by Teresa Rook
The Chiral tax, and then this theft. Everything we have: gone.
This, I think, this is why I’ve been so on-edge.
I lay in the dirt in the middle of an empty cellar, taking deep breaths, trying to force myself to my feet through the weight of my dread. A small part of me tries to put a positive spin on this, to introduce relief: it’s over now. The worst has passed. My anxiety no longer feels unearned.
Starvation is now months closer.
Sound comes to me, shouting, chaos from up above. My muscles protest as I drag myself out of the storehouse. I blink at a faint brightness from the direction of the barn, figures running in and out of its silhouette. As I stumble towards it, it gets brighter, a viscous, glowing red. Understanding hits me hard and leaves me dizzy.
There’s a fire. The barn. The animals.
Tilly.
The foal.
I watch one of the last timbers fall, sending a breathtaking display of sparks into the night air. There is nothing left to save.
I collapse at the edge of the embers and feel nothing. Not fear, not anger, not even the burns searing into my knees and palms. People hustle around me, in a panic, their words all jumbled together like the roar of the fire. I only hear my own voice, frantic inside my head. It's gone, Darga, everything, the whole barn, burned to the ground.
I keel over and retch, then shudder at the food that’s come out of me. That may have been my last meal.
At the very least we could have slaughtered the animals. Now, all we have are what tough, weathered wild tubers might have survived this drought. I'm already skinny. Mhyra is skinny. Abadiah is basically a walking skeleton. We are all skeletons now.
I snag a smoldering support to use as a torch and run back to the storehouse. I hold it to the ground where the wagon sat. Its tracks lead off north. Steal what you can and torch the rest. The woman’s probably heading for Cirrin to sell our food on their dirty market. If I had Tilly, maybe I could ride after her. If she wasn't so old. If I hadn't sliced her open yesterday.
If she hadn’t just turned to ash.
I refuse to think of the foal. Instead, I think of the woman, and a vital piece of information launches itself to the forefront: those boxes were witched. The woman was a witch.
I don't know what to do with this knowledge. When the Chirals destroyed the Witches, they destroyed the only people who could use their tech. Barnab had to relearn farming without it. And like Old Man Wells says: the trains stopped running and the world got smaller.
She had a long nose and near-black skin, a woman from Niroek. The lush greenery depicted on her wagon, like nothing one would find in Carnigai, even before the drought. I owe Old Man Wells an apology for all the times I sidestepped his crazy ramblings. He knew something was up with Niroek, even if he didn’t know the details.
Those details being: Niroek still has its witches.
five
Mudo is one of the last ones left sitting at the edge of the embers. I sit beside him.
“So much for my numbers,” he says.
I clap a hand to his shoulder in comfort. “It’s not over.”
“How is it not?” He doesn’t look at me as he speaks, just stares distantly over the ashes. “The fields have only one more harvest in them. Our stores will last us to the spring, but we can’t replace them after that. We could have slaughtered some of the animals to make up the difference, held over until the tomatoes started to bloom, at least. But how will we make it now? We’ll starve in the spring.”
I cringe and rub the side of my head, where a sizable bump has formed. He doesn’t know about the witch in the storehouse. Will there be a better time to tell him? If it were me, I’d want it all now. Better to be buried all at once. You may start out deeper, but at least you know how far you must dig.
“It’s worse than that,” I say. “The storehouse was just robbed. It’s empty.”
He is so still I can’t tell if he’s breathing. I jostle his shoulder.
“We still have that last harvest. We can stretch it.”
“Robbed,” he murmurs, then straightens his back at stares at me. I watch the panic play out over his face as my words sink in. “The storehouse is empty?”
“Yes.”
He drops his head into his hands and I look out over the rubble. I don’t think he’ll want me watching if he cries.
“How is it not over?” he asks again after some time, his voice monotone. There’s no inflection to his words, no burgeoning hope. He doesn’t believe there’s a path forward, but at least he’s asking me to prove him wrong.
I take a deep breath, pushing my own despair deep inside me and moving on to a plan. “I go to the Chirals,” I say.
He stares again, then laughs. It’s neither amused nor cruel, but overwhelmed, close to hysteria. “What will the Chirals do to help?” He spits on the ground after he speaks. I watch as his saliva is absorbed by the black soot.
“I’ll make them give back some of what they’re taken.”
His head is shaking before I’ve finished my sentence. “They’ll never do that.”
“They will. If they don’t, we starve, and there’s nobody to grow next year’s food.”
He’s quiet. I rub a small circle on his shoulder and push myself to my feet.
“Don’t worry,” I say with far more certainty that I feel. My legs are like stilts beneath me, far too thin to hold me up. But I square my shoulders. “Your numbers will work out. I’ll take care of it.”
#####
Salis isn't far, but I've never been before. I don't really leave the Farms, and neither does anyone else. We've got this distrust of the city, of people who take from others instead of doing for themselves.
I wrote my parents a note with what happened and how I'm going to fix it. We've been feeding the Chirals my entire life in return for very little. It's time for them to pay us back.
I left before dawn and have been following the tracks southeast for hours. A light dust storm, not quite a tornado, swirls to the north, the fourth I’ve seen since I set out. The scarf pulled up over my mouth and nose stops me from choking on sand but adds to the excessive heat from the sun. It was unwise of me not to plan for shelter in the middle of the day, but there’s nowhere to stop between Barnab and Salis. This path along the tracks is heavy in hoof prints, but it wasn’t made for walking.
The sun is now halfway down the other side of the sky. I'm used to being hungry, but this is approaching my limit. The coming winter hasn’t cooled the sun’s heat, and my canteen didn't make it past noon. The bitter cold of winter seems impossible, but when it comes, it will come fast.
I’ve done well, as this trip could have taken much longer. I take care of my body, as much as is possible when I can barely feed it, and this is why. The barren desert has rolled past me at a consistent clip. If I’m nearing exhaustion now, it’s because I put in the work to get this far.
Tilly would have made this trip so much easier. I take a deep gulp of air. Don’t think about her.
The smoke from countless Chiral chimneys is visible on the horizon, dark and cloudy in contrast to the dust storms I’ve been keeping a wary eye on. After another hour, I can make out buildings, too. They stretch across a sizable chunk of land and cast shadows across the sand. From here on, my progress will be agonizingly slow as I measure the distance between myself and the city with every step.
I reach its outskirts just as the sun sets. There’s no wall, no moat, no barrier to entry. No beauty to Salis, not like what I hear of the Dead Cities. The gypsies who stopped in Barnab for supplies used to tell me of the architectural wonders present in those derelict places, the eerie emptiness of what were once the most advanced areas on the continent. But gypsies don’t come to stock up anymore. These past few years, we’ve barely produced enough to feed our own. Nothing to sell, no buyers. No just-passing-throughs. No stories.
Instead, we have Salis, gray and crumbling with its massive stone archways that slant one way and then the
other. I wasn’t expecting artistry, but the descriptor that comes to mind is run-down. I touch a stone wall, still warm from the sun. The glue between the rock comes away, dusting my fingers. On the outskirts here, at least, this sprawling, poorly-made place is falling apart.
The Wolf won't be seeing anyone at this hour, so I'm stuck spending the night. I stick to the city’s fringes, trying to sleep within the skeleton of an abandoned building and racked with the worst hunger pangs in recent memory. There’s no position on the ground that will loosen the hard knots in my stomach.
Now that I've finally stopped moving, my mind catches up with me. Fire, starvation, futility. It’s hard to sit, to accept that I need to take some time to recover. My pulse pounds loud in my veins, urging me to act, to solve, to take no breaks. I’m afraid if I slow down my mind will speed up, and I don’t want to hear what’s going on inside my head.
In the morning, I will fix this. For now, I force myself into a hard-won sleep.
#####
“There's a process,” the skinny woman says before sniffing and looking pointedly past me. The buildings here at the centre of town are in better shape, taller and with cleaner lines, but the stark sense of poverty prevails. The inhabited parts are functional but still not pretty, littered with trash and discarded broken things, baskets and carts. In Barnab, everyone takes pride in our home. It would never be allowed to get like this.
“It's urgent,” I say, to no effect. Does she think I'm homeless? A reject, begging for something far above my lot in life? I cared for the chicken that laid your breakfast eggs, asshole. But she's done talking to me, and she struts away in fancy shoes with the heels worn down.
There’s a waiting list to see the Wolf, and it's long. I tried going directly to the silos with no luck. I waited in line for the better part of an hour, watching families walk off with bags full of the grain my tribe harvested. When it was my turn, they shooed me away as if I were vermin. So I've been wandering around this stinking, too-big-to-maintain city for hours, begging someone to help me see the Wolf, but no one cares. They disconnect as soon as they realize I want something from them. The only people who will catch my eye are the ones who want something from me, and I can’t help. I’m no less poor and desperate than they are.
I'm beginning to think my best bet might be a break-in.
I've learned that the Wolf dedicates four hours of her day to public inquiries, and that she receives her subjects in the main hall of her residence, a fortified castle in the very centre of town that’s much newer than everything else. Or older, maybe? It's better, in any case, and I can't tell if that's because it's old and built to last or too new to show signs of sagging.
I’m guessing old. I’d be surprised if the Chirals had built something so grand themselves. Probably a relic from before the genocide, just like the Dead Cities.
The wall around its perimeter, three times my height, speaks of paranoia. Though perhaps it’s justified. If Barnab’s cellars are an attractive target, I imagine the Chiral castle would be as well. Nowhere in Carnigai is wealth more concentrated than it is here, in the centre of Salis.
There's one gate at the front of the wall, facing the market. Nobody gets past without an escort, and nobody gets an escort unless they’ve waited on the list. This performance of hearing from the people is a farce.
I wander the winding market streets, doing my best to appear aimless while keeping my eyes open for what I need. People rub shoulders with me, eager to be about their own business. The faces I see are generally either drawn or frantic, and few appear well-fed.
I spot a length of rope discarded between two kiosks, browned and fraying, that was designed for transporting cattle. God knows how long it’s been since it was used. It will have no trouble supporting my tiny body. The peddlers try to catch my attention, but I don’t acknowledge them, so they resume calling out their wares into the street to little response.
The hook is harder. I need something that will latch on to the top of the wall so I can climb up, and not much fits that bill. I grow more anxious the longer I go without finding anything. Any hopefuls—half a wheel, a helmet pried halfway open—are too rusted to hold or too heavy for me to heft over the wall. My frustration mounts in proportion with the sun in the near-noon sky and with the worsening pangs in my stomach.
A child stands under the shade of one of the kiosk umbrellas, ignoring the annoyed fabric merchant trying to shoo him away. There’s a bright red apple in his tiny hands. I watch as he bites into it and a few drops of juice dribble onto the cobblestones. That should have been Tilly’s apple.
I give up and go back for the helmet, because it the only option I have and I have to try something. I choose a building that borders on the castle’s wall and sneak around behind it. Nobody seems to notice me climbing onto its roof, an easy enough task with all the footholds in the damaged brick. Near the center of the city, the people are crowded like sardines. Fortunately, most of them are too absorbed in their own activities to notice mine. I wrap the rope securely around the helmet, weaving it through the holes where rust has eaten through the metal. I heft it in my left hand, eyeing the distance between me and the wall.
I throw once and it falls short, so I reel it back up and try again. It slices my hand in three places, but this time it goes over and clangs against the interior wall. The sound makes me cringe, but I glance around and nobody's looking.
I tug on the rope to pull the helmet up to the summit. It seems to be wedged, but two good tugs and off it comes, so rusty that it's snapped in half. One half falls down the other side, and the rest swings and clatters against the side of this house. I throw the rope away in frustration and slither off the roof.
Some part of me asks what good this plan will accomplish, really, in the long run. Say I get into the castle’s cellars, how much food can I even carry back to Barnab in my arms?
But mostly I’m thinking of the witch in the storehouse, how she tried to bury me under those boxes. The white shimmers I saw but didn't register the meaning of, because an actual witch in the storehouse would have been ridiculous. Now I watch everywhere, though any witch would be mad to come to Salis, the home of the people who led the charge to wipe them out.
I sit cross-legged and think. I need to see the Wolf, because the asshole guarding the silos won't give me a thing without her say-so. But she's barricaded inside her castle, and I can't get through the front gate without weeks on a waiting list. I can't climb the wall that surrounds the main compound; it's too crumbly to support a foothold. The castle itself may be well-maintained, but that effort doesn’t stretch even to its protective outer wall, to say nothing of the market district built up around it. What little wealth is here does not spread far.
If I wait around for weeks, my family starves. And I clearly don't have the tools to scale the wall, something I've never done before and am an idiot for thinking was a viable option.
So, do I wait to ambush the Wolf when she emerges? Does she ever emerge?
I slap my palms against the ground and groan. Then my stomach groans, and the pain is so strong I have to roll onto my side, arms around knees pressed into my furious stomach. I can’t do anything if I can't eat.
So, I guess I have to steal.
The pain immediately gets worse, a flipping rather than a searing stab, shame and horror. No. I will not steal.
But don't they steal from us? There’s no reason they should be entitled to a share of our harvests.
I wander back into the market, people giving me a wider berth now that I'm scratched up and staggering. I try to keep my lips together, but it's a losing battle. My mouth waters, and I have to keep wiping spittle from its corners. I veer through an alley and come out flush against the castle wall, no idea where I’m going or what my current goal is.
There's some loose stone piled against the building opposite, the bank for a partially-built home, a project perhaps permanently abandoned. I stumble into it and put an arm out to steady myself, but it’s
not as solid as it looks. I have to sidestep as a few chunks of stone slide from its side and roll into the alley. A larger chunk rolls out to the base of the wall and clacks against it, knocking some of the plaster loose. I stare for a moment, and then I laugh.
I don’t have to go over it. I’ll go through it.
I go back for an abandoned cart I passed at the opening to the alley. I glance around me as I pull it into the gap, but if somebody objects to me taking it, they say nothing. Back at the stone pile, I fill it with the biggest rocks I can lift. It takes me several minutes, but then I have the cart weighted down, and it takes a mighty heave to get the wheels turning. Run it through the wall, march in, demand help.
It’s not a great plan.
The slope of the ground is more severe than I realized. The cart veers gracefully to the left and collides harmlessly with the side of another building, where it lies still.
The last of my energy has been used up, and I fall to my knees. I am so hungry I can't do anything. This is all my fault. The tears come so hard they drop from my cheeks, and I let them, finding some small solace in the weakness and vulnerability. I came all the way here and now I can't get the last few steps.
I take a few deep, slow breaths, forcing myself back to rationality. I can rob one of the houses on the edge of town. Mhyra and Abadiah are more important than my pride. I’ll sink to thievery rather than see them starve.
I look at the cart and tell myself I’m giving it one more shot, so I can know I did absolutely everything I could before I resorted to outright theft. I stand and remove the stones one by one. I back the cart up and line it up better this time. I fill it back up and push.
It picks up speed, and when it veers, it's towards the castle wall, rather than away from it. I feel like the world tilts as I watch, exhaustion twisting my vision and washing out the scene before me. The cart moves fast, and I feel delirious. Seconds away from impact. When it hits, this entire section of castle wall will crumble, and I’ll have my way in.
