Spare me the ways of the witch.
She had been afraid too. But her fear had been of what would happen if she tried to fight them. Of what a mess her gifts would make. Of proving she was what they thought her to be.
A monster, in a daughter’s skin.
‘I did not argue,’ she whispers, tasting blood. ‘I did not fight. I waited in the heart of the forest for the witch-finders to come and take me away. To go up to the stars where I would no longer be alone. Where I would belong.’
Raine’s expression this time is harder to read.
‘And did you?’ she asks. ‘Belong?’
Zane shakes her head. ‘No,’ she says, softly. ‘I did not.’
‘And the tree,’ Raine asks. ‘Did you light it afire?’
Zane’s hands tremble as she remembers that night. Falling asleep to her mother’s song.
Dreaming of flames.
Her jaw aches, and her eyes do too. Deep within the sockets, as they did when she lost them.
‘I never meant for it,’ she whispers. ‘I did not know then the power of dreams.’
Raine nods. ‘Like when you dreamt of the King of Winter?’ she asks. ‘Of the manticore?’
Zane nods. It is an effort to raise her head again.
‘He wants everything,’ she says. ‘The stars. All the spaces in between. He will consume all of the good hearts until no more remain.’
She takes a ragged breath.
‘Ommatid said that you would be the one to know him,’ she says, before she can stop herself. ‘Ask the outsider, she said.’
Raine shakes her head, and for a moment Zane wonders if this is still a testing.
‘I have my suspicions,’ the commissar says. ‘But I cannot be certain.’
‘Perhaps certainty is close,’ Zane says. ‘Or perhaps the answer is already at hand, but hidden.’
Raine puts her hand into her pocket and takes out that timepiece that she so treasures. She tilts the face of it as if to check the time.
‘Will that be all, commissar?’ Zane asks.
Raine looks at the readout and at her notes.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Unless there is anything you would like to tell me.’
Zane looks at the two birds, sitting silently beside Raine. Their eyes are like beads of jet.
‘No,’ Zane says. ‘Not a thing.’
Daven Wyck stands with his back against the wall in the hallway of the old scholam, listening to the wind howl. To his kinfolk moving around. Talking and singing. He picks up the smell of smoke on the wind. Of petrochem, from the yard outside.
Of blood, from where it has soaked into his fatigues.
Wyck puts his hand in the pouch at his belt and takes out the bolt shell that Raine gave him. He lets it sit in the palm of his hand. The shell is heavy and cold and marked with a graven aquila, like the one on the chain around his neck. That is heavy too. Growing heavier by the day.
Wyck has been running from death since Cawter. Since he left his name painted in ashes under the jungle canopy. By rights, holding the shell should feel no different. It’s just the fate he is owed, made real. Just the duskhounds’ due.
But it does feel different, this time. It makes the After feel closer, yawning wide like jaws. Waiting. Wyck can feel judgement looming too. The counting of his many sins. Wyck realises that it is not just death he has been running from, all this time, but from everything he has done. From every instinct and every decision.
From every cut, quick and deep.
Wyck rests his head against the cold stone for a moment longer and listens to the howl of the wind as he puts that bolt shell back in the pouch at his belt, next to the one that holds the vials. He runs his hands over his face and stands his aching body up straight, then follows the hall the rest of the way to his squad’s assigned quarters.
The door is wedged open, so they don’t notice him when he steps through it. His Wyldfolk are all sitting together in a ragged circle, talking. Or all that’s left of them, anyway. Tian’s cot is undisturbed, his spare kit still sitting on top of it. His prayer papers and his darkwood idol from home.
‘Room for one more?’ Wyck asks.
They stop talking then and turn to stare at him. Crys and Kane. Jey and Haro. But especially Awd. The look on his face, you’d think he’d seen the dead walk.
‘Sarge,’ Crys says. ‘What happened?’
‘I spoke with the commissar,’ Wyck says. ‘And then she let me walk.’
Awd’s face is drained pale. Wyck can see the tremor on him.
‘Then those souls, sworn to the Throne,’ Awd says. ‘You didn’t kill them?’
His Wyldfolk stare in silence and wait for the answer. For the lie that Raine gave him to tell. Running water echoes from elsewhere in the building.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
‘No,’ he says. ‘I killed them.’
‘Sarge,’ Crys says. ‘What are you saying?’
She’s desperate to have him redeemed, Wyck can see it in her face. He feels much worse about that than he does the killing. All the things he’s done, and still she looks at him that way, as if he could be a saint, or anywhere close.
‘They weren’t sworn to the Throne,’ Wyck says. ‘They were Sighted, wearing High Command’s colours. That’s why I killed them.’
‘Then they were enemies,’ Crys says. ‘Infiltrating. They meant to hurt us and you stopped them.’
Wyck nods, and that part, at least, isn’t a lie.
‘I knew it,’ Crys says. ‘Knew it couldn’t be right.’
‘Do you swear it?’ Awd asks.
Crys scowls at him. ‘He said it, Ger, and the commissar let him go. Isn’t that enough?’
‘You know that it isn’t,’ Awd says.
Crys moves like she’s about to hit him.
‘It’s alright, Yulia,’ Wyck says.
He holds out his hand, palm up. The one with the Wyldfolk’s mark on it. He takes the knife from his belt and draws it across the old scar to open it again.
‘I swear it,’ he says, careful in the way he chooses his words. That he chooses only truths. ‘I swear that I killed those who meant to hurt us, and that I did it to protect my kin.’
The blood wells up slow. He rolls his hand and squeezes it tight and blood drips onto the floor. Wyck thinks about his words, chosen so carefully. That he just said kin, meaning Zane, and that he said it in the moment of an oath. He thinks about that bolt shell he carries, the twin to hers, and he knows that it is a truth now. The two of them really are kin, whether he likes it or not. They are bound together by death, made and owed.
‘You believe me now?’ Wyck asks.
Awd nods. He has more than paled now. ‘I believe you,’ he says, softly.
Severina Raine sits on the floor of her quarters with the datareader she took from her desk. It sings and spools as the projection snaps live and Lucia’s words resolve once again.
For my sister. The truth is contained within.
Raine has the timepiece in her hand. The brass has warmed to her skin. She thinks about the King of Winter, and what he wants. She thinks about what Lucia said to her in the penitent’s cell, all of those years ago.
I followed what was in my heart.
Raine’s fingers hover over the keys a while before she inputs the passcode carefully and slowly.
H.E.A.R.T.
She hits the input key and the hololith snaps to black. When it resets, Raine finds herself looking into her sister’s dark eyes for the first time in more than a decade. Raine hits the key to stop the recording before Lucia can speak and her sister freezes with a spare half-smile on her face.
It is too much to bear, that smile. That look in her sister’s eyes. One hundred memories come flooding back that Raine thought she had buried or dismantled. Running the gantries with L
ucia in Gloam’s chill wind. Training as children with wooden blades while their mother applauded. Poring over maps and learning speeches and playing word games together until it was so dark they could not see one another. Lucia’s last word in the game was always goodnight, but Raine would guess poorly on purpose so she could speak with her sister for longer. Lucia humoured her, every time.
Raine wants to leave, then, but she cannot stand. She wants to speak, but she knows that she will cry. So she does the only thing she can do. What she came here to do.
She presses the key, and listens to her sister speak.
‘My sister,’ Lucia says, and her voice is just as Raine remembers it. Clear, and strong. So much like their mother’s. ‘If you are watching this, then it means that you too have followed your heart.’
She pauses, and that smile slips away. The recording was captured before Lucia was incarcerated. She isn’t starved or bruised, and she still wears her commissariat black.
‘If you are watching this, it means that you too have seen the darkness at the heart of the Bale Stars, and our crusade. I am sorry that it had to be you, just as I knew that it could be nobody else. You have always been the kind to seek the truth.’
Lucia laughs, and it is a sad sound.
‘To ask questions,’ she says. ‘You always were asking questions.’
Raine laughs too. It happens without intent, just like the tear that follows it and paints a cold trail down her face. She wipes it away quickly, as if it will leave a mark.
‘I promised you the truth,’ Lucia says. ‘And it will not be easy to take. For that, I am sorry too.’
Lucia pauses and takes a breath. In the background of the recording, Raine hears a fierce storm.
‘The darkness,’ Lucia says. ‘It is not colouring the crusade. It is the crusade. The corruption touches every part of it, and the roots of it are in High Command.’
She shakes her head.
‘They sent us to fight on foot on Virtue instead of collapsing the ice caverns from orbit because they were looking for something. For the same thing the Sighted had wanted from Virtue. Psychically-active crystal, hidden in the ice. The Sighted use it for rituals. For rites. I saw things on Virtue that should not have been possible. One of the Nine, killed in action, then active again not a day later. Not healed. The death was undone. After we took back Virtue, huge quantities of that crystal were shipped back to Steadfast under the cover of a ghost regiment.’
‘The Strixian Ninety-Ninth,’ Raine murmurs, in the same moment that her sister does, their two voices becoming indistinguishable.
‘It is not just the crystal that they are moving,’ Lucia says. ‘But weapons too. Armour. Sometimes even souls. They allow the transport fleets to be intercepted by the Sighted, who use our own weapons against us. They leak information and tactical data to keep the Bale Stars in conflict, ensuring that the war machine endures. Ensuring that they endure.’
Listening to Lucia’s words is like standing before a cold sunrise. One so bright that it picks out everything in hard, uncompromising detail and shows up all of the flaws.
‘That is the reason that they want the crystal, too,’ Lucia says. ‘To endure beyond the threat of death. They are powerful enough to create a regiment of ghosts in order to do it. To manipulate a whole fighting arm of the crusade to their own will in order to capture heretic artefacts and then fool the Munitorum into moving them. They mean to wrest power, and they do not need to gather allies to do it, because from High Command, every soldier sworn to the crusade is already an ally.’
Lucia sighs and she rubs at her face with the back of her hand. The capture is so unstable and aged that it is the first indicator that Lucia is crying.
‘What should you do,’ Lucia asks, ‘when you cannot tell how far the rot has spread?’
Raine is shaking now, just as she did when she saw Lucia last. ‘Burn it all down,’ she whispers. ‘To ensure you catch it.’
‘I meant to burn it, but in this I have failed,’ Lucia says. ‘My enemies have discovered me, and soon I will be just another ghost. Another soul spent to keep the war machine alive. I wish that I could have told you in person, but they would have killed you just as they will surely kill me. I could not allow that to happen, so I hid the truth away knowing that you would seek it, because you always do.’
That smile appears on Lucia’s face again, just for a moment.
‘You will not fail as I did, Severina,’ she says. ‘You will not break as father did. You will not be like me, or like him, or even mother. You will be your own legend, and for that, I am so very proud.’
And that is where the pict-feed capture stalls and ends, on Lucia’s face and that sparest hint of a smile. Raine aches from the day. From the fight in the Sanctum. From the dreams given to her by Ommatid. From the blast that should have killed her and from every duty she had to fulfil before she could find her way to this room in peace and finally unlock the truth her sister left her. Every one of those aches pales now compared to the one in her chest. She was wrong. She let her sister die, and then killed her over and over in her memories too, every day, for a decade.
Raine puts her hand out as if to touch the hololith, and it dazzles around her fingertips.
‘Sister,’ she says, softly. ‘I am sorry.’
Wyck turns his hand and looks at it in the dim light. At the blood from the mark he reopened and the ashes on his fingertips from painting Tian’s name. The smell of the smoke clings to his fatigues and to his skin. They burned Tian’s darkwood idol too. It didn’t seem right for anyone else to have it.
‘Dav.’
Wyck’s name is the first word Awd has spoken to him in hours. He says it quietly because Haro and Jey are asleep in their cots. Wyck doesn’t know where Crys is, or Kane. He wonders for a moment if they are together somewhere.
Wyck sits back on his cot. ‘What do you want?’ he asks.
Awd is sat on the floor. He won’t look Wyck in the eyes.
‘I thought it was true,’ he says. ‘I let my heart get twisted, when I should have known better.’ Awd shakes his head. ‘It’s because of the forges,’ he says, and then he sighs. ‘No, not just that. Because of Gholl too. Drast. Because of Hyxx and those priests. You remember?’
Wyck nods. ‘You know I do.’
Awd does look him in the eye now. ‘Fighting like that, where every face is an enemy. It’s an ugly way to do it. It splinters away the soul, piece by piece. A little more, every time. You know what I mean?’
Wyck thinks about those fights and the ones before it too. He thinks about running from death and all the things he has done.
‘You know I do,’ he says, again.
‘When I heard about the bodies, I got to thinking that maybe you were an enemy too,’ Awd says. ‘That maybe you’d gotten splintered so badly you’d broken. Snapped.’
Wyck thinks about holding that shard of glass to Nuria Lye’s throat. Splintered. Broken.
Snapped.
‘So you went to Yuri,’ Wyck says.
Awd nods, still looking at the floor. ‘I couldn’t let it lie. I tried, believe me, but I couldn’t work those hooks out of my soul.’
He finally looks up then.
‘If you wanted me out,’ Awd says. ‘If you wanted me dead, I would understand it. I betrayed the mark. Betrayed the blood we have spent.’
Wyck looks down at his hands. At the ash and the blood and the mark made twice now. He thinks about his death sentence. About the Kavrone and the fate-engines and the fact that the fighting will only get more ugly from here.
‘No,’ Wyck says. ‘I don’t want you out. Don’t want you dead, either.’
‘You don’t?’ Awd asks.
‘I want you to watch over the others,’ Wyck says. ‘Mind them. Make sure they aren’t getting splintered too badly. Especially the void-born. Yulia will help. She’s a
lways had too much of a heart.’
The words are clearly not what Awd expects, because he doesn’t answer in any way but to frown.
‘Do you understand me?’ Wyck asks. ‘I need you to say you’ll do it.’
‘I understand what you’re asking, Dav, but I don’t understand what you’re asking it for.’
Wyck shakes his head. ‘Just give me an answer,’ he says.
‘Alright,’ Awd says. ‘I’ll mind them.’
‘There’s another thing,’ Wyck says. ‘I want to know who it was who told you about the bodies.’
Awd is quiet for a moment. He glances over at Jey and Haro to make sure they are still sleeping.
‘And if I tell you,’ he says. ‘What will you do?’
‘Set them straight,’ Wyck says. ‘That’s all.’
‘You swear?’ Awd says.
‘I swear,’ Wyck replies. ‘One time before the commissar’s pistol is enough.’
Awd sighs, long and heavy. ‘Kolat,’ he says. ‘It was Ely Kolat.’
Andren Fel waits by those same words painted on the wall, just as Raine did for him before. He turns the datakey in his hands. It is such a small thing, the datakey, but it means so much. It might change everything.
Might be as much a death sentence as a bullet.
He rolls his hand around the datakey at the sound of footsteps approaching. It is Raine, but she is not wearing her commissariat uniform. No coat. No cap. She has on plain training fatigues and boots. A black vest and a short thermal layer jacket. The clothing she wears for sparring and combat drills. Her dark hair is wound in a crown braid like always, but much of it is escaping as if she has been woken from sleep. Judging by how exhausted she looks, though, she certainly wasn’t sleeping.
‘Captain,’ she says.
There is something different in her voice too. Fel thinks it might be the sound of hurt and he wonders just how bad the Sanctum was.
‘Commissar,’ he says, because that is how this works. ‘Not dead yet, then.’
The smile on Raine’s face is so slight that most wouldn’t catch it.
‘Not yet,’ she says.
Fel opens his hand and shows Raine the datakey, and she nods. They walk in silence through the building that was once a scholam, to that same room as before. Raine is masking a limp from the fight and her knuckles are split and bruised. Fel feels guilt over it. Not that she is hurt, but that he should have been there to get hurt with her. He pushes open the door to the scholam’s old library and the smell of damp and decay hits him all over again. Like old trees, turned sickly. It’s that map, being eaten away.
Honourbound - Rachel Harrison Page 31