The Fecund's Melancholy Daughter - Brent Hayward [17]
Taking a moment to inspect choices and actions that had brought her to this point in life, Name of the Sun was not happy with any of them.
About to trail her fingers in the water, she decided—as they touched the cold surface, and a darker shadow rose from the depths—against it.
Blades of the oars sliced down. The boat began to move once more.
And there came from the dark a series of cries, as if the tortured souls of the city had not, in fact, been taken by gods when they left Nowy Solum but had found refuge down here in the grotto, and had chosen this instant to wail.
Or, maybe, Nahid thought, listening closer, pushing forcefully against a column of sandstone to clear it, the souls were not wailing at all, but laughing.
Directly above, in a dorm in the East Wing, the sister, whose name was Octavia, suddenly sat up on her pallet. Rats scattered from where they had been watching her. She scratched at her latest fleabites. The darkness of the chamber caused Octavia to appear almost like the other girls, most of whom slumbered with more success on the pallets about. Though the large dorm room was cold, she smelled sour sweat. She shivered. Octavia liked this scent.
She had worked until long after dusk and needn’t awaken until second breakfast, though it might have been close to that hour now. She had hardly slept all night. Whenever she did manage to drift off, her dreams, benign at first, became garish and loud and quite terrifying, waking her, though details were elusive when she woke.
Each night Octavia had spent in the palace had been like this: enough nights now that she wondered if one could die, or go mad, from not sleeping.
Exhaustion was dry pressure behind each eye.
She took a deep breath but could not fill her lungs.
At first, in the dreams, she and her brother Nahid were together, in one of the common rooms at the ostracon. She remembered her brother’s hands, the veins like worms. He looked askance at her. “The womb,” he said, “is reserved for life. Outside, all bets are off.” She was not following. Nahid tried to explain further, but flames sprung up around them.
She tried to hold onto the parts where she was with Nahid, but these fragments became eclipsed by unnamed violence, obscured by the horrid acts that repeatedly woke her.
Coming here had been a mistake. She needed to get out of Jesthe. She had expected the chatelaine’s bed, special treatment, a taste of privilege. Maybe even an opportunity to somehow help herself.
Not labour, and neglect.
Octavia lay back down, to try sleep one more time, even for a few minutes.
But she heard someone come into the dorm. She listened to the soft footfalls getting closer. She did not open her eyes. Whoever it was stopped by her pallet. And stood there. Still she did not open her eyes.
“Hey, sleeping beauty?” A woman’s voice—Hetta, the night matron? “Hey, wake up. Our lady wants to see you.”
A toe, prodding her, so Octavia could no longer pretend. She rolled over, glanced quickly up—and, yes, Hetta stood there in the gloom—and looked away. “Who wants to see me?”
“Who do you fucking think? You know where the sun is really hiding? Not above the clouds, but up yer kholic arse, that’s where. It’s a fucking disgrace.”
“The chatelaine wants to see me?”
“Yes. And you’d better hurry. She’s in a bit of a state.”
Left with instinctual cravings and not much else, seeking concessions to dignity and a sense of peace, yet struggling with the means to accomplish this (let alone understand the drive), Pan Renik was more animal than man. From an early age, the situation of existence had been pretty clear to him: he could not live within the narrow parameters established by those who defined the norms of his society. Pan Renik had been an outcast even in his earliest memories. Now, in the treetop settlement, he was know simply as the exile.
He built his nest in the upmost branches, high above the huts and nets and concerns of the others, high above the padres.
Cut off from the hunts, without access