CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  -Under Your Sky

  The boys in the barracks slept like stones. Breath rasped thin in the dark, uneven. Chains shifted when someone rolled; straw whispered under skinny hips and ribs. The air was heavy with old sweat, woodsmoke, and the sour metal smell of the rings around their ankles.

  The door latch lifted. Light cut a narrow line across the floor.

  “Wake up.”

  The voice was quiet. It hung there a moment, swallowed by the room. No one moved. One of the younger boys coughed once and settled again. Somewhere a chain scraped as a foot twitched.

  “Wake up.”

  A few heads turned on their pallets, too used to being barked at to believe in the softness of that tone. No one truly woke.

  The sound that followed did it. The door slammed against its frame, wood jolting in the hinges. A bare fist struck the planks. Once. Twice. A third time. The blows shook dust from the rafters.

  Several boys jerked upright. Forty-eight choked on a breath and clutched at his chest. Eleven rolled from his pallet to a crouch before his eyes were fully open, hands coming up, expecting a boot.

  “What is it?” someone called, voice cracked with sleep. “Is it roll? Is it morning already?”

  “Get up,” the voice said. “Get up and come out.”

  The door swung inward. Cold gray light spilled across the nearest pallets and the line of chained ankles. The shape in the doorway turned and stepped away, leaving the door open.

  For a moment no one moved. Then habit pulled at them. Boys pushed themselves upright and shuffled toward the light, chains dragging. Links clinked and hissed on the boards. They blinked against the dawn and against the size of the space beyond the threshold.

  The yard lay open, bare. Smoke from the cookhouse drifted in a single, lazy thread. No overseer stood by the yard with his stick. No wardens paced the wall.

  Three bodies lay in the beaten dirt near the inner gate, close enough that the boys could see the dark stains around them. Two sprawled on their backs, faces turned to the paling sky. The third lay facedown, one arm stretched toward the gate, fingers clawed.

  The inner gate itself stood half open. Beyond it the passage toward the wardens’ quarters and common room lay in shadow. Whatever waited there could not be seen from the barracks door.

  “Where is Overseer?” someone whispered.

  “Maybe he’s at the bell.”

  “Bell should have rung by now.”

  “Shut up. Look.”

  They looked.

  He was sitting on a low stool outside the cookhouse door. For a heartbeat, no one recognized him. He had always been small, just another narrow back in the line when they stood for water or gruel. The boy on the stool was still thin, but he sat straight, shoulders square. His feet were bare on the packed dirt, toes curled against the cold. The ring on his left ankle had a crooked gap where he’d forced the links through, iron tongue twisted out of shape; it still clamped his leg, but nothing hung from it now. The length of chain that had once run between both ankles was looped around his right calf, wrapped and knotted so it would not drag.

  Blood had dried on his shirt in brown spatters and streaks. It marked his hands and forearms, his knuckles, the inside of one wrist. There was some on his cheek too, a curved swipe where he'd wiped sweat away and left someone else's life there without noticing.

  A knife lay in the dust by the leg of the stool. Beside it rested a short sword and a bow without an arrow nocked.

  His skin looked different. It had always held the yellow-gray of boys who never saw full daylight. Now it seemed lighter, strangely clean under the dirt, like someone had washed him in cold milk. His cheeks, once hollow, had filled out a little. Not much. Enough that the sharp angles had softened. He looked older. He looked like he had slept.

  Eleven was the first to walk closer.

  “Seventeen?” he said.

  A murmur passed through the others.

  “Is that Seventeen?”

  “That can't be him.”

  “Look at his eyes.”

  “They’re the same.”

  The boy on the stool watched them. His eyes were dark and calm. He did not smile.

  Eleven swallowed. His throat bobbed in his skinny neck. “You…” He hesitated, words catching. “You blessed by Blue Sky?”

  The murmur thickened around him.

  “Blue Sky blessed him?”

  “I told you. I told you Blue Sky was bored and sent help.”

  “Oh, Wolf Mother, look at all that blood.”

  “He looks like a ghost.”

  “Quiet,” someone hissed. “He’s listening.”

  He was. He heard every word. His gaze moved along the line of boys, counting, measuring. When it settled on Eleven, the smaller boy almost flinched.

  “Did you do this?” Eleven asked. His voice came out thin and high. He cleared his throat and tried again. “All of this. Was it you?”

  The boy on the stool did not answer at once. His fingers rested on his knees, relaxed, the pose of someone who could sit there all day while the sky brightened. When he finally spoke, his voice was low.

  “Hmm.”

  The sound never quite became a yes, or anything else.

  The others shifted, chains scraping. They looked from the dead men by the inner gate to the quiet boy by the cookhouse and back again.

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  A boy near the back of the crowd burst out, words tumbling over each other. “So what now? They’ll kill us for this. When Zhanar’s men come, they'll line us up against the wall and hang us from our chains.”

  “Shut up,” another muttered, but fear had already leapt from face to face.

  The boy on the stool lifted his head a little.

  “Either way,” he said, “you were going to die.”

  Silence followed that. It fell hard, thudding in their ears. Even the cookhouse fire seemed to crackle more quietly. He let the silence sit. He looked at them, one by one. Eleven. Forty-eight. The cougher by the door. The boy who had spoken of hanging. The little one from the border who still mixed steppe vowels with the southern consonants. His eyes weighed them like horses before a journey.

  “You're done waiting to die,” he said. “Now you're free to choose.”

  He nodded toward the gate and the land beyond the wall. The hills lay there, pale under thin morning light. Beyond them, unseen, the steppe stretched out under the same sky they had all been born beneath.

  “You can go,” he said. “You can step out that gate and walk until you find your way home. Or you can follow me to the steppes.”

  The words hung there. For some of the boys, “home” meant a particular campfire, a smell of sheep and snow. For others it meant nothing. This fort had taken them too young to remember anything else.

  The boy who had spoken of hanging found his tongue again. “How?” he demanded. His voice shook. “How do you expect us to return while we are chained?”

  The boy on the stool turned his eyes to Eleven.

  “He will set you free.”

  Every head pivoted. Eleven stared back at all of them, color draining from his already pale face.

  “Me?” he whispered.

  “Yes,” Ouz said. “You were apprentice to a smith once. You know how to break rings and rivets if someone gives you tools.”

  Eleven blinked. His mouth opened and closed. “I was,” he said at last, barely audible. “I was, but… how did you know that?”

  The boy on the stool made a soft sound in his throat. It could have been a laugh. It could have been the echo of one from some other day that had already been taken from him.

  “Hmm.”

  He pushed himself to his feet. The wrapped chain shifted up his leg and settled again. He nodded at a boy near the front, one from the border with quick eyes.

  “You,” he said. “Go and fetch tools for him. Hammer. Iron bar. Whatever you find. No one inside the fort is breathing except us.”

  The boy froze. For a few heartbeats no one moved. Chains hung slack. A couple of the boys shot quick looks at each other, waiting for someone else to step first. Hesitation flickered in their eyes.

  “He’s right,” Eleven said suddenly. His voice carried more than before. “Go. Listen to him. Look around if you don't believe it. Bring me something I can use to pry and something I can hit with.”

  The quick-eyed boy swallowed and nodded. He turned and trotted toward the storage sheds, chain tapping behind his heels. Two others followed, words of encouragement and curses mixed under their breath.

  The others looked back to the boy who had killed the wardens.

  “All of you can choose,” he said. “I won't drag anyone by the chain. You can go when he cuts you loose, or you can follow. If you're afraid, you can wait here. Zhanar will send someone one day. You can tell them I did this and hide behind my name.”

  He let that thought settle with them before he added, “I can't say what they'll do with you after.”

  Small sounds rustled through the group. A cough. The clink of a nervous foot. The soft curse of a boy from the northern camps. No one stepped forward. No one stepped away.

  Then Eleven moved. He walked out from the knot of bodies until he stood alone on the beaten dirt between the cookhouse and the barracks. His chains dragged a crooked line behind him. His hands shook, but his voice did not when he spoke.

  “From this day,” he said, “until my last day, I walk under your sky.”

  He dropped to his knees. The words struck the others like a gust of winter wind. Boys stared at Eleven, at the dust on his knees, at the way his head bowed but did not bend all the way. He was not begging. He was swearing.

  One of the steppe boys near him made a small sound in his throat. He stepped forward and repeated the words, accent thicker but meaning clear.

  “From this day until my last day, I walk under your sky.”

  He knelt beside Eleven. Another followed. Then another. Soon the dirt in front of the cookhouse was full of boys going down one by one, chains clattering as they settled. Some spoke the words in Steppe’s tongue, shaped to old patterns from their clans. Others used the border dialect, tripping over the phrasing but forcing the meaning through.

  The cougher knelt. Forty-eight knelt, jaw tight. His eyes shone with fear and something that looked like pride. Even he spoke the promise.

  A small boy from the southern border scratched at his ear and frowned. “I don't know what you're all saying,” he muttered in his rough dialect, “but I'll follow you.”

  He dropped down awkwardly, one knee hitting the dirt with a thud. Two other non-steppe boys shuffled after him, mimicking the gesture if not the words.

  Ouz watched them all. He did not smile then either. Something loosened under his ribs anyway.

  “Do as you see fit,” he said.

  The quick-eyed boy returned with an armful of metal. He had found a rust-flaked hammer, a bar of iron used for levering crates, and a wedge that might once have been a chisel. He dropped them at Eleven’s knees.

  Eleven picked up the hammer. His fingers remembered the weight. He took the wedge in his other hand and looked around at the waiting boys.

  “Line up,” he said. “We start with whoever is closest.”

  They came in a ragged half-circle. Eleven knelt by the first ankle ring, set the edge of the wedge against the flattened rivet, and struck. The hammer blow rang out across the yard, sharp, clear. Rust jumped. The iron shivered. On the third hit the rivet moved. On the fifth, it snapped.

  The ring sprang open a finger’s width. The boy hissed as cold metal bit his skin a last time. Eleven pulled the ring wide and worked it off over heel and toes. It left a pale band of mashed flesh and old sores around the ankle.

  The freed boy stared at his bare foot. He tried to lift it and nearly fell because there was no weight on the other end anymore.

  “Go,” Ouz said. “Take whatever you think you can wear from the wardens’ barracks. Boots. Coats. Anything that fits. Pick up weapons. Blade, arrow, bow, knife. Whatever you find.”

  The boy nodded and limped away, laughing once under his breath when the second step came easier than the first.

  One by one, Eleven worked along the line. The hammer rose and fell. Rivets broke. Rings bent and clattered to the ground, chains piling up in dull heaps. Some boys cried when the iron came away, from pain or from the feel of air on skin that had not seen it in years. Others simply stared, stunned. Their bodies had forgotten how light they could be.

  The freed boys scattered to raid the wardens’ quarters. They came back with mismatched boots, coats that hung off their shoulders, belts hacked shorter with knives. They carried spears and swords too large for them and knives that fit their hands exactly.

  At last Eleven straightened, arm trembling with fatigue. Only one set of rings remained fastened. He looked at the boy.

  Seventeen. Ouz. The one who had sat on the stool and spoken like someone older than any of them.

  “Yours,” Eleven said. “You're last.”

  He stepped forward, wedge in hand.

  Ouz shook his head. “No.”

  Eleven frowned. “You said we would go. You can't walk far with that much iron on your leg.”

  “Listen to me now,” the boy said. His voice cut clean through the clink of chains and distant bird calls. “Today we stay here. All of you. Eat. Sleep. Put meat in your bones.”

  He jerked his chin toward the barracks. “I need to go somewhere. I'll come back tomorrow. Don't go anywhere before. Don't open the gate for anyone unless it’s me.”

  Eleven stared at him. “Where are you going?”

  Ouz looked past him toward the wall. Beyond it, trees waited, dark even under the brightening sky.

  “I need to help someone,” he said. “If I can, I'll bring him back here to help us.”

  “You're leaving the fort?” Eleven’s voice cracked. “You, who never stepped beyond the inner gate? Are you planning to leave us behind after we gave our oaths?”

  Ouz held his gaze. For a moment he saw the small shape of himself in the old dream, boots full of dust, a father’s hand on his shoulder. He let the memory pass.

  “Wolf protect wolf,” he said. “I won't leave you behind. We'll go back to the steppes. Together. Eat. Sleep. Wait for me.”

  He picked up the knife from beside the stool and slid it into his belt. The sword followed, hanging loose at his hip. He took the bow in his hand and a quiver from the pile the others had brought. The chain on his right leg rattled softly as he walked, not dragging, only announcing itself.

  The yard lay silent as he crossed it. He passed the dead men without looking at their faces. The inner gate still stood half open. He set his hand against it and pushed it wider. Cold air from the outer yard slid past his bare feet as he slipped through. For the first time, there was no one on the wall to shout at him to get back.

  At the fort’s main gate, he set his shoulder against the smaller man-door set into it. It gave with a groan, just enough for him to slip through. Outside, the world smelled different. Wet earth. Pine sap. The thin sweetness of frost burning off under early light.

  Beyond the road, a dark line of trees waited. He turned his face toward them, adjusted the chain around his leg, tightened his grip on the bow, and started walking toward the forest no one was supposed to enter.