Northlight (6 page)

The milling bodies parted in front of Terricel for an instant and he saw a man, all in blue and lean as a norther wolf, standing beside Pateros. Pateros nodded to him and stooped over a little, as if to listen better. Terricel could almost see the familiar expression of concern on Pateros's face, the light in his green-gold eyes, his ready smile.

The next few moments came to Terricel in fragments — a swirl of green silk — the man in blue sprinting away — Pateros falling back into Montborne's arms — someone screaming.

Terricel's legs, after having carried him to Pateros's side, folded suddenly under him. The gritty pavement burned his knees. At first all he could see was the blood on Pateros's green robes and the hazel eyes open so wide that they seemed to take in the entire sky at once. The irises had turned green, all the gold drained from them.

Cherida bent over Pateros, beginning resuscitation. Her hair was coiled on the back of her neck and the muscles stood out like twin ropes of steel.

“What good will that do now?” came a whisper at Terricel's side, a woman's voice.

The Ranger knelt beside him, breathing hard, her lips drawn back from slightly uneven teeth. Ragged chestnut curls framed her face. For a moment her eyes held his, pale translucent amber. He'd never seen human eyes that color before.

He wanted to grab her and ask how she'd known what was going to happen. She
must
have known, the way she came charging across the plaza.

The Ranger spiraled to her feet, taut and graceful and looking fit enough to fight off half of Laurea. A moment later, more City Guards arrived and herded all the bystanders to one side. People muttered as they crowded together, a few sobbing, others praying aloud with the gaea-priest.

Terricel broke into a cold sweat. His hands started shaking. Someone shoved an elbow into his side and he gasped in a lungful of cheap floral scent, sweat and stale garlic.

He stepped back, almost stumbling over Esmelda's feet. In the horror and confusion, he'd lost sight of her, yet there she was, right behind him. Steady, unwavering and always in the center of things.

She might have been stone except for the movement of her breathing. Her eyes, dry as a lizard's, focused inward, on something no one else could see. He wondered if she were remembering other times — the Brassa War, perhaps, or the epidemic when she'd taken over as Senate presidio, her husband dead and she alone with two young children, one of them, himself, a mere baby.

Esmelda grasped Terricel's shoulder with one hand. He opened his mouth but his throat had gone dry, his voice paralyzed. No words came. Her fingers, thin and hard, dug into his flesh.

“Right now, we're all in shock,” she said. “It's a natural reaction and will pass. We have work to do, meanwhile, so get your brains uncorked. Orelia will hold these people for questioning, but she'll release us as soon as she can.” She put a slight emphasis on
we.

“Work?” Terricel stared at her. Pateros had been her friend as well as her political ally.

“We must begin setting up the electoral college immediately,” she said.

He frowned as he searched his memory for details of succession that he'd studied only because the civics course was compulsory. He couldn't remember how a non-dynastic Guardian was elected, except the process was complicated. The Senate, however, could appoint an emergency
pro tem
.

The Senate, he thought grimly, couldn't appoint a dish washer without written instructions.

Esmelda released Terricel's arm. “There are forces at work here that even I can't see,” she said, then went on in a tight, bleak voice. “I suspect that today's horrible business is only the beginning.”

Terricel held himself very still under the covers, hardly daring to breathe, lest the movement catapult him into full waking. The slats of sunlight that penetrated the shutters hadn't reached his eyelids yet. He still had a little more time. On most mornings, he clambered out of bed as soon as he woke, no matter where the sunlight touched his pillow. Today he lingered, waiting for that half-magical moment when time assumed a strangely liquid substance and its ripples could carry him in any direction he wished.

The Ranger woman yesterday had stirred up memories of the night his sister left for good. He'd lain in this very bed, a boy of nine, in this same almost-dreaming state, staring up at the walls that were not yet the dark, depressing blue as they were today, but eggshell color, like all the rest — his mother's choice. He always wondered why she'd let him choose his own color.

On that day, he'd waited for the house to grow quiet after the visitors left, the ones from faraway places with exotic names, the ones he must never, never interrupt.

Ripple — here was the moment he crept downstairs when, instead of the usual night hush and the quiet patter of the rain, he'd heard Aviyya and Esmelda screaming at each other.

Ripple — here he'd crouched in his favorite hiding place at the base of the bannister, listening.

“What does it take to make you
see?
” Aviyya's back was to him and raindrops quivered from the ends of her tangled black hair. “Maybe
you
just stepped into your own mother's place without a fight. Maybe that's exactly what you wanted all along. But I'm not you! I can't live with your secrets! I've got to have
my own
life!”

A heartbeat pause and then, from the shadows of the living room, his mother's voice: “We none of us have
our own
lives.”

“I've sworn your gods-forsaken oath and I'll keep it, damn you!” Avi rushed on. “You talk about family pride and honor and the balance of all Harth — don't you think I care about those things, too? But that's all — ”

“Keep your voice down!” Esmelda's voice came like the slither of a hunting snake. “The boy might hear.”

Ripple — here he'd lain awake in his room, listening to the rain thrashing on the roof. The storm had worsened, thunder crashing in the distance. The air smelled of wet grass and lightning. Minutes passed, hours maybe. His door opened slowly and the bed creaked as Aviyya sat beside him. She was fully dressed, an oiled-wool cloak over one arm.

“This is good-bye, baby brother. I'm going to miss you, but I can't let her do this to me.”

“What if something happens to you?”

She'd laughed, then smothered the sound with one hand. “I hope something
does
happen to me. Otherwise it would be a waste, running away. I intend to have lots and lots of things happen to me. Wild things, wonderful things. Like we used to play, only real.”

Despite Aviyya being seven years older, she'd been an excellent playfellow. She never fussed about her clothes and she never ran out of pretend adventures. Together they'd turned the living room into a norther tundra swept by bitter winds and blood-thirsty raiders, turned the glass-walled solarium with its masses of potted greenery into a forest south of the great Inland Sea. The staircase had become a terraced eastern steppe, and the polished bannister the perfect stake to which to tie the victim for the nomads' mystical rites.

“Take me with you!”

She'd rumpled his hair and sighed. “Oh, baby brother, if only I could.”

Years later, Terricel discovered that Aviyya had joined the Rangers. Esmelda had always known, as she knew so many other things that happened all over Harth, not just in Laurea, and she'd never told him. Pateros had received Avi's oath, but Terricel never blamed him for keeping her secret safe, as he had so many others.

Ripple — and here was that other woman Ranger now, knife strapped to her leg and looking crazy enough to try anything. Terricel wondered — if he met Aviyya today, would she be like that, too? Would he even recognize her?

He thought of all the stories she'd told him about their father — so many and so vivid that surely she must have made some of them up. But he'd never questioned her. He'd needed to believe in them as much as she did — how their father had taken her to his weaving studio, taught her to tie knots, use a camp knife, catch dragonspiders, how he'd danced with her and sung songs from his own childhood.

Sometimes Terricel could hear those songs echoing through his own dreams. Once, when he was four or five, he'd heard Esmelda singing a country ballad as she arranged the flowers Annelys had brought in from the garden. As soon as she realized he was crouched behind the bannister, listening, she broke off. Without a word, she'd taken him into her arms and held him, rocking him gently.

Finally the morning ripples died down, their substance bleached away by the morning light. There was no denying he was awake and it was today instead of yesterday, and he'd seen Pateros, the Guardian of Laurea, Gatekeeper of the South and a dozen other archaic titles, knifed down in the open plaza and lying bloodstained at his feet.

Terricel rummaged in the pile of clothing on the floor of his closet and extracted a shirt and trousers that looked reasonably clean. In the washing alcove adjacent to his bedroom, he bent over the sink and splashed cold water on his face. He wet his hair and ran his fingers through it, not that it would make much difference in the way the cowlick swirled out from the back of his head. These ordinary tasks, usually performed without thought, now felt unnatural, as if some part of him comprehended that life went on, but some other part could not.

Downstairs, the house lay quiet, undisturbed. Although there was no sign of Annelys, the house steward, Terricel caught the aroma of her breakfast bread. She was probably tending to the opal-eyed house snakes, rounding up the mated pair. They were turned loose each night to forage for rats and cockroaches. Their world of hunter and prey remained untouched by yesterday's events.

Esmelda's everyday cloak of gray wool still hung on its peg by the front door. Terricel took an apple from the bowl on the table and made his way down the corridor.

He cracked open the door. Inside, directly beneath Esmelda's bedroom, lay the cave of a room that served as her home office. Behind the overflowing bookshelves lay walls that were once a soft peach color, the sole relic of the time before she'd painted everything eggshell white. Years of candle smoke had darkened them.

Candles, beeswax candles, as costly as steel — the corners of the room reeked of them, even though Esmelda rarely actually burned them any more. The smell always made Terricel uneasy, as if some inarticulate longing within him, roused by memory, stirred fitfully in its sleep.

Esmelda, on the other hand, drew the smoky darkness of the room around her like a protective cloak. She sat at the desk, its blotter-covered surface piled with history books, notes, and a tray of bread and ripened cheese. Ashes smoldered in the ceramic crucible she used to burn letters. She'd turned her chair toward the uncurtained windows, and when Terricel entered, she was gazing over the garden, pen raised in mid-stroke.

“Orelia says the dagger was norther.” She put the pen down and jabbed a forefinger at a sheet of yellow message paper.

“Norther...” Terricel repeated. Saying the word aloud brought a shock of its own. He remembered Esmelda's words from the day before:
“...only the beginning...”

But no, she hadn't said the dagger was norther, she'd said
Orelia
said it was. He tilted his head, one eyebrow lifted questioningly.

She got to her feet. “Let's have a look at it.”

Terricel took a slice of bread, smeared it with the soft cheese, and followed his mother down the corridor. She lifted her cloak from its peg and settled it around her shoulders. The heavy woolen folds enveloped her, leaving her looking shrunken, frail.

For a moment Terricel's vision shifted. He saw her as he'd so often imagined her — for he'd been an infant at the time — standing on a dais in the plaza where she gave her famous speech. Her shoulders were thin and angular under her cloak of purple mourning, her eyes half-feverish as she studied the anxious faces below. She seemed more desolate and yet more resolute than he'd ever seen her. Rain slicked her black hair to her skull, as if leading the city through the epidemic had pared her to the core.

Give us hope,
they cried to her in his vision.
Give us strength.

“It will be our measure as a nation how we conduct ourselves in the days to come. It is not enough to merely survive.” He wasn't sure if he'd ever heard her speak those words or only imagined what she'd said.

“We must remember who we are.”

He blinked and saw her again, one image overlaid on the next, past, present and future blurring together. Again she stood on a dais, again bare-headed, but now in sunshine so clear and bright it turned her hair to silver-white. She wore green, with the Guardian's medallion around her neck. The people cheered as she raised her hands.

It was all nonsense, all childish yearnings, these pictures he painted in his mind.

Then he saw himself, standing at her side, still raw with the realization that he would be Guardian after her. He felt no sense of triumph or pleasure. Instead, the distant flowering trees pressed in on him like perfumed walls, closer and closer until he could no longer breathe.

Orelia's office would have been put to better use as a conference room. It was too big for any sense of intimacy, with its empty bookshelves and massive table of cheap grayish wood, polished to a high gloss. There were no outside windows, only a double panel of solar-battery lights along the ceiling. When Esmelda and Terricel arrived, the City Guards chief sat in an armchair at the far end, facing Montborne and Cherida. Standing along the wall behind Montborne was the grim-faced officer who went everywhere with him. Terricel had never heard the man's name; the story was that Montborne had saved his life at Brassaford.

“Esme. Come in, sit down,” Orelia said. Her eyes slid past Terricel. “Can I offer you anything? Tisane, juice?”