Bray lunged, the narrow gleam of her blade flashed. Quade parried with ease. He tested her to the left, and she met him with the clink of blade kissing blade.
They danced in this way for several minutes—tentative attacks and speedy evasions. Grunts, clanks, and the shuffling of feet. Bray’s breath came evenly, her pulse ticked rhythmically. The fight had returned her to herself. She was not a scared little girl, nor a cornered rat. She was Chisanta.
Her recent training with Ko-Jin had improved her speed. If she came out of this, she would thank him. But her strength was still only a fraction of Quade’s. Her sword arm quickly began to ache from the force of countering his blows. Sweat ran into her eyes, burning them and blurring her vision. She blinked furiously.
He struck with such force that her sword was wrenched from her grasp and fell to the ground with a clatter. Quade kicked it, and it skidded across the chamber, landing far from reach.
Bray raised her hands before her, fists clenched, making it plain that losing her weapon would not cow her. Quade’s thin lips twisted into a sneer. He sheathed his sword, and changed his stance for hand-to-hand combat.
Quade kicked and Bray only narrowly moved out of the way in time. Much to her own surprise, she found herself forming a pose from the Ada Chae—Crouching Butterfly. It took Quade off guard as well. She caught him in the chest and he stumbled.
“What is this?” His shrewd eyes scanned her up and down. “A Chiona fighting like a Cosanta? Fascinating.”
She kicked, but he was ready. He grabbed her leg and thrust her to the ground. She landed on her back with a grunt and in the space of a breath he was on top of her, pinning her down to the cold floor with the weight of his body. She wrapped her legs around one of his and thrust all of her weight to one side, flipping him onto his back. She punched him in the nose and heard a satisfying crack, but he shoved her backwards, pressed her shoulder blades into the floor once again. This time he placed his knees squarely on her chest and forced his full weight down on her. The breath escaped from her lungs in a long gust.
He leaned in close, horribly close. She could see every detail of his face. The sharp blade of his nose, the deep brown of his eyes, the dark stubble that surrounded his thin, twisted mouth. She could smell the blood that ran from his face where she had hit him. Being imprisoned beneath his weight filled her with desperation. She could not recall what move would dislodge him—all she could think was a kind of panicked chant: Stop, stop, stop, stop…
Tears welled in her eyes and the room began to lose focus. She needed air. Belatedly, she recalled the dagger strapped to her leg. It might as well be on the other side of the room, for all the likelihood of her reaching it.
It would be over soon, she knew. Her feet twitched pointlessly and her arms struggled weakly against the restraint of his strong hands.
He leaned in close and kissed her forehead, as if he were a loving father and she his daughter. “Sleep well, Bray Marron.”
And the room dissolved into nothingness.
Adearre leaned back to glimpse the small window at the far upper corner of their cell. “Sunrise.”
No one responded. Yarrow imagined they were all thinking the same thing: sixteen. They had just passed their sixteenth day in captivity. And miserable days they had been.
Yarrow twitched and darted rapid glances around the room. Sweat beaded on his brow and his muscles screamed at him to rise—to run, jump, do something.
He shifted and his fetters jangled. His tailbone ached from being pressed against the cold stone floor. The manacles brushed against the chafed, raw flesh around his wrists and ankles, but he felt the pain only dimly. What he felt acutely were the ants. They crawled over his flesh—between his toes, up his nostrils, behind his eyes. He jerked, shook his head, attempting to dislodge a phantom. It’s too cold for ants, he reminded himself yet again. Ants can lift twenty times their weight. Or was it thirty times? What had he been thinking of?
His jaw itched, so he rubbed his stubbled chin against his rough-spun shirt—the disguise that he still wore. He nearly gagged upon inhaling his own scent.
They were a grubby group by and large. The men had developed beards of varying quality. His own must be rather sad and sparse. He never could grow a proper one. Arlow used to mock him for that. Arlow, the traitor.
The Chiona had much more hair atop their heads and, save for Bray, they all still wore their civilian clothes. Yarrow wished he had changed. He would feel so much more himself in his robes. Being chained in an ant-infested basement was demoralizing enough without having his identity as a Cosanta stripped away as well.
Yarrow’s bloodshot eyes scanned his companions. The soft blue light that bathed the room gave them the aspect of cadavers, hollow-eyed and cold. Of course, they were cold—Yarrow as well. Then why was he sweating? It was chill enough that he could see his breath before him. That, at least, differentiated him from a corpse. The dead don’t breathe.
There was a famous verse that said as much, wasn’t there? ‘Alas, my dogged breast breathes on.’ Or was it ‘my dogged breast beats on?’ Something like that.
Why they were not dead, he could not fathom. For what reason was Quade keeping them alive? He clearly had no qualms with killing. He must have a motive. Still, to question his continued existence seemed somehow ungrateful. Or perhaps he feared he would jinx it. His mind steered clear.
Aside from Adearre, it was hard to tell if any of the others were awake. The Chiona all existed in a constant stupor. Without a clear notion of time or proper light, it would probably have been difficult to feel truly awake, even if they weren’t all perpetually drugged.
Yarrow envied them. He and Ko-Jin were drugged as well, with a kind of accelerant. It made his mind run in circles, his muscles itch to move, his heart pound in his chest. Their captors clearly didn’t want them to enter the Aeght a Seve—they made the Chiona too sleepy to attain the level of vigor required, and the Cosanta too on edge to achieve a peaceful state of mind. They were, all of them, barred from even that reprieve.
Yarrow studied Bray, as he so often did. He suspected she must be awake, though she did not look up at him. She sat calmly, her knees tucked up to her chin. Whenever she fell asleep, she twitched and called out—nightmares.
She appeared desolate, but Yarrow could not know her feelings.
It was the sphere—the thing at the center of the room, bathing them in its cold swirling light, but kept well out of their reach. It had stripped them all of their gifts. Yarrow felt strangely impotent without his additional sense, and lonely. Though he had not seen his family since he was a boy, he had never been truly severed from them until now.
He knew he was not the worst off, however. Bray seemed to bounce back and forth between dejection and rage. Her inability to escape gnawed at her. But even she was not the most pitiable of the lot.
Yarrow found it hard to look at Ko-Jin. He was so used to his friend being the very definition of strength and physical perfection. But since they had woken in this cell, with the horrid sphere for company, Ko-Jin had reverted to his former condition. He’d turned small and brittle, his back hunched and his foot twisted and deformed. He had wept silent tears that first morning, and since then had remained uncharacteristically quiet, his eyes blank, dead—though he, like Yarrow, could not sleep.
Yarrow knew he could not bear much more. A man had his limits. He would surely go mad without rest. His eyes itched and his muscles ached and shuddered. To be bone-wrenchingly exhausted and unable to sleep was a horrible torture. It had been many days since he had started to long for sleep far more than he longed for escape.
Escape. Surely, if he could just sleep, he could think of a way to break free. ‘Dissever yon bindings, my sweet, and render unto mine spirit thy fair liberty.’ What was that from? The Marking of Mellack? No, no it predated that. Adreon Sefelton perhaps?
Yarrow felt the muscle below his eye spasm and blinked.
The thick door to their cell pushed open, t
he wood brushing against the stone floor, and a tall youth entered with a tray. His nose wrinkled as he stepped in. Yarrow didn’t wonder. They must smell dreadful, between lack of bathing and having only rarely-emptied chamber pots for the necessary. The odor of captivity was far from ambrosial.
The boy did not speak to them. None of the youths ever spoke. Clearly, it had been forbidden. Yarrow had tried to get them to talk at first, but had long since given up that fruitless endeavor.
The boy handed each of them a dark stone bowl of congealed, gray porridge, then departed in a hurry. Between the effect of the sphere and the smell, Yarrow imagined dealing with the prisoners must be a loathed chore.
They were never given eating utensils, and the porridge was too thick to drink from the bowl. Yarrow sighed and plunged his filthy, trembling fingers into the food, scooped it into his mouth. It was disgusting, pasty in texture and cold, but wonderfully welcome none the less. They only received two meals a day, neither terribly filling. Yarrow’s hunger would be distracting if his tiredness did not eclipse all other concerns so fully.
If any of his companions had been asleep, they roused themselves to eat.
When Yarrow had finished his own breakfast and licked his fingers clean, he set his empty bowl down and looked up.
“Peer,” Yarrow said, his voice rough with disuse. “What’s on the bottom of your bowl?”
Peer flipped the vessel over. “It’s chalk. A message.”
“What does it say?” Adearre asked.
Peer stared at it for a while, his lips moved as if he were trying to sound the words out, his forehead creased in concentration. Finally, he let out a sigh of frustration and handed his bowl to Adearre on his left. “Can’t read it.”
Adearre took the offered dish and read: “‘You have a friend here. Be patient.’”
“A friend?” Bray said, as if the concept of friendship were a foreign thing.
“It must be whoever sent the telegram,” Adearre said.
“Can you tell anything else?” Yarrow asked, excited for the first time in over two weeks. “You know, about the handwriting or something?”
Adearre leveled him an exasperated look. “No,” he said, his eyes flicking up to the sphere in disgust.
“Oh right, of course not,” Yarrow said.
“Be patient for what?” Peer asked.
“Perhaps they mean to help us escape,” Yarrow said.
“Or it’s just mind games,” Bray said in a flat voice. “Quade loves mind games.”
“I do not know…Quade did not send the telegram. You said yourself he thought we would go to Che Mire. Someone here sent us that tip,” Adearre said, capping his statement with a long yawn.
Peer snorted. “And a bang-up job we did with that information.”
“I swear, if my mind were not full of fog I could think a way out of this,” Adearre said, rubbing his eyes.
“Or if that blasted sphere weren’t here,” Peer added. “I thought they’d be taking it away sometimes for that ceremony we saw the first day.”
“Not with Bray down here,” Adearre said.
Yarrow’s mind, running in circles as ever, tried to imagine every possible scenario for escape. He couldn’t see any way of avoiding the drugs. A woman came with a needle and administered it every evening. Though, he thought, the best time to escape would be just before they were drugged anew. The poison would be in their systems still, but less so than at any other time in the day.
As for the sphere, all they needed was a half a minute, and Bray at least could escape.
“Has anyone noticed the hallway outside the cell?” Yarrow asked, an idea beginning to form in his addled mind.
“What ’bout it?” Peer asked.
“Are we at the end of the hall, the beginning, or the middle?” Yarrow asked.
“The end,” Bray said with confidence.
Adearre offered her a quizzical look.
“I walked all around this place while we were gathering information, and I started to come to before they got me in the cell. I know the layout.” She held out her arm, perpendicular to the ground. Her chains jangled as she moved. “We’re here,” she pointed to the tip of her fingers, “and the stairway is here.” She pointed to the crook of her elbow.
“So it would be a straight shot down the hall? No turns?” Yarrow asked.
“Yes. Why, do you have an idea?” Bray asked, hope leaking into her voice. Yarrow could see a new glint in her green eyes.
“The beginnings of one,” Yarrow said.
Then, much to his surprise, his gut rejected its dinner. Yarrow leaned to the side, his stomach muscles contracting and spasming. The vomit hit the stone with a splat. That should help the smell, he thought as he wiped his mouth.
Bray picked idly at the scabs on her fingertips. The weight of the manacles around her thin wrists and ankles pulled at her. She felt like a bug stuck to the anchor of a boat, sinking deeper and deeper, getting every second further away from the sun, from air, from life.
It was the drugs. She knew this, but didn’t know it at the same time. Her mind was no longer her own. It was full of water; cool, blue, swirling.
“Bray, are you with us?” Yarrow asked kindly across the void.
“Yes,” she heard herself murmur, her voice soft and girlish.
“You understand your part in this?” Yarrow asked.
“Yes,” Bray said again. Part in what? No matter. It couldn’t be important. Nothing was important anymore. Life was just a cold plunge toward nothingness. Bray felt her eyes droop. She made herself sit up straighter on the cool stone floor. Her greatest battle was to stay awake, because when she slept she dreamt terrible things. Things that had happened to her long ago, mixed up with things that had never happened but felt like truth. She was trapped between haze and terrors.
“We’ve been planning for well nigh a week, Yarrow,” Peer said. “And we’ve been down here almost a month. How much longer is it going to take?”
“You know full well what we’re waiting for. The opportunity will come, and we need to be ready for it.”
Yarrow’s voice felt like a caress on Bray’s ear. She wished she could reach him. She remembered well how his touch made her burn. How his fingers traced the contours of her body, how his lips…
But he was so very far away. Not in fact—in fact he was just across the room. But in truth they were leagues apart—worlds. She could not touch him. Her mind slipped deeper into the darkness. No, she wanted to call. She tried to kick, to swim, to thrash. But the anchor pulled her, by wrist and ankle, down into the depths.
“She’s getting worse,” Peer murmured.
“I know,” Yarrow’s concerned voice broke through the water. Distantly, Bray wondered who the ‘she’ they spoke of was. “It needs to be soon.”
Sometime later—or perhaps moments—the door opened. Bray jerked up on the floor. She looked at the entrance, expecting to see some youth with a tray of food. But the man who entered had no tray.
“Arlow!” Yarrow’s voice thundered and snapped like ice cracking.
Arlow brought his hand up to his nose. “Great Spirits!” He looked around at the lot of them, horror in his eyes. “Yarrow, I swear I had no idea it was this bad, or I would have come sooner.”
“I don’t understand you.” Yarrow’s voice was tight and measured.
“You are Chisanta, for Spirits’ sake! This is appalling. I wouldn’t treat a dog thus. That Quade is going to get a piece of my mind. I’ll fix this, my old friend, I promise.”
“I still don’t understand you,” Yarrow said. The hardness in his voice made Bray want to weep. He sounded so unlike himself—angry, distrusting. Was he in the icy water as well? Could she swim to him? No, of course not. She was chained.
“I know you must be angry with me. If you recall, I did urge you to go home. I didn’t want this. But you must understand, Yarrow, Quade might have done some atrocious things, but what he is trying to do is for the good of all. You must lo
ok at the big picture. If the Chisanta were to rule Trinitas, so many problems could be solved.” Arlow’s tone was pleading—pleading for them, or perhaps just for Yarrow, to understand. To forgive.
Bray floundered. She wanted to see, but she was having trouble remembering where she kept her eyes. Surely they were in her head? What was her head connected to? She should know this…
“He has killed hundreds of people!” Yarrow bellowed loudly. Bray forgot people could be so loud.
“Yes, and I had no part in that, I swear,” Arlow said. “You don’t understand. You haven’t seen the world as I have. The poverty and the illness—it’s all from inadequate management. The Chisanta are so far better qualified to lead. Think of how many lives would be saved, Yarrow, in the long run. We are marked for a reason—we are elevated, we are superior.”
“You’re full of horse-shit,” Ko-Jin said, his voice rough from neglect.
Arlow’s boots sounded as he crossed the room. “Ko-Jin…” he said in a miserable voice.
Bray found her eye lids and pulled them open. Arlow was crouched close to…Ko-Jin?
Bray had forgotten how he had once looked. He was so small, so crumpled and ill-formed. This, too, made her want to weep. It was all wrong. This was not the Ko-Jin of now, it was the Ko-Jin of long ago. The little boy who sat in a tree with her, who smiled sheepishly and was embarrassed to play games.
“Arlow,” Ko-Jin said frostily. “Nice of you to drop in. You’ll forgive me for not standing.”
“I will talk to Quade,” Arlow said, his voice rising desperately. “This isn’t necessary. Sphere or no sphere, you aren’t strong enough to break through chains. I’ll talk to him…”
“If you’re going to be talking to Quade ’bout ill treatment,” Peer’s voice rung out, “why don’t you mention to him that he’s likely killing Bray.”
“What do you mean?” Arlow asked.
He crossed the room and crouched down over Bray, his form blocked the blue light. He leaned in close. He smelt wonderful, like soap and fresh air.
Division of the Marked (The Marked Series) Page 31
