by Evie Manieri
The little huddle broke apart and Triss trudged off with her head lowered, but Lahlil didn’t see much penitence in her expression.
“Sorry if they were bothering you,” said Behr. “They’re just curious.”
“Forget it,” said Lahlil. She started off through the trees, then a memory of Behr as a strong, wiry-haired boy with gentle eyes and a shy smile made her turn back around. “She looks like you.”
The shy smile returned and he mumbled some awkward acknowledgment before jogging after his daughter and putting his arm around her slender shoulders.
Mairi, the only other grown woman in the caravan besides her and Callia, had wedged her tent on a ridge between two trees. An untended fire smoldered in front of it, and a band of lamplight marked out the tent flap in the deepening gloom. Mairi glanced up as she entered, then immediately returned to the task of scraping the skin from a gnarled purple root into a bowl.
“Why are you here? Isn’t it time for your thingummy? Your fit?”
“The sun is down. My seizure is over.”
“Move out of my light.” The healer waved her into a corner while she measured water into the bowl, counting each drop under her breath.
Lahlil pulled back her cowl and stepped away from the lamp, but she couldn’t move any further because of the collection of things from Mairi’s cabin aboard the Dawn Gazer: clay pots, wooden bowls, gourds made into bottles, dippers and mortars sat on every flat surface. Casks of wood bound with iron bands were pushed almost to the tent walls, and garlands of dried plants hung from the supports or sat heaped in baskets. Lahlil nearly upset a shiny clay vessel in which a thick, oily sludge was reducing over the flame of an unshielded candle. As she watched, a heavy bubble glugged up to the surface and burst with an odor so foul it made her eyes water.
“And don’t touch that,” Mairi called out sharply, finally looking up. Her eyes were bloodshot and stormy with frustration and fatigue. She reached across to a low wooden chest and tossed a clanking missile to Lahlil—her silver flask—not some base metal polished up or covered in a thin sheet of silver but real, solid silver. She felt the weight resting in her hand, heavier than she remembered.
“That’s what I’ve got: nothing,” said Mairi. “I can’t lay hold of half the ingredients, and I can’t find substitutes for more than a third. I told you it was hopeless from the start. If you need more of it so badly, then go back to where you got it in the first place.”
“I can’t,” she said. “I need you to keep trying. I have to have it before the caravan leaves for Prol Irat.”
“You think I’m not trying? Believe me, you don’t want to go half as much as I want you to leave.” Storm clouds swept across Mairi’s face. “We’re going to have a new princeling in a few weeks and, Amai help us, a new queen-in-waiting. No one expects Jachi to marry Callia, but he’s the baby’s near-father, like it or not, and he has responsibilities.”
“That’s nothing to do with me.”
“Glad to hear it,” said Mairi. “Then go away and leave him alone.”
Lahlil tossed the flask back to her. “Make me something that works and I will.” On her way out of the tent the candle caught her eye and she stood for a moment, watching a drip of hot wax slide down and solidify into a white tear. In its depths she saw fields of snow under a slate-gray sky.
She walked along the paths until she came to Jachad’s tent, just south of the dead tree.
“Come for supper?” he asked after he bade her enter, half-rising from a meal neatly laid out on a folding table in the corner. Even in the lamplight she could pick out a dozen different shades of red and orange in his hair. He had grown a wiry beard in the months since they’d left the Shadar, but his freckles still made him look barely older than the boy who had shared his tent with her after his near-father, old King Tobias, rescued her from a burning death in the desert. “Pull up a stool. There’s too much food here for one person—there’s some bread, and stew, though not as good as my mother’s, I’m afraid.” He trailed off as he read her mood, then dropped his napkin onto the table beside his plate. “The maps, then. Help yourself.”
She flipped open the top of the tall map-box by his desk and located the one she wanted. Rolling out the vellum on the desk, she anchored the corners with a plate of fruit and a silver ewer.
“Where’s Oshi?” asked Jachad.
“With Callia.”
“Better him than me,” he sighed. A few sparks played around his fingers: the gift of fire from his sun-god father. “Why couldn’t she have stayed on her ship? She’s always on about something, and those clothes—she’s like a refugee from a Thacovian wedding party. How Shof could choose her after my mother, I can’t fathom, any more than I can understand why you—of all people—are the only one in my caravan who can tolerate her.”
She found the Ranjar River on the map and traced it south: rivers, hills, forests, and then the massive bog. She’d never met anyone who’d been south of Balt; at least, no one who’d ever come back. “She reminds me of someone.”
“Callia reminds you of someone you know? Who could that possibly be?”
“No one important. A mercenary.” She lifted up the ewer and the map rolled itself up. She put it back in the box and brought out a different one. “Her name was Nevie.”
“Was? What happened to her?” asked Jachad. He paused. “On second thought, don’t tell me.”
He got up from his unfinished meal and came to stand beside her. The desert had woven itself into the fabric of his robe and the air felt suddenly warmer for the scent. He took a sprig of berries from the dish by her hand and she caught a hint of their sourness as he bit into the fruit. “I love these. They’re the best part about the caravan coming here. Do you remember Wastewater, when we were little?”
She remembered the squat trees, the insects, the pools with sucking sands at the bottom, and the smell of dry grasses, reeds and decay. She remembered the snapping lizards hiding by the edge of the water, and how she had lain on her belly alongside Jachad with the other Nomas children to catch them by their tails. She remembered running with the reeds waving over her head, swatting the blood-sucking insects away from her face; running because Jachi was chasing her and just for the sake of running. She remembered the time they’d blundered into a stand of knife-grass, and how sternly Tobias had scolded them as he’d dabbed some stinging sap on their shallow cuts, and then spoiled them with cake and warm spiced milk for supper. She remembered lying in her cot and listening to the insect chorus as she looked up at the striped silk of the tent above her, and how Jachad had pretended to be asleep in the cot beside her.
“I remember the lizards,” she told him.
He made a faint sound in his throat that might have been a stifled sigh. “That’s a map of Norland. I thought you wanted to go south.”
“I am going south.”
“Decisive, as always,” said Jachad.
“A bad decision is better than none at all. Hesitation loses battles.”
“Are we in a battle? Someone should have told me.” He ran his knuckles across his beard. “Do you still think you’re taking Oshi with you?”
“He’s got to stay with me.” The mapmaker’s spiky mountain peaks blurred. “Harotha gave him to me for a reason. I’m going to see it through.”
“I don’t care what the elixir promised you, Lahlil. You can’t take a helpless infant with you into Shof knows what. Not even you could be that selfish.”
“Other people have done it,” she said, refusing to flinch; he had called her “selfish” before. “Settlers. Refugees.”
“Of which you are neither,” Jachad pointed out. “You can’t take that child out into the wilderness and make him run from your past. If you want to keep him with you, you’ll have to stay with us.”
“I’m leaving before the caravan goes on to Prol Irat.” She automatically noted the quickening of her pulse and the dryness in her throat; a habitual awareness drilled into her by a lifetime of relying on
her instincts. She stepped back from the desk. “They’ll be looking for me there. There’s a price on my head.”
“Not on your head—on the Mongrel’s. That’s not who you are any more.”
“I’ve done things I can’t take back, Jachi,” she said, “and that’s not going to change because we want it to. It’s not that simple. Anyway, you knew from the beginning I couldn’t stay.”
“I knew nothing of the sort, and neither did you.” He pushed himself away from the desk, rattling the brass hinges on the folding top. The water jug tilted, spun on its edge, and then dropped onto the carpet. Water glugged out from the narrow mouth and turned the rug’s blues to black and the reds to scarlet, but neither of them bent down to retrieve it. “You were content enough just to have Oshi, and us, after that mess in the Shadar. You weren’t expecting some great change to happen. Maybe the real reason you don’t want to leave Oshi behind is because you love him. People do love their babies occasionally, you know.”
“Don’t make this about Oshi,” she said. “I’ve tried staying in one place before. It didn’t work. I’d be putting everyone here in danger, including you.”
“You don’t have faith in anything, do you?” asked Jachad. Little tongues of flame were twisting around his fingers. “Not even me.”
“Faith is dangerous.”
“Why, for Shof’s sake?” he asked.
“Because it makes you drop your guard.”
He smiled, but the light didn’t reach his eyes. “Well, there it is, isn’t it?”
Jachad turned away from her and went back to his cold dinner. She rolled up the map of Norland, retied it, and placed it back in the partitioned box. The hinged lid clicked shut.
Lahlil took a sprig of berries from the dish before she left.
The darkness outside had deepened and clouds of tiny glowing insects swarmed from one patch of tall grass to another. She crushed one of the berries between her fingers, feeling the wet juice as the skin broke open. A stringy, yellow-eyed nightwing shot out of a patch of reeds and alighted on a leafless branch over her head. Some small rodent dangled from its curved beak, dripping blood onto the branches below. The bird eyed her for a moment, then tipped its head back and gulped down its prey in one bite.
Mairi was never going to be able to make her medicine for her. It wasn’t the healer’s fault; Lahlil had always known that medicine could only be made in Norland.
Norland. She still remembered every detail of that day on the snow-covered plain, sitting down by her fire to skin the dappled hides off the two lagramor she’d bagged that morning. The instant she had taken out her knife, the grachtel that had been following her for more than a week swooped down and dug its talons into the crust of ice on the other side of the fire, tracking the stroke of the blade with its white-rimmed eyes, until Lahlil had tossed it a few scraps of offal. She could almost hear Nevie’s voice calling out to her, but Nevie was long dead …
* * *
“General! Surprised to see me here, eh?” Nevie’s mercenary patois sounded even more garbled than usual: she was eating one of the hard green fruits that grew in the hot spring dells, chewing the fibrous flesh with her usual unhurried grace. She had always said that the only advantage of being from Marshmere was that there was nothing she couldn’t or wouldn’t eat. Her figure had come into view long before she reached Lahlil. The two shortswords at her waist and easy swing of her shoulders made her easy to identify; but, of course, it was always going to be Nevie.
“Knew you were tracking me,” Lahlil answered economically, feeling the cold burn her throat. There was a reason Norlanders communicated without opening their mouths.
“The emperor—he found out about the bloody striders, you know,” Nevie told her. “Just like you told us. Eoban put a big price on your head. Big price. That why you take this crazy job, eh? Kill him, before he kill you?”
“Close enough.” She stuck the spitted meat into the thawed ground by the fire, then walked out across the snowy plain to meet her visitor while the grachtel took wing in a streak of bright blue against the gray sky. “We could kill him together. We’ve done it before.”
“Like King Carder? Nah. Kill one of them assholes, you just get another. You know it.” Nevie tossed the pit of her fruit out onto the snow, making a black pockmark in the unbroken whiteness, then wiped her sticky gloves on her thighs. “Better to kill you instead. Nothing personal.”
“By yourself?”
“Too much gold, this job,” Nevie sighed, as if expecting her to commiserate. “I bring a crew, they turn on me, sure as a swamp witch got tits.”
“A full share of nothing is still nothing.” The slate-gray Norland sky was beginning to darken to a starless, moonless black and she could feel her seizure beginning. Even here in Norland, where the sun and moon were little more than ideas—things she had seen once in a dream, and then forgotten—there was no escaping the Nomas gods’ tug-of-war. Her muscles were already beginning to weaken. She had battled straight through it before, but not against someone as deadly as Nevie. Soon she would be at her most vulnerable, and Nevie knew it.
Lahlil circled around with the snow pulling at her boots, watching Nevie’s hips. Her hips would move first. The mercenary’s dark eyes took on a gleam without warmth, like the twilight sky reflected in the snow, and she chuckled. Her hips didn’t move after all, only her arm. The throwing motion was little more than a clever flick of her wrist, but the sword whirled out with impressive accuracy.
Lahlil twisted out of the way, but the weakness in her legs made her just a fraction too slow, and the tip of the blade caught her thigh as it flashed by. She felt a warm burst of blood and then pain, but Nevie dived at her before she could bother about it. Too late to block, Lahlil dropped her sword and writhed sideways, then grabbed for Nevie’s sword-arm, forcing the mercenary’s next blow wide of her body. But the edge of it caught Lahlil in the face, opening up a gash at the corner of her mouth. Blood trickled down her throat.
She managed to throw Nevie off and used the respite to fish her sword out of the snow. This time when Nevie rushed her, Lahlil had enough time to bring her blade up to block. She pushed whatever strength she had into her trembling arms and fought off the Marshmere woman, not trying to gain the offensive, not yet, instead getting first to her knees, then to her feet. They launched into a volley of sword strokes.
“You not doing so good, General. Not the same. I see it, after the striders.” Nevie’s blows came quickly, efficiently; she was testing her exactly the way she would any other opponent even though they had fought side by side a hundred times. Lahlil knew her reactions were slow and her thrusts weak. “I think you know it. I think maybe you come to Norland to die. I make it easy for you.”
“Stop now, and you can go.” Blood welled out from the gash in Lahlil’s mouth and down her chin, and her wounded leg was as responsive as a chunk of wood. No one had hurt her this badly in a long time. “You’re a pawn. The Norlander gods are using you.”
“What for?” asked Nevie.
“To punish me.”
The light dipped, and snow began falling in fat, heavy flakes. Lahlil strained her good eye as Nevie’s shortsword darted through the whiteness with a bright agility she couldn’t match. She was too late on one parry and had to fall back one step, then another. On the third step she put her weight on her injured leg and it folded beneath her.
Nevie had been so focused on Lahlil’s leg that she had not seen her draw her knife. She charged, fully committed.
Lahlil pivoted out of the way at the last moment and saw Nevie’s sword slide past within an inch of her chest, but by then she was punching her dagger straight through Nevie’s breastbone. The mercenary’s terrible rattling cry flew out over the plain. Lahlil caught her in her arms before she fell and sank down with her into the snow.
“General.” Nevie’s chest heaved under the knife and blood flecked her gaping mouth.
Lahlil bent her head low to make sure her voice found its wa
y into the dying woman’s ear. “The Norlander gods wanted to make me kill you,” she said. “To prove how much I disgust them.” Her own dark blood ran over her lips and pattered down onto Nevie’s face. “You were the closest thing I had to a friend.”
Nevie’s death came as a restoration of the heavy Norlander silence. Already the snow was working to bury the evidence of their intrusion, covering over the blood and settling in the hollows of Nevie’s half-lidded eyes. The snowy plain tilted to one side and wouldn’t go straight again. The fight had drawn her thirty paces away from the fire, and with her affliction draining what remained of her strength, it might as well have been fifty leagues. With no way to seal the wound in her leg, she would soon be dead as well. She had gone from freezing to being uncomfortably warm—so warm that she would have taken off her coat if she’d had the strength—and she could no longer feel either the cut on her leg or even the leg itself.
As her sight faded away to nothing, she moved her eye-patch to uncover the silver-green Norlander eye on her left instead of the brown Shadari eye on her right. When she saw the figures walking toward her through the snow, she thought it was Lord Valrig’s minions—the cursed—finally coming to claim her. When they were close enough for her to see their scars and missing limbs, she was sure of it.
Chapter 2
Daryan, the King of the Shadari, had fallen asleep.
Isa leaned over him and touched his shoulder with the tips of her fingers just as a gust of wind blew over the ridge and set the prickly grasses brushing against her cold Norlander skin. She shifted her body, trying to get away from a sharp rock gouging into her thigh through her worn trousers. The straggly bushes dotting the slope high above the city clacked their dry branches: an urgent conversation in a percussive language that was only just beyond her understanding. The thickness of the smooth wool robe she had pulled up over Daryan’s naked body shielded him from the chill of her touch as he slept. She noticed how the moonlight drained the color from the fabric as she skimmed her fingers over his chest.
