Poisoned Blade

by Kate Elliott

  But as amazing as this feat of engineering is, that’s not what I’m looking at. From this height and through the clear desert air I think I see against the southern horizon not sky but the far-distant glimmer of the sea still many days’ journey away.

  The crow takes wing as footsteps crunch up behind me.

  “Are you the adversary called Spider?” The speaker is a sun-weathered Patron man wearing a sergeant’s tunic. He has short hair, a scar on his chin and another on his left forearm, and a limp.

  “I am,” I answer cautiously.

  He studies my face in a way that makes me uncomfortable. “I see him in you.”

  “See whom in me?” I reply, careful to use my most educated Patron speech.

  “Esladas. I’m Sergeant Oras. I was your father’s most junior recruit when he was Sergeant Esladas of the spider scouts. He was promoted out of the Desert Command after being elevated to captain. We heard one of his daughters was traveling with Lord Gargaron as an adversary.” He nods in a way that brings tears to my eyes and I don’t even understand why. “You must be Jessamy.”

  I want to ask him a hundred questions but I don’t know where to start. “How do you know I’m Jessamy?”

  “I met your family once. You couldn’t have been more than five. I had leave and wanted to tour the sights of Saryenia but had no money for such a luxury. Your father kindly allowed me to sleep and eat at your family’s home. Your mother treated me very graciously although I fear I said ungracious things in her hearing that I much regret now. I was ignorant, and she was very beautiful, and I envied your father but pretended to despise him for acting like an Efean woman was his wife.”

  I don’t know what to say. It’s as if he is asking me to forgive him for an act I have no memory of and that wasn’t directed at me.

  “My apologies,” Oras goes on. “Regrets are a burden we carry our whole lives. I hope your mother is well.”

  I can’t chance the truth. “I’m sure she understood your struggle.”

  “I hope so. Funny to hear that you are running the trials as an adversary. No reason a strong girl like you couldn’t scout as well as many of these scatterbrained lads I have to train. You were the one your father said he wished could follow him into soldiering, as a son would have.”

  I hastily wipe away a tear but he’s already seen it and has drawn his own conclusions.

  “Do you want to meet the particular spider he fought in?”

  My mouth drops open, and he smiles as if I’ve given him a gift. I wish I could share it with Amaya and Bettany but of course I can’t.

  “This way.”

  We enter Crags Fort through its single outer gate. The interior is split into two courtyards: the outer courtyard with barracks, stables, workshop, cookhouse, and wheelhouse, and the inner citadel, the stronghold where the thirty-six men stationed at this fort can hold out against a larger force as long as their supplies of food and water last. The outer courtyard is crowded with wagons waiting their turn to be unloaded and Garon Palace soldiers watering the animals. The lords and their retinues have already entered the inner gate to the citadel, where they will surely relish the chance to lie on padded couches in a cool, dark chamber before a jolting ride down a hot, dusty, precipitous trail.

  The dim interior of the spider stable smells of oil and has a disconcerting taste that buzzes on my tongue like salt. The thick mudbrick walls make the inside cooler than the outside. There are twelve stalls but only four spiders, legs folded down and carapaces tipped forward, like animals at rest.

  Sergeant Oras stops at the last stall. As my eyes adjust I see a sheen chase like captured lightning over the brass surface of the spider. It gleams enough that I can make out all the joints and curves. Even folded down at rest it is as tall as I am, pitted with wear and amazingly beautiful.

  “Can I touch it?”

  “You can.”

  I press a palm to the metal. A buzz like the murmuring of wasps vibrates up my arm, and with a nervous laugh I snatch my hand back.

  “Where do the sparks come from?” I ask boldly.

  He tenses. “That’s a question for the priests, not for the likes of me to discuss. See here.” He picks up a copper rod and taps a pronounced dent at the forward rim of the carapace, over the harness where the soldier fits in. “If the carapace hadn’t caught that blow, your father would have taken it right in the face. We could have hammered out the dent, but those of us who still recall how we almost died that day because of a cursed idiot of an officer keep it to remind ourselves.”

  “Remind yourselves of what?”

  He glances down the length of the stable but we are alone. “That sometimes you have to take drastic measures to win.”

  “You mean my father did kill the captain in charge in order to take command and save Efea from invaders?”

  “We don’t tell the story quite like that. Do you know how to harness in?”

  “Yes, Father taught me. Who scouts in this spider now?”

  “A young fellow named Cestas. He’s our newest recruit.”

  “Where are the other spiders? Out on patrol?”

  “Six are on patrol. Cestas is on fort duty. As sergeant in charge I always oversee the pulley when a big shipment comes through.”

  “Because of the gold?”

  “Gold is a word I would not speak aloud, my girl. But you’re well protected. We just had a company of soldiers from the Akheres Garrison ride through ahead of you to make sure the road is clear.”

  That explains the hoofprints, although now that I think about it, Neartos never mentioned an extra company of soldiers.

  Oras goes on without noticing my silence. “As for those two spiders, their sparks extinguished just in the last month. Bad fortune for two to go at once! We’ve had no sparks to revive them, not that we are complaining about that.”

  It strikes me as a strange thing to say, since surely soldiers in a fort like this would want all their spiders in working order. I walk down to the sparkless machines. Their brass breathes no stinging aroma; they don’t gleam. When I set a hand on the metal, I feel only brass finely pitted by a thousand thousand grains of blown desert sand over the years that this mechanical creature has patrolled the frontier.

  “Jes!” Tana calls from outside.

  “That’s my trainer,” I say. “I have to go.”

  “My thanks for allowing me to share my memories with you, Jessamy. Your father was a good man and an even better sergeant.”

  “My thanks, Sergeant Oras,” I answer awkwardly.

  Shading my eyes, I hurry out into the sunlight. Tana is standing at the gate.

  “What were you doing in there?” she asks.

  “Looking at the spiders. My father served here. At this very fort.” I’m grinning so hard I can’t stop.

  “Best you not walk around alone among Patron soldiers, Jes.”

  “No one has shown me any discourtesy!”

  “It only takes one. It will take most of the day to lower and secure all the cargo and supplies. We won’t follow until late afternoon. Lord Agalar asked if he and his retinue could watch me put you three through a training session. He seemed very curious to know how you ‘acquire your skills,’ as he put it.” She snorts. “He’s kind of an ass, isn’t he? No offense to donkeys.”

  I laugh, and I seethe, but I wonder if Bettany put him up to watching me run a trial as an excuse to have a chance to talk to me.

  Tana leads me outside the fort toward what looks like a corral with high mudbrick walls and climbing posts tall enough to be seen over them. Agalar and his retinue are sitting expectantly on a shaded viewing terrace while Mis and Dusty stand in the doorway of a ready room built into the enclosure’s wall. They are drinking cups of chicken broth. I change into my practice gear and take a cup as well. Just as we are finishing, a young Patron man barely older than us dashes in, glances at Agalar’s party, then runs over to us.

  “I’m Cestas!” he says to Tana, bouncing on his toes with so much
excitement that it’s charming. By the way he talks I can tell he is Efean-born of Saroese ancestry, not an immigrant from old Saro like my father. He’s wiry, tall, and enthusiastic. “Sergeant Oras said you needed a fourth for a trial. It’s an honor to run against the famous Sergeant Esladas’s daughter!”

  Mis snorts audibly. Dusty pretends to bow to me as if I am a highborn lady.

  “Very well, Cestas,” says Tana with her best unimpressed face. “Start with a warm-up round of menageries.”

  Heat pours over me although the sun is not yet a handbreadth above the horizon. My muscles warm as we pace from cat to wasp to tomb spider. My awareness of Agalar’s incisive gaze and Bettany’s silent presence at his side falls away as my thoughts focus on the stamp of my feet on the ground, the movement of my arms, the jump and turn into a crouch, the stretch into a forward bend.

  Just as we finish warming up, an unexpected final audience member arrives. The fort’s priest is an older man with broad shoulders and an intent gaze made disturbing by the fact that he has no eyes, just empty sockets not even covered by patches. A crow sits on either shoulder, and I suddenly wonder if one is the crow that watched me at the cliff’s edge. To my surprise the priest flashes us four adversaries the kiss-off sign as a gesture of respect just as if he can see us.

  I get the draw to start on Rivers and take my place. The court is clearly hand-built by the men themselves over years, a standard beginner’s course, but its level of sophistication doesn’t matter to me. I want to show Bettany I haven’t been selfish, that the things I’ve worked for mean something, that she should be proud of me and not leave us and the only home we’ve ever known. That Efea means something. That we can make it mean something through our actions.

  The start bell chimes.

  Lacking water for Rivers, the soldiers have constructed rocking benches and circles of wood resting on wobbly bases to run across, made more difficult by varying balance points so the center is not always the best spot to place the foot. I make it across but Cestas knows the court well, giving him a considerable advantage. I decide to go to Trees next to grab a panoramic look over Traps and Pillars.

  So it is that when I climb the highest post in Trees I pause longer than I normally would to examine my surroundings. Mis balances easily on a slack rope in Traps. I don’t see Dusty. Cestas enters Trees behind me.

  Something seems off. I pause a moment longer, instincts tingling.

  All along, the regular thumping grind of the pulleys being turned as a cargo bin is lowered down the incline has sung as a rhythmic background, like drumming to build tension in a play. My gaze drifts over the fort walls to the wheelhouse shelter just as I realize I’m holding my breath waiting for the next thump, which never comes.

  Over by the pulley Sergeant Oras staggers into view with an arrow jiggling in his neck. As I stare in speechless astonishment, hardly able to believe I am not sitting in the high seats at the theater, he folds over like an actor bowing at the end of a scene and falls to the ground.

  18

  I stick two fingers in my mouth and whistle the three-tone pattern Father taught us girls, which he called “the desert alert.” In a flash of wings one crow takes off from the priest’s shoulder. A moment later the sentry in the watchtower sounds a trumpet blast. Soldiers bolt for the inner gate to take refuge in the citadel, just as another two men stagger from the wheelhouse with arrows sticking out of them, like dolls stuck with pins. Armed men holding shields over their heads swarm out of the wheelhouse. These new soldiers wear the uniforms of the Royal Army of Efea, and that confuses the Garon soldiers and the fort’s defenders for an instant too long. Their hesitation allows the attackers to pick off several of the sentries on the wall as well as cut down men who are trying to shove the cargo wagons into the citadel.

  The priest turns to Agalar. “Get to the citadel.”

  “Wait!” I call down from my post. “If we go into the fort we’ll run straight into the line of attack. The enemy is already inside the outer courtyard. What about the spiders in the fort?”

  “Curse it,” says Cestas. “Do you see any attackers outside the walls?”

  I scan but see nothing except an eerie landscape filled with places an enemy can hide. Even the spider scouts from earlier are missing. A fierce misgiving flares in my heart. This can’t be random. Inside the fort the fighting breaks into clusters amid the wagons. The priest scrambles down the terrace with the confidence of a man who knows exactly where everything is as he and all the adversaries converge on my post in Trees.

  “We must get in by the roof, Cestas,” says the priest. “If we climb in through the roof trap before they suspect what we mean to do, you and I might get two spiders out.”

  Someone has shut the citadel gate, leaving the men in the outer courtyard to a cruel fate. From up here I see Sergeant Oras roll up to his feet as he snaps the arrow’s shaft in two. Blood is splattered down his shoulder like red paint, but although the point pierced the skin of his neck it appears to have hit nothing vital. He staggers for the spider stable and, vanishing inside, slams the door shut.

  “Sergeant Oras has gotten inside!” I call down.

  “We must free the trapped spiders!” says the priest.

  He and Cestas bolt. As Agalar and his people begin climbing down the terrace, I descend the climbing post so fast I get a splinter in my palm. The sting focuses my mind but before I can say anything Bettany trots up, looking more cool and collected than she ought.

  “Hey!” she calls to me. “Just stay in the Fives court, don’t get involved, and I promise you it will be all right.”

  “People are already dead! We have to go!”

  “Will you listen to me, Jes? You won’t be in danger if you stay out of sight. They’re only after the gold—”

  “That’s what worries me! What will they do when they find out the gold they’re looking for isn’t there because Lord Gargaron—” I break off as I remember the hidden gold is a secret I must keep. As I realize Bettany shouldn’t be so calm, as if she knew an attack was coming.

  Agalar steps into view like a wolf that has finally cornered its victim. “Where is the gold, if not in the cargo wagons?”

  He draws his sword, and Bettany does nothing to defend me. She just stands there.

  She can’t be in on it.

  She can’t be.

  She’d never do this to me. To Amaya.

  Where is Amaya?

  Tana nudges me from behind with a wordless message, then steps forward to place herself between Agalar and me.

  I run, Mis and Dusty right behind me.

  From behind, Agalar shouts, “Get after them! Kill the priest and destroy the spiders. Move!”

  We grab the gate and shove it closed.

  Dusty shouts, “Jes, go after the priest to warn him. We’ll find a way to fix the latch to keep them penned and then follow.”

  I don’t even acknowledge them as I race after Cestas and the priest, whom I chase around the outer wall of the fort. Off in the distance I spot riders approaching, and I still don’t see any spider scouts coming to save the day. The sentries on the wall either are casualties or have gone down to join the fray, so when I catch up with Cestas and the priest no one has yet noticed us.

  Where a crude stick figure of a spider has been carved at the base of the wall, Cestas starts climbing, finding invisible handholds and finger’s-width ledges with the skill of a person who has made this ascent many times. I suddenly remember one of Father’s stories about a secret entrance he built into the spider stable as an emergency way in. He said people forget that spiders can climb.

  “What are you doing here? Go hide!” The priest’s back is to me but the crow on his shoulder, facing me, bobs its head aggressively.

  “We’ve walked into a trap! Lord Agalar is working with an enemy to steal the gold. The riders who got here ahead of us are part of it. They want to kill you and destroy the spiders.”

  I flex my hands, marking each hold Cestas used, the
n start up after. The priest follows. Desperation gives me wings, hones my instinct so fine it seems my fingers find each handhold without my even thinking of it. Just as I reach the top of the wall an arrow sings past, a whistle of death an arm’s length from my head. I duck, roll past a downed sentry, and slam into Cestas, who is lying prone on the roof of the spider stable. A half-open gap in the roof shows where he was pushing away a trapdoor cut into the roof.

  When I shake him, he gurgles and rolls over.

  He has an arrow in his eye.

  The whole world goes cold and dark. My vision blurs out. I can’t see but my hearing sharpens. Each crash of sword against sword, the grunt of a man hit and falling, even Cestas’s pulse as his blood leaks out of the dreadful wound: all hammer like thunder, a noise that drowns out the rest of existence.

  Until an arrow thunks into the roof next to me and a slap on my back jolts me.

  I’ve been hit.

  The priest scuttles past me. “Move! Help me open this.”

  He’s the one who slapped me. I haven’t been hit at all.

  Together we shove the trapdoor aside, then he grapples Cestas’s legs and shoves him into the opening. The young man falls, and hits with a sickening thud. A crow flaps past me into the interior. The priest swings down inside. As another arrow hits beside me I follow, hanging by my hands and then dropping.

  The moment I hit the ground a blade taps my head from behind.

  “Stand down!” says Sergeant Oras.

  “It’s me! Jessamy.”

  The sword drops away. “Curse it, we can’t rescue you, stupid girl.”

  “Grab the boy’s ankles,” says the priest.

  In the windowless stable a strange glow glimmers into being as the priest, now wearing gloves, shakes out a lacelike netting exactly as the other priests did that day in the King’s Garden. He’s kneeling by one of the sparkless spiders.