Are you a Nina?”
She looked up at that. A faint smile showed itself on her stricken face. “That’s what my gran calls me.”
“Come sit, Nina.” I nodded to the bed, as it was the only other place to sit in the room.
She sat, her hands twisting nervously in her lap. “I seen it. The thing they got out of the barrow.” She looked up at me, then down at her hands again. “Jimmy, Mauthen’s youngest boy, he showed me.”
My heart beat faster. “What was it?”
“It was a big fancy pot,” she said softly “About this high.” She held her hand about three feet off the ground. It was shaking. “It had all sorts of writings and pictures on it. Really fancy. I haven’t ever seen colors like that. And some of the paints were shiny like silver and gold.”
“Pictures of what?” I asked, fighting to keep my voice calm.
“People,” she said. “Mostly people. There was a woman holding a broken sword, and a man next to a dead tree, and another man with a dog biting his leg....” she trailed off.
“Was there one with white hair and black eyes?”
She looked at me wide-eyed, nodded. “Gave me the all-overs.” She shivered.
The Chandrian. It was a vase showing the Chandrian and their signs.
“Can you remember anything else about the pictures?” I asked. “Take your time, think hard.”
She thought about it. “There was one with no face, just a hood with nothing inside. There was a mirror by his feet and there was a bunch of moons over him. You know, full moon, half moon, sliver moon.” She looked down, thinking. “And there was a woman....” She blushed. “With some of her clothes off.”
“Can you remember anything else?” I asked. She shook her head. “What about the writing?”
Nina shook her head. “This was all foreign writing. It didn’t say anything.”
“Do you think you could draw any of the writing you saw on it?”
She shook her head again. “I only saw it for half a moment,” she said. “Me and Jimmy knew we’d catch a beating if his da caught us.” Her eyes welled up with sudden tears. “Are demons going to be coming for me too, cause I seen it?”
I shook my head reassuringly, but she burst into tears anyway. “I been so scared since what happened out at Mauthen’s,” she sobbed. “I keep having dreams. I know they’re going to come get me.”
I moved to sit next to her on the bed and put my arm around her, making comforting noises. Her sobbing slowly wound down. “Nothing is going to come and get you.”
She looked up at me. She was no longer crying, but I could see the truth of things in her eyes. Underneath it all she was still terrified. No amount of gentle words would be enough to reassure her.
I stood and went over to my cloak. “Let me give you something,” I said, reaching into one of the pockets. I brought a piece of the sympathy lamp I was working on in the Fishery, it was a disk of bright metal covered with intricate sygaldry on one side.
I brought it back to her. “I got this charm when I was in Veloran. Far away, across the Stormwal mountains. It is a most excellent charm against demons.” I took her hand and pressed it into her palm.
Nina looked down at it, then up at me. “Don’t you need it?”
I shook my head. “I have other ways of keeping safe.”
She clutched it, tears spilling down her cheeks again. “Oh thank you. I’ll keep it with me all the time.” Her hands were white-knuckled around it.
She would lose it. Not soon, but in a year, or two, or ten. It was human nature, and when that happened, she would be even worse off than before. “There’s no need for that,” I said quickly. “Here’s how it works.” I took her hand that clutched the piece of metal and wrapped it in my own. “Close your eyes.”
Nina closed her eyes, and I slowly recited the first ten lines of
I finished and she opened her eyes. They were full of wonder, not tears.
“Now it’s tuned to you,” I said. “No matter what, no matter where it is, it will protect you and keep you safe. You could even break it and melt it down and the charm would still hold.”
She threw her arms around me and kissed my cheek. Then stood suddenly, blushing. No longer pale and stricken, her eyes were bright. I hadn’t noticed before, but she was beautiful.
She left soon after that and I sat for a while on my bed, thinking.
Over the last month I had pulled a woman from a blazing inferno. I had called fire and lighting down on assassins and escaped to safety. I had even killed something that could have been either a dragon or a demon, depending on your point of view.
But there in that room was the first time I actually felt like any sort of hero. If you are looking for a reason for the man I would eventually become, if you are looking for a beginning, look there.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-THREE
Return
That evening i gathered up my things and made my way down to the common room. The townsfolk eyed me and murmured excitedly among themselves. I overheard a few comments as I walked to the bar, and realized that yesterday most of them had seen me wrapped in bandages, presumably with terrible wounds underneath. Today the bandages were gone, and all they saw were some minor bruises. Another miracle. I fought to keep from smiling.
The sullen innkeeper told me that he couldn’t possibly dream of charging me, seeing as how the entire town was in my debt and all that. I insisted. No no. Absolutely not. He wouldn’t hear of it. If only there was something else he could do to show his gratitude.
I put on a thoughtful expression. Now that he mentioned it, I said, if he happened to have another bottle of that lovely strawberry wine ...
I made my way to Evesdown docks and got a seat on a barge heading downriver. Then, while I was waiting, I asked if any of the dockworkers had seen a young woman come through here in the last couple days. Dark haired, pretty ...
They had. She had been by yesterday afternoon and shipped downriver. I felt a certain amount of relief, knowing that she was safe and relatively sound. But other than that, I didn’t know what to think. Why hadn’t she come to Trebon? Did she think I had abandoned her? Did she remember anything we had talked about that night as we lay on the greystone together?
We docked in Imre a few hours after dawn, and I went straightaway to Devi’s. After some spirited bargaining, I gave her the loden-stone and a single talent in order to wipe out my extremely short term loan of twenty talents. I still owed my original debt, but after all I’d been through, a four-talent debt no longer seemed terribly ominous, despite the fact that my purse was largely empty again.
It took a while to put my life back together. I’d only been gone four days, but I needed to make apologies and give explanations to all manner of people. I’d missed an appointment with Count Threpe, and two meetings with Manet, and a lunch with Fela. Anker’s had gone without a musician for two nights. Even Auri reproached me gently for not coming to visit her.
I’d missed classes with Kilvin, Elxa Dal, and Arwyl. They all accepted my apologies with gracious disapproval. I knew that when next term’s tuitions were set, I would end up paying for my sudden, largely unexplained absence.
Most important were Wil and Sim. They had heard rumors of a student attacked in an alley. Given Ambrose’s smugger-than-usual expression of late, they expected I had been run out of town, or, at worst, that I was weighted down with rocks at the bottom of the Omethi.
They were the only ones that got a real explanation of what had happened. Though I didn’t tell them the entire truth about why I was interested in the Chandrian, I did tell them the whole story, and showed them the scale. They were appropriately amazed, though they did tell me in plain terms that next time I would leave a note for them or there would be hell to pay.
And I looked for Denna, hoping to make my most important explanation of all. But, as always, looking did no
