Sunshield

by Emily B. Martin

  “Think I’ll take your advice, Dob,” I say. “You can have the road. Me and the sun, we’re going to Pasul, and then we’re going east.”

  I head back up the hill, slowly, unsteadily, because I’m feeling both light as wind and heavy as a rockslide. I pick up my hat along the way, flicking the mud from it and setting it back on my drenched locks. I weave through the waving pines to where Rat is crouched by Jema. I mount and nudge her down the slope.

  I tip my hat to Dob’s slouched body as we pass, and then I spur Jema toward Pasul without looking back.

  Tamsin

  Pasul is blurred and running with mud, as dark as twilight under the billowing clouds. Veran pulls his horse out of its canter at the town signpost, but he doesn’t pass under yet. He turns in the saddle and stares back across the flats, looking for Lark. I can feel his heart pounding against my back.

  “She’ll . . . she’ll be okay,” he says, his voice shaky. “I mean . . . she’ll be okay.”

  I free one of my hands from inside the cloak and pat his knee. It’s the closest thing I can approximate to reassurance—even aside from my mouth, I’m too exhausted to summon more energy.

  He shakes himself and turns his horse back under the signpost. Pasul is situated on a slight slope, so the town rises gradually before us, twinkling with lanterns in the downpour. We slosh up the main street. The posthouse for the stage line is the dominating feature of the lower town, surrounded by corrals of droopy workhorses, all pressed together in the rain, their coats slick and gleaming. A line of coaches are parked under a long shed. Nobody would think of setting out in this weather.

  Nobody, it seems, except one small mud-coach on the end. The doors are open, and the driver is readying it for travel, prepping the iron wheels for rough roads. They’re going out into the desert.

  We plod nearer. All the lights in the posthouse are blazing, and shadows hurry in front of the windows, as if people are rushing to and fro inside. But one person is stationary, standing on the porch and looking out into the rain. My head hurts, and Veran is distracted, and so it takes us both until we’re nearly even with the front door to recognize who it is.

  To be fair, his hair is down, and he’s in a dark traveling cloak made colorless by the rain. I can’t remember when I’ve ever seen Iano without colors or hairpins, so I can’t be blamed for passing over his silhouette. But the mistake doesn’t last long, and I snatch at the reins in Veran’s hands, causing his horse to snort and jerk to a stop. Veran shakes himself behind me.

  “Iano?” he says.

  Iano is staring hard at us through the rain—he leaves the glare of lantern light and steps out into the muddy street.

  “Oh . . . eta, Iano!” Veran comes to himself and slithers to the ground, landing with a splash in the road. “Ista . . . I found her! Look . . . look! Tamsin is here!”

  Veran reaches up wildly and starts to pull me from the saddle like I’m a parcel. I wobble when I hit the ground, sinking up to my ankles in muck. Iano has drifted nearer, now a few arm’s lengths away. Close enough, I expect, to see the damage that’s been done.

  Though, perhaps not. He takes a few splashing steps, close enough that I can see his expression but can’t interpret it, just lines of agony, probably shock. Perhaps dismay. Any moment now, he’ll stop again and simply stare. He may even argue that Veran brought back the wrong person.

  But he doesn’t. The nameless expression on his face only intensifies, and now he’s running, and it’s only as he reaches me that I realize he’s crying.

  I’ve never seen him cry.

  He clamps his hands on my shoulders, and then on my face, holding me close enough so that I can see which rivulets are rain and which are tears.

  “Tamsin . . .” His voice is cracked. “Oh, Tamsin . . .”

  “Uh!” Veran says suddenly. “Uh, Iano . . . I should mention . . . probably wait on the kissing. They, um, . . . they cut her tongue.”

  Now, then. Now it’s over. Iano’s face ripples with shock, and his cold fingers tighten on my cheeks. Numbly, I lean back, out of that intimate space only for whispers and kisses, and open my mouth. I take one of his hands and move it up to the fuzz above my ear, trying to make him realize, to see. To come to his senses. Hair gone. Words gone. Skin and swells and self gone. I’m not anything for you anymore, my dear. Let’s hurry this thing along, I’m tired.

  His fingers brush along my scalp to cradle the back of my neck. And his gaze, instead of fixing on my mangled tongue and cracked lips, locks back on mine again, creased and still spilling tears.

  “Oh, Tamsin,” he whispers. “Bless the Light you’re alive.”

  I sag, catching both of us by surprise. Be it hunger or exhaustion or the sudden realization that he hasn’t stepped away, that he really is here in the mud and excreta of the street . . . we sink to our knees. He folds around me, arms warm, pressing his face into my neck, and I simply lean my aching head on his shoulder.

  “Oh, Tamsin,” he whispers, and I realize that he, like me, has no other words. His breath hitches in his chest, and he tightens his grip. “Oh, Tamsin.”

  I hear Veran shift awkwardly, his feet squelching in the mud. His horse blows wetly, champing its bit.

  “Were you coming out to find us?” Veran finally asks.

  Iano lifts his head from my neck but doesn’t look at him, still gazing down at me. “What?”

  “That coach—were you riding out to find us?”

  “Oh—no. It’s not for me.” He blanches suddenly and looks up. “No . . . sorry. It’s for your ambassador. And the princess. They’re inside.”

  “They are? Eloise, is she—”

  “Very sick,” Iano replies. “She’s very sick. But—Veran, wait!”

  But Veran has taken off running toward the posthouse, dragging his horse behind him. Iano calls after him again, but whether it’s lost to the rain or Veran’s simply ignoring him, it does no good. Iano turns back to me.

  “They got here this morning,” he says. “They were escorted out—deported. The ambassador is furious. But, Tamsin—the guards are here, in Pasul. They ransacked my room. If I hadn’t been out by the crossroads, they’d have taken me in. They’ve found out about you. Someone . . . someone knows. Someone is against us, someone close. And I don’t . . .” His face is slowly paling, as if he’s coming to all these realizations now. “I don’t think we can go back.”

  He waits, as usual, expecting me to reply, to carry his thoughts forward. But I don’t.

  I can’t.

  He lifts his cold fingers again and brushes my cheek, my lips. He leans forward, but at the last moment aims just to the side, pressing a kiss to the corner of my lips.

  He leans back. “But you’re here. You’re back. And we’re together again.”

  He fishes in his pocket and comes up with my si-oque, the amber one I commissioned the day I got my right to title from the king. I turn it over and rub my thumb along the three glass beads—green for my mother, pale blue for my father. Yellow for me. Ochre isn’t a popular color among the titled—difficult to match, tricky to flaunt. Too pale and it becomes sickly, too dark and it becomes muddy. But when it hits just the right shade, just the right notes, it soars.

  I thought that was poetic when I first decided to keep it.

  Now it feels impossibly narrow. A too-small box I built for myself. A mold I don’t fit anymore.

  I slip it onto my wrist, where it settles, loose, against my skin. Iano folds his fingers around mine.

  “Things are . . . they’re going to be all right,” he says.

  I want to make him think rationally, to parse through this step by step. I want to tell him about the Hires, and Poia, and the unanswered questions still casting their shadows on us.

  But I can’t. So I say the only thing I can.

  “Uah.”

  Veran

  The posthouse is a flurry of light and bustle. I throw Kuree’s reins over the hitching post and splash to the door, dripping from head to foot.
Inside, porters are hauling luggage out the side door to the carriage shed. Rou is standing in the midst of everything, arguing with the post manager and looking angrier than I’ve ever seen him. Eloise is past him, curled in a hardback chair by the fireplace, wrapped in a quilt.

  By the Light, she’s lost weight, her normally appled cheeks hollow. Her skin has paled to chalky beige under her freckles. Her eyes are closed, her chest rising and falling in shallow breaths under the quilt.

  I start to creep forward, hoping Rou is too distracted to notice me just yet, but it’s no good. His sparking gaze falls on me, and his whole body seems to spasm in shock.

  “Veran!” he exclaims. And then, again, in more of a shout. “Veran!”

  I toss up my hands. “I’m sorry—Rou, I’m sorry, but if you’ll let me explain—”

  Eloise’s eyes slit open, and she lifts her head slightly. “Veran?”

  Rou is plowing past the porters, advancing on me, and I can’t for all the world tell if he’s going to hug me or throttle me.

  “What the blazing, blinding Light were you thinking?” he yells.

  Throttle, then, definitely. I use the hapless interference of a few porters to skitter around the periphery of the room toward Eloise, dashing for her chair like it’s a safe zone in a game of Tag the Buck.

  Rou doesn’t miss a beat, pivoting to follow me. “Running off into the desert alone?” he roars. “Do you have any idea what your mother will do to us both?”

  “But I’m fine,” I gasp, hovering behind Eloise’s chair. “I’m fine, and I did it—I got Tamsin back, the ashoki, the reason everything was falling apart—”

  “Oh, it’s come apart.” He wavers, trying to gauge which way I’m going to circle around the chair, before planting himself firmly in the middle. “It’s come apart into an international incident—we have been officially deported, and that’s not the worst of it. You’re being named as a conspirator against the Moquoian throne and an enemy of the court, and it was only by a spark’s luck I was able to argue for deportation and not prison for all three of us. Did you think at all? Did you think what running off with the prince just weeks before his coronation with the court on eggshells would look like?”

  “I thought it would help,” I croak—he’s rivaling Mama for sheer lung power. I cower behind Eloise. “Eloise and I . . . we thought it would help . . .”

  But no, that isn’t fair—Eloise had nothing to do with me running away. She rouses a little from the quilt and turns her head toward me. Her voice is soft enough that I think maybe she’s going to try to back me up, to calm things down. But in the brief moment that Rou’s taking a breath, she whispers, “I am so angry at you.”

  This seems to inflame Rou all the more. “You put everyone in danger, Veran. If you were my son—”

  “I’m not, though,” I say, straightening a little. “I’m not, and . . . and I did what I thought was right, and I’m not entirely convinced it wasn’t. If you would just listen, and sit down and let us all talk—Iano and Tamsin, the guards, whoever it is who’s tugging all these strings . . .”

  “Blessed Light, no,” Rou says. “We’ve been given to the end of the hour to leave Moquoia before we’re arrested. We’re getting in that coach and we’re setting the land speed record across the Ferinno. You can answer to the Alcoran Senate, and then your ma and pa. I’ve got Eloise to take care of now, and we’re lucky enough for that.” He stabs the air with his finger. “You sit down and don’t leave this spot until we’re ready to leave.”

  He storms back toward the porters and out the side door, slamming it so hard behind him a map of the desert jumps from its peg on the wall. I sink miserably into a chair beside Eloise.

  “I’m sorry, Eloise—I just . . .”

  “I thought you were going to talk to Iano,” she whispers, clutching the quilt tighter under her chin. Her curls are damp with sweat, darkening the deep golds hidden in the smoky brown. She shakes her head. “I was so worried. What if you had died?”

  “I didn’t, though, Eloise. I even had a seizure out there, and look, I’m fine.”

  Her eyes crack open again, and she studies me. “All by yourself?”

  “Well, no, I . . . I went to find the Sunshield Bandit. No, listen . . .” I put up a hand to stop Eloise’s exclamation. “She’s . . . she’s my friend now. She figured out where Tamsin was. She got us across the desert, and in and out of Tamsin’s prison. And she kept me safe while I was seizing. It was all okay. And she’ll be here in just a few minutes.” By the Light, as long as she hasn’t died fighting that bandit. Why had her staying behind been the most logical choice? She should have fled with me.

  And then there’s the matter of all my promises—the vow to get her campmates to safety, to get her sentence lifted, to help her figure out a new life outside the desert. How am I going to do that if every government from coast to coast is angry at me?

  “I’ll make it work,” I say aloud.

  Eloise shakes her head, her shadowed eyes closed again. “I’m not so sure we can,” she murmurs.

  The door opens again, and in come Tamsin and Iano, their clothes clinging to their skin. Iano helps Tamsin to the closest chair. She slumps for a moment, eyes closed. She must be exhausted. And she needs to see a healer.

  Rou comes back in the side door, spattered with rain. “The coach is ready. Veran, go get inside.”

  This is all happening too fast. “Rou—sir—please, can’t we just take a minute, and work some of this out?” I gesture to Tamsin. “At the very least, can we get Tamsin somewhere more comfortable?”

  “No, V.” His nickname is used more as a warning than a familial term. “We’re under royal orders to depart the country by three bells, and I am not letting them put Eloise in a cell, or you, for that matter. Go get in the coach. Iano . . . I don’t know what to tell you. Your guards are searching the upper city for you.”

  I swivel to Iano, my heart racing with desperation. “Can you stand down the order for deportation?”

  He shakes his head. “Not if it came from my mother. The throne is still hers.”

  “You could come with us,” I say quickly. “We could talk in the coach—”

  “And be accused of taking the Moquoian heir hostage—blazes, Veran, think, think, think.” Rou taps his own head angrily. “Think about this stuff! This isn’t debate class! This could mean international war. Go get in the coach.”

  Failure, then. All this to salvage something, and it all led to failure anyway.

  Eloise gives a thick, rattly cough. Under her father’s furious glare, I get up slowly from my chair. I look to Iano, who’s folding his wet cloak around Tamsin, who still has her eyes closed.

  “I’m sorry,” I say in Moquoian. “I didn’t mean to make such a mess. What will you do?”

  “I’m not sure,” Iano says. Despite the crumbling of the world around us, he looks calmer than he has in days, a resolution in his face that can only be described as kingly. “But you helped bring Tamsin back. So things aren’t as dark as we think.”

  Tamsin gives what might be a roll of her eyes behind her eyelids, perhaps at Iano’s poetic surety. She opens her eyes and surveys me, lips pursed. She turns gingerly toward the fireplace, looking first at Rou, who is waiting expectantly for me to make a move toward the door. Her gaze moves to Eloise, who is doing her best to stay awake and upright.

  Tamsin starts to look back to me, then her gaze stops, and she sweeps back to Eloise. She sits for a moment, her tired, emaciated body suddenly rigid. Her chapped lips part slightly.

  And then she’s a flurry of agitation, waving both at me and Iano, motioning around the room.

  “Aou’ha,” she says urgently. “Aou’ha.”

  Iano takes one of her frantic hands. “What? Tamsin—”

  “Parchment,” I say. “Daona—parchment. Here.” I lunge for the map that fell from the wall earlier and scramble for a scattering of quills near a ledger. She snatches the objects from my hands with urgency, grabbing fo
r the jar of ink even as I’m shaking it. She pries the cork out and dips the quill, slopping spots across the map in her hurry. They spread and stain, leaving a trail across the desolate Ferinno.

  Iano and I crowd behind her to see her writing. Even Rou, who is readying Eloise to stand, pauses his work.

  I stare in shock at the letters forming on the page.

  Outside, thunder rumbles.

  Lark

  The thunder is accompanied by lightning—the storm is directly overhead, and it’s a miracle I wasn’t struck dead while cantering across the flats. We slosh under the Pasul signpost. Jema is coated with mud from her shoulders to her hooves, and Rat looks like somebody dunked him in a coat of brown paint. I, ironically, am probably cleaner than I’ve ever been—my boots are coated, of course, but the rest of me is practically pulverized clean. The rain stings my cheeks where my eyeblack has washed away.

  I spy Veran’s horse outside the posthouse, and I flush with relief. They made it. I wonder if Saiph is with them, or somewhere else with the Moquoian prince. I guide Jema alongside Kuree and dismount with a splash. Rat hunkers down under her hooves and lies in the mud, panting.

  I pull my bandanna down and peel my hat off my head, water streaming from the brim. Wiping flecks of mud from my cheeks—it feels strange not to have them thick with grease—I push open the door.

  Veran is there, standing behind Tamsin as she scribbles something on a map. Beside him is a bedraggled Moquoian man, long black hair still dripping with rain. At the far end of the table stands an older man, Cypri, I guess, and behind him a pale figure curled up in a quilt. All five of them stop and look up at me as if I’m an apparition. Tamsin’s eyes are the sharpest, practically narrowed at my sudden arrival.

  “Uh.” I waver in the puddle I’m creating, suddenly aware I’m in a room of aristocratic near strangers, and that my face is still on a bunch of bounty sheets. My stomach turns uncomfortably. I gesture at Veran. “Where’s Saiph?”

  The attack comes from the back of the room.