Ellen Datlow - After - Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia

A ruffian had dared break into the Order and steal the small gold statue of Rosamond that received their offerings of incense in the training square. He’d swooped in, before the horrified eyes of three hundred training recruits, and grabbed a symbol of their queen.

All the other recruits were far behind now. The thief had lost them when he’d started swinging from the rafters. It was like nobody else had been spending nights making sure they could bear all their own weight and more on their arms.

There was a narrow space between the ceiling of the attics and the outside of the roof, where they both had to slither and crawl, and the blasphemer was less bulky than Tor, able to go faster and slip through smaller spaces, and he almost got away. Then they reached the oriel window and the thief swung through with a crash, like the heavens being shattered.

Tor followed him, and from there it was a sprint across rooftops.

The thief was fast, but so was Tor, and Tor had endurance. He gained remorselessly.

He could see the golden statue glint in the sun, winking in the thief’s hand. Rosamond, waiting for him to save her.

The thief had to check his stride to crouch and leap, going for a roof over the wall, outside the temple grounds. Tor launched himself at him and they went tumbling down to the curved roof ’s edge.

Tor grabbed for the statue. The thief held on, and went for a knife.

Tor slammed an elbow down on the inside of the thief ’s wrist and saw the knife fall from his temporarily paralyzed fingers.

“Now,” Tor said, looking down at the thief ’s face. He was younger than Tor had expected, to be so black in villainy. He was Tor’s age, with snarled flame-red hair. “Please hand over the queen.”

“Oh, is this the queen,” said the thief. “Pardon me. I had no idea she’d be so metallic. Or seven inches high.”

“Silence,” said Tor.

“Don’t you think we should be informed about that sort of thing before the Tri—”

“I said silence!” Tor shouted.

The blasphemer’s dagger looked poisoned, so Tor kicked it over the edge of the roof.

“Hey!” he had the gall to yell. “That was expensive!”

“I’m sure you can steal another one,” Tor said through his teeth. “Or you could if you weren’t going to be quartered in the square.”

That sent the thief into a spasm of frenzied activity. He wouldn’t have been bad with some training, Tor thought, but keeping him pinned was fairly easy, even though the rascal tried to bite.

Tor caught his blaspheming face between two gloved fingers and held him still.

“None of that.”

Tor realized his error almost immediately. He’d let go of the statue.

The thief immediately did so as well, and Tor watched, with time stretched slow by horror, as the gleaming queen rolled toward the gutter.

Then the thief elbowed Tor, hard and efficient, in the eye, rolled and dived, and stood on the edge with the statue in one hand—and one of the Nest boys who the masters hired to wash the upper windows in another. The thief held them both out over the street, the boy’s feet scrabbling on the edge of the gutter.

The statue would be damaged. The boy could be killed.

“Which one is it going to be?” the thief asked.

It shouldn’t even have been a question. It should be Rosamond, or any small part of her, before the world. But Tor couldn’t take his eyes off the Nest child’s fraying garment in the thief ’s grip. It could tear and the child could die without any decision being made at all.

He could save both, he told himself. He was fast enough.

So he lunged for the boy, caught him small and safe against his chest, and grabbed air where the thief should have been. He looked across a wall and saw the glint of the gold statue and the flame of the thief’s hair, already distant.

Tor touched the pin he wore proclaiming the Order, with the comm inside it, to report his failure to the masters.

As he did so, he let go of the child, and saw the child’s dirty, grinning face.

He didn’t look scared.

Of course he didn’t. Of course both the thief and the child were from the Nests, and the child had never been in any danger at all.

Tor was so unutterably stupid. He had failed Rosamond again.

He could have the child quartered in the square, but he didn’t have the stomach for it. He waved him back to his work, and he thought, next time, my queen, next time I will be strong enough and good enough. He did not know if he was lying to himself again.

He did not know if he was ever going to be ready for the Trials.

Yvain knew perfectly well that he’d been an idiot. The statue had not been worth the risk. But then, the statue was Rosamond. She never was worth the risk, was she?

He walked through the sunlit square with the statue stashed safe beneath his regulation winter jacket, humming to himself. That big Order trainee with the South-dark skin and the eyes of a fanatic might have covered him in bruises and given him a bad moment—would even a knight sacrifice a kid for a piece of metal?—but Yvain had won.

Take that, Rosamond.

The Trials were on the horizon sure as the sun at dawn, and it had never seemed like a better time to spit in the queen’s eye.

Which, speaking of, Yvain thought. It was market day, the last one before the Trials, and the queen’s ladies-in-waiting were out in force. He saw the distinctive coral-colored gowns everywhere he looked, and he looked at them all, searching for the prettiest face.

Said face belonged to a fetching little thing with crisp curls and demure eyes, standing by a fruit stall.

When Yvain approached her, she said, without looking up, “Do you think Roz would like—” Then she blinked her brown eyes and smiled. “Sorry, wrong man.”

“Ah now,” Yvain said. “You have the right man. You just don’t know it yet.”

She smiled a smile that made her even prettier. “Believe me, I do.”

“Can I not even get a small chance to convince you?” Yvain asked. “A tiny chance. The smallest of chances.”

“Is the Nest brat bothering you, my lady?” asked a voice, and by the sound of it—not quite a woman’s, but not quite a man’s either—Yvain knew it was one of the queen’s guard.

Both Yvain and the lady turned. It was a guardsman, in the uniform of blue on gray. Yvain wondered why they even needed uniforms. It wasn’t like anyone else aspired to be a cut man.

Nest brat , he’d said. It made Yvain think of growing up in the Nests with Persie, how people had shouted the words after them as they ran hand in hand over the rooftops.

“We were just talking, Dareus,” said the girl, touching his arm.

“She didn’t seem bothered,” Yvain said, with the guard’s words ringing in his ears. “Must be a nice novelty for her, talking to a real man.”

“Hmm,” said the guard. He seemed young enough, though it was hard to tell sometimes. Smaller than a real man and with a woman’s soft curve to his face, even if training meant he had muscles like a man.

The guard looked at Yvain with narrowed thoughtful eyes, and Yvain curled his lip into a sneer—who would let that happen to them?—just before he bit his tongue.

Which he did because the guard hooked a foot around his ankle and yanked him down so he fell, hitting his head on the fruit stall on the way down. Then the guard planted a foot on his chest. Yvain grabbed at it and tried to pull his feet out from under him, but the guard was already a little crouched, center of gravity low. Yvain grabbed at the knife hilt in the guard’s boot and brandished—a hilt without a blade.