Chapter 9 #2
I remembered every detail so clearly. Petra’s curly auburn hair. The sweet smell of clean hay. The old gray mare mouthing gently at my arm as I wept and longed for Ivyhill. Garnet was her name.
I remembered too many things, and I wished I could forget them all.
“Good morning,” said Brigid. “You look terrible.”
The littles stared at me with unabashed fascination. One of them whispered to the others behind her hand. This happened with all the new recruits. My reputation was the stuff of legend.
I tried my best to ignore them. The sight of their fresh little faces—so young, so unprepared for what awaited them—was like a kick to the gut. And how do you respond to a kick to the gut? You either kick back or you collapse.
“I need to fight someone,” I declared.
Brigid glanced down at her tiny charges. “Well, we’re a little busy at the moment. But I’ll be free at the hour.”
Panic lanced through me. “I can’t wait twenty minutes.”
Just then, Posey entered the stables, balancing two pails of water on her shoulders.
When she saw me, she stopped short. Her luminous, green-tinged copper skin and the silver cascade of her hair was such an outrageous contrast to the drudgery of fetching water for horses that I almost laughed.
It occurred to me that perhaps I was going mad.
“Is it true?” she asked, staring right at me.
Brigid peered past Posey at the stone yard beyond, where Nesset was striding toward the main house. “Ah, Nesset! Do you have a spare few minutes?”
The Vilia turned, instantly on her guard. I didn’t blame her. The forced cheer in Brigid’s voice spelled trouble.
I returned Posey’s stare. I was in no mood to pretend. “Is what true?”
“I heard about the mission to Sablemire.”
“Well done, you.”
Posey shrugged off her water pails. They hit the ground with a heavy thud, sloshing water everywhere. “They were just people. Just families. And you murdered them.”
“That’s enough, Posey,” said Brigid. Her voice sounded suddenly very far away.
“They were hostiles in a volatile territory,” I said, not taking my eyes off Posey’s. “Isolate and dispatch.”
I was a soldier. She didn’t frighten me. Nothing frightened me. You did well, Mara. I never doubted you.
“Volatile?” Posey scoffed, her silver fae eyes bright with tears.
Her hand flew to her throat. She clutched her locket in one angry fist. “No one cares about Sablemire. Not even the greediest fae clans bother with it. There’s nothing there but rocks and goats.
Those Oldens could have hidden there in peace, and clearly the villagers were letting them. ”
“There is no room for uncertainty in times of war,” I said, realizing only after I’d said the words that they were the Warden’s, not mine.
Posey shook her head slowly. “Will I be next, then? What if the Warden wakes up one day and decides I am too uncertain, too volatile? That my usefulness no longer outweighs the fact of my Olden heritage? If she orders you to isolate and dispatch me, will you do it? Or what about Nesset? She’s a revenant, created by necromancers. That sounds quite Olden to me.”
Nesset, whom Brigid had wrangled into the stables with no small effort, suddenly squared her shoulders. “I’d like to see anyone try and dispatch me.”
“Thank you so much, Nesset,” said Brigid, pressing a curry comb into her chest with one hand and ushering the three littles toward her with the other.
“My helpers here are almost finished. Only Gray Gus remains. Don’t forget that he can’t hear very well out of his right ear, so mind that you don’t sneak up on him. ”
Posey hadn’t moved from where she stood. The puddles of spilled water spread slowly toward her toes. “You’re not who I thought you were,” she said quietly. “And neither is the Order. I thought your goal was peace, not extermination. I’m leaving.”
“You can’t,” I said at once. “You know too much about Order operations. If you leave, we’ll find you.”
“And kill me.”
“Yes.” None of us can leave, I thought. Not you, not me. We’ll die in this place. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe today.
Posey watched me for a moment, perhaps ready to say more, but then she glanced at the littles and stormed out instead.
Brigid took my arm and led me outside in the opposite direction. “Mara? Shall we?”
“As long as you stop using that voice, yes.”
“Those littles don’t deserve your bad mood.”
“But they deserve to face death in their trials, do they?”
Once we were out of earshot, Brigid hissed, “Who told Posey about Sablemire, for gods’ sake? When I find out who blabbed, I’ll wring their neck.”
“I don’t see why everyone shouldn’t know. The Warden didn’t issue a black order.”
We passed through the stone colonnade that led from the stable yards to the training yards. In the shadows, Brigid stopped me and made me face her.
“Talk to me,” she said, looking right at me with those patient pale blue eyes of hers. “What’s happened?”
“Yesterday was a mistake,” I replied. I stared past her at the empty training yard and the practice swords leaning against the far wall. “Posey was right. Those Oldens wanted a safe place to hide from the war. And we slaughtered them without cause.”
“We don’t know that.”
“The Warden told me as we flew home. The village council had submitted a request for asylum on the Oldens’ behalf.”
Silence. Then Brigid said, “Maybe that isn’t the full story. She could have learned something else that superseded their request.”
“I suppose.”
“And anyway, once the Warden attacked, we had no choice. We had to be on the defensive after that. If we’d just stood there, they’d have killed us.”
Even these few seconds of conversation were too much time spent standing still. I itched to grab one of the weapons awaiting us in the training yard. It was too immense, this dark space yawning open inside me, this deafening silence flooding my limbs. If I didn’t move soon, it would kill me.
“Then she shouldn’t have attacked,” I said.
“Maybe not,” Brigid conceded. “But the harsh truth is that we don’t know what the Oldens intended. They could have been planning to turn on the village that very night, for all we know. Or other hostiles might have tracked them there and attacked, leaving the village in ruins and everyone dead.”
I couldn’t look at her. I was so desperate for solace that I would have seen her familiar face and believed her, and I didn’t want the comfort that would bring. I didn’t deserve to feel comfortable.
“You’re right,” I said flatly. “Staff or sword?”
Brigid put her hands on my shoulders. “Now, wait a moment. This is me you’re talking to, all right? You can’t put on that serene Mara mask and pretend I can’t see past it. Let’s go on a walk and talk this through.”
I roughly shrugged her off. “Staff or sword?”
Brigid stepped back, frowning. “Fine. Staff. But we’re talking about this later, once I’ve beaten this foul mood out of you.”
She strode across the yard, grabbed one of the sparring staffs, and tossed the other one to me.
It was like dangling a piece of fresh meat in front of a starving wolf.
All the scattered, brittle pieces of my mind snapped back together.
I caught the staff and lunged at her. She was ready, of course.
Our staffs crashed together with a sharp crack, and then I pushed off of her to spin around and strike again.
And again.
And again.
It was bliss to fight someone who actually challenged me, and soon enough I couldn’t remember who I was, where I was, or who I was fighting.
All I knew was the weight of the staff in my hands and the strength of my muscles.
I was fast, faster than my father, faster than anyone.
And when I used my staff to strike, it was like bringing down an ax large enough to split mountains.
Dimly, I heard someone shouting my name, but I pushed on, ignoring the sound, because with the sound of my name came thoughts I didn’t want to think, memories I didn’t want to recall.
And every lunge, every spin, every quick jab of my staff beat them back harder, faster, until all I could hear was my roaring blood and my panting breaths and the crack, crack, crack of my weapon finding its mark.
“Mara!” someone screamed right beside my ear.
I whirled around, my staff raised, but Cira ducked before I could hit her, and this—the sight of her cowering beneath me, shielding Brigid with her much smaller body—was what snapped me out of the gorgeous dark place into which I had fallen.
I stood there, in the training yard, in the pale, Mist-silvered light, sweating and panting and staring down at my friends in horror.
Brigid was alive, but her nose was broken, and there was a gash across her cheek.
Blood stained her collar, and her staff lay on the ground beside her, useless, broken in half.
I dropped my own staff and slowly stepped back from her, realizing only then that we weren’t alone. At least a dozen figures stared at me from the perimeter of the yard—littles, servants, Roses my own age. I didn’t look harder than that. I couldn’t bear to see who else might have been watching.
“I’m all right,” Brigid said, reassuring Cira. She pushed herself up. “Mara, wait—”
But I couldn’t be there for a single second longer. I turned away from the sight of Brigid’s bloody face and fled.