The Whitefire Crossing - By Courtney Schafer Page 0,117
last. “Sethan rolled right over for her, didn’t he?” She shook her head. “Why didn’t he tell anyone?”
“Same reason he rolled over. He didn’t want any chance of word getting back to Piadrol. He’d be cast out, exiled for life, and no Dalradian would ever even speak his name. He loved his sisters too much, couldn’t bear the thought of never hearing from them again. And later, after Melly was born...she was Tainted, and not lightly. You know how the Dalradians feel about that.” One of the teachings Sethan had disagreed with was the Dalradian conviction that Ninavel was the haunt of devils, and the Taint a demon’s mark. “If the priests found out Sethan’s bastard child was strongly Tainted, they wouldn’t have just cast out Sethan. They’d have sent men to kill both Sethan and Melly.”
Cara passed a hand over her eyes. “Fine, he was paying this girl money. How long?”
“About three years,” I said. “Then the girl got a little too ambitious with some other scheme and chose the wrong mark, or maybe crossed a ganglord. Either way, she ended up dead. So there was Sethan, left with a three-year-old kid he didn’t dare acknowledge. And you know Sethan, he never could save a single kenet. That was the year Orvan died, and Sethan had already given away most of that season’s pay to Orvan’s widow. He didn’t have anything left to pay someone to care for Melly in secret.”
A hint of curiosity had softened the grim set to Cara’s mouth. “What did he do?”
I gave a short laugh. “Something spectacularly stupid. Which is where I come in. Look, that stuff I told you back on my first convoy job, about how my parents died of sun sickness in the desert and Sethan took me in...none of it was true. I never knew my parents. Before I was an outrider, I was a Taint thief.”
Cara snorted. “That, I knew.”
“Sethan told you?” He’d promised he wouldn’t. He’d known how much I hated to talk about it.
Cara gave me a severe look. “No need to sound like that. Sethan never said a word, but he didn’t have to. My father was head outrider your first trip out, remember? First time he saw you climb, he said to me you must’ve had a powerful dose of the Taint as a kid. I asked him how he knew, and he said you climbed like you’d learned without fear. Said if you survived you’d be one hell of a climber, but he figured you’d end up dead before the season was out.”
“What? Why would he think that?” Denion had never said anything of the kind to me.
Cara shrugged. “He said those who learn with the Taint often forget it’s not there to save them anymore.”
“Only if I’d had a lazy handler. The whole point of teaching us to climb was so that we wouldn’t waste any effort with the Taint. If he caught us using it to help, we got punished, fast and hard. It doesn’t take much of that before you know better.”
“Here I just thought you’d gotten lucky,” Cara said. “Well, it wasn’t hard to guess how a Tainted kid with no apparent family might’ve survived in Ninavel. You’ve no cause to blame Sethan.”
“Yeah, fine,” I muttered, although the knot in my chest eased. “Sethan knew I’d been a Taint thief, and he didn’t follow the Dalradian line on that. He was fascinated.” At first I’d dodged his questions. Talking about my Tainted days was like yanking my guts out with a hook. But as time went on, the pain had dulled.
“I told him about life as a Tainter, but I wanted so bad to impress him, I only told him the good bits. So when Sethan found out Melly had a good strong dose of the Taint, he got the bright idea to give her to my old handler.”
I dug my fingers into a crack between wall boards, uncaring of splinters. Khalmet’s hand, but Sethan had been a real idiot sometimes. “It must’ve seemed perfect to him. He figured she’d be well cared for, and taught to read and write and climb, and he must’ve thought when she Changed, he’d just go and buy her back from Red Dal. Probably thought he’d take her on as a new outrider apprentice, the way he did with me.”
Cara opened her mouth to speak, but I overrode her. “I know, I shouldn’t have glamorized it like that. Damn it, if he’d thought to