“They must have thought I was one of the killers coming back,” I said. “Soldiers, outlaws, whoever it was.” I told him that I had buried his parents, that I didn’t leave them to rot with the other murdered ones, and that I could take him right to the village and the grave, if he ever wanted to go there. Which is certainly the truth—I could find that terrible place again if the sea had rolled over it.
He was rocking back and forth on his knees, just a little. Without looking up he whispered, “And you took me with you. You buried them, and you took me with you.”
“What else could I do? You were weaned, thank the gods. I bought a goat in the next town, and I used to dip bits of bread in her warm milk and feed you like that, all the way.” I tried to make a joke, to get him to stop that rocking. I said, “Heavy as a little anvil you were, too. Lugging you along with one arm, dragging that goat with the other—I don’t know how women do it. If you’d weighed an ounce more, I’d have had to leave you where I found you.”
Well, that did get him off his knees, no question about that. Shoulders hunched and shaking, the whole face writhing back from his bared teeth, hands clawing up, not toward me but himself. “I wish you had! Oh, I wish you’d left me there with them and just gone on your miserable, stinking way, and never given any of us another thought ever again! Rot your fat guts, I wish you’d left me to die with my family, my family!”
There was more, fifteen years’ worth of it. I let him go on as long as the supply lasted. He did hit me once, but he doesn’t really know how, and my body soaks these things up. When he finally ran out of breath, wheezing like me, I said, “I’m sorry I killed them, your parents. That started the moment I stood up in that shattered house and mopped the blood out of my eyes. I’ve lived with what I saw every second since, waking or sleeping, a lot longer than you have. It’s my business, and it will go on being my business until the day I die. But what I will not apologize for, not ever, to you or anybody, is that I brought you away from that house with me. Beyond a doubt it’s the stupidest thing I’ve done in my life, but it might be the only good thing, too. One or two others, just maybe, but the chances are you’ll be all I’ve got to show. When my time comes.”
How long did we stand looking at each other? I can’t say, but I’ll swear I felt the sun rising and setting on the back of my neck, and seasons changing, and I know I saw Rosseth grow older before my eyes. Was it the same for him, I wonder, looking at me, seeing me, seeing his childhood march away? And what I mumbled, after so many years, so much fuss, was, “You’re all I’ve got to show, and I could have done worse.” And we stared at each other some more, and I said, “Much worse.”
Rosseth said at last, “I am not going with Lal and Soukyan.” His voice was quiet, with neither tears nor anger in it, nothing but its own clarity. “But I am leaving. Not today, but soon.”
“When you please,” I said. “In your own time. Now it’s my time to go and kick Shadry and roar at Marinesha. An innkeeper’s work is never done.” He just blinked—he never knows when I’m joking, never has known. I turned and started away.
He stopped me at the stable door with a single word. “Karsh?” The shock of it was completely physical—not a sound at all, but a touch on your shoulder when you thought no one was there. I cannot remember when he last called me by my name. He said, “There was a song. Someone used to sing me a song. It was about going to Byrnarik Bay, going to play all day on Byrnarik Bay. That’s all I remember of it. I was wondering, do you think—do you think they used to sing that song, my parents?”
There’s a good reason I’m the size I am. Fat softens and soaks up other things besides blows. “Only parents would sing a song like that,” I said. “Must have been them,” and I got myself out of there and went on up the hill to the courtyard. He’ll sing “Byrnarik Bay” to his own brats, soon enough, and always grow damp around the eyes and soft around the chin when he does, and welcome to it. The song’s as idiotic as any of that sort, but it’s the only one I know. I sang it to him all the way through that bandit country where I found him, over and over, all the way home to my country, to The Gaff and Slasher.
LAL
I said, “What? Excuse me? You are going to do what?”
“I have to go back,” Soukyan repeated. “There really is no other choice.”
We were alone in the travelers’ shrine. Soukyan wanted to make a departure prayer, since we would be leaving tomorrow. Until now he had not spoken of his plans, and I had assumed that we might journey pleasantly together as far as Arakli, where many roads meet. Now, carefully fitting the greenish lumps of incense into the two tin burners, he said, “I am tired of running, Lal. I am also getting a bit old for it. If I am not to spend the last years of a short life trying to deal with new teams of assassins as they keep coming after me, then I must return to the place they all come from. The place I come from.”
I said, “That is completely insane. You told me yourself—they don’t forgive, and they won’t rest until you’re dead. You might as well commit suicide right here, where you’re guaranteed a decent burial, and spare yourself the ride.”
Soukyan shook his head slowly. “I don’t want them to forgive me. I want them to stop following me.” He made a quick gesture of blessing over the burners and lit the incense. “I want it done with, that’s all, one way or the other.”
“Oh, it will be done with,” I said. “That it will. I fought one of those people, remember.” Soukyan had his back to me, murmuring inaudibly into the thin fumes that smelled faintly like marsh water. I was furious. I said, “So you’ll fight them all at once and get it done with indeed. A hero’s death, no doubt of it. I would have let you drown if I’d known.”
Soukyan laughed then. His laugh is a private laugh, even when shared: there is always something kept aside. “Did I say I was going to fight them all? Did I? I thought you knew me better than that, Lal.” He turned to face me. “I have a plan. I even have an ally or two back there, and some old sleights and confidences to bargain with. Believe me, I will be as safe as I was with you on the river.” He put his hands on my shoulders, adding quietly, “Though not as happy. Likely, never again.”
“Stupidity,” I said. “I cannot abide stupidity.” I sounded like Karsh. I had never been so angry with him, not even when I discovered his deception, and I was angrier because I had no possible right to be angry. I said, “What plan? Let me hear this wonderful plan.”
He shook his head again. “Later, maybe. It’s far too long a story.”
“Everything is a long story,” I said. I felt very tired, suddenly not the slightest bit ready for any new adventures, any voyages anywhere. I put his hands away and moved restlessly around the little windowless room. It was designed and appointed more or less like any travelers’ shrine in this half of the world: always white, always freshly painted (there is a law, and even Karsh apparently heeds it), always provided with the ritual cloths and candles and statues of a dozen major religions. They vary somewhat, depending on the region, but the one in which I was raised is never among them. Mostly I find that just as well, but not then.
Behind me Soukyan said, “Lal, it has nothing to do with you. This is my life, my past, my own small destiny. I am finished with waiting for it to bring me to bay one more time. I will go and meet it, for a change—and not in a bathhouse or on a river shore, but on a field of my choosing. There’s really no more to be said.”
Nor was there, for some while. He commenced a cumbersome process of passing his bow, sword, and dagger back and forth through the two tiny threads of incense, muttering to himself as he did so. I went outside and sat in the dry grass, chewing weeds viciously and watching a flock of tourik birds mob a snow-hawk that had ventured too close to their nests. Then I came back into the shrine, though you’re not supposed to reenter after leaving a ceremony. Soukyan was kneeling, head bowed, weapons arranged just so before him. I said, “You can’t cross the Barrens in winter.”