“Cousin, I am aware of your . . .” He paused, and evidently decided to forego a more diplomatic wording. “Your want for death. Even so, I am charged with protecting you. Whether you like it or not.”
Ashtadukht focused on nothing in particular. It wasn’t that she wanted to die; she just didn’t want to live. She didn’t think she could put it into words, even in her own mind. Everything struck her as unappealing.
She sat there dejectedly, one arm slung across her chest, and pondered how unbelievable her situation had become. She’d been swept up in a series of increasingly impossible events. This reigned as the most magnificent mission she’d been on, and yet the worst by far. Maybe the two were connected.
“Shame you are half-div,” the Senmurw remarked. “Half of a waste, but your better half benefitted anyway. Feather had its healing power blunted.”
“What?”
“I saw him use the feather and said to myself, ‘That woman should be positively gleaming, but she has hardly recovered.’ Only explanation is you being half div.”
“I . . .” Ashtadukht looked around aimlessly. “What?”
“Drown the ne’er-do-well!” squawked the Chamrosh. “Drop like pebbles in the deeps!”
She squinted. “That can’t be right. You must be mistaken. I’m sure there’s another explanation.”
The Senmurw sighed. “There you are slicing up your words with contractions, too. Divs and those who have ventured too far into the abode of the Lie cannot help but do it.”
“But I’ve always spoken like this.”
“A person is born half-div.”
Ashtadukht was shaking her head. She scratched at her knuckles where the cuff of her sleeve would have rested. “I cann—I cann—” She simply could not say the full word. It refused to so much as appear in her brain.
“You can what?” asked the Senmurw.
“I can’t be half div,” she mumbled, realizing that it would have undermined her entire life. Her profession would be thrown into suspicion. It would mean that—she shook her head emphatically. “Can’t be,” she muttered.
Tirdad rested a hand on her shoulder. It was worn. She could feel the callouses, the ridges of wrinkles, the dirt that’d accumulated in the creases, the warmth of the blood flowing through his veins.
“Would you return us to civilization?” he asked. “Surely we cannot stay here.”
“I will do you this favour,” the Senmurw agreed. “But you must first bring me three giant waterskins from the boars inhabiting this island. The flight is a long one, and I will need nourishment.”
To Ashtadukht, this was someone else’s problem. She hid her face in her palms and did her best to pretend she had the privacy she yearned for. She’d laboured tirelessly during her years as a star-reckoner to hold together what little remained of her life after being widowed, and now even that was falling apart.
X
Ashtadukht reclined on the divan only half comfortably. Sure, it cushioned her now feather light weight quite amiably. But it reeked of an incense she couldn’t place: rose and musk had been grievously imposed upon by some well-meaning but ultimately lame alchemist. And the enthusiastic exchanges of her colleagues concerning—she listlessly rolled her head to look at their circle—concerning the last year in celestial observations hardly registered.
She’d first been lauded for standing her ground then reprimanded for her disappearance during the rebellion. Star-reckoners scarcely agreed. Although the prevailing sentiment was that she’d been in the wrong. That didn’t bother her so much. She’d grown accustomed to it. You had to be thick-skinned to do her job.
She just abhorred these mandatory meetings. At least the wine flowed freely, she thought as she took a heady swill of hers and returned her attention to the ceiling.
The Senmurw had kept its word, not that she’d expected the contrary; it was a servant of Truth after all. The rebellion had been squashed with little effort and without her aid. Tirdad seemed oddly normal after the whole affair. And he’d remained mum on the topic of her possibly being a half-div. As far as she knew anyway. But he’d been friendly, hadn’t watched her like a hawk. He’d just been there.
She needed that, she admitted. Because she felt as if she were clinging to the precipice, and she didn’t even know what of.
“Ashtadukht,” someone called.
It had an edge. Not actively, but the inevitable sort of edge a name took when it’d been stropped along the vocal cords several times too many.
She looked over. It wasn’t often that she was bothered after reviews were finished. “Huh?”
“You did well against the forty-armed div.” It was Mehr-farr, her old tutor. The years had finally begun to bow his back.
“Thank you,” she softly replied, thinking that they’d covered the event when it was still recent. She hadn’t the foggiest idea why he’d brought it up, and all of her ideas were presently rife with fog.
“That considered,” he went on, adopting the unmistakable tone a person used when delivering a message the recipient most certainly would not sign for. “We have decided to tackle this unknown div you have been chasing ourselves.”
“Excuse me?” Ashtadukht straightened. In the nebulousness of her intoxication, fear took form.
She looked from Mehr-farr to her peers, and their expressions ranged from pity to disappointment to scarcely hidden contempt. Fear became rage. “You promised me this,” she growled, rising as she did. “This is mine.”
Mehr-farr walked up to her and placed his hands on her shoulders. She seethed. She trembled. He would patronize her next.
“Come now, dear. Let us carry your burden awhile.”
“Never,” she said through clenched jaws. “This is my responsibility.”
He sighed and gave her a pained smile. “I know it must be difficult, dear. What it did to your husband . . .” He shook his head. “We sympathize. We truly do.”
Ashtadukht blazed. Her stare bored into his during those brief moments when he’d risk looking directly at her. Rage threatened to take over. She kneaded her sleeve furiously; it was all she could do to avoid exploding. “Don’t do this,” she said, her voice thick with warning. “Don’t do this to me.”
“We have been patient, dear. More than patient. But you must understand that this is larger than you.”
He squeezed her shoulders, to which she responded by slapping his hands away. He frowned, but continued.
“Every year a star-reckoner falls to this div. We can no longer idle while it picks us off. Frankly, we should have stepped in years ago, but I believed in you.”
“Believed in me?” She pushed past him, and swept a fiery glare over the star-reckoners. She’d had too much wine. “You never believed in me, you lousy tortoise-fuckers. Always looking down your nose while you, while you—”
She swung her arm.
“While you masturbate to star charts and calendars. I’m out there working my bones to dust. I took down that forty-armed div. And you know what? You know who didn’t? The tiny fucks it swallowed! If I’m so incompetent, if I’m so incompetent, how?”
Ashtadukht aimed an accusatory finger at four men in succession like rapidly loosed arrows. “You four. You were nearby. Where were you? Hiding in your fathers’ asses, no doubt. Father-loving cowards.”
She spat and staggered back to bump into Mehr-farr. Three of the four she’d addressed had stood, unwilling to suffer any further defamation.
“You should go,” Mehr-farr said from her rear. “You need to rest.”
“Don’t tell me what I, what I need to do,” she argued as he ushered her out.
When they’d reached the exit, he deposited her there with a grimace. “You have had too much to drink, dear. Sleep it off then enjoy the festivities. We can discuss this more when you are sober.”
He started to turn, but paused mid-pivot. “I do believe in you,” he said sullenly. He patted her arm and left her doddering there in the empty arch.
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��Don’t need you to believe in me,” she mumbled to herself once she’d been left alone. “Don’t need anyone to believe in me. I’m right here. I exist.”
The din of Nowruz closed on her, mingled with her rage to find something like a merrymaking-but-unhappy-about-it middle ground. Stumbling through the throngs, she absorbed the spirit of revelry as the capital city celebrated the Spring equinox and the arrival of a new year.
She lurched through a gathering of revellers, who were chanting, “Your red be mine, my yellow begone,” to the accompanying tune of a jubilantly hammered santur while leaping through and running over purifying flames. Ashtadukht emerged with a drink in her hand. As far as she was concerned, it’d always been there.
She took a draught. Her lot’s more recent vicissitude still stung. She took another. And another. And another.
Banquets hugged every corner, replete with laughter and untrammelled grins. There came to her the fleeting scent of jam-slathered venison before it joined its companions in the thick union of feast-fulfilling smells that would have surely been golden if it had colour.
“Need a new tunic,” she murmured to herself, comprehensible only because her thoughts flowed alongside. “Just bought a new tunic. But they say, they say you need new clothes for Nowruz.”
She furrowed her brow and took another swill. “Never do visit family like I should. Bet they despise the daughter who, who doesn’t—what’s it? That thing you should do to them.”
Her head lolled to one side as she inspected a table of fresh milk and cheese. She swallowed a mouthful of each, and washed them down with more wine. “Good,” she muttered. “Tradition fulfilled.”
“There you are,” said Tirdad as he approached, arms crossed. “How did the meeting go?”
Ashtadukht screwed up her face in a grimace. He had a knack for finding her. “Not well.”
“Oh?”
She gave her focus free rein to wander, and in her drunkenness it chose to linger on him.
“Cousin?”
She imagined his bare, muscled frame, hidden behind mere layers of fabric that could be peeled away like the skin of some lust-inspiring fruit. She felt as if a furnace burned in her abdomen. The thought coaxed her forward, which in her state resulted in a complete failure of balance. She fell into him.
“You have had too much wine,” he observed, supporting her where her compromised faculties could not. “You are wasted.”
She grumbled something that even she didn’t grasp into his chest before managing to lasso words in the proper order and articulation. “Not enough wine,” she said, bringing a bowl to her lips.
He confiscated it before she could drink and handed it off to a passing reveller. “You will regret this in the morning,” he said, and offered her a gentle smile. “Must have been a rough meeting. Let us find you somewhere to rest.”
“Don’t need rest,” Ashtadukht muttered as she willingly stumbled where he led her, most of her course driving directly into his side. If it weren’t for that and the arm around her back, she would have fallen over.
They found respite in the shadow of a home removed from the more immediate festival. It wasn’t quiet, but it was empty. He lowered her to the ground and sat beside her.
“You should not let them see you like that,” he said, staring at her as if he hoped to excavate some deeper meaning in her actions. “They are not worth it.”
“Stole my, my—” Ashtadukht flapped her arm irritably. “Bastards stole my childhood. Now this.”
“I do not follow.”
She leaned into him, slogging through a mire of muddied thoughts. She gave them a beetle-browed series of forced blinks in an ill-fated attempt at clearing the mud. “Do you, do you believe in me?” she finally asked.
“Believe in you?”
She nodded and gestured vaguely. “Like a god?” She shook her head. That wasn’t right.
“I am afraid not,” he replied with a hint of amusement. Then more seriously, and perceptively: “I believe in you as a star-reckoner.”
Ashtadukht grinned like a silly child. Her cheeks burned. She languidly dragged her face up his sleeve while she laboured to haul herself up by his tunic.
“What are you . . .” he began before trailing off as she climbed into his lap.
“Tirdad,” she breathed, levelling a salacious stare on his intrigued but hesitant eyes. Even in her uninhibited state, she quickly jerked her attention elsewhere—his gaze had always been so powerful. A hint of grey had begun to encroach upon the fringes of his hairline in recent years. She found it handsome. It fortified the image of a hardened yet intelligent warrior that he’d naturally fallen into. Her scrutiny followed his hairline to his full, similarly streaked beard, and farther yet down his torso.
Her hands, emboldened by wine and no longer content with idling limply by her sides, slipped sinuously beneath his tunic and into his trousers.
“Cousin,” he objected. “You are incredibly drunk. You do not know what you—”
There.
Ashtadukht gripped him, and was pleased to discover he was already well on the way to arousal. She ground against his thigh and stroked him with drunken conviction.
He swallowed audibly. “I have had some wine myself,” he said, his timbre taking a slight turn toward noncommittal resistance. “I think I should probably—”
There.
Her right hand had been a pathfinder for her left, which manoeuvred in and even lower, where its objective was delightfully heavy. She massaged him there, too, while greedily tugging.
She’d been watching the spot where her hands disappeared beneath his tunic almost hypnotically, and finally tore her cloudy, licentious attention from it to sneak a glance at his face.
It glowed. Or seemed to her to glow at any rate. The milky light of a full moon struck it at a flattering angle, threw a pearly sheen over his admiring expression, and further amplified her arousal. He beheld her with something that, deep down, she recognized as love.
All of her reason had vanished, drowned by alcohol, and with it, her restraint. She wanted him.
She extracted her left hand and, while maintaining eye contact, brought it to her lips. There, she sucked on her fingers, sensuously and unabashedly coiling her tongue over their knuckles. She finally had her chance to revel in something.
Tirdad diverted his gaze. “I wish you would do this when sober. As it is I . . . cannot.”
Ashtadukht froze as he took her gingerly by the hips and moved her back to his side. Her hands came to rest on her lap, and she looked at them stupidly. Her mind was still so fibrous as to make cotton seem like granite. Her desire still drummed madly. But his rejection had the effect of surgically dispersing a point of interest within the fog.
“I have to go,” she muttered miserably, and staggered to her feet.
“I want to,” he said, seeking to blunt the blow. “I truly do. But not like this. Not something you will regret when the wine wears off.”
She already regretted it. He reached for her wrist. “Ashta, I—”
“Don’t call me that!” she snarled, and snatched her arm away. “Don’t you, don’t you ever fucking call me that!”
She stood there, trembling and angry and wounded and doing her damnedest to defend that break in the fog.
“I have to go,” she said with the diaphanous pitch of a humiliated apology. Ashtadukht took a moment to gain her bearings, kneading her cuff as she did. Failing miserably, she lumbered off.
• • • • •
The night matured, ripened, and settled into a less boisterous climate as the celebrations came to a close. Ashtadukht had been wandering not exactly aimlessly, but without knowing how to get where she meant to go.
She had her origin and destination plainly at hand, but could not for the life of her chart a path between the two. After several frustrating hours of doddering around and ransacking the contents of her brain, she finally found herself standing at the entrance to the Observatory of Reckoners.
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Ashtadukht inhaled, and the alcohol allayed the ache in her lungs. She exhaled through pursed lips. She gripped a wineskin in one hand; this one wasn’t for her. In the other, her cuff, the inveterate fidgeting outside her awareness.
Those that came before had deserved it. She did not believe this. She did not console herself with it. A fact is not something you believe; a fact is not a consolation. It just is. Yes, they had all deserved it, every last one. But that long peregrination eventually led here: to the quarry most responsible.
She sauntered through the ingress as seductively as a woman with compromised motor control could manage. Being rebuffed by Tirdad leant some honesty to the sway of her hips, but this had nothing to do with it.
This was a ritual. This was vengeance.
She strode into the main chamber where, to her relief, Mehr-farr slumbered on a divan. He’d only ever been able to sleep by spending the late hours toiling over work. Ashtadukht ironed the enmity from her face, chiseling her scowl into a grin that could have fooled anyone, even a Supreme Judge. She disrobed silently, passionately. She ran her tongue over her lips. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t watching. She had to be in character. Convincing.
She leaned in and breathed into his ear. “Mehr-farr.”
No response.
“Mehr-farr.” Often, such sultry utterances could be described as husky. Husky is perhaps more suitable than one might think, as it implies a sort of roughness, carnal yet unpolished. What Ashtadukht uttered was not husky. She spoke like pure silver: with unrivalled conductivity and an unnatural lustre.
He stirred, blinking and mumbling to himself. “Bring me some soup. Your defense is meaningless without a heliacal rising.”
He looked at her, dumbfounded. During the span of time in which his chin hung slack, she drew herself to her full height and planted a foot beside his head. She did so in a calculated manner, so that the dim light of a nearby oil lamp cast a flattering gown of shadows over her flesh. It wasn’t about what was revealed; it was about what remained hidden.
A Star-Reckoner's Lot (A Star-Reckoner's Legacy Book 1) Page 24
