Light of the Outsider

by Matthew Wayne Selznick

  All their adventures, all the time he had pined for her, and this was the first time he had held her hands.

  They were warm.

  Hope swelled in his breast. Together, they would do this.

  "Upstairs, Raej. The Steadfast Capful—you know it—upstairs. Try to See."

  "I cannot simply call upon the Science."

  "Do whatever is necessary. Should I sit at the table?"

  "The sand is for patrons. A show." She pulled lightly, expecting him to release her, and despite everything Talen knew of Rajen, he risked holding on.

  Her tone went dry.

  "I have a suggestion of my own. Why don't you simply tell me what you think I'll see?"

  "I thought that would influence…?"

  "Do I tell you which words best rhyme? Just tell me, Talen."

  He squeezed her hands and said, "I know where Ranith is. Can you believe it?"

  Her hands flexed in his. He let go. Rajen took a step back, blinking rapidly. Her eyes went wide and seemed to look beyond the walls of the hut. Her mouth opened. She was obviously surprised, but Talen had the impression she was not reacting to what he had said. Not directly.

  However much she had allowed her composure to slip, it was quickly restored. She seemed irritated by the episode.

  "Should I believe it?"

  Talen told her what he'd heard, and where. He left out everything that had come before, for though Caela knew of Rajen, he saw no reason for Rajen to know of Caela.

  He should have known better than to underestimate her perception, magickal or otherwise. "Why were you upstairs in the first place? Don't you keep a room above Bol's shop?"

  His face grew hot. "I called upon a friend staying there."

  "Just passing through?" Her smile was wicked. "With her troupe?"

  This was mortifying. "Why is it acceptable for you to See that, and not what I ask of you? Rajen, how can you jest?"

  Her laugh was genuine, if a little cold. "All I need to see are the stains on your trousers, Talen." She waved a hand. "It matters not, believe me."

  That stung.

  "Are you sure?"

  Her quick smile was full of condescending pity. Thankfully, she came back to the subject at hand. "Let's say this child you think you heard really is Ranith. What would you do?"

  "I need you to tell me it is. To be certain."

  "Why? Just go to the guard and let them figure it out."

  Why was she being so difficult, when he was trying to give her the only and best gift he could give?

  "So I can rescue him, Rajen!"

  The incredulity on her face was far more cruel than if she had laughed again. "Rescue him? Talen, really?"

  "Of course! A noble act, Rajen! Think how grateful the Alwardendyn will be! They know of my family, you know. My mothersfather—"

  "Yes, yes." She nodded quickly. "Your mothersfather and his legendary deeds against the Faien in the battle of something-or-other."

  She was making him angry. "He was Recognized."

  "Fifty years ago, wasn't it?"

  "I will be able to go home," he said through clenched teeth. "I thought to take you with me. You could work your Science outside of the—"

  "You… thought..?" Now she was incensed as well. "Talen, if you bring Ranith back to the palace, the throne guard will take one look at you, tattered sellsong and half-suspected thief, and assume you stole the child in the first place." Her contempt flowed. "They will thank you, and they will throw you to the watersnipes, or hang your corpse from the palace gate with your severed hands stuffed in your mouth. You fool."

  Talen could not look away from her.

  As always.

  Now, though, he saw new shades on the palette of her beauty. She was simply too damaged to accept anything from him save a disappointment she seemed to cultivate and harvest, leaving him a fallow, barren field.

  His chest rose and fell. "You know how I regard you, Rajen." He willed his eyes not to fill. "We do not speak of it, you and I. But you know."

  She looked away. "I will not follow you. Or anyone." He thought she might spit on the floor. "Especially not into folly. You! You know this."

  The voice he heard coming from his own mouth was a rasping whisper; all he had left.

  "Rajen… it's a chance to be free."

  She would not look at him.

  Talen held up his hands. "That's what it is. I'm taking it." The tides of his resolve flowed anew. "I thought you would want it." He looked around her tiny hut. "I thought you would want to be free."

  This last entreaty seemed lost on her. A singer of sad songs, Talen was not surprised at how much he hurt.

  He unlatched the door. "I thought of you, first and only."

  Rajen stayed where she was.

  Talen failed to keep tears in their place. It didn’t matter anymore.

  "I won’t forget you," he said, "as I live my true life."

  He left her hut.

  ~

  Talen walked from Rajen's hut to Bol's tailor shop in a fugue state of furious disappointment, not infrequently blinking tears aside.

  He quartered in a converted attic beneath the steeply slanted open gable roof of the shop, accessed by a rickety flight of stairs leading to a shuttered frame that was both small door and good-enough window. Within, the space was crowded with a small chest, a chamber pot, and a narrow bed onto which Talen threw himself.

  It was Bol's work, a tightly woven and firmly stuffed pad on a wicker frame set off the floor on low legs. It was more comfortable than even Kug's beds at the Capful, and usually gave Talen the best sleep of his young life.

  Given that he'd spent many nights sleeping on bare ground, or on thin pads of scratchy reed, or on Ragan's narrow wagon benches, Talen allowed that his standards were not high.

  As his eyes adapted to Tala's pale, meager light streaming through the slightly open shutters, Talen stared at the cracks and grooves in the ceiling planks less than a hand above his nose. After three years seeing the same thing before sleep closed his eyes, those dusty worn planks were more familiar to him than the memory of his dead parents' faces.

  Another pebble on a mountain of shame.

  Discovering Ranith, Talen had imagined kicking that mountain to pieces and using the rubble to pave a road to his future. His redemption.

  With Rajen at his side.

  He didn't care that she'd most likely follow him out of convenience and expedience more than affection. She would have been with him. Or, if not with him… nearby. The rest would work itself out.

  Might have.

  Now?

  Would not.

  Not for the first time, Talen knew himself a fool for thinking Rajen would ever place him in her favor.

  She lived only for herself. Fiercely so. He knew very little of her history save that it was troubled, but Talen did know a little something of tragedy, and hardship, and how cruel the Shaper could be when the balance was disrupted and one's pathsong wandered into disharmony.

  Talen held fast to hope. His path might be clogged and overgrown with weeds and brambles, but it still went somewhere, and one day, even if it was not today or tomorrow, he would walk it again.

  Rajen's path was a spiral twisting around apparently unrelenting bitterness.

  As much as he wanted to cling to obstinate offense where she was concerned, he could not help feeling pity for her.

  He grinned ruefully. She would no more appreciate his pity than she did his intent to lift her to independence.

  He blinked and sat up on the bed. It didn't matter. For all anyone knew, Rajen's spiral could be just another wrinkle on Talen's own tangled path.

  Or maybe she did know. Her Science, capricious as the weather, was just as undeniable.

  Maybe Rajen did see the future. Talen, like most, had only the past to drive him.

  He slid off the bed, which, given the confines of his little room, put him right next to his chest. He moved the lamp sitting atop to the floor, worked the puzzle lo
ck on the latch, and pried open the lid.

  Within, nestled among the only clothing he owned besides what he currently wore, atop a package wrapped in a few treasured squares of his mothersfather's quilted armor, lay his family book.

  Talen crossed his legs and quickly wiped his hands on his trousers, a ritualistic gesture barely registering as a conscious act.

  Reverently, he lifted the book out of the chest and onto his lap.

  The binding was fieldhopper hide, tanned and dyed and folded and pressed by someone from his father's father's father's time. So Talen remembered his mother telling him.

  He could almost hear her voice.

  It had only been a year or so since Talen had acquired the book. He'd retrieved it, and two other artifacts, on his one and only pilgrimage back to the ruins of his family's farm, shortly after first meeting Rajen. The success of their venture, made sweeter by his fresh infatuation with the seer, drove him back to his life's mission, which he'd allowed to fade in the glare of the everyday struggle of keeping his belly full.

  It was painful to return to his former home, where he'd found the graves he'd dug in a half-starved and fully mad state more than a decade past were now three barely discernible, overgrown mounds. Still, he was glad he'd done it.

  While the stories in his family book had been enchanting and inspiring when read to him as a child, they meant so much more now that he could read them himself. The book, especially one pivotal passage, was his moral skystone.

  He turned up the lamp a bit and flipped pages until he found it. The chronicle of Kranlen, his mother's father, written in Kranlen's own hand on his return from the Wilendyn War. Kranlen's heroism there inspired the Alwardendyn to Recognize Kranlen and his descendants. With that Recognition came the grant of land where his family had modestly prospered.

  Until the plague wind came.

  Kranlen, an elder when Talen was born, had not lived long enough to suffer and die with his daughter, her heartfast, and their daughter while Talen, through some unknowable whim, lived on.

  Talen skimmed through the rest of the book, through his mother's birth, and his parents' heartfasting, and his sister's birth, and his own.

  The many blank leaves remaining had as much to say to him as the filled pages before.

  His mothersfather's legacy was Talen's responsibility. The last of Kranlen's line could not waste his life as a playerstroupe cutpurse; an alleyway thief; a tavern sellsong. Talen had not yet earned the right to claim his family's Recognition legacy… or the tokens to pay the reclamation tax.

  Talen closed the book. He stroked the cover absently and pondered.

  Rajen, far as he knew, had nothing to serve her as Talen's family book served him. No wonder she was so rigid with indignation.

  Even so, he conceded she was not wrong in one regard: If Talen simply marched into the palace with Ranith in his arms, the guard would take the path of least resistance and assume the worst. And Talen would be lost.

  The family book was no guarantee of Talen's legitimacy, for his father's renderings of his son were of an infant and a boy, not a magn of nineteen years. Who could say Talen had not simply stolen the book in an attempt to claim the land?

  Talen thanked his eight-year-old shade for possessing enough sense to sequester a second artifact, now safe in the bottom of the chest: a cast of his grandfather's sword hand, pressed in clay. Somewhere in the palace, in a vault or, perhaps, a place of higher honor, rested a duplicate.

  And then there was the third thing.

  Talen carefully laid the family book back in the chest atop the wrapped cast of Kranlen's handprint, closed the lid, and reset the puzzle lock. He put the lamp back on top of the chest and scooted around to face the bed.

  He had to nearly lie on the floor to get enough reach to pull the third artifact from its hiding place beneath the bed. With the long bundle of oiled cloth retrieved, he sat on the edge of the bed and unwrapped this last, most conspicuous remnant of his family legacy.

  The sight of it unfailingly sent a thrill through Talen.

  If the family book was Talen's symbolic skystone, here, then, was the literal thing, housed in an unadorned scabbard of pressed, sewn hide.

  Kranlen's blade, forged from a rock that fell from the sky three generations past by, so claimed the family book, renegade Gundynal artisans.

  The weapon was worth more than enough to pay the reclamation tax on Talen's family land, but he would never sell it. It was far more valuable as proof of his birthright… and yet another reminder he had a larger life to live.

  Talen unsheathed the sword, careful to not catch the blade on the close attic walls and ceiling.

  He had never used the weapon for its intended purpose. What cause had yet matched its worth?

  Today, Talen had discovered such.

  He took a stone from the pocket sewn into the scabbard and put his shoulder into sharpening the blade with vigor. The rhythmic song and frisson of rock on metal honed his resolve.

  All his life, he'd wondered why he survived after losing so many, and so much. Why had the plague wind left him standing like a sapling on the edge of a cliff? Why had Ragan sent him away the very night the guard caught up with the troupe and slaughtered his rough foster clan?

  What brought him to Aenikantag, to Rajen, and so to Caela, and so to the Steadfast Capful on this one fraught day?

  Talen was not ignorant to the romantic appeal of coincidence and happenstance. They were the seeds to many a song, after all.

  Still.

  Seers like Rajen read probability streams like a shipguide read the currents and the wind. If the future flowed through channels cut by fate and chance, it followed that the past was simply… upstream.

  It gave him comfort to believe he'd been nudged and, now and then, painfully shoved, onto the path that led him here.

  If he was guided, who else would drive him to deeds worthy of his ancestors, if not Kranlen, the most worthy of them all?

  "I will make you proud, mothersfather. I will bring us home."

  His arm ached with the effort of sharpening the blade. It made him feel strong.

  "Rajen will see. Through her Science, or otherwise. She's too practical to let this pass her by."

  Talen smiled. He could venture a glance at what was probable without any magick of his own. He knew a magn's nature well. It was his craft, after all.

  "I could look outside, mothersfather," he said to the sword, "and not be surprised to see Rajen gliding down the street on her way here right now."

  Sweat dripped into his eyes and he huffed. He wiped his forehead and his forearm came away wet. Getting a bit of night air right now was actually a delicious idea. He inspected the sword, decided it was perfect, and slid it back into the scabbard, which he lay with care on the bed.

  Crouching, he stepped to the shutters and pushed them open. The air was cool and bracing. It soothed him despite a hint of smoke remaining to taint the breeze.

  Talen suppressed a pang of disappointment. No Rajen in sight on the street below. Just a solitary magn.

  The tall, broad, hooded figure slouched in the doorway of a darkened shop across the way. As Talen watched, the magn pushed himself from his shelter and strode with sure purpose below Talen's window and away.

  Panic clutched Talen's bowels.

  It was the drunkard. Hatul.

  Hatul, who could barely stand or clearly speak when Talen had seen him at the Capful not all that long ago.

  Hatul, now moving with what could only be described as sober certainty.

  Talen jerked back and quickly closed the shutters.

  He did know! Or suspected.

  The gutterslink had followed Talen home.

  Had he ever truly been drunk?

  "Aza and Nza..!" Talen swore. The performer had been played.

  There was no time to wait; not for Rajen to come to her senses; not for Hatul to enact whatever machinations he had in his addled—or perhaps not at all addled—mind.

&nb
sp; He had to go tonight. There was no time. No time.

  He reached for the sword.

  He stopped.

  Ragan had taught him better than that.

  Scheme without sleep, mothers weep.

  Tomorrow night, then.

  He rubbed his sore arm and stared wide-eyed at nothing.

  Tomorrow night.

  Tomorrow night.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Ulthus

  Ulthus sat on a low, padded bench in the hallway outside his master's study. There was no telling how long Taghesh would keep him waiting. Here was an opportunity to calm himself, if he could.

  Rajen…

  If not for a very clear directive from Taghesh, Ulthus would have turned the seer's brain to bloody soup long ago.

  His irritation did not stem solely from the fact that she repeatedly spurned his master's invitation. Ulthus was not unfamiliar with rejection.

  Being denied retribution… now, that challenged his restraint.

  Thanks to Ulthus, Taghesh had gathered most known magickers within a dayspan to his cause. Did he truly need every one?

  That one?

  She was abrasive and solitary, and by all accounts her grasp of the Science was not impressive.

  Who would miss her, other than simpering patrons and that desperate sellsong?

  Ulthus exhaled slowly through gritted teeth, blinking deliberately and counting the beats of his heart as he did so.

  Taghesh must have good reason, undoubtedly informed by his masterful interpretation of the probability strands. For all Ulthus knew, perhaps it was the Outsider's will that Rajen lived. Taghesh was an honored instrument of Amang-huru, as Ulthus was for Taghesh.

  The notion came to Ulthus that he should enter the study.

  There was Taghesh's subtle Science at work, delicately adjusting the streams so that Ulthus, had he not known better, might have thought he'd made the decision on his own.

  Ulthus stood and opened the door.

  Taghesh, smiling slightly, rose from the high-backed, lushly padded chair behind his desk. "You return alone."

  Ulthus closed the door and hid his scowl by bowing his head.

  "I do."

  As if anything could truly be hidden from Taghesh.