Chapter 3
The coach waiting at the gate at dawn had clearly seen better days: Its paintwork was scuffed, its wheels were well-worn, and its body was speckled with the dry mud of countless travels. It had perhaps been robust and elegant once, but looking at it now, I had little hope of a comfortable journey.
It was the first day of Tima, the Turning to Autumn, and the air was crisp this early in the morning. I had donned the black uniform all trainees had to wear on the rare occasions we left the Institution—but black also seemed an appropriate choice after what I’d learned in Caerig’s office.
I blinked. My eyes were swollen from crying, and unused to the brightness: There were few windows in Arbenhaw.
The complex rose up like a mountain behind me—its walls the smooth black of nabyrium, a tough stone impervious to damage by Orha—while ahead, beyond the deep ditches and watchtowers, the tops of the larches shivered in the breeze.
Rooks and jackdaws eyed me beadily from the ramparts.
Their presence was an uneasy reminder of the Hundred, for all the Houses were named after birds: They claimed they were descended from the leaders of ancient clans who’d taken birds as emblems and inked them on their banners.
There seemed no escape from reminders of House Shearwater, of Zennia, of the island that was to be my new home.
When I finally saw Caerig and Rhama walking toward me, a heavy sense of foreboding settled in my chest.
A pair of armed guards strode along behind them. One was pale, squat, and heavyset, with grayish hair pulled back into a greasy ponytail and a face that bore an uncanny likeness to a toad’s. Judging by the squint-eyed look he gave me, he, like most people, harbored a deep distrust of Orha.
The second guard was taller, gangly, and sharp-eyed, with a matchlock gun strapped to his belt. Unlike his companion, he barely spared me a passing glance.
“Corith,” said Caerig as they came to the gate. “These fine gentlemen will be keeping you company on the journey.”
Keeping me from running off, more like.
Rhama stepped forward. Something glinted in his hands.
As he lifted it toward me, guided its cord over my head, the telltale hum of laconite filled the air.
Dark, blood-red, with pale, threadlike veins, the pendant nestled against my chest, and I felt its faint vibration through my clothes.
Should I attempt to speak to any water, my pleas would go unheeded, my gift thoroughly deadened.
I wasn’t used to it; we rarely set foot outside these gates. All Orha had to wear laconite when travelling, but we couldn’t exactly don it when we were training or working. I wouldn’t be permitted to remove the pendant until I reached Bower Island—and my service placement.
Caerig spoke: “I hope you realize how fortunate you are, Corith. Your classmates would give anything to be posted with such a family.” Perhaps she’d noticed the grim downturn of my mouth.
I gave no reply, merely tried not to wince. Fortunate. After last night’s news, that word cut deep.
Rhama, I saw, was studying me closely. He looked tired; days-old stubble dotted his jaw.
“You should know,” he said evenly, “that the ocean is a…different beast. These mountain springs, the pools in your practice chambers…” He paused, seeming to grope for the right words.
“Just remember your training. It takes time, and respect.”
If I hadn’t known better, I’d have thought he was concerned. But though Rhama had taught us for years, he’d never been one to display much warmth. No doubt he was thinking of Zennia’s accident, of how displeased Shearwater would be with another…
I searched his expression, burning to ask more questions about my friend—I was leaving anyway, they couldn’t punish me for impertinence now—but he seemed to sense it and flattened his features. The minute shake of his head that followed made it clear I’d be getting no answers from him.
The squat guard, whom Caerig introduced as Egard, hiked up his sword belt. “Let’s go,” he said brusquely. “The sooner this one gets to where she’s going, the better.”
And the sooner you’ll get paid, I wanted to shoot back, and can spend your wages in the dice and ale houses. As the pair walked past me, I thought I caught a stale whiff of drink.
Once the three of us were installed in the coach, Rhama leaned in and held out a sheet of parchment, stamped with the Institution’s official crest. “A letter of passage, in case you’re stopped on the road.
Informs anyone who cares to know of the purpose of your journey and why there is an Orha with you. ”
Egard pocketed it, shooting me another suspicious glare.
Before Rhama moved away, he caught my gaze, holding it just a fraction too long. There was meaning there. A reminder of his warning.
And perhaps, I imagined, something a little like Good luck.
—
Despite Egard’s thinly veiled hostility, he eventually let me glimpse the map he carried.
The journey was fifty miles as the crow flew, but with our route requiring a loop around the southern foothills of the Cradle, we’d be on the road for more like sixty-five.
Five nights in coaching inns until we reached Port Rhorstin.
Before he could snatch the map away, I traced down the coastline with my eyes to the Saltwoods, to the city of Pontarth and the tiny village marked Ystren.
My birthplace.
A knot had formed in my insides. My mother might still be there, I thought, working the little apothecary’s garden my father left us after he died.
He’d been killed when I was six in a pointless skirmish for a local lord who held tenured land from House Mallard.
Skewered by a polearm, then dragged behind a cart.
Even before I heard Zennia’s grim stories, I had reason to resent the Hundred’s deadly politicking, their bickering.
But though the thought of my mother made my eyes burn uncomfortably, I doubted she would ever welcome me back, even if I wanted to return to my hometown.
The law forbade Orha lacking sanctioned employment from ever using our gifts again, and tales of the Revolt still lurked like a shadow in people’s minds.
I’d be shunned, the object of deep suspicion, forced to wear laconite everywhere I went.
It wouldn’t be much of a life at all.
My sparse belongings barely filled the leather case they’d been packed in—by one of the Instructors’ servants, maybe—and I had nothing, no books, to pass the time on the journey.
Egard and his companion, who it turned out was called Belamy, amused themselves with card games and crude chitchat, neither of which I had any interest in joining.
Instead, I stared out at the passing scree slopes and stands of birches, by turns mesmerized and terrified to see the world outside Arbenhaw.
This was a world hostile to my kind. Though Arbenhaw had felt akin to a prison, it had also, for a decade, been my home. The bell tolls directing our movements every day. The Instructors: harsh, but always there, like strict parents…That was all gone. And it made my chest hurt a little.
As we trailed through Glangell, the great forest hugging the mountains, I tried to stave off my anxiety about the island, and my misery over Zennia, by daydreaming about running: imagining myself leaping out of the coach and disappearing, living amid nature, using my gift to draw up water.
But I knew the likely reality would be starvation. Winter was on its way, and nobles hunted in these woods. I’d eventually have to buy food, seek out shelter. And with laconite everywhere, humming whenever I came near, I’d quickly attract attention and be questioned.
I shivered as I watched fir trees flit past the window. Arbenhaw had been a veritable hotbed of rumors, and one was that there were Orha living in the wilds. Rebels. Insubordinates who called themselves the Cage.
I knew it was one of the few rumors that were true, because I’d seen the headlines screaming across the pages of the news pamphlets that Zennia—and I, more reluctantly—had pickpocketed during our rare trips to town: Brutal Assassination Blamed on Cage Terrorists.
Cage Strikes Again in Queendom’s Capital. Regent Shrike Vows to Root Out Rebels.
And then, of course, there had been Owyn.
Zennia and I had sometimes whispered about running. Made up silly stories about where we’d hide out. Then, for the first and only time during our training, one student had absconded. An older boy called Owyn.
He had been sixteen, Zennia and I only twelve.
Someone found out later, from a pamphlet plucked out of a gutter, that Owyn had been caught in just two days.
They’d made an example of him, said he’d wanted to join the Cage.
He hadn’t turned up at Arbenhaw again. None of us knew what had happened to him.
Those suspected of being linked to the Cage tended to disappear without trace.
Egard grunted. “You look like you’re being carted to the gallows, girl.”
I met his sour gaze and gave no reply.
Daydreaming about fleeing was a welcome distraction.
But in the end, I knew I much preferred a straw-and-linen mattress, a hot breakfast at the bar of a coaching inn, to roughing it in the woods, knowing that at any moment the same suspicion that had fallen on Owyn would fall on me—and the same fate, too.
—
That night, I staggered up to the eaves of the only guesthouse that had had a spare room, my tailbone burning from the jolting of the coach and my ears assailed by unfamiliar noises.
We were on the outskirts of the city of Tresteny, and despite the late hour, there were people guffawing, dogs barking, carts clattering by below.
I had no idea how I was going to sleep. At least I could take off my laconite pendant, which had purred against my breastbone all day, stopping me from dozing.
Egard narrowed his eyes as I set it on a table.
“We’ll be right down there, between the stairs and the door, so don’t even think about scuttling, little Orha rat.”
“I wasn’t,” I said shortly, squashing a spike of anger. I wished I could run, if only to deny Egard his payment.
After he and Belamy stomped down to the dice tables, I crouched and opened the leather case of my belongings. As I lifted the nightshift that lay on top, something fluttered out: a folded scrap of parchment. Unfolding it, I saw words inked in a precise hand across it:
If You Wish to Know What Happened to Your Friend, Go to the Veil, Port Rhorstin, on 14th Tima. Sunset Exactly. Bring a Mask.
I stared. Heard my breath over the rumble from downstairs.
With shaking fingers, I put the note aside and dug through the rest of my luggage. But there was nothing else, only my clothes, a pair of slippers, candles and rushlights, a tinderbox…
I sat back and reached for the note again.
Zennia.
The fourteenth of Tima was less than two weeks from now. And Port Rhorstin…that was the closest town to Bower Island. The embarking point for the nine-mile crossing to House Shearwater.
I had no idea what the Veil was, or why I had to bring a mask, or even if there’d be any possibility of getting there, but I already knew I’d do everything I could to make this meeting.
A meeting that someone at Arbenhaw must have arranged.
Loud thumps on the staircase made me jump to my feet. I crumpled the parchment into my palm, stood there frozen.
A rap on the door, Belamy’s voice issuing through it: “Forgot my coin purse. You decent in there?”
I angled my face away as he rummaged in his pack and hoped he couldn’t see the feverishness in my eyes.
That niggle of doubt I’d felt in Caerig’s office; that wrongness that had struck me at her words, “unfortunate accident”…My instinct had been right. There was more to all this—to Zennia’s accident—than I’d been told.
And in two weeks, I was determined, I would find out what it was.