Sunshield

by Emily B. Martin

  Her bandanna puffs with her breath. “Turn out your pockets.”

  My throat works again under her knifepoint. “I don’t have anything in my pockets.”

  The point digs a little deeper, bringing a sharp sting. My heart rate spikes. I fumble for my pockets while attempting to continue.

  “I didn’t bring anything in my pockets,” I try again, turning out the cloth linings. “But I did bring you something else.” I reach under my cape—slowly, because those eyes could probably sear holes in my flesh if I move too suddenly. I pull out the drawstring bag.

  “I came looking for you,” I begin. “I brought you money. Thirty keys. But it’s a pittance compared to what I’m prepared to offer you, if you’ll help me.”

  Her gaze falls on the bag.

  “Open it,” she demands without removing the knife.

  I do, showing her the glinting coins inside.

  “Toss it outside,” she says.

  I pull the bag tight again and throw it haphazardly—it’s hard to maneuver with her blade nicking my skin. It jingles when it hits the ground. For some reason, it sounds like my efforts shattering in the dirt.

  “I’m prepared to offer you a sum of two hundred keys,” I say quickly, hoping to keep her attention. “Plus the favor of both Moquoia and Alcoro, if you’ll help me find someone who’s been abducted.”

  Her eyes flash. “I don’t help nobles.”

  “You’re not helping nobles.” I can clarify the lie later. “You’re helping another trafficking victim, someone stolen away, being held prisoner somewhere here in the Ferinno.”

  “Ready the horses, Saiph,” she calls out. “And pick up that purse outside the stage.”

  “Wait,” I say hurriedly. “Please. I can offer you almost anything you need, as well as the promise of anonymity. This isn’t a trick, or a trap. A woman was abducted outside Pasul, near the Moquoian border, a woman named Tamsin Moropai. We believe she’s being held prisoner somewhere close by—letters have been sent as blackmail that indicate she’s within a few days’ ride of the border. She has golden skin, and long black hair—no, wait!”

  With no heed to my monologue, the Sunshield Bandit starts to back out the stage door, her knifepoint leaving my neck. Unthinking, I lunge forward and grab her wrist.

  Whack.

  The world goes blindingly white, and then blurry. I reel backward and slide down the cushion, my head spinning. Vaguely I reach up and touch the throbbing spot where she slammed the edge of her buckler into the side of my forehead.

  She stands over me, silhouetted against the open door, the sun making a halo of the little wisps that have frizzed out of her locks. She shifts slightly so the sun beams directly into my eyes. I squeeze them shut.

  “I’ll use the knife next time,” she says evenly. I draw in a ragged breath, hearing the thump of her boots on the running board. “Thanks for the money.”

  I grab for my last hope.

  “Lark,” I croak.

  She pauses at the sound of her name on my lips. I force my eyes open against the pain and the glare. I shift out of the direct sun. My cape is strewn sideways, the chain pressing against my throat. I unhook it and struggle to sit upright. She’s staring at me, her fingers gripping her knife as if she’s seriously considering passing it through my sternum and into the seat cushion on the far side.

  “Lark,” I say again. “I need your help.”

  “I don’t help nobles,” she repeats.

  “I’m not a noble,” I say. “At least, I’m not a Moquoian noble, or an Alcoran one. I’m just trying to save a life, and help a friend.” And facilitate peace between the east and the west, and save my own future from sinking into the mud. “I dressed like one because I hoped it would draw your attention. I was looking for you—you have to see that. Why else would I come out here with no guards? Please, you’re the only person who can help me.”

  Her gaze rakes over me. To my utter surprise, she steps back inside the stage, and even stranger, she sheathes her knife. But that buckler is still on her arm, glinting dangerously. And when she bends forward and takes my chin in her fingers, my thoughts vanish. I realize I’d been considering myself more or less immune to her mythological powers, since I was actively looking for her, inviting her to rob me. Since I’m not Moquoian, or Alcoran, or otherwise invested in her pursuits.

  At present, I feel very much the idiot. She’d kill me whether I was a beggar or the Light incarnate.

  She holds my chin still in her fingers. Her eyes are just a few inches from mine. They’re shot with gold.

  “How do you know my name?” she asks. “Did you get it in Pasul? Are there posters there?”

  “I’ll tell you,” I say, breathless, “if you’ll sit down and hear me out.”

  Her fingers tighten on my chin, and her eyes crease in anger. The bandanna flutters in front of her mouth. Distantly I wonder if I’m about to meet her buckler again.

  She’s silent for a long moment, longer, longer—it feels like eternity that she simply stares at me from close range, my face locked in her fingers. I tense in the quiet, and then I break the cardinal rule of diplomacy, the one Queen Mona Alastaire drilled into me from childhood.

  I rush to break the silence.

  “Why do they call you Lark?” I blurt.

  It’s such a foolish, asinine question—but her name is a misnomer. There’s no doubt about it. A lark is a sweet little songbird, lilting and delicate. A bird of poetry and children’s rhymes. Of lovers.

  It doesn’t describe her in the slightest.

  Her eyes comb over me again, from my face to my neck and collar and back up. Then she leans even closer, the cloth of her bandanna brushing my lips. My breath catches in a near choke in my throat. Her fingers leave my chin, sliding down to my cravat, close to where her knifepoint was earlier. I clutch the velvet cushion beneath me.

  “Because it’s how I like to do things,” she hisses. “On a lark.”

  She tilts her chin forward and crushes her lips against mine, the bandanna bunching between us. My heart bursts through my chest. Her fingers twist my cravat so hard the knot cinches against my skin.

  And then she’s gone.

  My eyes fly open—I didn’t realize I’d closed them—and I blink as the coach door swings on its hinges. My heart beats around my chest like a bird in a laurel thicket, and at some point, I remember to breathe again. I resist the urge to put my fingers to my lips, left feeling slightly bruised, with the taste of sand. I’ve had a string of romantic partners at home and university, but that was in a different galaxy altogether. That felt less like a kiss and more like an attack.

  From outside comes the whinny of a horse, a few shouts. The swearing of the driver. Hoofbeats thundering away.

  “They took your horse,” the driver calls.

  My breath streams out through my teeth, and I press my hand to my chest, trying to calm my heartbeat. I slide my fingers to my collar, trying to feel if there’s blood there from her knife or fiery burn marks from her fingers. It’s the same place she grabbed while she kissed me, leaving my cravat mussed out of its knot.

  Suddenly I lurch upright, clutching my collar. Frantically, I run my fingers over the silk, searching my lapels, then my trousers, then the seat cushion beneath me.

  Great swarming Light.

  It wasn’t a kiss.

  It was a distraction.

  She stole my firefly.

  Tamsin

  The bats tonight feel extra loud. I can’t lift my head to look at them, because I can barely stand to pick it up off the ground. I’ve had it clenched between my elbows since this morning. The pain I’d grown used to sharing headspace with has morphed, twisted, pupated into some new creature with wings and spines.

  This pain is making it harder for me to keep my thoughts in safe places. Flickers of melodies I’d been writing, turns of phrases, the satisfactory inhalation after a performance, the touch of warm hands—they all bob at the edge of my mind, where I’ve tried so
hard to cloister them. The bricks I’ve been setting to keep it all walled back keep crumbling.

  This captivity has been so much starker, so much plainer than that other stint in my life. There was pain in that one, too, a wrist that burned from twelve-hour days of scribing until I could barely close my fingers, and an emptying dread that I had gotten myself into something far more ugly and dangerous than I thought when I signed the bond. But there was distraction in the slavers’ work, an occupation, and one I learned more from than any of my other jobs. Like most people in Moquoia, I was raised with the idea that bond service was just another form of employment, a stopgap for people who had fallen down on their luck.

  Maybe that’s how the practice started, though I doubt it.

  I have very little shame in my life, it’s true, but what I do have rests in the recognition that I believed in the benign necessity of bond servitude right up until I was on the wrong end of the system. I assumed it was one of those regretful pillars on which society rested, and that if circumstances were truly terrible for those involved, surely someone would have done something about it by now.

  Three months as a cog in the slaving system cured me of that delusion. My nights were spent locked in a windowless room with a roommate, a dulcimer, and little else. But the days were far, far worse, defined by an unending shuffle of frightened Alcoran children stolen out of the Ferinno, resigned Moquoian teenagers forced by necessity into labor bonds, and seasoned workers so sun-beaten and stooped that it was impossible to tell whether they were sixteen or sixty. They had si-oques like mine, with beads of worn ancestral glass. My job was to copy down their health assessments, resigning their humanity to quantitative statistics and documenting where they would spend the next period of their lives.

  At the beginning, I thought a three-month bond was a fairly good deal—I could survive anything for three months, I reasoned. But I soon came to realize the short term wasn’t from a benevolent urge to preserve my future. According to Moquoian law, bond managers had to allow a government inspection every six months to ensure they were respecting bond terms and upholding humanitarian standards. Turns out, moving your base of operations every three months means you can dodge those inspections. Unlike the major bond ports, Port Ree and Port Urskin, which provide clean lodging and transparent record-keeping, the countless smaller black-market rings stage their unregulated business in shop cellars and loading docks, moving as many human bodies through as possible before packing up and leaving before they can be pinned down by suspicious auditors.

  I learned this the hard way, when my three-month stint was up. Instead of the meager payout I was expecting, I found myself standing on the street with only the clothes I was wearing, a wrist nearly immovable with scribe’s arthritis, an out-of-tune dulcimer, and a head full of haunted faces that I’d quietly consigned to the business of human lives.

  That’s when I first understood. I hadn’t been a victim of the system.

  I was the system.

  I remember looking up from the dirt and trash gusting along the streets of the Blows, the grimy sea-cliff neighborhood where the ephemeral slave ring had been, to where Tolukum Palace rose in the distance, its glassed walls scalding the sky.

  I took my first few steps in that direction that night, and I didn’t stop.

  I roll my wrist now. It twinges, predictably. It’s never been quite right since those days, but fortunately after my bond ended, I had to do very little scribing. The slavers had roomed me with the cook, Soe, and that’s who the dulcimer came from. I’d already picked up the basics of reading music from my time with Papi, and to pass the time, Soe showed me the fingerings she’d learned from her grandmother down in the redwood forests. I’ve since learned that her fingerings bear little resemblance to the handful of professional musicians bold enough to play such a humble folk instrument in concert. But I didn’t know that at the time—I just knew that music passed the time and that strumming was a welcome relief to my right wrist, stretching out my burning fingers and tendons. Soe gifted it to me after we parted, saying it was too tinny to play and too worthless to sell. I remember clutching it as I staggered, disoriented, toward Tolukum Palace. My treasure.

  My weapon.

  I wish I had my dulcimer now—an elegant painted model worlds different from that first boxy one with the missing string. I’m not sure I could play it with the pain in my head, but it would be a comfort.

  My stomach heaves, and I curl into a tighter ball. I’ve bled through the bandages Poia so gallantly provided me this morning, but I can’t bring myself to stand up and holler at the window again.

  Dirt and filth and rags. It seems unreal that I thought I’d left them all behind when I strode boldly onto the stage at Sun and Rain. Word had been spreading that the old ashoki was dying, and the palace was hunting for a new one. It wasn’t unheard of for monarchs’ scouts to discover their new teller on the street corner, or in the tavern. Why not onstage at the Festival of Sun and Rain? I borrowed a dress, used the last of my savings to pay the entry fee, and walked onto the stage knowing if I could just do things right, in front of the eyes of the king and court, no less, it could change things forever.

  I was right, but I hadn’t imagined my life would turn in a full circle before the end.

  Lark

  All right, I lied.

  About my name, I mean.

  I picked the name Lark because I was tired of the rustlers calling me Nit, which, as far as I could gather, was the name for little maggots or squirming bug-things. It had been a gritty, washed-out morning, thick with the smell and sound of cows. Cook was banging on the porridge pot to wake us up for breakfast, and I knew there’d be a hide-tanning if I wasn’t up quick. I rubbed my face against my threadbare blanket. I didn’t want to get up. I was bone-weary from the previous day’s branding, and I knew today would only be more of the same, driving the cows through harsh, scrubby territory. I could already taste the dust in my throat, feel the crisping of my skin under the sun.

  Somewhere, a bird started singing in the scrub.

  I don’t know what made me home in on it—it was hardly the first bird I’d ever heard. Maybe I was just trying to ignore Cook. Maybe I was reaching for the one pretty little thing in that endless stretch of sweat and grime.

  “Rose!” Cook called. “Nit! Get your asses out of bed, there’s coffee needs straining!”

  Rose groaned and rubbed her face. Out past the noise and hustle, the bird still sang.

  “Rose,” I said quietly. “What bird is that?”

  “What bird is what?”

  “That one singing in the scrub. Do you know what it is?”

  “I’unno,” she said sleepily. “A lark?”

  It probably wasn’t a lark. It was very likely the only bird name she knew, from that sappy song the cowhands sometimes sang off-key around the fire.

  It was the only bird name I knew, too.

  “A lark,” I repeated.

  So when I went up to Cook with my tin plate ready for porridge, and he said, “Strain the coffee first, Nit,” I responded with, “Lark.”

  “What’d you call me?” he said.

  “My name,” I said. “It’s Lark.” I could still hear the bird singing behind me.

  Cook shrugged his big, meaty shoulders. “Strain the coffee first, Lark.”

  So I strained the coffee. But I did it with a name of my own.

  I haven’t thought about that moment in a while. I suppose it should be significant, the choosing of a name, but it wasn’t really. The work went on. We still had to strain the coffee. We still had to drive the cows across the flats. We still ended up in Utzibor. Rose still lost her leg. We still escaped into this backward half existence. The name didn’t change anything.

  I stretch my neck and shoulders over the pebbly seep, the sly evening air slinking around the windbreak to lick my wet skin. Maybe it was the jubilation of the others in camp when we arrived with the new horse and the bag of money, but I gave in to extravagance
tonight and lit a small fire by the seep, so I could bring my troubled thinking to the water without worrying about the chills. Its crackle adds to the faint, parched murmur of the creek bed. The water in the seep is so low it doesn’t even cover the tops of my toes, but instead of brooding on this, my thoughts are stuck on our raid just a few hours ago. Saiph, I imagine, is still crowing. It’s been his biggest victory yet—holding up a coach and making off with a gleaming new horse, tack and all. Never mind that the coach stopped on its own, without the need to jam the wheels. Never mind that there were no guards, and the driver didn’t pull a crossbow on Sedge. Never mind that the dandy inside literally tossed his money at us.

  No, what I minded was that he knew my name.

  I clench my fists so hard my knuckles crack. First the old man in the stage outside Snaketown, then the wanted poster in Patzo’s general store, and now a Moquoian-dressed dandy poking along the river. My name never seemed that important before, but now it feels like a liability. Like some kind of slippery slope I can’t see coming—I know it’s there, and I know to be careful, but I can’t be sure exactly where it starts, or which step is going to send me over the edge.

  Absently, I rub my thumb over the filigree pin I twisted out of the dandy’s lapel. It’s some kind of bug, and it’s a pretty little thing, silver and intricate. The pearl is blue and milky smooth, almost creamy to the touch—I wasn’t aware that kind of texture existed in a gem. By my reckoning it could fetch fifty keys, maybe more if I find the right buyer.

  Or I might just keep it.

  I hang my head, letting the weight of my dreadlocks stretch out the stubborn rod of tension in my neck. We have the horse. We have some money. Now, I suppose, there’s no excuse not to try to take Rose into Pasul to be seen by a healer.

  No excuse, except that it could be the end of all of us. What if they have my name and face, too? Where else would the dandy have gotten it?

  There’s a rustle of brush outside, and Rat gives a low growl.