She nodded. “I carry my own monsters. Whether I like it or not, they too will always be a part of me. Ferro’s laughing eyes. The sound of Ulvarth’s voice. The feeling of his sycophants beating consciousness from me will always be imprinted on my skin.” Even now, as she said it, the phantom impacts were there.
“How often does it keep you up?”
“Only sometimes, now,” Eira said with a note of relief. “I’m trying to acknowledge that Ulvarth is a part of me without giving him the power to define me. To varying success.”
“Sounds familiar.” Varren chuckled sadly. “But I don’t think I’ve been as successful as you… The moment I saw the lutenz, I began to shake all over. All I wanted was to see him dead. And worse.”
“What did they do to you?” Curiosity prompted her to ask before she could think better of it. She hastily added, “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.” He had told them very factually about the mines and the empire previously. But Eirahad noticed, then, how detached it all felt. How he carefully avoided anything personal.
“I know, but part of me feels like I owe it to you for helping keep us safe and trying to get us back to Qwint.” He shrugged.
“You owe menothing.”
“Fine. Part of me wants to tell you.” He glanced her way. Eira nodded and remained silent, allowing him to speak uninterrupted. “I was born in Carsovia, in a small village not far from Qwint. Though I was mostly unaware of the two nations. Honestly, I lived most of my life without even really understanding what being part of an empiremeant.
“We were fishers. But that was mostly food for us. The real treasure in the town were our pearls. The divers knew special rune magic that gave them the ability to swim deep enough to collect the rare spiked clams that make the golden pearls.”
“Sounds beautiful.” Eira thought back to the jewels Solaris wore at the opening ceremonies. The display of power took on a different meaning with the context of Carsovia having their own major trade of precious rocks and metals.
“They were. Some were as big as your eye.” He smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. Only the shadow of a joy long gone. “But all those were collected by the royal knights. They came twice a year to demand their share—hardly anything was left over for us to sell and earn an income.”
“What did the knights do with them?”
“I heard the empress would take pearl baths, filling a pool the size of a small house with them, coated in precious oils and perfumes.”
Eira tried to imagine it. The thought was incomprehensible. Even the gilded spires of Solaris didn’t compare to that level of wealth.
“I never thought it was fair, even as a boy,” Varren continued. “But I saw the way the elders of the village acted around thoseknights when they came into our town—the way my parents acted. I knew better than to say anything. I had a friend make that mistake once. The soldiers made his parents beat him.”
Eira’s mouth fell open.
Varren laughed bitterly. “Your face looks like what I imagine mine did the first time I saw it happen.” He put his fingers under her chin, pushing lightly on her jaw. “Keep your face respectful, Mother told me. She explained later that parents always asked to perform the beatings because it would always be half of what the knights would’ve done. It was a kindness.”
The circumstances were so far removed from everything Eira had ever known that it made her stomach churn. Her own parents came to mind. For all their flaws, they would never go out of their way to harm her. And the Solaris Imperial family would never expect a parent to do so to their child for merely speaking up—or asking a question.
Granted, dissonance against Solaris in modern times was rare. But it wasn’tforbidden. Merely unpopular. She couldn’t imagine what ruler would bring about a world that would make parents beat their own children.
“One year, the knights came an extra time. There weren’t enough weeks between for the divers to stock up. So the knights took boys from the village to work the mines. My parents tried to flee—to smuggle me out to Qwint. But they weren’t successful.”
“That’s how you know all about the mines,” she said softly.
“Yes.”
No wonder he had wanted to avoid them at all costs. Eira had never blamed him for it, but she had been curious. Now, knowing this full explanation, she didn’t want him to even step foot on Carsovia.
Though, the full extent of the risk she and her friends were taking—what Adela was asking of her—was coming into view.
“How did you escape?”
“There was another boy, not much older than me at the time. The rumors were that he was born in the mines and grew up there—that was how he knew the tunnels so well. We called him Slip because he was always gone whenever the guards came around. Was like he vanished into thin air. I never knew what his real name was, if he had another name at all, but he didn’t seem to mind Slip.
“Slip got people out as he could, one at a time. He never asked for anything in return and couldn’t be bought or bartered. You never knew what was going through his head that made him pick some and not others…but one day, he showed up by my bunk and held out a hand. I’d been chosen.”
“Didn’t the guards ask questions about how people were disappearing?” Eira asked.
He shrugged. “We told them that the escaped person died in the deep tunnels. They didn’t question us further and never searched for bodies. Why would they risk going into those hot, cramped, deadly places? We were little more than pickaxes to them—criminals of the crown don’t last long in Carsovia. And since they never saw Slip, they had no reason to suspect anything else.”
Eira was still struggling to fathom such a horrible place. Such inhumane treatment of “criminals,” most or all of whom, by the way Varren told it, weren’t really even criminals.
