The meaty smell of their midday meal met his nose, and Kett fought back the memory of many such meals taken in this very home.
Kett edged his tone. “Not today, Salah. Go get your father.”
Salah looked up into his eyes, confused and a little hurt. But she went, leaving the door ajar. He listened in the stillness. All movement of the crowd on the road behind him had stopped. The scurry of feet inside his friend’s home receded. Then heavier steps approached, and Reelan pulled the door open wide.
His friend’s face showed a pleased look at the sight of Kett, and quickly fell when his eyes moved past him to the Bar’dyn and the waiting crowd of onlookers.
Then, Reelan’s eyes found the branding across Kett’s shoulders and chest. In a soft voice, he said, “You’re given. It’s as you planned.”
He shook his head almost imperceptibly. Reelan knew of Kett’s tribunal, of his ploy to get close to the Quiet as a means to gain their confidence and the information that might help them escape the Bourne. But his friend didn’t know why he came to his home this day.
“Close the door,” he said. “Leave your family inside.”
Reelan gave him a puzzled look, but did as he was asked. “Why have you brought Bar’dyn here?”
Kett wished he had time to explain it all. Together they might even have thought of a way out of this. But it had all happened so fast, and he hadn’t had time or opportunity to communicate with any of his fellows.
He looked back at his friend, trying to convey as much with his expression as he could, but found his face incapable of saying so much. And further hesitation in administering his newfound duty would be reported back to the Jinaal. He must do this now, or not at all.
May the Fathers forgive me.
He spoke loudly, so all could hear. “Reelan Sotal, you are a known separatist and are charged with sedition against the Quietgiven who protect and sustain you.”
Another confused look touched Reelan’s face. “What are you doing?”
“There will be no tribunal, Reelan Sotal,” he continued. “I know about your conspiracy, because I was part of it. But that was before I found a better way. The right way.”
Reelan shook his head, and spoke low, so only Kett could hear him. “Is there no other way?”
Kett nearly faltered. He nearly gave up his ruse. His friend had a family. Just as Kett did. It was the reason he was trying to get them out of the Bourne to begin with. He had to hold to that. And he was closer now. He knew the Jinaal were seeking a labraetates, a singer with the same power of song the Mors had before they’d used that song to escape the Bourne. But he needed more information, and in the meantime he’d been given this task. To kill his colleagues with whom he’d plotted separation. To kill his friends.
But he could give them hope for their families before he did so. He would take that much of a chance for them.
As briefly and quietly as he could, Kett said, “Don’t react to what I say … I know how to get us out. A labraetates. I’m getting close.” When he spoke it, there was dim heat in his chest. He quickly let go his feelings of separation, thinking that somehow Stulten would know. I’m given.
Reelan stared at him a long moment. He could see gratitude there, though it scarcely touched his friend’s face.
Then he continued with his task. “Step into the street.”
The sound of a door hinge came loud into the silence that followed. Behind Reelan, Kett watched as Salah poked her head out from the opened door. A moment later, Reelan’s mate, Cenell, pulled the door wide again and stepped out in front of her daughter.
“Kett, what are you doing here? Come in,” Cenell said.
In the next moment, her eyes caught sight of the Bar’dyn and of Kett’s branded chest. Her face hardened.
Reelan spoke without looking away from Kett. “Take Salah inside, Cenell. Go to the back of the house, where you cannot see or hear.”
Kett allowed a moment for this, risking uncertainty in the minds of his band of Bar’dyn. To his surprise, Cenell didn’t retreat inside their home. Instead, she picked up Salah and came to stand beside Reelan.
“Kett Valan,” she said, coldness in her tone, “if you come to take the life of one, you will either take the life of all, or you will kill a father in front of his child and her mother, and invite the scorn of the widowed and fatherless.”
He kept a stony countenance. Cenell didn’t know of this last deception in their plans for escape from the Bourne.
He shared another look with Reelan. He couldn’t give his old friend leave to try to change her mind, since witnessing this execution was precisely what the Jinaal wanted. And he couldn’t procrastinate any longer.
He strode back to the center of the street. There he turned and beckoned his friend. “Come forward, Reelan Sotal.”
As he spoke the words, Kett silently began to offer old prayers to the gods. Prayers he’d submitted so often that he scarcely had to think to recite them. He ignored that not once had those supplications been answered. What faith could there be if every request were granted?
Reelan turned and gently touched Cenell’s face, doing the same to Salah, before walking to the street’s center.
Kett smelled a coming rainstorm on the air as he drew his blade. Behind Reelan, Salah began to cry out for her father, her young mind beginning to grasp the danger. He stared into his friend’s face, blocking the sound from his mind.
Hardened though they all were by life inside the Bourne—beatings, executions, the use of humans, fear of what lay hidden deeper to the north—and hardened though he was by his new oath, Kett knew what he was about to do would haunt him.
Reelan looked back, sharing the tortured look in Kett’s eyes. In that brief moment, Kett could see understanding in his friend’s expression. Reelan would gladly die if it meant his family and all Gotun drew one step closer to life beyond the Bourne.
Salah’s cries now pierced Kett’s consciousness, sounding hollow as they fell on the hard ground and echoed up and down the street. Cenell held her fast, watching stoically.
“Do it,” Lliothan said, his voice low like shifting earth.
Kett nodded. As a mild wind soothed his burnt flesh, he then hardened his heart and drew his sword.
Unarmed and silent, his friend waited. The best Kett could do for him was make it quick and sure. He took hold of his blade with his other hand. With all his strength, he thrust the heavy steel into Reelan’s chest. His friend slumped forward into him. He buried his head in Reelan’s neck, and whispered, “I’m sorry.”
“Kett…” Then his friend was dead, and slipped to the hard ground.
“Da!” Salah cried. “Da! No, Da!”
It happened so fast, and yet the moments seemed to stretch like a nightmare. There was no fanfare or chorus of outrage or dismay. This town of Gotun had seen such before. Only the wail of a child made it different. And despite a distance that had entered him since being given, it broke Kett’s heart.
None of the onlookers moved in retaliation or turned away from the awful scene. The silence remained on the street as it had been before.
Reelan had known he must die. And while Kett had more names on his list—people he knew and had been commanded to execute—none were friends like Reelan. This oldest of fellows.
He stared down at the body, his heart hammering with grief. This would drive him mad. Part of him wanted to turn on the Bar’dyn, tear them apart, invite the town to help him. But another part of him knew the only way to honor Reelan’s sacrifice was to carry on. He swallowed hard, putting his emotions away.
All that was left was to put a capstone on it. “Spread the word,” he called into the quiet street. “Separatists will not be tolerated. It’s time that Inveterae accept their place alongside those who are given. We are equally captive inside this Bourne. And liberation is something we can only achieve together.”
When his words had dissipated on the wind along the street of Jopal, he sheathed his sword. He avoided l
ooking at his friend’s family; not to escape scorn or shame, but because he couldn’t bear the haunted eyes of a child who had learned fatherlessness so early. He had to remind himself that his skin burned from branding precisely because he meant to rescue others from the same.
But he was not the same. Even if he was right about it all. He was not the same.
He led Lliothan and the other Bar’dyn out of Jopal, up the road toward another of his fellows.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
Soil
There’s not enough regard for dirt.
—Carrots and Barrows, a humorist’s almanac on the changing state of agriculture in the Eastlands, commissioned by the society of Scriveners
Sutter made a show of walking the streets of Ir-Caul with Yenola on his arm. He’d waited a lifetime to lie with a woman, and it had been everything he’d ever dreamed of. Strolling with her now in the broad light of day, he couldn’t help feeling a bit more manly. He even found a bit of a strut.
They’d spent the better part of the day in his chambers, where he’d become convinced that Yenola had more than simply been with a man before; for her it seemed a practiced art. But he held no petty jealousies of her former lovers, taking it as a point of pride that she’d chosen to bed him. She was inquisitive, too. He was new to the art of love, but her questions were badly timed. They’d dampened his … mood.
But, pleasantly tired, they ambled the many roads of the great garrison city. In the streets, the questions mostly belonged to Sutter, and Yenola happily supplied answers. Most of her replies were superficial, until they happened on a home for orphans. There, Sutter stopped.
He’d known what it was before Yenola had named it. A few children sat against the front wall, playing in the dirt. A woman in a nearby rocking chair knitted slowly, working knots into a drab shawl. The woman was too old to have birthed these small ones, and there were too many of them, besides.
“What is this place?” he asked anyway.
For the first time, his companion’s voice didn’t brim with pride or enthusiasm when she replied. “There are fathers and mothers among the ranks. When they fall in battle, children are left behind. We care for them as best we can.” Yenola looked across the faded wood face of the orphanage. “It’s not our city’s finest quality.”
“How many?” he found himself asking.
Yenola gave Sutter an odd look. “The number is not great,” she said, seeming reticent. “Homes with cousins or other family are found when possible. And a few are claimed by the close comrades of their lost parents.”
Sutter approached the woman with the knitting needles. He didn’t know why, but he wanted to know how many children lived fatherless here. “My lady, are you the nursemaid?”
The old woman looked up with milky blue eyes and smiled a toothless smile. She nodded vaguely and moaned out something unintelligible. She then promptly returned her attention to her knots.
Watching her knobby fingers work the yarn, Sutter said, “Is this the care these children receive?”
His lover came forward and grabbed his hand. “It’s an unhappy place on a day meant for idle pleasures. Come, let us go.”
Sutter would not be moved. He looked down at three small ones whose bare feet and shabby clothes spoke of neglect and, if he guessed right, cold nights.
That could have been me.…
Without invitation he strode past the old woman and through the open door of the orphanage. The interior somehow appeared as washed and faded as the sun-facing outer walls of the place. A threadbare rug sat before a hearth that clearly hadn’t known fire for a very long time. A few wooden toys lay in corners. A couple of small chairs sat here and there, two of them occupied by very young girls, five or six years old, maybe. They looked up at him briefly, before returning to their play.
Behind him, Sutter heard Yenola enter the room. To her credit, she didn’t again entreat him to leave. Room by room he went, surveying the abject conditions. There were no books and scarcely a toy per child; most of these makeshift things he guessed the children cobbled together from garbage they scavenged from the streets. On more than one wall, graphite or limestone rocks had been used to draw directly on the wood. Most of the depictions were crude renderings of tall and short figures standing together. The young artists, he guessed, had sought to fix images of the families they’d once known, or hoped to know in the future.
He climbed the stair to the upper story, finding more children playing quietly, glumly. From one of these rooms, he looked through a window down at the rear yard, where more parentless waifs sat or stood, a few talking, many staring distractedly at nothing in particular.
As Yenola came to stand beside him at the window, keeping him silent company, Sutter couldn’t help but recall his own earliest beginnings. He had no precise memory of it, but he’d imagined the story his father had shared of Sutter’s birth parents. He’d imagined the bucket of water his birth father had very nearly dunked him in just after Sutter had drawn his first shuddering breath of life.
Pageant wagon folk. Slaves to their conceits and the roads and their humble audiences in town after town … and little time to raise a child, to raise Sutter.
He’d never have known a place like this. He would have died then, in that bucket, not even knowing what life was; Sutter was spared both the bucket and living a life in a place like this.
Still, these children were his kin in a way he couldn’t ignore. And there was nothing he could do to relieve the bleakness that clung here thick as horseshit.
Then his eyes lit on a plot of ground in the far corner of the rear yard: a garden. Sutter’s spirits rose, and he spun around, heading for the stair. Perhaps there was one thing he could do.
Out in the yard, he crossed hard-packed earth, well trodden by the feet of the orphans. His haste drew a few stares from the children. And their eyes brightened at the sight of Yenola until they could see she paid them little mind, as she simply tried to keep up with Sutter. He stopped at the edge of a large square of ground that had been formed into rough rows. There should have been green shoots pushing up through the soil by now—a fall planting. Instead, the earth was crusted, as though well watered long ago and then left untouched for weeks. He wondered if the garden was fallow, and hunkered down close to the hard soil.
He rooted around in one of the rows of earth, searching for seeds or shoots that might be growing up to the surface. Nothing. He tried again with a second row of dirt, finding only some rocks, and dead roots from vegetation long since removed. Sutter stubbornly tried a third row, aimless anger rising inside him. Still no sign of growth, but at least he found a seed.
Quickly, he pulled his hand back and brushed the dirt away, inspecting his find. It appeared to be a squash of some sort. But the shell of the seed had never opened; instead it appeared desiccated, the ground having sucked from it whatever nutrients it once held.
He looked up and surveyed again the barren little garden. He hated the mockery it must be to the children—the promise of food to fill bodies that clearly needed the nourishment, and yet no crop rose from the soil.
A garden wasn’t an easy thing to manage. And if the crone with the knitting needles was these children’s only caregiver, then he understood the failure to grow anything here. But that didn’t feel right. The soil and the seed, on their own, could push a sprout to the light of day. A farmer’s hand did most of its service or damage after that.
Sutter raised his fingers and licked at the dirt covering them. The soil held a bitter, acidic taste, slightly metallic, almost the way a field would taste if left unfertilized for several seasons. He wondered if the planter had known the state of the soil when he tilled the plot and seeded the rows. Likely not. And yet, Sutter found it hard to believe that this square of land was the only useless garden in the city. Others would likely be sharing the challenge of raising a crop.
He wouldn’t be able to help. Not even to plant a damn carrot. Nothing would grow here. Robbed of doing even that
much to assist a bunch of orphans, he felt miserable.
“Are you taking us on the walk?”
The voice startled both Sutter and Yenola. He turned to see a young boy—maybe seven years old—with a face pocked by scars. The lad wore a severe frown—the most emotion Sutter had seen from any of the children.
“The walk? What do you mean?” Sutter asked.
“We should leave,” Yenola said. “We’ve disturbed these children enough. We shouldn’t give them false hope.”
“The walk,” the boy repeated, with an incredulous, challenging tone, as though repeating the words would make it clear.
“I’m not from Ir-Caul,” Sutter explained.
The lad eyed Yenola suspiciously. “Is this your lady?”
With a small bit of pride, Sutter said, “Today, yes. Why?”
“Do you know about the walks?” the boy asked Yenola directly.
She stared back, saying nothing for several moments. She looked ready to reply, when the boy spoke again. “Send her into the house.”
Sutter shrugged at Yenola. “What can it hurt? I’ll talk to the boy.”
She stood for several seconds, obviously hesitant to leave them alone, then finally returned to the house, looking back once over her shoulder at Sutter and the lad. He sensed he’d made a mistake with her by indulging the boy’s desire to share something in confidence, but it was done. And in any case, what harm would a child’s secret do?
“Your woman is from the court,” the lad said. “She knows about the walks. And now she will know you know, and you’re a stranger. Be careful.”
Sutter shook his head. “What are these walks?”
The lad became quiet, looking around at the other orphans with whom he shared this place. Sutter got the sense that the boy was something of a parent to them. Probably the one who consoled them when sadness made them weep, and spoke for the group when it was necessary. Like now.
“Every few weeks,” he began, his voice growing soft and distant, almost like he needed to separate himself from the things he said, “at night, men come and wake some of us. They take two each time, give them shoes so that they can walk.”
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