by Jae Waller
“No. Suriel has withdrawn from overseeing their actions. The Corvittai fought under their own leadership today.”
“Under Nonil.” My hands curled into fists. “Is he your son?”
Parr’s expression turned to surprise. “Goodness. What gave you that idea?”
“You’re protecting your Corvittai source. Or you would’ve told Marijka who it is instead of killing her.”
“Nonil, my source, and my son are three different people. I had never met Nonil until recently. My son has nothing to do with the Corvittai.”
“So you don’t care that I killed Nonil?”
He didn’t flinch. “I consider it a blessing. Too many people have died because of him.”
My nails dug into my palms. “Why should I believe you?”
“I have never lied to you, Kateiko.”
“You left out some pretty fucking important truth.”
Without looking away, I took stock of my surroundings. Couch on my right, table on my left, chairs beyond it. Fireplace behind me. I picked up Parr’s glass and took a sip, letting my lips linger on the edge. The spice burned my throat. I set the wine on the table and backed toward the fireplace. Heat radiated from candles on the mantelpiece above my head.
“Tell me one thing,” I said. “You know I don’t care about the law, or — what anyone else thinks. I just want the truth.”
He drew forward, a slow step at a time. “Ask, my darling.”
I knotted my fingers into his shirt, feeling the strained rise and fall of his chest. Firelight flickered on his face. Branches scraped at a window like rattling bones. His knife was within reach, but I’d never get it before him.
My voice trembled. “How’d you know the Corvittai’s plans? Your source trusts you that much?”
His hand hesitated by my side. “Please understand—”
“The truth, Antoch. Or you’ll never see me again, I swear to the aeldu.”
Parr closed his eyes. His breath was shallow, his jaw tight. When he opened his eyes, he looked oddly calm. “I sent the Corvittai.”
I stared at him for just a second. Then I shoved him as hard as I could.
He toppled onto the table with an explosion of shattering glass. I vaulted over the couch, braid snapping through the air. A cry tore out of me when I landed on my wounded leg.
The door burst open. Fendul dashed in, sword drawn. Parr seized an iron poker and met the attack. He drew the slender knife with his other hand. Metal clanged on metal, echoing into the depths of the room. The knife spun to the floor and slid under a cabinet.
I reached for Nurivel and swore. Airedain hadn’t made it back in time.
Fendul pushed Parr toward the fireplace. Blood splattered across the floor. Parr’s face twisted and he smashed the poker into Fendul’s wrist. The fight shifted like a river reversing course. Steel flashed with firelight as Parr pressed Fendul into the open. I couldn’t even track their blows — then Fendul went sprawling.
I leapt forward. My flail slammed into Parr’s arm. The poker clattered to the floorboards. He wrenched the flail from my grip and flung it across the room. It smashed into something that fell like a toppling tree. I hit him in the mouth and choked as his elbow rammed my chest.
“Idiot!” Fendul snapped.
Distance. He knew my strengths.
I darted toward the far wall. Parr struck Fendul’s shoulder with a crack. The sword clanged to the floor, Fendul’s arm dangling limp. Parr shoved him back and seized the sword.
I snatched a marble figurine and threw it at a window. Glass rained out into the courtyard. In the second Parr looked aside, a crow shot toward the ceiling. It lurched and vanished into the shadows. I heard a thud and cringed.
Parr spun toward me, shoulders shaking, his sleeve shredded and bloody.
“Stay there.” I drew my hunting knife. The space between us yawned like a gorge. Cool air swirled through the broken window. The buzz of mosquitoes filled the air.
He spat blood. “You brought another viirelei to kill me?”
“How long?” I demanded. “How long have you been on their side?”
“I am not on the Corvittai’s side. We just have a mutual goal.” Parr watched me levelly. “See it from my eyes, Kateiko. I devoted my life to stopping the Rúonbattai. They kept me from everything precious — my wife’s last weeks on this earth, years of my son’s childhood. I held my comrades as they died. I pulled burnt bodies from farmhouses and drowned children from the sea. The Rin nation helped cause those things. I cannot allow history to repeat itself.”
“You’re saying this was to save people?”
“My goal has always been to protect the citizens of Eremur. Today I set two violent groups against each other. I have been working to destroy the Corvittai since last autumn, well before this war started.”
“Crieknaast didn’t know Suriel brought the Corvittai back until winter.”
“My family owns the abandoned logging camp on Tømmbrind Creek. I received word that poachers were using it for storage. I investigated and found a Corvittai supply cache.”
Images flashed through my mind. Suriel’s blinding sigil in the valley of stumps, the looted loggers’ buildings, riders wearing elk-sigil armour on a stormy autumn night — I inhaled sharply. “Give me the sword.”
Parr didn’t move.
“I trust my aim more than my patience.” I drew back my arm.
He still didn’t move.
I jerked my chin at the shadows behind him. “If you say you love me, you won’t hurt him.”
A muscle twitched by his mouth. Finally, he bent down and spun the sword across the gleaming floor. It skidded to a stop near my feet.
“Now take off your shirt.”
Parr’s brows drew together. “What—”
“Do it! I’ve killed four people! I can make it five!”
He unbuttoned his shirt and tossed it aside. His skin gleamed with sweat, his chest marked with scars under dark hair. Only one mattered — the jagged line under his collarbone. I’d seen it, touched it, not giving it a second thought.
The room suddenly felt too small. I couldn’t be far enough away from him. I balanced on the edge of a windswept cliff, a heartbeat from falling into an abyss.
“We’ve fought before.” I pointed at the scar with my blade. “In North Iyun Bel last year. Your horse broke my leg. I threw this knife at you.”
Realization swept across his face like wind through dry leaves.
Out of nowhere, the words of Airedain’s friend Nokohin came to me. I’m not afraid of the spirits out there. I’m afraid of the people right here. I choked with laughter. “All this time I’ve been worried about Suriel. We should be afraid of each other.”
Parr touched the scar. “I never told my men to harm you.”
“You didn’t tell them not to.” My revulsion twisted, hardened, froze into cold fury. “You talk about protecting people, but — we weren’t people to you — just stupid wood witches no one would miss—”
He stepped closer. “Darling girl—”
I thrust the knife forward. “I said stay there. And don’t ever call me that again.”
“Kateiko, please listen. I made mistakes—”
“It wasn’t a fucking mistake! That had nothing to do with the Rúonbattai — you just didn’t care! And the worst part — aeldu save me, the worst part is I defended you. I believed you were better than Montès and all the rest, but the whole time—” I spat on the floor. “When did you decide you might love me? Before or after I let you fuck me?”
Finally, finally, his expression broke — a second before Fendul put his hunting knife to Parr’s throat.
“Your choice, Kako.”
A trickle of blood ran past Parr’s collarbone. The words burned on my tongue. Kill him. Make him bleed into the ground. Kill him.
Parr twisted. Before I knew what was happening, Fendul was face-down on the floor with Parr’s knee on his back and the knife at his neck.
I bit back a scream. Fendul lay perfectly still even as Parr gripped his hair.
My pulse beat against the bogmoss in my right arm. The wound wasn’t as bad as my leg, but the bandage felt too tight. One clean throw. I shifted my knife to my left hand.
Parr’s eyes flickered from my blade to my face. “Kateiko.” My name was dead ash in his mouth. Wind stirred his hair around his shoulders. “Before. I loved you before.”
The knife trembled at Fendul’s neck. Parr couldn’t do it. Not in front of me. But if he ever got ahold of the Okorebai-Rin again — I remembered his words the day Baliad Iyo was sentenced to death. I will be dead before I give up.
“I believe you,” I said.
I threw my hunting knife. It spun through the void between us.
Parr flung himself sideways. The blade sailed past and crashed into something across the room. Fendul rolled, scrambling out of the way.
In the same moment, water froze into a spike in my right hand. One clean throw.
The ice thudded into Parr’s chest. Fendul’s knife clattered to the floor. Parr looked down and wiped away a trickle of blood as if in a dream. His eyes met mine just before he crumpled.
I leaned forward and fell into the abyss. I sank fast as a stone and drifted light as snow, arms spread like wings. The walls of the gorge rushed past, blurring, fading into greyness. Nothing else. No air, no light, no voices. Just endless space below.
We are falling, all of us falling one by one.
35.
INK & IRON
“Kako.”
A star winked in the abyss. I reached toward the icy light as I fell. It split into a thousand threads, weaving up my arm, cool and gentle as water.
“It’s okay, Kako. We’re okay.”
I stopped plummeting. Like a bird pulling up from a dive, I began to rise. The walls of the gorge fell away. The sky opened blue and infinite.
Fendul’s arms were around me. I was shaking. I slumped against him as dry sobs racked my chest. I won’t cry. I won’t cry for you.
He held me tight, but soon pulled back and gripped my shoulder. “I’m sorry, Kako, but we need to go.”
My eyes wandered the room. It was speckled with lights — the blue irumoi in Fendul’s hand, sputtering orange candle flames, white moonlight dappled with shadows. A moth bobbed near the shattered window. The spike in Parr’s chest had melted. He stared at the ceiling, black hair fanned out around his shoulders, a dark pool staining the floor.
I looked away, fighting back the urge to throw up. “How badly did he hurt you?”
Fendul grimaced. “Dislocated my shoulder. Couldn’t fly properly, but I popped it back in place. Listen — can anything in this place be traced back to you?”
“I . . . I don’t . . . A note. He left me a note.”
“Go look for it. I’ll find your weapons. Take these for now.” He pressed his hunting knife and the irumoi into my hands.
I crept through the manor. The corridors were suffocating tunnels. Candle brackets emerged from the gloom like bats clinging to the walls. I leapt into a doorway when the ceiling groaned, but nothing else made a sound.
The faces in the portrait hall looked pale as corpses, washed out by the glowing mushrooms. Sombre eyes watched me pass. I tried not to look, but the painting of the boy in the black elk-sigil coat snagged me. He felt the slightest bit familiar, but I couldn’t work out if he looked like Nonil. Maybe there was just something of Parr in his face. I wondered where he was, when he’d learn about his father’s death, if he’d return to this sepulchre of a home.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
I blinked fast and hurried to the white room. The bed had been remade, its sheets and blankets neatly tucked, but the note was on the table where I left it. I stuffed it into my purse, avoiding my reflection in the framed mirror.
Outside, wisps of cloud drifted in front of the moon, diluting the light into a dull glaze. Broken glass glittered on the flagstone. Anwea whinnied when I approached. My hands shook too hard to untether her, so I gave up and dropped the reins. “I can’t,” I told Fendul. “I just — can’t yet.”
I stumbled away to the willows and pushed aside curtains of leaves. The wind called my name, insistent. I emerged into waves of rippling grass, crumpled to my knees, and screamed. I screamed until my throat was raw and a flock of birds rose screeching. There was nowhere to hide here, no walls, no cocoons nurturing secrets. Just aching, bruising truth.
Fendul found me on my back with stalks dancing at the edge of my vision. He slumped next to me. The kinaru constellation in the north seemed to be watching us.
“I wish I knew sooner,” he said. “I wish I put my sword through his heart before he ever met you.”
I drew a spiral of water in the air. “Sverbians name weapons after they take a life. How do you name a weapon that doesn’t exist anymore?”
“You don’t, I guess. You let the weapon go and keep the memory.”
“What if I don’t want the memory?”
“I don’t think we get to choose.” He tore up a rustling handful of grass.
“Tiernan said Ferish believe some spirits go into the sky and some into the ground.” I split the spiral in the middle. Half drifted toward the clouds and turned into mist. The other half sank into the dirt. I rubbed my eyes with my wrists, the only part of my hands not covered in grime. “I told myself I wouldn’t cry for him.”
“Cry for you. Cry because it’s your pain, your grief, your anger. Cry because no one else gets to decide how you mourn.”
I rolled onto my side and drew my knees to my chest. Like a downpour you can taste coming, my tears broke free for the second time that day. Not the elegant tears of women in folk tales, but messy, wild tears that made my lungs burn and nose run and chest ache. Fendul stroked my hair until my sobbing faded into quiet gasps.
“I can’t go back to Toel,” I said when I could breathe. “Not tonight.”
“We have to get away from here. The city guards saw us come this way.”
“I know. Just not Toel. I . . . think I know somewhere we can go.”
He nodded. “All right. We’ll go back in the morning.”
We cut across the Roannveldt to the south, avoiding farms and a sleeping village. Fendul walked and I rode, trying to ignore the stinging in my thigh. Anwea’s head drooped and her tail swished slowly. I guessed at the direction, so it was a relief when a collapsed fence loomed out of the darkness. An alder rose like a rustling cairn above overgrown grass.
“This is where I found you,” Fendul said with sudden recognition.
A dirt path led from the pasture to a timber farmhouse. Its door hung open, creaking in the wind. The garden was choked with weeds. A weasel darted under a bush as we approached.
Fendul climbed the porch steps and glanced inside, holding up the irumoi. “Looks like they’re not coming back. Most of their things are gone.”
“A lot of people moved away when the war came west.” I rubbed Anwea’s neck. “I’ll be there soon. Yell if anyone comes.”
Flies buzzed up when I entered the barn. It reeked of rotting hay and dung. I lit a rushlight I found by the door and searched through rusted tools until I found a brush. The familiar motions of cleaning Anwea’s coat calmed me almost as much as her. I filled the water trough in the yard and tethered her away from the stench.
Orange light flickered from the farmhouse window. I crossed the porch and paused in the doorway. The place was an empty shell. Rough wooden furniture, a chipped clay bowl on a shelf, a mouldering onion in a bin. Dirt had drifted under the door and sunk into the floorboards. A candle stump guttered on the mantel, filling the air with the meaty smell of tallow.
I rested m
y head on the doorframe. Fendul leaned against the wall, staring out through a grimy window framed by faded curtains. With his back to the candle, I could barely see his face. The resin on his chest was almost black.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Tiernan warned me. Iannah, too. They knew not to trust Parr.”
He shook his head. “I should be the one apologizing.”
“What do you mean?” I stepped inside and shut the door.
Fendul pushed off the wall and paced across the room. “I knew about the Rúonbattai.”
My breath caught. “It’s true then.”
“The Rin and Iyo both allied with them. I can’t . . . deny what Parr said. They were brutal. So were the Ferish. We were desperate. The Bronnoi Ridge fire wasn’t an accident, nor were our dug-up burial grounds, gutted wolves left on the Colonnium steps . . . it goes on.”
“What about waking the saidu?”
He pinched his temples. “That’s true, too. The Iyo pulled out of the alliance when Liet suggested it. We refused at first, but after Suriel used Ferish mercenaries to massacre the Rúonbattai, my father decided we had no choice. We figured out in a year what the Rúonbattai had been working on for fourteen. Suriel didn’t try as hard to stop us. I suppose he didn’t want to kill children of the kinaru.”
I collapsed onto a chair, stretching out my aching legs. “What went wrong?”
“The saidu argued over whether to interfere in human affairs. Some said it was their job to protect us from outsiders. Others were afraid of turning out like Suriel, too involved with us. We think being dormant disoriented them. Normally when saidu fight, one surrenders, but this time one killed another, and . . .”
“A locust plague. That’s how Wotelem described it. The first death set them off on a rampage.” I picked at my unravelling bandages. “How did we wake—”
“That’s the one thing my father never told me. He didn’t want this to ever happen again.”
“Why did no one ever talk about this — not even my parents—”
Fendul rubbed the ink lines on his arm. “Most Rin didn’t know. We never fought for the Rúonbattai. Just gave them info, resources, passage through Anwen Bel. Same with the Iyo here in their territory.”
