by Glenda Larke
Behind them, Russet struggled to keep up. Terelle hesitated, about to offer to take his arm, but he glared at her, apparently affronted that she thought he needed aid. She shrugged and hurried after Feroze. At the top of the stairs, they were met by more orderlies in uniform, who fussed around them, showing them to their separate rooms, providing each of them with a change of clothes, readying baths and serving food on trays. Everything was overly comfortable, more opulent than needed, more confusingly complex than necessary. For her, the worst was tramping across wooden floors. In the Scarpen, even small items such as bab-wood chests were not all that plentiful. Imported wood for building was formidably expensive. To wear it out by walking on it felt like blasphemy.
A Khromatian woman came to help her dress; she wanted to laugh and send her away. When she held up what she was given to wear, she was glad she hadn’t because she couldn’t decide how to put it on. “What happened to our bags?” she asked in halting Khromatian.
“The orderlies will bring them up later, I suppose,” the woman said, and added scornfully, “They are military men, you know. Won’t do anything unless they get a direct order. Here, let me help you.” She took the clothing and began to wrap the fabric around Terelle, pleating and tucking the ends in. Terelle had seen women in the town wearing wraps, and had thought them pretty, but when she took a step, she half expected the whole thing to fall off. As she made her way to Russet’s room next door a little while later, the feel of the skirt flapping around her ankles was irritating.
Feroze was there before her. Russet was sound asleep, snoring noisily. They stood by his bed, looking down on him, but he didn’t stir.
“I think we had better leave him be,” Feroze said. “He’s worn out.”
“What does this Lord Bice intend to do with us?” she asked as they moved away from Russet’s bed. “He’s hardly said a word, and yet he’s apparently my cousin. That’s hardly making me feel welcome.”
“I dragged some information out of the orderly who was attending to me.” To Terelle’s ears, Feroze sounded unsettled and worried. “Hard work, but here’s what I found out. The Pinnacle—the one who was Russet’s son-in-law and your grandfather—he was the older brother of Lord Bice’s father. Because your grandparents had no children other than your mother, and she disappeared, the position passed to Lord Bice’s father after your grandparents died. He’s the present Pinnacle. Those armsmen with the tattoos are Bice’s three sons, by the way. Hue the eldest, Jet the middle one and Rubric, the good-looking young one.”
“Is Lord Bice next in line?”
“Yes.” His agreement sounded dubious, his tone wary. “He was an only child.”
“Until suddenly I pop up, in theory a pretender to the position. Which I don’t want.” She sighed. “I have to talk to Bice. To explain things.”
“I agree, ye need to be emphasising that ye’re here at the request of the Cloudmaster, in order to invite waterlords to the Quartern. Perhaps that will get his attention, more than anything else.” He shot a glance at Russet and lowered his voice still further. “Play down Russet’s part.”
She nodded.
“Would ye like me to be talking to Lord Bice first? I could look for him, ask him to see ye. I suppose ye could mention the waterpainting that has dragged ye here. It would tell him ye didn’t have a choice.”
She matched his whisper. “I’d like to. Then maybe he’d take me to where it was painted, so I could turn around and go home again.” She walked over to the window and looked out, thinking. Evening was approaching, speeded on its way by a cloud-covered sky. The glass squares distorted the landscape, blurring outlines and smudging colours. Someone crossing the grass appeared as a moving smear of hues across a static background. Why do they bother with glass when it is so hard to see through? “But it could be a lot more complicated than that. If I tell Bice about being coerced by Russet’s painting, he’ll guess Russet has plans for me, and for himself.”
“Which might put ye both in jeopardy.”
They looked at each other, their indecision shared. “Do you think I should go with you to see Bice now?” she asked.
“Not yet. I don’t want his contempt for Alabasters to be influencing his attitude to ye.”
“Surely you exaggerate.”
“Terelle, look around at this room. Yours I imagine is similar.”
She glanced around: two beds, a large fireplace, a woodpile beside it to burn—wood!—elaborate moulding around the top of the walls, waterpaintings long since parted from their trays now hanging in frames on the panelling. A ewer and wash basin on a stand. The glassed windows. “It’s luxurious. And so is mine. So?”
“A lovely room, fit for a lord. I told Lord Bice I was the advisor to the Bastion, and he put me in the windowless box room across the passage, with nothing more than a trundle bed and a single blanket. I suppose I’m lucky he didn’t put me down in the barracks with Elmar and Dibble.”
That shocked her more than anything else he’d said. “I don’t understand. That is—is—is discourteous, to say the least.”
“Deliberately so. They feel it is deserved.”
“No,” she said in revulsion. “What happened long ago should no longer have consequences. Worst of all is that you all acquiesce in your own punishment!”
He gave a faint smile, and something told her that he was not mocking her. Her words troubled him, she guessed because in his heart he agreed with her.
“We may never achieve a fair world, but it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t strive for it,” she said. “Are there any Alabaster servants in this house?”
“No. This is the heart of their rule in the Southern Marches. They don’t want Alabasters privy to their secrets.”
Someone knocked at the door, and as Russet didn’t stir, Feroze went to answer it. Dibble and Elmar were both there, the strain on their faces easing when they saw Terelle and Feroze. The servant who’d brought them to the door left, and Feroze waved the two men inside.
“We brought up the rest of your baggage,” Elmar said, dumping his load on the floor. He and Dibble exchanged unhappy looks, then Elmar continued, “Lady Terelle, I apologise for not—not succeeding in my duty.”
“Pardon? In what way?”
“The guards insisted on searching all our bags, including yours and Russet’s. They removed all the paint-powders. When I protested, they said it was Lord Bice’s orders.”
“They threatened us,” Dibble added sourly. “Said if we made a fuss they would bundle us up like roped baggage on our own animals and send us back to Alabaster.”
“All of the paints?” she asked, dismayed.
“They were thorough,” Elmar replied. “I’m sorry.”
“Not your fault.” She sat down on the second bed and tried not to feel sick with apprehension. “I hid some powders in the personal things I have with me. It’s enough for one painting. For emergencies.” When she saw Feroze’s face she felt even worse. He was looking at her in horror.
“We never thought—” he began, then stopped. “Neither the Bastion nor I dreamed they would treat ye and Russet with anything less than respect. Ye are Khromatians. And lords.”
“Bice is a lord,” Elmar said. “Does that make him a stormlord or a waterpainter?”
“Either,” Feroze replied. “There’s no way of knowing. Either way he could be dangerous, even though those possessing any water talents are bound by strict rules here. Watergiver family names are usually colours, and their personal name is always a colour, bestowed when they manifest their water skills, so you can tell them from ordinary folk.”
“Bice is a colour?” Dibble asked, surprised.
“There’s a bice green and a bice blue,” Terelle said. “Rubric is red ochre, jet is black. Hue seems to cover everything. What about their tattoos?”
He shook his head. “What you would call an upleveller thing. They indicate which of the fifteen aristocratic families a man is from. Meaningless, really. As for being a waterlord
or a painter: from my meagre knowledge of Khromatis, I think waterpainting is a rare talent.”
“That’s handy to know,” she said.
“It’s the kind of thing that Russet should have told ye, the old spindevil of a man.”
She shot a look at her great-grandfather, asleep with his mouth half open. “He’s always kept secrets, right from the beginning.”
“Gave him a sense of power over you,” Elmar said, his contempt for Russet obvious. He looked around for somewhere to sit, but there weren’t any chairs. Dibble was standing at the window, trying to see out, but it was dark and only his own face looked back at him. Elmar settled himself on the edge of the second bed. “You could have told us more, too,” he said to Feroze. “I’m fed up with secrets.”
“We know less than ye may think,” Feroze replied. “Some Alabasters live here in the Borderlands, certainly, but they are kept separate. Khromatians don’t mix with them, or talk to them, other than what’s needed for their work.”
No one said anything. Alabasters could still have told us more, she thought, if they could free themselves of their stupid ties to their past.
To break the embarrassing silence that followed, Feroze said, “I think ye two armsmen ought to be staying here the night. One on duty in the passage outside and the other asleep here with Lord Russet. Right now, I want to be locating and talking to Lord Bice.”
“You aren’t taking your sword?” Elmar asked as Feroze headed for the door.
“The orderly took it away from me, on Bice’s instructions. Alabasters are not permitted to go armed. But I do have my dagger.”
“Be careful,” Terelle said. Silly words, she knew. Careful of what? Careful how? He gave her a sad smile as if he was not looking forward to the conversation and left the room.
“Have you eaten?” she asked the two men as she closed the door behind him.
“Yes, if you can call their food fit to eat,” Dibble grumbled. He’d gone to the fireplace to light the lamp on the mantelshelf. The room was growing dark as the dusk closed in. He fiddled with his flint and steel, saying, “No bab anywhere.”
“The meal wasn’t that bad. Better than samphire, samphire and more samphire,” Elmar said.
“Blast, I think my tinder is damp. Now that’s one thing that doesn’t happen much back in the Quartern. Tell the truth, I don’t mind staying up here all night if they’ll let us. You’d have thought we were covered in sand lice with a bad case of desert peel, the way they treated us down there in the barracks. Not friendly, that’s for sure. One of the men said they’d be escorting us to the border tomorrow.”
“He did?” Elmar asked. “‘Us’?”
“Well, I think that’s what the fellow said. Don’t know if he meant just us two, or us two and the other Alabaster guards, or the whole lot of us, but he sounded like it was definite.”
Elmar swore. “Blighted eyes. That’s not good news.”
“Better than hearing they were going to gut us both while we’re asleep,” Dibble pointed out.
Terelle went to help him with the lamp. “Well, we’ll see what Feroze can do.”
“If they send us back to the border, we’ll pretend to go back—and follow you instead.” Dibble had the tinder alight at last, and Terelle held a taper to the flame. He sounded utterly confident and she envied him the certainty. She felt mean as she reminded him that water sensitives would notice their return.
“We’ll dodge them,” he said cheerfully. “After all, no water sensitive can possibly keep track of all the water they feel, can they? I mean, Lord Jasper told me he blocks it most of the time back in the Quartern, otherwise he’d go mad.”
That was true; he’d said much the same thing to her often enough. And in a place that had so much water like Khromatis, it must be even worse. And more difficult to track the water of individuals.
As he lifted the lamp glass for her to put the taper to the wick, she told them what Feroze had said about her relationship to Bice and the Pinnacle. Elmar’s expression became more and more grim.
“If your cousin is unscrupulous, he could well be planning your death right now. It’d certainly be in his interest.” He made an expression of disgust at the snoring Russet. “That old man’s a sun-fried fool.”
“At least I’m probably safe until the painting he did becomes real. Trouble is, until then, I’m not free to go where I want. It tugs at me all the time.”
“Can we have a look at it?” Elmar asked.
“If it’s still in the baggage.” She rummaged through the bags, found and then unrolled it so that they could look. She knew every nuance of it—the running water of the river, the way the grass appeared to be wind-ruffled, the clothes she was wearing, Russet’s clothes and his pair of sandals lying on the grass.
Dibble brought the lamp over to take a better look. “This is not going to give him much protection,” he said, studying it. “Those are his sandals, though. I saw them when the Khromatians were rifling through his things.”
“I did wonder why he bothered to bring such old, battered things with him,” Elmar said and gave Russet another look, but the man was still snoring, his mouth open, his face slack. “Besides, everything here is too damp and soggy for sandals.”
“And cold. How long ago did he do this?” Dibble asked Terelle.
“I was not much more than fourteen at the time.”
“So he was just guessing what you would look like, years in advance. Bit risky, wasn’t it?” Elmar asked.
“You know, I’m not sure anyone really knows all the risks. Perhaps his doing the painting determined what I would look like now. On the other hand, if you paint the impossible, it won’t come true. I guess that’s why he has my hair blowing across my face and my head ducked down so it’s shadowed a bit. He wouldn’t want to get my looks too wrong.”
Outside a wind had picked up and the casement rattled. The reflections of the lamp flame in each small pane cavorted in unison. Terelle remembered the salty fingers trailing across her face and shivered.
Dibble went back to the window and touched a pane with a finger. “It’s freezing out there and the sun has not long gone down.” He put his nose to the glass and peered through, then gave a grunt of surprise.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Water falling. Just like before the battle for the mother cistern when Jasper made it rain.”
Elmar was off the bed in a flash, striding to the window to peer out. “I’ll be pissing waterless,” he whispered. He hadn’t been at the battle.
She came to look as he opened the casement. A blast of cold air and water gusted in, whipping her hair back from her face. She touched the dampness on her cheeks. “Random rain,” she whispered.
“Not random, you silly frip!” Russet said suddenly from his bed. He sat up to stare at them all. “Regular rain. Be happening all the time. And have some sense, eh? Be cold and wet out there. Shut the window!”
At least now I know why they put glass in them, she thought.
The idea of not wanting water to enter was so alien to her she wanted to laugh, in hysteria rather than amusement.
It was Dibble, edgy and restless, who sobered her. “How long will we give Feroze to come back before we start getting jittery?” he asked.
They exchanged glances, but there was no way any of them knew the answer.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Khromatis
The Southern Marches
Marchford, Commander Bice’s manor
Feroze headed for the main stairs, driven partly by guilt.
They’re right. We ought to have told them more. He might not have known all Terelle needed to know, but Alabasters living and working in Khromatis could surely have supplied additional information.
As he walked down the long passage, his booted footfall echoing in the empty hall, he saw the Bastion in his mind’s eye. Old, fragile with age, making mistakes as his mind lost its acuteness. He loved that man, but knew he could have handled this better
.
We have lived too long attached to our past, a past that should mean nothing any more. Alabasters are good people. We may not have been so once, but now we seem to be better people than these Khromatians. And yet we have convinced ourselves otherwise. Even our faith is gentler, kinder than theirs…
It was twenty years since he’d last crossed the Borderlands. Now that he was experiencing Khromatian arrogance and prejudices at first hand once again, he was remembering his distaste for the place. Worse, as he walked this passage, he felt far too close to death. His rational voice said, Surely not. Bice is still governed by the law, and laws are strict here. His gut told him something else, and he didn’t like the words it used. Bice was an angry man. A man who’d thought for years that his future claim on the Pinnacle’s seat was secure. An angry man could be dangerous in his rage.
I have to convince him Terelle is not interested in staying in this land, let alone ruling it.
An orderly, replacing a burned-out candle in a holder along the passage, informed him that at this hour of the evening, Lord Bice and his sons would be dining in the room directly to the right at the bottom of the main staircase. As Feroze descended, the wood creaking under his boots, three men started on their way up. Young men all, finely dressed, laughing and jostling one another. Without their helmets and armour, with their shoulder-length hair loose about their shoulders, they bore little resemblance to the armsmen of Bice’s troop, but there was no mistaking their face tattoos. These were Bice’s three sons.
How they love colour, Feroze thought. They’re like noisy parrots swooping and quarrelling around a waterhole. So different from us. Colourful knee breeches tucked into long white stockings, gold-buckled shoes, shirts tied at the neck in elaborate bows—and for warmth, a vibrant, rough-spun Khromatian plaid thrown about their shoulders.
The oldest of them was the first up the stairs, and he stopped when he saw Feroze, deliberately blocking his passage. “What are you doing down here?” he asked, speaking his own tongue. His aggressive tone grated. “Weren’t you told to stay in your room?”