by M. A. Ray
“Yeah!” said Tony Scalietti, breaking the mood somewhat, and Wally nodded again. They had no idea what they were asking of him, no concept of the tempting moral compromise they were trying so hard to hand him—and Dingus, with his ten miles of skinny leg and round kid face, was at the head of them, offering himself to Jack’s cause on a silver charger.
Why are you doing this to me? Vandis thought. “I’m still telling you no.”
Jack stood. “You were right,” he said, looking back at Vandis. “He’s nothing like you.” He stalked off into the dark.
Without quite realizing it, Vandis was on his feet. “Don’t walk away from me!” he yelled. “Jack! Dammit, get back here!”
Jack didn’t stop. As the night swallowed him he threw up a dismissive hand. Vandis felt his face work into a heavy scowl, felt his temper slipping from his grasp as his eyes fell on Dingus, who almost—not quite—cringed.
“What in the hell did you think you were doing?” he bit out.
“Trying to help!”
“Not. Helpful!”
Dingus started to say something, but Vandis had no interest.
“I thought you knew when to keep your fucking mouth shut!” he roared.
The kid’s eyes narrowed. “So I’m not supposed to tell you when I think you’re wrong?”
“I don’t care how far off my ass you think I am! Your opinion does not fucking rate! I am the Master. You are the Squire. And if you can’t respect that, maybe you should be one for a few more years!”
“All I said was I could do it!”
“I made a decision, and you tried to contradict it! In public! Who do you think you are? If even Squires can tell me how to do my job, it’s the end of the world! If you offer me one more word on the subject, you will not stand Trials, and you will instead spend the rest of the Moot digging latrines—that is a promise! Have I made myself perfectly clear?”
Dingus stood. His jawline hardened, and he stared at Vandis, through Vandis, taut from head to toe. Suddenly Vandis was disinclined to push it, but he couldn’t back down with all these people around.
“I asked you a question. Answer it! Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir,” Dingus said, between his teeth. “Can I go now?”
“Go on! Get out of my sight.”
Dingus bolted in a scatter of gravel.
Vandis glared down at the other two boys. “What about you two chuckleheads? Think I forgot you? Are you ready to tell me I’m wrong?”
“Nae, Vandis,” Wally said, so quietly it was almost a whisper, and Tony shook his head. “May we go, too?”
He leaned over and said, “Get.”
The boys scuttled away and Vandis shut his eyes, breathing hard, thinking, I should not have done that.
“You might as well turn him over your knee and spank him next time,” Pearl said. “It’d probably be less humiliating.”
“What? Do you have a problem with me?” Vandis turned, arms flung wide. “Step the fuck up! Want the job? What I said to him goes for every last Knight! This is not business as usual! They’re making war on us, and the quicker everybody realizes that, the better!”
Pearl shook her head, raising a palm. A pond on a windless day, that was her face. “I didn’t say you were wrong. You’re good at your job, and I don’t think there’s anyone better to help us face this. I’m saying that, as a Master, you have a lot to learn.”
“Are you seriously criticizing my teaching technique at a time like this?”
“No time like the present.”
“That’s—”
“In case you missed it while you were after tearing him open,” Evan said mildly, “that lad just offered his life to someone he knows not a bit, and my lad was behind him, and Santo’s too. You were too hard, Vandis, far and away too hard.”
“Although,” Santo put in, “I personally gotta say I’m glad you put the kibosh on that. If you’d said yes, I wouldn’t have been able to say no. They could pull it off, Tony and Wally could. They’re goddamn good, the both of them. And Dingus, he’s a ghost in broad daylight.”
“Of course they could do it!” Vandis bellowed, nearly coming off his feet with the force of it. “That’s not the point! I’m not going to sit around the fire and use my sweet voice to explain to a bunch of reckless kids why I refuse to send them out to die! Is this the Lovespeakers’ fucking Feelings Day?”
“Nobody’s saying that, Vandis.” Pearl extended her hand, as if she expected him to take it. “They’re good boys, though, and you didn’t need to scream and curse to get your point across.”
“I wasn’t screaming! I raised my voice!”
“You were purple!”
Vandis’s face worked. He curled his legs under him and took off like an arrow, as high as he dared, until the cold sank into his bones and he couldn’t snag a breath. He dropped before he could pass out and loosed himself eastward, out over the Wastes, where nothing but the occasional cluster of barbarian campfires could distract him from the speed of his flight.
He spent over an hour in the air, but it didn’t clear his head. He just felt guiltier. Finally, he gave up and looped back to land in the campground. He hoped Dingus was still awake, and that maybe the other boys were still commiserating with him; he definitely wouldn’t apologize, but he had to make some things a little clearer. When he got back into the copse, though, the fire had been banked and the skinny shape of his boy lay curled under the blanket, head and all.
Sighing, Vandis poked up the fire and fed it, then sat down on his own bedroll. All he’d done was what he had to do, and now guilt sat millstone-heavy on his shoulders. As if he didn’t have enough to worry about already, with the illuminations in that fucking book. “Dammit,” he said hoarsely, and scrubbed at his face. “Dammit…” He dropped his forehead onto the heels of his hands, pressing hard, as if that would help the massive headache he was getting.
“Vandis.”
He jumped, and then raked his fingers through his hair. “I thought you were asleep.”
“I’m sorry, you know, for before,” Dingus said, in his soft baritone. “I didn’t mean to sass you or anything. It’s just, I thought—”
“I know what you thought.” Vandis made his own voice as gentle as it could sound—which wasn’t, very. He went over to sit on the end of Dingus’s bedroll, and Dingus sat up to give him space. “Your heart’s in the right place. Absolutely in the right place—but it wasn’t appropriate for you to volunteer yourself in front of everybody, especially since I’d already told Jack no.”
“Yes, sir.”
He puffed out his cheeks and blew a gust of air. “Don’t ‘sir’ me. I’m Vandis.”
“Yes, Vandis.” Dingus’s mouth turned up at the corners, and Vandis felt his own lips twitch, but it didn’t seem to be enough. His face fell again. He was going to have to say it, wasn’t he?
“I owe you an apology, too. It wasn’t appropriate for me to lose my temper like that, especially when I wasn’t really angry with you.”
“Could’ve fooled me.”
“Oh, don’t get me wrong, you pissed me off, but maybe I was a little more … harsh with you, particularly, than I needed to be. Jack’s the one I really needed to ream, but then you put yourself into it and he got to walk. I had to, do you understand that?” Please.
“Well … I guess. ’Cause you had to make sure nobody else challenged your authority.” He said it as if it tasted bad, but he said it.
“That’s right. I need everybody, including you, to abide by my decisions, even if you don’t personally like them.”
“That’s what I told the guys,” he admitted. “You got an important job, I said, and maybe we didn’t help ’cause we got in the way of what you needed to do.”
“Right now, Muscoda, the Aurelians, want to destroy us. Do you have any idea what that means? Jack hasn’t been the only one to come to me with this issue over family, but I need to think about what’s best for everyone. There’s what I want to do, and th
en there’s what I have to do to keep the Knights going.”
Dingus drew his knees up and laid his forearms over them. Vandis heard him swallow. “I could do it, though. If it’s just me, and I don’t have a leaf, why shouldn’t I?”
Because it’s you, and I don’t want you to. “Because it wouldn’t be just you. Those guys were all ready to jump in the maw with you. Look, if you were caught, any one of you, and the Muscodites somehow figured out you were associated with us, it’d be a shit-storm like we’ve never seen. Not only that, they would do terrible things to you in particular. You’d die, but it wouldn’t be fast, and it definitely wouldn’t be easy. A demon-blood mongrel straight from Vandis Vail? Are you kidding me?”
“I’m not afraid.”
“Of course not. You’re seventeen.”
“That’s not why.” A grin spread over that little-kid face: broad, wicked, and thoroughly unsettling. “They might get me, but they wouldn’t get me cheap.”
He groaned and rubbed his forehead at the sudden throb. “That is not a good reason to send you. I’m sticking with hell no, absolutely not, final word.”
“Yes, Vandis.”
Crickets sang in the cool night. Vandis folded his hands together and pressed them to his lips, thinking. Finally he said, “Look. You don’t need to prove yourself to me.”
The boy stared at the lumps his toes made in the bedroll. “Yes, I do.”
“No.” Vandis shook his head. “You’ve proven yourself a hundred times over just by getting this far and managing to turn out the way you have, instead of the warped piece of shit everyone’s always said you are. Even if, by some bizarre twist of fate, you don’t qualify—”
“Don’t say that!” Dingus groaned, and covered his ears. The points stuck out past his hands.
“Dingus,” Vandis said, trying not to laugh and failing miserably. “Dingus, come on. That’s not going to happen, and even if it did, even with all the bullshit that’s happened, do you know something? This has been the best year of my life.”
Dingus blinked a couple of times, and then beamed. “Yeah. Mine, too,” he said, and that made Vandis grin right back.
“Are you ready for tomorrow?”
“I guess.” He made a face. “Not really.”
“You’ll knock ’em dead,” Vandis promised, rising. “See you in the morning.”
“Yeah,” Dingus said, and lay down. Vandis crashed and slept; the only thing that disturbed him was Kessa slipping into camp, he didn’t know how much later.
He lifted his head and looked at her through half-open, gritty eyes. Then he lay back down. “In the morning,” he said, “we’re going to have words.”
“Yes, Vandis,” she muttered. He went back to sleep.
Silence
the Prime Cloister of the Order of Aurelius, just outside Muscoda City
Stas grew accustomed to a life danced to the tune of the great bells. They tolled all the hours from the tower, echoing through the yellow sandstone corridors of the monastery, ringing out over the gardens and fields to tell the Brothers and novices when to wake, when to sleep, when to work, when to pray. The routine soothed him; he knew that when Matins rang deep in the night, it was time to get up, to line up, to troop down to the big chapel with all the other boys for prayers, and to go back to bed until Lauds, which was the same thing all over again. When Prime rang it would be time to get up once more, and after a longer service, breakfast. Then the bath—shivery, cold, out in the early morning—and when Tierce rang, back to the chapel.
The Tierce prayer was short like the Night Offices: no homily, just a quick call-and-response chant and a liturgical plea for blessing on the day’s work. Stas knew it all, everyone’s part in every prayer, backwards and forwards, but he only mouthed along, trying to appear a beat or two behind the other novices.
These days, he played the idiot harder than ever. Certain of the terrible danger of discovery, Stas hadn’t spoken a single word since “miracle”—no, not one. He communicated only with Boris, in the privacy of their cell every night, using the hand language they’d developed. A hundred times a day, he wished he dared to speak, and a hundred times a day, he swallowed his words. He would have stammered them anyway. At lessons he sat slack and resisted giving all the answers with his tangled tongue. At first he listened carefully, but it was mostly reading with a little, a very little, figuring. When he and Boris came to the Cloisters, neither one could read. While Boris struggled along with “F-A-T” and “D-O-G” and “2 + 4,” Stas sat and spelled or figured in his mind: “H-I-E-R-O-P-H-A-N-T” and cube roots, all the way from Tierce to Sext.
At first, they struggled with where to put him between Sext and Nones, and again from Nones to Vespers. Clearly, he could not continue study with the other novices intended for the Mendicant’s position, but neither could he join Boris in the physical training required for Militants. They tried the fields, but he was too small to do the really heavy work; they tried the kitchens, but he kept falling into the pots he was meant to scrub. After the twenty-eighth time he wound up sodden, sudsy, and half drowned, they put him in the scriptorium. It was—he overheard—inside, quiet, and he would be watched over constantly. He might have been vaguely insulted, but the scriptorium was Stas’s idea of heaven.
The moment Brother Anatoly, one of the novice masters, opened the door to drop him off, Stas uttered a squeak of delight. The plain desks, the carved cabinets full of mysteries, the rolls of paper, parchment, and vellum, and the monks at work: it all looked wonderful. Brother Jerzy, the head illuminator, smiled down on him like a gracious bear and sat him down in a little desk chair where the sun shone over the surface, next to his own large, slanted desk.
“Here, little Stasya,” he said, and sliced a few pieces of paper off the roll with a tiny, sharp knife. He took a stick of charcoal and wrapped Stas’s hand around it, and then wrapped his own hand around Stas’s. “Let’s see what we can make of this.” Stas let him guide—he drew a little cat with just a few strokes. “Here, what is it? Cat, it’s a cat.” Underneath the picture, he wrote C-A-T. “This is cat, too. It’s how we say ‘cat’ without speaking aloud.” Stas suppressed a groan of dismay.
He drew another one. It was a bird: B-I-R-D. “What is this, Stasya? It’s a bird, isn’t it? Yes, it’s a bird.”
Stas sighed, inwardly, silently. Of course it was a bird. Couldn’t he see the wings Brother Jerzy had guided him to draw, open as if to fly? Couldn’t he read “bird”?
Once more, Brother Jerzy moved the charcoal, his hand, over the paper. “And what is this? Why, it’s a man!” M-A-N. I can do better, Stas thought, and when Brother Jerzy started to guide his hand through another picture, he jerked away and gazed up at the monk. He bent his head over the paper, drawing, experimenting with the charcoal as he went. It was Brother Jerzy. He brushed the faintest shadows under the monk’s bespectacled eyes with the end of his dusty pinky finger, and then sat back.
“I see,” said Brother Jerzy, and Stas rather thought he did. He held out his hand and Stas put the charcoal stick in his palm. He wrote: J-E-R-Z-Y. “This is me, isn’t it? Yes, it’s Brother Jerzy.” Then he sketched, quickly, and wrote S-T-A-S. “This is you, Stasya.”
Is that what I look like? The bones in the face Brother Jerzy had drawn—his face—stood out sharply. It was a thin face, a little smudged from the charcoal, with a small, pointed nose and large, round eyes.
“Stas,” Brother Jerzy said, tapping him on the shoulder, and then pointed to his own chest. “Jerzy. Do you want to draw for a while, little one? Will you draw me some more pictures?”
Looking at Brother Jerzy’s kind eyes, Stas debated with himself, and decided, just once, to nod. Brother Jerzy nodded back at him, and then sat down at the big desk.
He won his way out of voiceless silence with a sheet of cheap paper and a stick of charcoal. At first he drew very simple pictures like the one he’d done of Jerzy: one of the cows outside the window, or the outside of the Cloisters as he’d firs
t seen them, but it wasn’t enough. He wanted his drawings to look real.
One day in the spring he smuggled an old apple out of the dining hall, stuck deep in his smallclothes, and when he got to the scriptorium he set it on the desk and began to work. It took five days and nearly half a roll of paper before he was satisfied with his charcoal drawing, every wrinkle, every shadow, every touch of light, and though it was black and white, the apple looked almost as if he could pick it up and eat it. As a final touch, he wrote neatly beneath it on the paper: “A-P-P-L-E.”
He brought it to Brother Jerzy before Vespers. The monk smiled on him as no one in his life ever had before, a proud smile so lovely to Stas that it didn’t matter if he couldn’t sing at service that night with the other boys. The music strummed along his heartstrings.
Brother Jerzy started to give him ink and pens, and then a silverpoint stylus to keep for his very own. He had a cubby in one of those mysterious cabinets, with S-T-A-S on a label, and now he thought constantly of what he would draw next. When Abbot Iosef’s belly knocked him aside in the hall, Stas looked after him, memorizing the shapes that made up his fat body. When Boris went off with his practice sword, disappearing into the crowd of Militant novices, Stas drew what he saw: Boris looking back over his shoulder to smile. He drew the bowls of beans on the table at meals and the streaming light from the stained-glass windows that decorated the Bright Lady’s sanctuary. He drew the supply cabinets, inside and out; he drew the bookbinder’s table with a half-finished book. He drew the tonsured heads of the copyists bent over their work. The rolling corn fields he saw from the scriptorium window. The pigeons that pecked the corn Brother Jerzy left on the windowsill and Brother Jerzy at his desk, framed in the mullioned pane. Brother Jerzy’s Militant, Brother Jaroslaw, came in one day to speak to him, and Stas drew his broad, broad shoulders and square face.
He loved it. He loved to make the pictures in his mind come out onto the paper, or to draw exactly what he looked at and see that it was good. It took him a long time to make a picture, at least at first, but he practiced every day, Sext to Nones and Nones to Vespers.
