Making Peace, page 13
“Bath all ready?” Sen asked Cora.
Cora nodded without looking at us, her eyes sweeping the floor for stray dirt.
“Go on ahead, I’ll catch up,” I told Sen.
He nodded and walked over to the staircase, headed to the bathing areas in the sublevel. He passed Cora on his way and winked at her. “Don’t suppose I could convince you to join—“
Without looking, she planted her broom in his backside and swept him straight through the stairwell door. The broom pointed menacingly at me next, along with one arched eyebrow. With my hands up, I gave my best disarming smile and sidestepped into the stairwell, then headed up to my cell to grab a change of clothes.
When I walked into the split bath a few minutes later, I found Sen already soaking. An underground bath sounded strange to me at first, but the way they designed baths in Tiers made some sense. Each building had a small amount of the river diverted through it, but the law required the water be piped into only the lowest room to prevent overflow issues during flooding season. Since most houses held several families, a community bath for each home was the most efficient way.
Our bath was a carved stone room with no corners and was divided down the center by an eight-foot wall which stretched only halfway to the ceiling, providing an open, rounded architecture. Magical glowing orbs had been suspended from the ceiling at various points, spelling out some of the local constellations. A special species of underground fern local to the area’s cave systems had been encouraged to grow around the perimeter of the room, giving the whole place the feel of an outdoor garden rather than a basement.
Safely shielded on the men’s side, I went ahead and stripped down, tossing my soiled clothing to one side of the stone room. Sen was lying back on the carved steps, floating in the water with his eyes closed. Warm water lapped against my skin as I waded in, and I thanked whichever Saint had inspired the local nano-mages to invent warming systems for baths.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Sen asked me, his eyes still closed.
No, I don’t. Anything but that, I thought. “Not particularly.”
Someone had left a basket of cleansers on the edge of the bath and I helped myself. I took care to scrub away the dried blood that was caked on the backs of my hands and ground into the hairs on my arms. The sickly sweet fruit smell of the slippery blue liquid I’d chosen mixed with the serving girl’s blood and created the most terrible contrast in my mind.
“If this were two months ago, I’d be screaming,” I murmured.
“Hmm?” Sen raised his head, looking at me.
“Nothing.”
We were both quiet for a while as he watched me scrub away the blood.
“You’re becoming a real hard case, Belkan. More like one of us every day.”
I almost dropped the bottle of soap but managed to catch it. “What do you mean?” I went back to scrubbing. The blood seemed not to want to come off.
“Hmm.” Sen cupped his hands above his chest and let the water fall slowly through his fingers. “Remember the first murder scene? I heard your face was as white as it could get, and you barely moved from the one spot. Ugly thought they were going to have to carry you out because you were hardly even breathing. But today, you grabbed Cheena’s wrist like it was nothing, and even thought to check for irregularities.”
“Cheena?”
He looked into my eyes. “The girl, that’s… it was her name. I asked after you left.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I scrubbed at my arm some more. About half of the blood was gone, but it still smelled all wrong. “It’s good that you asked.”
He watched me for a few more moments, then slid toward me on the steps. “Here,” he said, selecting a different bottle out of the basket. When he uncapped it the clear liquid inside had a stronger smell, more sharp. “This does a better job with that sort of mess.” He poured some on my arm and rubbed it a few times, then pushed my arm under the water. When I brought it back up, a large portion of the blood had come off. I nodded my thanks and took the bottle from him, and he leaned back again on the steps.
“And what about you?” I asked him. “Why doesn’t this bother you?”
He didn’t answer, and I wasn’t going to press, so we sat there for a while with just the sound of my splashing reflecting gently off the rounded walls back to us.
“I killed my first man at ten years old.” Voice hard, so unlike his usual laughing tone that it startled me. I looked over to see his expression sealed up tight. Only his eyes gave voice to the pain inside, as hard as they’d been when he saw the bruises on Cheena’s wrist.
He continued: “It was the piece of trash who killed my mother, and if I’d been a little faster, a little harder, a little bit less of a child, she might still be alive. Hard isn’t bad, Bel. Hard means you can do what needs to be done.”
My mind was having trouble reconciling the laughing jokester I’d come to know with the image of a murderous child. “What happened?”
He blew out his breath at the ceiling, his face relaxing just a bit. His eyes stayed just as hard, though. “A disagreement over money. He owed her some, and decided he didn’t. She said he did. He wasn’t in a mood to bother arguing.” He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees.
“What does a ten-year-old boy do to survive alone in Tiers?” I asked.
He shook his head and gave a half-grin, one that would almost fit with his usual face. “Nah, I wasn’t alone. It was just me and my sister after that. She taught me a lot, raised me.”
I was more than a little surprised. “You have a sister?”
Sen looked at me quizzically. “Why is that surprising?”
I thought back to every interaction I’d seen him have with women, and every statement I’d heard him make about women. Still, I didn’t want to upset him and stop his story. “Um, no reason, I suppose. So your sister raised you from then on?”
He nodded and went back to studying the ferns across the way. “She did her best. Wasn’t much older than me, but she was a lot more resourceful. Smarter, too, I think. But things weren’t much better for her than they were for my mother. We lived hard, always on the edge of the streets. I had to do a lot more hard things to keep us both alive. That’s why I joined the Keepers. It was a place where those hard things could make a much larger difference, not just one ugly scene at a time but a real campaign against the injustices of the world which keep children in conditions like that. These hands of mine, they’re dirty. But the blood of the dying people they’ve cradled is soaked into them, crying out for meaning. For a better world.”
He drew a deep breath and smiled at me. “Anyway, my sister is the one who taught me about cleaning up blood. You can thank her if you ever meet her.”
I tried to imagine meeting a female version of Sen. I considered asking how she knew so much about cleaning up blood, but decided I probably didn’t want to know. “Uh, sure. I’ll do that. Wow, Sen, I’m… not sure what to say.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, here I’ve thought you were a little, uh, rude. I mean, you say some weird things sometimes. But there’s this other side to you. You had this tough life, and it sounds like you took good care of your sister. And here I thought you were just a disgusting, womanizing degenerate.”
He blinked a few times. “Well, before you say something that offends me, just remember everyone has a good side. You can’t judge a book by its tits, Bel.”
I sighed.
Later in my room, after I wrote down everything Sen had told me, I lay on my bed looking up at the ceiling and reflected on Sen’s words.
“A hard case, huh…?”
I raised my right hand above me, looking up at it. I had scrubbed and scrubbed, but it still smelled like blood. I wondered if maybe it always would.
I thought about the things I’d had to do in order to survive so far, and wondered what more would happen before this job was done. I thought about Sen, how he’d known right away what Cheena was going to do. Had he seen suicide before?
I thought about the black-haired man I’d killed. In my dreams I smelled his breath, saw the terror in his eyes as he realized what was happening. In the worst nightmares, he called out to his mother or his children before he died. Then I’d wake up and vomit into my chamber pot.
“What am I becoming?” I asked my hand. It gave me no answer.
“No matter what I do, how hard I have to become, I’ll never be like Ugly,” I promised, still speaking to the raised hand before me. “I won’t value human life that poorly.” I drew a breath. “I’m not like him. I can do this job and stay a good person. I can handle this. I can do it.”
My hand dropped onto my face, covering my eyes as they started to burn with unshed tears.
“……You’re such a liar.”
CHAPTER 21
LATER THAT NIGHT, I knocked softly on Shield’s door. After a minute or two of hushed activity inside, her door opened. She looked at me with raised eyebrows, clearly curious. “Bel? Everything okay?”
I nodded. “I, ah… I need to talk.”
She blinked, then stepped back and opened her door wide enough for me to slip inside. She was dressed in her heavy cotton nightgown again, with an extra robe thrown on over that, making it clear she had been getting ready for bed. I was still in my full daytime outfit. She must have noticed, but didn’t say anything about it, just gestured for me to be seated in the chair at her desk. She sat neatly on the edge of her bed, tucking her folded legs up under herself and clasping her hands in her lap.
I felt her eyes on me, waiting for me to begin, but I had no idea what I wanted to say. Why had I come in here? Something had compelled me to seek out someone I could talk to, but that same feeling hadn’t been considerate enough to give me any pointers on what to say.
Shield cleared her throat. “I heard there was some unpleasantness at the First House today. I’m sorry, Belkan, we seem to drag you into a lot of bad scenes.”
I nodded. That was the last thing I wanted to talk about, but I didn’t know what else to say. “Yeah. Well, I mean, that’s my job. I’m supposed to document it all. The good and the bad.”
She cocked her head slightly. “Sure, but just because it’s your job doesn’t mean it’s not hard. I remember how long it took me to get used to the things we see in our work.”
I studied the floorboards as I cast about for anything else, anything at all, that would rescue me from this train of thought. “Uh huh. Well, it’s rough, to be sure. Sen said it’s about hardness, being hard enough to handle the horror. But I can handle it. I can do this.”
I heard her laugh softly and I looked up, confused. She covered her mouth with the back of her hand, still laughing. “I’m sorry,” she said, her eyes twinkling. “I don’t mean to laugh. It’s just, you sound like I did when I started here. It was really hard. I remember my first case. Two men from different Houses had fought a duel right out in the street. Ugly was interviewing witnesses and asked me to check that both bodies only had wounds consistent with the other’s weapon. I thought I was going to faint, and I must have thrown up two or three times during the process. I remember that after the last time, I looked up and saw Ugly squatting down on his heels a few feet away, watching me. ‘It’s only gonna get harder from here,’ he told me. And I realized then he could have done the job himself. There was no reason to make me do it, except to test me. Either I’d do it, get through it and learn to handle the job, or the task would break me and I’d run away.”
Her eyes were soft, looking back into her memory. “I got real mad at him and snapped that I could do it. Then I wiped the vomit from my mouth, went back to the bodies, and finished the job. I was so angry that he thought I couldn’t manage it. Afterward, when we got back, I marched right up to him in the meal hall and demanded an apology. He pushed out the chair beside him with his foot and said, ‘Good job, kid.’ Then he smiled at me. Really smiled, like I’d never seen him smile before. And I knew he hadn’t been telling me to quit. He’d been giving me the straight truth. ‘It’s only gonna get harder from here.’ And it has. But he was also encouraging me to rise to the challenge.”
Her eyes snapped back into focus on the present, and she looked at me. “People rise or fall to your expectations, Belkan. And I’ve got high expectations for you. We all do. Yes, even Ugly. Don’t make that face,” she said when I frowned. “He’s not as bad as you think. You don’t know him, not really.”
I opened my mouth to disagree, to say I knew exactly what kind of person Ugly was, but then I remembered Sen sharing his story in the bath. Sen sacrificing his own softness, and maybe even his goodness, to become hard enough to protect his sister. Whom was Ugly protecting? And, more importantly, I realized with a start, whom was I protecting? For whom was I making these sacrifices? For myself, to pay off my debts back home? For my company, or for Edwin our Chief Editor?
“I don’t want to be like that, like Ugly. He seems so closed off, so brutal. Barely human, just cold instead. I didn’t even know how to use a sword before I came here. Now I do, and I’ve killed someone, and if I keep learning to use it… I just, I think I just want….” I found my breath catching in my throat.
I tried again. “I can handle….” Not that lie again, I told myself. My throat started to feel like it was closing at the same time as my breathing came harder and faster. In confusion, I raised my hand to my throat, feeling for something that might be choking me. I felt my eyes widening in fear, and I looked at Shield, who was looking right back at me in growing alarm.
My stomach seized up with a sharp pain and I hunched over in the chair, clutching my hair in my hands. “I can handle…” Lungs burning, heart pounding in my chest so hard my ribs were going to break. “Oh Lady, what have I...?” I clenched my eyes shut so hard I could see exploding light against the lids. The breathing got worse and I heard my lungs start rattling.
There was a rush of cloth and I was suddenly enveloped in warmth. I felt my head wrapped tight and held against a comforting softness. Shield was standing over me, holding me against her breast. Her long hair fell down around us, tickling the back of my neck. Every inch of her smelled like sundried cotton. She hummed what sounded like a lullaby, holding me against her body and rocking in a gentle rhythm.
In some detached part of my mind, I thought of my older sister Katie, with her black velvety hair so long and always perfectly brushed. She had held me like this when I was little, before I’d lost her to the plague. All at once I was nine years old again, crying from bad dreams, safely wrapped in my sister’s arms. How odd, that detached part of me thought, to find childhood again here in this place of darkness.
My throat began to open, and my breathing gradually slowed. My heart started to settle, though my ribs were still dreadfully sore. I drew several deep, shuddering breaths. I have no idea how long it took, but eventually I felt some semblance of control come back to me.
Shield held me the whole time, humming her lullaby. When she felt I was strong enough she let me go, and I heard her seat herself back on the bed. I kept my eyes closed, savoring the last snatches of memories of Katie. Then I opened my eyes and met Shield’s gaze.
“Thank you.”
She nodded, serious. “You’re very welcome. It happens to all of us, Bel. Hardness isn’t a bad thing, really. You have to be hard to survive a Keeper’s life. Ugly is certainly hard, but it’s allowed him to do some wonderful things for people, to truly help people. He’s done so many painful things in service to others. There’s been a price he’s had to pay. We all have a process, and maybe it never really ends. Maybe we keep getting stronger and stronger as we go along, and so we will always need someone to help us handle the pain. This life, this Keeper’s life, certainly isn’t an easy one. Everyone gets through in their own way, but everyone has moments during that process where they fall apart.” She patted my knee and smiled at last, lightening my heart as her smile always did.
“And when it happens again,” she said, “come back to me. I’ll be here for you, Bel. I promise.”
CHAPTER 22
“QUIT FIDGETING,” Shield said. “You look fine.”
We stood outside the entrance to the enormous rented hall holding the ball being organized by the First House. We were part of a long line of people waiting to be admitted and announced. Ugly and Shield stood together ahead of me, with me forming the third point of the triangle. Captain stood a short distance away, scanning the other guests.
“I don’t feel fine. I hate formal dress.” Ugly ran his finger around the inside neck of his Keeper’s military dress uniform: a midnight blue double-breasted jacket over a plain black tunic with matching blue pants, and military boots polished to a shine. Instead of medals lining the front of his chest there was a badge with the Keeper emblem. His uniform added a single silver epaulette on the left shoulder to denote his rank as second in command. Captain’s epaulette was gold, as befit a cell leader.
We shuffled forward with the line and the long strings of silver beads hanging from Ugly’s epaulette clacked together, which seemed to annoy him to no end. “No matter where you serve, they design the dress uniforms to be as uncomfortable as possible,” Ugly growled.
I looked at him curiously. “Did you often get to wear an officer’s dress uniform on Iron Sky?”
Ugly shot me a warning glare, but him wiggling his finger inside the turtleneck of his tunic lessened the severity of his rebuke. “Listen, scribbler—“
“Boys,” Shield said, gliding in between us with her back to me. Even in her serviceable lady’s dress uniform she managed to float like she was wearing a ball gown. She wore the same top as Ugly and Captain, though cut in a slimmer manner and with no epaulette. Instead of pants and flat boots, she wore a midnight blue ankle-length skirt and low-heeled boots laced up above the hemline. Like the rest of us, she wore a shortsword in a polished black sheath hanging from her belt.
I noticed Ugly also wore a knife at his other hip. And in his left boot. And his other boot. Shield took Ugly’s arm and rested lightly against him. “This is supposed to be a formal event,” she reminded us. “That means people will be paying attention to your manners. I hope the two of you remember how to have manners?”
Cora nodded without looking at us, her eyes sweeping the floor for stray dirt.
“Go on ahead, I’ll catch up,” I told Sen.
He nodded and walked over to the staircase, headed to the bathing areas in the sublevel. He passed Cora on his way and winked at her. “Don’t suppose I could convince you to join—“
Without looking, she planted her broom in his backside and swept him straight through the stairwell door. The broom pointed menacingly at me next, along with one arched eyebrow. With my hands up, I gave my best disarming smile and sidestepped into the stairwell, then headed up to my cell to grab a change of clothes.
When I walked into the split bath a few minutes later, I found Sen already soaking. An underground bath sounded strange to me at first, but the way they designed baths in Tiers made some sense. Each building had a small amount of the river diverted through it, but the law required the water be piped into only the lowest room to prevent overflow issues during flooding season. Since most houses held several families, a community bath for each home was the most efficient way.
Our bath was a carved stone room with no corners and was divided down the center by an eight-foot wall which stretched only halfway to the ceiling, providing an open, rounded architecture. Magical glowing orbs had been suspended from the ceiling at various points, spelling out some of the local constellations. A special species of underground fern local to the area’s cave systems had been encouraged to grow around the perimeter of the room, giving the whole place the feel of an outdoor garden rather than a basement.
Safely shielded on the men’s side, I went ahead and stripped down, tossing my soiled clothing to one side of the stone room. Sen was lying back on the carved steps, floating in the water with his eyes closed. Warm water lapped against my skin as I waded in, and I thanked whichever Saint had inspired the local nano-mages to invent warming systems for baths.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Sen asked me, his eyes still closed.
No, I don’t. Anything but that, I thought. “Not particularly.”
Someone had left a basket of cleansers on the edge of the bath and I helped myself. I took care to scrub away the dried blood that was caked on the backs of my hands and ground into the hairs on my arms. The sickly sweet fruit smell of the slippery blue liquid I’d chosen mixed with the serving girl’s blood and created the most terrible contrast in my mind.
“If this were two months ago, I’d be screaming,” I murmured.
“Hmm?” Sen raised his head, looking at me.
“Nothing.”
We were both quiet for a while as he watched me scrub away the blood.
“You’re becoming a real hard case, Belkan. More like one of us every day.”
I almost dropped the bottle of soap but managed to catch it. “What do you mean?” I went back to scrubbing. The blood seemed not to want to come off.
“Hmm.” Sen cupped his hands above his chest and let the water fall slowly through his fingers. “Remember the first murder scene? I heard your face was as white as it could get, and you barely moved from the one spot. Ugly thought they were going to have to carry you out because you were hardly even breathing. But today, you grabbed Cheena’s wrist like it was nothing, and even thought to check for irregularities.”
“Cheena?”
He looked into my eyes. “The girl, that’s… it was her name. I asked after you left.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I scrubbed at my arm some more. About half of the blood was gone, but it still smelled all wrong. “It’s good that you asked.”
He watched me for a few more moments, then slid toward me on the steps. “Here,” he said, selecting a different bottle out of the basket. When he uncapped it the clear liquid inside had a stronger smell, more sharp. “This does a better job with that sort of mess.” He poured some on my arm and rubbed it a few times, then pushed my arm under the water. When I brought it back up, a large portion of the blood had come off. I nodded my thanks and took the bottle from him, and he leaned back again on the steps.
“And what about you?” I asked him. “Why doesn’t this bother you?”
He didn’t answer, and I wasn’t going to press, so we sat there for a while with just the sound of my splashing reflecting gently off the rounded walls back to us.
“I killed my first man at ten years old.” Voice hard, so unlike his usual laughing tone that it startled me. I looked over to see his expression sealed up tight. Only his eyes gave voice to the pain inside, as hard as they’d been when he saw the bruises on Cheena’s wrist.
He continued: “It was the piece of trash who killed my mother, and if I’d been a little faster, a little harder, a little bit less of a child, she might still be alive. Hard isn’t bad, Bel. Hard means you can do what needs to be done.”
My mind was having trouble reconciling the laughing jokester I’d come to know with the image of a murderous child. “What happened?”
He blew out his breath at the ceiling, his face relaxing just a bit. His eyes stayed just as hard, though. “A disagreement over money. He owed her some, and decided he didn’t. She said he did. He wasn’t in a mood to bother arguing.” He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees.
“What does a ten-year-old boy do to survive alone in Tiers?” I asked.
He shook his head and gave a half-grin, one that would almost fit with his usual face. “Nah, I wasn’t alone. It was just me and my sister after that. She taught me a lot, raised me.”
I was more than a little surprised. “You have a sister?”
Sen looked at me quizzically. “Why is that surprising?”
I thought back to every interaction I’d seen him have with women, and every statement I’d heard him make about women. Still, I didn’t want to upset him and stop his story. “Um, no reason, I suppose. So your sister raised you from then on?”
He nodded and went back to studying the ferns across the way. “She did her best. Wasn’t much older than me, but she was a lot more resourceful. Smarter, too, I think. But things weren’t much better for her than they were for my mother. We lived hard, always on the edge of the streets. I had to do a lot more hard things to keep us both alive. That’s why I joined the Keepers. It was a place where those hard things could make a much larger difference, not just one ugly scene at a time but a real campaign against the injustices of the world which keep children in conditions like that. These hands of mine, they’re dirty. But the blood of the dying people they’ve cradled is soaked into them, crying out for meaning. For a better world.”
He drew a deep breath and smiled at me. “Anyway, my sister is the one who taught me about cleaning up blood. You can thank her if you ever meet her.”
I tried to imagine meeting a female version of Sen. I considered asking how she knew so much about cleaning up blood, but decided I probably didn’t want to know. “Uh, sure. I’ll do that. Wow, Sen, I’m… not sure what to say.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, here I’ve thought you were a little, uh, rude. I mean, you say some weird things sometimes. But there’s this other side to you. You had this tough life, and it sounds like you took good care of your sister. And here I thought you were just a disgusting, womanizing degenerate.”
He blinked a few times. “Well, before you say something that offends me, just remember everyone has a good side. You can’t judge a book by its tits, Bel.”
I sighed.
Later in my room, after I wrote down everything Sen had told me, I lay on my bed looking up at the ceiling and reflected on Sen’s words.
“A hard case, huh…?”
I raised my right hand above me, looking up at it. I had scrubbed and scrubbed, but it still smelled like blood. I wondered if maybe it always would.
I thought about the things I’d had to do in order to survive so far, and wondered what more would happen before this job was done. I thought about Sen, how he’d known right away what Cheena was going to do. Had he seen suicide before?
I thought about the black-haired man I’d killed. In my dreams I smelled his breath, saw the terror in his eyes as he realized what was happening. In the worst nightmares, he called out to his mother or his children before he died. Then I’d wake up and vomit into my chamber pot.
“What am I becoming?” I asked my hand. It gave me no answer.
“No matter what I do, how hard I have to become, I’ll never be like Ugly,” I promised, still speaking to the raised hand before me. “I won’t value human life that poorly.” I drew a breath. “I’m not like him. I can do this job and stay a good person. I can handle this. I can do it.”
My hand dropped onto my face, covering my eyes as they started to burn with unshed tears.
“……You’re such a liar.”
CHAPTER 21
LATER THAT NIGHT, I knocked softly on Shield’s door. After a minute or two of hushed activity inside, her door opened. She looked at me with raised eyebrows, clearly curious. “Bel? Everything okay?”
I nodded. “I, ah… I need to talk.”
She blinked, then stepped back and opened her door wide enough for me to slip inside. She was dressed in her heavy cotton nightgown again, with an extra robe thrown on over that, making it clear she had been getting ready for bed. I was still in my full daytime outfit. She must have noticed, but didn’t say anything about it, just gestured for me to be seated in the chair at her desk. She sat neatly on the edge of her bed, tucking her folded legs up under herself and clasping her hands in her lap.
I felt her eyes on me, waiting for me to begin, but I had no idea what I wanted to say. Why had I come in here? Something had compelled me to seek out someone I could talk to, but that same feeling hadn’t been considerate enough to give me any pointers on what to say.
Shield cleared her throat. “I heard there was some unpleasantness at the First House today. I’m sorry, Belkan, we seem to drag you into a lot of bad scenes.”
I nodded. That was the last thing I wanted to talk about, but I didn’t know what else to say. “Yeah. Well, I mean, that’s my job. I’m supposed to document it all. The good and the bad.”
She cocked her head slightly. “Sure, but just because it’s your job doesn’t mean it’s not hard. I remember how long it took me to get used to the things we see in our work.”
I studied the floorboards as I cast about for anything else, anything at all, that would rescue me from this train of thought. “Uh huh. Well, it’s rough, to be sure. Sen said it’s about hardness, being hard enough to handle the horror. But I can handle it. I can do this.”
I heard her laugh softly and I looked up, confused. She covered her mouth with the back of her hand, still laughing. “I’m sorry,” she said, her eyes twinkling. “I don’t mean to laugh. It’s just, you sound like I did when I started here. It was really hard. I remember my first case. Two men from different Houses had fought a duel right out in the street. Ugly was interviewing witnesses and asked me to check that both bodies only had wounds consistent with the other’s weapon. I thought I was going to faint, and I must have thrown up two or three times during the process. I remember that after the last time, I looked up and saw Ugly squatting down on his heels a few feet away, watching me. ‘It’s only gonna get harder from here,’ he told me. And I realized then he could have done the job himself. There was no reason to make me do it, except to test me. Either I’d do it, get through it and learn to handle the job, or the task would break me and I’d run away.”
Her eyes were soft, looking back into her memory. “I got real mad at him and snapped that I could do it. Then I wiped the vomit from my mouth, went back to the bodies, and finished the job. I was so angry that he thought I couldn’t manage it. Afterward, when we got back, I marched right up to him in the meal hall and demanded an apology. He pushed out the chair beside him with his foot and said, ‘Good job, kid.’ Then he smiled at me. Really smiled, like I’d never seen him smile before. And I knew he hadn’t been telling me to quit. He’d been giving me the straight truth. ‘It’s only gonna get harder from here.’ And it has. But he was also encouraging me to rise to the challenge.”
Her eyes snapped back into focus on the present, and she looked at me. “People rise or fall to your expectations, Belkan. And I’ve got high expectations for you. We all do. Yes, even Ugly. Don’t make that face,” she said when I frowned. “He’s not as bad as you think. You don’t know him, not really.”
I opened my mouth to disagree, to say I knew exactly what kind of person Ugly was, but then I remembered Sen sharing his story in the bath. Sen sacrificing his own softness, and maybe even his goodness, to become hard enough to protect his sister. Whom was Ugly protecting? And, more importantly, I realized with a start, whom was I protecting? For whom was I making these sacrifices? For myself, to pay off my debts back home? For my company, or for Edwin our Chief Editor?
“I don’t want to be like that, like Ugly. He seems so closed off, so brutal. Barely human, just cold instead. I didn’t even know how to use a sword before I came here. Now I do, and I’ve killed someone, and if I keep learning to use it… I just, I think I just want….” I found my breath catching in my throat.
I tried again. “I can handle….” Not that lie again, I told myself. My throat started to feel like it was closing at the same time as my breathing came harder and faster. In confusion, I raised my hand to my throat, feeling for something that might be choking me. I felt my eyes widening in fear, and I looked at Shield, who was looking right back at me in growing alarm.
My stomach seized up with a sharp pain and I hunched over in the chair, clutching my hair in my hands. “I can handle…” Lungs burning, heart pounding in my chest so hard my ribs were going to break. “Oh Lady, what have I...?” I clenched my eyes shut so hard I could see exploding light against the lids. The breathing got worse and I heard my lungs start rattling.
There was a rush of cloth and I was suddenly enveloped in warmth. I felt my head wrapped tight and held against a comforting softness. Shield was standing over me, holding me against her breast. Her long hair fell down around us, tickling the back of my neck. Every inch of her smelled like sundried cotton. She hummed what sounded like a lullaby, holding me against her body and rocking in a gentle rhythm.
In some detached part of my mind, I thought of my older sister Katie, with her black velvety hair so long and always perfectly brushed. She had held me like this when I was little, before I’d lost her to the plague. All at once I was nine years old again, crying from bad dreams, safely wrapped in my sister’s arms. How odd, that detached part of me thought, to find childhood again here in this place of darkness.
My throat began to open, and my breathing gradually slowed. My heart started to settle, though my ribs were still dreadfully sore. I drew several deep, shuddering breaths. I have no idea how long it took, but eventually I felt some semblance of control come back to me.
Shield held me the whole time, humming her lullaby. When she felt I was strong enough she let me go, and I heard her seat herself back on the bed. I kept my eyes closed, savoring the last snatches of memories of Katie. Then I opened my eyes and met Shield’s gaze.
“Thank you.”
She nodded, serious. “You’re very welcome. It happens to all of us, Bel. Hardness isn’t a bad thing, really. You have to be hard to survive a Keeper’s life. Ugly is certainly hard, but it’s allowed him to do some wonderful things for people, to truly help people. He’s done so many painful things in service to others. There’s been a price he’s had to pay. We all have a process, and maybe it never really ends. Maybe we keep getting stronger and stronger as we go along, and so we will always need someone to help us handle the pain. This life, this Keeper’s life, certainly isn’t an easy one. Everyone gets through in their own way, but everyone has moments during that process where they fall apart.” She patted my knee and smiled at last, lightening my heart as her smile always did.
“And when it happens again,” she said, “come back to me. I’ll be here for you, Bel. I promise.”
CHAPTER 22
“QUIT FIDGETING,” Shield said. “You look fine.”
We stood outside the entrance to the enormous rented hall holding the ball being organized by the First House. We were part of a long line of people waiting to be admitted and announced. Ugly and Shield stood together ahead of me, with me forming the third point of the triangle. Captain stood a short distance away, scanning the other guests.
“I don’t feel fine. I hate formal dress.” Ugly ran his finger around the inside neck of his Keeper’s military dress uniform: a midnight blue double-breasted jacket over a plain black tunic with matching blue pants, and military boots polished to a shine. Instead of medals lining the front of his chest there was a badge with the Keeper emblem. His uniform added a single silver epaulette on the left shoulder to denote his rank as second in command. Captain’s epaulette was gold, as befit a cell leader.
We shuffled forward with the line and the long strings of silver beads hanging from Ugly’s epaulette clacked together, which seemed to annoy him to no end. “No matter where you serve, they design the dress uniforms to be as uncomfortable as possible,” Ugly growled.
I looked at him curiously. “Did you often get to wear an officer’s dress uniform on Iron Sky?”
Ugly shot me a warning glare, but him wiggling his finger inside the turtleneck of his tunic lessened the severity of his rebuke. “Listen, scribbler—“
“Boys,” Shield said, gliding in between us with her back to me. Even in her serviceable lady’s dress uniform she managed to float like she was wearing a ball gown. She wore the same top as Ugly and Captain, though cut in a slimmer manner and with no epaulette. Instead of pants and flat boots, she wore a midnight blue ankle-length skirt and low-heeled boots laced up above the hemline. Like the rest of us, she wore a shortsword in a polished black sheath hanging from her belt.
I noticed Ugly also wore a knife at his other hip. And in his left boot. And his other boot. Shield took Ugly’s arm and rested lightly against him. “This is supposed to be a formal event,” she reminded us. “That means people will be paying attention to your manners. I hope the two of you remember how to have manners?”
