by Becca Mills
If that’s what I was, Cordus would know my value, yet he’d let me go. Some other power could take me from the ice men.
Or maybe I’d never even get there.
On the night I’d had that realization, I’d rolled over in my blankets and looked at Williams, sleeping just a few feet away.
Too damn many powers, he’d said of Emden. The same seemed to apply to all of Demesnes.
If Mizzy was right, I was traipsing through the lion’s den.
In the deep darkness under the trees, Williams was little more than a large, lumpy shape with a pale smudge for a face.
His attitude toward Mizzy had struck me as excessive from day one. But if I was a power in the making, his concern made more sense. If I were a power — or if she could just convince someone like Mary of the Flowers that I might be one — I’d buy a whole lot of protection.
It was best to err on the side of caution. I would hang onto Mizzy’s fealty for now.
Step one on the slippery slope, whispered a small, disapproving part of me.
I couldn’t argue. I knew it was wrong. But I was too scared to let her go.
As the days passed, I tried to establish a more comfortable relationship with Mizzy by chatting with her. Because she was a collector of stories, she knew a lot of fascinating tidbits. For instance, when I asked her about the Thirsting Ground, she ended up telling me about a scholar in New Alexandria who hypothesized that a strong enough gravity worker might be able to spawn new universes.
But our conversations were limited because I didn’t dare ask about the things I most wanted to understand — Eye of the Heavens, for instance, or Limu and his supposed weapon, or how I could start seeing workings, or what made her think I was a power. I didn’t want to tell her more than I already had.
Plus, our liege-and-vassal relationship meant our exchanges were full of landmines.
For example, one evening, when Mizzy and I were untacking and grooming our horses, I asked her in a low voice how relationships of fealty were enforced.
I’d been thinking about Williams and Cordus, but she saw my question differently. She stilled, her hands halfway into a saddlebag.
“I don’t break my oaths.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not asking about … you know … about you and me. I wasn’t thinking of that at all. I just want to know in general. Or, you know, because of Kevin.”
Mizzy studied a buckle on her saddlebag. I squirmed, wretchedly embarrassed and uncomfortable.
When she finally answered, her voice was flat.
“Fealty is a relationship of mutual benefit. It’s not supposed to need enforcing.”
“How does the vassal benefit?”
She looked up at me, clearly perplexed at my ignorance. “Support. Protection. Sometimes gifts or rewards, like the one you gave me.”
“Protection … from other powers?”
“Sure. Or even just other workers who happen to be stronger. Oath-breakers lose all that. They can be taken by anyone.”
“And that’s it? Everyone values protection so much they toe the line?”
“Well, no. There’s also the threat of stricture.” She saw my confused expression. “Stricture’s a sign a vassal carries so they can be tracked by anyone who knows their liege’s signature.”
“It contains the liege’s essence?”
She nodded.
I frowned, confused. “But your essence is, you know, your body.”
“That’s right.”
“So, what? The vassal wears a vial of his lord’s blood around his neck, or something?”
“No, a vial could be removed. Strictures are more permanent. I’ve heard implanting a tooth deep in the body is a popular choice.”
“A tooth?”
“Enamel holds up well.” She tilted her head, studying me. “It’s no more disturbing than a dozen other things we’ve seen here.”
“It is more disturbing. It’s awful.”
Mizzy shrugged, looking away.
I felt cold. Was she scared I was going to do that to her?
A powerful impulse to release her came over me. I suppressed it.
“How common is it?”
“Common enough. I’ve heard some powers stricture all their vassals as a matter of course.”
“What does —”
I noticed that Mizzy was looking past me a moment before Williams’s heavy hand landed on my shoulder. For a second, everything froze. Then he held his other hand up in front of me. From it dangled two full nosebags. I took them, and he moved away to feed the rest of the horses.
Mizzy watched him go. “He’s probably under stricture, if that’s what you were wondering.”
“How do you know?”
“Kevin says he has a good deal of Lord Cordus’s essence about him. Said, I mean. Kevin said.”
Williams glanced our way, glowering. I didn’t know if he’d heard or just sensed we’d been talking about him. Maybe neither. “Glower” was his default expression, after all.
I gave the horses their rations, then went back to my saddlebags and pulled out my gun-cleaning kit. Next came my toothbrush and hairbrush.
I wet my toothbrush and popped it in my mouth while I mulled over what Mizzy had said.
If Seconds could be placed under stricture, why didn’t Cordus have more reliable Seconds working for him? He certainly needed additional people in the F-Em. Why not put them under stricture and bring them over?
Plus, Elanora Wiri and Kibwe Okeke had cut and run during Cordus’s absence, so they probably weren’t under stricture. But why not? Or maybe they were counting on another power to remove the stricture.
I spat and rinsed out my mouth, then went to my bedroll and sat down to brush out my hair.
Williams finished up with the horses and headed over to Ida with an extra package of dried meat for the stew.
I watched him go.
Had Cordus really LoJacked him with a tooth? The idea was so appalling it seemed absurd. I felt a nervous laugh on its way up and coughed to cover it.
He glanced up, catching me staring.
I looked away, feeling oddly guilty, as though I’d trespassed on his privacy.
In our fourth week on the road, the topography started to change. The rolling hills steepened and became forested, and our pace slowed.
The towns became smaller and finally dissolved into scattered homesteads.
Fortunately, the packhorses were already fully loaded with food.
Mizzy said the region was called the Far Wild. It took up the northwestern side of the southern island, running for the next forty miles, right up to the channel separating the islands. The land was too steep and rocky to be optimal for farming, so the controlling power had made it a hunting preserve. He’d brought in some impressive game animals from other strata.
We came across a specimen in an upland meadow on our third day in the Wild — an eight-foot-tall stag with a rack of antlers bigger than a dinner table.
The Wild might’ve been a hunting preserve, but the stag wasn’t the least bit afraid of us. It turned toward us, lifting its head and bellowing out a challenge.
Williams stopped, and his fingers twitched.
When the stag came trotting toward us, I cringed, waiting for it to hit the invisible wall of a barrier. That didn’t happen. Instead it slowed to a walk and then slowed some more. It seemed to be pushing its way forward. Finally it stopped and, after another few seconds and a couple angry snorts, turned and walked away.
“What did you do?” Mizzy said. “I’ve never seen a barrier like that.”
As usual, Williams ignored her.
The Wild was beautiful, but traveling through it was hard. The road was cut deeply with erosion channels, and the dirt was liberally mixed with shards of shale that could cut the bulbs of a horse’s heel or the spongy tissue at the center of its hoof. We had to go slowly.
As it turned out, the road wasn’t the only danger.
On our tenth day in t
he Wild, one of the packhorses hooked a shoe on a rock and tore it off, taking a chunk out of the wall of its hoof.
Ida healed the damage, but it took almost an hour for Williams to pare the new hoof down and replace the shoe.
It was the fourth time that sort of thing had happened. The delays were mounting up. I could see the annoyance on Williams’s face when he trudged over to me to get his horse.
“We should’ve brought mules,” I said, holding his reins out to him.
“Stable master said there were none.”
“In all of Emden?”
He nodded.
“Lady Mary finds mules aesthetically displeasing,” said a cultured voice just behind me.
Williams stilled, his hand just above mine on the reins.
I met his eyes for an instant. They told me something very bad was happening.
I took a deep breath and turned around. A slender, dark-skinned man was standing there. He held some sort of exotic crossbow. Behind him were at least a dozen other people, all armed. No one looked murderous, but no one looked friendly, either.
How had they crept up on us like that?
“I am Negus,” said the man with the bow. “These are my lands. Now, who might you be? Not poachers, I hope.”
He smiled.
The hair on my arms stood up.
Negus. Heaven help us.
“Lord Negus,” Mizzy said in deeply respectful tones. “We are servants of William Gates.”
The man made a little moue. “I do not know him.”
“He is vassal to Lord Cordus.”
“Cordus …,” the man said thoughtfully. “Yes, the infant trying to hold all that territory in the first world.”
The man’s easy dismissal collided head-on with my perception of Cordus as a terrifying monster. I stood there blinking in confusion.
“We are traveling to Ice Like Glass, my lord,” Williams said.
He sounded surprisingly polite.
“I see. What takes you there?”
“I am sorry, my lord. I am not at liberty to say.”
“Indeed?” Negus said, his face lighting up with interest. “You must accept my hospitality, then, and I will try to worm the information out of you. Perhaps I will even give you some mules.”
He’d ignored me the whole time, but the last sentence was directed at me, along with a sharp look.
Uh-oh.
Mizzy rode alongside Negus.
I watched her interact with him, astonished.
The nervous, can’t-meet-your-eyes creature she’d been since Blue Seas had disappeared. Her demeanor was easy, pleasant, uncomplicated. She laughed readily and appeared flattered by his attention.
There was something ever so slightly sexualized about it, but it was nothing like the way she’d treated Williams at the beginning of our trip. Flirting with someone like Negus would’ve been offensively presumptuous — even I could see that. What she was doing was more like … suggesting openness, like a flower turning toward the sun, willing simply to accept whatever was offered.
It was pitch-perfect.
Not only was I thrown off by her personality change, I was also envious. I could never do that — adapt myself to the ideal shape for a given interaction.
I glanced over at Williams, who was riding beside me.
Well, I thought, I’m more adaptable than some people, at least.
Then again, he had the just-a-stupid-thug stereotype to hide behind.
I wondered how badass a five-foot-seven woman would have to look before people started writing her off as a stupid thug. Badassier than I ever would.
I shifted in my saddle, stretching my legs down.
It was our second day traveling with Negus. He was taking us to his home.
As it turned out, we’d almost missed him. When he brought us back to his hunting camp, it was in the process of being packed up. A day later and he probably would’ve been gone.
Unfortunately, we were just in time to be folded into his party, which was about fifty strong. Most of those people were ordinary servants — cooks, maids, fletchers, and so forth. Eight were vassals — probably strong workers. Two were visiting powers. Given what Mizzy had told me about the winnowing of the powers in Demesnes, I had to assume they were “heavyweights.”
Not that it mattered. “Small fry” powers could take us out with no problem.
We were traveling due west, and the going was a lot easier than it had been on the northern road. Negus just reworked the land in front of us, transforming rocky, forested terrain into a hard-packed dirt road. The forest rebuilt itself behind us, just as it had been. Occasionally he’d stop and scan the landscape ahead, as though choosing the route where his working would be easiest, but in general he just pressed on in a straight line.
If it was so easy to remake the land, why not redesign the Far Wild as productive farmland? He’d get a lot more tax revenue that way, and the increased population would breed more vassals for him.
I had a million questions like that, but if I asked a single one of them, I’d out myself as a newbie Nolander, and no one would send that kind of person on a trip like this. And I shouldn’t be a newbie at my age, anyway.
Maybe I should invent a backstory for myself. Raised by paranoid survivalists in Wisconsin’s North Woods. No contact with other people, so no one was around to notice when I saw through at, oh, age six. Maybe age four. I could pass myself off as a servant Mr. Gates sent along to do the cooking.
Well, maybe not the cooking, since I couldn’t cook.
Williams’s stirrup iron brushed against my leg. I realized it was the third time that had happened in the last few seconds.
“Tell me, Miss Hanson,” Negus said from right beside me, “what does that small smile mean?”
“I am sorry, my lord. I did not realize I was smiling.”
His lips curled slightly. “I rather thought I frightened you so much I would never see a smile on that pretty face.”
I flushed and looked down at my horse’s mane.
“Tell me, Miss Hanson, do you find me attractive?”
Oh god. Just shoot me now.
“Yes, of course. You are very handsome.”
He laughed. “My dear young woman, you have no more than glanced at me.”
Shooting. Now. Please.
I took a deep breath and looked at him.
He was, just as I’d said, handsome. All the powers I’d met seemed to care a lot about that sort of thing. Except the non-humanoid ones. And Mr. Gates, who let himself look old.
But actually, Negus was more attractive than most. I studied him, trying to figure out why. He had medium-brown skin and tightly curled black hair, cut short. His cheek bones were high and prominent, and his nose was thin. His whole face was on the thin side. His mouth looked soft in comparison. His eyes were a sort of hazel color — not quite brown, not quite gray. His left eyebrow arched up a bit higher than the right.
I realized he looked absolutely human. If he hadn’t identified himself, I would never have pegged him for a power.
“My, my. That is a thorough inspection,” he murmured. “What do you think now?”
“The same, my lord. Very handsome.”
He smiled, but it had more weight to it. I’d managed to do or say something that made him consider me more carefully. Mentally, I kicked myself.
Several long moments passed in silence.
“I am an émigré. Do you know where I am from?”
“No, my lord.”
I did, actually — Yellin’s list was coming back to me. I also knew he was thought to be about forty thousand years old.
“I was born in Africa. The place is now called Ethiopia,” he said. “Have you been there?”
I shook my head.
“It is a beautiful land. Or was, at any rate. I have not been back in some time.”
“Why is that?”
“It belongs to someone else now, does it not?”
It did. A power named Eliyah
u controlled that particular chunk of the world. Memorizing all the powers holding territory in the F-Em had been the first assignment Yellin gave me.
Negus made a dismissive gesture. “Besides, I have had my fill of humans. I held an empire there for five hundred years, give or take. Many of us did that sort of thing back then, when gods were known to walk the Earth. In truth, it grows tiresome. All the petty problems. All the petty lives — short, miserable, meaningless.”
I nodded politely. He wasn’t going to get a rise out of me that way.
“Would you want to be a god, Miss Hanson?”
Yikes.
“I think not.”
“Why is that?”
“I would be nervous all the time. What if I forgot for a moment and did something ungodly?”
“Ah, but when you are a god, everything you do is, by definition, godly.”
“I suppose so.”
“What do you want, then?”
Taken by surprise, I said what popped into my head. “Freedom. No, wait, not exactly. Perhaps … the chance to choose my own constraints.”
He tilted his head, studying me. “Why did you change your mind?”
“You cannot really be free unless you care for nothing.”
I made the mistake of looking at him, and he caught my gaze.
“What do you care for?” he said.
Boy did I walk right into that one.
“My lord, I will not burden you with my cares.”
“Indeed you will, Miss Hanson. I demand it.”
I saw the predatory focus in his eyes and, just like that, I realized I’d fundamentally misunderstood the test he was giving me.
“No,” I said firmly, “I will not.”
For a moment, I saw the creature he really was — ancient, potent, capricious, and very, very bored. I saw it because he let me. Then it was gone, and he was once again all light and charm and warm humanity.