Alexandria (11 page)

“It’s all right, Isabel,” soothes the midwife. “Keep taking those deep breathes.”

More labor pangs grip her midsection and she belts out another fantastic scream, clawing at the bed sheets with hooked fingers. Arana cringes and turns away, absconding to the corner with Keslin.

“I hope this isn’t for nothing, all this.”

“You don’t have to watch,” says Keslin.

“Neither do you.”

“True.”

The hallway outside is empty, which is unusual during a birth. There should be a delegation waiting with bated breath to get a first look at the new baby, but they have learned to stay away on nights like these—nights when it is their King’s progeny they are expecting.

Their attention drifts back to the exhibition of labor before them. Isabel is flushed and slicked with sweat, writhing in pain. Keslin considers it animalistic. Arana only watches expectantly, weighing the odds of bitter disappointment.

“Any prospects in the new lot?” he asks, changing the subject.

“Mmm. There’s a boy getting along well with the sledge crew. Braylon. He’s tall, getting stronger. Nisaq says he’s got a streak in him, but it looks like he can tame it. I’ll give him a few more months to finish settling in.”

“What about that one boy? The twelve year old.”

“The boy who killed Vallen?”

“Yes, him. What about him?”

Keslin laughs. “He’s in the pit.”

“For what?”

“For splitting Halis’s face open with a pickhammer.”

“Really? What happened?”

“Halis told him he killed his mother.”

“Ah,” says Arana. “What’s his name?”

“Jack. He was covered in bruises, his whole body.”

“Halis did that do him?”

“From the looks.”

“How is Halis?”

“He’s just next door. Do you want to see him?”

Arana looks impatiently at Isabel. “Yes, quickly.”

They slip out quietly and move around the corner to the small infirmary. Keslin walks past a few beds occupied by the old and sick and leads Arana to a thin cot set along the back wall.

Halis is unrecognizable, his entire head swaddled in strips of linen soaked through with blood, with one little gap left open, and through this gap a hateful eye watches Keslin and the King approach.

Keslin smiles. “He can only take liquids.”

“Halis,
can you hear me?”

The huddled and shrouded form of Halis gives a nod, ever so slight.

“I understand you were hurting the newcomers?”

Halis only glares up through his stained wrappings.

“Look where it got you.” Arana bends low, close enough to smell the sickly fetor wafting up from Halis’s gore-soaked rags. “If you lay a hand on him, or any of the others, ever again, I will lock you down with a swarm of starved rats and your wreck of a face will be the least of your worries, I can promise you.”

The only response is a choked gurgle.

“Do you want to see under the bandages?”

“No, Keslin, that’s not necessary. Let’s go.”

They step softly through the infirmary. A few frail old faces watch them leave.

“How long will you keep Jack locked up?”

“A good long while, I suppose. He nearly killed Halis. Do you want us to take him out early?”

“No, leave him.”

A mousey little nursemaid scampers up to them, breathless.
“It’s coming,”
she says, and turns to run back.

They take long, quick paces back to the maternity chamber where the midwife is on her feet, crouching over the struggling Isabel. She calls out sharp instructions while the nursemaids mop Isabel’s forehead and grip her hands tightly. She seizes with another contraction.

“Easy, Isabel, go easy,” the midwife says. As the gust of contraction starts to recede she says, “Now push, Isabel, nice and easy and push.”

Arana looks over her shoulder. His face takes on a pallor as the small, slick head starts to show.

Isabel crests over another wave of spasms and she’s told to push again. The midwife cradles the head and waits at attention for more to follow, and soon it does. The first fragile cries of life spring from the curled and purple form in the midwife’s hands, and she places him on Isabel’s chest and covers them both.

Arana pushes her aside and takes his place by Isabel, lifting the blanket and peering at the traumatized newborn. He has left this chamber before with false optimism, seeing eyes as light as his own at birth, only to have them darken to brown or hazel in the following months, but there is no mistaking this child. There is no gift from the Beyond in this room, no protector for the future, save Arana himself. He covers the baby and leans close to Isabel.

“Unworthy,”
he whispers to her.

This is the seventh child she has born him, and that word from his cold lips sets her distressed mind on edge. She works a wad of saliva in her mouth and spits it out onto his face.

He brushes it away and turns to the nursemaids. “Take this boy to the nursery and see to him.”

Jack is flying above a magnificent city. Bracing wind ripples his clothing and pulls the skin back taut on his face. As he soars higher, the clouds recede and he rockets toward the edge of the sky and all the uncertainty that lies beyond it. What separates the earth from the firmament he does not know, whether he will emerge on the distant shore of some exotic world, or be ripped limb from limb in an epic annihilation that leaves not a speck of his mortal husk intact. Fearless, he ascends.

He rolls over and looks down at the earth, flat and never-ending, with the translucent spires of great buildings growing up like towering stalagmites. On the avenues that run between them, he sees people and machines flowing along in some invisible current, the blood of the city coursing through asphalt veins. A burning sphere zooms past him, hurtling toward the surface with a tail of black smoke streaming behind it. He watches helplessly as it strikes one of the colossal glass and metal structures and explodes with a low rumble. The impossibly tall building lists to the side—slowly at first until it reaches its tipping point—then it falls furiously, knocking down everything in its path.

More fiery spheres blitz down from the skies above. The magical tether keeping him aloft suddenly evaporates—the force of gravity reasserts its authority over his body and he plummets toward the ground. The entire city is burning, a raging inferno now, and as he freefalls he can hear the people’s screams rising from the blanket of smoke. He knows that he will join them, that his insane downward trajectory will land him squarely in the middle of this disaster, that he will alight like dry tinder and suffer complete immolation and know no more.

As the flames grow to encompass his entire field of vision he snaps awake.

Darkness.

A dank odor, with a hint of something more foul. Decay. The rat that he killed. He cannot see it, but he thinks it is there. It was yesterday, or maybe the day before, or maybe many days before that. In some indeterminate past, a rat crawled under the wooden trapdoor that confines him and he killed it. Or maybe it has yet to happen, and this thought and these smells are mere premonitions of some future event. He reaches his hands out and feels along the cold wet floor, padding them along the walls until they land on a stiff, furry lump.

There it is.

They come once a day, to bring water and thin gruel and to empty his bucket. He does not beg or plead with them. He remembers why he is here. At the beginning of his punishment, he thought that if given the opportunity to play events out differently he would have done exactly the same thing all over again. Now he is not so certain. The waking hours in this pit are exquisite torture, and with sleep it is always a gamble. He is not sure how much more of this his sanity will withstand.

He drops the rat in the bucket.

The dreams are not always nightmares. He dreamt once that he was a toddler again and that his father was holding him in his rough, strong hands while his mother laughed and cooed at him. He wished he could have frozen that moment and never woken up. It brought with it the recollection of his father’s passing, weak and feeble on his straw mat until one morning he was still. Keethan and Marni would sit vigil with his mother during the last days, and that was when he and Lia first became friends. Her older brother was taken by a similar mysterious illness, and through this she was perhaps uniquely able to help Jack cope with his loss. Other children, and even parents, were frightened of the sickness and kept their distance. She would hold his hand and walk with him through the forest, or just sit with him in their small cabin, and sometimes not a word was spoken between them and that was fine.

He thinks back to the day they were captured, when they sat around the campfire in their cages and Lia stared at him with that look of infinite compassion on her face. He closes his eyes and pictures her that way. Blocking out all else, he focuses intently and gazes back at her with his mind’s eye and wonders if she can somehow feel him looking.

He hears the creaking of hinges and his mirage fades. Sounds of footsteps—voices and crying. He stands and listens as they pull back the panel covering the pit next to him, and he winces at the sobbing of the new prisoner. With a harsh crack the door is slammed shut and locked, and the shuffling footsteps leave the keep and plod upstairs.

Through the thick trapdoor he hears soft, sniffling cries.

“Hello?” he says. The sniffling stops. “Who’s there?” he asks, louder. “I’m Jack. What’s your name?”

For a great long moment the steady dripping of condensate grime is the only noise heard. Finally, muffled and distant, he hears a young girl’s voice cut through the stillness.

“Isabel,” she says.

The sewing shop is a hive of activity, seamstresses bent over cluttered workstations, their dexterous fingers stitching nimbly. Young women stand still with their arms outstretched and a flurry of fitters whirls around them, pulling and tugging on their garments and making quick dashes in chalk to signal what must be taken in or let out. The bonding rights ceremony is three days away and they are sorely behind.

Elise leads Haylen and Lia down from the kitchen. Calyn has relinquished them for the day, at her request, to help meet the deadline.

“Since you girls are so good with knives I’ll have you at the cutting table,” says Elise.

She walks them past the sewing stations to a broad table at the rear, with several children working around it and many lengths of rough fabric spread out flat. Elise shows them how to take the small, sharp blades and cut around the tracings to create angular, oddly shaped swaths of fabric which they hand off to be fitted together and sewn. Eleta is working next to them, carefully razoring out the left hemisphere of a flowing gown.

“It’s easy,” she says. “Just make sure you don’t snag the threads.”

“Thanks,” says Haylen, settling in next to her. “Do you like it here?”

“Yeah, it’s okay usually. We’re too busy right now, though.”

“Where’s Phoebe,” asks Lia.

“She over there. All they let her do is spin thread. She hates it.”

Lia and Haylen look for her in the spinning room, glumly turning her staff while another girl winds the fibers into thread.

“She wants to learn sewing,” Eleta continues, “but they said she’s still too small. Jeneth is learning. She’s good.”

They busy themselves for a while, making small slices, then realigning the fabric and slicing some more.

“What’s it like in the kitchen?”

“It’s good,” says Lia.

“It’s so hot,” Haylen adds, “but Calyn lets us eat all the time.”

“I thought I saw you two!” says Jeneth, running up with a bundle of fabric in her arms. “Did you come to save us?”

“Yeah, Elise asked for us.”

“Ooh, good.
Look at this…”
Jeneth unfolds the fabric she’s holding, a long dress in mid-construction. She holds it up against her body and poses for Lia and Haylen. “I sewed this part myself.”

“It’s so pretty. You did all that?”

“Some of it. It’s going to have fur around the neckline, and there’s a shawl that goes around it like this—” She demonstrates, turning at different angles. “I’ve never worn anything this nice. Look at them,” she says, motioning to the line of elegant young maidens, flushed and smiling, standing still while attendants fit their dresses trimly against their curved physiques. “They all look so happy.”