The first night of the riot was the hardest. Temoc lay awake in bed with Mina beside him, also awake, neither speaking. Sun set over the camp, and for the first time in weeks he was not there to celebrate it. Hungry gods murmured in his skull. They slept, though restless. He did not.
He rose, and walked the halls in boxer shorts. No lanterns lit his way, only the soft glow of streetlights through the windows. Eleven years ago they’d moved to these few rooms—small compared to the palatial chambers of his far-gone youth, but after his drunken wandering days the house seemed a paradise. At first he’d resisted moving into slave’s quarters, but he grew to love the Skittersill as he grew to know its people: hard honest folk oppressed by crooks.
He sat on an iron chair outside. Metal chilled his back and legs. The clouds boiled and writhed like crowds mashing against barricades. To the northwest, they glowed red—lit by Chakal Square fires?
The door opened. She bent to kiss his temple. “I love you.” Meaning: I’m glad you came home.
“I love you, too.” Meaning: I’m not sure.
“You did the right thing.”
“I know.”
“You could go. If you wanted. I can—” She broke off with a sudden ragged breath. “I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to say that just because I want to hear it.”
“Go back, then. Throw yourself into that—whatever that is.”
“I want to be here, with you.”
“Don’t lie.”
He stood and faced her, a single movement faster than he’d meant. His heart beat racehorse fast, as if he’d sprinted a mile. “I’m not lying.”
“If you think I’m holding you back, I can deal with that. But I need you to be honest with me.”
“I left good people there.” He lowered his voice. Don’t wake the neighbors, they might think there was something wrong. Hilarious. Absurd. He did not laugh. “But I can’t be in the movement and out of it at once, you understand? If I went back, I’d live and die with them.”
“Take us with you,” she said, but he heard the slight catch before “us.”
“You could survive it. Caleb? There are enough children stuck in this thing already. And if I leave you both alone the King in Red will take you hostage, or worse. So on the one hand I have my people, and on the other my wife, my son who I never taught to fight because I thought, in this modern age, he did not need to know. And … I love you. I want to be here.” He meant to set his hand on the table, but misjudged his own strength and struck it instead. “I wish there were two of me. I wish there were a million. And then the others would go right the wrongs of the world, and I would stay. I promised to stand beside you. I will not break that vow.”
The city could be so quiet after dark. Wind blew over tile roofs and brushed vine against vine. A carriage passed outside their house. Her nightdress shifted against her legs. “I couldn’t handle a million husbands. One is my limit. So don’t go getting any ideas.”
He looked down, saw himself, laughed. “I am not wise enough to make these choices. Choosing leaves a wound, and the wound scabs. When I wonder if I’ve made the right choice, I peel back the scab to look.” He mimed ripping open a scar on the inside of his forearm, and she made a twisted face. “When I was Caleb’s age, the priests marked me to bear the burdens of the gods. I expected to fight demons from beyond the sky. I should not need so much strength to refrain from fighting.”
“This isn’t a refrain.”
“No,” he said. “I suppose not.”
“Come to bed.”
“I won’t sleep.”
“Me neither. But at least we won’t sleep together.”
* * *
The next morning he had to walk two miles before he found a stocked grocery store. The market was mobbed but the streets were almost empty. Unnerving. Dresediel Lex was a city of wide avenues. Even the Skittersill, labyrinthine by comparison to other districts, sported streets any other city would call broad. Most days traffic glutted these, but this was not most days. Streetsweeper zombies shuffled along, their occupation gone: no excrement to clean, no dust to remove.
Temoc stopped outside his house to scan the Times he’d bought with the groceries. The front page was an etching of Chakal Square. The artist drew architectural features in painstaking detail but rendered humans as a single featureless mass. Temoc grunted when he read the headline: “Skittersill Rising.” It suggested a war between the people of the Skittersill and of Dresediel Lex, as if these people were not the same; it implicated everyone in the Skittersill in the Chakal Square violence. Perhaps he should find the journalist, correct him. But he, Temoc, did not speak for the movement anymore. He was not their master, not even their priest. Just a private citizen reading the news.
The Times devoted more space to the riots than they ever had to the peaceful movement. Of course. Violence sold. No mention of Tan Batac, just “a man injured in the initial outburst.” Nothing about an assassin. The story focused on the mother and her bloody child, and the Warden’s thrown rock. Even there, the Times shied from the truth. “In the confusion.” “Self-defense.”
“It’s bad to read on the sidewalk,” Elayne Kevarian said. “Someone might run into you.”
He did not jump. She stood before him, dressed in charcoal gray, hands in pockets. He had not heard her approach. “I wondered if you would come.”
“I wondered if you would leave the Square. Happy surprises for us both.”
“Happy,” he echoed.
“Go to the King in Red, Temoc. Stop this.”
“I am not sure,” he said, “that we are talking about the same King in Red. The … man … I saw yesterday did not want to stop the fighting.”
“He’ll listen if you sue for peace.”
“Beg, you mean. And if I succeed, what then? Return to Chakal Square to announce that though I abandoned them, I have dealt on their behalf?”
“If you make a good deal, they will honor it.”
“Any bargain I strike would be a coward’s compromise.”
“The King in Red wants to win,” she said. “Give him a personal victory over you, and you might be surprised how much he’ll surrender in return.”
“I will not show him that force will make me bend. I will not show my people that we should stand up for ourselves only until a sword is drawn.”
“There’s no shame in peace,” she said.
“There’s no shame in general peace. Each specific peace holds its own.” He dropped the newspaper in a trash can. “I want to help, Elayne. I wanted to fight, but I left. I denied the King in Red a target. For that, my fathers turn their faces from me. I can bear their disappointment. But I will not kneel to the man who killed my gods.”
“You’ll let Chel and the Kemals and everyone in that square suffer for your pride.”
“They made their decisions. I made mine. I survived. That was what you asked of me.”
“Fine,” she said.
“I have to go.” He lifted his grocery bag. “Before the meat spoils.”
“Take care of yourself, Temoc. And of them.”
“I will.” He turned from her, and walked inside to his family. She left in a shimmer of insect wings.
They did no work that day. They kept windows closed. Mina set her notes and books aside. They played go fish, and gin rummy, and xaltoc, and a variant on Fight-the-Landlord, which Mina won. Temoc asked Caleb about school, and Caleb told stories of his classmates, and some of the stories were true. At two in the afternoon, their windows rattled and water rippled in their glasses. Caleb ran outside, and Temoc and Mina followed him. Couatl flew west overhead in V formation. Talons glinted in the sun. Temoc’s grip tightened on Caleb’s arm. He did not notice until the boy squirmed and he let him go.
Smoke stained the western sky.
They waited. After a while, they made dinner.
All along, in Temoc’s mind, the city burned.