A Throne for Sisters

They hit her with every failure. The sisters lashed out with belts or canes, while the boys simply used their fists. All the time, they chanted the same thing.

“You’re not fit to be a free girl. You’re not fit to be a free girl.”

Kate felt hands on her and she tried to twist and fight back. She turned to scratch and punch and bite, and it was only as she came back to herself that she realized that the hands holding her weren’t those of the boys or the Masked Sisters. Instead, Emeline stood over her, with a finger to her lips.

“Quiet,” she said. “Too much noise, and you’ll wake the barge hands.”

Kate managed to get a grip on herself in time to keep from shouting out of sheer contrariness and panic.

“I thought you were the barge hand,” Kate managed.

She saw Emeline shake her head. “They’re sleeping up front. Said they’d carry me upriver if I guided the boat while they slept.”

Kate didn’t feel quite as safe then. Her new friend had saved her, and Kate had assumed that it was just the two of them on the boat, making their way down the wide river. Now, there were men she didn’t know there somewhere, and a part of Kate wanted to go up to them and shove them off the boat just for the crime of daring to be there.

She didn’t really. It was just that she needed to hit something then, and the orphanage’s inhabitants weren’t close at hand. She wanted to go back there and burn it to the ground, just so that she could be sure that it was gone from her life. She wanted revenge for every humiliation and blow that had been landed on her in the years she’d been there.

“Hey, you’re safe now,” Emeline said. “There’s no need to worry. The ones who were chasing you won’t catch you now.”

Kate nodded, but there was a part of her that still didn’t believe it. The House of the Unclaimed wasn’t a place you left behind. Instead, it was somewhere to carry with you, always there no matter how far you ran. Maybe it was one reason why they didn’t bother to lock the doors.

In an effort to ignore it all, Kate looked around at the city. In the evening light, the fog that had encompassed it was starting to burn away, revealing the wide expanse of the river stretching out on either side of them, lit by sailors’ lamps and cut through with small sandbanks and eddy currents, patches of faster water and slow, meandering stretches.

The city on either side seemed just as varied. There were wooden buildings mixed with stone ones, some standing in orderly rows, others reaching out like fingers into the space belonging to the flowing water. Some of the buildings obviously used the river for their business, with pulley systems or jetties showing the spots where goods were loaded and unloaded. Others were simply there with views out over the water for wealthy inhabitants.

Kate saw one man sitting there, trying to paint the river scene by lamplight, and she found herself wondering why anyone would bother. It wasn’t beautiful, out there, was it? The city impinged on it too much for that. The water had the earthy sediment-and-sewage-filled smell of a waterway that people just threw things into. The river’s surface was too full of boats and barges to see the reeds along the edges, or the birds that flitted amongst them. It wasn’t anywhere that she would have wanted to paint.

“Careful,” Emeline said as Kate started to stand up. “There are bridges ahead. You don’t want to hit your head.”

Kate dutifully sat back down again, looking ahead to where there was indeed a long bridge stretching across the river, low enough that probably only low barges like this one could get past it.

“They have to have separate docks on the other side,” Emeline said. “Only the barges can go through without hitting their masts on it.”

She pushed with her long steering pole as they got closer, lining the barge up with one of the bridge’s arches. Kate could see spikes there, with the heads of criminals preserved in pitch so that they wouldn’t rot as quickly. She wondered what their crimes were. Theft? Treason? Something in between?

There were open spaces by the side of the river as well as buildings. In those spaces, Kate saw men drilling for war, working with wooden muskets and crossbows because no one wanted to spend money on the real thing for mere recruits. Some of them were drilling in squares with pikes, while a few, probably officers, were fencing in front of the others with rapiers.

“You look as though you want to swim across and join them,” Emeline said.

“Wouldn’t you?” Kate said. “To be that strong, with no one to tell you what to do again.”

Emeline laughed at that. “In one of the mercenary crews? All they have is people giving them orders. Besides, would you want to go across the Knife-Water and risk your life for some cause that doesn’t mean anything?”

Kate wasn’t sure about that. Put the way Emeline said it, the idea sounded like folly, but it also sounded like a chance of adventure.

“Besides, you might not have to go abroad if the rumors are true,” Emeline said.

With most people, Kate would have read their thoughts to try to understand what they meant, but when she reached out for the other girl’s, she couldn’t see inside.

Kate, Emeline sent, don’t you know that’s rude?

“I’m sorry,” Kate said. She didn’t want to upset her new friend. “What did you mean, though?”

“Just that wars have a habit of not staying where you want them,” Emeline replied. “People talk as though the Knife-Water is some unassailable gap, rather than just twenty miles of calm sea.”

Kate hadn’t thought about it that way. When she’d heard about the wars across the water between the fragmented states there, it had always seemed like something happening on the other side of the world. In truth, parts of the lands there were probably closer to Ashton than the watermills of the north, or the granite mountain spaces beyond that.

“So, you’re not planning to run off and join one of the companies,” Kate said. “What then? Why are you finding rides to take you upriver?”

Emeline half closed her eyes, and Kate knew that there was some daydream or other flickering behind those eyelids.

“For Stonehome,” Emeline said in a voice that seemed caught up in the rapture of it for a moment.

“Stonehome?” Kate said. “What’s that?”

She saw the other girl’s eyes widen in surprise. “You don’t know? But you… you’re like me. You can hear thoughts!”

She probably said that a little louder than she intended. Certainly, it was the loudest thing she’d said since Kate had woken up.

“Stonehome is a place for people like us,” Emeline said. “They say that it’s a place where we can be safe, and others won’t attack us for what we can do.”

Kate wasn’t sure that she believed such a place could exist. She barely believed that other people with the same gift as her were out there in the world. She’d been so sure that it was just her and her sister, for so long.

“You’re sure this place exists?” Kate asked. It barely seemed possible.

“I’ve… heard rumors,” Emeline said. “I’m not sure where it is exactly. If it were in the open, it would be too dangerous. They say it’s out past the Ridings somewhere. I figured that I could focus on getting out of the city, then find it afterwards. I mean, people go there; it can’t be impossible to find.”

It seemed to be a lot for the other girl to pin her hopes on, but at least the boat was a good way for them to get out of the city. And maybe trying to find a place where those like them could be safe wasn’t such a bad dream to have.

“What was it like, in the orphanage?” Emeline asked.

Kate shook her head. “Worse than you could imagine. They treated us as if we weren’t even people, not really. Just inconvenient things to be shaped and sold.”

It was what they’d been, in a way. The House of the Unclaimed pretended to be a place of safety for abandoned children, but in fact, it was a kind of factory for indentured servants, existing to provide them with skills that would make them useful once they reached an age to be sold.

“What about you?” Kate asked. “How did you come to be on a boat like this?”

Emeline shrugged. “I lived out on the streets for a while. It was… hard.”

Kate knew how much pain could fit into a pause like that one. She reached out to wrap an arm around the other girl.

“I used to keep watch for… well, they were thieves, basically,” Emeline said. “They’d go into eating houses and inns, and they’d walk out in other people’s clothes, complete with whatever was in the pockets. I could tell them when there were people paying attention to them.”

Kate thought of the ways she’d had to use her own powers to steal. “What happened?”

Emeline shrugged. “I caught some of their thoughts. They were thinking of getting rid of me. They thought I was too soft-hearted.”

Kate could guess how hard that must have been. She was about to offer her new friend sympathy when she heard the sound of footsteps. This was what she hated about her talent: that it was so hit and miss. Why couldn’t it warn her about every potential problem?