The Hidden City

by Michelle West

More silence. But this time, Jewel wanted to hit herself. She did not ask Finch where her parents were. Or who. In fact, given that Finch now looked like a prettier, skinnier version of Lefty, she thought it might be best if she never asked another question again. In her life.

  Carver gave her a look.

  Arann deliberately didn’t.

  But Finch said nothing at all, and that was worse; it was in her eyes, and her face, her unbruised face.

  Given how she felt, Jewel surprised herself, and not in a good way. “Where were you, when you met that man?”

  Silence.

  “Could you get back there?”

  Carver’s eye widened and he shook his head; his hair slid across his face, and beneath it, his skin was both pale and unblemished. He really was almost handsome; his face was like the face of a storybook patriarch’s son. But his feet were bare.

  Finch had stopped walking entirely, which caused them all to stop, stillness radiating outward slowly, like the opposite of ripples in still water when a stone falls.

  It was Arann who said, and very gently, “She doesn’t mean to take you back there.”

  Finch looked at him—looked up at him—her neck stiff, her eyes slightly rounded.

  “She went to get you,” he added, in his reasonable Arann voice. More of his voice, Jewel thought, than either Finch or Carver had yet heard. “It sounds like she risked her life, even. You think she did all that to take you back?”

  In a low voice, Finch replied, “They’ll pay.”

  “Oh, they’ll pay,” Jewel said, her voice bright as new steel.

  “She meant money,” Carver told her curtly.

  Jewel shrugged.

  “Why do you want to know?” Carver’s hand had fallen away from his dagger. Jewel wasn’t certain when it had started to reach, and Rath would have been really annoyed at the lack of awareness.

  “I think—I think it’s important,” she said at last, and lamely.

  “Why?”

  “They—he,” she corrected herself, “came from that place, somehow. It’s a connection.”

  “I saw him. You saw him. You want to ever see him again?” Carver’s gaze was intent, intense.

  “Not that way, no.”

  “Then leave it alone.”

  But she couldn’t. Not yet. The Common trees were drawing closer as they resumed their walk. “Were there others, where you were?” Pressing, pushing the point, when she knew better.

  Finch closed her eyes, which was answer enough.

  “See?” Jewel said to Carver, or to Arann, or to no one in particular.

  Carver looked at Arann. “Is she crazy?”

  Arann shrugged. “Good crazy, maybe.”

  “Look,” Carver began. “How exactly did you know where she’d be?”

  And Lefty spoke his first words to the strangers; he said, “She had a nightmare.”

  Jewel closed her eyes.

  In the market, they were good children. Which meant silent children, hands out where everyone could see them. The guards at the gate stared at Carver’s feet long before he’d actually reached their disapproving glares, and Jewel was tense for a moment because she was preparing an argument.

  It wasn’t necessary. At this time of day, the guards were harried enough that they were willing to let the merchants fend for themselves, and although they issued a curt warning to the group, they let them go, crushed in a press of moving people who didn’t have the time or inclination to stop for the simple suspicion of a couple of armed and armored men.

  “We’re going to the cobbler’s?” Lefty surprised them all by asking.

  Jewel nodded. “That, and Helen. She’ll want to see Arann. She said so. And it can’t hurt to bring Finch and Carver, too.” But the words came out on their own, and without much thought; Jewel was occupied with other concerns.

  The cold. The food.

  The place Finch had managed to escape from. Oh, Hells, almost entirely that place. She couldn’t see it, and she didn’t fancy more nightmares. But she also didn’t want to ask Finch any more questions; the ones she had asked were intrusive enough that the girl was pale.

  The cobbler looked up when they entered; his door was actually narrower than Jewel had first thought it, although she noticed this only because Arann and Carver collided in the frame, and stopped there.

  While they did their quiet juggle for position, she approached the merchant. “I need shoes,” she told him. “Winter shoes.”

  “You don’t,” he said, with a grimace. “I’m surprised you got that one past the market guards.” He nodded at Carver, who had managed to turn sideways and slide in past Arann, without dislodging the older boy. “And the girl?”

  “Her, too. Unless you think you can repair what’s already on her feet.”

  Merchants were famous for their mendacity, but this one was one of Rath’s. He looked at Finch for a moment, and shook his head. Seeing more than her feet. Maybe too much more. “I can repair those,” he said at last, “but I don’t think they’ll last the Winter if she grows much.”

  “Then we’ll need new ones for her as well. Oh, and Arann.”

  The biggest of her charges stepped up at the mention of his name. He was quiet, as he always was, and utterly still; his gaze, unlike Carver’s, didn’t flit from edge to edge, taking in everything in the room that might not be nailed down. Jewel knew the look well, but struggled to ignore it. No point in alerting the already alert cobbler.

  He dealt first with Arann, and worked in silence. Finch was next, but he handled her differently; he didn’t touch her feet, not even her ankles; didn’t do more than tell her where to stand, and on what. He was careful not to meet her eyes too often, and when he did, Jewel saw why: he couldn’t keep the pity off his face.

  She liked him.

  She told herself that she liked him. She had to.

  “How long will this take?” she asked, more gruffly than she’d intended.

  “About five days for the three of them.”

  She nodded, but it was a curt nod. “You can’t do ’em sooner?”

  “Not at a decent rate, no.”

  “It’s going to get cold. Carver, at least—” she pointed.

  “I know. But I’ve got only one apprentice worth anything, and I’ve other customers as well.”

  “Then I’ll pay the indecent rate.”

  He gave her an odd look, and she met it, her own gaze defiant. After a few minutes, he shook his head and said, “All right, girl.”

  Clothing was next. Finch and Arann were examined and measured by Helen, and if the cobbler had taken care not to touch Finch, Helen felt no compunction whatsoever. She was firm; the unlit pipe clinging to the corner of her mouth made her words difficult to understand, but she made do with pointed gestures and a lot of muffled cursing.

  Where the cobbler had demanded five days, Helen demanded the opposite; she refused to let Finch leave her ragged stall without clothing—warm clothing—on her back. As she put it.

  Finch was embarrassed and grateful by turns, but said nothing. Arann, however, was less of an emergency in the eyes of the old woman. Although she had clothing she considered suitable for someone his size, she wanted a day to adjust things, and Jewel nodded.

  “Jay?”

  “Hmmm?”

  “Pay attention.”

  “Yes, Helen.” But it was hard to pay that attention. Something about Finch, something about the way she hadn’t answered the question, the last one, made Jewel uneasy in a prickly way.

  She couldn’t figure out what it was.

  But she knew who would.

  Rath was waiting for them when they made their way home, carrying a basket heavy with food from Farmer Hanson’s stall. The farmer was by far the friendliest of the three merchants; he asked the names of the newcomers as if Jewel was one of his children, and she answered in a like fashion. “The boy’s too skinny,” he told her, leaning over his produce as if he were the epitome of largesse. “And the girl as well.”
/>
  “So’s Lefty.”

  “Lefty has Arann.”

  “They have me.”

  The farmer’s smile was a warm one. “Things must be getting crowded at your place,” he told her.

  “Not that crowded. I’ve lived in smaller rooms.”

  “Good.” He handed her apples, and potatoes, and the bread that should have been gone by this time in the day. She took them all, paying for them. He failed to take the extra money she habitually offered. “You’ll need it,” he told her, glancing at Carver’s feet.

  Carver’s feet were of interest to everyone.

  She shook her head, her snort coming out in a brief, pale cloud. “Let’s go,” she said, to everyone at large. And like a small, unruly mass, they followed where she led, and she led them to the apartment; Rath entered the hall at the same time they did, but from the opposite end.

  He looked only at Jewel.

  “Room,” she told everyone else. Arann had the basket, and she paused. “Lefty? Can you help feed everyone?”

  “What about you?”

  “I’ll take care of me.”

  He nodded. Without even looking at Arann.

  Jewel closed the door and leaned against it, staring at Rath. He had retreated into his room, had taken the seat he favored, and sat looking up at her as if he expected her to say something Really Stupid.

  This was oddly comforting, because it was a very familiar expression. She almost hated to disappoint him, and since she was half certain she wouldn’t, she took a deep breath and met his eyes.

  “If,” he said quietly, “you are about to tell me that another child is in need of rescue, let me tell you to keep your nightmares to yourself.”

  She shook her head. “No nightmares,” she told him gravely.

  His expression indicated that he was not comforted.

  “But I talked to Finch. On the way to the Common.”

  “And?”

  “She had to come from somewhere, Rath.”

  “So did you.”

  She shook her head fiercely. “Not the same. She was someplace. She escaped. They—he—chased her.”

  “Jay. Jewel. I think your involvement in Finch’s life is now maximal. Does it matter where she came from?”

  It wasn’t the answer she was expecting. She wasn’t certain what she had been expecting, but this was wrong.

  “It matters,” she told him, keeping her voice even, “because whoever her pursuer was, he must have known where she’d be. He went to wherever it was—he probably didn’t expect her to run. Not the way she was dressed. He was going to kill her, Rath.” She paused. “They,” she added in a much quieter voice.

  “They failed. She’s here. I think it unlikely that they will find her again. I have work,” he added politely. But his eyes never left her face.

  “It’s just—”

  “Just what?”

  “Whoever they were, they must know. They must be there.”

  “Where?”

  “Where she was. The place she escaped from.”

  The eyes closed. “Jay—”

  “I’m right. I want to find out where she was. I don’t want her to go back—but I think, if she tells you what she can of the place, you’ll know where it is.”

  “I doubt—highly—that she will volunteer that information.”

  Better than Jewel had expected. But not by much. “She’ll tell you.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “Because she wasn’t the only prisoner.” Prisoner. The word left her tongue so easily, she knew that was exactly what Finch had been.

  “She told you this?”

  “Not—not exactly.”

  “Jay—”

  “Look. It can’t be legal. Whatever it was. It can’t be. We can get the magisterians—we can send word. They don’t have to know it comes from us—”

  He lifted a hand. She stopped.

  “Must you interfere in everything?” he asked quietly.

  “Not everything, Rath. But they were going to kill her. And if they couldn’t kill her, they might settle for someone else who’s trapped wherever she escaped from. You know that.”

  “Yes. I do.”

  “Why? What could she possibly—”

  “I don’t know, Jewel. I don’t know, and at this point, I am not entirely certain it’s safe to know.” He rose. “Do you know how you get to be old in these holdings, doing what I do?”

  She shook her head.

  “By knowing what to avoid, and when. This is something to avoid.”

  “But they’re after you as well,” she told him.

  “Yes.” The word was bleak. “And it’s not just me. I’m of little consequence, but not none. They cannot find me; if they could, they would never have attempted to take me in the Common. Here, there’s safety.”

  “Only for us.”

  “Only for me,” he replied, the threat in the words absolutely clear. “Leave it be, Jay.”

  But he knew she wouldn’t.

  Or couldn’t. He could not say with certainty what drove her, although he’d done nothing but observe her for weeks. He’d taught her some simple dagger throws, and some very simple unarmed combat, but she was not the most apt of pupils in that regard; she was small, and if she was flexible, she had little strength.

  No, her strength lay in what she called instinct. She should have died, in the alley.

  He had no special sight, no talent, no gift of birth—but he knew, far better than she, that she should be dead. And Rath? He would be left with the body, and a few odd memories; he would be left with her flotsam and jetsam, the children she was making a responsibility of the type he had assiduously avoided for all of his adult life.

  That she hadn’t died was a miracle. And it was entirely hers. The others? If they had such gifts, they had yet to evince them—and Rath very much doubted they ever would. Yet she had dragged two of them, a girl probably a year, maybe even two, younger than she, and a boy her own age by look—he was lanky in the way that the young are—across the tunnels in a blind and desperate run.

  To reach his side.

  To save his life.

  He pulled the chair out from under its place at his desk, and unlocked the writing flat, lowering it gently while it creaked. Dark green leather bore faint marks, faint impressions, the occasional dark stain of ink gone wrong. He covered it with paper.

  She was half right. That there were men with either talent or very illegal magical equipment in the lower holdings was a threat that could severely curtail his activities. He had not survived, as he had intimated, by ignorance. If he had no intention of tangling with them again, if he had every intention of following Andrei’s oblique advice, he could not do so blindly.

  But the weight of her years—her lack of years—was almost more than he could carry. He had seen the two only when Andrei had intervened. Had seen, for himself, that Jewel was not hampered by their invisibility, their lack of visual substance.

  And had seen, last, what reminded him most of his sister, his treacherous sister, in the curve of her spine, the straightening lines of her shoulders, the trembling of her slender arms, as she had drawn her own daggers and entered the alley, bypassing him with ease because she was so slight.

  Odd.

  To see his adult sister in the much smaller spine, the much slimmer stretch of shoulders; to see her patrician face in the ruddy complexion of a child who was half Torra by birth, and all Torra by personality. She had drawn the daggers she could barely wield, had dragged the children into a danger only she could sense, because of Rath.

  That was the heart of his ill-ease.

  That, and the fact that, without Andrei’s intervention, he could do nothing to save her. He had saved her life, he reasoned—if such feeble and pathetic attempts at justification could be graced with such a word—when he had brought her home, to this one and the one they had abandoned. He had fed her. He had, against all better judgment, gone through the streets of the holding wielding
his sword, to save the small giant and his maimed shadow.

  And he was coming to realize just how much that would mean if she died.

  How far did her talent extend? He had never mentioned his suspicion, his growing certainty that she was seer-born to anyone, and if Andrei guessed, he would keep it to himself. But in failing to mention it, he was depriving himself of information; the information he had gleaned had been from story and near-myth. Who had a seer? Who could answer the questions that threatened to propel him into a fight he had no hope of winning?

  And if he found a man—or woman—who was capable of answering his questions, would he still manage to keep Jewel hidden from them, from their use?

  He wrote a letter slowly, thinking of these things.

  And thinking, too, that Jewel would not be content to remain here while she sensed a different threat.

  Perhaps, he thought grimly, he should have waited until the cold had truly set in; until the loneliness and fear had resolved itself, at last, into the desperation that truly made orphans in the streets. She might have been broken then.

  But seeing her, that night, with no hope of victory, he thought instead of futility. She was, in the end, what she was.

  And he had lost one such woman to House Terafin.

  He had no desire—he admitted it, the quill digging deep furrows in the soft paper—to lose another.

  He finished his letter, and folding it, rose.

  It was time to talk to Finch.

  Rath fit in the room.

  Jewel reminded herself of this fact a dozen nervous times. She’d been in more crowded rooms. Her father’s friends had sometimes come home with him from the docks and the shipping yards, pulling up the crates and boxes that served as chairs when company was present, and jamming themselves around the table, as much as they could.

  But Rath was different. He took up more space than any four of those men, just by standing in the doorframe.

  “Jay,” he said, although he used the tone of voice reserved for the more formal—and therefore more despised—Jewel. “This is Finch?” His gaze traveled in a small arc, and landed more or less on the right person.

  It was a polite question, since he damn well knew the answer. And polite, from Rath, meant something. Not usually something good.