The Aware (The Isles of Glory Book 1) (6 page)

‘Because I can’t be sure she’s not part of some Cirkasian plot to dispose of the Castlemaid.’

He was scornful. ‘Cirkasian plot?
What
plot?’

‘You haven’t been listening, Syr-sylv. No sooner had the Castlemaid escaped the palace than she was captured and sold into slavery. In a land that purports, in theory, to have outlawed slave sales—sorry, outlawed
indenturing
anyone who is not a criminal, she was sold to a ship that had dealings with the Castlelord’s own agents. The whole thing stinks. My guess is that she was encouraged to escape and then betrayed. I’d like to know why.’

He saw what I was hinting at immediately. ‘Believe me, the Castlelord is not involved in the disappearance of his own daughter.’

‘Perhaps not,’ I admitted. ‘But someone is. There’s a lot more to this than you’re saying.’

‘I am not at liberty to discuss politics with a non-Keeper. You were given enough information to deal with the situation. You have handled it badly. A full report on this will be made to the Council if you don’t find the Castlemaid soon.’ He nodded abruptly, closed down the wards and left the room. I suspected he’d use his sylvmagic to hide his departure in the same way I guessed him to have blurred his arrival.

He left me with my anger, my frustration.

Five more years service, then if my application for citizenship was granted, I’d be able to look him in the eye as a person of worth. Then he and his fellows would have to address me as Syr-aware, then I would be able to own property in the Keeper Isles, then I would have a country. Five more years and I might just have that precious earlobe tattoo, the horned-marlin with the inlaid diamond splinter for a horn; the tattoo that would prove that I too had what most people automatically had at birth: citizenship of a nation, a place of belonging. Until then I was a halfbreed, welcome nowhere but a middenheap like Gorthan Spit, unable to own property anywhere else, or legally work anywhere else. Five more years…but only if I pleased the Keeper Council. Fail them, and my application had about as much chance as a tree had of ever growing in Gorthan Spit’s sand dunes.

I went to speak to the Cirkasian, of course. Syr-sylv Duthrick was right enough to question why I hadn’t done it already. She was a lead, and anyone who practised sylvmagic couldn’t be all bad.

She wasn’t in her own room, so I knocked on Noviss’s door, and sure enough she was there. She was standing by the window, feeding some small dark birds on the sill. Noviss was lounging on the bed and the look on his face when he saw me was enough to sour whale-milk.

‘Sorry to interrupt,’ I said to him and turned to her. ‘I’d like to speak to you privately, if I may.’

‘She doesn’t speak to slavers,’ Noviss said primly. He hadn’t added the adjective ‘halfbreed’ but I heard it nonetheless.

I almost sighed. The lad might look like an innocent but his self-righteous tongue was about as subtle as a sea-wasp sting.

‘She can also speak for herself,’ the Cirkasian reproved him mildly. She left the window and came across the room towards me. ‘My room?’

I nodded and she led the way, without even glancing at Noviss. She might have been young, but she already knew how to put a possessive man in his place.

There was nowhere to sit in her room except on the bed, but she had managed to procure decent brandy and a couple of whale-tooth mugs, so I was glad she’d suggested her room rather than mine. I was a little puzzled at her hospitality. On Gorthan Spit, gossip travelled as swiftly as a bore tide, so she doubtless had heard by now what I was after and I would have thought she’d be as touchy as her uptight friend—but she actually smiled as she handed me the drink. (I immediately wondered if it was poisoned and switched mugs when she put hers down and turned her back for a moment. I always made a point of being a suspicious bitch; it kept me alive.)

‘Well?’ she asked as she seated herself beside me and retrieved her mug from the wall ledge. ‘What do you want?’

‘I want to know what happened to the Cirkasian slave who sailed from Lem in the same ship that brought you here.’ I had a feeling that it paid to be blunt with this lady.

‘And can you think of a single reason why I should tell you?’

‘You do know?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘I want to buy her.’

‘We heard you were a pimp buying for a brothel.’

‘I did tell someone that, yes. It sounded a likely tale.’

‘And what’s the real reason?’

‘I was offered two thousand setus by her father to return her to her home.’ Substitute ‘Keepers’ in place of ‘her father’ and that was the truth.

‘Ah. Then you know who she is.’ She sipped her drink.

‘Certainly.’

‘The lady in question doesn’t want to go home. She is free and safe, and she will stay that way. You may as well say goodbye to your two thousand setus.’

‘She’s an innocent. How long will she last without protection?’

‘She’s not without protection. And what would happen to her if she went back would be worse.’ She took another swallow of her drink—without any ill-effect, of course. She was no poisoner. She continued, ‘The Castlemaid was to be married off to the Bastionlord of Breth, a fat, boy-loving tyrant twice her age.’

‘So?’ I drawled indifferently. ‘I’m told such alliances are sometimes necessary. A cross-island royal marriage brings certain advantages: international accords, trade treaties… An internal one often leads to feuds between noble families. So, the Castlemaid has to marry the Bastionlord: that’s the penalty of her birth. There are plenty of compensations.’

The Cirkasian didn’t move a muscle in her face, yet her eyes changed. They flattened; the irises became solid discs of steel. Not for the first time I had to revise my opinion of her. There was a core of hardness there that I hadn’t been aware of before. She said harshly, ‘Doesn’t that kind of double standard bother you?
You
especially? Why should Islandlords put themselves above the breeding laws?’

I shrugged. ‘It’s always been that way.’ Still, I thought of my mother, trapped by passion or rape or ignorance into bearing a halfbreed, forced to abandon me so as to escape the punishment that would have been hers had anyone known of her crime. I fingered my bare earlobe bitterly. No one kept an Islandlord’s child from his citizenship because of
his
mixed blood. No one hounded
him
from island to island.

I thought of Syr-sylv Duthrick. He and his fellow Councillors connived to break the breeding laws for Islandlords even as they upheld it for people like my unknown parents. Like me. For a moment I was thirteen again, lying on the table in the Physicians’ Hall in The Hub, knowing what was about to be done to me…
knowing
it, yet not really understanding. Not then.
Bastards all.

But I didn’t want to think about that. My future depended on Keeper goodwill.

‘It’s the Keepers who are to blame for this proposed marriage,’ she said suddenly, as if she had read my mind.

I pretended ignorance. ‘What have the Keepers got to do with a dynastic marriage?’

‘Is there anything in the Middling Islands that the Keepers
aren’t
involved in? The royal families of Cirkase and Breth only exist because the Keepers prop them up. The Keepers like royal dictatorships; dictators are easily manipulated—and they keep the lower classes in their place. Keepers aim for a unity of the Middling Islands under their leadership, with everyone bowing down to them because they are the ones with the power: with the sylvmagic. They tell us that without their protection, we’ll fall to the dunmagickers. And people like the Bastionlord and the Castlelord jump to do their bidding, partly because they believe in the danger, but mostly because they know where the sauce for their fish comes from. The Keepers have bought them, just as they have bought everyone in the Middling Isles. We have become so dependent on them we can no longer stand alone…

‘And in the meantime, people like the Castlemaid Lyssal get caught in the middle. Nobody cares, least of all people like you.’ She looked at me bitterly. ‘All you care about is your two thousand setus.
’

Her tirade had caught me utterly by surprise. Everything she said was true up to a point, and she couldn’t have found a better way of making me feel about as low as a lugworm. But I needed my two thousand setus. Money was the only thing that kept me from joining the pox-ridden whores in some back street somewhere, and that two thousand setus was a small fortune. Without money, I had nothing except an unguaranteed hope I might earn Keeper citizenship with twenty years of service. Without an ear tattoo, earning a living was difficult: I couldn’t legally live anywhere for more than three days at a time, except on Gorthan Spit; I could be legally harried across the Isles of Glory like a criminal—and had been, often enough. Even my services to the Keeper Council were unofficial and I couldn’t claim exemption from the law because of them. At least with money I could buy some peace, I could bribe a landlord to turn a blind eye to his tenant’s lack of citizenship, I could live well.

There had been a time when I’d thought money would also buy me a black-labour tattooist, a man or woman who could etch an island symbol and insert the precious stone within the tattoo, illegally, for a price. I had eventually discovered my mistake. The only artists who knew the secret of how to inlay the stone so that it did not fall out, so that the skin never grew over it, so that there was no scarring, so that its authenticity would never be questioned, were ghemphs—and ghemphs were incorruptible. They always had been and always would be, damn them. You couldn’t buy beings who apparently wanted nothing more than what they already had.

The Cirkasian put down her drink and reached across to me to touch my hair. I jerked away, but she was only pushing back my curls to look for a tattoo. When she didn’t find it, she withdrew her hand and looked at me with something like pity in her eyes. ‘You poor bloody isle-hopper. You don’t have much sodding choice, do you?’

I blinked. ‘Er, not much.’ She’d surprised me again, this time by her sudden lapse into earthy vulgarity; it was so at variance with her normal speech, with her aura of high-class style.

She poured some more brandy into my mug and reverted to her usual language without missing a beat. ‘Cut your losses on this one. You’ll never find the Castlemaid Lyssal.’

‘Who the hell
are
you? A friend of the Castlemaid’s?’

She shrugged. ‘What does it matter? I have Cirkasian citizenship, but otherwise, like you, I’m a renegade. My name’s Flame, by the way.’

I knocked my mug against hers in salute and started to chuckle.

‘What’s so funny about that? It’s not my real name, of course. It’s because of the colour of my hair—’

‘It’s beautiful hair,’ I said diplomatically. It was yellow, rather than red, so I assumed whoever had called her that must have been thinking of candle flame rather than a kitchen fire. ‘The name suits you.’

‘So? What’s so funny?’

‘My name’s Blaze. Because I had a bit of a temper in my younger days. Together,’ I grinned, ‘we’re a conflagration.’

We stared at one another and then simultaneously burst out laughing.

I hadn’t wanted to like her. She was everything I wasn’t: petite and lovely and purebred. And she had sylvmagic—which would have bought her Keeper citizenship if she had lacked a citizenship of her own. She had everything I’d ever wanted… Yet I liked her. I liked the intelligent humour in those lovely blue eyes, I liked the compassion I read there. I liked the way she came straight out and said what she thought; it may have been dangerously naive, but after the deviousness I’d had to deal with, it was a draught of sweet water. I said, ‘You’d better watch your step, Flame. Did you know that no one who sailed in to the Docks on that slaver from Cirkase would tell me you were on board?’

She shrugged. ‘They were well paid to keep quiet.’

Did she really think money would buy the silence of dregs like that? Her strange mix of naiveté and shrewdness was puzzling.

I said, ‘I suggested that I would pay them more. Normally that would be enough to have such men show an interest, at least, but they were scared. Or dunmagicked. You didn’t threaten them with sylvmagic, did you?’

She accepted without comment that I knew she had sylvtalent, but her frown deepened. ‘You don’t
threaten
people with sylvmagic.’ She had a point. Sylvmagic could do lots of things as far as people who had no Awareness were concerned; it could deceive the senses, cloud the truth, blur reality, create limited illusions, promote healing—but you couldn’t
hurt
anyone with it, not physically. Not like dunmagic. ‘What are you trying to say?’ she asked.

‘That someone didn’t want me—or anyone—to know that you or the Castlemaid Lyssal came in on that vessel. And they were either willing to make some pretty dire threats or they used a dunmagic seal to make sure no one talked. I’d watch my back if I were you. People like that usually have rather nasty motives. Maybe they think they can earn a ransom from the Castlelord if they can return his daughter. Maybe they think they can find out from you where she is. Watch your back, Flame.’

‘I have the sylvmagic.’ She said it confidently enough, but there was a moment’s doubt in her eyes; a flash of fear.

‘That may not help you against dunmagic.’ That also was true; when dunmagic and sylvmagic clashed, it depended on which practitioner was the most skilled, and from what I had smelled around Gorthan Spit, the someone with dunmagic was very skilled indeed. In that one respect, I had an advantage over her; neither dunmagic nor sylvmagic worked against one of the Awarefolk. It wasn’t dunmagic itself that frightened me, it was the fact that, because we Awarefolk could usually spot a dunmagicker as if he were a shark in a shoal of minnows, and because we were impervious to their spells, dunmagickers hated us enough to want us dead. And there was always an abundance of hideous non-magical ways to kill people…

Flame paled a little. ‘You have Awareness, don’t you? You and that Tor Ryder both; I saw your faces when you opened the door while I was healing Noviss. That’s how you know I have sylvmagic. You smelled it then. Neither of you could hide your surprise at seeing a Cirkasian sylv.’

‘They
are
rather rare,’ I said. ‘But you’re not nearly sharp enough for Gorthan Spit. Didn’t it occur to you that it might be dunmagic that we had? The dunmagicker who created that spell would have seen the healing of your sylvmagic spell just as you were able to see the damage that a dunmagic spell did to Noviss. Don’t trust anyone, Flame. Not me, not Ryder, not even that pretty boyfriend of yours.’ Another thought struck me. ‘You don’t
know
who this dunmagicker is, do you?’

She shook her head.

‘Or why Noviss was the victim?’

She shook her head again. ‘Even Noviss doesn’t know.’

I sighed. ‘It doesn’t take much to upset a dunmagicker. Perhaps Noviss was rude to him, not knowing who he was…that’s all it would take. If he sees Noviss is still up and about, and if he realises you’re the one who cured him, then you could be in real trouble. I’d get off Gorthan Spit as soon as I could, if I were you.’

‘I want to. But I can’t. I never bargained for what has actually happened: it’s that time of the year when the two-moon double ebb tides combine with certain currents; ships can come in from the north, the fishing vessels can potter around the coast, but no ship can hope to leave coastal waters for at least another week, perhaps longer. If they tried, they’d be swept south for days, weeks even.’ She gave a slight smile. ‘Thanks for the advice anyway.’