The sound of nearby grunts lifted Tif’s head, and she found that there were a handful of servants working together to get the metal keshe piece off of her right arm. They heaved it up and then managed to waddle it a few feet to the side, before setting it back down.
Free, Tif sat up, wiping at her tears with her Pep hand while trying to move her right. Her elbow worked well enough but her forearm didn’t look near as straight as she thought it should and throbbed something fierce. As Tif watched, the red ris on that arm brightened, followed by a growing heat that overpowered the pain she was feeling. Without her doing anything, her arm snapped an inch to the side, surprising her and Pep. After that, the tattoos dimmed and so did the heat, leaving her arm feeling and looking perfectly normal.
Her ris truly was amazing. Too bad it hadn't helped her more in the challenges.
“Candidate, are you alright?”
Following the voice, Tif discovered that the servant asking was the same kindly man who had helped her the day before.
“Yes, thank you,” she said, pushing herself up with her previously broken arm to show him she could. “Thank you, all.” The other servants were crowded around, but quickly bowed--a response Tif knew wasn’t for her.
She turned to see that the Archon’s brother, Hur-Rek-Sar, had entered the garden path, along with most of the other division leaders. He walked slowly, without hurry, and now that she was looking at him, his telltale ringing footsteps easily reached her ears. Tif thought he might be coming to see her specifically, but he stopped a few feet from the board and instead turned left and right to the many spectators who had migrated to either side.
“It seems that history was indeed made.” The inner division leader didn’t convey excitement with the remark, or much of anything else, but his voice was smooth and deep thanks to his Gold ris. Hearing his words, Tif remembered the administrator’s comments earlier about the Archon’s usual lack of participation. Another first she had managed despite losing. Perhaps people would remember, which might make getting into her next recruitment easier. “Southern Patrol Division,” he said, looking from Udaru, the aquaros, to Tif. “The task of collecting on her ris falls to you.”
A lump thudded into Tif’s gut. So they did have a plan for getting her Blood ris. It seemed her luck truly had run dry.
The aquaros, who was standing a bit back on the path, opened its long-toothed mouth. “But the Blood Plains are not my territory. This should go to--”
“You leave for Sah’Sah this day to conduct a tears run, do you not?” the Archon’s brother interrupted.
Tif cough-laughed but no one noticed. Their plan was to take her all the way to the Blood Plains? She’d love to go, to Sah’Sah, too, but there was no way she was leaving her parents in the sewers that long. Thank goodness she could just transfer the ris to them directly, and hopefully be off within the hour.
“We are.” A frill Tif hadn’t noticed before fluttered around Udaru’s scaled head. Did that mean frustration? If so, the aquaros should be really happy with her news.
“Then your division is most expedient. The matter is settled.”
Udaru’s snout dipped toward the ground, and the kindly servant made as if to lead Tif somewhere. However, another servant stopped him, this one younger with a scraggly black beard. The kindly servant hesitated, so Tif went ahead and followed the second, who took off rather quickly. They went past the huge das board to a space behind the division leader’s stand and rock garden, containing seven mid-sized pavilions. They looked similar to the ones used by the founding nobility for sleeping overnight, except that each of these had a symbol stitched above the entrance. Tif heard Hur-Rek-Sar’s voice carry about how the division leaders would now excuse themselves to decide which candidates to give offers to, likely to these very tents she guessed.
All of the pavilions had a triangle as part of their symbol, which Tif knew represented the mountain of Lercel, but the servant who was escorting her veered left, toward one with a star in the lower middle. Middle meant south, and the fact that the star was outside the triangle instead of within meant patrol. Exactly the sort of symbol Tif had always dreamed of wearing when she became a knight.
Inside the tent, there was a chair tucked behind a desk that contained a few sheets of parchment, a stylized ink pot, and a quill. The servant pointed to a second chair beside the desk and so Tif sat in it, expecting him to leave but instead he stepped closer until he was looming over her.
“Careful, fr--” she started to warn. If he accidently touched her exposed skin, he’d be knocked clean out.
“Breathe a word of the crest to the knights and your family dies.”
Tif choked on what she had been about to say next. “What?”
The man looked down at her over the spray of his beard. “Vak-Lav will have back what you stole.”
Her throat constricted further. Vak-Lav had her parents? For how long? Were they safe? Being tortured?
“Why didn’t you stop me earlier?” she hiss whispered at him. If she had spent time doing the challenges or sleeping or crying or anything else while her parents were being made to suffer…well, she’d be knocking out a lot of people in the underground on purpose, that’s what she’d be doing.
“If you had passed, you would have had different uses,” he answered.
Tif anger burned brighter in righteous indignation that they thought she would have spied on the knights for them, but worry for her parents won out.
“What am I supposed to do? Run away?” She wasn’t sure if she’d be able to get past the division leaders, and even if by the grace of Gold she managed it, the dishonor it would bring would mean that she’d probably never be able to join the knights.
And if she was never a knight, she’d never become the Archon.
“No,” he said, and Tif let out a shudder of relief. Relief which she immediately felt bad about because her parents were no closer to being free. Clicking steps sounded outside the tent, and the servant’s face pinched. “Another will tell you more.” He moved to the opposite side of the desk, just managing to get there before the flap opened, the aquaros entering the tent.
The patrol leader stared at Tif a moment with his ridge-covered eyes. After what she had just heard, she had no idea what Udaru would think of her surely dazed expression. “We will speak soon,” the aquaros said in that odd way, opening its mouth slightly and letting the words croak out.
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
She nodded her head, not knowing what else to do as the aquaros walked around the fake servant and sat at the desk. Tif could tell Udaru that the man worked for the underground, but then what? If Vak-Lav didn’t get what they wanted, she didn’t doubt they’d hurt, maybe even kill, her parents.
Tif glanced at the servant spy, hoping for some sort of direction, and saw he was...sweating? He shook ever so slightly, arms held unnaturally tight at his side. The way he was acting, it was just as likely that Udaru would realize the truth, which would put her parents in danger the same as if Tif ratted him out.
She opened her mouth, needing to say something but without any idea what it should be.
“Um, so, what are you writing?”
Udaru’s quill didn’t slow. “The obvious thing.”
Tif slapped her Pep hand into her forehead. Of course, acceptance letters to candidates who had passed the third challenge. But figuring that out didn’t keep the conversation going.
“Can I, uh, guess who you’re making offers to?”
The aquaros’s frill twitched. “If you must.”
There was almost no difference in the division leader’s tone, but the frill was starting to tell her everything Tif needed. If the division leader was agitated with her, all the better instead of looking at--Tif’s eyes bulged. The spy had put a hand on Udaru’s desk, apparently in an attempt to keep his still swaying body steady. Was he trying to be found out?
“Jer,” she said because it was the first name that came to her mind. “And Sur-Rak.” Both had passed and passed easily. “Tad-Soo.” He had also gotten a quick acceptance from the division leaders. Tif saw that Udaru had already written two letters and was working on a third, so that could be everyone, but she didn’t dare stay silent. “Rof.” With a long range technique like his, he should really be on the wall, but the aquaros might try to recruit him anyway. And Vytel? Mek-Car-Ris had seemed to like her, and the keshe was a patrol leader, too, so maybe Udaru would feel the same. “Vytel. So…all of them,” Tif finished, lamely. Not that it mattered. She didn’t need to be right, just distracting.
Tif waited for an answer but Udaru never gave one. The division leader did write five letters though and handed them off to the servant spy, who dashed out of the tent without looking back at Tif. He’d apparently meant it when he had said that the rest of her directions would come from someone else. She just hoped he didn’t give himself away while in a camp full of--
Udaru appeared before her chair, and she jumped; he hadn’t walked to get there but instead somehow stepped through the air, like he had against Opa.
“Will your oath bind you,” the aquaros asked, now entirely focused on her.
Tif could feel the power rolling off of the arcknight, and for a moment she let herself believe that Udaru could leap to her parents and rescue them with the same speed. The truth bubbled up her throat but fear kept it bottled in. Even if the aquaros could jump through the air, Udaru probably needed to know where to go, and she didn’t have a clue where Vak-Lav would hold her parents--almost certainly not in the one place she knew. Time she and the knights spent trying to find them, if they even agreed to help, would give Vak-Lav ample opportunity to dispose of her parents.
“My oath is enough,” Tif said. She didn’t like lying as a rule, but if ever there was a time for it, it was now.
“Your hesitation speaks loudly,” Udaru’s narrow face cocked to the side, putting her in mind of when a bird angles its heads to have one eye on its prey. “Do not think I will let you run. Stunting the growth of one so young is regrettable, but you seemed to know little of the power you possess, like you were fresh from the egg. You were arrogant, hotheaded, thinking your scales turned thick but in truth only passed your second molt.”
A lot of the words sailed right over her head, but Tif could agree with the arrogant bit, so she nodded vigorously. Not only had she been wrong to believe that her parents could hide easily in the sewers, but she had been stupid to underestimate Vak-Lav, who Awt had told her to be afraid of.
The conversation lapsed as the aquaros pulled a flat glass bottle from a wide pouch at its hip. The clear container was corked on top, keeping the brown liquid it contained trapped within. With a deft move of its clawed hand, Udaru removed the stopper with a soft pop, and--despite the danger to her family--Tif found herself wondering how the aquaros with its long jaw would manage the drink. The division leader surprised her by bringing the bottle to the side of its mouth, tilting its head with the pour and then quickly back, shooting the contents down its gullet. It did this a second time and then noticed her watching.
“Few keshe enjoy ursk, and no humans I know.”
Tif wasn’t so sure. From experience, she knew that when you were hungry almost anything could taste good. Right now though worry filled her gut so she didn’t bother asking for a swig of the lumpy, mud-like drink.
A burst of applause came from outside of the tent, and Udaru’s frill fluttered again.
“Is it--” Tif started.
“Someone who didn’t accept my letter,” the aquaros finished. Like everything the division leader said, it was a croak without variation, but the sound still seemed disappointed to Tif.
They stayed like that for longer than Tif would have liked: Udaru drinking every so often, clapping and cheers heard outside, sometimes close, sometimes far, and the entire time Tif worried that every moment she wasn’t helping her parents they were in trouble and that it was her fault. If she had known this would have happened, she would have gone with Awt, and done so happily to keep her parents from harm. She had wanted to become a knight to protect them, to give them a better life, and instead just the opposite was happening. Tif was staring at the rocky floor, berating herself, when she discovered that she was chewing on her nails. Judging from the state of her fingers, it was the third she had gone through. At least it wasn’t on her Pep hand; Pep never liked that.
Udaru let out a chuffing sound, and Tif looked up. There were still only the two of them in the pavilion.
“No one else is coming?”
“So it seems.” The division leader restoppered the bottle and tucked it back into the wide hip pouch, which it fit snugly inside.
“What happens now?”
The flap pulled back, and Tif felt a sudden certainty that the person she was about to see would be from the underground. However, like so much else recently, she was wrong.
“Rof,” Udaru said, fork tongue flicking out. “How unexpected.”
The keshe boy frowned, which accentuated the bruised color under his eyes that made him look sleepy to Tif. He held out a letter with the symbol of the south patrol at its top.
“You sent me an invitation.”
“I did,” the aquaros agreed, “but your style was clearly bred for a wall position. At least one must have offered.” Tif felt a ghost of pride for having been correct about that. If only the same could have been true for her parents’ safety.
Rof shrugged. “I want to be in patrol,” he said, without confirming or denying if he had gotten in anywhere else.
“Tight with your words,” Udaru said. “You will provide a balance to our prisoner.”
“Prisoner,” Tif said. “I’m not--”
“Do you wish to hear your first task as a tyro?” The aquaros was speaking to Rof, not her.
Tif felt a hitch in her chest. A tyro was a knight’s apprentice. That’s what she was supposed to be. Apparently Rof agreed because Udaru continued.
“It is to bring this prisoner safely to the Blood Plains so that her ris can be sold. She will be your sole responsibility, and if you fail in it, I will transfer you to a wall division when we return.”
Tif flinched inwardly. If the underground had plans for her and her ris, Rof would definitely fail. She glanced at the keshe boy, and saw determination in his eyes. For what she couldn’t say, but what if being in a patrol division was his dream? That made him just another person whose recruitment she was ruining. Tif hadn’t felt guilty when the other keshe boy, Rex, had complained about her being a Blooder reject, but in this moment she felt as if she was precisely that.
“There are some details I must see to now that our trip will be twice as long,” Udaru said. “Take her to the recruitment field and wait for me there.”
The aquaros stalked from the tent on clawed feet, leaving her and Rof staring at each other. She was the first to break the gaze.
“I won’t give you any trouble,” Tif said. She was sure that the underground would take care of that.