“I’m glad for that.” Lorn turns in the chair.
“That chair is hard. You could sit on the settee.”
He grins and stands, stretching. “I’m still a little stiff fromthe travel. Not used to sitting in a firewagon for days.”
“You … the man who could outwait anyone?”
“Only if I have a reason,” he points out. “Otherwise, I have trouble sitting still.”
“That I find hard to believe, my dear brother.”
Lorn rolls his eyes.
“I won’t ask about other … matters.” Myryan stands. “The kitchen isn’t much, but I need to eat something, and so do you.” She uncoils herself from the stool, standing as tall as Lorn, and motions for him to follow.
The kitchen has also been replastered and smells fresh and clean, despite the age of the dwelling. Somehow, the spare setting suits Myryan, Lom reflects, watching her extract a wedge of cheese from the watercooler.
Deftly, his sister slices the hard cheese into finger-sized wedges, yet Lorn can sense her reluctance with the knife, and her relief when she wipes it clean and replaces it in the wooden holder quickly.
“The knife bothers you.”
“Most healers have trouble with knives, even cupridium ones, but they’re not as bad as the iron ones.”
“The iron-”
“It’s not the iron. I can hold iron, any kind of iron, and it doesn’t bother me.”
Lorn frowns. “I’d think … this can’t be new.”
Myryan laughs. “New? It’s been a problem since the firstborn. The Magi’i don’t mention it because we’re just healers, not wielders of chaos.”
Lorn holds in the wince he feels.
“Take some of the cheese. You’re pale. I’m a healer, and I can sense it.” Myryan breaks off a chunk of the slightly stale bread and thrusts that at him as well.
“I didn’t come to take food.”
“I know. You came, and I’m glad.” Myryan chews the bread and cheese before speaking. “Is this all right? I like bread and cheese. Ciesrt doesn’t. He wants a hot breakfast and dinner. So I have the cheese at mid-day.”
“Bread and cheese like this are fine,” Lorn reassures her.“They’re not at all like what lancers get, even lancer officers. I didn’t say much about food last night, but I think anything in Cyad would taste wonderful. This is better cheese.” He raises his eyebrows. “What kind?”
“It’s from the east, someplace called Worrak, I think.”
“And the eastern barbarians actually make good cheese?”
“They’re not all like those in the north,” Myryan counters.
“No matter what father says?” Lorn smiles.
“Oh …” She pauses. “Father is beginning to look old. Didn’t you see it? Sometimes, I wonder.”
“His hair is white, not silver. But it will happen to us all,” Lorn says.
“But it’s so sudden. Last year, it was silver.”
Lorn frowns.
“There’s nothing I can do. Mother’s doing what she can. I hope she doesn’t try too hard.”
“Too hard?”
“She’s a healer, not just a mother. If she puts too much into helping father, then …” Myryan looks at Lorn.
“It could hurt her.”
“It could. It will.” Myryan wraps the cheese and replaces it in the cooler, then puts the bread in the keeper. She looks at the sandglass on the pedestal. “I don’t want to go … but I’d better … they expect me.”
“I’ll keep stopping by.”
“I hope so. You are my brother.” Her smile warms him, but it fades too quickly as she continues, “I won’t ask about other things, Lorn. I hope you work them out, but I shouldn’t know. We have dinner at least once a week with Ciesrt’s parents.”
He nods, understanding too well. “Thank you. I hope so, too.”
“I’m going to have to leave for the infirmary. Is there anything I can do before I go?”
Lorn wants to laugh. Anything she can do? He is the one who should have acted.
“Lorn …” Myryan’s amber eyes catch Lorn’s. “You did what you could. It’s better this way. I can accept Ciesrt.”
Accept. Lorn does not like the word.
“Would you mind if I just sat for a while in the garden?” he finally asks. “I need some quiet. I’ll leave from there.”
“You could stay here.”
“I think I’d like the garden.” Lorn does not wish to risk being seen in a glass within her walls without her present, for several reasons.
“If that’s what you’d like.” She smiles once more. “You’ve always needed some time apart from others. I’m glad that hasn’t changed.”
“I don’t always want that distance, Myryan.” He steps forward and hugs her. “I just can’t change things. Not now.”
She returns the hug, then steps back, and he wonders if he has changed so much that she must hang onto a few old mannerisms to assure herself that he remains the Lorn she knew.
After reclaiming the carry-bag and waving from the garden gate as Myryan walks out to the Road of Perpetual Light, Lorn steps back into the garden, finding the arbor.
Myryan may guess what he is doing, but she does not know, and one arbor is much like another in a screeing glass.
Some time after he senses that she is far enough eastward of the house that she cannot sense anything he may do, he steps into the corner of the arbor where the gray winter leaves of the grape are thick and will shield him from any eyes that may peer from the adjoining dwellings that rise above the blocks of the gray stone walls that enclose the rear garden of Myryan’s dwelling.
Once he has changed into the blues and boots that he had carried in the bag, he stretches, then readjusts the tunic. The blues feel strange on him … as if he had outgrown them. He checks the fit, and the tailoring is perfect. With a snort, he smiles.
He emerges from the arbor as a senior enumerator, carry-bag in hand, and walks through the outside garden gate, carefully latching it behind him, and then heads along the Road of Perpetual Light, westward back toward the center of Cyad.
At the Fifteenth Way, long before he can be seen from hisparents’ dwelling, he turns and walks southward to the Road of Benevolent Commerce. Bag still in hand, he follows it toward and then into the Merchanter section.
With the sun higher in the clear blue-green sky, the wind has softened and warmed, and more folk fill the walkways that flank the road. A wagon drawn by a single horse passes. Lorn notes the legend painted in yellow upon the green wagon sideboard: Tarfak House, Spices.
Perhaps Ryalor House should investigate spices. He smiles lopsidedly and continues walking, his steps quick and precise. As he passes the Empty Quarter coffee house, he can see that it appears more empty than three years earlier, and that the awning that once sheltered outside tables has been removed. So have the tables. Is there that little coffee left that it is too expensive for junior merchanters?
At the Third Harbor Way, he steps behind an empty wagon drawn by a pair of mules and crosses to the white stone walkway on the far side, where he turns harborward and walks down the gentle incline to the lower merchanters’ plaza. Three carts remain under their traditional green and white striped awnings as Lorn strides around them to the northwest corner of the plaza, his destination the squatlooking white building of the Clanless Traders, where Ryalth has continued to maintain the small office of Ryalor House.
Once inside the squared open archway and off the relatively uncrowded plaza, Lorn finds himself at the edge of a swirl of figures in blue, as well as a few in red, white, or green. Seemingly without much notice, Lorn eases through and around the small groups of traders and hagglers and hangers-on and makes his way to the stairs at the rear of the high-arched hall. He glances up at the three stories of balconies and hopes that Ryalth has not moved her trading office too far.
She has not moved it at all-it remains the same twodoored area at the back of the third level, well into the northeast corner. Sitting at the small corner desk, she studies a ledger, her head down, and as he slips toward her Lorn can see that she has cut her hair far shorter than he recalls.