just like a noose
They'll name a city after us
And later say it's all our fault.
We're living in a den of thieves
Rummaging for answers.
- Regina Spektor
The boy who had once been Demetri was nearly used to living in someone else's skin. Nearly – there was still a disconnect, that brief moment when someone shouted a name and he failed to turn, when someone inspecting his papers asked him for his birthday and he almost answered with the prince's, the urge to stand straight and meet men's eyes, rather than keeping his head down and hurrying on and hoping for peace. The girl who had once been Yenifer was used to it; she lied about him being deaf in one ear to excuse his slow responses, teased him about notions of upperosity to cover up the slightest twinge of Angeles that still clung to his accent, pinched his elbow to remind him what position he now held in society and to turn his eyes downwards. He wasn't sure he could have done it without her, but he wasn't sure she could have done it without him either. She still crawled into his bed every night and they put their arms around each other like the mortars were still raining down around them and if they let go they might never find one another again. She still flinched when tall men leaned too close, still inclined to starve herself given half the chance, still startled when a car backfired in the depths of the city. The boy who had been Demetri couldn't say that he judged her. She wasn't any weaker for it. She still spat venom.
They found work where they could. Girls were easier employed than boys, because the only jobs for the latter were in the militias and the garrisons, carrying guns bigger than themselves. A few days pay here, a few days there, head low when they saw the rebels or the Crown. The girl who had been Yenifer – and he knew now that wasn't, had never been, her real name but was what a real name anyway, what made one more valid than the other? - ran a few errands for the exiles, but she was one street kid among thousands, and though the alert may have gone out for the waifish girl who had disappeared with the prince, they had found that most of the ground troops didn't care to inspect too closely, didn't think to differentiate between the orphans who ran the errands on alternating days, rarely even looked her in the face. On those days, when the Marshals rolled through in their big trucks and men and women in camo patrolled, the boy who had been Demetri tended to stay in the apartment and just hope they wouldn't conduct a search. That was the only good thing about war, he thought – but of course it wasn't good – but the fact was that finding a home was never hard. Plenty of people had fled for the Crown territories, leaving houses and flats lying unlocked and decorated and ripe for invasion. This one had belonged to a family of five, two New Asian men smiling broadly, a lanky older boy and two little twin girls, smiling from the mantelpieces and the walls like distant memories. The girl who had been Yenifer had smashed two of the pictures one night, when the nightmares were bad, and then she had taped them back up again, very carefully, slicing open her fingers on the edges of the broken glass and smearing blood on the sheets when she slipped back into bed with him. He wasn't sure how often she slept anymore. He wasn't sure if she did. He wasn't sure he could, if she wasn't there.
Someone else's house, someone else's name, someone else's clothes. He didn't even really think of himself as Demetri anymore. Demetri had loved Set and Ysabel. Demetri had missed Liara and Mordred. Demetri had wanted to go home. And he didn't, not anymore, not really. There were days that it felt as though he had never been anywhere else, had never known any other life, and when he said this to the girl who had been Yenifer, she just nodded and said, "you're learning." It was a strange lesson. Nothing mattered. Not if he didn't want it to. They could leave, pick up new papers, jump the border and head into a different war-torn province, start a new, dirtier business wherever they went. Sometimes they did. A year after they had left the Kingdom, the girl who was not Yenifer anymore had been caught with stolen rations and beaten bloody in the town square for her sins, and the next day they climbed onto the roof of a train heading south and fell asleep under the sun, climbing down some hours later, striking out to find the nearest town and start all over again.
No one in their right mind would call this a happy ending, and yet Yenifer had said to him some nights ago, when they were sitting on the roof of their stolen apartment and watching the rebels celebrate Demetri's birthday with a paltry smattering of fireworks, "that's the thing about fairytales, Hector. They always end with, and then they lived happily ever after" and he had said, "what's the thing, Cei?" and she said "and then they lived" and he said "happily?" and she had not answered him. She had only set her head on his shoulder and he had wound his fingers through her hair and watched all the stars shatter into falling sparks as rebels whooped and cried aloud far below.
And so it goes.
Days keep coming, one out, one in, one out, one in, as sure and as mundane as breathing, just keep coming, and over time he forgot to be afraid.
Demetri doesn't know what he wishes he had, but he does know that there's no time now for thinking things like that. Survival, Yenifer has pointed out, is about belief. If you believe you belong here, then you do. If you believe there's no reason for the rebel patrols to inspect you too closely, then there's not. If you believe that you are Taj, or Gawain, or Hector, then you are. Names only have as much power as you accord them.
And if you believe that this is life, and this is all that life is, then it is so.
The most work that he found was burying the bodies. The more bodies dropped, the more bodies were needed to put them in the ground. The first time he did it, he was so overwhelmed by the memories of the massacre in Pongotown that his hands shook and his mind reeled and he was not finished, did not return to the house, until long after dark.
He was half-expecting that she would be gone – that she would have run. As she always did. As she always would.
She had made tea.
He isn't sure how to admit that he is starting to forget what it was to be Demetri.
Vardi Tayna never called the General father but she was fifteen years old the first time she called him papa.
They'd been in the ruined edifice, the carcass, of some abandoned house in a newly devastated town in the south, fresh from subjection to Thiago's cleaning regime, and the job that they'd done with the curtains in particular had put the spymaster into such a good mood that he had started shuffling a pack of cards, and asking about if anyone felt like a sly game of conquian while they waited for Demetri to finish cooking, and Demetri had protested that it wasn't him taking up the kitchen, for Klahan had commandeered the kitchen to strew flour about and make dumplings in anticipation of Vardi Tayna's return from a particularly long mission embedded in the heart of the capital. The air was heavy-laden with the scent of pastry and the sound of hurled lazy insults and the sound of rum pilfered from the officer's stores and poured from Wick's hand, as the night slowly tired of being night.
The General had been despairing of Demetri's kanom jeeb for a few months now, critiquing constantly his ratio of pork to shrimp, the way he wrapped the pastry, the texture of the straw mushrooms within, so the two were in the kitchen like apprentice and master, a blonde head and a dark head bent over the work surface, the General's calloused fingers moving the dumplings with the ease he usually reserved for handling a transmission or a trigger. "You see," he would murmur, and Demetri would nod.
"Chan kheaci. I see."
It was the constant refrain of the general-that-had-been and the king-that-would-be. A king trained only in war would know only war; the General had long ago, quite silently, determined that Demetri ought to know the stars, and the kitchen, and the bare bones of diplomacy. But what kind of a king could be raised here, out in the wastes?
It troubled him. Vardi Tayna could always tell that it troubled him, even if she did not say so; Demetri could always tell that it troubled him, and said so often.
It is the nature of children to read their father's thoughts and to understand his moods.
You see?
Chi. Yes, I see.
The dumplings then had to be steamed. It was a lengthy process, during which Demetri worked around the older man, preparing some Maehmay-inspired stew of what rations they'd carried with them from their latest foray into Fennley: a favourable cut of beef, some diced rabbit, banana leaves. The General watched from his vigil by the steamer, and occasionally offered some insight on how his wife would have done it – his advice was rarely taken.
The stars had faded and the dumplings had cooled when the radio Uzohola was adjusting had begun to spit out the fritz-and-static of approximated morse, someone holding the button down and releasing it, rapid-fire, to send a sort of SOS. It came out as a set of numbers. The General had said, "Demetri, get me a box for the dumplings. I need to go get her."
No one needed to ask who her was.
He found her in what the Anchorites called a maskor, one of the abandoned shipping container which rose out of the Wastelands like the shape of sleeping giants, often half-submerged into the land like something hatching. The rebels used these as prisons, and shelters, and base of operations, sometimes. Sometimes, they rigged them full of booby-traps so that anyone who so much as looked at it funny found themselves missing limbs and portions of their face.
The General wouldn't have put it past Vardi Tayna to have found her way to one of these trapped maskorrak, but judging by the trail of blood that led from without to within, she wasn't in the best shape to have dodged any dynamite herself.
"I'm glad you called." The last time she had been injured, she had maintained radio silence, hiding out in some seaside village in Hansport for three or five weeks until she could put weight on her ankle again. They'd all thought she was dead. She had learned to fish. "What have you done to yourself this time?"
"Eto bol'no." It hurts.
For good reason. Her arm, cradled against her chest, was a mass of torn flesh and cloth – he wasn't sure he could distinguish elbow from shoulder. She had torn open her jeans for material for a makeshift sling, baring a knee with a deep gash across its cap, a sliver of bone showing.
"Dogs?"
In the darkness of the space, he could see her nod as only a mere suggestion in the dark. She was still small, younger than her fifteen years – a number that the General always appended with an asterix, for Vardi Tayna had never maintained a great continuity with her age. She had been twelve for three years, because she had decided to be thirteen was a bad omen and she didn't like the shape of the number 14. She had changed the date of her birthday thrice. She insisted she was the same age as Taj and Wick and Demetri, though the boys were all of different ages.
"Well," she said, "first they shot me. Then the dogs got me."
"And then you got them?"
"Precisely."
"That's my girl."
He had handed her the bottle of rum and counted out the drinks – one for joy, two for sorrow, three for courage and four for courage – "bigger measures than that, Tayna, come on" – and she'd eaten two dumplings – "Demetri made these, didn't he?" – and he had dug her letters out of her bag, crumpled and blood-stained, so thoroughly blood-stained as to be useless – "am I going to be very disappointed, little one?" – and she handed him back the bottle and nodded to indicate she was ready to stand – "just be grateful they didn't catch me in the head."
He helped her up. She leaned against the wall of the maskor as he flipped the bottle in his hand and considered the far gable. The General always threw the empty bottle at the wall before they left - "if it smashes," he would remark darkly, "very bad luck".
It almost always smashed.
"Maybe you should try not throwing it so hard, papa," Vardi Tayna said.
"Where's the fun in that?"
It had smashed.
Wickaninnish was an old Tla-o-qui-aht name, carried by a famous Clayoquet chief in a time long before the war and long before Illéa. He had never liked his name too much: too long, too loaded, too identifying in caste and family and ethnicity. For most of his life, he had avoided the obvious nickname – most people called him Kani, if they had to call him at all. Sometimes they called him Harjo, which was his Muscogee stepfather's surname, and, sometimes they called him Masso, which was his deadbeat father's name, and if they belonged to the Crown, they called him redskin more often than they would admit.
Nowadays, of course, they usually called him ten-five-thirty-eight.
Prisoner number 10538. `He had asked them for a shorter number, or maybe 24601. Would have been easier to remember. They hadn't seemed amused. Maybe it was already in use somewhere in the massive complex, he had reasoned. The Royal Central Angeles Penitentiary was a small city in and of itself, with nearly thirty thousand inmates housed within a single facility. Most of the good numbers were probably already taken. There were just so many damn people here.
It had made it very difficult to make friends, he had always thought. It had made it very difficult to plan.
The other prisoners didn't tend to talk to people on death row, anyway, not if they could avoid it. They all figured Kani Masso must have done something awful to earn his place here. The forgivable stuff – the theft, the adultery, the fighting – that all got you put in the cell, not put on the row.
He'd heard all sorts of nasty stories about himself in the long three months since he'd got here. Give him another three, and he'd start to believe some of them.
It might have gone easier if he had accepted a brand. Most of the men on the row – the arsonists, the rapists, the poisoners – had at least one. A few of the more audacious had two. That usually got them into trouble, when they were found out. And they were always found out. Loyalty was very important in these parts, Kani had realised, but important like a heavy rock, not important like currency.
Important like a heavy rock. Maybe he was losing his mind. Well, that was pretty expected in a place like this.
A place like this was a long, corridor-shaped cell, designed for ten people, currently holding thirty-two. There was a relatively high turnover – weirdly, people just kept dying. Funny, that. Kani had earned his bed about ten weeks in, simply by virtue of out-living any previous owners and out-fighting any new hopefuls. He always tried to be grateful in victory, but his determination to keep his inch-thick mattress and single tog duvet hadn't earned him many friends.
Most of the guys he got along with had been hanged a few days in, anyway. Hanged or beheaded. Did they get a say in it? He made a mental note to ask about that, if he got the choice. He didn't particularly like the idea of hanging off the palace walls for the foreseeable; having his head on a pike sounded a touch more exciting, if the chance came.
If he got the choice, if he got the chance, if he was still here when the day came.
He was working on it.
It wasn't going well.
There were cell inspections twice an hour, so sleeping was something close to an impossibility. Two guards came in to patrol what they called the avenues, the aisles between the beds, shining a penlight in the faces of the men to make sure that everyone was accounted for. A third guard remained at the door, which he kept locked. If the inmates tried to riot, they'd only succeed in locking themselves in with two members of staff. Not ideal.
On this particular night, Kani was half-dozing on his treasured bed when the guard in his avenue targeted him with the penlight; by now, he barely flinched from the abrupt brightness, but when he was abruptly hauled to the ground with a hand on his collar – well, flinched was maybe not the right word. But he had learned by now that fighting back was not productive. He had earned more than a few black eyes trying to defend the more timid inmates, in his first few weeks here. About a month in, he'd found out exactly what crimes the meek Five he was defending had committed to earn his place on the avenue and, well, then Kani had been forced to hand out a few beatings of his own.
So, yeah, when he hit the ground, he just covered his head and covered his crotch and hoped for the best.
And… nothing.
He looked up. The uniform was ill-fitting; the face was unshaven; the hair was long and shaggy. A desperate man recognises another.
Kani said, somewhat dazedly, "is this a prison break?"
The man standing over him said, "if we play our cards right."
Oh. So it was a riot.
The other prisoner was looking at him expectantly. Oh, fuck. Were they expecting him to show a brand? Around him, the other prisoners were stirring, recognising that the routine had been disrupted. "What's the plan?"
After a moment, he determined from the silence that there probably was none.
Oh. Well. They'd figure something out.
They had to.
"Get up."
What did he honestly have to lose? His execution was scheduled for six days from now. Dead was dead.
"Get up."
By the end of the day, he had joined the General; by the end of the day, he had pledged himself to Demetri's cause; by the end of the day, he was no longer Kani Masso. He had always liked Wick Harjo a little better anyway. He seemed like a nicer guy.
"Get up."
He got up.
Vardi Tayna never called the General father but she was seventeen years old the last time she called him papa.
She said - no, she snarled. "Papa, I am not leaving you here."
Maybe she was sixteen. Maybe eighteen. She had never had baby fat; she had lines where older women had lines, more scars than a child should have. The General had always thought she was younger than she let them know.
"Kra-chok." Little mirror. He always called her that when he needed her to focus – like he was drawing attention to their similarities. They were similar. It had always helped, when they came under scrutiny. An old Asian man and a young Asian girl, the same dark eyes, the same way of holding themselves. Father and daughter, godfather and godchild, grandfather and granddaughter. Papa and kra-chok. "Of course you are."
Someone else would have said but they'll kill you. She did not. They both knew it was true. They did not need reminding.
"I'm not," she said, and the General thought she was trying to convince herself, more than him. "I'm not going to leave–"
He had taken her hand, and pressed his golden ring into it. Not his wedding ring – he would die with that on his finger and the image of Maehmay in his eye. It was the ring he had always worn, impressed with the royal seal and the motto of the Dunin family: astra inclinant, sed non obligant.
The stars incline us but do not bind us.
"Remember what we spoke about." Even now, he spoke enormously measuredly. "Remember about the Selection."
She had set her jaw, as Taj did, a vein pulsing in her throat. "Huyhn..."
"It's all part of the plan," the General had said. "It's all part of the plan."
He was dead five hours later.
"Gabriel," Yenifer said softly. "Please -"
"Gabe," Demetri whispered. "Come on..."
But Gabriel was rooted to the ground, and Raphael was running towards them, her face etched with fear, shouting not for her young king but for her brother, Gabriel don't do it please don't go and Gabriel was frozen and there were silhouettes moving towards them, maybe seeming closer than they really were, and Yenifer was pulling Demetri by the hand and saying,we have to go we have to go now they're going to catch us if we don't go DEMETRI.
So they ran.
And Gabriel watched them go.
He did not move. He wasn't sure he could have. For weeks and months and years later, he would wonder what it would have been like to go with them. To have run when they run. To have stayed with them, rather than with the rebellion.
Who would he have been?
He and Herry were moved to live with Pa after that. Herry, the small, anxious boy from Dominica, was happier on the farm; Gabriel could see why. It would have been good for anyone's nerves. It was peaceful here. Far from the war, from from the chaos, far from the city. It was just the sky and the grass and gentle days and quiet nights.
He thought Raphael was a little jealous of it all, on the occasions that she came to visit. She'd petitioned for permission to remain, but what reason could they find? They were just two in a kingdom of orphans. They deserved no special treatment. They certainly didn't deserve an armed guard.
But she returned every chance that she got – weekends, leave, Rosh Hashanah. The others came to visit as well, at first – Michael was stationed in the nearby market town, so Pa made sure she had an open invitation to Sunday lunch if she cared for it, but Kafziel and Samael had gone north and, Eremiel was in Hansport, so visits were infrequent and stilted and curtailed. Zadkiel was deeper in the Wastelands, and Uriel had died the previous Christmas. She had been the first sister to die, but as the long war dragged on, she was not the last.
Gabriel rather thought that was the reason he overheard the General and Raphael arguing so much, whenever she did visit. They would send him and Herry out to the farm, to feed the horses or get meat from the freezer or pick flowers for Pa, and he supposed they expected him to be out of earshot while they fought, but each time he and Herry would creep closer to the door and lean in, quite silently, to try and hear what was being said. Here, insulated from the war, it was very peaceful – but it was easy to forget that lives were being lost, that Queen Ysabel was still trying to kill them, that Demetri and Yenefer were still out there somewhere in the Wastelands.
But they never heard anything important about that. It was just Rafa arguing against Gabriel's conscription, as far as he could tell. He wasn't sure if that was fair – whether he deserved the exception, whether anyone did – but the Smetiskos had lost six sisters at this point and Gabriel could tell how desperate Raphael was not to lose more family.
The last argument they had was the worst. From outside the door, Gabriel could tell that Raphael was losing her temper. She so rarely did.
"I won't let you," she kept saying. "I won't let you."
"How do you intend to stop me?"
That hung in the air, very uncomfortably. Herry looked at Demetri with wide eyes, because it was clear that the answer was being communicated between the two and it was clear that the answer was not pleasant.
After that, Gabriel and Herry had to re-enter the kitchen because they'd been gone long enough that they'd arouse suspicion otherwise. The last thing Raphael said was, "Klahan, if you do this, I won't forgive you and the whole rebellion will lose faith."
The General had just said, "boys, how is the old mare's leg looking? Will she be good for the harvest next week?
And Raphael had turned, and smiled, and said nothing.
But he could tell that the General was thinking about what she was saying.
The very next day, he was informed that Herry's name was now, and would always be, Demetri.
