by Evie Manieri
Isa ignored the question.
Lahlil just stood still, shutting Isa out with her silence. Isa turned her back and went to sit on the ground next to the candle. She watched a pool of creamy wax break over the top and slide down, hardening as it went.
The sound and smell of the rain swept in through the door as Lahlil opened it and left with the warning still hanging in the silence.
Chapter 20
Lahlil braced her back against a thick trunk and drove the soles of her boots into the tree in front of her, kicking off strips of the rough bark as the spasms had their way with her. The filled waterskins lay nearby where she had dropped them. She pushed back with her rage as the pain tried to suck her into oblivion, screaming her refusal in a silent explosion of determination. She had to get through this: Jachad needed her. Once he was safe, the attacks could pull her into pieces, drown her, burn her until her bones turned black, but not now; not now.
The fit passed.
She fell onto the wet leaves between the two trees, then pushed herself up and moved the eye-patch over. She picked up the waterskins, ignoring the fact that her hands were still shaking. The worst of the storm had ended, but water still pattered through the leaves and a ground fog limited her view to twenty paces in any direction. She meant to go back inside, but instead she found herself picking up a stick and seeking out a certain pattern in the fallen stones, then kneeling down beside them to dig. She continued gouging into the dirt even after Jachad appeared around the corner of the wall. He was hanging back, clearly thinking that she hadn’t seen him even though his red hair blazed through the dripping greens and browns. She went on digging under the rock until she found the oiled-cloth pouch, then clawed it out the rest of the way with her fingers.
“Just doing a little gardening?” asked Jachad, coming forward.
“You should be resting.”
“You were a long time coming back with the water. You keep telling me you have a lot of enemies. I was worried you’d been abducted by a gang of vengeful squirrels.” He brushed the leaves off a nearby block of stone and sat down, ignoring the way the damp immediately started soaking into his clothes. She saw the way he tucked his hand under his thigh to resist the temptation to press it against his heart, and how he angled his body away from her so she wouldn’t notice how he was straining just to breathe regularly. “So, what is it about this place that makes you hate it so much? It’s obvious you wouldn’t have come here if you’d had any other choice.”
“This place.” The ground wasn’t solid enough for Lahlil’s liking. She could see right through down to the cellars below, and through time as well: people slouched against the walls and lying in messy beds on the ground; glassy-eyed people dressed in scraps of stolen or out-lived uniforms, groping about in the dark. “You don’t want to know.”
“No, of course not; that’s why I asked,” said Jachad. “Since it’s getting late, why don’t we skip over the bit where I ask you again and you say you don’t want to tell me, and then I make bad jokes until you tell me anyway?”
A laugh tugged at her mouth, but got no further. “It was a flop for mercenaries, back when the empire was pushing through all around here. I came here after I left the desert.”
“I see,” he said. “And that bag you just dug up?”
The knot was too tight for her muddy fingers, so she drew her knife and sliced through the string. She tipped the pendant into her hand, then looped her fingers through the chain until it hung down for him to see: a flat gold image of a flaming sun.
“I remember that,” said Jachad. “I remember when old King Tobias gave it to you. Why did you bury it here?”
“I wasn’t the person he gave it to any more.”
“Why not? Because you were a mercenary?”
She shook her head. “We weren’t just mercenaries, we were the lowest kind, the vultures. We took the jobs the regular mercenaries wouldn’t do. We stole, cheated, robbed the dead and left our own dead to rot on the field.”
“I see. So, this is where the Mongrel was born, is that it?”
Lahlil walked away toward the tower wall, kicking up the smell of mold from the wet leaves. The medallion swung from her hand like a pendulum.
“You were on your own,” he said. “You had to survive.”
“Don’t make excuses for me,” said Lahlil. “There was no excuse. You can’t paint over the past, Jachi. It always bleeds through.”
“This does look exactly like the kind of place you’d expect someone to get mystical fighting powers.” He got up and followed along behind her, looking around at the broken stones, and not even pretending he hadn’t deliberately changed the subject. “So, what was it? Magic mushrooms? It’s damp enough for them. A gateway to a demon realm behind those trees over there?” With no warning, he coughed and fell against the tree-trunk next to him, cringing in pain.
“Jachi!” The ground whisked out from under her as if someone was pulling it up like a carpet. She held out her arms to catch him, but he put his hand up to keep her back.
“I’m all right,” he said, in a spluttering voice. He coughed again, but then sucked in a deep breath. “I’m all right,” he said again, a little more believably. “Sorry. Everything just stopped there for a moment. I’m all right now.”
“Where’s that bottle Mairi gave you?”
He pulled it from his pocket and took a sip. “I think she made this stuff out of spiders,” he said, wiping the taste from his lips after he put the bottle away again, “and she didn’t take the eyes out, either.”
“You need to get back inside.”
“Not yet,” he said. She saw the way his knees were bent and knew the tree was supporting his weight. He didn’t trust himself to walk yet and he didn’t want her to know it. “You still haven’t told me how you came to be the great warrior
everyone dreads. It didn’t happen skulking around in that cellar. So what’s the secret?”
She leaned up against the trunk next to him and listened to the rain dripping through the leaves. “I’m not the one who made up those stories about magic and demon pacts and eating babies’ hearts. No one ever wanted to know the truth.”
“Which is?”
“I practiced,” she said, dropping the pendant into the palm of her left hand. “That’s all. When everyone else was getting drunk, I practiced. When I couldn’t sleep, I practiced. When I was hungry, or tired, or angry, I practiced. You can get good at anything if you do it enough.”
“I see,” said Jachad. A group of nondescript birds abandoned a nearby treetop and scattered on the ground by the wall, pecking at the dirt. “Then why not get good at something else?”
“You know why,” she told him.
“I want you to tell me.”
“Because I liked it,” said Lahlil. The truth burned in her throat like cheap drink, but she made herself talk through the pain. “I liked it. I liked the way I stopped being me when I was fighting. I could be the sword. I could be death. That’s why I didn’t care who I fought for, or why. I just wanted to keep fighting.”
The moment for him to respond came and went and the silence that replaced it roared in her ears. He plucked one of the broad leaves from a vine that had wrapped itself around the tree and tore it in half. She could taste its foul scent on the back of her tongue.
“I was thinking,” said Jachad, “that we might want to stop here.”
A new fear jabbed her in the stomach. “Stop?”
“You were out of this life—really out—and now you’re diving back in because of me. Remember what you told me, about how you don’t get to stop being the Mongrel just because you want to? You have to practice that too, and this sure as shit isn’t the place to do it.”
“I can handle it. You were right. I’ve changed.”
He caught her in his blue eyes. “Have you changed enough?”
“I’m not talking about this any more, Jachi.” Lahlil didn’t realize how hard she was squeezing the medallion until she felt the sharp points digging into her palm. “You’re tired. You need to rest.”
“What about Oshi?” he persisted. “What if you go too far to find your way back to him?”
“That’s all over. I told you that at Wastewater.”
“Is it? Because I think you would have said anything to make sure I got on that triffon.” Jachad finally pushed himself away from the tree and pretended to stretch to hide another grimace of pain. “Besides, I’m not looking forward to getting tossed around in some leaky little boat, or my ears freezing off in Norland.”
She followed him as he moved away toward the wall, catching up with him underneath a tangled canopy of ivy. “I’m not talking about this. I’m taking you inside to bleed you again before we start.”
“The worst part is thinking about what’s going to happen to you when I’m gone.” The fog was getting thicker by the moment, crowding in on them, making their little patch of ground an island in a sea of gray. He reached out and found her hand among the wet leaves. “I can’t stand to think of you alone again. I really can’t stand it.”
“Then stop talking about giving up,” said Lahlil.
He seized her shoulders like he wanted to shake her, but instead he pressed his lips against hers like a challenge and kissed her, even more forcefully than he had that night in his tent. His fingers dug into her back and brought up the darkness churning inside her and this time she matched his ferocity, sliding her hand into his hair and yanking him closer. Some feeling she couldn’t name blistered across her skin. The fog and the vines wrapped around them as they clung to each other: not for comfort, but as conduits for each other’s fury.
She pulled away when she felt him weakening, wishing she could give him just one drop of the frantic energy coursing through her. “I’m not going to let you give up.”
“I know,” he sighed, keeping hold of her hand, “but you have to promise me something.”
“What?”
“You won’t let us be separated, no matter what happens.”
She froze. “I can’t promise that. I don’t—”
“You have to say it, or I won’t go another step. For Shof’s sake, I don’t even care if you mean it. Promise me you won’t go off on your own, even if you think it’s the only way to save me. Promise me: we stay together.”
The air in her lungs had turned to iron, but she pushed out the words. “I promise.”
“All right, then. Let’s go back inside.”
She watched his mouth, expecting it to twitch into a smile, and waited for a gentle rejoinder or a clever retort. She didn’t get either one, but before she followed him around the corner she put the pendant around her neck and tucked the gold sun into her shirt.
When they got back to the cellar they found Isa sitting in the shadows with her back up against the wall and Blood’s Pride across her lap. She was asleep. Lahlil piled up the packs into a little couch and got the instruments ready while Jachad lay down.
“Do we really have to do this? I don’t think it’s helping.”
“It’s helping.” She dabbed on the ointment and Jachad closed his eyes, trying not to think about the lancet coming next. She got the wide bowl ready in his lap and tied the tourniquet, then gripped his wrist so he wouldn’t flinch and found a spot that she hadn’t already cut into. He gasped and clenched his arm as the lancet found the vein, but he was careful not to jerk away. She slowly loosened the cord until she could hear the slow drip of his blood into the bowl, then she cleaned the lancet with the eye-wateringly pungent solution Mairi had given her for the purpose.
“Tell me a story,” he said. His eyes were still closed.
“I just told you one.”
“Tell me how we can be going to meet a strider, when everyone knows the striders are all dead.”
“I can’t talk about that,” said Lahlil.
“You have to,” said Jachad. “I’m dying. I get whatever I want. Those are the rules.”
She watched the bowl carefully. “Emperor Eoban wanted the striders to work for him. When they wouldn’t, he put out a bounty on their heads. All their heads.”
“I know that part already. Where do you come in?”
“When there weren’t any more battles to fight, I put a crew together—people who were good at what they did—and we took whatever jobs we felt were worth our time.” The bowl had nearly filled to the little mark she had made with her knife. She used a little pressure to close the wound, then dabbed it with Mairi’s salve and tied a clean bandage over it.
“The striders?”
“No. The bounty wasn’t big enough for the time it would have taken to track them—and that got worse once they knew they were being hunted. If they saw anyone coming, they just strode away.”
“Good for them,” said Jachad.
She tied the bandage a little tighter.
“We were near Seabright when we found out eight of them had holed up nearby. It seemed like a good opportunity. We thought they’d try to stride away, but they didn’t; they tried to fight us. Then we found out why.”
“They were protecting something,” Jachad conjectured.
“Abroan children can’t stride, not alone, until they’re thirteen or fourteen. They had forty children younger than that—orphans, mostly—packed into the back of that house.”
Isa had woken up now. Lahlil thought about stopping, but pressed on anyway. “My crew was split over what to do with the children. Some wanted to kill them—the bounty was the same for adult and child—but the others wanted to let them go.” She moved the instruments aside and sat beside Jachad with her back against the wall, listening to his breathing. It sounded steadier than before, but they had a long walk through the forest to Dredge’s house. She wasn’t sure he could make it. “We compromised: we let them live—for a price—and faked their deaths so people would sto
p hunting them. Then we collected the emperor’s bounty on top of it.”
“So that’s the answer to how you lured them all into that field?” asked Isa, sitting up. “The massacre never actually happened?”
“We had the Abroans dig up their dead and bring them to that field, then we started the fire and burned the bodies,” said Lahlil. “Instead of inventing some story that could be disproven, we just wouldn’t say how we’d done it.”
“Then where did all the striders go?”
“Nowhere.” She leaned her head back against the wall and shut her eyes. “Striders are just Abroans if they don’t stride. We told them if they ever strode again, we’d find them and kill them. I caught one of them at it, but I let him go. I thought I might need him someday. Now I’m calling in the debt.”
Jachad’s breathing had slowed a little more. She touched her fingers to his wrist as gently as she could. He didn’t move, but his pulse was racing like a bird’s and he was still awake.
“What happened to your crew?” asked Isa.
“I broke it up,” she said. “I couldn’t see any point in going on with them. They had disappointed me. I thought they didn’t care about anything, but it turned out they still had some feelings left in them and that made them no good to me.”
“But you’re the one who wanted to let the striders go.”
“No,” Lahlil said. Out of the dark corners of the room, she saw Nevie forever walking toward her through the snow: Nevie, the only person in her crew who had been on her side that day. “I was the one who wanted to kill them all.”
Chapter 21
Lahlil tried not to keep turning back to check on Jachad as she pushed through the woods later that evening, but she couldn’t help it. She had let him rest as long as she could after the bleeding, but now he stumbled along behind her, rag-doll limp and barely able to keep the pace, while insects swarmed around the bloodstained bandage and roots trolled the ground as if purposefully snatching at his ankles. He had not mentioned the striders, not even once, but the way he avoided her eyes made her wish she had kept her silence. She had warned him before not to make excuses for her. Now she wished he would say something, anything. As for Isa, when she wasn’t plaguing Lahlil with questions about how far they had to go and how long it would take to get there, she disappeared behind a chilly curtain of condemnation.
