Twenty-Three
Floy was uneasy for the rest of the day, and even I felt oddly agitated as I went about my business of finding a meal. Because the dark was less friendly than the light, I went to sleep at sundown at the foot of the old Llenad Bridge, where the grass grew tall and thick. It wasn’t raining when Floy woke me in the morning for weaving.
I could line up the tunics in the water from smallest to largest. They seemed more netting than weave: Leode’s lacking gentians, Tem’s in even more need of saxifrage and columbine, and the rest just as bony. But that they could hold through to another season I didn’t doubt, so long as I remained exhausted. Energy poured through my fingers when I touched the shirts. The plants sapped my strength and ran with it, broken stems never growing grey or brittle, budding and flowering into new growth when the old fell away.
Floy became an excellent storyteller. She’d made it her task to recount the history of Eastern Estralony. She began with the second long night, when people ran over the waves and wove crowns of starlight. Then she brought sunlight into it, and progressed all the way to the Calabren djain’s capture and ravishing of the Twilen Simargh, which caused the earth to roll northward and give birth to the Southern Confederation, the countries of which were growing more irksome.
This morning Floy talked about Lorila’s old ports, bellicose city-states before they had been swallowed by land, and I felt as though I might be swallowed by sea as I pickled my knickers in the brackish water. I knotted my tongue into a ball, and wound a nettle stem through Arin’s collar, and all at once Floy stopped her mincing detail. I looked up and went still.
Andrei stood in front of me, horror on his face, and the water lapping at his legs.
I saw it all: saw him shadowing my steps all day, and saw him watching me go to sleep beneath the bridge. I climbed to my feet, holding the shirt.
“Is this your secret torture?” he said. His lips barely moved. “You’ve lost your mind––you’re tearing your hands to shreds. This”––he looked around him. “It’s sick’s what it is.”
Sick? “Leave,” I said.
Instead he walked up and tore the shirt from my hands. I collapsed and vomited. He backed away, still holding the thing, and it felt as though his hands were on me, in me. I heaved with every step he made, and he noticed, or else felt the wrongness, the profanity of it.
He dropped the shirt into the water.
“Marionin––” His hands shook. “Is that your Marionin?”
He was right on that count, and the other––I’d quite lost my mind. “Get out!” I fought to my feet and gouged at his chest; and wonders never ceasing, he allowed me to shove him through the archway and clear across the beach. “Get out!”
I turned around and sat astride a hollow log fallen over the strip of pebbles, head in hands, concentrating on my breathing for the five minutes it took Andrei to walk stubbornly back down the hill.
He straddled the log across from me, and the light grew above his head. I stared at him with such loathing I was surprised he didn’t melt into a puddle of innards.
“I’ve been told a story before,” he blurted. “It was disturbing, so very disturbing, but I was made to study the––the spiritual things. It was about a year ago, I think. I couldn’t get it out of my head. I don’t know if you’ve heard it, but it went something like this.”
And bold as the noon sun he began talking. I considered running off, but in a short while he’d hooked me better than Floy ever had.
“A Gireldine mother of three did a terrible thing to her two eldest sons––can’t remember what––and for fear of being mistreated in her old age, she designed for the birthright to fall to her youngest. Knowing where her children’s Marione were growing, she traveled to the place and pulled up her eldest sons’ flowers. She was crazy, I think.
“Anyway, The two boys survived. This was because, rather than dying as she hoped they would, they’d become sort of beast-like––not quite people anymore.
“Now it happened that one of the two boys had followed the mother. He saw the breaking of his spirit, and went straight to his older brother and told him what he’d seen and where the mother had cast aside the flowers. But as soon as he said this he went mad. Because he’d acted too much like a person just then, and his crippled spirit snapped completely off him.” He shook his head, looking as though he were about to laugh. “Least, that’s what they say happened.
“The older boy, at a loss for what to do, went to the place, collected the seeds of his dead Marionin, and sowed them. When this did nothing for his broken spirit, he sought the advice of a saebel. She said that in order to mend his spirit he must ‘weave shrouds for the murderers with the victims’ choices.’ Saebels know something, so he decided to follow her direction, but he misinterpreted somewhere: He thought one of the murderers was his mother, though she hadn’t killed anyone; he thought he and his brother were the victims, and that ‘choices’ were the same thing as ‘Marione’; and he also thought that a shroud was for the use of a corpse. So he grew a crop and wove a shroud of his and his mad brother’s Marione, and supposed he needed his mother’s dead body to put the shroud over. Not wanting to kill her himself, he ripped his youngest brother’s flowers from the ground, and promised the youngest he should have his seeds if he killed their mother. I warned you, it’s a horrible story.
“So the youngest murdered the mother and the oldest covered her corpse with the shroud. But all this did absolutely nothing, and five years after the original breaking the oldest boy went as mad as his brother. And the youngest eventually went mad, too, after trying to commit suicide.
“This story, The Oredh Brothers, it’s supposed to be pretty old, and the Girelden––they say the youngest and oldest were the murderers, and that they, all three of the brothers, were victims. So there should’ve been two shrouds made up of all three of the brothers’ Marione, and the shrouds should’ve been cast over the two sane brothers. And about the word ‘shroud’––if the saebel’d been speaking in Gireldine, she probably used a word I’ve forgotten. A tunic woven from the family flowers. I’ve seen people wearing them at weddings. And they definitely weren’t dead.” He looked at me straight in the face. “You were weaving one of those, weren’t you?”
The sun blinked over the cliffs. I remembered the baridarm my brothers and I had failed to weave for our dead father. I remembered Father mentioning the Oredh brothers. But most of all I was astounded, almost angry, that Andrei, of all people, should know the story, and I shouldn’t.
“I don’t know who broke your spirit,” said Andrei. “For the best, probably. Otherwise I’d have to find him and kill him, which is an awful lot of work.” I studied the shingle. “You remind me of a bird,” he said. “A wren, with those rings under your eyes.”
“Sweet blessed earth,” I said.
“You do this at dawn every day? No wonder you’re so tetchy. Need a proper sleep.” This merited argument, of course, but I was groggy, and fed up with arguing, and instead I thought how his hands had trembled after holding my spirit. And I dropped my head on his shoulder and went to sleep.
***
I came to at midday, curled on the ground, and saw that Andrei had scrawled, with giant characters of chalk on the cliff-face, the date and time of our next meeting. There was a question mark next to it, denoting humility, so I followed through.
He never mentioned my spirit. He explained how his mother had been gravely ill, and how Daifen had come in for a last visit. She died right then, and Daifen stole the family heirloom off her neck. The culprit must have been Daifen; the necklace was gone after he’d left.
I was a bit amazed. “Did Daifen kill her?” I said. “Maybe he just up and strangled her with it.”
Andrei started laughing, and then he got red and turned his head, and I could tell he was crying because his laughs got slobbery.
I waited for a while. Then I told him he was being awfully cold, jumping right from his mother’s death to his mother’s jewel.
“You didn’t know my mother,” he said, “and she would have rather I mourned the jewel.”
“D’you have to thieve it back? You could start an inquiry––”
He said no, absolutely not, he didn’t want to draw other people into it.
“Not sure they’ll take you serious?” I said.
He gave a terse nod. He was being very close-lipped.
“What about your sister? Does she know?”
Natty was aware that her social status was at stake. “That’s all she knows,” Andrei said. “And believe me, it’s enough.”
“That must be some feck-all great heirloom,” I said. “To ruin a girl’s status.”
“Enough about Natty. Natty’s better off not knowing.”
But it turned out Natty would need to know something. Because a secret search for hidden valuables at Daifen’s house was best undertaken if one were invited there under an innocent pretext, a pretext that would occur that year at the Daifen residence only for one night––the gala on the eve of the new year; and in order to mingle with the nobles invited, I had to pass for a one. A challenging job, Andrei agreed, and one that fell naturally to Natty.
Besides that, I had research to do.
I pleaded with Floy to spy on Daifen, but she refused for a week.
“Tell me, Reyna, why, by the green goats of Gaverdeen and all the necessary things you haven’t yet accomplished, did you agree to do this?”
“All those times he’s saved my arse,” I said. “It’s embarrassing. Please, Floy, don’t make my lot any harder.”
“Trying to make it easier’s what I’m doing.” But she consented when my whining became unbearable, and it took her but a day to root out the significant parts of the problem.
***
“Daifen’s hall,” said Floy, “is famous for sitting directly above an ancient well. Ocling’s Well.”
“It’s sacred,” I said, skipping shards of stone across the grey surf. I tried to recall why. “They say it goes far below the bottom of the sea, where the sweetwater collects. But wouldn’t it take days to draw water?”
“Don’t know.” Floy nestled in a chink in the sea wall, twisted her neck, and preened. “Daifen’s in control of it, though. I went inside. The well comes up in a cave, and a very important person must have built the house––the cave opens right into the master chambers like it’s part of the house.”
“I know. Some idiot Lauriad thought the well was running dry and hid it beneath his house.” I shrugged, glancing up at a silent birch reaching over the wall. “And now I bet Daifen has the only sweetwater well left in the country. The only one that in’t dry.”
“He doesn’t use the well for water so much as he uses the cave for a safe-deposit. So I’ll warrant your weasel’s heirloom is tucked away in the cave somewhere. But the cave has a locked door, and it’s a strange lock, right enough. Saw it. It’s square, and you’ll be able to rotate a square within a square as soon as break down the door with your head.”
“I’ll find out when I see it.”
“I’ve a better proposition,” said Floy, alighting on a long pile sticking from the water. “How about using the key?”
“Saw that too, did you?”
“Beneath the flagstones under the man’s wash-stand.”
“How do I get into his rooms?”
“You don’t––it’s heavily guarded. And he only lets his closest lackeys anywhere near, unless you’re Grulla the chambermaid or one of the two pageboys who carry him his bathwater.”
“Ugh.” I wrinkled my nose. “How much did you see, Floy?”
“I flew a perilous mission. Do I get a thank-you?”
She hardly needed one; missions were a thank-you in themselves for Rielde.
“Thank you most graciously,” I said anyway, throwing water at her.
***
I reached up and took a cannister from the self. It was an odd looking one: iron glazed with enamel so that the acid wouldn’t burn through the metal.
“Ain’t going to drown yer troubles with that?” Nefer said. I looked sheepishly over at him. “That don’t work half so well as Tuley’s whiskey. Help me build this fire up so’s I can anneal this.”
I slipped the can into my pocket, took up the bellows, and pumped until the flames leapt in the furnace. My trousers felt crispy, and I stepped back. Nefer hung a chalice bowl over the anvil horn and plannished it smooth. He sang boisterously as he did it.
Padlimaird was at his brazier, shaking his head, fitting together the chalice’s stem. It was fashioned like a tree, boughs cupped to receive the bowl.
I walked closer, saw the snakes creeping through the roots and the raptors roosting around the top––kestrel, osprey, eagle, kite––and noticed a familiar hallmark near the foot: a fish eating its tail.
I burst into laughter. Padlimaird flipped the thing over with his pliers. “Were the roots supposed to go on top?”
“You’re paying Dick Dagerleon a high compliment,” I said to Nefer. “Why’re you giving him the credit?”
Nefer smiled. “Habit.”
“He wants to see the look on Dick’s face when he’s asked to make another one,” said Padlimaird. Trid had done a fine job with Nefer’s arm, breaking the old fracture and splinting it. Now it was late in the fall and Nefer had the uninhibited use of both his arms.
“Send Paddy over to give poor Dick a couple of pointers.” I moved toward the door.
“Bring that canister back when ye’re through with it,” said Nefer.