To Saiya, it was another day in the Lowwards, outside the high stone walls of Verinna.
She had spent eleven years learning the shape of being on the wrong side of them. Which streets the market spilled into on a busy day, which alleys went quiet after dark, which route was the quickest way home towards the River District. Today the square was filled with people, Highward and Lowward alike, and she was winning.
“Give it back,” the boy from the Highwards frowned, watching his prized glass marble roll neatly into her palm. “That’s mine.”
“No. It was yours. And you lost it fair and square. What stings more? Losing to a Lowward? Or losing to a girl?” She’d grinned, and the children around her howled. This had been her whole morning, dusty knees and the click of glass and clay, the small fierce pleasure of taking something off someone who thought was above them.
The market fell still when the first bell came from the citadel, high on the mountain above them.
She felt it in her bones, the way the sound dropped and echoed across the city, her heart matching in pace. More bells followed, from the Order temples to the palace at the city’s heart, one bronze throat after another taking up the warning until all of Verinna was shouting the same word. Run.
She was on her feet before the marbles finished scattering. The Highward children they were competing with already gone.
Above the low rooftops the sky had torn. A seam of violet light, widening at its edges, and the air around them became too cold for the season. By the sounds of screaming and the way the ground vibrated with running feet, it was close.
She seized the nearest child by the wrist and shouted for the rest, voice swallowed by the panic already racing through the street.
“Stay close!” She stirred one boy ahead of her as another grabbed her shirt. “Don’t let go of each other, don’t stop!”
The marbles were gone, rolling into gutters, crushed under boots. It didn’t matter. They could always win more glass. They could not win back a life lost to Rift.
The main road had become a single panicked animal, all elbows and cries of fear as everyone ran for the gate. The merchants had gone through first with their carts and purses, the iron always stood open for coin. By the time half of the market had emptied, the gate was grinding down on the rest of them.
The wards that protected Verinna stopped at the wall. So did the city’s mercy.
Saiya had been raised on the Council’s promise that the protection would reach further one day. When the old texts gave up their secrets, when the Rune-Masters had enough metal. When, when, when. Her father had a word for that promise. A pretty stone, he’d called it, polished smooth and passed hand to hand so no one looked too hard at the empty palm holding it. They had been polishing it for centuries.
The gate was already down by the time they reached it, chains shrieking as the last of the barrier dragged into place. She didn’t waste a breath. She pulled left instead, toward the western plinth where the wall bulged outward, her friend Iris and her siblings at her heels along with half a dozen smaller children who should have stayed closer to home where they belonged.
“Are you sure it’s this one?” Iris dropped to a crouch, dragging the youngest down with her.
Saiya didn’t answer. She was already tracing the stone with her fingers the way her father had taught her, palm flat, hunting the groves for the one place where it went smooth. There. The swirl under her finger tips, under it the seam he had traced a hundred times while she complained she would never need it.
Four strokes. Left. Up. Down. Right.
She felt a pulse as marks appeared on the rock, and the wall breathed open.
Someone was standing on the other side.
Two boys older than her, fourteen or fifteen, staring back with the same shock she could feel on her own face. Highwards, head to foot, the clean boots, the coats cut by someone paid well, the easy way they held themselves. Behind them, deeper inside, were more. Watching.
She felt the change in posture of those at her back. The children drawing their hoods up. Even Iris, who lived within the walls of Verinna, pulled her cloak across her face. Saiya bristled, stood her ground, and lifted her chin.
“It isn’t the Nerathi,” the dark-haired boy said. Grey eyes, moving over her huddle and dismissing it as he turned his head. “Just the Lows.”
She knew the words they used to those born in the Lowwards. Lows. Lowborn. Dustrat. Each one stung. She let none of them reach into her chest, only held his stare when he faced her again until the corner of his mouth pulled down.
“You didn’t even touch the wall, Corin.” The fairer boy was looking at his friend now, half a laugh in his tone. “You didn’t open the door. So how did she—”
A monstrous cry came up out of the streets behind her, and every child at her back flinched as one. The sound crawled over her skin. They were coming closer.
Corin’s face hardened. “What are you doing this close to a Rift?”
“Getting away from it.” She didn’t step back. “The gate’s shut. So unless you’d like to watch us die out here, let us through.”
He swore under his breath, and stood aside. “In. All of you. Now.”
She herded them in. The passage was wide and dim, the stone scraping their shoulders as they pressed against the near wall, unwilling to go a step deeper than they had to, the Rift and the creatures pouring out of it still roaring at their backs. But the dark ahead of them was not empty, and it held a different kind of enemy.
“Just leave them where they belong.”
“Lowborn scum.”
“There are enough Dustrats inside the wall already—”
She felt the children around her shrink, shoulders dropping, and something in her went cold and level.
“None of you would last a day on our side of the wall,” she said into the dark, “so shut your mouths. Close the tunnel.”
Corin hadn’t moved to close it. He was looking at her in a wary and curious way.
“No one outside the wall should know about this tunnel,” he said. “So how do you?”
For half a breath she almost told him. My father showed me. She swallowed the words that almost escaped her lips. “It opened. That’s all that matters. Shut it now.”
“It can’t be that bad out there. The Riftguards always handle it,” a boy in the dark called out.
Saiya shook her head angrily, shouting down the tunnel, “You don’t know how bad it can get. You don’t live outside the walls.”
Corin paused and his hand lifted toward the seam to close it then heard a cheer from the walls above. A quick glance up and they saw a scatter of Highborns leaning over, watching the fight unfold from the safety of the walls. The fair boy was already leaning past him, grinning at the violet light bleeding down the street.
“Sounds like we’re winning. Let’s take a look,” Hal stepped out.
“Hal—” Corin went a pace after him, and Saiya instinctively caught a fistful of his retreating cloak.
“Are you mad? Get back inside!”
“Don’t fret.” Hal’s grin didn’t budge, one hand resting on the clean little sword at his waist. “My sister’s out there.”
She stared at him. “Wardbloods with no brains.”
“Petty.” Corin turned back to her. “You scold them about name-calling, then throw it back just as easily.”
“You started it.” Her teeth clenched. He wasn’t wrong, and that only made it worse. “And it’s the way you say it. We’re not lower than you. Stepping out into a Rift with a sword that’s never been used only proves what they say about your sort.”
“Which is?” One brow rose.
“That money doesn’t buy common sense.”
He bristled, but he didn’t look away. “We’re not going out there to fight. Just to look. We can handle ourselves.”
She laughed. “With those?” Her gaze flicked to the short swords, too clean to have ever met anything. “You’re no Riftguard.”
“Neither are you,” he retorted. “And you should not know about this tunnel. Only the Crown and its guards do. You treat the rules and the law like an insult when it is there to protect the city. That’s how people like you get caught. Or worse.”
“People like me?” She sank into a mocking bow. “Forgive me, your highness. I’ll go die quietly out of your way since you’re obviously on official business.”
His jaw tightened, and for half a breath she thought her sarcasm landed an insult.
Then something small shot past all of them. A boy younger than any of them, a sword too big for the hand that held it.
“Lyric!” Corin lunged and missed by inches.
“I only want to see!” Lyric called, already gone round the corner. “Before it’s over—”
Saiya’s feet moved without thinking, preparing to chase him down and drag him back. Stupid Wardpets, her mind snarled, even as her feet carried her past Corin and out into the open—
Hands caught her shoulders and threw her back.
Her spine hit stone hard enough to empty her lungs. She came up off the wall snarling, fury where breath should have been.
“I know these streets and you don’t,” she choked out, struggling to get back up. “My father’s a Riftguard. I can find him faster than—”
“So is Hal’s sister.” Corin’s eyes cut to the corner where the small boy had gone. “I’m not dealing with a half-wild girl with a death wish outside on top of finding him.”
“I can move faster than—”
“Stay here and don’t—”
“You’ll die out there—”
“Nasg!”
One turn of his fingers and her hands snapped back to the stone as though iron had closed round her wrists. Except there was no iron, only a cold weight biting in, and a low hum waking in the rock at her back. She threw her whole weight forward. The bind didn’t give, didn’t even strain.
Rune magic. A simple binding word spell, not one any ordinary citizen knew, the kind of thing kept locked behind the Council. Whoever he was, he was no idle Highward boy.
“You can’t do this!”
“I can, and I will.” His eyes went again to the corner, darkening in panic. “It’ll fade in a few minutes.” He spoke past her, into the dark. “Don’t let them out until it’s over. No matter what she says. Any of them.”
Hal was already in the street, that maddening half-smile still in place. “He couldn’t have gone far. And you really could stand to learn how to talk to girls, mate.”
“Just move, Hal. We need to find my brother.”
The wall sealed.
Saiya screamed at the stone until there was nothing left in her. The cold weight on her wrists held long after the boys’ footsteps had gone, then released all at once, so that her hands dropped to her sides as if they were never there. Iris’s hand found her shoulder. Neither of them spoke. The other Highwards, in the dark behind them, didn’t either.
When the bells finally stopped, she opened the wall herself and stepped out into the after.
The fight was over. Riftguards moved among the fallen, healers running towards those who needed aid. She looked for her father in every dark uniform.
She did not find him.
It was a week before Iris found her under the willow by the River Stagra, in the circle of six standing stones where they had scattered what the Rift attack had left them of her father. Only ash that wasn’t completely him, because there had been little left to give the fire. The Nerathi saw to that.
Iris looked hollowed out, as though the week had eaten her from the inside. She sat down without a word and laid a fistful of wildflowers at the foot of the tree, among the others already gone brown in the sun. Saiya did not ask where she had been, but she felt that she understood. Her parents probably kept her inside, punishing her for being beyond the walls, afraid to let her go past the city again. The Rift had been the worst the city had seen in years. But Iris had always been stubborn about loyalty.
For a long while neither of them spoke. The wind moved in the willow and the river kept its own counsel. Saiya had no tears left; she had spent them in the first days, and now there was only the flat numb weight where her father’s voice should have been, and the dagger in her lap, his favourite, the one he had taught her with.
Iris spoke to the river, not to her.
“They’ve finished the counting.” Her voice cracking, a pause Saiya felt in her teeth. “Five Riftguards gone. I’m– I’m so sorry about your father. I heard that he was the only one found.”
Saiya had no words. Hearing it said so gently still took something out of her she hadn’t known she still had.
“Over thirty injured. But fifty-three people are still missing. Four Highwards. The other forty-nine—” Iris didn’t finish. They both knew who she was referring to.
“I still can’t believe how bad it was, how much worse it could have been. If you hadn’t found the tunnel, Saiya, we’d all have—” Iris stopped, and pulled a thread loose from her sleeve, the way she always did when she was agitated. “Do you think the others were taken through?”
Taken through. Four Riftguards. Fifty-three citizens. Pulled screaming into the Rift, swallowed by the tear in the sky, and the sky sewn shut behind them. Lost to the world. Saiya turned the dagger over in her hands, still staring at the river. She shuddered, remembering the screams and nodded once. “May the Veil know their name.”
“May the Veil know their name,” Iris echoed quietly. She paused before she continued. “Remember the boys in the tunnel?” Iris finally looked at her, and whatever was in her face made Saiya’s stomach drop before the words arrived.
“What about them?”
“They saved the boy that ran out ahead. Lyric.”
Relief moved through her, and right behind it, anger.
“Good for him.”
“One leg broken but he is lucky to be alive. The other two though,” Iris went on, twisting another thread loose. “They didn’t make it—”
“Taken through?”
“No. They found their bodies.”
Saiya shut her eyes and breathed out, “They shouldn’t have gone out. I tried to stop them.”
Iris nodded, then sniffed. “After they saved Lyric, they got cornered.”
“That’s—” Saiya lowered her head.
“But they came back. Reborn.”
The wind seemed to stop. Saiya turned her head and saw, for the first time, how red Iris’s eyes were. How she trembled.
“A day later. Both of them. Marked. The youngest anyone can remember. They’re to be made Riftguards when they’re eighteen. That boy Corin… and Hal. They’re being sent to Vaerngard now. To begin training.”
Saiya saw the grief sitting plain on her friend’s face and didn’t press, only touched her shoulder to steady her as she shook.
“Did you know them?”
“Family friends,” Iris said quickly. “I couldn’t show my face that day. You know my parents would never let me out again if they knew I’d gone past the walls.”
Saiya nodded, guilt weighing down on her shoulders. “I’m… sorry.” She looked down at the dagger.
Her father had come back once, dying as a city guard not long after she was born, then walking back out of the Veil marked, to serve as a Riftguard instead. The Veil had handed him his gift the way it had just handed it to a boy who’d pinned her wrists to a wall and told her that her place was inside. The same gift. Or perhaps it was a curse. To be taken out of one life and forced to serve in another, only to die again. Those boys died, then returned. Yet her father won’t. No one did a second time.
She didn’t know what to feel.
She hated that boy, Corin, for the way he’d spoken to her, for binding her hands, for taking from her the right to act on her own terms. And she felt the loss of her father all the more sharply for it. Maybe, if she’d been out there, she could have warned him. Saved him. Saved the boys who ran out of the safety of the tunnel.
She felt sorry and the same time angry. They hadn’t deserved it, yet was certain that somehow it could have never been avoided. She had warned them, yet they hadn’t listened. Wardbloods never did.
She leaned into Iris, and Iris stayed, the two of them small against the high walls of Verinna behind them, the same walls that had decided who was worth keeping inside it.
And Saiya closed her hand around her father’s dagger until the hilt went warm in her grip, the way it must once have gone warm in his. She promised herself that she would never let it go.