And then he’d popped one into her mouth, laughing as the honeyed icing stuck to the corners of Dez’s lips. They’d taken a whole tray upstairs to his chamber with them, leaving Dalan’s good-natured brother to make up the loss.
“I knew him,” Dez said, speaking almost before she could stop herself. “He was a good man. He was a baker. With his brother. They were ...” Her words ran out. “They were good men.”
Though the soft look of sympathy didn’t leave Aline’s eyes, her head came up, just a little, like one who hears something more than is being said. “You knew him very well, didn’t you?”
“I knew him some.”
“More than that. Oh,” she said, answering Dez’s frown. “I know what a woman’s face looks like when she’s lost a man she loves.” She cleared her throat, a small sound. “I see it often in my mirror.”
The hour was late, the night warm in spite of that. The muffled sounds of the watch passing by Rose Hall drifted up, only slightly disturbing the silence between the two women. Then Aline sat a little forward.
“It’s all over the city that Dalan and his brother were trying to get out of Haven. What about the dark elf?”
Dez, in no mood for games, said, “You know about him. Dunbrae told you.”
Aline covered one hand with the other, as though trying to keep them still. She arranged each finger with careful precision, one on top of the other. Still, they looked too big where they sat on her lap. Everything was too big about her—her hands, her feet, her nose, and good gods knew, her long face. This was the woman Madoc Diviner had fallen in love with, enspelled. And this was also the woman Lir Wrackham had fallen in love with from the urgings of his own heart.
“You’re right,” Aline said, “and it was wrong of me to pretend I don’t know. Dunbrae did tell me about your exploit, and now I’d like to talk to you about it.”
In the tiny room that served as a bedroom for Usha and Dez, as well as her studio, Usha lighted two tall pillar candles. She took a freshly prepared canvas from the three leaning against the wall and held it for a moment, the weight well-balanced and not unwieldy for all that the canvas was a wide rectangle nearly as high as her waist. In the golden glow the recently scraped pa’ressa, the primer coat, no longer reflected light as though it were thin ice. Outside, the air was still. The breeze that had wandered listlessly around the garden when she sat talking with Dezra had fallen soon after Dez was gone.
Made restless by the events of the day, by the half hope that Dez would find a way out of Haven and the full-blown fear that she would fall afoul of Sir Radulf’s knights and Lady Mearah’s justice, Usha had come into the inn, ignored her bed, and paced around her cramped studio. Not eased, she prepared the next morning’s work by pinning her sketches of Kalend and Thelan to the walls. Some she put where the morning light would touch them, others where the moon’s would light them out of the darkness. She never worked by moonlight—who could?—but she thought by moonlight, and moonlight seemed to rouse in her soul that intuition all artists had to one degree or another, the instinct of knowing how to see patterns, to understand how and why they went together, why they seemed to wander away only to come back again to make something startling in its beauty, its passion, and sometimes a thing very near to perfection.
Usha set the canvas on its easel, now no longer dark-dusty from charcoal but polished and gleaming. On impulse, she blew out the candles. As from a distance, she heard the night noise, but something else had her attention, for each sketch peered out of the darkness, each face white and alight.
There was Kalend with an imp’s gleam in the moment before he punched Thelan’s arm for making rude noises. She smiled, remembering the mischief, more amused than she had been at the time. Beside that freckled face was a sketch of the two boys together. In it, they were icons of fraternal solidarity and good will. They looked like their mother. Usha thought, suddenly, that Kalend looked more like Loren Halgard, their uncle. The same strong jaw, and a tilt to his chin that reminded her of Loren on the afternoon he’d argued that he would do anything to protect Haven, and everything to protect his daughter.
Kin defending kin, father and daughter, brothers ...
Soft, Usha said, “Ah, yes.”
Though they had run screaming out of the room like vengeful goblins moments later, at the instant Usha had made the last line, the two boys had been still enough for her to produce this sketch, this image of the trustful companionship that bound the two brothers. This sense of solidarity, of kinship, was what Usha must reproduce.
She found her way into her work, and as she unpinned that sketch from the wall and set it on the table near the easel, she became aware that the tensions of the day had melted. She could go to bed now and rest, if not sleep. She could wait for Dez to return and trust that her sister-in-law’s heart would not outrace her sense, that Dez would go carefully after what she wanted.
The moon had moved across the sky. Time had passed. On the stairs Usha heard the sound of quick steps, and they turned into the hall.
Usha struck flint to steel and lit one candle. The light flared. Shadows jumped and made the images in her sketches seem to cringe back. One fluttered to the floor and Usha went to pick it up.
Dez stuck her head in the doorway. “Usha.”
Her voice thrilled as it always did when she had something exciting to tell. Usha waved her in and bent to pick up the fallen sketch. In the dancing light of the candle’s flame she saw it was one of Kalend perched on his stool.
“Usha, Aline—” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “She isn’t giving up.”
7
The upper room at Rose Hall where Usha and Dez had taken refuge the night Haven fell had changed substantially in the weeks since Usha had last been there. Aline had removed all the furniture but for a few blocky wooden chairs with deep seats and high arms. A long oak table now served as a desk. Other than these things and a few objects that had once decorated a small desk or the tops of wooden coffers, the room was bare. Aline was transforming it into something else, something much like a commander’s austere field headquarters.
“And that’s what it will be,” she’d said to Usha when her friend showed surprise at the change. “People were murdered in this city. You saw them.”
Usha nodded, chilled when she recalled the hanged men.
“Those are my people, Usha.” Her eyes shone, her long, homely face flushed with feeling. “Maybe you’ll tell me I’ve only lived in Haven for a few years, but... no. You sent me here. I agreed to come here and marry an old man in the cause of a good fight.” She closed her eyes, and in that moment sorrow made her face lovely. “Qualinesti might be lost, but Haven won’t be. She is my city, and I can help her.”
My city. Her words in no way recalled the arrogant sense of possession Sir Radulf Eigerson’s had. Aline spoke with the quiet, intense passion of a woman speaking of her home.
I am proud of her!
Now, looking around the changed room, Usha thought it was a good place to hold a conference. High windows showed the street and broad stretches of sky above the river. She amended her thought—a good place to plan a resurrection. Qui’thonas would indeed live again. At the moment, though, the resurrection was proving harder than imagined.
Usha looked at Dez pacing up and down where the magnificent Tarsian carpet used to be, at Aline carefully unrolling a map on the table. Neither of the two spoke, and neither looked at the other. Dez was marshalling her arguments. Aline looked around for heavy objects to hold the corners of the map in place. This, or scenes much like it, had been going on for most of the morning, and in this particular lull between arguments, Usha sat in the deep window embrasure looking down on the street before Rose Hall.