If he dared. If he cared enough to see past his own loss and sorrows, and see greater tragedy and need and be willing to lay himself on the line to fix it.
:Chosen — please. This is real. This is what I meant when I said that we needed you.:
He gazed into that abyss, and thought back at Cymry as hard as he could — :Is that the only reason you Chose me?:
Because if it was —
— if it was, and all of the love and belonging that had filled his heart and soul when he first looked into her eyes was a lie, a ruse to catch someone with his particular “set of skills” —
:Are you out of your mind?: she snapped indignantly, shaken right out of her solemnity by the question. :Can't you feel why I Chose you?:
That answer, unrehearsed, unfeigned, reassured him as no speech could have. And something in him shifted, straining against a barrier he hadn't realized was there until that moment.
But he still had questions that needed answering. “An’ if ye find this 'master,’ no matter how highborn 'e is,” he asked slowly, “ye'll do what?”
“Bring him to justice,” Alberich replied instantly, and held up a hand, to forgo any interruptions. “For murder. Of your friends, if no other can be proved, although — ”
“There are others?” Skif asked — not in amazement, no, for if the bastard, whoever he was, had been coldhearted enough to burn down a building full of people, he surely had other deaths on his conscience.
Now, for the first time, Alberich's face darkened with an anger Skif was very glad was not aimed at him. “Three of which I know, and perhaps more. And there is that which is worse than murder, which only kills the body. Slaving, for workers, but worse, to make pleasure slaves. Behind it, he is. In small — in the selling of children, here, even from the streets of Haven. And in large, very large, wherein whole families are reaved from their homes and sold OutKingdom.”
Skif heard himself gasp. There had always been rumors of that in the streets, and Bazie had hinted at it — but even his uncle hadn't stooped that low.
Worse than murder? Well — yes. He closed his eyes a moment, and thought about those rumors a moment. If the rumors were more than that, and the children — orphans or the unwanted — who vanished from Haven's streets ended up in the place where Bazie had intimated they went —
— and if there really were entire villages full of people who were snatched up and sold OutKingdom —
“Worse,” he heard himself agreeing.
“And one answer there is, for such evil.” Alberich's stone-like expression gave away nothing, but Skif wasn't looking for anything there. He already had his answer; forget anything else, he and this iron-spined man had a common cause.
And somewhere inside him, the barrier strained and broke.
“I'm in,” was all he said. “I'm with ye.” Alberich's eyes flickered briefly, then he nodded.
“More, we will speak, and at length. Now — ,”
There were a great many things Alberich could have said. If you want revenge, you'd better keep your nose clean, for instance, or if you get yourself thrown out of here for messing up, neither one of us will get what he wants. Or you'll have to work hard at being respectable, because it's going to take someone who looks respectable to trap this bastard.
He said none of those things. He let another of those penetrating looks analyze Skif and say something else. Something — that had warning in it, but against danger and not mere misbehavior. Something that had acceptance in it as well, and an acknowledgment that Skif had the right to be in this fight. And Skif nodded, quite as if he had heard every bit of it in words.
Alberich smiled. It was the sort of smile that said, I see we understand one another. That was all, but that was all that was needed.
A moment later, the sound of boots on the straw-covered floor marked Herald Teren's return. “Later speech, we will have,” Alberich promised, as Teren reached them. “For now — other things.”
* * * * * * * * * *
The other things were not what Skif had expected. Not that he'd really had any inkling of what to expect, but not even his vaguest intuitions measured up to his introduction to the Collegium and his first candlemarks as a Trainee.
“If you're all right, then, follow me,” Herald Teren said, and started off, quite as if he assumed Skif would follow and not bolt. Which Skif did, of course; it seemed that he was “in for it” after all, but not in the way he'd thought. His emotions were mixed, to say the least.
On top of it all was excitement and some apprehension still. Just beneath that was a bewildered sort of wonder and the certainty that at any moment they would realize they'd made a mistake — or that fearsome Alberich would call the Guards. He'd lived with what he was for so long…
Beneath that, though — was something still of the new image of the world and his place in it that he'd gotten during that encounter with Alberich. That — granted, the world stank, and a lot of people in it were rotten, and horrible things happened — but that he, little old Skif, petty thief, had a chance that wasn't given to many people, to help make things better. Not right; the job of making everything right was too big for one person, for a group of people like the Heralds, even — but better.
And under all of that, slowly and implacably filling in places he hadn't known were empty, was a feeling he couldn't even put a name to. It was big, that feeling, and it had been the thing that had broken through his barriers back there, when Cymry reaffirmed her bond with him. It was compounded of a lot of things; release, relief, those were certainly in there. But with the release came a sense that he was now irrevocably bound to something — something good. And accepted by that “something.” A feeling that he belonged, at last, to something he'd been searching for without ever realizing that he'd been looking. And there was an emotion connected with Cymry in there that, if he had to put a name to it, he might have said (with some embarrassment) was love. It was scary, having something that big sweep him up in itself. And if he had to think about it, he knew he'd be absolutely paralyzed —
So he didn't think about it. He just let it do whatever it was going to do, turning a blind eye to it. But he couldn't help but feel a little more cheerful, a little more at ease here, with every heartbeat that passed.
And there was plenty to keep him distracted from anything going on inside him, anyway.
Teren led him away from the stable and toward a building that absolutely dwarfed every other structure he had ever seen. And if he was impressed, he hated to think how all those farmboys and fisherfolk Cymry had talked about must have felt when they first saw it.
The building was huge, three-and-a-half stories of gray stone with a four-story double tower at the joining of two of the walls just ahead of them. “This is Herald's Collegium and the Palace,” Teren said, waving his hand in an arc that took in everything. “You can't actually see the New Palace part of the structure from here; it's blocked by this wing next to us, which is where all the Kingdom's Heralds have rooms.”
“But most uv 'em don't live here, at least, not most of th' time,” Skif stated, on a little firmer ground. “Right?”