by Evie Manieri
“I’m not waiting. Not this time.” The words sounded as if he had chiseled them out of rock. “You can live your life alone if that’s what you want, but don’t expect me to do the same.”
“I won’t.” She started to go, but something stopped her. At a loss, she fixed on the only question to come into her mind.
“What did Callia make you promise?”
Jachad folded his arms across his chest. “Her exact words?” he asked. “‘Amai’s sweet flower, if you don’t bed her tonight, I’ll find someone who will. Anyone can see she’s gasping for it.’”
Lahlil laughed; she actually laughed. Then she stopped laughing because Jachad had pulled her to him. His beard, softer than she expected, moved against her cheek and his lips brushed up against hers. The entire world condensed down to the points where their bodies touched and she brought her arms up around his neck as his came around her waist.
“Lahlil.”
Her name sounded new, like she had never heard it before. She didn’t know what was happening or what it meant and she didn’t care. She felt his breath in her ear; his lips skimmed her neck. They kissed again, and her skin came alive under his touch like the chill of a fever: a terrible ache that she couldn’t bear another moment. He hooked his finger under the cord of her eye-patch and tugged it down around her neck. His face blurred as her mismatched eyes fought each other: the brown eye, weaker at night, ruled over by Shof, and the silver eye taken by Amai. There had been a time, before her body became a battleground for the gods, when she and Jachad had sat side by side, gazing into the bonfire; when the cold desert wind had charged the night with possibility. His fingers traced the scars on her forehead, roved down to the crescent on her cheek.
Then he touched the scar pulling up the corner of her mouth and she flinched as the too-recent memory of pain from Nevie’s cut licked down her spine like a tongue of fire.
“What’s wrong? Did I hurt you?” asked Jachad, his eyes softening with concern.
She felt the moment slipping away and wanted to scream. “No,” she told him, looking to drift away again into his sea-blue eyes, but finding only her own memories reflected back at her. “That scar reminds me of something.”
“Reminds you of what?”
Lahlil remembered her face throbbing with pain, and the wound at her mouth trying to split apart when she swallowed. They had taken her eye-patch, and just like now, the double-vision had made it impossible for her to see very much. She recalled the faintly medicinal aroma tingeing the air, and even the feel of the fur rug beneath her fingers. She had woken other times before that one, feeling the same fur, seeing the same semi-darkness …
* * *
A Norlander physic: someone who could actually see the diseases and wounds inside her. Lahlil drew her shoulders a little further under the rug.
Lahlil said,
Something of significance passed between Cyrrin and the man with the sword, but she didn’t understand it.
She hauled herself up and swung her legs over the side of the bed, which turned out to be made of several pallets of stacked fir boughs. Bolts of pain shot up both legs the instant she tried to stand, and something inside her chest fluttered.
Lahlil lurched up anyway.
The man grabbed her wrists and held them behind her back, but though she struggled, she wouldn’t have been able to break the grip of a child in her current state. Cyrrin produced the silver flask Nevie had taken off the corpse of a duke after they had broken the siege of Bakkenresh—the one she kept filled with a cheap spirit that smelled and tasted like lamp oil. Lahlil tried to keep her lips closed as Cyrrin brought the spout up against them.
Lahlil held her breath when they pinched her nose closed, but she couldn’t hold it forever and the instant she gasped for breath, the healer tipped in the liquid, pushed her mouth closed again, then unexpectedly started stroking her throat so that she’d swallow before she could spit the medicine out.
The draft was cool, and tasted not quite sweet, not quite sour. She could feel it moving inside her—and then, a moment later, a heavy calm spread through her, like the stilling of a pool of water. An uncomfortable sensation pulled at her arms and legs, but it was nothing like she’d endured the past few years; it wasn’t the pain with the force of a lightning bolt that sent her muscles into spasm and locked them hard as stone.
The man pushed her back down on the bed.
She took a deep breath, expecting the sickness to squeeze the air out of her lungs, anticipating the suffocating pressure that went on and on and on, trying to choke the life out of her.
It didn’t come.
Lahlil looked up into the void and saw the ceiling of her childhood bedroom pressing down on her; she heard the deep growl of the stone as Meena opened the secret door. She must have dreamed of her old Shadari nurse slipping into the hidden room to check on her, taking her wrist as Cyrrin did now, while she feigned sleep so she wouldn’t have to explain the nameless panic that pinned her to the bed night after night. Lahlil shut her eyes now, feeling that panic threatening again, but helpless against the drowsiness pulling her down.
* * *
Lahlil made herself focus on the present, on the striped tent around her and on Jachad’s searching blue eyes, still waiting for an explanation. He wanted her to have faith. Maybe this time, with him, it wouldn’t all go wrong. Maybe this time, she really could stay.
Then she heard the panicked shouting outside and she knew the gods weren’t through with her yet.
Chapter 8
Lahlil and Jachad rushed out of the tent to find the source of the sound and instantly ran into a throng of frantic Nomas wading through the puddles and trampling down the reeds in their haste to reach them.
Lahlil listened to all of them at once, trying to piece together the story from their overlapping accounts while Jachad was still asking questions and begging for them to calm down. Callia had collapsed in the street—it wasn’t just an early labor; she had screamed that she could feel something wrong. Mairi had taken her into her tent and Callia was screaming and crying in there still. Mairi wouldn’t let anyone else inside.
“She’ll let me in,” Jachad vowed as he charged off.
“She was taking care of Oshi,” Lahlil said. “Where is he?”
But no one knew.
Lahlil followed, pushing her way through clouds of twinkling insects. She found a large, ominously quiet crowd clogging up the avenues around Mairi’s tent. A few had brought lamps, and the way the lights bobbed up and down as the men paced made her feel like she was on a ship. She heard no screaming or crying now.
Behr had taken charge of Oshi and was rocking and talking to him with gentle enthusiasm. He had been with Callia when it happened.
“She said she wasn’t feeling well,” he told her. “I was walking with her to Mairi’s tent, and she just … stopped. I don’t know much about how they get here—babies. My wife had all three of ours on the Windbourne. Is this kind of thing normal?”
She almost laughed at the idea that she would know any more than him.
Oshi gurgled and he added, “Mine are so big now. I miss this a little.” He was smiling up at the baby as he lifted him up high and jiggled him around. “They’re so easy at this age. Do you want to take him?”
Then Mairi came out of her tent. One look at her face was more than enough, and the blood in Lahlil’s veins turned to sand. Dead. The baby was dead. Jachad’s successor; the half-brother he was to have raised to be the next king: Shof the sun god’s son was dead.
“Callia?” someone asked.
“She’ll be all right,” said Jachad, coming out of the tent. Mairi dropped the cloth she was using to wipe her hands and staggered into Jachad’s arms. She wept into his chest, gasping apologies and explanations as the others turned to comfort each other or go back and spread the news.
“This isn’t right,” Lahlil told Mairi. “I want to see the baby.”
“What’s the point now?” Jachad asked wearily, still stroking Mairi’s hair. “Babies die. It’s part of life. We all have to accept that.”
“No son of Shof’s has ever died before,” said Mairi, lifting her tear-stained face from his shoulder. “You know that, Jachi. Let her look.”
“But she—”
“Do it,” said Mairi, looking up at Lahlil through pale eyes so swollen they barely opened. “I want you to see him. Poor little thing.” The last word sent her diving back into Jachad’s arms.
The lamp-lit tent was bright compared to the swamp outside. Many of Mairi’s belongings had been pushed aside to make way for a large basin of ominously dark water and a basket of soiled linens. Callia was lying on Mairi’s bed, just a vague shape huddled under several blankets. She looked like she was asleep, but Lahlil saw her shrink a little deeper into her coverings as she approached.
The bassinet, brightly painted with desert flowers and rolling dunes, sat on the floor against the surety of a happier outcome. A carefully folded blanket nestled inside. She knelt down beside it and pulled back one corner.
He was pathetically small, but perfect. She took inventory: two little arms and two little legs; a tiny head with a patch of dark hair; half-open eyes too small for her to see their color; ten fingers; ten impossibly small toes; a little chest, sunken and still where the beating heart should have been, and over it a strange black mark: a spot in the center with lines snaking out like a spindly anemone. She touched her finger to it and felt the cold flesh give under the pressure.
“Lahlil?” Callia called softly.
She kept her voice steady and calm. “Yes?”
“Do I still get to be queen?”
“I don’t know.”
“Will you ask Jachad?”
“Yes, I’ll ask.”
When she came out of the tent she could already feel the change, like the rustling of tinder before the spark. The ordered, routine world of the Nomas had just been burned away from the inside. The ash still held its shape, but the next breeze could blow it away.
“Did you see the mark?” asked Mairi, breaking free from Jachad’s arms and careening toward her as if she intended to fall at her feet. Jachad walked away toward the swamp. Men turned as he passed, looking as if they wanted to speak to him, and then looked away. “Have you seen it before? Do you know what it is?”
“No,” said Lahlil, watching Jachad walk away.
“No? Me neither.” Mairi dried her tears and set her face into a grim mask. “It’s not natural. I know what can go wrong with childbirth, but this … No, this is something else. Jachi knows it, too. He doesn’t want to believe it, that’s all.”
Lahlil took a lamp from one of the men and followed Jachad into the swamp. He left the high ground and waded across a shallow pool, not altering his course until a stand of razor-grass blocked his path. The light from her lamp bounced off the water, creating ripples of luminescence, and moths beat their papery wings against the pierced metal until they fell away, dazed by the heat.
“Jachi?”
He turned to her. He was pale enough for her to see every one of his freckles, even in the lamplight, and she didn’t like the way he had his hand pressed against his chest.
“Stay back,” he said, raising his palm to her.
A cold breath of fear blew over her. “Why?” she asked, moving forward regardless.
“Stay back!” he shouted, raising both hands high into the air. Twin flames shot up, revealing the plants and creatures of the swamp around them as suddenly as a bolt of lightning. But then the flames sputtered and in the center of each twisted a thin spiral of black smoke.
The tension in his mouth, the creased eyes … That wasn’t grief. It was physical pain.
“I felt it, when we were in my tent,” said Jachad. “I didn’t think it meant anything—”
She dropped the lantern onto the wet ground and leaped forward. Yellow and orange petals of flame scattered from his hands as she reached out for the front of his robe. He gripped her wrist and held it tight, squeezing until she could feel her own pulse throbbing beneath his fingers. They stood locked together, Jachad merely delaying the inevitable, stubbornly holding the line in a battle he’d already lost. Then his hold finally loosened.
She seized the collar of his robe with both hands and tore the fabric apart. The mark was there, over his heart: black vines, reaching out, pulling her down.
Chapter 9
Isa had exactly one thing to look forward to after the latest temple collapse: Daryan had announced a cerem
ony to open the Shadar’s first school, despite the advice of Omir and nearly everyone else around him. For hundreds of years, the only people among the Shadari who had been permitted to read and write were the ashas and the daimon, and even for them, the store of the Shadari’s knowledge had been reduced to nothing more than a few rote supplications to the gods. Daryan firmly believed his dream, to coax that knowledge out of the past, was as vital to the Shadar’s survival as forging black-bladed weapons for themselves or finding those people who had the ashas’ powers—the same powers as little Dramash. He was convinced that this would be the turning point.
Isa woke before dawn that morning to saddle Aeda. After an infuriating hour spent wrestling the massive saddle into place and securing it using all the one-handed tricks she had developed, she came back into the ashadom to wash and to get Blood’s Pride. A lamp left burning on one of the makeshift tables—wasting lamp oil, as if it wasn’t as scarce as everything else—illuminated a landscape of unwashed plates and cups, not to mention Herwald lying face-down on a bench with his arm dangling over the side. On the opposite side of the table, Tovar lay slumped over with his head on his arms. The rest had at least made their way back to their beds and would no doubt snore the day away until dusk, when they’d start over again, circling aimlessly through the monotonous days like a one-oared boat.
The humped back of the broken saddle separating her corner of the cave didn’t afford much privacy, but she washed as best as she could in the basin of water, though nothing but a proper bath would scrub away the reek of straw, sweat and triffon’s hide. She missed her big stone tub, along with the room to put it in and the cool water to fill it up.
A chill shot up Isa’s spine, but she hid it as best she could. She scanned the darkness until she found him leaning back on the bench with his feet propped up on a nearby table. She pulled on her shirt as quickly as she could without making it obvious that he had unnerved her. The fabric stuck to her tacky skin and she wished she hadn’t bothered with the wash.
