The Lost Gate (12 page)

“But the Gate Thief, he finds their outself and steals it. That's right. Snatches it away and won't give it back. The more of themselves they put into their gates, the more he takes from them. My grandfather put everything into the Great Gate he was making, and when the Gate Thief took it, my grandfather had nothing left. He could make no gate, not even the smallest one. My father taught me that my grandfather was a fool, to risk all on a single gate. But I knew that my grandfather had done what a great man must do—commit all. For if he had committed less of himself, he would always have had to wonder—if he had done more, might he not have succeeded? Grandfather held nothing back, so he did not have to wonder what else might have happened.

“His gate was working, you see. That's what Grandfather himself told me. ‘I could feel the connection,' he said. ‘And then it was gone. Like a hand in a crowd slipping the coins out of your purse. Gone before you know they're going.' ”

Hull reached out her hand to touch the intruder gingerly on his upper arm. “Is that how it felt for you? Did the Gate Thief take your outself after you came into the shade garden?”

The intruder looked at her, and now she was close enough that even in the dark she could see into his eyes. They looked deep and old. If he had looked at Jib, then Hull could understand why the girl had been unsure of the intruder's age. Ancient eyes, newborn skin. A very strange person. And so silent. Was that grief? Or was he mute?

“Can you talk at all?” asked Hull.

Just the tiniest hint of a shrug.

“What? You don't
know
whether you can speak? You understood me well enough—you knew what I was asking. Or at least that I was asking something. Do you understand me? Nod your head like this if you can.”

The intruder looked at her steadily, then nodded slightly.

“Then here's what I offer you. I will tell a lie—I'll make a slight parting of the cloth of the roof and say you slipped in that way. No one will guess what you are. For we're not in the Forest of Mages, and gatemages are much feared and hated, for you know what they say about that ancient Trickster, Loki of the North of Mitherkame—that he stole all the power between the worlds and then hid it away. Because of what he did, if folks think a man might be a gatemage, the ignorant ones will cast him out or kill him, while kings will seek to trap him and use him as a tool in their plans. So you must hide what you are, and I will help you.

“If you wish to stay here, that is,” she went on. “I'm a cook—it's within my gift to make sure all who work for me have food, or anyone else it pleases me to feed. Food and shelter—for you can sleep in a corner of the kitchen, with the prentices and scrubs. I can offer you no better, because then I'd need the approval of Rudder, the steward of the house, and he'll have no patience with a speechless boy. Or man. But I'll call you a boy, because that's the look you have. As long as you don't meet anyone's gaze, eye to eye. Can you do that? Look down and never let anyone gaze into your eyes? No harm to let
me
see your eyes, but they're strange. Do you know you have strange eyes? They'll make some folk wish to have you put out of their sight, and there are those with the power to do it. Don't look them in the eye, do you see what I mean?”

The boy nodded.

“So you can stay here as long as you need. It will look better if you do some work for me. Errands, perhaps. Or washing up. Are you willing to do that? Then I can justify feeding you.”

The boy nodded again, and a tiny smile flickered at the corners of his mouth.

“Ah then, you do understand,” said Hull, though in truth she had no idea what his tiny smile might have signified. “You must understand that for my grandfather's sake—and my father's, too, for he also had the seeds of great magery in him, but he stifled them his whole life, for fear that the Gate Thief would take his outself, too, and leave him like a cripple among mages, as Grandfather was. Like a one-legged man. No, a man without legs or arms, for what can you do without an outself?” She caught herself. “Oh, forgive me if that's your case as well—you never did answer me. And you need not. For the sake of the magery you had—or have—I will give you shelter here as long as you need it. Do you want that? Will you stay, under the terms I just described?”

The boy looked her in the eye again—and oh, how she felt the depth of those eyes, worse than looking over the north parapet at the great drop down to the river harbor, a thousand cubits of fall, they said—that was how it felt to fall into his eyes.

He opened his mouth.

“Thank you,” he said.

His words had an accent—but it was her own accent, a mixture of the way her father and grandfather talked and the way the Icewegians spoke. No one spoke like that, and perhaps in those two words she had heard too much. But it was as if her own voice spoke back to her—though pitched a little lower, in the range of a boy whose voice was in the midst of changing.

He could not have come by that accent naturally. He had learned it only just now, and the first words out of his mouth echoed her voice exactly, without a chance to rehearse. The second sign of a gatemage. He will have a way with languages, and know languages he should not know, just from hearing them, for his outself finds them in other people's mouths.

If he found her language, her exact language, then that meant he still had his outself, or some portion of it. He was still a mage, then.

She rose and walked to the darkest corner, the one nearest the entrance, so Jib could not have seen it if she didn't actually walk into the shade garden. There she unhooked the gossamer of the roof, three hooks' worth in both directions from the corner; then she rehooked the very corner itself. She would show it to Jib later, to explain how he got in and then rehooked the single spot. She could not bring herself to tear the gossamer itself. It was so perfectly made and she nursed the ambition of detaching it and folding it up at summer's end, to use again another year.

When she turned to fetch the boy, she was startled that he had gotten up and moved silently to a place right by the gate. He was looking at her with those eyes. She smiled at him. “I'm such a liar,” she said, indicating the corner of the roof. “But I said no lie to
you.
”

He smiled at her. Then he cast his eyes downward, and instantly all warmth had fled from him. He looked small now, though he was just as tall as before—about her height, and she was tallish for a woman.

She led him out of the shade garden. He waited, eyes downcast and beggarly, as she relocked the gate, then padded quietly behind her as she threaded her way among the stone slaughtering and butchery tables to the kitchen door. There she paused when she felt his hand touch her arm.

His voice was quiet, yet she heard each word clearly. “Are you like your father and grandfather?”

There it was—the great question of her childhood. For despite her dread of the Gate Thief, she thought it was to be expected that she would be a gatemage like her father and grandfather. Or, failing that, at least a mage of some considerable ability.

But Father had married a woman without a scrap of magery in her, and Hull had inherited her lack in its entirety. Mother had been a sweet and patient woman, but without any particular talent except one: the ability to love her children with her whole heart, so they grew up full of confidence and trust in the world.

“The only gift I have,” said Hull, “is the gift of remembering all kindnesses, and trusting those worthy of trust.”

He waited a moment longer, his hand still lightly touching her arm—an exact copy, she realized now, of her own touch on
his
arm back in the shade garden.

Though no word was said, she understood the question, because it was the second half of the joke she told only to herself. “Yes, I also have the curse of remembering all slights and ills, and of giving my trust just as readily to those who
don't
deserve it.”

She chuckled at that, and then opened the kitchen door and led him inside.

The prentices were all hard at work, but she knew that it was her pause at the kitchen door that had saved them, for they had certainly been looking out the high kitchen windows—she could see the flour marks where they had clambered up onto the counters. But she was feeling good—or at least mellow, nostalgic at so many memories of her father and grandfather, and rueful at what they had lost—and so she allowed them to get away with their time-wasting disobedience.

“Jib?” asked Hull.

The girl stepped forward from the table where she had been tearing the herbs.

“He came in through the corner of the roof and then refastened a single hook, which is why you didn't notice the gap.”

Jib nodded.

“I blame no one for this except the wind,” she said.

There was a slight lessening of tension.

“Nor do I blame this boy for being hungry and coming into a place where there might be food. He's a traveler, not from Iceway, or at least not from this part of it. He says little. He may not be full-witted. But I'll tolerate no unkindness. He is under my protection, and he serves in the kitchen as I ask him to, and owes no duty to anyone else. Do you understand?”

Jib spoke up boldly—a good girl, Hull thought again. Bold as brass. “I don't understand—is he below us or above us?”

“He is below no one and above no one,” said Hull. “He is mine, as long as he chooses to stay.”

“Has he a name?” asked Jib.

Hull looked down at the prentices' wads of dough on the table, now looking better but still not ready for loaving.

“Wad,” she said. “We will call him Wad, when we must call him anything at all. He'll have a place to sleep among the boys who bed beyond the stoves. Not the best place, but not the worst.” This last was as much for Wad's benefit as anyone else's. “Now get a bit of bread and cheese and chilled lemon water for the new boy.” She pointed at Jib. “You do it, since you found him. The rest of you, it's time for me to tell you why your wads of dough are as unworthy to be called ‘bread' as any mud ever daubed on a wattle.”

As Hull walked around the table, inspecting the wads of dough and finding what faults still existed, she could see that Jib was doing a good job of swiftly getting food and drink for the boy, and that Wad kept his eyes downward so deferentially that he almost disappeared. Good, thought Hull. No one outside the kitchen will even notice that he's here.

6

F
ISTALK

Cadging enough money, food, and free rides to get to DC wasn't hard—not with Eric in charge. He knew what they needed, when they needed it. He also knew who they should talk to.

“She looks nice,” Eric would say, or, “He'll want to show off to his girlfriend.” Or, “Look, he's got room and he's on a long haul north, he can drive us.”

Then it was Danny's job to walk up to them in his ragged clothes and ask for a few bucks. “Got to get home to my folks in Maryland,” he'd say, “but no way my dad's going to send me money.”

Or, if Danny and Eric approached them together, like they had to do when they wanted a ride instead of cash, Eric would say, “I left the keys in the car at a rest stop and it wasn't there when we got back to the parking lot. Now I've got to get my little brother home to Maryland anyhow I can. Our folks don't have another car, not that's working right now.”

And as often as not, people forked over money or offered them rides.

When they were alone, Eric was almost ecstatic. “Why didn't I get me a kid like you before? She gave us a twenty instead of a one!”

The upshot was that by the end of the second day they were on the Mall in Washington and Danny insisted they had to walk the whole length of it, despite how cold it was.

“Begging's a serious job, man,” said Eric. “You got to stick with it or you don't make enough to live.”

“Come on, I've never been here,” said Danny. “I want to see it.”

“Don't pull that big-eyed sad-kid crap on me,” said Eric.

“Yeah, I'm pretty good at it,” said Danny. “Thing I'm wondering is, why do I need
you
?”

Eric had obviously thought of the same question himself, because he immediately launched into a list. “First, you don't know where anything is and I know this town.”

Danny wanted to argue—hadn't he learned the map of the Mall? Lincoln on the left, Capitol on the right, Washington in the middle, White House on the north. Museums here and there along both sides. But there was no point in saying this—the point was that Danny wasn't going to let Eric order him around, and that was that.

“Second,” Eric continued, “there's guys who prey on kids your size and you ain't gonna be able to fight them off. Third, there's cops'll notice how you're dressed and take you to the station and turn you over to Social Services and they'll find your family and send you home, which I think you don't want.”

Danny listened to the whole thing, not dropping his innocent, needy, wide-eyed expression. This used to get laughs from the Aunts, but not for a long time—they stopped thinking Danny was funny quite some time ago.

“I can see by that pitiful act you're putting on that you're not listening to a word I say,” said Eric.

“That sounds word for word like somebody's mom talking,” said Danny.

Eric's face went grim with anger. “Say that again and I
will
leave you.”

Danny shrugged. What Eric didn't know—and Danny wasn't going to tell him—was that Danny wasn't going to get caught by anybody. Not child molesters and not cops or social workers. It was too easy to make a gate and get away.

Eric didn't know this—couldn't know it—wouldn't believe it if Danny told him. Instead, he glared for a long moment and then walked away.