“Not . . . exactly,” Winter said.
“You said it was a long story.”
“It is.”
“Well,” Jane said, “we’ve got a ways to go yet.”
—
By the time they made it back to Jane’s building, late in the afternoon, Winter had gone through most of the last three years. It had been a halting narrative, punctuated by Jane’s conversations with various merchants, fishwives, and other Dockside inhabitants along her route. A few times she’d had to stop while Jane was called on to solve some minor issue, such as one house’s tendency to lean onto another’s property and what that should mean for rents, or the matter of some rancid fish that somehow got packed into a shipment. Each time, the participants seemed to look to Jane for judgment as a matter of course, and accepted her ruling with more grace than Sal had done.
These gaps helped Winter keep her story straight. She told the truth, more or less, but left her personal involvement in events deliberately vague, and omitted any mention of Feor, Bobby’s healing, or that last awful night in the temple under the Great Desol. After a short internal struggle, she also decided to say nothing about what Janus had sent her to do. I still need to figure that out myself. I can always fill Jane in later.
Jane listened, her eyes going wider and wider, until by the end of the trip she was ignoring the friendly greetings that met her at every corner to concentrate entirely on Winter. When they stopped outside the barred gate of her building, she stopped and glared.
“You’re serious about this, aren’t you?” Jane said. “You ran away from Mrs. Wilmore’s and joined the army, like some girl out of a ballad?”
Winter nodded.
“And then you served in fucking Khandar with Vhalnich?”
“I didn’t mean to,” Winter said. “I went to Khandar because I thought it would be a good place to hide. It’s not my fault they decided to have a revolution right after I got there.”
“You really did it,” Jane said. “I do not fucking believe it!”
With a happy shout, she grabbed Winter and hugged her roughly, and after a stunned moment Winter hugged her back.
“God,” Jane said, “and here I was pretending I was the tough one, when you’ve been marching around fucking Khandar and eating monkey brains.”
“No monkeys in Khandar,” Winter said, a bit muffled. “Beetles, though. They like to eat beetles. And there’s these sort of snakes that live in the canals. They pack them in mud and bake them—”
“Please stop,” Jane said. “I’ve just worked up a healthy appetite and I’d hate to ruin it. Does your diet still extend to cows and pigs?”
“Not often enough,” Winter said. “Mostly we ate mutton. I never want to see another sheep as long as I live, alive or boiled.”
“Come on, then. You can sample the unique Vordanai delicacy I call ‘pork roast pretty rare on one side and fucking black on the other,’ because Nellie in the kitchen is still learning and tries her best.” Jane shook her head. “I can’t wait to tell the girls you were in Khandar. They’re going to have fits.”
“No!”
The word came out of Winter with such force that it surprised both of them. Jane went quiet.
“You can’t tell anyone,” Winter said, only now becoming aware of the risk she was taking. If word gets out that there’s a girl-in-boy’s-clothing in the Colonials, I’ll never be able to go back. The thought of wearing dresses for the rest of her life brought her close to the edge of panic, and her collar suddenly felt tight and hot. It hadn’t even occurred to her that she might not be able to trust Jane. “Please.” The word was all she could manage.
There was another strained silence. Jane coughed.
“Well,” she said. “It’s your story.”
“Thank you.” Winter felt her throat unclench. “I’m sorry. I should have . . . said something. I’ll explain—”
“Don’t worry about it,” Jane said. “In here we don’t ask about what happened to anybody if they don’t want to talk about it. Saves a lot of tears.” She smiled. “I guess we’ll have to entertain the girls with the story of how you saved my life from little Jim Bellows.”
Winter’s smile was weak, but grateful. “I don’t know if he could have hit you, to be honest. Except maybe by accident.”
“You’re probably right,” Jane said. “But we don’t have to tell them that.”
Supper was a drawn-out affair in Jane’s— Apartments? Barracks? Commune? Winter wasn’t really sure what to call it. The knocked-together kitchen and dining room weren’t big enough to hold all the girls at once, so they turned up in shifts, while a relay of cooks came and went in the kitchen under the uncertain supervision of Nellie-who-tries-her-best.
The dining room—fashioned from several adjacent offices by knocking down any inconvenient walls—was a churning flock of eating, talking, laughing young women, dressed in a bewildering variety of clothes that had all come from the bottom of someone’s ragbag. They ate off a menagerie of clay and wooden crockery, with flatware gathered from a thousand junk shops and rubbish bins. As far as Winter could tell, small groups turned up whenever they liked and ate their fill, then left to make room for others.
Jane presided over it all like a medieval baron, sitting at an especially tall table with a small group of the older girls. Winter had a seat to one side of her, which got her a few uncomfortable looks from some of the others, but Jane immediately launched into the story of what had happened at Crooked Sal’s, and that broke the ice. Abby, who seemed to serve as a kind of second-in-command, sat on Jane’s other side. Among the others, Winter recognized Becca and Chris from when she’d been captured, and was introduced to a short, soft-spoken girl named Min and a ramrod-thin woman closer to her own age called Winnie. These four, with Abby, seemed to serve as Jane’s lieutenants, and Winter’s presence at the high table apparently meant that she’d been added to their number.
The food was everything Jane had promised or threatened. It was plain and plentiful, with more meat and fish than Winter had seen in her years at Mrs. Wilmore’s or her time in the army. There was plenty of bread, too, great piles of steaming round loaves.
Winter ate her fill, and more. Her army time had taught her that the availability of food was always touch-and-go, so it was always best to stock up when one had the chance. Jane also attacked her plate with gusto, though she carried on a whispered conversation with Abby throughout the meal. Winter restrained her curiosity, though she couldn’t help noticing that Abby left in the middle of dinner, leaving behind a half-full plate.
Once she’d taken the edge off her hunger, certain questions presented themselves irresistibly to Winter. Jane was fully occupied in her role as master of the house, shouting across the room to this girl or that and occasionally roaring with laughter at the responses. Min reported on the day’s activities—her responsibilities seemed to focus on the care and feeding of the younger girls—and Jane listened and gave occasional instructions.
Where does it all come from? These girls ate better than she ever had in the army, and the food was certainly better than the gray slop produced by Mrs. Wilmore’s kitchen. How does she pay for all this? For that matter, where had the girls themselves come from? Abby said she’d been taking in orphans and strays, but that can’t be all of them.
As supper wore on, Winter started to worry. Janus sent me here for a reason, after all, and he’s Minister of Justice now. Maybe Jane’s running a gang of thieves. A gang of thieves that included a cadre of chattering, happy twelve-year-olds seemed unlikely, but Winter’s experience was limited. The feral children of Ashe-Katarion had certainly included their share of thieves, but she couldn’t picture them sitting around a table like this.
Another thought occurred to her, and Winter bit her lip. There was always one way for a group of young women to earn a living, after all. Surely not. Jane would never be
involved in something like that. Her friend’s morality had always been a bit selective, but surely there were some lines she would never cross. Never.
By the end of the meal, she was feeling decidedly uncomfortable. The conversation flowed all around her, but she was no part of it, like a rock sticking out of a smoothly flowing stream. It felt all too much like being back in Davis’ company, as the “Saint,” collecting her meager ration and wolfing it down in silence while the men around her joked and boasted about their drinking and whoring. The jokes were different, of course, but the feeling of camaraderie—from which she was excluded—was the same. She poked morosely at the congealing bits of fat and vegetable left on her plate.
A hand descended on her shoulder, and she looked up to find Jane smiling down at her.
“I’m about done,” she said. “Let’s go upstairs.”
“I’ve got—” Winter began.
“Some questions.” Jane gave a little sigh, and her smile faded. “I know.”
—
Jane’s room was on the top floor, in one corner of the building, where windows caught the sun from two sides. They arrived to find Abby tugging the door closed with one finger, awkward because she was carrying a thick wad of clothing in her arms.
“Sorry,” she said, edging to the side of the passage to let them pass.
Winter got the feeling that Jane’s room had been enlarged from its original state in the same way the dining room had, by pulling out interior walls, but here some effort had been made to disguise the fact. A half dozen rugs of different fabrics and vintages overlapped on the floor, and a heavy oak table in one corner was strewn with papers. The walls were hung with colorful fabric to disguise the crumbling plaster. A couple of heavy trunks, lids open, comprised Jane’s wardrobe, and an enormous mattress meant for a four-poster bed simply lay on the floor, covered by a clean but threadbare sheet.
“My palace,” Jane said, spreading her hands. “Do you like it?”
“I spent two years living in a tent,” Winter said, closing the door behind her. “Just sleeping indoors feels like a luxury to me.” She hesitated. “Nobody’s going to—”
“Sit with a glass pressed against the door? Don’t worry.”
Winter relaxed a little. “How long have you been here?”
“Just over a year,” Jane said. “It seems like longer.”
“You’ve certainly made yourself comfortable.”
“I’m good at that.” Jane winked, and went to a small cupboard standing on its own beside the big table. She withdrew a corked bottle and two slightly dusty glasses and waggled them suggestively at Winter. “Drink?”
Winter nodded. While Jane poured, she went to the window and twitched the curtain aside. Summer’s late evening sun was just setting, staining the muddy, sooty streets of the Docks with a pattern of red and black. Candles and torches burned here and there, but not many. The view was to the north, and Jane’s building was taller than those around it, and so Winter could see all the way to the river and beyond. The Island was a blaze of light in the distance, like an enormous ship.
Jane stepped up behind her, quietly, and pressed a glass into her hand. Winter sipped without looking, and was pleasantly surprised. Of course, any Vordanai wine would taste good next to that Khandarai stuff. She made a face at the memory.
“No good?” Jane sipped from her own glass. “Not the best vintage, I’ll grant you, but—”
“It’s fine.” Winter turned. “I have to ask. What are you doing here? Where did all these people come from? How do you manage to feed them all?”
“It is a bit odd, when I come to think about it.” Jane turned her glass back and forth, staring at it. Winter noted, absently, that much of the swearing had dropped out of her vocabulary now that they were alone. “It’s . . . like yours. A long story.”
“I think we have time,” Winter said.
“I suppose so.” Jane took a deep breath. “Most of the girls are from Mrs. Wilmore’s, like us.”
“What?”
“I went back, after I ran away from Ganhide,” Jane said. “I had to hide for a while, until they gave up looking for me, and I sort of got to thinking. I’d got away, all right, but there were all those girls still there, and the same thing was just going to happen to them—they’d be married off to the first brute of a farmer who came asking.”
“So you went back.”
“I went back.”
“And staged an . . . escape?” There had to be three hundred people in the building. Winter tried to imagine them all sneaking out of Mrs. Wilmore’s, one at a time, hiding from the proctors and the mistresses . . .
“In a way,” Jane said. She scratched the back of her head and reddened slightly. “More like a revolution, actually.”
“A revolution? But how did you keep from getting caught?”
“I didn’t.” Jane swallowed the rest of her drink with sudden decision. “When I first got there, I was hiding in the hedges and so forth, but the more I watched the more I thought . . . why bother? I mean, you were there. It’s not as though Mrs. Wilmore had a fucking battalion of guards on the premises.”
“But . . .”
“I know.” Jane shook her head. “When I first went back, I was so frightened. I spent days trying to figure out how to get in without the proctors seeing me. It all went to shit when I tried it, of course. I practically walked into one after five minutes. I was ready to run for it, and she was shouting, and suddenly I thought—she’s nothing! Just a little girl with a sash! She probably wasn’t fifteen, a little stick of a thing. I just pushed her out of the way and kept going.”
“Didn’t she fetch the mistresses?”
“Of course. But by that time I had a little while to talk to the girls in the dorms. So on one side there were five old women with willow switches, and on the other a couple of hundred angry girls.” Jane grinned. “They took one look at us and locked themselves in their offices.”
Winter couldn’t help laughing. It was true, when you thought about it that way. Mrs. Wilmore’s moral authority had always been so overpowering she’d seemed like a deity from antiquity, living on a mountaintop somewhere and dispensing favor or thunderbolts according to her whims. But, of course, she was human like anyone else. Just a bitter old woman. Even at Winter’s distant remove, it was a tremendously liberating thought.
“And you just walked out,” Winter said.
Jane nodded. “We just walked out. I told the girls I would take care of anyone who wanted to come with me. Some of them stayed behind, some of them just bolted and disappeared, and the rest . . .” She waved a hand at the building below them.
This must have been after Bobby escaped. The corporal had been closemouthed about her time in Mrs. Wilmore’s institution, but she surely would have mentioned this.
“You had all this ready for them?” Winter said.
“What? Oh no. God, it was fucking awful for a while. We spent a week sleeping in the swamps past the Bottoms, staying up half the night with torches and cudgels to keep the thieves and rapers away. I had no idea what I was doing. All this came later.”
Winter laughed again. That was Jane all over—do something bold, brilliant, beautiful, and have absolutely no idea how to handle the consequences. Dive in first and worry about how deep the water is later. She drained her own glass, looking around for the bottle, and it was a moment before she realized Jane had gone silent.
“Jane?”
She was staring at her hands, rolling the empty glass from one to the other. A single crimson droplet spiraled round and round just short of the rim, never quite escaping.
“Sorry,” Winter said. “I shouldn’t have laughed. It must have been terrible.”
“What? Oh.” Jane shook her head. “It’s all right. It is pretty fucking funny, when you think about it. I was just—running, from one thing to the next
, trying to stay one step ahead of the Armsmen and the thieves and just plain starvation. With a couple of hundred people suddenly looking to me to keep them safe and figure out where their next meal was coming from.”
Winter winced in sympathy. Her thoughts went back to her first mission with the Seventh Company, d’Vries’ idiot scout, and the sudden crashing realization that everything had descended on her shoulders. Screams and powder smoke, the crash of muskets and thrashing, terrified horses . . .
“I nearly left them,” Jane said, very quietly. “In the swamp. I was standing guard, and I thought, I could just leave. Then none of this would be my problem anymore.”
“You didn’t, though.”
“I wanted to. I wanted to, so badly. Or else to just wander out into the bog, get lost, step in some sinkhole, and just let it swallow me. It didn’t seem worth it.”
There was a long silence. Jane turned the glass round and round. Tentatively—it had been a long time since she’d touched another human being of her own free will—Winter extended a hand and let it rest on Jane’s shoulder.
“You did it, though. You won.” Winter patted her in a way she hoped was reassuring. “You beat Ganhide, and Mrs. Wilmore, and all the rest. I mean, look at this place!”
“You don’t understand,” Jane said. “I didn’t—I thought—”
She swallowed hard. Winter, uncertain, said nothing.
“I wasn’t looking to start a revolution at Mrs. Wilmore’s,” Jane said. “Not really. I was looking for you.”
Oh. Winter blinked.
“Every day, after I ran away from Ganhide, I thought about you stuck in that place and . . . what they would do to you, eventually. I had to go back. But it took so long—I needed to hide, and then . . .”
“I was gone by the time you got there,” Winter said.
Her throat clenched under a sudden, crushing wave of guilt. All this time, she’d felt like a traitor for her failure to set Jane free on that last night. She’d cursed herself as a coward. But what happened afterward is worse. I ran away to Khandar like all the demons of all the hells were after me. I never even considered going back to look for Jane, helping her get away from Ganhide, or all the other girls I left behind. I just ran until I found somewhere I thought no one would ever find me.
The Shadow Throne: Book Two of the Shadow Campaigns Page 15