Days of Blood & Starlight

57 A Basket Of Fruit

“A basket of fruit,” repeated Akiva, incredulous.

When Joram had declared war on the Stelians, he must have prepared for many scenarios, but Akiva doubted it had ever entered the emperor’s mind that his chosen foe might… turn him down.

He was back in Cape Armasin with his regiment, where the news had traveled on the tongues of scouts and soldiers and in small scroll missives tied to the legs of squalls; it came in scraps and whispers, lies and truth and guesses mixed with official dispatches that were just as full of lies as the gossip was, and it was a few days before Akiva, Hazael, and Liraz had enough pieces to make a puzzle.

It had not been Joram’s envoys, it seemed, who delivered the Stelian response. Indeed, the envoys had not returned at all, on top of which communication with advance troops staging in Caliphis had been severed, and a reconnaissance mission had likewise fallen off the map. Every seraph sent in the direction of the Far Isles had vanished. That news alone chilled Akiva, and also stirred his fascination. What was happening over the edge of the world?

And then… a basket of fruit.

Such was their reply. Truly, it was nothing more sinister than that. It wasn’t a basket of envoys’ heads or entrails; the fruit wasn’t even poisoned. It was just fruit, of some tropical variety unknown in the Empire. The emperor’s tasters had declared it “sweet.”

There was a note. Of its message, reports differed, but the report Akiva believed came from a nephew to an imperial steward, and it was this, in archaic Seraphic, in a feminine hand, and stamped with a wax seal depicting a scarab beetle: Thank you, but we must respectfully decline your overture, being more enjoyably occupied at present.

The nerve of it, the staggering gall. It took Akiva’s breath away.

“I still don’t understand,” Liraz said, after the initial shock wore off. “How does this explain the Breakblades?”

“Breakblades” was what Misbegotten called Silverswords, after their elegant weapons that would never withstand a blow in real combat—not that they ever saw any. The only indisputable fact of the entire mystery was this: Two days past, Astrae had awakened to the sight of fourteen Silverswords swinging from the Westway gibbet.

“Well,” said Hazael, “that would be the manner of delivery of the basket of fruit. You see, when our father woke in the morning, it was simply sitting at the foot of his bed, and no one could tell him how it had gotten there. Through ten guarded gates, into the heart of the inner sanctum where he believed himself safe from all comers, even the Shadows That Live.”

“Even the Shadows That Live could not have done this,” said Akiva, and he tried to fathom what magic could account for it. Invisibility alone was no help against closed doors. Had the Stelian emissary passed through walls? Beguiled each guard in turn? Simply wished the gift there? That was a thought. Just what were the Stelians capable of? Sometimes, when he was deep inside himself working a manipulation, Akiva imagined skeins of connection tracing across the great dark surfaces of oceans and coming at length to islands—islands green in honeyed light, morning air ashimmer with evaporating mist and the wings of iridescent birds, and he wondered: Did his blood make him Stelian? Joram’s blood didn’t make him his; why should his mother’s make him hers?

“Fourteen Breakblades swinging on the Westway.” Hazael let out a low whistle. “Imagine the sight, all that silver blinding in the sun.”

“Can the gibbet hold fourteen Breakblades, giants that they are?” Liraz wondered.

“Maybe it will collapse under their weight, and good riddance,” said Akiva—meaning the gibbet, not the guards. He had no love of Breakblades, but he couldn’t wish them dead. He shook his head. “Can the emperor believe he’s safer now?”

“If he does he’s a fool,” said Hazael. “The message is clear. Please enjoy this lovely fruit while contemplating all the ways we might kill you in your sleep.”

Grim as it all was—as bleak the picture of the gibbet bowed by the weight of fourteen guards—the most upsetting news came as an afterthought, and from a Misbegotten. Indeed only a Misbegotten would have taken note of it, or cared.

Melliel was the older half sister who had spoken up on behalf of the Misbegotten at the end of the war. She was thick, scarred, and inked; she fought with an ax and kept her gray hair hacked short as a man’s. There was nothing feminine about Melliel except her voice, which even in barked greeting had a ring of music to it. She had sometimes sung at campfires on campaign, and her song-stories had been transporting as few things ever were in a battle camp. She was posted in the capital, or had been until the day before. Now she was with a detachment of Misbegotten going west, into the mists and mysteries of the vanished troops. As if the Empire hadn’t lost enough soldiers in the final battles of the war. All of its armies had bled, but none more than the Misbegotten.

“Of course he would send Misbegotten,” Liraz had hissed, hearing their mission. “Who cares if bastards come back?”

Melliel, though, said she was glad to go—glad to be free of the spider’s web that was Astrae. It was she who told them what else had happened at the Tower of Conquest while the Breakblades swung.

“A shrouded body was… released… through Tav Gate that same morning.” Tav was the last of the Tower’s gates. It was the gutter door, belowground and egress-only; it was where waste was flushed out to sea.

Akiva steeled himself. “Who?”

Melliel’s jaw worked. “There’s no way to know for certain, but… apparently no one thought to dismiss the harem escort. They waited two hours at Alef before a steward noticed and sent them away.”

Akiva felt the news in his gut first and his fists an instant later—a hot surge that made them clench so tight his forearms burned. From Liraz came a choked noise; Hazael’s breathing grew hoarse and he turned abruptly to pace away trailing sparks. Turned and paced back. His fair face was red. Liraz was shaking, her fists clenched as tight as Akiva’s.

The harem escort was the procession of Silverswords that marched the concubines to and from the emperor’s bed. “Parade duty,” they called it. Akiva’s mother had made that walk years ago, who knew how many times—on one return with himself beginning in her belly. Liraz’s and Hazael’s mothers, too, and Melliel’s, and untold other girls and women. And the morning of the hangings, it would seem, the concubine who should have emerged from Alef had been sent out Tav instead, along with the night’s refuse.

“Terrible what happened to her,” Akiva heard in his head—the cruel, goading voice of his father the first time he had ever deigned to speak to him. Had his mother’s body been sent out Tav Gate, too?

A wave of weariness took him. How could life be so unrelentingly ugly? The war was over, but both sides were still slaughtering civilians; the emperor casually killed concubines in his bedchamber and sent his bastards into the unknown to die drumming up more war. There was nothing good in the world, nothing at all. And now that even his memories of happiness were corrupted, Akiva found himself in freefall.

Had she meant it? Had she truly never trusted him? He wanted to deny it; he remembered. He remembered those days—those nights—more clearly than any others in his life, and how she had curled into him in sleep, and how, when she woke to the sight of him, her brown eyes had come alive with light. Even on the scaffold, and again in Marrakesh, after the wishbone was snapped but before she understood…

Before she knew what he had done.

Maybe he had seen only what he wanted to see. It didn’t matter now, anyway. There was no more light in her eyes, not for him and, worse: not at all.

In the morning, when Melliel departed with her troops, Akiva stood on the rampart with Liraz and Hazael and saw them off. A part of him wished he were going, too, mists and mysteries and vanished troops and all, to see the Far Isles, and maybe meet the one who had written such a mad message to the emperor.

But his place was here, on this side of the world. His challenge was here, and his penance: to do what he had told Karou he would, which was anything and everything.

What was anything? What was everything?

He knew, but it seemed to loom before him as huge and insurmountable as the mountains of the south.

Rebellion.

With Madrigal, in the temple, everything had seemed possible. Was it? Would he find any sympathy in the ranks? There was a restiveness there, he knew, and a quiet desperation. He thought of Noam at the aqueduct, asking wildly when it would all end. There would be more like him, but there were those, too, who would claim women and children in their tally and laugh as the ink dried. That would always be true; there would always be both kinds of soldiers. How was he to find the good, recruit them, trust them to secrecy while he went about the slow and scraping work of building a rebellion?

Melliel’s troops were just a shimmer on the horizon now. The rocky swell of the cape headland blocked the view of the sea from here, but its clean scent was in the air, and the sky was great and endless. Finally, their Misbegotten brethren vanished into it.

“What now?” asked Liraz, turning to him.

He didn’t know what she meant. Liraz. He still didn’t know what to make of his sister. She had gone along with the bird summoning warily, and freeing the Kirin, but she had seemed more narrow-eyed and watchful than ever since his return from the rebel camp. With the news that the chimaera had taken to returning the civilian attacks, he feared that she would argue for giving up their location to their superiors.

There was a restless energy in her, her wings kicking off sparks as she paced. “How does one begin?” she asked. Stopped, fixed him with a stare, and held up her hands. Her black hands. “You said one has only to begin. So how do we?”

Begin? Mercy breeds mercy, Akiva had told her. He hardly knew what to say. “Do you mean…?”

“Harmony with the beasts?” she supplied. “I don’t know. I know that I’m through taking orders from men like Jael and Joram. I know that every night a girl must cross the skybridge knowing that no one will help her. Those are our mothers.” Her voice was raw. “We’re swords, they tell us, and swords have no mother or father, but I did have one once, and I can’t even remember her name. I don’t want to be this anymore.” Again, she lifted her hands. “I’ve done things—” Her voice cracked.

Hazael drew her against him. “We all have, Lir.”

She shook her head. Her eyes were wide and bright. No tears, not Liraz. “Not like me. You couldn’t. You’re good. Both of you, you’re better than me. You were helping them, weren’t you? While I was… while I…” She trailed off.

Akiva took her hands in his, covered up the black marks so she didn’t have to look at them. He remembered what Madrigal had told him, years ago, with her hand on his heart and his on hers. “War is all we’ve been taught, Lir,” he told his sister now. “But we don’t have to be that anymore. We’ll still be us, just—”

“A better us?”

He nodded.

“How?” Her restlessness overcame her. She shook him off to pace again. “I need to do something. Now.”

Hazael spoke. “We start to gather others. That’s our first step. I know who to start with.” Yes, Akiva realized. He would.

“It’s too slow,” Liraz said fiercely.

And Akiva agreed. The idea of steps—of a careful progression of plans and recruitment and scheming and subterfuge—it was far too slow.

“Liraz is right. How many more would die while we whisper secrets?”

“What, then?” asked Hazael.

In the deep distance, the sky was cleaved by a line of stormhunters on the move. The massive birds were drawn by some inner compass to knots of gathering wind, to deluge and turmoil and churned seas, hail and shipwreck and knives of lightning; no one knew why, but right now, Akiva felt the same pull in himself—toward the center of his own brewing storm.

“It was always going to be the first step,” he said. “It’s just coming eighteen years late.” He’d known what he had to do then, and he knew it now. As long as Joram remained in power, their world would know war and nothing but war. Hazael and Liraz were furrow-browed, waiting.

Akiva said, “I’m going to kill our father.”