Page 64 of Vilest Things
“I’m not going to do that.”
“It’s lucky that the attacking group wasn’t using their qi. If they strike again, you should know how to combat them. Once you have the crown, it’ll give you inhuman strength. I can teach you more then.”
“Otta.” Anton faces her firmly, putting his hands behind his back. “This isn’t… I don’t think we’re after the same goal here.”
Otta’s looking at her sleeve. She tucks it in once, then again to hide the stain. “How do you mean?”
The guards haven’t returned yet with the bodies. The trees are whistling in accompaniment to Otta’s jaunty tune from before, their flowering branches waving with the wind.
“I was hardly aware you knew this much about qi,” he says, “and suddenly you’re promoting yourself to my teacher. That’s not going to work for me.”
“You have no choice,” Otta replies easily. “August is too strong. If you don’t make the active effort to combat him, he’ll overpower you with time.”
“He’llover—” Anton cuts himself off, refusing to parrot her in his bewilderment. “Enough. If what you say is true, the crown will give me unlimited power. I require no additional teachings.”
Now Otta is frowning. Her eyes swivel fast—the guards are returning. She has less than a few seconds to get her retort in before they are overheard.
“Why are you being stubborn about this? You didn’t used to be this way.”
“Yes, I used to listen to every word out of your mouth,” Anton returns. When he thinks back to his last memory with Otta, she still looks the same. Yet when he looks into a mirror, he has changed countless times over. “Then you left me. I went into exile because of you, and you don’t think that takes a toll? I can’t be with you as we were, Otta. I won’t ever be again.”
Six dead bodies from the first half of the journey. The provinces are dangerous. People used to the comfort of the capital could never make it out here alone.
Otta stares him down. He expected a volatile argument, but there’s barely any reaction save for a small frown turning down the corners of her pink lips.
The guards come back and settle the dead into their graves.
“Fine,” she says. “I planned otherwise, anyway.”
Before Anton can ask what on earth she is talking about, Otta pivots and flutters out from the trees. He lets her go.
Lankil’s former capital looms in the distance.
Calla bites on her thumbnail, suppressing a sigh. She wants a cigarette. She should have bought a pack before they left San-Er, because heavens knows where she can find any out here. Certainly not in what used to qualify as cities in the provinces.
Wind blows into her eyes, harshly enough for her to tear up. The moon clears behind a cloud. Silver glitters along the horizon.
There remain ten or so abandoned cities in provincial Talin: prewar settlements that were evacuated when or shortly after Sica invaded. This city in Lankil doesn’t appear to have collapsed entirely, but it cannot have withstood the test of time either. Before the war, there was at least one city in each province, if not multiple in the provinces that were wealthiest. When Sica invaded, civilians either fled to San-Er, the last stronghold, or moved to the rural villages, where lifestyles were simpler. The luxuries of a city were too expensive to maintain—they couldn’t keep the water pipes or electricity grids going. After the war, there simply weren’t enough people left in the cities to rebuild.
Late-night documentaries in San-Er will sometimes run footage of abandoned cities that travelers took decades ago. Calla has watched a few in her sleepless hours, squinting at the screen with Mao Mao in her lap. They always seemed so uncanny. San-Er might have looked like this too, once. Buildings that rose proud with natural materials: browns and reds and yellows absorbing blue skies and rays of sunshine. Trees planted by the sidewalks. Grand arches and paved roads, a bird’s-eye view that made sense when overlooking the city. While these places were left to languish, San-Er took all of their burdens. San-Er was forced to grow new limbs that festered between old ones, replaced warm wooden beams with harsh, unyielding steel. It braced its favored ground for people, for people, for an unending influx of people, and it has become ruination in the process.
Calla bites harder on her nail, staring intently at the shape of the city fromafar. It does little to soothe her tension. She has so much volatile energy that she would chew off her own hand if she could, but that probably wouldn’t grow back in the same way her nails will.
Who were they? Why launch an attack in the forest, of all places?
If Calla hadn’t caught the telltale whiff of their presence, she doubts that they would have succeeded in killing a king—if that was even their goal—but they would have taken out a lot more of the delegation than six guards. Situating themselves on the curve of the road meant they were waiting for the delegation to pass by. It would have been difficult for the numbers at the front to see anything if the back had been attacked. The group was trying to incite chaos, rather than snatch the grand prize. Everyone knows royalty travels at the front.
They could have chosen somewhere with wider ground. Why hide in the trees, disguised with a camouflage veil?
“I can help you with that.”
Calla doesn’t turn her head, recognizing the voice. She swivels only her eyes to find Otta Avia holding a roll of bandages, standing much closer to her side than she would like.Ugh.She wishes she had accepted Joselie’s earlier offer to dress her wounds.
“I’m ever grateful for the offer,” Calla says, tugging her sleeve over the blood on her arm. “But I can find a healer in the next village.”
“You’ll bleed out before we reach the next village. I heard the Weisannas saying it will take another day of travel.”
Much as Calla could keep refusing, Otta Avia must have some motive for approaching her. Better to hear this now than await a lingering viper. Silently, Calla pulls her sleeve up, offering the wound.
