by Myke Cole
Twice, Heloise turned to scatter pursuing horsemen. She was too sick and exhausted to bother with the riders now, only lunged at the animals with the corner of her shield. She couldn’t spook trained warhorses, but the Pilgrims had seen what the shield could do, and sawed on the reins to keep clear. It was a stuttering, maddening way to proceed, but gradually the gap between the Order and the fleeing Tinkers grew, and at last Heloise gained the rise. She set her shield behind Barnard’s back and gently pressed him on.
One of the Pilgrims tried to dash up the rise after him, and Heloise was just about to turn to cover Barnard’s retreat when the horse’s hoof punched through the thin cover of gravel and into a rabbit hole. The horse tumbled, shrieking, and Heloise could hear the sharp crack as its leg gave way. The Pilgrim rolled almost to her feet, throwing up a useless arm to protect himself from her shield.
Heloise looked down at him. He was of an age with her father, his cheeks full and his hair gray. His pockmarked face was dusted with a few days’ growth of beard. The Order was supposed to swear vows of chastity and poverty, but everyone knew that they often had lovers, and even children. Maybe this one had a daughter of his own waiting for him somewhere. If I spare him, I will only have to fight him later.
But the Order was always talking about the Emperor’s mercy, and then never showing it. It was up to her to stand for how the Emperor should be, rather than how he was. She was no Palantine, but she could behave like one. “Tell your brothers to leave us alone,” she said, and ran for the trees.
She could hear Tone calling the Pilgrims back. “To me! In the name of the Emperor, to me! You’ll lame your Throne-cursed horses. Regroup on me!” Heloise could hear boots thudding on earth as a few of the Pilgrims dismounted to pursue on foot. “No, you hell-cursed fools!” Tone screamed at them. “You’re not going to run them down in armor! To me, damn you!”
She could hear one Pilgrim arguing with him, “Holy Brother, we’ll lose them in the woods!”
“Of course we will!” Tone roared. “We’ll lose them whether we chase them in there or not! Do you know these woods? Can you find your way in them clanking about with spurs and a flail like a damned fool?”
Heloise moved too far away to hear the Pilgrim’s reply, but there was no sound of pursuit, and Heloise knew the Pilgrims were following Tone’s orders. For a moment, she dared to let herself hope they might escape.
The trunks were thinner along the road, but they grew denser as she forged deeper. Soon she was forced to turn the war-machine sideways, crab-stepping it between trees and stumbling as the frame caught on branches. At last, she stepped the machine sideways between two trunks, and the frame shuddered. She felt the housing of the engine on its back snag fast against something. She didn’t doubt she could force the machine to drag itself free, but would that tear the engine away? She would have to get out to look.
In the broken machine, she had dangled awkwardly from the chest strap, her arms and legs barely reaching the control straps that drove the war-machine’s arms and legs. In this new one, Barnard had resized the driver’s cage to fit her perfectly. The metal limbs mirrored each of her motions so that she could control the machine unconsciously, simply moving as she normally did.
She raised her arms, feeling the straps tugging at her limbs, translating the motion into the machine. She braced the shield and the metal fist against opposite trunks and pushed gently outward, prying them apart.
The trunks were old, thick around as a man’s torso, and they resisted at first, the wood trembling, showering the machine with dead leaves and seed pods. Heloise pushed harder, the sickness rising as she felt the straps biting into her skin, the machine’s metal limbs pushing harder in response. The engine first purred, then growled, then roared as she put more effort in.
The inside of the machine was tight around her, the world reduced to what she could see through the slits in the metal head. The leather of the seat cushion behind her was slick with sweat and blood, and the tight space stank of it, mixing with the acrid stink of the seethestone.
Crack, one of the trunks splintered loudly enough to be heard over the machine’s engine, and Heloise realized with a shock that the noise might be telling the Order where she was. She dropped her arms, grateful for the easing of pressure against her skin, and the engine quieted to a dull mutter.
She paused, listening. The wood was silent all around her. The birds and animals had fled the noise of battle, but she couldn’t hear the other villagers. They were supposed to scatter, but had they all gone some other way? Had she gone the wrong way herself? She thought of calling out, decided against it. She’d made enough noise already. All the while, her mind chanted at her, Fool fool fool fool fool stupid little girl fool fool fool.
The silence and the rest slowed her heart, and she began to feel her wounds. The ragged flesh that once housed her eye pulsed and throbbed. There were lines of pain across her cheek. But the worst was her wrist. She looked over at the stump. The bandage was completely soaked, as was the leather strap snug around it. Blood had pooled in the recesses of the metal frame of the war-machine’s arm.
Heloise didn’t know how long she’d stared. She only knew that the quiet of the woods was like a comforting blanket. The thought of leaving the machine, of running through the woods unprotected, frightened her. Worse, it made her tired. Surely she could rest a moment before seeing to the machine. You’ve lost too much blood, she thought. You have to get moving. Your father is out there somewhere. He needs your help. They all do.
But her thoughts were clouded, and she began to feel strangely warm, save at her wrist, which felt as if it had been plunged into ice. She thought she saw a light in the distance, heard a distant creaking. It could mean danger, but she no longer cared. Her head was too heavy to lift. The color bled from her vision, and the world shrank to that tiny, distant light.
Basina, I’m sorry, she thought as it winked out.
3
KIPTI
The Kipti player put his lute back in his wagon, and took his gold. The Maior feared to give a heretic custom, but he was a man of his word, and the Kipti had made good on his promise to rid the shrine of the serpents. Surely, the Emperor would not judge him unkindly, for the Writ said that a word of truth was more pleasing to the Emperor than poetry, and was honoring his promise not a word of truth? But the Emperor weighed commerce with a heretic against the Maior’s honesty and judged him harshly. For the Kipti returned that very night and stole away with the Maior’s two sons, to be raised on the road.
—The Lament of the Maior of Gywd
Heloise opened her eyes to a hanging toy of wood and string, tiny horses pulling tiny wagons in an endless circle. Above it, a white canvas roof stretched over wooden hoops, sloping down to become walls.
A gentle breeze was coming from somewhere, turning the toy steadily, the wagons going round and round over her head. Tiny silver bells tinkled from the horses’ yokes.
“You like it?” a woman’s voice asked in a vaguely familiar accent. “My mother gave it to me back when I was with child. It was my daughter’s favorite toy.”
Heloise turned her head to see the speaker. A woman of an age with Leuba, only stronger, her skin dark and hardened by the sun. Her red-brown hair was streaked with gray, wrapped around a knife into a bun high on her head. She wore a red cloak, a deeper color than the Sojourners’, held shut with a trefoil-shaped brass pin. Her eyes were bright blue and smiling, like Tone’s might have been if he had been a kind man.
Heloise lay on a simple straw mattress. Above her, shelves were built into the wooden hoops, crammed with boxes, ribbons, and hand tools. The woman sat at a small bench before an even smaller table, cluttered with files, tiny hammers, coils of string.
The memory of the battle came back to her in a rush and Heloise sat up, her head swimming. Her skin felt … tight, taut leather stretched across the frame of her bones.
But there was no pain.
She tried to wink her right eye.
It was still gone, but it was no longer so hard to tell what was close and what was far away. She looked down at her body.
She had been dressed in a simple cotton shift, the chest unlaced, sleeves hiked up to her shoulders. The dirty linen was gone from around her wrist. The clean, scarred surface of her stump was pink, as if it had been healing for months, not days. She reached over with one of her good fingers, pressing against it. The flesh felt hard, leathery.
Heloise flexed her leg, her arm. The phantom fingers of her right hand clenched, released. She swung her right leg off the bed and onto the floor. It held her weight.
The woman raised a hand. “Easy, now. I’ve purged a fever strong enough to fell a giant from your blood. I’ve healed the worst wounds I’ve ever seen on a person who still drew breath. Your mighty heart still beats, but it is trapped in the body of a girl. Go slow.”
Heloise’s vision grayed, rippled. She shut her good eye, gritted her teeth until the tilting world settled, then opened it, wrestling with a boiling host of questions. “Where am I? Where are my parents?”
“Your people are here with us. They are safe, and so are you. Your mother and father are just outside. I cannot mend a person with her parents flitting about my head. They tell me your name is Heloise? I am Mother Leahlabel of the Sindi band of the Traveling People. You are in my home.”
The Traveling People was what they called themselves, but Heloise had been raised to call them “Kipti.” The canvas, the wooden hoops, the accent, all suddenly made sense. She was in a wagon. The Kipti steal children. Her mother’s words came rushing to her mind, she pushed them aside.
Heloise looked at her scars, pink and shining. “You … healed me?”
“I did, and you are well enough, by the look of it.”
Unless Heloise had been asleep for a month, there was only one way Leahlabel could have healed her so thoroughly. “It’s all right,” Heloise said. “I won’t cry out to the Order.”
Leahlabel laughed, waving a hand covered with rings of different metals. “Your Order can barely find their own asses in the dark with both hands and a candle. They certainly don’t find us when we don’t want to be found.”
Leahlabel frowned as Heloise searched her eyes. “Now, what is it that has you staring at me … Ah, you’d be looking for the portal. I know how you villagers think. It was my wizardry that healed you and your father both, Heloise. And the others among your village who came here wounded. Think on that before you fear me.”
Heloise could feel herself blush at the rebuke. “I’m sorry. It’s just that my friend was a wizard and he was going to teach me. He saved my father. But then … the devil … came out of him.”
“Veilstruck. He drew too much, too fast. It is rare, but it can happen to the inexperienced. There are ways to stay hidden when reaching beyond the veil. If you are weak, or hurried, or unskilled, the devils can see your hand, and grasp it.”
“The portal was in his eye, just like the stories say.”
“That is not a portal, Heloise. That is the reflection of the world beyond. You are seeing a tiny sliver of what the wizard sees. Sadly, by the time you can see it, there is no saving them.”
Heloise felt a stab of grief. I didn’t try to save him. I ran away.
“But there are no portals with me, Heloise. Or with Giorgi, who you will meet. The Traveling People do not shun our ‘wizards,’ and we certainly don’t kill them. Another reason why your Order hates us.”
“The Order? Did they follow us?”
“Our outriders are … out riding. I have no word as yet, but it does not appear you were followed this far. Still, the Mothers are nervous and it was all I could do to convince them to give you the time you needed to heal. We are not accustomed to taking in a village’s worth of refugees, and yours is the strangest village we have ever known. A young girl leading a rebellion against the Order? Bloody cloaks taken as trophies?” Leahlabel brandished a bit of gray fabric brown and stiff with blood. “There are some for turning you out lest you bring the Order upon us.”
“And you’re not? Why are you helping us?” This woman was a stranger, but the thought of having to run again, now, when she was too weak to walk, filled her with sick terror. She didn’t have the machine. She needed time to get her bearings.
Leahlabel paused, thinking. At last she shrugged. “You are in my daughter’s bed. She nearly killed me coming into this world, and didn’t stay long enough to give me joy as recompense. I have lost.” She sounded almost proud of the statement.
“I’m sorry,” Heloise said.
Leahlabel shook her head. “Do not be. Loss is the spinning wheel, it crusheth us beneath, and raiseth us up again. There was pain, to be sure, but it made me a Mother, and I am glad of that. But I look at you, and I think of your parents standing outside my wagon just now, worried sick over you. It reminds me that loss lifts a person up, but it is a burden, too, and one I would spare others if I could. It visits enough without my help.”
Leahlabel turned to her cluttered table and passed Heloise a waterskin. “Drink. Slowly. Don’t make yourself sick.”
As soon as the leather settled in her good hand, Heloise realized how thirsty she was. The first touch of the cool liquid against her lips sent a shock through her, the gray fog clearing from her head, and the world coming into sharper focus. “Thank you. Who are the Mothers?”
“I am just one, and all of us must agree what it is to be done with you. And so I must have your story. Your people tell me you are one of the sainted Palantines come to liberate all mankind from the yoke of the devils. If I am to advocate for you with the Mothers, I must have the truth, Heloise. I wish there was more time for you to rest, but I do not know how long they will wait. You must tell me now. How did you come to be in my wagon?”
And Heloise told her, slowly at first, carefully, watching Leahlabel’s lined face for the narrowing of her eyes or the turning of her mouth that would tell her she was being judged. But Leahlabel only watched her, listening, nodding occasionally to show she had grasped some point of the story. Heloise found herself speaking faster, telling more, drawn along by the open kindness in Leahlabel’s eyes.
When she was done, the Sindi Mother crossed her arms and sighed. “This is what your father says, and your Maior, and this tinker. I will admit that I didn’t believe them.”
“Do you believe me?”
“Yes, Heloise, I do. If there is one thing I have learned in my day it is that a lie is easy enough for one person, but nearly impossible for many. Sooner or later, one of them will get a detail wrong, and you will know. And there are no wrong details here, save one, I suppose.
“Are you a Palantine, Heloise Factor? Are you the saint your people say you are?”
Heloise wasn’t sure what Leahlabel expected from her. She thought of Sigir confronting her father before the battle. Do you think we can do it without the people’s hearts united behind their savior? Did the Kipti need the same from her?
“No,” Heloise said in the end, because the Order’s lies had been woven so thickly about the world that she couldn’t bear to add another. “I killed a devil, but I had a machine to help me. And I couldn’t save Basina, anyway.”
Leahlabel’s expression softened. “Who was Basina?”
“She was my friend. The devil killed her.”
There was something in Heloise’s voice that made Leahlabel’s expression shift, and Heloise felt the tear tracking its way down her cheek from her good eye. “I’m sorry,” she said quickly, wiping it away.
“She must have been a very good friend, Heloise Factor,” Leahlabel said slowly. “I can see it cut you deeply to lose her.”
Heloise realized with a start it was the first time she’d spoken of Basina’s death since it happened. “I wish I could have … I tried.”
Leahlabel stood. “I do not doubt you did. That is the way with loss. It spins questions that we cannot answer for the thing that has gone, but we can answer them in the things we do now. Come, Heloi
se. We are as ready as we will be. Let us reunite you with your people and face the Mothers.”
Leahlabel took her hand and drew Heloise through the archway of light surrounded by the canvas.
The wagons were drawn in a circle around a fire pit at least as large as the Tinkers’ crucible. Young saplings had been cut and leaned over it, holding up dozens of black iron hooks with pots and kettles of every shape and size. There were around forty of the Traveling People standing in a tight group so close to Leahlabel’s wagon that Heloise took a half-step back. There were men and women, children still clutching at their mothers’ hands, boys and girls Heloise’s own age. The men wore beards, golden hoops in their ears, and short, hooked, silver-handled knives at their waists, hilts crossing over their bellies. They chattered like sparrows, speaking in a language Heloise couldn’t understand, quick and light, so loud that Heloise could hear them clearly even though they were plainly trying to be quiet.
The women wore loose trousers the same color as Leahlabel’s cloak, but only two wore cloaks like hers, both of them at least as old as Leahlabel. The cloaked women stood apart from the rest. They alone did not whisper as Heloise appeared.
The villagers stood off to one side, huddled close together. Heloise searched their faces, recognizing Chunsia and Guntar, Ingomer, Danad, Poch, and Sald. At last, Heloise saw her mother, with Sigir’s comforting arm around her shoulders, and breathed a sigh of relief.
Samson and Barnard sat at the foot of the wagon’s short stairs. Both men jumped up as soon as they heard the creaking of the boards under her feet. Barnard’s eyes were red and raw, but he knelt, tugging his forelock. Samson bounded up the stairs and snatched Heloise into an embrace. With a cry, Leuba raced to join him. The speed with which Samson had stood could only mean that his leg was healed, and Heloise was silently grateful. She let herself pause a moment, accepting her father’s embrace, giving in to fatigue. But the Order wouldn’t care that she was tired, or that her love was dead. They wouldn’t show mercy because she was young. And because of this, her father’s love was poison. If she let him hold her long enough, she knew he would never let her go, that she would never want him to.