Ever since leaving the alley, Catelyn had debated what she would do with the girls. They couldn’t stay with her; she was barely equipped to keep herself from starving and she couldn’t take responsibility for caring for two young children. She would also have her own injuries to care for in the next few days. Taking them to her roost would put them all at significant risk.
Although she had no reason to suspect that the Imperial soldiers knew who she was or where she lived, at least one Imperial soldier had witnessed their escape. She had sensed him, breathlessly watching them from just beyond the estate’s wall. She’d heard as his breath caught in his throat, and his heartbeat had thrummed at her like a drum, loud and strong. Yet he had raised no alarm, no cry for help, and had simply watched them depart.
Still, despite that unusual observer, she had not survived this long by being careless, and she was not going to stop now. That meant the girls would not be able to stay with her. Catelyn felt as though her roost was compromised, and she would need to put her exit strategy into action. She had never hoped to need to use it, but this seemed like the necessary course of action, given all that had just happened.
Before she could restart her life, however, she needed to give these two girls a chance at the same thing. Elexia and Sera deserved that much. No, they deserved more, but Catelyn could only give them this slim chance.
There were certainly a number of options available to her, though Catelyn had hoped that the simplest would be the obvious choice.
“Where are your parents,” she asked them, after their first stop in one of the alleyways to rest their feet for a moment.
“Why do you want to know about them?” Elexia asked, a dangerous note in her voice.
“Don’t you want to return to them?” Catelyn asked.
The girls, both of them, swallowed hard, but remained silent. Catelyn knew the response well. She had heard the same silence before, with a few of the other chosen kids she had known growing up on the streets in the Seat.
Many parents in the Seat had vices of their own; vices which necessitated a steady flow of income to maintain. Desperate people do desperate things, and it was not uncommon for parents in such situations to sell or loan their children to predators like the men of the Sado-Sexual Elite, and Catelyn knew how the two girls had come to be in the home of Dane Callum this night. Catelyn didn’t press for further information.
“What about any friends or other relatives?” she wondered.
The girls still remained silent.
Catelyn sighed, and Elexia piped up with her unsteady voice.
“I thought...I guess I thought we would be staying with you.”
Catelyn felt her heart sink into her stomach. She felt the depth of the sadness and isolation in the girl’s voice, and she wished that things could be different, that things made more sense and that she could take them both in, raising them as younger sisters. But as much as she longed to take these girl’s pain away, she knew that she would not be capable of being what they needed her to be. Catelyn had her own pain and loneliness which ate away at her.
She idly wondered if the Divines were sending these girls to her, just as they had apparently sent the artifact, but having walked away from this night with her life, she was beginning to realize that her faith in the Divines was not what it was. In fact, given the things that had happened to her, and that had been allowed to happen to everyone in the Seat, she wondered whether she’d ever had any at all. The voice inside remained silent, but she knew it was right more often than not.
As she paused, thinking about her beliefs and considering what to say, she recalled recent times when that pain and loneliness had been taken away from her. And as she did, a voice rang clearly in her ears, a voice full of a depth of emotion that was uncommon in a place like the Seat, and Catelyn knew what she would do. She got the girls to their feet again.
“Come on, we’re going.”
Silena was started awake by the first knock on her door, her heart racing at the possibilities as she reached for the heavy plank of wood she kept by her bedside. When the second knock came from downstairs, she grabbed it along with a shawl she had laid at the foot of the bed to keep her feet warm, and padded from her room down the stairs and to the front door. At the base of the stairs, she poked at the fire in the hearth to stoke the flames, and a burst of warmth and light rewarded her efforts.
A third banging on the door, this time more insistent, sent Silena into a rage. Even if it were the Emperor himself calling at this prayer, she would give him a piece of her mind.
She looked to the sofa in the middle of the room, scanning the lumpy pile of blankets. Somewhere under there her bodyguard Erich snored, still passed out from their prior night drinking wine together, oblivious to the disturbance at the door just paces away.
“Useless lump you are,” she muttered affectionately under her breath as she shuffled over to the door.
Silena presumed that if it was indeed the Empire calling, they wouldn’t have knocked, nor would one bodyguard do much to dissuade them from whatever they had planned. She therefore could only conclude that it must be a disgruntled customer, which she knew just how to handle, thank you very much. And if not, well, she hoped Erich was simply being lazy and pretending to be asleep. She had to admit, she didn’t think much of him as a bodyguard. She mostly liked him for his company. And his rear end.
When she got to the door, she slid the small porthole near the top of the door open, to see who had come to call at this prayer of night, and at first she saw no one and began to mutter angrily about kids playing pranks. Then a small hand appeared, and a voice croaked “Down here!”
Silena slid the porthole shut and stood dumbfounded for a moment.
“What in Aldus’ name is this?” she whispered to herself.
She considered simply returning to bed.
This has to be a bad dream, that’s all, she thought.
But her curiosity was now winning her over, and she paused. Then, she turned around and, kicking herself for giving in, proceeded to unlatch the door, pulling the heavy oak in on its hinges. The sight that greeted her as she opened the door nearly sent her reeling.
Two small, skinny girls stood on her stoop, barely clothed and shivering, with cold or fright or both, clutching each other and sobbing uncontrollably.
Silena’s heart, which these days she only ever felt during episodes of anxiety and stress, leapt up into her throat and she dropped to her knees, without thinking, and hugged the girls to her, whispering “oh, you poor dears” over and over again.
After a few whispers, and with tears brimming in her own eyes, Silena looked the girls up and down, asking them how they’d got here and what they were doing, but they seemed unresponsive. That’s when Silena saw, on the ground next to the girls, a single, petite footprint made with blood, the five toes plainly visible.
She knew then who the girls had come with and Silena pulled the girls inside quickly, looking left and right, fearing that someone might be watching.
“Now the first thing we need to do is to find you some warm clothes,” Silena said as she bolted the door shut, then she yelled for Erich to wake up.
Chapter 10
Catelyn dropped to her knees as soon as she returned to her roost, exhausted, hurt, and anguished. Despite the sheer number of cuts, scrapes and burns she had sustained, what caused her the most pain wasn’t any of her injuries. It was her heart, which ached acutely at having to leave the girls, that cut the deepest. She had called many of her beliefs into question recently, but she believed with everything that she was that Silena would treat them as though they were her own children. She knew this, because that was how Silena had treated her. She may have been losing her faith in the Divines, but she still had faith in the goodness of the woman she had befriended.
No, not faith, she realized. Trust.
Despite this realization, she still felt an intense heartache at what she had been forced to do, and what she would be forced
to do now. She felt like crying, like she should just put her head into her hands and let the feelings take her, and damn the
consequences, but she stopped herself. She knew it would serve no purpose yet, so instead she resolved to set her escape plan in motion.
The very first sojourn after her parent’s murders, when she had gone about transforming the attic and crawlspace of the building she had taken over into a thieve’s roost best suited to the life she was going to lead, she had also built in a contingency plan just in case she came to the conclusion that she would need to flee the Empire. She had learned from the incident which had killed her parents and she had promised herself that she would never again be caught without a viable and swift exit strategy should things turn lethal. As much as it pained her to consider enacting her plan, she felt that she had no choice.
Catelyn went over the mental checklist of things that she would need to do to put that plan into action. Her first order of business was to at least treat the worst of her wounds, lest she fall prey to blood loss, infection or worse.
She knew that she had burns on her arms and legs, the worst being the one on the palm of her hand; cuts all over her body, mostly minor but a few that were deeper, including some on the soles of her feet which she knew she would need to clean and wrap before leaving the roost again; and bruises, such as the massive, painful one on her shoulder. After leaving the girls with Silena, Catelyn had tested her arm and realized that she had thankfully avoided her worst fear: that the joint had been dislocated. But it still burned with pain every time she moved her arm.
Having taken stock of the injuries that she knew about, she prepared herself for the pain she was about to experience in cleaning and dressing the worst of them. She wished that she could follow her usual routine for cleaning her injuries, but even now the Imperial officer who had spotted her fleeing the Dane’s estate could be marching a brigade up the street outside her home, searching for her, so she had no time to do her usual thorough selfassessment.
She forced herself to her feet and gingerly climbed down to her living chambers. She quickly went to the basins and washed the worst of the cuts to her feet, the pain stinging her and causing her to wince as she picked shards of glass and other materials from her soles and palms. She cleansed all of her open wounds with a stiff brush she kept near the basins, and the pain of reopening and scrubbing the wounds was almost more than she could bear, but she knew that she had to remove the dirt to prevent the filth entering into her blood. There was already a chance that she had been infected this way, but it didn’t mean she wouldn’t try everything she could to safeguard against it.
She knew that she would pick up a few more scars in the coming cycles.
When she was done cleaning herself, she wound the clean strips of cloth she always kept rolled near the basins around her arms and legs, and even protected her feet as well, covering the open wounds as best she could, while leaving her toes exposed so that she could continue to use them to sense the ground.
Once her wounds were dressed, she hobbled around the living space to recover the few possessions she wished to keep with her, including the weapon. She stuffed as much as she was able into her traveling bag; some dried food, clean clothing and other linens, jars of clean water, a thin blanket and a few personal necessities, and the weapon she strapped into the makeshift loop sheath she had fashioned, which she then attached to her thigh.
She mentally checked off everything she needed or wanted to take with her two more times and once she knew she had it all, she climbed back up to the upper floor and exited through the hole in the ceiling. She limped to the edge of her building, bent down and gripped the end of a coil of rope she had placed there many sojourns ago.
She held that rope for several whispers, feeling the weight of it in her hands. It was just a rope, but it was also much more. It was the end of her old life. She had survived here. She had conquered her fears here. She had transformed herself here. And now it was all going to the Void.
With a final heart-wrenching move, she tugged the rope hard, and then scurried as quickly as she was able along the eaves of the nearby buildings, heading south toward the Brunley channel.
Behind her, she heard the eruption from her roost as it burst into flames, but she did not turn her head back.
Catelyn hadn’t spent any time outside of the Seat her entire life, and the thought of relocating was frightening to her, but it was not worse than the alternative. Even as she traveled the strange rooftops of unfamiliar neighborhoods carefully, hobbling on her injured feet, her body spasming with pain from the toll this night had taken on her body, Imperial soldiers could very well be combing through the ashes of her roost searching for some clue as to her identity and whereabouts.
Catelyn knew enough about their methods to know that she would not want to be found there, and find her they would have if they were indeed searching for her.
The man in the alley, the Imperial officer who she had sensed watching her from the street, had not raised any sort of alarm at the time, which Catelyn still considered unusual. She knew without a doubt that he had seen her flee with the two girls, and she had to believe that whatever shock had prevented him from raising an alarm then, he would have come to his senses by now, reporting what he had seen to his commander or even to the Emperor himself.
Catelyn believed without a doubt that had she not enacted her escape plan, the Imperial army would have her in their custody and then her life would be over. But she had given herself a chance now. It was still a slim chance, especially given the extent of her injuries from the night, but at least she believed that she could rest easy knowing that the girls, Elexia and Sera, would be safe with Silena.
She knew that no one had been around to witness her leaving the two girls on Silena’s stoop, and Catelyn had stayed behind long enough to sense Silena open the door, hug the girls to her, then take them inside.
Silena would either need to hide the girls, or would have to explain where the two girls had come from, which would no doubt cause her some amount of trouble with the Imperial bureaucrats who regulated such things, but either way, Catelyn trusted Silena to do what would be best for the girls. In the wake of the Purge the previous night, she imagined that those who ruled and governed the Seat would have larger concerns on their minds that the disposition of two orphaned girls, not to mention that such an event would in itself create a plausible explanation for such events. Indeed, survivors of a Purge were often lauded by the Empire, for they were seen as the strongest of citizens, embodying the very qualities the Empire sought to portray.
Catelyn, however, had already pushed her luck well beyond her comfort level, and did not wish to have Imperial officers questioning her story
She could not rest so easy with her own situation, and chose to assume the worst; that she was almost certainly being described to every Imperial soldier in the Seat. The Empire almost never singled out an individual for execution, but given her actions had precipitated all of these events, Catelyn wasn’t going to rely on that assumption to keep her safe. She had no idea how much the Imperial soldiers knew, but she refused to take the chance when it was her life on the line. She needed to disappear for a while. Really disappear, not just laying low in her roost like she normally would have.
And so she found herself standing at the edge of the world that she knew, at the head of the Brunley Channel, smelling the changes in the air and searching her bubble for any sign that she was being followed. Behind her, she could hear the faint echoes of chaos as large chunks of the Seat burned to the ground or smoldered, dozens or even hundreds of people having been destroyed by the Emperor's decree.
Ahead, all she could detect was a cold, musty stench. She knew that south of the Seat lay the stretches of the Dun Marsh, and the Brunley Channel had been partially built on that terrain.
The land had been reinforced to take the construction of the walls, but still the marsh found a way to creep under and bubble up in places, and the w
all and structures throughout the Channel were in a constant state of disrepair. She could smell the rot, mold and mildew that had been accumulating for sojourns.
The Emperor may have spent thousands of marks to build the walls, but he hadn’t spent a single one to maintain them. He left such menial work to the citizens of each city to conduct their own maintenance. Failure to do so would, of course, results in swift and cruel punishment and so they toiled day and night to keep the Walls from crumbling.
But functional and well-maintained were very different things in the Seat. And so a haphazard accumulation of repairs and half-completed improvement projects dominated most of the Brunley Channel.
She had learned everything she knew of this area from one of her former fences, a man named Marko, whose family had settled in Exeter many generations before. Marko had once told Catelyn that his true name was Markotulinyaer, or at least that was how it had sounded to Catelyn’s ears the one time he had told it to her. Marko claimed that it was so unpronounceable to Western tongues that he simply preferred the residents of Exeter to use the more common name Marko, rather than butcher his God-given name. Catelyn knew he was right to insist on this; she had never been able to reproduce the sounds of the man’s native language, and she genuinely liked the man and didn’t wish to offend him.
Marko had rarely talked about his homeland, far to the East. Like his own name, he claimed that his land’s name was impossible to say in either the Western languages of Pyrus or Exeter. He simply called it Home. Catelyn enjoyed the rare stories that Marko would tell about Home, not just because his stories were always about exotic places and exciting action, but because Marko’s people, reputedly dark of skin though Catelyn had no way to know for sure, spoke with marvelous accents that were like music to her ears. She had read some about the people from the east in a book of history when she had been a child, but many of those books had merely touched on stories of other lands and had not provided much in the way of details.
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