Wander

He didn’t attempt to keep from weeping as he might have in the past. Behind him, the gathered generals and scholars and priests had already begun to cry. Ages ago, the high priest told him that tears were good for the survivors, that each drop pulled some of the latent sickness from the body.

Gul stopped believing this lie when he helped lower the high priest into his grave. But at least he wouldn’t have to water the inside of the mask tonight.

“Let it be known,” said a scribe, one of the unlucky ones who forgot how to weep months ago, “that the last surviving Rōth joins his father and mother in the next world.”

“So ends the era of Rōth,” murmured a scholar. A general reached down to the boy’s deathbed to remove the royal crown from his brittle, cooling fingers.

There was a silence in the room only broken by scratching quills and tears that dripped onto fine marble floors. The crown was passed between reverent hands, generals who attended King Mustafa Rōth’s funeral and who carried Queen Nekane’s body to the sea to drift back to the islands she fled years ago. Scholars and holy men bowed to the crown, servants looked away in deference.

It ended in General Utku’s hands. He turned to Gul, looked up to watch his eyes behind the clouded glass of his plague mask.

“Ward Gul Kemal of the house of Rōth,” he said, “you now receive the crown of Turkos, being last of kin to the Rōth line and the final successor to the throne.”

“So begins the era of Kemal.”

--

The wandering minister Zoysia visited many times in the following weeks. He lectured at length about the wonders of the Prophet Corpseflower and about how only Corpseflower’s miracles could save the heathen Turkans from death. Gul watched General Zara, choking on incense in his mask for fear of illness, grow more and more indignant as Zoysia came and went, face uncovered, never sick.

“Who is he that he’s safe?” Zara asked the sky from the balcony of the empty Rōth family quarters.

“Maybe his god is right,” Gul replied. “Maybe Corpseflower is blessed.”

“You know as well as I do they’re lying.” A thin cough. “They want something. No, the gods have abandoned us, King.”

When the plague broke out, the churches of Turkos splintered. Central Turkans packed into their churches and begged their multitudes of gods for help; Gul had seen the extreme ending of this scenario in the quarantined churches of abandoned towns, filled to their windows with corpses, that his soldiers burned to ashes. The Wonderous Garden kept its strange, dead-eyed devotees locked up in Meshullam’s walls, sending occasional processions to the citadel with offerings of burial flowers and apothecary solutions (but, as all things they offered, with a price). In the far south and east, around Rosi country and throughout the islands, were the most extreme reactions: the Rosini and the southern Turkans believed the gods had abandoned the world, leaving it to rot and wither like an untended flowerbed.

“The gods haven’t abandoned us, Zara,” Gul murmured. It was without conviction; Gul couldn’t say what the gods were doing, if anything. Was this the end of the Folk’s Curse, he wondered, the thing that made the Elder Esen attempt to kill the young gods at the world’s birth? Was the land poisoned, toxins sewed into farmland and dipped in the water by the countries to the north? He sighed and touched a tendril of flowers that escaped from his mask.

They stood in silence for a long moment. Below the castle were untended gardens, growing wild and thick with thorns, choked with the bodies of small things that nobody had the heart to bury. Thick black smoke rose in the distance—another funeral, another little community evaporated.

Gul turned away from the railing and looked back into the living quarters, bare and cold. “Someone once told me a story about an adventurer. Orhan Khal. He wandered in the woods to the north and returned with gemstones nobody had ever seen before.”

“I heard one similar,” Zara replied. “I heard the traveler never returned.”

“It’s worth a chance.”

Zara considered for such a long time that Gul was afraid the general would lay down his sword and find a wagon to take him south. When he finally looked up, the light in his eyes was one of conviction.

“I’ll prepare a scouting company.”

--

The company departed from Turka Büyük at nighttime, attended by only a few of Gul’s advisors and the city guards. Silently, moving slowly to quiet their horses and carts, they passed broadsheet news posters that circulated rumors about the King’s planned travel to the cursed, nameless forest. By daylight, governors and mayors and township councilors took audience with Gul, trying to convince him otherwise. Messenger birds and quick foot carriers came from across the nation; the King should shut the fortress doors and wait out the sickness lest his name be added to the list of deaths.

Others, the peasants mostly, rallied in thick crowds to cheer for the King’s resolve. They didn’t think he would live. They didn’t think anyone would, really. But they were glad someone was still trying.

With the morning sun still hours away, the company listened as the gates closed behind them. Tears, many soldiers remembered, water flowers, and flowers keep the sickness at bay.

--

There were no birds. No deer. Nobody, not even the sharp-eyed lookouts, had seen a fox’s den or a squirrel nest or so much as an anthill in miles. Save the wind and the sound of their own reluctant horses, the woods were silent.

Even the northerners, the ones who lived in Guierra and Eagleshead, didn’t know what to expect. Who would go willingly to the hole in the world, anyway? Soldiers looked out for unnatural light, for eerie noises and babbling speech.

The real rift was a surprise. It was simply a ripple, an intense feeling of wrongness, between two stunted, twisted trees. Leaves and grasses grew in pale and sickly, their veins showing through fragile skin, running blue as if full of human blood. All total, it was barely tall enough to accommodate a small woman—the two trees had grown so close together that most adults wouldn’t fit through the gap and the strange break.

Gul climbed down from his war elephant, already anxious in the close trees, and examined the ripple. True to the rumors, the rift seemed to pull at him—he felt weak in a foreign way, as if something he’d never noticed was being drained from him. Zara appeared from the crowd of soldiers and called to him.

“King. We don’t even know what’s on the other side, if there’s anything there at all. For all we know, this leads to the afterlife.” Zara clutched at his sword, a puff of incense spiraling around his head and tangling with his hair. “It could be dangerous.”

“We have to try.” Gul turned back to the portal and considered it. “Give me a minute, General. And some space. Let the men rest.”

He studied the trees, the way their grain spiraled around each trunk, how their falling leaves took far too long to reach the ground, while the soldiers moved away to break camp. Each time he drew nearer for another look, the portal pulled at his chest in strange ways, making his heart beat unnaturally.

It had been a long time since Gul felt this way, so long that he barely remembered the feeling, but it was abject terror. The strange pulls, the feeling of dizziness—his mother described it to him in the giant homelands, many years ago, pointing at the Godsclaw mountain where Elder Esen’s body was frozen, turned to stone after trying to kill the gods. It was the emotion that all giants felt at some point in their childhoods, as a curse for Esen’s sins. He had felt it last when he returned to the homelands to find them empty, houses vacant and not so much as a note left behind. The giant word for it—hrrai-kon. Terror of the way things really are. Fear of knowing too much.

Hrrai-kon. He thought that word, then tasted it on his mouth. Heard it aloud. “Hrrai-kon.” Good that his men weren’t around to hear their king so awed and terrified.

“You are too magical for this world.”

The voice appeared in his head, around him, hanging in the air as if visible. Gul wasn’t sure which sense was at play. For a moment, he tasted the voice, like bitter ginger, then smelled it moving between oranges and sandalwood. His body felt heavy and numb.

“The magic of this world bleeds away, young king. We are surprised you did not bleed away with it.” A long pause. “Ah, so you are half human. Smaller than the other giants, we see. The taste of your magic is different.”

Years passed in his mind. Maybe it was only seconds. The voice spoke up again: “You are searching for something. An answer, perhaps. Following the curse of your people. You call them the Folk, correct? All those poor souls cursed to know themselves?” Another pause; Gul could not move his mouth to answer.

“Young king, we want to know your Folk. We know that if your question goes unanswered, we will not know the Folk. There are victories to be claimed even in your mundane world. But you must give us something in return.”

Cotton—air—too much space filled Gul’s mouth. He choked as if there were something to choke on. His hands moved for the crown, too small, tied to his beltloops, but the voice clicked and hissed like a thousand cicadas.

“We do not need your jewels. There are better in other worlds. No, we want a service.”

Gul slowly turned his hands over to reveal his palms, thumbs outstretched. It was the gesture he saw many times from the old beggars in the capital streets—give me work, give me a purpose, though I have no voice.

“Not now, young king. Later. You will know. Now, open the rift. That’s it, push the trees aside. That pull? Magic. Keep going.”

The trees cracked and toppled to either side. A ringing noise flooded the woods, bouncing from trees and reverberating off far hills. Gul barely noticed that he had pushed the trees aside until the noise died down.

He never heard the voice again. Not for many years, at least.

--

The sky was lavender. That was what Gul first noticed about the Fae world. The grass, too. Distant mountains stood out in a pastel pink, sickly but beautiful. Thin but healthy trees sprouted in the distance, and even through the mask Gul could taste the clean air, charged with something he couldn’t begin to understand.

His men flooded around him, armed and ready as if something, anything would attack them. Zara was suddenly at his side, a borrowed polearm in hand, though Gul watched the images of mountains reflect off his sparkling eyes. He looked up at the sky and watched strange trailing clouds roll quickly across the world.

From ahead he heard a shout. Zara prickled and aimed his weapon forward, advancing at whatever the soldiers were backing away from. Whispers and cries rippled through the men.

Gul moved the soldiers aside, grabbing small shoulders and lifting scouts by their collars for space. Before Zara’s blade was a dazzling image of a woman.

He held Zara’s arm in place and pushed the tip of his weapon, lowering it to the grass. The woman bowed low, thick and glossy hair slipping around her shoulders, fine jewels sparkling in her clothing. There was a moment of a captivating, hazy smile before she vanished into thin air.

Zara dropped his weapon on the ground and choked on a sob—though he came from the abandoned-gods camp, he was still a deeply suspicious person. Such an encounter would surely mean death.

But this was a new world. Gul turned back to his men and opened his voice, low and vast.

“Break camp.”

--

Peace talks. Language lessons. Long cultural lectures, either delivered or sat through. They’d stumbled into a fantastic world populated by magical people who rode beautiful silver foxes instead of horses, and still it was like meeting a delegation from across an ocean. Gul knew King Mustafa had spent hours in court while Gul himself passed time in military campaigns, but he’d never known the extent.

There was one highlight: the Fae queen herself, Opeli. She was as radiant in person as she had been in afterimage, dripping with jewels and elegance, unreal. She put every tapestry of Grand Queen Yeris to shame.

And she was kind. She didn’t shuffle her delicate feet away from his for fear of being stepped on, something even Zara still did. Opeli sat with him in conversation even before their language gap closed up, took him through fields of fantastic flowers and demonstrated magic, the real sort, not the alchemy that only the Wonderous Garden knew how to use.

She listened rapt when he spoke about the human world. She wondered when he told her how tall his mother was, how tall the giant village Elder had been. She cried out at the story about Elder Esen and the Godsclaw mountain. She asked complicated questions about the Rosi in the southeast and the wild Kethars to the north.

She was perfect.

She was married.

--

There will be others. There will be men, women, all sorts of people to fill the gaps.

He stayed awake at night. He picked at already-light dinners.

There will be others.

Gul tried to convince himself that there would be others.

--

When the treaty was signed into law, there was a ripple of magic. It resounded in Gul’s chest, tasted like bitter cherry, nothing like the magic of the rift and its sickly voice. Nearby, Zara didn’t feel a thing. “Underwhelming,” he murmured.

He was still reeling from the magic’s effects when Opeli’s voice brought him back from the clouds. “A sick person,” she said in the sweetest Turkan he’d ever heard. “To cure the plague.”

Of course. The plague. Their entire reason for crossing the rift. His plague mask had grown entangled with the native plants; he wouldn’t even be able to pick it up from where it sat anymore.

He called for General Utku to bring a sick man through the rift.

--

“Offer me something,” said the queen.

What could Gul offer? What could someone magical want from a mere half-breed giant with no magic to call his own? What could a young king, stumbled into royalty through sheer chance and will of immune system, offer the most beautiful woman in any conceivable world?

What could he pay for his people’s lives?

He offered her luck. Luck, and his own blood. The only precious things she couldn’t have to herself.

--

For years later he wondered. Did someone else, anyone else find him beautiful? Was there anyone on Earth who made him breathless and who he made ache in return?

He searched. He had children, many wonderful, much smaller men and women who did great things and created art and conquered islands and killed traitors and raised cities. He never found another Opeli.

He wrote a hundred, a thousand letters. He mailed none of them. All his official mail was penned by another hand; he was afraid the magic of Faerie would give away the love in his ink. It would be a terrible disaster for the human king, the first Kemal, Gul the Red, humanity’s savior, the once Plague King and now First of the Era, to pine helplessly after a married queen.

Some nights he dreamt about her. About the one stolen moment when they both forgot about Treniten and their duties, when they may as well have been children hiding away from their respective parents. A mistake. A mistake that, given the chance, he’d never correct.

--

It was night when he left the city. His joints ached in the cool night—one of the downfalls of growing old, though he didn’t age like those around him. Zara had retired years ago and returned south. Utku died in a campaign in the far west. Baris, his eldest son, was now acting king. Gul merely sat by his side, advising, as if he ever had anything useful to say.

Something in his chest had been speaking for months, louder and louder every night. It kept him awake. It left bitter tastes in his throat. It made him smell oranges and sandalwood when there were none nearby. North, it said. North. The rift. Repay your promise.

It spoke to him. “Young king,” it said. “Give your services to me. It’s your time.”

Gul answered it. It allowed him to speak back, but only in front of the rift.

“Young king. Have you come to repay me?”

“There is so much to repay.”

--

While snow blew in circles around the horses and mules on the bottom level, Azar slid his knife into a boiled potato, cutting thick slices off and eating them immediately before their warmth could seep into the air. The previous two potatoes were soggy, dissatisfying things, but he’d made a point to save the best one until all the others vanished; now, puffing steam into the air, he remembered the early-winter farm, sleeping under a chill, how peaceful it looked in the night while he uprooted their final potato harvest and slipped into the silo for a sack of oats. The potato tasted like normalcy and his family and the Eastern Islands and walking south farther than what his pilfered map showed.

“Put it out of your mind,” he told himself, exhaling steam from his nostrils. With a sigh, he finished off the last bit of potato and removed a scrap of paper from his breast pocket.

He’d scrawled notes down on one side about the city of Onbirikhzi itself: how many individual guards he’d counted passing through each area, how complacent the citizens seemed, which sheds belonged to old, near-blind couples. On the other side he marked a crude map and a route, carefully labelled “Going Home Plan.”

In the center of the map was Vaingold Blacksmith, owned and operated by a single woman with a limp, a lined face and a broken fencerow. He’d spent entire days observing her, making sure that she couldn’t chase after him when he finally sprung his plan. Azar scrutinized the namesake, Vaingold herself, as she swatted at stray chickens, groaned in pain as she stood up from her stooped position over a grindwheel, took her meagre lunches sitting by the forge for heat. 

But inside the smithy, behind the frail woman’s watch, there were gold-trimmed axes and silver-piped swords and statuary that looked like a thousand different fertility gods. Vaingold Blacksmith was perfect. It was his ticket home.

Tonight, now that his food stores were depleted and his cobbled-together satchel was as light as possible, he’d slip into Vaingold Blacksmith and relieve her of some of the finest weapons. Beneath the counter he could pick up raw blocks of material—surely that would sell, even if a buyer recognized Vaingold’s work somewhere else. And he’d snatch a bite to eat while he was at it. Then he’d walk down the road until he came across a shop big enough to offer decent prices and stupid enough to take stolen goods.

He waited for night, folded and unfolded his plan a thousand, ten thousand times while the sunset turned the snow silver. He waited with a hand over his mouth when the lazy stable-girl finally poured grain into each box, swatting at the mules that reached for her grain bin. He waited until the snow stopped and the sound of horse feet died down and the birds flew back to their nests in the eaves.

He waited for his heart to still, then rolled up the worn-out blanket and packed it away.

--

The first thing he noticed was the feeling of sun on his left arm. Groggy, he glanced down to inspect it—wasn’t it night?—and found, sure enough, a shaft of light playing off the grey and black hair and the tan skin and the worn rope.

Worn rope?

He pulled at it, but found it tight, holding him fast despite the frays and discolorations. It wrapped around his forearm several times and disappeared behind a barrel—for the first time, he registered the feeling of the barrel’s chilly ribs pressing into his spine.

“Awake finally, I see,” came a thin voice from above him. Azar tipped his head back, fighting a feeling of sluggishness, afraid to confirm the speaker.

Vaingold, leaning heavily on an ornate cane, shook her head gently at him. “Don’t move too much, little thief,” she said. “You won’t be free for a few more hours.” The morning light glinted on her eyes at this angle and revealed serpentine eyes; looking into them for even that brief time made him feel weak and nauseous, and he let his head drop to his chest.

The silence seemed like hours, but the motion of the sunbeam onto his folded leg and into his lap said it was really only a few minutes. Vaingold’s feet shuffled on the floorboards, then he made out footsteps, cut with the gentle taps of her cane, disappearing into another room. Moments later, her footsteps returned with an accompanying scrape—she was pulling something, albeit something light, across the floor. Azar felt a trickle of sweat fall from his hair to his collar. A sword didn’t need to be heavy to kill. A length of wood could be a weapon with the right placement. Especially when the target was paralyzed.

The legs of a chair peeked into his view of the floor, and Vaingold’s feet with them. Wood groaned only slightly as she sat down, and her canetip settled between her shoes.

“I’ve never seen you before this month, thief,” she said. “You’re too dark to be from Onbirikzhi. You’re too young to be a travelling worker. And you have this blanket—” the tip of the cane swished to the right, indicating his belongings in a pile nearby, “—which you’ve sewn up, but I know what it is. I’ve seen deserters before.”

“So tell me, child. Where do you come from?”

Azar’s mouth felt cottony and his voice caught in his throat when he tried to speak. He tried again, again, and felt tears prickle in his eyes.

“Just nod when I say it. Charmurlu? Meshullam?”

It took her several minutes to wind her way through the northwestern cities into the central ones (“You can’t possibly be from Turka Büyük,” she said, “the King would be insane to send a child from his own city. Political suicide,”) and finally through the southern coast. He flinched at Tiguerout, and she watched his tears come thicker when she mentioned Ouaïnnkanou. Passenso. Diban. He nodded at Diban—it was as close as she’d ever get. Diban, with the black thatch roof over the town hall and hundreds of tiny streams crisscrossing the city, filtering out to the ocean.

“You’re Dibanese,” she said, “so you won’t have a last name. Let’s see, it was the name of your island in the Eastern regions, right? Given name of so-and-so island?”

He finally found his voice, a weak, trembling thing that said “Azar, vf’Tilsu.”

“Tilsu? Your island is named in Turkan, child?” He heard hair fall around her shoulders as her head swung from side to side. “It’s bad enough they stole your language. And a Turkan first name, too—”

“—family’s Turkan,” Azar managed.

“Turkans all the way in the Eastern Isles?” She whistled, then sucked in a deep breath. Her feet shifted, and one lifted off the ground; she’d crossed her legs. “Stranger things have happened.”

She guessed his story for half the morning, with a break midway to feed him a fistful of preserved fruits and to fix herself some bacon. Sometimes she seemed to already know his fate: without hesitation she recited that he was a child no older than sixteen, recruited from a poor family to the infantry in the King’s service, sent to Tiguerout for training, then to Béla Crava for orders, then to the Halflight front (though she couldn’t place exactly where in the region he’d gone). She scrutinized his physical state and said that he’d been on the run for several months, living off handouts and then stolen goods, and that he’d arrived in Onbirikzhi about three weeks ago, spreading his sticky fingers thin among many townsfolk to lengthen his time there.

“How did you know,” he asked once his voice returned and the heavy feeling in his legs evaporated, “how long I’ve been here?”

“Stupid child.” Vaingold took a little bite of her bacon; she ate slowly, as if each swallow hurt her. “You think you’re stealthy, hiding under bare bushes and watching my shop? Leaving footprints in the snow? The town guards aren’t much use—Gods, half the time they’re dead drunk the whole day—but I know a thief when I see one. Helps when you have the history.”

“You?” he asked. The smell of bacon flooded him as she leaned forward, and he tried not to stare at it.

“Me,” she replied. After a short hesitation she held out the last piece of meat, close enough that he could take it in his teeth, weak though he was. “Dinae Vaingold, the legend of East Ketharous. Come now, don’t look so offended. I haven’t seen Kethar lands for years, and good riddance. Nothing worth seeing there, not since the West Kethars set fire to the East.” She leaned back in her chair and folded her arms. “That’s a story for another day.”

Azar looked down at his lap for a minute, pondering her story. How did an East Kethari thief wind up in the crook of the Turkan Yuza mountains, running a smithy with a bum leg? Did all Kethars have those terrifying eyes? How did his plan go wrong? How does someone go home after they’ve been caught?

Surprisingly strong hands reached around him, and the rope tightened for a split second before loosening entirely. Vaingold unwrapped the ropes from his forearms and began coiling it around her elbow, making a tidy circle. “Little thief,” she said, “I trust you didn’t come here to rob me because of some evil in your soul.” He snorted, and she swatted at him. “Listen. You want to eat, don’t you? You’re strong, even though you’re small, and I have a job I need done.” She grabbed his hands and helped him to his feet, and he felt the callouses on her palms—that weakness in her legs wasn’t affecting her arms.

“Come with me,” she said, and pulled Azar outside to the forge.

--

Weeks passed like water, and the snow melted into puddles that made Azar’s chores a struggle. The shed ceiling leaked snow runoff onto the basket where he kept his materials—Dinae insisted that he begin his own toolkit and supply hoard—ruining some lengths of cheap leather, so he climbed up to the roof to patch it. Then the overhang by the forge. Then the roof of the storefront. Then the one over Dinae’s kitchen. He made pocket money patching their neighbor’s roof, then some more selling the sturdy nails he made on the lengthening afternoons.

For a year he could only sell nails and the occasional set of handles and door-pulls. Dinae’s regular customers accepted him, patting his early-greying hair when they saw him at the grindstone, but none trusted him with their work.

“Let them be,” Dinae consoled him one day as his tears stained a set of new tongs. “You’re young. You just started. Stop rusting your work and keep building.”

In the earliest mornings and the latest evenings, she taught him other skills. Dinae made him read any book she could get her hands on, tried to teach him figures and numbers (though he never quite caught on), lectured from the Magistrate’s history texts on the rise of the Turkan Empire and the royal families and the plague and the discovery of the First Rift and all the other little ones after it. If he worked hard enough, she regaled him with stories about her past in East Ketharous, where magic was still alive and, at one time, thriving; the time she stabbed a lich king and left him to die sprawled across his cursed treasure, the day a minotaur shattered her left knee, leaving her with that lifelong limp, the day she slayed a basilisk and drank its blood to steal its paralytic magic.

The next year, he grew taller, his last streaks of black hair vanished, and the townsfolk started buying his metalwork. His mother wrote frequently about his little sisters and their progress at the boarding school in Diban, though she thankfully never asked how exactly he got to Onbirikzhi. For his siblings’ birthdays he made them little trinkets out of bronze and sent them by courier down south; it was expensive, but what else did he buy but materials?

Dinae retired from regular work the year after, and he took over in her place. Business was bad for a while (some of her clients didn’t want to buy from a clearly-foreign youth with long hair and a body that didn’t fit into its clothes yet), but she slaved hours over the books until he understood her figures, gave advice until he could build back the clientele. The city paid her a handsome pension as thanks for some arcane task she’d performed years ago (a story she swore to never tell Azar, to his annoyance), and Azar poured all his profits into finally paying off the house and the workshop.

One day just before he paid the last packet of coin to the city, Dinae joined him in the workshop. She slid her fingers through his hair, pulling loose all the knots it had worked itself into during the day, and set about braiding it out of his way. “Can you make a crown again?” he requested, and she answered by pulling little strands of hair away from his temple in the start of a coiling crown-braid.

They sat in silence for a few minutes, attended by the sounds of Azar’s hair slipping through itself and the gentle scrape of sandpaper and the calls of late-summer birds. “You know,” she said, “just because you’ve been called a man before doesn’t mean you need to stay one.”

He considered for a second, then bent forward to blow metal shavings from the awl he was honing. “I don’t want to be called a woman, either.”

“It’s not a one-or-the-other choice, child.” She tied the braid off with a thin leather strip and reached into her shawl for a flower from the front garden, which she tucked into the crook behind his ear.

“True.” Azar reached for a tin of metal polish and began shining the awl’s shaft. “I don’t think I want to be either one.”

Dinae shrugged as she moved to leave the workshop. “Then you aren’t, little thief.” She paused, then turned back over a shoulder. “I’m going to see if the butcher has any rabbits today. Keep the kitchen fire stoked until I get back.”

Quietly, over the next few months, Dinae instructed the townsfolk to call Azar “they” instead of “he.” Some folks resisted, as she expected, but for the most part they couldn’t fight too hard. Azar was Azar, and if the townsfolk wanted good tools and well-tempered knives, they did what Azar wanted.

But though the town slowly swallowed Azar into its day-to-day machinations, Azar kept looking at the roads that lead other places. For years they looked at the southern road, unworn, that lead straight into the Sevi Forest and the portals that ripped holes in the fabric of reality, letting travelers fall gently into Faerie lands. But lately they looked at the roads southwest that skirted the Yuza range and eventually lead to Charmurlu, the traditional seat of the King’s third child; at the end of the Halflight boarder war they even looked east towards Béla Crava, now secure behind iron walls and reams of peace treaties. Little dirt paths lead north through the Yuzas and towards the offshoot range, the Ihangi, populated by reclusive, murderous family-clans. A nearly-forgotten road lead down into a canyon and into what Dinae claimed was a crypt; Azar wanted to know what kind of treasure remained behind the locked gates that the city had erected years before. They loved the forge and the full belly, but the roads were tempting.

They were well on their way to their twentieth birthday, finally taller than Dinae and growing muscular from the forge, desired by half the town’s young women and a quarter of the young men, when they wandered into Dinae’s office while they should have been working. She was sitting at her low desk, studying maps of old Turkos and the ancestral giant lands to the south, hair knotted high to keep her neck cool.

“Shouldn’t you be at the forge?” she asked. “Or are you finally here to apologize and send me back to the anvil?”

Azar cleared their throat and placed one foot carefully on top of the other in a Kethari apology stance, learned years ago as an apprentice. “You were an adventurer once,” they said. “I can’t spend my young years here.”

Dinae considered for a minute, hands folded over a map of the Godsclaw. “Promise me,” she said, “that when you’re tired of stealing petty cash and exploring every old temple you find, you’ll come back to take over the forge.”

A few stray leaves blew in through the open doorway, and Azar reached down to pick them up. When they stood again, they noted Dinae facing him fully, arms folded; she never looked this serious. “I promise,” they said. “Don’t die before I get back, old woman.” They waited a moment for her to rise and swat at their ears before leaving to pack.

--

Their first journey was a three-month trek into the Ihangi mountains. Every traveler and innkeep told them to turn back, but they kept on, smiling as they passed the signpost that marked the end of Turkan territory.

The natives that they found there were less murderous than scared—Azar didn’t blame them, knowing how Turkan explorers were during the Fifty-Year March. Half the Ihan cities were abandoned, too, burned down or falling apart or, even stranger, preserved as if every Ihan in the region was simply spirited away. Azar stuffed their pockets with intricate wooden machinery and bundled darkwood to bring back for Dinae.

Onbirikzhi received them like a hero. One of the rich Turkans from the Gilded District bought the tiny wooden machines at a good price; Azar asked that the payment be sent to Dinae directly. The darkwood went over fantastically. Dinae dabbled in woodwork, fearing the fire as her strength ebbed, and her planned whittlings were already in high demand. Julus, the mayor, asked Azar to make another trip to Ihana, but they declined. The roads to Charmurlu were more enticing.

--

Money was tight in Charmurlu. They resorted to odd jobs and requests from the less-than-savory businessmen. The Ihan Jobber, they were called for a time; break in and steal so-and-so ledger, or this-and-that heirloom. Eventually they were invited to escort the poet Mulkhazi, a controversial anti-Kemal writer, to the coast at Balbaşi: lucky break, they thought, even when the steppes to the west of the central desert forced them to hone their sloppy archery.

But just outside the city gates, Mulkhazi turned back and pressed a well-sharpened knife into Azar’s belly. “Sorry, Ihana-boy,” he said, laughing when Azar’s ears turned red, “I’m not planning to pay up. But hey, at least you’re out of Charmurlu, huh?” He called the city guards to pin Azar as a roving bandit before vanishing through the gates.

And just like that, Azar found themselves in a Balbaşan prison, stuck in a tiny cell with a small-time burglar and a crooked loansman. As the bailey locked their cell, Azar tried to look anywhere but the tiny window; the police commander had stuffed a grease pencil, a single sheet of paper and an envelope in their hands minutes before, so they looked at those instead.

“Last letter home, then?” asked the burglar. Azar nodded absently, missed their cellmate’s hand until it was already on the paper, pulling it away.

When their jaw tightened in anger, the burglar smiled disarmingly. There was something enticing, yet altogether unsettling about him. “Don’t worry, I’ll repay it. We’re going to get out of here. You and me, partner.” He held out a chapped hand. “The name’s Petori.”

--

“You fucked up my books again, Azar,” Petori said, leaning back in his seat. “I’m starting to believe this was intentional.”

They were six years out from the jailbreak in Balbaşi, working with a crew of twelve bandits who operated the tiny roads that crossed the Sevi. Ostensibly they kept the roads clear and safe while the Turkan government ignored any road that wasn’t a trade route, but really they extorted travelers and relieved them of their valuables. Business, if Azar could really call it business, was good, and they honestly couldn’t complain about their situation; Petori mostly let them do as they pleased, so they took only what they needed (or burningly wanted) and charged only the minimum, even escorting some groups back and forth between forest towns.

Besides, there were better ways to make money. Petori, hearing that Azar had operated a smithy for a few years, put Azar in change of the fledgling operation’s coffers. Certainly, if they kept dense, unreadable books and diverted funds though several different venues across the region, Petori would never notice evaporating coin, right?

But he did notice—Azar still wasn’t as good at math as they thought. Ringed by six other bandits, Petori’d called them into the great hall of their longhouse, commanded they stand at the end of the scarred dining table with their ledger open before them.

“So, tell me. Why are we diverting a portion of our earnings through the fish hatchery at the riverhead?”

Azar looked down at the book. “We stand to gain money if the region becomes a fishing destination.”

“Wrong,” Petori said. “A hatchery? Making a fishing destination?” He tapped his hand on the table, indicated something to Neesh with a quick motion. “You’re slipping, Azar. Maybe this is how you landed yourself in jail in the first place.”

They scowled. “You’re the one who wanted an accountant.” Neesh reached for their arm, but Azar pulled away.

“An accountant, Azar. Not a double agent.”

“Double—” Neesh’s hands, twice the size of Azar’s, wrapped around their biceps and squeezed. “I’m not working for anyone else, bastard.” They pulled hard, wincing. “Let go, Neesh.”

“Except yourself. And that wasn’t part of our deal.” Petori stood and turned away. “Neesh, what would you say Azar’s best feature is?”

Neesh remained silent, so Petori reached out an arm and slapped at the first bandit he could reach—Vanya, standing against the doorframe with his arms folded. “Vanya? Help him out.”

He was silent for a second. “Certainly not their intellect,” he murmured. “Maybe their face.”

“Face it is. Neesh, why don’t you take some value back from Azar? They do owe us money.”

Neesh, with a single-shouldered shrug, reached for his knife, holding Azar steady.

“Wait—” Azar called after Petori as he unlatched the heavy chamber door. “If that’s what you want, I’ll pay back the money—”

Petori cut them off. “You’ll pay us back, naturally. But first, we need to break even.”

--

Vanya brought in an alcohol-soaked rag, picking his way around the blood. “Made quite a mess,” he remarked to Neesh. “Petori’ll expect you to clean this.”

Neesh nodded wordlessly and adjusted his elbows on his knees. He sat on the edge of the table, hanging his head to look down at Azar, curled on the floor with their arms wrapped tight around their head.

“Up, Azar,” Vanya said. He prodded a foot into their side. “Petori wants you out. Said if the eastside raiding party came back and saw you, they were allowed to do whatever they wanted to you. And we both know how well you get on with Tarka.”

They remembered, vaguely, their mother describing a set of twin cousins as “thick as thieves,” inseparable friends. Maybe thieves worked differently in central Turkos than they did in the Eastern Islands. Azar carefully unwound their arms, letting blood drip down their front as they sat up.

With a shudder, Vanya tossed the alcohol-towel to them. “Well, you’re not getting a dowry offer any time soon. Good job, Neesh.”

Finally, Neesh spoke. “Petori said six thousand golds, plus interest. Fifteen percent of the total per year. We expect payment every single month.” The knife sang in his fingers as it twirled through the air, splattering blood on the floor. “You know the consequences.”

Azar felt how the cuts on their jaw pulled, raw and stinging, each time their face moved; the alcohol rag confirmed even more damage when it pressed against the wounds. They wanted to curl up and sleep, or to inspect their face, or to scream, but the sound of horses outside was a reminder.

They ran.

--

They staggered half-blind through the night, into rivers they drank from and bushes they ate from. Delirious, following roads only remembered by their muscles, they left the forest in a panic, following their feet.

Hours, days passed without hint. Azar never knew how long it took to leave the forest; years later they tried to check the distance between the forest and the Turkan steppe to the south, but they never found a clear answer. All they knew was that they fled blind like they’d done over ten years ago.

It was only luck that the sixth prince’s entourage was travelling just south of the Sevi forest. Only chance that the entourage was only the Lion Guard, the very few soldiers that the prince trusted closer than any other and would travel alone with. Pure serendipity that the tiny royal party was resting on a low, flat stone, watching their horses as they grazed in the fields beside the last pitiful trees.

Skill, though, that Azar was able to bolt past the sixth prince and his Lion Guard, straight to a tall painted mare and her trailing harness. Advantage when they leapt onto her back and kicked their heels into her sides, splattering blood from reopened wounds onto the grass and her back. Behind him, the Lion bellowed, but the damage was done, and the thief wheeled south with the stolen horse.

--

It took months to reach Ouaïnnkanou. The horse was stronger than any they’d ever known, but it was still weeks before they even passed into the Rosi region. They wasted time skirting wide around Tiguerout, even though child deserters had long ago been pardoned by the administration of the new Southern King. By the time they entered Ouaïnnkanou, the horse’s white patches had grown thick and the days had grown shorter. Their cuts became sores, then scabs.

Azar considered selling the horse, but they thought twice. Surely news about the sixth prince’s stolen horse would have beaten them to the city? They left the mare at a stable outside the city and snuck away for the docks.

They endeared themselves to a Passensan vessel, offered to repair some petty tools when they reached the city. The same way from the south port of Dailli island to Diban. Azar barely remembered the road from Diban to the farm, but their feet carried them anyway. The scabs peeled away and revealed deep pockmarks.

Their mother wept. Their siblings barely remembered their face. Now there were more: half-siblings from another marriage, a new man calling himself father, a family of Kethari refugees living in one of the outbuildings and tending to the fruit trees. Mother sent them up the hill to the old medicine man, who looked the same as he did years ago, but the scars couldn’t be lifted. Azar took a bit of faded, once-colorful cloth from their old bed and made a veil so they couldn’t see their ruined face in the reflection on the ocean.

Weeks later, their mother found them sitting in the clifftop orchard, watching the waves roll out to uncharted ocean. She sat with them, sewed a couple of old-fashioned thin bronze coins into their veil as decoration, held their hand for a long while as the sea breeze mixed both their grey braids together.

After a long silence, Azar carefully told her their plan. Their hand moved under the veil and traced the deep lines of each new scar, and their voice shook, but their eyes stayed fixed on the water.

“It’s all a fool’s errand, Azar,” their mother commented. She squeezed their hand. “You’re mixed into the wrong sort of people.”

Azar remained silent.

“But you’ve sent us so much money, and so many nice letters, and after the army…” she trailed off for a moment. “It’s the best we could have hoped for. It’s better than death, isn’t it?”

“Better than giving up,” Azar replied. They watched the sun sink below the waves, then went inside to pen a letter. In the morning, the two walked to Diban and hired a parcels courier. Azar, with their belongings wrapped safely in a sturdy red satchel, pressed their forehead to their mother’s crown before boarding a ship for Dailli island.

--

Dearest Petori,

My apologies for the long wait between correspondence. Your associate told me monthly payments, but my mending took much longer than I anticipated. Here are the last three months that I owe, plus this year’s interest in advance.

I intend to make a living for myself on the roads between Charmurlu and Balbaşi—how nostalgic, old friend, isn’t it? You know my skills. Rest assured that your next payments will be timely.

And finally, I’d like to apologize profusely for my misconduct. No more skimming off the top from now on. If you don’t mind, I’ll present the final payment to you in person, as is custom here in the Rosi region. They say it was how King Mauvis turned over the final Rosi history tomes to the Rōth regime back before the Kemal era. A true sign of servitude.

No hard feelings.

--

A man in a uniform came to the farm and took count of everyone present. Mother seemed afraid, but the man in the uniform barely said anything to her. He did, however, ask for the oldest child’s birthday and age. He made sure the child’s bones were strong, that the child’s vision was good, that the child could hear and run and climb. Then the soldier left. Azar was twelve years old.

Just before his fourteenth birthday, a magistrate’s messenger came from town and passed him a stamped, sealed paper. It was the year three-hundred forty-seven, in a season that Turkans would later call The Spring of Empty Houses.

He was a familiar face, the messenger; Azar recognized him as the gangly man who delivered forms from the town granary, as well as his mother’s tiny inheritance. The child tucked the paper under his arm and invited the messenger in to say hello to Mother and his baby sister, who took great joy in playing with the messenger’s long ringlets.

But the messenger shook his head. He insisted that Azar open the letter immediately. He had to return with a response.

Inside the letter was King Osman’s seal and an order. Report to the quartermaster at the Throne in the South as soon as possible.

Azar wasn’t stupid. The letter didn’t need to announce itself as a conscription order for him to know. Word in town was that you would know your assignment based on the reporting site: the magisters if you were selected for siege service, the guard academy for cavalry and archery recruits, the quartermaster for infantry. If you were to be excused for health or merit, you weren’t sent all the way to the Throne in Tiguerout.

Mother knew something was wrong when she returned from the peach grove. One of the twins was in the kitchen, sitting beneath the table and crying. She comforted the abandoned toddler and later found Azar in the wheat fields, tears streaking his dusty face.

Mother stopped his crying, stiffened his lip. She helped him pack up clothes and dried fruit and bread for the trip and sent him away with enough money for the ferry rides to the mainland.

--

Innsmen gave him free lodging in Passenso and Diban. Nobody seemed to ask why such a young child, so dirty in the face and with a farmhand’s clothes, was travelling somber and alone towards Tiguerout. The Dibani Arms owner gave him a free dinner and set him up in a tiny room on the second floor; at the Minstrel Inn in Passenso, a barmaid took him silently to a chamber out of the way of the other customers. He didn’t ask questions.

It was much the same in Ouaïnnkanou, the southernmost mainland city. There were choices of inns here, but most buildings had hand-painted signs advertising free rooms to young men heading for Tiguerout. He wandered into one near the edge of town and was sent to a room crowded with others. That night, he slept on the floor between a crying boy not much older than himself and a father who spent half the evening folding and unfolding a letter.

From Ouaïnnkanou to Tiguerout he rode in a wagon carrying hay and men. The farmers didn’t seem bothered by bindle-carrying travelers who hopped on the backs of their wagons without warning, so he stepped up onto one and held on tight. It was a rocky ride, but it was much faster than walking, and easier.

The child trained up quick, like all the other soldiers. There was, in that year, no time for long drills and specialization. The border dispute with Ketharous turned bloody in the earliest days of spring, and Turkos dealt with the blood in the only way they could at the time: young bodies, maybe not primed but armed and zealous. Azar’s training class was together for just under two months before they shipped north to Béla Crava for their final orders. The day after the company set out, Azar turned fourteen.

--

Caravans of soldiers, rations and weapons left Tiguerout on the ill-maintained northeast road that skirted the Oxspine mountains and wound along the coast of Turkos. This far east there weren’t many cities, just small fishing villages and scattered groups of sheep-farming nomads—the coast was ill-guarded and very few people settled in the region for fear of invasion by sea. Sometimes at night, though, when they passed along the shorter mountains, the company could see smoke from fires and radiant light from the cities along the Turkan steppe to the west.

Azar marched with the ration cart, rear left corner, a cloth over his face to keep out the dust and the cold. At first he tried to trot to keep up with it, but he soon learned to hang onto the side instead, sword drawn and ready for bandits and wolves. On the second day he fell off and couldn’t catch up for almost an hour. He did not fall again.

By night he stayed close to the ration cart and hid behind a wheel, rubbing his dust-dried eyes and trying to warm his hands. A rotation of men, young and old, joined him with blankets, thicker coats, stories, tears, but never the same person twice, never the same sad story told a second time. He collected their words and, with a scrap of paper in his tunic pocket, wrote them down in a letter to Mother.

It took nearly two months to reach Béla Crava from Tiguerout, two months of nighttime raids from wild boars and teary stories from strangers and choking dust that coated Azar’s tongue until all food tasted the same. They marched triumphant through the city as if they’d won some battle, banners flapping and brass calling around them, attended by townspeople who’d long since learned to see through the pageantry. An old lady, grumbling a language he didn’t know, handed him a delicious-smelling roll. He nibbled at it, but it tasted still like dust.

--

Company Twenty-Seven, the poster read, reporting to Colonel Youssein in Halflight Valley, at the outpost by the foot of Mount Egri. He knew the word Halflight. He knew the stories about men ripped apart by the Kethars. Azar tried to rub his eyes and reread the poster, but the words were the same: Company Twenty-Seven, Halflight Valley, Mount Egri outpost. The other soldiers broke down their caravan and headed for their supply trains and scouting companies and field hospitals, and he followed his company to the front.

--

It was October, with a chill settling into the wood of the pikes that surrounded their camp, when Azar ran from his first battle. A Kethari scouting team set explosive powder in the crook of a hastily-built guard tower and set it alight. The guards leapt down before the tower collapsed in on itself, and the horsemen rushed to cut off the scouts before they could escape.

Somewhere distant, Colonel Youssein called for the infantry to attack. From the ditches and the tents and the wagons, men bolted for the tower and the Kethars at the base.

Hours later, First Lieutenant Hokka found Azar cowering under the ribs of a dismantled wagon. She reprimanded him for cowardice and assigned him to night watch for two weeks.

In another life, First Lieutenant Hokka thought, I’d comfort him. A child, terrified under a wagon, watching soldiers twice his age torn to shreds. But the King’s offices don’t believe in children from the Eastern Isles, only men.

--

The next day, his bunkmate left for Béla Crava in a wagon attended by medics. They covered his pockmarked body in a wool cloth and waved thick, choking incenses around the camp. Kethar Rot, the whispers said, and anyone nearby could be struck the same. It lived in the water and the air and only Kethars themselves were immune. One of the artillerymen, a native of Meshullam, offered Azar a sticky salve and a prayer, but he shook his head, indicating the Sign of the Empty that his mother had sent along. No absent gods would spare them of the rot.

--

Two more skirmishes came and went, and the time between fights got shorter. They saw prowling Kethari scouts behind trees and rocks and in the distant hills to the east, even on days when nobody came running from cover with weapons raised. Wounded horses and camels littered the field around the camp (one with Azar’s knife in its ribs, earning nothing more than a stern nod from First Lieutenant Hokka), some draped over their crying riders. One of the Casthan soldiers, a pale man with very little skill in Turkan, wandered the fields at sundown silencing the horses and their trapped riders, but Azar was still sure he heard them crying at night.

The third skirmish bled into the night. Colonel Youssein called for reinforcements the first moment he could spare a horse; the messenger bolted silent into the night mere minutes before another wave of Kethars spilled down the steep hills, leaping over the bodies of their kin.

Azar was quick. All the youngest soldiers were. The Turkan armor was far too big on his body, so he had left it in his tent hours before; that night, weaving through abandoned cannons and falling bodies, he was glad for the light tunic. When their reinforcements arrived from the Bohula contingent, he found that the remainders of the Twenty-Seventh were all unarmored as well.

A Bohula contingent officer, ushering the sodden and exhausted survivors to a field hospital behind the camp, told him the battle was near over, that he’d done his service and his mother would be proud when she saw him. He said the dregs of the Twenty-Seventh would return to Tiguerout as heroes, adorned in garlands of rare flowers and sent back to their homes with as much silver as they could carry. This was the payment for their terror. A day later, the same officer took them from the hospital and sent them back to the smoke-choked field.

He rotated in and out of battle for two more days before the Kethari finally ran back into the hills, dragging dying officers behind them. Colonel Youssein’s final orders, taken from his jacket before his body was burned, directed the last thirty soldiers of his regiment to the Twenty-Ninth in the Siperm marsh. He watched Hokka’s dead eyes as she read their orders aloud, watched the light fade around her as they marched north.

--

The night watch shrieked, and Azar was the first to move. Ever since they left Mount Egri, he hadn’t slept at all; every tiny noise made his hands clench tight on his wool blanket, so he’d given up on sleep entirely.

He leapt up to see only one Kethar, midnight-black paint cutting his face into ribbons, the campfire glinting gold on the bronze tip of his spear. Azar found the night watcher’s knife stuck blade-down into a log, found it in his hand and flying easy, whistling, through the air,

found it in the Kethar’s throat,

found the Kethar on the ground

dead, eyes wide.

First Lieutenant Hokka didn’t say a word when she awoke. The Twenty-Seventh were silent. Nobody made a move to stop him when he snatched up his blanket and a flaming branch from their fire. Surely someone would report this, the whole incident, the scout and the single enemy casualty and the clear hints at a diverted raid, but not for quite a while.