"So you wouldn't get any ideas about trying to attack me when I let you loose."
She thought about herself left alone in this place with no one but a corpse and an unseen presence, lost in the middle of infinite blackness. She bit her lip and humiliation came on the heels of the fear. This was worse than being tied up.
"Turn around," Eric ordered.
Aria wiggled herself around and held out her wrists. She felt the bindings loosen. She pulled her wrists apart and brought her arms back around to her front in a riot of creaking, popping joints. She yanked off the remains of the sticky, clothlike stuff that still clung to her skin. She stretched her legs toward Eric. He slit the black strips neatly with one blade of an open pair of scissors. Aria kept her eyes on him as she rubbed her wrists and arms to get some feeling back. He did not look up.
Eric stepped back, keeping hold of the scissors. Aria wasn't fool enough to try to stand. Instead, she chafed and flexed ankles and knees. She yanked the sticky strips off her leggings and dropped them on the floor. Eric watched her for a moment before he backed toward the window-wall.
"How do you stand it?" Aria straightened her back. "Wha…what's out there."
He shrugged. "I got used to it. The shakes vanish fairly quickly. The rest comes with practice.
"Now, you wanted something to eat."
He drummed the mosaic and another hole opened. Out of this one, he pulled two packets of an unfamiliar shape. He ripped something off them, made yet another hole open in the wall, and dropped both packets inside.
When he came within arm's length again, he was carrying two plates, each topped by a palm-sized slab that might have been made out of the same stuff as the sofa.
"I know it doesn't look like food," he said as she took it from him, "but it will keep you going."
She picked up the slab. Its warmth set her fingers tingling.
She bit one corner. The stuff tasted like bitter nuts and had the consistency of old paste. She made herself finish it off anyway, washed down with more water Eric conjured up from the hole in the wall.
The Nameless Powers know I've eaten worse.
"Tell me, what did Narroways do to finally get itself cursed?" The casual words were strained around the edges, Aria noticed.
She swallowed her mouthful of paste. "Refused to give up during the siege."
"Siege?" he said incredulously.
For a moment, she looked at him like he was insane. "Oh, you had gone before that. It was maybe five years after you left, the Skymen made a full-scale bid for support for…For whatever it is the Skymen want from the Realm. King Sun announced he was going to make them ambassadors to his court and hear all their petitions. The Teachers kept on saying the Skymen were Aunorante Sangh. First City followed the First Teacher, of course, and sides got taken up and so did weapons. Narroways was cursed and the fighting's been going on ever since." She spoke the last words to her cup. She'd spent the past days trying not to worry about where Little Eye, or Roof Beam, or skinny Broken Trail were. She wasn't getting any better at it.
She set the cup down. Eric was scowling at the backs of his strangely bare hands.
"Thank you for the food," she said to get his attention back. When he looked up, Aria squared her shoulders. "Hear me, Eric Born kenu Teacher Hand kenu Lord Hand on the Seablade dena Enemy of the Aunorante Sangh. You don't want me with you, and I don't want to stay. Take me to a Skyman city, I'll manage after that. I'll find a way to pay you for passage and the bruised back."
He laughed sharply at that, but then sobered. "Stone in the Wall dena Aria Born of the Black Wall," Eric said levelly, "you couldn't find your feet in a Skyman city if someone showed you where to look." He shook his head. "All you have seen and Garismit's Eyes, you still don't understand!"
He looked at the closed window-wall. "Garismit's Eyes," he muttered again, "couldn't even find her feet."
"You're not sure of that."
That startled him. "What makes you think so?"
"You've taken my namestones, and you hid the scissors."
He snickered. "That, Notouch, is because you haven't got the sense to be afraid of what is happening to you. Besides, I saw the knife sheaths." He gestured at her arms.
Aria crossed her arms, gripping her empty sheaths.
"And you wonder why I don't want to leave sharp objects lying around." His mouth quirked up into a tight smile before he lapsed back into high-house tones. "Follow me. I'll show Aria where she can sleep."
"As her Teacher commands."
Eric ran his tongue over his lips thoughtfully as he circled the sofa to the back wall. He touched a hand-sized rectangle that was ivory instead of tan. A door-shaped section of the wall slid away as if pulled on invisible strings.
The space on the other side was so small it barely deserved the name "room." An alcove with a slab of the chair stuff in it took up most of the back wall. "Bed" she labeled it. Lines dissected the rest of the wall space into squares. A stool with a hole in it had been welded to the floor in the far corner. That was the extent of the place.
"Two things." Eric crowded his broad frame inside the tiny chamber. "One, the light. Touch here"—he pointed at another white square in the wall, this one above the bed alcove—"once and it goes away. Touch it again, and it comes back.
"Two"—he waved his hand at the stool—"when you need to say hello to a bush, do it in there. Touch here"—this time the square he pointed at was silver—"when you are finished. Understand that?"
"Bed, lamp, bush." She nodded at the appropriate objects.
"Stones."
She whirled around. Eric held out the lumpy black bundle she had made of her headcloth and her treasures.
"Thank you," she said as she took them. This time, she really meant it.
"Sleep until you wake up." Eric walked back out and the door slid shut behind him.
Maybe by then I'll know what to make of you, she could practically hear him thinking. Maybe by then, Teacher Hand, Eric Born, I'll know what to make of you.
Aria sat on the edge of the bed, and for a moment did nothing but hold the bundle of stones tightly against her chest.
"Where are you taking them, Mother?" asked Little Eye from memory. She had run one dirty, nail-bitten finger across the smooth surface of the stone.
"Mother is taking them to learn about the Skymen." Aria tucked them into her pouch one at a time. "She and they will be back soon."
Nameless Powers preserve me—Aria bowed her head over the stones—and do not let me have lied to my daughter.
The memory of Little Eye gave a fresh edge to Aria's resolve. The Skymen sought power in the Realm. Silver on the Clouds, the Heretic King of Narroways, had linked that quest for power to her own. If Aria could learn what was truly going on behind the Skymen's mysteries, if she could bring some skill or piece of knowledge to the Realm, at the very least it would help her family survive the strangeness sweeping the world. At most…Aria let her real hope surface. At most she could bargain with the Narroways lords to raise her family up from the mud and have them declared no longer Notouch. Such things had happened before, maybe only in the apocrypha, but maybe those stories would be enough.
After all, stories have been enough for me most of my life.
Don't lie to yourself. Aria fingered her bundle. If stories had been enough, you wouldn't be here now. You want to make the stories come true.
She undid the knotted cloth. The bundle fell open and the stones glimmered in the stark light of the glowing ceiling. They had taken no damage from her treatment of them. She had known they wouldn't. Perfect and beautiful, they waited for her need.