The sun made Qaelet’s white walls and streets too bright for a look longer than a glance, and dread was turning Farisa’s stomach over itself, because the madness she had feared for so long had infected an entire city, a place that had a way of turning on the mind. Phaneys, the woman who had professed faith in a time loop, had seemed lucid up to the forceful moment before, and this fact led Farisa to see cyclicity everywhere. The children playing on the streets were probably stuck in a game whose only rule was the evasion of logic. This place had no seasons, and perhaps it had grown so intolerant of time’s intrusions as to be muddled by events, fine as they were.
Farisa watched the building’s shadow scrape the ground. Trial. She said my trial is tomorrow.
The ringing of a discordant bell, leading to waves of shouts from streets and windows, followed by the use by bronze-armored men of their staves to restore order, suggested the truth of Phaneys’s regicidal prophecy. These people had killed their king, and this amethyst world would unravel from here. She suspected the woman had played a major role; no one could foretell a malicious future but one intending to make it.
A server came around sunset with a silver food tray. The food, at least, was not bad; her appetite was low, but she’d need strength in tomorrow’s trial. She walked the perimeter of her mockingly capacious room, dozens of times. The bookshelves were full, but the glamour enabling her to hear the Qaeleti language as her own had no written component, for the scripts were all illegible with the exclusion of one title, The Trial of the Century, embossed in gold-leaf Lyrian letters on the spine of a small black book. When she opened it, she found its pages blank, as if a perverse joke had been set here for just her. The author’s name, somehow, did not surprise her: Idrissa Ngazo, the 17th Marquessa of Qaelet.
She returned to her bed and fell on it. She had walked into a beautiful city of madness, and it had swallowed her, and it would take the others—Claes, Mazie, Andor, Saito, and even Eric—if she failed to find a way to warn them away. She would scream forever from the gallows, if it came to that.
Darkness did absolutely nothing for a long time, then faded into dawn. She did not hear a knock, nor movement of the doorknob, nor any indication that the room had been entered until a man’s arm slid under her face.
“Sleep last night?”
“No.”
“You will,” said the man who put a sweet-odored rag in front of her nose.
She fought an enclosing chill, but her rigid limbs and slowing mind lost their common language, and when her eyes opened, she stood in a spacious chamber with a domed ceiling, high windows, and an open arched door letting in far too much sunlight. Twenty people were inside, but more were entering. Her feet ached, as if she’d been standing here for hours, and her legs had been tied to a podium with tight silk.
“I hope you have rested well,” said Phaenys, whose eyes had become large and bright like alien suns.
#
The judge, a rotund man with blue suspenders, came into the courtroom and silently sat behind a blue marble barrier in a seat that elevated him above the rest of the room. A gong had been placed at his back. The prosecutor was a tall, thin man with dark hair and frigid eyes whose color changed as he looked around. People in silk robes continued to enter the courtroom through the arched doorway, filling the benches and forcing latecomers to stand.
“The jury may come,” said the judge.
Three men in white came to sit behind a wooden railing on a platform that put them above the rest of the court, but a foot and a half lower than the judge.
“Does the defendant, Farisa La’ewind, know the crimes of which she stands accused?”
Farisa looked around the room for cues, but none came. “I do not.”
The judge waited for a scroll to be handed to him, then read it. “You were brought into Qaelet on the promise of special talents, which you are known to possess, but were unable to solve our Problem. Although you convinced our king of your correctness, you failed to persuade anyone else. Our king, as you may know, had his enemies. It can therefore be argued that you are a sower of discord.”
Murmurs and chuckles could be heard from the crowd.
“The first charge, fraud, is for your promise to save us, though you found no solution we could use, due an undisclosed affliction on your soul from your being the cause of a fire that killed twenty people in your native land. The severe nature of this omission makes a case for sabotage and... espionage. The murder-arson itself happened so far away, we would usually consider it beyond our interests and jurisdiction and not hear the case, but the use of magic to kill or cause harm constitutes sorcery, which we hold as a capital offense. Knowing all this, how do you plead?”
Farisa’s hand stopped the other’s tremor. “Not guilty. On all charges.”
“The prosecutor shall begin.”
The young man’s frigid eyes narrowed. “Any answer but the exact truthful one shall add perjury to our litany of charges. Perjury in a capital case is itself a capital crime. Does the defendant understand this?”
She paused. “I do, but I have a question.”
Loud murmurs came from the crowd.
She continued. “I have no direct experience of fair courts, or even laws. I come from a world where a grot is a grot. Still, I believe that in a system such as yours, I have the right to secure an attorney. Is that so?”
The judge’s right eyebrow lifted. “Are you guilty?”
“I contend I am not.”
The judge guffawed. “If you are not guilty, why do you need an attorney? If you are innocent, then we want the same thing: the truth. Who is better equipped to advocate for the defendant than the defendant herself? You cannot expect us to spend resources on intermediaries.”
Farisa sighed. A grot really was a grot, everywhere in the world.
“Prosecution, please continue.”
The young man spread his feet. “I understand that you did not find us by accident, but deliberately. Is that true?”
“It is,” Farisa said.
“When did this journey commence?”
“Spring.”
“Spring,” he said dismissively. “Could you be more specific?”
“I left Cait Forest on April 26, ’94, by our calendar.”
“Initiating a journey that resulted in hundreds of deaths. Is that right?”
“Yes. In self-defense, we—”
“Have you personally ever killed anyone?”
Farisa looked at her hands.
“I repeat—”
“Yes.”
The prosecutor smiled. “The defendant admits she is a killer.”
“Yes. I have killed in self-defense, as well as the defense of others.”
“Tell us about a man named Daniel Chace.”
“He was a danger to all of us. He—”
“If we returned you to the world you came from, would you face execution for his death?”
Farisa swallowed. “Are you asking what I think would happen?”
The judge frowned. “Answer him.”
“Might I speak to—”
“We have been over this. The defendant is her own attorney.”
“Yes,” she said. “I would. If I were returned to the world I came from, the Global Company would consider his death an unlawful murder, and I would be executed.”
“So is it false to call you a fugitive?”
“No. I suppose it is not.”
“Is it true that your parents, both deceased, were considered criminals by this Global Company, the highest authority of your world, against which they participated in violent resistance?”
She paused and looked around before saying, “It is.”
The prosecutor opened his arms and addressed the crowd. “Clerics, mages, and shepherds! We have a wanted woman from a world whose machinations we want no part of. We could simply send her back to them, and make some temporary peace—”
Farisa pinned her shoulders back. “My death will not appease the Global Company. If they discover your existence, they will come for—”
The tallest of the three jurors stood. “We have reached a verdict.”
Farisa looked at the judge. “I haven’t had time to make my case.”
“There is no point. Our minds are made up.”
The judge averted his eyes and said, “Go on.”
The prosecutor flashed an ugly smile.
“We have reached a verdict on the killing of Daniel Chace,” said the juror. “We consider it contrary to Qaelet’s interest to involve itself in what appears to be a preliminary phase of an external war. To appease a foreign state would be to subordinate. We intend to insist on neutrality and independence for as long as we can. Therefore, on that charge, we find no cause to depart from the defendant’s account. Given a context of self-defense, we do not believe the crime of murder occurred.”
The courtroom spectators jeered.
“Do not worry, my friends,” said the prosecutor as he smiled with predatory glee. “We have other charges to address.” He paced. “Defendant, what are your intentions regarding Qaelet and its people?”
“I have none. At this point, I would like to leave.”
“Five people are coming after you. Do they mean us harm?”
“None at all. We know the Mountain Road continues. We ask for nothing but safe passage.”
“What do you expect to find to our south?”
She took a deep breath and put out her chest. “Freedom. We shall give no aid to Qaelet’s enemies. Indeed, we shall say nothing about this place.”
Uneasy snickers filled the room. A man in the front row scribbled notes. The woman next to him coughed.
The judge tried to calm his audience with hand gestures. “It is best for all of us if we can trust her. The burden of proof, I must remind you, resides with the State.”
The prosecutor said, “To this point, you have not confessed your other murders.”
“Other murders?” Farisa said. “Are you talking about orcs? Soldats?”
“The prosecution calls Phaenys, scientific advsior to the Crown of Qaelet.”
The woman stepped forward. “I scanned Farisa’s mind yesterday.”
“Excluding deaths caused in self-defense during her flight from the Global Company, did you find evidence of this woman causing another’s death?”
“I did.”
“She’s lying,” Farisa said.
The judge said, “I remind the defendant that perjury is a capital crime.”
Phaenys said, “Farisa commits no perjury. She does not remember having done so, as her own mind has protected itself from the memory. Still, she was the primary cause of a forest fire that took twenty lives.”
“I am not.” Farisa’s hand grabbed the polished marble of her stand in front of her. “There was a Monster with forty eyes.”
“Was there?”
“Cait Forest was my home, and its destruction broke my heart. I wanted to spend the rest of my life there.”
“You always knew, though, that you did not belong there and would be discovered. You knew the place and its people would reject you, and that this would bring the Monster to rise inside you, as it has always done and will always do.”
Farisa started to say something, but shouts erupted from the spectators, drowning out her attempt.
The judge clapped his hands and shouted, “Silence!”
The prosecutor turned on his heels. “Ordinarily, we would take no interest in a matter so small as a forest fire thousands of miles away, but sorcery is such a heinous matter that international jurisdiction is appropriate. Phaneys, tell us if you found any other uses of magic we might consider aberrant or illicit.”
She turned to face Farisa. “Tell me what you did on March 19, ‘94.”
“I’m not sure I remember.” Could a memory be trusted?
“That evening, she entered a mind unbidden. The victim was an eighteen-year-old student named Erysi Brune. Convinced that Erysi had been violated—”
Farisa insisted, “She was violated.”
“—the defendant erased the woman’s memory of the event, believing herself a healer.”
“She wanted the memory gone.”
“You manipulated her into feeling bad about it and so, yes, she did.”
The spectators howled as if clouds of blood had come overhead.
“A few days later, in her continuing state of rage and pique, Farisa entered the mind of the boy she had slept with, without his knowledge or consent. Is that correct, Farisa?”
She nodded.
“The mage’s erasure of his memory was slipshod, so driven with emotion it could even be called unskilled. Adjacent memories were lost, and so were unconscious animal capacities, resulting in his withdrawal from Macska College as well as a persistent epileptic apoplexy.”
The judge smiled despite an expression of pain. “Is that true?”
Farisa drew a deep breath. “Yes.”
The courtroom, with enough bodies packed into it that the outside could no longer be seen, turned raucous, with shouted calls for the use of graphic punishments as well as one woman’s audible spitting on the floor.
The judge said, “I remind the public that it is a privilege to observe civil proceedings.”
The lead juror stood. “At this time, we enter a verdict.”
Tiny cracks in the court’s stone walls sharpened in Farisa’s gaze.
The judge cleared his throat. “Very well. Please, express your verdict.”
“For these deeds, we find her guilty of unlawful witchcraft, but see no crime in this that meets the standard of capital sorcery. We consider time served in captivity adequate to cover any debts.”
“That is sound,” The judge said, barely disguising his contempt for the merciful finding. “So far, the jury feels the prosecution has failed to prove the commission of any capital crime. If it continues in such incompetence, it risks the waste of public time.”
The prosecutor’s nostrils flared, and it looked as if he meant to respond to the judge, but he saw it wiser to focus his enmity where it might fruitfully land, so he turned back to Farisa. “Precisely when did Cait Forest’s fire begin? April 26, you have told us. What hour?”
Farisa said, “The jury has already found—”
The prosecutor slowed his tempo and lowered his tone as he said, “The sorcery charges before the fire have been settled, but not those pertaining to the event itself.”
The judge added, “He asked a valid question. Answer it.”
“I cannot be sure,” Farisa said. “I was running for my life. I had no possessions, no watch or clock, but I would guess it was... one o’clock in the morning.”
“What were you doing before then?”
Farisa had run to the greenhouse, arriving just before eight o’clock. She had intended to steal tulip bulbs, but what had happened to those? Did it suit her interests to confess to such a minor theft? Would the admission prove her purity, and perhaps lead to resolution of that five-hour missing spell of time?
“I don’t know. Try as I might, I don’t remember the rest of that night.”
“The prosecution calls a witness.”
A small door opened in a side wall of the chamber. A woman walked in. Her skin was as pale as a bedsheet and she wore a fluffy blue robe. She growled, flashing gray teeth, then stood to face the crowd. The back of her neck had turned black with rot.
Farisa said, “You’re calling a corpse as a witness?”
The judge laughed. “Who tells better stories than the dead?”
“Disrobe,” the prosecutor told the dead woman.
“I object,” Farisa said.
“The deceased have no need of modesty,” the judge said. “The witness disrobes.”
The wraith did so, then spun around with her arms up. A swirl of putrefaction had opened her upper chest. Tendrils of gangrene ran parallel to her ribs. She had been naked under the robe except for a brassiere, which she removed. One of the breasts drooped, but held its place. The other one slid down her pale body, tearing off a sheet of long-dead skin as did, then landed on the floor with a plop.
In a raspy voice, the corpse said, “I come to Qaelet seeking redress. I had a beautiful life, which Farisa took. I want it back.”
“Do you recognize this woman?” asked the prosecutor.
“I don’t believe I do,” Farisa said.
“My name is Ilana Harrow.”
“The prosecution alleges that, on the night of April 25, Farisa killed this woman. The prosecution further argues Ilana’s death to have been causative of Cait Forest’s fire. Is this true?”
Farisa’s body tightened as if bracing to take a blow. Memories, like soil gasses from thawing tundra, spilled into her mind with such fidelity she could not offer falsehoods—in the blaring light of her exposed mind, only the truth would do.
“Yes. I killed Ilana.”
She had expected to hear such anger from the crowd that it would nauseate her. Instead, silence followed.
“The courtroom records Farisa’s confession,” said the judge. “Now I address Miss Harrow. If we find Farisa liable for your murder, what retribution would you accept?”
Ilana jabbed the stringy remains of her rot-shredded neck with a bony finger. “I want my life back. I deserve to live again.”
“I am sad to say that even we cannot offer that.”
Ilana approached the defendant. The dead woman’s pubic hair had all fallen out and her vulva had been replaced by a rust-colored ruin, the same hue as orc’s blood. She bared her teeth as she said:
“I never liked you, Farisa. I never did.”
Farisa said nothing. Of what use would it be to insult one whom murder had failed to silence?
Ilana, a showman after the last, continued in a high, mocking voice. “Farisa, fariza, virtue.” The emaciated corpse laughed. “Look at me, I’m virtue. Fariza, the dance of a flame. I’m a good girl, a smart girl, a girl who won’t ruin her life because she doesn’t like boys.” Ilana spat dark sputum on the floor. “Not that you would ever have the option. What man would want you? You always thought you were better than me. I’m sure you still do, even though you're a brown madwoman—a barefoot brown madwoman. What can you say against me? Who have I killed? No one. I have never tainted my soul in such a way, but you have. You killed Erysi. You killed me. I only meant to please a crowd. No one would have died, had nobody overreacted. You saw Cait Forest, raised from the swamps by my ancestors, in its highest form and set it ablaze. You destroyed its good name. You have taken so many lives to advance and protect your own, and yet—”
“Enough!” The judge put his hands together, then spread them an inch. “Answer the prosecutor’s question. What redress would you accept? Would Farisa’s death suffice?”
“No. I am dead too, so that could never be enough.” Ilana’s mouth opened and a tooth fell out. “I want madness. Five people are coming to rescue her. They are exhausted, hungry, and miserable. A mage, even a spent one, could end all their lives. I beg you, city of Qaelet, make her do it.”
Ilana then passed into a state of floating suspension, yielding the courtroom’s attention..
The prosecutor sneered at Farisa. “Miss Harrow makes a convincing witness, but I can do better.”
The next woman who walked in was less deformed by death than Ilana, her absence of life and warmth visible only by her pallor. She wore a flowing purple robe, leather sandals, and a pink hair ribbon Farisa knew she had seen before. She was short, like Farisa, and no older than eighteen, but walked with such poise she projected not only command but absolute invincibility to a life without it. Though dry and fading, her blonde hair was still striking, and her hands appeared quite soft, and her feet were beautiful in a way only one woman’s had been.
Farisa gritted her teeth. “Why the hell are you here?”
Erysi paid her no attention. Instead, she spun her body as Ilana had done while dropping the robe. She raised her perfect arms overhead. Unlike Ilana’s, her body bore no marks of trauma or corruption.
The judge said, “There are events the courtroom must understand.”
“I forgive Farisa for my death,” Erysi said. “Really, I do.”
The audience expressed displeasure, as they had not come here to hear an announcement of pardon.
“Unfortunately, I will never forgive her for”—Erysi squatted and reached inside herself; red spatter fell from her vulva, and a bloody mass twice the size of a kidney bean slid out—“his death.”
#
Before Farisa could say anything, the judge in the Qaeleti courtroom struck the gong behind himself for the first—but, she feared, not last—time. The sound of it seemed to spread visibly, and her vision could no longer track the vibrating world before her, instead garbled for a long moment until everything she saw was a brown woman—pretty, cross-legged, barefoot—on a bed.
I’m Erysi. Somehow, they have forced me into her, or her into me. Farisa understood that she and the courtroom had been plunged into the same experience; and then, for the duration of this replay, she had ceased to be Farisa.
“Zero,” said the brown woman who lived in this tiny cabin as she wrote in a notebook. “No need to total the numbers. There’s been no rain all winter. The drought continues.”
“You worry too much,” Erysi said.
Erysi held conflicting emotions about Farisa, a teacher of a dead language who would have been utterly friendless without the benefit of her own introductions. It wasn’t the dark woman’s fault—she just didn’t belong here. She would never be a professor, now that the frail headmistress was gone, and should count herself fortunate so long as she was allowed to teach here at all. She was also, at the age of twenty, soon to be older than the other students here, who tended to start at fifteen and consider a six-year stay a humiliation. Farisa was visibly awkward in everything she did, and this would not improve with time.
Still, she was sweet. She gave her love away like an exhausted merchant with a full cart at sundown. It wasn’t her fault that no one liked her; the name—fariza, which meant the motion of a flame, but was synonymous with virtue—told half the story, because she made you feel unclean. She saw life—each person and everything in it—amidst all possibilities, and no one could measure up to such a radiant standard as tended to exist, though she would never voice it, inside her mind. The people of Cait Forest rightly took this as a sort of arrogance—she was not a rising siren of society, a pale perfect pride of a well-placed family, but a pleasing oddity. She had refused to enter the warm lake of common human desires—it was no secret that she let neither money nor men cast a shadow on her fire—but not due to some true superiority, but more simply because it would never admit her. Farisa thought too highly for herself for a woman destined either to die alone or in the company of another women.
And yet she does love me, though. It feels good to be loved.
“You’re quiet this evening,” said Farisa as she put a hand on her own bare knee. “Is something wrong?”
“I have an exam tomorrow,” Erysi said.
“You can study here. I won’t bother you. Or, if you prefer, I can give you the key to the library.”
Something, up here, had been taken from Erysi. She was, unlike the artist friend Farisa still pined for, not creative. She was not curious, except when she had to be. She had a capability for numbers, but not little interest. She had always had an excellent memory, though. She could read a passage once and fare better on exams than people who had studied for weeks, and she had not once in her life forgotten an important name, not until so recently that she had taken up a secret habit of journaling, with a thin diary placed under the short leg of her own lopsided desk, ostensibly there to correct its wobble. Farisa could have discovered its existence and location illicitly, but had never done so—in any case, it was a mile and a half away in Erysi’s dorm room. She wrote down all important daily deeds, so they could not be erased.
There was, of note, that matter of Bufton. Erysi had discovered her own beauty quite young and knew it well, but the raw hateful desire on the man’s face, that was a potion of a new kind. The boy had not been much to look at until he had started drinking orc’s blood—the real stuff, five hundred grot per vial—and, while the twenty pounds of muscle gained were unnecessary, the deepening of his voice put it into a hypnotic register, and the graphite-gray where his eyes had once been white could never be ignored. The putrid sweet scent around the boy at all times made her think of freedom—of life away from coursework and gossip and expectations, up in the twisted bare mountains where no rule existed but force. Bufton would, every time they met, throw her onto a stained, shabby mattress and the magic would start. Each impalement hurt enough to make her sick, but then a flashfire heat would come toward the end, leaving her to want more, more.... more of this dazzling filth, more of this musky agony, more of this debasement by a man of future wealth and power, a man who would do such crimes to the world as to make this offense—she had not said no, had withheld yes to propel him—a halfpenny sin in comparison.
This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
Bufton’s furious hate did not exist in Farisa’s gentle kiss. Farisa did a thing with you, never to you; she was sweet and kind in all the ways of a child’s plush animal, something you could kiss and rub yourself against—if nobody found out. She was an escape in the present; one could not, in the Company’s world, afford to have her in one’s future. She was an indulgence all women of society needed to outgrow.
Farisa loves me, Bufton hates me; they feel different kinds of good, but hate is the force that runs the world.
Erysi had thought, until recently, that enough space existed between these two indulgences that no interference would occur, but in the past few days she had noticed a scent about herself, an odor of rust and corruption no shower washed away, a guilty pleasure at first—it reminded her of the grunting beast, the raging orc-boy, the act done so quickly she felt no moral responsibility—that turned into a source of concern because...
She will smell my change and she will judge me. That is the problem. I have to stop coming here.
Farisa scratched the ball of her foot, then her fingers interlaced with her own toes.
You poor thing, Farisa. Fariza? Virtue? It exists for the needy, the poor, the naive. It exists for dark-skinned girls who live alone in tiny cabins because the real world won’t have them. That’s all it is. The real world is the world of force, the world where one takes or one loses.
“I should get you a better mirror,” Erysi said as she paced the cabin floor. “The one in here makes everything look gray.”
“It’s old, but it’s of high quality,” said Farisa. “Besides, a bargain for the price of free.”
Farisa was beautiful, that was true. You could look past the dark skin. You could look past the tiny roll of fat, visible when she sat down, under her navel that a proper Easthorn would have abused laxatives to get rid of. You could look past the neediness and insecurities. You could imagine a world in which she—so intelligent, so caring for others despite the world’s irreciprocity, so driven in her own weird way to excel—was a woman of value. She was... she was even nice. And that was the problem. She wasn’t war face. She wasn't the forearm crushing the windpipe. She wasn’t the hate packed so tight it could rupture at any time, leaving the shuddering fatigue of an unused but exhausted lip.
Erysi said, “Do you even want me around?”
Farisa sat up. “What kind of question is that? Of course I do, silly.”
“Whenever I come up here, I feel like a bother.”
“Hush. You’ve never been one.”
Erysi sat on the bed.
Farisa touched Erysi’s calf. “What’s on your mind?”
“It’s always a little too cold or too hot in here.” Erysi removed her blouse. “Right now it’s hot.”.
Farisa wrapped her arms around Erysi’s waist. “Someone’s got a little belly.”
“Yeah, you do.”
“I always have.”
Erysi said, “I run five times a week.”
“I didn’t say I didn’t like it.” Farisa tugged Erysi’s side. “I do. Something to play with.”
Erysi smacked Farisa’s hand.
“I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”
“You didn’t.”
I have gained a pound or two, of course... no, it’s more than that... and I’ve had odd cravings, odd dreams... and that smell, that orc’s blood smell that keeps following me... no, Erysi. Don’t be an idiot.
“Well, then.” Farisa reached for a book on her nightstand and opened it. “Good.”
Erysi sat back; the cabin wall, abutting the edge of the bed, pressed back. The wood stove was giving off more heat than the cabin required in winter, let alone spring. Erysi would have to wear a sweater at all times if she kept coming up here, and this would get uncomfortable as the days grew warmer, so she decided that this dalliance would end tonight. She might as well enjoy the last of it.
She moved behind Farisa and tickled her side. “Don’t do that, I’m reading.” Her fingers moved down Farisa’s hips, to the backs of her bare knees. “Stop that,” Farisa said, though she started laughing. “I told you, I’m trying to—” Erysi tickled Farisa’s calves, then the soles of her feet. Farisa lost control, and a bare heel hit Erysi’s chin.
“Shit, I’m sorry.”
Erysi said, “No, I deserved it.”
“I hope it doesn’t hurt.”
“You barely grazed me,” Erysi said. The other woman had that Farisa look of concern; something in it triggered a wave of desire. They kissed. Their tongues danced. Erysi straddled Farisa, who took her nightshirt off; her dark nipples were erect and...
“I fucking want you, Erysi.”
“I want you too, Farisa.”
The power, the power Erysi had over this cute creature made her wet. Her tongue circled Farisa’s nipple; there she traced her own name, letter by letter.
“Stop.”
Erysi looked at Farisa, who had lifted her head. Fear had mixed with the desire in her eyes, and lines had crossed her brow.
“Stop and decide if you really mean this,” Farisa said. “This isn’t play for me. It’s my heart.”
“I know it is,” Erysi said as guided Farisa’s lips to her own nipple. “I know it is.” It felt so good to have Farisa lick the forming sweat of her breasts and shoulders and collarbone that Erysi’s vision lost color. She had never felt this before, and maybe there really was something about the silly girl in the isolated cabin, because she had been desired forever but never in this way...
“Take everything off,” Farisa said. “I’m on top.”
Soon they were fully nude. Farisa squeezed Erysi as if every inch of her own skin were crying out for contact with Erysi’s, and then arched her back to kiss Erysi’s breasts, ribs, belly. Farisa’s tongue darted, it circled, it fenced with the aplomb of a swordswoman. She’s gifted, she’s so fucking gifted. Hot breath filled Erysi’s navel, then a curious lick traced a thin line just below, and then... Oh my God, Farisa, you are so lovely, I fucking love everything about—
Crippling pain erupted in Erysi’s guts.
Farisa pulled back. “What’s wrong? Did I—?”
“It’s not your fault.” Erysi held her stomach and groaned. “It hurts. It hurts so bad.”
She had thought a standing position would loosen the knot in her body, but the invisible knife in Erysi’s belly twisted. She ran outside and puked on the grass. Blood raced into her throbbing head. Her tailbone shivered and she felt as if an intestinal hurricane would begin soon.
Farisa came outside with Erysi’s clothes. “Put them on, quick. I’ll take you to the doctor.”
Erysi stepped into her underpants. “The doctor can’t know.” She donned the blouse. “No one can know.”
Farisa, back inside the cabin, began to dress herself. “Everyone gets sick, Erysi.”
“This isn’t the sick everyone gets.”
“Don’t be—”
Erysi never heard the end of that sentence, because as soon as enough clothes were on her body, she broke into a split. This could never be explained to Farisa, nor would there be a need to do so, because Erysi, even in this weakened state, was the faster runner and would get away. She did not stop until she was sure, in the evening light of the April forest, that she was alone. Her fingers tingled. Roaring pain conquered her body, but at least she had escaped Farisa’s sight and judgment.
She loosened her pants and underpants. The odor of orc’s blood, and the rusty substance itself, collected along with everything else on a dead leaf from last autumn.
There had been no intention or guilt on Farisa’s part—she had never known of the orcish impurity, but as the opposite of her fariza, the two could not exist in proximity without mortal struggle. Erysi had been cleansed. She could walk away, free of this. She pulled up her pants and walked toward the lights of campus center. This was over; finally, over. She shook her arms and laughed.
Over the next few days, whenever she moved too swiftly, she would feel a V-shaped bolt of pain that speared her shoulder blades from the inside. She realized she would need to see the campus doctor, who confirmed what she had already known: she had lost not only one child, but all future ones. Farisa dragged me into her own infertility. I will die alone, unwanted, just like her.
The contempt she had always felt for Farisa’s social awkwardness and obscene sincerity turned into fury.
Still, her anger waned. Her belly flattened quickly, leaving nothing to hide, and she did need a friend more than ever, though she could never say why, so she returned to the Witch’s Cabin multiple times, though she spurned Farisa’s romantic advances. The woman would ask what had gone wrong.
Oh, Farisa. Where the hell do I begin?
Life would return to normal. She would not need her strange friend much longer. Bufton was gone—he had taken ill quite suddenly—but others would admire her beauty enough to lose themselves; she was sure of it. Good times, with full spring underway, were ahead. The nights were already warm enough for the student tavern’s outdoor space to remain open after dark, and soon it would be summer, when Cait Forest would turn into a three-month party and she would be able to forget that weird language teacher forever.
The first night that properly felt like summer was April 22; she was chatting with two large men when she felt a tug on her dress. She turned around to see Ilana Harrow.
“I know your secret.”
“My secret?”
Ilana pulled Erysi by the arm, out of the pub crowd and into a place where she could whisper unheard. “Farisa.”
“The language teacher,” Erysi said.
Ilana’s eyebrows went up and did not go down. “Who else?”
“I took her class a year ago. So what?”
“I have seen you with her. Outside of class. It is shameful.”
“Oh.” Erysi focused her eyes to meet Ilana’s. “No, it’s nothing like that. I pity her.”
“She’s not worth your pity. If you let her, she’ll turn you into a cunt eater.”
“Is she one?”
“Don’t insult my intelligence, Erysi. I know you know.”
“She isn’t—it isn’t like—she’s not even my friend. She hurt me. She hurt me in a way I can never forgive.”
“Did she?”
“I despise her.”
Ilana squeezed Erysi’s upper arm. “Good. You are going to prove it.”
“There’s no need. She will leave Cait Forest soon. The new headmaster intends to fire her.”
“He already has,” said Ilana.
“Then we can stop talking about her. She’s already gone.”
“I am sure she is not.” Ilana put a hand in Erysi’s hair with one hand and cupped her cheek with the other, holding her head so she could not escape the smell of her breath. “She’s here, and she has nowhere to go. She humiliated me, Erysi. You and I are going to make her suffer.”
#
The Qaeleti courtroom lights swam; as Farisa returned to herself, this diseased glare trespassed the skin and mixed with the body’s own waters.
The prosecutor’s voice boomed. “Rejection is hard for all to bear, is it not?”
All eyes in the courtroom converged on Farisa. She felt small, but wished she were microscopic—invisible, even.
The prosecutor continued. “One deranged enough to prefer her own sex, we should reason, might be driven by such perversion to murder twenty people. And twenty is merely the number she achieved. There is no reason to believe she did not intend to kill everyone in Cait Forest that night.”
Farisa remembered not the violent end of her time in Cait Forest, but her arrival there from a place with such different light and climate, the Far North, and then her mind settled on that motto of the Ignae: Hell is being remembered. It struck her as irrelevant more than profound. The speech of the overworld was harmless gossip in comparison to this deranged, half-dead place’s own ticking, twirling processes that seemed to keep events alive forever. Was Farisa really alive, if trapped here and facing a trial she could not win? Or was she already dead? She gripped the marble of the defendant’s stand, not because it would give her solidity, for nothing here could, but out of a need to straighten her spine.
“I think—no, I know—what happened,” Farisa confessed, out of breath though she had not moved. “I can tell you why Ilana and Erysi died.”
The judge said, “Then do.”
Memories arrived all at once.
#
On the evening of April 25, exactly as the tower clock struck eight, the first hour fully dark, Farisa smashed the window of a greenhouse, collected a few dozen tulip bulbs, ensured the Cait Forest labels were still on them, and set out, wishing to stain the night with no crime worse than petty theft, forever. She had not gone more than fifty yards when she felt a man’s hand around her waist and jerked away. A dart pricked her wrist. She woke up hooded with three pairs of arms beneath her.
A male voice said, “Stop kicking!”
The mage’s veins itched from the inside, as if her blood were made of splinters. Blackrue oil had been injected into her. She could not use the blue; she could not even control the motion of her body, though the shaking seemed to stop.
One of the voices asked, “Which tree is Ilana’s?”
Lightning, spiraling out from the inside of Farisa’s chest, splashed the surface of her skin.
“It’s right here.”
“Can you believe we had a witch on campus for three years?”
“The old headmistress was batty toward the end.”
Farisa felt a sense of weightlessness. The hood left her face, and the night stars jerked up. Different hands were tying her limbs were into stocks. Taunting voices—some boys, some girls—came at numerous pitches, but her vision was still too blurry for her to count faces. A bonfire’s orange light flickered.
A tall woman stepped forward, then whiffed a twigging cane overhead.
“You didn't think you were going to leave us without saying goodbye,” said Ilana’s voice.
The blue was still devoid of draw, and would be for quite some time. She could barely move her eyes, though the blurriness of her vision was reducing and she could count, if not recognize, the figures who had come to see whatever Ilana intended her to endure. Five bodies, ten, fifteen... eighteen, nineteen, twenty. Toward the back was a blonde girl who seemed familiar. A score of society’s best young men and women had come for this. Twenty faces; forty eyes.
#
In Qaelet’s courtroom, Farisa’s neck and face twitched; it was bad to have the lichyards of her mind torn open, but cruel to have the memories return in front of such a crowd. She wanted to walk away, but the ties against her calves were as tough as hardened spider silk.
Hold yourself together, Farisa. Somehow, you survived. Ilana is dead, and the dead can’t hurt you. You must have won.
But how? And, really, did I? If imagery like this could return with full force at any time, was the enemy vanquished? Was it not true that, in the mind of eternity, all events that had ever happened were, also, always happening?
If you scream or cry or make one mistake, all of Qaelet will deem you a dangerous madwoman, and you will never get out of this place, so hold yourself still, Farisa. Hold yourself damn still and listen until you know what this is.
The judge said, “The defendant seems unwilling to speak for herself.”
“We must establish a motive,” the prosecutor said. “If she conceals hers, she cannot fault us for constructing our own.”
I will speak, dammit. Just give me a moment to—
Ilana widened her ghastly smile. “May I request immunity?”
“You have it,” said the judge. “Our court tries the living, not the dead.”
Ilana clapped her skeletal hands. “I know what happened that night. I was there too, after all. I will tell you everything.”
“Very well,” said the judge as he grabbed his mallet and slammed it on the gong behind his bench.
Farisa’s world again dissolved. She could not stop herself from looking at the obscene array—fifty thousand grot, maybe a hundred—of gemstones and gold jewelry strewn amidst the patent medicines on a marble desk she decreasingly understood to be elsewhere. Artwork, mostly in disrepair from casual abandon, littered the floor, some paintings leaning against walls—the time had not been taken to hang them—and others already trampled. No other Cait Forest dorm room looked like this one.
One of Ilana’s numerous off-and-on boyfriends came to the open door and put his hand on the upper frame. “We got the tarsha.”
“Fine work,” Ilana said as she put a finger on his lower lip. “I shall be there soon. How many are coming?”
“All of them. Everyone you invited.”
“That’s perfect.” Ilana pecked his lips.
To draw too small a crowd would diminish the event’s importance, but too large of one would devalue the currency of invitation, so she had settled on a total crowd of eighteen, not including herself and Erysi. Hundreds of people, decades from now, would claim to have attended this event; thousands would say that their cousins or best friends had gone. Ilana, who extended invitations at her sole discretion, would forever know the truth. Tonight, there would be no better place in the universe to be than at the tree Ilana’s grandfather had named for her—no better place, at least, for everyone but the other star of the show, Farisa.
Ilana checked herself in the mirror from several angles. “Which side of my face do you like better?”
“You’re always beautiful,” the boy said.
“And you’re never any help.”
She had applied white arsenic to the left side of her face. No one could wear the stuff every day, obviously, but it gave her the appearance of a destroying angel, features stern and brutal and eternal, and she loved to see herself that way. On her right side, she wore a darker shade that had less to recommend it, but that made her eyes appear brighter and therefore fierce.
“The arsenic mask cracks a little bit when I smile,” Ilana said. “This is the most important night of my life, and I don’t want lines on my face. The color, on the other hand, cannot be beaten.” The pun was lost on the boy.
“No one will notice,” the boy said. “They’ll all be looking at...”
“At what?”
The clock on her desk ticked; it was eight twenty. She hoped the others would tolerate her lateness. In better times, a girl of Ilana’s age would be three or four years past her “birch birth”—her first twigging—but, for busy Ilana, the logistics were still new. She had finished putting on her striped twigging dress. “Do you like it?”
The boy sniffled. “It’s exquisite, Ilana.”
Ilana asked the boy to leave. “Make sure Erysi shows up.” That ingenue had once been Farisa’s friend, and needed to see what happened to cunt eaters.
She checked the mirror to find that the thousand-grot twigging dress fit her body perfectly. The stripes did not bend or distort, as they would on a cheaper garment. The cane, although this event was called a “birch birth,” had been made of Teroshi snakewood and used on that continent by her great-grandfather to crush slave rebellions. The staff felt hot to the touch, as if the spirits trapped inside it had come alive for this beautiful night.
These days, highborn women chattered about useless subjects like books—why read them, when one could learn what was in them from someone else?—and hylus, a sport she had played well but grown to find tedious. The pleasure in defeating an inferior athlete only mattered if one’s opponent hated losing as much as she did. If victors and vanquished could make small talk at parties the next weekend, the contest had no value—it wasn’t real competition if losers weren’t injured. When that old bitch headmistress had taken the sport away from her—a heart defect, the quack doctor had said—she was, in part of her mind, glad to be freed of the obligation to perform. The civilized, limited domination available on the field had lost its appeal, because athletic superiority meant so little if it could not be used for competitive physicality’s real purpose. At least, that was mostly true. The sport itself meant nothing, but the focused love of the crowd, when she was playing in highest form, she still craved—and, tonight, she could have it again. In a much better time, the most intimate conversation between two women of society was not about some silly sport, or some book that would be forgotten in a year, but about their birch births. If an acquaintance had wasted her first time on a field slave or a rented prisoner, you knew the money in her heart was not gold bullion.
A different boyfriend-of-the-week came by. “I’m almost ready,” she told him. “Make sure everything’s in order.”
She swung the cane a few times for practice, then went outside into the black shimmering night. The full moon was rising. As she hurried through the forest, she numbered the parts of the human body and decided on an order for her strikes. She had read all about Lorani foot modesty, and she knew how many nerves were in a woman’s soles, so she decided this part would be best and would be saved for last if she could control herself. She would have to be careful; if she selected the wrong order of entertainments, the crowd would like her less.
Ilana had not run since quitting hylus, but she was sprinting by the time she could see the tree her grandfather had named for her, where twigging stocks had been set up earlier this afternoon and her captive was now stripped and immobile. Her heart sped. That’s my tree, Ilana’s tree, every inch of Farisa belongs to me.
Nineteen boys and girls, laughing and smiling in a bonfire’s light, had come to watch. Farisa’s body had been placed in a bent position, wrists and calves tied, to double the humiliation. As Ilana beheld the crowd—her crowd—she found that, although she had never shown much creativity in school, possibilities bred in her mind faster than fire—a tangle of brown body parts, a cacophony of quavering screams, a nine-course meal of facial contortions, and she wanted all of it, all of it to wash over herself, because this had not even started and it was already better than sport, better than coca, better than sex.
My father was right. You really don’t know who you are until you have total power over someone.
Ilana stood in front of the crowd and curtsied in her flawless twigging dress. She swung her cane with full force over her head, making a powerful sound in the air. She looked at Farisa; the poor girl could not move, but her eyes darted in terror. This would be... this would be...
Ilana flashed her perfect smile. “This will be a show you’ll never forget.”
Indeed, they never would.
#
Farisa lay naked in the stocks as consciousness drifted in and out of her. Ilana’s cane scraped her shoulder; the blackrue was wearing off, so she could feel it.
Ilana swung her cane at Farisa’s face but stopped short of contact. Farisa’s immobile eyelids could not shut, but the flinch reflex garbled her visual frame as if her brain were yawning.
“I’ll wait for her to wake up a little bit,” Ilana told the crowd. “It’s always better if they participate.”
Ilana swung the cane overhead and paced a few times, then poked Farisa’s sides and belly with the stick. “You’ve still got some baby fat.” She squeezed a handful of breast. “These aren’t bad. They don’t make up for the belly and thighs, but they’re not nothing.” She squeezed harder. “Does this feel good, baby-wabie?”
Silence, Farisa understood, could be a potent weapon. Although the blackrue’s grip was softening—feeling had returned to most of her body, and she could blink now—she would not please the crowd with grimaces or moans, and she could certainly not beg. She would play dead for as long as she could. Twigging had five rules and, if they were followed, she would survive the knight, could escape to safety, and would handle revenge later.
She heard a whiff behind her, and this time the cane struck. Pain in the backs of her legs spread through her belly. On a second landing, a jolt to the back of the knee made her nauseous. A third strike—Farisa felt the turbulent air before impact, so it hit twice—shot through her nerves like shards of ice.
“She’s waking up,” Ilana said.
Do not cry, do not scream.
Ilana motioned to get a boy's attention. “That lever, over there.” The stocks moved, raising Farisa’s body, exposing her stomach. Ilana swung with her whole body; Farisa’s abdominal wall tightened in time to protect her organs, but the agony spilled through her chest and back like wine blotting a carpet. Ilana struck again and again and again in a flurry until she set the cudgel aside in preference of open-handed slaps.
Ilana grabbed Farisa’s lower belly and tore with sharp fingernails. “Look at the piggy’s shy navel. Look at it. I love you, Farisa”—Ilana said “love” as if she were licking the word—“but I have to tear this thing apart.”
The crowd cheered. “Do it, Ilana!”
Ilana was facing the crowd. “Not yet. There’s an order to this sort of thing. There are rules.”
She swung the cane in the air again, then began to strut like an imperial guard. Five paces left, a whiff overhead, five paces right, a whiff overhead.
The crowd began chanting. “Feet! Feet!”
Farisa heard someone turn a crank. The stocks moved, exposing her soles to the crowd.
Of course she would do this. She’s a true cunt, a low-given cunt.
“I’ll get there,” Ilana said. One of twigging’s rules prohibited the breaking of bones, so Ilana used the blades of her hands to thrum Farisa’s shins, then moved up her legs. “There’s so much to play with. Look at her jiggly thighs.” Ilana scratched and tore at the flesh, and Farisa smelled her own blood. Mobility had returned to her jaw, which trembled. “We’re just getting started, Fay.”
Pain, by this point, was sloshing around in Farisa’s body like pool water in an earthquake. Blows and slaps and punches—closed fists were not allowed in a conventional twigging, but Ilana had snuck a few in—continued to land on her body, the imprint of the last strike still hot when the next one landed, so she could no longer count them.
Two sharp thumbnails dug into the soles of Farisa’s feet.
“Curl your toes,” Ilana yelled.
Farisa held still.
The crowd echoed Ilana’s command.
Ilana pressed harder into skin, widening the channels of pain, causing her feet to quiver. “Curl your toes, you fat bitch.”
Farisa’s vocal cords had recovered mobility. In an almost inaudible gasp, she said, “Fuck you.”
“Fuck me? Rissy, you are the one getting fucked tonight. This is my show. Now curl your damn toes for these nice people.”
This is like the Marquessa’s attack. Pain is present—do not fight its being so. Control what you can, but deny her the pleasure of your misery.
“Bring up her head.” She heard a crank turn again. Her eyes shut at the full sight—of the others, and of her own state. “Make sure her eyes stay open.”
A boy, following Ilana’s order, dug finger and thumb into eyebrow and cheekbone.
“Do you know the five rules of twigging, Rissy?”
Farisa said nothing. She hated the sight of those rabid faces, all leering between the arches of her exposed feet. A volcanic scream wanted to release itself, but she swallowed it, damning the sound to die in her guts, because she refused to let these troglodytes hear it.
“Enough play.” Ilana grabbed the cane and swung it with full force. Farisa felt the skin split on the soles of her feet. The second blow turned her legs to ribbons and her belly into a molten glob of pain that twisted like a tumor around her spine. The third strike’s serrated knives turned her pelvis into dust, and her eyes shut despite the boy’s fingers pressing on her face. Twigging forbade bone breaking, but she felt certain her legs were nearly destroyed. Fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth strikes landed, filling her nerves with a sense of strangulation, but she did not cry, she did not scream, she did not beg.
“Bitch is shaking,” Ilana announced proudly with a mad smile on her face.
The crowd continued to chant, “More! More! More feet!”
Ilana swung again with full bodily force, but stopped short of Farisa’s agonized skin, delivering no more bluster than a breeze, but it felt like fire. The crowd roared; it emitted giddy sounds like a twisted trumpet. Farisa, as her vision had fully cleared, could see all the faces—two of Ilana’s current boyfriends, and a couple of her exes, and three of the richest girls in the college, and... Erysi.
The world turned gray when the next blow landed. A black hand of panic covered Farisa’s face and squeezed her head and she could not help herself from crying out.
“Ilana, stop!”
#
Ilana’s arms were worn out, but she had achieved the first level of success. So-called dead blows didn’t count; the victim’s begging was the meat of this thing—and the crowd had heard it.
Farisa’s eyes were now closed.
One of the girls, the one who used to do Ilana’s homework, asked, “Is she dead?”
“Of course not.” Ilana lifted Farisa’s head. She had read enough about twigging to know that its victims fainted from pain sometimes, but woke up in a minute or two. Farisa’s feet were bright red and the skin had broken in a couple places. “She’ll be back with us. She has nowhere to go”
Twigging, in order to keep the spectacle fit for polite society, had five rules. The first was against intentional bone-breaking: only light force could be used on the shins, ribcage, and hands. The second forbade damage to the neck or head, including strangulation. The third proscribed cutting weapons of all kinds—no razors, no knives, nothing sharper than fingernails. The fourth rule was that nothing could go in a hole. The fifth, and the hardest one to follow, for there was uncertainty in it, was that the victim could not die in the stocks—if she did so afterward, it was no more than an unfortunate accident for which the victim’s constitutional weakness was solely at fault, but if the death happened in public, the twigger could miss out on important invitations for months or even years.
“Wake her up!” shouted a whiny male voice.
Ilana ignored the command; the ingrate’s father was barely a Z-4.
She stretched her arms. She was no longer the athlete she had been; her face was hot and she was winded. She had to slow herself down; if these people saw her huffing or coughing, it would ruin the effect.
I want to do so much more, but I can’t be seen sweating.
The incapacitated mage’s eyes opened.
“She’s awake,” Ilana said. “I’m sawwy, Fawissa.” Ilana licked her victim’s bare heel, then the inside of her arch. “I’m sawwy I tweated your widdle feetsies so bad.” Her tongue traced the ball of Farisa’s foot, then the toes, those fragile toes that tasted like power; she sucked and nibbled and licked. This feeling of absolute dominance was the essence of life. She could start chewing and grind these tiny bones up. No one would know she had broken a rule in doing so. She could make sure Farisa never walked again. She could eat any inch of skin or all of it. She could make a bleeding red mess of Farisa’s femininity, so long as she did not break the fourth rule and go inside. Perhaps she would do all of these things.
She grabbed the twigging cane, having set it aside, and struck another blow. Farisa winced. She struck again. The victim shook. She struck again, to no response. The crowd, too, seemed to be losing interest. They had heard so little from the woman being beaten, they were now looking at each other, wondering if the event had already ended or would take an altogether different turn.
Scream, Farisa! What, are you done already, you cunt eater bitch? How dare you. How fucking dare you. This is my show. You will scream. If you faint I will wake you up and if you die, you tarsha twat, I will climb down into hell to bring you out because tonight you are mine because this is my fucking show and how fucking, how fucking dare, how fucking fucking fucking—
Ilana turned to face the crowd. She smiled. She made eye contact with each of the nineteen others in attendance.
“Twigging has five rules,” she said. “But we are Easthorns.” She drew a knife. "If we do not break a rule now and then, who are we?”
The crowd responded with adoration. “Yes, Ilana! Make her bleed! Bleed, bleed, bleed!”
A caning produced a spray of blood, but these people were the best of all society—they were worth more than a few airborne red drops. They deserved battlefield quantities of blood, the thick dumping kind you get when someone actually dies.
The dutiful entertainer dug her blade into Farisa’s left heel. Blood poured. It got on Ilana’s face and she licked it off. Farisa was still alive after all; she screamed, she convulsed, she begged for her life. “Just let me go! I won’t tell anyone!” I know you won’t, you fat cunt eater bitch. She reared her dagger back—
“Erysi?”
The bonfire was casting off more smoke, and an odd floral scent had filled the woods. Erysi had grabbed Ilana’s knife hand and was now between the two women.
“Are you insane? I almost killed you. Get out of the fucking way.”
Erysi’s eyes twisted in fear and pain as if she, not Farisa, were the one being tortured.
Ilana said, “Sweetheart, I would never do this to you. Never, ever. People like us don’t end up in twigging stocks. But right now, what I need you to do is go back and—”
Possessed by something dark and foreign, Erysi struck Ilana in the chest with far more force than a girl of her size ought to have, then threw her to the ground.
#
The truth had come back into her at the worst time; in Qaelet’s courtroom, Farisa’s body slumped, pulling the restraints on her legs.
The judge looked at her, as if expecting a response.
The prosecutor could not hide his glee. “We have established a motive for the killings. Twenty students had come to see Farisa’s suffering; those twenty are the ones who died in Farisa’s Fire. Isn’t that right, Erysi?”
“I’m sorry, Farisa—”
Cunt, you don’t get to betray me a second time.
“Yes, it is true,” Farisa said. “My escape did involve a fire. I have caused twenty deaths, and I am glad to have done it.”
#
Mazie’s eyelids opened to a blur.
No one had set a tent. No one had lit a fire. Desert ground pressed her back and arms, and previous movement against it had left scratches on her neck and shoulders. Her muscles were sore and her eyes stung, but her mind had collected now with such presence, it seemed she had slept a full night, though it had likely been no more than three or four hours. She had enough mental acuity, at least, to reject the visions and noises that had perturbed her during the long march before.
The others were awake. Saito said, “I fear I may become a liability in Malisse.”
Claes stood up and looked south. “How is that?”
“I believe I lived there in a past life. The people there might remember me.”
Andor, who was whittling a bamboo stalk, stopped to reconsider what he had heard. Eric was drinking from a waning canteen. They swung immediately into motion, knowing that idleness would stiffen their muscles and waste time they might not have.
Piles of stony rubble, about one every half mile, suggested buildings that had eroded long before living memory. Not even the wind could tell now what their original purposes had been. Uneven stone fences could be seen in the distance, but little could be said about what they had been erected to defend, or what against
Eric, three miles or so into the morning’s march, voiced a question nobody wanted to ask. “If Saito’s right about Malisse being haunted, what do we do if it has turned Farisa mad?”
Andor said, “I have a solution for that.”
Claes said, “What’s that?”
“I have a blowgun and darts. It’ll barely deliver enough force to break the skin, which is good, because we don't want to harm her.”
“Darts?”
“They’ll be dipped in blackrue oil, which will neutralize any—”
Claes said, “I’m not sure if—”
Eric said, “Is that safe?”
“Andor.” Saito stopped. “Blackrue pollen is bad enough, but if the oil is ingested—or injected—its effects can be much more severe.”
“Tell me.”
“In the first exposure, it’s a paralytic agent—unpleasant, but harmless on its own. The problem is that it tends to have a reversed immunity, like dengue fever or shingles, so the second time it gets into the bloodstream, the body will overreact and it’s...”
They had all stopped walking. Mazie looked up at a sky that was not moving but seemed to spin.
“What?”
“Lethal,” Saito said.
Who said what, in the conversation that followed, has been lost in all memory.
“It will be an absolute last resort, then.”
There was walking around in a circle. “If she’s mad, truly mad, by the time we get to her, she’s a danger to herself and all of us.”
“I wish I knew of another defense against magic.”
“I don’t think there is one.”
“You said it’s only the second injection that is fatal? If she had been injected before—”
“It’s excruciating. She would know. She would remember.”
“It hasn’t happened out here, and before she joined us, she was in—”
“Cait Forest, one of the safest places in the world.”
“It’s reasonable, then, to say she hasn’t been exposed.”
They kept walking. Mazie’s joints and feet hurt with every step. The sky, strangely enough, did not seem expansive in this country, but was inordinately long, and Eric was the first to spot the stain upon it.
He said, “That looks like...”
Mazie, forgetting her exhaustion, climbed a boulder and looked due south through the spyglass. Despite having only one hand to steady the lenses, she could see the smudge’s source, a den of stone walls that had not occurred by natural chance.
Saito said, “Is that a forest fire?”
Mazie said, “It isn’t. There are no trees. That’s Malisse, and whatever it is or was, it’s burning.”