Madta the Spy: Chapter 2
IN WHICH; Madta Cagenet endures a tense border crossing and is remembered by the wily ASTIS NOBARRE, who first enlisted the young woman in a daring endeavor infiltrate an enemy lord's household.
⁂
“Madta the Spy” is dedicated to
, thank you.1These subtle dreary men
in the same black cloaks,
these crows with the same look,
who spoke like crows, cawing
conspiring among themselves,
never seeing it fit to limn more
the darkling mystery around
all sides of their enterprise
for the purveyors and angels
charged with their deliverance.
Gessena Foren Caerlis;
The Desert Eidolon, and its Descent⁂
As quickly as our love came, then, in a joyous summer space it left behind a vernal waste, which, as I on this ruminate, had memories so fragile that a touch and they’d disintegrate. […] Those memories, us in the lake until the season’s turn was late sometime in the rabid dog days. Which had only just begun to flower distrust intrigued in our bower.
– Vimíçitus. “When It Was the End of Summer”2
Madta Cagenet is in the midst of a tense border crossing and is remembered by the wily enforcer ASTIS NOBARRE, a ruffian as imposing as he was gentle. It was HE who first enlisted the MAID MADTA in a daring endeavor to plant a grapevine in the rocky soil of DARYOVA that would reach all the way to MASTER ELMANDT’s ears in the faraway seat of the Duchy: XIATEP TERA.
𐫱 𐫱 𐫱
And now, as had the light and world before it, the final thing narrowed—their chances for getting through this outpost unscathed.
There was only a rider behind Madta and the driver; the guards must have known him for he was waved through and not detained. There weren’t any more carts coming up the hill behind them.
No one traveled these treacherous roads at night. It had to be during the light of day that the few wagons that came this way did so.
As night closed its grip around them, a rain started to pour. The darkness was almost complete.
There were only two torches on either side of a gate in the palisade, and those held by the guards who swarmed around their wagon, looking for anything they could take or sell.
These were the sort of men who, if they found nothing to purloin, would probably take things they could just break for sport and spite.
Torchlight forced back the dark, the silence pressing at her ribs like a tightening noose. The scent of mule sweat and damp grain mixed with the acrid tang of noka, curling from the broken seal of a crate. The stench of tar clung to the air, thick as the grease caking the mailed hands that rapped against wood, pulling burlap loose. Boots scraped against the churned filth of the road, shifting the mire into the lantern-lit haze.
The leader’s voice cut through the stillness like a razor. “Turn it all out. Every inch.”
A guard wrenched open another lid. Rough fingers plunged into the grain, rifling through sacks of meal. The coarse shuffle of burlap against leather made her teeth clench. Madta kept her eyes forward, breath measured, unmoving. Patience. Compliance. These were only defenses she had. Perhaps they were all she had to contend with a world that seemed ever in formation against her interests.
The driver had yet to speak, yet to move. Anything else would risk suspicion. He was at least clever enough to know that the almost imperceptible tremor in his right hand might make itself known as a quaver in his voice should he exercise it.
The guards had taken hold of the cargo.
A guard stepped closer. The leader gestured toward Madta, then the driver. “Search them.”
She lifted her arms, her sleeves stiff with hardened mud, caked with dust of the road and weather.
Leather scraped over the ribs of her stays, fingers pressing into the curve of her waist, tracing the seams of her shirt, over her arms, down her sides.
Madta Cagenet heard what he felt.
She listened, without wanting to, a river of thoughts this man had in his head. She felt the violent burning in him at her. He liked how young she appeared. The way her cropped, boyish hair hung in damp down in strings, framing her fine-boned face. He thrilled at the fierce intransigence of her eyes. He wanted to take it, break it and make her his.
This man did not care for her contours for their own sake. He had no interest in beauty. The image he held of her behind his beady eyes turned her stomach.
So she turned her capacity to listen more deeply away from the sounds his spirit made.
Madta would rather not take into her experience the vile animus of the man pawing at her.
When satisfied Madta had nothing on her person that should not be there, the guard stepped back to watch her. He leered but otherwise merely split his vision between the guards poring over the driver’s cargo and her shivering silhouette.
The driver grunted as the soldiers searched him. He muttered a curse. A tepid growl. His hands gripped tightly on the reins.
They pulled a little leather bag from Madta’s bag, spilling its contents into the dirt.
No.
Her silver. Made into dull stars, glimmering in a dun sky of earth.
Her world, her future, her year in comfort. It was all in the road.
The leader knelt down. His fingers moved through the coins, shifting them, counting. His gaze flicked to the driver, then to her. “Now where did you get this tidy sum?”
Madta hesitated. She shook her head. She put everything she could into a performance of a frightened child.
The leader looked at her, taking her measure with dark eyes. The burning things under his brow were wild and intelligent. She couldn’t perceive him inside her mind. The more clever her mark, the harder it was for her to make out the things his mind was telling her. She could not see through him. Like a sword would do, the cut of her mind was arrested by the links of his hauberk.
But she felt enough to know that this man was vicious. He was dangerous. Anyone could see that, really. She fell on edge around him and watched, observed. This officer was looking for a way into her. He glanced between her and the driver. She could see the mechanics of his cunning begin to turn as he pieced together what this strange pair might have vouchsafed in their cargo. Perhaps the man owed taxes; perhaps the girl would really be better off here. No one really cared what happened at this remote outpost. Madta felt that he had been sent here as a punishment for something heinous.
“Yours?" said the officer to the driver.
“Goddam right.” The driver spat onto the dirt by the leader’s feet and said, “I am a private denizen of the Duchy of Tera,”
The leader held up his hand. The driver was silent inside of a moment.
It had not been a bad artifice of courage, of warning that the driver, although exposed and vulnerable among these hardened men of iron, was himself not to be trifled with.
But Madta saw through it. And shortly thereafter, so did the leader of the guard. Even though some of the phlegm had violated the officer’s coat, he did remain quiet and still, I made the activity of the men under him in investigating the wagon. If anything, the leader seemed rather bemused.
“Tomorrow, the rain will wash that away,” said the officer, sending his wrist briefly at the stain.
Everything was quiet between the driver, the officer and Madta then. The only sounds were the noises of the other soldiers turning over the crates and cutting into sacks of grain.
“What will happen to you two by tomorrow, I wonder?” said the officer. “I think I know what will happen.”
He dipped his helmet in a slow nod.
“Right now, you,” he gestured to Madta, “will collect this fine for carrying contraband,” he waved his hand at the puddle of silver on the ground.
The officer’s eyes were so bereft of a smile’s implied warmth that it seemed a jagged rictus, intentionally calculated to unnerve. His gauntlet absconded with the silver, stuffing it into a bag of his own at his belt.
To take her mind off the men’s thoughts of her, she focused on the happiest thing she could remember. As the man ran his hands over her, she was glad that this memory had only happened two days prior.
It glinted vividly in her memory.
That was good.
That would help.
When she did not want to hear what others were inside, she found, if she could focus on little things, which, like hooks, tugged her mind ineluctably into the past, she could dampen in the screams of their thoughts enough to dull the pain of hearing them.
If a memory was different enough from the pain she experienced when in the drift, occupying herself with re-creating that scene of her history helped her to not think. At least think in the way that made her spirit drift into others’ without their knowing it.
And if Madta did not think, then she could not think what others thought.
IT WAS IN THE SUNNY DAYS that preceded the abrupt trauma of the passage Madta found herself in.
During a brief respite near the roadside to rest the mules and eat supper, Madta feigned a call of nature and ducked off into the bushes and thickets on the other side of the road.
Beyond that bramble, filled with little plants that tugged at her rough coat like hooks, there was a bit of open field.
She could let the last light of the dying sun illuminate the gorgeous little pressed circles of argent in their wallet.
Madta loosened the tie that threaded the opening of the purse, and angled the it so that some of the dying sun might still illuminate its contents.
Madta delicately pulled open the bag. And therein lay the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.
Silver pieces glowing in the afternoon. They were so numerous she could barely hold them in two hands.
The dying sun poured over the coins as Madta pored over them. The metal circles were little pools of ice, reflecting her sharp face back at her in blurred matte imitation.
All the world was in that little scrap of tanned skin—Madta’s whole future. Her life was now divided into enough clinquant silver coin she would've had to use two cupped hands to carry at all. One quarter—that meant one part of four—of the pay promised her should she survive the task.
It was highly likely that she would die. And that was naught but an afterthought to the crows that watched her as they circled.
The dour gentlemen wore black cloaks when they came, covered in the grime of the Drag, among the poorer favela buried in Xiatep.
They were crows, with the same opaque eyes and blank expressions, who spoke in the same way, who conspired among themselves.
These birds never saw it fit to tell her anything of what felt like a vast machine whirling around her.
If she hadn’t said ‘yes’ to the proposal, the tall man in the suit of charcoal would never have handed her the money he did now.
Its weight confirmed whatever was in it at least might actually be metal coin. She still trusted none of these men, though. And she had good reason not to trust men.
At least up until now, they had kept their word and appeared to indeed be persons of some political significance, because the black of their cloaks was a different shade than those of the other attorneys, assayers and clerks who wore the same thing.
Those who had power looked different. Even when they didn't intend to appear different.
The dark suit walked back to its dark carriage with its dour footmen, as stern and hard as the armor they wore.
Though there would not have been much she could have done had it transpired that she had been shortchanged, Madta glanced into the bag. Just for a moment.
There did seem to shine some silver down in there, but it was dim.
If she hadn’t agreed to this ploy of theirs, had she not decided to dash her life to the wind and start a new one far away, the young, blond soldier would never have leaned in and whispered: “Run.”
He, somehow, this man Casselton was the only one she felt she could trust. Why was that?
So, she was going to run away with what she had. The remaining sum on the other side of this folly, the men could keep. She was already coming out ahead, instantly made secure for the next year, even if she fribbled all the money away.
Astise Nobarre was lit by candlelight in the small house of his sister, in secret, in a room off to the side where his sister slept and had her things. They were in the Drag, tenements in the lower climes of the hanging chaos of the Teran capital, Xiatep Tera.
His sister watched him with wary eyes.
Nobarre leaned against the sallow wood and smoked a bit of noka from a pipe. The air was thick with the scent of burning leaf and the quiet weight of of the silence separating the siblings.
His sister did not have much, but her husband, a builder, had been recently conscripted away to make earthworks in defense Tera Proper now that the Barons had allowed their natural truculence to bloom into outright war.
Between the money he sent home and her position as a household servant in the city house of a middling member of the Tandrat, they could afford a ground-level home in the sturdier floors of the living places. It was a luxury that opened up into a common lawn where the rough scaffolding wrapping the rooms upon rooms soared up along all sides, five stories high. There was nowhere else anyone knew of that could erect buildings that tall.
It was in this little grassy yard she stood, and he leaned against the sill of the frame in her room’s wall that opened into one of the countless such city gardens.
“This discussion is fraught,” she said. “If that conniver finds out,”
“I know,” said Nobarre, continuing in a measured rhythm, emphasizing every beat, every curve of every word so that she might know some part of the gratitude he had for her in abiding his brooding.
“You are well aware I do not come unless my conscience demands you hear its contents,” he said.
“And I’m the one who endures all of your little constant fears,” she said.
“You are,” he said.
Xiatep Tera was a distant roar, people pressed on them everywhere; one could feel it, even boxed into this small, dank room. This pine cage.
“It's true,” he said. “there are none else whom I can confide.”
“Tell it to a drunk,” she said. “Tell it to a dog. Tell it to a scrap of paper with a charcoal pen. Carve it into a rock. Spare me the apprehension always sloshing about in your mind.”
“I don't know how to write enough words to express how I feel.”
How in the world you wound up being a spy is beyond me.
I'm not a spy. I work for attorneys, he said.
“Ah yes,” she said, her voice in throes of irony. “Men of affairs are they.”
Nobarre said nothing.
“They are cutthroats, refined. They cover themselves by those fine black coats they so fancy,” his sister said. “They are rough outlaws dressed in their courtly best.”
His sister side, stepping closer, arms wrapped tightly around herself. It was October now, and the air in this little courtyard was cold enough that Nobarre wanted to as well. Instead he took off his coat. He walked around back of her and draped the formed wool and leather over her shoulders.
“You say something like that always. And yet, every time, I feel like I see less of my brother and more of——” she paused.
“More of what?” Nobarre brow furrowed.
“More of the man they made you into.”
He exhaled in a soft laugh, a little smile rising on his face. “And what is that?”
"A man pursued by too many ghosts. A man who never speaks plainly. Who ever dissembles,” she said.
Silence settles between them. The candle flickered.
“Come,” she said at last. They stepped out into a little courtyard with a few cherry trees by moonlight. The branches shift softly in the breeze, petals catching silver in the dim light. This was a strange feature of Xiatep—rogue cherry trees growing down deep in the cheap rows of housing.
“It’s about a girl,” Nobarre finally said. “Her name is Ma”
“You shouldn’t be telling me this.” His sister’s body locked, recognition flashing across her face.
“I need someone to hear it. Someone in whom I can confide,” said Nobarre.
"No," she shook her head. “I will hear not a word from you on this. I would have no part in it. If you are discovered,"
“They won’t,” he said. There was a plan.
“They always do, Nobarre,” she said. “You tell me that your very self. These people are ruthless.”
He closed his eyes briefly. He feared his sister was right. Madta was in over her head. Nobarre’s masters would use her up, and when she’s no longer useful, they’ll toss her aside. Nobarre had seen it happen; he’d made it happen himself—disposing of assets no longer useful to the law offices of Hascher, Elmandt.
His sister swallowed, crossing and uncrossing her arms and picking at her dress, adrift between running and reaching for him. “And this time you care? What is it about her?"
"I don’t know," he admits. "I should not care. And yet I do, still."
She set her lips in a faint line, and stepped toward him. She encircled her brother’s wrist with her hand and lifted it. With her other, she put her palm in his, the way they used to as children in Ellabeth.
“Then let her go. You have the power to tell that lawyer to stop, don’t you?”
“It’s not that simple.”
“You chose a life of complexity,” she said.
“I chose nothing, you know as well as I that father,” he snapped.
“Was a hard man,” his sister said. “And a man,”
“Don’t say it,” said Nobarre. He shook his head. He wanted for a brief moment to clap his broad hands over his ears so he could not hear it.
“in deep pain,” she finished.
He watched his dear sister. She was right. She gave him a contingency, and yet, here there he stood, staid, unwilling to act, unwilling to let go of whatever part of himself still holds onto a sliver of conscience. Willing only to give himself over to the flow of the river of events fast picking up in fury during this middle of autumn.
“Promise me something,” she whispers.
He nodded, even without meaning to. Her hold over his heart was complete. There was little for her Nobarre would not do.
“should there ever come a time you are compelled to choose between saving her and saving yourself,” she reached over for the noka pipe and Nobarre obliged his sibling. She waited while he caught a pine needle in a bit of liquid flame from the lamp and held it over the pipe for her. She inhaled, savored the earthy bite, and exhaled. “You save yourself.”
Nobarre blanched at any mention of the possibility of such a choice in his future. She didn’t wait for him to answer. She clasped and pressed his hand briefly; she kissed her elder brother on his scarred cheek and left.
Her the sound of her quiet, receding paces did not need long to become lost in the night, and Nobarre was alone again. There he remained a while, watching cherry petals fall under the moonlight, smoke ascending in thin tendrils from the belly of the pipe his sister handed back to him.
His sister had just exacted a promise from him without his having agreed to it. He wondered if, when the time came, he’ll be able to keep that promise.
Katie was not only a) generous enough to be the first to pre-order the compiled paperback (2025) of this subplot; but also, b) courageous enough to have her good name associated with this if it flops.
Vimíçitus. Remembrances from Youth in Ellabeth. Remembrance IV; ¶ VII-IX(i-xx).