“Girl,” called the tracker. She slid out of her focus, out of dreams and memory. His heavy boots clopped up the stairs, and the floorboards beyond the yellow curtain groaned. “I forgot something.”
Anna had already brushed away the pattern and rolled over by the time the curtain moved, making sure that she kept her eyelids tucked—not pinched—shut. People could tell the difference.
The tracker moved to her straw mattress, filling the air with hints of stale sweat, and set something down near her back. It was hardtack, if the barley’s vaguely rancid odor gave any indication.
She kept her eyes closed, even in the ensuing minutes of silence. Even when she was almost certain she was alone. Just before she ventured to look around, she felt a gentle hand on her shoulder, and something—not someone, as it was far too coarse to be skin—gave a soft touch to her hair, almost like a kiss. Anna’s eyes shot open. She lay motionless for a moment, trembling, and sat up just as the curtain swung shut.
Then she pretended to rest again, and she did it so well that she actually slept.
* * * *
When she woke, the room was humid and dark. The air felt clogged, somehow suffocating, and it held the bitterness of smoking pork fat. She unfurled her hands, which had gathered clumps of linen during sleep, and tried to imagine Julek’s face. Nausea set in when she realized she couldn’t remember where all of his freckles were.
Anna rolled over, brushing against the tracker’s ration of hardtack. It had been so long since she’d eaten that she no longer thought about food. Or perhaps, she thought as she sat up on the linen, the tracker had fed her while she was unconscious. It was revolting to think that he had kept her alive, caring for her and moving her and singing to her, all to keep his investment intact.
Maybe there’s more to it, she told herself. Maybe he does need a wife.
But she felt as though she’d slept for days, and that would have given the tracker plenty of time to do whatever he wished. Her clothing had been changed from the ruined garments to a concealing brown dress, but she felt the same between her thighs. He hadn’t touched her. With some relief, she shelved the notion.
Laughter and wet coughing echoed from downstairs.
She placed a hand on the wall behind her and rose to one knee, tucking her head to her chest when the dizziness set in. In the darkness everything felt loose and ethereal, but the nerkoya had faded. She managed to push herself up and hobble along the pitted wattle and daub, slowly learning to function in a body with no will to continue.
As Anna approached the doorway, she wondered if she could escape and survive on her own. She was out of the wilderness, out of—
The thought fled as she pushed aside the yellow curtain and slipped into the corridor.
It was a narrow, dimly lit space, lined with identical creamy curtains on both sides. Candlesticks hung from iron chains, illuminating only the rafters and the locked shutters at either end of the hall. Soft light spilled from the crevice of a larger central curtain.
She wandered closer and parted the folds carefully, revealing a wooden stairway and a square, coal-packed hearth at its landing. The thyme-laced aroma of boiling pork and trout hit her in the same instant as a gust of heat, and as she crouched for an unobstructed view, she saw the pots frothing above the embers.
The bitter smoke of flesh and fat wafted up past the beams, stirring Anna’s hunger and forcing out belly growls.
She crept onto the stairway and ducked lower, trying to examine the common room beneath the rafters. The laughter was distant, likely in a partitioned room away from the pot. She craved escape from it all, even if it meant hobbling into the night, but not even her most urgent thoughts compared to hunger. She could plan after she ate. Until then she would think like a hound.
Two paces from the hearth and its pots sat something so outlandish that Anna couldn’t term it a boy. It tipped back and forth in a dark rocking chair, staring into the coals as more laughter broke out nearby.
Can it even see? Anna wondered.
A loose-fitting tunic, knotted at the neck and sleeves with hemp braiding, covered most of its skin. Only the arms and hairless head remained exposed. And where the fabric left him bare, the flesh was unnaturally light, so pale that Anna swore she could see into his guts. She could see threads of clear fluid winding their way beneath his arms like roots on a sapling, and she watched the woven musculature of his jaw and forehead shift as he gritted his teeth. His eyes were blank pearls, formless and dazzling.
And for the first time, Anna saw how bright the sigils truly were. Despite the translucence of his flesh and the sickly pallor of his innards, she saw the sigils burning pure white. At times they seemed lost to the tangle of exposed veins and tendons, but Anna’s mind never lost focus. She never lost complete awareness of what the sigil looked like: spiraling, jagged, and swirling in on itself until oblivion.
In the same instant, Anna felt the boy’s flawless eyes turn on her.
Panic struck her. She stumbled backward, catching her foot on the edge of a step. Suddenly the sedatives and hunger and terror returned, blurring her vision as she collapsed on the stairs. The left side of her head ached, but the pain was a distant humming, much like her heartbeat and the kettle’s spattering.
“Look, look,” a young voice snapped. The sounds were pulses, always receding. “Look here, huh?”
Something warm cupped the back of her head, and an even warmer touch brushed the hair from her face. She opened her eyes and stared back at the pair of pearls, which seemed to gaze deeper than pupils ever could.
Up close, framed in her shifting vision, the boy wasn’t so unsettling. His skin was smooth, like the polished stones Julek had skipped across the miller’s pond. Bands of muscle fiber twitched as he narrowed his eyes and turned Anna’s head from side to side. She liked that he was so clear, that she could stare into him and see his purity.
She tried to say something, anything, even to express agony, but could only push air through her throat in a hoarse whine.
“No,” the boy frowned. “No talking. Talking makes the opening.” He drew a finger across his translucent throat, mimicking a blade’s cut.
Anna nodded, and the world resolved itself from a wash of colors and ringing in her ears. She looked past the boy’s arm and stared at the kettle. Saliva flooded her mouth.
The boy trailed her gaze to the broth. “Oh.” He straightened Anna’s legs out over the steps and hurried to the bed of coals, then spooned broth into a clay bowl. After racing back up to her, he lowered the bowl to her waiting fingertips. “You drink.”
She hardly needed his consent. Straining to keep her head upright, she pressed her lips to the clay’s edge and drank. Pain tore across her tongue and lips and down her throat, but it was irrelevant compared to the comfort of a hot meal. When she finally leaned back and opened her eyes, she saw only remnants of viscous broth beaded along the rim of the bowl.
“Rest.” The boy’s voice muted the pain. He stepped around her and gingerly tucked his hand beneath her arm, lending support and beckoning her to stand.
Anna set the bowl down on a step and worked to push herself up. The boy was stronger than she’d imagined, wrenching her upright with little challenge. She swayed, but the boy, perhaps a palm or so taller than her, kept her balanced, and gave her the illusion of control. It was a lie, she knew, but he made her feel capable.
He made her feel strong.
And so she walked back to her quarters with the boy at her side, slipping in and out of wakefulness. Each time she lost consciousness, she saw the looming tree, Julek’s missing freckles, the moss-covered shed behind her house, finally recognizing the row of shutters in her quarters. The hands settled her gently into straw and linen.
The boy knelt beside her mattress. A wash of moonlight framed the translucency of his skull and jaw, and his eyes glowed in the blackness. He didn’t
blink, didn’t look away. “You haven’t eat.” Still staring, he picked up the chunk of hardtack and held it before Anna. “Why?”
Anybody who had spent appreciable time on the road knew why hardtack sat untouched. She opened her mouth to explain, or to say I hate it, but there was only a whistling of air.
The boy held up a lone finger, which appeared to Anna as a glowworm. He stood and left the room, but emerged several minutes later with something in his hands. “Look, look,” he said, releasing his bundle on the rug with much clinking. It was difficult to see, but he’d brought several sheets of pressed paper, a set of quills, and an egg-shaped vial of ink. “You see this?”
Anna recognized the writing tools, but she’d never used them before. Her father had written most of the outgoing messages, and those had been written on vellum using riding glyphs—simple, quick, and practical. Most of the town had followed suit. But Arek, an older saltman with one working eye, had told Anna she was bright enough to one day learn true words.
“Write,” the boy said. He placed a quill on the linen next to Anna, then uncorked the ink vial and set it on the floor.
She glanced down at the instruments, then shook her head. If it were anybody else before her, their smile less vibrant or hands less gentle, she would’ve strained to write help me flee with or without proper knowledge. Yet his presence settled her panic, and she could only gaze at the quill with longing.
“No write?” the boy asked.
Again Anna shook her head. She mouthed, “I can’t.”
“Why?”
She shook her head.
“So I teach,” the boy said with a grin. “You want teach?”
After so many days of being discussed and discarded, such questions were unthinkable. She’d forgotten that only a select few knew about her gifts, and that to everybody else, she was simply a girl. She was somebody worth helping with no expectation of hayat’s kiss. “Yes,” her lips curled.
“I teach.” He dipped his quill into the ink and scrawled something with flowing penmanship. “I Shem,” he said, running his finger beneath the four symbols he’d written. As he came to each symbol, he paused and spoke. “S, H, E, M. Shem.” Then the boy turned the quill’s point on himself and smiled proudly. “Shem. And you?”
Anna stared into the boy’s flesh and its soft glow. “Anna,” she mouthed.
“Anna,” Shem repeated with bold eyes. “Good. Now we write.”
Chapter 5
In her sleep, Anna saw light as a monolith, dazzling and horrible. Each time she reached for its surface, it vanished and reformed as a luminous symbol in the sky, just as alluring as the pattern she’d traced on her linen sheet.
She saw it as joined hexagons burning against the clouds.
Light.
The tracker whistled from the doorway, jarring Anna from sleep. He stood with the curtain gathered in one hand, a tarnished silver pitcher in the other. His burlap sack looked brighter today, perhaps cleaner, but his eyes retained their violet murkiness. “Time to eat,” he said, raising the pitcher higher. He sloshed its contents around. “Do you hear that, girl? Real milk. Don’t be late.” He slipped back through the curtains, his footsteps fading.
Anna sat up on the linen and rubbed at her eyes. The room was still dark, bathed in a cooling purple, but the city clamored beyond the shutters. Her throat was burning, as expected, but she felt surprisingly normal. No nausea, no panic, and no veil of sluggishness from the herbman’s remedies. She felt over her sutures, rough and prickly, and winced as she wrapped a linen strip over the tender skin. Pain was a small price to pay if it meant staving off nerkoya’s haziness. Yet even without the drugs, her world was distorted by the idea that the tracker had saved her, caring for her and protecting her during countless days on the road.
Remember what he is.
Remember that he has to die.
Gathering up the pleats of her brown dress, Anna rose and moved to the closest shutters. She realized, without the nerkoya’s pall, that the lock was merely a hook behind the shutter doors. She could escape, once she learned the streets well enough. Killing the tracker would require time to recover, and potentially reinforcements, and in spite of its urgency, she delayed her dreams of slitting his throat. Plan before you strike, her father had once said of installing fence posts. Anna peered through the window’s two slats at eye level, planning.
Directly below, wagons and horses ferried every manner of market good over cobblestones: silks, ingots, carrots, kiln-fired bowls, crushed dyes. Several giants, naked and hairless with wicker cargo loads lashed to their backs, hobbled through the crowds with pipe-playing handlers close behind. Even in the darkness before dawn, Anna recognized the distant blots of watchtowers and sprawling rooftops and fat-infused smoke smudging the air. Earthworks and timber walls formed cresting heights to her left, drawing the caravans into—
Malchym. The Western City.
Lost in its awe, watching fog tumble over its battlements and diffuse in the lowlands, Anna was slow to notice the branching alleys below, where maggot-stricken hound corpses lay among piss and creeping vines. Where roadside tenements bore jaggedly painted symbols and scorched wood and crooked nails, and old bloodstains endured on wattle and daub panels as dark dappling. Bronze-skinned children sat on porches and gazed at the passing procession, fixated on the salt-pouches of merchants and craftsmen. Wool-and-tin effigies of desert spirits stood watch upon chimneys, stirring in the breeze.
This is not the city, Anna realized. These are its gutters.
She examined the alleyways and their twisting paths, wondering if the chaotic layout might simplify her escape. Given proper planning, it surely would. But plans took time.
“Come along, girl,” the tracker called from beyond the fabric.
* * * *
Most guests had already eaten and departed when she arrived with the tracker, wandering up to a long, cracked table littered with empty plates near the front door. The first hints of daylight spilled through the threshold, along with dust and flies and a trade caravan’s foreign shouts.
Shem sat at the far end of the table with a starved, leather-skinned man to one side and a pale woman the other, eyeing his food curiously.
The woman was coughing into a handkerchief, her cheeks blushing in red and purple. Her eyes were red and watery, her black hair tied up in a copper wire. Triple-crowned spheres jerked beneath her skin as she stood and moved away, breathless. The leathery man had swollen, cloud-like sigils and tide-gem eyes, so blue that Anna couldn’t resist staring. His emergent beard littered dark skin like snowflakes, and he had cropped white hair to match. His tunic was long and stained, unlike Shem’s.
He smiled at Anna, and she forced herself to smile back.
Most others at the table didn’t bother to raise their heads from the food, aside from a young woman with a shaved head and cinnamon-colored fabric gathered around her neck. She had a lean build and bronze skin, her eyes roaming among guests like a circling hawk. Her sigils were sharp, branching roots that wound their way into blossoms. She did not eat, nor did she place her hands upon the table. Beside her was a baggy-eyed mother with an infant clutching her breast, and to her right was a shirtless man with brown tattoos—henna, the messengers called it. A potbellied man without earlobes or eyebrows paced behind her, murmuring in a northern tongue to his blindfolded companion, “Deguru yeftil, desh?”
The tracker led Anna to an open spot at the far end of the bench, and waited for her to bunch up her dress and sit before he wandered away.
Before Anna could reach for her fork, a hand reached past her and provoked a flinch. Back home, she’d never spooked so easily. She spun, still calming herself, to find the sickly woman limping back toward the cooking hearth.
Her blue skirt danced in the doorway’s breeze, just as mother’s once had. The woman turned with red-ringed eyes, flashed an awkward smile, and
slipped behind a set of curtains.
Only when Anna glanced back at the table did she notice that the woman had brought her a porridge-laden plate and fully filled mug.
“Shem, where is your mother?” The leather-skinned man was kneeling by one of the hearths, pulling iron bread molds away from the coals. His accent was rolling and unfamiliar. “Find her. Tell her to lay down, yes?”
Shem rose from his seat, collected a stack of porridge-streaked plates, and brought them to the hearth. He set them down gently beside a filled washtub. “Yes, ba.” With a subtle bow, he, too, disappeared behind the curtains.
“Bread?” his father asked Anna. He pointed down at a blackened loaf near the coals. “Eat bread, ah?” Anna shook her head, and in turn, the man gestured to her throat. “How is it?”
She clutched the fabric around her neck.
“Eat,” the tracker told her. He circled the table, crouched beside the hearth with a tin plate in hand, and used a cloth square to move a bread pan from the coals and turn the loaf over onto his plate. “You’re right about her being rare. Stronger than most, I’ll say. Not a trace of sick flesh.” He locked eyes with Shem’s father and gave a laugh like cracking ice. “Don’t think I’m brushing over your miracles. Your salve did a lot, I’ll say. But she survived five days in a cart. Five. Probably bled herself half-to-death by Wicew, but she made it.” The tracker stared at Anna. “You don’t find that every day.” He paused. “Eat, girl.”
Despite her nausea and their running conversation, which danced between northern pricing and how to disinfect a gut wound, Anna consumed more than she’d ever managed at home. She shoveled forkfuls of porridge up from her tin plate, pausing only to sip her weak beer or let the pain of swallowing subside. She chewed on dark bread and the innards of sweet, prickly fruit she’d never seen before, all under the press of their scrutiny.
“It needs to be dressed again, Anna,” the tracker said. He studied her as he ate, stuffing cardamom seeds under his mask. Mentions of Anna’s name drew her attention from a hovering forkful of porridge. “Galipa will make you another salve. How’s the pain?”
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