by E M Kaplan
With a sigh and a shake of her head, Jaine dismounted the cycle and took off her gloves, smacking them against her leg with resignation. “I was afraid you were going to say that.”
Chapter 28
Zunee cracked open one eye. After blinking several times to focus her vision, her line of sight collided with her lifelong friend’s concerned gaze. They lay on the dirty, woven rug of—she looked around—a small tent, a makeshift or travel ya’tuvah belonging to the Ashonti clan. The green on red woven pattern of the rug, distinctive of the Ashonti family, told her exactly where she was. The Ashontis were as known for the green on red spear pattern as much as their infamous lack of mercy.
When Zunee was only seven or eight years old, her hair still braided in spikes all over her head like a toddling babe, she’d overheard whispers of a child her own age, captured by the Ashontis, who had been made a slave in their household and who had been worked to death. Zunee’s father had shooed her away from the discussion when he’d seen her listening. Some tales were too harsh for young ears, even by her father’s lenient standards—he had thought it necessary to educate her on the realties of life. The only other sister who’d been as interested in their father’s stories was Rav, and Zunee had always copied her.
“How else will you survive?” He had often punctuated his tales with that familiar question, peppering tales of survival by common sense and wit with these same words. “Keep your nose into the wind,” he said with a tap to the side of his, “and your mind alive with these lessons of the past.”
But this child, the one who had met his death at the hands of the Ashonti clan, had been her very age. Made to do menial tasks around the camp, which was expected as a captive from a rival family. However, the difference between his treatment at the hands of the Ashonti versus any other clan had been the lack of nourishment, the lack of basic sustenance, and clothing. Shelter. Water. Food. They had starved him, beaten him, mocked him, and left his body unburied, not immolated, so that his broken bones lay stark and white under the Great Mother’s unrelenting rays of sun. So it was whispered. And so Zunee had overheard when she had not been supposed to.
They mirrored each other with their hands tied in the small of their backs, their faces pressed on the coarse fibers, both squinting from the twin aches in their heads. The situation was worse than Zunee had thought. Not only had Lantus Chok joined forces with the Ashonti clan, but a third warlord, Lohani, had joined them as well. Putting aside their differences, the three feuding warlords had come together in a time of suffering to increase their strength, to unite together in their joint survival. Personally, she found their temporary detente sickening.
Lena stood in the corner of the tent. An involuntary growl came up Zunee’s throat, matched by the agitated rustling of the tent flaps in the wind, when she saw her sister’s eye nearly swollen shut and her lip bloody. But the Chok boy, the one who’d been restraining her now held his elbow at a peculiar angle—his shoulder was no longer properly lined up with the rest of his arm, thanks to her maligna of a sister. He walked with a groin-pained limp, too. One that spoke of a questionable ability to reproduce. She eyed her sister, looking for other signs of abuse but saw nothing but undisguised fury on her sister’s face. All the girl needed was her cooking knives and they’d be free of this situation in no time at all. Release the desert storm’s rage, Zunee crowed.
Now she assessed her own body for violation. Her clothes were in place, lips not cracked, nose not ruptured. No ache between her legs. Other than her pounding headache from having been choked into blackness, she felt normal—that is, if she didn’t number her boiling rage among her current list of complaints. This situation was all her fault. She should not have allowed her sisters to rest until they had reached the river proper. There, they might have found shelter and better protection.
One of the Ashonti lackeys entered the tent carrying their belongings—Zunee’s small shoulder bag and Deni’s two-handled pack that he had carried across his back. The thin Ashonti boy, fully grown in height but not broad yet through the chest or shoulders, dumped Deni’s bag on the tent floor. Squatting down on thin legs, knees jutting out in front of him, he rifled through its contents. A head scarf to protect against winds, a carving knife, and some other small tokens scattered on the rug. The boy crowed in triumph when he found Deni’s cloth-wrapped packet of dried goat’s meat. Another one of Ashonti henchmen’s hand shot out and cuffed the boy on the ear. The man relieved him of his find, handing the meat to their clan leader.
Chastised, the boy emptied Zunee’s bag on the rug not inches from her nose. Her bag had no food, of course—she’d given every last crumb of it to her sisters. Her own head scarf fell out, along with a few trinkets. But her face flamed when Deni’s ceremonial infant dressing fell out of its pouch, obvious to all of them as to its significance. The black woven fabric with yellow threads tumbled in a heap on the floor. The lackey fingered it, looking at Brakah Ashonti for direction as to what to do with it.
“You’ve had a child?” Brakah Ashonti asked, his wrinkled face twisted further in a scowl. “I had taken you for a maiden and a warrior. Now I know otherwise. And I will place you in the appropriate tent so that you may serve your proper role.” His ominous words caused a shiver to run down her spine. The implication was that she would serve his men’s pleasure, as their slave. That sentence would, without a doubt, drive her to a violent end, whether hers or theirs remained to be seen. She would not stand for such a life.
Deni spoke up, though Zunee had trouble meeting his eyes—those familiar eyes that had always looked back at her, every day, no matter what stupid thing she had done. No, the rug was a fine place for her eyes to focus just at the moment. “That’s mine,” he said.
“Yours?” Brakah Ashonti asked, drawing closer to the two of them. He stooped near their faces, shoving the woven fabric first in Deni’s face, then in hers. The sandstone clasp came loose and struck her on the cheek. The pin came to rest alongside her jaw. She nudged it with her chin, and with her lips grasped it to hide inside of her cheek. “You’ve had a child together? Is that not forbidden between brother and sister? Or perhaps not all clans are as clear on the Great Mother’s lessons.” In fact, the Chok clan permitted marriage among siblings. Perhaps that accounted for their limited intelligence and overall deficiency in standards. Anyone who’d kept a herd of capra knew the absolute necessity of intermingling the animals with outside herds.
“He’s not my brother,” Zunee said, still facedown in humiliation, her voice muffled now that she had taken the small clasp into her mouth. How could she ever look him in the face again without recalling this horrifying moment. She would never live this down…if she lived at all. Spending the rest of her life as an Ashonti broodmare was not an acceptable future.
“On your feet, girl,” Ashonti said. He grabbed her arm and yanked her backwards. She was forced to stand to prevent her shoulder from being injured in the same manner her sister had hurt that other boy. If she wanted to hold on to her slim chance of escape, she’d need both of her arms intact.
Deni understood what was happening to her before she did. His shouts of protests followed her out the tent as Ashonti dragged her with him. Not only had she lost her belongings, her freedom, and her sisters, now she would lose her dignity at the hands of this bastard. Her now-bare feet dragging through the soft dirt, she struggled within his grasp, kicking up dusty clouds behind her. If he forced her to lie with him, she’d kill him as he slept.
If he got that far.
Despite his taunts, she was a maiden. But she wasn’t stupid. She knew exactly what could happen at the hands of her father’s enemy.
She moved the clasp from the swaddling blanket forward in her cheek. As soon as she could free her hands from their tight binding behind her back, she would stab him with the sharp end of it. Right in the neck where his life’s blood flowed most freely. She would watch it run from him and paint her face with it before she hunted down the others of his family
and slaughtered them.
When they reached his tent, he pushed her through the door ahead of him. She lost her footing, her feet catching on the edge of the thick rug. She pitched forward, landing on her belly, knocking the air out of her mouth with the force of it. Nearly losing the clasp in the impact, she expelled her breath in violent gust, but held her lips close together. But when she inhaled, gasping for breath, her nostrils pinching together from the effort, the clasp bumped over her tongue and went down her throat.
Along with it slipped her hope for freedom.
Chapter 29
Camped under the canopy of leaves that shut out most of the afternoon sky, Ott made some rough calculations as the meat turned on the spit over the fire. He’d always been a skilled hunter, but now with his increased size and strength—and ever-present luck, thank the good Lady Lutra—he’d managed to fell a deer within just a few hours of hunting. To Ott’s surprise, Bookman was nimble with a butcher’s knife. Ott didn’t want to think about why that might be the case—or what human flesh may have been carved from its owner’s bones under his knife.
While he’d been hunting, resourceful Marget had started a roaring cooking fire somehow, despite the soggy forest floor. She always was a handy little thing. By the time they had the meat spitted, the embers had been the perfect temperature to crisp the outside and leave the inside tender and juicy. Now his belly was full—almost enough to make him content, if he blocked out the destruction they’d witnessed just that day.
He sidled across the forest floor over to Harro, who was now awake, though still prone because of his splinted legs. The rough bandages were a mess, not doing the man much good. With gentle hands, Ott re-dressed the wounds. As he looked around for something to clean the muck off the man’s legs, Treyna handed him a cloth that she’d boiled in water over the fire. The best they could do under the circumstances. No Mel. No salves or herbs to allay the pain for the poor devil.
“Thanks,” Ott told her. As she turned away, the dagger at her belt glinted. Though her face and neck were still splattered with mud, now dried, her hands—and the dagger—were spotless. A cut agamite stone, clear as glass, glinted in the hilt, a green eye that winked at him in the light of the fire. Harro, holding onto consciousness by a tenuous thread, hissed through his teeth at the contact of cloth to flesh. Ott suppressed a cringe himself as he made a cursory exam of the gaping wounds.
“Sorry, man,” Ott said, placing a hand on his shoulder. “I wish I could do more for you. But I don’t have much to work with. Had to leave my pack at the inn.” He paused for a second when it struck him that the Praesepio was no longer above ground. He hoped for a minute that Daisy had gotten out of Navio alive, though the ground still shook now and then from a distant explosion. At this rate, most of the city would be demolished. Thousands of people would be without livelihood or roofs over their heads. Ott knew what it was like to wander around in the dark, the stench of trogs stinging his eyes and nose all the way up into his head so far he could still smell it when bad dreams overtook him.
“Just glad to be in the fresh air. So thanks for that,” Harro said. His voice, though gruff as ever, was weak and punctuated by sharp intakes of breath as Ott tightened the bindings on his ruined legs. Fresh blood seeped through the bandages, and Ott hid his fear that he’d caused the man’s wounds to flow again. He lay his hand on Harro’s arm, fingers pressing with unspoken apology.
Treyna returned to the fire to dump the soiled cloth back into the bubbling pot. Smart girl. They’d need the dressings again in a while. While Harro’s wounds seemed clean enough now, they’d emerged from the pit wearing enough foul mud to start an infestation in no time. Ott worried about the man’s legs, too, not sure if they were set properly. And a man like Harro, a horseman almost from birth, needed his legs fully functional.
Ott leaned closer so he could afford the man some privacy before he laid his query on him, the very calculations that he’d been mulling over the last few hours. “You disappeared from the Rob’s house over a year ago. During the trog attack. We all thought you’d been killed.” And eaten. But he kept that part to himself. “How did you survive?”
Harro shifted on the ground. Ott wanted to help him get more comfortable, but there was no other position possible for the man because of his damaged legs. As the shifting continued, Ott got the feeling it wasn’t physical pain that made the man restless, but rather something weighing on his mind. For once in his life, Ott stayed quiet and let Harro work out his thoughts in peace, until, at last, they bubbled to the surface into talk.
Finally, with dark brows drawn, he said, “I don’t know.”
Ott looked at him, taking in his emotional state. Maybe Harro was delirious. Perhaps an infection had already taken hold of him and hindered his ability to think. Ott rested a palm on Harro’s shoulder, noting with chagrin this time that his hand dwarfed the man’s arm. All Ott’s life growing up with Rob at the big house, Harro had been a stalwart presence, a massive bull of a man. And now Ott had overtaken him in size, like the next season’s crop growing taller than the dried stalks of the previous.
“It’s all right. Don’t tax yourself trying to remember. It’ll all come back to you in time.”
“No, not like that. I wasn’t dreaming. That’s what makes it all the more strange,” Harro insisted, his voice low and rough. Though now he seemed more confused than agitated. He sighed. “Maybe I did go mad. Maybe I can’t remember what befell us. I went into the pit after the trogs retreated. I went…to get her back.” His gaze tracked Trenya as she moved around the fire, now using a cool cloth to wash her face. She sat apart from Rav and Bookman, used to being ostracized by most of the people she encountered.
Treyna had been a seller of potions, a manipulator of flesh and muscle. At a young age, she’d been sold to a man who later took her for his wife. But Jonas was dead now, killed in the attack on the big house. Casualties had numbered in the hundreds that day—and it was the day they’d thought Harro had been lost. Now, Ott was shocked at the look of devotion on Harro’s face. The big man with the heavy brow watched Treyna move around the campfire, the lines of stress between his eyes easing. Such a strange expression to see on the rough outdoorsman’s face.
“What happened after you went into the pit then?” Ott prompted him, the intimate expression on Harro’s face making him uncomfortable.
“That’s the thing. I remember it as if it were yesterday,” Harro said and was silent.
“Yes. So?” Ott resolved to be patient, though it wasn’t a great strength with him. Especially when he missed Mel’s calming influence so much. Yet, he’d made it through another episode without causing any great mayhem and without blacking out. Points for him.
“No. I mean yesterday. Not as if it were like that. It was the very thing. I went down into the pit yesterday. The trogs attacked. My legs were rendered the way you see them now. I lost consciousness. And then, Treyna dragged me out somehow, where you found me. I don’t know how I got here to Navio or what happened to the time that passed.”
“Gods above, man, you were lost over a year ago.”
“I know that—but only because you told me so. I’m just as confounded as you are.”
Now they both looked at Treyna, thinking the same thing. She was the only one who had the answer to that question. Her sharp gaze met his across the fire, and he looked away, not eager to approach the subject with her. But Harro was not so intimidated.
“Come here,” he said, not even addressing her by name. But his tone had changed, Ott noted. The timber of the stableman’s voice was the same tone that he used on skittish horses, creatures that had been abused by previous masters. That hypnotic, low voice that never failed to bring recalcitrant beasts to heel. Ott watched Treyna now hurry to the man’s side. Abused girl. Abused animal. The two creatures were not so different, it seemed.
“What is it? What do you need?” Her tone, also, had changed when she addressed the big man. Where it had been sharp to Ott and to
the others in their camp, now it was softer.
“Tell us again how we came to be here.”
Treyna’s eyes tightened in wariness. Her gaze fell, and she twisted her now-clean fingers together, over and over each other, knotting them. She began in a whisper and had to clear her throat and start again. Ott leaned closer to catch her soft words.
“I took him into the clay.”
Chapter 30
“Into the clay? What do you mean by that?” Ott asked her, peering at Treyna’s fox-like face with its slanted eyes. Her hair was a reddish brown as well, now that he thought of it. He wondered which god she favored. She didn’t have the luck of Lutra about her as he did—a fact he was often ashamed of, especially when he’d done nothing to deserve such windfall.
Dovay, the bear-god of perseverance. Falcun of the sky. Pesca of water. Lady Lutra, the otter goddess for charisma and luck. Insectoj, nagging and always more powerful in numbers, the god of decay, erosion, undermining of plans…and civilizations. Colubrid the snake, schemer. To which of these old world deities did Treyna send her pleas?
Treyna brushed the hair back from her face and settled herself next to Harro. Though the big man made no move to touch or encourage her, their bond was obvious. So strong Ott nearly felt the pull of it himself.
“I can’t explain well because I don’t have the right words. I was never schooled,” she complained, her sharp tone returning, accusation cutting into his conscience. He knew her statement for its truth. Because she’d spent most of her life selling her potions and services out the back of Jonas’s run-down wagon, she couldn’t have had much of a childhood at all. Given half an opportunity, many people would have called her a witch—especially some of the so-called finer denizens of the big northern house—but the miners she’d served had never thought to persecute her, as effective as she’d been for them and their bodily aches.