Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
The acid rain was done in under an hour. Mama sent me off with the rewrapped wheaten half-round under one arm and the journal tucked under the other. “Take this to Elisabet,” she said of the round. “She probably hasn’t spoken to anyone all day.”
I sighed. “Your soft heart leaves you poor.” I knew what this half-round meant, precious wheat and flour given over to me.
“But not in what matters.” She tapped the top of the round. “Tell her she’s welcome here, will you? The girl’s reed-thin.”
“Of course.” I threw an arm around her, pressed myself against her soft body, and inhaled the scent of dough. “See you soon.”
She pulled away. “Go, or you’ll be late.”
Outside the sun was low, gilding the walls a faint green. The acid rains always left a mist in the air, sulfurous and thick like fog.
It was part of our kingdom’s curse.
The acid ate away at any surface it touched—rooftops, cobblestones, human skin.
Not immediately, but over time; that was the true insidiousness of it.
Stand out in a storm and it would feel like rain.
But afterward, your skin would itch and burn.
Do it daily and your skin would dry and slough away layer by layer.
But the greater curse was in how the rains starved us.
They prevented us from farming outdoors; they destroyed nearly every crop with a single storm, eating into watermelons and pumpkins.
Only the wheat lived. Why were the rains especially corrosive to our produce?
Only the gods knew. Maybe we humans had offended them, and so they had decided on the cruelest punishment of all: endless hunger, a never-full stomach.
Long ago, the kingdom had cultivated a special, glass-covered area in the northern district where all crops grew.
Though no one I knew except Aldric had ever seen it.
From there came our corn, our tomatoes, our weekly rations.
Without it, we would have nothing but bread.
All that grew beneath the acid rains were the hardiest grasses, the hardiest trees, the wheat.
Well, and all of us sons and daughters—thick-skinned and hardscrabble.
I jogged through the streets of the southern district, following the alleyway route to the inn.
I burst through the door into the empty quiet of the bar room and filed past the sounds of clattering dishes in the kitchen.
I peeked in; not Elisabet at the sink, but the older woman who owned the bar.
I took the narrow staircase up and marched to the end of the hallway.
The last door was shut. It was always shut.
I rapped three times. “Lis!”
No answer. Only a sudden thudding on the other side of the door, followed by a curse. I shifted the round to my hip and waited through the commotion.
When the door finally cracked open, Elisabet squinted at me from the candlelit panel of light. Her long brown braid hung over one shoulder like a thick serpentine pet, and her glasses were smudged with fingerprints. “Eury?”
If possible, she was thinner and paler, like a whippet of a tree that never saw sunlight. Hollows sat under her eyes. After she’d lost her parents, she’d never been healthy; grief seemed to have its own appetite.
And, for as long as I could recall, she’d been sick. A wasting illness. No one could figure out the source of it, and in the southern district, no one much cared.
I held out the wheaten half-round. “Mama says you need to eat.” I pressed it into her hands as I stepped into her room. “Why are all the shades drawn?” I followed the narrow path between stacks of books to the closest window—the one over her desk—and reached for the pull cord.
“No!” Elisabet appeared at my side and set her hand over mine. “It’ll ruin the papers.”
My gaze lowered to the mess of books and parchment atop her desk. The markings on them were as inscrutable to me as the ancient writing on the spire in the southern district. “More old… ink-stuff?”
“Records,” she said in her breathy way. “From hundreds of years past. I’ve been entrusted with their interpretation, and the sunlight would damage them.”
“Of course.” I turned toward her, feeling stiff. As children, Elisabet was always at my home. Her parents had been members of the patrol until they’d died on a mission beyond the walls, and she had become almost like my sister. She’d taught me to read and write, and never complained about it.
But we had diverged in adolescence. She’d become so obsessed with history she’d been noticed by the archivists’ college. Soon, she would leave for the central district—more old papers and candlelight and swishing robes. And I would stand on the wall.
At least we were both, in some sense, creatures of night.
Elisabet sighed, set down the round, and began gathering the parchment from her desk. She placed it into a folder with slow care and lowered the front flap. When she met my eyes, I understood the nod she gave me.
When you grew up together, that secret language between you never really died.
I opened the blinds over her desk, and the sunset filtered in over her busy room. Books, books, so many books, a twin bed, an inkpot with a white quill—she could wield that feather-tip like I held a sword—and only one chair.
I sat on the chair while she sat on her bed, facing me. She unwrapped the round in her lap, and I offered the small folding knife at my waist for cutting pieces off. She sat with straight-backed elegance in her green robes.
“This knife,” she said as she made a slow, inefficient cut, “is it guard-issue?”
My lips curled. “Does the edge not give it away?”
The smallest smile touched her mouth, though her eyes stayed down. “I hadn’t expected the wheat scythes to be sharper.”
“The scythes keep us fed.” A touch of bitterness entered my chest as I watched her saw away with my knife. Here in this cloistered room, even Lis’s work seemed more useful to the kingdom. “Feels like you’ve been locked away for weeks. What wisdom have you gleaned from our long-dead ancestors?”
Her brown eyes flitted up to me, then back down. “I’m not really allowed to discuss it. The college, you know…”
The college was known to be secretive. Still, my chest pricked. “Sure.”
She swallowed as she gazed down at the bread. Maybe she felt some guilt, or maybe some enthusiasm she couldn’t contain, because she said in a low voice, “Iron. It’s about iron.”
I tilted my head forward, interested enough. “Iron?”
“Not just any iron.” She cut off a mangled piece of bread and passed it to me. “It’s special, some formulation from long past. That’s all I know as yet.”
“Something besides sunlit?” All our weapons were made of sunlit iron. It was deadly to the monsters.
She gave a single, slow nod.
What could be more powerful than sunlit? I began chewing, feeling a little of the stiffness melt away as we ate. “That’s generous of the college to entrust you with their precious papers.”
“I insisted.” Her eyes met mine, now dancing in the candlelight and sunset. Finally, I’d touched on Elisabet’s heart. “Because the archives are so large, you know, and the language changed over the centuries, few have tried to learn the oldest script. None are fond of transcribing it, at least.”
She brought a piece of bread to her mouth and began chewing. Her eyes roamed over me as if noticing for the first time— “You’re in leathers.”
“Gets cold on the wall.”
“Are you up there now?” She paused. “Well, officially.”
Lis had always known about my nighttime wall-climbing. She’d never liked it, always treated it with wide-eyed caution, but she kept my secret. She was as loyal as she was reclusive.
“Tonight, and every night.” I finished off my piece and wiped my hands on my pants. “Speaking of which.”
Her eyes followed me as I stood. “It’s incredible that you did it, Eury. As a woman.”
“Your mother did it.”
I caught her flinch in the soft light. I shouldn’t have mentioned her mother; for me, she was inspiration—but for Lis, she was absence. True, cold, irrevocable absence. She’d ridden out one day and never returned.
Lis’s eyes lowered to the round. “You should take this with you to the barracks.” She began to wrap it back up.
I stopped her, my fingers over her hand. “Keep it. Mama will insist on giving me another one next week. And transcribing with a shaky hand could result in a whole new language.”
Her eyes lifted to me, softening with humor. It had been some time since I’d come to visit, and maybe both of us had forgotten the spark of our friendship. But it was still there.
“Who knows.” I straightened and turned toward the door. “Maybe this special iron will someday save us from the monsters.”
Back at the barracks, the night guard were filtering out into the yard. It was almost time for my shift on the wall. I crossed the yard to my bunk at a jog.
I opened the door and slammed into an arm that swung across the doorframe and caught me in the neck. I hit the wooden boards, dropped the half-round and journal, and two sets of hands closed around my feet. They dragged me inside and the door thudded shut behind us.
Four faces loomed above me, lit by the setting green-hued sun bleeding through the window.
Each of them were night guard like me, recognizable—but not.
I didn’t know any of them like Theo. Four young men, eyes cold with anger.
One sneered, two others’ eyes were alight with promise, the last was stone-faced.
The fourth stood in front of me, arms folded. He was tall and well-formed with razor-sharp lips. He was used to being followed. “You really fucked us last night, Waters,” he said.
This was danger, lethal-edged and all male.
“How hard is it for a girl,” another said, “to push your lips together and blow?”
This was about the whistle. The Vaelen-damned whistle. “I’m sorry.”
“You’ll be sorrier in ten minutes.”
A feral instinct made my fingers clench against the floorboards. “I ran this morning until I dropped.”