CHAPTER ELEVEN

In the Shadow of the Dust Cloud

Leta had always known her anger to be a hot thing—so full of wrath and ire that she imagined no one could touch her, lest they be burned. But the rage inside her now was cold. Like someone had frozen all of her emotions so she didn’t explode. She felt like a bomb trapped in amber, with the outer shell just beginning to split.

But her path forward had become simple, if not easy. The walk out of The Sourlands and back through the forest was faster with a clear destination in mind. Her stomach roiled too much to keep food down, and her mind buzzed too loud to be still, so she stopped little to eat and sleep, let alone to bathe.

She must have been quite a sight when she showed up to The Night Before dressed as Umara’s most down-on-her-luck nun, but she didn’t care. All she cared about now was getting answers—and revenge.

Leta arrived in the middle of supper hour. The sun was setting outside, and the moons were on the rise; she could just see Saipley’s faint outline crest on the horizon, and Lebelle would be shortly behind her sister. There was no one in front of the door to the inn, and she hoped she had made it back in time. Her thoughts on the walk here were so constant and jumbled, she had difficulty making room for things like the passing of the days. The only thoughts she could make out clearly—when she let herself—were of her profound grief and white-hot anger.

Leta Tallum, dressed in a nun’s habit so dirty it was beginning to look like nothing more than rags, stood before The Night Before and took a deep breath. The piece of fabric smelled heavily of the road and her tears—dust, ash, and salt. No one was around her, so she pulled it down and tried again. Her intentional breaths began to move her back into the present—back into linear time, rather than the series of sharp-edged flashes of moments she had been living in.

The scene around her was unfamiliar. Leta often felt like she’d lived lifetimes, but they were lived in extremes—royal wealth and elegance, then terrifying squalor. Here stood a town. The roads were mostly packed dirt, and the buildings lining the street were built for a person’s lifetime rather than for generations: they were wooden edifices hammered together with signs here and there proclaiming the name of the establishments. The doors to The Night Before swung open, then swung shut behind her on hinges that let the door wobble back and forth in its frame.

Leta didn’t know what to expect when she entered the room. Some looked up to see who had entered, but most didn’t bother. And half of those who looked up to see her quickly averted their gaze. She supposed they didn’t want a lecture or to pick up her tab. The room was of little note—it was a bit dark and dirty but not too crowded or loud.

“Can I help you, sister?” A female voice spoke from the side, and Leta had to turn her head to see past her robes. A sturdy woman was holding a tray full of drinks and a few plates of food in one hand, the other resting on her hip.

Leta was going to have to speak. In some ways, it had been days since she’d spoken; in other ways, it had been lifetimes. She cleared her throat and spoke, re-entering the land of people and time. “I believe two men are expecting me.”

The woman frowned, thinking, then said, “I think I know who yer looking for. They didn’t say you were a nun, though. They’re in the back room. I’ll walk with you, sister.”

It seemed like too much trouble to argue, so she let herself be led into a back room, which was smaller than the main room and held only four tables and a half dozen people. Indeed, Kiran and Clark sat at the farthest table, talking in low tones over watered-down ale.

“Thank you,” Leta said to the woman, who walked away with only a nod of her head, off to serve better-paying customers.

Leta walked over to the two men, wishing she’d bathed. She focused on Kiran, who was sitting facing her. As she neared, she saw confusion on his face, then recognition. He stood up so quickly that the chair made a harsh squeal against the floor. The others in the room gave him a quick glance, probably looking to see if there would be a fight (nothing like free entertainment) but soon went back to their business as they saw a nun standing opposite Kiran.

By now, Clark had also recognized Leta, but he remained seated and did not smile. Leta sat down with her back to the crowd and pulled down her face covering.

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She still felt too far removed from herself to recognize her emotions, but some must have shown on her face. “You’ve heard,” said Clark, his mouth pulling into a straight line.

“No,” said Leta. “I saw it myself.”

“Asha wept,” cursed Kiran under his breath, but Clark only nodded.

“I’m very sorry, Leta. I wish there were something we could have done.”

“Did you know?” asked Leta. “Did you know this would happen?” Her voice was cold, and her jaw was so tense that the words nearly snapped in two as she said them.

“No,” said Kiran, a bit too loudly. “We thought the crown would focus on you, on catching you. We worried, of course, that they would torture you or lock you away. But this…we could never have imagined.”

Kiran’s eyes were soft, and the way he looked at her made her want to cry. But now was not the time. Now was the time for action, anger, and vengeance. Later, she would mourn. Or maybe she would just join the others, but not before her business was done.

“You told me you could teach me.” Leta avoided being too specific in a room with others in it.

Kiran also kept his cards close to his chest. “Yes,” he said. “But this is bigger than all that’s happened. There is much more to learn and to know than we’ve spoken about so far.”

Leta nodded, but she didn’t care. There were precious few people who had helped her or loved her in her lifetime, and now they were all dead. The others could rot for all she cared, but she would first root out those who wronged her and have her vengeance. If she had to tell a few lies along the way, so be it.

* * *

They woke before first light, and Leta found herself again astride a horse in front of Kiran. She knew her robes must reek—they were musty even before she drug them through the forest and The Sourlands. But Kiran said nothing of it. She got this strange feeling with Kiran, like he constantly wanted to say more than he did. Since their palaver in the wayfare, he was terse and spoke only of necessities—and never used her name, not even when no one was around. It was in this way that they passed in near silence across the various towns and villages of Umara. The journey took nearly a week. Some nights, they would camp in a grove of trees, some they would risk paying for an inn.

The general silence and routine, as well as the motion of the horse underfoot, soothed something in Leta. Her anger was still there, but it began incorporating itself into her instead of being a sharp spur that constantly drew her attention. It freed her mind to think of the future now that it had escaped the loop of the past. Leta didn’t know where they were going; Clark and Kiran didn’t tell her, and she didn’t ask. It was thus a surprise when they pulled up in the Ashbarrens.

The Ashbarrens got their name shortly after the Cattoleiri left Umara, an event usually known as the “Descension.” When the Cattoleiri built their castles, most were built within rings of enchanted glass. But one, the largest, and Wadu’s own, was not. Instead, it was built at the top of a great mesa in the center of the capital city of Basti.

Leta had heard much of the Ashbarrens: in the princess part of her mind, they were the dark half of a fairy tale. The Ashbarrens were where the witch would banish the beautiful princess to punish her. She knew in the logical part of her mind that she’d seen and dealt with worse, but it still gave her a chill to approach them. She focused her attention on the Ashbarrens so she wouldn’t think of what lay at their center, within the ring of dust and ash: The Aria.

Before The Aria was Leta’s castle home, it was the seat of Cattoleiri power. It was built high from the stones and wind, with towering turrets and winding stairs. The stairs no longer spun of their own accord, and the windows did not shine like the first rays of morning, as it was once said. However, the crown was able to fund the upkeep of the castle, and it was an impressive place for a little girl to grow up in.

Unfortunately, the same could not be said for the Ashbarrens. When the Cattoleiri lived, the outskirts of The Basti had been stripped of their stones to create the Aria. It created a large depressed ring around the city. This ring was fitted with pipes that watered the dry lands to support the grass to feed the livestock and create farmlands to feed the people of The Basti. However, once the Cattoleiri left, the pipes no longer worked, the grasses dried, the livestock died, and the ash that now came from everywhere collected in the basin surrounding the city. It was where no one went except for the most desperate. They would go there and be reborn in the ash.

There were several bridges Leta could see spanning the Ashbarrens. They were each about a dozen meters across, reinforced and patched in several places. But Kiran didn’t head for any of the bridges.

“Kiran, we’re too close,” Leta said in his ear. “They’ll know me here.”

“Just keep your head down. We’re not too far now.”

They stabled their horses at a building near the cliff below, and Clark paid the stable hand with a silver stay. He seemed to know the two men and paid little attention to Leta.

Leta followed Clark and Kiran silently towards the Ashbarrens, the sounds of reluctant life emerging from down below. Kiran sat at the cliff’s edge, in front of a dozen-foot drop to the ground, then seemed to turn and climb down the dirt wall. Leta leaned out and looked more closely: rungs had been dug into the side of the wall, allowing people to enter and leave the Ashbarrens. She followed behind, her foot getting stuck in her robes once or twice. Leta prayed that the Ashbarrens would swallow her whole and that she could be hidden and changed and reborn in the ash, and the Ashbarrens obliged.