by Angela Boord
The Aliente road joined the old Eterean brick road on the other side of a stone bridge that spanned the northernmost tip of Kafrin Gorge, where the gap was narrowest. I had never liked crossing the Gorge. The limestone bridge was barely wide enough for a carriage. My ancestors had built it when they claimed the lands on the western side for the Aliente, but how they did so, no one knew. On a clear day, one could look down on the tops of the twisted laurels that grew in the rocky soil far below. People said it was built of magic, coaxed from the gray rock that lined the sides of the gorge. Whether or not there was magic involved, Kafrin Gorge was an eerie place in the snow. In the mist created by the warming of the day, the Gorge seemed bottomless, the bridge built to span the clouds.
It left me dizzy with vertigo. I wanted to close my eyes but didn’t dare. I always had trouble with vertigo, crossing this bridge. But now it was worse, even with Arsenault riding his black gelding next to me, so close I could touch the sleeve of his cloak if I wanted to.
He let his fingers skim the stone rail as the horses plodded on. It made me sick. “Don’t,” I said.
Fog obscured his expression. I leaned over my mare’s neck so I could be close to something real.
“Hang on, Kyrra,” Arsenault said softly. His shoulders twitched as if he might move his arm. “It’s an old place, isn’t it?”
“The gavaros say it’s full of ghosts. Probably from the fires.”
He looked over the edge. “I don’t think the fires created all the ghosts.”
I wondered what he meant, but the wind gusted and I clung to the mare’s neck. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a black blur. Then his hand was at my shoulder, steadying me.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” I said.
“Wait till we’re over the bridge.”
I tried to laugh, because I thought it was a joke. But there was no amusement on his face. He held on to my shoulder the rest of the way across.
Then we were on the other side and he let go. His black-gloved hand disappeared in the wind-tossed mane of his horse.
He didn’t say anything, but as my head cleared and my stomach settled, I noticed the worry lines fanning from the corners of his eyes. He stared straight ahead and didn’t speak again until we were well away from the bridge.
We didn’t arrive in the city until after nightfall. Snow drifted over the old Eterean road in places, and that slowed us down. But it was more dangerous to sleep by the road than to press on into the city. By the time we rode beneath Liera’s carved gates, my stomach was grumbling and I was stiff, sore, and exhausted, almost dozing in the saddle.
We came in the Raptor Gate, which led directly to the Talos. The Houses held the Talos in common, and as such, it had developed its own sort of market, a place where the contracts of gavaros were bought, sold, and traded like the rights to grazing land. The steady metallic clop of the horses’ hooves as we made our way down the brick street joined the general din, and I could do nothing but look around in amazement.
Men sat bundled against the cold under billowing, painted canvas pavilions and watched us pass. They wore House colors, most of them, but you could tell the householders from the gavaros because scribes sat beside the householders, scribbling furiously. Brokers at tables hawked gavaros like livestock. The gavaros didn’t have to be present, but some of them were—sitting around small bonfires in the shelter of the mud-brick buildings that lined the street, roasting chunks of lamb and onion on wooden skewers, playing cards and drinking. They seemed more intent on their card games than they did on the tables.
The smell of sizzling fat made my mouth water. “Will we get something hot to eat, Arsenault? Are we going to find an inn?”
“I know someone. He’ll put us up.”
“Is it safe?” I asked.
“Depends on what you mean by safe.”
I watched the men sitting beside the buildings, playing cards. Scabbard tips stuck out beneath the hems of cloaks, dragging the ground as they leaned forward to play a hand. One man sat on a rickety wooden chair with his back to the wall of the barracks, a brown glass bottle in one gloved hand, watching me. He toasted me with the bottle, and I turned quickly away, back to Arsenault.
“Surely, we won’t be getting our supplies here.”
“Best not to talk about it now,” he said, nudging his horse past a group of gavaros who stood in the road, ringing a householder clad in a sky-blue cloak. Prinze colors. I ducked low on my horse. She tossed her head at my sudden movement and bumped Arsenault’s horse with her haunches. I couldn’t help looking backward, my heart thumping, sure it was Cassis.
“It’s not who you think it is,” Arsenault said in a low voice, leaning over so I could hear him. I looked up at him in surprise. He’d flipped his hood up.
“I know that,” I said hotly, and sat up straighter. I wanted to flip my own hood up; my ears were cold and burning at the same time. But I didn’t trust my sense of balance yet and couldn’t let go of the rein.
My mare edged closer to his gelding, and my leg brushed his. I pulled her away. “Why would it be? There isn’t any reason Cassis would be down here, in the dark.”
Arsenault shrugged, but he looked troubled. “No,” he said. “You’re right.”
“Is there a reason he would be?”
“Your blades would do you little good in that case,” Arsenault said.
My cheeks flamed, and I was glad of the cold that had already raised a flush in them. “I wasn’t thinking of that.”
“Perhaps not now,” he said, and turned his horse toward a narrow alleyway that branched off the main road.
I squeezed my knees around my mare’s sides, wincing at the pain it caused me, and she followed him. The alley disappeared between two cracked brown brick buildings.
“Arsenault,” I said, “where are we going?”
It was dark in the alley. My heart beat faster. There wasn’t room for me to ride beside Arsenault, so I had to stay in back of him.
Then he pulled his sword. I knew it from the low hiss it made as it came free of the scabbard, and the flickering orange light from the mouth of the alley reflected in its blade.
“Arsenault?” I said. I wanted to shout and to whisper at the same time. My voice came out as a combination of the two, a loud, urgent whisper that immediately struck me as cowardly. I cursed myself for it, but when he didn’t answer, I called again, louder, “Arsenault!”
A shadow moved ahead of us, a rumpled shape I had taken to be a pile of broken furniture. It straightened up into the form of a tall man and stepped off the crooked staircase into the alley in front of Arsenault. I pulled my horse’s rein so tightly that I bowed her head and she whinnied at me in distress.
“It’s you,” the shadow said, squinting up at Arsenault from the folds of a cloak. I couldn’t see his face, but he had a deep voice with an accent I couldn’t place. Not Eterean. “And you’ve brought me someone.”
“I told you I would,” Arsenault said.
“The girl?”
Arsenault nodded, a movement of the darkness.
“Arsenault?” I said. “Who is this? Have you taken me here to give me up?” I pulled the reins so tight the mare danced backward, hooves ringing on the stone.
“She doesn’t trust you, eh?” the man said.
Arsenault sighed. “No,” he said. “Jon’s a friend of mine. We’ll stay with him.”
“You meet your friends in dark alleys? With your sword drawn?”
Arsenault twisted his sword. The light bounced off it. “It’s just that my sword is rather distinctive.” The odd carvings on the blade glowed for a moment much too brightly to be lit by the lamps on the street at my back. I looked around wildly for the source of the light, sure that someone else had stepped into the alley with a lantern, but there was no else there. The light winked out when he sheathed it, and he swung his right leg over his horse’s back to dismount. The saddle creaked and his bootheels crunched in gravel and broken glass when his feet hit the grou
nd.
The other man grunted. “Best you put that away. There’s Prinze about tonight.”
“I saw that,” Arsenault said grimly. Then he looked up at me. “Come on, Kyrra. We’re staying here.”
“I don’t believe you. Why would we stay with a man you meet in an alley?”
The man laughed, a low laugh that rumbled. “A bit picky for a serf girl, aren’t you?”
“I’m not—” I began, then realized I was. I shut my mouth.
“I won’t let anything happen to you,” Arsenault said.
I made an exasperated noise and traded the rein for the horse’s mane. I clutched it for a moment and made a point of not looking at the ground. Arsenault made no move to help me, but eventually, after a great deal of work and almost overbalancing, I finally stood on the ground.
I faced Arsenault. “You just stand there.”
“You didn’t need my help,” he said.
I gritted my teeth and resolved not to say anything. Instead, I raised my hood. The man who had looked like a heap of castoffs stood before me now, tall and broad, with a sword hilt jutting out the front of his cloak. He grinned at me, a flash of white teeth in a face as dark as the cloak he wore, then inclined his head, a subtle movement that was hard to see. “I welcome you to my house,” he said. “It’s not much, but…” He spread his hands. “…what can one do?”
Inside, the building was surprisingly warm and well lit. A fire blazed in a mud-brick fireplace, and clean-burning beeswax candles littered the dark wood mantel. Strings of dried garlic hung on iron hooks on either side of the mantel, and a black kettle hung over the fire. Whatever simmered inside lent the room a spicy, foreign aroma.
The only furniture in the room was a low table made of wood so dark, it looked like cast iron. It sat on a tasseled red-and-orange carpet that covered almost the entire floor, which was made of worn wood plank. Empty crockery plates and wooden cups were arranged on the table, and large pillows lay scattered around it. On one of these pillows reclined a man in Qalfan robes the color of old ivory. He’d pulled the bottom of his urqa down below his mouth and was smoking a polished wood pipe. When I walked in, his eyes narrowed.
“I thought you were bringing someone for me to read,” he said.
“I did,” Arsenault said.
“It’s a girl,” the Qalfan replied.
I wanted to sigh. Wasn’t it obvious I was a woman? I wondered why these men had to state it over and over.
“I’ve already been through that.” Jon’s voice boomed in the small space as he shrugged out of his cloak and unwound a thick black scarf from around his neck. I was already starting to sweat, and the smell of the food on the fire pained my stomach, but I didn’t want to take off my cloak. I wanted Arsenault to say he’d made a mistake, that we were going to stay at an inn closer to the markets, like I expected we would when I’d gotten on the horse.
Four stacks of leaf-wrapped blocks were piled against the wall behind the Qalfan, and I didn’t want to know what they contained. I didn’t want to know what the Qalfan was smoking in his pipe. Cassis had told me stories of what the Qalfans unloaded from their holds onto Lieran docks after they unloaded the barrels of pickled figs, the cedar logs, the ivory tusks that lined the stalls of Caprian markets. Piles of round metal tins full of crushed black poppy seeds, crackly brown sweetweed, and kacin, the dusty white powder made from the dried berries of a plant that grew in the jungles of Dakkar.
Cassis told me he’d tried it once. He said it felt like paradise but it burned his lungs and his nose, and the next morning, he’d woken with a headache far worse than any caused by wine.
Arsenault began taking off his cloak. When he saw me standing immobile in the center of the room, he stopped.
“Kyrra. Jon has offered us his house.”
Jon stood leaning against the mantel, watching me. He smiled again, without showing his teeth this time, and took a pipe out of his pocket, a metal tin from his other pocket. With one large finger he tapped a fine green-black powder into the bowl of the pipe, then replaced the tin in his pocket and reached up for something on the mantel, which he swiped across the wood.
Whatever it was—a yellow wood stick—its end suddenly burst into flame. I stepped backward in alarm, and Jon chuckled as he touched the flame to his pipe and shook out the stick. Then he threw it into the fire, and the fire immediately flared yellow.
“By all the gods,” I said.
Arsenault hung his cloak on a hook that jutted out from the wall by the door. “A match, Kyrra. The Saien make them. It’s only pine soaked in sulfur.”
Jon puffed on his pipe. “Lierans,” he said.
“I’ve never seen one before.”
“They’ve only started to come into the markets.” The Qalfan tapped his ashes into a white ceramic bowl. He smiled slightly, most of his face visible in the gap between the layers of his urqa. “It’s sweetweed,” he said. “From the Yrian province of Greater Qalfa.”
“In the blocks?” I asked.
“In my pipe.” His expression was flat.
“Take off your cloak and scarf, Kyrra,” Arsenault said.
I paused for a moment while all three men looked at me. Slowly, I unwound the scarf from around my neck. I walked to the hook beside the one that held Arsenault’s cloak, and I hung it up while the men watched my back. Then, clumsily, I unfastened the rope loops of my cloak. My thumb slipped many times on the wooden toggles, and I was grateful that the men could only see my back. I shrugged out of the cloak and caught it with my left hand before it fell to the floor.
I didn’t want to turn around. I knew they were all looking at the severed stump of my right arm. Even Arsenault.
“Ah,” the Qalfan said. “I see now why you bring her to us.”
I looked over my shoulder. Arsenault, at least, seemed troubled. But Jon and the Qalfan continued to watch me with unconcealed curiosity.
“Now you know why I’m a serf,” I said to Jon as I hung up the cloak, and he hitched an eyebrow and laid his pipe in a shallow clay bowl on the mantel.
“The smell of that food,” he said, “is making me hungry.”
We ate for a long time. There was not only the stew in the pot but baked yams and flatbread from the ashes, and pickled figs and dates and candied fruit in tins. The stew was so spicy, it made my eyes water, and full of ingredients I didn’t recognize. We ate it over chickpeas and scooped it up with chunks of bread. The stew made me thirsty and I drank too much of the sweet wine Jon served with it. By the time the meal was over, I was dizzy.
The men spoke little during the meal, mostly about shipping and the gavaro market, and how Arsenault’s commission with my father went. He glanced at me while he talked about it, but I made a point of concentrating on my food. No one asked me any questions, and I said nothing while I ate. When we finished, Arsenault brought a bucket of water from the cistern and we all washed our own bowls. Then the Qalfan and Jon retired with their pipes, and Jon offered one to Arsenault, and he took it and the sweetweed and lay back on the pillow next to mine, puffing smoke in lazy clouds at the ceiling.
“Why don’t you take a look at her now,” Arsenault said, smoking. “We’ll be spending tomorrow in the market.”
“Are you kidnapping me?” I asked. My tongue felt thick. The warmth of the wine was pleasant. The thought of being kidnapped wasn’t that alarming.
Arsenault laughed. “Why would I need to kidnap you? You came on your own.”
“Because you told me you wanted my company. But I was right, wasn’t I? You did have another motive.”
“Hah,” Jon said. “Smart girl.” He got up and walked to the wall where the bricks were stacked and began unwrapping one. The leaves crackled. He discarded the rope and the wrapping on the floor and hefted the white, pressed rectangle in one large hand. Then he peeled off a small strip of the compacted powder with his knife and tossed it in the fire. The fire popped. “Have to sell that cheaper,” he said.
I looked at Arsenau
lt. “Only the Prinze sell kacin.”
“True,” he said, watching the smoke drift up toward the rafters.
He’d brought me to a den of smugglers.
I struggled to get up, but my legs felt rubbery. The pillows were too deep. I scrabbled at the table, but my fingers kept slipping. The room began to spin, a whirl of orange and red like the spirals on the rug.
Words fell out of my mouth. “I don’t know why you’ve brought me here,” I said. “I trusted you, Arsenault, may all the gods damn you.”
There must have been kacin in the wine. And now the room was full of kacin smoke.
My nose burned and ran. I wiped it with my sleeve. My eyes started to burn, too.
“Arsenault!”
I felt like I was falling, but I was still in the pillow, staring at the ceiling. I thought I saw Arsenault get up beside me.
Then the world drained away, like blood flowing from a wound. I grasped for it but it ran through my fingers, and the night flowed on like a dream.
“If she brought blades,” the Qalfan said, “I should see them.”
“Give him the blades, Kyrra.”
Arsenault’s voice. Arsenault’s face was all I could see as he bent over me. His scar stood out like a lightning strike. I reached up to trace it.
He pushed my hand back down. “Kyrra, the blades.”
I cursed him. Garbled words came out of my mouth. My wrist flopped but I managed to hike it under my skirts and retrieve the leather bag from my pocket. Cold air brushed my legs and there was a tug and then my skirts were down again.
Arsenault handed the bag to the Qalfan, who dumped the blades out all over the floor.
“Those are mine!” I shouted. “Mine!”
“Huh,” Jon said. “She fights, doesn’t she?”
As if I were a fish on a line. “I’m not a fish!” I yelled at him.
“A swordfish,” Arsenault grunted. “Maybe.”
The Qalfan ripped open the sleeve of my stump and poked me with one of the blades.
I screamed. Fire rippled up my severed arm, outlining the ghost of it in red and blue curls of light like flames.