Calish couldn’t keep me from the window overlooking the west road. Since he was gone so often, and the servants still felt awkward speaking to me, I had little else to do during the day. The only thing I’d accomplished after he returned to duty was removing the mirrors from around the house. The servants thought it odd I didn’t like them, and I couldn’t very well explain that I needed them gone to avoid the angry woman of my reflection.
Her messages started out simple enough. She’d point me from the master room into the hall, down the hall, and into the front guest suite. I lost count how many times she pointed out the window. Despite the attempts I made to explain it to her, she badgered me to get involved in the world outside. I argued with Calish the evenings he came home but he wouldn’t permit it. “I know I’m supposed to do something,” I pled.
My reflection banged on her side of the glass so hard I feared it might break. She screamed at me daily, although I didn’t hear the sounds.
Do I look like that when I’m angry?
The mirror mouthed, “No! I’m pissed!”
Calish came home exhausted, and after a particularly difficult day, he roared at me too. His words were deafening. “I refuse to have this discussion again, Una! Right now, I need to know you’re safe, and that’s in this house.”
No one in the house would talk to me, and the only one who would, yelled. I slept alone too many nights because of the arguments with my husband. Feeling pulled between the two opposite opinions, I opted to side with the one to whom I married, instead of my alter ego.
Even with most of the mirrors gone, she found new ways to harass me. I thought brushing my hair using the silver platters would put some distance between me and my alternate self, but she followed me there. I ordered the servants to keep the drapes closed when she paced in their reflections. Eventually, I started drinking tea in the dark for fear she’d find a way to the reflection there to curse me out first thing in the morning.
With the house staff believing I’d lost my mind, they delivered our breakfast to our room in the mornings before we woke. I didn’t ever have a need to go downstairs. I spent my days sitting in front of the open bedroom window where I overheard the sounds of mourning and pain occurring in the streets.
I felt my spirit dying. With no activity, my muscles weakened. The sun nourished my ability to dream, but they were garbled versions of reality, shadowed by my memories of being held captive during Talium. While the cell was nicely furnished, and the food tasted better, I’d become a prisoner of the Authority once again.
I should be happy.
Calish noticed my depression, and one evening, I overheard him ordering the servants to speak with me. He even assigned them topics. The requirements made everyone, especially the butler, Jeorge, uncomfortable. While we didn’t have amazing conversations, we had come to the point of greetings and pleasantries on a regular basis. The rest of it, I made up. Calish didn’t have the energy to doubt my account of my discussions with the help. Still, breakfast waited on the servers’ tray each morning.
I wasn’t sure when it happened, but we stopped talking. Any conversations we had started with stinging words and ended with loud ones. When I admitted how lonely I’d grown, he suggested I meet the ladies of the neighborhood.
“I can’t go door to door and introduce myself,” I scoffed.
“You did at the Resistance Camp. What’s the difference?”
Everything.
Trisk had been the common thread leading me to everyone I met. My friends were hers. They accepted me because she did. When I wandered through the camp to test my skills, Nik stood by my side. He gave me courage, support, and direction. Calish wanted to toss me outside like a cat and expected me to come home purring.
“Will you go with me?”
“No need for that. The women here meet once a moon cycle for brunch and cocktails. You should go.”
“I’m not sure I’m up for that.”
The next day, he came home with an announcement. “Great news, my love. Remember the brunch I mentioned? I told Lieutenant Sencore you would host the next one!”
“What?”
He kissed me on the cheek and headed toward his office. I chased after him until I trapped him there.
“What do I know about brunches?” I yelled, feeling my pulse quicken.
“Find a nice dress and wait for them to show up.”
I laughed at the absurdity. “You’re insane if you think I can do this. Tell the lieutenant you made a mistake. Cancel it.”
He refused. “This is what servants do,” he argued. “Tell them, and they’ll take care of everything.”
I shrieked, “Tell them? They don’t talk to me!”
Calish stood at the door, his hand on the knob. “That’s not true. You tell me all the time about your conversations, and from what you say, they like you.” He sighed. “If you don’t mind, I have some work to do.”
As soon as he shut the door, I started to cry, not that it was unusual to do so after finishing a discussion with him.
The ladies who accepted my husband’s invitation were refined, proper, and elegant while I tended to be blunt, uncoordinated, and secretly pregnant in a poorly fitting sheet dress. Calish and I hadn’t been married long enough to announce my pregnancy, so the women were put off by my refusal to at least try their alcoholic concoctions. I made up some tale about wanting to start a family, and therefore the goddess Aria may not grant it if I didn’t honor my body.
I thought my excuse brilliant. All Citizens worshiped the gods, right?
Play the faith bit, and all will be fine.
I misread that entirely. I quickly learned these women didn’t feel reverent about the gods or women’s bodies, and the thought of “having children at a time like this” repulsed them. In one luncheon, I’d effectively alienated myself from the few people my husband permitted me to have relationships with.
Well, I guess I can say I tried.
Desperate for connection, I went to the kitchen the following afternoon to help with some of the daily chores, although it didn’t turn out as I had hoped. Feeling like an outsider in my own home, which wasn’t mine at all, I gave up and wandered into Calish’s vacant office. I spent the rest of the day on the chaise lounge with a book. Time passed quicker than it ever had, so I grabbed another to take to my room.
The next morning, the only evidence I had that my husband came home the night before was the crumbs of a muffin left on the serving tray and a compressed pillow laying haphazardly on the other side of the bed. Moving the tray closer, I started the novel I picked from downstairs and finished my breakfast in bed. Alone.
I spent days with various books on one of the many couches of the house. Like the window, the stories took me outside myself, but they had their own problems. The tropes were so predictable. Many were downright impossible, feel-good tales of a delusional author. All the characters were beautiful specimens, no matter if they were birds, bugs, or humans. They all had a problem easily resolved within a few hundred pages and lived mightier than the High Priest of their time.
What rubbish. Real people are ugly. Even the pretty ones are hideous when you get a good look at them.
I drew a bath and floated in the water, thinking about what beauty was. My scarred hand, my chewed foot, were they beautiful? Was I beautiful before Sada hacked away my curls during my incarceration or after my mother trimmed the ends last season? The people in the street, what about them?
Who cared about appearance? Riches, my next book professed, was the pinnacle of all existence, big bags of coin to purchase whatever you desired.
But tell me, Mr. Pran Dillishore, what would that coveted purse get you now?
I’ll tell you: it will buy you nothing.
One might use it to weigh down an old cloak stretched over a rickety framework when the rains came. But if I hadn’t read it, what would I do with all the time I spent avoiding servants and reflective surfaces?
Having finished all the books
on the top two shelves, I removed one from the next shelf. Fire of Black and Sound.
What does that mean? No worries, I’m sure I’ll find out by the third chapter.
Occasionally, Calish worked in the study instead of outside in the village. Knowing he had a pile of work to accomplish, I sat and read in the room just to be near him. While I’d like to say I felt better having him home, it didn’t feel any different than being in the room with the servants. He was there, yet we shared no dialogue or any other form of interaction. In the evenings, he had nothing left for me and would fall asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow. We certainly were not acting like newlyweds anymore.
I found myself waiting all day to hear about his life outside the house, only to watch him snoring next to me. Never asking for his permission, I lived a life in his memories while he lay next to me in the dark. He wouldn’t tell me about his day, and based on what I saw, I understood why he didn’t want to talk about anything. I observed the arguments between him, Noran, and Reinick. I witnessed the frustrations my husband dealt with in every moment. They charged Calish with finding solutions to impossible tasks, and the extra effort he put in barely kept the right people satisfied. He committed to work he’d started for the people of Ashlund and refused to give up.
He promised me to try his best. As such, I decided to be a good wife to him. I stopped being demanding, needy, and impatient. Instead, I poured his tea in the morning, greeted him with a smile when he kicked off his boots, and reminded him he was a good man every chance I had.
Despite what happened beyond the protective gates of the enormous neighborhood, when Calish returned home, he took a moment to kiss me with purpose and make sure he nuzzled my growing stomach and speak to the baby. Now that it was kicking and responding to Calish’s voice, the thought of having a child became more of a reality. I couldn’t mask the pregnancy any longer. My body made it clearly known from the way I stood and sat to the way I walked, slept, and breathed, I was expecting.
I found the baby needed more room than my body had to give, and the mass moved outward to make me look like I hid something beneath my shirt. It kicked and pushed out in all different directions and even rolled around. Apparently, he or she wasn’t any more comfortable than I was. More than once, the baby’s movements made me grab the wall for stability. Sometimes my little one would push onto my back, other times, right out the front, but the one place taking the most abuse had to be my bladder. Having a washroom in several places on each floor turned out to be a blessing, and I found myself running to use them frequently.
The thought of giving birth without my mother was downright frightening. Originally, I wished for my mother to come here, but I couldn’t easily send for her. I suggested to Calish maybe I should return to the Resistance Camp, but he forbade it. He claimed it was not only dangerous but said the roads had become all but impassable. The only way for me to get through was on horseback, and he would not allow me to ride in my condition for that long. He said he’d find a midwife, but I had yet to meet one.
* * *
The morning things changed began with the tiniest interruption to our morning routine.
“That’s odd,” Calish said, swinging his legs off the bed and into his pants.
“What?” I cleared the sleep from my eyes.
“Where’s our breakfast?”
I pulled on my robe and headed for the washroom as he opened the bedroom door and yelled down the hall. “Qarla?”
No one answered.
“Qarla!”
Still nothing.
“Is it their day off?” I asked, finishing my business on the toilet.
“They don’t get days off.”
I started to object but decided not to start an argument so early in the morning. Shuffling out of the washroom, trying to brush my hair from my face with my fingers, I said, “I’ll just go down and get it, Calish.”
“I wonder where she is.” He yawned, his feet padding against the tile on his way to the toilet. He paused to kiss me on the cheek. “Don’t worry about it, I’ll eat downstairs.”
Tying my robe properly, I shuffled down the stairs of an otherwise empty house. The tables were all clear, and as far as I could tell, none of the servants were there. The kettle wasn’t on the stove to heat the water for tea. Stepping out through the servants’ door and into the backyard, I heard a commotion coming from the other side of the house. Knowing it would be faster to go through the house than around the outside, I hustled to the front door. Calish jogged down the stairs just as I turned the deadbolt.
“Where are you going?” he asked, fastening his uniform cufflinks.
“The servants aren’t here, but something is happening out here.”
When I opened the door, the shouting of an angry mob quickened his pace. I stepped outside before he could stop me. Hundreds of people crowded against the wrought iron gate. Some reached through with threatening fists, and others pressed their face between the rails to scream profanities. Countless numbers of people clamored to get in, and their cumulative weight threatened to weaken the fence. The Authority archers were drawn on them, detouring the most motivated trespassers from successfully making it over the top. A handful of dying men already littered the driveway on our side of the gate, and the guards had no reservations to add more to their numbers.
“Oh shit, Una. Go back inside,” he said, pushing past me and sprinting toward the chaos.
Ignoring his instructions, I stayed on the porch, mesmerized by the situation. Should they break through, no one living in the gated neighborhood would be safe. The Citizens far outnumbered the Authority. A few well-placed torches to the dry grasses on our side of the perimeter would cause more casualties than the archers on the wall could launch into the attacking mob.
Calish spoke to a couple of the guards and gave them instructions. They seemed to agree with his strategy, but before they spread the word and implemented the idea, Reinick appeared. He marched out of his front door, in loose unders beneath an open robe, barefoot, with a bow of his own. He presented an arrow with a wrapped tip and touched it to the lit end of the cigar between his teeth. It ignited.
Before I took my first step, he pulled it back and fired it into the crowd pressing the gate. “No!” I screamed, running toward him. He launched three more before anyone on our side knew what he did.
“Stop!” Calish yelled as Reinick lit another. Already, the flaming arrows had met three unprepared targets who wailed in agony. One, shoved against the gate, couldn’t move because of the number of people crowded behind him. The next two victims of Reinick’s assault were engulfed in flames the instant they were shot. The crowd stood so densely, the hungry fire traveled quickly from one trespasser to the next. The protesters were nothing more than kindling leaning against the gate. Desperate to save themselves, a few Citizens tore free from the entrance. A fortunate few ripped off their burning clothing while others wildly slapped flames from their bodies and ran.
An inconceivable panic erupted as Reinick laughed and puffed his stout cigar and prepared another arrow. The people scattered in fear of another impending assault when he took aim. They fled, keeping a safe distance from burning victims. Casualties pleaded for help, only to be ignored by those fleeing the scene. Fearful of catching the dry grasses on fire, Calish ordered kill shots for anyone touched by flame. They had to be stopped before they spread fire beyond the archers’ reach. The men on the perimeter fence snapped their bows faster than I’d ever seen. A cascade of arrows sliced through men and women, not all burning, but leaving them flailing in the street just the same. Those who’d fallen, but were not fatally injured, were put down like wounded animals. Multiple arrows projecting from some of the dead bodies whose only motion came from the colorful feather fletchings swaying in the chaotic breeze. Others continued to burn like a pile of trash, filling the air with the smell of cooked flesh and singed hair. The first victim hung from the fence lifeless and charred, his mouth hanging open in an eternal scr
eam.
“Find a way to put them out!” Calish demanded, and his men scurried to fill buckets of water. He turned to Reinick and hollered, “What do you think you are doing!”
Reinick tossed his torch-like arrow to the ground, using his foot to smother the flame. Taking the cigar from his mouth, he looked beyond the gate and smirked. “Keeping us safe.” He took a long drag from the rolled tobacco. “What’s your problem, son?”
“What’s my problem?” Calish repeated.
“Yeah, I didn’t kill them.” He threw his bow over his shoulder. “You gave the order to shoot them, not me.” He picked up his extinguished arrow. “I bet they won’t rush our fences again.” Reinick winked and headed back toward his house, unfazed by the damage he caused.
Calish cursed him under his breath while squeezing the grip of the blade on his hip. The guards under his command opened the gate to suffocate the active flames with dirt or water.
Beyond the fence, I saw our servants, Qarla, Sterle, and Jeorge, at the edge of the gawking crowd. They saw me, obviously waiting to be escorted in. Clutching my robe closed, I walked toward the gate, but Calish stopped me en route. “I told you to go inside!” I started to defend myself, but he denied me the opportunity. “Go home!” he yelled.
I felt his men staring at us, and I made sure to fully cover my nakedness. Feeling small and embarrassed, but seeing our staff still huddled in the masses outside, I didn’t know what to do other than argue my position.
Calish turned me around and forced me forward. “Inside, now!”
“Our servants are out there,” I whispered, but he refused to change his mind. Feeling my eyes water up, I hurried back to the house and away from his strength, holding my stomach so it wouldn’t jostle too badly. I waited in the front room, watching out the window as Calish tended to the situation at hand. Eventually, he walked out beyond the gate and personally escorted our servants toward our house. I knew they wouldn’t use the entry door, so I watched helplessly, waiting for him to return through the servants’ entrance, which he never did.
Scavenger Girl: Season of Toridia Page 3