A Glimmer of Guile by Mary Patterson Thornburg

Author:Mary Patterson Thornburg [Thornburg, Mary Patterson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy, Fantasy Romance, Magic
ISBN: 9781601741806
Publisher: Uncial Press
Published: 2014-04-18T07:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Several hours had passed, I guessed, since it happened. I had no idea how Mani had managed to survive this long, and I wished for his sake that he hadn't. But he was conscious and, hearing me moving nearby, terribly agitated. I lay down on the ground beside him and spoke softly into his ear. "It's Vivia, Mani." I didn't know what else to say. I poured influence over him to ease his pain, felt him grow calm.

Now he will die.

But instead he moved one arm toward me, a fraction of an inch, and whispered urgently, "Vivia--"

I took his hand as gently as I could. "Yes, I'm here."

"Listen. Orath... I felt her..."

"It's over, Mani. She's gone." Although she wasn't. Or rather, never having been there in the flesh, she still sang horribly around us. I hoped he didn't hear her.

"Wait," he said, and stopped to gather breath. I waited. "She made them, made them..." A long pause. "You..."

"I know. I'll be all right. She won't touch me, Mani." I hoped it was the truth.

"Listen," he said again, after a moment, weaker now. "In my pack, money. Sorry." He was talking about Krinos's purse, I thought. Sorry he'd taken it.

"It's all right, Mani. You did your best, and you left me what was fair. Now it's my turn. I'll get her. I'll get them both. You rest now."

He'd turned his head until his face, crusted with blood, was inches from mine. "Both?"

"Yes. Believe me."

"Ah," he said. The glimmer he'd always been able to mask so well flickered and went out like a snuffed candle, and he died.

For a minute, no longer, I lay beside him and wept. Then I got up. It was near sundown and I was weary from my Shift, but there was work to be done. And I'd just made a promise that I'd now have to do my best to keep.

I slept that night on top of the shallow grave I'd put them in, scattered over with earth and heaped with branches. I'd made a fire, not by guile but with matches and sticks, and I woke occasionally to feed it. The wolves or wild dogs would dig through to them tomorrow night, but already their spirits were in the Mystery. Riga, I thought, wouldn't resent that I'd buried Mani with her and Kai. She was past bitterness now, in peace.

Krinos's purse was in Mani's pack, as he'd tried to tell me, along with several of my father's, and Jareth's, most beautiful bracelets, rings, pendants, and brooches, which Mani had apparently liberated from the pirate's cabin before leaving the ship. I put them all in my own pack the next morning and walked away from the bloody campsite. A rain or two would wash the place clean, after the wolves and ravens and magpies had done their jobs. By winter there'd be nothing left to show what had happened there.

I'd used no guile since shifting into my own form, except to cloak myself as well as I could against discovery by Orath.

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