Release: Davlova: Book One (22 page)

Will you be ready
, the leaflet asked,
when the gates come down?

I shivered and dropped the paper. This was more than propaganda. This was practically a call to arms, and everywhere I looked, I could see the response. Shopkeepers stood in clumps on the sidewalk, talking in hushed voices. On one corner, a yellow-robed man held court, standing on an overturned crate to proclaim his allegiance to anybody who sought to overthrow the Council. Nobody was shopping. In fact, when I looked around, I realized I couldn’t see a single person with the marks of nobility upon their cheek.

I altered my route, going out of my way in order to see the plaza.

The vendors were set up there, as usual, but the entire courtyard seemed too quiet, and too still. On the outskirts, I saw clan kids, but even they seemed distracted. Not looking for marks. Like the vendors, they seemed to be waiting. But for what?

I watched them all, the vendors and pickpockets, the whores on the corners, and the few customers like me, wandering idly amongst them without actually shopping.

They were all watching the gate. Not staring at it overtly, but their eyes kept straying that direction. I looked, and found the source of their unease. A group of men flanked the closed gate, all of them holding some kind of makeshift weapon, mostly hoes and pitchforks.

The gates between Upper and Lower Davlova had always been closely guarded from the inside. Anybody with the blue tattoo of nobility was allowed inside. Benedict’s policemen also lived inside the wall, which was why working for him was a coveted position. Other than the nobles and the guard, anybody wanting inside the white wall had to present a pass, showing that they lived there or worked there or were owned by a noble. But now, it seemed the nobles’ own security was working against them.

“Been there all morning,” a fish vendor said to me. “Only one noble tried to come out, and he turned tail quick. But it’s only a matter of time.”

And then what would happen? Would this self-appointed guard attack? Or would Benedict send his soldiers to arrest them all? Either way, I couldn’t imagine the outcome would be good. The lower city was at the tipping point. In the past, Benedict had used his raids to keep the trenches in check, but it wasn’t going to work this time. One wrongful death on our side of the wall, and the powder keg of rebellion would explode.

No matter how it went down, one thing was certain: this would not be a bloodless revolution.

I left the plaza, keeping an eye out for any pickpockets who were still on the prowl. I went past the gargoyles, waiting for one to pounce, wondering if they too were waiting for the wall to come down.

It was strange, entering the den again. I was more careful than usual as I lowered myself through the drain, afraid I’d tear or dirty my clothes. I worried they’d changed the knock, but for naught. I didn’t recognize the tiny waif who let me in, but that didn’t mean much. I’d given up trying to keep track of the youngest clan members years ago.

The den itself was smaller than I remembered, and smellier. At this time of the morning, many of the clan kids were still hanging around. Lorenzo threw me a casual salute. The rest ignored me.

I knocked again on the trap door and was boosted up into the storage space by Jimbo.

“Misha! Where the hell you been, brother? We figured you got snagged.”

“Not snagged. Just working on something else.”

He took in my still-bruised eye, then glanced down and whistled through his teeth. “Where’d you get them clothes?”

“I bought them.”

“And the black eye?”

“Got in the way of someone’s fist.”

He shook his head. “Must be some job.”

“I need to see Frey. He around?”

“Hang tight.”

He left me in the closet, but returned a few minutes later to tell me that Frey was waiting for me in the projection room.

Anzhéla’s office was as it had always been. There were no windows. The only lighting came from a few wall-mounted gas lamps. Anzhéla’s desk filled one end of the room. I was relieved she wasn’t there, and unwilling to consider what that relief meant. Frey sat behind his desk, playing with the electronic remnants that always covered it.

I expected him to lay into me immediately for coming in through the den after being told to stay away. At the very least, I expected him to ask how I knew I wasn’t followed. But one look at my face brought him upright.

“Holy Goddess, Misha. What happened to your face?”

I touched my bruised eye. It didn’t hurt anymore. I tended to forget about it until I looked in the mirror. The edges had begun to fade from purple to a sickly shade of green. “Just doing my job.” I’d intended it to come out as a joke, but it fell flat.

Frey crossed the room and used his hand under my chin to turn me toward the light, just as Donato had done in my room. “He do that to you often?”

“No.” At least in that I could be honest. “Not often.” Standing so close to him while talking about it made me uncomfortable. I pulled free of his grip and stepped around him in order to take the seat on the near side of Anzhéla’s desk. The same seat I’d sat in when she’d given me the job. “Sometimes he gets angry.”

Frey’s expression darkened. “That’s worse than if it was a sex thing. Rage is more dangerous than passion.”

If that were true, how bad would it be when the two were combined? I didn’t want to consider it. Instead, I took a deep breath and said, “I need a favor.”

His eyebrows rose in surprise. “What kind of favor?”

“Will you tell me about your implant?”

He froze, staring at me with eyes so dark and guarded, I worried he was about to hit me. But then he sighed, and all the anger seemed to drain from his body in that single breath. “I don’t suppose you’re asking out of perverse curiosity?”

“Curiosity, yes. But mostly...”

I let my words trail away, because I couldn’t say the rest. I couldn’t tell him about Ayo’s words, or his anguish. I couldn’t tell Frey how he’d asked me to kill him because his implant wouldn’t allow suicide.

Frey sighed and went to stand against the bar, crossing his arms across his chest. He watched me, and yet I had a feeling he wasn’t seeing me. He was looking inward, trying to decide where to start. “I was born on the hill. Did you know that?”

“No. You don’t have any tattoos.”

“Boys get them when they turn sixteen. Girls get them when they marry.”

“Oh.”

“And you know I was born a girl?”

“Yes.”

“I was supposed to be a doctor.” That didn’t surprise me. I knew Frey’s abilities when it came to healing. “My father had dreams of me being recruited by the Guild. I would have been the first woman, and he was determined. But...” He shook his head, looking down at his feet. He shuffled one boot against the wooden floor. “I’d told my dad my whole life I was a boy. Of course, he’d point out the obvious, that I was missing a cock.” His voice hitched to a stop, and I looked down at my boots, wanting to allow him his grief and his anger.

“I know how crazy it sounds,” he went on at last. “But I always knew my body was wrong. When I was a child, I’d steal my brother’s clothes. My parents laughed at first, but later, they didn’t find it so funny. Once I hit puberty, it became pretty clear I wasn’t normal. Not by their definition, anyway. My father began to despair that the Guild wouldn’t want me. At the same time, they’d be unable to marry me off. I was ruining everything. So when I was nearly eighteen, they took me to a doctor.”

“A Guild surgeon?”

He nodded, reaching up to touch the strange bald spots near the back of his head. “It’s come a long way since then, but at the time, it was...”

“Barbaric?”

He laughed, a harsh, angry sound. “It’s probably still barbaric, but they’ve at least refined their techniques. This clinician told them he could fix me.” He sighed, letting his hand fall from his head. “It meant I’d never be a Guild surgeon. But there was still a chance I could finish my medical training and become a regular doctor. And, at the very least, my parents would be able to marry me off to some rich nobleman, so they signed the contract. They held me down and drugged me, and when I woke up, I was a girl in every way.”

“So, it worked?”

He shook his head, leaning back to look up at the ceiling. “It did, and it didn’t. It’s hard to describe. It was like, on the surface of my mind, I was still a boy. But when I went to put on pants, I’d have this strange reaction.” He touched his solar plexus. “Here. This feeling of dread. Or of
wrong
. If I put on a dress and acted like a good society girl, everything would be fine. But I still remembered that it wasn’t really me.” He shook his head, looking over at me at last. “I’m not making any sense.”

“Kind of,” I said. “Keep going.”

He rubbed his forehead with his hand. After a minute, he turned to pour himself a drink, then came to sit in Anzhéla’s seat, across the desk from me. He didn’t swallow any of the alcohol in his glass. Instead, he held it tight in his hands, staring down at it as if it would give him the words he needed to go on. “The main thing —the thing the implant didn’t change—was that I didn’t like men. I mean, not the way a girl is supposed to, you know? Men would court me, and the whole time, I’d be daydreaming about their sisters. But my parents didn’t know that, and even if they had, they wouldn’t have cared. They wanted to marry me off, and they arranged for me to marry a man. A very rich man.”

“Did you do it?”

He finally met my gaze. “If he had been decent, I probably would have. I probably would have done my duty and married him to make my parents happy, but the first time we were alone, I realized how cruel he was.” He clenched his fists on the desk, shutting his eyes against whatever it was he remembered. “I won’t tell you what happened, but the short version is, I realized I’d rather die than marry him. And so I decided to do just that.”

It took me a second to realize what he meant. “You decided to die?”

He nodded. “Yes.”

I thought again about Ayo’s words, that he wasn’t even able to kill himself. “What happened?”

“I locked myself in my room and I took one of our lamps. Electric lamps, you know, because we were on the hill and the ban didn’t apply to us. And I cut the cord, and then plugged it in, and I stuck the bare wires here.” He touched the strange, bald spots behind his ear. “I thought, this way, it’s the implant that’s killing me. Maybe they’ll be sorry.” He laughed. “Isn’t that funny? All I could think of was, ‘this will show them!’”

I couldn’t laugh. I didn’t think it was funny at all.

“Anyway.” He spread his arms, smiling at me. “It didn’t work. I woke up two days later in the hospital. I was alive, but the implant was fried. I was me again, and when I told my parents I’d do it again if they tried to have a new one put in, they walked out of the hospital without a word. Told the doctor they wouldn’t pay for me either, so the orderlies carried me outside. Dragged me down the hill and dumped me through the gate.”

“I take it that was the end of your medical training?”

He nodded. “Between being broke and being banished from the hill, there was no doctor in Davlova who’d keep me on as an apprentice.”

“Have you seen your parents since then?”

“Not even once. And I haven’t been on that side of the wall since then, either.”

“That’s horrible.”

“No. It was release. Them abandoning me was the best thing they ever did for me.”

I’d felt sorry for myself many times for losing my mother. It hadn’t ever occurred to me that there were worse things than being an orphan. That sometimes parents weren’t worth having. That sometimes freedom was the greatest gift.

Which brought me to the second reason for my visit.

“There’s something else,” I said. “Do you know anybody who can translate the old language? The language of the tattoos?”

He narrowed his eyes at me. “Is this about the slave?”

I debated lying, but to what end? “Yes.” I had no idea what I expected to find by having Ayo’s tattoo translated, but it was the only thing I could come up with. “Can you help? I thought maybe the tattoo artist, but I assume he’s on the other side of the wall. Do you know—?”

To my surprise, Frey started to laugh, cutting me short. “You’re way off, my friend,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“When was the last time you paid homage to the Goddess?”

***

I hadn’t been inside a temple since shortly after my mother’s death. I’d gone there then, hoping to find some kind of peace. Some type of explanation for why men were allowed to do such terrible things to women.

I hadn’t found any answers, but as I was leaving the temple, Anzhéla had found me. So maybe the Goddess had helped me after all.

Each quadrant had a temple. They were positioned midway between the four compass points, built right into the wall. Each of the four lower city temples was supposed to have a matching temple in the upper city, directly on the opposite side of the wall. The temples were supposed to be an open doorway between the rich and the poor, but there were only two left in Upper Davlova, in the first and second quadrants, and even those no longer allowed passage through the wall. The upper temples connected to the third and fourth quadrants had been destroyed shortly after the High Priestess had been deposed, by order of the Council. The passages from the upper temples to the lower in the remaining temples had been ordered closed. The message was clear: holy women didn’t belong in the upper city. Still, two upper city temples remained. Where else were the pretty tattooed wives and well-bred children of the aristocrats supposed to pray on holy days?