Emerald House Rising, page 35
He offered his hand to shake, as if she were an equal—not as if to take hers to kiss, or in a condescending wave, as if he expected her to curtsy. She looked at it for a moment and then accepted it. “Partners.”
He looked down at her hand and smiled at her talisman ring. “Aunt Kestrienne gave me the stone you’re wearing in your ring at the same time she gave me my own ring. I didn’t know why at the time. She only told me that it had come from the same stone as the one used to set my ring. I didn’t even know what I was going to do with it when I brought it to your father to cut.” He covered her hand with his, and his clasp was warm and strong. “But you knew what to do. It looks lovely, Jena.”
“Thank you.” After a moment, Jena laughed and withdrew her hand. “Well, what now?”
Morgan shrugged. “I can lend you the books Aunt Kestrienne used to teach me. Arikan’s going to be my mentor, so I’ll be learning a bit with him. Other than that, I suppose we’ll simply live our lives and see how a partnership fits in. My life, at least, is going to be quite different from now on.”
Jena looked over back down the length of the gallery and spotted the Diamond in the crowd. “Did what I said help?”
“Yes, it did.”
“I’m glad. I like her. I wouldn’t have wanted you to lose her.”
“I’ll tell you a state secret.” He tugged at the corner of his mustache. “She still calls me Marzipan once in a while.”
Jena’s lips twitched. “Never in public, I hope.”
“Certainly not.” His eye came to rest on the new journeyman badge sewn to the shoulder of her dress, and he tapped it with a fingertip. “Your life is going to be changing, too, eh? Will you be going to work with a master in a different city, or staying here in Piyar?”
Jena’s smile faded. “I don’t know.” She turned away to look over the balustrade.
“Jena?” He came to lean on the railing beside her and looked at her with friendly concern. “What is it?”
“I don’t know what I’m going to do.” She sighed. “My—the man I was betrothed to, Bram, has been away, looking for me.…”
“I know. Arikan told me about him.”
“Oh.”
“Do you mean you’re not sure whether you’re still betrothed?”
Jena looked down at her fingers, fidgeting with her talisman ring. “Bram and I haven’t even talked since you and I partnered. I don’t know what he’ll think.”
“Is that what it depends on? What he thinks? What about what you think?”
She glanced up at him, her eyes prickling with tears, and angrily she brushed them away.
“What’s he like?”
Jena considered for a moment. “He’s mostly a quiet person. If he thinks something is his duty, he takes it very seriously. He’s one of the kindest persons I’ve ever known, and he’ll always tell you what he thinks is the truth, but … he’s not … not very imaginative. Or ambitious.”
“But you are.”
“I don’t know if I’m imaginative—”
“You have to have some imagination to be an adept. Not to mention a designer of jewelry.”
Jena shrugged. “But yes, I am ambitious. I don’t know if Bram can be comfortable with that. He doesn’t like magic, either.”
“Like Vianne. How interesting.” His voice sounded amused. “So, what you have to decide is, would building a life together with him be right for you both—even if you’re more the type to be the leader? Or perhaps you don’t feel comfortable with the wife being the leader, eh?”
“That sounds like what I told you,” Jena mumbled.
“Maybe you’d better listen to your own words.”
Jena didn’t say anything. She was staring at a man who had just walked into the Guildhall inner court below, a seabag slung over his shoulder. Something about him, the set of his shoulders, felt familiar—his gaze swept the hall, and the sound of the crowd on the floor above him made him glance upward. Jena straightened up in shock.
“Wait.” Morgan put a hand on her shoulder. “Before you go down to him, remember: I stayed with Vianne, true, but what’s right for your partner may not be what’s right for you. Whatever you decide, I hope …” He hesitated, and his fingers squeezed her shoulder. “I hope you’ll be happy. Good luck.”
Jena walked away from him without looking back, heading for the staircase.
Her hand felt cold on the marble railing. He saw her coming when she reached the first landing, and he dropped his seabag at his feet and pulled off his wool cap as she approached. Their eyes met, and her steps slowed and then stopped.
“I like the beard,” Jena said shyly.
His hand ran through its short, curling length. “It was terribly scratchy when it came in. But I like it, too. I’ll be keeping it, I think.”
Slowly she stepped closer and brushed her hand across his cheek, feeling the springy, soft whisker curls. He smelled of salt, and wet rope, and the open wintry air. The texture under her hand, the warmth of his breath across her wrist, made her heart constrict painfully, and she swallowed hard, almost dizzied by the heightening of her senses. Apparently he felt it, too, for he closed his eyes at her touch and, capturing her hand in his, pressed it to his lips. The calluses on his palms rasped against her skin, but his lips were warm and gentle.
After a moment, she pulled her hand away, and he opened his eyes and looked at her. Despite the new tracery of sun lines surrounding them, they were the same warm brown she remembered. He wore a small gold ring in his right ear.
“There’s a bench in the corner, underneath the gallery,” Jena said a little shakily. “Let’s sit down before I fall down.”
He smiled, and reached down to hoist his seabag over his shoulder. “Good idea.” He held out his hand to her, and they went to sit.
“How far north did you go?” she asked as he set the seabag at their feet.
“All the way to Niolantti. The first week I was on board ship, though, I didn’t think I’d make it even as far as Black Needle Point.” He laughed. “Hoisting sails and swabbing decks is a lot harder work than sewing shirts. Especially when you’re seasick.
“But I got my sea legs eventually. And I learned to love it. Love the sea, I mean.” He smiled reminiscently. “There were some nights, you know … the crew would be up on deck and the stars would come out … I never saw skies like that at night, living in the city. And the sea would be calm and smooth, like dark silk.…” He sighed. “A man can do a lot of thinking on a night like that.”
“What sorts of things did you think about?”
“About you and me, and how …” He rubbed his fingers through his short beard again. “Well, it’s hard to explain. I came to see how much I’d let events simply carry me along, instead of deciding things for myself.”
Jena nodded slowly. “We’d both been doing it, I think.”
“When I found out you were gone, I could have just waited to see what would happen, the way I’d been doing. Or I could make a choice. And I did. I decided I couldn’t just let you disappear. I had to find you. Going north after you felt like …” he hesitated for a minute, groping for words, “like the first time I’d actually taken my life into my own hands.”
Jena’s gaze dropped to her lap. “What happened when you came to Niolantti?”
“I disembarked and went into the city to try to arrange passage up the Orbo. But when I asked around about getting to Duone Keep, I found out the Duone household had left for Piyar. Lady Duone’s party had passed through the city less than a week before and taken a ship heading back along the coast the way I’d come. The news had come down the Tulio River that Lord Duone was heading overland; all the taverns were gossiping about the attack in Tenaway. So I turned around and found another ship to take me home again.”
“How did you know where I was today?”
“I went to your house first. Your father’s servants sent me here.”
“I think … I think a part of me knew you would be returning today.”
His eyes became shuttered, careful. “You can tell things like that now, can’t you?”
“Sometimes.” She swallowed again. “Bram, do you mind so much?”
He looked down at her hand in his. “I don’t know.”
“Did … did Arikan—”
“Yes, Arikan explained. A little.”
Her throat hurt. “Bram, I’m so sorry.”
He looked up at her again, as if surprised. “Sorry for what, Jena? That you know magic?” He shrugged. “It’s not something you did to hurt me. It just happened.”
She nodded, a little reassured. “Well, yes. But I’m sorry you felt you had to go chasing north after me.”
He snorted. “It didn’t make a bit of difference, though, really, did it? You managed to find your way back to your home and family anyway, without my rescuing you. Without my even finding you.”
“At least I know you cared enough to try.”
“I would have gone to the ends of the earth for you,” he said with a sudden fierceness. “I know that now. I love you, Jena.”
She flinched and took a deep breath. “You love someone who doesn’t exist anymore.”
He looked at her with his heart in his eyes, and suddenly she couldn’t bear it anymore. “I decided to fight the Guild, Bram, and I won. I’m a journeyman now. The last day we were together, when we walked by the river …” she paused, and the tears spilled over and began trickling down her face, “you said you didn’t think it … it would work out if I had my own gemcutting shop. Between us, I mean.” She gulped and paused, but he only held her hand in the same listening attitude, waiting for her to continue. “And I’m … I’m an adept—”
“A wizard,” he corrected swiftly, and she drew in a sharp breath.
“So Arikan explained that, too.”
He nodded. “Well, he told me some. He wouldn’t say who was your wizard partner. He said you should be the one to tell me that. If you wanted to.”
After a moment, she nodded. “I know how you feel about magic. But I can’t give it up.” Her fingers tightened in his. “I can’t. I won’t.”
“Jena—”
“I’m not the same person I was when we last saw each other,” she said desperately.
“Well, of course not,” he said with something like astonishment. “Jena, haven’t you been listening to what I’ve been saying? Did it never occur to you that I could change, too? That I’m not the same person anymore, either?”
Shocked, she stared at him, and then dropped her gaze, ashamed. “No, Bram. It didn’t.”
“Is that what this is all about? Do you think I won’t want you anymore, because you’re a journeyman and a wizard?”
“You have to understand what it means,” Jena persisted. “Even if we marry, I’ll always have another bond.”
Bram’s jaw tightened. “Are you his lover, then?”
“No!” she said impatiently. “He’s marrying someone else.”
“That doesn’t stop some men,” he observed wryly.
“It’s not like that.”
“But it could be like that, I think.”
“If we chose to, but we don’t. We—”
He placed a hand over hers to still her protests. “I’m not saying this to make you angry, Jena. I’m just trying to make you see that I understand. From what Arikan said, I know there’s someone else you’re going to feel close to. You’ll have things in common with him you won’t have with me. Even if you don’t intend to be his lover, the possibility will always be there. If I marry you, I’ll have to, well, learn to live around that.” He gave an impatient exclamation at the look of astonishment on her face. “Jena, don’t you see? Arikan explained this all to me months ago. But I still left the city to go after you.”
She felt hope stir. A sudden burst of laughter from the crowd in the gallery above them made her remember suddenly where she was, and her shoulders slumped again. “There’s also the gemcutting,” she said doggedly.
“Yes, I see.” Bram hesitated, and then touched the new journeyman badge at her shoulder, just as Morgan had.
“I want to be a master, Bram. I told you about the Guild’s rules, that I’d have to give up my membership if we have a son. I’ve been told that I can use my magic to … to arrange things so that we have only daughters.” She braced herself at the look of shock on his face. “Or even no children at all.”
“Jena! Is that what you really want?”
She hesitated. “I want to be a gemcutter.”
“Then be a gemcutter,” he said firmly. “But children—didn’t you want them, too?”
Miserably, she nodded.
“Well, then you’ll have to make the Guild bend the rules, the way you did to become a journeyman.”
“But Bram—about having children and being a gemcutter—you said—”
“I said a lot of things. But who am I to predict what might happen if we have children, or even if we don’t? After all, I’ve never been as sure as you are about what I want to do. I may just have a shop like my father, or do the silks. On my way to Niolantti, I had some ideas about sailmaking.” He shrugged. “Last summer, I was trying to make plans based on one possibility. But there are others, too. Who knows? After two years of journeyman traveling, you may decide in the end you don’t want to build a future with me.”
“Bram—”
“It could happen, Jena. We might decide to make it happen that way.”
The words stung, but her magic told her he was right. “We have changed,” she said.
“Yes, we have. If we stay together, we have a lot to learn about each other. I don’t think that even the adept can say for certain what our life might be like. I’m not saying it will be easy. I just know that …” He touched her cheek gently. “I think I’d like to get to know this new person you’re becoming.”
“So you are telling me to fight the Guild?”
“I’m telling you to fight for what you want. Isn’t that what I’m doing, Jena? Fighting for you?”
“Because it’s worth it to you.”
“Jena …” his hand brushed a tendril of hair back from her forehead. “You’re worth it to me.”
She kissed him then, feeling her heart twist with the bittersweetness of a new kind of magic. All her possibilities were still there, as shrouded with potential danger and doubt as ever. But through all of them ran a single certainty, reflected back to her from every angle like the light of a perfectly cut jewel.
What was it—happiness? She laughed as she felt Bram’s lips brush against her eyelids, her cheek, and then he took her into his arms for another kiss that left her breathless.
Did it matter?
She pulled back and ran a finger over the edge of the gold ring in his ear. “Now, about your New Year’s gift … how would you feel about something in garnet?”
Acknowledgments
With thanks to my tutor, Joel Rosenberg,
who glared at me and told me I could do it (even providing the computer so I’d have no excuse), and so I wrote the book because I didn’t dare disobey him;
To my mentor, Pat Wrede,
who sat patiently through endless phone calls and long sessions at the Good Earth, asking me the questions I needed to answer to bring the story to life, and who even made emergency house calls when I panicked;
To my fellow journeymen, Bruce Bethke, Carolyn Ives Gilman, and Kij Johnson,
who read the manuscript in all its various stages and offered their comments and encouragement;
And to my partner, Rob Ihinger,
who offered love, meals, and baby wrangling above and beyond the call of duty.
Special thanks are also due to,
Richard Johnson and Kij Johnson for technical computer support, to Pamela Dean for insight, perspective, and guidance on grammar nitpicks, to Leslie Foreman for her helpful information on gemstones, and especially to the Anonymous Benefactor (you know who you are).
About the Author
Peg Kerr lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with her husband and two daughters. Her fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Amazing Stories, Weird Tales, and various other magazines and anthologies.
Peg Kerr, Emerald House Rising
