Sisters of Sword and Song

by Rebecca Ross

“What happens now?” Evadne asked.

  “We will go to the Destry to have the contract stamped and made public.” Damon took the papyrus in his hand, the ink still glistening. “Meet me at daybreak in the courtyard. Good night, Evadne.”

  He departed the dining hall, and Evadne continued to sit at the table, staring at the flames burning on the brazier, overwhelmed by all that had just happened. And then she drank the wine in her cup and was just about to rise and drag herself to bed when a thought crossed her mind.

  She stopped, reaching for the papyrus Damon had left on the table. The myth of Acantha’s All-Seeing Crown. A missing relic.

  Evadne sank back onto the cushion. She felt for Kirkos’s Winged Necklace, traced the relic’s hard shape beneath her tunic as she reread her myth.

  Damon’s demeanor had changed when he saw the myth she had chosen. He had grown suspicious of her, as if she knew something. Where to find the All-Seeing Crown, perhaps? But why would he think Evadne knew such a thing? Because the crown was made of woven olive branches and she hailed from a grove?

  We all hold secrets like breath, Evadne thought, dwelling on her own, which hung around her neck, waiting for her to summon its magic into flight.

  Halcyon was holding a secret. As was Straton.

  What had they been protecting at the trial? What had Halcyon and Xander been doing, sparring privately all those times? Damon, Evadne was slowly coming to believe, knew the truth of it.

  She thought of her Uncle Ozias, of Lysander, of Amara’s father. All of them connected by the same desire—to find and claim a relic.

  Evadne set her myth into the brazier fire and watched the papyrus catch flame, curl, and turn into ash. As swift as breath. As irrevocable as stealing a life.

  And she believed that she finally knew what her sister and Xander and Straton had been secretly trying to do.

  XV

  Halcyon

  Work at the quarry began at dawn. Halcyon was the only woman among the convicts; most of them were relic hunters, and all of them were murderers. Her first day was just as terrible as her initial meeting with the mage. Her cell was small, and as soon as her iron door was unbolted at daybreak, three convicts meandered over to greet her. Their beards were long and knotted, their eyes hungry, their grins bent with suggestions that made Halcyon’s heart beat cold.

  “Welcome to the quarry,” the biggest of them crooned at her. He was missing a front tooth, and his face was weathered from days squinting against the sun. “Although it is difficult to imagine you taking a life. Who did you kill, my sweet?”

  Halcyon sat up from her cot slowly, her back still tender. She studied him, knowing he was strong. Most men who worked in the quarry were. Brute strength did not intimidate her; she had beaten plenty of men his size before. But she had also never felt such nagging pain in her body; everything felt arduous. Even something as simple as rising to her feet.

  This was also her first time being approached by men such as him. In the hoplite camp, Straton had uprooted this festerous behavior in his legion. Rape and sexual misconduct were rare, because the commander considered them both intolerable, unforgiveable. His punishments for such crimes were harsh. Halcyon had always felt safe in the camp, among her fellow warriors.

  “Did they cut out your tongue, then?” the missing-toothed man continued, taking a step into her cell.

  Halcyon’s fingers curled. Her fists were ready, her breaths lengthening. She was about to take out his other front tooth when there was a banging on her cell door.

  “Out, all of you,” a guard ordered. “To the mess hall.”

  The three convicts slunk away, their eyes still consumed with Halcyon. She waited until they were out of sight, the guard impatiently motioning for her to exit her cell.

  “Move along,” he said, prodding her back with his club.

  She winced and followed the winding corridor. The cells were underground and hewn from stone. It was cold and dimly lit, the prison seeming to curl like a serpent. But the mess hall was up, toward the light, and Halcyon could smell the gruel and fresh air as she stepped into a wide chamber set with long tables and benches. There was a food line, and Halcyon hesitantly approached it. Every eye hooked to her; she felt crushed beneath the weight of those gazes.

  Her hope of reuniting with Uncle Ozias vanished as she searched the faces around her. None of them she recognized. Although perhaps she might still cross paths with her uncle. There had to be hundreds of men here. She let that hope bloom; it kept her standing and moving and breathing.

  The first three weeks, Halcyon told herself. The first three weeks will be the hardest.

  And she was twelve years old again, standing in the camp of Abacus, shoulder to shoulder with other first-year trainees. The commander had paced before their perfect line and told them the first twenty-one days would be the hardest. They would be homesick; they would be exhausted; they would only be eating gruel and vegetables and water; they would vomit after training; their muscles would be relentlessly sore; they would want to quit; they would feel alone and bereft; they would hate him; they would respect him; they would wonder why they’d ever agreed to come in the first place; they could, likewise, leave at any time they felt like giving up.

  But if they could make it to day twenty-two, he had said, then they would last in the Bronze Legion.

  Day twenty-two, day twenty-two, she silently chanted, moving along the line.

  A guard was doling out the gruel from a large iron pot. He paused to stare at Halcyon when it was her turn, his eyes raking down her body, and he purposefully gave her a smaller portion.

  She accepted the gruel, but she was starting to realize how murder felt in one’s pulse. The pounding chorus of it. Five men. Five men did she want to kill here, and it had only been a few hours since she had arrived.

  “Let me help you with that,” yet another man said as he suggestively bumped into her, snatching her bowl of gruel.

  Six men, then. Halcyon stared at him, and he only smiled and laughed at her.

  “That belongs to me,” she said calmly. “Give it back.”

  “Oh, did you hear that, my friends?” he said, turning to glance across the room. “Mistress No-Hair is already giving orders, and she has not even proved her salt in the quarry yet.” He chuckled and brought his face close to hers. Beneath the grime and dust and facial hair, he was not much older than her. But the hatred burned in him like a flame, and it stole her breath to see a stranger cast such enmity upon her.

  “How about a trade?” he hissed. “I will give you your food, but you must give me something in return.”

  “Return her food, Cassian,” a voice interrupted with a crackling depth. “Now.”

  Cassian straightened. But he spat in Halcyon’s gruel before he returned it to her, sauntering away to a table where other young men were gathered, watching Halcyon with malicious interest.

  Halcyon stood for a moment, staring down at Cassian’s spit. She assumed the man who had spoken for her was one of the guards, but when she lifted her eyes, she was surprised to see he was a fellow convict, and while he was tall, he was not burly or seemingly strong. He was thin, his brow creased, his black hair shot through with silver, braided away from his eyes. He did not regard her with lust as the other men, but with a sadness that wrung out her homesickness.

  He turned and walked back to his table, sitting on a bench to finish his gruel. Halcyon did not want to follow him, but she needed an ally, and this man was the only one who struck her as honorable.

  She traced his steps, arriving at his side. “May I sit here?”

  “Sit wherever you like.”

  She sank onto the bench beside him and did her best to fish out Cassian’s spit. She lifted her bowl to her lips and began to swallow her gruel, forcing it down her throat.

  “Thank you,” she said after a few swallows.

  “You have no need to thank me,” the man said. “I only did what anyone should have done.”

  Halcyon pa
used, studying him from the corner of her eye. Something about him was different, but she could not name what it was. He obviously was not a relic hunter. He cast a different aura, one not lit by greed and ruthless ambition. And that aura must have granted him authority here, because despite his nonthreatening size, the other prisoners respected him.

  “Halcyon of Isaura,” she whispered.

  The man seemed surprised that she had introduced herself. He nearly dropped his bowl as he met her gaze, his eyes studying her with a shade of disbelief. “Thales of Zenia.”

  “You do not seem to belong here, Thales of Zenia.”

  Thales snorted. “No, and neither do you, Halcyon of Isaura. You should stay close to me for now. The first days here can be treacherous.” He rose, his motions infused with grace, and carried his empty bowl to a washbasin.

  Halcyon followed him. He was of the upper class, she suspected. That was why he felt out of place here. What had he been in his life before? A politician? An artist? A scholar?

  Another line formed from the mess hall to an outside deck. Halcyon waited in Thales’s shadow, watching as the convicts ahead of them checked in at a table. The guards were recording the prisoners’ identification numbers and bestowing them with the tools they needed for the day: iron hammers, picks, chisels, saws, wooden wedges, jars of water.

  “How can they trust murderers with such tools?” Halcyon said.

  “It is a marvel, is it not?” Thales sounded amused. “You have a greater chance of falling to your death than being split open by a pick. Although there have been a few murders by hammers here. But there is great punishment for those who dare to do it.”

  Halcyon mulled over that a moment. Then she asked, “What sort of punishment?”

  “A body part is removed. It’s usually an eye; sometimes it’s a tongue. But most important, if you murder another prisoner here, you are then granted a life sentence here. Most of us have only a matter of years or decades in this quarry before we move on to the next portion of our sentence. And after a few moons here . . . you will be more than ready to leave.”

  She was quiet, thinking about her next sentence: imprisonment in Mithra. She dreaded it, more than the quarry. Here, she would at least feel sunlight and breathe fresh air and work her body. In the prison, she would be chained to a wall in utter darkness.

  She thought of Evadne, brave and beautiful Evadne, taking five years of her sentence for her. Halcyon’s eyes burned; she struggled to diffuse the emotion, and it left scorch marks in her soul.

  “Every morning,” said Thales, breaking her thoughts, “your cell will open at dawn and you will come to the mess hall, to eat. Then you will walk to the captain, here on the deck, and tell him your number. He will rent the tools to you, and he keeps impeccable records. It is futile to try and smuggle one back into the mess hall or your cell.”

  “I was not thinking to,” Halcyon said, although she felt her cheeks warm, remembering how she had wanted to kill six men, just minutes ago.

  “Very good. Now, I am working on track twenty-seven. I could use your help and will ask the captain if you can work with me today.”

  Halcyon nodded, anxious as she and Thales approached the captain on the deck. He was a large man with a jagged scar on his face, his beefy hand swallowing the quill as he recorded the day’s rentals. Thales reported his number; the captain wrote it in perfect penmanship, and a guard behind him handed Thales his supplies for the day: a bundle of fifty wooden wedges, a chisel, a hammer, a jar of water.

  “I would benefit from having Hal—Convict . . .” Thales paused, expectant as he looked at her.

  Halcyon had nearly forgotten her number. “8651.”

  “Convict 8651’s assistance on track twenty-seven.”

  The captain slid his jaded gaze to Halcyon. He noticed every line and edge of her, just as the gruel guard had, and it took all her strength not to spew curses at him.

  “Very well,” the captain finally said, and Halcyon watched as he wrote her number—8651—onto his ledger. “I will rent you the same supplies as Convict 7909, and I will know if anything is missing come the end of the day.”

  Halcyon nodded and gathered up the tools, following Thales to where the wooden tracks along the quarry walls began to split and grow, like roots from a tree, down the steep face of marble. Several times, she worried she would slip and fall over the measly rope borders—the quarry was perilously deep—but the wooden tracks were built with footholds, and she eventually came to track twenty-seven and set down her supplies on a bench.

  “My task is to make shallow cuts along the marble,” Thales explained when Halcyon, back throbbing, moved to stand beside him, looking at the white marble face before them. “I then drive these wooden wedges into the cuts and soak them with water. The wedges will expand at an even rate, and it will fracture the marble into large sheets. The group behind me will come along and transport the sheet by pulleys. By then, I will be on the next track, repeating the cycle.” He paused to look at her. “Do you think you can drive the wedges into the cuts?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Let us begin.”

  Halcyon and Thales grasped their tools and started for the day. She did not notice it, not until he had taken the chisel in his grip. Thales’s right hand was crooked, his fingers bent at painful angles. It seemed that he could command a few motions with it, but he primarily worked with his left one. His right hand must have been brutally broken and healed without proper setting. And then Halcyon saw the scar on his right middle finger, like a ring had melted against his skin, leaving a mark.

  She pounded her first wedge into the crack. “You are a mage.”

  “So I was,” Thales said, turning it into a past statement. There was no emotion in his voice as he chiseled cracks into the marble.

  Halcyon waited for him to explain, but he refrained. He moved farther away from her. Again, she wondered why he was in this common quarry. He still had his tongue to sing, and he still had his dominant hand to cast, even if it bore the evidence from past trauma. By law, he should be in the mages’ prison, on the eastern coast.

  “Can you still cast magic?”

  “No.”

  “Is that why you are you here in a common quarry, Thales? Because you have lost your magic?”

  “I am here because they claim I murdered someone, Halcyon.”

  “They claim? You do not know for sure if you did or did not?”

  He refused to respond and Halcyon quieted, uncertain if he was humoring her or if he was serious with this notion that someone had framed him for murder. She resumed her work of hammering the wedges into the cracks he made. Soon, her back was on fire, and every pound into the marble was agony.

  “You are injured?”

  She turned to look at Thales, who was now the one to watch her closely.

  “Yes. I was whipped, days ago.”

  Thales glanced up at the upper tracks. There was always a guard within sight, Halcyon realized. They carried clubs and swords, ready to beat prisoners if they slacked in their tasks.

  “Here, let me hammer the wedges for a while,” Thales said. “You can take the jar of water and pour it slowly. It will give you some time to recover.”

  Halcyon gave him the hammer and took up the water, doing just as he suggested. She was as suspicious as she was intrigued by him—his past was a mystery, as were his motivations in helping her, an utter stranger.

  “Why are you being so kind to me?” she asked.

  “Do I need a reason to be kind to someone who needs it?”

  She was silent, displeased with how he perpetually evaded her questions.

  He must have sensed her annoyance. Thales sighed and said, “A few years ago, I incurred a debt from a man I wronged. Since then, I have been waiting to settle my debt to him.”

  Halcyon frowned. “And being kind to the new convict is how you plan to settle your debt?”

  Thales glanced at her. He had that shocked gleam in his eyes again. The same
shock as when Halcyon introduced herself.

  Her imagination began to roam, and she realized why the name of Isaura had startled him so greatly. Why he struggled to look her in the eye.

  “You know my uncle,” she breathed, and suddenly her heart was pounding in her throat. “Where is he? Is Ozias here?”

  “Shh,” Thales hushed her, his hand trembling. “Yes, I know him. And no, he is not here.”

  “Please, tell me where he is. My family has not heard of him in ten years, and I—”

  Thales turned to her, his face grooved in fear, anger. “Do not ask me, Halcyon. I hardly know your uncle, and I am not here to give you answers but to keep you alive, to fulfill my debt to him.”

  She fell quiet, watching Thales hammer stakes into the marble. She could be patient; she had five years in this place. One day, she would get the truth out of him.

  They worked in harmonious silence for hours. But as the heat heightened, Halcyon found herself desperate for a distraction.

  “Last night, when I was first brought into the outpost,” she said, “I was met by a mage.”

  Thales halted in his hammering for a beat. “Yes. That would be Macarius of Galenos. He arrived only a few days before you.”

  “And he is now lord of this common quarry?”

  “So the rumors claim.”

  “But I do not understand how. It is illegal for mages to be on common prison grounds.”

  Thales hammered a few more wedges, moving farther down the wall. Halcyon followed with her pouring water, waiting.

  “I have been here for two years now,” he said. “But before I was sentenced . . . things were changing among the Magical Court. There was talk of laws being altered, amended. To set us in higher places of power among the people, to give us unprecedented liberties. To turn us into gods.” He paused, despite the threat of a guard noticing his moment of rest. His shoulders stooped; his breathing was labored. He spread his left hand upon the marble, as if he could feel the pulse of the earth, of Corisande, hidden deep. “It is a dangerous belief, but the queen is not well. She has not been well for some time. She is not the queen I knew when I was young. And terrible laws are being passed through her, and it is going to change this land. Corisande will molt into something we will not recognize, and that grieves me deeply.”