The Temple bells rang eleven, the first stroke startling her. She tried to pull herself higher on the roof. Her arms ached, and her fingers were losing sensation as the rain numbed her skin. She turned her head to see how much farther she had to go, but the dark and the rain made it impossible to judge distance. Gods, what she would give for a rope. Left hand, left leg. Her shoulders protested. She had always been good at climbing, but she had never had to go this far.
Finally she came to the chimney. It was wide and old and, like everything else in this part of Karegg, deteriorating. She reached for the bricks and found a gap in the mortar big enough to put her fingertips into. She tugged experimentally. The brick did not move. Gripping the brick with one hand and the ridgepole with the other, she brought her knees up under her and pushed with her feet. That raised her head over the ridgepole. Another push, and she was able to bring her left leg across and straddle the ridge. Breathing hard, she leaned her forehead against the chimney.
Her arms felt heavy as lead, and her hands were cramping. She touched her left palm and found the gash across the middle. Blood was warm under her fingers. The cut was not deep, or it would have hurt a hell of a lot more, but the blood wasn’t going to clot until she could get somewhere dry and wrap it up. How was she going to explain it to Rumil? Maybe he would be asleep.
She flexed her hands repeatedly, trying to loosen the cramps. It was unlikely any of Karolje’s soldiers would find her now; she had dropped the bow and climbed out the gable window onto the roof as soon as the flames went out. They would not have been able to see her through the rain and the darkness. Since then she had been making her way, building by building, along the block and away from the soldiers gathered at the other end. This house was on the corner; once she was on the ground, she would be able to run in three directions if necessary.
Lanterns shone at the far end of the street where the soldiers were. The noise had died down some time ago. They had searched the house thoroughly by now and taken or killed whoever they could.
She had thought she was prepared for death, whether at the soldiers’ hands or her own. It was a necessary mind-set for a resister. Being captured was the worst thing that could happen. During the raid, she had been too busy shooting to think about death. Now, resting at last, she was suffused with fear. Her companions were dead, or would be soon, and she had barely escaped.
She did not fight the fear. It would fade. Fear to greater or lesser degrees belonged to Karegg. You learned to live with it, or you died. Nor did one grieve fallen soldiers in the midst of the battle.
There had been no time to prepare more than a cursory defense. Her resistance group had met there a few times over the last month—once too often, it appeared—and she had only had the bow and arrows because the house was being used to store them. Mink had brought the explosive to demonstrate how small he could make one.
Mink was dead. She had recognized his voice as he screamed. She would have to find one of the leaders and report, but not for a few days. There was nothing to be done about it. Let the soldiers lose interest. How had they been found out? A neighbor? A spy in the resistance? All six of them who knew about the house had been there, and none of the other five had acted like a traitor.
Her body shuddered with cold. If she did not get down now, she might not be able to later. She flexed her hands one more time, unstrapped her sandals, and tossed them to the ground. She grabbed the chimney and pulled herself to a stand. Hands on the top on it, she stepped around and felt at the bricks with one foot.
The bricks were coarse and cheap, the mortar cheaper. She found a toehold almost at once. She extended her arm and searched for a handhold in a good place. She gripped with her other hand. A steadying breath, and she swung her left leg off the roof. Her foot fumbled at the bricks, found a niche. She clung entirely to the chimney now.
Her right hand was the most insecure. She slid it down the chimney. A chink a handbreadth below was too close to be useful. Wind slapped her wet shirt against the bricks. An uneven bit of mortar dug into her left big toe. She brought her right hand back to where it had been and explored with her left. There was a handhold. She gripped, lowered her left foot.
She was over halfway to the ground when her right foot caught on a protrusion from the wall. She jerked with pain and surprise. The fingers of her left hand slid, and she clutched tightly, skinning her knuckles. She moved her toes over the chimney below the protrusion. It did not take long to find another toehold, but it was barely big enough. She put her right hand into the foothold she had just used and felt with her left foot. No holes, no chinks. Her arms trembled. Rain ran down the surface of the bricks.
Ten feet was a long drop, but not fatal. She set herself, closed her eyes, and pushed off from the chimney. Between the pain on the sole and the mud-slicked street, her right foot did not want to hold her weight when it touched down, and her ankle twisted. She was facedown on the ground before she could register the fall. Swearing, she got to her hands and knees. Her ankle throbbed, but not with the kind of pain that suggested serious injury. She groped around for her sandals and put them on. Then she got to a stand and tried to put weight on the ankle. It was bearable, but it would be a while before she could run on it.
She wrapped her bleeding hand into the bottom of her shirt and started walking north along the lightless street. The houses were dark. Even the stray dogs and the rats would be taking shelter. All she had to worry about was the watch.
* * *
An hour later, she staggered tiredly into the house she had shared with Rumil since they finished at the College two years ago. She had only had to hide twice.
A lamp was on. The dim light would be enough to see her way to the stairs and up to the next floor. The servants were no doubt asleep by now. She wrapped herself in one of the cloaks hanging by the door and, shivering, climbed the stairs.
The bedroom door was closed but not latched, and yellow light shone around the edges. Damn. This had the potential to be ugly. Rumil had been short-tempered since winter, and their quarrels were becoming more frequent. It was a long time since he had softened her name to Anya. She tightened her grip on the cloak and opened the door.
Rumil, fully dressed, sat in a chair with his arms folded. He said, “Where the hell have you been?”
“Don’t start this now, Rumil,” she said. Their rows always left her feeling drained and hollow. Her clothing was dripping on the floor. She tossed the cloak over a chair. “I need to get dry and go to bed.”
“You were late four nights ago. And a week ago. And two days before that. I can go on. Once, even twice, I could understand. But not over and over. Who is it?”
She was exhausted enough that it took a moment for the words to reach her understanding. When they did, she put down the towel she had been raising to her hair. “I’m not sleeping with anyone else,” she said. “And not for lack of opportunity.” She knew that statement to be a mistake as the words emerged. It wasn’t even true.
“Then what are you doing?”
If she told him about the resistance, he would throw her out. The house was his. Well, his father’s. His father was a well-off and influential wine merchant who sold to the Citadel steward and styled himself “Purveyor to the Crown.” The king was corrupt, but the wines sold by Servos Tashikian were popular among the nobles, and that was all that mattered to Rumil’s family.
“Radd kept me late,” she said. “I got caught in the storm.” She wanted to take off the wet clothing, but not with him looking at her as he was. She shivered.
“The storm came after dark. Radd wouldn’t keep you that late. Something else did.”
“I’m cold and wet and tired,” she said. “Tomorrow.”
“No,” Rumil said, slapping his hand down onto the wooden arm of his chair. “Now. You’re lying to me, and I’ve had enough.”
Her shoulders hurt, and there were scrapes and bruises on her forearms that she had not seen in the dark. “If I tell you the truth and y
ou don’t believe me, what else can I do? I don’t have any other lover. I don’t want any other lover.”
“What about Irini?”
“I’ve hardly seen her since we finished at the College. She’s about the last person I would want to be with again. And she has her own lover, anyway.”
“You’re lying,” he repeated.
“Stuff it, Rumil. If I were lying, why would I stop now? Not because you demand it, that’s for certain.”
He rose, rigid with fury. He had never struck her. There’s a first time for everything, she thought. “You can sleep in the drawing room.”
She stared at him. “Are you serious?”
“When you go out, I don’t know if you’re going to come back,” he said. “If you don’t want to be here, I don’t see why I should accommodate you.”
Oh, you pompous boy, she thought. Her own words were a knife stroke to the affection she still had for him. If that was how she saw him, she had no reason to stay.
“I’ll leave as soon as it’s light,” she shot back. “I’ve never been unfaithful, but I won’t stay with anyone who doesn’t trust me. I don’t need you.”
“You’ll be singing a different song in a week.”
She wore the key to the strongbox where she kept her money around her neck. She jerked the chain over her head and flung it at him. It clinked on the floor. “There. Go on. Take what you want. Take it all. I don’t owe you anything.” She inhaled, trying to control herself. Two hours ago she had been afraid for her life. Rumil’s anger paled by comparison.
He picked up the key and pulled so hard on the chain that the clasp broke. The key fell. “You’re about to lose the only chance you have.”
“Lose it? I’m taking it. I’m glad I never married you.”
“You little bitch. I should have believed them when they told me you were a slut.”
“I shouldn’t have believed them when they told me you were a man.”
“Half an hour,” he said. “Half an hour for you to get everything you want to take with you and put it in the drawing room.” He kicked the key back at her, then turned and tromped downstairs, each step booming in the stairwell.
Furious, Anza yanked the wardrobe open and threw clothing on the bed. She did not own much: clothing, a few books, some cheap hairpins, an elegant wooden carving of a mountain cat that was the only decorative thing she had brought north with her. A single, much-read letter from her father. A miniature of her long-dead mother. The queen’s journal. She paused, holding that, and considered how lucky she was herself to be able to walk away from Rumil. Her money and one valuable ring.
Her father had kept some things for her, including the book of poems by Rukovili she had taken from the College. She had not wanted Rumil to stumble upon it. If her father had recognized the owner’s mark as the queen’s, he had kept silent. His belongings had all been confiscated by the Crown after he was executed. She hoped no one recognized the book. It would have been wise to tear the frontispiece out.
She left her wet clothes; the bloody shirt was ruined and the trousers were too old to be worth the trouble. When filled, her trunk was too heavy to lift by herself. She dragged it across the floor, smiling grimly at the scratch marks. The muscles in her sides and arms hurt. The cut in her hand opened again. The blood smeared on the handle of the trunk and dripped on the floor. Bracing the trunk’s weight with one hand and pulling with the other, she brought it thudding down the stairs. The servants were surely awake by now. Thud, thud.
“I’ll get it,” Rumil said, not at all kindly. He picked the trunk up, carried it to the drawing room, and put it down with arrogant softness on the rug. When he released the handles, he noticed the blood.
“What did you do to yourself?”
She lifted her blood-smeared palm. “A cut. Nothing you need to worry about.”
“I’m not worrying. Go clean up in the kitchen and don’t get blood on anything. Go on, go do it. Now, Anza.”
I killed three men tonight, she thought. She feared she had said it. He did not react, so she must not have. She turned her back to him and walked as slowly as possible to the kitchen.
She rinsed the cut with water from the kettle and bandaged it with a clean dish cloth, folded into a strip. To tie it she had to hold one end of the cloth with her teeth. She took the opportunity to look at her sore foot. Whatever she had scraped against had not broken the skin.
Anger still beat in her, but her voice was steady when she returned to the drawing room and said, “I’ll be out of here faster with less embarrassment to you if you let Darish take me in the morning.”
His face pinkened, but he said, “I agree. I’ll tell him.” He walked out.
Anza opened a bottle of raki and poured a glass of the clear fluid, spilling some. She took one hasty gulp. It burned. Then she loosened her shoulders and sat on the upholstered sofa. She sipped, enjoying the heat against her lips and tongue, the growing warmth inside. She would not sleep tonight, not as roused as she was with conflict.
Her days were spent as a clerk for the lawyer Radd Orescu; he would let her stay in his office for a few nights while she found somewhere else to live. It would be cheaper to live with one of her friends, but the risk of them coming to Karolje’s attention was too great. Jance, whom she had once most trusted, had joined the Guard, and that had severed them.
She would not leave the resistance, not after what Karolje had done to her father. Her parents had never married, and after her mother died when she was eight, she had been raised by her mother’s sister on the edge of a small mid-country village and tutored by an old man as though she were of noble birth. The summer she turned sixteen, five years ago now, the letter had come from her father, summoning her to Karegg and a place he had secured for her in the College. She had not seen him then for ten years, not since Karolje was crowned and he was assigned to the king’s army, but the lure of a new city and the College drew her north.
He was a captain by then, but when he could he took her out for an afternoon and an early evening dinner. They talked, each learning who the other was. She was now coming to realize she should have listened more. He had been a kind man, and a generous one, and once she had asked him why he stayed a soldier. She would never forget his reply, made over steaming black tea while winter flurries drifted down. If the good men leave the army, he said, there will be no check on the cruelty of those who remain. She said, But you are ordered to do cruel things. He touched her, which he rarely did, and said, Karolje won’t live forever. When he dies, someone needs to be able to set things right. And that is saying more than I should say, daughter. She had already learned to be careful, and she nodded and changed the subject.
After that he taught her to shoot, to ride, to defend herself unarmed, to use a knife. She was competent but no more in all but shooting; in archery, she found her talent. Under Karolje, most weapons were illegal for commoners, and she practiced secretly, with her father or alone, in abandoned houses and weed-grown lots. No one, not even her lovers, knew about her father or her bow. She finished at the College, worked with Radd and lived with Rumil, and stayed well within the law.
Then, a few months ago, Karolje had her father executed. For what, she did not know. A week after she found out, she nervously entered a tavern that rumor said was crowded with resisters. She did not believe the rumor—if it was true, Karolje would have moved on them long ago—but she hoped it would signal her intent. She drank her beer and walked back to Radd’s. Two days later the first message came.
She should have left Rumil then. It would have been better for both of them.
He might change his mind about her leaving in the morning. She had to go anyway. She could tell herself she hadn’t said anything about the resistance because she wanted to protect him, but the truth was she had stopped trusting him before then. She had not told him about her father’s life, let alone his death. His father was deeply loyal to the Crown.
The air was still and silent, with that
peculiar chill of late night alone. A night for ghosts. It was on such a night three years ago that she had stayed up late talking to Rumil, their conversation increasingly personal, until their hands touched. A passion born of long acquaintance and youth and need, which should have come to its end the next morning. They were too different, he the city-bred merchant’s son accustomed to fine furniture and obedient servants, and she the farmer’s niece who had come to Karegg to learn and expected nothing to be done for her.
Her wet hair hung in tangles down her back, dampening her shirt. She lit the fire laid in the drawing room hearth. The flames roared. She held her hands as close as she could bear to and tried to draw the heat into herself. The hot air felt splendid on her face.
Red and gold flames, not hot enough yet for white and purple tongues to lick at the logs. The flames from a broken lantern had caught one man. He had screamed. She saw the other soldiers rush to him, the fire ruddying their skin, and smelled the burning flesh. On the floors below her, heavy men hurried through the rooms. When she drew the bow, her hand trembled with nervousness, and she had to nock the arrow three times before she let it fly.
I killed three soldiers, she thought. On the roof, the fact had strengthened her. Now it was a kick in the stomach. She was a traitor. A murderer.
She drew back from the fire. Sweat was standing out on her forehead, under her arms, dampening her palms. Was this what her father would have wanted? The men she had killed might have been good men, like him.
It’s a war. There are always good men who die in war.
He had known what he was doing when he trained her.
You can’t back out now, Anza, she told herself. You’ve killed. You’ve lied. You’re committed.
She shut her eyes. The flames left their impressions on her sight. Flames lit the darkness, and a man died.
MIRANTHA
AFTER THE SECOND of her two sons is born and she has healed from the birth, she asks Karolje if she can take them south to see her parents. To her surprise, he agrees. She thinks that his father the king must have told him to assent. Her own father is the commandant of the Southern Share, which means his soldiers are the first line of defense against a Tazekh invasion. The king needs his loyalty. That was what the marriage was supposed to do, but Karolje’s cruelty is eroding that support.
The Vanished Queen Page 3