“A wide difference between raw and impure. Ask any smith, Arki-when the iron ingots are poor quality, you might be able to hammer out a sickle, but you will never produce a fine fighting blade. It is the same with men. Which is why we only select the finest. Or used to.” He glared at the door as if he might still be able to cause the boy running down the hall to trip over his feet. “Bah. Perhaps it is only me. Perhaps I have simply been gone too long and soured. Or perhaps things are as bleak as they appear and we are all sliding toward a cliff. It remains to be seen.”
Braylar pushed his chair back and stood, steadily enough, but his red cheeks said he had been drinking for some time. “As you heard, we attend the Caucus in two days. Stay in this room until such time. Continue your translation, your recording, and enjoy the solitude.”
He started toward his bedchamber and I asked, more loudly than I intended, “Do you have any suspicions about what will happen?”
“Today? Tomorrow? Eternally?”
“At the Caucus.”
He looked over his shoulder, most of his face in shadow. “I always harbor suspicions, Arki. Always. You might think they would disappear back on familiar ground, among allies. And you would be an idiot for thinking so. The factions here revel in the opportunity to undermine and destroy one another, and alliances are forged of gossamer. The only thing you can depend on here is Tower. All else? The greatest suspicions imaginable. And never so legion as when an Emperor is pulling the strings. You can be sure he did not call a Caucus to hand out pretty doilies and candied eels.”
The captain walked out of the room, and nearly took my appetite with him.
But Vendurro’s logic suddenly seemed apt: do what you can do, and leave the rest to play itself out as it will.
I just wished I had his conviction in following it.
The next day I stayed sequestered in my room, happy to be translating in peace and quiet. But it was impossible not to be uneasy whenever I took a break or allowed my mind to drift. Braylar was correct-after reconciling myself to the fact that we were leaving Alespell and Anjuria, and surviving the various dangers on the road, I had made the mistake of thinking that Sunwrack would be a relatively safe, if alien, harbor. A respite from bloodletting and the threat of attack or ambush. But from everything I had heard, the thick stone walls, the thousands of loyal soldiers, the solidarity among them-they might as well have been paper and shadow for all the protection they seemed to afford. At least with the current emperor and Jackal Tower’s affiliations with the deposed emperor. Our position seemed worse than precarious, with the politics here being brutal and bloody even on the best of days.
It was better to struggle through passages written by men long dead than to meditate on the possibility of joining them.
But the second day, the room felt smaller, stuffier, and I was having serious trouble concentrating-words swam, thoughts evaded, and time seemed frozen in amber.
So I was surprised but grateful when Vendurro stopped by. I expected he would have been carousing with his Towermates, or sleeping off the same, but then remembered the excursion he had to have taken already. I was reluctant to pry, but equally reluctant to say nothing at all, since he had confided in me. So after a short exchange where he asked me about the dates and figs on my plate, and if I had eaten their like anywhere else, as he seemed to think the figs in particular had a unique flavor in this region, there was a pause. So I inquired, rather clumsily, “You saw her then? The widow?”
He scratched the back of his head, looked around the room, as if he had entered and forgotten exactly why, and said, “Ayyup. Went about as expected.”
“That well, eh?”
“Well, worse, truth be told. Mervulla went white the second she saw me. Alone, that is. Don’t know that she ever had seen me alone before-it was either with Gless or not at all. So she seen me standing in her door after three years, alone, and she knew straight away before I opened my mouth at all, started saying, ‘No, no’ over and over. Stepped away from the door, nearly tripped over her child. Been so long since I seen her, hardly recognized the little bugger at all. But the kid being there just made something awful something worse.
“Right about then, I hoped Mervulla might come at me like I thought, flailing and scratching, maybe even draw a blade and try to stick it in me-that I could have handled. But she just sat there, mouthing ‘no’ and not really saying it at all, tears rolling down her cheeks, her little one holding her skirts and legs tight, looking at me accusing like, wondering what I done to upset their world so much for no good plaguing reason, not recognizing me at all.
“And that was just about the saddest thing I could think of.”
“That she didn’t recognize you?”
“Nah. That it meant she probably wouldn’t have known her da, even if it had been him standing there at the door. And now she would never get the chance.”
I almost said that at least the child had gotten to know her father in some small measure, but bit my tongue. And the alternate point, also thankfully unspoken, was that it was better to not know a father at all than to realize he was lousy at the job. But neither point was fair or just. Glesswik might not have been a good father, but it’s said some grow into it. He might have.
Both comments were really more about me than this child I would never know, so I kept my mouth shut.
Vendurro spun a knife in a circle on the table, watching the blade catching the light. “I wanted to leave. Something fierce. Mervulla knew what had happened even without me uttering a word, and I figured anything I did say would only be sticking my thumb in the wound. But a man’s got a foul job to do, whether it’s shoveling shit or telling a woman her man got killed out in the middle of nowhere for no good plaguing reason anyone could put words to, well, best just to get to it and be done with it.
“We weren’t what anyone would have called close, so I had no plans to hug her or even so much as touch her. But when she dropped to her knees, I put my hand on her shoulder. She was shaking, staring at the floor, sobbing real quiet like, not even bothering to whisper ‘no’ anymore, one arm real loose about her kid’s waist, who was crying louder than she was, though couldn’t have uttered why.
“I said, ‘He went out fighting, just like you’d expect. Fought hard, to the end.’ It was a lie, of course, or might as well have been, as I was the last to know he was dead. Well, second, next to the sobbing widow there on the floor in front of me. But it was a good lie, just the same. ‘He wasn’t here like you would have liked, I know. Won’t pretend he was. But you ought to know, he was a good soldier. Did that as good as anybody I met.’ Another lie, of course, but no worse than the first. But that was about all I knew to say.
“She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, looked up at me. It was a long horsey face, and red-rimmed and snotty just then, but it struck me, like it had once or twice, that she was a handsome enough woman. No woman’s a pretty crier, but I’d seen worse. And once she stopped crying, she was hardly a hag. She could find herself another husband. The widowcoin would keep her out of Beggar’s Row or whorehouses, and she’d keep making some coin of her own out of their property. But I hoped she’d find someone else, not a Syldoon soldier. A man who wouldn’t be riding off anywhere to die. But I figured that would be sour consolation, so didn’t speak my mind on that count. That would have been the only true thing I said, but probably the worst of the lot.”
“Probably a good choice to leave that unsaid.”
“Aye. Instead, I fetched the bag of silver from my pouch, told her she could come by Jackal Tower every other month to collect more until it ran dry, or we could send a courier, if that was easier. Her eyes narrowed then, and the anger I had been steadied for finally showed itself-body tensed up, hands balled into fists, and she got off the floor, ignoring the whelp who was really starting to let loose now. Stared at me, looked at the bag as if it were full of scorpions, and I thought she was about to slap it into my face, or launch into an attack herself.