Page 53 of Broken Vow

Here was the moment. He had given me everything freely, and my old habit of fair dealing, the instinct I had grown up with before the world taught me how few people kept it, demanded I give something in return.

I thought of the three-legged crow flying over the lane, low, certain, and aimed at the barracks.

I found I could not give him all of it.

I gave him the crow. That much was true, that much might help him, and a man who had just hidden my name from the emperor had earned a true thing in return.

“There is something you should know,” I said. “This morning, just before we ran into you, a crow flew over us toward the barracks. Three legs, not two. I saw it plainly.” I watched him process the words. “The old woman who keeps company with me knows the old crafts far better than she lets on. She says it is no bird at all, but a familiar, a made thing, a sending. A wrong number of legs is a mark set there on purpose so the maker can be known to anyone able to read it. She says someone with very old, very dark craft has taken an interest in this business. Since you are hunting whoever wanted you caged, I thought you should have it.”

What I did not tell him was that Rainthorn intended to discover whose familiar it was. I did not mention that she had ways of listening kept secret even from us, or that I might have the name behind the bird within a day or two. When I had it, I would decide in my own time and on my own terms what part to share, and with whom.

I held that back not out of fear, I had stopped fearing him somewhere along this street, but because I knew what it cost to empty your hands for a man and stand left with nothing. I refused to be that woman again for anyone, no matter how good or true he proved to be, no matter how much my chest tightened when he adjusted his pace to mine.

“A three-legged crow.” Auden grew thoughtful. “I have no name to give you, but you are right that it points to a practitioner, and no mere hedge-charmer, either. A thing made that carefully and marked so boldly is the work of real, ancient power. Few in the empire hold such strength, and those who do do not fly familiars over barracks for sport.” His jaw set. “If someone of that stature is moving behind the scenes, this is far larger than a writ and a clerk. I have been a fool treating it as a soldier’s problem. I will find out whose bird that is.”

“So will I,” I said before I had fully decided to speak. Having said it, I did not pull the words back. “I have my own ways, my own people. You go yours, I will go mine, and perhaps we meet in the middle.”

He stopped walking. Instead of offering the usual warnings a certain kind of man gives a woman, that it was too dangerous, that she should leave it to him, that he would protect her, he simply looked at me. In his face was no patronizing fear that I would prove a hindrance, but something closer to awe that I intended to stand beside him.

“Then we hunt the same target from two sides,” he said. “I would rather do that than hunt alone, though I never expected to say such a thing.” He paused, his voice dropping lower. “Be careful with your ways, Liora. Whoever sent that bird is not being careful with theirs, and I find I dislike the thought of it turning toward you. Send word the moment you have a name. I will do the same.”

We had reached the fork in the street, his path leading back toward the barracks and the palace, mine returning home toward the old woman and the thread I had to pull. We stopped. The morning moved around us, loud and indifferent with cart wheels and shopkeeper cries, yet for a moment neither of us moved to leave.

“That night,” he said carefully, setting the words down like fragile glass. “The temple, the dance, all of it, I have not stopped thinking about it. About you. I wanted you to know that before we chase the same shadow.”

“I know,” I said. “Neither have I.” The truth of it ran deeper than I had meant to reveal.

He lifted his hand slowly, giving me time to step back, but I remained still. The backs of his fingers brushed my cheek, the slight calluses of a drummer and swordsman resting light against my skin. Warmth spread through me, sudden and complete, so that for a single breath the crow, the emperor, and the name I was going home to hunt vanished. I had spent so long flinching from touch. I had forgotten it could feel like this: a man’s hand against my face in the sun, asking for nothing, taking nothing, simply glad to be near.

Chapter 25

The tavern Selene chose was down a street I did not know. Low-ceilinged and warm, it was the kind of place that had been there long enough to stop trying. It had smoke-darkened beams, a fire too big for the room, and a girl in the corner singing old, long songs to a man playing a three-stringed instrument with a bone plectrum, plucking it in hard, bright strokes he was not quite landing in time with her.

“There,” Selene said, steering us to a bench by the hearth with the satisfaction of a general taking ground. “A table, a hearth, and not one person in this room who has ever signed a writ. Sit. Eat. Be ordinary with me for one evening, I beg you.”

I sat with the fire at my back, and somewhere in the first few minutes, I felt my shoulders drop from around my ears, where they had been living so long I had stopped noticing the tension. That was the first strange thing. I had forgotten my body could let go. I sat in the heat, my spine softening and my hands loosening in my lap, feeling with a wonder I did not quite trust that nothing in this room wanted anything from me. No one was hunting me here. No one needed me to be a lady, a weapon, or a cure. I could simply be a body in a warm chair, and the novelty of it was almost more than I could hold.

The bowl arrived chipped and steaming, a dark broth poured over rice gone soft at the edges, topped with shreds of slow-cooked meat, something pickled and sharp, and far too much pepper. I ate all of it, surprised by the plain, animal want of it. Then I drank the last of the broth straight from the bowl, as the men at the next table were doing, and ate the pickled bits after. I could not remember the last time I had been hungry like that, not with the gnawing of the curse, but with the good, honest emptiness of a person who means to live. Selene watched me with her chin resting on her hand, a softness in her face she would have denied to her grave.

“She is feeding,” she informed Rainthorn. “Look at her. I have never once seen her finish a bowl. We should have found her a bad tavern weeks ago.”

“You found her a great many things,” Rainthorn said into her cup. “Most of them trouble.”

“I found her you, you ungrateful root.”

“You found her me,” Rainthorn agreed, “which rather proves my point.”

An ache lay beneath it all, as there always was by then. Even as I laughed, I felt the thin, cold thread of it running through the warmth, the part of me that had learned its lesson too well and refused to be quiet. It sat in the back of my mind, reminding me that I did not get to keep things, that warmth was only a loan, and that the world always came to collect. But I was tired of listening to it. For one evening, I wanted the fire more than I wanted to be careful, so I pushed the cold thread down and let the warmth take me. That, I think now, was the most dangerous thing I did all night, far more dangerous than any roof I had ever crossed. I let myself be happy.

The singer reached the turn in the song where the lovers miss each other at the crossroads, the part everyone knows. Half the room sang the line back to her without prompting, the player finally catching up, and Selene, who could not carry a tune in a bucket, sang the loudest and entirely off-key. Tsuki put both paws over his ears from inside her hood, and I laughed. I really laughed, the kind that takes you by surprise, bends you over the table, and leaves your stomach aching after. My body remembered how before my mind did. It knew the feel of joy even though I had not let it in for so long. There was grief folded directly into that joy, that laughing had grown so foreign my own body had to remind me of it, but the grief did not spoil the moment. It made it sweeter. For the length of that one song, I was not a hunted thing on a failing clock, not a curse with a woman trapped inside, not the emperor’s secret, nor the witch’s quarry, nor anyone’s weapon. I was only Liora, a girl in a warm room with people who were her own, full of stew, laughing at a friend who could not sing. It was small, it was everything, and it was mine.

I want that set down because of what came after. I had it. For one evening, I had all of it.

We walked home loose, warm, and arguing happily about whether the player had been drunk or merely bad. Reaching our door, I reached in and left the window wide open to the soft spring dark.

I have gone back over that one small action more times than I can count. I did not leave it open out of carelessness. I was not stupid, I was not careless, and I had not forgotten for a single moment that I was hunted. I left the window open because the night was sweet, I was happy, and for once in all those frightened weeks, I felt safe. A person who feels safe opens a window. That was all. That was the whole of my crime. I felt safe, I let the spring in, and I went up the road laughing. While I laughed, the thing I should have feared slipped over the sill I had left open, entering the warm, lamplit room because I had been too happy to close it.

That was the lesson I kept failing to learn, the one that was continuously forced upon me: not that I was foolish, but that the exact moment I allowed myself to have something was the moment it was marked to be taken.