by Angela Boord
“Kyris,” Nibas says in a low voice. “You need to look at this.”
He’s unwound his cloak from Razi’s arm to check the wound. I lean over to look. The torches that line the canal give us a very dim light, so it’s hard to see details, but the gunshot obliterated the need for details.
“He was bleeding from his side,” Nibas tells me, speaking low enough that Razi probably won’t even register it. Or maybe he’ll remember it later in snatches, the way I remember the chirurgeon talking about my arm. “But I think that’s just a gash. I think the ball lodged in his arm.”
It’s a good assumption. His arm is hardly recognizable. Splinters of bone spike up white through the dark red mass of what was once his forearm. Nibas cut his sleeve back, but there are still bits of fabric embedded in the wound, and where the arm isn’t red, it’s black from powder and burns.
Nibas looks up at me, and I know what he’s thinking, what he can’t say if Razi is listening.
They’re going to have to take it off.
“They killed Vadz,” I say suddenly.
Nibas pauses in the act of rewrapping Razi’s arm and looks at me like I’ve just said something in another language. “What?”
“Last night. In the Night Market. You heard about the murder?”
“I heard there was some Rojornicki bastard…” His voice dies. “That was you, wasn’t it. And Vadz was the criminal.”
I nod.
“Why the hells didn’t you tell us, Kyris?”
“I didn’t want either of you getting caught up in that.”
“It was Vadz! You didn’t kill him, did you?”
“No! Do you think I’m a demon?”
“I think you’re an idiot. You should have said—”
“I didn’t want you to come into the temple with me. I tried to tell you I’d do it myself. I didn’t want Razi to go after that Qalfan in the garden!”
Nibas looks like he’s tearing his words off with his teeth. “Who killed Vadz, then?”
“I don’t know. He wore a mask. I think maybe it was the same man who shot Razi.”
“Was it the Qalfan from the Lady?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. If he betrayed his mistress.”
“Mistress?”
“Just forget I said that.”
“It’s his godsdamned arm, Kyris!”
“Do you think I don’t know that?”
“I’m not going to forgive you if he dies. He’s an idiot, but he’s a good idiot. He doesn’t deserve this.”
I sit back and draw my arm across my brow. “Don’t worry, Nibas. If he dies, I won’t forgive myself.”
Nibas’s face loses a little of its thundercloud look. He looks down at Razi, who shudders beneath my cloak, his eyes darting back and forth, closing and opening.
“You’re arguing about me?” Razi murmurs.
“Hush,” I say. “It’s nothing you need to worry about now.”
“Don’t argue. None of us knew he’d have a gun.”
He closes his eyes again, grimacing in pain. Nibas and I both regard him silently.
Then Nibas lifts his head to look at me. His dark eyes burn with anger like two coal embers.
“You’re going to find that bastard. And do for him the way he’s done for Razi.”
The Qalfan hospital is the largest building in the Qalfan Quarter. Its gray-white stone towers glow faintly in the moonlight, capped off by tile roofs that in the morning will reveal themselves a striking red. Qalfan medicine is in high demand. It’s not going to come cheap, even if Razi is a Nezar, honored and feared among his own people.
Getting Razi out of the boat is harder than getting him into it. He’s barely conscious, and we’re mostly dragging him up the steps and in through the big double doors.
The lobby is ablaze with candles and bustling with activity, even at this hour. The kinless huddle in cloaks on the floor, hoping to be taken as charity cases. A nurse in white Qalfan robes moves among them, distributing food and water. Householding women dressed in silken finery speak to more nurses sitting at big wood tables. Three young men wearing green velvet cloaks shiver in the corner, clutching their stomachs and looking pale.
They all look up when Nibas and I bring Razi in.
Two nurses appear instantly at our side.
“What happened? Where is he hurt?”
Another nurse runs down the hall, hopefully to fetch a chirurgeon.
Razi rouses enough to watch the women standing before us, their fingers moving in a no-nonsense way to check his arm, his side, the feel of his forehead.
He turns toward me. “Kyris,” he murmurs. “Make sure my nurses are good-looking?”
“I can dig the ball out,” the chirurgeon tells us as he washes his hands, once we have Razi in a room. Light from the candles reflects off his spectacles. “But it wouldn’t do any good. It smashed through his bones. There’s no way to heal those.”
“Does he know?” Nibas says. “Have you told him?”
The chirurgeon dries his hands on a towel and lifts a heavy leather apron over his head. He’s only wearing an allaq, not an urqa. His jaw is lightly stubbled with dark hair, like he’s been working for a while.
He rolls up the sleeves of his allaq, looking calm but troubled, too.
“No. Not yet. He’s a Nezar. If he gives up his arm…that’s his livelihood, isn’t it?”
“Kyris,” Nibas says. He’s always had the disconcerting habit of looking you right in the eye when he tells you hard things, and I know what he’s going to say to me now. It would be easier for me if he shouted at me again, but his craggy brown face is as spare as the landscape where he grew up, and as uncompromising.
“You’ve got to tell him.”
“Razi,” I say, coming to sit next to him. “They’ll be giving you more kacin soon.”
“My prayers have been answered,” he says in a barely audible voice. His eyes are closed and he’s drenched in sweat. But he shivers again and I tuck the covers in tighter around him. “What demon created a gun?” he says.
I remain silent for a moment. I don’t know what kind of demon created a gun, but I know the demon responsible for their first use in Liera.
Me.
Arsenault always said I wasn’t to blame, but I know.
I shift on the hard seat and seek out his good hand atop the blankets with my left hand. His head moves on the pillow when I touch him. His dark eyes—dull with pain but lucid—search my own.
“All those times I flirted with you,” he says, his voice raspy and raw. “I didn’t know it would take a gunshot.”
I try to smile, to say something sarcastic back, to keep up our relationship as it has been—to give Razi that comfort. But I can’t.
“They’re going to take your arm, Razi.”
He sighs. Turns his head, just a small shift toward the wall. “Thought so.”
“It— They’ll take care of you here. It will be a long recovery, but—”
“They’re not going to give me an arm like yours, though.”
“No. But you’ll learn how to get by with only one.”
“To fight? To earn my pay? Or am I going to have to be like one of those beggars at the door? My father let the Nezari pick me up because he couldn’t afford me.”
“The Nezari will take care of you. Nibas—”
“Is Nibas there?”
“Outside.”
“Not fair to Nibas.”
“I don’t think Nibas cares.”
He falls silent.
“I learned to fight one-handed,” I say. “I never expected to get this arm. You’ll still have your right hand.”
His mouth curves upward at the corner. “Stop whinging? That what you mean?”
I snort and lean over him. “Right. Suck it up, man. I’ll make them take it off below the elbow.”
“That comforts me.”
“Below the elbow will be better, Razi; trust me.”
“Don’t want to go back to farm in the d
ust.” Now the faint smile comes back. “Terrible farmer, anyhow.”
“You won’t have to. Just—stay alive and I’ll teach you how to fight.”
“The chirurgeon—Qalfan, yes?”
“He’s not wearing an urqa, but yes, I think so.”
“I want to say my prayers. Then—”
“Nibas and I won’t leave you. Stay alive, Razi.”
“Fate lies with the Sun. Never really understood that teaching. Until now. Idiot.”
“I shouldn’t have sought you out. Why’d you have to go after him?”
“Thought I was helping you… See? Idiot.”
“No, Razi—”
His fingers tighten briefly, weakly, on my own. “Now I know why you hate the Prinze.”
“You don’t,” I say raggedly. “You don’t know. But I’m adding you to the debt they have to pay.”
It’s not anything like when they cut off my arm.
I keep telling myself that, as I stand in Razi’s room at the beck and call of the surgeon. Instead of a wooden chopping block—a table with a clean white linen covering and surgical instruments laid out on top. A bed where Razi lies propped up. Rows of candles providing warm yellow light. One skinny window beside the bed where the moon hangs like a pearl in the night.
Instead of an axe, there are two saws—one large, one small. A row of knives in descending order of size. A selection of needles. A spool of silk thread. A pair of scissors.
All the steel gleams in the candlelight.
Instead of an executioner dressed in black like a raven, a man wearing spectacles and robed in white leans over Razi, picking small pieces of fabric out of his arm with a pair of tweezers. Behind him, a nurse pours liquids from a selection of brown bottles into a porcelain basin, and a young man in robes waits by the door. The room begins, suddenly, to smell of roses, and then of pine.
But when the chirurgeon rises from his chair and picks up a long silken cord, I begin to tremble.
Nibas, standing beside me with his shoulders squared, looks at me and says, “Kyris.”
The chirurgeon looks up at me too. “Are you going to be able to do this? It’s no shame if you need me to find someone else.”
They’ve given Razi so much kacin, he’s nearly asleep, but at my name he turns his head to look at me.
“Suck it up, Kyris.”
“I am not whinging,” I say, and I take a long, deep breath of rose and pine. “I can pin your ass to that bed any day.”
“Sounds exciting." Razi's mouth turns up into a long, sleepy smile, but he never opens his eyes.
“Very well,” the chirurgeon says. “I need one of you to hold this cord tight around his chest. We’ll twist it with this piece of wood to keep it from coming loose. My assistant will tighten the cord on his arm, and the nurse will help me sew up the blood vessels. But I’ll also need someone to hold him down.”
“Will you burn it afterward?” I say, trying to keep my voice steady.
The chirurgeon frowns and shakes his head. “No. I found during the wars that men I burned did more poorly than the ones I wasn’t able to burn. But it will be very important to maintain the pressure on those cords so I can sew up the vessels instead. He still runs the risk of bleeding to death. Do you understand?”
Nibas and I both nod.
An enormous wave of relief washes over me.
This is what Arsenault meant about Qalfan care.
We didn’t have this in Rojornick, either. When their chirurgeons took off a hand or a foot or a limb, all we heard from the medical tents was screaming. The scent of burning hair and flesh would drift out on the wind, but we could always tell ourselves it was just the smell of battle.
Still. This is worse than sitting outside the medical tents and listening to the screaming.
The chirurgeon eyes me over the rims of his spectacles. “You have to be strong to do this,” he says. “Are you sure…”
I flex my right hand. “I’m stronger than I look.”
And then we begin.
It’s bad.
It’s very bad.
The sound of the saw as it cuts through flesh and bone.
The smell of blood, somehow so much worse without battle to accompany it.
Razi screaming and thrashing, the chirurgeon shouting, “Hold him still!” and “Pull that cord!” and the sound of too much blood pouring into the basin on the floor, splashing the chirurgeon and the nurse and the assistant and Nibas and me.
The memories of being thrown down onto that block and hearing the axe whistle in the air until it hit my arm, and the absolute blooming burning red of the pain.
And then the sound of an arm hitting the porcelain basin and making it wobble on a wood floor.
Chapter 15
Could it really have been Arsenault, the man who shot Razi?
My mind skitters away from that thought as I walk alone down the hall away from Razi’s room, my blood-soaked clothes stiffening as they dry. The nurse catches up with me before I get very far.
“Ser, you can’t go out with those clothes. We are happy to provide you new ones before you leave. It is included in your payment.”
I threw some coins at them when we brought Razi in. I don’t know how many. They were gold.
“Ser.” She touches me lightly. On my right shoulder.
I jerk around, grabbing her by the wrist before I think about it. In her wide black eyes I see a reflection of how she sees me—wild, frightening, smeared with blood.
I step back quick and incline my head, the way Arsenault would apologize to a woman. “Pardon. I’m just a little on edge.”
She eyes my arm skeptically. Maybe she felt the metal through the cloth. “We have clothes,” she says again, slower now, like she’s talking to someone with trouble understanding. “If you’ll follow me.”
She hands me a plain linen shirt, trousers, and a wool cloak, and ushers me into a draped-off closet to change. I strip off my old clothes and stand in the dim quiet of the closet, staring at my reflection in the metal of my arm.
I thought it would be so easy. So appropriately ironic. Use a gun to kill a Prinze, since the Prinze had made guns the instrument of their supremacy. But now I don’t know what in all the hells is going on. Why is that gavaro leaving me alone? Why hurt everyone I’m with?
As a warning? To scare me off?
I feel like maybe I’m being played by the gods. Manipulated on a stage, like a player in a play.
It’s your move now, little bird. What will you do?
Chapter 16
Before the Prinze brought guns to Liera, it was as if we were all dreaming. And then Prinze ships landed in port with their holds full of guns and powder, and we all woke up.
The day my dream ended, I was wearing trousers and lying on my stomach in the grass on a hill overlooking the high road, the one that led up to our lodge in the foothills of the Irondels. I was helping Arsenault make a map of our estate. I lived in a tiny corner of his room behind a blanket that gave me some privacy at night, and he remained true to his word; he never touched my right arm, and my corner remained dark and private until I took the blanket down each morning.
Arsenault lay stretched out on his back with his head propped on his pack, his hat pulled low over his face, pretending to listen to me read from a book called The Pirate Raid, a True Account of Life Among the Most Bloodthirsty of Men. It was a warm afternoon in late spring, a year after I’d had my first visions. An enormous cork tree spread its arms out like a many-armed deity above us for shade.
“Prince Udolfo dropped down onto the blood-soaked deck of the pirate cutter and pulled his sword as he approached the pirate captain,” I read. “Some said the captain was the son of a giantess. He stripped naked to the waist when he fought and wore his beard twisted up with Saien sparklers. When he lit them, he became so frightening that many sailors threw themselves over the rail in terror without him ever having to bare his cutlasses. But the Prince’s courage was made of stronger steel �
�”
Arsenault snorted. Or snored. “Are you listening?” I asked. “You’ll miss the exciting part. I believe the pirate captain is about to show Udolfo that he’s captured his betrothed.”
“The woman who fainted at the sight of the pirate? Dolf deserves better.”
“Dolf?” I said.
Arsenault’s eyes cracked open and he pushed the hat up with one finger. “Isn’t that what his companion calls him?”
“I don’t think so, Arsenault.”
“Mmmm. Maybe I was confusing the story for another.”
“Well, you keep drifting off while I’m reading; that’s probably why. Honestly, Arsenault, I think I shall stop trying to share books with you and just read in the hall after supper.”
“If I’m drifting off, it’s only because it’s a warm day, and your voice…” He tugged his hat back down over his face. “Somehow, I doubt the author ever really saw what happened with the pirate.”
“It’s a story, Arsenault, not a military report.”
“How was he supposed to light those sparklers without burning off his beard?”
“Perhaps he soaked his beard before lighting them.”
“He’s got more balls than I do.”
“You’ve absolutely not a speck of romance in you, do you?”
The hat didn’t move. “Maybe his betrothed will make a heroic sacrifice and leave him free to court the pirate princess. How would that be for romance?”
I watched him for a moment, then couldn’t help skimming forward in the book.
Finally, I huffed out a breath. “Are you sure you haven’t read it before?”
“I must have heard it somewhere,” he mumbled.
I narrowed my eyes on him again, but he still didn’t move the hat.
“Well, you know what I think really happened,” I said in a bored voice. “I think his betrothed was a lot sharper than she looked. And while she was alone in the captain’s cabin, the pirate princess who is in love with Udolfo crept inside to have a chat with her, and as it turns out, the betrothed didn’t want to marry Udolfo either. And therefore, she works out a ruse with the princess to make it appear that she’s sacrificed herself heroically. But instead, a faithful fisherman pulls her out of the water, and she takes the place of the pirate princess, who marries Udolfo and settles down to become a respectable woman.”