“… want us to leave now? Tonight? Are you insane, Talis?”
“… you stay you’ll be in danger… go to your sister…”
“… so it was you? You lied to me…”
Nico lifted his head at that. He wondered whether his matarh was talking about the woman the Ambassador had accused Talis of killing.
There was more mumbling, then an exasperated huff from his matarh as she flung the door open, glared once at Nico without seeming to see him, then started gathering pots and utensils and stuffing them loudly into the cloth bags she used when she went to the market, muttering to herself. Talis, in the doorway between the rooms, watched her for a moment and gestured to Nico. He followed Talis into the room, watching as the man shut the door behind them.
“Matarh’s really angry,” Nico said as he sat on the bed
Talis nodded ruefully. “She is that,” he said. “And for good reason. Nico, the two of you need to leave the city. Tonight. You’ll be staying with your tantzia in Ville Paisli, which isn’t far from Nessantico.”
“Are you going with us?”
Talis shook his head. “No. Nico, after what happened, the Garde Kralji is going to be looking for me-the Ambassador is a friend of the Regent, and he’ll have them looking for me. He probably knows my first name and maybe yours, he knows what we look like, and he knows about where we live. We have a few turns of the glass before he can alert anyone, but I’m certain that Oldtown won’t be safe for the two of you soon. So you’re going to have to help your matarh gather up what you can and leave.”
“But the Garde Kralji…” Nico sputtered. “Did you do something wrong, Talis?”
“Wrong? No,” Talis told him. “I’ll explain it all to you when I can, Nico. For now you’re going to have to trust me. Do you trust me, Son?”
Nico nodded uncertainly. He wasn’t certain of anything at the moment. “Good,” Talis said. “I’m going to leave now and arrange for a cart to take you two out of the city-you remember the man I talked to at the Market? Uly? He can help me make those arrangements. When I get back, you and your matarh will need to be ready to leave, so make sure you have everything of yours you want, and help your matarh gather up her things.”
Nico’s mouth tasted sour, and the food he’d eaten burned in his stomach. From the kitchen, he could hear his matarh still packing things. “But if you stay, won’t they find you?”
“I have ways to hide myself if I’m alone, Nico, and I have things I need to do that I can only do here. Also…” Talis paused and tousled Nico’s head. Nico grimaced and ran his fingers through his hair to straighten it again. “What happened earlier has to be a secret, too, Nico-like the rest. If you tell people what you saw, well, you’d be putting your matarh in danger, and you wouldn’t want that, would you?”
“It was magic, wasn’t it?”
Talis nodded. “Yes, it was. And Nico, I think that you…” He stopped, shaking his head.
“What, Talis?”
“Nothing, Nico. Nothing.” Talis was reaching under the bed as he talked, pulling out the leather bag that held the strange metal bowl and putting his clothing and other things into it. “Now, why don’t you start gathering your things? Put them all in one place, and you and your matarh can decide what you’ll take and what you’ll leave here. Go on, now.”
Talis was already looking away, opening the chest at the foot of the bed and pulling out a linen nightshirt. Nico watched him. “Are you a teni?” he asked Talis.
Talis straightened, the linen half in the bag. “No,” he said, and the way Talis said it, not quite looking at him and drawing out the syllable, told Nico that it was a lie, or the kind of evasion of the truth that Nico sometimes used when his matarh asked him if he’d done something he shouldn’t have. “Now go on, boy. Hurry!”
Nico shivered. He left, wondering if he would ever see these rooms again.
Eneas cu’Kinnear
Eneas stood at the stern of the Stormcloud, staring at the storm clouds that appeared to be rushing toward them from behind. The horizon was a foreboding black under the rising thunderheads, a rushing night pricked with intermittent flares of lightning. He could see the blurred sheets of rain lashing the ocean underneath the clouds and hear the grumbling of distant low thunder. The Strettosei had turned a dull gray green that was flecked with whitecaps from the rising wind; the canvas sheets of the two-masted ship booming and cracking as they filled with the gales and thrust the ship through the deepening waves. The bow lifted and sliced uneasily through the moving hills of water; the wild spray speckled the hair of the sailors and soaked the military bashta Eneas wore. He could taste brine in his mouth. The air around him seemed to have chilled drastically in the last few minutes as the first outrunners of the storm stretched toward them. The dipping and rolling of the deck underneath his feet was alarming enough that Eneas found himself clutching at the rail.
He could feel the storm. The energy of it seemed to resonate inside him, and his fingertips tingled with every lightning strike, as if they touched him from a distance.
Chasing us from the west-like the hordes of the Westlanders, crackling with the power of the nahualli. Pursuing us even as we flee, coming to us in our very homes… Eneas shuddered, watching the storm’s approach and imagining he could see the shapes of the Westlander warriors in the clouds, or that the thunderheads were the smoke of sacrificial fires. He wondered what had happened in the Hellins since they’d left. He wondered, and he worried at the omen of the storm.
“You’d best get below to your cabin, O’Offizier. I’ll do what I can, but Cenzi knows there’ll be no calming the sea with this.” The wind-teni assigned to the ship had come up alongside him, unheard against the protest of the sails, the shrill keening of the wind through the rigging, and the urgent calls of the ship’s offiziers to the sailors on deck. She was staring at the storm in the same manner that Eneas would gaze at an enemy force arrayed against him, gauging it and pondering what strategies might work best against it. The task of the wind-teni was to fill the sails of the ship when the natural winds of the Strettosei would not cooperate. They would also strive to calm the storms that raked the deep waters between the Holdings and the Hellins, but that was the harder task, Eneas knew: the Moitidi of the sky were powerful and contemptuous of the Ilmodo and the attempts of the wind-teni to calm their fury.
“A bad one?” Eneas asked her.
The deck lifted as they rose on the next wave, then dropped abruptly as Stormcloud raced down the slope beyond. Eneas wrapped an arm around the rail as water sluiced over the deck; the wind-teni only shifted her weight easily and naturally. “I’ve seen worse,” she answered, but to Eneas’ ears it sounded more like bravado than confidence. “But you never really know what’s behind the thunderheads until it gets here. Let me test it.” Her hands lifted and moved in a spell-pattern, and she chanted in the language of the Ilmodo, her eyes closed as she faced the storm.
Her hands dropped. Her eyes opened and she glanced at him. “O’Offizier, are you also a teni?”
Eneas shook his head, puzzled. “No. I’ve had some little training, but…”
“Ahh…” She paused, her eyes narrowing. “Perhaps that’s it.”
“What?” he asked.
“Just now, when I opened myself to the storm, I thought I felt.. .” She shook her head, and droplets flew from her spray-darkened hair. The first spatters of cold rain hit the deck like tossed stones. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Right now, I have to see what I can do with this. Please, you should go below, O’Offizier…”
The ship lurched again, and with it, Eneas’ stomach. Lightning crackled nearer, and he thought he could feel the strike in his very flesh, raising the hairs on his arms. He gave the wind-teni the sign of Cenzi. “May Cenzi be with you to still the storm,” he told her, and she returned the gesture.