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For survivors
#RESIST
The big, black, ugly bird that clings
to rooftops in the city, long of wing
And long of neck, naked, warty thing
That swoops out of the twilight, singing
Songs of ugly hunger, early death
Where lost breaths are swallowed breath
by breath, we walked in city streets, enwreathed
in sidewalks, green grass and oak leaves wreath
the idylls of we who pretend until the bird
black bird cawing in the break of dawn, a word
of darkness, swoop upon the rooftops, heard
in bedrooms still dark, waking to a dead word
A kitten half-eaten by the dogs of moonlight
The wicked tooth, and harpies own all twilights.
—Mikos Rukovili
PROLOGUE
WHEN KAROLJE BECAME king, he ordered rooms in the library to be mortared shut. Sometimes Anza imagined the insides of the rooms, dark, the books and papers ravaged by mice, the furniture and floors thick with the dust of those twelve years. Karolje had expelled most of the masters and locked nearly all the buildings. In the College now there were three masters and barely sixty students, who studied under the ever-watchful eyes of Karolje’s soldiers. The city had once had numerous printers and booksellers, most of whom had abandoned their shops or turned to some other business or been killed.
Moonlight silvery-blue on the square and the library made her hesitate. The white harpy droppings streaking the roof tiles were bright. Rumil bumped into her. Jance looked back and said, “Are you about to quit?”
“We aren’t going to be inconspicuous,” Anza said. They had all drunk too much raki, but she remembered to keep her voice down. It was after midnight, and the College required them to be in their rooms.
“I have the bloody key,” Jance said. “All we have to do is cross the square.”
“Shut up, both of you,” said Rumil. He was always nervous about breaking rules.
They did. It was fall, a crisp coolness in the air that the raki dispelled nicely internally and left pleasant on the skin. Jance walked forward, confident, arrogant. That was the trick, of course; if you looked like you were skulking, you were much more suspect.
No one stopped them. They walked up the steps to the library portico. It was too dark to see any of the carvings on the door. Jance said, “Don’t crowd me,” and Anza and Rumil backed up.
The key scraped against metal as Jance tried to fit it into the lock. Then came the snick and the turn. He pushed, and the door opened.
All three of them had been in the building before, usually sent on an errand by a master, but never at night. The moon shone through the high windows and left blocks of silver light on the threadbare carpet. The staircase ascending to the gallery loomed. To the left, the rooms where the permitted books were shelved were full of darkness.
Jance stepped in. Rumil said, “Now what? We know what it looks like. You’ve won the bet.”
“Afraid of ghosts?”
“It’s a library, not a mausoleum. You won’t be able to see a damn thing in there.”
“Leave, then. Are you coming with me, Anza?”
“I’m staying, but I’ll explore on my own,” she said. She glanced at Rumil. He shook his head and turned around, shutting the door as he left. With the door closed, the building was larger, darker, the moonlight catching on the rail of the stair faint and insufficient.
Jance said, “I knew he wouldn’t come in. I stole some other keys too. I’m going to try them in the north wing.”
“Give me one.” She held out her hand.
He placed a smaller key on her palm. “I don’t know what it unlocks,” he said. “It might belong with another building. Meet me back here in an hour.”
She put her foot on the stairs. Each step was loud, each creak an explosion.
The gallery, which circled the entrance hall, was lined with locked doors, former offices for the masters. She had walked past them in the daytime and seen the scars where the masters’ sigils had been forced off the doors. At either end a windowless staircase led up to the third floor, where the forbidden books were walled off. The bricks covered the doorways in tidy rows, solidly mortared, impossible to pass through.
Once she had asked her father why Karolje walled the books away instead of burning them, and he had said, Those were the early days. Before the war with Tazekhor ended, before the killings began, before the queen vanished. Mirantha had disappeared three years after her husband was crowned, and no one spoke of her. Her vanishing was one of the stories everyone knew and no one could remember hearing. The thought was disquieting in the darkness, the silence.
She went to the nearest room and tried the key.
It fit in the third door, but stiffly. She twisted harder. There was a horrific screech from the lock. The hinges were not much quieter when the door swung open.
The air flowing out was stale and musty. Dust lay on the floor like velvet. Books were stacked unevenly here and there, some leaning against each other, on mostly empty shelves. Where the moonlight hit them, the gilt on the spine was bright. A table had been shoved out of place, and one of the two chairs was on its side. Soldiers like her father had come, forced the master or student out, and locked the door. Any books that were illegal would have been confiscated. Anza was surprised the College had been allowed to keep the key.
Softly, as though the floor were fragile, she walked in. Clouds of dust raised by her footsteps showed in the moonbeams, wraithlike. The shadows of the lead bars on the window made a lattice in the silver light. When she stepped forward, the lattice fell across her legs, caging them.
Absurdly, she righted the chair. She went to the window to look out at the empty square. No movement, no shadows. Her breath fogged the cold glass. Jance’s taunt to Rumil suddenly seemed fitting. The library might have been a tomb, full of the dead and their uneasy shades.
She turned back to the room and saw that on one shelf the books were arranged neatly, carefully. They had not been searched by soldiers. She crossed and pulled the books off one at a time, opened them in the moonlight. Each had an owner’s mark on the first page, its details illegible in the faint light. A history she knew to be banned, printed before it had been illegal. Essays. Another history. A volume of poetry, small enough to fit comfortably in one hand. The poet, Mikos Rukovili, had been executed for treason years ago. A thick treatise of political philosophy. The evil of kings is that they obtain their power through plunder and reiving and maintain it with oppression. She returned it hastily to the shelf; knowledge of the contents alone could get her killed
. A discourse on natural philosophy, illustrated with drawings in bold dark lines. A play.
How had they survived the king’s purge? Her tutor had had such books, and though he did not live in daily fear of king’s men in the small village, he had kept them hidden. When he taught her from them, he leashed his dog outside and locked the door. This is what Karegg is like now, he said, and she had understood that he was an exile. She had accepted the risk of learning with him, but she had never thought to find cracks in Karolje’s censorship within the College itself.
The book at the end of the shelf was thin and bound in a dark green leather, still relatively new. It fell open near the middle. She touched the corner of a page and felt the roughness of the pulp. The library scents of paper and leather and glue and dust bowed to a smell of orange blossoms and lavender and mint.
Moonlight revealed line after line of handwritten words marching across crisp pages in dark ink, written in the Eridian alphabet. Anza sounded out the first few words and realized that only the alphabet was Eridian, not the language. A protection against hasty glances or uneducated companions. Someone’s journal. There were no dates. She read a little further, then stopped at a word as fear clogged her throat. It was a name, a name she recognized. Her fingers trembled.
Her body screamed at her to run. She told herself she was not such a coward. She took several deep breaths, of the sort she had learned to take before she nocked an arrow to her bow. The journal had been kept, not destroyed. It mattered. If she did not take it now, it might not be seen for years, its voice further silenced. Someone had to read it.
She slipped it under the back of her shirt and beneath the waistband of her trousers. Impulsively, she took the poetry too. She looked at the owner’s mark again. This time, knowing who the journal writer was, she could read the mark.
The poetry fit into the loose pocket of her trousers. She did not dare try to take any of the other books. She retreated and brushed the dust off her shoes in the doorway. She wiped her hands on her pants and locked the door. Then she hurried back down to the library entrance.
The waiting until Jance appeared seemed hours. The comforting warmth of the raki had faded, and she expected soldiers to appear at any moment. She gave Jance back the key as soon as he was close enough to touch.
He dropped the library key twice before he got the door locked. Each time Anza started with surprise at the clank of metal against stone. They walked back together, more quickly than they had come, silent. She was glad to separate from him in the dormitory. They did not say good night.
Once inside her room, she changed rapidly into nightclothes by the light of a candle, forbidden this late. She briefly lifted the edge of the curtain to look for anyone passing outside. The flame swayed, shadows ebbing and increasing. Wax trickled over the rim and hardened on the side of the taper in rigid lines that reminded her of bones. She rotated the candle and huddled into her cold bed with the journal.
The first pages were a lesson book of some sort, in a child’s hand, but near the middle it had started to be used for its new purpose:
I know it is dangerous to write this, even in this foreign script. But I must put it in words somehow, or I will go mad. I would rather be killed for my deeds than because I have lost my mind.
It is three months since Karolje was crowned, and he has not relented about the boys. There is always a guard or two with them when they come or if I go to see them. I have stayed away from the schoolroom. If I go to the garden to walk with them, I am always joined by some other woman, usually the wife of one of Karolje’s favorites. Everything I say to my sons will be reported to their father. I cannot put Esvar on my lap and tell him the things he needs to hear to have a chance at growing into a good man. I cannot tell Tevin when his father lies. I can only let them know they continue to be loved.
Still I have not seen him alone. Karolje keeps him close, an adviser. This frightens me. The king must know, and he will kill me for it sometime. I am sure my maids have told him everything he asked.
When she finished reading, Anza blew out the candle, almost a stub now, and held the closed book on her lap. She ran the tip of one finger over the stamped seal on the cover. The queen had been careful in what she wrote—only near the end was the lover named, after he was dead, impaled as a traitor. Being careful had not protected her.
Anza knew she would be haunted by the journal’s last line for the rest of her life. When I am gone, Karolje will pay. A curse, a wish, a promise.
AFTER CAPTAIN HAVIDIAN bungled a raid on the resistance and was beheaded, raids were overseen by one or the other of Karolje’s two sons. Usually the task fell to Esvar, the younger, who hated it. Karolje was punishing him too. He wanted to be among the resisters, fighting the king, instead of rounding them up for the dungeons and torture chambers. He found himself afraid to go to bed those nights. Once he was alone in the dark, the thoughts and memories swirled around and around in his head, pulling him into some unimaginable abyss.
Tonight was likely to be no different. Low, heavy clouds had kept the day from ever warming, and now that the sun was down the air was cold, more like spring than early summer. In the gardens of the Citadel, the trees would be bending with the wind blowing strongly out of the northwest. Esvar hoped the rain held off.
The unpaved street was narrow, crowded with rickety houses whose upper stories blocked out most of the sky. Rats, undeterred by the horses, foraged among a nearby stinking pile of garbage, their scaly tails snakelike on the dirt, bright eyes gleaming in the lantern light. In daytime, the poverty would show in missing planks, in stained and ragged curtains, in grubby, too-thin children with infected sores on their arms and legs. The dank smell of the waterfront a few blocks away clung to everything.
The lightless house was three buildings down from the cross street where Esvar waited. Karegg was filled with abandoned houses that had become ratholes for the resistance, and raiding them was routine. The watchers had already confirmed that no one had left by front or back, door or window. The soldiers in the rear should be in position by now. Four soldiers on horseback blocked each end of the street. The ten other soldiers had all dismounted and were ready, stunning whips in one hand and daggers in the other. They had short swords, but they were instructed not to use them unless their lives were at real risk. Karolje wanted the captives able to talk.
Esvar looked the soldiers over one last time. “You and you,” he said, pointing, “will wait outside.” One looked too nervous, the other too eager. In the few months he had been leading the raids, he had developed an eye for both timidity and viciousness in his men. “And you, Rozik.” Rozik was capable of keeping the men under control if any of the resisters fled toward them.
“All right,” Esvar said, familiar apprehension tight within him. His horse’s ears twitched. “Go.”
The soldiers jogged away from him to the house. The three men Esvar had ordered to stay back fanned out, a lantern on the ground between them and the house, while two men broke down the door. Shouting, the soldiers poured in.
Shouts. A scream of pain. Esvar unclenched his fists. This was the worst of it. The watchers had said six resisters were inside, which was no challenge for seven trained soldiers. The greatest threat was the cramped space. In close quarters a knife strike could be deadly. The stunning whips, long enough to lash a raised arm into paralysis before a blade could ever touch, should dispose of the threat. Should. There was always room for something to go wrong.
Shutters banged as neighbors closed them. No one wanted to see what was happening. Ignorance was the only shield these people had against Karolje. Not much longer now. His eyes scanned the house restlessly from top to bottom.
He saw not the object but the motion, the disturbance in the darkness, as something arced from one of the upper windows. “Get down!” he yelled, but before the words left his mouth there was a boom. The world went silent. Flame spouted to the sky from the street, spilled lamp oil burning madly. His horse reared, its mouth
open in a scream he could not hear, and he reined it in with effort. In front of the house, a man writhed on the ground, his arm wrapped in fire, while clods of earth rained down. One struck by Esvar and sprayed his face with soil.
He dismounted and ran forward. His ears were ringing. The heat of the fire struck him like a blow, but he continued to the injured soldier. The man’s face was distorted and reddened with light and flame, his open mouth shining in the firelight, the sound inaudible over the noise in Esvar’s ears. Esvar flung his jacket over him and beat at the flames.
He smelled hair burning, and flesh, and the chemicals of the explosive. The light danced unsteadily as tears from the smoke filled his eyes.
Soldiers were upon him. One lifted the injured man; the other grabbed Esvar by the upper arm and hauled him away. There was a sudden pain in his back as the mail shirt he wore was briefly driven into his flesh. He spun and saw the arrow on the ground. It was steel-tipped, a military arrow. Where the hell had that come from? Beside him a soldier fell, a feathered shaft protruding from his neck.
They ran. An arrow grazed his shoulder. More arrows skipped against the ground. He looked back with swollen, painful eyes. The lurid flames painting the houses against the night transformed the street into the entrance to hell.
Panicked neighbors fled directly into the soldiers cordoning the block. As Esvar watched, appalled, a sword cut down the slender figure of a youth. Other soldiers followed suit. He raised his arms, shouting, but he could not hear his own voice. The soldiers likely couldn’t either. Firelight gilded the blades and the trappings of the horses.
Esvar pushed past a terrified woman and reached the soldiers. He waved them aside. For a moment no one moved; then the soldiers stepped out of the way, and the fleeing people scattered into the night. A few lay dead or injured.
The clouds chose that moment to disgorge themselves of torrential rain. Had Esvar still believed in the gods, he would have dropped to his knees in a prayer of gratitude. The water stung on his bare arms, hurting more than rain ever had. His skin was burned and tender. He was soaked through almost at once. He crossed his arms against the cold and turned his face upward, hoping the rain would clean his eyes.
The Vanished Queen Page 1
