by Evie Manieri
They both knew the risks of these trysts, however infrequent, but the urgency of satisfying their passion made everything else, even the constant pain of their touch, irrelevant. She pitied ordinary couples whose embraces cost them nothing, whose lovemaking came so cheaply that they could undertake it on a whim and forget it just as easily. They couldn’t know what it was like to have a lover’s arms circle around the small of their back like a pair of blacksmith’s tongs straight from the fire, or have kisses rain down like a shower of embers.
But now a different kind of pain shot down through the stump of her left shoulder and into her missing arm and she fished out one of the dense little green balls from the pouch around her waist, not allowing herself to remember that she had taken one just after Daryan had fallen asleep, or that she had only a few left and ought to be saving them, or that the Nomas healer who had given them to her might not be back for months. She tasted the medicine’s bitter tang the moment it touched her tongue and made herself chew slowly, needing the herbs and roots and whatever else made up the concoction to take the pain away.
“Daryan,” she said, gently pressing her hand down on his heart.
She drew her hand back a moment later when she heard the rumbling—it wasn’t very loud, but she still heard it, because she listened for it every day, all the time, with the vigilance of someone too accustomed to sudden catastrophe. The ground beneath her shuddered briefly, and then she knew for certain that the unsettled ruins of the old temple had shifted again, like a sleeping giant gnashing his teeth, grinding her happier memories down into gritty red dust.
“Was that the temple again?” asked Daryan, bolting upright. He pulled his robe on over his head then fumbled around in the stiff grass beside him for his gold circlet. His mouth turned down a little as he looked over at her and she was conscious of the way her old trousers had worn thin at the knees and of the unwashed state of her heavy braid. Since she could not do the braid up again with one hand, she rarely let her hair down any more. “You’re already dressed.”
“We should go down before someone gets hurt.” She waded through the tall weeds to where Aeda was waiting, breathing in the pungent sea-air-and-musk scent of the triffon’s bristly hide. She took a moment to scratch the ridges and the coarse tuft of fur between Aeda’s round little ears before beginning the methodical process of checking the harness for faults, while Aeda poked her blocky head around in the weeds looking for lizards and rodents to eat.
“I didn’t mean to fall asleep.” Daryan sent small stones skipping away down the slope toward the city below as he strode toward her, tying his belt. “Why didn’t you wake me up?”
“You needed the rest,” she said, swallowing against the dryness scraping at her throat. No matter how often she spoke Shadari, speaking aloud still burned. “You work until you’re ready to drop.”
“That doesn’t matter. I don’t want to waste a moment of the time we get to be alone together.” Daryan came up close behind her and circled his arm around her waist. “I need you more than sleep. You give me the strength to keep going.”
Her eye caught the glint of gold among his dark curls even as the heat of his body wrapped around her like a blanket through the layers of clothing between them. She closed her eyes and stood still as he rested his cheek against her white hair.
“We should go,” she told him, whispering even though there was no one but the goats on the next hilltop over to hear her.
“I know,” said Daryan, but he didn’t release her. “Tell me what’s wrong first. Something’s been bothering you all night. And don’t say ‘nothing.’ I’ve seen you sneaking those pills, and rubbing your arm like you do when it hurts. It always hurts more when you’re upset about something.”
“Later.” Isa jammed her foot in the stirrup, ready to swing herself into the saddle, but Daryan’s hand clamped down over her wrist like a cuff of red-hot iron and pulled her back.
“Now,” Daryan demanded, his mouth twitching with worry. “Please, Isa. Don’t leave me to wonder about it. Just tell me what’s happened.”
“I overhead something,” she confessed. Had Daryan been a Norlander, he would have been able to feel the uncertainty sweeping through her. She reached down and squeezed the little pouch, feeling the shapes of the pills inside. Only four left. “This morning in the palace, I heard Omir say they want to take Aeda away from me and have a Shadari fly her for you instead.”
“That? Is that all?” Daryan gave the shaky little laugh that meant he had been caught out. “That was just talk. I didn’t agree to it.”
“I know,” she said. Cool air snaked up underneath the untucked tail of her brother’s old shirt, but sweat still itched on the back of her neck. “You told them you’d think about it.”
“I had to say that,” Daryan insisted, his voice hardening suddenly. “You know how things are right now. Binit will jump on anything to turn them against me. But I’m not going to do it—I would hardly ever get to see you.”
“But I want you to think about it,” said Isa. He drew back like he’d been pricked with a pin. “You can fly Aeda yourself, and I can do something more important—train your soldiers, help with the fortifications, even translate the mural in the ashadom.” She and the rest of the Norlanders had taken up residence in the ashadom—the cave Harotha had discovered, where the ancient ashas had painted constellations and writing all over the walls. Daryan claimed to have chosen it for them because it was large and cool; Isa suspected it was because his people’s superstitious fears kept most of the Shadari away.
“Isa,” he said, drawing out her name in the way he did when he was trying not to be angry. He moved his hand toward the hair curling over the back of his neck, but stopped short. He had decided the old gesture was a childish tic, not in keeping with the dignity of his office. “I don’t think that’s a good idea, not right now. Binit will just say something about me letting the ‘Dead Ones’—sorry, but that’s what he’d say—run things again.”
“The Shadar is my home. I need to help. I want to be accepted.”
“You are,” Daryan insisted. “You’re a hero.”
“Yes, for killing my sister,” Isa reminded him. “I don’t want to be a hero for that. It’s not enough; I’m never really going to be accepted as one of them if I stay shut up in the ashadom.”
She hooked her fingers into the front of his robe and pulled him into a kiss. He made a soft sound deep in his throat even as his shoulders stiffened from the shock of her cold lips and seized her round the waist. She wanted to melt into him until nothing was left of her but a pool of water: melt out of existence …
“Isa,” Daryan said, pulling away from her. She leaned back with her heart thumping as he tilted his head down toward the dark city. “I know it’s been hard for you, but we can’t let it drive us apart now. Real change takes time and there’s not much I can do while I’m bouncing from one crisis to another. I need you to be patient, not do anything that’s going to cause more problems. You understand that, right?”
Aeda’s side pushed against her back as the creature breathed in and out. She could feel the rhythm somewhere deep within her: steady and relentless, and so much bigger than herself, like the whirl of the stars over their heads.
“We should go,” she said. She thrust her foot back into the stirrup and this time swung herself up, grateful that she’d finally found a way to fasten the harness so that she could wriggle in and out without having to manipulate the buckles one-handed. Daryan climbed up behind her and looped the harness over his shoulders. Then she wrapped the reins around her hand and whistled Aeda into the sky. A moment later, they were in the air with the triffon’s wings beating their slow rhythm beneath them.
The ascent was still the worst part, when the angled climb slid her backward in the saddle and the harness was the only difference between life and death. She held on to the pommel and pushed her heels down the way her brother Eofar had taught her. For years after watching her mother fall to her de
ath, the thought of even getting on a triffon’s back had terrified her to the point of insensibility; now, ironically, she had taken on the job of flying Daryan around to whatever crisis needed his attention most. In the last three months she had done enough flying to make up for the previous seventeen years; she thought she would have a hard time judging whether she or Aeda was the more exhausted. Still, she much preferred that to skulking around in the cave with the other Norlanders, watching them do nothing but wait for her brother Eofar—now their leader—to come back from Norland. They cared for nothing except drowning their boredom in the wine the Shadari provided as a cursory token of gratitude for taking their side against Frea.
The city below looked peaceful under the cover of night, though dawn would reveal the stark truth: the neighborhoods reduced to scorched rubble; the bleached skeletons of fishing boats wedged among the rocks; the crowds of hungry people washing like a muddy tide toward the scaffold-covered palace for their daily rations. Isa doubted that whatever fate the ashas, those ill-fated Shadari priests of yore, had sought to prevent could have been any worse than the future their very machinations had brought about.
She spotted four pyres blazing in a line along the shore and a strange feeling fizzed through her empty stomach. Resurrectionists. They fascinated her as much as they repulsed her, with their self-appointed task of digging up the Shadari dead her people had entombed in the Norlander manner so the bodies could instead be burned on ritual pyres, according to Shadari custom. Some of the bodies they’d exhumed were so old there was no one left to remember their names. She suspected Daryan of being a little envious—the resurrectionists had brought the Shadari together with apparently no effort whatsoever, while so many of Daryan’s attempts had failed. When he’d asked people to donate food to a common store to help feed the destitute, they’d claimed not to have enough for themselves. When he’d asked them to work the mines so they could make weapons to defend the Shadar, he’d been accused of trying to profit from their labor. And on it went.
Isa remembered the night three months ago, when she had convinced Daryan to stay in the Shadar to lead his people instead of running away together, the way they had planned. She had thought they needed his passion to reclaim the culture they had lost, to grow strong and independent once more, but she hadn’t anticipated how much of his secret, hard-earned wisdom would be viewed with skepticism and fear, or how a few ambitious men would exploit the uncomfortable fact that he had allied himself with her brother—a Dead One—to secure their victory.
“I wanted to go down to the beach to talk to them tonight,” Daryan shouted just behind her, his frustrated sigh snatched away by the wind. “Omir still thinks they have some kind of secret agenda. You know I rely on Omir—I’d never be able to manage without him—but he’s wrong this time. We need the resurrectionists on our side. I really need to speak to their leader, but they keep saying they don’t have one.”
Isa turned them north toward the ruins of the temple. The wide ring of debris from the original explosion had been picked over long ago, but the bulk of the structure had fallen back in on top of itself, and the rest—the remains of countless rooms and corridors and staircases—teetered in an increasingly unstable pile. In among the rubble was everything from straw mats and broken broom handles to massive carved chests and sacks of coins from her father’s imperial treasury. Every time the ruins settled, people who had lost everything in the war went looking to recover some scrap of their former lives, although too often they ended up getting themselves injured or killed in the process. Ever since Daryan had proclaimed the ruins off-limits in the interests of public safety, a few opportunists had seized on the issue as another chance to undermine his authority.
Darkness hid the clouds of red dust and grit kicked up by this latest collapse, but Isa could smell it in the air and taste it on her lips. Somewhere in that rubble was the other half of her burned left arm, still wrapped up in Eofar’s old shirt. Maybe it was nestled among the remnants of her mother’s tomb, near the carved lid of the sarcophagus a deranged slave had turned into her torture table, or even close to her mother’s broken body. Maybe the undiscovered dead watched over it for her. Another rumble signaled that the pile had not yet settled; sometimes that went on for hours.
A triffon rose up from behind the hills and crossed their path, beating back the cold night air with its leathery wings. It had no saddle, which meant it was one of the feral beasts, those which had fled after their berths in the temple had been destroyed.
As they flew on, tiny points of light—torches and lanterns—appeared around the ruins like a new constellation. Isa saw a fairly large group of Shadari winding through the streets in a loose column and she brought the triffon down lower until the crowd sharpened into individual figures. Relatively few of them carried lamps, but she numbered them at about a hundred. Some shouted when they saw the triffon.
“This isn’t good,” Daryan mused. “I know it’s that little prick Binit whipping them up again. Why do they even listen to him? Everyone knows he was Faroth’s laziest crony. He knows I’ll go down there—he just wants a confrontation so he can show off.”
Isa brought them down over a rutted street lined with derelict houses. Daryan was right: Binit was in the lead, his flabby arm sagging under the weight of a torch stinking of fish oil. Aeda’s heavy feet came down hard on the dusty street, sending up a cloud of dirt as her claws hit the ground. Her tail swept out and collided with a broken wall, sending more loose bricks into the street. Isa ducked her face into the crook of her arm to keep from breathing in the dirt while the crowd clogging up the narrow street jostled to a reluctant halt.
“Wait here. I’ll handle this,” Daryan said, as he unbuckled himself and slid down from the triffon’s back. “And don’t draw your sword,” he added.
“I won’t.” She stopped herself from reminding him that Blood’s Pride wasn’t her sword. Her sword, Truth’s Might, lay somewhere on the ocean floor. No matter how often she oiled and honed the plain steel blade or how many times she drilled with it until her shirt was dripping with perspiration, Blood’s Pride would always belong to her dead sister, Frea.
“Those ruins aren’t safe. No one should be going near them,” said Daryan, squaring off against Binit. Isa shifted uneasily in the saddle as tools swung, clanking, from the hands of those in the crowd.
“We’re here to do our duty. People were buried alive in there,” said Binit. The remainder of Faroth’s revolutionaries oozed out of the crowd and congealed around him. “We just want to give them a proper funeral. Don’t you, Daimon? Or is that another tradition we’re supposed to abandon now?”
“We can look for our dead in the morning, when we can see and the ruins have settled,” said Daryan. “Anyone who goes in there now is just being selfish.”
“Selfish?” Binit repeated, turning his chin to the side so the people behind him could hear. “Selfish! That’s what you said, isn’t it, Daimon?”
“Yes, selfish,” said Daryan, projecting his voice out over the crowd. A chill wrapped around the back of Isa’s neck. “It’s not just your lives I’m worried about, it’s the people I’ll have to send in after you when you get yourselves trapped in there.”
Daryan walked further into the street and gestured for Binit to come closer. The rabble-rouser hefted his torch a little higher and came out to meet him.
“I know why you really want to get in there,” said Daryan. He kept his voice low under the sound of the spitting torch, but Isa could hear him clearly. “Wait until dawn when it’s safer, and I’ll let you treasure-hunt as much as you want.”
“Sure, with Omir and his toy army right behind us, taking anything we find.”
“For the treasury,” Daryan corrected patiently, “but no, not this time: if you find anything, take it. You can swaddle your babies in the governor’s monogrammed napkins if you want. But I need you to do a few things for me.”
Binit rubbed his shoulder in a distasteful attempt at coyness
and pursed his fleshy lips. “What?”
“First, stop spreading these rumors about a plague. There isn’t any plague.”
“You’re denying it?”
“No one is sick,” said Daryan. Isa didn’t need to see his face to know he was clenching his teeth to keep from shouting. “I’ve got to hand it to you: not many men could convince people there’s a plague because there aren’t any bodies. Every time some family moves house, you and your friends are out there the next day parading up and down in front of the palace, claiming I’ve carried them off in the night. Gods help us, don’t you think people are scared enough already?”
“I’ll think about it,” said Binit.
“And stop discouraging people with the asha powers from coming forward. There’s absolutely no guarantee Eofar is going to be able to talk the Norland emperor out of invading again, and what have we got to defend ourselves? Some half-built walls in the mountain passes that wouldn’t hold back a herd of goats and fewer than a hundred imperial swords that we barely know how to use. It isn’t a sin for people to use their powers. Harotha told us so; she gave her life so we would know the truth.”
“Oh yes, Harotha’s ‘visions,’” said Binit, with an insincere laugh. “We’re just supposed to believe what she said, are we? And it just happened to be exactly what she wanted? Too bad she didn’t leave any elixir so we could see for ourselves. But maybe she thought of that, eh?”
Daryan lunged forward as if to grab Binit’s robe and Isa reached for Blood’s Pride despite his warning, but he remembered himself in time, instead balling up his fists and shaking his head in frustration. “What’s the point of all this, Binit?” he demanded. “What exactly are you trying to accomplish?”
“The Shadar needs to go back to the way it was before the Dead Ones came,” Binit answered. For once the arrogant smirk dropped away and he reminded Isa of a boy who had just come out into an unfamiliar street and no longer knew his way home. “You want to change everything. You want to change what we’ve believed for hundreds of years. I say what my father and my grandfather believed in is good enough for me. Who do you think you are?”
