Floodpath Page 18

  The stock tender has been replaced by a chemist hawking some miracle cure to a small crowd. I sidle around the edge of the stage. There’s a signboard tacked with adverts and notices, flanked by a few little saplings springing from the base of the long-dead tree. I shuffle close to them to screen myself from view and draw a few breaths.

  “Hey!”

  I start at the quick shout.

  A man is at the signboard, tacking up a new piece of parchment. He takes the nails out of his mouth and angrily brandishes his hammer at me. “Get off the roots!”

  “S—sorry?”

  “Get off the damned roots! Where were you raised, under a rock? Have some respect for your environment!”

  I look down, where I’m standing in the space between two small redwood saplings. Their roots crisscross under my feet.

  “Oh—sorry.” I step sideways, rattled. The man shakes his head, hammers a final nail in the board, and then moves off, muttering about soil compaction and careless youths.

  I lean against the signboard, taking a few deep breaths. The bundle in my arms is getting heavier by the second—I need to get back to Soe. Hopefully I can cross through the crowded square without being picked out by that woman with the eye twist.

  Maybe I’m just imagining things. It is market day after all—why should it be unusual to bump into the same person at two different stalls? Maybe she needed a new hat. That’s all. Maybe she didn’t actually hear me chatting about palace life with Iano in my accented Moquoian at the dairy stand. Maybe she didn’t hear me boasting about Silverwood silver to the hatter.

  I swallow.

  We should get going.

  I pick myself off the signboard. At the last second, I remember Lark’s suggestion to check the news, and I skim the notices on the board.

  My gaze is drawn immediately to her bounty sheet, and I suck in my breath. Iano and Soe hadn’t exaggerated. Two hundred crescents, dead or alive, plus an extra fifty for accomplices. Still, the portrait is out of date. Lark doesn’t have her sword and buckler, or her big black hat and eyeblack anymore. Next to hers is Tamsin’s, but it’s partially hidden by a newer sheet, one of many with the same bold text riffling in the breeze.

  My jaw drops.

  Come Out to Witness

  Tolukum’s Newest Ashoki

  Kimela Novarni

  on Her

  Debut Circuit

  Below it is a list of town names and the dates of each performance. Giantess Township is in the middle of the pack, listed for Mokonnsi 31—the last day of August. The day before Iano was originally supposed to be crowned—and Kimela officially instated as ashoki with him. What’s she doing on a debut tour the week before?

  I whip my head around. The man who just tacked up the notices is standing in front of the stage with the crowd, listening to the hawker shouting about his miracle tonic. I rip one of the pages from the board, stuff it in my tunic, and hurry his way.

  “Excuse me,” I say breathlessly. He turns to face me and frowns. “That notice you just put up—about the ashoki. Where did it come from?”

  “From the printer’s, didn’t it?” he says in irritation.

  “No, but I mean—where did the news come from? Tolukum? Who gave the order to put them up?”

  “The palace,” he says. “A messenger brought the woodblock this morning.”

  “Did the order come from the queen?”

  He shrugs. “I ’spect so. The royal seal is right there at the bottom. It’s not up to me to nose about palace orders.” He squints at me. “You’re not from these parts, are you?”

  Too late, I see the woman with the eye twist standing a few paces away, looking up at the stage with a faraway expression, as if not actually focused on the hawker’s presentation.

  I clamp my arms tighter around my bundle, and without another word, turn and rush back across the square, not caring whether I’ve come across as rude. I weave in and out of buyers and sellers, children and carts, until I spy Soe’s stall. She and Iano are just finishing breaking down the table. They both look up as I join them, panting and sweaty.

  “Where have you been?” Soe demands. “We thought you’d been mugged.”

  “We need to go,” I gasp, flinging my bundle into the cart. “There’s someone following me around—that woman who was listening to us in the dairy line, Iano. And that’s not all. Kimela will be coming through Giantess on a debut tour in just a few days. She’s been appointed ashoki without you.”

  Iano’s face pales. “What? When? By whom?”

  “I don’t know. I have the notice here. Let’s get on the road, and I’ll show you.”

  We rush to get the last of the goods packed into the back of the cart. I keep looking over my shoulder, expecting to see the scarred woman materialize from the crowd. But she doesn’t appear. Soe rouses the mules, hitches them back to the cart, and guides them out into the busy causeway. Iano and I hop into the cart, he into the seat and I into the back. I wriggle down between the hamper of groceries and the pile of clothes, trying to keep my head low as Soe drives the team through the crowds. I chew my lip, pondering what the appointment of the ashoki means—for us, for Tamsin, for Moquoia, for the East, for our doomed alliance. Ashoki, after all, is a lifetime appointment.

  After several minutes of lurching, the towering trees start to close in over us again. The clamor of the market fades away, replaced by the squeaking of the cart and the call of birds in the distant branches. I lean my head against the balled-up quilt, staring at the sky peeking through the dark boughs. Between the stuffy glass interior of Tolukum Palace and the blazing, wide-open Ferinno Desert, I’ve forgotten how much I miss being cradled in trees. I breathe through some of the tight apprehension in my chest.

  Iano turns in his seat. “All right. What’s this about Kimela?”

  “Here’s all I know,” I say, handing him the crumpled notice from my tunic. “The fellow who put it up said the woodblock came from the palace this morning.”

  Iano takes it, but he hesitates before turning around to read it.

  “What is that?” he asks, laying eyes on the patch cowhide hat.

  “A risk,” I say. “But I’m beginning to think it was a good one.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I’m not sure yet,” I admit. “But I think I might have a plan.”

  Tamsin

  I’m standing on tiptoes to hang the latest sheet over the rafters to dry when Rat starts barking. Lark lunges from her place at the table, swathed in a drift of wood shavings, and unearths the crossbow from a pile of papers. By the time she has it free of wood shavings and the crank wound, the door has swung open, and Soe stands on the threshold, her arms full of parcels.

  Her gaze sweeps the kitchen. Her lips part.

  “What,” she says, “are you doing?”

  Iano and Veran crowd behind her, their attention flickering between Lark—filmed in sawdust, with the crossbow in one hand and a carving knife in the other, a bloody rag bound hastily around the base of her thumb—and me, standing on my highest tiptoes to reach the rafters, my hands, dress, and probably face smudged with ink.

  I don’t blame them for staring. We’ve turned Soe’s kitchen into a cross between a mad chemist’s lab and some kind of library catastrophe. Ink boils heartily on the hearth, thickening down to the stickiness we need for the stamps. Next to it, resin melts in a pan, filling the room with the scent of burning pine. Paper and parchment litter the table and floor, all stamped with meandering lines of letters, many nonsensical or overlapping. In the center of the table stands a bowl packed with damp sand. Wood shavings coat the floor, and in a walnut basket sit piles of thumb-size wooden blocks.

  This is nothing, though—she’s going to have a fit when she sees the workroom.

  Veran looks around. “Had fun, did you?”

  “Tamsin! Be careful!” Iano leaps forward, stretching out his hand to help me off the chair.

  I don’t take it, though—I reach up and pull down
one of the dry sheets and hold it outward, grinning.

  “Ha!” I exclaim.

  His gaze flicks over it. “‘Rain cannot soak dry ground’—what does that mean?”

  I shake the paper and then look at Lark. I tip my finger toward my chin, and then at Iano, in the motion she showed me this morning.

  Tell him, I sign.

  “We’re printing,” Lark says. “Putting words onto pages.”

  “Stamping labels?” Iano asks, looking around at the wreck of the kitchen, bemused.

  “No—stamping sentences.” She gestures at me. “Tamsin’s sentences.”

  He looks again at the sheet I’m holding out. “Why?”

  I pretend that he’s asked how instead of why. I point to Lark and start to sign all the relevant words we’ve worked on today, fingerspelling the ones I can’t remember—letters, sand, resin, blocks, ink, paper, press . . .

  “What are you doing?” Iano asks, looking at my fingers.

  “I teach Tamsin some hand signs,” Lark says.

  Veran swivels his head to her. “You taught Tamsin sign language? You know sign language?”

  She rubs the back of her neck and answers in Eastern, explaining about her deaf friend. She nods back at me. “I am not remembering all of them, though.”

  “I don’t understand,” Soe says, looking at the nearest scrap of paper, with a crisp line of Es stamped out like a written screech. “How are you printing sentences? I only have two sets of each letter.”

  “Yes, we—we are pushing the stamps into the sand.” She points to the bowl of damp sand on the table. “To make . . . holes. Lu’tuw—itsk,” she says to Veran.

  “Imprints.”

  “Uah, the shapes of the letters in the sand, then we pour in the resin.” She points to the pan full of bubbling sap by the fire. “They get hard and make the letter shapes. Then we put them on blocks, so—new stamps.”

  That was your idea, I sign to her.

  “Uah, that part is my idea,” she agrees hesitantly. “It is how, uh, how the rustlers are forging their brands.” She switches back into Eastern again, explaining what she already described to me—that the rustlers would build a bootleg kiln, melt pig iron inside, get drunk around it all night, and then cast the melted metal into shapes in the sand. It meant they could forge new, unregistered brands on the go without the bother of finding a blacksmith.

  Veran is listening to her with a mixture of surprise and awe on his face. Iano is still watching me worriedly. I finally step down from the chair.

  Soe picks up one of our new resin stamps. “So . . . are you just stamping a few words at a time? Wouldn’t writing be faster?”

  I lift my hands, then hesitate. I still don’t know enough signs to explain, and Lark would have to translate my words anyway. Instead, I beckon them to the workroom. Silently, they follow me from the trashed kitchen into the equally trashed workroom, where the big press sits in the middle of the floor, surrounded by inky leather pads, dishes strewn with stamps, and drifts of crumpled paper. I urge Iano and Soe closer, so they can look into the basin of the big press, where the big wooden block sits, carved with ten rows of grooves, plus a splash of blood from where Lark’s knife slipped while she was carving them. Filling the top two rows are tight lines of letter stamps, facing up.

  Iano starts to speak, but I hold up a finger and pick up a leather pad. I smear it in a blob of tacky ink, then pat it over the letters. Soe and Iano watch as I hunt for a scrap of paper that still has some clear space, then set it carefully over the letters. When it’s in place, I pick up the long wooden arm, fit it into the screw, and haul it down. Lark has been doing this bit for most of the day, but I’m determined to do it now, pulling the clamp tight until my arms tremble with the effort. When I can’t pull it anymore, I reverse it, lifting the screw until I can slide my hand underneath and pull out the paper, stamped perfectly with two lines of crisp, uniform text.

  Iano takes the page, the sentence identical to the one he already saw. Soe looks at it, too, then at her press, the sides now smeared with sticky black ink. Veran and Lark watch from the doorway. I catch Lark’s eye—she leans against the doorframe and gives me a tired but satisfied half smile. She’s been an absolute machine today, hauling and carving and teaching me good Eastern curses and adding every sign she knows to her speech. There’s no doubt in my mind that this beast we’ve created would never have come about without her.

  It’s not perfect yet. We’re still finessing the ink—too wet and it runs off the resin, too sticky and it pulls them off their wooden backs. The resin takes a long time to harden, and many of the letters are misshapen or fuzzy with sand. And the wooden backs aren’t right either—they tend to splinter after a few presses. Metal—something soft like lead—would be ideal. A letter and block cast entirely in metal. With the right equipment, I don’t see why it can’t be done.

  Iano looks up at me, back at the page, then up to me again. He doesn’t seem to know what to say.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” he begins. “This is . . . clever. Very inventive, to make rows of stamps. But . . . I still don’t understand. This is all so much work. If you want to write out a sentence, why wouldn’t you just . . . write it?”

  A spark of indignation flares in my chest. I face him fully and give him a series of three signs that should be obvious even to someone who doesn’t know them.

  My. Wrist. Hurts, I sign, adding what sounds I can make with my mouth.

  “I know,” he says, taking my right hand. “I know your wrist gives you trouble, but . . . surely you can write a few sentences, take a break, and write some more later? And if you want to make several copies, why not commission a woodblock?”

  The spark turns into a flurry at his questions. How am I to dictate a woodblock, Iano? Why should I be content with scratching out just a few sentences at a time, while the rest tumble and wheel inside me? What if my thoughts go beyond one block? What if a different word strikes me halfway through? Don’t you see what movable letters can do? Don’t you see what we’ve done?

  “Oh!” Veran says from the door. “That reminds me—the notice we saw in town.”

  “Right.” Iano digs in his pocket and pulls out a folded sheet. He opens it and hands it to me, worry creasing his face. “Kimela Novarni has been officially instated as the ashoki. I don’t know how, or why—perhaps she threatened my mother, the way she threatened me. It would have been easy after I’d already named her to the court.”

  I jerk my gaze up to him, my brow furrowed.

  “Tamsin said a few days ago she didn’t think Kimela was behind it all,” Soe says. She’s right, but my irritation builds again despite her good intentions—I’m tired of people having my conversations for me. I pull my index finger across my chest.

  “We,” Lark says from the doorway. She’s leaning against the frame and watching me. “Don’t,” she continues as I splice the air with my palms. “Do that.”

  “Just because you wouldn’t do these things as ashoki doesn’t mean others wouldn’t,” Iano says.

  Veran shifts in the doorway. “Either way, if we can confront her, this could be a perfect opportunity to either get a confession out of her, or see if she has any better sense of who’s behind the blackmail.”

  Get a confession?

  “How?” I ask.

  “Well, she’ll be traveling by coach on the circuit there on the page.” Veran’s face takes on a kind of wry excitement. “And it just so happens that we have a professional bandit in our midst.”

  Behind him, Lark furrows her brow. “What?”

  He half-turns to her. “Think about it, Lark—we stop the coach just like you stopped all those others, somewhere outside Giantess. You and Tamsin could get in and confront her, like you did me. Stuck in that little space, facing both the Sunshield Bandit—who she framed—and Tamsin—who she had attacked . . . don’t you see? She’ll have to confess, or give us the information we need.”

  I raise my eyebrows at the optimism—
or, more bluntly, naiveté—of his conviction. Lark looks past him to where Iano is nodding his head. Her gaze slides to me. I frown and give her two quick signs, the opposite of what we’ve been telling each other all day.

  Bad idea.

  Soe catches my movement and watches me complete it. The boys are watching Lark. She stays quiet a moment longer, and then says something to Veran in Eastern, jerking her head for the front door. He hesitates, then hurries after her. We hear the door open and close, followed by the murmur of voices on the porch.

  Iano turns back to me. “I know you don’t think it’s Kimela. Veran isn’t entirely convinced it’s her, either—he’s more suspicious of Kobok. But even if it’s not her, we may still be able to get some answers. And—you may be able to share your ideas about policy. If she’s not guilty, then there’s no other option—she’s Moquoia’s ashoki for the rest of her life.”

  “Tamsin isn’t dead,” Soe points out. “Ashoki is a lifetime position, and she’s still alive.”

  A flash of trepidation crosses Iano’s face, and then he meets my gaze and the expression is replaced with guilt. “I know, but . . .”

  I make a flowery, agitated gesture to my lips to show that my thoughts are the same as his. Dead or not, I’m hardly going to sit onstage and silently strum my dulcimer for perplexed audiences.

  “I’m not saying we can’t work something out,” Iano says quickly. “You’ll always have a place in court, Tamsin, whether you’re onstage or not. Perhaps you can serve alongside Kimela, compose music that she performs. Maybe she can be convinced to adopt our ideas.”

  Kimela Novarni would sooner ally with an Utzibor bat than me, I expect, and even if she did, my professional hubris balks at the thought of writing lyrics for her to sing.

  My thoughts must show on my face, because Iano waves at the workshop, the press, the paper in my hand. “At any rate, we have a few days to strategize. You can use what you’ve started here today . . . write something that might sway her. It could be the best chance we have.”