The rush of blood back to my lower limbs as I stood made me gasp, tiny flares of nerves flooding my senses, and my movements scooping up and returning the documents were clumsy.
I was due to begin a shift in our sector in a while, but the thought of the long walk back up the hill was daunting. Instead, I followed a different idea and walked farther north, heading into the residential areas surrounding the sprawling school complex. Even in this subdued atmosphere, people still went about their daily business, particularly the young and elderly, who had not been assigned duties on the walls or elsewhere. The area ahead looked to be a poorer neighborhood. I wandered in, listening for sounds of activity. It was quiet, even for the circumstances; no open windows, no pedestrians, just bare streets and narrow, unfriendly houses looming overhead.
A group of young women crossed the road in front of me, carrying baskets on their broad shoulders. They walked past without chatter, disappearing into the maze of crooked stone housing on the left.
Unlike in the upper city, these houses snuggled close together, tottering up to four or five stories and stacked back from the road. Some shared tiled roofs and had small, communal walled gardens. From the edge of one roof on the corner a few wilted bluehood wreaths dangled, perhaps left over from the Children’s Festival earlier in the summer. Tiny alleyways connected the maze, and many of the walls had steep, external stairs built into the stone. The muffled sound of the girls’ footfalls carried strangely among the tightly packed buildings so I wasn’t sure in what direction they’d gone. I must have walked past these little communities a thousand times before, but until now had never paid any heed to them, or noticed how different these homes were from the spacious apartments of the upper city or even the neat housing closer to the school.
I noticed another faded wreath, then another. I found myself following them, a thought forming in my head. If countryfolk moving to the city were taking lower paid, un-Guilded work, this would be the kind of area where they would live. An area with prominent decorations for a celebration that had its roots, like so much of our culture, in the spiritual beliefs of the past. If no Darfri would come to us, perhaps I could go to them.
When I squeezed down a tight alleyway, the heads of two women rose above one of the walled gardens, one with hair in a tight tail and something familiar about the profile. I called out without thinking. “Eliska?”
They were a distance away, and the tall buildings limited the sunlight, so even when both faces jerked round, I couldn’t tell if the woman was the Stone-Guilder. Her companion’s face was unobscured as it stared at me, suspicious. Both turned and vanished from my sight, and I suddenly felt foolish; there was no reason for Eliska to be here, and I’d probably just scared off residents I’d hoped to talk to.
“Hello?” I called out. The gardens I passed by were sad things, overgrown with weeds and strewn with the hollow shells of rotten vegetables. I could no longer hear the women I’d originally followed. I walked down the alleyways, my footfalls intrusive in the silence. The buildings all looked much the same, with a single door on the ground floor, a window barred and oil-papered, and a frighteningly narrow stone staircase leading up the outside of the building to the upper floors. Clothing, laid out to dry in the sun, draped the iron balustrade of the equally narrow second-story landing of the nearest house.
And opposite, in a tiny alcove, a Darfri shrine.
They were common enough, especially around festival times: usually a small stack of rocks, clusters of herbs and flowers, artfully arranged, to which believers sometimes brought their young ones for blessings, or to wish someone good tidings. They were harmless little things, decorative and unobtrusive.
This one had been smashed, the rocks scattered and faded greenery flattened. The intense smell of old urine assaulted my nose. Uneasy, I backed away. “Is anyone here?” I called out again and bumped into the gate of the garden behind me. I tried knocking on the door of the house, but it swung open on its rickety hinges at my touch. “Hello?” Something felt wrong about the house; the silence, the stillness.… It was too intense. I stepped inside.
“Hello?”
Poorly lit though the room was, it was obvious no one would answer.
Cupboards lining the walls gaped like sad, empty mouths, and a blanket of dust and grit covered most of the surfaces, broken only by scattered foot tracks. On the back wall, someone had painted a single word: traitor.
The house was abandoned. More than that; abandoned and ransacked. I stepped through, queasy. By Silastians. Our own citizens did this. Stepping over smashed crockery and discarded clothing, I ran my hands over the stripped pallets in the corner, bending to pick up a toy wedged beneath an overturned stew pot. It was a child’s moppet, dressed in traditional country-style clothing with bright layered skirts and a scarf over its head. It was crudely stitched but its clothes were worn from hugs and the ink markings of its face had been loved off. Its hair stuffing poked out in places where the stitching had failed. Around its neck hung a miniature charm necklace like the one Tain’s Darfri servant had worn. I could almost picture the child who must have owned it. That a beloved toy had been abandoned left me almost as disquieted as the sacking.
Even as I knocked at the door of the neighboring building, which shared the yard with the first, I suspected the result would be the same, and it was. Any valuables that had ever been in these poor homes were long gone, just like their residents. The same layer of dirt and dust covered the remnants of the life the family had left here. It was the same thing in the stories above, and in every house on the small block.
I held the doll, transferring it between my hands. Where had the people gone, after their shrines were desecrated and their homes vandalized? Had they been driven out by fear of their fellow citizens, or forced to leave?
I climbed down one of the thin, stone staircases, pressing the side of my body and both hands close against the wall for balance. I felt like I’d just visited a different city from the Silasta we knew, a city within a city. I needed to talk to Tain.
Lendulos
DESCRIPTION: Decorative, flowering, warm-climate perennial, with plentiful bright orange flowers. Leaves used to treat headaches and joint pain, flower extract combined with alcohol used to treat bleeding wounds.
SYMPTOMS: Injection of flower tincture causes blood clotting, manifesting in localized pain and swelling, tenderness, muscle cramps, red or blue skin discoloration and heat, organ damage, death.
PROOFING CUES: Strong, citruslike taste with a rancid edge, extremely unpleasant and difficult to disguise (unlikely to be used as an ingested poison).
7
Jovan
I dreamed too much.
First it was fragments: lessons with Etan, tomfoolery with Tain. Then detailed, vibrant dreams, rich in memories, as though I were living those times again. One took me through my first poisoning and then my worst, and I woke clutching my throat and coughing, the caustic feeling still burning in my lungs as if I had freshly inhaled the deadly powder. I turned over in my bed, skin slick and muscles clenching. I tried breathing exercises to calm my mind, but the cough kept erupting and destroying my concentration. Sleep, you need to sleep.
Upon waking yet again, my heart raced and my brain swam with stress and fear. I couldn’t remember details—just a sense of threat. Tain and Kalina had been in danger, and I had been unable to get to them, but somehow knew they were going to die, and it would be my fault. I had to protect them both, and I was failing.