The Year of Our War (19 page)

A pair of green high heels minced into my field of vision. “Oh, my milk-and-water miscreant. What a shame.”

“Piss on it,” called Vance.

“As if wrecking his chances isn’t enough.” Aver-Falconet arranged me into a position where I could see the table. He swept the white cloth back, spilling bottles and lanterns. Under the table was a cage. The girl in the cage huddled away from the bars; she was so dirty that the terrified whites of her eyes were shocking as Insect eyes.

“This is the deal,” Aver-Falconet announced. “Jant Shira, please join us. The Wheel is the ruling gang of Hacilith’s East Bank. We offer you protection against Peterglass in return for only three-quarters of the profit you make.”

Still nauseous, I shrugged, shaking my head. I didn’t need refuge, usually. Usually I could outrun a coach-and-four.

“If you do not agree with me I will let Serin here go free. She belongs to Peterglass’s Bowyers and she will carry a message for us. Peterglass can come here and we will hand you over for an adequate price. I do not think they will let you live very long.”

The blond girl in the cage soaked in his words. She realized I was an outsider, and was looking at me as curiously as I was at her.

There was a lull in the storm that seethed inside me. I was beaten already, or rather, beaten again. I couldn’t fight these boys. Slum children were out of control, people said. They were right. “Yes…” I said. “I know poisons, and the cures to them. Cat is only one of the medicines I make. I can earn two hundred pounds a week for The Wheel if you keep Peterglass off my back.”

“Who’ll keep Felicitia off
your
back?” muttered Vance.

Felicitia? This
was
Felicitia Aver-Falconet? I stood up, painfully, and the older boy offered his hand. The fingernails were painted sea-green, with little rhinestones glued to them. A stroke of inspiration—I took his hand, and kissed it. There was a line of pinpoint scars on the back of his hand, reddened and bruised. I began to recognize the signs; he had his own reasons for recruiting me.

The fan flicked open like a peacock’s tail to hide his blush.

“If I’d known who you were I would have sworn loyalty at first,” I said. He was the Governor’s youngest son, estranged from the family and standing to inherit precisely nothing, but he still had the name. I knew it was important to feign interest in titles.

The room held its breath but Felicitia smiled. “Don’t mention it again.”

“Have you finished?” Layce’s rough voice wilted his fan. “Have we finished with the goat-shagger?”

“Yeah. Ah, yes. Ahem.”

“We have tickets to see Fevvers on the trapeze at the Campion. Like now. Let’s move.” Layce’s gang set down their glasses, gathered their coats and headed for the door. From outside came the sound of whirring bikes.

Layce took Felicitia’s arm but he twisted away and addressed me again: “Do you want to come with us?”

I stuttered. I’d never been to anything like the Campion before. I was afraid of the bright lights and the sheer number of vibrant people. If you could add together every sound over ten years’ time in Darkling it would never make a din as loud as one night’s performance in Hacilith. No doubt this would be the first trial of initiation. “Yes…Oh, yes—I would love to.”

“Can you ride a bike?”

“I’ll meet you there.”

Layce had feathers on the back of her dress, fashionably aping the mainly Awian aristocracy. Her fake feathers were looking a bit worse for wear. Felicitia walked close by, one and a half meters of emerald chiffon sewn with glittering Insect eye facets. Should I be frightened? What does he want? Grown used to accepting, I accepted his hand on my arse.

A
ll this self-pity was making me hungry, which curtailed my introspection. I set to work on Castle correspondence until the quadrangle clock began to chime midnight. By then I was so ravenous I couldn’t concentrate on anything so I left for the Great Hall where meals are continuously laid out for the Eszai, visitors and servants.

The Castle was so quiet it seemed unoccupied, which suited me fine. I’m happy on my own until I hear other people enjoying themselves, and have to compare myself to them. If there were no other people I wouldn’t feel alone.

T
he Great Hall was tiled dark red at the servants’ end, the color of dried blood. Rows of pillars down the center supported a vaulted ceiling. The Hall seemed larger at night as most of the tables had been cleared away. I glimpsed my frosted breath in the moonlight from a tall arched window. A sudden noise stopped me and I listened hard, heart racing.

I stood in the shadow of a red pillar and tried to make out the indistinct voices. Two men at the other end of the Hall were shouting in anger. I edged closer. There was a crash, a chair screeched on the tiling, a metal plate dropped to the floor. Still closer, it resolved into words.

“Well, I thought I would find you here, you bastard.” Petulant and deep, round Awian vowels like overripe fruit. Lightning. The other voice said something with a low sneer.

“Touch Ata again and you’re dead,” said Lightning.

“I should have
known
she’d run to you. Port. Storm. When I catch her I’ll—”

“You will have to pass me first,” the Archer pointed out. “Everyone knows she is better than you.” There was a scuffle and another crash. Then nothing.

I couldn’t think whether to stay and listen, or make my presence known. Blankness comes when I have to do something, when it’s best not to think. For example when facing Insect swarms, or cooking a fix. That’s it, I’m leaving. The part of me that charges the Insects or shoots an overdose took control. I dropped my hands to my sides and stepped out into oil lamp glare, stood there blinking.

“Boys,” I said. “Let’s not fight.”

Shearwater Mist was sitting on the edge of the table, leaned back, his thick arms among plates of food. Blood was running down his leg from a shallow cut, pooling on the floor. Lightning stood over him with a sword; he had just taken Mist’s own rapier from him. He had a quiver of arrows on his back, the embossed strap hanging down, and his flickering shadow on the ocher wall looked like a porcupine. I turned my attention from the suckling roast to Mist’s lined face. “What is this about?” I asked.

“Get lost, waif,” said Shearwater Mist. Lightning thumped him on the shoulder with the sword pommel. An Insect had once bitten through that shoulder, and the Sailor winced.

I edged forward but Lightning pointed the sword at me and sighted down the flat of its blade. “Mind your own business,” he said.

He’s right, it’s not my business, and he doesn’t want me to make it my business, and I shouldn’t be creeping around in the dark anyway.

I closed the space in a couple of strides and grabbed Lightning’s free arm. He flicked me away. Mist snarled, looking like a wolfhound. I felt like an alley cat watching lions fight.

“Stop that!” Lightning yelled at Mist.

“You have so much explaining to do, Mica,” Mist shouted back.

“You would be nothing if not for me!”

“Trying to steal it back? Pigs. Fly.” The sneer rolled up one side of Mist’s face like paralysis. Lightning seemed itching to hit it.

I sneaked a bottle of plum wine from the table and sat down on a pillar plinth, watching them. Mist hooked the remaining fingers of his left hand under the quiver strap that ran diagonally over Lightning’s chest, against his shirt. He tried to drag him closer. I thought the strap would break, and arrows would be all over the floor like pick-up sticks.

Lightning dropped the rapier, drew his own short archer’s sword. He pressed it against Mist’s neck so the blade ran behind his ear. “You’ll regret this,” he said. Mist tried to kick his knee.

Mist hadn’t altered his twisted smile; he looked like a wry shark. Gray hair straggled on his collar, a broad white streak in his hair, which I thought couldn’t be natural until I decided that nobody could keep it dyed for so long. His stony eyes were on the Archer.

“I’ll tell San,” I declared.

“There are many things I could inform the Emperor about Jant,” Lightning called back. Extortion, our instinct.

“Go ahead,” I muttered.

“Just because you have all the money you think you can do what you like!”

“This concerns honor, not wealth!” Lightning bawled in his face.

“Money is honor,” I remarked irrelevantly, and Mist gave me a genuine smile for a second. Then the sneer was back firmly in place. He grasped Lightning’s wrist holding the sword hilt, with his right hand, and squeezed. Lightning flicked the blade and a little trickle of blood ran down from behind Mist’s ear. There was a battle of wills, Lightning’s brawny arm tensing, the veins standing out on Mist’s thick hand. The Archer dropped his sword, and Mist slid off the table with a foot on both blades. He picked the rapier up. I could see white fingerprints around Lightning’s wrist; he narrowed his eyes as Mist squared up to him with the weapon.

“Shearwater…?” My voice sounded small.

“Get out of here, you inky-fingered waif,” he said menacingly. So I did.

I
ran out to the courtyard, icy cobbles sliding under my boots. In the center of the dark square I spread darker wings and struggled up to my window, where I had left the shutters ajar. I kicked them open and stepped down into a deserted untidy room. The only sound was a steady drip of candle wax onto the floor, where blue stalagmites were growing. “Tern?” I called. “Tern!
Tern!
—Governor Wrought! You skinny horse.” A scribbled note by the dead fireplace informed me she had gone to Hacilith. She was asking the Governor to accept the refugees swarming her manorship, with the idea that she could do more for them farther south, in the city.

I took a swig of sickly wine, realized I was holding a bottle. A potential weapon. Down in the Hall, I had a weapon all the time without realizing. Not a very worthy one, to use against these Awian lords. I giggled.

I only cut someone with broken glass once—that was a rich lord too, back in Hacilith. I left the gin shop in the dark, walking through Galt’s stained streets. Eventually I became aware of someone following me. I was so naïve; I had come as far as Cinder Street before the idea crossed my mind. The shop was nearby, the wings of its canopy folded back for the night. I couldn’t risk a dash to safety; Felicitia would learn where I lived. Instead, I took a detour, ran round a corner. Outside the Kentledge pub, drunkards had vomited so often the pavement was starting to dissolve. I picked an empty bottle from an overflowing bin, smashed it and lay in wait.

A figure came round the corner, and I jumped for his throat. I pressed the glass to his mouth. If I had twisted it, it would have sliced out his mouth, and the skin around it, like a circle from a pastry cutter.

“Who are you?” I yelled. Fury is the main passion I remember from that age.

“Mmm mm mm!”

“Oh. Bugger.”

I removed the bottle tentatively, my fingers tight enough to break it and Felicitia regarded me calmly. Blood was running into his mouth from a mustache of little cuts. He smeared his lips together like women do with lipstick, gave a broad red grin. “Well, my belligerent boy,” he said. “The East Bank gangs really do need you.”

T
hese are memories of which Lightning and Mist couldn’t conceive, and I can’t imagine the sort of memories they might have. I crossed to the only clean table and lit the burner under my still, made sure there was enough water and fern in the hopper. This is something I do automatically every time I come into the room. I couldn’t calm the older Eszai, I was truly useless. Lightning had always used Mist as a case in point when training me in combat, calling up examples of his foolishness. “Protect your eyes, fingers, teeth. These things don’t grow back. You don’t want to live without them, like Mist who caught his hand in an anchor chain, back when he was a
common sailor
.”

I sat down at a writing desk and started transcribing orders, sealing them with the Castle’s sunburst crest.

Several letters later—my subconscious had been counting the drops—the tone of their falling into a little glass beaker changed, and I knew I had enough cat to fill a syringe. The needle scratched against the glass as I sucked it up, still warm. I wound a leather bootlace round my arm, and after some messing about, sank it in a major vein.

Tiredness vanished. I went to sit back down at the desk. Cat’s a work drug. Sometimes cat is a work drug. With a steady hand, I went back to scripting the commands that San wanted me to send out. After a quarter hour, the peak began to fade, but I resisted taking more. Then I went and topped it up with another shot. Wish I had veins like the Sailor’s. I concentrated completely on the letters for a while. I have a theory that everybody in their lifetime gets fifteen minutes of ecstasy. Except me, ’cause I do it every night.

I crashed out of the second high too quickly to manage the distance between my desk and the still. Instead, I sat and stared into space, at the forested windows. Tiredness began to grow on me, unbearably. The glass was iced up in thin fern patterns, like fronds of scolopendium. They swirled around each other, curving, moving. They curled like girls’ downy feathers. I wish Tern were here. The frost plants changed color slowly, becoming murky gray, then a sharp light blue. I was puzzled. Ice is white. Blue is not white…Blue things are things like the sky…During the day…Daytime. Of course. I had better go to bed.

A hand on my shoulder shook me gently. I realized it had been there for some time. I gathered what little strength I had left and looked round. I found myself eye-to-eye with Lightning’s belt buckle. My gaze traveled up to his square face, short hair the color of burned sand. He was losing his tan in the Plainslands winter. “Good morning,” I said, in Scree by accident, then repeated it in Awian. I rubbed at my stubble; I need a wash.

“The door was open. I knocked but you gave no reply. It’s cold in here,” he observed. He used my books as stepping stones through the chaos of papers, from
Posteventualism
to
Pharmacopoeia, Darkling Linguistics
and
Solution Chemistry
in three apologetic steps.

“Is it? I wouldn’t know.”

A glance toward the still, which was dripping away, filling the air with a scent of hot oil and cut grass. “Oh. Jant? Are you all right?”

A streak of the old fury flickered through me. The idiot was still carrying a quiver over his shoulder. He also wore a circlet, which hid in his hair like a gold worm in hay. “I’m nothing. It’s not fair. This is no time to pursue your fifteenth-century quarrels, Micawater!” I glared at the arrow tops until he swung the quiver from his shoulder and laid it, with a crackle of sticks, on the carpet. The arrow fledgings were dyed bright red, which is the Castle color, but it also makes them easier to find in the snow, like little drops of blood.

Lightning makes a nervous gesture with his right hand sometimes, subconsciously. The frequency of that gesture shows how worried he is. He makes a fist with his hand, and then slides the tips of his fingers back over his palm, straightening the hand out. I know he does this to feel the deep ridges of a scar. When he was blood-brother to Savory, he grasped a sword and drew his hand along it, a quick motion cutting twice to the bone, from each edge of the blade. He loved her and the pale hollow of that scar must be very reassuring to him. It was because of the wound that he lost her, though. Couldn’t shoot straight with a hand cut to shreds.

I pushed myself out of the chair, stumbled across to the divan, where I lay curled up, my head on a cool satin cushion. Lightning said, “I wish to make reparation for what happened last night. You deserve an explanation.”

Did I? I didn’t care, really. I wanted a hit. But still I was grateful that he had thought of me. “I want an apology from Shearwater,” I declared, spreading a wing to form a bony blanket.

“Him? Ha!” Lightning passed a broad hand over his eyes, settled himself in the chair I had just vacated. He looked shattered, actually. “I hate Shearwater Mist,” he said. “San help me, I despise him and I always have. Ever since he joined the Circle. Violence is no way to treat a lady. Women are…Ata is…The way I feel about her is…One should never strike a woman.” Yes. They hit you back.

I thought I had made a mess of my life with drugs, but that is nothing to some people’s disaster with love. I offered him a broad smile of encouragement. “Talk,” I said.

“Ata has an idea, to deliver Tornado from Lowespass. She can sail great ships, with fyrd on board, up the river, as close as possible to the base of the crag. We can fight to the Fortress from there, with much lower attrition than if we march by land. You know that Insects don’t go into the river. If Mist’s caravels could manage it, and I had archers on them…” Lightning hesitated as he remembered how little I like ships.

“So you back this plan?” I asked.

“I don’t know. It is a new way of fighting. I would prefer to rely on our proven strengths…But I can think of no better way to reach Tornado.”

“Does the Emperor approve?”

“He thought it a great innovation!”

I said, “Then I don’t understand. Why doesn’t he order Mist to sail upriver?”

“Mist won’t do it. He advises San that the venture is impossible, Oriole River too shallow. They gave San conflicting information. Mist completely refuses to give her authority to try it. Then, right there in the Throne Room, Ata Challenged him! She said: ‘Look to your title, Shearwater Mist!’ They left the court and he turned on her.

“Ata sought me, for safety. She is still hiding in my room now; she locked the door. She is covered in bruises, Mist beat her; he is a coward and a miser. Ata wants to prove herself a better seafarer than him—and I think she is,” Lightning added loyally.

“What did San say?”

“That Ata has a legitimate Challenge.”

“Yes, but now, of all times!” I picked up a handful of letters. “Summerday town, gone. Rachis, Tanager, under attack. Insects sighted in Wrought. In Carniss. Insects on the Alula Road. Avernwater wants aid, Sheldrake won’t send any. We need Eszai in Awia; she is mad to make a Challenge now.” Mad or brave, I thought; and Mist is equally wrong to force her into it. “It’s a rash act; Mist will divorce her and San will throw her back into the flow of time, and I won’t miss her.”