Never Knew Another (4 page)

Jona’s father’s fortune had been stripped during the war. Smuggling was illegal, but everyone did it in wartime. Jona’s father wasn’t smuggling things the king needed, and he had so much land that could be sold off to pay for war. For his crimes, the Joni lands were confiscated, and he was hung next to common thieves, disgraced and poor.

My husband and I would have to dig up the body, later, and burn the ground where we found it. Jona’s stain probably came from his father, a demon’s child himself.

After the lord’s death, the war continued for months, and food was expensive. Jona’s mother had nothing but land to sell for it. Trees came down as the ground was sold. Jona watched what was left of his family’s estate devoured by the streets and shops and abbatoirs of the city that took his father to take the family’s land. He watched from his bedroom window while men with hammers and sweating backs placed stone upon stone. He wore black the day his father died. He kept wearing mourning black long after his father’s death, because his mother told him to, because she had to sell land to buy bread for her son, and the king hadn’t even left the widow half a coin from the ancestral treasures. Land to sell was the only wealth they had left. Jona wore cheap wool, itchier than hay, and watched the workmen building where once he had swung from the trees, carefree in white silk.

Jona’s grandfathers were all dead, and her mother’s brothers had died in the war. Without a patriarch, the family fell hard into poverty. Jona’s mother found work as a seamstress.

Her son grew up tall, and strong.

Jona entered the city guard. His mother threw him out of the house for swearing an oath to her husband’s murderer. He wasn’t doing it for the king, but she’d never understand that. The best that she could ever do is see how it could help her son improve their life. After he trained, out in the countryside, he returned to the city. He lived in barracks for a while, scrivening until he was promoted to Corporal to walk the street. He traded coin for cards and dice. His mother came for him in the barracks, and begged for him to come back into her house. She was an old woman alone. She had no one else, and she loved him. With time, she came to see the wisdom of his choice, even if she still hated the king. He could become an officer someday. He’d earn the fleur instead of buying it like the other young nobles. He’d bring honor back to the family name, marry well, and maybe things would be better for the grandchildren.

He loved the work. He was good at it, and it filled his days with something meaningful.

That’s what the sergeant knew. That was what the world knew.

I asked Calipari if he knew which parent held the demon taint.

He nodded. “It was the father.”

“How do you know?”

“Jona told me before I killed him.”

“Have you checked?”

“Of course not,” said Calipari. “This is a nasty business. If the king and the captain want her checked, they can send someone else. It was all in the report.”

“Was it?”

“Did the captain say anything about checking her?”

“No. He didn’t mention a report, either.”

“Well, she’s pretty old, and there are lots of reports. Too much paper in the guard, you ask me. If I spent more time with a good bat in my hand and less time with the cheap quills they kept sending me, the Pens’d be a different place. Be a better place. I’ve seen Jona’s ma a few times. She won’t have any more kids at her age, and I don’t want to burn anyone.”

He looked over my shoulder. I was sitting by the window, and he was lying in bed. He looked out at the blue sky, and the rolling sea clouds that had survived the journey this far inland.

I waited for him to speak. I folded my hands, and raised my eyebrows. I let my silence draw him out.

“She didn’t betray the city,” he said.

I leaned in close to him. I spoke close so he would listen. “If she housed a demon as wicked as Jona, she betrayed the whole world of men,” I said. “He never slept. He couldn’t. The stain inside of him kept him awake all night. While all decent folk were sleeping, he was killing people. He was working for the worst criminal in the city all night long. His mother probably knew when she saw the money coming in. I will test her blood myself. We will not hand her over to the guard lightly, but if she helped a demon child murder innocent people…”

Calipari looked at my hands. They were human. When he spoke, his voice was weary. “That’s not my business,” he said. “That’s Captain’s problem now, not mine. Jona saved my life. I killed him for it.”

“Why did you do it if you didn’t like it?”

He looked me in the face. I recognized this face. Calipari was a hard man, ready to fight when it was needed. He was fighting now. “Jona betrayed the city, and the king’s men. Good boys died because of him. It wouldn’t be a duty if it was easy. And it’s not my duty anymore, so I won’t do it. Please, leave his ma alone.”

“It’s amazing she’s still alive,” I said. “Every man with two masters must choose his side. He chose a third path. He betrayed all his masters for you and for Rachel.”

“How do you know that?” he asked.

“I am Erin’s Walker, Sergeant. I see inside the demon child’s mind, even in death. I see all that he remembers. I know there is more for you to tell me.”

“How can you do that?”

I shook my head. “You did the right thing, Sergeant. Eventually, every demon-stained mortal succumbs to the wickedness in their blood. You might have saved that part of his soul that passed as human. You can save more people from the Nameless deep in Elishta.”

He looked back to the window, and the gathering clouds. “No,” he said. “Men like him and me don’t get saved. I know what I did was right. I hate that I did it. Jona was one of my boys for almost three years.”

“Have you killed many people?”

“Of course,” he said, “but they were all criminals. Even if they were good sometimes, nobody was any good for long where I was stationed. And I know Jona wasn’t all bad. He was human, too, wasn’t he? He wasn’t just a demon child. He was a man, too.”

“Did you burn a girl last winter?”

“Yeah,” he said. “We found that one. Bled true. Anchorites missed her. She was sneaking out at night like a dumb kid. Got

in trouble. Didn’t even know what she was, inside.”

“She bled true,” I echoed.

“Burned her alive. She’d done nothing to deserve it.” Calipari sighed, and looked down at his hands. “She was a demon’s child, too. If there’s two… I guess everyone needs to go looking around for more. Two of them, one after another, you’d think the crusades were still on.”

“There may be more. My husband and I will try to find them. There were only three that Jona knew about, including himself, and of these three only Jona is dead. The girl was not one of them. Jona ruined the tests with his own blood to condemn that girl,” I said. “She died because Jona sent her to burn instead of the true demon child. There are others he sent to you to protect people who did not deserve protection. They weren’t burned, of course, but they were hung. You hung them like thieves.”

Calipari put his hands to his eyes. “Please, don’t tell me this.” He coughed, his chest shuddering. He pulled his hands away. His face had hardened into a stone. “How many?”

“Do you really want to know? This wasn’t your fault, but his. The deed is done.”

His courage broke. “No, I don’t want to know.” He turned away from me. The window was open. If he could have sat up, he could have seen Franka with her son, riding a horse in the yard while her mother watched over him. The boy wasn’t his, but he was the only father that boy would ever know.

“How many was it?” His voice was tight, his eyes turned from me. “Tell me.”

“Nineteen, with the girl.”

“Elishta but that’s a lot. Nineteen. Do you know their names?”

“He remembers their names, and so do I. Had he done what he was supposed to do, you would have been number twenty.”

“Elishta, that’s a lot,” he repeated.

“The innocent die,” I said, “There is no perfect justice, because there are no men as wise as wolves. Wolves say that it is easy to be wise when your belly is full. When your belly is empty, it is wise to fill it. Farm with all of your heart. You are not a uniform anymore. Show mercy when you can, and live in peace.”

He turned his gaze back to me from the window. His courage returned to him. He was the coiled spring Jona remembered, again, even if he couldn’t stand up to walk downstairs, yet. “I said I’d help you.” He pulled a sheet of paper from a drawer near his bed and began gracefully scripting locations and letters of reference for us to his informants across the city.

I went downstairs and prepared his lunch myself. When I returned, he stopped to eat, and then picked up his quill again. “This might take a while,” he said. Paper, then, from all over the tavern. By nightfall, a stack of papers was piled beside his bed, sorted by the numbers of guard posts upon hand-drawn maps. More marks in the maps indicated people and places to go. He gave us letters of introduction, too. People in the Pens wouldn’t trust us, but they’d trust him. “Here,” he said, “I’ll stay here a while, but I got land waiting for me as soon as I’m strong enough to take it. I served twenty years. I got the farmland waiting for me.”

Sergeant Calipari gestured at the man who had appeared behind me like a shadow from the hall. My husband had returned. “He don’t talk much do he?”

“My husband?”

“Yeah,” said Calipari, “is he all right?”

“He’s been talking all along,” I said. “Silence is a word to us, Sergeant.”

“Can’t be a nice word. What does he mean by it?”

I looked over at my husband. He turned away from us, and wandered into the hall. I knew what he was saying: these men who would have died instead of going to a church themselves; who help us because we saved, not because he wants to protect the people of the world from the demon children, and all those who protected the wicked from discovery.

I stood up from my chair, the papers under my arm. “He means to tell you whatever you wish to hear,” I said. “You and he have much in common. We both hate this business as much as you do, in our way.” I bowed to Sergeant Calipari. “You need to recover your strength. Spend a few more seasons here, maybe a year, even if you’re strong enough to leave. There will be plenty of work here for a strong man when we’re done purifying the place.”

He laughed. “Burning it down, are you? Thanks for finding me, and helping me get healthy again. I’ve never been sick like that before. I don’t think anything I ever had was as bad as that.”

I bowed again. I followed my husband into the main building. It was early, and few people were in the tavern. Only the barman, and two hardened drinkers with nowhere else to go until their coins ran out.

My husband spread fireseeds across the top of the bar. Bellini cursed hard. He demanded to know what we thought we were doing, furious and terrified of what he knew we might do.

My husband pushed Bellini from the seeds. “Accept our help,” he snarled. “We’re trying to save your life, and keep your patrons safe.”

In the city, the Guard Captain bows to us. The Bishops of Imam’s faithful and the greatest Lords of the city would greet us as equals among them. In this stinking tavern, this sweating man screamed at us to stop saving his life, and the life of all his patrons here.

I stepped in front of my husband and smiled at Bellini. If I had the wolfskin on my back, he would have seen it for the threat it was. I gently pushed against Bellini’s chest. He tried to punch my husband over my head. He hit only air. My husband was faster than men. He grabbed Bellini by the hair and threw him into the tavern yard. He tossed fireseeds across the man’s back. I struck a match beside my husband, and tossed it at the thrown seeds, giving life to them. The lit seeds took root in Bellini’s skin, blooming to life like firecrackers on a string. The flowers had long orange stalks, and petals of flame.

Bellini rolled around the sand to stamp the fire, screaming in agony. A fireseed was no worse than a bee sting, but there were a lot of them, and they hurt him deep.

We told everyone in the tavern to leave. They did. Someone helped Bellini to his feet, the flowers still eating into his back. They ran for the woods.

My husband and I cleared out all the people from the rooms, even Calipari. The building might not survive what we needed to do next.

My husband and I spread the seeds across the bottom floor, in the kitchen, and up the stairwell. We spread three thick layers of seed down the fourth floor hall and through the rooms. We didn’t need a match. We stepped into the yard and waited. We handed around a flask of dandelion wine and waited for the heat to come. Under the glare of midday, the growing heat from the slate roof ignited the seeds on the fourth floor. The flowers bloomed from there, all the way down, feeding on the fuel inside the stain to burn bright and hot. The flowers of the fireseed didn’t burn hot enough to ignite the building, but they came close in Calipari’s sickroom. Wallpaper singed and peeled. Cheap wooden furniture warped and collapsed.

The burning flowers lived for only a few hours. After releasing their heat, the fireseeds’ fruit congealed into the tips of the blooms like igneous pebbles. These would be swept through the building, slipping into every crevice. Many would be swept away into the yard. The wind would take them, and when the heat of high summer returned, the new fireseeds would blossom. Any taint in the tavern yard, no matter how small, would fuel the burning flowers. Someday there would be purity here.

We had not made a cure here. It was too late for that. Instead, we created the system of a cure. We would be here to keep watch, in the shadows of the woods, smelling for any sign of the stain accumulating in one place. Things would be better here someday. The people here would slowly get better. The fireseeds would blossom on this land for years to come.

***

The hard work was done. The local temples of Erin and Imam could take over, nursing the land and its people back to health. My husband and I returned to Dogsland, on the hunt for the bones of the demon child of a succubus that created Jona, the Lord of Joni. We were on the hunt for the immortal one, too old to know what demon had made him, or how many generations back it was. We were on the hunt for Rachel Nolander, the doppelganger’s daughter that had escaped another death in Dogsland, a first generation demon. We took the skull from the church so it would stay near me. The Pens were not safe, even for us, but we found a room as close as we thought we could risk. We ate dinner in our room, with the wolfskins on our backs, and all the furniture pushed against the walls to keep it out of our way.