It hovered above me, a deformed face with elements of the human and of the iguana. Its fleshless lips were parted, showing tiny teeth. I shrank toward the wall, cold with terror, and babbled a snatch of Kideti prayer: “From what is unseen… from what is afoot before dawn…”
“You had a bad dream,” the demon said in the language of the north. Its voice was husky and childish, with a slight lisp.
“God of my father,” I whispered, trembling. I wiped my face on the sheet. The shapes in the room began to resolve themselves: I recognized the window and marked the position of the screen, and knew that the figure before me was no monster, but the scarred child. She was dressed in a tattered blue shift, made no doubt from a worn-out robe, and her soft hair, unplaited, stood up around her head. She was holding a saucer of oil in which a twist of cotton was burning with a light that fluttered like a dying insect.
“You shouted,” she said.
“No doubt I did,” I muttered.
“What did you dream about?”
“An angel,” I said. I looked up into her face, trying to focus on her beautiful eyes with their vibrancy, their sweet directness. She looked back at me curiously.
“If you have a bad dream, you should never stay in bed. You should get up. Look.” She set the saucer of oil on the floor, took my wrist, and pulled until I got up from the pallet. Then she stretched her arms above her head. “You do this. Yes. Now you turn around.” Slowly we rotated, our hands in the air, our shadows huge on the walls, while the child recited solemnly:
“There,” she said, letting her arms fall. She smiled at me, brightness brimming in her eyes. “You ought to say it around a garlic plant, but we’re not allowed out at night. The others are on the roof. Do you want to go up?”
I nodded and put on my shirt, and the child picked up her meager light and glided soundlessly into the hall. The rooms were black and vacant; we surprised rats in the corners. The air was chill, with the odor of moldy straw. I saw that a radhu—often so bright, so cheerfully domestic—could also be a place of stark desolation. The bare feet of the child were silent on the cold stone floors, and the light she held up trembled under the arches.
At last we came to a narrow stairway where the air was fresh and the stars looked down through a triangular hole in the roof. The stairs were so steep that the girl crawled up and I followed the soles of her feet, already hearing soft voices outside. We emerged onto the roof, into the immeasurable night. The sky was littered with sharp, crystal stars. A sliver of moon diffused its powdery light onto the ruined house and the consummate stillness of the surrounding fields.
“Jevick!” Miros cried in a voice so heavily laden with feeling that I knew he was drunk even before I saw him. “Thank Avalei you’ve come. This is terrible. It’s been terrible.”
I moved toward him. Vines rustled about my ankles.
“Amaiv!” said a sharp voice. “What are you doing with that light? Put it out, and don’t spill the oil.”
The little girl blew out the light obediently. “He had a bad dream, yamas.”
“A bad dream.” Miros sighed. “Even sleep is dangerous…”
They sat against the low wall along the edge of the roof, where the vines made a thick curtain over the stone. Miros was holding a bottle and looking down, his face in shadow; the girl with the obstinate chin rested her head on his shoulder. A little apart from them sat the tall girl in the scarf, her legs splayed out and her toes pointing inward. I supposed she was half-witted. I stumbled over an empty bottle as I approached them and then sat down among the vines.
“Careful,” Miros said. “If you fall off the roof, vai, I’ll have killed an avneanyi on top of everything.”
The girl leaning against him began to giggle and could not stop. Miros held the bottle unsteadily toward me. “There, my friend,” he said. “Drink. I’ve given it all to Laris. We are drinking through her hospitality now.”
I drank some of the cleansing teiva and handed back the bottle. The scarred girl, like a deft little animal, curled up her legs beside me.
“You should be in bed,” the girl with Miros reprimanded her, suddenly recovering from her giggles.
“I can’t sleep,” the child protested, wheedling.
“You’ll sleep soon enough, and then who’s going to carry you downstairs?”
“I’ll sleep on the roof,” said the child decidedly.
“You can’t sleep on the roof.” The sister had lowered her head like an angry cow. It was this, along with the dogged way she spoke, and her slurred consonants, which showed me that she was very drunk as well.
Miros had one arm around her. He caressed the top of her head, and she nestled back into his shoulder with a sigh. He raised his head and looked at me, and the moonlight showed his features blurred with drink. “This is Laris,” he said brokenly. “This is Laris, a true daughter of the Valley. I’ve already given her two bottles of teiva. It was all I had. I’m going to give her everything I own. It will never be enough. Never enough for the Night Market.”
“Everything?” said Laris slyly, tugging the neck of his tunic.
“Ah gods,” Miros groaned. “You see how it’s been, my friend. Drink again. Don’t take such little sips; it won’t do anything. Let no one reject her hospitality.”
“That’s right.” Laris smirked.
I drank, more to dispel my own embarrassment than from a real desire for teiva. The drink made the stars look brighter, cut out of the sky with a tailor’s scissors. Dogs bayed away in the long fields.
“Laris, Laris,” Miros said sadly. “You don’t know who I am.” He rested his head on the wall, his features smooth in the delicate light. “Nobody knows who I am,” he murmured. “Except perhaps my uncle. Not even Jevick knows, and he is my best friend east of Sinidre.”
“I know who you are,” said Laris.
“No.” Miros shook his head wearily, rolling it back and forth on the wall. “No one knows. Not one of you. Jevick.” I felt him looking at me, though his eyes were lost in shadow. It was his cheek that shone, his brow. “You think I’m a gentleman, Jevick,” he said hoarsely. “But you are wrong. I have no honor. I forget everything, everyone. I will even forget the Night Market one day. I will forget it long enough to laugh again. It makes me hate myself… I tried to go into the army once. To be sent to the Lelevai. Everyone said I wouldn’t go through with the training. And they were right. I drank too much—you know, when you’re wearing a sword, they give you credit everywhere—and the way I gambled! Well, I had to give back the sword. For a year I thought I would die of shame. I had proved them right, my brothers, my uncles, everyone… But then—” He shrugged. “I didn’t have the courage to kill myself, either. It seemed so much more sensible to go hunting…”
He laughed, but even the moonlight showed the stiffness around his mouth. “The truth is, I have only been good for two things in my life: and those are hunting and londo. Even in love I have been a failure. Even in serving a goddess. And that is why, my Laris, I sleep alone.”
He kissed the top of her head. “No, no,” the girl said dully, clawing vaguely at the neck of his tunic. “I know who you are. You are the man foretold to me in the taubel, the man with the long shadow.”