I've missed a few days due to being busy but had opportunity to catch up a little today by having two posts in one day. Today's challenge - a snippet from a novel you want to write - gave me a chance to revisit the same world that we met in the challenge from Day 8 as they are both excerpts from the first draft of a novel I am currently working on...
1
Militza Tio knew she had, at best, eight
hours before her unwitting part in all of this came to light; eight hours
before the trail of scattered fragments and loose clues led them, inevitably,
to come for her.
She
stood and stared out of the small slit window of her quarters; her vantage
point giving her a good view of the eastern quarter of Top Side, its sprawling
and chaotic landscape of houses and shacks, bars and warehouses, market stalls
and bazaars spreading across the grey metal skin of Trinity and haphazardly piling
up against the soaring heights of The Spinnacles, like fungus growing against
tree trunks. The cityscape was bustling with life and activity, even at this
early hour, but she looked over and beyond it, instead taking in the sun as it began
to peek its way over the hills on the distant horizon, a ruddy orange ball
obscured by the morning mist. She knew that Trinity would have reached those
hills by tomorrow morning, would already be grinding its way through the muddy
valleys that lay beyond. And, if she wanted to live, she must be long gone by
then.
For the second
time that morning, she picked up and read the handwritten note that had been
left on her pillow; its meaning was unequivocal. She had been betrayed,
utterly.
She had woken
briefly in the night when he left their bed, but she had been too tired and her
head too dulled by the wine she had drank at the party to wake up properly and
so he had hushed her with a kiss and she had let her head again find the pillow
and slept on for another hour, maybe two, before finally stirring as dawn began
to break grey outside her window. The bed beside her had been empty; the sheets
still bore his impression, were still fresh with his scent, but she had known
immediately that something was wrong. She had felt a sudden anxious coldness
that caused her skin to prickle with goosebumps even before she had noticed the
ivory note that he had left for her on the pillow.
She had looked
at it. A small paper square, a piece of folded paper upon which he had written
her name in black ink. Frowning, she had reached across the bed and plucked it
with her fingers and opened it to read the message within.
There is something you need to know it
began and she had only reached the second sentence before she let the paper
slip absently from her fingers and slid, naked, from between the bed sheets and
walked to the bathroom. She padded barefoot across the cold metal floor and
looked inside. There was some small part of her that clung to the belief that
he was going to be standing there when she opened the door, that she would find
him standing there and awkwardly shaving himself in the small mirror on the
wall as he had done each morning for the three months that they had lived
together, that she would meet his jade eyes in the mirror and sneak up behind
him, slip her arms beneath his and encircle his chest, hold him pressed tight
to her and tell him about the strangest dream that she had just woken from. But
it was empty, and she could cling to the belief no longer.
She had
returned to stand by the bed and read the note from start to finish. It ended
with I hope you can find it in your heart
to, one day, forgive me.
She had stood there,
frozen beside the bed, for a few minutes, the note clasped tightly in her hand
as she tried to make sense of the thick knot of emotions that had instantly
gathered in her stomach; the pain, the anger, the disappointment, the fear; all
curled up and bound together in a tangled mess. A few minutes of confusion and
doubt, a few minutes of wanting to believe that what she was reading couldn’t
possibly be true, and then her training kicked in and her instincts took full control
of the situation.
Placing
the note back on the pillow, she had dressed swiftly but calmly; picking out a beige
cotton shirt and a pair of green trousers with utility pouches that would be
suitable for travelling before lacing up her black leather boots and fastening a
black sword belt at her waist. She then moved to the set of wooden drawers
beside her bed and opened the lower drawer, pulling out a set of rough brown
fabric robes, a fadwar, from its
place beneath a folded blanket. The
fadwar was a common sight in Trinity, it was a nondescript robe worn by any
number of traders and merchants and was large enough that she could simply slip
it over the top of her other clothes. She found the robes uncomfortable, the coarse
material scratching at her exposed skin whenever she moved, but she knew that
wearing it would allow her to more easily blend in with the crowds and its hood
would serve to hide her colourfully braided hair which would otherwise easily
identify her.
Gathering her
belongings had proved to be easy, she owned very little that she truly cared
for but was still surprised to find that her entire life here in Trinity could
be so rapidly condensed into a single shoulder bag. She gathered two fresh sets
of clothes and stuffed them into the bottom of the bag before opening the upper
drawer and examining its contents; finally taking a black firesteel, a bundle
of folded maps, a small brass compass, a hunting knife and a green box that
contained some basic medical aid. There were a few additional items that she
would have liked to have gathered from the general supplies area; some tinder,
some candles, a sleeping bag; but she knew that to do so would likely raise
awkward questions and arouse unwanted suspicions with the guards in charge of
the provisions. No, she had decided, it was better that she make do with what
she had and minimise the risk of discovery than have her escape attempt end
before it had even begun.
While packing had been a relatively simple
task, following her instincts without question and making the commitment to run
was proving to be more difficult; there was a large part of her that wanted to
stay and face down the gathering storm; that wanted to try to prove her
innocence and preserve her honour; but she knew, logically, that this could not
happen. They would discover the evidence and they would assume she was somehow
complicit in all of this; they would come for her and they would take her
inability to meaningfully answer their questions not as innocence, but as
obstinacy. Then they would work hard to extract the truths they would be
certain that she possessed and, by the time that they realised that she truly
knew nothing, it would be far too late for her.
Militza knew
that Aron Tarvis would not let whatever feelings he held for her impinge, in
any way, upon the duty that he was sworn to perform; the same man who had
treated her as something close to a daughter during these last seven years
would take little pleasure, but have no qualms, in doing whatever it might take
to loosen her tongue. He was honour bound to serve the interests of the Regent
and the City and she understood that there was nothing more important to him
than the blood oath which he had sworn upon entering the Shield Guard. It was
the same blood oath that she was now about to break and it made her ache to
think of how disappointed he would be in her, how disappointed they would all
be, when everything finally came to light. But she knew that their
disappointment could not be the equal of her life.
She had delayed
looking through the other set of drawers, the ones that lay on his side of the
bed, but finally opened them and poured over the contents. A pair of trousers
and some socks, a bracelet, a blue fountain pen and a bottle of black ink; she
wondered whether he had composed the letter while she slept or whether he had
written it the day before while she had been too busy getting ready to notice. She
wondered whether, as they had looked into each other’s eyes only twelve hours
earlier, he had already written the letter that he knew would break her heart.
There were no
clues waiting for her in the few possessions that he had left behind, nothing
that might suggest where had gone. She had expected nothing less from a man who
had so seamlessly slipped beneath her radar, a man who had fooled her into
believing that he loved her and failed to arouse even the slightest of
suspicions until the moment he disappeared, like a ghost, from her life.
And so, for the
second time that morning, she picked up and read the note, as if in the hope
that doing so would change the words on the page. But of course it did not. The message of betrayal remained the
same and she committed the message’s contents to her memory, searing every
single word deep into her brain, before crumpling the ivory paper into a tight ball
and bringing it to the flame of the solitary candle that burned in her room.
The edge of the
paper curled and charred brown for a moment before finally taking light.
Militza held it between her thumb and forefinger, fire licking painfully hot
and yellow at her flesh, until the paper was nothing more than a blackened ball
and the skin of her fingers and thumb was red. She welcomed the pain, even in
the knowledge that it was temporary and that her body would have repaired the
damage to it within minutes; she welcomed anything that, even briefly, loosened
the hold that the pain in her heart had over her. Finally, she closed her fist
tight around the remains of the paper, opening her hand to allow a shower of
black ashes to spill to the floor.
The final item remaining for her to take was
the sword in its scabbard. It was held, horizontally, between two clasps on the
wall; dull grey and absent of any kind of markings or ornamentation. There had
been a time, when she was much younger, that she had hated how mundane the
Shield Guard looked in their plain armour and drab swords; one of her earliest
memories had been of seeing Baron Caruthers arriving in Trinity with a retinue
of his personal guard, clad in ornate silver armour embossed with the sigil of
the City of Ironcloud, and she had felt sure that this was how soldiers should look. But, over time, she had come to
appreciate that aesthetics did nothing to sharpen a dull sword or to strengthen
one’s armour against a foe. In combat, purpose was everything.
She
walked across the room and took the scabbard and sword from its fixture on the
wall; the feel of it in her hand so natural, so light and well balanced, that
it sometimes felt that she was only truly whole in those moments when she was holding
it. In a way, she supposed, it was her,
or she was it.
Militza hefted
the fadwar in folds up around her
waist with one hand and, with the other, slipped the sword and its scabbard into
its place on her belt, tightening its mounting and then letting the robes fall
back into place. She examined herself as best she could without a mirror; the outline
of the sword seemed to be well disguised by the flow of the material but she
was certain that it would be easily spotted by a trained eye. It would be vital
that she avoided as many trained eyes as possible.
Being separated
from her blade like this felt unnatural to her; she felt almost naked at the
thought of her sword lying beneath this layer of fabric, so near yet out of her
reach. With a soft sigh to herself, she rummaged in her bag and removed the
hunting knife, using its tip to make a small incision in the material of the fadwar a few inches above her right hip.
If things should go badly she would, at least, have some way to get access to
her sword.
She took one
last look at her room, at the bed still unmade, and fought back the hot flood
of anger that tried to well up inside her. This had been her room for the last
three years, their room for the last three months, and she was being forced to
leave it all behind. She had to leave
everything behind; every person she knew or cared about, every place she was
familiar with, all needed to be excised from her life if she was to survive. She
put the anger away, compartmentalised her feelings as she had been taught to; she
couldn’t afford to waste even a moment on a pointless outpouring of emotion; if
she wanted to get out of Trinity alive then she needed to make every single
second count.
She had been
betrayed by Jude Anstra. She had been betrayed by the man she loved, betrayed
the very morning after she had celebrated her wedding to him. She was being
forced to desert the city that had meant everything to her, forced to dishonour
herself and bring shame upon the Shield Guard and those in it that she would
have counted as friends. All that was left to her now was to find the trail
that he would have left, to find it and follow it. She must flee Trinity and
its Caravan, must abandon its protection and follow that trail, wherever it
might take her.
And when Militza
Tio found Jude Anstra, she would make sure that he paid for his betrayal in
blood.
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