Thief With No Shadow (27 page)

“Did you bring milk, too?” Her voice was sharp. “That won’t spoil either.”

He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned back against the wall, still watching her. “No milk.”

Anger made her reckless. She placed the egg back in the basket before it shattered in her hand. “Tell me, do you become a hound when the moon is full?”

Bastian’s eyebrows lowered. He pushed away from the wall and uncrossed his arms. “Of course not.”

She smiled at him, tightly. “And I don’t sour milk or curdle eggs or become seen when salt is cast at me. Or chase all the spiders from a house. Ask Endal whether I lie.”

“I have asked him.” Bastian’s smile was as tight as her own, mocking. “He says you tell the truth.” He snapped his fingers. “Endal.”

The hound transferred his attention to Bastian, his head slightly cocked.

“Don’t let her out of your sight,” Bastian said. The words, the flat hostility in his voice, were insulting. He’d left her unguarded all day and now he set his hound on her again. “Bite her if she becomes unseen.”

Melke crossed her arms and raised her chin, to show him that she didn’t care.

“The equinox starts in four days.”

He was gone before Melke found her voice. “I know,” she whispered. “I know.”

S
HE WORE THE
new shoes in the morning. They fitted well. Hantje wasn’t able to answer her questions, though. He said her name when he woke, and smiled at her, but she couldn’t get him to speak beyond that. His gaze was slightly unfocused. She’d seen it before, in the eyes of the desert nomads who smoked poppy resin. The world was still unreal to him.

Hantje drank both tea and broth willingly, and allowed her to wash his face and comb his hair. He smiled again when she offered to read a tale to him, and was asleep before she’d finished the second page.

Melke laid the book on the floor and touched her fingers lightly to his cheek. He looked well. His breathing was even, his pulse strong and steady. Fever didn’t heat him or twist his dreams into nightmares. It was impossible to tell where the burns had been, and Liana said the bones had knitted. But he hadn’t the strength to think clearly.

“Sleep, Hantje,” she whispered. “Grow strong.”
And hurry. Time is short.

She stood. “Come, Endal. I need to wear in my shoes.”

The house told her what the sal Veres had been, and how much they’d lost. Melancholy settled on her as she walked through room after empty room, high-ceilinged and with large windows and wide stone fireplaces. She could see where pictures had hung on the paneled walls. The furniture was gone, the carpets, even the curtains.

She opened doors to a formal parlor, a study, a library with tall shelves and no books, and a large room with bay windows and a fireplace that dwarfed all the others. Melke touched the dusty mantelpiece. Clusters of leaves were carved into the stone. She looked around her. Was this where the family had gathered in the evenings?

Alongside the kitchen was a dining room, empty but for a single chair. Fabric was roughly bundled on the wooden seat and half a dozen buttons lay scattered on the floor.

Melke’s footsteps echoed as she crossed the room. The chair stood beside a window. The view was of bare meadows and the dusty track that led away from the farmhouse. She picked up the bundle and carefully shook it out. A blouse, with long sleeves and a plain collar. It lacked only buttons.

Had Liana sat here waiting for Bastian to return with the necklace?

Melke fingered the fabric. The cotton was coarse and undyed. It didn’t match the room; the elegantly paneled ceiling and ornate cornices demanded something finer.

She smoothed the creases and laid the blouse on the chair and bent to pick up the buttons, while Endal sniffed the fireplace. The buttons were made of bone, as simple and plain as the blouse. She turned one over in her fingers. Had Bastian made them?

Melke opened cupboards until she found where Liana kept the buttons. The deep shelves must once have held porcelain and silver; now they were almost bare. A few needles and a handful of pins lay on one shelf, a wooden spool of thread, scissors and a thimble. Buttons. Pieces of fabric were neatly piled on a lower shelf: the undyed cotton of Liana’s blouses and Bastian’s shirts, the sturdier dull brown cotton that his trousers and her skirts were made from, scraps of old bed linen.

She looked down at the embroidery on her cuffs. Flowers and leaves, intertwined. Stitched in thread a few shades darker than the blue-grey of her blouse.

Melke pressed her lips together and closed the cupboard. Liana should wear colored fabrics: apple greens and soft pinks, forget-me-not blue.

“Come, Endal.”

She climbed the wide staircase and halted at the top. She’d stood here twelve days ago, unseen, her heart knocking against her breastbone. A door had stood open, part way down the corridor. She’d heard the creak of a floorboard, a woman singing. The words had been too low to hear, the phrases broken by long pauses and the sound of a bed being stripped of its linen.

Today there was only silence.

The door to Bastian’s bedchamber was closed, as it had been that morning.
The firssst door on the right
. Melke walked over to it and laid her hand on the cool wood.

She had stood in this precise spot, afraid and determined, her ears alert to the singing down the corridor, her heart banging against her ribs.
Do it. Do it. Do it.

Bastian’s door had opened silently, showing her a large room with high windows and green curtains, empty. There’d been no creak of stiff hinges, nothing to give her away. She had stepped quickly inside and closed the door and stood with her back to it, her breathing shallow, her heartbeat fast. She’d seen wealth, not poverty, had noticed the expensive paneling and the commanding size of the bed, not the bareness of the room.

It isss in a chessst. Beneath the bed.

She had committed her crime swiftly, crossing the room and kneeling on the hard floorboards, reaching beneath the bed to pull out the chest.

“Forgive me,” she’d whispered, to Mam and Da, to the occupant of the room.

The chest was old and plain, the wood dark with age. A handful of items lay inside: a crocheted baby’s blanket, a battered wooden rattle, a thin and knotted skipping rope, a wooden spinning top with the paint worn off. The necklace was wrapped in a piece of linen. The cloth was embroidered in a child’s crooked stitches.

She had felt relief, kneeling on the floor. The necklace wasn’t valuable; the ordinariness of the other items told her that, rattle and skipping rope and spinning top. These things were mementos. The salamanders had told the truth.
Not jewelsss. Sssea ssstonesss.

Why do you want the necklace? she’d asked, when the salamanders had stated the price of Hantje’s freedom. The answer had been a sinuous shrug.
We like pretty thingsss.

Pretty. Priceless. But the creatures wouldn’t have cared whether the necklace was strung with psaaron tears or diamonds and rubies. It was merely another treasure to add to their pile.

The shimmering stones had become unseen once the necklace was around her throat. She’d folded the cloth and put it on top of the baby’s blanket and pushed the chest back under the bed.“Forgive me,” she’d whispered again, to the person who’d kept the necklace so carefully wrapped. To Bastian.

She had stood, a thief, and opened the door and crept back down the stairs, a thief, hearing Liana’s soft singing and the sound of a broom sweeping and the rapid beating of her own heart.

Guilt had been heavy in her belly, but stronger than guilt had been determination.
I’m doing the right thing
, she told herself as she stepped out into the yard, as she followed the rutted track at a half-jog, back towards the river.
I’m doing the right thing.

Melke lowered her hand from Bastian’s door. “It wasn’t the right thing,” she told the hound, her voice flat.

Endal pricked his ears.

The wrong thing. The worst thing. And now she must be a wraith again, a thief. It was the only way. Laws of nature couldn’t be broken; the psaaron would never ask the salamanders for the necklace, any more than the salamanders would give it back. The magical creatures chose paths that never crossed, and it was well for mankind that they did: their battles would make the mountains bleed and oceans boil dry.

She turned away from Bastian’s door. The corridor was silent apart from the
clack
of Endal’s claws on the wooden floor as he walked beside her. Two rooms down was Liana’s bedchamber, the door now shut as the girl slept.

She knew without having to ask that the blanket was Liana’s as a baby, that the toys in the chest had been the girl’s, and the cloth with the crooked stitches.

If the psaaron chose Liana, Bastian would be broken more surely than if the creature chose him.

Whatever choice the psaaron made, brother or sister, the result would be the same: pain beyond bearing for one, unendurable grief for the other.

Melke blew out a breath. “I will get it back,” she told the hound. “I
will
.”

Endal wagged his tail.

Beyond Liana’s room were other bedchambers, and around the corner a nursery. Melke opened the doors, peering inside. The rooms were empty of furnishings, bare. Dressing rooms and wardrobes opened off them, but no clothes hung inside.

Upstairs from the kitchen were four rooms for servants. Only hers had a bed. There had been no malice in Bastian to give her a servant’s bedchamber; there was nowhere else she could have slept.

Melke stood on the tiny, dark landing. There should be noise, footsteps and voices, children’s laughter, bustle in the kitchen. Instead, the house was empty around her, quiet.

The psaaron had destroyed a family. Did it know that?

She touched the wall. The stone was cold and rough beneath her fingers. There were no expensive wood panels here, where the servants had slept.

Vengeance. A family for a family. The necklace of psaaron tears for the flesh and blood of the sal Veres.

Hantje woke again, drank tea and broth, listened to two more pages of story, and fell asleep again.

“Outside, this time,” Melke said to Endal. The house was too silent, too empty.

But the yard was also silent. The henhouse had no hens. One horse stood in a bare paddock, eating hay beneath the shade of a dead tree. Two sheep, heavy with lamb, watched her from a lean-to pen. A lizard sunned itself by the well.

The garden had once been much bigger, three times the size it was now. The rows of dry, turned dirt looked like long graves. At the end, a small cesspit had been dug into the abandoned land. Another lizard watched the flies with heavy-lidded eyes.

The barn was empty except for a few implements: hoe and spade and rake, a rusted scythe. There was no cart, no plough. She saw a small dairy with a churn and a stone cheese weight, but no cows. More pens and paddocks, fenced and empty. A cobbled stable yard. Melke’s eyes widened slightly as she counted the stalls.

She walked slowly, opening doors. She found an empty tackroom, living quarters for grooms, and a bare and dusty feed room. With each step she took, each door that she unlatched, her horror grew. It was a tumor in her chest, swelling. Vere was far larger than she’d thought. What the sal Veres had lost was immense.

Her steps become slower. She didn’t want to see, didn’t want to know how vast the fall had been. She was scarcely moving now. Decay surrounded her, peeling whitewash and cracked panes of glass and missing slates on the roofs. Everything was so empty, so silent.

Melke halted. “Let’s go back, Endal.” But the hound wanted to continue. He waited for her at the end of the long building.

And around that corner were the ruins of a pleasure garden, with paths and fountains and ponds. The fruit trees were dead, as were the shrubs and low hedges. No flowers bloomed in the neatly laid-out beds.

Melke shivered. The skeletons of the plants were worse than the empty rooms in the house, worse than the stables and the bare paddocks. This was something she could reach out and touch. This was death.

She walked briskly through the garden, back towards the house. Endal trotted beside her with his tongue hanging out. He didn’t appear to mind the barren garden. She did. Her skin was cold despite the sun’s heat. She didn’t want to linger here, didn’t want to imagine what the flower beds might have looked like years ago.

At the end of the garden, alongside the house, was a bathhouse.

Melke stepped inside, cautious and curious. Lizards darted to hide. Endal pricked his ears at their rustlings, alert.

She stood and turned her head. She saw lapping waves and round-eyed fish. An octopus. A spouting whale. Beaked turtles. The tiles were laid out in patterns, greens and blues, white, and the pink of seashells. She reached out with a fingertip and felt smoothness, coolness.

Melke explored, her mouth slightly open in wonder. There had been hot water and cold. A changing room, a room to bathe in, a room for steam with benches around the walls, and...she almost laughed. Latrines, three of them, stone with wooden seats and a channel below where water used to flow. And basins for washing hands. Just like a public privy.