by Rachel Dunne
Rora’d told herself she wouldn’t be the one to break. It was Aro’s fault things were like this—she’d made him choose, and he’d chose himself over her, when all she’d done her whole life was choose him. Anddyr and Joros’d broken him, and every piece of Rora’d been screaming to kill them both, and Aro’d asked her not to because he thought they could help him more than Rora could. Rora planned on letting him live with that dumb choice. Let him see how much help they were, a crazy witch and a man who cared only about himself.
And then she’d seen how sick Aro looked, how he’d cried under Anddyr’s wild fists, and her anger had cracked, just a little bit.
She’d decided that the next time he came down, she’d say something. She still didn’t know what, it’d only been a few days since she’d decided and she hadn’t been able to come up with anything good. She’d figure it out. The twisting in her belly would chuck out some useful words.
Rora sat up straighter against the wall, put her hands in her lap, where it was harder to see the chains around them. She stared up at the open cellar door, and she watched the small group come down the ladder. That was a good thing about it being near as dark aboveground as it was in a witch-lit cellar: it didn’t take her eyes anything to pick out faces, and her hands clenched a little in her lap.
There was a new person, another witch by the looks of his crazy-wide eyes, with two fists pushing him forward. One of ’em was Skit, who knew how the cellar worked, brought food and cleaned up when things got really bad, knew enough to keep things from getting too bad most of the time. He was a good one, talked to Rora sometimes, though never if there was anyone important around to see. She could recognize the other fist’s face, but didn’t know his name, and following after the fists, in Aro’s usual place, was Tare.
It wasn’t that strange—Tare came down to the cellar pretty often, acting like it was to keep an eye on everyone and everything. Rora knew the real reason was that the Dogshead wouldn’t let Tare kill Rora, so the best Tare could do was remind herself that Rora’s life was pretty shit right now. Rora could understand that well enough. It was the same reason she sometimes glared over at Anddyr behind the not-wall when she was sure he wasn’t looking. You had to keep your hate burning bright, and the best way to do that was to see the one you hated being miserable.
So Tare came around pretty often, that wasn’t unusual, but what was unusual was that Aro wasn’t there at all. He always came down to push new witches through his not-wall.
Tare glared over at Rora as she passed by, same as she always did, but didn’t say anything. And Rora, all ready to blurt out some words at her brother, was left just staring with the nervous twist in her belly gone sour.
Tare and the fists pushed the new witch through the cellar, past Rora’s little corner to the far end, the big space that probably could’ve held three wagons if you could figure out how to get ’em through the cellar door. Now it was holding seven witches, all spread apart and glary like territorial cats. The fists added the new witch into the mix, pushing him through the not-wall, making the air shimmer and ripple for just a few seconds. Seemed like they didn’t need Aro for it, and the not-wall didn’t fall apart like it’d done the last time. The witch stood on the other side, looking like he’d bolt if he could just figure out which direction to run in.
And Anddyr, who always sat pressed into the corner, he reached out to gently touch the new witch’s leg. It made him jump, but then his eyes fixed on Anddyr like he was drowning and Anddyr was something floating by. He sat down next to Anddyr, and the not-wall did enough to muffle the sounds of their voices that Rora couldn’t pick out words, but after a while Anddyr turned his eyes away from the new one, looked back out to the same place he was always looking: Rora.
She looked away before he could see she’d been looking in the first place. She had promises to keep, after all. Even if they were just dumb little promises to herself. In the cellar, there weren’t many things worth keeping, but a promise might as well be one of ’em.
Tare was smirking over at her, that mocking little smile, like she thought it was the funniest thing in the world that the witch Rora hated so much loved her like an idiot.
Skit and the other fist started going around the cellar collecting filth buckets, working with the witches to get the special buckets Aro’d magicked up, the ones that could pass through the barrier. She hated those buckets; when the witches threw their fits, they weren’t shy about throwing the filth buckets around, and a lot of them ended up on her side of the not-wall.
Tare, nothing better to do, moved toward Rora’s end of the cellar, leaning back against the ladder and hooking her arms through the rungs. “You’re almost starting to look like a girl,” she said lightly, almost cheerfully. Rora still hadn’t figured out which was worse: when Tare spent all her time spitting and swearing and taunting, or when Tare ignored her, acted like Rora wasn’t even someone worth pretending was there.
Rora shook her head, felt her hair brush against one ear, and against the smooth skin where she would’ve had a second ear if Tare hadn’t cut it off. It was the longest her hair’d ever been, since she was a kid and desperate to make her and Aro look different, and he’d cried when she’d tried to chop his hair off. “Get me a dagger, and I can look proper and boyish again.”
Tare snorted. “Get you a dagger, and you’d just put it in my back. That’s all you’re good at.”
That amount of distrust hurt too much for Rora to have any light comeback. “Or maybe Sharra will turn her back long enough for you to put one in mine.”
“Maybe she will.”
Skit and the other fist—hells, Rora should know his name by now—came back down the ladder, buckets clean and ready to be passed back through the not-wall. That meant they’d all be leaving soon, and it meant her brother really wasn’t gonna show up. Softly, not really expecting any answer but a gob of spit, Rora asked Tare, “Is Aro okay?”
Tare frowned down at her, face twisted but not in any way Rora recognized. “He’s . . .” Down at her side, Tare’s hand turned over, palm out with the little finger tucked up, and wobbled a bit. It was one of the hand signs knives used to talk to each other, but Rora wasn’t sure Tare even meant to do it. It seemed like it was instinctual. “He’s just tired,” she finally said, but that was a lot less of an answer than the hand sign’d been. Tare’s mouth said fine, but her hand said wrong.
Rora swallowed a lump that fell hard into the tangled mess of her belly. “Can you . . .” What, was she gonna send Aro a message through Tare? Fat chance of that happening, and fatter chance of it even meaning anything that way. Anything she asked Tare to do, Tare’d probably take two jumps in the other direction just for spite. Rora sighed, pulled up her knees, and wrapped her chain-clanking arms around them. “Thanks,” she muttered, meaning it but not sure why she bothered.
Tare looked down at her like she wasn’t sure why Rora bothered either. It wasn’t a glare, though, and Tare left without saying anything else, Skit and the other fist following after. Skit did look back at her like maybe he was sorry, but he didn’t say anything either. Once they’d closed the cellar door behind them, she was just left with witchlight and Anddyr’s eyes staring like he could see inside her, all the way down to the twisting and the rocks in her belly.
Chapter Twenty
Harin was the first one to mention it to Joros, and so, later that night, Joros moved five silver gids from one of his pockets to another, and a single small copper back to the first pocket—the latter for his bet that, among those of the pack brave enough to talk to him, it would be Harin who broached the subject; and for the former, one silver coin for each moon-pass they’d let the nonsense carry on without saying anything.
As the only man in the entire place with more than a single coin to bite, Joros was reduced to betting against himself.
“We’re getting worried, is all,” Harin muttered, scuffing her tattered boot just outside Joros’s door. She hadn’t crossed the threshold—nerves, he imagined,
or perhaps some misplaced sense of propriety.
“It sounds like you should be,” Joros said heavily, smoothing over the layers of sarcasm and mirth with a topsoil of manufactured sorrow. He added, “I only wish you’d come to me sooner.” He’d given himself fifty-to-one odds they came to him on the second day. “He seemed so troubled lately, I thought to give him some space to heal on his own.” Really, he’d wanted to see if the boy was able to function on his own without Joros’s correction. Clearly, the boy was not.
Harin kicked her boot lightly against the doorframe, leaving a faint smear of mud against the wood that she didn’t seem to notice. “So you’ll talk to ’im?”
“Yes,” Joros said, sighing as he stood from his desk. “I’ll talk to him.”
Whitedog Pack had done what they could with a space not meant to live even half their number—there weren’t more than a dozen rooms that could conceivably be called bedrooms, and most of those were crammed full of people; they’d turned the dining hall into communal sleeping quarters; they’d even turned the stables into the saddest excuse for a bedroom he’d ever seen. No, that wasn’t quite right—he’d seen, briefly, where they’d all come from. The shit-reeking Canals, where they’d carved alcoves into mud walls and lined the spaces with flea-gnawed blankets. Hells, anywhere above water level had to seem an improvement to them.
Aro had been shunted into one of the dogpile rooms with six other people. The boy could have gotten a room to himself if he had any sense; between the Dogshead’s favor and his witchcraft, Aro had both respect and fear on his side. His roommates had given him the room’s only bed, and given him a wide berth between the bed and their mats. An overly loud sneeze from Aro likely would have sent them scattering.
But there Aro sat in a crowded room, little space to himself as he perched at the edge of his bed and steadily, methodically, drove the tip of a dagger down again and again into his palm. Blood pooled in his hand and dripped between his fingers, falling in slow spatters to the floor.
Joros stood in the doorway for a moment, watching with one eyebrow raised. Aro didn’t take any notice of him, or of the others in the room casting nervous glances at him. Joros had seen him over the last few days, stumbling from one place to another and dragging his nails down his arms, red furrows that had grown deeper until they’d sprouted blood. He’d slapped himself, gentle wake-up slaps at first that had become ringing, neck-snapping things as the days went by.
The dagger, though—that was new.
Joros stepped into the room and walked a straight line toward the younger man, forcing the others in the room to scoot or twist out of his way. He stood before Aro, a careful distance away from the small-but-growing puddle of blood, and said, “Aro. Walk with me.”
The boy’s eyes snapped up to fix on Joros’s face, as mad a look as Joros had ever seen in any mage’s eyes. The pack was always so careful with their words around Aro, suggesting rather than commanding, cajoling instead of ordering. Joros had no such compulsions; his time was valuable, and he wasn’t about to waste it pleading with a madman when he could far more easily just tell the madman what to do. There was something deeply gratifying about the way Aro lurched to his feet; it was the same feeling he got when he watched the pack slaughter preachers: his influence made manifest.
When Joros turned and walked from the room, Aro followed tight at his heels. He let Aro keep the knife and the boy left a trail of blood drops in their wake. He led the boy out of the house and then, as they walked through the crumbling gates to the road beyond, he called Aro up to his side. “They tell me you haven’t been sleeping,” he said.
Aro nodded jerkily, but said nothing. Joros made a soft noise at the back of his throat and kept walking. There was a place some of the pack had made, the feet and fingers who had been messengers and pickpockets and now found themselves with nothing to do. They’d decided to take up farming, or perhaps gardening, or possibly just dirt-turning for all the skill they seemed to have at it. There was a little cove among the surrounding fields, visible only from the estate walls, where the feet had stomped down grass in a circle, where the fingers had dragged logs from the other side of the road, where they could sit together and stare at the furrows they’d scratched in the ground and wait to see if anything would grow.
Joros had thought it beyond foolish at first—how did they expect to grow anything in a sunless world?—but the rest of the world was still growing and sprouting, spring beginning to bloom. Perhaps they could have grown a garden, if they’d known how.
Joros pushed his way through the head-high wheat stalks that had gone wild in his family’s absence. To the foolish boy Joros had been, the fields had always felt a sprawling castle, endless halls and wild spires and ceilings that curved above his head.
Once he found the tramped-down cove—quiet and empty with the fingers and feet having apparently found something somehow more thrilling than staring at dirt—Joros sat down on the cleanest-looking log and waited for Aro to jerkily seat himself nearby. Too close; Anddyr had had the same habit, when he was lost in his madness, of not remembering that personal boundaries existed. Joros readjusted himself farther away from the boy and the trickling pool of blood he was still drawing from his palm. Staring together at the hacked-at ground, Joros asked, “Aro, why haven’t you been sleeping?”
Aro turned wild eyes to him. “I can’t.” It came out somewhere between a hiss and a wail, a vocal contortion that made Joros’s own throat hurt. “If I—I’ll—”
“Out with it.”
The words practically exploded from Aro. “They’ll escape if I’m not careful, escape again. If I don’t hold the barrier, it’ll fall, and I have to watch it. I can’t let Sharra down.” He stabbed his palm particularly hard, gave the dagger a twist, eyes bugging at the apparent pain though he made no sound and did not stop. “I have to keep her safe, I have to keep the pack safe, and if I don’t, they’ll—they’ll—”
“They’ll what?”
“They’ll send me down there,” Aro whispered, “and they won’t ever let me come back up.”
Genuinely curious, Joros asked, “Did they tell you that?” It seemed like something Tare, heartless bitch that she was, might say—precisely the same kind of motivating threat Joros might have used.
“I can see it in their eyes. If I’m not useful . . . if I’m bad . . . they’ll get rid of me. They won’t need me anymore. Same way they got rid of Rora.” Aro made a choking, broken sob around his sister’s name. The dagger fell soundlessly into the blood-watered soil as Aro curled around himself, doubling in two with his arms tight around his middle, leaving behind a dark smear of blood on his tunic that was hardly clean to begin with. A high, keening sound drifted up from where his head hung between his knees.
Joros looked up at the stars, blinding-bright without the moon to fight. Impatiently, methodically, he counted them. He did not draw the lines between the stars, did not make shapes in the night sky as he’d done when he was boy to pass the lonely hours. He counted the stars, quicker than a heart’s beating, and he waited.
Aro raised his head, splotchy with unshed tears, to stare pitifully at Joros. “I hate it here,” the boy whispered.
And opportunity flared its wings to land gracefully on Joros’s shoulder.
Joros rested his hand lightly on Aro’s back, in his best approximation of a fatherly way. “So do I. Aro,” he asked gently, “do you want to leave this place?”
Aro’s eyes went wide and then knit in confusion, and he made an inarticulate little noise.
“There’s so much to be done beyond the walls of the estate, so many that need help. I want to go and give that help, but I can’t do it alone. After Anddyr’s betrayal—”
This time the noise was a plaintive sound of denial with no real conviction behind it.
“After Anddyr’s betrayal,” Joros repeated firmly, “I’ve been left as alone as you are. Foolish of me, not to see it earlier. We can help each other, Aro. I need a mage. And I can take you
far away from here.”
Aro rocked slowly, reached up to run one hand through his hair and grip it tight at the roots. That keening sound came from him again, his eyes wide and wild and lost when he turned his face up to Joros. “They . . . they need me . . .”
“Do they really?” Joros asked, low and implacable as only the cold truth can be. “Have they ever?” As Aro whimpered, Joros patted his back in that supposed-fatherly way again. “They’ve done you a disservice, Aro, treated you as little more than a tool to reach their means. They don’t understand what you’re capable of. I know you can be so much more.” The boy looked up at him with red eyes and running nose. “If I go, Aro, will you come with me?”
He could have commanded it, used the madness and the drug that sluiced through Aro—but a change of heart wasn’t the sort of thing the susceptibility to suggestion was meant for. He could order the boy to come with him, and Aro would, but as soon as the edge of sanity touched him he’d go racing back to where he belonged. No, it was far better to use the boy’s weakness to convince him that Joros’s way was the right one, and let Aro think he’d made the choice on his own.
Voice tremoring on the edge of breaking, Aro said, “If I go . . . I’ll need to make sure they’ll stay safe.” There was an earnestness in his face, a need to explain and to be understood. “They’re my family. I can’t leave them to die.”
“The mages?” Joros asked, and Aro nodded grimly. “You’re a clever boy—you’ll figure something out. I know you’re capable of greatness, Aro.”
Those offhand words were the ones to make him break, strangely enough, and so Joros stared up at the stars again as Aro curled himself into a small and shaking shape as he wept.
When the boy finally got his emotions under control, he seemed to be holding also a portion of his sanity; he lurched to his feet, and there was determination in his eyes. “I can do it,” he said.
“We’ll need to leave as soon as we can,” Joros said. “So much time has already been wasted.”