There was a pause.
“He can if I help him,” said Toudin.
“And if I do,” said Jifadry.
The soupmonger and the stewmonger. A dozen more spoke up, traders from up and down Hunger Long, the people Pelufer had filched from and taunted for almost as long as she could remember. Nemrina the weaver promised blankets, Meloni the seamer promised clothes. “Their mother was a coppersmith,” said Tiloura from Copper Long, “either of the younger can prentice to me, it’s in their blood and the rasping cough took my own girl.” Jifadry said, “It needn’t break the deal. Prentice off some youngling who wants to be a healer, there must be some old enough to make the choice.”
Denuorin turned to Anifa. “Their father was a good stallholder in his day, and his eldest remembers. She’d do well by Jiondor. It would honor Nimorin’s memory.”
Anifa surveyed the other alderfolk, then said to Risalyn, “It seems we’re all agreed. If there’s some other way we could ...”
“Not all.” Mireille oozed out from the back of the trader group like a worm after a hard rain. “I say they should go. Not every trader they’ve stolen from has been happy about it. They had two stones off me only yesterday—I bet you’d find them if you searched them. Are you forgetting Elora’s sacrilege?”
Floorboards creaked under feet shifting.
“Those things were burned,” Elora said, her eyes on the floor.
“Who’s to say you haven’t made more?”
Nolfi said, “You’ve had it in for Elora since you were little.”
“And you’ve defended her just as long, even when she turned her back on you,” Mireille shot back. “They’re no friends of yours. They didn’t want to know you once their mother died. They think they’re too good for the rest of us, too good to ask for help.”
“That’s enough,” Anifa said.
[88] “But they—”
“You’re still a child yourself, Mireille, and however much I may have agreed with you in the past, you have no more say among traders than Nolfi does until you’ve come of age—”
“Tell me what Pelufer has in those pouches. Tell me what Elora has in that sack. Tell me that, and I’ll be quiet.” Mireille folded her arms across her chest and stood with her nose up and her nostrils flared. She had gone from worm to rat. Sniffing for their defeat as for the scent of scraps.
“Their private belongings,” Anifa replied, “and if you’re suggesting we search them, that’s out of the question. They’re here for our protection, not to be judged on a charge of theft.”
“Maybe they should be,” said one of the traders. He drew glares, but he said, “Some of my bronze could be in those sacks. Look how they sag. If those girls leave, I’d like to know something of mine isn’t going with them.”
“If it’s stolen goods,” Jiondor said, we’ll find out when I get them home, and we’ll make restitution.” He turned to Anifa and Jeolle and Denuorin. “Let me take them home now? My word as a trader, there’ll be no sacrilege, no thieving.”
Pelufer winced. But we’ll be gone, she thought. He’ll be embarrassed, but his word will stand. She said, “Elora made a mistake. We want to go live with Jiondor.”
“I’m sorry.” Elora put a hand at her throat as if to push the words up and out. “I should have talked it over with my sister first. You’re very generous, Jiondor. Thank you.”
For one breath of relief, it seemed that would be it. Jiondor and the alderfolk were discussing details. The flowery woman was conceding, whatever she’d wanted, she’d lost and she couldn’t very well make a fuss. Nolfi was walking toward them, and so she didn’t see Mireille coming, Mireille used him as cover until she was close enough to dart out a hand to yank one of the pouches from her belt.
Pelufer cat-hopped back with an oath. Mireille failed to pull the pouch free. But the fabric was old, and never meant for holding pointy objects. Mireille’s finger snagged in a tear, and the battered pouch ripped open. Its contents spilled out.
Rusted awls with no handles. Braidmetal rings set with cut stones. A tarnished silver ring with a flat graven face. The three-armed pewter pendants of people of light.
Everyone in the room stared at the jangling mess. Mireille went pale, as if she’d expected to release a hoard of her own stones and instead had dug her claws into a nest of wasps.
“Those are things the bonefolk leave,” she breathed.
[89] Anifa rose from her seat and caned her way across the room, her entire body as stiff as the leg that no longer bent and the arm that braced the cane,
Her gaze rose from the spill to Pelufer’s face. “You thieved from the spirit wood,” she said. Pelufer set her jaw. What she’d done wasn’t wrong. The dead didn’t care. But Anifa didn’t know that, and she couldn’t tell her. “This changes everything.”
“It’s sacrilege,” Mireille said.
“And a rude act that revealed it,” Anifa snapped. “I’ll have words for you, Mireille. You’ve overstepped yourself. No, don’t even start—I don’t care that we’d never have known if not for you. Get out. Go tend your stall, and mind your step.”
Mireille slunk out of the tavern. Anifa caned her way back to her seat through a silent room. Pelufer made herself look at the traders who’d stuck up for her. A clump of disappointment, an edge of outrage. Nolfi was still standing near Elora, and it came to Pelufer, as he knuckled his brow and turned away, that he’d been sweet on Elora, and maybe she on him. When Elora stopped being his friend it was more because she didn’t trust herself not to tell him their secret than that she was afraid he’d guess it. There had been sacrifice there and she’d been blind to it.
It was the last of her worries now. This was a serious offense. They didn’t have to preach at her to tell her that. If you stole a cow, or a set of tools, or anything big, they kept you around long enough to return the goods or work off your debt, and then they booted you out of town. They sent you off.
Her heartbeat quickened. They would have to run. There was a back door to the tavern. Was anyone near it? Chancing a look would give her away. She made her face into stone, but her belly churned.
“Will you have them now, given this?” Anifa said to Risalyn.
“Of course I will. We’ll return those things, ask the dead for forgiveness, and then we’ll go, and spirits willing in a few years I’ll return you a set of fine young women who will obey the rules and ply a useful trade with honor.”
Pelufer’s stone face flushed hot with blood. Liar! she thought. Killer killer killer!
She tensed to spring, with no idea what she would do but maddened, goaded into doing something. Elora grabbed her hard, strong though she was trembling with confusion and shame. Caille was crushed between them. The dog growled, its hackles up, looking around as if it didn’t know who to attack, and the tavern cat was hissing, its tail blown up huge, its back arched. Caille’s face was screwed up as if with the effort of holding back tears.
[90] That was when Pelufer heard the sound in the walls.
The walls, and the floor—inside the walls, under the floor. Scratchings and scrabblings and squeakings.
“No,” she whispered to Caille, “no, stop it, no,” but it was too late, she and Elora had done the damage, their distress had flowed into Caille and through her into the floorboards of the tavern and every living thing felt it now, even the traders.
Motion erupted from each crack and cranny of the tavern. The walls crawled with mites and spiders, beetles and silverfish. Wasps poured in the window, disturbed from a nest under the eaves. Rats and mice skittered from cellar and pantry. People leaped from their seats, raised their arms and looked around with amazed wild eyes.
Caille could have done this on purpose. She hadn’t; she was upset, beside herself, she’d lost control. But it was the perfect diversion. Pelufer herded her sisters around and prepared to drag or shove them out the back door. Two keepers stood in her way.
If only she’d been able to look.
“No more runni
ng,” one of them said—she knew that face, but it wasn’t smiling now, he’d been playing with her yesterday when he let her duck under his arms, their whole life here had been a game of grownups letting them think they were quick and clever when the whole time they’d been taken care of. Pelufer wanted to throw herself at him, pummel him, curse him for tricking her. But the game was over. She had to be smarter than that now.
She crouched down to Caille. “You’ve got to stop it,” she said, softly, so no one would understand what she was saying to her terrifying, powerful sister.
People were stamping at insects, kicking at mice; someone had a broom raised. Caille screeched in horror. “No! No kill! No kill!” A baby’s words. She hadn’t talked like that when she was three let alone five. “No kill!” Her face was a boiled, swollen beet. Her body was bent nearly double, as if the blast of her shriek could stop all movement like a great wind.
Pelufer turned Caille firmly back to her and said, “The way to stop it is to calm yourself. Now. Or they’ll squash all the mice.”
Elora hunkered down with them. It was she and Pelufer who had to calm themselves. They took deep breaths, holding on to each other and Caille, watching each other. Caille fixed on them, breathed with them. Hysteria deflated into pouting, uncomprehending hurt. The scuttlings and squeakings faded. The creatures slipped back into their cracks and holes.
“Will they figure out it was her?” Elora said, voice low.
Pelufer shook her head: I don’t know.
[91] “Come on, girls,” said one of the keepers. “Your running days are over. It’s into the pantry with you until this is sorted.”
What a stupid place to put three little girls with rats running mad. The cowdog thought so, too, or at least didn’t like the keepers’ actions, but it backed off at a soft, sad touch from Caille, then trotted reluctantly back to its master. Pelufer let herself be guided with her sisters into the windowless storage space. She took careful note of how the pantry door stood in a wall perpendicular to the back door. The back of the pantry would be the side wall of the tavern.
When the keeper had closed the door on them, shutting out the sound of voices in the main room, Pelufer said, “It would be better to wait till dark, but I think you should do it now, Elora.”
Elora had huddled down and didn’t look ready to do anything. “Too much has happened. I need to think.”
“There isn’t time. They’re thinking, too. They’ll figure out that Caille is special, it won’t take much if that woman helps them, she already knows I’m special and she can lead them to it, you know she can. Or they’ll just get over the rats and spiders and give us to her.”
“If I do it,” Elora said, “they’ll know for sure.”
“But we’ll be gone.”
“I don’t want to go forever. I want to be able to come back.”
“We still can, no matter what they know. When we’re grownups, and they can’t do whatever they want with us.”
Elora wasn’t convinced. She had less confidence than Pelufer in the power of growing up, even though she held age over Pelufer’s head all the time and was always deferring to the grownups’ rules.
“If I do it, they still might catch us.”
Pelufer started to say something bold about how once they were out on the long no one could ever catch them, but she didn’t know that for sure anymore, not if all the keepers had been humoring her. “Then they’ll catch us, and at least they’ll keep us then instead of giving us to that woman. I’d rather have our secrets come out than be dead.”
It all came down to that, didn’t it. That was the decision.
“If the secret gets out,” Elora said, “everyone in the world will be trying to catch us, and we’ll never be safe no matter how far we run.”
That was what Father had told them. It was the admonition that had ruled their lives. Never tell. Never let anyone see.
Pelufer looked desperately around the pantry. It doubled as a tool room, and in two breaths she found what she needed: a shovel, to prop in the corner against the back wall. “Can you make it look like that did it?”
[92] “We’re not strong enough to do it with a shovel.”
“They’ll think we were scared. That makes people strong. They’ll think they didn’t hear the noise for their own arguing.”
“I’m sorry,” Caille said. They both turned in surprise, thinking she was talking to them, but the words were addressed to a mouse on her knee, nibbling grain she’d taken from a bag beside her. It was a wild mouse; she didn’t pet it, just watched it eat and said, “I’m sorry, mouse. I didn’t mean it. I was scared. I’m glad you didn’t get killed.”
Pelufer looked at Elora. Caille was talking to them after all.
“All right,” Elora said, and gave Pelufer the sack made of their blankets and linen cloth. It had her workings in it, and their bits and pieces. Pelufer still had enough of her spiritwood haul, in her pockets and her one remaining pouch, to get them started in another town, but they’d need the blankets after dark. The desire for sleep was an agony. She pushed it aside as Elora laid her hands on the cedar wall.
“It’s not a natural thing,” she warned. “I’ll be tired afterward. I might be too tired to run.”
“Stop putting it off,” Pelufer replied. “Just do it.”
Elora closed her eyes and applied herself, and Pelufer watched with a wicked glee as the laths of the wall went gray and brittle under Elora’s hands. She poked a knot out with her finger and used the hole for a grip to lever the laths off the support beams. They came away easily, and she stacked them to the side.
“They don’t like it,” she said. “They fit where they were.”
“No helping that,” Pelufer told her. “Keep going.”
The boards on the outside were trickier, and it took both of them to angle them inside. But they were lucky: beyond the hole Elora had made was the back of a refuse bin. No one had seen shingle fall mysteriously away from boards that then lifted themselves and slid from sight.
“Can you get through there?” Pelufer asked, gauging Elora’s slim frame against the spaces in the framing.
“I’ll have to,” she said. She couldn’t compromise support beams, and without knowing the framers’ craft they couldn’t be sure which those were.
Pelufer went through first, then took the sack from Elora and reached for Caille, who slid through like an otter, without help. Elora was through to the waist when she got stuck.
“Twist the other way,” Pelufer whispered. “No, more sideways.”
It was no good. She was going to have to remove a section of beam.
[93] “Just long enough for you to get out, then you can put it back and fix it,” Pelufer said.
“I can’t, Pel, I’m so tired already ...”
“You have to. You really have to.”
“I can’t.”
Choking back a growl, Pelufer wrapped her arms around Elora for one last pull. Hips grinding against wood, her tunic tearing, Elora came abruptly free—and the two of them tumbled against the bin with a jarring thud.
They went still and listened for footsteps. They heard nothing but their own breathing. Then Caille tapped Pelufer on the shin.
She looked up into Nolfi’s blinking face, then down at the pry bar in his hand.
“Well, that’s half the job done,” he said. “Get into the barrow.”
It wasn’t his barrow. It was some old, weathered thing that smelled of vegetable rot. A woman Pelufer didn’t know stood casually at the shafts. Around the barrow, as if lounging there trading gossip on a break, was a collection of bronzemongers. At the head of the alley were bronze stalls, and not one of the stallholders paying a bit of attention to what was going on behind them—but deftly turning the attention of customers away from it.
Elora got in first, curling herself like a potato peeling to fit, and Pelufer fit herself into the curl, hugging Caille in close and putting the blanket sack under her head. A big smelly piece of burlap w
as tossed over them, and their feet lifted as the woman took up the shafts and wheeled the barrow away onto Bronze Long.
“Wiggle your foot if you can hear me,” Nolfi said in a conversational tone. When Pelufer wiggled, he said with a forced smile in his voice, “This is Jiondor’s pledge, Beronwy. He’s still inside arguing for you.” Pelufer wiggled again, to make up for what she couldn’t say out loud. “All the traders pulled together to keep you out of that woman’s hands.” Again Pelufer wiggled. “Stop wiggling. You can thank us later.” Everything he said after that, and everything Beronwy said back, was ordinary trader talk until the barrow was plunked unceremoniously down on its back support legs and Nolfi said, “Stay put until dark and don’t move even then. Stay put until I come to fetch you.” Stray objects were piled on top of the burlap. Pelufer wiggled her foot in protest. “I’ll be a ninefoot away shelling peas and paying no attention to this barrow,” Nolfi said, “but if I hear this rubbish move I’ll come over here and club you over your thick stupid head, Pel.”
When his footsteps had receded, she tensed her muscles for the painstaking job of sliding out without disturbing whatever rattly junk [94] he had piled on them. Elora pinched her extra hard, and Caille locked her hands in with her strong little forearms.
It was a long wait, unable even to whisper to her sisters—she tried it and earned another pinch—sweltering and soaking under the rough burlap throw meant to keep produce fresh in the sun, not hold in the body heat of three nervous girls. Pelufer resigned, herself to using the time to take stock of what had happened, maybe figure a few things out. The next thing she knew Nolfi was shaking her awake and helping her lift Caille from the barrow, and Elora was already out and talking quietly with Beronwy and Jiondor off to the side.
She’d thought they were by Jiondor’s house, but of course that was the first place anyone would look for the escaped girls he’d wanted to foster. The barrow was parked by cottars’ crofts off the High Road, just the other side of the river from Pointhill. Only a couple of the crofts were still tended.
“You’ll have to give Jiondor what you took from the spirit wood,” Nolfi said. “Every bit of it, so he can return it.”
The Binder's Road (The Sequel to 'Illumination') Page 11