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kasihyaTitle: it's an art that's hard to teach
Character: Siaras
Location: Dein Efyd
Date: Day Two
The sun burned into my skin, and the smell of humanity filled my nose as it wafted up from the ground to where I stood: atop one of the shorter stone monuments that littered the sunken plaza between the manor and the city’s temple. The monument commemorating the conquering of the city by the Enwythau would have been more appropriate, but it was also nearly forty feet tall, so I’d settled for a ten-foot one instead. It worked out that the carvings on this one had been fairly recent, so the stone letters were still deep enough to make good grips.
‘Many faces I see here,’ I cried to the small crowd assembled around me. ‘And all of them tired. There is no shame in admitting it — why should you not be tired? Why should you not be weary to the point of breaking? For seventy, eighty years you — like your parents before you, and their parents before them — have toiled at the behest of the Enwythau people. At the behest of the Ulelweir, as they call themselves: the Chosen Seven of the Four Armed Deity. But why should this remain so? Have you not yet served your time? The turning of the calendar by the Mandate brought the downfall of the Meurig empire before this, and should it not also sweep the Enwythau Empire to the ground as well?’
I surveyed my audience. Faces upturned, eager, but cautious still. Well, that wouldn’t do. ‘I see it in your faces: why now, you ask? And why do you come seeking a fight, why do we not let the great circle do its work? Well, I will tell you. When a tree grows old, it does not fall immediately. First, it must rot for many years. When it finally comes toppling to the earth, the tree remains. The rainy season comes, and soaks it through, and then smaller things — lichens and mushrooms — will grown on its trunk. Soon, there will be flowers. As the plants root, they take away the structure of the tree, devouring it for themselves. This causes the fallen tree to break apart. In time, it becomes one with the ground around it, and new saplings spring up over it. With enough time, one of them will overpower the others and take its place.
‘On the other hand, there are the trees that we cut down. You all are farmers, I can see this, I know this: it is all that you are permitted to be. You know that here, far from the river or the sea, the best way to create a fertile field is to cut down the trees, even sometimes the great ones, and burn them. This very quickly creates an area for you to grow whatever you like with the season permitting.
‘Now, imagine that the Enwythau empire is like a great tree. Yes, you can let it decay and rot in its own time — but who knows when that time may be, or when it happens, what will spring up in its wake? And remember, that tree rotted from the inside out long before it fell. It could be that if we wait, it will be the Mynyoed, sweeping in from the north with their blasphemous naming of every god they come across and their laws that would have you marrying off your daughters to their sons while their sons hold the power to rule. Is that what you want for the future of this city?’
I paused, panting for breath, to let that one sink in. Faces turned away from me and to each other, murmuring I caught the eye of one boy, no more than twelve, staring up at me with wide eyes, and I smiled at him, reassuring. Then I resumed, for my favorite part of this speech.
‘But there is another option! Rise. Do not wait for the tree to rot and fall. Rather, cut it down with the axes of justice and repayment of a debt long overdue. We pay for the greed and overreach of our generations past, who thought to build towers to the sky and conquer the world over. For their crimes, we have suffered under two cycles of empires; would you have your children continue to pay, until all of the old ways and occupations are lost? The ambition of the Enwythau empire reaches similar heights; and is it not then our duty, given to us by the Mandate, to bring them to justice, and pass down the mandate to another?
‘And how, you ask, do we know the time is now? I will tell you. The draethyr of Cyfalaf is dead! Dead these four weeks, her and her daughter both: it was a disease of the skin, they say, brought by a Yashigaran envoy. A Yashigaran envoy, in Cyfalaf — have you ever heard of such a thing? Since when does the Enwythau empire treat with the pale-skinned travelers, unless it was the work of the Mandate to begin the toppling of this empire? And now her heir, the only surviving heir, is another foreigner, born to the draethyr and raised by her merchant father. Do you hear me, a teithwyr woman, chosen to ascend to the council of the Ulelweir! How else do you explain this, if not as a sign that the Enwythau empire has run its course?’ I spread my arms wide and grinned down at the crowd.
Now they murmured. I didn’t doubt that they had failed to hear the news of Morforwyn Draethyr’s passing: in the corner of the plaza designated for our purposes, I had found a summary from the last preacher who had come here eleven days prior, to proclaim the news to the common peoples. She had planted the idea, got them thinking, and then I would come along to help their thinking trend in the correct direction. Simple, elegant, and — so far as our leaders could tell — effective.
‘Preacher!’ shouted a woman from the back of the crowd. I waved a hand to show that I had heard her. ‘Behind you!’ she shrieked, pointing.
Deities and curses, I thought, and dropped onto my stomach. The air whooshed out of my lungs as I hit the stone, and a long, feathered arrow shaft flew over my head. I shut my eyes and rested my forehead against the warm stone with a sigh. Arrow, they brought arrows, they must really not like preachers in Dein Efyd. Why didn’t my predecessor make a note of that?
‘Stop, by the command of Nerys Draethyr of Dein Efyd,’ cried the voice of a man behind me.
‘If I stop, will you still kill me?’ I called down to him — or them, there were bound to be more than one, they never worked alone. I pulled my legs up underneath me and sat up. The hundred-odd teithwyr people I’d managed to gather in only five minutes had already begun to scatter in the face of the armed warriors of their overlords.
‘I make no promises,’ said the man behind me. ‘Come down here.’
I thanked the deities for the foresight to wear a shirt today that covered my back; when people saw the tattoos that lined it, they became much more hostile for some reason. Better to hide that fact. I put on a face of proud good humor for those listeners who remained, and felt my way down the back of the monument as slowly as I dared, hooking my fingers into the letters and numbers and all of the curly decorative bits that looked more impressive than functional.
Two feet off the ground, a calloused hand scraped against my shoulder and yanked me off the monument. I stumbled when my feet hit the ground, and waved my arms around for balance. A different pair of hands grabbed my outstretched wrist. I twisted around and was greeted by a savage-looking man in his thirties, teeth bared. I recognized that I’d be fighting a losing battle, and went limp in the hopes of convincing him that he really didn’t need to hold onto me that tightly. All it seemed to do was make him feel free to twist my arm up against my back. The other man did the same to my other hand. While I thought it was slightly ridiculous to send out two fully grown men to restrain one individual half their size and age, now wasn’t the time to be making remarks. I went easily enough.
‘I’m not going to run,’ I said. ‘I swear.’
‘You’ll forgive us for not taking you at your word,’ said the one. ‘Come along now.’
I felt myself being wrenched around backwards, and skipped a bit to avoid tripping over my own feet. As I spun, I glimpsed the few remaining members of my audience watching with fear, or something very like. I bared my teeth at them; time for a dramatic exit. ‘Prepare your axes!’ I shouted, as the two men pushed me away from the monument and towards the justice of the city.
&
Justice in Dein Efyd — to be fair, in most cities — involved two things. Were you a violent criminal, and had you committed any previous offenses? Violent criminals tended to languish in underground pits until one of the deities required a blood sacrifice too substantial for the priests to manage on their own, or they worked on construction projects until they died. The ones who weren’t, in the opinion of the warriors of justice, about to murder or mutilate anyone else tended to have their offense marked on their arms and released … until the second or third time they were caught.
This would be my eighth time.
It wasn’t my fault, really: speech wasn’t free, and that was the price paid for trying to get the people to listen. To think, even. And if that was the price, then I was willing to pay it.
‘That’s a pretty speech,’ said the priest of One Eye, deity of justice. He walked in a circle around me, and ran his fingertips over the lines of writing across my shoulder blades. I held very still. He leaned in close behind my head. ‘Pity it doesn’t hold weight. Pity murder and violence to the guards isn’t free either, and I right? ‘Cause I’m seeing a whole lot more of those than I am of this speech making.’ He tapped my spine and stepped back.
I swallowed. This was always the difficult part. ‘You’ll see, great man, that there’s no official punishment for speechmaking in most parts of the Enwythau realm. And it’d be illegal to send me to the markets or the cells without proper documentation. So what’s easier: change the laws that were ordained by the first council of the Ulelweir, or give me the wrong documentation and throw me in fairly?’ I injected my tone with as much bitterness as possible, playing up my case.
The priest came around to my front. His hands closed over the cords that hung about his neck as a mark of his office; he tugged on them as he looked at me. ‘And if this is the case, why are you not marked as gaethsion?’ His light, almost jesting tone was a nice touch — very nearly clever. I stared straight ahead at the mural on the wall in front of me, and shook my head.
‘I don’t know.’
The priest whipped the end of one of his cords at my face; the fraying knot of cotton and wooden beads caught the side of my neck. I hissed and drew up my shoulder, as my hands were bound. There was no point in pretending it hadn’t hurt, which would only enrage him.
‘Why are you not marked?’ he repeated.
‘I … I …’ Wait for it. Wait for his eyes to narrow with suspicion. Slump shoulders — not too much, not so that it was obviously a deliberate move — and angle head towards the floor. ‘I ran away. Again and again and again — I had a mission. Nothing could get in my way. I had to find a way to stay free,’ I said brokenly.
The priest fell silent. He paced before me, around me, while I kept my head bowed. ‘Another pretty story,’ he said at last.
I jerked my head up. ‘But it’s true!’
‘The prettiest part,’ said the priest. ‘I don’t doubt it for a second. But you’ll forgive me — if that were the case, I don’t think I’d have broken your spirit that easily.’
Damn it. I shut my eyes for a moment to compose myself and find a new plan of action. When I opened them, I met the priest’s eyes and snapped on a smile. ‘Where did I go wrong?’
‘Getting brought in while I presided. If you had met with one of my younger compatriots, they might have allowed themselves to be persuaded by the sight of a pretty face in distress. I will not allow anything to interfere with my fulfillment of the Deity’s will.’
Possibly cleverer than I had given him credit for. I remained still. ‘Your decision,’ I said.
‘Get Neidur,’ said the priest to one of the acolytes standing in the doorway. She turned on her heel and walked away.
‘Neidur?’ I asked.
The priest of the One Eyed Deity leaned down to tap my cheek. ‘The artisan. She will keep you from fleeing again.’
&
My cheek still stung as the door to the keeping place swung shut. I rubbed my the spot where the artisan had applied her brush to my skin. They said that before the Spider had shown humans the way to work magic with their crafts, tattoos had been done slowly, with bone needles dipped in ink. I didn’t have much use for the Spider, but I could still feel the ink crawling under my skin.
The keeping place was dark, and the only light came from a window set high into the wall. If I climbed up, I suspected that I’d discover it was spelled, too. The keeping place in another city had been like that, level with the street, with big open windows that’d cut you to ribbons if you tried to walk through them. But other matters held my attention before I could turn it to escape; namely, the rest of the room. The hole in the ground had been shored up with limestone and plaster walls, which currently contained something on the order of three dozen shadowy figures lurking in the corners. They sat in groups of ones, twos, and threes. I selected a spot by the door that was unoccupied by any of the larger figures, and sat down crosslegged against the wall. The other occupants of the keeping place had fallen silent when I was thrown in, and I felt their eyes on me as I sat. Let them watch; I had an impressive record written on my back for all to see, if they cared enough to make trouble.
No one did, though. Murmurs gradually started up again; I let my eyes adjust to the darkness and watched. The two figures closest to me resolved themselves into a girl a few years younger than me (tiroethyr, recently married — the wedding paint hadn’t yet faded from her face — and in possession of a recent gash along her forearm) and a tiroethyr boy of no more than twelve, who hugged his knees and mumbled into his arm when he spoke.
‘The damned worach was all smiles and promised he’d be different. His friends all told me he’d treat me like a draethyr,’ the girl said, when the level of noise had risen high enough that their conversation wouldn’t be heard across the keeping place.
‘Fuck ‘em all,’ muttered the boy. ‘M sorry. Me and my brother lived with a worach for two years. She was nice. The real ones usually are.’
The girl’s features started to come into focus. She smiled, or maybe it was a grimace. ‘What, you know a lot of them?’
‘Okay, two. Still.’
‘Yeah. No, he just liked to fuck other women, then got angry when I wanted to know where he’d been. It turned out he’d killed one of the others, so I didn’t get shut up in one of the really deep pits,’ the girl said, matter-of-factly. It caught me off-balance enough that I couldn’t help but laugh. But of their heads snapped towards me.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean to eavesdrop. It’s just that it’s a small space, and I thought it was funny. All praise to the One Eyed Deity.’
The girl’s expression changed into something colder. ‘Praise,’ she said.
‘I’m sorry,’ I repeated. ‘Honestly. If I’d known it would’ve offended you, I wouldn’t have laughed.’ She hesitated for a second, and I was in. I crossed my right fist over my chest. ‘I’m Siaras.’
The girl copied my gesture, though warily. ‘Siarlin,’ she said.
After a moment, the boy followed suit. ‘Taran.’
‘Have you been here for very long?’ I asked, leaning forwards and widening my eyes.
The boy shook his head. ‘Just yesterday evening.’
Siarlin scowled, reaching up to scratch her ink-darkened cheek. ‘Fifteen days this morning. Some of the others have been in for close to two months. Just waiting.’
That was something, at least. On the one hand, I didn’t have a lot of time to figure out an escape plan. On the other hand, if this lot had already been festering for forty days and nights already, then it was likely close to market time, so I’d not have to do the festering myself. I could work with this. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said to the girl. ‘Is the food good, at least?’
It was the boy who answered. ‘I swear they give us piss to drink, ‘cause they think if it’s dark we can’t tell the difference.’ He snickered.
I did my best to continue engaging them in conversation throughout the remainder of the afternoon, as they seemed — if not friendly — at least more open than the other people scattered about the room. I played the part of the eager-to-please, overly friendly child, irritating but harmless, and fell silent when I sensed that they were growing weary of me. It was unlikely that I’d see them again once we reached the market, but until then, I thought it was prudent to stay in their good graces.
Daylight was fading from the window when the door at the top of the stairs opened, and two more Enwythau men appeared in the entrance with a bucket held between them. All other activity in the keeping place ceased, and the other occupants looked up expectantly. Taran and Siarlin both braced themselves, dropping into ready crouches.
‘What’s going on?’ I asked.
They both looked at me like I was simple. ‘Supper,’ said Taran under his breath..
The two men hauled the bucket down to floor level. I sat back against the wall and watched as the other prisoners got up and began to circle in on the two guards like animals. The men never spoke; they let the bucket down with a thunk that made the contents shuffle with a noise like skin on bark. As soon as it had been done, the both of them scampered out of the room like there was a horde of wild pixies at their heels.
The door slammed shut again behind them, but I could hardly hear it over the roar that then erupted on the floor. I pressed myself as flat as I could arrange it as chaos broke loose, humans turning into crows who have found a carcass lying in an open field. Taran and Siarlin threw themselves in with the others, fighting tooth and claw. I myself stayed back; my stomach grumbled, but I would eat tomorrow, maybe, after I had a better understanding of what I would be throwing myself into.
Within a minute, Taran and Siarlin returned. They each had a fistful of plain tortilla in their possession as they raced back into our corner and curled up with their prizes. Siarlin had a broad scrape on her good arm, but the two of them seemed happy enough.
Taran shot me a puzzled look as he ate his tortilla. ‘Ain’t you hungry?’
I shrugged and hugged my knees, pressing them against my chest. ‘I wasn’t sure what to expect. Now I know for the morning.’
He turned away like I’d said something cruel, or slapped him across the face. Siarlin stuffed the last of her tortilla into her mouth, looked at him, looked at me, and looked away in obvious disinterest.
Shortly after, the keeping place quieted down as others drifted off to sleep for the night, while I sat in the darkness and thought.
chapter four
************
You're Gonna Go Far, Kid is my hands-down Siaras song. Of course it had to be used in xir introductory chapter.
Character: Siaras
Location: Dein Efyd
Date: Day Two
The sun burned into my skin, and the smell of humanity filled my nose as it wafted up from the ground to where I stood: atop one of the shorter stone monuments that littered the sunken plaza between the manor and the city’s temple. The monument commemorating the conquering of the city by the Enwythau would have been more appropriate, but it was also nearly forty feet tall, so I’d settled for a ten-foot one instead. It worked out that the carvings on this one had been fairly recent, so the stone letters were still deep enough to make good grips.
‘Many faces I see here,’ I cried to the small crowd assembled around me. ‘And all of them tired. There is no shame in admitting it — why should you not be tired? Why should you not be weary to the point of breaking? For seventy, eighty years you — like your parents before you, and their parents before them — have toiled at the behest of the Enwythau people. At the behest of the Ulelweir, as they call themselves: the Chosen Seven of the Four Armed Deity. But why should this remain so? Have you not yet served your time? The turning of the calendar by the Mandate brought the downfall of the Meurig empire before this, and should it not also sweep the Enwythau Empire to the ground as well?’
I surveyed my audience. Faces upturned, eager, but cautious still. Well, that wouldn’t do. ‘I see it in your faces: why now, you ask? And why do you come seeking a fight, why do we not let the great circle do its work? Well, I will tell you. When a tree grows old, it does not fall immediately. First, it must rot for many years. When it finally comes toppling to the earth, the tree remains. The rainy season comes, and soaks it through, and then smaller things — lichens and mushrooms — will grown on its trunk. Soon, there will be flowers. As the plants root, they take away the structure of the tree, devouring it for themselves. This causes the fallen tree to break apart. In time, it becomes one with the ground around it, and new saplings spring up over it. With enough time, one of them will overpower the others and take its place.
‘On the other hand, there are the trees that we cut down. You all are farmers, I can see this, I know this: it is all that you are permitted to be. You know that here, far from the river or the sea, the best way to create a fertile field is to cut down the trees, even sometimes the great ones, and burn them. This very quickly creates an area for you to grow whatever you like with the season permitting.
‘Now, imagine that the Enwythau empire is like a great tree. Yes, you can let it decay and rot in its own time — but who knows when that time may be, or when it happens, what will spring up in its wake? And remember, that tree rotted from the inside out long before it fell. It could be that if we wait, it will be the Mynyoed, sweeping in from the north with their blasphemous naming of every god they come across and their laws that would have you marrying off your daughters to their sons while their sons hold the power to rule. Is that what you want for the future of this city?’
I paused, panting for breath, to let that one sink in. Faces turned away from me and to each other, murmuring I caught the eye of one boy, no more than twelve, staring up at me with wide eyes, and I smiled at him, reassuring. Then I resumed, for my favorite part of this speech.
‘But there is another option! Rise. Do not wait for the tree to rot and fall. Rather, cut it down with the axes of justice and repayment of a debt long overdue. We pay for the greed and overreach of our generations past, who thought to build towers to the sky and conquer the world over. For their crimes, we have suffered under two cycles of empires; would you have your children continue to pay, until all of the old ways and occupations are lost? The ambition of the Enwythau empire reaches similar heights; and is it not then our duty, given to us by the Mandate, to bring them to justice, and pass down the mandate to another?
‘And how, you ask, do we know the time is now? I will tell you. The draethyr of Cyfalaf is dead! Dead these four weeks, her and her daughter both: it was a disease of the skin, they say, brought by a Yashigaran envoy. A Yashigaran envoy, in Cyfalaf — have you ever heard of such a thing? Since when does the Enwythau empire treat with the pale-skinned travelers, unless it was the work of the Mandate to begin the toppling of this empire? And now her heir, the only surviving heir, is another foreigner, born to the draethyr and raised by her merchant father. Do you hear me, a teithwyr woman, chosen to ascend to the council of the Ulelweir! How else do you explain this, if not as a sign that the Enwythau empire has run its course?’ I spread my arms wide and grinned down at the crowd.
Now they murmured. I didn’t doubt that they had failed to hear the news of Morforwyn Draethyr’s passing: in the corner of the plaza designated for our purposes, I had found a summary from the last preacher who had come here eleven days prior, to proclaim the news to the common peoples. She had planted the idea, got them thinking, and then I would come along to help their thinking trend in the correct direction. Simple, elegant, and — so far as our leaders could tell — effective.
‘Preacher!’ shouted a woman from the back of the crowd. I waved a hand to show that I had heard her. ‘Behind you!’ she shrieked, pointing.
Deities and curses, I thought, and dropped onto my stomach. The air whooshed out of my lungs as I hit the stone, and a long, feathered arrow shaft flew over my head. I shut my eyes and rested my forehead against the warm stone with a sigh. Arrow, they brought arrows, they must really not like preachers in Dein Efyd. Why didn’t my predecessor make a note of that?
‘Stop, by the command of Nerys Draethyr of Dein Efyd,’ cried the voice of a man behind me.
‘If I stop, will you still kill me?’ I called down to him — or them, there were bound to be more than one, they never worked alone. I pulled my legs up underneath me and sat up. The hundred-odd teithwyr people I’d managed to gather in only five minutes had already begun to scatter in the face of the armed warriors of their overlords.
‘I make no promises,’ said the man behind me. ‘Come down here.’
I thanked the deities for the foresight to wear a shirt today that covered my back; when people saw the tattoos that lined it, they became much more hostile for some reason. Better to hide that fact. I put on a face of proud good humor for those listeners who remained, and felt my way down the back of the monument as slowly as I dared, hooking my fingers into the letters and numbers and all of the curly decorative bits that looked more impressive than functional.
Two feet off the ground, a calloused hand scraped against my shoulder and yanked me off the monument. I stumbled when my feet hit the ground, and waved my arms around for balance. A different pair of hands grabbed my outstretched wrist. I twisted around and was greeted by a savage-looking man in his thirties, teeth bared. I recognized that I’d be fighting a losing battle, and went limp in the hopes of convincing him that he really didn’t need to hold onto me that tightly. All it seemed to do was make him feel free to twist my arm up against my back. The other man did the same to my other hand. While I thought it was slightly ridiculous to send out two fully grown men to restrain one individual half their size and age, now wasn’t the time to be making remarks. I went easily enough.
‘I’m not going to run,’ I said. ‘I swear.’
‘You’ll forgive us for not taking you at your word,’ said the one. ‘Come along now.’
I felt myself being wrenched around backwards, and skipped a bit to avoid tripping over my own feet. As I spun, I glimpsed the few remaining members of my audience watching with fear, or something very like. I bared my teeth at them; time for a dramatic exit. ‘Prepare your axes!’ I shouted, as the two men pushed me away from the monument and towards the justice of the city.
&
Justice in Dein Efyd — to be fair, in most cities — involved two things. Were you a violent criminal, and had you committed any previous offenses? Violent criminals tended to languish in underground pits until one of the deities required a blood sacrifice too substantial for the priests to manage on their own, or they worked on construction projects until they died. The ones who weren’t, in the opinion of the warriors of justice, about to murder or mutilate anyone else tended to have their offense marked on their arms and released … until the second or third time they were caught.
This would be my eighth time.
It wasn’t my fault, really: speech wasn’t free, and that was the price paid for trying to get the people to listen. To think, even. And if that was the price, then I was willing to pay it.
‘That’s a pretty speech,’ said the priest of One Eye, deity of justice. He walked in a circle around me, and ran his fingertips over the lines of writing across my shoulder blades. I held very still. He leaned in close behind my head. ‘Pity it doesn’t hold weight. Pity murder and violence to the guards isn’t free either, and I right? ‘Cause I’m seeing a whole lot more of those than I am of this speech making.’ He tapped my spine and stepped back.
I swallowed. This was always the difficult part. ‘You’ll see, great man, that there’s no official punishment for speechmaking in most parts of the Enwythau realm. And it’d be illegal to send me to the markets or the cells without proper documentation. So what’s easier: change the laws that were ordained by the first council of the Ulelweir, or give me the wrong documentation and throw me in fairly?’ I injected my tone with as much bitterness as possible, playing up my case.
The priest came around to my front. His hands closed over the cords that hung about his neck as a mark of his office; he tugged on them as he looked at me. ‘And if this is the case, why are you not marked as gaethsion?’ His light, almost jesting tone was a nice touch — very nearly clever. I stared straight ahead at the mural on the wall in front of me, and shook my head.
‘I don’t know.’
The priest whipped the end of one of his cords at my face; the fraying knot of cotton and wooden beads caught the side of my neck. I hissed and drew up my shoulder, as my hands were bound. There was no point in pretending it hadn’t hurt, which would only enrage him.
‘Why are you not marked?’ he repeated.
‘I … I …’ Wait for it. Wait for his eyes to narrow with suspicion. Slump shoulders — not too much, not so that it was obviously a deliberate move — and angle head towards the floor. ‘I ran away. Again and again and again — I had a mission. Nothing could get in my way. I had to find a way to stay free,’ I said brokenly.
The priest fell silent. He paced before me, around me, while I kept my head bowed. ‘Another pretty story,’ he said at last.
I jerked my head up. ‘But it’s true!’
‘The prettiest part,’ said the priest. ‘I don’t doubt it for a second. But you’ll forgive me — if that were the case, I don’t think I’d have broken your spirit that easily.’
Damn it. I shut my eyes for a moment to compose myself and find a new plan of action. When I opened them, I met the priest’s eyes and snapped on a smile. ‘Where did I go wrong?’
‘Getting brought in while I presided. If you had met with one of my younger compatriots, they might have allowed themselves to be persuaded by the sight of a pretty face in distress. I will not allow anything to interfere with my fulfillment of the Deity’s will.’
Possibly cleverer than I had given him credit for. I remained still. ‘Your decision,’ I said.
‘Get Neidur,’ said the priest to one of the acolytes standing in the doorway. She turned on her heel and walked away.
‘Neidur?’ I asked.
The priest of the One Eyed Deity leaned down to tap my cheek. ‘The artisan. She will keep you from fleeing again.’
&
My cheek still stung as the door to the keeping place swung shut. I rubbed my the spot where the artisan had applied her brush to my skin. They said that before the Spider had shown humans the way to work magic with their crafts, tattoos had been done slowly, with bone needles dipped in ink. I didn’t have much use for the Spider, but I could still feel the ink crawling under my skin.
The keeping place was dark, and the only light came from a window set high into the wall. If I climbed up, I suspected that I’d discover it was spelled, too. The keeping place in another city had been like that, level with the street, with big open windows that’d cut you to ribbons if you tried to walk through them. But other matters held my attention before I could turn it to escape; namely, the rest of the room. The hole in the ground had been shored up with limestone and plaster walls, which currently contained something on the order of three dozen shadowy figures lurking in the corners. They sat in groups of ones, twos, and threes. I selected a spot by the door that was unoccupied by any of the larger figures, and sat down crosslegged against the wall. The other occupants of the keeping place had fallen silent when I was thrown in, and I felt their eyes on me as I sat. Let them watch; I had an impressive record written on my back for all to see, if they cared enough to make trouble.
No one did, though. Murmurs gradually started up again; I let my eyes adjust to the darkness and watched. The two figures closest to me resolved themselves into a girl a few years younger than me (tiroethyr, recently married — the wedding paint hadn’t yet faded from her face — and in possession of a recent gash along her forearm) and a tiroethyr boy of no more than twelve, who hugged his knees and mumbled into his arm when he spoke.
‘The damned worach was all smiles and promised he’d be different. His friends all told me he’d treat me like a draethyr,’ the girl said, when the level of noise had risen high enough that their conversation wouldn’t be heard across the keeping place.
‘Fuck ‘em all,’ muttered the boy. ‘M sorry. Me and my brother lived with a worach for two years. She was nice. The real ones usually are.’
The girl’s features started to come into focus. She smiled, or maybe it was a grimace. ‘What, you know a lot of them?’
‘Okay, two. Still.’
‘Yeah. No, he just liked to fuck other women, then got angry when I wanted to know where he’d been. It turned out he’d killed one of the others, so I didn’t get shut up in one of the really deep pits,’ the girl said, matter-of-factly. It caught me off-balance enough that I couldn’t help but laugh. But of their heads snapped towards me.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean to eavesdrop. It’s just that it’s a small space, and I thought it was funny. All praise to the One Eyed Deity.’
The girl’s expression changed into something colder. ‘Praise,’ she said.
‘I’m sorry,’ I repeated. ‘Honestly. If I’d known it would’ve offended you, I wouldn’t have laughed.’ She hesitated for a second, and I was in. I crossed my right fist over my chest. ‘I’m Siaras.’
The girl copied my gesture, though warily. ‘Siarlin,’ she said.
After a moment, the boy followed suit. ‘Taran.’
‘Have you been here for very long?’ I asked, leaning forwards and widening my eyes.
The boy shook his head. ‘Just yesterday evening.’
Siarlin scowled, reaching up to scratch her ink-darkened cheek. ‘Fifteen days this morning. Some of the others have been in for close to two months. Just waiting.’
That was something, at least. On the one hand, I didn’t have a lot of time to figure out an escape plan. On the other hand, if this lot had already been festering for forty days and nights already, then it was likely close to market time, so I’d not have to do the festering myself. I could work with this. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said to the girl. ‘Is the food good, at least?’
It was the boy who answered. ‘I swear they give us piss to drink, ‘cause they think if it’s dark we can’t tell the difference.’ He snickered.
I did my best to continue engaging them in conversation throughout the remainder of the afternoon, as they seemed — if not friendly — at least more open than the other people scattered about the room. I played the part of the eager-to-please, overly friendly child, irritating but harmless, and fell silent when I sensed that they were growing weary of me. It was unlikely that I’d see them again once we reached the market, but until then, I thought it was prudent to stay in their good graces.
Daylight was fading from the window when the door at the top of the stairs opened, and two more Enwythau men appeared in the entrance with a bucket held between them. All other activity in the keeping place ceased, and the other occupants looked up expectantly. Taran and Siarlin both braced themselves, dropping into ready crouches.
‘What’s going on?’ I asked.
They both looked at me like I was simple. ‘Supper,’ said Taran under his breath..
The two men hauled the bucket down to floor level. I sat back against the wall and watched as the other prisoners got up and began to circle in on the two guards like animals. The men never spoke; they let the bucket down with a thunk that made the contents shuffle with a noise like skin on bark. As soon as it had been done, the both of them scampered out of the room like there was a horde of wild pixies at their heels.
The door slammed shut again behind them, but I could hardly hear it over the roar that then erupted on the floor. I pressed myself as flat as I could arrange it as chaos broke loose, humans turning into crows who have found a carcass lying in an open field. Taran and Siarlin threw themselves in with the others, fighting tooth and claw. I myself stayed back; my stomach grumbled, but I would eat tomorrow, maybe, after I had a better understanding of what I would be throwing myself into.
Within a minute, Taran and Siarlin returned. They each had a fistful of plain tortilla in their possession as they raced back into our corner and curled up with their prizes. Siarlin had a broad scrape on her good arm, but the two of them seemed happy enough.
Taran shot me a puzzled look as he ate his tortilla. ‘Ain’t you hungry?’
I shrugged and hugged my knees, pressing them against my chest. ‘I wasn’t sure what to expect. Now I know for the morning.’
He turned away like I’d said something cruel, or slapped him across the face. Siarlin stuffed the last of her tortilla into her mouth, looked at him, looked at me, and looked away in obvious disinterest.
Shortly after, the keeping place quieted down as others drifted off to sleep for the night, while I sat in the darkness and thought.
chapter four
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You're Gonna Go Far, Kid is my hands-down Siaras song. Of course it had to be used in xir introductory chapter.
