by Teresa Rook
What of Mhyra and Abadiah? My mother isn’t likely to share my motivations with Mhyra. Will she think I’ve simply left? Bailed out, left the farms to perish on their own? That maybe I’ve run off to the Niroek she can’t stop talking about. That magical Niroek where she’ll go one day with Abadiah, and they’ll both live in peace, far away from everyone—including me.
More likely, she’ll think she’s just scared me away. That I’ve finally taken her rejection to heart. Listened to her words instead of her body.
Maybe I have.
“What’s his name?” Korde asks, leaning forward. Story time.
“Abadiah,” I say. “Cute kid. Curious, friendly.” I grin at Korde. “Eats like a horse, when he can. Always has a smile.”
Chloje watches me with narrowed eyes, perhaps thinking I’m manipulating her son. Fariq pulls himself out of his head and makes small talk with Riksher, or tries. The Chiral gives mostly one-word answers, probably bitter about the state of Tribe Iral. Only three people.
He was so hopeful to learn of a nomadic tribe. Its reality must be difficult for him to accept.
“I hope he gets enough to eat soon,” Korde says.
I smile faintly. “Me too.”
Ennis is watching me, his mouth turned down and his shoulders slumped. He pushes the rabbit meat around his plate. “We’re going to help your tribe, Darga.”
I shrug. His assurances mean little to me. I am going to help my tribe.
fourteen
Even at night, there are Yurals prowling around the village’s edges. They converse amongst themselves, the occasional chuckle rising above the indistinct murmur of their words. I watch one Yural jokingly punch his companion in the shoulder before hopping backwards to avoid the retaliatory swipe. They reconcile immediately and their conversation resumes as they wander with no apparent aim around the outskirts of the village.
Korde leads us expertly around them, through breaks in their patrols and between shift changes. I wonder how many hours he’s sunk into watching the Yurals, learning their paths and patterns.
When one of the patrols has turned a corner and another is facing the empty desert, Korde has the six of us dash for a space between two outlying houses. Scattered runes hail me in the darkness, clinging to old walls or bits of rubble on the damaged cobblestone, uneven beneath our feet. The low, long buildings are arranged in haphazard blocks that shield us from view, and in this way we manage to creep deeper into Yural, silent as shadows.
At one point Chloje stops so suddenly that I walk right into her. I whisper an apology but she doesn’t seem to notice. She's staring at a low-built house with the roof coming off in patches, straw hanging down over its wooden walls. “This was my home,” she murmurs. She shakes it off before I can think of something to say.
We turn another corner, and there are the runes. A wall of them, a barrier of chairs and carts and rubble. It curves around a space small enough that I can easily see its curve. The inner buildings, walled off and protected.
Riksher doesn't catch my meaningful glance. Here are the runes, I want to say.
Korde means for us to climb over the barrier, but I’m reluctant to touch it. It’s made up of everything from old tables and chairs to doors and children’s toys, and all of it glows, a faint, pulsing white that weaves and ducks and breaches. Do they know that they’ve collected all their witch tech here? Was this on purpose?
Korde goes up first, then Riksher and Fariq. Chloje gestures me ahead of her. You say you want to help us? Prove it.
There is no zap, no heat when I touch the tech. The Yurals can't have known.
A few pieces shift under our weight, and I hold my breath every time one tumbles to the ground. But there are more sounds, more small clanks from further along the wall. This wall is haphazard. It wasn’t well-made, and I imagine it avalanches often, so the Yurals are used to some manner of light noise disturbance. What the wall lacks in stability it makes up for in sheer size. It would take a week to tunnel through.
We get over the wall and the inside is even smaller than I thought. I count twelve buildings, including a stable, each dark and silent. Tribe Yural asleep in its beds, and according to Riksher, their life being sapped by the wall they've erected to protect themselves. Nobody patrols in this inner city. Nobody is awake. So secure, they feel, that they need not worry.
At the center of all the homes, a heavy wooden door covers the entrance to an underground cellar. It glows faintly—moonlight, not runes. Korde leads us toward it. It’s splintered somewhat in the heat, old. Fariq bends to pry it open. It comes up with a creak, not a space that's accessed often. Fariq cringes at the sound, searching the windows for signs of movement. He drops the door lightly on the sand, leaving the cellar gaping before us, cloaked in darkness. Chloje stands stoic beside me. I can't tell what she's thinking.
We slip inside, one by one, except for Fariq who stands guard. The moonlight that comes through the opening can only reach the very front of the storehouse, but it's enough to make out the stacked boxes lining the walls. I shudder and hold my arms around myself, staying as close to the center of the room as possible.
Ennis sticks close by me. “You okay?” he whispers.
“Feels like home. That’s all.”
Chloje and Riksher have disappeared further into the storehouse, counting boxes. Korde sits on the bottom step at the entrance, staring up at the sky and tapping his foot silently. I don’t think he even realizes how his knee is bouncing. How he’s practically buzzing with nerves.
I sit beside him. “We’ll need the horses to get all this out of here. And a cart. Want to help me set that up?”
He nods eagerly and leads me away from the cellar. The houses are all perfectly dark. They must feel safe behind their wall.
The stable is towards the edge of the inner hamlet. We sneak silently up to its door and hear horses snuffling inside. A cart is conveniently parked around the side.
There’s a padlock on the door that Korde has open in seconds. I give him a thumbs-up, and he smiles.
We slip inside, nobody stirring in their houses. So far, so good.
“We’re going to be friends, aren’t we?”
Korde and I both freeze at the voice, high and poorly enunciated. A little girl stands on a stool by one of the only occupied stalls. Her little arms are crossed over the top and she rests her head on them, staring in our direction. “Friends forever.”
Korde opens his mouth to answer, but I raise a hand in front of his face to stop him. The little girl stays there, smiling and rocking back and forth to a little tune she’s humming. She doesn’t react to our presence.
She must be blind.
“Come here,” she says, waving to us. “Meet the new horseys.”
Or not.
She continues to wave us forward, so I take a hesitant step towards her. Her little nightgown has that same red stitching around the hem, and her long hair is tied up in a messy bun on the side of her head. She steps down from her stool and does a little twirl. “Won’t you come to the sea with me?”
Korde clears his throat and turns so she can’t see his face, then scrunches up his eyes and does an exaggerated eyeroll. Cuckoo.
“To the sea, the sea!” she croons, her voice rising. I sink down to my knees and go up to her, afraid she’ll wake the others.
“Yes, the sea,” I say. “Let’s all go to the sea.”
“But I’m not tired. Don’t make me go to bed! Bibi isn’t tired yet.”
Then it clicks. She’s not blind, she’s not crazy. She’s dreaming.
But how do we get the horses out of here without waking her up?
“Horseys can’t go swimming,” she says, suddenly sounding distressed. “Sea is too rough.”
“Yes, you’re right, the sea is rough,” I coo. Not only is it salt, but it’s a death sentence for anyone that sets foot in its waters. Nobody goes into the sea. Even the Nirokeans stick to their canals, where it’s calm. “How about we pretend to be horseys instead? Sleepy
horseys. Did you know horseys sleep standing up?” I glance into the stall behind her and see Amara watching me, her tack gone. Meeree must be in one of the other stalls.
The girl nods, staring at but past me.
And then she blinks. Her eyes go wide. Her mouth opens.
She wakes up.
She stumbles backwards, tripping over the stool. Her little hands pad frantically at the ground, then at the stall door beside her, as she tries to get her bearings. “THIEVES!” she screams at the top of her lungs. I try to pat her arms to calm her but she swats at me and backs away.
“Shh, shh, shh,” I say, my face getting hot. A nervous twitch spasms in my eyelid. “We were all going to play with the horseys, see? Remember?”
“THIEVES! HELP!”
“Darga,” Korde says from the doorway, his voice shaking. “They’re waking up.”
I curse and back away from the little girl. “Let’s go,” I say to Korde, shoving the stable door wide open. He looks at me with wide, panicked eyes, and I push him through. The Yurals must sleep light. There are already shouts and thumps coming from the homes.
The little girl continues to wail, and I shove a terrified Korde toward the storehouse. “Go!”
Our companions emerge from the cellar only to see we’re already surrounded. Riksher and Fariq seem calm, the hands by their sides, counting and measuring. Ennis’s movements are jerkier, jumping at every little thing, his flight instinct running high. Chloje looks around wildly, her face crumpling in relief when she sees her son. “Korde!”
“Get in the storehouse,” I say to him. He races for his mom, and she presses his face briefly to her shoulder, then ushers him down the stairs.
There are Yurals on all sides now, most only half-dressed in ragged bed clothing and holding weapons alongside household items, pans and fire-stokers. Men, women, young, old. The whole tribe has woken to defend their stores.
The leader from earlier steps forward. The flames from her tribe’s torches reflect off the whiteness of her canines, exposed in a snarl. She moves lithely. “You were told to leave this place.”
For a split second, I wonder if we can talk our way out of this, but then she opens her mouth in a howl and rushes at Riksher. There’s no hope of diplomacy here. We burned that bridge. Now we’ll have to fight our way out.
I barrel between Riksher and the woman, trying to force her back. She grabs my hair and I yelp, and then Riksher has grabbed me around the torso and yanked me away from her. The crowd converges upon us, and we all try to duck and weave, but there are no openings. They have us and the storehouse surrounded.
We try to hold our ground, but we are nothing against the twenty-something Yurals surrounding us. Chloje is useless, one foot down the stairs to her son, the other on the surface with her husband, unsure who to stand beside, unsure who she can protect. A Yural breaks from the mob and runs at her. She tries to back away, but of course she’s off balance, and she misplaces her foot and goes tumbling down the stairs. At least she catches her adversary’s shirt in her hand as she falls, and they go down together. My relief quickly turns to worry. Can Korde and Chloje fend him off?
I glance at Fariq, who is so occupied grappling he didn’t see the Yural go down with his wife. I grit my teeth and rationalize: if Fariq goes down to help them—if any of us do—it will only be easier for more to reach the storehouse. Korde and Chloje will have to deal with that one assailant on their own.
Maybe, I think grimly, the fall down the stairs broke his neck.
Or maybe it broke Chloje’s.
Ennis is no more an asset in a fight than Chloje, and Riksher yells for him to get underground. Riksher, Fariq, and I cannot hold them back alone, though Fariq is a better, swifter fighter than I would have thought. Slowly but surely, the Yurals advance, less coordinated than earlier but still keeping us pressed against the opening of the storehouse. The three of us stand on opposing sides with our backs to the open door so the Yurals have to come at us straight-on. I swipe to my right and catch a man in the temple, someone who’d gotten overconfident and tried to head down the stairs himself. As he falls, a woman slips past him. She’s three steps down before Ennis catches her. The two grapple on the stairs, and then I have to turn away to fend off a third attacker. His pitchfork misses my skull but catches in my ear, tearing the cartilage. Blood runs down my neck.
There are too many of them, and they close in mercilessly, forcing me to step back onto the steps. They force me down the stairs, Riksher too. I grab a spear meant for him, and I yank it past us, pulling the man off-balance. He topples head-first down the stairs, and I stick the spear in his back.
I look back up for Fariq, and my stomach squeezes. He’s still fighting, waving a torch he took from a wounded Yural, warning the rest of them back from the storehouse. They’re giving him a bit of a berth, but he can’t defend all sides of the open door, and the spears coming down for my and Riksher’s faces come with the advantage of high ground. It’s all we can do to hold the opening, stop them from getting down into the cellar to finish us off.
Chloje’s piercing voice. “Fariq!”
I keep my face grim and my knees bent, Riksher and I a shield for the three non-fighters inside. Chloje tries to force her way between us to reach the surface, but Riksher elbows her, hard, and she falls back. “Stay down!” he yells. Fariq tosses the torch aside, and I can’t see what he’s doing, not from this angle, but then the door rises from the ground and arcs towards us, closing.
“No!” Chloje shrieks.
I try to fight my way up the stairs but spears are coming at us from all angles, jabbing at our heads, trying to create an opening to get into the storehouse. I look at Riksher, helpless, and he’s feeling the same thing. We can’t help Fariq. Not if we want to protect the others.
The creaking of the door sounds again, and in the split second before the light winks out, Fariq’s face flashes in the space between the door and the ground. Bloodied, soundless, strong.
The closed door mutes the noise from above. Something falls onto it, hard, a thump. And then it—he, fuck, he—is dragged off, and before the door can be opened again, Riksher grabs hold of the handle. He puts all his weight on the wood so that the Yurals have to lift him as well as the door. It rattles, but it doesn’t open.
“Chloje,” I say, the start of a sentence I don’t know how to finish. I’ve known Fariq for a few hours. What do I say to the woman who has suddenly become his widow?
“You left him up there. You left him!”
“And he closed the door,” Ennis says, his hand on her arm. “He did that for you and Korde. If they get down here, they’ll kill us all. Fariq knew that. He did it for you.”
“Where’s Korde?” I ask, suddenly verging on panic. I squint in the darkness but there’s no light to see by.
“He’s here,” Ennis murmurs. “We had to take care of a few things. But he’ll be okay.”
“Thank you,” I say. I try not to think about how many bodies are down here with us.
Chloje doesn’t seem to hear us or register our presence, just rocks herself in a tight ball at the bottom of the steps. She stopped fighting quickly. Realized it was over.
I pull Ennis away.
“How are we going to get out of here?” I whisper. The Yurals continue to jeer and holler above us, frenzied.
Ennis exhales and lets his head fall forward until his forehead rests against mine. I have a moment of misgivings before I accept this: a friend.
“I don’t know,” he whispers back.
fifteen
I have never felt so oppressed by the dark. I’m sure the sun has risen by now, but this storehouse has nothing to show for it. My legs are cramping and my stomach gurgling, but there’s nothing to be done because there’s no light and no leaving. The Yurals are still above us, talking amongst themselves, waiting. Riksher has let go of the door but he sits just below it, and any time it begins to shift, he throws all his weight under it again.
They ar
e not getting in, but we are not getting out.
Chloje, still in shock, rocks herself by the base of the stairs. I wish I could give her a pep talk, snap her out of it for Korde’s sake. Because while I know the kid must be down here somewhere, I still haven’t seen him. He must know about his father. I wish his mother was in a place to help him.
“Hungry,” I remark to nobody in particular.
“Me too,” Ennis says. “Help me with one of these boxes.”
I glance at Chloje, but she voices no objection. Ennis rises with me and we both shake out our stiff bones. I keep my hands in front of me as I walk until my fingers bump into wood. I reach up and up until my they crest over the top of the pile, and then I feel back down for the base of the box. I get the tips of my fingers under its cracked corners and slide it out towards myself, meaning to catch it on my chest. But it’s heavier than I expected, and I squeal as it tips me backwards. Ennis catches the box, but I fall on my tailbone, a bruise that will last. I focus on that pain instead of the bruises that have bloomed across my knuckles—hits given—and the rest of my body—hits taken.
Ennis grunts under the weight and lowers the box to the ground, letting it drop the last few inches and jumping back, out of the way. I crouch to pry the top open, then stick a hand inside.
Inside is something rough and dry, stringy, about the size of a fist. My fingers close around it and I pull it out, unable to tell from its shape what it’s supposed to be. “Chloje,” I call, “what food did you grow?”
She doesn’t answer, doesn’t acknowledge me in any way. I bring the object closer to my face and inhale. It smells like dust. A sinking feeling nestles deep in my stomach.
Just a little bit of pressure, and the object, perhaps once an apple or a pepper, crumbles practically to dust in my fist. I’m left with a brittle, fibrous skeleton.
I throw it to the ground and reach for the next box. I hear Ennis behind me reaching into that first one and coming to my same conclusion. He whistles, low.
“What’s wrong?” Riksher asks.