Quatrain

by Sharon Shinn

  “You left because my father hurt her,” Kerk said.

  Her voice was hammered steel. “I left because you hurt her,” she said.

  He felt his entire body chill with shock.

  “You came to the nursery where she lay,” she continued in an implacable voice. “You stood over her, pinching her face and her little fingers, making her shriek, bruising that beautiful skin. I came running into the room to see what was making her scream, and I found you torturing your baby sister. Who knows what you would have done to her if I had not heard her crying? I left Gold Mountain because of you.”

  Kerk could not speak. Horror had paralyzed him; revulsion had stopped his heart.

  “I left a week later, knowing both of us could die upon the journey,” she said. “But that risk seemed smaller than raising my child in a house full of gulden men.”

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered. He could barely get the words past his strangled throat. “I have no memory of such behavior. I just remember a small girl, and my father’s anger, and the desperation on your face. It is as if I’m watching a scene filled with other people, but I am nowhere in it. If I did such things—”

  “I never loved you after that day,” she said flatly. “I have not wondered once what became of you. I do not care now. I am only here to tell you to stop looking for me. There is nothing either of us has to give that the other one would want.”

  “I would want forgiveness,” he said, barely breathing the words. “But there is nothing else I would ask of you.”

  Bree Socast came to her feet. “I do not have even that much to offer,” she said. “Your search has ended. Let me go.”

  She didn’t wait for an answer; she just walked away. Kerk thought she headed in the direction of the Centrifuge, not bothering to stop first in the main building and speak a farewell to Del. He couldn’t be sure; he wasn’t watching. He had buried his face in his hands and was trying with all his energy to keep his body from disintegrating into poisonous molecules of pain. He thought it was possible he would die of a broken heart on that very bench.

  A shadow, a rustle, a warm shape settling beside him. He didn’t have the strength to look up or strike out, and he certainly didn’t have the ability to speak. But it was no surprise at all to hear Jalci’s voice, subdued and wracked with pity.

  “Oh, Kerk, I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “What did she say to you?”

  He shook his head to indicate he could not answer. A gulden man did not show weakness to a woman; he did not turn to a woman for help. A gulden man must display strength at all times. He could not break down; he could not weep.

  Kerk kept his face nestled in his hands and let the tears wash through his fingers. His breath was ragged and insufficient. He was showing weakness before an indigo woman and he couldn’t stop himself and he didn’t care.

  She shifted beside him on the bench and put her arms around him, rocking him against her and brushing her lips against his exposed cheek. “She was so strange, when she spoke to us in Del’s office,” Jalci whispered in bluetongue. “So cold. I knew she was not interested in a reunion with you, but she must have done something worse than simply reject you. Kerk, what did she say? Tell me. You know I won’t stop asking until you tell me everything.”

  “She said—she said—that she found me hurting my baby sister,” he gasped out. “That she left Gold Mountain because of me.”

  “That gilder bitch!” Jalci exclaimed.

  He was so astonished that he looked up, not caring that she would see his face ruined with tears. “Don’t call her that.”

  But Jalci was furious. “Why would she say something like that? Only to wound you. Only because she wanted to be cruel.”

  He was bewildered. “But I am the one who was cruel.”

  “You were seven years old! You were jealous and confused and you didn’t understand why this new creature was in the house, sucking up all your mother’s love.”

  “That excuses nothing.”

  “What did you do to your sister? Did you throw her down the steps? Try to suffocate her?”

  “I—I pinched her and made her cry.”

  “That’s it? Kerk, I terrorized my younger sisters! I crept into their rooms at night and pretended I was a monster come to devour them. I made them eat insects. I told Surabeti that she wasn’t really my mother’s daughter, that we had found her in the woods one day and decided to take her in. She believed that for a whole year.”

  He stared at her, forgetting for a moment to cry. “That’s horrible,” he said.

  “I know! I feel dreadful about it now, but I was simply awful when I was a little girl. All children are savages. Don’t you know that?”

  “But to physically harm a young child, a baby—”

  “Well, that’s bad, of course, but it was your mother’s job to tell you that,” Jalci said firmly. “How does anyone learn the right behavior? They copy it from their parents—or, since your parents didn’t provide the best example, from their stepparents and their teachers and the other adults they admire. You aren’t born knowing that you shouldn’t hurt people. You aren’t born knowing that you have to be kind and that you have to forgive and you have to laugh. Your mother should have taught you that what you did was wrong. But she didn’t. She abandoned you instead. She’s the one at fault, Kerk. Not you. Never you.”

  He continued to stare at her, feeling the tears drying on his cheeks. He had never seen anyone so sincere, so convinced, so determined to believe in him. Her arms were still around him; she still leaned against him, and he could feel the heat of her body everywhere it touched his. “I don’t understand why you think I’m a good man,” he said at last.

  She smiled. “And I don’t understand how you could think you’re not.”

  He sighed and leaned against the back of the bench, careful not to displace her arms. She settled beside him and rested her cheek against his shoulder. “I don’t know how I go forward from this,” he said. “I don’t know how to readjust the way I think about what I want.”

  “She has not been in your life for seventeen years,” Jalci said. “You have already filled it with other things.”

  “Some of those things have been accidental,” he said.

  “Well, that’s true for everybody! Do you think I was walking along one day, thinking, ‘Hey, wouldn’t it be fun to meet a gulden man? I bet we’d be best friends within a month.’ It never crossed my mind.”

  “And I did not expect to find so much of my time dedicated to the Lost City—”

  She lifted her head. “Well, I hope you’re not thinking of walking away now,” she said. “Because of what happened with your mother.”

  He shook his head. “No. It’s just that I will have to acknowledge that I come here for a different reason than the one that brought me here to begin with.”

  “That’s been true for a long time,” she said. “You just didn’t realize it.”

  He looked at her for a moment. “It is not just because I enjoy coaching the boys.”

  She gave him a radiant smile. “I know. It’s because you want to see me.”

  His answering smile was rather bleak. “Now that my search is over, I have to think about the things that have happened because of the search. And you are the thing that is most precious and most complicated. I do not want to lose that, but I do not know how long either of us can sustain the friendship we have now.”

  “Oh, but, Kerk, I have the most wonderful news!” she exclaimed. She had released him so she could clap her hands together like a little girl. She was practically bouncing where she sat. “You know I have spent the last three days with my family—my aunts and my cousins and my uncles—and I thought it would be utterly dreary, but it wasn’t. My aunt Bella spent an hour talking business with me, and she went on and on about how she wanted to expand her import business, and she was looking at electronics, and everyone told her the man she needed to meet with was Brolt Barzhan, but so far she had not been able to arrange an intro
duction—”

  He was dumbfounded. “You can’t be serious.”

  “I am! And I casually mentioned that I had met his adopted son, and that I thought you had some influence with him—”

  “Hardly that.”

  “And she was very excited, and she asked if I thought you might be willing to come to the house someday and meet her! She lives in my grandmother’s city house; we could go there any day you were free—”

  “I would first want to ask Brolt if he is interested in expanding his indigo accounts, because we have determined that we should cut back on distribution—”

  “Who cares if he’s interested? In fact, it’s better if he’s not! Because then she’ll have to invite you to her house again and again, trying to make you like her, and you’ll be very haughty, and she’ll tell my mother that she wants me to be nice to you, and then no one at all will mind that we’re—that we’re friends,” she ended lamely.

  He smiled at her. And then, because he missed the warmth of her touch, he reached out and took both of her hands in his. The gesture pleased her; she instantly returned the pressure of his fingers. “You’re right. That would be best,” he agreed, mock-solemn. “We must do everything in our power to keep Brolt Barzhan from making a deal with your aunt Bella.”

  She brought his hands up and lightly kissed his knuckles, then nursed their folded hands against her chest. Her dark eyes searched his face. “So I have made you smile,” she said. “Does that mean you will be all right? Does that mean you have already let the healing start?”

  “I don’t know the answer to either of those questions,” he said honestly. “I’m not sure I have the strength to go to the gymnasium today. I would make a poor coach this afternoon, and the players would sense it. Maybe I’ll come back tomorrow. One way or the other, I will come back. You may tell the lady Del that, if she is worried. You may tell the boys.”

  “Because you realize how important it is that they see how a gulden man is supposed to behave,” she said. “Because you can teach them what your parents failed to teach you.”

  “Yes,” he said. And then he smiled. “And because I enjoy the game.”

  She laughed and let him go and accompanied him halfway to the Centrifuge before waving a cheery good-bye and turning back to the charity bank. He knew she was worried about him, though she pretended not to be, and he appreciated both the worry and the pretense. His brief lift of spirits had faded before he had settled into the ringcar, and his heart was heavy as he made the short drive home. It was not yet dark, which seemed strange. He thought midnight must have fallen on the whole world while his mother spoke of the blackness in his soul.

  Brolt’s house hummed with activity as Makk and the girls argued in the common room and Tess busied herself in the kitchen making dinner. Brolt and his nephews were still at work and might not be home for another hour or more. Moving slowly, because this was a route he rarely took, Kerk headed down the hallway to the kitchen to where Tess was mixing ingredients over the stove.

  “Kerk! You surprised me,” she exclaimed, when he spoke her name. Then she looked at him more closely. “Kerk,” she repeated in a quiet voice.

  She didn’t ask what was wrong. She merely turned off the stove, laid down her spoon, and dried her hands on a towel as she crossed the room. When she put her arms around him, he started crying again, weeping into her hair. He had never realized until this day that women possessed a certain kind of strength. He had never realized before how much he relied on it and how he would do anything to keep it in his life.

  Nine

  Brolt was not opposed to the idea of Kerk meeting Jalci’s aunt. “She gave her name as Riabella Contego, so I did not realize there was the Candachi connection,” he said two days later when Kerk had recovered his equilibrium enough to approach his stepfather with part of his story. “Even so, we must be prudent. We must be diligent. I have no reason to suppose that Kitrini Candachi is a particularly skilled businesswoman, and we cannot make deals with people just because we approve of their politics.”

  “I agree,” Kerk said. “But we could begin researching her company.”

  Brolt nodded. “I think we should. And if she indeed is willing to meet you, I think you should accept her invitation.”

  “Then I will.”

  “But I am not yet ready to set foot inside the house of a blueskin woman.”

  “No,” Kerk said. “I am not certain I am ready, either.”

  He sent a courier to Jalci, letting her know the first step of the negotiation was successfully completed, and received her reply within the hour. “Meet me tonight at Sorrietta,” she wrote. “It’s the new restaurant a block from North Zero with all the red awnings. We can talk. Give my name—I’ve already made reservations.”

  So a few hours later he made his way to the crowded, brightly lit building in the heart of the commercial district. As a waitress led him to Jalci’s table, he glanced around, appraising the clientele. Mostly young, mostly fashionable, mostly wealthy. More indigo than gulden, though the servers seemed to be split evenly between the races and no one gave him more than a passing glance. He and Jalci were unlikely to be assaulted this night because no one liked to see a gulden man talking to an indigo woman.

  He was studying his menu when someone pulled out one of the other chairs and dropped into it. But it wasn’t Jalci. He gazed in some surprise at the young gulden woman sitting across from him. She looked to be about sixteen, with creamy, rich skin, smooth flaxen hair, and an expression of blossoming excitement.

  “Perhaps you have made a mistake,” he said civilly in goldtongue. “I do not believe this is your table.”

  “Kerk Socast?” she said.

  He nodded, baffled.

  “Jalci told me to find you.”

  “Did she give you a message? Is she going to be late?”

  The girl was still staring at him as if she couldn’t believe her luck. As if she had been promised the most delightful gift and, when it was delivered, it had exceeded all her expectations. “I’m Coe,” she said in bluetongue. “I’m your sister.”

  He had to grab the table; the world titled that violently. “My sister,” he breathed.

  She laughed so happily he could almost see notes of music floating from her mouth. “Oh, I can’t believe I’ve finally met you!” she cried. “We look alike, don’t you think? Your hair’s darker and you’re bigger, of course, but your face. It’s just like mine.”

  “My sister,” he said again. He was starting to feel a strange bubble in his chest, like panic or fear, but it was neither of those emotions. It was lighter. Bigger. Closer to joy.

  “I was in the house when Del told Mother about you, and I eavesdropped on the whole conversation,” Coe said. “I figured out pretty quickly that she wasn’t going to tell me about you—and she wasn’t going to let you back into her life. So I went looking for Del the next day. And she introduced me to Jalci. And here I am.”

  “She wouldn’t want you to know me,” he said. “Our mother. She doesn’t believe I’m a good man.”

  “Well, maybe you’re not, but I want to find that out for myself,” Coe said. “Anyway, Jalci and Del couldn’t say enough nice things about you, so I think you can’t be so bad.” She grinned at him. “I have wanted to meet you for as long as I can remember. So tell me about yourself! Tell me everything! Where do you live? Who do you live with? What do you do? What do you like? Are you married? I can’t even think of everything to ask.”

  “I am the most ordinary of men,” he said.

  But he told her his story anyway, interrupted dozens of times when she had a comment or another question. She was fascinated by the most mundane detail of Geldricht life, demanded the minutest accounting of his own existence. “What happened then?” she said a dozen times. “And what happened then?”

  “But tell me about you,” he said, when she finally stopped asking questions. “Growing up in the city like this—what was it like?”

  “Well, I
think the first few years were dreadful,” she said candidly, “but I don’t remember them. Mother still talks about that time with a kind of horror, and whenever things go badly she gets this—this—look of fear on her face. As if she’s afraid she’ll be dragged back to some charnel house or slave pit. But I can usually calm her down.” Coe shrugged. “I’ve been working since I was twelve years old; I can speak three languages; I’m really good with money. I figure I’ll always be able to find a job. I’ve been thinking about going back to school and learning more about business. I might want to open a restaurant. I might want to open a clothing store. Basically, I think I’ll be able to do anything I want.”

  He shook his head, half admiring and half amazed. “No girl from Geldricht would ever speak that way,” he said. “Tess’s daughters wouldn’t know what to make of you.”

  She tossed her blond hair. “Well, once they’ve lived in the city long enough, Tess’s daughters might start thinking like that,” she said. “Who wants to be dependent on a man for everything in her life? Who wants to hope that she’ll be cherished and protected, when she can so easily take care of herself?”

  He should have been shocked, but instead he was grinning. “You’ll have trouble finding a husband if you talk that way,” he teased.

  “Maybe I won’t look for a husband—a gulden husband,” she said. “Maybe I’ll find a blueskin man instead.”

  Even that wasn’t as shocking as it should have been. Less than two months in the city, and Kerk had seen all of his familiar notions questioned and twisted and tossed aside. If he had grown up here, as Coe had, how different would he be now? If he stayed here the rest of his life, how different would he become?

  “I hope you find room in your life for one gulden man,” he said seriously. “I did not realize that, this whole time, you were the one I was looking for.”

  Her eyes widened. Not green like their mother’s, but gray-blue, like Kerk’s. “Of course I want to keep you around,” she said. “I have to go to work now, but can I see you tomorrow? Can I see you every day? I don’t think—I’m not sure that our mother will be able—”