by John Tristan
I took my hands from his grip and laid them in my lap. They looked like a stranger’s hands, narrow and ink stained. “I searched everywhere.” My voice seemed to come from very far away, over the rush of my own blood and heart beating like the sea in my ears. “All the temples and crypts.”
“Not everywhere.”
I pulled myself back from the rushing sea in my head and forced myself to focus on General Loren. “Where is he?”
He stood, frowning, and dragged me to my feet. “He is in Ashen.”
My hands became fists. “What?”
“He killed a boy. Ran him through in front of witnesses.”
I shook my head. “No.”
“I know you care for him, but this chaos...it changed people, often for the worse.”
I closed my eyes. “What was his name? The boy he killed.”
“Symön Barrabar.”
Black fireworks sparked behind my eyes. I doubled over, making a harsh, wordless sound; the General backed away from me, flinching.
“A boy. Maybe sixteen.” I gasped the words out. “Symön—do you know where I last heard that name?”
The General looked at me with his grave eyes. I took a breath and stilled myself, and the tears rolled down my cheeks, scarred and whole alike.
“Symön is the boy who set our house aflame and shut us up to die, General Loren. He is the one who Roberd Tallisk believes killed me.”
Loren nodded, almost to himself. “Does that make his death permissible?”
The tears still rolled one by one and fell to the kitchen floor. “No,” I said finally. “No more than Count Karan’s. Does it free your conscience that his came by blade instead of poison?”
He bristled. “That isn’t—I wish—”
I cut him off. “I wish the dead still lived, General. And I wish I had not been burned. I wish that my house still stood, and that my best friend had not had to flee in darkness from your mobs. But what I wish most of all?” I looked up at him and wiped away my tears. “I wish to see my master.”
Chapter Sixty
They took me to the palace in a plush, old carriage, repainted a martial blue. I wore my best clothes and my hair was freshly combed. I could have been riding to a display, almost. A first display, judging from the rhythm of my heart. Only my scars and my unusual escort broke the illusion.
It had taken nearly a week for General Loren to arrange this. I had barely slept or eaten since he had first come to the Teinnes’ house. Only Doiran’s steady hand had kept me from storming Ashen myself—his steady hand and his quiet advice. We wrote to judges and clerks, using Deino Meret’s seal; as a master of his art, he had earned their ears. My evidence turned simple murder into vengeance; with a death price paid to Symön Barrabar’s kin, Tallisk would be free.
The year’s imprisonment that his crime required in addition to the death price, he had already served. A year. I could not believe it; I cried when I heard it.
Now I had arrived at last, and my every breath hurt like a blow. No one had told me how I would find him: whole or scarred, sane or mad. Whether he knew I lived, whether he knew I was coming for him, I did not know.
Loren had sent two soldiers to escort me—veterans with closed, serious faces. They had their own share of scars, old and fresh. There were guards at the palace gates, still in red: the old city watch had not been thrown out with their masters, though no one called them bloodguards anymore. They waved us through into the courtyard. We had to leave the carriage to head down the narrow, sloping cobblestone path to the dungeons below.
“Are you all right, sir?” one of the soldiers asked, and I could not help but smile. It was the first time that anyone had called me sir.
“Fine,” I said. But I was trembling.
More guards stood at the heavy gates to Ashen, these in soldier blue. They checked our papers, stamped with the General’s seal, then searched me for weapons. Their hands were brisk and uncaring. I stared straight ahead. The doors were opened with a slow creak. The smell of the springs below the city hit me, sharp and all-encompassing. It was warm and damp; the walls were touched with mildew. Lamps burned behind wire cages in the wall, flickering with a strange, bluish light.
“In here,” one of my escorts said, and he guided me down a narrow corridor. I heard distant screams and the scrape of metal on rock. I was beginning to sweat. Down below, in the deepest cells, it must be near scalding, the very walls too hot to touch.
I thought of Isadel’s mother. How she had died here. If it were me—if I had landed in Ashen, instead of Tallisk—I knew I would be dead by now. The hot, damp air would have finished me in weeks.
He had been here a year.
They ushered me into a strange room: narrow, but long and high-ceilinged, with two doors opposite each other.
“This is the entryway. We must wait out here,” one of my escorts said. “Knock on the door when you are done. We’ll take you home.”
I nodded; the motion near dizzied me.
With a sympathetic look, he closed me in. I was alone. I looked up; there was a slit of light above, and a touch of fresh air cut the dank atmosphere. The room held a stone chair, a stone table. Wood would rot too soon here, I supposed. I took a seat; the stone felt strangely warm beneath me.
There was the metallic sound of keys turning in a lock, and then the door opposite me opened. A man entered. He was tall and stooped, with the veiny nose of a longtime drinker. His eyes passed over me and he grunted. “You must be here for the parolee.”
I stood up and bowed to him. “I am here for Roberd Tallisk, sir. Please, does he know I’m coming?”
He grunted again. “He knows he’s being released. That’s enough.”
“Please,” I said again. “How is he?”
He laughed, then—a thick and grating sound. “He’s alive. That’s enough.” He turned his head down the hall he’d come up from. “Bring up the parolee!”
I took a step back, out of the light, and turned my scars to face the wall. From the corner of my eye I saw two guards, hunched and burly, enter the room with their prisoner held between them.
“By order of the court,” the red-nosed man said in a rushed drone, “we release you, Roberd Tallisk. Restitution has been made. Do not err again.”
The guards shoved him forward and he stumbled, but did not fall. I held myself still, hands clenched. My nails pressed white lines of pain into my palms.
The guards left and shut the door. I barely saw them go.
Tallisk turned his face up to the bleary light. His hair had grown past his shoulders. He was pale and pared down, that I could tell from the corner of my eye. I wanted to turn and face him. I wanted to touch him, to make sure he was real. But fear held me still, in shadow and in profile.
“I dreamed,” he said, and his voice was rusty with long disuse, “that I was free. But you were in darkness, and I could not reach you.”
He staggered forward. I stepped back, flinching. The narrow room wavered through a teary haze.
“Etan?” He laughed hoarsely. “Are you Etan or am I mad?”
“You are not mad.” My voice came slow and halting.
He reached to me and this time I did not move; his left hand touched my scarred cheek. Two fingers—the first and second—had been truncated down to the middle knuckle, fingertips replaced by white, knotted scars.
“You live,” he breathed, and he pulled me close with clumsy strength. My cheek lay flush against his chest, and I felt the beat of his heart—a warm irregular drum. “You live,” he said again, and I called out his name; it echoed up the high walls and out into the daylight.
Chapter Sixty-One
Sun fell in narrow bands across Tallisk’s back; he had slept through the night and the morning. Noon warmed him now, and he stirred a little, not quite waking. I watched him from the doorway, not daring to enter.
We had stayed in rented rooms near to the palace. I had not wanted to take him to the Teinnes’ house; it was too full, too lively. He had spent a ye
ar in darkness with no company save the guards who brought his meals. He still flinched from the light and the noise of the world. Loren’s men had told me how they kept murderers in Ashen. Once a week they would take him up to one of those narrow rooms to stretch his legs and show him light. It seemed cruelty more than kindness, that one sliver of sun and air in a dark place.
He looked sallow and underfed; there was too little flesh on his frame. They had given him no combs or scissors for his hair, and it had grown in tangles, still a starless black.
He had not escaped without wounds. There were the foreshortened fingers of his left hand, and a spiraling scar on the wrist. His right hand was missing the two smallest fingers, and dead flesh had been cut away from its palm and his forearm, leaving them near-skeletal, all tendons and leathery skin.
My scars he had not seen, save those I couldn’t hide. We had slept in separate rooms and barely spoken. After General Loren’s soldiers had entered the narrow stone room, Tallisk had released me and moved like a ghost where they had led.
I wondered if he thought he still dreamed—if he expected to wake in darkness. I wondered how he would look at me when he knew himself awake.
With a slow groan, he turned onto his back. The familiar tattoos were all there, perfect and unmoving: the starburst at his collarbone, the weird faces on each shoulder, the cramped lines of writing around his neck. Only the blurred, elderly ink on his forearms had been touched by the fire. That, and his hands.
I bit my lip until I could no longer feel it under my teeth. I must have made a sound. Tallisk opened his eyes.
We watched each other silently for a long moment.
“I killed a man,” he said. “A boy.”
I nodded. “I know.”
“I had lost you.” He dragged himself half upright. “I woke in ash and I had lost you. I found my sword. I thought...I thought we were at war.”
With his every word I stepped closer to him, into the sunlight. He watched me with wolf eyes, hungry and wild.
“I looked for you. Hunted for you. Then I heard him. That laugh.” He held his hands up. “My hands. I didn’t notice they were burned. Not until after. After I had killed that boy.”
I crawled onto the bed and took his wounded hands in mine. He tried to pull away, but I held fast.
“Look at this,” he said. “Do you think I will ever hold a needle again?”
After a long, silent moment, I gently let his hands drop away. Slowly, button by button, I took off my shirt; with careful hesitation, I slid out of my trousers. My scars were exposed, every strange white inch of them, the ruin of his art before his eyes. Only a few curls of untouched greenery still remained, like weeds in an empty garden, still and dead.
“Look at me,” I said softly. “We have both been wounded, Roberd. What—what you made me... there is nothing left of it.” My breath caught in my throat at the words; a bitter fear rose in me like bile. What if he saw nothing but a ruin, this man who so loved beauty?
“Nothing left?” He laughed, a sound that seemed to pain him. “Is that what you think?” He reached out with his left hand then, to touch the flat white scars on my belly. I shuddered, and he pulled back. His eyes were dark. A corner of his mouth curled back over his teeth.
“This is my doing.” The softness of his voice was dangerous, a low growl before the kill. “Isadel was right. I should have sent you away.”
I blinked. The world became slow and clear; it was as if a god had brushed against me and given me, for a moment, a visionary’s sight.
I saw two futures laid out for us. In one, we would pretend we and the world had been unchanged by what had passed this year. That future, I thought, would be brief and bittersweet, its small joys finally swamped beneath grief for a life that never was. The other...I could not yet see its shape, or whether it was filled with joy or sorrow. I did not know whether it ended here, tonight, or in a shared ossuary long years from now. All I knew of it was its possibility—and that it had no room for the men we had been a year before.
So long I had lived on the edges between things. I was Gaelta and Keredy, rich and poor, canvas and artist, lover and whore. I had built a home there, on those boundaries. But here was only a choice, without room for compromise—and at least half of that choice lay in my hands.
I moved slow, as if in water. Some ancient grace lay upon me, beneath the scars. It was a hard-earned mercy, perhaps, but no one says the gods are fair.
I kissed him first on the palm of each hand. His wild eyes went wide and still. Slowly, I drew my fingers through his tangled hair and pulled him close to me. He let out a small, wordless cry when our mouths touched, as if he was afraid to kiss me.
I guided him; my hands had never been this sure. On the soft tilting place at his hip was the small, unfinished tattoo I had given him, more vivid than any other ink he bore. I laid the tips of my fingers against it; these lines were all delicate scars.
Then I drew back. I tilted my head and squared my shoulders. All of me was on display to him.
“All I have to give, I will give to you.” My words came quiet and sure. “If you want it.”
The air between us was still. I kept time with my heartbeats. Each one seemed to stretch on for hours. I counted them out in the silence of my mind: One. Two. Three.
Then his wounded hand closed on the back of my neck and pulled me into his kiss with bruising force. With all the hunger of a starving thing, he answered me in full.
He pulled away from me, and it was my turn to utter a wordless cry; he stroked the back of my neck with his remaining fingers, and I leaned in to his touch. “I can’t make the same offer.” His breaths came quick and ragged. “You see, you already have me.”
I looked up into his dark blue eyes. I knew that he would tell me nothing but the truth.
It was as if a final weight had dropped away, and I was flying. The sunlight through the window made bright patterns across our skin. I fell backward onto the bed under the weight of his touch.
With clumsily careful hands, he slowly traced every inch of new flesh, every wrecked curl of ink. I pulled him closer; my eyes were wide open, drinking him in. “Roberd.” I half breathed, half laughed his name.
“Etan,” he said, and he lowered his lips to the scars on my chest, tracing the new nerves with his tongue—tasting me, his mouth growing insatiable. The care and wonder of his touch still remained, but now a hunger burned beneath it. His skin was hot against me, his teeth lightly grazing me, old strength returning to his hands, wounded or no.
His rough kisses moved to my neck then, and lower again, tasting the hollow of my belly, sliding down between my legs. I curled my hands into claws against his back, feeling the shift of his muscles—he had grown thinner and sparer in his prison, but the outlines of him were still there, waiting to come back into their full strength.
“Etan,” he said again, making a low growl of my name, and then he slid atop me, parting my legs, clenching my wrists in his hands; he did not move as if we were some fragile, broken creatures, but as if we were both hale and whole.
He came into me with a low cry, pressing his hot mouth against my neck; with a sigh, I found we still fit together, each subtly lathed to the other’s pattern. I surrendered to his kisses, to his thrusts, and the smile on my face was the smile of triumph.
In the gold of noon light, we began work on the design of our future.
Chapter Sixty-Two
Smoke rose in lazy coils, white tendrils of incense mingling with the oily fug of the funeral pyre. I watched it rise, vivid against the hard blue of the sky.
It was the edge of winter, nearing spring, but cold enough still that my breath hung visible in the air. I wore a dark coat lined with fur, a little too large for me. We were few here on this chill morning: too few. The city had healed, but it would never be the city I had first come to. So many had left it never to return, one way or the other.
The priestess said her final benediction, and the corpse burners came t
o extinguish the pyre. When we had gone, they’d gather the remaining bones and stack them carefully in the ossuary. The ash would go to fertilize the temple grounds.
I felt a steadying hand against the small of my back. “Are you all right?”
Smiling through a thin, teary haze, I turned in to Roberd Tallisk’s embrace. He put his arm around me. The two silver fingers of his right hand clicked together as he brushed them through my hair. He had kept his own short since trimming a year’s untidy growth away. It suited him. He had regained his natural bulk, but something austere would always linger in his features, sharpened by the militant cut of his dark hair.
“Will you cry for me,” he asked in a whisper, “when I go on the pyre?”
“If you prove as worthy of it,” I said, the jest soft between us.
Deino Meret had not been treated gently by his last winter, less mild than the two that had come before. He had shivered and coughed, and the last of his sight had gone from him. He had never come back down from his attic, but when Roberd had kneeled by his bed and taken his hand, he had smiled. When he passed, it was with a sigh and a slow closing of his eyes.
Doiran and Roisel had come to the ceremony, and Padrig, who knew the corpse burners. Amere writ-Meret was there; she wore a tunic in mourning colors that showed the old ink on her arms—misty moons and a faded sky filled with blue and purple stars. She had returned to the city a month before, face browned by Southern sun.
The corpse burners finished their work. Two handfuls of ash they took and placed in small lacquered boxes. Amere took one and Roberd the other. He frowned, enclosing it within the circle of his hands. They gleamed in the wintry light, those hands—or at least, two whole fingers and two fingertips, a silversmith’s masterwork. Roberd could no longer hold the hammer and needle of his trade, but with care he had learned to steer a brush.
“You should have this,” he said.
I shook my head. “He was never truly my master. Not as he was yours.”
“I have not been an apprentice for a long time.” He turned the box round and round, eyeing its subtle design. “If you won’t have it, then let me put it in the workshop. He would appreciate it.”