by K A Riley
Sure enough, a sliver of a smile plays on the corners of Harah’s lips until it stretches out into a full-on grin.
She claps her hands, and Page, Squire, and Steward sprint to the water and wade across. They take the sack of seeds, the duck, and the cat from Brohn, and all of them head back, trudging their way through the trickling, brownish water, to re-join us on the shore.
Harah picks up Brohn’s jacket and stands behind him as he slips his arms into it. “You’ve bought yourself a ticket to the next round.”
“Next round?” I object. “But Brohn and Rain solved it.”
“Right,” Cardyn agrees. “You have to let us go.”
Some of Harah’s entourage break into childish giggles as Harah swings around to face us. “Don’t get cocky. All you did was keep yourselves alive for another ten minutes. It’s called the Trials. Plural.”
“How many?” Brohn asks through clenched teeth.
“As many as it takes until you fail,” Harah answers, smiling sweetly.
28
Carnival
Harah signals for her armored, oversized knights to take us to the Royal Courtyard.
Our boots kick up little clouds of dust and make happy crunching sounds on the pebble-covered path winding through the remnants of a now-scorched grove of skeletal, spindly-branched trees.
“Hey,” I tell Brohn along the way. “That was some good work back there.”
“Thank Rain. I couldn’t have done it without her brain.”
Walking on Brohn’s other side, Rain tells him, “And don’t you forget it.”
“Your pants got soaked, though,” Cardyn laughs.
“We’re alive,” Brohn answers. “Small price to pay, right?”
Harah glances back at us but doesn’t tell us to stop talking.
Brohn has his long jacket hooked on one finger and slung over his shoulder. He reaches out with his free hand to take hold of mine. I smile, squeeze his hand, and pat his forearm, which, I realize as I look down, is decorated with a crosshatching of thin red lines.
“What’s that?”
“What’s what?”
“Those marks.”
Brohn shrugs. “I don’t know. From the cat, I guess.”
“But you’re…”
Brohn lets go of my hand and raises his forearm up to his eyes to get a better look. “Hm. You’re right. That shouldn’t be possible.”
“What’s going on?” Cardyn asks from the other side of Rain.
I tell him, “Nothing. Just admiring Brohn’s arm.”
“Sounds exciting.”
I don’t respond to Cardyn’s sarcasm or to his weak attempt at an eyeroll. Besides, now is definitely not the time or place to say anything out loud about Brohn’s Emergent abilities or the fact that he’s somehow got cat scratches on his skin when I’ve personally seen him deflect close-range bullets.
We keep walking along—me and Brohn hand-in-hand—and I get the sense that he’s already forgotten about the impossible marks on his skin, but I haven’t.
What could it mean? Is his skin losing its density? Is he vulnerable now? If a cat can cut him, what’ll happen the next time someone like Ledge decides to swing a broadsword full-force at his head?
“We’re nearly there,” Harah calls out from the front of our procession.
With her three Attendants-in-Waiting in the lead, we’re marched back the way we came, over the hill, and across the dry patch of land. Instead of returning to the main doors, however, we’re led around the side of the palace and up to a set of tall, spiked iron gates.
Next to us, the four Gentlemen-at-Arms clomp forward to pull open the gate’s huge double doors. We’re marched down a dark, cobblestone corridor before being led out into the light of an expansive courtyard.
It’s hot, and now it’s raining at the same time. The water droplets sizzle and pop against the searing, steaming surfaces.
The perimeter of the courtyard is set up with a circle of colorful tents. The rain pinging off the thick canvas tops sounds like applause.
My Conspiracy and I are ordered to stop where we are.
The two red knights stand on guard to either side of us while the two silver knights escort Harah and her entourage of attendants up to the steps of a deep, wide-beamed wooden stage.
A boy and a girl drag a wet red carpet out of a cedar chest and take great pains laying it out along the short set of steps as Harah approaches.
Gathering up her skirts and robes, Harah mounts the steps, careful to walk around the tower of banana-yellow fabric covering a twenty-foot high structure in the middle of the stage.
Two attendants drag a high-backed cushioned armchair from the wings and set it down next to Harah while we take in the busy, boisterous activity of the wide courtyard.
Cardyn says, “Marvie. A carnival!”
Next to him, Steward, Harah’s patchy-haired and crusty-eyed male Attendant-in-Waiting, tells him, “Hardly.”
It’s not my place to disagree, but I share Cardyn’s initial reaction.
In the corner nearest to us, there’s a howling, roaring boy dressed in what appears to be a homemade dragon costume. He’s nearly invisible under a billowing green blanket with drawn-on scales and two gossamer wings flopping up and down from his back. He’s holding a torch up to his mouth and, between barks and growls, is breathing fire into the air for a ring of impressed little kids.
The torrential rain eases up and is replaced by a straggling shower and a light haze of mist. The damp air sizzles under the fire of the dragon-boy’s breath.
In another corner of the courtyard, an older girl and a boy are flipping bowling pins back and forth to each other to form two blurry white streaks through the air while a small girl in a pink frock stands giggling, but clearly terrified and near tears, in the middle.
At a wooden table, two boys are locked in a sweaty bout of arm-wrestling, their faces tense and contorted, while a crowd of cheering kids leans in around them, hooting and pumping their fists in the air as they egg the boys on.
Underneath a lavender tarp next to the stage, a bunch of small kids in baggy canvas aprons are fanning some older boys and girls of the Royal Fort Knights. I do a double-take when I realize I recognize at least two of the servants.
“Those are two of those Banter kids,” I say under my breath to Brohn. “The ones from the cells.”
Pretending to cough, Brohn covers his mouth with his arm. “For all her high and mighty talk, she’s still just a rich snob who kidnaps little kids to do her bidding.”
Thankfully, from her perch on the stage, Harah is too far away to catch on to our scornful assessment of the situation. Instead, she steps forward, slings her two blush-red braids behind her shoulders, and raises her scepter—a silver candlestick with a blue and white ceramic bowl taped to the top—high into the air.
As she does this, the remaining drizzle of rain stops completely and gives way again to the high afternoon sun. I’m thinking maybe Harah is a superpowered Emergent who can control the weather or something, but then I remember how unpredictable the weather is around here and decide that it’s only a coincidence.
On either side of Harah, her knights and attendants cup their hands around their mouths and call the crowd to attention.
The dragon-boy sheds his costume. The wrestling boys unclench from each other and stand, dripping with sweat, under the balcony that rings the courtyard. Harah’s crew of Lords and Ladies, mingling off to the side in their heavily bedazzled purple and white outfits, shuffle themselves into an orderly line.
When everyone is settled, Harah raises her scepter again. She points it one by one at me, Brohn, Cardyn, and Rain.
“First, the Royal Riddles. Who among you will accept the challenge? Which among you shall you nominate as your champion?”
Hands on the hilts of their swords, the two red knights step toward us and force the four of us forward until we’re gathered in a small clump in front of Harah and the raised stage.
We look back and forth toward each other before Brohn finally tells Rain she should be the one to take this challenge.
“Why me?”
“Because you’re smarter than the rest of us, you helped us pass the first test, you have the Culling, you’re good at chess and strategy and stuff, and you’re the only one who actually enjoys this kind of thing.”
“My Culling has seen better days,” Rain sighs. “But okay. If you trust me to take the lead on this…”
“We trust you,” I assure her.
“Definitely,” Cardyn adds.
Separated out from the rest of us by Harah’s three Attendants-in-Waiting, Rain is nudged up onto the square stage, which contains, towering in its center, that twenty-foot tall banana-yellow cover concealing…I can’t even begin to guess.
From here, it looks like it might be a pointlessly enormous doorframe. Or the world’s largest mirror. It’s got a wooden base poking out from under the sheet, but it could be anything.
The girl called Squire approaches the covered structure and pulls a cord. The huge sheet of material collapses down in a rumple of looping folds around the stage to reveal…
…a guillotine.
29
Riddles
Rising high into the air—higher even than the ring of balconies around the courtyard—is a framework of pockmarked, walnut colored wood.
The girl called Page nudges Rain up to a spot between the guillotine’s two main vertical posts where she forces Rain to kneel on a small wooden stool with her chin resting in a groove on a beam running from one leg of the guillotine to the other.
Just like the pictures I’ve seen on viz-caps, it’s a towering structure with a glinting, angled silver blade suspended by a rope in the middle. Extending out from the two main posts are a set of thinner legs on either side and one long, supporting post stretching on an angle from the top of the guillotine to the floor of the stage.
A baseball bat sized wooden handle with a rope leading up to a crank at the top of the guillotine sticks out of the side of the contraption.
Looming and menacing on dark legs and with the polished blade winking in the churning clouds of the red and gray sky, it practically looks alive.
Even if I didn’t know what it was for, I’d still be scared. No good can come out of something that looks like that.
Brohn calls out, “Hey!” and starts to step toward Rain and the stage, but the tip of a spear under his chin stops him in his tracks. He holds up his hands and allows me to guide him back.
Normally, I wouldn’t even be worried about Brohn. He could shrug off that spear like it was nothing more than a mild bee sting. But doing so would put me and Cardyn—and definitely Rain—at risk. I feel a pang of guilt knowing that our weak flesh and blood bodies prevent him from smashing us all out of here.
Besides, because I don’t know how a ten-pound cat managed to break his skin, I figure it’s best for him not to leap into an onslaught of spears, swords, and arrows at the moment.
With a grand flourish, Harah summons Squire up to the stage.
Squire paces in a slow circle around Rain, stepping over the base supports of the guillotine, before stopping behind her. “I'm where yesterday follows today, and tomorrow is in the middle.”
Cardyn gives me a sideways glance and says, “What the—?” but Rain, in the ominous shadow of the guillotine, simply scowls over at Squire from the corner of her eyes. “You’re a dictionary.”
Harah’s lips form a tight line across her face, and she gives Rain an evil-eyed stare before swinging her gaze over to Squire, who steps forward to tell Rain, “You may make one statement. If you tell a lie, we’ll hang you. If you tell the truth, we’ll burn you.”
Rain yawns and rolls her eyes in Squire’s general direction. “You’ll hang me.”
It takes me a few seconds of agonizing, hand-wringing contemplation to understand the life-saving paradox of Rain’s answer: If they do hang her, her statement will turn out to be true, in which case, they’d have to burn her. But if they do that, her statement will have been a lie, in which case, they’d have to hang her.
Next to me, his eyes wide in realization, Brohn pumps his fist and gives Rain a long-distance, “Nice job” nod, which she returns with a half-smile and a wink.
Squire balls up her small fists and paces for a few seconds behind Rain.
“How many pairs of animals did Moses take on the Ark?”
“Moses didn’t have an Ark. It was Noah.”
A half-amused, half-annoyed scowl stretched across her face, Harah calls Page and Steward up to the platform. She signals to two boys on either side of the billowing purple curtain at the back of the stage.
They latch onto two thick ropes and start pulling. The purple curtain rises to reveal two huge steel-reinforced doors—one painted a faded ocean blue, the other painted in a washed-out buttery yellow.
Harah nods to the boys who tie off the braided ropes and stand at attention, their hands clasped behind their backs.
Harah tells Rain to stand up and turn around to face the two giant doors. “There’s a team of archers, bows drawn and ready to fire, behind one of those doors. Behind the other is a corridor leading directly to one of the palace’s exits and to your freedom. Choose.”
On a hand signal cue from Harah, the red knight to our left stomps up to the stage and swings around to take a guard position in front of the blue door.
The red knight on our right does the same, lumbering under the weight of his armor to climb the stage stairs and stand, sword drawn, with his back to the yellow door.
“One of the knights always lies,” Squire announces. “One of them always tells the truth.”
Stalking around behind Rain, Squire nudges her toward the two doors. As she stands, Rain turns and gives us a confident smile.
As someone who spent much of her childhood plagued by insecurity, I don’t think I could ever describe myself in terms of Rain’s level of confidence. In full view of us, Harah and her entourage, and the hundred or so kids looking on in the courtyard, she just walked from under an actual guillotine and over to two tank-sized knights—each with a sword practically as heavy as Rain, herself—and didn’t even break a sweat.
Me? I would have been frantically looking around for the nearest bathroom.
Squire stops Rain in front of the two knights. “You can ask one of them one question.”
Rain looks up at the red knight in front of the blue door and gives him a soft, very pretty smile. She then walks over to stand in front of the silver knight, the top of her head barely coming up to his chest. She tilts her head back and smiles up at him, too, before returning to the first knight.
“Assuming my goal is to be free and not shot full of arrows, if I asked the other knight which door to pick, what would he say?”
The red knight turns his helmeted head toward Harah who pauses for a second before nodding for him to answer. The red knight hangs his head. “He’d tell you to pick the blue one.”
“Great. Then I pick the yellow one. If you’re telling the truth, the other knight is the liar, and he’d try to make me pick wrong. If you’re lying, the other knight is the truth-teller, and he’d tell me to pick the yellow door.”
Now Harah stands up, her cheeks a radiant pink. She frowns as if she’s been mortally insulted, as if Rain has just slapped her in the face with a white glove and challenged her to a duel. “Bring the vase,” she snaps.
“What about our freedom?” I shout up at her.
I’m answered from behind with a piercing dagger thrust to my side. The blade slices into my skin right above my hip bone, and I can feel blood seeping through my dress.
I cry out, and in a flash, Brohn steps over and backhands the boy who just stabbed me halfway across the courtyard. I try to grab at Brohn’s jacket, but he shrugs me off, storming his way across the courtyard to my startled attacker, who is desperately crab-walking backward as he scrambles to escape into a crowd of jeering kids.
B
rohn latches a hand onto the boy’s skinny ankle and drags him out of the crowd. In a last-ditch effort, the boy slashes his dagger over and over against Brohn’s forearm. Deep rips form in Brohn’s jacket sleeve and the tingling chime of metal on metal fills the courtyard, but, thankfully, there’s no blood.
As I breathe a sigh of relief, the boy’s eyes go wide, and a current of murmurs ripples through the crowd.
Ignoring it all, Brohn flings the boy back toward me and Cardyn. The boy slides to a twisted-neck, knotted halt at my feet with Brohn storming back and picking up the kid’s dagger, the tip still wet with my blood, along the way.
All around us, Harah’s guards spring into action, advancing on the small circle in the courtyard where Brohn, Cardyn, and I are now standing over the moaning boy.
Brohn reaches down and snags the boy’s ankle again. Only this time, instead of dragging him, he raises him fully off the ground and holds him dangling in the air for Harah to see.
With the boy hanging upside down like a skinned rabbit in a butcher’s window and with his own dagger now held to his throat, he squirms a little, but Brohn’s grip on his ankle is relentless.
“Enough!” Brohn growls at Harah. He points over to where I’ve got my arm pressed to my side to staunch the trickle of blood leaking down my jet-black dress. “It’s true. We broke into your palace. But we were just desperate to help a friend. You drew first blood.”
With the red and silver knight holding Rain back, Harah steps down from the stage and walks over to stand in front of Brohn. Looking small in front of him but still in total and absolute control, she gives the tiniest hand signal, and we’re instantly surrounded by at least a dozen archers and the other two armor-clad knights.
Harah steps right up to Brohn, her nose practically touching his chest, and runs her hand along his arm and his shredded jacket sleeve as she looks up into his eyes. “You seem to have a gift,” Her voice is a flirty whisper. “Am I right?”
