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1024 Words
d in the pure blackness after the noorestones went dark, I found Aaru’s hand, and we talked until we fell asleep.
“I ACCEPTED THE job.” Aaru’s whisper slithered through the dim space as I passed him a bundle of food through our hole. “Start tomorrow.”
A bright spark of hope shot through me. “Good. That gets us one step closer.”
He made a faint noise of affirmation.
“We’ve been here a month and a day now.”
Again, another noise—a barely audible hmph.
“Three decans and a day,” I said. “Thirty-one days.” Thirty-two for him, if we wanted to be accurate. Which my brain did.
Another hmph. Now he sounded a little annoyed. Of course he knew. Idris had the same calendar as the rest of the Fallen Isles.
I pulled back to the actual conversation, forcing my numbers to the background. “This is going to make a difference.”
“We will escape.”
Progress was slow, but we’d agreed from the start that we needed to be careful. Deliberate. We’d get only one chance, and we needed to make it work.
Fortunately, we had Gerel. She didn’t really believe we’d accomplish anything, but she played along. She knew the Heart better—she said—than any other trainee in her group, so she was able to give us a full list.
There were three exits:
1. The one I’d been brought through (it opened into a small grove of trees outside the city).
2. The exit for dragons (which I’d suspected, but now I had confirmation).
3. An exit into Warrior’s Circle (very public, not ideal for escape).
I’d have preferred to map the routes in my head myself, counting steps and intersections, but my movements were carefully monitored. Gerel’s instructions would have to do.
And now Aaru was going to work, too.
That meant he would be allowed out of his cell every day. He’d get to move around. Exercise. Eat. It wasn’t cleaning, like me, though. He’d been selected to work in the forge, where prisoners helped build the great chain links of the God Shackle.
Neither Aaru nor I had even half a clue about what the God Shackle was, so Gerel had rolled her eyes and explained that it was part of the Kyhani solution to the Great Abandonment. Decades ago, when it was first noticed that there were fewer dragons than ever, the Kyhani people had begun work on the immense chain—to literally bind their god to the seabed.
It seemed horrible to me, but the Warrior and the Lovers had such different views. It was probably a comfort to them.
::We will escape,:: Aaru repeated in quiet code, as I shimmied out from under the bed to distribute the rest of the food.
I glanced at Chenda, but her back was turned toward me, as usual. Even so, her changes were evident. Her braids looked ragged. Her copper clothes gathered snags and rips. Her perfect skin turned blotchy and blemished.
It was more difficult to see into her cell than Gerel’s, but sometimes as I walked by to and from work, I caught Chenda running her fingers across a tattered sleeve or down a long braid, like she could smooth the hairs back into position. She mourned her beauty. I understood. And that was why I kept trying to befriend her, no matter her rebukes.
Again tonight, she didn’t accept any of my food, but when the package went down the line, a few cheers went up. “Galadriel!” shouted Varissa. “My daughter the food bringer!”
Shortly after I’d started bringing food, Varissa—the woman who thought she had a daughter but didn’t, and thought she was from Bopha but wasn’t—decided to claim me as her daughter. I didn’t particularly want to be caught up in the fantasies of troubled minds, but resistance posed just as many problems.
I’d learned to give Aaru-like grunts when Varissa talked about our lives. She blamed our incarceration on a theft of mercy; apparently, we’d stolen bread for a homeless child with a magical singing voice and a box full of kittens. For that small crime, we’d been sentenced to the most horrible place on the Fallen Isles. At least, that was usually the story. The other story she liked involved a palm tree, a duck, and twenty-seven officer jackets “borrowed” from the town militia.
Then there was Hurrok, who screamed at night, and Kumas, who sang all the time though she had no talent for it, and Kason, who seemed to hate everyone but me. Probably because of the food.
When the food was all gone and the strips of silk returned to me, I hid them inside my pillow and copied Gerel’s stance. Aaru and I were both exercising with her now, though when I’d told her it was for our alliance, she’d made me promise to never try standing on my hands again.
“I wanted to be a Drakon Warrior,” she said during a series of squats. “That’s why I joined. I was small for my age, so no one thought I could do it. I endured the other trainees’ taunting for the first year—and then I broke every nose in my group within a few minutes.”
An
My gasp made her smile.
“Were you punished?” Aaru asked. Idris had very strict rules, he’d told me before, and even stricter punishments. Mostly, they seemed to involve locking people in basements.
Gerel shrugged. “I was reprimanded and made to apologize, but immediately given the top position in my class. On account of my fierceness and clear fighting skills.” She glanced at me and . . . didn’t quite smile, but almost. “Besides, noses look ridiculous. I improved the situation.”
I giggled in spite of myself. “They do, don’t they? But can you imagine our faces without them?”
“Oh, seven gods. No.” She gave a shiver of disgust.
- Writer
