didn't remember the names of any of the gardeners from when he'd left. It was doubtful the man had worked here fifteen years ago anyway.

It was a strange thing to be standing there again. He had sworn he would never come back—­he wanted to be rid of his mother's schemes and manipulations. He had wanted to choose his own path, not live in a house where his path was already laid out. It was typical adolescent nonsense, in its way, but it had shaped his life. He knew that his fate was his own, that all the choices he made in his life could be of his own free will, and to that end he had abandoned the wealth and prestige of his family in exchange for the seedy underbelly of the world, where things were more fluid. Standing there, looking down at those beautiful gardens while two stab wounds throbbed in his arm and shoulder, he wondered for a moment if he had chosen wrong.

But only a moment.

The bed called to him, the rich summer air and the exhaustion of the day weighing down every part of him. He gingerly slipped himself beneath the blankets, careful not to jostle his arm too much, and had barely laid his head on the pillow before sleep took him.

For the first time in over a decade, he slept without his sword at hand and without checking to see if the door was locked.