Empire of Sky

by Gabrielle S Awe

  I wonder why that is.

  CHAPTER 19

  In the morning Kjiersten pulls us from our rooms. The boys are bleary eyed and I wonder how late they stayed up last night. Kjiersten hands us each a new travelsack, sturdier than the ones we bought on the airship, and she supervises as we re-pack our bags. I like the new travelsack; it’s made of leather and toughened, waxed canvas, and it has a flap over the top and multiple pockets inside and outside and a strap that goes over each shoulder.

  I contemplate discarding the clothes I’ve collected; I don’t want to wear them again now that I’m back in my leathers but I hate throwing away clothes. In the end I keep them. The box I leave wrapped in the original travelsack and shove that in the new one. Kjiersten doesn’t ask about it and I’m glad.

  The boys are silently complying with her directions and I’m glad for that too; it’s too early for squabbling and I just want to get to the Undying. Kjiersten hands us dried meat wrapped in flatbread and canteens of water that hook onto our new packs and tells us we can eat on the road.

  As we leave the palace and set across the sky bridges in the trees I’m disappointed that the Queen hasn’t come to wish us well, or say goodbye to her son. Then Alexsi turns and grins and I see her, standing at the end of the marble steps, waving a birdlike arm. I don’t care if I ever see her again but I hope Alexsi does.

  The walkways are quiet; the suns are barely up and I can hear people stirring in the trees but few are out and about yet. The morning is cool and I enjoy it after the heat of the last two days; I’m glad Kjiersten insisted on leaving early. Everything smells green and damp and the small treecats are blinking sleepily and rubbing their faces while they lie twined around clusters of twigs and nestled in the cradles where the branches meet the trunk.

  Kjiersten eyes my leather slippers and shakes her head. “You can’t walk through the Forest in those; they’re too thin. Those city shoes won’t protect your feet at all.” She points to her shoes, which are made of stiffer leather with a thick sole and leather sides that lace up her calves like boots. I shrug helplessly.

  “I have these, or my silk slippers from the palace, or my fur boots - but I don’t want to wear those, they’re too hot.” I’ve never had so many shoes before and none of them are right. I don’t know that my feet need protecting but I definitely don’t want to ruin my leather slippers; when will I ever get a chance to get more from the Guild hall?

  Kjiersten looks at the princes’ shoes and disapproves of those as well. They are thicker than mine but they are also meant for palaces and city streets. She looks at the sky and sighs. “We need to take care of this before we leave the City. I can’t afford for one of you to get injured out there.” Her eyes slide past Alexsi; I think part of her still wouldn’t mind if something happened to him.

  Ten minutes later she’s banging on a shoe stall and barking out orders. The small man behind the counter grumbles about opening early and he still has sleep in his face but when he wakes up enough to recognize the Archer and the Prince he’s all business. He mostly ignores Zair and me which is fine; I’m not used to so much special attention and I just want to get this done and get back on the road.

  Kjiersten directs the cobbler on sizes and shoe varieties and quicker than I can believe we are all wearing shoes just like hers (she calls them mocs) and stowing away our others in our packs while Zair pays. He throws in a very generous tip and I smile; our Prince is not the same young man I tried to garrotte in his room.

  The new shoes are an adjustment after my slippers but they are quite fine. They make a small noise on the wood of the tree city so I practice different ways of stepping to minimize the sound. I catch Kjiersten watching me and I walk normally after that. She’s wearing beads in her braids this morning; I recognize some of the ones I bought at the Night Market and a drunken memory hits me, a memory of pressing beads into her hands and hiding them in her pockets while she laughs and dodges my kisses. My face flushes. She also has one of my knives in her belt and it’s the one she shot out of the air when the Priestess tried to force me to kill Zair.

  She’s pretty spectacular with that bow. I trained on the crossbow, of course, but assassins don’t have as much use for a shortbow (or even a longbow, but I haven’t seen one of those in years.) I’m good with a crossbow but nothing like her level of skill; I’d like to see her use her bow more. She handles it like it’s an extension of her body, a true master of her craft. The arrow she used in the palace was a standard shortbow arrow, 36 inches long, but she also has other lengths strapped to her back in what looks like a custom quiver.

  It takes us an hour to go across the tree city of Nevel. By the time we make it to the far side the city has woken and the residents, dressed in browns and greens and grays, are weaving and carving bowls and even stringing together fairy crystals in intricate designs. “Crafts district,” Kjiersten explains as we pass through. One of the craftswomen is stringing crystals and lights into a pattern of spidersilk suspended in a wooden frame that looks more grown than carved. It catches the light of the suns and brings me a brief joy as we walk by.

  All the residents wave at Kjiersten if they see her, and she waves back - not cheerily, like Zair would, but as casually, as if she knows each of them personally. None of them recognize Alexsi and he seems sad; a consequence of his virtual exile for most of his life. I hope when this is done he can come back and get to know his people. I wonder if they will still be his people when we are done; they are all happier than the people of Hinshalla. None of them look like slaves. But, just like in the Winter City, there aren’t as many people as I expected.

  “Where exactly is the Undying?” Zair asks as we leave the crafts district and begin our descent to the ground.

  “He’s out there,” Kjiersten gestures out into the forest. “There is no way to be exact about it. He is where he is.”

  Zair looks annoyed but he’s trying. “How do you find him?”

  Kjiersten chews on her cheek and shrugs. “He’s my father. I can always feel where he is. Besides, it’s not like he moves. It’s more like the Hollow World moves around him, so where he is in relation to us changes.”

  “What is the Hollow World?” I’ve wanted to know ever since the Queen said it.

  Kjiersten doesn’t look at me and it’s the Archer who answers, not Kjiersten the girl I danced with at the Night Market. “The Undying will tell you. It is not my place. I am only Guardian, and for now, Guide.”

  Zair is openly curious now. “Kjiersten, I’m sorry if this is personal, but who is your mother? How did you become the Guardian of Nevel?”

  It is Alexsi who answers for her. “Her mother is one of the Forest People, Zair. They guard the Forest of Nevel, along with the Great Owls. They are a secret in our realm. They are not like us.”

  Kjiersten looks dead ahead and doesn’t say anything, back straight, curved hips moving with the fierceness I sensed in her the night we danced. I wonder if she’s entirely human. Alexsi doesn’t continue and Zair and I know there are no more questions that can be asked.

  When we get to the ground it’s disorienting; I’ve grown used to looking at different vertical levels but from here it’s just us and the dirt and the bottoms of trees again. All the wonders of the treetops are hidden from us now. “Do not stray from the path,” Kjiersten reminds us, and her eyes shine oddly in the muted light down here; her teeth look longer. “It’s not safe for humans out there.”

  ◆◆◆

  There isn’t just one path. It forks and strays and meanders and I’m pretty sure it doesn’t actually go where we’re going and more path appears because Kjiersten wants it to. I’m more frightened in this strange forest than I’ve been since we left Hinshalla. All the other dangers we’ve faced I’ve understood; I’ve either trained for them or heard legends about them or, like the Night Train, they were so far beyond comprehension I didn’t know to be afraid.

  This forest, though, is deep and dark and fey. I feel a dark heart pulsing in
it and with each pulse something new appears; red spiders the size of my head, crawling up trunks of trees just off the path. More of the little green stick people we saw on the way to the City of Nevel, but these do not look friendly; they click their needle-like fingers together and watch us with liquid black eyes. The treecats here are larger and their ears are more pointed than rounded and instead of chasing moths they look like they chase larger prey. They look like if they banded together they could take down a small human.

  Worse are the things we can’t see; the things that move in the bushes and slither in the dark out in the forest itself, just feet away from the path but impenetrable to human eyes. Based on everything I’ve heard from Kjiersten I decide it’s just as well that we can’t see into the Forest; I don’t want to see what I’m hearing.

  The suns are setting and, even more so than when we left the Night Train, I don’t want to sleep on the path. I also don’t want to keep going; I’m scared of what the moons will bring out of the forest. I’m sweating and gripping my knife when Kjiersten calls a halt.

  “The path is safe, Alinya,” she reminds me, not unkindly.

  “Is the path narrowing?” I ask her, voice shaking.

  The princes look at me, worried.

  “No,” everyone but me says. I feel faint.

  “We’ll stop here for the night,” Kjiersten decides. “You don’t look good. The fairy fire is probably still working its way through you.” I don’t tell her I’m terrified. The Guild trains most fear out of us; fear makes you weak. There are no human threats, and few magical ones, that I can’t face. But this…

  A snake slithers up to the path and stops, watching us. Kjiersten nods her head at it and starts unpacking camp supplies. “We have at least another day of walking. Let’s do a full camp tonight; you all look like you’re not used to sleeping outside.”

  She’s given each of us a bedroll and we set them out, along with the small wooden cups and plates that came with our packs. She sets out a ring of stones in the middle of our bedrolls and then takes three large chunks of some odd material out of her pack and sets them in the fire ring. She uses a striker and suddenly we have a campfire. “Ever-wood,” she explains. “You can use each chunk a few times before they are consumed.” The flames lick the ever-wood but the wood isn’t consumed; there’s no ash.

  I hold my hands close to the fire and I feel the heat. Even though the forest is still warm from the suns setting, the ground here is cooler than where we first entered and the fire is welcome. It’s even more welcome when she heats flatbread on the rocks of the fire ring and then spreads the familiar layers of cheese, honey, and nuts on them. We’re starving and the boys eat theirs in five minutes. They eye mine greedily and I take my time finishing it, licking my fingers after every bite, and then I grin at them.

  “Still hungry?” Kjiersten asks and they nod; after a brief pause I nod too. I love the flatbread but my body needs more protein.

  “Ok. I’ll be back in a bit.” Kjiersten unshoulders her bow and walks off into the forest before we can say anything.

  “Will she be ok out there?” I ask Alexsi. He looks a little nervous but he reassures me.

  “She’s the Archer; this is her world, here in the Forest. She’ll be fine.”

  We sit on our bedrolls and wait. Zair distracts us by telling stories of breaking out of the palace when he was a boy; evading the guards, stealing from the Priestess, getting chased by the Flaming Man. I barely believe half of what he’s saying but he has Alexsi and me laughing and sometimes that’s more important than truth.

  Then he turns serious. “I think I saw her, once,” he says. We wait for him to explain. “The little Priestess, the next one. There’s a temple in the Palace; the Priestess lives there, and the nobles go there to seek her counsel or gossip, disguised as prayer. I was sneaking around, looking for trouble, and I went into the private rooms, the Priestess’ rooms. One of them was cold and empty of everything except for this bed in a tube.” He gestures with his hands, indicating a large cylinder. “It was even colder than the room; I touched it. It was made of glass and the white shiny stuff we found on the train, and there was a little girl inside it. She looked just like the Priestess, but smaller. She had the same skin, the same gold designs, but her eyes were closed as if she were sleeping. I thought it was a coffin.” He pauses and takes a long drink from his canteen.

  “Her body was covered with a blanket but her head was bare. She was bald, completely bald, and there were tubes going into her head. I thought she was dead. I thought the Priestess was keeping her dead daughter in the Temple of the Sky and I was even more terrified of her after that. But now…” he trails off.

  “Now we know,” I finish for him. “It’s almost worse. They’re growing the next Priestess in a tube in the Temple.”

  Just then Kjiersten returns and drops a small deer on the ground.

  “I’m going to teach you to dress a deer,” she says to us. “Watch.”

  Her movements are neat and efficient as she slices it open, drains the blood, skins it, and removes the organs, which she sets on a piece of the deer’s hide that she’s stretched out on the ground. We’re a ways from the campsite now, a few feet back on the path, and she uses another section of hide for a pile of meat that she carves off the deer as she breaks it down.

  I’m trying to follow along as best I can; Zair is enthralled and Alexsi looks nauseous as she explains which of the organs are edible and which are not. “We won’t use any of them, though; we’ll give them back to the forest as an offering. We can’t eat this much meat anyway.” She holds the heart for a moment before setting it in the pile of organs. I can tell she wants to put it in the other pile; I don’t know why she doesn’t.

  She rinses her hands with her canteen and then pulls a bag of rock salt out of her pack along with a few sections of leather. She divides the meat pile in half and packs one of the halves in salt and then wraps the pieces in leather sections and ties them off. “The salt will help the meat keep; we can have it for lunch tomorrow.”

  We help her toss the bones, hide, and organs into the forest. The leather bundles get divided up into our packs and then she carries the rest of the meat over to the fire. She shows us how to season it, using salt, pepper, and a small pouch of herbs.

  There’s a small pile of branches by the fire and she shows us how to peel them, then we slide the branches through the deer meat and roast it over the fire.

  “Deer is pretty lean,” she explains. “Cooking it this way will make it a little tough but it will still be good.” The meat cooks quickly and soon we are eating fresh roasted venison by the campfire. It’s delicious; there’s something about eating food outside, food you’ve helped prepare with your own hands. I’m not sure I could dress a deer by myself after this but she’s certainly taken our minds off the forest.

  CHAPTER 20

  I wake up every few hours. The boys and I are sleeping by the fire and Kjiersten watches over us. Every time I wake she is alert; she’s looking out at the forest. Her face has an expression, a longing to it, that I recognize. That’s how I feel when I think of my lost parents. She scans the forest, then checks on us, then gazes out again. I reach for her hand and then I fall asleep again. She won’t let us roll off the path in our sleep.

  When I wake again it’s morning. For once Alexsi is up first; Zair is still sleeping and Kjiersten is gazing out into the forest again and Alexsi is holding out his hands, concentrating. The trees around us shift and stretch and Kjiersten turns to look at us. “Stop that,” she commands sharply, and Alexsi drops his hands.

  “What’s wrong?” he asks, hurt.

  “You cannot use your power here; it’s forbidden.”

  “Forbidden by who?”

  “The Gods,” she answers. “If you use your powers in this part of the Forest you will wake it, and if you wake the Forest, even I can’t protect you.”

  She packs up, muttering about “unnatural magic” and “idiot princes.” I’m
as surprised as Alexsi; if the powers came from the Gods, how are they unnatural? “Five fucking Families,” she continues as she douses the fire with water from her canteen. The three ever-wood cubes look exactly the same as they did when she pulled them from her pack. Without waiting for them to cool she wraps them in leather and shoves them in her pack. We wake up Zair and finish packing up camp.

  Kjiersten hands us flatbread and salted meat and we eat as we walk. After an hour of walking Alexsi catches up to Kjiersten and apologizes to her in a low voice. She ignores him, doesn’t even look at him. “I didn’t know, Kjiersten, I really didn’t,” he says. “I only just found out about my power from my mother. She never told me not to use it in the Forest.”

  “You’re a child with a new toy,” she grits out. “Except that toy is a sword. Be sure you don’t kill anyone with it. Not all of us are happy to be at the mercy of princes and their power.” I can tell she’s not just talking about his magic.

  “I’m sorry about that too, Kjiersten,” he says softly. “The betrothal is already broken as far as I’m concerned. I will do whatever I can to make sure you are free.”

  She finally looks at him and gives him one quick nod before looking forward at the path again. Alexsi drops back to walk with Zair and I imagine Kjiersten’s straight back looks a bit more relaxed now.

  The hours pass. My feet hurt in my new shoes but with the rocks and twigs I’ve stepped on I can only imagine what condition they’d be in if I hadn’t gotten these mocs. My leather slippers would be in shreds. Zair is whistling a tune and telling more stories to Alexsi - cheerier than the one about the small Priestess.

  Kjiersten stops suddenly. “Let’s eat here,” she says, in a queer tone of voice. Her eyes are roaming the Forest. We sit on our bedrolls and take out the salted venison. “No fire,” she says with no explanation, and squats down on the path, looking ahead and to the left. Alexsi and Zair and I sit quietly, chewing on the tough meat and watching her watch the forest.