Moving only his eyes, the boy studied first Bel, then Willam, then brought his gaze back to Rowan. Then he hesitantly pulled out one hand and held it at arm’s length, leaning forward precariously so as to approach no nearer.
The hand held a rolled paper tied with a ribbon. Rowan took it. “Thank you.”
The boy dropped his hand, gaped as if stunned, then abruptly flashed a huge grin, remarkably similar to Beck’s. Then he was gone, off through the tables and out of the room, trailing a stream of giggles like bubbles in his wake.
“Expecting a message?” Bel asked.
“Not especially.” Rowan untied and unrolled the paper. A glance told her: “This is Ona’s.” She flattened it against the tablecloth.
A drawing, very old, by the condition of the paper. It showed a garden in full bloom, with banks of rhododendrons and ranks of daffodils, a cherry tree, a stone bench, the back of a house. In shaded outline: two figures, one standing, one stooped. Rowan turned it over.
Freshly written in artist’s pencil: Lorren and Eamer, Old Water Street, three doors past the pawnshop, blue house front. Not in Ona’s handwriting, Rowan saw; she assumed Naio’s.
Rowan reversed the page again. “And that would be Lorren and Eamer themselves.” She slid it across the table for Bel and Willam to see.
“That’s the back of Jannik’s house,” Willam said. “But the garden is different.”
“From forty years ago?” Bel speculated. “Ha. Kieran’s gardeners.”
“So it would seem. I really must speak with them.” Rowan began to rise, realized she had not touched her breakfast, sat again, regarded her gruel with distaste.
“How’s your leg?” Bel asked.
“Uncomfortable. That was rough work, last night.” Rowan downed her mug of milk.
Bel said to Willam: “That’s her code word for agonizing pain. You should have seen her while she was recuperating. She’d drag herself down the staircase by sitting on each step and sliding down, one by one, stagger over to the worktable, collapse in her chair, sit with her head on her arms for ten minutes, and when you asked her how she felt, she’d say she was ‘uncomfortable.’ ”
“In this case”—Rowan reached over to snatch the remains of Bel’s sausage—“it’s merely accurate. My leg hurts, but if I don’t work it, it will just stiffen up. Oh, my.” This in response to the flavor of the sausage. “And it’s a flat walk to Old Water Street,” she continued around a mouthful. “I’ll be fine. Bel—” Rowan had been about to ask if Bel was ready to go, but the only watchers so far had been for Willam, and not the steerswoman. There had been no other sign of interest in Rowan’s investigations from any threatening party. Jannik himself was still out of town, still entirely unaware of the steerswoman’s presence. There might well be no need for caution at all, and certainly none for urgency.
“I think you both should get some rest,” Rowan said. “Bel, I suspect you didn’t sleep last night, and I believe Willam hasn’t, either.”
“I dozed for about half an hour, until I thought the bath-house would be open.”
“You probably need sleep more than either of us,” Bel pointed out to Rowan.
“You may be right,” although she did not feel drowsy at all, “but. . .”
Bel grinned. “But you’re dying to hear what Kieran’s gardeners have to say.”
“I am,” Rowan admitted. “And they’re elderly. Perhaps they’ll be napping in the afternoon. I’ll do so, myself.” She scanned the table for tempting remnants, and discovered that Will had entirely neglected his cheese bread. She confiscated it, and the last of his apple slices.
The servers recognized the signs of imminent departure, and two approached, with trays and apologetic expressions. Bel rose, gestured expansively. “All this on my tally, please. Come on, Will. You really have to see the room they’ve given me.”
The three left the dining room together. In the hall, by the staircase, they paused: Rowan would be going down, Bel and Willam up.
No one else was present. Rowan said to Willam, “Why two days from now?”
Will rubbed his eyes; apparently the anticipation of sleep was causing its lack to catch up with him. “Regular maintenance and updates,” he said. “Certain systems will be down.” He forced himself to more alertness. “Some of the biggest spells need to be adjusted,” he explained. “While that’s happening, no one can use them.” He was unable to suppress a yawn. “I can handle the house, but if any wizards try to see what I’m doing, it’ll be harder for them . . . with the updates running . . .”
Bel took his arm. “Explain later. Sleep now.” She led him away, up the staircase.
9
The young woman who met Rowan at the door of the blue house on Old Water Street was amazed by the steerswoman’s request, but admitted Rowan and led her up a long, polished oak staircase. During the ascent, Rowan studied with interest the collection of odd objects displayed in niches along the wall: a blown-glass vase holding glass daffodils; a marionette of a tinker dancer, very realistic with its golden curls and flounced skirts, seated companionably beside an equally realistic evil imp; an empty bottle of lemon liqueur, chosen perhaps for its artful and ornate label; and an old book—no longer in its niche but being read by a young man seated on the stair beneath it. His only reaction to Rowan’s presence was to shift his knees aside as she and her guide passed by.
In the musty dimness at the top of the stairs, the woman crossed the landing and opened a door. Clean, bright light spilled out, and she stood aside as Rowan entered space that seemed all light, color, and fresh air.
A white room, with two beds, neatly made, on opposite walls. Broad double windows with glass panes stood open to the yard below, brown with autumn, but for splashes of asters and chrysanthemums, purple and pink, yellow and orange. A table directly under the window held more asters, freshly cut, in a blue vase.
On either side of the table in huge cushioned armchairs sat two ancient persons, quite the oldest Rowan had ever seen in her life. The one on the left seemed asleep, chin on chest; the other gazed out the window with an air of deep contentment.
Rowan glanced back, hoping the young woman would perform introductions; but she had departed. Rowan approached the pair tentatively, regretting the need to disturb them. “Excuse me?” It was the sleeper who reacted first, opening faded brown eyes to regard her curiously; the other turned from the window, blinking perplexity. “My name is Rowan. I’m a steerswoman—”
“Ah!” one of them said.
“Oh!” said the other.
“Don’t see many of those.”
“Traveling far and wide, all over the world.”
Rowan was relieved by their alertness. They were obviously at least not completely senile. “I wonder if you would mind answering a few questions?”
“Oh,” the one on the right said, in a dubious tone.
“Well,” the other said, “busy day, don’t know if we could fit you in . . .”
“There’s the roses to cover.”
“Pruning that apple tree.”
“Those daffodils. Got to plant ’em.”
“Three dozen of them, altogether.” Rowan became disturbed; for persons of such age, these plans were completely impossible.
“And,” the one on the right reminded the other, “the Grand Ball at the Dolphin tonight.”
“Oh, yes!” Brown eyes under raised brows caught and held Rowan’s gaze. “We intend,” their owner informed her, “to drink an entire keg of ale between us, kiss all the prettiest dancers, and kick up our heels until dawn.”
And Rowan laughed, half with humor, half with relief; they were obviously jesting. Her laughter pleased them, and they traded broad smiles.
With a lift of the chin, the one on the right indicated a straight-backed chair standing by the door. Rowan fetched it, placed it near, and sat.
She regarded them. “I’m sorry, I don’t know which of you is which.”
Laughter, in ancient, cracked voices. “I’m Lorren,”
the one on the left said. The head that had been tilted down in sleep remained tilted; Rowan assumed it a permanent condition.
“Eamer,” said the other, with a lift of one hand, bird-boned and blotched with brown.
Age had rendered them virtually indistinguishable from each other. Both were tiny, frail, and almost entirely bald, with a few sparse white hairs remaining on the top of yellowish pates, somewhat more behind the ears and across the backs of their heads. They seemed not to possess a single tooth between them.
They were dressed identically, in fine blue quilted silk house jackets, buttoned to the chin. Wool blankets covered their legs, home-knit, but of excellent work. The colors of these were brown, gold, green, and yellow, with small points of pink, echoing the flowers in the vase, and the autumn world outside the window.
Rowan realized that she absolutely could not determine their genders, and could find no polite way to ask. Even their voices gave no clue: Lorren’s was more creak than voice; Eamer’s name had been spoken by its owner in a fuzzy baritone, such as even a woman might acquire at such an advanced age. Rowan decided that the matter was irrelevant to her purposes.
Because she thought it would please them, the steerswoman pulled Ona’s drawing from her shoulder sack and passed it over.
Eamer took it, held it close to examine it, displayed pink gums in a grin, then leaned across to show it to Lorren.
“Ah,” Lorren said immediately, “Ona. That’s Ona’s work.”
“Yes, what a lovely girl.”
“All grown up now, of course. She married that fellow, what was his name, the dark one with all the hair—”
“Joly.”
“No, the other one. Naio.”
“Of Reeder-and-Naio, that’s right! Ho, that was a surprise.”
“Bigger surprise when the baby came. So late in life for Ona.” This with sympathy.
“Even later for Naio, not that that matters. But that baby was already on the way, wasn’t it? That’s the thing.”
Rowan said, “That’s Kieran’s garden, isn’t it?”
Eamer nodded thoughtfully.
“Yes . . . ,” Lorren said, laying the drawing down on the knitted brown-and-gold. “We were with him, what was it, twenty years?”
“No. Seventeen, altogether.”
“That’s right. Fifteen before, and two after.”
Rowan was about to inquire concerning “before” and “after”, then realized. “After he changed,” she said.
Both old persons nodded.
“Can you tell me about that? You seem to think there was a very clear division.”
“Oh, absolutely.”
“We were working—”
“It was morning—”
“Early. We always started early. We were planting marigolds that day.”
“We didn’t think he was up yet.”
“Well,” Eamer said to Lorren, “he’d been up all night, hadn’t he?”
Lorren nodded to the degree that the bent neck allowed. “By the look of him. Long, hard night.”
“Came out the back door, and just stood there.”
“Looking like he’d had a hod of bricks dropped on him.”
“Then he sat down on the back steps.”
“And me and Eamer, shooting glances at each other, and trying not to stare.”
“Didn’t want him to notice we’d noticed.”
“And when I looked at him again,” Lorren said, and raised one hand, as if indicating the scene, “he was looking straight at me. Nearly gave me a fright, because I thought he’d seen us watching. But no. He looked at me like he’d just noticed I was there, and didn’t know who I was.”
“And he looked at me the same. I just went back to work. But then”—here Eamer squinted in thought—“when I glanced up again, he was looking at me like he did know who I was. And he got up and walked over.”
“And we just didn’t know what was coming. So we stood up.
“And I took your hand. I remember that. . .”
“And when he reached us, he didn’t say a thing, for a bit.”
“And then he did say a thing, and he said it like he’d never thought of it before.”
“He said: ‘How do you support yourselves?’ ”
“Wait,” Rowan said, and looked from one to the other. “He paid you no wages?”
Both heads shook. “Fifteen years,” Eamer said. “Not a penny.”
“He’d seen us, you see, putting in that little garden over by East Well. Told us he liked our work, and from now on we’d do his garden.”
“And that was that.”
“The family supported us, all those years.”
Eamer sighed. “Hard times, all around.”
And the steerswoman realized what was coming next. “He started paying you for your work.”
Eamer leaned forward, despite the fact that it clearly took great effort. “He walked back into his house, came straight out again, took my right hand, and poured a fistful of silver and copper into it.”
“It was a lot of money!”
“It wasn’t fifteen years’ worth of wages—”
“No. But a lot of money, still, all at once.”
“I don’t think he’d counted it out at all. I think he just snatched up whatever was on hand . . .”
Rowan found this extremely interesting. “And did he begin paying you regularly after that?”
Lorren’s faded brown eyes grew wide, and the tilted head came nearly erect. “A silver coin, each and every week after!”
Rowan was amazed. “That’s an excellent wage indeed.”
“Yes, it was!” Eamer said, with feeling. “With an extra silver, each Winter Solstice!”
“Two Solstices, that was, and then he died.”
“What a shame, the little children were so sad . . .”
Rowan sat forward, elbows on knees, folded her hands. “Do you know how he died?”
Outside, clouds slipped past the sun, and the window edge permitted a narrow block of light to fall on Eamer, painting the right side of the blue silk jacket with a light sheen of gold. Lorren lifted one arm, laid an ancient hand on the fine white cloth that covered the table, spread fingers more bone than flesh. The cloth seemed to glow with sunlight, seemed to reflect light and heat back upward, through the translucent skin. “Old age,” Lorren said. “So we were told.”
Eamer’s head shook, slowly. “I don’t believe it.”
“No. . .”
“Why not?”
Eamer said, “He wasn’t old. Not really. We thought so at the time, of course. He looked a hundred years old to me, then. But now . . .”
“We know what old is, now,” Lorren said, still quietly regarding the cloth, the light, the glowing hand. “He wasn’t old. Not like this.”
“He was tall,” Eamer said, eyes gazing into the far distance beyond Rowan. “He was thin, but he stood straight. He had all his teeth, and he had all his hair.”
“Well, not everyone loses their hair . . .”
“Yes, they do.” Eamer said, returning to the present, and directed a twisted smile at Lorren. “Everyone. If they last long enough.” And Lorren chuckled.
“Perhaps magic kept him strong,” Rowan suggested.
“Now, see,” Eamer said to Rowan, emphasizing the point with one raised finger; the entire arm trembled. “That’s the thing. If the two of us can last this long, all on our own, it wouldn’t be age that takes someone with magic in his hands. No . . .”
“How old are you?” Rowan asked, suddenly needing to know. She felt herself in the presence of some wonderful natural phenomenon, like a tall, spreading waterfall, a trackless expanse of deep forest, a wild cliff of many peaks, cutting the sky, eternal.
Both Lorren and Eamer had to think long on this question. “I’ve seen a century, at least. . . ,” Lorren ventured.
“And I’m five years older.”
Rowan nodded, deeply pleased. She decided that she loved them. And it seemed to her th
at they certainly were a couple, but she remained unable to guess who possessed which gender—or, for that matter, whether their genders were opposite. She tried to recall what local custom prevailed in Donner concerning such matters, and discovered that she had not the slightest idea. And local customs did vary wildly across the known world. Rowan decided not to disturb these lovely people with a possibly upsetting question.
She returned, instead, to the matter at hand. “If Kieran did not die by natural means—” An immediate reaction on both faces stopped her.
Lorren said: “Slado.”
“Now, we don’t know that . . .” But Eamer clearly suspected, as well.
“Bet he did it.” Lorren’s brown eyes receded and vanished behind a squint of distaste. “I bet he thought he’d get Kieran’s holding.”
“No, he was too young. He couldn’t have learned all that much, yet.”
“And that’s why he didn’t know any better.”
“What was he like?” Rowan asked.
Identical expressions of deep displeasure. “Like Kieran,” Eamer said. “The Kieran-before. Exactly like.”
“No, not exactly. The old Kieran never went about town the way Slado did. Though the new Kieran did, a bit.”
“Well, that Slado, he was hardly more than a boy. A lad that age would, wouldn’t he? Out to the taverns, off riding . . .”
“He had a horse.”
“Who tended the horse?” Rowan asked, hoping for another informant.
“He stabled it at the Dolphin, same as Jannik does.”
Rowan decided to ask among the stable hands; perhaps their predecessors’ names were still remembered. “Did Slado have any friends among the folk?”
This took some thought. “None that I ever saw,” Lorren said. “Saw him chatting, sometimes. People his age, for the most part.”
“Did he ever speak to you?”
“Hm.” Eamer squinted. “Can’t recall. . .”
“Yes, he did. You remember. He complimented the roses, that time.”
“Ah, that’s right; but the roses were terrible that year! He didn’t know what he was talking about.”
“He was just saying it to say it. I think Kieran told him to be nice.”
A grunt. “Like that would work. Slado paid out that compliment like it pained him to do it.”
The Language of Power Page 13