the cursed sample chapter -- the darkening
I hate this place.
I hate the thump of the waterwheel turning our millstone, hate the fresh breeze coming down the mountainside, hate the way the summer sun lights up our packed dirt courtyard, shooting rainbows through the mist from Knife Creek. I hate the view of Chema as I stand here listening to the maize grind, city spreading in a landslide of thatch rooves and terraced gardens down the mountainside to the river below, smoke and shouts and dots of people in bright fabric. I hate the mountain valley spreading out beyond it, lake Tschida emerald green in the distance, border peaks blue-white with glaciers and the promise of next winter. I even hate my best friend a little, perched on the terrace wall beside me.
I hate it because I’m stuck here, because Dad needs my help too much to leave, because I can’t just enjoy life the way Willhem does. But most of all I hate it because they took Oni away, and this was our view, our family, our world to conquer.
Now it’s just a mill and some scenery.
Willhem is talking about schooling, about the tutors his father’s hired. “The etiquette instructor is the worst. Three hours on sitting properly, Kem. Three hours!”
I shrug. “Once you get it down, you’re practically guaranteed your dad’s mayorship. A big house on the river and ten thousand people paying you bribes. Beats milling grain your whole life.”
Willhem snorts. “Way I see it you’ve got easy money, a Dad who lets you do whatever you want, and the cutest girl in Chema coming to trade books with you.” Willhem shakes his head at the idea of books. “Beats debating a gentle versus decisive chairtaking.”
I snort back. “You want to take over the mill? Go gather Widow Meima’s maize.” She is waving from the millhouse door, her grains apparently fed through the stone, and I get up to help her. “Besides, what’s wrong with being ward mayor? You get a big house and fame and bribes from everyone in our third of the city.”
Willhem gets up with me. “It’s so small, that’s what. There’s a whole world beyond the city, Kem” he sweeps an arm at the view, “epic feats to accomplish.”
Will has always been obsessed with feats, with the heroes in tavern singers’s songs. “I’d settle for getting the day’s grinding done early.” I nod to Widow Meima and begin scooping her maize flour from the floor of the mill, Lady Anri behind her with her own hoop of maize.
Lady Anri clicks her tongue at Willhem. “A young man like you, strong, you should be thinking more of serving the people than making a name for yourself. Look at Kema here, filling in for his father. What would we do without his mill?”
Willhem gives her a winning smile. He’s tall and well-muscled from the game courts, and ladies like his strong chin and long black hair. As usual he wears a fine-spun tunic over worked-leather leg wraps, and his sandals are likely worth as much as our millhouse, studded with gold and ivory and made of exotic seaskins. “I have greater gifts to give the world than merchant work.”
Anri clicks her tongue again. I smile, relieved to see my friend’s way with women has some bounds. The truth is, though he’s a nice guy in private, around other people Willhem can be an ass. Somehow, the girls in town seem to go for that. It’s frustrating.
“The stone too,” Widow Meima says, her eyes revealing she’s not so immune to Willhem’s looks. I grimace. Part of the reason our mill has been so busy lately is because I started lifting the millstone to clean the last of the flour from underneath, as a favor to some of our neighbors on the mountain. Now all the customers want it—but business is business.
“Yes ma’am.” I take a breath and braid sight into strength, my vision graying to black as perceptick strength floods my body. I’m not as strong a visicept as Willhem or some of the tlachtli players, but it’s enough to lift the heavy millstone. I seize it under one hand, keeping pace with its turning, and heave up. It slides up the pole to someone’s appreciative gasp, and I start brushing the last of the maize meal from the stone beneath. Even Willhem shuts up—the sight of a single arm holding the crushing weight of the millstone is, I’m sure, an arresting one. It also isn’t worth it for a couple pebbleworths of maize meal, but here I am.
Brushing done, I let the stone down with a thud, and the rhythmic grinding begins again. My vision blurs back to find the two women with heads together, Willhem staring off somewhere. I overhear their low voices as I scoop the meager portion of maize that’s come from the stone.
“—no good will come of it, I tell you. Our generation never studied percepticks and that was good enough the way it was.”
“Aye but Anri-chan times have changed. With the Tleca just over the moutains, we need them to learn their skills, while they’re still young enough to do it. Emperor knows we don’t have the numbers to stand up to the savages.”
“Skills is one thing. We’ve always had the Academy. But to be using them now, with the comet out?”
Widow Meima scoffs as I stand with the last portion of grain and add it to the scale. “You don’t believe that old thing, do you? Three times it’s come now since the curse was spoken, and nothing’s come of it. It was the dying curse of a dying people, no more. They’re Tleca now, same as the rest, and we will be too if young men like Kema don’t practice their talents.” She smiles and lays a hand on my arm. “What does it come to, dear?”
“Three benas, ma’am, and a half if you can spare it.”
She spares me that, and a smile too, as speculative as the one she shot Willhem, though the woman is twice our age. “A pleasure, as always.”
“Yes ma’am,” I say, not sure I like her attentions. Lady Anri hands me her hoop, heavy with amaranth, and I see what has caught Willhem’s attention as I begin pouring in the grain: Drana Kalastria, coming down the mountain with a book in hand.
I spill a little: Drana is that kind of beautiful, even if you’ve seen her before, even if you’ve poured grain a million times. She wears a long roughspun skirt, belted below round breasts, with wild matted hair and shocking blue eyes. They are outlander eyes, Tleca eyes—a legacy of her Tleca father, of a mother who ran from her people and came back with a blue-eyed child, and half the reason Drana is hated as much as admired in town.
The other half is her craft, both hers and her mothers. They are herbalists, skilled in combining roots and leaves into medicines, as the jungle people do. People whisper they always include poison, as the jungle people do, but I have seen more than one parent trekking up the mountain after dark, and heard of more than one miraculous recovery come daybreak.
Moreso, people whisper that she is a rootspeaker—able to braid not only her own senses, but those of the plants she is familiar with, senses foreign to humans, giving her unnatural powers. As if to flaunt those fears, Drana always wears a braid of herbs woven into her wild hair. Today they are green and gold, with purple-blue alfalfa blossoms matching her eyes.
Anri clicks her tongue again. “Sorry!” I call, and curse myself, cleaning up the fresh spill of golden seeds.
Drana is the reason Willhem’s here, I know. Though we are good friends, we normally meet down in the city, near the pitcourts or at one of the student teahouses for a game of sevenlives. But when I mentioned she’d been coming to trade books with me sometimes, the man was all ears. Nevermind that he doesn’t read, that he’s got no interest in culture or history, that every other girl in Chema is throwing themselves at him—he happened to show up today.
It’s annoying. Willhem’s always been richer, more handsome, better at pit games, better with people, and—once we got old enough to care—better with girls. True, I’m probably better with percepticks, and physically stronger, but still somehow I always fall in his shadow. I thought with Drana it’d be different.
I’m going to make sure it’s different.
I get all the amaranth in the chute, expecting to find Drana eating up his bravado, and am pleaseantly surprised. Drana is looking like a thundercloud—a lovely thundercloud, but no less dangerous—and Willhem has the too-bright expression on his face I know best from when he’s caught doing something wrong. “Just an observation, that’s all!” he’s saying.
She turns to me, ignoring him, and something swells inside. “Kema. I finished the Tellemsworth book. Some interesting stuff in there.”
“Yeah,” I say, trying not to grin at Willhem’s befuddled look. “I don’t like it as well as Markels, but I thought the part where he travels with the Decalaes caravan was really interesting.”
She cocks her head to one side. “It was. I—“
“The Decalaes! Yes!” Willhem says, stepping a pace forward. “My—father has dealt with them. There are a lot of trials that come from being an official on the borders of the nation, you understand, and—“
Drana ignores him, though she raises her voice some. “—like how he talks about the jungle tribes too, about the symbolism in their body paints. And where their purple ochre comes from—“
She’s not done, but Willhem tries again. “Ochre, yes! Why, I think some of the sashes on my leggings are jungle ochre,” he says in a too-loud voice.
I shoot him a look—Willhem can be such an ass sometimes—but Drana beats me to it. “Ochre. How nice. Would that your legs were purple instead.”
She smiles sweetly, and it takes Willhem a moment to understand. “Ah—they are, at times! When you play in the tlachtli pits as often as I do, you tend to get a few bruises along the way.”
Drana steps closer to me, too close for him to hear, and my skin starts to burn. “Sorry,” I say. “He, ah, he can get boisterous sometimes.”
She raises an eyebrow. “Boisterous? He’s an ass. Why are you friends with him?”
Will is trying to break into the conversation, and she steps even closer. She might be a handswidth away from me now, closer than we’ve ever come sitting on the terrace wall talking about books. My cheeks are burning. I shrug. “We go back a long ways. And he’s a good guy, if you can get past the—“ I search for a word.
“Assness?”
“The assness! Yeah. Just, get past the assness.” A shadow passes across her face, but at least Willhem has stopped trying to break in. I think Lady Anri is yelling about something, but she can wait a second. “I’m—glad you liked the book. Maybe we can—talk about it another time? I’m not quite done with the Markels collection, but—“
The shadow is getting darker on her face, and I realize it’s not just her expression. Drana glances behind me, and Anri’s words register for the first time:
“The sun! The sun is going out!”
I look up. The sky is going dark, as if a stormcloud were passing the sun, but there is no storm, not a cloud in the sky. What in Ashnok's name? I squint—it looks like something is flying in front of the sun. Something huge. A giant chunk of its face is just not there.
“What’s going on?” Lady Anri half-screams, amaranth forgotten as she turns in the center of our courtyard, eyes wide. “What’s going on?”
“Something—something’s passing over the Sun,” Willhem says.
“The Tleca!” a man yells, hurrying up the slope. “The Tleca are coming!”
“No!” another yells, dragging a pair of goats down the mountain with two young kids at his heels. “A skybeast! A skybeast is eating the sun! We must fight!”
“The Darkbringer!” Anri screams, turning this way and that. “The curse! The Darkbringer has come!”
Those are not the words of the curse, but fear strikes into me. Tleca don’t fly, and skybeasts are children’s tales, but something is happening. The sky is truly going dark now, and I realize with a start I can see Elachti, the Mother’s Eye, shining above the eastern peaks. “Emperor help us,” I whisper.
Others have taken up the cry of Darkbringer, and I see Widow Meima in the terrace beyond, on her knees in the mud, wailing out a prayer to the God Emperor. Willhem stares at me, rooted to the spot, and somehow his fear more than anything drives it home: the Sun is going out.
Only Drana is calm. I catch her face as I’m looking around the courtyard, trying to find a solution, something to do. She stands with hands slightly spread, face turned up to the darkening sky. Her mouth is open, eyes wide, a look of total wonder on her face. It is so arresting that for a moment I stop too, and look up.
“Isn’t it wonderful?” she breathes, almost too low to hear.
Wonder is not what I’m feeling. “Drana,” I say. “We have to go. Have to get somewhere safe. If this—“
She utters a low laugh. “If this is the end, Kema, it is the end. There will be no hiding from it.”
Ice strikes further in my heart, then Willhem is there. “Drana,” he cries, taking her arm. “Drana come away with me. Now—before the light is gone, let’s go!”
She does not look away, but I think of my Dad and brother. Where are they? Are they safe? Oni is gone, of course, but Dad’s just inside. “To the house,” I say, grabbing them. “We’ll get in the house, and lock the door. We’ll be safe there.”
“No.” Willhem locks eyes with me, and in that moment there is nothing friendly about his gaze. “You go, Kema. Drana and I will go—somewhere else.”
I get it then—Willhem is making a last play for the woman. “Don’t be stupid!” I hiss. “Let’s go before something else happens.”
“You two go,” Drana says, voice still so peaceful it’s almost sleepy. “I want to see this.”
More people are running on the path outside, most fleeing up the slope, a few running down, widow still wailing in the terrace beyond. Willhem makes another plea for her to come away with him, and I notice with growing unease more of those fleeing in the half-dark are yelling about the Darkbringer.
The first tenets of the curse have happened now: a red comet in the eastern sky, then the darkening of the sun. The curse speaks of trials afterward, of someone seizing the bone scepter, but maybe they already happened too. Maybe the Darkbringer has already come. If so, there’s no hope for any of us. More importantly, there’s no hope for any one running by outside, but they’ll want answers. Want someone to blame.
“The house,” I say again, tightening my grip on their arms. “It’s not safe here.”
Willhem shakes my hand off, something feral in his eyes. “Go away Kema.”
“I’m not leaving you, but we need to go!”
The first stone hits then, clattering off the cobblestones, but it seems to wake them up. Willhem turns with a start, and Drana’s eyes leave the sky for the first time. A cluster of people have gathered at the entrance to the millyard, Lady Anri among them. “Darkbringer!” they call, and “Rootspeaker!” and then, “Kill the Darkbringer!”
Another stone flies, catching Willhem in the shoulder, and Drana wilts between us. It’s her they’re after: the rootspeaker, the outlander, the enemy. “Come on!” I yell again, trying to drag them toward the house.
But Willhem stands up straighter. “No. This isn’t right.”
I see his hands clench into fists, try again to pull him but he won’t budge—he’s sense-braiding. Say what you will about my friend, but he is brave. Maybe too brave.
“Willhem you can’t fight all of them!”
He pushes me back. “Take Drana and go!”
“Will no!”
He runs at the crowd, fists balled. It is so dark now I can barely see the fight that follows, only hear the cries and shouts, but there is a tangle of thumps and cries. Willhem’s voice dies off, and that of the crowd grows louder, becoming something like a chant. “Darkbringer! Rootspeaker! Kill the Darkbringer!”
I have to see if he’s okay. “Drana go!” I push her away from the crowd. “The house is unlocked, get in and bar the door!” Without waiting for a response I braid sound into weight. Their shouts fade to an echo, to silence, and I feel my body getting lighter, the pull of the earth slacking off. This is the one sense that I am good at, the one place where I shine. I can hear a pebble drop at a hundredpace, and when I braid that sense I can get my body next to weightless.
I crouch and then push off, air rushing soundlessly around me, up and over the crowd pushing into the courtyard, more of them now, indistinct forms in the dark.
The darkness. Fear breaks through my resolve: the sun really has gone out. Drana is not the Darkbringer, but somewhere something has gone very wrong. I push it down: first things first. Willhem.
I overdid my jump in my panic, and I soar over the entrance to the courtyard, the mob ignoring me now that I’ve left Drana. I realize with a start they might try to torch the roof, that Dad and Drana could get trapped inside, but no one has fire yet. First things first.
I land ankle-deep in the mud of the neighboring terrace, sound rushing back in a wail: Widow Meima is still there, hoop of maize meal spilled in the soil, praying to the God Emperor for mercy. I run back toward the mill, pushing through the panicked ring of people on the outside, like a herd of spooked goats, push through and strain my eyes till I see a form on the ground between moving legs. Willhem.
With a cry I run to him, crouch down, hold my hand to his lips: breath. Thank the Emperor he’s breathing. “Willhem you jackass.”
I braid sight again, hardly needing it now in the darkness, and use the increased strength to hitch Willhem onto my back. He’s heavy, and my back groans under the weight—sight-braiding gives you stronger muscles, but does nothing for your bones. I push backward, shouting at people to go home, to run to the forests, that there’s nothing here.
Nothing here but a violent mob and a dying Sun.
I stumble my way up the path, knowing it well enough that I find my way onto the next terrace, green reed shoots brushing against my ankles. I lay Willhem there, unbraiding vision to find only grayness. I hold my hand against his mouth: still breathing.
“Sorry man,” I whisper, “but I gotta leave you here for a bit. I’ll be back.” I smile, realizing what he’d say if he was awake. “Well you went and got yourself knocked out. This time, I get the girl.”
I braid sound again, shouts of the mob flickering out, and aim my jump more carefully this time. The terrace is a man’s height above the millyard terrace, accounting for the slope of the mountain, but our house is two stories, so I still need quite a bit of height. Too much, though, and I will sail right over, into the mob.
I jump, catching a glimpse of the sun: it is just a ring in the sky, like an unearthly black eye staring down at us. The Darkbringer. Fear rises, and I shove it down again. First things first.
My feet hit the thatch roof, bouncing from my near-weightlessness, and I unbraid sound some, the mob’s shouts a muted roar, but not all the way: our roof is old, and likely won’t hold my weight. I’m counting on it, actually, but not here where the drop beneath could break a leg. I run over to the far side, where the loft is, get as close as I can to where I think my bed is, let the rest of my weight return.
Thatch crackles underneath, and I pull the braid out, weight returning in a lurch. Something gives beneath, and I crash through, half-hitting the mattress and spilling onto the floor.
It’s dark inside, darker even than the courtyard, but I know my way around. “Drana?” I call, groping for the stairs. “Dad? You in here?”
A mumble from the wash area downstairs tells me Dad is here, likely already blind drunk. “Drana?”
No answer. I get to the front door, only bashing my shin on one chair in the process. It’s open, door lock unbarred. “Dark bring it,” I curse, pushing outside. She didn’t make it in. Maybe the mob already has her. “Drana!”
The mob is a roar out here—more must have joined, though I don’t know how, in the darkness. Thank the Emperor you can’t sense-braid to see in the dark, or this would have been over awhile ago.
There is no answer, nothing but the roar of the mob, and I see their shapes moving in the courtyard, dark forms with clubs and pitchforks and angry voices. If they had found her, they’d be clustered around her, I tell myself. She must have escaped, somehow. She must be safe.
“The house!” someone shouts. “She’s in the house!”
“No she isn’t!” I shout back, but my voice is lost in the roar, in the animal fear turned into anger, into violence. I know it won’t matter if they find her in there or not. They will tear my Dad apart where he lays, drunk in the bath stall.
“NO!” I run back toward the house, but the mob is ahead of me, people pushing, taking up the cry of “House! House! The Bringer’s in the House!”
I hear the wood door slam back against the wall and then--
And then I’m getting lighter, as though I was braiding hearing again, but I’m not, I can hear everything: the shouts of surprise, the rattle of tree leaves, the rhythmic slush of the waterwheel slowing. What is going on?
My feet leave the ground, unbidden, my body getting lighter still. I hear groans, the cracking of masonry under the shout of people. Someone knocks into me, and we both go bouncing in opposite directions, floating as though in a sea made of air.
Floating upwards, I realize. Is this the Darkbringer? Is this his evil design, to pull us all from the face of the earth, to eat us?
I bounce from the wall of the millhouse, scrabbling for it, but too late to try and push myself down. The whole crowd is drifting up, I see, faces hued in purple.
Purple. I glance at the sun, see a sliver of light shining on its eastern side, like a waxing moon at dusk. Light. The sun is coming back.
And regardless of what’s going on, regardless of the fact that I’m floating off the face of the earth, and the millhouse roof is too, thatch rising in a cloud of brown reed, relief floods into me. The sun is coming back. We are not doomed.
“The Sun!” I shout, pointing as I float. “The Sun is coming back!”
Word spreads like forest fire through the drifting crowd, shouts of joy mixing with panicked cries and wailing prayers. We are fifteen paces up now, or more, higher than I’ve ever jumped, paces higher than the millhouse roof, so we are in perfect position to watch the light begin to outline the terraces and rooves below, to see it catch in the sheet of water I realize is the millhouse stream, floating upwards with us. It is a miracle, like the dawn in fast forward, sun’s crescent waxing in the sky now, the mob’s shouts gone in gasps and whispers. This is not the Darkbringer. This is something much more holy. I have time for one perfect, grateful smile.
Then we drop.
Screams erupt as whatever has been holding us up gives way, and I braid hearing, hard. I hit the ground, weight lightened just enough that it doesn’t hurt.
Few around me are so lucky. A woman rolls on the ground nearby, clutching her leg, and I see with a lurch something yellow-white is poking through the skin: bone. Others are much the same, people falling from the millhouse roof as thatch reeds drift down all around us and the stream water splashes back into its course.
The darkness is over. And in the sped-up light of a new dawn, fifty people scream and bleed in my courtyard.
I hate the thump of the waterwheel turning our millstone, hate the fresh breeze coming down the mountainside, hate the way the summer sun lights up our packed dirt courtyard, shooting rainbows through the mist from Knife Creek. I hate the view of Chema as I stand here listening to the maize grind, city spreading in a landslide of thatch rooves and terraced gardens down the mountainside to the river below, smoke and shouts and dots of people in bright fabric. I hate the mountain valley spreading out beyond it, lake Tschida emerald green in the distance, border peaks blue-white with glaciers and the promise of next winter. I even hate my best friend a little, perched on the terrace wall beside me.
I hate it because I’m stuck here, because Dad needs my help too much to leave, because I can’t just enjoy life the way Willhem does. But most of all I hate it because they took Oni away, and this was our view, our family, our world to conquer.
Now it’s just a mill and some scenery.
Willhem is talking about schooling, about the tutors his father’s hired. “The etiquette instructor is the worst. Three hours on sitting properly, Kem. Three hours!”
I shrug. “Once you get it down, you’re practically guaranteed your dad’s mayorship. A big house on the river and ten thousand people paying you bribes. Beats milling grain your whole life.”
Willhem snorts. “Way I see it you’ve got easy money, a Dad who lets you do whatever you want, and the cutest girl in Chema coming to trade books with you.” Willhem shakes his head at the idea of books. “Beats debating a gentle versus decisive chairtaking.”
I snort back. “You want to take over the mill? Go gather Widow Meima’s maize.” She is waving from the millhouse door, her grains apparently fed through the stone, and I get up to help her. “Besides, what’s wrong with being ward mayor? You get a big house and fame and bribes from everyone in our third of the city.”
Willhem gets up with me. “It’s so small, that’s what. There’s a whole world beyond the city, Kem” he sweeps an arm at the view, “epic feats to accomplish.”
Will has always been obsessed with feats, with the heroes in tavern singers’s songs. “I’d settle for getting the day’s grinding done early.” I nod to Widow Meima and begin scooping her maize flour from the floor of the mill, Lady Anri behind her with her own hoop of maize.
Lady Anri clicks her tongue at Willhem. “A young man like you, strong, you should be thinking more of serving the people than making a name for yourself. Look at Kema here, filling in for his father. What would we do without his mill?”
Willhem gives her a winning smile. He’s tall and well-muscled from the game courts, and ladies like his strong chin and long black hair. As usual he wears a fine-spun tunic over worked-leather leg wraps, and his sandals are likely worth as much as our millhouse, studded with gold and ivory and made of exotic seaskins. “I have greater gifts to give the world than merchant work.”
Anri clicks her tongue again. I smile, relieved to see my friend’s way with women has some bounds. The truth is, though he’s a nice guy in private, around other people Willhem can be an ass. Somehow, the girls in town seem to go for that. It’s frustrating.
“The stone too,” Widow Meima says, her eyes revealing she’s not so immune to Willhem’s looks. I grimace. Part of the reason our mill has been so busy lately is because I started lifting the millstone to clean the last of the flour from underneath, as a favor to some of our neighbors on the mountain. Now all the customers want it—but business is business.
“Yes ma’am.” I take a breath and braid sight into strength, my vision graying to black as perceptick strength floods my body. I’m not as strong a visicept as Willhem or some of the tlachtli players, but it’s enough to lift the heavy millstone. I seize it under one hand, keeping pace with its turning, and heave up. It slides up the pole to someone’s appreciative gasp, and I start brushing the last of the maize meal from the stone beneath. Even Willhem shuts up—the sight of a single arm holding the crushing weight of the millstone is, I’m sure, an arresting one. It also isn’t worth it for a couple pebbleworths of maize meal, but here I am.
Brushing done, I let the stone down with a thud, and the rhythmic grinding begins again. My vision blurs back to find the two women with heads together, Willhem staring off somewhere. I overhear their low voices as I scoop the meager portion of maize that’s come from the stone.
“—no good will come of it, I tell you. Our generation never studied percepticks and that was good enough the way it was.”
“Aye but Anri-chan times have changed. With the Tleca just over the moutains, we need them to learn their skills, while they’re still young enough to do it. Emperor knows we don’t have the numbers to stand up to the savages.”
“Skills is one thing. We’ve always had the Academy. But to be using them now, with the comet out?”
Widow Meima scoffs as I stand with the last portion of grain and add it to the scale. “You don’t believe that old thing, do you? Three times it’s come now since the curse was spoken, and nothing’s come of it. It was the dying curse of a dying people, no more. They’re Tleca now, same as the rest, and we will be too if young men like Kema don’t practice their talents.” She smiles and lays a hand on my arm. “What does it come to, dear?”
“Three benas, ma’am, and a half if you can spare it.”
She spares me that, and a smile too, as speculative as the one she shot Willhem, though the woman is twice our age. “A pleasure, as always.”
“Yes ma’am,” I say, not sure I like her attentions. Lady Anri hands me her hoop, heavy with amaranth, and I see what has caught Willhem’s attention as I begin pouring in the grain: Drana Kalastria, coming down the mountain with a book in hand.
I spill a little: Drana is that kind of beautiful, even if you’ve seen her before, even if you’ve poured grain a million times. She wears a long roughspun skirt, belted below round breasts, with wild matted hair and shocking blue eyes. They are outlander eyes, Tleca eyes—a legacy of her Tleca father, of a mother who ran from her people and came back with a blue-eyed child, and half the reason Drana is hated as much as admired in town.
The other half is her craft, both hers and her mothers. They are herbalists, skilled in combining roots and leaves into medicines, as the jungle people do. People whisper they always include poison, as the jungle people do, but I have seen more than one parent trekking up the mountain after dark, and heard of more than one miraculous recovery come daybreak.
Moreso, people whisper that she is a rootspeaker—able to braid not only her own senses, but those of the plants she is familiar with, senses foreign to humans, giving her unnatural powers. As if to flaunt those fears, Drana always wears a braid of herbs woven into her wild hair. Today they are green and gold, with purple-blue alfalfa blossoms matching her eyes.
Anri clicks her tongue again. “Sorry!” I call, and curse myself, cleaning up the fresh spill of golden seeds.
Drana is the reason Willhem’s here, I know. Though we are good friends, we normally meet down in the city, near the pitcourts or at one of the student teahouses for a game of sevenlives. But when I mentioned she’d been coming to trade books with me sometimes, the man was all ears. Nevermind that he doesn’t read, that he’s got no interest in culture or history, that every other girl in Chema is throwing themselves at him—he happened to show up today.
It’s annoying. Willhem’s always been richer, more handsome, better at pit games, better with people, and—once we got old enough to care—better with girls. True, I’m probably better with percepticks, and physically stronger, but still somehow I always fall in his shadow. I thought with Drana it’d be different.
I’m going to make sure it’s different.
I get all the amaranth in the chute, expecting to find Drana eating up his bravado, and am pleaseantly surprised. Drana is looking like a thundercloud—a lovely thundercloud, but no less dangerous—and Willhem has the too-bright expression on his face I know best from when he’s caught doing something wrong. “Just an observation, that’s all!” he’s saying.
She turns to me, ignoring him, and something swells inside. “Kema. I finished the Tellemsworth book. Some interesting stuff in there.”
“Yeah,” I say, trying not to grin at Willhem’s befuddled look. “I don’t like it as well as Markels, but I thought the part where he travels with the Decalaes caravan was really interesting.”
She cocks her head to one side. “It was. I—“
“The Decalaes! Yes!” Willhem says, stepping a pace forward. “My—father has dealt with them. There are a lot of trials that come from being an official on the borders of the nation, you understand, and—“
Drana ignores him, though she raises her voice some. “—like how he talks about the jungle tribes too, about the symbolism in their body paints. And where their purple ochre comes from—“
She’s not done, but Willhem tries again. “Ochre, yes! Why, I think some of the sashes on my leggings are jungle ochre,” he says in a too-loud voice.
I shoot him a look—Willhem can be such an ass sometimes—but Drana beats me to it. “Ochre. How nice. Would that your legs were purple instead.”
She smiles sweetly, and it takes Willhem a moment to understand. “Ah—they are, at times! When you play in the tlachtli pits as often as I do, you tend to get a few bruises along the way.”
Drana steps closer to me, too close for him to hear, and my skin starts to burn. “Sorry,” I say. “He, ah, he can get boisterous sometimes.”
She raises an eyebrow. “Boisterous? He’s an ass. Why are you friends with him?”
Will is trying to break into the conversation, and she steps even closer. She might be a handswidth away from me now, closer than we’ve ever come sitting on the terrace wall talking about books. My cheeks are burning. I shrug. “We go back a long ways. And he’s a good guy, if you can get past the—“ I search for a word.
“Assness?”
“The assness! Yeah. Just, get past the assness.” A shadow passes across her face, but at least Willhem has stopped trying to break in. I think Lady Anri is yelling about something, but she can wait a second. “I’m—glad you liked the book. Maybe we can—talk about it another time? I’m not quite done with the Markels collection, but—“
The shadow is getting darker on her face, and I realize it’s not just her expression. Drana glances behind me, and Anri’s words register for the first time:
“The sun! The sun is going out!”
I look up. The sky is going dark, as if a stormcloud were passing the sun, but there is no storm, not a cloud in the sky. What in Ashnok's name? I squint—it looks like something is flying in front of the sun. Something huge. A giant chunk of its face is just not there.
“What’s going on?” Lady Anri half-screams, amaranth forgotten as she turns in the center of our courtyard, eyes wide. “What’s going on?”
“Something—something’s passing over the Sun,” Willhem says.
“The Tleca!” a man yells, hurrying up the slope. “The Tleca are coming!”
“No!” another yells, dragging a pair of goats down the mountain with two young kids at his heels. “A skybeast! A skybeast is eating the sun! We must fight!”
“The Darkbringer!” Anri screams, turning this way and that. “The curse! The Darkbringer has come!”
Those are not the words of the curse, but fear strikes into me. Tleca don’t fly, and skybeasts are children’s tales, but something is happening. The sky is truly going dark now, and I realize with a start I can see Elachti, the Mother’s Eye, shining above the eastern peaks. “Emperor help us,” I whisper.
Others have taken up the cry of Darkbringer, and I see Widow Meima in the terrace beyond, on her knees in the mud, wailing out a prayer to the God Emperor. Willhem stares at me, rooted to the spot, and somehow his fear more than anything drives it home: the Sun is going out.
Only Drana is calm. I catch her face as I’m looking around the courtyard, trying to find a solution, something to do. She stands with hands slightly spread, face turned up to the darkening sky. Her mouth is open, eyes wide, a look of total wonder on her face. It is so arresting that for a moment I stop too, and look up.
“Isn’t it wonderful?” she breathes, almost too low to hear.
Wonder is not what I’m feeling. “Drana,” I say. “We have to go. Have to get somewhere safe. If this—“
She utters a low laugh. “If this is the end, Kema, it is the end. There will be no hiding from it.”
Ice strikes further in my heart, then Willhem is there. “Drana,” he cries, taking her arm. “Drana come away with me. Now—before the light is gone, let’s go!”
She does not look away, but I think of my Dad and brother. Where are they? Are they safe? Oni is gone, of course, but Dad’s just inside. “To the house,” I say, grabbing them. “We’ll get in the house, and lock the door. We’ll be safe there.”
“No.” Willhem locks eyes with me, and in that moment there is nothing friendly about his gaze. “You go, Kema. Drana and I will go—somewhere else.”
I get it then—Willhem is making a last play for the woman. “Don’t be stupid!” I hiss. “Let’s go before something else happens.”
“You two go,” Drana says, voice still so peaceful it’s almost sleepy. “I want to see this.”
More people are running on the path outside, most fleeing up the slope, a few running down, widow still wailing in the terrace beyond. Willhem makes another plea for her to come away with him, and I notice with growing unease more of those fleeing in the half-dark are yelling about the Darkbringer.
The first tenets of the curse have happened now: a red comet in the eastern sky, then the darkening of the sun. The curse speaks of trials afterward, of someone seizing the bone scepter, but maybe they already happened too. Maybe the Darkbringer has already come. If so, there’s no hope for any of us. More importantly, there’s no hope for any one running by outside, but they’ll want answers. Want someone to blame.
“The house,” I say again, tightening my grip on their arms. “It’s not safe here.”
Willhem shakes my hand off, something feral in his eyes. “Go away Kema.”
“I’m not leaving you, but we need to go!”
The first stone hits then, clattering off the cobblestones, but it seems to wake them up. Willhem turns with a start, and Drana’s eyes leave the sky for the first time. A cluster of people have gathered at the entrance to the millyard, Lady Anri among them. “Darkbringer!” they call, and “Rootspeaker!” and then, “Kill the Darkbringer!”
Another stone flies, catching Willhem in the shoulder, and Drana wilts between us. It’s her they’re after: the rootspeaker, the outlander, the enemy. “Come on!” I yell again, trying to drag them toward the house.
But Willhem stands up straighter. “No. This isn’t right.”
I see his hands clench into fists, try again to pull him but he won’t budge—he’s sense-braiding. Say what you will about my friend, but he is brave. Maybe too brave.
“Willhem you can’t fight all of them!”
He pushes me back. “Take Drana and go!”
“Will no!”
He runs at the crowd, fists balled. It is so dark now I can barely see the fight that follows, only hear the cries and shouts, but there is a tangle of thumps and cries. Willhem’s voice dies off, and that of the crowd grows louder, becoming something like a chant. “Darkbringer! Rootspeaker! Kill the Darkbringer!”
I have to see if he’s okay. “Drana go!” I push her away from the crowd. “The house is unlocked, get in and bar the door!” Without waiting for a response I braid sound into weight. Their shouts fade to an echo, to silence, and I feel my body getting lighter, the pull of the earth slacking off. This is the one sense that I am good at, the one place where I shine. I can hear a pebble drop at a hundredpace, and when I braid that sense I can get my body next to weightless.
I crouch and then push off, air rushing soundlessly around me, up and over the crowd pushing into the courtyard, more of them now, indistinct forms in the dark.
The darkness. Fear breaks through my resolve: the sun really has gone out. Drana is not the Darkbringer, but somewhere something has gone very wrong. I push it down: first things first. Willhem.
I overdid my jump in my panic, and I soar over the entrance to the courtyard, the mob ignoring me now that I’ve left Drana. I realize with a start they might try to torch the roof, that Dad and Drana could get trapped inside, but no one has fire yet. First things first.
I land ankle-deep in the mud of the neighboring terrace, sound rushing back in a wail: Widow Meima is still there, hoop of maize meal spilled in the soil, praying to the God Emperor for mercy. I run back toward the mill, pushing through the panicked ring of people on the outside, like a herd of spooked goats, push through and strain my eyes till I see a form on the ground between moving legs. Willhem.
With a cry I run to him, crouch down, hold my hand to his lips: breath. Thank the Emperor he’s breathing. “Willhem you jackass.”
I braid sight again, hardly needing it now in the darkness, and use the increased strength to hitch Willhem onto my back. He’s heavy, and my back groans under the weight—sight-braiding gives you stronger muscles, but does nothing for your bones. I push backward, shouting at people to go home, to run to the forests, that there’s nothing here.
Nothing here but a violent mob and a dying Sun.
I stumble my way up the path, knowing it well enough that I find my way onto the next terrace, green reed shoots brushing against my ankles. I lay Willhem there, unbraiding vision to find only grayness. I hold my hand against his mouth: still breathing.
“Sorry man,” I whisper, “but I gotta leave you here for a bit. I’ll be back.” I smile, realizing what he’d say if he was awake. “Well you went and got yourself knocked out. This time, I get the girl.”
I braid sound again, shouts of the mob flickering out, and aim my jump more carefully this time. The terrace is a man’s height above the millyard terrace, accounting for the slope of the mountain, but our house is two stories, so I still need quite a bit of height. Too much, though, and I will sail right over, into the mob.
I jump, catching a glimpse of the sun: it is just a ring in the sky, like an unearthly black eye staring down at us. The Darkbringer. Fear rises, and I shove it down again. First things first.
My feet hit the thatch roof, bouncing from my near-weightlessness, and I unbraid sound some, the mob’s shouts a muted roar, but not all the way: our roof is old, and likely won’t hold my weight. I’m counting on it, actually, but not here where the drop beneath could break a leg. I run over to the far side, where the loft is, get as close as I can to where I think my bed is, let the rest of my weight return.
Thatch crackles underneath, and I pull the braid out, weight returning in a lurch. Something gives beneath, and I crash through, half-hitting the mattress and spilling onto the floor.
It’s dark inside, darker even than the courtyard, but I know my way around. “Drana?” I call, groping for the stairs. “Dad? You in here?”
A mumble from the wash area downstairs tells me Dad is here, likely already blind drunk. “Drana?”
No answer. I get to the front door, only bashing my shin on one chair in the process. It’s open, door lock unbarred. “Dark bring it,” I curse, pushing outside. She didn’t make it in. Maybe the mob already has her. “Drana!”
The mob is a roar out here—more must have joined, though I don’t know how, in the darkness. Thank the Emperor you can’t sense-braid to see in the dark, or this would have been over awhile ago.
There is no answer, nothing but the roar of the mob, and I see their shapes moving in the courtyard, dark forms with clubs and pitchforks and angry voices. If they had found her, they’d be clustered around her, I tell myself. She must have escaped, somehow. She must be safe.
“The house!” someone shouts. “She’s in the house!”
“No she isn’t!” I shout back, but my voice is lost in the roar, in the animal fear turned into anger, into violence. I know it won’t matter if they find her in there or not. They will tear my Dad apart where he lays, drunk in the bath stall.
“NO!” I run back toward the house, but the mob is ahead of me, people pushing, taking up the cry of “House! House! The Bringer’s in the House!”
I hear the wood door slam back against the wall and then--
And then I’m getting lighter, as though I was braiding hearing again, but I’m not, I can hear everything: the shouts of surprise, the rattle of tree leaves, the rhythmic slush of the waterwheel slowing. What is going on?
My feet leave the ground, unbidden, my body getting lighter still. I hear groans, the cracking of masonry under the shout of people. Someone knocks into me, and we both go bouncing in opposite directions, floating as though in a sea made of air.
Floating upwards, I realize. Is this the Darkbringer? Is this his evil design, to pull us all from the face of the earth, to eat us?
I bounce from the wall of the millhouse, scrabbling for it, but too late to try and push myself down. The whole crowd is drifting up, I see, faces hued in purple.
Purple. I glance at the sun, see a sliver of light shining on its eastern side, like a waxing moon at dusk. Light. The sun is coming back.
And regardless of what’s going on, regardless of the fact that I’m floating off the face of the earth, and the millhouse roof is too, thatch rising in a cloud of brown reed, relief floods into me. The sun is coming back. We are not doomed.
“The Sun!” I shout, pointing as I float. “The Sun is coming back!”
Word spreads like forest fire through the drifting crowd, shouts of joy mixing with panicked cries and wailing prayers. We are fifteen paces up now, or more, higher than I’ve ever jumped, paces higher than the millhouse roof, so we are in perfect position to watch the light begin to outline the terraces and rooves below, to see it catch in the sheet of water I realize is the millhouse stream, floating upwards with us. It is a miracle, like the dawn in fast forward, sun’s crescent waxing in the sky now, the mob’s shouts gone in gasps and whispers. This is not the Darkbringer. This is something much more holy. I have time for one perfect, grateful smile.
Then we drop.
Screams erupt as whatever has been holding us up gives way, and I braid hearing, hard. I hit the ground, weight lightened just enough that it doesn’t hurt.
Few around me are so lucky. A woman rolls on the ground nearby, clutching her leg, and I see with a lurch something yellow-white is poking through the skin: bone. Others are much the same, people falling from the millhouse roof as thatch reeds drift down all around us and the stream water splashes back into its course.
The darkness is over. And in the sped-up light of a new dawn, fifty people scream and bleed in my courtyard.