11 – 5
I close my mouth into a thin, grind-tooth line. Blink hard to banish any tears before they take a chance to fall. My nose flares as I breathe in, harsh and deep, against the heated rise of frustration from my heart. See things differently, do they? How kind of them, waiting until now to tell me! My lips part enough to curl. “You do?” I ask, looking between them.
It's Juliana who answers, “Yes,” she says, Clarke's agreement echoing in a wordless hum. It follows reason for Juliana to see me as a helpless child, with her a woman grown. I had thought she saw me differently: as an equal, or near to one. It would seem I was wrong.
What do I do now? Insist I'm not a child, not helpless, and demand I not be treated like it? Has that ever worked? I push the frustration out through my breath and go to the window. Lean my brow against the cool glass and close my eyes. I see Leda in her cage, clothed in tattered rags, bruised and bleeding. There is helplessness, should they wish to see it, to cozen and coddle it. Not here. Not in me. Timbers shift behind me, creaking under the weight of heavy boots.
Juliana.
She's beside me, behind me, leaning her muscled arm on the window's frame. She smells of leather and polish, of sweat and steel. For a moment, she simply stands there. Says nothing. When she does speak, her rich voice is quiet and soft in my ear. “I know you don't like it,” she says, “I wouldn't, either.”
I pull away from the glass to look up at her. She understands, this knight. It's there, in her narrowed eyes. Fear, too, more than I've ever seen in her. Not for herself, I should think, not ever for herself, but for us. She fears what might become of us, deep in some fog-choked alley.
What a fool I am to think otherwise. A proud fool, at that. Even so. “I'm not leaving,” I say, and behind her Clarke sighs. It seems she had expected as much from me. Juliana moves a half-step closer, towering over me in truth. My shoulders press into the glass, the cold panes wicking away the heat of my skin. I have to crane back my head to hold the lock of our eyes, but hold it I do. She needs to see. “Whatever happens here,” I all but whisper, “can't be worse than what already has.”
“Yes it can,” Juliana answers, without a moment's hesitation, “It so – easily – can. You've not...you don't know what people can be like, either of you. What they can do to each other, it –” She stops there with a sigh, looking away for a moment. When her eyes turn back to me, there's a shadow in their blue-dark depths. The shape it takes is of the fifth life taken. Drowned, with a Windrunner emblem stuffed in their mouth. “I want both of you as far from here as I can get you, before it starts.”
“You said – you said it would be a month before it did,” I say. The floor creaks behind her as Clarke rises to her feet, hidden by the breadth of Juliana's body. She doesn't speak, nor does she move further. She merely stands.
Strange.
“I did,” she admits, and freely. Then her hands come to rest on my shoulders, the strength of steel in the careful grip of her fingers. “What is this, Zira? You've done what you came to do. Why are you so bent on staying?”
I hesitate to tell her. I don't know why. Hasn't she proven that she respects our Royah ways? Hasn't that proof earned her some measure of trust? It should, and yet I hesitate.
In the end, the choice is taken from me. Made for me by Clarke, who says, “One of her – the guards arrested a Royah from the camp on a false pretense. Suspicions of theft and resisting a lawful arrest.” It would seem she knows how it rankles me, for she gives me an apologetic look and finishes by saying, “Yesterday.”
Juliana releases me, turning to face Clarke. In the moment of the turn, I see in her eyes the dark, rolling threat of a stormcloud. “And what actually happened?” she asks. Her voice is neither growl nor rumble. Not yet. Not yet.
It's I who answers. “One of them, he saw her in the market and he...he wanted her, so he tried to take her. She stopped him, – hurt – him, and he couldn't let it go.” I echo the words of Lenn, mother of Leda, spitting, “Coward couldn't take the beating he'd earned.”
“I see,” Juliana says, and there is the growl, there is the rumble. Thunder in her voice. A stormcloud in her eyes, “Of course, their captain said nothing of this when I asked how he broke his nose. I'd thought we could swap stories. Bond.” A disgusted snort hisses through her own crooked nose. “Fool. Alright, then.” She scoops up her helm from the bedside table, tucking it into the crook of that same arm. Steps to the door and swings it open, stopping in the empty frame. She looks back at us over the great, rounded hill of her shoulder. Lightning's flash in her narrowed gaze. “Come with me, both of you. I want you to see what I'm going to do.”
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- - -
At the eastern limits of the port, the lake has pushed inland. The slow erosion of years and tides has formed an inlet shaped in rough approximation to a bell. Beneath the blessed clarity of sunlight, its waters would be a foul and stagnant green; the air around it filled with the stench of rotting weeds and the humming buzz of clouds of stinging insects. Frogs and bats feast in the mire, growing fat on plentiful prey. It is the only quality of this place to have any virtue.
It is here, at the very end of this boggy inlet, that the people of port Viara chose to place their jail. The short, squat building perches mere feet from the stinking mire, a windowless and misshapen box of moss-covered timbers and a slate roof riddled with cracks. Its single door is reinforced with bands of rusting iron. Above it hangs a single, guttering lamp. The dim orange light it casts does little more than serve to highlight the fog-choked gloom.
Some dozen or feet from that door, Juliana halts in her march. Behind her, Clarke and I do as well. Keeping up with those strides hadn't been easy for either of us. I swipe chilled sweat from my brow and the nape of my neck, then look back at how far we'd come. A glow of silver-gold in the endless fog. That's all the town is from here.
Was it deliberate, I wonder, to build the jail this quarter-mile or so from the rest of town? Did the builders do it so they could do as the pleased in its walls, without fear of being caught out? Or was it simply that everyone else had been wise, built their homes and stores away from this fetid mire?
A bit of them all, I should think. That is where the answer lies.
“When we go in, I want you both behind me,” Juliana says, turning to face us. She's half in shadow, eyes hidden beneath the thunderhead of her brow. Her scuff-scarred armor catches the dim lamplight in its gouges and valleys. Little lines of light make her and otherworldly sight. Her free hand curls and loosens at her side. She's bracing herself, I realize. Readying for a fight. “I mean – right – behind me. Hands on my belt if you can manage it.”
With Clarke's breath returned to her she says, “You think they'll attack us. Attack you.”
“They will,” Juliana answers, “if they think they'll get away with it. If that happens, let go of me. Get out of the building and wait. If you can't do that, find a corner and stay in it.” Her eyes are hidden. The weight of her gaze is not. “Leave the fight to me. Do you understand?” She waits until both Clarke and I nod before nodding herself. Slips her helmet over her head, turn back to the jail. “Lets go.”
One moment we are a dozen or so feet from the door, the next we are at its stoop. Flakes of rust fall from the iron banding as Juliana hammers it with her fist. True to our word, the both of us have a hand hooked into the back of her belt. Clarke's free hand plays at the hollow of her throat, fingers tracing the silver-wire trim of her piece of ice. Mine curls into a fist. There are footsteps on the door's other side. Boots. They stop, and a muffled voice calls, “Visiting hours are over!”
Juliana's answer rolls like thunder. “I am Knight-Captain Juliana Morrow. I need to speak with Captain Vance. Open the door.”
The door doesn't open. The voice answers, “Captain's busy! You'll have to come back in the morning!” He snickers a laugh. So does another, so quiet and muffled I barely hear it. There's an ugliness in those sounds.
She hammers the door again, rattling the whole of its frame. More rust-flakes fall, an early snow of red and brown. She growls, “You're impeding the official business of a Knight of the Fort! I can have you in irons for that alone. Open the door, and I'll forget it happened.”
The door doesn't open. Juliana's shoulders roll, rising and falling like the deep-water waves of the lake, and with no less power to them. “Door stays closed,” a different voice answers. It's the other, the one whose laugh was quieted before, “Come back in the morning!”
Their laughter and footsteps diminish.
They walked away. I can't believe it. They actually walked away.
“Fools,” Juliana spits, then shakes her helmeted head. “Give me some space, girls.”
We do and, with a single forward step and a snarl, she kicks the jail's iron-banded door clean out of its frame.
Coda
No one's coming.
It had been taunt and torment both, given gleefully as they dragged her away in irons, taken for the crime of protecting herself. They'd put her in the middle of them, each one whispering to her of what they would do once she was theirs. Violence and violation they promised, and always, always with the same end:
No one's coming.
The air stank in this shitty little jail, stank like swamp and sweat. She'd put her back in the corner of her cell furthest from the door, waited for them to come, for them to keep their promises. Two of them had, neither the one she'd beaten before. They'd spoken to her softly, as if they sought to soothe a spooked horse, with wide, ugly smiles on their faces.
Their smiles would be uglier now, after she'd introduced her knees and elbows to their teeth.
She'd paid for that in pain. Two more had come and they'd knocked her to the ground, taken turns kicking bruises into her body. They'd left her cell flushed and proud, congratulating each other as if they'd won. It was the last of them who'd said it a third time, hissing the words through a split in his lip.
No one's coming.
From where she curls around at least one broken rib, Leda watches the jail's door fly off its hinges. The chunk of rotting wood hits one of the gap-teeth in the back, sending him to the ground. He groans and twists like he was dying. She smiles. If only.
Through the empty frame steps a giant in battered armor. In the depths of their helm, two pits of cobalt burn with fury. They fall on her, and a voice like thunder rolls through the room. “Release her. Now!”
They'd lied to her, it would seem. Someone came. Someone mighty.
She would enjoy this.