“You are as alive as I am,” I said, “and you are yourself. If you are not the Lukassa I followed here, maybe there never was any such person. Myself, I cannot again be the Tikat I was, and I am well content with that, as long as you and I recognize each other.” I opened my hand then, and she took hers away, but then brought it back so that our fingertips touched. I said, “What do we do now, Lukassa? I thought we could go home, back to those two other people, but we never can.”
“No,” she said very quietly. “Lal would take me along with her, if I asked her, but only because I asked. And Soukyan—” She spread her hands out, and I saw the scars I had been feeling, the two long cloudy blotches on the pale right palm, and the dark whiplash across the back, just below the ring. She said, “Soukyan would take me if Lal asked. So there we are.” Her smile was not the one I knew.
I took her hand and kissed the scarred palm. She clenched it for a moment, then let it fall open again. I said, “I would take you anywhere, but I don’t know a place to go.” We were quiet for a little, and then I added, “We could always stay here and work at the inn. Grow old with Karsh.”
It was said as a joke, but her face clouded and I realized that she had taken me seriously. I was just beginning to explain when the tafiya coughed politely behind us. He said, “If nobody would mind a suggestion?”
How long had he been awake and listening? We never knew. You never do know with him. We turned together, and there he sat, green eyes as mocking as the fox’s yellow eyes. Very full of himself, he was, exactly like the fox.
“It seems that my lamisetha can wait a bit longer,” he said. “I will take you with me.” When he looked at Lukassa, his eyes changed. He said to her, “I have passed the gates of death myself, but I was worse than dead. I would have been worse than dead through all eternity, if not for you. So you have a claim on me that I will never outlive. Also—”
Lukassa shook her head fiercely. She said, “What I did, I did without choice, without any idea of what it all meant. I have no claim on anyone.” Her voice was tired and flat.
“Don’t interrupt,” the old man said severely. “I turned Soukyan to stone once for ten minutes, for interrupting me one time too many.” But he was smiling at Lukassa almost with admiration. He said, “Also. Apparently my need to be forever teaching somebody something has survived the black gate as well as I. If you have sense enough to come with me, I may be able—”
Lukassa broke in again, “I do not want to be a wizard. Not for me, not ever.” She took hard hold of my hand again.
The old man sighed. “Is Lal a wizard? Is Soukyan a wizard? Be quiet and pay attention. If you come home with me, it is possible that I may in a while remember a way to let this Lukassa and that Lukassa—the one still there in the riverbed—visit each other, talk together, perhaps even live together. Then again, perhaps not—I promise nothing. But the roof doesn’t leak, and the food is generally quite good, and the house is a restful one.” He grinned then, a joyous, teasing, snaggle-mouthed grin, and I recalled Redcoat’s words, the fox’s words—Bones full of darkness, blood thick and cold with ancient mysteries. He added, “A little disquieting, just from time to time, but restful.”
Lukassa said firmly, “Tikat has to come too. I will not come without him.” The tafiya looked at me and raised his caterpillar eyebrows slightly. I said, “I can work, you know that. And what I can learn from being in your house, I will.” It made me nervous, to be talking to him in this way, and I kept turning Lukassa’s ring around and around on her finger, hardly aware that I was doing it.
The tafiya said nothing for a long time. He seemed to be looking, not at either of us, but at the fox, who presently yawned in his face, jumped down off the bed and trotted importantly away, tail high. Finally he said, and his tone was oddly melancholy, “You are as welcome as Lukassa, Tikat, but I would think carefully in your place, because you may find yourself learning more than you meant to learn. There are gifts and dreams and voices in you that may wake in my house, as they would nowhere else. So I would be very careful.”
I did not know how to answer him. I kept toying with Lukassa’s ring until it slipped over the knuckle and almost off her finger into my hand. She clutched at it immediately, saying, “Don’t, don’t do that, I must never take it off. Lal gave it to me when she raised me—if I lose it, I will die for good, fall to the dust I should have been so long ago.” Her hands were damp and shaking, and her face was old with fear.
The tafiya gazed at her with such concern, such tenderness that for a moment his face became like hers—he looked like her, how else can I say it? Only for a moment, it was, but I will remember it when I have forgotten every feat of wizardry I ever saw him do. Very, very gently, he said to her, “Lukassa, it is not so. I gave Lal that ring, and I should know. It was made to comfort and quiet certain sorrows, nothing more. Your life is yours, not the ring’s. Lukassa’s heart and soul and spirit are what keep Lukassa alive, not a dead green stone in a piece of dead metal. Give me the ring, and I will prove it to you.”
It took a long time for her to stop trembling and listen to him, and even then she would not take off the ring, for all his talk and mine. At first she said nothing but, “No,” over and over, into her fists; but at last she turned to the old man and told him, “I will give it to Lal. When we leave here, Tikat and I, to go with you, then I will give it back to Lal, and she can return it to you if she chooses. Or not.”
And from there she would not budge. The tafiya shook his head and blew through his beard and grumbled, “If we begin like this, teacher and student, how shall we end? You minded me better when I was a griga’ath.” But he had to be content with her decision all the same, and I think he was, in his way.
THE INNKEEPER
It has never been right since, I don’t care what he said or how great a wizard he was. Oh aye, everything works, if that’s what you mean by rightness, and some things work even better—I’m not such a fool as to say they don’t. But none of that is the same as being the way it was. Things can be replaced, fixed up perfectly, but they can’t be put back. Repaired doesn’t mean right.
Never mind, never mind—it isn’t worth the trouble, and besides there’s not much more to tell. The next two weeks were chaos, no more and no less. Marinesha and Rosseth had to run the inn—pity me, gods!—while I spent my time groveling and begging pardon before angry guests, injured guests (mercifully, a very few; as for the Kinariki wagoner, we never did find him again), and guests so terrified that some of them would not come back even for their belongings, not to mention settling their bills. Not only did I lose any number of valuable old customers, but of course the story got around everywhere, and I’ve been from that day to this building my clientele back to something like what it used to be. No wizard offered to help with that, I can assure you!
The woman Lal let me know that she and her companions would be leaving at last, as soon as the wizard and the little Lukassa were fit to travel. She also expressed her regrets—pointlessly but quite prettily, I will say—for all the troubles that had come with them to plague The Gaff and Slasher. “All the troubles”—as if she could have understood the half of what her lot had done to my life. But it was a change to have someone ask my pardon, so I told her we’d say no more about it, and let it go. Miss Nyateneri never bothered with any apology of her own, but that’s as well. I couldn’t have dealt with any more shocks just then.