I’m not sure that’s your real name.
Oddly, that was probably the least complicated and most true thing about me. Kazimyrah of Brightmist.
My mother had come from the northern province of Balwood, venturing to Sanctum City like so many others who crowded in there hoping it offered a better life than the harsh terrain beyond it, but she came there with the added burden of a baby in her belly and only a handful of coins. She never talked of my father. I didn’t know if he was alive or dead, if she had loved or hated him, or if she had even known him at all. Traveling alone across the barren plains was a dangerous prospect for anyone. He’s gone, Kazi, was all she had said, and she seemed sad so I didn’t ask again.
The quarter of Brightmist was in the northern part of the city. She managed to find an unoccupied hovel there that would keep the rain off— and a midwife—so that was where she settled. Jase wasn’t the first one to question my name, wondering if it was real. Most of those we encountered in the city had never heard the name Kazi. When asked about it, my mother told them it was a highland name that meant “spring.” Another time she had said it meant “little bird,” and another time, “god’s messenger.” I realized she didn’t know what it meant at all, and once she was gone, the name didn’t seem to matter. Who or what I was became a forgotten detail. Any name would do, and all kinds were pulled from the air to run me off. Scat, you nasty vermin, brat, pest, crapcake!
Until I devised a way to make them want me to stay.
The thing about a mark is they’ve created lies in their head, a story they’ve invented that they desperately want to believe, a fantasy that merely needs to be fed patiently—you are kinder, more beautiful, shrewder, wiser, you are deserving, eat up—like a round-mouthed fish breaking the surface of the water following after a trail of bread crumbs. Draw them closer with one morsel, two, and then hook them behind the gills, senseless and flapping, oblivious to what they have really lost because their bloated stomach is full.
Kazimyrah, I would sometimes whisper to myself as I slunk away with a meal hidden beneath my coat, because there were days even I forgot who I had once been.
* * *
I made more of an effort to erase Jase’s suspicions and convince him I was only a soldier, telling him about my training and life in the Sanctum. But even with that I had to carefully edit the truth. Training as Rahtan was different. The drills, hours, and study were endless. Probably the only thing I failed at was swimming, but only for lack of practice. I was smaller than most of the pledges and had to work twice as hard to prove myself. That part was easy to do. The hardest thing I had to learn was to sleep in a bed, not under it. Most nights, to save myself the anguish, I simply snuck off with a blanket to a hidden dark passage under the stairs.
One night, the queen had unexpectedly joined me. I remembered I had stared furiously at the lantern flame, focusing on it rather than her. I had felt shame for huddling in the dark. She sat on the floor next to me, the tunnel too small for us to stand.
“I came here too,” she had said. “It was a dark, safe space for me. There were many days I feared would be my last here in the Sanctum. I was so afraid then. Some days, I’m still afraid. I have so many promises to keep.”
“But you have kept your promises.”
“Freedoms are never won once and for all, Kazimyrah. They come and go, like the centuries. I cannot grow lazy. Memories are short. It is the forgetting that I fear.”
That was what I feared too.
Forgetting.
But none of this could I share with Jase.
When he asked me if juggling was part of Rahtan training, I laughed it off and said it was just something I had picked up along the way.
“What way is that?” Digging.
I told him a friend taught me. “You have clever friends.”
“Yes, I do,” I answered, offering no more information. I was self-taught. Desperation can be a good teacher, maybe the best teacher. I had to perfect new skills quickly—or starve. But his comment about friends made me think of Wren and Synové. They came to the Sanctum a few months after I did, both caught in scuffles with no immediate family to summon. Being the same ages and having known one another on the streets, we were naturally drawn together. After two years, Kaden, the queen’s Keep, had the final say on who would advance to Rahtan training. He had given us a long, stern look, trying to decide if all three of us would move on to the next level. Surprisingly, his wife, Pauline, had shot him a stern look in our favor. We’d trained and worked together ever since. I hoped they were safely tucked away, sitting tight, Synové entertaining Wren with the mundane details of the racaa. Yes, our plan had gone awry, but they were inventive and we had backup plans. By now they had probably figured out I wasn’t inside Tor’s Watch.
“How much farther is the settlement?”
“I’m not sure. I forgot to bring my map and compass. Why don’t you dig out yours?”
“You think we’re still on course?”
“Yes,” he answered emphatically. I wasn’t sure if he was annoyed that it was the second time I had asked or simply unhappy that we’d be walking into the Casswell settlement—and Vendan territory—whether he liked it or not.
He continued to tell me more stories about Tor’s Watch that I had to admit fascinated me. I looked forward to them. This morning, he’d told me about Breda’s Tears, a series of seven cascading waterfalls in the Moro mountains. They were named for the goddess Breda who had come to earth and fallen in love with the mere mortal Aris. Their love was so great that
new flowers sprang up in their footsteps, flowers more beautiful than any that the gods had ever created, and the gods became jealous. They forbade Breda from returning to earth, and when she disobeyed, they struck Aris dead. Her grief was so overwhelming that rivers of tears fell from the heavens, rushing down the mountains where they once walked, creating waterfalls that still flow to this day.
“And there are flowers that grow at the base of those waterfalls, that grow nowhere else on the mountain.”
“So it must be true,” I said.
He smiled. “Must be. I’ll show you one day.”
A clumsy silence fell. We both knew he would never show me, but his words had slipped out easily before he could stop them, as if he were talking to a friend.
There were more awkward moments.
Yesterday morning, I awoke to his arm slung over me, his chest nesting close to my back. He was unaware, probably seeking some warmth in his sleep. I lay there, not moving away, thinking about the weight of his arm, how it felt, the soft sound of his breaths, the heat of his skin. It was a reckless, indulgent minute, wondering what he dreamed of, and then sense flooded back in, and I carefully nudged his arm away before he woke up. I’d made a conscious effort not to touch him. I think he had done the same, but sleep had become its own thief, stealing away our intentions.
As we walked, I plied him with questions, sprinkled carefully so they would seem offhand and casual, mostly about Tor’s Watch. I learned it was a sprawling complex of homes and buildings that housed the offices of the Ballenger business empire. Their income came from multiple sources, but he didn’t tell me what they all were. When I thought he sensed I was digging, I changed the topic to something else, but I did learn that a hefty portion of their revenue came from the trading arena, a large exchange where buyers and sellers from all over the continent came to trade goods. It began with the grain grown in Eislandia, but with more trade opening up between the kingdoms since the new treaties, the arena had tripled in size every year since.
“Am I hearing this right?” I asked, laying on my thickest mocking tone. “You’re saying you have benefited from the new treaties?”
“In some ways. But not so much that we’re willing to give up who we are.”
He rubbed his bare finger just below the knuckle where his signet ring had once been. It was another tic I had noticed. He did it frequently when he talked of home. I imagined the struggle that had ensued when the hunter tried to take it from him. I was certain Jase hadn’t given it up easily. I supposed he was lucky he still had his finger at all.
I pushed my hand into the bottom of my pocket and fingered the warm circle of metal and wondered if I should give it to him, but it seemed too late now. He would wonder why I had taken it in the first place, and especially why it took me so long to hand it over. The keys I had taken for survival. The ring was for an entirely different reason.
In the year before the queen came, more of my stealing had become punitive. It was an angry tax I collected for answers I never received, and a retribution for all the fingertips of children taken by quarterlords and then fed to the swine. Most of the punitive thefts were for items that held no value. They could not fill a belly, but they filled me in other ways.
The smallest, most useless thing I ever stole was a shiny brass button that made the Tomac quarterlord so very proud. It protruded from his belly among a long line of shiny buttons on his jacket, a rare treasure he had bought from a Previzi driver. To me, they looked like fat golden rivets holding his belly in place. Stealing the middle button had ruined the entire showy effect. I had stalked him for a week, knowing just when he would pass down one small, crowded alley, throngs shoving against him, and I was there, my cap pulled low, my small curved blade in the palm of my hand. He didn’t know it was gone until he reached the end of the alley, and I heard his bellowing screech. I had smiled at the sweet sound. It was all the supper I needed.
Jase’s ring was just as useless to me as that button had been, and I had stolen it for the same reason. It was a symbol of power, a legacy they revered, and in one quiet move I had relegated it to the bottom of my dark, dirty pocket.
