The Four Forges (7 page)

He weighed the purse in his hand. Quite a bit if he was any judge, and if he were in a town with a traders’ post, there had to be amenities somewhere as well—even if he must keep a low profile—baths, and an inn with door-latching rooms. Trotting through the back streets, he located a few places and kept circling, eventually pausing at the rear of a laundry. Inside, he could hear the women folding laundry that had been washed and dried during the day, and he could smell the bubbling cauldrons of hot soapy water, waiting for the next batch. He considered chancing a bath here for free in one of the said cauldrons but thought better of it. The water might scald him badly, and he had no wish to be found stealing a bath when he could pay for it. Clothes, however, were another matter.

Squeezing through the back gate, he made his way into the storeroom where piles of dry clothes waited to be picked up. He found what he needed—pants, shirt, greatcoat—and slipped back out while the women gossiped and pinched one another over a recent marriage, a coming baby, and someone’s mean-tempered aunt, as if the lands had no greater concern. Perhaps they hadn’t, as far as the laundry drudges were concerned.

He pried open his pouch. One gold crown, a handful of gold half crowns, and a wealth of silver ten pieces shone at him. He fished out a piece of ten, knowing it would pay for bath, barber, and silence. He hung the pouch around his neck, tucking it far inside his shirt, before making his way to the baths.

Inside, he found plenty of hot water, herbed soap, an excellent attendant who promptly fetched a good barber, burned his clothes without comment, brought more herbs to treat the head and boot lice, and managed to bring a trencher with hot stew and a cold beer, all of which were handled before the dawn’s first light.

He canvassed the streets by daylight, fleeting as a shadow himself, still aching. By lane and sign, he realized he was in Brelin, a small backwater far from the mountains in which he and Gilgarran had come to ruin. The day warmed, the sun wan yet still strong despite the season. He paused as he came upon a fairer part of the city, and listened to the sound of children laughing.

No matter where he’d roamed, that sound seemed the same. It warmed him as the sunlight could not, and he paused to bask in it, letting it wash over him like the soothing waters of the bath he’d found late last eve. He could hear the slap, slap of a jumping rope and the stomp of shoed feet and boots in rhythm with the laughter, a few jeers, and the clap of hands now and then. Sevryn pushed closer, the corner of his mouth upturned as he listened.

He could hear them chanting now, the girls, underscored by the voice of a lad or two, as they danced and jumped to the skipping rope.

 
He bolted into their midst as his body went cold and grabbed the nearest girl by her elbow. Their chant stopped immediately, and they stared at him with big eyes. One or two darted away. He fought for breath, forcing it in and out of his icy chest.

“What is that you chant? Where did you hear it? Who taught it to you?”

The Kernan girl he’d captured stared at him, one eye brimming with an unshed tear, and scuffed her shoe upon the ground. “Why . . . you did, sir.”

He dropped her arm, stepping back in shock. “I . . . what?”

“Don’t you remember? You taught us . . .” She hung back, and then, as one, the remaining children turned and raced away from him, leaving nothing behind but the tangle of their dropped rope on the dusty street.

Sevryn put the palms of his hands to his eyes and let out a broken cry. He did not remember it, if he’d ever known it, but he forced it back into his skull now, and then stood, shaking. Something he’d known and could not have forgotten, he’d put into rhyme. Something he had never wanted to lose, and yet . . . had. He felt the need for another bath, healing, cleansing, and turned about, trembling so hard he could barely make his way.

He did not know what he’d known, once. But he could not forget it again.

He left the baths a second time a far cleaner and even more thoughtful man, the slender youth he’d been at Gilgarran’s side grown to manhood and no longer able to pass as a callow lad. In idle talk overheard as he soaked, recuperating, another shock stabbed through him. It had been nearly eighteen years since they had made their fatal journey. He’d been lost and was just now being found. He would have mourned those lost years, but that he savored finding life again, and he’d brought with him a mystery that he needed to solve.

STAYING IN BACK ALLEYS suited him. He found cleaner, nicer streets to frequent, and swapped out clothes for when he traveled them, but many interesting things often dropped in alleys that couldn’t be found in other parts of the city. For instance, that was how Sevryn had met Gilgarran.

Crouched behind a bakery sifting through troughs for burned crusts of bread and whatever else he could scrounge, cast aside by his parent, he’d been living on the streets for as long as he could remember. Quick-fingered but savvy, he stole only the worthless, avoiding guards and guardhouses. Sometimes he ran messages and gambling chits for meals or even a silver piece now and then, but he didn’t earn much that way because he wouldn’t join a street gang.

Not that a gang would have him if his lineage had been discovered, but his ears were barely pointed, and his stormy gray eyes showed none of the multijeweled qualities of most Vaelinars. Only his age could betray him, for he matured slowly, having inherited at least the potential for the long life span rumored of them. Some said they lived a full handful of centuries, others said they were near immortal. If the gangs were not so interested in themselves, they might have noticed that he stayed young, far younger than they, as they grew older. Stockier and shorter, too, than the high elves, he had spent most of his life successfully hiding from the scorn held for Vaelinars or half bloods among the true blood of Kerith. No one had a use for a half blood. Vaelinars, because the Talent for strange powers and magic rarely passed through, tainting their heritage, and the others because of their hatred for the invaders and sometime slavers. Never mind that the Vaelinars had brought new ways of doing things that were beneficial to all. They had also brought Godlike powers, and hatred, and war. Better to be dead than to be thought elven. Or, as the Kernan proverb went, “Better Death should knock on your door than a Vaelinar.”

He found a place for himself as he finally grew into a young man’s stature at the traders’ stables whenever the caravans coming in had fork-horns pulling the carts. The immense bovines had their racks sawn off and capped, but that made them uneasy and difficult to handle. They could no longer defend themselves as they’d grown used to, and in an animal way, that drove them berserk from time to time. Though devoid of horns, their weight and hooves could be extremely dangerous and their ill temper kept the stable boys far from them, afraid of being crushed or trampled. He could move among them, talking, petting, soothing them into settling down to be groomed and harnessed, or unharnessed and corralled. It proved a steady and legitimate way of earning coin. Along the way, as he occasionally saved up to visit a tavern, he found his ability to soothe could keep him out of other troubles as well, avoiding recalcitrant drunks and bullies. Occasionally, though, when the seasons changed, fork-horns would be replaced on the trails by mules, and he would lose his income for a while, relegated to scrounging from the alleys to stretch out his meager savings. He thought to train his weapon skills, to be hired as a caravan guard when he was grown enough. Traders hired small, private armies of guards and kept them well.

It was on such a raw and hungry day between seasons and work that Gilgarran fell on him from an upper story window. Knocked to the ground, Sevryn lay flat under the man and only knew that trouble had hit him hard. He twisted out from under, immediately falling into his soothing voice to scramble away before his attacker’s attackers fell on them both in pursuit. The gentleman wore fine clothes, and a mask, and good weapons, and everything spelled awful trouble.

“I’m no one to bother with. I’m just going to walk away and everything will be fine,”
he started, as he clambered to his feet, spreading his hands wide in supplication.

“Velk,”
spat the man. He rolled, knocking Sevryn’s feet out from under him, and pounced, kneeing him and grabbing him by the ear. “Who are you to use a Voice on me?”

“N-nobody,” Sevryn stammered as he panted for air. The knee on his chest kept him pinned, and then the gentleman pulled at him.

“Get up. Which way out, before we’re chased.”

His ear pinched painfully between fingers that felt as hard as steel, Sevryn carefully got to his feet and jabbed with his thumb.

“On, then, and don’t think you can outrun me. Quickly!”

The grip on his ear released. Sevryn broke for freedom as if a pot of boiling oil had been tossed at him, and the master ran after, effortlessly, right on his heels. He dodged throughout the town, keeping to the shadows, desperate but not so heedless as to give his secrets away to anyone. Anyone that is, but the man trailing him. They crossed into the derelict section, on the town’s far edge, where not even the desperate lived. Sevryn took him to his dodge hole, a cavern at the edge of an abandoned warehouse, deserted because of fire, with the timbers left creaking and swaying unreliably. It still stank of its ruination, a heavy, choking reek of devastation by flame.

Sevryn squatted on his heels in the corner of the lean-to, and looked at the gentleman who, at least, had to catch his breath. Behind Sevryn was a rotting half barrel which led to a tunnel through the precarious debris of the warehouse itself, an escape route for him that any sane person would think about a number of times before going after him if Sevryn made a break for it.

The gentleman caught his breath, narrowed eyes hard to see through the silken mask, but observing him. When he could speak evenly, which was before Sevryn could catch his own breath, that fact alone dismaying, he said again, “Who in the hell are you to use Voice on me?”

He thought of doing it again to calm the man down, but it didn’t seem prudent. “No one. I’m a gutter brat. I don’t know what you mean, but that’s the way I talk to the caravan animals at the traders’ stables. I can handle them, sometimes, when no one else can. I can soothe them. I get paid for it, when the stables are busy. When they’re not, I mine the streets for whatever I can get.”

“Calm them down, eh?” His visitor took his hands off his knees, and straightened, but he was too tall for the dodge hole, and had to bend a bit. “Do I look like an irate pack animal?”

Actually, he sounded rather like he could bellow like a fork-horn. Sevryn clamped his lips shut tight, holding that thought.

His visitor stayed wary, eyeing Sevryn. “Ever use it on a man?”

“Only sometimes. Drunks. No one who could remember me. I don’t want any trouble.”

“So you said.” The other assessed him for a long moment. “Tell me your name.”

That, he wouldn’t do. “No one,” he said evenly. “I’m just no one.”

The man pulled off his mask. The startling, swift beauty of his blue-green eyes with their streaks highlighting the iris hit him, as did the planes of his face, and the points of his ears. He stared at the high-bred Vaelinar. “Tell me your name,” the man repeated, staring into Sevryn’s own, plain stormy gray eyes.

“I . . . I haven’t got a proper one. No one admits to my birthing.”

The Vaelinar took a deep breath. “One last chance, and if you’ve half the smarts you seem to have, you’ll be telling me the truth. You know what I am. I don’t recommend lying to me.”

He bit the inside of his cheek, one hand moving behind him to touch the side of the rotting barrel, readying for another escape. “Sevryn,” he said. “That’s all to it. No House, no lineage.”

“You’ve Vaelinar blood.” Tension left the gentleman’s body as he folded his mask neatly and tucked it an inner pocket of his cloak, seeming to have gotten what he wanted. “You know that, I presume.”

It seemed futile to deny it, in the face of the other. He nodded.

“Who was your mother?”

“I barely remember. She was an herbalist. She made powders and fine soaps and scented candles, and she dumped me here. We didn’t even live in the same town, and I can’t remember where we came from anymore.” He shrugged.

The other arched an eyebrow. “Kernan, then? Likely. Your father would be the one you don’t know at all.”

It didn’t seem a question, but Sevryn answered it anyway. He nodded again.

“She brought you here and left you?”

Old feelings tightened his throat. He would look away if he could, but the eyes of the other drew him, like a moth to a sputtering candle flame, darting in and out of its influence and glamour. “She . . . she went after him, and never came back. There was a flood. South, where she went. Everyone said, such a shame. A shame.” He wrenched his gaze away, his words strangled by memory.

“And she certainly had a name . . .”

“Mista. She read the weather, too. People would come from far away and bring her things. Leaves. Twigs with moss. Caterpillars. She would read the seasons ahead, and tell people when to plant, what to grow, when to shear.” Sevryn put his chin up then. She had a worth. They had had a worth. He hadn’t been turned out till her coin ran out, and her return was so long overdue, only the worst could be imagined. Lost. He’d lost her. Mista of the long sable hair fixed with many small jeweled combs, combs her lover,
he’d
, bought for her and which she’d sold one by one while they’d journeyed to look for
him.
Beautiful in Sevryn’s memory with her sable hair and light blue eyes, smiling at him as she reached out to push aside his own unruly hair, reading his face just as she read the leaves and mosses of faraway places. His father had had gray eyes, like his own, she would murmur to him. Well, not like his own. His father had had Vaelinar eyes of many colors, rich and striking.