Three Silver Teeth

[Rance]

"How did you come to know of us?" the man with three silver teeth asked.

"Rumors."

"You came to the mountains on heresay alone?"

"I've done more reckless things."

A pause. He ran his tongue along his gums and said, "We don't take well to outsiders."

"I sent a letter of forewarning."

"How reliable do you think a courier can be?"

"It depends on how much he's paid."

* * * *

That had been months ago.

There was no warmth here. The gray sky above and the ragged edges of the mountains broke apart any breath of warmth the sunlight might bring. Sometimes there was snow. The flakes were not majestic, but rather fat and sharp and treacherous. In the right swirl of wind, they were knives. At night the wind howled against the stone walls and crept in through the cracks between the bricks. Somehow, even in this bitter clime, insects still thrived: roaches, resilient to the chill, found their way into the stores of cornmeal and saltmeat, burrowed themselves into the rubbery porkfat.

And you did not deny the ration of meat because its helping bore an occupant.

And you did not remove the little roach, for he deserved sympathy; he'd come here generations ago in a bag or a parcel, long-undetected, and his family line thrived despite the cold. No, you ate him too, for to free him from his fatty bed would be to commit him to a frozen death.

Farnie leaned over and whispered, "I quite like them too. I like the crunch."

Farnie was a dumpy girl whose lip and cheek sagged because in her childhood she had been forced to sleep in a barn near manure and every night she breathed in the fumes of rotten hay until the stink of it poisoned her blood. Sometimes her right eye stared off into the distance, like it hadn't been set right in the socket of her skull at birth. That was the way with her. That was the way with everything.

Chewing, Farnie asked, "Do you like it here," and wiped her mouth on her dress-sleeve.

"I like the work," said the newest girl.

"Are you daft? Nobody likes the work."

"I like the work."

Farnie tugged on saltpork with her eyeteeth. "Alright," she said. "Alright, so you do. I don't. But I like the mead. They brew good mead here. That's worth the work alone."

The dining hall, as cold as every other half-crumbling building on the premises, was dreadfully silent at this time of day: the Studious had already come for their rations and their helpings and their mead; after them, the Servitors had come for the leftovers. They were the last two who remained, and both harbored the same idea: that there was no place else that was ever as quiet as this, the uninhabited dining hall, where one could truly be alone with their thoughts.

That apparently didn't matter too much to Farnie Portfaunt.

The newest girl, trying not to look at Farnie, tilted her head and said, "Do you want my mead?"

Farnie's palsied face brightened. "I couldn't do that," she said, with all the insistence of a girl who knew her modesty might win her a gift. "No, no, I couldn't do that."

"It's all yours," said the newest girl, nudging the meadhorn toward her.

"You don't mind? Truly?"

The newest girl shook her head and said, "No, I don't; I don't have a taste for it."

But Farnie's mouth was hanging open with an unspoken question, and she arched one of her brows, and the newest girl knew exactly what Farnie was looking at. For in all the weeks they'd seen each other passing throught he gray halls, their arms full of linens or their elbows hanging with buckets of wash-water, they'd never entirely looked at one another, let alone really spoken to one another; theirs, after all, was the same story, as seemed to be every Servitors. Servitors were unremarkable beings, all cut out of the same mold: they were quiet, they were diligent, and these gray walls offered them a solace that needn't be spoken: Here, you can hide. Here, you can rest. Here, for the price of your obeisance, you can fade away into nothing.

So when Farnie jabbed a dirty finger onto the newest girl's wrist and asked, "What happened to your hand," the curiosity shocked the newest girl: she had tried very hard to be anything but an individual.

"Oh. That," the newest girl said, brandishing the pinkish lump of her handless left arm.

This time she didn't mind retelling the tale.

[Rance]

In the gatehouse he commanded she disrobe, but not to a point of immodesty; the gatehouse, like all other buildings on the premises, was all unfeeling stone, and not even the mortar could dissuade the bitter cold. She lay her bundle very gently aside; she stepped out of woolen outerclothes and stood in rumpled petticoats with her arms extended at her sides.

And she knew this place would be fine, bceause the man with three silver teeth did not inspect her himself: he withdrew and called in a short lass in a shroud. Her breaths came out as wheezing bursts from her nostrils. The lass clapped her hands in the pits of the visitor's arms, swiped them down the backs of her legs, ran them vigorously through the coarse cascade of black, black hair on the girl's head.

The lass clicked her tongue with mute satisfaction.

She left. Three Silver Teeth returned after a time. The girl had dragged her clothes back on by then.

"Forgive the intrusion," he said. "When war came to Derry, we had new visitors every day. Some made the trek through the mountains simply to hope we might harbor them in safety. Others came with more insidious purposes."

"To hurt you?"

"To hurt us," he agreed. "They would smuggle all manner of minute dangers in under their cloaks or in their hair."

"Why," she asked. "Why would they?"

"Because we," he said, "would have no part of war, for one side or another. And for some angry men, that alone is enough reason to want us dead. Duke Burel tainted the air with enough poorly-intended power; we would never dare add to that morass."

She swallowed, relieving her throat of its dryness. "Do you fear that I might be a danger?"

"You?" Another smile. She couldn't stop looking at his teeth. "The only thing you smuggled in was lice."

* * * *

That had been months ago.

Since then, every day was a constant cycle of repetition, repetition, repetition: awakening before daylight to warm the stoves and feed the hearths; distributing clean linens to those who required them; giving wooden plates to those who required them, pewter to others, and to the rare few, platters of true silver. And these she counted at each meal to be sure none of the other Servitors -- or any fo the Studious, for that matter -- had absconded with them.

Every fifth day, there was a bath. She shared chilled water with four other Servitors. She always preferred to be last.

Several weeks into her stay, when she had come down with a vicious case of the wet cough, Farnie had been assigned to her. That was rule. That was the way it was. That was the way with everything. A Servitor shall always serve; a Servitor shall serve even those who serve should the necessity arise. So Farnie tended to her, with her sagging lips and her off-center eye, with her chatty demeanor and that rattling laugh that seemed not to grow in noise, but simply to explode from her when it happened. Farnie -- friendly, bubbly, guarded, and entirely fake -- was a wonderful piece of art: she'd made herself into whatever she was, an ultimately forgettable farmgirl whose importance would cease to be the moment one looked away.

"You look better," Farnie said one day to the newest girl. "You look so much better."

"It's a cough," the newest girl said. "It's hardly enough to be kept abed."

"Perhaps. But sickness travels like wildfire here in such tight confines. If one person has the awful air, ten do, and then twenty; even one day of illness for the Studious and the whole delicate system--"

"--the whole delicate system becomes a chaos. I know, I know."

They didn't know each other well enough for their conversation to flow; rather, it was a herky-jerky distribution of questions and answers, an off-kelter back-and-forth that sometimes left too much silence or too much noise hanging between them. Then Farnie blurted, "I brought you parchment," and pelted a folded bit of paper and a coal nib down onto the bedding.

The newest girl stared at it. "For what," she asked.

"Somebody misses you."

The newest girl stared at a snag in the bedclothes.

"Somebody does," Farnie insisted. "Write. Be thankful you can, even with one hand. And when you're done, I'll see to it that it's given to the next courier. And then I'll take you to see your little girl."

Farnie left.

Cherny,

I am safe. Forgife my silents. I am away. It is better for her. And that I think is better for all.

With love,

GW

The following day, when she returned to Serving, it was with refreshed energy; it felt fine, just fine, after all, to reach out and touch the world once more.

[Rance]

She sat across from Three Silver Teeth in his study, where behind his broad shoulders, shelves upon shelves of dusty books reached high and wide. The thousands – maybe millions – of pages contained in this room alone was only a fraction of the knowledge on the premises, and yet, their power of the books here was remarkable: they turned a stone chamber into a welcoming abode; they filled the air with the musty stink of parchment and ink; they made the man sitting in front of them seem larger, greater, and more brilliant than anyone she had ever met.

And almost three months into her stay, she still had not learned his name. She hadn’t even seen him in anything but passing, but he’d neither questioned nor interrupted her in her work. He left that task to the Servitors above her, and the others responsible for her.

Now, he dipped a quill and scratched upon a roll of parchment.

“You are here,” Three Silver Teeth began, “because you sought asylum.”

“Yes,” the newest girl said. “For my child.”

Scritch-scratch went the quill.

“Why here?”

“You didn’t turn us away,” she said.

A long pause. The fire crackled. He said, “You forced my hand.”

Kneading at her skirts with her lone hand, the girl said, “How? How could I have possibly done that?”

“You capitalized upon my human sympathies,” Three Silver Teeth explained. “This place—“ he swept a hand to the room, “—hides amid the mountains, and the ways to it are treacherous and deadly indeed. You travelled those ways alone, and with a baby against you. What kind of monster would I be if I’d turned you away at the gates?” It was a question she didn’t expect to answer, and he hadn’t any expectation that she would. Instead, he shifted toward other topics: “Forgive my ignorance. No doubt the girls you Serve under know it, but I’ve not yet caught it: your name is…“

“Gloria.”

The quill scraped away. “That’s a terribly unremarkable name.”

“I’m a terribly unremarkable person.”

“How did you, Terribly Unremarkable Gloria, know this place existed in the first place?”

She turned her cheek, delving into a morass of old memories, seeing logbooks and ledgers flit soundlessly in front of her eyes. Watched them as they slipped across lacquered desks, passed between hands, and finally found hers. “The Inquisitory in Myrken Wood bears a file with the name Ruann upon it. The location, here,” she said, jabbing a plump finger down onto the cool oak of his desk, “and other small bits of information. Only a few sentences, but enough to pique my interest.”

Three Silver Teeth turned his head to the side and furrowed his brow. He chewed on the edge of his thumb. “Do you remember what was written?”

“Nothing worrisome. Small details. The name of the citadel. A general location. A few sketches. The purpose.”

His lips peeled back into a grimace. “We – myself, and those who held this post before me – highly value our privacy. That there’s this file, you say, which may contain information about—

“I implore you not to consider it a threat to your way of life,” Gloria interrupted. “Myrken Wood suffered a past of strange, dangerous magic. To log it all,” she assured him, “was to know, and to be safe in the face of greater threats, among which Ruann, to my knowledge, has never been listed.”

“We,” he breathed, “are a peaceful community, Gloria, and commit ourselves to that aim.”

“The Inquisitory’s file will not change that.”

He shifted himself in his chair, tension coiling in his forearms. “So you came to us as, what, an agent of your Myrken Wood government? Miss Wynsee, let me be clear: our students devote their lives to the study, containment, and examination of powerful artifacts; they are strictly prohibited from employing those objects for their own personal gains—“

“What? Oh, Nameless, no,” she blurted. “No, ser; my presence here isn’t one of accusation or observation. I am not here on behalf of the Inquisitory or anyone else. I am here on my behalf. I am here on behalf of my child. You took us in from the cold, and for that, I’m grateful – and devote my Service to you and the Studious.” She sucked in breath through her teeth. “I fled Myrken Wood. It is no place to raise a child.”

Again, he asked, “And why here? Why not anywhere else?”

“Ruann’s refusal to engage in any conflict told me what I needed to know.”

“Such as?”

“It’s a place of peace. And it’s a place,” Gloria said, “that nobody else wants to attack.”

The guttering candlelight seemed to catch in his eyes as realization began to bleed across his face. “From who do you run, Gloria, that you expect Ruann to protect you?”

“No one. No one seeks me out. No one wants my blood—“ not anymore “—and I owe no one any debts. My being here, I assure you, will not threaten Ruann’s peaceful existence. I simply wanted—“

“For your daughter to be safe.”

She nodded.

“For my daughter to be safe.”

For several long minutes, Three Silver Teeth took notes on his roll of parchment, occasionally refreshing the end of his nib with new ink. When he appeared satisfied with the notes he had committed to the page, he tossed a pinch of sand across the paper. “Anonymity is something we Ruannos hold dear. Before we stood upon those cold steps, seeking shelter, we were other people. We were soldiers, criminals, politicians; we were fathers, mothers, and murderers. We were Myrkeners, Thessils, or Grangers.

“And now,” he said, “we’re Ruannos, nothing more and nothing less, drawn here whether by need or by sheer arcane curiosity. Now, we’re the Studious, or we’re the Servitors. It’s not a unique lifestyle,” he said, “but it suffices. We judge not, and in turn, expect not to be judged.”

He slid a closed fist across the bureau toward her. When he unfurled his fingers, he held in his palm a bulky trinket: a small anvil, formed painstakingly out of pewter, attached to a length of twine. A necklace.

Gloria said, “How do you know I belong here?”

“Because your child belongs here. Because your child,” he said, “was built of very special things.”

He dismissed her. Later, when the other Servitors saw her anvil charm hanging newly from her neck – her Ruanno Proof, they called it, whatever that entailed – they embraced her more tightly, they spoke to her more freely, and they saw her as a fixture, a staple, a permanent constituent. Farnie offered her a lump of sweetcake, and Second Studious Yngrinne even said hello to her when he noticed the charm, a thing he’d never done before.

This was a safe place. This was a good place. This was a fine place to raise a little girl.

[Rance]

Your child…was built of very special things.

Serve in the day, sleep in the night; occasionally, trundle to the nursery to see her face, to feed her, to put that warm little body in your arms and take in the soft and perfect and innocent smell, to sing to her with a voice that hadn’t breathed a choirsong in years; to offer a fingertip to a pale, curious hand; to speak in Jernoan under you breath as if sharing fragile secrets with tiny ears that knew only those words—

And then the hour was done. Just an hour a day, because children made of very special things required a unique attention that she, as a Servitor, couldn’t wholly dedicate herself to. And what killed her — what truly burned her, like a stonebear’s venom on the skin — was that the infant girl seemed at greater ease in the arms of those nameless nurses. That she took just as well to a foreign breast. That she did not howl when the hour was done, did not yearn, did not wail out with wordless moans for just a few more minutes of mother, mother, mother…

Ruann knew how to take care of delicate objects.

One day the Servitors were having a lunch of porridge and boiled radish and Gloria had a spoon to her mouth and was about to taste the steaming stew and it was very good. The spoon clacked against her yellow teeth for just a second before — the blow was sudden — a row of knuckles struck down on the crown of her bonnet and nearly drove her cheek to the wooden table. The spoon leaped out of her hand. The porridge drooled out of an overturned bowl.

“What was that for,” Gloria said, turning, her tone incredulous, her tongue burnt.

“You’re awful. You’re an awful twat,” said her attacker, whose pale fist with its skin cracking from the dry, cold air shook closer and closer still. “I saw you. I see you going there, and that’s simply not right. It’s simply not fair.”

“Farnie,” Gloria said.

“Don’t Farnie me! You don’t have any right,” the girl said, her cheeks a burning, red bluster. “Why are you so special?”

“Farnie,” she said again, trying to use the name as a soothing balm.

But it only inflamed.

Farnie blurted out a guttural burst of noise and then threw her fist forward again to collide with Gloria’s hawkish nose. Farnie hadn’t ever fought before, and Gloria knew it: the girl snapped her fists out like they were teacups and scrunched her shoulders into a too-tight mass. She swung from the arms, flailing with passion and not with poise. An effective strike drove itself from the hips, rolled through them over the shoulder, carried itself through the bend of the elbow, and exploded out of the lowest knuckles or an exposed palm — all the energy from that initial twist. That was how you shattered a nose. That was how you bludgeoned a girl. Farnie lashed out, but it was hardly an attack. It was a desperate flail. Regardless, it was still an affront. So when Farnie went for the nose, Gloria pivoted, let the blow slide by her. Her lone hand didn’t grab, but simply guided the punch forward, cast Farnie just off-balance enough—

—enough that she could wrench the arm back, twist the bend of the elbow into the small of Farnie’s back, and expose the nape of the other girl’s neck.

She dug the stump of her arm just above the shoulderblades. Farnie’s cheek flattened on the table. Gloria leaned over her, resisting the urge to once, twice, three times rattle Farnie’s skull against the wood. “You,” Gloria said, “haven’t earned the right to hit me. Not yet. And you certainly don’t want to: I’ve broken stronger girls' ribs; I’ve made greater girls drag themselves bleeding through the sand in the low streets. Don’t,” she pleaded. “Don’t.”

Farnie’s eyes danced and twirled, flashing their whites, trying to look up at her assailant.

“It’s not fair. None of it is fair, and don’t you dare tell me it isn’t.”

“I was eating my supper."

“They let you see yours, don’t they? They let you see her. So why wouldn’t they let me see mine?”

For a few moments, Gloria had forgotten herself. She’d forgotten that in this world, women existed for one purpose: to do their husbands’ bidding, to entangle themselves with a man who would fill their belly fat with a baby, and then it was all mother, mother, mother until the child could fend for itself — children, actually; one a year if at all possible, until a woman couldn’t lift her skirts without finding another little wet, soft, bald skull. Why should Farnie have been any different? Why should this plain, waiflike, sagging-faced peasant-girl have been an exception to that, an all-encompassing and suffocating rule in this very cruel, very functional, very matter-of-fact world?

Gloria eased away. Stepped back. Farnie slid like liquid down to the floor and cradled her head.

“You’re not so special,” Farnie muttered. Her trembling hand reached up, scooped her anvil necklace from her bodice, and squeezed. “You’re no better than I am.”

“No. I’m not.”

“Then why do you go there, to the nursery, in and out, like you’re some queen—“

Squatting next to Farnie, Gloria offered the only consolation she could: a broad shoulder to lean on, a scaffold for the girl who’d just attacked her to press against. Farnie did, melting against the newest girl until she couldn’t even sit up on her own. She snuffed at her nose with the sleeve of her dress and stared relentlessly at a crack in the stony floor. Gloria said nothing. What was there to say? If the Jerno had learned anything in these, the past few odd and tumultuous months, it was that silence sometimes squeezed words like blood from a stone; you waited, you waited, you waited, and a weaker tongue would simply seek to fill the awkward air with familiarity: stories, tales, reasons.

“They wouldn’t let me see mine. I’d go at night, when the candles burned and the other Servitors had gone to bed, I went and I begged and I told them ‘I Served today, just as you wanted; I Served, so why shouldn’t I,’ and they would just purse their lips and shake their heads back and forth—“ she demonstrated, her waxy hair snapping against her cheeks, “—like I was some errant fool who’d wandered too far into a wing of the citadel I’d no right to visit.

“And then they’d tell me, ‘One day soon, Farnie. One day,’ and I believed them.”

Gloria timidly reached out, cradled Farnie’s hand as it clasped at her anvil necklace, and leaned down to gaze at her. “We could go,” she said. “Together. You could see my baby, and I could see yours, and we’d – we’d…”

How dare you, Glour’eya.

Cleared her throat.

“We’d be happy, and we’d have earned it, wouldn’t we, Farnie?”

How dare you offer to let someone else see her.

Farnie didn’t smile. Her sagging lip twitched. A rogue muscle under her eyelid kept throbbing, throbbing, throbbing with the pumping blood somewhere in the recesses of her body.

“I wouldn’t be happy,” Farnie said.

How dare you take her from him. Under what, the pretense of fear? She’s not just yours; she’s Catch’s; she’s his, too.

“I wouldn’t be happy. They buried her eight months ago.”

[Rance]

Several days later, Gloria sat uncomfortably across from Three Silver Teeth in his study chamber. Her right leg jittered, jumped, and jabbed down into the floor, her wooden-soled shoe click-clacking with each nervous fidget. Three Silver Teeth didn't seem to notice; he simply rested his cheek upon a curled fist and flipped through a tome opened before him.

"I've been Serving as expected," Gloria said to shatter the quiet. She cleared her throat, as if the words were a byproduct of the urge. "I'm not sure why you called me here."

"You've been here how long now, Gloria Wynsee?"

"Almost four months, ser."

"And your record states that you've Served reliably and obediently."

"There have been no infractions," she clarified. "I do not take my tasks lightly."

He smiled. Three teeth gleamed.

"You are a boon to Ruann and its progress. 'On the shoulders of Servitors stand the Studious'."

Whatever that means, she thought.

Three SIlver Teeth drummed one of his fingers on the cold surface of his bureau. He leaned forward, then, and steepled his hands before his lips. The fabric of his robes strained against his shoulders, and all Gloria could think was how poorly they'd been tailored, likely stitched by some aimless fingers that thought the only purpose of fabric and string was to connect sleeve to trunk. The shoddy work insulted her. He deserved better. "I know Servitor Farnie has spoken to you of her frustrations and her displeasures. Of the fate of her child, rest its soul," he said. "But before these words begin to fester some doubt in your conscience, I thought it better to assuage your fears of our purposes. Ruann is a place of peace; Ruann," he said, "is a place of goodwill."

"She said her child died."

"And so it did," Three Silver Teeth said. "But at no fault of her own, or our nurses."

"The child was ill?"

"The child was ill when she came."

"And you couldn't save her," Gloria said.

Three Silver Teeth shook his head. He stared at his desk. A flicker of emotion registered in his bone-hard eyes.

Regret.

"Ser," Gloria said, trying to feed rationality into her words. "Farnie is shattered. And broken. You, as a man, can likely only imagine what that loss is like. I can only imagine it. That was her child, and all she knows is that she was kept from seeing it, and holding it, and caring for it. And then she finds out the child is perished, and all she can think—"

"All she can think is that we did something to kill it," he said.

"All she can think is that you didn't let her to do something to save it," Gloria corrected. "If she's anything like me, she came here to see to the child's good health."

"We can't control chance or happenstance. We did all we could to keep the baby alive."

"Why didn't you at least let her see it?"

His cragged face wrinkled with displeasure. She knew he had no desire to be challenged by an underling. "The infant was in quarrantine. It harbored an illness that, if we let any but the most disciplined caregivers attend it, might have quickly spread outside the infirmary. Be aware, Sera Wynsee: separating an infant from its mother is no point of pride, but one unbridled sickness, one resilient disease, and this delicate environment can crumble. Farnie," he assured her, "will be nurtured and cared for, but that is the best we can offer her. For that, I'm sorry."

Did she believe him? So many times in Myrken Wood she'd been face-to-face with women and men and beings whose words reflected one ideal and whose actions expressed another. Too many times she had been that person. Three Silver Teeth had never demonstrated anything but goodwill toward his Servitors and Studious; he'd never beaten, never damaged or berated them; no, stoic as he was, he was fair. He was proper.

Gloria leaned forward. The chair creaked. She pressed her dark fingertip into a pool of wax in the collar of the guttering candle on his desk. When it dried, she peeled the little helmet of wax free from the pad of her finger.

"Ruann is a refuge," Three Silver Teeth said. "And it subists because of those who seek refuge in it. Wayward mothers bring tiny children; towns unable to care for them ferry us their orphans. Those very children grow up to become our Studious — the janitors and librarians, if you will, of our archives and knowldege. Ruann is a good place for children. Ruann is a good place for you."

It was all very Jernoan. Softer around the edges. Kinder, Less violent. More humane. But at its stony heart, where function and purpose and creed ruled, where the word of law was writ upon parchment and in tradition, it was all Glass Sands and Glass Sun. She could feel the sand whip and dance across her rough skin; the tarsweat, like a liquid reminder, trickled down the rolling hills of her neck and spine.

"But Farnie and her heartache isn't the purpose of this summons," Three Silver Teeth said. "I called you here, Gloria Wynsee, because I need your help."

A colony always needed the support of even its most insignificant constituents.

Sing songs. Eat sand. Strip the clothes from this corpse.

She touched the anvil pendant sitting jagged in the divot of her collarbone.

"How can I help," she said.

"You will need to travel."

"I am an experienced traveler," she told him. "Where do you want me to go?"

He smiled, three silver teeth agleam.

"To the South," he said. "To Razasan."

[Rance]

Days later they dressed her according to the standards of an ambassador of Ruann: several Servitors brought her to a cool, stone room where the walls were hung with embroidered drapes and herbs to eat and soothe and smoke were strung from hooks in the ceiling where they could dry undisturbed for weeks at a time.

The Servitors handled her harshly. Not poorly, but less as though she was a person and more as though she was a piece of rubberwood. They unbuttoned her cuffs, unstrung her bodice, stripped the skirts, washed her limbs and scrubbed the tufts of hair under her arms, scraped oils into her the coarse tangle of her black hair, dashed her lumpy belly with powdered clay. The only thing they left her to wear was the pewter anvil necklace, her Ruanno Proof. Flustered by the disproportionate contours of her body — all bottom-heavy hips and belly and thighs, limited of bust, powerful in the shoulders, a foreign blot in an otherwise pale world of wispy women — the Servitors fluttered around her with blouses and tunics and no, no, that won't fit her and a Jerno's more a rock than a girl, isn't she, and something will fit you, I promise.

They found her a dress. They shoved boots on her stubby feet. They tied her hair into tight, fist-sized knots on her head ("Aren't you ever embarrassed by how rough it is," the girl responsible for her hair had muttered) and crammed a starched bonnet on her scalp. And she felt so unlike herself in those clothes, so unstitched from familiarity.

The kirtle of the dress bore tenacious embroidery: an anvil of gray and black. On the right shoulder of the dress, a felted anvil; on the backs of her woolen gloves, anvils croceheted across the knuckles.

A rucksack of necessities strapped to her back. A woolen blanket rolled tight and worn like a sash from shoulder to hip.

Then the Servitors were gone. She was alone, a stiffly-standing wire-frame of starch and skin and fabric, breathing in the cool air, embracing these limited moments of silence and calm.

I belong to Ruann, now, don't I?

* * * *

Three Silver Teeth gave her a tube of hardened leather to wear across her back that bore some fat roll of parchment. He debriefed her on the why of her southward journey. She understood.

Before she left, they gave her access to the nursery. She graced herself with the fidgeting little body, the pale-skinned, platinum-haired progeny that a Nurse had told her could now take one, even two supported steps. She pressed the little girl's collar against her lips and nose and breathed her in, a life-giving breath; she brushed her callused fingers through the soft moss of the hair and buoyed herself with the child's misguided giggles. "I'll be back soon," she whispered, though she knew the child didn't understand, would never remember, would never recall. "I'll be back soon."

The child fell asleep soon enough. And that was that. That was that; Gloria Wynsee put the pale, wondrous child back into her ticking and crept away, her fingers desperate to stay touching the skin though her shoulders pulled her back, pulled her away—

Back in her room, she found the last two necessary components of her traveling kit:

Her dwarven longknife. Her little boot-blade, its steel scraped across with the name Liam.

The world was soft and silent and asleep with snow when she departed Ruann.

Her cheeks, very quickly, became ice.

[Rance]

Travel was neither modest nor comforting nor easy.

Blisters festooned her feet by the time she'd descended the Sikasoons. Tender sores leaked fluid and blood into the heels of her boots. Her dark flesh had been chewed away in ribbons from the toes.

She found the carriage just outside of Wrexham at the meeting of a road where a double-trunked tree hung its hairless head over a gray boulder. There, they demanded her papers and her Proof.

"Anyone can wear the anvils," said a man with a crossbow over his shoulder, "but a Ruanno has the pewter to show for it."

She wordlessly showed him her pendant. They allowed her to mount the carriage.

The left-right, left-right, rocking-shaking-swaying for the twelve leagues down to Almark — ten laborious hours of travel — was too great to bear. She draped her head out the window for most of the journey and left traces of half-digested supper in the snow. Whenever she would close her eyes to squeeze out the light in lieu of restful darkness, nausea hit again and again. The men laughed, because the rhythm of her puking ("I'll take bets on how long until she pops again!") was the best amusement they'd had in weeks.

In an unremarkable port-town near the southern shore of Almark, the ice had been too thick to permit any ships in or out of the harbor. She was forced to spend six days in what they deemed a lasshouse: a shelter for transient women without husbands, filled with debtors, broken women, and shattered souls who performed menial work. A woman, in this town, had no right to a to rent a room without a man; a woman, here, hadn't anything at all.

The ice gave way on the seventh day, breaking free into smaller lumps that seemed to shoulder themselves out into the ocean and to freedom. Boats began to pour in, and among them sailed women without men, all fleeing from other shores, all who Gloria watched get filtered to the lasshouses no matter the legitimacy of their papers or the pain of their stories.

Primitives traditions were often very lucrative.

From the docks, she clapped up the planks to the boat that would take her to Razasan. There, as she'd been instructed, she showed the quartermaster her Ruanno Proof.

"It gets you nothing," he grunted.

"I was told you would honor it," she said.

"Enough that I won't toss your fat ass into the ocean when we get far enough out. A little bit of metal doesn't matter shit to me."

Her jaw clicked with tension and impatience. "What do you require, then, for safe passage to Razasan?"

He squinted at her. For too long his eyes lingered on her complexion, on her mud-dark skin. His gaze never penetrated her, at least; never seemed desperately lascivious. Live long enough in a world shoulder-to-shoulder with men desperate to find value under a woman's skirts, it became all too easy to know when they thirsted.

He didn't.

But he did reach out to her. He clenched her forearm. Dug his fingers in. Squeezed it. Measured. Nodded.

"Come with me," he said.

She followed him not into the dark bowels of the ship's bilge, but up, up, across the bulwarks, underneath the wild webwork of ropes and beams and sails, and saw the cold, unevenful sea spread out for endless miles in front of them.

[Rance]

Rilman was his name. The quartermater, as they called him, was responsible for the well-being of the men aboard. Rilman marched, legs pumping on the deck like a man with focused purpose. Behind him, Gloria followed, skirts lofted, boots clapping a rhythm in time with his. Deckhands and shipmates all sharply turned their heads toward her as she passed, staring down the disturbance driven like a splinter into the normal process of their day. A woman.

They approached a sloppy, half-sleeping form sitting underneath one of the masts. He cradled a wicker-wrapped bottle. His mouth hung open like a door with rusted hinges, and his pinkish tongue lay swollen and sunburnt on the cradle of his teeth. He snored. He stank. The world of sailors and mates leaned away from the man and his coming retribution, for Rilman's eyes were unforgiving fires.

Rilman chambered his knee, then drove an iron kick into the drunkard's rib.

Something cracked under the heel. But the drunkard barely moved.

Rilman, lips pursed and cheeks puffed, was about to kick him again when Gloria, with a jerk of her chin, asked, "What am I supposed to help with?"

"He can fuck right off," Rilman said.

"Didn't you want me to do something?"

"He can fuck right off," the quartermaster repeated, then reached down, snared the man's collar in both fists, and snapped to Gloria: "You got haulin' arms on you, girl. Help me with this sack of shit. Lift his legs. Right, just like that. We're just going over the side with him."

Lifting a body wasn't too great a task for her: a live, conscious being unintentionally compensated for their weight, shifted imperceptibly to ease the burden on a lifter. But an unconscious, drunken fool? He'd been all but poured into his clothes. All his mass sank like fluid into his buttocks and his knees. Dead weight. His filthy trousers stank of salt and soured ale and shit. Rilman struggled with the shoulders and chest. He puttered out a breath and pushed the head and arms over the lip of the rail. She obeyed the task wordlessly, grunting and slinging the drunk's legs over the wooden rail, and she thought—

He couldn't get anyone else to help with this?

—as the body crumbled over the bow, tumbled through the air like a suspended doll, and then splashed down into the murky bay-water. White froth hissed out in ripples from around the man's body as, suddenly, awake, his flabby arms and legs ripped across the surface of the water, trying to stay afloat. "You useless, drunken, stupid sack of birdshit," Rilman snarled, leaning himself over the rail to spit his final criticisms. "You're in luck that I didn't stick my fuckin' blade between your ribs." Then he turned to Gloria, red-cheeked, intense. "No free rides for men or women here, no matter their pewter baubles or their pockets full of coin. Where you off to, exactly?"

"Razasan," she said, stumbling over the sibilance.

"Razasan," he said. "Fucking Razasan, of course it's Razasan, you fuckin' dollop. We always go to Razasan. Why else would they have directed you to this ship? What port in Razasan is what I mean," he clarified.

A frantic search in her pocket. A crumbled paper.

"Murkwater," she said. "Murkwater Bay."

Unsatisfied, he wrenched the paper from her hand, unfolded it, and dashed his eyes across the text. "Murkwater," he muttered. "Port Zenith." A pause. "Port Zenith? Why in gods' names you headed to Port Zenith?"

"Ruanno business," she said.

"Ruanno business," he repeated, jeering and mocking, throwing his voice. "Ruanno business, Ruanno business. Don't even know why I ask." He crumbled the parchment into a ball, punched it into her chest, and walked past her. She quickly followed him, and though already her stomach had started twisting and tumbling as the deck swayed beneath their feet, there was a breathless liveliness, a rapidity and an immediacy on this ship that started to ring in her bones.

On the docks, men hauled barrels, rolled them to the safety of land, and went back for more.

"I've got you for five days, and I intend to work you," Rilman said to her over his shoulder. "Beneath your feet lies fourteen tonnes of casked Lumorvic whiskey, and that ain't no small haul. We supply to buyers in Thessilane, in Heath, in Razasan, and elsewhere. We're fast, we're legal, and we don't put up with shit. You want a ride, you've got it, but you'll do it with the spray in your face and the Sun at your back.

"In the next hour, we depart and follow the winds south into the Violet Flats. We could stay along the coast, but the coast breeds problems: hostilities, waterway ownership disputes, taxation in passage."

"You're circumventing all that by going out to midsea?" she asked, trying her very best to seem like she knew water-talk, though she knew none of it.

"Down to midsea. Right down—" he cut his hand through the air and issued a fwip noise from his lips, "—from Almark to Razasan and its bays. Five days as opposed to a fortnight. If..."

"If what?"

"If we don't hit any obstacles."

"What obstacles could there possibly be out in the sea?"

* * * *

Two days later, standing underneath a Glass Sun hot enough to boil the sea and staring down the bloody point of a speartip, Gloria Wynsee told herself she'd never ask such a stupid question as long as she lived.

[Rance]

Remarkable, really, what two days of sailing could do. They peeled away from the shore, where the winds still lingered bitter and unkind with winter, and within hours the temperature had already risen.

On the first morning, Gloria hadn't time to be sick from the swaying, swaying, swaying; Rilman set her to work, lighting a fire of necessity: "On this ship, you work; you pay for your passage through sweat ahd blood," he said, and told her to bring her knife, rid herself of skirts, and tie back her hair. The day dashed by in a blur: she bailed water from the ship, cut free riggings (hemp was harder to slice through than she expected; with only one hand, she had to plant her heel on the rope to pull it taut), and even once was trusted to learn the pulleys of the minor sails.

Don't look at the sea, she told herself. Don't look at the water.

* * * *

The dried pork rations settled poorly with her, and on the second morning she woke in a hammock riddled with painful, pulse-pounding cramps in her innards and sweat on her brow. The weakness didn't matter: Rilman overturned the hammock and snarled at her ear so close that spittle showered her cheek: "Up, you fat twat, up, or I remind the men on this boat that the only worth you bring this fuckin' ship is on your back with your legs in the air."

On the second day she began to understand the vast properties of the tasks she was doing: she watched as the ropes almost imperceptibly turned and tightened the sails, how the pulleys — shaking and swaying in the spray — managed to hoist hundreds of pounds of canvas with but a single pull; how two-handed men like four-legged spiders clambered up the netting, threw themselves like monkeys between the masts.

When she worked, black sweat spilled from her brow and pooled in the divots of her collar. Because this cloistered wooden prison was full of hard men with unanswered urges, survival was mandatory. So she very quickly learned to spit messily, swear violently (they often laughed; her Jernoan accent was a travesty), and fart loudly; she divested herself of every evidence of her already-questionable femininity, for to be desired here was no option.

Three days. Three days until Razasan.

And it was just as she was taking a certain pleasure in that realization that a gruff man shouted, "Sails in the distance!" and all the work stopped and everyone on the ship stared in awe at the tiny, agile ship cutting a white arrow in the water directly toward them.

Rilman hissed in Gloria's ear, "You better fuckin' know how to use that knife."

"Can't we outrun then," she asked.

"We've got a hundred and fifty fuckin' casks of Lumorvic under our feet. Liquid weight on a boat gives us nothing in the way of speed. Better to just let them board."

"Let them board?" she asked. "That's absurd."

"They'll get close enough; they're light and quick. We try to pull off, they'll throw bottles of liquid fire on our deck and we're fucked. So, yeah, we let them board, and we hope we slit their throats faster than they slit ours."

She squinted her eyes and turned her head to speak harshly against his lapel. "You realize that as the only woman on this boat, that puts me in a very precarious position."

Rilman's face did not shift. Instead, he lifted her wrist, turned it upright, and jabbed his thumb in a long line from the bottom of her palm to her forearm.

"Good spot," he told her.

Then Rilman was gone.

Ten minutes later, hull-ribs struck against one another with a sound like thunder.

Dark men poured aboard. Spears glinted in the warm Sun and scimitars leaped free of their scabbards.

Only then did she realize the Violet Flats — this endless sea spanning around them — was so purple, so peculiarly unblue, and even as a rusted fishing-spear whistled past her ear she thought, It must be the coral. That must be it; it must be that, or the way the light reflects off the water, and it's so beautiful I want to just sink into it forever, and never come back...

[Rance]

Planks snapped down. Two ships became one. Men launched themselves across the makeshift bridges with no intent to engage in parley or consider armistice. They bore a motley distribution of weapons: knives, scimitars, cudgels, all rusty from old blood and the salt of the sea.

They had no sooner collided into Rilman's men than the blood began to flow and the screams leaped up from the mass.

Gloria considered herself a scrapper. Not a warrior, not a trained fighter, but a girl who knew how to throw a punch, could take a set of knuckles to the jaw and keep standing, might even be able to twist an arm and shatter an elbow if the circumstance was right. But this chaos of clashing blades was not her element. There was no reading the noise, the motions, or the intent; she knew neither the crew of their ship from the crew of the pirates. She was blind to sense: she started breathing rapidly, heavily, couldn't breathe, this isn't safe, this isn't safe, you're going to die—

She scrambled forward, barely managing her balance. Eyes flicked left, right, left, trying to find a cove of shadow or a spot under a cargo net to hide.

A glint of steel at the corner of her eye.

She threw herself to the deck just as a singing blade whipped through the air where her neck had been. Pumping blood sprang a deafening heartbeat in her ears, tha-thum, tha-thum, as she scrambled on hands and knees away from her attacker. But he was too quick. His shadow fell over her. He grabbed her by the back of the collar, yanked her up. He pressed his metal against her neck—

His shoulders jerked. His head snapped forward at an inhuman angle. A warm burst of blood squirted across the back of her skull.

The body crumbled lifelessly, pouring ontop of her, a narrow hatchet sticking up like a chimney from his brow.

So many bodies. Underneath them all she crawled between clashing knees and pumping boots. The Sunlight flickering through the cover of sweaty shadows. She found it impossible to draw a full and satisfying breath. The walls were closing in around her, these barriers of bone and skin and blood, and every time she wheezed to inhale a chestful of air, the doors inside her closed even tighter. The hinges of her lungs refused to budge. Her mind started to whirl in a maddening panic. Colors danced in the space behind her eyes.

She emerged from the crowd, stumbled into a man, and instinctively lashed out at him. Her stump drove against his teeth and her other hand lashed out, curled into a fist, and crashed against his chest. Air blew out of him. Again, she hit him, and again and again, until she managed to thrash out enough space in the world around her to...

Breathe. Breathe!

The Glass Sun blinded her. Forearm up to shade her eyes, she watched as the mass of men continued to surge against one another. Her heartbeat pulsed explosively in her chest. Panic set in at the edges of her vision. A man slipped around in a soup of his own spilled guts. A pommel from above struck him into death, and she saw something fall out of his sleeve: a fist-like figure, its fingers perpetually half-sprawled as if frozen in the motion of grasping. When it hit the planks, it knocked with a resonant thunk.

Ignoring her new surge of claustrophobia, she scrambled forward, felled her knees into a man's innards, and scooped up the wooden relic. Time and misuse had scarred it, turned it mottled and brown.

A hulking figure descended upon her, then, intent to kill. So she surged upward, swung the wooden appendage, and knocked out a whole company of teeth.

They came to steal Lumorvic whiskey, these pirates. So she stole a hand. For herself.

Some men died. They beat each other with their swords.

And Gloria laughed about it. Laughed, really laughed, until she puked. Cradled this brutish wooden hand, fat and pudgy and dwarven, while pirates and sailors clashed around her on this little oaken island floating in a violet sea scorching hot underneath the stare of a distinctly unwinter sun and Nameless, I feel trapped, I feel trapped, I want to be home, I'd love to be home, learning staff with Duquesne or reading books and teaching her how to walk and toddle and to the Veldt, why did I think of him, of all thoughts? Because you were taken with him, so fond, so enchanted—

Rilman touched her shoulder.

"It's done," he said, blood hanging like a red gem from the point of his nose. "It's done, aye?"

"I threw up," she said blankly.

"Looks like you got some spoils of your own," he said of the wooden hand.

"Another man killed him," she said.

"Wouldn't care if you did," he said.

"But I didn't."

A split on Rilman's upper lip distracted her. She thought, for a moment, she could see all the way inside of him through that gap in the dry skin. "Not too many people's morals survive the sea, girl," he told her.

"I didn't kill him," she said, firm, almost combative. Then she corrected him: "Woman."

He leaned close. Stank of foul odors, the copper of blood, a mire of sweat. "On a ship, a woman fucks. You're still a girl here, but here's the rub: don't stand here, proclaim how innocent you are, how better you think yourself than us, just because you didn't kill a man. Wrap yourself in warm lies all you want, I know you better than you think." He reached out, flicked her pewter anvil necklace. "Ruann's a place full of monsters, even if'n they don't look like them. Full of people running from everything they've done, or the children of blind and irresponsible and destructive fucks. And I've carted enough of Ruann's two-legged cargo to know Ruann doesn't send girls to do its filthy beauracracy."

Quick as a flash, he grabbed her by the scalp, wrenched her close, spoke to her, into her.

"You did enough heinous shit before you wore Ruanno Proof to earn it. Because no one wears it that hasn't. No one wears it that isn't capable of it."

He struck her in the stomach. Not once, not twice, but three times, and then a fourth. She crumbled to her knees as Rilman shouted to the crew: "Cut off their ears so we can make our shillings off the dead," he said. "Bound to be some criminals among them. Throw the bodies overboard. Mount their ship, see what goods they have that might be worth resale, and then burn the fucking thing behind us."

Night fell on the Violet Flats. The burning pirate ship winked and flickered at them from the distance as their hull cut through a water strewn with discarded corpses.

All this over Lumorvic whiskey.

Two days later, like a hazy oasis, Razasan emerged on the horizon.

[Rance]

For the second time in her life, she stood upon a foreign shore and felt inconceivably small.

A foreigner, an outsider, a know-nothing. A know-nothing with gray bruises still aching in her stomach.

Behind her, men hauled Lumorvic whiskey and the spoils of their four-minute war off the ship and onto the docks.

Rilman, beside her — she swore he was a thousand leagues away, shouting to her from across mountains and dunes and snowcaps — put his hand on her shoulder, yanked her close, and said, "This is your port."

"Don't touch me," she said.

"What, you afraid of me now?"

"Don't touch me," she said.

So he squeezed his fingers harder into the meat of her arm.

"You are in debt to me. That pewter necklace buys you nothing, means nothing, gains nothing. You are in debt to me, Gloria Wynsee, and one day I'll collect."

Then Rilman was gone, and the violet sea became a memory behind her as, Ruanno anvils embroidered on her shoulders and skirts, she stepped off the wet docks and toward the streets of Razasan.

* * * *

She was a page ripped out of another story altogether. The Myrken Wood story. A Jerno-turned-Myrkener (Myrkenite, dream-dead Elliot Brown used to say, stupid boy he was, so stupid), and in the notebook of that land she was just a few fluttering ribbons of leaflet hanging off the binding. Razasan was a city of visible affluence: golden towers like gilded eggs shone on the horizon; golden walls beckoned; white cliffs in the distance hung over the town like skeletal fingers, bleached by the sun and the sea, and with every step closer she felt sicker, because when she looked over her shoulder and saw the vastness of the sea she was all but teetering on the very edge of the whole world and she could just stumble and fall off into the abyss—

The glinting gold reminded her of the cities in Catch's mind, grown out like a tumor from the inside of that beautiful scar that bisected his scalp. And what of the tea she used to have with Ariane, where they would discuss their lives as foreigners, as unique friends, and all their fractures and creases? Cherny, too, that moral-minded astrolabe who guided her through stupidity like a shining celestrial beacon. And Tennant, who wrinkled her fingertips then teased her with wine and smiles, and Duquesne whose patience with her was altogether spiritual. And names, names, names chiseled into the back of her skull with a permanence that suddenly throbbed now that she was so far away from it all.

So she folded them all up. Folded them on their non-existant pages. Tucked them away in her bonnet.

When once she was responsible, in Jernoah, for peeling the dead clothes away from dead skin, a song...

"Al'dosh, al'dosh, fel win gez'me,
feth'me, shaldoh, shaldoh a'ar kez'she!
Kith, kith, gh'aldin win,
fel win, thel kith, c'ahl-c'ahl gez'me!"

—she wore a conical cap that reached a meter into the hot air as, with her chewed-short fingernails, she began to strip the dress of the dead woman away from the shoulders and reveal leathery skin. You see, the Sisters and Brothers cut a nice smile across her throat with a glass knife and it was a very pretty smile, a very devout smile, because a Sacrifice pleased the Nameless and you should be so happy to serve Their needs with your last breaths, yes, watch as the bubbly blood laps out like wine into the divots and runnels of the altar. There was another girl, too, a lanky, lumpy thing with heavy feet and a head shaped like a bad fruit who was helping her and she had her hands white-knuckle around the dead lady's shoes and was twisting them off like a cork.

"I know a rumor," the girl said to Glour'eya with a grimace. "A juicy little rumor."

"We can't talk," Glour'eya hissed, hiding her face beneath her hair.

"But I know a rumor," said the girl. "About you."

(It was always this; it was always this memory, insignificant, but an anchor—)

The shoe popped off. Dead toes stuck into the air. "Desra told me. She told me about how you pissed the bed."

A hot flush of anger and embarassment swept across her cheeks. "Desra lies. She's a liar."

"And it wasn't just once, she said. She said it's all the time."

"She's a liar," Glour'eya snarled, staring down at a lifeless collarbone, trying not to burst. "She's a liar, she's a liar, and we're not talking about it."

So the day went on. And that night, in her bedroll, Glour'eya stared at an invisible spot on the ceiling until she thought she could will it to burn or decay with the power of sight alone. She twisted, turned, found new spots on the walls, glared at them similarly, kept seeing Desra's face and the face of the girl whose head was shaped like a bad fruit. If she could — sometimes you could just wish for things, or pray for them, and the Nameless would answer you straight, wouldn't They? — she would cast a curse on them both, put stains on them, subject them to the hush-hush whispers of judgment. But no special powers of retribution came to her fingertips.

Driven by vengeance, snakelike, she slithered out of bed. Seeking out the right sleeping shadow, she found the girl with the head shaped like a bad fruit, placed a sweaty palm over her mouth, and then proceeded to drive an elbow down and down and down and down into her brow until there was blood and tears and "St—...stop, please, please, I'm sorry, I'm s—" and she imagined I'm doing you a favor, reshaping your skull.

That little bitch never dared to spread another rumor.

Here, the vapors of the past, the apparitions of history, the words of other stories, they didn't follow her. But that one, resilient, niggling in the recesses of her mind, remained.

Razasan thrived. In its midst she was nothing. Invisible.

At the corner of two streets, a placard hanged in the warm breeze, its wooden face adorned with a frothy mug. Inside, she requested a room. She drank a flat mead and gnawed a gray sausage and ate potatoes whose tasted reminded her of old slippers. A little drunk and numb-brained, she welcomed herself to Razasan.

A day passed. Two days. On the third, she sent for a courier to deliver to the nearest authority a letter. Its proclamation? Signed with a poorly-drawn anvil:

An emasery of Ruann seeks ott oddiance over matters of import.