Tomebound

To make she who carries seed be without child, feed her the root of the snowflake flower and mix it with harsh wine. In three days’ time, she will be purged. The blood must be buried under the moonlight on the next clear night and thanks uttered to Neles. If not, she will be barren all her days.

-The Twenty-Nine Mysteries, Book 8

Castle Muadazim, Dhasherah Region, Qarda

Cadas Lars awoke to a great commotion in the servants’ wing.

He rolled out of bed and immediately broke out his scratch paper and charcoal stick and set to sketching out the first insect he could think of, a beautiful moth he’d seen two nights prior when the sun set pink over Qarda. He drew the bug in exquisite detail purely from memory. It was more than a normal child’s doodle; it was as rigorous as a diagram that could have been ripped straight out of a world scholar’s book on insects.

His drawings were so precise that, during the first moon of his family’s stay in Qarda, the palace guards accused his mother of stealing books from the Hierophant’s personal library. When Cadas reproduced a new drawing, a Qardish scorpion, from memory, the guards were amazed and cleared his family of any wrongdoing.

Their praise rolled off his back. He just wanted to return to his drawings, his books, his private bug collection. Idle talk was such a waste of time. It bored him.

Two cousins of Cadas, caretakers of the paladins’ chambers, scrambled to gather up their things. They piled clothes, cookware, carved figurines from their home nation of Myrenthos, jars of spices, and every jingling, glinting coin they could find in the pandemonium. Cadas hardly noticed them and focused intently on his drawing.

The moth’s wings were complete, down to every tiny detail of their eyespots and even fine lines for their fuzz. Then he just had to touch up the antennae and the fur on its feet.

“Cadas!” The shrill voice hurt his ears—it sounded like a plate breaking. “Cadas, gather up your things.” It was his mother. She flitted into his room not unlike a fruit fly, darting here and there, too fast and too busy to sit still long enough for him to observe. “Did you hear me, Cadas? I said to gather up your things! Get together everything you want to take with you.”

He summoned every bit of willpower he had in him to utter a reply. “Why?” He went back to his drawing.

“This place isn’t safe for us anymore. We need to leave. When I come back into this room, I’m taking you and we’re leaving this place. Do you understand?” She didn’t wait for his response. It never came anyway.

He hated to be interrupted while drawing. Drawing, reading, writing—these were the only things that brought him peace in this wretched land.

***

When the Qardish soldiers—the Eloheed, as they called themselves—rode into their humble village of Lymna one day, Cadas could hardly believe his eyes. He thought they looked like brilliant golden beetles, giant ones that had learned how to sit upright and tame horses. He wanted to study them. He wanted to make diagrams of their beautiful yellow chitin, the amber stingers they carried at the ends of their black-tipped forelegs.

He watched silently, swaying back and forth in place, as they talked to the boring leather-armored guards who patrolled their small village. Somebody yelled something. Then the guards moved suddenly and the Eloheed ran them through with their stingers and it was all over as quickly as it had begun. Cadas wanted to go and inspect the guards’ bodies, but his mother yanked him by the collar back into their home.

***

Cadas finished the moth drawing. He labeled each part—the antennae, the legs, both the forewings and the hindwings, the proboscis, the thorax, the abdomen. He even labeled the head and the compound eyes, though those seemed obvious. Then he charted out the moth’s classification, an organizational system he’d devised himself.

It was Living; it was different from rocks and rivers that way. It was an Animal; it moved around and ate food, unlike plants and trees and all the living things that stayed put. It was a Bug; though it had fur like a Beast, it laid eggs instead of giving birth, and it had more than four legs. It was Flying, unlike spiders, earwigs, millipedes, and so on. It was not a fly or a bee; it was Non-Buzzing. It was a Moth, not a Butterfly. And finally, most specifically, it was a special kind of moth, the beautifully adapted Qardish owleye.

This was his favorite bug in all of Qarda. Sadly, his home village in Myrenthos had a much more multifarious bug population, and in greater numbers. He could spend whole days supervising anthills and following the trails of slithering centipedes, listening to the droning of beehives.

But when the Eloheed conquered his village, one small victory in their invasion of the great island nation Myrenthos, his best bug collecting days were over.

***

His mother and older siblings cooked a feast for the conquerors with what little they had left in the kitchen. Rabbit stew, stuffed grape leaves, boiled greens, and the very last of his mother’s prized spicy-sauced anchovies. “Don’t go easy on us,” the commander told her with a grin. “We’ll take it as spicy as you’ll serve it.”

They washed their meal down with yogurt for dessert and cup after cup of wine. Then they spent the rest of the evening raving drunkenly about their meal, the best meal they’d ever eaten, the purest-tasting herbs and the most succulent meat. “How could these wonderful cooks practice such detestable things? How could they rip babies out of wombs in the morning and yet prepare such delectable suppers at night? You who worship your pagan gods by dashing newborns against rocks!” These were the damning myths of Myrenthian practices that had spread like the book-burning fires of the Eloheed. No one dared contradict them.

The soldiers talked with the Lars family long into the night and until the sun rose again, all while Cadas collected fireflies and cockroaches in little glass jars he’d stolen from the kitchen and emptied of their spices. By the morning, it was settled; he and his family would move to Qarda immediately to serve food to the Hierophant. For a fair wage, of course.

Cadas didn't know what that meant or how that made it better. He had to leave all of his bugs behind. He cried and shrieked and convulsed the whole way there until his mother left him below deck on the Qardish ship to scream his lungs out. Landfall brought him no joy, not like his siblings, who jumped into the sand and kissed it.

There were fewer bugs in Qarda, at least in the sterile stone of the palace grounds in Rayyaq Raleed. Here in Castle Muadazim, in the cold, there was nothing but the occasional house spider. He adjusted to life in Qarda over time, but it was difficult.

One day, when Hierophant Drakhman was talking at him, which the man liked to do, he said, “Does the caterpillar know he will become a butterfly, or does he think he’s about to die in his cocoon? Ah, but when he spreads his wings for the first time, he knows it was all worth it.” Cadas didn’t understand the man’s words, and he flinched when the man ruffled his white-blond hair on his way out.

***

“Cadas, it’s time to go,” said his mother. She stormed into his room, arms full with saddlebags and loose jewelry.

“Why?” Cadas asked her again.

“Hierophant Drakhman is dead. We aren’t safe in Qarda any longer. This land will eat itself alive by nightfall and we won’t be here to watch it.” Cadas sat and kept adding tiny little enhancements to his moth diagram. “Our servitude to that killer is now ended, and with him gone, there’s no telling what these brutes will do to us. Are you hearing me, Cadas?”

She bent down next to him, spilling a cheap necklace onto the floor. She slapped the charcoal stick out of his hand. His instinct was to cry. Then her words clicked in his head.

“That man died?”

She nodded solemnly. “Yes, Cadas. He was killed in the middle of the night. The justice of the gods, for the way he butchered our innocent sisters and brothers. Have you heard anything else I’ve said?”

Cadas mulled over these developments. “Can I see the dead body?” She slapped him across the face and then the tears came.

“Mother Moon, help us,” she hissed, and she snatched the moth drawing from his hands, ripping it to pieces. “Some son I have. Grab your books and let’s go! You’re not to bring a single bug with you.” Cadas buried his face in his knees, sobbing. “Fine! Be this way! When the horses come to take us to port, your big brother is going to carry you by the scruff like a bad puppy! Do you want that?”

Her words passed through his ears like a lost cockroach burrowing its way to freedom. She was out of the room—that much he knew—but it made no difference. Cadas retreated into the privacy of his tears. His mother made a habit of destroying what he loved when she was very angry with him. It was a drawing to be proud of, one that he planned to add to his collection, but now it was charcoal-dusted scraps littering the tiles.

His breakdown lasted a long while, what felt like a whole day. But he was calming down and sucking in ragged breaths when he looked outside and saw that the shadows of the trees were short and the sun was straight overhead. He heard the clip-clopping of approaching horses.

Quickly, before anyone could see, he went fishing under his bed for the most special book he owned, a book of his own creation. He called it the Compendium; that was his favorite word that didn’t have to do with bugs or dead things, though it was full of information on both.

He opened the book and retrieved his charcoal stick. He flipped through pages and pages of insect diagrams and sketches of his own autopsies performed on dead birds, dead rats, empty beetle husks and shriveled spiders, and that one man’s corpse he’d found in the woods on a rainy day in Myrenthos. He reached the first blank page and drew nothing.

Instead, he wrote a single sentence: “Social rule: Do not ask to see a dead body or mother will hit you.” He closed the book and brought it with him.