The Hidden City

by Michelle West

  Farmer Hanson was happy to see her. Happy to see Lefty. “Where’s Arann?” he asked, before Jewel could interpose herself between them.

  Lefty, however, looked down at his feet. No answer there.

  “He’s at my place,” Jewel told him.

  “Yours?”

  She nodded. “He had a bit of a problem with—what was his name? Cliff?” At Lefty’s nod, she continued. “But we found him in time. He’s seen a doctor,” she added, voice low. “A real doctor. From the upper holdings, even. Rath brought him.”

  The farmer wasn’t as impressed with this as Jewel had been. “How bad was it?” he asked, the stall momentarily forgotten. And rain, too, as he stepped out from beneath the awning.

  Jewel frowned. “It was bad enough. He’s in bed. He has to sleep. The doctor said he can’t move for two weeks, but after that, he should be fine.”

  “And you’ll keep him that long?” Meaning, of course, Rath.

  “I’ll keep him longer,” she said, meeting Farmer Hanson’s worried gaze with an intensity that was, although she did not know it, much older than her face.

  He held that gaze for a moment, and then he smiled. It was a wan smile. “I was worried,” he said quietly.

  “Me, too. But Lefty came to get us. And Lefty’s staying with me, as well.”

  “Good. You keep an eye on them. I’ll have work for Arann when he’s fit.”

  Her smile was brief. “We’re late,” she said, taking the basket from Lefty’s good hand. “Is there anything good left?”

  Which, of course, changed the expression on the farmer’s face instantly. She was sorry to see it go, because she wanted the approval of this generous, avuncular man, but Lefty wasn’t, and Lefty needed the comfort of the familiar far more than she did.

  The dreams were bad.

  In her own room, in isolation, they were bad enough—but in a room with two boys, one who was under strict orders not to move, they were worse. She woke screaming, as she often did; Rath had learned to wait when he heard those screams.

  But she bit her lip, tasting blood, as she became aware that two sets of eyes were now watching her. Lefty’s, in the dark, were wide and round; he was out of his bed and in the corner, his hands across his face, almost before she had stopped.

  Arann was also out of his bed, or rather, out of the bedroll. He struggled toward her, turning from side to side as if seeking the threat.

  “Jay—”

  “Lie down,” she whispered. Had there been an “s” in either of the words, she would have hissed.

  Arann didn’t immediately obey, which added guilt to the horror of nightmare. This one wouldn’t leave her. It clung to waking, and she could see, imposed upon the safety of her four walls, her closed door, the open streets of the holding at night; the soft glow of magelights, the sound of running feet.

  The sound of high breath, sharp breath, young voice.

  Her own?

  No.

  “Arann,” she said, struggling now to make her voice as normal as possible, “I had a nightmare. That’s all. Just a nightmare. You’ve got to lie down. Rath will kill me if he has to call the doctor again.”

  Arann nodded slowly, and she realized that he wasn’t—quite—awake. He was ready to fight, and in his condition that would be suicide, but he wasn’t awake. Wasn’t quite himself. She made a note to herself: No screaming.

  Which, given the unpredictability of her nightmares, was going to be damn hard.

  “Lefty—” she stopped. Lefty, cowering in the corner, was holding a dagger. He’d picked it up where she’d thrown it—near the wall. Near the corner of the room. But Lefty, unlike Arann, was awake.

  This type of awake, on the other hand, had no safety in it.

  “Lefty, put the knife down,” she said, her voice low and measured.

  He wasn’t interested in listening. This close to sleep, there was only one voice he could hear.

  Arann groaned in pain. The sudden movement, the standing wariness, had been costly. But he grimaced and turned to Lefty. “It’s safe here,” he told the wild-eyed boy. “We’re safe. Put it down, Lefty.”

  Really, really no screaming, Jewel thought. But she waited, and after a long, long moment, Lefty let the dagger drop.

  “You have nightmares often?” Arann asked, keeping his words casual, and keeping the pain from their surface. He eased himself back to the floor.

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be. Lefty has ’em as well. He’s more quiet, though.”

  “I’ll try harder.”

  “Is it about your—is it about why you—” Arann coughed.

  “No,” she answered, understanding both the question and why he had asked it. Lefty had not moved. She knew he’d sit in that corner until morning light finally made its way through the window well. The covered well.

  “What was it?”

  “A girl,” she answered quietly. “A girl Lefty’s age. Even smaller than Lefty.”

  “What was her name?”

  “I don’t know.” Reflexively, she added, “Is.”

  “Is?”

  “What is her name.”

  Arann shrugged, and winced. “What is her name, then?”

  She started to say, I don’t know, but when she spoke, the word she used was, “Finch.”

  “Isn’t that a bird?”

  Jewel shrugged. “My parents named me Jewel,” she said bitterly. “People are stupid about names.”

  “Where do you know her from?”

  “I don’t,” Jewel said, lying back on the floor, as sleepy as Arann. Which is to say, heart pounding, eyes filled with night.

  “You don’t know?”

  She shook her head, and pushed hair out of her eyes, although there wasn’t much point. Rath had the magelight, and the light in her room wasn’t. “I don’t know.”

  “But you know her name.”

  She nodded.

  “Is this like—”

  “It was a nightmare,” she said firmly. Because she wanted to believe it. Rath was a good liar. But it was one of the things that he would fail to teach Jewel, time and again, although he thought it the most useful of his skills.

  “What happened?”

  She closed her eyes. “It was a nightmare,” she said, but the tone of her voice was entirely different. “There were boys, I think. Older boys. They were chasing her. In the streets.”

  “Which streets?”

  “I don’t know. Old holding streets. I think—” she paused, and did think. “She ran past Taverson’s place. The hole. She ran past Fennel’s.”

  “They’re not in the thirty-second.”

  “No.” She was thinking. “The moon was wrong.”

  “Wrong?”

  “I could see it.”

  Which she couldn’t, tonight. Or last night. Probably not tomorrow night either. “I could see moonlight. Some stars. Not many stars, though.” She paused again, and then added, “I could hear water.”

  “River?”

  She nodded. “Not rain. It wasn’t. Raining.”

  Lefty’s head rose, chin trembling. He still hadn’t moved. “It’s going to stop raining in three nights.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Farmer Hanson.”

  “He’s wrong more than he’s right.”

  Lefty had the grace to look indignant. She loved him for it.

  “How many?” Arann asked softly.

  “I don’t know. I couldn’t see them; I could hear them. They were shouting to each other.” She tried to pick the voices apart. “Maybe three.”

  Arann said, “I can’t get up by then.”

  And Jewel nodded grimly. But she said, “It was only a nightmare.”

  The room, silent, was answer enough. They’d seen the cart. They knew what that “only” might mean to someone like Jewel. And, to her surprise, they cared. Lefty, terrified. Arann, injured.

  She wanted to ask them how long they’d been living alone. Alone without adults. Alone witho
ut Oma. Alone without Rath. Because she knew that they shouldn’t care. Not about a girl they’d never heard of; not about a simple nightmare.

  She wanted to keep them. She wanted them here.

  And she knew Rath would be fit to kill if she brought anyone else to his home.

  “It was nothing,” she told them both, forcing her voice to sound sleepy. “It was just a dream. Forget about it.”

  In the morning—and it was later than normal when Jewel finally crept out of the room—she went straight to the kitchen. Lefty was dozing in the corner, the knife at his feet. Arann was snoring loudly, and the sound of his breath was a rattle that made her wince every time she heard it. Not a snore—her Oma had been the queen of all snorers—but something worse.

  She cut bread and cheese, and pulled out strips of dried meat; she cut apples, and added those to the mix. Gathering them all on the bare tablecloth, its red hatch lines faded to pink, its white a uniform gray, she bunched them together and carried them back to the room, leaving them by Arann’s side.

  She took the two plates, and made breakfast for herself and Rath. These, she carried silently down the hall, pausing at his door. As her hands were full, she kicked it.

  He answered it instantly, which was unusual. There were dark circles under his eyes, and he looked as if he might bite her head off and toss the plates down the hall—but that was the morning face she was most accustomed to, and she waited.

  He pulled the door open and let her in. His room was a mess, but it always was when he worked, and he had expressly forbidden her entry to clean it. Her tidying, he said, made everything impossible to find; the mess was its own geography, and he hated any change in terrain.

  But he watched her as she set his food on the table.

  “You had a nightmare,” he said, as she put her plate down beside his. It wasn’t a question.

  She nodded, pulled the only other chair in the room to the table, and leaned against the soft back. This chair had arm rests; it was Rath’s smoking chair. When he bothered to sit in one. Tobacco smoke lingered in the cloth; pipe smoke. A comfort.

  She could see the bottle of ink, the quills, the paper that contained the runic writing of Old Weston—Ancient Weston—that he was attempting to decipher. She almost asked him about it, but his expression forbid intrusion.

  “I had a nightmare,” she said at last. She was hungry. She began to eat.

  Rath waited. When it became clear that she would eat rather than talk, in itself something she seldom did, he sighed and joined her. Fifteen minutes passed, the sound of chewing the only sound in the room.

  “What was it about?”

  Her hesitation was marked. Everything she did was, by Rath; there was nothing he didn’t notice. “A girl,” she said at last.

  “A . . . girl.”

  She nodded.

  “Someone you know?”

  “No. But . . .”

  “But?”

  “I know her name.”

  He closed his eyes. “How old is this girl?”

  “Lefty’s age, I’d guess. Maybe younger. It’s hard to tell. She’s not very big.”

  “Pretty?”

  Jewel considered the question for a while, dried meat softening between her teeth. “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  “What was her name?”

  “Her name is Finch.”

  “She didn’t die?”

  “Not in my dream.”

  He said nothing. A lot of it.

  “It was a dream,” she said, faint hope guiding the words.

  “I heard you scream,” he replied, with stronger accusation.

  She nodded. “I don’t know why,” she told him, although he hadn’t asked. “She was being chased by men. Or boys. Older than us,” she added, aware that it wasn’t a useful distinction to Rath.

  “Why this girl?”

  “Rath, I don’t know.”

  “And the boys chasing her?”

  “I didn’t see them clearly.”

  “You often see them clearly.”

  This was, she realized, what had been bothering her. He was right. She did. “I know. I heard their voices—”

  And stopped, and met his eyes.

  They were open, and staring. “What did they sound like?” he asked casually. Always a bad sign.

  She was ahead of him, now. “Yes,” she whispered.

  “Like the man who ordered the tail.”

  “Like that. But louder.”

  “Jewel, need I remind you that I require privacy to work at all?”

  “No.”

  “Good.”

  They finished eating in silence, both aware that they had resolved nothing.

  Chapter Eight

  RATH WAS FINISHED for the day.

  Had, in fact, been finished before breakfast. Although he hadn’t looked it to Jewel’s inexpert eye, he’d also been awake. Her screams usually had that effect. Had the boys not been with her, he would have joined her, because he knew her well enough to know she’d be awake.

  He had chosen not to, because he didn’t wish to panic her guests. And, yes, he was aware that “guest” was fast becoming an inaccurate word, but he clung to faint hope.

  The only neat pile of papers in the room was on his desk; beside them, once again carefully wrapped in cloth, were the two bowls he’d taken from the maze. He was aware that he should wait at least a week or two before he attempted to unload them. He almost considered bypassing Radell—Avram’s Society of Averalaan Historians had caused him some small trouble, and he expected that both it and he would be watched should he enter it again.

  But he had a fondness for the stout, mendacious man with the fake beard, and a certain fondness for the money. The fact that the last two items had been sold for so good a price gave him the luxury of time, and he briefly considered crossing the bridge to the High City to seek out the Order of Knowledge.

  The money would not be as good; the information, however, would be better. He had not yet ascertained the use of the bowls themselves, but he was almost certain they were magical in nature. And handing something magical to Radell’s new clientele made Rath decidedly uneasy.

  So, too, had Jewel’s dream.

  Since she had recovered from her fevered state, she had had only dreams and the instinct that guided her daily life; she had offered Rath no waking vision, no clear guidance. Until this morning, he’d allowed himself to believe that she’d forgotten everything she’d said while the fever burned high.

  But while Rath was an accomplished liar, he liked to lie only when it suited a purpose. The man who had tailed him had been so competent, serving ignorance did not serve Rath’s sense of self-preservation.

  Finch, he thought. He wondered how literal the dream vision was. Wondered if there were, in fact, a girl smaller than Lefty who bore that name. On another day, it wouldn’t have mattered.

  But it did now.

  Because in her dream, the men who were chasing this child were also akin to the man who had tailed Rath. He had no illusions. If Jewel was unwilling to speak of the death of a child, he allowed her that comfort; he allowed himself none, because none was needed.

  If she were indeed being followed—and at speed—by three such men, she had no hope of eluding them.

  In and of itself, this was not his concern.

  But Jewel now knew it, too. And he had been gods-cursed foolish; he had not only gone to the rescue of one endangered boy, but had then summoned a doctor, at some personal cost that had nothing to do with coin, and had even allowed the boy—and his shadow—to stay.

  She was not going to leave the nightmare alone. He had asked a single question, and she had instantly understood the whole of its import.

  Grinding his teeth, he rose from his squat on the floor, and reached for his leather satchel. He carefully placed the bowls within it, cushioning them further with the thick weight of a shirt, and then topped them with his frustrating writings. Only when this was done did he change.

  Velv
et, he thought, with a mild sneer. A hat. New pants, new boots. He paused by the mirror, winced, and made ready to shave with cold water; the morning was passing him by. He was a perfect, elegant fop in shades of deep blue when he at last finished.

  Good enough for the High City, if he chose that route; certainly good enough for Radell if he chose otherwise. He kept his options open because, in the end, the disposition of his artifacts were not his chief concern.

  The Patris was.

  What were the odds that men such as the one who had followed him—missing success by the expedient of an unpredictable patrol—served anyone else in the hundred holdings? And why, if they served that Patris, were they hunting an urchin in the poorer streets of the city?

  Questions, and Rath hated questions. Mostly because he’d discovered with time that they had answers, and the answers were almost always worse.

  Farmer Hanson had not heard of Finch, at least not by name. That much wasn’t a surprise to Jewel. But he also couldn’t identify her by description. Granted, a terrified, tiny girl wasn’t the easiest to comfortably describe, but the farmer had always had keen eyes.

  Like, say, now, as he helped her with her basket. “Arann’s fine?” he asked her.

  She shrugged. She’d left Lefty at home with Arann, which was strictly against Rath’s orders, and had come down to the Common, ostensibly to shop.

  “You said she’s smaller than Lefty?”

  Jewel nodded.

  “You’re certain she’s on her own, that she has no family?”

  And nodded again. Because she knew. “Her hair’s longer than mine, and I think it’s lighter. It’s hard to tell. I only saw her at night. Her skin’s pale, though, and she’s all bone.”

  Farmer Hanson raised a brow. “This would be the pot calling the kettle black, hmmm?”

  Jewel shrugged. “She’s shorter. Than me.”

  “What was she wearing?”

  Good question, given what the street orphans usually owned: what they wore, and nothing else. Jewel started to answer, and then frowned. “You know,” she said quietly, “that’s a damn good question.”

  “Language, Jay.”

  “Good question, I mean,” she corrected herself. “I think she was . . . I think she was wearing a dress.”

  “Here?”