by Ember Lane
“So,” he said, pulling up a chair. “You’re what’s so important that I have to get up this early.” He grabbed a mug and some water. Will dropped me back my coin, cuffing Kaleb around the head, and telling him to sit up.
Kaleb flicked an irreverent glance at me, picking up his mug of water, looking in it with disgust, and putting it down again. “Tell you what... I’ll do you a deal. I’ll show you around this fair city and beyond if you buy me a coffee.”
“Deal.”
He jumped up, the chair making an awful screaming noise. “Good choice.”
We slipped out the front door.
“You kids have fun,” Will shouted, but I couldn’t tell if it was pride or humor carrying his words.
Outside, Kaleb slung his lute over his shoulder and looked at the alley’s dead-end wall. “Can you climb? It’ll avoid the swinging bodies; they’ll be stinking and bloated by now.”
“Yeah,” I said, “I can climb.”
He tore up the wall like a cat, sticking to the corner and then jumping over. I followed, wondering if the skill worked here and assuming it did when I reached the top easily. Maybe Melinka was right. Maybe they were just hidden.
“Jump!” he called up.
But I hesitated a moment as I sat atop the wall. It was like a gateway to another city. Instead of dangling corpses and stifling alleyways, a small, cobbled road led away, small single-story shops all lining it like soldiers in a file, though there was nothing uniform about them. Some were wide with glass fronts, others had tables set outside, and some had trays full of colorful fruit, aromatic herbs, or overflowed with vegetables.
I jumped, and he reached out and steadied me. “This is the market quarter. You name it; you can buy it here.” He pointed. “The street just over, we can get a coffee there.”
I caught a whiff of his scent, a heady dose of hemp oil, and spied the colored beads around his neck. He was a type, and a type of person I hadn’t encountered in Barakdor yet. Just as I noticed he’d held me a touch too long, he pushed me away, a grin adorning his freckled face, and he ambled down the snaking road.
“Do you always carry your lute?” I shouted after him.
He looked up at the sun, brushing his hair out of his eyes. “It’s a fine day for a song, and the inclination might take me. I have coin, which is rare. Your little friend paid handsomely last night, and we are free from Ruse. All this makes a song more likely.”
He ducked between shops and into a shaded alley that was painted a hundred different colors, each cobble, each curb, and murals adorned the walls—some of Mezzerain’s likeness, some of Melinka's, and dark foes too. Depictions of ShadowDancer, the Cers, and even the portly god, Belved, doing battle with our heroes.
“No Joss the Nine?” I asked.
“He’s there. See!” Kaleb pointed. “There, nine small ghosts, or there, nine shady trees. Always there, always nine.”
Nine seemed to be this land’s number: nine stones, nine lands, nine of Joss.
But just seven veils, and that appeared odd.
We dawdled out of the narrow alley and onto another street. The pungent odor of brewed coffee wafting over us instantly. Kaleb passed a number of shops before settling on a corner one and sitting at a little, round table. He raised his face to the sun again, drinking it in.
“So tell me, why the cloak and dagger? Why the secrecy?”
“About?”
“About you—about Alexa Drey. Tell me, why does Alexa Drey not exist here? Because I, for one, do not understand it.”
A waiter served, pouring out two mugs of aromatic coffee that had hints of cinnamon wafting from its steam. He served a pitcher of water, and one of frothy, white ale, and then laid some crusty, toasted bread right by it.
“Just coffee?”
“This is a creative’s quarter. Time is much slower here. You should sit back, drop those shoulders, and answer my question.”
Kaleb’s manner relaxed me, and though I maintained my concealment, I found I was replenishing my mana nearly as quickly as it was using it. Perhaps relaxation was the way—let it flow, like the bells—let it ebb, and let it flow.
I told him the reasons we wanted rebellion to come from within, not be led by some overpowered magic wielder.
He studied me all the while I talked, and even after, letting silence bud and grow until it became quite awkward.
“What?” I asked.
“You know,” he said. “You know that Valkyrie would get behind you—that their argument is floored and solely created to keep Joss the Nine in power.”
I shrugged. He said what I secretly thought. “What if I’m happy with that? What if I don’t want to reign, don’t want the responsibility of power?” While it irked me a little, it also quieted me. What I couldn’t tell him was that I wouldn’t be around forever. I was starborn and would leave Barakdor one day. “Those who reign shirk the business of living.”
He blew on his coffee, smiling after and taking a sip. “Shirk the business of living—I like that. Tell me, how good are you at it?”
He had me—trapped in the space of a sip of coffee.
“Not very, but it changes nothing. I have no aspirations to lead. I want to free these lands to let them breathe again, and I’ll fight tooth and nail for that, but lead—no, never.”
“Why fight, then?”
I looked him squarely in the eye. “So that one day I might be able to live, and everyone around me too.”
He tilted his head one way and then the other. “No, not having that. You fight for the adventure, and that draws you into the conflict. Anyway, you’re anonymous for the day, so what do you want to do?”
“A whole day?”
“I’m under orders, but I’m enjoying my orders so far.”
“The river,” I said suddenly. “I choose the river. Do you think we could hire a boat?”
“Think? I know. My friend Jaffur has one.”
“Then we’ll ask him if we can do that,” I said, happy that the focus of the conversation was no longer all about me. I asked him about his lute, where he learned to play, and why.
“Because, because, and because,” he replied. “Because my father had a tavern and needed a musician? Because I couldn’t resist the pull of the music? Or because I once saw a girl entranced by a boy who played a square not too far from here.”
“And did they fall in love?”
He tipped his head, his smile almost a laugh. “If they did, it’s not my story.”
“Take me there,” I said on impulse.
He lifted up his mug of coffee. “When breakfast is done.”
It took a while to polish off all the food. Even though I’d had an earlier meal, my ravenous hunger hadn’t been sated. I ate my fair share and more, and then we wandered, down all the time, through the colorful streets, past artists, weavers, potters, and more. The buzz of liberation was more muted here as if their art transcended such minor things as freedom, and they had harder masters than Ruse, who pressed them, chained them to their diligent work.
Yet a buzz there was and even though less boisterous than I’d seen, it was somehow more liberating in its subtlety. It was like they knew they deserved it and were unsurprised by its arrival, and I decided this was the freedom I should fight for. Not the freedom that needs to be cheered from every ruined crenelation, but the freedom that enables you to just continue, to get on with your life with less of a stoop and more of a skip.
Kaleb showed me the spot where the young musician had serenaded his girl, and it was perfect. A small square, a fountain in its center with benches all around, pretty colored buildings hemming in its cobbles, and the sky was a perfect blue square.
“He sat there on the ledge, and she sat at that table while he sung the song.”
“What song?” I asked.
“The fall of Taric: a tragedy, I suppose, but it has a nice tune.”
I sat at the table. “So play it for me,” but Kaleb blushed and declined.
“I
f I was to play you any song it would be this one,” and he strolled to the fountain and sat on its edge. He began playing, and at first I thought the song had no words, but then he began, and his voice took me by surprise.
He carried the tune perfectly, and it told the tale of Lamerell, of how she formed the world with the help of a giant. How they carved the valleys and filled the seas. How they seeded the forests and wove the dales, and how they laughed while they fashioned it all. How their loved bloomed but died when Lamerell saw the measure of their failure. It told the tale of a lonely giant who’d let his one true love slip through his fingers.
At the end, I clapped and brushed a tear away. Kaleb just stayed still for a while as if the song had drained him. He eventually looked up and shrugged nonchalantly, trying to pretend the power of his music hadn’t affected him. “Another tragedy, I suppose,” he said.
It was then I noticed a small crowd had gathered, and his words broke their trance. A few clapped, a few tossed coins, but most brushed a tear away and carried on about their business.
We made our way to the river after that, eventually finding his friend Jaffur unloading grain from his boat. He agreed to take us upriver if we pitched in and helped. We happily agreed, stacking the hemp bags onto a merchant’s cart and then waiting while Jaffur completed his business.
I offered to pay for my little excursion, but Jaffur wouldn’t take a single coin. Any friend of Kaleb’s was a friend of his, and it was an inauspicious day to take coin from strangers, especially young, blonde women with a strange accent. They laughed at that, and Kaleb said, “Especially those called Alexa.”
I guessed I wasn’t quite as clever as I thought, and that Joss the Nine’s plan was equally floored. Still, it wasn’t going to ruin my day.
Jaffur rowed us upstream, away from Pangor and all its river-born delights, and we were soon closed in by draping willows, overflowing banks, and reed clusters.
“How far up?” Jaffur asked.
“Take us to the stumps,” Kaleb replied.
“Really?” His shoulders sagged, but his cheer soon returned. “You can row half.”
“I can help,” I declared, but as I was resting against the boat’s bow and with my feet on the gunwale, it wasn’t the most convincing of offers.
“Nope,” Kaleb said. “My father insisted you have the day, and that doesn’t mean you rowing halfway to Magret.”
I didn’t fight hard. Instead, I tipped my head up and soaked in the sun, harvesting my light mana, watching as it exploded in size—twenty thousand, thirty thousand, forty thousand, and on, leaving my shadowmana behind. It was like a beast released. It was like it rewarded me for my own day’s indulgence.
It was late in the afternoon when Jaffur finally edged the boat over, hopping out, and mooring it to a fallen bough. He took out a bedroll, unraveling it on the bank.
“You two go. I’m going to catch some rest, light a fire, and do some fishing. I’ve seen the stumps a thousand times.”
“A thousand?” Kaleb questioned.
“Well…”
Kaleb took my hand; his grip was strong, firm, and reassuring. We climbed the bank, brushing aside overgrown nettles and seas of brambles, and made our way into a broad, deciduous forest, its canopy blotting out the sky but not stealing its beauty. I knew it was still there, just hiding.
“So, what are these stumps?” I asked as we scaled another bank.
“An enigma? Something you have to see to believe. It’s a fair climb.” He turned, rosy cheeked and out of breath, his lute still dangling over his shoulder. “You want to? Are you sure?”
I had the distinct feeling it was him who was unsure.
“Nope, you’ll have to carry on. I love an enigma.”
He huffed and turned and scrambled up the hill, using knotty roots as handholds and rocky outcrops as rest stops. Before too long, the trees ended, and we clambered out onto rich grassland peppered with rock that rose for a hundred yards until the slope ended. When we reached the line, it was like the top of the mountain had been chopped off, and a large field had replaced it. I stood and turned around and saw the river laid out before me, the city and the sea. It was beautiful, and it was now free.
“You helped liberate that,” he said, drawing beside me and pointing.
I followed his finger all the way down. The black tower lay in a charred line, toppled, dead, no longer a force or an influence, but a heap to clear up—a pile of useless rubble.
“Yes, yes I did.”
He grabbed my hand again, taking me farther onto the plateau, and then we came to them: the stumps, and there were eight of them, nine if you counted a heap of rotting shavings.
“I don’t understand,” Kaleb said. “Truly. They were never like this. It’s like some corruption has eaten away at them.”
He walked into the center, sitting on a protruding slab of gray stone. I sat beside him knowing this was some clue, some metaphor. Each of the stumps was in a state of decay, barring one and one alone. The first, the one that faced me, was like an anthill, black as night, and taller than the rest.
“Ruse,” I whispered.
The second was but a pile of festering shavings, grubs, and beetles feeding on its chestnut colored core.
“Variant.”
I deduced the one with no rot was Mandrake, and then Kaleb suddenly jerked, and he said, “Maybe there is some hope.”
A sprig of mauve, no, two, three, more, budded from one of the partly rotted stumps: new leaves, new life.
“A jaspur for Valkyrie,” I whispered.
“Growing again, living again. I hope. I’m truly sorry, Alexa. I shouldn’t have brought you here. Last time it was just stumps, stumps and the gray-eyed woman. Now it looks a desperate scene.”
My breath caught in my throat. “Gray-haired woman?”
He pursed his lips, biting the bottom one. “She used to come at dusk, hopping from stump to stump, always muttering. Jaffur thinks she’s a witch. We’d watch and laugh at her, and she’d feed from our humor and grow and shine more.”
“And you? What did you think she was?”
“A ghost? I don’t know. As she jumps, little lightning streaks radiate out from the stumps, like pulses. No, that’s not right. The streaks are too straight, too uniform.”
“Has she got gray eyes?”
“Yes.”
I let my head sag, gasping in my pain. There was only one who fit that description. “Sakina,” I said, and then realization hit me. “I doubt she’ll come anymore.”
“Why?”
I stifled a sob and inhaled the breath. “Because I condemned her to eternal damnation.”
“Harsh,” he said, trying to break the tension.
“Tell me; exactly what did she do?” A sudden burst of hope filled me—hope that maybe I was supposed to be here in this exact place—that it was part of Sakina’s greater plan.
“Do?”
“When she came as a vision, what did she do?”
Kaleb shrugged. “She skipped from one trunk to the next, but you can’t do that now. That stump’s gone, and most of the others are rotted.”
“No.” I was sure there was some motivation behind this. I was using Pog’s logic, desperately clinging to it. “No, you brought me here for a reason. I was led here for a reason.”
“What reason?”
“Pog says there’s no such thing as coincidence in any game.”
Kaleb recoiled from me. “Is this all a game to you?” His voice was suddenly accusatory.
“But isn’t it?” I asked, refusing to be cowed. “Because life can’t be this cruel. Leading me back to Sakina, a woman I never had the chance to fall in love with, yet somehow knew I could. A woman with nothing but good in her veins. You tell me why she had to die, why she begged me to send her to damnation, and I’ll admit it isn’t a game, but at the moment, I can’t accept life can be so cruel, not after Star.”
“I’m sorry, it’s just that—”
“No, don�
�t be. This is no game. It’s a trial.” And suddenly it all came toppling down on me. The stumps, Variant, everything. Fear gripped me as my vulnerability came to the fore again—my body, in a capsule, hurtling through space, lonely, alone, and worse, defenseless. He held me then as tears raked my body, my sorrow flooding out. The sun set slowly as if it were a curtain falling on my day’s theater and dropping behind the endless, Valkyrian sea.
And the stumps began to glow.
And I knew what they wanted.
I sniffled and shook my sorrow away, vowing that they were the last of my self-indulgent tears, now just pure bloody-mindedness would drive me. Standing, I walked to the sole, healthy stump, and I stood on it, just as she had, and felt its thrill as it recognized me, and its branches grew, turning to the willowy mauve of the jaspur tree then tinted with silver light as roots burst and flowed from the trunk like silver streams, but jagged like thunder, rebuffed by each of the other stumps until their progress became static, until they stopped. Only then did I jump to the next.
This one pulsed, and I understood what Kaleb was talking about. It was like it wanted to grow, to root, and burst upward like Mandrake, but it was smothered, smothered by Ruse’s oppression.
But then I felt her, somewhere deep under, struggling to tell me something. Her voice was muffled but forceful. The silver cracked out, but this time it was more like a sheet of ice breaking, the ground resisting, the stump itself oblivious. It met the silver of Mandrake, and it stabilized, but it was a tenuous marriage, and I doubted it would hold in place.
I jumped to the next and experienced the same—her muffled instructions urging me on. The silver cracked again, but the next stump was Ruse’s black mound, and I hesitated. Her instruction became more urgent, pushing me on.
So I leaped, and I landed, and my boots burst into crimson flame, and cries filled my ears, screams of torment and anguish.
“Calm them!”
“Sakina?”
“Calm them! Feed from them to stifle their suffering.”