We couldn’t get anything more out of Tyne that night, but in all likelihood his ominous warning was little more than the product of a fevered mind feeding him nightmares no child should have to endure. It didn’t stop me from being completely creeped out, however.
‘You okay, kid?’ Ferius asked.
There were only two chairs in the room – which we’d left to Seneira and her father so they could sit on either side of Tyne’s bed, each of them holding one of the boy’s hands even as their eyes were focused on each other, on their relief at being together and the guilt that both clearly felt but neither deserved. Ferius and I sat on the floor, leaning against the hospital room’s cold wall. I didn’t particularly like the way my Argosi mentor was looking at me. ‘Why are you asking?’
She gave a shrug, and for the third time started to reach into her waistcoat for a smoking reed only to remember it probably wasn’t a good idea to smoke so close to a sick child. ‘It’s all right to be scared,’ she said, dropping her hand into her lap. ‘You’re tired. You haven’t slept in a proper bed in months. You’ve got your own people chasing you and the rest of the world ready to join in anytime they find out you’ve got the shadowblack.’ A slight smirk came to her face as she gestured towards Seneira and said, more quietly, ‘And now you meet this girl and she’s got all kinds of problems, but anyone can see you fancy her anyway and you ain’t sure how to—’
‘Ferius?’ I interrupted. ‘Would you do something for me? Something important.’
‘Yeah, kid?’
‘Promise to never, ever give me romantic advice?’
Ferius chuckled. ‘Afraid I can’t do that.’
‘Why not?’
She reached out a hand and patted me on the shoulder. ‘Because anyone can see you’re terrible at romance, kid.’
Reichis peeked his head up from a cabinet drawer he’d wormed his way into. ‘The Argosi’s right, Kellen; your mating technique needs a lot of work.’
‘Go back to stealing medical supplies,’ I told him, which was probably a mistake since I’d already had to get into a heated argument with him to keep him from taking one of the scalpels because it was ‘shiny and pretty’. Reichis running around with a razor-sharp blade in his mouth was a problem the world didn’t need.
‘When is Rosie coming back?’ I asked, mostly to keep Ferius and Reichis from fixating on the subjects I’d prefer be left alone. The other Argosi had made some vague noises about searching for signs of more victims of the shadowblack and then left the rest of us to share in Seneira’s misery.
‘Who knows?’ Ferius said by way of reply. ‘The path of thorns and roses tends to lead away from personal entanglements.’
‘Wait … you mean she might have left for good? Just like that? Without even a goodbye?’
‘Goodbyes ain’t the Argosi way, kid.’
For some reason that sent a cold chill through me, and I wondered if one day I might wake up and find Ferius gone without so much as a word or a note. I was searching for a way to press her on that point that wouldn’t make me sound like a needy child, when Seneira startled me. I hadn’t even noticed her standing there.
‘We’re going to stay with Tyne tonight,’ she said. ‘You can sleep at the house if you want.’
Ferius gave me a raised eyebrow – her way of scolding me for being unobservant. ‘We’re fine right here for now. Go on back to your brother.’
Tyne had been falling in and out of consciousness for hours, his body convulsing uncontrollably every time one of the shadowblack seizures came upon him. Seneira and her father would hang on to the boy as if he were a fish on a line being yanked away by some unseen figure holding the pole. Seneira nodded and started to turn away, but then stopped. ‘Are you …? Will you be leaving town now that you’ve helped Rosie bring me home?’
Something softened in Ferius’s expression, and when she spoke next it was with a more formal tone than I was used to from her. ‘Rest easy, little sister. This is a weight too great even for a pair of shoulders as strong as yours. We will walk this road with you a while longer.’
‘Thank you,’ Seneira said. She gave us a grateful smile before returning to her brother’s bedside.
‘You sounded like Rosie just then,’ I observed.
Ferius reached into her waistcoat for a fourth time, then stopped herself and patted at the pocket as if that had been her intention all along. ‘Don’t talk nonsense, kid.’
‘You did. Usually you talk like a drunken Daroman shepherd, but right there you spoke just like Rosie does.’
I waited for another denial, but none came.
‘First thing you learn travelling the long roads, kid: language is as much in the way you speak as the words you choose.’
I thought about that. Most of the time, Ferius doesn’t really want people to know what she’s thinking – heck, sometimes I think she doesn’t even want people to take her seriously – so she uses that frontier drawl of hers. But here she’d wanted Seneira to feel safe, to feel protected. Rosie had been the one keeping her from harm until now, so Ferius had spoken the way she would – the way in which Seneira could most easily believe it.
‘You know, you make even simple things complicated,’ I said.
Ferius smiled. ‘Path of the Wild Daisy, kid.’
She pulled out one of her decks and dealt us out eight cards each, telling me the rules of a new game as she did. We played a few hands. I’d glance over at Seneira and her father every once in a while, then pay attention to the game again. After a while I heard Reichis snoring, passed out inside one of the drawers. It didn’t seem like much time had passed, but at one point when I looked over, I saw Seneira and Beren slumped over on each side of Tyne’s bed.
Figuring it was my turn to deal, I reached over to get the deck from Ferius, but the cards were strewn across the floor between us. I was going to chide her for dropping them, but her eyes were closed. That was unusual. Ferius never went to sleep until she’d secured whatever place we were holed up in, whether by setting traps around a campsite or barring entrances when we were indoors. I considered jostling her awake, but my own eyes were so heavy I could barely keep them open.
Wait, I thought. My eyes are already closed. Why can’t I open them?
There were, of course, any number of plausible explanations why I might be falling asleep. I was exhausted, bored and hadn’t eaten in ages. But there was one particularly good reason for me to remain conscious: my utter terror of being attacked again.
Wake up, I told myself. The command had no effect. Something was preventing me from opening my eyes.
Fear. Reach for the fear.
I gave free rein to all my worst terrors of being killed in my sleep – visions I usually worked very hard to ignore. A cold sweat came over me, pushing through the somnolence as the overwhelming desire to flee fought against the urge to sleep. I’m not sure what it says about me that I can make myself so terrified that I was able to wake when Ferius, ever watchful, couldn’t. My eyes finally blinked open, and that’s when I saw him.
He was tall – well, taller than me anyway. The light shed from the lantern over the bed was enough for me to make out the swarthy, weather-worn look of his handsome features. The intruder wore black leather riding trousers with heavy boots and spurs. His shirt was soft white linen and a bracelet made from some kind of glistening black stone beads adorned his left wrist. On his head he wore a black Daroman frontier hat, which at first looked just like Ferius’s, but then I noticed something odd: symbols etched in silver travelled all the way around the band above the brim. Glyphs. The kinds of magical motifs I recognised because I’d been around them most of my life. That’s when I noticed that the sleeves of his shirt were rolled up, and that there were three faded tattooed bands on each of his forearms.
Jan’Tep, I thought, as the last vestiges of whatever sleep spell he’d used faded away and I rose to my feet.
‘Hello there, Kellen of the house of Ke,’ he said, his hands loose at his sides, ready to cast another spell. ‘Imagine finding you here.’