by Sam Hawke
Before I could respond, she ran, limp and all, and I stared after her, not knowing whether I wanted to follow or not.
* * *
Days piled on top of each other, bleeding together into a stream of wearying tasks and increasing worries. None of the injured rebels survived to be interrogated. The army had retreated and the smoke and sounds from their sprawling camp suggested they were building more serious weaponry after their first failed attempt to scale the walls. I didn’t see the streetwoman again, but it was hard to move through the city without someone approaching me, seeking favors or audiences with Tain. I stayed inside much of the time, and covered my tattoos when I went out.
Within the city, tensions ran high as we settled into a strange new routine. Some businesses remained open; others had been redirected to perform citywide tasks. Hourly, it seemed, Jov was petitioned by someone in our sector, seeking instruction about how best to use a resource, or exemption from duties. We feared such rulings were being applied inconsistently across the city, but none of us had ever had to reorganize ten thousand people before, not even Marco, and mistakes would be made.
I slipped through the gate of the tournament grounds, entering the arena along with the dawn shift. Here, Marco and the stretched Order Guards taught rough classes in basic martial skills that we could use from the walls and, if they were scaled again, face-to-face. Technically, only those able-bodied enough to be up on the walls were supposed to attend, but enough Credolen were mixed among the common folk that I could join the archery practice squads without anyone taking notice. Just one more Credola, unskilled and weak, but determined. Jovan knew nothing of my plans; he had been sleeping at the Manor in any case, too worried to leave Tain alone in the company of only servants of whose loyalties we could not be certain.
It had become a routine. For months, well before the siege, I had been building up my physical strength. Swimming in the lake in the early morning, walking and even running on the tournament grounds, trying to slowly work past some of my limitations. Etan and Jov wanted me to rest, always to rest; I knew the root of their concern was love, and knew, too, I would never have a fully healthy body. But though the work had exhausted me, and sometimes left me unable to properly fake good health the following day, I had also seen signs of improvement that gave me hope. So why should I not learn some skills that could help my city?
I had tried to avoid shifts run by anyone who knew me. This was one of Credo Javesto’s sector’s shifts, a sector far from ours. But today luck hadn’t favored me and Marco himself was directing the training. He saw me immediately.
“Credola,” he said. Not quite a question, but the conflict in his expression was drawn in his thick eyebrows, bunched together. Was there anyone who didn’t know my limitations? “You are practicing?”
“Yes.” It was an effort not to add anything, not to explain or excuse.
He hesitated. I made myself meet his gaze, calm.
“The lightest bows are marked with white paint.”
“Yes, I know. Thank you.” Held my head up until he moved on.
I joined the line, standing in sequence with the others, just one more anonymous citizen. Stand side on. Body still. Head to the target, lift the bow with my left, grip the string with my right.…
“You grip it too tight.”
I loosened my right hand, bristling inside, and drew back. Apparently today peace would elude me. “Thank you, Lord Ectar. I always forget that.” Release.
The Talafan noble and his servants had been freed weeks ago with little fanfare and great embarrassment on both sides. Being locked in the Manor while an army attacked the city wasn’t exactly proper treatment of a noble guest; on the other hand, Ectar had still, as far as he and anyone else knew, brought a gift that had resulted in the death of the ruling Chancellor and his closest adviser.
Tain had escorted him from the Manor, awkward and stumbling over his words. Ectar had spoken little, and clutched his servant’s arm, fingers like the grip of a great pale bird. Since then, though he had faithfully turned up to our sector as agreed, he had avoided being anywhere near Tain. It had been a mistake to handle it personally; the Council had urged Tain to let our best diplomats handle the release, but he had refused. More reasons for resentment and frustration where he should have been building accord. He needed their respect if not their trust, but instead they feared him, feared his sudden shifts between malleable and stubborn.
“Your technique is improving, Credola.”
“Thank you,” I said again. Forcing a smile, I lowered my bow and turned to him. “Surely you don’t need any extra practice?”
“I am helping the Warrior-Guilder with training,” Ectar said. He looked different; it took a moment to realize it was his bare face. Usually heavy powders made his face pale as snow; today cosmetics still decorated his eyes and brows, but his skin looked natural. Pale, but pinkish-brown rather than alabaster. It made him seem less alien. “May I?” He helped me adjust my draw. “Relax your shoulders. You hurt your neck elsewise, see?”
“It’s kind of you to help Marco,” I said. “All of us.”
He shrugged, his eyes scanning the distance. “What am I to do? I wish to go home. That army of savages will not care who I am.”
True enough. We were all in this together, like it or not. “When will the Emperor become concerned and send for you?” Ectar had blustered to that effect upon his release, but been oddly quiet about it since. Perhaps he thought already to have been rescued. Perhaps, like me, he merely hoped some external ally had seen the siege and returned to Talafar to summon our allies for assistance.
“It is hard to say,” he said, then quickly deflected. “Has the Honored Chancellor made any progress toward peace talks?”
“I’m afraid not.” Ectar pressed me for information often, and I played a delicate game attempting to win his trust without risking revealing anything important. The more youthful, innocent version of myself needed to be flattered by his attention, but not suspiciously so. “If we only knew more of what they wanted.”
“There are some of these ‘earther’ people in your city,” he said, silently adjusting the stance of the person beside me. “Why does the Chancellor not require them to answer? My grandfather would force them to tell him what they know. And if he did not get the answers he would hang them outside the walls one by one until they talked, or the rebels did.”
It was impossible to hide my shock. One moment Ectar could appear vulnerable: a young man in a terrible situation, far from home and in a culture he didn’t fully understand. The next he seemed so casually cruel it turned my stomach. I found my voice at last. “What a thing to suggest, Lord Ectar.” Gentler than I felt. “We do not do such things in Silasta.”
“Perhaps that is why you are under attack,” he pointed out, but even as he said it he seemed to realize he had erred. He gave a false laugh. “I joke, Credola. It is frustration. We are stuck here, not knowing when they will strike. Your people are not prepared. I am afraid. Are you not afraid?”
“Of course I am,” I said, honestly. My arm, already weakening, shook as I drew again.
“I must help others, Credola. I will see you on assigned duties later?”
I nodded, returning to my practice. Ectar’s constant presence and watchfulness made a difficult task harder. Worse, I hadn’t missed some of the supportive grunts of people around me who had overheard his suggestion. It echoed the same sentiments increasingly muttered about the city since it had become apparent our attackers were Darfri; no matter how much Tain attempted to soothe such talk, his fledgling authority was insufficient to dampen it entirely.
When I finally packed up, dripping and drained, it felt doubtful I’d achieved much.
* * *
A quick visit to the bathhouse on the way home masked my morning efforts externally, but they had cost me. Even making tea felt like too much. I settled at the main table, surrounded by weeks of accumulated piles of paper, and tried to distract myself from
physical exhaustion by reading.
I sifted through various complaints sent to Tain, most of which seemed to be increasingly hysterical accusations. Though word had quickly spread that the attackers had a religious motivation, there was an underlying assumption that the rebellion had at least been funded if not actively encouraged by some foreign power; accordingly, any sign of what was deemed “suspicious” behavior from any poor soul with the wrong name or outfit or skin color was reported as if it were high intelligence. And while the majority was nonsense, we couldn’t afford to let real information slip through unnoticed. The Darfri were being aided by someone outside the country. Not only were supplies still arriving from multiple directions, but our watchers had seen signs of military leadership from people who did not appear to be Sjon; people garbed differently, mounted on graspads and moving through the camp like inspectors. Given the risk to the city of betrayal from the inside, the Council had made subtle, quiet restrictions on how wall defense allocations were to be made, limiting the numbers of foreigners who could be set to a particular task or given particular responsibilities. It was easy to see potential enemies or traitors. What had once been harmless, decorative expressions of our diverse city—different colors and clothes and the sounds of different languages and accents—had become something to mistrust.
The letters blurred together to my tired eyes. Suspicions and worries and risks … these names and numbers didn’t bring us any closer to understanding what was happening, let alone solving it.
I turned to another pile. Jov and I had likewise had no further luck in our investigations into the poisoning. Without the missing piece of the puzzle—what precisely was motivating the rebellion—we couldn’t know who was involved or how—even if—it was connected to Etan’s and the Chancellor’s deaths. The other side of the table was piled with bound rolls I’d collected from the Guildhalls. In them I hoped to find names of successful, even influential, people in the city who were Darfri. Out on the estates, people named their children in the old style, with the prefixes An- and Il-, so looking for those styles of names in the rolls should at least tell me who might have been raised Darfri. Despite our requests at every sector, few believers had come forward to help, and none had expressed insight into any religious cause for an uprising. I understood ordinary folk might be reluctant or fearful to come forward in the current atmosphere, but perhaps if we quietly approached prominent members of the Darfri community, we could learn something useful.
But to no avail.
“There’s nothing in here,” I said to my brother when he eventually came home in the late afternoon. My words distracted him from scrutinizing me. I had propped myself with pillows to help me sit straight but I couldn’t mask my pallor. I pointed at the page in front of me and he frowned down at it.
“Nothing where?”
I turned another page, gesturing at the list of names and profiles. “Look at these names.”
His eyes tracked the paper, taking in the Performers’ Guild sigil marking the top corner of the page, listing names, joining dates, and short profiles of members. He blinked, staring blankly at the neat text. “I don’t see—”
“Where are the Darfri?”
I gestured to the rolls spread out before us. Page after page of names and profiles, but no Darfri prefixes on any of them. Jov sat, rubbing his head, his frown deepening as he understood.
“It’s the same for all of them.”
“But there have to be some. People move from the estates to the city, surely? And while some of them probably take servant or un-Guilded jobs, they can’t all be doing that.”
“Presumably,” I said. “But if so, they’re dropping their full names when they do.”
He frowned. “Can we cross-check from school rolls from the estates, and look for names of the highest-achieving students? Then we can find them, prefixes or not, on the Guild rolls.”
I shook my head. “That’s what I thought, too. But I asked Budua for the school records from the estates and she said they haven’t been collected for decades.”
“Doesn’t your Guild have any supervision over the local schools, then? How—” My sharp cough cut Jov off. He winced and put a hand on my shoulder; I shrugged it off. “It looks like the Guild used to, but hasn’t been interacting much with them in years.”
Before I could say anything further, a knock made us jump. Tain’s messenger, Erel, waited there. “The Chancellor called for you, Credo Jovan,” the boy said. “He wants you at the Manor.”
* * *
The original Silastian school was in the upper city, a beautiful old building not far from our apartments. For the last half a century now, Silastian youths had studied in the lower city, in not one building but many. The school complex was an entire section of the city. It felt like returning to the past to walk that passage across Trickster’s Bridge and toward the administrative tower, the tallest building in the school. I could have found it blindfolded.
Though I couldn’t have articulated why, I’d found the Scribe-Guilder evasive when I asked her about the records. Perhaps Budua had just been defensive about having limited control over the nation’s education, but though Tain didn’t want to hear about it, and there had been no attempts on his life, Jov and I still remained on alert for a traitor on the Council.
I descended the narrow staircase into the bowels of the administrative building, the rhythmic taps of my footsteps echoing around me like a drumbeat. The air felt cool on my cheeks, still and lifeless, and the light from my small oil lamp struggled to part the thick cloak of darkness.
The door to the records room was locked, but of all the things I’d struggled with in my Tashi’s training, lock-picking had not been one of them. I made short work of it, the mechanism moving into place with a satisfying snick. High-ceilinged and cavernous, the room loomed around me, silent and austere with its rows and towers of metal shelves and cabinets. I walked its length, drawing my light across the neat, etched labels, searching for some references to schools outside Silasta. There were multiple cabinets marked for Moncasta, Telasa, and West Dortal, and when I searched through them I found not just rolls but extensive correspondence between teachers, reports on performance, and even work samples and recommendations from the school administrators. Meticulous records of students who had passed every course run at the school. All ranges of subjects—academic, physical, specialist. But of Sjona’s broader regions: nothing. No cabinets, no files, no sign of any Darfri-style family names.
I finally found reference to estate schools in the poorly labeled files and cabinets at the back of the room. Poorer quality materials, with faded lettering, and only very roughly organized into regions, but better than nothing. There was nowhere to sit and read, so I squatted on the cold stone floor, much to the protest of my knees and back.
By the time the oil in the lamp ran low, I couldn’t feel anything much below my waist, and a heavy sensation filled my chest like I’d breathed in the wrong kind of air. Some of these papers were a hundred years old, and the quality of the information recorded dramatically diminished by the time I’d reached the “newest,” which was still over forty years old. Over time, the city’s interest in the estate schools had clearly faded, leaving us with the frustrating modern state. I couldn’t tell from this what condition estate schools were in, or what they were teaching. I had no way to track their students. But I found the idea that the Council had let stewards of the Families determine the standard of services provided to their residents deeply troubling.
The rush of blood back to my lower limbs as I stood made me gasp, tiny flares of nerves flooding my senses, and my movements scooping up and returning the documents were clumsy.
I was due to begin a shift in our sector in a while, but the thought of the long walk back up the hill was daunting. Instead, I followed a different idea and walked farther north, heading into the residential areas surrounding the sprawling school complex. Even in this subdued atmosphere, people still went about their daily bu
siness, particularly the young and elderly, who had not been assigned duties on the walls or elsewhere. The area ahead looked to be a poorer neighborhood. I wandered in, listening for sounds of activity. It was quiet, even for the circumstances; no open windows, no pedestrians, just bare streets and narrow, unfriendly houses looming overhead.
A group of young women crossed the road in front of me, carrying baskets on their broad shoulders. They walked past without chatter, disappearing into the maze of crooked stone housing on the left.
Unlike in the upper city, these houses snuggled close together, tottering up to four or five stories and stacked back from the road. Some shared tiled roofs and had small, communal walled gardens. From the edge of one roof on the corner a few wilted bluehood wreaths dangled, perhaps left over from the Children’s Festival earlier in the summer. Tiny alleyways connected the maze, and many of the walls had steep, external stairs built into the stone. The muffled sound of the girls’ footfalls carried strangely among the tightly packed buildings so I wasn’t sure in what direction they’d gone. I must have walked past these little communities a thousand times before, but until now had never paid any heed to them, or noticed how different these homes were from the spacious apartments of the upper city or even the neat housing closer to the school.
I noticed another faded wreath, then another. I found myself following them, a thought forming in my head. If countryfolk moving to the city were taking lower paid, un-Guilded work, this would be the kind of area where they would live. An area with prominent decorations for a celebration that had its roots, like so much of our culture, in the spiritual beliefs of the past. If no Darfri would come to us, perhaps I could go to them.
When I squeezed down a tight alleyway, the heads of two women rose above one of the walled gardens, one with hair in a tight tail and something familiar about the profile. I called out without thinking. “Eliska?”
They were a distance away, and the tall buildings limited the sunlight, so even when both faces jerked round, I couldn’t tell if the woman was the Stone-Guilder. Her companion’s face was unobscured as it stared at me, suspicious. Both turned and vanished from my sight, and I suddenly felt foolish; there was no reason for Eliska to be here, and I’d probably just scared off residents I’d hoped to talk to.