Laric plunked down from the high altitude of his visions. “Pardon?”
“Hard to run off with a girl who can’t walk without a cane.” Shursta studied Laric, watching Laric return his look with full somber intent, as if seeking to read the careful deadpan of his face. “And then, what if her children are born crooked? You’d be polluting your line. Surely the Spectroxes are taunted enough without introducing little lame Sharrar Sarth into the mix. Aren’t you afraid what your family will say?”
“Damisel Sharrar Sarth,” Laric corrected him stiffly, emphasizing the honorific. He tried to govern his voice. “And—and any Spectrox who does not want to claim wit and brilliance and derring-do and that glorious bosom for kin can eat my…”
Shursta clinked his mug to Laric’s. “Relax. Sharrar has already told me she is going to elope with you on your big wooden boat. Two days after she met you. She said she’d been prepared to befriend you, but had not thought to be brought low by your—how did she put it?—incredible height, provocative fingers and… adorable teeth.” He coughed. “She went on about your teeth at some length. Forgive me if I don’t repeat all of it. I’m sure she’s composed a poem about them by now. If you find a proposal drummed up in couplets and shoved under your door tonight, you’ll have had time to prepare your soul.”
The look on Laric’s face was beyond the price of gemmajas. He reached his long arms across the table and pumped Shursta’s hand with both of his, and Shursta could not help laughing.
“Now, my friend,” he said. “Let me buy you a drink.”
It was at the bar Shursta noticed the bleak man in the corner. He looked as if he’d been sitting there so long that dust had settled over him, that lichen had grown over him, that spiders had woven cobwebs over his weary face. The difference between his despair and Laric’s elation struck Shursta with the force of a blow, and he asked, when he returned to Laric’s side, who the man might be.
“Ah.” Laric shook his head. “That’s Myrar Yaspir, poor bastard.”
“Poor bastard?” Shursta raised his eyebrows, inviting more. It was this same dark curiosity, he recognized, that had made him press Hyrryai for details about Kuista’s death the first day they met. He was unused to considering himself a gossip. But then, he thought, he’d had no friends to gossip with in Sif.
“Well.” Laric knocked back a mouthful. His gaze wandered up and to the right. Sharrar once told Shursta that you could always tell when someone was reaching for a memory, for they always looked up and to the right. He’d seen the expression on her face often as she memorized a story.
“All right. I guess it began when he meshed with Adularia Yaspir three years ago. Second mesh-rite for both. No children on either side. He courted her for nearly a year. You could see by his face on their meshing day that there was a man who had pursued the dream of a lifetime. That for him, this was not about the Yaspir name or industry or holdings, but about a great, burning love that would have consumed him had he not won it for his own. Adularia—well, I think she wanted children. She liked him enough. You could see the pink in her cheeks, the glow in her eyes on her meshing day. And you thought—if any couple’s in it past the one year mesh-mark, this is that couple. It’s usually that way for second meshings. You know.”
Shursta nodded.
“So the first year passes. No children. The second year passes. No children. Myrar starts coming here more often. Drinking hard. Talk around Droon was that Adularia wanted to leave him. He was arrested once for brawling. A second time, on more serious charges, for theft.”
“Really?” Shursta watched from the corner of his eye, the man who sat so still flies landed on him.
“Not just any theft. Gems from the Blodestone mines.”
Shursta loosed a low whistle. “Diamonds?”
“Not even!” Laric leaned in. “Semi-precious stones, uncut, unpolished. Not even cleaned yet. Just a handful of green chalcedonies, like the one you’re wearing.”
The breath left Shursta’s body. He touched the stone hanging from his ear. He remembered suddenly how Kuista Blodestone’s gemmaja had come up missing on her person, how that one small detail had so disturbed him that he had admonished his sister to hide her own upon her person, as if the red-speckled stone were some amulet of death. He opened his mouth. His throat clicked a few times before it started working.
“Why—why would he take such a thing?”
Shrugging, Laric said, “Don’t know. They made him return them all, of course. He spent some time in the stocks. Had to beg his wife to take him back. Promised her the moon, I heard. Stopped drinking. But she said that if she was not pregnant by winter, she’d leave him, and that was that.”
“What happened?”
“A few months later, she was pregnant. There was great rejoicing.” Laric finished his drink. “Of course, none of us were paying much attention to the Yaspirs at that time, because we were all still grieving for Kuista.”
“Kuista. Kuista Blodestone?”
Laric looked at Shursta, perturbed, as if to ask, Who else but Kuista Blodestone?
“Yes. We burned her pyre not a month before Adularia announced her pregnancy. Hyrryai was still bedridden. She didn’t leave the darkness of her room for six months.”
“And the child?” Shursta’s mouth tasted like dehydrated fish scales.
“Stillborn. Delivered dead at nine months.” Laric sighed. “Adularia has gone back to live with her sister. Sometimes Myrar shows up for work at the chandlery, sometimes not. Owner’s his kin, so he’s not been fired yet. But I think that the blood is thinning to water on one end, if you know what I mean.”
“Yes,” said Shursta, who was no longer listening. “I…Laric, please…please excuse me.”
Shursta had no memory of leaving the Thirsty Seagull, or of walking clear across Droon and leaving the city by the sea road gates. He saw nothing, heard nothing, the thoughts boiling in his head like a cauldron full of viscera. He felt sick. Gray. Late afternoon, evening, and the early hours of night he passed in that lonely cove where Kuista died. Where he had met Hyrryai. Long past the hour most people had retired, he trudged wearily back to the Blodestone house. Sharrar awaited him in the courtyard, sitting atop the breakfast table, bundled warmly in a shawl.
“You’re back!”
When his sister made as if to go to him, Shursta noticed she was stiff from sitting. He waved her down, joined her on the tabletop. She clasped his cold hand, squeezing.
“Shursta, it’s too dark to see your face. Thunder struck my chest when Laric told me how you left him. Are you all right? What died in you today?”
“Kuista Blodestone,” he whispered.
Sharrar was silent. She was, he realized, waiting for him to explain. But he could not.
“Sharrar,” he said wildly, “wise Sharrar, if stones could speak, what would they say?”
“Nothing quickly,” she quipped, her voice strained. Shursta knew her ears were pricked to pick up any clue he might let fall. Almost, he saw a glow about her skull as her riddle-raveling brain stoked itself to triple intensity. However he tried, he could not force his tongue to speak in anything clearer than questions.
“What does a stone possess other than…its stoneness? If not for wealth…or rarity…or beauty—why would someone covet…a hunk of rock?”
“Oh!” Sharrar’s laughter was too giddy, almost fevered, with relief. She knew this answer. “For its magic, of course!”
“Magic.”
It was not a common word. Not taboo—like incest or infanticide or cannibalism—but not common. Magic had drowned, it was said, along with the Nine Cities.