by Sam Hawke
“Is she conscious?” I asked the nearest man, who nodded and moved aside to let me closer.
“She held the whole thing,” he said reverently, staring at her with a half-fearful, half-admiring expression. “There weren’t any spirits this time. It was all just … her.”
“Hadrea,” I said gently, touching her shoulder. “Are you all right?”
Her eyes fluttered open and she gave me a faint smile as she focused on my face. “Kalina.” She squeezed my hand. “I am tired.”
I looked back at the enormous heap of devastation behind us, at the immeasurably heavy pile of broken wood and metal, flaming and smoking, dust rising around it. I couldn’t pretend to understand how she had done what she had done. “It must be tiring being a hero all the time.” My attempt at a grin was ruined by the crack in my voice.
Hadrea understood. Her grip on my hand grew both tighter and shakier. She unexpectedly touched me on the cheek with the other hand and said earnestly, “Kalina. Do not worry. He is alive, I am sure of it.”
I had been fighting through with stubbornness—Jov must be alive, because I couldn’t contemplate anything else—but now a glimmer of genuine hope lent terrifying, treacherous weight to that feeling. Hadrea looked up at me with an almost surreal calm. I didn’t quite know how to make sense of it, but a relaxed warmth emanated from her, the sort of peaceful air I’d always envied in her mother, and had never felt from her. It was almost disconcerting. Hadrea was ordinarily such a contained coil of energy that for a moment she didn’t really feel like my friend at all. And yet, her surety was comforting. How could I argue with someone who had just turned earth and fire and air to her will like some creature of legend?
“How—” I cleared my throat, tried again. My voice was so high. “How did you do that? You said the spirits weren’t answering, but then you did all that.”
“She did it by meddling in something outside her full understanding, despite the attempts of her superiors to warn her.” A harsh voice interrupted us. An-Ostada, looking weak and drained, propped up by a man on either side, but somehow imperious, surveyed the recovering group with an unsettlingly furious expression on her broad, sweat-streaked face. The whites of her eyes seemed enormous.
Any urge to placate seemed to have been burnt out of me. “Her superiors?” I snapped, stepping between them. “How many people did you save today, An-Ostada?” Those close enough to hear us in the crowd made murmurs of agreement. An-Hadrea, the hero who had saved us from the Os-Woorin’s wrath, had saved not just the people caught in that final collapse but potentially all of us, at seemingly great personal cost, again. They wouldn’t take an attack on her lightly.
“We have only just begun to repair the harm done to the secondworld and the spirits over the course of generations,” An-Ostada said. “The spirits are not an army in our employ to be used whenever it is convenient and they should not be relied upon as such. Speakers cannot compel—”
“Whatever Hadrea did worked,” I said. “That ought to be enough.”
“What she did was not Speaking. What she did was—”
“Was something you had never even taught us was possible,” Hadrea said earnestly. She struggled to sit up; I got beneath her shoulder to help her. “We do not need to Speak. We do not need to ask boons! We can use the power directly!”
“Can does not mean should.” An-Ostada looked sorrowfully round at the group of Darfri; I realized belatedly these must be the students who had left her teachings. The Darfri with whom Hadrea had experimented with Void and arson. “You are children, stumbling around in the dark. Look at you all! You are drugged!”
Hadrea flinched at the barb. She had taken Void before attempting whatever it was she had done, I’d seen it. “Our enemies are not sticking with the old ways!” Hadrea flung back. “Look what they brought against us! Did you even see that woman I stopped? She was using power stored in that vessel, and she was using it to attack us! You never taught us we could store and draw power without Speaking, without the spirits at all!”
“Such things are forbidden, An-Hadrea.” An-Ostada’s voice came out quieter but somehow more menacing than before.
“Well, it has not been forbidden to our enemies, apparently! Where are the spirits when enemies are murdering us in the middle of a celebration in their honor? Nowhere to be found. You are right—the spirits are not our army. Do you not see? We have to learn to look after ourselves. Find new ways.”
But An-Ostada shook her head. “I warned the Chancellor and the other Elders at the beginning that your gift was strong but your temperament ill-suited. You reach for power before understanding, and your ambition and greed endangers us all.” She sighed. “You will never be a Speaker. I will not teach you again. No one will teach you again.”
I watched that hit Hadrea like a strike, and my heart ached for her. But she was every bit as proud as she’d accused An-Ostada of being, and she buried the hurt with a scowl, tossing her head. “How lucky for me you have nothing I need to learn.”
The women glared at each other, then An-Ostada turned her head in dismissal, and Hadrea did the same.
“Credola Kalina! Is that a burn?” A woman took my arm and examined my hand, where a red welt ran across my palm. I didn’t know her but she had a no-nonsense, motherly sort of tone that expected obedience. “You need to get that cooled and wrapped.” I was being tugged away from Hadrea; she turned back from her gaze into the distance and dropped her head back onto the pillow.
“I’ll check on you in a bit,” I told her, but she didn’t respond.
Tain and I spotted each other at about the same time; he was holding a wad of cloth against a cut on his face and talking urgently to one of the physics. My heart skipped in relief at the sight of him, alive and apparently unharmed. Our eyes met and he dropped his hand off the bandage for a moment, said something to the physic in apology, and ran.
We didn’t speak at first. Relief pulsed through me, reciprocated in his shaking body as he held me close. “I’m so sorry,” he said against my hair, voice hoarse and broken. “Honor-down, Lini, I’m so sorry.”
“We didn’t predict this,” I said. An image of a burning woman, a memory of the breath stolen from my lungs. “Fortunes, no one predicted this.” We could worry about self-recrimination later. For now, we had to do what we could for our people. “Tain.” I pressed my head against the side of his, unable to look him in the eye. “I don’t know where Jov is. We stopped one blast but he ran to see if there were others while I tried to get people evacuating.”
He stiffened at my words, held frozen still, saying nothing. Then he pushed me away, eyes wild, a suddenly animated statue. “Which direction was he going? Where did you last see him?”
“We were together under the main guest box,” I said. “I came out that entrance there—” I pointed, wincing as I moved my fingers; the burn wasn’t bad but it still stung. “—and he ran to check for more devices. I don’t know in which direction. Hadrea tried to look but she couldn’t find him. But she says she’s sure he’s all right, she can feel it. I think it’s something to do with fresken.”
Tain released me entirely, his head moving jerkily between the possible exits. “You can’t go looking for him,” I warned him. “Tain? You’re the Chancellor. We need a leader right now.” The words hurt to say, and he looked at me as if I’d slapped him, so I softened my tone to explain. “If he went that way, where the … where the first blast went off, he’d have been right in the center of it.” Tain made a noise of rejection, a painful, guttural thing, and I took his hand with my uninjured one and plowed on. “But if he went the other way, nothing went off in that direction. He’d be fine. And it’s a big crowd, we won’t find him in a hurry.”
“Chancellor!” Someone hailed Tain down, grasping his arm and babbling. “What is happening? What are you going to do? Who’s done this to us?”
Realizing who was in their midst, other injured people came forward, pleading and demanding in equal force. Help
us! Why is this happening again? Please, my daughter! I watched as he masked the hopeless fear with quiet confidence, the face they needed, and let him be swept away. Other Councilors had found their way here now; I saw Eliska and Moest together and Javesto bending over a bleeding relative, and had to avert my eyes from the sight of Il-Yoro bearing down on one of the physics with a child slung over his shoulder. I thought I might be sick.
“Credola, your burn,” the physic reminded me.
“The burn can wait,” I told her, but she had already deposited me in a line of people waiting to be seen. There was a chain of supplies coming in now, which included hot and cold water; someone gave me a bucket of cold water and I immersed my hand in it gingerly. I yelped at the shock but quickly the seeping cold had a soothing effect, taking out the worst of the stinging from my skin. I watched the other patients almost unwittingly, identifying friends and colleagues with varying degrees of grief.
Missing limbs, projectile injuries, terrible burns, and scores of eye injuries; the blast had not discriminated, hitting people of all ages. Bleeding, silent children lay alongside their moaning grandmothers. I thought perhaps at last I could understand the nightmares that had plagued my brother since the siege; the images of the horrors he had seen in the aftermath of that battle.
I abandoned the bucket, let them bandage my hand to keep it clean, and asked someone what I could do to help. Numbly, I let myself be directed by a brusque physic into helping make crude bandages for anyone who was bleeding, which seemed to be half or more of the wounded here. “Head wounds first,” she told me. “Anything bleeding a lot, or spurting out in bursts, you yell for me straightaway, all right?” She’d turned away before she could hear my assent, and said to one of the other physics, “When will they get here? We should have seen the first of the litters by now.”
“They can’t get in, I’ll bet,” her colleague replied grimly. “Everyone’s trying to get out, they’ll be stuck. The Chancellor’s got the army trying to clear the collapsed exit to get them in there, that’s the closest one, anyway.”
Some people were helping by tearing up donated clothing and pilfered banners and flags. I used the makeshift bandages around bleeding injuries, one after another, and another. Helping was better than nothing, of course, but it was beyond frustrating when all I wanted was to know where Jov was and whether he was all right. I kept scanning the floods of people, hoping I would see his familiar face emerge. Thank the fortunes the rest of our family had stayed home, at least, so Dee wasn’t caught up in this mess along with the other unfortunate frightened children being carried on adults’ shoulders or searching tearfully for their mothers or Tashen.
Covered bodies had begun to be discreetly laid out in one corner of the area; someone had fashioned a rough tentlike structure to shield them from sight but their terrible still forms screamed out at me all the same. I felt I would never grow desensitized to the string of dreadful injuries; each fresh one seemed to carve out a new bleeding hole inside my middle.
I didn’t know how much time passed. I was aware of Tain, every now and again, coming by and conferring with physics or being yelled at by terrified citizens or foreigners or Councilors; once or twice he caught my eye, silently asking the question; always, I shook my head. My hearing slowly returned to normal, but the arena seemed no less noisy; though thousands must have fled, it remained crowded. The hospital area had a never-ending stream of new patients as people worked tirelessly to transport the injured and dead from the seating down to the grounds. The moon, brilliant and clear and bold in the sky tonight, gave decent light, but at some point people had arrived with proper lamps and even braziers to take the chill off where the physics were working.
Eventually, access must have been cleared because litters started arriving and physics were able to transport the most seriously injured to the hospital. That in turn relieved some of the pressure on the first-aid administration here at the arena. It felt like a long time I had been making and applying bandages, comforting crying people of all ages, cleaning wounds, directing people, but I was aware my sense of time might be skewed. Just as I finished tying off a bandage around a thickly bleeding leg wound I glanced up and saw him.
It took a moment to recognize him because his head was down, and a bigger man was slung half across his shoulder as he hauled him along. But something about the way he moved set my heart to racing.
“Jov!” I tried to yell but it came out a whisper. He seemed to hear it anyway, swiveling a weary head around as if looking for me. “Jov!”
I dropped the bandage I was cutting on the table and staggered over, half-blinded by tears of relief. Something extremely hard and tight in my chest I hadn’t even known was there released in a rush, and my whole body felt like a viscous liquid, so I was afraid my legs would slowly sink into themselves as I tried to run to my brother.
He was too encumbered by his existing burden to hug me but he squeezed his eyes shut and touched my hand, apparently unable to speak. The relief I felt was tempered by guilt; my family was safe in our apartments or relatively unscathed here. Who else could say the same?
“There were too many,” he said dully, struggling with the heavier man. I switched sides and helped prop up his charge and together we brought him in to join the queue to be seen. “I got one but they must have had a separate person lighting each.”
“We were never going to have enough time. Not with two of us.” If we’d used the Order Guards more effectively, though, thought of explosives sooner … Even though I’d only just been shutting down that line of thought when Tain had voiced it, it was hard not to obsess over how we could have prevented this. Ash and smoke still floated in the night air and the smells and sounds of death and destruction were a constant reminder of the scale of this disaster. “We have to stop them, Jov,” I said quietly. “Whoever this is. Look what they’re willing to do.”
Tain spotted us soon after and whooped and shouted his way over several obstacles to crush my brother in his grip. The two men hugged hard and silent for a long moment, then pulled me in, too. “You scared me,” Tain said, his voice muffled in my hair and Jov’s shoulder. “Honor-down, Jov, you scared the shit out of me. Don’t do that again, all right?”
“I promise, you’re stuck with me,” Jov said, half-laughing, and Tain stepped back a pace to regard us both with an intense expression.
“All three of us,” he said firmly, and when I grinned he gave my shoulder a rough shake until I stopped.
“I swear,” I agreed, and for a moment my eyes burned, forcing me to blink hard and look away until the tears retreated. There was enough to deal with, I thought, without us losing one another, even temporarily.
We broke apart and Tain took a few short breaths, staring down at his feet, as if summoning strength for something. Then he inhaled, straightened, and looked us both in the eye. “About … about Aven. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about talking to her. I felt shitty about it and I knew I should have but somehow it just made it harder to admit. And then I thought if I at least had something to justify it, it would be better, so it built up and up, and…”
“It’s all right,” I said automatically, then paused and reassessed. “I mean, no. It’s not all right that you kept it from us. We deserved to know. But compared to everything else…” I gave a brittle shrug and gestured around. “As long as you don’t keep something like this from us again. We have to be able to be honest with each other, even when it’s hard.”
Was it my imagination, or did he react to that, just the tiniest flinch? Even as he assured us it wouldn’t happen again, as sincere as ever, worry and disbelief had taken root inside me. We couldn’t afford more secrets.
Tain and Jov joined the crews of people helping pull the injured from the wreckage while I continued to assist the physics. The worst part, even worse than seeing the dead and dying, was seeing the reactions of their loved ones when they found them; my eyes grew swollen with tears for other families, and my sense of having be
en lucky at others’ expense grew. Credola Karista, who had been in the viewing box, found half a dozen of her family members being treated for serious wounds, and wailed over the body of an elderly woman who might have been her mother or aunt, her anguish so terrible it felt like a tangible thing, bleeding into everyone around her. For all that our families were not friendly, and despite everything I knew about her, the only thing I could feel for her now was pity.
“Why is this happening?” a girl of no more than twelve asked me, as I helped a physic hold her still so he could secure the shrapnel puncturing her back and side that he could not safely remove. She had her face turned toward me, and tears dripped down over her nose and the side of her face, making tracks in the sooty residue. “Why is this happening?”
“I don’t know,” I told her, holding her hand. “Shh, just hold still, sweetie. They’re going to take care of you, all right?”
“Why,” she whispered, her eyes glazed; I wasn’t even sure she could hear me.
The question we all would need answered. Fortunes, who hated us so much that they could do this? The rebellion and subsequent siege had killed many, but this, targeted at peaceful citizens enjoying sports and a celebratory display, just trying to bring in the new season with goodwill and cheer; who could hate us like this? Would any of our neighboring countries really commit such unprovoked violence for the sake of trade routes or resource wealth? We had thought only another country could have had the resourcing to fund Aven, but it was hard to imagine even Hiukipi organizing something like this.