The Witchwood Crown

  45

  A Nighttime Sun

  Zhakar sucked the rest of the meat off the haunch, then threw the rabbit bones into the fire where they popped and sizzled as the marrow boiled. Before they got too hot, he plucked them out with calloused fingers and snapped the bones in half, then sucked out the contents. He wiped his forearm against his mouth, leaving a trail of grease through his beard, and made a noise of satisfaction.

  “Are you finished with your meal, Stepfather? Or do I interrupt you?”

  Zhakar flinched and nearly fell off the bottom step of his new wagon. He had not noticed the tall shadow looming only a short distance away. “By the Piercer, how long have you been standing there? And where have you been? I thought you had left for good, all these days missing.”

  “Today I have been to a wedding,” his stepson said. “I did not see you there.”

  “Ah! May the gods curse it, is today the day? Drojan’s wedding? No one sent for me.” Zhakar was clearly ill at ease, and still did not look up to meet the younger man’s eye. “Ah, hell’s stripes on them all. How was the food? Was the food good?”

  “I left before the feast.”

  Something in the younger man’s tone finally made Zhakar look up. “Well, don’t expect to share any food of mine, because it’s all gone.” His eyes narrowed. “What have you been doing? Your clothes are covered in dirt. And is that blood?”

  “It could be. I was in a fight.” Unver came forward into the full light of the fire. The sun had all but sunk in the west and the sky was striped with purple and red. “But I do not come here for food, Stepfather. I come here for answers.”

  The older man half-rose, putting one hand behind him for balance. “Answers? What do you mean? How dare you strut in after all those days missing and talk to me this way?”

  A brief flash of firelight on metal, then the point of Unver’s long knife was against his neck, pushing until Zhakar gasped in pain and terror. “Were you going to go inside your nice new wagon and lock the door against me? Do you really think that would stop me?”

  “What are you doing? Have you gone mad? I am your father!”

  “No, you are my stepfather, and a poor one at that. Where did this wagon come from, old man? I think Odrig sold it to you. Am I right?”

  “Yes! Yes! Why do you act this way? He sold it to me for some horses!”

  “But those horses were mine, old man.”

  “They were in my paddock! That makes them mine!” Zhakar let out a sudden screech as the knife poked deeper into the wattle of flesh beneath his beard. “What do you want?”

  “I told you. Answers.” Unver sank down onto the steps. “Where do I come from?”

  “What nonsense is this? I told you!”

  “You told me I came from a clan far away across the grasslands.”

  “You did!”

  “Tell me their name!”

  The old man gasped in pain as the blade prodded him. “I do not remember! No, wait! It was one of the clans from the High Thrithings. They sent you to us.”

  “You told me my father and mother were both dead. Is that true?”

  “Of course—!”

  “Think and answer carefully, man. It may be your final act.”

  The deadness in Unver’s words seemed to frighten the old man more than the blade. Zhakar’s staring eyes showed a great deal of white. “Perhaps . . . perhaps I misunderstood—it was such a long time ago!” He could not bear to look at Unver’s face. “Your mother might have been . . . might have been alive. Yes, perhaps that was how it went. But your stepmother was so pleased to have you. Yes, that’s it, I remember now, we told you your mother was dead. It was the thane’s orders!”

  “Thane Hurvalt would not have ordered such a thing. He was a good man before his wits were taken.”

  “It is the truth, I swear it, Sanver!”

  “Do not call me that name!” He said it with such violence that the old man broke free and threw himself off the wagon steps and onto his knees. “That was the name my stepmother gave me, not you, Zhakar. After she died, you never spoke it once. You called me ‘Unver’ just like all the others—Nobody.”

  “Oh, by the spirits, what do you want? What do you want from me?”

  “I want as much truth as you know, old man. How did I come to the Crane Clan? Tell me all you know or I will slit you and bleed you like an old sheep.”

  “Do not hurt me. If you do not care for me, think of the others in the clan. If you spill my blood, they will shun you!”

  Unver laughed. It was sudden and loud, ragged as an uncleaned wound. “Will they? Do you know what I have done today, old man—stupid, selfish, lying old man? I have gone to a wedding, and I have killed the bridegroom. This here is his blood—at least so I believe.” He plucked at his tattered, stained shirt.

  “You killed Drojan?” The old man looked up from his knees, his terror even greater. “By all the gods, what have you done? Odrig will have your head!”

  “I think not.” Again, that terrible laugh, softer now but no less raw. “You see, I killed Odrig, too. I turned the wedding into a funeral. And I buried the bride as well—but her death was none of mine.”

  Zhakar began to weep. It was clear he believed every word. “Oh, Gods, what will we do? What will I do? You madman, you have destroyed us!”

  “There is no us, not since my stepmother died. You made that clear to me time and again, when you made me beg to be fed, when you gave me all the work you did not wish to do yourself, when you mocked me with the name the others had put on me—‘Nobody’. Now, if you do not wish to suffer a slower and more painful death than Thane Odrig, you’ll tell me everything you know about my true clan. And stop your blubbering or I will cut off your lips and you will tell me your secrets with a bloody mouth.”

  It took a long time because the old man could not stop crying and lamenting his unfair fate, but at last Unver had the story from him, word by ugly, weeping word.

  When he had finally finished, the old man lay on his back like a whipped dog. There were thin cuts on his cheeks and his hands, but no mortal wounds. “I have told you all I know,” he sobbed. “Please, son, do not kill me. Take Deofol and go. See, I did not sell him! I knew that if you returned, you would want him. He is in the paddock.”

  The younger man frowned. “For the last time, do not call me son. I am no son of yours.” He snorted and stood up. “Kill you? I have killed two men today. Why should I waste my blade on a sniveling creature like you? For my stepmother’s sake, I will let you live, so that you may remember your shame. I hope it burns you, old man.”

  “Oh, may the Sky Piercer bless you!” the old man said, and would have said more, but he was silenced by a kick in the ribs.

  “But before I go, I wish to see your fine new wagon that you bought with my hard work—with my horses, that would have been Kulva’s bride price.” He bent and took a burning brand from the fire, then walked the length of the wagon, examining the cunning fittings of leather and metal and painted wood. Then he went up the steps and stepped inside.

  “Seven horses this cost you?” he called. “Truly?”

  Zhakar was on his hands and knees now, trying to get to his feet, puffing and gasping from the ache in his chest. “It is a fine wagon!” he bawled. “Odrig gave me an excellent price!”

  Unver appeared in the doorway. “I think he cheated you.” He came down the steps and dropped the brand back into the firepit.

  “Cheated?” The old man was still struggling, but at last he managed to rise. Thin streams of blood had run down his cheeks and into his beard, giving him the look of a painted clan shaman. “It is a fine wagon! Odrig’s second best! How can you say I was cheated? What is wrong with it?”

  “For one thing,” Unver said with a hard smile, “someone seems to have set it on fire.”

  As Unver walked away toward the
paddock the old man screeched helplessly at the evening sky, calling for help. Flames were just beginning to lick at the windows and their carefully painted trim.

  By the time Unver saddled his horse and rode away, the wagon had become a ball of bright fire, visible from a great distance away, like a nighttime sun.

  She went out the southern door of the Sancellan Mahistrevis. It was the least used, but guarded as closely as all the others. Jesa nodded politely as the guards called to her, but she did not find their attention flattering, only confusing. Did they not know who she was? Did they think that the Duchess’s own nurse had time for flirting with soldiers, even if she wanted to? She was not even dressed to please, her hair pulled tight and wrapped in a head-scarf, her dress covered with an old cloak.

  Most men are fools, she thought.

  Time was pressing, so she made her way quickly through the farmer’s quarter of the old city to the spice market, and bought cinnamon, nutmeg, and Harcha pepper, paying with the silver coin her mistress had given her. As she went with her bag from merchant to merchant, Jesa kept a close watch for anyone following her but saw nothing out of the ordinary. The market was full of the usual morning buyers, many of them servants of great houses like herself—although none from any greater house, she thought with pride, since there was no house in Nabban above the Sancellan Mahistrevis, except perhaps the Sancellan Aedonitis, the palace of His Sacredness, the Lector.

  When she felt confident that she was not being watched, she left the market and walked quickly down Harbor Way toward the docks, through the wide commons and into the Avenue of the Saints as most called it, since the great entrance arch bore statues of several important religious figures. She only knew Saint Pelippa, the one who had given the dying Usires a drink of water from her bowl, and although the saints of Nabban were not hers, Jesa respected Pelippa as a woman who, for once, had been given praise for doing a woman’s thankless job.

  The Avenue of the Saints was a wide, winding road that led up from the quarter, curving around Estrenine Hill until it reached the large residences at the top, mostly owned by foreigners, rich merchants and rich nobles who liked to keep a place in the city—the greatest city in all the world, as Duke Saluceris liked to say. Jesa did not doubt it was true, at least in terms of size. Everywhere she went the roads were crowded, not just with folk going about their business, although there were plenty of those, but with others who never seemed to leave the streets at all; hawkers, layabouts, and even women who Jesa felt rather certain were the ones Canthia had told her about, those who had fallen so far from God (as the Duchess explained) that they had to sell their samuli, as Jesa’s people named them—their “delicate flowers”—for money.

  And although today everything seemed ordinary enough, even in this wealthy neighborhood she saw signs of the troubles that had beset the city lately, the riots in which she herself had nearly died. Crude pictures of wide-winged birds and the motto, “SECUNDIS PRIMIS EDIS”—“the second shall be the first”—had been painted on the walls of several buildings, symbols of the Stormbirds, the men who supported the duke’s enemies, Dallo Ingadaris and the duke’s own brother, Drusis. At the poorer end of the street, near the public market, she could even see the ruins of several houses that had been set afire. She shivered as she passed one, the blackened spaces of its windows like ghostly eyes.

  When she reached the middle of the hill she looked back once more to make sure she was not being followed, then turned and walked quickly through the gate and into the ill-tended courtyard of a tall house. At the back of the courtyard she knocked on a heavy wooden door. A servant opened the slot and asked her business. Jesa whispered Duchess Canthia’s name and was quickly admitted.

  If the outside of the house had been disappointing for the dwelling of a man as rich as Viscount Matreu, the inside was not. Candles burned everywhere, and tapestries of many colors hung on the walls, some stitched with bright golden wire, but she had little time to admire them as she passed.

  The servant silently led her upstairs to an antechamber furnished with thick, low couches and equally low tables and lit by several oil lamps. This room also was too thickly draped with fine tapestries to examine them all, but one in particular caught her attention. After the servant left, she walked closer to examine it.

  Jesa had never seen anything quite like it. The design was of a male human figure wearing a crown, but the figure had the tail of a whalefish (or so she assumed, having seen such things only in pictures). The crowned man’s hands were spread wide over what looked like mountains, but much of his vast body seemed to be floating in the ocean, with tiny ships surrounding him on all sides. Surely this must be a picture of Usires the Aedon, Jesa thought, the great god of Nabban, although she had never seen him portrayed in such a way. The strangest thing about the hanging, though, was the material itself. It was not stitchery that made the picture, but rather tiny little shining plates glued one beside another, like the beautiful mosaics on some of the floors of the Sancellan Mahistrevis. None of the shiny bits was much larger than baby Serasina’s fingernails; as Jesa moved they caught the light and seemed to flicker and move, as if the crowned man with the tail was truly alive and watching her. This made her fearful, so she made the sign of the Tree, although it still felt strange and false to do it. Still, in a foreign land there were foreign gods and demons that needed to be appeased, and Jesa was a practical young woman.

  “I see you are admiring the picture,” a voice said behind her.

  Jesa was as startled as if she had been caught stealing. She turned to see Viscount Matreu standing in the doorway. He wore a long housecoat, with what she thought might be the bottom of a nightdress showing above his hose and leather slippers.

  “I beg your pardon, my lord!” she said.

  “Why? Do you not like it?” He moved forward, smiling.

  “Oh, no. I think it is very good done. No, done very good.” She spread her hands helplessly, thwarted by words. “Beautiful.”

  “Yes, it is, I think. It was made by a great artist, one of the last on all of Spenit Island who practices the skill. Do you see the small pieces? Those are fish scales. We have many, many colors of fish in our waters.” He moved up beside her and examined the strange image. “Do you know who is pictured there? That is the great Lord Nuanni, the old god of the sea. The islands bowed to Usires long ago, but my people still have a great affection for him. They call him “Ocean Father,” and still sacrifice to him before beginning a long voyage.” He saw her look and laughed. “Fear not! The sacrifice is not a person. Only a bit of fruit or some pretty polished stones.” He kept his eyes on her face. “Do I not know you? What is your name?”

  “Jesa, my lord. I am the nurse to the Duchess Canthia. To her child.”

  “Of course! You were in the carriage in St. Lavennin’s Square the other day. That was a terrible thing. I am glad I was able to bring the duchess out safely with her child. And you, too, of course.”

  “Thank you, my lord. We owe you very much.”

  “I could have done nothing else. But, as we speak of your mistress, I believe you have brought something for me?”

  “Oh!” Jesa had been so taken by being once again in the presence of this handsome, dark man—despite his size, he was so much like the men of her own tribe, at least to look at—that she had nearly forgotten. She hoped her shame did not show on her face. “Yes, my lord. Yes, of course!” She reached into the bosom of her dress and pulled it out, embarrassed to hand it to him with the warmth of her body still on the roll of parchment. “My mistress sends this to you and asks you for the kindness of a reply.”

  He smiled as he took it, as an adult to a charming child. “Does she want my reply now?”

  “Yes, please, my lord. If you may please and do so.”

  “Very well. You must give me a little time, then.” He gestured to one of the low couches. “Please, sit, while I attend to your mistress??
?s letter.”

  Jesa sat, and did her best to look as though she did this sort of thing every day, entering the house of a wealthy nobleman without a chaperone, bearing messages from the duchess of all Nabban, but in truth she was flustered and more than a little frightened. She had no idea what the note said—she would no more have tried to read it than she would have intentionally harmed little Serasina—but since she did not know what it contained, she had no idea how the viscount would react. What if what the duchess had written made him angry? What if he beat her, or forbade her to leave?

  Courage, woman, she told herself. Remember the Green Honeybird. Your mistress the duchess honored you with this important task. Be a brave soldier for her!

  She took a deep breath and forced herself to get up and move around. The room was full of odd, interesting objects, but suddenly she was afraid to be so far from the Sancellan Mahistrevis and all that was familiar. Strange, when she was already so far from her true home!

  Jesa was staring at a scowling wooden mask when the viscount said, “A fierce fellow, eh? That is the Mountain Demon. In the high hills of Spenit they still dance the story of how he stole the maiden, the chief’s daughter, and how Brave Wing defeated him and brought her back to her people.”

  “It reminds me of something back home,” Jesa said, then had to repeat herself because she had spoken too softly. “They wear masks like this for the Homecoming Boats Festival in the Wran.”

  “Ah, is that where you are from? I wondered. You almost look like the hill people on my island.” He looked up from his writing desk and smiled. “Have you ever been to Spenit?”

  “No, my lord. I have come to Kwanitupul only, before I came to Nabban.”

  “Then this must all be very strange to you. Even growing up in the Honsa Spenitis, I found Nabban disturbing on my first visit. So loud! So many people!”

  “Yes, Lord. Very loud people.”

  “Very loud people indeed. I hope you are never subjected to a meeting of the Dominiate. They screech at each other like the birds they wear.”