Konrad was the last to emerge. His features were as boyish as ever, but his eyes had taken on the weathered tone of so many men in Rzolka—devoid of mischief, haunted by some unknown evil. He looked upon Anna and Yatrin as phantoms that weren’t truly there, just occurring like a trick of the light. Certainly he understood why they’d come alone—all officers eventually could. After some time in silence, standing as rigid as the pines beside his foxhole, he glanced back at their smoldering fire, where a gutted and skinned boar was dripping its renderings onto white coals. He gave a sharp whistle through two fingers. “Knives and tins, Viczera.”
* * * *
Konrad hadn’t eaten in three weeks. He was staring at Anna’s hunk of charred boar, pupils flickering madly in the firelight. His rune made eating a wasteful luxury, of course, but the feeling mind was never sated. “So the swine’s finally bled, is he?”
Anna wiped the grease from her lips with a handkerchief. “We’re not out of his maze.”
“I never suspected we were,” Konrad said. He hadn’t spoken much after Anna’s account, growing even more pensive when Gideon’s name appeared. He’d listened in calm, frigid silence. “Where’d the breaker get off to?”
“We’ll deal with him later,” Yatrin said, wrapping an arm around Anna’s shoulder as wind raked through the thicket and into their dugout. “The immediate threat slumbers in Golyna.”
“What was his endgame?” Konrad asked.
Anna’s eyes snapped up. “Did you know about his plan?”
“Of course not,” Konrad replied darkly. “It seems we’ve lost the greater part of our ranks in a single cycle. Nobody would wish for such a turn of the stars, panna.”
For a moment there was only the crackle of dead leaves and peeling bark. “That could’ve ended the war,” Anna said. “If he’d done as he wished—if Yatrin hadn’t been there—then where would things be now?”
“Wishing for annihilation is the highest heresy, according to the celestials.” He shrugged. “Or so they say.”
“I don’t wish for it. I wish for an end to this.”
“Surrender isn’t an end,” Yatrin said. “It’s damnation.”
Konrad nodded at that. “You’ve been clutching that hand awfully close,” he said to Anna, surveying her cloth-wrapped wrist with bloodshot eyes. “We ought to take a look at it.”
“It’s just a burn,” Anna said.
“We have larger tasks to address,” Yatrin said, locking eyes with Anna for a moment. He glanced at Konrad. “What have your men reported?”
“Truth be told, I doubt we have the numbers to make a push northward,” Konrad said. “Even worse, most of the ports have fallen. Caravans and travelers too. Anybody with a scythe raised at the wrong angle’s being marched into the fields and bled.”
“Nobody said anything about going northward,” Anna said, examining Yatrin to gauge his support. But he was only smiling faintly at her, his ease somehow new and vibrant, an old bit of brass scrubbed with lye until it gleamed in the firelight. “Everything that matters is still in Golyna.”
“The state will be rebuilt,” Konrad said. “What matters is that our people are safe, no? Now it’s a matter of putting our—”
“Our people are in Golyna,” Anna cut in.
His upper lip twitched. “What do you mean?”
“Our scribes, our foundlings, our—”
“What?”
“They lied. They pushed all of the innocents out, just to make room for their columns. And if you could see Shem, the way they drained him with their marching and crossing, day in, day out . . .”
“Where’s my wife?” Konrad whispered.
“It’s not that simple.”
“My child?”
“In the city,” Anna said.
Konrad’s lips were bruise-dark and trembling. “We had a deal.”
“This isn’t our doing. Teodor wouldn’t abandon the siege.”
“We had a fucking deal.”
“I was upholding my word,” Anna hissed. “They seized it all from me.”
“They?”
Anna braced herself, tensing against Yatrin’s arms as Konrad ceased to breathe. “Mesar must’ve been planning this with Gideon. I don’t know for how long, but he knew.”
“Then we’ll find them.”
“We’ll need to beat Volna into the city,” Anna explained. “If the Council can reverse its rulings, an evacuation by sea might be possible. But evacuating our people should be the priority. It’s unclear how many columns are loyalists, and how many are cooperating with us.”
“We should be able to enter Golyna easily,” Yatrin said. “If the Council knows of this deal, he’ll assume a cease-fire has already reached Volna’s lines.”
“If only we knew what their design on the city is,” Anna said quietly.
Konrad’s jaw was grinding from side to side, crunching along in tics. “Those flying machines.”
“We have defensive nets,” Anna said. “Whatever the method, I should be clear with you, Konrad: There is little chance of success for us in this hour. If you commit your fighters to this strike, they should know their lot.”
He looked at Anna’s bandaged hand, crinkling his brow. “What would you do to save someone you love?”
A pale, limp neck snapped and lost its essence. Freckles grew dim and tainted above rickets-riddled bones. “Anything.”
Konrad leaned forward, resting his forearms on his knees and allowing his head to drift down toward the flames. Soon the skin across his forehead grew darker, tighter, eventually breaking out in dark blotches and smoldering before he pulled away. The flesh crept over itself in pristine layers. “I can feel pain for an eternity, Anna. It would be a bit of a kiss compared to what I’d feel if we lost them. But I don’t absolve you of your bargain, you know. Bless the stars above an honorable man.”
“I know,” Anna said. “We’ll get them, Konrad. We’ll get them all out.”
“You can’t promise that.”
“The Nest will endure if we can pool enough focus,” she explained. “But that means my scribes. As many of them as we can get.”
“And then?”
“Jenis was sent to Kowak,” Yatrin said. “He might bring reinforcements.”
“Might,” Konrad repeated.
Anna glowered at him. “It’s all we have.”
“I’m aware.” Konrad stared into the fire. “If we get you those scribes, you’ll evacuate the city.”
“I will,” she whispered.
And although she suspected that nobody believed that lie, including herself, it brought enough peace to the copse to allow for flurries of owl hoots and the echoes of distant shell barrages. Soon the Hazani fighters in the neighboring dugout began to sing the songs from their childhood, old melodies and hymns from Gosuri mystics, ominous chanting that Anna had heard constantly in Malijad.
“We’ll leave you to devise the approach tactics,” Yatrin said, abruptly rising and urging Anna to her feet in turn. He offered Konrad a deep, earnest bow, then led Anna toward the earthen steps that ascended out of a twig-and-grass canopy. Once they were above ground, where cool night air sailed down from a blazing skyline and threaded their black hills, Yatrin led her into the deeper woods. Then he pulled her closer, cradling her bandaged hand with both of his own. “This is my fault, Anna.”
For the first time that day, with every sense except sight, she saw him, truly saw him. It was difficult to blink. “You could’ve risen earlier, you know.” Then came jerking half-breaths and fat, aching teardrops. “I waited for you for so long.”
“Anna.”
“You could’ve trusted me.”
“I did what I had to,” he said. “You know that, don’t you?”
“Even if we claw our way ahead,” she said, gazing off at the shimmers of Volna’s shells
in the southern gullies, “how long will it be until they find out?”
“Anna, listen—”
“You listen,” she snapped, tearing her wounded hand from Yatrin’s grip and holding it before him. “The war is over, Yatrin. They know, or they will know.”
“It’s just flesh.”
“This used to be fear. This used to topple cities or see men hanged, if I asked for it. Those working the fields, sleeping with little idols under their pillows; they would’ve never marched against the hayat this once held. What are we without this?”
“It doesn’t change how I see you,” Yatrin said. “If fear was the only thing we had, then we’ll find something better.”
Anna said nothing, just remained still in his embrace. “This world is bigger than us.”
“The world is us.” Suddenly his voice was fiercer, stauncher, and his hands weren’t so warm upon her skin. “We’ve lost more than good people to Volna, you know. Much more. Only the stars could whisper how many children have been undone in the world’s folds before they drew their first breath.” He gazed up at a black, clouded sky. “But don’t let them take your goodness, Anna.”
Yet she’d never sensed goodness within herself. Most people had rarely interacted with manifestations of such abstract things. In what seemed like a past life, she’d had Julek, but now? Now there was only some blind grasping at what it meant to be good, the same as any butcher from Volna or a lawless tribe. She could’ve been them. She could still be them.
“Don’t let them break you,” Yatrin continued. “It’s never too late to be here.”
Her hand’s throbbing faded into flickers of momentary bliss, blooming out of suffering and into awareness. It was something overwhelming and rare and precious, and her voice shook in waves. Yet there was no fear, no concern. “I’m here.”
He held the back of her head. “And I love you.”
What did it really mean, to love somebody? The question played through her head as Yatrin cradled her, his hands roaming across her upper back. What had it ever meant when somebody said they were in love?
And at once she knew it. “I love you too.”
“Have you ever thought of a joining?” He sighed. “What do you call it? Marriage?”
“What about it?”
“Have you wanted it?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I never thought I’d see that day. I still don’t know.”
“But if everything grew calm?”
Anna gripped his sleeves. “Be clear, Yatrin.”
“Will you marry me?”
Wind rustled the leaves and tattered canopy. Anna nestled herself in their din for an instant, filtering the question through every truth she knew of love, and of marriage, and of happiness. There were so many questions: Where could they live? Who could they trust? Could she trust him? Her stomach tightened into bitter pockets.
“Is it such a stabbing question?” Yatrin asked.
“No,” she said. “That’s not it.”
“Then what?”
“I’m not certain we’ll see any end to this. And if we do, it won’t be life. Not the way we’d want it.” She looked down into pure blackness. “I’m not one to chase after fantasies, Yatrin. Not anymore.”
“I’m not asking you to chase anything,” he said. “I’m asking for faith.”
She envisioned rows of Bylka’s girls crowned with lilacs, faces painted white with solstice ashes, all beckoning her to the joining grove.
“Then you have it,” Anna whispered. “I’ll marry you.”
Yatrin pulled her closer, and as they kissed she understood that her joining would not come. But somehow it didn’t change anything. Somehow, it only made his hands gentler and his eyes more familiar, and when they finally went to the clearing with their bedrolls, he was her world, far more meaningful and curious than any star or nebula above.
She was his and he was hers.
Chapter 18
Track 56 ran from Golyna’s central station to the foothills of Neluzzar, terminating at a rust-flecked, solitary depot that stood vigil over the dry valleys below like a buzzard. At first it had appeared abandoned, but as Viczera Company crept closer, working their way up the western rise of the slope on elbows and knees, two Chayam fighters had circled the second level’s windows and crossed the shaded walkway to the platforms.
“They’re not officers,” one of Konrad’s plains fighters noted, still cradled in a nest of rocks with the spyglass raised. “Don’t even seem to be armed.”
Grunting, Konrad shifted himself higher up on the stones and motioned for the spyglass. He took several minutes with the tool, sweeping its lens far to the east and west in wide swings, dialing knobs in and out as needed, before passing it back to its owner. “We ought to make an introduction.”
“Do you know their faces?” Anna asked. She was huddled with the others in the meager shade of a eucalyptus copse, trying not to move and even less to breathe. It had only been an hour since sunup, but her neck-wrap—which she’d doused in cold water before the eastward hike—had become a bone-rigid shroud over her hair. She’d forgotten what it was like to march, to fight, to simply hide without the coast’s blessings of wind.
“We may not need to overrun it,” Konrad replied. “Seems they’re playing out a cease-fire.”
Yatrin gestured toward the lower hills. “There’s a Volna column six leagues away.”
“They might not know it’s still running,” Konrad said. “If so, looks like the old breaker kept at least one word.”
“That’s assuming they’ve all defected,” a Hazani woman said, pausing to inspect the disassembled ruj spread across the cloth in her lap. “The state can’t risk another fracturing.”
Konrad slumped back against the rocks. “Cease-fire’s the ideal moment to begin purging their ranks.”
“Of whom?” Yatrin asked.
“Of anyone who isn’t pure,” Anna answered grimly. She gazed around at their lot, taking in the motley cheekbones and shades of flesh and inked markings, finally meeting Yatrin’s eyes with the bitter acceptance she’d known at the war’s onset. Back when she’d known that Nahora had never stood for anything beyond its own kind.
“We’ll see this made right,” Yatrin said to the group, taking similar stock of Viczera Company’s weary grimaces. “Anybody willing to die for the state is—”
“Your breaker wanted to make that choice for us,” the spyglass holder said.
“Nahora hasn’t turned its back on you,” Yatrin said. “I haven’t.”
Konrad smirked under a sheen of sweat. “Good enough for us.”
“At the very least,” Anna said, cutting through a locust-drone that emanated from far to the west, “we ought to warn them that Volna is still coming. Maybe they can put their line to some use.”
“Lines?” Konrad asked. “To where?”
“Out of the city.”
“Not for the ones that we’re seeking,” Konrad said. “Chances are slim that we could even run them to Kowak. Not that I’ve heard anything from our columns back in the homeland.”
“Hazan is vast,” one of the fighters added. “There are reaches beyond the butchers’ gaze.”
“We can’t conceal thousands of people,” Anna said.
“For a day, perhaps,” Konrad said. “Such bountiful options.”
“We need time more than anything else,” Anna said. Several of Konrad’s fighters muttered with vague agreement. “If Volna breaches the city before we do, then we’ve run out of options.”
“Hard to say, without any line to the Council,” Konrad said.
“They must’ve known Gideon’s plan.”
“What’s there to be done?”
Anna looked at Yatrin. It was a blunt acceptance of the inevitable. “There will be a reckoning.” She was too delirious and overheat
ed to dredge up the most haunting issue—the death of the state. It was an issue for the easterners more than anybody else, but every possible outcome lacked catharsis, let alone safety, a sense of identity. Regardless of whose banner flew over Golyna by the cycle’s end, Nahora would not—and could not—exist as it had. Every dawn was hounded by dusk.
* * * *
As far as the depot’s fighters knew, war had come to a grinding halt at daybreak. They were young and loose-lipped on some plum wine they kept in the bunkroom, eager to trade tales with those who’d done more than guarding a run-down depot on the outskirts of the conflict. Strange though it was, the fighters claimed they’d only heard a scattering of shells since the war broke out. Otherwise they’d been loading, unloading, packing and unpacking, readying themselves for withdrawal orders that never came. The taller fighter, seemingly the elder as well, headed up to the tracks with Konrad and Yatrin to inspect their remaining cars.
His comrade had darker skin, much like the Hazani Anna had encountered along the western trails. His flatspeak was practiced, yet surely more jagged than his Orsas.
But Anna could hardly stomach the depot. It was everything she despised about war, with all of its fumes and flaking paint and piss-sweat heat, somehow more oppressive than the foxholes she’d inhabited weeks prior. She left the others in the bunkroom and skirted the depot’s weed-choked perimeter, her empty canteen clutched in a bandaged hand, searching for the spigot or trough indicative of any proper Nahoran post.
At the back of the depot was a mound of iron beams and coal. Flies danced in wild black swirls, flitting in and out of a nearby doorway. It was sealed by a rotting wooden slab that bobbed in the breeze. A latrine, perhaps. After days in encampments, even that basic pleasure was enough.
Anna swung the door open and—
Both bodies were dripping with blood, contorted and naked and bound like sows, one with its neck slashed open and the other with a rent belly. Their skin was paler than the men in the depot; it was pale enough to be Nahoran.
Schisms Page 28