In the House of Five Dragons
7. Mercy Cried
“When Captain Errain of the Sun Court died in battle with the Fiori, leadership of the remaining forces fell to the commander of the Star Court Ninth Wing, Lord-Captain Rikard Mazrem. Under his orders, the last of the Carcaen army began their withdrawal from the Fiore mountains. Captain Mazrem led the VEIL knights south, which would have led them out of Fiore and into Erastrasus. But the Fiori cut off the retreating army and trapped them in the infamous Njorn Pass.”
— From Accounts of Njorn Pass, by Alexander Ferro
The branches of the tower were as bare as those of a Terran tree in winter. Stumble was changing bodies again, trading his comfortable malachite nightingale to a more watchful jasper owl. He was weaving the last strands of attention and wakefulness into shape when Flickerdim nudged him with one dark coil.
Look.
I can’t, Stumble grumbled. I’m not done with my eyes yet. What’s going on?
He’s at the city gate, on the road of the highest house. He is close.
Stumble hummed a sound midway between a nightingale’s song and the swish-and-silence of his new owl body. He craned his head this way and that, listening.
I can’t see yet. Show me, Flickerdim! Stumble thought excitedly.
Flickerdim let out a whisper-taste of sigh, but then did as the younger Alterran asked. He encircled Stumble in the deep, dusky-sweet sense of home, of a place so long loved that the sense of it was pressed and rich as sweet wine. There it was, the so-Terran fire of passion, so hot and so vivid that it surely warmed even Flickerdim’s coldest scorn!
But at the center of that heart was the Terran rage, his rage, the blossom of blood that belonged to no other creature, not of either world. Stumble’s feathers puffed out in every direction as though to push it away.
Take it back, Flicker. Age has sharpened your eyes and you can see things I can’t. Take it back.
Flickerdim’s cool touch retreated like a frost in spring. Hurry with those eyes, young one. You must see what is to come.
A needling pain bit at his guts and grew worse with every passing hour. Something inside him growled and he shook so badly now that the steel bands on his armor clattered like a sack of seashells. The strange blackness had come and gone again, full of misty memories of things that never happened.
Home. I’m home! I…
He stood at last at the edge of Dormaen, queen of cities and the marble heart of civilization! But where were the north gates, the huge iron doors twice the height of the tallest man and inscribed with the Carcaen laurel? The pointed stone arch that should have held them stood open and empty, unguarded. The broad whiteness of Tychon Road lay gap-toothed and broken.
The poets called it the great ivory river of Dormaen, twin to the silver-run Mazren.
An old woman, riding a bow-legged gray mule and half hidden by the heaped sacks of corn she held steady, ducked her head at him as she passed out of the city. He stared after her. Where was she bound? Did no one ask? Where were the VEIL knights that stood vigil at all hours of day and night in the name of the holy Carcaen Empire?
I’m home. All is changed, everything is new. But I am home.
He stepped through the arch.
What’s that? It glows with life, Stumble asked.
But the shadows run deep with death. That’s the city, Dormaen. He’s passing through the gates now.
They don’t recognize him.
Why should they?
He’s a hero. Their hero.
No, he’s not their hero anymore. No one is what they once were.
The next day, Thain was too tired for company and a long-faced priest turned Thainna away at the fostral door. Disappointed and sore, she was determined not to waste the trip all the way up from the Rows. Thainna returned to the taphouse, wondering if Dorros had anything else interesting to share, but the Flame was nowhere to be found. A different man behind the plank bar told her that Dorros had not been seen since yesterday. Thainna thanked him and did not linger. It was getting late, too late for much else. The whole day wasted…
It was time to go home. The road was full of people finished with a long day of underpaid work. Thainna joined the dirty tide of humanity flowing into the Rows. The night was darkening quickly, turning the sky from pink to purple to a blue so deep it seemed to have been pulled up from the distant depths of the sea. Even that dim light was sinking rapidly into inky black and stars bloomed one by one, all silvery, cold and distant as the eyes of the gods.
Thainna lived deeper in the Rows than most of the crowd. By the time she had reached her own neighborhood, the crush of humanity thinned to a trudging trickle. Thainna’s steps became slow and heavy, too, though it wasn’t the pain of her still-raw feet. She just didn’t want to go home. What was the point? There was nothing to go home to. Her brother was in the fostral. Her father was probably at the shop again, collecting money from more successful members of the House and tucking it away for safekeeping. There was no one at home waiting for her, no meal or even a warm bed.
But even the slowest feet eventually reached their destination. Thainna stopped between two lopsided shanties, rough-split planks and spars of wood strung with taut-laced pieces of cloth. One of them looked like it might have been some rich woman’s sheet once, but now it was torn and filthy beyond any hope of cleaning. It was all just trash now.
Thainna was jealous of the shabby little lean-tos. Hole-riddled and flea-ridden though they were, those homes still had walls. It would be warmer inside. Summer was coming to an end and the nights were growing colder. Flickering light from small cooking fires — few in the Rows could afford stoves — silhouetted faceless and shadowy occupants.
Thainna squeezed between the walls and through a narrow gap in the crumbling mortar. The alleyway beyond was cramped and irregular, squashed between two of the slanting hovels and backing on a third.
Home. This is my home.
Years before, Aelos covered the narrowest places overhead with thick mats, woven from rushes that young Thain and Thainna carried from the shore of the Mazren River, but those were long since gone. As soon as the twins were old enough to enter the service of the House of Five Dragons, there was no time to mend or replace the makeshift roof anymore.
A rotten old barrel squatted in one crooked corner, many times patched but still leaky. Thainna leaned over the rim and had to reach deep to scoop up a handful of water. It hadn’t rained for weeks. Her fingernails scraped the tar-coated bottom long before Thainna had enough to drink. When she was done, she coughed and spat out a slimy clot of something she could not identify and didn’t really want to.
The water wouldn’t hold out much longer. Nothing would.
Despair crashed over Thainna, pressing down on her stomach like a physical thing, crudely fashioned of heavy lead. Everything was falling apart.
It wasn’t a sudden thing. It wasn’t violent. This was a thousand times worse. It was plodding and inexorable, inevitable. It was the decay that turned even great men into putrid shreds of meat, that ground mountains down into sand. The Rows were rotten and Thainna was just another maggot wriggling through them. The best she could hope for was to grow up into a fly, buzzing and eating and soiling carrion. How could she ever be so stupid, to think that she could make any of it better? She lived in filth and drank water that tasted like mud.
Stupid, stupid, stupid!
And trying to steal and save enough money to bid in the coming Auction? Stupid. Thainna was competing with Flames and Eyes, many of whom had been rich even before joining the House of Five Dragons.
It’s not for me, Thainna reminded herself, but it did not help. Selfless or selfish, it was all a pointless waste of time.
Thainna could run. She could take Thain away from Dormaen. Maybe out to Lorrus or Myra — one of the smaller cities in the southern parts of the Kaelos Valley. All the money she had saved would be enough to start a new life. A real life.
But no one walks away from the House. And what would I do in a new life, anyway? I don’t know a trade. I’m just a thief. I steal what I need. I don’t make bread or mill it or bake it. All I know how to do is take it.
Thainna threw herself down on a chaff-filled sack that served as her bed and cried until there was nothing left to cry. It changed nothing.
Her despair was exhausting, but Thainna couldn’t sleep yet. It wasn’t that cold yet, but her weeping had started a bone-deep shiver that would not abate. Thainna pulled herself back to her feet. Despite the pain in her feet, she needed to walk, to get her blood moving again. Thainna squeezed back out the way she had come, sideways like a crab evading a fisherman’s trap.
The streets were all but empty now. She had been crying longer than she thought. In other parts of Dormaen, lanterns filled the streets with a friendly glow that guided late-night travelers, but not out here. Once, hae… The iron lamp hooks bolted to the sagging, failing walls had stood empty and cold for as long as Thainna could remember, only good for streaking the stones with rust every time it rained.
Still, there was light enough to see by. The moon and the stars all shone pearly white, making even the shabby, ugly Rows appear embroidered in silver on perfectly black velvet. It was almost pretty.
Thainna walked. She had no destination in mind, but she knew the streets of her home. She wouldn’t get lost. Too bad, she thought. It wasn’t a completely unpleasant thought, to vanish mysteriously into the night. Like Rikard Mazrem in Njorn Pass. Let everyone wonder where she had gone.
Of course, he didn’t just vanish… He died. Rikard Mazrem traded his life for those of his men, to save them from the Fiori.
The wild Fiori were as much her own kind as the Carcaens, but Thainna didn’t feel much pride or sympathy for her mother’s race. It was said that the Fiori even ate their own dead. But now, because of Captain Mazrem’s sacrifice, the surviving Fiori were as much a part of the great empire as the Carcaens who had founded it.
Thainna turned down another narrow alleyway, only slightly broader than the one she lived in and barely wide enough to walk through. But unfettered by such pedestrian confines, her thoughts whirled wildly like leaves on the wind.
If she did disappear, would anyone even notice or care? Her father? Probably not. He rarely came home anymore and it wasn’t like Thainna brought any money into their pathetic excuse for a home. Everything she earned went either into the hands of the Talons and Flames who gave her orders or else into the vaults to be saved for the Auction. As far as her father was concerned, Thainna was just another mouth to feed and one that spent entirely too much time talking.
No one from the House of Five Dragons would miss Thainna. She was one of hundreds of Talons. The Crest probably wouldn’t even notice the loss. Maybe when some of the others finally had to do their own petty thievery… Even then, they would only find some other young, unimportant Talon. Thainna was replaceable. Easily replaceable.
But Thain would miss her. That was enough to banish even idle daydreams of leaving. Thainna’s twin would be broken without her. Thain loved her. He needed her.
Cheered up, Thainna turned back at the closed and darkened bread shop, ready to make her way home. There was still no new work from the House. Tomorrow, she could have a word with Illius. For a cut of the take, he might be willing to pour a few more of the fake medals. She could tell him to change the mold, put the right year on the damned things. It wouldn’t be hard to sell some more of them before someone finally caught on. Every laurel brought her one closer to winning the Auction.
