Mehr-farr cleared his throat. “Am I dreaming?”
She slowly, sensually drew her fingertips from her knee, up her thigh, and into the shadows. She grinned conspiratorially.
“Must be. You should make the most of it.”
He sat up, obviously disturbed, but unable to prevent his eyes from appraising her figure. “If this is about your mission—”
Ashtadukht lowered one knee to the divan.
“Then you should know I cannot sway them. I am not even a star-reckoner anymore. I only came to consult and—”
She came face-to-face with her mentor and stole a kiss. To his credit, Mehr-farr did not return it. But she was so insistent, so messy that it did not need returning. “Let’s just enjoy ourselves,” she sighed over his lips. “It’s Nowruz after all.”
“By Ohrmazd, you reek of wine,” he objected. “Have you stopped drinking at all since you left?”
She lifted the wineskin and gave it a shake. “The trouble isn’t that I’m too drunk. It’s that you aren’t drunk enough.” She placed it in his lap, gave his crotch a squeeze—which told her he was not displeased by her performance—and walked to the nearby table in a way that can be best described as advertising. She swept its contents to the floor, turned to face him, and sat on the edge.
His eyes were glued to her. She had his attention. Good.
Ashtadukht brought one foot up to her side, then the other. Now, the lamplight had the opposite effect: it revealed everything, glazed her in brassy pulchritude. She added a practiced whine to her already sex-silver timbre.
“Quit gawking and fuck me,” she said.
Mehr-farr took a long draught of wine.
• • • • •
He turned out to be surprisingly vigorous for his age. More than once she’d found herself moaning honestly. But this had never been a matter of sexual gratification. Ashtadukht urged him with her hips, and he obliged by letting her roll on top of him.
While her body strived to grind against him feverishly, her mind bore the weight of the night she’d accidentally killed her husband. She relived the events of that Nowruz as if she were still there; she bridged the gap into the present by acting them out with her next victim. It’d become an annual ritual for Ashtadukht.
They’d brought this upon themselves, the corpulent rats. They’d seen how wildly her star-reckoning resolved. They’d witnessed her massive blunders, yet they’d urged her to continue, even authorized her as a royal star-reckoner.
They were all responsible for her husband’s death. Every last one of them. And this man in particular shouldered the greatest blame.
She wheezed. Her thighs burned. Bile rose in her throat for the fifth time since they started. Still, she pressed on. Soon. She could feel the unfurling of her mother’s unholy influence within her like the escarpment of a sneeze. She sought the war of the luminaries, and the equinox wrung it out of her. The sensation washed over her and fled immediately. She retreated from the past. She turned a frown on him, and looked on as the corruption climbed Mehr-farr’s abdomen like cotton soaking up pitch. She allowed herself a tiny smile once his soul had fully vacated his eyes.
Ashtadukht was a planet-reckoner.
She’d known this much for some time now. She could no more call for the aid of the stars than bring back her departed husband. The planets, however, the planets answered.
Originally, she had chalked it up to inexperience. Perhaps she’d read the stars incorrectly, referenced a chart she shouldn’t have, confused declination with right ascension, miscounted the windows of the heavens. Ashtadukht did her utmost to compensate.
When she finally made the connection that she was gleaning her power from the planets, she couldn’t explain why. Her reckoning remained chaotic—that was the temperament of the Lie after all. And substantially weaker than the men who’d trained her as a star-reckoner. But it worked. Sometimes.
And it had begun to make sense after Ahriman’s claim. If her mother was in fact Jeh, the wretched Whore, she would be repulsed by the stars by virtue of her bloodline. But the planets would gladly divert the stars’ strength to the wicked. Being half-div certainly qualified.
Ashtadukht didn’t like it. She hated entertaining the explanation, likely as she knew it was.
But at present, the thrill of retribution gripped her. She sighed contentedly and let it run its course; experience told her it would be a transient thrill. The age-old adage that revenge solved nothing might have been true. She surrendered to that possibility. But it felt damn good.
She climbed off him, muscles protesting with every movement, and surveyed her handiwork. She nodded. She would leave him here—send the other star-reckoners a message. That they had no refuge.
The deed done, she plodded unsteadily over to her garments and began dressing. She got as far as her trousers, one leg of which antagonized her by refusing to slip over her foot, when she was interrupted.
“Cousin.”
She inhaled sharply. The thrill dissipated prematurely. Her mind raced. Maybe if she sat still, if she didn’t look.
“Finish getting dressed,” Tirdad said coldly. “Pay me no mind. You never have anyway.”
Ashtadukht did as he instructed, methodically pulling on her garments. His presence hit her like a winter swim. She sobered up; she shivered. “I . . . I . . .” Her gaze fluttered between Mehr-farr and her clothes. She tried to piece together an excuse as clumsily as fishing for the right key in the dark. In freezing water.
“Do not bother with another lie,” Tirdad censured as he approached the dead man. “I have been here for long enough to have a very clear view of what transpired.”
He turned on her, and it was like watching as a tsunami neared, as the shoreline receded from her feet and she knew she was finished. “You were responsible all this time. You deceived me. You are a murderer. A div. To think I love you. And Gushnasp . . .” He shook his head.
“It’s not—”
“Be quiet.” His timbre was unlike any he’d ever used. It was flat, deadly, and so charged that every time he spoke she had to take a breath to steady herself.
“Gushnasp was, Gushnasp was an accident. They’re responsible. They deserve this.” She opened her mouth to press on, but he raised his sword. His sword.
“No more words.”
“Please, just let me—”
He took a step in her direction. “What did I say?”
Ashtadukht creased her brow, and her chin followed suit. She wanted dearly to cry. She wasn’t the bad guy here! “Please,” she muttered. He took another step.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Cousin, I—”
“Do not call me that ever again.” Tirdad’s stare was icy and unwavering. “You are no kin of mine. I belong to a noble Estate. A House your father and our ancestors built. One you have blemished, perhaps irreparably.”
She palmed her head. Let him run her through. “They knew all along that I hadn’t mastered it, that I couldn’t even control it. Imagine all the power of a star-reckoner at the fingertips of a girl who’d hardly just become a woman. And no control.”
“I am warning you. Stop talking.” He was closer now. The venom in his words smarted.
“They knew. They didn’t care. They gave me the title. They killed Gushnasp. They did. I’m giving them their just desserts. I’m dispensing justice. For Gushnasp.”
“You have shamed Gushnasp. You know it. That is why you do not visit his spirit during the Gahambars. Coward.”
Directly above her now. She craned her neck to look at his chest and stopped there. “Yes, I’m a coward. I . . . I can’t face him. But only because my incompetence killed him. Not because this is wrong. Don’t you see? Don’t you see that they’re at fault? If it weren’t for—”
Tirdad lifted his sword.
She closed her eyes. She’d never expected to feel so disquieted at the end, especially after bringing the man most responsible for her husband’s death to justice. Perhaps, she conceded, the
cause of her unrest lay in Tirdad’s inability to see that her ritual was for Gushnasp. That while exacting sweet vengeance was incontrovertibly thrilling, it was all for Gushnasp. The thrill came because she was one step closer to absolute justice: to wiping out each and every star-reckoner.
Sure, it was an implausible goal. But it was something to work toward.
“Go.”
She opened her eyes as he eased his sword into its scabbard. “Uh?”
“Go,” he said wearily. “Never let it be said that I place no value on our years together.”
Ashtadukht craned further to look at his face for the first time since he walked in. Devastation saddened his features. “Are you—”
“But if I ever see you again, you will regret it. We will both regret it. Leave Iran. Go . . . elsewhere.” Tirdad sighed and stepped away, indicating the exit. “I will try and redeem the name of our, of my House.”
“I’ll leave,” she muttered. “I’ll go far away. But you don’t have to tell anyone. You can keep this to yourself. Our family’s name—”
“My family’s name will not be soiled by further deception. Now go, before I come to my senses.”
Ashtadukht blinked. She looked at the body of Mehr-farr, at the mess she’d flung off the table, at Tirdad’s immaculate boots, and ended trained on her sacred girdle. She reached for it but hesitated, curling her fingers into her palm. She’d worn it since childhood, untied and retied it many times daily, as piety dictated. It represented traits and observances she’d long ago sloughed—often against her will. Nevertheless, she’d held onto it all this time. As if it’d absorbed those traits and she could somehow reclaim them one day.
She snatched it up and briskly left the room.
XI
Ashtadukht took flight. She avoided roads and civilization like the plague (which she happened to have unwittingly engendered by way of a single rat’s bite). She travelled mainly by night. All this because she knew Tirdad was a man of his word. If she were caught, she had no doubt she’d find herself between two boats, force-fed honey and milk until she’d defecated all over herself, until generations of carrion insects had formed empires in her swollen gut, until those empires had fallen, and eventually the noxious mass of decaying matter killed her. She’d only seen it performed once, but once was more than enough.
She crossed the marshes east of the capital, dogged by swarms of mosquitoes and unfriendly terrain, where the reed beds, tussocks, and chest-deep waters concealed any manner of beast. Beasts, Ashtadukht had figured, were preferable to humans. She was not wrong, for any beasts that might have been in her path gave her a wide berth.
A half-div planet-reckoner travelling by moonlight would not have been on the most desperate of menus, and Ashtadukht had already been backed into a corner.
The beasts had a keen eye for weakness; it separated today’s prey from tomorrow’s. They observed her miserable exhaustion, her cursing frustration, the tears she shed in her solitude, and they saw no weakness. They saw her bristling plaits, the determination in her stride, the scowl on her face, and the planets in her eyes. They saw a predator.
In fact, mosquitoes aside (exempt not due to any lapse in judgment but because they were too evil to care), the only creature she spotted during her march was a brave Basra Reed Warbler whose trilling had kept her company until she left the marsh behind.
From there she navigated the limestone defiles of the neighbouring mountain range, using the luminaries as a guide and endeavouring to keep her sometimes-debilitating illness in check. Without Tirdad to fall back on, she had to return to the more cautious routine she’d followed when travelling on her own. A bad day meant little to no travel, and even good days were approached warily.
Whenever she came upon an oak forest, she would do her utmost to plot a course that took her through it. During the day, the wind would sough through the leaves, and in the shade of that rustling lullaby, Ashtadukht would occasionally sleep soundly.
Once, when the loneliness had gotten the best of her she’d pulled the wooden spoon from her tunic.
“Howdy,” it said. “Really mucked that one up,” it said.
“Keep it up and I’ll find a termite nest.”
“Dang!” it exclaimed. “Don’t get your tassels in a tangle!”
“I’m serious.”
“Likewise, missy. Just saying things are real fat in the fire hereabouts. Dreadful stuff.”
“Yeah. I think. Why do you talk so strangely?”
“Always reckoned it was you what did the strange chatter. So why’d you pull me out all of a sudden?”
“Was worried I’d start hearing voices.”
“Aha! Figured you’d beat ‘em to the draw, eh?”
Ashtadukht chuckled in spite of her foul mood. “Yeah.”
“Should’ve forced that cousin of yours to plough you while you had the bottled courage in you. Should’ve bucked like a bronco in his lap, I’d say. Made little chickabiddies. Would’ve had him by the balls then.”
She sighed and returned the spoon to her tunic.
After a worrying detour around a salt glacier, she happened upon an isolated cabin, where she lifted another wide-brimmed hat while the owner dozed. This turned out to be especially timely, because the next night found her in a wide lane of pistachio-studded rangeland that seemed to have unfurled between a pair of peaks so as to catch as much sunlight as possible. While she continued to avoid travel by day, even the hours after dusk and before dawn were uncomfortably bright.
She travelled north, avoiding the arid Iranian plateau, where she would have surely needed to rely on civilization for sustenance. The mountains and steppes were not especially kind, but they allowed her the solitude she required.
Where one range intersected another, she turned east, and traversed the valleys of that until it flushed her into the lowlands surrounding the Mazandaran Sea. The forests were vivacious here. Brooks dissected deciduous boles, carved gently around beech and alder, busy with the croaking of frogs, to nourish an explosion of green. It was a familiar green; not in shape or organization, but in atmosphere. Before long, she was home.
Ashtadukht stood outside her estate. There, she leaned against the low, neglected wall that limned the grounds. Soldiers would arrive in the coming weeks, if not sooner. They would tear it apart. She would not mourn its passing; neither would she celebrate it. Ambivalence was too conflicted a word—she most certainly hated the place, with its grievously broken promises. But it had been theirs, if only in spirit. That had to mean something, she told herself.
She trudged through an overgrown tract of forecourt, her approach betrayed by the crackling of twigs and leaves underfoot. A nightingale truncated its rich, consummate, thousand-melody birdsong to issue a cry of warning—she’d trudged too close to its bush.
Gloom hung from the entrance to her estate, where darkness and the clammy scent of disuse prevailed. She poked her head in. Quiet and undisturbed stillness answered.
While the grounds had fallen into disrepair, the interior had fared better. Only the vestibule showed signs of neglect. The wind and rain had buffeted its walls and brought the outside in.
She entered, and trailed her fingers over what remained of a mural of a ram, passant and fiercely so. Her eyes adjusted to the deeper gloom, and she gave the mural an inquiring look. Her family had prospered under the standard of the ram. This one stood tall with its chin raised despite its depredation. She might have found some analog there, between herself and that ram, if she’d cared to ruminate. As it was, months of hard travel had worn her down. And the last thing she needed was a reminder of that, especially by a creature that represented the family that had disavowed her.
So she pressed on, disrupted the viscous stillness like walking through cobwebs as she passed from one corridor to the next, across the very same courtyard where—she pushed the memory away, and exited the courtyard summarily. A bat rushed by, squeaking into the night.
Ashtadukht slapped at the air
and sneered in its general direction, half-cowering. “Shouldn’t be startled in my own estate,” she grumbled as she took the next corridor, which led directly to her room. She drew up short of its entrance and began to knead misgivings into the weathered fold of her cuff. The nightingale resumed its multifaceted song.
“Shkarag,” she called into the gloom. “Are you there?”
No reply.
“Shkarag,” she called again, not having forgotten that the first hardly ever got a reply where that one was concerned. Still nothing.
She strode in cautiously, neither hopeful the half-div would be around nor sure she’d be greeted good-naturedly in any event. Her first step excited a drawn out crunch. Ashtadukht tensed up; she was literally and figuratively walking on eggshells. The next step crunched even louder. The floor had been carpeted with discarded shells. She frowned and ran an eye over the room. She could make out shapes in the gloom. A number of furnishings had been overturned, but Shkarag was nowhere to be seen.
So she shuffled forward, eggs scraping and crinkling around her boots like the death knells of unborn chicks, until her feet wedged under an out of sight obstruction. Caught off-balance, she found herself toppling forward. Ashtadukht hit the floor with a chorus of crunches. She groaned, scolding herself for not lighting a torch.
She swept her arms through the shells and rolled onto her back, cursing as she did. Ashtadukht sat up and peered into the darkness, squinting at a pair of legs. “Shkarag?”
She crawled over to where the half-Scion of the Bloody Club reclined beneath a divan, legs jutting from one end. Ashtadukht gave the shins a pat. “Wake up,” she said. “Come on. It’s me.”
After another pat failed to rouse her, she felt her way around the divan to where the half-div’s shoulders and head peeked from the opposite end. She rummaged through her pack for a clove of garlic, sniffed it to verify its identity, curled her lip, and stuffed it between Shkarag’s bottom lip and gum, careful to avoid pricking herself on the half-div’s fangs.
Ashtadukht shifted to a more comfortable position amongst the shells, and stroked Shkarag’s scalp while she waited. She’d fled here straightaway owing to a responsibility to warn her friend, but she’d made the trip all the while half hoping the half-div had moved on. The other, more selfish half had hoped she hadn’t lost her one remaining friend. She played her thumb over the broad, semi-keeled but polished scales, and breathed a sigh of relief. She was plotting the direction of her uprooted life and having a hard time of it when Shkarag bolted upright—or tried to anyway.
A Star-Reckoner's Lot (A Star-Reckoner's Legacy Book 1) Page 25
