by Patty Jansen
But the man, black-haired and unshaven, was staring past his wife and Myra to the sled, his suspicious piggy eyes narrowing when they met Loriane’s.
“Where be the sorcerer?” His mouth twitched. “That be my sled and my bear.”
Loriane said, “Tandor is injured. Can we please—”
“Who are you?” Eyes narrowed at Loriane. “You be the city whore?”
“Da!” Myra hissed. “Mistress Loriane has helped me. I was in pain for three days, not one day as you said, Ma. The baby was facing the wrong way and I did so much screaming I couldn’t talk for two days. Without Mistress Loriane, I would have been dead.”
The man studied Loriane’s face. His suspicious look didn’t vanish. “That be so?”
“Please,” Loriane said. “Could you offer us a meal and a bed?”
“It’ll cost,” Myra’s father said. He crossed his arms over his chest.
“I can pay.”
“Two silvergulls?”
Loriane swallowed hard. She had no money. Never in her life had she begged for anything. “Yes.” Her voice sounded unsteady. She had never lied either.
“You can’t do that, Da.”
“Myra, we don’t be rich people. If we don’t ask money from visitors, they’d ruin us.”
“I didn’t pay anything for her help. It’s only fair that she gets to stay for free.”
“Myra, get inside,” her mother said.
“Why? I’m not a child anymore.”
Her father said, “You’re fifteen. You know nothing about money.”
“But I know about what’s fair. And this isn’t—”
“Go inside.”
“Da, you can’t do this—”
“Please!” Loriane called out.
They were all silent, staring at her.
“I’m happy to sleep in the shed, but can I please use your outroom?” Loriane’s voice cracked. A few days ago, a thin and very pregnant girl had asked the same question while standing in the warm and comfortable room of her limpet. At the time, Loriane had been angry with Tandor and had thought of refusing.
“Of course you can,” Myra said. “Come, I’ll show you.”
Loriane pushed Tandor aside and rose slowly from the sled’s seat, wincing at a stab across her belly. Neither of Myra’s parents spoke although Myra’s mother’s eyes widened and fixed on Loriane’s belly.
Myra crunched back through the snow and took Loriane’s arm to help her down from the sled.
“Mother, Father, this is Loriane. She and Tandor will be staying in the upstairs bedroom. Loriane, this is my father Ontane, and my mother Dara. She has a bit of healing knowledge. I am sure that between the three of us, we can help your child into the world safely. Come.”
“Leave it, Myra.” Her father eyed his wife, and she shot back an angry look at her husband. “Mistress, go with my wife. She’ll show you the way.”
The woman stomped off without a further word. Loriane followed her into the house, through a dark corridor with a threadbare carpet, into a damp kitchen, where a pan bubbled on the stove. Whatever was in the pan smelled strongly of game meat, and Loriane wasn’t sure if the smell made her feel hungry or sick.
The woman flung open the door at the back of the kitchen. An icy wind came in. “The outroom.”
In the gathering dusk, Loriane stumbled into the freezing shack. There was a wooden plank with a hole, where she sat to do her business a few measly drops at a time. It burned. The child’s head inside her pressed on her bladder and relieving herself made little difference to her discomfort.
The sound of angry voices came from the kitchen.
Loriane wriggled off the seat.
There was no jug of water to wash herself, only a stack of cloths she dare not use. The baby kicked in her ribs, hard.
Both Myra and her mother were waiting for her in the kitchen. Myra still held the child in the sling and leaned against the wall. Her mother was stirring a pan. Neither was looking at the other.
“Come,” Myra said into the icy silence and started up the stairs, so narrow and steep that Loriane had to support herself by running her hands along both walls.
The upstairs bedroom was tiny and freezing cold. There was a hearth in the corner—empty, and just enough space around the not-quite-double bed to walk.
Loriane stood there, fighting back tears. She just wanted to go home, and not be dependent on these people who clearly didn’t want her. It had not been much of a life but it had been hers. Her modest limpet, the income she earned, her patients.
Isandor. She had always claimed to hate him, but at the same time, she loved him too. He was a good boy with a good heart. She hoped he was far away from the City of Glass, in a place where being Imperfect didn’t matter. If it was true that he had fled with the Queen, she hoped that they were happy.
“I’ve got to . . . I’ve got to get Tandor,” she said, to find the entire family standing in the doorway.
Behind them stood Ruko, carrying Tandor. Well, she couldn’t see Ruko of course, but Tandor floated in the air as if carried by invisible arms.
Ontane turned to Myra. “Letting the mistress here use the room is one thing, but I don’t want him in my house.”
Loriane wasn’t sure if he meant Tandor or Ruko.
Myra gave an annoyed snort. “Why do you keep going back on your promises all the time? Can’t you see he’s injured?”
“You keep out of it, girl.”
Myra turned to her mother. “Ma, you heard him, didn’t you? Da agreed, didn’t he?”
“My agreement didn’t include sorcerers and ghosts,” her father said.
Her mother said, giving Loriane a prim look, “Myra, dear, you have to understand. Our safety comes first. We still don’t know what the sorcerer—”
“Stop it! Just stop it!” Loriane shouted.
Silence.
“Take him back down, Ruko—”
“No!” Myra yelled. “You call yourselves my parents? I’m ashamed of you. If you make them sleep in the shed, then I’ll go there, too.”
“Don’t be stupid,” her father said.
“Then he stays here. I brought them here. They’re my guests. Now get out and give them some rest.” Myra ushered her parents out the room and shut the door. “Put him on the bed.” This to Ruko.
Tandor floated through the room onto the bed. He groaned, his eyes half open.
“You stay here and make yourself comfortable, Loriane. I’ll go and get some water to wash, some firewood and make sure to bring you some food,” Myra said and left the room.
Loriane dropped on the edge of the bed and sat there, staring in front of her. In a thin strip between the tattered curtains, a thick layer of ice covered the window. It was bitterly cold and her breath steamed. On a table in the corner of the room, a fur blanket moved and spread over Tandor, as if it flew by itself.
Ruko sat down on the other corner of the bed; she saw that by the way the mattress was pressed down.
“Look, Ruko,” she said. “I think you better go somewhere else. These people are nervous about you.” Never mind the other people, she was nervous about him.
By the skylights, he could kill her and she wouldn’t notice before it was too late. The old king’s servitors did that, according to the rumours.
She said into the silence, “You’ve done enough for Tandor. We can manage now. Can you wait with the sled?”
He didn’t move, and she didn’t know how to make him move. His cold and silent presence in the room made her shiver.
The door opened and Myra came back into the room, carrying a tray with two steaming bowls of soup and a roll of bread, still warm.
Loriane spooned up the soup. The first couple of mouthfulls were unsettling, and she wasn’t sure if her stomach would tolerate the food, but then she grew comfortably warm, and wolfed down the rest, as well as the roll.
“Thank you,” she said to Myra, who was busying herself lighting the fire. “You’re not eating?”
Myra shook her head. “I eat with my family.”
She threw a few chunks of wood—real wood—onto the fire. Flames licked the rough surface. Loriane had hardly ever seen wood used for furniture, let alone the wastage of it being burned.
Loriane glanced at the corner of the bed, where Ruko hadn’t moved. She had never seen him eat, but Myra ignored him completely, so maybe he didn’t need to.
She took the other bowl of soup from the tray and set it on the bedside table. “Help me get him up.”
But Myra had settled in the chair by the hearth feeding her baby, and it was Ruko who got up from his corner of the bed. His invisible hands lifted Tandor by the shoulders and propped him up against the pillows. The same invisible hands draped the cover over Tandor.
“You don’t want to eat anything, Ruko?” she asked him.
“He can’t eat,” Myra said. “That’s why he asked to be changed.”
“Wait—he asked for this?”
Myra nodded. “He is one of the Imperfect children Tandor rescued from the City of Glass. There were about fifty of us living in Bordertown. He placed us with foster families . I am the only one living with my real parents.”
She nodded at the bed where Ruko sat. “Ruko was unlucky to be placed with a family who only cared about the money Tandor paid them. They treated him badly. I don’t exactly know what happened, but the man, a woodcutter who used Ruko as a labourer to haul his sleds, was said to be fond of young boys—”
There was a crash in the corner of the room and one of the soup bowls lay in pieces, remnants of soup oozing down the wall.
Myra shifted forward as if to get up. “Hey, don’t do that. My parents are already stretching their tolerance by allowing you in here. Breaking things does not help your cause. You want to help your master? You behave!”
The corner of the bed pressed down again.
“Can you see him?” Loriane asked.
“Yes. He’s sulking. He was always an angry little boy.”
Loriane could stare all she wanted, but saw nothing.
“Yes, I said little boy and I’ll say it again as long as you behave like one.”
She gave a sniff.
“Anyway, then he started to grow too strong for the woodcutter to abuse, and the man stopped feeding him, and locked him in the shed and would come out at night to whip him—”
The corner of the bed moved.
Myra turned her head. “Yes, I know the whole village could hear you scream and we did nothing. I was thirteen, all right!” She glared and let a silence lapse. Then she sighed.
“So because he was constantly hurting with hunger and cold, Ruko asked Tandor to take his heart so he would become a servitor.”
“His heart?” Loriane thought of the beating heart in the jar in Tandor’s travel trunk. She’d heard about the servitors, but had always dismissed the stories as myths.
“Yes. If you take the heart from someone with icefire in his blood, someone with Thillei blood, this person becomes trapped between life and death. He’s still alive, but can’t speak. He doesn’t have a real body, and can walk through walls. But if he wants, he can pick up things and destroy things. You can’t kill a servitor. He only dies if the master dies.”
She glanced aside at Ruko, a questioning, curious glance.
Myra continued in a low voice, “We could all feel Ruko’s pain on the night that Tandor did it, but afterwards he calmed and we lived peacefully. Most of us with our families, but Ruko out in the snow. He doesn’t feel cold. He doesn’t get hungry. He’s happy, as far as a person like him can ever be happy—All right, you’re not happy, fine.”
A cold feeling crept over Loriane’s back. She didn’t like this invisible angry adolescent. She’d found Isandor and his brooding moods hard enough, and he’d at least been visible to her.
“And what does Tandor want? What is his grand scheme? Do you know anything about that?”
Myra shook her head. “I don’t think anyone knows. But he wanted to take the other Imperfects back from the Knights. Because the Knights came here and took all the Imperfect children into the palace, except me. So when he came to the City of Glass, he wanted to get into the palace. What he did once he was in there, I have no idea.”
Eyes half open, Tandor slurped soup from the spoon Loriane held out to him.
Loriane said, “He sure did something. I mean—look at him. What’s going on, why can’t he talk? He must have been doing something really, really stupid.” She poked Tandor’s chest. “Something happened while he was down in the dungeons. The explosion was his fault, I’m sure of it.”
“When he visited, he sometimes spoke of the Heart of the City and that he wanted to find it.”
Loriane had heard rumours of this thing. “Do you know what it is?”
“One day, a long time back, he showed us some pictures. It’s a kind of machine from way back before memory. Apparently, the people who built the glass towers played with it and it blew up on them, killing everyone who knew how the machine worked. Then the old King tried to regain the knowledge, but he only abused the power.”
Loriane said, “In the City of Glass they say there was a war back in the old times, and all the people who built the city got killed—”
“And then the royal family discovered it and used its lingering rays to power the lights, the trains and the glasshouses—”
“And to make servitors to suppress the people who couldn’t do anything with icefire.”
“Tandor told us that the Pirosians were jealous.”
Loriane felt herself get inexplicably angry. “If the King hadn’t used the power badly there would have been no need for jealousy. So the Pirosians banded together and formed the knighthood—”
“Using the eagles which only grew to that size under the influence of icefire.”
“That’s ridiculous. Did Tandor tell you that eagles are really the souls of the dead, too?”
Myra and Loriane glared at each other.
Then Loriane shrugged. “No one knows what’s true.”
“And who, exactly, discouraged people to learn to read?”
“And who, exactly, has been trying to bring the servitors back?” Loriane gestured at Tandor. “He doesn’t care about you. He didn’t care about any of us, only about his crazy scheme, whatever it was.”
Myra shuddered and clamped her hands around herself and went on in a more gentle tone, “I think he wanted to breed us Imperfects. He would come in occasionally and bring all of his children together in the guesthouse. The last time he did that, it was very different. He no longer had toys for all of us, but he’d give the older boys things like necklaces and told them to give them to girls they liked. And then he gave us drinks . . . you know, the kind parents wouldn’t allow us to have. And then it turned out he had rented the entire top floor of the guesthouse and said we could all stay the night, and . . . you know . . .” She glanced at the baby. “That’s how he happened.”
“It’s all Tandor’s machinations. He wanted you to have that baby. He wanted me to have my baby.”
Myra frowned at her. “When is your baby due?”
“The baby was due days ago. I don’t think this is a normal child.”
Tandor stirred and mumbled but his words were inaudible.
Myra stared at Loriane, her eyes wide. “Are you sure?”
“I’m not sure abou
t anything until this child is born. Listen, I want you to do something for me. In my bag you’ll find a pot of salve. I want you to put it on.” Lucky that she’d had her healing and midwifery bag with her when the city exploded.
“Put it on? Inside you?”
“You wanted to be a midwife? You can start with me.”
Chapter 5
* * *
PAIN.
There was pain all around.
Tandor heard women’s voices, but the meaning of their babble floated outside his range of hearing. He couldn’t see who the women were, but one of them had to be Loriane. Lovely, down-to-earth, Pirosian Loriane. The other one was probably Myra.
He couldn’t see where they had taken him, but after days in the cold on the sled, they were now inside. Myra’s house, probably.
Ruko was there, too, a glowering presence on the edge of Tandor’s vision. His figure was a mere silhouette, a dark form soaking up all icefire.
Tandor tried to move, but he couldn’t. Cords of icefire bound his hands to some ethereal substrate that he couldn’t feel.
“Get these off me.”
Ruko came to stand next to him, looking down, his hands behind his back. The recalcitrant lock of hair obscured one of his eyes. One corner of his mouth curved up.
“Who put these bonds on me?”
“I don’t know why I believed that you could control all that power unleashed from the Heart. I thought you were a sorcerer, but you’re just a simple weakling.”
“You’re not answering my question.”
Why not? Ruko was a servitor. He should obey to his master’s command.
“I can see no point in answering stupid questions. Whoever put the bonds on you was a smart person.”
“How dare you talk to me like that?”
“I will talk to you however I like. You broke your promise. You told me that we would free Peonie.”
So it was all about a girl? “I can’t do anything about that until you untie me.”
“No.” Ruko trailed an ice-cold hand over Tandor’s neck. “It’s too late to change your mind. I think I’ll have great pleasure killing you.” He closed the hand around the base of Tandor’s throat. His black eyes burned with anger.