“And you told this middleman about Melanna’s broken arm.”
Messine shook his head. “Yes. I was rattled, upset with myself. I had a whiskey and spilled more than I should. But that’s all. I don’t know his name. Average looking man, so I doubt my description of him would get you anywhere.”
Mikael puffed out his cheeks. Cerradine had known. This unknown employer could not be Faralis, because there was simply no way Mikael could see Cerradine allowing that man to keep a foothold in the Anjir household. In fact, there had been a maid reporting to Faralis at one point, but Pamini had managed to turn that maid, her girlfriend now, into an agent for the army instead. So this interested party was someone else, and that someone had murdered Aman Jusid to avenge Melanna’s injury.
“How is she?” Messine asked.
Mikael dragged himself back from his suppositions. “Oh, uh . . . she’s been placed in the Family temporarily,” he told the younger man. “I saw her in the infirmary yesterday, and she seemed overjoyed, despite the splint on her arm.”
Messine shook his head. “Not her—Miss Perrin.”
Mikael hid a smile. Messine had once said that Perrin was prettier than Shironne. “Has the colonel not kept you up to date?”
Messine shifted from one foot to the other, either cold or uncomfortable. “It would be . . . inappropriate for me to ask.”
And yet he’s doing so, knowing that I might be sympathetic.
Because, like Shironne, Perrin Anjir was still a child by Family standards. The colonel would expect Messine to keep that in mind. “Miss Perrin’s better, I think. Lady Sera returned from Halvdan Province and treated her rudely. Apparently having someone to argue with was what Perrin needed to get her out of bed.”
A faint smile touched Messine’s face, quickly gone. “I’m glad to hear that.”
Both of them were close to violating principles ground into them through their childhoods. Well over a year until Perrin Anjir was an adult, so Messine couldn’t talk to her, either. “I’ll let you know how she’s doing whenever I see you,” Mikael said.
“Thanks,” Messine said with a dismissive shrug.
“Are you going back to the colonel’s office after they clear out the house?”
“Yes,” Messine said. “Back to shuffling papers.”
Unfortunately, that was a large part of both of their jobs. “Thank you for answering my questions,” Mikael said. “I know you didn’t have to.”
“Just be careful, Mr. Lee,” Messine said as he headed toward the kitchen door. “This employer didn’t want me to know who I was working for. He probably won’t appreciate you seeking him out, either. Nor will the colonel, I think.”
Mikael watched him walk away. The colonel knew, and the next logical step for him would be to go to the colonel to ask for the identity of Melanna’s mysterious guardian. That same employer had likely paid off Joio Dimani, using a charity to do so.
A light snow began to fall, and he gazed up into the clouds. The city’s lights were cast back down at them, giving the city a dull glow.
Why would someone check on the youngest daughter’s well-being regularly like that, but not Shironne or Perrin’s?
Then he shook his head. The answer had been obvious all along, as well as why the colonel didn’t want Mikael pursuing this.
Melanna wasn’t Tornin Anjir’s daughter. Somehow, she was the child of another man—probably someone taller and with reddish hair. Savelle Anjir dreaded the slightest whiff of scandal, so having that come to light would be crushing for her. Especially since she would likely marry Colonel Cerradine when her time of mourning ended.
Can you hear me? Did you know?
He waited a moment, trying to feel an answer.
He didn’t actually catch words from Shironne’s mind. Nothing as clear as that.
But he had a distinct sense she found it amusing that he’d needed to ask at all. Because of course she knew. There was no way for her mother to keep a secret of that magnitude from her. She would have felt it every time she touched her mother’s hand. Perhaps she even sensed a difference when she touched her little sister.
And if this link between him and Shironne worked properly, he would have known, too.
Chapter 21
* * *
SHIRONNE LAY IN her bunk, listening to the other girls sleep, soft breathing interspersed with an occasional sigh.
Mikael had learned her mother’s deepest secret today.
She hadn’t made the connection between the death of the man Jusid and Melanna’s questionable parentage, so she’d never thought Mikael needed to know. Or that if he did need to know that at some point, he would be able to find it in her mind. But he hadn’t. And Colonel Cerradine could have told Mikael the truth but must not have believed Mikael would persist in his inquiries after being warned off.
If she were allowed to talk to Mikael, that would have saved him an afternoon trip down into the city.
If they wouldn’t treat me like a child.
He had fretted for a while before falling asleep, frustrated that he couldn’t talk to her about it, frustrated their parents’ lives never seemed as simple and pure as he would like. And even in sleep, his distress followed him.
The change came suddenly, his distress going from a vague discomfort to panic.
Shironne sat up, her skin prickling in response to his fear. She realized then, exactly what troubled him tonight. He feared a dream. It had been so long since his last dream of death that she’d begun to wonder if they’d gone away.
His fear spread around her now, though, like a rising fog in the barracks room.
A gasp came from the next bunk over as Tabita woke. She moaned, her distress shaking Shironne’s fragile hold on her self-control.
“Stop it,” Shironne hissed in her direction.
“I can’t help it,” Tabita returned through chattering teeth. Mikael’s panic reflected back out of Tabita’s thoughts, increasing the assault on Shironne’s mind.
“Shut him out.” Maria spoke calmly from across the room, not bothering to keep her voice down. “It will only get worse if you reflect.”
“Won’t someone just wake him?” Shironne asked. “Or calm him?”
There were plenty of sensitives up there in the palace. Surely one of them could reach him in his dream. She’d done it before, listening in to his dream, giving him an anchor. His panic had disappeared then. Deborah told her she’d served as his focus, keeping him from broadcasting the dream out to all the others.
“Nothing stops him,” Tabita muttered between clenched teeth.
Not true. Because he made me into a person who could.
Shironne struggled with her blankets, finally getting loose and rising from her bunk. She located her jacket on the shelf and pulled it on over her pajamas, then started hunting the new soft slippers the quartermaster had made for her to use on the sparring floors. “I’ll tell him to be quiet.”
“What do you think you’re doing?” Tabita hissed after her, but too late.
It took Shironne while to work her way up the stairwells and onto the great stair. Shironne could sense Mikael’s distress flowing out from where he slept in Above, like a distant light or sound, as if he called out to her. She couldn’t tell how others were perceiving this, only how she did, but it felt almost like a vine drawing her closer and closer.
Fortunately, the expectation that blacks weren’t supposed to interact with browns made it easy to avoid questions. When she made her way along One Down to the grand stair, the sentries there allowed her to pass, too distracted by Mikael’s broadcasting to protest, all save one. Shironne told that woman she was going up to the king’s household to see her mother, apparently good enough for the moment.
Once she got up the grand stair, though, the palace wasn’t easy to traverse. She paused in the hallway—that would be One Up East—with no idea what was around her. She felt for the wall and followed that. Unfortunately, there were no helpful guidelines to tell her wh
ere she was, no chevrons on the wall to direct her. She stumbled over the edge of a rug, but pushed herself up again, hoping she wasn’t about to fall up a stairwell. Or down one, for that matter. Even so, she followed Mikael’s call, up more stairs and along a chilly hallway until she laid her hand on a closed door. His quarters, she decided, sensing him not far from her now.
How long did that take me? Half an hour? She had no way to tell.
She turned the latch under her fingers and was relieved to find it unlocked.
Mikael dreamed his death dreams not as true dreams, over quickly and past into lighter sleep. Instead he was there, inside the person about to die. His dreams could take hours, Deborah had once told her.
And this one hadn’t even started. He was spinning out all this fear because he knew a dream was coming. A bad one—one that he didn’t want.
She pushed her way into the room. It was small, tight, and smelled of old draperies and of him. Cold fled in from where there must be a window. Almost there.
Shironne hoped nothing lay strewn across the floor. No, he was neat, a side effect of being raised with a blind member of his yeargroup. Her gloved hands encountered a chest not unlike her own, then a desk, and finally her shin painfully located the wooden frame of the bed, the third time in one day. She reached down and laid a hand on bare skin—Mikael’s shoulder.
The panic fluttering through her awareness ceased, like a bird coming to her fist. He’d recognized her touch, even in the worst of his fear. He’d been calling her, wanting her to come and anchor him again.
Keeping one hand on his shoulder, she clamped the other between her knees and managed to wriggle it out of the glove. She replaced the gloved hand with the bare one, then sank down onto the cold floor, wedged between his bed and the desk. She felt his perspiration, the cold sweat that panic left behind, his alone and easy to identify. His mind swirled down, his heart slowing, the blood moving deep under her fingers. He’d been on the sparring floor. His muscles ached.
His dream pulled at her, dragging her down into sleep, and her head fell to his shoulder as she gave in to the dream.
* * *
It felt warm in the room, and the light slanting in through the windows told her it must be early morning.
How is this possible?
It wasn’t winter in Mikael’s dream, either.
Shironne surveyed the room, seeing a bed with a man and a woman lying there, talking as if she didn’t exist. She quickly averted her eyes, staring back down at the dark, wooden floor.
She wore her old embroidered slippers, she noted with surprise, not the boots she’d been wearing in the Fortress. She stroked her hands down the front of her old blue tunic. Green and gold embroidery wrapped the cuffs of her sleeves. A bit of ribbon trailed from the edge of her green petticoat. She hadn’t worn this outfit in at least a month now.
She glanced at the hands touching her tunic, those long fingers she didn’t recognize, shaped now like her mother’s, not the child’s hands she remembered having before she went blind. Her braid reached almost to her waist, regaining the length cut off in the asylum. Tying off the end of her braid was the green ribbon she’d lost at the riverside last month.
This is how Mikael sees me. He’d encountered her clothed like this and, clearly, it had left an impression.
The man laughed in a warm and velvety voice, something familiar about the sound of it. Recalled to the dream, Shironne dared to look up again, and flushed when she saw the man wore nothing save a sheet that had slipped down past his hips. At least he lay turned away from her. The man had the darker coloring characteristic of Anvarrid blood, but the woman’s body was mostly hidden from Shironne’s view. A pale hand touched the man’s back, more the color one expected from a member of the Family.
Shironne caught her lower lip between her teeth. The last time she’d slipped into one of Mikael’s dreams, the victim hadn’t been aware of her presence. The bed’s occupants must be similarly unaware of her here. Their privacy didn’t matter now, though, not if she was to help. She stepped closer until she stood next to the bed, able to make out a few words of the lovers’ whispered conversation.
Shironne lightly touched the man’s bare shoulder and drew away, frustrated. The man was Mikael—or rather, Mikael was with him, his own mind tangled inside the man’s thoughts.
Shironne turned her attention to the woman instead. The woman’s ivory-colored hair spilled about the pillows unbraided. She touched a hand to the man’s cheek and called him Val, which told Shironne nothing.
Shironne made her way around to the other side of the bed to see the man’s face. Even with his olive skin, a smattering of freckles dusted his cheeks and the bridge of his nose. His laughing blue eyes looked oddly familiar, and Shironne wondered if she had ever met this man, if she’d perhaps seen him somewhere before she’d lost her sight.
The woman ran her fingers across his lips, and he leaned down to kiss her, a gesture of pure affection. He told her he was glad she’d come after him, and that he always felt hunted here.
Shironne touched a finger to the woman’s bare shoulder, hoping to find the woman’s name, but she thought only of the man—Valerion. Shironne jerked back.
Mikael’s father. That’s why his eyes look familiar.
This wasn’t a dream; this was the memory of a dream.
That was how it could be a summer morning, not a winter night. That was why the man in the dream was really Mikael—any connection to the true Valerion was long gone. She was only seeing Mikael’s memories of this long-ago dream.
The door slammed open. A gunshot sounded and Valerion shook with the impact, his eyes going wide in shock. He gasped for air, sounding strangled, his body falling across the woman’s, trapping her beneath his weight.
Shironne backed against the wall, too shocked to interfere. She couldn’t see the doorway from this side of the bed. The killer stood outside her line of sight.
Valerion struggled to breathe, mouth open as the woman tried to right him. She eased him onto his back, attempting to fight back the blood bubbling from his lips. A man’s voice spoke from the doorway, a horrified exclamation. “Lydia? Oh, gods . . .”
The woman rose from the bed, her face cold with fury, and pursued the unseen killer. When she moved away, Valerion’s head fell to the side, his eyes turned directly toward Shironne. Blood dribbled from the corner of his lips, staining the sheets. His eyes filled with tears.
He knows he’s dying. Shironne heard a second gunshot, but her eyes remained fixed on Valerion’s blue ones, so startlingly like Mikael’s. His mouth moved, words fighting to escape his lips that no one would ever hear.
No one but Mikael, far away, a thirteen sleeping in his barracks and sharing a dream from which the others in his yeargroup couldn’t wake him. Somehow his father had reached out, locking on to Mikael’s mind in his sleep, drawing Mikael nearer and nearer to death as the son sought desperately to hear what his father was saying with those last blood-soaked breaths.
Shironne chased that memory tucked away in Mikael’s mind instead of the dream overlaying his thoughts. The fright of his young yearmates, the return of the dream over and over, eventually leaving him bleeding into his lungs, too close a bond causing his body to mimic his dying father’s injuries. Worse and worse with every dream.
And he never found that answer, no matter how long he hung on, no matter how near he followed his father to the edge of death. But she could pull him back from that cliff.
“Wake up, Mikael,” Shironne yelled at him—the Mikael buried inside that long-ago memory of Valerion. “You have to wake up. Now!”
* * *
Shironne fell out of the dream with her hand still on Mikael’s bare shoulder, her legs gone numb. She sensed his mind barely rising out of sleep. Then it sunk back down into slumber’s grasp. True sleep this time. She raised her head, wondering at the chill around her, so cold after the warmth of the room in the dream.
“He usually sleeps out the rest
of the night,” a hushed voice told her—Deborah’s. “He should be all right, dear. Come away now.”
Exhausted, Shironne eased herself off the floor, feet tingling painfully as feeling crept back into them. Deborah touched a hand to her face, allowing her to feel her concern.
I should never have come to his room alone.
Deborah put a hand under her elbow, and Shironne followed her out of the small room. “Let’s get you back to your barracks,” Deborah said. “We’ll discuss this in the morning.”
Chapter 22
* * *
SHIRONNE SUSPECTED the others were staring at her—surreptitiously, but still staring.
Only Tabita had asked what she’d done, and Shironne couldn’t tell her. Most of the yeargroup, however, was aware of two very clear facts: Shironne had left their quarters, and Mikael Lee’s broadcasting stopped.
They ate breakfast in the mess hall, amid the crowd of talking and moving people. Shironne considered this one of the worst rooms in Below. The echoes confused her, making it difficult to get her bearings in the large room. Gabriel laid his hand on her shoulder as he passed, a friendly and reassuring touch. Shironne just hoped none of them would ask questions she was forbidden to answer.
Not surprisingly, Deborah sent for her directly after breakfast, and then escorted her up to the office of the Daujom.
Long before they reached the top of the grand stair, Shironne knew Mikael was there. He worried for her, hoping he’d not gotten her into trouble. She wished reassurance back at him, frustrated that she couldn’t seem to make him understand her words the way she could his. They could discuss everything if only he could do that.
Deborah led her into the office, and Shironne crossed quickly to the desk on the upper level. She had been in this office before, but she also possessed a mental map of the room’s layout, stolen from Mikael’s mind, so she negotiated the awkward single step up to Dahar’s end of the office without falling on her face. She guessed there were a couple of guards in the room as well, but their mental stillness made her unsure. Possibly three? Luckily, the hot-tempered Sera wasn’t present.
In Dreaming Bound Page 19