Blood Ties (6 page)

Ash

T
HERE WAS BLOOD
on the wall. Ash could smell it. Steam rose from the body at his feet. He thought briefly of warming his hands at the open wound, but realized that the thought was the thin edge of hysteria, part of the shocked giggles he could feel working their way up his throat. He didn’t have time for hysteria.

Ash wiped his dagger on the corpse’s sleeve, and ran. He ran like a fit, sober young man, not the drunken sot he’d pretended to be as he had entered the alley, reeling from wall to wall, and talking to himself loudly about how it was definitely time to go home now that he’d won so much at three-card draw. He’d made himself bait and the bait had been taken. The girl had come at him with a cosh and a hidden knife, and she’d intended to kill him right from the start. She’d been skilled, too. He barely escaped the knife after he’d hit the cosh from her hand.

As he ran, he listened. His footsteps pounded like the muffled drums at a funeral, but they were the only footfalls. The others who had been following him had gone. They had thought he was an easy mark and when he proved differently they had melted away.

He ran out of the dark alleys and into a street he knew was respectable, safe, rich, because the householders had paid to have torches set at each street corner. Around the fifth corner he found himself back in Acton Square, with late-night strollers coming in bunches toward him, from behind him, and a slew of restaurant tables in front of him. He pretended to cough and turned aside, then slid his dagger back into his belt unobtrusively. He wasn’t even breathing hard, and that seemed impossible. He felt as though he should be panting, sweating — showing
something
.

When Ash had first come to Turvite, Acton Square had astounded him. A large cobbled space between two-storied brick houses, it was always full of people. During the day, it was the market square, and the ground was covered by stalls and barrows and blankets spread with wares from every corner of the world. And unlike every other market he had ever seen, it didn’t smell, because the fish market was down by the docks, where the fishing fleet came in. In the evening, when the market was packed away, the eating houses and restaurants that surrounded the square put out chairs and trestle tables — some even with tablecloths! — and the rich of Turvite came to eat and stroll and be seen.

On this fine early summer night the square was full of people dining on freshly caught fish and salted beef, eels in aspic, grilled squab and fried finches wrapped in spinach leaves, with the waiters sliding like snakes between the tables. The smell of food turned Ash’s stomach.

Doronit had followed Ash unnoticed all the way through the “exercise.” She watched him for a moment before she made herself known. He was flushed and a little walleyed, like a spooked horse, as she had expected, but he was not out of control. His dark hair was even darker with sweat, but it was a warm night so no one would think anything amiss. She saw him take a deep breath and turn pale with the smell of food. It was time to bring him back to earth. She slid around the alley corner and approached him from behind so that she would seem to have come from nowhere.

“Good,” she said softly. “Almost perfect, sweetheart.”

He had done better than she had hoped. It was always hard to predict how the softhearted ones would react afterward, even when she had trained them twice as hard as this one. His hand started a fine tremor, which was always the first sign of panic. Time to take control. There was nothing like sex to distract a young man from moral scruples.

She smiled at him and patted his cheek lingeringly. “You should have slowed a little before the square and put your dagger away. But that’s a small fault.”

Ash stared at her. She was dressed like a well-to-do city woman, with wide navy trousers tucked into soft yellow boots, dark brown hair neatly braided, and a shawl pinned at the shoulder by a brooch set with sapphires. To match her eyes, he thought. Even dressed demurely, she was so beautiful that men stared as they went by, and women glanced sideways with a mixture of envy and rueful acceptance. Doronit was all curves, smoothly rounded; there wasn’t a hard line anywhere on her, from crown to toe. The girl in the alley had been curved, too, although skinny. He felt himself begin to shake.

Doronit tucked her hand into his elbow. “A nice hot cha, that’s what you need. Come.”

Ash tried not to react to the touch. Doronit thought his shakes were a reaction to the killing, and maybe they were, but he had never wanted her so badly. He couldn’t believe that he could feel so aroused, so alive, just after killing someone. Did that mean he was mind-sick — a killer at heart, who enjoyed it? He took his cloak off as though he were hot, and held it in front of him. Doronit smiled as though she knew why, and he flushed more. She always made him feel like an unschooled virgin, which he hadn’t been since he was fourteen. With Doronit any confidence he had disappeared and he was left, like now, holding his cloak in front of him and feeling like a fool. He clung to that feeling as a bulwark against the memory of the girl sliding down the wall, against the smell of her blood still in his nostrils.

They went to an eating house at the side of the square, sat on the bench in the farthest corner (“Never expose your back” had been one of his first lessons) and Doronit ordered cha and honey cakes. There was a piper outside the eating house playing “The Long Way Home.” Badly. It grated on his nerves, but the words rolled out inside his head, automatically.
It’s a long, long way, and I’ll be dead before I get there
. . .

Ash forced the words from his mind and sat still, as Doronit had taught him, drew his breath down, down farther, let it out slowly, allowing the shakes go with it until he was calm again.

“Well done,” she said. “You are ready to talk it over now?”

Her voice, as always, was soft, with a slight lisp, that faint hint of accent.

He shivered and nodded, losing some of his calm. “I killed her.”

“Yes,” Doronit mused. “A shame you had to use two strikes. That one to the shoulder left blood on the wall where she fell back against it. In this situation it doesn’t matter, but if you wished to dispose of the body without anyone knowing whether death had occurred, you would have found that awkward.”

Her words were a cold wind and steadied him faster than anything else could.

She sipped her cha and stroked his hand. “But I’m sure you won’t do it again.”

Silently, he shook his head. He hadn’t expected this — that she would analyze this exercise as she had every other lesson she had taught him. Surely killing was different from weapons practice or scribing?

“Good.” She held his hand lightly for a moment. He could feel the softness of her skin.

Trying to seem oblivious to her, he looked around at the activity in the square.

It was as busy as it always was in midevening. The swirl and chatter of people made no impression on Ash — but he was sharply aware of the safeguarders standing at the open doors of moneylenders, singlestaves in one hand and the other not far from their daggers. Ash looked at them with envy. Soon he’d be fully trained and one of them. Then he wondered if
they
had had to kill someone as part of their training. From where he stood he could see a good twenty safeguarders outside private offices and the Moot Hall. That was a lot of dead people.

Doronit tapped his arm to regain his attention. “Tonight you acted in self-defense. So. Killing is easy that way. Perhaps the time will come when you will have to kill someone who is not trying to kill you. What will you do then?”

He sipped his cha, playing for time. “If they were trying to kill — hurt someone else . . . I’d protect them . . .”

She smiled, for once, truly pleased. “Well, and that is what a safeguarder does, after all,” she said reassuringly. “They protect.”

The first step was killing to protect oneself. The second would be killing to protect someone else, an innocent. The third, to protect someone who’d paid for protection precisely because they weren’t innocent. In a year he’d be slitting the throat of anyone she told him to, and sleeping twice as well as normal afterward.

She woke him before dawn, when he was in the middle of a dream about her. He blushed, thinking she might have realized (what had he said or done while she was watching?). But she merely nodded to the door.

“Sometimes,” Doronit said, “you will have to go without sleep for days. This is a talent that can be developed. So. Run.”

Ash ran. He would have done anything for her. He knew how much he owed her. He had known from the first day, when his parents had brought him to Doronit, not really believing that she would take him on as an apprentice, not when the baker and the butcher and even the slaughterhouse had refused, because he was a Traveler and therefore not to be trusted. Why would a safeguarder house take on someone who was traitorous by blood, he had wondered, when its very business was being trustworthy?

But they had tried Doronit because she had the dark hair of the old blood, and, Ash realized now, because his parents had probably known that she placed little importance on the opinions of others, being so sure of her own. He found that surety comforting, particularly because she seemed certain he could be valuable to her. Once he was trained. At the moment, he knew that all he was doing was eating her food and using up her time with no return for her. And at nineteen, he was old for an apprentice, although Doronit had said that she had no use for the usual fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds.

“Not strong enough,” she had said, moving her hand admiringly down his arm. “Not mature enough to deal with the work we do.”

So he ran through the thickening heat of the morning, trying as hard as he could. The skills he did have amounted to nothing off the Road: being a mediocre drummer and knowing hundreds of songs by heart (but not being able to sing them) weren’t much use to anyone. If Doronit was prepared to take him on with nothing, no skills, no silver, no family with business contacts, he would burst his heart trying to please her.

Mountain girls are mighty kind

And river girls are pretty

Round the yard first, then down to the docks. His feet hit the hard stones of the street and slipped on the morning dew.

But Turvite girls are kinder still

To a smart boy from the city
. . .

As always, he ran to the rhythm of “Turvite Girls,” a rousing drinking song. The song, he had discovered, was most popular with the Turvite women themselves. Singing it in his head kept his feet moving fast enough to make him sweat, but not so fast he became breathless.

He turned the corner onto the drumming wooden planks of the docks. The fishing boats weren’t home yet. The merchanters raised their single masts brown against the gray clouds, and the shrouds rattled down from the mastheads like dice in a cup, tantalizingly just out of rhythm. Behind him the hills stretched up, blocking out half the sky.

Turvite rose from its harbor in tier upon tier of houses, ascending in a semicircle of hills between two sheer cliff headlands. Down here near the harbor — immersed in the smells of old fish heads, rotten mud and bilges — the houses were wooden or wattled, with the occasional brown-brick inn.

Ash looked up and back, toward Doronit’s house, wondering what she was doing, who she was seeing. Her house was amid the whitewashed brick buildings, halfway up the hills, with balconies out over the street. Farther up, on the highest tiers, the houses were golden stone mansions set in gardens full of small shrubs.

He stopped for a moment at the lowest part of the harbor to get his breath before he began the long climb. This was the best part of the day in Turvite, the only quiet time. The gulls were off chasing the fishing boats and the only sound was the wind moaning through the rigging.

For Carlion girls like salted flesh

And Pisay girls like bulls

But the Turvite girls love a city boy

Who’ll fill their cup to full.

Bodgers and todgers and sailors all know

Yes, the fellows all agree

There’s no finer girls in the wide, wide world

It’s a Turvite girl for me.

He remembered asking his mother why everyone laughed at the chorus — he must have been five, or six. She’d said that the words were just clever, and that was why people laughed. He was twelve or so before he found out what the “sailors knew.” He’d known there was another meaning, even at five, and he’d tucked it away in his mind, determined to find out the truth. He’d felt great satisfaction when he’d finally understood. Doronit said that only the truly determined survived, but he didn’t know the difference between “determined” and “truly determined.” He guessed he’d find out.

The first time he came to Turvite he had been a child. They had gone to the harbor to find lodgings, of course; it was in the old part of the city where Travelers, if not welcome, were tolerated. Coming down the hill on the main road that cuts the town in two, moving from the rich to the poorer quarters, Ash had been overwhelmed by the noise and bustle: pedlars shouting their wares, spruikers calling for shops and breweries, delivery wagons and handcarts trundling over the cobbles and, above him, the neighbors gossiping over their washing, strung between the balconies that almost met over the street. And down by the harbor, there had been more to marvel at: shouts and whistles from the stevedores, the slap of the tide against the wooden docks, and above everything, like a clean descant to a muddy melody, the calls of the gulls. His ears had rung for days after they arrived.

That first day, down at the harbor and almost onto the wharves, his father had turned him around to show him the city they had just walked through. It rose in layers of brown and white and gold.

“There’s no green,” Ash had said, feeling stupid. How could there be no green? The whole world was green, except in the snow country.

His mother sniffed. “Turviters think trees suck up the goodness from the air.”