by Jenna Rhodes
Bells chimed a bit impatiently as the other gestured. “What my companion is trying to convey is the press of time, even for the most excellent of tailors and seamstresses.”
“I see.” Rivergrace tried not to stretch her arm uneasily as her sleeve was released. “I think, miladies, that Mistress Lily can put all your fears to ease.”
“Will she work with fabric not her own?”
“She will, and has. Please let me get her.” Rivergrace dipped another curtsy and dashed into the back workroom before being detained again. Lily had gotten to her feet, clearly having heard every word, and stood waiting for her. She said nothing but hugged Grace tightly before going out to greet the potential clients. They talked for long moments before she and Nutmeg could hear melodious laughs, and then promises for business, and Lily returned, her cheeks flushed. “We’ll be busy,” she announced firmly.
Nutmeg let out a cheer, but Rivergrace could only stare after the women with a vague feeling of unrest.
The well digger was waiting for them as dusk draped cooling shadows all about Calcort on their way home from the shop. He’d left his assistant and bird at home, and stood as he and Tolby shared a pipe in the yard. The well seemed to draw the moon down inside it, reflecting it back as a soft, wavering eye peering from far below as Grace looked into it when she sat by its edge.
“It’s bad,” Nutmeg blurted out, as she saw the digger.
“Nae, lass, nae. I was just relating it to Master Tolby here. Oddest case of a well closing in all my history, and I wondered how I’d forgotten it, but I had, till I went looking through my records.” The digger waved his pipe at her. “Not a drop of bad water in it, far as I be knowin’. The priestess had us board it up.”
Tolby and Lily had never been much for priests and priestesses, although here in Calcort every few lanes seemed to have a small building with one or two living there. The religion they’d raised all the children in had been one of hard work and love for one another and all things in their keeping. If there had been any shrine at all to the Gods, it had been the orchards themselves. Grace stared mildly at Fancher in vague confusion.
“Seems the guardian of Tylivar had a dream one night that the Goddess came to her and said the well should be closed till she had need of it again.”
“This well?”
“Aye. Tylivar sent a vision of this particular well to th’ priestess.”
Tolby blew out a smoke ring. “And only this one? No others in the city? Any reasoning?”
“Aye, no, and none given. The way of Gods and Goddesses aren’t for the likes of us to know since the Magi let them down, although I hear the veiled lot talks to ’em fine. What Vaelinars and our Gods tolerate in each other, I cannot begin t’say.”
“That means we can’t leave it open?” Grace looked at the well in dismay, hating the thought of boarding it away again, and plotting to keep the boards with gaps, so at least the little living things that depended on it could reach it still.
“Frankly,” said Fancher. “That guardian has passed away long since, and was more than slightly addled when she did go. I doubt anyone around here gives a whoop about your well now. Leave it open. It tastes like sweet water and I’ve found nothing wrong with it. I’m thinkin’ if the Goddess wants it closed again, she’ll be tellin’ you soon enough. Till then.” He shrugged. “Good water is always a blessing.”
A few puffs of smoke wafted between them while Tolby thought, before looking at Rivergrace’s beseeching face, and saying, “I’ll stand on your judgment, then, master, and well met.” Tolby shook his hand, a coin passing between them, and the two walked off across the grounds, as Tolby showed him what he’d done to the ill-managed and all but abandoned place.
Nutmeg waited till they were out of earshot. “Think we dare?”
“It hasn’t poisoned me. I’ve been dabbling in it for a few weeks now.”
“But, Grace, you’re—” Her sister stopped in mid-sentence, her face stricken, and she looked as if she’d just bit her tongue.
Rivergrace glanced at her before supplying the word. “Different?”
“I can’t help it. You are.”
“I know,” she said miserably. “More than ever, I know.”
Nutmeg plopped down on the ground beside her. She knocked a pebble into the well, and a click-click-splash followed. “I hate the idea of you being veiled all the time.”
“But you wanted to make the veils.”
“That’s afore I found out everyone wears ’em or they get hated for not wearing them.” Nutmeg leaned her head on Rivergrace’s shoulder.
“It’s not so bad. And, look, we had those ladies come in tonight, just because they heard I worked with Lily.”
“Because they’re different, too.”
But, they weren’t different in the way she was, Rivergrace thought. They had been full-blooded Vaelinars, with court and House connections, taller and more graceful than she could ever hope to be, with stunning eyes that spoke of the magic they carried within them. She wasn’t one of them any more than she was a Dweller. “You think so?”
“I think,” Nutmeg said confidently, “you’re my sister, I found you, and no one is ever going to take that away from us.”
That made her smile. They leaned on each other for a long while, sitting by the edge of the well and watching the moon and stars drift across its still waters while the heat of the day slowly faded away.
Chapter Forty
EARLY DAWN BRIGHTENED the sky with red, fiery streaks. Red sky in the morning, sailor and farmer take warning, he thought. Abayan Diort reined to a halt, standing in his stirrups, and raised his hand in a gesture for the troops to wait. Burning torches dotted the stone walls of the city before them, a fortress of rigid determination and solitude, a city where his entreaties had been turned aside again and again. The time for talk was over. He looked at the stone. Built centuries ago and well kept, he considered the death toll to get through it. By sheer numbers, they would eventually overwhelm. Warfare, Galdarkan against Galdarkan, was not what he wished, but they had given him little choice by not allying with him when he’d brought the offer.
The war hammer hung from his baldric, its weight on his hip. A yearning called from it to him, to be swung in his hands, to be freed, a call that, however faint, never left him, and one that he’d never yielded to before. Abayan swung down from his mount, approached the flat plain before the stone walls, and looked up. The wall had a stone foot to it, under the dirt, a foundation laid down by old roads and workings. Overhead, he could see archers readying their bows. He put his hand on the hammer and drew it. They waited, unsure of loosing their arrows, for he stood barely within their range and was no threat to them yet, not with a hammer, a melee weapon. They had anticipated a siege, and had not worried, for they’d stores and water aplenty behind their heavy walls. His entreaty of alliance they sneered at, and had for years, and the new one yesterday was nothing new to them. Abayan clenched his teeth. He’d come to the end of his vaunted patience.
The hammer hummed in his grip. If he listened, he might even hear a guttural snatch or two in its deep whisper as he tightened his fingers about it and found a comfortable hold. God-ridden, they’d said. No, it was a Demon and he feared he already knew Its name.
“At my command,” he told his lieutenant. His aide nodded, cold eyes watching him.
Abayan spread his feet slightly, standing firmly on the rock base of the valley. He would put fear in their eyes and hearts, fear of what he would do to their bodies with his weapon, fear of the pounding hit of the massive hammer. In one fluid strike, he hefted the hammer over his head and then pounded its head on the ground in front of him to wake its power. Rakka. It hit with the ringing of stone on stone, belling deeply, tolling out its strength. He felt the ground tremble under him in answer, and the trembling grew to a shaking that rocked him back on his heels as the very earth roared to its foundations and back again. The ground began to split apart under the hammer’s head. He stared
down at it, watching the stone open, a crack that ran toward the city, widening, fracturing off, a spidery crack that grew broader and blacker in the blink of an eye. It hit the city walls, and there was a moment of nothingness.
Pressure beat against his ears, a sound he felt rather than heard. Then, with an echoing rakka, a harsh grunting, the stone of the walls began to fracture. A slow trickle of dust and gravel started it, and then the avalanche began as the walls came tumbling down, a roar of dirt and pebbles following it, and the city’s defense collapsed, one stone after another answering the call of the war hammer in a hail of debris. Screams pierced the morning air, screams of surprise and agony, and wails of dismay. Rock rained upon the dead and dying as they slipped from walls caving away underfoot, and were buried under the debris—archers, defenders, and onlookers. Screams continued as dust plumed upward like smoke, and the very foundations of the city shifted.
He lifted the hammer from the ground and gave his signal to move in.
Infantry poured from the gaps now, staggering uncertainly, their war cries stuck in their throats, yet waving their weapons with weak energy as they charged his troops. Chasms in the ground slowed both sides as they wound their way through the destruction to meet each other.
The weapon growled low at him to be struck again, and he answered it, with stone to flesh, blooding it as the enemy ran shrieking away from him. Metal bit into flesh, hammered it, mauled and pulped it, and he waded through, swinging the war hammer from right to left and back again like a scythe through wheat. No one stood before him.
He took the city in less than a candlemark, its resistance shattered by the fall of its walls. The hammer fought him as he stowed it away, its hum a guttural threat in his ears. The weaponsmith who had made it had no idea what being he’d instilled within it, but Abayan knew. This was the Demon-God Mmenonrakka, the earthshaker. He had suspected it before and now knew it as deep in his bones as the earthshaker had struck into the rock and stone. He would have to consider carefully where he would loose it again.
Abayan Diort rode through the destruction of the city. Not a stone in the wall remained where it had been placed and mortared, and behind those sundered structures, other walls showed cracks and sliding. Chimneys had fallen to the streets. The very bedrock of the city gaped open, ranging from a dark abyss which opened the town like a broken eggshell to spidery fractures cobwebbing the outskirts. The people crept out from the rubble and pressed their foreheads to the ground in abject terror as he rode by. His people, and he had crushed their defenses to bring them to him. All the words he’d spoken throughout his years had not done it. A single strike of the war hammer had.
He had never seen anything like it, nor had anyone else living.
Bright sunlight slanted through the window shutter and woke Rivergrace early. Nutmeg lay at peace, still, one arm flung out, a smile curving her mouth, her rosy cheeks a little pale with slumber. Grace slid out of bed and dressed quietly, then went outside to do a batch or two of laundry and catch the fresh morning air that drifted in over the hilly countryside to the north, before the smells of the city to the south began to overcome it. These early morning hours were hers, no one else about, and she could watch the sky awaken, although today the streaks of sunrise had already faded. Keldan and Hosmer had built a new cap and bucket pulley for the well, and she cranked up buckets of water for her tubs. Barefoot, the water splashed about her as she drew it and filled the tubs, taking care as she began to scrub and beat the clothes. She sang as she washed, the song that ran through her mind at such times, wondering if there were words to her tune, and not caring if there were or not, because the expression lay in the singing. The sun dried her almost as soon as she grew damp as the water carried away the soil and stains from the clothing, and she took pride in leaving the water almost as clean as it had been drawn from the well. She poured her tubs out near the gardens after fastening the garments out on her lines to dry and snap in the morning breeze only to find herself being watched. She dropped in an immediate curtsy.
The two Vaelinars who watched her did not wear veils, although their garments spoke of wealth. She peered up at them cautiously from her curtsy and the one whose skin looked like light, burnished copper beckoned her to her feet. She’d seen such rich color of skin among the elven but rarely. Even more rare was the bronze of gold coins, so deep it looked like gilding. She’d seen a man pass by on the Calcort streets who looked like that, drawing gazes from everyone, and ignoring them. These two had not come to ignore her, it seemed. The copper lady said, “We could not help but overhear the singing. Imagine our surprise to find such as you doing laundry.”
“My deepest apologies for awakening you. I meant no offense.”
“Offense? One might as well be offended by the bakers and the carters who are up at this hour as well. No, my dear, one can’t be offended by honest workers even if their day seems to start a bit early. We weren’t awakened, but taking in a bit of exercise when we heard you. We wondered if you were the famed laundress who magics away impossible stains.” This came from the dark-haired woman behind the first, a fan in her hand, fluttering now and then as if to emphasize a word. Her soft laughter took the edge off, although her interest in Rivergrace stayed sharp. Her eyes of deepest brown had green sparks in them, but her blood seemed most notable by her ears of sharp and swept-back points, her hair tucked behind them.
Her face grew warm at the notion that anyone would speak of her. “I could hardly be famous.”
The fan fluttered. “Town gossip is not to be believed, but enjoyed. Might your mother be the new seamstress we’ve gotten word about? We hear an old shop has new life in it, and engaging designs, and good craftsmanship now.”
Rivergrace rose stiffly from her curtsy, unable to hold it any longer. “I hope so if you’re speaking of Lily Farbranch, new proprietor and keyholder of the Greathouse shop. I’ll get her for you—”
“No need,” said the copper-hued one sharply and held up a hand to halt her. “Rumors on the street will carry us to her shop later, in good time. I have other curiosities at the moment.” She swept close to Rivergrace, eying her up and down as if memorizing her in detail. “What House or Holding is yours? What Lines?”
Grace froze in her tracks. “I-I—”
“Come now. Farbranch is a Dweller name, I believe, and you’re one of the Suldarran, one of us. Give me your bloodlines.” The copper-hued one leaned very near, her look intense.
Grace felt her heart begin to pound, as if threatened by her, and the dark-haired one put her fan to the crook of her companion’s arm as she murmured a soft word Rivergrace could not understand to draw her back. She felt her damp sleeve pushed up her arm, her thin white scar clearly visible, and she pushed her sleeve down, flustered, muttering, “Farbranch is the only name I know.”
“Don’t be daft, your blood history is evident. Why pretend you are a rustic when you are obviously not? Half, perhaps, not full-blooded, there is something other about you, yet...”
Grace took a step back, found the well’s crossbars at her hip, preventing farther retreat as the other unnerved her. She wanted them to go away, but held her tongue, not wanting to rouse the others or cause trouble. The power of the Vaelinars in Calcort seemed to be like their faces, often veiled but indisputably there.
“Your mother and father. Tell me who they are.” The smooth voice held an edge like a sword’s blade, her visitor full of quiet menace as she cornered Rivergrace.
“She may well not know,” her companion offered.
“Unfortunate, but a possibility.” A hand tipped with long, elegant nails raised, traced the air before her eyes and then, almost gently, lifted a strand of her hair away from her brow, smoothing it back. She looked upon Rivergrace with a cold assessment that burned a fire through her, sending her senses reeling away, and she clung to the well to stay on her feet. “I see some of the blood in her, but . . . you may well be right. Yet another by-blow. She has the eyes but not a touch of power in her.�
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She felt the words around her, on the air, hot and stifling, her limbs going weak in every joint, her body struggling just to breathe, all thought fleeing.
“You’re certain? What about the laundry?”
The copper-hued woman swung about, backhanding her companion across the face in a vicious slap. “Never question me again. I know what I know. Do you think it takes Talent to wash away a stain? Velk!”
The dark-haired woman put her hands to her face, smothering a noise, and then pulled a veil from her purse and dropped it about her quickly, concealing and hiding both her injury and her fear.
The interrogator traced her fingers over Rivergrace’s face again, paying no heed as she gave out a soft gasp and collapsed helplessly to lie at their feet. Darkness sharply defined by the edge of a hot sun began to claim her and she heard faintly, “I do not comprehend what Sevryn sees in her.”
“Perhaps it is only what any man sees in a woman.”
“Perhaps.”
Soft steps moved away from her as Rivergrace lost her struggle to understand and shadow claimed her.
“Lily says you’ll be at the shop late, so I’ll send Keldan by at lamplighting to bring the two of you home. We’ll not have you fainting again in the summer sun. ’Tis different here than at home—the old orchards—and I expect the two of you to show better sense than to let the heat get to you.” Tolby had his head inside a deep vat, and leaned out only long enough to send them on their way. He finished with a wave that set them off, and his last words were muffled by the good, aged wood of the restored vat to which each of them dutifully replied, “Love you, Da,” before going.
Embarrassed but grateful to be freed and away from fussing, Rivergrace wore her veil pulled back, letting the fresh morning air sweep across her face, with its scents that she had become used to. The neighborhoods had their own flavor, each of them, but she loved the bakery best. The smell of fresh baking bread cooled into faintness, the baking done, the racks and shelves of the bread sellers filled. Some of them had small shops within their thresholds, with tiny pastries and drinks to be had, although most simply bustled about delivering their goods to the various estates and inns around town. A new aroma of freshly squeezed fruits into juice wafted to them, as did other, more unpleasant odors of city living. A songbird swept past her ear with a startled chirp as they passed under a cobbler’s overhang. Looking up, she saw a nest tucked into its crossbeams.