1
I awake outside, staring up at the bright midday sky, with no clear idea how I’ve gotten wherever I am. The fact that I’m wretchedly hungover is a clue to my curious lapse of memory, but my head hurts too much to puzzle over it. I can hear the bustle of people as the aromas of food and horse dung waft over me in a light breeze. The front side of me, at least, is warm from the sun, but my backside rests on something hard and tilted, as smooth as glass. I groan and roll over.
And nearly fall off a rooftop. I catch myself at the last second, gasping. I sling my leg back onto a marble lip, scraping my knee, before my weight can drag me off. The gentle slope of the slippery roof—which is indeed glass—is still threatening to help me over the edge, and the mosaic-whorled ground is a dizzying distance from my down-turned face, about the height of six people standing on top of one another.
“Shit,” I breathe. Then I throw up.
The vomit—as red as the wine I must have guzzled the night before—vividly splatters a pile of oranges stacked in a neat pyramid on a vendor’s cart down below. There are lots of carts ringing me, because this is the agora, I realize. At the center of the square is a huge gazebo.
I know precisely where I am, at least: I’m spread-eagled on the edge of the gazebo’s dome, a rippling blue and green glass replica of the veil that protects the entire polis from the blight. This replica “veil” only shelters a fountain of the first king of Thanopolis, Athanatos, though he symbolizes the city itself, of course. Ringing the fountain and supporting the dome are three statues of the goddess, sculpted in white marble: the maiden, the mother, the crone. The maiden holds a chicken and a knife, hinting at blood soon to be spilled; the mother cradles—what else?—a baby; and a dog sits at the crone’s heels, mascot of the dying en route to the underworld, since dogs are supposedly the guardians of thresholds. I more often see them eating trash.
I’m certainly not shaping up to be immortalized. My vomit has narrowly missed the outstretched chicken in the maiden’s arms and hit the oranges instead. Better to have infuriated a fruit vendor than the goddess, I suppose.
The fruit vendor is indisputably furious. He’s shouting at me. “Rovan, you drunk of a girl, what are you doing up there?”
Oh no. He knows me. Luck is not on my side today.
“Ugh, who’s shouting?” moans a voice, quite nearby.
I carefully lever myself up to look. Yes, right. Bethea is up here with me. Her lips and eyes are swollen, but she’s nonetheless lovely as she props herself up on her elbows, blond hair and warm skin glowing. A crown of brightly wilting flowers sits askew on her head, and the disorderly folds of her peplos reveal too many voluptuous curves for decency. And yet I bet the two of us have thoroughly dispensed with decency already.
Don’t get attached, I remind myself. You’re leaving soon enough.
Bethea smacks her lips. “Where are we? Oh, the agora. On top of the statuary. And it’s market day. Lucky for us.”
“Do you remember what we were doing yesterday?”
She ponders for a moment. “Oh!” she exclaims, making us both grimace at her volume. Rubbing her temple, she finishes, “There was the pageant.”
I vaguely recall people parading through the streets, wearing gossamer death shrouds and cheap clay masks molded to look like skulls, colorful ribbons streaming from their wrists and wreaths of flowers in their hair. That’s where Bethea’s wilting crown must have come from. It all had something to do with the king—the current king, Neleus—though I didn’t care enough to discover exactly what. Pageants are often held to honor the famous and wealthy deceased, as if to put in a final good word before their arrival in the afterlife. But King Neleus isn’t dead, as far as I know. He is apparently old and sickly, has a middle-aged son ready to take over, and also has nearly grown grandchildren, but I’ve never seen any of them. The business of the royal family, other than that of the king, is mostly kept secret outside of the palace, away from the prying eyes of the populace. I’m fine with knowing next to nothing about them.
What I do know is there was plenty of free-flowing wine.
“Yes, the pageant,” I say. “That explains it. Somewhat.”
The two of us must have stolen across the dark and empty square last night after the festivities, climbed up the gazebo on a whim—though the goddess knows how we managed without breaking our necks—and then … Vaguely tantalizing memories of the two of us entwined surface in my mind. I remember more of that than how we got up here, especially the part where I was too drunk to achieve satisfaction.
“Lovely. Rather, you’re lovely,” Bethea adds, her eyes growing heavier lidded. She pinches a loose lock of my wavy hair—burnt umber in the daylight. “I’m sorry I wasn’t successful at persuading you to surrender.” Wincing, she pokes at her mouth. “I think my lips are numb.”
“That’s my fault and shame,” I assure her. “I was utterly wine wrecked.”
“Shame?” She arches an eyebrow.
“No, I … not about anything we did.”
“Are you sure? Your mother hasn’t convinced you?”
My mother doesn’t approve of my wine drinking or Bethea, never mind that I’m nineteen years of age and can do whatever and whomever I please. At least her disapproval has nothing to do with the fact that Bethea’s and my potential pairing can never result in natural children. Both of us are fine with that, even if some people might tut in reproach. No one much cares what you do in the bedroom, and yet having children is deemed a sacred duty to the polis, especially if you’re a bloodmage or a royal. But I’m definitely not a royal, and by all appearances I’m not a bloodmage. My dalliances are, as I’ve made clear, not exclusive to anyone and temporary, besides. No, my mother’s issue is with Bethea’s social standing. She fits into the category of “the less fortunate” as the poor daughter of a husbandless medium who communes with spirits in a back alley.
I shake my head. “My mother doesn’t have a peg leg to perch on. Everyone knows she’s ruined goods.” Ever since my father was hauled away when I was seven years old, and killed for being a fugitive, an unwarded bloodmage from an enemy island kingdom, suitors haven’t exactly been lining up at my mother’s door.
The memory still makes my stomach clench. Even now, I can smell the fear in the air, the blood. I try to shove it away.
At least, whatever my mother’s reputation, no one can resist her weaving—my weaving. My mother doesn’t have to lift a finger anymore, while my patterns are widely thought to be the most beautiful outside of the royal quarter. My scrolling vines and blossoms look as if they’ve grown from thread, my butterflies and birds ready to flap their wings. Since my mother takes credit for all my work, I view my drinking and dalliances as a fair trade.
And soon, so soon I can almost taste it, my mother won’t have to worry about me at all, because I’ll weave enough for her to retire on and leave all of this behind.
What I can taste now isn’t so pleasant. I roll my dry, vomit-flavored tongue around in my mouth and glance down at the still-shouting vendor. “I think we’ve been discovered.”
Bethea giggles. “Oh no. At least I didn’t fall off the roof and split like a melon. That would have been a real scene from some horribly dull tragedy. How did we get up here?”
“I was wondering the same thing. I’m also wondering how we get down.”
Bethea peers over the edge and shudders. “I better not have to be drunk to make the return journey, because we’re out of wine.” She flops back. “At least the view is lovely.”
I lean back on my elbows as well. Temples and official buildings, creamy and orderly, rise among verdant gardens and cobbled streets lined in blooming trellises until they reach the royal palace at the polis’s center. The palace is built of white marble in the smooth, swirling shape of a seashell, its perfectly round, columned tiers climbing to a point that nearly touches the shimmering magical barrier that surrounds the polis like an overturned bowl. I’ve never seen the sky without the veil, though my father told me it merely lends what is plain blue more of a green iridescence. The city itself rests atop a plateau that faces inland with jagged cliffs and slopes gently to a seaport on the other side, with just enough space for its populace and the farmlands that feed us. Beyond that, past the veil that protects us, is the blight. The blight is even less visible than the veil, but its effects on the land are obvious. The blight is everywhere, killing the land either through drought or a deep freeze. Depending on the direction you look from the polis, you might see the vast ocean to the east, billowing white snow around inhospitable mountain peaks to the northwest, or the dusty gray brown of the southwest desert. Any way you look, the blighted wasteland surrounding us is nearly devoid of life. The blight has consumed the entire continent aside from Thanopolis, half burying the skeletons of old towns and cities under either sand or ice.
And yet, somewhere beyond that great, desolate expanse is the island kingdom of Skyllea, which the blight hasn’t yet swallowed. My father’s homeland. Another memory: one of his strong, red-lined hands overlaying mine, directing my finger on a tattered map to find Skyllea. The warm rumble of his voice against my back, his stubble scratching at my cheek. His excitement, his pride. My urge, nearly overpowering, to go wherever he wanted, to be whatever he wanted. I thought I might explode with it.
There’s a hole in my chest, long walled off—except for the siren call of Skyllea, echoing in the empty dark.
It’s only as solid as a dream to me, but one I will reach out and touch someday—someday soon. As a child, my father warned me away from getting too close to the veil and the blight’s edge, but if merchants can cross it, I can, too. I’ve woven and saved, saved and woven. I’ve spoken to a Skyllean trader who says he’ll be taking his family’s caravan across the wasteland and I can buy passage. The journey is treacherous, and you need blood magic to protect you from the blight’s slow poison, which is why no one can leave without the king’s approval. All bloodmages—wards, with their guardians—serve him, and none would use their magic for such a thing without permission.
Maybe there, in Skyllea, I can escape that final memory of my father, the one that wine can never permanently wash away. His blood on the cobbles. A dead man’s eyes. My own guilt for ever secretly wishing he would join those who ended up killing him.
Under other circumstances, I might appreciate the opportunity to get a view of the wastes I’ll soon be traversing. But as curious as I am, right now my goal isn’t climbing higher atop the fountain’s precarious and potentially fragile glass dome.
Copyright © 2021 by AdriAnne Strickland
