Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
You ran until you were told to stop. Or until you dropped.
That day, I dropped.
I had done sixty-one laps. The others were told to stop at thirty—“but not you, Waters,” the regiment commander called out. Then he’d closed his door and not opened it again.
The sun was high when I finally fell down. It wasn’t my lungs that gave—those were trained to run forever. It was my muscles, crying with fatigue under my leathers. And my cottony throat.
I didn’t pass out. I turned onto my side in the yard, jammed an elbow under me, and retched up acid.
A shadow fell over me and shifted as the figure crouched. Theo, with a cup of water between his hands. “How many laps was that?”
I shook my head, reaching for the water. I couldn’t speak if I wanted to.
He watched as I drank with barbarous grace, half of it spilling into the dirt. Finally, I said, “Sixty-one.”
“Gods, don’t tell the others that—they’ll hate you more than they already do.”
I stared into the empty cup. “Sixty-one is good?”
“In your leathers?” He blew out air and rose, extending a hand to me. “It’s a death wish, Eury.”
I let him haul me upright. My legs were boneless. “But not impressive enough to overcome your stupid whistle.”
He chuffed. “It’s the suffering, not the achievement, that overcomes it.” A pause. “And it’s not stupid.”
“Have I suffered enough?”
“Hmm.” He tilted his head to one side, then the other. “Maybe for today. The other guard fell asleep two-thirds of the way through your penance, anyway.”
“They’re in their bunks? Thank Arxius.”
“Dead asleep.”
We started walking toward the women’s bunk, once a storehouse, repurposed when I’d joined the guard three months ago. Theo passed me a bundle wrapped in cloth; I unveiled it to find a thick hunk of wheaten bread. “All I could get.”
I started in on the bread at once. Stale, glorious. “This’ll be a problem for you.”
Theo let out a sigh, eyes lifting to the sky. “Yes, well, you really should have joined the bakers and saved me these problems, shouldn’t you?”
The bloody bakers. They wore flour like paint—it never came out of the crevices of their skin. I should know; my mother had once spent a day trying to clean herself of it and not succeeded.
I tore off another oversized chunk. I’d rather die in this yard.
We came to my bunk—twelve beds inside, and only one made up. That was mine. I turned to Theo. “I tried, you know.”
“To bake a round of bread?”
I slugged him in the shoulder. “The whistle. The line.”
“I know you did.”
“Really, Theo. I did.”
He gave a sloppy, one-sided smirk. “You better be a songbird tonight, or you’re fucked.”
The regiment commander’s words echoed: This. This is what keeps humans sane. Pointless ritual. But this was what dictated my life now.
I crossed my fingers in front of my chest. “I swear it.”
Theo turned, headed across the yard. I ate my bread, watching him go. He’d had the same walk his whole life, ever since we were a few hands tall. Ever since that day in the southern district when he’d sunk his teeth into the face of another boy who’d made fun of my last name.
That was Theo. Vicious in his loyalty.
The other boy had grown into a potter who still wore a half-crescent scar on his left cheek. And he never did so much as look at me after that day.
Maybe the regiment commander, that old bastard, was right about sanity. But I still hated him for running me into the dirt.
I passed inside the emptiness of the bunk. As I approached my bed, sunlight from the window glared off a sheen on the sheets. I lifted the top blanket; it came away sodden.
I took another bite of my bread, chewing slowly, staring down at my yellowed sheets and blanket. Theo had the long and short of it.
I needed to master that gods-damned whistle before tonight.
After a change of sheets and eight hours of sleep, I was free until my next shift on the wall. I headed toward the southern district, practicing my three-note whistle as I walked to the door carved with an imperfect sun on its face.
I knocked with the back of my hand. Shuffling steps, then the door creaked opened, and my mother stood on the other side. Her pale face lit as only a mother’s does, seeing their girl. “Hello, night guard.”
I rolled my eyes and stepped past her. “Mama.”
“What?” She turned after me as I paced toward the small kitchen. “Have I got the title wrong?”
“It’s only been one day.”
“One night.”
I swiped a finger over the kitchen counter, bringing a layer of flour with it. I couldn’t remember a time when my mother hadn’t stolen from the southern district’s storehouse to bake illicitly at home. It was the only way she could get by as a single woman.
Her floury hands took hold of a chair at the kitchen table. She pulled it out, leaving pale smudges on the wood, then took my arm. “Sit. You’ll have some.”
I followed her, dropping into the seat. “No, Mama.”
“Yes. Caelara knows what the barracks bread tastes like.”
I laughed. She wasn’t wrong. “Unfair. Nothing’s as good as yours.”
She had already disappeared around the corner. In the seconds she was gone, my eyes swept over the space. In three months, it seemed different—smaller, less elegant. Had the counter always been so sloped? Had this table always wobbled?
She came back with a circular round wrapped in paper and twine.
“No,” I said again. “Not one already wrapped.” That was worth two days’ pay.
She shushed me, setting the round on the counter and yanking the twine. It pained me to watch the work undone; how many thousands of pieces of twine had I tied?
When she had cut the crackling bread and set a cake-sized slice in front of me, she settled on her stool across from me. She leaned forward, bringing her hands to clasp on the table. “Tell me.”
I couldn’t resist the wheaten round in front of me. My hands moved without thought, and then the bread was in my mouth. My eyes shut, my breath came out, and even my aching legs seemed to quiet.
When I came back to myself, she wore a small smile.
“You should raise your prices,” I said.
“And who would buy? Anyway, tell me.”
Right—she had asked me a question. A soft burn started along my collarbone. “We stood atop the wall, Mama.”
Her head gave an indignant tilt. “Don’t tight-lip me. I know that’s not all. Your memory’s like a trap, Eury.”
She thought it was my first time atop the wall. She didn’t know how many hundreds of nights I’d snuck up there. For all her watchfulness, she had never suspected I left at night.
“I saw plains. Endless barren plains, and then”—I swept a hand out—“a wide fringe of evergreens at the horizon.”
“Sounds glorious.”
I took a bite. “Until the sun goes down and you can’t see past your hand.”
Her finger ran along a crack in the table. “Better that than the bakers. Or the patrol.”
The patrol. They were thought to be the most fearless of the guard, running regular expeditions past the wall. They mapped what was beyond, sought out resources, searched for threats. They roamed, explored on horseback, perhaps even ventured beyond our kingdom into lands I couldn’t imagine.
I had long fantasized about joining them, seeing what lay beyond the evergreens. But they wouldn’t accept a woman. Not ever.
I set the bread down. “Mama…”
“You weren’t alive when the patrol brought one of those things back,” she said.
My eyebrow lifted. I’d never heard her speak of this. “One of those things?”
“They rode it on a wagon covered by a tarp,” she said, one finger tracing through the air. “Right down the main street here in the southern district.”
I sat forward. “I’ve never heard of this.”
“That’s because they rode it in at night, and I was a girl with a habit of sneaking through the streets past dusk.”
My eyebrows rose higher. “You?”
She waved a hand. “It doesn’t matter. Eury, whatever was under that tarp—it was evil. I could feel it.”
She had always been a little airy, driven by her impulses and feelings and whatever god or demon she thought might be hovering at a given moment.
“Did you see it?”
“I only saw one thing.” She clenched the edges of the stool, leaning in. “A hand.”
“A hand?”
“It didn’t move, just bobbed along with the wagon. But when it passed by, I caught a glimpse of two-inch nails and black-veined skin. I’m certain the wall was attacked.”
I shook my head. “The wall hasn’t been attacked in two generations, Mama.”
“So they say.” She pushed her chair out. “More bread?”
“No, Mama.” I turned in my seat as she crossed around to the counter. She began cutting from the loaf anyway. “Tell me about the creature you saw.”
Her knife slowed, and her shoulders seemed to fall in toward her chest as though to shrink herself. “Perhaps another time.”
My hand tightened on the chairback. No one had ever spoken of the creatures, nor the reason why we stood atop the wall at all, as though speaking of those times would bring them back. “The thing you saw on the wagon, do you think it walked on two legs?”
“I said another time, Eury.” She came back around with two slices, one for each of us, and sat.
In the Kingdom of Storms, the rains came fast. I was still sitting in my mother’s kitchen when the room darkened, the wind took our hair, and she had only just gotten up to shut the window before the sky began to fall.
She stood at the glass. “Rain.”
Our people had a sixth sense for it. A smell in the air, distinct and astringent when it touched your nose. No matter the time of day, no matter where you were, you found cover.
At least the storms were brief.
I let out a sigh, gathering up our plates. “I left my jacket at the barracks.”
“So you’ll stay a while longer.”
“So I will.”
She brought me into the bedroom, the only other room in our home. We spent nearly all our time in the kitchen—preparing food and eating it, and when Aldric was around during my earliest years, talking.
She didn’t always welcome me into her bedroom. When Aldric came around, that was when I started going out into the night. That was when I first climbed the wall.
Today she sat me down on the bed and bent, began removing my boots.
“You don’t need to do that,” I said.
“Nonsense. You’re a guard now. Besides, I won’t have boots in my bed.”
I half-smiled as she pulled them off and set them side by side in the corner. When she came around and we both curled up on the bed together, my head on her shoulder, she stroked my hair in the way I liked.
“Now,” she said, “tell me about the wall.”
Beyond the small kitchen window, the acid rain hissed against the cobblestone. The sky hung green, its hue seeping through the glass, casting itself over the kitchen and the foot of the bed. It was an eerie time; a time I wanted my hair stroked.
“There’s nothing else to tell.”
“I saw the color your neck turned when you thought about it.”
“You saw that, huh?”
“Our family’s skin is too pale to hide such things. It’s one of our curses.” She’d always said that, but I had never seen her skin turn the same shade as mine when she was embarrassed or upset.
I sighed, eyes closing. “There’s a ritual the guard have. A whistle.”
“Oh?”
I tried to mimic the noise, but it was sad and breathy. “Three notes. Sort of like that.”
“Nobody ever taught you to whistle, did they? Shame on us. So what happened?”
“The guard goes around the wall whistling ahead of the regiment commander. It’s a signal to stand at attention.”
Her hand kept stroking. “Doesn’t the guard always stand?”
“Apparently not. Theo spent most of the night with his legs dangling over the wall.”
Her hand stilled.
My eyes opened, and I turned my face to see her. “What is it?”
She stared straight ahead, her eyes unseeing. “Fools. Young fools.”
“It isn’t just them. It’s been going forever. Even the regiment commander used to do it.”
She let out a harsh tsk. “They’re all fools on the wall, then.” Her blue-eyed gaze shifted down to me. “Did you sit, too?”
I swallowed. “No.”
“Good. You must never sit.”
“But—”
Her stroking had stopped. “Promise me.”
I wanted to protest. She knew so little of anything but this block of the southern district and baking bread. Words crowded my throat, but I held them back.
She leaned toward the edge of the bed, began rummaging through the nightstand. From it she pulled a bound journal as long as her hand. Familiar twine held its pages together, keeping the wavy pages from splaying open.
She offered it to me.
I didn’t accept right away. “What is this?”
“I wrote in this when I was your age.”
“You could write?”
Her gaze sharpened on me. Then softened. “Not in letters.”
I took the journal and opened it to the first page.
Line after line of familiar shapes greeted me.
“It’s the script,” I said. She’d spent hours teaching me her special script when I was a little girl.
A “code between us,” she’d called it. I hadn’t seen it in years, but I could still read it.
The written language of a woman who’d never been to school.
Tears touched my eyes. She could have kept me here, baking as her mother had done with her. But she’d seen how it bored me. Instead, she had sent me off every afternoon to learn to read and write from Elisabet.
Maybe it was her defiance of the choice she’d never gotten. Maybe she’d been more like me at one time.
I closed the journal. “I promise, I’ll never sit.”