Page 53 of The Summer Pass

Some of the warmth wrapped around Lill shifted, comfortingly.

“Good work,” said a voice that Lill definitely remembered. Vanu’s voice, or a shadow of it, even raspier than usual, coming from somewhere above Lill’s head.

He opened his eyes. The warmth that he was lying against was Vanu’s bare chest. Vanu’s arms were wrapped around him. They were both also wrapped up in blankets and furs, except for Lill’s arm, but he was happy to ignore his arm for the moment.

He sorted through his memories: Vanu, vaulting over the railing in the dungeon and kicking over three of the bowmen at once; Vanu with two drawn swords laying into the men who had been shooting at Lill, while the ones who had recognized Vanu shouted frantically at their fellows to surrender; Vanu wading through the stream and plucking Lill down from where he was hanging. No wonder he hadn’t felt scared, even when he thought Vanu was an angel come to destroy him. Some part of him must have known.

He couldn’t see Vanu’s face from where he was lying, and he couldn’t move without regaining control of his left arm, which was still having something—less spectacularly painful but still not really comfortable—done to it. He wanted to see Vanu’s face. Hearing Vanu’s voice again would be good too. He realized that he could feel Vanu’s heartbeat.

He heard footsteps and a rustle of clothing and peered up to see if he could see anyone else. Yes! There was Padunu, quite nearby, looking rather white-faced and displeased, and beyond him, looking like a vision through the steam coming off a bowl she was holding, was Susami.

Lill tried to croak out a greeting of some sort and sign to Susami at the same time, but neither one worked; his mouth was too dry to speak, and his arm⁠—

The pain when he made a real effort to move it snapped him fully back into his body and put some of his remaining memories back in place. His arm had had an arrow in it.

“He seems to be awake,” Padunu observed. “Kindly remain still, Lill. I am almost finished bandaging your arm. The arrow, you will be interested to know, had lodged itself in the bone, making it excessively difficult to remove. The point was bent in a most extraordinary way—you seem to have very tough bones.”

“You make it sound as if he did it on purpose to vex you, Padu,” said someone else. Otoni, who had appeared next to Susami, smiling and looking extremely pregnant. “Susami’s brought soup for you, Lill. And everyone else wants to apologize.”

“Not right now,” said Padunu sourly. “They may dwell with their guilt a few minutes more while he has something to eat.”

“Of course, I know that,” said Otoni easily. She was gathering up a bunch of bloodstained cloths and some mangled-looking, red, sticky things that might have been pieces of arrow.

Vanu moved under Lill, slowly levering them both up into a sitting position. The hair on his chest scratched pleasantly against Lill’s face, and Lill wondered if anyone would mind if he nuzzled a little bit. But then Vanu was tucking the blankets around him and withdrawing, getting up off the couch where they had been lying. Lill tried not to shiver as his source of warmth departed. But really, he wasn’t cold. It had just been so pleasant to be in Vanu’s arms.

He looked up at Vanu, and Vanu smiled at him, and Lill did not know that he had ever seen a smile look so sad. He didn’t know what expression to return, but it didn’t matter because Vanu had already looked away. He looked wrung out, the way he had at the camp up the mountain, and Lill didn’t know why he found that surprising.

Susami had come forward to support Lill in place of her father and was offering Lill the bowl of soup, which smelled sweet and spicy and was a dark, rich colour. She sat down beside him and helped him to drink it. He needed help because he couldn’t use his left arm at all and even his right was so sore he could barely lift it. For a little while the mechanics of slurping soup consumed all his attention. Padunu and Otoni came back with more bandages.

“Where did that soup come from?” Padunu demanded.

“Susami made it,” said Otoni. “There’s all kinds of food down in the cellar. But I don’t know where she managed to cook it.”

She signed the question to Susami, who smiled and signed back, “My secret.”

When Lill had finished the soup, Padunu set about immobilizing his left arm by strapping it to his side over his already-bandaged ribs. It was a relief not to be able to accidentally move the arm and provoke a spike of pain. He thought about asking if Padunu could just wrap his whole body up the same way, because at the moment, everything hurt. But he managed to lie back down, covered up in blankets and filled with warm soup, and when Susami signed, “Are you comfortable?” he smiled and nodded.

He looked around the room for the first time. It had high, dark rafters and whitewashed walls with some faded, peeling decoration around the top. There was no hearth but a brazier, very beautifully made in bronze, burned near the couch. There were a lot of other things, chests and jars and statuettes, heaped in corners, as if the room was used for stockpiling treasures. It all had a neglected, cobwebby air, though it looked like it had been a fine bedchamber at one time.

Mattresses, pillows and blankets were folded in piles on the floor where they had been tidied up after the night. A whole crew had obviously been sleeping in here. Lill could hear them talking quietly and moving around, out of his line of sight. Otoni came back with a cup of wine—warmed, so perhaps she’d found out where Susami was doing the cooking—and helped him drink it. The alcohol went to his head immediately, but in a comfortable way. He floated between sleep and waking for a while.

When next Lill paid attention to his surroundings, Vanu was standing on the opposite side of the room, looking out the narrow window. He had put on a shirt. Susami walked over to him and put her arms around him, and he hugged her close. They stood like that for a long time, Vanu resting his cheek on the top of his daughter’s head.

He released her in order to sign: “You’re all right?”

“Me? I’ve come to no harm.”

They sat down opposite each other on the seats in the deep embrasure of the window. They were lit by the sun from outside, and Lill could follow their conversation from where he lay. He watched, feeling as if he was in a dream and they wouldn’t be able to see him, even if they looked his way, because he wasn’t really there. As if he were back on that rock overlooking the valley again, watching Vanu from a distance.

“Gurti told me Darma was bothering you,” Vanu said.

So he knew that the Boar was Darma, then.

Susami shook her head. “We were afraid he was going to. He had us move in here ‘to show us honour,’ but Gurti thinks it was because the door has a lock, and he has the key to it. Then we found the secret door in the wall and the stairs down to the wine cellar, so we started—I guess you could say fortifying it, in case we needed someplace to retreat to. We were worried about the lowlanders—Halza and his betrothed and her mother—Darma thought they were spies at first, and we had a lot of trouble convincing him to leave them alone. But then, we were all worried for ourselves, too.” She paused, then went on slowly: “Darma is not making it a secret that he’s the one who betrayed us to the Zashians three years ago.”

Vanu took that in, his face impassive. Lill couldn’t guess whether he’d known that too or not. “Is he not?” he said finally.

“He told me it had to be done because you wanted to make the Hawakhaba abandon their ancestors’ ways and kneel to the Zashian king.” Susami shuddered. Her expression of anger made her look very like Vanu. “I hate that man. I wish he couldn’t sign so I didn’t have to speak with him.”