“It is a city of contrasts,” he said diplomatically, when Accacia turned to him. “I thank you for bringing me to see it.” He smiled. “Someone has taken the time to grow beautiful roses.” He indicated a tiny garden wedged between a cow pen and a closed shop, where a yellow rose vine bloomed.
Accacia sniffed. “Some of them keep flowers—but what is the use of it? They are only peasants. They would do better to grow beans in that space.”
It was then, as they turned a corner approaching the harbor, that Teb saw the slave children. A straggling line of ragged children hardly more than babies, carrying heavy bundles on their shoulders, in from the barges at the quay. Five children pulled a wheelless sledge piled with packets of cloth and long bundles that might have held spears. Teb could see chain marks on the children’s ankles. He supposed they slept chained at night, as he once had. Tattered tunics covered their backs, likely hiding scars from the lash. He wanted to leap down and cut them loose, and fight whoever would stop him. As he passed close to a line of straining children, he saw the blank, mindless stares that told him the rest of the story.
Beside him Accacia kicked her horse around a pile of barrels and seemed hardly to notice that her gelding nearly trampled three small children struggling with a hamper of clay jugs.
Seastrider had begun to tremble, shivering, so he leaned to rub her neck. She spoke to him with pain, not in words but with the same fury he felt. Seastrider, like every singing dragon, knew clearly all the sins and pain of Tirror’s long past. Yet she was driven to fury at the sight of the small slave children.
The four pages stopped at the foot of the cobbled street where it met the quay, and Kiri turned to look back. Their eyes met again for a moment; then he saw Accacia watching, and looked away. If this girl was Accacia’s scapegoat, it had not seemed to quell her spirit.
They took a different route returning to the palace, through a nearly abandoned part of the city where a few rag people camped between the broken walls in rooms without roofs. They circled the huge, stonewalled gaming stadium, flanked by a tangle of paintless cottages pushing so close to one another there was no room for animal pens. Accacia had begun a monologue about the intricacies of her family background, to which Teb hardly listened, when suddenly ahead a door opened, and a man with red hair and red beard threw a bucketful of dirty water into the gutter. Teb jerked Seastrider’s halter and stared. Garit. It was Garit. He swallowed back a shout and looked away. It was all he could do not to gallop ahead, leap down, and fling his arms around Garit.
Garit stood filling the doorway with his broad shoulders, his red hair and beard like flame, his eyes following the four pages. He hardly looked at Teb as he passed, surely did not recognize him, grown up. Memories flooded back, Garit teaching him to ride when he was five, holding his horse while he mounted, Garit saddling his mother’s mare and bringing a newly broken colt for her to ride. Garit’s reassuring voice, the night he helped Teb escape from Sivich’s army.
Teb leaned down to adjust his boot so he could look back. Garit returned his look seemingly without recognition. Yet was there a spark deep in his eyes? Teb could not be sure.
It had been four years. Teb had been only a child when he escaped from Sivich that night. He had grown, filled out, his face changed maybe more than he guessed. Teb stared ahead, filled with excitement. Garit was here in Dacia. Then maybe Camery was, too.
He made note of where he was in the city. When the entourage turned up a side street, Accacia was still talking, as if her pedigree was infinitely fascinating to him.
“. . . and her mother was my aunt Rhemia, so of course that makes me cousin to Abisha and in direct line of the throne in my own right, even if I were not to marry him.” She stopped speaking long enough to smile. Teb thought her vanity served her in one way. It had helped her retain her own history, even though her view of it was narrow and dull. Prince Abisha, riding ahead, did not turn to look back, though he must have heard her remarks. Accacia prattled on, seemingly unaware of her tastelessness. “That is on my father’s side, of course. I lived with my mother’s sister after my own parents died—with my aunt and cousin, the little page up there, Kiri. When my aunt died I saw to it, of course, that Kiri. . .”
Teb had ceased to listen and was watching Kiri. She was walking with a tighter gait, as if held by some new tension, as if she wanted to break away running and kept herself steady with effort. As the horses stepped out faster, heading for home, she swung out ahead of them as if relieved.
Had he seen her turn to look at Garit as she passed him? Garit’s hand had come up just then to stroke his beard, and Teb’s mind had been filled with his presence, so he was really not aware of Kiri.
Now tension filled Teb as the possibilities teased at him. Could there be a connection between them? He thought of the way the dragons responded to Kiri, of seeing her in the candle shop that he thought could be a rebel meeting place. He thought of seeing her return to her cottage late one night, despite the dangers of the city. He watched her striding ahead, his mind filled with possibilities. He meant to find out about Kiri. Just as surely as he meant to return to Garit.
Chapter 10
Kiri burned with impatience after Garit signaled her. The slow march back through the city seemed endless. What could be so urgent that he would stand in plain view of the king’s entourage the whole time it was passing? The traps the king had set around the city? But she had told him about the traps, and together they had sprung seven and destroyed them. Had they missed one? Had one of the cats been caught? Her heart lurched. Elmmira? But it did no good to imagine such things.
When at last they reached the palace stable, she ducked away from the other pages, into a storeroom beneath the horsemaster’s dwelling to wait until the pages had gone on. From the shadows she heard Roderica’s voice and Accacia’s as the two young women mounted the stairs above her head, probably to comb their hair and repair face coloring in Roderica’s room, after sweating in the morning sun.
When they had gone she went quickly through the palace and servants’ quarters, then through the side gate and down to her own cottage, where she changed into rags. Gram forced two oatcakes at her and some hot tea, which she gulped. The old woman’s bright eyes questioned, but Kiri could only say, “Garit wants me—I don’t know why.” She tangled her hair, hugged Gram and kissed the old woman’s wrinkled cheek, then was off through narrow back streets toward the core of the city.
Perhaps Garit’s urgency had to do with the new child slaves. The children must have been brought by the three new boats that rode in the harbor. The youngsters looked so thin and hopeless. She could imagine what they were fed, and how they slept at night, squeezed together for warmth in their thin garments. The loads they had carried looked far too heavy. Those children would grow up bent in their bodies as well as their spirits, cowed and unresisting. There were the blinded wolves, too. The memory of them sickened her. They were not of Dacia; there had been no speaking wolves in the country for years. These poor animals had come by ship, just as the slave children had.
When she reached Garit’s lane just past noon, it was busy and crowded. Three women whispered and laughed as they gathered laundry from fences, half a dozen beggars rummaged in a heap of trash, and on the corner two men argued, swearing, over a stack of cured goat hides. Kiri sauntered like any other street urchin, gawking idly at the arguing men. She began to poke through a pile of trash beside Garit’s front step. When no one was looking, she slipped around quickly to the back door. It opened at once, so Garit had been watching through a crack.