He laid the piece of plank down on their trading board and, without further word to anyone, went back to his own business on Pewter Short.
Mireille wasn’t through. “I’m very sorry for what happened to your mother’s shop,” she said to Elora. “But you abandoned it when you went off. You left the lumber there for the taking. If some scrapmonger took it, worse luck for you. But I traded for it fair and square. I’ll have it back now.”
Pelufer stepped out from behind the stall.
Elora calmly responded, “You made no effort to repair your stall, which amounts to the same thing. Anyone would think you weren’t going to bother. That doesn’t mean that someone could come along and take the parts that rightfully belonged to you. We just took the parts that rightfully belonged to us.”
“I demand restitution,” Mireille said, ignoring Pelufer moving toward her. “How was I to know where the scrapmonger got the wood?”
[465] “If there was a scrapmonger, then you were cheated,” Elora said. “Go demand restitution from him.”
“And how will I find him? You stole from me! I demand restitution from you!”
Pelufer reached out for Mireille’s arm as though she was going to try to reason with her in a more friendly way, but once she had it, she didn’t let go, even though Mireille tried to jerk back.
“Your mother told you never to lie, Mireille,” she said. She looked past Mireille, letting her eyes go out of focus. “She haunts you, did you know that? She’s asking you a question. She wants to know if you’ve forgotten that mendacity is the only affront worse than impropriety.”
“Get your hands off me! You can’t hear my mother’s haunt!”
“She can hear haunts,” Elora said. “She always could. That’s why she was in the spirit wood that day.”
Mireille’s conniving outrage was like a sheet of metal she held out before her to push her way through all the obstacles in the world. Pelufer saw it dent and crumple in the middle. Jenaille had been scared of the bonefolk, and of Prendra. Her kind of hate came from fear, and she passed that on to Mireille. Mireille was scared now, and Pelufer let her go. But Mireille held her ground. So Pelufer added, “Now get away from Prendra’s lot, she says. I don’t want you associating with that bonefolk’s get!” Then she pretended to come back into herself, appalled at how the haunt had insulted her and her sisters, and braced against the stall. Had her ruse worked?
Mireille went dead pale. That was answer enough. Pelufer was sure she’d won. Elora leaned forward to whisper, “Her mother wasn’t in there.” Pelufer, pretending to whisper back something affronted, said, “She might as well be!”
Elora covered her face with her hands. Through her fingers, Pelufer heard a snort of laughter.
The gawpers were swayed. You could see the ripples of curiosity move across them. Could the little girl really hear haunts? Could she hear their own haunts, speak to their own dead? Mireille had provided Pelufer with the perfect chance to show her wares.
But Mireille would not give up. “You leave my mother out of this,” she said.
“Your mother is the reason you hate us, and knocked our shed down, and used our lumber,” Elora said, as young and sweet and injured as could be.
To wrest the crowd’s sympathy back to her, Mireille cried, “None of this changes what I’m supposed to do for a stall now! You stole from me. I need that lumber to put my stall back up. It won’t work [466] the way it was, not since the expansion. My family has tended that stall for three generations!”
That was a persuasive plea. It wasn’t fair and it made no sense, but it worked on every trader’s sympathies. Pelufer had wanted to humiliate Mireille, make her leave them alone, and cry her new trade all at the same time. But she would never get rid of Mireille by humiliating her. They had gone about this all wrong. They had worked from spite of a spiteful girl. Don’t try to use someone who would use you. It twists on you. If she’d just done a working on Mireille’s old tin stall, to make it fit again, Mireille might have been satisfied. She’d have thought she got something out of them, and got away with hurting them too. She’d have thought she won, and she’d have left them alone.
Offer to put her poxy stall back together, Pelufer told herself. Do it. Say the words.
She couldn’t. Mireille made the alderfolk burn Elora’s workings. Mireille destroyed the only shelter they had left, and did her best to run them out of town, and stole the lumber while they were gone.
She knew what she should do, and she just couldn’t do it.
“I think you’ll find your stall repaired and waiting for you to set out your wares,” said a familiar voice from the crowd beyond Mireille. “Perhaps you should have stopped by there first this morning.”
Mireille whirled. “You!”
Louarn gave her the stunning smile that Pelufer had never trusted. She’d never been so glad to see a thing so beautifully crafted. “It’s made of tin, but that is what you started out with, yes? The stall your mother tended, and her mother before her, was made of softwood, and fell to the rot last summer, as I recall.”
When had Louarn ever met Mireille? And why was the old stonemonger Loralir on his arm like a favorite aunt?
Mireille shot an accusing finger at him. “That man trades the badges of people of light on a shadow market! The keepers were after him!”
Louarn’s smile turned gently pitying. “The keepers were after me because you set them on me, love, and where you got the idea that there’s a shadow market in mages’ gear, I can’t imagine.”
Mireille actually sputtered.
Loralir said, “Why don’t you go back to your stall, dear?” Loralir had the stall beside Mireille’s. They’d been competitors forever, but Loralir was unimpeachably prim and proper, and she’d coexisted about as well as anyone could with Mireille. “He did mine, too, you know. Was just finishing up yours at dawn when I came out to have another go, and he had mine up in a jiffy. He’s a lovely boy. And [467] he’s going to take something in trade for the work he did for me. Whether he wants to or not.” Ostentatiously, she pressed something into his hand, and Pelufer could see that Loaurn was genuinely taken aback. “I won’t hear no for an answer this time. Nobody helps me twice and gets away for nothing.” She gave him a quick peck on the cheek and was off, back to set out her wares and return to business.
As Mireille slid away, quick to avoid the issue of payment and probably wanting to check his work, Louarn looked at what Loralir had put in his hand, and started to laugh. “I have really got to learn not to turn down gifts.”
“What did she mean, ‘this time’?” Elora asked.
“I did her some small service on my first visit here. She tried to repay me with this. I declined. I thought it a useless trinket. Neither of us knew what it was. But I know now.” He called to Kara and Caille to bring over the children they’d been playing tag with. “Were any of these children in the bonefolk’s realm with you?”
“Tofro was,” Kara said. “But nobody believed him, so he won’t talk about it.”
Louarn knelt before a chubby boy whose lower lip was already coming out in a stubborn pout. He said, “I look a little like the scary woman, don’t I? But I’m not like her, not much anyway. I’m Kara and Caille’s friend. They’ll vouch for me. See? Do you believe me?” The boy looked at Kara and Caille, who were nodding, and then he shrugged. “Good lad,” Louarn said, and opened his hand.
In his palm lay a waxy, pale stone, irregular in shape, as though it had been hacked out of a bigger stone. When Louarn held his hand up near the little boy, the stone glowed like moonlight in the middle of the day.
“That’s magestone,” said a waysider in the small group of lingering gawpers.
Louarn nodded. “Yes it is.”
“That stuff is only supposed to glow for people of light.”
Louarn nodded again. “And so it does.”
For a few breaths more, the gawpers gawped. Then they were gone—to tell the alderfolk, to tell their friends, t
o flee, Pelufer had no idea. Only one or two were left now, their jaws hanging open.
Louarn thanked the boy and stood up. Despite the assurances, the boy thought something would happen to him, the way it did the last time he saw a stone like that. He looked surprised to be finished. Then he and the other children tore back into their game, Kara in the lead, calling over her shoulder to Caille to come join them.
Caille stood watching Louarn.
[468] “Would you like to know what the woman’s ring would have told about you?” he asked.
Her eyes on the stone, Caille shook her head, but she kept standing there.
“Are you sure?” Louarn said.
Eyes still on the stone, Caille shook her head again.
Pelufer went over and crouched down next to her, throwing a loose arm around her, saying nothing.
Caille looked slowly up at Louarn, and nodded.
He closed the stone in both hands, knelt in front of Caille, and said, “Pick a hand!”
It was a game he’d played with her in Gir Nuorin, a silly baby’s game that she only liked when Louarn played it. It was completely silly now, since the stone was in both hands. She giggled despite herself, and clapped her hands on both of his.
He opened them. The stone lay pale and lightless in his palms.
Pelufer let out a breath she hadn’t known she was holding.
“I guessed right!” Caille said, and darted off to rejoin her friends’ game.
“I think she’s glad because otherwise she’d have something that Kara was supposed to have, and that wouldn’t be fair,” Pelufer said, watching her go. It was so strange to see Caille surrounded by friends. Frightening, and wonderful, and sad. She supposed she’d get used to it eventually.
“That’s very astute of you,” Louarn said, and she found him looking at her with his head cocked.
She was about to rake him raw for letting them think he’d left them forever when one of the last gawpers touched her lightly on the shoulder, then snatched his hand back. Both she and Louarn stood up. “Can you really talk to haunts?” the man said.
Pelufer swallowed. Elora giving secrets away was one thing. Doing it herself was another. She’d cried their trade across the whole long, but that was to shock everyone. This was different. With an effort of will, she made her head go up and down.
“What would you take to talk to my family in Highhill?”
Pelufer could not begin to think.
Elora swept in to haggle with the man. It depended on how many haunts there were, and whether they were there or not, and of course whether he was satisfied, but they worked out a range, and next thing she knew Pelufer was headed back to Highhill, the scariest place of all next to the spirit wood.
Jiondor had said she might make a trade of this.
Well, they’d find that out now.
* * *
[469] She was back at noon with real tallystones in her pocket—stones she’d earned, not stolen. She was ready to present them to Elora, their very first takings, but she found the stall so swamped with custom that she had to squeeze between two stalls down the row and come up along the alley behind them to reach it, and then everybody was too busy to listen to her.
Louarn was arranging work for her, and Kara was sitting under the trading board, hiding while she scribed on a board with a piece of charcoal. Caille was watching in fascination. “Their names,” Kara said when Pelufer squatted for a closer look. “In order. You’ll never keep them straight otherwise. But you need someone who can scribe better than me.” It did seem to be hard for her, and her tongue stuck out while she worked the charcoal with her hand. But Pelufer had never seen anything like it. Marks that told you the order of customers! Now, that was a useful knack. It would leave all kinds of room in your head for remembering other things.
Elora was explaining the rules for healings for what sounded like the dozenth time. “One healing per customer for now,” she said to a man with a scrape on his head. “You might want to save it for something important. And you have to bring someone with you to help. The point is that other people can do it too. We’re going to teach you. So healings are free, but every one has to be a lesson, and you can’t come to us for small things.”
The scraped man went away, but another man came forward, with a sickly-looking child and dark circles under his eyes that attested to the difficulty in caring for him. “My boy’s got Saron’s palsy,” he said. “He’ll take his healing now, assuming this isn’t a barrel of backwash. You can give whatever lessons you like to me.”
Elora peeked under the board. “Are you ready, Caille?”
She must have turned dozens of small injuries away, if this was the first time Caille was doing a real healing.
Caille nodded, and came out.
The crowd that formed to watch her work made an immediate problem obvious: nobody could get through Hunger Long while this was going on. But the sooner the word got out, the better. She and Elora had decided, and Caille had agreed: The only way to protect their powers was to give them away. If they weren’t the only ones who could do what they could do, they wouldn’t be overwhelmed by people wanting them. If they weren’t the only ones, they wouldn’t be in danger because they were the only ones. They had to hide in plain sight, by making their powers commonplace. Everyone had some shine. There was no reason they shouldn’t learn to use it, or use it [470] better if they already could, or find it again if they’d lost it when they grew up. And there might be a lot of strong ones. Maybe not as strong as they were, but as strong as Kazhe, or Louarn, or even stronger.
It meant they were going to have to learn to explain how they did things. That was going to be hard. Jiondor was the one who pointed that out. But he also said that he learned more about being a trader from starting in to teach his sons about it than he ever had just doing it. It made you think about what you were doing, and do it better. They were learning more about the shine all the time. This would help them. So they’d get something out of it too.
A good traders’ solution, that was. Pelufer liked it.
Caille stood next to the boy and looked at Elora. Elora nodded. Caille took the man’s hands and put them on his son. She put her hands over them. Pelufer didn’t think the man had much of a shine, although the little boy had a lot, even though he must be seven or eight and he was sick and wasted. But the man saw Caille shine. He must have. His eyes flew wide as copper plates. And then he started to shine, too. He started to believe that maybe this wasn’t a barrel of backwash. He started to hope that his son might get better. He started to let himself want it. And then all his love and his longing and his strength began to ... shine.
Caille couldn’t explain what she could do. But she could share the feeling of it. That might be a better lesson than all the words that Pelufer and Elora would ever be able to come up with.
Their first customer went away more than satisfied. That gruff, exhausted, suspicious man went away awed and laughing and mopping his eyes, with his son healthy for the first time in his life. He’d thanked Caille so much that he’d scared her and she’d crawled back under the stall, and Elora said that he could thank them by trying to do what Caille had done, and she hoped he’d come back and let them know if he did, or if he had any questions. She was such a good trader. She was in her element here, behind her wooden stall. She wasn’t just shining with her shine. She was shining with happiness.
“How did you fare with your haunts?” she asked Pelufer at last, holding a hand up so the customers would wait a moment. It was a good technique. Get them excited, then make them wait.
Pelufer grinned. “He bawled like a baby,” she said. “He never got to say goodbye to his grandparents, and then there was his pledge, and his father, and his sister.” For a moment her grin left her, as she thought how terribly many dead there were in this town, how many had been lost to the fevers and coughs and poxes. But they weren’t lost, she told herself. Their selves went on. And maybe there’d be [471] something they could
do about it, someday. There were all those bodies in the bonefolk’s realm, with no one knowing what they were for. They were going to have to work on that, once they got themselves established. “Anyway, he feels better now. But I never saw so much blubbering in my life.”
“You’re going to see a good deal more, I expect,” Louarn said. He’d sent the rest of the hauntseekers away, and carefully wrapped the board Kara had scribed the names on. “You’ve got two days of work lined up for you. That was all the room Kara had on her board.”
“It’s because I scribe too big,” Kara said from under the stall. She had some string and was showing Caille how to make a cat’s cradle. “And you need sedgeweave and quills and things. What kind of place doesn’t let people scribe on sedgeweave?”
“That may change as the light returns,” Louarn said. “But for now we follow the rules.”
He didn’t look at Pelufer, but she knew the way his brow would have arched and the face she would have made back. He was almost all one shape now. It was different from the shape he’d had in the beginning. That one was flat. This one had volume. Like a sheet of metal turned and cut and soldered so that it could hold things. Some things would still bounce off him. But some things would fall in, and be held.
She suddenly felt too full of joy to be still. She had to do something—run, or jump up and down, or dance in and out of the stalls and alleys and shorts the way she used to, only this time calling hellos to the traders instead of snatching their wares. She would dance, the way she used to. She had left, and seen the world, and seen other worlds no one else got to see, and now she was home, and she felt as though she could dance forever.
“Hold on there, Pelufer,” Louarn said. “I have something to tell you. All three of you.”
Elora turned back to her customers, and Caille hunkered down into herself under the stall.
“I’m off up to Gir Nuorin to fetch our gear,” he said, “and whatever Risalyn and Yuralon left.”
The Binder's Road (The Sequel to 'Illumination') Page 59