“Don’t gawp at me, you knock-kneed pillock,” Brone growled. “You heard me. Follow him! See what he’s up to! See if he leads you to the mirror!”
“Are you mad? He’s a witch! He’s going to cast a spell on someone, or… or try to raise demons! If you want him followed so much do it yourself, or send that pimpled lad.”
Brone leaned forward across the writing desk on his lap, his doubleted belly spreading until it almost knocked over the inkwell. “Have you forgotten that I have your tiny little poet’s jewels cupped in my hand? And that I can have them snipped off any time I wish?”
Tinwright did his best not to appear terrified. “I don’t care. What are you going to do, report me to Hendon Tolly? I’ll just tell him that you’re spying on him. Your jewels will end up on a knacker’s table next to mine, Lord Brone. Then he’ll kill us both—but at least I’ll still have my soul. I won’t be carried off by demons!”
Brone stared at him hard for a long time, his mouth working in his bushy beard, which was now mostly gray. At last, something like a smile appeared in the hairy depths. “You’ve found a bit of courage after all, Tinwright. That’s good, I suppose—no man should remain an unmitigated coward all his life, even a wastrel like you. So what are we to do?” Brone suddenly reached out, far faster than Tinwright would have guessed possible, and grabbed the collar of the poet’s cloak so tightly that it threatened to strangle him. “If I can’t report you to Tolly, I suppose the only thing I can do is throttle you myself.” The smile had become something much more menacing.
“Nnnh! Dnnn’t!” It was really quite painfully tight around Tinwright’s throat. The Landsend relative returned with the wine and stopped in the doorway, watching the spectacle with interest.
“If you are no use to me, poet—even worse, if you have become a threat to me—then I have little choice ...”
“Buh umm nuh uh thrt!”
“I’d like to believe that, boy. But even if you’re not a threat, you’re still no help to me, and in such hard times—such dangerous times—there’s no need for you. Now, if you were to help me by doing what I ask, well, the crabs and starfish would keep coming—you must enjoy having a little money, eh, especially these days, with everything so dear and food so rare?—and I wouldn’t need to rip your head off.”
“Ull hlp! Ull hlp!”
“Good.” Brone turned loose of his cloak and he fell backward. The Landsend youth stepped politely out of the way to allow Tinwright to collapse onto the floor where he lay gasping.
“But why me? ” he asked when he had finally struggled back onto his feet, rubbing his aching neck. “I’m a poet!”
“And not a particularly good one,” Brone said. “But what choice do I have? Limp around the residence myself? Send my idiot nephew?” He gestured at the youth, who was paring his dirty fingernails again, but lifted the knife toward Tinwright in a sort of salute. “No, I need someone who is allowed and even expected to be in the residence—someone too foolish to be feared and too useless to be suspected. That’s you.”
Matt Tinwright rubbed his aching throat. “You do me too much honor, Count Avin.”
“There you go—a little spunk. That’s good. Now go find out what’s afoot and there’ll be more in it for you—perhaps even a jar of wine from my own store, eh? How would that be?”
The idea of being able to drink himself into oblivion for a day or two was the first real inducement he’d heard to keep serving Brone, although not dying was a close second. He made a cautious bow before leaving, half worrying that his head would fall off.
“Do you know what I think, Mother?” Kayyin spoke as if in continuation of a conversation briefly interrupted, instead of after an hour or more of silence.
Yasammez did not look at him and did not reply.
“I think you are beginning to feel something for these Sunlanders.”
“Other than to hasten your death,” she said, still not looking up, “why would you say such a preposterous thing?”
“Because I think it is true.”
“Have you any purpose other than irritating me? Remind me—why haven’t I killed you?”
“Perhaps you have discovered that you love your son after all.” He smiled, amused at this conceit. “That you have feelings as base and sentimental as the Sunlanders themselves. Perhaps after all these centuries of neglect and open scorn, you have found that you desire to make things right. Could that be, Mother?”
“No.”
“Ah. I thought not. But it was entertaining to consider.” He had been pacing; now he stopped. “Do you know what is truly strange? Having lived so long in the guise of a mortal—having lived as one—I find that in some ways I have become one. For instance, I am restless in a way none of our people ever has been. If I stay too long in one place it is as though I can feel myself dying the true death. I become impatient, discontented—as though the body itself commands my mind, instead of the other way around.”
“Perhaps that explains your foolish ideas,” Yasammez said. “It is not you, but this mortal guise you have taken on, that offers this nonsense. Interesting if so, but I would still rather have silence.”
He looked at her. She still did not look at him. “Why have you withdrawn from the Sunlander castle, my lady? It was all but yours, and you have also nearly conquered the tiny resistance in the caverns beneath it. Why pull back at such a time? Are you certain you have not begun to pity the mortals?”
For the first time her voice betrayed something, a descent into a deeper chill. “Do not speak foolishness. It offends me that a child of my loins should waste the air that way.”
“So you do not pity them at all. They mean less to you than the dirt beneath your feet.” He nodded. “Why, then, should you ask me to tell them the story of Janniya and his sister? What purpose could there have been for that, unless you wanted them to feel something of our pain… of your pain, to be more precise?”
“You tread on dangerous ground, Kayyin.”
“If I were a farmer pledged to destroy the rats that ate my crops, would I take the rats aside before passing sentence and explain to them what they had done?”
“Rats do not understand their crimes.” She turned her dark eyes on him then, at last. “If you say another word about the Sunlanders I will pull your living heart from your chest.”
He bowed. “As you wish, my lady. I will walk on the seashore instead and think about the enlightening conversation we have had today.” He rose, then moved toward the door. Yasammez could not help noticing that whatever was mortal in him now, or whatever feigned it, had not entirely diminished his grace. He still walked with the insolent silkiness of his younger days. She closed her eyes again.
Only moments after he had gone out she felt another presence—Aesi’uah, her chief eremite. Aesi’uah would stand silently for hours waiting for acknowledgment, Yasammez knew, but it was pointless to make her do so: the elusive point that Lady Porcupine had been chasing through the labyrinth of her own long memory was gone.
“Has the time come?” Yasammez asked.
Her adviser’s complexion, usually the soft, warm gray of a pigeon’s breast, was noticeably pale. “I fear it is so, my lady. Even with all the eremites mingling their thought and their song, he has withdrawn beyond our reach.” She hesitated. “We thought… I thought… perhaps if you ...”
“Of course I will come.” She rose from her chair, her thoughts heavier than her thick black armor. For the first time that she could remember she felt something of the vast weight of her age, the burden of her long-stretching life. “I must say farewell.”