Tortall (26 page)

Lost produced its head-knob and shook it. “Mathematics not fun.”

“No, Lost!” protested Adria. “You see, it’s a game!” She sat in the space it had left between it and the engineer. “Now, watch.”

Lost was soon able to leave Adria and Keraine to their discussion, as Adria got so absorbed in the way trigonometry unfolded in her mind that she forgot to include the darking.
Keraine kept pace for the most part, but when Adria tried to follow some of her newest ideas to their next revelation, the engineer held up a hand.

“No, that’s too theoretical for me!” she protested for the fourth time, laughing. “You’ve gone past the boundaries of what I studied! Others went on to advanced mathematics, but not me. Where did you learn this?”

“But I’ve only seen this as I’ve watched you,” Adria protested. “I’m just thinking aloud. Doesn’t it
have
to be this way? Other factors would change the calculations, but you didn’t include them.”

Keraine produced a flask and took a drink from it. “Barley water with lemon,” she said, offering it to Adria. “I’ve talked myself dry.”

Adria accepted it with murmured thanks. The liquid was cool in her throat. She was pouring some into her hand for Lost when the marketplace clock began to chime. Terror flooded her, buzzing in her veins and turning to heat in her belly. How could she not have heard the bell before this?

“Uh-oh?” Lost asked, peering up into her face.

“You look like a ghost just bit your heart,” said Keraine.

“School began two hours ago,” Adria whispered. “How could I not hear the bells?”

“I will write a letter to your headmaster,” Keraine said, preparing to cut a fresh sheet of parchment loose. “I will say I asked you to help me.”

Adria shook her head. “They will tell Father. My father is very strict about my attendance at school.”

“Father bad,” Lost announced flatly.

“No, no! He knows what is best for me,” Adria
protested. Inside her a voice, one that had been only a whisper before Lost came to add its doubts, said, Father only cares how he looks to other merchants.

Adria brushed the chalk from her hands and mumbled something to thank Keraine. Then she grabbed her book bag and raced down the canal road to the guild school, Lost clinging to her ankle to keep from being left behind.

When she reported to the head instructor, the man waved Adria away. “Your family has already been notified, Student Fairingrove. You will report to those studies which remain of your program for the day. Tomorrow we shall discuss with your father if you should remain in merchant studies or change to a convent school.”

Adria’s throat closed up tight. She had already gone far beyond the mathematics that was required of convent girls, who learned only what was needed to keep household books. She had hoped—she had dreamed—that her success in mathematics would be so great that her father would consent to her ultimate dream, to study in the great universities of Tortall or Carthak, even though she knew it was just a dream. Now she risked the loss even of Instructor Park’s class.

She reported to Carthaki history, but she barely heard the lecture or the questions, earning her a red mark from that instructor. She moved through the rest of her day in that manner, her mind racing along the same tracks: How could she appease Father? How could she convince him to give her another chance? Could she appeal to her mother? But Mother had not said a word against her father’s will since Adria could remember.

I’ll go and clean the upper storeroom, the one I’ve been putting off, she resolved at last. Lessons were over. She nodded to her friends, hoping they would understand why she hadn’t spoken with them that day, and trotted out into the street. I’ll do that, every last bit, and then I’ll decide. If he sees how hard I work, maybe he won’t take me out of school. She looked at her hands. They were shaking badly.

Out of sight of the students and instructors now, Lost rose from Adria’s pocket, twined around her arm, and climbed snakelike up to her shoulder. “Please talk,” the darking urged. “All afternoon you only shake. You still shake. Run away if news so bad. Come to Tortall. Nobody make you shake there.”

Adria smiled for the first time that day. “I’m too frightened to run off,” she replied. “I’ve never even left this town.”

“Time to go, then,” Lost said, but Adria shook her head. The roads and woods beyond the city were filled with killer centaurs, bandits, giant spiders with human heads, and other monsters. She’d heard the stories all her life from merchants who came to buy and sell at the shop. Girls who took the road risked murder, kidnapping, rape. Father had made sure Adria and her sisters knew of every daughter of their acquaintances who got caught in a servant’s arms, who ran away to a bad end, or who disgraced their families. Every daughter, every son.

She wanted to sit down and cry all over again, but if she was going to clean the storeroom better than she had before, she had to work. She had to start now.

Lost cleaned the downstairs storeroom with her. The darking made her smile as it swung or rolled or inched from
task to task. It sang to her in its piping voice, songs with words in languages she’d never heard. “Where did you learn so much?” she asked, stopping to catch her breath after shifting some crates.

“Other darkings,” Lost replied, hanging from a beam overhead. “What one know, all know.”

“Isn’t that confusing?” she asked, grabbing her buckets. It was time to attack that unused storeroom. “Having so many voices inside you? Or is that not how it works?”

“Not confusing. How we
are
. You two-leggers lonely,” Lost said, swinging from one temporary tentacle to another along the beams as it caught up with her. “Darkings never lonely.”

Adria bit her lip. She had been so lonely since Instructor Hillbrand had left the school.

When they reached the upstairs storeroom, she threw open the shutters. To her surprise, the late-afternoon light revealed signs of a recent dusting on the counter. There was a tattered cushion on the lone stool in the room. A man’s boot prints showed clearly in the thick dust on the floor. When Adria began to sweep under the counter, she pulled out a branch of half-burned candles that had been hidden there.

Lost vanished into those same shadows. “Books here,” she heard it call.

“Why would books be here?” she asked, getting down on her knees. “Lost, if there’s a rat under there—”

“No rat,” her friend replied. “Rats afraid of darkings. We get big, yell ‘Boo!’ Rat scamper. Fun!”

Adria chuckled softly, then smothered a gasp as her fingers touched what felt like leather. The darking was right.
Someone had put books under the counter, where no one would see them. She gripped the spine of the topmost volume and pulled it out onto her lap. It was a common account book, like those in the clerks’ office downstairs but with black leather binding instead of red.

“Who would put these here?” she asked herself more than Lost. “It doesn’t make sense.” She couldn’t see what was written where she sat. She struggled to her feet, keeping the heavy book in her hands.

“Me too,” Lost called from the floor.

She could barely tell the difference between it and the dark wood. Setting the book on the counter, she scooped up her friend, giving it a quick ride to the book. “Whee!” Lost squealed.

Adria set the darking on the counter and opened the book. The writing in it was her father’s.

“Why does he hide these up here?” she whispered to herself.

Adria slowly leafed through the pages. These were accounts. Moreover, they were
current
accounts, with dates that began that January and ended the day before.

Uneasy, she rubbed her forehead. She remembered pages from the books downstairs. She couldn’t help it. As she worked, she looked at them and tried her own calculations against those of the clerks. Her favorite books to view were Minter’s. Seeing his familiar neat columns and calculations took her back to the days when mathematics was fun, not something Father used in his unending war with his competitors.

This book was like those Minter kept for her father, but
different. There were extra columns and extra lines, costs and goods that were not in the books reviewed by the royal inspectors. Adria remembered yesterday’s totals. They were a little below the usual day’s profit, as had been the case for a week. According to
this
account, with these extra goods, her father’s accounts showed their business making profits a third higher than those recorded downstairs.

She continued to read swiftly. The goods labeled “sand” were plainly no such thing, not at the prices her father gave them. Nor were the goods he called “bronze ingots.” The “glass bottles” were the most expensive items of all, priced far above anything the shop ever carried. There was only one answer. Her father was smuggling. The downstairs books were for show. These recorded his real profits.

“Now what?” inquired Lost as Adria set that book aside and picked up the next one in the stack.

“Don’t know,” she replied, unaware that she was suddenly talking like a darking. “Strange.”

“Strange what?”

“Hush,” Adria whispered, reading the notations in this book, dated last year. There was another volume for the two years before that, and a fourth for the three years earlier yet. “Whatever Father is smuggling, he worked his way up,” she whispered to Lost. “See here? Only a little bit at first. More and more as time moved on, until every shipment that comes to him carries smuggled goods in the cargo.” She shivered.

“Cold?” Lost asked.

“Frightened,” Adria replied.

“You frightened before.”

“Frightened for all of us, Lost,” Adria said. There were
old, oily marks—finger marks—on the paper. “The Crown skins smugglers.” She put her nose close to one of the marks and sniffed. A tiny black blob, Lost’s head, did the same thing, even making the same noise.

“Frankincense,” she whispered. Her father didn’t sell frankincense in the shop. That must be one of the smuggled items.

“Adria!”

She cringed.

“Mithros curse you, girl, I know you’re hiding here!” her father cried from the storeroom below. “The longer you avoid me in this stinking, cowardly way, the worse it will go for you!”

“Father bad,” Lost said mulishly. “Time to go.”

“I have nowhere
to
go!” Adria whispered. She dragged herself to her feet. Then she looked at the book in her hand. How could he have put their family’s livelihood in such danger? Didn’t he care for them at all?

Swallowing often, trying to keep herself from throwing up out of sheer terror, she made herself walk toward the steps. She didn’t want Father to find her up here. Whether she showed him the evidence of his crimes or not, she didn’t want to be trapped in this musty room with no way to escape.

“Adria!” Father shouted yet again.

She put one foot on the stair, then another. A small weight struck her back and clung. “I right here,” Lost whispered.

The darking’s voice put a little strength in her shaky ankles. She walked faster. At the foot of the stair she placed the
smuggling book on a crate in the shadows, then moved into the light of the main storeroom.

Her father stood near the front door, looking into the clerks’ office. When he heard Adria’s steps, he closed the door and faced her. “There you are.” He strode quickly to her and gripped her by one arm. “How
dare
you hide from me? Stand straight and look me in the face. No sniveling.” His voice was quiet. That was a very bad sign.

“Father, please forgive me,” Adria whispered. “I know I was wrong to be late for school. I’ll never do it again—”

“As Mithros witnesses, you
will
never do so again,” her father snapped. “You will never be given such a chance.”

“Father, please don’t send me to convent school,” Adria begged. “I swear, I’ll never be late again, I’ll work here all through the holidays—”

Her father’s gray eyes opened wide. “Convent school? You have shown you are unfit for any schooling!”

“None?” cried Adria. “But I was late only once! How—”

He slapped her.

The force of his blow knocked her sideways into a stack of crates. Adria leaned there, one hand on her throbbing cheek, staring at him. He had never struck her before, or any of her sisters, though he had hit her brothers when they were younger.

He pulled his arm back for another slap.

“Stop!” A ribbon of black darted over Adria’s shoulder and onto the floor. It rose, spreading to form a thin, filmy wall. “No more hurt! No more yell!” Lost produced its head-knob on a long, skinny neck and put its face right in front
of the man’s. There it spread until it could have covered the human’s face. Softly the darking added,
“Or no more breathe.”

Adria’s father now took a step back. For a short time none of them spoke or moved. Then the man said, “So a monster has enchanted my obedient child. A monster that has taught her to lie.”

“Only one monster here,” Lost replied.

Her father’s words were the strangest thing Adria had heard him say. He sounded nearly mad, which made her shiver. “I’m not bespelled,” she said quietly, trying to explain without making him think she defied him. “Lost isn’t a monster. It’s a darking, from Tortall.” Adria moved so she stood beside her friend. Lost shrank in until it was a ribbon, then hopped to twine around her arm. She turned her hand so the darking could put a blob of itself in her palm. “See? It’s the most gentle creature in the world.” She stroked the darking’s head-knob with a finger that trembled.

Her father took another step back. “It’s a monster from an enemy realm. You should have brought it to me the moment you found it. Already the thing was working its wiles on you.”

He wasn’t listening. Adria tried again. “Father, there’s an engineer working on the new canal who can vouch for Lost,” she said. “She’s the reason I was late this morning. She’s named Keraine Waterstone.”

Her father reached for the flat, hard length of wood used to lever crates off carts. He clutched the lever with both hands and came closer to Adria and Lost. “Let go of that thing, my girl,” he ordered.