03. Law and Order (Adranaya)¶
Adra watched with consternation as the Anashi fled. She pretended not to notice the two Sihiri, but eventually they drew too close to ignore. The one in front, a squat, pompous rooster of a man with a paper-thin mustache and an ego to match, cleared his throat. When Adra looked his way, he actually snapped to attention. She barely managed to stifle a laugh.
“We’ve cleared out the rabble, Luminance,” said the soldier, as though he had done anything more than strut down the alley. As though Adra had wanted him there in the first place.
She glanced at the other officer, a middle-aged woman whose expression implied that she found the man just as insufferable as Adra did. Adra smiled at him with exaggerated earnestness. “Dear me! Thank you for getting rid of those dangerous criminals! I feel so much safer.”
The soldier’s cocky smirk drooped a bit as he struggled to decide if he’d detected sarcasm. He took in the glittering witchglass jewelry that pierced Adra’s nose, ears, and eyebrows. Such ostentation was frowned upon in polite society, which was why she liked it. Had she not been so obviously above his social station, the officer might have allowed his disapproval to show. “Yes, well. There’s a cynosure today in Daybreak Yard. Have to keep the area clear for real Sarmalans,” he said.
Adra widened her eyes. “Of course! And now that you’ve scared away all the foot traffic, there will be plenty of breathing room for the few customers who still wander by.” She gave a feral grin. “My parents will be thrilled.”
The female soldier pressed her lips together and stared straight ahead as though any movement would unravel her. But the man just nodded, choosing to take Adra’s comment at face value. “Good, good. We’ll just, uh, continue on, then.”
“Please! I wouldn’t want to keep you from your important duties!” Adra replied cheerfully. The woman officer allowed one eyebrow to raise just a fraction, then marched smartly down the alley, forcing the other soldier to quick-step to catch her.
Adra shook her head as she shut the door and went back into Feather and Vine. She knew she shouldn’t throw around her family’s prestige, especially given her fraught relationship with her family, but she enjoyed making the Sihiri uncomfortable. She was looking forward to recounting the tale to Gadarien, the dangerous young Cantereian she’d met at a noodle stall a few moons prior. He had such interesting ideas about the structures of power, shifts of perspective that showed her new facets of the world. There was something entrancing about him, as though he listened to her more deeply than anyone else. His attention was intoxicating, but also a bit frightening, knowing what he might detect if he looked too closely.
The shop didn’t officially open for another hour, but she hesitated to leave. Although most of her peers would have considered it shameful to work at a shop, Adra actually enjoyed it. She liked talking to customers, despite how snobbish most of them were. Even if she hadn’t enjoyed her work, her desire to do a good job at whatever task she undertook was embedded bone-deep. She couldn’t not do a good job.
The alley down which the Anashi had fled opened straight onto Daybreak Yard. If Adra left by the front door, there was a chance she could catch her and still make it back before opening time. She was loath to leave the shop unattended, but she was equally loath to let the Anashi vanish again.
She understood why the girl was skittish. The Anashi had it even worse than the Cantereians, ostracized for a mythological crime their ancestors had supposedly committed. Like most Sarmalans, Adra had been raised to believe that the proscription against the Anashi was as natural as sunlight. If it hadn’t been for her own history, she might never have given it a second thought. But what her family had done to Liade had opened her eyes to the sea of injustice upon which society blithely sailed. Gadarien had taught her that it didn’t have to stay that way. She couldn’t fix what was wrong with Sarmala, not alone, but if she could just talk to that Anashi, she could at least show her that some Sarmalans were different. And maybe one day the Anashi would allow Adra to personally make up for some of what her people owed.
Adra flushed. She was letting her desires rule her again, her cravings towing her along like a runaway horse. The last time she’d allowed her impulses to override her reason, it had gotten Liade killed and herself shipped off to Thelenza in disgrace. How many times was she going to have to learn the same lesson? She did want to talk to the Anashi, but strictly to chip away at the foundations of oppression. Nothing more.
Before she lost her nerve, she hurried out the front door and locked up. The market was filling up, the air swelling with excited chatter. Scanning the crowd, Adra recognized the Anashi’s backpack and mass of silvery curls as she slipped into a narrow lane between booths. Adra walked quickly, giving perfunctory nods to people who said hello. She wanted to run, but too many people knew her here. She had to maintain a semblance of dignity.
The crowd was thick among the booths, the sticky heat of bodies like a physical barrier. Adra squeezed through, catching glimpses of the Anashi and then losing sight again, also keeping an eye out for Gadarien. As much as she wanted to see him again, explaining why she was chasing some Anashi girl through the crowd when she should have been minding Feather and Vine would be awkward.
The chatter grew louder as she approached the pavilion where the three towering Refractions stood, their witchglass suns catching the spears of daylight that shot past the lip of the Eyewall. The central statue, the Aspect of Day, held a full orb in her strong hands, her likeness that of a woman in the peak of health. Dawn and Dusk, respectively crafted like a young girl and an old crone, each held half-suns flattened on the horizon.
Adra’s stomach dropped as she remembered what the Sihiri had said. Only one thing would draw such a crowd away from the market itself. Her instincts screamed at her to turn back, but the Anashi was heading steadily toward the pavilion, her lithe form slicing through the gaps. Adra felt like a rag being fought over by two dogs, simultaneously pulled forward and pushed away, but the pull won out, and she continued toward where she’d last seen the Anashi.
A row of city watchmen stood shoulder-to-shoulder in front of the pavilion, guarding a wooden scaffold on the raised platform. Beneath the scaffold, facing the sun, stood a semicircle of Sihiri. Their bare arms glinted with constellations of witchglass thorns, and their silvery half-capes, known as peljaki, shone like teeth in a grinning skull.
Adra looked up at the scaffold, her search for the Anashi forgotten. Cold dread seeped into her limbs, welling up from her memories. She desperately didn’t want to watch, but couldn’t seem to turn away, pinned in place like a butterfly on her mother’s wall.
On the platform, three Cantereian youths were bound to stout poles, bruised and bloody, their mouths stuffed with oily rags. Only one of them—a tall, rangy girl a bit younger than Adra—held herself upright and looked into the crowd with defiance. It was the same expression Liade had worn at the end. The cracks in Adra’s heart, so recently mended, started leaking despair into the space behind her ribs.
In front of the Sihiri stood Jovadão himself, the Commander of the Southern Watch. The tall warrior surveyed the crowd with his hands behind his back, sunlight gleaming off both his piebald scalp and the spiral insignia of Sarmala’s government, the Helix, stitched onto the center of his uniform. Elaborate tattoos of leafy vines rose from his stiff white collar to curl around his ears and throat. He seemed as impervious to the sun’s rays as he was to the loathing of his countrymen. Jovadão was a highly controversial figure, one of very few Cantereians who held high office in the Sarmalan military, and thus considered the worst kind of traitor. The fact that the Vorkyrda had appointed him to oversee this ritual was a statement in itself.
“Circamo is a crime against our homeland,” he said, his sonorous voice dispersing the crowd’s chatter. “It is an invitation to the goddess of death, forbidden both by the Vorkyrda’s word and the natural laws that bind us together. As such, it is an act of treason. Not against the state, but against society itself. The punishment,” he growled, gesturing to the scaffold and the waiting statues, “is death by cynosure.”
“Traitor!” someone shouted. Jovadão narrowed his eyes, his jaw clenched. Adra wasn’t sure whether the shout was referring to the commander or the youths tied to the scaffold.
“They chose this!” he said, jabbing a muscular finger at the scaffold to punctuate his words. He didn’t shout, but radiated a tight fury. “They chose circamo over country.”
“Not our country!” someone else shouted, their Cantereian accent clear this time. At a nod from Jovadão, three of the city watch detached from the line and entered the crowd, heading toward the shout.
“They knew the price,” said Jovadão. He had tamped his rage down to a smolder, his voice as weary as it was angry. “Now they must pay it.” He turned to the Sihiri and raised his palms skyward. In uncanny unison, the soldiers raised their boots and stomped the pavement. Their timing was eerily precise, the single sound booming through the square like a dropped crate.
The Sihiri raised their arms. Their peljaki floated up above their heads, curving into shallow bowls and growing mirror-bright, catching the sunlight and focusing it on the witchglass orbs held by the Aspects of Sky Mother. The crowd gasped and murmured as the stylized suns began to glow. The veins of the sorcerer-soldiers crackled with light, mirroring the Eyewall in the distance. Their commander’s eyes glowed white as they rolled back in his head.
Jovadão clenched his fists and the mirrored surfaces of the peljaki shifted a tiny fraction. The light suffusing the witchglass suns suddenly condensed into points on their surfaces, the two half-spheres shooting beams into the central orb. A point of pure radiance, almost brighter than the sun itself, appeared against the oily rag in the mouth of the youth on the left of the scaffold. An instant later, it exploded into white flame. The boy’s scream was as brief as it was horrifying, his face obscured by a thick plume of greasy black smoke.
“A mercy,” one Sarmalan onlooker murmured to his companion. “They don’t always start with the head.”
As the beam of light moved toward the second whimpering youth, the stench bludgeoned Adra like a club, threatening to crack her fragile sanity all over again. She gagged and tried to step back, but spectators were pressed in behind her. Suddenly nothing was more important than getting away from this place. She shouldered her way out, blinded by tears and heedless of courtesy or propriety as the memories she had so carefully stacked away came crashing down on her like a burning roof.
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