Shattering the Ley

by Joshua Palmatier

  “What’s this?”

  “My things,” Kara said, lifting her chin. “I’m leaving.”

  “I see. Make certain you leave the key.” He stepped around the trunk and into the kitchen, plates rattling as he began preparing dinner.

  Coldness sank into Kara’s gut at the flippant response and she flinched. But he’d meant it to hurt. It was how he controlled her, controlled everyone around him. He would hurt her, then claim she’d hurt him first, and she’d feel guilty because she’d never intended to hurt him. She’d apologize, or break down and cry, and he’d comfort her and tell her he loved her and everything would be all right, and then somehow whatever had prompted the argument would be lost and forgotten amid all the emotions; they’d continue on as usual, nothing changed, nothing fixed. She knew it because it was how all of their arguments had ended the last few years.

  But not this one. She crushed the hurt and stoked her anger.

  “The key’s already in the kitchen.” She moved forward and grabbed his jacket, tossing it to the floor. “I only stayed long enough to let you know I was leaving.”

  “Why stay at all? You’ve obviously been thinking about this for a long time.” He appeared in the door, cup in hand, and watched her struggle with the trunk. “I don’t think you really want to go.”

  She glared at him, gave up trying to lift the trunk, and opened the front door instead, grabbing the trunk by one handle and dragging it across the floor.

  “You’re wrong,” she huffed, already feeling tears beginning to burn at the corners of her eyes, even though she’d vowed she wouldn’t cry. “I’m done. I don’t want to compete with her anymore.”

  Marcus looked honestly confused, but then his eyes widened and he pushed away from the wall. “You mean Dierdre?”

  “If Dierdre is the black-haired woman you met today at the Tambourine, then yes.”

  She didn’t miss his guilty twitch.

  “It’s not—that isn’t—Kara, Dierdre’s nothing!”

  “Nothing?” She’d managed to drag the trunk out into the hall, could feel at least two pairs of neighbors’ eyes on her where she stood, her chest tight from exertion and pain. “You’ve been meeting with her off and on for the past two years at least, and you never mentioned her. You’ve spent more time with her at cafés and taverns than you have with me. That’s not nothing. So tell me what it is?”

  Marcus, his blondish-brown hair ruffled and out of place, his blue eyes cold and concealing, said nothing.

  Kara glowered, clenched her jaw, and reached for the trunk again, hauling it down the hall. It felt lighter now, her anger taking over almost completely, but she still couldn’t lift it by brute force.

  “Kara,” Marcus said, but she ignored him, heading for the stairs. “Kara!”

  She turned back, let him see her rage, even though she knew her eyes would be rimmed with red and her face splotched. “What?”

  He stood in the door to their loft, body tense. For the first time during one of their arguments, he appeared lost. He groped for a response, but the hardness in his expression never changed.

  Finally, he said, “It isn’t what you think.”

  She answered by jerking the trunk down the first step with a solid thunk.

  A wave of sickening despair hit her when she reached the street, but she sucked in a deep breath and held it, used it to keep back the pain and the tears both. She needed to think. She needed somewhere to stay, somewhere away from Marcus, a place he wouldn’t look for her right away, until she could get settled. A move to another district might be best, but she wasn’t familiar enough with housing in any of the others to know where to go or who to speak to, not even the five districts she’d worked since the Primes had started transferring her every two years in preparation for becoming a Prime herself. Hedge—and Tallow, her current district—would likely be the best options. She knew their streets intimately, but not the Wielders who worked there or the citizens who lived there, even though she’d dealt with them on a daily basis for four years combined. Her strongest ties were still in Eld. The nearest districts—Stone, Green, Leeds, and even Confluence—were mostly main thoroughfares in her head, the only points of interest their nodes and ley stations. That was how the Primes wanted it—distinct and separate, no one Wielder familiar with enough of the ley system to be able to map the whole. Even though she’d worked more than one district, her picture of the ley was still fractured, none of the districts where she’d worked adjacent to each other. But Marcus knew Eld as intimately as she did. He’d know all of the places she might run.

  Except possibly one.

  “Cory.”

  She chewed on her lower lip, uncertain she wanted to risk giving Cory the wrong impression. They’d met on numerous occasions, but her relationship with Marcus had kept them distant. She knew he still had feelings for her. But she couldn’t think of anywhere else.

  She contemplated the trunk. She couldn’t drag it all the way to Confluence.

  “Need help with that?”

  Glancing up, she met the speaker’s eyes. She didn’t recognize him, but he had a horse, a cart full of musk melons, and a nice smile.

  “I’m headed toward Confluence. Is that out of your way?”

  The man shrugged. About forty years old, his hair was streaked with gray, wrinkles just beginning to form around his eyes and mouth. “Doesn’t matter. One of you Wielders saved my boy from one of those distortions a few years back. If it hadn’t been for that, he’d be dead.”

  He hopped down off the cart, shifted some of the melons around, then hefted the trunk into the back, grunting with its weight. Dusting off his hands, he motioned her onto the seat and climbed up beside her.

  “Where to?”

  “Moat Street, on the edge of Eld.”

  The man nodded. “I know it. Outside the walls of Confluence and the University.” He hied the horse into motion, the animal flicking its ears as it struggled forward under the new weight, and they merged with the traffic on the street.

  He didn’t ask any questions as they made their way down from the nest of streets surrounding the node into the less tangled section surrounding the walls that partitioned Eld from Confluence, but he kept up a steady stream of light conversation, as if he sensed the tension thrumming through her body. Kara let him ramble, realizing he didn’t expect her to respond. She wondered if her misery was that easy to spot and scrubbed at her face self-consciously. Her fury had ebbed, simmering low and deep, replaced with a hollow emptiness. She felt untethered, listless, the juddering of the cart on cobbles somehow remote, even though it rattled her bones. What would she do now? Where would she go? She didn’t want to move to Tallow. The streets were rough, the residents mostly Gorrani who’d moved in after the candlemakers that gave the district its name had moved out. The Gorrani had different views on women and their place in society; they only tolerated Kara because she was a Wielder. No, not Tallow. Besides, her two-year stint in Tallow was nearly over. She needed to stay in Eld for now. But what if she ran into Marcus on the street? What if she had to work with him? She shuddered, revulsion and rage spiking, twisted with a pang of longing and loss.

  “Which way?”

  She jumped when the man touched her arm and suddenly realized he’d been speaking to her. They’d reached Moat Street, the wall that had once been the limits of ancient Erenthrall—back when it was nothing more than a town and a baronial estate—rose before her, one of its gates standing wide as people streamed in and out around them. She glanced toward the old stone of the gate’s arch and noted the crest at the apex—a horse rampant, the tertiary gate—and oriented herself. “Left. It’s only a few streets beyond the gate.”

  Twenty minutes later, the man waved as his horse cantered off down Moat Street, leaving Kara at the bottom of a short flight of steps leading to another set of flats. The building was old, perhaps as old as the
walls themselves, but nearly everything this close to Confluence was. Made of quarried granite, with small windows and carved sills, intricate stonework edging the roof, Kara thought it must once have been a trading house. She glanced down the street, noted the University scholars in their variegated tan- and dun-hooded robes mixed in with the regular inhabitants of Eld, then sighed and dragged her trunk up the steps and into the building. Cory lived on the second floor.

  By the time she’d reached his landing, she was sweaty and the anger had returned. She was not surprised to find Cory was not home.

  Hours later, she heard the door below open and feet trudging up the stairs. She raised her head and watched as Cory emerged on the landing, his dirty blond hair too long and curling out from the sides of his head. His brow was furrowed in thought and he didn’t notice her until he’d almost reached the door.

  “What in hells—” He jerked back, nearly dropping the books and papers he carried in one hand. He caught them with an awkward grab and curse, then straightened as Kara stood. “Kara? What are you doing here?”

  “I didn’t know where else to go. I left Marcus.”

  Cory’s gaze dropped to the trunk and Kara watched the emotions cross his still boyish face, even though he was now twenty-five—puzzlement, realization, a sudden spike of hope and glee carefully hidden beneath a thick layer of genuine concern. “I see.” They stared at each other a moment, the air between them crackling with the unaddressed, impulsive moment on the rooftop fifteen years before when he’d kissed her, and then Cory ducked his head and shifted the weight of the books so he could reach out and touch the lock of the door. Kara felt a knot of tension in the Tapestry loosen and release. Cory opened the door and held it, motioning her inside with his head. “Come on in.”

  She pulled her trunk in behind her.

  The flat comprised two rooms. The first large, with an area to the side that served as a kitchen, chairs around a table covered in papers and books in the center, another table against the far wall beneath a window serving as a desk. A door led to the second, what Kara assumed was a bedroom. Even though she and Cory had stayed in touch during her years at the college and her time as a Wielder, she had only ever met him here once or twice before heading out to a local tavern or café. Cory crossed the room and dumped his books and papers on the chair to the desk while she hovered by the door, glancing around at the mess. It wasn’t the same type of mess left by Marcus, with clothes left lying and dishes sitting unwashed. Everything was in its place here except the books and papers, materials she assumed Cory needed for his graduate studies at the University.

  “Would you like something to drink? Or eat? I’m not certain what I have. . . .” Cory moved into the kitchen and began searching through drawers and cupboards. The Tapestry pulsed as he set a kettle onto the ley’s heating stone. “Grab a seat.”

  “They’re all covered in books.”

  She caught Cory’s wince from the corner of her eye. “Oh, don’t worry about that. Just move it out of the way. I’m certain I’ll be able to find what I need again later.”

  He didn’t sound certain, though. Kara shifted into the room, the old wooden trading floor creaking beneath her, and freed one of the chairs around the table of its burden.

  “So, um . . . what happened?”

  Kara leaned back heavily. “I saw Marcus with that black-haired woman again.”

  “Oh.” The kettle began to rattle. “What are you going to do?”

  Kara’s chest tightened. “I don’t know. I can’t go back. I won’t. Not this time.”

  “But you’ll still have to deal with him, right? You’ll have to work with him, even if you’re in Tallow.”

  “I know.”

  The kettle began to shriek. Cory lifted it from the stone and poured the water into a jug serving as a teapot. He dumped something into the jug, then picked up a cup and small bowl he’d filled with grapes and brought it over to the table, hesitating before setting them both down on top of some of the books and papers. Kara leaned forward and grabbed a handful of grapes.

  “So what are you going to do?” Cory repeated, beginning to shift books off the table to make room for the tea.

  Kara picked up one of the pages and stared at the scrawled notes. “Not much I can do. My stint at Tallow is coming to an end in another few months. Hopefully, the Primes will transfer me to a node away from Eld—North Umber or Plinth perhaps. Some place where I can move and live without fearing for my life. At least I know Marcus will be stuck in Eld.” She frowned at the paper she held. “What’s this? It looks like it has something to do with the ley, but no one at the University is allowed to manipulate the ley. Not in any significant way.”

  Cory snatched the paper from her. “It’s nothing. Something my mentor and I are working on. Ignore it.” He shuffled it into another stack of papers and dropped it all to the floor nervously, not meeting Kara’s eyes. “The tea should be ready.”

  She watched as he strained it back into the kettle, then brought it over to the table and settled down into his own chair.

  “Can’t you request a transfer to a particular node? Or even ask for one away from Eld? I don’t see why they wouldn’t take that into account.”

  Kara scoffed. “You don’t understand the Primes. They’re too damned protective of the Nexus and their power. They don’t care what’s happened between Marcus and me. They don’t care about any of the Wielders. We’re worker bees to them. They don’t even listen to us when we tell them that the distortions and the recent blackouts in the ley are caused by overuse. They’re suspicious of everything that the Wielders do and barely allowed us to repair the distortions when they first began appearing. Only the Baron and common sense forced them to see that there weren’t enough Primes to handle all of the distortions. They aren’t about to listen to my own personal problems and take those into account when deciding what node I’ll be shifted to next.”

  “Are you certain? Has anyone ever asked?”

  Kara drew breath to retort, but caught herself. “Not that I know of,” she finally admitted.

  “Then ask. It couldn’t hurt. The worst they can do is say no.”

  She plopped a few more grapes in her mouth, chewing on the bitter seeds, then sighed. “I still don’t have a place to stay for the next few months.”

  Cory stilled. The possibilities hung in the air, awkward and potent, and she girded herself to reject his offer to move in with him, but he surprised her.

  “I know of a few places that are available. One of them is even near where we used to live.”

  Her relief was palpable. By Cory’s grimace and lowered eyes, he’d noticed. She hated herself for it, but said, “That would be great,” and reached for the tea.

  Cory stood abruptly. “You can stay here for the night and we’ll see about the other place tomorrow. Right now, I think we both need something stronger than tea.”

  Cursing herself, but not knowing what else to do, Kara agreed.

  Kara spoke to Karl, the current senior Wielder at the Tallow node, about her upcoming transfer. He was skeptical, but said he’d bring the issue to the Primes’ attention. For the next few days, he paired her up with Yvar for the street work. He squeezed her shoulder in sympathy as she left his office. Yvar was a quiet girl, competent but uninteresting. Patrols were uneventful.

  She spent her time off with Cory, settling into the flat he’d talked about and drinking at The Golden Oak, a tavern near her place that refused to use the ley for heat or cooking, even though the use of hearths was a fire hazard that most of those living in Erenthrall refused to risk. Eld was one of the only districts where it was still allowed.

  She saw Marcus twice, both times from a distance. The second time, he was with Dierdre again, both of them walking down Carver Street, heads together in intense conversation. Kara ducked into a shop selling shawls from the Archipelago, the colors bright en
ough to hurt her eyes, the scent of perfume cloying. She caught a snatch of their conversation as they passed the open door, something about shifting the pattern of refraction . . . and then they were gone. Kara’s chest had tightened so hard she thought she would choke and she fled the shop as soon as she could, sucking in the fresh air outside to steady herself. She wiped her eyes fiercely, cursing the heavy, biting fragrances of the shop, and headed back to her new flat.

  As she closed the door behind her, glancing over the sparse furniture, the scattered odds and ends she’d managed to unpack from the trunk, and the empty room with the large windows that gave her a spectacular view of the towers of Grass and the city between and beyond, a wave of loneliness overcame her. She shrugged it off by moving to the kitchen to boil water for rice, her hands trembling as they held the pot.

  The next day, Karl informed her that the Primes had responded. She was no longer part of Tallow; she’d been transferred to Stone. Her heart sank. Stone was adjacent to Eld; she’d be closer to Marcus than she had been for her last two assignments. She’d likely have to work with him because Stone and Eld cooperated in so many ways when it came to the ley.

  As she sank into a nearby chair in despair, a bitter laugh escaped her. At least she wouldn’t need to move. The flat Cory had found for her would be perfect for working at Stone, and moving to Stone wouldn’t push Marcus any farther away.

  She ignored the niggling relief that prickled her skin.

  She’d enjoyed the last few days with Cory far too much.

  Marcus started when Dierdre’s hand gripped his own lying on the table outside the café.

  “You’re deep in thought,” Dierdre said, squeezing his fingers. “What’s bothering you?”

  Marcus grimaced and pulled his hand from her grasp, then caught Dierdre’s tight frown. A breeze tugged her dark hair over her pale face—stern, with harsh edges—but Marcus had to admit to himself that Dierdre had her own allure. He could see why Kara would mistake their meetings for liaisons.