We Leave Together, стр. 55
I see an image of the man, in Jona’s memory, the only time Jona saw him and it stuck. Lord Severa Jona has one boot on the carriage step. He hands the parasol to his servant. Lord Severa turns back once to look at his house.
Jona catches his father’s eye from a second story window. Jona waves. His father clenches his jaw. Then, as if catching his bad behavior and correcting himself, the father smiles. He lifts one hand up in a wave. He gets into the carriage with the three old king’s men and he’s gone forever.
CHAPTER 17
We climbed over the rubble that used to be his home. We dove into the sewers after him, smelling his stain in the ground. We ran through the dark.
He was here. He had to be here. There was nowhere else to run with Sabachthani burned to ash except into the ground, into the inns of the city, or into the streets. He had no safe harbor, now. He had no known place to hide. Eritrean was looking for him. There were king’s men at all harbors. Erin’s faithful swarmed the hills, howling wolves, packs of wolves that never bothered to pull the skin of man across their beautiful, terrible bodies—claw and tooth and strength of the wild beasts.
The dogs of the city know that we hunt. They that remember the woods in the their blood howl back to us. They howl when they smell the demon stink on their streets and alleys.
Howl, dogs. We howl back, and we run.
The streets are clean enough of the stain that we can find him.
The fires have burned enough down that we can find him. He has no harbor here.
Cry out for us, dogs. This is your city, dogs, where you piss your boundary lines and claim all buildings and streets. You would have his stain removed.
They cry back.
We all hunt.
***
Jona spent weeks alone after Rachel left. He drifted listlessly in and out of alcohol. He showed up for duty his uniform torn and wrinkled and the undershirt showing through the places where the old uniform had burned through. Calipari sent him home, and docked his pay. Jona needed new uniforms soon, but his mother couldn’t make them fast enough.
Jona didn’t care.
Jona spent his nights drinking and avoiding his mother. For weeks, he showed up for work a little drunk, and sobered up slowly in the daylight until night came and he drank again.
In the daylight, Jona sank like his father’s burning ships. Calipari wrote a letter to the lieutenant requesting a change of duties for his troublesome corporal gone to pieces over a woman. Sergeant Calipari was concerned that after he retired, Corporal Lord Joni would be put under a new sergeant that didn’t know how to keep Lord Joni in line. The lieutenant wrote back word that Jona was going to be the new sergeant, and probably an officer soon after if his friends in the nobility had anything to say about it, and it didn’t matter what happened in the Pens to anybody as long as whatever happened stayed there, and the meat kept coming through.
Calipari waited two weeks out until the end of his assignment, watching Jona show up dirty and drunk, and the other king’s men avoiding him.
Nothing mattered in the Pens.
Calipari asked for an early out of the desk job, and a chance to travel to his promised ground. His request was accepted. To his surprise, he was assigned Corporal Jona Lord Joni to go with him, for the inspection tour of the northern guard towers. The lieutenant suggested it would be a chance for Calipari to clean up and train the next boy in the Pens.
Calipari thought nothing of it, then, and just wanted to drag Jona away from the drinking halls a while and help him clear his head.
As far as Calipari knew, Jona had never had a girl before, so he had never lost one before. It takes a few to learn how to lose one.
Jona died on this journey. We found his skull where he fell. Calipari drove a sword through his chest where Rachel destroyed him.
***
There are two nations on this isthmus. We have spoken long of Dogsland. North of Dogsland, past a series of fat hills that stretches one bumpy finger into the sea, there exists another sea power. I call it Northland, for it is north of Dogsland, though this, too, is not the real name. Let them not burn our woods over mere words in a scroll.
To talk of Northland is to talk of Lord Sabachthani. Lord Sabachthani stood on the hills that border the two lands, and sacrificed to the demons of Elishta. In one particular valley, the two main land armies smashed together. The king commanded Lord Sabachthani to win the field with his magic, no matter the cost. Sabachthani called upon his demon lords.
Purple smoke followed a powerful wind into the valley, and this presence ignited in the blood-stained grass with a purple flame. No flesh or fragment of grass burned in the flame. The souls inside the flesh burned, and the force of life in all the grass. Each body that fell dead below the thrust of sword stood up again, and turned their weapons upon the living.
Everything the fire touched was blighted. The armies of the dead marched along the red valley, guarding their red valley until their bodies and bones rotted into dust.
The fighting stopped. Neither nation had the land army to overcome the city walls after this. The merchant companies forged expensive alliances with both nations, and commerce