He was like a wolf, circling his prey, each pass bringing him just a bit closer to the kill. She knew where this was headed. The question. It was only a matter of time before he asked her.
“Yes, Weaver.”
“You’ve been gleaning?”
“Yes.”
“Anything interesting?”
“Not so far.”
A pause, and then it would come. It always did.
“Have you found him yet?”
Just once she wanted to ask innocently, Who, Weaver? But the kindness he had shown her had its limits, unlike his ability to hurt her, which had none.
“No, Weaver. Not yet. I’ve asked throughout the city, as I did in Bistan, Noltierre, and Solkara. No one has seen him.”
“It may be time you moved on to Caensse.”
“I still believe he’s in Aneira.”
“So you’ve told me before,” the Weaver said, his voice hardening. “Yet you’ve nothing to show for the four turns you’ve spent there. Thus far, your instincts on this matter have served you poorly. You’re searching for a Qirsi man and an Eibithanan noble whose face is covered with scars. They shouldn’t be this hard to find. If they were in Aneira, you’d have heard something by now.”
Not necessarily, she wanted to say. He’s smarter than you thinly He may be smarter than you. But all she could manage was “He may be avoiding the larger cities. I’ve yet to search the countryside.”
“He wouldn’t go to the smaller towns. You told me yourself that he’s probably searching for you, which means he’ll go where the festivals go.”
Again Cresenne nodded, though she felt her heart clenching itself into a fist. For the first several turns she had assumed that Grinsa would come after her. He didn’t know that she carried his child, but he had loved her, and that should have been enough. She knew there was a new king in Eibithar and she had no doubt that Grinsa had gone to the City of Kings to see him invested. The Revel had been there too, of course, so Grinsa would have learned from one of the other gleaners, probably Trin, that she had left the Revel. At the time she told Trin that she intended to return to Wethyrn, but Grinsa was too clever to believe that. He’d head south.
Or so she thought. Because recently it had become clear to her that he hadn’t followed her at all. He should have found her by now. She had done everything she could to lead him to her. She found the assassin she had hired to kill Brienne, she joined the Festival, she sat in every Qirsi tavern between Mertesse and Noltierre. Everywhere she went, she asked about him, and not subtly. She had done all the things he might expect her to do, and more. She had done everything but stand in the sanctuary bell towers and yell, “Cresenne ja Terba is here!” A blind man could have found her. If he’d been looking.
He loved her. She was certain of it. It had to be the boy’s fault, that stubborn, spoiled brat of a lord. But for all the times she told herself this, there were twice as many when her chest ached as if someone had buried a dagger there. Even now, speaking with the Weaver, when she needed so desperately to hide her feelings, she could not keep the hurt from welling up again, like blood from a wound.
“What is it, child?” the Weaver asked, clearly trying to mask his impatience.
She shook her head, cursing the single tear that ran down her cheek. “Nothing.”
“You’re worried that I’m angry with you.”
Cresenne said nothing. She might be able to lie to him, but if he caught her, he’d kill her right then. And the baby, too. Not for the first time, she used her fear of him to mask her true thoughts.
“I’m not,” he said. “I want to find this man, that’s all. I don’t believe he’s in Aneira.”
“I-I don’t want to go to Caerisse,” she said in a small voice.
He exhaled slowly, as if struggling to keep his ire in check. “Why not?”
“The winds are already blowing cold from the north. The snows are going to be fierce this year. And I don’t want to be up on the steppe when my baby is born.”
There was enough truth in this to conceal her real reason for wanting to stay in Aneira. Snow had already fallen on the steppe, and the cold turns up in Caerisse promised to be brutal. If she was going to travel with one of the festivals after her child came, she preferred to be at least somewhat comfortable.
Besides, she knew that Grinsa was near. She sensed it, just the way she sensed that this baby she carried was going to be a girl. She’d gleaned nothing. She’d had no visions of Grinsa or the Curgh boy. But her body and her heart told her what her mind couldn’t. He was in Aneira. Perhaps she should have explained this to the Weaver, but she feared that he would understand all too well.
“All right,” he said at length, just as she knew he would. When it came to this child, she could get him to agree to almost anything. “Remain in Aneira. Continue your search there. When the rains come and the air grows warmer, you’ll go to Caerisse.”
“Of course. Thank you, Weaver.”
He seemed to stare at her again, his wild white hair stirring in the wind, his features still masked by shadows from the brilliant light behind him.
“If you have a girl,” he said, his voice softening once more, “I hope she looks just like you.”
She will. “Again, thank you,” Cresenne said, making herself smile.
“We’ll speak again soon. If you find him, or hear anything of his whereabouts, remain in Kett, even if the Festival leaves. Make some excuse, but stay there. I don’t want to have any trouble finding you.”
The dream ended abruptly and Cresenne opened her eyes to a room so dark she could barely see to the edge of her bed. The inn was quiet, as was the street outside her window. It must have been well past the midnight bells.
“Damn him,” she whispered in the blackness. She needed to sleep more, but already she had begun to sift through her conversation with the Weaver, searching for anything that might tell her who he was and where she could find him.
She felt the baby move and smiled, placing a hand on her belly.
“Are you awake, too?”
She sat up, propping up her pillow against the bedroom wall and leaning back against it. These encounters with the Weaver always woke the child. Cresenne thought it must be because of how her body reacted to fear-the quickening of her pulse, the tightening of her stomach. How could the baby not notice? A part of her wanted to believe that he or she woke up to offer comfort. Certainly nothing made Cresenne forget the Weaver and all that he represented faster than feeling that tiny body turning somersaults in her belly like a festival tumbler.
“Don’t you know it’s the middle of the night?”
A tiny foot pushed against her hand, then a second.
“So you know, but you just don’t care.”
The feet moved away, but an elbow dug against her side.
“Where’s your father little one? Is he really in Aneira, or am I just fooling myself?”
Not too long ago she had been ready to concede that she must be wrong, that Grinsa couldn’t be in Aneira. But then she heard of the assassination of Bistari’s duke. Immediately she knew that it had to have been the work of the Qirsi. Others were not nearly so quick to reach that conclusion, and she gathered from what she had heard that the use of the garrote and the scrap of Solkaran uniform had succeeded in fooling Eandi nobles and Qirsi ministers alike, including the duke of Kett. Of course, they didn’t know the movement and its tactics as she did. Cresenne thought it had been poorly done, the signs pointing to the king too heavy-handed. To her mind, it bespoke a dangerous overconfidence. More to the point, however, she felt reasonably certain that the murder had been carried out by the same man she sent to Kentigern. Cadel, whom she last saw in Noltierre when she told him of the death of his partner. The killing so closely resembled an assassination he had been hired to carry out in Sanbira a year or two before that she thought it had to be his work.
And since he had pledged himself to finding and killing Gnnsa in order to avenge Jedrek’s death, the fact that he was still in Aneira gave her some cause to hope that the gleaner was as well. It wasn’t much. It was pitifully little, really. But taken with the nameless sense she had that Grinsa was nearby, it was all she needed.