Beasts of Tabat (26 page)

But he said nothing, betrayed nothing.

That evening old Jules lit the signal fire and I changed out of my shit-raddled clothes, took up my baskets, and went down along the fence of leaning sticks, more sign than fence, to the lantern lit clearing that marked our trading spot.

Jules was a scarf-wrapped old man—he wore at least a dozen of them, wrapped around his face, hands, arms, and neck, and he never let any more of his skin show than he had to. He had the look of a broken-backed yew bush, stooped and close to the ground.

He pawed through the first few baskets, muttering under his breath. I kept the last one back. He straightened.

“Thirty silver and whatever’s due for that one you’re hiding.” He pointed a finger at my feet.

“I don’t know what it’s worth,” I said. I knelt and unfolded the cloth over the shining fungus. He stared.

“Sell that one to your father, is the first thing I’d do,” he said slowly.

“How much would you ask him for it?”

“A hundred gold, easily,” he said. “Perhaps some magic to boot.”

“Give me ten gold, here and now, and it’s yours.”

“You won’t be around to conduct the bargain with your father?”

“It’s time for me to move on,” I said. He gave me the coins and wished me luck. I didn’t turn back to the tower. Instead I set off along the lane without looking back, not caring about anything I left behind.

I never heard from my father again. But when I first was taken aboard the ship, unconscious, they said I burned with blue fire. They threw me overboard, but the flames kept burning until all my clothing was gone and I floated on the waves, a mass of blisters. The ship’s physician had me hauled back on board as a curiosity, and by the time I recovered and woke, screaming, the ship was long under way. The next two weeks were fever and ointment.

And somewhere in the midst of all that haze of pain, a thought came to me one night.

It must have been my father’s magic preventing me from the realization before. How had I never wondered? Who was my mother? Why had my father never spoken of her?

My father, so clever at breeding Beasts, at creating things that had never existed before.

I was something new, something outside Beast and Human and Shifter. I went to the Isles and learned things about myself. People were new to me at first, but they accepted me as one of them because I looked like one of them.

But my sympathy lay with the Beasts, now that I was something so close to one, their plight concerned me even more. When I heard tales of Tabat, of how it fueled its engines, of the Beasts that had built it and now lived in it as slaves, it inflamed me.

And so I came to Tabat, ready to bring it down.

He recognized the voice now.

Murga
.

* * *

Murga called Teo into the tent that served him as office and storehouse late the next evening.

“Something about you keeps drawing my eye to you, boy,” Murga said, gesturing at Teo to stand before the desk. His chalklike face angled to inspect Teo. “Sometimes I swear you’re creeping into my dreams.”

Teo’s cheeks heated.

“Not like that,” Murga said irritably. He tilted his head, as though sniffing the air. “Must I take you apart to discover what it is? We all have our secrets, boy. I’m going to show you one of mine.”

Teo stared at him, feeling his heart race. This felt wrong. Ominous.

Something was happening to Murga’s face. It crawled and shifted, reshaping itself. The nose pulled in, the lips became fuller. The eyes shaded from black to grey.

He was Miche Courdeau, too. How could that be? Teo’s head swam with dizziness. Was Miche some sort of Shifter? But Shifters had animal and Human forms. What sort of Shifter changed between one Human form and another?

“And now I have shown you a secret, and fireworms will eat your liver if you speak of it, I’ll see to that. So, boy, what is yours?”

Teo searched his mind for something that might satisfy Murga but still keep Teo’s Shifter nature a secret. “I had a Shadow Twin,” he found himself blurting out.

Murga ceased motion so suddenly that it was akin to a flinch. Then he stepped closer.

“Had? As in they perished?”

“She died in the womb,” Teo said. “Lidiya said she never drew breath.”

“Well, well.” Murga went back to the desk and sat down. The chair creaked beneath his weight. The tent canvas sighed as outside winds played over it, rippling the walls and setting the lamp’s flame trembling in time with Teo’s heartbeat.

Murga’s stare was an iron gimlet. “If your twin had lived, you would have access to her powers. But you seem ordinary enough for your … kind.”

The way he lingered over the last word made Teo’s heart race so fast that he was afraid it might burst. The air inside the tent’s confines felt as thunderstorm heavy.
Did Murga know what
he was? Relief at no longer having to hide warred with terror:
What if Murga turned him over to the Duke?

“Do you know why Humans and Beasts alike hate Shifters?” Murga asked.

Teo shook his head, still mute with shock.
How could Miche and Murga be the same person?

“Because they can’t be spotted by sight, the way a Beast might be. They can walk among Humans and spy on them. Humans fear Beasts will rise up against them someday. How much greater that fear if they think they can be fooled into thinking their foes are their friends? And Beasts, they know that Shifters can pass, can pretend to be Human. No one likes them, boy, no one. And the College of Mages, worse yet. The blood of a Shifter and a Shadow Twin? You could work powerful magic with that, boy. Very powerful. They’d take you apart to use you in their spells. If Bella Kanto knew you were one, she’d see you put to the sword simply to spare you that.”

It hurt Teo to think that, but it was true. He knew how much Shifters were despised. He’d seen the announcements of their executions.

Murga’s hands gathered on the desk. Fascinated, Teo watched them assemble pen and paper.

“You can read, I trust?”

Teo’s nod was infinitesimal. Murga acknowledged it by beginning to scrawl on the paper.

“You are an ordinary boy,” Murga said as he wrote. “Nothing special to you, only a lingering aura of what might have been. Isn’t that so?”

Teo’s heartbeat and the lamp flicker slowed. The walls were still and silent.

“Yes,” Teo said. Murga didn’t mean to tell his secret, but that didn’t make Teo any less frightened. It simply meant the man had some use for him.

“Tomorrow, you will run errands for me in the early morning.” Murga indicated a crate beside the tent entrance. “You will take a copy of the book there to each of these addresses. Wrap them beforehand in the paper you see there and tie it with string.” He looked back at Teo. “Understand that? Cover them completely. I’d not wish them exposed to the vagaries of weather.” He pushed the paper at Teo.

Teo folded it and slipped it in his pocket, standing.

“Is that all?” he asked, and heard desperation in his voice.

Murga reached out to the key at the lamp’s base. He turned it with a click, and the flame gasped once, then subsided into darkness.

“Go to bed, ordinary boy,” he said.

***

Chapter Twenty-Five

Winter’s Battle

The day has come.

Countless times I’ve stepped out into the arena to take part in the Gladiatorial ceremonies, part public entertainment, part civic ritual, but always, thoroughly a spectacle that allows me to glimpse Tabat’s heart. My breath always catches when I first stand on the tiles, feeling the slight ridges and troughs of their patternings through my boot soles, weapon not yet in hand but ready at my hip. My armor, elaborately chased, is light and latticed, showing flashes of the white linen tunic I wear beneath it. Pretty armor, but not something I would care to wear into real battle.

It isn’t the noise of the crowd or the sense of their eyes watching me move forward. It isn’t the sound of the opposite door rolling upward, revealing my opponent, distance making her a doll-sized figure facing me, come to challenge me.

It’s something else, a sense of magic running through me, Priestess of sword and shield. Not just the crowd but the world watches me, ready to shape itself in accordance to my skill. Is this how Mages feel when magic pours itself through them?

It is why I won’t quit until defeat forces me. I crave this rush of righteousness, this sense of being something larger than I really am. These are the moments when I become the Bella Kanto of the penny-wides, moving forward to salute her opponent, knowing the end is already written.

Once little Djana, who’d arrived from the Flower Continent years ago, sullen but showing signs of skill, now all grown up and facing her teacher.

My teeth bared in a grin beneath my visor.

We both walk forward until only a few feet separate us, and I’m able to see the device on the tiny, triangular shield she carries to match mine, the slits in the visor masking her face. We unsheathe our swords. Winter’s is hilted in crystal and silver, while Spring’s blazes with stones, yellow tourmalines, emeralds, and sapphires, as bright as a cloudless day.

Blade touches blade in ritual salute; once, twice, and again. The crowd roars; Skye must be among them, in the section that Lucya reserves for the students of the Brides of Steel. I wear a charm at my throat that she gave me last week.

We close. I strike lightly, a quick
rat-a-tat
test of Djana’s speed and strength.

What I discover astonishes me. Has the girl been holding back in practice all this time? Certainly she is the best of a bad year, but both Lucya and I had debated whether or not to put her in the ring.

Joy, not dismay, flashes through me at the realization. It will be a worthy fight, not just going through the motions. How long has the girl been preparing for this, hoping to overtake me?

I will give her a fight then.

I close and slash. Djana slides the blade away by interposing her shield, struck in turn, a blow that skitters along my side, ineffectually seeking entrance.

Something strange about her.

I sidestep, put myself between Djana and an aetheric light. Let the girl squint a bit.

I dart forward, stooping a touch to let the blaze of light hit her full on as I do so. That often works well.

But I’ve shown my students that trick. Djana moves and turns, pulling me into a new spot where the light falls across us both, dragging our shadows out along the ripples of blue and gold.

We meet. The crowd roars as she slashes, and I knock her blade aside. We withdraw, meet and withdraw again.

This is not Djana. I know her blade work. This is someone else.

And with that thought, I know.

Skye.

I spare a glance up to the box where the students and staff of the Brides of Steel cluster. Lucya stares down at me. Her eyes are flinty.

You drive me to some rash action,
I hear her say in my memory.

Skye pushes forward.

We close, grappling this time. I find her blade angled at me and duck away just in time.

Did I see something on the blade?

We close again. I weave a cage of air and steel around my opponent as I try to glimpse what I saw before.

There. A blue shine, so subtle, so easy to miss.

Poison.

No time to call out. And what will happen to the weather if the ritual is interrupted? What will it mean for Tabat if Spring wins with a poisoned blade?

Does Skye know? Does she mean to kill me then? That thought is as painful as any blow.

But surely not. She doesn’t fight as an opponent would, knowing the blade poisoned, knowing that a scratch can kill. Someone has put it there, and in her ignorance she has not checked her weapon beforehand as a seasoned Gladiator would.

Should I simply let her win?

She will still love me if she defeats me, surely. Perhaps love me even more, for have given her such a thing.

Skye sees my hesitation. She presses forward, eager to end things quickly. Our blades clash again.

I could throw this and she would know. It would rob her of her victory if she thought I had thrown the fight. She would resent me.

She swings. I parry.

I could try to be subtle about it, pretend to make mistakes. But what will it do to my city? Surely it isn’t pride that holds me back. Surely it isn’t that I cannot bear to give up being Champion for selfish reasons.

Without recovering her balance fully, she swings again. Too eager.

My blade flicks out, angry but calculated, deflecting Skye’s point to exactly where I want it. At the same time, I kick hard and equally precise, at the kneecap, settled behind a circle of metal but still so vulnerable to being struck. Not a crippling blow, but a painful one.

The girl staggers even as the crowd groans. A fair move, but not the flashy blade work they want.

She falls forward, grabbing at me. We roll, grappling.

This will not end till blood is shed.

An opening as we roll, flashes of the crowd on their feet, trying to see what is happening, as my hand drives the blade, trying to knock hers aside. There is a skitter of sparks and I feel all the bad luck spells around me closing in, forcing the blade home.

Skye goes limp beneath me.

My blood thundering in my ears and my harsh breaths are all that I can hear as I pull away. A Physician rushes out from a side door. Gladiatorial fights are rarely fatal, but often medical help is needed.

I try to breathe. I can feel that sense of righteousness, that I have performed my duty, that I have done as I should, but overpowering it is worry.

And then guilt and black sorrow as the Physician rises, shaking his head. The crowd screams outrage.

Dead.

This time I’ve not defeated Spring, but killed her entirely.

I’ve killed Skye.

***

Chapter Twenty-Six

Aftermath

Questioned by the Duke’s Peacekeepers, none of Skye’s fellow students or teachers can think of any reason why the girl should have had a poisoned blade.

I go to confront Lucya. She has caused all this. She has killed Skye with her spiteful act, setting her in the arena against me.

Lucya, though, has an answer for me.

“I know what caused it and that name is Bella Kanto!” she spits at me. “Dead! All for your vanity!”

I reel back.

Skye is dead. Horribly dead, a gap in the world that I can scarcely comprehend, a hole of the sort I have not felt since my parents’ death.

But I am not responsible, no matter what Lucya says.

“You are unjust,” I protest. “You put her there.”

Lucya shakes her head.

“I had no way of knowing what lengths your enemies would go to. This is about releasing Tabat from Winter. They will kill you next.”

There is no reasoning with her. I make a stiff farewell and depart the Brides of Steel.

I do not say when I will come again.

Lucya does not ask.

* * *

Skye is dead.

Unthinkable that such a thing could have happened.

How did it slip away from me, how did she get far enough ahead that I couldn’t stop her?

I lie in bed, tangled in blankets and guilt, utterly unwilling to get up. I can hear the distant sounds of the house, but they seem muted, as though I were hearing them through deep water.

And no one will sympathize; no one will know I’ve lost my love, because it wasn’t a love I could admit to. Lucya will know a little of it, but I won’t show her how far I’ve fallen. Leonoa will only think I had it coming, for trying to interfere with her and Glyndia. And Adelina will say something practical and correct and utterly infuriating.

Rolling over, I bury myself further in the warmth of the eiderdown. It’s cold outside. It will be cold six more weeks, a cold I brought to the city.

A cold it deserves for killing Skye.

It makes me think of other things I don’t want to think about.

Jolietta died. They’d taken Phillip away in chains and harness, his head hanging down, lank-maned. Hoof beats, slow, stumbling hoof beats, echoed in my heart. It tore my heart to hear them but at the same time, joy stitched it together again, repaired each wrenching, scarring, hard-scabbed pain at the thought that Jolietta was gone, gone for good.

But before she’d died, the thing she’d done.

I lie back and let myself remember.

* * *

Phillip was there that first night; when I first arrived at Piper Hill. I was put to bed in a small chamber in a bed that smelled of mildew. I waited until Jolietta was asleep before creeping downstairs, out the back door, and along the stable passageway.

Moonlight and rain drenched the apple orchard. My cloak wrapped tightly around me, an oilcloth dervish, I crept out among the stunted trees, short that they might be more easily picked. Underfoot the rotting, wet fruit sent up olfactory lamentations of fermentation and vomit and slick mud.

The Centaur stood among the trees, so still that I didn’t see him at first. He stamped as I passed, stamped twice in the dazzle of moonlight that fell across his long, tangled hair, his broad chest, the flat face and furry, pointed ears.

“Go back,” he said.

I faced him, defiant. “Or what?” Could any punishment be worse than the loss of Leonoa and that safe haven?

His voice was surprisingly deep, surprisingly gentle. I was unprepared for that gentleness. It shook me to the core.

“I am not in charge, here, child. Jolietta will not let you escape, though, and she will make you pay dearly if she has to hunt you.”

All through the trip there, my aunt had spoken to me no more than she had the crates in the wagon, or the horses pulling it. But I felt a chill at the thought of crossing her.

“Wait until you know what she is capable of before you test her,” he said.

It was wise advice, I knew in my heart. But I walked on, and he didn’t try to stop me. I made it several miles before Jolietta caught up with me. She said nothing to me, but under her direction, my foot had been propped on a rock by one Minotaur while another raised his hoof and stamped down.…

“That will slow you down next time,” Jolietta said coldly to me as I curled in the dirt around the throb of the broken bones in my foot. “I will see you in the morning, and I will start your lessons.”

But clinging to the back of the wagon, feeling every painful jolt, I realized that they had already begun.

At Piper Hill, Phillip bandaged my foot and did not comment as he found me crutches. We did not speak of our conversation, but that night I found a tray outside my door, despite Jolietta’s words, and knew that he had brought it.

As time had passed, I realized that Jolietta liked to pit the two of us, her new apprentice and her former trainee, against each other. For a long time I’d been wary, but gradually I realized that Phillip placed himself outside that battle, or even colluded with a sidelong wink, a mere drooping of a lid in which I learned to read amusement.

Phillip. My mind circles like a hawk, hovering over the same point—his long-nosed face, his clever hands, his slow, lilting accent. His vanity about his mane, which was long and copper colored, so it shone in the sun. I remember him galloping to dry it, a long shining plume, and another at his tail.

It was as though I’ve opened the cupboard where I had stuffed all these memories before. Phillip, smuggling me handfuls of dried apples. Phillip, managing to maneuver Jolietta so she gave the task of Dragon tending to me, thinking it a punishment, when all I wanted most in the world was the solitude it offered.

Phillip, whom I betrayed.

That morning, it was my fifteenth birthday. I roused with sweat crawling down my sides. It was the dead of summer and the coast breezes were drained of movement, unable to travel the few miles inland to cleanse the air at Piper Hill. The sheet underneath me was sodden with sweat, limp folds draping the cot, mirroring the torn rags at the windows.

Phillip’s quarters were sparse. A patched jacket hung on a nail on the back of the door. A small chest sat at the cot’s foot. A jelly jar held sprays of blue flowers on the windowsill—the light entered the glass and was flung out by the shape, scattered into fragments that danced across the blanket’s rough weave, the worn wood underfoot, the ancient gilt clinging to the innermost clefts of the wooded curlicues that adorned the graying walls. The air smelled of the pine tar he chewed—a lump of it sat on the windowsill beside the flowers.

I stood frozen in the doorway. How could Phillip seem so here when I knew he was elsewhere? It was as though I could turn my head and find him standing there, scowling.

A board behind me creaked.

I spun, and there he was. The scowling was even more horrific in person.

“What are you looking for?”

“You?”

“Then why not speak when you saw me a few moments ago, headed towards the stables?”

My mind raced, but my lips flapped uselessly.

“What did you really want?”

I dropped my gaze to the floor. It was most scuffed near the doorway, where his comings and goings had worn away the polish to the yellow grain beneath.

“Bella, what did you really want?”

“I wanted to know what you were writing earlier,” I admitted.

It was as though his anger made him a foot taller. He took a step closer to me. “And because you wanted, you felt you had a right?”

I stammered several incoherent things.

“You’re as bad as your aunt,” he said. “I was writing a letter to a friend. Shall I begin passing them through you, to check them and make sure there are no words of sedition in them? You’re at a tender age still to be taking up a career as a Censor.”

I blushed angrily. “I just wanted to see them.”

He smelled of horse and man-sweat and pine, breathing the last in my face as he pressed forward, menacing me. At the same time, there was a hint of sex in his demeanor that I recognized. I had only recently come to an awareness of my power over some men and a few women, how a bold look or seductive gesture could reduce them to incoherency. Several stable hands had begun to ask for kisses recently, finally daring to look outside my aunt’s possible anger. My core burned as though to match the fierce heat coming from his body.

I looked up at him and licked my lips, a deliberate, rehearsed gesture.

He kept staring down at me. I could see the heartbeat fluttering in his throat, could feel his warmth as though it were already laid against my skin. It flashed through my mind,
Oh, how this would anger Jolietta.
The thought made me lick my lips once again, looking into his eyes.

He pushed me, which sent me sprawling. I fetched up against the wall with a painful blow along my ribs that drove the breath out of me.

“Certainly I have no rights here, being a Beast against an exalted Human,” he said, stressing the last word with a mocking twist. “But perhaps in the name of friendship, you might do me the courtesy of staying out of my things.”

“It’s not about you being a Beast!” I said. “I was just curious! It’s illegal, Phillip. You could get in trouble.”

But he said nothing more, simply stared me out of the room.

How could I have done what came next? I was as petty and as malicious as any teenager I’ve ever taught—and there is a long list of them.

How could I have gone so far as to ally with Jolietta, to take the side of the person I’d hated so hard and fiercely for so long?

But I did.

There was no sunlight in Jolietta’s room, which faced the inner courtyard rather than the outer fences, as Phillip’s did. The curtains were made of knotted lace, fine as spider webs, and everything about Jolietta’s immaculately clean room spoke of careful, costly elegance.

Jolietta stood in the doorway. The lamp behind her made her look like a spider made of iron, axe-blade harsh and cruel.

“What is it?” she said.

“I’ve seen Phillip writing letters,” I said.

Even now, decades later, shame blazes in me at the memory, at the betrayal. I had known it for one—I just had not anticipated its cost.

Jolietta didn’t say, “Are you sure?” Instead, she pushed past me. But she did not go immediately to Phillip’s room as I had thought she would, but to the infirmary. I trailed after her.

A shudder went through me, bone deep, when I saw Jolietta take the black-sided case down from the third shelf.

I said in protest: “Surely you’re not going to put him down?”

“No,” Jolietta said. Relief loosed my neck and shoulders, making me realize all at once how tight they had been. “I’ll have him for breeding and simple work stock, if nothing else. It is a shame, though, to lose a skilled physician. I’ll have to begin training one or two of the others up.”

In the yard, me still trailing her, Jolietta signaled to Brutus and Caesar, who lumbered after her in turn. Jolietta’s staccato of heel clicks led the slower, more ponderous tread behind her in turn. She did not knock at Phillip’s door, but simply turned the knob and went in, the Minotaurs after her.

Brutus’s bare back blocked my view—I saw in sharp detail the scars across his back, the swell of bullish muscle, the blotches of old sun—but I could not see Phillip or Jolietta.

“Hold him,” Jolietta said. “Pinch his nose shut.”

“Is there no other choice?” Phillip said, his voice high and desperate. “What is it that you think I have done?”

Jolietta did not speak to him.

* * *

The tip of the wire slid in and I saw the light go out of Phillip’s eyes. I screamed and struck out, but Caesar held me and would not let me go. Then I tried to look away, but at Jolietta’s bidding, he caught my head and held it, forcing me to witness.

I had never seen a Beast dulled before.

Afterwards she gave me chocolate as a reward for betraying him.

Here’s the most shameful thing of all: I wept, but I ate it anyway.

Afterward, I tried to press the knife into Phillip’s hands, over and over again, but he would not take it. I gripped the steel curve, freshly sharpened that afternoon at the great round of the grindstone. Me pumping its pedal with a steady rock of my foot. Sparks showered away whenever the blade touched the moving stone.

Even now, whenever metal sparks like that, I feel the burn of that afternoon’s memory, sitting in the stable sharpening a knife to kill my aunt, the taste of blood in my mouth, the lack of sleep burning in my skull.

And after all of that, I was unsuccessful. I tried, but Jolietta had me beaten and sold Phillip away. She locked me in a room on the second floor. “Until I know what to do with you,” she snarled.

I spent an uncomfortable night. While my aunt couldn’t dull me in the way she could a Beast, she did have the right to punish a wayward apprentice, depending on how much dirty laundry she wanted to air in public.

And then in the early morning, I lay on the floorboards, wrapped in my cloak and staring at the ceiling, wondering, worrying what Jolietta would do. I heard the dawn stirring, the household servants going about their work, the creak of the cook at the pump, the smell of wood smoke as she got the stove going, followed by the creeping smell of coffee.

I heard what must have been Brutus knocking at his mistress’s door, a steady solid sound that had ended with a crash. I wasn’t paying attention until that crash, and after it I heard the stentorian wails, the grief. Some of Jolietta’s creatures had known only life with her, and Brutus was one. When he appeared in my doorway, he looked oddly withered, like a plant forced into the wrong form and then deprived.

He said, “Mistress Jolietta is dead. She died in her sleep. We have sent for the doctor, but you are the mistress now.”

I gaped at him. He hulked there in the doorway, long-lashed cow’s eyes downturned.

I said, “Dead?” My mind felt about for strands of logic, like someone in the water looking for debris that might let them rest.

“Dead,” he repeated.

And with that, I was free.

Enough.

I am still free.