“And,” she went on composedly, “if there was a particularly wicked man asking for an early dinner … and if you knew he’d ruined a few innocent people in his time and even driven a couple of them to suicide … and if you knew a little girl was crying her eyes out because he’d threatened her with what amounts to a death sentence unless she slept with him, even though she’d just fallen in love with someone else… and moreover this wicked man wanted her to give him information that would betray certain other persons … Well, then, Smith, I expect something rather dreadful might find its way into the appetizer he’d ordered.
“Mind you, I admit to nothing,” she added. “But I have absolutely no regrets.”
Smith sat in silence a moment, turning his drink in his hands, watching the ice melt. “Information that would betray certain other persons,” he echoed. “He wasn’t sure about you yet, but if he’d scared Burnbright badly enough, he’d have had you; and you’ve got a restaurant and a reputation to lose. Much better prospect for blackmail.
“You sneaked up there in the dark and burned most of his notes, but someone—probably Burnbright—interrupted you before you finished. You had the feast to get on the table, and Burnbright to calm down, so you never got back in there to burn the rest of the papers before Pinion discovered the murder.”
Mrs. Smith exhaled smoke and watched him, silent. At last he said, “Tell me how you got mixed up in the Spellmetal massacre.”
She sighed.
“Years ago,” she said, “I was working for the old Golden Chain caravan line. We got a party of passengers bound for the country up around Karkateen.
“It was the Sunborn and his followers. They’d just been thrown out of one town, so they’d chartered passage to another. But the Sunborn had already begun to talk of founding a city where all races would live together in perfect amity.
“When they left the caravan at Karkateen, I went with them.”
“Had you become a convert?” Smith asked. She shook her head, her eyes fixed on something distant, and she shrugged.
“I was just a bad girl out for a good time,” she said. “I didn’t believe the races could live together in peace. I didn’t believe one man could change the world. But the Sunborn asked me to come, and … if he’d asked me to jump from the top of a tower, I’d have done it. You never heard him speak, Smith, or you’d understand.
“He had the strangest gift for making one clean, no matter what he did in bed with one. He carried innocence with him like a cloak he could throw about your shoulders. With him, you felt as though you were forgiven for every wrong thing you’d ever done… and love became a sacrament, meant something far more than grappling for pleasure in the dark.
“Well. There were nearly thirty of us, of mixed races. Of the Children of the Sun there were a few boys and girls from well-to-do families. There was me; there were a couple of outcasts, half-breeds, and one girl who was blind; and there was a young man who always seemed uncomfortable with us, but he was the Sunborn’s kinsman, and so he followed him out of a sense of family duty. Ramack, his name was. The greenies were all a wild lot, nothing like the ones you meet here running shops. Gorgeous savages. Poets. Musicians.
“It was a mad life. It was wonderful, and stupid, and exhausting. We committed excesses you couldn’t begin to imagine. We starved, we wandered in the rain, we danced in our rags and picked flowers by the side of the highway. It was everything Festival is supposed to be, but with a soul, Smith!
“The Sunborn joined me to a Yendri man, and blessed our union in the name of racial harmony. I suppose I loved Hladderin well enough; greenies make reasonably good lovers, and he was drop-dead beautiful too. But I loved the Sunborn more.
“When Mogaron Spellmetal joined us, he suggested we all go live on his family’s land. Away we went, dancing and singing. I bore Hladderin a child … what can I say? He was a pretty baby. I was never the motherly type, but his father thought the world of him.
“He was just six months old the day House Spellmetal showed up with their army.”
“You don’t have to talk about this part, if it’s painful,” said Smith.
“I won’t talk about it. I still can’t… but during the fighting, a grenade blew out the back wall of the garden. And when it was over, I ran like mad through the break, and so did a lot of others. I looked back and saw Hladderin fall with one of those damned long black arrows through his throat. Right after him came Ramack carrying the blind girl, her name was Haisa, she’d been a special favorite of the Sunborn’s because he said she was a seeress. She was in labor at that very moment. Her baby picked that time of all times for its inauspicious birth!
“Ramack and Haisa got out alive, though. I waved to them, and Ramack spotted the ditch where I’d taken cover, and they joined me there. We managed to crawl away from the slaughter, and by nightfall we were safe. I don’t know what happened to the others.
“Haisa had her baby that night. It was a little girl.”
“Burnbright?” asked Smith. Mrs. Smith nodded.
“We hid in the wilderness for a couple of weeks, weeping and trying to think what to do. It was hard to get our brains engaged again, after all that long ecstatic time. Ramack decided at last that the best thing to do was to throw ourselves on the mercy of the authorities. We hadn’t heard yet about how Mogaron had died, you see, or his father’s blood oath, and since Ramack had never really been a believer in the Sun-born, he didn’t mind recanting. In the end he and Haisa went off to Karkateen and gave themselves up. You know what happened to them. At least the assassins missed the baby.”
“Why didn’t you go?” Smith asked.
“I wasn’t willing to recant,” Mrs. Smith replied. “And I had my child to think of. But what kind of life would he have had with me, under the circumstances, being the color he was? I’d heard the stories of the Green Witch, as we used to call her on the caravan routes. Our nasty little lord’s sainted Mother. Hladderin had told me she took in orphans.
“So I carried him up to the Greenlands, and I climbed that black mountain. I came to a fearful black gate where demons in plate armor leered at me. But a disciple in white robes came down, practically glowing with reflected holiness, and took the child off my hands and promised to keep him safe. And that was that.
“I went down the mountain and took sanctuary myself for a while, in the Abbey at Kemeldion. When the scandal had become old news, I changed my name to Smith and got a job cooking for your cousin’s caravan line. It was work I knew, and, besides, it seemed like a good idea to keep moving.
“I kept track of what the Karkateen authorities had done with Burnbright, which was the alias they had sensibly given her. When your cousin needed a runner to replace one that had quit, I suggested he pick one up in Mount Flame. By sheer good luck he got little Burnbright. I’ve looked out for her ever since, for her father’s sake.”
Loud in the sleeping house, they heard the sound of footsteps approaching. A moment later the kitchen door opened, and Lord Ermenwyr looked in. He was very pale.
“I wonder whether I might get something for indigestion?” he inquired. “But I see I’m interrupting serious talk.”
“Fairly serious,” Smith said.
“Yes, I thought you’d have to have a certain conversation sooner or later.” The lordling pulled out a stool and sat down at the table. “May I respectfully suggest that no one do anything rash? If by some silly chance somebody accidentally happened to, oh, I don’t know, commit a murder or something—which I’m sure would have been completely justified, whatever the circumstances—well, you wouldn’t believe the unsavory incidents my family has hushed up.”