by Sam Hawke
“Finish your game first.” Her expression turned warm as she smiled at Dija across the board, and ruffled her hair. “How are you feeling, little one?”
“I’m not so little,” Dee said, without looking up from the game, but her voice had a smile in it. “I’m all right, I guess.”
Hadrea looked her over carefully, and then gave me a questioning flick of her eyebrows. I shrugged. Truth was, Dee was handling the trauma remarkably well, better than me, most likely. She still couldn’t talk easily about Merenda, and I’d heard her crying in bed at night, but most of the city probably did that. Hadrea watched the girl thoughtfully. She had been as stern as Ana about my niece’s recovery when we’d spoken last night, making me promise to give Dija time to grieve for Merenda and to process the things she had seen before she was embroiled once more in my world. It was on her recommendation that I had suggested muse, even though it seemed wrong to do something recreational in the circumstances. As someone who had lost her Tashi at a similar age, she had better experience on the issue than me.
“Did you talk to her?” I asked, trying to keep my tone light.
“Not myself. A friend in the lower town recognized the description as soon as I said she might have one patched eye.”
Dija stared determinedly at the board and moved a yellow piece at the other side of the circle, but I could tell by the too-careful frown between her glasses that she was only pretending not to pay attention to our conversation.
“At least, I think it is your woman. My friend says there is a one-eyed Darfri woman saying a lot of things about the spirits to anyone who will listen. He did not think she was…” Hadrea tapped her forehead. “Quite right in the head.”
“Kalina said she was a bit incoherent, but given the circumstances…”
Dija stacked my flame piece under her blue, and I swiftly captured her red piece with my blue and stacked them. “Don’t forget to pay attention,” I warned her with a faint smile.
“I won’t,” she said, and though her face remained grave there was a hint of pleasure in her voice as she circled her yellow piece around the board in the spiral dive, a move I definitely hadn’t shown her, and captured my blue, creating a red/blue/yellow tower in a very aggressive position on the board. I gaped at her, and she managed a smile, the first I’d seen on her since before the explosions.
“Where did you learn that?”
“Sjease.”
“Obviously not keeping them busy enough if they’ve got this much time to teach you sneaky muse moves,” I muttered.
We finished our game under Hadrea’s half-amused, half-bored eye—I still won, but only barely, and that multi-tower did a lot of damage to my strategy. “Bed for you, I think,” I said, swirling the last dregs of my tea in the cup. Dija got to her feet obediently. The lack of argument worried me; it was as though what had happened had extinguished some spark within her.
“She just needs time,” Hadrea said quietly, watching me watch her go off to bed. “She is not broken. Only weighed down.”
And what am I doing to lift the weight? I wondered. Ana would not readily cease her campaign to convince her daughter to leave the city, but if she was more subtle about it, I was too tired and too caught up with everything else to have a stalwart defense. I could not guarantee Dee’s safety here, but nor could I guarantee it back in Telasa. And she was a thoughtful and intelligent child who seemed to know her own mind, and whose will should not be ignored. But I thought I understood, now, how none of those logical arguments would mean anything in the face of the deep, biological fear that came from loving a child, and it made me sympathetic to Ana in a helpless sort of way.
“So.” I packed up the muse board. “Can we go and talk to this woman, right in the head or not?”
“Yes. And Jovan, I think you were right to ask. There are more rumors out of the Darfri quarters in the lower city. People hearing word from families out on the estates, especially to the north. Dead spirits and other strange things, too.” She shivered. “I do not like the sound of this, Jovan. That woman I fought at the arena was not just a Speaker who believed in the rebellion. She was something else.”
But what, we had no idea. An-Ostada had reported on the matter to the Council yesterday. But it had been a frustrating experience that had given us no more answers. An-Ostada had not known the dead Speaker and seemed to regard her existence as an exhibit of greatest blasphemy. The presence of someone using Darfri magic against us had not, as I’d hoped, made her more forthcoming with information about fresken and how it could be weaponized, but the opposite; she had channeled her offense and shame into a greater defensiveness on the topic.
“We are most likely looking at a lone, rogue woman with Speaker potential, with a grasping ambition, who has meddled in the secondworld and stumbled upon forbidden magics,” she had told the Council, glaring around as if we had insulted her. “It is unfortunate, but these dangerous students do arise from time to time.” She had looked pointedly at Salvea and me then. “Had we been permitted to practice our ancestral rites and teachings appropriately over the last few decades, such disasters would never have occurred.”
Now, I modulated my tone carefully, hoping to distract Hadrea from a topic that led only to prickly defensiveness at best, and open anger and withdrawal at worst. “You’re the one who actually understands this stuff,” I said. “We’re swinging in the dark here. Do you think there’s a connection between what’s happening on the estates with the spirits, and that woman at the arena?”
“I do not know,” she said, appropriately mollified. She looked thoughtful, and worried. “Perhaps. Or perhaps not. But this woman insists she was turned away from the determination council and the Order Guards and any other official she tried to speak to. Your Captain Chen means well, but she is focused on immediate threats to the city, and I fear she does not see Darfri matters as Silastian matters. That is the problem. Even good people treat us like we are a race apart.”
I wanted to shout my frustration. She was right; it was wrong-footed and dangerous to have officials acting as if Darfri matters were some special breed of issue, separate from the country at large. It was bloody hard to do otherwise, though, when Darfri leaders like An-Ostada were forcefully resisting the idea. “I’m sure a lot of important things are being put aside at the moment,” I said neutrally. “But I think this might be critical. Can we go talk to her now?”
“Yes. I would have liked to wait for Kalina, but I think we ought to go tonight. The woman is staying at a place in the outer village, and from what I heard, I fear if we do not go, we may lose the chance to talk to her. I do not think she will stay for long.”
We left with only one guard, and I borrowed one of the boys’ jackets. Hadrea kept the hood of her cloak up. I hadn’t been out in the outer village much; it had grown out of necessity for a city stuffed to bursting, but the early settlements of tents and poor sewage had gradually improved, so now the stench of shit didn’t rise from waste at the sides of the roads, and said roads were well-packed dirt, swept and maintained, and marked out neatly in rows. There were no maintained streetlights at this stage, so our way was lit mostly by grubby light spilling from residences and the few social buildings. It was quiet, almost eerily so, but then I supposed a large number of residents had probably either packed up and left for one of the other towns, or sought shelter within the walls of Silasta proper. Those who remained were probably afraid, and rightly so.
“There.” Hadrea, who had been counting buildings as we walked, nodded to a house that looked, to my mind, far too small to function as an inn. No signage or other advertisement for its services marked the outside to my eyes, but Hadrea pointed out a hanging wreath of dried bluehood and thyme on the door. “That is for accommodation,” she said. “The Guild is aware, I am sure, but they have better things to do than to try to stamp out this sort of thing when we are not even within city walls.”
“Tamarik, are you hungry?” I asked our guard, who shook his head crisply
.
“No, Credo. Want me to stay out here and keep an eye on things?”
“Thank you.” I had no idea what this woman might tell us, but the presence of an armed escort never really helped me make a pleasant first impression.
The door was unlocked and we walked immediately into a simple tearoom, with unfinished benches and grubby cushions, but a cheerful warmth from a big oven, the smell of spiced roasted meat, and the low chatter of conversation. Perhaps a dozen patrons were taking tea or eating at the benches: men whose build and clothing suggested physical laborers, a few elderly persons taking careful and sparing bites of meat, one family with thin, wide-eyed children, and a surly-faced woman who glared over the rim of her cup as though searching for a fight to pick. A tired-looking elderly woman no taller than my rib cage, presumably the owner, was moving between the rows and topping up tea with an equally elderly-looking pot.
The woman who had approached Kalina was easy enough to spot. She must have gone to the hospital at some point because the bandage covering one of her eyes and wrapping around her hair looked professionally done, not to mention being the only clean bit of fabric on her. There was a wide gap in every direction around where she sat, tearing flat black strips of bread off the round on a plate in front of her and stuffing them in her mouth hastily, in the manner of a person who expects them to be taken away at any moment. Between mouthfuls she seemed to be muttering something, and as we cautiously approached, she jerked, looking up at us with alarm. She looked desperate, frantic, half-starved.
“Can we sit down?” I asked her, keeping my hands open and my arms gently raised, just as if I approached a startled wild animal. “Would that be all right?”
She looked at her meal, pulled the plate a little closer to herself, then nodded cautiously.
We sat slowly, and after a moment’s further staring, she returned to eating. I couldn’t make out the words she mumbled as she stuffed the bread down. The owner came by, offering us cups of steaming black tea and a jar of honey, her eyes traveling anxiously over our clothes; though my tattoos were covered we were all too obviously dressed for a different part of the city. “Haven’t seen you here before, neighbors. Are you … working in the area?”
“We are not here to report anyone to the Guild,” Hadrea said bluntly, accepting the cup of tea, and the woman visibly relaxed.
She set the teapot down and smiled a charming, broad grin, suddenly affable. “We’ve all had a rough few years, eh? ’Specially those of us nearer to the bottom of the heap, if you follow. We all try to get by, best as we can.”
“Can you bring our friend here some more food?” I asked, gesturing to the woman beside me. “She looks hungry.”
The owner sighed and dropped her voice low. “You know her?”
“No,” I admitted.
“She’s been on her own on the roads a bit too long, that one, and then she was at the arena the other night, when … well. Don’t mind the things she says. I’ve told her to go back to the hospital but she’s not thinking straight.”
The main door opened and another traveler entered, visibly harassed. His hair was long and wild and his face a crisscross of lines. An assortment of Darfri charms hung from his neck and he wore traveling boots that had seen plenty of wear. The owner excused herself and headed over to greet him, and I turned to the woman beside me. “I’m Jovan Oromani,” I said gently. “I’m on the Council. Someone told me you were trying to warn us about something.”
She closed her one good eye, screwing up her face as if she were trying to remember something.
“Something about the spirits,” I prompted.
She opened her eye and it focused on me with sudden clarity. Without warning, her hand flew out and seized the front of my clothes in a taut, filthy grip. “We did not protect them,” she said in an urgent whisper. “They are murdered before our eyes and we do nothing.”
“What do you mean, murdered?” Hadrea asked. “How do you murder a spirit?”
“I saw it,” she insisted, but her words slurred a little and she stopped, shook her head, and looked around the room as if surprised to find herself there. “I tried to tell them, but they did not believe me.” Her expression grew fearful and she dropped my clothes abruptly and cowered back over her plate of bread. The owner returned with a plate of meat cut from the big roast and a scoop of salty dark rice, and I pushed it in front of the woman.
“Here, eat,” I said, and she didn’t wait for further invitation, but snatched a dripping slice from the tray and stuffed it into her mouth whole.
“She looks exhausted,” I murmured to Hadrea. “I wonder if she’s slept since the blast. Might be she left the hospital too early. Thendra said they didn’t have the controls to stop people wandering out if they wanted to.”
Hadrea, peering at what looked like dried blood in the woman’s ear, frowned. “Perhaps we could take her back, if she will let us. A head injury should not be left unattended.”
The traveler who had come in before had taken a seat at the other end of our bench, next to a big man who smelled strongly of oku, and the owner was pouring him a cup of tea and smiling. “What can I get you?” she asked, carefully turning the cup on the spot and then pushing it in front of him.
“Some cursed leadership for the country for a start,” he said, unwinding his scarf with unnecessary force. “Maybe another shot at the rebellion.”
The owner laughed nervously, her gaze flicking over to where we sat. The man hadn’t seen us yet but even if she’d not recognized me, the owner must have guessed at our identities. “Mind that talk, now,” she said with forced cheer. “Just tea, or something to eat?”
The man requested food but clearly wasn’t done with his grumbling; he muttered and swore as he adjusted himself, and when he tried to take a sip of tea his hands were shaking and he put it down again.
“You been inside the walls again?” his neighbor asked. Evidently he was familiar with the story.
“I went all the way to the Manor this time, for all the good it has done.” The man made a derisive snort. “I waited all day for an audience and then was turned away without getting near the determination council.”
“Oh, ah, bad times abound, though,” the neighbor said. “They’ll have a lot on their plate, eh?”
“They are looking up their asses is what they are doing. And we all know the only thing you will find up there is shit.” Apparently deciding better of his rant, the fellow blew out his breath and turned his attention to his tea and to the plate of rice that had followed. Our own neighbor was shoveling rice with the fingers of one hand and hoarding meat with the other.
Hadrea had been gently attempting to engage the woman in conversation again, to little avail. “What is your name?” she tried. “I am An-Hadrea esLosi. Who are you?”
The woman squinted at her with the good eye. “Dima,” she said slowly. “An-Dima esFasa.”
Encouraged by this moment of clarity, I smiled at her. “Fasa, to the north?” A village and lands in the Iliri estate, I was relatively sure. “That is home?”
Dima stared at me, her breath coming in short spurts, like she was panting. It was the effort, I realized, the effort of concentrating on us. Her eye kept drooping and her elbows on the table slipping, and I suspected it was only willpower or pain keeping her from falling asleep there at the bench. No wonder she was agitated and incoherent. “Home. They were there. But they are sleeping deeply, and then, the spirits! Murdered!”
“I do not think a spirit can be murdered,” Hadrea said, kindly enough, but she looked thoughtful. “But many spirits sleep very deeply, or slowly die from neglect. What spirits have you lost?”
“Outside our village.” Her voice was a harsh whisper. “There was a special place. A sacred place. That was the first. They took it. And I tried to tell, tried to warn, but they did not take me seriously. I ran so far and they were there, and they … gone. I felt it, and…” She trailed off again, rubbing her forehead. Her hand slipped and h
er head jerked down suddenly as if the hand had been load bearing.
“We should take her back to the hospital,” Hadrea said with more certainty. “I do not think she is safe to leave on her own.”
I nodded. “Let her finish her food, then we’ll see if we can get her there.”
Meanwhile, the man down the bench had started up his complaint again. “It was not just for my own sake that I went,” he was muttering. “If the local council could not find her, I expected nothing more from the city one. But this is about more than me, and they are running scared instead of listening.”
“Any’s the wonder?” the neighbor said, a touch incredulously. He leaned closer, brandishing one hand to punctuate his words. “Did you not hear? On top of the arena massacre, the Heir’s dead, and most of the Leka family to boot, I heard. You can’t trust Order Guards, you can’t trust the army. War’s coming, my friend, and they’re picking off the rich and powerful first. They’re right to be running scared.”
The Darfri man pressed his lips together and breathed hard out of his nose. One of his hands fingered the charm around his neck absently. “Perhaps so. But they are looking in the wrong places for their war, and if you try to tell them this, they do not listen. The Compact is meaningless. They have learned nothing from their past.”
I hadn’t meant to eavesdrop, but what he was saying sounded like an echo of Dima’s words.
“Excuse me just a moment,” I told Dima, who had moved a jealous hand between her plate and Hadrea and was leaning over the food like a guard. I spun around on my cushion and faced the man.
“Where should the Council be looking?” I asked.
The man snorted and set down his tea as he looked me up and down. “The same place as last time. In its own yard. Why, do you have some secret way of making them listen?”
“I’m on the Council,” I said flatly. “I’m Jovan Oromani.” While he looked me up and down suspiciously, I shrugged the fabric off my arm so he could see my tattoos. “This is my friend, An-Hadrea esLosi. We’re here and we’re listening. What were you trying to tell the Council?”