Schisms Page 5

  “I need you to prepare a column for tomorrow,” Anna said.

  The Alakeph veteran regarded her warily. “This isn’t the time for retaliation.”

  “It’s not for fighting,” she said. “It’s for Nahora.”

  Chapter 4

  Anna sat on the edge of a cliff, high along the ridges between Tas Hassan and Karawat, where shifting fog revealed valleys blotted with cypresses and red anemones and tall, swaying grass. It was curious to watch the world shifting below her, to sense the divide between her ankles and scorching rock blurring until her body was the heat, the shrub-dotted fissures, the streams and flats snaking out under a midday sun. Soon she was also the wind, the very same that was dancing through her hair, and the starlight that darkened her skin. She was time, weathering the hillsides and worming roots through soil.

  She was a fighter’s gentle steps over stone.

  “I’m listening, Yatrin,” Anna said, her awareness sinking back into her body.

  “They want to rendezvous four leagues to the east,” Yatrin replied. He moved closer, but kept a generous distance from the edge. “It’s not too late to break off our arrangements.”

  Anna shut her eyes against the light. “Do you trust your people?”

  “I want to.”

  From Anna’s observations, Yatrin was one of the few fighters—within the Nest or deployed in the field—who held any reservations about making contact. It was natural, considering the birthplace of nearly half her forces. Even those who’d turned their backs on the state still traded Orsas in the corridors, practiced their calligraphy by transcribing sacred mandates, and found themselves gazing to the northeast with every sunset. But Yatrin was his own oak, his roots severed from the state and its ploys. Or so it seemed. Anna considered that it was merely a ruse held in her presence, but Mesar and his men had shown the truth of things when they nudged Yatrin’s ribs in the bunks.

  Afraid of a little homecoming, Yatroshu?

  It’s our first chance to take real ground. Don’t grind your heel upon it.

  She joined her fighters, thirty-five in all, in the fold between granite crests. Her southern fighters had donned their camouflage smocks, which were knotted with mud-soaked burlap strips and withered moss, while the northerners and easterners rested in loose shawls and cotton tunics. Being unarmored seemed to induce dread. The caution and exhaustion and bitterness were bare on their faces, as bare as their mounds of vests, ruji, tins, wrapped rations, rope, and spare boots, some of which had been plucked from the dead at Sadh Nur Amah and still smelled of vinegar. But her fighters were arranged in radiating knots around Mesar, and only those with southern blood—part of Jenis’s unit, or the sister unit they’d recruited from Kowak—glanced at Anna as she appeared. There was always a nexus to morale, a center of balance shifting and swaying hearts below the immediate terror of killing.

  The afterglow of Anna’s meditation lingered, and she envisioned herself as empty wind once more, her body dissolving into Mesar’s. . . .

  “Once we pass Karawat, the sentiment should soften,” one of Jenis’s fighters was saying to Mesar. They were both squatting on loose earth, their water-soaked wrappings draped over their heads and upper backs. “Even so, you ought to be the spearhead.”

  Mesar rubbed his stubble, examining the lines they’d scrawled into the dirt. “Nothing outruns mistruth, it seems.”

  “They’ve made up their minds.” The fighter shrugged. “Golyna’s got a different eye than the stick-dwellers.”

  “It needs to be an introduction, not a surrender.”

  “Eh?”

  “Enemies surrender,” Mesar said. “Every bit of chatter feeds their perception, regardless of whose lips are moving. It simply isn’t about figureheads, you see. This isn’t the north, nor the south. The state’s ears are keen on all voices, and once this war begins in earnest, you’ll see that.”

  Jenis’s fighter gave a throaty laugh. “Did one spot of good, though. They took half the horses’ worth. Probably worried we’d scalp them if they turned it down.”

  His southern comrades chuckled under their damp shade.

  “What happened?” Anna asked Yatrin quietly, maintaining her distance from Mesar’s inner circle.

  “Khutai and his men were fighting uphill,” Yatrin said with folded arms. “Volna’s emissaries passed through this morning.”

  “Are they trying to buy out their garrison?”

  “Not quite. They were passing on the news about Sadh Nur Amah.”

  “A warning, then.”

  Yatrin shook his head. “They told the governor it was our doing. Not just here, either. They probably sent riders to every notch of central Hazan.”

  An old vein of anger flared up in Anna, burning and tight across her face, but she was quick to settle it. It wasn’t the first time they’d polished their own devastation into something noble, but it was the most egregious. They were becoming bolder, more brash, more certain in their ability to control minds as easily as trade routes. They were winning. They’d proven as much through semantics alone.

  No longer Patvor, the monsters.

  They were Volna, the liberators.

  Khara rested on the outskirts of the gathering, still working on her aspen carving. Her vest and outer wrappings were piled beside her, revealing the dark, slick sheen of her shoulders in the sunlight. She glanced up and met Anna’s eyes.

  “Watch her,” Anna said to Yatrin, turning away to conceal her lips. It was impossible to predict how she’d act without her partner. That was the trouble of pairing, Anna supposed. Lovers fought like wild dogs, but the bereaved resigned themselves to death.

  “Are you sure she’s the one to watch?” Yatrin asked. The question begged itself: They were both staring at Ramyi, who’d garnered her own flock of fighters under the shade of a crooked juniper tree.

  The girl wore her bruise like a pendant, smirking as she tossed stones with the younger men and women from Jenis’s unit. As far as Anna could read, it was all a mask. Drifting, vapid behavior was a ruse she knew too well. The night before, Ramyi had shambled off to the lower bunks with shuddering legs, forming a mirrored memory of walking endlessly in some autumn sprawl. But it was better if she didn’t break. Not around the others.

  “She’ll do fine,” Anna said. “I did. She has to prove herself, and she’ll suffer until it happens.”

  “She’s not the only one who suffers,” Yatrin said.

  “It was panic.” A twinge of pity flashed through her as she studied Ramyi. “Don’t lash the world to her shoulders, Yatrin. She’s a child.”

  “The world crashes down on all of us, doesn’t it?”

  Anna blinked at the Nahoran and his shadows of truth. You cannot be broken by what you are, she recalled from the Kojadi tomes. But being was no simple task.

  “Are we prepared to mobilize?” Mesar called out, ceasing the pockets of conversation that sprouted beneath shade and sweeping branches.

  “Mesar,” Anna said, “pay them in full for the horses.”

  Jenis’s fighters glanced at one another with pinched brows. The unit’s quartermaster, lugging a sack of amber and Rzolkan alloy over his smock, narrowed his eyes. They all looked expectantly at the Alakeph commander.

  “Vying for some peddlers’ hearts?” Jenis’s captain said with a sneer.

  Mesar, still squatting and regarding the scarred dirt before him, drew a hard breath. “You heard her.”

  * * * *

  At dusk they convened with the horse peddlers in the crux of a gentle gully. Yatrin, Khara, and several of Mesar’s men circled the mass of swishing tails and hot dust and leather reins, confirming their order of fifty-two horses and six mules. A group of Nahoran children waited with wagons on the crest of the slope, silhouetted against a bruising sky, keeping watch over heaps of saddles and stirrups the northerners had scoffed at.


  “Look at them,” Anna said to Yatrin, pointing at the clump of peddlers dealing with Mesar. They kept their arms crossed, their eyes low, their legs rigid. It was more severe than mistrust of strangers. Their village was three days’ ride from salvation—be it kator railways, a frontline garrison, or a mesa holdout—and their fate, whether delivered as blades or alloy bars, had already been sealed. That was why Mesar and Jenis had chosen it, Anna realized during their descent from the ridge. A border garrison with kator lines would’ve been easier, but given them less leverage. Less terror, in plainer terms.

  “They’re as hardy as they look,” Yatrin said. “My father bought a gelding from this region after my first campaign. It could clear two fields before its hooves slowed. The heat sits well with them.”

  Anna hummed as though she’d been speaking of the beasts. “Impressive breeders.”

  “They’re part of the state too,” he replied. “Beasts or men, it’s all the state. It resides in everything here.”

  She eyed Yatrin sidelong. It was an old maxim, as useless as any other.

  But Yatrin’s stare was mired in his truth of the world. “The grain in their bellies, the water in their troughs, the whips on their flesh. Their mother’s wombs were formed by the state too. So was every kind word and every lump of sugar.”

  “And you think that’s what plays through their minds when they run?”

  “Not through their minds, really,” Yatrin said. “It is their mind. That’s what Malchym never understood about our ranks. We weren’t afraid to lose something we didn’t own.”

  Baqir’s body, loaned from Golyna and its shimmering towers, played through Anna’s mind with vivid clarity. The parched soil of Hazan drank and drank, never sated. Nahora’s only divergence was its gift for glamorizing its thirst.

  “Do you really believe it?” Anna asked.

  Yatrin’s lids sank over his eyes, aging him in an instant. “If Nahora didn’t, they would already have been subjugated. Courage sustains them.”

  “My father told it differently,” Anna replied. “He said the forests are lined with brave bones. When leaves show their bellies, the clever seek shelter. The brave flatten their tongues and wait for the rain.”

  “And yet there’s no rain in the flatlands.”

  Anna watched their quartermaster lug two sacks of alloy from a pile, dragging them over crumbling earth and tossing them at the peddlers’ feet. “Nor are there any leaves.”

  One of the peddlers stooped down and sifted through his take. He rubbed his chin, mumbled something in Orsas, listened to Jenis’s fighters as they bickered and pointed at him. Soon Mesar’s men joined in, their rising flatspeak drowning out the horses’ whinnies.

  Seeds of conflict were simple to spot, if one knew where to look. Anna led Yatrin down the slope in a wash of dust, straining to hear the dispute.

  “. . . and it’s unfair,” one of the peddlers was saying. “It’s just not enough.”

  “First we offered fifty, and you took it,” Jenis’s captain barked.

  “And then you came to your senses. It’s dishonorable to rescind your price.”

  “It’s enough,” a hooded peddler said to his companion. “We can go.”

  “These are the best of the herds,” the first peddler grunted.

  “We can arrange to deliver the other ten agir tomorrow,” Mesar suggested. His even tone was a token gesture, buried beneath the growing sea of shouts and accusations.

  “We can leave some of the pack horses,” Anna said. Her presence stilled the men, though only for a moment. She forced her voice beyond comfort to stamp out the last of their mutters. “Go and fetch some of our cloths, Khutai. Bring whatever we can spare.”

  Before Mesar’s captain could move, the first peddler threw up his hands. “We have all the cloth we want. We’re not beggars.”

  “Jersuh,” his companion hissed. His eyes were bulging. “Do you know who that is?”

  “A foolish girl,” the peddler said.

  “Fifty is enough.”

  “It’s not and you know it. Straighten your spine, would you?” The peddler’s companions were shifting away from him, glancing at Anna and the dark, wandering scars across her neck. But he was a brave man with no mind for leaves. He was studying Yatrin, Khara, and a dozen others in their press of shadowed blades. “I see eastern sun on your faces, brothers and sisters. But you march with such butchers.”

  “Butchers?”

  A girl’s delicate whisper had never put so much fear in Anna.

  Ramyi slid through the crowd, her splotchy purple welt bathed in the dying light from the east. Her Hazani eyes, so much narrower than their southern counterparts, had widened enough to reveal bloodshot tendrils. There was no Kojadi veil over the girl’s expression, only wrath. “You think my people are butchers?”

  “It’s all right, Ramyi,” Mesar whispered. “Remember the mothers’ words of clarity.”

  “I have no mother,” Ramyi said. “The eastern saviors made sure of that.”

  “He meant nothing by it. Our people share common aims.”

  “I meant it,” the peddler said, spitting on the burlap sacks near Ramyi. “Look at this little animal you carry around.” He shook his head at the Nahorans around Anna. “What is this girl here for, ah? Is she some reward for the throats you slit in the flatlands? Do you share her, or is she somebody’s property? Is she married to her brother?”

  Ramyi’s fists curled within her sleeves.

  “That’s enough,” Anna said, culling the rage she saw blooming in the crowd. Most of the Hazani and pale-skinned northerners had, at the very least, stiffened their shoulders and pursed their lips. But several among them, especially those with henna-dyed eyes and pins arrayed in ladder-like columns under the skin of their forearms—recruited from cartel networks and sanctuary encampments—were on the cusp of killing. Ramyi’s eyes were hardest to disarm, but memories of violence lingered like their own instructor. “Leave ten pack horses. I urge you to accept my offer. It’s the fairest you’ll receive.”

  The peddlers mulled about in contemplative silence. Finally, their leader cleared his throat. “An interesting view on fairness.” He looked at his horses, all stamping around in a hazy circle. “Very well, then. It seems to be Hazani fairness.”

  “I’ll gut you,” Ramyi snapped, breaking any sense of reprieve.

  “Me?” the peddler asked. “What—”

  “Don’t you dare speak about me or my family.” But the girl’s anger rested beneath a press of hurt, of swollen eyes and quivering brows.

  “Nahora has seen your breed before,” the peddler chuckled. “Northern children with foul tongues and foul blood. The state can endure far more than you.”

  Ramyi’s lower jaw shook, rattling with words she couldn’t channel into a blade or a fresh vessel for hayat. She glanced at Anna, nearly flinching as she did so, then gazed at the mound of burlap. “We’ll see about that,” she whispered.

  “Forty-two horses and six mules, then,” Mesar said to his men. “Help them load their wagon.”

  By the time they’d saddled half of the horses—including Anna’s—and lashed their equipment to the pack animals, it was full dark. Anna stood with Yatrin and the others on the highest rise of the slopes, gazing out at the bruise-blue hills and flats and gorges to the north, her hands grasping the reins of her black mare. Far below, the lantern-like baubles dangling from the herders’ wagon wormed toward the shelter of watchtowers and mud walls. At every moment, Anna expected Ramyi’s markings to burst out of one of her fighters, sundering the earth beneath distant wagon wheels or consuming the peddlers’ flesh in a wreath of silver flame.

  Ramyi was still, thoughtful, as she sat behind Khara on a circling horse. With her arms wrapped around the easterner and eyes bold with glossy lamplight, her gaze calmly tracking the wagon’s course, it appeared that
Mesar’s short bout of circle meditation had settled her temper.

  That was the worrying way of it, Anna knew: Anger formed and fell away with every breath, but hatred simply learned to sleep.

  * * * *

  The days passed slowly, sweeping by as a pall of droning crickets and dry heat and blue skies over valleys of moss and rust. Despite the fur-lined saddle, Anna’s legs were chafed and smeared with rosy blood by the end of the first day. That was the cost of existing beyond the hardships of the true world, perhaps. Between measured riding stretches Anna had paused and signaled for Ramyi to mark Khutai, who had the thickest, yet fairest, neck among her fighters. Ramyi’s meditation had uncovered countless runes, some more useful than other, but during this ride, the girl added a rune she’d come to term sprout. When Khutai tensed properly, the sand shot up around them in an immense, crackling dome, its walls firmer than iron, encasing them in lightless silence for an instant. Then it dissolved into a rain of powder-soft grit, as gentle as winter’s first flurry. Or so Anna had seen in training. Khutai had sharp reflexes, but ruji shavings rarely announced their arrival.

  Their caravan had passed several farmers, but the only domestic troops—Chayam— they spotted along their procession were shadows upon the hilltops. In each of their seven encounters, Anna’s fighters had glinted a single mirror signal:

  We seek negotiations in Golyna.

  Each time, it was received without reply.

  When Anna meditated within her tent on the low side of a windswept rise, burrowed into the ground and encircled by heated rocks like any skillful Gosuri shelter, the storm was deafening. She heard the wind shearing apart grass and sun-dried branches, chilling the horses as they snorted and stomped about, rattling the makeshift paddock formed by the tent poles that jutted up through the soil. It was difficult to focus without seeing the girl’s blooming golden pupils or envisioning Shem in the hallway of some distant palace. Soon she rose, pacing around the ring of cushions and hanging candle cages with air screeching and aching into her chest. Can I really control her? Should I? Shadows of truth. After some time she hung a kettle to boil over their hearth, crept past Yatrin, and climbed up the tent’s ladder, emerging into the moaning blackness of the palisade. Frigid air howled across the darkness, joined by flurries of glittering sand and the sound of watchmen’s boots raking over packed earth. She hurried to the tent housing Ramyi and Khara, peeled back its upper flap, and leaned her head into the candlelight alongside a flurry of mica and glittering sand.