I sat in the church with my back against the wall, alone. Water from the rain had plastered my hair to my back. Across from me was a pile of crumpled balls of paper.
It was my fault.
If I hadn't let Davod out… I should have known. I did know. They told me.
Holding Rock's limp body in the bloody grass, his face still haunts me. His eyes wide and glazed over looking towards the clouds, not reacting to my fingers, that open gash in the center of his chest clean through his back.
The enemy prisoners probably noted the number of men on the wall during their escape and passed that intel to their commander, who realized that was the perfect time to strike.
And, as the princess said, it was worse.
Carthia wasn't just a city; I compromised a system of fortresses.
If it was just the city, an enemy could lay siege and starve everyone out. So, the builders counted on three supply routes: the river route to the sea, the mountain passes through Terbulin and Saen, and the fertile flood plain where we grew the Emperor's precious sugar cane along with everything we had for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
The sea was cut off about a year before I arrived when the enemy took the Gate to Hell. That left only Tower Six downstream to shield Carthia from river attacks.
The mountain routes were guarded by the castle at the Lake of Doom. That was where Miyani was stationed—she lost her family, her whole people when the Sewu'oni betrayed them. She still blamed herself.
The flood plain was guarded against river crossings by towers Two, Three, Four, and Five, and it was protected from overland attack by Tower One.
Was.
Because of me, Tower One, 'Praying Mantis' was now the perfect staging ground for attacks against the plain.
The rain outside was relatively tame, but it had gone on for hours. Trails of water seeped through the cracks in the ceiling and meandered down the walls, pooling on the floor in rings of fuzzy green algae.
I'd resolved to tell Davod's parents what truly happened.
To Dara and Haegan,
From Caleb,
You've probably received an official letter from the Marquis that Davod has been killed in battle, but I wanted to write to you personally and tell you what happened. You deserve to know the truth.
There is a vine here that's highly venomous. We were in pursuit of an enemy who'd tried to attack us earlier, but Davod made a charge at them and we had them running. He led us valiantly through the woods until they'd set a trap for us. I nearly fell in, but he pulled me back. He saved my life, but just then an enemy arrow caught his arm. It shouldn't have been fatal, but the shock of it made him lose his footing and he fell into the vine…
I crumpled it up and tossed it with the others. They deserved the truth.
And what about Geraln? I should write to his family as well. They were the ones who'd invited me over for Jhodash. Father Yewan didn't like me partaking in those pagan festivals, but what was he going to say? Geraln's mum made the absolute best halvystra. She poured honey into the gravy and made the roux out of carmelized onions, and my God.
Geraln had gone to the knowledge tournament in Heralia City, and had asked Talys to care for his herb garden while he was away. She ended up fixing everything he'd done wrong and had it thriving when he got back.
He thought that meant she liked him.
How did he go out?
I imagined him on the wall when the enemy broke through, they're swarming in the courtyard, and he's up on the wall picking them off. Maybe Northstar is at the doorway to one of the towers, blocking the enemy from coming up the stairs. He's overwhelmed, and Geraln has nothing left, so he turns his bow and shoots one more before they're upon him.
Unless he's still alive.
I could hear Sarina's voice in my head. He's dead. They told you. No prisoners, no survivors.
They told me that; I didn't know if it was true. He could be held in secret. He could still be out there surviving the jungle.
Geraln was never a woodsman, and you know that. He's probably been eaten by a bear.
They didn't have bears in Uhui.
He's that inept!
No, he could have figured something out. Maybe he negotiated his imprisonment when he realized the enemy controlled the tower. He might have thrown his bow down and knelt, knowing they were upon him. He was smart enough, he could have done that.
Princess Rosalynd asked for prisoners, you read their reply.
That didn't mean there weren't any. They might have said they had none and held some secretly.
Someone's in denial.
"Sarina, you're a voice inside my head, and I'm imagining what you'd say. You're not actually here."
What's your point?
A tear escaped and wandered down my cheek. "I wish you were here."
I don't. You know how I feel about snakes.
But they're so adorable!
I'm going to smack you!
"You're not real."
There you go bringing up minor technicalities.
He could still be alive.
Maybe?
There was an indentation on the wall to my left where pieces of stone had broken off and piled on the floor, covered in moss. Black mold and green and red lichens followed cracks in the stone all the way up to the ceiling. The vine reaching through the high window now had branches with tendrils burrowing into the mortar.
Rock said he would tear the whole church down and build it from scratch.
To Dara and Haegan,
From Caleb,
I'm writing to tell you the truth about how Davod died because you deserve to know the truth. He was hungover.
You killed your own son, you drunken piece of shit. It was your fault. He made a difficult choice, and instead of working through his feelings he followed your example of drowning everything in alcohol. Except he was better than you because he didn't beat whoever upset him.
And Dara, always looking on, always complicit.
I tossed that one onto the pile with the others.
I started laughing. Every chortle cost a thousand knives to my chest from broken ribs, but I couldn't stop.
If you're going to use hyperbole, commit to it.
A billion knives.
Much better.
I thought my best friend died the day he emptied his father's spirits into the creek; man beat his own son unconscious. Again. And Dara allowed it every time.
What was she supposed to do? Half the time she was the one with the busted lip.
Mother Searnie told them he should spend the next few nights at the church for some bullshit medical reason. We didn't care; we stayed up all night trading dirty jokes.
I didn't understand why his eyes lingered on Sarina, and I didn't think to ask.
Every time I closed my eyes, that small black bird ripped another scrap from his eyeball.
I didn't know if Geraln's captain pulled wall duty or not. I didn't know who his captain was. Kylen would have looked out for him. Melox had said a few things about the guy from the Wolf Clan, and I believed him. That guy was an asshole. Hopefully Geraln was in Kylen's group.
I didn't know where Gino was, either.
You wrote to me about him from Kyoen. He seemed nice.
We'd been told to bring a cart full of huge cotton bales to a dressmaker's shop. I'd imagined some small boutique corner store, but it turned out to be this huge big giant monstrosity.
A bit redundant?
It was big. We walked in, and there were these girls there. Hundreds of girls, some young, some older, a lot of them our age, and they all crowded around us, asking where we stayed, our names, all that. Their manager lady comes out, and she was this salty old hag, "get back to work and stop bothering these boys!"
We weren't bothered. Really, we weren't.
I'll bet you weren't!
When I first came to live at the church in Kyoen, Gino put his arm around my back and called me his brother.
He told everyone at Carthia I was sent away because of some hedonistic debauchery. It wasn't like that. I never told him what happened.
I never got a chance.
You had plenty of chances. It wasn't a priority.
Why do we do this to ourselves?
The Emperor says "go die in a war" and we go. Those who survive get to live with knowing they took a man away from his children.
The good-looking one lay in the ferns. He looked up with a smile, gazing in wonder at the majesty and beauty of the jungle all around him. A sudden look of shock as the men in front discovered their dead scout. How fast did my arrow pop through his jaw and punch through the back of his skull? Did he blink? Did his life have time to flash before him? Did he have a split-second to recall a woman he loved, the sensation of her hand on his skin?
He still didn't move.
When the Emperor ordered men destroyed, he probably laughed about it.
Safely in his marble palace in Golago City a thousand miles away.
Who made these rules and why did we abide in them?
I agreed. By coming here, I agreed.
And if you hadn't, you never would have met Miyani.
She was amazing. Was meeting her worth my friends getting killed?
What kind of boyfriend are you?
It was all my fault.
A small pile of sand came through a crack in the stone floor, and a line of ants scurried out into the rain. Water dripped from the ceiling.
I didn't have to tell Davod's parents anything in particular. Who would ever contradict me?
To Dara and Haegan,
From Caleb,
You deserve to know how your son was killed. You deserve to know the truth.
Our position was tenuous. We held the walls against a relentless enemy, and we knew that if we fell, all of Carthia would be lost. They attacked throughout the day, they kept at it throughout the night. Many of us were scared and exhausted, but Davod, standing in the morning with the halo of sunlight behind him gave us all hope. He charged with his sword and valiantly cut down the enemy forces until there was only one left, a towering beast of a man three yards tall!
Davod cut, and the monster parried. Then the monster swung his giant axe, and Davod jumped out of the way…
I crumpled that up and tossed it onto the pile with the rest.
When Borel was asking for volunteers, he and I both looked at Gino.
Gino looked away.
Maybe my brother was still out there?
Maybe he was with Geraln in Kylen's group. They're at their post. The hour grows late, and their sekiwa has not returned. Kylen knows what to do, he was an experienced leader. They go back to the tower, but something isn't right. They're not opening the bridge. He puts his hand out, and Geraln steps up. They're looking at the ramparts, and something doesn't look right. They figure out what's happened, and go back to the forest.
You know how good Geraln was; he could have threaded those arrow slits from three-hundred yards.
Geraln does that. He takes out the guy shooting at them and covers their escape back to the forest. Now they have to figure out what to do. There are thirteen of them. Malchuk is with them; he's experienced something like this before when he fought in Kulun.
They're all dead. Every last one of them.
No. They go for Tower Two, Dog's Arse.
Yes, it's called that.
They didn't make it before nightfall.
In the blackness of night, that horrible sound. Yips and howls, growing into an army, then closing in fast. Then silence.
How would it have gone if they couldn't make it to the trees?
No, that was not acceptable. They had to attack the tower.
On the algae-covered shelf was a copy of Scripture with black mold spots along the spine.
I closed my eyes and rifled through the pages, hoping God would guide me to an answer there. Half the pages were so overtaken with mold the text was barely readable. My fingers landed on the story of King Davod.
He slew the giant with one shot of his sling and saved the day.
I was looking at a different day, the day when he slept with another man's wife and then murdered him to claim her for himself.
This was the exemplar of faith.
God still called him righteous.
Maybe I didn't need to be perfect.
Perhaps my mistakes could be forgiven?
What if I stood before the Baron of Gath with cracked ribs, leaning on a cane from nearly having my leg ripped off by a wild dog, having survived while Davod and Geraln both... Geraln hadn't been found yet; he might still be alive.
What would the Baron say? Thank you for your service.
"Fuck off, asshole."
I laughed. It hurt to laugh. They didn't like us using that word.
Sometimes it's necessary.
No. Fuck was a sexual word. Held in reverence. It should never be used in a violent or forceful way.
What word in Uhuida carried the same weight?
pʊ ɣʊwose xatʌ! Eat shit.
Eating was a special thing in their culture; they brought their dead out for the Jungle to consume them. Eating shit probably hit harder than it seemed.
The Baron wouldn't get it.
I sat in the church with my back against the wall, alone. A small anole lizard scampered across the wall nibbling at the ants as they crawled out from their nest. A vine crept through the window, and the rain dripped lazily from the sky.
What kind of magic enabled me to talk to those vita'o in the wild, and why did I deserve it?
Why couldn't Davod have been endowed with some magic that made him immune to the vine?
My heart broke at the image of him in my head. I couldn't live through that again, and yet my mind tortured me constantly with those roots burrowing into his flesh. I couldn't do this.
I broke from grasping for the words to give Davod's parents, and sought an easier letter to write.
To Sarina,
From Caleb,
I'd have written sooner to let you know when I arrived, but unfortunately I lost all my money to a kid in a card game and I couldn't afford postage.
I believe word will arrive at Gath to let everyone know that both Geraln and Davod have been killed. I can't begin to tell you how that feels. It's not like it was when we lost Tor; it's different somehow. I feel like something has been ripped from me. Friends who witnessed certain things, now I'm the only one left to carry those memories. It's heavy, and I don't know what to do with it.
There's something else I need to tell you. I've met someone. Yes, I know, you probably called that, but this is different. I have feelings for her I never knew existed. Her name is Miyani, and when I'm with her, I feel whole. Like I've been missing something my whole life.
I know I said I'd wait for you, that you and I would be together. I made these promises. I didn't know…
I crumpled that one up and tossed it with the others.
That wasn't easier.
Miyani lost people, too. Ude, Gozhu, Thavo, her tribesmen, people she'd known her whole life. God, what was she going through, having saved so many of her people only to lose them at the tower?
And Yumi.
Sitting in the stall with Blue, Miyani and I trying to understand one another while Yumi pretended to read her book, smiling and laughing at us while we hacked our way through a language barrier. The gleam of pride in her eye when we figured it out.
I wondered if Ales and Faren were with Kylen's group when they narrowly escaped thanks to Geraln's heroic shot through the arrow slit?
Oh yeah, why not? Even better. When they went back to the forest, they ran into the Wolf Captain. He lost a lot of guys in an attack, but he's picked up quite a few stragglers, including Jezi.
And Psycho.
Absolutely.
There was no one left to witness Oasis shouting death threats from the sixth floor of a hotel in Ulum. If I told that story, who would say "I was there"? Who would bear witness to nights in the pass smoking happy cabbage discussing politics, philosophy, and other, less serious things?
No one left to witness the moment Miyani emerged from the trees and asked us our names.
Thisisweird convinced Davod we were taking him to the vine; he did his part. All I had to do was uphold mine.
His Naveris was named Tanee. She ran a pub in a nearby village. She had a guy who brought fish for the kitchen, but he was no longer available so a friend recommended Ales. She wanted the freshest fish, so he gave it to her in a bucket still swimming.
She hadn't expected that.
And Faren, too. He wasn't made for war.
Standing with him in the library marveling at that strange book, the one with the red cover and black ink symbols no one could translate, when Geraln rushed in to tell us Ales had been stabbed.
Faren stayed by his side until he recovered.
How was it fair for Thisisweird to recover from that only to die out there?
Father in Heaven, why me?
I should have had more to pray.
Maybe the lesson from Scripture is to tell the cold, naked truth. A lie denies. Know the whole truth, and they can decide what it means for themselves. If I lied to them, that would take away their power. Therein lies the sin. In my greed, in my cowardice, I withhold the truth they need to move on, move forward. I take away their power. Scripture never says King Davod was a hero for slaying the giant, nor does it call him a villain when he screwed up later on.
The cold, naked truth empowers us to decide for ourselves.
Tell them the cold, naked truth.
To Dara and Haegan,
From Caleb,
I want to tell you what happened to Davod.
There is a vine here they call kitifikani, and it's very toxic. It makes you crazy to seek it out and touch it over and over again, and try to convince others to do the same. Once you do, it will dig its roots into your body and consume you.
This is what happened to Davod. He was drunk the previous night, and in his hangover, he lost his footing and fell into the vine. We brought him back to the tower and locked him up to keep him safe. I was told that it takes three months before he's safe enough to let him out, but I was a fool. I didn't take that seriously, and he talked me into letting him out instead. I allowed him to talk me into letting him out. He'd made a deal with some enemy prisoners to help them escape in exchange for their help finding the vine again.
It was all my fault.
Because of this, because of my mistake, the enemy took the tower and killed everyone there, including Geraln, including…
I crumpled that one up and tossed it with the others.