Nancy Berberick - Prisoner of Haven

Usha’s eyes went wide. “And those? Where’d you get those?”

“Same place. You hungry?”

Usha was always hungry. Not starving but always a little bit hungry from dining on thin soup and whatever the servants in Loren’s kitchen could make of the odd things that survived the flood. It mostly had to do with water and dried fish. Gratefully, she accepted half the bread and cheese. Then, taking small sips of wine, the two sat in silence and watched the street.

After a while, Usha said, “I don’t really like the quiet.”

“It’s been like that all over the city,” Dez said. She passed the bottle, Usha wet her lips and handed back the wine as sweet, delicate fire drifted through her. “You hardly see anyone in the day time. They’re all shoveling out, and looking for food. You’d think that would mean you’d see them on the streets, but you don’t. They try to keep out of the way of Sir Radulf’s men, and they know the side ways, the alleys, and who to find across the backyard fence. No one goes far from home, and everyone worries about finding food.”

One more sip, and Usha put the bottle down. She let silence last as long as it took for the wine’s fire to settle again into banked warmth.

“Dez.”

Dezra nodded, as though she knew the question to come. She bounced a fist lightly on her knee.

“Aline is fine. Rose Hall took a hard hit. You know those windows everyone admired? They’re halfway to the bottom of the river now, if not washed up on Qualinesti banks. But Aline doesn’t care. It’s only glass, she says, and then she goes on trying to make Qui’thonas work.”

“But how?”

Dez glanced at Usha, then away again as though trying to decide how much to say. “She does what she can. We all do. It was never easy.” Again, a moment of silence then, “Madoc’s fine. And Dunbrae.”

It was all Usha wanted to know. For the rest, she knew what all of Haven did. The moors of the North Seeker Reaches had become an abode of dragons. No one was traveling those gray roads on any business at all.

Dez nodded, as though to agree with some private understanding. She took another sip of wine.

“I used to think we were trapped here, and I hated it. I found ways out for others but never one for us. Not that I didn’t try. I always did, looking at every way. Was it safe? Was it the right way to take? Trapped. I used to think so. Now I think we’re lost. Gone down a wrong road and no way back.”

The words chilled Usha, winding out of a dark, hollow mood she’d never heard from Dezra before. Why did it surprise? Dezra had come to Haven as she always did in summer, on business for her father’s inn, to meet a lover and renew a sweet acquaintance, then to ride back home again. Now, her father was dead, her lover hanged…

Usha closed her eyes.

…and her brother’s wife was sleeping with another man.

“Dez, there will be a way out. There will be a road home.”

Dezra’s lips twisted. She leaned across the distance between them and flipped Usha’s silver braid over her shoulder.

“What are you,” she said, “some guiding star? There’s no way. None I can see, and I’ve been doing nothing but looking.”

With sudden, restless energy, Dezra pounded the stopper into the bottle and shoved it into her pack. A clatter of boot heels and she was halfway across the studio.

“If you’re looking for me, let Rusty know. He’ll find me.”

Indeed, Usha thought, but she said nothing, asked none of the questions left unanswered-including how much Rusty knew about Dezra’s business, and how it was he would know how to find her.

“Dez?”

Dez lifted a hand-farewell or an attempt to stall further questions. She did that on her way out the door and didn’t turn to say more.

In the silence of the empty studio, Usha thought she heard echoes of the strife that had crackled through it like wild lightning. Behind those echoes, like ghosts, she heard words she’d twice recalled since Tamara had shouted them, words she hadn’t truly weighed until then.

You never liked him. You and my father, you’ve always suspected him!

Gods know I never liked him, Usha thought as she went around the studio picking up sketches and moving stools against the wall. But she hadn’t thought Loren’s feelings for his daughter’s betrothed were obvious in his daughter’s presence. The knight was his security, his way to Haven’s peace-or at least his daughter’s well-being.

What did Tamara imagine Loren suspected of Sir Radulf?

From the doorway, a voice said, “Mistress Usha?” Rowan nodded when she looked up. “Master Loren sent me looking for you. Are you ready for home now?”

“I am.”

Madoc Diviner wiped sweat from his face with the back of his hand, scraping a grit of mud across raw skin. Water dripped down every wall of the tunnel, slid off the supporting beams, and pooled on the floor.

Floor. Odd word for it, he thought scornfully. It had been a while since this sucking mud could be called a floor. In some places, he sank to his shins in mud.

This was the best of the tunnels under Haven, yet every time he looked around, Madoc thought that would be the moment it turned into his tomb.

There were rats-big ones with pelts the color of an old man’s beard, beady black eyes, and pale, hairless tails. Get close enough and you could see the vermin riding their backs. They plopped into the water and swam, finding rat-ways in the dark. They scurried along the sides of the sunken floor, chittering. Sometimes they just sat in gloomy corners and preened their whiskers. The less tolerant of them, like the one just outside the light so only its eyes showed, glared.

“I hate this place,” Madoc muttered.

The dwarf Dunbrae grunted, but he didn’t say what he usually said to a comment like that. He didn’t say-and so I’m not going to throttle him, Madoc thought-he didn’t say, “I know.”

Not only did he keep quiet, Dunbrae didn’t run his thumb along the side of the onyx ring, that silent way he had of suggesting he knew pretty much anything anyone could want to know about what was going on in the mind or the heart another. Madoc would like to have thought that a good thing. He didn’t. He wasn’t a man to waste his time on fantasy. Likely the dwarf was distracted and had omitted the insult.

In the dark, Dunbrae seemed to exist only half-embodied, a shimmering ghost in a spitting pool of light cast by oil lamps that hated the moisture in the air and gave only sulky illumination. He stood on a brace of wood laid across the tunnel, which made him the driest man in the place. He didn’t venture into the tunnel itself. If Madoc had gone into mud to his shins, Dunbrae would have been up to his waist. And so, in this operation, the dwarf was the pit-boss. Madoc twisted a humorless smile.

“We have to go farther,” Dunbrae said. He held up a lamp and peered out as far as light would let him see. Not very far at all. “It’s looking good. I’m thinking as far as we’ve gone-”

“We?” Madoc groaned, stretched his back, and shifted his weight. “Dwarf, I’ve gone, and I’ve come back, and I’ve gone again. You haven’t stirred yourself in an hour.”

“As far as we’ve gone,” Dunbrae said, “we’re seeing some hope for this tunnel.” He lifted a lamp to see Madoc better. “It’s drying out, you say.”

It was, somewhat, and when water ran, it ran down and out to the river again. The backwash from the storm had collapsed nearly every tunnel in Qui’thonas’s network, dragged out floors, and carved away walls. Bad as this tunnel seemed, the worst hadn’t happened. It could be functional again soon.