by Daryl Banner
Halves’ mother drops onto the couch next to him and leans forward. “He … He left? He hasn’t been with—?”
“No. Didn’t your sister say?” The man sighs, long and deep. “She and I had words. Difficult words. I had to leave her for some time. It was a hard month, but I returned during the worst of the Madness. I just couldn’t leave her alone. And Lionis still had not returned. We suspected he went back to his home to check on his family. Where else could he have gone, anyway? Haven’t you been back?”
“No.” She is visibly upset by this news, her hand reaching for her throat as if she’s having trouble finding air. “No, I haven’t. The … The Guardian at the, the, the front …” She closes her eyes, clearly distressed. “They won’t let me out. Not even for a stroll.”
Halves finds that news surprising. He takes a few steps into the lobby and waves toward his mother, getting her attention. Then he makes a few quick motions with his hands—a finger to the chest, a hand in the air, a cup of his palm to the ear, wiggling fingers by his chin, and then a one-handed symbol for nine.
His mother understands him. “It doesn’t matter that I’ve been relieved of all charges. I was relieved by a dying man. The new Lead Officer is stricter. I mean, I would’ve gone to the ninth by now if I could. Doesn’t she know that?” she asks rhetorically of her sister, looking off, her eyes seething at once. “Doesn’t she know I’d do fucking anything to find my boys?”
The large bearded man, Hale by name, eyes her. “Why, of course she does. Why else is she such a bitch to you?”
For a second, Halves’ mother doesn’t seem to know what to make of Hale’s words. In the next moment, the pair of them burst into laughter. Hale’s laughter is deep and infectious, echoing up his short, stout, big-bellied body, and causing his glasses to dance on the bridge of his nose.
“Aye, just walk right on in there,” Hale tells her after his laughs die down. “The ninth is a free ward. Guardian lets them be, in fact.”
“No, not so easy,” his mother counters. “The ninth is governed by some Androw or Ardow person who’s acting as the Warden, but without such a title. They’ve an alliance with Guardian, I overheard, but it won’t last when a Queen or King is named. No one is allowed in or out, since Guardian mistrusts them despite the alliance.”
“I say go anyway. It’s your home. You’ve a right.”
A flushed nurse appears at the doorway opposite them. He has his hat removed and fans his face with it. “Ellena? Miss Ellena?”
She turns, takes one look at him, then sighs and rises from her seat, smoothing out her blouse. “Work beckons.” She puts a hand on Halves’ cheek, winks at him. “Keep your chin up. Well, you know. Figuratively.” Then, with another tiny sigh, she takes off to join the nurse, the pair of them disappearing through the door.
After her departure, Hale mutters something about checking on his wife and whether she’s driven poor Ennebal mad or not, then lifts himself from his seat with a grunt and ambles away, still muttering. Halves can’t blame him for his awkwardness. He is an unfortunate man caught between two women who, in each other’s presence, can only draw knives.
Of course, he knows all about having such feelings for a sibling. Despite all the love he might carry in his heart for his older brother, he knows the sting of familial betrayal. He knows it in the form of likely being an uncle to his maybe-child. He knows it in the form of his brother’s insufferably competitive nature. He knows it in all the setbacks he’s been handed by Three Sister—and the very lack of such setbacks for his brother. Aleks has just had the luckier flip of the coin, Halves tells himself. Three Sister doesn’t favor any person over another.
He could use a moment in the temple to pray to the Sisters. He has really taken a liking to it, sometimes going with his mother at his side, the pair of them praying. It’s not such a strange thing when one does it regularly and with intent.
Context is everything, he had learned once, and when you have something to pray for, praying is so much easier. A moment in the temple ought to do my unrested mind some good.
Besides, he’s convinced the Sisters truly do listen.
He has his mother to thank for their priceless inner peace.
On his way to the temple, however, Halvesand’s wicked feet take him past a different room entirely, one in which he spent many months recovering. He stops by the opened door to the room and discovers that he cannot move past it.
He wonders if he’ll ever move past everything that happened in this quaint, unassuming hospital room.
Halvesand’s eyes, heavy with all the memories, find a different individual occupying the bed—some poor Guardian fool who picked the wrong battle on the streets during his patrol. He’ll be fixed up in a week or less, surely. No one has spent as long recovering from any wound as Halves has, nor has made such an impressive recovery. Or so said the nurses, Halves thinks ruefully.
And for someone who’s recovered so well, it’s a wonder that Halves is still so broken. Just standing here at the door, he can feel his heart gallop away from him like a stray animal in the Greens, chasing a wind through the tall, endless grass.
Always chasing. Always running. Always racing, he is.
Halves blinks, then remembers the girl with the black hair and the poison on her lips. Mercy. The one who drew a knife across his neck in the first place. The one who did this to him in the name of seeking the To-Be-Queen of Atlas, Ruena. The one who wished to avenge the execution of her lover Dran.
Vengeance is a messy train to board. So many get their neck slit along every stop on its fiery path.
Halves feels a single tear let loose from his eye, a tear he didn’t realize he was making. Even months later, his tears still sting, and the trail it makes down his cheek burns like the hot oil from a first ward pepper.
And maybe what he feels in his heart isn’t fear anymore.
Maybe it doesn’t matter if he’s alive or dead.
Maybe it doesn’t matter if the baby is his or his brother’s.
Maybe it doesn’t matter whether the poison lives in my neck, or in my heart, or in the very core of my existence.
0244 Athan
Athan has a new fan in the stands this glorious night.
After the pit master calls Athan’s name, he can even hear the specific shouts of Edrick’s encouragement. Maybe it’s the dry, almost sarcastic way in which the pleasure boy cheers. It makes Athan want to laugh despite himself.
But when he goes into the pits, he nearly doesn’t have the heart to win. His opponent looks terrified of him before he’s even thrown the first punch. It becomes evident by Athan’s third win that what he suspected is right: his heart just isn’t in the mood to fight anymore.
He bows out of his very next match, forfeiting, much to the disappointment and booing of the crowd. No blood today, I’m afraid.
Or is it just his mood this day? Has something else changed? Athan never came here for blood. He only came as a sort of therapy and to help contribute to the ninth, but the harder truth to face is that the ninth can do well enough without his gifts of gold and small rations of food.
Also, and perhaps worse, the therapy part no longer works.
If anything, Athan is only stuffing his pain about losing Wick deeper and deeper into his internal, bottomless well of anguish. The fighting isn’t helping. The pretending to sleep every night has become torture. Every day Athan misses him more, not less.
Will anything in this stupid, useless city heal Athan’s grief?
As he passes by the long, black-and-red striped pavilion where a number of other challengers rest, chat, and warm up, he finds a familiar face by its entrance. “Why?” asks the bright-eyed boy with the orange, sandy hair.
Athan shrugs at him. “Sorry, Nickel.” It takes a moment for the name to come back to him; to be fair, he hasn’t seen the boy for a while. “My heart isn’t in it today.”
“Your heart’s always in it,” Nickel argues. “It’s wounded.”
�
�Sorry. Good day, Nickel.” Athan moves past him, going on his way toward the stands to collect Edrick.
Nickel’s voice slaps his backside like a strong wind. “You can’t just give up! When the sword’s at your face, you don’t just let your enemy strike it through you!”
Athan, still walking away, looks over his shoulder at the boy. “I was never in it for blood. I only wanted—”
“I don’t care what you want! Don’t you have any loved ones who died? Ones you couldn’t save? Would they be proud of you right now, walking away like a coward?”
That makes Athan stop. He turns completely now, facing the boy with five paces between their tensed faces. “Who do you think I’m fighting in there?” he asks, his voice surprisingly calm.
Nickel is confused by the question. “Them,” he blurts, pointing a thumb at the pavilion at his back.
“No.” He puts a patient hand on his own chest. “We’re fighting ourselves, Nickel. We’re fighting our own demons. We beat them out of our souls and have others beat them out of us, too. It’s the darkness in us all that we’re fighting, not each other.”
“Sure doesn’t look like that,” Nickel protests.
Athan shrugs. “It never does.”
The boy doesn’t look any more satisfied than he was when he was first shouting at Athan a moment ago. He just crosses his arms and sulks. Two men leave the pavilion and bump into him on their way out. Neither apologize or even acknowledge the boy, continuing on toward the pit.
Finally Nickel drops his arms and walks right up to Athan. His voice is low and angry when he speaks. “You’re wrong. You don’t fight for yourself. You fight for us.” He slaps a hand to his own chest. “When I see you fight, I get stronger. When I see you win, I win. It doesn’t matter about whoever you’ve lost. We’ve all lost loved ones.”
Athan’s brow furrows. Something is wrong with this boy.
“But when you are in that arena and you’re spilling blood from others’ mouths, you are spilling that blood for folk like me who can’t.” Nickel’s eyes are wet now with a red, violent sort of emotion. “You’re the strength that each of us dreams of having. You’re the answer to our anger. And without you fighting in those pits, then people like me are just …” His eyes detach, staring off. “… angry.”
Right then, another group of men approach the pavilion behind Nickel. One of them looks over, and his eyes sharpen when he sees the likes of Athan. “Aye, the cheater’s called it quits early today,” he taunts. “Or maybe he’s just bored of stealing.”
It’s the man from the other day who put up a good fight, was ultimately defeated, and then accused Athan of cheating. The one whose big and unruly beard is cleaved in half down the chin.
Nickel turns, unnecessarily coming to Athan’s defense. “He is not a cheater.”
The man towers over the boy by two feet. “And who are you? A butt boy he pays to cheer him on each day?” The man’s friends laugh at that, nudging one another and eyeing Athan challengingly. “Go on, then. Tell us how fair and honest your little friend is. Tell us how he doesn’t cheat his way to his victories.” When the man turns his face to Athan, both halves of his beard seem to wiggle. “You know the rules. No Legacies in the pits. Just ‘cause yours is one I can’t see doesn’t mean you ain’t using it. I know you are. We all do.”
Athan stares at the man, long and hard. Nickel says something else, but neither the man nor Athan are paying attention, their eyes locked in the way of two horned animals.
“Is it a win you want?” asks Athan, taking a step toward him and cutting off something Nickel was going on about. “Is that what’ll make you happy?” He lifts his pouch of gold—a tiny thing compared to his usual days in the pits. All of the men’s eyes, the bearded one’s included, are locked upon the pouch as if it’s a magical device that can grant wishes. Perhaps it is, to them. It’s then that Athan feels a very sudden change of heart. “Really?” he asks, softer. “Just gold?”
The man pulls his eyes from the pouch and brings them back to Athan. He comes the rest of the way to him, pushing past Nickel and bringing his bearded face right in front of the Lifted boy’s. “I’ll find out what it is you do, boy, and when I do—”
“I don’t do this for the gold.” Athan pitches the pouch of gold at the other men’s feet. All of them, even the bearded man himself, look down at the spilled winnings at once, meager as they may be. “I have said that from the start. And I don’t do it to wound the egos of proud fighters like you.”
The bearded man turns back to him, still angry, but now doubly bewildered. “Then what the fuck are you doing in these pits, boy?”
“I wish I knew.” Athan stares hard at the man before him. “One day, I was mourning the death of my boyfriend. The next day, I had a bruised cheek, reddened knuckles … and felt better than I’d felt in a long time. The pain was gone, even if just for a moment, even if just until the next day when I returned here.”
The other men haven’t touched the gold yet. They still stare at it as if Athan might at any moment collect it back, like his throwing of the gold will turn out to have been just a dramatic gesture.
“Once, I had all the gold I wanted at my fingertips,” murmurs Athan thoughtfully. “But it got me nothing. I wish everyone in the world could have all the gold their hearts desire … because then they would realize it isn’t the answer.”
“Oh, he’s a philosopher now!” crows the bearded man to his buds.
“I’m no philosopher. I’m just … just a stupid boy with dreams in his eyes, a stupid boy at his end.” Athan turns to go, done with the whole lot of them, Nickel included.
The bearded man calls out after him: “Hey, dream boy!”
Athan, against all his instinct, stops and entertains the man once more, turning to listen.
“Come here.” He comes up to Athan and, unexpectedly, throws an arm around his back. His hold on the Lifted boy is tight, almost aggressive. “You are a sad little fucker, aren’t you? That’s why you fight in those pits … because you’re sad?”
“Let him go,” barks Nickel, though his bark sounds far more like a whimper.
Fork-beard ignores him. “You once had all the gold in the world, you said?”
“Not anymore.” Athan surveys the looks on all the men’s faces. They look suddenly more attentive than they do malicious or angry. Perhaps I ought to have kept my mouth shut about the gold. “My family was well-off. They’re dead now.”
“Aye. Alas. The Madness took them, I dare to ask?”
Athan figures it’s a close enough guess than to go on describing the complicated truth of a poisoned feast at a dinner party. “Yes.”
“Well, pardon my insensitive words, boy, but while they may be dead, gold cannot die.” The man’s half-hug of Athan grows even tighter still. “You don’t suspect their gold might be sitting in a bank someplace, do you? Or buried under your floor? Or hidden in a wall behind your daddy’s study?”
Daddy. Athan’s face flushes, feeling all the mockery behind the man’s tongue. He hates you and your stupid philosophies, Athan tells himself, not wishing to be made a fool again. He loves only your gold, of which you have none anymore.
Not that he believes me. “I told you, I haven’t any gold.”
“Aye, and I suppose that’s why you’re so damn eager to give it all away. Just … throwing it on the ground as you were.”
Athan’s eyes drift down to the gold, still spilled at the men’s feet. He doesn’t respond.
“I suspect the reason you’re so quick to toss these coins at us,” the man goes on, “is because you have more than you need sitting under that cheating ass of yours.”
“I have none,” states Athan firmly.
“Aye. And like the cheating, I think you’re lying.”
Nickel steps forward and grabs the man by the back of his shirt. “Let him go!” he shouts, pulling. His efforts don’t budge the man in the least. “He has been nothing but fair! He has done nothing—!”
&nbs
p; One of the men grabs Nickel by his throat, cutting off his words, and tosses him aside like a slab of tenth market meat. As Nickel tries to scramble to his feet, the man is over him with a wide, bare, dirty foot held over the boy’s neck, pinning him. The boy gags and chokes, trying pitifully to free himself.
“Stop it,” orders Athan. “Do you really need to play with a boy his size? Lay your attention on me. Not him.”
Then, not a second later, two armored figures appear around the bend. Guardian. “Hey, hey!” barks one of them, a woman behind her visor. “Hands off the boy. And you, release him,” she demands of the one atop Nickel.
When the man takes his foot off the boy’s neck, Nickel kicks away and scrambles to his feet, gasping to regain his breath. The bearded one lets go of Athan, then slowly backs away with his hands lifted in surrender. “No trouble, no trouble,” he insists lightly.
As one Guardian stands there, hand on his sword and ready to unsheathe it, the lead woman stands between the men. Her eyes are on Nickel first. “You okay, boy?”
He only eyes her sullenly as he holds his throat, saying nothing.
The woman turns to Athan. “And you? Are you fine?”
“I was before.” Athan looks on the men, all of whom stare at him with sharpened daggers in their eyes, daring him to say a wrong thing. “These men have merely had too much to drink, I suspect. Their form of play is a touch rough for my taste, but harmless.”
“A touch rough,” mutters the Guardian suspiciously.
“Yes.” Athan looks over the men, then nods at the gold upon the ground. “So rough, they went and spilled their day’s earnings.”
To that, two of the men reluctantly look at one another, then go to their knees to collect the measly amount of coins off the ground.
Fork-beard stands perfectly in place, watching Athan with only darkness in his glassy eyes.
The men are still scraping coins off the soil when the Guardian woman turns her hardened stare upon them. “Go on, all of you. I think you’ve had enough fun with these boys half your ages. Go on,” she repeats, firmer.