A Brightness Long Ago, page 10
The healer’s hands were quick, steady, sure. Assured was a better word. She had long fingers, Adria saw.
“How long have you been doing this?” she asked. They were alone in an empty house, some hours yet to sunrise.
“A while,” the other replied, removing the blood-soaked wrappings, setting them aside. Adria looked down but couldn’t see much.
“Where did you start?”
“My work? At home, a little.”
“Where is home.”
“North.”
Adria laughed. “You don’t like talking about yourself, do you?”
“No,” said the other, though she looked up, and smiled briefly. She was small, neat, her hair was long, mostly a light brown, some white showing already.
Adria leaned back and, as the healer continued to deal with her wound, high up on her thigh, found herself unexpectedly slipping towards feelings that had not been present for some time.
She felt herself flushing, hoped the other woman wouldn’t notice. But the sensations, or the aspiring towards sensation, did not go away. She’d been touched there before. Not often, but a Ripoli daughter did have access to assistance in this regard from the women of her chambers. Better than a man slipping into a room, into her, and the risk of a child. It was known and accepted. She hadn’t done it often, but . . .
After a few moments of trying to remember the last time anyone had touched her, aware of a quickened heartbeat, Adria cleared her throat and said, “Would it be a breach of your duties as a healer if you were to ease me in other ways?”
The hands slowed for a beat, then continued as before. Adria’s body treated as a problem to be addressed. But the healer said nothing.
Until she was done. She straightened the bed coverings over Adria, checked her pulse at her wrist, then looked levelly at her.
“I will make the evening drink for you now. But listen, first. If you had said that you desired me, that you wondered if I desired you, we might have had a different conversation. But not even a Ripoli can use me that way. Nor, if you truly are trying to not live such a life, doing what you seem to be doing, should you speak so to any woman—or man. Expecting service, claiming the right to it? I think you mean to live a different existence, my lady, but I might be wrong.”
She left, with the bloodstained bandages.
Adria felt as if she had been stabbed again. Her cheeks were hot. She squeezed her eyes shut.
The healer came back with the drink a little later. Adria thanked her for it. Neither of them said anything else. She slept not long after—that was the point of the infusion, after all.
She fell asleep ashamed and woke the same way.
* * *
• • •
JELENA LAY AWAKE for what remained of the night, tangled as in a thicket by anger and stirred desire—and an unexpected compassion. Eventually she saw the sky begin to brighten through cracks in the shutters. The other woman was younger than she was, but had already done something Jelena would never have dreamed of doing, involving risks on a terrifying scale. And killing! But it seemed she remained what she’d been born to be, a daughter of Macera’s lord, raised in the grandest city-state palace in Batiara.
Growing up in such a fashion, Jelena thought, took so much out of a person—if you wanted to change your life—it demanded so much.
* * *
The three men killed outside the healer’s house that night, by order of Folco Cino d’Acorsi, were also young—because he had stipulated unmarried and no children. They were carried a distance south by their fellow soldiers, then buried towards sunrise when the light came back.
They each had a story that had taken them to that farmyard, but none that went from it, except to graves in strange ground.
PART TWO
CHAPTER IV
I haven’t always found that it is our intentions, the decisions we make, that shape and guide our lives. The opposite, just as often, it seems to me. Impulse creates our stories, or chance, the entirely unforeseen. And what we remember of our own past can be unpredictable. I didn’t learn this at school in Avegna, but I think Guarino would have agreed.
Beyond that, we are often borne where the winds of our time carry us. We might sail where we like in a ship—until a storm overtakes us, or pirates, boarding at sunrise. Calm waters and easy winds allow an illusion of mastery, control. But it is only ever that. The devout say we must trust in Jad. I have come to believe life is easier for them. Reversals are more easily dealt with when there is faith.
I have seen too much by now to be truly devout any more, though I still fear judgment for that sliding towards heresy, especially when I’m awake at night, and I often am. It is an uneasy world one walks through when there is no firm belief in what will come after, or that what happens to us as we live through our days is affected by the correctness of our faith.
I don’t talk about this, of course.
* * *
• • •
I WATCHED ADRIA RIPOLI disappear into the night, supported now by another man. I was struggling for poise, or clarity at least. Neither came to me. I remember feeling an impulse to follow them, follow her: she had asked if I wanted to come. I could do that. There were far worse men to have as a leader than Folco d’Acorsi, and he’d be in my debt for saving his niece, who had killed for him that night.
It still shook me, that he’d used her in that way and that she had chosen such a task. Task? Weak word, I told myself: that a woman had elected to enter the palace of Mylasia and murder the count, taking that on her soul.
It was possible that the wealthy and powerful were simply not for people like me to understand. I didn’t believe that, however. Not after years at a school among the children of power. I did think I understood them, or that I could. But the Ripoli of Macera were one of the wealthiest families of all. That had to mean something. Arimanno, this woman’s father, had bought himself a duke’s title for a rumoured sum so large it was deemed impossible by many.
I heard their horses beyond where I could see. I could still catch up to them. She had invited me. We had moved together in the dark and I had heard her laughter, elicited it, realized her courage.
And I didn’t go.
I let her ride away. Why and how do we make choices at such times? Fear, caution, honour? I will say the heart of it was honour for me that night, though there will have been other things at work. But it seemed to me, bone deep as the poets say, that I owed it to Morani di Rosso to at least try to help him avert a fate that seemed inevitable—because of what Adria Ripoli had just done.
As to why a man taught philosophy would be thinking of averting the inevitable, I have no good answer. We don’t always have answers when the road of our life forks and we have to choose a path, at speed, in the night.
There were decisions to make that might save or end my own life first. Did I re-enter the palace, bolt the door, go back up that same stairway? Or stay out here and go around, back towards the city gate, hoping it was open, that men were out searching for the assassin who had—clearly!—escaped down a rope to the square and somehow eluded the guards there?
Those guards, I thought again, under stars in a cold wind, would very likely die, depending on what followed in the palace now.
That thought—what followed in the palace—was what took me back inside. I’d left my lamp on the lowest step, and by Jad’s mercy in small things, it still held its flame.
I started back up. There was nothing I could do about the blood on the stairs—I did wonder how well she could ride, how far, but I had made a choice and wouldn’t be there to see. There would certainly be blood on my own leggings, and I’d be stepping through it as I went up. I’d need an answer for that when I stepped out, and I didn’t have one.
I left the hidden stairway on the first floor of the palace. The third was where I’d entered, the second where I’d found Adria. The first floor was where we servants and guards and minor officials had our living quarters. If the god was kind, they’d all be roused by now in tumult and fear. Searching in the palace or outside, or gathered gawping in the antechamber by the dead count’s rooms.
I listened for silence, prayed for it, admitted myself unworthy of Jad’s help, then lifted the latch. Listened again, drew breath and opened the door.
Had there been guards, had there been anyone in that room when I stepped out, bloodied and furtive, my life would have ended in Mylasia, tortured and flayed. There is no doubt of this.
I’m alive, telling my story, my part of a larger story. There was no one there.
I closed the panel and went quickly through that large room, a refectory, and turned left and left to my own bedchamber. I shared it with two others—and neither was inside. I closed the door and checked my hose. Blood on the right leg, some on my boots. But I wasn’t trailing blood where I walked, which was a gift of grace. I changed to my other leggings as quickly as I could, boots off to do it then back on, fearing all the while that the door would open, hard questions asked—and dying.
I stood up, trying to be calm, not doing well at it, then reminded myself that Adria Ripoli had gone into the chamber of the Beast alone, knowing he killed people there. It helped. It did.
I went out and up the stairs. I saw people now, hurrying up or down. We all eyed each other nervously. One man was crying, sitting on a step, no shoes. I didn’t know him.
These were the servants’ stairs I’d taken with Morani’s wine. I made a show of speed, as if summoned. Two steps at a time, I went back to the third floor—because that was where Morani would be, if he hadn’t been taken away already, or killed already.
And right then my life forked again on an autumn night.
There were twenty or thirty men in the antechamber, a tumult of voices, gesturing as we Batiarans are said by others to always be doing. (I don’t do that myself, or I don’t think I do.) I didn’t see Morani, so I drew a breath and began pushing towards the door, still acting as if I’d been called there.
Half a dozen inside, including Morani. He was alive.
Someone was speaking loudly. The dead man was still on the carpeted floor. Uberto’s body had been covered with another carpet, not especially well. I bent and straightened the covering, to hide his face better. His eyes still gaped. No one had closed them. I had a thought, and made a point of stepping in the blood pooled beside him. An explanation for blood on my boots, if I needed it.
When I looked, I realized that the speaker, a man I didn’t know, was asserting control here—or trying to. He was big, broad-shouldered, well dressed.
“I want everyone in the palace searching! Here, below, all through the city! I want that woman found!” He was nearly shouting.
I want, I thought. Who was this?
“We are all aware of that need, Signore Valeri.” This was Uberto’s chancellor replying, a man I didn’t yet know well. He had clearly dressed in haste. His thin hair was disordered; he wore no hat. “It is good of you to offer to assist the court. I believe matters will go more smoothly if you leave it to the palace guard and officials.”
“Leave it to you? You blundered into this murderous calamity! No honourable man of Mylasia will leave anything to you now!”
I blinked in surprise. I probably wasn’t the only one.
“Indeed? Your concern is for the count and his family, signore?”
The chancellor would be a man deeply versed in nuance and diplomacy, to have survived in his office. He’d been here for years.
The man named Valeri glared at him. He was red-faced, perhaps fifty years old. This time he did shout. “How dare you! What else would be my concern?”
“Ah. Well. As to that, there are,” said the chancellor gravely, “many things a man might be thinking about tonight. You should know I have already sent a guard to the holy retreat where the countess is. And the count’s child is guarded, safely with us.”
“What? Who told you to do that?” Valeri snapped.
“Signore Valeri,” said Morani, speaking for the first time, “with the greatest respect, why would officials of the palace have an obligation to tell a merchant what they are doing, or wait for his direction? As the chancellor has just said, it would be very much better if you were to return home. We are all frightened and angry tonight. Morning will show us more clearly how to proceed.”
There was a silence. I looked from Morani to the chancellor—his name was Novarro—and then back at the big-shouldered merchant. It seemed obvious, even to someone young as I was that night, that Valeri had come here hoping to find chaos and weakness to exploit with assertiveness.
He levelled a finger at Morani. Something in the way he did it made me step nearer. No one had said anything about my being in the room yet; I think only Morani had noted me. Servants and minor officials come and go in a palace. They are like furniture, hardly seen. Something occurred to me and I looked around. The three other men in the room were also strangers to me, and they were dressed in livery. They had come with the merchant. And they were armed.
The man named Valeri said, “You dare even speak? You are the one whose treachery lies at the heart of this!” He wheeled back to the chancellor. “How is this man still alive?”
Chancellor Novarro said, softly, “Signore, that is a most terrible accusation. I say again, you would be better to—”
Valeri drew a sword. In the palace, in the count’s room.
“No!” he cried. “It is not better for Mylasia to let foul conspiracy flourish! The people need leadership, not evil men in this palace killing their lord!”
He levelled his blade at Morani, who did not flinch. I remember that.
“Signore!” said the chancellor again. But he didn’t move.
I did. Forks in the roads of our lives. Things done, without thought or conscious decision. A moment claiming us—and the rest of our days.
Valeri took a fighter’s step towards Morani, sword extended. I took two towards him, very fast. I was young and quick, I had my knife out as I moved. And I stabbed him twice from behind, once in the lower back and then through the heart.
“You do not draw a blade in this room!” I shouted. “No one does!”
Valeri fell. He was dead, in fact, as he did. His eldest son was senior in his family from that instant, even if he couldn’t know it yet. Various aspects of the future of Mylasia and other places flowed into and out of that moment, from what I did. The forks in our path are not only for ourselves.
“Guards!” the chancellor shouted. “To me!”
The three men who had come with Valeri, who had not reacted quickly at all, now began to do so. They made to draw their swords. One did get his blade out—then sheathed it as five guards burst into the chamber.
“Gentlemen,” said the chancellor to Valeri’s three men, “you will lay your swords down, please.”
They didn’t hesitate. Their employer appeared to be dead, and they were surrounded by palace guards. Swords were laid down.
But a second man had now been killed here. By me.
I looked at the chancellor. “My lord, tell me I did right! He was going to kill Signore di Rosso. He drew his weapon on him! In this room! Who was he to give orders here?”
I didn’t have to work to simulate panic and a plea. I had just killed my first man. The same night Adria did, though I didn’t have that thought until later.
“Who, indeed,” said the chancellor of Mylasia. “This,” he added quietly, “is a terrible night.”
Morani was looking at me. I couldn’t read his expression.
Chancellor Novarro’s brow knit. Then he said, “Guards, kill these three men, please. I begin to see whose conspiracy this was, who sent a woman to kill the count.”
My jaw dropped.
“My lord chancellor—” Morani began.
But the palace guards of Uberto of Mylasia were well trained and not shy about killing. The three men of the merchant were easily dispatched. One, quicker than the others, turned and tried to get out the open window to the rope and down. He didn’t make it. He died with his body half in and half out of the window. He stayed like that until morning, when he was taken down to the square and cut into pieces with the others.
“We do not yet have the woman,” the chancellor said. His colour had risen, I saw, but he sounded more confident now. I understood something: someone needed to be blamed for tonight. The city would be in chaos, and chaos spawned violence.
Chancellor Novarro appeared to have made his decision. It seemed that the merchant, Valeri, had rolled dice boldly, and lost. If they didn’t find the woman—and I was fairly certain that, unless she couldn’t ride, they would not—there would now be a story to tell from the palace: of a conspiracy in the city, and its treacherous leader slain.
Valeri’s family, I thought, would all be killed, down to the children. Their houses, land outside the walls, ships if they had any, all these would be destroyed or smoothly claimed by someone who paid bribes in the right places.
The chancellor, I had been told, was a wealthy man, bribes had been welcome. Also, the heir of Count Uberto was nine years of age. He’d need a steward to guide him, and Mylasia, for years.
I looked at Morani. He was staring at Novarro. He said nothing. This development might, I realized, save his life. Or not.
* * *
• • •
THE WORLD KNOWS what happened in Mylasia in the days that followed.
Or, Batiara does. Because we are important—our city-states are influential, wealthy, the High Patriarch is here, in Rhodias—we tend to assume that what happens among us must matter everywhere.
