Prisoner of Haven

by Nancy Varian Berberick

  “How could you?”

  Usha shuddered, opened her eyes, and pushed away from the table. Shaking, she turned and saw Tamara standing behind her, the yellow scarf balled up in her fists, her face white.

  “I thought you were my friend! How could you—?”

  Usha looked at the sketches under her hands. The images of fear and death had finally resolved so that she could not look at even one without being certain that what she truly saw was the tall, perilous shape of Sir Radulf.

  Tamara saw it too.

  “Tamara—”

  The girl flung away. “Get away from me! You never liked him. You and my father, you’ve always suspected him.” She sobbed again. “You’re jealous.”

  “Tamara, stop it! You’re wrong about Sir Radulf. He isn’t what you think he is.” Usha took a step closer, reaching to calm the girl. “He couldn’t be. He never was. He’s—”

  Blue eyes flashed, as much in panic as anger. Tamara raised her fists to strike or ward off. Usha never learned which. A slim, swift figure darted into the room, and Tamara cried out, rage and terror as Dezra pinned her arms and turned her.

  Half laughing by the flash in her eyes and wholly annoyed, Dezra said, “Enough of that! What—”

  Tamara yanked back, kicked Dez’s shin hard, and wrenched out of her grip. Dez cursed. Usha reached for Tamara. On a storm of weeping and fury, the girl was gone.

  Twisting Tamara’s fallen scarf in her hands, Usha looked around the studio. No different in appearance than moments before, still it felt as though lightning had lashed through.

  “Well,” Dez drawled, “it’s certainly heartening to see you getting on so well with Loren’s daughter.”

  Usha eyed her sister-in-law, looking for anger or bitterness. She found none. Dezra seemed even paler than when Usha had last seen her. She was grieving Caramon, the father with whom she’d often had a thunderous relationship, yet the father she’d so loved.

  “Well,” Usha said, thinking of fathers and daughters, “things have been better.”

  Dez jerked her head toward the window. “I saw her going off with one of Sir Radulf’s knights. What’s going on?”

  Usha had a hundred questions for Dezra about what had been going on—where had she been, how was Aline and what had become of Madoc—but she let them stay unspoken. The tidy silver braid she’d made of her hair was fraying. She pushed back stray wisps from her neck. “What’s going on? Pretty much what it looks like—a trapped woman screaming for help.”

  “And it all comes out sounding like curses.” Dez picked up the fallen sketches. She looked narrow-eyed at one and then the other. “She see this?”

  “Yes. She didn’t like it much.”

  “Can’t blame her, but—” an awkward pause then—“she shouldn’t blame you. Not for seeing what’s there to see.”

  That wasn’t peace, but it could be in time. Usha felt tensions fall away she hadn’t known she’d been holding.

  “I’m not sure she really blames me. She blames…” You never liked him! You and my father! “She doesn’t know who to blame, and she’s certainly not going to blame herself for getting what she wanted. I don’t know. It’s complicated with girls that age.”

  Dezra laughed, a sudden explosive sound that had nothing to do with merriment and much to do with understanding. “You’re telling me? I used to be a girl that age.” She stepped out the door and came back in with a pack. She shoved the two stools to the window and lifted her face to a small breeze as she set the pack on the sill.

  “Come over. It’s cooler here.”

  Usha did. When she was comfortable, Dez took a leather bottle out of the pack. She pulled the stopper, and the sweet scent of blond elven wine drifted out. Usha’s eyes went wide. The scent was almost taste.

  “Where did you get that?”

  “Let’s say I got it and leave it there.” She dipped into her pack again and came up with a heel of bread and a fist-sized chunk of cheese.

  Usha’s eyes went wide. “And those? Where’d you get those?”

  “Same place. You hungry?”

  Usha was always hungry. Not starving but always a little bit hungry from dining on thin soup and whatever the servants in Loren’s kitchen could make of the odd things that survived the flood. It mostly had to do with water and dried fish. Gratefully, she accepted half the bread and cheese. Then, taking small sips of wine, the two sat in silence and watched the street.

  After a while, Usha said, “I don’t really like the quiet.”

  “It’s been like that all over the city,” Dez said. She passed the bottle, Usha wet her lips and handed back the wine as sweet, delicate fire drifted through her. “You hardly see anyone in the day time. They’re all shoveling out, and looking for food. You’d think that would mean you’d see them on the streets, but you don’t. They try to keep out of the way of Sir Radulf’s men, and they know the side ways, the alleys, and who to find across the backyard fence. No one goes far from home, and everyone worries about finding food.”

  One more sip, and Usha put the bottle down. She let silence last as long as it took for the wine’s fire to settle again into banked warmth.

  “Dez.”

  Dezra nodded, as though she knew the question to come. She bounced a fist lightly on her knee.

  “Aline is fine. Rose Hall took a hard hit. You know those windows everyone admired? They’re halfway to the bottom of the river now, if not washed up on Qualinesti banks. But Aline doesn’t care. It’s only glass, she says, and then she goes on trying to make Qui’thonas work.”

  “But how?”

  Dez glanced at Usha, then away again as though trying to decide how much to say. “She does what she can. We all do. It was never easy.” Again, a moment of silence then, “Madoc’s fine. And Dunbrae.”

  It was all Usha wanted to know. For the rest, she knew what all of Haven did. The moors of the North Seeker Reaches had become an abode of dragons. No one was traveling those gray roads on any business at all.

  Dez nodded, as though to agree with some private understanding. She took another sip of wine.

  “I used to think we were trapped here, and I hated it. I found ways out for others but never one for us. Not that I didn’t try. I always did, looking at every way. Was it safe? Was it the right way to take? Trapped. I used to think so. Now I think we’re lost. Gone down a wrong road and no way back.”

  The words chilled Usha, winding out of a dark, hollow mood she’d never heard from Dezra before. Why did it surprise? Dezra had come to Haven as she always did in summer, on business for her father’s inn, to meet a lover and renew a sweet acquaintance, then to ride back home again. Now, her father was dead, her lover hanged…

  Usha closed her eyes.

  …and her brother’s wife was sleeping with another man.

  “Dez, there will be a way out. There will be a road home.”

  Dezra’s lips twisted. She leaned across the distance between them and flipped Usha’s silver braid over her shoulder.

  “What are you,” she said, “some guiding star? There’s no way. None I can see, and I’ve been doing nothing but looking.”

  With sudden, restless energy, Dezra pounded the stopper into the bottle and shoved it into her pack. A clatter of boot heels and she was halfway across the studio.

  “If you’re looking for me, let Rusty know. He’ll find me.”

  Indeed, Usha thought, but she said nothing, asked none of the questions left unanswered—including how much Rusty knew about Dezra’s business, and how it was he would know how to find her.

  “Dez?”

  Dez lifted a hand—farewell or an attempt to stall further questions. She did that on her way out the door and didn’t turn to say more.

  In the silence of the empty studio, Usha thought she heard echoes of the strife that had crackled through it like wild lightning. Behind those echoes, like ghosts, she heard words she’d twice recalled since Tamara had shouted them, words she hadn’t truly weighed until then.


  You never liked him. You and my father, you’ve always suspected him!

  Gods know I never liked him, Usha thought as she went around the studio picking up sketches and moving stools against the wall. But she hadn’t thought Loren’s feelings for his daughter’s betrothed were obvious in his daughter’s presence. The knight was his security, his way to Haven’s peace—or at least his daughter’s well-being.

  What did Tamara imagine Loren suspected of Sir Radulf?

  From the doorway, a voice said, “Mistress Usha?” Rowan nodded when she looked up. “Master Loren sent me looking for you. Are you ready for home now?”

  “I am.”

  21

  Madoc Diviner wiped sweat from his face with the back of his hand, scraping a grit of mud across raw skin. Water dripped down every wall of the tunnel, slid off the supporting beams, and pooled on the floor.

  Floor. Odd word for it, he thought scornfully. It had been a while since this sucking mud could be called a floor. In some places, he sank to his shins in mud.

  This was the best of the tunnels under Haven, yet every time he looked around, Madoc thought that would be the moment it turned into his tomb.

  There were rats—big ones with pelts the color of an old man’s beard, beady black eyes, and pale, hairless tails. Get close enough and you could see the vermin riding their backs. They plopped into the water and swam, finding rat-ways in the dark. They scurried along the sides of the sunken floor, chittering. Sometimes they just sat in gloomy corners and preened their whiskers. The less tolerant of them, like the one just outside the light so only its eyes showed, glared.

  “I hate this place,” Madoc muttered.

  The dwarf Dunbrae grunted, but he didn’t say what he usually said to a comment like that. He didn’t say—and so I’m not going to throttle him, Madoc thought—he didn’t say, “I know.”

  Not only did he keep quiet, Dunbrae didn’t run his thumb along the side of the onyx ring, that silent way he had of suggesting he knew pretty much anything anyone could want to know about what was going on in the mind or the heart another. Madoc would like to have thought that a good thing. He didn’t. He wasn’t a man to waste his time on fantasy. Likely the dwarf was distracted and had omitted the insult.

  In the dark, Dunbrae seemed to exist only half-embodied, a shimmering ghost in a spitting pool of light cast by oil lamps that hated the moisture in the air and gave only sulky illumination. He stood on a brace of wood laid across the tunnel, which made him the driest man in the place. He didn’t venture into the tunnel itself. If Madoc had gone into mud to his shins, Dunbrae would have been up to his waist. And so, in this operation, the dwarf was the pit-boss. Madoc twisted a humorless smile.

  “We have to go farther,” Dunbrae said. He held up a lamp and peered out as far as light would let him see. Not very far at all. “It’s looking good. I’m thinking as far as we’ve gone—”

  “We?” Madoc groaned, stretched his back, and shifted his weight. “Dwarf, I’ve gone, and I’ve come back, and I’ve gone again. You haven’t stirred yourself in an hour.”

  “As far as we’ve gone,” Dunbrae said, “we’re seeing some hope for this tunnel.” He lifted a lamp to see Madoc better. “It’s drying out, you say.”

  It was, somewhat, and when water ran, it ran down and out to the river again. The backwash from the storm had collapsed nearly every tunnel in Qui’thonas’s network, dragged out floors, and carved away walls. Bad as this tunnel seemed, the worst hadn’t happened. It could be functional again soon.

  Even better though, the tunnel below Rose Hall was revealed as a wonder, for around the next bend was the side branch they had never used. They’d always believed it doubled back to become a dead end, the way blocked by years of stone and rubble from an old collapse. The storm and the river’s backwash had changed that, undermining what had seemed an impassible blockage and revealing a stone-walled cavity that might have started out as a cave but ended up as a catacomb. Past the old rock fall, the level of the floor dropped fully the length of a tall man’s height. There had been bodies—old bones and skulls—washed out from their burial niches in the flood and dragged into floors of the maze. Best, though, the catacomb was part of a network of burial chambers, little rooms leading one to another, each stoutly walled by the bones of the earth, some passageways arched in stone, others rough as the world had made them.

  Every one of those chambers—“Little jewels on a necklace,” Dunbrae called them—was solid, and a man could walk the path of them and find himself in places below the city Qui’thonas or pirates had never dreamed existed.

  It all looked dwarf-built, from before the time of Old Keep, or so Dunbrae said. And then he went on to praise the work of dwarves, to assure Aline that this string of catacombs was exactly what Qui’thonas needed.

  “Go out to map,” Aline had asked Madoc. “If it’s as Dunbrae says, it will be more than we ever imagined we could hope for or have.”

  In truth that was everything Madoc wanted—that Aline could have all she hoped for. So he mapped, slogging in the tunnels with Dunbrae in the days after the storm. Some days were bad, most were worse, but today, despite what he said to the dwarf, today wasn’t so bad. He’d gotten into the catacombs yesterday, left kits for torches and leather bottles filled with water. He’d get back there today, and he’d leave more. Qui’thonas had a new way out of Haven, one not even Aline herself had known about.

  Madoc stood as best he could—knees stiff, feet wet—and took a lamp from the dwarf. He saw to the tarred sack on his back, shifting the weight of brands and wicking and oil. Dunbrae’s light grew faint behind him. Ahead the beams holding the dripping ceiling glittered, and the stone walls glistened. The passage had been risky here yesterday, a slog through mud and standing water. It had changed since then. Madoc caught glimpses of a floor lower than it had been. Like a sculptor, the great storm had carved something out of Haven below ground no one now living had known how to see.

  At the intersection where the first burial chambers were, Madoc stopped and shifted the load on his back. He listened to water drip. Behind, Dunbrae moved in such a way that his light was obscured. Breath held, Madoc waited to see it again. He didn’t. He drew breath to call out, and something itched in his mind—the old feeling of knowing, a warning to keep quiet. Dunbrae must have moved, for his light winked again in the darkness.

  Madoc kept still, listening to the sounds of the tunnel and the quiet beat of his heart. The silence erupted in sudden shouting.

  “Mage!” Dunbrae bellowed. “Bring ’em in!”

  The tunnel filled with the sounds of panic—splashing, cries of terror, and Madoc recognized Dezra’s voice, quick and commanding.

  “Run! Don’t turn! Go straight! Go, go, go!”

  Madoc ran for her, splashing into a part of the tunnel he hadn’t seen yet today, hoping no sink hole had opened, no walls had collapsed.

  “Dez!”

  Lantern high, he saw only the flash of light on wet walls and the golden gleam on puddled floors. He swung the lantern in an arc, hoping that Dez was close enough to see and be guided.

  They came out of the murk and the darkness—white-faced, an old man, a child, and a tottering woman whose white hair clung to her face and neck in filthy snarls. They were a battered lot, every one of them with scratches and cuts, even the child bruised and torn, as though they’d fled and fought and fled again. As Madoc reached them, Dez turned and swooped the old woman up into her arms. Madoc thrust the lantern into the man’s hand and snatched the weeping child.

  “Ahead,” he told Dez. “Dunbrae is there.”

  Gasping, Dez shook her head. “No. We can’t.”

  The child sobbed, and the old man said, “We been found by knights.”

  Madoc looked at Dez, who nodded.

  “I collapsed the tunnel back there. Not hard. It was all mud and sliding. But it won’t keep.”

  “Worse,” Madoc said. “They know it’s here.”

  D
ez sifted the light load of the half-fainting woman and slogged on. Her voice like a knife’s edge, she said, “You can’t imagine how much worse.”

  He learned. Dez had gone out with two others of Qui’thonas on a route scouted well in advance to a safe house found in one of the fishing villages downriver. They’d been met on the road by knights.

  “Killed the child’s father,” she said, her voice low. “And killed Konal.”

  Madoc winced. Konal had been the only elf left to Qui’thonas, a young woman working for what she’d proudly called a debt of honor. Konal’s had been one of the first families rescued from Qualinesti after Aline’s marriage funded the effort.

  “Who else?” Madoc asked.

  “Dead? No one.”

  Madoc’s belly went cold.

  “Barthel’s been captured.”

  With a great splashing, Dunbrae came down the tunnel, sloshing through muddy water up to his shins, lantern as high as he could hold it. His face all shadow and white eyes, he jerked his head back the way he’d come.

  “No one’s going that way,” he growled. He stood, a steely-eyed guardian at the gate. “No one’s leading knights any farther.”

  The old woman moaned.

  “There are no knights,” Dez said, walking past him.

  Dunbrae got in her way. “You said they found the tunnel.”

  Madoc wouldn’t have needed a shred of his old divination skills to know that Dez stood on the ragged edge of her temper. The pulse pounded in her temples, and her jaw was a hard, clenched line.

  “I collapsed the damned thing, Dunbrae. Let it be.”

  The dwarf stood stone stubborn.

  “I don’t care. They know it’s there. They’ll dig or think things through. Whatever they do, they won’t let it be till they find where it ends. No one’s getting near—”

  He didn’t speak Aline’s name, he didn’t have to.

  “He’s right,” Madoc said, lip curling a little at the irony of affirming Dunbrae’s case. “We can’t go farther, Dez. Or not the way we used to.” He nodded to Dunbrae. “Barthel’s been captured. He’ll hold out. Maybe. Or maybe not.”