Queens of Tristaine

by Cate Culpepper

  “You’d have to sneak out after curfew.” Brenna hoped she was hearing her. “Wait for us in the pagoda. We’ll come for you, Nell. We’ll bring you with us.”

  Nell patted Brenna’s wrist, and her smile was wistful. “I’ve missed you, Bren. I can see you’ve changed. I wouldn’t have known you.”

  Brenna tried to read her expression. “Nell. Please. You have so much to gain and so little to lose. You have three hours to decide.”

  “I’ll think about it. I will.” Nell patted her hand again, then lifted the strap of the backpack over her shoulder. “It’s late for me, I’m going home. Be careful tonight, Brenna. And remember, if this goes wrong, I’ve never heard of you.”

  “Thank you, Nell,” Brenna whispered. She watched her climb out of the booth and make her way toward the exit doors. She didn’t look back, and Brenna didn’t need her psychic sense to know she would never see Nell again. She lowered her head.

  The harsh clank of a glass on the table jerked Brenna erect, her nerve-endings firing like pistons. A full snifter of whiskey sat before her. A dead man, holding a second glass, slid into the booth across from her.

  He was dirty and emaciated, and his bare forearms were etched with needle tracks. He still would have been handsome, though, were it not for his missing eye, a dark, lid-covered dent beneath his brow. His one eye was whole but blood-shot with drink, and Brenna remembered that he used to have beautiful eyes, a crystalline blue, shining down at Samantha on their wedding day.

  “Matthew.” It was all she could say, the only sound she could make.

  “Brenna.” Matthew slurred her name, his teeth clenched so tightly his jaw trembled. “I couldn’t believe it was you. I couldn’t believe it. I had to buy you a drink.” He pushed the other snifter toward her, sloshing cheap whiskey over its rim.

  “We heard you were dead.” Brenna pressed her hand to her mouth and tried to steady her voice. “Matthew, sweet Gaia—”

  “You heard right.” He took a healthy slug of his drink and studied her in sullen silence. “We were going to name our child after you, Sammy and me, if it was a girl. Did you know that? We were going to name our baby Brenna, after you.”

  “Matt, Sammy is—”

  “She loved you that much. She thought you hung the stars in the sky.” He leaned his elbows heavily on the table. “Hell, I loved you too, Brenna, like you were my own sister. Why did you kill us? Why did you blow my family apart?”

  “Please, Matthew, listen.” Still trying to draw even breath, Brenna clenched her hands in mute pleading. “Sammy is alive—”

  “I don’t want to hear about Samantha.” Matthew slammed the snifter down on the table hard enough to crack its base, and a pocket of quiet formed around them. He stared at her with a muddy hatred, and soon the curious lost interest and the noise swelled again.

  “I gave her up.” The fury faded from Matthew’s eye, and he looked at her dully. “I told them where to find her. It didn’t even take them very long to convince me. Just one prick.” He pointed vaguely at his empty eye socket. “My wife, with my baby inside her, and if the tip of that scalpel came any closer to my other eye, I would have led them to her hiding place myself. I don’t think about Samantha anymore.”

  Brenna tried for words and failed, gripped by waves of desolation.

  “I hope it was worth it,” Matthew said softly. “Whatever you killed my family for. That woman you escaped with, are you happy together? Do you have a daughter? Did you name her Samantha?”

  “Stop,” Brenna gasped, and that freed her tongue. “She’s alive, Matt! She escaped. Sammy is safe, she’s—”

  Fire filled Brenna’s eyes as Matthew threw the contents of his glass in her face. The burning liquid splashed over her throat and drenched her breasts.

  “I...don’t...think...about...your sister...anymore.”

  She couldn’t see him get up, but she heard his parting words.

  “Rot in hell, Brenna.”

  Darkness clouded Brenna’s vision as she sat there, trembling, whiskey dripping from her chin. She was inundated by its noxious, familiar smell.

  Finally she lifted her head and saw the full snifter Matthew had set before her. Almost without her bidding, Brenna’s shaking fingers reached out and grasped it. She emptied it in three long swallows, then coughed spasmodically as it burned its way down her core.

  Nell’s second beer still stood untouched on the table. Brenna drank that too.

  Chapter Ten

  Jess was shivering with cold, wracked with it in defiance of the mild summer night. So far, this malaise creeping through her was limited to a dry ache in her throat and these bloody chills. Jess’s mind was clear and her legs were still strong. All she could do was pray to her Mothers they stayed that way.

  “Hey. Jesstin.” Kyla’s touch on her arm was gentle. “You’re shaking like an aspen treetop. Come here.”

  Jess hesitated but then shifted closer to Kyla and allowed her to slip her arm around her. Kyla rubbed Jess’s arm briskly, and then moved the flat of her palm across her back in warming circles.

  “Thanks, lass,” Jess whispered.

  “You don’t have to thank me for this, Jess.”

  Jess tried to relax into Kyla’s ministrations, but Brenna was due to join them soon, and she couldn’t turn off the invisible beacon that searched the air constantly for her adonai. She frowned as a mild crunching sound came from Kyla’s other side.

  “These candy bars are great.” Dana smacked her lips. “Chocolate candy bars are one of the few things the City has over Tristaine. Want one?” She extended a wrapped bar to Kyla and Jess. “Pam gave me two.”

  “I can’t believe you’re eating candy at a time like this.” Kyla frowned, still rubbing Jess’s back. She snatched the bar from Dana. “I didn’t say I didn’t want it.”

  A bricked circle of lush, high vegetation on the Clinic’s outer grounds provided them secure shelter while they waited. It was hours sitting in wet grass with leafy boughs in their faces, but only Jess seemed chilled by their damp vigil. She reached out cautiously and moved a thin branch an inch.

  The Clinic awaited them like a malign sentinel, bathed in the harsh arc lamps posted at even intervals around the grounds. Beyond it, partially visible over the Clinic’s north roof, were the looming walls of the Prison.

  Jess had served hard labor there for six months. She’d been beaten there, and starved, and locked into a dank hole a thousand leagues from the sky. She was forced to leave Kyla and Camryn behind those gray walls when they took her to the Clinic, forced to imagine them beaten and starved.

  “Jess? You want some of this? Dana’s right, it’s great.”

  Jess stared at the white sheen of the Clinic, and her shaking grew worse. The beatings had become torture there. Caster had made Brenna hurt her, Brenna with her gentle, healing hands, forced to apply a stunning electric shock to Jess’s shoulder.

  And Caster had stripped her. Her Brenna. Stripped her, tied her with ropes, and ordered Jess to whip her. That was her choice, scourge Brenna or betray Tristaine.

  “Jesstin.”

  Kyla sounded so firm Jess started, thinking for a disoriented moment that Shann sat beside her.

  Kyla’s hand slid beneath Jess’s dark hair and cupped her neck, then pulled her head down on her shoulder. Jess’s muscles tightened, every fiber in her being resisting such intimate surrender.

  “Stop it,” Kyla said quietly. “Let me hold you.”

  “Jess? What’s wrong?” Dana touched Jess’s leg. “Is she all right, Ky?”

  “No, but that’s okay.” Kyla stroked Jess’s hair, rocking her gently. “Jess doesn’t need to be strong right now. Don’t worry; she will be when we need her. She always is.”

  Jess let out a hitching breath. A soft melody issued from Kyla’s lips, not a lullaby, but a cheerful, lilting song Amazons sang at their harvest festival. Her rigid back began to relax, and her shivering lessened. Dana’s hand still rested on her leg. Jess felt its warm
th.

  Kyla’s sweet song ended, and Jess sat up slowly, feeling as if she’d had ten hours of solid sleep. Kyla rested two fingers against Jess’s lips.

  “Again, you don’t have to thank your adanin for simple comfort, Jesstin,” she murmured. “Our love for you is your birthright, and it runs very deep.”

  Jess’s sore throat tightened, and she kissed the tips of Kyla’s fingers.

  “Are you okay now?” Dana still sounded worried.

  “Aye, I’m fine now.” Jess tried to see through the smog to check the position of the moon. “How’s our time, Dana?”

  “That’s the thing.” Dana rose up on her knees cautiously and peered through the foliage. “It’s got to be close to curfew, Jesstin. And I don’t see any sign of—”

  The raucous curfew siren blasted through the night, shattering the silence into quivering shards.

  “Jess,” Kyla gasped.

  Jess steadied her, searching the skies as if the Goddess might drop salvation into their laps.

  Brenna, Jess’s mind screamed. Where are you?

  *

  Brenna lurched out of the booth, her thighs knocking the heavy table painfully, barely registering the jangle of keys as they fell to the wooden floor. She bent to snatch them up, and nearly fell headlong as dizziness coursed through her.

  Dear Gaia, she thought, what have I done. How much time has passed?

  Surely, surely she had sat there only a few minutes with Matthew’s whiskey drying on her face and boiling in her stomach.

  Time enough had sped by to allow a dismaying number of people to leave the bar. It was almost empty. Brenna focused on moving, the sheer physical mechanics of putting one foot in front of the other and following the few remaining patrons outside. After four years of sobriety, the alcohol hit her broadside like a horned ram, and she gave her head a fierce shake.

  Brenna stepped out onto the sidewalk and looked around wildly. The streets were almost deserted, just a few pedestrians and vehicles heading directly home before curfew sounded. She leaned against a light pole and commanded her mind to stop reeling, then pushed off it and ran.

  She was fast when she had to be, and she hit a dead sprint within seconds. The Clinic lay just adjacent to a park six blocks over. She could make it in good time if she wasn’t stopped. Then Brenna realized that racing through City streets like a frenzied banshee increased the possibility of drawing unwelcome interest, and she made herself slow to a trot.

  She rounded the corner of a bank and plowed directly into a police officer.

  The young woman gave a bark of surprise and steadied Brenna, gripping her arms. “Hey, slow down!”

  “I’m s-sorry—”

  “Phew.” The officer’s nose wrinkled beneath her visor. “Smells like you’ve been hitting it pretty heavy tonight, ma’am. You know it’s almost curfew?”

  “I know.” Brenna stared at the hand still clenching her upper arm. “I live close. I can make it.”

  “Better show me some ID.” The policewoman released her and slipped a small notebook out of her breast pocket. “Public drunkenness may go down in the Boroughs, but not on my beat.”

  Just do it. You have no choice.

  For years, the silent voices that instructed Brenna came from spectral sources. Tonight she heard her own voice. She didn’t need otherworldly advice. She understood what she had to do for the clan she loved.

  Brenna reached into her belt and drew out the small dagger. Calling on a move Jess had taught her years ago, she swept her right leg in a sharp circle and kicked the woman’s feet out from under her. She went down with a shocked gasp and Brenna was all over her, the dagger clenched in her fist.

  At the last moment she twisted, turning her blade from the exposed throat and cutting the leg, slicing the cop’s Achilles tendon with surgical precision. The officer bellowed in pain and threw herself backward, smacking her head into the heavy cornerstone of the bank building. Brenna froze, her teeth bared, and she watched her sag into unconsciousness.

  Brenna clenched the collar of the woman’s uniform shirt and heaved with all her might, pulling her dead weight around the corner of the building and into the alley behind it. Panting, she knelt and tried to check the woman’s pupils, a futile effort in the darkness, then she tore a strip from the officer’s shirt and bound her badly bleeding leg. She was no older than Dana, her slack features youthful and fresh.

  Brenna hovered over the senseless woman, her eyes squeezed shut, and tried desperately to make the surreal decision as to whether to take the life of a defenseless human being. The liquor made her brain sluggish and slow. If the head wound wasn’t fatal, she would awake within hours. In hours, Brenna expected to either be locked in a Clinic cell or well outside the City limits, headed for the foothills. Any alarm this cop raised would be centered downtown.

  Brenna snatched the police radio and gun from the woman’s belt. She had crippled her. She would need time to crawl for help. She whispered a fleeting prayer over the motionless form and lunged to her feet.

  She raced to the end of the alley and dropped the gun and radio into a deep tin trash bin, flinching at the hollow clang of their impact. Cramps hit her belly and she bent double and vomited copiously. She spat twice, and then she just kept running.

  Brenna squeezed the small pouch tied to her belt and felt the sharpness of the keys inside it. There was the drug store, and the street just beyond it ran straight to the Clinic compound.

  The curfew siren blasted around Brenna and she almost fell. An appalled horror surged through her and she started to run again, faster than she’d ever run in her life.

  *

  “They’ll start a full perimeter search in two minutes, Jesstin.” Dana sounded unnaturally calm. “No more.”

  Jess knew she had allowed Brenna all the time they could spare. They had counted on being inside the building by now, well before the arc lamps illuminating the Clinic’s outer walls went to high and flooded the grounds in a harsh glare. Even the most indifferent sentry wouldn’t miss three women crouching in the greenery of their refuge. Their only hope was to get inside before the curfew check started.

  “Go for the utility doors.” Jess fought down a roil of nausea, picturing Brenna captured or hurt, or worse. I won’t leave the City without you. She didn’t need to speak the promise aloud. It was visceral. “We’ll get in through the heating ducts. They’re right above them. Move with me.”

  Then they were running, ghosting across the neatly trimmed grass with the Clinic looming large ahead in the darkness, and they were halfway there when Jess saw her. Brenna was sprinting just as fast, coming around the north wall, crossing open ground against all common sense, searching for them wildly.

  At the same moment, a steel door opened in the back of the Clinic, and two armed guards stepped out.

  Brenna froze.

  The guards didn’t see her at first. They stood between the Amazons and Brenna, both lighting cigarettes, one of them laughing. Then the high, powerful arc lamps stationed around the compound clicked on, flooding the area with light.

  Still running, Jess slapped Dana’s shoulder and veered sharply, increasing her speed. For a sick moment, Jess thought she wouldn’t reach them in time. The men had both spotted Brenna, and now one of them was lifting his rifle.

  “Hey!” the guard shouted, and then Jess plowed into him, knocking him several yards through the air before they both crashed to the ground. She jumped to her feet and whirled, and the second guard cracked his rifle stock hard against the side of her head.

  The night spiraled dizzily in Jess’s vision and she dropped to her knees, pain pounding through her skull. She heard Brenna cry her name breathlessly, and then felt her arms around her, steadying her in the grass.

  Jess heard Dana take down the second guard, and when she could see again, both men were lying senseless on the ground. “We need to get them under cover,” she said. The blow to the head had her reeling, but the glaring light around them spurred her
to her feet with Brenna’s quick support.

  Kyla and Dana grabbed one of the unconscious guards, and Brenna helped Jess grip the second man’s collar and drag him toward the Clinic wall.

  “Jess, down here!” Dana signaled them urgently.

  Still half-dazed, Jess followed her, hauling the guard’s dead weight around a waist-high wall of concrete and down four steps into the small utility bay. It was empty except for an old oil-soaked engine in one corner and provided adequate shelter from the floodlights.

  Jess dropped the man, gasping, and leaned hard on the cool brick wall, hoping her stomach would settle. “Dana, Kyla. Cuff those men and gag them.” She didn’t know if either guard was alive, and she didn’t care. They just needed them safely immobilized for the night.

  “Jess? Let me look at you.” Brenna’s grip was firm on Jess’s shoulders, turning her so she could see the bloody cut above her hairline. Jess felt a drop of warm wetness drip down her throat. She lifted Brenna’s cool hands from her face and held them, and let relief flood through her.

  “I thought you were lost, Bren,” Jess said hoarsely.

  “Jesstin, I’m so s-sorry.” Brenna’s eyes were anguished, but she was alive, and she was here. “How bad is your head?”

  Jess couldn’t answer. She stared at Brenna. She smelled liquor on her breath, on her clothes. Brenna must have seen her shock.

  “Jess, I didn’t mean to—”

  “Tell me later, Brenna.” Jess held Brenna’s chin and tried to focus on her features through her blurred vision. “The whys of it don’t matter now. I just need to know if your mind is clear.”

  “Yes, I’m clear.” Brenna looked up at her pleadingly. “I got rid of most of it.”

  “And the keys?”

  “Right here.” Brenna fumbled with the pouch on her belt and drew out a steel ring of long keys.

  “Oh, bless you, Brenna, you got them.” Kyla grasped Brenna’s arm, still breathing hard.