Sunshield Read online

  I peruse the bottles of various tinctures and cure-alls, mentally calculating what I can afford along with the dry goods I need. I may not be able to spell reliably, and my reading is slow, but years of stretching coppers has made me decent at mathematics. Good enough, anyway, to know there’s no way I can afford Golden Butter Skin Balm for Pickle or Doc Yaxa’s Miracle Tonic for little Whit. I consider filching a bottle of castor oil to replace my bottle of dwindling scalp oil, but I decide against it. I like Patzo, and I have no desire to cheat him. I remove a cheap bottle of coneflower tonic and some blister cream for Rose.

  The stocky lady stomps out, clutching her parcels and a package of parchment. As Patzo rummages under the counter, I cross the store and set down my bottles.

  “Afternoon, Patzo.”

  He drops whatever he’s digging for and straightens as if struck by lightning.

  “Lark,” he says hoarsely.

  “I need ten pounds of cornmeal, and a few measures of beans and some lard. Plus a length of canvas, if you’ve got any—and I wouldn’t say no to filling your woodshed for a bed in the storeroom.”

  His copious black mustache quivers, and he cuts his gaze sideways, falling on a wall scattered with bold adverts for life-changing products and curling political announcements from the capital.

  And my face.

  I blink several times, at first doubting my own eyes. The nose is too slender, but that’s inconsequential among everything else—the thick eyeblack, the wide-brimmed hat, the frayed bandanna, the long locked hair.

  WANTED ALIVE: “LARK,” THE SUNSHIELD BANDIT

  SKIN: BROWN

  EYES: BROWN

  HAIR: DARK BROWN

  NOTABLE FEATURES: TATTOOS ON HAND AND WRISTS

  MULTIPLE PIERCINGS IN BOTH EARS

  WEAPONS: SWORD, BUCKLER, CROSSBOW, HUNTING KNIFE

  PRESUMED LOCATION: INDETERMINATE, BETWEEN SNAKETOWN AND PASUL, EAST OF WATER SCRAPE

  REWARD FOR LIVE CAPTURE: 150 CE SILVERS

  NO REWARD GIVEN UPON DEATH

  “They brought them in a few days ago, a whole passel of ’em,” he says. “Soldiers from Callais, they posted them all over town. Gave the sheriff a big old fright. Said if word came back that you’d been through town without being locked up, she’d answer to the Senate. Then she came and hollered at me, made me swear to hand you over next time you came in . . .”

  Heat flushes through me, driven by my spiking heartbeat. Through the dingy store window, I see the stock boy racing through the rain, angling toward the sheriff’s office. He must have lit out the back door, through the storeroom I’d been hoping to sleep in tonight. I look slowly back to Patzo.

  “Patzo.” I try to keep my voice calm. “Listen, I’ve never once done you a bad turn. I’ve paid you for every speck of corn I’ve ever bought, haven’t I? I keep an eye out for your nephew, don’t I?”

  “I know it, Lark, I do, but I can’t go against the law . . .”

  “Hold on.” I spread my hands on the counter. “Do me a favor—just get me the bag of cornmeal. That’s all—just the cornmeal, and then I’ll leave.” I dig a haphazard handful of coins out of the purse and push them across the counter. “Please.”

  Thunder cracks the air; lightning splits the room into light and shadow. It seems to startle him into a decision. He leaps for the crossbow under the counter and scrambles to pull the lever.

  I toss up my hands. “Patzo!”

  “If the sheriff sees you strolling out of here with goods, it’ll be me in the stocks, not you—you get out of here, and don’t come back round again. I’ll turn you in next time—I mean it!”

  Through the rain pouring off the porch roof, I see the door to the sheriff’s office open. Swearing, I scoop my handful of coins back into the purse—several of them ping off the floor, little lost promises rolling away under the shelves. Despite the point of the quarrel trained in my direction, I swipe the two bottles of medicine, too—turns out I should have gone for the fancy stuff after all. Without waiting any longer, I bolt from the store.

  The rain is falling in sheets now, whipping the sign hanging over the door. Jema is tossing her head, her coat and saddle drenched. I loosen her lead from the post and vault onto her back. A shout rings out—I look over my shoulder to see the sheriff splashing up the road, jamming a quarrel into a crossbow. I wheel Jema around and spur her in the opposite direction. Rat races along at her side. The sheriff shouts again, but it’s lost to the next peal of thunder. A quarrel whizzes past my shoulder. I swear, put my head down, and focus on trying to see through the driving rain.

  We gallop out of town, mud spraying from Jema’s hooves. It coats my back and hair; I pull my bandanna over my mouth to keep it from spattering my lips. We streak back up the rise, the rock arches and sagebrush flats blurred by rain. I give Jema her head, letting her race down the washed-out track, praying to whatever entity that watches over this strip of nowhere that she doesn’t set her footing wrong.

  A bolt of lightning strikes the ground in the distance. I bite down a sense of panic—out in the middle of this wide-open land, I’m the tallest thing there is. I should pull over and take cover down in the ditch—but what if the sheriff comes after me? Will she give chase in this weather? Or will she count on the elements taking care of me before I’m a mile out of town? Tomorrow morning she’ll be able to trot out here and retrieve my body, charred black as a burnt biscuit.

  At the next ground strike, perhaps a mile in front of us, I throw caution to the wind and guide Jema off the main track. She veers into the sage. Rat runs along behind, winding in and out of the brush. His ears are flat against his head, tail slightly tucked. I try to whistle some encouragement to him, but it’s lost to the next crack of thunder.

  The world goes white. The bolt hits so close I can feel it buzz through my body. Jema pulls up short, whinnying. Without waiting to be thrown from the saddle, I swing to the ground and gather up her reins. Dipping my hat against the driving rain, I run, dragging Jema blindly behind me.

  There’s a jut of rock a stone’s throw away. It’s hardly taller than me—crap for cover, but at least we won’t be the tallest targets. I haul Jema into the lee of the rock and turn her head out of the wind. Rat slinks around her hooves, his thick, coarse fur shedding water. I want to collapse against the rock, but I know better—sitting flat against a tower of rock is a sure way to take a bolt of lightning up through the buttocks. Working Jema’s girth strap with slick fingers, I heave the saddle off her back, toss it down on the ground, and crouch on top of it, trying to avoid any contact with the earth. I’ll squash the already beat-up leather, but it’s a far cry better than being struck by lightning.

  Squatting in the driving rain, I bow my head forward into my hands. Water streams from the brim of my hat. My face on the poster swims in my vision again. They found me. After years of vague descriptions and halfhearted bounties, they found my face and my name. A hundred fifty keys! Fire and rock, I could buy a year of room and board for every person in camp with that money. I was in Snaketown last month without any whisper of a bounty . . . I stocked Patzo’s woodshed and passed the night stretched on the milling sacks, stomach full of fried grouse and baked beans and sweet cornbread made without a single grain of sand gritting it up. What changed? What went wrong? How have they finally found me?

  That man.

  The one in the stage, the rich one with the books and the boots. The one whose purse I hoped to trade for supplies we desperately need in camp. The one who heard Saiph—stupid blockheaded leatherbrained Saiph—carelessly drop my real name. That old man took the information back to wherever he came from.

  Callais. The capital. The Senate. He name-dropped the provost of the university. I’d thought he was just searching for something to scare me off. But he certainly had the look of an academic type, and the Senate is never far away from a mention of the university. Dammit. I grip my head in my hands. The man took my name and description back to the Alcoran Senate. Are they fronting the m
oney for my capture out of the government treasury?

  Because it is a capture, not just a bounty. It’s not the ambivalent dead or alive so many other bandits get branded with. They want me brought in breathing. But that’s far from reassuring—I can’t imagine they have anything pleasant waiting for me in Callais. Is this about hunting slavers for them? Is it to serve punishment for robbing that old man and a dozen-odd others? Is it about making a statement? Are they hoping to do something gruesome to my body—hang me from a wall somewhere as a warning to any other bandit foolish enough to threaten a spotty old professor?

  Jema stomps her hooves, sending Rat scooting to my side. He leans against my calf, and I absent-mindedly scratch his ears. Great Light, without Snaketown, our closest bit of civilization is Pasul—almost a day’s ride in the other direction. It’s a Moquoian town on the very edge of the border, where the sagebrush flats start to rise and buckle to create the little range of mountains that traps all the water on the far side. I’ll have to take Saiph with me. He, at least, can pass for Moquoian, and his language is better than mine—mine is out of practice since my days in the sand quarries of Tellman’s Ditch. We’ll have to change currency, too—I’m sure there’s a bank there, but the idea of spending unnecessary time showing my face around town makes me nervous. And that’s assuming this bounty hasn’t traveled that far—I’ve broken open enough Moquoian slave wagons to make them happy to turn me over to Alcoran authorities. If they aren’t looking for me yet, they probably will be soon. I swear and rub my eyes—and then I swear again as I get Rat’s wet fur stuck in my eyeballs.

  Lightning flashes again, followed by thunder a second or two later. The storm is blowing south—they never last long out here, but damn if they don’t throw everything they have at you in the meantime. I look up dejectedly, soaked through and starting to shiver. I wish I hadn’t spent all that time collecting cattail pollen—it’ll be soggy and useless by now. As it is, I won’t be able to get all the way back to camp tonight, especially since I’ll have to pick through the flats away from the main road. Come to think of it, I should probably get on the far side of the caprocks, to hide from view in case the sheriff decides I’m worth chasing before the sun goes down. I didn’t bring any gear with me—no blanket or tinderbox. I’d planned at least on stretching out in the town stables, if not in Patzo’s storeroom. I barely even have any food beyond wet cattail pollen.

  It’s going to be a long, cold, wet night.

  The rain is slackening. I tilt my hat back and look up at the sky, letting the droplets sting my face. Water. Precious water. It’s all or nothing out here—raging thunderstorms, sleet, hail, flash floods . . . or nothing. That, it seems, is the model for Three Lines, too. Feast or famine. All or nothing.

  It’s not nothing, though. Not yet. I lick the raindrops off my lips. Storms pass. Ours will, too. We can ride it out—find cover and dodge the lightning strikes.

  I just have to figure out how.

  Tamsin

  It’s raining. It began a little while ago, and it’s lasted longer than any of the other fizzly showers in the last few weeks. Wafts of cool, moist air have been curling from my window, bringing the scent of wet earth with them. I won’t pretend I can imagine myself back in Moquoia, not even when I close my eyes, but it’s a comfort to hear that steady patter, broken by rumbles of robust thunder. It’s like my heart has been parched along with my skin and sanity, and the sound of rushing water cools me like a river stone in a gully.

  I stand under the window, letting wind-caught droplets spritz my cheeks. The other nice thing is that the rain drowns out Beskin’s muttering. Poia left yesterday morning to resupply, and Beskin is tiresome when she’s alone. She seems to adore reorganizing the kitchen, and the resulting clatter and banging of crockery and pots sets my teeth on edge.

  Now that I’m awake more, I’ve been spending the past few days puzzling over who Beskin and Poia are working for. I can’t see either one of them as the mastermind behind my capture. Disregarding their questionable grasps on strategy, they can’t just be mailing their blackmail letters straight to Tolukum—the couriers would be able to track them right back here. They must have a middleman, and the attack on my coach needed several other accomplices. There must be someone in Tolukum, perhaps someone right in court, who is quietly pulling all the strings. For hours and hours I’ve pored over all the people I knew, as well as the ones I didn’t, who might like to see me locked mutely in a storeroom in the wilderness.

  The growing length of the list is . . . dispiriting.

  My head still hurts from the attack, and nursing so many unanswered questions is making me agitated. Beskin’s compulsive nattering doesn’t help. Truly, I can see why Poia spends an hour getting to and from the well every day. I wonder if she’ll take her time coming back from town, too, or if her need to keep me secure will outweigh her hatred of her coconspirator.

  I also wonder if there’s any higher chance of them lending me writing material once they have parchment again. It’s not as if I can send letters to anyone, so I don’t see why they should care, unless keeping me idle is just another form of torment. Pointless torment—I’m hardly a threat now. But I never appreciated just how much I process the world by writing it down. I know why I’m that way, of course. My parents were scribes.

  It’s a little outside the norm for an ashoki. Most of us are born into political spheres, surrounded by diplomats, advisers, and courtiers—building up our nuanced understanding of the court and how to shake it without toppling it completely. Some other ashoki come straight from an entertainment background, having popped out of the womb clutching a harp or finger drum. Such tellers are quick-witted enough to pick up the culture of the court by observation.

  I come from neither of these backgrounds. My parents shared a large, airy office with the other scribes in Tolukum’s main library, copying pages of text to send to the book binders. I started coming with them while I was still in the nursing sling on Mami’s chest. They were fast writers—Papi could turn out a hundred pages a day. I loved Mami’s handwriting best, though—broad and even, every curve perfectly proportioned. In my young opinion, the rich scholars who received books written in her hand were the luckiest of all the scribes’ clients.

  It was no surprise to anyone when I learned my letters very early on and took to thumbing through books in my parents’ queues to pass the time while they worked. Sometimes I helped the other scribes in small ways—fetching parchment or ink or quills, turning up the lanterns on the days it got dark early, or rushing bundles of finished pages to the binders’ offices downstairs.

  But the lifestyle of a scribe, while earning a comfortable wage, takes its toll on the body. A full third of the workers in the office walked with a cane, even some of the young ones—a product of spending days hunched over the angled drafting tables. Many were forced to retire when their eyesight weakened, or when it became agony to hold a quill in their ruined fingers.

  It was Papi who started to show signs of wear first, and it was his eyesight that went. I remember him squinting at pages, his nose barely an inch away, to be sure he got the transcription correct. I festooned his desk with lanterns to keep the lighting bright, and I made sure his ink was always good and dark. But nothing I did seemed to make a difference. Until one day.

  “Tamsin, come here.”

  I put down the quills I was trimming and trotted over.

  “This sentence—I can’t make heads or tails of it.”

  To be fair, the previous scribe’s handwriting was uneven and lightly drawn. “It says, Allow the host or hostess to sample first, unless they direct otherwise.”

  Papi grunted and began to copy it down, his eyes screwed up. “Thank you. This text is impossible.”

  I noticed he’d made very little progress for the morning—he hadn’t even completed the first chapter yet. I scooted onto the stool next to his desk. “Want me to read the next line?”

  “Do you have something else you’re supposed
to be doing?”

  “Not really.”

  He sighed and rubbed his eyes. “Sure. Read me a few paragraphs. Give my eyes a break.”

  I read a few paragraphs. And then a few more. I read to the end of the chapter. It was an etiquette manual for hosting a formal dinner party, and in that short time, I learned two brand-new words, desultory and ideological. Papi’s pace picked up, his quill moving with more assurance now that his gaze didn’t have to jump back and forth. When I finished the chapter, he asked if I wanted to stop.

  I didn’t. I’d just learned how one should gracefully handle a clash of opposing political views. This was getting interesting.

  We continued. For the rest of the day, I read the text aloud to him, stopping only to get a giant glass of chilled tea. I sipped it between sentences, allowing his quill to catch up.

  So began my role as an orator, narrating the texts so Papi could copy them down. When we finished the etiquette manual, we moved on to a book of stormwater management, and then a history of glassmaking, and then a guide to falconry.

  I learned about stage theatrics from a drama technicians’ guide. I learned the fundamentals of the dulcimer after dictating an entire manual on their manufacture and technique. I picked up the beginnings of Eastern after painstakingly reading a translation guide, spelling out each foreign word, their consonants clipped and impatient and practically spit from the tongue. I learned the cadence of songwriting and poetry recitation from a six-volume set of classic ballads and epics.

  One of the last things I helped Papi with, before he retired to nurture what was left of his eyesight, was ten copies of the intricate court fashions for the upcoming social year. I read it aloud from cover to cover ten times, but rather than getting bored, I found it fascinating. Not necessarily the frittering over embroidery and lace, but the way it was all saturated with politics. The precise cut of silk for the Bakkonso Ball could convey the wearer’s status, intentions, and political leanings. Matching patterns with others in court could instigate alliances; hair accessories made by a certain jeweler could signify not just that you had wealth, but how you came by it, what you used it for, and how you were willing to invest it. And the colors—every minute tint and shade had a different ramification depending on the event.