by Robyn Bennis
Finally, on the longest night of the year, moonless, with the wind blowing hard from the forest, carrying ice that stung her face and eyes, and with the goats stirring restless and alarmed below her, the wind let up just long enough for her to hear the crunch of a footstep in the snow. It was no more than ten yards ahead. The goats in the shed threw themselves against the rear wall, each one pushing for the back. With their bustle serving to cover the sound, she pulled her rifle’s hammer back to full cock and put a hand on the shutter of her darkened lantern.
The goats’ panic grew, and they climbed atop each other to get away from the smell of death creeping toward them. Josette pulled the shutter and a square of light lit the snow ahead.
For just an instant, she saw the beast’s yellow eyes reflecting the glow of the lantern, like windows into the fires of hell. They disappeared as the predator turned to flee, but in that light she could make out its ghostly gray body against the white snow.
She aimed just ahead of it, let out half a breath, and squeezed the trigger.
The temple bell rang out two in the morning, startling her out of her remembrance and pulling her back to the moment.
The Vins must have gone back to bed by now, but she waited another quarter of an hour, in case they too had been roused by the bell. Then she took a tiny, birdlike step down the slope of the roof.
A whisper rose from below, saying, “Jump here.” She scooted over, climbed down, hanging by her fingers off the edge of the roof, and dropped. She landed soft as a feather on Bernat’s luggage.
“It’s a good thing I insisted on taking this,” he whispered in her ear, as he helped her down to the street. “It’s my instinct for contingencies that Colonel Okura was counting on, when he asked you to take me on this mission.”
“I swear to God, Bernie, I will choke you to death with your own spare pantaloons.” She tugged the luggage out, handed Bernat his bag, and shouldered hers. “Stay quiet and stay close.”
He offered her a dark lantern as they set out, but she refused it. She had navigated the streets of Durum in pitch black a hundred times before. She could tell where she was by the pattern of cobblestones under her feet.
She led them across town. In her head, she worked out the quickest way to Mrs. Turel’s house that avoided the barricaded southwest quarter, as well as the town square with its forest of gallows.
As they were skirting the center of town, they saw a Vin patrol coming down the street. They had to duck into a side alley and hide behind a pile of garbage until it passed. They hit another patrol as they turned north, and would have been caught going around the corner if the Vin soldiers weren’t in the midst of a heated conversation that revealed their presence from half a block away.
After that close call, Josette slowed and took her party by a more tortuous path, weaving down the most disused alleys and crossing the wider streets only after stopping for minutes at a time to watch for patrols. The caution paid off when three Vinzhalian patrols passed without spotting them, while her little band of infiltrators huddled in stinking alleys.
By the time they approached Mrs. Turel’s house, with the reek of the nearby tannery hanging thick in the moist air, the eastern sky was already turning gray. If Mrs. Turel wasn’t part of a secret network of loyal Garnians—if she was just a batty old lady who liked to make up numbers—Josette would be hard-pressed to find safe harbor before the sun came up.
She tapped on the door.
Footsteps sounded inside—slow, cautious, unfriendly footsteps coming down the stairs. A face appeared at the window. It moved back too quickly for Josette to identify it, but she was sure it wasn’t Mrs. Turel. She signaled the others to find cover, but they had hardly moved an inch when the door opened and a head stuck out.
“Good God, is that you, Josie? I thought Nadia was imagining things when she told me. Get inside before anyone sees you.” It took a moment for her to recognize the man as Mr. Turel. The pistol clutched in his whitened fingers was discordant enough, but what was truly off about him was his size. Mr. Turel had been a robust man even in lean years, but now his frame was gaunt.
They rushed inside. Mr. Turel took a last look up and down the street, then shut the door and barred it. There wasn’t much light inside the cramped first floor of the house, but in what little there was, Josette noticed that he did not put away the pistol.
“Who is it?” Mrs. Turel’s anxious voice came from upstairs.
“It’s Josie,” Mr. Turel said, “and a couple of foreign-looking fellows.”
“I’ll have you know,” Bernat said, with a level of volume and indignity that made everyone jump a little, including himself, “that I am as Garnian as the Chikyun Sword, and that Sergeant Jutes is as Garnian as … as…” He looked over the sergeant’s square Brandheimian features and white complexion, and waved a dismissive hand about. “He’s been naturalized, in any event.”
“They’re with me,” Josette said, putting a hand on Bernat’s shoulder to calm him. “We’re here to organize a resistance within the city.”
Mr. Turel laughed, and Mrs. Turel joined in as she came down the stairs. Good God, she was thin as a rail, too. Josette hadn’t noticed it the day before, in all the commotion.
Mrs. Turel reached the bottom of the stairs and said, “Josie, we’ve been fighting the Vins since they got here. Sit down, sit down. No, no, away from the window, you damn fool.” This last comment was directed at Bernat, who had no sooner collapsed into a chair than Mr. Turel grabbed it by the back and tried to dump him onto the floor.
Bernat stood, grumbling about his sore leg, and moved to another chair, while Mr. Turel leaned in to whisper to Josette, “You sure he’s not a foreigner?”
“I believe his family is from the south of Garnia,” she said.
“Oh, them,” Mr. Turel said, as if it explained everything. “That’s hardly Garnian at all.”
“I am the son of the Marquis of Copia Lugon,” Bernat insisted, as he set his sore leg up on the Turels’ dining table. “I can trace my lineage back to the ancient Tellurians, with ancestors from every duchy in the country. How can anyone be more authentically Garnian than that?”
Mrs. Turel clapped her hands to her cheeks. “Arthur, I think he’s the man Elise talked about.”
“Him?” Mr. Turel asked, leaning over to study Bernat. He huffed. “I thought he’d be taller. And less foreign-looking.”
“If anything, it’s you, sir, who are—”
“Bernie, shush,” Josette said, stopping him before he got them thrown out onto the street and left to the sparse mercy of the Vins. She would have to explain later that these people had probably never been south of … well, south of Durum, now that she thought of it. They didn’t realize just how foreign-looking the majority of their countrymen were, nor how manifestly Vin-like the features of a typical Durumite would seem to the rest of the country.
They did have a tinge of Vin in their accent, for one thing. She had never noticed it while growing up here, nor had she ever heard it mentioned until Roland’s comment, but now that it had been pointed out to her, it was unmistakable. It was hardly surprising, however. Durum had once been a jewel of Vinzhalia, long before it was conquered by Garnia and went into its centuries-long decline, as lucrative trade withered under the strain of near-constant warfare.
When Josette last lived in Durum, there were still families who—with broadly varying degrees of secrecy—blamed Garnia for Durum’s plight and longed for a restoration to Vin rule. No one knew just how many of them had taken their discontent to the level of spying for Vinzhalia, but there were enough of them that the city’s half-hearted counterespionage efforts uncovered a spy or two every generation.
A hollow boom sounded outside and all five heads turned to the west, just in time to hear the following crack. In the morning light, the Garnian artillery was firing again.
Josette asked Mr. Turel, “How do we signal the resistance fighters?”
He looked confused at the very questi
on.
She clarified. “Do you place something in a window, to signal the need for a meeting? Leave a bucket upturned at the well? Or is it a certain pattern of hammer blows at the blacksmith? There must be something. How do you pass messages?”
Mr. Turel looked to Mrs. Turel, who shrugged her shoulders and said, “Usually I just go down to Heny’s, on the excuse of needing a remedy for ladies’ troubles.”
Josette blinked twice while she worked out the obvious in her head. “You mean to say Heny the midwife is leading the resistance in Durum?”
Mr. Turel scowled at that. “Not leading it,” he said, sharply.
“More at the center of it,” Mrs. Turel added. “It only makes sense. Every woman in town has one excuse or another to visit her, and not the Vins nor their informants would ever think twice at our comings and goings. So she just sort of turned into the, uh, what do you call the bit at the middle of a wheel, Arthur?”
“Hub.”
“She turned into the hub. Is it a hub? No, that’s not right. The part at the middle of the wheel.”
“It’s called the hub, Nadia.”
“No, that’s not it. Whatever it is, though, Heny’s that.”
“It’s a hub.”
“No, you’re thinking of something else.”
Josette interrupted before things became too bloody. “Can you visit Heny today, and get us in touch with her?” The cannons went off again, all four of them in a rippling fire running north to south.
Mrs. Turel looked down at her nightshirt. “Just let me dress, and I’ll go right now. While I’m out, try to remember that word, will you?”
“It’s a hub!” This time it was not just Mr. Turel, but Bernat and Jutes who all said it together.
Mrs. Turel paused a moment on the stairs, thought it over, and shook her head. “No, that ain’t it.”
Josette stopped Bernat from giving any further thoughts, then asked Mr. Turel, “Do you have someplace to hide us for the day?”
Mr. Turel nodded and led them down to a root cellar. The floor down there was surprisingly comfortable, as it was amply padded by empty sacks, and had hardly any food in it to get in their way. Once she was situated, Josette retrieved her rifled pistol, fit a percussion cap into the slot ahead of the hammer, and cradled it on her stomach as she closed her eyes.
And, though here it was merely chill and humid, rather than freezing and wet, her mind went back to the roof of that goat shed, where flint scraped against frizzen, and icy wind blew the sparks into her face.
* * *
ENSIGN KEMBER WAS still standing watch when the siege guns began to fire in the morning light. Lieutenant Hanon had assigned her the night watch as soon as Captain Dupre was off the ship, had left orders not to wake him, and was still asleep in his berth. She wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do in such a circumstance, so she remained on watch into the morning.
She might have argued with him in the first place, citing the regulations which forbid auxiliary officers from standing watch at night, but those regulations were habitually ignored in the signal corps, and the same regulations forbade her from firing the cannons, so that would never do. So she’d gone on watch, and remained on watch, and now she was stuck on watch, for the crew of the morning relief had already come on duty, and she’d look a mercurial fool if she suddenly decided to take Corporal Lupien off the rudder and give him the deck. The entire situation from top to bottom was perfectly absurd, of course, and yet perfectly in keeping with her experience of the army.
What would the captain do?
The captain would walk back there and kick out the supports on Lieutenant Hanon’s berth, to let him either tumble onto the catwalk or fall through the ship’s thin outer envelope, as his reaction speed and airman’s instincts dictated.
Then again, the captain didn’t seem to care what people thought of her. If the captain had Kember’s scar, she’d wear it openly. She wouldn’t cover it in concealer, even if it made her hideous, even if the sight of it made that Roland fellow scorn her. And even if he scorned her, she’d never let anyone know. Inside, she might be hurting, but it would never show on the surface. In fact, you might not even know they’d split up.
Whereas Kember’s reactions to her very few, very short courtships had been the exact opposite. She had never worried when they ended. In fact, she was usually relieved—but she always took care to show pain on the surface, lest anyone think her unusual.
At noon, Hanon was still in his berth. Kember used the excuse of the changing watch to give Lupien the deck, but at least one officer had to be awake and ready to take command, so she took up the station of the deck lookout, though it had been over twenty-four hours since she last had a wink of sleep.
This was why, after the fog burned away and was replaced by partial cloud cover, she passed it off as mere imagination when she saw a flash of white tailfin disappearing into a cloud to starboard. It couldn’t have been another ship, after all, since what she thought she’d seen was a tail that tapered smoothly into the frames amidships, the way Mistral’s did. With her sister ships still under construction, Mistral was the only rigid airship in the sky with a design like that. And hadn’t Kember closed her eyes to rest them, and only opened them when her drooping head startled her awake? In that moment, she must have dreamed of her own ship—she’d done it before—and woke with an image of it reflected in her mind’s eye.
She returned her attention to Durum, watching for any of the prearranged signals from the captain. Her eyes went over it, street by street. But at the end of each circuit of the town, her gaze turned back to that one patch of sky, where lay the great billowing cloud that her dream-conjured ship had disappeared into.
* * *
“I REMEMBERED WHAT that word is,” Mrs. Turel said, as she came down the steps to the root cellar. “It’s ‘axle.’ And all of you thinking it was something else. Heny and me had a laugh about that, let me tell you.”
Bernat sat up from his resting spot on a pile of lumpy burlap and shielded his eyes against the light coming in from upstairs. Jutes and Josette stirred in the gloom of the root cellar.
“Will Heny be coming?” Josette asked.
“She’s sending an escort after dark, to smuggle you to her place,” Mrs. Turel said, with an odd sort of impish delight in her voice.
Bernat had to wait all afternoon and half the evening to find out what that delight meant. Throughout his forced quiescence, he occupied himself in alternately napping, listening to the cannons, being shushed by Josette for trying to talk, and trying to feed a scrap of rotten turnip to the cellar rats. None of them would approach him, though, preferring instead to scratch around near the walls at the opposite end of the cellar, occasionally getting into fights or engaging in licentious acts.
The Turels were meager entertainment. Of their scant conversations, only a word here and there could be understood through the floorboards. He gathered that their farmland lay outside the walls, and the siege had denied them their occupation. Unaccustomed to being shut in and idle during the day, they sat at opposite ends of a table through entire hours of unmoving silence. It must have been the most dreadfully awkward day—though Bernat had to admit, as he rolled rotten turnip between his fingers and listened to rats fornicating in the dark, his own day was in the running.
And so it was the purest joy he felt when, at about seven in the evening, he heard a knock on the door. It might have been Heny’s man, or it might have been the Vins come to hang them all. Either way, it would be a relief.
The little door at the top of the steps opened. “Bernie?” a voice asked.
“Elise?” He squinted into the light. “Elise!” He leapt up, ignoring the brutal soreness in his injured leg. He was in such a hurry, he hit his head on the floorboards, not just when he stood, but again when he was going up the steps.
It was worth it, though. It was worth all the suffering in the world to wrap his arms around Elise and kiss her with su
ch a force of burning desire that the rats would blush to see it. He could hear the Turels making indelicate comments to each other, and Josette clearing her throat with great force and frequency, but he ignored them. His beloved was safe and alive, and he was in her arms, and that was all that mattered.
Together, they fell into a wonderful sort of timelessness, in which the comments and throat-clearing faded away to nothing, and all that existed in all the world was Elise and himself. He couldn’t have said how much time passed before they finally leaned apart. He only knew it was long enough to get the beginnings of a cramp in his tongue, but not quite long enough for Josette to douse them with the pail of water she’d fetched from somewhere.
“Hello, Mother,” Josette said as she set the pail down, a hint of disappointment in her eyes.
“Josie?” Elise said, noticing her for the first time. “What are you doing here?”
Josette was about to speak, but she appeared to think better of her first choice of words. She sighed and said instead, “Just tagging along on Lord Hinkal’s mission.”
Elise let him go and took a couple of steps toward Josette. Josette took a couple of steps toward Elise as well, but they did not embrace. For a moment, Bernat thought he might be treated to the absurd sight of mother and daughter shaking hands, but they only stood there at a respectful distance, and nodded to each other.
“You’re looking well,” Josette said.
“And you … the same.”
Josette looked at the front window, then at her feet, then seemed to suck on a tooth behind tightly closed lips, and finally said, “Heny’s got you running errands for the resistance, eh?”
“She has.” Elise looked at the back window, then at her feet, then fiddled with the collar of her chemise, and finally continued, “We better get moving. It’ll be curfew soon. I’d put those bags of yours in a laundry basket, so you don’t look quite so much like soldiers on the march.”