by Angela Boord
He winced again as he pulled on his gloves, then nodded. “Give it to me now. The kacin is wearing off. I’ll have to hurry.”
I handed him the silver rod and he bent his head. The rod began to glow with a bright white light so intense, I had to shade my eyes. When I looked back, the end of the rod had turned a shade of dark gray, almost black, and smoke drifted up from it.
“Take the silver end, Kyrra,” he said. “Don’t touch the black end.”
I was shaking. I remembered the way Jon and Arsenault had talked about magic and giving me a new arm in the house on the Talos like recalling it from a dream. “Is it hot?”
“The Qalfans call it lunar caustic. They form it from silver and spirit of niter. It’s not hot, but it will burn and stain your skin. Take that end and dig it in the cut—along the sides and inside. It will burn out the fevers.”
His voice sounded strained. Sweat glistened on his forehead.
I willed my hand to stop shaking as I took the silver rod from his hand. I expected it to be warm if not hot, but it was cool to the touch. Taking a deep breath, I turned it down into his wound and watched in alarm as smoke curled up from the edges.
“Arsenault—”
“No, that’s what ought to be happen. Just—finish. It’s…uncomfortable.”
He was breathing fast and sweating more. “Was your marriage so bad?” I said, hoping to distract him. “That it destroyed all hope in future entanglements?”
“You mean, beyond a silk scarf and a cold night?”
I ran the silver stick into the deep end of the cut and winced as he tried to pull away from it. I couldn’t put my hand on his shoulder to hold him there, so I had to commit to my strategy of distraction. “Yes,” I said. “Because it seems as if life would be…long…that way.”
I told myself I was just keeping him talking, but perhaps I was asking him mostly to give me some hope for the future, too, that it wouldn’t always be this turning of old pain and new emptiness.
“When one has been married,” he said slowly, and with great effort, “there is always a piece of you that you have given away. That you will never get back, because you gave it as a gift. Perhaps there will be hope, one day, but for a long time, you just feel like a ghost. A shade of who you once were, when there were two of you.”
I took the stick out of his wound. “And your marriage…”
“Sella died a long time ago.”
“How?”
He wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of a rumpled sleeve and his gloved hand. “K-killed. Knifed.”
I sat down on the chair beside him heavily and set the silver rod on the table. I didn’t want to ask, but I had to. “And…children?”
He let his head fall back against the wall, eyes closed, and nodded. “Two boys. A little girl. Pippa. She had red hair. Redder than her mother’s.” He took a great gulp of air and began stripping off his gloves. “Kyrra, let’s not speak of this.”
The pain in his voice cut me. Perhaps I should have shown him more compassion, the way Margarithe would have. “But, Arsenault, you don’t seem that old.”
“I was…very young.”
I knew what it was like to be very young. I stood up, taking the ointment with me, then knelt next to him again. He turned his head in my direction and I scooped the ointment out with my fingers and smeared it on his wound. The medicinal smell again filled my head with memories. For a moment, the only sound was the guttering candle and my fingers rubbing the ointment over his raw flesh—blackened now where the silver had touched it.
“I sometimes wonder,” I said, while I concentrated on the glistening ointment, “what my child would have looked like, had he been born. I didn’t know, but I always think of him as a boy. With dark hair and eyes. Like Cassis.”
For a long, stretched-out space, Arsenault was quiet. Then I felt his fingers against my temple, smoothing back the strands of hair that had fallen past my face. I leaned into his hand and he let it linger there, comfortingly, his thumb against the beat of my pulse.
I wondered if I could make the night stop. If we could sit here like this until the sun came up, with his hand warm against me and his fingers in my hair, and neither of us asking anything of the other except only to be.
But then he pulled his hand away. Slowly.
“Kyrra,” he said, and I looked up at him. He seemed as if he wanted to say something but then thought better of it, and instead he said, “Will you write in my book? So I don’t forget?”
Chapter 11
I wrote as much as I could in Arsenault’s book, but after a time, he began to shiver and mumble in his own language, and though I used every blanket he owned, nothing seemed to help until I gave up and lay down beside him. Then, finally, his heart slowed its panicked beating and the chills stopped coming. I must have fallen asleep too. In the morning, I woke up wedged between his body and the wall.
He had shifted so that my head rested on his shoulder. His arm curved around me and his hand lay on my hip, as if he had drawn me closer in the night. One of the blankets covered me, too, and I didn’t remember sliding underneath it. His chest moved slowly with every deep breath and his skin was cool to the touch. The silver he’d magicked had worked.
I should have gotten straight up. But it was warm under the blankets on a cold morning, and I had no desire to endure the knowing glances of those who thought they knew what had happened. When I raised my head to look at Arsenault, a heavy pain lumbered through it, and my mouth felt like someone had stuffed a rag in it. I wasn’t used to drinking. I wanted to close my eyes and go back to sleep, and curse whatever other people thought; it wasn’t like I had any remaining reputation to protect, was it?
But the thought of him waking to find me in his bed gave me pause. I wasn’t sure I could bear either a positive or a negative reaction. He seemed to be sleeping deeply now. His unbound dark hair fanned out over the pillow and hid his scar, and he didn’t look as intimidating, though his beard had grown a little wild. Instead, he felt…safe. Like a shelter, a place to hide when the world outside was cruel.
I wanted to sink back into that shelter and let the outside world be cruel to itself. But I had learned not to trust what I thought I wanted, so I did the smart thing and got up.
Arsenault stirred and murmured something which might have been my name, but didn’t wake more than that. I straightened his blankets, closed up his book and put it back in the chest, and then went to draw water to wash. I was embarrassed to be seen leaving Arsenault’s room in the dawn light, but I knew the only cure for it was to get on with the day.
I ran into Margarithe at the cistern.
She straightened up stiffly with the bucket in her hands when she saw me. “Kyrra.”
I tried to smile at her. “He wanted me to pull his stitches. And burn out the fevers in his wound. He didn’t want to subject you to that.”
She looked at me warily. “You don’t dance around an issue, do you?”
“Better to meet trouble head on. If it’s not going anywhere.”
She poured the water into the large urn she carried, then passed me the empty bucket. I hooked it onto the pulley and began turning the winch, sending the bucket creaking downward toward the black water at the bottom. I leaned over to watch its descent and was caught by the shimmering skin on the surface of the water, like a mirror that reflected my face back up to me, the wounded, frightened eyes with the hollows beneath. I looked like a winter-starved doe.
“Kyrra,” Margarithe said. “I said, is he all right?”
The bucket broke the surface of the water and I rubbed my eyes. Three glasses of wine had been too much—though, truly, I hadn’t felt myself for a week or more. I alternated between feeling light and untethered and heavy as lead, as if I were being pulled down into the soil. And it was so cold—so much colder than it was back in his bed, under the covers. “Yes,” I said. “I think he will be. He wasn’t himself last night. Lobardin gave him something for the pain. He wasn’t in h
is right mind.”
Maragarithe eyed me skeptically. “Are you sure?”
What was I doing, handing out this hope to her, even as I hoped she wouldn’t take it?
No, I did hope she would take it, because I didn’t need any entanglements.
If she was right, he’d been hired to keep an eye on me, the same way my father had hired the Qalfan chirurgeon. And the way he had held me tight to keep me safe from Cassis in the Day Market and touched my face in the dark last night meant nothing, nor did the warmth I felt this morning when I woke at his side.
I could feel my face heating at the thought and I ducked my head to keep her from noticing. “He wasn’t,” I said, truthfully. “Today he’ll be better, and I’ll work in the kitchen and sleep in the combing house tonight.”
“You slept—”
“He had chills. I stayed to take care of him. But they’re gone now, and I think he’ll heal fine. You know how men are.”
Margarithe smiled slightly. “Do you think he’ll be out today, or if he’s still in his sickbed, will he let me see him?”
I began to winch the bucket back up, thankful that she hadn’t pressed the subject. “If I know Arsenault,” I said, “he’ll be up and around whether it’s a good idea or not.”
As it turned out, I was right.
He was up and around by afternoon, limping into the kitchens with a walking stick made of two stout olive branches twisted together. I didn’t know where he found it or if he’d made it himself, perhaps using magic. But the wound in his leg didn’t slow him down much.
He’d bathed and changed into his Aliente clothes. His beard was neatly trimmed. When he saw Margarithe and me side by side at the table, kneading bread dough, he stopped as if the sight pulled him up short. Then he put his head down like he was charging toward battle and clomped up to the table with his stick.
“Arsenault!” Margarithe said. “Should you be walking on that leg?”
He frowned down at it. “It’s fine,” he said. “Just sore. It will heal better now it’s clean.” He looked down at the dough that I continued to knead.
“Your hand’s better, Kyrra?”
“It is.”
He rubbed his beard, and I darted a glance up at him, trying to read his face. He looked like I’d felt the day after he and Jon gave me the drugged wine.
“Why are you here, Arsenault?” Margarithe said cautiously.
“Well, I thought I might get something to eat,” he said. “Since I missed breakfast and the midday meal.”
He looked over at me in accusation.
“You seemed to need the sleep,” I said.
He made a sound somewhere in between scoffing and agreement, then turned to Margarithe. “Is there anything to eat? Something I can carry?”
“Why do you need to carry it? You can have some soup and bread and sit right here.”
He shook his head. “I have work to do. Kyrra, will you clean up and come with me?”
Margarithe drew in her breath sharply. I looked up at Arsenault’s face to see if he had noticed, but he seemed distracted. His gaze roved over the room, toward the door, as if he was impatient to get on with things.
“Why?” I said.
His attention came back to me. “I have to ask you some questions about your father. And the”—his voice stumbled—“the Garonze.”
I kept my eyes from widening, barely. Nodding, I wiped my floury hand on my apron and reached behind me for my cloak hanging on the wall.
“Margarithe, will you get me something to eat?” Arsenault said, his voice softening, and when I turned, it was to see his hand on hers as it rested on the table.
She nodded, turning her head to the side almost shyly, and disappeared back into the pantry to collect a lunch for him.
I looked away. It wasn’t my business what he did, and he hadn’t been in his right mind last night, so maybe he had changed it. He hadn’t asked me to lie down beside him, for the gods’ sake.
I began wrestling my way into my cloak, wishing I could give it a good beating.
He surprised me by pulling the cloak up on my other shoulder. I stared up at him. He hardly ever helped me with anything if I could do it myself. But now he was standing there looking worried, and his expression erased my own irritation.
“Is it important, Arsenault?” I said.
“Your father hanged him,” he said. “Before I got a chance to ask any questions.”
His hurt leg slowed him down, so I could keep up, but he gave no other quarter to his injury. We walked away from the barracks into the gray, windy day while he ate another of those sandwiches he favored, and I hunched up in my cloak, trying to avoid the wind. It seemed colder than it ought to.
“Is something wrong?” he asked.
“What would be wrong?”
“You’re…quiet.”
“Am I really such a chatterer?”
“No, no, that’s not it. I meant, usually you’re more… Did I say something? Last night?”
Not last night, I thought, and I wondered if maybe I’d just forgotten pulling up the covers as I’d slept beside him, and maybe he’d never realized I was there after all.
But I didn’t voice any of that. Instead, I said, “Nothing to wound me, if that’s what you mean.”
“It’s always a haze with the kacin. Just makes my memory worse.”
I squinted at him. “Did you take a blow to the head?”
“No, just the leg.”
“Not fighting bandits. I mean before. I know this isn’t your first military service. And your nose…”
He looked down at me. “What’s wrong with my nose?” He sounded half-amused and half-annoyed.
“There’s nothing wrong with your nose,” I said, trying hard not to sound defensive. “It’s a perfectly fine nose. But how did you break it? Maybe the blow affected your mind.”
He gave me a strange look, then laughed. “I doubt that. Although a more sensible man would probably have left that tavern before the brawl broke out.”
“Then your scar?”
His smile died and he touched the scar the way he did sometimes, self-consciously. “No, not the scar.”
“Then I don’t understand. Why do you worry about your memory? Not long ago, you recited every verse of ‘The Robber King’ to me. No one has all the verses memorized, especially the boring bits in the middle.”
“Memorizing songs isn’t difficult. It’s events that I lose.” He looked over his shoulder nervously, as if trying to make sure no one would overhear. “It has to do with the magic.”
“Your magic eats memories?”
“In a manner of speaking. I have this gift…but I paid a price for it.”
“What kind of price?”
“The kind of price I would never pay now, knowing what it was. But all that’s in the past. I can usually remember what happened yesterday. Unless I’ve been drinking or smoking kacin.”
“So you don’t remember last night at all?” I said.
He glanced sideways at me, then back at something on his other side. “I didn’t say that.”
Who in all the hells knew what that meant, but I was afraid to ask. “Well,” I began, “you did say something of Margarithe.”
“Did I?”
“You said she was a mistake. And yet, just now, you didn’t act like she was a mistake.”
“Does that bother you?”
Yes, I thought.
“No,” I said. “I’m just trying to discern you, Arsenault. Are you the kind of man who will lead a woman on just to get lunch, or was the kacin talking last night, or…”
“I started thinking about what you said.”
“What I said?”
“About life being long. And how maybe she just wanted comfort too.”
“Oh.”
He was facing straight ahead, squinting at the horizon as he spoke. Still not looking at me, thank all the gods. “I’m not in a position to make promises. So, I try to avoid situations where they�
��ll be required. But maybe…it was cruel of me to assume she wanted more than I could give.” He took in a big breath. “On the other hand…if a woman needed more than comfort…it would be crueler of me to lead her into thinking I could promise anything more. No matter how much I might want to.”
I tried to sort that out.
I knew his touch in the dark had been nothing, and that the warmth of waking this morning was only an illusion. I’d spent a long time telling him I wasn’t his whore, hadn’t I? But if he sought his comfort with Margarithe and spent his time with me, did that mean he really did think of me as a friend, or did it instead mean I was strictly business?
I had never had a friend, so I didn’t know how to tell the difference.
My mother had spent a lot of time trying to teach me how to analyze the behavior of others, but I wished her teaching had extended to analyzing myself. Why had it ached to see him touching Margarithe’s hand? Perhaps it was because I knew no one would ever touch me like that. Cassis and I had spoiled tenderness in our desperate rush for desire, and now I would never experience it. What Arsenault had shown me last night had nothing to do with that kind of love. He was my protector, perhaps, my teacher, maybe even my friend, but I was certainly not a woman in his eyes.
I wondered why that thought hurt. It shouldn’t hurt. I didn’t want to be Arsenault’s woman, or anyone else’s.
I pulled my cloak tighter over my right shoulder and wished the wind would go away. “Well, I wrote in your book for you, like you asked me to,” I said.
He looked troubled. “Yes. I saw that.”
“Why was the rest of it blank? Is it new?”
“I hide the entries. With a glamour. It’ll wear off eventually, but by then…well, I suppose I won’t begrudge anyone reading it.”
“You mean it will stay until your death? Or that you have to actively—I don’t know what words to use—set it? Are there spells or magic words or—”
He chuckled. “No. It’s not like stories. Magic’s not tied up in anything outside itself. It just is. No one knows why it calls to one person and not to another. But the ability to use it is something you’re born with—like yellow hair and blue eyes. You don’t need any special words.”