38. A Sword Above, A Shadow Below
V iola had stormed out almost as soon as Nicodemus had finished his explanation. It was hard to tell if she was angry with him, or the Crown, or just too shocked to formulate words. He couldn’t blame her for any reaction.
At least he’d told her. At least he’d given her an idea of what she was walking into.
He hadn’t managed to explain how he knew what he did—and she hadn’t asked.
She would, when she returned, if she decided she wanted to speak to him again. She might not. She might want to forget what she saw. She might visit a mage and ask for her memories to be removed and live once more in ignorance. A lot of people might choose that path.
It didn’t seem like the one Viola would choose, but he could be wrong.
Cordelia found him back in his room shortly after Viola had left.
“Was that the chimaera blade I saw her run off with?”
Nico lay black against the pillows after taking another swig of pain potion. “Yes.”
“You gave her a gift .”
“I gave her a tool with which to defend herself.”
“It was definitely a gift.”
“You… shut up.”
“Nico,” she said, her expression sobering, “did you tell her?”
“More or less. She knows the Crown is keeping something from her, that they’ve been messing with her memories and that the Farm isn’t what she thinks. I didn’t have time to tell her exactly what she’ll see.”
Cordelia nodded. “I’m glad you told her.”
Nicodemus wasn’t sure he was. Was it the right thing to do? Yes. That didn’t mean he had to be glad about it. He didn’t think he’d be glad about anything until Viola was back, and there were no more secrets between them, and she forgave him for ever manipulating her in the first place, for withholding the information.
Cordelia must have sensed something was amiss, because the next thing he knew, she was patting his head. It was a very flat, awkward pat, like someone who’d learned the motion purely from watching a painting, and yet Nico was only half sure he wanted her to stop.
“She’ll come back,” she said brightly. “She’ll come back, and then she’ll know what we know, and she’ll want to bring the kingdom crumbling down. Maybe not for the same reasons you do, but… she’ll want it nonetheless. And then we can burn everything down and walk off into the sunset—”
“Lela—”
“Well, maybe not burn it. But destroy it!” Her eyes blazed.
“And if she doesn’t?” he asked quietly.
Cordelia paused in her plotting. “Doesn’t what?”
“What if she doesn’t want to bring the kingdom crumbling down?”
What if, like so many others that must have been bought off or paid for their silence, she decided not to act? What if she thought that the needs of the many outweighed the needs of the few? Nico’s own motivations were hardly altruistic. Could he blame her if she didn’t want to help him destroy her country?
Cordelia frowned. “Then she’s not the person we thought she was,” she said simply.
She is everything I thought and more.
He only wished she was here.
Viola’s first assignment was to patrol the wheat fields. Two giants were plucking the grain by hand, not trusted with scythes. It would have taken twenty farm hands an entire day to clear a patch of land this big back in Auro; here, it took the giants a couple of hours, and the yield they harvested…
It could feed a town for a season.
No magic could replicate this below, she feared. No floramancer could grow crops this size, no windmancer chop them down. Ironically, she thought that Nico could probably make reasonably quick work of it, though she couldn’t imagine him toiling in the fields, couldn’t imagine his immaculate hands dirty with anything other than paint.
Nico.
How much of this had he known—and for how long? Why had he shared it with her? Had this always been his plan—befriend a knight and manipulate them into witnessing this? Why her? Was it just because she’d fallen into his lap, or because…
She didn’t want her mind to go there, but it was a better place to go than keep it here, watching the giants toil and sweat, their eyes watering with fear whenever they were too slow.
I won’t harm you, she wanted to shout, but what did that even matter? She wasn’t the only guard here. A windmancer was hovering nearby, over the fields, a whip of wind ready whenever they faltered.
Viola wouldn’t hurt them. The windmancer would.
She froze in her thoughts. The windmancer was Ariel of the House of Wind. Viola knew her from her days as an apprentice. She was one of the daughters of the main house, a girl almost as pale as a cloud, her hair as light and crisp as the flesh of an apple. There was a time Viola would have called her a friend—perhaps something more—though they’d not kept in correspondence since Viola moved to Lysandra.
Ariel’s expression wasn’t glazed like the knight’s. If anything, she looked slightly bored. She wasn’t under an enchantment, which meant she was here of her own free will.
Oh Ariel, Ariel, what have you done?
What had everyone done?
This sort of operation required dozens, maybe hundreds of people. How many knew, and for how long?
The nearby giant sagged. She was a woman of indeterminate age, who looked like she might have once had a full, round figure. Her belly still had a wideness to it, but her face was hollow and gaunt, her skin grey, her hair and eyes leeched of colour. She slumped to her knees, the ground rumbling beneath her. Viola moved instinctively, not to hurt, but to help—
“At ease, Windbright,” Ariel called from above.
Her voice made Viola shudder. It was cold and clinical, nothing like the Ariel she remembered. And it meant that Ariel clearly remembered her.
The windmancer hovered in the space between the giant and Viola, buffeted by the wind. It caught the white and blue sleeves of her clothes, tugging on her cape, granting her the appearance of some kind of goddess.
The vengeful, wrathful kind.
“She won’t give us any trouble, will you?” Ariel said.
The giant stared at her, struggling to her feet. She stumbled again. Ariel raised her arms to summon a wind-whip, and the giant at last hauled herself to her feet. She staggered to the next patch of wheat, plucking it with hunched shoulders. Her fingers were cracked and blistered.
Viola’s family wouldn’t have treated an animal this way. She remembered one year her mother dismissed a farmhand for beating an ox. The farmhand yelled back that the beast was being stubborn, and what did it matter? The ox was destined for slaughter sooner or later.
“There is a difference between pain and death,” her mother had responded. “And we strive not to cause either unnecessarily.”
Viola had always known pain could be worse than death. It was a lesson she’d learned more and more the older she became, and none more so than the day she lost everything, and living seemed like a curse.
She imagined these giants knew that too.
Routine governed Viola’s days in a way it never had before. She could see why so many of the knights came back from this place groaning of the monotony. Something about it sunk into your bones.
Like the way the whips sunk into the flesh of the giant.
Viola hadn’t had to raise hers yet. She was dreading if— when —that moment came.
The knights rose at the crack of dawn. They dressed in silence, ate in silence, received their orders with nothing more than a ‘yes, Ser.’ They gathered their equipment and headed out into the fields, sometimes using airships to deliver them. The Farm spanned for miles. There seemed to be nothing else around them—no villages, no castles or settlements of any kind. Just meadows and mountains as far as the eye could see.
There must have been settlements here once, a society before they came. What had happened to everyone else ?
Viola suspected she already had the answer to that question, but she did not want to ask it.
She preferred the shifts on board the airships themselves, travelling over the land. Brutality was easier to ignore from a distance. She could stand aboard the ship and stare at the fields instead, silently staring at the birds that swept beside the vessel. They too were giant—everything here was.
In the evenings, at the mess hall, the enchantments that everyone was under seemed to wear off, just enough to allow them to speak, to converse of things that had happened on the journey, or last week, in the months or years beforehand. No one spoke of the day. No one mentioned the weather, or how tired they were, or how many giants they had tortured that day. It was like it had never happened.
The easing of the enchantment wasn’t done for any kind means, Viola knew. It was done because keeping someone under a thrall for prolonged periods was dangerous. It was why the work was undertaken in shifts, with knights only coming once a year for no longer than a month. How many here knew the truth all year round? Skyborn, she suspected, and the rest of the overseers. What of the mages and mancers? There were not enough of them in Auro for a shift system to work. Did they hold this truth permanently? How much had the Crown paid them for their silence?
How could any amount be enough?
“Tell me,” Nico had asked, back at the Winter Ball, “if the Crown told you to slaughter innocents, would you do it?”
He’d been testing her—a test she’d obviously passed but now wished she’d failed. If she had, if she’d proved to be a perfectly loyal soldier, she wouldn’t be here now.
Yes you would, a voice reminded her. You just wouldn’t be conscious of any of it.
Which was worse? How was she supposed to go home and be a knight and serve the Crown after this?
You’re not , said a voice that sounded strangely like Nico’s. That was the point. That was why he’d shown her. Because he wanted something from her. He always had.
And behind Nico’s betrayal was another, deeper one. Jax and Isabeau had sanctioned this. The Queen and King who had praised her, and given her a pretty dress, and inspired her to choose this path in the first place. It was worse than anything Nicodemus had done to her. It was worse than anything Nicodemus had ever done.
Viola swallowed the rising lump in her throat and bit into the fish in front of her. The texture was off—of course it was. One bass probably fed the whole table. Livestock likely didn’t make it to Auro, or if they did, it was probably diced up into something else. The change in texture was less discernible in fruit and vegetables. Or perhaps she’d just gotten used to it over the years.
She’d noticed the food had tasted different when she moved to the House of Wind. She’d just assumed it was because she wasn’t eating farm-fresh produce.
Naive. Foolish. Stupid.
There was something about learning the truth that always made you feel like an idiot, that drew guilt inwards rather than throwing it at the person who’d spun the lies in the first place.
This isn’t my fault, Viola reminded herself, as she struggled to swallow. I didn’t do this.
That may be, a voice reminded her, but what will you do now because of it?
The voice sounded like her parents’, like Sebastian’s, even a little of her own. She wanted to ignore it. She already knew she couldn’t.
She turned back to the conversation the rest of her table was having, seeing if there was something she could join in on, something to distract herself with, but nothing came. She wondered how the enchantment was working. In the food and drink, obviously, but maybe held back for the evening meal. The room must be runed in some way, not allowing them to recall the memories of the day. Complex, powerful stuff. Not achieved by one person alone.
The softening of the enchantment also allowed the knights the opportunities to gain real memories. They’d have some foggy ones of patrolling the fields, and crisp, real ones of chatting over food, of entertainment in the long evenings. Enough to make them want to come back. Enough to waylay suspicions.
Someone sat down beside her, and Viola turned to find herself next to Ariel. “Goddess, Viola! How good to see you again!”
She leaned across to embrace her, as if they hadn’t just been out in the fields together hours beforehand. Ariel had whipped a giant hard enough to draw blood.
Viola blinked, unsure of how much she was supposed to remember, before deciding that everyone in the room was lucid enough for her to act a little like herself, at least for now.
“Ariel! My word, it’s been years!”
Ariel crinkled her nose. “I saw you last year.”
Last year. The last time Viola had been on duty. She had no memory of meeting Ariel, not even a foggy one. What had happened between them? Auriel’s light, what if they’d slept together and she’d forgotten ?
“Sorry,” she murmured, deeply hoping that wasn’t true. Ariel wouldn’t do that, surely? But then, Ariel had just spent her day beating slaves. What wouldn’t you do, once you’d crossed that line?
“I’m having a little trouble remembering.”
Something flickered in Ariel’s eyes. “That’s understandable,” she murmured, which made Viola think she might feel a little guilty, about the memory-messing if nothing else.
“What are you doing here?” Viola asked, hoping the question sounded curious rather than accusatory.
“The pay is good, and I didn’t fancy joining the Nightingales,” she said off-handedly, referring to an elite group of mancers that served the Crown directly, usually as spies. Most of them tended to be windmancers, whose natural agility and illusion magic made them perfect for espionage. Other mancers could heal or build or create, there were a range of jobs for them. For windmancers, it was the Nightingales or end up on board an airship to bolster the sails, or powering crystal mills in some remote location. “Magic deserves more” Ariel had told her once. Viola had thought that rather snobby at the time, but in hindsight she understood better what it felt like to have talents underappreciated or wasted, even if she also felt that all roles were important. She liked the challenges too. But this—how was this a good use of Ariel’s abilities?
Not that she could ask that. Not without revealing what she knew.
“Do you like it here?” she asked instead.
Ariel faltered. “The location is nice,” she said. “But anyway—enough of me. How have you been getting on? Are you seeing anyone at the moment?”
A few seats down, Freya froze.
“No,” said Viola slowly, unable to explain Nico and whatever they were.
“Well…” said Ariel, her hand inching closer to Viola’s, “would you like to be?”
Viola pulled her hand away. “I’m taking some time for myself,” she said, in a manner she hoped was diplomatic even though she didn’t think Ariel deserved her diplomacy.
Ariel shrugged. “Well, if you change your mind, do let me know. I have a private room here.”
At least her telling Viola about the room seemed to suggest that nothing had happened between them before. Small mercies, at least. But she wondered who else Ariel might have invited there and who remembered nothing about the encounter shortly after it ended.
Not right. None of this was right.
Dinner ended not long after. The knights were given another drink to see them off to sleep, and everyone shuffled back to their bunks, asleep within minutes. Only Viola lay awake, no longer thinking of her family, but of all the awful things she’d witnessed since she came here. She wished she could talk to Nico. Maybe to yell at him, or maybe just to have someone who understood. She’d brought her notebook with her, but it had been confiscated by the guards upon arrival. It would likely be returned to her at the end of the month, but she missed it nonetheless.
But more than paper and ink, she missed the person behind the pen, both the one she wrote to and the one she’d been before she came here, and never would be again.