10 Hatred
Seventh day of the Month of Breath, first month of the new year, fifteen days after Sarai’s departure
Homecoming was a bittersweet thing.
Sarai couldn’t call Arsamea her home any more than a blade could call an anvil “father.” It had only borne her as she had formed. She had grown despite it, not of it.
And yet, this still felt like homecoming.
It had taken fifteen days to reach Arsamea from the port town of Sal Flumen.
Bridgers could only open Bridges, also called portals, to places they had already visited, and Méherre had only ever been as far north as Sal Flumen.
The resulting lengthy ride up the mountain had been a test of their mounts’ endurance and the southern-born vigiles’ tolerance for cold.
She didn’t know how the Academiae’s assessors—especially a drunken Telmar—made the trek every year.
Sarai dismounted from Caelum and held the mare’s reins as she trudged through the snow. The Month of Breath turned Arsamea into a sea of the softest white. It draped the stone houses, knee high at its lowest and piled as tall as she was on the sides of the village’s lone street.
And she knew this too. How cold Cretus’s shed would get in the winter.
How much the men would drink and the hundreds of cups she would have to clean and polish every night.
Her feet traced the path to Cretus’s tavern with such ease that she feared for a moment that the last eleven months had been a dream.
So much had changed. So much stayed the same.
Here, in Ur Dinyé’s most remote village, time held still.
The comings and goings of Tetrarchs, gods, and plagues meant nothing to the good folk here, so long as they got their grain, vegetables, and tallow and hoarded it while their less fortunate starved.
That Marus had sent for her meant that something had thrown this gentle balance balance off kilter.
“Why does he call himself ‘Chieftain’?” a half-frozen vigile called over the howling wind. “Thought we did away with those titles hundreds of years ago.”
“Arsamea enjoys clinging to the past,” she said dryly. “In more ways than one, if you see how they treat the womenfolk.”
One of the women among the vigiles scowled. “Are you certain you don’t want us to come with you?”
Sarai liked them all immensely, but something in her rebelled at the thought of them seeing the reality of her origins. “Thank you, but I’ll manage.” She softened the refusal with a smile. “These folk aren’t a pleasant sort.”
“I’ve always wondered if they really do smell of goat.” Méherre trudged through a snowdrift with the natural ease of a northerner.
Sarai smiled despite her disquiet. The Bridger had largely kept to herself during the trek up the mountain, but had a welcome dry wit, wore no masks and couched nothing in fawning terms. It was hard not to like her.
The vigiles fenced the tavern while Sarai tied Caelum under its awning. Her hand tremors made a mess of the knot, but it didn’t have to hold. She didn’t trust this place enough to stay the night.
A blur of candlelight peered through the frozen windowpanes. Voices drifted past the door. They stopped when Sarai knocked. A familiar, heavyset man threw it open. Her gaze trailed up his white-flecked beard to his small eyes, glittering with dislike.
“You’re here,” Marus said after a moment.
“You asked,” she reminded him.
The ugly look on his face said that he hadn’t wanted to. The feeling was mutual. But she’d come north for every piece of the puzzle it could provide.
Her eyebrows rose at his silence. “Shall we continue this indoors?”
“By all means.” He didn’t move from the doorway, arms folded.
She pulled off her gloves, beshaz already active on her armilla in case this all went south. “I won’t play your games, Marus. We can speak indoors or I return to Sal Flumen, and you suffer whatever had you writing to me in such a tizzy.”
Red splotched his face. “You ruined my daughter’s life. You have no right to anything, patchwork creature!” he snarled.
So much stayed the same. “Sal Flumen it is.” She walked over to Caelum when a brawny paw gripped her shoulder and pulled her inside.
Fear struck her with breathtaking speed. Memories arrowed through of the numerous times he had done this where she had ended up with some form of damaged or broken limb.
She jerked away and rounded on him. “Touch me again, and I’ll break that hand.”
A nasty laugh from a corner of the tavern. “Can you really?”
Sarai coolly examined Ethra’s pale, pinched features. The healer had been Marus’s bit on the side the last time she’d seen her. “Yes. But can you heal him?”
Ignoring the woman’s glower, she took in the tavern. The same sneering crowd assembled along the tables. Nothing had changed.
Wait. “Where’s Cretus?”
Marus threw his bulk into a chair. “Dead.”
“May his soul rest with the Elsar,” she recited automatically. “What of?”
“Same thing that’s taken many a good man here,” another man growled. “Whitesleep. Someone’s dosing us secretly.”
Whitesleep again? She leaned against the counter with a frown, pondering a connection to Edessa’s victims. “How did the dead look? Clustered together?” Raving of laughing skies and a reckoning?
Ethra gave her a withering look. “Blue skin and lips from respiratory depression. What else?”
No bloodbath. Just whitesleep overdoses then. But how had it made its way here? The cold kept Arsamea close to oblivion. Alcohol was their preferred drug for its illusion of heat.
“Only healers can legally prescribe whitesleep,” she murmured.
By the looks several in the tavern gave Ethra, this topic had been well-explored.
“I’m innocent,” the healer snapped. “This isn’t a joke. We have eleven dead.”
Well, shit. For a village as small as Arsamea that was a cull. “Who were the victims?”
“Our best trappers,” Marus snarled. “How the fuck are we to hunt without our men?”
“Ask the women,” Sarai said coolly to a round of snickering within the tavern.
The women dropped their eyes to their laps, wearing the bitter exhaustion of those who were tired of asking for respect. Wrath and Ruin. The north remained as immutable as the ice it was encased in.
She sighed. “You said someone was dosing you. Any suspects?”
“Plenty,” a man said. “Fucking tunnel rats are behind this. Nothing they wouldn’t do for coin.”
“We got rid of them all, but it keeps happening.” Ethra’s face hardened. “Should never have allowed them to take root. They must still be hiding here somewhere, now that we’ve emptied the tunnels.”
Hold on. Sarai went still. “Got rid of who?”
“Tunnel rats. Threw them all off the mountain road,” the healer said with bored disdain. “Then, another one of us dies two days later. They’re toying with us.”
Off the mountain road. Her blood went cold upon recalling the abyss on the other side of the narrow path into Arsamea. Caelum had almost balked on the trip. “You murdered them?” she whispered.
Marus’s fist struck the table. She hated that she had to hold back a flinch. “Still fending for your fucking kind while we starve and die. They’re poisoning us. You’ll find where they are.” He snarled. “Least you can do after what you did to Cisuré.”
“She chose her road.” The hole Cisuré’s betrayal had made in her had barely clotted. “Don’t you dare pin that on me.”
“Don’t I dare?” He rose with the menace of a blackstripe bear.
Past merged with present. This time, she failed to suppress a flinch when he approached with the same stride that had always promised pain.
“I dare do a lot of things, patchwork creature. You’re going to scour every inch of this village for the rats who did this, and you’ll see that we’re compensated for the loss of our hunters by making the Tetrarchy send up more supplies.
If you’re going to spread your legs for a madman, you earn us something and show gratitude for all we did—”
“All you did?” Fury slid a noose around her throat. “I’ve earned every ounce of my power. You—” She froze when the tavern burst into guffaws. Eyes roved over her black and gold cloak and lit up with glee.
“You have no power. We don’t care about your big titles, Petitor Sarai.
” Marus laughed, stepping closer. She involuntarily shrank back and hit the counter.
“Everything you have comes from the man you’re fucking.
You couldn’t stop us from tossing you into the tunnels if you tried.
Blood will out, tunnel rat. Yours belongs with your own. ”
He touched her, and she kept her word. Gripping his hand with her free one, she reached past skin into his tendons and flayed them open with controlled slivers of magic, just as Telmar had taught her. He released her with a roar, and she sprang for the door.
It flew open before she reached it. The Arsameans surrounding her reared back at the sight of six angry vigiles with their blades out. Behind them, Méherre looked strangely pale.
Breathing hard, Sarai faced the tavern. “You were saying?”
Marus sneered, Ethra bending over his ruined hand. “Run along, patchwork creature. You have no strength of your own.”
A bitter feeling, isn’t it? Powerlessness. She grit her teeth at the memory of Silvus’s comment.
Walking through the vigiles’ parted ranks, she went outside, making for the metal trapdoor that led to Arsamea’s underground tunnels.
Crusted with trodden snow, it looked like it hadn’t been opened in days.
And she knew. But she still tapped her foot over the door, her heart sinking with every second that passed without an answer.
Kadra’s vigiles helped her wrest it open. She called into the pitch-black space, telling anyone within that she could help them. A couple of vigiles nervously accompanied her down the ladder, sparks of lightning serving as their sconces.
During childhood, she had thought the tunnels to be mazelike and endless.
Now, she saw the claustrophobic space for what it was—a prison, a punishment for poverty.
She took in the piles of filthy clothing, the long-dried trails of blood leading toward the ladder where people had been dragged up.
There was no one here. There would be no one here until one of the vaunted families in that tavern fell on desperate times and had no other choice.
Then, they would understand. Then, they would search for a mercy they had not given.
Anger burned up her throat to sting her eyes. I should have returned sooner. Climbing up, she shook her head at the other vigiles’ inquiries.
“That’s homicidium.” One glared at the crowd amassed outside the tavern. “We could arrest them all. Get them to Sal Flumen.”
“I can bring your Magus Supreme,” Méherre added, a turbulent ocean in her dark eyes. “There’s enough reason to kill them all.”
“Like the north wouldn’t erupt into civil war if a Tetrarch wiped out a village?
The truly terrible thing about having political power is that you have to preserve the rights of people you hate!
” The lump in her throat threatened to choke her.
She almost wanted it to. “I can only Probe everyone until I find who threw these poor people off the mountain and dosed the village men with whitesleep—” She froze.
Turned. She stared at the group, yards away.
At the large, bearded men in their furs, at the women defiantly meeting her gaze. The answer settled in place, soft as a sigh. Cursed fucking village. Blood pounded in her ears. These people never changed.
She stalked back to them. “You can’t be dosed with whitesleep, you fuckwits!
It has to be rubbed on the eyelids. You searched below ground for someone to blame when you’ve been fucking them!
Your women are sick of you! So, they made you sick!
” And the perpetrators hadn’t cared about who ended up carrying the blame.
She halted before a proud-nosed woman. “Why?” she demanded and went cold when the woman smiled, something horribly blank behind her eyes. Not malice nor glee, but peace. Her irises expanded until they grazed the borders of her sclera. Behind Sarai, Méherre inhaled sharply.
“It came to us,” the woman said dreamily. “Like a thought we forgot that we had forgotten.”
“What did?” Sarai whispered.
“The idea that we could.”
True, Sarai registered. Marus had turned the color of ash.
Méherre’s throat worked before she undid the knot tethering Caelum and turned to her with grim eyes.
Sarai needed no further convincing. Getting into the saddle, she raced down the street and through Arsamea’s gates before dismounting to bow toward the abyss on the right of the winding mountain road back to Sal Flumen.
“May the Elsar cradle your souls,” she whispered to the victims it had claimed.
She stood there until Méherre tapped her shoulder and opened a portal back to Sal Flumen, murmuring that she should rest. Yet, it wasn’t sleep that came in a too-quiet inn but visions of eyes with black sclera, a voice whispering to her that she could, and Marus and Silvus reminding her of the same truth.
You have no power.