The Hidden City

by Michelle West

  “Not hardly. But . . .” Her voice trailed off, and fell until it was almost inaudible. “Lefty told us what happened. I didn’t want to push him.”

  Jewel nodded. “What do you think of him?”

  “He seems nice,” Finch replied with care. “But quiet.”

  “I think he’ll always be quiet. It’s when he’s not that we’ll have to listen.”

  “He loved his mother,” Finch added. And Jewel remembered what had happened to Finch and said nothing. But she touched Finch’s shoulder, wanting the contact, or wanting to offer it. Nor did Finch pull away. “He’s talking to Lander,” she added.

  “Talking to him?”

  “Well, gesturing at him. Lefty taught him a bit, and he picked it up really quickly. I think Lander likes him.”

  Jewel nodded quietly. “Lander will talk to us,” she told Finch, and knew it for truth. “In his own time, he’ll talk.”

  “Maybe Jester will stop,” Duster added, but without much malice. Fires banked, here. It gave Jewel hope. “We have to go to the Common,” she added, “before the day is out.”

  To Teller, the noise was almost overpowering. The rooms were crowded, and the kitchen large compared to his home, but every corner seemed to be filled with something or someone. He wanted to feel lucky; felt, instead, a simple lack of anything but cold. His fingers ached with it, and his chest was tight. He could no longer feel his toes.

  He watched them all. Especially Jay, because everyone seemed to look to her for guidance. She was dark-haired, and her hair curled around her face so awkwardly she was constantly shoving it to one side or the other; she was slender and neither tall nor short. Her eyes were dark, and her skin Southern.

  And she understood his loss.

  He understood hers. He had no way to speak of either, no words for the certainty. But some part of him had been waiting for her in the snow; for her or for the gods. She had come first. His mother had believed in fate, and in the malice of Kalliaris, the goddess of luck. Teller had believed in his mother, and had accepted the way her world worked. This world, however, was new to him.

  New, and yet, still his own. Because Jay was here; she had found him, he had followed. He had watched the silent giant carry his mother home. He wouldn’t have asked it; couldn’t have demanded it—he had no words, not then.

  But she had seen it and understood it, and what she asked, they offered. He labored under no illusions; he knew that she could never ask him to do what Arann had done. If he had a place here, it wasn’t Arann’s place. But he had one; he had to find it, and hold it.

  He liked Lefty, although he thought it odd that Lefty spent most of his time with his arm wedged under his armpit. He only stopped that when he spoke with Lander, the mute, pale boy that Jewel had also taken in. Lefty told Teller how Lander had come to be here, and Finch stood by, correcting him gently when she felt he needed it. Fisher could talk, but didn’t; it wasn’t so much that he was quiet—you knew when he was in the room—as that he didn’t feel a need to talk at all. He nodded often, grunted once or twice, ate three times as much as Arann, and kept mostly to himself.

  But he was willing to learn what Lefty was willing to teach or share: the movement of hands, the silent language that Lander responded to. Not one of these children had family. Not Jay either, according to Finch.

  Carver told him the story of Finch’s rescue, and Finch let him talk. When he had finished, Teller said, looking up at Carver from the patch of floor he’d made his seat, “I don’t understand one thing.”

  “What?”

  “Why you were there.”

  Carver shrugged. “I don’t understand it either,” he said at last.

  “But you helped her—in the tavern—you started the fight.”

  Carver nodded.

  “Why?”

  “She needed help.”

  “A lot of people need help,” Teller replied quietly.

  “She needed help I could offer.”

  Teller nodded at that. It made sense. “What do you do here?”

  “Do?”

  “What kind of work?”

  “Work?”

  Finch looked at her feet. They weren’t bare. “We do whatever Jay tells us,” she said at last. “She’s teaching us to read. And to write. Well, most of us. Not Lander, yet. But she says he’ll learn.”

  “She’s teaching you to read?”

  Finch nodded.

  Teller felt a peculiar hunger then, the hunger that had entirely escaped him when Finch had offered him food or blankets. “Read what?” he asked carefully.

  “She says anything, in the end,” Finch told him. “But we’re learning letters first. And our names.”

  “Why?”

  Finch shrugged. “Her father taught her, before he died. And Old Rath told her she had to keep learning if she wanted to stay here.”

  “He’s teaching her?”

  Finch nodded.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. You ask a lot of why.”

  Teller smiled. “It’s the only way I’ll understand anything.”

  “Jay would ask, too. Why,” Finch added. “I asked her why. Why she saved me. Why she saved the rest of us.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She didn’t. I think if she could, she’d save the whole city, or die trying.” Finch’s eyes were bright, and wide, as she spoke. “And I want to help her,” she added, looking down at her slender arms, her orphan hands. “Whatever she wants to do—it can’t be bad. And I’d rather help Jewel than do almost anything else. If it means reading, I’ll learn to read. If it means fighting, I’ll learn to fight.”

  Teller frowned, and Carver shook his head. “She’s been trying to teach Finch and Lefty to fight a bit. Not like soldiers,” he added, “but just enough to be able to get away if they have to.”

  From what? He didn’t ask. Enough, to have the questions answered. Enough, because it made him think of something other than his mother. She had died alone, in the cold; he hadn’t even been there. He couldn’t remember if he’d told her he loved her before she’d gone. He couldn’t know for sure that she knew it, while she lay in the street dying.

  “Teller?”

  He smiled and shook his head. “Cold,” he said. “Just cold.” Winter death in the tone of the words. And Finch didn’t ask more. He liked Finch. He liked Carver. And Lefty, so nervous, and yet in his own way so generous; Arann, who stood over Lefty like a shadow or a guardian; Jester who tried so hard to make people laugh, when there was so little to laugh about. Even Fisher, who in his own way tried to make Lander more comfortable.

  But Duster scared him.

  “So we learn to read?”

  “And we go to the market with her, sometimes. We get the water, we help some of the older people. She doesn’t ask much, Teller.”

  And you want her to ask more. Again, he didn’t say it. “She will,” he told her gently. “From both of us, even us, she will.”

  “You’re not afraid of her?”

  He shook his head. “I feel like I’ve known her forever,” he said, meaning it. “I don’t know anything about her, but . . .” He shrugged. “I know she wants me here, and that’s enough.”

  Finch nodded. “It’s good, this place.”

  “Crowded,” Carver added. But he smiled when he said it, his hair hanging over one eye as he leaned back against the wall. “She’s got a bit of a temper.”

  “And she speaks Torra,” Finch added. “Do you?”

  “A bit.”

  “I think—” Finch shook her head. “You’ll like it here.”

  “And what about Duster?”

  “Duster saved my life,” Finch replied. But her expression was troubled. Teller didn’t ask more; Carver’s expression had frozen in place. Teller was new here; he would learn. Was determined to learn.

  Jay went out with Carver and Arann and Lefty, and when she came back, snow melting in the curls of her hair, she had blankets, clothing, food. The blankets, she
handed to Teller. “We don’t have beds,” she added. “These will have to do for now.”

  She paused for a minute, and then said quietly, “Kitchen.” It was to Teller she spoke, and only to Teller, and the rest understood it; when he rose, they stayed where they were. He followed her. On the scant counter space, she was carving bread that had almost frozen; it was like chipping soft rock. She nodded toward a chair, and he took it, waiting by the table.

  “I don’t know what they’ve said about me,” she began, back turned toward him as she worked, “and most of it probably isn’t true.”

  He had to smile at that.

  “But you should know something if you’re going to stay here. You haven’t asked me how I found you.”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “When Kalliaris smiles, it’s not a good idea to ask why. She might frown instead.”

  Jewel chuckled. “Good answer. You would have liked my Oma.”

  He said nothing.

  “But you should know that—” she put the knife down with a curse, and he saw she’d cut her finger; saw blood ebb into bread that seemed too frozen to absorb it.

  He rose quickly and handed her a towel, and she took it without a word; the cut itself seemed beneath her notice.

  “I want to apologize,” she said at last, looking down at bloody bread without dismay. “But to do that, I have to explain. Sometimes I know things, Teller.”

  He waited.

  “I just know them. I can’t predict what I’ll know, or when, or even how—but when I know something, it’s true.”

  He nodded.

  “I knew you would be there. We were on the way to the Common in the snow. We were playing in it,” she added, and her eyes seemed to look beyond the wall, as if it were a window. “And then I—I knew I had to go. To you, to where you were. I knew what you were looking for. I knew you weren’t dressed for the cold. You don’t have Winter clothing, do you?” She paused when he became motionless. “Not clothing that fits,” she added.

  He shook his head.

  She nodded. “But I didn’t know that your mother would die. Only that she was dead. I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  He understood what she was apologizing for. “You didn’t kill her,” he said as gently as possible. Older than his years, as his mother had often said.

  “No. But I couldn’t save her, and if I could—” she held out her palms almost helplessly, one wound in towel. “You would still have a mother. You wouldn’t have to be here.”

  “You’re apologizing because my mother died?”

  “No. Because I couldn’t see that in time. Only you.”

  “Jay—”

  “That’s all,” she added. “I wanted to tell you I’m sorry.”

  It never occurred to him—then or later—to doubt her. To doubt what she said about her ability to see, or to doubt her regret. He stood, pushing the chair to one side. But he didn’t touch her; he had noticed that no one did.

  “My mother would have liked you,” he told her. “She would have been happy I met you. She would have told you to think about the things you did well, not the things you couldn’t do anything about.”

  “She would?”

  He nodded. “It’s what she used to tell me.” And stopped. The silence stretched out between them. “I was afraid,” he said, seeing now through the same wall that Jewel gazed beyond. “That I would never see her again. I was afraid that the world had ended.”

  She said, “I knew when my father would die.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It was horrible. The worst thing in my life. Even worse than being right.” She had begun to knead the towel that bound her cut hand as if it were part of her flesh and she sought to remake it.

  He still didn’t touch her. But he came to stand closer, to stand within touching distance. “I don’t think I want your gift,” he said at last. “But if it didn’t exist, I think—I think I would be dead. In the snow.”

  “But you’d be with your mother. At least that’s what my mother believed. And my father.”

  “I’m not ready to be with her yet.” Hard to say the words, but in saying them, he found comfort, and not guilt.

  “Good,” she told him firmly, “because I’m not ready to lose you.” She added, turning away, “I feel as if I know you, or have always known you. Or will always know you. I can’t see the future—not all of it, and not when I want to. But I know that you’re part of it, that you have to be part of it. That’s why I ran,” she added. “That’s why you’re here.”

  Only at night did he cry. At night, in a room full of strangers pressed together on the floor. His mother had always gone out when the sun began to set, dressed in what had seemed at first finery, and in the end just pieces of cloth stitched together in such a way that meant she was leaving; as it grew darker, as the sounds of the streets quieted and changed, he was on his own, when all words, good or ill, didn’t matter. The walls had listened, and the gods, but neither interfered.

  Here, they slept, or pretended to sleep, these strangers and Jay, and no one asked him questions, no one offered him any comfort except the pretence of ignorance. That, and their presence, their silent acceptance. Even their understanding: they were all orphans, in this place. All they had was each other. This was the only privacy the den would ever offer, and he accepted it, as he accepted all else.

  In this fashion, Teller began the journey toward home.

  Duster, to no one’s surprise, was good with knives. She could even throw them and actually hit the large wooden target that Rath had set up in the boys’ room. It hadn’t been their room to begin with; he had used it for training. And he had been at his most unkind during those sessions, his voice rising and falling like a dog’s bark or growl.

  He asked Jewel, Carver, Arann, and Duster to join him there; the others, he said, wouldn’t fit, and he would see to them later. But Jewel knew he was lying; she didn’t call him on it. Rath always had reasons for what he did.

  Rath gave them long sticks; longer than short knives, but shorter than swords. They were heavy, too—heavier, Jewel thought, than wood had any right to be. He carried a stick of the same size, and he had height and reach as an advantage.

  “Not fair,” Jewel told him curtly, when her wrist had taken its third sharp slap, and she could feel the bruises beginning to form.

  “There is no fair in a fight like this,” he snapped. “You go out into the streets and tell the roving dens they’re not being fair, and if you’re lucky, they’ll only laugh.”

  Duster had sneered at Jewel’s comment, but not at Rath, and Jewel noted that this was the first time she treated Rath with anything approaching respect. Because it was clear—even to Jewel—that Rath was good. Better, she knew, than she herself would ever be. But maybe not better than Duster.

  Arann got clouted on wrist, shoulder, and the side of the head; he was big, but almost ambling, and he did not strike hard when he chose to try. Rath cursed him roundly, and with heat. Jewel had to bite back words—all of them Torra—and she threw herself into Rath’s damn lesson with ferocity and focus. She managed just once to strike his elbow, and to strike it hard enough that it threw him off.

  “Good,” he said, withdrawing.

  She relaxed, and he tossed the wooden stick, catching it with his left hand and lunging toward her before she’d had any chance to feel pride at her meager achievement.

  She found that he was at least as good with his left hand as he had been with the right, and she took the bruises there, too. Accepted them as the price for carelessness.

  Carver was not as foolish, and nothing Rath said or did angered him. Rath hated Carver’s hair, considered it a gift to any opponents of “worth” as he called them, but could not convince Carver to cut it or push it up under a bandanna. He had much less luck with Carver than he’d had with either Arann or Jewel; Carver could move, and his movements were like a dance. He didn’t stand to fight; he didn’t stand at all. He leaped fr
om foot to foot, seeking not so much flight as unpredictability.

  Rath caught him in the chest in the end, but it took about five minutes, and when it was done, and Carver was gasping for breath on one knee, Rath nodded. “Not bad,” he said, in a grudging way. “You fight like a street boy, but you fight well enough to survive.”

  He turned last to Duster. “You,” he said quietly.

  Duster looked dubiously at the weight of wood in her hand. “This?” she said, with barely concealed contempt.

  “I could kill you with it,” Rath replied evenly. There was no threat in the words, just certainty, and Jewel expected Duster to bridle, to give in to anger. But Duster shrugged instead. She looked different in this small room, with its boards along the wall and its creaky floors; it was girded by rolled blankets, the odd pillow, a pile of clothing, all pushed aside to make space.

  “If you prefer, use your knife.”

  Duster looked up at him; had to look up at him, he had straightened to his full height. Gone was the element of the scholar, the seeker of knowledge; gone as well the gentleman that he sometimes chose to be. What was left was something that made Jewel uncomfortable, because it reminded her of . . . Duster.

  But Duster had her pride. She threw the stick over her shoulder, and Arann dodged it; it clattered, skidding across the floor into a gray blanket. She pulled a dagger, tossing it from her right hand to her left, crouching slightly, knees bent, shoulders curved inward. She looked comfortable here. She looked, suddenly, as if she truly belonged to this room, and to the man who now ruled it.

  Rath did not draw a knife; he merely shifted the position of his stick and waited. Duster waited as well, observing him. The sneer that was almost her only expression had melted into something serious, something that bordered on respect. Because she believed he could kill her. They all believed it. Jewel knew he wouldn’t. Mostly.

  But he had never liked Duster.

  They drew a single breath—watchers, and combatants alike—as if they were one thing, audience and performers. And then Duster began to move toward him. She didn’t dance the way Carver did; she didn’t shift her position, make the position itself unreliable. She didn’t smile, she didn’t crack a joke; these things she couldn’t have done anyway.