A deadly calm settles into Aralia’s bones, as she and Pasha skirt along hatefully familiar corridors, now empty and dark. This night will culminate in one of two possible outcomes.
A stolen key gains them access to the kitchen. Aralia pauses to pocket a knife. Thirst batters at the doors of her mind. She’s had no water since this morning.
Outside the larder, there is a window big enough to wiggle through. They both make it in blessed silence.
From the sill, it’s one careful step to the gnarled branch of an elder apple tree. Two small, agile bodies have no trouble scrambling and clambering to the ground. So far, so good.
They spend a few precious minutes up a neighboring tree, retrieving the makeshift rope Pasha wove out of ripped up infirmary bed sheets last week. Then, hardly daring to breath, they make for the shadowed edge of the little orchard and press themselves flat to the wet grass. Ahead, across a starkly open stretch of parade ground, is their goal—the scaffold staircase that leads up to the ramparts.
To her immense satisfaction, Aralia sees no sentries. The gatehouse door is shut, lamplight leaking around the edges. There’s no sign of the pickets that patrol atop the battlements. With any luck, they are in the jakes, alternating between kneeling and sitting with their trousers around their ankles, fully occupied with purging the poison that Aralia dosed Hellebore’s entire water supply with right before suppertime that evening. As of late afternoon, as a collective punishment, water rations have been withheld from all of the wards, based on Aralia’s reports of a sudden, heavy spree of subversive graffiti in the showers. Only the snitches will have been exempted.
Pasha and Aralia share one last look with each other, nod, then spring up and begin to sprint fast and low across the open ground.
They almost reach the staircase before everything goes horribly wrong.
~ ~ ~
Within a week of their arrival in the nightmare, Pasha begins to be summoned for individual ‘treatment’ sessions with a hygienist named Rudgutter. Each time he returns to Aralia’s side jumpier and more hollow-eyed.
She watches helplessly as he retreats into himself week by week, trying to find some refuge amidst the relentless, intrusive violation.
They have arrived at Hellebore during a time when there are suicide attempts happening almost every night. Belts are contraband, as are chairs and crates—anything that can be stood on and pulled or kicked away.
To prevent rioting, the wards are kept segregated—never more than two-score children are allowed to gather at a time. The constant surveillance makes it difficult to exchange information or pass news, but the sudden absence of a familiar face at meals or exercises needs no explanation.
The freedom to take one’s own life, Aralia understands soon enough, is a release from the hold of their captors. It is a choice that strips their authority, sets a limit to their power. It is a way to take from the hygienists their role as supreme judges, a loss of control which they despise.
When Aralia and Pasha arrive in their ward, they find that some of the girls have been helping each other to try to die. Aralia immediately begins trying to persuade her wardmates to reverse this act of solidarity. She and Pasha start interrupting the attempts without involving the guards, and some of the other girls listen to her, and join in.
On the third day in a row without a suicide attempt, Aralia and Monarda and Pasha and a few others huddle on Aralia’s bunk after lights-out and whisper about where they would go, if they managed to escape.
During their second month, Aralia sees in Pasha’s eyes that he is getting closer and closer to taking the only escape he can, with or without her help. She grits her teeth, because if she cannot keep Pasha alive, she will have failed Kalista, and Jacynth, and Esca, and everyone. She knows that if he dies here, so will she.
She needs to get them both out, and time is against her.
Becoming a collaborator is easy. She tells some of her wardmates her plan, and asks for volunteers. At this point, a number of them look up to her. Some of them have siblings in other wards, or share different kinships, more illegible to the Imperiat. Islander ties are strong here, despite the efforts of their captors to stamp them flat. Together, they hatch small infractions for her to betray them with. A stolen blanket here, a broken plate there. No more than a few blows as punishment.
Aralia uses these betrayals to wheedle her way further into their captors’ trust. An older boy named Abel from ward seven has snitched his way into the coveted infirmary assistant position. He mysteriously hangs himself one night, and a few days later, when a rash of flu-like symptoms crops up in all the other wards simultaneously, Aralia gets the job.
She begins stealing.
~ ~ ~
It comes without warning, mid-sprint.
From the other side of the fortress, a faint, strangled cry. A crash. The barking of hounds. Yelling. The blast of a trumpet.
A chemical flare whistles up into the sky, scorching the entire parade ground with a flood of brassy white light.
Aralia stumbles and Pasha pulls her the rest of the way into the shadow of the scaffolding.They huddle frozen at the bottom of the staircase, caught halfway between bolting and hiding.
What, Aralia thinks numbly, did I do wrong?
The door to gatehouse bangs open and a half-dozen marines spillout and begin straggling towards the far side of the fortress. In the distance, the uproar is only growing.Aralia’s ears pick out the clash of blades.
The marines aren’t moving well, she notices. Some of them are stumbling and clutching their stomachs as they run. There’s no time to savor her satisfaction, because two more of them have emerged from the gatehouse and making for the staircase where she and Pasha are crouching.
In the light of the flare, they spot the fugitives easily.
“Hoy! Escape! We got runners!”
Aralia curses under her breath as she bolts up the staircase, close on Pasha’s heels.
The men clatter up after them, the wuffing of their labored breaths and the heavy sounds of their bodies on the planks driving frantic spikes of terror into her brain.
They gain the battlements above the gate and Aralia sees it—the heavy winch that ratchets up the portcullis. The jutting shape of the iron handle should easily hold the weight of two bodies on a line.
“Here, throw it over,” she hisses to Pasha, thrusting the makeshift rope into his hands. “Go, I’ll be right behind you.”
She turns back to the scaffold, fumbling in her pocket for the stolen paring knife. She can hear them groaning and grunting as they pound up the last stretch of stairs. Aralia knows the punishment for escape attempts, and she is prepared to die rather than watch the hygienists maim Pasha. Maybe she can trip these two men, get them tangled up enough to stumble and fall backwards over the edge.
“Aralia!”
“Go, Pasha! Now!” She tenses as the first marine clears the top step, and sends a quick wish for welcome to Jacynth, to Hallel, to—
A familiar whistling, followed by a thud, and the first marine gasps and crumples to the planks, a dark-fletched arrow protruding from his ribs.
Kalista? She looks around wildly, as two more arrows sail out of the night and drop the second marine.
By the light of the flare, she sees a cluster of dark figures farther along the battlements, nocking arrows.
Aralia lifts her arms, palms out. “Don’t shoot!” she screams. She twists to see if Pasha got clear—
He’s scrambling back over the ramparts. “Goddamit, Pasha!”
“You were going to stay?!” His voice is indignant. “You were going to leave me?!”
The chemical light from the flare is beginning to sputter and die. Aralia stifles her retort, and turns to confront the approaching silhouettes of the strangers. There are six of them, clad in dark clothing and carrying shortbows—pointed down, at least.
“Kids,” says one grimly.
“Are they ours?”
“No matter. Lark, stay here at the gate and see they come to no harm. The rest of us must find the barracks and feather any man that sets foot outside its door.”
Aralia thinks she recognizes the dialect they are using—they are from the Isle of Faso. The sounds of skirmishing have given way to breaking glass, splintering wood, and yells punctured by the occasional scream. Aralia can see the glow and flicker of flames.
“It’s that tall building,” blurts Pasha, pointing. “Watch out for the pale uniforms—some of them are sorcerers.”
All but one of the strangers trot off along the walltop.
The one who has stayed gestures with her bow at the gatehouse. “How many came out of there already?”
“Eight.”
“Hm. Are there more within?”
Pasha hesitates. “I—we don’t know. The watch was light tonight, on account of…a sickness in the water.”
“Hm.” The warrior’s face is in shadow, but Aralia can feel her penetrating stare roving over the two of them.
The sky is lightening in the east. By now Aralia has counted almost a hundred of the mysterious attackers, swarming the grounds, torching buildings and looting the armory. The three of them watch from the ramparts as a trickle of marines finally crawl from the dark hole of the barracks door, pouring with smoke, and are shot.
After a while, the stranger sits, dangling her legs off the inside edge of the wall, and lights a pipe.
“So, where are you kids from?”
Aralia says nothing. She is watching as a handful of cowering, half-naked kitchen staff are marched into the orchard by two bowmen. Only the bowmen emerge again. A dozen more dark-clad figures are busy herding children onto the parade ground below.
Pasha glances at her quickly, then addresses the stranger. “Um. Who are you?”
“Andartes,” comes the short reply. “Can’t tell you more than that, I’m afraid.”
“Andartes?” He blurts. “Then we’re allies! Do you know—”
“Pasha,” warns Aralia.
He falls silent.
From the main hall comes the sound of a voice raised in pleading, followed by a cry suddenly cut short. Aralia shudders with something much darker than relief, but no less vivid. It is happening. Hellebore is over.
~ ~ ~
In the grim, gray morning, the Andartes herd the children out of the front gate as they torch the fortress behind them.
Some of the children—most of them from Faso—walk alongside their liberators, in joyous reunion. Most, however, straggle along in shock and confusion.
Aralia sees Monarda and Emilia attached like limpets to either side of a broad man with attentive eyes and ruffled gray hair. Monarda looks at her inscrutably, and Aralia glances away.
On the heels of the strange procession follows a train of mule carts carrying several wounded and fallen fighters, as well as bundles of looted weapons and stores. Even in the numbness of her exhaustion, Aralia’s mind flits and darts with assessments as she stumbles down the switchbacks to the sheltered cove below. A fleet of shallow-drafted smuggler galleys is pulled up on the dark, smooth sand, guarded by a cluster of bowmen.
The march halts at the beach. The children glance around fearfully at the surrounding warriors, as a few of the kids from Faso, including Monarda and Emilia, begin to point out certain ashen faces to the Andartes.
“Him.”
“Her, and him.”
“And him.”
Aralia sees instantly that they are sorting out all the snitches and collaborators. The indicated children are promptly pulled out of the crowd to stand apart, in a fretting, shrinking cluster.
Emilia comes to stop in front of Aralia, and pauses.
Aralia stares back at her defiantly, and says nothing.
The Andartes look on in silence, like deadly avenging angels.
Pasha steps between them. “Emilia, no. She never snitched.”
Emilia narrows her eyes at him. “She was playing some game, apart from everyone else. You both were.”
“It was a strategy to set us all free,” Pasha protests, his voice sounding thin and hollow even to Aralia. Didn’t some part of her know that she deserved this? “That hellhole was rigged to have a class of collaborators. Aralia was the one who figured out how to use that, to control the position on everyone’s behalf. Ask Mona. If you’d been in there for longer, you would have done the same.”
“I wouldn’t have! I never would have played their favorite, and tried to work from the inside,” Emilia snarls. “Anyway, if that was true, you wouldn’t have tried to save your own skins by throwing everyone else under the keel.”
Aralia’s insides wince, and she resists the urge to glance guiltily at Monarda.
“Don’t do this, Emilia,” Pasha tries again, weakly. In desperation, he turns to the silent watchers. “Aralia is the one who poisoned all the guards. Without her, those marines would have killed a lot more of you! She had to siphon ingredients from the infirmary for weeks to cobble together a viable poison.”
For the first time in months, Aralia feels Kalista frowning at her. Do not let Pasha down, not now.She braces herself against the despair and self-hatred that Hellebore has infected her with. It is past time to lay their cards on the table.
“Andartes,” she calls to the silent watching warriors. “I am Aralia Cordivar of the vessel Damselfly, heir to the lineage of Jyllish navigators, pupil to Moa Wheelbird, Venti Orlam and Jacynth Stormheart. I remember the codes for safe passage and succor taught to me by my elders, should I ever find myself in need and at the mercy of those who keep the ways of the Andartes. I was told that uttering them would vouchsafe my life. I promise you that we are fighting in the same war, against the same foe. I ask that you take us with you.”
She turns back to Emilia. “You can always feed me to the sharks later, if I cannot explain myself to your satisfaction.”
Emilia’s mouth makes a wry twist and she nods. “Fine.” Then, to the huddled group of collaborators: “Get away, unless you want to die, here and now. Run back to the ruins of that prison where you belong. Stay there and rot, for all I care. Go!”
They cringe back from her ferocity, and began to stumble raggedly away down the beach.
Grimacing, Emilia addresses the rest of the children—the unclaimed ones. “Everyone else here is free to go or come as you wish! Don’t worry, we won’t throw you away like jetsam or leave you hung out to dry. We will find a place for you, if you so choose.”
Like a surging wave, the children crowd around her, piping questions.
Aralia sees the Andartes are splitting into crews of a dozen or so and working their long, light craft back into the lapping waves. How far is the journey back to their home port, or ports? Aralia has spent countless nights wondering where they are—which island the dirty secret of Hellebore is hidden upon. Here is another clue, for the galleys aren’t outfitted for long voyages, but rigged instead for quick, nimble maneuvering, designed to hug the coast and hop from island to island.
Pasha grips her shoulder. “Come on, let’s find a berth.”
They walk towards the nearest crew, standing knee deep in the surf. Cautious, tired faces look in their direction.
“We’re bound for Faso,” calls Aralia. “Do you have room for us?”
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