Sunshield

by Emily B. Martin

  What you would think of me now, hair gone, eyes red, left with no words but the guttural sounds I can spit from my swollen lips. You’d turn away. I know you would—it’s only what would be expected. You are the people’s prince, the court darling, drawn to lovely, adorned things. You’re expected to appreciate strength not in raw form, but carefully polished and presented just right. A pretty woman in pretty silk singing with a pretty voice.

  I can’t blame you. I was glad I fell so neatly into that box.

  Leave it, Iano. The picture you’re hanging on to isn’t accurate anymore, and it won’t be ever again. Don’t let them twist you into anarchy over me, because all the things you would have fought for are gone now.

  Leave it.

  Leave me.

  Lark

  I shift in my saddle, surreptitiously loosening my belt. I ate too much last night, more than I have in months, though I’ve been reasoning that somebody had to finish the last serving in the pot, or it would’ve attracted animals during the night. To be fair, I think Veran made an extra helping on purpose. I can still taste the sweet potatoes and fat red beans, mixed up with spicy sausage and garlic and onions fried a little too long. By the Light, that was a good meal.

  I wonder what else he has in his pack.

  He’s less woozy today, after some rest. The bruise on his forehead is a rich berry purple, half covered by a flop of dusty black curls. We’ve fashioned a kind of cowl out of his cloak, and I gave him another round of eyeblack. He made a fuss about washing out my sword rag before tying it back over his chin. Now he’s almost unrecognizable, just a pair of eyes and eyebrows and those obnoxious eyelashes and that little scar. I study him out of the corner of my eye—the horses are picking their way down a crumbly slope, and I don’t want him swaying too much.

  He catches my glance. “What?”

  “Oh, I was just thinking, if it weren’t for how clean your tunic is, you could pass for just another desert vagabond. Maybe we can turn over a stage and score you a hat.”

  He grunts and hitches the handkerchief farther up his nose. “After all this is over, I’m taking you shopping. You’d be amazed how much stuff you can get without violently taking it from other people.”

  “Oh, don’t preach at me. Most of the stuff for camp I have bought, fair and square, from Patzo’s in Snaketown.” Though let’s not get into details about where the money came from. “And it’s thanks to your nosy old professor that I can’t anymore.”

  “If by nosy you mean traveling in a private stage across the desert, minding his own business until you attacked him, then yes, I see what you’re getting at.”

  “He reported me back to Callais! He tripled my bounty and set the reward for my live capture! What does he want, to hang me himself?”

  Veran, strangely, looks away, down toward the dark line that’s the rock cliffs of Utzibor. Just another hour and we’ll be there. “On the contrary, Colm has . . . different reasons for wanting to talk to you.”

  “Something tells me a hundred fifty keys is a little high for just a conversation.”

  “Do you know who Colm is?” he asks, looking back at me.

  “Well, I know now that he’s some high hat at the university.”

  “Well, yeah, he’s a dean, and he’s married to the provost, Gemma.” He throws a dirty look at my horse. “But he’s also the brother of Mona Alastaire, queen of Lumen Lake. And fifteen years ago, Queen Mona and her husband, Rou, and their twin daughters, Eloise and Moira, were in Matariki with me and my ma for a diplomatic summit, when Moira disappeared off the pier. They searched the docks, and then the streets, and then the whole city. Lumeni divers were rushed in to trawl the harbor. My ma’s entire Wood Guard was sent into the surrounding countryside to search for leads. The Paroan and Cypri navies were sent out. For months and months they searched. But there was never a body, or any record of where she might have gone. This was at the height of the ocean slave routes—after that happened, the navies started going aggressively after seafaring traffickers.”

  “Because a princess was stolen,” I point out. “Not because of all the other few hundred folk who suffered the same thing before her.”

  “I don’t deny it. And the crackdown on ocean trafficking made for a jump in desert trafficking, and here we are. But that’s not the point—the point is that Queen Mona and Ambassador Rou, and Colm and the rest of us, have always kept our ears open for leads on Moira. And your reputation is known more broadly than you think. So when you appeared in Colm’s stage door . . .” He trails off and shrugs.

  “Why does everybody assume I personally know every slave who’s passed through the system?” I ask.

  “Well, you know more than the rest of us, for sure.” He eyes me sideways over his handkerchief. “And you told me you have a Lumeni girl in your camp.”

  “She’s not full Lumeni, though—”

  “Neither was Moira. Neither is Eloise. Mona is Lumeni, like Colm. Ambassador Rou is Cypri. Brown skin, brown eyes, fine curly hair. Moira and Eloise are a blend of both—light brown skin, freckles, curly golden-brown hair.”

  I glance down at the back of my hand, sun-crisp and scratched, a dark sepia under the dirt. Lila swims in my vision, her tan skin and long lashes and tendency toward fickleness. If anyone in our camp could be a princess, it’s her.

  “Lila’s hair is sort of dirty blond,” I admit. “But it’s not curly. And I don’t think she has any more freckles than anybody else.”

  “Well, I don’t remember exactly how identical Eloise and Moira were. I was little at the time, and I’ve only seen one portrait of them together. They could look completely different now. Are Lila’s eyes blue or brown?”

  “Brown.”

  “Hm,” he says. “You see why I might be interested in the others in your camp? Why Colm might be interested, or Eloise or Ambassador Rou?”

  “I’m not going lie, Veran—if she’s not dead, she’s probably not in the Ferinno. I mean, there’s a chance it could be Lila. Or it could be someone still in the quarries. But if she was stolen in Matariki and put on a ship, she was probably sent around the cape. At the very least, she’s in Moquoia, but it’s more likely she’s out on one of the islands. All the slaves who work here in the desert started out here—even the older ones.”

  He frowns in thought. The sun is edging lower in the sky—once we cleared the slot canyons after lunch, I purposefully put myself on his western side, but unlike the past few days it was more to be sure I could see him clearly in case he started to fall. Now he turns to me again, squinting against the glare behind me.

  “This is a big reason we need diplomacy with the Moquoians to go through,” he says. “Creating a strong alliance with them means we can start dismantling the system that took Moira away. We can make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

  I look away. “I get that. But do you understand how it feels to hear you say that, when it didn’t matter for the rest of us? Nobody sent out navies after me. Nobody stood on a dock, wondering where I’d gone.”

  “How do you know they didn’t?”

  I squint hard at the dark line of Utzibor, my mouth twisting underneath my bandanna. I’d like to tell him off—he has no right to make assumptions about my past. Though, I suppose, that’s all I’ve ever done.

  When he continues, his voice isn’t smug or barbed. It’s soft. “I know your campmates are your family, but if you don’t know where or who you came from, who’s to say someone didn’t search for you? Who’s to say someone doesn’t miss you?”

  “I know who I came from,” I say, trying to inject warning into my voice. Stop, beware, turn back now.

  But the idiot doesn’t catch it. His face splits with shock. “You do? Do you have names?”

  “A name,” I say pointedly. “My father’s.”

  “But that’s something! That could be everything! Have you asked around? Have you checked town registers—”

  “No.”

  “But he could still be alive—by the
Light, Lark, he could be in the Ferinno.”

  “Probably.”

  He stares at me, squinting hard against the sun. I look out over the terrain—we’re starting the gradual descent toward Utzibor.

  “Don’t you want to find him?” he asks. “He probably looked for you—he might still wonder where you’ve—”

  Finally, I snap and turn back to him. “I know my father’s name because it was on my sale papers, Veran. I didn’t get captured. I was sold by my family.”

  He goes silent. He goes so silent I can hear the gears grind to a halt in his head, and then the clamoring of questions as they racket around his mind. And I don’t want to answer them, but I know if I don’t he’ll always have this assumption, that a family can only be a unit, a tether—not the knife that cuts your rope.

  “Vega Palto, Port Iskon,” I say. “That’s his name, and where the sale was made. My name is Nit, and that’s as much as I know. The rest of the document was just my health records at the time of purchase. I risked my neck to swipe it out of my file—I actually broke my finger on purpose so I had to be brought in for medical examination.” I tilt my left hand to show him the little bumpy knit on my knuckle, lost among all the other scrapes and scars. “And that’s what it told me—that my Alcoran father sold me for a hundred fifty keys. Funny, that’s still what I’m worth, isn’t it?”

  He’s dead quiet. The rocks sound with the dull thud of our horses’ hooves. The brush shakes as Rat lunges. A doomed creature gives a death squeal.

  “The wild thing,” I continue, “is that I remember him a little. I try not to, but I distinctly remember that he liked cinnamon in his coffee. I remember that smell. And if he was Alcoran, then I assume my mother was Cypri, and I remember her braiding my hair. And I remember feeling happy. That’s the weirdest part. All the other kids I knew who had been sold came from broken families, desperate families, families willing to sell a spare child on a ten-year bond to try to make ends meet. Not me—I was sold by a happy family, one that could afford a spice like cinnamon, with no bond. No expectation or interest in ever getting me back.”

  “It . . .” he begins. “It could be a mistake, Lark. Or . . . or . . . you could be remembering it wrong . . .”

  “You’re right,” I say sharply. “I could be inventing the part about being happy—it’s the part that makes the least amount of sense. I could search them out and find out that I made up those little details—maybe they’re layabouts who just needed extra cash.” I mirror his question from a minute ago. “You see why I might not want to make a search for them? At least on my own I know what I have. I know what I am. I’m not interested in my family, Veran. They’re not safety or identity to me. It’s just blood, and that’s less than worthless out here. Family doesn’t last.”

  A rocky bluff has risen to my right, momentarily blocking the red sun as it sinks toward the horizon, so he doesn’t have to squint to look at me. He just gazes, his sagebrush eyes wide and sad over his blackened cheeks and my grubby polishing rag.

  “Don’t pity me,” I say.

  “I’m not.”

  “Yes, you are. You’re doing it right now. Stop it.”

  “I’m not pitying you,” he says. “I just . . . I wish I could change it.”

  “Life can’t be changed. We’re just meant to react to it.”

  “I don’t . . . I don’t believe that.”

  “You wouldn’t, would you? You can probably give a single word and your whole world tips to suit you.”

  “Except that my body gives way and takes my mind with it,” he says, each word slow. “And it endangers my life and restricts those around me, and I won’t ever be able to do the things I know I can otherwise do, and I’ll probably die a young man.”

  My breath catches behind my bandanna.

  I keep forgetting that.

  I look away, just as the bluff to my right disappears. The sun blazes across my eyes. I tip my hat brim down.

  “Sorry,” I mumble. “I didn’t mean that.”

  “Yeah, you did. But I understand. I’ve been more privileged than most. I’m certainly more privileged than you. But the idea that life is what it is, and I’m just meant to roll along with it—what’s that mean for me, Lark? Do I stay in my room with pillows on the floor for the rest of my life? Because a lot of folk think so.”

  “There must be something in between pillows on the floor and flirting with every opportunity death throws your way.”

  “If there is, I’d like to hear it, and fast,” he says. “Because so far I’ve only become acquainted with the two extremes. Honestly, if I could die at any moment, I’d rather it be a death in action rather than on the floor of my bedroom.”

  Before I can reply, there’s a sting on my right wrist. I shake off a horsefly, letting out a breathy curse. It’s bitten me right on the e of Strength. I stare at the tattoo, remembering my comment to him yesterday, that these two things—strength and perseverance—are what it takes to survive.

  What if you had both of those things, but they weren’t enough?

  “So don’t pity me,” he says.

  I look up. “I’m not.”

  “Exactly.”

  I twist my mouth behind my bandanna, and his cheeks round under the eyeblack. Then he cuts his gaze away, rubbing his eyes.

  “You and the be-damned sun, I swear.”

  I glance out at the horizon, about to relent and offer to ride on his other side for a while, when my thoughts freeze in my head. I suck in a breath.

  “Veran, stop—hold on, stop.”

  He eases gently on his horse’s reins. I move Jema closer to him, peering hard at the terrain in front of us. He follows my gaze.

  About a mile ahead of us lie the buckled caverns of Utzibor, spread with the wide tamped-down branding rings. Already, in the orange sunset, a few black specks are flittering around the cottonwoods, bats roused from their daytime roosts. Soon there will be more, many more. But between us and them are four figures, mounted, picking their way along a brushy draw to keep out of sight of the adobe compound built against the bluffs. Late sunlight flashes off a mattock head strapped to a pannier.

  “Who’s that?” Veran asks. “Are those Tamsin’s guards?”

  “It’s Dirtwater Dob,” I say. “Another outlaw. I had a run-in with him and one of Tamsin’s guards a little while ago. They must have found where she’s holed away.”

  “Dammit.” Veran’s hands tighten on his reins. “Of all the rotten timing—what do you suppose they’re trying to do?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m sure it’s no good. Let’s dismount and get a little closer—there’s a copse over there where we can wait and watch. We have to make sure this really is where Tamsin is, anyway.”

  We slide off our horses and lead them down the slope, keeping an eye on the little posse creeping toward the compound. I glance over my shoulder a few times, nibbling my lip—I wish we could put the sinking sun more directly behind us, but to do that we’d have to ride nearly even with Dob’s group. Fortunately, the approach is studded with rocky upthrusts, like roots of the cavern bluffs. We skulk from cover to cover, trying to keep the horses out of gravel that might slide and give us away.

  Finally we reach the shade of a stand of cottonwood trees, thick with scrub willow around their roots. We tether the horses and creep through the thicket. At the edge of the brush, we lie on our bellies, gazing down at the compound.

  Dob and his three companions have sheltered themselves by the river and are scoping the compound from the sage. I scan the branding rings and the lumpy adobe buildings pressed up against the cavern bluffs, their desiccated timber-and-reed roofs red in the sunset. One outbuilding looks less abandoned than the others—the windows are uncovered, and the clay chimney is black with new smoke. The dirt leading to the door is tamped down, not windblown and scattered with twigs like a few of the other buildings.

  “There are mules,” Veran whispers, nodding.

  In the shadowed corner by the occup
ied building is a covered hitching post, where two dun-colored mules and a donkey idly nose the ground.

  “I think that bigger one is the one I saw last week,” I say. “The one the woman was riding when she ran into Dob’s posse.”

  “What are they looking for?” he wonders, his gaze on Dob. “Do you think they’ve heard about Tamsin?”

  “I can’t think what they’d want with her,” I reply. “It’s not particularly like Dirtwater Dob—he’s a poacher and a part-time rustler. He’s never had an interest in slavers or the road besides wanting territory closer to the grazing grounds up north. More likely he’s here to settle a score—that traveler he jumped had a lot of parcels, which means money and goods. He’s probably in the mood for a heist.”

  Veran blows out his breath. “What do we do?”

  “We’re going to have to wait,” I say. “See what Dob does. Who knows—maybe he’ll do some of the work for us.”

  “You think he’ll let Tamsin out?”

  “No, you dunce, I think he might kill a few of the guards inside.”

  He winces. “I was sort of hoping we could avoid killing anybody.”

  “How did you think we were going to break Tamsin out?”

  “I . . . hadn’t worked much further past making it out of your camp alive,” he admits.

  “Blazing Light, you really have absolutely no forethought, do you?”

  “None at all,” he confirms. “My excuse is that part of my brain is the part that’s glitchy.”

  I shake my head, and he snickers.

  “Though I can pick a lock,” he says. “I figured that might be useful.”

  “It might be. But let’s wait, and get a sense of what we’re up against first. We don’t know if there’s one guard or twenty. I’d rather Dob do that dirty work, if possible.”

  He pulls his handkerchief down and settles his chin on his arms. I set my cheek on my fist. Rat lopes out of the underbrush and flumps down between us.

  “Your dog stinks,” Veran says.

  “You would, too, if you lived off carrion.”

  “I guess so. What a diplomatic worldview. You could make a persuasive politician. Shall we switch jobs?”