When they arrived at Nokire this time, Vaenuth allowed her small caravan a whole day of rest. When they had rushed past to reach the Expanse and to trade with the Slither tribe, they had barely stopped at all. Nokire was abuzz, as always, with other caravans or jungle tribes arriving and leaving without much warning. Vaenuth chose to stay in her camp that night, rather than finding some distraction in Rainrest.
At dinner, she sat with Hulean and Banno. Tagg, irritated by the magician, kept his distance and ate with one of the other women.
“What I’d really like to figure out,” Hulean said to his tenuous friends, “is if the Slithers can use magic or not.”
Banno shrugged. “I heard in Rema once, at the Swan and Rook, that they could not.”
Hulean sighed. “Please, words from an inn are not evidence of truth. I’m a researcher. I want to ask one of them firsthand.”
Vaenuth sighed. The magician had been less coy than his past version. She had to wonder if Elli had seen this side of him. Had Hulean been honest with her, at least? And if he had, what had she thought when she died? Her appetite soured, more than it always was. Banno’s efforts to keep her fed had been less persuasive since their argument after Logren.
“Words from an inn have saved our lives more than once,” Banno said, sternly.
Hulean opened his mouth to retort, but then fell silent. “I don’t suppose an academic debate would be well received here…”
“No, I don’t suppose it would,” Vaenuth muttered, and stood up. She was wearing her white binding around her torso, and scratched a bug bite on her back. When she was in the desert, she hated it and longed for the forest; when she camped under the tall jungle trees, she longed for the dry Expanse…
They had eaten a stew prepared by one of her workers, so she brought the old wooden bowl back over to the supply wagon after rinsing it out with a squirt of water from a skin. Her tent was pitched in the middle of a group of others, cushioned by them from the noisy area around their wagons. The wagons had a few supplies they had gained from the Slithers, but they were travelling light so far. She opened the flap and strode inside. She lit a cool-burning brazier for light, and sat down at her small wooden fold-out table. She had to fill out one of the forms she’d been given for her stay at Nokire. Mainly, it was just names and tax claims, a formality.
When at last she was done, she buckled two of the clasps at the opening of her tent, so the canvas wouldn’t flap in the hot breeze. Then she pulled her work trousers off and lay down in her hammock to get some sleep in her small clothes.
She never remembered her dreams—they were dark and unpleasant, and threatened to break through the supports that kept her trauma at bay; when she awoke to the sound of screams and the smell of smoke, she knew only that she had dreamed, and that she no longer was.
She clambered to her feet and crossed to the opening, quickly undoing the buckles. She didn’t bother with clothes yet—if the commotion was in camp, she’d rather save her business and friends than retain modesty she had lost long ago—and stuck her head out of the opening. One of her workers was running by, a new hire. He glanced at her in surprise, though the canvas of her tent hid most of her body. “What’s going on?” she asked him.
“N-Nokire,” he stammered. He looked half asleep too. “There’s a fire.”
“Get the tents packed! Wake up anyone who isn’t,” Vaenuth blurted. She spun back inside her tent, put out the brazier with an animal hide while pulled on her trousers. She made sure her wool binding was wrapped tightly around herself. Then she started packing.
Moments later, Banno came walking in. She was mostly done cramming what had been unpacked into her wooden trunk. “What’s the plan?” her oldest friend asked.
“Get everyone to a safe distance. Forest is damp, humid, it’s the wet season, but I don’t want to risk anything,” Vaenuth said. The smell of smoke was almost overbearing, nonetheless, and the shouts and cries from the town were haunting in the night. “How bad is it?”
“Bad,” Banno said. “I’ll get the wagons loaded.”
“Make sure everyone else is with you,” she said as he started to leave.
Banno paused, and turned back to her. “What? Where are you going?”
Vaenuth shrugged, as she heaved up her trunk and followed him to the tent flap. “I made a friend here. She might need help.”
“Plenty of people in Nokire might,” Banno said, “But that’s not a good reason to risk our lives. That’s not how we’ve done things in the past, Vae.”
“And it’s not how we’re doing things now,” Vaenuth said. She gave him a glare when he continued to follow her, and he threw up his hands before pacing away to find other things to load. She slammed her trunk down on a wagon-bed and shoved it as far forward on the wagon as she could, then turned toward the fire for the first time.
Some of trees had caught, but they were doing a lot more smoking than burning. The wooden wall around the town was smouldering dark trails skyward, smearing out the burning buildings inside from Vae’s sight, but it was collapsing in some places to the forest floor. The Magistrate’s longhouse in the middle of town was a massive column of fire up into the sky. There was no combat, that she could see; the shadows of bodies were all scrambling out of town or trying to fight the fire with steaming buckets of water.
“Let’s go, Vae,” Tagg said, striding up to her.
“What, I told Banno I was going alone,” she said.
He gave her a flat look. “Blight that. Banno has got everyone else to take care of. I need a bit of heat, myself. Let’s go.”
Vaenuth stared at him for a second, then, with a sigh, started walking. Tagg kept up. They went from the scattered torchlight of her camp to the darkness of the forest. As the smoke around them billowed into their faces, the light gradually returned. Before they reached a hole in the wall they could fit through, it became a blinding inferno. The smoke was filling her eyes with tears.
“Here,” Tagg said, and handed her a strip of cloth from his shirt; he’d torn it off completely, and sweat dribbled down his angular torso. He showed her how to wrap the cloth from his shirt around her face to help protect it from smoke.
Through the linen, she inhaled somewhat cleaner air, and they dashed up a chaotic street into the town.
An hour later, the dying fires were witnessed by three people sitting outside the walls. They had collapsed, exhausted and sore, against a small dirt slope. Tagg was administering an ointment he had made from mud and leaf; Iloli’s back had been burned, when she was pinned against a wall by a fallen section of floor. She had made it out, only to be trapped in a smoke-filled chamber until Vaenuth and Tagg had found a back way into her second-storey home.
Vaenuth sat there, staring at the fires and marvelling at how cool the moss was, against the skin of her lower back.
Iloli still had tears running down her cheeks, but they were likely because of the smoke. She put her hand on Vaenuth’s tattooed arm, dark skin against artistic white. “Now I have a brand too,” she said, through her pain. The skin of her shoulder was bubbled and stretched, gruesomely, and she couldn’t move that arm without agony. But she was alive, and her face unaffected.
Vaenuth shrugged. “What does your Emperor God say about loss?” she asked, and looked back at the remnants of Nokire. They would rebuild—there was far too much economy here to let it die in this senselessness. But close to a hundred must have died, and multiple hundreds more sat in the forest in shock.
Her friend didn’t reply at first.
“I’m sorry,” Vaenuth said, “I try not to be too… offensive to my friends…” To society, she did—that’s what her piercings and tattoos were all about. To offend the senses and lusts that had destroyed her youth.
“I’m not offended,” Iloli said. “Maybe I’ll come with you to Rema… and ask him myself.”
Vaenuth looked back at her friend. Tagg was smiling, and nodded to Vae. Iloli looked at her, looking more exhausted than hurt. Through it all, she had a bit of hope. How? Vaenuth wondered. How do you hope?