Sunshield

by Emily B. Martin

  My cheeks heat, but I take her offered hand. Her palm is thick with calluses and incidental scars—I know because I have to hang on to it, steadying myself on her shoulder. I follow her precariously to my horse’s side, but once there, I shake my head.

  “I don’t think I can get up, Lark.”

  “I’ll help you—here, you can step up on my leg . . .”

  “I can’t stay up.” I grip the saddle, hot with embarrassment. “I’ll fall off—especially if we’re going downhill.”

  She looks down the slope. “Well . . . all right. Can you walk, if I help you? It’s not that far—maybe a half mile.”

  A half mile sounds like a day’s trek, but I nod. “I can try.”

  “We can stop when you need to.”

  “Okay.”

  “First, though—here.” She leaves me clinging to my horse and approaches her own, digging through her pack. She comes up with a threadbare bandanna and a little tobacco tin. She pops open the tin to reveal a gob of dark, sooty eyeblack.

  She dips her thumb and smears it over my cheeks. She shakes out the handkerchief and ties it over my nose and mouth.

  “This smells like blade polish,” I say.

  “Probably because I use it to clean my sword,” she says, knotting it behind my head.

  “Urg, Lark.”

  “It’s your own damn fault—who travels into the desert without even a handkerchief? Or a hat, for that matter.” She reaches over my shoulder and flips my cloak hood over my head. “That’ll have to serve, for now.” She makes one last check of all our gear and then leads my horse around behind hers, tucking the reins under her panniers. She comes back to my side and gathers up her horse’s reins.

  “You know, I always thought the bandanna and eyeblack were mostly fashion choices, to hide your identity,” I say. “But they really help, don’t they?”

  Her eyes roll so hard over her greasy cheeks I’m afraid they’ll pop out. “By the Light, you are an imbecile.” She takes my right arm and loops it over her shoulders, under her thick ponytail of locks.

  Maybe it’s the tone of her voice, or her solid weight supporting my whispery body, but the insult sounds less fierce and more familiar than yesterday’s. She settles her arm around my waist, clucks to her horse, and starts us all down the slope.

  She’s a hair taller than me, making her head cant toward mine as she holds my weight. My feet skid in the loose sandstone, and more than once she has to muscle me upright to keep me from falling. We knock foreheads a few times, worsening my headache. I lean hard on her shoulder, panting against the oily bandanna.

  “Sorry,” I mumble, over and over. “Sorry.”

  “Knock it off,” she finally says. “It’s annoying.”

  “Sorry.”

  She huffs and adjusts my arm over her shoulders. “What’s that bird singing?”

  “Which?”

  “The buzzy one.”

  “Are you just trying to distract me?”

  “Yes. What is it?”

  “A pewee,” I say. “A western one. It says its name, hear it? Pee-wee.”

  “If you say so. What’s that growly one?”

  I tilt my ear up to the sky. “Harris hawk. They hunt in groups.”

  “And the cooing?”

  “Hopeless dove.”

  “Hopeless?”

  “That’s what it says, listen—No hope. No hope.”

  She snorts, which I’m quickly finding is her idea of a laugh. I strain to hear any other calls, but our party’s slipping and crunching drowns everything else out.

  “What’s that plant?” she asks, nodding to the closest sagebrush.

  I tsk. “Oh, please.”

  “Oh, sorry,” she says seriously. “I thought you’d know.”

  “I do—”

  She snorts again.

  “Very funny,” I say, using sarcasm as a cover. The Sunshield Bandit is joking with me.

  We continue. I take a bad skid, grabbing her vest to steady myself. She pauses, tucks her horse’s reins into her belt, and takes hold of my wrist to keep me up on her shoulder. With her arm up, her shirtsleeve slides down toward her elbow, revealing the longsword tattooed on the inside of her forearm. The point drives into that scarred concentric circle.

  My stomach twists. It’s faded and distorted.

  She’s had it for a while.

  My gaze slides up toward her wrist, where the edge of a letter begins.

  “What’s that word on your wrist?” I ask.

  “Strength.”

  “And the one on your left?”

  “Perseverance.”

  “Why’d you pick those?”

  “Because that’s what it takes to survive.”

  “Hm.” I maneuver my foot around a desiccated root. “Maybe for you. I’d probably tattoo don’t stand at the top of stairs.”

  Her gaze cuts sideways. “Is that how you got that scar?”

  “On my eyebrow? No—would you believe it, that didn’t come from a seizure. It came from me falling off a walkwire after I snuck out when I was fourteen. I’d never been allowed to run them before. Ma and Vynce make it look easy.” I shrug. “I thought I could do it, too. I was determined to do my two nights.”

  “Two nights—you’ve said that before.”

  “Yeah, to go from trainee to scout, you have to spend two nights solo in the forest.” I hitch myself a little higher on her shoulder. “You get a cloak and a compass, and nothing else. They ride you out to the middle of the forest and give you an end point. You have two days to get there on your own to earn your florets. All my friends were earning theirs—I must’ve watched a dozen of them come back all dirty and victorious, kneeling in front of my ma as she swore them in. And even though I was still having one or two seizures a month at that point, I decided I had to try, too. I made it two miles from the palace, when I was defeated by the first walkwire. I fell into a laurel slick twelve feet below and carved up my eyebrow.”

  I remember that ugly swoop of emptiness as my feet slid off the wire, the brief realization before hitting the branches that I had made a terrible mistake.

  “One of the Woodwalkers found me crawling out of the ravine on his way back to headquarters.” I step over a rock. “Of course, it was only after the tongue-lashing and the embarrassment of it all that I found out that no trainee does their two nights completely alone—one of the older scouts secretly tails them to make sure they don’t get into trouble. Like falling off a walkwire.”

  Lark’s bandanna puffs—I can’t tell if it’s a laugh or not. I glance at her. “That probably sounds completely stupid to you. I’m sure at fourteen you were already taking down slavers.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” she says, adjusting my arm on her shoulder. “I don’t know how old I am.”

  Oh.

  I . . .

  Oh.

  “Oh,” I say.

  “I feel like I’m fifty,” she says. “’Specially when I get to coughing. But Rose and I both guess I’m twentysomething. I only really started keeping track of time after the wagon. I’d started my bleeding before I left, so I must have been around thirteen or fourteen. After that I was with the rustlers. Ow—you’ve got my hair.”

  “Sorry.” I try to loosen her locks from my dire grip. “So . . . rustlers. Cows, I take it?”

  “Usually. Sometimes goats, but they’re a damn nuisance to drive.”

  “I see. Is that where you learned to fight?”

  “It’s where I learned most things. They don’t teach you much beyond digging in the quarries.” She pauses to tug on Jema’s lead as the horse noses a clump of grass. “Everybody needed to be able to fight a little—we weren’t a big enough posse that we could afford to leave the herds undefended. Rose had the better aim—they gave her the crossbow. I wound up with the longsword after we found an abandoned cache in the water scrape.”

  “And the buckler?”

  “The buckler . . . I won that after I turned over my first wagon.”
/>   I glance at her. “Really? You took up slaver-hunting before you had the sun strategy?”

  “It wasn’t a conscious decision,” she says. “I didn’t one day decide to be a bandit known for using the sun. I didn’t even decide I was going to be a bandit who went after wagons. It was just a few weeks after we’d left the rustlers, and Rose and I were at a dead end—our original plan had been to try to find work in Teso’s Ford, or along the stage road. But there are bounties in all the towns for escaped slaves.”

  “There are not,” I blurt in shock.

  She cuts her gaze crossways at me. “Yeah, there are.”

  “Slaving is illegal in Alcoro. There would never be official bounties . . .”

  She tuts behind her bandanna. “Come on, Veran. I know it’s all law and order for you, but not everything is done by the rulebook. Slavers lose money when slaves run away, so they post bounties. Do you think a half-starved canyonman is going to turn down twenty keys just because his government doesn’t condone slavery? That’s how Sedge got the ring around his neck. They’re rougher on you if you’ve already escaped once.”

  I break my gaze away to stare at the ground in front of us.

  “I didn’t know that,” I finally say. “I thought only Moquoia funneled money into the system.”

  “Everybody’s always willing to think it’s somebody else’s problem,” she says.

  “Did you escape?”

  “Obviously.”

  “But I mean—more than once?”

  “No. Just once.”

  “How?”

  She’s quiet, scanning the horizon in front of us, watching for storms or bandits or who-knows-what that I’m not aware of.

  “Whatever heroic image you’ve got in mind isn’t how it happened,” she says. “I didn’t battle my way out. I didn’t know how to fight at that point, and I was skinny and small. They were moving some of us from Tellman’s Ditch to another quarry. There had been rains, and our wagon got stuck in a drainage. There were four of us inside—the guards pulled us out, unlocked our wrist cuffs, and told us to get behind each wheel and push. The driver whipped the oxen, and the two guards switched between pushing at the back and levering the wheels. At one point, they were both on the far side of the wagon. I’m not sure what I was thinking—I certainly knew there was a higher likelihood of a beating than an escape—but I just sort of sank down into the reeds in the drainage and crawled away. It was my luck they were stuck on that one wheel for a while, or they’d have caught me right away.”

  “Where did you go?” I ask, trying to keep the awe out of my voice.

  “Nowhere,” she says. “At some point I was smart enough to realize they would search straight up the drainage to find me, so I left the reeds and started walking out into the desert. They started hunting for me not long after—I could hear them shouting. I crawled into a catclaw thicket to hide until night fell, and then I kept walking. I had no water, and I didn’t know how to find it. I passed out the following afternoon under a juniper. If Rose and Cook hadn’t found me while they were collecting firewood, I’d have just died right there. Cook gave me water and told me there would be more if I helped Rose chop sweet potatoes.” She shrugs under my arm. “And so began my life for the next three years, till Rose and I stole a few horses and some supplies and rode off.”

  “That’s amazing.”

  “It’s really not,” she says.

  “Just walking away?” I say. “Without knowing what’s in front of you? That’s brave.”

  “It’s no different from what you just did—walking off from something relatively safe into something unknown.”

  “Except, as you’ve seen, my decisions were driven by vanity, not bravery.”

  “Bravery isn’t a motive,” she says. “You don’t choose to do something because of bravery. ‘Bravery’ is just a by-product of doing something, a word that gets awarded after you succeed. If I’d died under that juniper tree, crawling away from the wagon would have been stupid. But because I survived—out of luck—you say it’s brave.”

  I chew on that for a moment. The slope is leveling out, and a little way ahead of us, I see the boulder copse we’re heading for.

  “I dunno, Lark,” I say. “I know folk who’ve failed, and they’re still considered brave for trying. If my ma goes out to battle a wildfire, but doesn’t manage to control it, and it burns that season’s timber harvest, is she less brave for trying? That’s happened, by the way.”

  “You’re a big fan of your ma, aren’t you?”

  “You’re dodging my question.”

  She rolls her eyes again. “I’m not going to say your ma’s not brave. You’d probably make a show of trying to fight me, and I just want to get you down this hill.”

  I’m about to reply that I’ve never had the stamina for fighting, when my foot slides on a loose rock. I pivot toward her and instinctively throw my free arm around her shoulder—she grabs me just as quickly under the armpits, and by the time I’ve dug my toes into the ground, we’re in an awkward, crouched embrace. Our eyes lock for a breath, just inches away from each other. Behind her, Jema throws up her nose at the abrupt halt.

  Heat flares in my face—I hadn’t thought anything could be more embarrassing than making a fool of myself in a foreign court, but turns out throwing myself into the arms of the Sunshield Bandit tops it.

  “Sorry,” I gasp, trying to dig my toes farther into the loose soil. I don’t know how to push away from her without first pulling myself closer to her face.

  Her bandanna pulls toward her mouth as she draws in a breath. She widens her stance, and with a heave, hefts me upright. She plants her palms on my shoulders and locks her elbows, holding me at arm’s length.

  “There, you see?” she says. “Always trying to pick a fight. I’m warning you—I’m only going easy because you make pretty good sausages.”

  My cheeks blaze more, but I’m grateful for the banter. Finally steady, I drop my grip around her neck. “What happens when the sausages are gone?”

  “All bets are off.” She doesn’t take her palms off my shoulders. Her gaze sharpens over her bandanna. “You’re good?”

  “No, I’m a mess.”

  “Well, keep it together for another fifty feet.” She rearranges Jema’s reins in her back pocket and then threads my arm over her shoulder again. With a last bit of huffing and puffing, we reach the stand of boulders, their flanks overgrown with stubborn catclaw. With a grunt, Lark slides me off her shoulder and into the shade. I wobble to the ground with relief.

  “Blazes.” She winds her arm and straightens her vest where I yanked it askew. She looks down at me, and her gaze drops to my hands. I’ve opened my palms toward her—my breath just hasn’t caught up.

  Or maybe the words just stick.

  Thanks. It bubbles up in my chest, and I mean to say it—really I do. Thanks, Lark. You saved my life a little while longer.

  I pause too long.

  “Oh—water?” She digs for the canteen and places it in my upturned hands.

  “Thank you,” I blurt.

  “It’s your canteen,” she says, shrugging and turning away. “I’m going to settle the horses. Rat, you stay.”

  Rat yawns and flops down beside me. I close my fingers over the canteen as Lark clucks to the horses and leads them out of the brush. Sighing, I drag my hand over my face before remembering the eyeblack. I gaze wearily at the black smears on my palm.

  “I’m an idiot,” I say.

  Rat thumps his tail once on the dusty ground—probably in agreement.

  Resigned, I work the cork out of the canteen.

  I know one thing for sure.

  I’m pulling out all the stops on dinner tonight.

  Tamsin

  I’m woken this morning by the creak of my cell door. I open my bleary eyes and wait to move until the world has stopped spinning. But I don’t get the chance. Before I fully latch on to consciousness, Poia takes my shoulder and turns me onto my back. I grunt in su
rprise, but I’m weakened by lack of food and life in general, and it takes little effort for her to hold me in place. I hear the pop of a cork. Poia kneels over me and grasps my cheeks in her fingers. I cry out, squirming. She tips the contents of a bottle into my mouth.

  Great shining colors of the Light, she may as well have dunked me in oil and set me on fire. It splits my head open, blinding me. I writhe under Poia, my back bowing off the ground as I gag on the liquid, spraying bloody droplets.

  “Get off,” Beskin says suddenly. “She might vomit.”

  Poia moves off my chest, and I roll onto my side like a dying cockroach, tears and snot streaming down my face as I spew the liquid out. I’ve once seen a boiled egg burst out of its shell, the gelled albumin blistering in the water. That’s how it feels, like everything soft and tender in my head is bursting from my skull only to be seared by boiling water. I shake, blinded.

  “That should fight off infection, anyway,” Poia says matter-of-factly. “Beskin, change out her mat and blanket.” She pokes me in the back as I clutch my head once again, trying to squish the insides of my skull back behind my teeth. “Tamsin, I’m going to bring you some broth later. You’d better drink it, if you don’t want your mouth to get worse.”

  They roll me off my bloody mat and set a new one down. They drop a new blanket over me. I don’t even care that it’s actually big enough to cover my feet. I curl into a ball, half on the mat, half off. Fetal and on fire, hungry and broken, I’ve got no strength left to spare for my brain, which happily plunges into self-pity.

  Iano.

  I squeeze my eyes shut, tears still streaming from them. Great Light, Iano. I miss you. I miss your proud eyes and steady arms and archer-clever fingers. I miss your deep, genuine laugh and your determined sense of right and wrong. I miss the way you threaded my hair loose and kissed my eyes. I miss the way you listened, the way you leaned forward, rapt, as if hungry for each word.