Blood Ties (22 page)

By the morning of the chase she was anxious past eating, almost past talking. The fog still surrounded her and she wanted the chase — the jumps, the speed, the danger — to bring her back to life again, at least for the duration of the race. Gorham counseled her on strategy over breakfast, while she saddled up, while they walked to the starting point. She nodded and didn’t hear anything he said. The only thing she was aware of was the roan at her shoulder. She smiled at Maude and Gorham and then went to collect her neckerchief. It was bright blue: a good color, a lucky color.

She tied it on and swung herself up in the saddle as the other riders did the same, jostling and swearing at each other. They eyed her sideways. Women rode often enough in the chases, but none of them had seen this one before, looking like a Traveler with her black hair and eyes. Wasn’t strong enough, most of them thought, not enough muscle, not enough guts, most likely, though her horse looked fit enough . . . too strong for a girl. Some noticed the set of her mouth and felt a momentary doubt, but pushed it aside to concentrate on their own mounts, fresh and restive, eager to race.

The Kill was a young man — very young, very fair — wearing the warlord’s colors of brown and gold. He was pale with excitement and shifted his grip on the lance as his hands sweated. “Ride!” the counter shouted, and the Kill set off. “One, two, three . . .”

Bramble felt the fog lift, the glass clear. The riders counted with him, still jostling for position. Bramble found herself being edged to the back and shouldered the roan forward until she could see the Kill over another horse’s head. She counted under her breath, tapping it out with one finger on the roan’s neck. They had practiced this, too, the roan growing more and more eager to move as the taps continued. At “forty-nine” she flicked him hard and at “fifty” he was springing ahead, sliding through the gap in front to be among the first group away.

They headed downhill in a helter-skelter flurry of hooves and shouts. Bramble pressed the roan, fixed her eyes on the Kill ahead, and blocked out everything else. The horse was enjoying himself, his ears pricked and muscles springy, having a wonderful time. Bramble laughed under her breath and leaned forward into the first jump.

It was post and rails: easy for all the horses and reassuring to start with. One fell, all the same, at the back. There was a rise up to the second fence and some of the horses slipped back from the first group. Bramble found herself one of three: a chestnut mare on one side, and a dapple gray on the other.

They cleared the low stone fence with equal ease and curved to follow the Kill together. He was over a stream and heading for a high stone wall. They surged forward, increasing the pace on the flat. The chestnut misjudged the width of the stream and landed in the water. She splashed out but had lost time, so the gray and Bramble were now ahead.

There was a good distance to the wall, and the gray began to edge forward. Bramble didn’t even have time to react: the roan surged ahead. She could feel his determination not to be beaten, and his pleasure at leaving the other horse behind.

They were a length ahead at the stone fence and two lengths ahead when they landed. The roan was a marvel, taking off at the perfect moment, and landing with a spring that got them straight back to racing speed. Bramble laughed again and set her eyes on the Kill.

There were two more fences. She and the roan took them alone, just as she had imagined. She was exultant, and so was he. They could both hear the hooves behind them, but nothing could catch them. The practice gallops had been nothing, a canter in comparison.
No one has ever been so fast,
she thought. She could feel the presence of the gods, but only faintly, as though not even they could keep up.

As the Kill labored up the last hill to the finish point, she and the roan flashed past him. The gods had finally caught up. She could feel their presence — the pressure of their attention — just as she had when they leaped the chasm. She reached out and plucked the lance from the Kill’s hand, laughing aloud and ignoring the gasps from the crowd at the finish. She waved the lance with its red scarf above her head; she was fully alive again, the fog had gone completely, and she heard the crowd laugh and cheer with her, felt the gods themselves exult.

The roan reared in reaction to the crowd’s cheers, the scarf swept out on the breeze, and Bramble was, for a moment, a heraldic figure, the crest for some great warlord: the Kill Reborn.

Ash

D
ORONIT KEPT
Ash busy, training him in the use of poisons. He didn’t like the catalog of symptoms, which was gruesome yet compelling.

“Why do I have to know all this?” he protested. “I don’t want to poison people.”

She smiled at him condescendingly so that again he felt like a child. He was so easy to read, so easy to manipulate; it exhilarated her like a sweet wine. Leading him, step by step, into intrigue and sophistication had become as much her favorite hobby as a way of crafting a useful tool.

“Of course you don’t, sweetheart,” she said, keeping her voice steady and warm, as to a child. “But others may want to poison you. You need to know what to look for, what to smell for; you need to recognize the effects. With the slower-acting venoms, it’s possible to save yourself if you realize what’s happened early enough. Come, don’t be foolish.”

Looking very foolish and rather adorable, he sat down next to her at the workbench in her cellar and examined the herbs she had spread out in front of him.

“Lily of the valley,” she said, touching the leaves and red berries. “Yellow leaves are the strongest. They must be kept thoroughly dry, otherwise they grow moldy and lose their strength. This stops the heart, like foxglove. Some use it as a medicine.”

And so she went on: meadow saffron, celandine, white hellebore, mistletoe, and rarer plants like yellow pheasant’s eye and blackthorn.

“Now with rue,” she said, “most use the leaves, but I’ve found that the stems are just as potent —” She pretended to catch herself up on that and looked at him to see if he had been paying attention. She had to ease him in with nothing too shocking, nothing he would think
unforgivable
. “Not for poison, of course, sweetheart. But . . . well, you’re old enough to know the truth of it, yes? When a young woman wishes to be rid of a child in the womb, perhaps she might come to me, or to another herbalist, and we might give her an infusion of rue. You understand? It’s dangerous for her, and certainly uncomfortable, but for some girls it’s worth the risk.”

It sounded plausible and, if he checked with a herbalist, he would find that rue was used in just such a way. She saw the momentary wariness in his eyes, shifted nearer to him, and laid her hand over his. “What, are you shocked after all, sweetheart? Didn’t your roving parents teach you the truth about life? Or didn’t they believe in forcing miscarriages?”

He stood up and pulled his hand away, stung. “If they had, I wouldn’t be here,” he said. “My mother told me that once. She tried to convince my father that it wouldn’t be good for them to be burdened with a child, but he said they had to accept the consequences of their actions.”

“So, they didn’t want you. More fool them.” Doronit’s heart sped up with excitement. That was it, the cord that would bind him to her: being wanted. Being valued. Belonging. She’d suspected it before, but now she was sure. She stood next to him and slid her hand through his arm so he could feel her breast against his elbow. “I know how to value you,” she said. “And you belong to me, now.”

Ash swallowed down the lump in his throat. It was true. He did belong to her. Who else would want him? He was no good for anything, everyone knew it. Except Doronit. Doronit had taken him from his parents gladly.

“I won’t let you down,” he said, and for the first time dared to put his arm around her.

“I know you won’t,” she said. She stroked his cheek kindly then pulled away and sat back down at the bench. “Now, arnica,” she said briskly, leaving him standing there feeling foolish, once again. “It’s often used because there’s no suspicion if someone finds it in your pack. It’s used for so many other things . . .”

The training went on through the shortening autumn days and the chilling nights. Ash was earning money for her now, as a safeguarder at Merchant House functions, but some part of each day was still given over to training: concocting poisons, or their antidotes, singlestave and knife-throwing practice, hand-to-hand fighting, the system of whistles by which all of Doronit’s people communicated (oddly enough, he could whistle those two-note signals easily, although he couldn’t sing the same notes), and numbers and tallying.

“Never let a client cheat you,” Doronit said as she showed him how to use a slate and chalk. “The only way to protect yourself is to be as fast with numbers as they are.”

Ash put all thoughts of killing away from him. He was a safeguarder. It was a respectable profession, not important, perhaps, but respectable. He began to spend more time away from the house. Aylmer took him to taverns where the mead was strong and the music loud, and he met young men working for other guardhouses. One of them was Dufe, the safeguarder who had parted ways with Doronit the year before Ash had arrived in Turvite.

Dufe was a swarthy southerner with bright brown eyes and beautiful hands. Sitting next to him in the smoky din of the tavern, Ash noticed the same heart-thumping confusion he felt when Doronit touched him, especially when Dufe leaned across him to take a mug of mead from the waitress, and rested a hand on his thigh as he did so.

Dufe grinned at Ash’s flushed face. “How old are you, young one?” he asked.

“Just turned twenty.”

“You look younger. Doronit likes to get them young, doesn’t she? The younger the better. She’s got no morals at all, that woman.”

Ash bridled instantly, his hand going to his dagger.

Dufe laughed at him and lifted his hands. “No, no, I won’t fight you over that. She’s the perfect woman, if you want to think so.” He stood up and drained off his mug. His hand dropped on Ash’s shoulder and he bent over. “A word of advice. Have a bit of fun away from the old woman. Find a nice young one like yourself. Doronit will eat your heart out bit by bit, and she’ll do it so sly you won’t even feel it going.”

His grip on Ash’s shoulder tightened, then he was gone. Aylmer turned back from the waitress he had been talking to and grinned at him. “Dufe gone? Oh, well, he’s got a nice warm wife to go home to. Not that he does that often. He’s one that likes to taste life.”

“Mmmm.” Ash wasn’t sure whether to be angry or worried by Dufe’s words. He shook them off and ordered another mead.

“Dufe’s got a good heart,” Aylmer said cheerfully. “That’s why he and Doronit never got on. He was already fully trained when he came up from the south. She took him on, but he only lasted a month. He sets strict rules for himself . . . except when it comes to shagging.” He chuckled. “The stories I could tell you about that man!”

Ash walked home alone. Aylmer had gone upstairs with the waitress. Ash didn’t know if he envied him or not. In the quiet darkness the ghosts stood out more strongly than ever: pale forms clustering near doorways, or walking aimlessly through the night. They nodded to him as he passed, and he nodded back. They seemed as solid as he was. Perhaps they were. Perhaps he was as insubstantial. Perhaps nothing was as it seemed, Doronit included.

On Midwinter’s Eve the Turviters shuttered the windows, set covers over the lamps and screens around the fires, so the bright colors of their walls were doused, and sat in pitch darkness, practicing for death. The youngest person in the house, and the oldest, recited together the Midwinter Prophecy, and then the door was set open to the ghosts. The ghosts entered where they pleased. And when they pleased, they set their hand on a man’s head here, a woman’s there, pointing out the people marked by illness who were to die before the next Midwinter’s Eve. They did not always choose to enter.

“It’s considered a blessing,” Doronit explained to Ash. “It gives the person the chance to put their affairs in order, to say their goodbyes. The ghosts only do it for the people they like.”

He looked around the empty room. “They don’t come in here?”

She laughed shortly. “Not willingly. Come.”

She led him out into the night. The streets were emptier than he had ever seen them.

“Why do the ghosts stay, Doronit?” He had wondered that for a long time.

“Because they’re angry at being killed and their killers have not offered reparation. Because they don’t want to leave the people they love. Because they owe a debt. Because they’re afraid of the dark beyond the grave — as they should be.”

“But beyond death is life again.” That was what his parents had taught him.

“So
you
think. But who knows for truth? Perhaps there is nothing. Perhaps the spirit . . . shreds itself against death until there is nothing left.”

“Is that what you believe?”

A person who believed that, he thought, would have no reason to live well. There would be no reason for honor or pity or generosity, which, his parents had taught him, were the qualities necessary for rebirth. “These are the things that work against the dark,” his mother had said. “These are the only things that can pierce the dark beyond the grave and lead the spirit through to new life.”

Doronit stopped. “I think not about it.”

She had led the way to the open space where the black rock waited beneath its oak tree. It was the sacred place where, it was said, the gods of Turvite had once lived, before Acton came and drove them all away. Ash knew better. Although nothing called him by name, as it had last time he was there, he could feel the power in the stone beckoning.

They waited. The wind was biting. He felt his nose turning blue with cold. He rubbed it with gloved fingers. Doronit stood still. Gradually, the ghosts came, answering the call. One by one they left the houses and slid into the streets, all of them drawn to the same place.

“They come to greet the dawn at the old holy place,” Doronit said quietly. “This will be the last night for those who have paid their debts.”

“By giving warning of death?”

“What else can the dead do for the living?”

He thought of the girl he had killed. She had warned him, too, though not of simple death: “Death of the soul,” Martine had said.

The ghosts swirled and eddied around the gods’ stone. Doronit pointed to one, then another.
“Speak,”
she urged. “Tell me your secrets.”

They spoke, reluctantly, one by one, some with sorrow, and some with hatred. They told her all they knew: the silly secrets, of first love and small vanities, and the deep secrets, their own and others’. They spoke of betrayal and murder and heartbreak, of violence, of fraud and lechery, greed and lies, domestic tyrannies and harsh cruelties.

Ash listened. Initially, as Doronit had commanded the first ghost to speak, he had felt elated: at last he knew someone like him, who could not only see ghosts, but compel them to talk. He wasn’t a freak after all. But as he heard the stories that Doronit extracted from them, he started feeling ill. Stories flowed out of them of calumny, of rape behind closed doors, of small bribes and large corruption. The ordinary stories were the worst. They filled him so that he was close to tears; they were so full of love and grief, hatred and joy, the secrets of the heart. To listen made him ashamed. But still he listened. Doronit had brought him here for a reason and he needed to know what it was.

He thought of Dufe’s scathing remark: “She’s got no morals at all . . .” Was this moral? Was it wrong? Did the dead have the right to keep their secrets? They couldn’t be hurt, could they? He tried to convince himself that they were hurting no one, but it was difficult to believe, looking at their faces and seeing how they hated giving up their secrets. Perhaps taking secrets to the grave was the only power the dead had, and Doronit was taking it away.

Doronit’s voice was growing weaker. He realized that she was exerting her will as well as her voice, that it was her strength that was forcing the ghosts’ revelations. She leaned against him for support as it continued. Finally, with still twenty or more of the spirits left to speak, she shook her head.

“That’s it for me,” she said. “Your turn, Ash.”

He stared at her, incredulous. “Me?”

“Of course, sweetheart. That’s why I brought you. Did you think I didn’t know? After Ghost Begone Night? Half the ghosts in the city told me your name.”

“I can’t —”

“Can’t?”
she said. “What do you think I’ve trained you for?” She straightened. He could only see her face in the faint light reflected from the spirits, but he knew she was angry. “Why do you think I took you from your fools of parents, who couldn’t see what they had in their hands? Why have I housed you and fed and — yes —
loved
you all this time? For
this,
stupid one. And now you say you can’t?”

“I . . .”
She loves me, she says she loves me
. “But —”

She changed tone. “Sweetheart, sweetheart. This is why I’m successful, why I can charge the prices I do. Why the town clerk smiles at me in the street. I know
everything
. I could misuse this knowledge, but I don’t. I don’t blackmail anyone — I don’t reveal any of these secrets. But for my own protection, and for yours, Aylmer’s, Hildie’s, and all the rest — I must know. I’m exhausted, I have no more strength. I need your help. Now.”

He hesitated still.

She drew a breath. He wasn’t as well trained as she had thought, but he could still be brought to heel.

“Of course,” she said slowly, “if you don’t do this, you’re worthless to me. I have half a dozen who are better with the knife and singlestave. I’m fond of you, sweetheart, but I can’t afford you if you don’t earn your keep.”

She saw the threat sweep through him, turning him cold. He pictured himself on the streets. He couldn’t go back to his parents. He had thought he was doing well with the knife and the stave, but what did he know? Without her . . .

“Speak,”
he said, and listened while his guts roiled with shame.

Ash sat on the side of his bed, his hands dangling over his knees.
My room,
he thought,
the first I’ve ever had
.
My bed.
He looked around. A cupboard, with several changes of clothing carefully folded, warm red blankets, a lantern on the table, an earthenware jug and mug, two pairs of boots and a pair of evening shoes . . . All his. The brick walls were painted sea green with a blue trim. The shutters were solid and fit tightly. Even on this midwinter night, it was not freezingly cold. The room glowed. It felt like home.