Could the people who worked in this house also read minds? It was just one more thing she didn’t know.
Alizhan was looking down a steep drop into the back garden of the house, where the same care had been taken to cut back the vines growing nearest to the house. Most tactics meant to keep people out were also good for keeping people in.
She had to get inside. She considered her options: jump down, then try to open the back door or one of the windows. Alizhan didn’t have her set of lockpicks on her, but there was a chance not all the windows were latched.
Another option: go around to the front of the house, knock on the door, wait for someone to answer and then knock them out. The drawback to this plan was that it would weaken her, or possibly knock her out as well.
That was when she saw the face in the window. A small brown oval in the lower corner pane. Based on height, it had to be a child. Alizhan couldn’t tell if it was a boy or a girl.
She also couldn’t tell if she’d been seen. But either she was already in trouble or this was the opportunity she’d been waiting for, so she jumped down, landing in a crouch, vines rustling under her feet. Quickly and silently, she made her way to the window and touched the glass.
The child recoiled from the sight of her hand, but then remembered the glass was there and moved closer to examine her. Alizhan put on what she hoped was a big, reassuring smile and pointed toward the door.
The child disappeared. The door opened.
A bearded man strode out of the doorway with his sword drawn. “You there.”
Shit. Alizhan would never get close enough to touch him with his sword brandished like that. The guard’s thoughts weren’t silent, but they weren’t easy to read, either. Everything in his mind was distant and foggy: he was suspicious and hostile, but she already knew that. From the sword.
Did he mean to kill her? She couldn’t tell. That, as much as the brandished weapon, chilled her. This man knew how to protect himself against her, and she knew nothing of how to protect herself from him.
Her heart, that deafening drum, wanted to burst from her chest. Her feet would not move.
And then the guard smiled. Alizhan couldn’t tell what kind of a smile it was—in books, people were always talking about whether a smile was cold or warm or bright or grim—but Alizhan only ever saw smiles as an upward curve of the lips. No matter how long she studied this language of the face that everyone else had been born knowing, she would always decipher it with difficulty. Still, smiling struck her as an odd thing for a wary stranger to do.
He said nothing. There was no accompanying taunt.
Just as Alizhan realized that his suspicion and hostility were fading away, she noticed the child from the window standing next to him. The child was at his side, in a position to tug at his sleeve. One small hand was wrapped around the bare skin between the guard’s glove and the end of his sleeve. The guard closed his eyes. His body folded as she watched, crumpling to the ground with no resistance.
“He’s sleepy,” the child said.
Based on the child’s short hair and neutral-colored clothing, Alizhan was guessing it was a boy. He was small. Six years old? Seven? She didn’t know anything about children. She hadn’t really been expecting this one to reappear again.
“Everyone’s always sleepy,” he told her.
Alizhan’s heart wouldn’t stop pounding. Even though she recognized that this child was like Mala—and he was uheko, possessed of touch-magic, like her—she still felt a stab of terror. No matter how serenely the guard had slipped into sleep, it shook her to see an armed man felled by a small child. Was Alizhan next?
You do the same thing, she reminded herself. Other people are scared of you.
They’d been scared of her since she’d been as small as him. Except Ev. What would Ev do? The boy didn’t come closer. Maybe he could tell she was afraid of him. More likely, he was afraid of her. But they didn’t have to be. Alizhan bent down to his height. She nodded gravely and then put a finger to her lips. There were probably more guards. “My name is Alizhan. What’s yours?” she whispered.
“Zilal.”
“How many kids live here, Zilal?”
“At least one hundred.”
She couldn’t feel everyone in the house, but that figure struck her as unlikely, to say the least. But the boy’s answer definitely meant more than two or three. Maybe more than ten. Could it mean more than twenty? How could she get that many children out? Maybe she should make her way to the front door and let Ev, Djal, and Mala in.
But she’d come here for another reason.
“Have you seen a boy…” she started. What could she say about Kasrik? She could draw an outline, but she could never fill in the details. “A man. Taller than me. Skinny. Angry. He, um… he can read minds?”
“The one who spits,” Zilal said, a solemn guess.
That was a better lead than she’d had before. Alizhan nodded. “Can you show me?”
Zilal stuck out his hand, obviously wanting her to hold it. Alizhan stopped. It was such a tiny little thing to be afraid of, a child’s bare hand.
Her own hands were bare. She’d been prepared to hurt someone. She took a breath. She’d touched Mala earlier. Zilal had a similar gift, if he’d put that guard to sleep himself. It was good that he was gifted; his shields would be naturally strong and it would make things easier for her. Far easier than touching someone with no gift.
Alizhan took the boy’s hand, bracing for a stab of pain through her temples. Nothing happened. Zilal stared at her and tugged on her hand until she followed him.
Alizhan had watched the back of the house while Ev, Djal, and Mala had lurked in Gold Street for the past few hours. In addition to Anavik, the one Ev had recognized from the pamphlet, there were three others—two more men and one woman—who’d come and gone. Alizhan had checked with the others twice now, and they’d be expecting her again soon.
Four priests and at least one guard. There was likely another guard at the front of the house, which she’d need to keep in mind if she wanted to leave by that door. Probably another one around somewhere else, too. If she were in charge, she wouldn’t leave “at least one hundred” gifted children in the care of only two adult guards.
She wouldn’t leave them in the care of ungifted adults at all, since Zilal had just demonstrated what a bad idea that was.
He led her up a set of stairs and into a room with no windows. It was lit by the green glow of lamp light, and in the center, Kasrik was strapped to a chair.
“Kasrik.”
His head lolled back against the wooden chair frame. Either he couldn’t hear her or he couldn’t respond. Alizhan let go of Zilal’s hand and rushed to Kasrik, tugging at the restraints around his arms, heedless of touching him. She needed something to cut the ropes, so tightly knotted that they were digging into the flesh of his forearms. Alizhan turned to the table that ran along one wall of the otherwise empty room. Its surface was covered with tools—her stomach lurched—and glass bottles of some clear liquid, some with what looked like long, tangled coils of translucent string inside.
Her hand finally landed on a simple blade. She whipped back around to cut Kasrik free, and that was when she noticed his arms.
They were covered in long, thin black scars. No, not scars—something else. The skin was dead and flaking away.
Kasrik didn’t flinch when she touched him. He barely moved at all. Alizhan felt nothing from his mind, and very little reaction from his body. But he was breathing. He had a pulse.
She slid the blade of the knife between his arm and the rope and then slit the rope. When she freed Kasrik’s left arm, it simply dropped from the armrest of the chair to hang at his side.
What would she do if he didn’t wake up? He was bigger than her. She couldn’t carry him out of here. Alizhan pushed that worry aside and cut the ropes at his ankles. Zilal was still watching her in silence.
“Do you know what they did to him?” Alizhan asked.
&n
bsp; Zilal nodded once. “They made him scream.”
Alizhan’s breath caught. But just as she was about to ask more questions, she felt someone’s presence in the hallway outside the door. Kasrik was unbound but unconscious, and there was no way she could save him, and Zilal, and herself.
A stocky young man appeared in the doorway.
She clenched the handle of the knife.
The man wasn’t dressed like a priest, but he thought of himself as one. That was all Alizhan could get from his thoughts. Like the guard at the door, he’d learned to obscure his intentions. He gave off only a hint of what he felt, and it wasn’t reassuring. The man didn’t smell like the bright alertness that might precede a confrontation. Smug triumph sat heavy in the air around him.
“You want to know what we did to him?” the man said. “We asked him about you.”
“They rang the hour bell,” Ev said. “Alizhan was supposed to check in and she didn’t.”
“What do you want to do about it?” Djal asked. “Should we look for her around back?”
Ev shook her head. Her quivering heart threatened to panic. Either Alizhan had been captured or she’d gone in alone. “There’s only one place she could be.”
The orphanage, remarkably similar in construction and style to all the surrounding houses, still somehow gave off a grim air of foreboding. Djal was saying something about making a plan, and Mala was agreeing with him, but Ev simply left them behind. She walked right up to the courtyard wall.
“What are you doing?” Djal said.
“Boost me up,” she demanded. “And then toss my staff over. We should have done this hours ago. I’ll let you in when I can.”
He nodded, kneeling and lacing his hands together. Even as tall as she was, Ev couldn’t reach the top of the wall that way. Instead, she had to sit on his shoulders, wait for him to stand, and then rise to a standing position on top of his shoulders, with one hand braced against the wall.
So much for subtlety.
She grabbed the top of the wall and pulled herself over, then dropped down into the garden. A few moments later, her staff clattered to the ground beside her. She picked it up just in time to swing it at the guard who came charging out of the house. She didn’t hit him hard enough to take him down, but it was enough to send his sword toward the empty air instead of her torso. Ev stepped to the side, rearranging her grip on the staff so she could aim a sweeping strike at his legs. He went down hard, cracking his head against the cobblestone path to the door.
Ev rifled through his pockets and found a ring of keys. She shoved key after key into the garden gate, glancing over her shoulder, until one finally clicked. Djal and Mala came right through.
“You’re bleeding,” Djal said. He bent to pick up the guard’s sword as he said it.
“But he didn’t hit—” Ev started, and then saw that he was right. It was the cut her mother had stitched closed after she and Alizhan had first been attacked. The newly healed skin must have split open. Once Djal pointed it out, the pain was obvious, burning along her side. But she’d ignored it before and she could ignore it again. She needed to focus to dull the pain in her side and to quiet the frantic and fearful trembling at the back of her mind that threatened to overwhelm her. “It doesn’t matter. Find Alizhan.”
The door was an imposing thing, heavy wood with many latches. But in his haste, the guard hadn’t locked it. Ev opened it and walked in. The inside of the house, much like the outside, was unremarkable. Red tile floor and white plaster walls. Very little furniture in the first rooms. But men with swords didn’t come charging out of unremarkable houses.
“You go up, we’ll search this floor and the cellar,” Djal said.
Ev ran up the stairs with no further discussion. At the top, she was confronted with the sound of conversation, and a stocky young man standing in the doorway of a room, blocking her view.
“We asked him about you,” the man was saying. He hadn’t noticed Ev yet. He was intent on something in the room, and one of his big, gloved hands was clamped around the neck of a squirming child. “But now that you’re here, we don’t need to ask him anything else. That’s a good thing, too. He was getting more and more useless.”
“Why do you care who I am?” That was Alizhan’s voice. Strange to hear her ask a question. Either she was stalling, or she genuinely didn’t know. Maybe both. Could this man have some kind of power?
“Where’s the book?” he countered.
“What could you possibly want with a book? It’s not like you can read.”
“As opposed to gutter trash like you,” he said, not rising to the taunt. “The lowest of the low. Ha-Varensi took you in and raised you like her own, and you threw it all away. For what? Mar’s money? Or is he giving you something else? Are you one of his little sluts?” The man advanced on Alizhan. “You’ll tell me where the book is and what Mar ha-Solora paid you to betray ha-Varensi once I burn it out of you. See your friend there? He had a real smart mouth until I got to him. And for him, it was only his arms. With you, I think we’ll start with your face.” He huffed with satisfaction, then looked down at the child, still writhing in his grip. “And you, little monster—you can watch.”
If Ev attacked him, she might hurt the child. Maybe if she bashed him in the head with her staff, his hand would spasm and he’d let go of the kid. But the doorway would keep her from making a swing with enough momentum to do real damage.
“What did you do to him?” Alizhan said with what sounded like real interest. “I’ve never seen scars like that before.”
“Pure medusa venom,” the man said with a note of pride. “Those streaks are from the tentacles. You lay them right down on the skin, it burns like hell and never heals. Fixes your filthy kind right up. Stops you from working your witchcraft on innocent people.”
“You’ve done this before,” Alizhan guessed, as though they were both partaking in an intellectual exercise. Ev could never have sounded so detached from her own fate, especially not if that fate was imminent torture.
“Don’t worry, I’ve had plenty of practice curing the deformed,” the man said. “Now, since you’ve so conveniently cut all his restraints, push him onto the floor and get in the chair.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because if you don’t, I’ll snap this little one’s neck.”
The child gasped at that, and Ev heard movement, but still couldn’t see into the room. It didn’t matter. She didn’t need a perfect plan. This man had threatened to murder a child and torture Alizhan, and she had to do something right now.
Instead of bashing him with her staff, she simply jabbed him sharply in the small of the back.
He whirled, but didn’t let go of the boy, which had been her hope. Oh well. Kids were resourceful in general, and Ev was guessing this one in particular could take care of himself. She dropped her staff and charged the man, ramming into him with her whole body and sending them both sprawling to the floor. He did let go of the boy as they were falling, and the boy got away as quickly as possible. Ev pinned the man to the ground under her body, sat up, and punched him in the face. Hard. And then she kept punching.
“Ev, Ev, stop. There’s rope in here. We can tie him up. We need him alive.”
“I wasn’t planning to murder him,” Ev said between breaths, although in truth she wasn’t so sure. Her knuckles were bloody. She wiped them on her victim’s clothes.
“I was reminding myself,” Alizhan said. “This room is evidence against Iriyat. Everyone in this house is evidence. We’re going to need everyone and everything here to take her down.”
“He’s not going to say anything against her,” Ev said.
“Maybe,” Alizhan said. “He was talking like a true believer. But it’s possible that everyone here has had their memory altered. Maybe everyone working for Iriyat has. I want to give them a chance.”
“How can we possibly protect this many people while we wait for the Council to gather for a trial?” Ev asked. If t
hey lost track of any of these people, Iriyat could swoop in and change their memories. It felt insurmountable.
“I think we just have to keep them here. We’ll stay in the house.”
“He can’t stay in the house,” Ev said, nodding at Kasrik, still barely conscious in the chair. “He needs help.”
“You’re right,” Alizhan said. “Find Mala. She’ll know what to do. If it’s safe to move him, take him to Mar. I trust him to help Kasrik, and we need him to get Ezatur and Sideran on his side, because that’s our best chance of exposing Iriyat. He’ll have to work quietly. If Iriyat gets word that we’re here, or that Kasrik got out alive, she’ll come. If she comes, I don’t know how we’ll stop her. She could make us forget our own names.”
Violence came to mind so quickly that Ev felt ashamed of herself. They couldn’t just kill Iriyat. Beyond the problem of getting away with the murder of a beloved public figure, Iriyat had loyal supporters in the Temple, people who might continue this unconscionable work without her. No, Ev and Alizhan had to discredit her. They had to link her to this terrible place, and they had to do it in full view of the city. Her downfall needed to be seared into the collective memory so completely that even Iriyat herself could not undo it.
Ev took a deep breath. Easier said than done.
Ev left Alizhan with Kasrik and their tied-up attacker.
The child in the room, a boy named Zilal, led Ev down the stairs into a large room packed wall-to-wall with cots. Djal and Mala were kneeling on the floor in the aisle between the beds, surrounded by children. There were at least a dozen—no, Ev realized after counting, there were nineteen, including the boy at her side.
There would have been twenty while Kasrik was living here. Had he been as miserable in this room as Alizhan would be? Had he spent long hours watching for an opportunity to escape?
“Alizhan says we need to stay here with them,” Ev told Djal and Mala.
Djal nodded. “I found a guard sleeping on the floor near the back door, and I knocked out another one on my way here. Trussed them both up in the hallway. I’m sure there are more.”
Thornfruit (The Gardener's Hand Book 1) Page 23