81. Now Heart
NOW: HEART
In the morning, both of us drowsy and gentle with each other, he walked me back to wagon four hundred and twenty-three.
When I got there, everyone was awake despite the rest of the campground all yet asleep under their own wagons.
A second wagon was pulled next to ours and Keir, Dermid, and Evangeline were climbing out of it.
Reed kissed me and left me with them, not seeming surprised by this second vehicle or his brothers.
Tessa approached me as I stood watching. “They’ve a wagon with a false bottom. They’re going to put anything of value to us in it and keep it outside the city gates. So when we leave with Adelaide, we won’t have to take all of our belongings on our escape from the city.”
“I wish you wouldn’t use the word escape,” I sighed.
“Look at the way these soldiers all look at us. We’re prisoners, not pilgrims. We are not refugees, Robbie. We are something else to them.”
I began to aid in the labor of dividing up what could be left behind in Skow and what could fit into the false bottom of the scouts’ wagon.
Once my small trunk with The Life of Una, my two tools for the act of care, and my meager belongings were secured, I deferred to everyone else when it came to deciding what was worth keeping.
My thoughts were adrift, and I decided to empty the latrine bucket half full with piss.
“I’m to the ditch,” I told them and began to walk away.
“I’ll join you,” said Keir by my side, in step with me. “I’ve something to say to you, if I may.”
I kept my features composed and answered, “Your people and my own have become friendly. Please speak freely, Keir.”
The tall, handsome Vyggian turned to me, his sleek dark braid over one shoulder. “I must speak of my stepbrother. Though it is strange to call him that when I feel like we are kin by blood.”
We walked on for a bit, not speaking, wending our way around waking penitents, horses, wagons, and tents.
When we reached the latrine, he took the bucket from me and carried out my chore.
Then Keir said, “I know you think I will want to talk of Jade, but I do not. Though Tessa tells me you yourself are likely refraining from inquiring after my commitment to her.”
“I have tried not to meddle, as you do seem to be already very much in love with her.”
“I plan to ask for her hand in marriage,” he replied. “As I think my brother may ask you.”
A slap across my face could not have surprised me more. “He may?”
Keir set the bucket down and crossed his arms. “Has he told you how he lost his eye?”
“In a fight, he said.”
Keir held my gaze and then spoke, his voice low and sad. “My father cut it out of him.”
He let his words sit on the air between us. Then he went on.
“There was never a boy more in want of a father than Reed when he was seven. My father was a foreman on salt shallow crews. He was good at getting the best results from his men when they harvested the salt. My mother died when I was young. It was just the two of us. The lord of the island where Reed hails from sent for my father, offered him a good wage to move to that island and lead the crews that worked the shallows. Reed’s mother was a local beauty.
She spurned any suitor, apparently always holding out for the return of Reed’s father from Tintar.
My father saw that he couldn’t have her easily, so he wanted her.
They toyed with each other. Their entire marriage was a game.
To Reed, it was all of his dreams coming true. ”
Keir’s eyes were distant, like he was not seeing me.
“He adored my father, refused to listen to my warnings that deep down my father was sadistic and exacting. We were happy as brothers, and that was the only thing we squabbled over. I was constantly evading my father, and Reed was constantly following him around. My father nursed this. He relished in his stepson’s worship.
But then, Tintarians visited our island for one reason or another.
I was too young to remember. And someone explained their gods to Reed.
And he fell in love. He already knew his father had sea magic and that air and sea magic ran strong in the Spinner line.
Already, he could see and hear farther than most children.
He had more agility than any other boy. Could scale a cliffside without a slip.
And he had his soundless step. When he learned more of Brother Air, he became fixated.
He transferred his prime interest to the study of air.
He got his hands on books about the gods, about some higher practice of air magic in which the practitioner becomes their highest self by not wanting anything, by not caring.
And he learned of their archpriest in their capital’s air temple, a blind man who sees everything, both natural and supernatural.
As winters passed, this annoyed my father more and more.
He had somewhat lost his little pet. He began to mock Reed and the priest, and this sorely wounded Reed as he still adored my father. They fought a great deal.”
A sense of dread sat heavy in my breast. I found myself not wanting to listen, wanting to walk away.
“When Reed was fourteen, his mother was to market and I was somewhere doing the gods know what, likely shirking my chores. When I came home I—” He cut himself off and winced.
“When I came home, I found Reed on the ground outside the house. He was not awake, and his head was covered in so much blood, I thought he must have been dead.”
My throat was so tight, I could not draw breath. “No,” I protested, even if I knew the outcome.
Keir grimaced. “I do not know what precipitated their fight, but my father was almost as big as Dermid. And Reed has always been strong, but at fourteen, he did not stand a chance. The removal of that eye was a jeer at everything Reed loved. I’m sure my father made some speech about the blind archpriest of Tintar’s air temple.
I’m sure he ridiculed Reed as he gouged him.
I did my best by my brother. I tried to clean the wound and dress it.
I tried to rouse him, keep him awake. I feared if he truly slept, he would never wake. ”
“What did his mother do?” I asked, blinking away my tears.
“She came home. She looked at her son. She looked at her husband. And she never spoke of it. And nor did my father. When Reed was able to speak, when his wound stopped pouring out blood, I asked him what had happened, and do you know what he said to me?”
I could not speak. I could not think. I was sickened and aggrieved by this story. I wanted to cover my ears and turn away.
“He said, ‘It does not matter and I do not care.’ Then he quoted some old Tintarian sage’s words about ‘the desires of my life are not the whole of it.’ I think this old practice of air magic is a decent idea.
But in the hands of a heartbroken boy? He twisted it.
He bent it to serve him. And he has never let himself care about anything in life except the three of us.
Even then, when the three of us express our love openly, he will put his hand on our shoulders, nod his head, smile.
But he has to be deep in his cups to tell us he loves us. ”
“Why do you tell me this?” I asked, more tears sliding down my cheek.
“Because I have never seen him this way around a woman.”
I was afraid to ask anything else in that regard. The answers to what Keir might see when he observed Reed’s feelings for me were not truths I was ready to handle. So I asked the question I had wanted to ask all along.
“Keir, what are a Helmsman, a Tintarian woman, a Vyggian, and a half-Tintarian, half-Vyggian man doing on a religious pilgrimage to Perpatane to get folk away from Tintar?”
He shook his head and stared down at the ground. “I was hoping you knew.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean he left the forest wardens after winters of service without notice. He just left his post, left Nyossa, returned to Pikestully, and said he was going to return to Vyggia to reclaim his mother’s house, that he didn’t want any part of some war.
And then, after he had visited the Shark’s Keep, where the Shark King and his armies are marshaled, after he had submitted his last report on the activity of the borders he patrolled, he changed his mind.
He returned to the quarters the four of us kept together and announced he was traveling to a settlement of the low country called Sheridan and he was going to try to find work on the caravan. ”
“And gave no other explanation?”
Keir grinned, but his face was sorrowful.
“He wouldn’t say a word. Wouldn’t give us a breath of reason.
And keep in mind, I had dropped out of the army when he did.
I was back to work as a guard with Dermid and Evangeline.
We had no real dedication for our work. So we decided if he was going, so were we. ”
“Just like that?”
“The way Jade tells it, you and yours are the same.”
“We are. Still, I have wondered all this time. Why do you think—”
“It has something to do with you,” Keir spoke over me. “That is all I know. I tell you all of this to say, have a care with his heart, madam.”