by Ben Peek
‘No.’ Despite her actions, Zaifyr’s voice did not rise. ‘No, I hadn’t talked to the dead. Jae’le was right. But your Keepers did not leave me much of a choice in Mireea. Fo, especially.’
‘They were children.’
‘None of us is a child.’
‘They were, compared to you.’ She walked down a hallway to the back of the house, to a room that was flooded with light. A dusty, sun-faded table sat in the middle, a pair of chairs on either side. ‘But it does not matter. You’re here now,’ she said. ‘Here to stand trial for both their deaths. Here to abuse laws you do not respect. At least tell me that Jae’le had no idea that this would happen – at least tell me that this is not some plan that the two of you have created.’
‘I already told you that what he said was true.’ Zaifyr watched as she placed the bottle in the middle of the table. ‘He will not be happy, either.’
‘When has he ever stayed angry at you? Or you at him?’ Aelyn pulled two glasses from beneath the table and blew into each to clean the dust out. Once she had finished, she met his gaze. ‘I warned them, you know. Fo and Bau. I sent them a message, telling them that you would be there and that they should avoid you. I told them to treat you like Mireea and keep neutral.’
‘They failed Mireea as well.’
‘I know.’ A note in her voice suggested that the conversation was one that she had had before. ‘I do not want war, Qian,’ she said. ‘Those days are long gone for me. I had my fill in Asila. I had my fill before that and after that. Yeflam is a neutral country. I fought to make it so. I spent the last bit of fighting in me bringing it about. Now, instead, I am interested in education, in philosophy. I want to write about the nature of gods and how they influence our world. I want to prepare for the day that I will be a god – and I want to prepare the people for that as well.’
‘You’ve made a treaty with the Leerans, haven’t you?’ The realization occurred to him with a faint surprise. ‘With the child god?’
‘The Leerans call her that, not I,’ Aelyn said. ‘I imagine that the child is like you or me, and I expect this will prove true when I meet her. When the Enclave met the Leerans, it was through a woman named Estalia.’
‘Why would—’
It was she who interrupted him this time. ‘Take a look around you. Yeflam is a nation that will number four million people within the decade. On Ger’s back, Mireea is nothing compared to us. Even to call it a nation is to believe it is something that it is not. If some other nation – and Leera is a nation – wishes to go to war with the Lady of the Spine to control her lucrative trade route, what is it to me? I own the oceans in this part of the world. Any treaty I have with Muriel Wagan is easily put aside to keep war from coming to my country and my people.’
‘Except now,’ Zaifyr said.
‘Except now.’ Aelyn’s hand did not tremble as she unstoppered the bottle. ‘Now Muriel Wagan brings me the killer of two of my brothers and I must offer her sanctuary.’ The wine that began to fill the two glasses was so dark that the afternoon’s sun could not lighten it. ‘The Leerans will ask me why I allow that and I will say that it is so my brother can stand trial for crimes for which he will never be punished.’
‘The Leeran Army is no threat to you.’
‘I did not say that.’
‘Then what are you saying?’ He picked up one of the glasses, one of his silver charms hitting the side of the glass as he did so. When she did not answer, he said, ‘The child is a real god. I met her.’ In the dusty room around them, haunts of dead men and women began to fill the room. ‘I met her, Aelyn,’ he repeated, ‘and she is not like us. She is not a piece of divinity lost in a mortal. She is divinity. She was pulled out of the earth in Eakar. Ask Jae’le, if you do not believe me. He saw it happen and did not tell us about it. But it does not matter. What matters is that she is not a complete god. She does not have a name and she relies upon the dead for her power, much like a witch, or a warlock. Only, unlike them, it is she who keeps the dead in our world. She who has locked them away from salvation or oblivion. It is she who creates the misery you see around you. If we do not strike at her, if we do not kill her now, she will visit that misery on us, and on everyone else in this world.’
‘When I met you,’ she said, after a moment. ‘The first time, so long ago now. When I met you then, you sounded like this. You and Jae’le both.’
‘He is not here.’ The ghosts around them began to fade, their shape disintegrating beneath the afternoon sun’s light, until nothing remained that she could see, or hear. ‘And I am not that man any more,’ he said.
‘I truly hope so, brother.’ In her hand the glass was still, the red wine untouched. ‘For that man left nothing in his wake.’
4.
By the time the last of the tents had been erected, pamphlets and newspapers had begun to fall onto Wila.
The afternoon’s sun had sunk behind the black ocean when the pieces of paper began to settle on the dirt and sand. For a while, they went unnoticed: Lieutenant Mills, white and grey-haired, had finished recording who would share with whom when a piece of paper came snaking along the narrow lanes. It stuck on the cloth of a freshly staked tent, where it was picked up by a guard. Ayae was one of the next to pick up a piece. It was a single sheet of Yeflam’s dirt-coloured recycled paper, with the words GO BACK HOME written in big, block letters on it. When she showed it to Caeli, who stood next to her, the guard swapped her for one with a drawing of the Mireean people standing on the edge of Yeflam. They were tipping the great stone city as if it were a boat, tipping it into the waiting Leeran forces, which held swords and catapults and stood on the bones of their enemies. Ayae balled up the picture in her hand and turned to the stone platform of Neela behind her, where the city’s lamp revealed children throwing the papers over the edge gleefully.
‘Lovely,’ Caeli said beside her. ‘Just lovely. Nothing makes me happier than adults using kids to say what they’re afraid to say.’
Ayae did not disagree. ‘I thought Neela was a Traders’ Union city.’
‘It is. Surely you’re not surprised?’
She was, a little. On the mountain road to Yeflam, Benan Le’ta had assured Lady Wagan that the Mireeans would be welcomed in Yeflam. They were refugees, he said. He had walked through the crowd, shaking hands, greeting both men and women. People will be sympathetic to your plight, he had continued. They will understand. Aelyn Meah would have no choice but to release all of your people into the cities after a few days. He said that he would personally advocate it. The other representative, Faje, had made no such promises. Ayae had thought that Faise, who had arrived the same day as Le’ta and Faje, had been unnecessarily pessimistic when she heard what had been said. ‘Wila is a prison,’ Ayae’s oldest friend said to an unsurprised Lady Wagan. ‘All the islands are prisons. When you stand on one, you’re not standing on Yeflam, and you are not subject to Yeflam law. Basically, you have no rights.’
Faise had arrived with her husband, Zineer. A slender, bespectacled and balding white man, he appeared sombre in comparison to his wife, who was small and plump and brown-skinned. She wore a green and purple silk shirt with black trousers over black boots, each article meticulously kept, unlike her husband, whose laces were frayed and the edges of his white shirt stained with ink. The two had been forced to wait until Le’ta and Faje had left the next day before they could speak to Lady Wagan. Ayae had been surprised when they told her that the Lady of the Spine had sent a letter requesting their presence. Still, she had been pleased to see Faise, happier than she had thought possible to spend a night beside a woman whose companionship was unconditional and who, in the face of the animosity that some Mireean people held, responded in a much less complex way than Zaifyr.
‘There is no excuse,’ Faise said, when Ayae told her why people were acting that way towards her, after she had told Faise that she had changed. ‘I mean, what if you decided to set their hair on fire?’
‘I’m not going to se
t their hair on fire.’ Though I’d like to. ‘I’m trying to be understanding. It is a difficult time.’
‘How about her?’ Faise pointed at Keallis, the dark-haired white woman who had been a city planner. ‘A hair-burning would teach her not to stare.’
Despite herself, Ayae laughed. ‘Maybe,’ she admitted.
Keallis was before her now, one of a handful of people who had been assigned the job of collecting the paper by the lieutenant. The tents were so tightly pegged next to each other that there was no room to avoid the woman as she and Caeli made their way past. Keallis regarded Ayae coldly, but if Muriel Wagan’s guard noticed, she gave no indication. They continued to the tent that the Lady of the Spine had taken for her own. It sat on the northern side of the island and was the largest in the makeshift city, though Ayae would not have said that that meant much. The tents that it was compared to were no more than narrow dirty pieces of cloth on a triangle of wood; Muriel Wagan’s tent was simply square and nearly normal sized.
The Lady of the Spine had a collection of pamphlets laid out in front of her when the two women entered. Two had drawings of Lady Wagan on them. She pointed at the one furthest from her and said, ‘That one isn’t a bad likeness of me – if I was to be holding a knife at your throat and had an army of ghosts behind me, that is. It even calls me the Lady of the Ghosts.’
In the guttering light in the tent, Ayae could see where the responsibilities of the last three weeks – perhaps the last year – had left its mark on the woman. Her solid middle-aged body slid more easily into fat and her red-dyed hair revealed grey roots, while the bags under her eyes had darkened considerably. ‘The presses must have been printing these for at least a week before we arrived,’ she continued, the humour leaving her voice. ‘Preparing to drop this on us. How are people taking it?’
‘In their stride,’ Caeli replied. ‘A few will probably blame Ayae, either because she didn’t stop it, or because she’s here, but any excuse for those people.’
She had noticed, then. Ayae offered a half-shrug to Lady Wagan. ‘It’s not important.’
‘You’re showing more dignity than they deserve.’ The older woman waved for them to sit on her cloth floor. ‘You’d think that they wouldn’t so easily forget what you and Steel did for them. Or that the cure for Fo’s disease came from Zaifyr.’
‘Some people haven’t forgotten,’ Ayae said, taking a seat.
‘Good.’ The Lady of the Spine began to pull the pamphlets together. ‘But still: when you get an offer to leave, take it.’
That surprised her and she said so.
‘The Keepers won’t leave you here,’ Lady Wagan explained. ‘You may not be part of their Enclave, but you are one of their kin – you’re an inheritor of a god’s power. They won’t leave you here. They won’t be able to stomach it politically.’
Ayae thought about leaving Wila, about stepping off the island that reminded her so much of her youth. ‘I couldn’t do that,’ she said, despite her thoughts.
‘You could,’ Lady Wagan said bluntly. ‘And you will. They may have allowed Aned to stay in Yeflam, but he won’t be able to do everything for us alone.’ She lifted the pamphlets. ‘And I doubt he’ll have any chance to advocate for us with the Keepers and stop these papers, either.’
Ayae did not want to agree. Leaving Wila would be taking a step away from the shared responsibility of life on the island and the collective experience of pain that it held. She had not understood that when she had been a child in Sooia, when she had lived behind the walls, with adults fearful of the Innocent’s army, but in the years that had followed, she recalled fragments of the words that the adults had spoken and the importance of community. She understood the idea of a shared burden now and recognized the responsibility that people had to each other. It was something, even with people like Keallis, that Ayae felt was important, especially now, when she felt that she knew intimately what other Mireean people would feel in the coming months. She was about to tell Lady Wagan that when the tent flap was pulled back and the silver-haired white healer Reila led two men inside. A stretcher lay between them, and on it lay Lord Elan Wagan, a thick bandage tied around his face to hide the damaged sockets where his eyes had once been.
‘They would not take him?’ Lady Wagan stood, her body releasing a sigh as she did. ‘Not even for mercy?’
‘Le’ta said that he would be better here,’ the healer replied. ‘With people who loved him.’
Ayae let her words go unsaid. With a brief nod, she and Caeli left the tent, leaving Muriel Wagan with her husband, with the burden that she had to shoulder alone, in the absence of her daughter. Ayae remembered that when Lord Wagan began screaming on the first night that they were on Wila. The sound, brief though it was, did not spare a single man or woman on the island, but they could return to a sleep that Lady Wagan would not find.
Ayae lay in the tent she shared with Caeli. In the quiet that followed the screams, the guard said, ‘The sedatives are doing less and less.’
‘If ever there was a cause for mercy . . .’ Ayae said, staring up at the fabric roof. ‘But to spare him his pain . . .’
‘Is to deliver him to more.’ Caeli was silent for such a long time that Ayae thought that she had fallen back to sleep. But then, ‘I had the plague in Mireea,’ she said, ‘the first signs of it.’
‘You got the shot, though?’ Ayae asked.
‘Yes,’ Caeli said. ‘A day before you went into the tower.’
‘Good.’
‘I used to be like that planner, Keallis,’ she continued. ‘Well, not as bad. But I had my doubts. Cursed people were a problem. That was my opinion. My mother and father used to say it all the time. It’s not right to blame my parents, but when I think about where it came from, I guess it is them. Lady Wagan wouldn’t tolerate me saying it, so I kept it to myself, but still, it was there. I thought it.’
‘It’s okay.’ Ayae didn’t know what else to say. ‘Really.’
‘No, it’s not. You have to admit when you’re wrong. Maybe you don’t have to say it aloud, but you have to admit it.’
‘You don’t have to say it.’
‘But I am.’ Caeli fell silent, but this time, Ayae knew that she hadn’t fallen asleep. She knew that she lay on her back, staring at the low ceiling. ‘You know that she is right, don’t you?’ Caeli said, after a minute. ‘About leaving, that is.’
‘Yes,’ Ayae said softly. ‘I know.’
5.
The Captain of the Spine, Aned Heast, was not with Muriel Wagan and the Mireean people when they were led down to Wila.
He had been sent into Yeflam two days before. On the night he left the mountain camp, he did so alone, on foot, and with no fanfare. He was, once all descriptions of him were reduced, a man who wore the decades he had lived beneath the broken sun with a sword at his side and a hand out for coin. Upon first sitting opposite him, many felt that his weathered features and pale-blue eyes belonged to a man who had little pity, who weighed their worth against the money he was being paid and little else. People had always said that of him: in his youth, men and women said that it was because he had suffered the loss of a young love; in the decades after he had lost his leg, people who met Heast said that something had broken in him, that a kindness that existed in the hearts of other men had left him with the limb. Neither version was the complete truth, but he did little to convince people otherwise. When he first lost his leg, enough men and women had known what else he had lost that their words had an echo of truth, but the words were now repeated by those who knew nothing about it. He was thinking of that when, an hour outside the camp, he discovered Benan Le’ta waiting for him at the side of the moonlit road.
The merchant had not impressed Heast. A short white man, Le’ta’s weight rolled down him as if he was a pear, but with a square and stubby head atop his shoulders. It was he who, once the siege had been laid in Mireea, had sent the letters demanding that the two Keepers, Fo and Bau, be put in chains and brought to him
, if the Mireeans wanted his help. It was an impossible request, but then, in Heast’s mind, Le’ta had planned an impossible scenario. The merchant imagined a public hearing of the two Keepers’ crimes in Mireea and he believed that such a hearing would provide him with leverage, if not against the Keepers, then against his own political enemies in the Traders’ Union. The sharp letters in Le’ta’s handwriting had admitted that to Muriel Wagan in the first week after Mireea fell. Indeed, when Le’ta first rode into the camp, Heast thought he was going to throw a tantrum and stamp his feet. If it had not been for the presence of Faje, and Aelyn Meah’s desire to keep Zaifyr away from the Floating Cities, he might very well have done so.
‘Le’ta will turn on us once we are welcomed into the city by the Keepers,’ Lady Wagan had said, hours before Heast left the camp. He had gone to her tent to bid her goodbye, to tell her of the orders he had given to his soldiers and to Lieutenant Mills, who would assume command while Heast was gone. ‘He is an idiot.’
‘You agree with what Faise said, then?’ Faise had arrived on the same day as the ambassadors and Heast had done everything he could to lose her and her husband in the camp while Le’ta and Faje were there. ‘That it will be nothing but a prison?’
‘It was plain to see before.’ Muriel looked tired. She had not been sleeping well, but he could not blame her for that. ‘Le’ta will try and use us as political leverage rather than work with us. It almost makes me wish that Lian Alahn had remained in power. It would have been a different situation if he had – but we will have to make do with what we have.’ She handed him a folded piece of paper. ‘Faise and Zineer will meet you at this location the day after we arrive.’
He took the paper, pushed it beneath his old, worn leather armour. ‘Essa sent a note. He and the Brotherhood are in Yeflam.’
‘Good.’
‘He is not happy about it.’