Schisms Read online

  “Ramyi, come with me,” Anna called out.

  Khara stirred in her bundled quilts, but kept her eyes sealed.

  Screeching wind was the immediate reply. Anna waited, rocking on her haunches and staring into the patchwork of shadows and candlelight, till Ramyi wandered forth in tan robes with eyes tucked low.

  Déjà vu was more chilling than the next gust.

  They sat in Anna’s tent with legs crossed, drinking mint and quince teas like the courtiers from Nur Sabah. Candlelight sifted through patterned iron boxes and danced upon the walls in orange, thorny swirls. It was rare to spend time with the girl outside of meditative sessions or schooling, but it hadn’t always been that way. Once Ramyi had been shy and tender and receptive to Anna’s knowledge of making bone-broth and tying knots. She’d never been much of a friend—Anna had few of those and wanted even less—but she was a vessel for kindness, for wisdom, for everything Anna had accumulated through steady breaths and murder, yet had never been able to pass on. But war had a habit of twisting things. Anna could sense the barrier between them as tangibly as the steam curling up from their cups: Two beings, more attuned to their interconnection than the countless masses around them, were unable to make amends or shave down the calluses upon their hands. They were both girls, after all. Again, war had obscured that simple truth. It felt so foolish to Anna, but she wouldn’t be the first to disarm. There was too much hurt in surrender. Perhaps the pain was just too immediate, too intense. Over time, separation brought its own suffering. Especially when Anna contrasted her life with the Claw’s virtues, sensing the roots of her legacy drying and blackening below a mighty oak…

  Yatrin slept in the darkness at the edge of the tent, his quiet breaths a reflection of a shallow slumber. His presence seemed to unnerve Ramyi, who kept glancing at his covers, almost as though safeguarding a captive. There was understandable reproach, if not lurking envy, in the girl’s pursed lips. It must’ve been maddening for her to find the enlightened Kuzalem stocking her chambers with young men, then being forced under the cane of a female shepherd.

  But reality was always a distortion of the truth, bending and fracturing through separate minds.

  “How are your legs?” Anna asked in flatspeak.

  Holding her tea near her lips, Ramyi glanced up. They’d spent the better part of an hour without speaking. “My legs?”

  “All the riding,” she said. “The herbmen gave me something for blisters.”

  “I don’t need it.” Ramyi sipped her tea. “But thank you.”

  Anna had seen the way the girl carried herself, with a wide stance and gritted teeth whenever her thighs brushed together. Maybe stubbornness, not the clarity of a scribe, was their binding thread. “Do you feel guilty when people die?”

  Ramyi resettled the blankets around her knees and ankles. “The past is immutable.”

  “I’m not trying to teach you now,” Anna said. “Tell me how you feel. Leave out the proverbs.”

  “I’m just so tired, Anna.”

  “It was a hard day.”

  “No,” Ramyi said. “I’m tired.” This time she’d opted for the word jashel’na, which left the stitches of time across the root adjective. It was a word usually found upon the lips of riders and old weavers.

  “You must miss the hall-mothers,” Anna said.

  “Sometimes,” Ramyi said. “We all miss people.”

  A knot of discomfort formed in Anna’s throat. “Death is only a burden, Ramyi. Don’t bear it across your shoulders.” She softened her eyes. “My anger was misguided. Events occur beyond our permission, I know.”

  The girl flattened her brow and flared her nostrils, meeting Anna’s gaze head-on. But she was well-trained, a product of Halshaf meditation from the time of swaddling, and she held back whatever retort was prickling on her lips. That muted veil came over her. “I understand.”

  “And I’m proud of you,” Anna said. “Do you know that?”

  “I appreciate it.”

  “Ramyi,” she whispered.

  “What? What do you want?”

  “Be here with me,” Anna said, patting the quilt near her kettle.

  “I am here,” she said sharply.

  “If you’re truly present—”

  “I’m here, I’ve always been here,” Ramyi interrupted. “But you don’t understand how quickly we aren’t here. Some people are here, then they’re gone. But I’m still here.” Her last sentence was softer, riding the crest of a breaking voice.

  “We won’t always be,” Anna said. “I forgot what it’s like to have your years.”

  Ramyi tucked her hands into the folds of her shawl and bowed her head. Again she was burying spiteful words, tucking away the obvious protest that Anna was barely her senior.

  “You spoke of cleaning up my mess,” Anna said. Noting Ramyi’s discomfort, she teased a smile. “You were right.”

  “I don’t want to speak about it.”

  “Does it frighten you?”

  Ramyi set her teacup down and picked at her nails. “Sometimes everything is scary,” she explained. “Blood used to make me sick, you know. But now, at times, nothing frightens me at all. When I was angry with that horse peddler, I wasn’t afraid of what he’d do to me. He could’ve torn out my eyes, and it wouldn’t have made any difference. Is that how you feel?”

  Anna studied the endless depths in the girl’s eyes. At times. Fearlessness was a sheer drop, a nudge over some precipice where time and death and life were concepts, not constraints. When such moments occurred within Anna, the winds of the world had always managed to cushion her fall and sew her back into her body. But she’d known minds that had taken the leap and never regressed, never scrambling or clawing at the cliff’s vanishing edge.

  Ramyi’s feet already knew the ecstasy of weightlessness. In times of war, it was a threatening addiction.

  “If you stay aware,” Anna said, “you’ll know how to act. Fear won’t sway you.”

  “I can still fail.”

  “You won’t. We’ll both do our best to focus, won’t we?” Anna grinned at Ramyi, but was met with flitting, wounded eyes. She reached out, ignoring the girl’s instinctive recoil, and touched her smooth black hair. “This isn’t our fight, but nobody else will do it for us.”

  She nodded, coaxing a smile out of crooked lips. Compassion was still a foreign thing to her, a doe apt to be startled and set to flight by a careless breath.

  “And when this is over, we’ll have a life,” Anna said.

  Ramyi’s eyes dimmed. “I’m not sure it’ll end.”

  “We’ll end it,” she said, stroking her hair. “By any means.”

  “We.” Spoken like a foreign word, bitter and vague on Ramyi’s tongue.

  Anna embraced the back of the girl’s skull, pressed their foreheads together, and nodded. Their breaths slowed till they cycled in tandem, their warm exhales and shallow inhales bleeding together, smudging the threshold of separate selves. Soon Anna had the sense of holding herself, of issuing and receiving kindness she’d once craved so dearly. “We.”

  * * * *

  By the end of the second day, the railway at Zakamun was well within reach. Mesar’s trailcarver led their procession into the wide, sloping bowl of a grass valley as dusk fell, spurred by Anna’s order to reach the kator by midday. It was a practical decision, all things considered: The horses rode well in the day’s heat, but they became tireless in the final stretch of day, when the air cooled and the sun was ragged on the horizon. Everybody mulled about as the horses fed, drinking plum wine and sharing jokes unsuited to Ramyi’s ears, growing unexpectedly animated with a dose of rest and conversation. Throughout their ride, the roads and causeways spanning the mountains had grown more desolate and worrisome with the risk of ambushes or full assaults.

  The land spoke its warnings, Anna supposed, but isolation sc
reamed them.

  Most of the riding posts they passed had been abandoned recently, with overturned buckets and the deep impressions of hooves littering the grazing strips. Those who’d remained in spite of evacuation warnings—Huuri groomers, fatherless children, scattered southern settlers—were quick to fetch bales of hay, brush the horses down, and collect their keep, rarely offering anything beyond the most functional greetings and idle chatter.

  “Speak with them,” Anna had suggested to Jenis’s fighters as they gathered along a fence. They were hard, scar-shrouded men, but they’d listened. They sensed the fields and their slowness as well as Anna. Slowness—that was truly what heralded war. “Right now, they treat you like outsiders, and yes, that’s what you’ll always be. But they can trust outsiders. They’ll need to.” She’d watched two Huuri children chasing their sheep around the yard, giggling and imitating its baa-baa call. “Ask them if they know how to dig a trench.”

  But when Zakamun and its garrison grew near, there was no terror around the outlying manor complexes and sprawling estates. At dawn the gatherers paced through apple orchards, children splashed one another at the watering holes, and dogs slept within the shade of the mud walls hemming in dirt paths. Some of the older boys even gathered on stilted porches and whistled down at the passing women, including Ramyi, though the girl’s glares were enough to ward off most attention. It all seemed akin to a parade, not a military maneuver. Even as they entered Zakamun’s commercial district, filing past the windows of curious bakers and seamstresses, there was an air of normalcy. Violence had once been a potential tool for Anna’s unit, but now, as they were close enough to smell the burning grit of the kator lines, it was a wick they were unprepared to light.

  In fact, the polish and radiance of the Nahoran city lured most of Anna’s attention. She hadn’t examined nor appreciated the world’s beauty in a long while, perhaps ever. Zakamun made it natural, made her lose herself in the azure roofing and hanging gardens and narrow archways, which featured such precise masonry that Anna rarely noticed the fissures between white slabs.

  “Have you been here?” Anna asked Yatrin as they passed a public bath and its canopy shroud of vines and woven branches. Children ran past, giggling and pointing at the Alakeph brothers’ white coverings, which surely hadn’t graced their streets in years. There was history in their presence, almost a playful aura, and Mesar’s unit reflected it in their smiles.

  “My sister—by blood, I mean—was ordained at the monastery atop the northern hill.” Yatrin gestured to a collapsed dome on the nearby rise. “We’ll see it repaired in time, I hope.”

  “Perhaps someday,” Anna said. “I think there will be more demanding tasks to come.”

  “In Nahora, parts reflect a whole, you understand. Structures form a city, and cities form the state. The morale of our people is bound to this truth.”

  Ramyi hummed, breaking her longstanding silence. “The state’s about to have its spine broken, then.”

  Anna didn’t offer any reproach, nor did she even glance at the girl. There was some truth in her words, after all. War broke everything, and there was no sense in mourning rubble to avoid the bodies pinned beneath it. Perhaps Nahora had forgotten the agony of domination, of invasion, of massacre. But life was a patient tutor.

  Yatrin’s lips tensed into a hard line. He looked past Ramyi, instead focusing on a group of young men splitting pomegranates in the shade. “It’s good to return.”

  Some of Jenis’s men muttered to one another in river-tongue and garbled grymjek, training their eyes on the limestone balconies that jutted out over the road.

  “They’re watching us,” one said.

  “There, just behind the cart,” another said.

  “Get ready for them,” a third added.

  Anna halted and spun around, glaring at the southern troops. “Mind your weapons,” she said in the river-tongue. “We didn’t come here to fight.” Mesar’s men slowed at the sound of her voice, and some even complied with the command, having acquired the southern tongue during their time in the Nest or plains monasteries. Anna studied the motionless fighters, including Mesar, before switching to flatspeak. Memories of Nahora—its little mechanical bird, its savage fighters, its incessant hunting—played through Anna’s head. “If they cast stones at us, you have my permission to destroy them.”

  Mesar nodded back at her, seemingly content with the approach.

  A warm, high laugh echoed across the square. It was familiar in the worst way, so ingrained in Anna’s dreams that her awareness collapsed for an instant, buckling under the weight of the impossible. But the laughter carried on, rushing to meet Anna with its mutated eastern register and violet thorns. “Casting stones won’t be necessary, panna.”

  Konrad emerged from a slender green doorway on the unit’s right, trailed by a detachment of Nahoran fighters wearing spring combat sets: thin, sand-shaded plating, draping olive cloth, and hanging stomach pouches loaded with spare ammunition. His features were unchanged, but he was no longer a charming foreigner sprinkled with northern dust. His youth was an old tree, its bark unchanged, but its core hollow and withering.

  Yet as Anna stared at him, ignoring the soft twist of his lips and his hand’s beckoning curl, she wondered whether there had ever been a core to him. Perhaps he’d always been a maelstrom of half-truths and scheming, more cunning beast than man.

  Whatever the case, he was here.

  At once Anna observed the remainder of his men. Some were perched in the high towers and rooftop gardens ringing the square, while others readied themselves at the ritual spring walls, slipping boots over their just-washed feet and lifting yuzeli from the basins below dribbling spouts. She wagered that they hadn’t installed any explosive charges in the area; after all, the civilians themselves were still largely unaware of the threat at hand, wandering between their formations and haggling over clay jugs of oil.

  “Nothing sudden,” Anna said in flatspeak.

  Konrad stopped halfway through his approach, stilling his men with a wave. He’d preserved the easy walk of a man beyond death’s clutches. “Welcome to Nahora,” he said with a sweeping bow.

  She still pictured him as she’d left him in Malijad. A blade through his forehead, blood and sweat dripping off Bora and running down his face, flames scorching the air itself and creeping toward his body.

  “Konrad,” Mesar said warmly, shouldering past his men and taking his place with Anna and Yatrin. The stiffness of days on the open road had faded, now replaced by eager eyes and a rare grin. He returned the southerner’s bow.

  Konrad had never truly slighted the Alakeph, certainly not as much as Patvor had, but Mesar’s formality was puzzling nonetheless. It had no roots in friendship nor kinship. Manufactured sincerity was the lifeblood of politics, she supposed. Under the watch of loaded ruji, it was the cost of survival.

  “As of last autumn, it’s Ga’mir Konrad Asiyalar,” the southerner corrected.

  “My apologies, Ga’mir,” Mesar said quickly. Even if the rank was unwarranted, it was a quick and wise impulse to bow down—a captain of his stature could level a settlement without a word of dissent. But the order that had inducted him, Asiyalar, carried even more considerable clout.

  Konrad squinted at the patchwork assortment of Alakeph brothers, southern fighters, northern recruits, and eastern deserters, who were marked by spines as rigid as the marble statues lining the square. “This is all you brought?”

  Anna met his eyes, but they belonged to a stranger. Malijad was a distant specter in their minds. Perhaps Konrad was even younger now, having let death race ahead of him. But Anna could feel her age, her wisdom birthed through pain, her resolve to be anybody except a pawn for wicked men. “They’re well-trained.”

  “They have interesting looks,” Konrad said, narrowing his eyes at Yatrin and Khara. “Orsas’afim nester agol?”

  Yatrin no
dded. “This is our birthplace.”

  “Haven’t lost my sight yet.” Konrad grinned. “I had no idea you kept such varied company, Anna.”

  Anna looked at the gathering of bronze-skinned, green-eyed fighters gathered by the nearby archway. They were likely Borzaq, plucked from Nahora’s standard regiments and forged into something inhuman. Konrad must’ve selected them with care.

  But who had chosen him?

  “Curious that you didn’t materialize in our magistrates’ bathhouse,” Konrad continued.

  “Decorum,” Anna said. There was no sense in ceding the truth of the situation: Shem’s tunnels could only link the Nest with territory he knew intimately, places he’d surveyed exhaustively and recognized as an extension of himself and his pristine memory. Golyna was little more than a name to him.

  “It’s just quite a surprise, turning up in the flesh,” Konrad replied. “Not that I’m complaining.”

  “We’ve come to you with open palms, Ga’mir,” Mesar said.

  Konrad arched a brow and gestured at the rows of horses being led into the square. “If we sifted through their packs, what would we find?”

  “Nothing to be used against you,” Mesar replied.