by Robyn Bennis
“Perhaps you should, regarding this and other matters,” Bernat said. And if he’d left it at that, she might have convinced herself to go with him and free her mother. She’d half talked herself into it as it was, when he dashed his own hopes with his eagerness to manipulate. “You’ll be happy to know, too, that I have my soldier’s heart well in hand. I didn’t condemn Major Dvakov, when I easily could have.”
“Oh good,” she said evenly. “I was hoping you’d get that sorted out. And that certainly is the accepted means of curing soldier’s heart: saving the life of a smug little shit who deserves to die a dozen times over. That, or bathing in the sacred waters of the spring of Atbok, but that’s such a long trip.”
His face went indignant, bordering on petulant. “You’re making fun of me.”
“Thank you for noticing,” she said. “In my defense, you’re begging for it. More so than usual, even. Do you know why they call it soldier’s heart, Bernie?”
He perked up a little. “I had wondered.”
“It’s because they used to think it was caused by being away from home.” She leaned back in her chair and smirked. “Well, I say they used to think that, but I don’t think anyone ever did. I think it was just one of those little fibs that high-ranking officers tell themselves, along the same line as, ‘I got this job by merit.’” She tried to find a mug that had more than dregs in it, and grew grim when her search came up empty. “It’s an excuse, of course. It’s a way for the generals to believe it’s not their fault. That they didn’t do this to the men under their command, that it wasn’t their orders, and certainly not their negligence. It’s only something that would have happened anyway, the first time the men were away from home. But the fundamental thing about soldier’s heart, Bernie … Are you listening very carefully, now?”
He was, but he leaned in closer, and she did the same, until their foreheads nearly touched across the table.
“The real, core thing that you have to know about soldier’s heart, Bernie, the thing about soldier’s heart that you want to remember … is that you don’t have it, and you never have.”
Judging by his expression, that was the very last thing Bernat expected to hear. He rocked back as if she’d just struck him in the face with something quite a bit heavier than a bowl of nuts.
Josette continued, “What you have is something we in the army—those of us who’ve been in the army long enough to know, I mean—it’s what we in the army call, ‘being an asshole.’” She smiled reassuringly and made an expansive gesture with her hands. “Don’t worry, it’s a common condition.”
Bernat pondered this while the barman put a fresh mug of ale before each of them. “But my recent tendency toward destruction, this drive to solve every problem by beating the hell out of people…”
“Hasn’t a thing to do with soldier’s heart,” Josette said. “I’ve seen soldier’s heart cause anger, Bernie, I’ve even seen it cause rage, but it doesn’t cause violence. That’s you. That’s something you chose to do, from almost the moment you got a taste for it. Tell me, how often do your bouts of violence actually follow a bout of anger? How often do you panic about something in the past, instead of something in the present?”
He swallowed and said nothing.
“You get panicky when your life’s in danger. That ain’t soldier’s heart, or anything at all, really. That’s as ordinary as ordinary gets. And if you suddenly find that you’re solving your problems with violence, it’s because you damn well taught yourself to solve your problems with violence.” She drained her mug and added, “I’m proud of you.”
When she reached for Bernat’s drink, he handed it over without argument.
“But there’s nothing peculiar about the way you are.” She looked him up and down. “Not in the military sense, anyhow.”
He was silent for so long, and stared so forlornly at the wall, that she thought he might cry. But then he only nodded. “So I don’t have soldier’s heart? This is just who I am? That’s a sobering thought.”
“Well, I got good news on that front,” she said, raising her mug to him in salute. “There’s nothing so sobering you can’t outdrink it.”
“I’m not convinced of that,” Bernat said. They were both silent for a while, and then, after a few false starts, he asked, “Have you been home yet?”
Josette didn’t answer, but Bernat’s half smile showed that he knew the answer in any event.
“You should drop by.” He stood and turned to leave. After a step, he looked back to add, “Visit Duchess Prettyheart. See what she’s been up to since you last spoke.” As he left, Josette wondered if there was enough ale in the tavern to make sense of that comment. She suspected there wasn’t, but resolved to make the attempt, out of courtesy.
The question was settled a little before midnight, when the tavern keeper tipped the last keg and a corporal—newly promoted out of the forlorn hope—paid him half a penny to suck it dry.
It was then that Josette finally recognized the wisdom in Bernat’s advice. Yes, she would visit her childhood home, because Vin soldiers might have quartered in it during the occupation, and in that case there would be alcohol hidden there. The effects of the tavern’s watered-down ale were waning, after all, and sobriety simply wasn’t an option after the day she’d had.
So she walked, thinking of the foundations of ancient walls, and of the making of soldiers, and of the business she was in, and of two tiny wolf cubs crying in the snow, and arrived so suddenly at her destination that it seemed she could hardly have passed through the space between.
She stood at the end of a narrow lane in front of a brick-and-stone house. She stood there for some time, though she couldn’t have said quite how much, before trying the door and finding it locked. But when she heaved up on the handle, she found that, even after all these years, doing so made enough space between the door and the doorjamb that she could work the bolt back with her fingers and unlock the door without a key.
It was pitch black inside, but the curtains were permeated with the smell of smoke and human gas—which meant Vin soldiers had, indeed, been quartered here. She found her mother’s oil lamp not where it had been, but sitting at the center of the dining table, and struck a light with steel and flint left carelessly next to it. By the pale yellow light of the lamp, she put the flint back into the drawer under the window, where it belonged.
The lower room was much as she had last left it, minus the loom, but plus several stereoplate illustrations of buxom women in various states of undress. She looked into all the likely hiding places, and found a small bottle of Vinzhalian arkhi hidden inside a hollowed-out nook in a ceiling beam. This intensely alcoholic Vin delicacy was made from fermented mare’s milk, smelled like paraffin fuel, tasted like rancid butter, and was gone far too soon.
By reflexive impulse, she left the empty bottle by the door for the rag-and-bone man to collect in the morning—never stopping to wonder who would let him in, or if he was even still alive. From just inside the doorway, she looked across the room to the stairs. She took the lamp and went up to the second floor, calling herself a fool for ever hesitating, and for doubting the snow-white purity of her own motives in going upstairs only to search for alcohol.
Upstairs, the ancient bed that had once dominated the room was gone. In its place were four portable cots lined in front of the fireplace. In between, the floor was dusted with unswept gray soot. The windowsill was similarly covered, where the Vins had carelessly tossed ash from the fireplace out the window. But not with any regularity, judging by the unsightly gray mound piled under the grate.
She searched the room from top to bottom, looking in all the secret hidey holes she knew well, and all the likely spots a newcomer might think of. She left the loose stone under the window for last, not because that was where Duchess Prettyheart had been hidden—what an absurd thought—but because it was the last hiding place the Vins were likely to discover.
The loose stone fit perfectly into its mortar. O
nly someone lying belly-down on the floor was apt to notice the worn bottom edge, where little hands could slide a knife under the stone, and lever it up and out of its hollow.
Somewhat larger hands did the job now, remembering the trick of it after a few failed attempts. Holding the lamp next to her head, Josette peered into the space inside. There was something in there, hopefully something better than that godawful arkhi the Vins had stashed downstairs.
She reached in, but what she pulled out was Duchess Prettyheart, wearing the same summer dress she’d worn to the prince’s ball, the last time Josette had seen her. That had been a heady time for the young duchess, what with having to find something to wear at the last minute after Mr. Skender’s goat ate all her clothes, and having her first kiss with the prince at midnight under the sparkling light of a golden chandelier—albeit a golden chandelier that looked rather like candlelight reflected off the polished side of a brass teakettle.
It was a wonder the rats hadn’t gotten to her. It was rats that had made the hollow behind the stone in the first place, she always thought, chewing their warrens through the older, softer daub plaster the house was originally made of, before the stone and brick facings were added.
How had the rats not found her?
But the rats had indeed found her, Josette saw as she held the doll up to the light. And not just found her, but torn her to pieces. And not just once, but over and over again. Somewhere in the walls of this house, there must have been rats’ nests made from three or four dolls’ worth of Duchess Prettyheart.
But someone had cared for her all these years, taking her from her hiding place at intervals to patch her up. Every reparative stitch had been made with precise attention, every patch matched as perfectly as possible to the material, every bit of wool and sawdust stuffing replaced and pushed carefully into place—with never a hollow in the doll’s stuffing, and never a spot too dense. And then the mender had returned Duchess Prettyheart to the same hiding place, for reasons as irrational as they were obvious.
Josette nearly fell down the stairs in her haste to reach the street. She ran to the end of the lane, tripping frequently but never falling. She tried to think of where Bernat might be, if not the tavern she’d just come from.
For, if she couldn’t find him, all was lost.
* * *
BERNAT STOOD SHIVERING in the chill of the night, fingering the ice-cold key in his coat pocket so frequently that in time it warmed to his body temperature. He checked his pocket watch again, but still couldn’t read it in the feeble starlight.
He was beginning to think Josette must have passed out inside the house, when finally he heard unsteady footfalls coming down the lane. Flickering yellow light lit the street in front, and then Josette came racing round the corner, carrying a lamp in one hand and a doll in the other. She had so little notion of where she was going that she didn’t notice him there until he said, “There you are.”
She stopped in front of him, began to speak, then turned away to throw up into a nearby flower box. After wiping her mouth on her sleeve, she said, “I thought I’d have to run all over town to find you.”
“Nonsense,” he said, handing his handkerchief to her. “Knowing where to be is one of my qualities.”
“Oh, what’s the other one?”
“Ignoring comments such as that.” He checked his watch by the light of the lamp. Half past midnight. “Shall we go, or is there more to disgorge?”
She looked as if there might be, but after a moment’s consideration she said, “Let’s start out and see how it goes.”
“Best, then, if we set our pace on the brisk side.”
Brisk they were, arriving at the dungeon in only fifteen minutes. But then, “dungeon” was coming it a little high. On his first visit during the afternoon, he was expecting dripping walls, row upon row of barred cells, and never a sign of the sky. The Durum dungeon, on the other hand, was composed in its entirety of two spacious cells built into the basement of the town hall and a comfy nook for the jailer, each with a fine view of the square through a grating set at eye level within and street level without. In central Kuchin, such rooms would rent for ten liras a month.
Cell walls and cell doors alike were made from ancient timber and rusted iron. When they opened Elise’s door, she was standing at the grating, staring at the stars, sucking whatever juice she could from the last hours of her life.
She turned when they entered, looking from one to the other with eyes that wouldn’t dare to hope. They looked evenly at Josette, and Elise asked, “So what’s it to be, then?”
“Three nooses between us, if we don’t hurry,” Josette said. “Come on, Mother. We’ll have time for nostalgic melancholia once we’re out of the city.”
Elise was released and stepped toward Bernat. He recoiled, worried she might attempt to embrace him. If that had been her plan, she thought better of it when she saw his reaction. “Open the other door” was all she said, ducking into the jailer’s nook and coming out with a foot-long wooden tipstaff.
There was a creaking from the other cell. Major Dvakov stepped out of shadow and into the lantern light, his face stoic and stern. He said nothing, but only stared into Bernat with eyes that seemed to dissect him, cutting him open to discover the very root of his every weakness.
“But how—” Bernat began.
“I sent a runner to Major Emery, after you left the tavern,” Josette said, answering his question before he could finish it. “Told them to hang the son of a bitch.”
He swallowed hard, unable to look away from Dvakov. “Well,” he said, his voice faltering only a little, “I suppose, as long as I’m not the one who doomed him…”
“Open the door,” Elise said, arms at her side, staff swinging gently back and forth in one hand. Josette drew her pistol and held it ready.
Dvakov even stepped politely back when Bernat turned the key in the lock, giving the door room to swing inward. The Vin major didn’t flinch when Elise’s first blow hit him in the gut. Her second took out his knee and sent him to the floor. She hit him no higher than the shoulders, raining blows on his kidneys, his extremities, his groin, until finally his pain outran his stoicism and he cried out. Only then did she send a crushing blow against his windpipe that muffled the screams.
She had turned his body to jelly before she began to tire, but he still lived when she started on his head, retaining enough strength in her flagging arms to make his face into an unrecognizable jumble of bruises and blood.
Bernat looked away, meeting Josette’s eyes. “We are in a bit of a hurry, Mother,” she said.
Elise dropped the staff and leaned against the dungeon wall, gasping for breath. Bernat thought he heard sobbing mixed amid her heavy breaths, but by the time he looked, she had wiped her face clean, removing the spattered blood and any tears that might have wetted her cheeks.
On their way out, they left the lantern and dungeon key at the bottom of a rain barrel. They threaded their way through the streets of southwestern Durum. It was easier going than when the Vins were in charge, since the 132nd had few patrols out. At least, it had few patrols that hadn’t noticed suspicious activity at the tavern much earlier in the evening, and decided it was their sworn duty to investigate.
There were guards on the wall, but they were looking outward. The escape party slipped into the breach and picked their way over the rubble, worried now about tumbling rocks that might give them away, rather than Vin bullets. From there, it was only a matter of following the circumference of the wall to the woods.
“Get off the road before dawn,” Josette said from somewhere to Bernat’s left. It was so dark on the edge of the forest that he wouldn’t have known she was there if she didn’t speak. “You know the woods, so the search parties won’t find you. Just make sure you keep moving east and stay off the road until you’re deep into Vinzhalia. Don’t turn around. Don’t ever come back here. Those are the terms of your release.”
The only sounds i
n reply were croaking frogs and chirping insects. It was quiet so long, Bernat began to wonder if Elise had slipped away unnoticed. And then, finally, she said, “You’re the only good thing I ever did with my life, Josie. That’s why I’ve hated you so much, these past years: for getting away from me.”
“That’s, um, that’s very sweet, Mother.”
He thought he heard them embrace, and then heard Elise shuffling about in the dark. “Still there, Bernie?” she asked.
“I’m here” was all he said.
She found him and put her arms around him. He returned her embrace, but not for too long, nor too tightly, lest she get the idea that he still loved her. He did love her, for all that, but he could hardly let her know it.
“Here, take this to keep you safe,” Josette said.
There was some fumbling in the dark before Elise gasped and said, “I can’t take your pistol, Josie. The king gave it to you.”
A moment of thoughtful silence, and then Josette said, “Good God, you’re right. I would never have offered if I’d had less to drink. Here, give it back, and take this instead.”
The subvocal sounds Elise made during the exchange were at first indignant, but quickly turned to a soft coo. “Duchess Prettyheart,” she said. There was an unnerving sort of softness in Elise’s usually strident voice, and it underlay a barely detectable tremor.
“She’s better off under your care, I think. And she always did like dumplings.”
Again, Elise was so perfectly quiet for so long that Bernat thought she had already snuck off. Then she broke the silence with, “You ain’t the same girl who cried over those wolves. I’m sorry I said you were.”
“Be safe, Mother” was all Josette said in reply.
“You know, you’d fix a lot of your problems by settling down with a nice man.”
Bernat could sense Josette struggling to keep her voice low as she said again, “Be safe, Mother.” She then heaved a defeated sigh and added, “I love you.”
But this time, Elise really was gone, having disappeared into the woods with a hunter’s silent stride. Bernat fumbled through the dark until he bumped into Josette, who was not searching, but only standing stiff and still.