“Come,” Shem said. “We go to Bora.”
To Bora, Anna weighed in her head. She latched onto the idea and its safety, and set out with awkward steps across packed earth. At her side, the foundlings and hall sisters formed loose rows flowing in the same direction, making no attempt to hide their curiosity about the city.
Those in the streets were even more mystified. Some collected in crowds or halted their wagons, perhaps due to the remaining Alakeph and their bloodstained vestments. The procession lumbered past as though trapped in the eye of a storm, slowing the gusts around them and draining noise from the air itself. They were an anomaly, an omen beyond explanation. Muttering and shouting and whispering fell away as they walked forth.
Anna lifted her head and focused on Bora’s sigils through the press of bodies, trying to predict their movements and failing as the sun crept from beneath cloud cover and blinded her. There was something erratic in the northerner’s blood, something guarded against the moment.
Bora lifted her head to the muddied skies, the loaded ruj resting harmlessly against her thigh. “They’ve come.”
Stillness fell over the streets in a manner more suited to a startled herd than crowds of onlookers. It was sensory overload, and those lining the roads simply shied away or shrank back from the soldiers, as though they might be trampled or beaten for standing anywhere near the targets. There were hundreds of the Dogwood, it seemed, all swelling forth through the civilian ranks like blood squeezed from a pricked fingertip. They bore helmets and shoulder plates and fastened cuirasses with films of heated sand, and their ruji jutted out to form an all-encompassing firing ring. Shadowed warriors materialized on the balconies and terraces above, and more shooters burst from nearby doorways and storeroom stairwells, deploying behind stacked crates on the street’s western approach. Their mass blocked off the frontal approach to the kator as well as the path back to the grate, though their weapons were enough to dissuade flight. When the clapping of boots and the rustle of metal against leather faded, the crowds resumed their murmuring.
Bora was motionless at the head of the procession, showing no alarm. The dullness in her gaze suggested she was counting granules of sand along the road.
Shem curled his fingers around the back of Anna’s arm.
“Don’t,” Anna whispered. “Be still, Shem.”
His grip loosened.
In the calmness, Anna met the hooded eyes of the Dogwood men and wondered which would be her killer. It seemed incredible that they’d even reached the kator, let alone nearly fled. But perhaps that illusion had been their intent all along. For wicked men there was nothing sweeter than the death of hope.
“Pohamov!” The command was grating within the silence, and some of the ruji wavered as their bearers flinched.
But something grew more familiar about the voice as it folded again and again through Anna’s mind, circling closer with each pass to the truth.
The tracker shouldered his way through the press and stood against the kator’s darkened chrome. The corners of his burlap stirred in the breeze like cropped horns. “Anna,” he called, free of scorn.
She shivered with her eyes cast low. She avoided Shem’s eyes and shifted her arm out of his grip, then gently shouldered her way through the crowd. Despite the gnawing aches down her shins, she forced herself to walk with Bora’s grace.
Beneath fetid burlap folds, the tracker’s rune bled its light as brightly as it had the day it was carved into his flesh. Its stare was more intense than any of the soldiers crowding her periphery, more unreadable than the black slits of its owner’s mask.
“You’re alive and well.” The tracker’s chest fell in a rush. To the uninformed, it could’ve been mistaken as relief. “Most of you.”
Anna edged past Bora and glared at the tracker.
“All good things have their end.” The tracker edged forward with a hollow laugh. “By the Grove. You ought to see the fucker’s face, Anna. It’ll take the herbmen a cycle before he can open both—”
“I hate you,” Anna said.
The wind shifted. He tipped his head lower and darkness creased his mask. “Come back with me. We’ll drown out the bad blood in arak and roasts, eh?”
Silence.
“No more orza to bitch, and moan, and bitch,” the tracker groaned. “Nahoran fucks left a small mess, but it’ll be swept away by dusk. Just means more casks for the rest of us. Almost too much to go around. Almost.”
“I’m done with you.”
“Done with me?” the tracker asked. “Without me you’d be minced somewhere down in those canals. Who do you think called off Teodor’s hounds?”
Anna’s haggard eyes were slate.
“Oh, don’t tell me the sukra got to you that deeply.” He shook his head, his voice like the scratching of frayed bowstring. “I see your wit, Anna. You can see a fair peace offering when it’s dangling in front of you.”
“There is no peace,” Anna said. “You killed them.”
The tracker leaned around Anna to inspect the mass of foundlings, hall sisters, and Alakeph, offering only a weary huff in response. “You must mean the shepherd for this tired lot, right? You can pin that to Teodor.”
“You knew.”
“Huh.” The tracker crossed his arms. “Must’ve lost my ability to hear thoughts, then.”
“That must be what Teodor did,” Anna hissed. “That must be how he knew what happened.”
The tracker remained quiet, but slowly the realization flickered in his eyes, biting through the dusk petals and bloodshot tendrils. “In the forest.”
“In the forest.” Anna clenched her jaw. “You’re not a friend.”
“Partners. I never said friends.”
“Then I’m walking away,” Anna whispered. “You’ll need to kill me.”
His shoulders hunched in an anxious curve, and his eyes widened to fill the mask’s slits. “He’s a sadistic breed. I never surrendered your secrets. Not the ones you’d cry about.”
Anna’s face flushed. “You told them everything.”
“Didn’t think they’d corrupt the report like that.” For better or worse, a note of earnestness had crept into his voice. “We can rein him in. Now that he’s seen the shit that he slops in from the pens.”
“There’s no change for wicked men.”
The tracker gazed skyward. “Might be.”
“And no forgiveness,” she finished.
“But you’ll plant your boots and stand by them,” the tracker said. “Forget every trace of Rzolka, Anna. Forget your blood and your home. Just like she taught you.”
Anna’s lips shook. “I’ll save it myself.”
“She wants you to think you can.” The tracker moved closer, but Anna shied away. “Do you remember the tomesroom, girl? How that iron slipped across your neck? Warm blood all over you?”
Anna glowered.
“Lost causes come and go. That’s the fucking flow of war, really.” He sighed. “I saw something in you, Anna. Something you can’t toss onto a pyre like any other mound of flesh. We were fated to be partners, you and I. Kindred souls, bound for glory or the Grove, eh? There’s a will to fight in you, and gifts, and if you—”
“I,” Anna said softly, her brittle words enough to silence the tracker, “hate you.”
“You need me.”
“Kill me.”
The tracker folded his arms, scoffing. His laughter started out gently, tucked away beneath his burlap, before he raised his voice. “Ever lie awake and dream about those green fucking fields?” He leaned in with a monstrous shadow. “Peace can be sweet, Anna. It can be warm beds and warmer tits. Pipes so full that they overflow. Might even be young blood in your family, and little girls running round the house, calling you mum and clinging to your skirts.” He stepped back. “But peace isn’t bought with salt, girl. It’s won wit
h blood. We’ve reddened these fields enough.”
Anna blinked back burning tears. “And there’s still no peace. There never will be.”
“Not if you walk away,” the tracker said. “Teodor has the blood of wolves. Once he has a scent, he’ll hunt you endlessly.”
“And you can’t stop him,” Anna spat, “because you have a coward’s blood.”
“Because we bled together,” the tracker said. “Because we made oaths. I always keep my promises, girl. Always.”
“You can’t promise me peace.”
“If you come now, I might. A touch of groveling to Teodor, some alone time to wash the blood from your pretty little hairs, few runes here and there . . .”
Anna took in a measured breath. “Death is easier.”
“Back to this, are we?”
“I won’t go with you.”
“And them?” The tracker gestured over Anna’s shoulder at Bora, at Shem, at the masses of nameless and innocent followers held at the barrels of ruji. “Teodor wants your fucking scalp for what you did. Imagine what he’d do to them.” The tracker’s eyes lingered on Shem and his fresh runes. “Oh, the fun he’d have with the Huuri korpa.” When he noticed the twitch in Anna’s brow he laughed. “Ah. Taken back, girl. Your friend.”
The streets were entirely silent, the crowd likely only able to understand flecks of the river-tongue, if anything. Yet the gravity of the exchange muted them.
Anna looked upon the kator with a blank mind, caught between what could’ve been and what was. “We’ll make a deal, then.”
It caught the tracker off-guard. “Deal?”
“My word and yours.”
“Go on,” he said.
“Let them leave.” Anna nodded toward the kator. “They leave and you don’t hunt them, and I’ll return with you.”
“That simple?”
“I suppose.”
The tracker’s head lulled to one side. “Could be that you turn on us as soon as you get back, no?”
“Then you’ll kill me.”
“Hardly. Teodor’ll have his way before he kills you.”
“Even if I help you, it could happen.”
“I wouldn’t let it,” the tracker said. “Consider it part of the deal, Anna.”
Anna met the tracker’s clouded eyes and weighed the truth of his words. Compared to the wicked men in the kales, she believed him. There was grief that had neither reason nor any attempt at concealment.
“You have to swear that you’ll leave them alone,” Anna said.
The tracker’s nod was a solemn thing. “On my word.”
“And you can’t send these warriors after them.”
“Pedantic.” The tracker chuckled. “Fine. It’s agreed, girl. Send them off, and let’s be quick of it.”
Anna turned away from the tracker and felt a thousand stares wash over her. Their sigils were a nebula woven together by hayat and countless essences, distilling down from noble bloodlines and bastards and the wickedest seeds born of violence until they congealed into an ocean of colliding symbols. They swam before her and coalesced and diverged as though speaking, more connected than Anna could ever be to another person, even to her own kin. It was beautiful, striking, transient. It simply was.
Orders for movement in flatspeak echoed down the lines, and the long march to the kator began with the foundlings and the hall sisters in a tired, beaten slog, staring at Anna with faint understanding as they passed her and brushed her hands with their own. Their sigils drifted past like the first snowfall of autumn, dancing down and reveling in their beauty before they faded among the leaves. The Alakeph passed her with bowed heads.
One by one they followed the Dogwood’s paths and vanished, trickling away until only Shem and Bora remained in the street. Shem, as always, wore a look of perpetual bemusement, and the brightness in his eyes suggested that he hadn’t deciphered Anna’s decision. Bora, by contrast, wore a look Anna had never seen—resignation.
There was a relaxed curve in the northerner’s back that would’ve been normal for anybody else, but Bora looked broken without her tension. Only the hard amber of her eyes preserved her identity.
I’m so sorry, Anna wanted to say. But to whom?
She wondered, as Bora pressed Shem’s back and urged the boy forward, if the apology was meant for herself. If Shem could even survive in the sands without her affection, without her touch.
“We go,” Shem said as he approached Anna, the skin around his teeth stretching back to expose his smile. He took her hand and waited. “We go?”
The words stalled in Anna’s throat, yet she held his gaze. “Of course,” she managed at last, almost too quiet to hear. “I’ll meet you on the kator.”
For all of Shem’s skill in reading her and drawing out her fears, he failed in that moment. He gave her hands a last squeeze and began his patient march to the kator, his shoulders drawn back in triumph.
Finally came Bora. She stood before Anna with the ruj clutched in her hands and angled toward the dirt, her face caked in grime and torso splotched with blood. New hairs sprouted along her scalp like the bristles of a boar, and for reasons Anna couldn’t understand, she wanted to touch the northerner’s head and trace the sigils along her skull. She wanted to draw out the concentrated knowledge that she hadn’t been wise enough to glean during her training.
“We always have a choice,” Bora said.
“I know.” She admired the way Bora seemed to already know when her words weren’t finished. “You heard what I told them, didn’t you?”
“I did,” Bora said. “It is admirable, child.”
“Sooner, please,” the tracker called from the kator’s platform, evidently having been midway through scolding Shem with pointed fingers. “Vital things to be done, Anna.”
Bora paid it no mind. “Someday, I may have to kill you.”
“You won’t need to,” Anna whispered. She glanced down at the ruj. “Could I have it, Bora?”
Bora realized the implication. The hard edge in her stare bit into Anna. “Press it beneath your chin, child,” Bora said. “Be sure that you’re committed when you do so, and maintain your aim. Otherwise, the end will come slowly.”
Anna swallowed the knot forming in the back of her throat. She lowered her hand to Bora’s and felt the cold metal of the ruj barrel. She glanced back at the tracker, who had torn his gaze from Shem to watch the exchange, and detected no alarm in his movements. To the contrary, he seemed relieved by the northerner’s disarming.
Considering the number of ruji and blades encircling the street and surrounding square, there was little risk in an armed child.
Or so Anna assumed.
She grasped the upper portion of the barrel, and the underside of her fist brushed the top of Bora’s. She felt the woman’s warmth and leathery skin and tactile bones in one feeling, and in the—
A lone ruj hissed among the Dogwood ranks.
In one instant Bora stood before Anna, a placid smile on her face. Her tarnished cloak hung in pleats about her, swirling in the breeze and twisting over the dirt near Anna’s heels. She was not a warrior, but a child who’d wandered the world and tucked away her loves and fears where nobody could find and break them.
In the next, she was not there.
There was only a torso shorn of its neck and head and shoulders and half of a ribcage. Bits of fractured bone, like those of a sow in a dusty market so long ago, protruded from the mess, and everywhere was bright and dark red liquid, bits of torn flesh that could not have belonged to a living creature, curving up and out of disembodied legs that—
Ringing. Screaming deep in her skull. Heartbeats. Her face stung from chips of bone and cartilage, but the pain was not real, and neither was the red, dripping pulp across her chest, or the ruptured coils of intestines spilling to her feet, or—
The body that could not be Bora toppled to one side and twitched, gushed, then fell still, the packed soil brightening and spreading its stain as it sopped up her life.
Without the sound of footsteps, Shem appeared at Anna’s side and was screaming something to her, shaking her shoulders.
The street receded in her mind like the tide, rolling back and shrinking until it was only a keyhole of reality, and around that sliver of perception spun blackness and fog. In the haze, Anna walked and freed her legs from the pain, and she rebuilt the broken bodies she’d seen strewn across sand and bogs and cobblestones. Black reeds sprouted up among the mists, but she pushed through them and peeled off her shoes when the ground became too damp. Ahead was a monolith, the shape she’d seen in dreams and meditation. Its perfect sides called out to her, no longer taunting but inviting, and she approached the obsidian angles as a child approaches a fawn. Again, it was wreathed in the smog that distorted its shapes and formed impossible geometry, so far beyond the mind’s capacity that it could only be parsed in divided units.
But this time, the monolith welcomed her.
Hayat curled over the mist and peeled it away, unveiling the shape Anna had waited so long to embrace. Each segment fed her insight of its brilliance and its power, and her eyes chased the revelations as they tore over the surface, faster and faster—
She saw death.
Before the world reassembled itself, Anna’s limbs moved of their own accord. Their actions were veiled behind the mist, but slowly Anna’s vision cleared and the dusty street refocused, and she saw her hands gripping Shem’s collarbones. Dimly aware of the tracker as he struck the guilty Dogwood man and threw him to the dirt, she stared at the unmarked flesh below Shem’s rune. With the hayat’s strength and the burning shape of death fresh in her vision, she dug the nail of her index finger into Shem’s throat.
All else faded as the translucent skin bled and split apart, gushing hayat in primordial tufts. She dragged her nail downward then bisected the incision near its origin, curving the second line and arcing it toward his jugular vein. The blood slowed, retreated, and crystallized into mottled scar tissue over the mark.
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