by Becca Mills
“I don’t think that’s it. I think she was after immortality.”
“Hunter’ll make you mortal damned fast.”
I remembered with a shudder the green man that’d pursued my sister-in-law in the spring.
“Look, this is all guess work. There’s no evidence Mizzy plans to sell us out.” Then I remembered a key fact. “Besides, Nolanders aren’t hunted anymore.”
“Bullshit. We’re all hunted. You’re only as safe as your owner’s strength makes you.”
I stared at him for several seconds before realizing my mouth was hanging open.
“But —”
“Enough,” he said. “Quit being stupid. You don’t know shit. You want to stay alive, do what I tell you.”
“You know, if —”
“Shut up.”
I sat back, steaming. I’d been thinking better of the man, but apparently the post-rape-attempt grace period was over, and he was back to his asshole self. I felt like punching him. He blamed me for being “stupid” but wouldn’t give me the answers I needed to make better decisions. It was infuriating.
I stood, mustering what dignity I could. “Being a beginner is not the same as being stupid.”
He looked bored. “Not a tutor.”
“That’s too bad, because there’s no one else.”
I walked over to Ida and Mizzy.
“You two arguing?” Ida said, glancing across the room at Williams.
I plopped down into a chair and motioned for the barmaid. “No, not exactly.”
There was an awkward pause as they waited for me to explain and I didn’t.
Mizzy cleared her throat. “When are we leaving?”
“Soon. Don’t bother unpacking.”
As soon as I said it, I wondered if I should’ve lied and said “not for a few days.” I just had no idea.
Oh for crying out loud. Now he had me trying to set traps for people.
“Hey,” Mizzy said softly, “what’s wrong?”
I summoned a smile. “Just wishing we could stay here longer. That tub …”
“Amen to that,” Ida said, and we all laughed.
The barmaid showed up, and I ordered a big lunch.
“Hey,” I said after she’d left, “where’s Kevin?”
“Upstairs,” Mizzy said. “He said he felt ill.”
“Reverse sea-sickness, or something?”
She shrugged. “I guess. Or maybe just mooning over that piece of tail he picked up on the boat.”
“That boy is a fool,” Ida said. “Always has been. He doesn’t know what a fine woman he has in Joanna. And Kite — the best son a man could ask for.” She shook her head. “Damned fool.”
“He was born too pretty,” Mizzy said. “Remember, Ida? That little rosebud of a mouth?” She turned back to me. “Honest to god, he was the most beautiful baby I’ve ever seen. The most beautiful child, too.”
I nodded, momentarily put off-balance by the reminder of Mizzy’s age. “Well, hopefully he’ll get his priorities straightened out.”
Ida shook her head. “Second ‘amen’ of the day to that.”
When I got back up to my room, I pulled off my shoes and turned down the bedclothes. They were coarse but thick and very clean. This was going to be the best nap I’d had in ages.
Someone knocked firmly at my door.
“Yes?” I called out in Baasha.
The door opened to reveal Williams. He didn’t look happy. “Powell’s gone.”
“Are you sure?”
Instead of responding, he jerked his head and headed down the hall.
I got up and followed him to Ida’s door. This time he didn’t bother knocking.
Ida and Mizzy were sitting on the floor going through their saddlebags.
“Where’s Powell?”
Ida looked up blankly. “In his room?”
Mizzy grasped the situation more quickly. She jumped up and rushed out of the room, calling for Kevin. If it was an act, it was a really good one. She sounded terrified. I heard her clatter down the stairs, still calling out for him.
“Kevin’s gone?” Ida said. She shook her head. “He’s just down getting dinner or something.”
“He’s not downstairs,” Williams said flatly.
“Then he went out to get it somewhere else,” she said. “He’ll be back.”
A long handful of seconds passed in silence.
Williams’s face hardened. “Get your things. We’re leaving.”
“We can’t leave him,” Ida said. “He’ll come back.”
Williams stalked out, ignoring her.
She turned to me. “Beth, please. We can’t leave Kevin here. We have to wait.”
“We’re not leaving anyone behind,” I said firmly. “Of course not.”
But the conversation I’d had with Williams downstairs was already pushing into my mind.
Too damn many powers.
“Who’s the lord of Emden?”
“It’s a lady — Lady Mary.”
Deep in my mind, a closet door swung open and a forgotten bit of Yellin’s lessons crawled out.
“Mary … it’s not Mary of the Flowers, is it?”
Ida nodded. “Yeah. Her.”
My stomach tightened. “We have to get out of here. Now.” I started to leave but paused at the door. “I’m sorry about Kevin.”
I hurried back to my room, Ida’s despairing cries chasing me down the hall.
The total number of powers wasn’t large, and the known great powers were a small subgroup. Yellin had given me a list of seventeen of them to memorize — their full names, their territories, their supposed places and times of origin, their supposed power levels and abilities.
Cordus had been on that list. So had Mary of the Flowers. She was bad news. Really bad news. The oldest and strongest of them all — and utterly mad. If there was even a chance Kevin had run to her, we were in serious trouble.
I shifted in my saddle, uncomfortable after so many weeks off horseback.
Plus, I hadn’t had a chance to dig out my chaps, and I was pretty sure my wrinkled jeans were giving me saddle sores.
Mizzy and Ida were riding in front of me. Williams rode to my left.
Every so often, I could hear a stifled sob from Ida. Mizzy was silent, but I swear I could see pain in the lines of her back.
It was almost midnight. We’d been on the road for nine hours.
Williams had rushed us out of the inn in thirty minutes flat, telling the innkeeper we’d just learned of a death in the family.
Not far from the truth, that. Kevin was basically dead to the people back in Free. Bill Gates might give his people the freedom to do as they pleased, but Kevin’s new lord or lady, whoever it turned out to be, would not be so generous. Kevin would very likely spend the rest of his life here.
I gathered this from what Ida had said in her initial grief. I would have to ask her or Mizzy about it later.
The night deepened, and what traffic had been on the road faded to the occasional straggler.
We’d pressed the horses hard at first. Now we were shifting between a walk and a trot, trying to keep them going as long as possible.
At every crossroads, Williams consulted with Mizzy. When I asked her about it, she said he wanted to take a different route north — one that would run through the holdings of powers thought not to be allied with Mary of the Flowers.
We continued for another two hours and then stopped to sleep and rest the horses.
I did indeed have saddle sores. Ida kindly healed them. Afterwards, I set about finding my chaps. Mizzy helped me dig through and then repack the saddlebags.
By dawn, we were back on the road.
Even that early in the morning, the road had traffic — farmers and traders moving their goods toward the city. As the sun rose, the traffic increased, but by mid-morning, it had tapered off.
The land we rode through was postcard pretty — lush rolling hills divided neatly into fields and pastures, quaint st
one farm houses, flocks of sheep and herds of milk cows. It was about as picturesque as you could get.
I moved my horse closer to Mizzy’s, intending to ask about Demesnes. She glanced over at me, blinking quickly. Embarrassed, I reined away. Intruding on her grief was the last thing I wanted to do.
“Do you have a question, Beth? I’d welcome some distraction.”
“You’re sure? It’s not important.”
“Yeah. Please.”
“Well, how does this all work? Do powers own all the land and lease it to normal people?”
“No, they don’t own the land, exactly. But they do hold territories and tax the people who live in them. And any strong workers who emerge belong to them.”
Without thinking about it, I glanced up at Williams.
When I looked back at Mizzy, she mouthed, “Is he a Second?”
I put on my best beats-me expression and shrugged. “That doesn’t sound much different from how things work with Nolanders in the F-Em.”
Mizzy was looking at me oddly. Maybe she thought I should know this stuff.
“It’s not, really. The main difference is that here the powers usually don’t bother people who can’t do much. Over there, they scoop up every last person who sees through.”
I could see why. People who see through workings could tip humanity off to the existence of Seconds. In the F-Em, they posed a threat. Here they didn’t.
“How do the powers divide up territories? Everyone must want a bigger one, right?”
A bigger territory would mean more taxes and more strong vassals.
“Yeah, they’re ambitious that way. They squabble and go to war with one another all the time. Weaker powers ally with one another so they can withstand stronger ones.”
I looked around at the countryside. “It doesn’t look like there’s been a war in a long time.”
“Actually, Demesnes had a major war fifteen years ago.”
“What happened?”
“No names,” Williams said.
I looked around. We were alone on the road.
“Right,” Mizzy said. “Well, in brief, four middleweights banded together to destroy one of the heavyweights who’d been giving them a hard time. They killed her and took her land. Some of the other heavyweights decided a message needed to be sent, so they attacked the four middleweights. All the other middleweights rallied to their defense. When the dust settled, the number of powers holding land in this stratum had gone from one hundred twenty-two to eighty-six.”
“Wow.”
“Now it’s down to thirty.”
“Eighty-six to thirty? How did that happen?”
“Without the middleweights there as a cushion, the heavyweights started gobbling up the small fry.”
The idea of “small fry” powers seemed oxymoronic. Then I remembered that Nolanders’ capacity was graded exponentially. Someone who saw through at eight would be twice as strong as someone who saw through at seven. Someone who saw through at fourteen would be more than a thousand times stronger than someone who saw through at four. Maybe it was the same with powers.
“It’s a scarier place now,” Mizzy said quietly. “There are a whole lot of powerful people sharing borders. On the other hand …”
“What?”
“Fewer powers mean fewer people who could extradite us back to Lady Mary’s territory.”
“We can’t be extradited. We haven’t broken any laws.”
She rubbed her thumb over her saddle’s horn, as though it had a smudge. “Beth, you can’t just pass through another power’s territory without getting permission. Well, I mean, you can. But it’s considered an aggressive act.”
It took me a painfully large number of seconds to realize Mizzy’s “you” meant me, specifically.
Oh my god. She thinks I’m a power.
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t.
We rode on in silence until evening. I tried to think of other things — to focus on the acres of green pastures and pretty stone cottages — but every so often, I’d realize I was about to cry, and a split second later, I’d remember why.
Once we’d set up camp and I’d crawled into my bedroll, I let the tears come.
The thought of being a power was unbearable.
Knowing there were “nice” powers out there, like Bill Gates, didn’t make me feel much better. He might’ve done a lot of good in the past, but eventually he’d had to make a deal with the devil. He couldn’t really protect his people, now — in the end, they were subject to Cordus. That’s what it’d be like to be a power — every relationship you had would be based on strength versus weakness. It’d all be about who you served and who served you.
If that was where I was headed, I didn’t want to get there.
I’m not a power. It’s not possible.
One of the books about the S-Em Yellin had given me said that powers generally saw through between forty and sixty years of age. Something had caused me to see through before my time, yes, but surely not by that much.
Plus, Cordus was packing me off to the ice men. In the Seconds’ mixed-up mentality, power was everything, and Bob’s death couldn’t possibly be worth an infant power as a solatium.
No, I would end up like Callie. Like Mizzy. Very strong but not a power.
I could accept that. I’d still be a person. People could choose to be good or bad, or do their best to choose, anyway. But the powers transcended all that. They were other — human bodies optional, human feelings forgotten.
Twenty-three is a long way from forty, much less sixty.
Seventeen years.
Seventeen years is forever.
I burrowed into my bedroll and thought it over and over, like a mantra.
Chapter 16
Despite our panicked departure from Emden, our travel was uneventful. We saw no sign of pursuit. Maybe Kevin hadn’t gone to Mary of the Flowers, after all. Maybe he’d just run off with his mistress.
Ever paranoid, Williams steered us away from inns. We had good weather, so camping was comfortable enough. What wasn’t so comfortable was the watch the man kept on me, now that his tracker was gone. He set a barrier around our campsite every night. If I needed to go to the bathroom, he came right along with. It was beyond annoying. And also pointless. I might fantasize about running away into the woods and living off the land, but I knew I couldn’t pull it off. I was no survivalist.
The weeks passed, and we settled into a steady routine. We got an early start, rode for five hours, and then stopped for lunch. Then we continued on for another four hours, stopping by early evening. We covered twenty-five to thirty-five miles a day.
When we passed through towns, we laid in dried foodstuffs and other gear we hadn’t had a chance to buy in Emden.
I named my new mount Joe. Getting used to him was easy — he was as friendly and mellow as Copper had been nasty and anxious. And he had lovely gaits, very smooth. Riding him was a pleasure.
Of course, the easy travel meant my mind had plenty of time to dwell on the things that were bothering me.
Flashbacks to the rape attempt started happening during the day. I’d be riding along, everything fine. Then out of the blue, my heart would start racing, nausea would sweep over me, and I’d break out in a cold sweat.
At those moments, Williams would rein in beside me and say my name in a quiet, steady voice. That was all, but it helped.
One evening he sat down by our campfire with one of the packsaddles on his lap.
“Cleaning tack?” I said. “I can help.”
He jerked his head at my bedroll, sending me off to sleep like a nosy kid.
I lay down and watched as he took the saddle apart. He unscrewed, greased, and retightened the bolts holding the bucks to the crosspieces. Then he oiled the wood, drenching the boreholes in particular, and all the leathers. He left it all out to dry overnight, then oiled it again and reassembled it in the morning.
I didn’t have any flashbacks that day. Or the next. It to
ok me a week to realize the saddle’s creaking had been setting them off. The thing had sounded just like the door to my cabin on Rykthas’s ship.
Unfortunately, Williams was a lot less helpful on the question of what I was. The day after I realized Mizzy thought I was a power, I rode up beside him, told him we needed a barrier, and asked him directly.
He didn’t even bother looking at me. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“So Cordus hasn’t said anything to you that suggests I might be a power?”
He still didn’t turn. “Nope.”
I tried again. “Well then, hypothetically, at what age —”
“Hypotheticals are pointless,” he said, and rode ahead.
Honest to god, I’d never felt so alone.
With no outside input, and no one to share the burden, my mind worried the idea endlessly. I went back through every interaction I’d had with anyone, looking for the strange and the suggestive. Stuff like Miss Sturluson saying I might be the other person, besides Cordus, capable of destroying the youngling fragment of the Thirsting Ground. Like Graham telling me not to mention the mouse. Like looking through the strait in Dorf and seeing and being seen by Limu on the other side. Like Eye of the Heavens being my sister-in-law. Like Williams thinking I could have a vassal. Like Ghosteater’s interest in me. Like my being taught Baasha.
Like being able to break the mind-working Cordus had done on me, without even knowing I was doing it.
That last one took my breath away. For some reason, I’d never thought of my realization in Free as the destruction of Cordus’s working. But that must have been what happened. Enough seeds of doubt got planted, and I started questioning the ideas he’d given me, and eventually, they lost their hold.
It shouldn’t have been possible for me to do that, especially not in a matter of days.
I had once watched Cordus force an extremely powerful green man to dismember itself, a handful at a time. Saying Cordus’s mind-working was strong was like saying a neutron star was heavy. But it’d rolled right off me.
More than any other thing, that tipped the scales in the wrong direction.
But the solatium thing — I clung to that. I just couldn’t believe Cordus, finding he had a baby power in his hands, would throw her away. What were the chances he’d ever get me back? They say possession is nine-tenths of the law, and a baby power was a once-in-a-century prize. Maybe even rarer than that, now that the F-Em was so heavily populated. Graham had told me strong Nolanders don’t survive unless they “grow up in the boonies” — the presence of the unseen in urban areas drives them mad, as it almost had me. Who knows how many more human émigrés would survive to maturity on an Earth where the boonies were harder and harder to come by?