The Spare Daughter
Melantha
The Hall of Offering had one hundred and twelve steps, and Melantha of House Kora counted every one of them so she would not have to look at her mother.
The steps were white quartz. The sun of Olympeia Prime struck them so hard that they seemed to burn from the inside, and the heat came up through the thin soles of her sandals. Above the Hall, close enough to cast a shadow if the sun ever allowed shadows, rose the Sun-Spire. Crimson and gold banners cracked in the wind at its peak. The god who owned that tower was still far away on the Eastern Campaign, but the whole city behaved as if he were watching.
“Shoulders back,” Lady Kora said, without turning her head.
“They are back.”
“Then put them further back. And stop squinting. You look like a fishwife.”
Melantha opened her eyes wider and let the light stab them. Ninety-one. Ninety-two. Behind her, two house servants carried a single trunk between them. It held three gowns, all of them altered from her mother’s old ones, and a box of face paint that had cost more than the servants earned in a year. House Kora was very old and very proud and very nearly out of money. The roof of their villa on the Fourth Terrace leaked into the ballroom every winter. Last year a piece of the ceiling had fallen into the soup at a dinner party, and her mother had laughed as if it were a charming accident and then cried in the pantry for an hour.
The Tribute Purse would fix the roof. Every High House that presented a daughter at the Ascendance received it, whether the god chose the girl or not. That was the whole of Melantha’s plan. Walk up these steps. Live in this Hall for three weeks. Walk out onto the sand of the arena on the day of the Ascendance, kneel, be looked at, and be sent home.
Nobody chose Kora. Everyone knew the god would choose the Damaris girl. House Damaris was a Founding House, and its daughter had been raised for this since before she could read. The rest of them were spares, offered so the ceremony looked fair.
One hundred and twelve. Melantha stopped at the top and breathed.
The doors of the Hall stood open. Beside them, on either side, stood a Myrmidon.
She had seen the War God’s elite guard before, of course. Everyone had. They lined the avenues on feast days, tall and silent in bronze armor, their faces hidden behind full helms with narrow slits for eyes. Children were told that there was no man inside, only obedience poured into a shape. Melantha had never been close enough to test that theory.
She was close enough now. The Myrmidon on the left was so still that a fly walked across the bronze nose guard of his helm and he did nothing about it.
“Lady Kora. Lady Melantha.” A steward in white came out with a scroll. “House Vane arrived this morning. You are the second tribute. The Damaris household has chosen to prepare its daughter at home, as is the right of a Founding House.”
“Of course they have,” her mother said, and smiled the smile that meant she would like to push someone down a well.
The steward read the rules aloud while they stood in the sun. A tribute may not leave the Hall until the Ascendance. A tribute may receive her family once in each week. A tribute may not be touched by any man before the god has looked at her. Each tribute will be given a Shield, who will guard her door, her steps and her honor, and who will answer to the Legion with his life.
“Your Shield,” the steward said, and nodded at the Myrmidon on the left.
The fly took off. The Myrmidon did not move.
“Does he have a name?” Melantha asked.
The steward looked at her as though she had asked whether the stairs had a name. “Myrmidons give their names to the god when they swear, my lady. He is your Shield. That is all you need to call him.”
Her mother kissed the air beside her cheek. Lady Kora smelled of amber and of the engineered roses that grew all over the Upper Realm, the ones that never wilted because they had never been truly alive.
“Be pleasing,” her mother said quietly. “Be grateful. And remember that if you shame us, there is always next season, and Ianthe is nineteen.”
Melantha’s hands went cold in the heat. “There will be no next season. He is choosing a wife. He only needs one.”
“Gods change their minds.” Lady Kora stepped back. “Three weeks. Do not make me regret that I let you take your sister’s place.”
Let me. As if it had been a kindness. As if Melantha had not stood in the leaking ballroom and watched Ianthe shake so hard that her teeth clicked, and said, I’ll go. Send me. I’m older, and nobody will ever choose me anyway.
Her mother went down the hundred and twelve steps without looking back. Melantha watched her until she was a small, straight, proud shape among the floating aqueducts, and then she turned around.
The Myrmidon had moved. He stood a pace behind her now, exactly where her shadow would have been.
“Well,” she said. “It seems we are going to spend three weeks together. I’m Melantha. I talk too much. I am told it is my worst quality, after my laugh and my eyebrow.”
She touched the small white scar that cut through her right eyebrow. She had fallen out of a fig tree at seven and split it on a garden wall. Her mother had wept more about that scar than about the roof.
The helm looked down at her. Behind the eye slits there was only darkness.
“I’ll take that as a warm welcome,” Melantha said, and walked inside.
The Hall of Offering was beautiful in the way a jewelry box is beautiful. Every wall was white marble veined with gold. Fountains ran in every courtyard. The rooms were cool and high and smelled of lilies, and the beds were so soft that Melantha sank into hers on the first evening and lay there staring at the painted ceiling, feeling like a pearl someone had put away for later.
Seraphine of House Vane had the rooms across the courtyard. She was tall and lovely, with hair like poured copper, and she spent the first supper explaining which of her gowns had been sewn by the finest seamstress on the First Terrace. Then she asked, very sweetly, whether House Kora had ever had its roof repaired. Melantha said yes, last week, by a team of flying horses, and Seraphine did not speak to her again.
After supper the Hall went quiet. Melantha’s Shield took his place outside her door, his back to the carved wood. She knew because she opened it three times to check. Each time he was there, his spear upright, his helm facing the courtyard.
“Do you sleep standing up?” she asked the third time.
Nothing.
“Do you sleep at all? Do you eat? Is there someone inside that armor, or is it just a very well-trained tortoise?”
Nothing. She thought, though she could not have proved it, that the helm turned a hair’s breadth toward her before it turned back.
She closed the door and lay down and did not sleep. The room was too quiet. At home there was always the drip of the roof and Ianthe’s soft snore through the wall and the old house settling around them like a dog turning before it lies down. Here there was only the fountain and the slow, enormous silence of a building made to hold something precious.
Near midnight she gave up. She pulled a dark shawl over her nightgown and went out onto her balcony. There was a narrow stone stair at the end of it, meant for the servants who tended the roof garden. The gate at the bottom was locked. The gate at the top was not.
The roof of the Hall of Offering was flat and white and still warm from the day. A fig tree grew in a great clay pot near the parapet. Melantha went to it the way some people go to a temple. She put her hand on its smooth grey bark, and for the first time since the hundred and twelve steps, she breathed all the way down.
Olympeia Prime lay below her, glowing. The Gilded District floated on its terraces, every roof edged with lamplight. The aqueducts hung in the dark like silver ribbons. Far below, the Lower Districts were a dimmer, redder glow that smelled faintly of salt and smoke even from up here. And beyond them, to the west, there was nothing at all. The Scorned Lands. The grey line of the Cliffs of Silence. The end of the world.
Low in the western sky, so faint that she was never sure she saw it, there was a bruise of violet light. Her old nurse used to say it was the breath of the Exile, the Chaos God the Council had thrown out of the city centuries ago. If you were bad, Agathe used to say, he would come up the cliffs on a road of shadow and carry you off to his castle of black glass, and you would never see the sun again.
Melantha had been a terrible child. She had waited for him for years. He had never come.
She climbed up onto the parapet to see better.
It was wide enough to sit on, so she sat, and then it was wide enough to stand on, so she stood. The wind came up the terraces and pulled her hair loose from its braid. Below her bare toes, the white wall of the Hall dropped three stories to the next terrace, and below that the city fell away and away.
She was not going to jump. She only wanted, for one moment, to stand somewhere nobody had told her to stand.
The hand that closed around her wrist was made of bronze.
It did not yank. It held. Hard and still warm from the day, the jointed fingers of the gauntlet wrapped all the way around her arm, and the force behind them was so steady that she knew at once she could have thrown her whole weight backward off the wall and still not moved him an inch.
“Come down,” said a voice inside the helm. “Lady.”
It was low and rough, as if it were not used often. It was very much a man’s voice. There was someone in there after all.
Melantha looked down at the helm, at the black eye slits, at the place where a mouth would be.
“So you do talk,” she said.
“Come down.”
“I was not going to jump.”
“Then you will not mind coming down.”
She laughed. It came out of her before she could stop it, the laugh her mother hated, too loud and too sudden. It went out over the glowing city and was lost.
The gauntlet did not let go. But when she stepped off the parapet, he took her weight with his other hand at her waist and set her down on the roof as lightly as if she were made of glass. Then he took both hands away at once, as if she had burned him.
A tribute may not be touched by any man before the god has looked at her.
Melantha looked at him. He looked at the city.
“You are going to report this,” she said.
“No.”
“Why not?”
There was a long silence. The fig leaves moved. Somewhere far below, a bell rang the first hour after midnight.
“Because,” said her Shield, “they would give you another guard. And he would not have caught you.”
No Name Beneath the Helm
Evander
The Myrmidon barracks on the Second Terrace had every window cut on the eastern wall. The old soldiers said it was so the sun would wake them. The young ones said it was so no Myrmidon ever had to look west while he slept, toward the cliffs and the dark thing below them. Evander had served twelve years and had stopped believing either story. He thought the god simply liked his men to face the light, the way a farmer likes his crops to face it.
He had not slept in the barracks since the day he was given this post. He slept in snatches, standing, with his back to a carved door in the Hall of Offering, and he did not mind.
That was the first problem.
Guarding a tribute was not an honor. It was what the Legion did with a man it could not use and did not want to waste. Last year, at the edge of the Voidlands, a shadow-stalker had spat on him as it died. The acid had eaten through the leather under his gorget and burned a path from the left side of his jaw down to his collarbone. The healers had saved his life and the use of his neck. They had not been able to save the skin, which healed in a hard, shining rope of scar. When the god marched east this spring, Captain Draxos had looked at the scar and said, “Not you. Not this time,” and Evander had stayed behind to stand outside doors.
He had expected to hate it. Instead, he had been given Melantha of House Kora.
She talked to the door.
He did not know what else to call it. Every night, after the Hall went quiet, she sat on the floor on the other side of the carved wood and talked, and he stood with his back to it and listened, and neither of them pretended that the door was not there.
“I have decided to give you a name,” she said on the third night. “Since the god has yours and is clearly not using it. I thought Tortoise, but that seems unkind. What about Bronze? No. Too obvious. Pillar. Wall. Sir Wall of the Hall. Do you like that?”
He did not answer. A Myrmidon spoke to the one he guarded only to keep her safe.
“I’ll take that as a yes, Sir Wall.”
On the fifth night she told him about the roof, and the soup, and her mother crying in the pantry. On the sixth she told him about her sister Ianthe, who played the lyre and was afraid of thunder and of gods and of most men, and who had shaken so badly at the thought of the arena that Melantha had stood up in front of the whole family and volunteered.
“You must think I’m very brave,” she said through the wood.
He thought she was the bravest person he had guarded in twelve years, and he had once guarded a general through a burning city.
“I’m not,” she went on. “I just know how this ends. Everyone does. He will choose Damaris. I’ll kneel, he’ll look at me for as long as it takes to sneeze, and I’ll go home with a purse full of gold and a story for dinner parties. The worst part will be the sand in my shoes.”
She was quiet for a while after that.
“Unless Damaris breaks her ankle,” she said, much more softly. “Or falls ill. Or he simply looks at her and doesn’t like her nose. Then there would only be Seraphine and me. And she has better hair.”
Evander’s hand tightened on his spear until the wood creaked.
“Was that you?” she asked. “Sir Wall? Was that a noise?”
He said nothing. But on the seventh night, when she asked him whether there had been a person before the helm, a boy with a mother and a name, he heard himself say, “There was.”
The silence on the other side of the door was so complete that he wondered if she had fallen asleep.
“Where?” she whispered.
“The Salt Stair. By the harbor. My father made pots.”
“What was his name?”
“That,” Evander said, “belongs to the god.”
Her mother came on the eighth day, with her sister.
Lady Kora inspected Melantha’s hands and teeth and posture like a buyer at a horse fair and left after a quarter of an hour. Ianthe stayed a few minutes longer. She was a soft, dark, nervous girl who would not look at the Myrmidon, and before she left, she pressed her sister’s hands and whispered something that drained the color from Melantha’s face.
Evander heard it because he heard everything. That was his work.
Agathe was sick. The old nurse, the one who had raised both girls, who now lived in two rooms above a net-maker’s shop on the Salt Stair. Lung fever. The physician would not climb down to the harbor for less than a silver crown, and House Kora did not have a silver crown to spare.
That night Melantha did not talk to the door.
She opened it.
She was dressed in a plain brown wool cloak with the hood up, the kind a kitchen girl might wear. In her hand was a small purse. Every tribute was given an allowance in the Hall, and Evander had watched her spend almost none of it.
“You can’t leave your post,” she said. “I know. So I am not going to ask you to carry this. I’m going to carry it myself, and you are going to stand very still and not see me, the way you didn’t see the fly.”
“No.”
“It is two silver crowns and a jar of honey. I will be back before the bells ring three.”
“If you are seen outside the Hall,” he said, “you will be sent home in disgrace. Your house will lose the Purse. Your sister will take your place next season.”
“And if I stay inside, the woman who taught me to walk will drown in her own lungs.” She lifted her chin. In the lamplight the little white scar through her eyebrow looked like a crack in porcelain. “I chose to come here. Nobody made me. I am choosing this, too. You can stop me. You are much bigger than I am. But you will have to put your hands on me to do it, and we both know what the rules say about that.”
They looked at each other. Behind his eye slits she could see nothing. He could see everything: the pulse beating in her throat, the way her fingers shook on the purse strings, the stubborn set of her mouth.
There were rules for a Shield. He knew them the way he knew his own heartbeat. Guard her door. Guard her steps. Guard her honor. Answer with your life.
Her steps were going to the Salt Stair whether he liked it or not.
“Then I go with you,” Evander said.
They went down by the roof stair, through the kitchen yard and out by the gate where the bakers brought bread at dawn. Evander wore his long dark cloak over his armor, but nothing could hide a Myrmidon’s helm, so he did not try. People stepped out of his way in the streets. It was the first and only time he had been glad of how they feared him.
The Lower Districts at night were another country. The quartz paving gave way to old black stone, slick with things he did not want to name. The air smelled of fish and tar and frying oil. Lamps burned red behind cheap paper shades. Somewhere a drum was beating, and somewhere else a woman was singing a song about a sailor who never came home. Melantha walked fast with her hood low, and he walked one pace behind her, where her shadow would have been if the moon had been up.
Agathe’s rooms were up a ladder at the back of the net-maker’s shop. The old woman lay in a narrow bed under a window, breathing in short, wet pulls. She was small and brown and wrinkled as a walnut, and when she saw Melantha, she struggled up onto her elbows and said, in a voice like a rusty gate, “You foolish girl. You absolutely foolish girl. Come here.”
Evander stood by the ladder while they held each other. He looked at the cracked wall and the drying herbs and the wooden bowl by the bed, and he did not look at the tears on Melantha’s face, because a Myrmidon did not see such things.
They climbed two terraces to the physician’s house and pounded on his door until he came down in his nightshirt. Melantha paid him with the first silver crown and promised him the second when Agathe could sit up and complain about his prices. The physician looked at the bronze helm behind her and decided not to argue.
It was long past the second bell when they started back up toward the Hall.
The alley was a shortcut. Melantha knew it from childhood. It ran between the backs of two slaughterhouses below the Butcher’s Quarter, narrow and dark and stinking of old blood. Halfway along it, Evander heard the scrape of a boot that did not belong to either of them.
“Behind me,” he said.
To her credit, she did not ask why. She moved.
There were four of them. Dock men, broad in the shoulder, with cudgels and a fishing net and one long hook-knife that caught the red light from a window above. They came out of a doorway in front and from behind a stack of barrels at the back, and they did not look at the girl at all. They looked at the armor.
“A Myrmidon,” said the one with the knife. His voice was thick with wine. “All alone in the Butcher’s Quarter. Do you know what bronze sells for at the harbor, friend?”
“Walk away,” Evander said.
“The Legion took my brother east three summers ago. Sent back his sandals.” The man smiled. “I think the Legion owes me a helmet.”
They came at once.
The net came first, flung high and wide. Evander caught it on the shaft of his spear and threw it back into two faces. The first cudgel hit his shoulder plate and rang like a bell. He drove the butt of his spear into a belly, turned, and took the second cudgel on his forearm guard. Pain flashed up to his elbow. Somewhere behind him Melantha shouted, and then there was a crash of glass and a burst of light. She had torn a lantern from its hook and smashed it at a man’s feet, and burning oil ran across the stones.
He saw the knife too late.
It came low under his guard, where the armor of his right forearm met the leather of his glove, and it bit. Hot blood ran into his palm. He caught the man’s wrist with his other hand and squeezed until the knife fell. Then a cudgel he had not seen came around from his blind side and struck the side of his helm with all the weight of a big man’s body behind it.
The world rang white.
He went to one knee. The strap of his helm, weakened by twelve years of sun and sweat, snapped. The bronze tore away from his face and rolled, clanging, across the stones, and stopped at Melantha’s feet.
Night air touched his bare face in an open street for the first time in twelve years. It touched his mouth and his eyes and the long burned rope of his scar. He heard the dock men running, their boots splashing away down the alley. He heard his own breath, loud and naked.
He looked up.
Melantha was standing over him in the light of the burning oil, his helm in both her hands, staring at his face.
And from the mouth of the alley came the long, hard call of a Legion horn, and the light of many torches turning toward them.
“Patrol!” a voice shouted. “Who’s down there? Show yourselves!”
