Chapter One: Temi ONE Temi The streets of Lordsgrave District were not peaceful. They hadn''t been since the day a greyblood army had risen from beneath the city to slaughter hundreds. It had been six moons since the Lordsgrave Massacre, yet Nine Lords'' easternmost slum had not recovered. Broken, abandoned buildings stood on every dirt road. Each household knew someone who had died that day, and each had lost two souls more to the king''s war draft. No one had forgotten how the bluehawks, the invokers, the entire city, had abandoned Lordsgrave District to its fate. A deep anger simmered just beneath the surface, and as the moons went on, it hardened into rage. It shone in the eyes of the dockworkers down on the banks of the River Ae, as they watched galleys slide past, filled with millet and wheat and rice bound for highblood homes.
It hung in the shadows with the beggars and vagabonds, whose cups were empty of alms, their clothes hanging from wasted shoulders. It flavoured every conversation at the newly risen shanties, where those fleeing the squalor of empty villages had set up home. It echoed in the shouts of children as they played on rooftops and in alleyways, children sent outside for longer each day as their elders worked more hours for less coin. It rose, unspoken, in the chatter around cookpots as stews were watered down and meals shared between ever more mouths. It was everywhere: in the stories sung at inns, in the chatter at the teahouse, in the glances of the whores, in the grumbles of the elders, in the gossip at the boreholes, in the cries of the street traders, in the very air itself. The streets of Lordsgrave were not peaceful, and Temi knew, as she stood at the bakery window that morning, that soon the simmering rage would overflow. "Monks coming!" cried Maiwo, running in from the street. Temi''s cousin might have been only nine rains of age, but he knew when the family needed a warning.
"How many?" Aunt Selek called from behind the counter. "Five!" Maiwo said, joining her. Temi looked round to see her willowy, powdered aunt pulling their special loaves down from the back shelves and into the sack they kept ready beneath the counter. Maiwo hefted the thing, his scrawny dark brown arms straining, and then disappeared into the kitchen just as the door banged open. Nothing could clear the bakery faster than the arrival of Father Palui the Pure. As he strode into the bakery, trailing four burly monks in the golden robes of the Garden, their remaining customers slipped outside. all save Old Javesh, Temi''s neighbour, who stood leaning on his cane. Palui''s bulging eyes swept the room, like some great bird of prey sighting its next meal.
He reminded Temi of the giant tortoises Old Baba had told her stories about--long-necked and curious, every movement measured. Beneath the looping golden fabric of his robe, his sinewy brown arms were corded with dense muscle. The knuckles of the hand that gripped his holy staff--the crystal at its heart blinking--were as bruised and bony as a dockside fighter''s. Temi wondered who he''d punched today. She hoped they''d got in a few hits of their own. "Good day, Holy Father," Temi said as Aunt Selek glared at him from beneath her heavy brow. Temi''s Vushemi aunt had never been one to hide her temper, and that had only deepened since her wife, Yeshe, had gone away to war. "Afraid all we got left is Yennish black.
what with the price of grain and all." "Each of the loaves on the shelf, please," Father Palui said, turning to his burly noviciates. "And anything you can find in the back." "You are not coming back here," Aunt Selek said, striding to the end of the counter in a rustle of skirts and beads. "This place, it is only for family." Father Palui eyed her. "You stand in the king''s city, upon the king''s soil, and all that lies within it belongs to the king. Please move aside.
I do not wish to use force." His soft, whistling voice was all the more sinister for how mild his tone was. His face, too; he always wore the same half-smile, as though he had glimpsed beneath the surface of the world and knew every secret it had to tell. Selek held his gaze for a few moments longer, then stepped back, muttering a string of Vushemi curses under her breath. Temi watched, powerless, as the monks strode to the shelves, pulling down the remaining loaves, tearing them open, then casting them aside. "Oi!" shouted Old Javesh. "That''s good bread what you''re throwing away there!" Temi kept her face neutral as the monks strode into the kitchen. She prayed that Maiwo had had the good sense to drag the sack to the back of the yard, but after a moment, she heard more shouts--Uncle Amaan, his child Mtobi--and then one of the monks returned brandishing the sack of special loaves.
"Found this in the back, Your Holiness!" he said. Father Palui strode forward, his eyes bright. Since the first day he arrived on the street--the day Temi''s mother and Aunt Yeshe had gone to war, along with so many--he had been watching the bakery. He came to them several times a week, sometimes alone, sometimes with a swarm of golden monks in tow, to inspect the bakery, the yard, the family room, even their sleep room. He hadn''t yet found Old Baba''s workshop--not since Aunt Selek had moved the goat pen on top of it. But Temi knew it was only a matter of time. Father Palui sensed techwork, and however well the Bakers of Arrant Hill might hide what they did, eventually, he would find it. Father Palui snatched a loaf from the bag and tore it open to reveal a blackened hollow in the middle.
"What is this?" he said, holding it up like a talisman. He threw it at his noviciate, then tore at another, to find the middle much the same. "Looks like mould," Old Javesh said, sucking on his gums. " ''Ere, you selling them, Tem? I''ll take whatever I can get--got ten hungry mouths at home to feed." Father Palui touched the bread with the tip of his staff, as delicately as if it were a wetwoods python. The crystal at its heart began to glow, Forbidden glyphs sliding across its surface, faster, faster. Temi wished, not for the first time, that she shared her brother''s skill for that secret language--ancestors preserve Tunji''s soul. But from the tightness in Father Palui''s jaw, she knew that he had discovered nothing.
"Not sure why that keeps happening," Temi said quickly. "Must be something to do with that last lot of rye we got." "Take them all," Father Palui said, sweeping his eyes across the bakery again. His gaze came to rest on her. "That is not mould." "You will not!" Aunt Selek said, striding forward to take the sack back. "Auntie," Temi said softly, as Selek pulled on the sack of bread. "Oh my, what''s happening?" came a soft voice, and there stood Mama Elleth, Temi''s Yennish grandmother, a round, pale-skinned, white-haired woman.
She wore a striped Yennish smock still dusted with flour, and the bemused frown of an elder who no longer quite understood the world. "They are thieves!" Selek declared, as the monk wrenched the sack from her hands. "These items are being confiscated," Palui said. "They pose a threat to king and kingdom. Now please stand aside." "Well now, that is a lot of words," Mama Elleth said pleasantly. She turned to Temi. "Temi dear, what is the holy man saying? Something about taking food from hungry locals?" If Mama Elleth was good at one thing, aside from baking, it was sowing unease with the sweetest of smiles.
Every Lordsgrave resident south of the river knew about her sharp eyes and even sharper mind, but to these monks, she was the picture of a bumbling elder. As the monks strode out into the street, Old Baba lifted shakily from his chair beside the door, hand wobbling as he steadied himself on his cane. "How the fuck did he know they were in the bread?" Temi muttered as she followed. "I thought you said he wouldn''t be able to detect them?" A warmth slid up her arm from the scar a spirit witch had given her a lifetime ago. The heat blossomed in her chest, as enticing as Jebbanese red, as forbidding as the flames of a pyre. A burst of emotions uncurled in Temi''s mind--amusement, irritation, condescension and that familiar, barely contained fury. The sensation coalesced into a voice that echoed in the recesses of Temi''s mind. [What does it matter?] Vunaji said.
[He will find nothing, I assure you.] "Aren''t you going to stop them?" Old Baba said, pointing after the monks. "Leave it, Old Baba." But her grandfather ignored her, hobbling after them and shouting, "Stop this! Bring back our bread!" Within a heartbeat, half a dozen people had emerged from the wooden shacks and mudbrick huts of Arrant Hill. "What''s going on, Old Uncle?" "You all right?" "Hoy, monk--what''s in the sack?" Once, the people of Lordsgrave would never have dared speak to a monk in anger. But that had been before the Lordsgrave Massacre, before the holy ones abandoned the district in its time of greatest need, before the monks marched hundreds of its people to a doomed war. So when Old Baba hobbled after them and took hold of the sack, nobody in the crowd trailing behind him sought to intervene. Then it happened.
One of the monks pushed Old Baba back, and he went tumbling to the ground with a soft "Ah-ah!" "What the fuck?" cried Jumiki, child of the woodcutter at the bottom of the hill. Their fist snapped out--reflexively, really; just an instinct, and the.