Snowtear

by S. B. Davidson

  Strength had never been something Riken possessed in abundance, but he managed to pry the hysterical woman from him. With more force than he’d intended, he pushed her away. She slid from the bed and collapsed into a shaking, weeping pile on the dirty floor.

  Catching his breath, Riken eased out of the opposite side of the bed. He found a pair of pants balled in a corner, pulled them on. As Jillian Dumay wept without hindrance, he retrieved her discarded dress from the floor and walked over to her. Seeing her in such straits tugged at a piece of his heart that rarely saw light. He reached down to offer her the dress, but she slapped his hand away.

  “Min,” he said.

  “Go away. Leave me to mourn in peace.”

  “Min Dumay,” Riken said, backing up a couple steps. “What on Cryshal made you think I was ending this job?”

  A sob stuck halfway in her throat. Her arm fell from her face, and she stared up at him with strained eyes.

  “I have no intention of ceasing my search for Sage,” Riken said.

  “But, Mon Ullimar…he said you had done everything you could. He said he’d already paid you.”

  “That he did, and quite handsomely, to be sure. But, Min, only I say when my job is done, and that won’t be until I’ve found Sage Ullimar, one way or another.”

  “But…why?”

  Riken didn’t know how to answer that, so he simply held out the dress to her.

  She rose from the ground. Suddenly very aware of her nakedness, she couldn’t find a safe place for her arms. She looked upon him in total bewilderment, still crying, but much softer now. Finally, she took the dress from his hand, but her arm fell limp at her side as she continued to hold his gaze. Her entire body sunk, and she crumbled into his arms, burying her face into the crook of his neck.

  Riken wrapped his arms around her, careful to stay around the middle of her back.

  “How little you think of me, Min Dumay,” he said, if only to somehow lighten the mood.

  Without removing her face from his neck, she said, “I think you an angel straight from Haven, Mon Snowtear.”

  “Spend a little more time with me.”

  Chapter Eleven

  “Who’s Amana?”

  “Why was Mon Ullimar so quick to give up on his only daughter?”

  “Are you dodging my question?” Jillian asked.

  She sat on the edge of the bed, fully clothed now. With the recession of the red in her eyes, the torment on her face had fled, too. What remained was a reticent despondency, secreting from her like heat from a candle. Watching her absently trace a circle on the bed with her finger, Riken wondered for the third or fourth time how he’d previously missed the quiet beauty in her face.

  “Aye,” he said. “Answer mine first.”

  “Honestly, I have no idea. I know how much he loves Sage, even if he has a hard time showing it. If you’d asked me yesterday, I’d have told you nothing short of his own death would’ve stopped him from finding her. Maybe not even that.”

  “I gathered as much. So why?”

  “Asked and answered, Mon Snowtear.”

  “I think, after last night’s proceedings, you’d agree that we know each other a little too well now for such formalities. Riken will do fine.”

  She lowered her eyes, and her cheeks flushed. The act seemed out of place on her. He doubted the proper lady had ever done much in her life to warrant the need of a good blush.

  “Again, my apologies for my abhorrent behavior, Mon Snowtear.”

  “Riken, or my friends call me Twig.”

  “Do they?” she asked.

  “Well, friend,” Riken said. “It’s a fairly recent brand.”

  “Riken’s a good name.”

  “Better than Twig?”

  She nodded.

  “You’ll have to tell Uther that,” he said.

  A slender smile spread on her face, cracking the hard mask she wore for the world. What her life must be like, to feel the constant need to display such airs. Was it her cycles of servitude in the Ullimar house or something older?

  “Are you hungry?” Jillian asked.

  “It would be a fun game, seeing if I could keep anything down.”

  “I’ll get you something. There’s an inn just up the block, right? Anything in particular you’d like?”

  Riken shrugged, his stomach turning at the thought of anything more than a plate of eggs and a mug of water.

  “Take one of Gregor’s lyn on the wardrobe there,” he said, motioning to the tall stack of grey coins.

  After she’d left, Riken got up and went to the window. He still felt as if he’d been trampled beneath a herd of overfed cattle, but at least the fire in his skin had withdrawn. He unlatched the window and eased it open, relishing the embrace of the cool air on his face.

  Watching the early morning bustle of the street, he pondered the question he’d posed to Jillian. Why had Gregor Ullimar come here and paid him off? Two weeks was hardly a lot of time when it was one’s own daughter missing. True, the chances of finding Sage among the living now were lean, but Riken had never met a parent in his life that would accept such a fact. He’d had similar jobs before, one that had gone on for over five months before the parents had finally acknowledged the utter futility of further investigation. Parents, loving or not, weren’t likely to concede defeat until the coin ran out or a body surfaced.

  “Do you know something I don’t, Gregor?” Riken asked the wind.

  Jillian returned with two healthy plates of eggs and a loaf of Mon Rath’s pumpernickel.

  “No table?” she asked, searching the small room for a place to ease her burden.

  “I rarely eat in, much less entertain,” Riken said. “Plop them on the wardrobe. That is, if you don’t mind sitting on the dirty floor.”

  “You think me afraid of dirt?”

  “Are you?”

  “As my dress is already soiled,” Jillian said, dropping the plates atop the toppled wardrobe, “I hardly see the harm.”

  She bent her knees, tucked her dress behind her legs, then sat meditation style on one side of the wardrobe. Riken left the window and joined her.

  The eggs went down easy enough, but, once digested, they bubbled in his stomach like spiced wine. He could almost feel the grease lining his insides. Swallowing a gag was a constant evil throughout the meal.

  Jillian, unencumbered by such unpleasantness, nibbled politely at her food like she was inspecting rare diamonds. When an errant piece of egg stuck to the rim of her upper lip, Riken was amazed she didn’t immediately wipe it away. Perhaps she hadn’t noticed it.

  “So?” he asked.

  She raised her eyebrows in question.

  “Any thoughts on Mon Ullimar?”

  “Your turn,” she said.

  “My turn, what?”

  “I already answered your question. I said I have no idea. Now you answer mine?”

  “Which one?” Riken asked.

  “Who’s Amana?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Mon Snow…Riken.”

  “A girl I knew a long time ago,” he said, not caring to entertain this subject.

  “Whose name you scream in the night like you had the Prince himself after you? You must’ve truly aggrieved her, or she you.”

  “Why say that?”

  “For her to have put such fear in you that you still have nightmares about it. I think I’d like her.”

  “You would’ve,” Riken said. “Everyone did.”

  “Tell me about her.”

  “Why?”

  “So my ears will have a better treat than your incessant smacking,” Jillian said with a soft laugh.

  Even to those closest to him – a painfully minuscule group – Riken didn’t speak of Amana. Uther knew a little about her. Sod knew more, but only because the little urchin had finagled it out of him one night after Riken had partaken of a few too many bottles of honeyed apple wine. Though more than fifty cycles had passed, the subject was still too fr
esh and cruel in his mind. He didn’t often care to exacerbate the wound with reminiscence. His dreams did enough of that.

  “Amana is not a subject I care to speak on,” he said, hoping that Min Dumay had somehow been passed over on the day every woman on Cryshal was given the power to bend him to her will with little more than a bat of an eye and a pouting lip.

  He was wrong. Jillian could pout those slender lips with the best of them.

  Riken let his wooden spoon fall to his plate and exhaled a resigning sigh.

  “She was…my sister,” he said.

  “Was?”

  “Is…was…the proper etiquette escapes me.”

  “She died?” Jillian asked, placing her spoon neatly next to her plate.

  “Many cycles ago.”

  Riken felt suddenly lightheaded as old terrible visions assaulted his mind. Over the cycles, he’d become so adept at keeping them buried in his waking hours that their abrupt admission to the light of day caught him ill-prepared. Reflexively, he made a half-hearted attempt at forcing them down, but looking at his breakfast companion’s reassuring eyes provided him a gentle nudge. Strangely, he felt need to tell her of this darkest moment in his life.

  Why that would be, he couldn’t absorb. Perhaps, it was that she’d shown him her own private demons the previous night, allowed herself to be so naked in his presence – figuratively and quite literally. It could be that he needed someone to spill his inner turmoil onto, someone who wouldn’t think him weak. Maybe he’d needed that without knowing it for a long while. Of course, it could’ve just been lingering thoughts of her lithe, nude body beckoning him, and the hope that his openness might reap an extended encore.

  “When I was five-cycles-old, I took ill and stayed that way for two whole cycles. I couldn’t leave my bed, couldn’t make it five steps without feeling like I had a bull sitting on my chest. My mother fed me, bathed me with wet cloths, helped me with my bed pot when it got too full. As the rest of the children in my section of Burden flourished and grew beyond my window, my life was that tiny, dust-ridden, dank bedroom. My parents couldn’t afford any meliorater that would’ve done me any good, so for two cycles, my body ceased to develop. This pristine specimen of the male human form you see before you now is the product of that time in my life.”

  “I remember having a number of playmates before my affliction – local youths, mostly, boys and girls from slums similar to Sorrow. When I first took to the bed, a few of them would stop by every couple days to check my progress, inquire of my mother when I’d be able to come out and play. After a month, they made such rounds less often. Midway through that first awful cycle, they stopped altogether.”

  “Ragged fourth generation books my mother picked up in little trash shops became my only companions. With a miniscule foundation provided by my almost-illiterate father, I taught myself to read within four months. I devoured everything put before me – histories, adventure stories like Mon Signiery’s Time Forgotten Tales, instructional texts on how to bake bread or start fires with flint and tinder, everything.”

  “By the time the effects of the illness left me, my friends had surpassed me, and two cycles of solitude had somehow dampened my social skills, so attempts at making new companions were unmitigated disasters. Allowed passage into the world of the living, I found myself just as alone as I’d been under my sheets.”

  “Then, when I was eight, as if recompense for my period of persecution, Amana was born.”

  “Since I had little more gainful to do with my time, and my mother worked long hours at a bakery, and my father didn’t get home from the docks till dark, I undertook the role of warden to my infant sister.”

  “She was a glorious baby. Hardly ever cried, as long as I was willing to read aloud to her. I took her down to the bakery twice a day so mother could nurse her, but otherwise it was just the two of us most of the daylight hours.”

  “Amana’s first word was ‘Pa’, but when my father figured out that she directed the title at me, then subsequently switched me but good, I quickly spent the next few days rectifying the egregious offense.”

  “At three, I taught her to read. At four, she wrote better than my mother ever would. I watched her grow to a beautiful, angelic child of seven cycles. She had hair the shade of ripe wheat, big chestnut eyes, and a small mouth that loved nothing more than to laugh at her older brother’s pitiful jests. With her bubbly, inviting personality, she could’ve filled her little world to the brim with friends, but she bestowed that endowment to me alone. My parent’s loved Amana, their unbroken child; I adored her.”

  “Together we grew up in the lowliest neighborhoods of the great corner city of Burden. We attended as many plays as we could at the city’s free theatres. Amana especially loved the romances; I was always more of a tragedy man myself. You know, secrets and betrayals always leading up to copious amounts of blood and guts. When our father had lost too much of his paltry wages in tavern card games, we pilfered pastries and sweets from unsuspecting merchants’ booths. Well, I did. All Amana would assent to was being lookout. At night, I read her stories till she fell asleep in the bed we shared.”

  “But her favorite thing in all the world was crafting. At making dozens of little nothings into something unique and beautiful, she was a glowing natural. Our modest abode was brimming with birdhouses, figurines made from twigs, candle holders – anything she could fashion out of some little piece of scrap she found on the street. Her preferred rummaging spot was Howlwind Forest.”

  “Howlwind was only a mile or so outside the bounds of Burden, but even with my illness nine cycles in the wake, I hadn’t cultivated much of a body, so the trip, which we took at least twice a week, was, for me, demanding at best. Amana never complained of our lethargic progression. Probably she utilized the excess time thinking up new things to create with the treasures she hoped to find once there.”

  Riken paused, fearful of treading into cruel waters. Jillian’s encouraging face provided the needed measure of solace. He continued.

  “On our final trip together, her find was a magnificent pinecone. Gazing at it with a terrific gleam in her eyes, she told me she planned on using it to make another birdhouse for mother.”

  “I remember the look on my sister’s face – such jubilation at the thought of mother’s smile when she’d see the painstakingly-crafted gift. I remember the way her golden hair tussled softly in the breeze whining through the dense trees. I remember how her simple, pink dress –

  a size too large for her little body – dragged on the needle-laden ground beneath her feet. I remember her smiling at me, making a small, fragile boy feel like he could lift a mountain over his head if she needed him to. And…I remember the dreadful sound of low, hungry growls.”

  Riken stopped again, a jagged rock in his throat. He looked away from Jillian as the first tears welled then seeped from his eyes. He rose from the floor, muscles aching, and went to the window. He opened it, letting the cool wind smother the heat on his face.

  “If it weren’t for my dreams,” he said, “perhaps I might not recollect it so vividly. Perhaps that’s not it, though. It could be that such traumatic events just brand themselves into your mind, so you can never be permitted the liberation of forgetting. Like the aftereffects of illness, they torment you the rest of your pathetic life.”

  “When the wolves came, Amana was looking at that damned cone. I yelled to her, but they were on her before my cry finished leaving my throat. I ran to her, but tripped on her picking basket, and fell. I lost consciousness, and when I came to, the wolves were gone. All that remained in that clearing was a useless wretch of a brother with a few fresh bite marks on his arms and legs, and his innocent sister’s ravaged body.”

  “I wish with all of whatever miserable soul I possess that they’d taken me too. Maybe I was too scrawny even for them, not enough meat for even a light snack, useless even as food for beasts.”

  “When I could conjure enough of my meager strength to lift her
tiny body, I carried my sister from that forest. Crying myself raw, covered in her blood, I made it as far as the city gate before collapsing. I don’t know who brought us home, but I wish they’d just left me where I crashed.”

  “In our house, I woke to my mother’s horrible shrieking. It went on and on, filling the small confines of our home. In the bedroom I’d shared with Amana, I got up and went to the door. Moments after I creaked it open, I saw my father coming for me. After the first clout to the side of my head, I don’t remember anything that happened till waking in a third-rate meliorater’s office with more cuts and bruises than a freshly slaughtered hog.”

  Riken hung his head, spent. Exposing oneself so flagrantly after cycles of deep-seated repression had a way of doing that. He couldn’t bear to look over at the woman. He didn’t want her to see the torment he knew was plastered on his face.

  “How could your father blame you?” Jillian asked, rising.

  “How could he not?”

  “You were but a child,” she said, and he felt her hand on his turned back. “Even a grown man couldn’t have fended off those beasts.”

  “I killed his only daughter,” Riken said, not looking at her.

  Jillian’s hands gripped his shoulders and rubbed slowly.

  “Nay,” she whispered.

  “I let her die. A simple beating was hardly fair trade.”

  “Riken, there was nothing you could’ve done.”

  Feeling undeserving of her tenderness, he pulled away and walked to the other side of the room, wiping the wetness from his face with his sleeve.

  “From then on, my mother and father wanted nothing to do with me. They sent me to apprentice with a leatherworker. I didn’t mind. I couldn’t have lived long under those reproachful glares and constant beatings. I lived with Frederick Whitemoon till my seventeenth nameday. He was a kind man, and, for some reason known only to him, he cared for me like a true father. At seventeen, he scrounged enough coin to send me to Burden’s Foundation.”