Sneering, Dimestra shoved the coat and boots against his chest. “Put them on.”
Roy set his jaw but gave in, begrudgingly accepting the clothing. He took a few steps back into the manor to avoid the snow blowing in through the open door. He donned the coat, on top of his nightgown, then shucked off his slippers and put on the boots. As he laced them up, he had the sudden and inexplicable impulse to bite back at Matron Dimestra with some retort or accusation.Why let this happen?he would say.Why let the Governor take me away, Matron? Why the change of heart? Why stop at risking the life of one son on the battlefield when you can dispense of them both? After all, what use am I to you?But as much as he tried, he could not find it in himself to summon the words.
“Are you ready?” Dimestra asked.
“Yes,” Roy said, his voice shaking, once he finished buttoning up his coat. He strode toward the door. The wind whipped around him, dragging the hem of his coat out into the snow, and it was then that Roy knew it was time to go. He’d delayed the inevitable long enough. “I’m ready.”
Behind Dimestra and her companion—a Citadel emissary, if Roy had to guess—was the horse-drawn sled Roy had spotted earlier. The driver, a sour-faced man swaddled in a scarf, heaved Roy’s bags onto the rack in the rear of the sled and then secured the cargo with a long length of rope. The horses shook their heads and nickered impatiently, bristling in the cold. Roy hung his head, bracing himself against the chill, and then stepped up into the sled, accepting the driver’s proffered hand.
Scowling, Dimestra sat down in the seat opposite Roy, next to the emissary. She leaned over and rapped on the door of the sled with her knuckles. “Let’s be quick about it, shall we?” She looked at Roy. “It’s best we don’t keep the Governor waiting.”
Roy looked away, licking his cold, chapped lips, and aggressively scratched his wrist until he felt satisfied and grounded. He attempted to sneak a glimpse of his sister and her small carving, but it was too late. Dawnseve Manor had already faded far behind them, and Briar with it.
His sister was lost in the snow.
2
In fairer climes, the ride to the Orphic Basilica—which rested in an isolated clearing far beyond the northwestern outskirts of Rasileus, the largest town in Northgard—would’ve taken no longer than twenty minutes. However, the road was layered thick with snow, and even in a sled, it forced the driver to stop every so often and shovel it out of the way. This happened a few times, eliciting grumbles of disapproving impatience from the Matron, but it allowed Roy a closer look of the vista he’d seen from Dawnseve Manor. A breeze lashed across his cheek, sweeping toward him from the right, and it was there that he looked.
In the distance, through the building haze of the snow, he saw the bulky outline of a commune shelter, made of cobblestone and weather-worn pieces of wood, all covered with a sheet of brown canvas that served as the walls and ceiling. Around the structure were snaking lines of citizens, as Roy had seen before. He was close enough now to make out a group of people clustered together. A family, perhaps? A Drove was trudging toward them with seeming purpose, all her features obscured by a strip of woolen cloth but for her downcast eyes, which Roy could just barely see.
The sled driver, who’d cleared the majority of the snow blocking the road, hopped up onto the sled. It gave a sudden jolt, and the Drove whom Roy had been observing looked up, her gaze snapping to his with frightening alertness. Her eyes looked foggy, though that was probably an effect of the snow, and vividly bloodshot.
Then she turned back to her business, disregarding Roy and his companions as though she’d never noticed them. She raised a black baton, which Roy hadn’t seen before. The family shrank back, their mouths drawn into horrified grimaces, though the Drove continued her advance. One member of the family—a young boy—tried to run, but the baton whipped down in a blur and cracked open his skull. The boy was dead before he, and a pink splatter of his brains, hit the snowy ground.
As the sled glided onward, Roy, terrified, said to the Matron out of the corner of his mouth, “Did you see that?”
“See what?” she said, then looked where he was pointing. “Oh—yes.”
“You stand for this?” Roy asked. “This is part of the alliance you’ve forged with the Governor?”
“I do,” the Matron said, her gaze set forward. “It is. He was in dire need of some additional soldiers, so I contributed, and I...” She shook her head.
“What? What could youpossiblybe getting out of this?”
The Matron sniffed contemptuously, as though she’d smelt something foul. “Well, the aristocracy deservesomesort of safety for all their—our—labor.”
Roy went rigid with sheer disbelief. “You’re preserving the lives of the entire aristocracy at the expense of one aristocrat?”At the expense of your own son?
She did not reply.
A little while after, they passed around two dozen scholars skewered on the finials of a gate to an abandoned manor, like a row of scarecrows. A book covered each of their faces, some at angles that concealed their features and others positioned so that their grim rictuses or dim, glazed eyes were visible. Driven into the spines of these books were massive iron nails, each one encircled by a pool of frozen blood.
They’ve been bookmarked, Roy thought. He’d heard of the penalty and its apt, cruel name before but had never seen it with his own eyes. The macabre sight calcified his distanced dread into irrepressible horror.
As the sled moved on, Roy inspected the impaled corpses, searching for a familiar face among those whose features were partially revealed, but immediately realized there was no point. He hadn’t met another scholar before, so none of these corpses stood out to him. He still watched them, though, until they gained the ethereal aspect of phantoms and then disappeared entirely.
A shiver had coursed through Roy during the entire journey and now made his muscles tremble and lock together. He huddled deeper into his coat, his teeth chattering, his hands wedged into his armpits. He didn’t particularly mind the cold; this was his ideal element for a late-night bout of reading, a warm glass of cider in his hands, his feet propped up on a stool before the fireplace.
As soon as the thought formed, though, a seed of guilt sprouted in his stomach. Had he taken these forbidden literary pleasures for granted? Or was it because these pleasures were forbidden that he hadn’t deserved them in the first place?
“You ought to be more grateful for his assistance,” Dimestra said to Roy, breaking the silence. “He’s given you garments, he’s giving you food—”
Roy gave up fussing with his coat and pressed his hands into his lap. “I’d argue it’s my assistance that takes precedence here. Aren’t I the one helping him?”
Distaste passed over Dimestra’s features. “I understand that there has been little reason for you to visit the city, so I’ll forgive your confusion, although I will not forgive your complacency. You should consider yourself lucky you weren’t spirited off to the Iron Citadel, Roy. At least now, you’re getting what you wanted.”
That was the problem, though. Roy wasn’t sure thiswaswhat he wanted. He had been satisfied, maybe even content, learning the lost and fragmented history of the old world—the Age of Scribes—from the works of the authors, poets, and playwrights who had come from that time... but exploiting these invaluable resources for a man who would gladly exile or kill Roy’s fellow academics felt like betrayal. He didn’t know if it was worth it. Even if thisdidwin Northgard the war, he recoiled at the prospect of living with the shame of divorcing himself from his peers, for he had no doubt that his place as a scholar would be finished no matter the results he produced.
