A Mischief in the Woodwork

CHAPTER 15

The Seeds of Sabotage

Since Letta was out, Enda took her old fingers to stitching me up where I needed. They were not quite as steady, but they knew what they were doing.

As I was lying there, suffering freely in the post-adrenaline pain of it all, wincing tears streaming down my cheeks, Tanen appeared at the doorway. In all my rawness, I was pummeled by a mix of emotions at the sight of him. Frustration at him seeing me like this. Shame at my lack of gratitude and the way I had treated him before now. Embarrassment that my tears showed no reservations in his presence, and pride to override the embarrassment. The distinct wish, above all other feelings, that he would just go away, or simply had never come at all. Then none of these other feelings would matter.

And I'd be dead.

Because of that one redeeming reminder, I allowed him his presence at the door. He stood there a moment, recognizing my suffering.

In his bandaged hands was a token of sorts. One customized, reinforced silvery garment. I recognized it immediately.

Without a word, he cast it to the ground there, pointedly, and then left – leaving it at my feet, so to speak. No words were necessary.

My initial reaction was a tentative flare. But there was no 'I told you so' written on his face. Only something grave in its own triumph.

I snuffed my welling eyes closed, slicing off the last tears and tying off the rest that were pending. Creating a moat about myself would not help anything. Tanen's offering would.

Might.

It was not something that I took to, but he had made a fair enough statement. When Enda was finished, I limped to the discarded garment and went through the resigned, painstaking motions of lacing it onto myself, so that no one else had to know of it. Tanen may have earned himself a chance to be heeded in this, but I was not going to have 'Tanen is Right' laced all over me for the whole of the house to see.

I hid it safely under my tunic, knowing it would probably be discovered soon as I was treated for my ailments, but determined to keep it in perspective while I could.

*

'Keeping things in perspective' was not something that came easily in Dar'on in that time, however. If one attempted such a thing, he would likely only be laughed at. Perhaps corrected, or left in the dust entirely.

For in patterns of change, things have the nasty habit to do just that – change.

Dice in the wind.

You might keep the game in perspective, but then the dice are rolled.

And then the game changes.

*

My fever dreams were gone, but they were replaced by nightmares with new faces. It seemed it was simply one great masquerade conspiracy, an onion that peeled off one mask after another, a snake that shed its skin only to be renewed.

I went to sleep at night and could not shake one very haunting image: that which painted a vivid landscape of the wardog's attack.

But it was not my own endangerment that spurred the dream. Instead, it was Dani and Viola on that doorstep, at the mercy of the rampant beast, pitiful in their defense. I couldn't say where my perspective was rooted, but I was aware of Tanen's. He watched from the window, not moving a muscle. I screamed at someone to do something, because I seemed anchored in helplessness, but no one came to their aide. The door could not be forced open against the resistance of the children's pummeled bodies, and where Tanen had crashed through a window in my interest, he did nothing but stand and watch as the children faced the same fate.

I screamed at him. I pounded my fists against the restrictive membranes of the dream, but they held me fast. Thank the gods I could not interpret the gritty details of the children's demise through my frustration, panic, and tears, but the horror of it took place either way. Raucous oaths ripped from my throat, clawing at the walls that kept me from doing what Tanen wouldn't. I shredded him with my shrieks.

But he remained stoic, composed and horrible. Still as an unfeeling statue.

I bloodied my hands on the invisible walls around me, but it was no use.

Tanen would not do for the children what he did for me.

*

I had the dream three nights in a row. My singing voice had returned – enough that I could charm the weedflowers again, so I needn't worry about that. But I could not shake the bother of Tanen rooted within the issue.

On that third night, I awoke from the horrible dream gasping and sweaty. I could not breathe beneath the tight laces of the corset Tanen had devised. I felt caught in a web. His web.

I launched from my pallet, stumbling away toward the door, tugging at my laces to loosen them as I went. I fumbled with the lock on the door and threw back the latch, and then spilled out onto the porch and into the predawn mist. The gloom was icy against the beads of sweat on my skin as I went to my knees there, but I sucked in great gulps of the cold to refresh me. Then I drew myself up and sat on my legs, and stared out over the eddying land and calmed myself. It was mystic and peaceful, a calm sea of ghosts and angels walking among us.

I stayed there without the chill penetrating me, my flesh fiery, my core feverish. To the touch, my skin turned cold, but it was only a shallow frost. I did not feel it within. I was effulgent.

I heard the floorboards creak in the house. A look over my shoulder saw the faint silhouette of someone coming to check on me. I'd left the door cracked. As the figure drew nearer, dawn whispers painted telltale details onto his face.

Dismay sank a ship inside me, but the cold numbed the outer traces of its presence.

Tanen came to the door.

“Are you alright?” he inquired quietly.

I looked out over the land, trying to center myself. I hated his concern. I could not deal with the possible sincerity of it, when in the back of my mind was the image from my dream of him standing there, watching as a wardog tore the children to shreds in my place. Not doing for them what he had done for me. It haunted me.

I'm sure he could not understand the raw hatred in my eyes as I turned to look at him. Maybe he was blind to it. That would be for the better, I supposed, even though I wanted to spit at him. Concern remained lodged unfairly in his woken eyes.

“I just needed some air,” I managed to say without sharpening each word with derision.

He eyed the roving mist. A sorry excuse for air, he seemed to be thinking.

A sorry excuse for most things, these days.

“It doesn't bother you to be sitting here?” he asked instead of his apparent musing. At my quizzical look, he explained, “Where it...happened.”

It wasn't me, Tanen, I wanted to say. It was the children. And you left them. How could you?

I swallowed that. It tasted like lemons and rust.

Not a real taste.

“The Serbaens say that the greatest thrones to be sat upon are the ones where we sit ourselves down and realize we are masters in our own right. There are many thrones to be taken in life. If you sit at death's doorstep and look it in its face, that doorstep becomes a throne. You have made peace with it. You have mastered it. So I sit at the doorstep where death came knocking.”

The concept that this doorstep could be a throne was not something that seemed to readily translate to him, although it did seem to intrigue him. But in all honesty, I could see that he was unable to see it as anything other than the estranged scene of the crime that it was, that anyone else would see it as.

“Fear sits on many thrones,” I said, looking at him. “It is crowned king over and over again. The greatest tyrant you will ever know in this life.”

“Do you have a throne in the city, too?” he asked, and I sensed a mocking tone in his voice. The implication was, seemingly, that I was a fool to claim peace could be made with that. That I had mastered any of it. If I thought that, I was clearly delusional.

“Anything can be a throne.”

He shook his head. “To claim that any of that death-heap is a throne to be sat upon is an insult to those destroyed by it.”

Do not talk insults with me, Tanen of Cathwade.

Yet, of course, his perspective was one of decency. I granted him that.

Until I remembered that he would not say the same thing if darkskins had been the majority of the casualties.

After all, I may sit on a throne and make the best of the world that I lived in, but I would never watch from a window while children were being mauled.

I told myself: That wasn't real, Vant.

But it was real to me. It was not born of nothing. I'd seen the pattern of this man's thoughts.

His decency was one-sided.

As for me, the fact that I had perhaps become two-sided did not occur to me. The seeds had been planted in me. Tanen could not help it; every time the tree that was his person grew, it was irrevocably born of the roots that I had already named. Quick-spawning roots that tore up the pavement of their groundwork before I could walk down that road.

But that's how things went in Dar'on. Pavement buckled, and roads were never traveled the way they were meant to be.

Thus was born a forest of obstruction around the person that was Tanen of Cathwade. And since I was not entirely malicious, I would never take an ax to those trees, regardless of how I wanted to be.

No. I would have to discover Tanen's true colors another way.