All mockery, whether of me or of himself, was gone from his voice. He reached up to grip my shoulder, and I could feel how thin and tremulous his fingers had become. “Tikat, I dare not die, I must not, not yet. Do not let me die.”
Panic and bewilderment spilled through me then, as though from his fingers on my arm. I said, “Why turn to me? What can I do to help you?”
But he was looking beyond me as I spoke, toward the one window. He said loudly, “Ah, there you are. I was beginning to think you had forsaken me.”
There was no one else in the room. He was talking to a dance of sunlight just below the windowsill. “No, no, certainly not, I trust I know you better than that.” The voice held a bantering tone, close almost to laughter.
I left then, before I could begin hearing the sunlight answer him. In the corridor, sweeping, Marinesha looked up too quickly and then away. I knew that she had been listening at the door—Marinesha is a bad liar, even wordlessly. I said, “He is no worse. No better than yesterday, but no worse.”
I would have gone on by, but she came and stood before me, closer than was usual for her. If I have not said that Marinesha is quite pretty, with large dark-gray eyes, a generous mouth, and skin that should have been coarsened by her work and has not been at all, it is because her appearance meant nothing to me, one way or the other. She talked too much, but she always treated me gently enough, while giving Rosseth the raw side of her tongue on any pretext. She said now, anxious but hesitant, “Tikat—Tikat, did he speak to—to another in the room?”
“Aye,” I said, “an old acquaintance who just happens to look like a wall. For all I know, wizards have many such friends.” In truth, I was concerned to be away, to puzzle over my tafiya’s words by myself. But Marinesha did not move from my path. She bit her lip and looked somewhere else again, and said, very low, “Tikat, Lukassa is not the only woman in the world.”
I could hardly hear her. She was blushing so deeply that even her yellow-brown hair seemed to darken with blood. I said, with a harshness that was starting to come too easily, “And if she were, I would not have her, nor any other in her place. I want no one, Marinesha. No more of that for me, never.”
Marinesha put her hand timidly against my cheek. I took hold of her wrist and shook my head, saying nothing. I think I was not rough, but when I looked back she had pushed the wrist hard against her lips, as though I had bruised her. It plagues me to this day, that sight of her. There was no need to hurt Marinesha.
The days strained toward autumn without seeming to grow any shorter or cooler. I felt that I had been all my life drudging at that inn, like Rosseth, and wondered often why I should stay on another hour. There were some still who might be missing me at home; and the Barrens, killing in spring, would be impassable when the snow came. There was nothing for me in this place; there never had been. It was all a waste, all of it, and time to say so and be done. And still I drudged on.
One afternoon Karsh ordered Rosseth and me to replace several rotted roof beams in the smokehouse. This would have been weary work in any weather; now it was both exhausting and dangerous, since the timbers slipped constantly through our sweating fingers and twice came near crushing our legs. We finally rigged a serviceable hoist, and I was standing underneath, guiding a beam up to Rosseth on the roof, when I saw Nyateneri in the doorway. The fox sat on his haunches beside her.
We got the beam properly set in, and Rosseth began hammering hard and wildly, never looking at Nyateneri. She was a handsome woman, in a soldierly way, as tall as I, with changing eyes and short, thick gray-brown hair. Not at all beautiful, nor suddenly, unexpectedly pretty like Marinesha—but even in my village you would stare when she strode past, and remember her long after the beautiful ones. I had never seen her and the fox together. He looked straight at me, putting one ear back and laughing out of his bright yellow eyes.
Nyateneri said, “I need to speak to you both. Come down, Rosseth.” She did not raise her voice, but he looked up, hesitated for a moment, and then dropped lightly from the roof to land in the straw beside me. “Soukyan,” he said, almost whispering. I did not know what the word meant then.
“He is dying,” Nyateneri said. “There is nothing we can do.” Her brown face showed no emotion, but her voice was slow in that way I know myself, when each word seems to be dragged back into your throat by despair. She said, “It will be tomorrow night.”
“How do you know?” Rosseth had hold of my hand, a child’s blind clutch, which I still felt long after he had let go. “He’s strong, you don’t know. I never thought he’d last out the first night he came, but he did, he did, and he’ll last through this one too. You don’t know.” He was blinking very fast.
Nyateneri looked at him with more softness than I had ever supposed in that swaggering woman. “He does, Rosseth. He knows.” Rosseth stared at her for a long time before he nodded very slowly. Nyateneri said, “He wants us there. You, me, Lal, Lukassa—Tikat.” She paused just enough to let me know whose idea I was. “He wants us all there.”
“Why tomorrow night?” Rosseth’s dark eyes were dry and stubbornly angry now, the way he gets. “How can he—why tomorrow night?”
“Because of the new moon.” Nyateneri seemed genuinely surprised. “Wizards can only die on new-moon nights.” Plainly she had thought that even louts like us must have known so simple a thing, and was annoyed with herself for the assumption. She turned away without another word, but the fox sat where he was, yellow gaze never leaving me. I heard him in my head, no mistaking that grating, derisive bark: Well, boy, well now, fellow horsethief, and aren’t you a longer way from home than anyone in the world? I could not move from where I stood until he stretched himself lingeringly, fore and aft, like any dog or cat, then sauntered off after Nyateneri. A dust-draggled little bird flew up almost under his nose, and he pounced stifflegged at it but missed.
Rosseth was looking at me as I had looked at the fox. He said, “You have another new friend.”
“Not likely,” I said. “I leave a few tidbits out now and then, to persuade him to spare Karsh’s chickens. He knows my smell by now, I suppose.”
“When did you ever care about Karsh’s chickens?” Rosseth’s voice was tight and thin. I shrugged and reached for the last beam remaining, but Rosseth caught my hand again, crying out, “Tikat, no one tells me what is happening. Why is the wizard really dying? How can he be certain that he will go with the new moon tomorrow night? Something terrible is happening, and no one will tell me what it is. Guests fight in their rooms—horses kick down their stall doors and go at each other like demons, for no reason, even poor old Tunzi. Marinesha says that Shadry wakes everyone every night, screaming that he is being buried alive. Why did Gatti Jinni throw a wine bottle at that street-singer yesterday? Why does the well water smell filthy-sweet as gangrene, and why won’t the wind ever, ever stop? What is Karsh trying so hard to say to me—and why now, why now?—why do you have secrets with a fox? And Tikat, Tikat, what is watching? What is watching us all out of the wind and the well and the horses’ eyes?”
I put my arm around his shoulders. He looked as surprised by the gesture as I felt. Rosseth always called a—a something, a wishfulness—from me that no one else has ever summoned, except Lukassa. It frightened me each time, but each time a bit less. I said, “I don’t know. I was sure it must be my imagining.”
Rosseth shook his head violently. “No, it is all real. Tikat, talk to me, let us put what knowledge we do have side by side. I will tell you what I almost see—you tell me what you think you imagine. I’ll tell you what I begin to guess—you’ll say what you—”