by Angela Boord
The second day out, Mikelo and I sit in its shadow to eat our biscuits and drink our wine. No one else is around, but I begin to itch in my shoulder blades, as if someone stands behind me.
If I turn around, will it be Arsenault or the man who killed Vadz and shot Razi?
“Tell me what Cassis looks like now,” I say to Mikelo, to take my mind from the feeling, and to break the silence, which gnaws at me. “Tell me what’s become of him.”
Mikelo sits with one knee up, his hand with its biscuit resting atop it, squinting out to sea. In that pose, he reminds me too much of Arsenault, so I follow his gaze to see what he’s looking at. Caravels, trampers, carracks, galleons—from this height, all the ships look nearly the same, like small bits of driftwood heaved at the shore.
“He looks much the same as he always has, I suppose. He hasn’t injured himself, or contracted any plagues, or managed to disfigure himself in any other way. How long has it been since you saw him last?”
The last time I actually got a good look at him was in the Market that day I tricked Arsenault into eating a silkworm. “Seven years,” I say.
“I suppose he just looks older. He’s twenty-eight, not old.”
I’m twenty-five. I wonder what Cassis will think of me when he sees me. How have I aged? I’m not the girl I was, and I’ve spent the past five years trying to hide any part of me that might appeal to man or woman, although that didn’t always work. My fellow gavaros wondered why I threw myself into battle the way I did, but battle was safe. It was recreation that was dangerous.
Mikelo is watching me. Over the past five days, I’ve become familiar with his quiet ways and his sea-green eyes that hide more than they reveal. I’m beginning to wonder if he’s playing a ruse too, biding his time for Geoffre. Does he see spies I don’t? Maybe an assassin?
Perhaps it’s just the emptiness of the road that makes me paranoid.
“And Cassis’s wife?” I ask.
Mikelo relaxes and smiles. “Camile. A beautiful woman. She has long, dark hair, eyes the color of agate…”
“And she’s barren,” I say before I can help myself. My shoulder blades itch again, but when I turn around, all that meets me is the sight of Mount Kosemi, cloaked in its perpetual gray haze.
Mikelo doesn’t reply but continues to watch me. He finishes his biscuit and dusts the crumbs from his shirt.
“What are you looking for?” he finally asks.
I sniff. “Nothing.” I begin rolling my pack up, getting ready to leave.
“You’ve been doing that for some time now. Have you heard something? Is it Andris?”
I cock my head, listening for the crunch of gravel or the patter of voices. But there’s only the screech of an osprey riding the winds above the surf, and the distant crashing of the surf itself. “No.”
“You seem nervous.”
“I’m not going to let Geoffre’s men just walk up on me, now, am I?” I rise and shoulder my pack, then kick the crumbs into a pile for the birds. “Come on.”
The road follows the lip of the cliff. An old stone wall stands at its edge, crumbling in a dozen places. No telling who built it, but it isn’t much protection. Mikelo runs his hand along it as he walks.
“You really do think he’s following us, don’t you?”
“Of course I do,” I say testily. “I said he would, didn’t I?”
“Would he know the route you would choose?”
“Maybe.”
“How well did you know him? Before.”
I squint at the sea. The air is sharp atop the cliffs, cool, but not too cold. I tighten my grip on my pack.
“Well enough.”
“So, he might guess that you would come this way.”
“He certainly knew all the routes to and from my father’s lands. Probably better than I did. He traversed them regularly. But he’s become a different man since then.”
“Surely, you didn’t have a gavaro after you lost your arm.”
“He wasn’t my gavaro. He was my father’s gavaro. A gavaro on my father’s land, where I was a serf.”
“Gavaros switch sides,” he says.
“They do. But Arsenault made my arm.”
The knowledge rattles him. It’s easy to tell; he has such an open face. He glances at my right hand, but I’m wearing gloves—kid leather, the way a lady might. I bargained the seller down, though the price was still too high. But I had to have them.
“Arsenault had a talent for metalworking,” I say. “He could See the truth of things. And people. What lay inside them. But that was before Kafrin Gorge.”
“Jon brought him to us. ‘You’ve need of a swordsman, don’t you?’ Jon asked Devid, and by all the gods, Andris could fight.” Mikelo turns to me. “I saw him. He defeated all our best fighters, but not Devid himself. He pulled on the last stroke.”
“Devid’s not the kind of man who respects those who can beat him.”
Mikelo shakes his head. “No. Perhaps that’s why Geoffre prefers Cassis.”
“If Geoffre prefers Cassis, it’s only because he knows Cassis is better at manipulating people and easy to rule.” My voice is more bitter than the air, but I can’t help it. “It was always so.”
“Not so much now,” Mikelo says.
“That remains to be seen. Which leaves you. Why does Geoffre like you, Mikelo?”
Nothing fills the silence but the crunch of our boots on the lava rocks, the whistle of the wind through the crags that drop away beneath us, the pounding drum of the ocean. Mikelo stares at the ground while he walks, his brow furrowed, carrying his pack as if it weighed a hundred stone. Then he says, “I don’t know. If he thinks I’m a better choice than Cassis, it’s only because Cassis has rebelled and chooses his own consort. I told you, I don’t want the succession. I wish I was never in line for it.”
“Devid would have had you killed had you stayed in Liera. Sooner or later.”
“I’ll do my duty to my house,” Mikelo says tightly. “If I have to. But I’m not sure my uncle wants me for that.”
“What else would he want you for?”
Mikelo’s eyes grow troubled. He turns away from me to stare once again at the scenery.
“Do you know why Jon Barra supports you?”
“No. Do you?”
“I’ve an idea. I’ll wager he wants to break the Prinze monopoly on the gun trade, empty your coffers, and drive all your kinsmen from his country into the sea. He must think you’re easy to rule, too.”
Mikelo’s face darkens. “He’s only a smuggler.”
I adjust my pack on my back. “They say he’s a prince in his country. And Jon has his ways. He was pinned once by a Kavol army on the low ground. But at the end of the day, it was the Kavol who were running away in retreat.”
“Jon said when he delivered Andris to Devid that he’d fought with him before, and you say that Andris fought for your father. Jon must not have been able to defeat the Prinze so easily.”
“Arsenault commanded my father’s forces. Jon had little to do with it.”
“It’s true then. Andris was your father’s second-in-command. That’s why you call him Arsenault.”
I nod, warily, with the feeling that I have just stepped onto a pocket of unstable snow.
“There are portraits of your father’s captain,” Mikelo says, and looks at me sideways. “But Andris doesn’t…quite…look like him, does he? The portraits all show a man with a nasty scar and a silver streak in his hair. A broken nose. Andris has none of that.”
“Perhaps you’re right, then. Perhaps it’s not him.”
“But you believe he is. Why?”
I take a deep breath before I can stop myself, and I scan the rocks that rise above us. Lots of places for men to hide up there.
How to explain to Mikelo all the little things that remain the same—the way he moves and sits, his expressions, his eyes…his taste for sandwiches? And should I?
If Mikelo has come to think of himself as less of a pri
soner, I have too.
“I can’t tell you why,” I say finally. “But I know he’s the same man. So does Jon.”
“If anyone had recognized him, he’d be in pieces. I think many of my kinsmen hold him personally responsible for many of our deaths in the war. The story goes that he used to work for Cassis but then turned traitor.”
“What did he do for Cassis?”
“As I understand it, at first he was just a retainer. But then it came to be known that he had ties to Dakkar, the Caprine, and the Aliente, and he was used mainly for information. Some of it probably resulted in the guns we were able to acquire.”
Damn the man.
Arsenault was always a briar patch of secrets. I knew he’d spied on the Prinze for my father, but perhaps we were wrong? Had he not been spying on Geoffre but actually spying on my father for Geoffre? Working his way up the ranks. Working his way…through me?
Or had he gone over to the Prinze after he sent me away, after he stayed to fight with my father though by then, he disagreed with my father on almost everything important?
I can’t believe it.
But Vanni said he broke. So, if he betrayed my father, maybe he didn’t do it…voluntarily.
I swallow. Mikelo is watching me, waiting for me to say something. “Do you know what happened at Kafrin Gorge?” I ask him.
Mikelo frowns thoughtfully. “Kafrin Gorge was the battle that crushed the Aliente. Afterward, your family members banded only in small groups…” He glances at me hesitantly. “…which were summarily wiped out. It’s my understanding that at Kafrin Gorge, my uncle made to parley with the Aliente forces, to allow them to offer surrender. His forces stood down, but the Aliente forces charged and my uncle had no choice but to order the gorge set afire. Your father’s forces were caught in the fire and suffered a crushing defeat. Almost none of them lived.”
He’s talking about my father and gavaros like Saes and Verrin whom I once ate and drank with—of my cousins and uncles.
“And you believed Geoffre so innocent?”
Mikelo stares at me. “It was his word,” he says.
Your uncle’s word means as much as the dirt we walk on, I want to tell him. But I’ll gain no information by trading recriminations. “You said, ‘almost none of them lived.’ Was there a record of who survived?”
Mikelo’s expression is deceptively neutral as he says, “Your captain was rumored to live, but no one knew where he was. Everyone that survived was badly burned. Our troops collected most of them and executed them afterwards. They did them a mercy, as I understand it.”
“And Arsenault?”
He shrugs. “His body was never found. To be honest, no one knew if he was at Kafrin or not. I don’t know who was commanding the Aliente forces. There were a lot of rumors swirling around by then, and whatever bodies remained after the fire were too badly burned to identify.”
“My father died there,” I say. “Didn’t he?”
Mikelo turns away to stare at the mountain. “Yes.”
So, I have it confirmed.
We walk silently for a moment. Then Mikelo says, “Arsenault failed your father. Do you really think he’ll follow us?”
Deceptive youth. I look in his eyes and see his uncle, not his cousins or his wastrel half-brothers.
“You fight to wound,” I tell him.
“Is there another way?”
The road levels off onto a plateau of rolling hills, greening with grass to be cut and baled for hay. Soon, small green olives will begin to swell on the silver-gray branches of the olive trees and tiny chartreuse bunches of grapes will speckle the hexagonal plantings crowning the hills. But right now, the lavender spikes of blooming orchids thrust up through the grass, and hedges of quince and lilac breathe their perfume into the air.
Near twilight, we veer off the road to search for wild asparagus. I hunt through the bracken to discover the stands of thin purple and green stalks, then harvest them with my knife. Mikelo finds a few mushrooms, beige with gray gills, growing under the cypress trees that form the hedgerow. He opens his hands to show me.
“Aedamma,” I name them. “Good to eat.” I follow him into the trees and take the few handfuls of forage from my skirt and place them on a large flat rock. Mikelo squats and lets his mushrooms tumble onto it. They bounce like buttons, and I put my hand up to stop them falling off.
“You seem to know what grows here,” he says.
“Not so different than our villa. We used to hunt mushrooms in the woods. It was a pastime.”
“We didn’t eat mushrooms in Baleria. When I joined my uncle at his hunts, we sometimes went into the woods for icini. It was the first time I’d eaten fungi.”
The asparagus is so green and tender, I don’t even need to strip the stalks. It crunches when I bite into it. I sit down by the rock and stretch out my feet.
“Aren’t we going to build a fire?” Mikelo asks.
“No. There are horses coming behind us.”
Mikelo stands and looks out between the fans of cypress that screen us from the road. The cypress trees stand straight in a long row, their bulbous shapes like unlit torches. “You knew they were coming?” he says. “From so far away? I didn’t see them.”
“There’s dust in the air. Look again.”
He peers out between the trees, parting their branches with one hand. Hard to see in the twilight now, but with the horses, that party should have gained on us. He lets the branch drop back into place.
“I see them,” he says.
I take another bite of asparagus. “I think you probably saw them earlier but were waiting to see if I noticed. Do you still harbor thoughts of escape?”
“Don’t you?” he says, a tight smile pulling at his mouth.
I pull a rope from my pack. “Eat anyway. It’s not too bitter.”
He glances at the trees again, a long glance, then comes to sit by me. “How far to the lodge?” he asks.
“A few more days on foot to Karansis. We’ll take horses from there. Then…it will depend on whether or not there’s still snow.”
“And after you take Driese and kill Cassis—what then?”
“That will depend on the circumstances,” I say, watching him. “If I don’t need you anymore, I’ll let you go. I suppose you could go anywhere you wanted. You wouldn’t have to go back to Geoffre.”
“And you’d just leave? You think it’s going to be that easy? You’re not going to have to deal with my uncle, or Andris, or Jon?”
“You asked what would happen if I fulfilled my contract. I suppose I’d let you go. Unless you were still useful to me. Then perhaps you could come with me. I’ve had enough of Rojornick; I’d probably run for southern Vençal. Somewhere sunny and warm.”
He holds my gaze for a moment. Still weighing the benefits of escape, the wages of whatever he perceives to be his duty, whether or not he believes I’ll do what I say. It’s easy to track the course of his thoughts; anybody would be thinking them. He picks up a mushroom and turns it around in his fingers.
“Do you think Andris rides that horse?”
“Hard to say. It could be him…”
“But you don’t think so?”
“Pounding in on a horse where everyone can see him isn’t Arsenault’s style. But it might be your uncle’s.”
“You know, in Baleria, all the mushrooms were poisonous. Some of them grew big and round as ostrich eggs. We kicked them like balls. I ate one once and nearly died. And here, you tell me mushrooms are good to eat, and I have to decide to trust you or not. From all I’ve known, fungi are death.”
I show him my open hands in a gesture of helplessness. “All I can tell you is that I’ll keep you alive as long as keeping you alive keeps me alive. But if killing you will keep me alive, I’ll do it. That hasn’t changed. I’m a gavaro, Mikelo, and that’s as much an offer of trust as I can make.”
He frowns at me. “And would you keep from killing a man because of anything else, except that his life support
ed yours?”
The horse on the road—could it be Arsenault? Bringing a Prinze patrol with him? Gooseflesh crawls up my back. I want to go to the trees and keep watch. Instead, I meet Mikelo’s gaze, dark in the fading light. “I would,” I say. “I have.”
His frown deepens, and he rises and walks to the trees instead of me. He looks out once more at the specks the other party makes behind us. “Escape is tangled,” he says.
“Trust is tangled too.” I uncoil my rope. “Now eat, Mikelo, and then I’m going to truss you so I can sleep for a bit.”
He eyes the rope, then me. “I think you’re the only person who has ever been completely truthful to me,” he says.
He bites into the mushroom and chews it slowly.
After we eat our supper, I bind Mikelo's arms and ankles. This has been our routine. I think he’ll stay, but I can’t take a chance on trust. If the pilgrims behind us should not be pilgrims but Prinze…
Mikelo rolls away from me in the leaf litter. His fingers wriggle against his back.
“Are your bonds too tight?”
“No.” His hands still and in a few minutes, his chest begins to move up and down in a steady, slow rhythm, and the sound of his breathing joins the wind in the trees. He’s not used to walking this much, and in truth, neither am I, not after wintering in Liera. My feet are all over blisters.
I ease my boots off and rotate my ankles so they pop.
“What was that?” Mikelo asks sleepily.
“Oh, probably a brigand,” I say.
He brings up his head. “What?”
“Honestly, Mikelo. It was nothing. You’re too nervous. Sleep for a little while, and if it will make you feel better, I’ll wake you when I’m tired.”
He settles his head back on the ground, hesitantly. Then he says, “You aren’t tired now?”
I am, but I can’t sleep. The feeling of being watched hasn’t subsided. “No,” I say. “I’ll stay awake a little longer.”
That seems to satisfy him. He goes to sleep, for good this time, and I sit with my back against the tree and pull my boots back on because my feet are getting cold. I watch him and think about things for a while.