March stared back at Holywell. He felt exhilarated. It had been good to exert his will, to have someone do his bidding for a change.
“You look like you will kill; there is no doubting it. That gleam in your eye.” Holywell squeezed March’s shoulder. “A fine asset, that look. But don’t be killing anyone just yet. There’s plenty of time for that, brother.”
EDYON
DORNAN, PITORIA
EDYON ENTERED the dimly lit tent and took a moment to let his eyes adjust. Across the small wooden octagonal table sat Madame Eruth. Her body was covered—dressed seemed the wrong word—in faded patterned scarves that blended so well with the rugs it was always a challenge to know where the tent ended and she began.
“You’ve brought the bones this time.”
Madame Eruth spoke with certainty, as she did all things. Her comment wasn’t a prediction but a statement of the obvious.
Edyon put a kroner and the bones on the table.
“Tell me my future.”
The kroner and the request were the same as Edyon gave every time he and Madame Eruth met, which was at least three times a year, but the bones were a new development in Edyon’s search for knowledge. Madame Eruth had a crystal ball, which she preferred. However, with Edyon she’d also used tea leaves, palm reading, and cards. Edyon had had his future told and retold based on these devices for many years, but the last time they met, at the fair at Gorgant in the autumn, Madame Eruth had said he should kill an animal and bring the bones with him next time.
And as luck would have it, at least for Edyon, a chicken had come into his possession a few days earlier. He’d managed to kill it, though he hadn’t wrung its neck properly and the wretched creature had squawked and flapped and clawed until Edyon had cut its head off, apologizing at the same time. Once it was dead he’d boiled the body until the meat fell off the bones and he left them to dry in the sun. He’d scattered the meat in the woods for the foxes to find, hoping some gift to nature might help with the prediction. He didn’t really believe in the power of nature and spent half his time telling himself Madame Eruth was a fraud, and yet he always came back. There was something here in the tent, with her, away from books and learning and logic, something deeper that he hoped would help him.
Madame Eruth swayed forward, and a wrinkled hand extended from the scarves to prod the chicken bones.
“Move the table. Cast the bones on the floor,” she said.
Her hand and Edyon’s coin were already back in her scarves.
Edyon set the table to one side, and Madame Eruth widened her legs. The scarves parted a little and Edyon glimpsed the inside of her thigh, pale, blue-veined and hairless, and reminding him of chicken skin. He picked up the bones and, holding them in his cupped hands, right hand over left, shook them, feeling their lightness, hearing their soft clatter. He swapped his hands over and shook them the same number of times with left hand over right. All the while he was thinking to himself, My future . . . My future . . .
“You don’t need to think of anything,” Madame Eruth said. “Best not to think.”
Edyon carried on shaking the bones. Madame Eruth was beginning to sound like his mother with all her instructions. And he really didn’t want to think of his mother at this moment; he wanted to think of the future. His future. Not his mother’s plans and ambitions for him. Not the failure of his law studies or, rather, the success of those studies but the refusal of two universities to grant him a place. Not the lack of friends. Not the rejection of Xavier of Ruen, whom he’d met at the midwinter fair and approached with all the courtesy and poetry of the best of legitimate lovers, only to be spurned at the first of the spring fairs and called in public a “common bastard.” All things that, one way or the other, Madame Eruth had predicted, though in truth anyone with common sense could have foretold, anyone except his mother, who insisted he was talented enough to do whatever he wanted, or indeed what she wanted. But while she had money enough to pay for his tutoring, and he had the brains to get the highest marks, his mother had forgotten to marry Edyon’s father, and all her money and clever talking could make no difference to the fact that being illegitimate meant being ineligible for university. So he might work as a lawyer’s scribe, slaving away for someone he could out-argue and out-think, but he’d always be a lackey, scribbling notes and running errands and— “However, you do need to throw the bones,” Madame Eruth reminded Edyon.
He gave them a final shake and threw them.
Edyon waited. He knew not to ask questions, never to interrupt. However, after a long silence he looked up from the bones to Madame Eruth.
Madame Eruth had her eyes closed, but she pointed to Edyon.
“You are not honest, but the bones are true. They don’t lie. They don’t steal.”
Edyon clenched his jaw. If he’d wanted another lecture, he would have stayed for breakfast with his mother.
He looked down at the bones, willing them to reveal something hopeful, something different.
Madame Eruth swept her hand above them, saying, “Speak to me. Tell me. Show me.’
Edyon found himself thinking, Tell me. Show me.
Madame Eruth went still and opened her eyes. She pointed at a bone with her crooked finger. “Your future . . . has many paths. You must make a choice. And”—she laughed a little—“thievery is not always the wrong one.” She looked up at Edyon. “But you must be honest.”
Edyon nodded earnestly, already feeling he’d wasted his money. This was even vaguer than usual. And who in the whole country was truly honest?
“With the new moon, a new man enters your life.”
Edyon had been expecting this. There was always a new man entering his life.
“A foreign man. Handsome.”
Madame Eruth’s new men were always handsome, though not often foreign, but this was hardly a dramatic revelation.
Madame Eruth turned her gaze back to the bones, swooping her head low as if smelling them. She closed her eyes, her head still moving in a circle over the bones, round once . . . twice . . . then she sat up and shuddered. “This is not like anything I’ve seen before. Did you kill the bird yourself? You didn’t find it dead somewhere?”
“I killed it. And prepared the bones.”
“You’re not lying?”
“I would never lie to you.”
Madame Eruth frowned but turned to the bones once more and leaned over them.
After a long silence she looked at Edyon and said, “There is a new influence on you. One I’ve not sensed with you before.”
Edyon couldn’t stop himself from asking, “A good influence?”
“His presence has changed everything.”
And somehow Edyon knew what she was going to say.
“Your father.”
Madame Eruth had always told Edyon that she could only sense his mother’s presence, never his father’s.
“My father’s presence? Is he . . . ? Do I meet him?”
Madame Eruth didn’t reply.
“So . . . his influence? Does he want to help me? With university?”
“There is no university.”
“Then what?”
Madame Eruth turned from him and passed her hands over the bones again, and a spasm of something like fear crossed her wrinkled face. “The foreign man is in pain. I cannot see if he lives or dies.” Madame Eruth caught Edyon’s eye, frowning as if this was his fault. “You might help him. But beware: he lies too.” She pointed to the wishbone. “This is the crossroads. Your future divides here. This is where you must choose a path. There is a journey, a difficult one to far lands and riches or”—and here she pointed to the cracked thigh bone—“to . . . pain, suffering, and death.”
Edyon had to ask. “My death?”
Madame Eruth shook her head.
“I see death all around you now.”
MARCH
DORNAN, PITORIA