By unspoken agreement, we isolated ourselves from the party. The village was sitting, noshing on freshly baked pies and newly slaughtered chickens with their picnic blankets the floor of the meeting hall—an enormous one-room log cabin with a high ceiling and rough, dug in log floors. We stood. Mirjam siddled herself back against the wall towards the back of the room by the shackers—the poorer families didn’t have more for picnicking than rice and fish. I followed her example, scanning the crowd of families whose clothing was all patches.
No one told them to sit towards the back of the room when they left their fields. They just did. For such a small village, we had a disproportionate resistance to seeing shackers advance. People gave Mirjam shit for letting their children take food home from the garden. Yin, who could do no wrong because she was a Wainwyre, was an angel for taking the time to teach the little ones they wouldn’t let into school once or twice a week in the evenings—but I was a pariah for helping her. Ru’our Kholtan would not hire them. It was rare for a shacker boy to land an apprenticeship, rarer still for a shacker woman to land a job outside the fields.
Elvias, the student Aldin beat over his shirt clasp, was among their ranks, sitting on the patched blankets. He had dark, earth colored hair, freckles, and stood just a hair smaller than Ordin. He was part of a family of eight—four younger brothers, his little sister Yanja, his mother, Olivine, holding the baby. No father. Olivine was one of the village’s laundry women, too frail to work the rice paddies. But they had another name for her when she wasn’t around. Whore. If someone had paid her, I understood it. There was no salary for being a warrior student, gatekeeping training to the wealthy and the foundlings that lived on the benevolence of the council. Olivine had a family to feed. And in spite of being worn thin by poverty, she had high cheekbones, smooth skin, and wide-set eyes. So she made sacrifices.
Elvias glared at me like I should mind my own business, but Yanja waved to me and adjusted an imaginary looking glass. I smirked. It was a running joke with the children that I had an invisible telescope. What really had was long distance vision, a penchant for high ground, and willingness to put up with the children’s screaming, chaotic fits of imagination in the garden behind the Medicine Lodge on Saturdays. Yanja giggled and snuggled closer to Elvias, who put an arm around her without looking enthused about it, reluctantly brothering. Hell knows what that family went through, but a pang of envy still shot through me.
Ru’our Kholtan’s shoulders were straight and his head was high, his auburn hair pulled back and shining. He swept into the hall from the back entrance, the crowd parting for him to take his place with the council of elders on the stand at the front of the room.
I looked for Yinjane Wainwyre in the audience right in front of him. She had a shacker girl cuddled up on her lap and was already looking back towards the two of us. I caught her eyes, her gaze paralleling my confusion, asking the same question, Do you know what’s going on here? Her confusion meant that she, too, knew something was wrong—but like me, she didn’t know what. We both looked away. We couldn’t talk now.
Kholtan bowed deeply to the crowd, and the presentation began with thunderous applause, “Kholtan! Elder Kholtan!” The wares flowed into the room, on the dirty, calloused, wet bare feet of serving boys as they swiftly shuffled in intricate pieces of furniture, porcelain dishes and small, expensive barrels of preserved fruits. They herded live pigs and goats from the back of the room to the front, to be presented to the council in their high chairs on the platform.
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And then the boys began to circle back and lead in horses in long lines, in the back of the building, out the front entrance behind the elders. There were at least fifty. The crowd was pointing, gasping, their hands over their mouths, their hands were clasped on the arms of their friends and their fingers were pointing at the stallions. I spotted one woman weeping, maybe for joy at the sight of so many animals together, so much prosperity.
But I was confused. We couldn’t fit them all in the stables just outside the village, there wasn’t enough space. Had he brought them here to show them off, before he went to trade them at Cholvekesta, or another trading post? This village wasn’t on dry ground, it wasn’t as if we could use them to carry things within our streets—we had canals. Money in itself meant nothing, a wood cup worked as well as a platinum one when half the village could only afford water to fill it. What’s the price of so many horses? Why?
A serving boy, maybe half my age and dressed in a clean, pressed jacket and tunic entered at the back of the meeting hall and approached with one jade-handled sword, sheathed in pale green scabbard in his hands and balanced in his hands—well balanced, well-crafted.
It was nothing to twist hair about, but my stomach sunk, a slow wave of intuition rolling into my system.
Dozens of less elaborate blades came, being carried in by the line of boys. Each servant was from good family and making good money in Kholtan’s employ, filing in and displaying the weapons, carefully untying them from their muslins and laying them in the carts and on the crates before the elder’s chairs for all to see, sliding them out of their sheaths to reveal the bare glint of metal. Broadswords, lances, spears, knives, maces and clubs. Axes. Armor. Shields. Dozens of bows and hundreds of arrows, all steel-tipped. The crowd gasped and murmured. Now there was nervous tension. Now their was excitement. I saw Elvias’s eyes go keen, following the steel.
“This is the latest technology and finest workmanship from the border towns.” Ru’our drew the jade-handled sword from its scabbard to show a dark, matte steel with a razor-edged glint. I hadn’t seen craftsmanship like that in a long time. The crowd gasped and sighed. Objectively, it was beautiful. He twirled it lightly, demonstrating the balance and ease of movement, and flashed the sword around through several sequences with Kimell, an apprentice who was just about to be inducted as a warrior. They pretended to block and defend—they were out of measure, never truly in striking range of each other. Only close enough to touch blades. Because they knew real blades were dangerous.
The villagers sat on their picnic blankets and applauded at the show.
“Second only to a firearm, and we can’t have those here, can we?” He jested, and his audience laughed, as if Xavian firearm regulations were something to be laughed at. They slaughtered entire towns for one of the residents having so much as a low-caliber pistol.
“Ladies and gentlemen, our military is now the most formidable in the entire northern territory. Congratulations, you are now living in the most powerful village within sixty miles.” The eyes of the people—little ones through adults, grew wide and huge. The six-year-olds with their imported, factory-made sweets that he’d handed out dying their mouths bright red and blue, the students and apprentices with their hands twitching with hunger.
There was a sweeping, spiraling feeling in my body. Vertigo. The feeling you got when you were falling. I could feel Mirjam’s gaze from my left, but I kept my eyes glued ahead in a straight stare.
I have to get out of here.