by AnonYMous
“The first time, you mean? It was the day my family died.”
“You said Ozias killed them.”
“Not personally. He had them executed.”
“For what?”
“Treason.”
“And were they guilty?”
“I don’t know.” Driss shrugged. “They were close with Ozias’s parents, Lieve and Zal. After they were assassinated, my parents began spending more time in the capital. To support Ozias or to gain influence over him. Both, maybe. That didn’t last long. We were practically living in seclusion by the time Ozias leveled the charges.”
“What do you think happened to sour the relationship?” Alma asked.
“My parents said Ozias was a sweet kid.” Driss shrugged. “Maybe he was. But they were convinced once he’d gotten over his grief he’d go back to being that sweet kid again—and we all know that never happened.”
Alma changed the subject. “How did you escape?”
“My older brother convinced me to run. He said someone had to survive to carry on the family name and I was the youngest. We didn’t have much warning, just enough for him to throw a rope through a window and hold it while I climbed down. I thought I’d be able to hide in the cedar forests. I followed the first trail that went in the right direction and it led me to a stone hut with smoke curling out of the chimney. When I pounded on the door, you opened it.”
“I remember the hut. It stayed cool on the hottest days. Freezing in winter, but during the summer . . .” Alma smiled at the memory. On the hottest days, she’d retreat to the cool of the cabin, sit by the window and watch the afternoon wane. Those had been the most pleasant, the most peaceful days of her entire life.
“The soldiers tracked me down, though,” said Driss. “I couldn’t believe it. Instead of saving myself, I’d put you in danger. But you had a bolthole prepared, ready to go.”
“A bolthole hardly big enough for one person.”
“It wasn’t comfortable. We waited for hours and—” Driss paused then, awkwardly, added, “I couldn’t stop crying. You kept telling me to be quiet. At first you were furious, but by the end you were holding me so tight . . .”
She could tell he would have preferred not to mention the crying. But the memory was important enough that he’d forced himself. He wanted to give it back to her, second hand.
“Driss,” she said. “That wasn’t me.”
“Yes, it was. You need to know who you are. Alma—”
“I wasn’t there,” Alma insisted. “It didn’t happen to me.”
“That’s okay. You don’t remember but I do—we do, I mean. Everyone in the rebellion. We can help you.”
“Help me do what? Become the person you knew?” said Alma. “Because I’m not sure that’s what she wanted for me.” Alma paused. “For herself.” She sighed. “It’s confusing.”
Driss looked stricken.
Out of pity, more than anything else, Alma said, “Finish the story. The soldiers didn’t find us, I take it?”
“No. They destroyed your hut and moved on.”
“The hut’s gone?” Alma asked. “All my things . . .”
“Word and wish,” Driss swore. “You didn’t know. How could you have? Alma, I’m sorry.”
Alma stuck out her foot, clad in burgundy leather, and flexed it daintily. “Everything I owned combined wouldn’t be half as valuable as one of these boots you gave me.”
“So we’re even?”
“Are we?” Alma asked. “I have no idea.”
Driss opened his mouth and then, hesitating, shut it again. He shook his head. “No. I tried to convince you, back then, that I could pay you if I got my lands and title back, that it was in your interest to help me. At the time, I thought it was a compelling argument. Looking at you now . . . you couldn’t have bought that for a minute.”
“I should hope not.”
“It made so much sense at the time. Of course you’d drop everything to help me. All we had to do was overthrow the sitting monarch. Who wouldn’t jump at that opportunity?”
“Aren’t you doing the same thing now?” Alma asked. “I met you for the first time yesterday and you’ve already assumed that I’ll drop everything to help you overthrow the sitting monarch.”
“I guess I am.” An infectious smile spread across his face. “So how about it?”
A smile tugged at Alma’s lips, too, and she laughed helplessly. “You’re hard to turn down.”
“That might just be the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.” Driss rolled onto his back, crossed his elbows behind his head, and shut his eyes. “I’m going to sleep now, before you can say anything to spoil it.”
Alma tried to do the same. Driss’s breathing slowed and then evened out while she tossed and turned. Finally she got up and returned to the window, just like she used to do at the Safe House. How many hours of her life had she lost this way, looking down on Ozias’s guards as they went about their business?
But she wasn’t at the Safe House anymore. Nobody had locked her in. If she wanted to torment herself with the sight of those two soldiers she’d indirectly killed, she could do that. To prove it to herself, Alma descended to the base of the witch’s chimney. She crept close to the trading post, to the bodies hanging from the wall.
A low murmur of voices made her freeze.
Two soldiers, side by side, on patrol.
Alma retreated, moving a step back for each step they took forward.
One soldier’s voice carried through the still air. “Here’s the thing I don’t understand. Why keep the witch alive? The King caught her, he had no use for her . . . he should have killed her when he had the chance.”
“Exactly. So what does that mean? If he kept her alive, it’s because he’s got some use for her.”
“Yeah? Like what?”
“She turned on the rebels.” The soldier spoke confidently. “I have a friend who was with Ozias during the coup. He says the witch ran right up to the king and stood there, waiting to be captured. There she was, face to face with the man she supposedly spent years of her life trying to kill, and she doesn’t attack? It makes no sense!”
“I’ve heard that rumor,” said the first soldier. “I don’t buy it. Ozias would never bargain with a witch.”
“Not just any witch,” said the other. “Alma. With the things she can do, if we had her on our side . . .”
“We don’t need any witches.”
“So you think it’s a coincidence that Alma ‘escaped’ from the Safe House right as Ozias left the capital to visit his parents’ shrine?”
“She was with Driss, you dolt.”
“Was she?” returned the first. “How do you know? None of us saw him, did we? Just those two hanging from the wall . . .”
Their voices faded as they continued on their patrol, oblivious to how close they’d come to their target.
Alma sat with a huff. Gooseflesh rose along her arms, despite the warm night air. Those soldiers had been guessing, but their guess was as good as hers, wasn’t it? And they’d suggested a possibility that had never occurred to Alma during her year in prison, though it ought to have.
She’d been afraid that the rebels still harbored the traitor who’d betrayed them. Driss hadn’t been sure who was responsible—perhaps because it had never occurred to him to suspect her. But the theory made sense. She’d assumed that when she’d cast on herself—when she’d broken Gadi’s cardinal rule of magic—she’d been full of regret. But what if she’d been blindsided by guilt? It was easy to believe that a traitor might have doubts. Might wish, more than anything, to take it all back and start over.
Like the soldier on patrol, she found it hard to believe that she’d ever make a deal with Ozias. But so many other details fit, and who knew what that other version of herself was capable of? Not her.
Alma trudged back up to the room where Driss lay, limp and graceful in sleep, face pillowed in his arms. She knelt by his side, studied his profile.
&
nbsp; In her heart, she believed he was exactly what he seemed: a friend who’d stuck by her through thick and thin, a brave and charismatic man well-suited to leadership, a rebel driven equally by a thirst for justice and a thirst for vengeance.
And maybe he wanted to be something more than a friend to her. She would have sworn that he’d been about to kiss her earlier that evening, before he’d jumped away. And when he’d dropped her that afternoon, too. Either he despised her, or . . . well. The opposite.
Maybe a bit of both. He’d gone to a great deal of effort to rescue his friend—the woman and also the relationship, years of shared experiences and mutual care. Instead, he’d gotten her.
She had to find out what had happened on the night of the coup. Driss knew the rebels had been betrayed, but not by who. He could tell her about planning the coup, about what had gone wrong, but he had no idea what had happened after he’d fled with the rest of the rebels.
If the soldiers’ gossip was accurate, she’d gone to meet Ozias. She’d been face to face with the tyrant, the man she held responsible for Gadi’s death. She could have killed him, ending his reign of terror, but she hadn’t. Why not?
Most rumors sprouted from a seed of truth, but only fools swallowed them whole. If she wanted to know what had really happened, she’d have to ask a witness. Someone who’d been with her when she’d cast on herself, someone close enough to see and understand the whole sequence of events.
She’d have to ask Ozias himself.
And most amazing of all? She could. He’d just embarked on his yearly pilgrimage to his parents’ shrine, where Queen Lieve and King Zal were buried.
Most of the dead were burned, their ashes crushed and scattered. Only crowned rulers were ever buried—at least, officially. Rumor had it that each of the perfume trees in the Safe House’s garden had been planted in a corpse.
The remains of the dead were dangerous and unpredictable. They’d been known to spawn ghosts and lay curses, manifesting something dangerously close to sentience. Most people went out of their way to avoid them.
Just the thought of visiting the remains of a murdered King and Queen gave Alma chills. She didn’t want to contemplate what would happen to someone who spilled blood over their bones. And the blood of their own son? She shuddered. It would be worse than anything she’d ever experienced at Ozias’s hands.
A shrine would be a terrible place to commit murder. But if she had a few questions to ask? That was a risk worth taking. She’d never have a better chance.
She packed up her all-in-one and tiptoed down the stairs and out into the fresh air. There she retraced the path she’d taken with Driss, all the way to the sign she’d noted on the way out: Easy access! Cheap!—50 silver.
She knocked at the door, just as Driss had. The young man swung it open, sandy-eyed and yawning, and came to attention when he saw her.
“Commander?”
“I need a spider,” she told him. “Can you arrange it?”
Chapter 6
The caves seemed darker, narrower, and more mazelike the second time around. She hadn’t realized how calming Driss’s presence at her side had been until it was gone.
Not that the spider gave her anything to complain about. She didn’t scoff at Alma’s nervousness, didn’t try to fill the eerie silence with inane chitchat, didn’t ask prying questions. She was fine. They never ascended to the open air, never saw the sky, and Alma quickly lost track of time. They walked and crawled and scrambled through endless impenetrable dark before laying out their bedrolls and closing their eyes on the glowstone torches they’d set down within arm’s reach.
Periodically, they reached junctions where painted signs marked the way to major landmarks. After taking a few turns, Alma realized they always turned toward a glyph of an S-shaped line, usually painted blue.
After five sleeps, the irregular tunnel debouched them into a cavern, a space too large for the light of their meager torches to illuminate. A slender pier made of low-grade glowstone shed a diffuse light over the shifting surface of a river, whose gentle murmuring doubled and redoubled itself into a chorus of soothing echoes.
These echoes, some loud and close, others faint and distant, filled the vast space the way water fills a bowl. Alma could hear the cavern’s vastness, feel the empty space all around her.
“This is where I leave you,” said the spider. “A raft will come through sooner or later. You can take it to the Great Way.”
“For what price?” Alma wondered if the small purse from her all-in-one would cover the cost.
“For you?” The spider’s eyebrows lifted. “Nothing.”
“Assuming I don’t tell anyone who I am.”
The spider snorted. “Still nothing. Ivar knows you.”
“Oh.”
The spider retreated into the darkness. Alone, Alma hurried to the pier and settled down to wait on the rough-hewn stone, comforted by its light. The water flowed sluggishly and the glowstone posts of the pier illuminated patches of lichen on the stony riverbed. Now and again, a fish breached the surface, testing the air before sinking out of sight. Alma pitied them. Couldn’t be much of a life down here, even for a creature with a brain the size of a pea.
Or maybe the river was a fishy paradise, home to an endless bounty of fish food, and she just saw prisons everywhere.
A man emerged from the darkness, a rucksack thrown over one shoulder. He wore a thick beard flecked with gray and a tightly wrapped headscarf, one end dangling jauntily over his shoulder. He walked slowly, with the aid of a cane, and greeted her with a friendly wave.
“Hail, traveler,” he said.
“Hail,” Alma replied.
The old man dropped his rucksack on the pier with a relieved sigh. He sat on it, stretching out his legs, then reached into the pockets of his loose, workman’s trousers. A moment later, he opened his fist to reveal a handful of nuts still in their hard shells.
He stretched out his hand. “Hungry?”
“Thanks.” Alma took one of the nuts and used the knife from her all-in-one to crack it open.
“Have you been waiting long?”
“A few hours,” Alma answered. “Do you know how often the rafts come? I forgot to ask.”
“They come when they come.” The man offered her another nut. “Open this for me? My hands aren’t so steady anymore.”
Alma peeked at the hands in question, but the fingerless gloves he wore hid most of them. She cracked the shell and handed it back.
“Thank you,” he said. “So, what have you done to earn our king’s displeasure?”
Alma smiled faintly. “It’ll take more than a nut to buy that story.”
“Ah.” The old man nodded sagely and held out his hand again. “Two nuts?”
Alma picked up a nut, cracked it, and handed it back. “I don’t think so.”
“Pity. I collect the stories. Most everyone down here has one.” The old man popped the nut into his mouth and chewed. “You’d be surprised.”
Alma shifted uncomfortably. He looked at her like he knew her. Practically everyone she met knew more about her life than she did.
A swishing sound, brief and purposeful, interrupted the river’s peaceful murmuring. Then a flimsy, flat-bottomed craft emerged from the darkness. A young man used a long pole to nudge it close to the pier, where he moved quickly to fling a loop of rope around one of the glowstone posts.
A woman wearing a hooded cloak made of light, fine wool that must have cost a fortune leapt onto the glowing pier and scurried away without a word. A stout man followed, wheezing as he slung a heavy pack over his shoulders before hefting two burlap sacks, one in each hand. He lurched onto the pier and plodded into the darkness.
The young pilot waved her aboard. He was tall and lanky, his skin sallow from lack of sunlight, with his hair pulled back in a short queue. Judging by his wide, pleased smile, he recognized her. She placed him as the man her spider had mentioned, Ivar.
“You look different,” said Ivar
.
Knowing how fast boys his age grew, Alma quipped back, “So do you,” which won her a chuckle.
“You two know one another?” The old man asked. He grunted when he received no reply, counting out coins from his purse and reaching for his luggage.
Alma blocked his hand with her own. “Let me.”
The old man straightened and murmured his thanks as she transferred his rucksack onto the raft.
Ivar steered them into the slow current. The pier, and its soothing light, shrank into the distance. Then they left the vast cavern and the chorus of echoes stopped abruptly.
They never moved much faster than a fit man could walk and never in a straight line. The river wound through channels silent but for the plink of dripping water, glowstone lanterns positioned at each of the raft’s corners illuminating the shallow ripples girdling the raft and not much else.
Even after spending almost a week traveling through the caves, Alma found the river eerie. She curled up against her all-in-one and closed her eyes to it, trying to lose herself in sleep. She woke to eat and then napped again, a pattern that continued until Ivar docked the raft at a simple wooden pier. The old man was gone. The raft’s glowstone lanterns lit an uncomfortably squashed cavern, the distance from floor to ceiling less than five feet.
Alma rubbed the crust from her eyes. “The Great Way?”
“That’s right.”
She offered Ivar a few coins, as a tip. He refused them, so she slipped them into his pocket instead—one of the skills she’d learned from Gadi, though he’d been teaching her to lift purses rather than fill them. She disembarked, Ivar handed over her all-in-one, and she watched him pole away.
She was afraid she’d find herself in another maze of tunnels, hunting for glyphs of a staircase, but the ground sloped up to a natural opening. Her first glimpse of the bright blue sky beyond blinded her; she retreated to the deep shadows, blinking away the dazzle. When she could see again, she moved more cautiously, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the flood of light.
Soon a vista opened up to her, lush and noisy with summer. The surrounding hills looked like they’d been draped in endless bolts of deep green velvet, rolling gently down to a wide highway paved in white stone. People, small as ants from this distance, traveled both ways along the road—singly, in groups, trailed by loaded donkeys or driving sturdy carts.