The Harvest (9 page)

Heron bleats like a throat-cut sheep, startling her.

He saw what she did. Did anyone else?

She looks up.

There. The welding skiffs.

Two of them.

Men looking. Pointing. They’re too far away to know for sure, but . . .

She turns to the Harpy. The one who was once Bettina.

“You,” she barks. The girl, to her credit, snaps right to attention—unlike Heron, she isn’t standing there, staring at the space where Berwin Luzerne once stood. She stands tall and stiff, shoulders back, feet together.

“Yes, Dirae.”

“Go. Take two of your sisters. Kill the men on those skiffs. Make it look like an accident. Understand?”

A short, clipped nod from the girl, then she’s moving inside, to the elevator. To the other Harpies, a few pods below.

Breathe. Breathe. Steady your heartbeat. This is good.

This is what progress looks like
.

Heron stammers: “Wh-what are we going to do?”

“We’re going to keep going” is her answer. “Nothing changes.”

“He’s dead! That’s a change.”

“He
fell
,” she corrects. “He was old. And careless. And he fell. The other architects will gather and take control for a time. Eventually they will name a new Master Architect.”

“And if that Master Architect disagrees with your plan?”

“He won’t,” she says. “Or
she
won’t. And you won’t tell anyone what really happened here, because if you do, then by the gods . . .”

He stiffens, swallowing hard.

Enyastasia says no more than that. Instead, she just stands at the edge of the platform, breathing in, breathing out. Not sure if she should laugh or cry. Eventually, she sees shadowy shapes running along the anchor cables, spears in their hands. Soon after, the screams of men dying. Bodies thrown overboard. Then both skiffs explode, and fire rains down.

THROWING KNIVES

A
KNIFE
FLIES
FAST,
embedding in the man’s head. It rocks back on its mooring, coming loose, and rolls off onto the ground. The skull breaks apart, and dry corn scatters like a cupful of loose teeth.

The cob man is dispatched.

“Finally learning how to throw those things,” Squirrel says in her squeaky voice. She swings her arms and claps her hands. The girl can never seem to stay still. She’s a bundle of energy vibrating on a whole other frequency.

“I learned from the best,” Gwennie says, walking over and reclaiming the throwing knives from the body of the corncob man: a dummy they built together for target practice, cobs strung together under a ratty burlap shirt. She boots the head into the hungry corn.

Her little brother, Scooter, hops out of the way as it tumbles past. “Nice kick, sis.” He doesn’t smile, though. He hasn’t smiled in a while. And his arm still looks crooked—it works, but it’s weaker than his other one. From where it broke.

Still, she thanks him. Walks past and musses his hair. “Where’s Mom?”

“Back in her room.”

“She okay?”

“She’s okay.” But the way he says it, Gwennie knows that isn’t true. Means her mother is having another one of those days. Her gray days. Never gets outta bed.

Squirrel comes up, snatches one of the knives out of Gwennie’s hand. Balances it on a fingertip, then hops it from one digit to the next. “Papa would still say you need to do better.”

“I do need to do better.”

“I miss Papa.”

“I know. I miss mine, too.” She chances a glance at Scooter, who looks lost and sad.

Damn
.

Squirrel shrugs. “I’m sorry yours is gone. But Papa will be back for me one day soon. You’ll see.”

A vein of defiance and anger in that statement. Gwennie has not yet had the heart to pinch that vein and close it off. She carries her own grief: the loss of her father, the death of Cael. Hopelessness has settled into her bones like an infection. She can’t do the same to Squirrel. The girl wants to believe her father survived the city falling, so be it. Reality will get in its punches soon enough.

She goes and sits down on her bed. No. Not her bed.
Their
bed. Soon, very soon, to be her wedding bed. A crummy, rickety thing as comfortable as sleeping on a grave-mound. It lists to the right, too, like a boat in a hard wind—Boyland’s heavy and gives the bed a drunken lean. Even when he’s not in it.

On her pillow is a single apple.

Big as her fist. Skin shined to a gleam.

A note tied to the stem. From Boyland?

She sits at the edge of the bed, ignoring the apple. Her stomach growls. She’s hungry. Not starving—they have food here, thanks to Balastair and Cleo living a mile over. Balastair had seeds with him. Always had seeds with him, he said. Turns out, he was the one who gave the seeds to Arthur, Cael’s father. They knew each other, though Balastair said not well, and mostly through his mother and . . . oh, King Hell, none of it matters anymore. Gwennie
is
starving, but not for food. She’s hungry for something else.
Anything
else.

They live in the shadow of the Workman’s Spine mountains. They came here, as per the map—it’s in the corner of the Heartland, miles from a small town called Tin Cup and not much else except the sonic Boundary and the mountains past it. With what little money they had and what work they could offer, they all carved out small homes here.

In one week, they’re getting married.

Because, really,
she thinks,
what choice do I even have?
Every time she lies underneath him, the bed jumping and thumping against the wooden floor, that’s the thought that goes through her.
I don’t have any choice. This is my best option
. And yet, no matter how many times she thinks it, it never feels true. Some things are true and don’t feel that way, she knows that. That’s what Gwennie tells herself to help find sleep at night.

Of course, when she sleeps at night, she dreams of Cael and Balastair. She thinks of her time as a raider, a short time among the Sleeping Dogs on the flotilla. She thinks of the map that hung on Balastair’s wall, a map that showed a world much greater than just the Heartland, a world with places called the Braided Glades, the Moon Coast, the Atlas Ocean.

An ocean! A coast!

Something.
Anything
.

Anything but this. Living here in the upper corner of the Heartland map, hoping to be like a marble that rolled under a bed or a ring that slides to the back of a drawer, hoping to avoid attention, hoping to never be found. A while back she told Balastair she wanted to be out of here, wanted to leave, but he said they couldn’t. He said it was too dangerous. Things were changing out there. The Empyrean was a convocation of eagles protecting its nest and eggs now—vicious, ready to kill without provocation.

Then she kissed him. And he kissed her back. And it was good. She asked him again:
Now will you go away with me?

But he said no, no, they need to stay safe. Shelter in place.

She cried that night.

The next day she told Boyland they were getting married. They set a date. That date is fast approaching. Nobody talks about it. It’s just assumed to be happening, like a train you know will arrive. A train you think might run you over.

She hasn’t cried since. Instead, she feels dried up. Like ground gone parched from greedy, thirsty roots. A thought strikes her like a thrown stone:

I need a change or I’m going to die here
.

She looks down at one of the throwing knives in her hands.

Die here in forty, fifty years.
Or die here now
.

The knife is heavy. Sharp.

She grabs it, grabs the apple, and cuts into it. The note falls onto her thigh and she turns it over—

A little sweetness
—
B.

The calligraphy—elegant. Looks like it was written by a human of some taste, not a witless clod with all the brains of a tree stump.

Which means: a gift from Balastair, not from Boyland.

The apple skin pops under the knife as she cuts a few little slices. Chews on them. It is sweet. She barely tastes it.

Footsteps. The rickety shack-house shakes.

In comes Boyland, big dumb grin on his big dumb head. His arms are crossed, and his chest is puffed out like a dog that just killed a chicken.

“I did it,” he says.

“Good” is her only response. It’s a hollow word, a dead word.

“You don’t even know what I did.”

“Nope.”

“You’re still mopey. Okay. I know, I get that. This’ll fix it.” His mouth spreads into a big flat-toothed grin. “I’ve set us up. After the wedding, we can get rid of this shack. Build a proper farmhouse. Get a new boat, maybe—”

“What did you do?”

“Whaddya mean, what did I do? Helluva way to ask that question. Lord and Lady, Gwennie. A wife is supposed to have faith in her husband—”

I’m not your wife yet.
“Just tell me. Just tell me what you did, Boyland, that’s gonna set us up for life out here in the middle of Old Scratch’s crap-hole.”

He stops for a moment, staring flatly at her, but then seems to find his center again: “I made a deal with Tin Cup’s Mercado Maven. Little goblin-lookin’ fella named Solow. I promised him fresh fruits and vegetables for a, a, a . . . what’s the word, a
premium
payout and—”

She finds herself on her feet, in his face. His logjam arms grab her behind her back and pull her close for a kiss—he must think she’s happy about this, which means he really is as dumb as the headless cob man out back—so instead, Gwennie pulls away and punches him in the arm.

“You ass,” she says.

“What the hell?”

“Balastair told us those were
our
fruits and vegetables. That we couldn’t sell them. Because selling them will draw
attention
to us. Empyrean attention!”

Boyland sneers. “Your
boyfriend
and I don’t agree on that point. Nobody’s paying attention to Tin Cup, Gwennie. We’re at the godsdamn edges of the Lord and Lady’s creation—”

The world is much bigger and much smaller than you think, buckethead.

Buckethead.
That was Cael’s word for him.

Cael.

Shit.

“He’s not my boyfriend, you turd.”

Boyland keeps on ranting: “—and nobody cares about these fancy-pants fruits and veggies, nobody cares because nobody’s looking, and it’s not my job as your husband to take care of that snooty Empyrean prick and his bitchy priss ex-wife or wife or whatever it is that they’re doing now—”

“Wife,” Gwennie growls. “They’re back together.”

“And I can see that burns you, too. You know what?” Here he thrusts one of those meaty sausage fingers in her face, just an inch from her nose, filling the minimal space between them with an aura of threat and menace. “I’ve let a lot slide with you. Because you’re going to be my wife and because I love you.”

“I can
really
feel the love.”

“Oh, shut the hell up. You ain’t been nice to me since we got engaged. I’m trying to take care of you. Take care of
us
. I gotta do what’s best for you and me because if we’re gonna try to bring a couple of babies into this world—”

Her laugh is a bitter purge. “You wanna have kids with me? Dream on, buckethead.”

“You’re mean. Mean as a rat snake.” He nods suddenly like he’s made some kind of decision. “I’ve been too nice to you. Lettin’ you have your way and all, lettin’ you think you’re an equal partner in all this. My father didn’t just let my mother have a share in the decisions, and she didn’t want any, either, because as a woman she knew her place—”

“Your father was a drunk, and your mother was weak.”

Bam
.

He slaps her. Not hard enough to knock her out or send her backward, but his meaty paw still forces her teeth to clack together and leaves her face stinging. Gwennie roars, and even as he raises his hand again, the knife flashes, cutting the air with a hiss, and he reels his hand back. He holds his right hand with his left, and blood wells up through the fingers.

Boyland looks stunned. Not angry. Just shocked into silence.

“You killed Cael,” she says, feeling the poison bubble up out of her—it had been stewing inside her for so long, pooling in her lungs, swimming in her guts, and here it is, spat out all over him as he cradles his knife-slashed palm. “I almost had him. Almost. If you had helped me, maybe we could’ve gotten him in the skiff. And he wouldn’t have died there.”

Boyland’s voice is soft, not angry—a fraying, raggedy sound. “I had to do it to save you. If you had gone over with him, I dunno what I’d have done.”

“No. You had to do it because if he was left alive,
then
I would’ve gone with him. Would’ve been me and him, not me and you. He saved my little brother. And that wasn’t the first time! When Scooter was about to fall, what did you do? Tell me, Boyland. Tell me how
you
would’ve saved my little brother.”

But Boyland doesn’t say anything. Gwennie thinks in that moment that the real knife in her hand has nothing on the invisible one she just stuck in his heart.