The mug shatters in Iraline’s grip, spilling blood and ceramic.
“You’ve always been a selfish child, haven’t you?” Iraline remarks, tone mild despite the injuries that striate her hands. Legs cross. Iraline makes no move to bind her wounds, only stares beyond the horizon of Yavena’s silhouette, features locked in grim contemplation.
“I’m only trying to—”
“Get out.”
Yavena feels a weight descend upon a shoulder and turns to find a heavyset Gak behind her, somehow still menacing despite the ridiculousness of its kitchen accoutrements. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Go.” Soft, so soft, too soft, Iraline’s repudiation, like the last gasp of a broken heart.
* * *
Footsteps like drumbeats, slow but nuanced, pregnant with meaning.
“Ah, Yavena.” The Dog-King manifests from around a corner, silhouette turned monstrous by the chiaroscuro of his lamp. “We were just thinking about you.”
The Ovia inclines her head in answer, silent and resentful. It has been hours since Iraline banished her from her company. Hours spent prowling the periphery of the kitchen, seeking entrance, seeking escape from the automata that dog Yavena’s every step. Her simulacra escorts, draped in gauze and off-white silks, still their twitching as the Dog-King approaches, their clockwork eyes whirling.
“How goes your onslaught on the walls of Fort Iraline?”
Yavena shrugs. As one, the automata return their attention to her, talons clicking. “Poorly.”
“We see.” The Dog-King lowers his lamp and pinches the space between his eyes. In the penumbra of the corridor, his features seem softer—the face of an everyman, rather than a monarch. “Well. You still have a few more days before the weekend arrives.”
Bitterness knifes through Yavena’s terse response. “As you say, Lord-General.”
The Dog-King chuckles. A ripple of fingers causes the automata to erupt into movement again. Expressionless, and without so much as a backward glance at Yavena or the Dog-King, the animated corpses melt back into the shadows.
“There. Some privacy. Walk with us, Ovia.”
Silence tightens its stranglehold over the environment, a hush Yavena is reluctant to break. It is only when it becomes evident the Dog-King requires that transgression that Yavena offers a quiet, “Some privacy for what, my lord?”
“Ah, Yavena. So diplomatic, yet so direct.” The Dog-King makes a tutting noise, restarts his languid walk. The oil lamp keeps time with his stride. “To talk, of course.”
The Ovia falls into lockstep, careful to remain a dagger’s width behind him. “There’s really nothing to talk about.”
Cheerily, like someone recapturing the thread of an interesting conversation, the Dog-King says, “Individuality, you know, is sacrosanct among the Gak. We pride ourselves on nuance, on building a legacy that is absolutely unique.”
Yavena cannot resist. “Does it gall you to use the majestic pronoun, then?”
They round a corner. The corridor swells into a massive hall, its walls fleshed with tapestries and naval charts. The Dog-King halts. His laughter, abrupt as thunder, ricochets through the space, unself-conscious, the merriment of someone unweighted by a crown. “Immensely. But we must make sacrifices for what we love.”
“And that love of yours is power?”
“Power is a supplementary bonus,” the Dog-King counters easily, as though debating the price of herbs rather than ownership of a country. “We do not love it. We appreciate it exists. What we do love is our people, our nation. We are enamored of them. Enough to allow our identity to be subsumed by our duty, to stop existing as ‘I’ but instead as the collective power of the throne. Surely you, of all people, can appreciate that—the desire to give oneself up for the sake of others.”
Yavena says nothing, throat clotted with ruminations.
An interruption: “Tell me, Yavena, why do the Ten Thousand Colors lack family names?”
“Because we are merely feathers on a wing,” Yavena recites, rhythmic, the words as familiar as breath.
The Dog-King cocks his head, ears pricking forward. “We know the propaganda. Tell us what your people think. Tell us if this ideology pleases you, if it appalls you, if you have secret names among yourselves—”
Memories spasm like birth contractions, like the convulsions of death; snatches of anguish and half-remembered diatribes, a swarm of faces and secrets, but Yavena wrestles it all down. She smiles instead, bows her head low. “Forgive me, Lord-General. But the hare does not trade gossip with the hawk.”
Another explosion of laughter, rich and wild. “If you will not educate us about your people, tell us instead why you are violating the edicts of your twin Courts. Iraline comes to us with all her papers in order.”
“Because—” Yavena enlarges her stance, prepares to author a lie that even the Gak cannot scale, only to crumple, stooping under her own exhaustion. “Because this is my fault. She wouldn’t be in this situation if I hadn’t—”
“If you hadn’t what?” The prompt arrives in an inquisitive whine, scandalously bestial.
“Been a coward,” Yavena finishes. It is, as far as she is concerned, an accurate summarization of the situation.
“You love her spectacularly.”
Yavena trains her gaze on nothing and everything, expression abstracted by a morass of emotions. “More than breath and bone and hope.”
“That is good.” The Dog-King nods. “Devotion wins wars.”
“Perhaps,” Yavena replies, not wanting to allow him access into her private concerns. She bows during the lull in dialogue. “If the Lord-General no longer requires my presence, I should find my rest. I only have days to ask a mountain to weep blood.”
“Find it, Yavena. Our apologies for keeping you. But a word of advice before you leave: Rules are meant to be domesticated, not regarded as apex predators. The best players are those who can make the guidelines play fetch.”
* * *
Yavena does not sleep. She cannot.
Serpent-silent, she pads through the hallways of the complex, hounded by a tempest of what-ifs. She knows Iraline. There will be no persuading her, not when her mind has settled into its chosen configuration. But there are other ways to win a game, are there not?
“Ira?” A puff of sound, kept low to circumvent detection. No one has explicitly forbidden nocturnal expeditions, but Yavena has learned to guard against risk.
“Yavena?” A sleep-hazed answer as the door creaks open.
No response, save for her entrance. Yavena leans back, feels the wood click shut behind her. A swallowed breath to steady herself. She arches her head.
Iraline stands before her, tiger-striped by moonlight and carelessly dressed in a white cotton shift. “What are you doing here?” Iraline whispers as she rubs the sleep from her eyes.
“I came to talk.” Yavena slumps onto the edge of Iraline’s cot. “Why are you doing this?”
“Doing what?”
“This. This … dying you’re planning on.” Yavena spits the words, the taste of them like poison on the tongue.
“Because I belong to the Court of the Dead,” Iraline replies, slouching against a wall, arms crossed. Outside, the night is silent, heavy with anticipation. Tropical heat steams through the iron slats of Iraline’s window. “Why else?”
“You’re a Mother. A fertile Mother. You have decades before you even need to—”
Iraline palms her face, nodding, her answering smile taut. “Oh, sweetmeat. I—do you want the truth? The truth is, I am tired. Tired of watching children die, of raising other people’s children to watch them die, of feeding bright-eyed innocents—”
“Everyone gives of themselves willingly, don’t they?” Yavena cannot contain the slither of petty viciousness.
“Yes. No. We are taught to forsake self, you know. What matter is one life when it can purchase happiness for so many?” Iraline chuckles, wan. “Not all of us are strong enough for this duty.”<
br />
The moonlight bleaches the color from her feathers, turns the glow of her eyes feral and strange. “It doesn’t matter. Go home, Yavena. I’ll talk to the Lord-General. He’ll let you forfeit without repercussion, I’m sure of it. He’s a kind one, if nothing else. Go.”
“I promised I would always take care of you, sister,” Yavena answers, loathing the petulance that worms through her voice.
The older Ovia lowers herself to her knees. Their hands interlock, her touch edged with a gentleness that makes Yavena ache. “I know. But this is—I have my reasons for courting the Black Hound, beloved. Now go.”
Yavena considers the puzzle of their lives, the parameters of love. She strokes her claws over Iraline’s own, measuring the topography of knuckles, the texture of her palms, the width of their lives. She nods once. “Not without you.”
No Ovia is harmless. Each and every one of the Ten Thousand Colors is taught the balletic elegance of the kris, the soft places common to all sapient life. But Iraline is only a Mother, and Yavena a Keeper whetted on desperation. She strikes before Iraline can protest: a needle plunged into a vein.
Betrayal widens Iraline’s gaze for a heartbeat before she collapses into a boneless heap, inert and unfeeling. Yavena gathers her sister’s form and pads towards the door. The Dog-King had only said to win Iraline from herself, had not he not? Not how it needed to be accomplished. He would appreciate this, certainly. More importantly, he would understand.
She steps into the hallway. It is time for a different game.
* * *
This is a dance: a ballon of escape, arabesques performed on razor-point steeples, entrechat between battlements, Iraline’s weight on her shoulder like a lifetime of guilt.
Yavena doesn’t stop, doesn’t pause, doesn’t think. Every breath is a transaction paid with someone else’s blood. Knife and kris glimmer, a charnel duet, keeping counterpoint with an orchestra of split viscera, opened lung.
Time empties of meaning. Yavena’s world contracts into muscle memory and offal, to reptilian instinct, to a single demand hammering between spasming ventricles. Out, out, out.
Around her, the Gak begin to howl.
Out, out, out.
Yavena traverses arrows and closing gates, past an artillery of talons and physiques made monstrous without the frame of protocol. Who knew, she pants in the red-black dark behind her eyelids, that the Gak could be so terrifying?
Out, out, out.
The howling deafens.
Release. Somewhere between impossibilities, Yavena crosses the final gate and hurtles into the blackness, her lungs boiling. She is barely Ovia at this point, only impulse and the appetite of survival, her body latticed with a thousand red scars. Into the jungle she flings herself, Iraline secure against her spine, and the last thought Yavena births before the Gak’s fortress becomes a memory is this:
Why do the warning horns sound so much like pleasure?
* * *
The Dog-King looks up from his chess table, smile light.
“Aaaah, Hahvah, you were right,” he breathes, attention swinging back to the smaller Gak sitting opposite the game board, face shadowed by a ludicrous cap. “Yavena is a runner.”
“I get to marry your brother now.” The little Gak relocates a bishop, his answering grin gleaming with teeth. “Your move, your lordship.”
“So many deaths just because you wouldn’t court him in public? Oh, the games we play, Hahvah. The games we play.”
Hahvah’s eyes are tar black, marrow sweet. “Checkmate. Do we have a deal, your lordship?”
“Of course. Set the board, will you? The new round awaits.”
* * *
She runs.
For weeks, for hours, for amoebic eternities, Yavena runs. Until her breath is splinters and her muscles rot. There is no respite, only shards of unconsciousness interlaced with days that will not end and ceaseless nights spent staring into the jungle’s teeth.
The journey is complicated by Iraline’s refutal of her rescue. The first time she wakes, the older Ovia screams, a thunder of rage and grief so loud that Yavena, desperate to circumvent discovery, poisons her with sleep. The second time, Iraline does not cry out, only flees. It is circumstance alone that allows Yavena to retrieve her, weeping, from the dark, Iraline’s ankle a mess of broken bone.
“You need to return me, sister,” Iraline hisses between gasps of pain.
“No.”
“Yavena. Please.” Iraline traps Yavena’s wrist in fingers made iron from desperation. “Please. You need to take me back. You can’t—the Dog-King. He will not forgive this.”
“No,” Yavena repeats and squeezes Iraline’s flesh, an exact application of cruelty that immediately robs the latter of her senses.
There is no third confrontation. Yavena does not permit it. She keeps Iraline docile with venom, her mind chemical-slurred, her movements leaden with toxins. Yavena’s actions are a betrayal, she knows this, a blasphemy of trust, but there is no other hope, no way to go but forward. When they at last they reach the courts of the Ten Thousand Colors, absolution will surely be found.
* * *
There is no absolution, only fire.
“What—”
Yavena’s eyes map the labyrinth of the Ovia capital, warped by destruction, its sunset-clasped minarets and aqueducts reduced to a memory. Smoke haunts rubble-licked streets, thick as lies, as anguish.
In the distance, knotting with the funeral hymns of the Ovia, the voice of the Gak, triumphant.
“No.” Yavena exhales, fear congealing in her throat. She staggers through the archway into the main pavilion, now a landscape of broken bodies, whimpering survivors, and ravaged architecture. “Nononono.”
Iraline, fingers crusted with the grime of the road, says nothing, only slumps to her knees as Yavena releases her.
“No,” Yavena says again, as though the word could subvert the truth of a thousand half-eaten corpses. “How could this—”
Even as the question unspools, an answer decants itself into her mind, a taste like salt, like a sister’s desperation.
You did this.
It is hours before Yavena submits to this knowledge, to the horror of her actions. Hours before she collapses in an alley, her face in her arms, and wails for forgiveness from a city of indifferent ghosts.
* * *
The Dog-King is not what Yavena remembers.
He is colossal, primordial, a nightmare made fur and sickle-moon snarl. Where Yavena remembered a scholar’s inquisitiveness, a boyishness of conduct, there is only a predator’s stare, hard and flat and golden behind small amber glasses.
“Why?” It is the only word that Yavena can find.
“Because you betrayed your end of the bargain.”
Yavena jolts forward, one wincing step at a time, back held straight despite the agony that oozes between every vertebra. She can barely feel her left arm, can barely register the connection between tendon and nerve, the muscles flayed almost to ribbons. With a grunt, Yavena transfers her kris to her right hand, her weight to her left foot. Her grip tightens. After all that has happened, she will not bow, will not bend till she carves absolution from the ribs of the king.
“It was one Mother,” she whispers between a mouthful of blood.
The Dog-King bares an indolent smile. “One Mother. One bargain. One treaty.”
“You tricked us—”
“We gave you every opportunity to perform as you should have, and you failed.”
“You used me!” she screams, limping closer, closer to where the Dog-King sits draped over his throne of dead Mothers.
“Perhaps,” replies the Dog-King as he studies a fan of claws. “Perhaps we decided to use you in a stupid little bet with a stupid little mutt, but then thought, ‘Ah! This could be so much more.’ Perhaps we then decided that the Gak required a new world order, one where our pups would know the hunt as our ancestors did, and our meals were taut-muscled and not limp from a lifetime of coddling. Perha
ps this was all our fault, but the hawk never discusses business with the hare.”
“I’m going to kill you.”
“Really.”
Yavena squares her stance, swallows copper and bile, tries not to sway even as her head swims with grief and the ice-water fury of those without anything to lose. “I’ve killed everyone else. All of your guards, all of your soldiers. None of them could stop me. I—”
“Yes.” The Dog-King grins, unfolding like the death of nations. “Tell me, little Ovia, why do you think that is?”
The Road, and the Valley, and the Beasts
Keffy R. M. Kehrli
The valley of my home is long and crooked and narrow, cut into the landscape like a knife wound. A river runs along the bottom, flooding often through the spring, drying to a barest trickle in late summer, and freezing in winter. Shadowing the river is the great old road, a broad expanse of weeds and cracked bricks that were laid by hands long since forgotten.
As a rule, we do not travel the road, as it is not ours to use.
Our town has no official name. It is merely a collection of houses rough-hewn from tree and stone for those of us who find ourselves here. There are never any visitors, and none of us ever leave, not by road, nor by river, and certainly never in the baskets of the dead. Perhaps the town had a name once, and the people who lived here before us decided that there was no need to keep a name if there was no one to speak with. Would we have names, ourselves, if there were never anyone to introduce ourselves to?
We are not born here, but here we die, and our bodies are buried in the cemetery tucked up against the eastern wall of the valley. There we rest with all those who lived here before, whether they gave the town a name or no, their own names obscured by lichens and mosses and worn away by the callused hands of time.
Why is there a road if it is not used? Ah, but it is used, frequently—only never by any of us.
There is a procession of giant Beasts that travels the great road past us twice a day, in the morning traveling upriver and in the evening traveling down. In the dim light of early dawn, the Beasts walk hunched and weary, their backs laden with baskets full of the newly dead, whose eyes stare and gleam in the dark, legs and arms limp or stiff depending on how long they’ve been dead. In the evenings, the Beasts pass us again, looking strong and refreshed, their baskets hanging limp and empty. Sometimes at dusk they whistle while they travel, the fluting sounds echoing down the valley for hours.
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