CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  -Gods Who Don’t Care About Forts

  First the yard. Then the ditch. On the third try, I chose the wall. That me did, anyway, the version of me I’m watching run himself into splinters. Not the gate, where dogs and wardens watched every breath. Not the ditch, where the ice broke and the current took him.

  Up.

  The day rolled out in a way that already felt worn thin. Bell. Porridge. Line. Work. The same orders, the same blows, the same rough jokes from wardens who never seemed to tire of cruelty. Crooked Nose didn’t shove my shoulder this time; I was already moving before anyone had to warn me. I moved through it all with my head down, keeping my pace steady. Not so fast anyone would notice, not so slow someone would bother to kick me. At the time, that felt like a kind of invisibility. Watching it now, I can see how loud it really was.

  I’d seen enough evenings here to know that when the sun sank low and red toward the hills, the men on the palisade would change. Some would come down shivering, stamping their feet and swearing about the cold. Others would go up, shoulders hunched, torches in hand. The light shifted, and the shadows moved with it. That was when the wall thinned.

  The fort had no stone curtain like the border keeps I’d heard the older men talk about. It was timber and packed earth, sharpened stakes and a ditch full of black water. The palisade was rough logs tied together, with a narrow walkway behind it where wardens could pace and peer out over the snow.

  At one corner, near the smaller granary and the animal pens, the wall met a cluster of low roofs. Storage sheds. A smokehouse. A place for tools and rotten rope and things no one wanted to leave in the snow.

  From the yard, the roofs sloped up toward the palisade like a broken stair. I’d noticed that slope once before, on another pass through this same day, but that time I’d chosen the river instead. That me hadn’t learned yet that “new” didn’t mean “better,” only “different dying.”

  Tonight, my ribs still ached with the memory of that cold, but my eyes were clear. I kept the line of sheds in the corner of my vision all day, turning the path of mud and timber into a simple map in my head.

  When the second bell rang and work crews were driven back toward the barracks, I coughed, stumbled, and let myself fall behind. A warden smacked me across the shoulder with the flat of a stick.

  Shit-face, I thought. Same curse, same man. Some parts of the day nail themselves down and never move.

  “Move it, rat.”

  I moved. Just not toward the barracks. The moment the warden turned away to bellow at someone else, I slid sideways between two stacks of wood. The gap was narrow and full of splinters. The smell of sap and old smoke pressed in on me. I held my breath, squeezed through, and came out in the thin alley that ran along the rear of the sheds.

  No one looked this way. All the light and attention pointed inward, toward the center yard where the overseer liked to speak and hurt and count.

  The sky above the fort was turning dark, with a few early stars starting to show. Torches hissed along the palisade. Their light flickered on the snow and on the churned black mud at the base of the logs.

  I pressed my palms to the side of the nearest shed. Rough boards. Nails hammered in crooked. Frost along the gaps. I’d climbed worse things back home, before chains and collars. Rock faces near the river, with my cousins shouting orders from below. The slick side of a cliff where meltwater had turned the stone to ice. The bare trunk of a wind-stripped tree that swayed while I clung to it.

  I set my bare foot on a knot in the wood, tested my weight, and pushed up. The board groaned. For a heartbeat I froze, listening. A voice drifted from the yard, too far to matter. I moved again. Hands. Feet. Weight close to the wall. Breathe through your teeth. Don’t look down, idiot. That was how I thought of myself in that moment: an idiot who might still get out if he followed his own orders. I made it to the lip of the roof. The pitch was shallow but slick, a thin crust of snow hiding ice beneath. I flattened myself along it and crawled, ribs pressed to the cold boards through the thin slave shirt, breath puffing white in front of my face.

  Closer. The palisade loomed above me, dark against the evening sky. I could hear the soft thud of boots along the walkway behind it, the occasional clatter of a spear butt and the low murmur of a man talking to himself to keep from falling asleep. After a while the mutter turned into half a song in the Zhanar tongue, words rising and falling in the cold air. I caught only pieces. Taerlang’s name when the man’s voice lifted on the word for sword. Yangz’e when he asked for a moon in a black night. Shenjie when he promised a wolf would fall to his arrow. Aichen when he laughed about an empty purse finding coin. The rest blurred into sound and breath from men praying to gods that weren’t mine, leaking through the gaps in the logs.

  That me didn’t know what any of it meant. He just heard names and wishes and the way a man held his fear between his teeth. Watching it now, I can pull the lines apart, little prayers I’ll be able to use later. Useful knowledge, paid for with his blood, not mine.

  Between two torch brackets there was a gap. If I timed it between footsteps. If I reached up quick and quiet. If my hands didn’t slip. Three ifs already felt like too many. My uncle used to say plans with that many moving pieces ended with someone dead. Watching it now, I can hear his voice and see exactly where he would have stopped me.

  Then be a warrior the Blue Sky can be proud of, and may Qut rest easy on you.

  I edged closer until my fingers brushed the underside of the palisade logs. Cold, rough, with bits of bark still clinging where the men who built it had been too lazy to strip them clean.

  I listened. One pair of boots paced away. Another pair approached. Right, left, right again. A small hitch in the stride, like that warden’s knee hurt in the cold.

  Hitch. Step. Step. Pause. I moved on the pause. I pushed myself up, fingers finding purchase in a split between the logs. Toes found the edge of a support beam on the inside of the wall. I heaved, belly scraping splinters, and rolled myself onto the narrow planks of the walkway behind the palisade. For a moment I lay pressed flat against the rough backs of the logs, listening. Boots thudded somewhere along the wall to my left before fading. No shout. No dogs.

  I got my feet under me and rose into a half crouch. The top of the palisade was a line of uneven logs in front of me, some a little higher, some a little lower where the men who built it had cut them badly. At one of the lower spots I set my hand, then another, and pushed myself just high enough to see over.

  My hand twitched toward the cord at my neck on instinct, fingers brushing the small weight there before I forced them back to the wood.

  The ditch lay below, rimmed with broken ice. Beyond it, the snowfields ran out under the fading light, a flat white sheet over the earth. Farther still, a smudge of trees, black against the sky. And beyond that, a line. Hills. Or maybe the rise of the steppe. Home, somewhere on the other side, too far to see.

  For a heartbeat I thought it wasn’t so far, and an ugly little hope kicked in my chest. That hope looks even smaller from here, hooked into Iye’s power and watching him run.

  “Oi!”

  The shout cracked out behind me on the walkway. The sound hit like a slap. I flinched and moved on instinct, shifting my weight forward, trying to swing a leg up and over so I could drop to the far side before hands could close on me.

  Something punched into my side. It wasn’t like the river, cold and blunt. It was hot, a spike of sudden pain that tore through cloth and skin and meat from behind, angling down and out. The force of it drove me chest-first into the top of the logs. My fingers spasmed, lost their grip, and the strength went out of my legs.

  For a breathless instant my ribs were the only thing keeping me on the wall. Until they weren’t.

  The palisade fell away beneath me as my body tipped outward. The world flipped past in jolts of color and shape.

  Sky. Wall. Torch. Sky.

  I hit the ditch. The water knocked the breath from me for the second time in what felt like the same endless day. The cold went past skin and into bone, into the back of my teeth, into the raw edge of the arrow wound. My spine hit something half-frozen and jagged.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  Then there was nothing at all. Now, watching from a safer distance, that drop into nothing makes my stomach tighten.

  I woke to porridge again.

  All right. That was wrong. Why was I still here? By my count this was his second death; the First Passage should have stopped by now. So why was it still running?

  This time I didn’t try to move too quickly or too carefully. I lay for a moment in the dark, listening to the rasp of sleep-thick breathing all around me, the shifting of bodies on straw, the soft click of teeth as someone clenched their jaw through a bad dream.

  My side didn’t hurt. My ribs didn’t feel like they’d been used as a drum. There was no arrow in me. No water in my lungs. It was wrong, waking whole. I’d thought it the first time. The second. The third. After a while, that wrongness started to feel like the only steady thing in my days.

  The bell rang. Early again. The same curse from the same corner of the barracks, muttered into a threadbare blanket.

  “The bell’s early today,” someone muttered again. “Means the overseer woke up angry.”

  No one laughed. Angry was the default. The words were habit, not joke.

  I pushed myself upright. I could throw myself at the wall ten more times. At the ditch. At the gate. At the dogs. Every path I’d tried so far had ended the same way: dying. Sometimes it was just cold and dark. Sometimes it was that gray field with the black grass and Aldac?. The dying itself never got softer. Bones still snapped, lungs still burned, nerves still screamed right up until the moment the world went away. If there was a chance to live through a day without feeling that again, I’d take it.

  There had to be a pattern in there somewhere. If there was, I could learn it. I just had to stop moving like a kicked dog and start acting like someone who actually meant to live. That was the thought that stuck. That me didn’t have a name for it yet. I do.

  Rule three, I thought, as I stood and joined the flow of bodies toward the door. Watch before you move.

  The day went on, the same as before. I walked the same packed-earth path from barracks to yard. I lined up for the same ladle of gray porridge, the same stale crust, the same slop that splashed onto my fingers when the boy in front stumbled and jostled me. It had happened the last time this morning came around; back then I’d just wiped the mess on my shirt without really seeing who’d spilled it. Forty-eight.

  The boy snatched his bowl closer to his chest, whispered an apology without looking up, and shuffled on. His hair stuck up where frost had matted it in strange directions overnight. His nose was pink and raw from the cold. He hunched around his food like someone might steal it, bony shoulders almost brushing his ears.

  Before, I’d barely seen him as more than a number in front of me in the line. This time I said nothing. I watched. I watched how many breaths it took to go from barracks to gate. I watched how many steps the dogs took between each post on their chains, how far the chains would let them lunge.

  Flea dragged his peg half a handspan farther each time he threw himself at the edge of his circle, claws tearing at frozen mud.

  I watched which wardens cut corners on patrol and which ones did their circuits properly. The ones who moved like they believed they owned anything they could see, and the ones who moved like they were afraid of something that wasn’t in the yard at all.

  I watched the overseer’s eyes when he spoke. How they barely rested on the children unless someone displeased him. How they lingered on the wardens instead, weighing, counting, measuring their fear.

  I did the work set to me. Carry this. Stack that. Drag this away. Hands blistered, back aching, I did it all in the right amount of time, with the right amount of effort. Not first. Not last. Rule one still applied.

  As the day brightened and dimmed again, I added more lines to the map in my head. The angle of the wall where the ditch curved. The weak point in the fence around the animal pens, where a board had warped away from its post. The rhythm of the bells. The way the smoke rose from the cookhouse roof in a straight column when the wind fell still.

  I didn’t make a run for it. My muscles itched with the urge. Every time a warden turned his back, every time a dog looked the wrong way, my body leaned forward a fraction before I forced it back.

  Three rules now. Don’t stand out. Know the distance. Watch before you move. I told myself that over and over until the words sat in the back of my mind like a scratch I couldn’t quite ignore. By the time the last bell rang and the children were driven back toward the barracks, my legs felt like they had walked twice the distance the others had. Weight was one thing to carry. Being noticed was worse. Still, I had something to show for it that wasn’t another broken bone.

  I knew now where the shadows pooled when the torches were lit. I knew that the warden with the stiff knee took three steps between each torch bracket on the wall, and on the fourth liked to stop and lean, rubbing at his leg. I knew that Flea barked itself hoarse at most wardens who crossed the yard, throwing its weight against the chain, but when the overseer passed it went quiet, only a low rumble in its throat and its tail tucked tight. Knowing where to step wasn’t much, but it beat walking blind.

  Night in the barracks felt different from morning. Morning was sour, all breath and porridge and the heavy dread of the bell. Night still smelled of straw and unwashed bodies, but the hunger was duller. The wardens’ voices were far away. The overseer didn’t come here often. If he did, it was because he wanted something, and everyone heard he was coming before he reached them. For now, the only sounds were whispers.

  The wardens had shoved us all inside with the usual curses, slammed the door, dropped the bar, and trudged off toward their own warmth. A single sliver of torchlight came in under the warped bottom of the door, no wider than a finger.

  I lay on my side, knees curled toward my chest, watching that sliver. Around me, children shifted, found spots, curled into one another for warmth. Numbers were easier to remember than faces. I’d learned some of those, though, in the strange stutter of repeated mornings. In the far corner, Forty-eight lay curled on his straw mat, a thin back beneath a threadbare blanket. He coughed into the crook of his arm, tried to muffle the sound, failed.

  Someone further down the row snorted.

  “A Barak will come for you if you keep coughing like that,” a voice said quietly. “My village shaman said they like the weak ones. Sick children. Soft meat.”

  “Don’t say that,” another voice murmured. “You’ll scare him.”

  “He should be scared.” I recognized the crooked nose from the morning line, heard it in the bend of the words. “My uncle fought a cartload of them once. Said their heads were like dogs, and their arms hung lower than their knees. Teeth all the way back to their throats. They run on two legs when they chase you and on four when they eat.”

  A little shiver ran along the row. In the corner, Forty-eight raised his head a little.

  “If they come, Wolf Mother will protect us,” he whispered. “She doesn’t let monsters eat children.”

  A few of the city-born boys made skeptical sounds.

  “We’re far from the steppe,” Crooked Nose said. “These are Zhanar gods’ lands now. Wolf Mother doesn’t walk this snow.”

  “Maybe she’s waiting.” The softer voice spoke again from somewhere down the row. “My grandfather used to say the Blue Sky lets things happen until he’s bored, and when he is, he sends a storm. Maybe this is the part where he’s waiting.”

  “Blue Sky doesn’t care what happens in forts,” someone else muttered. “Only to clan riders and chiefs and people with names.”

  “We had names,” Forty-eight said. “Before.”

  Crooked Nose shifted on the straw.

  “Our shaman said names only matter to gods and shamans.” Straw rustled as he settled back. “The rest of us are just meat they count.”

  Silence at that. It pressed on the room. I stared at the line of light under the door until it blurred. I’d had a name too, once. More than just a number and a set of rules in my head. There had been people who used it. Uncles and cousins and a father who only raised his voice when the horses misbehaved.

  The snow here wasn’t the same as the snow at home. It was wetter, stickier, heavy with the smell of woodsmoke instead of open sky.

  I rolled onto my back and stared up into the dark where the rafters hid. The boys kept talking. Stories about the border. How the forts were meant to keep raiders out, but sometimes the raiders came anyway. Tales of a clan that had stolen a whole herd from under a garrison commander’s nose. In some versions there was a knight or a Qut Batur at the heart of it, a man whose inner strength let him cleave a line of soldiers with a single swing. Half the details were wrong. I could tell. They talked about the steppe like it was a far-off myth, not a place where people woke and ate and pissed and argued over whose turn it was to watch the goats. I listened anyway. The stories were twisted and wrong, but close enough to remind me of home.

  Forty-eight’s voice came softly after a while, almost at my shoulder.

  “You don’t talk much,” he whispered.

  I turned my head. In the dark, eyes were just darker patches.

  “Talking doesn’t change anything here,” I said. That was what I believed at the time.

  “It makes it less loud in my head,” Forty-eight answered. “When I don’t talk, it’s like the overseer is in there instead.”

  That was an odd way to put it. Too sharp for someone who still tripped over porridge. Too familiar as well. I knew what it was to carry someone else’s voice around in my skull.

  “What did they call you?” I asked before I could stop myself.

  A pause. Straw rustled.

  “I don’t remember,” the boy said, and I knew he was lying. “Forty-eight is easier.”

  I almost said my own name in return. The old one, the one tied to smoke and horsehair and wind. Instead I let it sit on my tongue until it faded.

  “You cough too much,” I said.

  Forty-eight let out a tiny, offended breath.

  “I try not to,” he said. “It sneaks up.”

  “So pull your blanket over your head when it does,” I said. “The wardens hear noise before they see who makes it.”

  “Is that a rule?” he asked. There was a thin thread of dry humor under the fear now, like he was testing to see if jokes still worked in this place.

  “Call it one,” I said. “If you want to keep your teeth.”

  Forty-eight was quiet for a moment. When he spoke again, his voice was smaller.

  “I’ll try to keep it,” he murmured. “The rule, I mean.”

  I could hear the smile in his voice. Something in my chest shifted, a little ease I didn’t have words for yet. Watching it now, I can almost see the worry sitting under that smile, the way he was already bracing for sickness.

  “Tell us a story, then,” someone on the other side of Forty-eight whispered. “You sound like you know things.”

  “I know that tomorrow the bell will ring early,” I said. “I know they’ll feed us porridge and call it mercy. I know the dogs will bark themselves hoarse at the wardens, and that when the overseer crosses the yard they’ll go quiet, only rumbling in their throats, and yelp when they’re kicked for it.”

  “That’s not a story,” the boy complained.

  “It’s the only one this place ever tells,” I said.

  I thought of the wall. The ditch. The river. The moment the world had opened and the hills had been a smudge against the sky.

  “I’ll tell you a better one when I’m not dead,” I said.

  I heard the confusion in the way the straw shifted. Good. Let the day confuse someone else for once.

  “Don’t say that,” Forty-eight whispered. “You’ll curse it.”

  I closed my eyes. I already did, I thought, but kept it in my own head. Sleep came slow, one breath at a time, one knot of tension at a time. I let it take me because staying awake wouldn’t stop anything. This place didn’t care what any boy wanted.

  I expected the barracks ceiling when I opened my eyes.

  Instead there was gray.