“I’m a witness,” Azmar adds. “Given your new status, I don’t think this is what you want.”
Cold calculation weighs down his tone. Grodd lowers me, but not enough for me to touch the floor. I focus on that trickle of air. In, out. In, out.
“You’ll witness, huh?” Grodd’s words are husky and raw. “You want to fight for her? You’ll lose.”
“Perhaps,” Azmar concedes, “but then again, I’ve never had the opportunity to challenge you.”
Grodd hesitates. I pull back his thumb just a little as he looks Azmar up and down. Grodd is everything a trollis warrior should be, but Azmar is not weak. Even if he did lose in combat, Grodd would not come out of it unscathed like he did with Perg.
“You can fall lower.” Azmar folds his arms across his chest. “Neither of you came down here unseen.”
A growl sounds low in Grodd’s throat. He stiffens, livid, the heat of his anger burning from his fingers into my neck.
And then he hauls me inside and drops me.
My lead feet can’t hold me up. I fall hard to my knees and palms, gasping for air, coughing nearly hard enough to empty my stomach. The dark room spins around me. My ears whistle. In, out. In, out.
“You are nothing,” Grodd spits at Azmar, and he stalks away, making sure to strike Azmar’s shoulder with his own as he goes. His footsteps fade, each a hair quieter than the last. My hand moves to my throat, to the bruises forming there. I look through mussed hair, watching Grodd’s shadow leave, watching him pass window after window until I can’t see him anymore. All the while Azmar stands there, head turned as though he listens as well, unmoving as the canyon wall so near to us.
And then the footsteps cease altogether, and I know Grodd is gone. Only then does Azmar approach me. As if he didn’t want Grodd to see.
I swallow against my raw throat and stare at Azmar. He must have seen me in the market, or in Engineering. Maybe another trollis warned him of Grodd’s pursuit. I don’t know, and I don’t care. He came. He saved me.
Never, never in all my life has anyone protected me from anything. My father, my siblings, neighbors, servants, friends, strangers. None of them ever stood up for me. None of them ever cared to put themselves in jeopardy for my sake.
The purplish light from the window washes away the earlier coldness from Azmar’s features. “Lark.” He touches my shoulder and kneels. My name sounds like the wind.
I cry, hot tears streaming over my cold cheeks. The sob that follows hurts. Throwing my arms around his thick waist, I weep into his shirt. Hold on as if the canyon’s maw still gapes beneath me. I want to speak, to thank him, praise him, bless him, but I can’t. The fear trickles out of me in the form of salty water, and I shake with the realization that I am safe.
Gradually, Azmar’s arms encircle me as well, and the maw beneath me closes and recedes. We stay like that for a long time, until my body no longer shakes, my tears stop, and my skin starts to itch beneath my wet dress. And in that moment, right before we pull apart, I realize I might be in more trouble than I thought.
And it has absolutely nothing to do with Grodd.
Chapter 12
No one knows what to make of me when I arrive. I’m sixteen, barely a woman but already taller than the others in the township. Andru’s mother takes pity on me, feeds me, puts me to use. I work hard. I want to repay her kindness, to carve a place into their family the way I carved lines into the water-starved earth with prayers that something, this year, would grow there.
Andru is older than me. Midtwenties. But he’s kind. Bandages my blisters, listens to me prattle on about stars. His demeanor is so calm, his expressions lively, his smile contagious. It’s easy to fall in love with him.
Maybe he thinks the same about me. Or maybe it’s the lack of available women. But he asks me to marry him two weeks after meeting me. I say yes. Happiness laces my every step, my every breath. Finally, finally, I have the family I’ve been searching for. Andru will make a kind and gentle husband. Our babies will have his dark eyes, maybe my blonde hair. Regardless, they will be beautiful, and we will raise them in a little cottage all our own. He starts building it the day after he proposes.
The crops are, indeed, doing a little better this year, thanks to a deep well built the autumn previous. The aerolass must have noticed. They are creatures of the sky, whom I thought had abandoned the human plains. They raid us mercilessly. Run down women and children, take precious oil and herbs by the sackful. Light homes on fire. Break us, so we won’t follow.
They come to our half-finished home. But I won’t let them have it.
I think Andru will be proud of me, defending our little bit of land and our promise to one another, a promise we’ll fulfill at the week’s end. I think he’ll understand.
I think he loves me.
But his parents mark me as a devil. Other villagers blame my presence for the raids. My heart breaks as Andru joins them. He never openly reviles me, and he does, at least, convince the others not to kill me.
And so I leave that little half-finished house, and all my dreams of our future together, behind.
That was Ungo.
I’d gone seeking refuge, with the faint hope that I might come across the Cosmodian and ask her to teach me, but I didn’t know her name, and she didn’t call Ungo home. But I found someone else, however brief his companionship may have been. Even now, nearly four years later, I think of Andru. Even now, I sometimes wish I had let the aerolass band destroy everything so that I might have kept something.
Unach notices my bruises the next morning, despite my attempt to hide them with my hair.
“What in the black pits is this?” She grabs my chin like I’m a dog and lifts my head, taking in the dark marks left by Grodd’s fingers. “You’d think you’d learn, getting mixed up with those humans!”
I pull from her grasp and rub my neck. “They’re friendly to me now, Unach.”
Her thick brows furrow. She spins toward Azmar, who winds the cords of his hair behind his head. “Do you know about this?”
Azmar hunches over in a chair, reading something, his dark, twilled hair falling over either shoulder, save for the top half that’s been spun into a knot at the back of his head, a pen sticking from it like an overlong thorn. The way the light falls, he’s half in shadow. The darker half shades him deep viridian, while the lit half colors him more like young buckthorn. His eyes glint like sunlit sandstone, and when he glances toward me, I can’t read his smooth expression. His words from last night flash through my mind. If you set her down and walk away, I won’t report you. And Azmar is a man of his word.
He doesn’t lie, he simply doesn’t answer, stands, and walks into the narrow kitchen.
But I didn’t make such a promise, and I have no desire to protect Grodd or to keep more secrets than necessary. “It was Grodd.”