The Shattering of the Spirit-Sword Brackish 1

by Sam Farren

  Something soft brushed Castelle’s legs. Her knees slammed the underside of the table. Her heart raced, but Tanen only laughed.

  Putting their sandwich on Castelle’s plate, they ducked down and scooped up a small, grey cat.

  “Hey, baby,” Tanen said, kissing the cat atop its head. “Wondering what all the fuss is about, huh? We’ve got a new guest staying with us. Just for a couple of days, probably. This is Cas. She seems pretty nice, so don’t you go worrying.”

  The cat tilted its head to the side, then rolled on its back in Tanen’s arms, paws pressed to their face.

  “Oh, right. That was rude of me,” Tanen said. “Cas, this is Rhy. He’s a little shy, so don’t hold it against him if he goes running.”

  Without looking down, Castelle picked up Tanen’s forfeited half of the sandwich.

  “I’m sorry,” Castelle said. “What kind of household is this? There are at least a hundred shoes in the entrance hall, I’m certain some of the paintings in the corridor used to hang in the castle, and I haven’t seen a single servant in the place.”

  “Oh, we don’t need servants. Everyone mucks in. You can wash your plate after this, Your Majesty.”

  Castelle scowled around her sandwich.

  “Honestly? It’s mostly a house of fuck-ups. Svir likes collecting ‘em. Like, I dunno, dumb homeless kids, people who need to get away from some shit,” Tanen said, shrugging. “They all wind up here. Niamh puts up with us and pretends like we all ain’t one big, happy family.”

  Chewing slowly, Castelle said, “You’re telling me Svir runs this ridiculously large house for those in need, out of the goodness of her heart? That this is some sort of—some sort of makeshift temple?”

  “Damn. Sounds boring, when you put it like that. But yeah, I guess. Like a temple, without the official protection and all the fancy statues. Probably shouldn’t imply Svir has a heart, though. Don’t let her hear that.”

  Rhy hopped from Tanen’s arms and braved the tabletop, edging closer to Castelle’s plate to sniff the crumbs.

  “For all the people supposedly in need living here, it never occurred to you, or Svir, that I may be one of them?” Castelle asked.

  “Oh, no, no. We get that. We totally get that. You’ve seen some shit, right?” Tanen asked. “It’s just, listen. This place ain’t cheap to run, okay? Like, food ain’t free, and there’s all the repairs, the new bedding, oil for the lanterns, shit like that.

  “But hey, don’t worry yourself, yeah? Before Svir headed out to track you down, her and Niamh were arguing whether you were like, evil, or whether you’d left all that Greyser-bullshit behind. Just let ‘em get to know you and you’ll do fine. I’ll stick up for you.”

  Groaning, Castelle sprawled across the table, head in her arms. Money. It was always about money, when you didn’t have any. She took a deep breath, trying to keep calm. Tanen was right. All she had to do was prove she wasn’t her mother.

  Svir was the reverse of all her parents had believed in. While they had been willing to sacrifice the many to feed those who already feasted at banquets each night, Svir was willing to sacrifice one to help many.

  Whether she was cruel or just calculated didn’t matter. The end result would be the same, and the quiet, nagging voice in the back of her head said there was probably something deserved in this, an irony she couldn’t quite grasp.

  It was the exact sort of sacrifice a ruler should be willing to make for their people, on a scale that’d be insignificant to the people outside of the house.

  But Castelle wasn’t her mother.

  She wasn’t her mother.

  “You okay there, Cas?”

  Rhy tiptoed over, nose tapping gently atop her head.

  “Is this your cat?” Castelle asked, peering up and patting the back of Rhy’s head.

  The cat let out a little chirp and looked back at Tanen for guidance.

  “Nah. Cat-sitting for a friend,” Tanen said. “We’re like, best friends now, though. He even sleeps in my bed, sometimes. Anyway. What’s your next move, Cas? I’ve gotta go clear up Svir’s mess, like always, and you ploughed through that sandwich like, uh, a joke that’s probably inappropriate to make around ex-royalty. So! I don’t reckon you wanna come dispose of the body, do you? Even though that’d probably help, huh? I mean, you know where it is, right?

  “Ugh, never mind. Svir would put my fingers in a sandwich if I lost you. You’re our meal ticket for the next year, girl. No, uh. No offence. You really do seem alright. I mean, I’ve read about your family and they sound like a real bunch of cu—bad people, but from the twenty minutes I’ve known you, I’ve got a different vibe. Like, you’re almost not obnoxious at all! Just hang in there. So, what’s the plan?

  “You wanna go to bed? I could get something set up for you. Rhy might even join you, if you’re up for company.”

  A bed meant a chamber, and a chamber meant a window. She’d never had to before, but Castelle had every faith in smashing her way through the glass and climbing out. What did it matter if she wasn’t on the ground floor? She’d already broken her leg once.

  Everyone would be distracted by whatever surgery Svir was undergoing. Castelle could slip out of the window, and from there, she’d run and she’d run, and at some point, she’d run into Eos.

  Eos wasn’t doing this for money. She was doing it for Layla, doing it because she believed in what Layla believed in.

  “I am tired,” Castelle admitted. “It’s been an exhausting few days. Months. If you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to rest.”

  “Yeah, yeah, you got it, Cas,” Tanen said. They picked up Rhy and dropped him on their shoulder. “You reckon you can remember where you were when the m-u-r-d-e-r went down? A vague direction is fine. It’s just that Svir expects me to, I dunno, sniff these things out like a dog or something.”

  Castelle did her utmost to retrace the path they’d taken from the scene to Torshval. The journey felt empty, with only her footsteps to focus on, and not the capital looming over her, like a wave that’d never break against the shore of her past. Tanen nodded as she spoke, nudging her up the stairs.

  They led her to a room at the end of the corridor, tapping the bolts on the outside.

  “Yeah. It locks from out here. Sorry. We’re prepared for like, pretty much everything,” Tanen said.

  An apology only had so much weight to it when the speaker was going to pull those locks across. Rhy walked in circles around Tanen’s feet as they leant against the doorframe, about to say something else.

  Niamh came up the stairs, sending them running.

  “So, uh, yeah, I’ll get going!” they said, hopping over Rhy. “Good to meet ya, Cas.”

  Rhy trilled, heading after Tanen, and Niamh watched the pair head downstairs.

  “Svir’s in surgery now. She’ll be fine, like she always is,” Niamh said. “Thank you for bringing her here. She’s not very good at asking for help, no matter how desperately she needs it.”

  “I was going to end up here, somehow,” Castelle said, hands held out in a resigned shrug. “Honestly, I have no idea why I came. Why I helped her. You don’t owe me anything.”

  “Svir tends to have that effect on people. Don’t take it personally,” Niamh said, taking something from her pocket. “Here. Svir wanted me to give this to you.”

  Castelle took the crumpled letter from her, words still inked perfectly across the envelope, letters swirling. It wasn’t something that’d been written in a rush, out of desperation. The lettering was too neat, too controlled, for that. Her fathers had sat down and put thought into each and every word.

  She knew that much without opening the letter. She ran her thumb across the creased paper, tracing blotches of ink through it.

  “Thank you,” Castelle said, distantly. “Thank you, I…”

  “You don’t recognise me, do you?” Niamh asked, arms folded over her chest.

  She arched a brow, challenging, and the real problem was that Castelle very almost did recog
nise her.

  “I recognise that I should recognise you,” Castelle tried.

  The corner of Niamh’s mouth quirked into a smile, and she said, “I get it. You were the Princess. You dealt with countless courtiers and nobles trying to get to your parents through you every day. I understand. My father was merely a Count and I had to endure countless sycophants wherever I went. Even in my own home.”

  Castelle opened her mouth, hesitated, and said nothing.

  “This used to be the Tarwin District, for what it’s worth,” Niamh added.

  As a child, Castelle had memorised the names and crests of all the noble houses that mattered, and spent hours poring over family trees. Marigold was to take on the responsibilities of ruling, but her siblings had to be there to support her, had to know all the tenuous tensions and allegiances running through the Kingdom, as well as who owed them favours and who wasn’t to be trusted.

  “Count Lorcan?” Castelle asked, mind turning back to retrieve the information. “Gods. I didn’t know he had a daughter.”

  Laughing, Niamh said, “Neither did he. But here I am, fourteen years on from the little rebellion that put us all in our places.”

  Most of those places had been in the dirt, in pyres. Castelle was desperate to know how Niamh had survived, if she’d hidden or been spared, but didn’t get the chance to speak. She didn’t need to. Niamh had sought her out for reasons beyond delivering a letter.

  They stood on the landing, the only two people who could truly understand what being on the wrong side of the rebellion had meant.

  “My mother sold out to the resistance several months before the uprising. My father didn’t, but at least never learnt of my mother’s betrayal,” Niamh said. “We got out. Barely. The house wasn’t razed to the ground, which was something. Word has it you were taken across the archipelago by Lords Damir and Ira.”

  “I was,” Castelle said. “I’ve been in Laister, all this time.”

  For years, she’d used the cost of survival to console herself. She was in the forest, true, cut off from her Kingdom, but at least she’d survived. At least she had a heart beating in her chest. She was the only one who’d escaped, the only one slaughter had spared, and she ought to have been grateful for that.

  Yet there was Niamh, the woman who would’ve become Countess, alive and well, still living in a city that had turned against its ruling class. She had a home of her own, freedom to come and go as she pleased. She had a wife, she had so much, and Castelle had spent but a handful of minutes in her presence.

  How empty she must seem to Niamh. Everything she had was in her blood, in the letter in her hand.

  “Did anyone else survive?” Castelle asked quietly.

  “I hear rumours, every now and again. I catch glimpses of familiar faces in busy crowds. I wouldn’t like to make any assumptions, though. It was mostly the younger amongst us, and I believe we understand the good that came from the massacre.

  “Either that, or people are still binding their time, waiting to exact their revenge decades later. Who can say?”

  Certainly not Castelle.

  “I’m glad you survived,” Castelle said. “Not because of—because of who you were, but because we were children, weren’t we?”

  “That we were. I was born in the same year as you. My parents were always very proud of that fact.”

  For the first time in days, a smile pulled at Castelle’s mouth. Their shared past lingered between them, and though Castelle did not know Niamh and had never caught much more than a glance of her as a child, she was not the stranger she’d taken her for.

  There might be a way out of this, after all.

  “I’d better get back to my wife,” Niamh said, bowing her head. “She gets terribly needy after an ordeal like this. Goodnight, Castelle.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Castelle tugged the bars crisscrossing the small window, on the off-chance no one had ever tried that before.

  They didn’t budge. Her arm fit between the bars, but what good was smashing the glass if she couldn’t get through? Niamh had locked the door from the outside, and there was no secret trapdoor, no passage behind the sole bookcase.

  The room was fit for purpose, with a neatly-made double bed and not much else. Assuring herself it wasn’t the same as giving up, Castelle sat on the bed and could’ve wept for the relief being off her feet brought. Failing to escape the room wasn’t indicative of being unable to escape at all.

  She wouldn’t be there forever. Once the excitement of Svir’s latest injury blew over, they’d want to see her again. They’d want to speak with her, to prod and poke at the last Greyser to grace the archipelago. Someone would slip up. Tanen would take their eye off her for a second too long, or Niamh would give herself over to a pang of nostalgia and forget to lock her door.

  There’d been a door leading off the kitchen. Not all the windows in the house could be barred. There were other ways out.

  She’d never have the strength to escape if she didn’t sleep.

  Lying down, but not going so far as to pull the covers over her, Castelle closed her eyes. Exhaustion clung to her bones, pulsed through her head, resolving as nausea. Svir’s surgery wouldn’t be over any time soon. No one would bother her until morning.

  She was lying in the most comfortable bed she’d been in since leaving the temple, yet her eyes darted behind her eyelids. The letter from her fathers was in her pocket. She’d never drift off with its weight against her.

  Sitting up, she smoothed the crumpled envelope against the blankets. Her name was still upon it. The handwriting hadn’t changed.

  If she wanted to read it, it had to be soon. There was a single candle in the room, and little more than an inch of it.

  She ripped the envelope open and pulled the letter out. It was folded into careful quarters, and she turned those quarters into halves before courage left her.

  Her ribs pressed to her heart and would not relent until she read it, but if she read it now, she’d believe the scattered lies, the promise of safety and solitude in the face of imprisonment.

  Castelle slipped it back into her pocket.

  If she didn’t sleep, she didn’t sleep.

  In the light of day, the house slowly came to life. Laughter rang from the kitchen, plates and pans clipping the counters; a sure sign Svir’s surgery had been a success. The front door opened and closed over and over, the chorus of goodbyes growing softer each time. Not a single person’s day was disrupted by Castelle’s presence.

  What a strange household it was, headed by a Yrician and a woman who would’ve been a Countess, in another world, filled to the brim with people with no apparent relation by blood.

  Castelle halted her thoughts, frowning.

  She had no concept of what a normal household was, of what was strange. She’d spent twelve years in a renovated temple, piety plastered over, convinced she owned the whole archipelago, watched over by two men pretending to be her fathers and a slew of servants pretending she was a Princess.

  By the time hunger was the most pressing of Castelle’s problems, a far-off bell rang out for midday. She had paced the room a hundred times, sat down and got up until her knees ached. She no longer knew how to wait, how to be still. If someone came to collect her, leaving behind a pile of gold for Svir, it’d be a relief.

  What did it matter where she was going or who she was with, so long as she was going somewhere?

  Tanen broke her from her thoughts with a knock at the door and a hearty call of, “Yo, good morning, Princess. Promise we didn’t forget ya.”

  The bolt pulled across. Tanen started when they opened the door and Castelle was stood on the other side.

  “Whoa, okay, you’re eager. Don’t blame ya. There’s sod all to do in there, right? All of those books are complete rubbish, Cas. Don’t waste your time on ‘em,” Tanen said, jerking a thumb over their shoulder, urging her into the hallway. “Got some good ones, if you’re looking for something worth reading. Damn, di
d you even get new books in that creepy forest temple, Cas? How’d that work, anyway? Where you like, frozen in time? Nothing coming in, nothing going out?”

  “Basically,” Castelle said, taking cautious steps down the hallway. “There were hundreds of books I’d yet to read, so it didn’t trouble me that nothing new was coming in.”

  “Well, it should. You’ve gotta read By Creation’s Design. It’s pretty much all philosophy, all musing and pondering and pontificating. You into that kinda shit? I mean, there’s a story in there too, it’s cleverly disguised, but it’s all anyone’s talking about these days.”

  “You like philosophy?” Castelle asked, smiling for the first time all day.

  “Hell yeah. What’s better than reading about a bunch of dead rich people wondering whether anything has consequence or moral or meaning to make you feel like you’ve got your life on track?” Tanen said, hopping down the stairs. “It’s like, shit, I might be fucking up, but at least I’m doing something, yeah? At least I’m putting shit into action and not living a life of inward hesitance. Oh, and you should totally read The Mermaid’s Wife, too. Trashy romance without being clichéd. The sex scenes are only a little bit embarrassing.”

  “Let’s hope my next captor has an impressive library,” Castelle muttered.

  “Oh,” Tanen said. “Right. Yeah. Sorry, girl. Look, me and Niamh are on your side, yeah? Svir is too. She just doesn’t know it yet. So don’t sweat it, okay? Everyone has the wrong end of a dozen sticks.”

  Tanen led Castelle to a dining room where a long, narrow table was surrounded by armchairs with low tables between them. Niamh and Svir were at the main table, Niamh digging into an early lunch, Svir slumped in her chair, arm in a sling. Adrenaline had left her, and the reality of recovery had taken its hold.

  “Two months,” Svir muttered as Castelle took the seat Tanen pulled out for her. “I’m to wear this for two months. The doctors said I may never regain full use of my arm. Of my right arm.”