by Daryl Banner
Standing next to Lady Kael is her regal daughter—or no, wait—her niece, if Athan remembers correctly. An eccentric girl, but just as rigid in demeanor as her Aunt Kael. The girl has silver-grey eyes and endless white-blonde hair. There’s a small patch missing above her ear where a nasty scar traces down to her chin. She’s isn’t the friendliest, but in truth, Athan can’t think of a single reason to call her unkind. Even being the niece of the heir of Atlas and quite important, Athan cannot remember her name.
“Go on,” prompts his mother, and Athan remembers that he must still play his part.
He clears his throat, then smiles his broadest. “It is a pleasure, Lady Kael. I wonder how … or … what an honor it must be, to know that you are the next Queen of Atlas.”
“Honor, you say.” Lady Kael Mirand-Thrin’s voice is dry and hard, her words drawn out long and brittle as ancient tree limbs. “After the last Queen perverted the title for us decent women to follow? I guarantee you, I’ll be leagues smarter than that slum rat.” She sips from the garish glass in her skeletal fingers, swallows loud. “But thank you for your sentiment. I still see you as a babe in your mother’s arm, you sweet thing.” Her pearl eyes flick up to Athan’s mother, piercing and cold. “He’s such a sweet thing.”
With that, Lady Kael makes no further words, turning on her needle-sharp heels and slowly moving toward other guests. The niece, her grey eyes gently lingering on Athan a touch too long, soon follows her aunt, vanishing into the party.
“Sweet thing,” echoes Athan’s mother, unimpressed, and she too disappears to another room. The noise of snooty chatter and glasses clinking dances up to the high, high ceilings, dances down every mountain-high corridor that leads into every enormous den, library, sitting room, standing room, veranda, gallery, dining hall, breakfast hall and kitchen of Broadmore Manor.
It isn’t long before Athan’s grown agonizingly bored of the stuffy talk of men and their estates, the bragging and boasting among girls of their studies and futures, boys showing off their own … it’s always like this. Athan makes sure to keep wearing his smile; it’s the most important part of his outfit, he’s learned as much from mother and father. He finds his sister Janna by the sweets, bothering herself to an entire plate of twelve of them. She tastes half of one, makes a muted comment on how she expected them to taste sweeter, then discards the rest into a trash receptacle.
Not giving up, his mother comes around again, pulling Athan through the room to talk up his education and his curricula and how impressed he’s left the many tutors he’s had over the years. He knows these speeches so well, he could recite them for her and save mother the effort of moving tongue and teeth.
Despite the micromanagement of his attention, his eyes keep finding a boy on the other side of the hall whom, he is certain, he’s never met. Why won’t she introduce me to that one? The boy’s shape is firm, tall and lean, and his stance among his peers portrays one of strength and pride. He’s such a sight, just his existence distracts Athan enough to lose half a conversation he’s supposed to be having with some other Lord or Lady.
Half an hour later, the party moves to the sprawling veranda that overlooks the mirror-calm pool. It glows gorgeously by blue-silver moonlight, and so does the handsome boy to whom Athan has paid such agonizing attention. He never manages to catch his eye, but he’s hoping maybe soon the boy will quit talking to his friends and take mind to the rest of the party—namely, him.
At that moment, a naughty breeze carries the big feathered hat off an unsuspecting Lady Oalia’s head, gently guiding it like a bird until it lands gracefully on the surface of the water. Her hand goes to her yellow hair, mouth opened in shock. The hat of bows and frill and pomp, now floating leisurely in the pool.
This is his opening … Athan must make the boy pay mind.
Abandoning the crystal of water he was nursing, with a rush of bravery he imagines only the lowborn and true might know, Athan sprints to the poolside and, with complete and utter dignity cast to the unminding wind, bounds into the water, fine suit and all, to retrieve the runaway hat.
Head breaking the surface of water, he’s smiling proudly ear to soft, wet, drippy ear as he frees himself from the pool, crosses the terrace soaked hair to slipper, his every footfall a slap of wet against tile, and offers the hat back to its owner. When at last he lets himself take in the faces of the guests who paid witness to his heroism—that being all the guests—his smile slowly dies.
Lady Oalia seems less impressed and more appalled. The terrible discomforting silence stretches like the longest finger ever known on the unkindest of hands, until Lady Oalia’s own long fingers reluctantly seizes the hat.
Then the silence is broken by girls’ laughter. Athan looks and finds his sister Janna among a group of girls who are all breaking laughs, tears of hilarity in their eyes … all except for one of them, the niece of Lady Kael Mirand-Thrin, who keeps silent.
His face reddening, it only now comes back to him. Ruena. Lady Kael Mirand-Thrin’s niece … her name is Ruena.
Then the boys begin to laugh, joining the girls. Athan spots the dashing boy from earlier bending back in laughter, the tall and proud boy, his eyes scanning Athan down to the toe, derisive, amused, cackling. Well, I’ve earned his attention now, at least.
The rest of the guests choose to keep to their silent protest of Athan’s behavior, offended beyond the use of words or laughter. Athan knows he should’ve let the help fetch the hat. No proper Son or Daughter of Sanctum would allow themselves to be so soiled among their guests.
Athan’s face flushes an even more terrible shade of red, his eyes near to break tears. With a face as stony as the polished flagstone beneath his bare feet, he whispers, “Good eve,” then excuses himself from the terrace to clean up. The echoes of the boys and girls laughing follow him like a swarm of insects.
That night, after the servants undress him and make through his bath, Athan dismisses them with a nearly inaudible word and he’s left alone in the bathroom. Naked, he brings himself up to the large body-length window of the bathroom. Pressed against it, he watches the bright, thriving, whirring lights of the world below. Here at the window, on the fourth floor of Broadmore Manor, sitting at the very edge of the Lifted City itself … all it would take is an unlatching of the window, a push of its glass, and one careless tip forward to drop into the twisting lights and fervor.
He unlatches the window and pushes the glass open wide. The cool wind chills his body instantly, still wet from the bath, but he stands strong. The moon beams on him from the endless black above. A waxing gibbous, he names it with sick humor. He knows what phase it is and he knows what phase it’ll be next, that pale enemy in the night sky. But what is he? Who is he?
Who will he become next?
I can’t live like this, I just can’t. He grips the sides of the window, dares himself. Then he’s leaning out. I can be brave, just one little jump. One little slip of his finger, and the slums will come racing toward him like a friend. Mother isn’t here. Janna isn’t here. Lady Kael and Ruena aren’t here. The servants are gone … No one can stop me now. Not the laughing boys, not the girls, not Lady Oalia or the tutor, no one. He shivers, his hand nearly losing grip, and it doesn’t scare him. Nothing scares him worse than the thought of another day in the sky. I’ll just be another one of my gold coins, dropped into the streets of Atlas. Just let go, Athan …
Let go …
He lets go, dropping back into the tub. His eyes open to find the white, boring ceiling. The desire for freedom is gone … or laughing at him … or floating in a pool.
Maybe another day.
0016 Halvesand
“They’re fools’ dreams,” his brother Aleks argues, annoyed he’s even bringing it up again. “I told you not to listen to a bit of it, and here you are.”
“Could you imagine what we’d make for the family? Just one week guarding a house in the Lifted City—”
“Serving a house,” Aleks corrects him. “Get it ri
ght. We are not welcomed as guests up there, but servants … lowborn and unwanted. They’d sooner pay you to leave than hire you. Have you ever met a Privileged?”
“You’re just afraid I might actually land such a job. You heard it too! Even Trainer Obert complimented my speed. Just one week in a house up there, I’d earn more than I would three whole months here on the streets!”
Aleks and Halves round the corner, continuing on their trek through the dusty third ward toward the Gravel and Prism, and following behind in a wordless march is the stern and frostily-natured twenty-year-old woman named Ennebal, the recluse woman of sharply shoulder-cropped jet hair that Halves keeps staring at every lunch hour in the commons. When she was put on their team today, a stupid grin found the face of Halvesand Lesser.
“What do you think, Ennebal?” asks Halves, but of course she has no answer. For as little as she shows in her face, it’s a wonder she hears anything at all.
Aleks puts an eye on his brother, and it could easily be mistaken for a glare. “Don’t underestimate the good we have here in Guardian … Just high enough, just low enough.”
Suddenly a sound cuts into Halves’ ear from the radio and he stops to concentrate, listening, then takes a glance at his brother who received the same transmission. “Fight in the local market?” he asks—to be sure he heard right—and his brother’s nod confirms. Ennebal watches the two of them flatly, making no face. “Let’s crash ourselves a party,” Halves says to her.
No reaction. Did he really expect one?
The three of them hurry down the 14th and 15th and pass under the elevated train tracks of the Last Call. The market spreads out before them, a crowd formed at the far end where two men are in a heated debate. Halves sees a salesmen beaten in, the skin broken on his cheek and blood tracing his chin like drool. When the attacker spots the three Guardian, he takes two steps back, releasing his victim, then twists his face and shouts, “Oh, look here! Sanctum’s peons have come to serve!” He spits at them, staggering left, staggering right. “Go ahead, peons. Serve your justice. This man, by the way, is a thieving liar asshole.”
“He’s angry,” explains the salesman with blood all over his face. “It’s because I—so sorry, sirs—because I wouldn’t come down on the price of this Lionswear Jacket.”
“The thing is stained,” cries the angry man, pointing—yet his finger seems not to know what it points at. Here, there, and everywhere. “How can you justify selling an item that’s ruined?”
“Just as you can justify wanting to purchase it,” answers Aleksand. “You’ve assaulted a person and drawn blood.”
“You think wearing that shit gives you power? It doesn’t,” he spits back. “You’re just a dressed-up boy with a sword. They don’t even arm you proper with guns and bombs anymore.”
“Bombs were outlawed over twenty turns of Kings ago. If you were at all studied, you’d know that.” Aleks lifts an eyebrow to his brother. “Your call, Halves. You bear the weight of decision. Let him go, or bring him in for judgment?”
Two answers. Halves stares down sadly at the attacker, all puffed up and drunk with rage. The bloodied salesman wincing … This can’t just be forgiven. Who in their right mind would?
“Hey, peon!” shouts the man suddenly, then spits again, landing it right on Halves’ left boot. “Go on! Put me in front of the King so I can spit on him too!”
“The only thing you’ll be spitting is your own blood,” says Halves coolly. “You want a stained coat to hug you, now you’ll have chains, though I doubt they’ll be as warm. Bring him in.”
Without warning, the man lunges, coming at Halves with full intention to tackle him to the pavement. Sadly for the man, he is not aware of Halvesand’s Legacy, and when the man collides into Halves’ body, it is like crashing into a steel wall, Halves not budged in the least.
Collapsing, likely with three or four bones broken by his own momentum, the man now at Halves’ feet only whimpers for words. Aleks enlists his own strength to haul him over his back like a sack, and they make leave. Ennebal tilts her head, muttering into the transmitter, and within twenty-three crawling minutes, a tired hovercraft rounds the corner to pick them up, coughing twice from its exhaust before returning lazily to the station.
In the hovercraft, Ennebal sits on the other side of Aleks. Maybe for the better, thinks Halves. Enough sits on his mind, he doesn’t need his heart tickled anymore. No fraternization. Not that she’s shown him a speck of interest, cold and silent and unsmiling as she is. Maybe she likes women. He sighs, drawing his brother’s attention, then spends the rest of the ride in dark silence.
In the quiet of nightfall, Halves opts out of dinner and, instead, broods in the empty barracks to reflect on his first-ever arrest. Sitting on the long wooden table with his feet propped up on the bench, he is tortured by doubt. Was it the way the man insulted him and Guardian, calling them peons and mocking them? Surely he isn’t so sensitive to let such childish words bother him. Childish, yes, but the man was likely forty or older, and Halves is only twenty-two. What drives a man to such anger, being old enough to know the consequences?
Halves is no fool. That man will be sentenced before King Greymyn, never to see the light of the sun again. I’ve sentenced a man to die, or else live out his days in a cold dungeon somewhere in the forgotten heart of Atlas. Though both suspiciously sound like dying.
He hears the yawn of an opening door behind him, then the footsteps that proceed, a person crossing the barrack. When he turns, he’s surprised to find Ennebal standing there. She says nothing, but simply takes a seat on the same table, further down.
Even with the distance between them—the table half as long as the room—he feels his breathing quicken.
“Was I wrong?” he asks, ignoring his heart—one of the many things Trainer Obert had warned would kill him. “Should I have tended to the salesman’s wounds and dismissed the angry man? Obert said sympathy kills us. But how can we put aside our sympathies and our hearts and still call ourselves human? Those are our brothers and sisters we’re protecting out there, right?” Halves makes a face, hurt suddenly. “I just condemned a person.”
Ennebal says nothing. Discouraged by the unkind quiet, Halves goes on. “Murder a child or steal a knob of bread, you’ll be named just as bad before the King and tossed to the Combs for life. There must be ample space there, deeper into the ground than the city is tall, for all the criminals that are put to judgment and never heard of again. Really, Ennebal, who’s ever actually passed a judgment of the King and come out fairly?”
A ringing silence fills the room. Halves worries he’s gone too far … Did he sound like the man they’d just sent for judgment, scorning Sanctum and Guardian and the system of justice? What am I thinking, letting go such thoughts so acidly??
“There is hearsay,” she says, the sound of her voice startling him, “of Sanctum preparing its great Weapon and setting to rights the wrongs of all of Atlas, though I can’t fathom how. So … perhaps justice is soon to come no matter.”
Staring at her, he says, “I hadn’t expected your voice to sound so soft.” She stares at his lips while he speaks, her already-too-close eyebrows pulling closer, as if annoyed. “Sorry, but I just say what I feel at times. Sometimes I say too much.”
“Your Legacy is incredible.” She doesn’t smile at all, but her voice seems to. “Can you stop anything?”
“Assuming I’m not caught by surprise, yes.” Halves shrugs, modestly playing off his gift of immovability. “Though, I haven’t yet tried stopping a collapsing building, or a sharp sword, or … well, I guess even with a Legacy like mine, you find you’re not as brave as you think. I certainly don’t want to learn what happens if my Legacy fails to stop the sword aimed at my face.”
Her eyes are still on his lips. She seems closer to him, her hand nearly grazing his own, though he doesn’t recall her moving.
“Did I tell you I have a perfect view of the Dark Abandon just outside my dormitory window?” he goes
on. She is so close, he could kiss her. Or she could kiss him … or eat him, or whatever she preferred really. “If that shadowed, forgotten wedge of the city is truly ripe with criminals and runaways, how is that just?—to ignore them, even as a King? Why are they so exempt from the laws we swallow such guilt to uphold?”
“You talk a lot,” says Ennebal plainly.
“Did you move—Are you sitting closer to me?”
“It’s not guilt you should feel,” she goes on, still not meeting his eyes. Really, truly, she can just kiss him and end it right here. Stop it. Stop tempting me. “It’s determination. That the King is good enough to allow us the power of wreaking our own justice. We are not the ones who cry for heroes to save them. We are the heroes.”
“Heroes, you call us?” He leans in further, unsure if he should chuckle, throw a flirty smile, or give way to parted lips and shared breath … Don’t do it, Halves. “You think … I was a hero?”
“It’s not what I think that matters.”
“I think I expected your voice to be deeper, maybe.” He tilts his head, studies her. Just an inch or two more and our lips will make friends. “Why is it you eat alone each day? You could sit at my table, y’know …”
She hops off, the conversation over at once, apparently, and she coolly strolls out of the room. It is so sudden, Halves can only watch her in a half-smiling daze, unsure whether to be ashamed that he’d said something wrong, or proud that he’d said something so right-on to inspire such a reaction. The good and evil in one man, in one woman, a constant war of right and wrong … of do this or do that. Kiss, don’t kiss. Kill, don’t kill. Two answers. Halves, the judge of death and of life today in one little moment.
He smiles victoriously, unsure to which side—right or wrong, good or bad—he owes the victory.
0017 Link
Link picks at his hands, the clock above the teacher’s head stealing all his attention. He couldn’t say what today’s lesson is, for the whole world is that clock, and the time, and the ticking, ticking, ticking.