Marya had rebelled. She could not kill the girl with her sister’s name, and she’d meant to miss her altogether, aiming at a particular spot instead of allowing the tracker to work, only Zinnia hadn’t ducked. She’d seen the device, though, preparing to harm her, and she’d only stared, stony-eyed. She was still sitting now, but the image blurred, distorted by the tears in Marya’s eyes. Fall! She stormed inwardly; she wanted to be angry, or to grieve, or go mad, but the only emotion that she could feel was fear, slowly creeping up to shroud her heart in ice.
Elle Tonarych didn’t cry, because Zinnia was alive. Crowds of townspeople were shouting and running around them, but she and the others staggered up from the ground and hurried over to Zinnia, whose blood was dripping into the fountain. She had moved only to put her hand over the wound. Leera took a deep breath.
“You’re alive, Questel, and you’re going to stay that way. Tell Elle what to do to help you, and do it now.”
Zinnia looked a little taken aback, but she told Elle to bind the arm tightly. Elle sat beside her, trying not to hurt her and grateful for the distraction of Friya and Joran hurrying up with their purchases, eyes wide and scared.
Leera divided up half the bread evenly, ordering them all to eat. She looked tense, Elle thought, and she was staring hard at a group of teens across the plaza. Actually, the teens were staring at them. Abruptly, the other group started towards them, and Leera was suddenly on her feet, fists on her hips, her expression not quite aggressive but definitely challenging. The eight teens stopped a few feet away, and Elle realized they must be another group made by the king. Her twin brother was not among them, which was good because Elle didn’t want him anywhere near the danger and bloodshed that seemed to follow her group.
“How goes it?” asked a tall boy politely.
Elle’s group cast sidelong glances at each other. The question seemed absurd, but the boy went on,
“We are already on our fifth task, and we expect to finish them all by tomorrow. If you like, we can help you.”
He looked at Zinnia, raising his eyebrows.
“You seem to be in trouble.”
Cay ventured awkwardly,
“We, uh, just finished our first task. I think. I mean, right? Opening the Doar? Except…we were…well, it’s all because of the king, that-”
Fortunately, Friya froze him with a glare, and before either of them could say anything, Leera broke in,
“Each group has eight tasks? We were not told.”
“Oh, yes,” said a girl from the other group. “Our first one-”
And that was when the copper orb burst into existence again, spitting fire, and shot Friya through the head.
Leera Stern wanted her excuses so badly that it hurt. There had been no time. She could not have reached Aztlán even if she had already been moving. One of the others should have done something… but the truth was, she had not even called an order.
“Vojen!” she shouted, but again she was too late. He was already running towards Zinnia, who helped splash water over the flames charring his clothes. Eight tasks. One down, and two dead, one injured. Leera’s promise seemed more impossible all the time, but somehow, a spark of determination opened inside her. She would protect her group, or she would die trying. The prospect seemed not unlikely.
Cay Vojen was thinking about his aunt. Usually she was in constant motion, keeping the farm running with her patient energy, but there was one day he’d found her sitting in the kitchen, crying. Cay had said something to her, anything, to make her feel better, but it hadn’t helped. Later, he’d watched her wrapping burns on his baby cousin’s hands.
Guilt and fear and anger burned almost as much as the blisters rising on his arms and torso. He couldn’t bear to look at the body that used to be Friya, so he pulled away from Zinnia (who followed him, tying off a bandage) and rummaged through her bag for something to spread over her. She liked nice things, he remembered somewhere off in the distance. He picked a cloth that he guessed was silk.
Leera crouched beside him as he settled it over her.
“We need to move,” she said.
“She should be buried,” he replied, his eyes on the ground. “She’d want to be buried the way she…deserved.”
Leera hesitated, then nodded.
“According to her status, you mean. I agree.”
She stood and looked at the remains of their group, huddled together looking exhausted and scared. The other group was long gone, faster than frogs leap when you step into their pool.
Cay remembered the evening of the day he’d seen his aunt crying. She’d been serving them all at the table and his uncle, normally an undemonstrative person, had put an arm briefly around her and muttered,
“It was the right thing to do.”
His aunt had started crying again, but it was different from before, and Cay had been relieved. There was a comfort for pain in knowing the right path, Cay thought.
He stood as well.
“Let’s do this last thing, for our friend, like she would’ve wanted,” he said, and for once he didn’t feel self-conscious.
Okner Annersap was not given to reading novels, but it had occurred to him one year that the “popular” of today might become the classics of tomorrow, and he did not care to miss a reference when the material was so readily available to him. He had taken to heart the moral of The Wasteful Prisoner, another resolution of his being to not ignore folk stories, and had set out to read nearly two hundred popular works of fiction with selections for all imaginable genres. There had been an awkward moment when his mother found him reading Lillicent Powell’s Sally, Sweetheart: A Tragic Story of Dreams and Romance, but the book that came to mind now was one by an amateur author under the pseudonym Dour Black. The plot had been strewn with holes, and the ending rather obvious, true, but Okner found the parallels to their current situation uncomfortably visible. The book had had invisible man-eating monsters that had picked off every non-essential character one by one until the hero and his love interest managed to cobble together a means of escape and cemented their romance in the same chapter, leaving a horde of useless friends to throw themselves sacrificially (and wholly unnecessarily) at the monsters to aid their flight. In group Marya’s case, however, Okner reasoned, the deaths were not due to the voracious appetites of insentient creatures but rather to the will of someone with an astonishing amount of power. Also, that someone had just made a mistake. Up to that point, the logical conclusion would have been that the king had orchestrated Solldero’s death, since it occurred through the completion of his instructions. But Friya Aztlán’s devotion to the king was – had been – crystal clear. That meant that the killer was someone close enough to the king and with enough power and privilege to be able to use the king as a façade, and Okner rather thought that Solldero Noy had had the right idea when he’d mentioned one Malcav. One of the king’s advisors, wasn’t he? Okner retreated into his memories to consider.
Joran Arundasi vomited. Zinnia told him to chew purple herbs from her pouch, but she didn’t get up from where she was huddled on the ground, cradling her arm. The cloth that had fallen from Friya’s body lay soaked on the ground, where nobody touched it. Cay and Leera were standing with Okner, talking quietly, but from the distant expression on the tall boy’s face, Jor doubted he was hearing any of it. He spat to try and get rid of the acid taste before stumbling over. Elle was sitting listlessly nearby, and Jor hesitantly offered her a hand up. She stared at it for moment, then took it slowly and let him pull her up. Joran didn’t know what to do. This wasn’t a mood he could cheer her out of with a few jokes…or himself, for that matter. The gloom was almost too much to handle, reminding him of…
Leera nodded at the two of them.
“The townspeople will bury our companion as befits her station. We will honor her memory by continuing to complete the tasks given us with courage and acumen.”
The words sounded good, but the meaning took time to filter through their numbed senses.
“Okay,” Joran managed. “Do we know what the next task is?”
“That guy said the clue for it,” Cay reminded him. “He said something about the sky.”
“Clear the sky,” Elle murmured.
The four of them looked at each other sideways and then lifted their heads. There were a few fluffy clouds, but the sun was shining.
“Uh…” said Joran.
Zinnia Questel didn’t want to think about how much her arm was hurting, and definitely not about how she was going to sew it up. She would have done it for a patient, and she wasn’t in the mood to spare herself the pain. But she always gave her patients a distraction, and fortunately Okner was talking.
They had moved outside of the town to sit awkwardly on the banks of a small stream. Elle’s arms were squeezed tightly around her knees and Joran was repeatedly rinsing out his mouth, but Leera and Cay were focused on Okner.
“Um, sorry, I kind of got confused again-” Cay interjected apologetically. “The sky isn’t actually the sky?”
From the way he kept glancing up, he thought that was literal. Zinn started a half smile that quickly turned into a grimace as she pushed the needle through.
“I believe we can count on the relative constancy of the firmament, my young friend,” Okner said patiently. “My intention was to convey the probability of the word ‘sky’ not referring to that actual sky, but rather to the river Skye, which is the second largest river in this country and incidentally quite close to Oceanfront.”
Elle lifted her head.
“Oceanfront? That’s where Solldero lived; we have to go there!”
She didn’t seem aware of the tear trickling down her cheek, but Zinn watched its progress as she pulled the thread tight.
Leera narrowed her eyes accusingly.
“And ‘clearing’ the Skye would mean exactly what? Fishing out debris until we drop?”
“I am, of course, not privy to the wishes of the king, or perhaps more likely, his closest and most trusted advisor Malcav, who left the country with his parents when they were banished in his childhood by the father of our current king. This can perhaps explain his irreluctance to place his majesty in a poor light, as he has done on numerous occasions thus-”
“Okner.”
Leera’s tone left no doubt as to her meaning.
“My construance is that the clue will lead us to displace, if only temporarily, some of the… persons… who pursue their… occupations…in a series of tunnels under the Skye. The extent of the tunnels is unknown due to-”
Zinnia tuned him out and focused on tying the knot one-handed.
A doctor didn’t give up. She would do her best with the next patient to come along. Even if it turned out to be herself…