by Ben Peek
“People will come to find you, even here,” he said. “You will find no sanctuary from your name here.”
“But the kind of people who come here will be different. Here, they will not ask me to change the shape of the world.”
For a moment, Zaifyr did not understand. He would not ask another to shape the world for him, not even one with a legacy as long as Samuel Orlan’s. No, if he wanted to reshape the world, he would do so without permission. “My brothers and sisters would not allow that, either,” he said, finally.
“No,” the cartographer said. “But their kingdoms are larger, and the people in them are less and less beholden to those you call family.”
Zaifyr’s attention drifted to the pages on the table, to the faint, half outlines of hands that pressed the pages flat, that stopped the expensive vellum from rolling. “Settle your family in Asila if you want,” he said, softly. “But you are not my responsibility, Samuel. My responsibilities lie with others.”
He did not hear the three leave. He remembered looking up, some time later, to find that the room was dark, and that snow had begun to drift through the open window. He could not, even now, remember if it had been snowing when they entered. He remembered rising from his seat. He could see a haunt’s faint hands on the glass, looking to close it, but he did, instead. The moment was rare. Of late, he had been giving more and more of his power to the dead, allowing them tactile sensation within the world in the tower. He could feel their desire for more, could hear their whispered words, but he was still, at that stage, resisting.
When the cartographer returned, he did not bring his wife or daughter. He came alone, but, Zaifyr admitted, not unwanted. He found a chair on his third or fourth visit, and placed it in front of the desk, where the two would talk for hours. Samuel Orlan’s conversation was not difficult, but it was not long until Zaifyr began to sense in the cartographer a mind that was relentless in its search for information, a mind that, despite the proclamations of neutrality and a desire to be left alone, was full of politics and agendas; here was a man who kept his own council on what took place in the borders he drew, and who believed he had ownership in what took place in them.
In that way, the Seventy-First was no different from the current Samuel Orlan.
To him, to the Samuel Orlan who had sat beneath his lamp in Mireea, Zaifyr said, “I am not saying that I will help her.” His voice was neither slow nor disused, as it had once been. “It may not be physically possible. I want you to understand that.”
“It is no ordinary time on this mountain,” the old cartographer said. “You know that, yes?”
“It is not my intention to get involved in this war.”
“Of course. I would think nothing else.” Samuel Orlan rose from his chair, and turned to the door. Before opening it, however, he said, “I often wonder how it is that your brothers and sisters define their place in the world. It is hard to walk away from what you once held as your own—hard, I think, to watch it fall to events that you disagree with so vehemently, events conducted by men and women you have little respect for.”
Zaifyr shrugged. “That time is over.”
The cartographer inclined his head. “Of course.”
Yet, after the old man left, his words followed Zaifyr, followed him to the window where he watched the other man disappear into the streets. Once out of his sight, Zaifyr pulled down the blankets of his bed and climbed beneath them and let the implication of Orlan’s words sink in. As he began to fall asleep, he was struck by a sensation that there was a profound revelation in Orlan’s words, a truth that even Zaifyr, old as he was, would be surprised by.
But as he fell asleep, he knew that the thought was but a lie, and that no such truth existed.
3.
Outside the Spine’s Keep, the dark, cobbled streets of Mireea led Ayae into narrow alleys and to the cracked paving stones around the recently constructed crude walls.
Lady Wagan had been most understanding after Ayae told her no. The sympathy in her voice had come as a surprise, just as the ease in which she had said it: Ayae had expected the thread of steel in her tone to harden, for her request to become a command, one that she could argue against. She had been prepared for a fight—had been preparing for a fight since Fo and Bau—and without it, she had risen from the chair awkwardly and left. She fumbled with the door as she pulled it closed and her frustration at herself, and her expected response, was such that, by the time she had walked through the corridors and emerged at the front of the Keep, she had decided to visit the witch, Olcea.
Olcea was one of a dozen witches who lived and worked in Mireea, but was the only one of them that Ayae knew, personally. Faise had introduced her six years ago, when the two had been looking for work. Both she and Faise had been living in the orphanage at the time, aware that they could not continue to do so much longer: they were already old girls, girls whose public schooling was soon to end, and there were always new girls arriving, always a need for their beds. Neither Faise nor Ayae had much of an idea about their future, but what they did know was that they were growing tired of the long dorm that was their home, the narrow beds and slivers of personal space they shared with close to fifty others, and so they had begun what other girls (and, on another floor, boys) had begun: they searched for a way out.
The options available to them were limited, but it was Faise who found a solution first, with a job offer from the witch.
“It’s not an apprenticeship,” she explained, later. The two sat out the back of the orphanage, staring at the tall, dark form of it from one of the long tables that was kept for lunches and classes. The lamps inside the building had been lit and it looked as if dozens of eyes were watching them. “She wants me to finish the schooling here and do tasks for her. There’s an older girl, a real apprentice, who is leaving and I’m going to do some of her work. Like, go to the markets, bring her groceries, keep the house clean. Maybe I’ll learn some then, but who knows. She mostly wants me to travel to Yeflam. It’s not great work—” neither Faise nor Ayae could define great work yet “—but it pays well enough.”
Well enough that once Ayae began accompanying her down to Yeflam, they could rent a two-bedroom apartment.
Until Ayae became Samuel Orlan’s apprentice, Olcea had been the financial salvation of the two girls, a middle-aged woman moving into old age: neither Faise nor Ayae had ever known skin darker than hers. She spoke softly, a private woman who kept the palms of her hands wrapped to hide the pink skin there, as if years of work with blood and bone had worn away the pigment. On her more expansive days, Olcea told them stories of her youth, telling them that she had been born on the coast of Tinalan. She had been driven out in her mid-twenties by a series of race wars that had come from the heart of the Marble Palaces. She had lost both her children there, killed by a soldier whose head she kept in a jar at the back of her house—a head she called Hien—and on more than one occasion, as the girls finished up for the night, or arrived early, they would overhear Olcea talking to it, as if they were old friends. She was a strange woman, a witch who seemed to know more than she let on, who lived in a ramshackle house that always needed work, and who had a steady stream of girls from the orphanage to do that. She hired girls to fix the roof and tidy the garden, girls to run errands and write notes for her, a steady stream of orphans on a sliding scale of pay, learning, Ayae suspected, skills for once they were older.
According to Faise—who spent more time at the shop than Ayae—most of Olcea’s customers were women, also. They came for a variety of reasons, and the two would discuss the stranger ones as they rode the witch’s wagon down to Yeflam, the one-month round trip ample time to cover a range of topics. “She has had a lot mercenaries recently,” Faise said, on one trip. “Some of them are young, some not, but they’re all armed. Guards, swordswomen, soldiers: they have a lot of cuts and scars they have her attend to. Though the other day, one of them brought in a copy of one of those cheap mercenary novels for her and to
ld her she was in it.”
“Was she?”
Faise grinned. “For a chapter. She said if she could do half of what it said, she’d be a queen.”
For the most part, the journeys between Yeflam and Mireea were without incident. On their first trip Olcea had begun a ritual she kept for every trip—a conversation that was a list of the dangers she knew—to ensure that they slept in the back of the wagon when on the road. After that first time, however, she need not have worried: four nights out of Mireea, Faise had pulled the wagon off the side of the road and the two had crawled into the back, tired and sore from the days of riding. Ayae had been unable to fall asleep immediately and she had lain awake, staring up at the night sky instead. Outside the city, the stars seemed so bright, so endless and, with the thought in her mind, she had stared up, lost in them until she heard a crack, followed by the grunt of a man and the sniff of an animal.
Rising, she saw not a single man, but half a dozen men. They emerged from the trees around her, gray mongrels leading the way, their noses pressed to the ground, tails leveled like lances behind.
She was unarmed, just as Faise was, and her hand tightened around her friend’s arm, partly in fear, partly to warn her.
The dogs clearly had the scent of something, and for a second, Ayae had feared that it was either her, Faise, or the hulking, black ox Olcea owned; but the beast itself had made no move at the sight of the men or the animals and, as the men and dogs walked around and past it continuing down the road, it became clear that they could not see the animal, nor the two girls sitting in the back. She held her breath, and saw that Faise had done the same, and the minute that the six men stood around the cart dragged out for a year of both their young lives, for the rest of their youth passing at such speed and potential horror that, should they not have moved away and crossed the road when they did, Ayae was not sure what she would have done.
“The girl I replaced,” Faise whispered, after the men had disappeared into the dark woods on the other side of the road. “She said Olcea paints this wagon in blood once a year.”
The same wagon Ayae saw now, the same wagon attached to the same hulking black ox, the same wagon and ox outside Olcea’s shop, half filled with furniture.
4.
“I don’t know why I bothered to break the chains,” Zean had said as he pulled a long coat off one of the men he had killed. Behind him, the lords and barons had gathered around their middle-aged Prince and were plotting their return. “I don’t have a wealthy blood brother any more and they would have turned a nice profit. Even the old ones.”
“But who would have thanked you back home?”
He swung the brown hide coat over his arms. “To think, I would have missed my chance at being exiled for kindness.”
The memory still made Bueralan smile. Around him, Dark were filtering through the lower level of the barracks, passing around drinks and food, pausing only to watch when Aerala grabbed the edge of her hammock and dumped Ruk from it. He had told them about the company of Samuel Orlan, of how the cartographer had made it clear that he would accompany them, and they had taken the news well, accepting the added responsibility it put on them with a grace that he himself felt he did not have. It was a stark contrast to the hours after his rescue, when he had been the only one to find grace in the rescue. He could still remember the whispers, the hushed conversations taking place away from him and Zean, and the look of shock on Jehinar Meih’s face when he said that he would not be returning to Ooila. Surrounded by those few for whom he had become a beacon to return to their privilege, the exiled prince had become leashed, and was now being driven, much like the mule that had led them across the border—though as Zean said, when Meih drew closer to them, the mule would have at least known that it was a beast of burden.
“Don’t miss this opportunity, Baron Le,” Jehinar Meih said, his protective ring half a dozen paces behind him, his face steadfastly turned from Zean. “We have been given a second chance by your man. We can still bring thought and progress to our country.”
The ten days that Bueralan had spent with the fifteen men, stripped of their positions, and their rights, had shown him that their revolution had been one built on the back of self-interest and misogyny. The last was the harshest realization, for he had not thought himself capable of such a motivation; but he had believed that the First Queen had represented a cultural and intellectual stagnation, that her statements against slavery and inequalities of wealth and gender were nothing but lies to calm her populace; he had said that her birth and feminine link to power was a gift from a dead deity. The irony that their revolution had grown out of the very thing they were born with—their rank, privilege, political strength and disrespect for the First Queen—was late in arriving, but nonetheless true.
Yet, when the exiled prince left with his court, he left with his back straight, proud and defiant. For a moment, Bueralan thought he made a mistake, one that lingered until months later when he heard of the prince’s death. His execution was thanks to those who had urged him to return home, who had sold him for the promise that they would not end up like him—a promise the First Queen had kept only in terms of how they died.
By then, Bueralan and Zean were two continents to the east, crossing Leviathan’s Blood as poor sailors until they reached Yeala, where no one knew his name. There, he had begun the path that would eventually lead to Dark—there, he and Zean had sold their swords in three battles and, finally, one war.
It had been a small war, a series of battles in a long chain of animosity between two families who had, in Bueralan’s mind, long forgotten the reason of their feud. The opinion was shared by Serra Milai who, taller and darker than either Zean or Bueralan, had told them that was typical for most of her experiences as a mercenary. “Feuds born from the hate children suckled on,” she said, after she and the mercenary band Sky had been dismissed by Lord Feana. They had won his small war, taken back land that had been lost two generations before. In front of them, Serra rolled a silver coin stamped with the Lord’s balding head across her long, strong fingers. “Their coin all spends the same, but their hate wears on you, sure enough.”
She had a plan to reinvent Sky. It had never been a large unit, never been defined by a single battle or event that would demand huge fees, or result in any of the fictions that had become an important part of success, but it had been loyal and long lived. Now, though, a lot of Serra’s soldiers were retiring, purchasing land that was offered by Feana at a cheap rate to seed his success around him. She hadn’t been surprised: Bueralan, turning introspective as he eased onto one of the chairs in the barracks, suspected that Serra had taken the job so that her aging soldiers would have that opportunity. It had not been for her, however.
She had offered him and Zean (“You and your boy,” she said) a job in the new Sky, a job to be intelligent with, a job to slip in and out, a job to disrupt, to step out of full pitched battles and instead work more subtly.
“It’s still warfare,” she said, when she first brought it up. “Sabotage work. It has some killing, but nothing like you’ve seen over the last month. None of the tent hospitals, none of the witches with pens of small animals to butcher for your healing, none of this glory shit that is becoming so popular. No one will ever need to know who you worked for.”
After she had left, Bueralan turned to Zean and asked him what he thought.
“Someone always knows,” the latter said laconically. They were sitting in a small bar, in a booth at the back. “Which is maybe why this is not the kind of work we should be doing.”
“Not enough renown?”
Zean met his gaze. “I know you like the sound of it, but this work is not so different from what we did for Meih.” He was never the Prince. “Working weak links, plots within plots, pitting your intelligence against someone else’s and seeing who comes out best.”
“You think I like it because I want redemption?”
“Do you?” he asked.
“No
.”
“It was a big mistake getting involved with him.”
“It was,” Bueralan admitted. “How’d you feel after the last battle?”
Zean leaned back, shrugged once. “Lucky.”
“We were lucky; we’re not soldiers.”
“We would learn it.”
“Would we?” he said. “You would be happy to dig ditches, clean latrines and stitch yourself up with pig gut until you earn enough rank to pay for a witch?”
“Your privilege is showing.”
Bueralan grinned.
“But yeah,” Zean continued in a drawl, “I’m not fond of the dog work.”
“We’d not last.”
“We won’t,” he agreed, “but you still haven’t answered the question: what happens when the First Queen finds out that we’re essentially revolutionaries for hire?”
5.
Ayae had not seen Olcea since the night before Faise left, but if the witch was surprised to see her arrival under the night’s sky, it did not show. “Ayae.” In the lamplight, the streaks of silver in her thick black hair shone, but her face was tired and lined, even when she smiled. “I have heard your name spoken of a lot recently.”