61

It was rare for Jorge to visit the Viajero Quarter. Frankly, it had always made him a little uncomfortable. The Viajero all had such an ease about them. Such a casual warmth. Just as with the Izmorozians, he was keenly aware that there was a distance between the Viajero and himself that perhaps no effort on his part could ever hope to bridge. The difference was, these were supposed to be his people.

Yet even though the Viajero Quarter reminded him of just how unlike most of his countrymen he was, he was here anyway. Maria was worried about Sonya, and since he was her best friend, she had asked him to come down and talk to her.

Jorge didn’t know precisely what the problem was. Maria had been vague on the details. But he could guess at least some of it. Someone had slain the entire imperial garrison. Who else could do that except Sonya? But what had happened after? Had she been killed and brought back to life again by her goddess during the attack? If so, then the change of appearance, and possibly of behavior as well, would no doubt have alarmed Maria. Of course he had warned his sister something like this might happen. Maybe it was the shame of that which had made her skimp on the details of her request. But whatever had happened, and whatever Sonya had become, Jorge had to hope that he could still help his friend.

His family had insisted he take protection with him to the quarter, so Ignacio followed at a respectful distance. Jorge had been embarrassed at first. He felt it was bad enough being a member of one of the Great Families “slumming it” in the Viajero Quarter. He couldn’t understand why his sister had never been similarly self-conscious about that.

But now that he had reached the quarter, he was grateful for Ignacio’s protection. He had not felt this kind of unease since before the battle at Gogoleth. Everywhere he looked, he saw it in people’s eyes. A terrible, desperate eagerness. The sort of self-righteous impulse that overrode reason and made people fling their lives away. They were still Viajero, of course. Still laughing and singing and dancing. But there was an edge to it all. An aggressiveness that was not typical of the usually easygoing artist community.

The farther he got into the quarter, the more overt it became. He began to see anti-imperial slogans painted on the walls. FREE RAÍZ! and DEATH TO THE GREEDY EMPIRE! He saw a massive portrait of the empress with a pig nose. It was all fairly coarse compared to typical Viajero work, but what it lacked in finesse, it made up for with a seething fury that seemed to lurk beneath each brushstroke. The music that drifted down from open windows was no less unnerving. Hard, scraping guitar, sharp staccato drums. It made walking through the streets of the quarter feel like passing through a thunderstorm.

Finally he saw a familiar face. Lucia was a relatively young Viajero, but her natural gift for singing, fierce artistic discipline, and her fiery passion had already made her a well-respected presence in the quarter. It was said even the renowned Raízian playwright Pedro Molina would doff his hat to her when they passed each other in the street, and there was rumor that he was currently writing a new play with her in mind for the lead role.

But now Lucia was working with a small group of dancers who were marking through the choreography of something that even without the energy and commitment of a performance made Jorge ill at ease. Something about it seemed terribly old. And ominous.

“No, Francisco!” she shouted at one dancer. “Do you want us all to be turned inside out, our guts flung into the faces of our enemies? Is that what you want?”

“N-no, Lucia!” Even though the man was much larger than her, he was clearly cowed by her presence.

“Then God damn you, pivot on that right heel like I told you!” She let out an explosive sigh and threw her hands into the air. “Or else kill me now!”

Jorge was afraid to interrupt her, lest her explosive temper turn on him, so he continued to watch them practice for a short while until she eventually noticed him.

“Ah, Jorge. Maria said you’d be stopping by.”

She shifted from fierce commander to cavalier artist with sudden and jarring ease.

“Forgive me for interrupting, Lucia,” he said.

“Think nothing of it.” She flipped her hand at the dancers. “Everyone go practice. When I come back, I expect to see it done perfectly.”

She strode over to him. “Okay, little brother, you want to see your lover?”

Jorge didn’t know why she thought she could talk to him like that, but more importantly, he had to clear up the bigger misunderstanding.

“Er, Lucia, Sonya and I are not—”

“Oh I know,” she said. “I can smell a virgin a mile away.”

“Ah…” This was why he didn’t like being around Viajero. Not only did they make him feel stiff and formal, they shamed him for it. “So how is Sonya?”

Lucia waved her hand, as though shooing a fly. “Like I told Maria, it’s nothing to worry about. Just a spell of melancholy. It happens to all artists. Perfectly natural.”

Jorge decided not to argue whether it was natural or not and instead said, “All the same, I’d like to see her.”

“Of course, of course,” Lucia said agreeably. “Melancholy may be normal, but it never hurts to have a good friend to help you through it. And who knows when those imperial pigs will try to come back. I respect another artist’s process, of course, but the sooner you can get her back into a fighting mood, the better.”

She led him down one of the narrow, winding streets this part of Colmo was so famous for. It was said that the great Viajero architect Joaquin Fortuny had designed this neighborhood with the Viajero specifically in mind, claiming that its circuitous ways and irregular passages were conducive to the creative spirit. Jorge merely found it conducive to getting lost.

But Lucia knew its routes well, and led him through the maze to one building nestled in among all the rest with no distinguishing features except a newly painted mural of an arctic fox that looked down balefully at him from above the entrance.

“I take it someone did that for her?” he asked Lucia.

Lucia nodded. “We wanted her to feel welcome, you know? So we asked Felix to do it. He’s one of the best at painting animal likenesses in all Raíz. You’ve probably seen his work all over the city.”

Jorge could rarely differentiate one artist’s work for another, but he nodded as though he could. Yet again, there was this unspoken pressure to appear creative and cultured in a way he was not, and probably never could be.

Lucia glanced meaningfully at Ignacio. “You’ll want to leave the muscle behind.”

“How dare you—” Ignacio began, looking deeply offended.

“No, she’s right,” Jorge said gently. “I’m sorry, Ignacio. Will you wait here for me?”

Ignacio took a moment to regain his temper, then nodded. “As you wish, Señor.”

“Wonderful,” Lucia said dryly. “Shall we enter then, most honored Señor?”

The shades inside were all drawn and there were no candles or lanterns lit so the place was quite dim.

“How does she even see to piss?” muttered Lucia.

“She can see in the dark,” said Jorge.

“Impressive.”

“Sonya?” he called. “It’s Jorge.”

“Hey.”

He heard her voice faintly but he almost didn’t recognize it. Her moods had shifted quite a lot since they’d been forced to flee Izmoroz, but this was much more stark a difference. She sounded listless. Hopeless, even. That didn’t make sense, though. If it was true that she’d just killed a bunch of imperial soldiers, she should be rather cheerful.

He went farther into the room, his eyes straining in the dim light. Finally he found her lying on a cot in the corner near a shuttered window. The tiny slits of sunlight that filtered through showed her lying on her back staring up at the ceiling. He paused, not sure what to do.

Lucia was apparently not as intimidated by this scene. She flopped into a nearby chair. “I brought your rich boy, Sonya.”

“Thanks,” said Sonya, although she did not sound particularly thankful and still did not bother to look at them.

“Go on.” Lucia waved impatiently to Jorge.

Although he didn’t like being pushed around, he moved over to Sonya and after a moment sat down on the gritty stone floor beside her cot.

“Sonya,” he whispered. “What happened?”

It took her a while to respond, but he could tell she was working toward something, so he remained silent and waited.

“I killed them all,” she said softly.

He waited for more, but that seemed to be the end of it.

“Sonya, I hate to say this but you’ve… killed a lot of people. What made it different this time?”

“I made it different,” she said.

“How do you mean?”

“A Ranger of Marzanna is supposed to believe that death is natural. There’s nothing wrong with dying or killing, provided there’s a purpose for it. I accepted that and it didn’t use to bother me. But the justifications I clung to: freeing my people, serving the Lady… I lost them. So instead I started killing for money. For community. For acceptance. Honestly, just for something to do.”

She finally turned to look at him. The small bands of sunlight shone across her watery golden eyes.

“And it was easy, Jorge. So easy. Maybe I could have just floated along like that for years, but it all felt… trivial. So when Lucia came to me with something that sounded important, I jumped at it. I went into that garrison thinking finally I’m getting back to doing what I’m supposed to do. Even if I wasn’t in Izmoroz, I was still a Ranger of Marzanna.”

She looked back to the ceiling. She closed her eyes and a tear streaked down her cheek.

“Sonya…,” Jorge said. “I still don’t understand what’s wrong.”

“I realized that I don’t want to be a servant of death anymore, Jorge,” she whispered. “But without that, I don’t know what’s left of me.”