The moment to escape, if there had ever truly been such a moment, was gone. Tinwright wondered if a real man should offer to take real poison to make up for his crime. Perhaps, he reminded himself, but he wasn’t a real man— not that kind, anyway. “I said you’re not dead, my lady. Elan. You’re alive.”
She tried to lift her head, but could not. Her gaze jumped fearfully from side to side. “What...? Where am I? Oh, no, surely you are lying. You are some demon of the lands before the gate, and this is a test.”
He was surprised to discover that he felt even lower than he had thought he would. “No, Lady Elan, no. You are alive. I could not bear to see you die.” He dropped to his knees and took her hand, still cold as death. “You are in a safe place. I had confederates.” He shook his head. “I make it too grand. A woman I know, one who has been kind enough to tend you, and to help especially with...with your privacies...” He felt himself blushing and was disgusted. Matt Tinwright, man of the world! But something about this woman reduced him to childish embarrassments. “She and I stole you out of the residence.” He could not quite bear to tell her yet that they had dragged her to this place in a laundry basket.
Her eyes were now shut again. “Hendon...”
“He thinks you have run away. He seemed amused, to be honest. He is a bad man, Lady Elan...”
“Oh, the gods have mercy, he will find me. Matt Tinwright, you are a fool!”
“So everyone tells me.”
She tried to rise again, but was far too weak. “I trusted you and you betrayed me.”
“No! I...I love you. I couldn’t bear to...to...”
“Then you are twice a fool. You loved a dead woman. If I could not let myself love you then, how could I now, when you’ve denied me the one release I could hope for?” Tears ran down her cheeks but she did not, or perhaps could not, lift her hands to dry them. Tinwright moved forward with his own kerchief, but as he began dabbing at her face she turned away. “Leave me alone.”
“But, my lady...!”
“I hate you, Tinwright. You are a boy, a foolish boy, and in your childishness you have doomed me to horror and misery. Now get out of my sight. Is there no chance the poison might yet kill me?”
He hung his head. “You have been asleep almost three days. You will regain your strength soon.”
“Good.” She opened her eyes as if to fix his face one last time in her memory, then squeezed them shut again. “At least then I’ll be able to take my own life and do it properly. All gods curse me for a coward, seeking to do the deed with womanish, weak poisons!”
“But...”
“Go! If you do not leave me alone, you craven, I shall scream until someone comes. I think I have the strength for that.”
He stood on the stairs for a long time, uncertain of where to go, let alone what to do. The rains had begun again, turning the muddy alley into a swamp and the Summer Tower into an unlit beacon on a storm-battered coast.
Can’t go back, can’t go forward. He hung his head, felt the cold rain dribble down the back of his neck. Zosim, you nasty godling, you have put me in another trap and I’m sure you’re laughing. Why did I ever think you and your heavenly kind might have changed their minds about me?
“Opal!” Chert shouted, then a fit of coughing snatched what little remained of his breath. He bent over in the doorway, gasping as if he had cut into a bed of dry gypsum. “Opal, get the boy,” he called when he had recovered a little. “We have to hide.” But it was strange she had not come to him already.
He staggered into the back room. It was empty, with no sign of his wife or Flint. His heart, already put to a cruel test with his dash across the Inner Keep and just beginning to slow, instead started to race once more. Where could she be? There were at least a dozen possible places, but Brother Okros and those soldiers could only be a short way behind him and he did not have time to rush around searching blindly.
He went out into Wedge Road and began beating on doors, but succeeded only in frightening their neighbor Agate Celadon half to death. She didn’t know where Opal had gone, nor did anyone else. Chert sent a desperate prayer to the Earth Elders as he sprinted toward the guildhall as fast as his weary legs could take him.
There seemed to be more people around the venerable building than usual, he saw as he hobbled up the front steps, important and unimportant folk milling about on the landing before the front door. The inner chamber was equally crowded. Several of the men called to him, but when he only demanded to know whether they’d seen Opal or the boy, they shrugged and shook their heads, surprised that he did not want to hear what they had to say.
Chert almost ran into Chaven in the anteroom of the Council Chamber. The physician caught him, then waited patiently while the exhausted Funderling slowly filled his lungs back up with air.
“I am longing to hear your news,” Chaven said, “but I have been called with some urgency by some of your friends on the Guild Council. It seems a stranger—one of the big folk as you call us, one of my kind—has stumbled into the Council room. Everyone is quite upset about it.”
“By the Lord of the Hot, Wet Stone, don’t go in there!” Chert reached up and grabbed Chaven’s sleeve as tightly as he could. “That’s what I’ve come...come to tell you about. It must be one of Brother Okros’ soldiers—maybe even Okros himself!”
“Okros? What are you talking about?” Now Chert had the physician’s full attention.
“I’ll tell you, but...but if they are already in the guildhall, I fear my news is too late.” Chert slumped to the floor, panting. “I’ll just c-catch my breath, then I ha-have to find Opal.”
“Tell me first,” Chaven said. “The keepers of this hall told me it is only one man. Perhaps we can take him prisoner before his fellows realize where he has gone.” He stood and waved some of the other Funderlings over, then squatted by Chert once more. “Tell me all.”
“It does not matter,” Chert moaned. “I have lost my family and I can’t find them. Soon the soldiers will be everywhere. There’s nothing we can do, Chaven.”
“Perhaps.” For the first time in a while, the physician seemed his old, confident self. “But that does not mean I will give in to that traitorous thief Okros without a fight.” Chaven turned to the other Funderlings who were beginning to gather around them. “Some of you men must have weapons, or at least picks and stone-axes. Go get them. We’ll capture the one lurking in the Council Chamber first, then make him tell us where his fellows are.”
So now the Funderlings were to follow a paunchy scholar into battle against Hendon Tolly and all the giant soldiers of Southmarch? If Chert had not been so close to weeping, he might even have enjoyed the bleak joke of it, but all he could think was that his people’s world was ending and it was mostly his fault.
“By all the oracles, it is bitter out here!” Merolanna said for perhaps the fifth or sixth time. “I should have brought more furs. Is there nothing in this boat to keep an old woman from freezing to death?”
The young Skimmer Rafe didn’t even look up from his oars. “It’s not a pleasure barge, is it? Fishing boat, that’s what it is. Might be a sealskin in that bag, still.”
The duchess waited for Sister Utta to volunteer her services; then, when Utta did no such thing, she began with evident reluctance to poke among the articles wedged under the bench, sighing loudly. Utta, who was determined not be moved, looked away.
She returned to her inspection of Rafe, their boatman and (at least as long as they were on the water) their guide in unfamiliar territory. It was not just the long Skimmer arms that marked him out, although those were very much in evidence as he plied the oars against the choppy swells of Brenn’s Bay. Some of the other differences were hidden now that he had put on a thin shirt, seemingly more as a sop to convention than as actual protection against the chill bay winds: like his arms, his neck seemed longer than with most folk, and it made a bit of a hump where it joined his back between the shoulder blades.