by Tammy Salyer
The Knights settled Irrick in a midship storage closet with a stout door. He roused from his odd stupor enough to hiss at them in his strange new way, unsettling both Safran and Roi, but Mylla was too spent to be bothered by it now. Upon returning to the launch bay, the Knights listened as she told her tale both audibly and channeled using her Mentalios for Thorvíl’s sake, who was watching the helm.
“Asteryss has completely fallen . . .”
By the end of it, late evening bruised the skies. With her back rigid, she faced the Stallari Regent, readying herself for the rebuke for her brazen and unsanctioned leave that she knew was coming.
But Eisa surprised her. “I’ll look into the Scrylle to see if it can tell us anything about what’s happened to Irrick and how to cure him of Balavad’s curse. Go to the hold and get something to eat, Mylla, then catch a few hours of sleep. You’ll be on helm watch later. I’ll speak to Stave and have him direct the Vigilance south.”
Without another word, she exited the docking bay. Speechless, Mylla watched her go before turning to Roi and Safran. “Did I miss something?”
Roi twitched an eyebrow and offered the old expression, “Don’t question a gift given by a shadow, for it can never reclaim it.” He was right; it was probably best to just forget the whole thing and move on. They would soon be facing an even more unpredictable situation: the people of the Empire of Dyrrakium.
With their help, Mylla set about securing the dragørfly scout, and they all retired to the hold together, Safran and Roi seeming to realize that comfort from friends at the moment would nourish her better than any food could.
Did he say why he chose to stay? Safran asked as she set out cups and shook tea leaves into strainers. There was no need to say who “he” was.
Collapsing into one of the seats, Mylla said tonelessly, “His family is there. The city is his home. And he’s not a Knight. He felt his contributions would better suit those with whom he is closest.”
She was punishing herself, and she knew it, by minimizing the connection, and the commitment, she and Lock had made to each other by speaking of herself as his lowest priority. They’d met when he was twenty-three, a fresh inductee into Wing training, seven turns ago now. Though filled with youth’s usual bravado, his eyes had held a quality that had drawn Mylla, a recognition of kindred spirits, perhaps. No other person in all her turns had made her feel as . . . herself . . . as he did. Lock had awoken her to the notion that there was more than being a Knight. Because she’d been too young to know her parents or her past, her life in the Conservatum had been her only identity. By virtue of who he was, someone who’d rejected the Conservatum to pursue goals of his own, she’d considered what it might have meant for herself to choose a life beyond the Knights. Just imagining it was a freedom she’d never known she was missing. And now he was gone. It seemed easier to pretend none of the past seven turns had happened. Maybe if she pretended long enough, she would come to believe it. She had a very, very long time to find out.
Safran placed a steaming mug in front of her, and Mylla automatically wrapped her hands around the warm crockery. She wasn’t cold, but the heat soothed her. “All things being equal,” she went on, straining to hide the bitterness in her voice, “I suppose I’m lucky. Eisa might have shredded me for going against her orders.”
You accomplished the mission. There is nothing for her to be quarrelsome about, Safran said protectively. The Vigilance and the vessel are safer for now. In the morning, we’ll decide our next gambit.
“What do you think she’ll want to do with Irrick—if we can’t find a way to cure him?”
“If he is cursed by a Verity, we may have no hope of countering such a thing. Eisa will likely recommend we free him from this unnatural torment.” Roi’s words dropped like stones on Mylla’s chest.
“No,” she argued. “He has been nothing but loyal to the Conservatum, and to us. We can’t reward that with an . . . execution.”
Roi chose to fall silent on the matter, but Safran frowned. We’ll keep faith in that fight, for now and always. He was a good friend and a stalwart servant of Vaka Aster. We’ll find a way to help him.
Mylla tried to ignore her reference to Irrick in the past tense. After a moment of contemplating her cooling tea, and finding no hidden hope there, she voiced her fear, “Eisa has served the Order too long. She’s forgotten how to care about anyone, to feel anything for others. She only knows how to be dutiful. She’s just . . . heartless.”
Roi set down his own cup. “It isn’t that she’s forgotten. She had a heart, but it betrayed her. And she killed it.”
She and Safran eyed him, trying to make sense of his cryptic words. Mylla asked, “What do you mean?”
“She is bound to protect the vessel. Her feelings for another put that charge to the test, and she was forced to make a choice. You can’t understand because you didn’t know her in days past, when her oath was still in its spring and her duty had not yet been tested.”
Combat, wysticism, Verity lore: most of Mylla’s skills came from Eisa’s tireless and grueling—sometimes cruel—training, endured both while Mylla had still been an acolyte at the Conservatum and after she’d taken her oath to Vaka Aster. The older Knight had spared no trial or test to ensure Mylla more than earned her right to be asked to join the Order. And though Mylla had spent endless hours under Eisa’s yoke, Eisa had never said a word about herself beyond the indirect telling of the grandness of their shared heritage, the Empire of Dyrrakium. And even those few moments of insight had been delivered with the subtle implication that Mylla didn’t deserve to call herself a Dyrrak, and never would. All of which had resulted in Mylla never even considering asking Eisa about her own past.
Safran said, Roibeard, tell us what you know. If Eisa is to lead us, we deserve to understand who she is. And who she was.
Roi leaned back in his seat, his aged leather breeches sighing at the motion, still as stiff in places as their wearer was. Looking toward the ceiling, he thoughtfully rubbed the mark on his chin. “You know she is a Dyrrak,” he finally began. “For five centuries, some thousand turns after the War of Rivening, before the kingdom was exiled, the Dyrraks once again tried to mend their bonds with Yor and Ivoryss. Eisa came to the Conservatum then. It wasn’t until after the Dyrraks murdered the old Arch Keeper of Yor—if you believe the common history—that she renounced her heritage. At least as far as commoners were concerned. It was the only way to keep them from turning on the Knights, knowing we had a Dyrrak among us.”
The way he blinked when his gaze fell back on them made it appear as if he’d forgotten they were near. “This was shortly after I swore my oath to the Order, when she turned away from all the kingdoms and stamped out any final loyalties she still had to commoners, all commoners.”
He stood and walked to the kettle, leaving Safran and Mylla to share their surprise in silence. Mylla hadn’t known any of this. Carrying the kettle—not by the handle, but holding it with both hands wrapped around the piping-hot body—Roi returned and placed the pot before them. Lifting his hands, whose palms were as red as the fires that had scorched Omina, he pondered the lesions for a moment. “If you live long enough, no matter who you are, you begin to forget the feeling of pain. You grow so tolerant of it that it no longer has much effect on you.” To illustrate his point, he held his palms out so Mylla and Safran could see them. The burns were already gone. Mylla thought back to her wounded shoulder of yesterday, a gash that should have stopped her. But she’d merely noted it and continued to fight until it healed. “Pain of the body, anyway. Pain of the heart, it seems, does not ever become tolerable.”
He poured more water into his teacup and stirred it with a finger. “Before the Cataclysm, she fell in love with a commoner. The commoner betrayed her, and the Knights, so Eisa killed her. And that was the last time Eisa acknowledged Dyrrakium publicly, or, as you have observed, Mylla, acknowledged her own heart. But trust me, she still has one.”
His story finished so ab
ruptly, Mylla wasn’t sure if she understood. “She loved a commoner? But she holds them in so much contempt.” It made a stark, perverse sense, but it was the last reason for Eisa’s attitude toward the people of Vinnr she’d have thought of.
“Come here, novice. Let me show you.” He withdrew his Mentalios and waved at them to hold theirs up. “Clear your minds and listen to my memories.”
She had to fight down discomfort at the overwhelming intimacy of looking at another’s memory, but curiosity compelled her to do as he directed. With Roi holding their wystic lenses in a stack, she and Safran stared into their centers while he closed his eyes and took a long breath. Mylla focused on nothing, as she’d been trained, and for a moment her mind clouded as if filling with fog. What could only be described as a powerful wind pushed through this, unnerving her with its intensity—but then she was somewhere else.
With a blink that was only in her head, she found herself in an unfamiliar pub, sitting at a long table with several others beside a roaring hearth fire. Laughter and the sounds of a poorly but enthusiastically played lyre and flute flooded her ears, but it was the woman who sat across from her who grabbed her attention. She looked young and carefree in the way she was dressed in a low-cut flaxen smock that draped off one shoulder, with her hair, long, black, and curly, left to flow unbraided down her back. As Mylla watched, the woman let out a raucous laugh at something the clearly Yorish ginger-headed woman next to her said, and the laugh wrinkles beside her steel-gray eyes showed her real age.
Eisa?
It was clearly her. The shaved sides of her head, the Dyrrak fashion, the black, already fading tattoos made this obvious. But her as a vigorous woman full of joy, utterly unlike the Eisa Mylla knew and could barely believe had ever existed.
A moment later the redhead leaned in and whispered something in Eisa’s ear, and she looked directly at Mylla—or it seemed she did—with a look of mock surprise. Then she turned and grabbed the woman’s cheeks and kissed her long and full, not caring that those at the table laughed at their zesty display.
A hand that seemed disembodied rose before Mylla and held out a bowlful of bread. “Bread, Eisa? Lillias? By the looks of things, you’ll need your energy this evening.”
The voice belonged to Roi and carried an amused lilt that was also unfamiliar. Mylla realized this was the past, and she was seeing a night they’d dined together at a public house through Roi’s eyes. Eisa disengaged from the kiss and took the basket, saying, “Even a Knight Corporealis needs a night free of duty on occasion. Consider that a lesson, novice.” She smiled impishly but kindly at Roi, not in the acerbic and biting way Mylla was used to.
She mused at how strange it was to hear one of her elders being referred to as “novice” as the fog blew back inside her mind. She waited in the stillness, her only companion a sense of foreboding. For Eisa to have been capable of so much happiness, whatever the betrayal was that had changed her and robbed her of anything but the stoic, merciless warrior aspect, it must have been unthinkable.
When the wind blew her mental sight clear again, Mylla stood in a quiet night-darkened quiet hallway. The only sounds were breathing and muffled voices coming from a door in front of Roi’s eyes. Eisa’s back was to him, and in the stillness, a pulsing blue glow came from her hands. She took a backward step, raised an armored leg, and kicked the door open. Roi rushed into the room behind her, and Mylla sensed the form of another Knight at their backs. Roi’s arm rose, but his great blade, clenched in both hands, never swung. There wasn’t time before the six men and two women within had jumped to their feet preparing to defend themselves but been downed by Eisa’s klinkí stones.
All but one.
The ginger-haired woman, whom Roi had called Lillias, faced them with an unwavering glare, though fear and more than a hint of resignation blanketed her face. Eisa’s stones formed a ring around her torso, leaving the redhead no option for advance or retreat.
“Betrayer,” Eisa said, the word sounding forced through a locked throat.
Lillias looked pointedly at the stones, then at Roi and the other Knight, then back to Eisa. “I am the betrayer? Hah. Dyrakkium, your homeland, attacked my Arch Keeper, killed him, and you and your Knights offered nary a whit of aid. Who is the betrayer here, Eisa?”
“I am not my people, and this is not the Knights’ fight.”
“Isn’t it? Isn’t watching kingdoms go to war and then sweeping in like a plague to take over once too many have died always what the Knights Corporealis do? Like flies on carcasses. Your Order,” the woman nearly spat the word, “would rather see innocents burn than help save them. I tried, Eisa, I tried to get you to see reason, to help Yor, and you refused!” In her rage, she forgot the ring of deadly stones circling her and lunged.
Eisa let her, opening the stones just enough for her to pass. She stopped on her own and remained where she was, the full measure of accusation in her eyes lit by the stones’ cerulean hearts.
“So you and your accomplices plot in the dark against us when you should instead be rallying to your kingdoms,” Eisa said.
Mylla knew that tone. It carried a deep and festering bite when Eisa was angry, and the way she’d said “your” was meant to emphasize the divide Lillias had called out between Knights and commoners of all kingdoms.
Lillias, however, seemed to hear it as an admission of the betrayal she accused Eisa of. “If we didn’t,” she said, “what would the Knights’ second-in-command, the great Dyrrak warrior Eisa Nazaria, have advised her Order to do while our backs were turned?”
The orange glow of wall lamps embedded around the room in small alcoves illuminated Eisa’s face. Mylla saw her eyes sparkling with heavy but unspilled tears and her lips trembling. She seemed incapable of speaking.
The woman’s expression relaxed, but the softness looked to Mylla to be calculated. She could easily guess how Eisa would react as the woman said, “But, perhaps, it isn’t too late, my love. We can convince the people of Yor that the Knights are on our side if you would simply share your secrets. Entrust the protection of Vaka Aster to the people of Yor. Share your Knights’ secrets with us all so that this betrayal never happens again—we must be protected from our enemies! It will be enough to show where your fealty, all of yours”—her eyes swept once again to Roi and the third Knight, whom Mylla had not yet seen—“truly lies.”
Eisa’s mouth pulled into a tight-lipped frown. “Truly, lies are all you’re capable of, Lillias.” In a harder voice, she went on: “Our fealty is not a bargaining chip for fickle folk to play with. Our duty is not to weak-minded commoners without loyalty to anything but their own schemes.”
“Then that is your choice,” Lillias sneered, “and we have made ours. The Knights will be overthrown, as you deserve to be. Not by the good people you killed here tonight, but there are others.”
No one moved for a drawn-out breath. Then Roi said, “We can leave her, Eisa. She’s no more threat to us. The Stallari awaits us in the Vigilance and our retreat is planned. The Knights and the vessel will be safe.”
Eisa remained motionless for another moment, then flicked her wrist and pulled back her stones. “Meet me outside,” she said without looking at Roi.
“Are you certain?”
She didn’t respond, and Roi and the third Knight backed through the doorway. An ominous tick of the clock passed, then Eisa came out. In the lamplight, Mylla saw a strange curved blade in her hand and her sleeve saturated with blood.
“Eisa?” Roi said.
She walked by him, never slowing, and repeated Roi’s words: “She’s no more threat to us.”
The fog descended, and once more Mylla blinked into the present in the Vigilance’s hold. She looked at Safran, and her friend’s troubled return glance told her she’d seen the same thing. “Why?” she asked Roi. “Why did she kill them? Why did the Yorish people make those accusations against the Knights?” What she knew of from history was the same as what this memory had shown: the Dyrraks attempted to
overthrow Yor by killing their Arch Keeper. They’d unleashed what had been called the Cataclysm, a worldwide expulsion of Dyrrakium from the rest. They had not immediately given in, and the short war had been bloody.
Roi draped his Mentalios over his neck and tipped back his cup to finish his tea. Mylla remembered hers, now cold and unappealing waiting at her fingertips. She drank it anyway, trying to wash away the bitter taste Roi’s shared memories had left in her mouth.
“Their folly isn’t their fault. It’s the cycle.”
“Cycle?”
“If you are a Knight long enough, you will understand. People, the common people, don’t have the advantage of knowing history the way we do. For them, it is a shadow of a past they are left to remember, and memory fades. For us, it lives on and never fades. War, civilization, life, and death. These are the cycles that continuously govern them. Things come and go for them, and they forget.
“We Knights are caught in the repetition, even though we live apart. First we are feared and resented, and they blame us for troubles that they cause but can’t control. Then we leave them behind for a time and come back later to find we are tolerated once more, even sometimes welcomed. And if we let them, commoners will eventually come to revere us, or worse, to worship us. Letting them has come close to the undoing of the Knights in times past. Then a war or a sickness or a disaster happens once again, and we are the first to be blamed, and again, feared and resented—we become their target because we are flesh and blood like them, unlike Vaka Aster, whom they’re afraid of and who is untouchable. It’s happened dozens of times in Vinnric history. Temporality is all commoners’ chief frailty. They just can’t help themselves.”
Maybe they don’t want to, Safran put in. She stood, seemingly shaken by the experience. I’m going to look in on Stave.
Mylla and Roi nodded goodbye and remained at the table. After a time, she asked, “Why, Roi? Why does this cycle repeat? Vaka Aster could intervene, couldn’t she?” She thought back to Lock’s words in the catacombs. Even if Vaka Aster were here to swear allegiance to, how could I serve her when she allowed this to happen? “Why let people repeat mistakes that could be avoided?”