by Sonia Lyris
He stood at the other end of the room, watching. Waiting.
“And what about later, on the way north?” Amarta asked Maris.
He had taken off the headwrap, brushing fingers through his dark hair and unbraided beard. “She makes a good point,” he said to Maris. “I can hardly protect her all the way to Yarpin from a separate room.”
But this was not merely a practical matter; Amarta had worked so hard to bring the dog inside where she could see him. She didn’t want him back on the street where he might vanish into the shadows again, watching her. Hunting her.
Maris looked at each of them and shrugged. “As you say.” At the bed Maris pulled out the cot tucked underneath, moving it to the other end of the room where he stood. Then she took a chair at the table, unlacing her boots, pausing as she realized Amarta had not yet moved. “If we are to share a room, then you must also rest. He will not trouble you tonight, that’s certain.”
Amarta watched him as he walked the room, working the locking mechanism of the door, checking behind the pictures on the walls, dropping down to examine the carved base of the circular table that sat near the bed. At the window he opened and closed the slats, looking outside where swells of laughter and applause came from the watching crowds in the courtyard and on the walkway outside the room.
Finally he sat in the chair on the other side of the table from Maris.
Amarta sat as well, dragging her gaze from him, taking off her own boots, the ones Maris had bought for her. Elkhide, heavy, and so comfortable, with horn buttons to wrap at the sides. Without question the most marvelous and expensive things she had ever owned.
One more debt she could not pay.
He spoke to Maris in Perripin and she answered shortly, clearly still annoyed. But he kept on talking, his face animated, and after a while Maris laughed, a sound that shocked Amarta. She watched as they talked, gesturing, switching between Arunkin and Perripin and back.
“The ship was sold,” Tayre was saying, having dropped the other accent entirely. Or maybe he had simply adopted a new one.
“A terrible shame,” Maris said.
“An excellent price,” he replied. “Most of it to the owner, some to me.”
“And then?”
They spoke like old friends, Maris and her hunter. The way Maris acted, as if he were an ordinary person, made Amarta feel very strange indeed.
“Spice tariffs are a symptom,” Maris was now saying.
“Then why does it cost more to transport spice legally through a few Perripin states than from Kelerre to Yarpin? That’s the Perripin confederacy in action, I’d say.”
“The states are lazy, is why. Distracted by their own political dances,” she said, then switched to Perripin again.
Amarta’s eyes wanted to close. Surely if Maris said she was safe tonight, she was.
“Have you heard,” he was saying, “Kelerre’s council levied a tax on goods in and out of Yarpin?”
Maris made a surprised sound. “That’s a change that ought to get the capital’s attention and inspire a healthy black market. Just your specialty, Enlon. Pah,” she exhaled in frustration. “I keep calling you that. How many names do you have?”
“A sufficiency.”
Maris snorted. “I don’t like it.”
Unless—the thought came to Amarta—he had no intention of returning her to the capital at all, but meant to kill her the moment Maris left. Her eyes snapped open again.
The look he was giving Maris now was full of mocking concern. “Forgive me my unintentional deception, High One.”
“Watch your tongue,” she said, but she was smiling as she said it.
“What does that mean,” Amarta asked. “‘High One’?”
Maris raised her eyebrows at Tayre, inviting him to answer. As he turned his look on Amarta, she felt a chill.
“It is the formal address for mages,” he said. “No one else uses it, not even the most arrogant of monarchs, not even the Anandynars, for fear of offending mages who might overhear. The large ears of mages.”
Maris snorted. “Yet you make it sound an insult.” To Amarta, amused: “He enjoys taking such risks.”
“As he enjoys killing,” Amarta said. In the silence that followed, she wished she’d stayed silent.
“Is that what you think? I kill for amusement?”
She gave a shrug, not knowing how to respond. He stood and slowly walked toward her, stopping a few feet away from where she sat on the bed, crouching down to bring his head level with hers.
“I take contracts,” he said. “If the work I have agreed to requires killing, I kill.”
Anger flared inside her. “You take the lives of strangers for money.”
“Would you prefer I kill only those I know?”
“You should leave the innocent alone.”
“Ah, now you want me to decide who is innocent and who is not?”
“You twist my words. You hunt those who have done nothing to hurt you, merely for coin.”
“No one suffers from your visions, Seer? You never take coin to tell people what tomorrow will bring them? All those who pay you are innocent?”
She shook her head. “I did not choose to be what I am.”
“What makes you think I did? We both use our abilities for our benefit, even when there is a cost to others.”
“No. I am nothing like you. I would never do to anyone what you’ve done to me these many years.”
“Never? Truly?”
“You’re a killer. A dog. A monster.” Years of fear and anger drove her to spit insults, but the satisfaction faded quickly.
He spoke softly. “I watched a girl wearing your cloak die near what I suspect is the hidden city of Kusan.” He paused. “Ah, you are not surprised to hear this. So I ask you: Did that moment have your touch upon it?” He watched her a moment, then nodded. “We are not so different, you and I.” He shrugged a little. Suddenly, smoothly, there was a knife in his hand.
Amarta jerked backwards on the bed.
“Enlon,” Maris said in warning.
The knife rotated in his hand like flowing water, black hilt pointing toward Amarta. He lay it on the floor by her boots and stood. “Now that we walk the same path, to the same destination, you have nothing to fear from me. You should have a knife. This is a good one. Take it. A gift.”
He withdrew to sit again in the chair across from Maris. They resumed their conversation.
Amarta reached to take the knife, turning it over in her hands, examining the sharp blade, the black hilt carved with designs of waves. This knife, she was somehow sure, was the very knife with which he had threatened her in the Nesmar forest.
She looked at him again, and he looked back, offering a small, friendly smile that from anyone else would have set her at ease.
Touching the flat of the knife blade, she failed to foresee her own blood, but she no longer found that particularly reassuring.
At last she drifted off to sleep, the two of them still talking. When she woke hours later, her back to Maris, moonlight through the slats showed her his sleeping form on the cot at the other end of the room.
He slept. Like an ordinary man.
She did not. In the morning they packed and went to buy horses.
“I will see you a ways north, I think,” Maris said, looking between the two of them.
Amarta recognized Tayre’s horse as the same one that had run along the rock banks of the Sennant River while they escaped on a raft. He was big and beautiful and dark chestnut colored, with white forelock and feet. He nuzzled her hand.
“Not your fault, to have such a monster ride you,” she whispered, petting his nose.
Maris helped her up on the spotted mare chosen for her, larger than the Teva’s shaota Amarta had once ridden before. As Amarta sat there, clutching the tawny mane in terror, she wondered how it could seem so much farther to the ground from atop the animal than it had from the ground.
They left the city, taking a smaller road no
rth past farms and orchards. He rode in front, which suited Amarta. Better to watch him than have him watch her. After a time, Maris came even with him, and they began to talk again in that confusing mix of languages they had, telling each other stories, told so compellingly that they caught her imagination right until they continued in some other language.
At her frustrated sound, they both looked back at her.
“I can’t understand that. Would you go on, but in Arunkin?”
They did.
Light showers came and went, cooling the heat of the day, wetting the dusty roads into mud. When the sky darkened toward night, they stopped at an inn where Maris arranged for them two adjoining rooms. “One night for you to sleep without fear of him,” she explained softly to Amarta.
When trays of stew and bread came, Tayre took his into the other room. Amarta watched him go, feeling slightly less reassured than she might.
“He is no danger to you, not with me here.”
“And after you’re gone?”
Maris dipped bread in her stew, took a bite. “You’re looking in the wrong place for your problems. You should be considering the Lord Commander and what he will want from you.”
“You don’t know what Tayre is capable of.”
That earned her a sharp look. “You don’t know what I’m capable of, either. But know this: his word is reliable. If he says you are safe with him, you are.”
Amarta did not believe that. They ate in silence. When they were done, Maris said, “We have another long day’s ride tomorrow. Do you think you can rest now?”
“Yes.”
But while Maris breathed deeply in sleep, Amarta watched the door, remembering the ways and times she had fled this man, how close he had come each time. How close he was now.
This was absurd. She of all people should be able to know what he might and would do.
But his future was strange; it seemed to shift each time she looked. A fog of possibilities.
Vision warned of no particular threat from him, at least not tonight. Somehow that was not enough.
She must have fallen asleep, because she started awake from a nightmare in which he chased her across mountain paths, barely missing with each grab. In dream she scrambled up and down drifts of snow, climbing and falling, sounds of pursuit close behind. When the knife he had just given her in the waking world was in dream again at her throat, she had woken, gasping.
A bit of moonlight came through the shutters, a shining line across the wooden floor.
“Ama?” Maris asked. “What is it?”
“He is in my dreams.”
“Are my assurances so worthless? He will not touch you.”
“He has tried to kill me so many times.”
“More in your dreams than in truth, I think. Will you take some herbs to help you sleep?”
“No.”
“You must sleep.”
“No.”
Maris sighed, pulled back the covers, rose and lit a lamp. “Go talk to him.”
“What? Now?”
“We have days of riding ahead, and it will only get more difficult as we pass into Arun and onto the Great Road. I don’t want to have to tie you to your horse to keep you from falling off in exhaustion. I’m here, Ama. Even with the door closed, you could not be safer.”
“You can protect me from him, even through the door?”
“I can.”
Amarta wondered how that worked. But then, people probably wondered how her ability worked, too.
So she stood, pulled shirt and trousers over her underclothes, and walked to his door and stopped. What was she going to say? Feeling foolish as she stood there, knowing Maris’s eyes were on her, she pushed the door open, stepping into the dark of his room, and shut the door behind.
She heard nothing. Surely he would have heard her come in?
“Hello?” she whispered.
“I’m here,” he said, from closer than she expected.
She pressed back against the door, hearing him move in the darkness, his feet brushing the floor. Surely he could move more quietly than that; why would he want her to know where he was?
A flame sparked to light, the lamp in his hand, showing him standing there, dressed, eyes on her. He put the lamp on a table, still watching her. “What is it?” he asked.
There was no safety anywhere. Not in questions, not in answers.
“I have nightmares about you.”
“I know.”
“You know? How can you know that?”
“I see it in your eyes. I hear it in your tone. The way you hold yourself. I have been feared before, Amarta. I know what it looks like.”
“I want you to stop chasing me. My visions tell me you won’t hurt me tonight. That to travel with you is probably safe. But—” Her voice caught. She took a step forward, as if daring herself. “But I don’t believe it. And my dreams don’t believe it.”
“What can I do to reassure you?”
She took another step toward him. Close enough to touch. She raised a hand, then stopped, not sure what she intended.
“Go ahead,” he said.
Holding her breath, she touched his arm. Through the shirt she felt muscle, warmth. She pulled her hand back. Was he really made of the same stuff she was? Not a shadow at all? “Are you truly done hunting me?”
“You say you want to deliver yourself to the Lord Commander. As long as this is so, I have no cause to pursue you.”
She bit her lip, quick, hard. “What could I give you to make you stop coming after me and my family, forever? To give me your word you won’t ever hunt me again?”
“I only take one contract at a time. Nothing you can offer me will change that. While your intention and my contract are aligned, you and your family have nothing to fear from me.”
“But after that? You could come after me again.”
“I could, I suppose. I hope not to.”
“Why not? Because the dog can never catch this rabbit?” Her taunt felt childish. Maris, she reminded herself, would not always be so near by.
He chuckled. “In time, Seer, I would find a way.”
“Then why not?”
“As long you’re running, you’re weak. I’d rather see you strong.”
She shook her head, angry at this pretense. “You’re a liar. I don’t believe anything you say.”
“Sensible, especially with me. But don’t listen only to your fears, Amarta. Listen to your reason. Why would I lie about that?”
“I don’t know. I’m sure you have reasons. Why would you want me strong?”
“If you don’t believe anything I say, why should I answer you?”
“Tell me,” she said. “I want to hear it.”
He put one foot in front of the other and, with a startling, simple grace, let himself down to the floor, arriving cross-legged, looking up at her.
What was this? Was he trying to reassure her somehow by making himself seem smaller? That was absurd; she knew better. To show him so, she sat down on the floor in front of him, though not as smoothly.
“I’m curious,” he said. “About what you’ll do when you’re not running away.”
“I don’t believe you.”
He held out both hands, palms up, toward her. A clear invitation. She shook her head. Refusing what, she wasn’t sure.
He waited, hands held out, unmoving.
“What do you want?” she asked at last.
“Take my hands.”
“Why?”
“Please.”
His voice, so often light and even, now held some entreaty. But that, too, meant nothing—he lied as easily as he took in air. He could pretend anything.
Still he held out his hands. Would he wait all night?
Maris, she reminded herself. Near by. With a deep breath, she put her hands on his. As her fingers touched his palms, she felt a brief flash. An echo of the past, a whisper of the future.
“Are these the hands that terrify you, Amarta, that give you
bad dreams?”
She nodded.
“Feel them. Are they warm? Are they alive?” He gently pressed her hands with his fingers and thumb.
Again she nodded.
“Where are these hands?”
She frowned in confusion and looked at his fingers curled up around the sides of hers.
“Here,” he answered for her. “Not in your dreams. Here. On the ends of my arms.”
She giggled and tried to stifle it, which only made it worse. He smiled in response. She felt a subtle shift inside herself, as if he were, for the first time, truly on her side. He didn’t seem the killer who chased her down forest paths, or the shadow that stalked her through the mountains.
She quickly pulled her hands back. “This is another game. You toy with me.”
“Go back to your bed and sleep, Amarta. Dream of something else. And in the morning,” he added, standing, again fluid in his motion, his hand downward in an offer to help her stand, “you’ll still be safe from this hunter.”
“You could be lying.”
“Of course. But since you can’t be sure, is it not sensible, at least for this journey, to assume I mean what I say?”
For this she had no answer. After a moment she took his hand, let him help her stand.
They rode across the border, into Arunkel, and then north through Gotar Province. At the Munasee Cut, they paused before the floating bridge, and Maris looked a question at Amarta. She looked into the near future, the one that included them crossing the bridge safely, and nodded. They walked the horses onto the wide wooden floating bridge and across without incident.
Munasee, a day’s ride east. Where she and Dirina and Pas had last fled, from the man at her side. Who was no longer, however temporarily, her enemy. Such an odd change.
From there they rode north through Olapan Province. Mountains rose to the east, snow heavy and white on distant, jagged peaks.
Day after day Amarta steeled herself for Maris to leave, but she stayed. She would leave, she kept saying, just not yet.
Waiting until Amarta was at ease with him? That would not happen, she resolved.
But Tayre was friendlier each day. A little warmer. Smiling at her. It was easy to forget the many things he had done. Too easy.