Sunshield

by Emily B. Martin

  This obvious oversight trips me up. “I suppose . . . I’ll have to send a message. Is there someone you trust to station in Pasul until I get back?”

  He snorts. “With cloaked figures and secret letters being stolen from my rooms? No.” His foot drops from the chair cushion. “I’ll come with you.”

  As if on cue, a crackle of lightning flashes outside the window, streaking the far wall with rain shadows.

  “You just said it was too dangerous for you to leave,” I say.

  “I said it was too dangerous for me to ride out alone into the desert to confront a bloodthirsty outlaw,” he replies. “The horse track to Pasul is different. It’s lightly used, and what little highway robbery we have generally stays on the coach roads. I’ll come with you to Pasul and make inquiries while you’re gone.”

  “Er,” I begin. “Are you sure? I’m going to be sleeping on the ground. Outside.”

  “I’m aware, Prince Veran,” he says flatly. “And I’ll thank you that I am quite a robust camper.” He pauses. “Granted, it’s always been with the pavilion during hunting season up in the hills, but that’s beside the point. I don’t pretend it will be pleasant, but that is not why I am going. What’s your people’s expression? An open sky makes trials small?”

  That’s an Alcoran expression, but I won’t contest it. “If you’re sure. I can still try to secure a messenger in Pasul . . .”

  “No,” he says, and there’s a definite hardness in his voice now. “This idea may be crazy, but it’s the first hope I’ve had since Tamsin was attacked. The fewer people who know about it, the fewer chances it may go astray.” His sharp black gaze narrows at me. “This isn’t politics or curiosity to me, Veran. This is about getting Tamsin back. Her life is at stake, along with this country’s throne. You understand that, don’t you?”

  I nod vigorously. “Uah, of course.”

  “Good.” He stands from his chair. “Let me change into traveling clothes and pack a few things, and then we can go. We’ll tell the guards we’re having an argument about racehorses as we go to the stables—it should hold for a few hours.”

  By the Light, this is moving fast. There will be no time to relay our hasty plan to Eloise or leave a note begging forgiveness from Rou.

  Priorities, I remind myself. If we can keep the alliance from collapsing, there will be plenty of time to plead my case later. And perhaps, if we’re successful, I might not need to grovel at all. I get a vision of Rou clapping me on the shoulder, of Eloise smiling at me, of letters sent back home with accounts of my heroics. My stomach warms, and I struggle to keep my expression grim to match the look on Iano’s face.

  He doesn’t see my internal battle. He picks up his rapier. “What’s your weapon, by the way?”

  It strikes me that wit is the incorrect response. “Um, I’m decent at targets, though I’ve never shot a crossbow.”

  He heads to his wall of quivers, and too late I notice the dart board off to one side. Vynce has one like it on the wall of his room, and he’s driven the staff to the edge of sanity with the collection of pinholes from missed targets. On Iano’s, there are no holes in the wall, only six darts clustered near the center of the board, just random enough to suggest they were thrown into that arrangement, not shoved in purposefully.

  Iano takes down a bow longer than I am tall, running his fingers along the bone-white limbs.

  “Er,” I begin, trying to head him off before he asks me to draw it. “But I’m not good enough to waste a longbow on. I’m used to flatbows. And anyway, I don’t think meeting the Sunshield Bandit heavily armed is the best strategy. We still don’t know how many outlaws she has in her camp, and if I look ready for a fight . . .” She’ll probably fight me.

  “Well, I’m not traveling the back roads to Pasul after dark without arms,” he says flatly, removing the elegant quiver with the blue-fletched arrows. He rummages in a trunk and emerges with a few coils of bowstring, a box that rattles with arrowheads, and a bintu hunting knife with its characteristic curve. He checks the edge on the knife, sheathes it, and tosses it to me. I catch it awkwardly.

  “Now you’ve got something, at least.” He removes a leather satchel from the trunk. “Here’s another consideration, though. Assuming the Sunshield Bandit cooperates and does attack you outside Pasul, what if she doesn’t stay to listen? Most of our reports say she strikes fast. What if she runs off before you can convince her to help?”

  I worry my lip, pretending to test the heft and handling of the knife to buy myself time. The metal gleams coldly, turning the reflected firelight pale.

  My head shoots up.

  “Oh . . . I have an idea,” I say in a rush. “The beginning of an idea, at least. Can we make a side trip before going to the stables?”

  “If it’s quick.”

  “I think it will be.” I sheathe the knife with a snap. “She uses the sun as a weapon, but we can go after her with the night.”

  Iano tsks as he heads toward his bedroom door.

  “There’s no need to get dramatic,” he says over his shoulder.

  But I think, with how fast this is all going, dramatic is the only way this is going to work.

  Tamsin

  H

  I

  R

  E

  S

  Veran

  Iano proves to be a more stalwart travel companion than I would have thought. Our first twenty-four hours of travel are defined largely by being utterly, penetratingly soaked. The rain does not so much fall as simply envelop us, above, around, below, and soon inside as well. Despite my heavy felted cloak, within a half hour even my undergarments are soaked, making my seat squelch in the saddle with every rise of my horse’s shoulders.

  The few times I steal a glance at Iano, his face is set and grim. He’s traded his jeweled hairpin for a kind of gallant horsetail under a black hood, festooned with a golden tassel. Between that, his expensively styled tack, and the graceful longbow and quiver slung over his back, we’re clearly marked as some flavor of nobility, but I’m hoping we can pass for merely well-to-do travelers and not two princes off on a highly inadvisable mission.

  Our first night of camping finds us in a small clearing off the road, huddled under a questionably rigged tarpaulin. The rain streams through the canopy, collecting in the center of the tarp and making it sag until a steady trickle pours between us and puddles on the ground.

  Iano doesn’t comment at our miserable shelter, but it’s eating away at me. Woodcraft has been a staple of my life since before my first breath, but I’m realizing too late it’s not exactly hereditary. I’ve heard enough of Mama’s tales to repeat them in my sleep, and I’ve read the collection of Woodwalker handbooks more than the average Woodwalker, but there can be no denying that I’m severely lacking in hands-on experience. Climbing trees and knowing birdcalls is one thing, but it’s another thing entirely to stand holding a rope, befuddled by cold and stiff fingers, trying to recall which knot is used to lash together a bivouac. Is it a slipknot, and if so, which one? Is it an eight on a bight? For that matter, how does one tie an eight on a bight without a manual?

  As I’m gnawing on these intricacies, Iano gives a little start and slaps his neck. He pulls his hand away to reveal a crushed mosquito. When we first left the palace, he produced a jar of oily cream that smelled of lemon balm, but a few intrepid insects haven’t been deterred by it.

  “How soon does rainshed fever develop after you’ve been bitten?” I ask.

  Iano grimaces and wipes his palm on his cloak. “A few days, usually, but we’ve gotten a fair distance away from Tolukum—the danger of fever diminishes in the outer hamlets. Nobody really knows why.”

  Perhaps it’s the recent series of events that does it—the dead birds on the ground, Eloise’s sickness, the mosquitoes in the window—but the answer strikes me like a lightning bolt. That same curiosity Eloise and I mused over not long ago now seems plain as day. I twist to face him.

  “How long have those giant
windows been up in the palace?”

  “The atriums?” He scratches his new bug bite. “The first went up during my great-grandmother’s reign, perhaps seventy, seventy-five years ago. That was when our factories first started producing sheet glass. The next few were added a decade or so later, and then the biggest was completed about fifteen years ago.”

  “And there’s been a rise in rainshed fever since then?”

  “Only around Tolukum,” he says.

  “Right. Iano—has anyone noticed how many birds strike the glass of the palace?”

  His face creases with confusion. “Well, that’s unavoidable, I suppose. One does hear them occasionally—”

  “Not occasionally,” I say. “All the time. All day long, every day. Do you know how many dead birds I saw along the palace foundation?”

  “What were you doing at the foundation?”

  “Wallowing in despair, thanks to our interaction at Bakkonso. There were dozens, Iano, just in that little section, and I’m sure there are more all over the terraces and windowsills.”

  “Well, what of it?” he asks. “That’s the responsibility of the staff—to clean up refuse like that. What does it have to do with rainshed fever?”

  Something very Silvern is waking up inside me, and ethnocentric bias be damned, I know my folk would have made this connection before now. “Those songbirds eat mosquitoes, Iano. As you’ve put up more and more glass in the city, you’re killing off more and more birds. Fewer birds means more mosquitoes, which means higher chances of a person being bitten by one that’s infected. That’s why it’s only in the city, not the villages. It’s your glass, Iano.”

  He stops scratching, his gaze going unfocused. He stares blankly at the trickle of water streaming from our drooping tarpaulin.

  “That seems . . .” he begins. “I mean, how can we really know for sure?”

  “I know that killing off a single type of animal in those numbers is going to tip nature’s balance,” I reply. “That’s something my folk would never overlook.”

  A flicker of disdain crosses his face. “Well, we can’t all be your folk,” he snaps, mimicking my antiquated phrase. “And I’ll have you know Moquoia has its own foresters, not so different from your fabled Woodwalkers.” He pauses, thoughtful, while I hold back the biggest scoff of my life.

  “Though,” he adds after a moment, “I’ll mention it to the staff when we get back to Tolukum. Perhaps they’ll have a more definite estimate of how many birds they collect.”

  “You should cover the glass,” I say. “Or at least string mirrors inside.”

  “That will be a difficult expense to justify.”

  “Even if it brings down the cases of rainshed fever?”

  He gives me a resigned look. “If,” he says. “That’s a very big if.”

  We lapse into silence for the remainder of the evening, listening to the shifting timbre of the rain on our tarp. There’s little opportunity for sleep, wet and uncomfortable as we are, and the night passes agonizingly slowly. When the first gray slips of light start to show through the trees, we get up without comment. We share some soggy walnut bread, I roll up our sodden tarp, and then we mount and continue on.

  Fortunately—blessedly—we travel as quickly as I’d hoped. The coach road, by necessity, runs parallel to the coastline below the western spine of the mountains, forced to make a few lengthy detours over bridges stout enough to support heavy loads. Our track, however, splits from the main road early on our second day and takes a more direct line toward Pasul, leading us up and down steep valley sides carpeted with growth so thick you could burrow inside it. Gnarled hardwoods arch over the track, their green-hung boughs made monstrous with ferns and mosses. In the late afternoon, after a long, slippery climb over a misty ridgeline, we cross a tangible border—the fir and hemlock trees transition into aspen and ponderosa pine, the lush moss gives way to tougher lichens, and the skies ease from moody gray to hazy blue.

  We’ve reached the rainshadow.

  It’s bitterly cold, especially since we’ve hardly had a chance to dry out before night falls, and there’s a confident wind gusting over the ridgeline. In the last slips of daylight, we set up a hasty camp in a stand of boulders that act as a windbreak. There are no sturdy trees to lash up the tarp, but given how well that went the first night, I put my effort instead into collecting splintery lengths of tough mountain juniper for a fire. Fortunately, my firelighting skills are something I could always easily work on from Lampyrinae, and soon Iano and I huddle into our damp bedrolls on either side of a steady blaze.

  I’m tired enough from forty-eight hours of hard travel and no sleep that I don’t wake at all to stoke the fire, and by morning it’s stone cold. Puffing and chilled through, limbs aching, we slap ourselves, stomp our frozen feet, and clumsily pack up camp. Our horses watch, their breath misting around their noses, probably amused at our pitiful attempts to warm up before we fling ourselves into their saddles and urge them downhill, toward warmer air.

  The one bad thing about this route, I muse as we start to thaw out, is that we’re missing the redwoods. The groves of giants are all on the western slopes, south of Tolukum, where the soil is sea-breeze damp but not drenched. But it’s clear as we descend the eastern slopes of the Moquovik Mountains that the soil is now too dry and nutrient-poor to support such mammoth plant life, devoid of the fertile foothills fed by constant rainfall on the other side of the ridge. Our way is instead buffeted by pine, ash, and a heinous amount of scrub oak, choking the path and scratching our calves as our horses push through it.

  “Amazing that the landscape can be so different after just a few hours of riding,” I say to Iano around midmorning. “Too bad we have to rush through it.”

  “We’re not here to admire the scenery,” he says grimly.

  I shut up for the rest of the morning.

  By afternoon, the last of the moisture finally wicks away from my clothes, just in time for the sun to gain its full fever pitch. My absent-minded observation from earlier becomes a serious consternation. I drag my rolled-up sleeve over my forehead, marveling that in twenty-four hours I’ve gone from feeling like I’d never be warm and dry again to sweating out all the rain Moquoia has to offer.

  Our third night’s camp is the easiest, with only a few requisite discomforts, and after another long morning of riding, we crest the head of a drop-off to see the border town of Pasul below. The land changes dramatically before us, the dimpled hills giving way to sagebrush flats as suddenly as if someone had taken a giant rolling pin right up to our feet, leaving us perched on a rocky cliff. This is the final hindrance to a sturdy coach road—even if a coach managed to get this far, over and through the steep, tangled slopes, it could never manage the switchbacking trail down the final incline to the flats below. We take it slowly, our horses patiently plodding around each tight turn, bringing us finally into town as the sun drops behind the cliff at our backs.

  Pasul is a place that seemingly can’t decide what it wants to be, waffling between a rural outpost and bustling city. It’s too far out to support any industry beyond the mail line and quarry camps, but it’s the only bit of civilization for miles, and full of transients—ranchers bringing cattle to market, homesteaders laying in supplies, free quarriers on leave, and the odd businessperson cleaving carefully to the small reputable quarter. The main street is wide and well-kept, flanked by inns and public houses, but the alleys that lead off it are narrow and dark, with signs for less luxurious accommodations for the short on change—work-for-rent, copper hangs, and the ominous roof cots—tether included.

  Iano and I make our way past the less savory alleys and head for the Sweet Pine, where Rou and Eloise and I stayed with Colm upon our arrival. It’s a grand little building, a clear mashup of Moquoian design and Alcoran building material—rounded walls of white adobe and red tile, with generous windows throughout, though the glass is made of small cut panes, not the endless panels of Tolukum Palace. There’s a clean public roo
m below, mostly filled with well-to-do travelers and business folk. The girl at the bar asks for our names.

  Partway through giving my name, I decide to lie. “V-vvvynce,” I stammer unconvincingly, my brother being the first V that pops to mind, though I suppose I could have gone with my father. “Vyncet Whitetail. And—” I glance at Iano.

  “Escer Gee,” he says.

  It must be glaringly obvious that we’re lying, but she writes them down anyway, making me spell out my foreign vowels. Most folk in town speak at least a little of both Eastern and Moquoian, but the Silverwood is a long way off, and nobody in Alcoro takes epithets like we do. She hands us a key and directs us to the second floor.

  The room is small and neat, with two narrow rope beds and a potted agave plant in the window. I want to fling my bruised, achy body onto the mattress and sleep for a day, but we both have things to do if I’m going to ride out into the desert tomorrow morning. We deposit our bags and head back out—he to inquire about a coach and driver willing to travel alone into bandit country, me to clean out the town’s general store of its nonperishable goods.

  Before the sun rises the following morning, Iano helps me get dressed in the fanciest Moquoian ensemble I’ve been gifted. It’s a rather offensive shade of raspberry, with long tails on the jacket and cabochon buttons the size of my thumbnail along the calves. I suck in my stomach as I fight to fasten the jacket over the waistcoat.

  “I must admit,” I say breathlessly as Iano fruitlessly twists my hair into something that will hold a pin, “I find your clothing very restrictive.”

  “You walk too loosely,” he says, tugging at my scalp, as if it might make my hair grow. “You walk like you have saplings for legs. The silk is meant to allow the wearer to walk gracefully with minimal effort—it creates the posture for you.” He stabs the pin through the knot he’s managed to fuss up and stands back, looking unsatisfied. “It looks a bit like a toddler got into his father’s jewelry box.”