by Rachel Dunne
Joros wanted to feel his usual fury, because the fury at least was something he understood, knew how to process. But he just felt . . . sad. A genuine sadness, the sort of thing he hadn’t felt when he’d left his home and family, or when he’d realized his two decades of service to the Fallen had been an utter waste, or when he’d killed Dirrakara, whom he might even have loved if that was a thing he’d ever learned how to do. This was a child’s sadness, brought on by a world-twisting realization that booted one unceremoniously toward adulthood. The last time Joros had felt the like was when his oldest brother, bastard that he was, had told Joros he’d been a mistake, and that everything would be better if Joros had never been born. Joros had been nine then, and the words had held enough of the flavor of truth to send him running into the surrounding fields, wiping tears from his cheeks. After the first dozen minutes of running, he’d decided he didn’t actually want to run away, but by then nothing looked familiar, and the wheat reached higher than he could jump. He hadn’t stumbled home until an hour after the sun had gone down, and no one was relieved to see him or startled he’d been gone.
Now he felt nine again, full of the same world-crushing pain of a child realizing that the world didn’t give a shit what he wanted. All his years spent plotting, charting the course of his life and the world he would shape around himself, planning a solution for every possible contingency . . . all of his careful planning had failed. Everything had ended when the Twins rose, and since then he hadn’t been able to plan any further ahead than where he’d put his foot down next. If there was anything that could be done to stop the Twins now, he didn’t know how to go hunting for it, and the solution certainly hadn’t drifted magically into his mind.
There was a metallic sound to his left, and Joros froze. Some instinctive part of his brain put a name to the sound—the jangle of armor—and lurched to life—fractionally. It was enough to send his hand to grip his short sword’s hilt, but not enough to draw it. His eyes flickered, searching, between tree trunks—and then he saw them.
Walking shadows, moving toward them through the moonlit trees. Two, five, more—all wearing black robes. Preachers of the Long Night, and Joros could only imagine how bold they’d be, surrounded by their ultimate success.
At his side, Rora had drawn her daggers, hopefully as many as she could hold at once. The air around Joros crackled as one of the mages—probably Anddyr, since Aro had been clawing at his own arms until recently—raised an invisible, protective shield around their small group. That would keep them safe for a while, but if it came to a fight—if the preachers struck first and fast and hard—the four of them wouldn’t be enough. No matter how hard they fought, how hard they tried, they would die. That was the way of the world.
“Hail, Brothers,” one of the preachers called across the distance, and surprise sealed Joros’s lips for a moment. Joros remembered in a rush—without being stupid enough to gape down at himself—that he was still wearing one of his old black robes, that Anddyr was as well, that perhaps Rora and Aro’s clothes were dark enough to pass for black . . .
Joros’s mind lurched into sudden, frantic activity.
“Hail, Brothers,” Joros repeated, keeping the surprise from his voice. His hand didn’t leave his sword, though—they might see through the lie at any moment. Joros didn’t want them coming any closer for a lot of reasons, but short of outright fleeing, there weren’t many options for keeping them away.
“Have you come from the south?” the same preacher called. There were at least eight of them—no, nine—fanned out among the trees, and that was a number that looked rather intimidating compared to four. “Did you see it happen? Did you see them rise?” There was that fervor in his voice, the all-encompassing kind of faith that was equal parts annoying and terrifying.
“We did,” Joros said shortly. He’d never learned how to talk to those sorts with anything but condescension, and that seemed like a poor route to take, what with being so outnumbered. Two mages evened out the numbers a bit, but at the same time, it really didn’t. Anddyr was dependable, to an extent, even when he was trapped in his madness. The right spells could make him worth three fighters. Aro, though, was generally a useless lump. So long as he was in one of his sane moods, he could cast spells effectively enough, if erratically—but when the madness was on him, he couldn’t be counted on for anything, and was more often a danger than he ever was a help.
With the Twins freed, with Joros’s last plans an utter failure, perhaps he could finally get rid of the useless twin.
That was a thought for later. There was more immediate business at hand. The preachers were drawing closer, close enough that, soon, they’d bump into air that was unexpectedly solid.
Joros made a subtle motion with his hand, one he hoped Anddyr would see in the darkness. The mage must have, for the crackling air faded until all the hairs on Joros’s arms lay flat once more. The preachers drew closer, sensing nothing at all amiss.
“It’s true, then?” the talkative one went on. “I mean, of course it is, just look around!” He laughed, the others joining in, like a pack of hyenas cackling as they circled their prey . . . There was nothing particularly threatening about them besides their greater numbers, but Joros knew how quickly camaraderie could switch to enmity. “We got the summons, but we couldn’t make it back in time . . . we were in Montevelle, important business with the Duke, but you don’t need to know that. Tell us everything!”
They were close enough now that, even in the darkness, he could see the expectant looks on their faces, their excitement and their zealous faith.
Joros stood there, staring back at them, his tongue frozen to the roof of his mouth. The part of his brain that had been running on adrenaline ran out. He couldn’t think of the lie that would make the preachers leave, couldn’t think what attack would be best, couldn’t think.
He stared, and the silence stretched. The eagerness faded slowly from the preachers’ eyes, replaced by confusion.
“No time,” a voice croaked from behind Joros’s shoulder. “We’re on important business, too. We need to get to Mercetta as fast as we can.”
Aro. Foolish, thoughtless Aro, speaking when he shouldn’t have, daring to say anything when Joros himself couldn’t think of the right words . . . but at least they were words, any words. It was an imperfect plan, a flimsy lie, but at least it was something. Sluggishly, Joros’s mind started turning once more, rust flaking away from the gears that had always been plotting.
“Yes,” Joros said, straightening his back, tipping up his chin—little affectations that could add a sense of superiority better than any tone of voice. “They’ll be able to tell you more in the hills, but we have no time to waste. And you’d best hurry—important things are afoot.” That was too grandiose, he realized too late, but they didn’t seem to notice—the talkative one widened his eyes, the eagerness creeping back in.
“The hills . . . ?” he asked carefully.
Joros waved his hand back in the direction they’d come. “Almost directly south. Through the Plains. I don’t doubt you’ll encounter others who have more time to spend giving simple directions.” Not even a year ago, Joros had been a member of the Ventallo, one of the elite rulers of the Fallen, and that position had brought with it an extreme level of haughtiness—and that was something that couldn’t be shaken easily. Joros could throw on that haughtiness like a cloak, and he saw how it cowed the preachers.
The talker actually bowed to him. “As you say. Forgive us, we’ll be on our way. Strength in the night, Brothers, and may the Twins guide your steps.”
And they left, easy as that. Joros stared after them, not sure what he should feel first or strongest. Satisfaction, of course, that a few sentences had been enough to chase them away. Relief that his planning mind hadn’t been shattered and broken beyond repair. Resentment that he’d given up the cow-eyed scraping his position in the Fallen had brought him for the band of fools he was now saddled with. Curiosity that Aro, perhaps,
wasn’t quite as stupid as Joros had always thought.
Joros turned away once the darkness had swallowed the preachers, and he began walking north once more. There was nothing else to do—but the gears were slowly waking in Joros’s mind. Turning, still sluggish, still gummed up by failure and the fog of sadness—but beginning to turn nonetheless.
Later, as Joros’s thoughts spun faster and faster, even walking became a distraction. He stumbled over his own feet more than once, ran into the others’ backs or had them run into his. His numbed mind had shrugged off its shroud, and as though attempting to correct for its previous paralysis all at once, his thoughts were racing, crashing and colliding, spinning too quickly—spinning out of control. It was almost worse than the numbness—at least then, he hadn’t been able to feel the crushing weight of his failure.
Joros called a halt, hoping that stilling his body might still his thoughts. They made a rough camp, with the scarce remains of the supplies they’d brought south: a battered pot, two ratty travelsacks filled with a grain that made a tasteless porridge, a flint and steel that had survived the rest of Joros’s fire kit, and their own cloaks. No bedrolls, no tents, no shelter from the wind that rattled the tree branches around them. Winter was fading, but it still held ground in the forest beyond the Plains. It felt colder without the sun’s light . . . but not as cold as it should have, not a winter to beat all winters as he would have expected. Joros still didn’t quite know what to make of that.
He insisted on a fire, now that they had trees for both kindling and shelter, and Rora was too tired to argue with him. That was disappointing. He stared at them each in turn, Rora poking at the fire, Anddyr stirring the porridge as it bubbled thickly over the flames, Aro muttering to himself as he stared up at the stars. Joros hoped one of them would be foolish enough to open their mouth, to give him an excuse to talk, to argue, to stop thinking.
But no. They were caught up in their own thoughts. And Joros’s continued to race, uncontrolled, unabated.
Joros stood abruptly, startling all of them. “I’m going hunting,” he said, not that he owed them any explanation. The mages stared like they couldn’t comprehend the words, but Rora raised an eyebrow at him—a disbelieving eyebrow, as if she thought it was a joke not even funny enough to laugh at. Joros could remember a time when that might have thrown him into a rage, but he felt only the sadness and the reeling of his thoughts. “Give me your knife,” he said to her, utterly inflectionless, holding out his hand. That made her other eyebrow go up, but after a moment she fished out one of her daggers from its hiding place, flipped it up to catch it by the tip, and laid the hilt into his palm. Ignoring the blatant braggadocio, Joros closed his fingers around the dagger and turned for the trees.
The sun’s disappearance had thrown the animal kingdom into as much of an uproar as Joros imagined any city across Fiatera was in. Normally diurnal animals were now forced to venture out in the night, animals that didn’t know how to survive when they couldn’t see their predators. That generally made it an easy task for Rora to bring down a bird or a squirrel to supplement the bland porridge, but she’d had less luck since leaving the Plains, with trees and branches now getting between her and her prey. Joros was sick of being constantly hungry, his stomach lined only with porridge.
Joros tucked the dagger into his belt near his shortsword—not a hunting tool, and he wouldn’t risk its edge—and skimmed his fingers over the rough ground, searching for stones among the deadfall and gritty patches of snow. He found a few that fit comfortably into his hand and tucked all but one into his cloak’s biggest pocket—far away from the damned seekstone that was now linked to a god—and put his back to a tree, waiting. He would have preferred to sit, but the ground was too cold and damp to be comfortable, and he didn’t want to get his cloak soaked now when he’d need to sleep in it later.
Then it was just waiting for a bird or a rabbit or a fecking deer and hoping that he could stun it long enough to cut its throat. And waiting on animals was nothing like the sort of distraction he’d been hoping for.
The problem was—and he’d begun to realize this slowly—that he believed now. It was hard to deny the existence of a god after he’d watched two of them burst through a hill and steal the nearest bodies for their own, carving a swath of death to power their rise. Only a fool would try to deny the evidence of his own eyes. That made the Twins real—and if the Twins were real, that made the Parents real, too, and if the Parents were real, then why in the name of every bleeding hell hadn’t they done anything to stop their wayward children from returning to power? Joros had done everything he could to keep the Twins bound—and the Parents, who should have been doing far more than a mere human, had instead done nothing. They had let him fail, and left him with nothing.
Things had been easier when he hadn’t believed—when he’d been a simple preacher, seeing an opportunity for power among a band of lunatics who actually believed the stories they told about gods bound beneath the earth; or when he’d started to actually wield that power, building a network of preachers that spanned the kingdom, shadowseekers all acting on his command, for his benefit. He knew the moment when it had all begun to fall apart: when Dirrakara—sly, conniving, insidious Dirrakara—had given him a pet, a mage to do his bidding, and told him so guilelessly that she was sure he would find a use for the mage. Like calls to like, Anddyr had told him. A thought had burrowed into Joros’s brain that perhaps he could find the gods he feigned belief in by using the mage and that disturbing relic of the Fallen—an enormous fleshy, burned leg that cast doubts on his own doubts but was easy enough to avoid thinking of, the wondering kept as securely locked away as the leg. Like calls to like, and the mage had done it, somehow, found something and there was no denying it. It was hard to maintain disbelief in the face of five flickering points laid out like a constellation across a map of Fiatera, five likes the mage had found with the leg, flung to the far horizons—
There was a rustling in the brush, and Joros’s hand flung out instinctively, the stone in his palm going crashing through the sparse foliage. Surprisingly, there was a shrill scream, and instinct carried him again: he jumped forward, using the tree’s trunk for leverage, and pulled out the dagger with one hand as the other pushed aside the branches and deadfall where the scream came from. He found a rabbit half on its side, back or leg broken, and he slashed with the knife just as he’d planned, a quick cut across the throat. He grabbed the rabbit by the ears, and it felt good. He’d heard others talk about how it could make a person feel powerful, taking a life, and he hadn’t understood that. When he’d killed Dirrakara, he’d only felt frustrated that it had come to that point—that was how he chose to remember it, at least, just the frustration and none of the other uncomfortable, complicated things. He knew, at least, that killing her hadn’t made him feel powerful.
Looking at the rabbit he’d killed, Joros felt a touch of that—“powerful” wasn’t the right word, though. “Satisfied” was closer, or “gratified.” He’d set out to do a thing and done it. “Useful” felt like the right word.
Joros tucked the rabbit into his belt and started collecting wood, clearing a space among the sparse, dirty snow to start a fire. He still had his flint and steel, and it took him longer to get a spark than he would ever admit, but he built up a nice fire and split his time between feeding it more sticks and skinning the rabbit. That was something he’d never done before, but if it was something Rora could do, there was no reason he couldn’t. Though a good amount of meat came away with the hide, he was left with plenty of rabbit to put on the sharp end of a stick. The smell of it roasting made his stomach roar, but he’d be damned if he’d eat half-raw meat and wind up shitting out his innards; he’d have a proper meal. He sat watching the rabbit brown and char, listening to his thoughts spin.
There was a thing Dirrakara had taught him, or tried to at least. “You get so angry,” she’d chided, not understanding, never understanding how impossibly frustrating it was to be cons
tantly surrounded by so much madness. She’d told him it was all right to feel anger—“Or any emotion,” she’d said lightly, but with unmistakable reproach—so long as he didn’t let it consume him. “Feel it,” she’d said, “feel it entirely . . . and then move past it. I know you believe your anger sharpens you, but there’s a point where it makes you . . . unproductive.”
To the cooking rabbit, since Dirrakara wasn’t there, Joros said aloud, “Made me pretty damned productive when I killed you, didn’t it?” There wasn’t any emotion behind the words, though, no anger or sadness, just a statement flat as a path that had been walked a thousand times. She’d been wrong about so much. His anger sharpened him to a fine point, deadly and unstoppable. It was the little-boy emotions, the sadness and the fear, that made him unproductive. Dirrakara had been wrong about so much . . . but not all of it.
Joros prayed, for the first time since he’d been a boy, since he’d realized that no one cared about him in this world or all the worlds beyond it. He prayed to the Parents, whose existence he could no longer deny, and his prayers were full of all the sadness and the fear. He felt them, felt them entirely, let them consume him . . . and let them fade away with the words of his prayers. They left behind a great emptiness, and in the wake of those foolish, childish emotions rose the familiar anger. Was it still prayer, if he screamed at the Parents? His anger shouted at the stars above, at the missing sun, at the Parents sitting secure in the godworld beyond the sky, and any lingering sadness morphed into hatred, fear into frustration. They had let this happen to the world, let this happen to him.
He had failed in all else—so be it. But he had wallowed long enough, been directionless long enough. There was one clear path left to him, one thing that he could yet do. He could still destroy the Twins, show the Parents that he didn’t need them, that he was better than them. He could still be useful.