by Kate Elliott
“But—I—”
“Heya!” Her eyes widened as she looked past him. She broke into a run.
He turned. Miravia had stumbled into the clearing from the trail that led up to the waterfall; she was swaying, hands extended as a falling woman begs for help.
The hells!
He bolted, passing Miyara easily, and reached Miravia in time to catch her as her legs gave out. She was washed gray like a corpse, and breathing hard.
“My love! Ravia! What’s happened? Are you hurt?”
Her mouth opened, but no words came out. In her stunned gaze he saw nothing but blank incomprehension, as if a lilu had sunk its claws into her heart and drained away all thought, leaving only emotion. But her body worked. She regained her feet, pulled away from him, and began running back up the trail. He had to follow, glancing back to assure himself that Miyara, armed with baton and sword, was jogging at his heels. A look of alarm erased the suspicion that had so recently scarred her expression. They wound up through the thickly perfumed trees, the late flowering bushes, the profusion of fruit. He bumped his head on a dangling sunfruit, which dropped to thud on the earth and tumble away into the undergrowth. So much lay hidden.
Commanded to keep our mouths shut.
“Ravia!” he called, but she kept running, passion the wings that carried her.
He was puffing and heaving by the time they burst out into the ruins. He stumbled to a halt as Miyara stopped beside him.
“The hells!” cried the reeve with the breath he could not take.
The waterfall, swollen with the last of the rains, pounded its fury into the pool. Water lapped to the brim, wavelets spilling along flat terraces of smooth stone. The cursed pool was writhing with blue threads like infant firelings pouring up from the depths. Miravia was staring not at the pool but at something else entirely.
A slight figure huddled on one of the low stone walls whose tumbled remains graced the ruins. Black hair plastered her neck and wove trails down the soaking wet silk of her bloodstained taloos. Her mouth was parted, and slowly, as if it hurt to move, she straightened and looked toward them.
Thunder boomed. It began to rain in a fierce, unexpected cloudburst.
Mai.
• • •
THEN SHE WOKE, coughing water out of her mouth. Only half aware of what she was doing, she dragged herself onto a shelf of rock and lay heaving until she could breathe again. Her chest hurt; pain squeezed her ribs with each sharp inhalation.
A woman screamed.
Hu! What if Tuvi hadn’t gotten here yet and Sheyshi tried again? What if the slave had gone after the baby?
She pushed up through an agony of tight muscles, but instead of Sheyshi and Priya and the baby, Miravia was standing a stone’s toss from her with hands shielding her cheeks and her mouth and eyes gone all round as though an awful demon was rising out of the pool behind Mai about to pounce. She actually turned to look, the feeling was so strong, maybe Sheyshi climbing out of the water with her knife, but there was no one, only a shimmering surface of blue threads she recognized as the newborn spirits born in the womb of the firelings and not yet strong enough to take flight into the storms.
How did she know that?
“Miravia!” she rasped, but Miravia was already gone, fleeing flip flap flip flap, her footsteps reverberating through the empty ruins as water poured over the high lip and roared into the pool. Spray moistened her face. She staggered to the path that led behind a curtain of falling water and into the overhang. Priya might have hidden Atani in here, but the overhang lay dim and empty but for the altar stone heaped with withered wreaths and flower necklaces and a fresh-blooming spray of plum blossoms. Out of season surely, she thought at random as she caught herself on the stone, trying not to topple over.
A ring sat on the stone. She stared at it a long time: a Mei clan wolf’s-head ring, big enough to fit a man’s finger. She’d given hers to Anji, but she knew who this one belonged to: It was Shai’s ring. Left on the altar.
She snatched it up and stumbled outside, hand pressing into her stomach as a prickling pain spread across her midsection. Legs giving out, she sank onto the ruins of a low wall. Her flesh felt ragged beneath her probing fingers. The lips of the stab wound were still tender, felt through the wet silk of her taloos. Where had all that blood come from that soaked the silk? Why did it still hurt so much?
She had to go find Atani, but she didn’t have the strength to rise. Just rest a little, and a little longer yet, and then strength would come. It must. She had to find Atani, and Priya, and O’eki. She had to warn Miravia. Sheyshi was a murderer, an agent long since planted into her household without anyone knowing. Not even Anji had known. She was sure of it.
Anji would never have acquiesced to her death. Or at least, not under these circumstances. He hated to lose, and he would never allow his mother to win. That was his weakness. Of course her beauty had attracted him in Kartu Town’s market, but any Qin officer might admire beauty and even sample what could not be denied to him, and then ride on. Why hadn’t she seen it before now? Perhaps he had been, as he claimed, amused or even impressed when she had tried to sell him almonds at a price twice market value. But now she wondered if it had irritated him as well. Folk feared the Qin. They were wise to do so. And here this slip of a girl from a dusty provincial trading town, a place of no possible importance in the wide world, had the gall to mock him by demanding such a price.
She could see the scene unfold with stark clarity. It was easy to see from this side of the knife that had plunged into her flesh, whose blade had wept her blood.
He had taken her, just like in the songs. The dashing, powerful officer. The humble fruit seller unable to say “no.” Yet their hardships had bound them together; their journey had forced them to forge a partnership. They had been building something worthwhile, hadn’t they? Didn’t Anji truly love her? Hadn’t he defied his mother on her behalf? Or had he only been irritated at having his will crossed?
Because Anji had betrayed her anyway, when it suited his purposes. He had promised to safeguard Hari but had killed him instead. Who else would Hari have trusted to come so close? Who else could have walked right up to him without Hari having the least idea what was about to happen?
Only Anji.
Thunder boomed. Rain hammered the clearing as if it meant to disintegrate her and sweep her fragments back into the pool whose healing touch had saved her. Saved her for what? For waking up to realize that she could not trust the man she loved?
So when she heard the clap of running feet followed by the intake of shocked breath followed by silence as the rain gave out as abruptly as it had washed through, it was hard to be frightened of what they might do to her. She’d already been stabbed in the heart and survived.
Miravia had returned, bringing with her Reeve Miyara, whose unsheathed sword and expression of stunned fear kindled a flame of indignation. What had she ever done to make people fear her? She was the one Sheyshi had tried to kill!
“Mistress Mai?”
“Master Keshad!” This was too much! Her sight wasn’t clouded. He placed a hand intimately on Miravia’s hip to shift the young woman behind him, but not before Mai realized that the bulge in Miravia’s taloos wasn’t the fabric twisted and pouching. “Miravia! Are you pregnant? By him?”
“Mai!” Miravia pushed past Keshad and flung herself at Mai, her body solid and warm and comforting as Mai hung onto her and she hung on to Mai, sobbing and hugging.
“Best get away from her,” said the reeve into their blubbering reunion. “She must be a lilu, Miravia. Come to lure you to your death by taking the form of one you love.”
Mai sat straight, releasing Miravia and wiping her nose. “I’m the one who was stabbed! How can I then be the lilu? Where is Atani? Where is Sheyshi? Shouldn’t you be chasing after her?” She rose, and the reeve leaped back as if expecting Mai to smite her.
Keshad paced forward with hands extended in an annoying way meant to placate, as
if he too thought she was a lilu and must be bribed. “Here, now. What do you want, lilu?”
“Miravia, you can’t possibly believe I’m a lilu! Where is Atani?”
Miravia trembled as she brushed fingers over the sopping fabric of Mai’s taloos. “Commander Anji took him, of course. He thought you were dead. Everyone thought you were dead, because you were stabbed and blood was everywhere and you sank into the pool and no one could reach you. Mai, sit down.”
Mai sat, coughing as though there were more water in her lungs, but there wasn’t, just a sick weight of dread. She spread a hand over her own belly, where she and Anji had seeded another life, although no one could possibly yet suspect. “Miravia, how are you come to be so obviously pregnant, when this morning you weren’t pregnant at all?”
“Don’t touch her!” cried the reeve.
Keshad sat down, so Mai was boxed between him and Miravia. “Careful, lilu. I have a knife and I’m not afraid to use it.”
“Kesh! Don’t you dare!” Miravia took Mai’s hand and turned it over, opened her fingers, traced the lines that creased her palms, although in truth her hands were horribly wrinkled as they would be after being immersed in water for a long time. “Mai. Listen to me. Sheyshi stabbed you. Then the Qin killed her. It seems Sheyshi wasn’t stupid at all but only playing a part. She was an agent for Anji’s mother all along.”
“Anji’s mother! The old bitch! She warned me she wouldn’t let me get in the way of her plans for Anji. When he finds out what she did—”
“Mai! Listen! He already knows. It’s been seven months—two hundred and fifty-two days—”
“Two hundred and fifty-three,” said Keshad.
“You think it’s really Mai, don’t you?” demanded Miyara, keeping her distance.
“Of course it’s Mai,” said Miravia as she stroked Mai’s arm and smiled, her face as bright as the threads whose glow made the pool shimmer both on its visible surface and in its depths. “She’s annoyed with me for getting pregnant by Kesh, because she wanted me to marry Chief Tuvi. No lilu would care about that. Anyway, isn’t it obvious? The firelings saved her. They hid her away until they healed her. Just like in the tales.”
She wept tears sweetened by joy, but Mai had heard a different melody in Miyara’s voice, and she captured the reeve’s gaze until, at last, Miyara shook her head with a twisted smile.
“I could believe it. I want to believe it. But Mai—”
“Tell me what you fear to tell me,” said Mai. “I beg you.”
“Think of what Anji will say when he finds out she’s alive!” cried Miravia with happy abandon.
Miyara made an awning with a hand over her eyes, thinking. After a while, she looked up. “Maybe a bowl of rice and a cup of cordial first.”
“No.” She opened her hand, displaying the ring. “What does this mean?”
The reeve shrugged. “Your uncle Shai left that as an offering on the altar.”
The Merciful One’s touch might untwist the knot in your heart, dizzying you. “He’s alive, then. He survived.”
“He did. But he’s gone, Mai. He left the Hundred with that scout, Tohon.”
“Taking Hari’s bones back to Kartu Town. Poor Shai. He’ll hate it there. And I’ll never see him again.”
“He may have said something about a Kartu Town, but I think he was going on with Tohon, to wherever the Qin live. They were like father and son, if you know what I mean.”
Ah. The words eased the ache a little, knowing that Shai had a hope of being happy. “And what about my son? Is Atani dead? Did that old bitch have him murdered, too, so the emperor’s sister could marry Anji and make a treaty and fine fat children between them?”
“The child was taken away by his father,” said Miyara. “Everyone knows Commander Anji dotes on the boy. But the rest is as you say, Mistress. His mother took over the running of his household. He married the Sirniakan woman.”
Mai wiped beads of moisture from her face, her heart as cold as her chilled skin and damp hands. Anji had betrayed her.
“There’s one thing I need to do first. Miravia, will you help me?”
“Of course.”
“Wouldn’t it be wise to ask what it is before you agree to it?” demanded Keshad, but Miravia cast him such a look that Mai would have smiled if she had remembered how.
She rose. “After that, I beg you, Miyara, please take me to my son. I’ll never leave him in the clutches of those women.”
BY STAGES.
First she sent Keshad out with Miyara to Astafero. Miyara returned with Siras and a brash young reeve named Ildiya so passionately infatuated with Siras that she would do anything he asked. Ildiya flew out with Miravia, while Mai followed with Miyara. Siras hauled the single heavy chest of the few but precious items worth taking away from Merciful Valley.
They flew to Naya Hall, now a training hall for all newly jessed reeves from across the Hundred. After a period of training, these novice reeves were assigned to one of forty-six secondary halls and outposts according to family groupings and flight assignments. It was a new system, devised by Commander Anji.
“Anji is commander of the reeve halls?” Mai demanded. “How can that be? What happened to Joss?”
So it was with the shattering news that Anji had also killed both Joss and his eagle thundering in her heart that Mai spent a miserable night in Astafero. The house built for her and Anji lay abandoned but for a few desert mice, chirping geckos, and two stout clothes chests shoved forgotten into a back storeroom. At dawn, having sent a message ahead asking Mistress Behara to meet her, she walked down to Astafero’s council square.
Several hundred people had gathered, and they wept, and touched her, and showed her the flower-bedecked altar they’d set up under a roofed shelter at Hasibal’s stone.
“Do you want to pray to the Merciful One, Mistress?” Behara asked her. “Many of us do, remembering the prayers. How can it be you are alive? Everyone said you were murdered by the red hounds out of Sirniaka.”
“Is that what they said?” And yet, how to explain what would only make them distrust her? “In truth, verea, I was sorely hurt and I suppose it was deemed better to set it about that I was dead than to risk a second attack.”
Ah. Of course. This made perfect sense. Exactly the kind of wise decision Commander Anji would make to confound his enemies. They showed her the sprawling market, the burgeoning fields, the expanding docks, the steady expansion of the irrigation channels being dug mey by mey up into the hills. The garrison fort with its well-behaved soldiers.
No one feared attack from the empire. The commander had taken care of that even if he had had to marry that foreign woman who, it was said, no one ever saw. Those problems with bandits and renegades in previous years? Neh, not a problem at all any longer, at least not here in Olo’osson. Trade was brisk and profitable. Why, a woman walking alone could carry a precious vessel of water-white all the way from Astafero past Old Fort and to Horn, and not fear she’d be assaulted! The commander had taken care of that.
They prayed the prayers to the Merciful One at the altar of Hasibal every day, they told her, and their prayers had been answered.
They flew north in stages.
The second night they slept over in a village on West Track, a quiet town whose innkeeper welcomed them gravely. He proudly showed them a newly built dormitory set aside for traveling reeves and soldiers. A much smaller chamber was set aside for female reeves, with only two pallets folded up in the bedding cupboard.
He had no idea who Mai was, although he looked twice and then three times at Miravia and, when Kesh pointedly draped an arm around his wife’s shoulders, smiled apologetically as he explained he’d recently been serving numbers of Ri Amarah men hastening to and from Toskala on business for the commander.
“I thought they kept their women—Never mind. My apologies, verea.”
He invited them to dine in the main room of the inn and hurried off to the kitchen. The inn wasn’t crowded but t
he locals were drinking, eyeing them with the satisfaction locals take in seeing outsiders look unsure of themselves. A pair of young men really looked Mai over, and then began arguing in low voices. The innkeeper and his wife brought their party cordial and a big pot of well-spiced barsh to share for their supper.
“How much?” asked Mai, preparing to bargain.
He looked surprised. “Eh, verea, any reeve or soldier or messenger receives free lodging and food. It’s part of the tax, isn’t it? The militia tithe.” He grinned. “However, I’m only obligated to serve you a single cup of cordial. After that, you have to pay house prices.”
“The militia tithe? What manner of tax is that?”
His smile softened, as if he’d just figured out she was as stupid as she was pretty. “So the army and the reeves can patrol, make sure we’re not burned out of our villages, killed in our beds. I’m happy to feed them, seeing how peaceful things are now.”
The young men sauntered up, swaggering with nervous bravado. “Velin here says he’s seen you before, verea,” said the one courageous enough to speak first. “He says he’s sure he saw you in Olossi that one time he went there for festival. Aren’t you one of Hasibal’s players? They take in outlander slaves, sometimes, and train them up. Hard to see how a man could forget a face like yours. I’m Noresh, by the way. We’d be happy to buy you a cup, eh?”
She knew how to smile to make a man feel she regretted the necessity of discouraging his advances. “My apologies, ver. I’m on a mission with these reeves. Nothing I can speak of.”
That impressed them. Out of misplaced pity, a scab she kept picking at, she told the innkeeper to pour them each a cup and handed over a few vey. They wandered away, flushed and whispering at their triumph, and kept glancing her way as they lingered over their cups as if to drag out the ecstasy. A woman brought out her lute and began accompanying herself on songs, the folk joining in on the chorus and the hand gestures. The music flowed so sweetly; thoughts might wander down these bright tuneful paths and let go of the shadows.
