Sunshield

by Emily B. Martin

  He lies, loose-limbed, half in my lap, utterly silent. My heart ricochets around my chest—I have no idea what just happened, or whether it’s done. I’ve seen folk collapse before, from heat or dehydration or just plain exhaustion, but I’ve never seen someone shake like he just did. The bandanna flutters over his mouth.

  He doesn’t look at all like a dandy noble right now. He looks fragile and hurt. All his angles are bent and awkward, and he’s drooling on my knee. His forehead’s bleeding.

  It’s nearly noon—the sun is practically overhead, blazing down on the both of us. Slowly I ease his head off my lap. I unhook his cloak where it’s tangled up around his shoulders and ball it under his head. I drape the hem over his eyes.

  “Stay,” I say to Rat. He gives a little sigh but stays where he is, propped against Veran’s back. I rise to my knees and look over the sage and yucca.

  The horses have ambled a short distance away, tearing at a clump of sedge in the rocks. Just past them is a lopsided boulder, its narrow end lifted uphill, leaving a wedge of shadow underneath. It’s not much, but it’s the only shelter I can see in our immediate vicinity.

  I crouch down.

  “Veran.” I prod his shoulder. He doesn’t twitch, his breath still puffing under my bandanna.

  Gritting my teeth, I grab his wrists and lift them over my head. I’ve carried people before, but they’re usually kids, smaller than me and whisper-thin from work and bad food. Veran is my size, well-fed, and utterly dead weight. I bow my shoulder almost to the ground and loop my arm through his legs. The wet patch on his trousers seeps into my shoulder, but this shirt’s seen worse—the guts of a thousand stew-pot animals, snot and slime from Jema and Rat, and a variety of body fluids from every one of my campmates. I ignore it and grit my teeth.

  “Damn you,” I grunt, heaving upright. I stagger to my feet. “Damn you, blasted sun-frazzled dandy.”

  I stumble through the sage, my boots catching on the rocky slope, until we reach the lee of the boulder. As gently as I can—which isn’t much—I slide Veran off my shoulders. He bumps down to the ground.

  “Rat,” I call. He trots forward, and I pull him down behind Veran’s back again, to keep him on his side.

  It’s not much better than the slope, but at least his head’s in the shade, and he’s not pointed downhill. Once I’m sure he’s stable against Rat, I hurry to bring the horses back, leading them to another clump of tough grasses. I pull Veran’s pack off his horse and dig out his canteen, dribbling some water between his lips. Most of it trickles out again. I sit back on my heels.

  “Damn,” I repeat.

  This is not an ideal place to be stuck. Aside from the lack of shelter, we’re high up, making us likely targets if an afternoon thunderstorm blows in. I glance at the sky, but it’s too early in the day to tell if there will be a cloudburst later. I could try to move Veran to lower ground—maybe drape him across his horse—but we’ll go slowly, and in all likelihood we’ll reach the slot canyons right when the showers would usually start. Those sluices are notorious for sudden flash floods, so fast and powerful they could sweep a horse and rider away in seconds.

  And anyway, what am I supposed to do if he doesn’t wake up? Keep toting him across the desert? Leave him flopped over with my pack while I try to find Tamsin at Utzibor?

  I look at his slack face again. The blood seeping through the dirt on his forehead is starting to mat. I decide to start with that. I take my bandanna off his mouth and splash a little water onto it. I’m dabbing at his forehead, turning everything to mud, when he stirs.

  “Veran?”

  He squeezes his eyes a few times, and then opens them, blinking fast.

  “Veran—are you . . . are you all right?”

  His blinking continues. He shifts and moans, pressing his face to the dirt. Dust swirls around his lips, coating them. Hurriedly I swipe them with the bandanna again.

  His blinking slows, and his eyes dart here and there under half lids.

  “Ma.” His voice is a croak.

  I lean over him. “Veran?”

  His head shifts, craning to find me. “Lady Queen?”

  “Veran, it’s me—Lark.”

  “Lerk.”

  “Right, Lark, the Sunshield Bandit—we’re traveling together? We’re going to find Tamsin?”

  His eyes flutter and then open wide. He squirms, shifting his arms to brace against the ground. He pushes as if he’s trying to sit up. I loop my arms under his neck and shoulders and heave him upright—he leans heavy on me, cockeyed, his forehead mucked with dirt and blood. Bracing against my shoulder, he stares hard at me, his gray-green gaze flicking here and there over my face.

  He slurs something, his accent too thick for me to understand. “What?”

  He stares again, and his eyes seem to clear a little. He looks out at the sunbaked slope, and then to the horses, and then back to me. He wipes his mouth with a limp hand and glances down at his wet trousers.

  He sucks in a breath.

  “Sorry,” he mumbles.

  “What, Veran—” I shift my feet and try to prop him up a little more. “What happened? Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. I’ll be fine.” He spits, drool crusting the edge of his lips. “Is there . . . water?”

  I hand him his canteen. He fumbles with the cork, takes a short swallow, and spits again.

  “What happened?” I ask again. “Are you dehydrated? Was it the heat?”

  He takes another swallow and bends his head forward over his knees.

  “Seizure,” he mutters.

  “What?”

  “A seizure!” he says more forcefully. “I had a seizure. I blacked out.”

  “You were shaking all over . . .”

  “And I pissed myself. Yeah. It was a seizure. I get them.”

  “Why?”

  He scowls at the patches of water and spit on the ground. “If you figure it out, let me know.” He wipes his forehead and then frowns at the sticky blood left on his hand. “Oh, damn.”

  “Yeah—you hit pretty hard.” I fold my bandanna to a cleanish patch and start to work again on the mess.

  He shifts and reaches behind him. “Is that Rat?”

  “Yeah, I made him lie down to keep you from rolling over. I didn’t know what else to do.”

  He closes his eyes as I keep dabbing with the bandanna. “That’s all you really can do. How long did I go?”

  “I dunno, a minute, maybe less. Then you were out for about five minutes.” Time feels like it’s only just starting up again.

  “Mm.” He flinches as I wipe the grit out of the deepest scratch. “Well, that’s nice. They used to be longer.”

  I lean back—his forehead’s still a mess, but the blood is clotting itself. “How long have you had them?”

  “Forever,” he says shortly. He turns his head away, gazing out across the hillside, his nose and mouth scrunched up.

  I’m not really sure what to say. I’m not really sure what to do.

  But then he continues. “I had the first one when I was a few months old.”

  He sips again from his canteen, swishing the water through his mouth before swallowing. “Mama says she had me in the sling up on Skullcap Bald when I started convulsing. It was my bad luck that the next two came when I was out in the forest again—the second around eighteen months toddling around the Rooftops, and the third a few months later while I was playing with my sisters in the creek. Viyamae saw me go down and dragged me out of the water and hollered for Ma. And after that, Papa said nope, no more. Mama always let us run after her boot fringe out in the forest, but Pa decided that was too dangerous for me. So while Vi and Ida and Vynce got to go out with Mama on patrols and camp checks, I had to stick to the council room with Papa.”

  His accent is broad as a valley, even more so than when he was chatting with Hettie. He rubs his forehead, a frustrated movement. “It was the worst when I was ten, twelve years old. Three or four seizures a week during the bad sp
ells, plus the day or so of crappy recovery time after each one, when everything’s too bright and loud and I’m full of sand. They had all kinds of folk look at me. The Alcorans call it the Prism’s disease, because they used to think it was brought on by the Light. But my folk just call it the bows. Most medical types now think it’s got to do with a hitch in the brain.” He taps his grubby forehead.

  Suddenly, the little scar splitting his eyebrow makes a bit more sense. My guilt rushes back.

  “Is there medicine for it?” I ask.

  He takes another swig of water and spits again. “Nothing reliable. Ma tinkered with all kinds of herbs and weird powders. Some sort of worked, most just tasted bad. It killed her that I was stuck around the palace—I was good, you know, at woodcraft, even better than my brother. I knew every page in the handbook, I knew every bird, every plant.” The mud creases on his forehead, his eyes distant. “But you can’t do your two solo nights to earn your scout florets if you could collapse and convulse at any moment. Can’t keep night watch up in the canopy platforms, can’t run the walkwires, can’t timber a tree, can’t fight wildfires. Can’t hike through bear country if you’re going to fall and lie around bleeding for a while. Can’t be part of a scouting party if your team has to keep half an eye on you and route around the terrain you’re not allowed to tackle. And guess what? Can’t be a scout? Can’t be a Woodwalker.”

  I dig around for the significance of that word and remember it’s his mother’s title, the name of the folk who watch over the forest. It hadn’t seemed an especially important job to me back when he mentioned it the first time, but he talks about it with more reverence than I’ve heard him mention kings or queens or ambassadors.

  He silently examines an abrasion on the back of his hand. I stare at the nearest tangle of sage.

  “Greenbrier,” I say. “You didn’t pick it because it’s nice for birds, did you?”

  “The toughest, most stubborn, hardest-to-kill thing anywhere on the mountain slopes,” he says with a harsh note. “Wildfire, blight, hard freeze, landslide, drought—greenbrier will be the first thing growing again. You couldn’t pry it off the mountainsides if you set the whole country on it.”

  We’re silent. He’s not so much leaning on me now as sitting shoulder to shoulder.

  “And yet here you are,” I feel obligated to point out.

  “Here I am,” he agrees. “Running clear away from everybody who’s ever watched out for me, all so I can feel like I’ve got some control over something.” He sighs and rubs his eyes. “I should have told you, Lark. I’m sorry. That wasn’t fair to you. You should have known what you were getting into when I told you I was coming.”

  I stop myself from pointing out that I didn’t want him to come even before I knew he had seizures. But just as I think it, Rose’s voice comes to me unexpectedly.

  You act like a person needs to be whole to be considered a person at all. That crap’s tiring, Lark.

  How easy must it be for people to brush off Veran as being less than whole?

  Easy, if my kneejerk reaction is the same as it was for Rose.

  “You know yourself best,” I say. “And you still chose to come.”

  “It was selfish. You shouldn’t have had to—”

  “It’s okay,” I say. “Really.”

  He keeps his head in his hand. “I thought I could make it.”

  “I led us up the slope. You said it was too bright.”

  “You didn’t know. And I was already shaky this morning. The brightness just hurried things along. Being tired makes it worse, more than anything. I just had one a few days ago after staying up half the night, climbing around a bunch of ladders in the rain. I fell out of bed and woke up all woozy. I thought I might have another few weeks before the next spell, but I was wrong.” He digs his fingertips into his eyes. “I shouldn’t have come.”

  I don’t have a response. An hour ago I would have said the same thing.

  You haven’t had to fight for a day in your life, I said this morning. Thinking his stiff, slow movements were due to a singular night on the ground.

  You don’t know a damn thing, he spat back.

  Somewhere in the scrub, a bird starts singing. I latch on to it immediately, drawn to its familiar jumble of fluty notes. I hear it all the time, the bird that was whistling that day in the rustlers’ camp, the bird I asked Rose about. The bird she guessed about, and the guess I adopted as my name.

  I nudge his arm, hoping to distract him. “Hey, that bird singing—what kind is it?”

  He picks his head off his hand, listening. His shoulder is a warm weight on mine. Rat stretches against our backs.

  “Meadowlark,” he says. “I think. I’m not so good with the western birds.”

  I dunno. A lark?

  Meadowlark.

  Sweet little song in a mess of rock and dust.

  “Oh.” My voice sounds more strained than I mean it to—I try to swallow without being obvious about it. “Well. That’s good.”

  He looks at me. “Why?”

  I tilt my hat brim. “I fibbed to you, too. About my name.”

  “You mean when you kissed me in the stage? ‘On a lark?’”

  “It wasn’t a kiss,” I say quickly. Stupidly.

  “No,” he agrees. “You punched me in the mouth. With your mouth.”

  A snort escapes me, bubbling into a laugh. It’s strangled and chokey at first, like it’s rusty from disuse. But then it clears, and I have a hard time stopping. He snickers beside me.

  It’s weird—just to laugh.

  “Sorry about that,” I say quickly.

  “The mouth-punch? You decked me with your buckler and you’re apologizing for the mouth-punch?”

  “Well, all of it, I guess.”

  “To be fair, I did come looking for trouble,” he says. “Is kissing a tactic you use a lot?”

  “Never,” I say.

  There’s a weird half silence.

  “Anyway,” I say hurriedly.

  “Anyway,” he agrees. “Lark. Sweet little desert bird?”

  “Not very fitting, is it?”

  “Well, I’m named after a nigh unkillable forest thorn when I could die in a puddle of my own urine at any moment.” He shifts. “Maybe we should switch. Dandy songbird and prickly vine?”

  “Probably best to keep folk guessing,” I suggest.

  “Probably.” He rocks a little, gingerly, and sets his feet under him. “I think I’ll go change my pants.”

  I keep my hand a few inches from his sleeve as he slowly rises, gripping the boulder behind us for support. “You’re not going to topple over again?” I ask.

  “Nah, probably not.” He tries to pass it off as a joke.

  “Veran,” I say as he gathers up his pack. “If it happens again—what do I do?”

  “Oh, you know.” He waves his hand, clutching his pack close to his waist. “Basically what you did. Roll me on my side, keep me from choking on my own vomit. Count the days until you’re rid of me.”

  His voice is light—but I can tell it’s forced. He’s embarrassed, and I think he feels bad for not warning me. He wades into the sagebrush. There’s a jingle of a belt buckle.

  “It’s all right, you know,” I call. “I’m just glad you’re okay.”

  “Yeah,” he mutters. I can see the top of his head bob up and down over the sage. “And—yeah, thanks. Sorry.”

  “At least now I know.”

  “Yeah.” I hear fabric hit the ground. “Now you know.”

  Veran

  Useless. Utterly useless.

  Worse than useless.

  A burden.

  Even the short walk into the sage to change out of my piss-soaked trousers leaves me wobbly and dizzy. I haven’t felt this off-balance after a seizure since before university, and I haven’t had two so close together since before even that. With this one coming on the heels of the one after Bakkonso just a few days ago, I’m gnawing on worry. I’ve pushed my worthless body past its n
ormal limits, and now I’m squandering the precious time we need to get to Tamsin. For nearly an hour after I change clothes, it’s all I can do to sit propped against my pack, sipping water.

  I ache all over. My wrist twinges where I probably landed on it, and my forehead throbs. I don’t want to think about what it must have been like to haul my soiled, malfunctioning body under this rock.

  Blazes.

  Lark disappears a few times—once to hike back up the rocky rise to refill my canteen, and once to ride down the base of the ridge to find better shelter. She leaves Rat with me both times, stopping every few seconds to order him to stay. He doesn’t like it, panting heavily at my side and squeaking anxiously, but he stays put. He stinks, his breath absolutely rancid. Not many of my folk keep pets—a few keep kestrels, or put up gourds for purple martins to keep the bugs down in garden beds. A few have Winderan-bred dogs to guard their turkeys or goats. But I don’t know anyone in the Silverwood who keeps an animal companion. I found it a bizarre practice at university, where my roommate kept a gecko in a crate. He’d put the little lizard on his shoulder while he read.

  Still—I admit I like having Rat with me. Beyond the fact that I could probably be taken for carrion by any passing scavenger, he’s kind of funny. He hums and huffs and flops those big goofy ears every which way. At one point, he drapes his head over my knees and closes his eyes.

  “You smell,” I say.

  He sneezes, blowing snot on my clean trousers. That feels deserved.

  A little while later, he lifts his head, ears perked. Up the slope comes the familiar tromp of boots.

  “There’s a stand of boulders with a little copse,” Lark says, rounding the rock, bandanna and hat protecting her face again. “It’s low enough that we wouldn’t be a lightning target, but not so low we’d have to worry about flooding.”

  “We can try to keep going,” I say, despite feeling unable to do anything of the sort. “We’ve already lost so much time.”

  “At this rate, we’ll come into the thick of Dirtwater Dob’s territory in the middle of the afternoon. I don’t want to make camp where we might be discovered—he and I don’t quite see eye to eye. We might as well wait until we can move quickly through his range. Can you ride? I’ll lead your horse.”