kathleen.j.danielsonTovet, Five Years Ago
Smoke clogged the clear mountain air: smoke, and screams. Fia Toku picked her way through the ruins, wiping strands of damp hair out of her eyes and cursing at the sting of her ash-smeared fingertips. She spat in her palms and scrubbed her hands together, but it was useless; she knew nothing but a cold mountain stream and a bar of harsh lye soap could scrub away stains like these.
At that moment, hungry, sore, and filthy, she couldn’t remember why she volunteered to spend her day this way. She’d felt melancholy when she woke this morning, she supposed, nostalgic for a valley much like the one that now smoldered around her, and she had just wanted to be alone—so she’d asked for this, the sweaty, thankless task of combing the ruins for iron scraps and tools that the army could melt and repurpose. Now her pack was stuffed full of metal, the seams straining under the weight, and though she clanked softly with each step, she did not want to return to camp yet. If she did, they would put her to work beheading the survivors.
She’d do it if she had to, of course—we soldiers must always do our part, to protect the kingdom from traitors—but if she was being honest with herself, beheadings always gave her nightmares. All she craved now was a hot meal and a bit of clean silence, so she relished the smoky quiet, and walked slowly down a tree-lined lane littered with houses’ fallen timbers, charred and smoldering. She tipped her head back and sighed, contented.
A passerby, if her battalion had not just killed the last of them, might have thought she was gazing up at the snowy peaks above. But truly her eyes were closed, and though her boot crunched upon the remains of something broken, she did not notice, or pause, or break stride. She thought only of the lush stew the cooks would serve that night, in celebration of a job well done.
Then her foot caught upon something solid, and the weight of metal upon her back nearly turned the stumble into a fall. With effort she regained her balance and knelt to inspect whatever had tripped her.
It was a metal box, scorched and dented. She prodded it with a cautious finger; warm, but not too hot to touch. She picked it up and was about to stuff it in her pack with the rest when she heard a rattle within. Perhaps it was a safe, or a jewelry box, or something of the like: she did not usually loot, but it couldn’t hurt to allow herself, just this once, a well-deserved treat. So she pried up a loose brick from the cobbles and smashed it upon the lock.
The blackened latch popped open immediately, nearly disintegrating beneath the blow. She dumped the box’s contents onto the cobblestones and sat back, sighing through her teeth. There was only a sheaf of papers, a little glass bottle of ink, and a calligraphy brush—a lot of nothing, completely worthless to the army.
Yet she did not stand, did not kick it all aside and move along. She picked up the papers and rifled through them, gently, as if afraid she might crumple them. She paused upon one in particular, frozen as if stricken by the words written there in bold expert strokes of black:
Sodden, forgotten—
A book left out in the rain,
Ink bleeding away.
She blinked hard, and ground the heels of her hands into her eyes until she saw only red, until she could pretend she did not remember—but she could hardly forget.
She knew, she knew, it would beat at her head like the pounding of guilt if she did not say it aloud. And so she mumbled, reluctant and tuneless, into her wrists:
“Honeysuckle tree / Drops sprigs of flame upon / Fia’s shining hair.”
The remembering was more tender than love, and just as painful—seventeen syllables of wet ink, written for her with infinite care by a mother whose heart she would only ever break.
She gulped a breath, and rolled up the stack of papers, and tucked them shakily into her inside pocket.
#
The beheadings had stopped, mercifully, by the time she wound her way back to camp. She skirted the bloody field at its edge, trying not to look at the soldiers carving a shallow trench for the remains, and joined the lineup of soldiers waiting to empty their collected iron into the scraps wagon. Footsteps approached, and an elbow nudged her: Lorce, his front spattered with blood, his fingernails rimmed with brown. She wrinkled her nose and took a step away.
“You smell like a butcher’s shop,” she told him, trying to hold her breath. “Go wash, idiot.”
“I am a butcher’s shop!” he laughed, and spread his arms wide. “A one-man butcher’s shop, baby.”
She rolled her eyes and left him as the line advanced. He trotted to catch up.
“Where were you all day?” he said. “You missed all the fun.”
“I had my own fun,” she said, and smirked, though in truth she’d spent hours simply wandering, watching the light change across the mountains, gathering the odd bit of metal as an excuse for her reclusiveness. Lorce cackled and slapped her on the back.
“Good girl,” he said, and winked in response to her glare. “Well, Fia, I do believe I’ll take your advice and wash. Perhaps in the town well?”
She did not respond, but the woman in front of her laughed, and punched Lorce’s forearm as he sauntered away. He threw a wicked grin over his shoulder.
Fia sighed, and waited, and when her turn came she upended her pack. The growing heap of iron swallowed up the box, busted and broken, before she could catch a last glimpse.
She wandered off then, because the sun had already sunk behind the peaks, and though there was more to be done before dinner—pitching tents, building fires, unspooling bedrolls—she was content to let others carry that burden for tonight. These mountains made her want to pick flowers and blackberries and mushrooms, to hum her way through the valley with her hair in two plaits and her father’s bees humming along behind her. So she shouldered her empty metal-torn pack, and tightened her slipping years-worn sword belt, and nodded to the friends she passed as she wove through camp, and away.
This valley had been green in the morning, but now it was gray: with ash, with smoke, with the crumbling char of lives lost. But it had been years since these things, the distasteful necessities of a life spent beating back the tides of treason, bothered her. She kept her eyes up, up to the untouched peaks: to what was left. It was only when she noticed in her periphery the scattering of little flames across the ground, fallen fingers of fire, that she allowed herself to look down.
Honeysuckle blossoms, stems anchored in the ash, petals fluttering in the breeze. They were sparse here, but a few yards away their brightness thickened, blotting out the gray in a ring around a smoke-blackened tree. She approached it, her footsteps muffled in the flowers’ softness. She placed her hand on the tree, and it came away smudged.
Even the gentle pressure of her hand upon the trunk made the blossoms fall harder and faster, the gentle snick of dozens of stems separating from dying branches loud against the apocalyptic stillness. They caught in her long black braid, caught and tumbled to the earth.
And for the first time in years she could hear her father’s voice, telling her: We planted that tree for you, darling, when you were born. So it would grow with you. And, of course, it’s like catnip for the bees. And her mother, ever the romantic, as if testing the feel of the words in her mouth: Fia Toku, Fia of the honeysuckle.
Fia shook her head, and turned, and headed back to camp. As it turned out, she was in the mood for pitching some tents after all.
#
She decided to eat at Lorce’s fire tonight, because though he was an annoying ass, he was a riot to drink with—and after a day of good army fun, she thought with a worrying tinge of bitterness, the camp would be positively roiling with drunkenness. At the supper call the two of them lined up together outside the cooks’ tent, tin bowls and mugs in hand, Lorce boasting in his foolish way and she rolling her eyes, smiling despite herself.
Then came their turn, and as soon as the server slopped her portion into her bowl, her mood soured.
“Gruel?” she hissed to Lorce once they had settled beside his fire. “Commander Kesheg said we were to have a feast tonight. Stew, and ale, and fresh bread.”
Lorce looked at her strangely. “He didn’t say that.”
“Yes, he did! He said that once we killed the traitors, we would feast to celebrate.”
“Oh!” Lorce said, and laughed and laughed, until she shoved him, and with visible effort he tried to control himself. “We haven’t killed the traitors yet, you fool,” he said, chortling.
Something rose in her throat. “What do you mean, we haven’t killed the traitors? Who the hell were you beheading, then?”
He shrugged, and shoveled a spoonful into his mouth. Wetly, he said: “Dunno. But this isn’t the town we’re officially assigned to. Didn’t you read the sign at the gate? This town was called Tovet. We’re assigned to Arneso.”
“I didn’t read the sign!” she snapped. “Forgive me for assuming that if we were razing a village, it was the right fucking village!”
“All right, all right, calm down,” he said, and rolled his eyes. “You’ll get your feast in a couple days.”
“I don’t give a damn about the feast,” she said, and rose. “Don’t you care that we murdered a town of innocent people?”
“They were hardly innocent,” he said, “and execution is hardly murder. Tovet was no more than a day’s ride away from Arneso, anyway. It’s likely the same publications and meetings reported there made it here too.”
“But we have no proof.”
Lorce set his bowl down, and met her eye. “Careful, Fia.”
“I am careful,” she hissed. “I just—I feel misled.” She grabbed her bowl, and her pack, and her mug of tepid water. “I’m going for a walk.”
He shrugged again, and she stalked away. She did not meet the eyes of any whose fire she passed, though some called out to her in greeting and invitation. When she had broken free of the straggling edges of camp, she tipped her head back, and she let out a single dry sob, and she wandered.
The moon had risen, nearly full tonight, and in its glow she could vaguely find her way. She picked a slow path between the trees, winding toward town, not intending to go far, only to walk until she began to yearn for her bedroll. She kept her eyes upon the ground, upon the snaking roots that shuddered across her vision, endeavoring to trip her.
Then something crunched beneath her feet, and she looked up—and before her in the gloom were the skeletal remains of burned-out hives and empty honeycombs, dead bees strewn across the ground, their corpses crackling to pieces beneath her feet.
She dropped to her hands and knees with a quiet huff of shock, and in the burnt detritus beside her fingers there rustled something small and feeble: a lone survivor. Shakily she tipped a bit of water from her mug onto the ground beside it, and with a finger nudged the sluggish little creature toward the puddle. But it was no good; the water swirled with ash, and though the bee began to drink, she knew it was going to die anyway, just as surely as it would without her.
And so she prayed, not to any higher power, but to her parents, for forgiveness. For absolution, though after today she knew she did not deserve it.
#
On the day she signed away her name, she wore her finest shirt, and her cleanest pants, and a ribbon in her hair. It was market day, and she was seventeen and bored of her life, and she liked it when the village boys flirted; it was good for business, she told her teasing father, but truly she just liked the attention, and the implicit assurance that she was the prettiest girl around.
But when she and her father had kissed her mother goodbye, and wheeled their carts of honey the mile downhill to town, and set up their little stand at the corner of the marketplace in the town square, the boys did not come to browse her wares. In fact, no one did: the whole town, it seemed, had come to market, but only to shop at a single stall, a new one across the square.
Fia’s father hailed the fish vendor, who wiped her hands on her apron and hurried over.
“What’s going on over there?” her father asked, nodding to the crowd.
“Army recruiter,” said the fisherwoman, and shrugged. “Came to town last night. They’re all signing up, or else fighting over who’s most loyal to the king.” She sighed. “I’ve not had a single customer all day, dammit! The stream was more trout than water this morning, and now they’re rotting in the sun, and my income with them.” She squinted at Fia and her father. “What do you say, take a brace for half price? Come on, Ilyon, bring something nice back for your wife tonight, eh? What’s our esteemed poetess working on now, anyways—last I heard it was a love epic, for some nobleman—?”
The two continued chatting, but Fia stopped listening; it was the same conversation, more or less, that her father had every week, with every vendor, with every customer, with every passerby. Fia sighed, and tapped her foot, and fixed her eyes upon the crowd, upon the crop-haired woman at its center. Her father and the fish vendor had their backs turned, she gesturing to her stall and he nodding, arms crossed; Fia was alone, no customers, no one to appreciate the effort she’d made today. She huffed a sigh and crossed her arms. If only, if only she could have more than this, more than fish vendors and honey carts haggling for pennies on market day.
But her self-pity did not, could not, go uninterrupted, and she looked up at a shift in the clamor: the recruiter, shoving through the crowd, making no visible effort to be gentle, sauntering up to Fia’s stall. She stopped, hip cocked, and surveyed the just-so stacks of honey jars walling the space between them.
“Can I help you, ma’am?”
The recruiter looked up, slowly, and crossed her arms before her leather-plated chest. “It’s captain,” she said, eyes flickering from the ribbon in Fia’s hair to the slightly rumpled linen of her tucked-in shirt. “Captain Turis. How much for a jar?”
“Oh. One gold.”
Turis raised an eyebrow. “One gold? That’s your army rate?”
“Army rate?” Fia’s mouth worked, flustered. “Uh, well, I don’t know, you see—”
“You don’t know,” repeated Turis, a little bemused. “Not familiar with the army, are we?”
“I’m familiar,” said Fia, indignant and a little stung. “We just don’t get many—many soldiers, here.” She nibbled anxiously at her lip and glanced toward the fisherwoman’s stall; her father was still there, his back turned. “How about eight silver?”
Turis eyed her. “Six.”
“Seven,” said Fia, and the two exchanged a smirk of familiarity. Seven silver passed into Fia’s hand, a jar of honey into Turis’. But the captain lingered.
“You drive a hard bargain, girl. It shows real heart. What’s your name?”
“Fia. Fia Toku,” she said, her face warm.
“Ms. Toku, what do you know of the army?”
“Not much,” she admitted. “We’re so isolated out here, we don’t get much news, or many travelers or merchants.”
“But your parents—they haven’t spoken of us?”
“No,” said Fia offhandedly, for the truth was tinged with treason. Better to lie, and pretend her parents shared the views of the rest of the town. The safe views, and the correct ones. “They just say what everyone else around here says.”
“And that is?”
“That you serve the king, and enact his will.” She hesitated, but said no more.
Turis was silent for a moment. “You know, you’re the only young person here who hasn’t come to fawn over me,” she said then. “And that tells me one thing. Do you know what that is?”
Fia shook her head.
“That you’re the only one in this town truly worthy of joining our army family.”
Fia did not know what to say; lips parted, eyes widened, she simply stared as Turis appraised her.
“You a farm girl?” asked the captain. “You’ve got broad shoulders.”
“No,” said Fia shyly, “but I help my father harvest the honey, and I set rabbit traps. I’m strong.”
“I can see that,” said Turis, with a knowing smile. She leaned upon the table, and looked Fia in the eye. “Would you be interested in joining the army, Ms. Toku?”
“Well—” Fia glanced again at her father, who now stood scrutinizing the fish vendor’s trout, unselfconscious deliberation upon his face. She sighed. “I just want to do something that matters,” she said. “I want to make the kingdom a better place. I can’t do that here. I can’t do much at all here.”
Turis nodded. “I felt the same way, when I was your age. Hard to make a difference when the only thing you’re fighting for is yourself.”
“It is,” said Fia with feeling. “That’s exactly how I feel.”
“Then join us,” urged Turis. “You’ll never feel small again. You’ll always know that you’re a part of something bigger than yourself. And you’ll get free food and housing, and a healthy stipend each month, enough to send home to your parents. We take care of our own, and we do it well.” She smiled at the excitement, the ache of hunger, in Fia’s eyes. Turis pulled a pen and contract from the bag at her hip, laying them precisely upon the table before her. “What do you say, Ms. Toku?”
“I—” But a burst of laughter cut her off. She looked over at her father, chuckling as the fisherwoman cackled at something he’d said. She knew exactly what he’d say about all this; she could hear his words, and her mother’s, clear as her own voice in her head: Don’t, Fia, they’re not what they say they are, they lie and cheat and kill their way across the kingdom, and if you dare criticize them they cry treason.
But she had to make her own way, didn’t she? She had to think for herself. And she thought: I’ll miss them if I leave. She’d miss the bees, and her garden, and her mother’s writing desk, wet ink gleaming in the afternoon sun. She’d miss walking through the valley—but wasn’t she giving it up just for now, just for a chance to see a world bigger than this little town, to make a mark bigger than bees wandering the air round a honeysuckle tree? She would come back and visit, obviously. She would send all her wages home. She would write whenever she could. And in a couple years she’d move on from the army, start whatever career and life she decided she wanted.
So she turned back to Turis, and smiled bravely.
“I’m in,” said Fia breathlessly, and flicking her hair over her shoulder she signed her name, with a little heart dotting the i.
#
But that was not what mattered now.
What mattered was her parents’ reaction, when she told them her news over dinner that night: their fury, which she did not realize disguised grief until years had passed, until it was far too late. What mattered was the devastation in her father’s eyes when she told him she’d spent her teenage years wanting more than this, more than beekeeping and gardening and poetry in a quiet valley at the outskirts of a town too insignificant to appear on any map. What mattered was her mother crying out that they didn’t need army money, and what’s more they wouldn’t take it, they wouldn’t accept the earnings of cruelty and oppression.
What mattered was that Fia screamed at them, insisting they were wrong about the army. After all, they were the only people she knew who held such beliefs; she’d never, ever heard anyone else speak a word against the army or in favor of traitors, not her teachers, not her school friends, not even the eccentric candlemaker she’d taken a job with last summer. No, no, it was only her parents—they were traitors, did they know that?—traitors to the crown, to the army, to everything this kingdom stood for.
She’d trembled as she blurted out these things she knew to be true, quaking with the rage that had been brewing in her through her teenage years—the rage of leading a life of monotonous insignificance, of having no prospects for the fast-approaching future, of being constantly caged into squatty buildings with small-minded people who thought only of their next meal and never of what more they could do with their petty little lives, if only they tried.
Even back then I knew, she thought now, that I could kill, that someday I would. She had already possessed the simmering anger required, and the certainty that she was unfailingly right.
Nevertheless. She’d left home the next morning without saying goodbye, and for the five years since, she’d sent her parents all her earnings—one paper bill every three months, tucked into a thick envelope, Kiri and Ilyon Toku scrawled across the parchment—and believed every day that they were wrong, they are wrong, they have to be wrong.
Until now.
Her dripping tears mingled with the puddle before her. The surviving bee had long since stilled. The ground crunched under heavy footfalls behind her, and for a single dark moment she thought she would not stand in defense. But instincts overcame self-hatred, and she rose, and drew her dagger.
“It’s just me,” said a voice, and the shape of Lorce emerged, shadowy, from the trees. “Just checking up on you.”
She sheathed her blade with more force than necessary. “Not like you to be kind.”
“I’m not,” he said. “Commander’s orders. You looked like you might be running off.”
She laughed bitterly. “Of course. Well, no need to worry. It’s just—well, it’s that time of the month, is all.”
The great brutish idiot had the nerve, or rather the cowardice, to back up a step. “Got it,” he said, and for a moment she thought she saw a flicker of knowing in his eyes, but he blinked it away before she could be certain. “Well. I’ll, uh, tell the commander that, then.”
“Yes, you do that,” she muttered under her breath as he walked back to camp. It was a clumsy lie, she knew, and one any man smarter than Lorce could have seen through, but it would give her a bit of time to decide what to do. Whether to go back to camp, and continue razing villages like her hometown, slaughtering people like her parents, as if she had never realized the truth—or to desert.
But everyone knew what happened to deserters who were found.
I cannot go on like this, she thought. Believing their lies. Pretending I am doing good, just to justify abandoning my family.
So. She had only one option, one path to choose: she must desert, and she must not be found. She threw up her hood, and she ran.