by Kaden, John
“What is your name?”
“… Lia.”
“Lia.” He stands and takes her other hand and looks deeply into her. “Where are you from?”
“I work in the kitchen.”
“Clearly.”
Keslin quiets his rambling and smiles over his shoulder at Freja and Mazi. They look on icily as Arana surveys the new girl.
“You were brought from the forest?”
Lia parts her lips but no words come out. Arana leans forward and smells her, taking long, slow inhalations. His breath is bitter with wine. Her once small frame has grown womanly and he turns her in a circle before him and runs his hands down her side, feeling her contours, then turns her again and cups her breasts. She stands perfectly still and watches helplessly. He brushes back her hair and thumbs her eyelids wide open.
“Look at her eyes, Keslin, they look like wolves’ eyes.”
“They’re very nice.”
“Thank you, Lia.”
“You’re welcome,” she says, trembling.
Arana retakes his seat and dismisses her with a flick of his wrist. She dips her knees and gives a slight curtsy, then turns and takes one deliberate step after another toward the door, fighting the urge to run as fast as she can.
Jack fidgets on a bench with three other boys of his age on the Temple’s high terrace, the omnipresent warriors watching over them. He looks off at the horizon. They used to say that the world is a circle like the other bodies in the sky, and that if a man travels far enough in one direction he will sooner or later double back on himself, but as Jack looks out toward the furthest reaches he thinks it has all the appearances of infinity, like he could take a never-ending swim if he lit out on a straight enough path.
Arana jogs briskly up the last few steps and Keslin pulls his aging body along after. The three boys at Jack’s side stand immediately, and he jumps up quick to match them.
“Brave men, Keslin. And you are men now,” he tells them. “Children no longer. This day marks your passage.”
He motions them to join him by the rail, then puts his arms around their shoulders and together they look out across the expanse. Far below, people are traversing the garden paths and Jack scans their faces as best he can from this distance. None look familiar.
“This is not my Temple,” says Arana, talking low and with tremendous gravity. “It is yours—if you defend it, it belongs to you. Look at all of them, and over there, every one of those homes has a family living inside. You must be willing to give your lives for these people, to fight and die for them, if that’s what it takes. If you can do that, if you can make that promise to me and to the Temple, then your rewards will be endless. Look at me.” They look. “You have been Nezra since birth,” he tells Jack’s companions. “We are blood. And Jack, you’ve come from far away, but I know you are able. Will you make this promise to defend your family?”
Three of them nod. Jack does not.
“Tell me then. Look at me and tell me, I promise to defend this family with my life.”
Down the line they go, each boy reciting the promise. Jack is last. This moment has been on his horizon for over two years and he wonders if it is even possible for him to say no. He has envisioned himself declining the call to service and being thrown back into his cell and locked away and forgotten until some future detachment pries open the sealed trap and finds the skeleton of a fifteen year old boy, chained and grinning. In the end, it is that same inner force that commanded him to eat even when he wished to starve that speaks for him. He looks Arana squarely in his crystal blue eyes, mindful of the occult powers they have been known to possess, and recites the pledge.
“I promise to defend this family with my life,” he says.
A sick numbness spreads through his body and he wonders if the King is working some strange magic on him.
“Very good,” Arana says, and Jack can see the victory on his face. “Keslin, meet these new Sons of the Temple. Men, this is Keslin. He handles all matters of defense, and has since the earliest days. You are in his control now.”
“Welcome, men,” Keslin declares grandly, surveying them with keen eyes. “You are in for quite an adventure. Follow me.”
He leads them to the clothier and waits in the corridor while Railek outfits them. After a short span, the four novices emerge wearing the standard attire—high-cut boots, black cloths around their waists, and belts fitted over their shoulders. Jack flinches when he looks down and realizes he looks exactly like the armed warriors at his side, with only one exception—his hair has not been shorn.
He guides them out past the amphitheatre and on toward the outer provinces. People stop and give encouraging smiles as they pass. Jack stares straight ahead and tries to block them out. They diverge from the quarry road and march single file past the stables. In an open field, Keslin stops and unties the belt that cinches his shirt closed.
“I want you to have a full understanding… of what it is we do… and why we do it.” He pulls back his shirt and lets it fall. The boys gasp. Across his torso, starting from his left shoulder and cutting a mean path to his beltline, is a texture of flesh that would look unhealthy on a corpse, pinkish and boiling, gruesomely marbled with old scar tissue. “I was here…” he avows, “when everything burned, I was here. I carried my dead child in these arms.” He raises them, palms up, and his forearms are a spider’s web of gnarled and mottled disfigurement. “I will not let it happen again.”
They behold him grimly, unable to look away.
He slips his shirt back over his shoulders and ties his belt off, then leads them the rest of the way in silence. They walk to a slatted wood structure set back from the quarry road, and when Keslin enters the men milling around stop and face him rigidly.
“Come meet your new recruits,” he calls out.
A man rises and approaches from the rear of the barracks, stout as a boulder, with lithe, twitching muscles that look distinctly engineered for this grisly business. He inspects the four young men in a vaguely reptilian fashion.
“This is Taket. Obey him.”
Taket is a well-seasoned scout. On a long, dark night nearly three years back he sat perched in the high branches of a great sequoia and watched Jack perform his ceremonial Fire dance with thoughts of heartless murder on his mind. He proceeds down the length of the aisle, his great bulk and long stride making it seem as though his footfalls would shake the whole flimsy barracks with each step, yet he treads silently. Jack and his fellow recruits watch him leave. Keslin leans back against one of the bunks and grins.
“I think you’d better follow him,” he says.
They hustle out the front entrance to catch up. Taket walks past a battery of warriors and accelerates until he is sprinting away, and the recruits fall in with the rest of the team in pursuit of his swiftly receding form. He leads them down a trail that veers northward along the bluffs, waves slushing over the tumbled rocks below, the path cutting dangerously close to the edge, a sheer drop straight down to a jagged shore.
Jack huffs along as the path curves inland through piney scrag. A steep upslope slows their pace as each man shambles to the top, stepping from boulder to boulder. Taket runs them hard, stopping only at small streams to drink then racing off again. Before long Jack’s breathing turns ragged and a hot throb burns in his chest, but he does not slow. Their path weaves through the forest and back along the coast. In the late morning they struggle up another rocky incline, pale dust sticking to their sweaty skin.
Taket stops and stretches, waiting for his team to collect. Jack is second to last and when he reaches the top he staggers and pants and looks around. Behind them, a line of smoke landmarks the Temple, some distance away now. The path winds down the other side of the hillock and ends at an alluring crescent of sandy beach, shrouded on both ends by immense outcroppings. Taket stands with his feet spread and his arms crossed, appraising his men. He looks toward his four new additions.
“Do you know how to swim?”
<
br /> “Yes,” say three of them.
Jack shakes his head no.
“Then today,” says Taket, “you will learn something.”
“Look how fat she is,” Phoebe commands, stretching her skinny stick arms around Jeneth’s much pregnant stomach. “I think she has five babies in there.”
“I don’t have five babies. You’re asking for it. Someday, when you’re pregnant, I’m going to sit around all day calling you fat like you do me.”
“Okay,” says Phoebe. She puts her ear against Jeneth’s belly button and listens. She gasps. “I can hear them.”
“That’s my stomach growling, stupid. All day long,” she tells Lia, “all day long she’s like this.”
“I think it’s your babies growling.”
“Babies don’t growl, Phoebe.”
“You look beautiful,” says Lia.
“Thank you.”
“Here, sit down, Jeneth. Your feet must be tired.” Lia takes her hand and guides her to a bed in the corner. She has moved into a smaller room in the nearly finished wing, living now with Haylen and two other girls who were born at the Temple. “I’ll get you another pillow for your back.”
“That’s okay, I can’t stay long. I have to walk Phoebe back to the lodge, then I’m meeting Eriem after his training.”
“I’m so happy for you, Jeneth. He seems like a good man.”
“He’s great. I just get nervous they’re going to send him out. It’s so dangerous.”
“Yeah,” Lia says absently.
“Guess who just started training with them? Eriem just told me.”
“I don’t know. Who?”
“Jack.”
Lia freezes. “He’s…”
“He’s doing well. Eriem says he’s a fast learner.”
A fast learner, Lia agonizes. What is he learning, how to steal children? She rakes herself and shoves these thoughts into a deeply hidden compartment in her mind and locks them away until bedtime. “I’m glad that he’s okay.”
“It’s too bad he’s not older.”
“Why?”
“I remember how well you two always got along. It’s a shame he won’t be choosing, that’s all.”
“Oh.”
“Don’t worry—you’re so pretty, I’m sure you’ll get snatched up quick.”
Lia forces a thin smile. “Thanks.”
Jack’s training continues on through the long summer. They run everyday, always in the morning and sometimes again in the evening, and for distances that grow to feel endless, breaking from the path to climb trees or dive from high cliffs. At night, sleep comes deep and heavy. Days at the quarry become an afterthought with the time spent on this cruel regimen. They grapple and learn to fight, squaring off in impromptu bouts, and when they are not fighting each other they seclude themselves and strike at roped up shadowmen, stitched with leather and packed with sand. They practice bladework and learn the most vulnerable parts of the human body. Everyday he discovers a new way to hurt people.
Taket swings them around behind the barracks for a rest before their afternoon drills, and Jack snatches an apple and stands in line for a drink of water.
“I knew you’d end up here.”
“Hey!”
“How is it?” Braylon asks, draping an arm around his shoulder, brotherly.
“It’s hard,” says Jack, drinking down a ladleful of water, then wiping his arm across his mouth. “But… at least it’s not boring.”
“Exactly. Have they taken you hunting yet?”
“Just once. Hey, where’ve you been? I haven’t seen you since I’ve been back.”
Braylon grins wide. “It was the greatest thing I’ve ever seen. A city… the biggest city ever… the size of the whole forest.”
“You saw it?” Jack says, envying the adventure.
“Yeah, we went all around it. King Nezra rode out special for a few days to see it for himself.”
“What was it like?”
“There’s water all around it. We rode up north and around because there’s no way across, and the whole way there are buildings… buildings everywhere.”
“Whole ones?”
“Not really. They looked mostly like the ones down over there, only bigger.” He nods off toward the ruins.
“Were there people?”
“We saw a few fires around, but not much. Mostly animals. But it went on for as far as you could see, and they had us searching through all of it. For over a month.”
“Searching for what?”
“Don’t know, exactly.”
“They didn’t tell you?”
Braylon narrows his eyes, thinking. “They said it’s supposed to be a place that knows things.”
“How can a place know things?”
Braylon shrugs.
“They send us looking every two or three years,” says Feiyan from the water line. “This was the second time I’ve gone. Didn’t find anything the first time either.”
“Why do they want to find it?”
“They don’t even really know.” Feiyan dips the ladle and drinks, then sidles closer to them. “We’ve been looking for it for years and haven’t found anything. I’m not sure it’s out there.”
“No,” says Eriem, catching his breath, “it’s real. It has to be. What about Thomas?”
“How do you know he told the truth?”
“What did he ever lie about?”
“Who is that?” asks Jack.
“What? Didn’t you learn this? He was here a long time ago.”
“The prophet?”
“Yes.”
“I forgot his name.”
“He said he came from a city to the north. Taught how to build the Temple and plant fields, all sorts of things. He must have learned it somewhere.”
“Maybe he was smart and worked it all out himself. If there was a city out there that could build temples like this, why haven’t we found it?”
“We haven’t gone far enough.”
“It’s legend. Nowhere I’ve seen could come close to building something like this.”
“Whatever it is, it counts. My first venture.” Braylon rubs a hand over his freshly shaven head.
“Barely,” says Eriem, goading him, “there’s no danger.”
“There’s plenty.”
“We scouted a group of wanderers in the northeast. They paint themselves with animal blood and eat raw meat and fight with spears. That’s danger.”
“Are you going?”
Eriem nods. “I just found out. I won’t even see my baby born.”
Taket launches out of the barracks and calls the men out to the range. Jack takes his bow and runs off to queue himself in front of the straw targets. His first few volleys go wide and he repositions himself and tries again. The arrow thunks into the outer edge of the bundle and hangs limply. He curses himself and draws another, aligning his sight down the thin shuttle. His mind betrays him with a bitter memory, and he envisions the dying eyes of the man he killed when he was twelve, such unmistakable malice extinguished so quickly by one lucky shot. He recalls the eerie calm that overtook him in that instant, that blinding red haze, and he stills his hand and quiets his mind, then releases the bowstring.
Lia stands with her arms outstretched and her back straight. Elise smoothes her hands down the sides of Lia’s dress and makes a few rough markings around the bottom.
“It’s going to look beautiful,” says Lia.
“Thank you. I wish Jeneth could help, I know she wanted to sew your dress.”
“I think she’s going to have her hands full for a while.”
“I know. She’s so sweet, she got Jeneth’s looks, I think.”
“Mmm.”
Elise pushes her arms softly to her sides and smoothes down the sleeves. She straightens the waistline and brushes away a few specks of lint.
“I’m really happy for you, Lia.”
“Thank you.”
“I mean it. I hated seeing you sad. You deserve
a really happy life, and I know you’re going to get it.”
“Thank you. I owe a lot to you, for helping me through.”
“Please, we have to look out for each other, don’t we?” She squeezes Lia’s hand. “Okay, slip this off. Just a few little changes, I promise it will be ready. And Lia…”
“Yes?”
“Remember to smile.”
They ride back in the morning after a grueling month spent in the forest with Taket, allowed only their short hunting knives and no other tools, surviving off what they could kill at short distance. They swept a great arc around the provinces and covered more land than Jack had ever seen.
By early evening they arrive at the stables to water their horses and brush them down. Jack unsaddles one of the calmer mares and leads her back to her stall. He smoothes down her bristly mane and carries over the sack of grain and pours it out into her trough. Cullen bars the gate of the next stall over and sits off by the stable doors waiting for Jack to finish. The other conscripts have been charged with butchering the wild boar they cornered and killed on their last day in the woods. Taket granted them a rare night off to lay by the barracks and roast the kill in their own fire pit.
The day trainers are winding down their practice, stowing their gear away in the armory and suiting into different attire before wandering back to the Temple to be with their families. Braylon lingers around with the last few, turning simple tasks into lengthy processes. He is sharpening his knife for the third time when Jack and the recruits return to the barracks.
“Welcome back. Kill anything?”
“Yeah. There’s pig cooking. You’re here late, they keep you?”
“Just leaving,” says Braylon, but he makes no move to rise. “I thought I’d go check on Jeneth. She can’t even sleep until Eriem comes home.”
“How’s Mariset?”
“Beautiful. Jeneth can’t wait for you to meet her. Says she misses you and hopes your well.”
“Tell her thanks.”
“I’ll do that.” Braylon takes a deep breath and settles in next to Jack. “I wanted to talk to you… You probably don’t want to hear this, but I thought it should come from one of your friends. Jeneth said… at the bonding rights in three days, Lia is going to stand.”