by Daryl Banner
“You’ve changed.” Arrow has no other way to put it. “Since we left the Warden’s Tower in the sixth. Perhaps before. You’ve … You have undergone some kind of change.”
“So have you. You’re cold and secretive and keep a gun in your drawer.”
The words create a cone of ice in Arrow’s stomach. Slowly, he turns his face unto Prat, disbelief in his eyes.
“Yeah.” Prat puffs up his chest, proud of himself. “I found it. One night last week. I was looking for my charcoal pencil, the one I like to mapmake with, and I found your little outlawed weapon.”
“Prat …” warns Arrow, his voice low and deadly.
“Why do you have a gun, Arrow? Or perhaps I ought to ask, how do you have a gun? Only the most elite of Guardian are allowed to wield such weapons, and even the most of them carry neons and swords instead.”
Arrow’s gaze drops to Prat’s knees. He finds his resolve shaken so deeply to the core, he can’t even form a proper response.
“Secretive,” repeats Prat haughtily. “Secretive and criminal, you are. What other laws are you breaking?”
Finally, Arrow’s been thrown leverage. “Laws?” He scoffs. “You and I were members of a treasonous rebel group called Rain, should I remind you. Our sole purpose was to assassinate the Banshee King and bring about a change to Atlas. And you speak to me of breaking laws? You and I have been breaking laws for years, you idiot.”
“But we broke them together! Not even Gandra or Yellow owned a gun, Arrow. This is different.”
“This is no different, and it is none of your business. Rone and Victra drank themselves silly on chemical every night of the week. Juston and Adamant went on bazaar-lifting sprees all the time when Rain had nothing to do, coming back with little trinkets and baked snacks and odd things they could slip into their pockets. Even Cintha had secrets, secrets involving the burial of her mother in her and Rone’s backyard. Law breaking. Everyone fucking did it. Anwick? He lied on his Legacy Exam. Even our golden boy Athan broke the law to run the streets at our side, proving his loyalty to the slums over the King, Sanctum, the Lifted City, and his own family. And you want to stand there, righteous as a fool, and talk to me about laws?” Arrow scoffs at him. “Fuck off, Pratganth Upgold. Fuck off and leave me to my work. And don’t look through my drawers again.”
“You’re a fucking bastard, Arrow Fyrefellow. Half mad, just like Impis. Fyre and Fyre, brothers, you two might as well be, fucking mad brothers who—”
“Just fuck off already,” spits Arrow over his shoulder.
Prat kicks the wall, then storms out of the room. Arrow sits there glaring at his screen, unsure what he was even trying to focus on, his brain rattled by his outed secret.
With a thought, he pulls open his drawer quickly, and discovers his gun still sitting there under a pile of papers where he’d kept it hidden. He breathes a short-lived sigh of relief before worry rushes back to claim him again. Prat knows, but he only knows half the truth about why I keep this gun.
Somehow, that darker second half doesn’t feel so safely tucked away anymore.
0311 Halvesand
There is an older woman Halvesand has never seen who has a Legacy that allows her to throw her voice. Her power is so ample that she can cast it out like a flood, her words spilling through halls and rooms and under cracks in locked doors.
And it’s through her Legacy that Halves hears his name: “Lesser to the White Hall. Lesser to the White Hall.”
The words lift him right from where he sits. He fixes his plate on his chest, pulls on his boots, then regards his hair with one quick glance into a mirror and a swipe of his hand, parting it to one side. He meets his own eyes for a moment, recognizing the strength he’s regained in them over the months, and for a flicker of an instant, recalling the gaunt, sickly look in his face before he was cleared by his superiors and started training again at Eleven Wings.
Halvesand Lesser has come a long way.
He leaves his room and walks down the labyrinth of corridors and stairwells that lead to the Grounds, through which he passes to reach the significantly less-populated section of Fortress. In these halls, everything is quiet. He hears nothing but his own footsteps and the subtle shifting of his body within his armor, and now and then, even his own breath. Something about the thick metal thing around his neck makes his breaths more audible, which is somewhat annoying when one is trying to be stealthy.
After passing two checkpoints with Shadow Guards, he at last reaches the doors to the White Hall: the throne room of Queen Kael. The Shadow Guards there step aside, and the great doors groan as they open, letting in Halvesand to the dark hall.
The light never touches the farthest walls of the hall, making the single stone walkway appear to stretch across a great chasm of nothing. Only faint white faces and stone hands peak out from the dark here and there as he goes, but with an unturnable neck, Halves cannot observe them in the least.
He stops at the first step, then folds his hands over his waist and stands at ease, awaiting the great white brazier and the Queen, who stands next to it, glowing in its light.
“Halvesand Lesser,” she greets him formally, and while her tone is polite, her face is flat and cold. “Are you enjoying your time here in our Fortress of the Dark Abandon?”
Recalling their mode of communication, he blinks once firmly.
“Good.” There is no change in the woman’s expression, whether she’s praising, asking a question, or conversing plainly, as if her own face were made of pale stone. “Forrest was right about you. I’ve been told your training is notable. You are, despite the issue of your neck, agile and keen and quite strong. Halvesand … I am saying your name properly, aren’t I?”
She enunciates each letter and syllable so distinctly and grandly, Halvesand feels like he has been mistaken for some prestigious past King of Atlas. He’d tell her she’s overpronouncing it if he could.
But he can’t. So he only blinks once to affirm.
“Good. Now we arrive at my purpose for summoning you.” She slowly paces to the other side of the brazier as she speaks. “I need to employ a Guardian for a … special task. It can’t be any Guardian at all. It must be one who will perform the task silently, dutifully, and loyally. And, most importantly of all …” She stops and stares into the pale flame. “… discreetly.”
Halvesand blinks once, despite her not looking his way.
The woman’s eyes flick to meet his. “You’ve heard the Lifted expression ‘Bodyguard’, have you not? It is a term from the Ancients used to describe a certain kind of Guardian assigned to one person. Much like some elite members of the Sky Guard are tasked with protecting the Queen or King at all costs. A so-named Bodyguardian, or Bodyguard, is tasked with the duty of protecting one individual at all costs. It is their one and only task. Blink if you understand.”
Halvesand blinks.
“You have familial ties to the ninth, I’m to understand. A mother and an older brother and a soon-to-be-born son and a lady friend at your eleventh Guardian Headquarters. Blink if I have it right.”
Halvesand blinks.
“As you are already a sworn-in Guardian, I presume you have made your vows to serve Atlas, to forsake familial bonds in the spirit of your service, and to serve with unwavering faith in your leaders. Do I have such a Guardian standing before me?”
Halvesand blinks.
“The one I am tasking you with protecting—Your Sworn Duty—is one for whom you will lay your life down, should the need come. This is an assignment I do not make lightly, Halvesand. This is a task you may decline, but you must decline it here, and you must decline it now. Do you so decline?”
Halvesand does not blink, his eyes wet with determination.
“You accept your post as Bodyguardian to your Sworn Duty?”
To that, Halvesand blinks firmly.
“Good.” She comes down the steps and stands next to him with a cool glint of superiority in her eyes. “Your Sworn Duty awaits you at the top of the Shad
ow Tower.” As if prompted by her words, a door opens to the right of the brazier, light spilling in.
Halvesand slowly makes his way up the steps of the stage, then passes through the door, which leads him to a stairwell he’s not seen before. He stands there for a moment, bending his whole body so as to see upwards. The stairs seem to go on and on. The stairs also head downward, even deeper than he thought Fortress runs. Exactly how deep into the ground does this place go …?
The door shuts at his back, startling him. When he finds he is alone, he swallows his doubts and ascends the stairs one by one.
Who is my Sworn Duty? Halves has to wonder. Is it a prisoner they’ve taken from some rebel mastermind? Is it the leader of Rain, the group his brothers were involved in, captured at long last? Is it one of his own, a Guardian who has forsaken his post, locked up atop this tower? Or perhaps it is a precious person, someone who is in need of protection, a child, or a distant relative to the Mirand-Thrin or Netheris bloodline. I pray they are not Lifted and awful to make a manage of.
About halfway up the tower, small windows appear in the wall, indicating that they are now above ground. When he makes a glance out one of them, however, he finds he’s far more above the ground than he thought. He stops at one of the windows, confused, only to discover that the tower is actually attached to the Wall itself, as if built out of the side of it, anchored to the brick and stone and steel. I’ve never been to the edge of the city before, he realizes. Not even in the ninth from what I remember, unless Aleks or mom or dad took me there as a child, through Greens and muds and nothing.
At the top of the stairs, he finds a simple stone landing, free of any window, only a door before him, tall and made of dark wood that looks burned or treated with some kind of chemical. He stands before that door, unsure if he is going to be greeted, or if he ought to knock, or simply allow himself in. I’ll knock, he decides, lifting a fist to the wood and giving it two taps.
He hears movement behind the door.
Then, silence.
That is when Halves notices the small hole in the door, right about where his eyes would line up—the size of an eye, too. He stares at the hole, wondering if he’s being watched through it by his Sworn Duty. As he cannot speak, he only stares back at that hole, uncertain.
Finally, he hears a voice, a woman’s voice: “Who are you?”
It’s a woman …
Halvesand frowns. Has she not been told …? He makes a clumsy gesture with his fingers at his lips, attempting to indicate (without the use of proper hand language) that he cannot speak.
After a brief moment, the woman says, “I’m sorry. There’s been a mistake. You may return to your post.”
His eyes search the door in frustration. Then, assuming he is being watched, he points to his chest, then at the stairs, then draws a circle around his head, indicating a crown—Queen.
“Sorry. No. You may return to your post,” she repeats, and then Halvesand listens to movement as the woman’s footsteps take her away from the door.
Halvesand bristles. I’ve climbed up the whole fucking tower. Is my Sworn Duty seriously turning me away? He gives the door another knock, but this time, there is no answer.
He places a hand on the door handle—a thick, blunt, iron thing—and gives it a solid push.
To his surprise, the door is unlocked, swinging open heavily and quietly to reveal the room. The woman has already made it to the other end where a great wide window stretches nearly the whole length of the far wall. It is a large room that likely takes up the whole top of the tower, as it is also very tall. The ceiling is a cone with its point in the center, long support beams racing across the empty space between the walls of the roof. Little trinkets and decorations hang from the beams, among them a small chandelier with eight lit candles that give a warm orange glow to the otherwise cool-colored gloom of the space. There is a bed with enough space for two in the center of the room, adorned with silken sheets and a lot of blue and purple pillows. Against the round walls are a few tables, a short bookshelf, and some potted plants, the length of which pour out over the lip of the wide, wide window, likely making a long green vine down the side of the tower, if Halves might guess it.
And the woman who let him in, the sole occupant of the room, stands at that wide, wide window.
Halves blinks.
It is the Shadow Lady. The same Shadow Lady he saw during his jogs with Cope at the Grounds. Her long black hair flows down to her waist, longer than he expected. She wears a pretty ornate white gown, similar to the Queen’s, but with notes of dark purple and blue colors hidden in its folds, giving her a more welcoming yet reserved palette for the eye. Perhaps it is the angle at which she stands, but a patch of hair seems to be missing from the side of her head right by her ear, indicative of a scar that then traces to the side of her jaw, the only part of her face he can see.
Next to her rests a bunch of metal shapes, gears, cords, cables, and other things. Some of the pieces seem to make the shape of a leg. Other pieces make an arm with fingers. There are plastic bits, glass bits, and a few large metal plates that could be a deconstructed piece of Guardian armor for all he knows. He knows not what to make of the mess, other than the Shadow Lady has a hobby of collecting odds and ends.
He takes a step into the room, his foot shuffling along the stone.
The sound makes the woman spin about quickly, and a flash of indignance burns her eyes. “I did not invite you in!” she protests.
Halvesand’s eyes fall on her face.
And it is now that he experiences a shock of revelation.
Her face is one he knows, a face that countless across all of Atlas would know, a face belonging to a woman that countless across all of Atlas think is dead.
The face of Ruena Netheris.
“I said it clearly,” she announces, her voice as grand as her Aunt Kael’s, but somehow gentler, kinder, even in her vexed tone of voice. “There’s been a mistake, and you may return to your post. That was your order: return to your post. Not: please enter my room.”
Halvesand shuffles a foot, as if to take another step in, but takes a step back instead, and his heel hits the doorframe. He swallows once, the swallow burning his throat in the slightest, and then he lifts an anxious hand to his chest in a gesture that means: Sorry.
“Yes, sorry, and I am sorry too,” Ruena retorts in a curt, annoyed manner, “sorry that you’ve wasted your time climbing all those steps on account of my foolish aunt who feels I need protection. I do not need protection. I …” She lifts a hand, which at once crackles with the buzzing threat of electricity. “… can well enough protect myself.”
She knew I said sorry. Can she understand my hands? Halvesand takes another step into the room and moves a hand toward his belly to make another gesture.
Ruena aims her hand his way. “I said return to your post.”
Halvesand, cautious and ready for anything, takes another step into the room and gestures at Ruena: I cannot leave. I am your Sworn Duty. It is an order from the Queen.
He gets out half the words with his hands before all he sees is a spidery bolt of light crackling across the room toward him, forming a purple-white bridge between their bodies.
The bolt, however, is deflected by Halvesand’s body and forced to find two new paths to finish its current: the stones at his very feet and two trinkets dangling from the beams over his head, which sing a groaning, sputtering song of metal and sparks as the electricity courses through them.
The light is gone in a fraction of a second, and all is calm again.
Halves, having shut his eyes from the flash, opens them to find Ruena’s wide with horror. Apparently, she did not intend to let loose her Legacy, if he’s reading that look right.
“I …” She stammers and drops her hand. “I … It was … It was an accident. A slip of my … my …” She squints suddenly. “How did you bend my light away? Did you …?” Her bewildered eyes meet his. “Is it on account of your Legacy? Have you a shie
ld of some kind?”
Does Kael Mirand-Thrin’s niece truly know the hand language, or was it a coincidence before? He places two fingers at the center of his chest, then twists them.
“Legacy,” murmurs Ruena, reading his hand, her eyes hovering there. She looks bothered for a moment, then merely curious, her head tilting to the side, all her long black hair swinging.
Halves wonders if there is a reason she is so guarded. Perhaps her time here in the Dark Abandon has not been ideal. Maybe her reunion with her aunt was an unpleasant one, for all Halves knows. Or maybe the woman has endured a psychological descent since the former Royal Legacist stole her coronation day.
Whatever the reason, he decides to take advantage of this brief moment where Ruena seems to have let down her own shield. He brings a hand to his head, wiggles his fingers downward, then taps his chin and draws a line over his forehead: Your hair is black?
Ruena, listening, brings a hand to her head. “Well …” The young woman seems uncertain how to reply. “I … I suspect it is an obvious thing that my … identity … be kept a secret. Of course, part of that is changing a few obvious attributes.” She gives a careless wave at herself. “My hair, for one. It is simply a dye, able to be washed out. I am—and have since my arrival been—confined to this tower and some chosen restricted areas. Well, unless the illusionist is here, in which case she cloaks me in her … illusions. But she is busy in the sixth, and—Never mind, I am saying too much already.” Then, just as quickly, she adds, “Then again, if you are my Sworn Bodyguardian, then you are also sworn to secrecy.”
Halvesand gives a shake of his fist: Yes.
Ruena returns him a reluctant nod, her gaze thoughtful. After a moment, she moves back to the far window, then talks to him over her shoulder. “I saw you in the Grounds. You were jogging.”
He replies by pointing two fingers to his eyes, then those two fingers out at her: I saw you.
“Indeed,” murmurs Ruena. She seems to think something over. “Where are you from?”
He indicates the number nine.