by Sonia Lyris
“Turn her over,” Tayre ordered, motioning to the girl, face down on the ground.
Clutching his wrist, giving an agonized look at his bow lying feet away in the dirt, the man lurched to the girl and pushed her onto her back with his foot.
She was not Amarta al Botaros. Disappointing, but not surprising. He doubted any of the other Kusani were still alive to tell him anything. Maybe the attackers knew something.
“Why kill them?” he asked. “Any of these could have led you to the girl.”
Swallowing hard with pain, he said, “We only need the head.”
“You do know it has to be the right head, don’t you?”
“It is the right head.”
“What makes you think so?”
“She has the cloak. The one we were told she wears.”
Hunting the cloak. Not the girl.
Idiots. These two clearly knew nothing of the hidden city or the whereabouts of the seer.
“Who hired you?” he asked.
“No one. I—”
The next bolt went through his shoulder. The man screamed.
Tayre dismounted. “Who hired you?” he asked again.
“The Lord Commander. No, no, please don’t, I—”
It was, alas, the answer he had expected, so he sent the third bolt through the man’s throat to keep him quiet for a bit, but alive, in case Tayre wanted more answers. The man’s mouth moved silently as he slipped to his knees, hands clawing at his throat.
Tayre bent down to touch the girl’s neck. Dead. The cloak was definitely the seer’s—he remembered the unusual strip of blue on the hem, now bloodied.
What did all this mean? That someone had taken the cloak from her was the simplest and thus most likely explanation. But she could see into the future, making this far from a typical situation. He had to assume what he was looking at now was no accident.
Did she know he would be standing here right now, watching this girl’s blood seep out of her into the cloak, this garment that used to be hers? Had she predicted his intent here today and acted to thwart him? Or was this all instinct to her, as a horse knew to snap at a fly, or a cat to kill a mouse?
He confirmed that each of the Kusani was dead. As clumsy as the attackers were, they were competent enough against the Kusani; not a pulse remained to question.
Too bad all around, he thought, standing, gaze sweeping the land from the road leading west to the deadlands to the eastward hills that went to the market towns that were the wagon’s original destination.
While the road was rarely traveled, it would be in time. The Kusani might even come to investigate when their people failed to return. Best to clean up and move on.
He put his knife blade up and through the heart of the attacker still gurgling and clutching his throat, and inspected the second attacker, a man so young he could barely grow a beard. He lay keening, curled around his stomach, the bolt having sliced through his kidney as Tayre had intended, accounting for the obvious discomfort. A few more questions of the young man gained Tayre no new insights, so he twisted the man’s head sharply and let him die.
As he stripped the cloak off the dead girl for closer inspection, he came to the conclusion that the seer was no longer here. Not in the deadlands, not in Kusan. Her cloak on this girl, so close in age, could be no accident.
An intriguing mystery, Kusan, but for now one best left hidden. By the time he returned with force sufficient to take the underground city, he was confident she would be long gone, the trail again cold. He could not, with that level of expenditure and visibility, afford to be wrong again; it would exhaust what little credibility he still had with the Lord Commander.
So it seemed this event had changed his mind after all.
Had she foreseen all this? Was she clever enough to have engineered it? If he had decided to apprehend her alive, before he had the Lord Commander’s permission to kill her, would she have acted otherwise?
How many moves ahead could she see?
He stopped himself from this line of supposition. Guessing at what she might foresee based on his intent would get him nowhere. Short of examining her up close and with sufficient time, this was no more than circles of speculation and excessive conjecture, a trap as surely as his previous underestimation of her had been.
He must reason from immediate evidence. He turned slowly, looking for any other clues in the scene of slaughter before him.
Another thought occurred to him, born of another set of rumors entirely. He knelt down and made a second, closer examination of the fallen Kusani, looking at their eyes, scalps, brows, and arms. They were all blond.
Even more interesting: Kusan, it seemed, was at least in part a slave refuge. It did not change his plans; while a city of Emendi was a prize of significant worth and something the Lord Commander might even be interested in, making slaves had nothing to do with this contract nor his determination to find the girl.
The seer had turned into a potent adversary. Acquiring her, breathing or not, was all that concerned him now.
He had to admit that it might not be possible. His uncle, the man who had raised him and taught him his craft, had also shown him how to find the edge of the possible and go beyond it. That meant finding the place where what you knew wasn’t enough, where your very conception of the world kept you from understanding the next step.
Find the unknown. Make it known to you.
He would find her, study her, and complete his contract. However long it took.
With that thought he rode the dead bodies up into the high hills, putting them deep in the ground. The wagon and carthorse he would take to one of the small towns where those he knew would make it vanish for him.
Then he would search the deadland roads again for the girl, her sister, and the now-walking boy-child. Most likely she would continue southward, heading toward one of the coastal port towns or cities. Possibly even Munasee.
The trail was there. He would find it.
Chapter Seventeen
Maris wandered the coast and its many harbor towns, spending some of the money that Innel delivered monthly to her, listening to the news of the approaching coronation. When it arrived in midsummer, festivals unfolded across the land, turning into boisterous and inebriated revelries that Maris knew were mere echoes of the extravaganzas occurring in the capital.
It had been over half a century since a monarch had been crowned. Despite her cynicism Maris found herself caught up in the optimism embedded in the celebrations. She wondered if the queen might bring more than a new face to her coins.
But Maris did not enjoy the festivities for long, making camp in a deserted collection of lightly wooded hills at the edge of a beach, sleeping on the dunes. With the rise and fall of the surf, roar of the waves, scent of brine, and cry of gulls, she could feel the tug of the salt water and had very nearly decided to contract as crew and return to the ocean again.
Of course, she already had a contract. With the crown. For which she had taken coin.
She stayed.
She felt the man riding along the beach toward her before she saw him. Young, trim, clean-shaven, his rust-red and black surcoat hemmed with a messenger’s white. Another horse followed along.
He rode up to her. “Marisel dua Mage?”
She nodded affirmation, wondering how long he had been searching the countryside and beaches for her. From the way his throat tightened and his heart sped at her nod, she guessed this was the first time he had met one of her kind. No surprise, his reaction, in this land where a loathing for magic was as common as poverty. Odd, she had always thought, when the Shentarat glass plains in her homeland should have served as a more terrifying reminder. Perhaps rumor was more compelling than evidence.
They were beautiful mounts, the horses. Large and brown, happy and healthy. It cheered Maris to draw herself up onto the saddle of this powerful animal that was well cared for and wanted no more from the day than the chance to run and to eat.
“Nalas,�
� he answered as they rode north, when she asked his name.
“And you are . . . ?” she asked, prompting for more.
“Confused,” he admitted with a rueful smile. At her look, he continued. “A half-year ago I was honor guard to the princess’s intended. His second, I suppose. Now he’s Lord Commander as well as Royal Consort, and all the other things he takes care of. So am I second? To which? I rather doubt I’m second as consort to the princess—the queen,” he quickly corrected, then shrugged. “Things have been a bit confused since the coronation. Forgive me for the lengthy explanation, High One—”
“Don’t call me that.”
He winced and fell silent. “My apologies,” he said at last.
She nodded, the touch of regret at her sharp words tempered by the realization that this was probably why Innel had sent him, to be charming while escorting a potentially touchy mage to the capital. His manner was easy and kind, and she found herself relaxing somewhat. Credit to the Lord Commander for thinking ahead.
Her mood soured again when they reached the crowded outskirts of the capital, the crowds thick, a morass of struggles and impulses, of maladies and miseries. She felt them pressing in, their ills palpable.
She reached focus down through her horse’s legs and into the earth, borrowing his animal ease, finding some measure of calm in each hoof step. Solidifying her ethereal shield muffled somewhat the increasing splashes of pain and hunger but did not block them out altogether.
Yarpin’s city gates were twisted wrought iron, stretching upward, cumulating in high, sharp pikes, as if to claim even the sky.
What will Arunkel not eat?
When last she had been here, the Grandmother Queen was a handful of years dead and Restarn had finally produced his heir. These events seemed to spark a frenzy in Restarn, who had then set in motion another massive Anandynar expansion. As his armies spread across the land, stomping flat tribes and towns and city-states who had previously thought to rule themselves, Maris had gone deep into the countryside. Inspired by those with the temerity to resist Arun rule, she helped the many who needed her, applying skills she had herself only recently come to own.
She found herself at a village deep in disputed territory and advised them on how to resist the avaricious Arun army, only to watch helplessly as the village elders decided they would instead pay the tribute the new rulers demanded, even though it was obvious it would smash them into poverty and starvation. Her warnings fell on deaf ears; they simply refused to fight.
She moved on, giving what she could, but too many needed too much. She could not help them all.
The ocean of suffering Iliban.
When exhaustion finally drove her into retreat, she went back to Perripur, where unification fever had sparked to flame, the confederated states finally willing to put aside their differences to organize an army to fight against the encroaching Anandynars. A united Perripur would have been undefeatable.
But it never came to pass. Restarn proved too canny to tangle with his southern neighbor, keeping his forces well north of the border states.
She was bitterly disappointed. A conflict with Arun would have taken Perripin attention from domestic squabbles, put it north, where it belonged. But lacking a credible Anandynar threat, the states were content to stay independent and bickering. As long as Restarn did not cross the border, they would not bother to resist him.
While, above the borderline, the Anandynar king simply took what he wanted.
As their two horses passed through the gates, people surged out of their way, and they watched those who watched them. Here Maris’s foreign looks brought curiosity; it was Nalas’s uniform that attracted fearful, suspicious glares. The king’s soldiers—now the queen’s—had not been well-liked. That had not changed.
Was Yarpin, she wondered, truly worse than the other Arun cities, like Munasee or Garaya? Or was she letting the disturbing memory of Keyretura color her assessment?
It was worse, she decided: there was a keenness to Yarpin’s heaviness, as if somehow the avarice of the empire burned hottest here, using the potency of human suffering as fuel, producing a dark smoke of agony that spread outward in all directions.
The actual stench was impressive as well, coming from the sewers and the corners of city walls that served as both trash heaps and scavenger piles.
As they passed, a ragged woman stood to watch, one side of her face intact, the other melted, the monarchy’s sigil branded on her face where her other eye used to be.
The king’s justice. The queen’s now, Maris supposed. Before she quite realized it she had sent a bit of herself into the woman’s body. Hunger, injury, pain. What had she expected? She withdrew quickly.
At the edge of an alleyway three men crouched in a circle. One threw dice across the stones, his other hand tight around the arm of a small boy. As the dice came to rest, he held up the boy’s arm with a triumphant yell, drawing the terrified child deeper into the alleyway, leaving little doubt as to his fate. A sense of sick despair came to her.
She could make it otherwise. Dismount, follow them into the alley. Take the boy away from him. No one could stop her. But would she be anything more than his new captor? She could imagine the look of horror in his eyes as he realized what she was. To release him again only meant he would be back in someone else’s grasp before long. There was no winning that game.
For a moment a man paced them, hopping along on one leg, hand trailing a brick wall for balance. Then he stopped, shook his cloak off to reveal a wrist stump, which he jerked up and toward them. Nalas looked straight ahead as if he had not seen it, though Maris suspected otherwise. The man wouldn’t have dared the gesture, Maris knew, if not for the messenger’s white that meant they were unlikely to stop. Maris had seen Arun soldiers dismount for milder offenses, and the offender had not even limped away.
What had the man done to lose two limbs? Touched an expensive item in the marketplace, perhaps. Or hopped too slowly out of the way of some aristo out for a ride.
Fingers extended, she reached her focus downward below the stones and dirt and basements under the buildings, deep beneath the layers of human remains and debris, farther past all touch of humankind, taking stability from the earth itself, bringing it back into her body and mind to keep the cacophony at bay.
The more of Yarpin she saw, the better she remembered why she didn’t want to be here.
As their mounts ascended the steepening main road, eager to reach home, they passed merchant mansions. The lanes to either side widened. First the Lesser Houses, then the Greater Houses—estates of dual-color splendor, towers reaching high, sigils snapping in the ocean breeze.
But beyond, the glinting Yarpin palace dwarfed them all, rising above the palace walls. At the gates to the palace grounds they were waved through.
What, she wondered again, was she doing here, atop this fine horse, contracted to the very monarchy she abhorred?
It seemed that while Yarpin had not changed, she herself had. When she was done here, she promised herself, she would go home to Perripur.
Of course, memory waited there as well. Perripin faces swam in her mind’s eye, those she had not been able to save, from her parents to friends to countless strangers. The few who had cursed her across the years were bad enough, but worse yet were the many who should have cursed her but who, instead, praised her with their last breath.
Even working for the Arun monarchy was better than that.
She was escorted through high-ceilinged halls lined with lavish tapestries depicting mining towns joyously celebrating beside Arun soldiers, or tribes expressing gratitude for Anandynar rule. History was written by those who owned the looms.
And now those she passed were well-fed and well-dressed. None missed limbs or were ill. She felt an ease come over her, and something like self-loathing followed close behind.
At a room with doors higher than anyone could need, with windows that looked out into the gardens of red tulips, stood the man she had met
in the Ill Wind, whom she now knew to be the Royal Consort and Lord Commander.
“Marisel al Perripur,” he said, dismissing the scribes and soldiers who filled the room. “On behalf of my queen, Cern esse Arunkel, welcome to Yarpin palace.”
He was impressive in his uniform, the black collar glinting with royal gold, mixed-metal buttons down the front atop rust-colored amardide fabric. Maris realized that she had not truly met him before. These were his colors, not the nondescript clothes he’d worn at their meeting at the Ill Wind. Had he dressed thus in that meeting, would she have agreed to this contract?
“Please,” he said, inviting her to sit at a table with him.
At the center of the table was a bowl of fruit. She picked out a green lilikoi, grown in southern Perripur, far distant. Such wealth.
“Our gratitude, Marisel, for coming to us here.”
So very polite. With a mage, respect first. Reason later.
She had agreed to this obscene contract, she could say. She regretted it now and would return his money and go, she could say.
Instead she bit into the lilikoi, sucking out the pulp through the hole she’d made with her teeth, as she had when she’d been a child. Tart and sweet, it brought her memories of bright, hot summers full of ease and childhood delights. Before Keyretura. “And so I am here,” she said, hearing the weight in her tone. “What do you want of me?”
“What can you do?”
“I have many skills,” she answered, putting the lilikoi aside to pick out a ripe peach. “Among them arithmetics, high-elevation farming, circular harp, and birthing babies. Shall I give you a complete list?”
It smelled marvelous, the peach.
“We can discuss something else, then. News of Perripur, perhaps?”
This was how one caught an animal in a trap, with bait like the fruit she held in her hand. She frowned, put it back on the table. “Are you so badly in need of company that you must hire a mage to find it?”
His smile froze for a moment. “I meant no insult.”
She waved the apology away. “We’ll both be happier if you simply tell me what it is you want of me.”