“Why tell us any of this?” said Jean.
“Because I value your discomfort.” Patience smiled without warmth. “I described the conditions of your employment very succinctly. We are not vanishing from the world, merely from the eyes of ordinary people. Share our business with anyone and you are alwaysin our reach.”
“Ordinary people,” said Locke. “Well, how ordinary am I, really? What’s the truth of all the tales you spun about my past?”
“You should look at the painting I brought for Sabetha.” Patience tapped the wrapped object leaning against the wall behind her. “I’m leaving it here, though in a day or two it will be nothing but white ash. It’s the only portrait of Lamor Acanthus ever painted during his life. I ought to tell you, the likeness is impeccable.”
“A simple answer!” shouted Locke. “What am I?”
“You’re a man who doesn’t get to knowthe answer,” said Patience, and now her smile was genuine. She was shaking with the obvious difficulty of containing her laughter. “Look at you. Camorri! Confidence trickster! You think you know what revengeis? Well, here’s mine on you. Before I was Archedama Patience, I was called Seamstress. Not because I enjoy needlework, but because I tailor to fit.”
Locke could only stare at her, feeling cold and hollow to the depths of his guts.
“Live a good long life without your answer,” she said. “I think you’ll find the evidence neatly balanced in either direction. Now, one thing more will I tell you, and this only because I know it will haunt and disquiet you. My son preferred to mock my premonitions, but only because he didn’t want to face the fact that they always have substance. I shall give you a little prophecy, Locke Lamora, as best as I have seen it.
“Three things must you take up and three things must you lose before you die: a key, a crown, a child.” Patience pushed her hood up over her head. “You will die when a silver rain falls.”
“You’re making all this shit up,” said Locke.
“I could be,” said Patience. “I very well could be. And that’s part of your punishment. Go forth now and live, Locke Lamora. Live, uncertain.”
She gestured once and was gone.
2
JEAN REMAINED at the door, staring at the gray-wrapped package. Finally, Locke worked up the nerve to seize it and tear away the cover.
It was an oil painting. Locke stared at it for some time, feeling the lines on his face draw taut as a bowstring, feeling moistness well in the corners of his eyes.
“Of course,” he said. “Of course. Lamor Acanthus. And wife, I presume.”
He made a noise that was half dour laugh and half strangled sob, and threw the painting on the bed. The black-robed man in the portrait looked nothing like Locke; he was broad-shouldered, with the classically dark, sharp aspect of a Therin Throne patrician. The woman beside him bore the same sort of haughty glamour, down to her bones, but she was much fairer of skin.
Her thick, flowing hair was as red as fresh blood.
“I’m everything Sabetha was afraid of,” said Locke. “Tailored to fit.”
“I’m … I’m sorry as hell I got you into this,” said Jean.
“Shit! Don’t go wobbly on me now, Jean. I was as good as dead, and the only way out of this was to go through, all the way to Patience’s endgame. Now she’s played it.”
“We can go after Sabetha,” said Jean. “She’s had half an hour, how far could she get?”
“I want to,” said Locke, wiping his eyes. “Gods, I can still smell her everywhere in this room. And gods, I want her back.” He slumped onto the bed. “But I … I promised to trust her. I promised to … respect her decisions, no matter how much it fucking cut me. If she has to run from this, if she has to be away from me, then for as long as she needs, I’ll … I’ll accept it. If she wants to find me again, what could stop her?”
Jean put his hands on Locke’s shoulders and bowed his head in thought.
“You’re gonna be fucking miserableto live with for a couple of weeks,” he said at last.
“Probably,” said Locke with a rueful chuckle. “I’m sorry.”
“Well, we should case this place and pack everything useful we can lay our hands on,” said Jean. “Clothes, food, tools. We don’t have to go after Sabetha, but we’d best have our asses on the road before the sun peeks over the horizon.”
“Why?”
“Karthain hasn’t kept up an army or maintained its walls for three hundred years,” said Jean. “In a few hours, it’s going to wake up to discover that the only thing keeping it protected from the world at large has vanished during the night. Do you want to be here when thatmess breaks wide open?”
“Oh, shit. Good point.”
Locke stood up and looked around the room one last time.
“Key, crown, child,” he muttered. “Well, fuck you, Patience. Three things must you kiss before I let you spook me for good. My boots, my balls, and my ass.”
Locke pulled his boots on and followed Jean down the stairs, impatient to have Karthain at his back and slowly sinking into the horizon.
EPILOGUE
WINGS
1
THE BOY IS six. He stares at the Amathel, breathes the lake air, the wholesome scents of life and freshness. He stares at the glinting lights, the jewels in the blackness, the secrets of the Eldren scattered in the depths. The dock folk claim that fishermen in the water at night have been driven mad by the lights, have dived down toward them, pulling frantically, as if toward the surface, until they drowned. Or vanished.
The boy is not afraid of the lights. The boy has power the dock folk can only guess at. He feels a pressure in his temples when he stares out across the waters. He hears something lower and lovelier than the steady wash of the waves and the cries of the birds. The power of the hidden things calls to the power of the boy.
The boy knows the Amathel took his father. He has been told this, but he remembers nothing. He was too young. There is no memory to mourn. The lake of jewels means only life, beauty, soothing familiarity.
All these things. And the power that waits for his power to match it. To revealit.
2
THE BOY is four, the boy is ten, the man is twenty. His body shifts in this place. Sometimes he is whole, sometimes he is pleased, sometimes his memories are bright and vivid as paintings glowing with the fire of the gods in every speck of pigment.
Sometimes he speaks in a rich rolling voice. Sometimes he moves his hands and feels the fingers there, feels them brushing over surfaces and picking things up. He does not know why this pleases him, why he feels something like the hot pressure of tears behind his eyes, why the joy is so bittersweet.
Sometimes he walks in a fog. His thoughts are wrapped in dull cotton. Sometimes he is on a street, and he is confused. He is bound with rope, throbbing with pain, his hands and his mouth caked with blood. His own blood. The rain comes down and men are staring at him, studying him, afraid.
Sometimes he is gazing out across the Amathel, feeling the life of the bird for the first time. A gull, an elegant white thing, wheeling in tight circles. The boy feels its needs, its hunger, the elegant simplicity of the thing at the center of it all. The boy visualizes this as a wheel, a piece of clockwork, a logic circle turning without friction or remorse. Strike, eat, live on the wind. Strike, eat, live on the wind.
The boy moves his fingers to call up his untutored power. He reaches out and takes the life of the bird like a humming thread in the hands that nobody else can see, the hands of power his mother has taught him to use.
The bird is startled.
Its wings fold awkwardly. It plummets twenty feet and bounces hard off a rock, then plops into the water, fluttering and squawking agitatedly, lucky its wings aren’t broken.
The boy needs practice.