The Castes and the OutCastes: The Complete Trilogy

by Davis Ashura

  The cake, or cakes in this case—ten of them—had required all of the unsweetened chocolate and vanilla Rukh’s nanna had sent to him by way of Jessira. Until this afternoon, Rukh had never had the time to use it.

  It was odd. Though Rukh was a terrible cook, baking was another matter. Maybe it was because baking had none of the messiness of cooking, where half the time the chef seemed to add spices and ingredients for no apparent reason other than a hunch or a feeling. Baking, on the other hand, required exquisite precision. With baking, exacting measurements were the difference between a culinary work of art and a stinking pile of manure.

  The laborers were already walking amongst the crowd, passing out slices of cake on small, white plates.

  The Governor-General moved to stand next to Rukh. “I know you have struggled here, and you haven’t been as happy as you might have wished,” Mon Peace said. “And I know much of it was our own doing.” He smiled faintly, as if amused by a secret only he knew. “What I did for you tonight…consider it an apology.”

  Rukh studied Mon Peace. The man sounded sincere. Rukh nodded acknowledgment. “Thank you for your kindness,” he said.

  The Governor-General gave him a companionable clap on the shoulder. “Think nothing of it. If there’s anything else I can do for you, let me know,” he said before moving on. Mon Peace had other people to greet and compliment. He was a politician after all.

  “You have a powerful ally,” a woman said in a hoarse voice as she came to stand by Rukh. It was Senator Brill River of Crofthold Jonie. She was an ancient woman—by far the oldest senator in Stronghold—an old dodderer who leaned heavily on her cane. Her hair was wispy and white, and her face was wrinkled like a crumpled piece of parchment. With her puckered lips—she’d lost her teeth decades earlier—she had a perpetually sour appearance, but behind thick glasses, her eyes were kind.

  “I’m not sure what to say,” Rukh said, still confused by the turn of events.

  “The Governor-General was a fine warrior in his time, but he has always been an even better leader,” Senator River said. “And one thing he cannot abide is false pride and useless people. I was with him when he saw you fight in the Trials.” She shook her head. “I’ve never seen him so upset.”

  “He didn’t like seeing his warriors defeated?” Rukh guessed.

  “No,” the senator said. “He was angry with the officers of the Home Army. He knew you had applied for both the Army East and West, and had been summarily turned down without even a demonstration of your abilities. He demanded to know why they hadn’t accepted you into their ranks. And later, when he learned what some of our more foolish warriors might have attempted to do to you…he was incensed. He’s ordered an investigation into the matter.” Senator River chuckled. “I’m glad I’m not an officer of the Army.” She peered at Rukh over the edge of her perched glasses. “Your commission was made upon his direct order.”

  Rukh didn’t know what to say. He was heartened to know that justice would finally be administered to his attackers, but it had taken too long, and it shouldn’t have required his victory in the Trials. He also had trouble believing in everyone’s sudden change of heart toward him. It was too neat and tidy.

  Senator River chuckled again. “We probably seem unreliable to someone in your position,” she said. “But Stronghold did not grow from fifty-five souls to the city you see now without making accommodations.”

  “It seems more like being hypocritical,” Rukh said.

  “Perhaps,” the senator replied. “I prefer to think of it as being pragmatic.” She clutched Rukh’s hands. “Turn your heart aside from anger. Some of us may deserve it, but it will only harm you in the end. You can still find a purpose and joy here.”

  “What is this…food?” Sign asked, bouncing into Rukh’s line of vision.

  “Think on what I’ve said,” Senator River said, as she hobbled off.

  Sign was pointing to her cake. “What is it?”

  “Chocolate cake,” Rukh said. “The Governor-General told you.”

  “It’s divine. Did Jessira really have this every day in Ashoka?”

  Rukh nodded. “Pretty much. I was worried she might have become addicted to it.”

  “Can that happen?” Sign asked, looking stricken.

  “No,” Rukh said with a laugh. In that moment he remembered what Sign’s peddananna and peddamma had earlier offered to him. The laughter died, and a wariness took its place. He looked about, seeking a graceful way to leave Sign behind.

  “If you’re looking for my family, they left after the Governor-General’s speech,” Sign said.

  He hadn’t been looking for them, but it was the excuse Rukh himself had wanted to hear. “Am I expected to stay any longer, or can I go?”

  “This isn’t a gaol,” Sign said, speaking as if he were a simpleton. “You can leave whenever you want.”

  Rukh nodded acknowledgment. Just as he was about to go, he paused. “Why is everyone behaving so differently toward me?” he asked. “Is it really because of my performance in the Trials?”

  Sign gave a crooked grin and dimples formed on both her cheeks. “We had a crisis of conscience?”

  “Is that a question or an answer?”

  The smile left her, replaced by a fleeting look of guilt. “Most people won’t want to admit it, but it was your victory. The way you destroyed our best—it opened a lot of eyes.”

  Rukh’s jaw clenched. “Meaning without it, I’d still be the Pureblood bastard? Not worthy of respect or justice?”

  Sign grinned again. “You’re still a Pureblood bastard, but now, you’re our Pureblood bastard. Didn’t you hear the Governor-General say so?”

  Rukh couldn’t help it. He laughed. “Have you always been so incorrigible?”

  “Only if it gets me what I want,” Sign said, still grinning.

  “And what do you want?”

  “A chance to train with you.”

  Rukh recalled again what Master and Mistress Grey had suggested for him and Sign, and his smiled faded. After learning their purpose, her presence made him uncomfortable. And for some reason, laughing with her felt like betraying Jessira. “Is this the famed Stronghold pragmatism at work?” Rukh asked. “Admit your faults, only so long as you get something back in return?”

  “If I say ‘yes’, will you train me?”

  “No. I’m still leaving for Hammer.”

  Sign frowned, looking serious for once. “We’ll just have to figure out a way to bind you to us then.”

  Teach them to long for the vast and endless sea. Only then, while caught in the teeth of a storm, will a child remember humility.

  ~Humble Offerings by Suran, AF 205

  Snow crunched as Jessira walked the steep incline of a mountain’s ridge. The sun burned harsh in the heights, and she squinted against the reflected glare. It had taken three days to reach the top of this final mountain pass, but afterward, the going should be easier, more downhill than up. Jessira paused a moment, panting as she gasped the thin air. Her breath steamed as she looked to see how much further she had to go.

  Just another few hundred yards. First Mother be praised!

  She pressed on, making her way past broken spires of gray rock, thrusting through the crust of snow and ice like the jagged remnants of ruined towers. She shivered as a knifing wind cut through her heavy garments before it moved on to moan restlessly through the ravines.

  Rukh broke the trail ahead of her, leading a packhorse. His snowshoes crabbed forward in a regular cadence of lift and fall. Lift and fall. He, too, gasped the thin air. Jessira stared resentfully at his back. If he wasn’t so damn proud, they could be safe and warm back in Stronghold. A few days ago, Rukh had won the Trials of Hume, and despite the generous offer made by the Governor-General, he had still decided to leave her home behind. And Jessira had held firm to her commitment to go with him.

  All because she had the misfortune of loving him. But it wasn’t like the ridiculous notions of young love in some Ash
okan romance. What she felt for Rukh was something else: a bond of caring, friendship, and loyalty—and, yes, desire. Even more, though, there was also a debt owed and a pragmatism wherein she hoped to change his heart so the two of them could both shortly return to Stronghold. After all, most of her people had finally realized just how much Rukh could help them.

  So, when Rukh had departed her home, Jessira had gone as well, and though she kept pace with him, to say they walked together would be a falsehood. His stiff-necked pride held them apart. He had yet to completely forgive her people—or her. Did he still think she had betrayed him when she’d let him cut her out of his life? She didn’t know, and Rukh wouldn’t talk to her about it. The situation had Jessira struggling to find her balance, and she didn’t know what to do or say to fix the dilemma in which she found herself.

  What she did understand was that neither of them was happy, and neither of them knew how to move past it. Actually, that wasn’t true. Jessira knew; but Rukh would have to take the first step. He would have to accept her decision to accompany him. First Father, she was heartily tired of his stubbornness. She was here. It was time he accepted it.

  She bit back an oath of frustration. And the price she had paid for going with Rukh would likely be steep, at least based upon the short, heated follow-up conversation she had with Disbar following the Champion’s Gala. He had been waiting for her outside the Home House. It had been the last time the two of them had spoken, and she knew Disbar’s poisonous words would damage her reputation, but she didn’t care.

  Her only regret in ending their engagement was the trouble it would bring to her family. They shouldn’t have to suffer on her account. And of course, there were those who would judge Jessira as being selfish for the choice she had made; but had she gone through with the marriage to Disbar, she would have merely been a martyr on the altar of society’s expectations. Jessira had another name for someone like that, a better name: victim. It was a role Jessira refused to accept for herself.

  She wanted more out of life. She wanted love.

  But Rukh had been cold toward her since their departure from Stronghold and she didn’t know why. Their situation together left Jessira wondering if she would have been better off staying at home. Had she does so, at least she would have had some semblance of her dignity intact because right now, following along after Rukh, she felt like his loyal dog.

  It was humiliating.

  Sometimes she wondered if she should have allowed Sign to be the one to accompany Rukh. After his victory in the Trials, talk had swiftly arisen on how best to bind him to Stronghold. The most obvious ploy would be through marriage and who would make a better choice than Sign Deep, the beautiful woman he already knew and liked? Jessira’s parents had been all-too-happy to help facilitate such a union. They had even approached Rukh at the Champion’s Gala and presented him with the proposal.

  Even if he hadn’t turned them down, Jessira would not have allowed it. At this point, there was no chance she would allow some other woman from Stronghold to try and win Rukh’s love. She’d sacrificed too much to allow something like that to happen.

  So here she was, trudging through the cold and snow, with a man who wouldn’t talk to her. Wonderful.

  Love could be such a horrible Bitch, almost as bad as Karma.

  A little less than a week after their departure from Stronghold, Rukh and Jessira found themselves traveling through a long valley amidst the lowlands of the Privation Mountains. There was no snow to shroud the ground down here in the lower reaches, but the world remained cold and damp with an incessant, icy rain. They made camp beneath the sheltering limbs of a copse of pine trees. Thin, ashen needles littered the forest floor, softening it and protecting Rukh and Jessira’s gear from the muddy ground made boggy by the icy drizzle that had steadily fallen for the past two days. The rain chilled them to the bone, and they sat huddled around a small campfire. The sound of water pattering off the leaves and ground, hissing as it struck the fire, were the only noises to be heard. The wiser animals were huddled deep in their holes and burrows, staying warm on a night like this.

  The chill wet weather; the loneliness in the world beyond their camp—all of it seemed an apt metaphor for Rukh and Jessira’s travels thus far. The darkness at the heart of their relationship had yet to brighten. Their conversations were as terse and cold as the falling rain. Rukh knew it was mostly his fault, but he didn’t know how to make himself speak the words he knew were needed. He was too angry with Jessira. The worst part was he wasn’t entirely sure why. It was monumentally unfair to her, but he didn’t know how reconcile his own feelings about the state in which they found themselves.

  Just then, Jessira shivered and inched closer to the fire. “A hot bath and a warm bed would go a long way to making me feel alive again,” she said. “I think my fingers have fallen off.”

  “If you’d stayed in Stronghold, you could have had both,” he observed.

  She stared at him, unmoving and expressionless. Her face hardened, and she rose to her feet. “If that’s what you wish,” she said. “Goodbye, Rukh.” Jessira strode to her bags and began putting away her bedroll and the rest of her gear.

  “What are you doing?” Rukh asked as she slung a pack over her shoulder.

  “I’m leaving.”

  “Why?”

  “Why do you care?” Jessira challenged.

  “I just thought.…”

  His words were interrupted when she stepped forward. Before he could react, she had gripped the front of his shirt and pulled him close. She kissed him. It wasn’t soft and gentle. There was no tenderness. Her kiss was hard, fierce, and demanding. But just before she broke away, her lips momentarily softened against his. It was an offer to share more of herself, give more if asked. The kiss was pure Jessira. It was a distilled expression of who she was as a woman and a person.

  “I thought I could handle your anger, but I never expected your hatred,” she said.

  “I don’t hate you,” Rukh said. “I could never feel that way toward you.”

  “Really? Because given your behavior the past week, it certainly seems like you do.”

  “I don’t hate you,” Rukh repeated. “It’s just.…” He ran out of words, struggling to express what he thought and felt.

  “It’s what?” Jessira asked. She dropped her pack and waited on him with arms crossed. “Is it because you think I abandoned you when we reached Stronghold?”

  Rukh shrugged. “You made a decision based on your own self-interest.”

  “Yes I did,” Jessira said. “And you pushed me to it. Whenever I came to visit you, you turned aside like you didn’t want to be seen with me or didn’t want my company. I knew what you were doing—you were trying to protect me—and I might have eventually accepted your choice. But I never abandoned you.”

  Rukh waved aside her explanation. “I understand that,” he said. “But it’s not the reason I’m angry with you. I promised your nanna that I would stay away from you. I promised to help protect your honor. I haven’t. In Stronghold, your reputation is ruined; and I can’t help think that I am to blame for it,” he said. “I feel like you would have never ended your engagement if not for me. It makes me out to be a liar and a thief.”

  Her hardness toward him softened. “And that’s why you’re mad at me?” she asked, her face a mask of confusion as she struggled to understand his reasoning.

  He threw his hands in the air. “Kummas don’t look for companionship with another man’s wife or fiancé, and yet here you are with me. I’ve lost my integrity, and after being found Unworthy, my good name and my word were all I had left. There’s nothing left.”

  “Your word and name are still with you, and so am I,” Jessira said. “It was my decision to end my engagement to Disbar.”

  “I know but—”

  “But nothing!” Jessira interrupted. “What I did, the choice I made, had nothing to do with you. Disbar wasn’t the man I thought he was. I couldn’t have married him even
if I had never met you. I dissolved my engagement based on my own needs, not yours. As such, any dishonor I suffer will be due to my actions, not yours. I am my own person, and I don’t need, or want, your protection.”

  “It’s not how things are done in Ashoka,” Rukh explained. “There, a man is expected to shield a woman from harm. Women are our future. Without them, there is nothing.”

  “In Stronghold, such matters are handled differently,” Jessira said, a dangerous glint in her eyes. “Perhaps you should remember that from now on.”

  Rukh considered what she was saying. And he thought back on how frustrated he’d been with her decision to come with him, how it put a lie to every thing he had promised her nanna and.…His thoughts pulled up short. He realized with a dawning horror how little any of it really mattered. Jessira was her own woman. She was right. She could make her own decisions. Rukh felt nauseous when he thought about how he’d behaved toward her. “I’m sorry,” he said, unable to meet her eyes. “I’m such an ass.”

  Jessira studied him, a thoughtful expression on her face. “Yes, you are,” she agreed. “And you’re also an idiot.”

  Rukh sighed. “So what happens now?”

  “What do you want to happen?”

  “Can we start over again?” he asked. “Pretend the past few months never happened?”

  Jessira tilted her head in speculation. “How do we do that?”

  He put out a hand. “My name is Rukh Shektan. I’m a Pureblood Kumma from Ashoka.”

  Jessira took his hand and shook it, smiling faintly. “My name is Jessira Grey. I’m an OutCaste from Stronghold.”

  “Funny. You look like a ghrina to me,” Rukh said. He ventured a smile, hoping she would see the humor in his words.

  Jessira eyed him with pursed lips. “Say that word to me again, and you’ll be picking your teeth off the ground.” She brushed past him and set out her bedroll.