“It’s right to see people punished for their crimes,” she says to us. “We could all use a reminder that there are punishments for those who take what they haven’t earned. We have a duty to be grateful for all our rulers do to provide for us.”
I remember my parents, killed for trying to bring more medicine to the people. I consider Mistress Kendall, executed in the street for crying out in her grief, or poor Gillis, who definitely didn’t deserve to die because his mother was too poor to buy medicine for them both.
I’m not sure what I feel, really, but it definitely isn’t gratitude.
There are wagons full of people heading for the gates to the Royal Sector, so Karri and I hitch up our homespun skirts and climb onto the first one with space available while Mistress Solomon pays an extra coin to sit up front near the driver. We’re pressed together at the back, sharing a bale of hay to sit on, but I don’t mind. The day is overcast and cool, with a hint of mist in the air.
Karri leans close. “Have you seen your sweetheart?” she murmurs. “He’s not one of them, is he?”
I meet her gaze. “No. He’s not.” I remember Wes’s eyes, almost hurt when I said I thought he was caught up with the others from Steel City. “He’s not a smuggler.”
“He’s well, then?”
I think of Weston in the firelight, his thumb tracing over my lip like it was something precious, and I press my fingertips to my mouth. I could almost taste his breath as he said, Not never, Tessa. But not right now.
Karri grins and bumps me with her shoulder. “He’s well.”
I wonder if he’ll be somewhere in the crowd today. He said a lot of the forge workers would likely be in attendance, but whether he meant it in solidarity or in judgment, I couldn’t tell.
Probably just like everyone else flocking to the gates: partly horrified, partly curious.
Partly relieved, because someone else’s downfall generally means your own isn’t imminent.
I don’t grin back at Karri, because it feels odd to smile while we’re being carted along to watch someone else die. Wes wasn’t among them, but I wonder if he knows them, or if he knows someone close to them. No one in Kandala is a stranger to what happens to smugglers, but always before it’s been one or two, like Wes and me. Never a group.
When the fevers first began taking lives, it wasn’t long after King Harristan had come to power, naming his brother, Prince Corrick, as King’s Justice. Father was a true apothecary then, providing real medicines and elixirs, not like the potions and herbs that Mistress Solomon dispenses. He knew how to ease an ache or salve a burn or calm a colicky infant. Mother and Father weren’t anxious about a new king, at least not at first. King Harristan and his brother were young, but the royal family was loved. We were all shocked by the assassination—and all of Kandala mourned along with the brothers.
That is . . . we all mourned until people began to fall sick and die. Father tried tinctures and poultices and every combination of herbs he could think of, but nothing worked—until a healer in Emberridge discovered that the petals of the Moonflower could reduce the fever and allow the body to heal itself. Within a fortnight, word had spread to all the sectors. Fights broke out over supply of the Moonflower. Raids and thievery became common. Deals were worked in back alleys and shadowed sitting rooms, where gold or weapons or anything of value would be traded for a few days’ doses. Emberridge and Moonlight Plains, the only sectors where the plant grew, quickly hired enforcers to guard their borders, and later they built a wall.
At first, King Harristan tried to maintain order, but desperate people take desperate actions, and there was never enough medicine to go around. We had people knocking on our door at all hours of the night, begging for whatever Father could do for them, and I’d mix elixirs and potions and teas in the hope that anything else would work.
Nothing ever did.
Out of desperation, Father found a smuggler who was willing to cut our family in on whatever he stole, provided we gave him half our proceeds from selling the medicines to Father’s patients.
Father would charge half and gave all the money to the thief. He always said it was more important to save everyone we could. That a few extra coins in his pocket wasn’t worth the cost of a few more bodies on the funeral pyre. It was then that he discovered that spreading the medicine among more people would still save lives. He tried to share his records with the king, but there were too many apothecaries, too many theories, too much fear and death and pain. Everyone was afraid to take less.
Then King Harristan struck a deal with the Emberridge and Moonlight Plains sectors, using royal funds to provide doses for the people of Kandala, allocated by sector. It wasn’t enough—there was never enough—but it was something.
King Harristan also promised a death sentence for thievery, smuggling, and illegal trade.
His brother, Prince Corrick, the King’s Justice, made good on that promise.
Brutally. Publicly. Horribly.
But it was effective. Within a month, order had been restored. Many people had access to medicine.
Many, but not all.
Father tried to continue helping, Mother at his side.
And then they were caught. Sometimes I wonder if I was lucky that they fought back, that they were executed in the early dawn hours by the night patrol. That they didn’t have to stay in the Hold, waiting to die, knowing their daughter would have to watch.
Lucky.
Karri squeezes my hand. Her gaze has turned pitying. “I find it upsetting, too,” she whispers.
Not like I do. Her parents never do anything wrong. They’re almost afraid to take the medicine allotted to them, as if they’re being greedy. But she means well, so I squeeze back.
The gates to the Royal Sector are closed, but a massive wooden stage has been dragged into place before it. I’m too far away to see much detail, but the stage is high enough for everyone to get a good view. Eight armored guards stand in a line, crossbows in hand. At their feet kneel the eight prisoners. They’re all in muslin tunics, with burlap sacks tied over their heads, so I can’t tell who’s a man and who’s a woman. They must be bound in place somehow, because two seem slumped, their heads hanging at an odd angle.
I wonder if those two are already dead. One has a stain at the front of the burlap, something soaking into the material. Blood, maybe, or vomit.
I have to look away. My throat is tight.
The road is mobbed with people, and I’ve already lost sight of Mistress Solomon. People mill and churn, and gossip runs high. The emotion of the crowd is overwhelming, pressing against me like something alive.
“Look,” says a man nearby. “That one’s pissed himself.”
I don’t want to look, but my eyes are traitors and they shift to the stage anyway before quickly flicking away. The man is right. I wonder how much terror you need to feel before that would happen.
It’s not a hot day, but I feel sweaty and sick.
The burlap is awful. The guards are awful.
The king is awful. The prince is awful.
I want to rush the stage. I want to grab a crossbow. I want to lie in wait and fire a bolt right into them both.
It’s a ridiculous thought. I’d be dead before I got anywhere close. I swallow hard, and rage pushes away some of the emotion churning in my gut, replacing it with white-hot fury. It allows me to look up, to lock my gaze on those prisoners.