by Brit Mandelo
She cupped her hard hand around my jaw and cheek and left ear. “Don’t turn me away, Mars,” she said quietly. “It’s no night to be alone.”
“You’re right,” I replied. “But let’s try something a little different.” I felt wild and daring, even though I knew she wouldn’t understand. I took her by the hand and led her out to our practice area by the stable. They kept a lantern out there for late arrivals; it gave us just enough light to see motion, but the fine work would have to be done by instinct: by feel.
“You want to practice?” she said.
My heart was thudding under my ribs. This was the closest I had ever come to telling anyone what it was like with me. It was so tempting to say Take me down, Brax, challenge me, control me, equal me, best me, love me. But I only smiled and stepped into the small circle of light. “Put your hands on me,” I whispered, soft enough so that she would not hear, and centered myself.
∞
They were fair auditions, and hard, and we were brilliant. I could tell they had never seen anything like us. The method was to put two quads into the arena with wooden swords. I learned later that they looked for how we fought, but that was only part of it. “The fighting is the easiest thing to teach,” Captain Gerlain told me once. “What I look for is basic coordination, understanding of the body and how it works. And how the quad works together.”
It was an incredible day, a blur of things swirled together: crisp air that smelled of fried bread from the camp kitchen and the sweat of a hundred nervous humans; the sounds of leather on skin and huffing breath interleaved with the faint music of temple singers practicing three streets away; and the touch of a hundred different hands, the textures of their skin, the energies that ran between us as we laid hold of one another.
After he saw our stormfighting, Gerlain started putting other quads against us, so that we fought more than anyone else. Most of the fighters didn’t know what to make of us, and I began to see that Gerlain was using us as a touchstone to test the others. Those who tried to learn from us, who adapted as best they could, had the good news with us when Gerlain’s sergeant read out the names at the end of the day; and Gerlain himself stopped Lucky and said curtly, “You and your quad’ll be teaching the rest an hour a day, after regular training, starting tomorrow afternoon. Work out your program with Sergeant Manto. And don’t get above yourselves. Manto will be watching, and so will I.”
“Hoo hoo!” said Lucky. “Let’s get drunk!” But I was already intoxicated by the day, dizzy with the feel of so many strangers’ skin against mine. And I was a guard. I whispered it to Ad as we walked back to the inn through the streets that now seemed familiar and welcoming. I made it, I told her. Lemon City. I thought of Tom, and my mother: I’m safe, I found a place for myself. I saw Ad with her sheepskin and her special stick; I felt Tom’s tears on my skin, and my mother’s hand on my hair. Then Ro was standing in the door to the inn, looking for me, waiting: and I went in.
∞
It was the stormfighting that kept us out of a job for such a long time. Gerlain and Manto saw it as a tactical advantage and a way to teach warriors not to rely on their swords. Tom would have approved. But many of our fellow soldiers did not. Our frank admission that it was still raw, as dangerous to the fighter as to the target, and our matter-of-fact approach to teaching, were the only things that kept us from being permanent outsiders in the guard. Even so, we made fewer friends than we might have.
“Can’t let you go yet,” Manto would shrug each month, when new postings were announced. “Need you to teach the newbs.”
“Let someone else teach,” Ro was arguing again.
“Who? There’s no one here who knows it the way you do.”
“That’s because you keep posting them on as soon as they’ve halfway learned anything.”
“Shucks,” Manto grinned, showing her teeth. “You noticed.”
“Manto, try to see this from our point of view….”
“Oh gods,” I whispered to Lucky, “There he goes, being reasonable again. Do something.”
“Right,” she whispered back, and then stepped between Ro and Manto, pointing a finger at Ro when he tried to protest. She said pleasantly, “We came here to be guards, not baby-minders. You want us to teach, fine, we’ll teach other guards. Until then, I think we’ll just go get a beer.” She turned and started for the gate, hooking a thumb into Ro’s belt to pull him along. Brax sighed and reached for her gear. I gave Manto a cheerful smile and a goodbye salute.
“All right, children,” Manto said, pitching her voice to halt Lucky and Ro. “Report to Andavista tomorrow at the palace. Take all your toys, you’ll draw quarters up there.”
Even Lucky was momentarily speechless.
Manto grinned again. “The orders have been in for a couple of weeks. I just wanted to see how much more time I could get out of you.” She slapped me on the arm so hard I almost fell over. “Welcome to the army.”
“Where the hell have you people been?” Sergeant Andavista snarled at us the next morning. “Been waiting for you for two weeks.” There seemed to be no good answer to that, so we didn’t even try. “Your rooms are at the end of the southwest gallery. Unpack and report back here to me in ten minutes. Move!”
The rooms had individual beds, for which I was grateful. The double-wide bunks at the training camp had made us all more tense with one another as time went on, and I was tired of sleeping on the floor—particularly after a good day’s work, when my body felt hollowed out by the thousand moments of desire roused and sated and born again, every time we grappled, when I only wanted to sleep close to one of my unknowing lovers and drink in the smell of our sweat on their skin.
Andavista handed us off to the watch commander, who gave us new gear with the palace insignia and a brain-numbing recital of guard schedules. Then she found a man just coming off watch and drafted him to show us around. The soldier looked bone-tired, but he nodded agreeably enough and tried to hide his yawns as he led us up and down seemingly endless hallways. He pointed out the usual watch stations: main gate, trade entrances, public rooms, armory, the three floors of rooms where the bureaucrats lived and worked, and the fourteen floors of nobles’ chambers, which he waved at dismissively. I remembered my mother saying ticks on a dog.
He brought us to a massive set of wooden doors strapped with iron. “Royal suite,” he said economically. “Last stop on the tour. Can you find your own way back?”
We did, although it took the better part of an hour and made us all grumpy. “Not bad,” the watch commander commented when we returned. “Last week’s set had to be fetched out.”
And so we settled. It wasn’t much different from living in my village, except that I belonged. We learned soldiery and taught stormfighting and found time to practice by ourselves, to reinforce old ideas, to invent new ones. It was an easy routine to settle to, but I’d had my lessons too well from Tom to ever relax completely, and the rest of the quad had learned to trust my edge. And it helped in a turned-around way that news of us had spread up from the training ground, and there were soldiers we’d never met who resented us for being different, and were contemptuous of what they’d heard about stormfighting. Being the occasional target of pointed remarks or pointed elbows was new for Brax and Lucky and Ro; it kept them aware in a way that all my warnings never could. So on the day we found swords at our throats, we were ready.
They came for the king and prince during the midnight watch when we were stationed outside the royal wing. Ro thought he might have seen the king once, at the far end of the audience room, but these doors were the closest we had ever been to the people we were sworn to protect. And it was our first posting to this most private area of the palace. Perhaps that’s why they chose our watch to try it. Or perhaps because they had dismissed the purposely slow practice drills of storm art as nothing more than fancy-fighting; it was a common enough belief among our detractors.
The first sign we had that anything was amiss was when two of the
daywatch quads came up the hall. Brax stepped forward; it was her night to be in charge. “We’re relieving you,” their leader said. “Andavista wants you down at the gates.”
“What’s up?” Brax asked neutrally, but I could see the way her shoulders tensed.
The other shrugged. “Dunno. Some kind of commotion at the gates, security’s being tightened inside. Andavista says jump, I reckon it’s our job to ask which cliff he had in mind.”
Brax stood silent for a moment, thinking. “Ro, go find Andavista or Saree and get it in person. No offense,” she added to the two quads in front of her.
“None taken,” their leader said; and then her sword was out and coming down on Brax. She struck hard and fast, but Brax was already under her arm and pushing her off center, taking only enough time to break the other woman’s arm as she went down. The other seven moved in, Brax scrambled up with blood on her sword, and then they were on us.
I wasn’t ready for the noise of it, the clattering of metal on metal, the yells, the way that everything reverberated in the closed space of the hallway. I could hear the bolts slamming into place in the doors behind us, and knew that at least someone was alerted: no one but Andavista or Gerlain would get inside now. Lucky was shouting but I couldn’t tell what or who it was meant for. Then I saw Ro shaking his head even as he turned and cut another soldier’s feet out from under him, and I understood. “Go on,” I yelled. “Get help! We don’t know how many more there might be!”
For a moment Ro looked terribly young. Then his face set, and he turned up the hall. It was bad strategy on the part of the assassins to arrive in a group, rather than splitting up and approaching from both directions; but they’d had to preserve the illusion of being ordered to the post. Two of them tried to head Ro off: he gutted one and kept going, and Brax stepped in front of the other. Three horrible moments later she made a rough, rattling sound and they both went down in a boneless tumble. Brax left a broad smear of blood on the wall behind her as she fell.
Lucky and I were side by side now, facing the four that were still standing. Out of the side of my right eye I could see Brax lying limp against the wall. Lucky was panting. There was a moment of silence in the hall; we all looked at each other, as if we’d suddenly found ourselves doing something unexpected and someone had stopped to ask, what now?
“Blow them down,” I told Lucky, and we swirled into them like the lightning and the wind.
I’d never before fought for my life or another’s. These people weren’t Tom; I couldn’t drop my sword and call stop. And these were our own we were facing, people we’d eaten with, insulted and argued with, and whose measure we had taken on the training field. Some of them were people I had taught, muscle to muscle, skin to skin. Now I reached for them in rage, and my touch was voracious. I went in close to one, up near his center, my arm fully extended under his and lifting up, taking his balance, thrusting my weight forward to put him down. It was sweet to feel him scrabbling under my hands, pulling at my tunic, trying to right himself, and then my sword was at his neck and I cut off his life in a ragged line. His trousers soiled with shit and he fell into a puddle at my feet. My body sang. I took the taste of his death between my teeth and stepped on his stomach to get to the woman behind him.
∞
I woke in our rooms. Ro was there, watching over me.
“How are you?”
“Don’t touch me,” I said.
He waited. “Brax and Lucky are going to be fine.” I put a hand up to my head. “It was deep, to the bone, but it’s not infected. They had to shave your head,” he added, too late.
“Saree came around. Those two quads were hired to win a place in the guards and wait for the right moment. The one they took alive didn’t last long enough to tell them who did the hiring. Poor bastard.”
I felt empty and dirty, and I couldn’t think of anything to say.
He swallowed, moved closer, but he was careful not to touch me. “Mars, I know it’s the first time you’ve killed. It’s hard, but we’ve all been through it. We can help you, if you’ll let us.”
“You don’t understand,” I said.
“I do, truly.” He was so earnest. “I remember—”
I held up a hand. “Blessing on you, Ro, but it’s not the killing, it’s—I can’t. I can’t talk about it.” I swung my legs off the other side of the bed, stood shakily, looked around for something to wear. My head hurt all the way down to my feet, but I wasn’t as weak as I’d expected to be. Good. I found my tunic and overshirt, and a pair of dirty leggings.
“Where are you going?”
“I need to get out. I’ll be fine,” I added, seeing his face. “I won’t leave the palace. I just want some time to think. I’m not looking for a ledge to jump off.”
He managed a tight smile. I did not come close to him as I left.
I really did want to wander: to get lost. I had the wit to stay away from the public halls, and I did not want the company and the avid questions of other guards, so I steered toward the lower floors: the kitchens, the pantry, and the enclosed food gardens. I found a stair down from the scullery that led to a vast series of storerooms, smokerooms, wine cellars.
I thought about the killing.
The sword work wasn’t so bad. The sensations of weapon contact were always more muted for me than hand-to-hand. But stormfighting was so much more intense: seducing my opponent into me, or thrusting myself into her space, or breathing in the smell of him while my hands turned him to my will. I’d got used to it being delicious, smooth, powerful, like gulping a mug of warm cream on a cold night. Until the hallway, until the man’s throat spilled open under my sword, until I broke his partner open with my hands. With my hands—and the fizzing thrill through my body was overrun by something that felt like chunks of fire, like vomit in my veins. I hated it. It made me feel lonely in a way I’d never thought to feel again. So I sat down in the cellars of the palace and wept for something I’d lost, and then I wept some more for the greater loss to come.
My head hurt worse when I’d run dry of tears. I gathered myself up and went to find my quad.
∞
They were sitting quietly when I came into the room, not talking; Brax on one of the beds drowsing in the last of the sun through the west window, Lucky crowded in beside her with her bad leg propped on a pillow, Ro on the floor nearby leaning against the mattress so that his head was close to theirs.
“Ho, Mars,” Lucky said gently.
They were so beautiful that for a handful of moments I could only look at them. When I opened my mouth I had no idea what might come out of it.
“I love you all so much,” I said. I wasn’t nervous anymore; it was time they knew me, and whatever happened next I would always have this picture of them, and the muscle-deep memory of all our times.
“Being with you three is like…. Gods, sometimes I imagine leaving home a day earlier or later. How easy it would have been to miss you on the road. What if I’d missed you? What would I be now?”
They were silent, watching me. I was the center of the world.
“That time on the road, when you asked me to….” I made a hapless sort of gesture, and Ro smiled. “You thought I was saying no, but what I was really saying was no, not like that.” I swallowed. I wasn’t sure how to say the next bit; and then Brax surprised me.
“The night before the guard trials, out behind the inn, when I thought we were practicing. We were really fucking, your way.”
I felt like a lightning-struck tree, all soft pulp suddenly exposed to the world, ruptured and raw. And I did the thing more frightening than fighting Tom, or leaving home, or losing Ad. I whispered yes. Then I crossed my arms to hold myself in, and tried to find words to hold off the moment when they would send me away. “I didn’t know until I met you on the road, and we began to practice, and every time we touched in this particular way I thought I would die from it. That’s when I figured it out, you know. I was a virgin when I met you,” and I couldn’t h
elp but smile, because it was so right. “For me, the touch of your palm on my wrist is the same as any act of love; it’s my way of bringing our bodies together. It’s no different from putting ourselves inside each other.”
“Mars, it’s—” Ro began.
“Don’t you tell me it’s okay!” I cut him off. “You’re always the peacemaker, Ro, but you don’t understand. You don’t understand what I’ve done. Every time we’ve touched as fighters, all the teaching and the practice, it’s all been sex for me, hours and hours of it with one of you or all of you, or other quads that we’ve taught. And you never knew. What’s that but some kind of rape? It’s bad enough with people I love, and then there’s all those strangers. I’ve probably had more partners than all the whores in Ziren Square. And I can’t help it, and gods know I can’t stop because it’s the most unbelievable…but what I did to all of you, that’s unforgivable, but I was so afraid that you’d…well, I expect you can guess what I thought, and I’m sure you’re thinking it now. No, wait,” I said, to stop Brax from speaking. “Then there’s this killing. You were right, Ro, I’ve never killed before, and it was horrible, it was disgusting because I still felt it even when I was pulling her arm out of its socket. And I didn’t want to, I didn’t want to, but I thought of what they’d done to Brax and then I was glad to hurt them and then there was this fierce, terrible wave…. Oh, gods, I’m sorry.” I was panting now, clenching myself. “I’m sorry. But it’s there, and I thought you should know.” They were still silent; Brax and Lucky were holding hands so tightly that I could see their fingers going white, and Ro looked sad and patient. “I love you,” I said, and then everything was beyond bearing, and I had to leave.
