Clan names were a smudge in her mind. Her earliest memories were six years after the war had ended, and the only scar left in Bylka had been the river grove, where apple saplings sprouted from fields that had been put to the torch. She remembered the taste of those apples better than any of her father’s excuses for silence, although she still wondered what made him wake and scream in the night.
“I’d imagine that the girls here looked just like you,” the tracker told her.
Anna clenched her fists.
“Long blond hair, slender—”
“You’ll not look at me anymore,” Anna snapped.
“Without a close watch, you might take off into the night. It’s no place for young girls.” The tracker picked up the bronze flask at his side, uncorked it, and drank. “Do you wish death on every man who has a kind word?”
“Only wicked men.”
The tracker grunted. “Wicked. Do you know what subjective means, girl?”
Anna glowered. In truth, she’d never learned the term before, but she wasn’t prepared to disarm herself so easily. Her father had operated a riding post, and his vocabulary rarely stretched past words of saddling and threshing. Mother had only given her words about weaving and mending. She’d learned an eternity’s worth of curses from the boys who felted cloth by the river, but never words of substance.
She huffed at the tracker. “Do you know what acquisition means?”
“Mhm,” the tracker said. “But it doesn’t seem relevant, now does it? I’m not trying to make the daughter of a bucket hauler feel dim, you understand. I’m teaching you the power of words.” He gave a wheeze. “More to the point, the power of an accusation. Calling somebody wicked without knowing its meaning—well, where we’re going, they’ll bloody your pretty face for it.”
Outside, a pack of coyotes let off shrill howls. Anna sank lower in her chair, and for the first time that day, she longed for her bed. She longed for the crunch of wet gravel as the night watchmen patrolled the trails, for Julek and the way her blankets nestled against his in the common room, for the boy who made thought-catching snares out of roots and twine and old feathers, who brought Anna sweet dreams and restful nights. . . .
The tracker noticed. “Would you call them wicked, girl?”
“Who?” she asked faintly. Wind raked through the trees and over the broken battlements, giving Anna the sensation of gnats crawling across her neck.
“Why, the hounds,” the tracker said. “Are they wicked?”
She shook her head.
“Yet they’d lick your bones, if you stepped outside.” The tracker laughed as though he hadn’t forced images of a charcoal-haired boy into Anna’s mind, nor forced a lifetime of sleep-screaming onto her. “Some things lack a mind, girl. Some things are wicked because you have what they need, and they take it.” He glanced out into the darkness. “To the sows you fatten and bleed, you’re wicked.”
“I don’t care,” Anna said. She watched the candle as it flickered, catching stray breezes from the courtyard and sputtering. Being thrown into darkness didn’t seem so frightening anymore.
“Subjectivity.” The tracker folded his hands over outstretched legs. “Remember it when you call a man wicked. Those who lived in this keep were probably honorable, until somebody else decided they weren’t.”
There was something cryptic in those words, and soon Anna understood: The man was sentimental about it. Underneath his mask, he was flesh—or something of the sort. “Who lived here?” she asked at last.
But the tracker’s mind was elsewhere, and he closed his eyes. “It doesn’t matter. None of them are here now, are they?”
“You seem to know about them.”
“There isn’t much to know anymore, girl.” The tracker snorted. “Wars have a habit of changing things. Sometimes, they just make them disappear.”
Another gust of wind raked the courtyard, moaning as it passed the open doorway and swept fallen leaves into the chamber. The candle flickered, painting the walls with a gloomy rust color, then regained its steady burn.
Anna wrapped her arms about herself and pulled her legs closer to the chair.
“Do you need a covering?” the tracker asked.
It surprised her, but she didn’t let it show. She couldn’t. He was a killer, not a savior, even if he wanted to appear that way. Subjectivity, she told herself. Instead, she loosened her arms, ignoring the onset of goose-flesh. “I don’t want anything from you. I just want to sleep.”
“There might still be a storeroom by the eastern wall, if—”
“I said no.” Anna blinked to prevent the onset of any tears, which would undoubtedly sparkle in the candlelight.
“You’ll be cold.”
“What does it matter to you?” she asked with a crumbling voice. She immediately regretted asking. If he really cared for her, if he had some shred of—
“You’re my investment,” the tracker said flatly, severing her thoughts. “I need you alive, girl.”
Anna pursed her lips. Good. Make this easier for me.
“Lower your hackles,” the tracker said. “If you need a blanket, tell me now. I won’t be waking from a dead sleep to search the stores.”
She could hardly believe how quickly the warmth left his voice. There was no expectation of kindness, of course, but his lure of goodwill only made it worse. For a moment, she’d fallen for his ploy. And she hated herself for it.
“Well?” the tracker asked.
Anna stared back at the burlap sack and its darkened eye-holes. “The people who lived here got exactly what they deserved.”
Wind screeched through the chamber without warning, snuffing out the candle’s flame. Now there was only the distant yipping of coyotes, the rattle of branches against stonework, and the panicked breathing of one young girl.
But to Anna the chamber was far from blackness. The room’s shape persisted in ghostly lines, carved into her vision like the etchings once made by Patrek on festival days.
She saw the one cut that could never be sealed by runes. She saw a wound ready to be torn open and infected until it festered. She saw her path to revenge.
She saw grief in the tracker’s eyes.
Chapter 3
Anna woke so abruptly that she couldn’t tell if she’d been sleeping at all. In an instant, she had both feet planted on the packed earth, her eyes wrenched open to the darkness, and her fingers tightened around the cold links of her necklace.
When she realized where she was, her stomach soured.
Outside the rain had thickened into a downpour, constant and deafening. She’d loved rain back home, where she could lie beneath a quilt’s woven armor while father lit the candles. It was always warm inside, and the rain whispered and hummed on the roof and grass, never able to reach her. But here the rain shouted and the wind shrieked.
She pressed a hand to her forearm, finding the skin clammy and tender. Her throat was hoarse and her mouth dry, making swallowing nearly impossible. Somewhere in the darkness, she recalled, the tracker kept a skin full of water.
Him, she remembered suddenly. I have to kill him. The thought struck her while she stood, almost as intense as the hunger pangs and thirst and dizziness. Once she’d forced down her nausea she peered into the darkness.
One by one the chamber’s murky curves emerged, until at last the familiar shape of a marching boot became visible.
I have to kill him.
Anna groped at her belt, scratching over linen and cracked leather as she searched for the hunting knife. At last her nails struck iron, still tacky with the tracker’s blood. Another flash of sickness came over her as she seized the wooden tang and pulled the blade free. Her eyes had adjusted enough to see her target slumped against the wall. She lowered the blade to her hip, braced her thumb along the iron’s upper ridge, and crept forward.
There
was no time to think about what she would do after killing him. Fear put trembling in her fingers, but it had lost its power. Now it was a fever, constant and incurable.
Three steps, two steps, one, all the while breathing in his odors of decay, hearing his ragged breathing and grinding teeth.
A horse whinnied outside.
Anna froze in place, the blade shaking in her hands. Put it through his eye. But her arm was locked in place, as rigid as the keep’s crumbling stone pillars. Voices rose in the blackness.
The first was deep and wounded, hardly audible over the storm. “Shut it up before I cut its stones off, korpa.”
“This is his first ranging,” said a younger man.
They were lowlanders, surely. Men who carried their accent had often ridden through Bylka and stabled horses in father’s barn, but Anna had never been allowed to speak with them. Men of Malchym, was all mother had said about them. That, and to never approach them.
Anna looked at the tracker’s inert form, his unarmored chest rising and falling, and moved the blade closer. The iron tip snagged on his burlap. With a gentle hand, Anna lifted the sack’s hem. The rune’s faint glimmer of hayat energy remained on his flesh, luminous against the black wall. Her resolve fell away in tandem with her arm, leaving the blade shaking by her side. No matter how badly she wanted it, she couldn’t bring herself to try—and fail—once again. Maybe they were right. Maybe she was right. She was a coward. And worse yet, she was complicit, and no better than—
“Check the east wing,” the older man called from outside.
It occurred to her that the storm hadn’t woken her up. It had only concealed their approach.
The knife still in her grasp, Anna stepped over the tracker and pressed herself flat against the cold, mossy stonework. Another hard wash of rain drowned out most of her hearing, but she was certain of a newfound silence, and the possibility that she was inside of the east wing. She sidled along the wall with an outstretched arm, her knuckles and iron blade catching on crevices. She came to a halt at the doorway, where her hand met the protruding frame.
Thunder bellowed from the gloom, sending the horses into fits and shaking the mud beneath Anna’s bare feet.
“East!” screamed the older man, who now seemed farther away and on the left side of the doorway, perhaps near the stables. “We’re not paid by the day, korpa.”
“They checked the tomesroom last week,” said the younger man, much closer than Anna had anticipated.
“If they were as dense as you, they probably found everything except the ledgers,” the older man growled. “Check the tomesroom, to the east. I don’t care how many pints you burn, boy. Look over everything. Got it?”
There was a long pause, then, “Tek.”
Anna heard the clopping of heavy boots moving away from the chamber, quickening, fading across the yard. She peered out from the doorway’s edge.
A pool of lantern light outlined the younger man’s form. He was already twenty paces away, jogging to escape the storm and reach the tomesroom across the yard. His lantern revealed flowing black garments upon his shoulders and a wide-brimmed hat, which sagged and fluttered in the downpour. Between the darkness and his eerie glow, the man was a monster. She’d seen enough monsters that day.
Anna glanced at the tracker’s still form, then back at the yard, discerning little beyond flits of silver as moonlight met rainfall. And amid the downpour, almost invisible given its silence, a black horse circled the yard.
They hadn’t tied the beast to a post or led it under an awning, which meant it was probably trained. And trained animals were ridden by trained men, if Anna’s experience in the lodge had taught her anything. But trained for what? Julek had sometimes worked the stables with father, and might’ve noticed its mannerisms and the way it carried itself, whether it was meant for messaging or—
Might have, Anna thought. Might.
All she knew with certainty was that she couldn’t mount, much less ride, a full grown horse.
She returned her attention to the riders. She hadn’t seen a cudgel or blade on the younger man, but he was also cloaked in full garb, and didn’t seem to expect trouble here. If they were good men, her salt could buy her passage to the next town.
Yes, that was it. She almost cried at the thought. Within hours she could be home again, or by a lodge’s fire, and—
No, it was too early to think about who wouldn’t be there. She tucked her blade away and set off running.
The rain was freezing on her skin, a far cry from dusk’s warmth. Wind slashed across the yard. Before long, her hair was plastered to her face, her tunic soaked and frigid. Her feet barely found purchase in the mire, skidding and sinking, but the mud took the sting out of her sores. She was close, if the echoes of approaching masonry were accurate. When her feet touched solid stone, the rainfall stopped, leaving her dripping beneath the tomesroom’s portico. She shivered and listened to her own breaths, now deafening in the small space. Warm air drifted past her like an invitation to the darkness. She raised her hands, wandering forward, brushing at nothingness until she felt the entryway’s dry stone.
Bathed in the earthy rot of cheap paper, memories resurfaced. They came as vivid flashes of nights by the hearth, where she helped her mother sort missives and glyph scrolls on polished counters. She recalled the way her fingers felt against crisp sheets that had been continually rain-soaked and dried.
Metal crashed against stone with a hollow clap.
Anna flinched.
Somebody—the younger man, most likely—was stomping through the aisles. He walked with the reckless heft of a man who believed he was alone, making no effort to muffle his coughing or the thunderclaps of the scroll cases he tossed aside.
Anna crept forward, tracking the man by his haphazard throws. It was black as tar in the tomesroom, perhaps even worse without moonlight, but there had to be a light somewhere. She wandered forward, her right hand on the dusty shelving, and watched for the man’s lantern.
At the end of the aisle, where her fingers curled around a mason’s straight stone edge, a warm glow leaked across the floor.
Within the wash of light, far down the main aisle of scrolls, discarded strips of paper and crushed candle wax littered the floor like a crypt’s bones. The man and his black covering blotted out a portion of the light, but the cone that projected before him bathed the walls and shimmered over brass cylinders, revealing the upper vaulting of the tomesroom. It was higher than Anna had expected, with its shelves melding into the ceiling’s stonework.
She followed the man for a few paces. Her damp feet caught on a piece of paper, dragging it over stone, but the rain muffled most of the crinkling. As she shook her foot free, her toe struck brass. Pain shot up her leg, but the sensation was drowned out by bristling terror. The brass container spun down the aisle, scraping and clanking, before it came to rest just behind the man.
His silhouette spun, and the blinding light of his lantern, suspended by a hook, hovering at navel level, glared back at Anna like a pale eye.
“Milosz!” the man called. His light did not move. “Milosz!” he called again, this time far louder.
Anna raised a hand to shield her eyes from the light, but the glow was too intense to see anything. She stood in silence, trembling, hoping the man would soon realize her age and note her broken appearance, from a drenched tunic to mud-covered, bloodied feet. After a moment of waiting, she cleared her throat. “You have to help me.”
The light jumped when she spoke. “Stay where you are,” the man said between panicked huffs.
“I won’t hurt you,” said Anna. It was shocking that she even had to assure the man of such things. It also meant he was probably unarmed.
After a long pause, he risked a step forward. “What are you doing here?”
“It wasn’t my choice,” she said. She imagined the tracker waking an
d creeping behind her in the darkness, wrapping his rough hands around her throat. “I’m from Bylka.”
“A riding post.” Before Anna could reply, the man staggered back. “Milosz!” he yelled, the words bearing enough force to set Anna’s ears to ringing. Tremors wracked his voice, the kind that young boys and girls developed when they began to fear death. “Keep your distance.”
Suddenly Anna heard footfalls clopping through the mud outside, clapping over the portico’s tiled floor, and finally clacking behind her. She glanced over her shoulder, but the darkness revealed only sprawling cobwebs on the shelving. The terror returned to her, but it was only another senseless emotion. Her body was simply drained of fright and dread. Instead she felt her heartbeat and its painful aches, and icy sweat forming on her neck like fresh rainfall.
If she were butchered right there, it would only prove that the day had been an awful nightmare, and nothing more.
For better or worse, she felt no blade. She just heard the wet boots slow and then come to a complete stop at her back, almost as close as the tracker had been that morning. The voice that followed fit her recollection of the older man.
“That’s a strange looking ledger, Kaba,” Milosz said. He hummed to himself then asked, with a bit more gravity, “Where did you find her?”
“She just appeared.” Kaba set his lantern down on the floor.
“Appeared?”
“Yes,” Kaba said. “What do we do with her?”
“I need to get away from here,” Anna said suddenly. She stole a glance behind her, if only to show Milosz her face and youth. “I’m no harm to anybody. I was brought here against my will. Please, just help me.”
Milosz grunted. “There are very few ways a girl ends up in this place.” He spat on the tiles. “I suggest you speak quickly.”
“Kidnapping,” she said, turning to see the luminous sigils on Milosz’s face and neck in the light’s residual glow. He had a delicate, spiraling system that joined to form octagons. She studied the sigil carefully, forcing herself back to speech as she watched the symbols twist and turn. “One of the bogat’s men did it.”
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