Brian Staveley - The Providence of Fire

Adare spent the better part of the morning hunched beneath a bridge, pressed up against the stone pilings, teeth chattering in the brisk spring breeze, limbs trembling beneath her sodden wool robe, hair damp and cold on her nape, despite having wrung it out a dozen times over. She would have dried more quickly in the sun, but she couldn’t leave the shadows until she was dry. A drenched woman wandering the streets would draw attention, and when Fulton and Birch came looking, she didn’t want anyone to remember her passage.

Worse than the cold was the waiting. Every minute she waited was another minute during which the Aedolians could organize their pursuit, pursuit she was ill equipped to handle. How long did wool take to dry? She had no idea. Every morning of her life, a slave had arrived with freshly laundered clothes, and every evening that same slave had removed the dirty garments. For all Adare knew, she could be crouched beneath the bridge all day, shivering, waiting.

She bit her lip. That wasn’t an option. By the time night fell, Aedolians would be scouring both banks of the Chute, searching for exit points, hunting beneath bridges. She needed to be well away by nightfall, by noon, and yet there was no way to wish the cloth dry. Instead, as she trembled and crouched, she tried to think through the next few hours, to anticipate the difficulties in her plan, the flaws.

Difficulties weren’t hard to come by. First, she had to find a route to the Godsway that wouldn’t get her beaten, robbed, or raped. She risked a glimpse out from beneath the bridge. It was impossible to say how far the current had carried her or where, exactly, she’d finally managed to claw her way out of the water, but the leaning tenements, the narrow streets, the stench of offal and rotten food, suggested one of the city’s slums, maybe even the Perfumed Quarter. Somewhere in the near distance she could hear a woman and man shouting at each other, one voice high and biting, the other a ponderous growl of rage. Something heavy smashed into a wall, shattering into pieces, and the voices fell silent. Nearer at hand a dog barked over and over and over.

With numb fingers, Adare slipped the damp blindfold from the pocket of her dress. She tied it in place. In the deep shadow of the bridge she couldn’t see much-her own hand when she waved it in front of her face, sunlight reflecting off the water of the canal before it slid beneath the stone arch, the vague shapes of rotted pilings. She’d known the cloth would hinder her ability to see, but she hadn’t remembered it being quite so bad when she’d practiced in the privacy of her chamber. After fiddling with it for a while, twisting it this way and that, she pulled it off entirely, untied it, then started the whole process over again.

If the blindfold slipped down, she was dead. If it came untied, she was dead. While the shadows of the tenements retreated across the canal she toyed with the cloth over and over until there was nothing left to adjust. It wasn’t great, but she could live with it. Would have to live with it. She tested the wool of her dress with a tentative hand. It was still damp, but not sopping wet. There was a tenuous line between prudence and cowardice, and Adare felt herself edging toward it.

“Get up,” she muttered at herself. “Get out. It’s time.”

The bridge was empty when she emerged from beneath it, and Adare let out a sigh of relief when she realized that the only people in sight were two women twenty paces down the road, one hauling a large bucket, the other bent beneath the weight of a shapeless sack tossed across one shoulder. Even better, in the full light of the sun, she could actually see that they were women through the cloth, though the details were hazy. The Chute had carried her west, which meant the Temple of Light lay somewhere to the north. Adare glanced behind her once more, hesitated, then stepped down from the bridge.

All the streets around the Dawn Palace were paved. Some, like the Godsway, were built of massive limestone flags, each the size of a wagon, every single one replaced every twenty years as wheels and weather pitted the surface. Others were cobbled more simply, with brick or uneven stone, open gutters running on either side. Never, though, had Adare walked a street without any paving at all, without gutters or culverts to siphon away the runoff, and she froze as her foot plunged up past the ankle in mud. She hoped it was only mud, though the stench suggested something more foul.

She yanked her foot free. Then, gritting her teeth, she set out again, stepping gingerly, trying to choose the firmest, highest ground, to avoid the troughs and ruts. It was slow going, but she’d managed to keep her boots on, to make her way steadily in the direction she desperately hoped was north, when laughter from behind made her turn.

“Y’aren’t gettin’ yer boots dirty, are ya?”

While she’d been picking and choosing her steps, hitching her dress up to keep it clear of the mire, two young men had come up behind her, plodding through the muck. They were barefoot, she realized when they drew close enough to see, indifferent to the splashing and splattering along the ragged hems of their pants. One carried a canal hook casually over his shoulder, the other a rough basket. Canal rats, Adare realized.

There was a living to be made-a meager one-loitering on Annur’s bridges, plucking from the current whatever detritus floated beneath. Adare had grown up on children’s tales of Emmiel the Beggar Lord, who dredged a chest of gems from the waters and found himself the richest man in Annur. These two seemed not to have had Emmiel’s luck. The basket was empty, and judging from their gaunt cheeks, it had been empty for a while.

The youth with the hook gestured at her. He had short hair and a pointed weasel’s face. A sly smile. Adare felt her stomach clench.

“I said, y’aren’t gettin’ yer boots dirty, are ya?” He paused, noticing her blindfold for the first time. “What’s wrong with yer eyes?”

Had Adare not rehearsed the response a hundred times she would have stood there stupidly, her mouth hanging open. Instead, she managed to mutter, “River blindness.”

“River blindness?” The hook-holder glanced at his companion, a short, pimpled youth with a gourd for a head. Gourd studied her a moment, then spat into the mud.

“River blindness?” the first young man said, turning back to her.

Adare nodded.

He swung the canal hook down from his shoulder, waving it back and forth before her eyes. “Can ya see that?” he demanded. “Whatta ya see?”

“I can see,” Adare replied, “but the light hurts.”

She turned away, hoping they would leave it at that, managed five steps before she felt the hook snag her dress, pulling her up short.

“Hold on, hold on!” the one with the hook said, tugging her back, forcing her to turn. “What kinda boys would we be if we let a nice lady like you get ’er boots dirty? A poor blind lady?”

“I’m not really blind,” Adare said, trying to disentangle the hook from the cloth. “I’m all right.”

“Please,” he insisted, waving his compatriot over. “We’ve no employment t’trouble us for the moment. Let us help you at least as far as Dellen’s Square. The road gets better there.”

“I couldn’t.”

“The basket,” he pressed, gesturing toward the wicker basket. It was wide as her circled arms, large enough to hold almost anything they might haul from the canal, and fitted with heavy wooden handles. “Sit yer ass right there and let Orren and me carry ya.”

Adare hesitated. The two youths frightened her, but then, she was quickly discovering that everything outside the confines of the red walls frightened her: the canal, the narrow streets, the shouts and slamming doors, the people with their hard, defiant eyes. The whole ’Kent-kissing world was turning out to be terrifying, but every Annurian citizen couldn’t be a robber or a rapist. The rich, she reminded herself, did not have a monopoly on decency. She tried to think about the picture she presented: a mud-smeared young woman suffering from a strange sort of blindness, navigating a particularly treacherous street. Maybe they just wanted to help.