Lukassa shuddered. I could feel it where we sat, as though the earth had shuddered beneath both of us. She would not look at me. I said, “There is no other. If you want her back, that part of yourself, you must go to him.”
“I will not. I will not.” I could barely hear her, so low she spoke. She clenched her hands on the bedframe, looking down at her knees pressed tightly together. “Let me alone. I will not.”
“He loves you,” I said. “Little as I know of love, I know that much past doubting.” But she shook her head so that I heard the very gristle of her neck crack, crying to me, “Lal, no, let be, I cannot bear this.” She called me by my name rarely, and Nyateneri not at all. I touched her to comfort her—as clumsily as Nyateneri had me—but she pushed my hand away and sat still until we heard booted feet on the stair again. Then she turned to face me, paler than ever, but seeing me out of dry, steady eyes.
“I do not know if I want her back,” she said. “That Lukassa.” Then Nyateneri had pushed the door open with her foot and was inside with her arms full of bottles of Dragon’s Daughter. She was smiling savagely—I half-expected to see bits of Karsh’s habitual dirty smock stuck between her teeth. She said, “A simple misunderstanding. I knew it would turn out so, once I explained the situation.”
Perhaps it was the effects of exhaustion, reaction to her fight for life, or perhaps I am simply as vain as I’ve always suspected, but Nyateneri had a weaker head than I that night. No more wincing, no grimaces: she drank straight from the bottle like any common soldier, and it took distinctly less than one bottle before she began to tell us about the convent she had fled. I was right about that, after all, if about precious little else.
“It’s deep in the west country,” she said. “No, you don’t know it, Lal, it’s not anywhere near any place you could know, as much journeying as you’ve done. The closest town is Sumildene, and it’s not close at all, and no one goes there who doesn’t have to.” Which is true enough, as I know, having been once to Sumildene, but there was no reason to go into that. Nyateneri said, “West and south of Sumildene, the land turns boggy, no good for anything but tilgit farmers, and not many of those.” She grinned at our stares. “Tilgit? It’s a kind of marsh weed: you dry it out and pound it forever and it makes a perfectly disgusting porridge that seems to keep people alive until they’d rather die than eat any more of the stuff. Oh, we did look forward to fast-days at the convent. I’d have run away for that reason alone.”
“What is it called,” I asked, “that place?” Nyateneri spread her hands and smiled apologetically. I asked then, “How long did you live there?”
“Twenty-one years,” Nyateneri said quietly. “From the time I was nine years old.” She answered my next question before I voiced it. “Eleven years. I have been fleeing them for eleven years.”
Lukassa sipped her wine, wrinkling her nose and mouth into a dainty sneeze. She said, “I don’t understand. What kind of a convent could that be?”
Nyateneri did not answer. I said, “A convent that forbids its sisters ever to break their vows. There are such.” The fox had come down from the table and curled in a corner, bright eyes glittering under drowsy lids. I continued: “But I have never heard of a convent that would pursue a recusant for eleven years, let alone set assassins after her.” When Nyateneri opened a second bottle without looking at me, a mischief took me to add, “I must say, I don’t think much of trackers who take that long a time to run down their quarry. I’d have found you in two years, at most, and I know those who would have done it within one.”
It was purest bait, of course, and Nyateneri must have known it for bait immediately. In any event, she took a great soldier’s swig, set the bottle down so that the wine jumped from the neck, and said to the walls, “The first ones caught me in less time than that. The convent breeds none but the best.”
That left me breathless and speechless, I confess it. Nyateneri was well into the second bottle before I was able to ask, “The first ones? There were—there have been others?”
Nyateneri’s smile this time, made her look old. “Two other teams. They hunt in teams, and there is no losing them. You have to kill them.” The smile clenched on me, exactly as I had imagined it gripping fat Karsh. Nyateneri said, “By and by, more swiftly than you’d think, the word gets back to the convent, and then a new team comes after you. I am the first ever to survive three such hunts. They will be displeased.”
It took Lukassa to speak again, after a long silence, to ask the question that I was too profoundly bewildered to ask. She said, “Why? Why must they kill everyone who leaves them? They wouldn’t do that if they knew what it was to be dead.” There was an unpitying gentleness about her voice that was strangely terrible to hear. I can hear it still.
Nyateneri put her unhurt hand on Lukassa’s hand. She did not squeeze at all, or stroke it; only left it there for a little moment. “I rather think they do know,” she said, “more than most, anyway. They have too much knowledge at that place, too many secrets, and that is what may not leave.” Lukassa drew breath for another question, but Nyateneri forestalled it, laughing and mimicking her, not unkindly, in a child’s eager voice. “ ‘What secrets, what knowledge?’ Oh, they are grand and foul secrets, Lukassa, dreadful secrets, secrets of kings, queens, priests, generals, judges, ministers: secrets that would shake down temples here, an empire there, start this war, end that, compel her to flee her crown, him to slay himself, them to destroy a nation in order to keep one pitiful truth hidden. Stupid secrets, stupid secrets.”
She slapped the other hand down on the table: not hard, but hard enough so that her lips flattened and her face lost a half-shade of color. I said, “Let me see that,” but she held the hand out away from me and went on talking, her voice not less but more even than before. “The convent is very old. I do not know how old. The people there are of all kinds, some old, some quite young, as I was. The one thing they have in common is that they all bring their secrets with them. You must, everyone must have at least one secret to tell, or you cannot be admitted.”
“You were nine years old,” I said. I held her eyes with mine while I reached for her hand again. The back and the beginning of the wrist felt cushiony with heat, but my fingertips could find nothing broken. Nyateneri closed her eyes. “I had secrets enough for them. They were happy to take me in, and I—I was content there, I was, for a long time. I grew strong there. I learned a great deal. Pour me some more wine or give me my hand back. What garden spell are you working now?”
“No magic—only something I’ve seen done in the South Islands to fool pain. At times I can do it. They taught you much about pain in the convent, didn’t they?”
Nyateneri emptied her mug in two gulps. She said, “I knew somewhat already,” and then nothing for a long time while she drank and I drank, and I worked on her hand. Lukassa sat on the bed and watched us both, slipping some of her wine to the fox when she thought I wasn’t looking. The tree hisses at the window; outside on the landing, slow feet tramp by, a heavy voice grumbles a sea-song—the sailor on his way to bed. Further off, next room but one, the holy man and woman are chanting in quiet antiphony. I know the prayer, a little.
“Why did you leave?” Her hand was beginning to respond—I have no idea why that island trick works as it does, and I am never comfortable with the sense of near-scalding water pumping through my own flesh, even though I know it to be illusion. But it does work.