80
“It’s bound to something. That’s the way with them, curses. Always are. Have to be! Like…” Llolamae screwed her face tight, almost scowling with concentration. “Imagine a knot. The complicated fisherman’s kind. There’s loops and there’s twists and there’s, like, knots tied to knots. But if you know how it got tied, you know how to undo it. See?”
“I think so,” said Simra.
The sun was setting in Vedith’s garden, already halfway hidden behind the high mountainsides that walled the valley in. Pink sky. Heat and green and growth or not, it was still Winter, and the days were short, the nights dark and sudden.
“How’s that help us?” said Simra. He was fidgety with second thoughts he was trying not to have. His knee trembled as he sat by the water, boots and footwraps off, and cleaned his feet in the cold of it.
Funny, how quick an ‘us’ had cropped up. Him and the mer he came here to kill, and the girl who guided him to the place where he could do it. Funny, how sometimes when you call something funny you call it that so as not to call it something else.
“Well…” Llolamae sat in the elbow of a thick and gnarled tree, legs crossed under her. She cocked her head, frowning. “Knots, right? A pull on the right part, and it comes undone. That’s curses. Causalities and conditions, all hung on a central contingency.” Tutored words, told off pat. She closed her eyes and nodded then, smiled a little, like she was proud to have remembered a part of some long-ago lesson.
“I understand that alright. But say you come across a knot you didn’t tie, and don’t know how to tie. Not much more you can do than just fumble at it, is there? Pick and scrabble. Hope your fingernails are just the right length and your luck’s just right to come across the right bits. See what comes loose…”
“Aye…” Llolamae admitted. “I’d best get started then.”
Simra’s back straightened and he turned full around through his waist. Raised a wet leg onto the streamside and leaned chin on hands, hands on knee. He looked at Llolamae, brows low and creased. “On…fumbling?”
“Did you not hear me?” Llolamae dropped out of the tree in a flop of feet and falling cloth. “Just sort of got to start feeling round the edges of it, seeing if I can find the thing. Contingency. The thing it’s bound to.”
On his feet now, Simra drew up close to Llolamae, lowering his voice. “Why? I mean, like it or not, I’m on this path now. I could’ve killed him. Sort of still don’t know why I didn’t. But what about you? What’s your reason? Sympathy? Loyalty? Whatever Vedith knows about the torquestone?”
Llolamae shrugged and gave a faint simple smile. “Have you not seen Master Vidanu’s Tel? I don’t want to sleep in a hole under canvas anymore, waiting for a proper spire to grow. Vedith can help.”
Simra bent low, drying his feet and picking up his boots to hide the smile that cracked across his face. “Wise is what that is!” His best imitation of Vedith; a decent one, at least. “Wise is what I call that!”
Poor taste, might’ve been, to joke about someone just as soon as you get done breaking their fingers with their own teakettle. It got Llolamae laughing though, which meant the blame was shared, halved. You take what chances to laugh as life gives you.
The old gardener had retreated inside, into the creeper-grown cottage, alone. Jokes or not, Simra couldn’t blame him. Reckoned it was best he leave him that way. Wouldn’t be the first time he’d tried to get back on talking terms with someone he’d pulled a blade on, but that was one of many things that didn’t get easier with practice. Leave it till tomorrow. He let Llolamae head inside, alone, and alone he stayed out here.
Fast shadows along the ground. They lengthened and grew with the sinking sun, then spread like damp over everything. Planting beds and plants; the root-branches and branch-roots of the tall things that weren’t quite trees. Walls of the cottage as the dusk came down and a golden light glowed up inside. Llolamae’s magelight. No windows, but it fissured out through the cracks and gaps; made it look like it was breaking apart.
Simra walked in the warm dark, between the beds, the tree-things, the trellis. Careful planted feet, going nowhere. Going nowhere, he told himself, going nowhere; reassuring himself of it, confirming it in his mind. A fragile thought, wavering like a candleflame.
Harder to keep smiling once you’re alone. He made himself breathe from his belly, hand jumping from the hilt of his sword to the sheathes on his knives to the woodbound grip of his sword, uneasy again. If he’d been one for praying, he thought, now would’ve been a good time. Sparing a life — not the kind of thing you want cause to regret. He’d’ve liked cause to do it more often.
…
It wasn’t falling asleep that came hard. Out in the warm dark open, in sweat-stiff clothes, with his mantle balled round his scarf for a pillow, sleep fell on Simra quick and heavy as a Summer’s sudden rain. He’d been so tired. Days of tumbling first this way then that, never knowing where he was headed, or how he was meant to get there. Confusion can exhaust you, same as anything else.
But he woke before dawn, mist on his cheeks and soaked into his outer shirt, world still grey and faded. Couldn’t get back to sleep after that. He picked himself up, stretched, arms above his head and back arching. Regretted it. Grunted a curse and hobbled a few steps, trying to work out the new knots he’d tied in his muscles.
He’d heard of people – swordsmen, ascetics, people with time on their hands – who’d start each day stretching. They’d move from one pose to another, each with their own special names. Scorpion Rears to Strike; Swallow Takes Flight; Spinning Silk. After that it’d be like they’d shaken off all the weight of their body and it’d go through the day light as thought, doing what it was told. Simra didn’t know any stretches like that. Part of him wished that he did. The rest scoffed at the whole idea, or at least the idea that it would work for him. Some things just hurt. Some things, once broke, stay broken.
It was still hot, cloying. The warmth down here didn’t come from the sun, didn’t leave with it either. Just pooled like water, regardless of night or shade. Made you sluggish. It was a warmth that wore you like wet clothes.
A teacup lay on its side, half-forgotten in the flattened grass where he and Vedith had fought. Knees clicking, Simra bent and picked it up, took it over to the watercourse that ran through the garden. Filled it. The cup’s dark glaze turned the water to ink. He splashed a careful measure onto the hobstone and hovered his calloused left palm above it. He felt it grow warm then hot as he fed its enchantment another splash of water.
The teapot was dented, muddy, discarded same as the teacup. He fetched his own – dark fire-blackened bronze, small and sturdy, just more than enough for one person and barely that – and made tea.
With nothing to eat, he drank the whole pot.
There was light enough to read by now. No food, little sleep, but at least he had that. Crouching by his bookbag, he unlaced its mouth and pawed through. Paper, parchment, a book written on slats of wood, laced together like window shutters. Best not to read anything that mattered, that needed to last — not in this wet heat.
He fanned out the handbills and bounties he always had, stuffed and dogeared in the bag’s bottom. Woodcut prints of faces the law, or some lord, or the Temple had put a price on, all of them land and sea and leagues away, useless to him. Old news from elsewhere. Boat refugees from Bravil moved on by measured and merciful force from Narsis; told there’s land for settling in Vvardenfell; meanwhile, the violence in Cyrodiil rages on. Always violence, unrest, discontent — a decade of the same and getting worse each year, and they still didn’t call it a war. First the Concordat that lost Hammerfell, now this ‘violence’, and the Empire still wouldn’t admit it was anything less than whole. For certain it wouldn’t admit it was at war with itself; ablaze with a fire that threatened to spread. That was last year, last Summer, and nothing Simra didn’t already know. Caselif had told him enough for that. He stuffed the bill back in his bag, keeping it for scrap paper.
The writ stood out. It was long, not a scrap but a scroll, and made from fine silkpaper. Not block-printed in bulk, but written in his own formal hand — decent, even with the strike and scratchiness that came with employing a dip-pen to write a script meant for the brushes he’d never quite learnt to use. Ulessen’s scribe had hunched over his shoulder, watching as he wrote it. Now, with the sun rising slow, a change in the dark before it shed any light, he sat in the shade of the trellis and began to read.
It was his usual. He’d done his own writwork for years now, he’d said. Set his own terms. And he never left much room for worming out by one clause or another, not for him, and not for the client. That was the idea. Keep things stark, simple, in plain words, but lengthy enough, detailed enough, to make things seem professional, polished, planned for. In this writ, only the clause about up-front pay was changed. There was no pay at all, just a debt held over him, clear and quiet and smug, sure there was no way out from under it but the way Ulessen had offered him. A backroads lender, you could run from, hide from. A Telvanni magister, one with all the force and power of an old Tel behind them, would always find you.
A shrill from inside the cottage and Simra was already on his feet. It wasn’t the same sound as hurried him up that snowbank two yesterdays ago, and into a triangle of Kogaru with spears and sour red-painted faces. But it was still Llolamae, and it was close enough. He trampled beds, weeds, grasses. Found the door and shouldered it in, hand gone to his knives and twitching one out of its sheathe.
Vedith was asleep, on his back, on a palette of green wood and silky mushroom skin. Open mouth and pot-belly rising, falling. His broken hand was clawed shut, clutched to his chest like a pigeon’s bad wing.
Llolamae turned to look at Simra with ricebowl-wide eyes, sparkling with her grin even before he saw it in her red-gummed mouth, her mismatched child and unchild’s teeth. She shrieked again, words this time:
“I done it!”
Simra slackened and stopped. The hand on his knife-grip, the half-drawn blade, was heavy and weak now. His shoulders sagged. “You figured it out?” He said it flat. Couldn’t muster any feeling into the words, not while his heart was still pounding, choking the back of his throat and fooling his tongue dry and clumsy.
“I reckon so, aye!”
“Then why scream about it?” He saw Vedith was still sleeping, even through all the noise. Seemed Simra had strength left to feel bitter on that, at least.
Llolamae half-turned away, a slight hang to the angle of her head. “Thought you’d be pleased…”
Simra held back a grunt, a huff, and slumped against one of the cottage walls. “I am.” Seemed he had sense left to feel bad over snapping at her, at least. To feel bad all round. Aching shuddering muscles, battle-blood draining sick and away before he even knew it was up and upon him. “That’s good. Really good, maybe.”
“Sort of wondered if you’d come running again, too…” A part-moon sliver of Llolamae’s grin had stayed on her face. She turned it to him now.
Simra shrugged. He was here, wasn’t he? “What’d you find out? Can you break it? The curse.”
“Not with magic, no. Reckon I know how, though.”