“But you brought me here?”
“This place is safe,” he said. “I wish there weren’t prostitutes, but there are. I wish people weren’t power hungry, but they are. And it gets muddled anyway. When you’re starving, you’ll do things you wouldn’t do otherwise. It can be worse, too, you know? There are places where women who work there are treated really badly. Lilla runs a tight shop. And she protects these women. If my mother had stayed here, she’d still be alive.”
“Safe,” she mused, unsure if she believed him.
“No one would look for you here,” said Keirth. “You’ll be okay.”
“So you’re still planning on going? On leaving me here all alone?”
“I promised Lilla that I’d stick around for a bit, and I will,” he said. “But eventually, I do have to go after Risciter. Once he’s out of the picture, everything gets easier.”
Ariana did not want to be left alone in a brothel. At all. But she guessed it was better than being sent back to the sector. Maybe it wasn’t. She wasn’t sure.
Keirth stood up. “Look, I’ll show you around. I’ll take you for a walk down in that valley.” He pointed out the window. “There’s a stream down there, with a little footbridge. When I was a kid, I used to play down there for hours, making little boats out of leaves and floating them under the bridge. Then I’d drop stuff on them from on top of the bridge and try to sink them.”
She had to smile at that. “You made boats just to destroy them?”
“Absolutely,” said Keirth. “Is there another reason to make things?”
“I guess not if you’re a little boy,” she grinned.
“I suppose you never had to make your own toys, seeing that you were so rich and spoiled. You probably got new ones every week, the minute you got sick of the old ones.”
“We weren’t encouraged to play a lot, in fact,” she informed him. “We were mostly meant to be quiet and look pretty so that people could speculate on whom we’d marry when we were old enough.”
“Sounds boring,” said Keirth.
“A lot of the time,” she said. “Show me your bridge.”
They trooped out of the cottage together.
Upon arriving at the bridge, Keirth stripped off his socks and shoes, sat on the bridge, and dangled his bare feet in the water.
“Is it cold?” Ariana sat down with him.
“It feels divine.”
Ariana took off her own shoes and tentatively dipped a toe in the water. Not too cold. She eased both feet in.
“So, no playing when you were a kid, huh?” Keirth asked.
“Well, not no playing,” said Ariana. “My sister Maga and I had a nanny once that used to take us out to the park and let us run wild. She’d devise all these interesting games for us, have us pretend to be pirate princesses or wild horses or...all kinds of things. She was a lot of fun.” Ariana paused. “Of course, I suppose my mother had her dismissed because she was always making Maga and I look sweaty and untidy.”
“Nannies,” said Keirth. “I guess you didn’t spend much time with your mother, then.”
“Well, my mother wasn’t much for playing, that was for sure. She always seemed beautiful and poised and untouchable to me when I was young,” said Ariana.
“I get that. My mother didn’t seem untouchable to me, exactly, but I remember being somewhat awed by her as a little boy. I thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world.”
“I guess you spent a lot of time with your mother,” said Ariana.
“When I was very small, I did. Back then, it was like me and my mother against the world, and she protected me with this kind of fierce intensity. Back then, she seemed so strong.” Keirth looked at his fingers. “But I don’t know if she changed when I got older, or if I just realized that she was actually very fragile. In the years before she died, I felt more and more as if I was the one who was protecting her. She seemed desperate and sad most of the time. I always feel like I failed her. If I’d been quicker. If I’d realized something was wrong earlier.”
She put a hand on his arm. “Keirth, you can’t blame yourself. You were only a boy.”
“I was fifteen,” said Keirth. He stared out over the small stream, not facing her. “We were on Hallon. I stayed away when she had...company. At least I tried. But if I did come back when she was busy, I had this little hiding place I used to crawl into, someplace where she couldn’t see me, but I could see her.”
Ariana sucked in her breath. He was going to tell her about the murder, wasn’t he? Did she want to hear?