“He wants to hide himself from her, of course. He needs the cloak for that.”
“So does that mean I’m never getting the cloak back? He’s going to wear it all the time?”
“We know she needs direct sunlight to do her… Seeing? Seering? So if you do jobs, you’ll likely go after sunset and have to return the cloak before dawn. If you do well, after she’s dead, you’ll get to keep your own then. Your own fault, though, you shoulda found the other cloak they recovered.”
Teia raised her hands. “It wasn’t there.”
“I know. We believe you about that. We’ve had the White’s room turned inside out, looking for hiding spots. Went through all your shit, too. Best guess is that she hid it somewhere and didn’t tell anyone where before she died. The Old Man thinks she kept the Fox cloak to study it, thinking that no one could use a cloak that short. Or maybe she knew about the cloaks and hoped to teach you how to use it herself, someday. Loved to study things, she did.”
“Whoa,” Teia said. “She never said anything to me about that. Swear.”
“Death does tend to interrupt plans. It’s why we do what we do. Anyway, the Old Man will be handling you directly from now on. I’ll fill you in on your drops and how he’ll signal you, or how you can signal him in an emergency.”
He did, using much of the same tradecraft that Teia already knew from working with Karris. It all left Teia’s mind whirling, though. She’d be meeting directly with the Old Man of the Desert?
After so long of nothing, it was hope. She might actually cut off the Order at the head.
If she was smart, she’d need to do it before the Third Eye was killed. In the meantime, she’d have to pass word about all of this to the Iron White.
“There’s just one more thing,” Murder Sharp said. “You’re still pretty useless with paryl. It’s my fault, I know. I haven’t been able to come around and teach you like I should. But it’s war. Everything is different now. Nothing is as we’d like. In the basement here is the solution to your problem.”
“Solution?” Teia asked. Her chest tightened.
“There’s a slave down there. An old man. Won’t be missed. Practice on him. The paralysis pinches, the lung clots, the seizures. When you’ve learned as much as you can before your next shift, kill him. With paryl if you can. There’ll be a new slave down there every few weeks. Do try to learn fast. Murder practice ain’t like other practice. Every body we have to get rid of puts someone’s life in danger.”
And then he left.
Murder practice. Dear Orholam. Teia looked at the doorway to the basement stairs as if it were the mouth of hell itself.
She reached to squeeze the vial of oil she kept at her neck, but it was no longer there.
Chapter 44
The woods sang a song Kip had never known. The ponderosas swayed and shyly sighed as frogs croaked in chaotic chorus, descants of squirrels soaring high above all like preening sopranos while the wind danced past, her tresses brushing his cheek as she spun, leafy skirts flaring, willowy legs flashing.
The evening chill held him back from the floor, putting a hand upon his thudding heart. Be still, my dear, be still.
The last drop of rain pressed a shushing finger across his lips.
Made pliant by the rain’s caresses, the earth pulled back her leafy covers like a beckoning lover, and the scent of their love filled the house of sky.
“Kip?” Conn Arthur whispered. “My lord, are you well?”
Kip came back to himself. “I’m eccentric, Conn Arthur,” he said, very quietly, “eccentric.” Not crazy.
“Never mistook you for concentric, sir.”
Kip grinned. A wit, in a bear?
On the other hand, he was probably the last person who should judge a person’s mind by the flesh suit it wore.
They were fanning out through the woods here as the late afternoon passed, looking for signs of the spy. They had docked not twenty paces back, and it had taken only that much distance for Kip to be overwhelmed by a sense of homecoming.
Not his own homecoming. Daimhin Web’s. He nodded to Conn Arthur, and, spreading out with twenty others for a distance of three hundred paces, they began ghosting through the woods.
Daimhin Web was from a village long lauded for its skillful hunters. Among the best of them, there was a test, an impossible test, to sneak up on a deer and touch it with your bare hand. Many young men tried for years, learning everything from their elders about scent and silence and silhouettes and the sweet subterfuge of stalking; they meditated on water and wind and all the ways of the wood and weather. They became satraps of silence, conns of camouflage, paragons of patience.
And friends of frustration.
Those were all traits invaluable to the master hunters they became, for on the path that led to that test and that failure, they were molded into the greatest stalkers known to man.
And this time, unlike any other time he’d been in the cards, Kip could remember exactly how Web did what he did.
As he moved through the woods, though, it became clear that remembering the mechanics of an action was different from learning it in your own body. Moving silently was itself the culmination of dozens of discrete skills, practiced separately and then together for so long that the stalker could do them without thinking. Scouting was a set of different but parallel skills: paying attention to the wind, to the sounds of the animals, knowing each kind and knowing to what each kind reacted and how: this bird goes silent when it notices animals, this kind takes flight when a predator or outsider is within this distance, these squirrels turn toward those they scold.
To pay attention to all those while tracking and using scent as well was simply beyond Kip.
By living the card and remembering all that was in it, he was instantly twice as adept as he had been before—he could now understand what made the master masterful, but that didn’t make him a master himself. Kip could suddenly identify all the smells in his nostrils, but his nose wasn’t as naturally keen as Web’s, nor his body so light and lean. Web could bend branches with a step that Kip’s big tread would crush.
But what a man! Web’s first hand brush against a deer’s flank had been partly luck. While he’d been stalking the deer, a running javelina had startled it toward him, so he’d not had to close the last ten impossible feet by stealth.
Another man would have taken his bragging rights and never looked back. Web had instead redoubled his efforts. This at fourteen years of age. He’d succeeded twice more by the time he was sixteen, and when a rival called him a liar for his claims—no hunter had ever succeeded three times—Web had left his village with only a knife and gone to stalk the legendary white stag.