by Kate Elliott
“ ‘One who is an outlander may save them.’ Do you know the phrase?”
“It’s from the tale of the Guardians. As a terrible war ravages the Hundred, an orphaned girl begs the gods for peace. The gods raise the Guardians out of a sacred pool and give them gifts and command them to establish justice in the land. But then after all that there is a prophecy that one among the Guardians will betray the others. And one of the gods tells the orphaned girl that an outlander will save them.”
She gestured, and a servant crept forward, gaze averted, and took away the tray. The soldiers, at their remove, remained watchful, every gaze fixed on Shai.
“Over the generations,” she said, “it has become commonly understood that this phrase refers to the land and its people, but in truth, it refers to the Guardians themselves. One who is an outlander may save the Guardians. That is why I need Harishil’s cooperation to eliminate those who threaten the rest of us.”
“Threaten you? Your army is the one that abuses and rapes children. That strings people up on poles. Attacks cities, burns villages—shall I go on?”
He meant to make her angry, but her calm was unshakable. “Certainly you are a young man who speaks boldly. What you are actually thinking, of course, I cannot know, because you are veiled to my sight. By any chance, are you a seventh son?”
The question startled him, not least because of its accuracy. “Why?”
“Not all the gods-cursed demons are seventh sons or seventh daughters, but many are.”
“I’m not a demon!”
She went on as if he had not spoken. “Born from the same woman’s womb, such a child will see and hear ghosts. Sired by the same father on different women, such a child will only hear or only see. So it is written in temple archives, and so I have ascertained in my time. I was just wondering if it might be true among outlanders as well.”
Was Anji a seventh son, Shai wondered? It was not a question he’d likely ever get a chance to ask. Nor was he inclined to answer any question she asked about him, or Anji. Yet he must keep her talking, to see what he could learn.
“How can you know the phrase about the outlander refers to the Guardians, and not to the land and its people? How can we even know the tale is true as told, and not altered over time as folk forget old words and make up new ones?”
Her smile troubled him because it hid so much. “Some of us can know perfectly well what was meant, young man.”
“No one can know, unless they were there themselves!”
She looked away from him, as if hiding her gaze, and yet she was simply beckoning to a servant to bring a new tray, with tea and sweet bean cakes. Hu! Seeing them, his mouth watered. He was so sick of porridge. But he kept his hands on his thighs, refusing to grab.
“Yet Harishil is not the only outlander. Here you are. What is your name, Shai?” She shook her head at his reaction. “Surely you must realize that old woman in the woods, knowing your name, would have revealed it to me. What do you want? What is your desire?”
To kill you.
“Wealth? Sex? Land? Better food? Children and a wife? Power to rule others?”
“I want my brother back, and then I want to go home.” But it was a lie, because Hari had been eaten by a demon, and Shai could no longer imagine a life in Kartu Town.
“Harishil and the cloak are now one creature. A Guardian.”
“Hari only came to the Hundred a few years ago. He can’t have worn that cloak always. Someone must have worn it before him. So if a cloak can pass from one person to another, then Hari can be released.”
“Then he will be dead.”
“Hari is already a ghost. The only difference is whether or not he is your slave.”
Her expression hardened. He drew back, suddenly afraid although she made no move or signal. The tightening of her eyes was threat enough. “It is easy for you to pass judgment on what you do not understand. Harishil was given the gift of a second chance at living, a chance to repair and restore what had gone wrong in his life before. It is no simple thing to leave that opportunity behind. What of those who sacrificed to bring justice? Who gave everything, risked everything, to help others? Are they, having made one or two small mistakes as Guardians, meant to be destroyed by other Guardians too self-righteous to be merciful? Must I, who am responsible for the greatest act of justice known in the Hundred, stand passively as others judge me? As others call me corrupted? I will not give up my life—”
“You don’t have a life to give up,” cried Shai. “You’re dead. All of you are ghosts. You just tell yourself you’re alive. But it’s a lie. Everything you do is a lie.”
She rose, and he saw in her an ancient power so twisted by fear it had become the opposite of what it was meant to be.
“Do you know to whom you are speaking? I am not to be spoken to with such disrespect.”
“No, I don’t know who you are, or what is your name is, or why I should care.”
“I can have my soldiers kill you.”
“But you can’t kill me yourself, because I’m veiled. That’s how it is, isn’t it? You can’t kill me, and I can lie to you. How that must rankle.” What power words had! With each stab of sharp words, he felt her anger grow. “Yet if you have me killed, then you have no hold over Hari. And you need him, don’t you? Him, or someone like him, a cloak you can control and corrupt. That’s what Bevard is, isn’t it? And Yordenas and Radas. You discovered their weakness, and you corrupted them. But Hari isn’t proving so easy to corrupt, is he? Part of him is weak, but the part that is my beloved brother is strong, and he’s fighting you.”
He’d overreached; he felt her anger swallowed as the stillness that follows a cessation of blustery wind, and he tensed, waiting for a blow. She swept up the brush, paper, and inkstone and tucked them in a sleeve. She extricated the spear from beneath the pillow on which she’d been seated.
“You are correct,” she said softly, “that Harishil can be released from the cloak if he proves unreliable. It has happened to others before him.”
“Five to kill one, isn’t that right? Without Hari, you’re still one short.”
“So he may have told you. So he may believe. But there are other ways. Maybe you will be next, Shai. What would you do, if you were to awaken as a Guardian? Were you to stand on the threshold between death and life, what would you choose?”
He rose, and the soldiers stiffened, raising their weapons, but he opened his hands to show himself unarmed. As he was, except with words. “I would do what is right.”
Her smile twisted condescendingly. “So do we all say, at first, thinking we know what is right, and that what is right is easily known. It is easy to pray in ignorance and innocence that peace return to the land—” An expression chased across her face, fleeting, frightened, and quickly controlled. “—but to have to live for generation after generation with what you have yourself called forth, and the burden and struggle it entails, to see corruption strike and be helpless against its rot, again and again and again, that is not so easy, is it? Not when you are the one who will be blamed.”
Skin prickling, uneasy and indeed in some manner revolted, Shai took a step away, and she flinched, as if his disgust actually hurt her.
“Who are you?” he asked.
She gestured to the soldiers. “Take him back to his cell. There he will remain until I—or the gods—free him.”
• • •
“THIS IS TO be my new home?”
From the porch of Mai’s house in the Barrens, Miravia surveyed the town of Astafero sprawled down the slope below them. Mai held her hand, enjoying Miravia’s unadorned pleasure as her friend scanned the vista with its staggering mountain peaks in the west and the green-blue waters of the Olo’o Sea shimmering in the early morning light out of the east.
“It is a dry and dusty place, nothing special,” said Mai. “I spent many lonely hours here. The market is small.”
She glanced through open doors into the audience chamber where Anji sat li
stening to Chief Deze give a report. Tuvi was standing behind Anji, holding Atani—at any gathering of senior Qin officers, the baby was passed from one soldier to the next—and there were other officers, most Qin but two local men were in attendance as well as the Naya Hall submarshal and her chief reeves, Etad and Miyara.
“Maybe it is not allowed to go to the market,” Miravia added, accustomed to disappointment, “because you were attacked by red hounds from the empire.”
“That was months ago. Now the militia guards the roads, and the Hieros’s spies watch everywhere else.”
“I should like to be a spy, only I suppose my looks would betray me. Like Eliar’s betray him.” She sighed abruptly, releasing Mai’s hand as she stared toward the mountains. “What do you suppose has happened to—” She coughed, shoulders tense. “There was another person who went south, wasn’t there?”
Mai put an arm around her. “Keshad? I hope he’s a good spy. He’s a precise accountant and a good merchant. But very emotional. He is deeply attached—”
“To a woman?” Miravia’s voice was sharp as she stepped out of Mai’s embrace and into the sun; the light flooded her flawless skin and brush-tip eyes.
“His sister. Like you and Eliar.” Mai forced a smile. She did not want to speak of Eliar, who had traded away his sister’s happiness for a chance to play at spying. On such a glorious day, it was easier to signal to Chief Tuvi, who handed Atani over to Chief Deze, where the baby settled comfortably. Anji’s gaze flicked to Tuvi as the chief nodded, and Anji’s right hand shifted. It had taken her months to learn to see the small signals the Qin used among themselves.
Tuvi walked up. “Mistress?”
“We want to go down into the market, Chief. It is likely to be safe, is it not?”
“Safe enough, Mistress.”
“Will the officers be wanting tea?”
Tuvi looked surprised, then gestured toward the chamber. “Did you not already order Sheyshi in with the cups? For there she sits.”
“I did not!”
Yet the young woman was seated in the shadows behind Anji. A tray with tea bowls and a ceramic pot sat next to her, but by the way her head was sagging forward, Mai guessed she was dozing off, no doubt bored by the lengthy reports concerning the spacing and timing of patrols along the network of roads and paths in Olo’osson.
“How odd,” added Mai. “Priya must have told her—”
“Priya went to the baths.”
“Of course she did, at dawn. Hu! Perhaps Sheyshi thought of bringing the tea herself!”
She and Tuvi laughed at this absurd notion as they started walking down the hill, paced by their escort, but Miravia was not amused.
“Is it not wrong to belittle her? Besides that, why should any slave show initiative when they take no benefit from their labors?” She glanced at Mai and flushed deeply. “Begging your pardon, Mai. I do not mean—”
Mai took her hand. “I value your friendship because you are honest. Do not change merely to spare my feelings. I know you disapprove of slavery. That you wish I did not keep slaves in my own house.”
“Certainly you treat your slaves with more consideration than many do, Mistress.” Tuvi kept pace beside them with one hand tucked around his sword hilt and the other hanging at his side, his posture relaxed although Mai knew he was always alert, eyes and senses attuned to potential dangers.
“You gave me shelter, Mai. I don’t mean to slap you in the face for it.”
“Neh, let’s get it out in the open now you live with us. You must see every day that Priya, O’eki, and Sheyshi are slaves.”
“Not to mention the many debt slaves working off their debts here in the settlement,” added Tuvi with that typical Qin instinct for going for the throat. He nodded politely at Miravia. “It is all very well to hold such views, just as it is all very well to chant prayers in the temples, but when we walk through the world we walk through things as they are. I had an older brother who became a priest of the Merciful One. I was a small boy. Once a year I would ride with my mother and sisters to visit him. How I admired him and the handsome temple buildings! He even learned to read the holy script, ring the bells, and chant the holy words. Then war came. He and his brother priests were cut down in the hall and the gold ornaments and silk vestments taken by soldiers. So I thought after that, that it was better to be a soldier.”
“Did he not pray to the Qin gods?” Miravia asked. “Did he turn his back on the faith of his own people?”
“We Qin are not like you other folk. Our ancestors quarrel, and we are involved in the quarrels since we are their children. Besides that, the heavens watch over us. But that does not mean another holy one cannot walk on the earth. The Merciful One walks in some hearts and not in others. Yet a prayer does not stop a man, or a woman, from becoming a slave. Priya could tell you that. She is a wise woman. And like my older brother, she can read.”
“Among my people, all children are taught to read. Isn’t that better?”
“Yet you chose to flee your own people rather than remain among them in the marriage they had chosen for you,” he replied. “So maybe you did not like that life so much among your own people who do not approve of slavery. Is it not to a form of slavery you compared the betrothal? If you believe the men of your people treat their women as slaves, then how can you condemn other people for keeping slaves or owning a debt that must be worked off by labor?”
“That I chose to flee—at a great cost to me—losing my family—never to see my dear brothers and mother again—has nothing to do with my statement that slavery is always wrong! You mistake the general for the particular, Chief Tuvi.”
He smiled. “Maybe I do. But I don’t understand how the Ri Amarah can insist that slavery is always wrong and then keep their women closed away behind walls. My mother and sisters would never have put up with that!”
“If the world is not as it is meant to be, then we must work to correct it.” She turned with passion to Mai, grasping her arm. “You must dislike hearing us argue!”
“Was that an argument?” asked Tuvi, his pace not faltering.
The four soldiers kept an even distance at all four points. As they passed the thatched roof of the council square, six council members chatting over a morning tea rose to greet Mai.
“Verea! Well come. That you are here makes the day bright.”
“Will you preside over an assizes before you leave again, verea?”
“You have not come alone, verea?”
“No, indeed,” she replied, greeting each one by name. “Here is my sister, Miravia. She will be running my household in Astafero.” Mai studied their expressions as they eyed Miravia’s face; they clearly knew what she was, rumor having traveled ahead. “If there is ever any question that needs my attention when I am in Olossi, that for some unlikely reason you cannot solve yourselves although I cannot imagine why that would be so, then you must bring the question to Miravia’s attention. She will write a message which can be flown to Olossi by a reeve. She has my complete trust.”
“Ah! Eh! Very good!” They revised their expectations, smiled more warmly.
Tuvi settled back as Mai stepped into the shade with the women. She asked after their businesses and their families. Mistress Sarana had married a Qin soldier and was noticeably pregnant; it wasn’t so many months, really, since the first marriages had been blessed at the gods’ altars. Maybe that rice had been nibbled on early! But wasn’t that the way folk did go about things here, casual about sex in a way inconceivable to any woman in Kartu Town? Yet when she thought of how Anji had slapped her, her cheek still burned.
“Verea?”
“Just wondering how your daughter is, Mistress,” she said to Behara, now head of Astafero’s council. “I hear she ate Chief Deze’s rice!”
“She did, and we hope there will be fruit soon, but too early to tell, eh? Anyway, he’s been posted to West Track, so she’ll live here for now and he comes to visit as often as he can.”
That
was the way things worked in Astafero. Some of the newly married women chose to migrate to new towns to follow their husbands on assignment. Others remained at the settlement with families growing as kinfolk who were struggling to eat came to live where there was work and food to be had. Miravia watched and listened, not saying a word.
When Mai extricated herself from the conversation, they walked down into the market with its familiar dried fish smell. There were new shops set up in crude storefronts with canvas walls and older shops newly refurbished with brick. They sold cloth, banners, harness, tools, dishes and serving utensils of everyday quality, storage chests of precious wood, baskets, bedding, mats, and spices and bean paste shipped or carted in from elsewhere. Miravia trailed behind as Mai chatted with every person she knew and met new people, because folk were coming to Astafero as people did where there was security in an insecure world. Yet Miravia did shyly smile at people who, despite being taken aback by her features, politely engaged her in the casual talk of the marketplace. At length, they worked their way down to the main gate. Mai surveyed the further sprawl of brickyards, smithies, fish racks, workshops, and the green patches of burgeoning fields watered from the underground channels still being dug. But she did not suggest venturing past the gate’s shadow.
“The Ri Amarah have lived in the Hundred for four generations, and you not even two years, but you are treated as a cousin while my people are still seen as outlanders,” said Miravia in a low voice. “I want to be part of the Hundred, Mai. Not an outlander all my life.”
Tuvi had climbed the ladder to the parapet and was speaking to the soldier in charge of gate duty; the two men were pointing—quite rudely! how she would ever cure the Qin of finger pointing she did not know!—at some object or movement much farther out.
Mai took a deep breath. “If you were to marry Tuvi—”
Miravia pushed a sandal into the dirt, digging a hole.
“Not now, I mean! No hurry!”
“It’s too early,” Miravia muttered, cheeks scalded red although it wasn’t hot.
“Of course!” Mai took her hand, tucked it into the crook of her own elbow, and indicated the market. “Best I go back to nurse Atani. Do you want to stay in the market?”
