“I wish thou wouldst sing a song for us now,” Abrid said.
“I don’t have my harp,” Naä said shortly. “And the Myetrans, I’m afraid, have stolen my voice for a while.”
Again she looked at the knife. Again she looked at the sky. “You two,” she said, “at least get out of the orchard here and back somewhere in the woods. And hide! I have to go — ”
“Where art thou going?” Rimgia asked, now on her knees, now rocking back to get her feet under her. She stood.
“I think,” Naä said, “I’m going back to town — to Çiron. Again.”
“Naä?”
For the singer had abruptly turned.
She turned back again. “Yes?”
Rimgia bent to pick up the shawl. “Thank you!”
“For going back?”
“For trading places with me!”
Naä laughed. Then she started again through the trees. If they’ve stolen my voice from me, she thought as she entered the woods to descend the slope, I must steal something from them in return. But what can it be that they’ll sorely, sorely miss?
Qualt was in love with Rimgia.
We’ve written it; it was true.
Thus it would be silly to believe that in the course of all Qualt’s enterprises, she was never once in his mind. But it would be equally simplistic to think she formed some sort of focus for him — that somehow all his acts were envisioned, performed, and evaluated with her image bright before him; that they were done for her. Rather, the sort of social catastrophe that Çiron had undergone takes selves already shattered by the simple exigencies of the everyday and drives the fragments even farther apart, so that the separate selves of love and bravery, misery and despair, run on apace, influencing one another certainly, but not in any way one.
As such catastrophes occasionally evoke extraordinary acts of selflessness or bravery, they sometimes evoke extraordinary efforts to make one part of what is too easily called the self confront another part.
Naä had found Rimgia doubtless because she was not, in that final dash through the woods, looking for her. But once he had conveyed the gravity of what his winged companion had overheard to the Handsman and — a few minutes later — to the Queen at Hi-Vator, Qualt decided with the same force of will that had impelled him for the whole of the day, even to this height, that he must now find Rimgia and speak to her.
Perhaps Qualt’s failure — his only failure, really, among all he’d attempted since the Myetrans came — was because he was so certain he knew where to find her.
The scrabblings on the roof were the footsteps of one Winged One, or three, or perhaps more. On the ground beside the hut, light from the crescent moon was lapped and loosed by a score of beating, crossing, conflicting wings.
Someone, unthinking, mewed.
Someone else went “Shhush!”
Then Qualt lowered himself down from the roof’s edge, feeling for the window, the toes of his right foot catching on the shutter’s planks, while the night air, which minutes before had been a torrent around him, was just a breeze at his back. When he swung his other foot against the shutter, the catch gave and it swung in. Stepping about and finding purchase on the sill, he caught the fingertips of his right hand over the upper lintel and let himself down till he was sitting in the window, holding on to the beam above with one hand and the window’s side with the other, his head — along with both legs — thrust into the darkened hut.
Recalling the motion with which his companion had pushed himself off the upper ledge into the night, Qualt jumped forward and landed in a squat that dropped him low enough to scrape the knuckles on his right hand painfully on the floor. His left hand flailed out because the floor was closer than he’d thought.
Regaining his balance, he whispered, “Rimgia? Abrid?” He stood. “Rimgia…it’s me, Qualt!”
The darkness across the room to his left he recognized as the fireplace, its embers dead. There, next to it, that must have been Kern’s pick. And that was probably Kern’s — or Rimgia’s — fishing pole against the wall.
“Rimgia?” He took another step across the kitchen, feeling suddenly the emptiness of the house as the noises on the roof caused him to lift his eyes but brought forth no sound within.
Didn’t Rimgia sleep in the back, over there?
He pushed the hanging away and stepped inside. From a half-open shutter, light from the moon lay over a pallet, with a wrinkled throw across the matting — not unlike the one he so rarely slept on these summer nights in his cottage down by the dump. “Rimgia?” And Abrid’s sleeping space just beyond the wall…“Abrid?” He said that out full voice three times. Then he said again more softly: “Rimgia?” He stood there; and while the hanging swung behind him, he pulled his lower lip into his mouth to press it with his front teeth — till, at sudden pain, he let it free and put his tongue up over his upper lip now. He rubbed both forearms against his ribs and swallowed and coughed and swallowed again. The chill aloft on the night had been refreshing, but the memory of it made him want to hug himself in his desire for warmth. A vision he’d had, during the whole of the flight down, was of coming in (through the window, more or less as he’d done) to kneel on one knee by her bed, to reach out and touch her shoulder as she slept; then, when his touch startled her awake, so that she lifted her head, pulling copper hair over the pillow (the moonlight was supposed to be full silver, not just this gauze of half shadow), he would say…Qualt took another breath, stepped forward, dropped to a squat, knees winging up beside him, and reached for the bed. He only rested his wide fingers on the wrinkled throw, however, while he tried to take in the fact that she was really not here.
Still, if she was absent, it was her absence. And everything hers was, it seemed, extraordinarily important at this moment.
“Rimgia,” he said, “I like thee — like thee a lot! Dost thou like me? I mean…really like me?”
Then, because of the scrabbling above, Qualt was up, into the other room (to flee the vacant house that had just held his bravest act that day), to vault onto the sill and twist about, reach up for the lintel, his broad feet — a moment later — disappearing above it.
Chapter Six
“What’s going to happen to him, do you think? They’re gonna kill him?”
Uk said, “Executed at dawn — that’s the prince’s order.”
There was a grunt in the darkness. “Pretty rough on the lieutenant.”
Uk said, “About as rough as it gets.” He chuckled. It was a dry, dreary, unfeeling chuckle — one he’d started coming out with to make himself seem less feeling than he was. Now, he noted, he did not indeed feel much.
“He was a good officer, Lieutenant Kire,” another voice said from the dark on the other side. (No one else had laughed.) “He was always fair.”
And another: “He was the best.”
“He was a damned good officer,” Uk said. “It’s too bad — but I guess I understand it. I don’t like it. But I understand it.”
“Sabotage? Incompetence, treason? You think the charges are fair?”
“I don’t know,” Uk said. “I don’t know if anything in this war is fair or unfair. But I was standing right out there with the prince when the lieutenant was in there talking to her. He’s in there telling her how he’s been disobeying orders, trying to make things easier on the villagers, making a flogging of ten lashes into two, things like that. She’s supposed to be a prisoner, and he told her right out she could leave if she wanted. I heard him.”