“I don’t know,” Dunun said. “I haven’t seen her. Her son found her dead and called the night guard. They moved her into the cold rooms. They said there were no marks on her, and her son said she was not sick. She did not look or smell of poison.”
“I want to see her,” Kieve said, and Braith said, “Of course.”
The sleet had stopped but wind still boomed through the ward; it scoured the ground and exposed the ridged ice below. A stout rope, bowed by the wind, stretched from the barracks to the castle. They clung to it, Braith and Kieve and her bodyguards, boots sliding on the ice. Within the shelter of the Scholars Garden the wind lightened. Braith grabbed the jamb of an inset door. It opened easily enough, but it took three of them to pull it closed again. Braith used her tinderbox to light a torch. It sputtered and caught.
She led the way down a narrow staircase into a maze of corridors and cellars, then down another flight into rougher tunnels. Stains grew and passed in the torch light. Some stains became branching hallways slick with ice; Kieve heard the far-away sound of dripping water. They descended a short flight of stairs so little used that after centuries the marks of the mason’s chisel were clear and sharp. Even sound was muted here. People found bones in rock, Kieve thought. Old bones turned to rock themselves. She hunched further into her cloak.
They climbed a set of stairs that twisted upon itself time after time, interrupted by landings and stubby halls ending at blank rock walls. At the top they forced open a door and stepped into yet another tunnel. Glyn reached forward and brushed spiderwebs from Kieve’s cloak. They took a moment to clean each other before proceeding. Puwan, finding a spider in Glyn’s hood, shuddered. Glyn’s hand moved as she made the furca. Under Hueil’s Garden tree roots netted over the entrance to one branching hallway. The air grew warmer. Something hissed. A scent of sulphur increased until Kieve’s throat ached and her eyes stung. The torch flickered. Braith led them to the right, in a great arc around the springs that fed the Crescent Bathhouse overhead.
“Mouths of darkness,” Glyn muttered.
The smell lessened, the air cooled, then chilled, then bit at them again. Braith turned them down a branch hallway and put her hand to a plain door at its end.
“I don’t know this tunnel,” Kieve said.
“It’s good to know we keep some secrets from you.” She pushed the door open. They went down another flight of stairs, broad ones worn with age and footsteps, and entered the cold rooms where the castle’s dead were kept until proper obsequies could take place. Torch light flickered and steadied on the walls.
Three bodies lay in one of the middle rooms, each clad in brown death robes. Braith found a bracket and slid her torch into it.
“Takimi Baker,” she said, flicking back the head covering on one of them. “She died last week—the wasting sickness, I think. Something with her lungs. It happens to bakers.” She opened the robe on the second corpse. “Oh. Damn, I knew him. He worked in the armory. I didn’t know he was already dead. A mercy.” She pulled the robe open further to reveal the wreckage of an arm. Lines of gangrene crawled toward the shoulder. She covered both corpses. Kieve walked to the third slab and opened the robe, disclosing the apothecary’s lined face and grey hair. She took off her overgloves and tucked them under her belt, and untied the cloth that held the apothecary’s jaw closed.
Cold had kept the blood from settling. The woman’s backside looked as clean as her front, her skin unmarked by anything save age and old scars from pruning hooks and shears, small burns and scrapes, and child-belly lines along her stomach and thighs. Her neck felt solid, straight.
“Dunun said she wasn’t sick,” Kieve said. Braith nodded.
Kieve pressed her lips together, thinking. The woman looked as though she slept, save for her pallid skin. Her hair lay loose around her shoulders, dark grey streaked with a lighter grey, still thick. Kieve reached for a strand of it and tucked it behind her ear. Something caught her eye.
“I need more light.”
Braith brought the torch closer. Kieve pushed the apothecary onto her side. Puwan held her there while the Rider lifted the woman’s hair aside and touched the skin at the base of the jaw, under the ear. There, the tiny mark left by a shayka. Dunun could be forgiven for not knowing to look for it; the shayka was an Inguruki weapon, and a rare one. She stood away. Puwan rolled the body onto its back again.
“Rider?” Braith said.
Kieve shook her head. She tied the apothecary’s jaw closed. Her anger rose and she paused to deal with it before smoothing the brown robe closed over the apothecary’s body.
“Rider?” Braith said again.
“I don’t know,” she said as she pulled on her gloves. “I’m not sure. Can you let me be unsure, for a while longer?”
Braith frowned. “Does it threaten order?”
“I don’t know,” she said again. “Give me one day. If I have to leave before then, I will tell you everything I’ve learned.”
They stood for a moment, staring at each other, until Braith grimaced. “We shall have to trust you, won’t we?” she said. “Cadoc gives us no choice.”
“Is it that hard, to trust me?” Kieve said.
“It is hard to be helpless,” Braith said. It wasn’t an answer.
The cold rooms opened into the ossuary’s lobby so they came out under the four-faced mask of Death: solemn, smiling, sleeping, screaming. Instead of entering the Garden of the Lady, they climbed another set of stairs into the base of the White Tower. Braith left them in the wide, curved corridor at the Tower’s base. Kieve watched her go, listening to the small sounds that Puwan and Glyn made as they waited for her to move. She cursed herself for not remembering, in the heat of her argument with Ilach, to ask him to call off the bodyguard. She thought about the mark on the apothecary’s neck. She needed to see Esylk.
The best disguise, Cadoc had confided once, in his cups, is no disguise at all. This from a man whose every movement was observed and discussed, and who needed disguise as much as a duck needed a saddle. Kieve pressed her lips together and turned up the stairs. Puwan and Glyn clattered after.
Esylk was not in her rooms, according to her Chancellor. He looked beyond Kieve’s shoulder at the soldiers and blanched. Kieve frowned, realizing what it must look like even to someone from out-province, a Rider flanked by two others.
“They are my bodyguard,” she said. He nodded, polite and disbelieving, and she turned away.
They passed the stairs leading to Taryn’s rooms and along the flight of the arched bridge above Hueil’s Garden. Someone had thought to stretch ropes. The ice underfoot seemed to move, tilting them first to one side then to another, but the sleet had not returned and the wind had lessened a little. Below, two servants spread gritty ash along the slick ice in the Snake, pressing it down behind them. Where bits escaped, the wind lifted them and pushed them into snow banks beside the walls, leaving a pattern that was no pattern at all. She hesitated at the end of the bridge, where she could turn right and up toward Cairun’s chambers or left and down toward the Great Hall. Puwan and Glyn stopped too. Her body remembered the feel of his fingers, the smooth skin along his hips and the weight of him. She shook it away. The bodyguards wouldn’t even let her use a chamber pot in privacy. She turned away from the right-hand passage and stopped, remembering Leyek in the passageway the morning before. She turned back.
Mazus opened the door, looked beyond her at the soldiers, and paled.
“They are a bodyguard,” Kieve said. He turned his wide gaze to her and chewed his lip. “Only a bodyguard. From Commander Ilach. Because of the guildmaster’s death,” she said, impatient with herself for needing to put him at his ease. “Lord Cairun?”
“Oh! Oh, he is here, he is...come in. Come in.” Mazus swung the door open wider and ushered them into the crooked hallway, past the door to Cairun’s bedchamber and into his small reception room.
Heavy drapes and tapestries covered the walls. A fire burned above grotesquely worked firedogs
. Cairun sat before it, a book on his lap. He closed it as Kieve and the soldiers came into the room and knelt.
“Rider,” he said, rising and giving his hand to her. “You have come to Take me?”
“No, my lord,” she replied, standing. The room was warm. Her stomach unclenched a little, but he didn’t return her smile. She thought of Daenet’s question in the watch niche. “In truth, no. They are a bodyguard, set by Commander Ilach to keep me from being stabbed or poisoned.” He arched an eyebrow. She nodded. “That is all, my lord.”
“Ah. Then welcome, Rider. Sit, please. Mazus, some wine.”
The Chancellor scurried out. After a moment of hesitation her bodyguards took seats at the far side of the room. Kieve glanced down, realizing that Cairun still held her hand. He smiled and she rolled her eyes at him, repossessing her hand. He returned to his seat and, at his gesture, she opened her cloak, draped it over a chair, and sat beside him, separated by the table that bore his book. Still Calton’s Cosmology. She removed her gloves and touched it with her fingertips. The fire spoke, in small cracklings and hisses.
“I grieve with you,” he said at last, “for the death of your guildmaster.”
“I thank you. Shared grief is more easily...” After a moment she said, “I can barely comprehend it.” She put her hands into her lap and rubbed them together, cold despite the warmth of the little room. “He was—he was a second father. I was his apprentice, did you know?” Cairun nodded. “Of course you would know. I should not be surprised at what you know.”
Mazus came in with the wine. He set the flask on the table and, receiving his master’s nod, took two cups to the soldiers. They refused them but Puwan came to stand at Kieve’s shoulder, eyes on the winecup at her elbow.
“You will have to let him taste it,” she said to Cairun. “Or he will not be satisfied.”
Cairun’s lips tilted. He poured wine into his cup and Kieve’s, and leaned away so that Puwan could take, and sip, and wait, and nod, and hand the wine to the Rider.
“They will not leave the room?” Cairun murmured as Puwan returned to his seat. She met his deep brown gaze and felt heat move up from her core. She shook her head.
“Pity,” he murmured. “It must be hard, to be without your solitude.”
She sipped a little at the wine. “I haven’t apologized for intruding on your own solitude. I am sorry. I come with no excuse.”
“You no longer need one,” he said. He caught her gaze again. “I have spent these two days,” he said quietly, “with the print of you on my skin.”
“And I yours,” she murmured back.
His hand lay on the table, palm up. Her fingers itched to touch it. Instead she curled them around the wine cup again. The fire leaped up the pyramid of logs, sending tongues of light lapping across the room.
“I am told that my uncle weakened during the night,” he said.
“It is like Calton’s proof of infinity,” Kieve said, tapping her fingers against the book’s cover. “He loses half his strength, then half his strength again, then half again, then half, and never dies at all.”
Cairun laughed, surprised. “You have read Calton?”
“Years since, my lord. In Koerstadt.”
“At the university?”
She shook her head. “The Guild provides us with a thorough education. You schooled at Koerstadt?”
“In the university at TanaRive. I was fostered there,” he said. “When my fostering was done I convinced my father to let me stay at the university, at Lords College.” He sipped at his wine. “I miss it, Koerstadt.”
She remembered the university, housed in buildings that sprawled along the banks of the Morat across the river from the docks and markets of Koerstadt. Each structure was made of stone from a separate province, one yellow, another rose, a third cream, a fourth the pale green of the serpentine rock from Teneleh Province by the sea. Along one side a meadow swept up the hill to meet the outriders of the forests of Brodveld Province; along the other side, thick stone walls kept either the students or the townsfolk out, depending on whom you asked. The students were fond of oratory and pranks; the members of Lords College had a reputation for music and prided themselves on their close harmonies, often used to celebrate, in mighty chorus, sex and drink.
“Isbael was at Koerstadt,” Kieve said.
“Not as a student, when I was there. She was Dalmorat’s steward then.” He had opened the collar of his shirt. She looked away from the hollow of his throat, where she had set her lips. “I saw her once during my years there—my father asked her to command my return.” Kieve raised her eyebrows. “I didn’t go. I was lucky she only asked and did not advocate. Marub Castle may be the family’s ancestral home, but it holds no allure for me. You have not been there.”
“No,” she said, but she saw it clearly on the map in her mind. A small holding in the cliffs above the Morat, far to the north with mountains shouldering close on either side.
“Count yourself lucky. Koerstadt in comparison seemed like—seemed like riding into the Cloud Palace, and Marub Castle a frigid rock.”
“Why did you return?” she said.
He shrugged. “My father died. Do you miss it? Koerstadt?”
She cradled the winecup in her palm. “No, my lord. I hated it.”
“Hated it!” He shook his head, dark curls catching amber gleams in the firelight. “Hated warmth, and music, and decent food?”
“Oppressive heat, and buildings always between myself and the horizon.” She sipped at the wine.
“Everything there is shaped with a sense of the beautiful, whether the making of sculpture or the piling of fruit in a stall.”
“The stench, constantly, of people everywhere, and a million things sweating or rotting or cooking.”
“Shops and parks and the street of booksellers,” he said. The corner of his mouth tilted.
“Through which one can’t move for the crowds of people and horses and wagons and the piles of garbage.”
“At least it is cleared away every night, not thrown into a great stinking midden below Lord’s Walk,” he said. “Surely you can’t admire that?”
“No, my lord. But that is not the choice.”
“Ah,” he said. “The Outlands.”
She nodded and put the cup down. “Yes, my lord. Mountains clean and sharp as teeth, and air so fresh it seems new made, and snow blowing from the peaks like locks of hair.”
“And not a human being in sight.”
“Yes. Oh, yes.”
He spread his hands. “There is a world between Koerstadt and some forsaken mountain north of the border. So how will we manage this, Rider?”
Her breath stalled. “My lord,” she said, her voice low. “Is there a future to discuss?”
The smile left his face and he looked suddenly young. “I didn’t think so,” he said. “I don’t know. Kieve.”
“My lord?”
“Not ‘my lord’,” he said. “Say my name.”
She moistened her lips. “Cairun,” she said. His name tasted like cream in her mouth and she said it again. “Cairun.”
A small silence came then, into which the fire crackled. She thought that she could feel every curve and plane of his body, for all that table and chairs and clothes divided them.
“Lord Taryn,” he said.
She shook her head. “Taryn was a friend. It was lonely here. That is all.”
His expression did not change but he sat back a little. She looked at him, her world gone quiet.
“I no longer know my own mind,” he said.
“Dalmorat is famous for that,” she said, and thought about Lords College, and the guild hall, and Uruk, and his skin against and within her own, and the wind pouring off Stormbringer’s flanks. And of lying under the stars in a circle of stone, telling Inguruki tales to Pyrs. It brought her back to the small, warm room. She touched her wine cup again.
“My lord, yesterday morning, a young shadi from Myned...”
�
��Ah? Oh, the boy Leyek. The fool. Lost a trinket to me at the bones and came begging for its return.”
“And did you give it to him?”
“No, I no longer had it.” He leaned back a little. “I had already given it to Gadyn, since he likes such curiosities. I sent the boy along to him.” He raised an eyebrow. “Do you know what it was?”
“Do you?”
He shrugged. “Some bit of frippery. I’ve seen such items before, border-goods, probably carved by some odorous Trapper and sold for a sack of grain, or an apple. Is it important?”
She shook her head. “I have not seen him since, and I was curious.” She pushed the wine cup a little bit away. “My lord, I must go. There are people I must find, and talk to.”
He frowned, then the frown cleared. “About the guildmaster’s death.” He stood, releasing her to stand also. “I had forgotten for the moment. Forgive me.”
“Of course.” She pulled the cloak around her shoulders. Behind her Puwan and Glyn came to their feet, settling their cloaks and swords. “I thank you for your hospitality, my lord.”
“My lord?” he echoed, and touched his fingers to her hand. She stopped in the act of drawing on her gloves. His touch felt like the bar the huckster held out at the fair, while his assistant cranked and folk paid their stivers to be shocked. “Say my name.”
“Cairun,” she said. He moved his fingers. She bowed and turned and left, the soldiers at her heels.
* * * *
They came down the last flight of stairs and into the heat and warmth and light and noise and smell of the Great Hall. Balor’s minions had piled the boards high with food: baked goods, some cheeses, few meats. Castle shadeen stood along the walls. Puwan nodded to one as they passed and tilted his head toward the tower stairs. The shadi shook his head a little. The land-barons had separated into groups; one around the chair where Gadyn sat, another centered by Taryn Steward. She wondered if his betrothal was common knowledge yet. She wondered if Cairun knew about it, and caught herself. Of course he knew.
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