In Dreaming Bound

by J. Kathleen Cheney

  “I’ll do that,” Tabita said.

  Shironne made her way slowly toward the quarters’ door, concerned that someone might have left something on the floor between the rows of beds. But soon she stood at the quarters’ door and stepped into the hallway where the chevrons on the walls could guide her. At this point, both rows of chevrons led in the same direction, toward the main stairwells in the center of the Fortress.

  “I can’t remember their names,” Shironne said. “Could you tell me again?”

  “Whose names?”

  “The three girls on the bed. The ones who were waiting for you. Their voices are so similar I can’t tell them apart.”

  Tabita chuckled. “It’s Hanna, Hedda, and Norah. I suspect if I closed my eyes, I wouldn’t be able to tell them apart either. It probably doesn’t help you to know that Hanna is Larossan, like you, but was raised here from birth.”

  And it didn’t help that their names sounded alike. Shironne repeated the names anyway. In time she should be able to differentiate them.

  “Also,” Tabita added, “in my mind, they even feel the same. They’re that close. It will rip their hearts out when Hanna has to leave.”

  Because Hanna was Larossan, like all the people who worked for the colonel. Once they’d served sentry duty for three years, they were expected to leave, the Family’s duty to them—as required by treaty—completed.

  “It’s possible they might lose all three of them then,” Tabita told her. “And Theo, for that matter.”

  “They?” Shironne asked. They’d reached the end of the hall and she started following the upper chevrons toward the central stairwells.

  “They?” Tabita repeated.

  “You said they might lose them. Not we.” She’d questioned prisoners for the army before. The wording of a statement, even one made in casual conversation, could be important.

  “Ah,” Tabita said. “I won’t be here, either. I’ll be sent back to Jannsen once I’m of age.” She tried to hold in the sense of loss that accompanied those words. “If you hear me called a dove, it means I was sent here from Jannsen but will have to go back.”

  “You don’t want to,” Shironne guessed.

  “No,” Tabita answered softly.

  Shironne reached a corner and felt the chevrons on the other side of it, trying to decide whether she needed to cross the hallway. It’s logic, she reminded herself. But this hallway was busy, a large group of people coming toward them from the left. Giggling voices, quickly shushed, suggested it was a younger yeargroup, curious minds considering her, but turning away politely. Shironne let the group pass and then followed, relatively certain the children were headed to the commons as well. That was cheating, but she was tired now. “Who makes that decision?”

  “The elders,” Tabita said.

  “Couldn’t you ask to stay?”

  It took a moment for Tabita to answer. “It’s the way it is.”

  Shironne walked on, one gloved hand trailing on the chevrons. Later, when Tabita wasn’t paying attention, she was going to hunt through Mikael’s memories and figure out why Tabita was here. And why she couldn’t stay.

  Because if they won’t let Tabita stay, they won’t let me, either.

  * * *

  Mikael had felt a brief moment of panic from Shironne earlier, too vague for him to grasp the source, but enough that he could feel her distress. He’d thought calm back at her, and after a moment her fear had subsided.

  That was exactly the sort of thing the elders had forbidden him to do.

  Over the last month, he’d discussed this at length with Deborah. If what she understood of binding was correct, the more time that he and Shironne spent in proximity, the closer their minds would become. Curiously, it didn’t seem to be an even exchange, perhaps due to Shironne’s greater inherent sensitivity. She was able to pierce through into his mind at will and dig through his thoughts. He could almost feel it when she did that, like an itch inside his brain, but he never had any idea what she was looking for.

  He didn’t mind. His knowledge was likely making it easier for her to get along, rather like he was a book of instructions.

  What was curious, though, was that he wasn’t developing the ability to peek into her thoughts. True, he picked up strong reactions from her—surprise, alarm, fear—and usually had an idea where she was. But when it came to developing the true mutual communication that bound pairs were supposed to have, he failed. Deborah hadn’t opined on the meaning of that, and he certainly wasn’t going to go to the chaplains to explore the issue. They were already suspicious of the relationship, given the age disparity. He didn’t need to feed their worries.

  He opened his eyes to find Kassannan gazing at him impassively in the dim interior of the coach bearing them to the hospital at the Army Square. Kassannan wasn’t a sensitive, so he wouldn’t have felt him disappear, as Dahar put it. But Mikael suspected he’d fallen out of the conversation instead. “I apologize. I lost my train of thought.”

  “I said that you can’t be there,” Kassannan said. “Tomorrow, whenever they can get Shironne to come view this body.”

  “I understand.” Mikael puzzled over the idea. “Who does that request go through, anyhow?”

  “Deborah, as her sponsor. You want to take a note to her?”

  To Deborah. He wouldn’t run into Shironne in the infirmary if he went after dinner, so that seemed safe. “I’ll do that.”

  “We’re going to miss her around the office,” Kassannan said. “I am.”

  Kassannan had worked with Shironne more closely than anyone else in that office. His wife had died several months past, and much of the work that kept Kassannan occupied in the time afterward was his work with Shironne.

  “Given what she is,” Mikael said, “everyone will want her time.” The coach made another turn and slowed. They must be at the hospital. “I’ll leave you to it, then. We’ll talk tomorrow?”

  Once the coach had stopped, Kassannan opened his door and jumped down. “We’ll do that.”

  Chapter 13

  * * *

  SHIRONNE WOKE BLEARY and exhausted. She lay in her bunk and suppressed the desire to cry.

  Sleep had been elusive. She’d never before slept in the presence of anyone other than her sisters or mother. Being in a room with thirteen unfamiliar girls nearby had kept her on edge. A few of the girls snored. One snorted in her sleep, seeming to time that noise exactly to each moment when Shironne was about to drift off.

  The bed was narrower than her old one, too, and the sheets so new they smelled of starch. They felt harsh against her bare arms and cheek, causing her to wonder what would happen when, inevitably, they had to be washed. Would they be thrown in with everyone else’s laundry to pick up bits of others’ dirt? She hoped someone had a plan for that, because she couldn’t find the answer in Mikael’s mind.

  A few of the other girls were moving about, which was likely what woke her this time. A hand touched her shoulder—Tabita. “I know you didn’t sleep well,” the other girl whispered, “but some of us are going down to the sparring floor. Would you like to come?”

  The sparring floor was on Six Down, the place where the Family went to practice their fighting skills. Not that Shironne herself had fighting skills; that wasn’t why Tabita offered. It was an offer of protection instead. Tabita wanted to keep her close to make certain none of the others hazed her, as Dahar had called it. That hinted some of the others were staying.

  Although the yeargroup’s elderly sponsors—loud Agnes and faint-voiced Clara—had their rooms right across the guideline from the sixteens’ hall, they were far enough away that they wouldn’t be able to intervene quickly. The hope was that the sixteens would be able to tame themselves, but Shironne didn’t know the others well enough to guess whether that had worked.

  “Yes, I’ll come.” Shironne pushed back the bedding and sat up, using her toes to locate her slippers. Her nightclothes—a loose pair of trousers and a sleeveless shirt—seemed war
m enough to handle the temperature here. The Fortresses never got cold. It was cool. Chilly even, but not cold. Not cold like the palace, at least. And her current state of dress was actually acceptable in the hallways. The Family had few qualms about baring skin in front of each other, something she’d learned from Deborah the previous month. Even so, Shironne reached up to find the uniform jacket she’d left on the shelf and tugged it on. She wasn’t comfortable being seen in only a thin linen shirt even if all the others were. “Do I have time to visit the toilets?”

  “I’ll go with you,” Tabita said. “We need to talk about your schedule anyway.”

  “Oh, yes. I need to go visit the army,” Shironne said.

  Tabita put a hand on Shironne’s jacket sleeve. “Do we need to talk about this again?”

  In the dark of the night, Shironne had dared to reach out to Mikael’s mind and found him awake and worrying. About her mostly—why she’d been kidnapped, how she was fitting in Below, and what the others thought of her—but also about the mysterious body he’d handed over to the army, one with injuries suspiciously like Melanna’s. That meant the army would send for her to view it today, surely.

  But she shouldn’t know about that. Not yet. “Would you rather I not say anything if I know something I’m not supposed to? Let you tell me everything instead, I mean?”

  Tabita sighed, a hint of consternation leaking out. “No, just be careful there’s no one nearby.”

  With the Family sometimes being silent in her mind’s perception, that might be difficult. “I’ll try,” she promised anyway.

  Half an hour later she was dressed and following the endless stairwells to Six Down. Tabita and two of the trio had gone ahead of her, leaving her alone with Hanna. Hanna’s pleasant disposition helped bolster Shironne’s spirits. They talked as Shironne made her slow way down the stairwells. Apparently, it wasn’t dawn yet, another reason Shironne felt tired. Hanna offered the explanation that a large number of sentries would come off duty in an hour and crowd the sparring floors. Since sentries, guards, and quarterguards fulfilled the treaty, the rest of the Family—including the children—worked around their schedules. The sentries would have priority in the mess hall as well as the sparring floor, so the sixteens would wait for their breakfast, too.

  They were between Four Down and Five Down on the landing where the main stairwell turned. The stairwell was huge, wide enough for twelve people to climb abreast, Mikael had once told her. Other people had passed her and Hanna, some going up, some down, more evident by the sounds of their feet and the scent of perspiration and warm wool than their intrusion on Shironne’s mind. All refrained from speaking to her and Hanna because of their brown uniforms. “So when the new year comes,” Shironne asked, pausing to rest, “you’ll become a sentry? Is that right?”

  Hanna let her irritation be felt—or perhaps she couldn’t control it. “I’ll be stuck somewhere where no outsider will see my brown skin, but I’ll serve three years like everyone else.”

  She’d forgotten that Hanna was Larossan, like her. Or part Larossan. The ancient treaty between the Family and the Anvarrid included a rarely invoked provision that the Family would take in orphans with Anvarrid blood. That meant any Larossan woman could claim her child had an Anvarrid father and pass that child off to the Family. Shironne suspected Hanna didn’t have much, if any, Anvarrid blood. She seemed far more Family than, for example, Maria, whose mind had a clear Anvarrid tinge to it. Should I call it a tinge? Characteristic? Perhaps an aspect?

  Shironne cast her mind back over her childhood memories of seeing the Family. Like most citizens of Noikinos, she’d ridden past the palace from time to time in a carriage, leaning out to catch glimpses of the sentry line at the palace gates, stern faces and black uniforms. All blond, with their long hair worn in identical braids. No ranks visible. Their high collars even helped hide whether a sentry was male or female, although there were certainly other cues. But Mikael’s mind supplied her with the information that the Lucases put their most identical sentries in the public venues. The ones who were obviously different, like Hanna, would stand in hidden locations.

  And for the first time, Shironne grasped why Mikael bleached his hair. His hair went darker every year, but among the Lucas Family, the need to conform was very strong. He felt the desire to conform just as Hanna must, even though he would never serve as a sentry here.

  “What’s wrong?” Hanna asked.

  Shironne caught her lower lip between her teeth. She could hardly admit she’d been thinking about Mikael. “I was just wondering if I would be asked to stand sentry duty next year.”

  “I doubt that,” Hanna said coolly. “You’re too valuable. They’ll make exceptions for you.”

  But not for her.

  Hanna hadn’t said it aloud, even though it was the truth. At the end of those three years Hanna would be sent out of the Fortress to make her way in the Larossan world. From her interactions with Cerradine’s people, Shironne knew that suddenly having to figure out how Larossans lived was difficult and confusing and lonely.

  It was the opposite of what she was doing now.

  “I apologize for the way that sounded,” Hanna added with remorse. “It’s not your fault. Tabita said it’s unpleasant being a touch-sensitive. From what she’s read, a lot of them starve to death. Is that true?”

  “Um . . . I had trouble eating at first,” Shironne said. “My mother had the cook boil milk for me, which helped. I survived on tea with milk for a couple of months.” That had been one of the more terrifying aspects of the eruption of her powers. She’d suddenly been able to taste everything, every impurity, and the traces of the hands of whoever had prepared the food. Each spice shifted in its taste, some more potent and some tasting only like dirt or bark. She’d had to relearn to tolerate foods. She rarely ate meat even now, as it carried too much of a sense of a living creature with it, full of impurities of its own. Fortunately, dinner in the mess area the previous evening had been some manner of bean soup—acceptable, although a little bland compared to Cook’s excellent fare.

  “Apparently, you can do a lot of strange things that I can’t,” Hanna added, “so I’m sure they’ll make you work all the time.” Faint sorrow accompanied that prediction.

  Shironne laid her hand on the wall and felt her way with one foot to the next flight of stairs. She’s trying to justify to herself why I’ll stay and she won’t.

  Hanna didn’t talk the rest of the way to Six Down, her mind turning in slow circles, rehashing something she’d thought through a thousand times before. She stepped out of the stairwell. “Do you need me to lead you?”

  Shironne had been on Six Down before. From Mikael’s mind, she had a vague idea of its layout. There would be dozens of large squares painted on the gray floor, some with pads made from old fabrics, others plain stone. Myriad voices spoke, and there were echoing noises of clashing of metal and sounds that reminded her of fistfights; that would be the sparring. The air was warmer on this level and bore the scent and humidity of many bodies. The light felt different on her face, as well. This was the floor where one could sunburn, even without the sun.

  The main problem with the sparring floor, however, was that it was a shapeless void to her.

  She had a vague impression now of where Tabita was—about the distance of a city square away from her, almost straight ahead—but she couldn’t assume there was a clear path between her and Tabita. “Yes, please. I don’t have any way to find anything here.”

  Hanna took Shironne’s hand and led her to one side. Even through the glove, Shironne could sense Hanna’s determination to be pleasant and accepting and happy. Mikael did the same thing, she realized. As do I.

  After some distance to the side, they turned and headed into the wide-open space. “We have to stay to the children’s side,” Hanna explained as she drew Shironne forward. They drew to a halt near where Tabita spoke with one of the other girls. “We’re at the edge of a square. We sit here and wait our turns.
”

  Turns? “Who else is here?”

  “At this square? Just Tabita, Norah, and Hanna. Gabriel and Eli are two squares over, and Theo and Kasper and Iver. There are a handful of the fifteens here, too.”

  “But not younger?”

  “Not allowed to come down this early,” Hanna said. “We sit down right here to . . . well, to watch for now.”

  Shironne sat carefully where Hanna told her to. Through her glove she could feel the painted line of the square, almost a foot wide, atop the not-stone of the floor. She leaned forward—her shorn hair brushing her cheek and startling her again—and touched a thick pad made of layers and layers of fabric, old and treated with camphor and lanolin.

  “Don’t cross the line,” Hanna whispered.

  Shironne snatched her hand back. Mikael’s mind told her that Family were superstitious about crossing lines, and that offered another reason she shouldn’t walk directly across the sparring floor to where she wanted to go—she might cross a painted line.

  She could hear Tabita explaining something to someone on the floor, the words indistinct at this distance. Hanna concentrated on whatever was going on in the square, leaving Shironne alone after a fashion. From the participants, she heard a grunt and then the unmistakable sound of a body hitting that fabric mat. What just happened?

  Someone walked near her, and she heard the sounds of someone—no, him—lowering himself to the ground. Gabriel, she decided, recognizing the friendly young man’s open mind from their previous meeting a month before. “Hello, Gabriel.”

  “Hello, Shironne.”

  She felt his relief, probably that she remembered him, and a quick hint of concern from Hanna. He was tall, even sitting, and she caught the scent of his perspiration and damp wool. Hadn’t he been practicing with Eli a moment before? “Have you come to watch?”

  “Yes, but more to explain,” he said. “Your own hand-to-hand training will be limited, but I suspect Tabita will want you to learn some ability to defend yourself.”