Blood Ties (23 page)

He thought about being outside, homeless, deserted, and began to shiver. After all, he reasoned, the ghosts were dead. She wasn’t hurting them. And Doronit had said that she never used the information for ill. He clung to that even while he knew it was a lie and that she would use her knowledge any way she could, and all for her own good. But he didn’t allow himself to think about it, any more than he let himself think about the Deep, or the demons there. He refused to think about how the demons would judge Doronit. This was his home, Doronit was all the family he had; he had to trust her.

He slept badly that night, but in the morning he got up and went to singlestave practice as usual, and smiled at Doronit afterward, while they shared breakfast.

Doronit was very loving to him for days afterward. More, she began to include him in business meetings with Merchant House, with sea captains who wanted protection for their goods heading for Mitchen and Carlion, with the owner of the Sailor’s Rest who had been having trouble with some fishers from Foreverfroze, here to sell a cargo of seal fur and whitefish oil.

Aylmer clouted him on the shoulder and congratulated him the first time he negotiated a deal himself, with Doronit just smiling on.

“So you’re the heir, then, eh?” Aylmer grinned over the singlestave, trying to distract him with talk. “She’s grooming you to take over, youngling. You’ll be worth a warlord’s ransom.”

Aylmer hit a glancing blow and then doubled it back fast to test his guard.

Ash parried it easily, grinned back and changed from shield to spear, trying to poke Aylmer in the stomach. “I’ll be your boss!”

“Yes, sir, no, sir, whatever you say, sir.” Aylmer backed out of stave reach and pretended to bow and scrape. “Well, I don’t know why she’s chosen you, lad, but I suppose you do?”

Ash blushed. It was true, he did know; the memory of Midwinter’s Eve was still sharp in his mind, still brought a wave of nausea.

“No need to be embarrassed, lad.” Aylmer chuckled. “She’s not to my taste, but I can see you’re sharper than I ever was — a bit of shagging here and there is a small price to pay for a good business.”

Ash grinned halfheartedly. It would be easier to live with himself if Aylmer was right. But Doronit never touched him, except the occasional pat on the cheek or hand sliding down his arm. He had realized, after Midwinter’s Eve, that she did it deliberately, to throw him off balance. But that didn’t stop him stammering, or the hot wave of desire that swept over him.

He fed the memory of those moments into an attack on Aylmer: thrust, shield, sweep, spear, parry. He vented all his frustration and pushed his desire into the stave, and for the first time he beat Aylmer back. He rallied quickly but it wasn’t enough. They ranged over the practice room, sweating and heaving, with no thought now for anything but the staves and each other’s movement. Ash came forward with a step he’d only practiced alone, and took Aylmer by surprise on the back foot, swept his legs out from under him and had Aylmer with the stave at his throat.

“Hah!” Ash shouted, and his opponent threw his stave down in surrender. Ash was jubilant. It was the first time he had defeated any of the older safeguarders, and Aylmer was acknowledged as being very good with the stave.

Alymer grinned, but rubbed his back as he got up. “Trying to make me feel old, boy?” He looked at Ash with fresh interest. He’d always been fast at singlestave but he’d never shown the right mix of aggression and composure that made for a formidable opponent. That had changed; the diffident young man had vanished. Maybe becoming Doronit’s chosen heir had given him confidence, Aylmer thought, or maybe he was just growing into himself, as boys often did around that age. It had made Aylmer feel the creeping touch of age. He was old enough to be Ash’s father, and he winced as he bent over to pick up his stave.

“Come to the tavern,” Ash said, bouncing on his toes, energy undiminished. “I’m buying.”

As they walked out into the spring day, into the hawkers’ cries and the rumble of carts, into the clamorous bargaining at the market, into the smells and sounds and life of Turvite, Ash felt his heart expanding. He did love this city, loved its energy and its venality, too, the way its citizens were sharp and generous at the same time, openhanded with food or drink, but otherwise kept track of every copper. He loved the sense of being part of something larger, of having his own role to play in the city’s life, of sharing fellow feeling with every other inhabitant. He might not have had much to call his own, but he was a Turviter.

He bounded into the tavern and bought Aylmer a tankard of mead, not ale. “You want to get me drunk, boy?” Aylmer protested.

Ash just laughed. “Why not? It’s the end of the working day, why shouldn’t we get drunk?”

And later he went upstairs with one of the waitresses, the tall blond, buxom one (the one least like Doronit). He was too drunk to do much more than roll in the sheets with her laughing. But they slept, and when they woke up they laughed some more, and sighed, then shagged with satisfying energy until dawn.

He went home in the early morning light and let himself into the house quietly, but not quietly enough. As he walked down the hall, Doronit appeared at the door to her room and just stood there, looking at him. He forced himself to stand still, not to blush or stammer out excuses. She lifted an eyebrow at him and suddenly grinned; it was a real smile, unlike any he’d had from her before. He grinned back.

“I’ll be calling you the same time as usual,” she said. “You might be better off not going to sleep at all.” She disappeared into her room.

He took her advice, his heart lighter, not just because of the night with the waitress, but because he had stood his ground with Doronit for the first time and her smile had acknowledged it. Perhaps he could work his way to some kind of equality with her.

Saker

S
AKER RETURNED
to the house he had inherited from the enchanter, in Whitehaven, in the Far South Domain, and finally finished his map. Every massacre site was marked in red, not in blood — as Saker felt would have been appropriate — but at least in red. Every smaller battle site, where fewer than twenty had been killed, was marked in orange. The few individual murders he had managed to track down were marked in yellow. He had to use saffron for that, but it had been worth it. Every death, every desecration, would be remembered.

His walls were covered with scrolls: every account of the invasion still in existence, plus his own notes. It had taken Saker fifteen years to gather them all, once his reason for living had become clear to him. But they hadn’t been enough. Only Rowan’s songs had allowed him to complete his map. From their words — and from what they did not say — he had colored the Domains to show exactly where Acton’s people had killed.

The colors followed the main rivers and the coastline, leaving empty spaces inland. He didn’t know what to do about those empty spaces. They weren’t empty any longer. In a thousand years Acton’s people had spread right across the land, cutting down the forests that his people had left in peace, spreading anywhere there was a stream or a place to dig a well. There were no deaths to be avenged in those empty spaces, but the people living there had benefited from all the other deaths, all the red and orange and yellow. After an hour’s brooding over the map, Saker delicately shaded those parts a pale green, for the death of trees. Perhaps the ghosts of the forests would come to join his army. Who could tell? These days he knew that anything was possible.

It was time to try the spell again. There had been something missing, but his Sight knew that it was only a small thing, a twist on what he was already doing . . . He went over to the cloth-shrouded box near his window and folded back the purple cover. The words of the spell weren’t hard, but the concentration required was enormous. He shut out the sounds of the street below, the noise of pots being washed in the kitchen of the house next door, the intensity of his own heartbeat and breathing. Only the bones remained, with their faint earthy scent. He held the knife ready against his palm and made the cut without blinking.

His blood dripped onto the bones as he said the words of the spell, and he felt his heart swell with pain and love as his father’s ghost rose before him, looking just as he had twenty-five years ago, in the moment before the warlord’s axe had taken him. Saker had been five then. He took in the apparition: broad-shouldered but not tall, dark hair and eyes now pale; his strong, beloved face disfigured by the head wound that had killed him.

His father smiled at him, then raised an eyebrow questioningly.

Saker pointed to the map. “It’s finished,” he said.

His father moved slowly over to the table and looked down. He pointed to the green areas and looked at Saker.

“The death of trees,” Saker explained.

His father nodded. He let his hand trace the contours of the Western Mountains, up to the foothills where their village, Cliffhaven, had been — and still was. He motioned as though to tap the table at that point.

Saker nodded. “I know,” he said. “But not yet. We must try somewhere else first.”

His father frowned and tapped the table impatiently, although the tip of his finger went straight through.

Saker felt the familiar lurch in his stomach, the desire to please his father tightening his guts. He hardened himself against it. “Soon,” he promised. “I don’t have enough blood for all the ghosts in Cliffhaven. We have to find a way to share the blood out without killing the spellcaster. We’ll try somewhere else first.”

His father still frowned.

“We’re very close,” Saker said. “I promise.”

Then his father smiled and made as if to embrace him. Saker said the last few words of the spell, the words he had saved for this moment. His father’s arms came around him and he moved happily into the firm hug, feeling his father’s hands on his back, the shoulder under his cheek. He closed his eyes and surrendered to being a little boy again, when everything was all right.

The spell faded too soon. Saker covered the dry bones and wiped away his tears. He had to find a way to make it last, and not just for his father, but his sisters and cousins, and all his family. His mother’s bones were beyond recovery, but he could call up everyone else . . . the entire village. And then they would take back what was theirs. Every bit of it.

Ash

A
T THE
vernal equinox, Doronit took Ash out to the cliffs
beyond the harbor, where he had met and scattered the ghosts on festival night. It was a windy, damp night, with thin clouds covering a sickle moon, and the waves below thumping against the rocks.

She stood on the edge of the cliff and told him to stand behind her. Then she whistled.

The melody was a simple one: five notes repeated over and over in a minor key. Ash waited. Nothing happened.

Doronit kept whistling, on and on. He began to feel dizzy, as though he could lean against the wind and into the notes of the tune as he might lean against a breaking wave. He felt light-headed and heavyhearted, sorrowful, almost, distant from his own body, yet sharply aware of the ground beneath his feet. Perhaps she had drugged him.

“Whistle,” she said, and dug him in the ribs. He stumbled, almost sending them both over the cliff, but she pulled him back and shook him a little. Then she turned him to face outward over the water.
“Whistle!”

He picked up the tune from her. Standing there, listening, the notes had wound themselves into his brain so tight he wondered if he’d never get them out. It was the first time in his life he’d ever managed to reproduce a tune. He was making music for the first time! He whistled enthusiastically, and she relaxed, satisfied.

Then he saw the wind wraiths coming, flying across the scudding clouds toward them.

He had seen water sprites once, dancing on a waterfall in the high mountains west of Circ. The wind wraiths were like them: sharp features, long fingers and claws, slitted eyes with no pupils, just all black, and hair that waved back from their smooth faces like seaweed under water. But where the water sprites were emerald and silver and blue, the wind wraiths were cloudy white and gray, half transparent, and as much sound as sight, rushing, wuthering, until the back of his head had a line down the middle where it felt like it was going to split open. There were only three wraiths, but they seemed to be everywhere.

“Greetings at the Turn of the Year, People of the Air,” Doronit said.

Ash whistled. One of the wraiths slithered past him, beading his arm with moisture and bringing him up in goose bumps.

It faced Doronit, no more than a foot away. “Again, woman?” Its voice was like steam shrilling from a kettle. It pierced his ears.

“Again, honored ones. What news?”

“No news for our enemies.” It smiled. Its teeth were square and blunt.

“I am thy friend,” Doronit said. “I bring news. Two ships, but a day out from Turvite, bound for the islands. Two
old
ships.”

The wraith moistened its lips and slid a finger down her cheek.

She flinched, but stood firm, looking straight into its eyes.

Ash’s whistle slowed.

The wraith smiled and set one clawed finger at the corner of Doronit’s mouth.

He whistled faster, back to the correct tempo, and the finger was withdrawn. His heart was pounding as though he were running. His mouth was drying out.

“What news for me, friend?” Doronit whispered.

“So sad, so sad . . .” The wraith smiled. “The
White Hind
gone in a late gale, the
Sunrise
lost its cargo, all jettisoned. The
Cloven Hoof
foundered, all hands dead. The sea is eating woven wool and fine timber, alum and indigo. It will be bluer than ever this summer.”

“Ridiculous name for a ship, anyway,” Doronit said. “My thanks, honored one.”

The other wraiths gathered closer.

The wraith reached for Ash, to pull him over the cliff. Doronit hauled him back. He kept whistling.

“Our payment, friend,” it said.

“Not this one. Not this year. I’ve given you two ships. That should be enough. North and southwest they’re riding, with red sails.”

The wraiths surrounded Ash, sliding against his skin, trying to disrupt the rhythm of the tune.

“Enough!” Doronit said. “Come, Ash.” She pulled him away, walking backward to keep her face toward the cliffs and the wraiths.

“Fondness is foolishness,” the wraith whispered to her, but she ignored it and began whistling.

It was a different tune, the same five notes, but in a different order. Ash couldn’t stop whistling his own melody until she put a cold hand over his mouth. In an instant they shrieked away, like tattered cloaks streaming across the sky.

She waited for his questions as they walked back to town, but he said nothing. He was thinking about her words, “Not this year.” So she had paid them in other years. But what coin had she paid in? Who had gone up with her to the cliffs last year?

That night in his dreams she turned into a wind wraith at the moment of climax, but even as a wraith she was beautiful, and he surrendered his throat to her claws in a kind of ecstasy. He woke, sweating, and lay in the dark, ashamed, but not knowing what he was most ashamed of — helping her with the wraiths, or being drawn to her even if she had a wraith’s heart. Because if she had appeared at the doorway to his room at that moment he would have been filled with a fierce desire. He couldn’t imagine being without her.

The next day Doronit paid a visit to the merchants who dealt in wool, and purchased a great deal of blue cloth: the blue that only merchants and their servants could wear. She bought up all the blue cloth in the city. A rumor spread that she intended to fit out all her safeguarders in blue tunics. Ash had started it, at her direction.

A week later news swept through port that Beasle’s two ships, the
High Flag
and the
Winged Flag
, were lost with all hands and cargo in an unseasonable storm.

The following day Beasle visited Doronit, and that afternoon Doronit gave Ash silver for new spring clothes. When he went to show her what he’d bought, he saw there was a small coffer in her room, which had not been there the day before: a beautiful, painted coffer with very strong locks.

“How many people were on Beasle’s ships?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Twenty? Forty?”

“How much were they insured for?”

She smiled. “Quite a lot.”

“And was there really as much cargo aboard as the insurers were told?”

She laughed. “Very good. Very good. You’re doing fine. Now what have you bought for the Merchants’ Banquet?”

The sailors were dead. There was no proof: the ships were old and there had been a storm. There was no doubt about the storm. Perhaps the ships would have sunk anyway. Perhaps the storm would have happened without Doronit. There was nothing he could do. Nowhere he wanted to go. Nowhere he
could
go.

The news of the
Cloven Hoof
’s sinking became known. Doronit “reconsidered” her decision to have tunics made for her staff, and resold half of her blue fabric to the wool merchants at double the price. The other half she kept: “On Ghost Begone Night the merchants give their servants their new livery for the year, so they look smart for the festival. The price will triple before then.”

The year turned. The fishing boats at harbor began to stink in the sun. Ash ran and trained all through the summer heat as he had through the winter cold. “The weather won’t abate itself because you’re uncomfortable,” Doronit had said. “What use is a safeguarder who has to sit down in the shade?”

On a gray, airless day in early autumn, before the first chill had come to break the summer stew, he loped into the courtyard with sweat running down his whole body, and found her waiting for him with a cool drink and a towel.

“What’s happened?” he asked.

She smiled sideways at him. “Twelve months ago you wouldn’t have asked anything. You would have blushed and smiled at me. Come.”

She led the way into her room. He toweled off as he went and gulped down the juice.

Her room was cool and calm. Conscious of his sweat, he sat on the edge of the window seat, with his elbows on his knees. She sat next to him.

“We have a problem. I . . . have an enemy.”

She pulled a twist of yellow paper from her pocket: a sweetmeat pouch, with balls of dried apricot and shredded nut meat. They were her favorites, from Perle, the confectioner.

“Smell them.”

She held the paper under his nose, and he sniffed. Apricot, nut, honey . . . something else, faint and sharp, like almonds . . .

“Bitter almond,” he said, shocked. “Not Perle?”

“No, no. I bought these yesterday, had some. I was fine, no? I left them here, on the little table. Today I saw three people here — Aylmer, Eral, from the Merchant Guild, and the stonecaster.”

“Martine?”

“After she was gone I went to take a sweet. Something was . . . not right. I don’t know. Perhaps the paper was twisted differently. I was careful. I smelled the poison.”

“So Eral?”

“No, why would he? We do good trade together. Ten years, no problems. And Aylmer is loyal.”

“Yes . . . yes, he is. But why would Martine—?”

“She came to warn me against Ranny, to tell me not to go into business with her. ‘For your own good,’ she said. She hates Ranny, everyone knows that.”

“Aylmer said it was Ranny who hated Martine.”

“Why not? It’s natural to hate someone who hates you. But Martine has always hated Ranny and all her house. Why else would she tell her that she knew the date of her death and then tell her no more? That is something one would do only to an enemy. Place death in her mind, with no relief from wondering.”

“I don’t—”

“You like her. But she is dangerous.”

He remembered Martine’s knife in the boy’s shoulder, her calm face as she stepped over two corpses bleeding on her own rug.

“Yes, but—”

“She tried to kill me.” Doronit’s voice was sharp.

Underneath his confusion and the shock of Doronit’s near escape, he was skeptical about Martine being the culprit. It was hard to believe.

Doronit had a plan. She would ask to see Martine secretly, for a private reading. She would emphasize the need for confidentiality, say that she was coming alone. Ash would wait outside.

“If she wants me dead, she will try to take the opportunity. If she bears no ill will, I will have a reading and we will turn our eyes elsewhere.”

There was a storm brewing, the first of the autumn storms. The Turviters were indoors, waiting for the deluge. Only ghosts roamed the darkened streets, glancing furtively at Doronit and Ash as they went past, melting backward into alleys and alcoves. He nodded at one or two, but they never took their eyes off Doronit. She ignored them.

There was a scurry of dead leaves and dust in circles at their feet. Lightning flashed in the distance.

“Hurry,” Doronit said. “But stay back until she lets me in.”

He hid in a doorway while Doronit approached Martine’s door. The circle of ghosts around it drew back and Doronit went in.

Thunder clapped on the cliffs outside the city, and rumbled backward into the hills. Ash hesitated. Doronit wanted him to stay here, but if he went in the back way he’d be able to hear their conversation. Part of him, the remnant of the boy who had come to Turvite, resisted. Surely he could trust Doronit? But the part that remembered Midwinter’s Eve and the ghosts’ stolen secrets, the part that remembered the wind wraiths reaching for him on the cliffs, knew better.

He turned and ran for the back lane, jumped up over the bakery flour store, over the roof tiles, and across to Martine’s roof. He slid his knife under the latch on the dormer window and dropped soundlessly to the floor. This was how the second assassin had got in. Martine should have nailed it shut.

He crept down the stairs. Murmuring came from the parlor. He froze in the dark as thunder crashed directly overhead. He heard a scuffle.

“Ash! To me! To me!”

He found them struggling with a knife, Doronit’s skill almost matched by Martine’s greater height and strength. He shouldered into both of them and sent them smashing to the floor. He picked up the knife.

“Kill her now!” Doronit said. “She tried to knife me. Slit her throat!”

The women stood up in a breath, glaring at each other. He was frozen, without words, almost without thought.

“Ash. Kill her now.”

“She tried to kill you with this knife?” he asked, keeping a wary eye on Martine.

She stared back at him, her breath slowing. She said nothing, but stood a little straighter, less threateningly. She moved away from Doronit, toward the mantelpiece where Acton’s brooch still lay.

“You saw!” Doronit said.

Ash was still watching Martine.

“Ash, sweetheart, I know you don’t like killing, but sometimes it’s necessary. Knowing when is what makes a good safeguarder. Someone I can trust. Someone I can keep with me. Forever.”

It was more disguised than on Midwinter’s Eve, but still a threat: do what I tell you or I will abandon you. Panic overtook him, just as it had then. He looked at the knife, at Martine, at the knife again.

“This,” he said slowly, “is not her knife.”

Doronit stared at him. “What?”

“This is not her knife. Her knife is white.”

“Well, maybe she has two!”

“Maybe. Or maybe you set this up. How much is Ranny paying?”

For a moment she almost denied it. Then she laughed. “Ah, you have grown clever, no? Old enough now to be more than an apprentice. Ranny pays well — she pays
us
well, and more to come if we rid her of this thorn in her side.”

Doronit was now standing close to him, her hand on his shoulder, her breath on his cheek: a moment of dizziness, of sweet closeness and belonging.

“She is nothing to us, Ash. Do it quickly and we will be gone.”

For the first time he read desire for him in her eyes and realized that he would have to be a killer for her to want him.

Martine waited. He closed his eyes. Doronit’s scent was around him: warmth, home . . .

He threw the knife to Martine, hilt first. “She says it’s your knife. You’d better have it.”

Doronit hissed. “You fool!” She swung at him, her ring scoring his cheek. “I would have made you my partner. My successor.”

“Successor to fear and death,” Martine said.

“Why not?” Doronit glanced at him. “Why should I care what happens to Acton’s people? Why should you? The three of us are among the last of the old blood. Why should we care about the Turviters, who murdered our people and took our land and laughed at our ghosts? Why should I not make myself wealthy at their expense?”