by Sam Sykes
“Two hours?” The clerk’s eyes went wide. “But everyone will be at dinner by then! The crowds, they—”
“They will go eat if they want. They will stay if they want. They will cause trouble if they want and then they will join the prisoner on the execution line.” She pointed a finger at Inspire. “Make that much clear. Inform the Staff Sergeant to double the guards.”
“But… but…”
“Another word, Inspire, and it’ll be insubordination. The Revolution tells this city when to move, not the clock.” She gestured to the cell door. “Go.”
Inspire spared a worried glance at Sal before scurrying back to the door. He paused, glancing over his shoulder.
“Forgive me, madam, but… about the weapon…”
“If I have to tell the Staff Sergeant myself, Inspire, I’ll be telling him to find a cell for you as well.”
The door clanged shut. The air held still. Tretta walked back to her chair, pulled it to the table, and sat, hands lying flat upon the wood. She stared evenly at Sal across the length.
“Whatever else you tell me,” she said, “I cannot guarantee your life.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“It is a matter of duty. Those who violate the laws of the Revolution must pay.”
“Uh-huh.”
“For the glory and safety of our continuous march, we must—”
“Shit, woman, delaying my execution will be pointless if you make me strangle myself to avoid hearing this.” She scooted her chair back to the table. “I knew I was going to die the moment they brought me here. Life isn’t what concerns me anymore. I’ve done what I was put here to do.”
“Then what—”
“My story,” she said. “What I tell you, you write down. Down to the fucking letter, you write it. You tell it. You remember it. You let it be known what Sal the Cacophony did before she went cackling to hell and left this dark earth to all you dumb motherfuckers.”
Tretta narrowed her eyes. “Why?”
Sal smiled. “Ocumani oth rethar.”
“Of course,” she said, rolling her eyes. “More Imperial garbage. Try to keep that to a minimum, would you?”
“You’re going to like this next part, then,” Sal said. “It involves everyone but Imperials…”
ELEVEN
LOWSTAFF
There’s a line from one of my favorite operas that goes something like this.
“A thousand people may you find like a thousand flowers, a thousand scents upon the wind—here, savored, and gone.”
I really liked that line. Or I did before I came to the Scar, anyway. Since then, I’ve come to believe it gives people a little too much credit. In my experience, they’re not really like flowers, so much as they are like wounds, hundreds of little cuts you collect over the years.
Some of them you barely notice, healing up and leaving nary a mark behind. Some of them you feel deep and stitch up bad and you carry the scar of them for the rest of your days. And then some of them…
“OW!”
… you keep picking at.
“Would you fucking be careful?”
No matter how much you know you shouldn’t.
Liette looked up from her seat beside the bed, a decided lack of amusement playing across her face as she did. She held up a quill and daubed it in a glowing inkwell. She then proceeded to hold my arm down as she scrawled a faint script around my wound, pointedly ignoring my wince.
“Hold still,” she muttered, scribbling. “You’ve been riding with this thing all day. It’s a wonder it hasn’t gotten infected yet.”
“Yeah, a fucking miracle,” I replied, wincing again.
“Oh, don’t be such a baby,” she said. “I’ve seen you take worse hits than this.”
She glared up at me over her glasses, strands of hair falling down a sweat-plastered brow and making her look like some kind of especially annoyed animal in an especially nice-smelling thicket. She’d been at this for the better part of four hours—the first two spent pushing me into bed. But if she hadn’t aggravated my wound in doing so, I’d already be on the road to Stark’s Mutter.
The thunderbow had hit me harder than I thought. The scarf had kept it from punching through my insides, but it had hit hard enough to give me the makings of a wound. Then with the ride here, the breaking in, the traps, the shower, everything… it just decided now was the perfect time to show up and start bleeding everywhere.
She was right, of course. I had taken worse hits. Some of them on her behalf. I didn’t mind the pain. Not nearly as much as the delay.
Galta the Thorn. Kresh the Tempest. Riccu the Knock.
I could hear their names, over and over, in my head. Weighty words, carved out of iron and sharpened on a crude whetstone and stabbed directly into my back.
Taltho the Scourge. Zanze the Beast.
I could see faces whenever I blinked. Leering grins and laughter from a place without air or light that disappeared as soon as I opened my eyes.
Vraki the Gate.
I could hear his voice.
Jindu the Blade.
Whispering to me from that dark place.
“I’m sorry.”
And I felt a pain harsher than any wound could give.
He was out there. They all were. Every name on my list. And now that I had the worst of them cornered in some shitty little piece of the Scar, I was doing something other than chasing them down and putting the Cacophony through their teeth. I was lying here, like some mewling kitten, while some arrogant, know-it-all, piece of—
“FUCK!” I shrieked as a stinging sensation shot up my side.
“It’s worse than it looks,” Liette replied. “But you’ll be all right.”
“I’m not in pain. I’m just pissed.”
“Because it hurts.”
“Because you had whiskey all this time and didn’t tell me.”
She clicked her tongue as her quill continued to dart across my side, painting precise sigils around my wound, chiding me to keep still. Spellwrighting is an art, and like any art, it has its pupils and its masters. The art of convincing a sword it can explode into flame is trivial. The art of wrighting flesh so that a wound can be persuaded to heal faster demanded precision.
Precision that was not helped by the canvas—that is, me—twitching, screaming, or otherwise cursing. I could hardly help it, though—the sensation of my flesh closing itself wasn’t the worst agony I’d felt even in these last few days, but it still fucking hurt.
“You drink too much anyway,” she muttered.
“I disagree. If I’d had whiskey instead of wine, I wouldn’t have this urge to slap you right now.”
“And you fight too much,” she replied, a note of ire creeping into her voice.
“Again, I refer you back to your previously mentioned unslapped face as evidence of—”
“And you fucking complain too much,” she snapped at me suddenly, throwing down the quill and reaching out to seize me by the neck and force me to look down at my side. “Or do you not fucking see the wound?”
I did. A large gash had opened up around the bruise where the arrow had struck. Ringed as it was by her sigils, I could see how nasty it was.
“You always do this.” Her voice came out as an angry hiss as she shoved me away. “You always go off with a sword and that… that fucking weapon and you think you’re invincible and then you get bloodied and beaten and you come back to me and expect me to act like just because you don’t give a shit what happens to you, neither should I and…”
Her hands hung in the air in front of her, fingers extended and shaking as though she could just tear an answer out of thin air with them. Or like she could strangle me until she felt better. But, failing both of those, she curled them into fists and dropped them in her lap. She looked down at them, those hands that could make a piece of silk as strong as steel, and seemed to wonder why they couldn’t do what she wanted them to.
“Why can’t I make you stop?” she
whispered.
To me. To herself. It didn’t matter.
I still felt her words. Not like iron jammed in my back. But like glass, cutting something soft and important inside me.
I reached for her hand. And when she pulled away, I fully knew why.
“Do you remember the last time we saw each other?” she asked.
I let my hand drop. It fell on the sheets, leaden and limp. I remembered. I had heard a name muttered in a tavern when I went to buy a bottle of wine for her—I wanted something harder, but I wanted to do something nice for her. I had gotten it; we had shared it; I hadn’t said a word all night. The next day, I had stepped out just to go ask after that name.
Four months later, I had found Daiga.
And I had killed him.
And here I was.
“When you walked out my door, I swore it would be the last time I saw you,” she said, painfully soft. “Not because I didn’t want to see you again, but because I knew this might be the time you don’t come back and one day I’ll hear a tale about how Sal the Cacophony was rotting in a hole in the ground somewhere in the Scar I’d never find.”
“I came back.”
I wanted to sound plaintive. But even the words tasted sour on my tongue, insincere.
“You did,” she said. “And I knew you would because you always do. It’s always something that brings you here and something that makes you stay and I keep thinking that this time you’ll be here forever, but…” She closed her eyes. “I told myself this time I wouldn’t let you in. But you went and broke my fucking window, didn’t you?”
I don’t know why I reached out for her. Maybe I thought I’d make it better, like I could find the words I needed to say if I could just touch her, just hold her hand. But when I found her fingers in mine, I didn’t find any words.
I just found her hand. The hand that found me in the night when I couldn’t sleep. The hand that pulled me up over a ledge as a lot of people with a lot of swords chased after me. The hand that I let touch my scars, let linger on them, let make me feel like they weren’t part of a broken woman…
The hand that would be patching up my wounds instead of making things if I kept doing this.
This time, it was me who pulled away. I pushed myself up, my side screaming as I did. She lodged some kind of protest that I tried not to listen to as I headed for the door. She was right. It was me who kept coming back, me who kept bringing blood to her door. The right thing to do was leave. What curses she hurled at me, that was the price to pay. I could ignore words.
Her standing in the doorway, though, I couldn’t.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” she demanded, throwing her arms out as if either of them could stop me.
“Going,” I replied. I sighed. “You’re right, I need to—”
“You need to stop and think for once,” she snapped, neatly severing my words at the neck. “What in the fuck did I say that you interpreted as ‘let me just run out the door with a massive wound and go get another to go with it?’”
“But you just said I—”
“You didn’t hear anything I said because you don’t listen to me,” she growled. “You never fucking do. You always assume you know what the answer is and leave before I can even finish a sentence. So let me be perfectly clear when I tell you this.”
Her eyes turned deadly serious behind her glasses. Fuck me, had they always been that big?
“I know the names on that list,” she said. “I know what they’ve done. I know what’ll happen to you if you go after them.”
Liette was a Freemaker, a seeker of truth. She didn’t know how to lie. She didn’t know what would happen. Because if she did, she would know why I couldn’t stay.
“Birdshit,” I hissed. “If you really knew what they’d done, you’d know why them being summoned together by that letter is such a bad thing. You’d know how many people will die by their hands if I don’t stop them.” I narrowed my eyes. “You don’t know what they’ve done. You don’t know what they can do.”
“I…” She started to protest, but her voice, along with her gaze, fell silent. “Fine. I don’t know. But I know you ran off and got hurt trying to get their names. I know you touched your scars when you heard them. I know you whisper a name in your sleep sometimes.” She stared up at me over the rims of her glasses. “And it isn’t mine.”
People are wounds. They cut and they hurt and they bleed. Some hurt for a little while and go away. Some don’t stop hurting until you make them.
Liette was always out to make it stop. She couldn’t conceive of a world in which she couldn’t fix everything. It was what made me ask her name. It was what made me find out her true name. And it was what made her stand in front of me like this, her arms held out wide.
Like she could stop me.
I tried to push past her. She pushed back.
“Get out of the way,” I growled.
“No,” she replied.
“What, you think you can stop me?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“I’m Twenty-Two Dead Roses in a Chipped Porcelain Vase,” she replied, puffing up as much as she could. “I breathe life into the inanimate and answer the riddles of reality over tea. I can stop you.”
“Yeah?” I put a hand on the side of her head and rudely shoved her aside. “You’re also short.”
She staggered away as I stalked through the door. I hadn’t even cleared the threshold when I heard her snarl and felt her hand. She had reached for my arm, but her fingers found my wound instead, sending a lance of pain shooting up through my flank. I let out a scream and fell to my knees, clutching my side.
“SAL!” She fell beside me, arms on my shoulders. “I’m… I’m sorry! I just wanted to stop you! I thought… I didn’t mean…”
“Get off me,” I growled, pulling myself back onto my feet using the door. “I’m fine. I’m…”
“You’re hurt.”
“Because you fucking grabbed my wound, you prick!” I shrugged her off, tried to stalk back through the door. “Just let me…”
She didn’t. She was in my way again, trying to shove me back. I had half a foot and twenty pounds on her, but as it turns out, getting hit where you’re already bleeding makes it hard to fight back.
I reached out to shove her away again. She caught my wrist, shoved hard. I bit back a cry as I felt the wall against my back. I scowled down at her. She looked up at me.
And I saw her.
She wasn’t a fighter, but she was fighting me. She wasn’t a healer, but she was trying to help me. I could have shoved her away, kicked her in the shins, punched her, beaten her, broken her if I wanted to. And she knew all that. She’d seen me do it to people.
But she was still fighting me. She was still holding on to me.
And I don’t know what she saw when she looked back at me. I don’t know if she saw an ingrate or a Vagrant or just another wound that wouldn’t close. But she saw me.
And she leaned up.
And the silk of her dress pressed against my belly.
And her lips found mine.
I don’t know how long it lasted. It didn’t make anything stop hurting. But I didn’t pull away. And when it was over, I looked at her.
“What kind of two-coin opera shit…” I whispered. “Did you expect that to stop me?”
I don’t know if she did. All I knew is she turned away. And I couldn’t let her do that.
I grabbed her by her shoulders, whirled her around, and pressed her against the wall. I leaned down, pulled her into me. I found her taste, her scent, all of her in one breath that I drew in and couldn’t let go.
The blood left my legs. The wind left my lungs. The wound, maybe. Or maybe something else. I couldn’t think of what and I didn’t care. I collapsed, finding my way to the bed only by luck and her hands. We fell there, her atop me, and we saw each other.
And we knew how this ended. We knew it wouldn’t be happy. Not for people like
us. But maybe…
Maybe this was as close as we would get.
She leaned down, placed her lips upon the scar on my cheek. She went lower, kissed the one on my neck. She slid lower, her lips brushing the scar on my ribs, her breath hot on the scar on my belly, her teeth lightly grazing the scar on my hip as she pulled my belt free, pulled my leggings low, and found me with her tongue.
I closed my eyes. I felt her. And she felt me.
And, for a little while, we could pretend this was all we needed.
TWELVE
ELSEWHERE
I remember the first time I met him. Back then, it had seemed like a dream as well.
Like it did now.
I was small. And wanting to be smaller, I huddled in a corner and curled myself tight, pulling tiny knees up to my chest and cradling them in tiny hands. When I still wasn’t small enough, I buried my head and shut my eyes. Somehow, I thought, if I became small enough, no one would notice me. They’d look at me and think I was some misplaced thing that had no real reason to be here, in this great hall.
And then they’d let me go home.
So I shut my eyes. And I willed myself to be smaller. And I waited until what felt like an eternity had passed. And I opened my eyes.
And I was still there. In that big, empty hall full of empty beds that weren’t mine and brimming with people I didn’t know. They called it a barracks. I didn’t know what that word meant, but it wasn’t home. And no one was coming to take me there. And I started to cry.
I don’t know how small I was. I couldn’t remember the last time I cried. Nor do I know how long or how loud I cried. I didn’t know anything until I felt someone’s hands around my shoulders.
I don’t remember the man, though I’d seen him in my dreams. I don’t remember whether he was tall or short or fat or thin. But I remember his eyes. They were wide and white and full of fear. And his mouth fumbled with words I could barely understand.
“Don’t cry,” he hissed. “Don’t cry, don’t cry. You can’t cry. If you cry, they’ll think it’s my fault. They’ll think it’s—”
To be honest, I don’t remember the rest of what he said. I don’t remember much else.
