“Which bogat?” Kaba asked.
Anna swallowed. She hadn’t expected it to even be a question. “Radzym.”
There was a lull in the exchange. Milosz seemed to be staring past Anna and toward his companion, grunting and shrugging his upper lip in discomfort. He had a hard look about him, as though he rarely experienced indecision. But this matter gnawed at him. His small, dark eyes narrowed, and he scratched at his beard, which glowed like silver thread in the light. Finally, Milosz folded his arms over his black cloak and nodded. “She isn’t with them.”
Kaba’s reply was delayed. “How do you know?”
“Look at her,” Milosz said as he inspected Anna. “Starved. And grains are about the only thing Nahora can get through our rivers.”
“Napawna. She isn’t on their rosters,” Kaba said, “but they have sympathizers everywhere.”
Milosz spat. “You’ve just come off the tit. What would you know about the wars, boy? What would you know about sympathizers?”
Although Anna’s only indication of Kaba was his hovering light, she took his silence as an acceptance of defeat, or at least submission. Even Milosz let the quietness sink in to prove his point before continuing. But Anna struggled to focus, watching the runes contorting over Milosz’s skin, warping and stretching.
“Where are you from?” Milosz asked.
“Bylka,” she whispered. “My brother and I, we came from there.”
“Where’s your brother?”
“He’s dead.” The words were cold when they left her lips, but she felt less than expected. She’d seen young boys bury their fathers after they came back from fighting, and they didn’t blink, much less weep, for three days, perhaps four. But after a certain point, they broke.
Anna hoped she would never reach the fifth day.
“What was his crime?” Kaba asked.
“Cichbasz, korpa,” Milosz growled. The snap of his final curse filled the tomesroom. He spoke the grymjek, the clanspeak, better than Anna’s own father. And there was a pointed brutality behind it. “What happened to him, girl?”
“The man who took me here,” Anna said, trying not to let the tingling in her gut ferment into fear again. She hadn’t wanted to discuss Julek; she hadn’t meant to even bring him up. “He was a tracker. He did it over salt.”
“A tracker wouldn’t kill,” Milosz replied. “We can’t do a thing if you’re on his writ.”
“I wasn’t,” she said weakly. “He told me that my brother was the one that the bogat wanted. At first, he didn’t want me. He didn’t need me.”
“Did Jan ever receive word back from Kowak?” Kaba asked, and Anna was grateful to return to comfortable silence.
“Ne,” Milosz said. Hardened leather plates rustled under his cloak. “Did the tracker tell you why he wanted your brother, panna?”
“No,” Anna whispered.
Milosz said something to Kaba in full grymjek, and both men exchanged looks, somehow seeming insightful in the blackness. Milosz was the first to speak again. “Who gave Radzym the boy’s name?”
My mother, my father. The words hung like cobwebs in her mouth, and she couldn’t force them out. But that was all they needed, it seemed.
Milosz grunted. “Just like the others, then.” He furrowed his brow. “Kaba, we’ll have to send word from the next post. Tell Malchym that it’s getting worse.”
Despite the chill, she felt a surge of hot blood. “You knew they were taking people.”
“It’s beyond our influence, panna. But once we get word to Malchym—”
Anna whirled toward Milosz. “What is he doing to them?”
“This isn’t a matter for you,” Milosz said, his voice low but equally harsh. “Even if we knew ourselves.” After a moment of quiet, letting the distant thunder break outside, Milosz bowed his head. “Fetch the gelding, Kaba. Add Radzym’s name to the writ.”
Add. There were others committing the same crime under Malchym’s watch. The city of lights and luxury, of riders on purebred horses and gold-trim saddles, of soldiers sworn to clear-hearted oaths.
And they did nothing.
“Panna,” Milosz said soothingly, “why does he want you?”
“I don’t know,” Anna admitted. By now, she’d almost convinced herself that such a lie was true.
“Where is he?” Milosz asked, the question so chilling that not even Kaba ventured to interject. A lone peal of thunder broke over the tomesroom.
In their collective silence, Anna heard the patter of approaching steps.
Heavy boots echoed from the doorway.
Without willing it, Anna shrank away from the beast. She skirted to the left and out of Kaba’s wash of pale light, somehow winding up in a narrow aisle of scroll cases, but she felt far from hidden. Even in the darkness, hiding among the maze, the tracker could see her. She sensed it. He could peer through the blackness and rot, meeting her gaze directly. In the shelter of the shadows, she trembled.
“Milosz,” hissed Kaba. He shook his light, the beam flickering across Milosz’s back and illuminating folds of wine-dark fabric, tousled gray hair.
But the older man did not look back. Even with the light dancing and fidgeting, a victim to Kaba’s shaking wrist, Anna discerned the slow, practiced withdrawal of a weapon. Polished metal reflected a mote of lantern light, then returned to shadow.
Anna stared at Kaba as her vision returned, the lingering flashes of white light fading by the second. Free of the lantern’s glare, she could see most of the aisles again, and the horror on the young man’s face.
His essence writhed like it had been left to roast over coals. It almost never grew so agitated. The only men with such violent sigils were on the cusp of death, and they knew it. The sigils knew it. Then at last the lantern in Kaba’s hand became visible, starting with the brass hook from which it hung. An oval had been cut from the front of the cylinder, and the inner light—a lit candle, or perhaps a burning oil reservoir—spilled its light in a directed cone.
The tracker’s voice jarred her. “I seem to have lost a girl.”
“Is he armed?” Kaba asked. His light only managed to illuminate patches of the tracker.
“No,” Milosz said. He lowered his blade’s point to the stone floor, readying himself. “If he’s wise, he’ll listen very closely when I tell him to stand against the wall.”
But the tracker did not move, and Anna didn’t expect he would. She was the only one who could see the luminous snowflake beneath the burlap hem, the rune that she had carved almost an entire day earlier. Even now, in spite of its age, it pulsed like a white-hot furnace. She had never seen anybody’s rune last so long, least of all her own.
And she had never seen them put to such murderous use.
“Ah,” the tracker said, “so you met her?”
“Are you a tracker?” Milosz asked.
“By trade and pastime, yes.”
“Where is the bogat’s writ?” Milosz’s stance hardened. “An agent of Malchym has the right to see such things.”
“In another situation, I would be quick to show you it.” The tracker took a step forward, forcing Milosz to raise his blade an inch, then sighed. “Unfortunately, this girl is worth a great deal to me, and I can’t lose her. For all I know, you two are mordyca, out for the blood of innocents. After a while on these roads, such things aren’t as shocking as you would expect.” The tracker glanced around the darkness, his hollow eye-slits giving him the appearance of a raven, or the spirits that mother chased away with her charms. “Why do you shelter her?”
“Shelter her from what?”
“Milosz, where is she?” Kaba swung his lantern from side to side, the brass hinges squealing with every pass. “Milosz, I can’t see her anymore!”
Anna threw herself back against the stone shelving as the light rushed past, revealing the hordes of n
eedle-legged spiders that made their home among the ruins. And then the light was gone, and she returned to the void. Her chest ached as she withheld her breaths, listening and waiting and screaming on the inside, feeling the legs of the spiders as they danced across her neck and forearms, spindly and prickling.
Callused fingers clamped around her neck. Before she could react, there was a grunt and a tug, and then she was rolling backward, pain exploding through her legs. Something on the floor bit at her, raking and slicing and tearing at the skin—the same sensation she had felt when the glassmaker’s pane shattered—until she felt herself scrambling on the stones, still held round the neck by an unshakable force. The fingers squeezed, pinching her nerves and bruising the tender flesh.
Anna cried out.
“I have her,” Kaba shouted from above her. He squeezed again, then dragged Anna to her feet, keeping her directly in front of himself. “Don’t you move,” he whispered. “Don’t even dare.”
Twenty paces away, Milosz continued to face the tracker. The two men were staring at one another, frozen, so detached that they could have been statues among the rubble. Kaba’s brass cylinder, which rested just beside Anna’s foot, framed the moment in pale light. Dust motes shifted and swirled as they crossed the illumined expanse.
“Kaba,” Milosz said, never moving, “I want you to release her immediately.”
“Good, we found her,” the tracker said. “That’s one less complication.”
Anna tried to control her breaths, but Kaba’s grip made it impossible. Every inhale, deep or shallow, reminded her of the pinched nerves around her airway. Her leggings clung to her skin, tacky where the glass shards had drawn blood and left their marks. But she had no time to feel that pain. With trembling hands, she combed along her sides—so softly that Kaba could not realize it—and felt for the blade.
“Once he stands against the wall, I’ll release her,” Kaba called.
Anna found the blade’s coarse wooden tang. “Let go of me.”
“Not another word,” Kaba said as he squeezed harder.
But this time, she was not so quick to cry out. This time, she did not think of pain, or the deafening shouts beside her ear. She thought of the previous day, and how a man had fixed her in place with his crossbow, threatening death all the while.
“Now, Kaba,” Milosz growled.
She wrapped her right hand around the blade, overcome with the same helplessness she’d felt in the path of the tracker’s crossbow. Fed by the same wrath she’d tasted as the creature tore into Julek. “Release me.”
“I will kill you,” Kaba said. His breaths were overwhelming in her ears. He shifted his other arm, and Anna felt the cold, narrow press of iron against her neck. “Do you feel that? Shut up. Just shut up.”
Anna snatched the blade from her belt, point down, and thrust backward. The iron tore through something soft, glanced off a harder substance, and then wriggled through the man’s innards, its sinewy pull no different from venison. She forced her arm further back as Kaba began to scream.
Ahead, the tracker surged forward—seemingly unarmed—and charged into Milosz’s rising blade. But the weapon did nothing beyond slow his pace. He walked onward as though consuming the iron, undaunted, and took hold of Milosz’s neck.
Framed in the pale light, it appeared to Anna as a dance of spirits.
Something cold bit across her throat, followed by a more chilling sensation. She felt the tomesroom’s decaying air slipping into her throat, but didn’t dare take a breath. Liquid rushed free and soiled the neckline of her tunic, and suddenly her fingers and toes lost their warmth. Wetness spread over her chest and down across her stomach. She was faintly aware of the pitter-patter on the stone directly beneath her, and the little droplets that splashed back onto her bare feet.
This is what dying feels like, she realized. This is how you felt.
And in Kaba’s ethereal light, the world fell away.
Chapter 4
In Bylka, the mourners did not wait for death to sing their songs. Two years ago, the thresher—Josep, second of Andrei—had been found coughing up blood in the fields. By sunset, he was sent to a small, lavender-smelling house on the far edge of town, so distant that even his hounds could not seek him out. And in that separate house, a group of ten children, boys and girls alike, sang songs in the grymjek. They sang without fail, even as the herbman covered the body in branches and called his kin to specify the death ceremony. They’d chosen the End of Teeth, likely because their storehouse’s grains were low that year, and his hounds needed to eat something.
Anna had been one of those girls in the lavender house, and she had held her candle as wax burned her fingers. She remembered all the songs they sang to the dying man.
So when Anna slipped out of murky dreamscapes and into a world of pain and mellow humming, she thought she’d already died. She heard the voice whispering the old words into her ears, but she couldn’t recognize the children who sang for her, or why they sounded more like a man than a boy.
Yet she knew she was alive, and somehow it disappointed her. Her body seemed reluctant to exist. No matter how hard she willed it, she couldn’t swallow. Her throat burned, and her mouth tasted of stale saliva and blood.
“Easy,” the tracker said.
Tears swelled at the corners of her eyes, and as she pinched her brows, she felt where older droplets had pooled and dried. She refused to make any noise—she never did—but the pain was unbearable. Without testing her theory, she was certain that she might never make a sound again.
She might never speak.
But as she opened her eyes, none of it seemed to matter. A ragged linen sheet was stretched out beneath her, barely covering the pile of straw and wool that served as her mattress. Above her and to the right there was a set of sealed, narrow shutters. Bars of light crept through the slats and across the nearby rug, offering glimpses into the woven pattern of spirals and hexagons. Fragrances that could only be termed foreign hung in the air, sweet and nostril-burning. Beneath that came the stench of rot, the earthiness of decomposing straw. And from outside, she heard horse hooves and the cries of merchants, beggars, flagellants, infants.
At the foot of the mattress, sunken low like a soglav on its haunches, the tracker stared at her.
“That’s it.” The tracker rested a hand on her ankle. A mixture of poultices and bandage wraps covered her from toe to knee. “Don’t move too swiftly, girl. Otherwise you’ll just tear it open.”
Anna touched her throat with a shaking hand, ignoring the tracker’s grunt of protest. Her fingers felt detached, gliding over the wound and the rigid, wax-coated zigzags where thread held her skin shut.
“Sedatives,” the tracker explained. He shook his head. “Poor, poor girl. The Hazani probably gave you enough nerkoya to put down an ox. Not that you’d want to do without. Not right now, anyway.”
Anna jerked her leg away from the tracker’s touch. Her throat was too torn for speech, even as she strained to say leave me with parted lips.
“Like I said, you’ll rip it,” the tracker said. He gestured to his neck, where folds of burlap gathered like aging skin. “Do you feel it, girl? Probably not. But when the petals wear off, you’ll feel the words stirring in there. Galipa said you were lucky. A touch deeper, and he might have severed the cords completely.”
The tomesroom and their dusty blackness came over Anna, and she remembered that moment as though it had been last season, or before her life entirely. It seemed so far away, until she touched her neck again.
A heap of red-splotched rags, jars, and string sat on the floor beside the tracker. When he noticed Anna’s gaze on the pile, he cleared his throat.
“It wasn’t me,” he said. “I can sew the flesh shut, but I’m no herbman, girl. That sort of thing is Galipa’s work. Him, and his pale little boy.” He shut his eyes, thinking. “Names were never my str
ength. They’ll be up here soon.” He produced a dark leather canteen shaped like a teardrop, then placed it beside Anna’s leg. “Try to drink some of that. It should all go down.”
Anna’s vision fluttered in and out of focus as the tracker stood, examined her for an unusually long period of time, and finally exited through the doorway’s hanging yellow curtain. The room lost its edges and melded together, and for once she could imagine she was nowhere at all. She let her head fall back onto the patchy linen and the comfort of the straw, her heartbeat and breaths so infrequent that death seemed possible. She closed her eyes, listening, entranced by the clamor of busy markets and flutes beyond the shutters. If she just held her breath for long enough, she might eventually slip away.
Then it came.
Visions of light screamed through her mind. Light, and hard, vicious angles that made her fingers curl for an ink quill. The lines arranged themselves and grew bolder, and she could do nothing to stop it. She was a vessel. Soon she felt the linen moving beneath her, her fingers wearing deep grooves into the fabric and underlying straw. The angles and light whispered to her in a foreign tongue. And she traced faster, with more resolve and confidence, until she burrowed too far and felt the cracked wood beneath the linen.
Blackness swallowed the visions, and there was nothing. Her heartbeats were beyond control, thumping so fiercely that it pained the stitching in her neck. She could hardly draw a breath without gasping.
Anna stopped tracing and opened her eyes.
Her finger slowed to a crawl inside the pattern’s linen trenches. It was the symbol she’d seen in her mind, but now it was clarified: a jumble of octagons, all perfect in shape and size, linked by their inner points. It had been etched with such precision that Anna shuddered, pulled back her finger, and sheltered it in a tight fist.
Light.
The thought itself surprised her. Within the pattern’s rigidity and flawless symmetry, she saw the glow of Kaba’s lantern, how it had blinded her like the sun itself.
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