Slow Burn Read online

  Unfortunately, the only way to get answers would be to remain with the Wesah, and that was the last thing Gemma wanted to do. After her pathetic first attempt at escape, she’d fashioned herself into a model prisoner—silent and docile, practically bovine. Neither Athène nor any other member of the naasyoon ever hurt her (other than to restrain her wrists and ankles at night), and almost in spite of herself, Gemma began to acclimate to her new lifestyle, even to understand a few words of the Wesah language.

  Taanishi meant “hello.”

  Mafwe was a way to express surprise.

  Chee acted as a signifier for a question.

  The naasyoon usually woke before sunrise and rode for a few hours before stopping to eat. A small group of warriors would go off to hunt or forage, and only rarely did they return empty-handed. The preparation of meals fell to the two missives (or nisklaav, as they were known among the tribeswomen), Gornoy and Rugaru. Gornoy was short and burly, solid as a stone, while Rugaru was rangy and supple—he reminded Gemma of one of those slender, fragile-looking vines that turned out to be fibrous and impenetrable when you tried to cut it. Each man was rather handsome in his way, and Gemma doubted that was a coincidence. The Wesah didn’t raise boys within the tribe, which meant missives had to be imported, either by invitation or abduction; physical beauty was almost certainly taken into account during this selection process.

  Both missives were perfectly fluent in English—Gemma regularly overheard them telling bawdy jokes in a thick outerland patois—but they refused to speak it with her. Gornoy had only shrugged when she’d tried to engage him in conversation, while Rugaru had flicked a spoonful of boiling water her way and hissed like a snake. So much for solicitude from her fellow abductees.

  In general, the tribeswomen treated Gemma more like a pet than a prisoner. The only exception was a sharp-featured woman called Noémie, who made a point of shouldering Gemma whenever they passed each other, muttering dahor—the Wesah word for “outsider”—under her breath. Noémie was Athène’s favorite, often spending the night in the chieftain’s tent, emerging bleary-eyed and messy-haired the next morning. It was common knowledge that the Wesah permitted and even encouraged such liaisons, but Gemma hadn’t expected it to be so blatant. One night, the ruckus they made was so loud it caused quiet laughter among the others, and even kept Gemma from sleeping.

  Nicimos, she eventually learned, was the Wesah word for “sweetheart.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  On a clear morning a little more than two weeks after Gemma’s abduction, the gray outline of the Ramshield Mountains appeared on the horizon, and over the next few days, the sierra grew more and more distinct, until Gemma could make out every snow-cut facet and cloud-wreathed peak. A steep path, scarcely wide enough for two horses to ride abreast, led up the side of one of these mountains. It took hours to reach the summit, and all the while, Gemma had the strange sensation that she was acting as a counterweight to the sun, rising as it fell. At the top, she found herself gazing down on a deep caldera filled with luminous turquoise water and set in a corona of rime. The lake was roughly the shape of an hourglass—two roundish bodies connected by a narrow opening, like a corseted waist. Neighboring lakes sparkled in the distance, each one contained within the stone chalice of a mountain crater.

  Distracted by the view, Gemma didn’t notice the naasyoon’s preparations until the first drumbeats began reverberating around the caldera. She turned and saw the tribeswomen seated in a rough circle in the snow. Those with hand drums were already beating out a steady rhythm with small sticks wrapped in leather. After a time, an older tribeswoman donned a headdress of exquisitely beaded black feathers and began to sing. Her voice was strong and assured, if not particularly musical, and each phrase was echoed by the rest of the naasyoon. Gemma thought back to her days in the ministry and the call-and-response spirituals they would perform at gatherings. Not so different, really, from whatever this was. If she’d had her violin with her, she could’ve accompanied them; the song consisted of a single droning chord, so one could solo indefinitely on the same scale.

  Gemma realized her eighteenth birthday must have come and gone sometime in the last few days. Strange that such a milestone could pass unremarked and uncelebrated. Did the Wesah care about birthdays? And why should they? Why should anyone, for that matter?

  Flora’s birthday was exactly three months after Gemma’s. She’d be turning eleven this year—and who would be there to celebrate with her? Just their grandfather, unless Clive or Clover managed to make it home in time. Gemma stroked the necklace her sister had given her that last day in the Anchor: sweat-hardened and gritty, fibrous as hempen rope.

  “You cry,” Athène said, coming to sit beside Gemma.

  “I miss my sister,” Gemma replied, investing the words with accusation.

  “This is from her?” The chieftain reached out to touch the annulus, and Gemma slapped her hand away. She expected some form of reprisal, perhaps even wanted it, but Athène only shook her head. “You still want run, chee.”

  “Of course I do! I’m a prisoner!”

  Athène groaned with frustration, mumbling something to herself in Wesah. “You are not prisoner! You woman! You belong to you!” The chieftain pounded her chest, as if to drive the point home. “We make deal now, chee. You promise to walk with the naasyoon to the Villenaître. Then, you still want leave, I let you leave.”

  “Where is the Villenaître?”

  “Not so close,” Athène said, “also not so far.” There was a playful glint in her eye, and Gemma hated how she couldn’t help but find it slightly charming. She turned away from the chieftain, gazing across the caldera lake, its frosty corona glittering like millions of tiny diamonds. The chanting of the tribeswomen seemed to grow louder, and though Gemma didn’t understand the words, she could tell that the song was a celebration of the majesty of this place. The Wesah tongue had never sounded so lovely, so full of meaning and mystery. The snowscape began to brighten, gleaming like a blown ember; Gemma closed her eyes against the dazzling white. In the darkness, time slowed, stumbled, stopped. Her senses began to merge. She saw the notes of the song, floating like rainbow motes against the black canvas of her eyelids. She heard the cascading melodies made by the day’s last sunbeams as they burnished the bronze surface of the lake.

  By the time she realized what was happening, the fit had already taken hold. She turned her gaze once again to Athène, who’d pushed back her fur hood and tilted her face up toward the sky. For the first time, the chieftain didn’t look like an enemy. She looked pure, peaceful, radiant . . .

  Gemma’s last thought was of one more wonder, as unfathomable as any Wesah ritual, as compelling as any story told in the Filia.

  A part of her no longer wanted to run.

  2. Clive

  SHE’S LOVELY, ISN’T SHE?”

  Clive pulled sharply away from the guitar, as if he’d been caught doing something shameful. And maybe he had; his father used to say that playing music was the closest to the devil he ever wanted to get.

  “Would you like to try her out?” Vernon asked. He was one of the trio of portly, hirsute brothers who ran Anderson’s Music Shop.

  “If you wouldn’t mind.”

  “What do you think it’s there for?”

  Clive took the guitar down from the hook. He hadn’t held one in so long, not since . . .

  That telltale pressure behind the eyes, a whitewater of memory, a cresting wave of grief—he swallowed them all down. How many times had his father brought him and Clover here, to buy new strings, or have Gemma’s bow rehaired, or simply admire the new merchandise? Old Man Anderson, dead these last three years, would have some sort of toy for the children—a shaker he’d made by filling a walnut shell with sand, or an impractically heavy terra-cotta bell. Once, he presented them with a six-tine linguaphone the size of a matchbox; Clover broke it the very next day when he tried to add an extra note.

  The layout of the place hadn’t changed in a
ll those years: mandolins, fiddles, and guitars hung from pegs on the right wall, while the left wall was taken up by a couple of upright basses and various musical accessories. Through the doorway behind the counter, Clive could see into the workshop, where the other two Anderson brothers were at work on an upright piano; half-built, it looked like a dried-out animal carcass.

  “Here,” Vernon said, producing a tuning fork from the pocket of his overalls. “This’ll be an A.” He struck the fork against the counter.

  A sharp shock of recognition—Clover used to have a tuning fork like that. They’d left it in the small wagon outside Amestown, along with the rest of their instruments. Clive remembered how his brother would tap it with his fingernail and hold it up to his ear, as if it were telling him a secret. The recollection twisted, Clover’s smiling face contorting into a rictus of pain, as it had in those final moments outside Sophia—the black hole punched through his shoulder, blood staining his jacket and making perfect red circles in the snow. In the space of a day, Clive had abandoned the girl who might have been his wife and shot his own brother in the back. Nearly two months ago now, and yet the wound of wounding remained fresh in Clive’s mind. Clover may’ve been a heretic and traitor, but Clive knew he’d never be able to forgive himself for what he’d done. He felt marked now, like Kayin before him; the guilt weighed heavy on his shoulders, every second of every day, like a mantle of stone.

  “You all right?” Vernon said.

  Clive mustered up the shadow of a smile. “Sorry. I’m just distracted this morning.” He finished tuning, then strummed the open strings. The notes rang out clear and discrete, lingering like snowflakes caught in an updraft.

  “I’ll take it,” he said.

  Vernon looked surprised. “You’ve hardly played it.”

  “I’ve heard what I need to.”

  “But, Clive”—and Vernon’s expression went a little sheepish here, his voice dropping to an apologetic whisper—“I can’t give you much of a deal on it. It’s the rosewood, you see.”

  Like everyone else in the capital, Vernon knew what had befallen Daniel and Ellen Hamill, and he seemed to equate Clive’s orphanhood with destitution. But men of the cloth made a healthy living, and Honor Hamill had been thrifty. Clive’s inheritance wouldn’t make a man of leisure out of him, but he could certainly afford the occasional luxury. Or even the occasional two luxuries.

  “I don’t care about the price,” Clive said. “Now, let’s talk violins.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Snow had fallen heavy on the city last night, quilting the plazas in feathery white, glazing the roofs and balconies, laying narrow pipes of sweet icing along the balustrades and lintels. At the margins of the more well-traveled roads, it had already turned black with soot and hard as quartz.

  Clive passed through Devon Square, where a lay preacher in tatty robes and sandals that exposed his chilblained toes was ranting about the dangerous path the Descendancy was walking. He coughed thickly, spat a virescent wad of phlegm. Clearly he was recovering from the weak strain of plague that had swept through the city’s poorer quarters while Clive had been away, claiming a few dozen lives before a timely quarantine got it under control. In spite of his passion, no one appeared to be paying the poor man much mind. A month ago, he might’ve found a more sympathetic audience, but after the surviving members of the Protectorate contingent had returned to the Anchor, public opinion had shifted firmly and finally in the direction of war. Like any principle that has outlived its usefulness, the Descendant credo of nonviolence had been collectively shrugged off like a bulky coat, facilitating a certain moral flexibility, a wider range of motion. Doubts were swept aside, leaving only one word on the people’s lips: When?

  That word electrified the old men who spent their mornings talking politics in the city’s squares and cafés. It precipitated fistfights between old friends after a few drinks in the local tavern. It inspired the soldiers of the Protectorate to spend long hours on the Bastion’s training fields, readying themselves for glorious battle.

  Other than a dicey moment on a couple of ice-glazed cobblestones, Clive made it across the city without incident. The Poplin house was almost completely free of snow—all of it borne to the ground by the steep V of the roof—but icicles hung from the gables in brilliant serried clusters, an inverted palisade of glass.

  Clive had moved in almost three weeks ago, immediately after his return to the Anchor. His own home was entirely unlivable now—a bleak and silent memorial to everything and everyone he’d lost. Mitchell Poplin, Flora and Gemma’s grandfather, was pushing sixty-five and said he’d be grateful to have another pair of hands around, not to mention someone to look after Flora. He helped to arrange the sale of Clive’s old house and its furnishings to a family friend with children on the way. Going through the place one last time before the transfer, Clive had been surprised at how little he cared to keep: his father’s papers, his mother’s jewelry, some linens. Clover’s things were all stuffed into a trunk, which now sat in a cobwebbed corner of the Poplins’ basement.

  Clive carried his new acquisitions upstairs and laid them out on the bed. It was technically his bed now, but he still couldn’t help but think of it as Gemma’s. He liked living in her space; it made him feel connected to her, as if he were keeping watch somehow. The room was so modest, so warm, so ineradicably Gemma. The only furniture other than the bed was the small vanity next to the window. On its surface lay the remnants of a life: a crystal vial of scent with a thin line of amber at the bottom; a tin vase full of wildflowers long since gone dry and crumbly; a silver bracelet, slightly tarnished, that she’d outgrown. A humble annulus of twigs was nailed just above the bed. Clive could remember the week he’d spent making it, and the light in Gemma’s eyes when he’d given it to her, and suddenly he missed her with a keenness that took his breath away.

  “Clive? Is that you?”

  “Yeah.”

  Bare feet pattered along the hallway like raindrops. Flora peeked her head around the door. “Grampy wants to see you. He’s down in the—” The words died on her lips as she noticed the violin. “Did you go to Anderson’s?”

  “I did,” Clive replied.

  “Why didn’t you take me?”

  “You weren’t awake.”

  “You could’ve woken me up!”

  “I tried. I poured a whole bucket of cold water on your head.”

  “Liar.” Flora crossed the room to get a better look at the instrument. “It’s sure something.”

  “I’m glad you think so, because it’s yours.”

  Flora gasped; she knew what a good violin cost. “You mean it?”

  “I do.”

  Reverent as a sinner entering the Dubium, Flora raised the instrument to her neck and plucked out a major scale. “I’ve lost all my calluses,” she said.

  “They come back quick.”

  She looked up at him, tears pooling in her eyes. “You didn’t have to do this.”

  “Of course I did. Your birthday’s coming up soon. And besides”—his voice caught like a wagon wheel hitting a divot, but he kept rolling on, hoping Flora hadn’t noticed—“I know I let you down. I never should’ve let your sister come on the march.”

  “You couldn’t have stopped her. Once she set her mind to something—”

  “I should go see what your granddad wants,” Clive said gruffly, turning away before Flora absorbed his grief. He had to be strong for her; he owed her that much, at least. “You get to know your new relation there.”

  “All right,” she said, and Clive sensed the capitulation in her tone, as if it were her looking out for his emotions instead of the other way around. “Thanks again for the violin.”

  “It’s my pleasure.”

  Mitchell Poplin would be down in the workshop, as he was every day at this time. A furniture maker by trade, he specialized in the profoundly unspecial: straight-backed chairs and sturdy footstools, square dining tables and unembellished cabinetry. These pieces f
etched just enough money to pay for the food and materials required to get him through the next round of production.

  Clive liked it in the workshop—the tang of freshly planed pine, the chug and whine of the treadle lathe, the sonorous back-and-forth of the saw blade. This morning Mitchell was finishing up an armoire that he’d already sold to a merchant a few doors down. The room smelled strongly of brass polish.

  “That’s coming along nicely,” Clive said.

  “I guess so. But these handles here refuse to look like brothers.” The old man cocked his head and glanced toward the ceiling. The plangent strains of “Sister River” seeped down through the plaster; Clive could remember teaching it to Flora half a decade ago. “Do I hear a violin?”

  “I bought it for Flora this morning. And a guitar for me.”

  Mitchell whistled. “Musta cost a pretty shekel.”

  “And an ugly one. And a few more besides. But I’ve got the money.”

  “Or you used to.” Mitchell stepped back to survey his handiwork and harrumphed. “I think it’s time I gave up on these things ever matching. Guess I’ll have to say I planned it this way. Call it artistic license.”

  “So is this what you wanted to see me about?” Clive said. “Your handles?”

  Mitchell blanched. “Daughter’s love! I completely forgot. That marshal fella with all the scars came by while you were out.”

  “What for?”

  “I didn’t ask. No offense, but the man gives me the willies.”

  Clive hadn’t spoken to Burns since they’d returned to the Anchor. In fact, he hadn’t spoken to anyone in the Protectorate, or so much as set foot inside the Bastion. “Dereliction of duty” was the official term, punishable by court-martial. But Clive didn’t care; he’d earned the break. He only wished it could’ve lasted a little longer.