The Gate Thief mm-2 Read online

  “I came here to beg you to be careful. You trust people that you shouldn’t trust.”

  “I trust you,” said Danny. “I let you into my house late at night. I listen to you because I believe you really are my friend. Why should I trust you and not her?”

  “What could I do to you?” asked Pat. “But she-she can hurt you.”

  “I’m not falling in love with her, if that’s what you think,” said Danny. “She’s older than me. But she’s like Veevee-a fellow gatemage. She taught me how to lock my own gates-she took terrible risks to follow me and we teach each other. We help each other.”

  “See, that’s it,” said Pat. “She’s using you.”

  “And I’m using her.”

  “No, she’s using you. It’s all calculation, it’s all-”

  “And you know this how?”

  “I just do! She needs you right now, but the minute she doesn’t, the minute she sees some advantage in betraying you-”

  “But that might be true of anybody,” said Danny.

  “No,” said Pat.

  “Yes!” insisted Danny. “People are human, even people like me. You can trust people until you can’t. They mean what they say until they don’t.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” said Pat. “People aren’t all like that. There are people you can count on because they’d die before they’d betray you or even let you down.”

  Danny thought about that. It was a strange way of looking at the world. “I’ve read a lot of history,” said Danny. “It filled the time when the other kids were learning magery. And I don’t think I remember ever reading about anybody who wasn’t human, with all the normal failings.”

  “Then you better go back and read again,” said Pat. “Joan of Arc, for instance.”

  “What about her?” said Danny.

  “She was absolutely true to her voices. She never denied them.”

  “Well, actually, she did.”

  “She was tricked and trapped and she recanted and died for it because in the end she was true. There are people like that.”

  “Lunatics?” said Danny.

  “Don’t joke, buddy-boy,” said Pat, “because I’m serious. Your cynical attitude about people is mostly right, but there really are good people who can be counted on.”

  “My attitude isn’t cynical, it’s realistic. Who else is on your list, besides the girl who heard voices?”

  “And led armies, and created France as a nation.”

  “I apologize to dead Jeanne d’Arc for speaking of her so lightly.”

  “There was Jesus,” said Pat.

  That took Danny aback. “What about him?”

  “True to his word. A true friend.”

  “To whom?”

  “To everybody,” said Pat.

  “You’re a Christian,” said Danny.

  “What about it if I am?” said Pat. “Even if you don’t think he died for your sins, he thought he did. And he went ahead with it, he was true to his word.”

  He didn’t bother explaining to her that the Families just thought of Jesus and Mohammed and Moses and Elijah as Semitics. Mages, but not from the Families, not from Westil. “Jesus and Joan of Arc,” he said. “Not a very long list.”

  “They’re famous, that’s all,” said Pat. “The list is very, very long. There are millions of people who gave their word and then kept it, even at the cost of their own lives, at the cost of terrible agony. Soldiers who did brave things and died. Businessmen who kept true to bad contracts and lost everything, but they gave their word. There are people like that!”

  “All right,” said Danny. “I believe it.” And when he thought about it, he wondered. “Am I one of them?” he asked.

  “I think you are,” said Pat.

  “I’m a prankster, I lie all the time, I’m good at it, I conned people out of their money all the way to DC. But I also try to keep my promises. This is so weird. Is it possible that I’m actually an honest man?”

  “I don’t know,” said Pat. “That’s not my point.”

  “I know,” said Danny. “You didn’t come to tell me that I’m virtuous. You came here to tell me that you are.”

  Pat sat very still, thinking. “Yes,” she said. “That is why I came.”

  “To tell me that you’re not Xena, who just wants to have a baby with the most powerful man she’s ever met,” said Danny. “And you’re not like Hermia, who’s just using me and letting me use her because by helping each other we both gain. With you it isn’t a bargain or a trade, and it isn’t because you want to get something from me.”

  Pat was crying now. “Yes.”

  Danny got up and sat on the couch beside her and she nestled against his shoulder and he put his arm around her and she cried. “You came here to tell me that you’re my true friend and that I can count on you in a way I can’t count on anybody else.”

  She nodded against his shoulder.

  “You came to tell me that you love me.”

  She pulled away, turned and flopped down against the other arm of the couch and cried even harder. “I’m so stupid,” she said. “If I’d known that was what I came to say I wouldn’t have come!”

  Danny put his hand on her back and she did not recoil. He stroked her gently and said, “You came to tell me that you’re the best of my friends, that you’re the truest, the most reliable. That you don’t think this magery is cool, you think it’s dangerous, and I’m in danger, and you don’t want anything bad to happen to me, because what you care about isn’t power or coolness. It’s me. You care about me.”

  She nodded, and she wasn’t crying now. His hand was stroking her back, and when she sat up his arm stayed around her and she turned her tear-soaked, red-eyed face to him and he kissed her.

  It wasn’t like with Lana. Yes, it was, in that his body approved of what was happening. But he wasn’t afraid. He took her at her word. He trusted her. And he realized that in all his conversations with his friends at high school, Pat was the only one he actually listened to with any expectation that her words would matter to him at the level of reality rather than entertainment.

  Which wasn’t strictly true, he realized. He respected Hal and liked him and he thought Hal was also worth listening to. But he wasn’t like Pat. He didn’t see as clearly and harshly and truthfully as Pat did. Hal told the truth as far as he knew it-but Pat was far more likely to know true things, so her honesty was more valuable. More reliable.

  Meaning I can use her.

  Danny hated the thought as soon as it came to his mind. It was an ugly bit of self-knowledge. He broke off the kiss.

  “Please,” said Pat, and tried to resume it.

  “No,” said Danny.

  Pat nodded and sat back, facing forward, like a scolded schoolgirl.

  “Oh, I want to kiss you,” said Danny. “You’re the only woman I’ve actually felt this way about, though I didn’t realize it until just now. I really do trust you and respect you and you’re my true friend, which is what you came to say and you said it and you’re right and I believe you. But here’s the thing. I’m not as good as you. I use people. I can count on you, but can you count on me?”

  She gave a little shrug. “I can’t control that,” she said. “I can only control what I do.”

  “Well, I can control what I do,” said Danny. “My body wants you right now. Tonight. You understand me? And if I hadn’t stopped kissing you just now, you would have let me sleep with you, am I right?”

  She bent forward and hid her face in her hands again. “I’m a terrible Christian,” she said.

  “But I don’t want to be that guy,” said Danny.

  “What guy?”

  “The guy who sleeps with a woman because he can. Like most of the guys in our Family history. Those gods who got women pregnant all over mythology. I’m not as good as you are, Pat, but I’m better than they are. Loving me is going to do nothing but make you miserable.”

  Pat got up from the couch.

  “Pl
ease,” said Danny.

  “I have to get home to bed,” said Pat. “My folks will worry. They’re worriers.”

  “But you would have stayed the night with me.”

  “Because then you would be my family. But you’re not. They are. I have to go.”

  “I didn’t lie to you,” said Danny. “I could have.”

  She stood at the partly open door. “I know that,” she said. “You’ve been straight with me. You’re even better than I thought you were. I love you more than I thought I did. You love me more than either of us thought you could. We’re never going to sleep together, I’m not going to be the woman in your life, and yet right now I’m as happy as I’ve ever been in my whole life. Go figure.” Then she went through the door and closed it behind her.

  I am the stupidest guy in the whole world, thought Danny. I let her go out that door without saying a single word more.

  But Danny also knew that his decision was the right one. His desire for her was far more than the fleeting interest he had had in Xena, which was based entirely on Xena’s eagerness. What he didn’t know was whether his desire for Pat was also based on her availability. Maybe Pat was simply more the kind of woman that he was attracted to-quiet, smart, truthful, a little sharp-tongued but also kind-hearted. Sort of like Leslie. Sort of like Mama. Maybe that’s the kind of woman he would always fall for, and she simply happened to be the first.

  He was about to do the most dangerous things in his already-dangerous life. Whether his attraction to her was just momentary or he really loved her in a stay-true-your-whole-life kind of way, this was not the time to complicate things. Besides, what if the Families had spies watching him? What if she had stayed the night? Then he’d be putting her in danger of being used as a hostage. Or of being tortured or killed because that would be a way to hurt him, the Gatefather that was always out of their direct reach.

  He was right to break off that kiss and she was right to leave and that was how it had to be.

  And how did it begin? With him touching her as he ushered her to sit down.

  Did he unconsciously know even then where her visit to him was going to lead? Did he know deep inside that he felt something stronger for her than for any other woman he knew?

  No.

  He touched Pat because that’s what Marion did when he was bringing a guest into his house. Always the hand on the back, guiding them in. Marion was something of a toucher. Danny wasn’t. But without realizing it, he had picked up the idea that when you have a guest, and you want to bring them in, you put your hand on their back to guide and accompany them.

  Danny had never had an actual guest at his house before, and so when Pat showed up alone, unexpected, Danny, in his nervousness, unconsciously followed the pattern he had observed with Marion Silverman.

  That’s all it had been.

  But where it led was to a place much deeper than that. Pat was the smartest of his friends, the most mature. Her caustic nature partly came from the fact that she stood outside everything, observing. The way Danny had always been a permanent outsider. She was the one who was most like Danny, at least in the way she dealt with people. Always detached. Always cautious, analyzing.

  Except I’m not cautious. And where she’s silent, I talk, I say things. In fact, Pat is nothing like me and I’m nothing like her, but I’d be a better person if I were.

  Then again, she’d be a happier person if she were a little more like me. Wouldn’t she? She always seems so sour.

  Stop thinking about it, he told himself as he took his pants back off, and his underwear and socks, and slid into bed to try to sleep. Stop thinking about it.

  But he didn’t stop. Pat was all over his thoughts before he slept, and while he slept, and he woke up thinking about her in the morning, cursing himself for a fool as he prepared to head over to Coach Lieder’s house. The last thing he needed was to have a woman on his mind.

  10

  CONFESSION

  Wad gated to the farming village in the high country of Iceway. He appeared near the public well, so that there was no chance that his manner of arrival would go unremarked. He came showing his power: A gatemage is in the world, and he came here, and he walked from this well directly to the house where the strange woman and her two damaged, terrified sons were brought only a few days ago.

  It was the house of Roop and Levet where Wad walked. Inside, he found-as he expected-that the eldest daughter, Eko, was tending to Anonoei, the onetime concubine of King Prayard, and her two sons, eight-year-old Eluik and six-year-old Enopp.

  The boys had spent the past two years in total isolation, living like tortured animals. For Enopp especially, the two-year imprisonment had been more than half his life, for who remembers anything before the age of three? Their imprisonment had ended in terror and violence, with soldiers stabbing at them; and then they had been magically gated to this high mountain place, to be cared for by strangers, and their wounds healed, and their mother restored to them, and her children restored to her, and all was …

  Not well. Wad did not expect things to be well at all.

  The boys did not speak, but they saw him come in. They did not fear him. If they thought of him in any way, it would come from the fact that they had seen him magically heal wounds, that he had arranged for them to be fed and kept warm. They would think of him as the great mage who had rescued them from hell. If they were capable of rational thought at all.

  Wad was looking at the boys, who were looking at him. Anonoei was looking down at the table, where she was chopping an onion. Chopping it very, very fine.

  It was Eko, the eldest daughter of the house, who spoke first. “The man in the tree,” she said. “Have I done well with them? Do they look strong to you?”

  “Yes,” said Wad.

  “The boys don’t speak to me or anyone but their mother and each other. The younger one doesn’t speak even to them. The mother speaks to me now and then. I haven’t pressed them. I think something terrible has happened to them.”

  “It has,” said Wad.

  “He saved us,” murmured Anonoei.

  “Yes,” said Wad. “I did. But before we can proceed any further, I have to make sure you understand everything that I did, and why I did it. Only then is there a chance that we can work together to try to undo some portion of my crimes.”

  Anonoei looked up then. “Your crimes?”

  “I know you remember me,” said Wad. “I know you saw me spying on you from the rafters, back when you were King Prayard’s mistress and lay with him in the castle where another woman was the queen.”

  “That was you,” she said.

  “You winked at me,” said Wad.

  “You saw us, and you said nothing, though I knew not and know not why. But I winked at you, to show you that I knew you were there, and that I, too, would say nothing. That’s why I recognized you when you snatched us out of our prison cells when the soldiers were trying to kill us. When you brought us to the snow, I thought I knew you, but I couldn’t think when or how we met. I thought you were a strange kitchen boy. But you were really a great mage, a gatemage, all along.”

  “I was, though at the time I barely knew it myself,” said Wad.

  “A gatemage,” whispered Eko. “But living in a tree.”

  “That’s one story,” said Wad to Eko. “But I’m here to tell another. About how some men came to murder Queen Bexoi and I, appointing myself as her protector, warned her and saved her life. I showed her then the kind of mage I was, and she showed me the kind of mage she was.”

  “Bexoi?” said Anonoei with contempt. “A Sparrowfriend!”

  “That was her disguise. She’s a Firemaster at least, if not a Lightrider. And she has the power to make a self-clant so perfect that not only could it speak in her voice, but also when the assassin stabbed it, it bled, and the blood spilled onto the sheets.”

  Anonoei touched her fingers to her lips.

  “No one knew but me. I saw it with my own eyes. I was proud that
she trusted me. I became her lover. She bore my son and pretended it was Prayard’s.”

  “The baby was yours?” said Anonoei. “So Prayard didn’t lie when he told me that he never put his seed in her.” She looked away.

  “He was faithful to you,” said Wad. “And you joined in plotting against him and against the Queen. I know you were guilty of that, and you know what the penalty would have been, had you been caught.”

  “Never against him,” she said. “And I was part of no plot. They told me to pack for a journey, for myself and my sons.”

  “You knew what it meant.”

  She did not disagree.

  “Bexoi wanted me to get you out of the way. I loved her and I did her bidding. But I also distrusted her even then, and so I didn’t kill you. What I did was worse. I took you and your two dangerous sons, and I put you in the mouths of old slag tunnels in the face of the cliff, and I made gates that caught you if you fell and put you back at the top of the cave, so you lived in constant torment, always about to fall, never able to end your captivity by leaping from the cell. That was my idea, my plan. That was how I saved you alive. How I punished you and your innocent sons, because you posed a threat to the woman I loved, and to my son that she was bearing.”

  “That’s a poor excuse,” said Eko boldly.

  “It’s no excuse at all,” said Wad, turning to the girl. “It was a monstrous crime against the three of them, and I did it. I thought of it and I carried it out and no one knew that they were there except for me. I stole food and gave it to them. As time went on the food grew better and I made their imprisonment more bearable. When the Queen learned that they were still alive and demanded that I kill them, I disobeyed her. There are a few things in my favor.”

  Wad turned back to Anonoei. “But nothing makes up for the evil that I did. I tormented you and your sons. Whatever terrors and dark visions inhabit their minds, I caused.”

  Wad looked at the boys, for his eye caught some motion. It was the younger one, Enopp. He had broken his gaze at Wad and was now looking at his brother and then his mother. His face showed some animation for the first time. But Eluik remained dead-eyed, his gaze still riveted on Wad.