Chapter 12 - Confession
Irenna swept ginger flakes off the sill of her hearthroom window with a sharp whisk of her hand. Whatever shield from bad spirits the runic root dust might have offered broke. “I’ve waited enough,” she said. “I’ve given Aster-Szem ten summers before this one to make itself a welcome town.”
“Widow,” Hearn replied. He came to her from the basket he had been filling with dried albuma fruits. He tried to make his voice soft and soothing, but a flush had risen to his face. “Can you really say that Szem hasn’t given you a home?”
“It hasn’t. It won’t. The rooster’s crow is plain for all to hear.”
“You said: one person doing what was right might look well in others’ eyes.”
“Hearn…”
“What will they say, humans and muira both, if they see us two desert the town now?”
“We won’t know if we’re not around to suffer it.”
“They’ll call us fairweatherers.”
“Hearn, it’s time to leave Szem. Suly, put those down.”
Suly Vabdas had been watching his mother and Hearn for some time, flipping his gaze back and forth between the two, while he sat by the hearth with Irenna’s lockbreaking tools and tapped them against each other. As Irenna swept over to him and took the set, he said, “They tink like my flute. They’ve each got a song in them.”
“I know, Suly,” said Irenna. She quickly took a jar of pickled beetroot from beside the boy and carried it back to where Hearn had packed the other foodstuffs. “Speak with your gods now. Or go and practice the wind pipe.”
Hearn leaned against the sill of the window. A hot, swift summer gale blew through the open pane. “Ostok, the bountyman,” Hearn mused. “He’s like a prowling cat. He’s close.”
“How close?” Irenna asked, without stopping from her packing.
Hearn scratched his burned palm. “He’s followed the ones who did it from scene to scene. He’ll deliver the assassin, I’m certain.”
“How long until you accept that there will be war?”
“Ren…”
“And Aster-Szem will be its first victim.”
Hearn swept his palm across the sill as Irenna had, though the flakes were gone already. “Where is safer?” he asked.
“My people burn their clothes and furniture in the ditch of the old river,” said Irenna, slowly folding her own wool clothes and stuffing them into a basket as she spoke. “Any muira seen on the Aster side is hectored right back to her own proper quarter - the better to keep us all in one place where we might be watched. Sky’s spots, even the regular work’s dried up for a muira lockbreaker. Those who might have trusted me to replace their keys and locks, they either resort to stacking possessions up against the doors and windows, or else abandon their homes altogether. The muira of Szem no longer trust a lock. Why should they? The boot of a soldier may break down any wooden door or pane of glass.”
Hearn looked at her sharply. “Has someone tried breaking in?”
“So when you ask, ‘where is safer?’” Irenna went on, “my answer is: ‘anywhere else’.”
Hearn noticed Irenna struggling to lift a heavy set of elk tack from the floor. He came over and picked it up for her, and set it down by the door. He said, “Look, did Theman trust the Second Track when he first traveled the girting glass? Did not the Puga give him pause at first?”
Irenna looked unimpressed. “You’re quoting themic scripture?”
“What would have been his fate if he hadn’t dared to enter the seacover?”
“He might have lived longer.”
“It’s wrong in some way,” said Hearn. He stared through the open window at the other hearths, their stone bricks tinted pink in the sun. “‘It is only a seasoning,’ as the gods say.”
“You misunderstand.”
“How?”
“The gods speak of trials which cannot be avoided. And the ‘seasoning’ here is leaving the place we have made our hearth. We are afraid to leave out of habit.”
“It’s wrong to abandon trusted friends in this city.”
“There are no trustworthy Leegesmen.” Irenna’s face instantly softened as she glanced at Hearn. She stepped over and wrapped her fingers around his arm. “I’m sorry.”
“I’ve lived here all my life, Ren,” said Hearn. He stroked her hair. “Except when I served.”
“You’re an exception, Hearn of Aster. Oh Suly!”
Irenna turned sharply on her son. Suly had been shaking one of the sackcloth dolls full of bones sitting beside the hearth. The stitching of the doll had come suddenly loose; bones littered the floor.
“They’re all yellow,” said Suly as he picked up one of the bones.
“That’s your grandfather,” Irenna said, sweeping the bones up from the floor with her hand. She snatched the empty doll from her son and poured the bones back inside. “Get the stitching kit from the closet. Sew it back up.”
“But momma he-”
“Now, Suly.”
Her son gaped at her as his shoulders slowly sank. He took the doll and walked quietly toward the closet. Irenna sighed and turned back to Hearn. “Can you grab that letter and the saddle?” she asked. “I’ll get my ring bag. We’ll go and bring the cart over from the stable.”
Hearn lifted the saddle onto his shoulder. He picked up the letter, which was yellowed and unsealed, and skimmed its contents. It was the Progeny and Ancestry for hearth Vabdas. At the bottom were the names of Irenna and Suly.
“It will give us free passage into the kingdom,” said Irenna, noticing Hearn’s look as he read.
“My name can never appear here,” said Hearn absently.
“They’ll let you in.” Irenna came over and pushed his hands down.
“Not when they see a Leegesman.”
“They’ll trust you when they hear you speak. You, my love, have a trusting voice. I heard it. I suppose your bountyman did too.”
Hearn looked her full in the face. He rubbed a palm, his burned one, over his jaw. He took a deep breath, and finally let his hand fall, blowing out a long breath. Irenna watched him, expectant and waiting. “Irenna,” said Hearn, setting the letter down.
“Hearn, we have to get out of the city,” she said firmly.
“That’s not what I’m going to say. Irenna, I want you to listen to me very closely. Have you- ever heard of The Footsteps in Red?”
“No.”
“They are the group responsible for the murder of Srik Tillich. They’re a group of Teironian nationalists. They believe Teiron is any place where a Teironian lives. They believe that- that all muira are a threat to Teironian happiness and peace.”
“You say they killed Srik. Are they still in the city?”
“I think one is, at least.”
“Then,” said Irenna after a pause, “all the more reason to go.”
“They have an oath that they swear, and three symbols: a red footprint, a dark green cloak, and a white jawbone split in two. They have agents in Ahn as well - even men and women high up in the court of Queen Balgah. Muira who, for one reason or another, are hostile to her regime.”
“The bountyman’s - Ostok - he must tell the queen. Or someone in the royal army. Does he have names?”
“Irenna-”
“Hearn, this is remarkable enough. You’ve already done my people enough service by helping this Ostok Horksog. How did the bountyman figure all of this out?”
Irenna had spoken at a quick pace; excitement had stolen her thoughts for departure. But Hearn waited a long, long, long moment before he replied. When he did, he did not meet Irenna’s eye, but only looked at the hearths across the road. “Ostok has not figured all this out.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I know that The Footsteps in Red have members in Ahn. He does not.”
Irenna’s brow furrowed in confusion. “Did you find some paper that you’ve kept from him?”
“No.”
“Then how?”
“Because,” Hearn began, stopped, then began again. “Because I lived in Ahn for a time in the war years.”
“You never told me this… How did you learn about these Footsteps in Red?”
“I was introduced.”
Irenna leaned slowly back. Her hand dropped from Hearn’s arm. “Introduced how?”
“In the fall of 3390, I was twenty three. The first ceasefire had just been signed. I lived in a squalid hovel with fourteen other Teironian soldiers, a few miles south of Margrane along the river. The village was called Nemesko. The villagers loathed us of course. They burned our laundry when we didn’t set a man to watch it, and we had to get our water from the well in groups of three. Moreover, the bodies of our fellow soldiers, left in the ditches below the walls of Margrane, were daily floated down the river. We used to watch for them, both to see if they had anything of value, and to guess if we could recognize the bloated faces. I’m sorry to disturb you, Widow. I tell you these things hoping that you will understand how I could have- could have hated, wrongly, a people with whom we were ostensibly at peace.”
“How did you meet these traitor muira?”
“A Teironian man came to stay with us one evening. He was traveling from Vass; first to Margrane, then to the capital. He was a lecturer, he said. He taught Leegesspeech and muiric to Teironians. ‘Know what your foe knows,’ he used to tell us. His name was Githos of Teiron. He told us that the men we’d fought beside had not been slaughtered by the muira for nothing. He told us there were plans for the then queen, Mirella Balgah, which would make all that we had fought for right.”
“Go on,” said Irenna.
“Githos was the first man I knew from The Footsteps in Red. It was he who gave me my pledge to recite. I only met a handful. They explained to me a plot for the murder of Mirella. I was to act as one among a number of prisoners taken by her knights, pretending to be officers in the Teironian army. We were to go before her in chains through the streets of Bruna - during a parade.”
Irenna groaned. “You knew,” she said, sliding a hand over her eyes.
“I didn’t,” Hearn answered earnestly. “Widow, I had no idea they were even still operating. This was fifteen years ago.”
“What was fifteen years ago?” They both turned to regard Suly. The boy was staring at them, one hand stitching the bone doll of his grandfather.
Irenna set her face back in hands. “Just leave,” she said quietly.
“He has no context Irenna. He can’t have heard-”
“Not my son!” she spat, dropping her hands and glaring. “You. You who wear a face that is not your own. Go. Leave this hearth.”
“I never followed through with-”
“Go.”
Irenna stretched her arm and pointed toward the exit of her hearth. Her pale finger shone whiter still in the light streaming through the window. Hearn reached up to grab her shoulders, but she slid deftly back out of his reach. “Go,” she said again. She held her face as still as marble.
Hearn gave her a last look. “Please stay in Szem,” he said. Irenna kept silent, still, and pointing. Like a statue. Suly watched, silent too.
Silently, in his turn, Hearn left.
“Are you just now coming from the widow Irenna’s hearth, my faithful guide?”
Hearn looked up when he heard Ostok’s voice hailing him from up the road. “What?” said Hearn, his thoughts broken. The bountyman stood beside the gate of a high walled yard. Recognition spread over Hearn’s face. He nodded.
“I was just about to venture toward that quarter of Szem in search of you, having already stopped at your home and found no answer to my knocking. How are you, Hearn?”
“Fine.”
“You seem a bit pallid. Don’t tell me that unwavering, steady mind of yours is still running over what happened at the siltstack?”
“What did you want me for?” asked Hearn.
“Come in,” said Ostok, pressing the barred gate of the yard open. “I’m interrogating someone we both know. I’d like you at my side and watching this someone as she answers my questions.”
Hearn said nothing as Ostok led him into the space. The other three walls - the ones not facing the street - formed a u-shaped structure. Enormous stone pillars ran up in sets of four on each side. Between them were rows of windows in three stories. The lowest levels must have been partially sunken into the earth, Hearn realized, for the windows were set hardly a hand above the yard ground. Iron bars covered each of the windows, riveted into the stone. Hearn saw the green and white colors of Ahn everywhere: painted on the double oak doors leading into the building, faded in the patterned tile path that ran through the terse grass, upholstering a tattered armchair that sat incongruously beneath one of the black-leaved albuma trees in a corner of the space. Mostly he noticed the colors on the armor of the royal army soldiers, who moved to and from the oak doors, or stood in the yard practicing scales on bronze horns.
“Do you know what this place is?” Ostok asked. He led the way across the colored tiles to one of the windows.
“A prison?” Hearn guessed.
“I’d wager you’ve never set your eyes inside. Well the council of Szem call it an exile’s park, but the purpose is the same. See how the grime and spit has gathered on some of the upper windows? One cannot see through them either way. I’ve asked the royal army soldiers - quartered here temporarily, you understand, as a measure against unrest - I’ve asked those soldiers to take a good stout wooden ladder and wipe down the panes. One can see some of those windows from the street you know. Imagine the example it sets for any passerby, human or muira. They see a lack of care taken by the royal army for its prisoners. But neither the dour chief warden nor the captain of these soldiers has taken any heed to what I say.”
One of the soldiers at that moment blew a pealing set of notes from the bell of his horn: dun, dun dunDundun, dunDundun. The others took up the slow marching tune, mostly in unison, mostly in-key. Hearn said, “Who are we meeting?”
“To the point as ever,” Ostok exclaimed with a smile. You keep me punctual, Hearn. This is her. Good afternoon, mell - or mother perhaps - Vimienn.”
Some emotion did finally suffuse Hearn’s face. He saw, behind the bars of a first-floor cell in the rightmost corner of the yard, the hunched shadow of Vimienn. She looked up at the pair - the first floor cells being partially sunken. She stuck her face through the open window, and wrapped her long ivory fingers around the rusted iron bars.
“Sweet boy Hearn,” said the muira woman. She tisked and shook her face slowly, in a way that made her oily hair sway along her cheeks. “You used to run with a better crowd.”
“Address your grievances to me, my dear,” said Ostok pleasantly. He took a seat in the old motheaten armchair under the albuma tree, setting his hands over the feathers which were bursting forth through the cracks in the upholstery.
“You’re a traitor to our people,” Vimienn replied. “Locking up a good elder mother like myself, last of my hearth, in this dingy cellar. But him, he’s betrayed his friends.”
“Now, now. None of that kind of talk. One of your - let us call them patients if you like - one of your patients came to a soldier of the royal army. He told us of a vision. He saw you and some strange figure conversing.”
Vimienn tapped a fingernail on the glass. “Saw me in a vision? For a vision you’d toss this caring woman of aching bones and weary blood onto these damp stones?”
“Not precisely. Another one of your - hem, patients - has told me that he saw the same vision.”
“Liars.”
“I have learned much about the paths you walk in this town, mell Vimienn.”
Vimienn smiled sardonically. “You’re a clever boy.”
“You should really be up front with me. I am a bountyman with a specific purpose to my questions. I’m not a vigil soldier. Your regular trade matters to me no more than the hairs I shave from the back of my neck. But conspiring to murder an elder is of great concern.”
“Murder!”
“It has happened, my dear.”
“Murder!” the muira woman screamed again, drawing a glance from one of the royal army soldiers as he stepped out of the yard. “How could these feeble arms kill a strong man like our Srik Tillich?”
“Come now, you can’t be ‘strong for your children’ and ‘too weak to bear a switch’ at once. Were your feeble arms at hand when Srik fell?”
“Some human killed Srik.”
“You know this?”
Vimienn tapped the window pane impatiently. “Everyone knows. All these Teironians want to bury their spears in the breasts of our queen Balgah and her royal councilors. Any one of them might have killed Srik Tillich. Oh Hearn, lost boy, don’t take so hard the words of this absent-minded mother. She didn’t mean you. It’s this cell, dearie. This damp, close space puts my poor brain in a fog. Help your poor mother out of it.”
Hearn looked with disinterest at the woman in the cell. “Speak the truth to bountyman Ostok, mell Vimienn,” he said.
“You used to be a humbler, commoner human.”
“I’m the same as ever.”
“No. You’re too noble for a backwater muira like this poor mother. You’ll chew and smile with diplomats, but you look at ladies like me with contempt.”
“Ah,” Ostok interrupted with a raised finger, sitting forth in his chair. “There you are wrong, my fine suspect. My dependable border agent perhaps doesn’t smile as much as one might like. He and I have dined together, however, and I’ve seen no difference in his countenance on the street versus in the embassy. Moreover he saved- well, he has proven himself a just man. He cares for our species and his own.”
“Is that why you’ve got the soldiers eyeballing him?” Vimienn asked slyly.
Ostok glanced over his shoulder at the royal army troops. They stood in formation. Most had their horns before them, blowing through the notes of practice. One stood with his back against the wall, and his eyes fixed in the corner where Ostok sat and Hearn stood.
Ostok turned back to Vimienn. He smiled down at her, though his smile didn’t reach his eyes. “The royal army is a punctilious organ of her majesty,” he said. “I asked them not to bother with us, but I’m sure they wish to keep everyone healthy and safe.”
“Vimienn,” said Hearn, “was this strange person you met one of your customers?”
“Once I could have told you the name and face of every child in Aster-Szem,” the muira woman said. Her expression turned unfeignedly sad. “Now the faces I see under the helmets are new ones. And some of the ones I used to see on the road have not been by for many days.”
“Was the person you met a new face?”
“The muira are leaving Szem. But why be surprised? War’s coming…”
“It needn’t,” said Ostok, leaning forward in his chair. “Answer the question’s my guide asks you. I think they’re sharp questions which I’m keen to hear the answers to myself. We may yet solve the budding resentment between the peoples of Teiron and Ahn.”
Vimienn shook her head, and her face took on a severe expression. “We muira have won our kingdom through the sharpness of our spears, not the sharpness of our minds.”
Hearn leaned down to the armchair and pressed his palm to Ostok’s ear. “Has war come to the table as she says?” he asked.
But Vimienn had sharp ears, and caught the whisper. “Have your upper class pals left you in the dark?” she asked. “War’s around the corner, innocent boy.”
“The vigil have blocked all routes from Aster,” Ostok explained. “And the royal army has done the same on the Szem roads. No one enters or exits the city unchecked.”
For a moment, the steady plink, plink, plink of a hammer on leather sounded through the courtyard, as an army cobbler worked in the corner on a set of boots. Hearn stood with a thoughtful and frowning face. Ostok, after a moment, added, “And- and I believe The Gorvoid has delivered an ultimatum to the Teironian Tyrant.”
Hearn’s eyes focused, fixing themselves back on Vimienn. “Then she will answer what we ask,” he said. “Time is against the city.”
“I told you both already,” Vimienn protested. “How can I know any face in the city now?”
Ostok opened his mouth, as if to debate, but Hearn spoke first. “Tell us the name of this person you met. If you don’t, I’ll take you across to Aster. I’ll tell the vigil that you sell goldneedle and centipede wax to addicts.”
Ostok glanced at Hearn with surprise in his small black eyes. Vimienn responded more wildly, with a scream that drew glances from the practicing horn division. “This poor mother! She gives med’cine to beggars, and this brute wants to lock her up for it.”
“The vigil won’t lock you up. You’re a muira selling poison to humans. They’ll stick a spear in your throat and throw your body in the riverbed.”
Ostok cleared his throat but said nothing. Vimienn glanced from Hearn to Ostok, and some brightness came to her eyes. Her nostrils flared, and she scratched at the glass of the sill with her fingernails. “You wouldn’t sell a woman born to a hearth over to the Teironians,” she said, raising her voice and looking at the royal army soldiers. But the soldiers were at that moment in the middle of a long rhythm of continuous, striding song. They couldn’t hear her.
Ostok said, “I must rely on the experience of a local expert, mell. Do just tell us.”
“I don’t know.” Vimienn wrapped her arms about her shoulders and squeezed her white skin till it turned red. She paced back and forth. Across the way, two soldiers swapped helmets, each trying to decide which was the better fit between them.
Hearn said, “Pull her out. We’ll drag her over now.”
“Murder.”
“Someone came to you. They wanted to find a way out of the city.” Hearn glanced at Ostok. “A way that smuggled goods and weapons might enter and leave.”
“She never gave me her name.” Vimienn hung, with her hands wrapped tight around the iron bars for support. She sobbed. “She asked me how to leave without the roads. I told her, ‘How could this innocent mother know that?’ That’s all it was, I swear on my father’s bones.”
Ostok watched Vimienn closely. He pulled a slate of hardened writing-leather and a piece of chalk from the bag he carried. He wrote out something quickly, then passed the leather to Hearn. Hearn read the one word written: ‘lying’.
Hearn nodded. He said, “I’ll fetch the gaoler.”
“The stranger will kill me,” Vimienn said, shaking the bars over her window, speaking breathlessly as Hearn turned to go. “kill me, for talking to you.”
Ostok said, “Not if you’re safe in here. We’ll host you until this ‘stranger’ is caught and bagged.”
“It’s the stranger or the vigil,” Hearn added.
Vimienn scratched the window, then chewed her fingernails, then pulled on her oily hair. She tried to catch Ostok’s eye, but the bountyman had chosen that moment to take out his smoking pipe, and was attentively stuffing it. Hearn looked at her with his body half-turned the other way, as if waiting for a reply, and prepared to retrieve her cell keys if she did not give one. Finally the muira woman hiccupped, sobbed, and sank down, resting her thin frame on the ledge of her window. “Kloe,” she said weakly.
“Speak more clearly now my dear mell,” said Ostok through a cloud of pipe smoke. “Repeat that please.”
“Kloe’s the name she gave. Kloe of Teiron.”
Ostok looked surprised. “I expected a man. Well, describe her.”
“She wore a dark green cloak. It was night. How should my poor eyes know?”
“Did she have gloves?”
“No. Her hands were pale and all cut up, now that you mention it. Isn’t that helpful?”
“Immensely so.”
Vimienn picked her face up again and leaned eagerly between the bars. “Let this poor mother free then. Let me tend to my sick boys and-”
“What did she ask you,” Hearn interrupted. “What did you say to her, and she to you?”
“I can’t say that we talked about-”
“You want the vigil’s handling?”
“She asked about exactly what you said, ungrateful boy Hearn,” said Vimienn sourly. “She said she wanted to know how to get out of the city. How to escape into Teiron, without the roads. And I told her I didn’t know - which is the honest truth by all my spirit gods! - but that I might know someone who could show her how to get out. She forced me, boys, forced me to say all this.”
“How did this woman know where and when to find you?” asked Ostok.
Vimienn shrank back from the window. “She stumbled past me at night, and followed me to my hospital.”
Ostok smiled. “And how did she know you would know a passage to and from the city by ways other than the main roads?”
“I don’t know, I told you. It’s a man who gives me my medicine. He’s the one that she wanted to see, not this poor old mother.”
Hearn and Ostok were each silent for a moment. Finally Hearn said, “Who is he? The man who knows the way to and from the city?”
“You might as well have them soldiers carve my poor old eyes out and my poor old ears off, before I’ll betray the one who gives me my medicine. It doesn’t matter anyway,” Vimienn groaned. “Kloe met him last night, my dears. And I heard it all straight from his mouth. He told her about the old sewers. He told her about the ones that go a long, long, long way, right under Aster. They come out under the high cliff wall on that north side of manors and riches. So it’s all done you see, silly boys. Kloe of Teiron’s gone back to Teiron. Now, let me go!”
Ostok tapped out his pipe and stood. “Best not, Mell Vimienn,” he said.
“You said-”
“Now weep not, grieve not. It’s all for your good benefit. You’ll stay there until I’m certain that this Kloe of Teiron is an actual person. Not a figment. And until I determine if she’s flown the coop. And if she hasn’t, until I’ve hooked and jerked her from the stream.”
Vimienn cursed, but Ostok reached down and slid the window shut. Her further imprecations were lost in the marching song of the royal army trumpeters.
Ostok turned to Hearn. The latter had his hand clasped over his mouth and a look of some concern on his face. “Well my faithful agent,” said Ostok, putting on a look of cheer. “Do you think we’ll find this assassin yet?”