by Rachel Dunne
Scal kicked out his leg. His foot bounced against the fighter’s knee, and Scal felt the bone crack, and the fighter began to fall with a curse, with a wild swing of his blade. Like the witch, he did not bleed. Like the witch, he still died.
There was a line of fire along Scal’s forearm. In his sword’s light, he could see the blood welling from the thin slice there, where the fighter’s last swing had scored. Blood that was black in the moonlight, shimmering, and it spilled down his arm and over his fingers where they held the hilt of the sword. Scal drew in a breath that seared his lungs, that tasted of winter and faraway ice. He did not know himself half as well as when blood stained his hands, spattered his face.
The two preachers had tried to flee. Tripping over each other, wailing, stumbling against trees. They would have been smarter to separate, but fear made fools of all men. There was no joy in hunting, but it was a thing Scal could do well. There was little enough difference between a man and a deer, when fear chased, when blood boiled, when the trees rose shadowed and strangling.
Scal caught them, and he sent one to join the others in death. But the second preacher he held, arm tight around the man’s neck, denying him air. The preacher clawed at Scal’s arm, and his legs kicked where they hung off the ground. I have so many questions, Vatri had said, with the fires in her eyes, and so Scal held the preacher tight against his chest. Waiting for his breath-starved body to still, waiting for the fight to flow from his limbs. Scal thought that he could almost see the man’s blood flowing beneath his skin. That he could feel his heartbeat, like a caged thing through his ribs, pounding against the calm thud of Scal’s own heart. His left hand curled around the back of the preacher’s head. He had touched Vatri, touched things that were not weapons, and they had not burst with flames or with ice. He had not willed them to.
His fingers buried in the man’s hair, arm tight around his neck, Scal wondered what would happen if he willed the ice to flow from his fingers. No blood. No questions. If the end was the same, it could hardly matter what means.
I have so many questions. Vatri would ask them at the point of Scal’s blade. And when it was done, whether she got her answers or not, it would end the same.
Branches rustled, brambles snapping beneath soft feet. Scal did not turn. Only held tighter to the preacher as his limbs went slack, breath washing over Scal’s arm, fingers slipping from the furrows they had carved in flesh. More scars, that would make him whole, make him himself.
“That was neatly done,” Vatri said at his shoulder. Scal opened his arm. Let the preacher fall boneless to the ground. He did not open his mouth, because he did not know what would come out of it.
He leaned down and tied the unconscious preacher’s wrists together behind his back, tied his ankles together for good measure. He propped the man up against the trunk of a tree, and then Scal stepped away, back, letting the shadows swallow him. He might have gone farther, if he could.
Vatri crouched before the preacher, and she reached out to roughly pat his cheek. Bleary, slow-blinking, the preacher woke. He made a strangled noise when his eyes fixed on her scarred face. A monster escaped from the realm of nightmares.
“Where were you going?” Vatri asked.
The preacher said nothing, pressing his lips together tight. Anger and pride and faith flickering in his gaze.
“Where are the Twins?”
Silence.
Vatri was undeterred. “What have your leaders told you to do?”
“What have you done to the mages?”
“Where are the Twins?”
The preacher twisted his shoulders, rested more comfortably back against the trunk of the tree. There was almost a smile on his lips. A tilt to his head that seemed to say, You can waste as much of your breath as you would like.
“What will be the Fallen’s next move?”
“Where are the Twins?”
“Scal.”
He came forward, obedient as a dog. Stepped to Vatri’s side and he drew the sword once more, right hand around the worn grip so that the flames danced bright along its edge, and the preacher’s eyes flickered with fear. Scal stretched the blade out until its tip almost rested against the preacher’s throat. Scal did not will it to burn, but the preacher’s neck and cheek reddened with the heat.
Scal’s hand had never shaken, holding a blade. It did not now either, but he almost wished it would. That, somehow, someone might see a piece of the quaking within him. That someone might see his jaw, held as tight as the preacher’s.
“I give you one last chance,” Vatri said, voice steady and even. Pleasant. “Where are the Twins?”
The preacher swallowed hard, throat bobbing closer to the sword. There was sweat on his brow, on his upper lip, and the fear was growing more wild in his eyes. He stared at the tip of the blade, and his eyes flicked to Vatri, to Scal, to the blade, and rested finally on Vatri. There was no less fear in his eyes when he said, “I won’t tell you anything.”
Vatri sighed as though the words truly made her sad, but Scal could see the fire of his sword matched in her gaze. “Then you’re choosing your own fate. Scal.”
There was a cry trapped behind Scal’s teeth. A screech like the witch had made, dying, or like the wails of the fleeing preachers. A cry that would carry endless, and shake the roots of the trees, and make the stars tremble in the sky, and shatter the world in half. Shatter Scal in half.
He kept his teeth pressed tight together, and he drove the sword forward. There was fire, and there was no blood, and the scream clung to the roof of his mouth. Fighting, fighting to break free.
“May the Parents watch over your soul,” Vatri intoned. It sounded almost like she meant the words. She rose from the dead man’s side, said, “There will be others,” and then she made her way through the trees. Shadows fluttering like moths’ wings across her scarred flesh, the darkness pulling her deeper into the forest.
Scal, obedient, loyal, followed.
Chapter Nine
Keiro sat cross-legged far beneath the earth, his back straight, hands loose upon his knees, chin tilted upward. Every inch of his bearing spoke to calm confidence. Every inch was a lie, but it was a good lie—a necessary lie.
For around him, the earth trembled.
Keiro forced his breath to come steady, even though his heart thundered and every instinct screamed that he should flee. He sat still, and he breathed, and he waited.
Across from where he sat, a god-storm raged.
Fratarro was in the middle of what Keiro would have called a tantrum, if Fratarro had truly been the child whose skin he wore. But Fratarro was no child, and even a god’s petulant anger was a frightening thing to behold. His pose mimicked Keiro’s, legs folded and back straight, and though Fratarro’s hands rested on his knees, the right one shook like a leaf in a tempest, while the left lay utterly, disturbingly still.
Showers of dirt pattered onto Keiro’s shoulders, onto the ground. Somewhere not so far away, the earth groaned with the stress of staying put as Fratarro worked, however unintentionally, to shake it to pieces.
Left unchecked, it would not be very long until he succeeded.
Keiro strove to keep his voice steady, to keep the words from breaking into a scream, as he recited, “Gentle Fratarro, warm and kind.” A child’s rhyme, words he’d heard recited countless times through the halls of Mount Raturo . . . but there could be power in even the simplest words. “Though deep beneath the earth confined, good children know they’ll always find his loving heart and caring mind.” As Keiro repeated the rhyme, the words coming stronger to his lips, Fratarro’s shaking hand began slowly to still. The fury faded from his eyes by slow measures, until he squeezed them shut; and they were summer-breeze calm when he opened them once more.
Keiro said the rhyme again and again until the dirt stopped raining on his shoulders, until the floor stopped trembling beneath him, until Fratarro sighed and said softly, “Thank you.”
“Of course, my lord.”
“Brother,” Keiro amended quickly, and the tremors stilled. It felt wrong to address his god so casually, but self-preservation was stronger than propriety, and he would do nearly anything to keep Fratarro’s frustration in check. If he wasn’t so exhausted, he might have remembered better how carefully he needed to step. “You’re doing better, Brother.”
“I’m not,” Fratarro said, and he sounded so much like a sulky teen that Keiro almost smiled. That was a dangerous line to walk—no matter that Fratarro looked like an adolescent, he was centuries old, older than all the stars in the sky. To forget that, for even a moment, was dangerous.
“Control will come,” Keiro said, hoping, praying, that the words were true. They all needed them to be true. “Power must come first, and you’re certainly showing that. The rest will follow. You were . . . bereft for so long. No one expected you to rise to your full power immediately.”
A wan smile twisted Fratarro’s lips. “You tell sweet lies, Keiro Godson.” Keiro opened his mouth to babble an argument or defense, but Fratarro lifted a hand to halt his words and wave them away. “You’ve done enough today. Go. I know there is more to be done above. You’re more useful above.”
It wasn’t meant to be a cut against him, Keiro knew that, but there was still a dull ache beneath his breastbone at the words. He rose slowly to his feet, leaving Fratarro sitting alone at the center of the chamber. Walking between pools of flickering blue light, Keiro paused to lift something that had fallen to the floor during the tremors, incongruous by its very presence in the nearly empty chamber. It was lumpy and ratty and faintly musty. Turning it in his hands, Keiro recognized the shape of a horse, an old and poorly stuffed toy.
“Leave it,” Fratarro said, and Keiro fought back the urge to shout, for Fratarro stood suddenly at his elbow. The unnatural silence of a child, combined with the powers of a god. “I don’t know why I keep it . . .” But he held out the fingers of his good hand, and Keiro handed him the stuffed horse. He watched Fratarro run his thumb down the yarn-mane, staring into the horse’s button eyes. Fratarro’s own eyes were . . . different. Keiro could not quite say how, and he left before they could change again. As he crawled into the tunnel from the chamber, his last glimpse was of Fratarro reaching up to place the horse on a shelf sunk into the wall, dark with shadows.
Keiro had grown very skilled, of late, at not questioning the things he saw. His mind was a study in emptiness as he crawled through the bowels of the earth. He did not—very carefully, did not—think of the second part of the child’s rhyme: Patient Sororra, trapped in sleep, her anger brightly burning deep. If you’ve crossed her, run and weep, for she has promises to keep. The tunnels were long, and he was alone with his mind as carefully empty as the tunnels themselves. Best to be safe—there was no telling when Sororra might be listening.
Above, on solid ground beneath the dark, open sky where clean air blew across his face, there was almost, almost, peace. There was a single moment of it, at least, where Keiro knelt with his eyes closed and his face upturned, and felt relief like a tide through his veins. It felt so like the first time he had visited these hills, when he had seen the Starborn sing to the full moon and felt a moment of heartbreaking peace. Yaket, Elder of the plainswalkers who had lived in the grass sea since the Plains had been only knee-high, had shown him the mravigi, and he’d thought he’d understood the message she’d been trying to teach him. He should have listened to her better, then and later. In the piling mountain of Keiro’s regrets, it was a firm foundation stone. He might have had more peaceful moments like this if he’d learned her lessons better. He might not have been so terrified of his own thoughts.
He supposed it was fitting, that Yaket found him there. “These are troubled times, Godson,” she said as she lowered herself down next to him, startling him from his melancholy.
Keiro swallowed heavily, and could not look at her. “It has . . . been a long while, Elder.” She did not often leave her people, the few that were left of her tribe, and Keiro couldn’t bear to see them—or, rather, to see all the faces that were missing. He kept telling himself it was better for Yaket and the plainswalkers—the last thing they needed was for the Twins or the Fallen to turn their attention and their ire on the plainswalkers.
“It is better for us, away from the hills. Your people are not so welcoming of strangers . . . especially not of strangers they believe have wronged them.”
They are not my people, Keiro wanted to say, but the words stuck to the roof of his mouth and his tongue could not free them. Instead, he said, “You must understand their suspicion. They think that if you and your people did not come to the Fallen with the location of the Twins, that can only mean you intended to keep them hidden away forever. There is no room in their minds for any other option.”
Yaket did not answer right away. “That was what you thought, too, at first.”
“It was,” Keiro agreed softly. He could not say any more, keeping his mind carefully blank of any thoughts. It was dangerous, certainly, to say anything else, and dangerous enough even to think beyond the constant pressure in his chest, the endless exhaustion, the fear, the fear, the fear . . .
“I think you know, now, why I made the choices I made,” Yaket said, not hearing the warning in his silence. “You know why my people have stayed here for so long, and kept our silence for so long. We, who lived so close to them, knew the stakes better than your people ever could.”
“Yaket—”
“We are not without hope, Keiro. We never were, and we never shall be.” Her words came in a rush, fierce passion lighting through her voice. “My people are old enough to remember the lessons of the past. We can find a way to fix all of this, to restore—”
“Yaket!” Keiro nearly shouted it as he surged to his feet, hands clapped over his ears like a child, desperate not to hear, desperate not to let Sororra hear. Yaket stared up at him, her wrinkles smoothed by wide-mouthed surprise. Keiro put his back to her and wrapped his arms around himself, trying desperately to slow his heartbeat, to calm his thoughts—these would be like an open door to a thief, for a goddess ever listening for opposition. “You cannot ever speak these things, Yaket. Do you hear me?” His hands still shook, but his breaths came more even. He was so, so tired. “These are troubled times,” he said heavily. Her own words, echoed back to her. “We must all be faithful, loyal followers of the Twins in their path to victory. They have risen, and they will rise further.” He stopped the words before they could leave his mouth, but he could not stop them drifting through his thoughts: And there is nothing we can do to stop them.
He heard Yaket start to rise, knew the compassion he would see on her face if he turned, knew she would touch her crabbed hand to his shoulder and he would break. There was so much danger here. He fled before it could consume him.
He wanted to pray, but there was no safety in prayer anymore. Sororra would hear, and that was what he did not want. He kept his teeth clenched, and did not let himself hope that she hadn’t been listening, that she hadn’t heard the whispering of blasphemy—
No. Dangerous to even think the word.
I am loyal, he thought. I am a good and faithful servant of the Twins. But he didn’t know if the words were his own, or Sororra’s.
They would need to be his own, if he was to survive this. He could give the Twins no reason to doubt him.
He thought of Yaket, likely staring after him, her heart heavy with grief—for herself, certainly, but he did not doubt that most of it would be for him. The thought made his own heart heavy, but he pushed away the pain. She had to understand. Everything had changed now. Everything was different.
He very carefully did not think, Everything is wrong.
If she had heard, if she had been listening through Keiro when Yaket was talking, it might already be too late. A seed of doubt would be all it too
k, a single ripple enough to turn into a capsizing wave. She might even now be returning from wherever she whiled away the long hours waiting for her brother to regain his power, her course set on Keiro, set to destroy anything that might get in her way—
“Brother Keiro!”
Ripped from his apocalyptic thoughts, Keiro stumbled over his own feet and nearly fell. Laseneo was huffing toward him, eyes huge in his moon-pale face, and one of his hands was already inching toward the back of his neck as he ran.
Keiro stared at him in stark disbelief. As Laseneo stopped, panting, before him, Keiro said, “You’re supposed to be gone.” Blunter words than he might have chosen another time, but his nerves and his mind and his soul were frayed. Laseneo should have left hours ago with the rest of the Fallen. Keiro couldn’t allow disobedience, couldn’t be seen as weak—not by the Fallen, and certainly not by—
Laseneo curled into himself, taken aback. “Brother Keiro, I serve you . . .”
Keiro cut him off with a sharp motion. He had to find a way to salvage this ruin of a night, so that Sororra need never know any of it. “All of the Fallen save those specifically named were to leave. Were you named, Laseneo?”
“N-no, but . . .” Laseneo began rubbing his own neck again, his fingers leaving red marks like claws. “That’s w-why I came to find you . . .”
Keiro’s pulse grew loud in his ears. “Show me,” he said, before Laseneo could say any more. Something had gone wrong, but there had to be a way for Keiro to fix it, and to do so without Sororra ever hearing. He was her voice and her hands, her will among the Fallen. He couldn’t fail her.
Laseneo scampered across the hills, eager as a puppy, and Keiro followed with a lump in his throat that might choke him, and his thoughts carefully blank. Raised voices soon led him as much as Laseneo, and they came across a large crowd of people clustered in the valley between two hills—a larger crowd of people than there should have been.
