The Things We Bury

by Kaleb Schad

  He looked at Isabell’s beautiful face. She had taught him that.

  She was still asleep. Anaz brushed the brown hair from her forehead. He leaned over her and laid his lips on hers, not to breathe into her, but to say thank you.

  It was then, during the stolen kiss, that the door kicked in and four guards nearly trampled each other coming for Anaz.

  60

  “You!” Baron Blackhand screamed.

  Too fast. Anaz came to his feet and reached out with the hsing-li to buckle the stone floor in front of the first guard—he stumbled to his knees—but Anaz was doing it all too fast. Consciousness bobbed somewhere six feet behind his skull and it took a long second to recapture it. By then, they had him. Thick leather gloves and iron grips clasped his arms.

  “Clumsy fuck,” one of the guards scoffed at the fallen soldier.

  “What have you done to my daughter?” the baron whispered. Anaz thought there was more emphasis on the word “my” than on any concern the baron might feel for Isabell’s safety.

  He didn’t know if he could even get free. His head wouldn’t stop spinning. That stone in the floor, it had been eager to buckle. A stone that had always dreamed of jumping. If Anaz asked it through the hsing-li, it would be happy to skip through the air and smash into skulls. But that would mean killing these men, if he could even find the strength to call on the hsing-li again.

  You would use and end others’ lives for your own happiness? Reyn’s teachings hung on his heart, holding him back.

  The baron and Sir Nattic pushed into the chamber. An old man with whispy white hair and wearing a grey robe with silver embroidery knelt next to Isabell and held his cheek to her mouth. “She breathes,” the man said. He picked up the cup and sniffed at it, wiped a finger along its rim and tasted a speck of detritus. “Cellet bark. Mistress Syrup.” He looked at Anaz, then at the baron. “He poisoned her, my lord.”

  The baron drew his sword and lurched towards Anaz.

  “Nay, Lord!” Nattic shouted.

  The baron half turned, glanced at Nattic, looked at Anaz.

  “He’s the other one!” Nattic said. “With the page girl. Let me question them both first.”

  Isabell moaned softly and her head rolled to the side.

  The baron slowed his breathing, studied Anaz. “I should have known,” he said. “You were behind it all, weren’t you? You’re the one who convinced my daughter to betray her own family. You’re the one who’s been assaulting my soldiers every night. And now, when you knew she’d felt too much guilt, begged forgiveness and confessed her crimes, you came to silence her from betraying you.” He grabbed Anaz by the throat, began squeezing. “I should have killed you the moment my guards brought you back. Every time I have shown mercy, it has come back to haunt me.” The fingers nearly touched behind Anaz’s wind pipe.

  Blackness surrounded his vision. Don’t fight back. Don’t kill him.

  The physik pulled on Isabell’s chin and peered into her mouth, trying to see down her throat. “It’s not swollen,” he said. “My lord, she may live.”

  The baron released his grip.

  Anaz coughed and red misted across one of the guards.

  “Airim’s cock,” the guard swore.

  “Tonight, Nattic,” the baron said. “Answers by sunup. He hangs at dawn. And then I’m taking my daughter to her wedding.”

  They didn’t let Anaz walk as they carried him out of the room, his feet hovering over the floor. That was probably best. He didn’t think he would be able to even if they allowed. He craned his neck to look at Isabell, to steal one last glance. Her eyes fluttered and she tried to open them, but he knew she didn’t see him.

  The piebald was a good horse, strong and surefooted, but it wasn’t Syla. Would never be Syla. He’d killed her. He’d brought her out here, ridden her into this nightmare and she’d said yes, she’d said, let me carry you, and then he’d ridden her into her death. Syla. For sixteen summers he’d had that horse. Sixteen summers she had shown him how to stand still in the rain and not care, how to face a steep climb with enthusiasm and grit instead of whining and laziness. And his thanks to her was a savaged throat.

  His left leg throbbed with every jolt, stabbing explosions every time the piebald’s hooves hit stone. Blood dribbled down his side, sticky in his waistband, under his sword belt.

  Red charged along behind them, his head arcing up and down. He was glad to have the old buck with him. They’d been through a lot and they were going to get through this together, too.

  They were almost out of the burn, the blackened branches reaching for his face and eyes like ancient Fletchers and Wallwraiths anchored to the earth for ages.

  Fletchers.

  The creature lunging for him. Half of Yorjan’s face there, half somewhere else. He closed his eyes against the vision, then opened them again, but it was useless, the night almost as black as the back of his eyelids. The moon had moved behind clouds. It smelled like rain coming.

  He thought about the story of those dead Airim’s Lances, about the truths they told and the truths they now knew.

  He held within him a fear he didn’t understand, couldn’t ever understand, a fear written into his soul before time and made possible only once he’d had children. His wife and his kids. They were gateways to the fear, doors opened when they came into his life.

  Yorjan’s face. Yellow stakes of bone amid black pulp. What if that was Nikolai? Elnis? Alysha or Miria?

  Daveon slapped the reins and the piebald, from somewhere, found another wind to put into his gallop.

  Somewhere on the descent Anaz had passed out. When he woke he was in a large, dark room. A handful of torches stood out of sconces on the walls, but they were twenty feet away and six brick pillars blocked much of their light. A high fire hissed and popped in the hearth, angry orange light and long shadows. Lelana had called it the Maw.

  Leather straps held him to a flat wooden table. It was elevated to the height of a man’s waist and it was angled slightly so that Anaz’s head was lower than his feet. He could see a grate in the floor under him. They’d stripped his clothes. He saw them bundled near a brick pillar. Fear and fatigue shook Anaz and his hips bobbled against the table.

  A second rack stood next to him. Sunell. They had stripped her as well and he could see her tiny ribs gasping and seizing with her terror. Bared as she was, Anaz realized how young the poor child was. He understood her fear. He understood how an entire life could be deprecated and reordered in a moment like this, never to be fixed, never to be rebuilt.

  He reached for the hsing-li, but the effort sent a bellowing rending through his head and he had to close his eyes and release it. Too much. He could feel the Rot fully holding him now. He’d given too much of himself to Isabell, it had seized the opening. He drew a small amount of hsing-li into himself and began pushing back the Rot.

  Nattic came into view. He’d removed his tunic and wore only his pants and a long leather apron. A nest of black, wiry hair creeped above the hem of the apron. He studied the two and said, “The king, he has artists for this kind of thing, but I, well, frankly, I don’t have much stomach for it, so I like to just get to it. And, since we don’t have much time, that’s probably for the best.”

  Anaz couldn’t lay here. When was struggling against what would be the right answer? When was not struggling, allowing things like this, a sin against the hsing-li so great as to forever cut yourself from it?

  “Sunell,” Nattic said. She was crying, but she opened her eyes and looked at him. He set down a steel saw, long teeth on the blade. It gave a tiny wang when the metal blade touched the metal of the table. “Remember that time I was sick with the flu and Loren had just given you that raspberry cake as payment for some errand you’d run for him and you brought me that cake and gave it to me? You knew it was my favorite and that I was sick and you thought I wouldn’t mind the taste of something other than phlegm. Remember that? That was mighty right of you.”

  “I remember,
” she whispered.

  “Or that time you’d come with me and Benton out to Fwaston’s Pass and that birch’d fallen on Benton and you’d run all the way back into town to get help? All that way. What, seven miles? I don’t think there’s deer can run like you can. Got help and just in time, too. Benton owed you his life.”

  “He said thank you.”

  Anaz heard the hope rising in Sunell’s voice, could see the way her breathing slowed.

  The Rot yielded faster this time. He’d learned its tricks. He drew a little more hsing-li into him, pushed. Faster. Be ready.

  “I’m reminding you of these things for a reason, Sunell,” he said. “I need you to understand. It won’t matter. If you were my own daughter, and I don’t deny some days it felt as if you were, it wouldn’t matter.” He picked up a chisel and a mallet and he stood over her. “There isn’t any way this doesn’t end with you dead. That ain’t something that can be changed, girl. But you can change how badly it hurts going out. That you can change.”

  He walked around Sunell’s table and stood next to Anaz, between the two of them and he kept looking at Sunell.

  Anaz drew more hsing-li. The world tilted sideways. Too much…not ready…hurry…

  “I’m gonna’ start with the small guy and I want you to watch, Sunell. I want you to pay attention. He’s a tough little fucker, I can see that, and he’s not going to talk, so this’ll take some time. I want you to see what taking time means right now. Because you ain’t got time left. The amount of time you have is fixed. It’s a point that can’t be moved. Certain. All you can choose is what you feel in that fixed amount, you understand?”

  Sunell sobbed, hard, racking gasps and her tiny frame shook and the buckles of the straps tapped, tapped, tapped against the wooden table.

  “And you,” Nattic looked at Anaz. Nothing but hatred in his face. “I’m not going to ask you any questions. Not for a while. I’m just going to let you hurt, because this,” he gestured to Sunell, “this is your fault. And for that, well, I just have to make sure you don’t die before sunrise. You did this to that poor girl.”

  Anaz had to agree with the knight.

  This was his fault.

  He tried drawing more of the hsing-li. He wasn’t ready. It was too much.

  He watched the knife come down.

  If this was the hisng-li’s will, so be it.

  Hakkana flashed into his mind. Standing in Anaz’s room in his tower, after Vlaknak, when Anaz had said that he had learned that nothing outside of himself could bring him happiness. Hakkana’s look. The words: Just remember. There are things outside of yourself that can bring you unhappiness.

  But, what if this wasn’t the hsing-li’s will? What if it had put him here for a reason greater than suffering?

  Nattic’s knife entered the skin at the knuckle of Anaz’s pinky and he could feel the tip sliding around the joint.

  He opened his mouth. Somewhere, someone screamed. It could have been him. He didn’t know.

  61

  The edges of Isabell’s world smeared. Her bedposts at the foot of her bed sparred against each other, shifting left and right, into and out of each other. Outside it was night and she smelled the fire and heard it crackling and a pile of skins and woolen blankets pressed against her.

  “Don’t try to sit up,” a man’s voice said.

  Isabell tried to sit up. Her stomach lurched and she heaved over the side of the bed and retched, but nothing was expunged, only bile and effort. When she opened her eyes she noticed a bucket at the side of the bed and a volume of red wine and digested food inside of it.

  “That’s your third time,” the voice said.

  Isabell draped an arm across her forehead and tried finding the voice. It was Essen, her father’s physik. He sat near the fire, a book open in his lap.

  “How—”

  “The outsider, the one with strange eyes, he poisoned you,” Essen said. “Mistress Syrup. Really you’re quite lucky your father got me here when he did. I saved your life, that I did.”

  “You—”

  “But don’t worry. The villain has been taken.”

  A memory. Anaz hanging between two soldiers, looking over his shoulder at her. She’d woken. She remembered.

  “He…taken?” Speaking felt as if the words were being formed by a porcupine lodged in her throat. Her lungs burned with every breath.

  “Caught in the act,” Essen said. “I shouldn’t even mention it, but he was taking his pleasure with you, my lady. Imagine, kissing the woman he’d just tried to kill. Who can fathom what depravity he had in mind had we not interceded. An awful, awful man.” Essen shook his head and reworked his robe so it lay flat.

  Anaz. Here. Kissing her? Gathering her thoughts was like snagging gnats in the wind.

  “But fear not, my lady. He was taken with that page girl to the Maw. We will never again fear that man, I assure you.”

  “Sunell.”

  “Treachery!” Essen hissed. “Within your own house. I can’t imagine how you must feel, my lady. Did you know she was helping smuggle the coward peasants from the village these last many days? You must have known. That must be why they tried to kill you, isn’t it? Well, as I say, we needs not fear their wickedness nevermore.”

  Isabell lifted her head from her pillow and it didn’t instantly explode as last time. She held herself there for a moment, then backed up against the wall until she was half sitting. Her strength returned slowly, but surely.

  “Well, as I say, you should make a full recovery. That’s the nice thing—if such a thing can be said for the poison—of Mistress Syrup. It is a gentle poison. It kills one softly, and should one not die, it leaves little lasting legacy. I suppose that’s the etymology of the Mistress part of the name.”

  Essen stood and tapped a powder into a goblet of water, then used his finger to swirl the mixture. He walked over to Isabell and held it out to her.

  “You should sleep. I tried asking him to consider letting you rest, but he insists you will be away by sunup. Just after he executes the two traitors.”

  She took the cup from him and looked into it, at the small shivering waves from her shaking hands.

  She dropped the cup and the liquid spilled into her slop bucket.

  “My lady! Take a care,” Essen said. He tsked as he looked in the bucket and saw the wine cup floating in it. “Now I need to start over.”

  He gently, but firmly, pressed Isabell back into her bed, forcing her to lie down. “Your father was very strict. No moving. No activity whatsoever. Lay in bed, rest and make yourself healed and beautiful and vibrant for when you are presented to the earl. Your father was very strict.”

  “I’m sure he was,” Isabell said. “I won’t move. I promise.”

  Execute the two traitors. Sunup. The words laid down next to each other and formed within her a line that she would not allow her father to cross.

  She made fists under the blankets, wiggled her feet. Yes, her strength was returning.

  Anaz had come for her. He had come. She had given up because she had thought he had given up, but he hadn’t. He hadn’t.

  She would be damned if she would again.

  62

  Malic was pretty certain he hadn’t stopped smiling the entire ride back into town, even with the wench weeping nonstop and that hypocrite Taralost grumbling the whole way in. Malic had been glad to lose that bag of pity at the keep.

  There just weren’t nothing like a plan clicking into place. It was what had made him so sure stealing that money from Captain Nader would be worth it. Not just for the coin, though that was the big horse on the pull—stole more money than he could spend if he lived three lifetimes—but to see if he could make a plan of it that worked. And he did. Just like taking the Sunflower Stop from that Connor family. A handful of other brilliant moves in there. And now he had again. Malic was pretty sure he was six and oh on plans in the last eight years. It was a gift.

  There were only two horses in the Sunflower
Stop’s courtyard.

  “I’m going to kill you,” Alysha hissed. She sat in front of him, her hands tied to the saddle horn. He’d made sure to keep one arm wrapped around her waist the entire ride, high up on her ribs, just under the bouncing under-swells of her breasts.

  Every jolt of the saddle had rent flame up his injured ass and it was an odd mixture of misery and joy the entire ride in. That little shit kid. Maybe they should swing past there on their way out of town. Put the kids away.

  “You’ll drop your guard sometime, Evan,” Alysha said. “You’ll think you have everything figured out and that you’ve beaten me and you’ll drop your guard and that’s when I’ll do it. I’ll put a knife in your throat. I promise you.”

  “See?” he said, “How can a man not love a woman with that kind of spirit?”

  Two Fingers climbed down from his horse and made a loose half-hitch of the reins on the hitching pole, then took Malic’s reins. Malic climbed down, wincing as he swung his leg out of the saddle, and started to untie Alysha.

  “I’ll take most of that edge off you,” he said, “but I’m hoping you can keep some of it. Six years is a long time. Well, and let’s be honest, way things are going here, I’m not so sure there’s much hope for Humay. Blackhand is going to have other things to worry about over your indentured state and how long it lasts. Six years is probably just maybe long enough for us to get to liking each other and after that, who knows, you’ll probably want to stay on at that point.”

  “We’re gettin’ the money, right?” Two Fingers said.

  Malic nodded. “It’s time. We got all we can get out of this town.” He stood looking at the front of the Sunflower Stop, the painted sign with the cardinal pecking at a sunflower and the sun encircling it all. He’d had the sign painted by a passing artist who’d come through for Market Day six years ago and it still held its color, even in the night.