Chapter 3 #2
“Oh, ouch,” Rion said in sympathy, apparently inspecting his wound. “Is that from … a fork?”
“I thought he was a pea,” Eiko defended. “Will a drink make it better?”
“I think I’m the one who owes you a drink,” Ky said. “Let’s go find ourselves a fire.”
There were times when Eiko felt the burden of her life: the strain on Kaito to keep the lights burning and their bellies full, the press of the Quiet against the back of her mind, and the loss of her sight. The pressure on her friends to keep her physical body shrouded in light to keep her safe.
She no longer ran into the night or scaled the rocky mountain in her brother’s hand-me-downs.
That dream nestled deep inside her heart that the monster of the Quiet had tried to exploit all those years ago was dead.
There were times when she felt the loss, but she tried to acknowledge those moments in the briefest, most gentle way possible.
They were like the wind, and she couldn’t demand the wind to stop blowing; she could only stand there and wait for the moment to pass.
“Let’s go,” she agreed, but before they could spill into the joyous bustle of the crowd, her two friends pulled up short.
“Why are the guards marching this way?” Rion whispered. “What else happened at dinner?”
To an outsider, it may have sounded like a joke, but Eiko and Ky both paused to think the question over seriously.
“Rion Shulin,” a gruff voice declared, the faint tapping and clinking of keys against a belt and the scent of oiled leather drawing close. “You need to come with us.”
The three of them drew closer together, clinging to each other. Eiko twisted her arm through Rion’s tightly.
“Just her.” The second voice was sharp with warning.
Ky pried Eiko’s fingers free and wrapped them around his own forearm instead.
As the son of Lord Erendi, he should have felt an inflated sense of importance and invulnerability around his father’s guards, but the slightest tremble in the muscles beneath Eiko’s grip told her enough to convince her to stay quiet.
She held on to him as their friend was marched away.
“Follow them,” she whispered, huddling into Ky’s side and tucking her cane beneath her arm to move faster.
He led her silently through the crackling flames and bustling crowds, the gathered people too distracted to notice a sight that would have halted all activity within the valley of the Sigh on any other day.
Rion wasn’t a lady, but she was a well-dressed and well-respected commoner. Her flower cart at the marketplace drew a crowd of admirers so vast, Lord Erendi’s steward was forced to reserve Rion a permanent stall in the corner large enough to accommodate the lines that formed for her attention.
Eiko often joked that it was lucky Ky’s brothers were too fancy for the marketplace, or they might end up snubbing all noble marriage prospects and snatching Rion up, and then Eiko would be forced to hate her on principle, as she did all other nobles.
Ky didn’t count. He agreed that he didn’t count and that he would also be forced to hate Rion if she married one of his brothers, as he hated his brothers just as much as Eiko hated nobles.
“The fete is the other way,” Kaito declared, falling into step on her other side. He still stunk of the mines, making her nose crinkle.
“Did dinner go that well, then?” Ren quipped—never far behind her brother. “Is that why you two are sneaking off into the forest?”
“They took Rion.” Fear made Ky’s tone snap.
“They?” Kaito asked, confused.
“The guards,” Eiko specified. “Be quiet, or they’ll hear us following.”
Their small group fell silent, Kaito taking her other arm to help Ky direct her as they moved away from the noise of the fete. Ky and Kaito didn’t bother to warn her of snags in her path—they simply lifted her smoothly clear of them without breaking stride.
“They’ve gone past the tracks,” Kaito warned quietly as they crept around the front of the train, the terrain changing beneath her boots. “Get your glitterstones out. There’s no marked path. They’re heading into the woods. What the fuck is this?”
“Only thing out here is the old prison,” Ren whispered back as they slowed their pace. It was necessary, with the uneven ground covering the thick thatch of forest behind the mountain.
“Just that and the forest,” Kaito agreed. “What is Rion mixed up in?”
“Nothing,” Eiko hissed, furious at the suggestion. Rion would never steal, hurt anyone, or cheat anyone. She certainly had opinions, but she was smart enough not to share them outside her close friendships. Her mother and father were both good, hard-working, sensible people.
There was no good reason for the soldiers to be dragging her off into the night.
“What uniforms were they wearing?” she asked.
“Purity guard,” Ky answered tightly.
Kaito hushed them, and Eiko could hear the faintest sound of voices in the distance. They slowed further, creeping up to the ridge above the old prison. She remembered playing there when she was little. Games of dare with Kaito to see who could be braver and creep the closest to the old building.
Eiko always won … but in hindsight, she suspected he had always let her win.
Kaito pressed her down, and they all huddled together, lying on their stomachs, the grass tickling her face as she tucked her chin to the cold ground and strained her ears.
“It’s full of guards.” Ky sounded confused. “I had no idea it was operational again. My father hasn’t said a word.”
“I can almost see her.” Ren stretched out beside Kaito. “If we can get to the next ridge, we’ll be able to see them through the collapsed wall.”
“Careful and quiet,” Kaito ordered, “and stay low, or they’ll see the light from our glitterstones.” They crawled over the peak and scrambled down to the next, flattening themselves against the grass again.
“They have someone else there,” Ky breathed quietly against the ground. “I think it’s Kira.”
“Kira with the peaches?” Eiko asked, recalling the sweet voice of the woman from the marketplace with her cart of fruit. Rion loved the peaches at that stall so much that they had become the reason Eiko was forced to go to the markets early every morning before Rion set up her own stall.
“What other Kira is there?” Ky asked distractedly, and then, “What is that? A coconut?”
“Too big,” Ren murmured, “and too green. And the other Kiras are: Kira with the birds, Kira with the limp, and Kira who wanted Kaito to court her so badly she broke her ankle chasing after him at the fete two years ago.”
“They just broke open the husk of this weird fruit I’ve never seen before,” Kaito narrated to Eiko. “And they’re—” His entire body tensed, and Ky swore beneath his breath. Eiko poked Kaito, hoping to prompt him to continue.
“They just tied them to chairs facing each other,” Kaito rushed out. “Rion and Kira. What do we do?”
“Kira with the peaches?” Eiko tried to ascertain again. It certainly wasn’t important, but it was the only detail her mind was currently gripping onto.
“Yes, it’s Kira with the bloody peach—”
“I think that’s a hollow seed,” Ky’s voice was too weak, too quiet, the sound of a man reeling over something horrible.
“I overheard my father talking about a shipment of them—he was ranting something like ‘a silver piece each? Those husk balls better perform magic,’ or something. Apparently, he spent a fortune to acquire them from Oakensnare.”
“I don’t like this,” Kaito hissed. “Lord Erendi would never spend a fortune giving something good to the commonfolk.”
“What do we do?” Eiko insisted. “What’s happening?”
“They’re questioning them.”
“There are too many guards for us to interfere,” Ren whispered.
“Shh,” Eiko hushed them all, straining her ears at the faint sound of a guard’s laugh.
“The deviant isn’t going to talk.”
Those were the words she heard.
She could hear Ky opening his mouth to speak again, so she quickly gripped his arm tightly and squeezed it to silence him.
“… ready?” She caught the tail-end of a guard’s question.
“… it in.” A partial reply, and then, louder, like a proud declaration. “This will purify you of your evils, Rion Shulin.”
“They’re pouring something from the hollow seed into their mouths,” Ky said tightly.
“Fuck this. I’ll create a distraction.” Kaito slipped away from Eiko’s left side, and she listened to the faint rustling of him sneaking from their ridge.
“Hurry,” she whispered into the ground before turning her head to the side to whisper to Ky. “What is it doing? The hollow seed?”
“I don’t know,” Ky gritted out in a panic. “They’re not reacting at all. Just sitting there.”
When the slight smell of smoke reached her nostrils a few minutes later, the first sounds of alarm rose from the old prison. The guards, likely spotting a fire in the forest, hurried to organise themselves.
“Just leave them tied up,” a loud call barked out. “Fill as many buckets with water as you can—we can’t afford to draw attention to this part of the forest.”
“Stay low,” Kaito warned, returning suddenly and lying beside Eiko again. “It will draw them in the other direction so they won’t see our glitterstones.”
Eiko held her breath as heavy footsteps rushed into the forest on the other side of the prison, and then the tall bodies on either side of her were shifting.
She jumped to her feet, reaching for Ky as he reached for her, but it was her brother who took her arms and dropped in front of her, hauling her up to cling to his back.
“No time,” he huffed out, as they crested the ridge and ran down towards the prison.
“Knife on the table there,” Kaito ordered, as the cool, clean air of the forest turned musty with the smell of sweat and something else. Something sickly sweet and syrupy.
Eiko tried to picture the old prison as it had been ten years ago: a ruin, the front yielding and crumbling open to the forest, exposing its belly to the elements, while the deeper depths remained in shadow.
Kaito set her down, and she reached out towards the scent of jasmine, quickly finding Rion’s shoulder.
“You okay?” she asked, hands drifting over the clammy skin of her friend’s face.
“Uhh.” Rion sounded confused. “I uhh … I don’t … I don’t know.”
“I don’t feel so good,” Kira whispered shakily.
“Cut the fucking ropes,” Kaito demanded hurriedly. “Girls, you need to throw that shit up. Now.”
Rion made a sound of disgusted agreement just as her ropes were cut, allowing her to stand, and forcing Eiko’s hands to drop from her clammy skin.
The group moved back to the collapsed entrance of the old prison, but Eiko held back.
A muffled, retching sound drifted from outside as Rion and Kira emptied their stomachs and Eiko turned away, trying to drown out the noise and concentrate on the other sound that had captured her attention.
It was … something like a whimper.
She should ignore it and get out of there as quickly as possible.
She should not go deeper into the old prison.
It was obviously exactly what she was going to do.
She traced her path with her cane, following the sound further into the crumbling old building, the scent of sweat turning into something more acrid. Every step smelled worse, the cold digging deeper into her skin, a hint of mould now mingling with the other damp and depressing aromas.
“Eiko!” Kaito hissed, but she ignored him, moving faster, that whimpering sound reaching out to her again.
It was accompanied by other sounds that had her skin crawling.
Shuffling. A soft cry. A pained moan.
The sounds were echoey and empty, like they belonged to the ghosts of whichever unfortunate souls had perished in the fire that ate away half of the old prison.
She imagined the walls were still black, as they had been all those years ago, with moss breaching cracked stone and vines pushing through the twisted old window bars.
Reaching for the glitterstone hanging from her neck, she made sure the copper cover hadn’t slid to a close, withdrawing its protection from the shadowy corners of the prison as she moved away from the group. When she bumped into the bars of a cage, a hand shot out to grip her dress.
“Help me,” a voice croaked. Desperate and broken. “Please … h-help me.”
“Oh my sun.” The whisper behind her was Ky, and the horror in his voice had her edging away from the cage, the grip on her skirt so weak, it took only a tug to fall away.
“There are dozens of them.” Rion was there too, sounding sick and scared. “Grey skin. Shaking. Weak. Blood crusting around their ears.” She seemed to be narrating purely out of habit. “Sores on their arms and legs. Something is eating away at their skin. Their eyes are … dead.”
“Hol-low,” the voice croaked, cutting off halfway through the word on a short, wet cough. “N-not dead.”
“What is this?” Kaito rarely sounded so shaken. Eiko could only remember that tone in his voice from the day of their grandmother’s funeral. Only then and never since.
Until now.
“They’ve been hollowed.” This was a new voice. It came from one of the cages. Eiko instinctively moved towards the rasp, feeling her group closing in around her, also moving to the speaker.
She reached hesitantly for the bars. They were slippery beneath her touch, making her shudder.
“Enji?” Ky asked, and there was that tone again. That horrible, shaken tone her brother had only ever used twice. Now Ky was using it.
“I’m sorry,” Enji replied. “Ky, I’m so sorry. I … told them everything. They had a list of all these names … They said you were already confirmed, but if I gave them details of your crimes, they wouldn’t make me drink it.”
“Drink the hollow seed?” Ky asked. “What fucking crimes? What the fuck is happening?”
“The crimes we committed togeth—” Enji broke off into a wet coughing fit. “Together, in secret. We’re deviants, Ky. That’s why they have to hollow us. To cure us. You’re on the list.”
“We need to get out of here.” This time, Kaito’s articulation was hard as granite, wiped of all emotion. “The guards will be back any minute, and Ky, if your name—”
“I can’t just leave—” Ky started, but Ren tugged them away from the cage.
“For the love of fucking light, let’s get out of here,” Ren growled, and Eiko found herself tossed over a broad shoulder. “Sorry, but we need to run before they come back and see three of the people on their list standing inside waiting to be force-fed that shit again.”