Blood Ties by Pamela Freeman

chalk laid ready.
    She gestured him to it. “Geography. I suppose you know the main trade routes, but can you draw a map?”
    He grabbed the chalk and began to draw confidently, marking the outlines of the Domains, all eleven of them, and then the main rivers and towns, barely hesitating, whispering under his breath as he marked each one.
    “What’s that?” Doronit asked.
    “It’s a teaching song from Foreverfroze,” he said, “about Domain rivers.”
    He was clearly embarrassed, using a child’s song to aid his memory, but Doronit nodded. “Useful.”
    It didn’t take him long to finish the map. “Those are the main routes,” he said, dusting the chalk from his fingers. “I could put in the secondary roads if you wanted . . .”
    She smiled. “So. In this I think the student knows more than the teacher. I will come to you when I want information about secondary roads.”
    Doronit was more than pleased, and not just at his skill, but at the strength and surety with which he’d completed the task. For a while, while he concentrated, he had been a man instead of a boy. She sighed a little inside, imagining what it would be like to have someone she could trust, a strong man, at her back. She’d never found anyone she could rely on, but perhaps this boy would become what she needed.
    “I suppose you know your history, too?” she said, and gave him a flirting smile.
    He reddened a little, but sat up straight, looking her in the eyes. “Yes.”
    “Are you sure?” A strong man sometime in the future was all very well, she thought, but she couldn’t afford to have him become cocky right now. “Tell me about the war between the Western Mountains and the Central Domains.”
    “Which one?” She paused, unsure for once, and he smiled at her, but it was a happy smile, not a cocky one. “There have been three, in the last thousand years.”
    Her first impulse was to slap him down, but she restrained herself. This could be another moment to bind him to her, to make him love her as well as want her. She laughed, making it clear she was laughing at herself, not at him.
    “And I thought I knew my history!” she said. “How do you know all this?”
    He shrugged, clearly pleased but trying not to show it. “There are songs. Just about every important moment in time has its own song. At least one.”
    “But you can’t know them all!” This time she really was astonished.
    “Maybe not
all,
” he said, being modest. “But most.”
    He was close to cockiness now, buoyed up by his first sense of superiority over her. She couldn’t allow that.
    “But you never sing,” she said, and watched the knife go home.
    He paled, picked up the chalk and fiddled with it, marking an unimportant tributary of the Knife River.
    “No,” he said quietly. “I can’t sing. But I know the songs.”
    There it was, the sense of uselessness that his parents had drummed into him, the fools! But it was helpful to her. He’d soon be at the point where only her opinion mattered.
    “How wonderful,” she said warmly, and he looked at her in surprise, taking self-respect from her and drawing himself up. She patted his hand and then waved dismissively at the map. “None of my other safeguarders care about the past. They probably don’t even know that there used to be only six Domains instead of eleven.”
    He smiled tentatively. “North and South, Far North and Far South, Western Mountains and Central.”
    She patted him on the shoulder. “Acton may have been a great war leader, but he didn’t have much imagination when it came to naming things, did he?”
    They laughed together and then she sent him out to deliver a message. It was to Hildie, who had been hired out for the day to a jeweler expecting a big shipment of rubies.
    The jeweler’s workshop was a simple shopfront in the middle tier of the city, two streets above Acton Square: close enough to the houses of the rich that they wouldn’t think it a trouble to walk there, but