6. SIX
SIX
CALVEROUS
Location: Kaidech
Dowagian students began their days at dawn.
The first straws of light pierced the gap between the curtains in their one-roomed home as Calver tied on canvas shoes with peeling rubber soles. Just as he set a hand on the door handle, his mother murmured from behind him, her tone as inauspicious as thunder at sea.
“I need you to watch Arleena today.”
Calver paused. “You m-m-mean when I get b-b-b-back?”
“No.” Her voice was sluggish with sleep. “Sooner. I’m leaving after she’s had breakfast.”
Calver’s muscles tightened. He turned to look at Arleena, still snoring softly in the bundle of blankets he’d abandoned minutes before. Women—and girls for that matter—weren’t allowed in the studio. “I have d-dowagian.”
“And you can still go. Calisto will allow it. We’ve spoken on it already.”
She’d already spoken to Calisto? “Where are you g-going?”
“To meet with a friend.”
“W-w-why can’t—”
“I thought you loved to take Arleena?”
Calver did love taking Arleena out of the house with him. That wasn’t why he was asking.
“Why can’t she go with you?” He didn’t even stutter. There were no secrets between blood. That was her rule. He wouldn’t let her lie again.
His mother sat like a specter in the stifling gloom, face masked by darkness. “It’s not a good place for her.”
“Then it’s n-n-not a good p–p”—Calver screwed his eyes shut and forced out the word—“place for you.”
His mother sniffed. “Calver, drop this now. I need your help.”
He wouldn’t drop it, but he did cross the room and drop to his knees beside her. She looked away. She’d been drifting. He couldn’t help but wonder if she’d disappear like his father, given the chance.
“T-t-take me with you. I will keep you safe. I c-can, you know?”
“Sweet boy, this is something you cannot help me with.”
“You are coming back?” It erupted from his throat with unexpected anger.
She paused, lips parted, until understanding crashed across her features like a wave. “Oh. Calverous.” Her arms cocooned him. He sat stiffly, unwilling to return the embrace. “I’ll be back tonight. Before highmoon. I swear it.”
Calver pulled away. “F-f-f-fine.”
“You’re leaving?” Arleena stirred from the blankets.
“You’re going with Calver today, love.”
Arleena’s brown eyes locked onto his, and she gave him a bleary smile. Calver’s stomach coiled. He was bringing his five-year-old sister to dowagian. He knew of at least one person who was never going to let him forget it.
By the time Arleena had finished a biscuit and pulled on her good kaftan and scarf, morning foot-traffic had already picked up in the alleys of their slum.
The crowd kicked up dust from the unpaved roads around them, casting a haze across the early lowsun.
Kretch. Calver was usually the first one at the studio.
He made a habit of beating Mesu Calisto to the door.
He tugged on Arleena’s hand. “C’mon.”
The walk should have taken fifteen minutes, but his sister lagged at the baker’s, the bookshop, the fountain, and a half-dozen other places before he scooted her along.
She hadn’t been out in weeks. She probably wouldn’t be out again for weeks again, after this.
Mother was different now: things left over the hearth too long, hours spent in bed, snappiness where there had once been patience.
Arleena was the only thing left to control, and she suffered for it.
“Arleena. I’m l-l-late.” The more he tugged, the more she dragged her feet.
She grinned. “Skip dowagian. Let’s go to the ocean.”
“No. I have to be there. I c-can’t miss it or—”
Arleena wrestled her arm from him and turned down a side street where three children her age were playing a game with stones. She’d stopped listening to Mother long ago; she hardly listened to him anymore. Anger boiled in his stomach.
“F-f-fine. If you d-d-d-don’t want to come, I’ll j-j-just leave you here.”
He wasn’t sure if the words were loud or if this side street had an echo, but the sentence could have split stone.
His sister froze. She gave him one look that gouged deeper than a dowaga ever could, then made a run for it.
“ARLEENA!” he screamed, but she’d disappeared from his sight into the mob of people bustling through Kaidech’s main street.
For long minutes, Calver peeled through the throng, searching for a child no one would ever realize was missing: a girl too tall, too skinny, and too smart for her age.
He bit down his panic and moved to the side of the street, where he scaled a pole holding a public Aetech lamp.
She was gone. How could one girl disappear so fast—like she knew exactly how to get lost the quickest? Several buildings down the street, a small sweet shop had its doors thrown open. Arleena always liked to press her nose up to the glass to watch the workers make honeyed cakes.
Calver slid down the pole. Dipping erratically through the crowd, he was cursed at more than once.
He searched the sweet shop front before stepping inside.
The well-groomed owner glared at his tattered appearance, watching to make sure he didn’t swipe anything.
Calver backed out wordlessly and rounded the corner into the alley beside the shop.
Arleena was there, in the shadows cast by the building, huddled against the wall. She cradled something in her hands.
“Arleena!” He threw his arms around her, and she choked out a sob. Relief and frustration warred with one another, leaving little space for empathy. He squeezed it out anyway. “W-w-w-what’s wrong?”
“I didn’t mean to,” she whimpered, opening her hands.
In her palms lay a dead starling, its little form bent to strange angles.
Arleena had always loved birds. “I was in the shop. And the keeper threw me out and I fell and I… I squashed it. Right under me. Why was it there? I just… How do I fix it?”
A starling grounded in the city central and away from its flock must have already been injured. She’d put it out of its misery, really.
“Sorry, Arleena.” He unwrapped his arms from her and tucked her unruly curls behind her ear, then cradled the little body away with his fingers.
He piled dirt into a mound and pushed it over the broken creature.
“Some things can’t be fixed. But you c-c-can fix the way you f-feel about it. ” That was what Calisto would say.
She buried her face in her knees. “Like you fixed how you wanted to leave me?”
Calver pulled his sister’s face between his hands until she looked him dead in the eye. “I was mad. I’m still m-mad. But I-I-I-I will never, never leave you. I p-promise. I promise it with every inch of me.”
Her lip quivered. “Until you leave with the Red Wing.”
Calver chewed the inside of his cheek. “M-maybe. But after, I’ll come back to you. I’ll always come b-b-back for you.”
Arleena sniffed. Then she circled around to his back, where she wrapped him in limbs: her way of asking for a ride. Her cheek settled onto his shoulders. He hoisted her up.
“I’m late. Dowagian now. Then the b-b-beach after.” He began a quick stride for Calisto’s studio. Arleena sniffed again. “Do you b-believe me?” he asked her.
“I do.”
By the time Calver arrived at Calisto’s dowagian studio, he was half an hour tardy.
He burst through the door into the familiar scent of oil used to maintain blades, sweat beading at his brow from the strain of jogging with a five-year-old on his back.
His shadow stretched across the room, thrown by the light from the studio’s tall windows.
Ten heads swiveled to look at him. The students stood in two lines which faced one another, the standard formation for initial clashes.
It meant he’d missed the entire warm-up.
Fighting to still his galloping heart, Calver set his sister down.
“Sit against the f-f-f-far wall. Stay there,” he whispered through labored breaths.
Her face soured, as if she’d bitten back an argument.
As she scurried off to the wall, he caught sight of Pim, whose jaw nearly hit the floor as he stared at Arleena.
He could hear his friend’s silent reproach: You’re. An. Imbecile.
Chaos. He was.
Calisto waited in the room’s center, his braided white beard cascading over his withered fighting arm—always kept slung across his chest. Calver clasped opposite elbows and bowed his head. “I-I-I-I—”
“Fall in line.” Calisto’s command was gentle but firm.
Calver nodded. The two lines adamantly kept eyes from Calver and even more adamantly kept eyes from the not-boy who was distinctly not-allowed at the room’s perimeter.
The five facing west clutched wooden sparring dowagas.
The four opposite had none. They were continuing the prior day’s practice of empty-handed disarming.
Calver fell into place with the four boys without weapons. He widened his stance, raised his arms, ready for Calisto’s call.
Suddenly, all his senses tilted. The hair on the back of his neck rose; his world narrowed to his very next movement.
This feeling was not foreign to him: his body always knew when a physical hit was likely before his brain caught up to how.
He listened to the instinct, trying to discern what about this clash felt so appallingly wrong.
Calisto whistled the start of the round, and Calver’s four teammates backed from the center of the room to sit cross-legged against the wall.
They’d tapped out. He didn’t even have time to question them.
The opposing line moved in quickly. His frustration, which he’d been struggling to quiet as it was, flared at the betrayal.
Calver lowered his stance as Milas, the closest, charged him. He slipped sideways and lashed forward to lock Milas’s elbow and wrist. He got his leg behind Milas and wrenched the weapon from him with a throw—a maneuver as useless as Chaos could make a thing, considering four others waited for him.