Sign of the Knife, page 16
CHAPTER 14
It was a late fall afternoon in Brynn when I first threw a knife. Catriona and I grew pumpkins that year to enter in Woodall’s harvest festival and we were already planning how to spend our winning coins. Catriona wanted blue beads to make a hairpiece like all the girls were wearing, and I was hoping to buy enough sugar to make taffy.
Mama and I were preparing supper the night before the festival when Catriona, who was picking herbs, screamed as if Woon himself had appeared in our garden.
Mama and I dashed outside.
Catriona stood on the bench, screaming and pointing at her pumpkin. A huge spider was making his way across the orange flesh.
Mama ran to calm Catriona and called over her shoulder,
“Mira, take care of it, will you?”
I don’t remember even thinking. One moment the knife I’d been chopping vegetables with was in my hand, and the next moment it was flying across the pumpkin patch, sticking through the spider and into the pumpkin.
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Catriona screamed even louder and clapped her hands over her eyes.
I stared at the knife sticking out of the pumpkin. I hadn’t known I could do that!
Pulling the knife from the spider was disgusting. Catriona cried about not being able to enter her pumpkin. I said one little knife mark wasn’t going to disqualify her and she said the knife mark wasn’t little, and that the spider innards had contaminated it.
Mama gave me a stern look that meant not to tease Catriona about being afraid of spiders, and as an apology, I told Catriona she could enter my pumpkin.
We left her pumpkin home, since she refused to get into Emil’s cart if the “spider pumpkin” was anywhere nearby.
When Emil saw the pumpkin, he looked me up and down.
While Mama and Amara loaded the cart with food for the day, I threw the knife again. It clunked against the fence behind the pumpkin and landed in the dirt.
“Not bad,” Emil said. “Try again.”
I did, and on my third try it stuck in the pumpkin.
Mama came around the corner of the cottage and found Catriona’s pumpkin so hacked up it was questionable if it could even be salvaged for pies.
“What do you two think you’re doing?”
My excitement melted as I realized I was likely to be left home from the harvest festival.
But Emil was grinning as if he’d just won a young calf. “She’s very good! Really.”
Mama looked at the two of us, then at her best knife sticking out of the remains of Catriona’s pumpkin. She harrumphed and turned back to the wagon. “You’d best hurry or we won’t be in time for the apple bobbing.”
Several days later Emil brought me a knife that was heavier than Mama’s. He said I could keep it if I’d agree to practice. “You 167
can throw at trees, or at my barn. Just not near any people or livestock.”
I told Roland about this several moons later when we were walking through the market. He stopped and studied me. “Are you good?”
“Emil says I am. But I have only him to compare to.”
“And how are you compared to him?”
I lifted my shoulders. “Good, I suppose.”
When he finally spoke, he said, “Where did you say you were born?”
“Lydelia. What does this have to do with knives?”
He examined the rings on his hand. “Nothing. Come. I’ve left my table unattended.”
After that day our relationship changed. He began coming to Brynn even when it wasn’t market day, meeting me in the fields or the forest when I finished school. He wore simple clothes instead of merchant’s robes, and his eyes rested on me in a way that made me blush. If I’d thought my archery and knife throwing practices with Emil had tired me, they were nothing compared to what Roland did.
He showed me how to hang from a tree and pull myself up until my head just cleared the branch, and then do it again, and again, until my arms trembled and I could hardly sleep at night for the pain. He showed me how to strengthen my legs and back and stomach until I ached all over. And he helped me practice until I could throw a knife while running and hit the targets he swung from tree branches in the woods outside of town.
He never wanted to talk about why my skills interested him, and after a while I quit asking, just enjoying his undivided attention.
One night, I returned home not long before sunset and told Mama I’d been dawdling in the woods after school.
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She looked at me over the mushrooms she was chopping and said, “Truly, Mira. And I suppose that stone merchant has nothing to do with this?”
I felt my face flush. “What stone merchant?”
Catriona picked up her darning and scuttled out the door to the garden.
“Catriona!” I called after her. Did she say something?
Mama set down the mushroom and looked at me. “Mira, the entire village has been talking. It’s what gossip is made of these days—Mira and the stone merchant—Roland. Is that his name?”
I stared at her, unwilling to believe what she was saying.
I’d been crazy to think women in the village might keep tight lips about my life when they were speaking openly against the king.
“At least I have something to do!” I shouted. “At least I have a friend!”
I ran out the door and into the woods. I flew past trees and bushes, beyond Emil’s barn, over the stream and down into the valley of trees.
A fox scurried out of my way and crows rose in a cloud of wings, cawing their alarm.
I stopped at a fallen log and kicked it. Hard. And then harder. Bits of bark went flying. I picked up a heavy stick and whacked a nearby oak over and over until the stick was only a stub.
Stupid village! Stupid gossip! Stupid girl!
I picked up a smaller stick and hit it against another tree. It snapped and I scraped my knuckles on the bark. I pounded the tree with my fists, crying out.
“Mama’s not really angry, you know.”
I stopped.
Catriona was standing beside a large pine. “She just wants to know what you’ve been doing.”
I tore off a piece of bark and we looked at each other.
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“You followed me.”
“You weren’t hard to find.”
“Why does everyone in this village have to be into everyone else’s lives? Why can’t you all leave me alone?”
“Because you’re interesting.” She pushed some pine needles aside with her toe. “It’s not often a merchant teaches a maid to throw knives.”
I threw the bit of bark against a tree and watched it hit.
“Mama just wants to know what you’re doing. She wants you to talk to her.”
“How do you know?”
“She’s worried about you.”
“This is what I do, Catriona. It’s who I am. She’s going to tell me to stop. And I won’t. I’ll run away if she tries to make me.”
Catriona tipped her head. “She didn’t make you stop with Emil. Even after you—umm—chopped up my pumpkin.” The corners of her mouth twitched up and she glanced at me.
I felt my own mouth twitch. “That was one pretty hacked up pumpkin.”
“That was one pretty hacked up spider.” Catriona said.
I smiled.
“Just talk to her, Mira. She’s not angry. I think she is, maybe, amazed. Maybe scared. But she would have told you to stop a long time ago if she was going to. She could have forbidden you to go to school, like Lora’s ma, and kept you home. But she didn’t.”
I let her words sink in. If I’d been honest with myself, I would have admitted from the beginning that she knew. There were no secrets in Brynn.
Catriona held out her hand. “Come talk to Mama.”
We climbed up the hill. Cat’s hand was warm in mine. She pointed out birds and whistled their songs back to them. When we came to a clump of mira blossoms, she picked one and handed it to me.
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“I don’t know how you do it,” I said as I took the slender pink flower.
She laughed. “Yes, it’s a great skill to pick a flower. Nearly as great as throwing knives.”
“I mean how you make people feel better. Help them be happy. In truth, if Mama isn’t angry with me, it’s because of you.”
When we got home, Mama scolded like I had seldom heard her scold before and assigned me extra weeding for the rest of the season for not talking to her earlier.
I was sullen, but inwardly pleased, for of all the things she could have chosen, weeding was the least disagreeable.
But to my shock, when I was about to escape to the garden, Mama said, “Why don’t you invite Roland here? To the house?
You can practice in the woods beside our cottage. Then I can keep an eye on things.”
To my even greater shock, Roland came. And he brought presents. For Mama he brought a stone baking board and a strong-smelling herbal tea to help with her aching joints.
She thanked him awkwardly, but after he was gone, she exclaimed over the tea for days, saying it was almost impossible to find in Gilan and was just what she needed. The stone baking board was the only one she ever used after that.
For Catriona, he brought a lilt carving of a kitten curled about itself with its nose resting on its tail. It had veins of some blue gemstone running through it, like stripes in the kitten’s fur.
Catriona carried it in the pocket of her skirts and showed it to all the girls at school. At night, the kitten slept under her pillow.
And for me he brought a new tunic, bright yellow like the merchant’s tents, cut in the newest fashion and sewn with emerald-colored sequins that sparkled in the sun. I wore it all summer.
One afternoon while Mama and Catriona were visiting friends, Roland came to the cottage as I was gathering eggs. He led me to a mossy glen dappled in sunlight and shadows. He slipped 171
the yellow tunic off my shoulders and pulled me down on the ground beside him.
I gave myself to him willingly, thrilled at the touch of his hands, the power in his body, and the certainty that he would be my husband someday soon.
A few moons later, Roland met me on the path into Brynn one morning and I went with him to the shed behind Butcher Bruke’s instead of to school. In the slanting light of the doorway, he kissed me and asked if I would swear to secrecy. On my life. A thrill rushed through me, like that first day in the glen.
I looked in Roland’s eyes and swore on my life never to tell a soul whatever it was he wanted to share with me.
He told me about Domhnall’s secret society—the Order of the Dragon. As Roland spoke, I noticed how the dust motes floated around him and how his fair hair glistened in the slanting sunlight. He was unbelievably beautiful. I’d found a spark of excitement in dusty little Brynn after all.
Roland said he could teach me more than knife throwing now. Together, we would help Domhnall save young girls from the king. We could save all of Gilan.
Roland knelt and drew the sign of the knife, a circle with a cross inside it, on the dirt floor. “This,” he said, “is the sign of Domhnall’s supporters. But when it’s red, it means death.”
I looked at the circle and X on the floor, not comprehending.
“Being in the Order of the Dragon means doing whatever Domhnall asks of you. Everything. And if you don’t,” he placed a finger under my chin and tipped my face toward his, “the sign of the knife turns red. Any fool who thinks to disobey Domhnall is removed.”
“Killed,” I whispered.
“Keep your promises, Mira, and the sign will protect you.”
“I always do,” I whispered.
He took both my hands. “Will you join us, Mira?”
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“Yes.”
Roland kissed me long and hard. A dusty shaft of light fell on his shoulders and I knew he was the most beautiful, most powerful person ever. He fingered my hair, and ran his hand along my shoulder, under my tunic.
I shivered as I laid my head on his chest.
He took off his simple stone ring and showed it to me.
There were carvings on the inside—a cross and a tiny dragon.
“This symbol,” he said, “is of the inner Circle of the Dragon. More elite even than the Order. If you kill for Domhnall, you’re recognized with a matching ring, always worn on the smallest finger of the left hand.”
I looked at my hand. “By your scar.”
He nodded. “As a reminder that however great you think you are, you are nothing compared to Domhnall. You are as insignificant as the smallest finger of the left hand.”
He lifted my other hand and kissed it. “But it’s your right hand that interests Domhnall. Your skill with knives. You were meant for much more than this dull village life. You can feel it, Mira, can’t you?”
I kissed him hard.
I’d always known it.
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CHAPTER 15
I kept Ordalf near the top of my bag as we rode through the woods. There was no way to know how many men Domhnall had, but no one doubted he would kill us when he caught us. Domhnall the Dragon showed no mercy.
Prince Joren rode hard. He said if we could reach Lydelia, his peacekeeping army would protect us and fight Domhnall.
Twice we saw flashes of color through the trees behind us that caused us to spur our horses on in an undignified panic. We were the foxes fleeing the hunter. Stories I’d applauded, albeit with growing unease, of Domhnall eliminating people who opposed him, now set my bones shaking. Being the fox rather than the maid who cheers the hunter from the safety of her cottage brought new questions and fears to my mind. I knew Domhnall was freeing our people, but I was beginning to wonder if this was the only—or even the best—way to go about it.
I’d done so many jobs for Roland since my initiation into the Order. At first, they were tiny—carrying slips of parchment to a farmer in another village or following a royal guard for an afternoon to see who he spoke to. I picked up packages and gathered information from travelers. During this past winter’s 174
Festival of Lights, I slipped a mixture of herbs into a collector’s mug in the Brynn tavern to make him forget caution so he would be easier for Roland to question.
As my assignments progressed, so did my understanding of the political situation in Gilan. When Roland gave me a letter to deliver that detailed the torture of two young girls who tried to escape being Derrik’s concubines, I thought I would either be sick or explode with anger.
Finally, Roland said I was ready to advance into the inner Circle of the Dragon, and somehow, naïvely, I never considered what sorts of jobs would come after that. I trained as an assassin, learned to throw knives at moving targets, to slip in and out of crowds and evade detection in any situation, to slit an animal’s throat so I could slit a man’s. But it was all theory in my mind. I never understood how it would feel to kill someone.
Now as I felt Ordalf pressing against my back, instead of being proud of how far I’d come in the Order, I trembled at what I had promised.
We stopped to camp only when it was impossible to see.
We piled blankets together in the center of our makeshift camp with horses and guards in a circle and slept beneath the stars only long enough to remain functional, prepared to flee at any moment.
Illsabet and I had very little privacy, which was fine with me.
Privacy felt like vulnerability.
Our rear scouts said Domhnall was a safe distance behind us, and guards stayed on duty in alternating shifts. I prayed to the gods that Domhnall wouldn’t find us as we slept.
In the morning, I gave my little mare a piece of carrot I’d stolen from the cook and rubbed her nose. She made a happy sound and nuzzled me back. “Moonlight,” I whispered. It seemed the perfect name for her.
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We rode through dense woods that day. The path was so narrow that we rode single file with Varik so close behind me I was afraid Moonlight, might kick him.
When we emerged from the woods, the mountains had risen up out of the horizon before us. The closer we rode, the larger they grew, until they were unbelievably tall, jagged cliffs of shattered stones jutting out of the earth in front of us. The ground rose and fell in steeper and rockier hills the closer we got to them.
Prince Joren sent three guards ahead to buy food in Elmar so we wouldn’t have to stop long. He hoped Domhnall would be held up at the entrance to the canyons, trying to find provisions that, after we bought them, would no longer be available.
Around mid-afternoon we passed a stone cottage with a flock of geese and a weathered rabbit hutch. It was the first sign of habitation we’d seen since leaving the villages surrounding Climonta.
“Made it to Elmar,” Orn grunted.
I stared at the cottage. Bits of red cloth hung at the windows; a bucket of feed and a pair of wooden shoes stood beside the door.
