After setting a fire in the hearth of the small hut given them for quarters, Kett broke his silence. “Why do Quietgiven herd the humans? Why keep them in pens?”
Elam stood up, rubbing arms that had held his little girl all day—the child now gratefully slept. “I’m not sure I know.”
“Father?” Kett pressed.
Elam sighed, casting a look at his babe before turning toward Kett. “The Velle use some of them. Has to do with the power they have to move things. Change things. The humans are like wood for them to burn.”
“But why so many?” Kett questioned.
Elam seemed only able to shake his head, evidently having no answer.
And there are so many camps.…
They lingered only a few minutes in the warmth before his father said, “Come,” and headed out into the night again.
Elam went directly to the adjacent pen. The fence had been built of thick iron rods that rose twice the height of the tallest human. The top of each rod ended in a sharp point. And the fenced-in area was easily fifty strides on a side. Like stock, the captives could mill about if they wanted. Beneath a shabby lean-to on one side, more than thirty women huddled together to keep warm.
His father unlocked the gate and went in, heading for the lean-to. As he neared, they grew restless, pushing back against the bars beneath the slanted roof of their shelter.
Elam held up his hands to try and ease their anxiety. “Do any of you speak a Bourne tongue?”
Most of the women nodded. They’d been here long enough to learn.
“Good.” His father looked them over. “I need a woman who has her milk. To nurse my child.”
None answered, though several reflexively covered their breasts.
“You’ll be given a place to sleep. Inside.” Elam gestured toward his and Kett’s new home. “A fire. And extra food.” A moment later he added, “And no beatings.”
“Do we have to fuck you, too?” one woman asked, her words filled with hatred and hurt.
“Nurse the child. That’s all,” Elam assured them.
For a long while, none of the women spoke or moved. Elam could force one to do it. But Kett knew his father wanted a volunteer. Someone Elam could hopefully trust with his little girl.
The silence stretched in the dark pen. Far behind them, the child woke and began to cry from inside their home. The sound of it was like a song sung with just two notes. Distant and faded.
The human who finally raised a hand wasn’t the oldest and saltiest, nor the youngest and most brave looking. Getting to her feet was a dark-haired woman with a mild face. “I still have my milk,” was all she said.
Elam nodded in gratitude and turned back toward the gate. The woman wove her way through her sister prisoners, and followed.
Back inside their home, the woman found the baby in a floor cradle, and took it immediately to her bosom. On her knees, she rocked back and forth in a practiced motion, feeding the babe, who still hadn’t a name. Elam and Kett sat in low-slung chairs and watched, listening to the small sucking noises, which reminded Kett of the sound his feet made pulling out of dredge mud.
The woman never looked up. Never complained, as the hungry infant fed on-and-off for the better part of an hour.
Afterward, both the woman and the little girl looked spent. Elam gently took his child from the human’s arms and put her back in the floor cradle. He then went into the shed behind their home and returned with an iron-bar cage that he set in the corner of the hearth room.
“It’s better than the cold outside,” he remarked, as he opened the door for the woman.
“My name is Asha,” she said, and crawled inside her cage.
His father handed her two wool afghans before closing the door and securing it with a lock. “I’m Elam. This is Kett.”
“And the child?” she asked.
“No name yet,” his father replied. “Hasn’t needed one.”
“We all need a name.” She stared at the child asleep in its cradle. “What was her mother’s name?”
A long moment later, Elam answered, “Sala.”
“Sala, then,” the woman said, speaking it firmly. “Sala Cotlyn,” she amended.
Before either Kett or his father could ask, Asha explained. “The name of my daughter before they took her away.”
She didn’t wait to hear comment or argument about it, and curled into the corner of her cage, losing herself in afghans oversized for her.
* * *
For three months, the same routine. Day and night. Elam tended the larger pen outside, seeing to the women—new ones, those who died or killed themselves, those who gave birth, the transfer of the get of their wombs to unknown Quiet intentions. And Kett watched after Asha—let her out to feed Sala Cotlyn, locked her back up afterward, got her warm stews and cups of water, took her into the field to shit or piss, fetched her buckets of water to sponge away the stink on her skin.
And they talked a lot.
“Father says humans are used by Velle to render the Will,” Kett said, probing Asha to learn more about her kind.
“Some,” she said, adjusting her breast in little Sala’s mouth.
“And the others?” he asked.
Asha looked up. “How do you not know?”
“I’m a dredge farmer.” He hunched his shoulders. “I know onions.”
“Mating,” she said without emotion. “I can’t tell if it’s for pleasure or something else. But there’s lots of it. Seems they like to keep us pregnant. Some of us, anyway. The human men they hold in other pens, entire camps of them. They forge iron. Build. They’re worked until they can’t work anymore.”
Kett shook his head, trying to figure it out. “They don’t use humans much to farm; I know that.”
“Different kind of farming, I suppose,” she said. It was the first time he’d seen her smile, though it was rather mirthless. “But some … some they take north and west. I hear up there they aren’t kept in pens at all. That they don’t do much of anything. But those are rumors whispered at night, when the wombs get hopeful.”
“Wombs?”
“You’ll learn the language of it,” Asha chided mildly. “We are what we do.”
Kett considered it. “They called us ‘dredges.’” He nodded with new understanding.
She nursed Sala Cotlyn in silence for a time. And Kett regarded her cage. She had several more blankets now, to make it more comfortable. And there was a small basket of food—nuts, dried meat, a few edible leaf stems—and a few utensils. She also had a small set of mouth pipes. She sometimes played to little Sala when the babe grew irritable.
In Asha’s cage, there was even a small sketch she’d made on a scrap of parchment. She’d woven her image in and around the words written there. Drawn mostly with charcoal, the picture had been brushed in here and there with a russet color. Kett guessed at where she got that “ink,” but never said anything.
He finally asked her. “Why are you helping us?”
“Nurse the child?” She laughed. This had mirth, but it came out somewhat coarse. Maybe she was just tired.
“Father could have forced you. But you volunteered.” Kett looked back at her. “After losing your daughter, too.” He paused. “Honestly, I’m not sure why any human would help us.”
“You’re Inveterae,” Asha said, as if that explained everything.
He showed her a puzzled expression.
“You’re a captive here as much as I am,” she clarified.
“But we herd you like animals,” he argued. “We keep you caged so the Quiet can do with you as they please. And the little ones you do have…”
The woman stared back him, her gaze far away. “I want to go home. I want to leave the Bourne.” She pointed at him. “I want to leave it as much as you do.”
Kett gave her a narrow look. “As much as I do? I didn’t say that.”
“You will,” she followed. “You’re still young. You haven’t learned the cage of it yet.”
&nb
sp; But he had. Some of it, anyway.
The music is mostly gone.
That’s when he understood why she was helping them.
“Make a friend of me. Of father.” He made his own smile. “That’s why you did it.” His smile faltered, and he held up his arm so she could see his brands. “We’re going back to the dredge farm as soon as little Sala can take hard food. We don’t have a choice about it.”
Asha stared back at him, and spoke with a quiet voice, “There’s always a choice.” Her words had a cold feeling in them. And they left Kett with a mix of emotions. Because he and Asha had become friends. Or so he thought. But now he also felt an unnamed fear.
A fear he understood as he watched her pull from her sleeve a spoon sharpened into a shiv. The bowl of it had been wrapped with lengths of wool to form a handle. The other end had been ground to a point. She rather gracefully brought it up to little Sala’s throat.
Kett held up his hands. “Asha, no. We trusted you.”
“Tell me why I should care about that.” She didn’t yell. Her face never tightened in anger. “After what everything your kind has done, tell me why.”
“But you said we were prisoners, too—”
“The worst kind,” she cut in with her even tone. “You do the Quiet’s bidding to curry a dog’s favor. What does it get you? And what does it cost us?” She nodded toward the outer pen, where other women were being held.
Kett looked down at the baby. “You want to avenge Cotlyn. But killing Sala isn’t going to bring her back. All you’ll be doing is murdering a baby. Taking the last part of my mother away from my father and me.”
Asha nodded. “That’s right. And maybe then your godsdamned ears will be opened.” Silent tears fell from her eyes. “Maybe our cries won’t go unanswered by a people who should stand up against the Quiet. Lead us from this place.”
She began to tremble with anger. Or fear. Whatever it was, her shiv swayed and pricked Sala, who began to cry loudly in her arms. A drop of blood welled beneath the baby’s chin and ran down her neck.
Asha’s eyes widened. She appeared surprised and panicked and filled with indignation. She quivered like a string ready to snap. Her silent tears came faster, running over her placid cheeks. It was strange to see.
But not uncommon.
“Bourne sickness” the humans called it. Many wound up this way. Fragile minds broke from the strain of captivity. Only this human, Asha, held a shiv to Kett’s sister, his mother’s namesake.
His anger bloomed. But came tempered by something else. Empathy.
He held up his hands. “Asha, you don’t need to do this. Please.”
Her trembling hands caused the shiv to prick Sala again. The child wailed now, the sound loud in the room. And soon running steps approached from outside. The door was thrown open, and Elam burst in, another Inveterae behind him—a roaming pen-hand.
Kett’s father took in the situation at a glance, and leveled a hard stare at Asha. “If you’re going to kill the child, do it quickly. Don’t make it suffer.”
Asha snapped from her daze. “The same as you do for us?” she said with icy sarcasm.
“I’ll make yours quick, if you do the same for my child,” Elam replied. “You have my word.”
She laughed again. There was something loose-sounding in it. Still cold, but unsteady.
Elam didn’t wait a moment longer. He started toward her. Kett saw her hand flex on the shiv; her shoulder rose as she set to plunge the homemade knife deep into little Sala’s throat.
And in a moment of clarity, Kett knew she would go through with it. Not from lunacy or anger. Something had gone lost inside Asha. He’d watched it ebb over the last three months.
Do you humans hear music, too?
She would have her moment’s justice, and then be glad to die herself.
But looking at his little sister, Kett felt more than a brotherly urge to save her. It somehow seemed suddenly important for reasons that were different. Larger.
Before his father’s presence could force Asha to murder the babe, he called out to her. “You named her Cotlyn.”
That brought his father’s attention, and Asha’s, too. They stared at him in a long moment of suspended action.
Kett continued. “Whether she lives … or not, you can decide with your knife. But it’s not vengeance if you kill her. And her death won’t change my heart, or my father’s heart, into something you think it should be.” He swallowed. “You’ll just be killing a child you saved from death. Which makes her yours, every godsdamned bit as much as she’s ours.”
A long moment later, Asha began to sob, and lowered her knife. She bent over and kissed Sala Cotlyn, whispering an apology as she did so.
Elam sent his extra pen-hand away, and sat into his chair, where he buried his head in his hands.
Kett stared at Asha and his father and thought about cages.
* * *
That evening, as Asha slept in her cage, and little Sala slept in her cradle, Kett sat near the fire trying to drive out the chill that had gotten inside him. It was a foolish thing to do. His chill wasn’t from the cold.
“We’re more like the humans than we are the Quiet,” he said to his father, who had just returned from securing the pen and the rest of his day’s end chores.
“Because we’re slaves to Quietgiven?” Elam said, rubbing at his hands.
“No,” Kett replied. “Because we can’t leave the Bourne.”
His father’s eyes narrowed. “I’ve been told humans can walk right through the Veil. Has no hold on them.”
Kett smiled darkly. “Which is why we keep them penned up.”
“That’s at least part of it,” his father answered. “Kett, don’t let what happened today get inside you—”
Kett shook that off. “We weren’t meant to be here. But we are. The stories say the gods didn’t believe in us. Easier for them to send us into the Bourne with the dissenting god’s own. So we don’t belong here. And we don’t belong south of the Pall, either.” He gave his father a long look. “Where should we be?”
His father smiled. Not a tired or ironic kind. “You still hear the music, don’t you?”
“I’m not sure what that means anymore,” Kett answered.
“Your mother would be pleased,” Elam added.
Then his father sat back, taking a moment to regard his daughter, the woman who nursed her, and finally Kett. “A long time ago,” Elam said, “just a few generations after the Placing, many of us left the Bourne.”
Kett turned sharply toward his father, a flicker of hope in his belly. “What?”
“We don’t speak of it—breeds false hope. And false hope will kill a content Gotun.” Elam smiled again. “Five Houses. All of them Mor peoples. They escaped through the Veil. Used a kind of song to tear through. Some say they went to get out of the Bourne. Some say they went to keep their song from Quiet hands. Whatever the truth, they got away.”
The wind stirred in trees outside. Wood creaked in the yard behind their home.
“No one has this Mor song anymore?” Kett asked.
“Not on this side of the Veil.” His father must have seen his disappointment. “But they aren’t the only ones to get through.”
Kett felt another spark of hope.
Elam sat forward in his chair. “The Lul’Masi, another House, they pierced the Veil. No song that time.”
“Then how?” Kett quickly asked.
“No one knows,” his father said, “but the Lul’Masi were sky watchers. Better at it than other Inveterae, or even the Quiet, so the story goes. Must have learned something in the stars.”
Again wind murmured and wood creaked beyond the walls of their home. Kett might have found it less random, if he hadn’t been so excited by what he was hearing.
“Then we could do the same,” he suggested. “There are ways to get out.” He looked over at Asha. “And the humans could come with us.”
Elam put his hands up in a slowing motion.<
br />
But Kett’s mind was racing forward. “Maybe the Mors and Lul’Masi have something in common. We can study—”
“We’ll have to keep it quiet,” his father said. “It’s dangerous talk. And don’t ever share any of it with someone you wouldn’t trust with your life. Don’t even repeat the stories I’ve told you unless the Inveterae you’re with will guard them—”
The door to their home opened. The camp overseer walked in. A Bar’dyn more heavily muscled than most. His eyes moved over every surface, assessing, before fixing on Kett’s father.
“Telling stories?” the Bar’dyn asked.
“A small slip,” Elam admitted. “Probably brought on by the human woman. It won’t happen again.”
“Tales of music and stars,” the Bar’dyn said without passion. He looked down at Kett. “Inciting sedition in one so young.”
“Told to discourage,” Elam lied. “To warn. We know our obligations.”
The overseer didn’t immediately reply, and walked the room, brushing near Elam, Kett, the cradle, and Asha’s cage, where he sniffed twice. He then ambled back to face Kett’s father, staring at him with blank disregard.
“You’re borrowed. Here for a wet nurse.” The Bar’dyn leaned in, his voice low. “A dredge. Come to me when your children lost a mother. Come into my camp and telling stories of escape.”
Elam lowered his eyes, a sign of respect and submission. “Please,” he whispered.
In his low, rough voice, the overseer went on. “I’m here because I heard there was an incident today. I thought I might be of help. Imagine my surprise to hear from beyond the walls of this home, your voices, sharing entirely the wrong kind of stories.”
Elam didn’t dare look up. He stood, waiting.
The overseer turned and looked down at Kett again. “And what about you, little dredge. What do you think of what your father was saying?”
Kett felt a fire inside. Is this the music they speak of? He wanted to shout back with bright defiance. He wanted to take Asha’s shiv to the Bar’dyn. He did neither. Instead, he stared up. Spoke like a child. And lied like a thief.
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