Chapter Twelve
A blue eye.
It stares, distorted, from the polished glass. Arana leans closer, his wine-rankened breath fogging the surface and tinting the orb with a milky haze. It speaks nothing to him, offers no condolences, reveals no hint of any cosmic significance. It stares coldly back from the other side of the mirror, blasphemous.
Outside his parlor, the Temple sleeps—only the creaking echo of sentries on their rounds, the static of crashing waves, low murmurs from the corridor—all else is silence. He withdrew here early in the evening, his absence palpable in the Temple Hall. He imagines them whispering about him—he wonders if they quietly suspect that he is an impostor.
He narrows his eyelids down to slits and focuses solely on the little black pupil at the center of that mocking blue halo. He strains again to conjure the endless worlds that were promised him, and the lies of his father ricochet through his addled mind, the great and lofty bestowals—the cruel mixture of sincerities and deceptions.
Arana takes the glass in his hands and hurls it across the length of his parlor. It shatters against a portrait of himself, standing valiantly at the head of the reflecting pool, the Temple rising above him like some gaudy behemoth. Broken shards tinkle to the floor and the frame tilts askew. He walks to it and faces himself. Beams of light descend upon him from the churning skies, highlighting his features with a golden spirit glow. He pulls it from the wall and breaks the frame over his knee and extracts the stiffened canvas and rips it again and again, rending it to tattered shreds.
He takes the pieces and cants drunkenly toward his fireplace, steadying himself on one of the high-backed lounge chairs, and throws them into the flames. The mismatched collage of his own image catches afire and turns to fluffy white ash, the pieces curling in upon themselves. He sits and watches it burn, a sheen of perspiration on his hardened face and two small reflections of fire sparkling in the middle of those dark, bitter pupils, consuming a likeness of the very face that beholds it.
When the canvas is all but cinder, he rises and staggers to the door. The sentries startle when he bursts into the corridor.
Arana makes for the balcony and the men attending him hustle to keep up their escort. He acknowledges none of them, his mind consumed of only one thought—more effective methods. His arrhythmic footsteps reverberate through the empty Temple passageways, through the foyer, and finally to the sunken landing that spirals down to the underground keep. The guard unit stationed at the bottom watches him descend, perplexed looks falling over them. He stops in front of the barred wooden door that conceals the keep.
“Open it.”
The sentries do as they are bidden, lifting the bar and pushing the door open to the dismal interior. A tiny sconce fights off pitch-blackness. New courses of stonework lay drying in the back shadows, the tiers standing over waist high. Small, dark shapes race along the walls. It smells of decomposition. The man guarding Renning snaps awake and stands nervously at attention when his leader enters.
“Give me your knife,” says Arana. An instant of hesitation passes and the man offers it forward. Arana wraps his fingers around the hilt. “Get out.” They start back ever so gradually, riveted by their King’s every movement. “Get out!” he screams, trembling. They collect in the antechamber and watch. He paces over and slams the door, then turns to face his prisoners.
Renning hangs slack, his shoulders straining against the weight of his body. He does not stir. A short distance away, curled on the floor like a sleeping dog, lays the boy. His lip quivers. His slow, doleful countenance looks up at Arana, a glint of sorrowful hope in his sluggish eyes.
Arana squares himself in front of Renning. “Wake up.” He belts him across the jaw.
“Ungh…”
“Tell me your secrets.” He hits him again. “I know you can hear me. Tell me who you are.” He hits him again. “Tell me where you’re from.” Again. “Tell me.”
“A city…” says Renning, “to the north.”
“Lies.”
“A hundred miles… it’s there.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m nobody.”
“Why are you here?”
“I heard… such wonderful things about you.”
Arana throws an elbow into his teeth, scattering the few he has left out onto the floor. “Stop lying. Tell me. What do you know?”
“More than you ever will.”
Arana takes the knife and pulls the boy up by his hair. He squeals when the knife touches his throat.
“Put him down—”
“Tell me or he dies.”
Renning looks at the boy. A small droplet of blood slides down the knife’s blade and falls to the floor. The boy looks up in anguish. Renning tries to lift himself and his weak body gives out.
“Kill me.”
“I will not.”
“Please.”
Arana curves the blade in deeper and blood flows freely.
“Please,” he says again, tears coursing down his cheeks.
“Where are you from?”
“South.”
“Where south?”
“Please, please kill me.”
“Where south?” He pulls the boy closer and tightens his grip.
“It’s… it’s… a hundred miles…”
“You’re lying.”
Arana commits the act, quick and businesslike, and lets the body fall from his arms. It twitches on the ground in the final convulsions of death. Renning screams. Arana backs away and looks at what he has done, staring in terrified astonishment like a boy who’s just stumbled across his first carcass in the woods. His maddened eyes are spread so wide the entire circlets of blue are visible. He wipes the blade clean on Renning’s torn shirt and tucks it back in his belt.
“Tomorrow I’ll send for another one,” he says shakily. “We have lots of children.”
The heavy ashen cloud cover breaks apart and bright neon pink shines through the cracks. They stumble out of their tent and sit rubbing their eyes on the rain-soaked veranda, twigs and soggy clumps of leaves strewn about from the deluge.
“We slept too long.”
“Good,” says Lia.
She wanders alone down the garden path, stretching her arms above her head and yawning wide. Jack leads Balazir outside and ties him up by a patch of tall grass, then returns to collect their things. The matriarch peers around the gallery entrance and startles when Jack sees her. He gives a respectful nod and goes about his business.
“I’m sorry for what happened to you,” she says as she approaches.
“Thank you. It was good of you to let us stay.”
She gives the slightest of acknowledgements. Her mouth seems incapable of smiling. “It wasn’t my idea. These people that hunt you, are they many?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know anywhere that is safe?”
“No.” It is the answer she was expecting. “But you have to leave the coast. There must be someplace out there.”
“There are places. We passed settlements. We were afraid to approach them.”
“Why?”
“We were afraid they would see us as enemies. That they would kill us. We have something in common, you and I.”
“We do?”
“I was raised in a wonderful place. By the best people I’ve ever known. And I watched it all vanish before my eyes.”
“What happened?”
“It's gone. That's all I care to say.”
“Oh. I’m sorry. Maybe you can make a good place of your own, someday.”
“I’ve been trying for thirty years. Here,” she says, and hands him a satchel of fruit. “It’s not much.”
“Thank you.”
She looks in him intensely, then turns and walks back down the long gallery to begin preparations for her clan’s departure. Jack weaves between the tents and steps back out to where Balazir stands, absently chewing a mouthful of grass. He unties him and climbs in the saddle, then ambles down to get Lia.
“Look,” she says. “H-E-L-P. See?”
The word is spelled out across the downslope that drops away from the mansion. The stones that form the letters are sunken halfway down into the earth, with a netting of yellowed weeds covering them—they have been laid out as such since before Kas and her friends ever arrived here.
“I wonder if they ever got it,” he says, and pulls Lia up behind him. He touches the reins and Balazir steps carefully off the mossy patio and trudges across the enormous stone E and moves on down the hill.
“It looks like they wrote it for people in the sky to see.”
“Maybe they did.”
The burgeoning sunlight steams the rainwater out of the drenched earth and makes the air heavy and damp. Jack pushes the horse as fast as he can on the soft ground and they start to find their course again.
“Can you look at the map?” he asks. Lia digs around and pulls it out. “See that road we were on?”
“I think so.”
He scoots sideways and points to a crooked line that stretches down the length of the long shoreline.
“How come their map is so good?”
“They must’ve wandered around a lot.”
“That road goes all the way south.”
“Yeah, it looks like it does.”
“We’re going to follow it?”
“We’re going to stay close to it. I don’t want to go right on it, though.”
“Why not?”
“Don’t know. A bad feeling.”
Lia turns around, itching with paranoia all over again, and surveys behind her the vigorous stretch of lush country they’ve just covered. She scours the northern horizon’s multicolored highlands and along the shadowy folds of interior woodlands, searching for any sign of the last two horsemen from the decimated search brigade. A family of deer traipses through the grass, lowering their sleek heads to graze and then bounding off to other domains. She sees no warriors giving chase, but that itchy feeling still remains that she and Jack are not alone out here. She shifts around and settles in for a long ride. Away back in the distance, engulfed by a scruffy parcel of dense growth, shines that little flash of glinting light that had caught her eye yesterday, and she turns her head and does not see it.
“Hurry up, we’ll lose them.” Cirune dances his knife blade absently between his fingers. His clothes are still damp and his skin is paling.
“They have a map,” Halis says tonelessly, his voice coarse and gravelly. He sits astride his horse and peers off through his scope.
“Now you’re just seeing things. Give it to me.”
Halis canters back and thrusts the scope over. Cirune takes it and works himself around to a good sightline, then squints down into the eyepiece. The girl is folding something up and stowing it in the pack slung over her shoulder.
“Still think they’re just roaming around?”
“No. But I still think you’re scared of the boy.”
Lia giggles and her insides feel weightless as Balazir leaps over the top of an uprooted tree trunk and runs steeply down the ravine on other side. He careens around a bend in the shallow crick bed and speeds off again, his nostrils flaring and his stout-ribbed sides heaving splendidly. Jack grins and spurs him just a touch more and he responds fiercely, his heavy hooves pummeling the forest floor. Old oak and pine trees and tall waving grass streak by in a furious blur of green, freckled through with golden poppies and sprays of purple.
The old road is to their right and it meanders down through the cut rock and curves back along the precipitous rind that lines the coast, its far edge crumbling and falling away. Some stretches of it are simply gone, replaced by gaping chasms that cascade down to the sandy, dreck-covered beach.
“I hope they leave,” says Lia.
“They will.” Jack tells her about the brief conversation he had with the stern old woman. “Been walking most of thirty years, she told me. Thirty years. What was I thinking?”
“Huh?”
“Us,” he says. “I thought we’d just… I don’t know… settle down someplace nice. Build a house and live out on our own. But there aren’t any nice places.”
“Did she tell you what happened to her?”
“Her home is gone, that’s all she said.”
“Think someone burned it?”
“Burned it or stole it, I don’t know which.”
“Maybe it was another king.”
“I sure hope not,” says Jack.
“There must be more of them out there. They probably blew the world up to begin with.”
“I never heard of one before Nezra, but if there were others like him then they must’ve.”
“How could people do that? All the horrible things they’ve done. Burn people, Jack. Burn people to death.”
“It’s because of what happened to them…”
“Bad things happened to us—we don’t go around burning people.”
“Well… no.”
“I just don’t understand how they can be so nice and so mean at the same time.”
“They’re wicked.”
“But they’re not,” says Lia. “They’re not wicked. In the kitchen, if Calyn saw me looking sad, it made her sad, too. But when I tried to tell her what happened to my parents, about that night they died… she just wouldn’t listen. She didn’t care. She didn’t want to know about it. And the other girls, too, they were the same way. They’re not wicked, most of them.”
“Do you think King Arana is good?”
“Maybe. If he was somewhere else, with different people, maybe he would be. Maybe he wouldn’t think everything belonged to him.”
Jack looks at her sideways and her face is full of bashful sincerity. A good Arana. The thought had never occurred to him. The only Arana he can envision is the one he has known, the one who ordered the slaughter of countless villages across the countryside.
“What if I was born in his place?” Jack poses. “What if I was born there, and I was told all those things about being everybody’s protector? Would I turn out like him?”
“No, you wouldn’t, you’re… oh… ohh—” She stops herself, chewing her lip pensively. “Maybe you would.”
“I killed Feiyan and he didn’t have any weapons,” says Jack. “They were holding him on the ground, and I killed him. I killed Braylon.”
“Yeah,” says Lia, “I know.”
“Do you think it makes me wicked?”
Lia softens her eyes on him and shakes her head. “No, Jack.”
“But, why not? Feiyan was doing what they trained him to do. I don’t know what choice he had, ever since he was little they told him what to do and he did it. They told him he’d be wicked if he didn’t do it. And he has a family and two boys and they love him, and I killed him.”
“When he did what they told him, did he feel bad after?”
“I don’t know.”
The steep, pine-covered mountains have been encroaching on their path, little by little, forcing them closer to the coast and the sheer drop-off that lies at its edge. Their shadows pool directly below them in the noonday sun, and the airborne moisture from the nightlong downpour makes their skin hot and sticky with sweat-grime.
Gradually the rising foothills force them back toward the old road. Jack can’t see it, but he knows it is there. Only the trimmed contours of the landscape betray its true path—the ground underfoot looks the same all around. Ahead of them lies a slender concourse that clings tightly along the slanted face of the mountainside. It snakes away for some distance, then curves out of sight. They look around behind them one last time before committing to the passage, then Balazir steps timidly forward onto the constricting pathway.
The surf below foams and slushes up onto the rocks and the gulls call out and swirl shiftlessly overhead, and all around them is white noise and insolent squawking. The steady jet of ocean wind dries their damp foreheads and cools them considerably, and they pass the sloshing skin back and forth and take long drinks of the stale water. As the sun tracks downward, it throws light on the towering western face and brightens the tips of the close-packed pine trees, stretching above them like an armory of green arrows.
Jack rides along the ascending shoulder, keeping as much distance from the edge as he can manage, picking their way along the thinning shelf like a couple of long-lost sherpas.
“Anything coming up behind us?” He speaks quietly and keeps his eyes trained on the line ahead.
“Nothing,” she says after a spell. “So this is the way they came, Ethan and Renning?”
“I guess so.”
“They came up this way, going north… and they found Kas and her family, and they stayed with them… and then they went to the Temple…”
“And they got caught.”
“Will they really kill them?”
“Probably. They don’t like it when people get close to the Temple.”
“What were they doing?”
“I have no idea.”
“Has it ever happened before?” she asks.
“Not for a long time. Just these two, I think.”
“Do you think they were running, too?”
“Running?”
“Like us. I mean, if they came from such a good place, why would they leave it? Why didn’t they just stay?”
“They weren’t running. Could’ve been looking for something, though.”
“Looking for the Temple?”
“Why not? If they did know the prophet, he might have told them about Arana… maybe they wanted to go up and see for themselves.”
“If they knew what Arana does, that’s enough reason to stay away. They’d be stupid to go there and sneak around.”
“I hope they’re not stupid,” says Jack. “That’d make us pretty stupid, too, following their map and doing all this for them.”
“True,” she says, looking around at the precarious situation they’ve gotten themselves into, plodding along this degenerate trail. “But this does feel a little stupid.”
“A little. I think Kas thought we were crazy.”
“You’re still thinking about Kas, huh?”
“I’m not. I’m just—”
“I don’t think I like the way she looked at you.”
“Yeah,” says Jack, “me either.”
Lia squawks louder than the circling gulls and doubles over onto his back, laughing. “Yes, you did. I saw you blushing.”
“No.”
“Ohh,” she gasps, “you’re blushing again!”
“It’s the heat.”
“It’s Kas running around with no clothes on.”
“You’re crazy.”
“I know. And you’re blushing.” She pokes his cheek.
“Stop it.”
“No,” she says, and pokes him again.
Jack looks back over his shoulder at her crooked smile. Her hair is matted and filthy, dark hollows under her eyes, ripped and bloodstained gown, and she looks as pretty as she did at the Temple parade. She looks back with mischievous sweetness.
“Jack…”
“Yes?”
“The road is gone.”
“Huh?”
He swivels back just as Balazir rounds the bend, and up ahead a landslide has carried off an entire section of road. The face of the mountain runs down slanted, like an enormous dirt ramp, into the ocean. Stunted trees sprout from of the muddy incline, half as tall as the surrounding pine forest. Jack halts Balazir.
“Oh no.”
“What are we gonna do?”
Jack puts a hand over his mouth and looks despairingly at the missing terrain. “We can either go back the way we came… or we can try to go up and around.”
“I don’t want to go back.”
Jack nods.
They dismount and grope their way up the first couple rises, then urge Balazir to follow. He treads the steep pitch with more agility than either of them. They grab roots and branches and pull themselves along in tiring little bursts, and as the road diminishes with the sickening height, Jack and Lia fall back on an embedded slab of rock and lie panting and shaking. Only a few scant drops fall from the mouth of the waterskin when Lia tilts it back and drinks.
“Okay,” says Jack, “now we just have to get back down.”
“I’m so thirsty, I almost miss the rain.”
“Don’t say that. We’ll find water when the road widens out.”
“How far is that?”
“Not sure, really.”
Lia crawls off the mossy slab and descends with a controlled slide. Balazir stands sideways to their bearing and takes slow, measured steps that angle down the face of the mountain. He is not as sure-footed on the descent, dangling his hoof out before him as if he doesn’t quite know where to place it. Halfway down, his hooves slip and he churns his great hind legs in search of ground that does not shift or crumble, and to no avail. He falls to his side and rolls, his legs kicking out above him in a wild panic. They stop and watch breathlessly as he struggles, hoping against all else that he does not maim himself as he slides frantically down toward the chasm.
“Balazir!”
He grinds to a halt, a hair’s breadth away from careening over the edge and tumbling to the broken rocks on the shore. The fear in his face sends harsh pulses through their nerves. Balazir props his hooves in front of him and slowly rights himself, then pushes his massive body onto a flatter tier. He stops and breathes for an instant, then skitters down the rest of the slope and looks back up at them with watery black eyes.
Jack scrambles down, sliding from tree to tree as fast as he can. He jumps off the last boulder and goes to Balazir and takes his lead and walks him forward.
“Is he okay?” Lia calls.
“I think so,” says Jack, rubbing his side and looking him over. “He’s not limping.”
They stop there on the western edge of the world and take the last of the fruit from their pack and sit looking out over the expanse. Jack works his knife around the core of the remaining apple and quarters it and feeds two quarters to the horse, then splits the rest with Lia.
When they’ve finished their meager rations, Jack and Lia step cautiously to the edge and peer over.
“I can’t believe they built a road here.”
“I know,” says Jack. “I would have just flown everywhere.” He rubs a handful of dust between his palms like talc.
Lia goes and scratches her fingernails gently along Balazir’s coat and he nickers softly. He swings his large head around and sniffs at her shoulder, where sweat and melted honey trickle down, and drags his rough tongue across her upper arm, lapping at the salty sweetness around her bandages.
“Balazir,” she squeals.
Balazir grunts and pursues her more aggressively. She laughs and pulls her arm back, and the horse regards her with his drawn, serious face.
“Don’t do that,” she tells him.
He chuffs and saunters away.
“Are you okay?”
“He tried to eat my arm.”
“I see that.”
She slicks horse spit off her shoulder and wipes it on her nightgown. Jack ties off the drawstring on their pack and pulls himself into the saddle, and Lia slides on behind him and they advance southward as the afternoon dwindles. Balazir dips his head and drinks from a clouded, muddy puddle left from last night’s rain. Jack ventures a couple small sips, foul and dirt tasting, and decides to hold out until they cross something better.
They weave between the thin scattering of pines and ride lightly over another veering camber that clings to the outer shoulder of the mountain. Around the way, the road opens into a small sanctuary, shrouded on all but one side by rising inclines and overhanging forest. Stone chimneys stand amidst the foliage as tombstones for the homes they once warmed. Not much else stands besides.
They trot through the lost mountain hamlet searching for water. In a shallow ditch near the deepest reaches they find it, thin rivulets trickling down off the rocks and collecting at their feet. Balazir gulps about a dozen mouthfuls before they’ve even climbed all the way down off the saddle, and they dip their heads in right after. Jack traipses around, stretching his legs and inspecting their whereabouts, and Lia grazes Balazir around the grassy channels that run through the burg.
She pokes around in the soggy dirt with a broken stick, turning up various odds and ends, doorknobs, an ornament of eagle’s wings, broken utensils, and a drab, bent wheel with disintegrating spokes. Balazir watches sluggishly, with tufts of grass poking out of his mouth as he chews.
“Jack?” She drops the stick and paces around looking for him.
“Over here,” he calls, walking toward her with something in his arms.
“Jack, don’t you dare.”
“Easy,” he says, “it’s dead.” He stretches the coiled snake out and holds it above his head, thick and ropy, with black and white stripes alternating down its length. “We can eat it.”
“Did you kill it?”
“Yeah.”
“Gross.”
Jack smiles and loops it back up and packs it away. “Balazir doing okay?”
“He’s eating a lot.”
“I guess that’s good. When he’s done, let’s get out of here.”
“It’s too bad, you know… I could almost live here. Look what I found…” She shows him the little metal wings she dug out of the topsoil, and dances them through the air in a drunken flight pattern. “Screeee! Screeee!” she says.
“What is that?”
“It’s a bird.” She swooshes it past his head, then pitches it away in the brush. “Okay, let’s go.”
They leave the pleasant little recess behind and carry on down the narrow crust that winds them southward. Past several more harrowing curvations, the mountains begin to level off and their path turns away from the narrow coastal drop-off and sweeps through the low foothills. The entire landscape flattens out and slopes gently down toward the sandy shoals at sea level, and a late afternoon fogbank creeps inland and piles up against the far-off hillsides like an enormous snowdrift.
“Why are we stopping?”
“We’re going to switch places.”
Lia brightens and turns rosy as she jumps down off Balazir, then she hooks her foot in the stirrup and swings up onto the front of the saddle. Balazir sways his head around and snuffles at her boot. Jack climbs up behind and slips his arms through hers and shows her how to hold the reins. He takes her hands and touches the reins to the side of the horse’s neck and tugs back gently with the other hand and they ride around in a wide circle while Lia hitches with laughter.
“Now just pull back a little and he’ll stop.”
“Okay… Now what?”
“When you’re ready, squeeze your legs together, give him a light touch with your heels, and he’ll go.”
She does so and Balazir lumbers forward.
“Why is he going so slow? How do I make him go fast?”
“Uh… why don’t we just go slow for a little while. Practice turning.”
“Okay.” She rides a tight figure eight and smiles back over her shoulder at him. “I’ve been watching you.”
“Oh, I see. You want to go fast?”
She nods furiously. Jack tells her how to send the signal and she clenches her heels swiftly and they surge into a loping gallop, charging across the open field through the bright sunlit fog.
They settle and build a small fire at eventide, and they sit quietly and roast their snake meat. Lia looks idly at the map and ponders the great distance they’ve covered in the last two days, and the nascent, unknown world she’s seen for the first time. After they’ve eaten, Jack tamps out the fire and they lie down for the night. Lia falls asleep first and Jack listens to her soft purring as he tries to unwind his tense muscles and calm his strobing mind.
He closes his eyes.
Crickets and wind song and whispered neighs from Balazir, and above this delicate refrain he hears the trampling of hooves riding down on them.
“Lia, get up.”
“Hmm?”
“They’re coming!”
He dashes to Balazir and unfastens his bow and wheels around with an arrow drawn back. Lia runs to him and clings to his back, holding the kitchen knife in her small, trembling hand.
“Untie him. You ride, and I’ll shoot.”
Balazir shuffles his hooves and whinnies as he hears their approach, and Lia’s quick hands fumble in the pitch dark for his lead. The silhouettes of two horsemen rise over the embankment and scream toward them.
“Forget it,” says Jack. “Go!”
She hesitates for an instant, then turns and runs for cover. The horsemen split their course, one following Lia’s trajectory, the other narrowing in on Jack. He trains his bow on the shadowed form and releases the string, grimacing as the arrow strikes the foreleg of the horse, missing the rider completely. The horse rears back and screams. Jack fires off another shot and Halis dodges around the side of the horse and loses his hold on the reins. He tumbles to the ground and launches himself at Jack with his machete drawn back.
Jack backpedals and tries to slide out another arrow, but Halis is gaining too fast to maneuver. He swings the long bow in a wide arc and cracks it in half against Halis’s blade, knocking it aside. Halis reaches out and clamps his free hand over Jack’s throat and pushes him to the ground and falls on him with a barrage of punches leveled at his face and sides. Jack raises his forearms up to shield himself and Halis gnashes and snaps at him like a feral boar. Jack tries to pull away, only to be dragged back and elbowed sharply in the ribs. Lia screams as Halis works his knee onto Jack’s chest and keeps on pummeling him.
Cirune rounds the thick trunk that Lia hides behind and snatches at her again. She swings out with her little knife and Cirune pulls his mount to the side and doubles back on her. She stumbles away, clutching their pack against her chest, looking wildly around for Jack. Cirune feints to her left, then rears his horse back and crosses to her right. He reaches a hand down and clutches a tangle of her hair, then spurs his horse forward, dragging her along behind. He rides to the tree where Balazir is hitched and draws out his blade and cuts the lead, then throws his foot out and kicks roughly into Balazir’s side and sets him running.
“No!” she screams.
Cirune hefts her up by the hair, then works his other arm under her shoulder and drags her over the pommel and rips the pack out of her hands. From the corner of her eye she sees Jack on his back, his face a mask of blood.
Halis bears down on his throat. Through the blood in his eyes Jack can see nothing—he flails his arms out, reaching for anything. He feels along Halis’s shoulders and lays his palms across his face, and he can feel the rippled flesh on his cheek, the hollowed indentations and the jagged scar. Lightheaded and on the verge of unconsciousness, he presses a thumb into Halis’s eye socket and bursts it open. He emits the same horrible sound he made at the quarry years ago when Jack ruined his face the first time. He scampers out from underneath the thrashing form and kicks his heel into Halis’s jaw, then pounces on him like a true savage.
Cirune rides around and barrels toward Jack with his long blade ready to slice down into him. Lia struggles in his grasp, holding her knife tightly with the blade pointing back toward her wrist. She works her arm around behind her, aiming for the soft parts, and sinks the kitchen knife into Cirune’s side and he lets out a tortured howl.
Jack fumbles in the dirt for the machete and he swings it and chops it squarely into the pale meat of Halis’s throat and a river of steaming blood pours out. He stands and staggers clumsily forward and falls to his knees.
Frantically, Lia works herself off the saddle and drops to the ground. Cirune twists his hand deeper into her hair and rides over to Halis’s deserted horse, skittish and backpacing away, and lashes it, corralling it toward the direction he sent Balazir. He tries again to pull Lia onto his horse and she claws feverishly at his forearm, drawing thin streaks of blood.
“Jack! Jack, help!”
On shaking legs, Jack stands and immediately falls to the dirt again. He feels around for loose stones and begins hurling them at the receding horseman. The first couple go wild, and he finally connects with the third. Cirune flinches and Lia drives her elbow into his ribs. She bucks back against the knife handle, still lodged in his stomach, then leverages herself against the horse’s barrel-chest and pushes away. She feels a tearing on her scalp, and when she tumbles to the ground she sees Cirune lording over her with a fresh, red clump of hair in his hand.
Jack is on his feet now and advancing steadily. He looks like he’s been painted in blood. He fixes on Cirune and sways the machete before him like a pendulum. Nimble Lia scrambles backwards on the ground, then leaps into a lopsided sprint. Cirune makes a false start toward her and Jack steps into his path and they eye each other viciously. With increasing dread Cirune feels along his torso and fondles the knife handle that protrudes from his side. He winces and cries out again, weighing his options behind a panicked veil, then pulls the reins to the side and tears off after the other two galloping steeds. The machete drops from Jack’s hand and he sinks to the ground and watches Cirune ride away.
“Lia…”
“I’m here.”
“Are you hurt?”
“I’m more worried about you.”
“I’ll be fine.” He pulls himself up and looks around. “Where’s the… the…”
“He took it,” says Lia. “He took everything.”
Jack puts his head in his hands, and as Lia starts toward him he rushes away and kicks Halis’s corpse in the head. He screams and stomps brutally down, again and again, shattering the dead skull underneath.
“Jack! Stop it!”
He crumples at Halis’s feet and stares blankly into the night. Lia settles behind him and wraps her arms around his neck.
“He killed my mother.”
“Jack, I’m so sorry.” She holds the pendant in her hand, wearing its surface down with her thumb, then slips it back in her gown and turns Jack’s face toward hers and caresses his blood red cheek.
“We shouldn’t stay here,” he says. “In case he comes back.”
“We don’t have a map…”
“I know.”
“Where are we going to go?”
“South.”
They brace themselves against one another and start to move, holding nothing with them. The only map that guides them now is the scattering of distant light across the night sky, cast down from distant, faraway worlds some untold aeons ago. They put the North Star at their backs and walk slowly into the enfolding darkness.
With no pressing deadlines in the shop, the Temple girls laugh and carry on brightly. Since the days of the infiltration, their initial fear has transformed into a kind of exuberant solidarity, spurred on by talk that a larger invasion was suppressed, put down in its infancy by the strength of the ethereal shield that protects them, and that order has been restored and the perpetrators of this vile act safely imprisoned. They feel, at last, that things are getting back to normal.
Narrow aisles run between the tables and workstations and Elise navigates them breezily and settles in with the new apprentices and inspects their simple stitchwork.
“How are you coming, Phoebe? Let me see.” Phoebe hands up the dress. It has frayed, uneven seams and crimps and puckers where none should be. “Hmm, okay,” says Elise, “I think you’re going a little too fast. Let’s try again, and take your time with it, okay?”
“Okay.”
Though her work is fairly lacking, she plucks the needle in and out with unmatched vigor. She makes a face so serious it’s comical and pulls out the thread she has spent most of the morning on and gets ready to start all over. Before long, she is absorbed in childish reverie and she does not notice, and is still far too young to understand, the distrustful glances that are stolen toward her and the other outsiders.
A couple of the native girls start humming together the melody of a spirited anthem from their lessons, sotto voce and only sometimes in-tune. Several others join in playfully and their little singalong gains momentum until they nearly abandon their work altogether to trill out the esoteric chant of their strength and supreme heritage. Phoebe sways with their odd rhythm and belts out the chorus as loudly as her small voice will allow.
Jeneth buries her head in her work. She mouths the words along with them, her face strained and remote. If she were not numb to sensation, she would feel the slipping pin pricks that sting her fingertips whenever her concentration falters. Each meticulous stitch she completes brings her closer to the moment when she can leave the shop, gather Mariset from the nursery, and hurry back to the refuge of her cottage—though even that haven has grown cold as of late. She and Eriem fought about the necklace again last night. The weight of his accusation presses on her still, and she assembles words and phrases in her head she hopes will convince him unquestionably that she is not trading favors with some outside force, assisting the spies or working in concert with her runaway friends to subvert the Temple and its well-being. She will try again to save what they have, though a growing voice tells her it is hopeless, and she dreads another sleepless night, icy and touchless.
The girls reach their crescendo and erupt in ripples of laughter.
“Don’t you like our song?” asks Akena. She gives Jeneth a crafty look from across the table.
“I like it,” Jeneth says, eyes focused on her work.
“Doesn’t seem like you do.”
They huddle on the far side of the table, looking askance and giggling. A sociable girl name Jespira leans in and utters some bit that sets her friends off again.
“What did you say?” Jeneth asks, snapping her head around.
Jespira’s tight lips bend in a patronizing smile and she gives no response.
“She said maybe you’d be happier out in the woods somewhere.”
Jeneth tries to stare them down coldly but flushes under their concerted scrutiny, and she looks back to her stitching and can feel their eyes working her over hotly. She collects up her things and backs away from the table and scurries down the aisle toward the station where Phoebe sits. Akena heads her off and grips her by the elbow.
“We don’t know what your friends did,” she hisses, “but we know they did something.”
“You don’t know anything. They didn’t have anything to do with what happened.”
“Oh, yes they did, and you helped them get away, didn’t you? You helped pass a message to those men. We know more than you think we do, and if you think about trying anything like that again we’ll be watching.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about. Let me go,” she says, and jerks her arm back. Jespira laughs and Jeneth glares so spitefully it pulls the attention of the entire shop their way. Jeneth turns away from her gloating face and paces quickly down the aisle and settles next to Phoebe, flustered and breathing heavily.
“Hi.”
“Hi, Phoebe. Want some help?”
“Mmmhmm. What did that girl say to you?”
“Nothing. Just ignore them.” Jeneth turns Phoebe’s dress in her hands listlessly, self-conscious of the watchful eyes that observe them.
“Why are they laughing at you, did you do something funny?”
“No.”
“Oh. Well, you must have and not known it, like when I had a green bean in my hair from eating and I didn’t know it until I got to my room and everybody laughed at me…”
“How did you get food in your hair?”
“From eating.”
Jeneth sighs out a constrained laugh and scoots closer to Phoebe. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“Just… thank you.”
The girls around them take up humming a new melody and the light chatter bubbles back to its previous level. Jeneth helps pull the rest of the faulty stitching out of Phoebe’s dress and shows her how to line up the seam and stitch it together evenly.
“How come mine’s not as good as yours?”
“Because you need more practice.”
“All I do is practice.”
“Are you getting better?”
“Yes.”
“See?”
“When will I be as good as you?”
“Just keep trying and you’ll get it someday. It just takes time.”
“I want to make my own dress when I get bonded, I want to make it all by myself and make it the best dress of any of the girls.”
“Well… you have a lot of time to think about that.”
“It’s going to be so long it goes all the way across the Temple and squirrels and birds can stand on it and ride along behind me.”
“Are you going to put green beans in your hair?”
“Yeah, probably gonna to put a lot of them.”
“I can’t wait to see that.”
The shop door opens and two sentries stride through. The girls look up briefly then return to their work and their song. Elise gets up from her workstation and steps to the entrance to meet them and they speak quietly for a long moment. Jeneth darts her eyes up and catches Elise looking back her way, a worried look on her face. The two men pace through the shop, heading straight toward her, and her palms begin to sweat. Her mind floods with all the accusations and rumors that have swirled through the Temple’s gossip circles and she fears they’ve come to imprison her in the keep. In an instant her mouth seems to dry of all moisture and she watches, mortified, as the sentries come to a halt directly behind her.
“Which is Phoebe?”
“I am.” Phoebe looks up bashfully with her bottom lip tucked under.
“Come with us.”
“Where we going?”
“You’ll find out when we get there.”
“Why?”
“King’s orders.”
All work draws to a standstill and every girl, native and outsider alike, is riveted by the unusual encounter. Phoebe looks around shyly and starts to follow the men out of the shop.
“No,” Jeneth scrapes out with her dry, nerve-wracked voice, and she watches helplessly as Phoebe is led away. They have heard rumors of a little boy taken from the fields in just this manner. He was never returned.
“Where are you taking her?” Elise asks as they move past.
They ignore her and proceed through to the corridor, leaving the shop behind in stunned silence. Phoebe pads softly down the sandstone walkway and looks up curiously at the men who escort her, their rigid faces trained straightforward. They take her through the grand foyer to a secluded offset niche and descend the tight staircase. At the bottom of the landing an old man crouches in the darkness. Phoebe is taken to him.
“Are you Phoebe?” asks Keslin.
“Yes.”
“That’s a very pretty name. Thank you for meeting me.”
“You’re welcome.”
He pulls her close and peers into her frisky little eyes. “You look like a clever young girl. Tell me, Phoebe… do you like to play make believe?”
Tacking northbound on the mountain road, Cirune drives his steeds. He bears down with his heels, gripping the reins like a drowning man, his face a portrait of agony. His stomach is wrapped and clotted with stiff blood, and each time his horse’s hooves rebound off the hard ground it sends a fresh spike of pain into his side. Halis’s injured horse wants to veer off course and run wild, and each time he rides around to shepherd it back he loses valuable time and is contented to let it go forever the next time it strays. Noble Balazir keeps pace brilliantly.
Through the winding pass and over the hills and valleys he rides, hurtling on a straight shot back to the Temple, the lone survivor of the ill-fated search brigade. He fears bleakly the disgrace he will face at having lost the runaways after coming so close, but he hopes the pack lashed to his pommel will keep him from the pit, if he lives long enough to deliver it, for if that scrap of hide contains what he believes it does—nothing less than a map to the lost city of their dreams—then it will be more than enough salvation to see him through.