The Seer - eARC (50 page)

“That my word was binding. She made a threat on my life, should I fail to deliver you whole.”

“To the Lord Commander, who may well kill me the moment I arrive?”

“You are of more use to him alive.”

“But you would say that, would you not, to keep me on course?”

He nodded to accept the point. “Nonetheless, it is so.”

“I can trust you one more day, then.”

“Yes.”

Once in the Lord Commander’s hands, she would no longer have any choices. But now, at least for tonight, she still did.

She wondered about the future. Not the far future, not even tomorrow, but now, these next few minutes. Wondered about it, but didn’t attempt to foresee. For this moment she needed her senses more than her vision. And courage.

Tayre watched her approach. Relaxed. Ready. Always ready.

Heart pounding, she stepped close to him. Close enough to smell him, to hear him breathe. Deliberately, slowly, she put her hand flat on his chest, looked up into his eyes, tried to smile, faltered.

He blinked. Other than that, he might have been made from stone.

“What is this, Amarta?”

“I ask that you be my first time.”

He covered her hand on his chest with his own.

“
Do
you?”

“Yes.”

“Your first time could mean a baby if you lack sufficient understanding.”

She felt her face go hot, pulled away. “I know that.”

“You didn’t,” he said, his voice betraying surprise.

Now she understood Dirina’s moon counts, why her sister would arrange pebbles in a row so carefully when she went with the village men. It was so obvious. How could she not have known?

“No one told you? Not your mother?”

“I was five when my mother died.” Who she had let die. She pushed the thought away.

“Dirina?”

Amarta shook her head. “She thought if I didn’t know, I wouldn’t make her mistake.”

“Many children are born to that particular misunderstanding.”

“Then teach me.”

“You should be taught by an anknapa. An older woman. Not me.”

“Don’t give me that,” she said, tension making her testy. “You know all this and more. You must.”

His brief smile faded to unreadability. “What has changed so that you would invite this hunting dog so very, very close, Amarta?”

Her face was still warm. “Tomorrow I give myself up to the Lord Commander, which I may not survive.”

“That is not reason enough to choose me.”

“I say it is.” Her voice sounded uncertain in her own ears. “I say it is,” she repeated more firmly.

For a long moment he watched her. She waited uneasily. He might say no. He couldn’t say no. She didn’t want him to say no.

“I could die tomorrow, Tayre.”

“This would change how you think of me, Seer.”

“I don’t care.”

“You might well care in the future.”

“So be it. I still ask. Please.”

He was silent again for a long moment. It was all she could do to keep her gaze steady on his.

Brown eyes. Hunter’s eyes.
She swallowed, refusing to look away.

At last he nodded, stepped back, stripped off his shirt to bare skin.

“Men,” he said, “are different, in ways both obvious and subtle.” Standing on one foot he untied and removed a boot, making it look easy, then switched feet and took off the other. He pulled off his pants and the silk underneath and stood there without clothes, silently inviting her to look.

After a few moments he chuckled. “The woman who can look into the future has never before seen a naked man.”

“I’ve seen Pas.”

“Pas is a child.”

He gestured to her to come closer, held his hands out, and turned slowly, inviting her touch. She put her fingers on his stomach, his chest, feeling the skin and hair as he turned, giving her time to explore. When she stood back and nodded, he took her hand and wrapped it around his penis.

“Most of the visible difference is here. Like with animals, yes? Notice how this feels? Firm, but the skin smooth?”

“Yes.”

“Like a water skin,” he said. “It gets tight with blood, then shrinks when it empties. Firm to soft, throughout the day and night. Most men can’t control this, but some can. Sometimes it is a result of desire, but not always. You understand?”

She nodded again.

He guided her hand down to the looser part underneath. “These are like sacks, where the seed is kept, the seed that makes a woman pregnant. A man always has seed, so that doesn’t matter as much. More important is when the woman is fertile. If you bleed with the moon, you are unlikely to be fertile now, but it is still a costly gamble. I want you to look into the future and be certain: Is there a possibility that you are pregnant in these next months?”

Amarta looked along the line that was her own body’s future. A glimpse of darkness and agony and terror, but unrelated to this; she pushed it aside. Nowhere in the near future did a life grow inside her. “No.”

She bent a little to get a better look at the seed sacks. She took one of them between her fingers and pressed to see if she could feel any of the seeds inside. He grabbed her wrist, tightly, precisely, and her fingers loosened of their own accord.

“Don’t press like that unless you’re trying to hurt me, in which case you’ll need to know quite a bit more than you do. That’s an entirely different lesson.”

“Oh.”

He moved her hand up to his mouth, where he brushed her fingertips with his lips.

Her heart begin to speed. She tried to remind herself to be wary, but it was only words in her head. If she was afraid of anything, it was that he might stop.

Something occurred to her. Feeling her tense, he stopped, waited.

“Do you like me?” she asked.

“Does that matter?”

“Dirina said a first time should be with someone who likes me.” In the Nesmar forest, as Amarta limped along in pain, her sister had said this. As the three of them fled this very man. For a moment she felt dizzy.

“I think that quite sensible advice.”

“And do you?”

He stared at her a moment. “Yes.” Then he came close, bent down, and touched her lips with his own.

So much more gentle, this, and startlingly so, than Darad’s quick, brusque kisses in Kusan. Like the difference between the weak wine she’d had before and the rich, smoky drink Maris had brought them.

He slowly moved his lips down her face and to the side of her neck. Somehow it relaxed her. Half relaxed and half something else.

Suddenly she began to shake all over, unable to stop. He drew her down onto the bed and sat beside her. As she sobbed soundlessly, he pulled a blanket over her. When she could again breathe easily, she rolled over to face him, grabbed his hand, pulled him down next to her.

“Continue,” she said.

“Are you sure, Amarta?”

“Yes.” Eyes closed, she brought her face close to his, finding his lips again.

So this was a first time. It filled her with a kind of longing, a deliciousness. A hunger. She opened her eyes, looking into his.

The feel of forest floor under her back. Smells of rotting leaves. A knife pressed to her throat. Oblivion a moment away.

Again she curled away from him, trembling. He put a hand on her shoulder. A comforting touch.

How could she be taking reassurance from this creature, this monster?

And yet she did.

“This was bound to be difficult, Amarta,” he said. “There is no need to continue.”

She turned back to face him. “Yes, there is. I ask you to teach me.”

“A strange courage you have, Seer.”

“Practice for tomorrow,” she said with a half laugh, half sob, and pulled him close, their noses touching. This time she would keep her eyes open.

His slow and even breathing calmed her. Then he moved his lips on hers in a slow circle that made all other thought cease.

It was so unlike anything she had ever felt that images of the past and future finally quieted. He was, she realized, bringing her into the present, a place that she very much wanted to be.

When she awoke, a gray early morning cast a watery light through the panes. Outside, the wind gusted with the start of a spring storm. He lay on his side, watching her.

She reached out a hand to him. Something had changed between them, but something else had not. He reached back and wove his fingers through hers.

To look at him now was an intensity of fear and longing. He smiled a warm smile.

A smile on a face that didn’t smile.

Pretense or no, it worked. Her spirits lifted.

“Why did you say yes?” she asked him.

“It is in my contract’s best interest to have you compliant.”

“What does that mean?”

“Your trust in me has grown, has it not? You want my touch. You care for me. You are less likely today to change your mind.”

“That was why? Not because you like me?”

“Can it not be both?”

“But, then—why would you tell me this? Wouldn’t that make me suspicious of you?”

“More than you already were?”

Were
. In the past. But she could not deny it.

“Then—why tell me this at all?”

“Why indeed? Think on it. Are you in any pain?”

“Should I be?”

“I was careful. Still, tell me if you hurt.”

Did she? Only in spirit, at the thought of leaving this room. “I want to stay here forever and—”

“And?”

“And have a second time.”

He nodded, not agreeing or disagreeing. “We have time for that, if you wish, though not much. Best we arrive at the palace in daylight.”

His words swept away the sweetness of the night, replacing it with the hard clarity of what she was about to do.

And what she had just done. She had shared a bed and sex with her hunter. Had wanted to, had asked to. Wanted to again.

He was right: she trusted him in a way she had not before. But there was something more, something he did not know yet. She shut her eyes a moment, recalling the reasons she was here, that had forced her on this path to seek out the very man who had sent the hunter after her.

She sat up. “How many people have you killed?” she asked.

“I don’t keep a count,” he answered, sitting up next to her.

“Really?”

A tilt of his head. “I used to. When I was a child.”

A
child
? He had killed as a child?

But then, hadn’t she as well?

“Twenty? Thirty?”

“More than that.”

More than thirty lives ended, because that was his work. More by far, she would guess, from the tone of his answer.

“If . . .” She considered how best to say it. “If your contract said to kill me, right now, would you do so?”

“Yes.”

“Even after last night?”

“Yes.”

“Even if . . .” Her voice dropped. “Even if, I don’t know, even if you liked me a very great deal? Even if we had made a baby together? Even then?”

“I only accept contracts I intend to fulfill. Yes, even then. Why?”

“How much did he give you, to find me?”

He shook his head. He wouldn’t tell her.

“I only want to know how much such contracts cost.”

“That depends on many things. The contract. The various terms. Who holds it. You, perhaps?” She started to answer, but nothing came out. “As I have said, I can’t take another contract now. I still have this one to fulfill.”

This one. To deliver her.

“But when this contract is done . . .” Done with her. One way or another. “When this is over, you could then be free then to take another?”

“Tell me what is in your mind.”

She glanced at the window. Clouds rushed past against a blue-gray sky. “I don’t have the kind of money the Lord Commander does.”

“Few do. Tell me, Ama.”

“I need someone to . . .” She took a breath. “To help me understand what I am. To teach me to use vision in a way that does not cause more suffering.”

“You think I can do this?”

She looked down at her hand, still in his. “You aren’t like anyone whose future I’ve seen. Most struggle toward something or run from what terrifies them. As I’ve been running for so long.” From him. She looked away, at the sharp sword in the tapestry on the wall. “I can see what might happen tomorrow, yes. But you . . .” She could feel him there, listening intently. “You see what happens today and now. I think that might be just as rare. I must learn to see better so I can avoid making futures I have no business making, and hurting people I want to protect. If I can’t do that . . .” She looked at him. He met her gaze evenly. Watching, always watching, with his hunter’s eyes. “Then I will need someone to help me stop. To help me die. I don’t know who else I could ask that of, who I could trust.”

He leaned toward her a little, the intensity of his look startling.

“Don’t trust me, Amarta. I am not in your employ.” Nor was he her friend. She knew this.

“But if you were—if I could somehow get the money—I could trust you to do what I had hired you to do. Yes?”

“Yes. If.”

“If I ever get free, I want to see things. Learn things. About myself. About the world. I need someone to guide me. Just—if.” She lay down next to him. “Will you think on it?”

“Yes.”

“Now, will you show me what a second time is like?”

He laughed a little and smiled. For a moment it seemed to her that she could believe this reaction. True or not, she smiled in response.

“Yes,” he answered.

Chapter Twenty-seven

Triangles of bright sun cut dust-filled shafts from the ceiling and high walls of the long-house, casting bright shapes on the dirt underfoot. At a table sat an old man, his skin nearly as tanned as the deer hide he worked, his straight, white hair braided into three tails, a shock of black through the one that swept back from his face. “I think you are mistaken,” he said.

On either side of him sat two white-haired women. They might have been mirror images of each other but for the pale blue jacket one wore where the other’s was orange. One woman was slowly feeding two lines of thin dried stems through her fingers from a nearby basket, passing them across a heavy double spool that sat on the table in front of the man. From there the lines went to the other woman, who wound them together onto a spindle, feeding the resulting twine back to the man between them. With a large needle he pulled the twine through holes in a skin on his lap.

“Do you want to trade places, then, and you can do my work instead?” the woman in orange asked mildly.

An amused snort from the other woman. The elder man smiled.

From the end of the long-house a large door came slightly open. A small, striped horse, nose first, pushed its way inside, walking slowly along the length of the house toward the woman in orange. He stopped there, nosed at her shoulder. She halted her work, forcing the other two to stop as well, turning in her seat to face the shaota, a chuffing sound coming from her throat. She bore the animal’s affectionate nuzzling and then the slightly wet snort that followed, patting the horse’s side as it turned away, flicked its tail, and wandered back outside.

The woman in orange turned back to the table. The three resumed their work.

“Perhaps you are not wrong,” the man said after a time.

At this the woman in blue laughed a little.

Another door opened, a smaller one nearer the table. In came a man and woman breathing hard. The woman brushed her dark hair back out of her eyes. The man clasped his hands together.

“Forgive our intrusion, Elders. We have urgent news.”

“We listen, Mara and Jolon,” said the man, not looking up from his work.

“Our unpleasant associates come riding on their large, clumsy horses. A ten count.”

“Ah.”

The three elders’ hands stopped their motion. The old man put his work on the table.

“Were they followed into our lands?”

“They were not,” said Jolon.

“What do you wish us to do, Elders?” asked Mara.

The three elders found each other’s gazes, small expressions flickering across their faces.

After a moment the woman in the coat said, “What choice is there? None. Bid them welcome.”

The Arunkin, who they knew better than they wanted to, stepped inside the long-house. Two of his kind followed, each standing on either side of the door as if they owned it.

He was tall, the Arunkin, feet set wide on the dirt floor as if to claim the land on which he stood, perhaps by virtue of his size. There was little in this Arunkin’s wordless message that the elders had not seen before.

He adjusted the cuffs of his long riding coat, cuffs and lapels woven through with silver thread, extravagant to the point of impracticality. The rest of the outfit was brown. Not the deep, rich soil brown of one of their gaudy Houses, but the brown of trees in winter, the brown of their dull horses.

“Elders,” he said, dipping his head.

The woman in blue spoke. “You make a path to us, like a painted arrow. Do you mean to show someone the way?”

“This problem is urgent and can’t wait for a circuitous approach.”

“We listen,” said the old man.

“People are asking questions in Varo and Sio Provinces. About gold. Nuggets. Coins. All the ways you ship across your borders. Someone has started to talk.”

The old man said, “In the years we have been about this, it had to happen that someone would ask such questions.”

“Yes, but the problem now is that someone is answering the questions. One of yours, I suspect. Your townspeople. Or the strays you take in.”

“No,” said the old man. “It is not any of ours.”

The tall Arunkin snorted. “You are so confident of their loyalty?”

The old man replied, “The Hanathans are our own. We protect and care for them. They would no more tell our secrets than would the shaota.”

“And the deserters you keep taking in?”

“Why would they betray us when we give them sanctuary?” asked the woman in orange.

“You shock me with your naivete. Have you never met those who want more than they are given through largesse? You think these who deserted their sworn obligations are so full of honor?”

“Do you think them so full of ingratitude?” the old man asked.

The woman in orange put a hand over his on the table. To the Arunkin, she said: “We make you welcome in Otevan, and then we argue. Let us save time and say you are in the right. What do you want us to do?”

“My people will do what we can to quiet the rumors and obscure the arrow that leads to you. But you—you must send no more shipments. Delay your next caravan. No figurines, nuggets, coins or any of the other myriad of ways you have been transporting gold out of Otevan, not until things are quiet again.”

“This we can do,” the woman in orange replied. “What is ready to go now, though, you take.”

“No. Too many are watching the roads from Otevan through Sio and Varo. When it is again safe, we will tell you, and you can resume your deliveries.”

“Again,” said the old man, “we take the risks while you take the benefit.”

The woman in blue spoke up. “We relied on your promise to empty the mine.”

“It is not our fault the vein turned out to be so unusually difficult to exhaust.”

“This was to be finished years ago,” the woman in orange said.

“Plans must change as circumstances change. You will pause your mining operations until we tell you otherwise.”

A grunt from the old man. He looked to the woman on one side, and then to the other. Then to the Arunkin he said, “Do not mistake our hearing you for compliance. We ask you to take all that is above ground, and we forgo claim to our part. The mine we can bury, as we originally intended.”

“No, you can’t. There is no burying a thing that can be dug up again. Too many know. Your people. Ours. The only way forward is to empty it.”

“And yet this seems as impossible now as it did when you first thrust this bargain upon us.”

“Dig faster. Use more of your grateful Hanathans and those deserters you are so fond of.”

“There is only room in a hole for so many before they are mining body parts instead of metal. Take what is ready to leave Otevan and go, or we will dispose of it ourselves.”

“Dispose of it?” the man asked, confused.

“We have an even larger hole to the east of us.”

“The Rift? You will not. Half of that is ours.”

“All of it is yours if you take it now.”

“I say again, that is not possible. You will wait until we tell you to resume shipments. Then you will do so.”

“Arunkin, we have spilled a great deal of blood these last three centuries to insure we are beholden to no one.”

“I wonder how the crown would react if they knew what you’ve been doing here these past six years.”

“Yes. The threat. Again.”

The Arunkin shrugged. “You’ve broken the queen’s law. Not merely mining gold, but selling it, and forging coins.”

“At your insistence.”

“Harboring deserters. Now listen to me: be patient, be quiet, and we will soon be back to our previous and beneficial partnership.”

“We hear your words,” said the old man.

“Do more than hear them, Elders, unless you want to test the strength of the Anandynars’ respect for your borders.”

Silence fell on the room for a long moment.

“Don’t make enemies of Arunkel, Teva.”

The Arunkin waited a time for the Elders or Mara and Jolon to answer, but they were silent. Finally he nodded slowly and left, taking his men and brown horses with him.

“Bury the mine?” asked the woman in blue of the other two.

“He is right,” said the old man. “If you can bury it with a shovel, you can uncover it with one.”

“Do we change direction and veer away from these associates, despite their threats?” asked the woman in blue.

The woman in orange nodded her head. “Because of their threats. I say yes.”

“Let us circle this question again,” said the man, who then addressed Jolon and Mara. “You have traveled among the Arunkin. What do you advise?”

A humorless snort. “Do not trust them.”

“That we see.” His eyes searched those of Mara and Jolon. “If you stood where we stand, what would you do now?”

“Can we not simply wait,” Mara asked, “As he advises? Are we so weak we cannot take advice from someone who insults us even when it may be the best path? Can we not let him quiet the arrows that point to us, and, at least for now, do nothing?”

Jolon said, “But how long do we ride in their shadow?”

“A time, perhaps,” said the elder in blue.

“Is there wisdom in this?” the old man asked each of the women.

“I say we have had enough,” answered the woman in orange. “It is time to come out from the shadow.”

“I say we can wait a time longer,” replied the one in blue. “Mara’s words have sense in them.”

The man tilted his head at them both.

“We will wait, then,” answered the woman in orange. “But we must consider and prepare for the worst possible outcomes.”

A long moment’s silence. Jolon and Mara watched the elders, all of whom seemed deep in thought.

“Is Gallelon still living in Mirsda?” asked the old man.

“You speak of the mage, Elder?” asked Jolon.

“If this goes very badly,” said the woman in orange, “we may need to ask his help.”

“We will go and see if he is still there,” answered Mara.