Troubled Waters (2 page)

“Would you like me to send Miela over to help you?” Doman asked. “You know she is a reasonably organized woman.”

It was a small joke, but Zoe found herself incapable of smiling. Doman’s wife was magnificently capable. She had raised ten children and served as a great maternal presence to everyone in the village, even Zoe’s father, who had been the last man in the world in need of mothering.

“Thank you, no,” Zoe said, speaking with an effort. “If I have something to occupy my hands, perhaps my heart won’t hurt quite so much.”

“You must come and spend the night with us, of course,” he said.

Zoe shook her head. “No. Thank you, but no.”

“Then Miela will come here to sleep.”

She shook her head again, but it was reflex. She knew if Doman decided she should not be alone tonight, one way or the other, she would not be alone. Doman was all
hunti
, all wood, stubborn and immovable. It did not matter how much you leaned against Doman, how many burdens you piled on him; he would not change and he would not break.

The rain had started to fall with a bleak and heavy steadiness; it was the kind of rain that could go on for days. Even less light spilled in through the small, high windows of frosted glass, so Zoe stepped over a pile of soiled clothing to light a lamp. Instantly the clutter of the room was even more visible.

She made an indeterminate gesture to indicate the whole room. “My father wanted you to pick something to remember him by,” she said. “Anything in the entire house.”

It was a common enough tradition, a way for the living to remember the dead. Doman must have realized that he had been given the supreme honor of being the first to choose among Navarr’s possessions, for he nodded once, suitably solemn. He was a tall man, thin and sinewy, with brown-bark skin and thick gray hair, and the colorful overrobe he had worn to the funeral made him look like some kind of oracle.

“I am happy to bring a piece of Navarr Ardelay into my own home,” Doman said. “But I wouldn’t want to take anything that you held especially dear.”

“The things I want to keep I have already moved into my room,” she said. “Take what you like.”

Doman glanced at the carved desk—a huge, ungainly piece of furniture, bought five years ago from a peddler selling a strange assortment of quality merchandise from the back of his wagon. Next he studied the bronze fountain, a miniature replica of the one that played in the great hall of the royal palace. But then he stepped toward the back wall and pointed at the three pieces hanging over the rumpled bed.

“I would take the random blessings, if you could stand the loss,” he said.

For the first time in four days, Zoe almost smiled. “Doman,” she said. “Your trait is wood. And you covet the blessings of a man of fire?”

He indicated the first item hanging on the wall. It was a square of hammered copper, perhaps five by five inches, with the symbol for courage embossed in it from behind. He had no trouble summoning a smile. “That is a blessing that should fall on a
hunti
man,” he said.

“True enough,” she said.

“And endurance is a blessing for a
torz
woman, and Miela is certainly that,” Doman added.

The symbol for endurance was the most beautiful of the three blessings, embroidered in shades of blue on a crisp white background and contained in a frame of carved wood. “Yes, I know Miela has always liked that piece,” Zoe said.

Doman gestured at the third blessing, a stylized symbol vividly painted onto a long narrow bolt of stretched canvas. “And who could not use triumph in his life?” he asked. “I shall be the envy of everyone in the village.”

Triumph was the rarest of the extraordinary blessings—everyone knew that—and Navarr had always considered it exquisitely ironic that it had been one of the gifts bestowed upon him at birth. Or perhaps the irony had only become clear to him during those last ten years of his life. Certainly, when he was younger, when he lived in Chialto and had the ear of King Vernon, he had been considered one of the most successful men of his generation. Maybe different blessings exerted their power at different points in a person’s life, Zoe thought. Triumph had governed Navarr’s existence for twenty or thirty years, but it had given way to endurance at the end. Zoe supposed that there had been times during his political career when her father had displayed great courage; thus, in their way, as they always did, the three blessings had proved themselves to be true.

“I will be happy to think his blessings are now blessing you,” Zoe said formally.

Doman turned to give her a sober inspection. “Although perhaps I should leave them behind to nurture you instead,” he replied.

Zoe shook her head. “I will draw strength from my own blessings,” she said, extending her left hand and giving a slight shake to the silver bracelet that held three charms.

“Beauty, love, and power,” Doman said, for of course he had seen the blessings dangling from her wrist every day of the past ten years. “At least one has been true your whole life. Love and power will surely come.”

“Surely,” Zoe echoed, though she had never believed it. In fact, she knew the first blessing wasn’t true, either. She was tall, thin, and serious, with straight black hair, fierce black eyes, and faintly olive skin that quickly tanned dark in the early days of summer. If she had had to pick an
elay
trait that described her, she thought she would have claimed honor instead. But no one had any say in their own random blessings.

“When shall I send Miela to come help you?” Doman asked.

Zoe glanced around the room, at the piles of clothes and papers and general disarray. For a moment she could not imagine how the whole mess could be reorganized into something tidy and respectable and
bearable
. She could not imagine how to restructure the house into a place she could live in without her father.

“I don’t know,” she said, suddenly too weary to stand. “Later. An hour or two from now. I have to lie down. I have to sleep. Maybe it will all make sense when I wake up.”

Doman crossed to her side and kissed her very gently on her forehead. “Perhaps not today when you wake up,” he said. “And perhaps not tomorrow. But soon enough you will heal. It is the way of the world.”

A
s soon as Doman was gone, Zoe curled up on her mat in the kitchen, but despite her exhaustion she remained awake for a long time. Idly, she played with the charms on her bracelet, fingering them one by one. She had always thought there could hardly have been three blessings that suited her less, but she cherished them anyway. Mostly because she loved the tale of how her father had sought them out, inebriated with happiness.

He had been so excited at her birth—so the story went—that he could barely wait for her to be five hours old before he rushed out into the crowded streets of Chialto, looking for likely strangers to bestow blessings on his newborn daughter. She had come squalling into the world shortly after midnight, so it was scarcely dawn when the clock struck that fifth hour, and the only people patrolling the street at that time were late drunks, early servants, and women who sold their favors. He had excitedly begged a token from someone in each category.

The cheerful, dizzy man, who had just stepped out of a tavern, fished in his pocket and pulled out a cheap blessing coin stamped with beauty. “It’s the only kind I carry,” he confided with a smile. “Every girl deserves to be beautiful.”

The servant, a rushed and unsmiling woman of exceeding plainness, had dutifully stopped and dug through her bag and come up with a bent and dingy coin that held the glyph for love. “We can go to a temple if that’s not one you like,” she’d said, but Navarr had been delighted to think that his tiny little girl would receive so great a gift.

It was the prostitute, weary and young, who had fulfilled her role in the traditional way, accompanying Navarr to the nearest temple, where he paid the tithe for both of them to enter. They didn’t waste time sitting in one of the five pews, inhaling the incense-heavy air and meditating themselves back into a state of balance. They just stepped up to the big, heavy barrel in the middle of the chamber and plunged their hands deep into its rich bounty of coins.

The prostitute had pulled up a token first. “One for your daughter,” she said, and dropped it into Navarr’s hand.

“Power,” he had said, when he had identified the symbol by the murky light. He’d laughed. “It seems like such a heavy blessing for such a tiny creature!”

“Maybe it will suit her better when she is my age, or yours,” she’d replied. She dipped into the barrel again, not as deeply this time, and pulled up a second token. “And one for me,” she said. Her voice was wistful when she added, “Wealth. That would be nice.”

Navarr pressed a few quint-golds into her hand. Random blessings were supposed to be freely given, and most people refused payment for the service, but this girl quickly pocketed her bounty. “Did you pull a coin for yourself?” she wanted to know.

He nodded and showed her. “Change,” he said.

It was a
coru
trait. “Is your daughter born to a woman of blood, then?” she asked.

He was laughing again. “Yes, but this blessing is for me, I fear,” he said. “An infant in the house changes everything, don’t you think? I have been told that my life will never be the same.”

“I hope you come to love her,” the prostitute had said.

“I already do.”

Zoe had heard this story so often she could recite it along with her father by the time she was five years old. Her mother had never seemed quite as amused by the part where Navarr and a woman of the streets searched the city together for a temple, but that was the point of random blessings: You were not supposed to show caution or discrimination about the people you approached. You were supposed to rely on the people who had been sent to you by the unchoreographed currents of the universe. You were supposed to understand that wisdom could be imparted by anyone, no matter how unexpected, that everyone had a gift to bestow.

Zoe squirmed on her mat and turned over to try for a more comfortable position. Everyone had a gift to bestow; everyone had a lifespan to complete; the world would change whether you wished it to or not. These were among the immutable truths that she could not alter by weeping. She closed her eyes and finally managed to summon a haunted and unsatisfactory sleep.

I
t was still raining a couple of hours later when Zoe woke up. As a woman born to a
coru
mother, the trait of blood and water, Zoe had always liked rain. She loved its many moods—from gentle and romantic to wild and unrestrained—and she loved the fresh, newly washed scent it always left behind. As a practical matter, rain was a welcome visitor here in the village, refilling cisterns and replenishing underground aquifers. Zoe was not the only one who loved the rain.

She pushed herself to her feet and then stood there a moment, trying to decide what to do. Caring for her father had taken up almost every waking moment for the past quintile, especially during the final days of his illness. What would she do now that she did not need to make his food, coax him to eat, and clean away the messes his body produced? Whom would she speak to, now that that great restless mind had shut down? What purpose could she have to go on living?

Foolish thoughts. Her father would be distressed to think she considered her own existence so dependent on his. Zoe shook her head and forced herself to look around.

The kitchen was a mess. A long room with the cooking hearth tucked into the far right corner, it was so narrow that two people could barely pass each other to work. Next to the hearth were clustered all the implements used for cooking—the baking stones, the baskets and sealed crocks of ingredients, the pans and dishes. Near the far left corner of the room, Zoe had hung a gauzy purple curtain to create her own small private space. It held little more than a sleeping mat, a trunk of clothes, and a few useless but beloved treasures.

Now the mat was a tangle of bedsheets and discarded tunics Zoe had been too busy to wash. The kitchen held piles of dirty dishes and scraps of forgotten food. The floor had not been swept clean for days.

There was no purpose to Zoe’s life, not now, but at least she could put it back into some kind of order.

So for the next two hours she began the slow, methodical repair of the small house. She made a pile of all the items that needed washing; she put fresh linens on her own bed, which would be used again, and her father’s, which would not. She brought in a bucket of rainwater and scrubbed the kitchen, cleaned the dishes, wiped the floors, and even freshened up the
kierten
. She made the place habitable again, but it was hardly a home.

It was still raining at nightfall when Miela stepped in, careful not to track in mud. “I’ve cooked dinner and made up a bed for you in my daughter’s old room,” Miela said. The consummate tactician, Miela never bothered asking you to accede to her plans; she just told you what to do next. “Bring your nightclothes and come with me now.”

So Zoe stuffed a few items in a bag and obediently followed Miela out into the wet night. Only when she felt the drops on her face did she realize she had been crying all afternoon. The tears were hot on her cheeks, but the rain was cool; it did not wash away any of her grief, only gave it a different temperature against her skin.

M
iela worked with Zoe for the next two days to clean out the house. Zoe felt sometimes like a spinning doll set in motion by someone else’s hand. If Miela had not been there to animate her, Zoe thought she might not have moved at all. Grief shrouded her thoughts and muffled her mind. She felt utterly blank. She could not even summon the energy to consider how long this state would last.

Miela, by contrast, was a bundle of competent bustle. A large woman, with broad hands and a wild aureole of curly gray hair, Miela projected calm and purpose, and both were equally soothing. At the same time, Miela kept up a steady stream of conversation that helped Zoe tether her consciousness to the physical world. Miela never asked Zoe for an opinion; she simply stated her decisions.