“Your father will hear you,” said Heart. “And he will require First Teacher Signed to Still Water to do the same.”
“You fool!” Eric leapt to his feet. “You blood-crossed fool! You’ve been used for years and finally sent to die and you still think you know what my father will do!”
“Eric.” Arla looked up at him and there was genuine concern on her face. “I hate to agree with him, but we have to try it.” She spoke in Standard. Eric was very aware that Jay was watching them both closely. “We need all the help we can get,” she said. “Even from the high-house fools.”
Eric looked away from her. He looked at the wicker walls with the crumbling wisps of moss poking out of the mud chinking. He looked at the roof. Beams and trimmed poles supported thatch and shadows. He looked at the flickering fire on its flat, brown stone.
She was right. He did not want her to be, because that meant Heart was also right. Worse, it meant he had to go back and stand in front of Father again, and tell him … tell him what? He wouldn’t care about ten years of heresy and impossibility, as long as Eric could tell him how to drive the Vitae into submission. If Eric could tell him that, anything would be forgiven.
The problem was, that was the one thing Eric could not tell him. That meant that Father’d try to exact a price, for Eric’s daring to abandon his family, for daring to question the designs of the Seablade House. Father and Mother both would demand that Eric show he was of use, and they were experts at putting people to use.
He did not miss the fact that they hadn’t just sent out Heart to die. They’d sent Mind as well, because to send her husband without her would have looked strange. It might have endangered whatever plan they were birthing.
Ten years gone and it wasn’t enough. Eric folded his arms against a chill that was entirely inside him. He tried to think of another reason why this was impossible, but he couldn’t.
“The Servant sees this deed,” he said to the fire. “It cannot be denied.”
“Thank you,” said Jay. Arla just nodded in silent approval.
“You’ve some sense in you yet,” said Heart.
Anger burst white-hot inside Eric and his hands splayed out at his sides. He turned on his heel and brushed past the door blanket.
Iron Shaper and what looked like most of the Notouch clan still clustered in front of the house. Their muttered debate broke off when Eric appeared.
“Get your belongings together,” he said to Shaper as he descended the ladder. “You need to get your families as deep into the marshes as you can.”
“What is happening, Teacher?” Shaper sneered the title.
Definitely one of Arla’s family. “I don’t know,” he said. “Nobody knows. That’s why you’d better get yourselves out of here.” He marched through the crowd before any of them could ask him anything.
Eric walked away without a plan. He just let the force of his confusion choose a path for him. It took him in a wandering line until his boots splashed in open water.
“Garismit’s Eyes.” He pulled himself up short, one step shy of stumbling over the piles of reeds Nail in the Beam and his sons had left off cutting so they could help fight. The stalks glistened in the sun. If they weren’t spread out properly soon, they’d pick up some of the fast-growing mold that lurked around the Lif marshes. It carried a stench that all the light of both of the suns above wouldn’t be able to bake out.
Idly, he prodded the green-grey heap with the toe of his boot, flicking reeds onto the bare ground and kicking them out into an even layer. It was useless and pointless. The clan wouldn’t carry undried reeds with them, they’d cut new when they got to … wherever the Notouch knew to hide. But it was better than thinking.
It was better than realizing that Heart probably knew how Lady Fire fared, and that he hadn’t even thought to ask.
“My Lord Teacher?” said a man’s low voice.
Eric turned. A broad-shouldered Notouch knelt on the soft ground behind him, dirt-stained hands raised in front of his eyes. He was going bald, Eric noted. He could see his leather-tough scalp through his scraggly black hair. Behind him, knelt Branch in the River.
Oddly discomforted, Eric mustered old manners. He raised both hands with the palms turned toward the man. “I stand in the place of the Nameless Powers and the Servant Garismit and so do I greet you who were named when the Powers walked the world.” His inner eye saw Arla sitting in the Vitae cell, her dark eyes narrowed and watchful as he spouted what she already knew to be nonsense. “I was named by them Teacher Hand kenu Lord Hand on the Seablade dena Enemy of the Aunorante Sangh.