CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  -One Knot at a Time

  The dogs were quiet. That was the strangest part. Somewhere out in the yard, their corner of the world had gone still. The wild barking from the afternoon was gone. Every so often one of them let out a soft, pained huff, a broken sound in the dark.

  Inside the barracks, the air was thick with sweat and old straw. Voices rose and fell in little knots.

  “…never seen them go at each other like that…”

  “…Flea almost took Kurn’s hand off…”

  “…good. Bastard kicks hard…”

  Laughter flared, a quick burst of mean sound that faded into coughs and shivers.

  I didn’t sit. I stood near the door, close enough that I could see the outline of the bar in my mind even with it on the other side of the wood. One arm folded tight across my ribs. The other rested under my chin, fingers at my lower lip, that elbow propped on my forearm.

  Two problems, I thought. The dogs are out of the way. That part’s done. The other problem lay across the door like a fallen tree. How do you lift a bar when you can’t see it? How do you unhook a lock from the wrong side?

  I could picture it. The door itself was thick planks banded in iron on the outside. I’d watched wardens wrestle it often enough. The bar was a length of wood set into iron cups bolted to the wall. When they dropped it, the weight held the door shut against its frame. From in here, it might as well have been a cliff.

  I frowned at the seam where wood met wood. There were gaps there, thin as a knife edge, where old planks didn’t quite meet. Cold edged through them at night. On most nights so did the jangle of chains and a snore from the nearest dog. Tonight there was only quiet. If air could slip through, metal could too. A knife. A hook. Something I could use to push or lift.

  “Hey, Seventeen.”

  The small voice pulled me back. I turned my head. Forty-eight hovered a step away, blanket clutched around his shoulders. In the thin strip of light leaking in around the door, his eyes looked even bigger than usual.

  “What are you thinking about?” the boy asked.

  I held his gaze for a moment without speaking. Forty-eight shifted his weight, but he didn’t look away. He waited. The others nearby were busy with their own whispers, talk of dogs and beatings and meat that had turned to mud. No one seemed interested in the boy who’d spent the afternoon hauling himself in and out of the ditch while wardens cursed.

  He won’t remember when the day snaps back, I thought. None of them do. Morning comes and their words go with it. That was the strange mercy in all of this. Shame didn’t stick. Only the bruises did.

  “This door,” I said at last. “I was thinking how to open it. From in here.”

  Forty-eight’s fingers tightened on his blanket.

  “You’re not thinking of trying to escape, are you?” he whispered.

  His voice pitched up on the last word, sharp with a child’s panic. I let the question hang and looked back at the door.

  “If I can’t open it,” I said, “there’s no point thinking about escape.”

  Forty-eight swallowed.

  “If you try,” he said, “they’ll kill you.”

  The corner of my mouth twitched.

  “I know,” I said.

  Forty-eight stared at me.

  “So why think about it at all?” he asked. “Why think about the door if you’re not going to run?”

  “I told you,” I said. “I’m not thinking about running. I’m thinking about how to open the door.”

  There was a shuffle behind us. Another voice cut in, sharp and wary.

  “If you open it and run,” the crooked-nosed boy said, “they won’t just punish you. They’ll punish all of us. After they kill you.”

  He came up on my other side, close enough that I could see the iron ring around his ankle and the number stamped into it. Eleven.

  I’d never bothered to read it before. I let my eyes rest on the mark before raising them to his face.

  “Eleven,” I said.

  The boy blinked.

  “What?”

  “That’s your number,” I said. “Eleven.”

  I let it settle and nodded toward the door.

  “And like I said, I’m not talking about running. I’m thinking about the door. From in here. How it works.” I shrugged a little. “You can think of it as a game.”

  Forty-eight’s brow furrowed.

  “A game?” he echoed. “Like Tepuk?”

  Eleven snorted.

  “You played Tepuk?” he asked Forty-eight. “You don’t look like you ever ran for anything in your life.”

  The word Tepuk hit me sideways.

  For a heartbeat, the barracks vanished. I was back on the steppe, lungs burning with clean cold air instead of dust. Frosted grass bent and sprang up under my boots as we tore across it. The ball was just a leather skin stuffed tight with felt, but in that moment it was everything.

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  I heard our laughter. Saw the smear of red on one boy’s cheek where someone’s boot had caught him as we all lunged for the same kick. My foot swung, caught the ball just right, sent it arcing past the line of piled stones the others guarded.

  I shouted something, the word lost in the roar in my chest. My uncle’s voice came from the hill above.

  The memory snapped and dropped me back into the dim barracks, air thick and stale with other people’s breath.

  Eleven was still talking.

  “…my father was the clan smith,” he was saying. “So I know a little about iron. He let me watch while he worked. Hammer, tongs, heat. I wanted to be like him. Make blades, shoe horses, fix anything that bent wrong.”

  Something hot and sour twisted in my gut. I didn’t see the forge. I saw a different yurt. Bigger than the one I’d grown up in. Thick felt walls, painted poles, a braided rug underfoot. The table in the center was crowded, my father at the head, my aunt, my cousins. Bowls of thin stew, a plate of meat in the middle like something too important to touch.

  My stepmother’s bracelets had clinked when she leaned forward. Her teeth had flashed in the lamplight.

  “Sell the whore’s brat,” she’d said, tapping one painted nail against the table. “He’s done nothing but drag us into bad luck. The last raid failed. The Zhanar watch the border now. If you want grain, sell the boy. Tell them he’s a son. Tell them he’s an heir. They’ll pay more.”

  My father hadn’t looked at me when he agreed. My jaw tightened. My fingers drifted up to the small weight at my throat, the bit of cord and the little thing hanging from it. The only piece of the steppe I’d been allowed to keep.

  “Except this door isn’t metal,” Forty-eight said, tugging me back.

  Eleven clicked his tongue.

  “Yes, but the thing that keeps it shut isn’t wood,” he said. “It’s that big bar outside. And the thing that keeps the bar from falling off the wall is iron. Old iron.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “Explain,” I said.

  Eleven shifted, warming to the subject.

  “The bar rests in iron cups,” he said. “You saw them when they brought you in, yeah? One on each side. The cups have lips that curl up so the bar doesn’t roll out if someone bumps the door. They’re bolted into the posts.”

  He jerked his chin toward the left-hand wall, where the cold bit hardest.

  “The big ones that frame the door,” he went on. “They put those up when the fort went up. Before we were born. Maybe before our fathers were. Iron like that rusts. It loosens. Sometimes it cracks.”

  “And?” I said.

  “And,” Eleven said, frowning, clearly annoyed he had to spell it out, “if you had something strong and thin enough, like the point of a sword, you could slide it through the gaps between the planks and push up on the lip of the iron from underneath. Or pry at the bolt. Once it moves a little, the weight of the bar does the rest. It slides out of its seat and there’s nothing holding the door shut but its own weight and the latch.”

  Forty-eight’s mouth fell open.

  “That would work?” he whispered.

  “If the iron’s as rotten as it looks, yes,” Eleven said. “If I had a blade and time, I could do it.” He sniffed, then added, almost grudging, “If I could get the blade.”

  Forty-eight looked from him to me and back again.

  “Wow,” he breathed. “You are smarter than you look.”

  Eleven’s head snapped around. “What did you say, rat?” he hissed.

  Forty-eight flinched, shrinking into his blanket.

  I straightened.

  “Don’t call each other rats,” I said.

  Both boys looked at me.

  “That’s what the Zhanar bastards call us,” I went on. “Their word, their insult. You put it in your mouths and throw it at each other, you’re just doing their work for them.”

  Silence pressed in for a second. Somewhere outside, one of the dogs turned in its sleep and let out a low whine.

  Forty-eight blinked slowly. “Sorry,” he muttered.

  Eleven looked away, jaw tight.

  I let the moment sit and glanced back at him.

  “And you,” I said. “You really are smarter than you look, Eleven.”

  The corner of his mouth ticked up.

  Forty-eight let out a quick, stifled laugh.

  Eleven scowled, but there was a flicker of something else under it. Pride, maybe. Or relief at being seen as more than another chain with a number on it.

  “Of course I am,” he said. “You’ll see. I’ll surprise you with my genius from now on. Even the clan shaman wanted to teach me once. Said I should learn letters and omens from him. My father sent my older brother instead. I remember. It was the Year of the Hare, second month, when he went.”

  He sniffed again, softer.

  “The shaman threw him out before the Hare year was over,” he added. “Said he had the brains of a goat.”

  Forty-eight stared.

  “Your father was a smith,” he said. “The shaman wanted you for an apprentice. How did you end up here?”

  Eleven’s mouth flattened.

  “Famine,” he said after a moment. “Famine. The Hare year didn’t give rain. The Ox year didn’t either. The herds grew thin. Our clan chief called the families together and said each household would send one child to the Zhanar. Payment. A promise we wouldn’t raid their roads or their wagons.”

  He lifted his ankle slightly, the chain clinking.

  “I was the youngest,” Eleven said. “So they sold me. Year turned to Dragon. They counted us like goats and loaded us on wagons. That’s how.”

  He let his foot drop.

  “They told our parents we’d serve in forts,” he went on. “Guard roads, carry spears, get fed. Nobody said anything about chains. Same story in every clan, I hear. Same years. Same hunger.”

  Forty-eight nodded slowly.

  “Yes,” he said. “The elders in my yurt said the clan chief made a bargain with the Zhanar. One child from each family. One less mouth to feed. One more chain for their walls. They said the ones who went would be soldiers or servants in Zhanar lands,” he added quietly. “No one said they wouldn’t be allowed to come home.”

  He drew his blanket tighter.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “There are no steppes anymore. Just forts and fields and this place. Talking about the grass won’t bring it back.”

  My hand rose without thinking, fingers finding the small shape under my shirt. I closed my fist around it until the edges bit into my palm.

  Maybe the steppe is gone for you, I thought. Not for me. For me it’s still there when I close my eyes.

  I let my hand fall.

  “So,” I said. “The bar sits in rotten iron. The iron can be moved with the right leverage. You’re sure.”

  Eleven rolled his eyes.

  “I’m not stupid,” he said. “I watched my father set hinges and brackets all my life. You give me something strong enough, thin enough, long enough to reach through the crack… yes. I can make it move.”

  I thought of the yard. Rauk’s hand on the knife. The blade there wasn’t sword-long, but it had reach. I’d seen Rauk split joints and bone with it.

  My mind traced the distance from Rauk’s stool by the cookhouse wall to the barracks door. From the door out across the yard in my memory, over chains, hinges, nails, all the places iron bit wood. The wardens kept their blades high and close, never where a slave’s hand could reach. But the fort was full of metal, and metal wore down. Sooner or later a link would break, a nail would work loose, a sliver of iron would end up in the dirt. From a piece like that to the narrow gap between planks where rust flaked when the air was damp. If not a sword, I thought, a knife instead.

  “What about a knife instead of a sword?” I asked. “If the metal’s good.”

  Eleven frowned, thinking.

  “If it doesn’t bend when you lean on it, if the point’s narrow enough, then yeah,” he said. “Why not. Iron doesn’t care whether the thing pushing it has a name. It only cares about force.”

  He shook his head, trying to scatter the thoughts.

  “Enough,” he muttered. “We should sleep. The bell’ll drag us up soon enough, and the overseer doesn’t like it when his slaves yawn.”

  Eleven turned and picked his way back through the rows of pallets, chain dragging softly behind him.

  Forty-eight lingered a heartbeat longer. He looked at me, eyes shiny in the half-dark.

  “Don’t do anything foolish,” he whispered. “Please.”

  I didn’t answer. His gaze held on me before it dropped. Forty-eight shuffled back to his place and curled around his thin blanket. The thin light at the door’s edge faded to almost nothing. I stood a moment longer by the door, listening to the weight of the bar on the other side in my imagination, the dogs’ rough breaths somewhere outside, the slow settling of bodies inside.

  I’m not thinking about running, I told myself. Not yet. First the bar. Next the door. After that the yard. One knot at a time.

  I went to my pallet, lay down, and stared up at the cracked plank overhead until my eyes burned. At some point, sleep found me.

  The bell rang.

  I woke to the same crack in the ceiling, the same sour breath close by, the same cold seeping in around the frame of the door. I could hear the dogs back at their pegs, chains clinking just beyond the wood.

  The day began again.