Dark Ends

by Clayton Snyder

  He made a sound; I couldn’t tell what it meant. I helped him to the cot in the corner and sat him down on it, and he sighed as he leaned against the wall. Then he patted my knee with his left hand.

  “Peri,” he said again. He said my name a lot. Maybe he needed to remind himself of who I was. “Good girl.”

  “I’ve brought you some figs, Papa. Your favorite. And some bread.”

  He looked surprised. “Where? The markets have?”

  I smiled tightly and nodded. “The markets have.” I stretched out my hand and uncurled my fingers to reveal the bread Frost had given me.

  My father looked at me. His eye pulled down on the right side, too. I remembered when his hair had been as dark as mine, his features as chiseled as if they were hewn from wood. Now they drooped as if they were made of wax, and his hair and beard revealed the gray that had been lurking there, for years maybe, while I carried on, thinking he was ageless.

  “Peri? You ate?” my father said.

  I forced the smile to remain. “Yes,” I lied. “I ate.”

  Slowly, clumsily, he took the bread with his left hand and tore off a piece with his teeth. Crumbs dribbled over his lips and stuck in his beard, but he didn’t seem to notice.

  I brushed them away. “We’ll need to trim your beard again soon.”

  “Crazy old man,” he said, with a wheeze that was supposed to be a laugh. “Mistake me for a wizard.”

  I laughed. He tried harder to smile, but his mouth only turned upward on the left side. The events of the marketplace left me no defenses against my emotions. I felt like crying, but that isn’t what Papa would have done if the situation was reversed.

  Papa would have made tea.

  He had made a lot of tea for my sister and me. Bad things happened to us, small things, little girl things—things a mother should have dealt with—but since there wasn’t any mother, he took them as seriously as if they meant the world.

  That does sound like a difficult problem. Why don’t I make tea and we’ll talk about it.

  I rose to putter around with the kettle and the fire in the brazier we used for both warmth and cooking. I’d banked the fire when I left, and now I poked it again to get it going. It was late fall, and winter was just beginning to send out its icy heralds. In a better year, we would have had barrels of apples, and I would have come home to make pies or dumplings, or perhaps to bake an apple for each of us, drizzling them with honey and almonds, and just a dash of cinnamon…

  Reluctantly, I pulled myself from my fantasies and reached into my pocket for our reality, two half-spoiled figs, one of which was smashed into the fabric of my pocket. I set them on the table, trying not to drool. In truth, I should have stuck to onions. But Papa had always loved figs—fig cakes, fig jam—and I had thought, if only I brought him a fig, maybe it would lighten this dark basement a little. But what had I got for indulging in flights of fancy? A riot and a man who now knew I was a thief.

  Useless to worry about that now. What’s done was done, no matter how much I might regret it. I could only chalk it up as a lesson of what not to do in the future. I went back to the shelf and began searching through all the jars and pots with their clearly lettered labels, looking for some combination of herbs that would make my fingers stop trembling.

  A nice chamomile was what I needed.

  When I turned around, Papa was half-asleep, leaning against the wall. He’d used to possess so much energy, reading and writing long into the night, sketching new plants he’d found on his hikes into the mountains. Everything was fodder for his research.

  “Papa?” I said. “Would you like me to read the letter from Vri while you eat your figs?”

  “Read,” he sighed, closing his eyes again. “But you eat.”

  “Papa, the figs were for you.”

  “Not hungry.”

  Whatever remaining integrity I’d possessed felt like it fell through the bottom of my stomach. I’d caused a riot, and all for nothing. I wanted to argue with him, but I probably wouldn’t get anything else to eat today.

  So, I pushed the thoughts away, sat at the table, and picked up the sheaf of papers lying there. It was the last letter from my sister before Granthas closed the port. My father asked me to read it over and over, almost as often as he asked me to read from his botany books.

  “Dear Papa and Peri,” I read. “I have settled into Eterea as well as might be expected for such a provincial. Honestly, if I hear one more person disparage us as an outpost of barbarians, I think I shall vomit. An extra vomit shouldn’t be hard to work in, considering vomiting is the thing I am most prepared to do these days, especially if there is any savory meat in the vicinity. This little one thinks he can subsist entirely on honey buns and cheese curds. Thank the gods Breus is willing to have them brought to me at any hour of day or night. I must confess it strange, having servants to provide me with such odd requests. I’ve startled more than one kitchen maid in the early dark, coming in to start the fire only to find me sitting in my nightdress and robe, eating cheese straight out of the pot with my fingers.”

  “How old?” Papa said.

  I sighed, turning a fig in my fingers until they grew sticky. I put the fig down and licked away the sweetness, savoring the taste with every swipe of my tongue. “The baby will have been born by now,” I said when my fingers were clean. “Maybe even toddling around.”

  Thank the gods Vri’s new husband had taken her off the island before Granthus went mad. I’d seen starving pregnant women. Their bellies continued to swell, but they looked like a ball attached to a pile of sticks.

  “Peri. Eat.”

  I let out a deep sigh and lifted the fig to my mouth, closing my eyes in the hopes it would be possible for me to enjoy it. But the first bite was so sweet it was painful, and all I could see as I squeezed the seedy pulp between my teeth was the woman on the ground, licking her fingers while she was being crushed by the men on her back.

  “Where,” Papa said.

  I swallowed and opened my eyes. Papa sat hunched over, watching me intensely. He looked like a vulture, wrapped in his blanket with his shoulders pulled up, his dark eyes feverishly bright.

  “Bread. Where?” he said.

  “I told you, I got it in the market—”

  “No ovens.”

  So now your mind works? I thought testily and immediately regretted it. Guilt washed over me. I pushed the other fig aside.

  “A man gave it to me.”

  “Peri—begging?”

  “No! I would never beg, Papa.”

  “Money?”

  If I could have lied to him, I would have. But he knew our dwindling supply of herbs had shrunk to the point where it was mostly unsellable. Just a few pots and jars left for making tea. No ability to get out of the city to replenish our stores, no way to write to foreign countries, asking for more. An herbalist with no herbs went out of business quickly.

  “No,” I said.

  “Then… what?”

  I ran my thumb up and down the handle of my teacup. “He asked me for my time. He said to come see him at the city gates tomorrow.”

  Papa tried to shake his head. “Bad bargain.”

  I cupped my tea in both hands and stared into it as if I were a truthseer, mostly to avoid looking at Papa. I knew I’d made a bad bargain. I only half-believed Frost when he said he had no interest in trading food for sex, even though I hoped it was truth. But I’d made that bed, and now I would need to lie in it.

  “Stay,” Papa said.

  “But he might have more bread.”

  Papa’s left brow pulled down, and a dark flush spread over his face. “Peranza. You, one of those girls? For bread?” He shook his head, as violently as he could manage. “Not my bread. Not my girl. No. No.”

  I didn’t like how red he was turning. I put my cup down, and by the time I stepped to the side of the bed, he’d started choking—gasping and gulping for breath, but still shaking his head and saying, “No, no!”

  Hi
s limbs tremored and jerked. I put my arms around him, tight, trying to stop it. “Papa. Hush. It’s all right. I won’t become one of those girls. Don’t worry. It will be all right. Hush.”

  Slowly, his body lost its rigidity. He slumped in my arms and began to cry on my shoulder—not really any tears, just dry sounds.

  My life was like one of those trick pictures painted by Eterean artists. Look at it your whole life and see only one thing, as if the painting contained but a single image. Then one day someone flips the painting over, and you realize it forms an entirely new picture when you turn it upside down. You can never go back to seeing the first picture the way it was. Now all you’ve got is the upside-down painting.

  How much longer could this go on? How much longer could we live this way, on stolen figs and bread?

  My father wasn’t afraid I would become a prostitute—at least not a common one.

  He wanted to save me from becoming a Dragon Girl.

  The heart of Medeas was the Dragon Temple, dedicated to an old god whose name no one remembered anymore. Next to the temple were the Offices of the Governor, which Granthas now occupied, the Office of Sedition, and the Lyceum, where the free and noble classes of the island were educated. The round towers and flat roof of the Temple, built of native timber and red and black basalt, jutted up out of the jumble of foreign marble buildings constructed by the Etereans like the volcano that thrust itself cloudward on the northern side of the island.

  We had always been dedicated to our dragons—dedicated to them even as we feared them. The entire island was said to have once been a dragon, tamed and cursed by the father god Tekus when he claimed control of the sea. But when the Etereans came, our relationship with dragons changed.

  Before the Etereans, Dragon Fixers magicked our populations of dragons into leaving us alone. It didn’t always work, but after the Etereans the Dragon Fixers began to fail. So, the Etereans turned to the Dragon Youth.

  The Dragon Youth were magic attractors—young men and women who drew magic to themselves like a lodestone captured iron. Acolytes from the Dragon Temple trolled the neighborhoods, luring in poor girls and boys with promises of food and shelter to take the Temple’s magic tests. The youth who passed these tests served as sacred courtesans to the governor’s Fixers, to soak up as much magic as possible.

  Then they became a lodestone for dragons. The dragons feasted on the Dragon Youth and left the rest of the city alone.

  But Frost didn’t seem the acolyte type, even if he had wielded his bread like a hunter baiting a trap. The acolytes always dressed in rich patrician robes of purple and indigo, not plain freeman clothes like Frost had. And when they came into the poorer areas of town, they looked down their proud Eterean noses at us. Still, I tried to talk myself out of meeting him. I listed all the sane and sensible reasons it would be dangerous to go. I told myself I would be violating the spirit of the discussion I’d had with my father.

  If I’d made a promise to him, I would have abided by it. But as with my decision to become a thief, hunger and my father’s well-being became their own justification. Watching Papa wrestle again with scrolls he’d once read and written with ease… as my hunger pangs kept me awake that night on my own thin pallet on the floor, listening to his heavy, labored breathing… I turned our words over in my head until I realized I hadn’t promised him anything. He’d only said he didn’t want me to become a Dragon Girl. Once I’d discovered this loophole, I couldn’t help but walk through it.

  If Frost was from the Dragon Temple, it wouldn’t matter, anyway. I was far too ordinary to pass the magic tests. I didn’t know why Papa worried so much.

  In the morning, I ransacked our paltry stores for an old turnip and a shriveled carrot I’d snitched from a food cart two days ago. I chopped them into a pot of water and threw in a few grains of salt and set it to boil, then smashed the remains of my fig together with the leftover crumbs of bread into a tiny cake. My father seemed to be having a good day, which meant he was sitting up, making another attempt to read an old set of his notes. I glimpsed a sketch of a woman mixed in with the papers—lots of wild dark hair, the sly corner of a smile, an official stamp in the corner.

  My mother.

  He’d be absorbed in his task for a long time, then. When I was younger, I’d rarely seen that sketch of my mother, but now he looked at it every day—almost as often as he studied his portrait of Vri. Watching him trace the lines of their pictures with the fingers of his left hand, made me ache in a complicated way. I missed Vri. I told myself I didn’t miss my mother, but maybe I did, deep inside.

  I hadn’t found a study yet that would sort out those emotions.

  Papa barely noticed when I slipped outside with the fig cake, such as it was, and snuck upstairs to ask Yula to stay with him again. I had to rap hard on her door to get anyone to answer it. Yula lived with her large family—parents, siblings, nieces and nephews, cousins, lovers, friends—the gods only knew the relationships of all the people who passed over that threshold. I couldn’t imagine living in the middle of such constant noise and chaos, but when I went back downstairs to the small room I shared with my father, it felt so empty and quiet, so… invisible. If I disappeared, who would miss me? Just my father. Then again, if I went missing, my father would die; if Yula went missing, her family would just close ranks.

  Thinking about it that way should have made me feel better—more necessary. Instead, I felt like somebody had shoved me underwater and told me to breathe. What I wouldn’t give, just for a day, to be like Yula—surrounded by capable people, loved, noticed… and utterly unnecessary.

  Except that I needed her. Who else could I get to sit with a sick old man?

  She finally came to the door. Her round, brown face was flushed from the heat of the crowded room, and she was smiling until she saw me. Then her gaze slid backward over her shoulder, and she slid out the door, pulling it almost closed behind her, her fingers in the crack the only thing keeping it open. With her other hand, she threw her long tail of black curls over her shoulder and leaned toward me.

  “You want me to watch your papa again, yes?”

  Yula had grown up down on the docks. She had a sailor’s lilt to her speech, a remnant of not so long ago when our docks welcomed the whole world. But now her father had no work, and his family’s speech was a just a footnote in history—or it would be, if any of us survived to write the story.

  “You’ll pay me again today, yes?” she said.

  I opened my hand to reveal the fig cake. Yula flushed and squealed in delight. “Oh, fig!” she said, and swiped the cake off my palm. She put the whole thing in her mouth and closed her eyes.

  “I have soup on the boil, too,” I said. “It’s only water now, so you’ll have to stay until it’s done if you want to eat.”

  She opened her eyes and looked at me with the crumbs of the cake still dusting her lips. She swallowed and licked them away before she spoke. “Hard to carry soup,” she said.

  I sighed. “I know. Have the little ones down if you like. Papa would enjoy that.”

  “Oh, Ma don’t want me down there in the first place. Thinks what your papa has is catching. But maybe…” She glanced up at me shyly, from under her sparse eyelashes, “I could bring my man?”

  I eyed her skeptically. “Is that what happened yesterday, Yula? Is that why you left Papa alone?”

  “Oh, no, sera,” she said hurriedly. “No, ma’am.” She looked down sheepishly. “It was the little ones, you know. Ma don’t like me down there, and one of the little ones said Ma was looking for me, and well—all them lovely noodles would have gone to waste. So, I had to come up and tell Ma a lie and then the little ones got the noodles, and oh, sera, you should have seen their faces.”

  I shifted uncomfortably. “Well, I still don’t know about bringing a man…”

  “You can meet him,” Yula said happily. Before I could stop her, she pushed open the door and called, “Bero! Come here, won’t you?”

  A tal
l, thin man wearing a burgundy tunic walked over. Like everyone else, he looked like he was wearing clothes too big for him, and the hollows in his cheeks made his nose even more prominent. His brown curls formed a tight cap on top of his head.

  Yula folded her hands over his arm, and he leaned forward in expectation of being introduced. “This is Peri,” she said. “She lives downstairs. Her Papa is sick and needs tending. I thought you might come with me and help. Perhaps her papa would like a little male company—though he can’t speak much. Can read and write, though. Used to be a scholar.”

  “Aye?” the man said, with genuine interest. “What kind of scholar was he?”

  “Botany,” I said. “If it matters. Really, it was nice to meet you, but I need to be going—”

  “I’m a scribe,” he said. “Down at the Office of Sedition. All I do is copy out writs. Was a time I thought I might be trained in the Lyceum.” He gave me a wistful smile, and Yula patted his arm.

  “It’s a good job,” she said. “Working as a copyist. We might be able to have our own room some day.”

  “I get more work all the time,” he said. “What with the Seditionists getting more and more active. I wrote ten condemnations yesterday alone.”

  “Ten!” I exclaimed.

  The Seditionist party was outlawed by the Empire. You heard murmurs about them in the market, sometimes saw bits of their rhetoric copied out on scraps of paper passed around taverns and back alleys by men who thought we could overpower Granthus and his Eterean Guard if we would only band together. The Etereans came down ruthlessly on Seditionists if they caught them, throwing them to their vicious machine monsters for entertainment if they weren’t executed outright. The Seditionists mainly laid low. Ten condemnations in one day was a lot.

  Yula’s man looked at me with solemn, hangdog eyes. “If you don’t mind me saying so, sera, I’d be careful going out today. The food riot yesterday got people stirred up, and the Seditionists are trying to work the crowd, so to speak. It’s not safe.”

  I hoped he didn’t notice the way I tensed. “Surely, just going out…”