Dark Ends

by Clayton Snyder

“You don’t even want to be seen in contact with them. The guards have been picking up everyone, hoping to stamp out the movement now before it gains momentum. They bring everybody in, then sort them out later.”

  “But you… you’ve nothing to do with the Governor, do you?” I asked hesitantly. “Or the guards? You just copy writs?”

  He gave me a strange look, then laughed. “No, I’m not important enough to deal with the Governor’s Office. I’ve basic copying skills, that’s it. Why? Is your business with the Governor’s Office?”

  He turned curious eyes on me, and I made myself put on a bland smile, reminding myself of the most important precept I had learned from thieving: Act like you’re not breaking any rules. “No,” I said. “I was just curious. I suppose it would be all right to bring him, Yula.”

  But my stomach had knotted up so much that for once all thoughts of eating flew from my head. I wasn’t cut out for thievery, or sneakery, or intrigue. I would have been happiest to have set up our apartment in an unused corner of the Lyceum laboratory. I missed the surety of droppers and vials, mortars and pestles. But I reminded myself that all this—meeting Frost, making sure Yula’s man was safe—was for my father.

  It wouldn’t do me any good to venture into the dragon’s lair, if I allowed the dragon into ours.

  The city gates loomed up out of the foggy morning like a doorway to another time. My ancestors had built them long ago, and the story of the island was carved into their basalt pillars. All of that history was lost now to Eterean rule, buried in Eterean construction projects, which had ground to a halt when the dragons returned and Granthus closed the harbor.

  A contingent of Eterean soldiers guarded the gates to make sure no one entered or left. There seemed to be a lot of them around this morning. Some of the soldiers wore the impassive wooden masks and bells our Dragon Fixers used long ago to signify their authority over the dragons. It wasn’t clear if the Eterean soldiers wore them to scare the dragons or to scare us. The machine dogs at their sides seemed to indicate the latter. The gold trim on many of the uniforms made me nervous; only Granthus’s private bodyguard wore Eterean gold, and Granthus wasn’t the sort of governor who remained shut up in his palace. He had been a general before he was made governor, and he still maintained his military habits.

  I dodged a soldier to enter the Tavern-By-the-Walls—a squat, sturdy building made of the same basalt as the gates. A mill with a great water wheel shared a wall with it, and the creak and splash of the wheel as the stream turned it soon swallowed the sound of the soldier’s clanking bells as he walked away.

  I pushed the door to the tavern open quickly before I lost my nerve.

  Inside, it should have smelled like breakfast. Instead, it smelled like onions and frying fish and whatever bad beer people were brewing using old, moldy grain. People still gathered, though—men mostly, sitting at the tables and nursing their mugs, gaunt faces flushed with the warmth of the fire, or maybe the effects of alcohol on empty stomachs.

  I tried to pretend I belonged and walked straight up to the barkeep.

  He looked up from wiping out a mug and raised an eyebrow at me. “Sera?” he said. “What can I get you?”

  “I’m—I’m here to meet someone. His name is Frost.”

  The eyebrow only crept further upward. “Frost, eh.”

  “Yes,” I said, trying to recollect my confidence. Or maybe to invent it. “He told me to meet him here. If he isn’t around, I could leave him a note. Or… or I could wait. But I can’t wait long.”

  “I’m sure he wouldn’t want you to wait.”

  I jerked my head up to see Frost himself walking through a door behind the bar. He still wore his cloak and hood. He put a hand on the barkeep’s shoulder. “Tea, I think, and whatever food you’ve got,” he said.

  “Ain’t much, Frost,” the barkeep said.

  “Just bring it to the table in the back.”

  He led me to an empty table in the back corner, and a serving girl brought us steaming cups of tisane—an herbal concoction, not exactly tea.

  I sniffed before I drank. “Clover,” I said, and sighed, wrapping my cold hands around the mug. “Well, at least it’s not dandelion. All we need now is to have our appetites stimulated. But the clover should be all right.”

  “It grows on the hillside behind us.”

  “If we were all sheep, we’d be fine, wouldn’t we?”

  His mouth twisted into that amused, cynical smile I remembered from yesterday. “If we were sheep that eat grass, I suppose. Have you come for the bread?”

  “Why else would I be here?”

  “Did you eat the figs?”

  “I ate… one fig.”

  “Have you had anything else since yesterday?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I’m just wondering why a woman wearing freeman’s clothes has been reduced to stealing food she doesn’t even eat.”

  I took a sip of the tisane and settled the mug back on the table firmly before leaning toward him. “And I wonder where that food’s coming from. And why you would want to talk to me.”

  He waved his hand vaguely. “The food’s coming from out of the gates.”

  “You’re a smuggler? But aren’t they starving outside, too?”

  “Not everyone outside is starving. But I’m not a smuggler. And I’m not sharing the names of my sources. How about we start with your name first?”

  “Peri,” I told him curtly.

  “Just ‘Peri’? You’re a freewoman. There’s more to it than that.”

  “Peranza,” I said, sighing.

  He gave me the same odd look most everyone did, but unlike most people he didn’t immediately proclaim its strangeness. My full name was the least ordinary thing about me, given to me by hopelessly scholarly parents. It was an old-fashioned name, plucked straight from old epics and fairy stories. “My parents liked poetry,” I said apologetically.

  Frost smiled. “Peranza the Steadfast. The goddess of fortune dropped a skein of yarn she received from the fatespinners. Peranza found it and wouldn’t rest until she returned it.”

  “You’ve read it.” I was surprised. The story merited a brief mention in a long poem about the war of the gods over the province of magic. My parents had shared a poetry tutor at the Lyceum and fell in love while memorizing stanzas. My name was but a lingering memory of a love that had been dead for a long time.

  Frost shrugged. “Heard it read. Does Peranza the Steadfast have a family name?” He watched me with those oddly flecked animalian eyes, which grew more hooded the longer my silence spun out. But I wasn’t about to give him my family name if I could help it.

  “How do you get out of the gates?” I said. “Without the soldiers catching you? Do you bribe them? Feed them?”

  He snorted. “The soldiers have food. You’re the one who needs it.”

  He turned his gaze directly on me. The shadows of his hood seemed to lend his eyes even greater intensity. I thought I had imagined their strangeness, but I was wrong. They were just as not-quite-human as I remembered. Was it only the color or also the shape of his pupils? Or maybe it was the fact that even while he spoke words of compassion, his eyes were hard as polished agate.

  I was staring. I turned away, embarrassed.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “But my father…”

  Mid-sentence the tavern door opened and a group of soldiers dressed in masks and bells walked in. They announced their entrance with a jangle and clang, and everyone in the room looked up.

  “The Most Esteemed Governor Granthus,” an unmasked soldier announced. “All rise.”

  I thought I heard Frost curse softly, but maybe it was just the murmur that ran through the room as the men pushed back their chairs and stood up. I wanted to curse. Granthus wouldn’t recognize me by sight. But he knew my family, and I didn’t want to invite any attention to my father, if we were questioned in a search for Seditionists. I wished, suddenly, that I’d listened to Yula’s copyist and stayed hom
e.

  Granthus stood ramrod straight in the doorway, his deep burgundy cape secured over his shoulders with golden pins that gleamed in the yellow light. The light also flashed off the golden wolf’s head stitched on his tunic. His silver hair swept down from a high widow’s peak and lay clean and soft against his back. He looked something like his machines, Fixed by Smiths from precious metals. He began to remove his black gloves.

  “My lord,” the barkeep said. “To what do we owe this visit?”

  “I was inspecting the gates again. Now I desire breakfast for myself and my men.”

  The barkeep looked up nervously at the soldiers crowding the entrance. “My lord. There are too many of them.”

  “What do you mean, too many?”

  “Forgive me, but we don’t have enough food.”

  “Aren’t you a tavern? I’ve eaten here many times before.”

  “Yes, my lord, but… we’ve had no deliveries since Ninth Month.”

  “Haven’t I put out edicts that the city shall become self-sufficient?” Granthus said testily. “We’ve the sea. You can raise rabbits, can’t you? Fowl? Grow vegetables in pots?”

  One of the men standing at a table near the door broke in. “If it wasn’t nearly winter.”

  Granthus swung around. “Who said that?”

  The man squared his shoulders. He looked as if he’d been bigger in the past, the way his clothes hung off his shoulders. His curly black beard had gray streaks in it. “I did, my lord.”

  “You’re using autumn as an excuse? You could have turned to this work a month ago instead of waiting for deliveries.”

  “Takes time to grow things, my lord, and it’s too cold now. Besides, wheat don’t grow in a pot. Where are we to get our bread?”

  A low rumble of agreement spread through the men at the tables.

  “We all have to tighten our belts in these hard times,” Granthus said. “But I expect you to feed your protectors.”

  “Protectors?” the man burst out. “The dragons never killed this many people!”

  Dead silence.

  Granthus pulled on the glove he’d removed. “Take him,” he told his soldiers.

  The man broke. His shoulders, held proudly a moment before, slumped and he looked around wildly. He grabbed a table knife and whipped it out in front of him. But he was no match for trained Eterean guards. They grabbed him and dragged him out the door.

  In the brief lacuna that followed, while everyone wondered what to do, I looked at Frost. He was carving marks on the table with his thumbnail, not watching the proceedings at all.

  He was an Acolyte or a Seditionist, and I didn’t want to associate with either. When the rest of the men ran out of the room to watch what happened to their compatriot, I whirled and ran, too.

  “Peri!” Frost called out. I heard him throw a chair out of the way to follow me, but I didn’t stop.

  I didn’t stop to watch the man being savaged in the courtyard either—torn apart by snarling, silver dogs while the soldiers laid down money and Granthus stood by with his arms crossed over his chest.

  Instead, I lost myself in the crowd and ran all the way home.

  I laid low for a while. But we had to eat.

  Every time I went out, the feeling of being watched crawled over my back. Sometimes I even turned fast enough to see white hair poking out of a hood. I began to avoid our marketplace and instead walked all the way down to the fish markets. It was a lot harder to steal a big, slimy fish than it was to pocket a couple of figs, though. The smell always gave you away.

  Soldiers roamed all over the city now. They wore their stern wooden masks, the strings of bells slung over their shoulders a clanging, jangling cacophony with every step. I barely dared steal anything, and what I did, I gave to my father.

  Then one day, I found myself wandering the street in front of the Dragon Temple.

  I didn’t know how my feet brought me there. Maybe I’d walked that direction to avoid a familiar brown hood or a flip of white hair—or maybe that was just a dream. My hunger had passed the point of pain and propelled me into a perpetual light-headed fugue state.

  Eating cheese straight out of the pot with my fingers, I read from Vri’s letter, and I couldn’t even imagine such a thing. Did cheese exist? Was there once a time when we could have it any time we wanted it, and sit at a table in the middle of the night, eating it with our fingers?

  By some kind of hunger logic, I wondered if Frost had been herding me toward the Temple. Maybe he was an acolyte. After all, he’d ignored the suffering of the Seditionist in the tavern. If I found Frost at the temple, perhaps all our problems would be solved. I’d be fed until I failed the magic tests, Vri was safe in Eterea where the Temple couldn’t find her, and for the brief time they let me stay, surely the temple would take care of my father.

  Hunger spins a dangerous rhetoric.

  The thought let something loose inside me, though. Something that was holding me up, making me put one foot in front of the other. I’d found myself woolgathering in front of the Temple before, but this time an acolyte pushed open the big oak doors and stepped onto the portico. It wasn’t Frost, and for some reason this surprised me. I don’t know why I’d convinced myself it would be him. But this acolyte was Eterean, with that classic patrician nose that looked as if it had been broken in the middle, and curly brown hair and olive skin just a shade lighter than my own. The sleeves of his rich red wool robes were so voluminous he could run his hands up them, which he did.

  “Can I help you, girl?”

  Could he help me? My heart pounded in my chest. My ribs felt light as bird bones, and my heart skipped beats as its pace quickened.

  “Is there a man here?” I said. “With white hair? A young man, not an old one?”

  The acolyte frowned. Then he lifted his head slightly, the frown turning into a crafty look. “Are you talking about Stefan Frost?”

  Stefan. So that was his real name. I bobbed my head. “Perhaps you could fetch him?”

  The acolyte barked a laugh. “If I could do that, girl, I’d likely get a promotion. What do you know about Frost?” He gave me a look with an edge to it, like a knife.

  I stumbled backward. “N-nothing,” I said. “I thought he might be an acolyte—”

  The acolyte tilted his head. He reminded me of a bird of prey. But then his expression turned prospective, and in an instant, his face smoothed over with benevolence, as if he had suddenly donned a mask. He leaned toward me.

  “So, you wanted to enter the Temple?”

  “I—” I stuttered. “I don’t know.”

  “Oh,” he said. “But, look at how your bones stand out. And how thin your hair is. You’re hungry, aren’t you?”

  Mutely, I nodded.

  “Poor girl. Life is hard on the streets, isn’t it? Perhaps you need a bed. And a bath? And supper, of course. We’ve supper every night.”

  Every night? I wanted to say, like a little girl asking about candies. Instead I said, “How?”

  The acolyte pulled one of his hands out of his sleeves and waved it vaguely in the air. “Sacrifices are made elsewhere to provide food for the Dragon Youth. Saving the populace from dragon attack is a very important role.”

  “Y-yes,” I said unsteadily.

  The acolyte removed his other hand from his sleeves. In his fingers he held a small, shriveled brown thing. A date. He held it up so I could see.

  “Would you like to come inside? There’s something familiar about you… what did you say your name was?”

  “Peri,” I breathed, my eyes pinned to the date. The acolyte raised his brows, and I amended it: “Peranza.”

  The acolyte’s brows jumped. “There was another girl,” he said. “Who had a sister named Peranza…”

  That snapped me back to reality. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “I’m an only child.”

  “Mmmm. Peranza. If you follow me, you can have this date. And more. Much, much more.”

  My
father didn’t want this, and neither did I. Frost wasn’t in that temple either.

  But I was so, so hungry. And Vri was safe, off the island.

  I watched the acolyte’s back until he reached the top of the stairs. Then it was as Frost said back in the market—the drive to survive took over. I put my foot on the step.

  “Peri,” a voice said near my shoulder. “I don’t think you want to do that.”

  I didn’t have the presence of mind to be startled. Somewhere in my head I recognized the voice as Frost’s, but it didn’t seem strange that he should have followed me here and finally come to speak to me. It felt like the conversation had conjured him up.

  I didn’t turn my head. “In the alleys,” I said, “the acolytes come for the girls with honey pastries. And apples and flatbread and skewers of lamb. Not just a single date.”

  “Come with me, Peri. I’ll feed you,” he said and put his hand on my arm. When he began to pull me away, I did turn to look at him.

  His hood was like a tunnel. All I could see was his face—his green-gold eyes, the ruined bones.

  The acolyte’s footsteps halted. “You, there!” he said. “Don’t hamper a volunteer for the dragons.”

  Frost kept his head down and bowed, like any respectful freeman would. “No, ser,” he said. “My sister’s a little off in the head. She wouldn’t make a good Dragon Girl. She’s just in it for the food.”

  He took my elbow and began steering me away.

  “You know, they have wine, too,” I said. “And if you’re deemed worthy, you sleep on a feather bed. In the morning, they serve you mulled cider and sausages and griddle cakes with dates and cream.”

  “They do not. It’s all a scam, Peri.”

  “Peranza!” the acolyte called, his sandals slapping against the steps as he ran down them after me. “Let go of her!”

  “My father said I shouldn’t go with you,” I said as Frost dragged me into a stumbling run. “He was afraid you wanted me for the temple. To give me to the dragons. But you aren’t part of the temple, are you?”

  “No.”

  “Come back!” the acolyte called, and Frost ran faster, forcing me to run to keep up with him. “Peranza!”