The Secret Texts Read online

  “Jerrpu?”

  “My kind of person. As you call yourself human.”

  Kait swallowed and nodded to show she understood. “So he . . . trained you . . .”

  “Trained. A weak word for what he did.” Rrru-eeth smiled thinly. “Oh, yes. He trained us regularly. We learned all sorts of techniques for pleasing those who would one day be our masters. Bagga, which is what he had us call him, was especially fond of teaching us to take pain and humiliation, which he said was the ultimate form of giving pleasure.” She looked away and her eyes narrowed again. “We spent long years with him, my sister and I. The other two from our group he sold, and all of those children that he bought afterward, as well. The two of us he kept until we were no longer little girls at all—but you see, we had become very good at taking pain and humiliation, and he spent a great deal of time and effort finding new ways to give it out. He told us he kept us because we were stronger than the little children that he could sell for a better price, and he didn’t want to risk breaking one of them while developing new training when he could practice on us.”

  Kait closed her eyes and rubbed her temples. She felt sick. She’d taken the existence of servants and slaves for granted all her life; they were the silent faces in the hallways, bringing things or taking them away, making sure rooms stayed clean and beds had fresh linen and food came on time and tasted the way it was supposed to. They’d never had voices to her before. They’d never seemed entirely real.

  Now she thought of the slaves that belonged to her own Family—they were different because in Ibera they had to be human, of course, not Scarred, but they were still slaves. Among the Galweighs, she could think of several men who bought child slaves regularly and sold them to their associates when the children reached adolescence. She’d never given much thought to the purposes those children served, nor to where they had come from or what became of them when they grew up. There were things Family didn’t discuss, and how relatives used their slaves was one of them.

  She looked over at Rrru-eeth and bit her lip. She was ready for the happy ending, the one in which Rrru-eeth won her freedom and found love. “So what happened? How did it all end?”

  “During training one day, Bagga hurt my sister more than she could take. She died.” Rrru-eeth’s voice was flat. “I saw him kill her, so I killed him. I hurt him first, using everything I had learned from years of torture. Then I killed him very slowly. Then I took the children he was training to sell, and dressed them, and stole as much of Bagga’s money as I could find in his house, and marched the children through the streets of Glasmar down to the docks. I could find only one captain who would take us aboard without the children’s papers.” She jerked her chin in the direction of the ship’s helm. “Ian Draclas. He wanted a lot of money—more than I had. It’s risky transporting slaves if you don’t have a slaver’s seal or slaver’s papers, and of course neither of us would be able to prove that the children were free, because they weren’t. So I offered myself without wages for as long as it would take to pay for their passage to safety. He hired someone who made papers for all of them. And for me. He took them someplace where they could live as free children, and found them families. I found my own family here. I found love here, and freedom from pain and humiliation and torture. And as long as I never step on land ruled by a Family again, I should be safe enough.”

  Sick, Kait closed her eyes and covered her face with her hands. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  “You don’t owe me an apology.”

  “I’m sorry you suffered. I’m . . .” How could anyone make restitution for the pain Rrru-eeth had suffered? How could she be marked for death, when the ones who had deserved death had been the men who killed her family to take her as a slave, and the men who had sold her, and the man who eventually bought her? Where was the justice that would champion such an outcome?

  The Reborn would free the slaves, Kait realized. He would bring peace, and justice, and he would remove Rrru-eeth’s pain.

  “I’m sorry that someone could do that to you, and leave you to blame.” Kait stood and rested a hand on Rrru-eeth’s shoulder. “That’s all going to change. All of it.”

  * * *

  Ry paced along the deck, forward, then aft, then forward again, in no mood to talk with anyone. She was out there. Still far ahead of him, getting closer to her goal.

  He tasted the salt spray on his lips, and stared out at the sea. Clouds built along the southern horizon, a line of black that looked for the moment like a distant mountain range. The sun dropped closer to the western horizon. A pod of whales had run alongside the Wind Treasure for nearly two days, until sometime after midday they had either tired of their game, or lost interest in the humans and their ship, or had been lured away by schools of fish; in any case, they had veered off and Ry had seen nothing alive in the ocean the rest of the day.

  The captain said the clouds looked like the leading edge of trouble. He’d set the ship’s course more directly northward and added extra sails. The change might move them toward safety, but it moved them away from Kait.

  Ry grew impatient. He wearied of the waiting, of the bleakness of the sea, of wanting her and not having her. She was a drug, and the longer she was out of his system, the more he lusted after her.

  In their cabin, Valard and Yanth played querrist, and Jaim wrote a long entry in his journal, and Karyl played his guitarra and wrote another of those sad love songs he used to lure women into bed with him. Only Trev had been out on the deck since the evening meal, and he kept his distance, watching Ry without saying anything.

  He stalked forward, then aft. Lately, the visions he saw through her eyes when he closed his own had changed. Now, late in the night, he saw a man—oddly familiar-looking, whose presence in her bed was somehow more infuriating for that tantalizing familiarity. They were lovers, Kait and this stranger.

  Ry knew about the Karnee drives. He’d subsumed his own by the use of magic, but at a fierce cost. When the lusts were worst, he quenched them with a spell—but when he did, he burned inside, and suffered terrible rages, and blinding headaches, and Shift came at him harder and faster. Still, he did not give in to the lust, which was why, when his mother demanded he serve in his father’s stead, she could not trot forward half a dozen of his little bastards for him to legitimize.

  Kait showed no signs of knowing Wolf magic. So she couldn’t know the spell that suppressed the lust. Her Karnee desires ran unchecked.

  Ry didn’t care.

  She was his. He’d claimed her, his magic had marked her, she did not belong with another man. And when he closed his eyes in the night and saw her touching that stranger, and kissing him, and bedding him, he made himself a promise.

  When he caught up with Kait and claimed her, Ry intended to rip out that stranger’s heart and crush it in his hand.

  Chapter 26

  Danya twisted in her sleep and cried out, and in doing so woke herself. Another nightmare, another return to the dungeon and the Sabirs, to her Family’s abandonment of her, to torture and horror. Waking was no better, for as she shook off the nightmare, the reality of unending touching by invisible fingers became stronger. Invisible eyes spied on her; invisible strangers reached inside of her and caressed the child she carried. Those strangers promised lies—love and safety and security, concern, compassion, joy. She fought them off when they tried to smother her with their false comfort; she was unable to push them away from the bastard babe.

  Their presence had been constant for days. She couldn’t stand it. She wanted to scream, to destroy things, to hurt someone, but as before, when she had been the Sabirs’ prisoner, she was helpless. She shivered beneath the fur robe, but not from cold.

  Gently, child, Luercas said. Gently. Your fear won’t help you, and it won’t change anything. Let them have their moment, and don’t spend yourself in wasted resistance. Your moment will come. For now, get up and come with me; I want to show you something wonderful.

  “Who keeps t
ouching me?” she asked.

  Hush. Not here, not now. Be satisfied that they won’t hurt you. We can discuss who they are and what they want soon. Soon. In the meantime, come. What I have to show you will bring you joy.

  Luercas didn’t understand the sense of violation that those constant touches brought back. He said the things that had killed him had been much like what had happened to her, but for him to tell her to accept—to quit fighting—he proved to her that he didn’t really remember.

  Nevertheless, doing something would be better than lying there in the darkness with nothing to think about but the unending probings of the strangers. She rose and let the robe fall to the floor. She pulled on the fur chaps her host’s wife, Tayae, had made for her, and the modified fur tunic that had been a gift from the women in the next house over—the tunic that made room for the spikes erupting from her spine and joints, and somehow emphasized her hideous deformities—and she tugged on the straw-insulated fur boots that kept her feet warm but still permitted her claws to project. She listened to Tayae and Goerg and their children sleeping in the loft; she made no noise as she crawled down the passageway that led from the main room, where she slept, to the outdoors. Her hosts woke easily, and though they would never question her activities, she would feel obligated to give them some sort of explanation, in her still-halting Karganese, of where she was going and why.

  Outside, the long night of the arctic winter still reigned. The stars glittered with cold brilliance, close and malevolent. The snow crunched beneath the flat, hard skin soles of her boots, the only sound other than the wind whistling across distant drifts.

  Set out along the main path. Follow it to the river. When you reach the river, cross and turn right along the bluffs.

  She was coming to know the area well enough. Because she didn’t know what else to do, she’d offered her services to the villagers—after a few days, and with some nervousness, the Kargan women had asked her to help them carry stored food from the village’s outlying caches back to the underground houses. She’d accepted, and had been on her way back to the village with them, loaded with food, when a pack of lorrags attacked.

  The lorrags were Scarred monsters that might have started out as wolves or bears, but might as easily have been rabbits before the Wizards’ War twisted them into nightmares. They burrowed beneath the snow where they could and, where they could not, moved on top of it on four wide, well-padded feet, nearly invisible in their heavy white winter coats. They were terrifying beasts, cannier than wolves though a bit smaller, lean and fast and tough. The four lorrags that erupted out of their tunnels in the snow had given no warning of their presence beforehand, and had Danya not been there with teeth and claws at the ready when they struck, one or more of the Kargan women would have died.

  That none had, and that the village had lost none of its food, either, had won Danya both gratitude and complete acceptance. No one cared that she bore different Scars than they. She became a part of every food-carrying expedition; she became an invited companion during hide preparation and sewing sessions, though her hands were not capable of holding the tiny bone needles or of threading the sinews through the little eyes. She was more physically suited to hunting, and the Kargan men welcomed her, too, and took her with them. Her nose was better than theirs and her speed over short distances allowed her to run down game that would otherwise have escaped. She added to the wealth of the village in measurable ways, and the Kargans showed their appreciation at every turn. The women gave her gifts; the adults brought her into their council circles. The village adopted her as one of its own in a smoke-hut ceremony, and the boys who were too young to hunt and the men who were too old or injured were renovating an abandoned house for her as they did for their own children who reached adulthood and stayed within the village. Until they finished the renovations and purified it with ceremonies, she continued to live with Goerg’s family, and to collect her welcome gifts, and to alternately hunt with the men and work with the women.

  She remained bitter. She did not forgive her Family, she did not forgive the Sabirs, and she could not forget the Scars that made her a monster, or the unborn child that had been forced upon her. Acceptance into the Kargan clan made the sting more bitter, because she could not forget that the Kargans were monsters like her. She could not forget that she could never go home—that she was outcast forever from the society of humans, and that the people who should have welcomed her never would again. Yet . . . if she could somehow make her way through Ibera without being killed for being an abomination, and if she could reach the Galweigh Wolves, they would take her in and set her in the circle with the rest of their Scarred to work magic. She would have to hide in the darkness, her only contact with the world she had once loved through the eyes of the young Galweigh Wolves who had not yet been set in circle and who therefore remained free.

  Every human from her past, though, had been taken away from her, and nothing she could do could ever win even one of them back. She was dead to them, and they to her.

  Accompanied by such thoughts, she crunched through the darkness over the shell of compressed snow, breaking through occasionally, and quickly reached the river. The Kargans called it the Sokema, which meant “Our Blessing.” It cut like a raw wound through the rolling white-on-white tundra, a darker line of black in the darkness. Wind blew thin curvettes of snow across its mirror-slick black-ice surface, but the snow didn’t stick. She walked out onto its surface without hesitation, not worried about it holding her weight. She’d helped the village women chop ice to reach the running water beneath—they used the holes both to draw up cooking and drinking water and so they could set the live lines that gave them fresh fish to supplement the dried fish and smoked meat and the occasional fresh game. She knew from that experience that the frozen surface was thicker than she was tall.

  The novelty of ice, like the novelty of snow, had worn off quickly. It became just another obstacle to contend with—its slickness offered little purchase to her boots, and would have offered even less to her bare, hard-scaled feet. She scrabbled with claws splayed out; she kept her arms out for balance; she wished once again that she could master the art of skimming across the surface on the narrow carved-bone blades that the Kargans used, but her unwieldy, Scarred body seemed unable to accommodate itself to the graceful, flowing movements required.

  Reaching the bluffs on the far side took both time and effort, and she was panting by the time she arrived.

  She didn’t remember the directions Luercas had given her. “Which way now?”

  Turn to your right. Climb the bluffs, but not all the way to the top. Follow along them just below the ridge so you won’t show against the skyline, should anyone decide to look for you.

  Danya wondered why Luercas thought anyone might care to look for her. The villagers’ sense of privacy, from everything she had so far seen, was acute. If she went out for a walk, they refrained from asking anything about her destination or what had happened while she was out; they did not ask her where she was from; they did not question who she was. Early on, they had offered her their own names, but did not ask for hers. When she eventually told them, they treated her name as a gift. She couldn’t imagine them looking for her unless they thought she had come to grief. She suggested as much to Luercas.

  The surprise I have for you is something the villagers are aware of, though only in a distant way. None of them has ever seen it; none of them would ever dare. Their superstitions make them fear this place, though neither they nor their parents nor their grandparents nor their great-grandparents have ventured to test those superstitions against reality. If they realize you have gone to In-kanmerea, their name for the place, they will fear for your life, and for your soul. He paused, then added, In-kanmerea means “House of the Devil Ghosts.” I could give you their beliefs about it, I suppose, but they have no basis in fact, so why bother? Better you see the place for yourself. She felt his next pause as a sigh. I don’t know that any of the Kargans would be
brave enough to attempt your rescue if they knew you had entered . . . but I would not gamble against that; you seem to have made yourself beloved in a very short time.

  She said nothing. She clambered along the bluffs and considered the idea of the pragmatic Kargans being superstitious about any sort of wonderful place. Such an idea seemed to run counter to everything she’d seen of them so far. Their fears seemed to be of those things that offered real danger to them, like the lorrags, or like the sudden ice storms that had already killed one young man since she arrived. But people were contradictions. It was their nature. She assumed the fact would be true even about almost-people like the Scarred.

  Like me.

  The bluffs carried her around a bend and out of sight of the village. Immediately, Luercas told her, Now climb up to the ridge. Stay along the river—In-kanmerea will be easy to miss otherwise.

  It was almost easy to miss in spite of her following his directions exactly. She almost walked by the entranceway that lay at arm’s length to her left. White on white in the starlight, with the same delicate glitter as the snow all around it, it could have been a large, oddly formed drift. The snow that did drift into the corners of the long curve of stairs burrowing into the snow-glazed tundra furthered the illusion.

  Go down. Slowly; the stairs may be icy. A warming spell cast on them prevented that once, but if snowdrifts can accumulate, the spell must have fallen apart.

  Danya looked down into the darkness, uneasy. The Kargans feared things that were dangerous; they waited to discover the danger of the unknown before fearing it. Had they acted in any other way, she would have died when she fell through the roof into Goerg’s house. At the mouth of the House of the Devil Ghosts, she hesitated, and presented Luercas with a plausible excuse for her hesitation. “If the spell ever worked, it should still work. According to the Law of Magical Inertia, spells in force tend to remain in force unless acted on by an opposite force.”