“I’ve seen a lot of girls. The market is crowded,” Ev said. She didn’t like the way the two men raked their gazes down her body. Laalvur had a city guard, but it was a small force. The Great Houses and other wealthy citizens employed their own men to keep the peace, or so they called it. House guards started fights more often than they ended them. Regardless of the insignia on their tunics, they never made Ev feel any safer. These two men wore blue tunics embroidered with the insignia of Solor, the Great House that sat at the tip of Hahim. Not Varenx House, then.
What did Mar ha-Solora—or his guards—want with Ev’s thief?
“She’s small. Wouldn’t even come up to your shoulder.”
“Hardly a helpful description,” Ev said. Most women were smaller than her, and the world took every chance to remind her. It hadn’t even been a triad since Ajee had spluttered his objections. What man wants a wife who towers over him? Not Ajee.
Still, being tall had its advantages. She could look these two men in the eye while they questioned her. The first guard stepped closer to her. Ev could smell fish sauce on his breath. Ugh. She wanted to recoil, but there was no space. The wood of the cart brushed the backs of her legs.
“She’s got long black hair and light eyes, but she might be wearing a disguise,” he said. He was broader than Ev, but not as big as Papa. He would still fall hard with one precisely aimed strike. Ev’s grip on the wood tightened. It would be easier if she had more space, but there was nowhere to move. She would slam her staff between his legs if she had to.
Brutal, and brutally effective. Papa had been very clear on that point.
“She’s a strange one, got a real unsettling way about her,” the other guard said. He spoke in the clipped, rapid way that characterized people who’d lived in Laalvur all their lives. He was a little leaner than the first guard. He might be faster in a fight. Even if she took out the first guard, the second one would have time to draw his sword.
He stayed a step back, smirking at how Ev leaned away from the first guard.
“What’s in the cart?” the first guard said.
Four empty crates under a sheet of burlap. Ev stepped to the side, shifting away from the guard, and drew back the cloth. They peered into the crates for a moment, and then exchanged a glance. Ev held her breath. Then the first guard crouched down to look under the cart.
Smoking hell. Ev lifted her staff. She could slam the butt of it into his head. No. That was panic talking. She couldn’t knock out a Solor guard in the middle of the market. The other guard would have his sword at her throat in an instant.
But the first guard just shrugged and stood up. “No sign of her,” he said to his partner. Satisfied, they took their leave.
A sigh rushed out of Ev once they were out of sight. How had they missed the thief? When she was sure no one was looking, she ducked down to check under the cart. There was nothing there.
Then she squinted into the shadows. She’d expected the woman to be crouching on the ground, and when she hadn’t seen that, her gaze had passed over the scene without incident. But the woman was clinging to the bottom of the cart, bracing her feet against the corners and flattening her small body against the wood.
The men were gone. Ev made a great show of rearranging her burlap sheet, spreading it wide like a curtain and shaking it out. The woman dropped from her position without a sound, and Ev covered her as she crawled into the cart. Ev had to pack the wooden crates around her and then lay the sheet over the top of everything.
After she checked the donkey’s harness, Ev peeled up the corner of the sheet one last time to check the cart. The woman’s grin glinted in the shadows. She was wedged between the crates, curled into a tiny ball. Ev’s bones ached at the sight, but the woman looked perfectly pleased with herself. She put her finger to her lips again.
Ev nodded once, a little offended at the reminder. She knew how to keep quiet. She let the sheet drop.
Ev wanted to hurry out of the market, but she forced herself to take her time. It was a long, slow trip through the narrow switchbacked street that led up and out of Arishdenan. The donkey seemed torturously slow this shift. Ev tried not to look at the cart, but there was nowhere else to look. If she so much as breathed in the direction of one of the young men hawking pamphlets, they’d be in her face offering her their curious and ghastly mixture of politics and pornography, featuring members of the Council of Nine—Slutty Sideran’s Secret Affair!—for the low, low price of two kalap. Ev never wanted any part of what they offered, but she especially couldn’t afford to spend money or time on that now.
Was the woman hurt? What had she done to make Solor guards follow her? Was anyone else angry with her? Was Ev being followed? It was impossible to tell in the city with so many people around. The back of her neck prickled.
Her path back to the farm wound through the terraced hillsides. Ev kept to the light as much as possible, dodging the pools of shadow on the road. It would be easy for someone to hide in these hills. The sun-facing sides had been denuded of trees so that no shade spotted the farmland beneath, but the other side of the road was rocky and wild. Ev walked with her staff in hand.
Her father rarely talked about Adappyr, and he never talked about why he’d left, but Ev knew the Adpri abhorred violence. And yet her father knew how to fight. He’d insisted on teaching her. If she was going to get into fights, he said, she ought to win them. He’d taught her to fight with her fists and with a staff, and at first he’d treated it like an art. There were stances to learn, forms to follow, sequences of movements to memorize. Later, he’d taught her a desperate, cornered kind of fighting—in those lessons, he said things like go for the eyes, use your teeth, kick him in the balls. Ev’s imaginary opponent was always a him.
Where had he learned all this? Why was it so important to him for Ev to know all of it? Were the whispers about her father being a murderer true? She’d asked him about it between drills, and he’d only said Don’t hurt anyone you don’t have to. And then he’d swung his staff at her and they’d gone back to sparring.
Ev carried her staff to the market when she went by herself. Men were less likely to ask her to smile if she was carrying a big stick.
She wondered if men asked the thief to smile. Ev had never seen her with a weapon, so men probably said all manner of nasty things to her. Ev clutched her staff, twisting the smooth wood in her hand. It was stupid to feel protective of a stranger.
For all she knew, the woman could be lying in wait and planning to kill her.
Probably not, though. And she was so little. Ev could take her.
They were far enough out of the city, and this stretch of road was empty. It was still a long walk back to the farm.
“My name is Ev,” Ev said aloud. She’d been waiting to say that for ten years.
Nothing in the cart stirred. The woman didn’t answer.
“It would be nice to know your name, that’s all,” Ev said. She thought about pointing out that she was taking a huge risk by trusting the woman and smuggling her out of Laalvur, but that seemed obvious, and she didn’t want to be rude.
There was a shuffling and snapping of branches in the undergrowth at the side of the path. Ev grabbed her staff in both hands and whipped around. Someone burst forth, barreling toward her. Ev lifted her weapon high, stared down her assailant—black cloth over face, leather jerkin, dagger in hand—and slammed the end of her staff into his forehead.
He thudded to the ground. Ev took a half step forward. He was unconscious. His face was covered, but he wasn’t big enough to be one of the guards from the market. He wasn’t wearing Solor colors or Varenx colors. So who was he? And why in the smoking hell was he following her? If he was a robber, he could have picked richer targets in the city. Was he a rapist? Or was he after her thief? Ev glanced over her shoulder to make sure the woman was all right, and a second man leapt up from behind the cart.
The corner of the cart was between them. She thrust her staff across the distance. He dod
ged nimbly, surging forward and drawing a knife from his belt. Ev took a step back and began whipping the staff in a figure 8 in front of her body. He only had a knife, so he’d need to be close before he could hurt her.
He darted in again and she struck him in the side before he could touch her. In the instant of his stunned reaction to being struck, she plunged her staff toward his head, but he was too fast. He slipped out of her way. He took another step toward her, and Ev backed up again, her staff still spinning. He’d come around the corner now, and the cart no longer stood between them. Ev lifted her staff, whirling it above her head and then bringing it down until it cracked against his skull.
He stumbled, and Ev meant to hit him again, but she heard leather shoe soles scraping against the packed dirt of the path—the first man had gotten up again. He was behind her. She needed more space. She needed to get away from the cart so that she could swing freely and have a chance at hitting both of them. No—the first man was too close, and he had a knife. Ev gripped the staff in both hands and rammed it backward without looking. He grunted. She’d caught him in the abdomen.
But now the second man was slashing at her, drawing his blade in a hot line of pain from her ribcage to the front curve of her hipbone. Ev grit her teeth. It was a shallow cut. She thrust her staff forward, trying to spear the second guard in the gut. She got him, but the blunt end of her staff wasn’t enough to stop him. Ev was attacking both of them savagely now, hitting with as much force as possible, but there were two of them, and there was no space.
The thief erupted out of the cart and bashed the second man in the face with an empty vegetable crate. The sturdy wooden crate withstood the assault, and Ev had to dodge the wild swing herself. The thief went for the first man after that, smashing the crate into his face with abandon. It was enough of a distraction for Ev to sweep her staff under the second man’s feet and trip him. Once he was on the ground, she put the end of her staff against his windpipe and her foot on his knife hand.
“Don’t move,” Ev said. She looked over at the thief. “Everything okay over there?”
“Great!” the thief said breathlessly. Sweat ran down the sides of her face. The man was unconscious and bleeding from a cut over his eye. The thief, her little grey-gloved hands still clenched around her weapon, had a sickly pallor, but she looked directly at Ev and forced a smile.
Ev knew from experience that hurting another human being for the first time was upsetting. And the woman must have been terrified before that, trapped in the cart. But hurting people should be emotionally difficult, so it was a mark in the woman’s favor that she looked ill.
“Oh, that’s not why—” the woman started, and then stopped to watch Ev bind the hands and feet of the other man. Whatever she’d intended to say, she let it go. Her hands unclenched and she dropped the wooden crate. It nearly hit the unconscious man in the face, but instead fell harmlessly to the ground next to him, kicking up a little puff of red-brown road dust.
“Are there more of them, do you think?” Ev said.
The thief’s mouth twisted in contemplation for a moment. “Let’s not find out.”
Ev had to sacrifice her scarf and rip a strip from the bottom of her tunic before both men were adequately tied up. It took much longer than she wanted. Her cut wasn’t bleeding badly, but the fabric of her tunic was sticking to it and every time she moved, it pulled sharply. “So now we just… leave them here?”
“Well, I don’t want to kill them,” the thief said. Her nonchalance alarmed Ev, who hadn’t expected to end up discussing murder so casually when she’d set off for her weekly trip to the market. “And I didn’t really enjoy their company, so I don’t want to bring them with us.”
With us. As if they had a plan to go somewhere together.
With exaggerated dignity, the thief picked up the crate from the ground and set it back in the cart. Then she walked to the front of the cart and prodded the donkey—who’d remained calm throughout this ordeal—into walking forward.
She seemed to cheer up as they got farther away, and with her cheer came chatter.
“You were spectacular,” the thief was saying as they walked. “I loved how quiet you got. Everyone is so loud all the time, and I was hoping you wouldn’t be like that, but then on the way here you were being so noisy, all full of doubts and questions—”
Ev narrowed her eyes at the woman. She’d said two sentences on their long walk out of the city. That hardly qualified as “noisy.”
The cut on Ev’s side stung. She’d just been taking her usual path home. She could have led these men straight to her parents’ farm. There might still be others following them. Fiery fucking hell, what a monumental fool she was. She had no idea what she’d gotten herself into.
“Don’t be mad,” the woman said, interrupting the flow of her own story and startling Ev. The woman wasn’t even looking at her.
Ev wasn’t mad. She was tense. Apprehensive. Uncomfortable. The distinction wasn’t worth mentioning, as was generally the case for Ev’s feelings, so she said nothing.
The instant passed. The woman launched back into her retelling. “Those men showed up, and you went so quiet, it was like there was only one thing in the world: the fight. It was so clean and calm and perfect. I get that feeling, too, sometimes. People are crowding you and chasing you and all of a sudden, you can focus. You know exactly what to do.”
“Do people chase you often?” Ev said. She didn’t like to interrupt, but the question struck her as urgent.
The woman shrugged. “I don’t know. How much chasing is normal? Does it matter? I wish I could feel that way all the time. So sure of everything. Not distracted and confused.” The thief sighed, and then said, “Oh! My name is Alizhan, by the way. I wanted to tell you earlier, but you were being so loud and I could tell those men were there, and it didn’t seem like the right time. I’m sorry I never told you before. I wanted to. You were always happy to see me. No one is ever happy to see me!”
Everything she said came out in the same quick, light tone. No one is ever happy to see me—what a funny world we live in! That lightness was a decoration, a distraction enclosing the hollow loneliness of what she was saying, and it was as fragile as a painted eggshell. One or two taps, and it would crack. Ev said nothing, and she meant her silence as an act of kindness.
“I like that feeling, the one you get when you see me,” the woman was saying. “That’s why I came to you. I knew you’d help me, and I knew you had a staff, but I never knew you’d be so good at it.” Alizhan grinned at Ev, as wide and bright as a caricature drawing in a pamphlet. There was something goofy and endearingly off about her. Ev was beginning to get the impression that Alizhan didn’t spend much time with people.
Despite everything, Ev couldn’t stop herself from smiling back. Monumental fool or not, she was in it now. She had to find out what kind of trouble this strange girl was in.
“Oh,” said Alizhan after they’d been walking for a little while. “You’re not mad. You’re in pain.”
“It’s just a cut,” Ev said reflexively. What an odd way for Alizhan to phrase it. How could she tell, anyway? Ev wasn’t complaining.
“No, don’t be like that. You’re hurt, I can tell. Do you want me to look at it? Maybe I should look at it,” she said. “You probably shouldn’t let your tunic stick to it like that. Hey.” The last word was directed at the donkey, who stopped when Alizhan tugged on his harness. Her attention returned to Ev. “Sit in the cart.”
Ev sat. Alizhan took a deep breath, as though being near Ev required preparation, and then lifted up the bottom hem of Ev’s tunic with no warning at all. The cut ran diagonally along Ev’s left side, from her lower ribs to the top of her hipbone.
“Wow, you have… a lot of muscles.”
Ev sighed, and then regretted it, since the movement pulled at her cut. “You don’t know what you’re doing, do you?”
Alizhan was holding Ev’s tunic up with one hand. Her other hand, still gloved in gre
y leather, hovered close to the cut, one finger extended.
“Don’t!” Ev said. She had no idea where those gloves had been. They were probably as grimy as the rest of the girl. She grabbed Alizhan’s bare wrist to keep her hand away.
Something jolted through her. Shock lit Alizhan’s wide eyes. She wobbled in Ev’s vision, a grimace of pain on her face. Ev fainted.
4
Lyrebird shift, 30th Triad of Orsha, 761
I DO NOT WANT TO tell this story, and yet I must.
I am not a liar by nature, only by necessity. Still, it is a trait I have cultivated for many long years, and having trained and trimmed myself into this shape, I find it difficult to fight free of the habit. But I want there to be truth between us, tangled and thorny as truth always is.
I know it has not always been easy between us. If you are reading these words, know this: you are the one thing in this world for which I care.
Everything I have done, all of it, has been for you.
There. I shall try to recount the whole of it now. Were these words destined for other eyes, I might put them in better order, but this text is mine and yours alone, so I will let my mind’s seeds take root where they fall. I trust you will understand me.
I will start with Arav. I wish I could say I noticed him as soon as I boarded the ship. (It was called In the Shade I Saw My Love Go Walking after a song I hated at the time. Following tradition, the crew had nicknamed the vessel Shade.) I wish I could say our eyes met and our hearts sang and we were drawn to each other. But that is not how it happened. I am sure I was rude to him in those first shifts, although I cannot remember a particular incident; I was rude to everyone on the ship. I was sixteen and I did not want to be there.
I had prayed for sickness, eruptions, waves, war—anything so I did not have to cross the water to meet Rossin Tyrenx, the wealthy lord in Nalitzva who was to be my husband. But calm is crueler than chaos: the rowers were strong and the sea was peaceful, and I was my parents’ gamepiece.
Thornfruit (The Gardener's Hand Book 1) Page 5