Alexandria (12 page)

Elise approaches and puts her arm around Jeneth.

“Jeneth, honey, how’s your stitching coming?”

“Almost finished. I just wanted to show Lia and Haylen.”

“She does good work, doesn’t she?”

“It’s beautiful.”

“Speaking of work, you’d better get back to it. We’re running out of time.”

“Okay.” She turns to go back to her station. “See you tonight.
Don’t cut yourselves.”

“Did you get in trouble?”

For a while she can’t even respond to Jack’s question. Isabel is crimped over in her tiny cell holding herself, her mind an emotional cocktail.

“Yes…”

“Me too,” says Jack, and waits for her to say something else. He strains to hear her voice but the only noise is that steady drip and the endless scratching of the rats. “Are you okay?”

“No,” she says, “I’m not.”

“What happened?”

“I’m unworthy.”

“What does that mean?”

“My baby… my baby is not a gift.” She chokes up all over again.

“Is the baby okay? What do you mean?”

“He’s a good baby. He’s beautiful. There’s nothing wrong with him.”

Jack leans back against the cold wall and tries to untangle her words. She makes as little sense as most things here.

“Why are
you
here?” asks Isabel.

“I hurt a man bad.”

“Oh. Why did you do that?”

“He took something from me.” The moment replays, unbidden, in Jack’s mind.

“How long have you been here?”

“I’m not sure,” he says. “A long time. Will they ever let us out?

“Probably. Sometimes they don’t.”

Sometimes they don’t
. Jack is not tall enough to reach the lid of his cell, when he jumps he can barely touch it. Even if he could reach, it’s doubtful he could work the lock and open it, and even then he would be confronted with more locked doors. He is trapped.

“Why… why are you unworthy?”

“What?”

“How come you’re unworthy?” he repeats, louder this time.

“Because… the Beyond wouldn’t send me a special child.”

“What kind of special child?”

“A child with spirit eyes.”

“Like the King has?”

“Yes. Like Arana’s.”

He learned about this at his lessons. There is power in the King’s gaze, and Jack would swear he almost felt it once.

“What happens to the babies? The ones that aren’t special?”

“The whole family raises them. He has fifty-three.”

“He has fifty-three babies?”

“Children. Some of them are grown. Seven of them are mine.”

Fifty three,
Jack thinks. His entire village had a population of only a little more than twice that. “Are you the Queen?”

“No,” she says, sullen. “I will never be.”

They hear footsteps coming from the stairwell and cease their conversation. The door grinds open on rusty hinges and someone approaches the pits.

“Quiet,”
the sentry shouts, and beats an axe handle against the wooden coverings. “And stay quiet if you want food and water today.”

They do as they are told.

The young women stand in a line at the head of the Temple Hall, dressed in their newly minted gowns and lavish jewelry, preening like ornamented pixies for the audience of rough-knuckled men. Ezbeth stands to one side of the spacious hall, checking her list against the faces in the crowd. Only one vacancy stands out, one man given bonding rights this season who is not in attendance because tonight he lies in the infirmary, the bones of his face as incongruent as unmatched puzzle pieces.

Sentries pull open the double doors and Arana steps into the Hall, dressed as simply as the other men in attendance. He meanders between the tables, greeting the spirited men and engaging them in bits of conversation along the way. The women smile and pose and watch him intently. He makes a round of the entire Hall, speaking to nearly every man, smiling and asking after their families or giving gracious accolades, eventually making his way to a thick wooden table at the front of the Hall.

When he is seated, the crowd quiets to a hush and Ezbeth commences the bonding rights ceremony. She froths on about what an honor it is to be chosen and how these are the most coveted proceedings at the Temple, and finally calls the girls forward one at a time and speaks to their virtues. The girls smile on all the while before giving sweet curtsies and retaking their places in line.

Arana is first to select and Ezbeth turns the ceremony over to him. He entered the room decided, and takes no time in calling the women forth.

“Mazi… and Freja,” he says.

They step demurely forward and approach him. He inspects them at length, feeling their waists and hips, turning them around and gazing into their eyes, separating their lips and rubbing the pad of his thumb across the fronts of their teeth. The women stand still and allow themselves to be handled thusly.

“I’ll have them both,” he says.

Ezbeth raises an eyebrow in mild surprise. “Of course,” she says quickly—with Halis absent there would be one girl unchosen anyway. Arana leads Freja and Mazi to the front of the Hall, where Ezbeth releases them from her guardianship and declares them bonded. A din of congratulations breaks out and Arana exits the Hall as he entered it, politicking every step of the way, until at last he reaches the doorway and lights off down the corridor with his new possessions at his side.

The doors crack shut and Ezbeth moves down the list, from warrior to craftsman, until all men have chosen and all women have been selected.

There is no view of the night sky from his subterranean pit, but if Jack could see it he would know that five full moons have passed their phases since his incarceration began. He itches all over from the cold, moldy air and his flesh is scabby. It is getting more difficult to grasp the distinction between dreaming and wakefulness, the two states blend together in a carnival of deranged visions. When he finds himself alone in his burning village with his mother shimmering in the distance, he is horrified to find her face has turned hazy, nearly as blurred as his father’s. When he awakens, the hallucinations take over where the dreams leave off and the nightmarish cinema continues.

He is in such a stupor when the trapdoor of his cell is lifted and dropped on the floor. Jack doesn’t bother looking. He expects to see his bucket hooked and lifted out of the pit by rope, but it doesn’t happen.

“Jack,” a familiar voice says from above.

He raises his head wearily and sees the King kneeling by the lip of his cell, reaching down into the pit.

“Take my hand, Jack. Don’t be scared.” Jack lifts his emaciated arm and Arana hoists him up and sets him on the ground. “That’s better. Not very nice down there, I imagine.”

Jack shakes his head.

“Do you understand why you’re here?”

Jack nods.

“Good. I’m not angry with you. And I’ve told Halis to leave you alone. What do you think of that?”

“Thank you.”

Jack watches his eyes, riveted, afraid they might emit some force that paralyzes him or boils the blood in his veins, such as it’s been told.

“You were just doing what you thought was right, weren’t you? You were defending your family—that’s why you killed Vallen. You didn’t know any better.” Arana puts his arm around him. “You and I are very much alike, Jack. We both have an instinct to protect. Would you say that’s true?”

“Y—yes.”

“That same instinct that put you in this pit could do great things for you in the future, if you learn to use it to protect
this
family, to defend this Temple. Do you think you could do that?”

“Yes.” He speaks without thinking, his voice unfamiliar to him.

“You could make a fine soldier someday.”

Jack casts his eyes down and stares at the ground, wishing more and more that this entire conversation will prove to be an elaborate concoction of his crazed mind.

“You have a lot of time to decide. Come here.” Arana pulls him close and gives him a tight, fatherly hug. “I love you as one of my own, I hope you know that.” He releases his embrace and clasps him by his thin shoulders. “I only want to give you mercy, Jack. Please let me know when you are ready to accept it.”

Arana lowers him into the pit and replaces the hatch and locks it, then pivots to leave, his footsteps echoing up and out of the keep.

Jack plunks down on the floor of his cell. Strange emotions stir inside his weary mind.

“Come out, little mice,”
chants Lia,
“come out, come out.”

The girls open their eyes and break from their circle by the fireplace and start to crawl about on all fours, squeaking and chittering their front teeth together. They scuttle around the room, clinging to the walls and turning over baskets, foraging around in the cubbied shelving. Sena turns round and round watching them, giggling to herself.

Jeneth opted out of the game, feeling more mature than all this, and she rocks by the fire holding Sena’s baby girl, lost in her own world. One of the little mice clops around the foot of her chair and squeaks at her.

“Very cute, Phoebe.”

Phoebe squeaks again and races off.

“Got it,” says Eleta. She moves to the center of the lodge and holds the prize above her head—a little ball of twine colored red. The rest of the girls stop being mice and run and circle up again.

“Very nice, Eleta. That was hid good that time.” Sena sighs and rubs her hands together. “Well, it’s getting late we should—”

The whole lodge erupts in protest.
“One more! Please please please—”

“Okay, okay, settle down,” Sena says, backpedaling. “One more game, and then bedtime. Eleta, you’ve got the ball.”

“Okay,” she says, “but you play too this time.”

“All right, I’ll play, but only if you all promise to go to sleep right after.”

They nod solemnly. The girls close their eyes and Eleta paces the floor looking for a good hiding spot.

“Now,” says Eleta, commanding the space,
“come out, little birds, come out.”

The girls take their cue and rise up, flapping their arms and cawing while they fan out across the lodge looking for the ball. Sena flaps around with them, feeling profoundly stupid. Lia soars across the room, jumping from bunk to bunk.