om’d seen her eyes go wide with the word seerstone. He studied her face. There was more light trickling down through the smog, dissipating into the dusty, diffused daylight of the Soots; but there were enough shadows still in the tiny twisting back street with its dead end, and more still in the dank stretch of alleyway at one side. He wasn’t sure if it was the shadows, this time, that made the prefect so godsdamn hard to read.
He didn’t know how to account for it, how her eyes went wide the second he said it, and no later. Had she already known? And earlier, how she’d giggled, like she couldn’t help it. Or the warm openness in her field, always – which, he thought, was a damned hard pretense for a galdor to keep up, much less such a young one. He couldn’t imagine what lay underneath it, though he ached with the trying.
And to what end, all of it? Perhaps she’d known, or thought she’d known, what words would set him at ease; perhaps she’d been angling – was still angling – for his trust, with how she’d bowed her head solemn as the grave, with just a flicker of uncertainty.
Perhaps she felt it; perhaps she was using what she felt. But he’d been yaching that uncanny art himself long enough to know when he saw it.
Though not as long as some; not yet.
He was still tangled in the twist of his thoughts when her thanks yanked him out. The air stung his cheeks, and his thin chest ached. Ada’na Nkemi stood looking at him, solemn; her hand was no longer on his arm, though he couldn’t’ve said when it’d fallen. He could feel the place where it’d been, a small wrinkle in the wool of his sleeve.
Another, even paler attempt at a smile. You didn’t say, he thought, what you would do with what I just gave you. Clever. You didn’t say –
The prefect’s hand settled on his arm again. Strange to think he’d missed it there.
The mona in his field stirred and almost tensed again, against the grain of hers – just a shiver – and then settled again. He gave up the qalqa of smiling. He did not think ada’na would mind.
They stood there for a while; Tom wasn’t sure how long, and ada’na didn’t seem impatient. Her field didn’t, at any rate. You’re good at your job, he wanted to say, but he didn’t think he’d be telling the truth. A proper brigk’s job was mostly planting the heel of his boot in a natt’s face.
Finally, he drew in a breath, and slid his shaky hand out of his pocket, and patted the prefect’s shoulder under a swath of cold damp wool.
The first few steps were the hardest; maybe he’d known they’d be. The alleyway went down before it reached its end, and he remembered it, now, how hard it’d been to claw his way to his feet. The edges of his fingernails were still uneven from it.
With the prefect at his shoulder, he moved in. His eyes skimmed the puddles of stagnant water, the shuttered window halfway up on the right side, the slick glistening stones. He felt himself fall into his old stalk, careful-footed, toe-to-heel.
He found himself squinting against the shadows, straining to make out any detail. He wondered if it was so dark to the prefect. “I was told a story, when I was a lad,” he said softly, studying a rotting pile of boards. “About a –”
A lass and a wicked galdor. “A magistra who set her most beautiful student impossible tasks,” he said instead, smiling faintly. “The last of them – a big pile of lentils, red and green and brown, big as a house, and she had to divide them up by color. The nanny” – he thought of Deirdre’s hands, gathering up his hair into braids; her rough voice, she called on Vita – “told me the Lady stilled the moons so that she could finish. My mother told me the older ending – that she went old and gray, still at her task.”
His smile went crooked, darkly wry - but genuine, like the flare of a candle - and then went out as his eyes found a familiar patch of ground.
He remembered in bursts how the kov’d wrenched him backwards; he remembered the struggle, his jaw tightening, his heart speeding up. But the struggle hadn’t been long. He shut his eyes once, only once, and took a sharp breath in through his nose.
When he opened them, he sighed. “I can’t think of what he might’ve left. I didn’t get a good look at him; he might’ve been bald, for all I can see any hairs, and I’m afraid, ada’na, I didn’t spill much of his blood.” His lips twisted, bitter. “And with all this water…”