Alexandria (33 page)

“Okay.”

Though her work is fairly lacking, she plucks the needle in and out with unmatched vigor. She makes a face so serious it’s comical and pulls out the thread she has spent most of the morning on and gets ready to start all over. Before long, she is absorbed in childish reverie and she does not notice, and is still far too young to understand, the distrustful glances that are stolen toward her and the other outsiders.

A couple of the native girls start humming together the melody of a spirited anthem from their lessons, sotto voce and only sometimes in-tune. Several others join in playfully and their little singalong gains momentum until they nearly abandon their work altogether to trill out the esoteric chant of their strength and supreme heritage. Phoebe sways with their odd rhythm and belts out the chorus as loudly as her small voice will allow.

Jeneth buries her head in her work. She mouths the words along with them, her face strained and remote. If she were not numb to sensation, she would feel the slipping pin pricks that sting her fingertips whenever her concentration falters. Each meticulous stitch she completes brings her closer to the moment when she can leave the shop, gather Mariset from the nursery, and hurry back to the refuge of her cottage—though even that haven has grown cold as of late. She and Eriem fought about the necklace again last night. The weight of his accusation presses on her still, and she assembles words and phrases in her head she hopes will convince him unquestionably that she is not trading favors with some outside force, assisting the spies or working in concert with her runaway friends to subvert the Temple and its well-being. She will try again to save what they have, though a growing voice tells her it is hopeless, and she dreads another sleepless night, icy and touchless.

The girls reach their crescendo and erupt in ripples of laughter.

“Don’t you like our song?” asks Akena. She gives Jeneth a crafty look from across the table.

“I like it,” Jeneth says, eyes focused on her work.

“Doesn’t seem like you do.”

They huddle on the far side of the table, looking askance and giggling. A sociable girl name Jespira leans in and utters some bit that sets her friends off again.

“What did you say?” Jeneth asks, snapping her head around.

Jespira’s tight lips bend in a patronizing smile and she gives no response.

“She said maybe you’d be happier out in the woods somewhere.”

Jeneth tries to stare them down coldly but flushes under their concerted scrutiny, and she looks back to her stitching and can feel their eyes working her over hotly. She collects up her things and backs away from the table and scurries down the aisle toward the station where Phoebe sits. Akena heads her off and grips her by the elbow.

“We don’t know what your friends did,” she hisses, “but we know they did something.”

“You don’t know anything. They didn’t have anything to do with what happened.”

“Oh, yes they did, and you helped them get away, didn’t you? You helped pass a message to those men. We know more than you think we do, and if you think about trying anything like that again we’ll be watching.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about. Let me go,” she says, and jerks her arm back. Jespira laughs and Jeneth glares so spitefully it pulls the attention of the entire shop their way. Jeneth turns away from her gloating face and paces quickly down the aisle and settles next to Phoebe, flustered and breathing heavily.

“Hi.”

“Hi, Phoebe. Want some help?”

“Mmmhmm
. What did that girl say to you?”

“Nothing. Just ignore them.” Jeneth turns Phoebe’s dress in her hands listlessly, self-conscious of the watchful eyes that observe them.

“Why are they laughing at you, did you do something funny?”

“No.”

“Oh. Well, you must have and not known it, like when I had a green bean in my hair from eating and I didn’t know it until I got to my room and everybody laughed at me…”

“How did you get food in your hair?”

“From eating.”

Jeneth sighs out a constrained laugh and scoots closer to Phoebe. “Thank you.”

“For what?”

“Just… thank you.”

The girls around them take up humming a new melody and the light chatter bubbles back to its previous level. Jeneth helps pull the rest of the faulty stitching out of Phoebe’s dress and shows her how to line up the seam and stitch it together evenly.

“How come mine’s not as good as yours?”

“Because you need more practice.”

“All I do is practice.”

“Are you getting better?”

“Yes.”

“See?”

“When will I be as good as you?”

“Just keep trying and you’ll get it someday. It just takes time.”

“I want to make my own dress when I get bonded, I want to make it all by myself and make it the best dress of any of the girls.”

“Well… you have a lot of time to think about that.”

“It’s going to be so long it goes all the way across the Temple and squirrels and birds can stand on it and ride along behind me.”

“Are you going to put green beans in your hair?”

“Yeah, probably gonna to put a lot of them.”

“I can’t wait to see that.”

The shop door opens and two sentries stride through. The girls look up briefly then return to their work and their song. Elise gets up from her workstation and steps to the entrance to meet them and they speak quietly for a long moment. Jeneth darts her eyes up and catches Elise looking back her way, a worried look on her face. The two men pace through the shop, heading straight toward her, and her palms begin to sweat. Her mind floods with all the accusations and rumors that have swirled through the Temple’s gossip circles and she fears they’ve come to imprison her in the keep. In an instant her mouth seems to dry of all moisture and she watches, mortified, as the sentries come to a halt directly behind her.

“Which is Phoebe?”

“I am.” Phoebe looks up bashfully with her bottom lip tucked under.

“Come with us.”

“Where we going?”

“You’ll find out when we get there.”

“Why?”

“King’s orders.”

All work draws to a standstill and every girl, native and outsider alike, is riveted by the unusual encounter. Phoebe looks around shyly and starts to follow the men out of the shop.

“No,”
Jeneth scrapes out with her dry, nerve-wracked voice, and she watches helplessly as Phoebe is led away. They have heard rumors of a little boy taken from the fields in just this manner. He was never returned.

“Where are you taking her?” Elise asks as they move past.

They ignore her and proceed through to the corridor, leaving the shop behind in stunned silence. Phoebe pads softly down the sandstone walkway and looks up curiously at the men who escort her, their rigid faces trained straightforward. They take her through the grand foyer to a secluded offset niche and descend the tight staircase. At the bottom of the landing an old man crouches in the darkness. Phoebe is taken to him.

“Are you Phoebe?” asks Keslin.

“Yes.”

“That’s a very pretty name. Thank you for meeting me.”

“You’re welcome.”

He pulls her close and peers into her frisky little eyes. “You look like a clever young girl. Tell me, Phoebe… do you like to play make believe?”

Tacking northbound on the mountain road, Cirune drives his steeds. He bears down with his heels, gripping the reins like a drowning man, his face a portrait of agony. His stomach is wrapped and clotted with stiff blood, and each time his horse’s hooves rebound off the hard ground it sends a fresh spike of pain into his side. Halis’s injured horse wants to veer off course and run wild, and each time he rides around to shepherd it back he loses valuable time and is contented to let it go forever the next time it strays. Noble Balazir keeps pace brilliantly.

Through the winding pass and over the hills and valleys he rides, hurtling on a straight shot back to the Temple, the lone survivor of the ill-fated search brigade. He fears bleakly the disgrace he will face at having lost the runaways after coming so close, but he hopes the pack lashed to his pommel will keep him from the pit, if he lives long enough to deliver it, for if that scrap of hide contains what he believes it does—nothing less than a map to the lost city of their dreams—then it will be more than enough salvation to see him through.

Chapter Thirteen

The blackness behind Jack’s eyelids begins to redden and he opens them. The sun is rising. They had limped a ways and collapsed behind a viny stone partition, and as he sits up and yawns, disoriented, the dried cake of blood on his face cracks and flakes away like the faces of the old porcelain figurines on the floor of the hollowed-out mansion. Lia sits next to him, hugging her knees to her chest, and looks upon him tranquilly. A single rivulet of dirty crimson trails down the left side of her face.

“Were you watching me sleep?”

She nods warmly. “We need to clean you up.”

She helps him to his feet and they stumble out into the open and look around at the cloudless day. Rainworn concrete walls lay embedded in the earth like the monoliths of some occult formation, leaning over in rough lines and arcs across the meadow, as if the whole arrangement were laid out carefully on ancient ley lines by astrological mystics. They tread through it wordlessly, carrying no bow, no map, no provisions.

As they walk, frames and flickers of motion from the night’s assault flash through their minds in a psychedelic bazaar. Jack tries to push it away, and he conjures in its place a vague replica of the map they lost, trying in vain to reconstruct mentally the lines and symbols. His head throbs and he gives up. Lia swivels about as if every feature of the landscape poses an imminent threat. Past the violent imagery and the ringing in their ears, the only steady thought that pierces the fog of their minds is how sorely they miss Balazir.

They curve west and go toward the beach. Groves of palm trees stretch and tilt toward the sun’s slanted pathway like enormous dandelions straining for the light. Sandpipers play at the water’s edge, and Jack and Lia doff their reeking boots, slog through the sand, and wade out into the brewing froth and immerse themselves in the cold morning swell. Lia bends forward and soaks her ratty hair, working the strands between her fingers to wash out the grime, and she feels daintily around the sore patch where a fistful of it was crudely ratcheted away. Jack flips over and backstrokes away from the coast. He slackens his body and allows the ocean to carry him on its current, and he rolls and tumbles with a passing wave. As the water stills, he bobs up and down and looks back toward the shore where Lia paddles and splashes around, backlit and bathed in solar radiance, her lacerated nightgown sheer and clinging. Jack submerges and pistons his legs through the turbulent water, tendrils of wavering kelp brushing against his body. Back in the shallows he puts his feet down and walks upright through the plush sand.

“Come here,” says Lia.

Jack goes to her and she runs her fingertips across the swelling around his eyes and the fresh cut on his cheek. She unwinds the wrapping around his forearm and takes the bandages off his chest and cleanses them, then scoops up handfuls of saltwater and splashes it onto his wounds. Delicately she traces her fingers over the punctures and cuts and he pulls her close and holds her. She nuzzles against the crook of his neck and they breathe deeply in each other’s arms as the ebbing water laps around their waists.

“Maybe you were right.”

“About what?”

“That they’re wicked,” she says. Jack’s face grows stormy. “You’re not sorry, are you… that you killed him?”

“No. I wish I could kill him every day for the rest of my life, but it wouldn’t bring our parents back.”

“At least he won’t kill anybody ever again.”

“Yeah,” Jack says flatly, thinking on the scores of young warriors ready and eager to take Halis’s place. As he looks at Lia, he thinks again how close he came to losing her and his heart feels heavy and sore. He brushes a wet slither of hair from her forehead and kneads her soft earlobe between his thumb and forefinger. She looks up at him with glistening brown eyes that contain a depth of innocence Jack fears he may never know again, the light and graceful purity of never having killed. He traces his lips across hers and they fall against each other urgently, conveying themselves in a silent language more ancient than the perished world that surrounds them.

They tread back to the shore, whispering low to each other though no soul breathes anywhere near that may overhear them. The thin, scalloped beach is strewn with tangles of kelp and driftwood and water-worn bits of shell and they walk across it, hand-in-hand, and climb back to the grassy shelf where their boots lay airing in the breeze. They lie on their backs and let the warm sun dry the saltwater off their skin and soaked clothing, closing their eyes and sinking into the cool earth and feeling the minute scrabbling of tiny insects marching through the grass beneath them. Lia feels something land on her arm, with legs as soft as eyelashes, and she lies perfectly still and lets it explore the inner bend of her elbow for a spell, then it takes wing again and flies off with a buzz that tickles her ears.