The Toils (Book Two)

XVI. El Sueño

Noxa and Rhi strode through the gap side-by-side.
Rhi couldn't help but look up, seeing faces in the windows of the Second House.
She felt sick, knowing her parents' murderers were in there.
Noxa could see the archers on the roof staring down at him, but none of them fired for fear of setting off bombs this close to the building.
They grew closer to the end of the break, Coalition soldiers stared disgustedly at them.
The pair stopped at the end of the break.
Noxa held his arms out to receive a bomb from a woman nearest to him.
"Thank you", he nodded curtly as she passed it over.
Turning back to face the Coalition soldiers, he stared at them intently for a second.
Rhi couldn't help but press her right hand to her heart, feeling it racing in her chest.
A few more tense seconds elapsed before Noxa cleared his throat and spoke in his drawl - "step aside, please".
There was no fear in his voice, no concern.
He was, emotionless.
The Coalition guards looked at each other uneasily, wondering what to do next.

"The fuck do we do?", Thatcher turned to Wolesley and the others and asked.
"We need to get you lot downstairs for a start", Wolesley clutched Thatchers' upper arm and tried to guide her from the room.
Thatcher stood her ground, "let go of me".
"Thatcher - they've got the ability to blow this place to smithereens, you need to get down into the basement", Wolesley insisted, though he released his grip.
Thatcher closed her eyes and allowed her mind to tick over for a moment or two.
"Fine", Thatcher seemingly relented, allowing Wolesley to guide the four others from the room.
They crossed out of the hall, entered the staircase, and began to descend.
Thatcher, Ruataupare, Arihona, and Magnus, lead by Wolesley, passed the landing for the fifth floor, then the fourth, and then the third.
However, on the landing for the second floor, Thatcher stopped.
"Hold up - I forgot something", Thatcher spoke airily and opened the door to the second-floor corridor.
"Wait- what?!", Wolesley called out over the protests of the others.
Thatcher vanished from sight, leaving the others confused on the landing.
"Go down to the basement, I'll keep an eye over her", Wolesley spoke over his shoulder as he too entered the second-floor corridor.
The other three went on with no arguments.
Wolesley strolled down the moldy hall, with its flaking paint and its eternally scuffed up linoleum. 
Where all the doors to bedrooms lining the corridor were open, only one was shut.
Wolesley jogged forth, approaching the door and knocking loudly - "Thatcher!".
On the other side of the door, Thatcher gulped, crossing the floor of the square room, and stopping short of the window.
Lower to the ground than she was on the fifth floor, the crowd below looked far larger.
Tentatively, Thatcher opened the window - it had been closed so long that when it finally opened, it opened with a thunderous CRACK!.


The fire grew out of control fast, Asper noted, shaking Atua awake, she spoke to Poe - "in the smelting house, there were buckets - get them".
Poe wasted no time, nodding, he sprinted through the sand towards the village square, spraying sand beneath his feet as he bolted away.
"Come on, wake up!", Asper shook Atua by the shoulders, willing him to wake.
Groggily, Atua pulled his eyes open and roused.
"Are you alright?", Asper spoke, already knowing the answer but asking anyway.
"What 'appened?", Atua pulled himself onto his elbows and groaned.
"Very few of us survived", Asper released her grip and said solemnly.
"And them?", Atua rubbed a large gash on his forehead, blood trickling past his nose.
"Largely unmaimed", Asper leaned back, before pushing herself onto her feet.
"Come, we need to get this fire out to make a way in case the fighters from the Citadel make their way north", Asper helped Atua to his feet.

*

Thatcher stood against the open window, before commanding over the sill and to the Guards below - "let them through!", Thatcher yelled down.
The Guards exchanged a few nervous glances, before going as they were told.
Noxa and Rhi stroke through the path made by the split ranks, stopping just a few feet away from the house.
No one spoke for fear of letting their guards down first.
Thatcher stared into Noxas' eye - finally, a face to the name.
Noxa, however, remained indifferent. 
He, unlike Thatcher, hadn't heard stories.
"Who am I speaking with?", Noxa called up.
"Thatcher, Head Of State", Thatcher snarled back.
"I'm No-", he started before Thatcher quipped - 
"I know who you are".
"Good", Noxa nodded, "that makes this whole introductory... thing", he waved vaguely, "a lot easier".
"Oh?", Thatcher cocked her head, daring Noxa to spill more.
"We want the Prince", Rhi squeaked, trying to muster as much force behind her words as she could.
Thatcher stared at Noxa, unwilling to break her gaze.
A silent beat - not one of the more than 1500 soldiers below dared cough.
Thatcher stared at Noxa.
Noxa stared at Thatcher.
The black sky overhead added to the tense ambiance, foreboding, somehow.
"You heard her", Noxa broke the silent streak with a crack in his otherwise silky smooth drawl.
"You always let the kid speak for you?", Thatcher felt her own voice crack.
The reality was, no one was prepared for this meeting of forces, but they were here, forced to speak to one and other with all the excitement of a teenager using a fake ID for the first time.
"It's her mission", Noxa deflected.
"Ha!", Thatcher laughed mirthlessly, "Really? How old are you, love?", Thatcher asked without looking at Rhi.
"She's ten", Noxa spoke before Rhi had the chance to.
"And you expect me to believe a ten-year-old Settled girl wanted to invade Gossfordshire?", Thatcher sneered.
"She ain't no 'Settled Girl', Madam Head Of State", Noxa mocked.
"No?", Thatcher cocked her head, drawn into the exchange with a hook of curiosity.
"No. It seems that you've not been looking after your own, here in Gossfordshire", Noxa continued mocking in a rather sing-songy tone.
"I don't know what you're talking about", Thatcher bit her lip and replied despondently.
"No, you wouldn't. You're up there with the Princes and the Kings, no fucking clue what's happening down on the ground - eh?", Noxa glanced around at his own soldiers, now having closed ranks behind him, giving the Gossfordshire Guards no way to escape.
"That's a system I've tried to change", Thatcher grew defensive.
She didn't know why she felt the need to engage with this dude - maybe it was the idea that he had something over her, maybe it was her wanting her words to be true, either way, two years of constant snipes at her right to rule had ground Thatcher down.
"You can try to change it as much as you like - that doesn't make past transgressions correct", Noxa noted.
"What happened to you?", Thatcher finally broke her gaze on Noxa, and finally allowed her eyes to lock onto Rhi.
Rhi stiffened slightly.
"It's a slap in the face that you don't know", Rhi shouted up, "that my parents' deaths mean so little to you that you actually need to ask me that question".
"I'm sorry", Thatcher pleaded, "I'm sorry I don't know but if you just told me - we can make this right".
There was a thick silence in the air. Thatcher knew the minute the conversation died out, they would attack.
Trying once again, she repeated - "who were your parents, hon?".
Rhi did not immediately answer, she didn't even know if she wanted to.
After a beat, she said, "they lived in Altomontis. They were killed by The Prince, his wife, and an old lady".
Thatcher thought about it for a moment, before suddenly realizing who she was speaking to.
"We tried to find you for so long", Thatcher spoke into her hand, "how did you get to meet with this lot?".
"It doesn't matter", Rhi stood firm, "I just want the Prince, his wife, and the old lady, and I want them now".
"Sweetie, they're dead", Thatcher spoke sincerely.
"You're a liar!", Rhi screamed out.
"It's true. Ritty isn't here, he fucked off months ago, Antonia was killed not too long after killing your parents, and Agnes died literally less than a week ago", Thatcher recounted.
"You're protecting them!", Rhi rang out again.
"I honestly assure you, that's not true", Thatcher tried to be sincere but found herself growing annoyed at being called a 'liar' by a ten-year-old, "so, how can we make this right?".
"There is no 'we', here. There is us", she pointed over her shoulder to the Settled soldiers, with their bared teeth and their bombs, "and you".
"You're wrong", Thatcher felt her annoyance turn to indignance, "it's more than that. It's more than the binary - it's about all of us now - we've moved the Settlers in - they've got land of their own now - a country of their own. We can do that for you, too - but you need to stop this".
"That won't bring the child's' parents back", Noxa called out, announcing to the crowd, "it won't undo the centuries of repression we've faced".
"It was all of you - Asper and the Settlers, too", Thatcher pointed out, still frantic - realizing she wasn't winning with words, "but that was then, under different leaders in different times!".
"If we never followed them North, if we didn't leave when we did - what would've happened to us?", Noxa asked, taking a step forth.
Thatcher said nothing - the question seemed like a trap regardless of how she answered.
"How is it the others ended up here, and not us?", Noxa drawled.
"We needed the land south, and made a deal with Asper", Thatcher admitted, her mouth dry.
Why she was answering honestly, she didn't know.
"You needed the land south", Noxa nodded and echoed, "and so with her lot out - you were, what, going to take the land with no regard for us?", Noxa suggested.
"We were going to eradicate you", Thatcher said, her words sobering in her mouth.
Saying it in the cold light of day, in front of the man she had sentenced to death without even meeting, seemed to bring her careening back to earth violently.
Noxa grew tense, his jaw squaring off.
"We needed the land", Thatcher repeated, it wasn't a justification, just the truth, "we needed it and we thought of you all as murderous people. As far as we were concerned, we were in the right", Thatcher placed her sword to the floor, making a spectacle of this display of trust.
Noxa wanted to explode, he wanted to hit, and punch, and otherwise scream - but he didn't.
Despite his tremoring, he swallowed.
"Where are your vulnerable?", Noxa spoke through quivering lips.
"They're safe, far away from here", Thatcher took a deep breath and recentered herself.
"Exactly", Noxa took another step forward.
The Guards around him watched uneasily but otherwise allowed him to move a single step closer.
"Our vulnerable are somewhere safe", Noxa drawled, "because, Madam Head of State, we have vulnerable, too. I ask; what would've happened to them in this Plan A scenario of yours?".
Thatcher licked her lips.
She stuttered a few loose lines but, ultimately, she fell short.
"I can't hear you", Noxa said, making sure his dominance was showing.
"What would you have done to ours?", Thatcher asked, boldly strapping herself back to earth, "Would you have killed them as you did to Aspers?".
Noxa had been stung - he remembered that, and it visibly shook him.
"Probably", Noxa admitted with a lift of his eyebrows, "I digress. What happens in our country is up to us; you have no right to come in and massacre us from outside".
"Because you've never done that", Thatcher replied rather sarcastically.
"We were fighting for our lives back then! THE ICY TUNDRAS OF THE COLD COUNTRY!", Noxa raised his voice to a shout.
"SO WERE WE!", Thatcher screamed back imploringly, "WE'VE BOTH GOT THE SAME PROBLEM FOR FUCKS SAKE!".
Noxa seemed slightly taken aback.
A moment passed where nothing was said.
"Suppose that's true, how would we have solved it?", Noxa broke the silence, asking genuinely.
The shift in tone seemed to melt some of the weight from Thatchers' shoulders.
"We could've set you up alongside Asper and the others", Thatcher replied, "we could've split the land in two. Hard borders, keep you from killing each other".
"Maybe we could've grown reliable crops", Noxa shrugged, stepping forwards and allowing his shoulders to relax.
"Yeah; that would've worked, too. You could've raised pigs, or made weapons. Not that we'd've needed them, because our biggest enemy would've been our best ally", Thatcher figured.
"And we could've helped in the south, too, with your whole 'land' problem. I mean, who knows it better than the folks who've been wandering it for the last four generations", Noxa said aloud.
"But we keep talking about what could've happened", Thatcher sadly realized, "and not what's going to happen".
"That's right, because after everything, no matter how much the same we are, the points of difference are just too far to overcome", Noxa shrugged coldly.
"You don't have to do it, you know?", Thatcher suggested - she turned her attention to the larger crowd, speaking up, "you can stay here - we can work this out. It doesn't have to be like this! We can get your vulnerable, bring them here, set them up; we can survive this together".
Her voice was stained with plea, she felt almost pathetic.
"What's going to happen if we choose to walk away?", Noxa sarcastically asked.
Thatcher grimaced, wincing as if she'd been cut with a razor.
She looked away for a brief moment, before refocussing her gaze on Noxa and Rhi.
"Yeah", Thatcher nodded sadly, knowing now that there was no stopping it, "I guess you're right".
"It was a pleasure meeting you, Madam Head of State", Noxa said without a trace of mocking this time around.
"I wish I could say the same", Thatcher replied sadly.
With that, Noxa hurled his bomb towards the Second House and dove over Rhi.
As it hit the ground just in front of the atrium windows, it detonated, throwing Thatcher off her feet, shattering untold windows, and killing a handful of Guardsmen all at once.
Noxa was immediately stabbed by the Guards immediately next to him, but Rhi was spared.
Panicked, she crawled through the crowd - bombs detonating behind her, arrows flying overhead, the crowd pushing forwards as they tried getting closer to the Second House.

In the bushes just off the backyard to the Second House, Rena and Ikime hid deep in the bushes.
They watched smoke billow in stacks off the roof of the house.
The Settled Folk who had (but five minutes ago) surrounded the house in its entirety, were now out the front, leaving Rena and Ikime blind to what was happening.
"When?", Ikime asked Rena.
"Wait for the bombs to stop", Rena nodded, whispering.
"They could've killed everyone by then", Ikime replied with a frown.
"What are the two of us going to do until then, eh? You wanna - what - run in their and sword them to death?", Rena snapped, a scowl lining her face.
"I just don't like the idea of hiding here in these bushes while our friends die!", Ikime growled.
"We need to wait", Rena echoed.

Thatcher crawled along the floor towards the bedroom door, glass sticking out of almost every inch of her upper back thigh.
"Wolesley!", she screamed, hoping he would hear her from the other side of the door.
Bombs continued to go off in the front yard, but she was unable to take a look.
The wound sustained in Rebury was now open once again, blood gushed violently over her leg and onto the linoleum floor.