Oath Bound (Book 3) (20 page)

Vandis huffed and huddled
more deeply in his cloak.

“The lightning—was that
true? Did you smite them with lightning?”

“Just the one.”

“You aren’t just
menyoral,
”
she said, swinging around in front of him and walking backward so they could
talk face-to-face. “You’re the only one. You are
The
Menyoral.
Which is why you need to be far more careful than you have been.”

“You, too? How many
times—”

“Until you listen, or
until you die.” She stabbed a spear of a finger at him. “You are not careful.
You are observant, most of the time, but you are
not
careful. You came
to the Strike alone tonight.”

“Three times they’ve
tried for me, and failed. Don’t you think they’ve given up by now?”

“Four.” She stopped at
the center of another streetlight’s illumination and produced something out of her
pocket, pressing it on him. “Four times.”

He stopped, too, and
unwrapped the handkerchief. Two disk-and-rays pendants, browning bloodstains on
the white cloth. Here she’d put it, in his face: what she was. “Wynn—”

“I can only protect you
so far, Vandis.” Softly she said it, cold. “They’re fanatics. They won’t give
up until they’ve pissed on your corpse. I would have thought you’d understand
that.”

“Even fanatics should be
able to recognize a lost cause.”

“You know better.” She
began to walk again, more slowly this time. “If you think they’ve finished with
you, you’re a damned fool. If they decide they can’t get at you directly, where
do you think they’ll go next?”

Vandis paled. “Do you
think they’d—”

“Wherever you’ve stashed
them, I suggest you get to them before someone else does.”

“I haven’t told anyone
where they are.”

“Perhaps not, but I
suspect I could suss it out in less than a day, and you can bet
they
will have thought of it.” She stopped by HQ’s front walk. She might have a
point; he’d hardly noticed where they were. When she spoke again, it was
harder, colder. “Don’t act so much the fool that you lose what you love most.”

“Well, good night to you,
too,” he snapped, and turned up the walk. If she weren’t so right, it wouldn’t
make him so angry.

“What sin is it that I
don’t want to see you hurt?” she asked, and when he turned she lifted a palm.
Her voice softened again. “I know that I joke, but a world without Vandis in it
isn’t a world I’d care to inhabit.”

“There’s nothing more I
can do! I’m stuck here until the Watch finishes up. Do you have any idea how
long that could be?”

She raised an eyebrow.

“Right,” he said, rubbing
the back of his neck. “Right. But in the meantime, I can’t go to them. I can’t
get away!”

Wynn scanned the street.
She took a deep breath, and bowed her head. She stepped in close, so close he
caught a hint of scented soap. He could feel her warmth, and her lips brushed
his ear when she whispered, “Where are they?”

He turned his head to
stare at her.

“You can tell me, or I
can suss it out, but the time it will take me is time they may not have.”

“What are you saying?”

“Are you truly so dense?”

Vandis shut his eyes.
“Windish,” he barely said, barely dared to breathe.

Her lips touched his,
pressed snowflake-light and cool. He couldn’t recall a single softer thing, and
it gave him a little snap of heat in his chest. “Good night, Vandis,” she said,
and strode away down Temple Row, leaving him blinking and wondering what the
hell he’d just done.

Feej Park, Windish

Midnight had passed, but
Dingus sat back against a rock, sleepless, with Peepa in his lap and Tai
snuggled up to his chest. All around him, Ishlings snoozed, curled in their
blankets. Their tiny bodies warmed him, and he was comfortable enough that he
didn’t feel the need to move, but unlike them—unlike Kessa, who’d helped him
clean up after supper and gone right to sleep—Dingus didn’t dare close his
eyes. He sat there with his mind spinning in worried circles, wondering what
the hell he was supposed to do next.

He missed Vandis so bad
it felt like a pit in his chest. Part of his worry, just a little part, was
what would Vandis say when he found out what happened between Dingus and Tikka?
Certain as sundown, Vandis would understand why Dingus had to do what he’d
done, and why he had to keep doing it, but he didn’t expect his Master to like
it, no, not by half. He doubted any of this would’ve happened if Vandis had
been here… but if Vandis had been here, all his Ishlings would still be
stealing and starving and dying, bit by bit, a little more every day. He
gathered Tai up tighter. If he was to lose his leaf, which he didn’t think he
would, but if he did, well… he’d have Tai and all the rest. He didn’t
want
a big X branded over his tattoo, but it wouldn’t stop him. “Won’t stop me,” he
whispered into Tai’s fuzz, and Tai let out a tiny cheep of sleepy contentment.

He’d found a good camp: a
finger of land that stuck out into the bay, for the most part pebbly beach, but
with a stand of trees in the middle, which was where they’d settled. At high
tide the waves washed up almost to the edge of the trees. He hoped they’d be
allowed to stay here, but if not, he’d pack the Ishlings out of the city and
write a letter to Vandis telling where they were. He’d have to write one
anyways, he figured, to say they’d left Tikka’s.

Tikka was probably
writing one this very minute, saying what a shithead Dingus had turned out to
be, but he found he didn’t much care what Tikka thought. Vandis would hear him out.
He felt that. But Vandis would also want to hear it from him before getting
back to Windish—if Vandis
ever
got
back.

Stupid to worry. It
hadn’t even been the month yet, but Dingus couldn’t help it any more than he
could help breathing, and he could sure as hell use some guidance right now.
Help
me,
he prayed.
Please help me figure this out.
No answer came
winging out of the sky, and no Vandis landed in front of him, not that he’d
expected either. He tipped his head back against the rock and—sat right back up
again, setting Tai carefully aside. He shifted Peepa off his lap and stood. On
his way to the place where the finger of land came off the coast—the spot the
noise had come from—he stooped to pick up one of his swords.

When he reached the edge
of the copse, Dingus concealed himself partway behind a tree to size things up.
Three Ish came slowly up the peninsula from the rocky mainland, two bigger ones
flanking a smaller. One of the larger figures carried a lantern. Dingus
thought, for a moment, of circling around them; he could have, but no. That’d
put them between him and his Ishlings, and he couldn’t have that. He stepped
out from behind the pine to block their path.

He didn’t like what he
saw: an old Ish with gray hair streaking his face and crest, and on either side
two dark, glossy Ish men with thick muscles. He focused on the old one in the
middle, and
he
focused in turn on Dingus, smirking as only wide Ish lips
could smirk.

“You’re Dingus, I
imagine,” he said. His voice was almost clean of accent, high, but precise
rather than fluting.

“Yeah, I am.”
And
how’d you know my name?

“So Laben wasn’t lying.
You aren’t quite the tallest Big I’ve ever seen, but you’re close.” He paused
for a heartbeat, thoughtful. “When you grow up, you might be. He didn’t mention
you were a child.”

Dingus said nothing.

“Consider this a courtesy
visit, Dingus. Given your recent takeover of Laben’s business, I want to
confirm your understanding of the terms.”

“Terms?” he asked
blankly, trying to unwind what-all the old Ish had just said. A courtesy visit
at midnight? “I didn’t take over any business.”

“But you have. Nobody’s
disputing your claim to Laben’s workforce. Nevertheless—”

“You mean the kids.”

“Mm.” The wide mouth
thinned. “Yes. Seventeen Ishlings, I believe, and trained pickpockets to a
tail.”

“They’re not picking
pockets though.” Dingus shook his head. “I don’t—”

The old Ish bared his
fangs in a grin that didn’t reach his eyes. “Whatever they’re doing for you, I
couldn’t care less, but I advise you to get them earning again as quickly as
you can. These are difficult times, Dingus. Someone’s got to pay me.”

“What for? I don’t even
know you. Why should I pay you anything?”

“Now this is a hick,” he
said, looking side-to-side at the muscled Ish flanking him. They laughed,
stupid and nasty, a sound Dingus knew in his bones. “You have so much to learn
about how the world works, Dingus. If you pay me, nothing happens to you. If
you don’t…”

“You’re threatening me!”
He couldn’t believe it.

“Oh, you’re a sharp one.”
The old Ish’s eyes glittered with malicious amusement. Dingus knew that
expression, too, and he wasn’t about to knuckle under, not now that he had his
leaf. Not now that he had seventeen little kids plus Kessa depending on him to
be a man. “Yes, I’m threatening you. Perhaps it’s a little brutish, but it’s
made me a wealthy man, and I hate losing income. Four weeks from today, I’ll
come back to collect in the amount of sixty sovereigns.”

“
What?
” That was
more than his stipend for a whole year, and he’d spent out of it besides. It
might as well be a thousand.

“From that day, your
payment will be due every four weeks, in the same amount.”

“Are you shitting me?”

“Yatan always gets his
money,” said one of the muscle-bound goons, the one on Dingus’s left, though
they looked enough alike that they seemed interchangeable. He cracked his thick
knuckles. “You’re tall now, but wait ’til we’re done with your knees.”

“Now, now, Teerin, let’s
give Dingus the time I’ve promised him.”

“You come back,” Dingus
said, “all you’ll get from me is this.” He drew his sword about a third of the
way, making sure the old Ish—Yatan—saw the metal shine before he slotted it
back into the scabbard. “I won’t pay you a clipped bit. Not now. Not in a
month.
Never.
”

“Ask some of those
Ishlings what can happen to you,” Yatan suggested. “Leem, Teerin, let’s go.
Four weeks.”

“Don’t bother.”

Yatan laughed again. “By
all the totems, you’ve got brass ones! You’ll learn, boy, you’ll learn.”

Dingus watched the
lantern bob away into the distance. No, he’d learned about all he could stomach
about guys like that, guys that smirked from behind a wall of muscle, whether
it was their own or somebody else’s. He watched them until the light winked out
of sight, then turned back to the trees.

“In morning,” Tai cheeped
from the ground, hushed and afraid, “we is go to market. I tells the other
kids. We is ready to pick pockets for you.”

Dingus extended his arm,
beckoning, and Tai leapt to grab his hand. In a moment, the Ishling settled on
his shoulder. He rubbed the fur under Tai’s jaw, soft and clean, the way it
should be. “No, Tai.”

The Ishling shivered,
huddling into his neck. “Yatan is bad. You isn’t can keep money from him. He is
very much angry then.”

“I dealt with Laben,
didn’t I?”

“Yes, yes, you is, but—”

“You’re gonna have to
trust me to deal with this, too.”
Somehow.

“Dingus,” Tai whispered,
“you isn’t understand. You is hear Yatan’s words, but you isn’t hear what he
says
.
Laben is dead. If you isn’t pay him, you is dead, too… slow, most like.”

“Let him try,” Dingus
said, fighting to keep his voice steady. In a fortnight, Vandis would be
back—had to be back—and if Dingus couldn’t figure something out, once it was
all laid out Vandis would be sure to. Hadn’t he fixed everything up with Kessa
in less than an hour? When Vandis came back, this problem wouldn’t take more
than a day to solve. Dingus breathed a little easier, and when they got back to
camp he lay down with Tai on his chest, rubbing at his leaf, which prickled and
throbbed strangely.

He took it as a good
sign, and went to sleep.

Aurelian cloisters,
just outside Muscoda City; the novices’ dormitory

Just after Matins, Stas
lay on his back, staring at the ceiling in the soft light from the brazier
between his shelf and Boris’s. Nodding off all through service, and now that he
was back in bed: wide awake. He’d folded his thin blanket into a cushion for
his head; sometimes even in winter the brazier warmed the cell enough for that.

He settled into the most
comfortable position a hard wooden shelf would allow a bony boy and bent his
attention toward a beetle crawling up the wall at his side. How did it move so
quickly on such little legs? Why didn’t it just open its shell, let out the
delicate wings beneath, and fly to where it wanted to go? Stas reached out and
coaxed it onto his finger. It trundled up his hand. He swallowed his giggles;
its tiny feet tickled his skin.

He didn’t think the bugs
really cared about him—they didn’t have much concern for anything beyond
staying alive—but they were good friends, from his point of view. They were
never unkind to him. They just… were. He loved them nearly better than Boris,
since they never asked silly questions, though of course he loved Boris a
little better. He glanced over at the shelf across the way, the lumps hips and
legs made curled under the blanket, and the skinny span of shoulders smashed
against the wood on one side. The sight of Boris made him smile.

All right. He loved Boris
more than a little better. Boris was the one who watched with his big blue eyes
wide to catch the slightest motion of Stas’s fingers, who listened when Stas
didn’t make a sound. Just reminding himself that Boris was here relaxed him. He
kept his face toward his friend and molded to his shelf as far as he could.

His eyes were harder to
open with every blink. He struggled with his lids, but at last he gave in and
let them stay shut, drifting in the place between waking and sleeping where
everything was fleecy and warm. Boris breathed evenly, and Stas imagined that
was a lullaby.

A terrible, long scream
cut across his brain, and another, longer: jabbed in, twisted. Boris lay tight
on his shelf, and Stas slid off his own and crossed to his friend. He laid a
hand on Boris’s ankle, and Boris squeaked and jumped. “O—o—only—mmmmme,” Stas
managed to get out, but before he’d made it past the second “o,” Boris twisted
over to show him a white face.

“Stas,” he said, while
the screams frayed. “What is it?”

I do not know. It will
be all right,
he signed.
I am sure it will. I am going to see.

Boris wrapped his hand
into Stas’s smock, saying fiercely, “No, don’t!”

I will just look out
the curtain. Besides, you know that nobody ever sees me.
He eased the
fabric out of Boris’s grasp, smiling his best reassurances in spite of the
shrieks rattling up the corridor, and skipped away when Boris grabbed for him
again. It was only a few steps to the black curtain that covered the doorway,
even for someone as little as Stas. He skirted the brazier and pulled the
streaky, badly-dyed burlap aside.

The moment he stepped
out, a crowd of novices charged down the plain corridor, knocking him down and
trampling him flat. Their bare feet crushed him. He bit back a cry when one
smashed his hand. “Fire!” they all shouted, in a cacophonous mess of voices,
and many fists hammered at the heavy door to the rest of the cloisters. “Fire!
Let us out!”

Stas could smell foul
smoke now, and he struggled to rise with his bruises blooming, yellowing,
fading in the blink of an eye. Boris pulled him to his feet and clung,
magically there. “What do we do?” he whispered, and Stas squeezed his arm.
There
was
a fire, no doubt of that; the stink was of no brazier in
Stas’s experience, and down at the other end of the corridor, flames licked up
one of the black curtains. Smoke blurred the torchlight. All they could do was
wait for someone to come and open the barred door.

“Fire!” the other novices
screamed, over and over. Out of the curtain afire, into that dark smoke, reeled
a figure in flames. One of the older novices, it must be; and he howled in
agony as he ran up the corridor as though fleeing some awful beast, thumping
into walls, brushing curtains and leaving them alight. His life guttered in his
chest, visible to Stas even through the fire eating at his blistering,
blackening skin.

“Kas!” Another of the
older novices ran through the remnants of that first curtain and up the
corridor after his fellow. “
Kasper!
” And if Kasper was in agony, so was
Jan—it was Jan talking, Kasper’s brother-novice. His smock dropped away in
smoldering clumps, and his head was covered in the fine ash that had been his
hair, but no blisters rose on his skin. Blue life-light crowned his brow. Most
people glowed in the chest, and Jan had that, too, but it blazed around his
temples.

Kasper’s legs gave, and
he staggered, falling on his face right in front of Stas and Boris. Boris let a
mind-melting scream into Stas’s ear and tried to wrench him back from Kasper,
back into their cell. Stas resisted, wriggled away, and squatted close by, stretching
out a hand. He thought to touch, to give his life like he’d given to Boris—some
things were more important than keeping his secret—but he couldn’t keep his
fingers on the older boy long enough to wake his power, though when he pulled
them back the blisters disappeared from his fingertips as quickly as he could
look at them. Kasper twitched, burning, still burning.

Jan let out a wordless,
animal sound of grief. Tears tracked through the ash on his face, glinting in
the flames that still rippled over Kasper, and when he lifted his Brother, the
fire touched him, but he wasn’t burned. “I’m sorry!” he wailed. “I’m sorry, I
didn’t mean to, please don’t! Kas, please…”

Stas hugged himself, trembling,
not two feet from the scene. Kasper’s life dimmed, a candle reaching the end of
its wick. While all the other novices stared, shocked into silence, Jan bent
his head over Kasper. Charred skin flaked away from the near-corpse and drifted
to the floor.

The door clunked. “All
right, move aside! Move aside now!” It was one of the novice masters—Brother
Bratislaw, a Militant. “You’ve pissed yourselves! Move, I say!” Monks piled
into the corridor, bearing buckets of water. Stas stayed where he was, hunching
when one of them stepped over him, and he heard what Brother Bratislaw said to
Jan, crouching there among gouts of steam as the monks worked to put out the
fire.

“The Queen of Heaven has
given you a wonderful gift,” he said, though Jan wept on and on, rocking
Kasper, as if his tears could quench the fire. “She’s blessed you above all
these others, so that you may serve your Fatherland. Do you understand?”

Jan didn’t look up, and
Stas saw the pain in all the broken lines of his body, felt it almost as if
Boris had been the one to burn. A dreadful ache sank down through Stas’s bones
and into his heart. His ribs constricted—or maybe that was Boris, suddenly
behind him, hugging hard. “Kas,” Jan choked.

“I know, lad,” said
Brother Bratislaw, unexpectedly gentle. “To lose a Brother is grief beyond
telling.”

“My Kas, I killed him,”
Jan sobbed. “I don’t know how I did it—I burned—I killed my Kas…” He lifted his
face, and Stas trembled again to see, even from the side, that despair. His
eyebrows had burned to smudges of ash, and his face looked paper-white under
the soot.

“Yes,” the Militant
Brother said. “But the Queen of Heaven will not mark it against your soul. Now
you must come. I myself shall take you to a place where there is help, and
hope.”

“No hope. No help.”

No, there wasn’t any.
Kasper’s life guttered once more, and went out of him. Stas bit down on a cry
of his own. He didn’t think Brother Bratislaw had noticed him or Boris, not
until the Militant turned a hard gaze on them and jerked his head toward the
door, where all the other novices had lined up. Stas and Boris scuttled to
obey, and they trooped through the maze of intersecting corridors at the end of
the file.

They ended in another
novice dormitory, already full, and there was a scuffle and shuffle of boys
arranging themselves. Stas was so glad to be expected to share a shelf with
Boris, so glad to curl under the scratchy blanket into his friend’s warmth, so
glad to listen to the quick, tripping heartbeat. He couldn’t help thinking of
Jan, all alone without his Kas, and being a thousand times grateful for his own
Boris. He put his skinny arms around Boris and squeezed, and Boris did the
same.

“Stas, what happened? I
don’t understand.”

“You shut up over there!”
snapped one of the other boys in the cell, who’d been displaced from his shelf
and blanket so Stas and Boris would have somewhere to sleep. Stas pressed his
face deeper into Boris’s warm smock.

“…happened before, you
know,” drifted down the hall from another cell, in a novice’s hoarse, deepening
voice. “Not exactly that, but my first year there was a boy who shot his
Brother with lightning. The monks took him away, and we never saw him anymore.”

“So what happened to
him?” asked another. “You think they purified him?”

“I don’t know,” said the
first boy. “Next day, they told us he was blessed and he’d gone somewhere else.
They might have done. They might do anything, you don’t know what they’ll do
sometimes.”

Boris’s chest shook with
a suppressed moan. His arms tightened around Stas.

When his power had come
he’d helped Boris, but what if it became, somehow, different? What if he hurt
or killed Boris before he could stop himself? What if the Brothers found out
and “blessed” him too? He tightened his grasp on his Boris. His thoughts of
Kasper’s burning body and Jan’s crown of life-light, of the light that stood
out from his own skin and the warm glow in Boris’s heart, and of grasping the
wire, so long ago now, meant sleep took a long time coming.