by Micah Yongo
Neythan walked up behind. Stamped against the calf of the one nearest. The man yelped and went down on one knee. Neythan snagged a flailing arm, locked it. Grabbed chin and skull and twisted hard. Dull snap of bone as the man turned abruptly limp and slumped to the ground. Neythan took his sword as he went down.
The bodyguard was already turning toward him. Neythan stepped in while she was still off balance. Swung blade. Knee to the ribs. Limbs tangling as he shoved her back into the other soldier.
Arianna danced on the periphery as the soldier fell into her. The man grunted feebly as she grasped a limb and yanked.
The bodyguard’s eyes locked with Neythan’s as she lunged back at him. She feinted, grabbed his wrist, then slammed him face-first into the wall as his sword clattered to the ground.
Vision whited out, sparks at the edges.
Neythan was slumping to the floor when she hit him again. He grabbed at her knee blindly, trying to drag her down. Heard another scream and then the dull clang of metal as blades smacked.
He was on the ground.
Arianna and the bodyguard were fighting.
He flailed around, found the dropped sword just in time, came to as Arianna reeled back from the bodyguard and thudded against the opposite wall.
The pale woman was wheeling back around toward him with her blade raised, the metal skidding off the stone of the narrow alley as she swung down for the killing stroke right as Neythan, still on his knees, drove his shortsword hard into her hip and shoved it through to the hilt.
The woman froze mid-motion with her sword still overhead as she stared down at him. He watched a string of bloody saliva drop from the corner of her mouth, but it wasn’t until she slumped to her knees and then face down in the dirt that Neythan saw the blade Arianna had thrown, lodged in the bodyguard’s back.
“You’re welcome,” she said when Neythan looked up at her.
He snorted as he climbed to his feet.
Arianna stood there, sword clasped loose and low. Bloody mouthed and panting. “Alone at last,” she said.
Neythan stared.
Arianna shrugged her chin at the fallen bodyguard and soldiers. “I thought you were with them,” she said. “But you are not… which makes me wonder why you are here.”
“Is that all you have to say?”
Arianna tipped her head, quizzical. “You were expecting some grander welcome?”
“You must have known this was coming, Ari. Must have known that I’d come. That I’d find you.”
Arianna smiled. “I know better by now than to trust what I am told to know.”
Neythan matched the smile with a sour one of his own. “Good. Then I shall tell you what I know.” He began to walk slowly toward her. “I know you are a betrayer. I know you slaughtered Yannick like an animal. And I know that you are going to die, here, now, like an animal, for that sin.”
But Arianna only looked at him, her smile now a confused one. “Is that what you think?”
Neythan, still holding the soldier’s sword, bent to tug the dagger from the bodyguard’s back. “A blade in the back,” he said, looking at it. “Apt…” He rose with it in one hand and the sword in the other. “How right it will be for you to die by the same means.”
“You think I am the betrayer?”
Neythan took another step forward. “Let’s not play this game, Ari. I was there. I saw what you did.”
But something didn’t make sense, the way she was looking at him, like he was some puzzle. It wasn’t what he’d expected.
He took another step. “You broke the covenant, betrayed your creed, betrayed the Brotherhood.”
“It is they, and you, who have betrayed me, Neythan.”
And now she wasn’t making sense at all. She seemed to be measuring him with her gaze, as though truly puzzled.
“You’re not part of it, are you?” she said wonderingly. “You do not know why I killed him?”
Neythan took another slow step. What was he missing? “In the beginning I asked myself, but now…” he shook his head. “Riches? A bribe? The precious ‘freedom’ you always hungered for? It doesn’t matter now. What matters is I found you.”
But she didn’t seem to be listening. “So, you really do not know.” Her attention was elsewhere, distracted. “Well, that is good.”
“You mock me?”
“No…” and then she did something even stranger. She lowered her sword, let it slide loose from her fingers and turned her palms to him. Open.
Neythan didn’t say anything, just watched her standing there, still and unarmed.
“He was trying to kill me, Neythan.”
“Pick it up.”
“Yannick… He tried to kill me as I slept.”
“You’re lying.”
“Am I? Why did I not kill you too, then? If all I sought were riches and freedom, and there you were, asleep and unguarded…”
Neythan stood still. It had been his first question after Godswell, the one he remained unable to answer, the one that bothered him most.
“Why would I not spare myself…” She gestured at him, the bodies, the blood, everything, “…this, by simply taking your life as I did his?”
And now he was uncertain, awaiting the answer, or a trick; she’d always been good at tricks.
“Yannick said it was his decree to kill me, Neythan. He said it was the will of the elders.”
Neythan took another step now. The will of the elders. He thought of Elder Safít in the brothel, in Hanesda, who she’d been meeting and why. “Why would the elders seek your life?”
“I don’t know. That is why I am here. It’s what I’ve been trying to find out. What I know is they would have taken it, Yannick would have, had it not been for the dream that woke me.”
“Dream?”
“You will not believe me.”
Neythan almost laughed but didn’t. The things he’d seen. The things he was now hearing.
“I saw a Watcher,” she said. “That night in the inn, in my dream. A Watcher. They are… real, Neythan.”
Neythan just stood looking at her. They could hear more soldiers nearing, the noise of tumult from the city square growing louder.
“I know what you will say. I don’t expect for you to believe me, it doesn’t even matter anymore. Nothing matters.”
“What did this Watcher tell you?”
And the way Arianna looked at him, that same querying look he’d known back in Ilysia by the Dry Lake those years before. A fragile, uncertain smile, part joy, part wonder.
Neythan wasn’t sure if he believed her or not, but too much fit for him not to ask. There were too many questions. Why she hadn’t killed him as she had Yannick. Why Elder Safít had been at that brothel if, as seemed likely, she somehow had. If the eldership had transgressed their own laws, if Safít had departed the temple she was sworn to abide, then what else might be true that he would have once called a lie? Less than three moons ago he thought Watchers no more than a myth. Now Arianna was claiming to have seen one, just as he had.
“We must leave here,” was all Neythan said. “The city. We need to find a way out.”
“You believe me?”
Neythan just stared at her. No way to answer. “We must leave,” he said again.
Arianna was still smiling, but something else was there too, something he couldn’t read. “Well,” she said in the end. “After all these years we finally agree on something.”
Thirty-Three
B E T R A Y E R
They escaped by the eastern watchtower, leaping and hopping along the rooftops to cross the city. They felled a pair of watchmen and lowered themselves partway down the twenty-foot drop with a cart rope before climbing the rest of the way, digging and clawing into the narrow sills of the stonework like apes and scampering away into the Bulapa Lake forest to wait and rest in silence, nothing to say, too much to say, their presences surreal to one another. Familiar strangers.
“You never liked Yannick,” Neythan s
aid eventually, breaking the lull. They were both lying on the grass, face up beside a clutch of shrubs and bracken, staring at the blue-green gloaming overhead. He said it as much to spoil the silence as anything. Nearly two months of wishing her dead, it made any shared quiet, at least for now, feel itchy.
“I didn’t trust him.” She said it calmly, as though the words were a discovery, floating up from some great distance within her she’d only just realized was there. “And with good reason it turns out,” she added.
“So you say.”
“Yes, so I say. But it’s funny how quickly a blade at your throat can help you make your mind up about someone.”
“And that’s what you saw, Yannick with his dagger at your neck.”
“Yes. That is what I saw.”
Neythan didn’t answer. They stared at the sky. The leaves of the forest shivered in the breeze like the sound of pouring rice. Part of him couldn’t believe they were lying here like this, speaking, and not engaged in mortal combat. For weeks he’d foreseen nothing else.
“The strange thing,” Arianna said, her words still floating, calm and deadpan, “was afterward I liked him more… I mean just sitting there like that at breakfast, the morning we left Ilysia, same as always, quiet as always, and all the while plotting how best to kill me… You think about that afterward, you know. You wonder, was he thinking of it then, killing me? When we ate? When he went to his bloodtree? When he greeted me?”
A long cloud was drawing slowly along the sky above them in the shape of a hare.
Arianna marked his silence. “You blame me,” she said.
Neythan thought about it. “He is dead. You are alive.”
“You’d rather it the other way around?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You think me a liar.”
“I think you could’ve been mistaken.”
Arianna laughed. “You see, that’s the problem with you, Neythan. You do not see things as they are, you see them as you’d like them to be. I tell you Yannick tried to kill me, you say I must be mistaken.”
“He could have been confused.”
“No, Neythan. He was not. It was his decree.”
“He actually said that.”
“Yes. The only time I hear him speak and it’s so he can tell me that killing me is his decree. He told me as I tried to wrestle the blade from him. It was as though he was trying to convince me to let him do it – it’s my decree, it is the will of the elders. As though that should make me willing to die… Well. I am not willing.”
“If that’s true, then he was not at fault.”
Arianna sat up and looked at him. “For trying to kill me?”
“He had no choice.”
“There’s always a choice, Neythan.”
“What would you have done, had the decree been yours?”
“What would you?”
Neythan thought about it.
“See?” Arianna said. “You, Josef, Yannick – you’re each the same that way. That’s why I didn’t wake you.”
“Because you didn’t trust me.”
She didn’t answer. He could hear her getting up, moving around. He kept watching the cloud. It was more the shape of a house now.
“You used to trust me,” he said. And there it was, that thing they never spoke of, the thing that years ago had changed everything between them. He could feel its gravity opening to them in the silence.
Arianna’s movements slowed.
Neythan sat up and looked at her. She was tearing at the hem of her dress; stale sweat steaming from her shiny thighs. It was getting cooler, and darker. She looked up and saw him watching, waiting for an answer.
“Your uncle used to trust you too,” was all she said, and let the silence do the rest.
Neythan, to this day, could never fathom why Uncle Sol told him the things he did: his visions, his beliefs about the Brotherhood. Neythan had been just a boy. How could he know that telling, when asked, of the things his uncle shared would also mean his uncle’s exile? How could he know that it would be his own divulgences that would banish his only remaining bloodkin?
“I loved Master Sol as a father,” Arianna said. “He was the only one who understood me. You knew that. And then he was gone. Because of you.”
“It wasn’t my fault.”
“Then whose fault was it?”
“He should never have told me the things he did.”
“He told you because he trusted you. Like I trusted you. But you chose to betray him. You chose to tell the elders.”
“They came to me. They demanded the truth. I was a child. What was I to do?”
“Lie, Neythan.”
“It was forbidden.”
“Just as it is forbidden to turn our swords on one another, and yet here we are. Yannick did not hesitate, and neither did the elders, to turn their swords on me.”
She was right. Truth was he’d always known she was right. He’d known it when she changed toward him those years ago, making herself a stranger to him, breaking the furtive bond they’d known, that nameless thing forever marked by that one night of words unspoken by the Great Dry Lake. It was then Neythan discovered it was not just his uncle he’d unwittingly exiled, but also himself. The only two people able to dent the solitude he’d known since Father and Mother died were now gone from him, one by the Brotherhood’s edict and the other by her disgust at his part in it. Everything changed from then. Afterward, sometimes, they would bicker, they would banter, but they would never talk, not like they had that night with their feet dangling above the Dry Lake, as though they were the last ones left in the world, as though possessors of some shared secret only they could understand.
“Look.”
Arianna was brandishing her palm. She’d been using the rag she’d torn from her dress to wipe it.
“That’s where I caught Yannick’s blade,” she said. “When he tried to slit my throat as I slept.”
Neythan looked at the thin line of rouged, shiny flesh that crossed her palm.
“It’s healed well now, but it wasn’t easy to hide. The apothecaries in Hanesda ask a fortune… Touch it.”
Neythan did, and then looked up at her. She held his gaze.
“You see?” she said. “I am not lying. I was not mistaken.” She sat back on her haunches, still watching him. “We’ve no kin but each other now.” Her eyes were staring into his, waiting for him to acknowledge the truth she’d always wanted him to, the truth he’d always resisted. “The Shedaím are not our kin,” she said. “They never were. The Brotherhood is not true.”
Neythan, after a long pause, nodded.
Arianna continued to watch him, then rose from squatting beside him and stepped away, sitting down again by the bushes.
“I never blamed you, Neythan,” she said quietly as she tied the rag around a wound on her calf. “For your uncle, I mean… It’s just, I didn’t trust you anymore. I couldn’t.”
“And what about now?”
She glanced at him, and then away through the forest trees, toward the city in the distance where the cityguard and watchmen were no doubt still seeking them. “Now?” She shrugged, wry smile. “The elders seek my life, and you’re the only one who knows the truth of it. And you’ve chosen to hear my side, in spite of everything. What right have I to not trust you now?”
“I suppose that will have to do.”
Their tacit covenant hung in the quiet between them for a moment before she paused and turned to look back at him again. “Why have you chosen to hear my side?”
The forest was beginning to chill further. The sun had receded toward the horizon, peeping out from behind the city watchtowers. Neythan let out a long sigh and decided. “The Watcher you spoke of… I have seen one too.”
She stared at him, then smiled, then laughed. “Is that so?”
“Yes. It is… I need you to tell me what she said to you.”
“‘She…’” Arianna’s smile faded. “You have seen her.”
“Yes… Yes.” She shuffled on her seat to face him now, newly fascinated, excited even. “She visited me, in my dreams… I thought I was going mad but when she spoke to me that night in Godswell, told me of what Yannick was going to do, that I needed to wake up… after seeing the truth of what she said I knew it wasn’t madness… And so I went to the place she called me, to a waterfall. That’s when she told me.”
“Told you what?”
“That I’d find the answers in Hanesda. She told me what to do. She provided everything. The clothes. Silver. Everything. And then… took me there.”
“Took you.”
“Yes.”
“To Hanesda.”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. She showed me… it was like a door. When I stepped through to the other side I was by the main road, a mile from Hanesda. I could see the city before me…”
Neythan’s head wagged slowly.
“She did not do the same for you?”
“No. She did not. She spoke riddles. I cannot remember half of them. She told me where to find you.”
Arianna nodded thoughtfully to herself.
“What else did she say?” Neythan asked.
“That was all. When I came to the city I made it my aim to meet the sharíf, to try and discover his involvement, why my death had been ordered.”
“And did you?”
“No… I don’t know… I don’t think he knows anything. I tried befriending him, prompting him, seeing how he’d respond. But he is as he appears.”
“What of those around him, his counsellors, his courtiers?”
“His chamberlain, Elias. He was different. He knew things. He was not like the sharíf. He is not as he appears at all. I’d catch him watching me sometimes. I think he knew I wasn’t as I appeared too. So I began to watch him back, just little things, slipping into his bedchamber when he wasn’t there, looking around. His letters and so forth. After a while I began to follow him, sometimes out of the palace. Sometimes I’d see him meeting people – judges, governors, vassals. Just him. A chamberlain. They’d come to the city, visit with the sharíf awhile, eat with him, then later, when I followed Elias, I’d find them meeting with him in a cornerhouse or grove, or often in the old man’s vineyard or some other place. They’d meet so long I’d have to leave for fear of being missed from the palace.”