6.

 

Heast wanted to speak to her. Before she had left her house, before she had parted ways with the healer, and in an attempt to divert the conversation away from Zaifyr, Ayae had asked Reila who the captain had sent to her, though she knew the answer. Deep in her stomach, she knew it. “It was a mistake,” the elderly woman said. “Heast makes them rarely, and this one was a man’s mistake. Do not hold it against him.”

She replayed the words as she approached Illaan, two blocks from her house.

He sat behind a wooden table in the middle of a cobbled road, surrounded by ration booklets and boxes of canned and dried food. He had not shaved since she had last seen him, but the stubble on his jaw did not lend him the air of a veteran soldier. Rather, she thought him the parody of one. He was too tall, his facial features too neat. Ayae had always thought of him as a man with an air of culture about him, a soldier who did not draw his sword but fought with laws and politics and economics. But seeing him now, she realized that the opposite was true: that Illaan did not fight with knowledge or intelligence, but with fear and with force.

She had always thought well of him, from the first time she had met him, in Mireea’s large, sprawling Saturday market. She had been standing with Faise, listening to her friend haggle over a brown- and gold-flecked dress. Lost in people watching, Ayae saw Illaan emerge onto the narrow path that weaved between the stalls, but it was not until he greeted the merchant by name and, with a few words, cut in half the price Faise had been bargaining over that she gave him more attention than she had anyone else. Later, he told her that he had made up the price with the merchant, had used it only to meet her.

He knew everything and everyone within Mireea and within months his knowledge of her was just as complete. He knew not to ask about the memories of her parents, about if she had seen the Innocent, about the orphanage or Samuel Orlan; but he knew how to spell her name, how to pronounce it and how to make her laugh. It was his own background that taught him that: he was the third son from a family of wine merchants in Yeflam, the son whose father had purchased him a commission in the trade capital of the world on his sixteenth birthday, to educate him and prepare him a place in the family business a decade later.

He saw her now, as she approached his table, but did not rise. He held her gaze, then turned to the two guards behind him, the first tall and young, the second older, solid, gray going to fat. She did not hear his words, but they were about her. The latter man shook his head. To that, Illaan said, “You’ll do as I say.”

“He’ll do what?” she asked.

He did not turn.

“I don’t want to fight, Illaan.” The words surprised her, the ease of them suggesting a truth. “I was told you were meant to find me.”

He kept his back to her.

Finally, the older guard said, “Sergeant, the girl—”

“You’re wrong, Corporal. She’s not a girl.”

“Look at me when you say that,” Ayae said.

“She is cursed.” He turned and, for a moment, she did not recognize the man before her. But just for a moment. “And we need not help those who defy the natural laws of the world.”

“I didn’t know that you had begun defining what was natural and what was not.”

“The world is not unknown to me.”

Despite herself, she laughed.

He spat.

Her hand, when she lifted it to her face, when her index finger caught the spittle that ran down her cheek, was warm.

“Sergeant—”

“I am really,” Illaan said in a quiet, controlled voice, “really not interested in what you have to say, Corporal. Look into her eyes. Look and you will see what she is.”

“Can I do the same for you, Sergeant?”

The voice came from a newcomer. A woman stepped past Ayae, tall, strikingly pale with short black hair. She wore a mix of boiled leather and chain mail, the dye a faded black. At her side she wore a long sword, the scabbard one of simple, aged leather. Behind her came two men, both of a similar age to the corporal, but where he had begun to run to fat, these men, twice his size, were as much muscle and graying beard as they were leather and chain. Over their backs they held large weapons, the one on the left a huge two-handed sword, the one on the right an equally large axe.

“It is amazing what comes out of the son of a Traders Union official from Yeflam,” she continued. “You would almost think that fear had become a political currency to be used against a ruling class.”

“This is none of your concern, Meina,” Illaan growled. “It’s no concern to any mercenary.”

“I outrank you considerably, Sergeant,” the woman said. “You would do well to remember that when addressing me.”

He spat on the ground.

Ayae’s flat palm connected with his chest.

Illaan hit the wall behind him.

The mercenary crossed to where Illaan lay and crouched over the smoldering remains of his leather chest piece. The imprint of Ayae’s palm was deeply burned into the armor. Meeting her gaze, the tall woman said, “I think I like you.”

Beneath her, Illaan groaned. Meina’s hand slapped his bruised chest. “I would stay down, if I were you, Sergeant,” she said pleasantly. “In fact, I wouldn’t get up until myself and your girl are gone. Even then I might consider staying down. I can only imagine what your captain will say after he hears about this.”