In the Shadow of Lightning

5

Thessa used the cover of the early-morning darkness to cross the river, commandeering one of the many public canoes that could be found tied to docks throughout the Grent delta. She was no strategist or soldier, but as far as she could tell the invasion of Grent seemed focused on the east many miles away. The attack on the Grent Royal Glassworks appeared to be an isolated contingency. She almost turned back a hundred times, reasoning with herself that Kastora might have rallied their small garrison and turned away the Ossan invaders. But she’d been given a task and she would deliver the schematics to Adriana Grappo. If Kastora wanted them with the Grappo, despite the breakout of war, then she would follow his instructions.

By dawn, just a couple of hours after the attack on the glassworks, she had reached the northern boroughs of Grent. Church bells rang, people crowding the streets, rumors spreading faster than wildfire. The duke was already dead, one man claimed. The Ossan surprise attack had failed entirely, another shouted. Some people screamed and panicked, while others stood on their doorsteps and stared toward the smoke rising to the east, loudly positing that this was all some sort of mistake.

Thessa stopped only long enough to ask for news from passersby. None of it was helpful, and yet she kept moving. She’d been given a mission. She intended on carrying it out. She found herself staring at the sky, looking for Ekhi’s familiar silhouette circling above the glassworks far behind her. His absence felt like a hole in her gut. He was, she realized, the last thing she had from home, given to her as a chick when she apprenticed with Kastora ten years ago. He’d been her companion ever since.

By noon she had reached the suburbs. Roads turned into dirt tracks, tenements giving way to houses, which gave way to farmsteads. She walked for miles, her feet hurting in her heavy siliceer’s boots, her apron discarded so as not to so candidly give away her profession. She had no money, no godglass, and no papers. She was exhausted and scared, but she forced herself to keep her eyes up and her shoulders squared. If she walked with purpose, she would be less likely to be questioned.

She couldn’t cry for Ekhi. Not yet. Her plan was simple: follow the cobbled highway all the way around Ossa and enter the city from the north, where she was less likely to be questioned. She might have to sleep under a hedge for a night or two, but it should be safe.

It was getting into the late afternoon when she came over a hill to see a small group blocking the road just below her. It was a large family, perhaps twenty people all told – mostly children and the elderly. They had three wagons, all piled with what looked to be their worldly possessions. The last of these wagons was stuck in the ditch at the bottom of the hill, one wheel sunken deep into the mud. The four healthy adults and their ox couldn’t get the cart unstuck.

The children and elderly stared back toward the smoke rising from Grent, wringing their hands nervously. Refugees then, fleeing the city at the outbreak of the fighting.

“Ma’am!” one of the men called. He was perhaps in his forties, covered in mud from trying to get the wagon unstuck. “Ma’am, please help us!”

Thessa had already moved to give them a wide berth, and it took her a moment to realize they were talking to her. She hesitated. Slowing down meant that more fleeing refugees might overtake her on the road. These poor folks seemed worried about the same thing. Could she risk stopping to help?

“Please, ma’am,” the man called again. “Just one more to help push should do it. We’re all about spent and we still have miles to go.”

Thessa weighed her options for half a moment. “Where are you headed?” she asked.

“Vlorstad,” the man replied. “I’ve got an Ossan cousin up there who’ll take us in until whatever is happening blows over.”

Thessa’s route would pass Vlorstad later this evening. It was still many miles away, over the border. Traveling with a group like this might actually be safer. “Give me a ride to Vlorstad?” she asked.

“Absolutely!”

Thessa rolled up her sleeves and hurried down to the bottom of the ditch. She was no ox, but years of working the furnaces had given her a strong back and arms. She set her heavy boots against the slippery sides of the ditch, and threw her shoulder against the back of the wagon with the other four. True to the stranger’s word, they managed to rock it back and forth until the wheel popped out of the rut. Within minutes, they had freed the wagon entirely and helped push it up the next hill.

The group caught their breath there, where they were joined by the others. Thessa quickly found herself swamped by children hugging her legs and elderly men and women shaking her hand enthusiastically. The leader – the man who’d called to her – shooed them all away. “My name is Serres, by the way.” He offered his hand.

“Teala,” Thessa replied, giving the fake name she’d thought up a few miles back.

“Mighty obliged, Teala. Had half a dozen others pass right by us without so much as a glance. You said you’re going to Vlorstad?”

“Past it, actually. But a ride would save my feet.”

“No problem at all, if you’re willing to help us out of any more pickles like that one.”

The agreement was made, and Thessa was soon riding on the back lip of the wagon she’d helped rescue, sitting beside a sleeping child and listening to Serres’s wife sing softly to pass the time. It was a massive relief to be off her feet, but it also gave her empty time to think about Ekhi. She could still hear his pained screech after that musket shot and, though she had not witnessed it, she could imagine the plume of feathers and blood as he tumbled to the earth.

Her dark reverie was interrupted by Serres. “Teala, do you know what’s happening in Grent?” he asked over his shoulder. “Nobody seems to know why Ossa attacked.”

“I don’t either,” Thessa admitted. That wasn’t strictly true. If Kastora was correct, then the Ossans had decided to seize cindersand and research from the smaller city-state.

He nodded as if that was what he expected. “Where are you heading?” he asked.

Thessa sought an easy lie. “I have a friend in Havshire. As soon as I heard the cannons, I thought it was a good idea to get out of town.”

“You’re a wise woman,” Serres responded, patting a trunk lashed in place just behind him. “We did the same thing. The missus had us up at five o’clock this morning, packing everything we could fit. If Ossa has finally decided Grent’s time has come it’s best to get somewhere we can pretend we’ve been Ossan all along, right? I doubt anyone will even notice.” He paused. “Havshire is forty miles. Are you really going to walk all that way in those boots, without a jacket?”

“I panicked,” Thessa said, hoping she sounded passably sheepish. “My family was at Holikan when I was a kid. I spook pretty easily at the sound of cannon fire.”

Serres shuddered. “My sympathies, young lady. I’ve heard the rumors about that place. Glassdamned Ossans. If you’d like to stay with us in Vlorstad tonight, I can’t offer you a bed but might be able to rustle up a spare blanket and let you huddle under the wagons.”

It was better than sleeping in a bush. “That’s very kind of you,” Thessa said. She would prefer to make it into Ossa tonight, even if she had to walk past midnight, but this gave her an extra option. She could make the decision once they reached Vlorstad.

She looked down at her boots dangling off the back lip of the wagon, covered in mud. She wasn’t supposed to wear them outside the compound – they were heavy and expensive, and the less wear on them the better. The thought of Kastora scolding her for tramping through a ditch in them almost made her smile. Surely that was exactly what would happen when he caught up to her at the Hyacinth Hotel. She could hear the lecture tumbling out of him as he distractedly examined the schematics she’d smuggled into Ossa.

Checking to be sure no one was watching, Thessa drew the vellum schematics out of her boot and unrolled them on her knee. It felt a little like opening someone’s personal journal. She pushed past that thought, reminding herself that Kastora was going to bring her into the project anyway. She might as well know what it was.

Each piece of vellum was dominated by technical drawings of the phoenix channel and the compartment in which it was housed, viewed from several different angles. It looked like a weapon of war – a cannon in which energy was loaded in one end and sorcery came out the other. The margins of the vellum were crammed with tiny notes.

She was mostly left to her own devices there at the back of the wagon, and it gave her plenty of time to study the schematics. Within a couple of hours she had a good grasp of Kastora’s working theories and the materials he had used. Had anyone ever thought to use cinderite as the core of a phoenix channel before? Cinderite had its own sorcerous resonance but in a thousand years of research no one had ever found a use for it. She slid the schematics back into her boot, her mind turning as she considered ways to improve upon his design.

The sleeping child beside her soon woke, and Thessa was bemused to find him watching her. The little boy was perhaps eight or nine, curled up in a large tunic. Thessa looked toward Serres, wondering if she should alert him that his child was awake. She was, she was the first to admit, not good with kids. Plenty of the apprentices at the glassworks were as young as twelve, but she didn’t have experience with anyone younger than that since her own little sister died at Holikan.

“Hi,” she ventured.

The child remained silent.

“I’m Teala. It’s good to meet you.”

Still no response. Thessa side-eyed the child for a few minutes, waiting for some kind of reaction, but he seemed content to watch her. She eventually let her gaze drift back to the south, where the plumes of smoke stood out in the golden rays of the setting sun.

She felt a tug on her sleeve and looked down to find that the boy had produced a number of little wooden toys and laid them out on his lap. There were perhaps a dozen of them, all different animals. He displayed them without expression, as if waiting to gauge her response.

“Are those yours?”

A solemn nod.

Thessa pointed to one of the animals, a little bird with wings spread. “I have a bird. Had.” She flinched, feeling her smile slip. “His name was Ekhi, and he was a falcon. He had gorgeous brown feathers, tipped with red, and a speckled white and brown breast.”

The boy handed her the bird, placing it in her palm. Taking it between two fingers, she mimicked it flying around his head, then used it to pounce on one of the other animals in his lap. He finally cracked, a shy smile darting across his face so quickly she might have imagined it.

“Leone,” Serres called, “leave our guest alone.”

“He’s fine,” Thessa assured him.

“If he’s bothering you, just ignore him.” Serres stretched and yawned. “Just a few more hours to go. I’ll be glad to be off the road, let me tell you. I don’t like traveling with all the old folks.” He gestured to the two wagons in front of them, where the oldest of the group were riding in the back like Thessa, while most of the other children were walking alongside. “Last thing we need is one of them catching sick. I–”

They came over a hill, the other wagons momentarily leaving their vision over the crest, and then Serres yanked at the reins, swearing loudly. The sudden jerking of the wagon nearly dumped Thessa off the back of the cart. Thessa steadied herself and craned her neck to look for the problem, half expecting to see a tree across the road.

What she did see made her blood run cold. There, less than twenty paces in front of the lead wagon, was a handful of Ossan legionaries. Four men, three women, all wearing their black uniforms with gold trim, muskets held with bayonets fixed. The soldiers blocked the road.

There was no hailing, no conversation. The soldiers approached, two of them coming out front while the others hung back just a little ways.

“What’s going on?” Serres demanded.

The soldier in charge, a woman with a crimson-and-silver braided collar, ignored him. “This is good,” she told her closest companion. “Told you it would pay off.”

“Ma’am,” Serres said firmly, “I have papers showing Ossan relations. We’re simply trying to get to our family.”

The soldier didn’t even seem to notice she was being spoken to. “That one,” she said, pointing at Serres. “That one, that one, that one. Oh, definitely that one.” She pointed directly at Thessa. The other soldier came over and grabbed Thessa by the arm. She tried to struggle but found his grip like iron as he yanked her down from the wagon. She twisted, landing hard on one knee, looking up to see a forgeglass stud in one of his ears.

No point in fighting him at all.

The other five soldiers finally approached. They grabbed family members, yanking them out of wagons, pushing them to either side of the road, emptying each cart of people before guiding the horses to a clearing just to one side of the highway.

Serres’s objections grew louder and more violent, until one of the soldiers flipped around his musket and bashed the stock across Serres’s head. Thessa stifled a gasp as he was dragged over to Thessa’s side of the road and dumped beside her.

It was all so sudden that Thessa barely had time to react. She stared at the soldiers, dumbfounded, then across the road to where all the children and older members of the group had been herded. The boy, Leone, stared at his father with mouth agape, clutching his wooden toys. Thessa wrestled with her fear and confusion, realizing she should have made a plan for this eventuality, not knowing what she could even do. Should she escape? Abandon the family that had given her a ride? It wasn’t like she could actually help them.

Children cried, adults wailed, and with growing horror Thessa realized that all the able-bodied adults had been deposited over with her. She looked around for some sort of leadership among the group but they seemed even more shocked than she was. She knelt down beside Serres, splashing him with a little bit of water from his own canteen, pressing the hem of her tunic against the split in his brow until he came around.

The sorting finished. The soldier in charge looked bored, yawning toward a weeping child while one of her subordinates pointed across the street. “What do we do with them, Sergeant?”

“Run ’em off. We got no use for ’em.”

Serres sat up, casting a grateful look toward Thessa. “What are you going to do with us?” he demanded. “I have Ossan family, I…”

The sergeant drew her pistol with the casual confidence of someone who was always prepared to kill. Serres fell silent and a smile flickered across her face. “You’re trespassers,” she said with a shrug. “Spies, coming across the border to spread chaos and dissension.”

“We are no such thing!” Serres objected.

Another yawn from the sergeant. “Does it look like I give a shit? We’re confiscating your goods. The Ossan navy needs sailors. I need a country home.” One of the other soldiers laughed at this. She continued, “If you survive a few voyages, I’m sure they’ll let you find your family when the war is over.”

Thessa barely listened. She was watching carefully, looking for the chance to escape. Sprinting off into the trees might be her best chance. There were only seven soldiers and they had over twenty prisoners to corral. If even one tried to come after her, they would risk losing the rest of the family. Thessa had just planned out her escape route when a young man whom she had not met suddenly made a break for it, sprinting toward the very trees she’d been eyeballing.

Without batting an eye, the sergeant took a musket from one of her subordinates, sighted, and put a bullet between the young man’s shoulder blades.

The crack of the musket felt like a physical blow. Thessa stared at the fallen body, listening to the gasps around her. A middle-aged woman – probably the young man’s mother – tried to run toward him but was restrained by her family.

“Got no patience for your shit!” the sergeant proclaimed. “Friend of mine will be by in an hour and then you’ll all start your careers in the Ossan navy. Get used to being on your knees, because there’s a lot of decks that need scrubbing!”

To this point, Thessa had managed to keep some veneer of calm. Her glassworks had been attacked, she’d been forced to abandon her master – they’d killed her glassdamned bird – and now she was being sold like a dog? Her panic finally broke through. She couldn’t help the family, but maybe she could help herself. She could not fail Kastora. She leapt to her feet, facing the sergeant, squaring her shoulders.

“I’m not being sold to the navy,” she snapped.

“Nobody’s selling anyone,” the sergeant replied with a chuckle, as if amused by Thessa’s outburst. “Slavery is illegal in the Ossan Empire. You’re merely being … impressed into service for an indeterminate amount of time.”

“I won’t do it.”

Whatever humor the sergeant found in this situation seemed to fade away. “Reload your musket,” she ordered her subordinate.

Thessa sought desperately for something that could save her without revealing who she was. Kastora’s orders echoed through her mind: Trust no one. Get to Adriana Grappo. “I’m more valuable to you here in Ossa than I am on some ship.”

“Do tell,” the sergeant said flatly.

“I’m a siliceer.”

The sergeant’s eyes narrowed. Everyone was staring at Thessa now, from the soldiers to Serres to the rest of the kind people who’d allowed her to share their company for the last few hours. The sergeant stepped over and grabbed Thessa by the arms, pulling up her sleeves to examine the scars on them. She looked at Thessa’s tunic, then at her boots.

“Well glassdamn,” she said, “I guess you are. What rank?”

Thessa hesitated. She shouldn’t expose herself too much. “Senior apprentice.”

“Impressive.”

Thessa felt a wave of relief flood through her. “I can arrange a payment for my freedom. I promise, you’ll get more from me that way.”

The sergeant seemed to mull this over, a thoughtful frown on her face. “From who?”

Trust no one. But Thessa had to take a chance here, otherwise she wouldn’t deliver anything. “From Adriana Grappo at the Hyacinth Hotel. She’s a family friend.”

The sergeant stepped away, conferring with two of her subordinates while the others kept a strict watch on the refugees. Thessa’s heart pounded in her chest. She could feel her brief companions staring at her with a mix of fear, anger, and jealousy. She hated to abandon them, but forced herself to keep her thoughts on her mission. Maybe she’d gotten through this.

The conference stretched on for several minutes. Sweat began to trickle down the back of Thessa’s neck, and the soldiers on guard duty shifted nervously.

Finally, the sergeant returned looking irritable. “Tempting offer,” she said shortly, “but I’m turning it down.”

Thessa’s breath caught in her throat. Was she being literally shipped off into the Ossan navy? Was there any way to escape? “Why?” she demanded, putting every ounce of imperiousness into her voice that she could manage.

The sergeant seemed unimpressed. “Because we have strict instructions to deliver captured Grent siliceers to the Ivory Forest Glassworks. And” – she shrugged – “Adriana Grappo is dead. It’s the whole reason for the war. I doubt we’re going to get a good ransom out of her failure of a son.”

Thessa barely heard anything after the word “dead.” She stared back at the sergeant, her mouth hanging open, feeling numb. “I … What happened … I don’t…” She tried to form a coherent sentence.

“No more questions,” the sergeant sighed. Her demeanor had changed noticeably. Perhaps not respectful, but not as severe as she was behaving toward the other prisoners. Thessa tried to take solace in that and failed. She’d had one ally within Ossa, and a corpse wasn’t going to provide the protection Thessa needed to get through this war. How was she going to meet back up with Master Kastora? Where would she go?

Assuming, of course, she could get out of this mess.