3.

 

Outside the Spine’s Keep, the dark, cobbled streets of Mireea led Ayae into narrow alleys and to the cracked paving stones around the recently constructed crude walls.

Lady Wagan had been most understanding after Ayae told her no. The sympathy in her voice had come as a surprise, just as the ease in which she had said it: Ayae had expected the thread of steel in her tone to harden, for her request to become a command, one that she could argue against. She had been prepared for a fight—had been preparing for a fight since Fo and Bau—and without it, she had risen from the chair awkwardly and left. She fumbled with the door as she pulled it closed and her frustration at herself, and her expected response, was such that, by the time she had walked through the corridors and emerged at the front of the Keep, she had decided to visit the witch, Olcea.

Olcea was one of a dozen witches who lived and worked in Mireea, but was the only one of them that Ayae knew, personally. Faise had introduced her six years ago, when the two had been looking for work. Both she and Faise had been living in the orphanage at the time, aware that they could not continue to do so much longer: they were already old girls, girls whose public schooling was soon to end, and there were always new girls arriving, always a need for their beds. Neither Faise nor Ayae had much of an idea about their future, but what they did know was that they were growing tired of the long dorm that was their home, the narrow beds and slivers of personal space they shared with close to fifty others, and so they had begun what other girls (and, on another floor, boys) had begun: they searched for a way out.

The options available to them were limited, but it was Faise who found a solution first, with a job offer from the witch.

“It’s not an apprenticeship,” she explained, later. The two sat out the back of the orphanage, staring at the tall, dark form of it from one of the long tables that was kept for lunches and classes. The lamps inside the building had been lit and it looked as if dozens of eyes were watching them. “She wants me to finish the schooling here and do tasks for her. There’s an older girl, a real apprentice, who is leaving and I’m going to do some of her work. Like, go to the markets, bring her groceries, keep the house clean. Maybe I’ll learn some then, but who knows. She mostly wants me to travel to Yeflam. It’s not great work—” neither Faise nor Ayae could define great work yet “—but it pays well enough.”

Well enough that once Ayae began accompanying her down to Yeflam, they could rent a two-bedroom apartment.

Until Ayae became Samuel Orlan’s apprentice, Olcea had been the financial salvation of the two girls, a middle-aged woman moving into old age: neither Faise nor Ayae had ever known skin darker than hers. She spoke softly, a private woman who kept the palms of her hands wrapped to hide the pink skin there, as if years of work with blood and bone had worn away the pigment. On her more expansive days, Olcea told them stories of her youth, telling them that she had been born on the coast of Tinalan. She had been driven out in her mid-twenties by a series of race wars that had come from the heart of the Marble Palaces. She had lost both her children there, killed by a soldier whose head she kept in a jar at the back of her house—a head she called Hien—and on more than one occasion, as the girls finished up for the night, or arrived early, they would overhear Olcea talking to it, as if they were old friends. She was a strange woman, a witch who seemed to know more than she let on, who lived in a ramshackle house that always needed work, and who had a steady stream of girls from the orphanage to do that. She hired girls to fix the roof and tidy the garden, girls to run errands and write notes for her, a steady stream of orphans on a sliding scale of pay, learning, Ayae suspected, skills for once they were older.

According to Faise—who spent more time at the shop than Ayae—most of Olcea’s customers were women, also. They came for a variety of reasons, and the two would discuss the stranger ones as they rode the witch’s wagon down to Yeflam, the one-month round trip ample time to cover a range of topics. “She has had a lot mercenaries recently,” Faise said, on one trip. “Some of them are young, some not, but they’re all armed. Guards, swordswomen, soldiers: they have a lot of cuts and scars they have her attend to. Though the other day, one of them brought in a copy of one of those cheap mercenary novels for her and told her she was in it.”

“Was she?”

Faise grinned. “For a chapter. She said if she could do half of what it said, she’d be a queen.”

For the most part, the journeys between Yeflam and Mireea were without incident. On their first trip Olcea had begun a ritual she kept for every trip—a conversation that was a list of the dangers she knew—to ensure that they slept in the back of the wagon when on the road. After that first time, however, she need not have worried: four nights out of Mireea, Faise had pulled the wagon off the side of the road and the two had crawled into the back, tired and sore from the days of riding. Ayae had been unable to fall asleep immediately and she had lain awake, staring up at the night sky instead. Outside the city, the stars seemed so bright, so endless and, with the thought in her mind, she had stared up, lost in them until she heard a crack, followed by the grunt of a man and the sniff of an animal.

Rising, she saw not a single man, but half a dozen men. They emerged from the trees around her, gray mongrels leading the way, their noses pressed to the ground, tails leveled like lances behind.

She was unarmed, just as Faise was, and her hand tightened around her friend’s arm, partly in fear, partly to warn her.

The dogs clearly had the scent of something, and for a second, Ayae had feared that it was either her, Faise, or the hulking, black ox Olcea owned; but the beast itself had made no move at the sight of the men or the animals and, as the men and dogs walked around and past it continuing down the road, it became clear that they could not see the animal, nor the two girls sitting in the back. She held her breath, and saw that Faise had done the same, and the minute that the six men stood around the cart dragged out for a year of both their young lives, for the rest of their youth passing at such speed and potential horror that, should they not have moved away and crossed the road when they did, Ayae was not sure what she would have done.

“The girl I replaced,” Faise whispered, after the men had disappeared into the dark woods on the other side of the road. “She said Olcea paints this wagon in blood once a year.”

The same wagon Ayae saw now, the same wagon attached to the same hulking black ox, the same wagon and ox outside Olcea’s shop, half filled with furniture.