“Why would you think that I would have any hand in his death? Tentaris had declared its war. There is always a price to be paid in battle, especially among the merchant houses.”
“He was not killed because of the trade war.”
“No?” Vellen feigned surprise that would have fooled no one. Nor was it meant to. “No, I suppose you are right.”
“My Lord.” Her eyes were wide and dark; no light seemed to touch them.
“I don’t know who, little Amalayna.” The words grated. “I would have settled for your sister, although it would have been a longer wait.” He laughed at the expression that turned her face from white to a mottled pink. “Oh yes. I cannot answer your question. Only Lord Valens has the information you seek.”
She rose then, no longer seeing him, although he stood only a few feet away. She had suspected that her father might have known of this, but to find it on his hands ...
“But at least you offer one advantage.”
She turned her eyes to him almost blindly, following the direction of his voice.
“You have proven that you are able to bear children. Every house covets that; it is not always common among the nobility.”
She said nothing, nothing at all, but the veneer of her control was weak and close to breaking. He grabbed her shoulders and drew her close.
All smile was gone from his face. “Amalayna, you will learn that I am not crossed often. You have what you wanted; do not be a fool now.” He wheeled her around and used her body to shove the door open. He released her, and she fell back, her elbows scraping the carpet. “Never come here unannounced again.”
She gathered the shreds of her dignity about her and stood shakily. Lord Vellen was a strong man. “My Lord,” she said, bowing her head so that stray strands of hair touched her cheek, “I will not.”
The words, even and sure, forced a grudging respect. She had some strength about her, certainly more than her sister had ever shown. The decision that the Greater Cabal had forced upon him had not been a poor one.
Her skirts swished by in a formal curtsy that was all that his rank demanded, and then she righted herself and walked quietly out of his rooms.
The sky was blue and clear and naked as it glared down at the empty streets. No people crossed the cobbled walk of the High City; no hollow, booted step announced the presence of the guards on their patrols. Everywhere the buildings and gates of the manored houses stood silent and closed.
Lady Amalayna walked these streets alone. She had no guards or slaves to attend her, and her fancy, heavy carriage had been sent back to House Valens empty to allay the suspicions of Lord Vellen.
Habit forced her shoulders straight. Habit kept her chin up and her feet moving in the delicate, arrogant gait of her lineage. No anger showed, and no tears fell. She was, after all, Amalayna of House Valens.
She walked like a ghost that had lingered beyond even its time. Echoes blew past her ears, carried like breeze by the memory that was shouting all of its useless warnings.
Laranth ...
She struggled to find any understanding or any resolve that could support her as she walked, but they were too hard and too solid to be contained by the ethereal being she felt she had become.
Drifting, helpless, she continued to walk the path to House Valens in the silence of screams that she could not utter.
chapter hirteen
Rennath had changed much over the centuries. What had once been a simple dirt track through farmland was now a wide, packed road through squat, low buildings that were densely concentrated even this far from the city’s center. They were rectangular for the most part, but one had a curving hall that seemed to be built into a sloping hill. That house was thatched an awful shade of green, and the doors were gaudily painted. In fact, many of the buildings here were painted; it seemed that color had seeped over the gray of the city she remembered. Rennath.
Erin walked in silence toward it. The murmur of guards, both in front and behind, was lost to the breeze and the clip of horses. Instead of torchlight, sunlight glinted off helm and corselet. The sky was bright blue, not deep and dark. She was armed, armored, and quite alone.
But she still walked free.
“Look at those spires.” She caught the words clearly although they weren’t spoken to her. Only when she heard them did she realize that she had been averting her eyes, and she looked slowly to the heights of the city to see the black spires, arrayed now with banners that were blacker and cleaner. The road curved into what must be the outer city.
The sharp crackle of paper told her that Hildy must be readying their passes. No one looked nervous; the documents, with their spidery writing and bold, red wax seals, were perfunctory. No trouble was expected here.
In fact, almost everyone looked relieved to have arrived at last. There were no more stops on the journey; from here they could return home. Hildy already planned to pick up a few more guards from her usual sources, or so she had said, to replace the ones she would leave behind here.
Erin alone felt no relief. She looked ahead, to see Darin walking closely beside Hamin. He was chattering away, but she didn’t listen carefully enough to hear what he was saying. His smile was light enough, and his tone held no fear.
Rennath.
She wondered how much of it she would recognize. She wondered how she would feel when she walked past the place of judgment in the market—if the market itself had not been moved. She wondered what those spires would mean to her now.
All she felt was a peculiar numbness. That twisted sprawl of streets and buildings, those people moving quickly or slowly among them carrying their burdens, seemed a waking dream. Perhaps they were; she had slept very little for the last few nights. Sleep and darkness had intertwined into a painful, harrowing pattern. Each night she fought anew the urge to comfort him, telling herself it was only the blood, knowing, as she kept herself steady with the thought, that it was a lie.
She had never come to this city without him.
Her chin rose a fraction of an inch, and her eyes became unwavering. She did not even see the city guards that called a halt to the caravan, and if they spoke at all, their voices did not reach her ears. She heard only his voice, saw only the home that they had shared.
“Who lives there now?” To her surprise, the voice was hers. But it was strange to her ears.
“In the palace?” someone asked.
She turned then to see Corfaire. His face looked familiar to her on two levels, and it was the deeper one that resonated. The long, thin lines of his face belonged to this city’s nobility. To Rennath. Were he attired differently, he would be part of the landscape of hostilities that had been home to her.
“Erin?” he asked. It was rare that he used her name, and the surprise of hearing it pulled her a little closer.
“I’m all right. It’s—nothing.”
An eyebrow arched askance. When she returned no answer, he turned to look at the spires as well. “In the palace proper?” He shook his head. “No one.”
“None at all?”
“The dead, maybe.”
She shivered. “But—it’s still standing.”
“Yes.” He fell into step with her as the caravan began moving forward again. “I forget that you don’t know much about these lands.”
She could have stopped him, but she smiled instead. Or at least her lips turned up at the corners. “No.”
“The grounds themselves are tended, and the walls and spires maintained by some imperial dictate that no one understands. I don’t believe even the Church does.”
“The Church?”
He nodded, and if he heard the pale tremor in her voice, he made no sign of it. “It is an estate that they covet, but they’ve made no move to touch it. Odd, isn’t it?” His eyes narrowed; her expressions changed so fluidly he could not identify them.
“Do you think that we might see it?”
“Yes, in a manner of speaking.” He watched her eyes trail down to the
feet that she moved mechanically forward. “We’ll pass it on the market route to the merchants’ quarter.”
She was silent for a few moments, wrapped in thought and distance. Then she turned to him suddenly, and her eyes were sharp and brilliant.
“Is it guarded?”
“Against whom?” The words were measured. “No one will enter it. Why do you ask?”
“Just curiosity.”
Corfaire nodded blandly and turned his attention to the road. But he shook his head slightly as he walked. The lady was a very poor liar.
Things were different in the outer city. There were very few trees remaining, and those were old and grand. Their lowest bowers topped the buildings that nature had not made, lending shade and dropping leaves as the season turned.
“Hey Erin!”
She smiled as Darin caught her arm.
“Hildy says the Church isn’t really powerful here. It’s why we don’t have to worry about the passes so much.” His face was brown and not a little dirty; his clothing was whole, but travel worn. He, too, could have been a part of this city years ago—if not for the staff that he carried so blithely. Looking at the staff, she wondered what its presence presaged; the lines had not been in the city for centuries.
Better that they had never come at all.
No. She shook her head, and her braid batted ineffectually at her shoulders.
“... and Hildy says that the best bakers in the Empire are here. We’ll meet one of them before we lodge in for the night.”
That seemed to be the last item in the litany of “Hildy says” that Darin had been practicing. He waited a few minutes and then wandered back to Tiras.
Erin wished she had had something to say, but she was glad that he was gone. Without him she could continue to look around the city, to feel the strangeness of it, and to recognize herself as an alien.
Perhaps Corfaire knew how she felt. Perhaps not, but he walked now to join her in her welcome solitude. Ignoring him had no effect; he continued to keep pace with her.
“See, Lady. We come to the old gates. Soon we will enter the old city.” He pointed, although there was no need for it; Erin could see the walls well enough.
“They aren’t guarded, but you can see what used to be the post; it’s off to the right.” His finger shifted a fraction. “You can tell the age of it.”
She wanted him to leave, but couldn’t bring herself to say so.
“See, those arches beneath the gate? Those must have taken years to build, and they stand well. The wall is solid stone. There was a curtain wall of some sort—that’s gone now.”
“Do you know the city well?” She had never asked a question that sounded less curious.
“Fairly. When I left the capital, it was to Rennath that I came.”
“Why?”
He didn’t answer for a moment, and the silence stretched between them like a wall. For once, Erin wasn’t interested in breaching it.
“Why?” he repeated, the word slow and deliberate. The tone of his voice changed; it was bitter now, and the mockery in it was turned inward.
Against her will, Erin found herself listening intently as the walls grew closer. There were some cracks in them, some spots where the stone had weathered poorly, and some where the stone, ringed by new mortar, had been replaced.
“Rennath is a place of legend to us.”
“Us?” The word was out before she could stop it, but for once Corfaire did not bristle. She noted, however, that he did not answer, either.
“If you can reach Rennath, or so the stories go, you will find the freedom you seek.” He laughed. “You’ll find safety.”
“Why?” This time the question wasn’t flat or lifeless.
“Do you really not know?”
The breath of a sigh escaped her half-open mouth. “Corfaire. Please.”
“Don’t.” The word was sharp.
So much of conversation is punctuated by silence, and each silence has its own depth, and its own private meaning, for people on either side of its divide. Silence returned to them, given a deathly life by the sound of footsteps on every side. A wisp of other people’s conversations filtered in without reaching Corfaire or Erin.
They were not friends; Erin felt they would never be so. And she could not say any of what she felt to one who was not.
The arches started their span above the head and beneath the sky. Great, rounded pockets of stone caught and carried noise, returning to it an echo and substance that an open sky could not provide. Above their heads, carved and worn, were thick, deep letters that Erin could not read. But she knew what they said.
Then she was through, and Rennath, the tight little circle of time, opened before her. The stone was cobbled and exactly as wide as she remembered. It forked immediately in three different directions—one to either side, and one that went straight as far as the eye could see. The arrogance of the city’s builder was plain, for the road took no curves or bends as it reached openly for the palace. If any army entered here, it would find its task easy.
Easy yes, but only because the city’s lord was no longer at home.
Beyond the palace the road stretched in a wide arc on either side of the grounds; it met again and traveled to the open market. Any and all who had wares to hawk there had to pass beneath the spires. This she could not see yet, but she knew it had not changed.
There—there, ahead on her left, was one of the many different guild buildings the city had boasted. It was squat, but not so ugly as the buildings outside of the wall, and she smiled at its dowdy exterior because it was familiar. She had seen the building go up over a three-year period. It had been a request of hers; she had become fond of the weavers’ guild members, and many of her slaves had been sent there, to live as free a life as the Empire allowed.
Further up on her right another building stood. It was shabby; the windows were boarded shut. She wondered who lived there now, remembering; always remembering. That was the House of the Sick in her time; funded in part by the city’s lord. By the Empire’s lord. He had never understood why it held so much import to her, but he had allowed her to remove an entire document library and refashion it to suit the needs of the injured.
There were no injured there now, or if there were, no doctors or surgeons to tend them. She looked up at the high, carved eaves and ledges to see dry twigs and old grass jutting out in several places. A small head peered down at her, and a little beak opened in a squawk. She whistled up, and the bird vanished in alarm.
Halfway between the gate and the palace, eight tall buildings lined the street, four on either side. They were new—at least, newer in construction than most of the city—and they were tall. Narrow alleys broke them into neat, short blocks of nearly faceless, painted wood. She stopped in front of one, looking at the single door that sat recessed over four sagging steps.
There were numbers on it—at least there had been; the middle two were missing.
“Lady?”
She shook her head and saw that the wagons had traveled on. Very quietly she moved in to take up the last rank. To walk in the shadows that the spires cast. They had no blood, no magic—but the warmth of the sun was suddenly cut off, and for a moment she could see the black, pale skies of Rennath’s winter. She raised her head, leaning further and further back, until she could see the ramparts that she had often stood upon while gazing out.
“Lady?”
Soft, persistent word. She knew it was Corfaire, but did not answer him. Instead, she let her eyes trail down until they lost sight of the towers for the wall.
As Corfaire had said, the gates were not guarded—at least not obviously so. But the red and black enamel of the crest that joined them glinted in the daylight. Beyond the black bars she could see the grass; it was cut, and no weeds seemed to grow there. But the flowers seemed out of season, somehow.
Who tends these now? She could see no one; the grounds were preternaturally still. No birds seemed to fly there; no squirrels made thei
r mad dashes across the open ground. It was as if nothing moved at all.
At least, not yet.
The caravan moved, and she moved with it, following the bend in the road. But the gates she saw more clearly than she did the crowds around her.
There were guards in the city that bore no crests, not even that of the Church. She had not seen them during the caravan’s march to the market, nor had they been at the market gates.
Those gates were new; Corfaire had said they were supposed to keep thieves out. There were other markets in the outer city that the poorer people could frequent; only people with house crests or house documents were allowed entry here. Slaves and nobles.
Still, the gates had not been guarded—neither when the caravan arrived to register its presence and leave an address to call upon, nor when they had left to find their rooms in the hotel of Hildy’s choice.
Guards were out in the streets now. There were many, and they didn’t appear with any regularity. But they had to be avoided, and she had come narrowly close to being discovered.
For the fifth time she checked her breast pocket. Paper rustled crisply between two layers of cloth. Good; she still had her documents. She hoped she wouldn’t need them, but she had had enough presence of mind to take them in case of emergency.
The streets were quiet. There were more lamps along them than she remembered, each shedding a diffuse light out on cobbled ground. She avoided them, calling her blood-linked light to guide her footsteps. And then she stopped; here it still felt wrong to use her power.
Even if he was gone. Perhaps because he was gone.
The hotel she had slipped out of was close to the city center. It was a grand and glorious building, but it had not always been a hotel. At least one of the families that had been in power in the Rennath that Erin remembered had long since fallen upon poor fortune.
She was not even sure that the hotel was in noble hands. But the rooms were grand and large, even if there weren’t many of them. Erin had wondered how they could afford their accommodation. Hildy had smiled.