Floodpath Read online

  And this means being as quiet as I can—no dulcimer or humming or too much moving about. An approaching horse’s hooves would be muffled on the thick redwood carpet, and a single traveler barely noticeable. Even the mule and cart that Soe drove away, with Iano at her side (looking back worriedly every six seconds), was lost to the deep swallowing silence of the forest. But it’s for the best—this way Iano can watch the road into Giantess while Soe collects the salal berries and walnuts she needs for her next round of pressing. Her last market run was two weeks ago, and we’ve unfortunately caught her when her supplies are low.

  She lives simply here, with only three sets of clothes, and I’m wearing one of them, a work dress that would have fit me snugly several weeks ago but now hangs off me like a sack. Iano had to change back into his traveling gear—between that, his new stubbly beard, and his hair braided and tucked under a cap, I hope he’ll go unrecognized as the face on the copper coins should someone pass by. I reach for another well-buttered nut biscuit, determined to reclaim some of my curves, and study the parchment balanced on my knees.

  I’ve started notes from our conversation last night. Kimela’s connection to the plantations on Ketori, her attention to symbolism and ceremony. Queen Isme’s desire to see some order restored to the rollicking court, and her seal on the bounty sheets.

  I’ve added Minister Kobok, but his name spurred half a dozen others who are equally outspoken about preserving Moquoia’s slave-based industry. The only things that make Kobok stand out more are his management of the quarries at the edge of the Ferinno, and his determination to keep the country’s industry safe from banditry—hardly insignificant motivations.

  The whos and hows are exhausting, so I’ve moved on to a growing to-do list, the beginnings of something that could be considered a plan.

  It feels good to write after so long. I organize things best this way—left in my head, my ideas jumble and hide, but on paper I can lay them out straight, connect them, label them, list them. Two pages now are filled with straggled text studded with arrows, circles, and underlines.

  I take it back. It feels good to see my ideas on paper. It does not feel good to write. I rotate my wrist, trying to ignore the hot pain spiking in my joints. Nine hours a day for three solid months spent at a drafting table, recording the vital statistics of slaves passing through the illegal distribution ring—I carry that work as a penance in my right wrist, reminding me that I got off easy. I shake my arm, trying to will away the stiff curl that my fingers want to take. Mami had scribe’s arthritis, too, her fingers so gnarled by the end of her life that they barely flexed at all. But there’s more I want to write, there’s more that needs doing. I swish another sip of Soe’s astringent vinegar tonic around in my mouth—she says it will help my tongue heal—butter another biscuit, and take up the quill again, missing the ink pot on the first dip thanks to the stiffness in my fingers.

  I’ve covered nearly every point of interest I can think of regarding our enemy in Tolukum Palace, so I move on to the next urgent matter weighing on my mind.

  Veran and Lark:

  Whereabouts???

  Investigate South Burr for signs of activity

  Check Pasul for return west—posthouse, prison, inns

  Check Snaketown for journey east

  Send letter to Callais; inquire after Eastern Ambassadors & Lark’s camp

  If no news???

  My quill pauses on the page, the whirl of my brain momentarily blotting out the throbbing in my wrist. If no trace can be found of the Silverwood prince and the Lumeni princess, what then?

  Draft letters to Silverwood monarchy and Lumeni queen/Cypri ambassador

  Organize search & recovery of bodies

  I swallow.

  Prepare for collapse in diplomatic rela—

  “Ah!” I drop both the quill and the nut biscuit, which lands butter-side down on the top half of my page. I suck in a breath and cradle my wrist to my chest. My fingers are curling in on themselves, my tendons tightening uncontrollably. I sniffle around the pain, carefully set the spoiled parchment at my feet, and lay my wrist on my lap. With my left hand, I uncurl my fingers one by one, biting my lip. Fire races up my arm, into my shoulder, all the way to my back. An hour spent writing, and already my body rebels.

  “Kuas,” I say, the curse deadened by my inability to pronounce the s at the end. Clutching my right arm to my stomach, I stoop and lift the biscuit off the parchment. It’s a dual tragedy—butter smears the neat lists on the top half of the page, and the biscuit itself is splotched with black ink. I almost throw the biscuit in anger, but I don’t want to hit any of Soe’s empty glass bottles or buckets of walnut meal. I consider balling up my parchment in frustration, but it feels like such a waste of effort, and anyway, I’d need two hands to do it satisfactorily. I want to shout, but I think again of the faceless enemy prowling around outside Soe’s windows, waiting for a sign to burst in and end me.

  I slump forward on the bench, winding my good arm over my head.

  No speech.

  No song.

  No writing.

  An image comes to me of a life lived in fragments, single words and short phrases scratched out on a slate. Gestures and points. Yes-or-no questions. Plucking a tune on a dulcimer and singing the lyrics only in my head. I may have learned to live with limited speech if I still had the ability to pour out the contents of my head onto paper. But this—robbed now of the written word . . .

  My last weapon is gone.

  I’m still in prison.

  Lark

  As twilight falls on the hillside above Tellman’s Ditch, Veran collapses again.

  He was sitting down this time, at least, and merely slumps to one side, spilling his lapful of chicory roots we had gathered. I’d been shushing Rat—he was whining—and so I don’t have time to break his fall. I lunge forward and roll his head out of the grass, padding his cheek with my palms as he shakes.

  “Rat!” I call. He’s nestled down a little way from us, which is odd given that we’re bivouacked under a hanging rock, and the ground here is damp and cool. He pokes his head out of the hot grass, batlike ears tilted backward.

  “Come here, Rat! Come!”

  Tentatively he gets up and lopes to me, skirting around Veran’s seizing body with his nose down. I grab his ruff and drag him down behind Veran’s back to keep him propped on his side.

  At the last minute I think about yanking his trousers off to keep him from wetting them—he doesn’t have a spare pair like last time—but I don’t have the chance before his shaking slows. His body relaxes, and he retches, spraying spit into the dirt before he goes still.

  I let my breath out through my teeth and brush his hair off his forehead. He didn’t seem to hit anything when he went down—there are no fresh scrapes or blood, only the old bruise from his last seizure, now barely more than a greenish splotch near his hairline.

  It could have been worse.

  Still, he takes longer to come around this time. I wipe his mouth with his bandanna and dabble the other one in the seep we took turns digging through the afternoon—being closer to the river meant we didn’t have to dig quite as deep, and we’ve spent the past few hours sipping the murky water in the basin. I make several passes between the seep and his mouth before he finally coughs, groans, and rubs his eyes. He pitches haphazardly off his side, and I grab his shoulder to roll him back. He cranes his head to look up at me.

  “Hi,” I say. “Welcome back.”

  “Ugh.” He blinks several times. “Whuh . . .”

  “It’s me—Lark. We’re in the water scrape above Tellman’s Ditch. We have no gear, we’re both filthy, our only water is in a mud seep, and the only things to eat are chicory roots and raw grasshoppers.”

  His eyes drift closed. “Oh, right,” he says weakly. “Damn.”

  “Are you okay? I tried to keep you in place, but you hit the ground before I could stop you.”

  His fingertips creep experimentally over his
cheek. “Yeah . . . I think so. Blazes.” He scrubs his face. “What a pair we make.”

  “At least you didn’t bring yours on out of stubbornness and spite. Want to sit up?”

  He grips my arm and struggles upright. Rat sits up at the disturbance, and Veran scratches him behind his ears.

  “Thanks, Rat.” He glances over himself, letting out a relieved breath at his dry trousers. He wipes the back of his hand over his mouth.

  “Three seizures in less than two weeks,” he murmurs. “That’s closer than they’ve come since I was fifteen.”

  “You’re treating your body pretty rough,” I say, wetting the handkerchief again and handing it to him. “No sleep, no food, no water, miles of walking. I don’t blame our bodies for pitching a fit.” As soon as the words leave my mouth, I regret them. “Sorry—I shouldn’t joke.”

  “No, joking’s okay. It makes it less terrible. And you’re right. I’m pushing myself too hard.” He squeezes the handkerchief into his mouth, swallows the pitiful dribble, and leans his head over his knees. “I just worry because we’re not done yet. We still have to get out of the water scrape and into Moquoia. And once we’re there—who knows what we’ll find. If Soe’s isn’t safe, or if Tamsin and Iano aren’t there, we’re going to have to think of something else.”

  “First we have to get in and out of the compound,” I say. “What’s the thing your ma says?”

  “One crisis at a time,” he says.

  “Yeah, I’m starting to see the wisdom in that.” I gesture at the compound below us. “If we can’t make off with something useful, it might not matter if we can’t find Tamsin or Iano.”

  He gazes at the compound, his arms around his knees. The first yellow lights are starting to twinkle in the rows of barracks.

  “I know what it means for you to go back in there,” he says quietly.

  “It’s just headquarters. I wasn’t there that much. It would be worse if it was—” I wave vaguely downstream, toward the quarry and the tents.

  He looks in that direction, the giant raw gash along the river lost to the dim light. No lanterns in the tent city—only a straggle of lights circling the perimeter of the camp.

  “How long were you there?” he asks.

  “It’s hard to remember. There was no sense in keeping track of time.”

  “Well, you’re nineteen now. You escaped from the rustlers’ camp—three years ago?”

  “Four.”

  “Four years. And you were there for how long?”

  “Three years, I think.” I remember three drunken festivals to celebrate the Alcoran holiday Starfall, mostly because it meant Rose and I could sleep in the next morning.

  “That puts you at—twelve years old, when you escaped from the slave wagon. And you had just turned five when you were—when you disappeared in Matariki. Which makes it . . .” His gaze settles on the near-invisible river. “Seven years.”

  A breeze, carrying the night’s chill, slinks through the grass. My stomach is tight, but not turning like I might expect. Yesterday, hearing him methodically piece together my life—with spare parts borrowed from that other life that still doesn’t feel like it belongs to me—would have sent me into a panic. But now it only feels surreal.

  “I don’t think I was here the whole time,” I say.

  “No?”

  “They don’t typically toss little kids into the quarry. They’re not strong enough to dig sand. I started out cleaning glass in a factory.” I can still smell the reek of the cedar-oil solution they had us use to wipe down the panes.

  “Vittenta, probably.”

  “Probably. Then they shuffled me over here after a few years to run empty carts. I was only in the quarry for a year or so.”

  He rubs his bleary face. “And you’re sure we can’t just set the compound on fire while we’re down there?”

  “No,” I say. “One of the workers will get blamed for it.”

  He heaves a sigh. “What about setting all the mules loose?”

  “Why don’t you rest for a little bit?” I say drily. “We’re both going to need strength just to pinch a couple of canteens.”

  He grumbles but settles back down on the dirt, lacing his fingers over his chest. He takes a few deep breaths.

  “It just makes me want to destroy something,” he says.

  The corner of my mouth lifts, and I scratch Rat’s ears. “I’m telling you, you make a bad outlaw. You have to choose your destruction more strategically.”

  He heaves another sigh. “Oh believe me, I’m making a damn list. First up—the entirety of this mysterious Port Iskon. I’m burning that place down.”

  A swoop of some strange emotion pitches through me. It would be easy to needle him, to chide him for being a clueless, privileged prince, but I’m caught off-guard by how comforting his indignation is. How much it sounds like he actually cares about . . . well, me, potentially. I remind myself that caring is just a step away from pity, and I don’t want his pity. I remind myself that I can’t rely on him, or anyone—whether by choice or chance, people don’t always mean what they say. People don’t always stick around. Especially not gently bred princes with hero complexes.

  Still, it’s hard to ignore that little seed of gratitude. That he might care.

  I shake myself, and he slits open one green eye. “You okay?” he asks.

  “Yeah, just—uh, cold.” I flush at the stupid comment—sweat still prickles the back of my neck.

  He closes his eye again. “I’d offer you a coat, but I haven’t got one.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “Anytime. I live to please.”

  “As long as you don’t die for it, too.”

  “Nah,” he says. “That part’s out of my control.”

  My smile from earlier twists anxiously.

  Joking might make things less terrible, but I wish it didn’t hit so close to reality.

  Veran

  We creep along the perimeter fence of the headquarters compound. It’s a cursory construction, the pickets only just clearing our heads. Lark already described the double wall, twelve feet high, thick with guards, that surrounds the tent city. This fence exists more for the look of security.

  Rat pads along with us. We couldn’t be sure where we would leave the compound, so we couldn’t leave him behind. But Lark pointed out that he also might serve as a decoy—if someone hears a stray noise, all they might see is a curious coyote nosing around camp. I just hope it won’t end in crossbow fire.

  We reach one of several wide openings in the fence for carts and clamber easily over the gate. A few dozen yards away sits a large log-hewn building, its glazed windows spilling light. All the other buildings in the compound are dark and hushed, and we’re well hidden by the shadows. Lark leads us to the right, toward a long, low structure sitting against the far end of the compound. The stables. I follow, trying to control the jellied feeling in my legs.

  Our hasty plan, based on Lark’s memory of the compound and our observations throughout the afternoon, is to scavenge a few small necessities from the mule drivers’ storage shed and then make off quietly with two mounts, exiting through the corrals. Unfortunately, this spits us out downstream of the compound, between the barracks and the tent city, but it’s better than trying to sneak two mules past the guard quarters and out the main entrance upstream. We just have to hope any guards patrolling the quarry will be focused inward, not out on the corrals.

  “Sst,” Lark hisses, touching my arm. I stop and follow her gaze. A few paces away, faintly outlined in the light from the main building, is a watering trough.

  We crouch and scramble quietly toward it. There’s a skim of grass and dirt over the top, and it gives off a horsey smell, but neither of us pause. We dip our heads toward the water and drink in short, deep bursts, trying not to gasp too loudly between each draw. Rat laps at the puddles around our knees.

  When I’ve had as much as my stomach can hold, I lean my weary forehead against the cool metal. I
’d be happy to just sit here for the next hour, drinking deeply whenever the urge rises, but Lark sits back on her heels and wipes her mouth. She looks out toward the stables.

  “Blazes,” she whispers. “What’s that?”

  I look up. Just where the circle of light from the main building melts into the night, a dark, hulking shape sits, stationary, outside the wide stable door. On its far side, illuminated by two lamps burning in the driver’s box, are the shifting backs and flicking ears of a two-horse team. The sound of idle teeth mouthing their bits reaches us.

  “A coach,” I whisper. “Two in hand.”

  “There’s a guard,” she says.

  I see him now, standing a few paces from the door of the coach, still but alert. He’s facing the main building.

  “Whose coach is it?” I ask.

  “What does it matter?” she replies. “We have bigger concerns.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like the fact that they’re in our way.”

  We crouch silently, peering over the water trough.

  “I suppose we could try to go around the back side,” she murmurs. “Circle the compound and come at the stables from the other end.”

  “Will we be able to grab the mules without the guard hearing?”

  “I don’t know,” she says. “But the other option is to wait and hope they go away.”

  We consider for a moment. I’m just about to suggest we retreat farther into the shadows, when a bright rectangle of light blazes from the main building—a door has swung open, and a shadowed figure appears on the threshold. We duck instinctively behind the trough, but as soon as we do, the door slams shut, dousing the light. Hurried footsteps crunch toward the stables. A few murmured words are exchanged. When we peek over the trough, a second guard is conversing with the first.

  “Different uniforms,” I mutter.

  “The new one’s a quarry guard,” Lark says. “I don’t know about the other one.”