She stepped inside the crowded office, which contained a map dotted with colored markers, a table with neat piles of papers, and some weaponry stacked in a corner. She passed behind three of the practice tutors, her bare feet soundless on the wooden floor.
She assumed the head-down, blank-faced pose she’d seen the other runners use, and began to listen to the conversation, which was about some girl’s performance at a tryout just moments ago.
It was the third mention of ‘the girl’ — like everyone knew who she was — and knife throwing that sent a weird pang through Seshe. ‘The girl’ had to be CJ.
“Really?” Alsaes said. “Hit the target every time?”
“Not dead center,” a tutor said. “Reasonably good aim, but bad throwing habits. Poor training.”
“Shouldn’t think she’d had any,” Alsaes drawled. “Anything else of note?”
“Fast enough,” another tutor said, a young man. “Good runner, good climber, agile.”
“Brilliant with a sword, no doubt, as well?” Alsaes sounded s-o-o-o amused.
“Rudimentary at best,” an older man said. “About the strength you’d expect — none — no concept of defense. Have-at-’em offense with no strategy. No real training.”
“Characteristic,” Alsaes said. “Well, do what you can to better her skills, because Kessler wills it so. We’ll arrange another evaluation by and by.”
The tutors rose, standing in a row, and Alsaes noticed Seshe then. “Yes?”
“Reports,” Seshe said blankly.
Alsaes held out his hand. His eyes narrowed. Seshe felt his assessing stare, but she let her own gaze go diffuse, knowing he’d see her as a dullard and a fool. “Sit,” he commanded. “Let’s see if we need to arrange any demonstrations in the effectiveness of discipline ...” He looked up at the waiting tutors. “You may go.”
Without a word they filed out. Seshe’s heart squeezed with pity for the intolerable life Prince Kessler Sonscarna had to have suffered before his final escape from Shnit: she had listened to Puddlenose’s careless and rare (but harrowing) references to what being Shnit’s heir was like, during the times Shnit had tried to wrest him by enchantment to turn against Clair’s mother, and then against Clair, and betray them. It made perfect sense that Kessler would hate titles, because in Chwahirsland the heirs had all the appearance of prerogatives but actually they had been in more danger even than enemies. An honest person would loathe the falsity; a sneaky, amoral one would try to grab all those trappings for himself if he managed to get into a position of power.
Seshe watched Alsaes from the edge of her vision, and knew with visceral certainty that if Alsaes had his way, there would indeed be titles, or military ranks, and bowing and saluting and all the rest of the outer prerogatives of power. Instead, he had to make do with the threats of punishment and discipline.
A dangerous enemy in his pettiness.
“Here, girl.”
She looked up blankly into another sharp gaze. Then Alsaes smirked. “You’re one of the Mearsieans, aren’t you?”
She ducked her head in a nod.
“Settled in? Like your assignment?”
“It’s all very interesting, but I have a lot to learn,” she said in a dull voice.
She could see his boredom.
“Well.” He threw down the last of the reports. “No discipline problems to speak of. Everyone settled in — or almost everyone. Perhaps we’ll have to have a royal demonstration, eh?” He said that word ‘royal’ with a really nasty inflection.
Warning flared in Seshe, bright and painful. If only she could get to CJ! But she just ducked her head again.
“Run along,” Alsaes said, waggling his fingers in dismissal.
She left.
o0o
Irene glanced out the window — and there was Seshe plodding by. Her head was down, her long, thick locks of knee-length pale hair half-veiling her face, but Irene knew that posture. Seshe was upset over something.
Groanboils! Irene considered and discarded excuses for going outside — but there weren’t any. After-hours rec time was spent with your bunkmates. Period. If she got caught going out, they’d all go on report.
She looked around the neat, plain barracks room. Not that she cared a jot for any of these people. But still, it would be horrible to get them all into trouble for rule breaking. Everyone was afraid of that disgusting slimebrain of an Alsaes. Just from one or two whispered stories, Irene could tell that the bullying splatface just loved thinking up rotten things to do to people who broke the rules. And everyone had to watch.
She sighed, and pretended to be interested in the card game some of the others had gotten up. She loathed cards, especially the memory games the tutors encouraged them to play in order to train their minds to be more observant.
Some of the grown women were already horridly observant, but Irene had stumbled on the way to distract them if they looked at her like they were about to ask questions.
It was just that morning. She’d seen CJ walking by, and had tried to catch her attention. They were supposed to be evaluating patterns in piles of buttons strewn on the floor, and the tutor had looked at her in surprise when he caught Irene gazing out the window. “Irene? Are you distracted?” he’d asked.
Irene had promptly zombied, copying the blank face and voice she’d observed in others. “I know my duty in the Plan,” she’d said, because she’d heard others say it, and knew it was an acceptable answer. Then she saw why. She watched in total amazement as all the others went blank and the tutor rattled off a list of commands that would be his part in the Plan, as others whispered to themselves.
Later she’d tested it again, with one of the kids who’d been around a long time. When Irene said, “Do you know your duty in the Plan?” the girl had gone blank in the face then jabbered out a list of orders!
At first Irene had thought of this discovery as a way to keep them from noticing her slips, but when she thought back about that tutor and what he’d said about his intended actions in some kingdom she’d never heard of, she wondered if this might not be useful for someone.
But who? The girls couldn’t get out to find help. She couldn’t even get near any of the other Mearsiean girls in order to talk it over and find out what they thought.
She stifled her fourth yawn, and decided the main goal here was to act like the others, so no one would notice any differences and yank her in to get punished or send her to Dejain for one of her mysterious interviews.
o0o
Next morning, Gwen and Sherry got a chance to talk as they wiped down all the tables in their mess hall after breakfast, and then stacked dishes into readiness for lunch.
No one cared if they talked together, as long as it wasn’t in Mearsiean. No one was supposed to talk in her home language. All had to use the same tongue. No one cared about what they said as long as they worked hard and weren’t seen laughing or having any kind of fun.
“They think we’re a pair of dummies,” Gwen observed to Sherry on the third day.
Sherry blinked her large blue eyes, and smiled. “Good.”
Gwen’s mood changed in an eye blink from injury to relief. “Yeah, who cares?”
“I’m just worried about Seshe,” Sherry said as she finished with one table and waited for Gwen to wipe down the second bench. “Every time I see her she looks sad.”
“And every time I see Dhana it looks like her head hurts.”
“No water in sight. Or even trees.”
“Reminds me of Earth,” Gwen said, making a face. “You know, Progress. Cementing over everything, killing everything green.”
“Ugh!” It was too loud. Sherry looked around guiltily, but no one had noticed.
Gwen scrubbed briskly at a bench. “Just the place. Not the people — luckily. I think somebody went to Earth once, and thought all this ugliness really, you know, efficient. They were big on that when I was there, efficiency.”
“You must be right,” Sherry said, sighing.
“I just think it stinky that when we get to travel it always seems to some disgusting yukko place where we’d never want to go, like Chwahirsland. Or here.”
“I just hope CJ can get us out.” Gwen sent a fearful look at the windows, and the eternally bright sunlight. “Who would pick this place — and why?”
“Someone who’d been in the dark?” Sherry offered.
“Yeah. Or else it’s out of the way, or the local ruler is a rockhead and doesn’t know — ” Gwen stopped quickly, in case anyone was listening. In a lower voice, as she bent over another bench, she added, “What worries me is that Clair doesn’t know where we are. She’s probably wasting all her magic trying to find us in Chwahirsland.”
Sherry nodded soberly, but didn’t answer.
A sour-faced woman stomped over. “At this rate you’ll still be cleaning during the next meal. Get to the floors, you at that end and you at this.”
“Just two more benches,” Gwen said, pointing.
“Do it. Quickly.” The woman turned away.
The girls watched her go, Gwen shaking her head. She’d overheard someone say that the woman had been a prisoner before, and had changed her mind after watching one of the executions. Apparently the ones who changed their minds had another choice: going to Dejain for a loyalty spell, or else serving in a menial job while constantly guarded, until they’d proved themselves. Some didn’t even get that choice — they had to have the magic spell, and it made the people into dutiful robots.
Gwen had seen a few of them. They were the creepiest sight in a very creepy place.
“How can they prove themselves?” Sherry has asked the boy who told them all this.
He’d wrinkled his nose before hefting another big soup container up. “When Alsaes decides, I guess. Just like the rest of us — we get moved out of the kitchen when he decides we’re ready.”
“So you didn’t join up just to work in the kitchen?” Gwen had asked.
He’d given her a pained look. “Of course not. I mean, it’s good work — if you like it — but they said I was too young, no training. My brother insisted they take me if he joined, because if I didn’t get to join, I woulda gotten killed at home for sure.” At the word ‘home’ his face had hardened.
Gwen thought all this over as she swept her end of the floor. First she considered how much she didn’t know. Like, why the itchfeet didn’t pretend to join, like the Mearsiean girls had. There’s got to be something missing.
This was on her mind again as a couple more long, dreary days passed.
The weather stayed hot and dry, and Gwen could tell how miserable it was making Dhana, who looked pale and drawn when she came and went in her line.
Gwen and Sherry made sure that the water jug at Dhana’s table got extra fillings at all the meals, and Gwen saw that Dhana drank more each day.
Seshe looked quiet and withdrawn, and as for poor Faline, she was hardly recognizable. Gwen was grateful that at least she had company; Faline had no one, and her job had to be even more boring than kitchen.
Irene looked annoyed, but all right, and Diana tired.
Gwen never got to talk to any of them — she just counted up each glimpse, and other than keeping Dhana’s table in extra water, she couldn’t do anything to help.
o0o
They’d been there a long stretch of days before Gwen finally saw me, but since I’m writing this the way she said it, I’ll call myself CJ.
“How long has it been?” she asked Sherry just before noon.
Sherry shook her head. “Dunno.” She gave a wan reflection of her old smile. “If there was a limit, I’d count ’em. But now ... I’d rather not know how long I’ve been stuck here.”
Gwen nodded, thinking that every day was just like another — and about the best thing you could say for any of ’em was that boredom was better than life-threatening danger.
Then she saw CJ, just as she opened the door to the mess hall.
CJ looked hot, and sweaty (and yes it’s weird to talk about me like this, but I’m telling you how Gwen saw me). Gwen watched CJ look around fast, as if she expected a room full of armed Chwahir to jump out at her. Gwen felt her heartbeat quicken, and she nudged Sherry.
Both found business on the food line.
CJ was alone, which meant, at least for a short time, that they might be able to talk.
Gwen busied herself rearranging the little round breads they served at each meal, until at last CJ was across from her. “What a relief,” CJ muttered, her head bent as if she were inspecting the breads. “One meal away from him.”
“You have to eat with Kessler?” Gwen asked, wrinkling her nose — and all thoughts of danger faded behind the wish for some funny gossip with which to make the other girls laugh. “Does he have disgusting manners?”
CJ flashed a quick grin, and then reached with her hand toward a bread. “Not with. At his office. I have to ask. He just works, but it’s the idea. Oh, Gwen, it’s so horrible — ”
“Is there something wrong with the bread?”
Gwen and CJ both looked up guiltily. The sour woman stood right behind Gwen; her face soured even more when she recognized CJ.
“No,” CJ said. “Wondered which was freshest. Hate dry bread.”
“We bake them all at the same time,” the woman stated.
CJ grabbed one, and moved on.
Gwen exchanged a grimace with Sherry, and they kept on with their work, Gwen watching unsuccessfully for another chance to get near CJ.
She saw how the tutors respectfully but firmly sent CJ away from their tables to the head one at the front of the room, which most of the time was bare.
And of course Alsaes chose this meal to patronize the mess hall.
Six
I sat down in the big dining area, my mood vile. I’d raced through my morning’s work so that I could time it just right; most of the stuff I had to do usually kept me busy past the scheduled mealtimes for everybody else. If Kessler ate or slept, I’d seen no signs of it. I mean, he didn’t seem to have a bedroom, and I kept hearing evidence of things he had been doing during the night, as if he worked around the clock.
I HATE hot weather. I really hate it. But I’d just spent the hottest part of the morning busily working my way down the practice areas in the blazing desert sun, just so I could see the girls at lunch — and when I got there, I had about ten seconds’ talk with Gwen before some prune-faced noser came up to glare at me.
The others girls I glimpsed as they came in — following obedient lines — all except Diana. Unfortunately the girls stayed in their lines and the looks the adult leaders gave me kept me from going near the girls.
Weird looks. The same look that Kessler got the rare times I saw him around other people. I hated that — oh, I can’t even begin to describe how much I hated that. Not just because it was so clear in those faces that they thought I was devoted to the Plan (and every face thus confirmed me a liar and a traitor in some weird way — like, not to their plan so much as to my own word) but because they obviously thought I had some kind of power. And of course I hadn’t. I’d been singled out by the leader. That was all. But it was a big all to them.
Alsaes got The Look, too. He loved it. You could see it in his little smile, in the jaunty way he swaggered up the middle of a street expecting everyone to scramble out of his path. Kessler, on the other hoof, didn’t seem to notice — or if he did, he didn’t show it. His reactions were so unlike most people’s it was impossible to guess what he was thinking.
Well, two of those adult leaders pointed me to the small table at the front where, they said, others sat. ‘Others’ covered people who didn’t belong to a barracks — from the various trainers and experts (called tutors) to Alsaes, Kessler, Dejain — and me.
I dropped my tray onto the table, my mood rotten. I tried to cheer myself, thinking that at least I didn’t have to sit with Kessler for once — and not five seconds later Alsaes set his tray down directly opposite me.
“Working ha
rd?” he asked.
“Yes.” I thought of his threat to the itchfeet in the prison, and Dejain’s warning, and fought hard not to blast him with richly deserved sarcasm.
“Anything you’d like improved?” he asked.
His tone was like needles under the fingernails.
The scenery in front of me I thought, but I kept my face as blank as I could, adding in the back of my brain, And after that, everything else in this nightmare place.
Out loud, I said, “Nope.”
“Anything you want to study in further depth?”
“Not ready,” I said.
“Really?” Alsaes raised his brows — how he reminded me of that elegant, languid King Carlael of Colend, except Alsaes wasn’t nearly as handsome as that maddening crazy Carlael. And ol’ Carlael was a snobby, sarcastic king but he hadn’t been a bully. “Kessler sees such potential in you.” Once again Alsaes’s tone was goading — like he wanted me to mouth off.
I was not about to say anything about Kessler to this creep, for I knew he’d twist it against me somehow. And then I realized that anything I said would be twisted, that Alsaes was going to get back at me for the kick in the face, and Kessler’s laugh, and all my nasty comments. He had the power. I didn’t. He was looking for any excuse to smoosh me like a bug.
So I bent over my food and began to eat.
He didn’t talk to me again, and I ignored him completely. Soon as I was done I dumped my dishes into the barrel (noting the cleaning spell — at least poor Gwen and Sherry didn’t have to wash dishes for hours) and left without a backward glance.
The heat and bright sunlight were like a slap in the face.
In defeat I walked slowly back toward Kessler’s office. I had nowhere else to go. If I went to practice again, the tutors would immediately stop whoever was there, even if there was a large group — and then they would stand around and watch me.
Nowhere to go.