These Divided Shores, page 9
Once a heretic, the only way out was through flames.
Lu wanted to make the magic Elazar sought, and put it in her body before he could use it. That had been their plan, back on the Astuto—to make magic first and show the world that such power came from Grace Loray, not the Pious God. Was it too late for that? Ben had seen how quickly the villagers of Grace Loray had surrendered to Elazar. Would they believe anyone who countered him and said, “No, these mighty acts are not the Pious God, but your own magic?”
Did these types of grand thoughts matter right now? They needed to escape.
Ben felt ill.
Gunnar waved at himself. He winced, his own wounds unhealed. “Eye of the Sun. Elazar—he is not wrong about that. Can you remove it from me?”
Ben finished the sheet, now a pile of makeshift bandages. Lu pushed up her sleeve and set about wrapping them around her wounds.
“I don’t know,” Lu said, grimacing. “Maybe. I can’t—ah.”
“Here.” Ben took her wrist and tightened a strip for her.
She let him, which surprised him almost as much as the brazen way she asked Gunnar, “How was it made permanent?”
Gunnar blinked. Lu’s face flashed with empathy.
“I can’t undo it if I don’t know how your people gave it to you,” she said.
Gunnar dropped to the floor in a huff. Silence held, no distant footsteps or grating walls.
“They slaughter the bear,” Gunnar whispered.
Lu hardened under Ben’s touch and met his eyes. Gunnar was still in a drug-warped fog. Did he know he was speaking? If he was clearheaded, he wouldn’t tell them this—
Ben almost spoke, but Lu snatched his hand.
“They are rare, the bears. The embodiment of the Visjorn spirit. One of the few things Mecht clans agree on is that Visjorn bears are only to be killed for—this.” Gunnar launched a flame into his palm. “Eye of the Sun commanders hunt one into the mountains. They slit its throat, gather the blood. They take it, and Eye of the Sun flower, and they—” He made a motion like stirring. “Warriors drink it. They cannot stand, cannot speak, even, for days after. Others—” Gunnar threw his head back so his golden hair fell away from his face. The knot in his throat bobbed on a swallow. “Some women volunteer to drink the mixture, their swollen bellies . . . It is an honor, to birth an Eye of the Sun warrior. They are stronger. They are near gods.
“My mother volunteered.” Gunnar’s voice had been soft before, but now it was snowflakes on a blanket of snow. “She is revered for having me. But she is not . . . right. The women, they survive, but barely. It is not a life. Not an honor.”
His cheek glinted. He was weeping.
Ben choked down the urge to unravel.
“Pregnant women.” Lu pierced Ben with a look. “Your father can never know that.”
Could he already? Ben had no idea what other experiments Elazar had employed over the years. Or which ones he was still doing.
“Even if I can remove it from you,” Lu started, “we need your abilities to get out. I need strength too. The secret is Visjorn blood?”
“Or the way they cook it,” Ben said. “Or the way they prepare the flower. Or all of it, a perfect dance. There are too many variables—we should focus on another escape option.”
“I tried to escape while you were gone.” Lu motioned to her now-bandaged arm. “We need a weapon that will make us stronger than Elazar. To get out—and to win this war. Grace Loray put everything we had into the last revolution, and we still ended up back here, under Argrid. To stop them, to truly win, we need an undefeatable weapon.”
“I won’t make permanent magic while we’re under Elazar’s control,” Ben said, “and I will never make it as a weapon. I will not become my father to stop him.” I still feel, came the unwarranted thought. I am not him—I will never be him—
Lu looked ready to scream, but Gunnar spoke first.
“She’s right,” he said. “This is how wars are fought—with weapons, not with secrets.”
“You told me the opposite on the Astuto: that this magic is burning the Mechtlands. That making permanent magic will encourage greater threats. What changed?”
Gunnar’s face was soft, his head bobbing. “Permanent magic is a powerful weapon. Creating it invites threats. But your father is already a threat. I did not know him before. We must create a weapon powerful enough to match him.”
“But you heard Elazar in the villages.” To Lu, Ben explained, “He spoke of a coming light that will bless those who surrender to him and destroy the ones who fight back. He has a plan that he believes will be enough of a sacrifice to make the Pious God grant him unchallenged power—which means people will die. What if permanent magic is the final piece of his plan?”
“We already know that permanent magic is the final piece to his plan,” Lu shot back. “He wants to make his soldiers unstoppable as they force Grace Loray to submit. There’s his coming light. But if I have permanent magic first? I will be unchallenged. Not him. This was his plan and ours when we were still on your father’s ship. Why would you think it’s changed?”
Ben shook his head, unable to process the level of pain in her eyes. Perhaps she was right. With everything that had happened, Ben had lost sight of the details. Elazar himself had told Ben his great plan in the Grace Neus Cathedral, to create unstoppable defensors.
Still, Ben couldn’t soothe the itch that Elazar had not told him about every facet of his final triumph.
Lu tapped her fingers on her knee. “We can’t get Visjorn blood without Elazar’s knowledge. But we can work on other things once he gives us magic. Maybe it’s temperature, like you said. Or method.”
Ben jerked back, his fire wearing off, leaving him exhausted to his bones.
“We must try,” Gunnar said. “To fight this way. What would you rather do?”
All Ben had was the image of Lu’s bloodstained shirt. The memory of Gunnar’s whimper after his beating. The cheers of the people whose loved ones Elazar had healed in the villages.
Hopelessness beat an empty laugh from Ben’s chest.
Everyone except Ben wanted to use magic in this war. How could he be the only one who sensed how futile it would be? Using magic against Elazar was like tossing buckets of water into a flood—it would add more of the danger that would destroy them.
Monxes brought Lu and Ben the crudest of laboratory supplies. A table, mortars, pestles, and vials of the most harmless plants: some for healing, some for strength, some for movement. They left a book as well—Lu’s worn copy of Botanical Wonders of the Grace Loray Colony, the bullet hole in its cover an oddly calming link to her life outside this prison.
But she had no use for this book now, knowing how incomplete its information on Grace Loray’s magic truly was. She knew about reducing plants to increase their potency from what Fatemah had done with Budwig Beans. To cure Shaking Sickness, which was caused by taking too much botanical magic, one needed to take the plants that countered what they had ingested—a realization Lu had come to on her own. Ben had explained on the Astuto what plants had gone into his healing potion. Gunnar had given them the piece about Visjorn blood, and the notion of specific heat, or the addition of nonplant ingredients, or length of cooking.
Tom couldn’t have learned any of that, even with her slipup in mentioning the Tuncians. So he couldn’t be that close to making permanent magic.
Could the secret lie in the cause and cure of Shaking Sickness? To take, at once, both a concentrated version of a plant and its counterpart with no delay between the absorption of one over the other. Aerated Blossom, a plant that gave levity and flight, counteracted Powersage, a strength-enhancing plant—could distilled versions of both in one tonic balance their effects and give extended, permanent strength and flight?
Monxes provided a pair of tongs similar to what Lu had used to pick the cell’s lock. The curved metal glinting on the table was as if Milo were outside the bars, unlocking the door and ushering her out. He wanted her to try to escape again.
Ben and Gunnar were here, though. This time would be different. They would get out, but they would have to be strategic—and they would need permanent magic.
Lu worked.
At some point, monxes returned with defensors. Maybe a day later, maybe longer, time was impossible to tell. They asked what progress had been made.
“None,” Lu said. Before she could regret it, defensors chained Gunnar and whipped him forty-two times while the monxes prayed to the Pious God for understanding.
“Lu.” Ben was next to her, his voice rough with tears, his matted hair falling around his face. Behind him, Gunnar moaned as he was let down from his chains.
“Some plants are already permanent, in a way,” Lu whispered to a vial of Cleanse Root. She had used Healica to mend her own wounds, but they wouldn’t be able to reach Gunnar, across the hall. “Permanent in that when you ingest a healing plant, your injury does not return. Or—” With Menesia, your memories do not resurface. Lu blocked the discussion Milo had had with her father. “What we want is similar, but to make it so plants continue to work. For them to lie dormant in the body until called upon. That’s right, isn’t it?”
Gunnar cried out and Ben’s eyes snapped shut.
They were all stretched so thin, Lu thought she must be translucent.
Ben dropped onto the cot next to the table. “What do you want me to do?”
She and Ben tried to make Powersage and Aerated Blossom permanent. The difficulty lay in the application—Powersage gave increased strength when absorbed through the skin; Aerated Blossom gave a few seconds of flight when inhaled. They infused Powersage with Aerated Blossom smoke and cooked it over a burner on high, high heat until they had a single dose—but how to apply it? To rub it on the skin? To eat it?
Lu dreamed of Tom. Of him arguing with Kari in their sunlit apartment. Of him working on magic in his own laboratory and making discoveries Lu hadn’t yet realized.
He never came to see her. Whether by Elazar’s choice or his own, it didn’t matter.
Milo and Elazar came. Ben choked out the excuse that he and Lu had ruined their latest batches of magic—but Lu had a vial of mixed Powersage and Aerated Blossom in her boot.
Elazar stood in the hall, Ben restrained by Jakes and Gunnar rattling on the bars of his cell, as Milo dosed her with Lazonade and cut her apart.
After Milo left, she sat on the cot, her head on Ben’s shoulder, dreading and hoping for her numbness to subside. Ben ground down more Healica for her.
“Vex,” Lu said into the stillness. Horror set her spinning. “I haven’t . . . I haven’t asked you what plants the Church might have given him.”
Ben moaned in confusion.
Sensation crept into Lu’s hands and she fought not to scream as her new wounds burned. “Shaking Sickness. The Church gave him Shaking Sickness. You would know what they used.”
Ben shifted. “Paxben has Shaking Sickness?”
She frowned. He didn’t know? She had to have told him. . . .
Ben drew her closer to him and handed her the prepared Healica. “We can talk about—Vex—later. Rest.”
Panic split through Lu’s fog. They couldn’t rest. Milo would return, again and again; defensors would whip Gunnar, over and over.
She wanted to get out. She wanted to go home. She wanted to be alone on this island with only the people she loved. She wanted peace.
Lu reached to her boot, a shout cracking her lips. She grabbed the vial of Powersage and Aerated Blossom.
Ben didn’t speak as Lu downed the vial. She cringed at the syrupy tartness, not at what it might do to her. Whether this potion worked didn’t matter—when Lu was healed, she would pick the lock again. She would leave this cell and never come back.
One way or another.
9
VEX, HIS CREW, and Kari were going to break into the Port Camden prison with the Emerdian and Tuncian raider syndicates.
No matter how many times Vex repeated that, he couldn’t take it seriously. But if the war went as expected, all the syndicates would be working together, and with the Council too. It was so inconceivable that Vex found himself constantly shaking his head.
While Cansu’s raiders used Nayeli’s Budwig Bean to coordinate the arrival of the Tuncian raider armada, Nate went over the prison layout. His syndicate had gotten schematics for the building over the years—Emerdian raiders were, after all, the ones most likely to get locked up there—so he showed them sketches of the prison’s floors, explaining which halls could be moved and where the levers were hidden.
There were as many as seven levels, four deep in the prison’s plateau, three aboveground; but with a twist of a lever, one section connected to another and seven levels became six. When the Emerdians and the Tuncians attacked the prison, their priority would be getting to the levers and knobs first, and putting a half dozen people in charge of fighting off any guards who tried to overtake them.
“The levers correspond to walls; the knobs to cells; large cranks move whole hallways,” Nate explained one night to Kari and Vex. A fire raged in the peach-blush brick hearth, sweltering the room alongside the constant island heat. Having a fire whenever people were in a room was an Emerdian tradition, Vex had learned.
After four days cramped in Nate’s rickety townhouse—“This is just a beat-up old safe house. My real home is far more lavish—don’t touch that! It’s an antique!”—Vex had learned more about the Emerdian Head and his raiders than he had ever wanted to know. They couldn’t go into the city too often for fear of Argrid snatching them up, so they’d stayed cramped in this three-story hotbox, sleeping on the floor, arguing over the food Nate’s raiders managed to find in the desolate streets, and generally getting in each other’s way.
Nate gulped from a canteen and hissed at the acidity of—he’d told Vex three times now—liquor that’ll rip the skin off your throat.
“That water too much for you, Nate?” Vex asked.
Nate ignored him and leaned over the table. He was the only one standing—a sad attempt at snatching control when it was clear at every moment that Kari was in charge.
“There are four places in the prison with smaller control panels.” Nate pointed at a map. “Only the guardhouse—here—has a panel with all the controls, but shit, it’s a nightmare. Twenty different levers. Fifteen knobs. Five cranks.” Nate folded his arms triumphantly. “Luckily, you have someone who understands the innermost workings of this complicated system.”
“Oh?” Vex leaned back in his chair. “When does he get here?”
“You’re dying of Shaking Sickness, yet you have the energy to insult me. I’m honored.”
The heat had already made Vex’s face red, but he swallowed hard. They’d spent too long in this small space together—Vex knew Nate had a minor Narcotium Creeper addiction and chewed leaves every night before bed; another of his raiders hummed in his sleep; one raider named Barnabas had a bag of nasty Emerdian licorice hidden under a floorboard, and he’d stuff a few pieces in his mouth when he thought no one was looking. As though candies that smelled like feet were in danger of being stolen.
If Vex’d noticed that, of course someone had noticed him shaking. It happened all the damn time now, anyway.
“Insulting you is effortless, Natey,” Vex spat. “I hardly break a sweat.”
“Why are you here?” Nate countered. “You aren’t contributing. Go wait for the Tuncians by the door like the good little unaligned Argridian rat you are.”
“Really don’t like how you keep saying Argridian rat.”
“Really don’t care, Argridian rat.”
Vex scowled. He’d joined every meeting where Kari and Nate went over their plans, and all he’d done was make smart-ass comments. He could see Kari’s growing exasperation, but damn it, he would’ve contributed if he could. But any suggestion he thought of, they’d already planned.
What would Ben do? He’d have added something useful about other allies or a single move that’d make the whole war easier. Vex had had lessons on diplomacy and war alongside Ben when they’d been younger, but he’d spent those classes drawing inappropriate sketches of the monxe tutors. Anytime Rodrigu had discussed strategy with him, Vex had been so fidgety he’d ended up with his legs slung over the back of the chair and his head on the floor.
Nate was right. Why was Vex here?
Kari stood, lifting her hands between them. “Nathaniel, we will send you in with the group bound for the guard tower. Is there a way to reset all the dead-end hallways, so we can move through the prison without hindrance? A fail-safe, perhaps?”
Nate shook his head. “Engineers designed these prisons to make escapes impossible. We won’t have much time before the soldiers stationed there raise the alarm and any Argridians in the city add reinforcements. Our best bet is splitting up, sending in as many groups as we can, and having our people go cell by cell to lead the prisoners out so they don’t get lost.”
“We could divide our numbers into four effective groups. How do the guards at the main control panel communicate with those in the prison?”
Communicate? Vex frowned, thinking.
“They don’t,” Nate said. “They establish a pattern for the day, the guards memorize it, and every guard knows where the smaller control panels are hidden in the prison itself.”
“Then we will need to memorize a pattern. Which arrangement would access the most cells at once? We can shift halfway to reach any cells we might—”
“Budwig!”
Nate and Kari whipped to face Vex, who had shouted the word.
He cleared his throat, trying as hard as he could to look helpful. “Budwig,” he repeated. “The Tuncians might have more sets of Budwig Beans when they get here. We can use them to communicate with the guard tower—have Nate open walls or shift hallways as we need them.”
Kari smiled. “Good idea, Devereux.”
Vex had to use his not considerable store of resolve to keep from looking at Nate and going, You hear that? The Argridian rat had a good idea!
