“So it must be true,” I said.
He smiled. “Must be. I’ll show you one day.”
A clumsy silence fell. We both knew he would never show me, but his words had slipped out easily before he could stop them, as if he were talking to a friend.
There were more awkward moments.
Yesterday morning, I awoke to his arm slung over me, his chest nesting close to my back. He was unaware, probably seeking some warmth in his sleep. I lay there, not moving away, thinking about the weight of his arm, how it felt, the soft sound of his breaths, the heat of his skin. It was a reckless, indulgent minute, wondering what he dreamed of, and then sense flooded back in, and I carefully nudged his arm away before he woke up. I’d made a conscious effort not to touch him. I think he had done the same, but sleep had become its own thief, stealing away our intentions.
As we walked, I plied him with questions, sprinkled carefully so they would seem offhand and casual, mostly about Tor’s Watch. I learned it was a sprawling complex of homes and buildings that housed the offices of the Ballenger business empire. Their income came from multiple sources, but he didn’t tell me what they all were. When I thought he sensed I was digging, I changed the topic to something else, but I did learn that a hefty portion of their revenue came from the trading arena, a large exchange where buyers and sellers from all over the continent came to trade goods. It began with the grain grown in Eislandia, but with more trade opening up between the kingdoms since the new treaties, the arena had tripled in size every year since.
“Am I hearing this right?” I asked, laying on my thickest mocking tone. “You’re saying you have benefited from the new treaties?”
“In some ways. But not so much that we’re willing to give up who we are.”
He rubbed his bare finger just below the knuckle where his signet ring had once been. It was another tic I had noticed. He did it frequently when he talked of home. I imagined the struggle that had ensued when the hunter tried to take it from him. I was certain Jase hadn’t given it up easily. I supposed he was lucky he still had his finger at all.
I pushed my hand into the bottom of my pocket and fingered the warm circle of metal and wondered if I should give it to him, but it seemed too late now. He would wonder why I had taken it in the first place, and especially why it took me so long to hand it over. The keys I had taken for survival. The ring was for an entirely different reason.
In the year before the queen came, more of my stealing had become punitive. It was an angry tax I collected for answers I never received, and a retribution for all the fingertips of children taken by quarterlords and then fed to the swine. Most of the punitive thefts were for items that held no value. They could not fill a belly, but they filled me in other ways.
The smallest, most useless thing I ever stole was a shiny brass button that made the Tomac quarterlord so very proud. It protruded from his belly among a long line of shiny buttons on his jacket, a rare treasure he had bought from a Previzi driver. To me, they looked like fat golden rivets holding his belly in place. Stealing the middle button had ruined the entire showy effect. I had stalked him for a week, knowing just when he would pass down one small, crowded alley, throngs shoving against him, and I was there, my cap pulled low, my small curved blade in the palm of my hand. He didn’t know it was gone until he reached the end of the alley, and I heard his bellowing screech. I had smiled at the sweet sound. It was all the supper I needed.
Jase’s ring was just as useless to me as that button had been, and I had stolen it for the same reason. It was a symbol of power, a legacy they revered, and in one quiet move I had relegated it to the bottom of my dark, dirty pocket.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
JASE
She had an intense curiosity, and I was happy to feed it with stories about Tor’s Watch, but when it came to her own life her words became reserved and calculated. Being chained to someone hour after hour, day after day, gives every pause a hidden weight. I dwelled on the details she wouldn’t share.
What had her life been like in Venda? Or maybe, more precisely, what had they done to her? She was not the result of happy, content parents. It was like she’d been held prisoner in a cellar her whole life. She flinched at sun and an open sky. As soon as we hit the Heethe plateau, she kept her eyes straight ahead on some distant point, her focus like steel, her shoulders rigid, like she carried a heavy pack on her back. When I pointed out an eagle soaring above us, she barely gave it a glance.
I turned the conversation back to something that she seemed confident about—being a soldier. She told me about the various weapons that were forged for the Rahtan, the knives, ziethes, swords, rope darts, crossbows, and more. The fortress Keep assessed what best suited their strengths. Her sword and knives were presented to her by the queen when she became Rahtan.
“Have you ever used them?”
She raised a brow. “You mean, have I ever killed anyone? Yes. Only two so far. I try to avoid it if I can.”
If I can. She said it so casually, unruffled, the same girl who I had to coax riddles from each night so she could sleep under an open sky.
“Who did you kill?” I asked.
“Raiders,” she answered. A frown pulled at the corner of her mouth as if she was still disgusted by the encounter. “We were rear guard on a supply train. They didn’t see us hanging back. That was the point. But we saw them. What about you? Have you ever killed anyone?”
I nodded. Far more than three, but I didn’t tell her how many and I was glad she didn’t ask.
More than once, she caught me studying her. I tried to focus on the landscape, but my eyes drifted back to her again and again. She fascinated me, her contradictions, her secrets, and the girl that sometimes surfaced from beneath her tough soldier exterior, like when she spotted the wish stalks on the bank. The girl who forgot who I was and pressed a wish stalk to my ankle. In another world, another circumstance, I think we might have been friends. Or more.
I knew that I spent more time wondering about her than I should.
I scanned the foothills ahead, trying to concentrate. Trying to push my mind back to where it should be. I had ridden this way before but had never walked it all on foot—especially not barefoot, chained, and half starved. It was hard to judge distances. How much farther was it? Was there any chance of getting back before they sealed the tomb? What was going through all of their minds? Where the hell is Jase? No doubt search parties had been sent out, but no body had been found. I was certain that the Rahtan with Kazi were in my brothers’ custody by now, being interrogated. Mason could squeeze information out of anyone, but even Kazi’s companions wouldn’t have any hunch about what had happened to us. They couldn’t have known about the labor hunters any more than Kazi and I had.
Her comment, I saw the damage myself, kept resurfacing in my mind, the burning of the fields and the theft of all the settlers’ livestock. We had meant to scare them off. They had to leave. Our visit hadn’t been pleasant. The short horn had been a warning, a chance for them to gather up their things and move on, but that was all we took. Who took the rest?