CHAPTER TWELVE

  -What I Did the First Time

  The wicked fall into Tamag, the seventh depth beneath Evren; the good and fallen warriors rise to Ucmak with Blue Sky and run the endless meadows.

  -Old Shaman Korkut

  For a moment there was nothing. Not the boards. Not the stink. Not the boys. Just weight behind his eyes and the warmth of the stone in his hand, like someone had pressed a coal into his palm and forgotten to let go.

  “I warned you,” Iye said. Her voice came from everywhere at once, close as breath. “From where I am, I can’t see inside your skull. Your memories are yours. Your missing piece is yours. But I can pull you close to where it tore.”

  “Tore,” he repeated. His tongue felt slow. “You mean the part that’s missing.”

  “I mean the hole you keep reaching for and losing,” she said. “If there’s a knot there, I can bring you to the edge of it. After that, you look. You learn. Or you break. None of that touches me.”

  “That’s comforting.”

  “It isn’t meant to be.” There was a pause, like a cat waiting between one step and the next. “Listen to me, boy. Don’t grab for anything. Don’t try to change what you see. Let it run. If you flinch away, you’ll lose it again.”

  His fingers tightened around the stone. Or he thought they did. He couldn’t feel his hands anymore. He couldn’t feel his body at all. There was only the sense of falling without moving, as if the world were sliding past him instead.

  “I think I see something,” he whispered. “There. That’s me. On the boards. Under the blanket. I can watch and I can see everything. I’m there, but I’m here too.”

  “Good,” Iye said. Her voice sounded farther away now, thinned by distance or time. “Then watch.”

  He wondered if what he was starting to see was the First Passage the strange letters had named before, some day he had never lived but that still felt tangled through everything.

  [Error: Intrusion.]

  [Accessing recorded First Passage.]

  [Error: First Passage cannot be found.]

  [Error: Breach detected.]

  [Entering recorded First Passage.]

  Those strange letters again. But this time it looks like I can see what happened on the First Passage. The day starts the same way it did for me today: the bell, my hands flying to my throat, the stink of damp straw and too many boys under greasy blankets. The same crack in the ceiling that looks like a river on a map. The jade-moon stone hot against my palm when I grab for it. The words that flicker across my thoughts are the same, too:

  [Skill acquired: Practicing Death.]

  [Death teaches only those who persevere.]

  Back then, I told myself I wouldn’t die under boots again. That was me then. It’s still me.

  The echo of the bell still hung in the air. Boys scrambled to obey. Chains clinked. Bare feet slapped the floor. The overseer with half an ear stood by the cookhouse door, cup in hand, counting bodies instead of boys. Porridge, thin, lukewarm. The stumble in front of me, the strip of gruel on my fingers, the crooked-nosed boy’s shove and his muttered, “Move, rat.”

  The morning had started over. Days didn’t do that. That was exactly what that version of me had thought, too. Watching that version of me go through it again, I felt each beat land the same way it had this morning. Same thoughts. Same anger. Same cold. Up to this point, everything had matched, even the way I burned.

  I stepped away from the line. I should plan. Think. Draw a map in my head. Beyond the dogs, at the far corner of the yard, the same knot of sheds and a smokehouse sagged against the wall, their roofs sloping up toward the palisade like a broken stair. Watching it now, I could feel the moment where the day started to lean.

  Instead my eyes slid to the dog yard. That part was new. I was pretty sure this brilliant idea of mine was how my First Passage ended early.

  Three dogs were chained under the low shed roof, ribs sharp, fur dull. Their breath steamed in hard little puffs. They watched the slaves with the flat, hungry focus of beasts that had learned two things: food came from men’s hands, and so did pain.

  The biggest dog, the one they called Flea, had more slack in its chain than the others; the last links scraped the dirt when it moved. The peg that held it in the ground leaned a little, its top bent from some old blow. I’d noticed that lean before while scrubbing slop, but only as something that made my stomach twist when the dogs threw themselves forward. Today I saw him see it, and knew it wouldn’t take much to break it free.

  Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

  Now I had something I’d never had before: knowledge. And time. Both bought with blood. Cheap payment, apparently. For me, anyway.

  I spent the morning hauling grain. Sacks from the river barges to the granary. My bare feet sank into frozen mud at the riverbank and slid on the hard ruts of wagon tracks in the yard. The chain on my ankle rang, short and sharp. Men shouted. Whips cracked when someone moved too slowly.

  A sack slipped from my shoulder near the granary door. Grain spilled across the ground. A warden kicked out without even looking. The boot caught me low in the ribs. Hard. Simple. My chest burned. A deeper ache pulsed along my side where the leather had found me. I staggered, caught myself, and kept moving. The pain was familiar. It slid into place instead of swallowing me.

  Pain settled. Information followed. As long as I was still collecting it, I wasn’t done with this day.

  “Seventeen?” a voice whispered beside me, thin and scraped raw by the cold. “Are you… are you all right?”

  I kept my eyes on the spilled grain long enough to be sure no warden was watching, and only then risked a glance. The boy at my shoulder was no bigger than I was, maybe smaller, his nose raw and red above a shirt that hung off him. The iron ring at his ankle was stamped with a different number: forty-eight.

  Concern sat strangely on his face. In this place, kicks were easier to find than questions. He sniffed once, hard, the way he did between almost every other word, the cold having moved into his nose and refused to leave.

  Maybe the boy had spoken to me on the first version of this morning too, but I’d been too busy thinking about running to hear it. Or maybe this was new, one of the small ways my choices bent the day. I couldn’t remember forty-eight ever talking to me before. Most boys saved their breath for work and screaming.

  I said nothing. I hitched the sack higher on my shoulder and stepped back into the line. I moved. Not fast enough to be noticed as strong, not slow enough to be marked as weak.

  Rule one: never be the first or the last in the line.

  All the while, my eyes counted. Breaths from the barracks to the gate. Steps from the gate to the granary. Fewer than the last time I’d counted. Close enough to run. Far enough to bleed.

  Rule two: know the distance before you run.

  I watched the wardens too. The two who always cut corners on patrol near the ditch. The one whose hands shook when he drew his bow. The one whose laugh turned thin and high when the overseer looked his way.

  I watched the patterns. Everything in the fort moved on tracks carved by boredom and fear. Men were as predictable as rats when the maze was tight enough.

  I had the advantage now. I’d seen one end to the path. I knew where some of the blind corners were. I could feel, almost like touch, the places where the world invited me to step. The choices that felt easy. Familiar. I didn’t trust those places.

  When the ladder up the granary side came into view, my palms prickled. I made myself look at it, without letting my feet wander closer. It felt like an answer offered too fast. The kind of way out that got you killed. I stepped aside. I didn’t go near it. But I marked it, quietly, as a possibility.

  Instead, when midday came and the horn blew for rest, I angled my path toward the cookhouse. Near the wall, shards of a broken clay jar lay half-buried in frozen dirt. Old. Blackened with soot. I saw them, and kept moving, but I didn’t forget.

  The dogs lifted their heads as I approached. Their chains weren’t long. Each iron collar ran to a peg sunk just far enough from the wall that a man could sit with his back against the wood and stay out of reach if he was careful. The warden on kitchen duty liked to sit there anyway, so close the dogs could smell the meat on his hands, not close enough to touch him. He liked to see how near they could come before the chain snapped them short. I’d seen him do it before, letting them throw themselves against the chains for a few scraps.

  Flea’s lips peeled back, teeth yellow and wet. A growl rolled up from the dog’s chest, low and steady. The other two joined in.

  The warden on kitchen duty sat on a stool by the wall, knife in one hand, a block of tough cured meat in the other. He carved slices slowly, dropping scraps into a pot. My vision narrowed on the man’s hands. Thick fingers, marked by a scar I knew. I’d watched those hands toss scraps into the mud and watched other boys scramble for them like puppies. My own fingers brushed my throat before I noticed they had moved.

  “What d’you want now, rat?” the warden asked, not even looking up.

  I dropped my eyes, the way I always did. “Sack is torn, master,” I said in border dialect. Truth. The canvas had ripped on a nail earlier. “Need needle. Thread.”

  The warden snorted. “Don’t need no sack to pull grain.” He jerked his chin toward the yard. “Take the split one. Carry half loads. More trips’ll teach you not to tear it.”

  The dogs stared at the pot. Saliva dripped from Flea’s muzzle.

  I let my shoulders sag, the answer settling on me like extra weight. “Yes, master,” I murmured. Cheap lesson, I thought. Easy to be generous with other people’s backs.

  I turned as if to go. My heel clipped the leg of the warden’s stool. The man rocked with a curse, hand jerking. The knife slid off the meat block and nicked his thumb. A bright bead of blood swelled.

  “Watch it, you little shit,” he snapped.

  He lifted his hand to his mouth, sucking at the cut. The knife clattered to the ground by his boot.

  I froze. The dogs didn’t. The smell of blood hit them like a blow. Flea lunged at the warden’s hand, chain clanking hard enough to spray dirt. The warden swore again and kicked at the dog, his boot thudding into its ribs. The chain yanked the peg. Once. Twice. The crooked metal groaned.

  I flinched back, one arm over my face, playing the terrified slave, and let myself stumble sideways toward the iron peg where the chain met the ground. I went down hard on one knee, scrambling away from the snapping jaws. The dog’s eyes never left the bleeding hand.

  My free hand found the peg. An accident, if anyone looked quick. I pushed with all the strength in my thin arms. The earth around the peg had been beaten to dust by a hundred lunges. The metal was rusted, already leaning. It shifted. Not enough. I gritted my teeth and shoved again, pretending to fall, pretending to catch myself on the post. My weight drove down through my hand. The peg tore free with a gritty shriek. I felt the dirt crumble around it. The chain went slack.

  Flea didn’t waste the gift. The dog threw itself at the kitchen warden with a sound that was almost joy. For half a heartbeat, the sound scraped the wrong way through me. Its teeth closed on the man’s wrist, right at the base of his scarred thumb. Bone crunched. Blood sprayed in a hot, pulsing arc. The man screamed, high and shocked.

  Chaos hit the yard at once. The second dog went wild at the smell, hurling itself against its own chain until the collar nearly strangled it. Boys in the yard froze, then scattered in all directions. A dropped bucket clanged. A sack of grain slid from someone’s shoulder and burst, pale kernels rolling everywhere.

  “Dogs loose!” someone shouted.

  The overseer spun, dropped his cup, and charged toward the noise.

  I didn’t watch the rest. I ran. Not toward the usual gap between sheds. That path belonged to my first death. Dog. Lantern. Boot. Knife. Instead I cut straight for the outer wall. The wood loomed ahead, rough and gray and spiked at the top. I aimed for the section where the mud had slumped, where the logs were undercut and the ditch beyond came closest.

  Behind me, men yelled and dogs snarled. I heard the thud of boots, the snap of whips used like ropes to grab the animals. I heard the wet rip of flesh tearing as Flea shook its head and the kitchen warden shrieked again.

  No one shouted my number. No one had ever cared enough to learn my real name. Good.