Gemhide heaved a sigh and turned to Gherun. “She’s one of them. It’s real.” He held the letter out to the other man, who took it wordlessly and slipped it into the fold of his robes.
Gherun turned his hateful gaze on her. “So, that’s it, then?” The almost-weeping quality of his voice had gone. “Any other news you’d like to deliver?”
“No, everything I was supposed to give you was in that envelope.” She stepped into the street proper. “And since you did your little trick before you got the letter, we’ll call it square. I won’t tell anyone you attacked one of us. You didn’t know, right?”
“How generous of you.”
“It is, really, but you’re mad. I get that. So, I’m gonna leave and let you work through that on your own. We’re not so bad, you know. You really will be protected now.” She turned to Gemhide. “You knew about us already, didn’t you?”
He nodded and pursed his lips.
“You’re under our protection, right?”
“Yes,” he said through gritted teeth.
“Good.”
Not knowing what else to say and seeing that her words were doing nothing to make the situation any better or easier, she turned on her heel and began the walk back through the streets. Neither man tried to stop her. If Gemhide was under the protection of the Ink, she wouldn’t be stealing any books from him. That meant her days learning from Belamy were limited.
They were always limited, she reminded herself. While this was true, it did little to make her feel better about her situation. It’s probably over tomorrow. The Big Boss was expecting her to make her move when Belamy attended the show; once she took the only thing she thought could be the soul tether, she’d be out of the old man’s house for good. If she didn’t make her move, the Big Boss would know about it, and wouldn’t likely take kindly to her failure to produce results.
The air burned her lungs as she walked the half-cleared streets. There were few pedestrians out, and those who were kept coats wrapped tight and stepped with a fervent haste on the clearest parts of the road. A carriage passed her, its occupant shrouded in shadow as the driver “heed” and “hawed” at the horse to turn this way or that around snowdrifts and corners.
The knot had returned to her stomach. It was time for her to make her decision, to make her move, and she wanted to do nothing of the sort. “Steal or run. Steal or run.” She was muttering to herself, and she knew it, but she couldn’t help it. The question had been running through her head for weeks, at varying speeds and urgencies. It had become very urgent. “Steal or run. Steal or run.” Normally, she would have people to discuss such a problem with, but all of them were of the Ink and could only be expected to give one answer: steal. Twitch probably would have actually thought about it before answering. He’s been weird, though. Whatever Tillby’s crew did really stuck with him. In his addled state, he couldn’t be trusted with her doubts.
A month ago, she wouldn’t have considered it much of a choice; the theft would have been easy and guiltless, because it would have helped her survive. The Ink was still helping her survive, but she had other considerations, too.
She could not do it, she decided. Selling Belamy into servitude was not an option. If she were someone like Kite, it would be easy, and she felt a mixture of jealousy and revulsion. He doesn’t care about anyone. He’d sell his own mother if he thought it would help him, never mind save him from being cast out or punished. She hated herself in that moment, for thinking Kite was worth envying.
Having made the decision, Skate felt the knot in her stomach disappear. “I won’t do it.” She said it out loud, just to hear it. Hearing it said convinced her even further that it was the right thing to do. It raised questions, of course. Will I be able to run? Where will I go? Should I tell Belamy? These questions, though important to answer, did not weigh heavily on her. She would figure it out in time. She had confidence in that, though she couldn’t explain why.
The snow did not seem as biting as she made her way to the home of Barrison Belamy once more.
Chapter 24
In which alchemy drives one to tears, ethics are discussed, and geography is puzzled over.
Skate found the home much as she’d left it, though the fire had died down again. She lifted a log at a time from the ever-full supply until she felt confident that the heat would be just short of oppressive. Then she opened the bookcase and made her way down to the lab.
Belamy was still there, working away on his creations. There were three stoppered bottles full of something brackish collected on a table opposite him, far away from where he was currently working. The acrid smell made Skate’s eyes water. The old man was pouring a gray powder into a bottle of clear liquid. As he poured, the clear water began to take on the cloudy, brownish appearance of its completed fellows. When he finished pouring, Belamy set the empty container down and swirled the liquid around in the bottle. Satisfied, he stoppered that one, too. The smell got to be too much; she coughed, and the wizard noticed her.
“Upstairs!” he said, shooing her away and waving with the bottle around the room generally. “I don’t have the vents open; you can’t be down here.”
Skate coughed more and nodded, keeping a hand against the wall as she walked, not trusting herself not to fall over on the way up. She wiped away the painful moisture from her eyes, and found that the heat from the fireplace made the irritation subside. She sat in front of the increasingly warm fire, knees bent, and arms resting on her knees while she waited for Belamy to come up.
At some point, Belamy had turned the flames back to their natural color. Wanting to enjoy the color of the blue fire, Skate spoke the Dwarvish words: “Gerunk kekondahash.” Immediately, the room was awash in the azure light. Skate stared into the flames and thought.
I should explain everything to him. She backed off of the idea immediately; the more Belamy knew about her and her connection with the people he was hunting, the more likely it was he’d never want to see her again, and then she’d have isolated herself from all possible friends and safe places. He can’t know that I was one of them.
If she did decide to leave the Ink, which was her only option now that she’d decided not to steal Belamy’s tether, she’d never be safe on the streets again. She needed a place, and the wizard’s was her only option. If it had just been Boss Marshall and Haman she’d be breaking with, she might have been able to explain herself and get away with a clean separation from the organization; but with the Big Boss keeping a close eye on the crew’s activities, looking over the Boss’s shoulder with regard to every decision, that couldn’t happen. BB would demand retribution, and the crew would be forced to oblige, or else another crew would be brought in to do the job. Here, though, protected by the heavy stone walls of the house and the magic of its owner, she’d be safe.
He can’t know.
The wizard’s slippered feet made soft scooching noises on the stone steps of the hidden staircase. She turned to look at him, her eyes clear of the stinging vapors trapped below. He looked as he always had, old and bent but still alert, still able to move around. He had a look of concern. “Is everything all right? Why did you come down, when you knew I was working with my alchemical tools?”