“I understand.” Her voice sounded bright, but her expression was crestfallen. “I wish you well on your voyage.”
“Thank you, Rieve.”
She leaned forward, raising herself up on her toes, steadying herself with both hands on his arms. He wouldn’t have minded her staying in just that position for a very long time. Then she pressed her lips to her cheek. The kiss burned there, as if those lips had been made of fired steel. “For your courage,” she said. “And for luck.”
He didn’t know what to say. He wanted to touch the spot she had kissed, but didn’t want her to think he was trying to rub away the trace of her lips.
While he was still searching for some sort of meaningful response, she met his gaze, then turned and hurried from the shop without looking back.
He had driven her away. She had taken the liberty of kissing him, and he had stood there like an absolute fool, saying and doing nothing. And she had realized her mistake and raced out of his presence.
He couldn’t blame her.
He stood looking at the empty doorway, knowing that the best thing that might ever have entered his life had just fled it again, because he had not known how to respond.
Suddenly, he couldn’t wait to get out of Nibenay.
Ruhm went drinking with friends again that evening, but Aric couldn’t bring himself to join them. Instead he walked around the city—his city, the only one he had ever known. The one he would soon leave behind. Perhaps he would return, perhaps not. Every traveler told tales of the dangers waiting in the wide world, and the book Aric had tried to read described a landscape full of perils and plagues.
Without the daytime sun blasting the city streets, they were more crowded than during the heat of afternoon. All around him were swindlers, thieves, thugs and killers; people did what they could to survive on Athas, and Aric knew that only a few lucky breaks had made the difference between him having a lawful career and joining Nibenay’s nighttime parade of criminality.
Bundled against the cold, Aric threaded the city’s narrow streets, alleyways and courtyards, passing between pedestrians and kanks and merchant stalls, couriers carrying messages or goods, bands of musicians and dancers, drunks weaving unsteadily between one tavern and the next. Everywhere the eye landed there was something to see: brightly colored clothing, members of every intelligent race known to Athas. Stone walls and cobblestone roadways were intricately carved to display the glorious history of the Shadow King, or else the family histories of those who built the individual structures. Sometimes buildings themselves were the sculptures—here a family home carved in the shape of a face, where one entered through a gaping mouth and looked out upstairs windows shaped like eyes—the “skin” carved still further, with scenes from that family’s past—there an entire block built to represent a cloud ray, its surface carvings representing past defeats of those huge monsters.
Above the streets, people stretched lines and hung clothing to dry, on those occasions when they had enough water to wash. Higher still, the buildings seemed to meet overhead, sometimes with other walkways far above the streets. There was layer upon layer of life in Nibenay; spires, minarets and turrets everywhere blotted out the stars. Sometimes Aric thought one could live a dozen lifetimes and never see it all.
Music rang from many corners, people singing and playing for their own amusement, small bands and even orchestras and choirs gathered here and there in more organized performances. And Nibenay had its own smell, comprised of blood and sweat and urine, animal dung and ale, the smoke from cooking fires and the oil from lanterns. All of it combined into a single odor that told Aric at every step that he was home.
Since he might never again see the place, he wanted to visit some spots that had been important to him over the years. He would stay far away from the elven market—that place had few pleasant associations, mostly memories of bitterness and strife.
His mother, the half-elf Keyasune, had never left the city either, as far as he knew. She had, in fact, rarely left the area right around the elven market. Her parents had a stall there, selling bolts of fabric obtained from other cities, and her human mother, she said, made blankets and articles of clothing that they also sold. When they were killed, as was often the fate of elves and those who wed them, Keyasune took over the stall. It was there she had met Aric’s father, a human.
“He came in one evening to buy some fine silk,” she told Aric once. He was nine years old, and had been pestering her with questions about his father. She had taken him on a walk, away from the Hill District, out the South Gate and into the desert beyond the city walls. “One of his family’s slaves was a fine seamstress, and his mother wanted silk to have some dresses made. I was alone in the stall, and your father saw my silks and had to have some. It was a wonderfully cool early evening, late in the season of Sun Descending. He tried to bargain the price down, but I held firm.
“While we bickered, though, we were also chatting. There was something about him—his face reminded me of the setting sun, and I smiled just to look at it. He seemed to like me as well. Even after he had paid me for the silk, he stayed and talked. Other merchants glared at us, of course—they are glad to see the coins of humans, but not so receptive to humans themselves.
“When I tried to sleep that night, I kept thinking about him. I later learned he was having the same problem, tossing about his bed thinking of me.
“The next evening, he came back. Same the evening after that. Soon, we were involved in a romance.”
“Yuck,” Aric said. He picked up a rock and hurled it at the city wall, but it fell short of its mark.
“I will spare you those details, Aric. The only reason I’m telling you this is so that you’ll know that once, your father was important to me. He wasn’t just some man I met, but someone I cared for deeply.
“He seemed to like me as well. But it was strange—he liked me, but he hated elves. Never had a good word to say about them. When he was with me, he seemed to loathe himself for being there. If I had been exactly the same person, but not a half-elf, I had no doubt that we’d be wed. But whenever we were together, it had to be in secret, where no one would see us. He stopped coming to the elven market altogether, instead sending me messages when he wanted to see me, and making me meet him elsewhere in the city.
“Then came the day that I had to tell him about you—that I was with child. I feared his reaction, but it was even more explosive than I expected. We had taken a room at an inn, so we could have privacy. But when I told him, he ranted and paced and threw things. Finally the innkeeper knocked on the door to see why so much noise was coming from the room, and your father took advantage of the distraction to storm away.
“I never saw him again.”
“Did you go to his house?” Aric asked.
“He had never told me where he lived. I knew only his first name, but not what family he was from. He had to protect them, he said, from the stigma of having a son who loved a half-elf.”
“What’s a stigma, Mother?” Aric was young, but he understood that telling this story was hard for his mother, could see sadness playing about her lips and eyes, the lines it made in her forehead. He knew, also, that he had forced her to tell it—that asking about him so frequently, and more and more often in the market stall where other elves could overhear, had put her in a position where she had to give him the story. But just this once, she had insisted, and then they’d never speak of it again. He had agreed to her terms, although with a small boy’s uncertain grasp of what “never” might mean.
“It’s something that other people might judge someone for, without knowing the real story behind that fact. What it really meant was that he was ashamed of being with me and didn’t want his family to know about it. And when he learned that he had fathered a child, he wanted nothing more to do with me—with us, really. It was as if he had thought it was all just a game, and it wasn’t until that happened that he knew there could be consequences.