by David Estes
“Thank you,” Jai said. “For cleaning the poison off my skin. For carrying me.”
“It was the least I could do after you saved us all, though I’ll take an assist since it was my fireroot.” She smiled. “But now, how about that story?”
Jai grimaced, but this time it wasn’t from the pain. He was hoping she’d forgotten. Then again, he’d wanted to tell her a couple of nights ago, and she’d opened up to him about her past. And maybe the pain of the telling would help him forget about his physical pain, at least for a while. The incline grew steeper, the red rocks thicker and taller, rising to great points cutting into the blue sky.
“My mother is a slave,” Jai said.
Shanti flinched. “That’s not funny,” she said.
“Sorry, I should’ve led with another line,” he said. “But I wasn’t japing. It’s true.”
“I…don’t understand.” Her coppery brows furrowed together, a few locks of hair blowing across her face. “You are not Teran. Your skin isn’t red and your hair is too dark.”
“I’m half. My father was Phanecian,” Jai explained.
“That explains your eyes. They are too big for you to be full Phanecian, though your skin is tanned like the slavers.”
“My father was a slave owner,” Jai said.
“Oh. Oh. I’m sorry.”
“It’s not what you think. My father didn’t force my mother, didn’t rape her. They loved each other.”
Shanti said nothing.
“It’s true,” Jai insisted. “I’m not clinging to some childhood fantasy.”
“How do you know?”
“Because my father is…” The words stuck in his throat—it had been years since he’d spoken of his past. “He’s gone. My father is gone.”
Shanti licked her lips, a troubled expression working its way from her chin to her eyes, which reflected Jai’s own sadness. “I’m sorry. You don’t have to tell the rest. It is your story to lock away, if you wish.”
“No,” he said, reaching up to grasp her wrist, just above where she held the edge of the gurney. The pain that lanced through his arm was fierce, but it was worth it. “I’m ready to tell it. My father was a slave owner, yes, but he never treated his slaves badly. That doesn’t make it right, I know, and I don’t condone it, but I can’t hate him either. Despite her red skin and black eyes, I never even knew my mother was a slave until I was five name days old. I can still remember the agony in my father’s eyes when he told me the truth. I wanted to hit him, to run away, to hide and never come out. But I didn’t do any of that, I just fell into his arms and cried. Later, after I felt better, he told me he fell in love with her the moment she came into our household. A little later she had me.
“Looking back, it seems so obvious. She looked like all the other slaves, but she had her free will, to do as she wished while in our household. She was an amazing dancer.”
Shanti’s eyed widened. “Phen sur, right? She was the dancer you were talking about before, wasn’t she?”
Jai nodded. “She glowed when she danced. Literally. It was like Surai was inside of her, or a part of her. My father and I couldn’t take our eyes off of her when she danced.”
“What happened?”
Jai tried to decide where to start the next part of his story. “As a boy, Father never let me leave the house. I didn’t mind that much, because he taught me phen lu, which I loved. When company came over, I had to stay in my room. But I was young and ignorant to the ways of the world. Only his slaves knew about me, and they were commanded to keep his secret.”
“And yet secrets always find the light of day eventually,” Shanti said. Jai could see it in her eyes, she knew what was coming, or at least had a guess. Once you’ve experienced tragedy, you tend to look for it hiding behind every shadow. Jai knew that feeling all too well.
“Yes. One of the other neighboring household masters realized what was going on, what had happened. He told the emperor about my mother, about me. The day I first laid eyes on Vin Hoza is branded in my mind like it was yesterday. He took my mother away. She didn’t fight it, couldn’t fight it—not when Hoza commanded her with the voice of her original master—but my father did. He slew four of Hoza’s men trying to get to the emperor before they subdued him. Hoza could’ve stopped him, made him a slave, but he seemed to be enjoying watching my father’s rage. Afterwards, he killed him for it. That’s how I know my father loved my mother, regardless of the slave mark she bore.”
Shanti didn’t need to say she was sorry again, Jai could see it in her silver-blue eyes. They’d both lost those they loved, regardless of whether he had the black tears to prove it. “What happened to her? To your mother.”
Jai shrugged. “I don’t know. They took her away.”
“She’s still a slave?”
“We are all still slaves. Just like my people. I gave them free will, but they are still slaves, at least until we can get them out of Phanes.”
“What happened to you after Hoza took her? How did you become a master?”
Jai flinched at the title. “I was taken to a master training camp. I think Hoza thought I was young enough to still be ‘rehabilitated’ to think the way he did. They taught me and the other boys phen ru. Not to protect, to punish. Sometimes the things I saw in that place gives me nightmares, but it gets better with time. But I never forgot what Emperor Hoza did to my family. Never.”
“You want to save these people for your mother?”
“I don’t know if I have a specific reason. Only that I must. Only that it’s what I’m meant to do.”
“We all have our reasons for what we do. Revenge. Atonement. Anger, hate, love. A lost brother, mother, friend. A lost soul.”
“What is your reason?”
“The reasons don’t matter,” Shanti said, squinting. “Only the results. I just want the empire to burn to the ground, with Hoza amongst the rubble. Why else would I haul all this fireroot around with me?”
“I understand wanting to overthrow Hoza and set our people free,” Jai said. “But this is our home. We can’t destroy it.”
“We are outsiders, even you with your tanned skin. This was never our home,” Shanti said. “We’ve sent our stories to the gods. Now it’s up to us to finish them.”
She crested the top of an incline and started down the opposite side. The line of refugees stretched for leagues in both directions.
A day later, Jai could walk again, though each step was painful. Two days later and he didn’t hunch nearly as much. On day three his skin began to peel off, flaking away with each breath of wind.
Though his people were weary and saddened by the loss of their loved ones between the Black and Red Rocks, they were fighters, as they had been their entire lives, never wavering as they pushed through the superheated mountain passes. More of the injured died along the way, and they buried them beneath cairns constructed of red stones. It was the best they could do, although it pained Jai greatly to know the vulzures would get to the bodies. The large raptors had been following them ever since the night with the red pyzon, and Jai was certain their long winged shadows wouldn’t leave them until they breached the great wall to the north.
On the fourth day, Jai noticed Axa sitting by himself when they stopped for their midday meal. He was holding his mirror and talking into it. The heat has addled his brain, Jai thought. When he went over to him, Axa thrust the mirror back into his skirt.
“I wanted to say thank you for carrying me for so long,” Jai said. Like Shanti, Axa had refused to pass his burden onto any other, even after his arms began trembling with exertion. Joaquin had taunted the former master for a while, before growing bored of it.
“Yes, Master,” Axa said.
“I am not your master,” he said. “Not anymore.”
“Master?”
“No.” Jai shook his head. He said the words he’d said to all the others. “I command you to act of your own free will, to make your own decisions, to walk your own paths. You
are no longer chained to me. You will no longer call me Master. You are your own master. Do you understand?”
“Yes…” Axa hesitated, as if the word ‘Master’ was on the tip of his tongue, like some kind of subconscious reflex, but then he closed his mouth. His eyes were still fully black, because, like the others, he was still technically a slave. If Vin Hoza were to appear next to him and tell him to leap from a cliff, Axa would obey without question. He wasn’t truly free, and never would be until they got past the bounds of Hoza’s territory.
Jai turned and walked away to find several of his people watching him with narrowed eyes. “Do you remember the time Master Axa beat me within an inch of my life?” one of them said, stepping forward. It was Joaquin again, his arms folded across his chest. He was a blunt man with a crooked nose and small, narrow eyes. Jai did remember. It was one of Axa’s first days as a mine master in Garadia. From the beginning, Axa had rebelled against Jai’s way of doing things. Jai had found Joaquin in a puddle of his own blood, ragged whip marks strewn across every bit of his skin. One of his eyes was swollen shut and he was barely breathing.
“Yes,” Jai said.
“And now you set him free, treat him like you treat the rest of us?” His eyes fired arrows of accusation across the space separating them. Several others nodded their agreement with his words. Other turned away, not wanting to get involved in the confrontation, but Jai had a feeling their thoughts would echo Joaquin’s.
“No,” Jai said. “He’s not like you. He’s not my family. He’s just a broken man in need of a second chance.”
“And if he runs away and goes back to his true Master? Hoza will destroy us all. Is that what you want?”
“You know I don’t.”
More and more people noticed the raised voices, milling toward them to find out what was going on. Sonika Vaid and her Black Tears approached, but Jai waved them off. Like Axa, they were outsiders, too, not connected to his people the way he was.
“We should beat him and leave him for the vulzures,” Joaquin said.
“We already decided he could come with us,” Jai said.
Joaquin pointed a finger at Jai. “No. You decided. After your speech, who was going to vote against you?”
Jai recalled that there was one vote against him—Joaquin’s—but he didn’t think pointing that out would make a difference. “I won’t leave anyone behind,” he said.
“Oh no? What about our dead? We left them, didn’t we? That man doesn’t belong here, and we can’t let him go, so that leaves only one other option.”
“We’re not going to hurt him.” Jai remained calm, still hoping he could resolve the situation with words. “Being marked by Hoza changes a man. He’s not the master he once was. He never will be again.”
“And yet, at his soulless core, that’s what he is.”
“He carried Jai Jiroux across the desert,” a new voice said. Several people looked back, and Jai craned his neck to see who had spoken. The gathered crowd parted and Jig and Viola’s mother, Marella, approached. “Master Axa would never have done that. He hated Jai as much as he hated us. Do you not remember?”
Joaquin shook his head. “Do you not remember what he did to me? And I’m not the only one. That filth”—he jabbed an angry finger at Axa, who was ignoring the entire thing, once more whispering into his mirror—“beat us, whipped us, belittled us, spat on us. And we’re going to just forget all that because he’s finally been given a taste of his own treatment and made a slave?” His words were having an impact, Jai could see. More and more heads were nodding. If he didn’t defuse the situation soon, the protests could turn violent.
As it turned out, he didn’t need to, because Marella and her two children stepped between them, facing Joaquin. Marella said, “We have trusted Jai Jiroux for many years, and we must trust him still. He has never failed us, has never given us anything but a chance at a different life. A better life. Were you not there on the desert plains when the red pyzon was killing our people? I was there. I saw what Jai Jiroux did. He risked his own life to save us. He did what no one else would, all for a bunch of worthless slaves.”
Jai tried to interject, but Marella waved him off.
“My children have no father. That is Vin Hoza’s fault alone, but they look at Jai Jiroux like a father. He is my family and he is yours. Trust him and find a better life. He will not let us down. He never has.”
Her words hung in the air in a silence broken only by the wind whistling between the red rocks. And then Jig cried, “Aye! What my mother said!”
The boy’s unexpected shout seemed to break the spell over the crowd, and one by one they added their agreement, dispersing and returning to their meals, until only Marella, her children, and Joaquin remained.
Joaquin said, “I will never forget the day you chose Axa over me.”
“Joaq, come on, that’s not what I—” Jai started to say, but stopped when the man turned and walked away.
Jai’s chin dropped to his chest. Marella said, “He doesn’t mean it. He’s just angry.”
“I know.” And yet the truth didn’t make it hurt any less. Joaquin was once someone he could share a meal with, a man who would throw himself in front of a cave-in to protect another slave. A friend. Jai wondered if what he’d said was true; if, in a way, Jai had chosen Axa over him. If so, was it worth protecting someone who’d once hated him?
Jai’s justicemark burned on his heel. Yes, it told him. Axa is not the enemy. Not anymore.
To Jai’s relief, there were no additional confrontations as they made their way through the Red Rocks. Two more of the injured from the pyzon attack died, bringing the total to over one hundred. Jai remembered every single one, and was determined to make their sacrifices count.
When they descended the final slope and emerged from the red, blade-like spires they’d known for the last seven days, Jai’s heart leapt so high he could feel it in his throat.
Because there they were: the Southron Gates, rising tall and impenetrable in the distance, a final barrier to freedom. To the east, the waters of the Burning Sea sparkled in the midafternoon light. An ocean of desert was spread out before them. Directly ahead, between them and the Gates, were the outlines of structures. A city. The great warcity of Sousa, home to thousands of Hoza’s soldiers charged with defending the eastern portion of the wall.
“We’ll wait until nightfall,” Sonika said, once more astride her horse, a beautiful black destrier she called Chainbreaker. “Then we make directly for the weakness in the wall your father told you about. Let’s hope his words were true.”
“I know they were,” Jai said. A ripple of emotion swelled within him at the thought of breaching the walls. His head wasn’t in the clouds, however; he knew many would die during the final leg of their journey. “We will have to be silent on our approach. Tell everyone, the children especially. Those with small children will have to do everything in their power to keep them quiet. We’ll pad each horse’s hooves.”
Right on cue, Shanti’s own horse rattled up, pulling its cart laden with several barrels filled with fireroot. “We’ll pad the wheels of this rickety old cart, too.”
“Good,” Jai said, nodding. “Do we have enough powder?” A few barrels had been lost during the pyzon attack, and another cracked open when it fell from the cart while traversing one particularly treacherous mountain pass.
“Enough to crack several large stones,” Shanti said. “So it will depend on how thick the first layer of the wall is before reaching the hollow your father told you about.”
“It will have to be sufficient,” Jai said. “But we also need to save enough to blast through the other side.”
Shanti nodded. “Leave it to me. Or did you want to handle the fireroot? After the last time, I think you may have a talent for blowing things up.” She grinned.
“I’ll pass,” Jai said, grinning back. “I’d hate to risk my new skin.” Over the last few days more of his flesh had peeled off, leaving his arms, ches
t, and back patchy and marbled.
“Back into the rocks,” Sonika said. “We need to rest and prepare for tonight.”
As the Tears spread out through the people to pass along the orders and the plan, Jai gazed at the point where the Burning Sea met the longest river in the Four Kingdoms, the Spear. Just beyond, he swore he saw a ray of sunlight glint off of something metallic. But then it was gone. A trick of the eye, he thought. Nothing more.
He turned and followed Sonika and the others back up the path to the cover of the rocks.
Once more, he would offer his people the choice to turn back, to hide or return to Phanea or take whatever they thought was the best course. He suspected none would accept his offer, a thought that thrilled and terrified him.
On the morrow, many would die.
The sacrifice for freedom, he thought.
Thirty-One
The Western Kingdom, Knight’s End
Rhea Loren
Rhea the Righteous wasn’t just the title her people had given her. No, it was more than that. It was her legend, her mark, a name that would follow her after death into the annals of history. Songs would be sung about her. Stories would be told, molding and changing and becoming even more wondrous than the already-wondrous truth.
Though she was far from death, she knew she would never really die, a thought that pleased her more than anything else.
To spur her legend on, Rhea released twelve northern prisoners, each of whom looked ready to piss in their britches just looking at her. They were given safe passage across the bay to Blackstone, where they would tell their tale, moving through the kingdom until they reached Lord Griswold at Castle Hill, where they would inform him of the destruction of his entire force. No streams would be sent. No, she wanted the news to move slowly, methodically, like a painful disease. She wished she could be there to see the look on his face.
Additionally, Rhea enlisted the help of western messengers, who would ride south and east, spreading the news of her pet sea monster and the north’s demise. She would use fear like a spear, striking the first blow on her remaining enemies’ hearts from a distance. And then she would come for them to take their heads.
