"I don't understand." He looked at the baker's wife. "It's all . . . I don't understand. This isn't . . . Something's gone wrong."
"Yes. Our village is gone. The women massacred, the men turned to shadow stalkers, the children stolen. I believe that qualifies as 'something gone wrong.'"
She expected her tone to rouse him to anger, to slough off his shock. But he only stared at the dead woman.
"We need to go after my sister," she said. "Find her."
"Yes."
"And we need to tell someone. Out there. Warn them."
"Tell . . . ?" His voice faded to a whisper. "Yes, I suppose that's all that can be done. My duty . . ." He swallowed. "Tell someone. Warn them." He pushed to his feet so fast Daigo jumped. Then he turned on Moria, and in a blink, the old Gavril was back, his face stone, his eyes harder still. "Let's see that note."
Twenty-two
Moria left Gavril there, reading Ashyn's note. She got as far as the street before he came after her.
"Where are you running?" he said, striding up beside her.
"To find my sister, obviously. Find her, find the children, warn someone. That's the plan, isn't it?"
He swung in front of her. "It's not a half day's jaunt, Keeper. Night has fallen. It will be just as dark until morning, so there's little point in rushing. We'll need more lantern oil, fire-starter, warmer clothes. . . . My cloak is in the barracks and you need yours. If you can recall where you dropped it."
"I know exactly where I dropped it. At home, where it lies in my dead father's hand. It's still there, I'm sure. Where he tried to kill me and I had to kill him. I will freeze before I go back for that cloak."
As she spoke, the annoyance fell from his face and by the time she finished, she saw . . .
Empathy. Shared pain and understanding and contrition. She saw that and she turned away.
"I'll find something at the barracks," she said.
"Can you go into your father's shop?" His voice was low, the undertone of compassion making her anxious, and she wanted to brush it off. Make him angry again.
You fault him for being unkind in your grief, and you fault him for being kind. What do you want, Moria?
"If you don't feel you can go into his shop, I will," he said. "But that is the best place to find supplies."
She answered by veering in that direction.
Gavril suggested she tell him what she needed from the shop. His tone said he would see it as no sign of weakness if she stayed out. She still saw weakness in the choice. Moreover she saw a lack of respect for her father.
He'd been proud of his shop. Proud to be a merchant. The empire would have let him take on a higher-ranking position in Edgewood. He was the father of the Keeper and the Seeker. He ought not tend shop. Yet he did, and while Moria knew he enjoyed his profession, it was also a quiet rebellion. The empire had cost him his wife and could have cost him his children. Now they'd "allow" him to rise from his caste-bound occupation? No, they would not. He wouldn't risk rebelling loudly, as Moria would, but he did so with a quiet resolve that seemed so much braver. She would honor that bravery by going into his shop for the last time.
The mental wall stayed up as she went in, and she was glad. It let her look around the familiar tables and shelves, inhale the familiar scents, and commit it all to memory. She started gathering everything they'd need along with packs to put it in.
Her father's entire selection of clothing fit on one shelf. There was a separate room given to the raw materials--furs and leathers and fabric and buttons and clasps and threads and baubles. The people in the empire viewed ready-made clothing as emergency wear only. It might be cheaper, but only because the tailor fashioned it from ends and scraps. The one cloak they found was for a man--too large, made of patchwork leather without fur.
"You'll need a sleeping fur if you take that. Otherwise, you'll freeze. The deeper you go into the Wastes, the colder it gets at night." Gavril looked around. "Does your father keep orders anywhere? Perhaps something waiting to be picked up?"
He did. While it might make sense for a person to buy the raw material and take it to a tailor, that wasn't how it worked. A tailor was an artisan, two castes above a merchant. He ought not soil himself with matters of trade. So the merchant gave him the order and materials, then sold the finished item back to the customer, and returned a portion of the cost to the tailor. Which meant that the tailor was still selling his goods--just to the merchant instead of the client--and losing money in the bargain. A ludicrous arrangement to Moria, though it seemed perfectly reasonable to everyone else.
She took Gavril to where her father kept commissioned goods awaiting pickup. There were no cloaks. Nothing that could substitute either. She was about to take the plain leather one when Gavril said, "Moria?"
He held out a parcel wrapped in paper. On the top of it, in block writing, it read: This is NOT your Fire Festival gift, Moria, so do NOT peek in it.
It was her father's writing. Gavril put the parcel in her hands. She opened it carefully, as she'd never opened a gift in her life. First the string. Then the paper. She laid the parcel on a table and opened it to find . . . a cloak. A magnificent butter-soft leather cloak with a removable fur liner.
As she lifted it, a note fell to the table. In her father's neat, precise handwriting, it read: